Pastoral Prayer for the fourth Sunday of Advent

Holy God:

We have journeyed with you to Bethlehem.  We are tired from the journey.  We have longed to see the Christ child.  With searching hearts we follow the star, we peer into the manger.

The preparations for the season have distracted our hearts from our purpose.  There are still many things yet to be done.  You have spoken to our hearts and we have made preparations for your coming to our lives, as well.  Many of the paths upon which you have led us have not been easy paths.  Repentance, expectation, and longing have taken their toll.

And now we near the end of the Advent journey.  We wonder if your visitation is a fairy tale.  We hear the words that you are coming again, that you are visiting us with your son and your salvation, we hear these words like Christmas songs we will soon pack up until next year.

As we look for your visitation, may we be surprised.  Surprised to find that you have been with us all along.  You have never abandoned your people.  You have been hard to find.  But you have been best seen by those who allowed you to reveal yourself.  

You are with us in our sicknesses and you are with us in our strength.  You are with us in our failures and you are with us in our triumphs.  You are with us in our families, in our grieving, in our fears.  You are with us in our decisions.  You are with us in our addictions.  You are with us in our confusion, in wisdom and folly.  You are with us in every attempt at a new start, every faltering act of love, every trembling beginning of reconciliation, every gift, every sleepless night, every dream deferred.

You have been with us all along.  Help us to see you, to recognize you.

Help us to find salvation in you. In every way that we can be saved, save us.  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for Advent 1 (Expect)

Holy God:

We give you thanks and praise for all you have done for your people.  We thank you that you have revealed yourself in your son, that you have made  a way that we can come into new life, and that we can constantly be reshaped into your image and likeness.

We thank you for all the blessings of life, for family and health and peace, for provision and shelter and friendship.

As we enter into the season of Advent, we thank you also for what you have planned that we cannot know.  We thank you for the unexpected.  Thank you Father, for all you have planned that is beyond our comprehension.

Give us a spirit of holy expectation, a capability to live our lives with wide eyed wonder for the surprises you have in store for us.

We have grown accustomed to making our lives as routine as possible.  We have come to expect that what you will do is what you have always done, that what you will give is what you have always given, that who you will be to us is what you have been, that we will always be who we have always been, that we will always accomplish for your kingdom the kinds of things that we have always done.

You shocked the world and turned it upside down when you took flesh in Jesus and made a new covenant, when you visited the world as one us and the God who created all things became a part of creation.  

So shock us again.  Visit us in surprising and unexpected ways.  Give us a yearning for your visitation and a hunger to see what you will do in us.  Let your work of salvation in us be fresh.  Renew your calling upon our lives and use us in ways we never imagined.  give new life to our relationships.  Visit us again and do what only you can imagine.  Come, O come Emmanuel.

Amen.

Remember for my good

This is the time of year that Methodist churches are forming budgets and personnel committees are making decisions about the salaries of pastors.  In our system, conventional wisdom among pastors has often been to think of career advancement in terms of salary.  What I mean is this: Measuring success in ministry is very difficult, and yet we all want a sense of knowing how we're coming along in life.  Church membership, attendance, activity, etc. are ways to measure, but they are not concrete measures.  Salaries feel to preachers to be apples-to-apples measure of how they compare with their peers.  Also, bishops and district superintendents use salaries as a primary guide for appointing pastors.  Some cabinets use salaries as the primary guide, an almost exclusive measure, even above compatibility between clergy and congregation.

I was reading today in Nehemiah 5, and stumbled upon Nehemiah's reflections on his pay for the work of repairing the walls around Jerusalem.  He mentioned that former governors of Jerusalem used taxation upon the people and "laid a heavy burdens upon the people," so that they might have "food and wine."  Nehemiah refuses to follow the example of predecessors who used the people to make a more comfortable life for themselves, "because of the fear of the Lord."  Nehemiah's internal rationale when it came to his support was that God's opinion of his actions in regard to what salary he took for his work was all that mattered--not the opinion of his peers, his spouse, or his own sense of success related to his pay.  I dare say that clergy would raise their support differently if the only thing that mattered in conversations about compensation was God's judgement on their motives and means.

Nehemiah also says that he did not take from the people a food allowance that the empire gave him rights to take, and yet he saw to it that the workers in his administrative apparatus were properly fed.  He says that he always remembered that the people and servants were "gathered there for the work."  He had no problem raising support from the people and he calls the labor and resources for the project a burden.  But he is unwilling to add to their burden for the sake of his comfort.  Pastors would do well to follow Nehemiah's example and to make sure that their only concern is the mission of the church and the support of staff and lay leadership.  Pastors are certainly supposed to call the people to sacrificial giving and service.  But their giving and service must be dedicated only to the mission of the church to proclaim the Gospel and share the love of Christ, never to make a more comfortable life or a more successful ministerial career for themselves.

Lastly, Nehemiah trusts that the Lord, not the people, and not the empire that appointed him, will be the one to reward him.  Nehemiah expects a reward.  "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people."  Do we all want God to remember, or do we have some things we wish God would forget?

As pastors make decisions about their giving and receiving, we would do well to follow Nehemiah's example.  God sees the heart and he sees all of our choices in the motivations by which we act and the words which we use to achieve our ends.  We, like Nehemiah, would do well to live as if only God was the rewarder of our work, and that only God would be the one to judge what we have given and what we have received from his people.

Pastoral Prayer for stewardship (presence) based on Philippians 2:1-11, 19-30

Holy God:

We thank you each week for the opportunity to gather in your house and to be with your people.  We thank you that your presence is with us and that your spirit flows to us through each other.  

Especially in this time when we reflect on our commitment to our church family and our call to support its ministries, we are grateful for all that it means to have a family in Christ and to know that we are not alone in our Christian journey.  We are thankful for a people who help us to raise our children to know you, who stand by us and comfort us in the challenges of life, who grieve with us when we grieve.  We thank you for a people who have shared life with us, who know our story, people with whom we have a history.   We are thankful for friends in Christ with whom we can laugh.  We are thankful for fellow soldiers in your army of redeeming love, who lock arms with us in our collective mission to reach our community and world with the grace of Jesus Christ.

We take these things for granted.  We take each other for granted.  So forgive us when we wander, when we lose our heart for your house and your people.  

Teach us to give of ourselves to one another--to fulfill your command to love one another.  Make this body of believers and living community of grace and redemption, a people who bind up each other’s wounds and teach each other by their example how to follow Christ.  Teach us to truly be a body.  And may your body rise up to fulfill your mission.

Amen. 

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 15:1-10 (the Parable of the Lost Sheep)

Holy God:

We give you thanks and praise for the beauty of this day and for all the promise it offers.  We thank you for life, for joy, for every opportunity to walk with you as children of the light.

An old hymn has the line, “prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”  We all, like sheep, have gone astray.  We are all prone to wander.  We have times when our hearts are completely wrapped up in your heart and we can’t imagine that we would ever stray.  And then, one day, we wake up and wonder if we even know how to pray.  We feel as if we are merely going through the motions.  We may look just the same on the outside, but inside, we are like the Prodigal Son, lost in a far off country.

As easily as we wander, we quickly judge others when they wander.  We want everyone else to be held to high standards.  We get tired of always doing your business of drawing back the wanderers to your fold.  We want people to take responsibility and do right without having to be helped all the time.  When they wander, we often act as if they should do some penance before they are fully celebrated in the family.  

Cleanse our hearts and give us a new view of your heart.  Give us a heart like the shepherd who left the ninety-nine to go looking for the sheep, whose heart was full of joy when he found it, who celebrated and put the lost sheep on his shoulders because he was so happy to have found it.  Give us a heart like the father of the prodigal son, who threw a party when his son returned because he had been lost and now was found, dead and now alive.  Help us to find our greatest joy in the finding of the lost.  Help us to remember, and perhaps to know for the first time, the joy that comes from being lost and then being found by your love and grace.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for 1 Sept 2013 (based on Luke 14:7-24--the Parable of the Banquet)

Holy God:

We gather today to give you praise.  Many things have taken our attention this week.  Many things have been the object of our praise and adoration.  Many things have captured our imagination and inspired our passion.  Today, we gather to remember that nothing truly matters in the light of your glory.  Everything else will pass away, but only you, your love, and your eternal Kingdom will last forever.

We have spent our lives trying to move forward, trying to move up.  From time to time we have pushed others out of the way.  We have climbed over others, excluded others, and made others feel small.  We have been hurt and angry when others have treated us with less than respect or have made us feel like outsiders.

Today, we remember your Son, who took flesh and walked among us.  We remember that he took his place with the least, the last, and the lost.  We remember that he made himself a criminal, an ethnic minority, a person in poverty, a person under political domination.  We remember that he was despised and rejected by men, and object of scorn and ridicule.

We look forward to a day when he will throw a banquet for his people, where he will be the host and each and every one of us will be the guest of honor.  In the meantime, teach us to place ourselves where he chose to place himself--in the last place.  In the place of dishonor.  And so, may we find him there.  And may he make a new world through us in which there are no places of dishonor and where everyone has a place at the table, a world that begins to look a little more like the marriage supper of the lamb.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for 18 Aug 2013 (based on Luke 12:49-56: "I came to bring fire; Do you think I came to bring peace? I came to bring division; etc.")

Holy God:

We thank you for this day, a day full of promise and a day full of beauty.  We thank you for nourishing the earth with the rains, for nourishing our bodies with the bounty of the earth, for nourishing our hearts with your love and the love of family and friends.  

We thank you, Holy God, that we gather here today as a community of disciples, those who have heard and are hearing your call to follow.  We thank you that we are sheep who hear your voice, that we are learning to follow with gladness and joy. We thank you for each and every person who is finding new life, new joy, a new way to live, and a new family through the grace of your Son Jesus Christ.

You have told us that though our journey with you is a journey of joy and love, it is a journey that will not always be easy.  You have told us that if we truly follow you, there will always be resistance and misunderstanding from others.  Too often, we have failed to take you at your word.  We have been surprised, disappointed, and angry when others failed to celebrate your work in our lives and have been less than enthusiastic about the change you are making in us.  From time to time, we have responded in anger, or even given up and gone back to our old life.  

Remind us, O God, of the price that you paid to love us.  Remind us of how our world responded to the love Jesus offered.  Remind us, O Lord, of all that our Savior made possible because he refused to stop loving even to death.  Remind us, O God, of all that is possible when your people follow you in loving each other and the world no matter what.  Empower us to be true disciples, disciples who take in stride the misunderstanding and even persecution that true transformation necessarily invites.  Help us to use even the challenging moments as opportunities to let you love and grace shine forth, to demonstrate that your work in us is true, to show the world that we will not be turned back and that the love of God in Christ is the only thing that matters to us, that we will love as we have been loved no matter the cost.

May your grace and love extend to our community, our families, our friends, our church, our enemies, the nations, the poor, those who are sick, those who are in prison, all who mourn, until all the world has become a community of Christ-followers walking together with you in joy and loving community.  Use our acts of grace and love as your tool to make your Kingdom come.

Amen. 

Taking Responsibility in the UMC

I've had a tremendous privilege in my ministry, especially in recent years, to mentor many young people in vocational ministry.  Mentoring keeps me fresh.  It helps me to continually talk about ministry with folks whose passion has not yet been diminished by the grind of daily church life.  It keeps me talking about theology, calling, new ideas, new books.

The youth pastor at our church is beginning candidacy and applying to seminary.  Like me, he comes from a different tradition.  We talk about Calvinism more than I care to.  We talk about reaching people, organizing for effective ministry, dealing with God's people.  It's a very cool thing.  I hope I never get to a place in ministry that I'm no longer surrounded by people who are just starting out and are constantly asking questions.

He's trying to figure out if he's called to be a United Methodist clergyperson.  Today, we drew a scale on the white board.  We put the pro-UMC stuff on one side and the not-so-pro-UMC on the other side.  One surprise: Itineracy was on the pro-UMC side.  We agreed that our system of sending is apostolic and biblical.  We agreed that it is unpleasant.  We agreed that our issues with itineracy (we all have them) are a matter of struggling to take up the cross.  They are our problems, not the UMC's.

I shared the underside of the itineracy.  Biblically, it makes all the sense in the world that clergy (and all Christians) should lay down their lives and make themselves available to Christ to be sent wherever the mission sends them.

The problem is in practicality.  We all have reasons that we find itineracy inpractical.  Here's mine.

The problem, as I see it, is that our system creates the perfect opportunity for everyone within the system to blame everyone else.

Pastors who are unhappy in their appointments blame the cabinet for sending them where they see little opportunity.  They blame religious politics.  They blame recalcitrant congregation members.

Congregations blame the cabinet for sending them pastors they don't like.  Because they do not choose pastors, they can easily avoid responsibility for making things work.  If they had hired their pastors, they could at least say that they had chosen the pastor and ought to live with their decision.  They can blame the decline of the congregation on the pastor and feel slighted if they feel that they had been overlooked for a better pastor.

Cabinets can blame the pastors and congregations for failing to be effective in reaching their communities.

Everyone can blame seminaries.  Everyone can (and does) blame the general church.  We are a big denomination, so we have factions, so we can scapegoat whoever is not in our camp (liberals, conservatives, minorities, majorities, big churches, small churches, on and on it goes).

I suppose all of us have given into this temptation at one time or another.  I have.  I've had times I've felt passed over.  I've had times I've grumbled inside myself about a congregation, a community, a DS, the ineffectiveness of this or that committee, board, plan, or vote.

It's exhausting.  It's fruitless.  It sucks the life out of ministry.  It makes us bitter.  It's a downward spiral.  It produces no life.

There's nothing more invigorating then deciding that wherever we are is the placed we are called to be. And so we can commit to do whatever we can to leverage the life we have been given to do the very most we can to be a catalyst for the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God.  We can be happy in this system, no matter where we are.  But we have to own where we are, what we are doing, the opportunities around us, the people we have been blessed to serve and serve with.  We cannot let ourselves get lost in what someone else got that we should have gotten, how much more money someone else gets paid, or how this or that group said something that's destroying the denomination.

None of us can do anything about the decline of the UMC.  But we can do a whale of a lot to keep ourselves from declining.  We can do more than we probably realize about the decline of wherever we are serving.  I can't do one thing about anyone else.  I can't change anyone else.  But I can do something about me.  I can let Jesus Christ change me.

The UMC gives us an opportunity to preach the Gospel.  For those of us who are ordained, we are promised a lifetime paycheck and benefits.  The upside is that we are free to live a life of adventure following God's call in places we never would have chosen.  The downside is that our system breeds a sense of entitlement.

I don't believe that the UMC can be saved by a program, a speech, better appointment making, an influx of cash, "systemic change," or anything else.  I do believe that I can reach more people with the grace of Jesus Christ tomorrow than I did today.

If I fail, it's no one's fault but mine.    

Pastoral Prayer for 11 Aug. 2013 (based on Luke 12:32-40)

Holy God:

We thank you for your great love for us, we thank you for the great world you have created.  We thank you for the blessings of life and the opportunity to know and serve you.

We thank you for Jesus, who took flesh and walked among us.  He left the glory of heaven and experienced life as we live it.  We remember that he came proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  We have never quite understood what he meant.  How much he must have seen a broken world and known that things could be different.  He certainly taught us to live differently, to value different things than this world values, to invest our lives in the things this world finds worthless, to find treasure where the world see nothing particularly important.

We are grateful because he gave up everything the world says matters in order to spend his life for the sake of love.  That love has made all the difference for us.

So teach us to see as he saw, to put our whole energy, our greatest joy and our only priority, into things that remain, things of heaven things that matter in God’s eyes.

Give us a divine urgency for love, for grace, for friendship, for forgiveness, for joy, for children, for praise, for prayer, for healing, for the face of God, for the least among us.  All those things that seem like religious words were those things for which you gave your life.  So give us new eyes.  May we give our lives for those things.

Amen.

Thoughts on the Millennials I See Coming to Church

Since Rachel Held Evans recently wrote a blog for CNN on Millennials leaving the church, social media has been full of responses, some positive, most reacting against much of what she shared.  I've decided to weigh in.

I don't know why millennials are leaving "the church."  I know that lots of people of all generations are not going to church anymore.  I don't know all the reasons why.  I'm no sociologist and I don't follow Pew Forum as closely as a probably should.

I do know that lots of millennials are coming to the church I serve today.  At my last church, we had tons of them, too, and I had more than forty of them that came to a college Bible study I led on Wednesday nights.  The congregation I serve now and the last one I served are very different from each other.  One thing they share in common is that neither of them looks much like a church that ought to reach young people, but they both do.  So I've been thinking more about what works in reaching millennials more than what has caused them to leave.

In my mind, there are differences between generations, but people within a generation cannot be painted with a broad brush.  There are differences within the people in all the generations within the church.  I do not believe in shaping the message or the programming of a congregation to suit the whims of any generation.  I think that young people would be repelled by a congregation that seemed too desperate to reach or keep them.  Young people value authenticity.  That's nothing new--young people have always valued authenticity.

Of course, there are simple things that we can do to communicate in a relevant way with emerging generations.  Social media is helpful.  Web is helpful.  Fresh music can be helpful.  This has always been true--Christians have always used the newest forms of communication available to them.  Early Christianity grew quickly for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that the first Christians were some of the first religious people to use a codex as a medium for sacred text and therefore had a portable tool for sharing their scriptures.  The Christians with the good music have reached people effectively in every era of the Christian faith.  These things are not new, either.

I agree with Evans that many millennials are put off by the religious right and that many kids who were raised in conservative evangelical homes during the era of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition have walked away from their churches as soon as they could.  It's also true that people of every generation have been put off by religious political entanglements of every kind in every time and place.

I disagree with her that the answer is to replace conservative religious politics with liberal religious politics.  There is no life in subjugating the heart of the Gospel to any political agenda.

Any time Christians have tried to force society to act like society is Christian rather than sharing the Gospel in love, the power of the cross has been set aside for the sake of an earthly form of power and the church has become impotent and astray from its only true power: the crossly, shameful, powerless power of the crucified Lord.

Is anything new these days?  I think so.  What's new is that a tipping point is being reached in American culture as a whole.  We are no longer culturally Christian.  To my mind, this means that we can no longer expect that people will come to church because it's considered a good thing to do.  Americans don't have to go to church to be considered good citizens anymore.

Then what should we do?  There's only one thing to do.  It has nothing to do with strategizing to reach millennials (though an exodus of millennials might make us finally willing to get back to fundamentals).  Millennials, like all sinners, need the Gospel.  They need Jesus.  They will come (better, they will respond when we come to them) when we talk about Jesus, as long as we refuse to add anything to our message of Jesus.  They will journey with us if we will walk as true disciples.

I don't believe that millennials want coffee bars, candles, light shows, skinny jeans, or progressive activism at church.  Some do, but those who are put off by church won't return for that stuff.  They can get that stuff somewhere else.

I do believe that if we offer Jesus, if we genuinely share the love of Jesus by listening to people, if we build relationships oriented around the love of Christ, if we share Christ's love in our community and world in tangible ways, if we proclaim the message that Jesus loved people enough to live and die and rise again for them, if we offer the life that comes from walking with Jesus, then the Spirit will bring life to all people.  It works with millennials.  It works with everyone.  It's working at our church.

It's helpful, of course, not to put an unnecessary burden of an unscientific worldview, the burden of a political agenda, the burden of intractable forms of worship and church programming, the burden of legalistic moralism, the burden of anything but Jesus alone to the call of the Gospel.  That's always been true, as it was true when the Gentiles shocked the first Christians by receiving the Spirit in the book of Acts.

At my church, we talk about Jesus.  We talk about Jesus a lot.  The people offer true hospitality in the Spirit of Christ.  They reach out in Christ's love when people have been broken by life.  They care about everyone, no matter their age.  They want young people, but they also want people of all ages, not to build the church, but to build the people Jesus loves.   They love peoples' children.

We are not a cool church.  We have Folgers coffee.  We have organ music.  Our contemporary worship service is in a metal building.  We're working on it.  But I don't think we will ever make the cover of Relevant magazine.  I wear suits.  I'm not ever going to wear a pair of skinny jeans.  None of these things matter.  Not really.

I'm blessed beyond measure to be in a church where people are coming into relationship with Christ and connecting with a community of fellow disciples.  Many of them are millennials.  I have come to believe that there is no magic formula, no program, no system, no fad, no worship style that works.  I believe that the the love of Jesus works.  I believe that there is no substitute for laboring passionately to share Christ's love in creative and even desperate ways.  I believe that when it focuses on Christ and focuses on being the church, the church works.

New Science and Religion Stuff, or, Learning to be a Truly Biblical Creationist

Once again, I have resources to offer on science and religion.

First off, I have discovered that the very best and most concise discussion of creationism and intelligent design can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of Francis Collins' The Language of God.  For those of you who heard Dr. Wesley Wachob's speech at Annual Conference, many of the arguments will be very similar.  Collins helps explains both the scientific and theological reasons that creationism and intelligent design are not only unhelpful but also dangerous to both faith and science.  I wish we could read those chapters aloud from the floor of Annual Conference.

I have been fascinated by my initial perusal of The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, by Ronald L. Numbers.  We are often given the idea that all Christians, and all people in the West generally, thought of creation like the scientific creationists do, until Darwin came along with his idea of evolution, which was rejected and continues to be rejected by true Christians except the liberal, Bible modifying kind.  This characterization is completely inaccurate.  Young earth creationism with a pseudo-scientific view of Genesis 1-2 is a very new phenomenon.  Even William Jennings Bryant, some of the authors of The Fundamentals (the series of pamphlets on fundamental conservative Christian beliefs from which the term "fundamentalism" arose), and conservative Presbyterian Princeton theologian Benjamin Warfield believed in some forms of evolution and read Genesis 1-2 in a theological manner.  Modern scientific creationism dates to the publication of Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961 and the subsequent development of Creation Science societies (I read The Genesis Flood when I was a child and at one time, I was the youngest member of the Kansas Creation Science Society!).  This relatively recent way of looking at the Bible and the fossil record has influenced state law on science education and has brought us to the current conversation in our Annual Conference.

I've said before that all Christians affirm the Apostles' Creed's statement that "I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth," and so we are all creationists in one sense.  We may be faithful Christians and have varying views on the way that God has created and is creating.

Unfortunately, arguments about creationism and differing views on the interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 tend to flatten out the doctrine of creation.  Whatever we think of the science around creation, the doctrine of creation is rich and central to our faith.  It has implications in the world that are much more important than how science is taught in the classroom--it has everything to do with how God views the world he created and called good and how we, the pinnacle of God's creation, will live out the first thing he commanded us to do, to tend the garden.  As Wesleyans, we believe in "The Great Salvation," that God saves souls first and foremost, but that his salvation extends to all things and that even the cosmos is redeemed by the salvific work of Christ.  When we limit our doctrine of creation to a conversation about God making the earth in six days or six thousand years or whatever, it gets awfully difficult to think about salvation in those grand and cosmic terms.

I think a robust conversation on the doctrine of creation would help us have a much more meaningful conversation about science and religion than we currently are.  Here are a few resources that might serve as helpful conversation partners:

Dorothy Soelle.  To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation. More accessible than Moltman, Soelle explores how the doctrine of creation impacts all kinds of contemporary issues.  The average reader from our part of the world will likely disagree with her on many of her conclusions, but she serves as a great conversation partner to get a sense of how a genuinely orthodox understanding of creation causes us to consider how God is working in the world in ways we often dismiss.

Jurgen Moltmann. God in Creation.  Moltmann is always incredibly good and rich.  He's always pretty difficult to read, too.  This book is complete on the doctrine of creation, and has terrific interaction with Karl Barth's volumes on creation in Church Dogmatics.  A serious reader of this book would walk away with a rich theological understanding of creation and God's interaction with the material world.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer.  Creation and Fall.  Bonheoffer's work tends to be short, accessible, and incredibly meaningful to both laypersons and scholars.  Creation and Fall is based on Bonheoffer's lectures on Genesis 1-3.  It's a wonderful example of the kind of amazing insight into God's world, humanity, and the relationship between God and people available to us through these texts.  So often, when our conversations about these texts turns to fighting evolution, the ability to learn these kinds of insights from God word is lost.  Genesis is not a science textbook.  Even if the young earth creationist are right, they are using Genesis for a different purpose than God intended for it.  This book points us back to what Genesis 1-3 was intended to teach us.

Eugene Peterson.  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.  Read section 1, entitled, Christ Plays in Creation.  Read the whole thing.  Peterson writes beautifully and worshipfully, as a person who has taken the glory of God seriously.  Our conversation on these matters often veers far from worship.  Peterson helps brings us back.  Remember--conversation about creation and worship are inseparable in scripture, particularly in the Psalms and wisdom literature.  Maybe worship is what Genesis 1 is about, too, and if we are fighting about science, we may very well have missed the whole point.  It might be time to direct our hearts back to God rather than the directions these debates point us.

Well, that's all for now.  More to come.  [But probably not much more]

Pastoral Prayer (on overcoming shame, based on Colossians 2:6-19

Holy God:

We are glad to be in your house and we are thankful that our brothers and sisters surround us with love and grace.  We are thankful for the songs we sing, the Word proclaimed, the closeness of your spirit.  Today is a day of joy and we are grateful that we are each and all enfolded into your presence, your care and your embrace.

Deep in our hearts, you know, Holy God, that each of us has something that we hide from the others, something underneath our smiles and handshakes.  You know, O God, each of our stories, each of our hearts, everything in our pasts, everything in our present.

We pretend, but we know.  And so we temper our passion for you and the joy you call us to because each of us has something for which we are ashamed.  Each of us has a hidden concern that we have not been fully forgiven, that we are not fully authentic, that the others remember something about us that we wish we could erase from the past, or that we might serve you with a full heart only to fail you again.

Teach us to take our eyes off of our own limitations and to place our eyes fully on Jesus, whose resurrection shows that there is no limit to the power he has to make us new, whose crucifixion shows that there is no limit to his compassion for sinners, whose sacrifice is so complete that we know that there is nothing too great that he cannot wash away and renew.

Whether in shame or in arrogance, or even in simple distraction, we forget to measure our lives and to focus our lives entirely on the one who is our life.  So give us fresh vision and a fresh love for you.  Help us to only see Jesus, that the world might see Jesus in us.

Amen.

Progress on Faith and Science Questions

I have found myself playing a role in a conversation that previously has not been of particularly interest to me, the subject of the interaction of faith and science.  At Annual Conference last month, the body rejected several petitions that sought to affirm a young earth creationist viewpoint among United Methodists.

At one time, when I was a child, this conversation seemed very important to me.  In fact, as a preteen, I was the youngest member of the Kansas Creation Science Society.  As my faith matured in teen years, the question of how long God spent creating the earth became unimportant to me and I focused on a very experiential form of Christianity that included a lot of evangelism, loud prayer meetings, missions, and playing Christian worship songs on guitars.  I loved church history and systematic theology during my undergrad years, and plunged into biblical studies. I even spent some time looking into apologetics.  Perhaps I'm a bit too post-modern, but I've never felt that people came to faith through rational argument (that's another blog).  Even at a conservative place like Oral Roberts University, learning genre appropriate means to study scripture helped me see how the Bible can be read faithfully without supporting young earth creationism.  Most of my apologetics have come from people like CS Lewis, whose work has been valuable to me not because it proves Christianity to unbelievers, but because it helps make Christian theology accessible without dumbing it down, which helps me as a teacher of the faith to communicate better.

But, I'm on the committee on resolutions and petitions, so I've had to work on these petitions in committee.  And I'm on the conference board of church and society, which has been asked to provide resources to better study the question.  So I'm reading about faith and science these days.

I've already recommended Lawson Bryan's book and Adam Hamilton's stuff that touches on the subject.

Here are some names of some popular and very thoughtful writers on my reading list:

Alister McGrath.  McGrath is known to many Christian readers through his popular and very good theology textbook.  He's written tons of books and lots of subjects, including a book I read and enjoyed very much on the production of the King James Version.  McGrath holds doctorates in theology and molecular biophysics.  He's written Science and Religion: An Introduction, a book I think everyone who wants to participate in this conversation should be required to read.  It's not difficult.  It's not shallow.  It's a perfect start to an intelligent and faithful conversation on the subject.

Francis Collins.  Francis Collins is the head of the National Institutes of Health and led the team that mapped the human genome.  A former atheist, he came to faith through his study of science.  His The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief was a very popular New York Times bestseller.

John Polkinghorne: Polkinghorne is a recipient of the Templeton Prize (a sort of religious version of the Nobel Prize).  He left his job as chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge University to study for the priesthood.  He is widely recognized as the world's greatest thinker on the interaction of science and religion, and his writings are noted for being written to be accessible to lay people.  He has written more than 25 books on the subject of science and religion.  I don't know where to start, so I've ordered The Polkinghorne Reader as a sampler.

William Lane Craig.  Craig has made a name for himself in recent years as a gifted apologist who gives The New Atheists fits in public debates.  He destroyed Christopher Hitchens. Richard Dawkins famously said that he is the one Christian who puts the fear of God in him.  He is not trained as a scientist, but holds doctorates in both theology and philosophy.  His philosophical work was on cosmology, though, and so scientific questions related to origins are central to his expertise.  He's on the conservative side theologically and in terms of social ethics, teaching at Biola and beginning his training at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  I don't know where to begin with his writings and would love a recommendation.  He's got a good website.

These are some of the top defenders of the Christian faith these days, the folks on the front lines of intellectual debates for the existence of a personal God, believers who engage science in a meaningful way.  Interestingly, none of these feel that evolution is inconsistent with Christian faith or a faithful reading of Bible, and all of them are opposed to young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Those who argue for creationism (not the Apostles' Creed kind, but, as Polinghorne calls it, creationism in "that curious North American sense") and intelligent design often say that there are tons of scientists who are creationists, and people debate about whether they are correct about this.  What's interesting to me is not how difficult it is to find a creationist scientist, but how difficult it is to find a creationist apologist for the Christian faith who also has any reputable scientific training.  The same is true of biblical scholars--it's nearly impossible to find a faithful Christian who teaches the Bible as reputable scholar and who reads the Bible the way the creationists and intelligent design people read it.  I would love to hear from anyone who can offer some good counter examples.  I'm supposed to be providing resources for everyone, so I'm open to getting as much help as possible.

Pastoral Prayer for June 30 (for Independence Day, based on Galatians 5)

Holy God:

We give you thanks and praise for the many blessings of life.  Especially in this season, we who live in this country are grateful for the blessing that the nation in which we are privileged to dwell is a land of political freedom.  We are grateful that we are each free to worship according to the dictates of our own conscience, that our faith is a matter of heart and conviction and not one of external compulsion.  We are grateful that we are gauranteed the right of free expression and that we can freely share our faith in the public sphere.  We are grateful that we are guaranteed the freedom of assembly and that as we gather today to worship you we do so without fear.

So often, we are given to complaining about our leaders, our government, and our culture.  Help us to take some time to be grateful.  Help us to remember that the fact that we can complain means that we have freedoms that most of the world cannot begin to imagine.

We pray for the nation in which we live.  We are citizens first of your kingdom, and citizens of this nation second.  And yet, we love this land, not only for what it is, but also because you have called us to it and you have given us your heart, a heart that loves to world enough that your Son gave his life for its sake.  Help us to remember that we have been placed in this great country not only as a privilege and a blessing, but, more importantly, with a calling and to be a blessing.  

we celebrate freedom, and yet many of us our bound up and imprisoned within.  Set us free on the inside.  Give us true freedom--freedom to live as fully alive, as you designed us to live.  Help us to find the peace, power, joy,  and love that only comes through the Son of God who died and rose again to set us free.  Help us to live an overcoming life through the power of you Spirit, led by your spirit and walking in new life in your spirit.  Give us a kind of freedom that is truly free, no matter what our circumstances may be without.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for June 23, 2013 (based on Galatians 3:23-29)

Holy God:

We thank you that your is revealed in this place--in song, in scripture, in symbol, in sacrament.  Most especially, we see your glory in the faces of one another, in the constantly restored image of God reflected through those who have laid aside their lives so that they might be made more and more like him each day.  

So many times, we have sought to understand ourselves, to establish an identity for ourselves.  We wear many labels: rich or poor, black or white, married or single, young or old, outgoing or shy, simple or sophisticated, conservative or liberal, employed, unemployed, retired, Americans, Alabamians, parents, children, grandparents.

But none of these labels and the many, many more that we give to ourselves or others give to us define us or tell the true story of who we are.  So we search.  We search for what we are about, what are lives mean, who we really are.

Help us to find ourselves in you.  You, who made us.  You, who remakes us.  You, who called us from the foundation of the earth, who knit us in our mother’s womb, who has seen every moment of every day of our lives, who has heard our cries in the night and the deepest yearnings of our souls, who will receive us into the arms of your mercy when we take our last breath.  

You have called us to lay down our lives, to be crucified with Christ, to make our lives not about us but about him.  And yet, you have loved us most.  And you have promised that if we would lay aside our lives we would find them.  You have warned us that all we do to find our lives would cause us to lose them. 

We give ourselves to you.  We find ourselves in finding you.  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for 16 June 2013 (based on Gal. 2:15-21)

Holy and Gracious God:

We have come into your house to worship you, for you alone are God and you alone are worthy of our praise.  With grateful hearts, we thank you for the gift of your Son Jesus Christ, who took flesh, lived, died, and was raised that we might know your great heart of love and that we might be completely saved in every way.

We have tasted your love, though we have rarely lived fully in the light of your love.  We have sought to prove ourselves to you, to others, to ourselves.  We have always felt like we never quite measured up, like there was always something more that should be done, or always something that we had done that could never quite be overcome.  We have tried to make a case for ourselves.  We’ve looked at the man in mirror and tried to feel good about what we see, though deep in our hearts we’ve always had our doubts.  Someone else is smarter, more beautiful, more successful, better liked, more loved.

So today, help us to rest in you, to trust in you alone.  You have loved us eternally.  Each of us is precious in your sight, and a unique act of your loving creation.  Most importantly, the blood of Jesus was shed for each of us and for all of us.  Whenever we seek to waste our lives in building a false case for ourselves, teach us to look to the cross and to see that we are worthy of the sacrifice of the son of God.  

We trust in you alone.  We thank you that we need nothing else.  

Amen. 

Wedding homily for the marriage of Jack Allen and Heather Kelly

Genesis 2:14-18

18 Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ ¹⁹So out of the ground the LordGod formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man^* there was not found a helper as his partner.²¹So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.²²And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
   and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,^*
   for out of Man^* this one was taken.’
²⁴Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

This is a familiar story, and yet it's a strange one, a story about divine surgery, complete with holy anesthesia.

It's a story about the nature of covenant.  It reminds us that this wedding today is not a show. It's not about the flowers, or the pictures, or the programs, the dresses, the music, or even about the bride.  You are not the audience.

Today we have gathered in the house of God in God's presence.  As is always the case when we gather for worship, God is the audience.

Our response the the glory of God, the proclamation of God's Word, and, most importantly, God's faithfulness, is to form a covenant.

A covenant is a kind of promise.  It's a promise beyond a promise, a promise that binds those who make a promise together and makes something new.

Today, Heather is making a promise to Jack.  Jack is making a promise to Heather.  Heather and Jack are making a promise to God.  Most importantly, God is making a promise to Jack and Heather.  God is binding Himself to them.  He is faithful, and God will surely be true to His promise.  This is why Dietrich Bonheoffer once said in a wedding homily that we often say to couples that their love will hold their marriage together, while the exact opposite is true.  Because your marriage is a covenant and because God has promised to be with you always, your marriage will hold your love together even when it waxes and wanes.

The image we have in our text of a rib being taken from the man to make the woman is an image of covenant.  It's an image that reminds you that because you are in covenant with each other, you are part of each other.  It's an image not unlike that of the Church as the Body of Christ--because we, the Church, are in covenant with God and each other, we are part of each other and belong to each other.

That means that from today on, each of your joys will be the other's joys.  Each of your hurts will be the other's hurts.  Your dreams have become each other's dreams.  Your children, your choices, your money will always be shared.  Nothing good can happen to one of you without the other being blessed.  Nothing bad can happen to one of you without the other hurting.

So be always be good to one another, because in being good to each other you will also be blessed.

And know that you are not alone.  Your life together is a new thing and your life has become different. And God is with you in your life together.

Just as God's presence is here in this place of worship, God's presence will always be with you, and you will never be alone.

Pastoral Prayer for 9 June 2013 (based on Galatians 1:11-24)

Holy God:

We have come into this place for one reason only this morning: to worship you.  Only the sacrifice of your son gives us access to your throne, only the faithful love we have seen in Jesus makes us know that we are loved, only your radical grace draws us into your fold and wraps us in your embrace.

It was the love of Christ that brought us to this house today, it was the love of Christ that made us part of this family, it was the love of Christ that made our hearts alive.

We have been tempted to be distracted by many things since--We have easily become lost in activities and rules and church protocol. We have thought that our life together was about meetings and vestments and calendars and things to be fixed.  We have become so passionate about the songs we should sing that we have lost the spirit of the one who put a song in our heart.

You care about the work done at meetings, about the opprtunities for renewal we put in a calendar, about the songs that teach us to remember your great love in Jesus.  So help us always to put first things first.  To love him first and foremost, and to allow everything in this life to point us back to the love that set us free.

Amen.

Creationism Petitions

Annual Conference is over--a very wonderful Annual Conference with a tremendous level of harmony.  One subject of debate was a conversation about Creationism due to three petitions submitted by John Moneyham of Forest Park UMC in Panama City, along with his pastor, John Friedman and his District Superintendent, Gary Daniel.  I am a member of the Committee of Resolutions and Petitions and had a front row seat on this conversation.

I'm grateful for the way in which the conversation was held.  Mr. Wesley taught us about "holy conferencing." He believed that we learn from God when we gather to hear from each other in a spirit of openness and love.  I think our conversation mostly was focused on listening and learning rather than fighting and winning.

Though Mr. Moneyham and I saw the issues differently, I was pleasantly surprised that the process gave me opportunity to become friends with him.  He's a delightful guy, even if he's very determined.  His motives are terrific.  He teaches Sunday School for teenagers.  As questions arose among his students about evolution and creation, he researched the position of the United Methodist Church and, as a Creationist, was disappointed to find a pro-evolutionary stance.  He feels that a person can be Christian and believe in theistic evolution, but he feels that our statements preclude the beliefs of a person who believes in a literal six day creation.  I disagree with him--I think that our statements make room for anyone who affirms the Affirmation of Faith's confession: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, CREATOR of heaven and earth."  I was opposed to the petitions for many reasons, but mostly because I felt that they limited the options for how a faithful Christian can think about God's creating.  I was encouraged to know that this was not Mr. Moneyham's intention and that he wants a church that allows us to think and let think on these issues as much as I do.  Even on the issue of the Clergy Letter Project (of which I am a signee), Mr. Moneyham does not oppose much of the language of the letter itself, and he opposes the letter because he reads it differently than I do.  He believes it only makes room for darwinian atheistic evolution and that it undermines the authority of the Bible.  I believe that the letter acknowledges that faithful Christians believe in the Bible and its authority, and believe in God as Creator though they can read scripture and come to different conclusions as to how God creates and is creating.

I was disappointed that Mr. Moneyham questioned Rev. Kathy Knight's faithfulness to the position of the committee as a whole.  Kathy had a very difficult job.  Mr. Moneyham is a member of the Committee on Resolutions and Petitions and he submitted three petitions.  This gave him an opportunity to monopolize the time of the committee arguing for his petitions.  We spent more than an hour discussing his petitions and had less than fifteen minutes to discuss all the others.  (This raises a big question in my mind--I think that it's inappropriate for a member of the committee to submit a petition or resolution and I think we need to spell this out in the Standing Rules.  The whole purpose of the committee is to have a disinterested group to study and give guidance to the issues on behalf of the whole conference.)  Kathy had a very difficult job--she had to share basic rationale for the committee's recommendations and she had to condense an hour long conversation to a few short sentences.  She did an amazing job and was very faithful.  I'm deeply grateful for her wisdom and leadership, and I'm impressed that she never got defensive when integrity was questioned in the way it was.  My one regret from the whole process is that I did not get up to defend her.  If the conversation had not shifted so quickly to substance than I would have certainly done so.

This conversation is meaningful and important.  It's a conversation about what is necessary and fundamental and what is not.  It's a conversation about the Gospel--is the preaching of the Gospel the only burden we will put on those who are challenged to give their lives to Christ, or will we add a particular view of science and origins on top of it?

It is also an issue of the authority of Scripture--Will we trust Scripture?   How should Scripture be read well and faithfully?  How do we rightly divide the Word of truth?

It's a question of the interaction of faith and culture.  What role does faith have in the shaping of culture and what means are appropriate to influence culture?  Is it appropriate for Christians to use their influence to tell science teachers what to teach in the classroom?  If so, should we be surprised if the science teachers want to tell us what to say in our churches?

I've recently been asked to become a part of the Conference Board of Church and Society.  Dr. R. Lawson Bryan shared with me that he felt that this important issue would be a very helpful one for the Board to take up.  He feels that we could be helpful in bringing together people who could teach us how to speak faithfully, wisely, and intelligently on these issues, and could offer resources for churches to discuss these issues with their people.  I certainly will make this a priority in my time on the Board.

The Conference Board of Higher Education and Campus Ministry presented Huntingdon College President J. Cameron West the Francis Asbury Award for contribution to campus ministry, and in his acceptance speech, he offered Huntingdon College as a resource for this conversation.  It seems to me that this is one of the primary reasons we ought to have a United Methodist College--to serve as a place where people with good minds can help us think well as faithful Christians in ways that impact our congregations and our people who live as disciples in the world.  We have United Methodists scholars who are trained to teach us how to be disciples by loving the Lord with all our minds.  Huntingdon has some great resources--Erastus Dudley is a science guy, but he is also a faithful Christian who makes a tremendous contribution to the spiritual life of the college.  Jason Borders is a fine New Testament scholar and deeply committed believer who began is training to be a scientist before he switched over to  biblical studies.  Frank Buckner is the head of the Religion faculty and this question is at the center of his academic expertise.  These fine Christian scholars love to share in local churches (Jason and Frank are ordained UMC clergy).  I encourage folks who want to think these issues through to avail themselves to these folks as well as the many other fine science and religion faculty at Huntingdon.

As a beginning--Let me offer two resources I have found helpful on this subject.  Our own Dr. R. Lawson Bryan spent an extraordinary amount of time (over a year of preparation) researching a sermon series on faith and science.  Dr. Bryan began his education in the sciences before he was called to ministry.  He used the preparation for this sermon series as a basis for a very fine, very accessible, short and thoughtful book on the subject entitled Pursuing Science, Finding Faith.  It's available on Amazon (here's a link): http://www.amazon.com/Pursuing-Science-Finding-Faith-Lawson/dp/0984942602/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370530384&sr=1-1&keywords=faith+and+science+lawson+bryan

I have also led a congregation in a study of Adam Hamilton's Confronting the Controversies and found it very helpful.  It has an entire chapter on the question of evolution being taught in the public schools.  It also began as a sermon series, at the largest church in our denomination.  The very articulate 18-year-old who spoke on the petitions at Annual Conference references how helpful he had found Hamilton's work.  Here's a link to that book: http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Controversies-Biblical-Perspectives-Issues/dp/0687346002/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370530627&sr=1-1&keywords=confronting+the+controversies

I look forward to seeing where this important conversation leads us!

Pastoral Prayer for June 2, 2013 (based on Galatians 1)

Holy God:

We thank you for Jesus. We thank you that you took flesh, that in him you showed what you had intended for human life.  You showed us the way to live fully, fully alive and fully loving.  We thank you that he died to heal the broken relationship between you and every person, that he rose again to prove who he was and to demonstrate that you would be true to your promise to make us and all things new.

This simple Gospel has meant everything to us--it has brought us from death to life.  It has made us see the difference between drawing breath and living life to its fullest.  Knowing Jesus has meant everything to us.

From time to time we have lost our way.  We have made our lives in Christ about something else--about religious busyness, or following moral rules, or knowing the right things or doing things the right way or a million other diversions from simple trust and joy in you.  

So help us to find new life today in the place where we found it at the first.  Help us to look Jesus square in the face and be overwhelmed by his grace and love, to give ourselves entirely to Him as he has given himself entirely to us, to know ourselves to be forgiven and beloved, to trust him completely and nothing else.

For Jesus, who made us and all things new, who is the beginning and end of our hope and the one in whom we place all our trust, we are eternally grateful.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for Pentecost

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created.  And you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy your consolations.  

May the same Spirit who blew over the formless mass of creation and brought order, new life, and a new earth blow over us today and bring order to our lives, create something new in us, and renew our hurting world.  

May the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead raise up everything we thought was hopeless.  

May the same Spirit that gave courage to the prophets shake us out of complacency and empower us to speak the truth of God boldly and uncompromisingly in the spirit of Christ’s gracious love.  

May the same Spirit that made us the Church draw us together as a congregation and as a worldwide Christian family, with unbreakable bonds and loving unity.  

May the same Spirit that caused the first Christians to share the Gospel with boldness until the whole earth knew the name of Jesus compel us to give of the grace we have received until Millbrook truly knows that there is life in the name of Jesus.  Amen.

Eighteen (June newsletter frontpage article)

There’s a number that keeps coming back to me, nearly tormenting me.  The number is 18.  I learned this number from Dr. Jim Graham, pastor of Coosada Baptist Church.  It’s the percentage of people in Elmore County in church each Sunday morning.

Of course, the real number that shakes me up is 82--the 82% who stay home.  Who are these people? Many of them probably have never heard the Gospel and have only a passing acquaintance with the name and person of Jesus Christ.  Most of them probably had some religious training in childhood but have since dropped out because something happened to cause them to disconnect along the way.  Many of them are youth and children whose parents never brought them to church and have no idea what church is about.  We church goers have become an extreme minority.

What does this mean? For one, it means that if we don’t get serious about reaching unbelievers with the Gospel we should expect that Christianity will become irrelevant in our community within a generation or two.

For another, it means that we need to think differently about how we reach people.  Most of us have spent our lives in a our world where people were basically Christian and church growth meant that congregations competed for where people went to church.  That world is gone.  If every church in Elmore County doubled in attendance, we still would be reaching less than half the population.  We need to work together.

For another, it means that evangelism can no longer be the work of advertisement or a committee alone.  Every Christian needs to have a conviction that people need Jesus, Jesus is found in church, our church offers Jesus, and people need to be here.  Each of us needs to invite people to church all the time.  Graciously, never being pushy, but always looking for opportunities to invite.  Everything that happens at our church, from Vacation Bible School to a Sunday School supper, is an evangelistic opportunity.

We also need to recognize that the people who visit us do not come fully formed and do not know the customs and expectations of our congregation.  We need to be patient and recognize that the only thing that really matters is Jesus.  We also need to remember how easy it is to forget how strange and scary it can be to be somewhere new, how helpful it is to find a friend, find a sign, and get help in understanding how things work.  

So let’s all be invitational, hospitable, and visionary.  God has given us a great opportunity.  Praying, working, dreaming, loving together, I believe we can win Elmore County for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Blessings,

Nathan

A Theology of Church Buildings

My recent experience serving a church in the midst of a building program has given me opportunity to think about God's perspective on buildings.  Institutional church life is influenced by church buildings more than we often realize.  Many or most church meetings have little or nothing to do with anything but the construction, care, and use of buildings.  And yet, we rarely address what scripture and the teachings of our faith might tell us about how a Christian community should approach buildings.

NT Wright is very helpful here.  In his Simply Christian, he describes how the Tabernacle and then the Temple served the function of being the place where God's space and human space converged.  The Temple was a physical testimony to God's immanence.  It was a place where people could physically go to experience the reality that God is not removed from us but that heaven and earth interlock and crash in upon each other.  The planning, building, protecting, renovating, mourning, and rebuilding of the Temple take up an extraordinary amount of the Hebrew Bible's attention.

Jesus claims that he is the Temple--his very body.  Wherever Jesus is, the Kingdom of God draws near.  Heaven and earth interlock and intersect wherever Jesus is.

Therefore, there is no need of a Temple after Jesus.  After Jesus ascends, the New Testament (in its various strains, voices, and witnesses) agrees that the people of God are the place where Jesus is to be found and where heaven and earth intersect.

For example, the Book of Hebrews uses Temple language in very Platonic terms, saying the the earthly temple was always only a shadow of the heavenly temple anyway, that Jesus provides a perfect temple in himself, that believers must remain always faithful to the community of faith because it is there where we discover the living temple of Christ as we gather together.

1 Peter claims very explicitly that we are a living/spiritual/windy house (oikos pneumatikos), that each and every believer is a living stone that makes the true house of God, that Jesus is the cornerstone that holds us all together and fits us to each other.

Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians--We are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  We normally think this means that each of us has the Spirit within us, which is true, but beside Paul's point.  He argues that the physical bodies of the physical community collectively constitute the physical presence of Christ wherever we gather, so whatever any one of us does in the body--whether it be an act of agape or an act of sin--affects the whole body and Christ himself.

Early Christians had no buildings.  The New Testament talks very often of the people gathering to pray, share meals, remember the Lord, reflect on scripture, etc.  Clearly, this happened in homes for the first century (at the very least) of the Church's life.  Each and every Christian gathering in the New Testament is either constituted of Christians participating in Jewish worship in a Temple or synagogue or gathering among themselves in homes.  There are no archeological remains of any building constructed for the purpose of Christian worship before the house church of Duro-Europos (ca. 235 AD).

In recent years, many Christian leaders and thinkers have argued (aided by the disastrous results of church overbuilding and borrowing just before the 2008 financial collapse) that churches should do all they can to get out of the building business entirely.  They have argued that the future of church life will be found in interconnected home cell groups, or gatherings of Christians in public spaces.  There have been many successful experiments with this model as well as many disasters.  Several coastal UMC congregations have successfully launched "Worship on the Water" services (Gulf Breeze, Woodlawn in PCB, Perdido's Florabama site).  These services have attracted huge crowds and many new believers, proved to be extraordinarily cost efficient, and allowed ministry energy to be focused on discipleship rather than administrative matters.

At the same time, we have yet to see one of these beach services flourish without the support of a large, stable, traditional bricks-and-mortar congregation.  A building provides a center and a gathering place for the people of God.  A house does not make a family, but it is very difficult for a family to stay deeply connected without centers of family life such as dinner tables, living rooms, and walls to hold family portraits.  Congregations that meet in rented spaces may be dynamic and charismatic (in the non-Pentecostal sense), but they also lack roots and tend to be built around the personality of preacher.  Perhaps this is a shakier idolatry--buildings last longer than preachers and are less given to failure.  The "no-church-buildings-in-the-future" crowd sometimes seems more in love with making futuristic predictions and seeming smarter than the rest of us than getting busy doing God's work in the world through whatever means necessary (buildings or no buildings).

Theologically speaking, church buildings must always be understood as tools for a greater purpose and never as an end in themselves.  At the point that the building becomes the goal and the people become the means to build or maintain the physical space, a destructive idolatry has taken over that will cause the true and living Church of God expressed among a body of believers to begin to die.  This is why "build it and they will come" never works.  It's why churches that build big, expensive buildings without clarity of the missional purposes of those buildings find themselves hamstrung both programmatically and financially.  It's why a church that limits the use of facilities in order to protect the facility from harm or theft or to save money will quickly find the facility falling into disrepair with no money to fix it up--God is not in the business of maintaining our idols.  God pays the invoice when he's placed an order, but he will not pay up if he didn't order it.  God does not pay for monuments.  When we use every resource to build the living Church and accomplish what he intended to be done through the buildings, he has a remarkable way of getting them paid for.

Whether congregations are wrestling with whether to build, or what to build, or how to use existing buildings, the question must always be an afterthought of the missional purpose and call of the collective people of God.  The question of the future and call of a congregation is never about a building.  It's always about a living community drawing the world to itself and spreading the love of God in tangible ways to the world around it.  Buildings may or may not be helpful to that call, and the building of the buildings themselves is almost always is a distraction from the mission, just as it's impossible to dig a hole at the same time you're at the hardware store shopping for a shovel.  Buildings can be an obscenely inefficient use of Kingdom money, too--think of how much mission or evangelism ministry could be done with the millions of dollars that go into most church buildings.  While buildings may be useful for ministry, we should try to get the most bang for the buck as possible and get out of the building business as quickly as possible.

There.  Those are some initial thoughts.  Now I have to go shopping for stained glass windows.

Pastoral Prayer (2nd Sun of Easter, Jn. 20:19-31)

Holy God:

We praise you in this glorious season in which we celebrate the Resurrection of your son, thegreatest of your miracles, the source of every miracle, the sign of your life-giving power, the hope of
future glory, and the beginning of new life in the here and now.

We confess to you that though we believe in the resurrection, we often fail to live in the newness of life
it offers. We are tempted to forget that the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells in us,
and that in every moment we can live lives infused with power and possibility. We are often fearful—
fearful of a dangerous world, fearful of the sin within us, fearful of failure, fearful of threats within and
without.

So help us, holy God, to feel a fresh surge of your life-giving spirit. Help us to go on the offensive against the forces of darkness. Help us to combat hate with love. Help us to partner with you in your great plan to spread your light into every dark corner of your world. Help us to live as an Easter people—a people who risk greatly and love greatly because we know that when we act in obedience to you, we act with the full power of your resurrection filling us. Help us to answer your call to complete your work of making every dead thing alive again through the power of your spirit.
Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for Easter Day (inspired by 1 Cor. 15))

Holy God:

We give you praise with hearts full of thanksgiving on this, the greatest of days, the day your Son rose
from the dead to show us that death had been destroyed. You have given us the perfect sign of your
faithfulness, you miracle working power, and your love that gives us ultimate victory.

We confess to you that deep in our hearts, the reality of the continuing power of death continues to
weigh us down and limit our ability to celebrate fully. We feel the power of death in our bodies. We still grieve over those who have died ahead of us. We experience the power of death drawing our souls into the dust. We struggle to overcome the sin within us. We struggle to overcome cynicism and a gnawing sense that our world is corrupt beyond repair.

Help us to see the many small and great demonstrations of your life-giving power overcoming the
blasphemous claims of death all around us. Help us to believe in our bones that the resurrection is not
some beautiful fairy tale of something that happened ago, but a demonstration of the way your life
renews all life. Help us to believe beyond our seeing that you are even now swallowing up every kind of death in your victory. Help us to live in every moment so that we will spread your life and participate in the renewing of everything.

Most of all, give each of us new life. To those who have never been made alive by your spirit, may
this Easter Sunday be the beginning of a new birth to a life lived with you, a life of power, joy, and
confidence, a life lived in wonder and awe of your miracle working power. For those of us who have
grown weary and lost our easter vision, help us to feel a fresh surge of your resurrection power making
everything dead within us alive again.

You said that if the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwelt in us, he would give new life to our mortal bodies. So bring healing to every broken body, joy to every broken spirit, reconciliation to every broken relationship, and peace to our broken world.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 15:1-3, 11-32 (the Parable of the Prodigal God)

Holy God

Thank you for bringing us into this house of worship once again today.  Thank you for the joy we feel as we share this hour with those we love.  Thank you most of all, for the grace we feel here, the love you have extended to us, the welcome we feel simply because we are all loved by you and your grace swings the door wide open for all who enter.  We thank you that this place is a sign of the love, the grace, and the welcome that you offer us in all times and all places, that your forgiveness is a banquet of joy and love to which we are continually invited.

We confess that we have often failed to accept your invitation.  We’ve wanted to go our own way.  We’ve needed to figure things out on our own.  Either through our own misunderstanding or through the failed witness of others, we’ve often misunderstood what you are calling us to.  We’ve run from you because we’ve thought that you were a hard task master, or that you wanted to make our live boring or lifeless.  We’ve very rarely thought of the grace you’ve offered us as an opportunity to live lives of celebration and rejoicing, a banquet, a party celebrating your goodness and redemption.

So whether we’ve run away from your grace because wee wanted the life we could create for ourselves more than the life you have for us, or even if we’ve been good religious people who’ve been so stuck on following the rules and being good citizens that we’ve forgotten what it means to truly feast on your mercy, help us to enter your house with fresh love, fresh grace, fresh joy.  Let the party of your grace begin.

Be with those who suffer.  Make them know your closeness and bring them new life.  Bless our enemies.  Bless those who are far from your family.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 13:1-9 (parable of the unfruitful fig tree)

Holy God:

We thank you for the love you have poured out to us, the love you are pouring out right now, and the love you have sent before us for the needs ahead of us.  We thank you that you chose us without regard to our deserving.  We thank you that you have given us your word, your spirit, your very lifeblood.  You have given us each other.  You have given us new hearts and loving friends, countless sermons and Bible Studies, a comfortable building in which to worship, and so much more than we can ever name.  

You have told us to abide in you, and we are thankful that you want to abide with us.  You also said that if we abide in you and your word abides in us, then we would produce fruit that would last.  Those words comfort us, but they also worry us.  Because they teach us that the life you have invested in us should produce a return.  And you have taught us that you will hold us accountable for producing the fruit that your love should produce.

So help us to take a hard look at ourselves, both as individuals and as a church.  Help us to honestly take account of what we have produced--how we have loved others, how we have grown as disciples, how we have helped others to come to faith.  Today, let us honestly hear from you what good has come from all those hours in church and all those sermons and all our religious activity.  We want to be made new.  We want our lives to be fruitful.

We cannot be anything other than what we have always been unless you remake us.  So help us, holy God, to feel our need to be nourished, shaped, transformed, and reconnected.  And help our lives to bring a harvest of righteousness.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for Lent 2 (Luke 13:31-35--Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I have longed to gather you under my wings...)

Holy God--

Your son taught us to be holy, as you are holy.  He said that if we would hold onto our lives, we would lose them, but if we would lay down our lives for for you and for th esake of the Gospel, we would find them.  We have often felt your spirit moving within us to give our all, and we have sometimes answered that call as best as we can.  Our feet are made of clay and the voices that draw us away are many.  As the old hymn says, we are prone to wander.  Yet you keep calling--you tell us that your goal is to make us perfect in our love.

When we hide from you, as Adam hid from you in the garden, we ask you to come looking for us, as you did him.  Let us hear your voice.  O holy and loving God, let all our repenting be about nothing more than running into your arms.  May we never feel shamed or cajoled, bullied, manipulated or coerced.  For your call to be holy is always a call to come in from the rain, to come away from ways of living that destroy us.  Help us to find ourselves, to be made safe from the storms of this life, under the shelter of your wings.

We offer our all, as you have offered all of yourself to us.  We give our money because it is not ours but yours, and you have made us stewards.  We thank you for your provision and give back the portion you commanded in thanksgiving.  We offer you those who we love who are hurting--may your love overshadow them, comfort and heal them.  we offer our land and this community.  Help us to run to you and to find ourselves under the loving care of your Lordship.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for the First Sunday of Lent

Holy God,

We remember this day a time when your Son went away to be alone in the wilderness, to fast and pray, to be alone with you.  He took time out of his life to confront those things that were a temptation to him.  He confronted the devil.  Help us, through these forty days and always, never to run from those things within us that make us afraid, those places where the unknown and uncomfortable dwell, the broken places of unforgiveness and misdirected motives, of insecurity, of rage, of loneliness and hopelessness.  We will do anything to hide from ourselves.  We will invite any distraction.  We will fill our lives with noise and people and a thousand excuses.  But the demons still whisper to us and the wilderness cannot be contained.  Give us the courage to finally face it, to face ourselves, to have the guts not to run away from whatever we’ve been running from for so long.

We thank you that when we go to the wilderness, we don’t go alone.  We go with you.  We go together.  And because you are there, it is you who give us comfort.  You are the one who makes our hearts perfect.  So we present ourselves to you.  We want to give ourselves completely, but maybe we’re not quite ready for that yet.  So take what we can give today, and grace us to give it all.  Grace us to have a perfect heart totally given in love to you.

Amen.

Throwing a Party

I was distracting during prayer worrying about church finances and thinking about Stewardship matters when I read the Old Testament lectionary text for the week, Deuteronomy 26:1-11.  It tells us exactly what to do when we give.

1. Give the firstfruit of your harvest (in case you are not a farmer, that means to give to the Lord before you pay your bills or buy anything for yourself).

2. Give it to the priest (I give to the church before I give anywhere else, and I think this is the proper way to give).

3. Say the following: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord hear our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.  The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and fave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord have given me."

Why are we taught to give this speech (or at least something similar as a prayer of our heart)?  Because we need to stop poor-mouthing and feeling sorry for ourselves that we don't have a house like someone on the Real Housewives and carry around a wad of benjamins like Tony Soprano.  This speech teaches us to say to God, "I came from absolutely nothing and my people were absolute nobodies.  And now, look at the amazing blessing I have!"

4. Throw a party.  "Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house."  Enjoy what God has given you.  He gave it to you so that you can enjoy it.  If you're anxious or feel guilty about it, then your wasting the gift God wanted you to have for your enjoyment (and the enjoyment of those around you).  Just don't forget where it came from.

I must say that we could use some help with our view of money.  We are pretty miserable and anxious and we gripe like crazy about how bad times are and how the government is robbing us blind and how we can barely survive.  All the while we live in the richest nation on earth and have multiple cars and the latest phones, computers, and multitude other gadgets and gizmos to keep us constantly distracted.

It's time to get grateful, get generous, get real, get happy, and throw a party.