Being In Christ is a Different Thing 6/23/19 Pentecost 2C

the Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Being In Christ is a Different Thing

 6/23/19  Pentecost 2C

Wow, this is another Sunday where I want to preach on each of the texts!  Over the years, I’ve explored each of these texts, and even memorized portions.  Songs have been written on the Psalms text, about our souls longing for God like a deer for water, and the phrase “deep calls to deep” is one I quote.  I actually had a meditation published on the 1 Kings 9 text, about Elijah lying discouraged under the broom tree, then hearing that “still, small voice of God” in the silence.  Luke 8 is the memorable story of the man with so many demons in him that they tell Jesus their name is Legion, and when Jesus casts them out of the man and into a herd of pigs, the whole herd commits suicide. 

Yet its the Galatians text that holds what may be my favorite verse, or at least among my top couple  - Galatians 3:28:  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. This is the verse that taught me of the radical inclusion of Christ’s kindom; that gave me a glimpse of the wonder of the diversity included in God’s love and creation.  And this is the verse that, for a 22 year old young woman raised in very conservative Christianity where women were captive in a patriarchal system based  more on culture and habit that outlined what a woman’s sphere was and was not - for this young woman who loved Jesus, Jesus’ church and the Scripture, this verse told me deep in my heart that yes, God could be calling me to the ministry.  Because in the realm of God divisions cease, male and female have nothing to do with our call, our gifts from the Spirit, and our service in ministry.  It was okay for me to go to seminary. While my love for God remained the same, the content of my faith changed as I let go of the rules taught me as a girl, and saw that this Scripture actually challenged those rules.  I realized the way my ministers had interpreted the Bible (although they would have denied interpreting and would have said they just read it literally) did not account for the vision and breadth of this verse, and was actually influenced by what they thought oughta be according to the culture they’d grown up in.  At that point, my faith in God went through a transformation that led me out of my home church, where no questions were allowed and no deviation from what the preacher said was allowed. I grew that day, and my experience of God grew, too. I realized that there were other ways of being a good Christian than the ways I had been taught, and that good people could interpret Scripture differently.  

Suddenly, I was curious and excited to learn some of those other ways faithful believers saw the Scriptures.  Before that, I had accepted that my preacher taught the only right way to be a Christian.  And that there was only one right way.  Since other people disagreed with my preacher, they had to be wrong, or be deceived or not praying right.  I was really good at arguing or debating with people that held other interpretations, because I knew lots of verses to quote that my preacher used.  I thought that as a Christian, I had to hold tightly to these rules the preacher taught, and get better at showing people where they were wrong.  Now, suddenly, all that dropped away - it wasn’t that I lost my faith, because this change seemed to be of God.  There was now a bigger way of faith to be explored, things I’d never heard or been exposed to.  I felt a little scared, but mostly excited.

Those kinds of transitions in my faith life have continued to happen periodically.  Usually its because a situation in my life doesn’t fit in the way I’ve organized my views of faith and God and life.  That transition I mentioned about Galatians 3:28 happened while I was grieving the death of my dad, and wondering why God took him while my sister and I were still young …and my dad was a good and faithful Christian, too.  I was struggling with how God let this death  happen to us.  There were also things going on in my home church that didn’t sit well with what I thought I’d been taught, and that was a struggle.  I was trying to understand these things in my rule-oriented legalism about God, and it was like trying to force a round object into a square hole - it wouldn’t go. Realizing there was much about God and faith that I didn’t know, I was free now to ponder in a bigger realm.

I had another transition in joining a Presbyterian Church, not staying with my Baptist upbringing.  Again when my 3rd child was born terminally ill, I wrestled with my understanding of God and bad things happening when I was trying so hard to do well.  My own health crisis 4 years ago, when cancer was found in my body after I’d had a terrible experience in a church  - that became a time of a faith transition  as God once again proved big enough to contain my questioning and my grief.  While going through the time was painful, my confidence in God’s love eventually led to a new understanding. 

The young girl that I was, would think that the current me is the next thing to a heathen.  Yet its been a journey of faith. 

Some folks I’ve known along the way have found these crises of faith too difficult to bear, and decided to just abandon all belief in God, and leave church altogether.  Their anger at God for not fitting the box they had put God in, was deep. They couldn’t see that they had put God in a box, and limited what God does and who God is.  When their experiences in life didn’t fit, they chose to quit.  At least for the present - God doesn’t give up on people.  Growth and new life is always possible in God. 

In the apostle Paul’s letter to the believers in the city of Galatia, he uses the illustration of this kind of growth to explain how the gospel of Christ builds on the faith of Israel, as a young child’s thinking about rules gives way to a more mature vision of living in the grace of God in Jesus. I can come to this Scripture now, not taking it literally, and see that Paul was trying to explain both Christianity’s continuity with Judaism as well as its difference from Judaism.  I can se that taking his argument literally can lead to an anti-Semitism, or to making Judaism seem lesser, which us smarter people have surpassed.  Maybe at the beginning of Christianity this kind of thinking was necessary, just as the Protestant Reformers had to vilify the practices of the Roman Catholic churches when the two separated.  Like people who want to leave a relationship - or a church -  have to work up a head of steam and anger in order to leave, proving that they’re doing the more righteous thing. 

We have to be careful speaking of the faith of Israel here, not to say its childish or that Christianity surpasses it.  Judaism produced Jesus; his love for God and his insights into what God desired were formed within Judaism.  Jesus never left Judaism; he was a Jew when he was crucified and still a Jew when he was raised.  All Jesus’ early followers were Jews.  Judaism kept alive a faith in the One God, and formed many deeply faithful men and women in their relationship with God. Following the precepts of the Law, ie the rules, led reflective people to embrace a way of life with God that included and respected much arguing and debating over the meanings of the words of Scripture, and led to important explorations into science and the human condition. The world has indeed been blessed by Judaism, including the blessing who is Jesus.

Just as Jesus sought to purify the practice of faith in his day, so the apostle Paul seeks to explain Jesus’ vision of the kindom of God as one of welcome, oneness, mercy, grace, forgiveness and restoration of our distance from God.  Instead of approaching this through the Law, however, we are invited to approach God through gratitude, and through Jesus’ vision of the realm of God where righteousness and justice are done.  We might call it a paradigm shift in the way to approach God, which actually opens the way for us Gentiles to come to God and share in the abundance of love, forgiveness and welcome God has for humanity. 

Its not unlike the change in comprehension of a child to that of an adult. To me, it mainly feels like a different approach and perhaps a different order of understanding.  Judaism certainly includes all the words like mercy and grace and faith, even while it speaks of the Law as the disciplinarian.  Christianity starts with the love of God, the forgiveness of our sins and the restoration of our brokenness from God - and in our gratitude for this, we then take on new  behaviors fit for living in the kindom of God.  Its a different model.

The thing about faith is that its never static, never in a box, never totally understood, never practiced in its fullness.  We humans are limited by many things - our brain development, our emotional wounds, our tendency to go off on tangents, our willfulness and sinfulness, our places of  weakness where greed or envy pull us by the nose right off the true path.  We all have need to grow; and our whole lifetime isn’t long enough to overcome all that weighs us down. 

“Lifelong Discipleship Formation” is the language that the Vital Congregations Initiative uses for this.  In their research, it was realized that persons of every age need the challenge and invitation to grow. Faith can’t stay at the same level from childhood to adulthood - it is faith all the time, of course, not lesser or greater; it just changes in its understanding and its application as our living gets more complex.  Vital churches recognize that all people need to continue the journey with God, from learning facts and stories and the book of the Bible in order perhaps, then pondering its meaning, then living it in all its implications for life.  We might know the story of Pentecost, for example, about the Holy Spirit coming on those Christ-followers gathered in the upper room praying, which is not the same as feeling guided by that same Spirit into mission and ministry ourselves, and then opening ourselves to follow and do it.   

    Paul’s example in this text has to do with the transformation of how our rules that divide humanity are now subsumed under the great vision of God’s kindom, that we all become one in Christ; that as Christ’s body now, these divisions are dissolved.  Not that we don’t stay male and female, or black or white, or Mexican or Asian, or Jew and Gentile, or tone deaf or athletic - its that, now that we’re all believing in Christ, divisions are overcome with love.  Former divisions don’t have anything to do with being called to serve God. Distinctions that matter in the world have nothing to do with who is more important in Christ, who is better in Christ, who is able to serve God.  Our relationships with one another are transformed in love.  Living in God’s kindom, everything is different from what it was before.  Being in Christ makes a huge difference in everything - our values, our behaviors, our goals, our world view, what we see as good, what we see as important. 

Its even more difficult to live in the kindom of God without those rules, so the church attempts to put them back in on a pretty regular basis.  To standardize things, to regulate things, to see who’s doing it right or better, whoops - we hear our need to win coming in….  Responding to God in gratitude and love often needs to be worked out again and again, as different eras challenge different accepted truths that may be more cultural than faithful. We need to keep growing, because like we Presbyterians say, we are reformed yet always being reformed as the spirit leads. 

This expectation of continued growth and study needs to be a mark of our faith. There is more to see and learn in the Scriptures than we see when we were younger - growing in faith is not limited. This is the message of the text from Galatians to us today - the invitation to see our oneness in Christ at a new level, to ponder again how being in Christ is different from being a good citizen or a nice person, to look at just how different this kindom of God is from what we’ve known in the world, and consider our own growth and maturity in our spiritual lives.  AMEN.

God's Wisdom 6/16/19 Trinity

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

GOD’S WISDOM

6/16/19  TRINITY SUNDAY  (& Father’s Day)

God, in our most basic understanding, and almost by definition, is complex and mysterious beyond our mind’s understanding.  When we try and explain how and who and what God is like using our human brains and our human words, the best we can do never really sums God up.  Inevitably, when we say God is like such and so, we are already limiting God and therefore wrong.  While it’s interesting to try and explain God on Trinity Sunday, its not really possible. We have to speak about God, though, so we do the best we can... all the while knowing it is incomplete.  God is Spirit, God is infinite; our brain cannot take in the totality of God.   So our word “Trinity” is one of those approximations, a description that explains God somewhat while still ultimately falling short.

The scripture we just read from the apostle John doesn’t use the word “Trinity,” yet in that one brief paragraph Jesus speaks of himself, the aspect of God he calls the Father, and says that the Spirit of Truth will continue to teach them.  Jesus often uses the metaphorical language of ‘son’ and ‘father’ to explain how he is of God, and one with God.  And the Spirit, which is called ‘his’ Spirit and God’s Spirit, comes upon the believers in a new way at the day of Pentecost (which we celebrated last week), and on through the book called the Acts of the Apostles.  So our scriptures speak of God with various names and functions - various “persons” as we’ve learned to say in our theology, although never do these same scriptures state a doctrine or thesis of God except to call God One.  

Theologians have used much ink and paper trying to explain this oneness of God that also seems to have this multiplicity about it.  Our faith ancestors have come up with all kinds of illustrations like the clover, the egg, the triangle, the way H2O can be solid, liquid and gas…and so on.  I tried out yet another explanation in my children’s time.

Our Jewish sisters and brothers don’t care much for our doctrine of the Trinity, yet the Old Testament contains various experiences of God, too.  God’s Spirit comes upon people when they prophecy.  There are strange verses in the book of Beginnings, Genesis, where God (plural!) says, “Let US create humanity in OUR image.” Then there are the 3 men who appear to Abraham and foretell he will have a son Isaac, who are seen as somehow a picture of God.  A dark figure wrestles with Jacob and changes his name to Israel, the patriarch of that whole tribal people - and that is seen somehow as God.  And in the scripture from Proverbs, a bit of which we read, the figure of Wisdom is developed as a female co-creator with God and a seeker of people.  Further,  if we study the words written about her, Jesus later claims them as about himself.  The word “wisdom” features often in our New Testament, although not as a personification like in Proverbs. 

Feminist theologians look at the traditional Trinity doctrine and suggest that we see God as a relational being, in relationship with Godself, in another mysterious envisioning of God as plural yet one.  They notice that this relationship within God is not hierarchical, nor is one part less valued than another.  Its this relationship of equals that is also a oneness - a oneness of will, a oneness of work, a oneness of purpose...despite seeming to have different functions.  The next logical step, in seeing humanity as created in God’s image, is to also value the relational nature of human persons, and see it as also non-hierarchical, equally valued even if differing biological functions.

This insight into human relationships fits in so well with how the apostle Paul envisions the church as the body of Christ, and how he writes about a body’s various parts all working together as one body, even with differing functions.  Being one body is a good metaphor for looking at THE Church, and our church in particular.  Each is valued, each is honored, each is respected, each is necessary; there is no hierarchy, all are important and all are worthy.   It leads us to affirm one another despite our differences of color, race, socioeconomic status, age or gender.  Its the oneness of Pentecost, the oneness in the Spirit. 

The value of healthy relationships and healthy functioning as a body, as a group, is recognized by the Vital Congregations Initiative as a “Mark” of a well-functioning church, that is lifting up one another and and striving together to fulfill what God has asked us to do.  Churches who are living into what Christ called us to be, have healthy ways of being together. In studying, serving, planning - all the functions of a vital congregation are supported by being a healthy group in healthy relationships with each other.  I’m going to be pondering all 7 marks that have been identified as Vital in our upcoming sermons, just to get us thinking a bit, stretching our understandings, and assisting us to re-envision, reimagine, how to be the Church of Christ in this new millennium. 

Like our relational God, our relationships within the church are vital.  Thanks to the social sciences, we know a lot today about what makes groups work together well, and, in the opposite, how groups can get derailed by certain known pitfalls and not work as effectively as we could. The church can use this same insight, or wisdom about group functioning, to help us do our ministry, and not get in our own way.

            So what do good relationships look like in a group?

In effective groups, each person fulfills their specific task. All people don’t all do the same task, and one person doesn’t do all the tasks.  A pitfall that derails some churches is when the church seems to think the pastor should do everything, and that their part is simply warming a pew on Sundays when its convenient. On the other hand, some pastors will overfunction and take things over. God has called EACH of those who believe, and in a healthy group, each takes responsibility for responding to their own call to follow Christ.  The pastor is basically charged with continuing to teach the word of God, and encourage people in faith to serve in the way God leads.  I like those bulletins where they list Pastor: Rev so and so; Ministers - all the people. Now that’s good theology!   Each of us here is called to serve God and have needed gifts for the ministry -   we have our function, our vision, our insight, our understanding; we have something to offer the whole.  God moves each of our hearts to see a need or long for a certain part of church work …. So a healthy group has all the members functioning in their best ways.  In the body metaphor, the toes do the toe work, the stomach does the stomach work, and so on. We’re not all eyes, and we’re not all ears. One person can’t do it all.  When we each are involved in the mission we feel called to, that’s healthy. 

            In effective groups, the group has a stated mission, which is understood by all, and all pull in th same direction.  All persons and their work aim at that purpose.  In a healthy church, all persons and all committees are pulling in the same direction.  Its good us to have a clear understanding of our mission, so we can spend our energy on things that further our purpose in Christ.  A church can derail itself if some people are working on another agenda than the rest.  If, for example, some people are interested in furthering their own power, or spending their energy in getting their opinions favored, then the purpose of the church is sidelined.  An interest in hoarding money can rebound to the detriment of a church’s God-centered program.  Adhering to cultural views on things like our country’s former civil war, or our bigotry about black people, can interfere with the message of Christ that is our primary work.  Groups, and churches, need to focus on Christ’s call and the service we have been called to do, and not be pulled in different directions. 

            Effective groups have a good immune system, like bodies.  Healthy ways of relating can be like an immune system, and will defeat various viruses or germs that try to attack its health.   However, sometimes unhealthy ways become characteristic of groups or churches, interfere with the church and its mission.  We pastors often comment on the detrimental effects of  folks not talking to the right person about a problem - but RATHER, talking about the problem to other people instead.  For example, if someone is angry at something I did, the right person to talk to is me!  That’s the healthy way to handle it.  In an unhealthy way, the person who’s angry at me will go complain about me to 5 or 6 other people, and tell them how awful I am to have done such a thing! Then 6 people will all have a one-sided version of a potential problem, and meanwhile I won’t know anything about it. This underground murmuring eventually leads to open conflict, and  hurts our church’s mission.  Another unhealthy way of handling a problem is to not tell the whole story, or to tell it in exaggerated terms, or deliberately misstate things in order to make trouble.  That’s an even worse sickness in the body.   A healthy way to act, if one is approached in a sideways fashion, is to refuse to be drawn in, and seek correct information.   

            Effective groups have good communications. There are healthy ways to seek more information so we are not talking in ignorance and spreading wrong information.  Look at the Session’s minutes, for example, to see what was actually done.  Talk to the pastor or an elder if we feel something is being overlooked.  Our Session meets to gather the work of all its committees, and makes sure we are all working towards the same mission.  One way a good immune system works in an effective group is that if someone comes to tell you some problem that doesn’t involve yourself, the healthy response is to say, “Talk to the right person.”  Or help them look up the facts.   And don’t let them bend your ear, and surely don’t pass it on. 

            In an effective and healthy group, the individuals also take care of their own health.  The apostle Paul reminds us that if a toe is hurting, the whole body aches. We know that.  A bad knee or a bad shoulder hampers all that we want to do.  Each member of the body’s health contributes to the whole body’s health.  We get glasses for our eyes and see the dentist for good teeth - healthy people are not afraid to see a counselor if we have old wounds or a temper or other personal  issues. This is a faith thing - God will show us our faults, and offer us healing in various ways, so we become better people.  If  each part of the body is healthier, the body is healthier.  

A healthy congregation is part of what enables a church to pursue the mission God has laid on our hearts, and not get in our own way, or be derailed from what God can do through us.  Our vision, then, as a vital congregation, is this healthy church, working well together, and toward the common goal in Christ Jesus.  May it be so for us - AMEN.

All We Can Do Is Trust 6/2/19 Easter 7C

6/2/19   Easter 7C

All We Can Do Is Trust

Rev Dr Rebecca L. Kiser

Pre-Scripture -

This morning’s text is rather lengthy and has several moving parts.  We’re going to dig into it and see where the Holy Spirit speaks to us - like usual with the Scriptures, there are plenty of places, actions, and characters that the Spirit  may use to capture our imaginations and speak to our hearts about being and doing church.  I began work on this passage through imagining myself there with Paul and Silas, and imagining what I’d be feeling, seeing, hearing and smelling.  That’s one method of letting the Spirit speak through the written words.  Of course I also studied it regarding theology; then, in the method recommended from way back, ie reading the Scripture alongside the news of the day, one in each hand.  So this outcome is a little different for me today. 

After Scripture:

            The text starts out with a character, a young slave girl, nameless, who only appears as a character to set up the story of Paul and Silas’s event while sharing the good news of Jesus among the Gentiles.  They have been sent out by their community as evangelists.  This nameless slave girl crosses their path and gets into this narrative because her healing occasions their being beaten, thrown in jail, and held in chains.  Their good deed in what the text calls casting out the spirit of divination from her, rebounds on them in calamity.  It happens! It still happens today.

See, her owners were using her to make money, like people who think they can own other people do …. they exploited her for their own profit, ignoring her humanity, her needs, her thoughts and feelings.   As a slave, she was an object in their eyes, a means to wealth for them, while she got no part of it.  She had no value or worth to them other than this questionable gift that the Scripture says comes from a spirit who had taken her over.  Like other characters that the scripture called possessed who recognized Jesus as the Messiah of God that he was, the spirit in this girl recognizes Paul and Silas as servants of God who are proclaiming God’s great acts of forgiveness and restoration for people. 

So when Paul casts out that spirit, ie when he heals her, her owners are NOT pleased that she has been restored and healed … what they care about is that she can’t tell fortunes and make money for them.  She is now worthless to them, her worth having been based on their profit.  And she disappears from the story.

(ASIDE - Its weird to me that Paul heals her because he is annoyed with her calling out what is actually the truth about him and Silas, saying that they are bringing God’s truth and salvation.  I guess she’s a distraction to their work or something; whatever his motivation, he does see her as a suffering person and heals her.) 

The reaction to his healing her in response to her human need, is that her owners start to lie and slander Paul and Silas to the government people they have in their pockets, another technique we are familiar with throughout history and even today, and have Paul and Silas made the bad guys.  They are beaten (or tortured) in a humiliating way, then, untreated, they are thrown into an inner prison and put in chains.  All for healing a person - and therefore causing these corrupt guys to lose money.  I was amazed at how a simple act of healing turned into an occasion of slander, arrest and great punishment in no way proportional to their act, upon these two men speaking and acting the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But it happens.  When your Christian actions get in the way of money and power, money and power take revenge.

So these attitudes and outcomes aren’t particular to their generation - its a common result of how thinking we own people demeans the owners, and leads to callous behaviors.  Even today the story is repeated in how some nationalities and persons are demeaned and devalued by the more dominant peoples.  When we treat others as objects, our own characters are damaged.  We can see this in our ongoing issues around immigration, especially on our southern borders, which is in the news almost daily.  This country that we love and have been proud to be in, has failed to consider the humanity and personhood of those seeking refuge in our country - they are nameless, like the slave girl.  And we’ve actually been making much money off of them when they have come in illegally, as they do jobs others don’t want to do.  Instead of seeing their needs, they are being dehumanized, callously labelled as criminals and bad, scapegoating them as evil - not seeing the common human motives and needs that drive them.  If we did this, we’d have to be more just in our treatment of them. 

Notice that I’m not commenting on having good borders to our country, nor am I commenting on caring about the good of our current citizens - I’m commenting only on how people are being depersonalized and made to seem worthless, so that we then feel justified in treating them without humanitarian care. They, like the slave girl in this story, are unnamed, and disappear into the ongoing story of our country.

I’ve seen many stories online and on TV about Presbyterians and others trying to do humanitarian work at our own southern borders.  This past Wednesday, a trial began for Dr. Scott Warren, an archeology prof at Aho, Arizona, for putting water, food and clothing in the deserts for migrant people.  He’s not sneaking them across our border, he’s not helping them enter the country illegally, he’s not trying to hide them from the government - he just provided some humanitarian aid to people who risk of dying from dehydration in their desperate attempt to get here.  He is on trial this week for 3 felony counts of aiding migrants, and faces up to 20 years in prison, in what Amnesty International is calling a “criminalization of human compassion.”   Its not the only story like this, either. 

Our denomination has been aware of immigration issues since back in 1894, when issues arose about the treatment of Chinese. In 2004, our PC(USA) established an Office of Immigration Issues.  We now have the Presbyterians for Just Immigration that is joining most major Christian denominations for calling for a reworking of immigration policies, and compassion for recognizing all humans’ worth.  Most of the work of this arm of our larger church is education to help those who are interested to get more involved; and legal resources to local presbyteries who have become involved. Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians (and more), are all involved in trying to reunite children who’ve been separated from their families.  We know this is severely damaging to the children and the parents.  Many people of faith have tried to visit the detainment centers for children, and been turned away or arrested.  Not to steal children out, not to attack the soldiers guarding the places, not to do any violence or destruction - simply to offer Christian charity and compassion to suffering humans.  Like Paul and Silas, they have brought down trouble own their own heads. 

So what happens to Paul and Silas for healing this unnamed slave girl isn’t an anomaly in our world today.  Lying and slandering those who interfere with the making of money off such suffering people is not an anomaly, either.  Nor is government support for the harsh retaliations of these “owners” of people.  What happened to Paul and Silas has way too many parallels to unjust systems through all the years. It is difficult to call out injustice, and interfere with the making of money or the power of those who hoard such power.

Usually this story of Paul and Silas is presented more as a “look what faith they had and look how God took care of them” type of sermon.  I tried to go there with it, but kept being pulled in this other direction as I lived with this text.  The stories I saw in the news kept “pinging” on the story in this Scripture.   

However, this aspect of the story is also truth for us to know.  Can you imagine being lied about and slandered, being humiliated by a beating and being thrown in prison just for doing good - and then praying and singing praise to God?  Paul and Silas trusted that God had not abandoned them, nd that God was with them through it all.  Imagining myself in the text, I’d have been praying more like, “God, what happened?  What in the world are you thinking? How are we ever going to get out of this mess?” 

Actually, though, this is a form of praying, isn’t it?  We are taking our feelings and thoughts to God - we aren’t throwing out everything to do with God as nonsense, but are asking God how to cope with loss, anger, trouble, and whatever.  We still go to God, there is still an assurance deep down that God cares and listens.  At some point, our prayers get to the place of reaffirming our trust, because in the end, that’s all we can do.

Now, not every time we suffer for doing good is as obvious and violent as these examples.  In fact, much of it is more silent, the reactions of those made uncomfortable more like continual water drops on our head - which can and do add up.  Nor is every calamity in our lives caused by doing a humanitarian or compassionate act - some is our own fault.  Then also, some calamities seem to just randomly drop out of the blue.  What is important for us to note, in whatever kind of calamity we find ourselves in, is the faith of these two believers that God has not abandoned them, that God is with them even in the midst of adversity. 

We keep coming to church, even if the hymns make us cry.  I’ve done that, maybe others here have, too.  Songs and hymns touch us, express our feelings and needs; they often speak to us at a heart level. All of us probably have hymns or other songs that are comforting and inspiring to us.  I have a Facebook friend who is going through some rough times, who posts many links to the songs that are meaningful to him during this time – he finds comfort in the songs. Some of the hymns I’ve cried in are, “God of Compassion in Mercy Befriend Us,” “Spirit of God Descend Upon My Heart,” and  found inspiration from “How Can I Keep from Singing,”  I bet if Paul and Silas knew “Amazing Grace,” they’d have been singing that.  

When calamity befalls us in our lives, whether its a random tornado or flood, whether its an unjust result of a good and compassionate act, or whether we brought it on ourselves by our actions, faith assures us that we go through it with God.  God does not abandon us.  Its right and good to bring all that we think and feel to God, and seek understanding, or at least rest there knowing we are not abandoned.  It is faith that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other, seeking to be the person God knows us to be in every action, working through this seeming disaster. 

In Paul and Silas’ case, their release from the calamity was rather miraculous - an earthquake shook the prison doors open and shook the chains free.  The man who had been their jailer and guard heard the word of God, took them to his own house and treated their welts, and his whole family turned to God.  Again, a very dramatic ending.  Coming through our own calamities aren’t usually so dramatic, although often they include miracles - miracles of love, sharing, and good people.  Often it takes some years to work through calamities that fall on us, yet when we persevere with God, there will be blessings.  Often in my life, I’ve been changed deeply inside, whether the outside changes much or not.  My eyes have been opened to see grace, and see God.  Our perspectives change, our attitudes change - these are miraculous, too. 

God is making a way, we read from our texts only a few weeks ago.  And not jut in individual lives.  For example, our own Indiantown Church went through its own calamity a few years back, and persevered, and worked to keep this church alive - and were successful. Despite the hurt and loss, we trusted that God does not abandon us, God continues to be with us.  All we can do is trust and keep moving into God’s future.

May we remember this story of Paul and Silas as we deal with the troubles and calamities of our own lives, and may we call on that same trust to see us through to the time when we are blessed.   AMEN.

God Makes A Home With Us 5/26/19 Easter 6C

5/26/19    Easter 6C

God Makes a Home With Us

Rev Dr Rebecca L. Kiser

My children and foster son Billy all graduated from Maury High School in Norfolk, a common alma mater.  They all had the shared trauma of learning this ting called THE MAURY PARAGRAPH that the Maury English teachers taught, …and me, too, as I had to endure 4 children learning it. The Maury Paragraph started with a succinct opening sentence, included at least three points, and then concluded with an effective segue sentence to the next Maury Paragraph. They had to outline it, show their 3 points, and then write it.  This was supposed to help them on their college essays. 

We ALL hated The Maury Paragraph.  Sometimes I still remember it when I hit the return key on my computer for a new paragraph, although its not required in my sermons nowadays.  I think what it taught the kids was to organize their thinking, and stay on one subject at a time while they say what they have to say.  So that’s not a bad thing…

This text from John would flunk The Maury Paragraph rules.  It sounds like it joins together a group of Jesus’ sayings that may have a word or two in common, but really its rather disjointed, with multiple emphases. They’re kinda loosely joined together, but its not a linear thought process.  That’s okay - John wanted to get all Jesus’ important sayings into his gospel, I get that.  He and the other gospel writers tried to group things in ways to hang together, and sometimes they were more effective than others.

Seminary didn’t care so much about paragraphs, but they did care about your sermon hanging together and not going off in all directions.  A professor told us that the point of a sermon should be able to be summed up in one sentence.  Trying to cover too many points in one sermon was the mark of a novice.  This passage from John has way too many ways a sermon could go, so I decided to go with what captured my meditations and ponderings, which was what Jesus means when he says, “we will make our home with them.” The point of this sermon is to explore what that means.   I noticed that there is Trinitarian thing going on about who will make a home with those of us who love Jesus - there’s Jesus, and who he calls my Father, then there’s the Advocate who will be sent to us in Jesus’ name. This unity, this oneness, which grows to include us believers, is a hallmark in the gospel of John.  This rather mystical concept of a oneness and an indwelling of all that is God, and within us, is important to the way he sees us believers as Christ’s body.  John says it in other places, too – Himself in God, us in him, God in him, God in us…All connected, united, joined.

So what does it mean to us? That’s another concept our profs at seminary pounded into us - the question, “So what?”  Sermons are not to teach a set of facts, so much as to apply the Word of God to our living.  So what does this oneness, this unity, mean in our living in the kindom of Christ, this earthly place where God’s will needs to be done on earth as in heaven?  What does it mean that God makes a home with us? 

We can ponder now that if God is with us, within us, and made a home with us, that therefore God goes with us wherever we go.   Our bodies have become God’s temple as the scripture says elsewhere; God has taken up a dwelling in us.  So we carry God to the Food Lion, and our interactions there; we carry God when we drive to Florence to Costco, or the mall, or the movies.  God is with us when we eat out or eat home.  God is with us when we’re at work, in whatever we do there, the clients we see, the deals we make, the way we talk with our co-workers.  God goes with us to dance recitals and competitions.  God goes with us to the doctor’s, or to the hospital, or when we drive our spouse, children or parents there.  God drives with us when we’re going to Atlanta for a conference or a mission trip to Greece.  God is with us when we prune flowers or rake leaves.  God goes to school with us, and out to recess with us.  God is with us when we sit at Session meetings and interact with each other and think of the church’s work.  God is with us when we read posts on Facebook or send tweets.  God is with us when we’re getting married or freezing strawberries.  We are now joined with God, and God with us - the overwhelming Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all that is - and us, the creation, the work of God’s hands. We are now connected. Not that this makes us God - yet God lives in us and with us - guiding us, available to us, wanting to be more manifest in us, wanting to transform us so that Christ will show in us.  Encouraging us in our struggles, caring for us when we hurt, opening our eyes and ears to how God sees and loves the world. 

A modern word would be “interconnection,” or perhaps “interdependent.” We study that in school, too, when we study habitats and how everything in that habitat balances together, interconnected in minute ways so that it all works and prospers. We might study it in regards to our planet, where oxygen and carbon dioxide are balanced in a way that supports life; where water currents affect temperatures; where deforestation and emissions on a land mass can affect temperatures, which affects currents, which affects the polar ice caps, which affects how high the tides rise.  Our planet is a habitat, and balanced for life to prosper.  Our ozone layer protects us from the sun’s rays which can damage us, and our unconcern for how we change the atmosphere has affected the ozone.  God has so ordered the life on this planet so that life as we know it thrives and prospers - our scientists are discovering just how this all works together, and how much  humanity need to live and act in this knowledge, and live in this awareness.

Ah, ‘awareness’ is a good word – “awareness” is a word perhaps more familiar to Eastern religious traditions than to ours, although its a good word to describe what Jesus is getting at in his words about our unity and oneness with God, Jesus and the Advocate.  Its not just a nice concept to read about at church and forget for the rest of the week - this is what God tells us about our spiritual reality - in our following of Christ, in our living in Christ’ kindom, this awareness of how we are united to God is vital to our attitudes, our actions, our living.  This awareness of our interconnection to God - and to each other, by the way, and to the planet of which soil we are made, - this is the awareness of who we are and what life means that informs the rest of our living.  It runs counter to the culture that tells us we are independent, we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and our hard work, we are individuals, the planet here for our use, people here to be winners over and be used.  We see where that kind of worldview is getting us - pollution, suffering, ghettos, divisions - this is not God’s design; this does not help life thrive. 

Once again, Christ’s kindom runs counter to what we absorb from the very systems in our culture. A worldview based on this kind of human understanding is not the kindom of heaven!  And the worldview that God teaches is different on a deep level, an understanding that we walk and live and move and have our being embedded in God’s creation and embedded with God as well.  The development of western Christianity missed this, in my opinion - we emphasized tasks and behaviors without teaching the “why” behind them. And we taught obedience to avoid hell, instead of the bliss of being one with God and the love and delight of following God’s ways.  Following Jesus leads us to a new way, a way that sees the interdependence of God’s creation, and sees the real although mystical oneness of believers with God. 

For example, consider the name we use for Jesus at Christmas - Immanuel.  Hear the word “immanent” in that - the immanent God = immanu-el.  Translated as ‘God with us’, the God who is here.  We use it about the infant Jesus, God born in flesh.  But you know, Jesus is showing us the truth about God, that God has been here all the time, and is even now here all the time.  God is the one who is present.  God dwells in and among us and creation; and as believers in God, we know God as the One who is present.  Not that every thought we have is God speaking - we have a very human voice inside us that is swayed by all kinds of human desires for power, lust, hurts, angers, cravings, glittery false desires that pull us away, and so on.  Our spiritual life is a battle of sorts, a battle to listen for God’s Spirit and heed it, follow it; a work of sorting God’s voice from our lesser voices, and following. 

I talked to my son over the weekend, and as we shared about our weeks, I mentioned how, at the Vital Congregations conference, we had communion 2 night in a row, and then when I attended 1st Myrtle Beach’s early Sabbath service (on Thursday night), I got to have communion yet again.  I said, “I like having communion often like that!”  He asked, “Why, mom? What difference does it make?”  So I had to feel around for some words to explain, and I said that communion was more than just juice and pieces of bread, it carried a sacred meaning about how we need God, how God feeds us - and not just in our souls, but also in the world, with real bread and juice.  And how we are part of a larger picture that includes Christians of other stripes, but who are bound together in God’s world.  And as a ritual, it reminds me of these things on a regular basis.  Ah, he said, awareness, living in the awareness of life.  Yes, I said. It brings me back to the awareness of the whole that my faith teaches me is reality.  I can forget that so easily in doing all the stuff I have to do every day.  It’s good to be brought back to that awareness of how God is present.   My son who loves philosophy says, “So any eating could actually do that.”  Well, yeah….but its the ritual, the sacred eating, as a part of worship of God, that first teaches me that awareness of God making a home with me. 

See, he gets it, although he just doesn’t like churches too much.  Church, in his mind, and his generation’s mind, is too preoccupied with details, and who’s right and who’s wrong, what Jesus called ‘straining out the gnats and swallowing the camels.’  The worldview Christ teaches is more than gnats!  Its meaningful, and speaks to people’s great need for belonging, of having a purpose, and is hopeful of abundant life.  If we can get around to saying it in a way that can be heard, and not get lost in the morass of petty fluff, God could open more hearts that long for this forgiveness and restoration. The mess in our own living of Christianity at a lower level can cloud the larger message of God, and distort the worldview of God that supports life and its thriving that was intended. 

Okay, I like to talk big Picture things, like how the truth is that God has made a home with us.  But, see, its important that the big picture be right, the worldview be right, so that the small and daily actions be also right.  If we start with a view of our human aloneness, our independence and individualism as our foundation, we are set up to fighting for our own good and seeing others as threats.  We have to win, so they have to lose. Since the purpose is for ME to survive and thrive, to ‘win,’ so to speak, then I can ride roughshod over other peoples, those losers who are poor and powerless.  Its okay that to get all I can for ME, so I can rip other people off, trick people, use my power to defeat people, and even despoil the world I live in.  As long as I throw God a bone now and then, quote a Bible verse or so go to church to stay on God’s good side, I can do what I want to win.  That’s tricking God, too.  Or thinking that I can manipulate God….  It sets us up to have fights and wars and excuse ourselves for our meanness. 

When we start with the foundation of God’s big picture and learn to walk in that awareness, we will have a different value system - we will seek the good of all persons like we seek our own.  Our awareness of the truth of God with us, God making a home with us, the way we are joined in faith with God and with others, can lead us to better communities, better actions and behaviors with others, not needing to rule over them or use our power to get our way.  We appreciate and understand the ways all creation is connected, and seek to live in ways that will help all prosper, and guard this planet where God has placed us.  We can think beyond our own good only, when we see that God loves the world.  God’s worldview will have us treating people right even if they are cashiers at Food Lion, even if they are a different color, even if they are  different gender, even if they belong to a different political party, even if they worship differently - we don’t have to beat them, and we don’t have to rule over them, even if our function in our job is to lead or direct or be the boss.  We value our customers and our employees and care for their good as we care for our own.  We are aware that we are all one in Christ, and with Christ in God.  It makes all the difference.

There was a book I read some years ago called, All Children are Our Children.  It didn’t come at it from a religious point of view per se - It pointed out that our living will be impacted at some point by the way any children of the world are treated.  If they are uneducated, or starved, or their families broken up by us - it will all eventually affect the way the world goes.  Humanity will reap what we sow, in effect. The book urged people to work for the good and well-being of all children, as a way to also work for the good of our own children in the future.  So it was based more on a long-term view for our good than on religious beliefs per se,….  although faith could have taught us the same lesson of valuing all life as the way God has designed things to function for thriving.  God made us all and seeks us all again, willing to forgive and transform as God makes a home with us.

We are seeking a renewed view of what church is and can be, and a revived sense of call here at Indiantown, and in our presbytery, and in our own spiritual lives.  So we go back to the basics, go behind the assumptions, peer into the things we’ve always done just because the last generation did them that way and it feels so familiar and comfortable.  We let these foundational faith concepts color our seeing as we look at our community, as we look at our lives, and as we look at our church.  We let God open our eyes yet again, and yet more, and ask to be led into what God says is good.  Its not necessarily easy, yet it is right and good.

My prayer for us is that we can cultivate this awareness of God making a home with us so that it becomes a daily and a constant awareness.  That we can grow in carrying this awareness of God into the moments of each day, wherever we are - home or school or work or even at church!.  A different generation called it practicing the presence of God, a good spiritual practice that will transform us from within.  This is how faith grows and comes out in our living.  May God work in us as we seek this awareness.  AMEN.

They're Not Like Us! 5/19/19 Easter 5C

5/19/19   Easter 5C

They’re Not Like Us!

Rev Dr Rebecca L. Kiser

Before reading text:

This past week’s conference for the Vital Congregations Initiative was a wonderful and moving experience of vision and hope for the larger church’s mission and ministry into the future.  We worshipped, we praised, we wept, we ate together, we fellowshipped with people both like us and different from us.  Like us, because they praised God and prayed like Joyce and I, and were Presbyterians like Joyce and I; different, because to the outward eye and ear we differed in ways that often divide people in our country and world.  Like I experienced at the NEXT Church conference as well, people of all colors and differing first languages gave visual evidence to the unity of the Spirit, and displayed hope of how Presbyterian worship has a promising future.  In fact, the very diversity of people encourages and invigorates our witness and our worship.  I came back tired in a good way - we were enlivened, excited and full of hope that this process, planned in a large part by the next generation of church leadership, can lead all of us in a deeper relationship with God’s Spirit and listening for the next new thing that God is doing in the church. 

And that goes real well with the 2000-year old text of the burgeoning new church growing and spreading the gospel in early Jerusalem and that region, which is also about how God, through Jesus Christ and the Spirit, is both attending to God’s faithful worshippers as well as doing an unexpected and new thing.  Its worship of God, which is the same; yet full of surprises and changes that are different, and that challenge old assumptions, old boundaries.  It was already different that God was incarnate, ie “en-fleshed” and walked among us in Christ Jesus, and then it was surprising that Jesus was raised from the dead.  Now it is almost shocking to these believers who had early on followed God and believed in Jesus, that God was again confounding expectations and reaching to the population of the whole world instead of just the chosen, the Jewish nation. 

Listen for the word of God as we read together Acts 11: 1-18.  And I mean together - get out those pew Bibles so we’re all in the same translation, and find the Acts of the Apostles just after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.    The events we will read about actually take place in the prior ch 10 - then after the surprising events and the apostle Peter’s responses, he gets called on the carpet and tells the whole thing again in ch 11. Let’s read:

Acts 11:1-18

11Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ ¹⁰This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. ¹¹At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ ¹⁵And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” ¹⁸When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

Up until this point, Jesus’ followers were all faithful Jews.  Well, there were those who converted, and those who recognized the depth of the Jewish faith and honored it.  But by and large, Jesus, who was a good Jew and never changed, was acclaimed by his followers to be the Messiah that they expected and longed for.  This new sect was from within Judaism. The apostles were all good members of their own faith tradition, with the addition that they saw Jesus as the fulfillment of their people’s long hope, which was surprising enough.  Not everybody in the faith tradition could go there.  And the claim of Jesus’ resurrection was astounding and weird enough that others obviously had some difficulty with it, too. 

Now, however, something happens that makes for a major change within the standards of the Jewish faith.  All though their history, Jews have had nothing to do with Gentiles, ie everybody else who’s not Jewish.  Part of keeping their faith tradition from being diluted was to keep their ethnicity pure as well.  Of course there were certain exceptions along the way, but racial purity and ethnic purity was a big value within the tradition.  Gentiles had different ways, Gentiles worshipped false gods, not the God of Abraham.  They were unclean, and basically anathema.

That’s the point of the dream Peter has - as a Jewish man, observant of the Law, he can’t eat those unclean animals.  But in the dream, God says three times that, “If I say they’re clean now, don’t disagree with me, and don’t call them profane.”  We can only imagine how shocking this dream must have been to Peter.  What?????  Peter has been praying, and this happens in his prayer!!!!   Then these Gentile guys are knocking at the door and asking him to come with them to a Gentile house and preach to them.  Ah ha - Peter makes the connection - God’s Spirit wants him to go with these Gentiles.  He doesn’t know why, but it seems God prepared him for this, and he decides to follow it.  He takes some Jewish brothers with him.  They all see God’s Spirit fall on the Gentiles, and these Gentiles show the same signs as Jewish believers.  So Peter does the next thing, which is to offer them baptism, and eats with them, accepting them as members of Jesus’ church.  Its radical!

Peter and his friends break a lot of traditional rules here - rules they’ve considered God’s will for centuries.  Peter isn’t just some rogue, non-observant and rule-breaking wild kid freaking out the grown-ups.  Peter walked with Jesus for the three years, and learned from Jesus.  Peter has been in prison for his faith, and he preached the powerful sermon at Pentecost from which many Jews from around the Mediterranean came to believe. And this same Peter ate with Gentiles and baptized them!

Word gets out, and Peter gets called on the carpet to explain himself.  Its of God, he says. God is the one who declared the boundaries broken, I just followed in faith.  God’s vision of what God is doing far exceeds Peter’s vision, or anyone else’s.  Who am I to hinder God?

Well, our early Christian ancestors in faith wrestled with this for more years, trying to figure out whether Gentile converts should follow Judaism, and to what extent.  There was a lot of confusion about how this new step worked.  Were Gentile converts, like, 2nd class believers?  Just how far are these traditional divisions broken?  What does it mean that we who follow Jesus have become a new family, across racial, ethnic boundaries?  Or across any boundaries? 

They’re not like us! But they worship God through Jesus.  They don’t know our history! And they have a different history! But they worship God through Jesus. They eat different foods and have a different culture!!!! But they worship God through Jesus. They’re not white! They’re not Americans!!! They’re not conservatives! They’re not in our political party! They don’t dress like us!  They don’t sing like us! But they worship God through Jesus.  But this is the way WE do things, and we’re right!! But they worship God through Jesus, too.

See, following Jesus is the game changer here - other distinctions don’t matter - following Jesus becomes the mark of this new family, this church.  The rest is fluff - although sometimes its hard to see that or admit that.  They aren’t capitalists!  They don’t know the cues of Southern charm!  They not fluent in Western history!  They don’t know our hymns!  Friends, that is all non-essential - that is all fluff.  Seeking to follow Jesus and live in Jesus’ realm - that makes them our kin, our family, and not 2nd class, either.

 

Friends, change happens. God had a bigger picture in mind.  And still has a bigger picture in mind, even now - we never see the whole of it, never get all the nuances and how it works out.  I guess we just can’t see it all at once, which is why we say “reformed and always being reformed” as our Presby motto. This Jesus thing is more than a personal salvation so we get to heaven when we die - that’s too small a goal for what God is doing.  Jesus died for the world and was raised for the world; Jesus lived as a human and cared for the well-being of humans, and directed a way of living that can actually save our world - our volatile, threatened world, our divided and polemical world - our world where angers erupt over who’s in power and who rules - and that values basically the total opposite of what God’s realm values. 

We, my friends, are called to witness, by our love for one another in Christ, that there is another way to live - a way of respect, a way of caring, a way that doesn’t pit one kind of person against another, a way where the least are cared for and provided for, where even the seemingly more powerful can do the just thing for the good of all, where humility and care for the whole wins over just taking care of #1.  We Christ-followers, united in Christ’s family, are called to show God’s love for the world by our love and our getting along; by sharing in the world’s abundance in care for one another so that all have enough.  We are not just our race or skin color - we ARE the church of Jesus Christ and therefore kin to one another -  and through this faith, and through living into the kindom of God, there IS hope and salvation for the world.  We are to be such witnesses. 

Its a high calling of the church. Unfortunately, it seems to me that we Christ-followers have wimped out on the hard stuff, and let ourselves and our church instead share the same divisions that the rest of the world has.  We don’t live up to the deep wisdom of Jesus’ teachings, where the God of the universe tells us about how things were designed to be.  We haven’t valued that wisdom, and instead find ourselves quibbling over the fluff, spending our energy on disagreements - and not keeping God’s big vision in front of our eyes. I don’t know what to do about this, because it seems that each of us have to learn it ourselves, individually, and over and over again in each generation.  And each of us seeks to live for Christ in the midst of surviving, suffering from our own wounds and problems, being influenced by the hate and competition around us, and led by our noses by things that glitter but are not gold.  Although God has extended grace to us and forgiven us, it takes most of a lifetime to learn to live into who we are in Christ.

The church as a whole is gradually seeing more of God’s vision, as God expands our circles of caring, and our comprehension of the enormity of God’s grace, only it seems to take generations for each step, and we can grow weary.

Let me share with you a transforming moment I had some years back that might speak some to our current situation in 2019.  I was newly divorced, and working for the Presbytery of Eastern VA in hunger advocacy, and preaching some Sundays when asked.  One of our downtown churches was closing its doors, selling its building and its artifacts, and I decided to attend their last service and offer my support to that brave pastor and congregation who saw the writing on the wall and made a hard decision.  The presbytery would have a final celebration there the next Sunday afternoon, when other clergy and friends could attend - this was the last time they worshipped as a church.  I walked down the halls, looking into rooms that spoke of an earlier architecture, halls that had once welcomed many post-WW2 families and children of the baby boom, and it hit me that it wasn’t only this particular church that was dying.  No, it was a whole era that was passing, the era of traditional families, the era where just about everyone went to church, and that the larger church had influence speaking to our nation.  The whole era when we white folks didn’t think too much about other races because we were dominant, although we didn’t  acknowledge it; the era when we spoke of America as a Christian nation and shared many values with other nice people. - or thought we did.  An era when people expected a better standard of living than their parents in each generation, and hard work paid off - or at least we thought so. 

I sat in that sanctuary and felt the world that I grew up in slipping away like water, and wondered what in the world would come next.  I was already in mid-life, and the world had irrevocably changed.  I was not prepared, and had no vision of what was ahead.  So I prayed like crazy.  I trusted that God was still in charge, and would continue to be; I trusted that God’s Word would endure in some form, because the faith we have is true, and God’s Spirit always does surprising and wonderful new things.  I wondered if people of my generation would be able to make the necessary changes in time.  It would probably be the next generation after mine, I thought, not raised and embedded so much in the traditional form of church like I had been.  I prayed for them.  And I prayed that I would not be an impediment to what God was doing, or be too stuck in my ways to see what was coming, and could help be a bridge to it. 

That has been my prayer since my mid-life, as I watched the world get weirder and weirder, and further away from the world I thought I was getting.  Maybe every generation feels this way, I don’t know.  I have tried to be faithful to what I believed God was saying in my heart, have continued to work in a faith that is shrinking and floundering across the country, and have tried to teach and preach what God was showing me.

I saw the first glimmerings of possibility that have moved me just this year, both at the NEXT church conference and even more at this Vital Congregations Initiative. This generation of church leaders and clergy aren’t afraid to call it like they see it, and name what has been happening, and call for better.  They are calling for our local churches to re-enter the scriptures, and re-open our hearts to God speaking.  They are asking our congregations to re-engage in our own spiritual practices and seek the Spirit’s wisdom.  They are asking us to look at our environments and our communities, and ask God to show us where our resources can match to human need.  And do it.  We Presbyterians may not be as numerous as in past years, and our finances may not be as robust - but those things have never stopped the historical  church before.  Those Presbyterians in the pews may be older - but we are still alive and we are still God’s own.  Our call is still to follow Christ and witness to God’s love. 

Change happens.  Yet, we worship a God who is new every morning, who is surprising and creative, a God of life.  And God is still speaking, still acting and still calling.  I hope we at Indiantown Pres will give it our best prayers and efforts, listening for God and expecting God to be working.  Pray for your leadership here as we set a course for this process and call us all to engage in following a new vision.  AMEN.