Little Missions

Matthew 10:37-42

June 26, 2011

Someone stops in the middle of sawing or brushing or hammering to go to a van and fetch a particular tool for the person up on the roof who urgently needs in order to keep making the home dryer. A work crew takes time to buy items from sparsely stocked shelves at a local mom and pop shop to support the local economy. One member of that crew spends a good part of an afternoon sitting and chatting with the homeowner, triggering lots of smiles and spawning a new friendship. A plain brown lunch bag is blessed to special use when a person places a warm fuzzy for someone within it.

A songwriter sitting at home in a church manse prays over a passage of Scripture, pens some lyrics, then picks up a guitar to teach the Gospel in a new way to support rehabilitating, renewing experiences. Pan after pan of homemade lasagna is layered with love for neighbors near and known as well as in states southwest of here. One bank check after another gets dedicated to God’s glory. One degree of organizational coordination occurs after another, each one constructing a large-scale, faith-full, hope-filled adventure.

There are so many little missions that make up a big mission endeavor like the Appalachia Service Project. The entire service project is a composite of selfless things done in the spirit of Jesus. These are all significant acts of discipleship. This same protocol works for just about all the avenues of ministry we carry out here at FPC. It’s a myriad approach to ministry illustrating how the Gospel writer, Matthew, defines the meaning of Church.

When Matthew -- son of Levi, tax collector for Herod Antipas, and original disciple of Jesus -- wrote an account of the life, death and resurrection of his Lord, he had two particular goals. One was to recall and preserve Jesus’ example and instructions to his followers. The other was for Matthew to instruct his own community of disciples a few generations later. He was in a position of pastoral authority to really define how the Church -- as the Body of the Risen Christ -- was to go about being what Jesus intended it to be.

To summarize this in just one little word – SENT.

Matthew emphasizes mission. Not mission as merely a program of a congregation, but as “the defining purpose of everything the Church does.”[i] We exist to give the Gospel away, not to keep it gathered in one place.

Growing in faithful loyalty as disciples of Christ means giving away and growing beyond ourselves; even at the cost of self-preservation. Matthew punctuates this tough point by recalling one of the more radical statements Jesus made – you and I are to love Him above all else, even above allegiance to our own family and to our own life. I don’t this is a drastic ultimatum. I read this as having priority in the right place for any and all people who acknowledge that they’ve been redeemed by the Lord. The more we make the amazing grace of Jesus the absolute center of our lives, the more we will gladly share the Gospel and at the same time gain a rich life of faith, hope, love and holy peace.

To “take up the cross” means to receive what Jesus has offered. What He offered was salvation through subtraction – he poured out his pride and blood in order to gain new life and open the way to multiplying God’s healing, resurrecting love. This is our model for discipleship and mission. The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary puts it this way -- “Discipleship is represented not as adding on another worthy cause to one’s list of obligations, but a giving of self that is the ultimate self-fulfillment.”[ii]

When we think on mirroring Jesus in mission, we thank the Lord and pray for all people called to serve the Good News in big, bold ways. Today, I think especially of Bill and Angela Mannion’s family serving as missionaries in the very dangerous Nuba mountains of the Sudan. And, while not dangerous but still quite a full and faithful commitment, we also think of our upcoming hosting of families presently without homes through the Interfaith Hospitality Network and, as I’ve already mentioned, the next episode in our partnership with ASP.

To be clear, though, Matthew doesn’t just emphasize the big ticket discipleship acts. Whenever anyone does anything to welcome another in the name of Jesus and to help them know Jesus welcomes them, it is mission. Each little mission contributes to the very vital purpose of the being a sending church.

Notice he doesn’t record that Jesus referred to his first disciples as “The Great Ones.” Instead, he referred to them as “little ones.” This term can obviously refer to children, as it does in Luke 17, but Matthew notes it as a way Jesus referred to anyone acting in faith. We are all “little ones” because each time we selflessly give more of our time, talent and energy away in the name and spirit of Jesus we grow in faithful loyalty. Sometimes this giving away is in larger chunks, but usually, day to day, it happens one little bit at a time, adding to the great composite of discipleship that is the Church. We are never singular Christians. We are always representing our faithful, communal commitment to Christ’s interests, the way political envoys and ambassadors act on behalf of their sovereigns.

And so a colleague of ministry asks us, “What would happen if we truly believed we bear the presence of Christ to every person we encounter, in every home, workplace, or neighborhood we enter? What would happen if we saw every conversation as an opportunity to speak words of grace, every interaction as an opportunity to embody Christ’s love for the neighbor?”[iii]

Let’s not speculate about what would happen. Let’s say what will happen as each of us constantly and intentionally works to abide by the entire sending charge given to us by Jesus as it is recorded throughout Matthew 10:5-42.

We will seek God’s lost sheep – strangers, friends and family who have known God’s love and law and strayed from a faithful fold. We do so for the sake of holy hospitality, not for self-righteous rebuke or personal glory.

We will proclaim Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is near. Fidelity to Jesus is not about a ticket into heaven as much as it is about joyfully riding on the divine train rails covering this earth. Our Lord’s work is always underway, near and far away.

We will participate in holy healing and the divine casting out of evil. Along with deep love, there is also deep hurt in people’s hearts. We represent Christ’s broadly cast, all-inclusive compassion. Along with goodness and grace, there are alchemies of evil across society. We represent the purging, reconciling power of the Prince of Peace.

We will embrace equity for all as well poverty for the sake of serving. This means we shed socially deconstructing desires of power and privilege. Our little missions are done not for status, but for solidarity with all one another as saints in the Light.

We will rejoice that God values every hair on the head of every human being. If some of you have less hair than others, don’t worry, I don’t interpret this to mean God loves you less! More importantly, this means that even when someone’s value as a child of God seems to escape our assessment, we will celebrate that person as being under God’s constant loving care.

And, to sum all this up, we will know the spiritual reward of doing even the smallest things – even giving a cup of cold water in the name of any disciple of Christ.

[Pastor steps out of pulpit, pours water into a cup and gives it to a disciple in the the name of another disciple on the other side of the sanctuary]

Amen.

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[i] www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt10x42

[ii] www.workingpreacher.com/commentary id=969

Our Sun, Our Ray, Our Warmth

Matthew 28:16-20

Trinity Sunday/Father’s Day, June 19, 2011

Experience teaches me that worship leaders need to pay close attention to both the secular and the sacred calendars. The sacred calendar is the one issued by our denomination that identifies special days and full seasons in the liturgical year. By “liturgical” I mean pertaining to public worship. For example, this calendar tells Mary Elizabeth, Robin and I when the seasons of Lent and Advent begin. It’s a calendar for keeping our faithful community enriched, informed, and uplifted. For today, June 19, 2011, one week after Pentecost, this calendar encourages us to celebrate the Holy Trinity.

On our secular calendar -- the one with pictures of kittens, or golf courses, or flower gardens on it -- today is designated as Father’s Day. President Johnson made this recognition of fatherhood official in 1966, though attempts had been made since 1913. It’s a day, quite honestly, that for half my life I tried to avoid acknowledging since I’ve never had a relationship with my own father. Since I became father to Anna and Rebecca, however, old hurts have been abundantly blessed with healing love and so today is quite a wonderful day.

As a preacher, I always want to consult and to consider both the sacred and secular calendars when deciding what biblical message to offer week in and week out. Some of my colleagues rather adamantly avoid acknowledging secular holidays in worship. I’m not in this camp, but nor am I in the camp of offering messages that celebrate the secular at the expense of solid Scripture study. So there is always a bit of an inner tension about what exactly to address on days like today.

Tuesday of this week, I resolved this tension by deciding to teach what the Bible says about God the Father. Focusing on this Person of the Three that make up the Holy Trinity seemed quite a logical fit. But then, by Wednesday evening, I had read a really excellent article in this month’s Presbyterian’s Today magazine. It is titled, “Reclaiming the Trinity” and persuasively argues in favor of using fresh language in worship to talk about the central threefold identity of our God. It does so as a reminder that we need to consistently refer to the Trinity in order to keep from becoming “functional Unitarians,” as the author of the article puts it. After reading this, I felt it rather wrong to only focus on God the Father, even though it’s Father’s Day.

So where did this leave me? First of all, I reminded myself to stay anchored in our lesson from Matthew’s Gospel. These wonderfully familiar words from the 28^th chapter are known as the Great Commission and are thoroughly Trinitarian. We who are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are constantly being sent out to disciple others in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How well you understand what this means depends on your understanding of “discipleship” as well as on how well you comprehend that our God really is Three-in-One, One-in-Three. I’ll have more to say on discipleship on other days, but today let’s use some fresh language about the Trinity to help all of us gain a greater appreciation for why we should always think and speak about God in this way.

The Presbyterian’s Today article offers several biblically based metaphors to freshen up the traditional, familial language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is no disrespect for traditional language here, just an acknowledgement that interpreting the Trinity in new ways might be helpful. We’ll focus on one of those suggestions, and, since it is Father’s Day, along the way I’ll offer some witness to how faith in the Trinity helps me as a dad.

The new biblically based and also imaginative way to consider and talk about the Trinity I was most drawn to in the article is to consider God as Our Sun (as in the star), Our Ray, and Our Warmth. Each one of us is drawn into divine life through these three distinct but interdependent identities that interpret the divine work of our Triune God.

Traditionally, God as Our Sun (again, as in the star) is called the Father or the Creator. I find this metaphor of the sun spawns nicely from Psalm 84, verse 11, which states the “Lord God is a sun and shield.” Just think about humankind and our entire planet’s relationship to the sun. Most all earth life forms are completely dependent on it. Its heat and light provide the engine of growth. Thus, the sun generates and regenerates life and is central to our survival. It is fully present to us every single day and thus its existence is impossible to ignore or deny.

In the same way, God is forever our fully present, not to be ignored or denied source of all life. If we get into the habit of thinking about and appreciating God the way we consider our sun, every moment of our days can be a devotional one. God is the great and good generator of life in all its abundant diversity.

Now if we only regarded this Earth’s sun as being up and out in space, it would be rather hard to relate to. Its relevance would seem remote to us. We would not deeply comprehend our dependence upon it. Science tells us that our sun is some 93 million miles away[i] from Earth and so what helps us know that this distance is not just beyond us, but bridged to meet us right where we are?

Well, we talk about the sun’s rays. Rays help us realize the sun’s power is shining directly upon us. They are the brilliant bridge between up there and down here. Every single picture of the sky drawn through the years by my daughters illustrates them. And what an inspiring delight it is to capture a representation of them when taking photos! Rays remind us that the great sun is connected to us and taking care of our lives.

And so considering Jesus as Our Ray makes tremendous sense to me. He is, of course, traditionally referred to by the familial term Son and the theological term Redeemer. Jesus is God’s ray, God’s reach, God’s direct divine touch upon humankind. Our Lord is the brilliant bridge who illuminates, exemplifies, and make real God the Sun’s life generating and saving power. Through Jesus, Our Redeeming Ray, we are liberated from feeling as though we’ve been abandoned by our very life source. We are saved from darkness and decay and death. We are regenerated. And we partner with Our Ray to bring hopeful, healing light to all the self-destructive cycles human beings and our planet experience. Thus we faithfully sing, “Lord the light of love is shining, in the midst of our darkness shining, Jesus, Light of the world, shine upon us, set us free by the truth you now bring us … shine, Jesus, shine!”

God is Our Sun -- our great source of life. God is also Our Ray -- our illuminator, liberator and regenerator. This brings us to the third part of how we understand God’s identity. God is Our Warmth, traditionally referred by the theological terms Holy Spirit and Sustainer.

Can you recall a time when you were hustling and bustling about your day and then suddenly paused to let the light and warmth of the sun soak your skin? Do you recall that moment as being energizing and restorative? Even on hot days, pausing for a few seconds of radiant, reassuring warmth can be a welcome experience. And on frigid days it feels like salvation itself! This warmth is what we experience when being touched by sun and ray, and it positively impacts our whole body.

God as Our Warmth is the personal loving touch of God Our Sun and Our Ray. Nothing is more life affirming and life transforming than personally experiencing the powerful presence of Our Warmth. This warmth of divine love – in all the ways it is expressed and experienced – sustains and energizes us. It locates and connects us to Our Ray and Our Sun.

When I consider what fatherhood means to me, I begin with Our Warmth. My human father was not present for me, for reasons I regret I’ll never get to hear about directly. And because I was not raised being taught the Bible, I didn’t have language for understanding how God is a much greater and reliable kind of Father. Yet from as far back as I can remember, I felt Our Warmth with me. It manifest itself in my intuition, helping me know the goodness of Our Sun and Our Ray before I had any traditional names for them. It was comforting. It was loving. It was saving. I just knew a benevolent spiritual presence was a deeply important reality and not at all remote from my circumstances.

This Warmth remained with me through the years, most especially keeping me constant company as I experienced my greatest anxieties as a dad two years ago. All in all, I live for the myriad of ways this Warmth is alive in my ever growing relationship with Rebecca and Anna. It is named more directly for them than it was for me growing up, but still there are many times when silence falls, hands and bodies get held, and our Holy Trinity is simply but fully felt.

Three-In-One, One-In-Three. You wouldn’t explain the sun without also talking about rays and warmth, right? So too we can comprehend and experience and teach God as Trinity. Let us go from here today, as disciples, seeking to shine in the holy company of Our Sun, Our Ray and Our Warmth. Amen.

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[i] http://www.aerospaceguide.net/solar_system/sun.html

Campfire Church

Acts 2:1-7, Pentecost 2011

Let’s fill in the blank together … “It only takes a spark, to get a ________ going!” Glad you know this! Now I’m going to take the liberty of changing up the wording a bit on this Pentecost morning by saying, “It only takes a spark to get Christian community going.”

I learned this in a very real first hand way during my college summer days as a staff counselor at Camp Johnsonburg. All across the acreage of that inspiring wood, fire was more than just a religious symbol. It truly was a center piece around which Christian community was formed.

I cannot even begin to calculate how many campfires I had a hand in building. And when I first started in the summer of 1989, I wasn’t exactly a skilled Boy Scout and didn’t even have any experience getting a fire started in a Weber grill. Not that charcoal experience would have helped anyways since camp did not allow the use of lighter fluid. We had to very carefully build an ignitable structure with whatever kindling material and appropriate wood we could find.

At times this happened in beautiful, dry weather; other times in the aftermath of a good summer soaking. Whatever the conditions were, my co-counselor and I had to work diligently to get a fire going. The communal campfire time – for singing God’s praises, discussing the biblical theme of the day, communing with marshmallows and chocolate – was too important not to make every effort each evening of camp.

The campfire locations changed, as did weather conditions and available materials. But there was one part of the campfire building process that was a constant -- the necessity of fanning flames. The tiniest sparks needed wind to grow stronger, be it wind from my breath or the push of air from a songbook or something like it. Forgetting to do this step meant failing to get a good blaze and therefore failure to experience spiritual formation while a group of people gathered around it.

In the midst of a multitude of Johnsonburg campfires, my calling from the Lord into His ministry became clearer. After three summers on staff and four years of working Fall and Spring youth retreats, I knew that I had to give my life to faithfully building Christian community. And I knew that giving my life to this meant never, ever forgetting the step of welcoming the wind of the Holy Spirit to blow upon and through me so as to ignite the formative fire of faith in the lives of those I was to be in ministry with. All my church experiences in the years since those days at J-burg root back to what happened around those campfires – sharing spoken and sung words of faith, communing together, praising God with our presence, our respect for each other and our careful stewardship of Creation. From the start, my calling has been about building spiritual campfires in every part of church life.

Luke, the Gospel writer and author of the Book of Acts, tells us this morning about a historic event in the life of the early church. It was a spiritually formative experience that centrally displayed both wind and fire.

Jesus’ disciples had been gathered together in one place, forty days following the ten day celebration of Passover when they had shared a final meal with our Lord. They did so because the Risen Jesus, before his ascension, had specifically ordered them to prayerfully wait together in Jerusalem for the further fulfillment of God the Father’s promises. This fulfillment arrived in dramatic fashion during the traditional Jewish festival of Shavout which commemorated God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses at Mt. Sinai fifty days after the exodus from Egypt. As such, there was great gathering of Jewish pilgrims in Jerusalem as Jesus’ disciples prayerfully waited in a room together for God to do the next big action on behalf of salvation history.

Prayer was answered as a tremendous rush of wind filled that sacred waiting room so that “no space escaped its occupation.”[i] This same wind then miraculously morphed into forks of fire, perhaps the very same kind of burning but not consuming fire Moses had witnessed. What was initially felt, since wind cannot be seen, “became a recognizable and expressible image – an incarnation of God’s Spirit.”[ii] These sacred sparks settled upon each disciple in the room, giving them special interpretive ability to go out among the gathered pilgrims – pilgrims of many different tongues -- in order to spread word of the Gospel. The wind of God blew and the faith-forming fire grew!

And Church was born, not Church as a rigid institution of laws and rituals, of budget items and membership roles, but Church as a place for gathered-around-the-campfire experiences of Spirit dancing, soul-restoring transformation.

Where is this holy wind blowing and where is the sacred fire burning today here at FPC, among we who are Faithful People in Christ? In what way or ways do we in this community gather together to receive the fulfillment of God’s promises through wind and word and faithful flame?

To truly acknowledge and celebrate Pentecost, we cannot be just about remembering something that happened long ago. The holy wind is very presently filling every space of our individual and our communal lives. We are very much being gifted with new ways to interpret and spread the refining fire that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Earlier this year, I, ever the campfire counselor at heart, engaged our church officers in conversation about my concern that FPC members are having less and less ability to gather together in one place for worship and fellowship. As a congregation, our families are geographically spread out. And families with school children have, it sure seems, more demands than ever before on their time. Activities, including on Sunday mornings, make it harder to commit time and talent to our FPC family life together. Of greatest importance to our congregational identity, worship attendance has remained steady but not grown, and worship is the heart hearth of our faithful community. Here in worship, generations gather together to be faithfully formed as Christ’s disciples by the Holy Spirit through prayer, praise, communion, and receiving fresh stirrings from the Word of God.

If you pay attention to reports about decline in America’s major denominations, we are caught right in this cultural thicket. And this precisely why we need to relive that very first day of Pentecost. We disciples of today do well to recall that the first disciples no doubt felt somewhat stuck and anxious without a clear understanding of what was to become of their faithful band and the entire Jesus’ movement – stuck, that is, until the great visit of sacred wind and flame and fresh interpretive power. We need today’s reminder that the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of the Living Lord -- is not stagnant and dying just because cultural shifts are occurring. Sacred wind is ever upon us, firing up new forms for interpreting and spreading the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Blessedly assured of this, your church leadership has responded to the concern about all congregation members not knowing and being and bonding with one another. We have done so by way of our Neighborhood Ministry initiative.

I trust you all recall receiving a letter of explanation at home about this and that you’ve heard some buzz about it since. In the letter, we stated our belief that knowing, supporting and encouraging one another in the faith as an intergenerational church family is critical to the identity and vitality of FPC. We then presented a new model for mutual ministry that located each FPC member and family in one of five geographical neighborhoods. We also identified an Elder-Deacon dynamic duo given shepherding responsibility, along with myself, for each of those neighborhoods. The general idea is that your church leadership can help facilitate ways for FPC family to gather together and bond in new, congregational building ways. There isn’t a program manual for this new initiative and it is still very much in development. If there were a manual, I do believe page one would exclaim, “Let the Spirit lead you!”

I call attention to this today in order to affirm that this fresh approach intends to spark and spread faith-forming fire. It intends to gather us around spiritual camp fires when we cannot gather together by the heart hearth of our Sunday worship and fellowship. And it intends to assist the constantly rushing, reforming holy wind by increasing and strengthening inter-church, intergenerational communication and interaction. I pray you are feeling the sacred wind and flame all over this, all over our leadership, all over you, and all over FPC’s present and future!

Overall, Pentecost reminds us that Jesus is not someplace up and beyond us, but always in our midst. He is the fiery sunrise light burning in the heart of our lives and our faithful community. His Spirit illuminates, interprets, dances and decrees.

Yet we can easily slip into thinking and acting as if Jesus is only a person of the past. Murdoch University Professor Emeritus Bill Loader holds the church accountable for this by asking, “If we celebrate the presence of God in the person of Jesus who lived compassion in flesh and blood, does his death leave us without hope and only with memory?”

Empowered by Pentecost revelation, this faithful professor replies, “God, God’s Spirit, the Spirit which drove Jesus, is accessible to all! Believe it! Believe that God said yes to Jesus by raising him from the dead. God said: this is who I am and how I am! We are not left with a good and inspiring memory, but a promised presence. That presence promises we stay in touch with the divine word, we learn to communicate in love, and we celebrate being a community in true continuity with God’s people of all ages.”[iii]

Amen for such words! So, fanned by the Spirit and freshly fired up, let’s faithfully move FPC ahead to the glory of God in Jesus Christ! It really does take all of our sparks to get and to keep Christian community going! Amen.

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[i] Dr. Mitzi J. Smith online lectionary commentary for June 12, 2011 on Acts 2:1-21 at www.workingpreacher.org

[ii] Ibid.

[iii]http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/BEpPentecost.htm