David and the Giant

Yesterday's sermon was on David facing his giant, and attempting to ask others what about David's experience might be helpful to them in facing their own.

I started this endeavor by planning to speak on the Five Smooth Stones David picked up in the stream-bed ...

I morphed into instead talking about how David knew those stones were the right stones ...

The 1st Samuel 17 passage seems to be clear in that David:

o Knows God ... David is outraged in that the living God is being disrespected by the Philistines and their champion ...
o Knows himself ... he turns down Saul's equipment, because it wasn't what he was used to ...
o Knows his experience is of value ... which is admittedly, the flip side of knowing himself ...
o Knows that his brother in his negativity is full of "it" ... what ever "it" is ...

Yes ... I think it changed to being a sermon about "knowing" or in philosophical terms ... how do we know what we know ... or epistemology.

This knowledge helps us to frame how we know what our own smooth stones might be as we face the Giants in our collective and individual lives.

This passage speaks to all of us ... it's very timeless quality is that the message is so powerful to people as we try to figure out what life is all about ... 1st Samuel 17 tells us a lot about us in our human condition ...

I have already had one member of the church tell me that the direction he had planned for Monday morning was changed as a result of the words he heard yesterday ... in my best, 'tripped-out Flo' from the Progressive commercials ... I can only offer a "wow" on that ...

Peace ...

Leadership and Coffee Pots

At the church, we have about five of the 10 to 12 cup coffee pots. They are of varying ages and functionality.

One of the older pots is about 40 years old, and doesn't get real hot. We use it to make water so people can have tea or cocoa. It may be the hubris of coffee drinkers to believe that tea or cocoa drinkers don't really like it too hot, but frankly, no one has come up and said "this isn't hot enough for tea". Silence in this area is probably good ....

A couple more of the pots are from the early 80s or so, and while looking a little like the older one they each present their own challenges. One has a place for a cone filter, the other a basket one. Their pots aren't interchangeable either ...

These pots don't get used every week, and I am not exactly sure why ...

We also have two brand spanking new coffee pots. New here is a relative term, and in reality means less old than the other three or so. They look just spectacular, all shiny and modern. The funny thing is that while these two look a whole lot alike, they aren't in fact, anything alike. Different manufacturers. They are beyond their color and modern appearance, nothing like each other. I'll bet Eli Whitney had this kind of manufacturing problem in mind, when he invented the manufactured cotton gin (and the manufactured rifle, but that is a bad image for a pastor to use) where all the parts for the various gins could be disassembled and then reassembled into different machines. Or is my memory bad and he did this with guns only?

Here's the bottom line: If you put the wrong pot under the wrong basket, you get lots of coffee all over the place.

And, to make it even better, the first three pots are all ten cup pots, and these are twelve cup pots. They take just a little more grounds in order to ensure you have coffee and not tea. At least that is what the people who are looking for bold coffee call it when what they get is hot but tasteless -- they insult the product by calling it "tea". Is tasteless an absolute truth or is it relative?

Paul must have had this very situation when in his first letter to his miscreant church in Corinth. He commented to them that everybody gets to make a contribution in their own way, and it was important to be part of the organic whole.

It takes some effort to get the organic process for this production into good working order.

Isn't church leadership a lot like that?

Isn't it about putting the right elements of the pot together so that all the parts are working as a team?

Isn't it about being sure that the new, slick idea doesn't swamp out a perfectly good idea that has been working and producing for a while, and while it isn't as pretty or new anymore, it still works.

Isn't it about being sure that all are trained in such a way that they recognize the strengths and weaknesses of all those who wish to help build up God's kingdom ....

Oh ... did I mention that a lot of the volunteers don't actually drink coffee themselves, so are always at a loss as to how much coffee to actually put inside the filter ...

I would elaborate on that, but I think you get the drift ...

Peace ....

Once

John Carney is the writer and director for an excellent Irish film called Once.

Warning: Once is not for those who find the F-Bomb uttered about three hundred and seventy two times to be offensive.

I spoke with a former resident of Ireland and he commented that it doesn't have the same explosive quality there it does here. It is nonetheless, a problem.

However, Carney says he got the title from what he perceives to be an Irish malaise of men sitting in the pub drinking their Guinness and saying "Once I get a new job" or "Once I get moved into a new house" or "Once I get ... " ... in short, they sit at the pub, looking for a future, better day, and never get started ... The movie is about getting started ...

Our hero participates in a profession where street musicians perform and hope for passers by to transfer some of their wealth to themselves. This is called: busking. Needless to say, these buskers don't get very wealthy. But through his day job as a vacuum cleaner repairman, our street musician pays the bills.

The key to the movie is our busker meets a young woman who will move him from contemplating success to seeing himself as a success.

How often is that all we need ... someone to give us that urge, boost, vision, and maybe even, a good solid kick in the pants ... to get us moving from where we are, to where we can be ...

It is about that gentle, loving breath of someone, on behalf of God, that moves us from our own bar stool, sipping our own Guiness, saying "Once" and that future ill defined vision, towards an increasingly immediate, more restless now.

It isn't about creating anxiety. It is about creating through ourselves what we are called to be ...

It isn't only the how of that, but it is also the when.

Timing is so often the critical element that is more of the gift of God than we may want to understand ...

In the Orient, time is not viewed in such a linear fashion, as we are prone to do in our Robert Frost -- The Road Not Taken influenced world. We too often seem to see opportunity in a linear fashion of make the right decision now, or it may not return. In the Orient, time is not seen quite the same way ... a decision deferred is still a decision, but at the same time, it may come back, and in fact, it may come back again, in better, richer, more robust fashion.

I started this talking about getting started. I finish asking myself how do we measure the when?

Peace ...

What has happened to Methodism in the Rockies?

I just completed a short look at Methodism in the Rocky Mountains.

We are not doing very well.

There was a time in the early 1950s, where the ratio of Methodists to the local population had just about, but not quite, gotten to the same ratio as the nation at large. Not bad given the nearly 100 year head-start the East Coast had on that and the fairly late settling of most of the area. But soon thereafter, we began to slide. Since 1970, Methodism in the US of A has declined by about 20%. In the Rocky Mountain West, it is closer to 40% ...

Why?

Good question ....

If churches are our deployment platform for the distribution of our "product" (scriptural holiness based on Grace), then we slowed our growth in the 1930s and that may have begun our long slow slide to where we are ...

If what is preached is important, and understand I am just spitballing it here, but somewhere, I think I learned that it is, then are we out of touch with our surroundings? Some would say we are and we need to move ... the question is ... which direction?

Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us, spoke to our Annual Conference (a gathering of Methodists in an area, long standing tradition, hard to explain to an outsider, and an insider understands immediately). She mesmerized the room ... her theme was that mainlines (and Methodism is part of the mainlines) are starting to experience a subtle turn-around by little points of light who are being clearly intentional in their approach. A move away from establishment and modernity towards intentionality and post-modernity. Dr. Bass did suggest that she didn't know what our "product" was ... I thought I knew before she said it ... but no body in the Qs & As at the end mentioned that to her ... maybe we were just tired ...

The churches in the Rocky Mountains -- that are also Methodist -- that do seem to be growing are the ones who are indeed trying to be intentional about who they are ... how post-modern they are ... I guess we'll see ...

What has happened to Methodism in the Rockies ... I think somewhere, sometime, in a long distant place, we made a wrong turn, and it has taken us a long time to figure it out ... I wonder if we have time to re-join our sisters and brothers in the rest of Wesleyan Pietism or are we doomed to wander as we slowly spin into oblivion ... I am ever the optimist ... Hope says Yes, History says No ...

Send me a note and I will send you a .pdf of my "report" (email address is part of profile).

More later ...

David ... A Man for our Time?

This is week number two of a series focused on David: A Man for our Time. I had really thought that the sermon would be, given the Independence Day theme, about David as Priest over King. It seemed like a good passage to remind each of us that church and state are not truly equal, separate, yes, but not equal. The passage selected is from 2 Samuel 6 and it is where David dances at the entrance of the Ark into Jerusalem.

Instead, I feel called to talk about why Michal, his wife, has become estranged from David.

By all appearances, he seems to want her for what she can bring to him in the way of power. Gradually, as the story unfolds in 1st and 2nd Samuel, she grows less enamored with David and here, finally, as he dances into Jerusalem in front of the Ark, genitals showing to all who want to see, even 'slave girls', he has crossed some kind of emotional Rubicon for Michal and she says enough.

David seems to have brought this on himself. He treats her abominably over time, seemingly wanting her for what she brings to him in the way of power and prestige, and she keeps giving him slack, and finally, enough.

On a day where our hearts and minds will be looking for the pastor to speak in some kind of illuminating way about freedom (Fourth of July weekend), the words seem to be pointing this pastor towards a reflection on how we can lose our way towards political leadership by treating others shabbily on that journey to kingship.

Peace ...