A More Compleat Tool Belt

If your only tool is a hammer, all problems are a nail

I am advocate for a good tool belt.  Good.  Not perfect. 

In the last decade I have become far more competent at household repairs than I was before that.  YouTube has been invaluable in this.  Where before I would enter a new task with trepidation combined with a lack of knowledge, I can now only deal with my own trepidation.  My knowledge is much higher. 

In effect, I am increasing the number of tools, and skills, associated with my tool belt. 

My tool belt is become closer to good.  It will never be perfect.  There will be times when what is needed to repair things in my home exceed my skills, my tools, and truth be known, my interest factor.  Some of these things I am just not interested in.  I am sure some of my pastor colleagues are just not interested in increasing their knowledge in numbers because their interest factor is so low. 

For now, I want to focus on the number of tools in our tool belt, and less about analysis of numbers as a wrench, screwdriver, or hammer. 

When I was introduced to the leadership at Hilltop United Methodist in 2012, one of the questions I was asked was focused on me as if I were the sole leader responsible for transformation.  I attempted to turn the conversation around to leadership as a cooperative, and communitarian, adventure.  One of the tools in my perceived tool belt is leadership development.  Jesus developed twelve and that development changed our world. 

In that same conversation, I was asked what I had learned in Colorado Springs that would work in Salt Lake.  My answer was while some solutions might transport, I expected issues at Hilltop were different than in Colorado Springs, and we needed to be adaptive in our leadership, rather than technical.  One of the tools in my perceived tool belt is adaptive leadership.  Jesus displays his adaptive ability on multiple occasions, often in his use of parables and storytelling as a way of teaching and leading. 

Clarity on purpose is another tool for that tool belt.  Our focus in the military focused on mission, and clarity from leadership as to what was important and what was less important in our missional focus.  One of the tools in my perceived tool belt is a laser focus on our purpose, our why, our mission.  Jesus missional focus was on Calvary and the Empty Tomb. 

The ability to absorb criticism is a critical tool.  It doesn’t mean that you don’t let criticism bother you.  All of us want to be liked and respected.  And you can get too far in front of those you are leading.  You must stay in contact with them, while, I believe, leading from the front.  I once asked a key leader why I was getting a particular task and he said “you don’t let other people bother you” and I replied, “Another person I have fooled.”  The truth of course is that like all of us, I want the respect and admiration of others, but there is a time for our skins to be a little thicker than it often is.  A United Methodist District Superintendent once told me my leadership task at my church was as pastor to lead my sheep to faithfulness.  Easy to say:  hard to accomplish.  A tool in my perceived tool belt is a thicker skin.  Notice I said skin, not a coat of armor.  Do I need to offer any specific Jesus example of a thicker skin at times? 

Other examples exist of tools and skills.  That is just four.  

I like the ancient English word:  compleat.  It suggests finality, and the reality is that I have discovered that in reality, the more I know, the more I know I don’t know.  So when I think back to this tool belt image, it isn’t a compleat tool belt, it is a more compleat tool belt.  Closer to finality, and perfection but still a mirror that gives me an incomplete view of the world around me.  Better but not perfect. 

My hope in my blogs is that elements of this completeness in creating and managing our leadership tool belt will emerge. 

A more compleat tool belt.  With more tools than a hammer. 

Selah, Dennis

A Sacred, Transforming Encounter

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night,

while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

Psalm 42, Verses 1-3, NRSV

C. S Lewis in Mere Christianity suggests we are created with needs for which the means exist in the creation for those needs to be met.  Examples are food, water, rest.  He suggests that God is just such a need:  a need for which the divine encounter fulfills that.  He posits that we to seek the divine, the transcendent, through time and space.  Said another way, seeking the divine has been true across time and across cultures.  It is a universal constant.  That need is for Lewis, and he has persuaded me, a deep inner need for the spiritual. 

David in Psalm 42 is addressing that fundamental need for encountering, meeting God through the image of longing.

I have heard it suggested that we have a God sized hole in our souls, and we are incomplete until we allow that hole to be filled.  We long to have that hole filled and the world is ready to provide suggestions on how fill it for us with work, commodities, and self-worship.  That is an abbreviated list.  The world is far better financed and replete with marketing savvy than faith communities to persuade us to buy their hole filling element du jour.

We do need to be clear that in this meeting, we are expected to walk away from it, different.  Jacob wrestles with the angel in Genesis 32 and he walks away physically and spiritually changed.  His very name is changed:  Israel – one who wrestles with God.  We are all at some point, Israel:  one who wrestles with God.  But at the same time, our “soul longs for you, O God.” 

Lewis does not remotely suggest that the hole in our soul is filled in exactly the same way, with the same transcendent moments and events.  If that were true, then we would all find the same kind of music, preaching, service organization, readings, to be filling.  I am confident now you know that is not the case.  For many, the hole in their soul is not filled with activities inside the building called church, but specifically interactions with the homeless and with those in need of spiritual care and nurture:  many gifts, many elements, all together making up “the body of Christ.” 

I observed earlier about Jacob wrestling with God and then arising from that match with a new name:  Israel.  Immediately after that cosmic wrestling match, he encountered his brother.  He was fearful that in that encounter, his brother’s righteous indignation over the way Jacob left years earlier would continue to be present.  Instead, the reunion was a happy one, and the one who had wrestled with God, said seeing his brother was like seeing “the face of God.”  We see the Face of God when we encounter those around us.

 

I have no idea what the future holds for all of us.

But I believe that turning down the volume of the world message, and turning up the volume of the Jesus message comes about when we encounter the sacred.  Are we travelers passing through this world or is this world our permanent address?  Our biblical message is that we are traveling through, not staying.

 

In a quote of uncertain origin:  “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human one.”

When we buy into the idea of encountering Jesus, we say that we are prepared to take up the values of Jesus, and tell the values of the world to move back a row or two in our pantheon of values. 

Peace be with you and I wish you far more than luck in life, I wish you an encounter with the sacred in the form of Jesus. 

Selah, Dennis

Becoming

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse.  'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become ….’”

The Velveteen Rabbit

I once was asked why I didn’t title my sermons.  

My not serious, tongue in cheek, quip was that I was a closet Episcopalian, and while I believed in Jesus, I didn’t believe in titles.  Episcopalians do not title their sermons, Methodists normally do.  But I assure you, I am not a closet Episcopalian.  Their Sunday duds are just not me.  I might become an Episcopalian, but I doubt it. 

I wonder if the issue is less about title and more about the why, the purpose of the sermon, and for me, it is about being, becoming.  “What does it mean to be a Follower of Christ?”  

Spanish has two verbs to be.  One has an element of permanence, and the other is understood to be temporary.  If you use the wrong verb to say someone is smart or beautiful, you are actually suggesting it is not part of their normal state.  I see this doing/being in the same way.  We have to do the church enough, that at some point it stops being doing, and it becomes a vital statement about who we actually are. 

I assure you that after having prepared right at 500 sermons I am not the same person I was 500 sermons ago.  Church is a different reality for me than twenty years ago, sometimes even twenty minutes ago. 

Being a Christian within the church is, in the sense of the two Spanish verbs to be, permanent and temporary.  Gradually as we become real in terms of being little Christs, the meaning of Christian after all, he becomes permanently part of who we are, and we leave more and more of the temporary behind. 

Wesley would call it "moving on to perfection." 

I suspect this moving on is never completed, that in this life, we are never fully 100% finished.  To paraphrase Paul from 1^st Corinthians 13, I suspect it is a state of constant becoming, a state of seeing in the mirror and just getting it dimly, always seeking more light, more clarity, moving always towards becoming. In the words of the Skin Horse, you become real, real as a follower of Christ.

Selah, Dennis

Pronouns Matter

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ.  1 Corinthians 12:12 (ESV)

In my time in the Army, I often heard leaders say while pointing to the US Army strip on our uniforms “there is no me in Army” then point to our name tags, mine of course saying SHAW and offering “there is no I in Team.”

There is no me in Army, there is no I in team. 

The preamble to the Constitution starts, “We the people.” 

The New York Yankees do not allow names on the backs of their jerseys, only numbers.  

Some coaches tell basketball, football, and baseball players to play for the name on the front of their jersey rather than the name on the back.  The back has their last name, and on the front, is the team name. 

All of those ideas point to the same concept that Paul was pointing to in his ongoing philosophical dispute with the church in Corinth:  when you sign on to be a follower of Christ, you leave the stuff behind you previously held on to.  For Paul, the image of a healthy human body was helpful to understanding the idea of team:  the team worked together and the eye was the eye, and it didn’t try to be the ear, mouth, or ankle. 

There is no me in Church, there is no I in team.  Me and I are called pronouns, which mean they can be used as a substitute for nouns. 

Here is my point:  Pronouns matter, they matter a lot. 

How many times do we hear national leaders over the last twenty years get into extended dialogue where the pronouns used are I, me or my.  Those are all first person, singular pronouns.  Somehow when Jesus says “I am the light of the world” that is positive, but when a leader pronounces “I am the light of the world” it is jarring. 

Personally, I always try to make sure the pronouns when I speak to leaders about leadership are to the maximum degree possible, if first person, plural.  We.  Us. 

When in active church leadership, I ask that when we sing “Spirit of the Living God” the pronouns be us, rather than me.  “Melt us, mold us, use us.”  Yes? 

But that is so hard.  Look at the very first sentence of this thought piece:  quickly it gets to first person, singular.  Sometimes the I statement is unavoidable.  First person singular isn’t automatically sinful.  But other times, it would be more true, more helpful, and more kind to go to plural pronouns. 

Reading European sports writers talk about the recent World Cup was interesting.  England are something.  Not England is something.  My word processor gives me an error on are following the singular noun, England, but England in the context meant is a team, a plural. 

Maybe we need to think of the Body of Christ in a European team concept:  The body of Christ are …

English teachers will freak out but in reality the plural verb makes an excellent point – a team is intrinsically plural, not singular.  You want the team to get to a place of unity, oneness, functioning as one.  But even in perfect oneness, perfect unity, it is still a collection of me’s and I’s. 

I used The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown several years ago for sermon illustrations.  Boys in the Boat is the story of the University of Washington Rowing Team and how, spoiler alert, they won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1936.  In part, the book is about how one man, Joe Rantz, neglected and abandoned by his family, had to learn to sacrifice his personal individuality for the unity of the team.  When Rantz makes that psychological, spiritual shift in his understanding of how it all fits together, the crew is one with each other.  The nine members of the Crew become one. 

For Paul, this thing called church is a one.  He sees it in terms of the complexity of the human body, many diverse parts and roles, but still functioning as a single thing.  All of this diversity of function and role still serves to keep the body healthy and viable.  Every member of the body, that is eyes, fingers, feet, stomach, ears, all function in support of the one that is the entire body: the entire body of Christ. 

This Jesus stuff isn’t easy.  It isn’t going to happen without effort and hard work and a willingness to make that psychological, spiritual shift in understanding of how it all fits together.  You’ve got to sacrifice much of our individuality to make it all fit together.

One of the barometers in how we assess how we are doing on this “body of Christ” stuff is the pronouns.  When first person singular dominate, we are probably focused on the wrong things.  When the dominant pronouns are plural, we are probably functioning consistent with what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 12. 

There is no me in Church, there is no I in team. 

Selah, Dennis

Gifts of the Spirit

Galatians 5: 19-23:  Now the works of the flesh are obvious: … impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. 

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

Paul is big on the idea of the Spirit.  The Spirit is clearly an important theological idea for Paul.  References to the Spirit fill Paul’s letters as he coaches his far flung flock.  One is quoted here.  Paul was having trouble with Galatians Community UMC.  Things had fallen apart after he had left. 

I like to think of the Galatians readings in terms of car dashboard lights.  

When we are in proper relationship with God, our fellow co-laborers in the church and ourselves our dashboard lights are green.  Love, joy, peace and other good things are displayed consistent with what Paul enumerates in Galatians 5: 22-23.  The machine should work well when the lights are all green.  However, we need to check our spiritual engines when the dashboard lights are red with strife, anger, factions, envy and the like.  In the car dashboard world, green is normally good, red is normally a problem.  Fruits of the Spirit are good; Works of the Flesh are not.  Galatians 5 helps us understand and measure how we are doing with this relationship stuff.  The passage is an indicator of relationship. 

The issue here is how we use our gifts in order to produce Fruits of the Spirit.  Sometimes we know what those gifts are:  I am good at numbers and I am not particularly good at small engine repair.  But I didn’t know I was good at numbers until I got dropped into a position in 1973 that called for me to be a numerical analyst.  I struggled for a while but mentors and coaches helped me and turned that struggle into strength.  What we now see as a gift was at one time not a gift.  It was honed and developed by others, plus my own willingness to be coached to success.  I had to be a numbers disciple, a student, for a while.  In reality, I am still a numbers disciple, constantly looking at web sites and articles about how to better display data so that it becomes information, but I digress. 

I had to trust others to see that gift in me that I didn’t know that I possessed. 

In my learning and growing here, I didn’t become angry or exercise poor self-control.  In fact, this endeavor became an object that lead to joy.  When it comes to being a numerical analyst, my dashboard lights here were never red, always green. 

Look to the dashboard lights and crosscheck them against Galatians 5.  Green?  Red?  Listen to your heart.  Listen to others.  Listen for God.  Remember that God sometimes speaks in a small, still, voice, except when small, still isn’t working. 

Selah, Dennis

Familiar in the Unfamiliar

[The Angels ask Mary]:  “Woman, why are you weeping?”

[Mary] said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?”

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (Which means Teacher).  John 20: 13b-16 (NRSV)

I was in my fifties before much of the significance of this scene started to really lay claim to my soul.  Every time I explore the scene again, it grows in power, its meaning sharpens a little more. 

Easter, 2018, found me preaching from the Gospel of John and the extract above is part of the common reading for the day.  I will touch on other elements of the scene, but the center piece of the message is how Mary recognizes Jesus through the calling of her name.   

John in his beautiful writing style is looping back earlier in his Gospel where the Good Shepherd says about his sheep: "The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (John 10:3). The Good Shepherd then adds, "I know my own and my own know me" (John 10:14).  Mary is part of his flock, so it should not be surprising that she recognizes the risen Christ when his voice is heard calling her name.

Mary is experiencing the familiar, Jesus, in an unfamiliar place, the garden outside the tomb. 

Because she is a member of Jesus flock, she recognizes Jesus through her called name. 

For Mary, here in this scene, it was the voice of Jesus calling her by name, making the unfamiliar, familiar.  Life is like that, we are able to live and survive in the unfamiliar because of the familiar. 

Sometimes, for some of us, the familiar is television, the older the better.  Remember the television series that started in 1983 and ran till 1992, about a bar in Boston, ‘where everybody knows your name:’ Cheer’s?  Our name is a powerful force to take us to familiarity even in a place of unfamiliarity.   

The familiar is often best understood, experienced, in community.  James Baldwin published in 1961 a collection of essays about the black experience in the United States, under the dark title Nobody Knows My Name.  Baldwin’s title suggests he is haunted by the absence of community, i.e. Nobody.  In comparing Baldwin’s essays with the Gospel of John with community one writer suggests:

When one's name is known and called, one is enfolded in community. When Mary's name was called by the risen Jesus, she was enfolded into the company of heaven, and she recognized the One who now lives directly within and from the life of God.”

That is goosebump:  Jesus is calling Mary into the community of heaven.  In her case, it is a community of the faithful who encounter the risen Jesus.  At this moment in the John biblical narrative, it is a pretty exclusive community:  her.  Be not anxious:  It doesn’t stay that way. 

Do we understand, when Jesus calls us by name, it is a call to community? 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:  “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.”  Are you ready to be interrupted by God? 

Here’s the question: if Jesus calls you by name, would you recognize his voice?’  Here my Bonhoeffer twist is, ‘would you want to recognize his voice?’ 

An industrial size dose of candor would compel many, if not most, to admit we do not truly believe that Jesus will come to us in the garden and call us by name. 

If Jesus does, we will do everything in our power to pretend we don’t recognize the calling voice. 

For many, if not most, recognizing Jesus voice in the garden would scream out for immediate rejection.

Jesus is calling us to disconnect from the preferred familiar, and emerge in a reality so profoundly different, so totally unfamiliar, we cannot imagine it.

At least, we cannot imagine it, until Jesus calls us by name. 

It is important to place ourselves in spaces where we experience and affirm Jesus in our midst.  We do this in hearing “the body of Christ, broken for you”, in the scent of the oil from the candles, in the familiar sound of a favored hymn or anthem that stirs us in places too deep to be named, in the feel of the Bible given to us in love in a confirmation class fifty years ago.  Those are the familiars that help us to live in the unfamiliar and are part of how we hear the voice of Jesus calling our very names.  The unfamiliar for me from 2012 to 2019 included the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake, my wife staying overnight for Family Promise, or in community creating emergency buckets at the United Methodist Committee on Relief in Salt Lake. Last night it was for me feeding the needy at Asbury UMC here in Charles Town.  

Easter comes, and then it comes, and then it comes again.  Easter in a familiar rhythm, sound, sights and smells.  However, from those familiars, we are called to serve, and that can make the familiar pretty unfamiliar. 

Are you familiar enough with the voice of Jesus to recognize he calling you by name, and if yes, is he calling you into the unfamiliar?  If so, listen.

Selah, Dennis

Listening in order to Understand

Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

James 1:19-21, The Message.

I use a quote from Stephen Covey a lot:  “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

We all regularly encounter those who start sentences with something like “I don’t understand” but then complete what began as a quest for understanding with why what they don’t understand is clearly wrong, stupid, or something they strongly disagree with. 

This is basic human nature:  it is part of the human condition. 

My reaction when this happens is to think “you must think you understand enough about this to say you don’t like it.”  I hear the religious authorities of Jesus day saying to “I don’t understand this Jesus dude, and I don’t like him.” 

I confess I find this type of conversation jarring.  I operate in the faith that optimism, enthusiasm, and hope are contagious. 

May I invite all of us to lead with our ears and follow with our tongues? 

May I invite everyone to replace replace negativity with the "help me understand.” 

Bonhoeffer nails it (as he usually does):  "The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them."

He also writes:  "There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that .... is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person."  It almost sounds like the Covey  above!  Maybe I need to change who I am quoting from Covey to Bonhoeffer?  

Rise above basic human nature: listening is not part of the human condition.

In the 1951, John Huston movie “The African Queen” the character played by Humphrey Bogart laments that how he behaves is “only human nature” to which the Katherine Hepburn character answers:  “Nature … is what we are put in this world to rise above.” 

We are Easter people. 

Let us endeavor to spread the joy of the empty tomb in all that we do. 

John Wesley wrote: “I have often repented of judging too severely, but very seldom of being too merciful.”

It can be argued that judging too quickly is a form of judging too severely.

Perhaps in seeking understanding, we might reduce the need to request mercy later.

Selah, Dennis

Trust and Faith: Maternal Cousins

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
    and do not rely on your own insight.

In all your ways acknowledge him,
    and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3: 5-6, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Trust and faith are related, cousins, not twins. 

Faith, leaning on Hebrews 11, is about assurance and conviction (NRSV:  “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”). 

Trust is about character.  Our own character and how we feel about the character of the other.  Heart in biblical terms is usually about character rather than our bodily organ.  Both, organ and character, are vital, necessary, life giving. 

How we understand the character of the other is driven generally by experience.  It takes time for us to know someone well enough to get a full measure of their character, and after we do, it is often fixed:  concrete.  A great example of this is after Saint Paul gets metaphorically knocked off his horse in Acts 9 on his way to Damascus, Paul reaches out to the gathered community of Jesus followers, in Damascus and Jerusalem, but fails to connect.  Simple:  they don’t trust him.  ‘We know this guy; he has shown us who he is.  Don’t trust him.  It’s all an act.’  Even the intervention of trusted Barnabas fails until Barnabas gets his own appointment in Antioch.  He remembers Paul and puts him to work.  Paul is redeemed, and that redemption hinges on Barnabas’ trust in the character of Paul’s repentance. 

I expect we have all heard the phrase:  “In God we trust, everything else, we check.”  It says everyone else’s character is untrustworthy. 

That worldview, that statement of the human condition, is remarkably cynical.  

In fact, that cynicism is organizationally cancerous.  Like undiagnosed, untreated cancer, lack of trust is fatal:  killing vision, killing mission, killing hope, killing creativity.  Mistrust is a cancer on our view of much of our current world:  government, media, business, and the church.

But this is a reflection on leadership, not our entire culture:  Leaders must be open to self-examination.  Must.  Self-examination leading to self-awareness is a leadership imperative.  Leaders, true leaders, those who actually bring about change, must be willing to trust in their judgment, their own growth and maturity, and others.

What would have happened if Barnabas had trusted the judgment of the crowd in Damascus and Jerusalem, and allowed the mistrust of Paul to cause him, Barnabas, to not invite Paul to assist him with Antioch First UMC? 

Often mistrust is a function of fear.  1 John 4: 18 tells us there is ‘no fear in love’ and that ‘true love’ casts out fear. 

What is it we fear individually?

What do we fear organizationally?

How do we overcome those fears as individuals and within the organizations we are part of. 

Those questions will not be easy, and if one generates an answer quickly, reflexively, then the gentle, seeking completeness, reader might need to go back and re-read this short reflection until this dose of chemotherapy, this dose of radiation treatment, this surgery, has begun to excise the cancer of mistrust from our organizational body. 

Selah, Dennis

A Constant State of Gratitude

Proverbs 22:2-4 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

“The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life.”

November, both secularly and religiously, presents so many opportunities for us to be thankful. I think of it as a month set aside for us to be in a constant state of gratitude. 

The first Sunday in November is a chance to remember the great ‘cloud of witnesses’ that have gone before us and paved the way for us. The personal courage it took to leave a Bristol, England in a seventeenth century sailing vessel is impressive. This courage was displayed multiple times in multiple ways throughout our history. Others had to have the courage to survive today buoyed by hope tomorrow would bring a life of freedom. I find the courage, among other characteristics, of our forebears humbling. Their courage in the face of life challenges almost always leads me to a state of gratitude, a gratitude that empowers me to be hopeful and optimistic. 

This year the second Sunday is the actual day of remembrance for those who have served: Veteran’s Day. While officially the day is one of remembering those who have served in the military, I think including those who have answered the call to serve us in the role of first responders, e.g., police, fire, medics, are a focus I have used in the past, and want to again this year. Having been a member of the Warrior Class, I plan to try and offer a thought or three as to how we can best support those who move towards the sound of danger. Again, I find the courage, humbling. Again, courage leads me through a state of gratitude, towards hopeful and optimistic. 

Thanksgiving Day is preceded by the third Sunday, and we are going to reflect a little on what it means to respond from multiple blessings in gratitude. The Hilltop musical tradition of how we mass, play and sing “Come Ye Thankful People Come” is goose bump. It consistently makes me awe-full. 

The final Sunday of the Church Year is “Christ the King Sunday.” Awe and gratitude are always in my mind when I think humbly about Jesus as the Christ.

Sometimes, focusing so much on Thanksgiving, humility and gratitude does lead me to feel called to share with all of this precious flock called Hilltop, the joy I find in ministry. First, I think of myself as a person of ideas, and I have the happy task of getting time each week to participate in a drama focused on ideas. Further, I have spent a great deal of time over these last six plus years with you during moments of great personal pain, anguish, and confusion. Being allowed to be there at those moments is inspiring and humbling.  When I walk into the room of someone close to the end of this life, and their face lights up at seeing me is nothing short of an awe-full moment. There is nothing awful about it. And at that moment, I am each of you, there to sing, read scripture, anoint with oil, pray, listen, and quietly hold a faithful hand. It is so humbling. 

I walk into lives, that without the presence of the divine would have every reason to be in a state of despair, and I find, among other things, courage. And yet again, I find the courage, humbling. And yet again, courage leads me through a state of gratitude, towards hopeful and optimistic.

November presents many opportunities for us to be thankful. 

   Might I invite each of you to think of November as a month set aside for you to be in a state of gratitude?  

      How do we grow that gratitude for a month into a constant feeling?  

         I have found such a feeling leads to riches beyond silver and gold. 

Selah, Pastor Dennis

Familiar in the Unfamiliar

[The Angels ask Mary]:  “Woman, why are you weeping?”

[Mary] said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?”

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (Which means Teacher).  John 20: 13b-16 (NRSV)

I was in my fifties before much of the significance of this scene started to really lay claim to my soul.  Every time I explore the scene again, it grows in power, its meaning sharpens a little more. 

Easter, 2018, finds me preaching from the Gospel of John and the extract above is part of the common reading for the day.  I will touch on other elements of the scene, but the center piece of the message is how Mary recognizes Jesus through the calling of her name.   

John in his beautiful writing style is looping back earlier in his Gospel where the Good Shepherd says about his sheep: "The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (John 10:3). The Good Shepherd then adds, "I know my own and my own know me" (John 10:14).  Mary is part of his flock, so it should not be surprising that she recognizes the risen Christ when his voice is heard calling her name.

Mary is experiencing the familiar, Jesus, in an unfamiliar place, the garden outside the tomb. 

Because she is a member of Jesus flock, she recognizes Jesus through her called name. 

For Mary, here in this scene, it was the voice of Jesus calling her by name, making the unfamiliar, familiar.  Life is like that, we are able to live and survive in the unfamiliar because of the familiar. 

Sometimes, for some of us, the familiar is television, the older the better.  Remember the television series that started in 1983 and ran till 1992, about a bar in Boston, ‘where everybody knows your name:’ Cheer’s?  Our name is a powerful force to take us to familiarity even in a place of unfamiliarity.   

The familiar is often best understood, experienced, in community.  James Baldwin published in 1961 a collection of essays about the black experience in the United States, under the dark title Nobody Knows My Name.  Baldwin’s title suggests he is haunted by the absence of community, i.e. Nobody.  In comparing Baldwin’s essays with the Gospel of John with community one writer suggests:

When one's name is known and called, one is enfolded in community. When Mary's name was called by the risen Jesus, she was enfolded into the company of heaven, and she recognized the One who now lives directly within and from the life of God.

That is goosebump:  Jesus is calling Mary into the community of heaven.  In her case, it is a community of the faithful who encounter the risen Jesus.  At this moment in the John biblical narrative, it is a pretty exclusive community:  her.  Be not anxious:  It doesn’t stay that way. 

Do we understand, when Jesus calls us by name, it is a call to community? 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:  “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.”  Are you ready to be interrupted by God? 

Here’s the question: if Jesus calls you by name, would you recognize his voice?’  Here my Bonhoeffer twist is, ‘would you want to recognize his voice?’ 

An industrial size dose of candor would compel many, if not most, to admit we do not truly believe that Jesus will come to us in the garden and call us by name. 

If Jesus does, we will do everything in our power to pretend we don’t recognize the calling voice. 

For many, if not most, recognizing Jesus voice in the garden would scream out for immediate rejection.

Jesus is calling us to disconnect from the preferred familiar, and emerge in a reality so profoundly different, so totally unfamiliar, we cannot imagine it.

At least, we cannot imagine it, until Jesus calls us by name. 

It is important to place ourselves in spaces where we experience and affirm Jesus in our midst.  We do this in hearing “the body of Christ, broken for you”, in the scent of the oil from the candles, in the familiar sound of a favored hymn or anthem that stirs us in places too deep to be named, in the feel of the Bible given to us in love in a confirmation class fifty years ago.  Those are the familiars that help us to live in the unfamiliar and are part of how we hear the voice of Jesus calling our very names.  The unfamiliar includes the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake, staying overnight for Family Promise, or creating emergency buckets at the United Methodist Committee on Relief here in Salt Lake.

Easter comes, and then it comes, and then it comes again.  Easter in a familiar rhythm, sound, sights and smells.  However, from those familiars, we are called to serve, and that can make the familiar pretty unfamiliar. 

Are you familiar enough with the voice of Jesus to recognize him calling you by name, and if yes, is he calling you into the unfamiliar?  If so, listen.

Selah, Pastor Dennis

Children Make the Parent

“We all know that parents do not make children but that children make parents … Authentic parenting is one long sacrificial act … parenting reveals the way that sacrifice at once diminishes our life as we knew it … while at the same time revealing to us larger and infinitely more fascinating forms of life … Parents know experientially that the very process which makes them suffer also makes them grow.”

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Living Gospel

Luke Johnson is a New Testament Scholar at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.  Candler people I know in ministry speak highly of him. 

Right off, there are a few things with the quote that potentially give me pause.

Initially, I was not sure I would have said my life had been diminished by being a parent, even with the qualifying phrase “as we knew it” coming so quickly.  But try as I can, I am unable to wordsmith a better image of shrinking what we thought was important before we became parents.  It certainly has a way of changing our focus.  I told my children after the birth of their children that ‘your life will never be the same.’  My son in particular recently reminded me of that phrase and said it was so true. 

I also know using the above quote can be painful for some.  Parenting can have a mixed message; it can be a mine field in how we understand it or see it.  Some want to be parents, and have not realized this goal.  Others have had strained relations with their children, birth and adopted, feeling, as Johnson alludes to, they had sacrificed much but different than Johnson, for little appreciation. 

Life is so complicated at times. 

But, Luke Johnson is touching on an element of the Christian walk that too many of us try and avoid, or see as some kind of plague or curse:  suffering. 

It seems to me that whenever I read the word suffering, I hear in my brain this echo of Paul from Romans 5:
 

¹ Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.  (NIV)

Paul writes:  “Glory in our sufferings.”  Paul is using glory as a verb which means to take pride or pleasure.  For sure I do not take pleasure in suffering.  For me, suffering might at times be a badge of honor that I wear, but I don’t think Paul means suffering by itself is the badge of honor.  Paul talks about it as part of life.  We are going to suffer, but that suffering leads to positive outcomes:  perseverance, character and hope.  Hope and the character that precedes it are the badges of honor.  Johnson means it the same way:  our suffering as a parent leads to changing us in positive ways.  We grow from the experience.  We are forever different.  Growth and a different outlook are for Johnson the badges of honor. 

We don’t have to experience or be near the actual physical birth pains of a human child in order to be a parent and be forever experientially changed as a result. 

We used the image of Hilltop as a parent when we were talking about a satellite campus growing into a fully identifiable separate church somewhere south and west of us.  We did so with intentionality thinking that being a parent in this sacrificial way, would help define us, in a positive way, as to who we are.  I really think that idea still has resonance and meaning.  Because we had one miscarriage, does not mean we should swear off parenting. 

I hear those who say:  ‘we aren’t ready yet’ and ‘we tried that last year and it didn’t work, let’s focus on Hilltop first.’  I concede there are elements of Hilltop life that needs strengthening. That is absolutely true.  I am not sure our miscarriage was entirely driven by lack of strength, but let’s talk.  What does need strengthening? 

Examples of things that need our continued attention are:  money, volunteerism, lack of universal engagement, aging infrastructure, a culture with a waning interest in Christianity in a post-Christendom world, and enthusiasm for the topic of parenting.  I could go on. 

But I still plan to persevere here in hopeful and hope producing leadership.  Here I think I am doing this in the tradition of Hilltop’s Saint:  the late Reverend James Cowell.  Jim was the pastor here at Hilltop from 1991 to 1997 and was the architect of Colorado Springs Sunrise United Methodist.  Being bold, creating church children from healthy parents was a core belief of Jim’s.  Core.  I am his ideological descendent. 

Like Cowell and Johnson, I think this image of Hilltop as a parent is critical to help define who we are as children of God. 

We should do this in order to produce a Pauline like ecclesial character that looks forward to hopeful outcomes. 

Suffering, and know that we are going to, isn’t embraced because it is pleasurable, but rather look at how so many who have been able to be parents have had their very lives changed by that process. 

In the early 1900s a phrase emerged:  What would Jesus Do?  We see it abbreviated as WWJD.  Well, at Hilltop for sure, what about maybe WWJ²D.  Jesus and Jim – or J Squared. J Cubed if we add Johnson?   

It is time to start the conversation again. 

God doesn’t call us to small tasks. 

How do we strengthen Mother Hilltop so that she is capable of nurturing new life? 

How do we get started on this soon? 

Selah, Pastor Dennis

Humility

“I tell you that this man … went home justified before God. For all those who … humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 18: 14 (New International Version)

Exalt means held in high regard. Good when this high regard is by others, problematic when this high regard is about ourselves. In this passage, Jesus is pointing out that proper self-awareness contains a dollop of humility.

Honest humility is an endearing quality in our interaction with others.  An honest humility, backed up by a true and honest self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses, is a positive human characteristic. In contrast, few take pleasure in being in the company of those who are compelled to be the smartest person in the room: wearying.  This is hubris, a word of Greek origin.

Hubris “came to be defined as overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered cosmos.”  Some of that bothers me, but overall, it resonates.  My take is the disregard of who we really are. When acting in a state of hubris, we are fakes, charlatans, or to put a twist on Shakespeare “a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”

Humility and hubris are opposites. To balance humility and hubris requires excellent emotional intelligence and a high self-awareness. 

Hubris is a character flaw, but too much humility can also be a flaw. What about those for whom it isn’t honest humility, but rather an unconscious inability to see ourselves as worthy, successful, fun, and all of the things that help lead to a well rounded soul? 

Self doubt eats at our very core and saps us of the strength for living life abundantly. 

Carl Jung, the noted Swiss psychiatrist, once wrote:  “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

I love baseball. Former major leaguer Manny Ramirez provides an excellent example of the unconscious staying unconscious. Manny was a great hitter but less than thoughtful in the thinking elements of the game. His Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre was once asked why Manny did something less than helpful, and Joe said “it’s just Manny being Manny.” Some would say it was Manny’s fate to live in a world of self-absorption. Maybe because he could hit a baseball an incredible distance on a regular basis but not understand other elements of the game, Manny possessed what was arguably low self-awareness. He had hubris as it related to his hitting prowess, but a profound lack of honest humility in how all of that fit together to make him a complete player in all phases of the game. 

Our walk, in community, with Jesus is at least in part so that we can be complete players in all phases of the game of life. Jung would suggest this means we conduct an honest inventory of who we are. This can be tricky because, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Jesus would suggest a proper self-awareness contains a dollop of humility, the type that is healthy and interested in growth. The commendation is not to beat ourselves up over our failures, but rather to quietly assess and inventory who we are. This is done in healthy conversation with those we trust and love, on long walks alone in the creation, and a thousand other approaches to be appropriately alone or with others for the purpose of growth. 

Selah