Thoughts on Reformation Sunday

All Saints Church, Wittenberg, Germany

It’s Reformation Sunday today and I’m thinking about the church. Recently, I heard this simple statement, “a living body is continually repairing, healing its brokenness.” I am currently serving as an intentional interim in a mid-size rural congregation. In interim ministry this statement brings an element of hope and possibility. For twenty-five years, I’ve served as a settled pastor in various congregations and this statement poses both a challenge and a threat for the congregations who have become comfortable with their pastor, one another, and with their way of doing ministry. On this Reformation Sunday, it seems appropriate to reflect upon the church, both in times of change and times when our life together is static and predictable. 

In the United States, Reformation Sunday comes in the fall of the year – on the cusp – of winter when flues, colds and other illnesses seem to be more prevalent to the healthy and active. Flues and colds are an infection that compromises the immune system and creates stress for our bodies and our minds. We know that in time, the flu symptoms will disappear and we’ll be better again. This is an example of how the “living body repairs and heals its brokenness.” Our bodies are amazing. As long as we have breath, our bodies will continue to repair its brokenness. 

Consider a rock. A rock is lifeless and for centuries can remain static and unchanging. A rock changes and eventually diminishes when it comes in contact with wind, sand, or water. When the winds blow and water crashes against the rock, its only response is to chisel away to nothing more than the sand and grit that will one day blow against another rock, breaking it apart and becoming unrecognizable in the course of time. Rocks, unlike living bodies, react to the elements by crumbling to nothingness. It may take a very long time, but it will not repair itself. Instead it disappears. A living body continues to repair itself, but a lifeless body decays and soon disappears like a rock that does nothing to change its course.

Martin Luther's 95 Theses

On this day, the Protestant churches remember Martin Luther’s actions that evolved into a movement and changed the course of history. The Reformation was a historical and real event that happened long ago, but as I see it, it is also a metaphor for a viable and living church today. Reformation Sunday reminds us that every day is an opportunity to fix our brokenness and respond to change in positive ways. This day reminds the Church Universal and our own churches that we can respond to change in two ways. We can respond to change like a lifeless rock, allowing the winds of change to compromise its integrity and chisel away God’s message of Shalom. This is one way – we can allow change to act upon us or we can respond to change like a living body – continually meeting change as an opportunity to strengthen our life together. Just as a living body is continually repairing and healing its brokenness, Reformation day is an invitation to do the same today.

Re-forming, re-shaping, and renewing is the message of the day. Whether we are traveling through an uncertain time – an in-between time, we can approach the change and transition with the spirit of Martin Luther believing that such is the time to re-imagine life together. The living body is continually looking at new ways of being the Church. In the same way,  a church or a congregation that has become comfortable with their life together will not dream dreams or see visions and like the rock sitting alone in the desert will one day find they are not what they once were and the winds of time and change will define for them a life that  no longer has  meaning.  

On Getting Lost in the Bible

It’s probably happened to you before. You move to a new area and you’re trying to learn your way around your new community or perhaps you've recently passed your driving test and received your license and you’re noticing different ways to get around your town for the first time. As you are learning how to get around your community you know that there have been times that you've gotten lost. If you have a map in your car, you may consult the map, you notice street names, highway names or some identifiable route or road and you find it on your map and you are able to see where you are and where you would like to go. Perhaps you turn the GPS on in your telephone and wait for it to find you and begin giving directions, helping you find your way out of a state of being lost. Sometimes we stop and get directions or more than likely we keep traveling, hoping you’ll recognize a building, a fence-line, a familiar street name or another landmark such as trees, lakes or ponds.

Once again, I found myself in places I didn't think I was planning to go. Once again I call upon map skills or check my watch to see the time of day and looking for the sun so I can find the direction I need to be heading. I review routes with Google maps; check with folks for the landmarks that I should look for or what side of the road the house is on. I program my GPS and I am off and sometimes I get to the place I am going with minimal trouble and other times even my GPS cannot find where I am going and I am among the lost. The thing about learning any new community is that we are never really lost, we’re just exploring new ways to get around, but until we start our drive and set out on our journey, we’ll never learn the way and even if we get lost, we can add another route to the same destination at another time.

Getting lost is not always comfortable. The bigger the city, the more wooded the area or the more traffic there is, we find that in our state of being lost becomes less desirable.  Regardless, it is a part of learning and becoming so familiar with your area that when an unexpected detour comes along, you’ll know another way to get around. Getting lost on the way to someone’s house is the way we learn. We don’t fail just because we got lost along the way. No, that is how we learn. Just as we can expect to get lost when learning a community, I would like to suggest that we need to get lost in the Bible. With anxious souls and gloved hands we've gingerly and fearfully handle our sacred scriptures and in doing so, we've created an idol out of bound paper and have added to the illiteracy of scripture. Instead of getting lost in the Bible we've allowed others to interpret the scripture for us and have corporately lamented that we really don’t know anything about our Bible. Like someone who has lived all their life in the same house, they take the same route to the grocery store that their parents took when they were young. When we become too satisfied with the familiar, we rob ourselves of the newness and the beauty of another way.

When we take the same route through the Bible that has been interpreted to us by someone else for all of our lives and when we leave the Bible reading and interpretation to someone else, we relegate the scripture to a painful death of ignorance and irrelevance. The scripture is so much more than the accumulated knowledge of pastors, theologians, teachers, and scholars. What makes the scripture meaningful is not what others may say about the scripture, but what we may discover when we allow ourselves to question, to doubt, to explore, to experience, or to study. If the Bible falls on the ground you will not have to answer to God’s judgment. If you write in your Bibles or even throw old warn Bible away, you will not go to Hell.

 The scriptures are words,poetry  thoughts, stories, songs, and accounts of thousands of years of history, but the pages between the leather covers is not the ending of God’s creative work among humanity. God continues to use each one of us to bring new life to God’s amazing work among us. God’s words are not bound by the covers of the book, but continue to be written in the lives and examples of faithful men and women who dare to get lost in the Bible. It is when we get lost in the scripture that we are able to discover “new wine in old wine-skins” or discover living water that quenches our thirst and gives us the desire and the curiosity to keep exploring without judgment or retribution. The only truth in the Holy Scripture is what is meaningful to you and what empowers you to set out on a journey to make the scripture relevant to you. Getting lost in the Bible is the first step in finding your way through this life. So, don’t worry, just get lost in the Bible and the Holy Spirit will reveal to you what you need to know.  

Still No Justice

In 1992, five police officers were acquitted of any guilt in the beating of Rodney King. At that time Jesse Jackson spoke up and said that “today we have witnessed a miscarriage of justice!” Those were powerful words then and in light of recent events are still words that haunt us today.  In the not guilty verdict of the trial of George Zimmerman, we have once again witnessed yet another “miscarriage of justice.” When I heard the verdict my heart sank. My friend and colleague,  Rev. John C. Dorhauer, Conference Minister of the Southwest Conference of the United Church of Crhist posted on Facebook, “No justice for Trayvon. Is this really who we want to be?” My answer would be no, this is not what I want to be and I expect better from a nation who prides itself on justice for all. 

It is true, I do not believe that George Zimmerman intended to kill Treyvon Martin, but the idiotic “gun laws” of the State of Florida, vigilantism, profiling or shall I say it, institutional racism, and permission given to grown men by the State of Florida, to fantasize  about being a community hero allowed this “miscarriage of justice” to happen. No, there were probably no laws broken – it would appear that both the victim and the assailant were defending themselves in a situation that got out of hand. The injustice may not even be that in the end there was a death of another American teenager.The injustice is the language and the attitude of George Zimmerman who assumed that a black youth with a hoodie over his head on misty, rainy night was up to no good. This is, to me, the wrong that was unleashed that night and an indication that racism and the injustice still rears its ugly head in our nation and there are still grown men and women who still believe that all black youth are up to no good. I cringe to think that if the roles were reversed, Treyvon Martin would not be off to church today, like the Zimmerman family, but facing his first day of life in prison. Is this really who we want to be?

 The prophet Isaiah, one among many prophets, speaks to injustice so powerfully and with such passion. He says, 

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” Isaiah 1:16-17.  

 Having found much solace in the prophet Isaiah over the years, I cannot help, but think that we have not learned anything – there is still no justice.  We are still living in a fantasy world thinking that God adores our laws and our expressions of faithfulness, but I’m here to say that in light of this verdict and countless other atrocities that plague our dark and sickening relationship with race, we are not pleasing God. How do I know? The prophets tells us so. So what can be done? 

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean…” the prophet tells us what we need to do and what is pleasing to God. The good news is that this is an invitation to change our ways and just as I believe we are not pleasing God with our actions, God still believes in us and knows that we have the hutzpah to make it right, to wash the blood from our hands, and stand for justice for all people, justice that stands up against racism, justice that stands against idiotic gun laws, justice that stands against the privileged and the powerful, and justice that stands for ‘kingdom values’ and not American values. Today, like the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, I “walk and stand in solidarity with the family of Trayvon Martin” and believe with all my heart that one day “justice and righteousness WILL flow like an ever flowing stream…”

Hoeing and Harvesting

Maybe I didn't notice it before, but I continue to be amused at the folks, some of them young kids, some adults, or maybe migrant workers who walk the rows of beans hoeing out the weeds that seem to grow taller and more quickly than the beans planted in fields. I noticed orange and yellow flags that seem to be at the end of some of the rows and conclude that maybe that is an indication of where to begin weeding or where a day’s worked ended. I don’t know, but I am amused by the concept of weeding and hoeing the beans row by row.

In other agrarians regions I've lived in before I have not seen  throngs of people going through the bean fields cutting out the weeds and so this is a new concept for me. I guess in the communities I have lived, the farmers choose to spray the weeds growing in the bean fields rather than to send  workers out to manually remove the weeds from the beans.  

As I see this and also notice the weeds high and above the golden wheat, I am reminded of a parable that is found in Matthew – the Parable of the weeds among the wheat. Perhaps you will remember this. It is said that a farmer spread good seed in a field, but as the seeds germinated, some of the servants noticed that among the good seed there seemed to be many weeds. The servant questioned the master, ‘did we not sow good seed?’ The master agreed that it was good seed, but somewhere along the way, the ‘evil one’ sowed weeds among the wheat. The servant asks, ‘do you want us to go out in the field and pull the weeds so that there can be a greater harvest? The master responded, ‘No for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest and then we will know the weeds from the grain and then we will gather up the weeds, bind them, throw them into the fire, and harvest the good grain.”

This parable, the golden wheat, the throng of workers walking the fields with hoes in hand and weeding the bean rows got me thinking about the life we have known and the life we long to see. The agricultural parables throughout the Christian gospels reflect two realities, the reality of the human condition or an alternative reality that imagines a world – a field free of the weeds that compromise the dignity and integrity of all of God’s Creation.

Our human condition cannot help but have a few weeds that darken the shinier side of living and loving. Where are the weeds that bring suffering in our world? The weeds of injustice still find its way into the most progressive of our communities. A rural congregation, seemingly hard working and stable still feeds 60 plus families each week from their pantry.  The Supreme Court votes against affirmative action and voting reforms and large corporations receive a multitude of tax breaks and a few very wealthy people can control Washington with their billions of dollars. The weeds of injustice are still painfully present.

The Harvest is Plentiful, but the laborers are few

What about the evasive weeds of broken relationships that clutter your life? Maybe the weeds of abuse and neglect have been your experience.  Have the weeds of addiction and personal suffering compromised the quality and wholeness of your life? The weeds of life do get in the way of experiencing a life that is really worth living and from time to time, we need to do some hoeing. Maybe it’s time to walk the bean fields and do some hoeing.  Take some time to gather up the weeds, bind them in bundles to be burned and begin to free your life from the weeds that minimize the harvest. Just where are the weeds in the fields today? Is it time to do some digging and free the wheat from the weeds? When God calls us into the field to hoe, just where will you begin?

Making Room

For the last several years, Carly and I made a decision that we were not going to buy additional book shelves for our ever growing collection of books. Instead, we made a decision that when we buy new books (unless they are digital books) we would have to make room for the books on the shelves we already own. As you can imagine for two pastors who have come from families that value books, this has not been an easy transition. In order to fit the new book or books on our shelves, we find ourselves asking questions such as, “Is this a book that will have some lasting value?” Will we use this book more than just a couple of times?” “Do we really need to buy this book or can we borrow it from the library?” “For what reasons are we attracted to this book?” If we purchase the book and we have to make room for the new ones, we take a look at our old collection and see which ones we have not looked at in a long time or perhaps the topic or material  is outdated, then we remove it from our collection. We might sell it on half.com, pass it on to another person that would appreciate the book, or we donate it to the library. Regardless we make room for something new.

Recently,  I wanted to reduce my file cabinet collection of twelve full drawers to one four drawer file cabinet. You can imagine what a task that was, but I was able to do it. As I began cleaning files, I had material from my college years, Seminary notes and papers. I found material that dated back to my first Confirmation class. I found material that I prepared for some of my very first Bible studies.  I found my Ordination paper I wrote twenty-five years ago,  and countless other resources that I've collected and used at one time or another. In a day and age when there is so much information stored digitally, it makes sense to lighten the load and find new ways to accumulate, store, and use the plethora of material that is now available to the average American. Change makes all of this possible.

Deciding on books, storing books, going through years and years of files and deciding which ones to keep and which resources have served their purpose and which ones are no longer helpful is what I've been up to lately. When I find  resources that no longer serve my ministry, I might flip through pages, re-read some of the material, bathing in the special memories for a moment and celebrate what, at one time, was what I needed, but like so much in life, I've moved beyond that resource and need to find new resources that will serve me better today.

It seems to me the task of living and loving every day is about making room for something new; learn new ways to relate to one another. We need to take time to bathe in special memories, and move forward into the future with a different set of tools, expectations, hopes and dreams that are needed to embrace our new experiences.  I wonder if God gets bored with the sameness of life and I think that’s why God puts a lot of value in creating and renewing. God endowed all of us with creativity and has given us the skills to do some amazing things. God calls us to keep our eyes on the new possibilities and to live into this exciting new day. When making room for this new day, we’ll quickly learn is that this new time requires a different set of tools, skills and new ways to live and love together. 

 Is it time to go through book shelves of once helpful quotes, "how to do" books, or  insights that served us well at one time, but are no longer usable?  Is it time to go through the  file cabinets of past grudges, old behaviors that served us well, but now it is time to leave behind and find new tools and skills that will be more helpful and relevant? As you sort through your books to make room for something new and as you sort through the files that you will soon leave in another place, bathe in the memories for a moment, bless them as a part of who you are today,  move to the new place where God is calling you, and rejoice in the new creation you are becoming.