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(For November/December 2018 Wayland UMC newsletter) I just added two new songs to my iTunes playlist for Bernie Williams, a Latin jazz musician, to whom I am not related. Most recently, his music gives me energy for my morning routine. And with five of his songs on my playlist I now can go on a healthy walk to the rhythm of his songs.

Playlists can be helpful that way. They can focus our attention on particular activities. Perhaps you have a playlist for your physical work out or a walk or household chores. Athletes use music to focus their concentration on the game or match or challenge ahead. If a song is on your playlist, hopefully, it’s because it resonates with you.

I like the way Carole King’s “Jazzman” depicts a Christ figure:

Lift me, won’t you lift me above the old routine;
Make it nice, play it clean jazzman
When the jazzman’s testifyin’ a faithless man believes
He can sing you into paradise or bring you to your knees

And the way “Listen to the Music” by the Doobie Brothers expresses a longing for good news:

Don’t you feel it growin’, day by day
People gettin’ ready for the news
Some are happy, some are sad
Oh, we got to let the music play
What the people need
Is a way to make ’em smile
It ain’t so hard to do if you know how
Gotta get a message
Get it on through…

Songs inspire us or bring us into a positive mental, physical, or spiritual state. They have therapeutic and healing qualities. And music is not the only source for this kind of transformation in our lives. There are rehearsals of familiar written and spoken messages that focus our attention and inspire us for faithful living. This is the potential before us every year at Advent. The season of Advent starts a new church year and this year the first Sunday of Advent is December 2. Each year in some fashion we replay messages of peace, joy, love, and hope that we find in Jesus.

This year is the 200th anniversary of the release of the song, Silent Night, Holy Night. From our Worship Design Studio resource:

“This hymn has become the best-loved worship moment of many Christians–even those who only come to church once a year. Something mystical occurs as we light our candles and sing the hope of “all is calm, all is bright”–peace and light for the world.”

We sing Silent Night, Holy Night every Christmas Eve along with Christians throughout the world. We resist the violence, fear, and deception that assault our spirits, minds, and bodies as we return to the good news that can focus our attention and inspire us for faithful living. In seemingly futile times, we affirm that the peace, joy, love, and hope that we find in Jesus are ultimately the strongest powers in the world.

Now that our daughters are no longer in school (Lindsey & Callan and grandsons, Braxton and Miles, are in their first home in Belmont; Sarah & Flo both work for Disney in Florida; Amanda has begun a year-long contract teaching English in South Korea), our nieces and nephews are the family members entering a new school year. I always feel refreshed at the change of seasons in education and the natural world. The change gives us permission to adjust our perspective on life, relationships, work and rest and perhaps change our daily practices.

Autumn and a new school year are invitations to reflect on our faith.

Following Jesus is hard work. It is a mysterious combination of being and doing; grace and responsibility; stillness and action; surrender and victory. We learn how to hold on and let go of commitments and plans for the sake of knowing and loving God.

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense” (Ralph Waldo Emerson in Ready for Anything, David Allen, 24)

It’s not that I have already reached this goal or have already been perfected, but I pursue it, so that I may grab hold of it because Christ grabbed hold of me for just this purpose. Brothers and sisters, I myself don’t think I’ve reached it, but I do this one thing: I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me. The goal I pursue is the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:12-14; Common English Bible)

I have been intrigued and inspired by the work of David Allen and the Getting Things Done system. He has brought together the ways our brain works and provided practices for releasing the life-energy within us.

“One of the most effective ways to spark a dynamic vision is to clean your garage. Don’t get me wrong. Writing a great strategic plan and creating a clean, well-ordered garage are very different activities. One requires a high-level focus and a willingness to see beyond the conditioning and details of current reality. The other requires an often brutal hand-to-hand combat with those details. Yet there is a strange and wondrous relationship between the two…when people want to get control of their work and life by ‘setting priorities’…(m)y choice is always to go for cleaning up the garage of their work, their life, and their head. Then the priorities, the vision, and the plan emerge – grounded, with solid roots” (Ready for Anything, David Allen, 24-25).

What if Autumn and the new school year are opportunities to clean our spiritual garages; roll up our sleeves and pay attention to what needs to stay and what needs to leave in our hearts? In the Church year, this season is called Ordinary Time. It can be a more relaxed occasion for attending to the hard work of faith though we may not recognize it that way. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work” (Thomas Edison in Ready for Anything, David Allen, 25).

Autumn and the new school year are opportunities to hear and experience the solid grounding of our faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; to know and feel the love of God as the hardest work of overcoming evil, forgiving sins, and restoring right relationships.

I hope we are able to work hard to leave behind the burdens of the past and reach out for the possibilities of the future as we experience God’s upward call in Christ Jesus. And I pray that in doing so we may find that our hard work depends entirely on the hardest work God does in Jesus Christ.

Let’s enjoy this fall season of ministry and be open to learning what God has in store for the Church and the world.

This is a fourth-anniversary post. I began serving Wayland United Methodist Church in July 2014. I thank God for the friendships and work we share as disciples of Jesus Christ entering the fifth year of ministry together. On 3/24/14, Beverly and I had our introductory meeting with the Staff Pastor Parish Relations Committee. At that time, I brought these questions:

1. What is ready to happen here?
2. What are you on the verge of, that with encouragement and blessing you can enter into?
3. What gives you hope?
4. How do things grow and change here? What happens, who leads it?

A solid source of continuing education for me is The Great Courses. I mostly get the audio versions of them to listen to on walks or long drives. My library currently has 14 courses. It is helpful to re-listen to them over time.

In “Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2^nd Edition,” Professor Richard Wolfson reviews pre-classical physics (before Isaac Newton) and the understandings of motion in heaven and on earth (celestial and terrestrial). The earliest belief about earthly motion was that “Terrestrial objects naturally assume a state of rest close to the center of the universe (Earth); force is required to maintain motion.” Galileo (1564–1642) redefined this belief through physical and thought experiments. He found that the “natural state” of motion on earth was straight-line motion at constant speed. So, objects in the world are naturally in motion, not at rest.

 Nelson Searcy is a church growth and evangelism leader. About 16 years ago I began studying his work. He describes the process of churches growing through recognized attendance levels of 65,125, 250, and 500 people in worship. We are facing the first level of 65 with an average worship attendance in the mid-50s.

He raises two questions about church growth that carry important distinctions:

• The wrong question is “How do I get my church to grow?”
• The right question is “What is keeping my church from growing?”

The wrong question assumes that the natural state of the Church is at rest and we need to do something to make it move. The right question assumes that the natural state of the Church is that it is moving and growing and, therefore, we need to remove the barriers or hindrances to allow the growth to emerge.

Searcy further challenges us to make two determining decisions:

1. Determine it is God’s will for your church to grow.
2. Determine you want your church to grow.

I consider these questions to be calls to prayer, conversation, planning, and action in my fifth year of ministry in Wayland. Our statement of purpose is “God is calling us to be a congregation inspired to serve as a beacon for Christ in the community.” I look forward to growing together in this direction. And I do so with this prayer:

When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong (Ephesians 3:14-17).

These three phrases are spoken quite regularly in our current national political discourse. There is a desire for primary leaders and actors in our national drama to speak on the record and be examined under oath and not be above the law. The tension this desire reveals is the suspicion or suggestion that there will be different answers given when someone is speaking on the record or under oath than when they respond in public media or private conversations. The tension highlights the gap or disconnection or contradiction that is believed to exist between what someone is saying and what is really true.

On the record and under oath describe careful and limited discourse that happens in a specific context, often legal and adversarial. To speak off the record, not under oath, or as an anonymous source allows us to speculate wildly or use drastic and combative language to shape or frame a narrative before other sides of the conflict weigh in with their comments. Speaking off the record also is often how we first learn of controversies and troubles. There is a freedom to speak more openly when not making official statements.

As people of faith and followers of Jesus, we are called to live lives that are not characterized by drastic differences between what we say and do and what is true. Jesus invites us to a free and abundant life in love with God and our neighbor and our self. We are invited to find unity and wholeness in God’s mercy and grace as individuals and communities. We are given light and guidance by the Holy Spirit to see the truth of our lives. We understand the differences between our walk and our talk to be conditions of our humanity, we are sinful and have limited understanding of the mystery of this life we share.

The demand to speak on the record and under oath are used as weapons against opponents. We judge resistance or unwillingness to go on the record or testify under oath as a fear that our lives or statements or actions will be revealed to be false or misleading. By holding to this negative and combative view of going on the record or speaking under oath, we miss the redeeming freedom Christ gives us to confess the distance in our lives between how we live and what is true.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:8-9).

How then do we respond in this atmosphere of suspicion that lacks direct truthful conversation and genuine spiritual reflection?

In The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, Alan Kreider writes: How then did the church grow? Scholars have seen the church’s growth as coming through something modest: “casual contact.” In all these relationships, “affective bonds” were formed. The most reliable means of communicating the attractiveness of the faith to others and enticing them to investigate things further was the Christians’ character, bearing, and behavior. The habitus of the individual Christian was crucial (81; my emphasis).

As a result, out of their love for their cultures, the Christians attempted to embody alternatives that pointed the way forward for the healing of their cultures. Both as individual believers and also as believing communities, they lived lives that contain a yes and a no. With both they aimed to make a positive contribution to the common good (98; my emphasis).

It is not easy to live authentic lives in the tension of our culture. We find strength in God’s grace and our shared spiritual community to be honest about our brokenness and still make positive contributions to the common good.

I write this on the day that students, teachers, administrators, and staff return to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida two weeks after the shooting deaths of 14 students, a Geography teacher, Athletic Director, and Assistant Football Coach.

In the grief, funerals and memorial services, political activism of high school students, and heartache has come a criticism of people offering their “thoughts and prayers.” Some people have sent checks worth “thoughts and prayers” to politicians. As I understand the criticism from those to whom they are offered, “thoughts and prayers” are meaningless responses empty of empathy that represent a step away from the pain and anguish of the people most affected by the violence.

As I shared in my February 18 sermon, “Thoughts and prayers” are rightly ridiculed as shallow and meaningless when they are out of sync with meaningful actions and commitments to justice and safety. For me, it raises the question,

Are “thoughts and prayers” a way in or out? Are they a way IN to the pain and injustice of the world that Jesus shares with us or are they a way OUT of responsibility for creating and contributing to a world of justice, peace, and love.

In responding to the question, I appreciate the wisdom of Scripture, the experience of the early Church, and the testimony of people whose lives have been changed.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:8-9).

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:2).

One day Jesus rebuked an evil spirit that had made a boy unable to hear and speak. Afterward, when Jesus was alone in the house with his disciples, they asked him, “Why couldn’t we cast out that evil spirit?” Jesus replied, “This kind can be cast out only by prayer” (Mark 9:25-29).

In The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, Alan Kreider writes:

Prayer enabled them not only to cope with the dangers of day-to-day living but also to do joyfully the risky things that enabled the church to grow – to travel to new places, to touch plague victims, to see enemies as potential brothers…According to Adalbert Hamman, Christian prayer was “existential prayer.” It was gutsy, practical, passionate and immediate. It grew out of the struggles and concerns of the people who prayed, many of whom had little control over their lives. If at times it was noisy, that was unsurprising (my emphasis, pp. 204,207).

Each Sunday in worship we receive prayer requests and answered prayers. Our Prayer Chain receives requests during the week. As a follow up to a recent worship prayer request, I learned of this testimony from the person we lifted up in prayer:

It is hard to believe that I arrived here Monday night close to death and in the space of just over 48 hours have been restored to normalcy in heart and lung function…I will tell the story of the many exceptional professionals who delivered an outstanding level of personal service to me here in more detail later. Suffice to say it is humbling to be the recipient of so many talents and skills…If you question the power of prayer and positive energy intervening in circumstances we feel are out of control, I will gladly be the first to set you straight (my emphasis).

I feel the weight of the criticism of those who offer “thoughts and prayers” as a way to stay OUT of the pain and responsibility of engaging with the world God loves. I also recognize the call to truly embody our “thoughts and prayers” and believe that the Church can be a witness to the God who suffers with us and the Christ who shows us a way IN to God’s love for people who hurt and need help.

Good morning and God bless you! I set a goal for 2017 to read twenty books. I actually read twenty-three and have adjusted my 2018 goal to twenty-five books. Up through seventh grade I pretty much only read sports books. It was a challenge to expand the scope of my reading. My dad and sister were the most prolific readers in my family growing up. Beverly and I read a lot at the house and on the road and we like very different kinds of books.

I enjoy ministry in the Wayland community. In 2017, I joined the Friends of Henika District Library group (http://henikalibrary.org/friends-of-the-henika-district-library/). We meet monthly and I am not in charge. One emphasis we are exploring is adult literacy. It may result in some ministry opportunities for us in the future. But the work has reminded me how much I enjoy reading and how important literacy is for all people. It affects our quality of life.

Annie Dillard, a favorite author of mine since seminary, writes, “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by… Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life” (The Writing Life).

Reading can change us. St. Augustine, a theologian and Bishop of the early Christian Church, writes of this call to conversion in the midst of agonizing soul-searching:

So was I speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Instantly, my countenance altered… So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find (Confessions of St. Augustine, Chapter XII; my emphasis).

I am enjoying our adult Sunday School class. We made it through Genesis in a little more than a year, discussing a chapter per week. Bea Stewart calculated that at our rate we would get through the whole Bible in about twenty-two years. You really need to buckle up when you walk into class these days as we are now in Acts. I have a pastoral and personal concern that we be grounded in our faith so that our actions have an intensity and integrity to face opposition and contention in the world. Reading is a primary way for me to experience the depth of discipleship and joy of community life.

A new author I have discovered through Twitter is Danielle L. (D.L.) Mayfield. She has recently started a new series, “A Sabbath Way of Reading – Reading to Save Our Souls,” on her blog, Off the Page (https://offthepage.com/2017/12/27/a-sabbath-way-of-reading/):

Reading plays a crucial role in our learning how to act faithfully in the world, to act for the common good of our churches, our neighborhoods, and the world. Apart from reading scripture and interpreting it (another act that itself requires a good deal of reading), we can’t give an account of how or why we do certain things. I want to challenge the church to think about all the ways we read and to see how reading carefully and well helps us to act with more understanding and more compassion in any given situation (C. Christopher Smith in A Sabbath Way of Reading – Reading to Save Our Souls in Off the Page by D. L. Mayfield, 12/27/17; my emphasis)

I pray for a rich and inspiring year of reading for you. Let’s share what we are finding helpful. So that acting with more understanding and more compassion may be the distinguishing marks of our congregation in 2018.

(Written for the Wayland UMC November/December 2017 newsletter) The fourth quarter of the year is filled with energy and inspiration for me. October is my half-birthday month and includes the World Series. The colors and temperature of the world change. November begins with All Saints’ Day and concludes with Thanksgiving. December introduces Advent which prepares and leads us to Christmas.

In the last newsletter, I wrote about (next to Beverly) my best friend whose cancer treatment was becoming more intense. Thom Andrews died September 14 at home with his family. We celebrated his life on September 23 at Westwood UMC in Kalamazoo. For several years, Thom created, curated and led a public ministry called Season of Forgiveness (http://www.seasonofforgiveness.org/).

At his funeral, I shared a portion of his blog post from 12/20/16 where he described his then current round of therapy:

“I’m in the midst of a five-treatment Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT). Its cooler name is cyber knife. Whatever you call it, it involves high doses of radiation converging on a tumor buried in my Lumbar 2 vertebrae. Awesome…For me, this adventure is my version of skydiving. It takes some precise preparation, an expensive machine, and the willingness to jump and hope it all works out.”

And then he wrote this:

“Another thing: it involves trusting my life to a lot of people. I trust doctors, nurses, technicians and other specialists to get things right when doing treatments. We’ve been blessed in this regard.”

Thom was an incredible person to be around. He gave me heart and our conversations were filled with insight and laughter. Thom trusted his life to us and we responded in kind and I wonder if that is a deeper way to understand Christmas: God trusting the divine life of Jesus to us and inviting us to trust our lives to Jesus and each other.

The apostle Paul described Christ Jesus this way in Philippians: “When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges” (The Message).

The journey to trust God and each other and ourselves is a profound experience filled with energy and inspiration and desperation and grief and celebration.

To whom do you trust your life?

In this world with family, friends, strangers, and enemies, Jesus calls us to recover life, take a real rest and learn the unforced rhythms of grace; to live freely and lightly. Jesus asks us to trust our lives to him enough to be made new people whose rhythms are graceful and natural, fitting to who we are in God’s image, like my dear friend, Thom. In the fullness of Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas, I invite you to trust God a couple more degrees, take a few more steps toward intimacy with significant people in your life and be open to those to whom love is a stranger, like God did with Jesus.

Thom described the trusting of his life this way: “But, if I want a good cry, all I need to do is think of how I trust the support that I’ve received and continue to receive during this wild adventure. It’s humbling and overwhelming. Every thought, prayer, well wish, email, text, call, etc. adds another layer of warmth, another plank under my feet. It means so very much.”

Let’s not be afraid to enter this spiritual season with open hearts to trust our lives to God and each other.

“The mystics would say whenever you stand apart and objectify anything you stop knowing it. You have to love, respect, and enter into relationship with what you desire to know…This is knowing by participation” (Knowing through Loving, Sunday, February 26, 2017; Father Richard Rohr, OFM).

We are quite messed up in our national political life with fighting about facts or alternative facts or truth or half-truths. We accuse each other of reporting fake news because we don’t agree with it or it challenges us to be responsible for our statements and actions. I am grateful for free press organizations that take time to study and learn about the subjects they report. I use a filter for the quality of news inversely related to the drama, anger, and disdain present in the story. In other words, news stories presented with entertaining drama, anger, and disdain for the people involved have less value for me and don’t serve the truth they want to report.

Comedians and artists gain popularity in times of arrogant, foolish, and outrageous communications and reporting. I like the use of humor to reveal our obsessive-compulsive behaviors and feel the pain of recognition when their commentary hits home. However, we don’t learn much about real news when we communicate combatively.

In late January, I posted this photo on Facebook with this comment: “Paused a moment to consider how this collection (my Evernote journal is on the bottom) on my reading table represents basic commitments in my life and ministry.” One of my colleagues commented in jest, “put the Holy Bible on the top.” I replied, “I notice it is in the middle.”

I love learning God’s Word and having it in the middle of my conversations, considerations, and commitments to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ. And I am blessed and energized by being with other people who love to learn. That’s why I appreciate Father Richard Rohr’s statement about the need to love, respect, and enter into relationship with what you desire to know. When news is shared from a perspective of love, respect, and relationship, we feel its truth. That is the best understanding of evangelism I have.

But this type of communication comes with great risk. Parker Palmer writes in Healing the Heart of Democracy:

If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death. What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life (page 18; my emphasis).

At my dad’s funeral, I found comfort in these words about learning and wisdom:

My child, if you accept my words and treasure up my commandments within you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; if you indeed cry out for insight, and raise your voice for understanding; if you seek it like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures—then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God (Proverbs 2:1-5).

Real, good news is found in the passionate pursuit of knowledge with an open heart.

I pray we enter the Holy Week and the Easter season with this spirit to learn what we need to know for abundant life with God and each other.

Psalm 40:2 – He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure (NRSV); He lifted me out of the ditch, pulled me from deep mud. He stood me up on a solid rock to make sure I wouldn’t slip (The Message); He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire. He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along (NLT).

The “slippery slope” image is used as a rhetorical technique in arguments. It is a version of reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity”). If we allow this first thing to happen, then all these other things will happen and we will eventually be in an extreme position or condition that is bad or undesirable. It is similar to a domino effect. It also is good for creating fear and mistrust in another person’s or group’s statements or beliefs.

I got to thinking more about the image, slippery slope. It assumes we currently are elevated, holding the high ground, or standing in the beneficial position of dominance. It assumes we are in a good, right place NOW, so changing is bad and wrong.

But what if that’s not where we are? What came to me is that a contrasting image for a slippery slope (down which we may fall) is a miry bog (out of which we are lifted by God). The three versions of Psalm 40:2 highlight the power of this image. We are drawn up and lifted; our feet are placed on solid ground to take steady steps along God’s way.

Discerning and then accepting or changing our primary frame of reference is a powerful spiritual act. Are we about to fall down a slippery slope or be lifted up from a miry bog?

Knowing our primary frame of reference, or where we are coming from, helps us understand other dimensions of our life.

George Lakoff, in his book Moral Politics, presents the images of Strict Father or Nurturing Parent to describe the deeply different foundations we have for the political beliefs we hold. Another contrast is Nature or Nurture for how we describe the predominant influence on our human development.

Can we be in two places at once? Is there a slippery slope in the miry bog or a miry bog at the top of a slippery slope? How true are both of them at the same time?

One of my most influential seminary professors, Rev. Dr. Letty Russell, said that what you see depends on where you stand. We are challenged to learn from those who are standing in different places.

In my August 2019 post, “What Does Your Survey Say?” I wrote:

I know we feel the corrosive effects of violence from racism, menacing policies of leaders (and now laws of legislatures encouraging suspicion and accusation against our neighbors), threatening rhetoric, and grossly unjust differences of wealth. Jesus also was subject to these forces in his death on the cross.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
(When I Survey the Wondrous Cross)

Sorrow and love mingle for sure but so does anger at the humiliation and disregard for vulnerable people represented in the crown of thorns. We still live in a world that needs saving and healing and restoration and peace. And I am inspired to keep showing up for Church and ministry and life by the words of Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power reconstitute the world (“Natural Resources” by Adrienne Rich in Household of Freedom by Rev. Dr. Letty Russell).

I pray that we might seek God’s help to be lifted out of the miry bog of violence and exploitation, regain our balance, and find ways to walk together along God’s way. And I am grateful for amazingly faithful people who reconstitute the world God has given us.