As we embrace the challenge to become a radically inclusive community, we want to take every opportunity to recognize and lift up our God given diversity whether that diversity is in our culture and language, our physical bodies, our faith traditions, our gender identities, our sexual orientation, spirituality, or any of dozens of other divine diversities.
This week we Dare To Cry with each other in worship as we continue with a theme inspired by Regina Sara Ryan's poem "Dangerous Prayers." But that's only one piece of our worship; this weekend we'll also celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May, when we gather together. Cinco de Mayo commemorates Mexico's victory over the larger and better equipped French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862.
As I've thought about our opportunity to celebrate with our Mexican brothers and sisters this weekend, I've become aware of many opportunities to grow in our relationships with our expanding multicultural families--opportunities that can be informed by our Christian experience.
First is an opportunity to grow and expand our language. Too often we congratulate ourselves over our daring use of gender inclusive language for our God and then stop right there. Every once in awhile we allow ourselves the rare Alpha, Omega, or Jehovah. But what beauty rests in "Vaya con Dios" and "La paz de Cristo." For centuries Christians denied ourselves the beauty and diversity of our own languages and approached God only in Latin, through priest translators. Martin Luther (I'm making up for criticizing him last week :-) ) wrested God language away from the institutional Church and offered it to the people.
May we honor that gift not only by using the breadth of human languages in our God talk, but also by allowing ourselves the inspiration of new translations and new voices. We can rest in the New Revised Standard Version or even the King James Version of the Bible if we like, but we can also dance in the modernity of The Message and allow ourselves the familiarity of the New Living Bible. We can read Bonhoeffer and Buechner, but we should also converse with Isasi-Diaz and Gutierrez.
I love the UCC's promise that "God is still speaking." Who am I to say whether God speaks with a lilt or a drawl or a 'het or a tilde or...
Dios Te Bendiga...
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Dare to Dance!
This week in worship we will dare you to dance. Now, I know there might be some of you who will choose to stay home rather than submit yourselves to the possibility of being asked to dance in church. To those who might be so inclined (and I am definitely one), please don't worry. Other than the people who have already volunteered to dance, none of you will be expected to--well, none of you will be expected to literally. All of you will be invited to let your spirits dance, your faith dance, and your imagination dance. And you're welcome to do that in the privacy of your own home or discreetly in your extra-ecclesial life. If, however, the Spirit says move and you gotta move, you will find yourself much supported and encouraged.
That leads me--albeit a little awkwardly--to other opportunities we have to dance, to move in and with the Spirit. The music of change has been our theme song for over two years now. We've quick-stepped through times, moving so fast that everything became a kind of blur. We've waltzed through the beauty and tradition of different liturgical seasons; and we've slow danced a time or two, holding on to each other rather than really moving anywhere. But now, we're ready to dance with the stars-or at least reach for them.
We're creating a challenging, exciting program for our next steps. This new program will include strategic moves in the areas of radical inclusivity and Christian hospitality; connecting people to God and each other throughout the MCC Austin community of faith; and providing for sustainable and meaningful growth not just in numbers, but in discipleship and spiritual maturity.
I encourage each one of you to take an active role in choreographing our next 1-10 years. Help us to know who you are, what your passions are, what you desire from your church home, and what you discern God is calling MCC Austin to be and do. The first and easiest way to do that is by participating in a survey that our Mission Possible Team (formerly Focus 8 Team) is launching today. The survey has many purposes, among which are the following:
--To provide MCC Austin members with an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the church and assist church leaders in planning for the future
--To help direct strategic planning efforts (radical inclusivity, connecting new and current members to congregational life, and meaningful growth (including plans for building a permanent sanctuary)
--To help evaluate members' level of church involvement, church attendance, perceptions of congregational identity, demographics, and hopes for the future of MCCA
The survey is targeted toward new members and long-term members and can be accessed via Survey Monkey beginning today, April 22, and ending on May 3, 2009. The survey is completely confidential, and the data collected will be collated and analyzed by members of the Mission Possible Team. Results will be available to the congregation at the end of May 2009 and will be used to make recommendations and to assess how well we are addressing our priorities.
I know answering surveys is probably not at the top of your priority lists and probably not anywhere at all on your "bucket lists," but please do take the time to fill this one out. You heard Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson assure us last Sunday that God is using MCC Churches to bring hope and healing and the Gospel of God's love to all the world. Such an ambitious agenda must be owned not just by a few MCC leaders or churches, but by all of us--especially by those of us, as Rev. Bill Young reminded us, to whom much has been given.
The music is playing; shall we dance?
Blessings and Love...
That leads me--albeit a little awkwardly--to other opportunities we have to dance, to move in and with the Spirit. The music of change has been our theme song for over two years now. We've quick-stepped through times, moving so fast that everything became a kind of blur. We've waltzed through the beauty and tradition of different liturgical seasons; and we've slow danced a time or two, holding on to each other rather than really moving anywhere. But now, we're ready to dance with the stars-or at least reach for them.
We're creating a challenging, exciting program for our next steps. This new program will include strategic moves in the areas of radical inclusivity and Christian hospitality; connecting people to God and each other throughout the MCC Austin community of faith; and providing for sustainable and meaningful growth not just in numbers, but in discipleship and spiritual maturity.
I encourage each one of you to take an active role in choreographing our next 1-10 years. Help us to know who you are, what your passions are, what you desire from your church home, and what you discern God is calling MCC Austin to be and do. The first and easiest way to do that is by participating in a survey that our Mission Possible Team (formerly Focus 8 Team) is launching today. The survey has many purposes, among which are the following:
--To provide MCC Austin members with an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the church and assist church leaders in planning for the future
--To help direct strategic planning efforts (radical inclusivity, connecting new and current members to congregational life, and meaningful growth (including plans for building a permanent sanctuary)
--To help evaluate members' level of church involvement, church attendance, perceptions of congregational identity, demographics, and hopes for the future of MCCA
The survey is targeted toward new members and long-term members and can be accessed via Survey Monkey beginning today, April 22, and ending on May 3, 2009. The survey is completely confidential, and the data collected will be collated and analyzed by members of the Mission Possible Team. Results will be available to the congregation at the end of May 2009 and will be used to make recommendations and to assess how well we are addressing our priorities.
I know answering surveys is probably not at the top of your priority lists and probably not anywhere at all on your "bucket lists," but please do take the time to fill this one out. You heard Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson assure us last Sunday that God is using MCC Churches to bring hope and healing and the Gospel of God's love to all the world. Such an ambitious agenda must be owned not just by a few MCC leaders or churches, but by all of us--especially by those of us, as Rev. Bill Young reminded us, to whom much has been given.
The music is playing; shall we dance?
Blessings and Love...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A Worship Experience
Each week I look forward with great anticipation to our worship together, and this weekend especially so. On Saturday @ 6:24, our Congregational Life Director, Alycia Erickson, will preach at MCC Austin for the first time. On Sunday, the Moderator of MCC Churches, Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson, will bring us the message in both services. In addition, our sanctuary choir will sing at both services on Sunday as will our good, good friends Out4Joy: Ken, Kim, Kay, and Doug.
So I've been thinking about what a wonderful thing it is to practically wish the weekdays by so that I can get to Saturday and Sunday worship. I mean, that's a really good way for a pastor to feel, right? I hope a good number of you feel that way too...
But on the other hand, last night I had an experience that reminded me that worship can happen in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of places.
I shouldn't have been surprised by my worshipful experience last night; after all, I was at church! But I wasn't in the Easter adorned sanctuary. I was in the social hall, sitting at a yellow plastic covered table, drinking watered down iced tea, eating stale pretzels, and making my way through an ambitiously full agenda with the rest of our Board of Directors.
Low and behold, worship happened.
As we entered the portion of our agenda titled "Grow as Spiritual Leaders," we read several times through Philippians 4:4-9. I asked the Board to share how those verses spoke to their personal lives or their service as Board members. What many of our reflections included was an acknowledgment of how we begin to lose our fear and find peace and accomplish more when we give our decisions and actions over to God. After our sharing time, we offered a prayer thanking God for direction and for the peace that passes understanding and headed into the action items on our agenda. We ended up working for another 2 hours, and we took up some challenging topics, but our spirits were calm, our hearts and wills were united in purpose, and we managed to laugh many times before we finally blew out the Christ candle and went home.
Here's what I took from this experience: Worship is ceremonies, prayers, or other forms by which we express our love for God. Many times this happens within a stated worship service, but many times it happens outside of those services. We worship together at Seders and socials, when we collect our history and welcome diversity, when we tend the grounds and decorate the sanctuary, when we teach the children and host IHN families and write checks for MCC Cares and pray for our Board of Elders. Whenever we express our love for God, we are worshipping.
Don't get me wrong-this is not an invitation to skip Saturday and Sunday worship services. Rather, it's an invitation to add to them in whatever ways speak to your spirit. Attend a class; join a ministry; participate in church meetings, go to cluster conference. God doesn't wait for the weekends to bless us; we need not wait to worship.
Grace and Peace...
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Dancing With Conflict
This week we have many opportunities to fellowship and worship together. As we prepare to enter these holy experiences together, I want to share with you sort of a Paul Harvey "The Rest of the Story" story. You see, the events that led up to bringing you this week's worship offerings have been as much of a gift as I anticipate the services themselves will be. Here's the rest of the story:
The week before Holy Week, the MCC Austin Sunday Worship Team met for our weekly meeting. About a dozen of us squeezed around tables in a local deli, indulged in soup or sandwiches or decadent desserts, tried to filter out the clink and clatter from the counter, and tried to turn down the volume of nearby guests, some of whom practice their Spanish lessons with great volume and gusto each Monday evening.
The Sunday Worship Team is made up of roughly 15 people, and it represents a pretty wide swath of the congregation. We have members whose creativity and imagination skip merrily off the charts, members whose knack for analysis and deductive skills would shame Sherlock Holmes, and members who fill in nicely the whole spectrum in between. Each member of the team is passionate, amazingly articulate even if not especially verbal, and almost all fill leadership roles in their families, work places, or at our church. Considering our strength and diversity, we never should have been surprised by what happened next, but we were.
On that Monday before Holy Week, we had a rather unexpected visitor show up at our meeting: Conflict.
What on earth was Conflict doing there? We hadn't invited him. She isn't a member or regular attender of our church as far as any of us know. And besides, isn't Church the last place that Conflict would feel welcome, or wanted, or fed???
I'm embarrassed to say we politely ignored Conflict for a while, kind of like we would an elephant in the room. But then we threw caution to the wind and invited him to dance on the table! Right there in the midst of us! Right there in public!
Oh, and she kept dancing...even when the rest of us went home.
I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about her dancing there.... In one way, she was pitiful and all alone, just dancing there with no one wanting to join her. And yet, in another way, she danced with us all...wouldn't stop beckoning and cajoling and insisting we be her partner...would not be, and never will be, ignored.
I don't know how each member of the team interpreted this dance, but I know that for me the interpretation continued to be one of great sadness. From my perception, our imaginations were stymied. Our appreciation for each other and free flow of ideas and actions were all gunked up. We were broken. I couldn't fix us. I felt small and useless.
I did the only thing I felt like doing. I cried. Then I did the only thing I thought could help. I prayed. Sometimes I used words; sometimes I didn't. Many of my prayers were like great big fill in the blank tests-with most of the blanks empty.
And then, finally, another visitor appeared. This one longed for and very much welcomed: The Lord of the Dance. The Lord of the Dance who danced at Bethlehem, at Cana, on the mountaintops, on the water. The one who dares us to remember:
They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the life that will never, never die
I'll live in you if you'll live in me
I am the Lord of the dance, said he.
I don't know if any of this matters to you, but for me, I have had the blessing of an early Easter. For several days I had felt confined to a dark tomb, and then the Light of the World burst in and my hope and my heart were resurrected again. The Lord of the Dance wanted to dance with me! And not just with me, of course, but with all of us who had been hurting all week.
A week after Conflict surprised us all, our team met again. This time, we had a chair waiting for Conflict, and of course, he was there, but looking a little smaller and less sure of himself than he had been the week before. I think she was taken aback to find that not only had each of us found during the course of the week a certain comfort with having her present, but we were expecting her. We saved a chair for her. Yes, Conflict took his place right there along with Kindness, Compassion, Tension, "Stuff," Certainty, Doubt, Love, Pain, Grace, and all the rest of us. It was a blessed time.
So there you have it-the rest of the story. But only the rest of this one story. The Living Word has many, many more stories to create with us all.
I hope you find the services this week beautiful. They were created through the grace of God by beautiful people who love you, each other, and our God very much. Thanks be to God!
Always in Hope,
The week before Holy Week, the MCC Austin Sunday Worship Team met for our weekly meeting. About a dozen of us squeezed around tables in a local deli, indulged in soup or sandwiches or decadent desserts, tried to filter out the clink and clatter from the counter, and tried to turn down the volume of nearby guests, some of whom practice their Spanish lessons with great volume and gusto each Monday evening.
The Sunday Worship Team is made up of roughly 15 people, and it represents a pretty wide swath of the congregation. We have members whose creativity and imagination skip merrily off the charts, members whose knack for analysis and deductive skills would shame Sherlock Holmes, and members who fill in nicely the whole spectrum in between. Each member of the team is passionate, amazingly articulate even if not especially verbal, and almost all fill leadership roles in their families, work places, or at our church. Considering our strength and diversity, we never should have been surprised by what happened next, but we were.
On that Monday before Holy Week, we had a rather unexpected visitor show up at our meeting: Conflict.
What on earth was Conflict doing there? We hadn't invited him. She isn't a member or regular attender of our church as far as any of us know. And besides, isn't Church the last place that Conflict would feel welcome, or wanted, or fed???
I'm embarrassed to say we politely ignored Conflict for a while, kind of like we would an elephant in the room. But then we threw caution to the wind and invited him to dance on the table! Right there in the midst of us! Right there in public!
Oh, and she kept dancing...even when the rest of us went home.
I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about her dancing there.... In one way, she was pitiful and all alone, just dancing there with no one wanting to join her. And yet, in another way, she danced with us all...wouldn't stop beckoning and cajoling and insisting we be her partner...would not be, and never will be, ignored.
I don't know how each member of the team interpreted this dance, but I know that for me the interpretation continued to be one of great sadness. From my perception, our imaginations were stymied. Our appreciation for each other and free flow of ideas and actions were all gunked up. We were broken. I couldn't fix us. I felt small and useless.
I did the only thing I felt like doing. I cried. Then I did the only thing I thought could help. I prayed. Sometimes I used words; sometimes I didn't. Many of my prayers were like great big fill in the blank tests-with most of the blanks empty.
And then, finally, another visitor appeared. This one longed for and very much welcomed: The Lord of the Dance. The Lord of the Dance who danced at Bethlehem, at Cana, on the mountaintops, on the water. The one who dares us to remember:
They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the life that will never, never die
I'll live in you if you'll live in me
I am the Lord of the dance, said he.
I don't know if any of this matters to you, but for me, I have had the blessing of an early Easter. For several days I had felt confined to a dark tomb, and then the Light of the World burst in and my hope and my heart were resurrected again. The Lord of the Dance wanted to dance with me! And not just with me, of course, but with all of us who had been hurting all week.
A week after Conflict surprised us all, our team met again. This time, we had a chair waiting for Conflict, and of course, he was there, but looking a little smaller and less sure of himself than he had been the week before. I think she was taken aback to find that not only had each of us found during the course of the week a certain comfort with having her present, but we were expecting her. We saved a chair for her. Yes, Conflict took his place right there along with Kindness, Compassion, Tension, "Stuff," Certainty, Doubt, Love, Pain, Grace, and all the rest of us. It was a blessed time.
So there you have it-the rest of the story. But only the rest of this one story. The Living Word has many, many more stories to create with us all.
I hope you find the services this week beautiful. They were created through the grace of God by beautiful people who love you, each other, and our God very much. Thanks be to God!
Always in Hope,
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Rejoice in Adversity
Usually, I tell you on Wednesday what my weekend sermon IS about. Today, I'll tell you what this week's sermon, "Rejoice in Adversity," is NOT about.
It's not about the theodicy question. Theodicy is a Greek term for the problem of reconciling the presence of evil and suffering in the world with the idea that there truly is a benevolent, omnipotent God. I won't take up the theodicy issue because I couldn't even provide a decent bibliography of the topic in a fifteen minute sermon.
It's not about that saying we like to toss around jokingly: "God never gives us more than we can stand-I wish God didn't think so highly of me!" For the most part, my life is embarrassingly good. Never in my life have I lacked for nutritious food, clean water, or safe shelter. Never have I faced a life threatening diagnosis or lost a child to the 1,000 things parents fear losing their children to.
It's not about God's ability to bring good out of the greatest suffering. Yes, my life is easy and excessive in comparison to so many of the world's people, but when I hurt, I hurt. Sometimes I feel like that funny- looking man with the red nose in the game "Operation"-I feel like unskilled people are pulling out my internal organs with a flimsy pair of tweezers. This pain often has nothing to do with physical injury or illness at all. Often, it's the searing pain of rejection or a lost friendship or a bungled attempt at reconciliation.
Now, don't worry. Don't think that it's already Wednesday and your pastor doesn't have a clue about what her sermon is about. I do. God's been working on me.
If you'd like a preview, spend some time reading this weekend's scripture from the Gospel of Mark. There is a lot of adversity there, and a lot of rejoicing. I guess you could say there's a lot of life. I can't wait to worship with you!
Always in Hope,
It's not about the theodicy question. Theodicy is a Greek term for the problem of reconciling the presence of evil and suffering in the world with the idea that there truly is a benevolent, omnipotent God. I won't take up the theodicy issue because I couldn't even provide a decent bibliography of the topic in a fifteen minute sermon.
It's not about that saying we like to toss around jokingly: "God never gives us more than we can stand-I wish God didn't think so highly of me!" For the most part, my life is embarrassingly good. Never in my life have I lacked for nutritious food, clean water, or safe shelter. Never have I faced a life threatening diagnosis or lost a child to the 1,000 things parents fear losing their children to.
It's not about God's ability to bring good out of the greatest suffering. Yes, my life is easy and excessive in comparison to so many of the world's people, but when I hurt, I hurt. Sometimes I feel like that funny- looking man with the red nose in the game "Operation"-I feel like unskilled people are pulling out my internal organs with a flimsy pair of tweezers. This pain often has nothing to do with physical injury or illness at all. Often, it's the searing pain of rejection or a lost friendship or a bungled attempt at reconciliation.
Now, don't worry. Don't think that it's already Wednesday and your pastor doesn't have a clue about what her sermon is about. I do. God's been working on me.
If you'd like a preview, spend some time reading this weekend's scripture from the Gospel of Mark. There is a lot of adversity there, and a lot of rejoicing. I guess you could say there's a lot of life. I can't wait to worship with you!
Always in Hope,
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