Money and Politics: October Stewardship Campaign at First UMC

This letter appears in the October edition of The Beam, the monthly newsletter of First United Methodist Church of Ontario where I am pleased to serve. I hope it brings up some questions for you as we enter the fall and holiday "giving season" as well as leading into this years contested presidential election. Do you let God influence every area of your life?

*****

Dear First UMC Family,

The month of October is going to center around two things you hope your pastor never talks about:

Money and Politics

Why?

Because there should be no area of our lives we attempt to keep separate from God.

October is going to be our season of Stewardship. This is usually code in “church-ese” for fundraising. But I want to invite us into deeper reflection on the topic.

Stewardship is defined as “the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care”.

Everything we have in this life is entrusted to us by our divine maker. Life on this earth is temporary. Our existence here will only last a lifetime. But WE together as the Body of Christ are co-eternal with God and God’s creation. Therefore the decisions about how we live out our lives have both temporal and eternal implications. Which is a big responsibility! And that responsibility encourages us to evaluate how well we are using our temporal blessings for eternal kingdom building.

While Stewardship is about more than money, it is also absolutely about money. Because money reveals our true motives. James K. Frick, the iconic development officer at Notre Dame University, who took the University’s endowment from $9 million to $200 million over his 20 year tenure, had a saying that defines why Stewardship will always involve conversations about money. He said,

“Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.”

We can not claim to be Christians who are focused on making Disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world if our pocketbook says otherwise. This season of Stewardship will include reflections on how we participate in a temporal economic system using eternal kingdom values. AKA, how we can make sure our financial lives are in line with our spiritual lives. This goes for individual families as well as our church family.

The consideration of our money also leads to inherent conversations about politics. One definition describes politics as “the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community… as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities”. Politics is about how we organize ourselves and manage our relationships with others. More often than not how we choose to be in relationship with others is influenced by financial concerns. The Gospel of grace and abundance asks us to flip that narrative, to make our relationships what informs our financial actions.

People first, money second.

This is not easy work, but it is good and important work! There will certainly be many opportunities for confession and repentance for all of us in this reflective process. But I pray that on the other side of it we will have freer spirits, a renewed trust in God and a clear set of priorities for the next year of life together in this faith community.

May God’s grace and wisdom be abundant in your life through this season, and in our life together.

Peace,

-Pastor Blair

Sermon Snippet: Being Honest About Who We Are

August 28, 2016

Mark 2:13-17

The church has an image problem. We are supposed to be seen as the body of Christ, but that’s not often how pop culture portrays us. Just look at the portrayal of young Christians in movies like Easy A and Saved . For those that have not been exposed to real life Christian Communities, these film portrayals can seem pretty accurate.

In a 2007 study by the Barna Group, young people were asked to choose from a word bank what words best described Christians. The top answers were Judgemental (87%), Hypocritical (85%) and Anti-homosexual (91%). A close fourth descriptor was “insensitive to others” (70%).

When a majority of American young people read this story from Mark, they see us as the Pharisees. Those inside the church of today are the ones who are chastising Jesus for hanging out with “sinners”.

The Pharisees get a really bad rep too. They were a sect of Judaism that saw a degradation of morality in the Jewish culture. People were not upholding the law of Moses, and so they sought to revive the people of God through a strict adherence to the law. They were hyper focused on the purity laws, which dictate actions, foods, and even professions that will make one unclean, and unfit to enter the Temple for worship. This included tax collectors, like Levi, whom Jesus invites to follow him, and whose friends Jesus goes to dine with.

The Pharisees question Jesus’ choice, because by dining with sinners, he makes himself unclean by association, and unfit to enter the temple for worship. They are trying to understand why a rabbi, an obviously religious man, would make this choice.

Jesus response is one of my favorite lines of the whole New Testament. “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, sick people do. I did not come to call righteous people, but sinners.”

Boom! Truth Bomb.

Theologian C.S. Lewis said, 

“A church is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members.”

Read that again.

When Jesus is seeking to revive the Children of God, he isn’t one bit concerned with getting people into worship. That’s the Pharisee’s goal. Jesus' modus operandi is not to call people in, but to GO OUT and be with the people who have been barred from entering the house of God. And Jesus doesn’t go out to tell people everything they’re doing wrong. Again, that’s the Pharisees. Instead, he goes out and offers grace to people who would never imagine acceptance was possible for them.


This is the model of the Emergent Church Movement. Recognizing the decline in church attendance in the Western World was attached to perceptions of Christians as Pharisaic and unwelcoming, Emergent Church leaders seek to take church to the people, offering Christ in unexpected places.

One of those places is in bars. Jerry Herships runs a United Methodist Faith Community in Denver called AfterHours. They meet on Monday nights in different bars around the city. They have a message, community witnessing, share in communion, and pack lunches that they distribute to the homeless of Denver. Their slogan is “Church without the parts that suck.”

Beer and Hymns has become popular movement around the country. My best friend from Seminary, Karen Slappey, began a Beer and Hymns in Atlanta. She had such positive turnout that they began offering Bar Church, a full liturgy with a celebration of communion, once a month, in addition to beer and hymns. The idea is to provide a place for people to connect with God who would never step foot in a church. And it works.

I should mention that neither Karen nor Jerry are "Young People". They are above the 35-year-old threshold our church sets for that designation. They didn't do this just for the millenials that responded to that Barna Study. They simply recognized a new way of being the church needed to be attempted. And they’re doing it to roaring success.

BEING the church in this way requires a shift in mindset. 

A lot of resources go into worship planning and programming inside churches without ever taking stock of what the needs are of the people surrounding the building. Don't get me wrong, I want excellent worship as much as the next guy in the pew. But our worship has to be about the right things. If all out energy is focused on what’s happening inside, we're going to be neglecting Christ's model of finding out what’s happening outside.

Christ’s life, death and resurrection create the possibility for this shift to be successful. In the Old Testament, worship was mostly about trying to atone for our sins through ritual sacrifice, burning of offerings and the like. But worship through Christ is different. Worship now is about remembering the forgiveness God has already offered us; offering confession and reminding each other of pardon; coming together to be honest about how we’re NOT perfect, but how we trust God can restore us to wholeness.

Worship now should not be about coming together to feel guilty. Worship now should be about coming to fill up on grace so we can GO OUT and offer it to others.

For a long time the church has treated worship as the final goal. Our existence has been centered around getting people INTO worship. But that's not the model Christ has for us. Worship is a starting point, a filling station for the work God calls us to in the world. Christ wasn’t about pulling people in. Christ was about meeting people where they are. That has to be our focus too.

We come into this space, not to pretend how perfect we are, but to admit to how broken we are, and to be reminded that God loves us anyway. So that we can go out and share that message with others. Whether or not those others will ever step foot inside this building. If our focus is about butts in seats, we’ll find ourselves behaving more and more like the Pharisees. But if our focus is about changing lives, we’ll find God takes care of the multiplication.

How do you view worship in your Christian life? Do you go out of your way to spend time with sinners? How can you be more focused this week on offering grace OUTSIDE of the church building or programs?

Sermon Snippet: Destruction/Creation

Here on my blog I'll be posting Sermon Snippets, brief reflections on the main points of my sermon each week. Hopefully soon I'll also be able to include audio of the sermons, but for now, I hope you'll enjoy these summaries.
-----

Destruction/Creation

Genesis 9:8-17

We like to think of the story of Noah's Ark as a cutesy tale of animals, parading onto a boat two-by-two. It's often the second story that appears in our children's Bibles, after Adam and Even in the garden. Unfortunately, these cutesy images of this story often stay with us into adulthood, overshadowing the reality of what this story in Genesis is really about.

There's not really anything cutesy about mass genocide.

That's right. God sees that the whole world is evil and wipes out everybody except for Noah. And this isn't the only time God kills a lot of people or destroys things. It happens a lot in the Old Testament. It happens on the cross when God kills God's own son.

I had a lot of trouble with God's destruction.

How could a God who was all loving, all knowing, all powerful and defined by grace be killing all these people and destroying creation? It just made God seem like a real jerk. And I could understand, after reading a lot of the violent passages of the Bible, why many people aren't interested in getting to know that God.

God the Destroyer
Hinduism is often misunderstood as a polytheistic religion. It's actually monotheistic religion, with the different avatars understood as the different manifestations of God. Similar to the Christian trinity; One God, Three Persons.

Hinduism has its own trinity, called the Trimurti, made up of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the redeemer and Shiva the destroyer. That's right. In Hinduism, there is a very clear description of God as destroyer. One blog describes Shiva's character in this way: 

Shiva’s powers of destruction are used to destroy the imperfections of the world, paving the way for beneficial change. The destruction is not arbitrary but constructive.

We tend to think of the trinity as God the creator, Christ the redeemer and Spirit the sustainer, but why, with all of this destruction we see in scripture, couldn't God have a character as destroyer?

I began to see destruction as a part of God's action of creation. When things have devolved so completely that the most merciful thing to do is destroy them, so that there can be hope for new creation after death. Life. Death. Resurrection. We can't get to the resurrection without the death. So sometimes God has to make the hard choice to put an end to something that has been corrupted to make way for something new and grace filled. 

But the flood was a little different. When the flood comes upon the earth, it is God letting the primordial chaos break back in, attempting a "re-do" of the created order. Things had gotten so bad, God's best option was to start over.

Except for Noah. God saw righteousness in Noah. God saw hope that creation was not completely in vain. And so after the flood subsided, God creates a new covenant with Noah as the remnant of Creation's original good. A covenant never to flood the earth again. Which doesn't seem like it's a very good promise, especially if you're living in Louisiana right now. 

But I don't think the covenant is actually about the water, it's about what the water represents. 

In promising not to destroy the earth by flood, God is actually promising not to go backwards again, to try to "undo" creation, but instead to move forward with us, even as we continue to fail and rebel. The Rainbow Covenant is not about never again seeing God the destroyer, but a promise that the destruction will never be an act intended to restart us. The Rainbow is a sign that God will respond in the future with NEW creation, even in the midst of destruction.

As people of the Rainbow Covenant, we are called to be Noah in the face of destruction. To hold onto the promise of newness. To not stand in the midst of the flood trying to figure out "Why?", but rather to look forward to God's next steps and as "What next?" We are not to be bogged down in the grief and inexplicable pain of destruction, but to look for God's work within and through it, moving us towards the redemption that is to come. 

It only works this way when the destruction comes purely from God. We're pretty good at destroying one another, but this destruction is done with malice and sin. God doesn't call Noah to be a mercenary and take care of all the evil. God calls Noah to preserve and protect the remnant of goodness. God isn't calling us to help in the destruction. God is calling us to work towards the new creation. This is our place in the Rainbow Covenant.

How do you understand God's violence in the scriptures? How have you been able to respond in faith to seemingly senseless destruction?

Not actually a Rev... yet

So you've found the blog of Pastor Blair. Good job. The title comes from an acknowledgement that as much as I love the Book of Discipline, I'm not a big fan of rules. Especially when those rules don't make sense or limit the Gospel. But as a young pastor, I can sometimes come across to older generations as a bit unruly. Hence the name.

But for the record, I am not yet a Reverend.

I'm a Licensed Local Pastor in the United Methodist Church, currently serving on Ontario, California. Previously I've served in Hollywood, CA and Chatsworth, GA. I'm a graduate of Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a first career clergy person. I'm in the Ordination Process to become an Elder in the California Pacific Annual Conference, but I'm not quite there yet. Reverend is a title reserved for those that are ordained. But the blog title is so good, I figured I can start using it for now, with an optimistic look towards my ordination process. If we get a few more years into all of this and I'm STILL not officially a Rev, I'll reconsider the title.

For now, enjoy my ministry reflections and sermon snippets here at unrulyrev.blogspot.com

Thanks for following.