Thompson's Blog

Lobbying for God
Luke 18:1-8
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” 6And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Upon first reading of this passage, there seems to be a very clear and straightforward message in these verses. Jesus stated that he wanted his followers to be persistent in prayer, and he told a parable to illustrate the point. The parable portrays the effectiveness of persistence upon the most incorrigible of people, a judge who had no regard for God or people, and the parable is followed by the logical conclusion that if a powerful judge without any compassion can be persuaded by the badgering of a person without any standing in society, then how much more responsive our loving God will be to the cry of justice.

This is a fine message, and I wish I could say that this is all we need to know and to practice. The message is that God is so much more responsive than a wretched judge. And since this is the case just think how much more good we can accomplish if we’ll be diligent in our prayers to God.

But the message I get from my first reading doesn’t hold up for me for long. My experience is that this parable doesn’t contain the magic formula for getting things done here on earth. I don’t say this because I have thoroughly tested the effectiveness of perpetual prayer – at least not in the manner that it should be tested. I don’t lift myself up as someone who has prayed without ceasing for a righteous cause.

I’m inclined to think that most of us pray without ceasing. I’m highly influenced by my friend and retired pastor, Lewis Chesser, who believes that prayer is that which we are most focused upon at any given moment. The question is not whether we pray or not, but what it is that we are praying for or about. We are praying creatures, but we aren’t necessarily faithful to God in that which we are praying for.

And a closer reading of this parable raises a number of questions that go beyond the message that my first reading portrayed. This parable is not a lesson on the simple formula for generating justice on earth. I think there is a message about the value of persistence, but I don’t think the lesson is that we will get what we want if we will pursue it with relentlessness. Jesus says that God will grant justice much faster than a cold-hearted judge, but we all know that the justice God grants doesn’t always play out in court. Life as we live it is not so neatly ordered.

Bad things happen to good people. Wretched people sometimes become elevated to high places. Innocent people get harsh sentences, and children become victims of all sorts of bad things. Experiencing good fortune on earth is not entirely arbitrary, but it’s not the predictable consequence of diligent prayer. There may be a simple lesson involved in this morning’s scripture, but it’s not that the manifestation of justice on earth is the consequence of an adequate amount of prayer. It very well may be that diligent prayer for justice puts us in touch with the true essence of justice, but this doesn’t mean it’s going to play out so clearly on earth.

A close second reading of this passage is not as satisfying as a quick first reading. After telling this parable that seems to be a simple admonition to engage in persistent in prayer, why does it conclude with the question of whether or not the Son of Man would find faith on earth upon his return?

Maybe he raised the question because we are people who can be pretty discouraged by the way things do tend to play out on earth. We are people who want results for what we perceive to be our relentless efforts, and we aren’t so good at hanging on when we don’t see the results we think we deserve. Most of us aren’t so good at working with diligence while dealing with randomness, but this is the territory in which we live.

I do believe that persistent work for justice actually pays off in this world in real ways, but it isn’t clearly predictable. I heard the story of Nelson Mandela on Sixty Minutes last Sunday. He spent 27 years as a political prisoner in his effort to break the rule of the legally racist government of South Africa. He didn’t allow his immediate circumstances to define his understanding of what was going on, and I think this is the view of reality Jesus was imploring us to have if we wish to follow him.

I suppose the remarkable thing about that story was that it had a good ending even after 27 years. Certainly there are cases where people have struggled much longer than that without such clear results. We can point to many other countries and situations where struggles for justice have yet to see the light of day. In fact I think the heart of Christianity is to live with absolute trust in the coming of God’s kingdom on earth without the expectation of how or when that will happen.

I used to listen to an obscure musician from Mississippi named Mac MacAnally who had a song entitled “It’s a Crazy World” and the first line went like this, “It’s a crazy world, but I live here, and if you can hear me singing, so do you!”

That was a song that made a lot of sense to me, and the truth is that this world has probably always been ruled by an excessive degree of randomness. The crazy world that we live in is not a new development. The fact that Jesus was hung on a cross two thousand years ago is pretty good evidence of this. I don’t think Jesus was naïve about the way things work in this world or with God when he told the parable of the dishonest judge and the persistent widow. He didn’t want us to have unreasonable expectations of what prayer would make happen, but he didn’t want us to try to make things happen on our own.

I mentioned earlier that I’m inclined to think the issue is not whether or not we pray, but what it is we are in prayer about, and how it is we embody our prayer. I think our challenge is not to implore God in the way that the poor widow went after the horrible judge. God doesn’t need persuasion in the way that the jaded judge needed to be persuaded. Our work is not to let God know what’s going on, and what needs to happen, but to let God inform us of what’s really going on, and how we can help make that happen.

To use language that we are most familiar with in our country – I think we should think of ourselves as lobbyists for God. A good lobbyist is in the business of promoting the cause of their client, and if we are good lobbyists for God our primary desire is to give ourselves to the business of promoting God’s work here on earth. I think this is the nature of the persistent prayer Jesus was seeking to promote.

So my third reading of this passage makes me think that if the unrighteous judge could be persuaded to grant justice through the badgering of a nameless widow there’s certainly hope for us. I dare say there’s not a person in the room this morning who is more obstinant than the judge in this morning’s text, and he came to do the right thing. I think we all know that our hearts can be focused on selfish and unrighteous causes every now and then. I can see why Jesus wondered if the faith he embodied would last. You might say we have all been known to engage in lobbying for clients other than God, but we aren’t unaware of the claim of God on our lives and the opportunity that this brings to us.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’re a community that has engaged in some effective lobbying for God. I feel like we have been empowered to do some work that brings relief into people’s lives and at the same time gives God a good name. I like to think God is seeing us as a good lobbying firm. It seems like we are in need of some additional human and financial resources, and I think we should pursue people and money in the manner the widow went after that judge – without any expectation of how that will play out. I trust God will lead us and provide for us if we will be faithful and focused in the prayerful work to which we have been called.

I dare say the Holy Spirit is lobbying each of us in some manner that will help us understand how we can be more faithful to Christ’s call for us to engage in the holy work of lobbying for God. That’s a full sentence so I’m going to say it again:

I dare say the Holy Spirit is lobbying each of us in some manner that will help us understand how we can be more faithful to Christ’s call for us to engage in the holy work of lobbying for God.

Our Obsessive Compulsive God
Luke 15:1-10

15Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3So he told them this parable: 4“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

So how logical is it for a shepherd to leave 99 sheep in the wilderness to go in search of the one who has strayed? It would be easy to give this story a passing glance and say, yes, Jesus was advocating that we pay special attention to the people who are clearly out of bounds, and all of God’s angels get really excited when an absolutely horrible example of a human being turns around and becomes a Sunday School teacher, but if that is all this is about I’m guessing the angels have long gaps between their parties.

Jesus makes it clear that God is in the business of obsessively pursuing individuals who have lost their way, but he’s not so clear about who that is. I’m thinking there may even be some sarcasm here. As I say, there’s something odd about this. I think we are to think of God as the shepherd, and we’re told that God abandons the 99 and goes after the one. The one who is out of bounds gets the most attention from God. What are we to think of that?

Now there’s no threat to the 9 coins while the woman goes in search of the one lost coin, so this one makes more sense on some level, but I don’t think we should overlook who it is playing the role of God in this story. It was a woman. One commentator I read pointed out that this is the only parable that portrays God as a woman, and I don’t think the Pharisees and scribes were comfortable with Jesus seeing God as being like a person they considered to be inherently inferior.

Jesus was messing with people when he told these parables. He was messing with all of us. I think he was pointing out that discipleship is messy business. It’s not about keeping proper company and spending lots of time in the sanctuary. It’s about making decisions to head off into uncharted territory, working with absolute diligence without promise for success, and stumbling into opportunities for divine celebration. It’s about not listening to people who think they know what God expects from all of us.

That may sound like an odd thing to hear from someone in my position, but this passage is clear about Jesus’ suspicion of religious authorities. I don’t think Jesus just hung out with official sinners because they were the most lost – they were better company for him than the overly religious types. That’s certainly my experience, and as the former director of a Wesley Foundation I’ve had a lot of experience with people who aren’t overly religious.

I’m not particularly proud of this, but frankly, I never was able to generate much religious activity at the Wesley Foundation. It was hard for me to get people to engage in organized worship or study activities, but this is not to say that there weren’t things that went on there that felt very holy to me. I’m just not inclined to think that there are easily distinguishable lines between those who are spiritually lost and those who aren’t. What I do believe is that God is in the business of seeking those who are lost, and God uses us to do that work. God even uses us when we are still in the process of being found.

Of course some of us are further out in the wilderness than others. Which brings to mind my friend Randy. Randy came riding up to the Wesley Foundation on a bicycle one hot summer day. He was a man in his fifties who had clearly been traveling by bicycle for a long time. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and he was about as brown as the descendant of a European can be. Leathery would be the right way to describe him. My friend Charles Zook would go on to nickname him, Grissel, which seemed quite appropriate.

I tried to keep him moving by offering him nothing but food and directions, but he asked if there was anything he could do. I had a huge pile of debris in the back yard of the Wesley Foundation, and I was wanting to put that pile on a trailer, so I told him I would be happy for him to load all that trash on the trailer. Given the fact that it was close to 100 degrees I thought surely that would get him moving down the road, but it didn’t. He put a huge pile of construction waste and limbs on that trailer, and at that point he had my attention.

I was also at a critical point in the construction of the yurt we built at the Wesley Foundation, and I needed some help. I told Randy I would let him stay the night at the Wesley Foundation if he wanted to stick around and help me the next day. He said he would and he did. We got to work early the next day, and he and I worked well together.

We’ll that one day turned into a week, and I had never worked around anyone who was as focused and diligent on doing what I needed to get done. Building a yurt in the back yard of the Wesley Foundation was one of the most interesting things I got to do while I was there, and the appearance of Randy was critical to that process. I told Randy I couldn’t pay him, but I would let him stay at the Wesley Foundation and I would keep him fed, and that suited him.

Randy and I became very familiar with each other that week, and he was an interesting man. He had been riding his bicycle for about 18 months. He began in Minnesota, he had headed to east coast, went down to Florida, made an inland tour of Alabama, and then over to Biloxi where he had worked at a UM hurricane recovery center, and then he came to Little Rock. His journey had been shaped by an interest in the Civil War, and the fact that he was a Methodist. United Methodist churches and institutions were always the 1st places he checked for food, work or shelter as he made his way around the country.

Had Randy left after that first week I would consider him to have been nothing but an angel who had come to Little Rock on a mission from God. But he didn’t leave after that week. We continued to work together for a couple of weeks, but classes began to meet at UALR and as I often heard him say, “he wasn’t a people person.” I came to realize that there was a theme to most of the stories he told, which was that most of the relationships he entered into concluded with some kind of train wreck. And that would be the case with me as well.

Randy’s capacity to work hard was rivaled with his capacity to drink hard and we had a couple of incidents. I told him he couldn’t drink at the Wesley Foundation, so Randy set up a chair just beyond our dumpster that he came to call his office, and Randy proceeded to become a problem. I ended up getting Randy a good donated bicycle from a friend, I pulled together some money, and I told him he had to go. He proceeded to use that money to get really drunk and belligerent, and our next to final day ended with him in a stupor and me calling the police. They hauled him off and told him he wasn’t to return to the UALR campus.

A student called me the next morning as I was on my way to the Wesley Foundation and told me Randy was back. I genuinely thought he had returned to attack me in some way, so I arrived from a different direction and I hollered at him from a safe distance. It turned out that he was sober, and apologetic. He was also broke and his bicycle had been stolen. He said he was willing to leave but he needed a bicycle. Fortunately another student heard what was going on and offered to give him his old bicycle.

I’ll never forget my final conversation with Randy that day. He told me I had been a good friend to him. I pointed out that I had called the police on him on two different occasions, and he said, “Yeah, that’s what I mean, you only called the police twice.”

This story didn’t end with angels rejoicing in heaven, but it was a powerful experience for me. I don’t know what kind of impact the Wesley Foundation had on Randy, but I like to think God led him into our community and that God used us in some way to reach out to him. I would also say that Randy helped me understand something about God on some level. Randy was driven in a powerful manner – certainly not always in a good direction, but always full speed ahead, and I think that’s a characteristic Jesus wants us to see about God.

These parables reveal God’s relentless pusuit of us, and I’m sure this means God is reaching out to us whether we’re overly self-righteous religious authorities or we’re irresponsible belligerent alchoholic wanderers. God wants us to discover who we are in God’s eyes, and how we can best live that out on earth. I believe God is in pursuit of us all, and that we all have new discoveries to make about who we are, who we can become, and what we need to be doing.

We are called to engage in the messy work of reaching out to one another in gracious and redeeming ways and to always understand that we don’t even know how God will use us to do the work of reaching lost souls.There’s a lot of good news in these parables. I think it’s an indication of how obsessively pursued by God we all are, and how much joy we can bring if we will be followers of Christ and not imitators of Pharisees. This work of discipleship is so much more interesting and joyful than distorted religious authorities have forever led us to believe.

Thanks be to God for the crazy love that is there for us and empowering to us. Because of God’s love for us we can live without fear of associating with anyone. There aren’t any of us who are too far gone to be found by our obsessively compulsive redeeming God.

And thanks be to God for that.
Amen.

Strong Language
Luke 14:25-33

25Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Jesus says you can’t follow him unless you hate your family and give up all of your possessions, but you can belong to a church and hold on to everything.

In fact I read in the Arkansas United Methodist Newspaper last week that Jon Stewart had used the ease of being a United Methodist as the butt of a joke not long ago. I didn’t see the segment, and I’m really not sure how much he went on about it, but he said something to the effect that becoming a United Methodist is a lot like getting an online degree from University of Phoenix.

Now I generally find Jon Stewart pretty entertaining. And I generally agree that becoming a United Methodist is a pretty easy thing to do, but it makes me mad that he decided to pick on us. I’m probably as critical as anyone of the way our denomination tends to function, but when someone on the outside becomes critical of us I tend to feel pretty defensive of my homies.

I know what he said is true on some level. We make it easy to join our body, and we aren’t very demanding on one another in regard to the way we live out our discipleship. This isn’t the formula for success in regard to generating a powerful organization, but I don’t like the alternative. I wouldn’t be able to function in a body that’s highly demanding and overly judgmental. Some say we have more questions than answers and I say amen. I know that we are a dysfunctional denomination in many ways, but I’ll always take dysfunction over fundamentalism and in some ways I think those are our options.

Especially when the one we seek to follow says things like what we’ve read this morning. Jesus is all but impossible to follow.

This is a tough passage of scripture. What a bad sound bite. I mean there aren’t many deranged cult leaders who talk about hating mothers. It seems unchristian to say such a thing. What was he thinking? There he had a multitude of people following him and wanting to be close to him, and he turned to them and uttered these ugly words about hating their own people. We aren’t told how the crowd reacted, but I would guess that it dampened their enthusiasm. Saying to that crowd of people that it would be necessary for them to hate their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children was a sure way to offend everyone’s senses.

And of course these words aren’t just for those people who were following Jesus around on that particular day. I’m sure that crowd wasn’t nearly as loving and insightful as we are, and it could be that he would have used softer language if we had been the ones pushing to be close to him, but we are invited to act as if these words are directed at us. It may be easy to be a United Methodist, but following Jesus is nothing like getting a degree from the University of Phoenix.

One reaction I have to this passage of scripture is that I just don’t qualify as a disciple. I don’t consider myself to be an exemplary son, brother, husband and father, but I don’t hate any of these people in my family – at least not in the sense that I usually understand the word hate to be used, and I have no intention to develop hatred for these people.

So in one sense you could say that I don’t qualify to be a disciple. Because I don’t hate my close family members I don’t have enough raw materials to build the tower, and my army is no match for my enemy. I guess I could use this as an excuse to forget the whole thing, but I can’t. I’m sure I’m like a lot of people in the crowd who continued following Jesus on the day he uttered these words – I know I don’t have all it takes, but I can’t turn away.

Now the note in my Bible says that what Jesus was doing when he used the word hate was expressing some hyperbole. And I’m not wanting to turn Jesus into a United Methodist and water his words down into some kind of palatable soup, but if this was an exaggerated truth, what is that truth? What is it about our families that we need to resist? In some ways the answer to that question probably varies from family to family, but I don’t think it’s the various dysfunctions that Jesus was addressing when he uttered these words. There was probably a pattern in existence in his day that gave his words a distinct meaning.

According to some Biblical scholars, family roles were very clearly defined in Jesus’ day, and who you were depended upon your position and role in the family. The value of your life depended upon the reputation of your ancestors, the order in which you were born, your gender, and your age. Their societal structure didn’t really appreciate individuality or creativity. The economic system was well defined, and it was maintained through the traditional family structure. The family system didn’t exist to enable an individual to best develop into an authentic servant of God, individuals existed to maintain the economic and cultural traditions of the system.

Self-understanding and authentic spirituality are never encouraged by systems, and all cultures have powerful systems at work that exist at the expense of individuals. It’s hard to resist the claims of these systems on our lives. To live a spiritually authentic, creative, and obedient life is to appear foolish in the eyes of most conventional societies, but this is the type of life that Jesus lived and the life to which he was calling his disciples.

This is the source of abundant life, but it’s not a life that’s readily rewarded in material ways. Jesus wanted his disciples to know how costly it would be to stand with him in the tradition of authentic spirituality, and that’s why he used the strong language that we read this morning.

It’s hard to break out of powerful systems, and when people do break free from established systems their actions can be interpreted as forms of hatred for the people they were supposed to love and respect. We live in a confusing world, and it’s not easy to know how best to resist dehumanizing trends. I consider it nothing less than an act of God when someone does find a clear way to stand in resistance to a dehumanizing system and in solidarity with the true community of faith.

This is a huge issue for us. Now there are Christian communities who take very bold actions to exhibit their positions on things. I just heard of some Christian group in Florida that’s going to burn Quran’s next week. Jon Stewart can’t make fun of them for being wishy washy, but I’m inclined to believe that the things most threatening to us are not so simple. People of other faiths aren’t our problem. Even the violently misguided members of other faiths are not our biggest problem.

I’m convinced that the challenge for us is to try to understand the ways in which we’re owned by powerful individuals and systems and how we play up to those who seek to use us in Godless and dehumanizing ways.

I consider it to be somewhat of a miracle when I become conscious of the way in which I’m embracing something that should be resisted. Or to use Jesus’ word, when I realize I love something that I should be hating. There are many agendas in this world that need to be resisted, but it’s important to note who Jesus considered to be the most threatening people of his day. He didn’t point his finger at the political and religious power brokers of the day and tell the multitude to hate them, he pointed to the people with whom they most closely associated, and he included in that list their own selves.

What Jesus did when he turned to the crowd and gave them this warning was to remind us all that there is a dangerous connection between attachment and spiritual death. Our biggest spiritual threats come from the things and relationships to which we are most attached. It’s easy for us to fall into the mode of allowing other people, things, and systems to define who we are.

I knew a student at UALR who once read me a poem about his desire to stay wild all of his life, but the way he used the word wild wasn’t in the manner we generally think of young people behaving. He didn’t imply that he wanted to live a life of partying and craziness. I can’t recall his exact words, and I hate that I didn’t get a copy of his poem, but what I understood him to be saying was that he wanted to remain unowned by any system or person that would program him to behave in a predictable manner.

I don’t think his concept of staying wild is far from what Jesus said we must do if we wish to be his disciple – we’ve got to resist becoming attached to anything other than the uncontrollable, extravagant, and gracious love of God. Every other allegiance is short sighted and spiritually dangerous.

Most of us are probably much better at being good United Methodists as described by Jon Stewart than we are at being faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, but even as the flawed followers that we are, I think we know that Jesus was pointing to something we want. We want to be in touch with something more significant than the roles we play in the dysfunctional and dehumanizing systems that rule our world. We want to love God and to resist everything else that seeks to rule us.

Jon Stewart may very well be right in ridiculing our mediocrity, but we are at least looking in the right direction. As harsh as Jesus’ words may be, by gathering together today we are showing that we haven’t departed from the group who was trying to follow Jesus, and I consider this to be a sign that there’s hope for us yet.

I may be wrong, but as far as I can tell, this is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Amen

Hardly Hallmark
Luke 12:49-56
49“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
54He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. 55And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. 56You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

This isn’t a passage of scripture you’ll ever find on a Hallmark product – it’s hardly along the lines of a Mother’s Day wish. I generally think of Hallmark cards as very traditional expressions of affection for friends and family members. Behind a Hallmark card is the assumption that love is intact in the places it belongs. Hallmark cards give voice to those situations in which children and parents and family members of all generations and friends and spouses and boyfriends and girlfriends all love each other in the way they’re supposed to love each other, but as we see in this passage, it’s not the way things always are.

What we’ve got this morning are not sweet words spoken fondly of those traditional family values that we all supposed to dearly hold. There’s no uncritical cherishing going on in this passage. This is not to say that Jesus had no appreciation for those ties that bind families together, but in this passage we hear how Jesus highlighted the tension that was going to erupt between family members as a result of his work.

I’m reminded of that line of greeting cards that features this woman named Maxine who has little appreciation for traditional values and relationships. She’s generally portrayed as having choice words for people who expect proper behavior, and those cards seem to go over pretty well. I think Maxine gives voice to a perspective that we can all appreciate to some extent. Irreverence has it’s place, and I think Jesus was probably considered to be irreverent to a large extent, but I don’t think he shared Maxine’s brand of irreverence.

Jesus was somewhere between the sentiments you’ll find on a Hallmark cards and those expressed by Maxine. Jesus wasn’t just an advocate of maintaining traditional family order, but he wasn’t just contemptuous of tradition. Jesus was an advocate of authentic faith in God and he recognized that such faith can be the source of tremendous conflict.

There’s some heat involved in Jesus’ words, and the fire of which Jesus spoke was designed to purge not comfort. Jesus didn’t see his work as the source of unconditional unity. He clearly saw that what he was doing was going to be the source of much conflict and division among people who were supposed to be the most closely associated. Jesus had rough things to say sometimes – and it wasn’t just about family ties being broken. This passage concludes with a sweeping indictment of the crowd. He called them hypocrites and contrasted their capability of forecasting the weather with their ability to discern the truth of the moment. The fact that he called them hypocrites indicated that the problem was more of an unwillingness to see the opportunity than an inability to comprehend what was going on.

Sometimes people wonder about the value of following the Lectionary for preaching. There are many people who have no idea what the lectionary is, but basically it’s the prescribed selection of scriptures for every Sunday of the year. It’s a three year cycle of selected readings, and some people feel that it’s boring or uncreative to follow the lectionary for preaching purposes, but I’m thinking that this is not a passage of scripture we would ever read in church if it wasn’t so prescribed. I’m not sure what kind of sermon series this passage would fit into very well. These are not the kind of words most of us are anxious to hear from the one we look to for unconditional love, but it’s good for us to be reminded that loving words aren’t always nice.

I’m reminded of a day in high school when I was learning to play golf. I was on the high school golf team, which wasn’t a team that was that hard to make in Wynne Arkansas. If you had a set of golf clubs you could be on the golf team, but I really wanted to learn to play golf, and I worked pretty hard at it. The local country club professional gave us some lessons and I tried to do what he said.

I never was as good as I wanted to be, and as everyone knows who has ever played golf, it can be a really frustrating game. People express their frustrations in various ways, and I was no exception. I know it’s nearly impossible for you to visualize this, but I was known to toss a golf club every now and then. So we had a match one day at the country club, which we won, and as I was leaving the parking lot Mr. Brun the club pro came up to me. I thought he was going to congratulate us on our victory, but he didn’t. He told me he had seen me throw my club after missing a short putt and he got real clear about what he thought about that. I won’t quote him, but I can remember exactly what he told me, and that was in about 1976. I don’t really remember anything else anybody said in 1976, but I remember that.

As we all know, there is such a thing as tough love. And just because we don’t want to hear something doesn’t mean we don’t need to hear it. It’s not easy to sort these things out, and we don’t always hear what we need to hear because of the tone in which it’s delivered, but sometimes it takes a harsh tone to get out attention.

Jesus had a lot of things to say in his relatively short life, and the tone conveyed by this passage certainly wasn’t present in all the words he spoke, but I don’t think we’re just getting a glimpse of Jesus on a bad day. There’s truth to these words. There’s something important for us to hear. The harshness of these words aren’t characteristic of everything Jesus said, but the words we’ve read today don’t need to be overlooked. They point to the fact that discipleship is about something more than behaving nicely.

Jesus didn’t want blind enthusiasm. Jesus wanted people to be engaged in the work of personal and social transformation — which is tough, mysterious, and scary work. This transformation business is tough work because it involves change. It requires patterns to be broken and relationships to be redefined. It disrupts lifestyles and exposes injustice.

The transformation business is mysterious work because it’s easy to avoid and hard to define. It doesn’t pay off in cash and it can be labeled by friends and family members as foolish and disruptive. The process isn’t easily documented and it can’t be quantified with statistics.

The transformation business is scary work because you don’t know where it will take you or what it will require. You don’t know who you’ll end up working with, and who will touch your life. The transformation business is not what society promotes nor what parents dream of for their children, and this is why we are more inclined to predict the weather than we are to pursue life in the Kingdom of God.

I’m making sweeping generalizations about us. Maybe this isn’t the case for you. Maybe for you the path to true life is clear, well lit, level, and everyone you know is encouraging you to stay on it and keep moving – regardless of the cost or condition. Maybe you’ve already been through the fire, and you aren’t even tempted to pursue anything less than spiritual truth. If this is the case we’re all proud to have you in our midst, but that’s not always my priority.

And Jesus sure had a hard time finding people with passion for the transforming love of God as he made his way to Jerusalem.

What I hear Jesus saying is that this world is largely organized in such a manner that the pressure is on us to live superficial lives. We are given clearly defined roles to play, and we are rewarded for not disrupting the system. Jesus made reference to the various family relationships that he was likely to disrupt. The family system was probably the most powerful system in tact in rural Palestine. It fit into a larger religious system, but it was on the level of family relationships that order was maintained, and what Jesus taught was actually very threatening to that system. The threat came in the form of Jesus encouraging people to be spiritually authentic at the expense of being traditionally appropriate.

I’m guessing there are a number of people in the sanctuary this morning who have felt the pressure to be traditional at the expense of being honest and authentic. This passage is confirmation for me of how Christian it is for us to promote faithfulness in relationships but not insist that all relationships be traditionally shaped. Jesus resisted the pressure of society to define how all people should live and serve God, and that’s the attitude we should have as well.

You can bet that Jesus faced tremendous pressure to get a real job, and you can be sure that the families of his disciples were distressed over the choices that their loved ones had made as well. I think it’s safe to assume that Jesus (the unmarried-childless-wandering-unorthodox teacher who left behind understandable work – that Jesus) was not so highly regarded by the traditionalists at the coffee shop in Nazareth.

The pressure to play along with life as everyone knew it would have been great on Jesus – just as it is for us. To break away from the systems that rule us is to go through fire, and it’s fear of the fire that generally keeps us in our places. But Jesus makes me think that this form of fire is not so threatening. Jesus sought to kindle such fires, but he wasn’t out to hurt people. His desire was to liberate us from the demands of standard behavior and to abide in the Kingdom of God.

I know this sounds pretty high minded, but it plays out in really common ways. It affects the way we treat people who are in any way disenfranchised. It informs the way we spend our time, energy, and money. It’s a reminder to us that we are in good company when we feel criticized for deviating from standard behavior out of desire to serve our neighbors.

It’s not pleasant to experience criticism, but it can be a privilege if we are criticized for doing the right thing. We just don’t want to be in the company of those who were criticized by Jesus for being more concerned with the weather than they were for God, and by the grace of God we will avoid that tragedy. Thanks be to God for that.

How To Pray
Luke 11:1-13

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3Give us each day our daily bread. 4And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” 5And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs. 9“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

If you read today’s sermon title on the Now Happening email blast, and you’ve come this morning with the expectation of learning the secret maneuver that will enable you to gain access to God’s miraculous vending machine of divine intervention you are going to leave disappointed.

I wish I knew the right way to shake it so that it would predictably dispense those particular circumstances we feel would make all the difference – but I don’t. The title of this sermon only makes sense when you put it in the context of the other sermons I’ve preached this month in which I’ve raised impossibly large concepts to ponder and bolted from being excessively particular on how to act, and how not to act.

I answered the question of how to act by suggesting we be nice to each other. I answered the question of how not to act by suggesting we not have unreasonable expectations of each other. And I’m going to spend the next few minutes dancing around the un-dissectible concept of prayer, but I can tell you now my conclusion will simply be to do it. So I’m about to engage in a few minutes of largely forgettable filler, and I will conclude with what you already know, which is that it’s important to pray.

I really resonate to something the contemporary Christian writer, Anne Lamott, said about prayer. She said the two best prayers she knows of are: “Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!”, and “Help me, help me, help me!” And I don’t think those are prayers that any of us have a hard time learning. Disaster happens and we learn to pray. Disaster is averted and we give thanks to God.

I think the problem most of us have is to never engage in any kind of prayer that doesn’t revolve around giving great thanks or asking for relief. I know I tend to bounce like a pin-ball between those perspectives of my heart, and I believe that a person who is grounded in prayer will be more prepared for the varying circumstances of life.

It’s interesting that Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray like John had taught his disciples. I actually read something John Wesley said about that, which is that different spiritual teachers had a tendency to provide particular words for people to use when they prayed.

It’s as if they were asking Jesus for his particular set of words. I don’t think they were asking for his set of magic words, but I’m guessing they have always been used in that way. In fact I’m sure I’ve tried to use them in that way. I have no doubt I’ve said the Lord’s Prayer in hope of getting what my heart desired. I think it’s hard not to use it as if it’s some kind of good luck charm.

But I don’t think this was what Jesus was intending when he shared these words with his disciples. It seems to me he gave these words to his disciples to shape their image of God, and these words provide a very particular image of God.

It’s no small deal that Jesus invited us to address God as, Our Father. This one phrase has probably done more to establish an image of God than any other phrase in human language, but I don’t think it’s functioned in the manner Jesus intended. As we all know, this has contributed to the unfortunate mindset that considers God to be exclusively male.

And while this way of thinking is very limiting and distracting, it has also served to reinforce a particular hierarchy on earth. If you believe that God is male, it’s only logical that you would think male human beings are more God-like than female human beings and therefore more valuable. Jesus gave us this word to use when we pray to God, but I don’t think he was thinking of how we would use it to prey on each other.

Some people have speculated that Jesus used this word to indicate how near God is to us. I’ve heard that the word Jesus used was more along the lines of Daddy than Father. And I certainly embrace the notion that God is near and as concerned about us as individuals as a good father is to his child, but something else I read made even more sense to me. Someone said this was Jesus’ way of telling everyone that we all have equal access to God. Jesus was inviting his disciples to have their own relationship with God – that we don’t have to address anyone between ourselves and God.

I don’t think this was a small deal for people who had been taught they needed to bring animals to the priest in the temple which is where they had to buy the animal from the authorized sacrificial animal dealer with money they had acquired from the authorized money exchange dealer. All of this was done in order for people to feel that they had become reconciled with God for whatever violation they had committed that caused their relationship with God to have become broken down.

Those words, Our Father, sound incredibly innocent, but they played into the whole sense of spiritual and religious revolution that Jesus had begun. He didn’t want his followers to think they had to engage in commerce in order to engage with God – and this was not a good thing for the religion business. It helps me understand why they wanted to kill him. Jesus wasn’t being nice when he invited his followers to address God as Daddy, he was cutting out the middle man.

And he was inviting them to see beyond the arrangement of this world. Jesus invited them to seek to abide in an alternate kingdom. We don’t resonate to this word kingdom in the same way that Jesus’ original disciples would have experienced the word. We don’t live in a kingdom. We go visit the magic kingdom at Disneyworld, and it doesn’t feel like an ominous presence, but the people who asked Jesus how to pray lived in a kingdom that wasn’t so magical. They lived in a kingdom that crushed people for not showing proper respect to the emperor.

Once again, this was not safe language. To long for the Kingdom of God was to show some disdain for the kingdom at hand, and that was not a welcome sentiment. I don’t think it would have been safe to speak this prayer loudly in a public place during Jesus’ day. I think it would have been seen as treasonous. Of course we can say this prayer anywhere and no one feels threatened by any part of it. I don’t think the prayer is any less subversive to our society than it was to Herod’s system, but it’s lost it’s teeth in some way.

It’s a sad thing on some level that the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray has become so welcome everywhere. I’m not sure it continues to have the impact it had when Jesus first shared it.

Of course it has those petitions that feel very current – those petitions that aren’t unlike the prayer of Anne Lamott, but it isn’t insignificant that the prayer Jesus taught was from the first person plural. It begins with Our Father …, it goes on to say Give us …, and forgive us …, and protect us. At the heart of this prayer is the necessity for right relationships. This prayer was designed to direct our hearts toward having the right relationship with God and wanting to live in proper fellowship with one another.

It was Jesus’ intention for us to have what we need, but not more than we need, and I think he saw both of those conditions as problematic for our souls. This prayer that Jesus shared with his disciples is an instructive prayer, and if we will hear what it says as we say it it will help us understand to whom it is we are praying.

But praying isn’t an intellectual exercise. It’s an activity of the heart, and we can find ourselves praying a very focused prayer in an involuntary manner when we are facing difficult circumstances, or inattentively saying the words of prayer in a distracted manner.

Jesus valued prayer, and this little parable at the end of the story is clearly an instruction to be diligent about prayer. It borders on indicating that we will get what we want if we pray fervently enough, but clearly that isn’t what happens – unless what you want is to live life in communication with God.

And this is the only thing I know to be true about prayer – which is that it happens, and it’s a good thing. Clearly Jesus had a fervent prayer life, but it didn’t prevent him from suffering at the hand of malicious people. It did provide him with access to the source of all life as he dealt with the forces of death. I think this is the best any of us will ever do.

There aren’t any magic words to use when we pray, but there is some magic that happens in our hearts when we open ourselves up to the presence of God. I don’t believe it fixes the problems we face in the way we would often prefer, but it certainly repairs our hearts and it enables us find joy in the midst of sorrow and strength in the midst of trials.

I do think it’s helpful to think about who it is we are praying to, and what it is we are to pray for, but I’m primarily here to say that I believe our God is listening when we say: Help us, help us, help us, forgive us, forgive us, forgive us, and thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!

How Not To Act
Luke 10:38-42

8Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. ³⁹She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. ⁴⁰But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” ⁴¹But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; ⁴²there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Last week we read and pondered the story Jesus told that has become known as the story of the Good Samaritan. If we were to rename the players in this story to reflect current prejudices we might well call that the story of the Good Undocumented Worker . This isn’t very poetic, but I think that gets at some of the animosity that existed between the Jews and the Samaritans. And you could say the whole point of telling that story was to provide a lesson on how to act if you want to abide in the Kingdom of God.

Which is quite different from today’s story — that might well be called a lesson on how not to act if you want to abide there. Last week’s story emphasized the need for us to spring into action at the right moment. This week’s story reveals the need to know when it’s time to sit down and do nothing but pay attention. This business of following Christ is tricky. Just when you think you know the most important thing to do you find out there is something more important than that.

And frankly I think this passage is more threatening to the way we normally function than the thought of extending grace to someone we generally find to be objectionable. The fact that Jesus reprimanded Martha instead of Mary is somewhat unsettling to the way we operate. We love being busy and distracted.

It’s interesting to me that we have as many people named Martha’s as we do in our country because as we can all see, she is not the hero of this story. It’s almost like we understand where Martha was coming from so well we appreciate her in spite of the reaction she got from Jesus. We understand what Jesus was saying, but most of us sympathize with Martha. I think most of us identify with the Martha in this story more than we do the Mary.

My mother was a Martha in a very literal sense, (that was her name) and there is a kitchen named after her in the 1st United Methodist Church in Wynne. Actually they named the entire new fellowship Hall after her, but during the planning process my father committed to making a significant contribution to the church if they would name the kitchen after her – which seemed very appropriate because she was not unfamiliar with serving food at church.

We were really honored when they decided to name the whole new building after her. I mean I can’t really tell you how big a deal it is for our family that there is this really nice building called The Martha Murray Hall, but they didn’t name that building after her because she sat around pondering the meaning of life.

So there’s this tension we are all familiar with. We recognize the value of people who spend hours in the kitchen making sure things are going well at the table. We understand the essential nature of people who are committed to doing that work, and we recognize the spiritual discipline that is involved in making sure people get fed. I’m sure that’s why people continue to name their children Martha, and we would be in bad shape if we didn’t have these Marthas around who know how to get things done and are willing to do it.

And one thing we shouldn’t do with this story is to belittle the value of kitchen work or to think that the most essential conversations occur outside of the kitchen. It’s still very common in our society to find women in the kitchen and men in the den, but we all know that some of the most important conversations occur in the kitchen. I mean if you want in depth analysis of the Razorback’s offensive line you might need to stay in the den, but if you want to know what’s going on people’s lives you need to listen up in the kitchen. Clearly this is an oversimplification, but we have a different set of traditions and expectations that need to be examined and questioned.

And being a hard working person in the kitchen or anywhere else is not the problem Jesus was addressing. There was an attitude that accompanied Martha’s work that seems to have been the problem.
It’s not easy to separate the work Martha was doing from the attitude she was harboring, but I think the problem was more with what Martha was expecting than what she was doing.

Who hasn’t experienced the situation where one member of a family decides what another member needs to be doing, and applying all available forms of pressure to carry out the agenda. This never was a problem for my sister and I when I was growing up. I simply did as I was told – at least this is the way I remember it. There was a little bit of confusion when I got married and began doing everything my wife told me to do, but now everything is clear.

That may not be everyone’s opinion of that situation. The truth is that sometimes Sharla has to remind me what to do. Clearly I’m just kidding about that. I always know what Sharla wants before she has to say anything. Right.

I think we all understand how those dynamics play out in unfortunate ways within families, but this doesn’t just play out among people who are related. There isn’t anything unusual about unrelated people deciding what other people need to be doing. Some people to think they know what other people need to be doing and they get really agitated when their agenda’s aren’t met.

Expectations are always dangerous. I know that some of the most awkward situations I’ve found myself in are due to misguided expectations, and misguided expectations are easy to formulate. I don’t do a lot of counseling with people before they get married. It’s not that people don’t need counseling prior to marriage, but it isn’t what I do best. I try to warn people about how hard it is, and I always let people know what generally gets me in trouble, which is the tendency to harbor expectations without exercising any communication. But I’m guessing most people learn about this in same way I did – which is through the suffering of consequences from harboring expectations without bothering to engage in communication.

It seems to me that this is what was going on between Martha and Mary and Jesus. Although it may be that Martha was operating with a set of expectations that had been very clearly communicated for centuries as to what a woman’s role was to be when a man came to the house and Mary recognized that something had changed when Jesus came into the house. Jesus didn’t operate by the expectations of their society, and many people found this to be pretty unsettling.

In some ways, our agendas generally reflect our understanding of God, and for that reason it’s easy to think that our agendas are inspired by God. For people who actively seek to serve God, there is the desire to create the same order on earth as we sense it to be in heaven. This isn’t a bad agenda, but I think we need to maintain an equal amount of distrust of our patterns of behavior as we do our diligence in maintaining those patterns.

Mary was a person who’s vocation in life wasn’t dictated by the voice of society, but she was a person who sought to hear the voice of God. She chose to listen to Jesus, and to do this was to defy the agenda of society – and of her sister. This was a bold and heroic act on her part.

I once heard someone say that half of the task of a person who seeks to serve God is to try to establish an image of God, and the other half of the task is to let go of that image. There is something essential about trying to exercise faith in this world. It’s clearly necessary to try to connect our hands and our feet with our hearts and our minds, but this can’t be done well without the exercise of simply trying to listen to the voice of God as well. And this doesn’t mean we only listen to what our neighbors or our sisters or our brothers are saying about God. We all need to spend some quality time on our own in the presence of our Lord.

The practice of Christianity is the practice of listening to Jesus, and it seems to me that to listen to Jesus is to engage in the practice of seeking to serve God and our neighbors in very concrete ways without becoming set in our ways. Which is a difficult task.

Our high calling is to do as Mary did — to defy the pressure of powerful agendas and to listen for the authentic words of Jesus. Now I don’t want anyone to think I’m suggesting anyone needs to get out of the kitchen around here. In fact I’m sure the heat of our kitchen is a wonderful place to hear what Jesus is thinking. I’m sure there is a difference between being busy and being distracted, and this is something we all have to measure.

It’s not an easy thing to separate the expectations of others from the claim of God on our lives, but it is only by living in response to the authentic word of God that we will find ourselves in the right company at the right time, and exercising what Jesus would call the better part.

How to Act
Luke 10:25-37

25Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

The phrase Good Samaritan has become a part of our vocabulary. People who’ve never been to church know what it means to be a good Samaritan – at least in it’s watered down form. Which is the way in which people who often go to church generally think of this story. We use it to describe people who are particularly helpful in a somewhat unpredictable manner.

But if you really look at this story, and if you think about what Jesus was doing when he told this story you realize that Jesus wasn’t giving a little lesson on the importance of being helpful. He told a story that was designed to disrupt a time honored sacred tradition. This story was more along the lines of a ghost story than a quaint moralism. It’s important for us to keep in mind the nature of this relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans during Jesus’ day.

It wasn’t that the Jews and the Samaritans didn’t really like each other. It’s more like a Jew would rather have his finger nails removed than to be taken care of by a Samaritan. Simply hearing this story would have been a bad experience for this well trained and disciplined Jewish man, but as we all know, sometimes it’s good to have a bad time.

Jesus created an image that redefined reality — which isn’t an easy thing for us to experience. We’re so used to hearing this story it’s hard for us to feel the discomfort in the room that Jesus created when he told this parable, but it’s not hard to see that Jesus was trying to expand this religious expert’s concept of the Kingdom of God.

This Mosaic scholar approached Jesus with the intention of putting him to the test, but he found himself on the ropes so to speak. He entered this conversation feeling as if he was as righteous as he needed to be, but I don’t think that’s how he felt when the conversation was over. He had created a system of measuring righteousness that he was comfortable with, and he made the mistake of thinking that his measuring stick was perfectly calibrated.

The fact that this man asked Jesus what he must do to obtain eternal life indicated that he wasn’t totally clueless about the work of Jesus. The notion of eternal or abundant life was more of a Christian concept than a Jewish idea, so he revealed a somewhat informed perspective on what Jesus was teaching, but he assumed he could obtain that higher state of being by adhering to a traditional and flawed notion of righteousness. He was right about the most important commandments. He knew that the most important thing for us to do is to love God with all our hearts, minds, and souls, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, but this didn’t satisfy Jesus because he knew what he thought about some of his neighbors.

The traditional concept of the neighbor within the Jewish community was that their neighbors were their fellow Jews. They felt that they should love the other members of their community as they loved God, which is not a bad idea until it becomes such an exclusive thing — and that is what had happened. This religious expert liked the idea of having a closer relationship with God — he grasped the concept of obtaining abundant life, but he didn’t realize that it would require him to live in a whole new world. He thought he could just tweak his old one.

While the focus of this story is the redefining of an old relationship, the real purpose of this story was to call into question the manner in which this highly regarded man measured righteousness. This is what this legalist was used to doing, and Jesus was intent on showing him what was wrong with that. When you like the idea of keeping score on yourself and other people you are going to get burned.

This story is instructive about how we should treat all other people, but it’s more of a warning not to think too highly of the manner in which we’re living our lives. I’m not saying that we’re all miserable failures at practicing divine hospitality and we should live our lives in a perpetual state of groveling for forgiveness, but I do think it’s spiritually dangerous to think we have arrived. And just when you think you’ve become a proper example of redeemed living – somebody like Jesus will come along and tell a story or do something that will put a crack right in the center of your façade.

I guess spiritual development always comes down to how we treat one another, but this story of the Good Samaritan isn’t just about seeing the humanity of traditional enemies. It’s about the danger of thinking that we see the whole picture and becoming too satisfied with where we see ourselves in that picture. This poor lawyer liked the way he had defined reality, and because of that he pushed Jesus to give him some credit. I don’t know how this guy responded to what he heard Jesus say, but I don’t think he was comforted by the conclusion he was forced to draw.

It’s never a bad thing to fall off a pedestal into the arms of reality, but if you are like me you prefer to learn from the mistakes of other people than to be the example for others.

Unfortunately I haven’t always learned from others. I’ve been the example more often than I prefer, but those are the lessons you remember most clearly.

I’ve previously told you of my appreciation for bicycles, but the truth is I love cars as well – Chevrolet’s in particular. My great-grandfather was a railroad man, and that’s what moved him to Wynne, but his son, my grandfather, made the transition to the automobile business, and in 1926 he opened Murray Chevrolet Company. My father took over the business, and he had what you would call true love for Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles.

So when I turned 16, my parents gave me one of the more unique models that Chevrolet produced — a 1964 Corvair. This was in 1974, so it wasn’t a new car, but Daddy thought Corvairs were undeservedly maligned. It was an interesting little car with the engine in the rear and a suspension system that Ralph Nader considered to be unsafe at any speed.

It was a novel vehicle, and I enjoyed the notoriety it gave me. So one night there was this gathering of teenagers at somebody’s house, and this fellow wanted to go for a ride in my car. I pulled out on the main drag through town talking about my car and I’m going on about its various qualities when suddenly those dreaded blue lights came on behind me. I stopped and soon I was sitting in the squad car answering various questions from officer Curtner. After a minute or two he told me that he stopped me because he thought I may have been drinking.

Of course the truth of the matter was that the car had sort of a natural weaving pattern to it, and of course I was talking which contributed to that subtle wandering from one side of the lane to the other, but I hadn’t been drinking and he figured that out. So he let me get back in my car, but he didn’t let me go. He sat in his car for a few minutes and when he emerged he handed me a ticket for driving with a fictitious license plate.

It looked real to me, but apparently the credit manager at my father’s car business (who happened to be Officer Curtner’s uncle) had taken an unexpired tag off another car and put it on my Corvair. Well, I had nothing to do with that so I didn’t feel convicted of anything, but I did feel targeted by officer Curtner. I felt like he was looking for some reason to give me trouble, and it made me want to give him some trouble. Unfortunately the opportunity arose.

I was mowing my great aunt’s yard one afternoon and I could see officer Curtner parked across the street watching for speeders. I noticed that he was in a squad car that didn’t even have a license plate on it. As I rode my lawnmower home I became convinced that I should point this violation out to him, so when I got home I got on my bicycle and rode back down that same street. I stopped by his car, and when he rolled down the window I pointed out to him that he was driving a car without a license plate on it. He explained to me that it was a new car and that there was a legal time limit before a new car had to have a tag. I said O.K. in my most righteous tone, and I was about to leave when he held up this jacket and said, “Isn’t this yours. I think it fell off the back of your lawnmower.”

It was mine, and let me tell you it was terrible to have to admit it. I mean just when you think you know how bad someone is they go and do something nice. This was a terrible experience that has served me well. Just like that self-righteous lawyer that approached Jesus to test him, I discovered the type of trouble you get into when you underestimate the humanity of anyone.

It’s easy to think we share God’s perspective on ourselves and on other people, but that is a dangerous attitude. It’s easy to justify misbehavior toward people that we judge to be misguided, but this is not the way we should behave if we genuinely wish to be filled with a more eternal form of life.

Of course the good news is that it’s hard to maintain blanket judgments about ourselves or other people. By the grace of God we continue to discover the ways in which we are not as gracious as we can be and more judgmental than we are authorized to be. It doesn’t matter where we sit on the political spectrum, it’s easy to find ourselves in the company of this man who thought he knew all he needed to know and was doing all he needed to do – until he met Jesus.

This Jesus is something. He uplifts the lost, exasperates the found, and reminds us just how important it is to be kind – to everyone.

What To Take (elemental instructions from Jesus)
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

10After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. ²He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. ³Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. ⁴Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. ⁵Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ ⁶And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. ⁷Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. ⁸Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; ⁹cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ ¹⁰But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ¹¹‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’ ¹²I tell you, on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town. ¹³“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. ¹⁴But at the judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you. ¹⁵And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades. ¹⁶“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

¹⁷The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” ¹⁸He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. ¹⁹See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. ²⁰Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

There’s an interesting contrast between the nature of this teaching and the spirit of today. The national holiday we are celebrating today is of course called Independence Day, while the instruction Jesus gives to this group of people who were willing to be sent was to be intentionally dependent. So welcome to church, where we’re constantly reminded how counter our calling is to the logic of conventional wisdom.

If I leave my house without my Swiss Army knife in my pocket I feel vulnerable. I generally carry a tool bag in the back of my car, and I prefer boots to shoes. I like to feel protected and equipped, and while this is somewhat sensible it isn’t the logic Jesus was using when he sent the seventy out to share their experience of the Kingdom of God.

I’m not apologetic for liking to be well equipped. It can be a useful thing for me and people around me, but I recognize that my affection for feeling prepared can get in the way of something Jesus wanted us to understand. There was this occasion when Jesus wanted his followers to go out without much of anything. It isn’t that he didn’t want them to be useful, or that he wanted them to suffer, but he wanted them to be useful in a more profound sense. He wanted them to make themselves available for hospitality so that they could share the hospitality of Christ.

Certainly some people have made an art form of depending on other people. And there is this thing we call co-dependence which I guess is not a pretty thing, but there is a good side of dependency – it’s called relationship. Jesus had a radical plan for promoting relationships. He directed his disciples to go out without the means to support themselves. No money, no knapsack — not even any sandals. There is a sense in which Jesus equipped his disciples with vulnerability and need. It’s not exactly in line with military planning, but it wasn’t an unintentional maneuver. There was a strategy behind his thinking, but it isn’t a strategy that you will see put in place very often any more. We don’t like the feeling of being like lambs in the midst of wolves. I don’t think I’m alone with my desire to be able to take care of myself. Wisdom dictates to all of us to watch out for ourselves.

There was another angle to his strategy. In addition to sending the disciples out with need for other people, he also wanted his disciples to be clear about the nature of their power. They weren’t to operate from positions of power. Jesus was sending them out with something significant, but it wasn’t obviously valuable. All they had was a message. It was a message that could change the shape of their lives, but you wouldn’t know this just by looking. In other words, they had no authority to impose peace through strength — they were only able to offer peace by sharing what they knew about Jesus.

Jesus was not a name that impressed everyone, so Jesus prepared the disciples for the fact that his name wouldn’t open every door that they approached, but his name was all that they were to rely upon. Jesus was a name that had great power, but this wasn’t obvious to everyone. The name of Jesus would mean nothing to people who were oriented around the more visible forms of power, but it was a powerful name to people who were willing to trust these people who had nothing to offer but the name and message of Jesus.

Jesus has a really famous name now, so there are people who are attracted to the name of Jesus because they want to have more power, but the power of Jesus’ name was not a highly recognized thing when these seventy went out. The powerful things that happened during this expedition occurred when people responded to what the disciples had to say out of their desire for peace and not power, and this is how it continues to work.

This story is a little bit intimidating, because I don’t think our experience with the name of Jesus is a dramatic as the successes that are recorded in this story. I’ve never really returned from a missionary venture with the joy of having healed diseases and cast out demons with nothing but the use of Jesus’ name. This is beyond the realm of my experience.

But I don’t think we are to compare our results with their results. Jesus didn’t get excited about their accomplishments — Jesus was happy about their willingness to get involved in the sharing of the good news of God’s love and nearness. We aren’t judged by the result of our work. The important thing is for us to do what we can to share what we know about Jesus.

This story caused me to think about the people who attracted me to the church, and what it was about them that made me want to be a part of the church. I am sure that my attraction to the church began at a very early age, and it came through relationships I had with people who extended the grace of Christ in ways that are real but hard to document.

One of the early influences on me was the pastor of our church when I was very young. Brother John McCormick died a few years ago, but there are a lot of people who could tell you of vivid experiences they had with Bro. McCormick – and most of them would be positive. As I say, I was very young when he was the pastor in Wynne, so I don’t remember a thing that he ever said in a sermon, but I do remember how he made me feel when I was around him. He acted as if it was the greatest thing in the world for me to be in the church. He would say things to me that made me feel noticed and welcome. There was a graciousness within him that spoke to my heart.

I was probably ten years old when he left Wynne, and I didn’t see him much after that, but I spent a memorable evening with him many years later. It happened while I was on that bicycle ride I told you about a few weeks ago. I rode from Wynne to Fayetteville and back one summer while I was in college. In a previous sermon I told about my second day and night when I got bit by a dog near Mt. View.

I didn’t communicate with anyone in advance of my trip, but I sort of planned my route through places where I thought I knew people. I had decided I would stay in Harrison on the third night, and I had hoped to stay in the home of this girl that I had gotten to know at the Wesley Foundation in Fayetteville. I knew her father was a doctor, but I couldn’t find any doctors with her last name in the phone book, so I ended up sitting in the town square near dark racking my brain for people I might know in Harrison.

And I suddenly remembered that Bro. McCormick was the pastor of a church in Harrison, and it wasn’t hard to find his number. He wasn’t someone I had exactly kept up with, and I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but I called him, and he remembered me.

He was pretty surprised by the situation, but I don’t think the governor would have been treated with more hospitality than I was that night. I saw him a few times over the years after that, and every time he would recall in great detail the amount of food I ate that night, and that experience continues to remind me of how good it can be to be in this community that we call the church.

The church is a community that is founded upon radical dependence and hospitality. We are to be people who are to offer peace to anyone that we have the opportunity to get involved with. Grand miracles don’t happen all the time, but it is always a redeeming thing when people are motivated by the love of Jesus to be gracious and open to each other. I don’t guess I’ve ever seen Satan falling from the sky like lightening when we reach out in loving ways toward other people, but I don’t guess there is anything that feels better than making connections with other people that is based on this formula of need and hospitality.

I know I much prefer being in the role of provider than recipient, but in order to understand then nature of God’s power as it was revealed in Jesus I think it’s important for us to be the ones who are in need every now and then. It’s easy to want to be self-sufficient, but Jesus wants us to learn to be dependent upon God and to trust in the resourcefulness of God to address the most essential needs we have.

This is the genious of this movement we call the church. Jesus may have sent his followers out as lambs in the midst of wolves, but he was being as wise as a serpent when he did it. Jesus knew he would never change the world with a conventionally equipped army. He sent his troops out with nothing, and the revolution he began continues to change the shape of this world and the state of our hearts.

Struck By Truth

Luke 9:51-62
51When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 55But he turned and rebuked them. 56Then they went on to another village.
57As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

This is not a particularly endearing passage of scripture that we’re looking at this morning. These aren’t the words people generally choose to read at weddings, funerals, or other significant moments in life. These words are sort of low on comfort and assurance, and they aren’t particularly inspirational – but they aren’t insignificant. I guess there is some good news here for people who are the equivalent of those bad Samaritans who had no hospitality for Jesus as he journeyed toward Jerusalem. Jesus went against the recommendation of James and John and chose not to respond to their hard heartedness with a rain of fire.

But I don’t take much comfort in the fact that Jesus didn’t take great offense at outright hostility toward him. Most of my inhospitality toward him is much more subtle than outright rejection, and the passages that follow this story of accommodation to inhospitable behavior involve indictment of people who were guilty of more subtle forms of denunciation. The people Jesus judged to be unfit for the Kingdom of God had more ambivalence about the undertaking than actual antagonism for the way of Christ.

Jesus almost seemed more sympathetic toward the unwelcoming Samaritans than he did toward the people who came up to him and expressed affection for him. The first person who came up and said he wanted to follow him was welcomed with the promise of homelessness. The second person was invited by Jesus to follow him, but Jesus expressed disappointment that the man wanted to go home and follow through with the burial ritual of his father. And the third person who came up to Jesus was similarly chastised for wanting to give notice to his family that he would be heading out in a new direction.

Jesus was not exercising what we would call good southern hospitality in this passage, and frankly it sort of grates on my sensibilities. I’m inclined to act nice toward people even if I don’t necessarily appreciate what they’re doing. And I guess that’s just another difference between myself and Jesus. In fact what this passage does is expose a lot of difference between the way I tend to operate and the way Jesus functioned, and as I say, I don’t consider these to be particularly comforting words.

I definitely think that in our society we are more inclined to exercise subtle forms of rejection to Jesus than outright hostility. There is a lot of similarity between many of us and the characters we see in this passage who had trouble sorting out what is most essential. The demands and opportunities of this world are relentless. There is a lot of pressure on us to perform well, to act proper, and to establish positions for ourselves here on earth. I don’t even think we recognize the extent of those demands, how they define our priorities, and how they take precedence over the call of Christ.

I think we are often as oblivious as that unfortunate person who told Jesus he wanted to follow him after he went home to say farewell. We are so much more conscious of the protocols of this world than we are to divine opportunities. It’s so much easier to know what certain people expect of us than we are to know when we need to let go of standard behavior and to go with God.

This is a large challenge for us. And part of the challenge is that we can’t hardly tell the difference between the way the church portrays Christ and the way the world functions. I don’t know how an organization maintains the radical nature of Christ over the course of centuries, but in many ways the church has the same priorities as does secular society. The church wants to be powerful in the same way that corporations and political parties want to be powerful. In many ways our mother organization serves those familiar masters of fame and fortune, and it’s hard for us to not do the same. The expectations of this world are powerful. The things we generally want are not the things Jesus offered.

As Jesus very clearly reveals in this passage, he was largely homeless, he had little concern for the way he was perceived, and there was no question about his allegiance. I don’t know about you, but I like my nice house, I care what others think of me, and I have variable priorities. It’s hard to know how to balance functioning in this world and following Christ. In many ways those agendas seem so divergent. It’s a tough balance, and I like to think God understands our human and American dilemma, but I also think it’s important to at least recognize our self-absorption every now and then. I had a little tutorial in this last week while we were in Boston.

Sharla and I had a really nice trip to Boston. I largely avoided most all of the spiritual disciplines recommended by Wesley without feeling spiritually traumatized by what you might call routine self-indulgence, but there was one night that got to me.

Through my uncle Jack, and his daughter Whitney, who is married to Jay who was a friend to Stacey who is married to Larry who is connected to the Red Sox, Sharla and I got tickets to a Red Sox baseball game. Now this was more exciting to me than it was to Sharla, but she agreed to go along, and our instruction was to retrieve our tickets from the VIP Will Call window. I’m not sure why, but we were asked by more than one person if we were sure we were looking for the VIP Will Call window, but we were taken to the window and our tickets were there.

So we take the tickets and it turned out that our seats were inside a club section of the stadium. We found our seats and they were really nice. We weren’t sure how to get a hot-dog inside the restaurant that we walked through to get to our seats, so we actually went down to the main level and bought a hot dog, but we made it back to our seats and other people had begun filling in the section. We were then handed a menu by a man who would turn out to be our waiter, and after we ordered a bowl of clam chowder and something to drink I handed the man my credit card and he responded by saying no, the concessions were paid for in our seats.

And let me tell you, this was no small deal. Just for a little perspective on the economics of the situation, you can buy a six-pack of anything for the price of one beer in Fenway Park. So here we were, in prime seats in this beautiful ballpark, a waiter who will bring us whatever we want and the bill was going to someone we didn’t know. It was a nice setup. I took this picture and sent it to my cousin with the complaint that I was about 2’ off from the center of home plate, but that things were pretty well.

I never had been very clear on who had provided our seats, but as we spoke to the man sitting next to us we came to find out that Larry was in fact one of the owners of the Red Sox. Let me say, it felt pretty heady to be sitting where we were, and I was living large. We didn’t go without anything we wanted that night, and I was telling our neighbors more than they ever wanted to know about life in Arkansas.

Things got really interesting near the end of the 8th inning when Larry Lucchino himself appeared and sat down to my left. Well I assure you I was doing my best to make sure the President and CEO of the Boston Red Sox had the right impression of me. Not that I was succeeding at my objective, but I was doing all I could to make sure he knew how clever a United Methodist minister from Arkansas could be when all of a sudden I saw him make a desperate dive to his left as a baseball came flying toward his forehead.

I was so focused on what I was wanting him to know about me and what I thought I had been paying no attention to the game, and I never saw the foul ball coming our way. It struck him right above his right eye, and within moments he had been whisked away by some people who knew who he was and had seen what had happened. He hadn’t lost consciousness from the blow, and someone thought he had been able to slightly deflect it with his hand, but I’m telling you that ball came in with some force.

And it really let the air out of my ball. If anything, I felt like I had been a source of distraction for him, and what had been feeling like a really wonderful time had become a pretty ugly situation. I wasn’t exactly responsible, but it left me feeling pretty bad. On one level it hurt my ego because I felt like I had failed to be the hero. I wish I had seen the ball coming and been able to reach out and snag the incoming baseball. In reality I’ve got such slow reflexes that never would have happened if you had told me in advance that it was coming, but my ego was somewhat wounded for my failure to do something remarkable for a very important person.

Which brings up the other painful reality of the evening. The abrupt end of our delightful evening brought into focus the extent to which I loved the feeling of being next to someone who was somebody. It was a big thing for me to be enjoying the hospitality of this man who was a high level executive with one of the premier baseball teams in the world. It was like being in the presence of royalty, and it didn’t end with me being knighted, which I suppose is what I was wanting to happen on some level. I had this overwhelming desire to be well regarded by this person who occupies such a significant position, and while the evening could have ended in a less painful manner for him, it probably was destined to end poorly for me.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to enjoy the fruits of this world. In fact I don’t think there’s any virtue in avoiding delightful experiences, but this world is incredibly seductive, and it’s easy to think that the most important thing is to become important in the way that we generally measure importance in this world. I know it’s easy for me to want to have a high level position in an incredible organization and to spend my time associating with other significant people.

And sometimes I forget that this is the very thing Jesus offers when he asks us to follow him. We don’t always see it, but we are in the presence of royalty, we are invited to abide with Christ in the Kingdom of God, and I’m not sure how to find better company than that. It’s hard to keep both hands on this plow, and it’s not fun to recognize the ways in which we’ve let go and are looking back, but by the grace of God we get struck by the truth every now and then. It’s always good to see who we are and what we’re doing – even if it isn’t a pleasant sight because it’s always good to be reminded of where it is we will find that peace that passes all understanding the kind of joy that endures when the ballgame is over.

Look Who Came To Dinner?
Luke 7:36 – 8:3

It’s always good to go to Annual Conference with low expectations for what I consider to be progressive action, and my low expectations are usually fulfilled. In fact I usually come home feeling pretty depressed. Of course that’s partially due to the physical and emotional fatigue I feel from trying to have high quality conversation with a bunch of people I see about once a year. Just trying to call people by name without glancing at their nametag is exhausting for me. And there’s the time I spend time catching up with people who’s names I know well but don’t get to see often. For me, Annual Conference generally means I stay up late, I get up early, and I stay awake by attempting to write clever text messages to my friends about the less than clever reporting that goes on during the day.

But I came home with a strange sense of hope this year. It could be that had come home and slept in my own bed two out of the three nights, but I think it had to do with something that actually happened during our conference.

This morning’s scripture reading relates well to the dynamics of an annual meeting of a large religious body. This passage speaks to the tension that exists between institutional maintenance of proper policy and the uncontainable presence of God that was incarnate in Jesus and at work in the life of this woman who was labeled as a sinner. This is an old and possibly essential tension. It seems like a worthy endeavor for a religious community to establish standards and policies and to define proper order. Without such an attempt to create definition for a body of believers it would be easy to loose connection with the past and the wisdom of those who have gone before us.

I don’t regret that we religious people seek to be organized and methodical and to maintain tradition. It seems to me that the alternative would be chaos and disconnection on a profound level. I actually like being part of a body that has some rigidity to it, it’s sort of like having a framework of bones for our flesh. I like having a skeleton. It may be fine to be a slug or jellyfish or other life form without a rigid structure, but I’m grateful for the opportunities that bones allow.

So I don’t have contempt for the religious body that gives me employment and allows me the opportunity to promote and practice and talk about things that I consider to be of utmost importance. I cherish the sense of connection I feel when we come together from all over the state and beyond to celebrate and remember. It felt really good to me to see our banner in the midst of all the other banners in the procession of our opening worship service. We are part of something larger than ourselves, and that is what I experience to some extent when we come together for Annual Conference.

But that’s not all that I feel when I go to Annual Conference. As essential as I know the organization to be, it is a horrible creature in many ways. As surely as our framework maintains essential teachings and provides opportunities for essential work to be done, it also preserves unholy traditions, it values order more than creativity, and it often functions with a heavy hand. It’s a frightening body in many ways, and it has a tendency to hand out more judgment than grace.

I dare say the trip to Annual Conference is about as relaxing as an evening at Simon the Pharisee’s house when Jesus is coming to dinner. That just doesn’t sound like a good time for anyone who had any sense of the conflict that existed between how Judaism functioned at the time and how dysfunctional Jesus sensed that to be. Fortunately there was this woman who seemed to know nothing other than gratitude for Jesus, and she turned what could have been a bad time for everyone into an opportunity for God to be glorified. This didn’t really happen in a manner that Simon immediately appreciated, but who knows, that might have become an evening he grew to value.

None of us change our minds easily, but sometimes things happen that cause us to see others, ourselves, and our God in a whole new way. It’s rare, but by the grace of God it happens. This happened for me at Annual Conference this year.

It’s not easy to explain what happened without taking a long time to explain a lot of background dynamics, but here’s the rough sketch. A pastor denied membership in a church to a man he knew to be homosexual for that very reason. Someone brought charges against the pastor and it went to the United Methodist version of the Supreme Court which is called The Judicial Council. The Judicial Council upheld the pastor’s action in what has become known as Decision 1032.

The United Methodist Church meets every 4 years at what is called General Conference, and this is where various changes to our rules and order take place. The last General Conference was in 2008, and one thing that happened was that a word was changed in a sentence in regard to church membership. A phrase that once read, “any person in good standing in another denomination may be admitted into the United Methodist Church” was changed to read, “any person in good standing in another denomination shall be admitted into the United Methodist Church”.

So the proponents of equality for homosexual people, namely the Reconciling Ministry Network, put together a resolution that called for the Judicial Council to revisit their decision in light of this change in the Book of Discipline. So one of our church members, Harold Hughes, submitted this resolution to be considered by our Annual Conference, and he happened to have the resolution at a MFSA meeting which is what you might call a liberal caucus group, and a number of us became cosigners of the resolution.

OK, so resolutions are debated and voted on near the end of Annual Conference, and this is one of the only really live moments of the three day event. And it’s very controlled debate. Whenever a resolution is presented there are to be three arguments in favor of the resolution, three arguments against it, and then a vote.

I knew Harold was going to present the Resolution, but I didn’t know who else was going to speak in favor of it – you never really know. It depends on who is standing at a microphone and who the Bishop recognizes. I knew there would be plenty of people lined up to speak against it, but I figured since my name was on the resolution I should be prepared to speak to it, and I was prepared. Which is no small thing — it’s a pretty intimidating body to address.

There was a break just prior to the debate, and Harold and I generated a bit of a strategy. He was going to primarily argue that there was a technical conflict between Decision 1032 and a word in the Book of Discipline, and I was going to argue that the decision represented bad policy, that pastor’s shouldn’t be gatekeepers for membership. A friend came up from another church and said she had heard there was some organized resistance to the resolution. I told her it wasn’t like we expected the vote to go our way – we just wanted to make a good stand.

So when the time came, Harold was on his way to the microphone but this highly conservative man made it there first and began a speech that wasn’t easy to follow, but by the time he finished it was clear that he was opposed to the resolution. The Bishop then apologized to Harold for not allowing him to present the resolution before there was an argument. Harold went on to make his case, and he made a good presentation. He said he might be the only gay man in the building but he was determined to keep the United Methodist Church true to it’s claim to have open hearts, open doors, and open minds. He did point out the technical problem with the decision, but he didn’t hide the fact that this decision had been used to discriminate against a person who was openly homosexual.

So I was all geared up to give what I assure you was a remarkable speech, but I didn’t get to do because another pastor was recognized at another microphone, and he called for the question to be voted on. His motion carried, and there I was all geared up for battle and someone called off the war. I was really frustrated and I went to the microphone and declared my sense of frustration in a rather bungling manner, at which time I was invited by the bishop to sit down.

So at that moment I was frustrated, I felt like an idiot for expressing my frustration in a remarkably inarticulate fashion, and I assumed the resolution was about to be soundly defeated, but when he called for the vote the nays didn’t clearly have it. He had us raise our hands and it still looked to close to call, so Bishop Crutchfield had us stand, and to my amazement the resolution passed. I couldn’t believe it. I had experienced a roller-coaster ride of emotion.

It’s the first time I ever witnessed a vote at the Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church that went in favor of the gay man. It’s probably good I didn’t get to give my speech. It was a powerful experience for me and I assume it was for Harold and Carole as well. It felt like the majority of people had literally stood up for a good cause, and as surprising as this sounds, this is not normal. This is not a gathering of people who are known for striking bold positions, but they did last Wednesday morning.

A really nice post-script to this event happened for me Friday when I ran into the man who had pulled the plug on our debate just prior to my speech. I don’t know him well, but I had always had good feelings toward him prior to that moment. I wasn’t happy with him and I wasn’t glad to run into him, but he came up to me and began making small talk. We were both cordial, and I was about to leave when told me he was sorry he had put an end to the debate last Wednesday. It was a truly gracious act on his part, and I told him I appreciated what he had just said to me. I left that conversation with an even greater sense of appreciation for my connection to this conference.

I guess the point of all of this for me is that the church is an incredibly flawed organization. I know the United Methodist Church as it exists in Arkansas is an incredibly stodgy body that rarely exercises anything that feels like bold action to me, but I felt like it took a step in that direction last Wednesday. I’m not raising my expectations too high, but I was moved by what happened last Wednesday and last Friday.

This business of religion is tricky. It’s not easy to get a bunch of people moving in the right direction. What is easy is for those of us who claim to love God and follow Jesus is to think that it’s enough to make the claim, but every once in while someone like the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar shows us what it looks like to actually express love for God and affection for Jesus.

I like to think Harold’s resolution gave us the opportunity to make such an expression last Wednesday. It wasn’t too costly on anyone’s behalf to cast a vote in the direction of inclusiveness, but I don’t think anyone would have predicted that outcome. It leaves me feeling that we actually have some flesh on the bones of our structure, and thanks be to God every once in while someone rubs some of that costly ointment on our feet.