September's Thoughts

FOR REFLECTION:
"TURNING ANXIETY INTO PRAYER"

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, writes the Philippians 4:6-7 scripture like this:

“Don't fret or worry.  Instead of worrying, pray.  Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.  Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.  It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life”

Paul's teaching “Don't fret or worry” seems unrealistic. 

Who among us has gone even one day without worrying about something? 

Over the past several months it seems we have been bombarded with bad news.  The news of floods, natural disasters, and unexpected deaths, along with the reality of rising gas prices, home foreclosures, and rising costs of basic commodities have elevated our anxiety levels.

I have learned that anxiety is contagious and that when we are driven by our anxiety, we tend to see the world differently.  We begin to make our decisions based upon the fear of the “lack of” and we tend to focus on needs, problems, and shortages rather than the great goodness of God.

Let's think about it for a moment. 

What do you do when you are worried about a loved one, your health, your financial security, some worthwhile project you are working on, a terrorist attack, or your own failures and shortcomings.  Paul reminds us to “Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.”  In other words, turn your anxiety into prayer.

May I remind you that the one place we do not have to be anxious is the church.  I know there are anxious times, but as Christians we are focused upon the covenant God who is with us, for us, and working for our good.  We are focused upon the Creator of the universe who provides for all our needs.  We are focused upon the God we can depend upon to provide for us and to see us through any point of crisis or anxiety. 

When we turn our anxiety into prayer, Paul writes, “Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. 

It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life” Now, let's turn our anxiety unto prayer. 

I am sure that each one of us has had a time in our lives when worrying led into much prayer and much faith, and through those times God has answered prayers, given us extra strength, and/or given us the answers that each one of us needed to grow stronger and closer to the Almighty God and Father.

I will share that in this congregation we have many different testimonies of God answering prayers and healings. Praise be to God!

I invite you to pray for whatever raises your anxiety level.  Remember Paul's words, “Don't fret or worry.  Instead of worrying, pray.  Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.  Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.  It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.”

O Mighty Father, I confess to you my anxieties in my life.  I place my anxiety in your hands.  If there is a certain action you want me to take in regard to any of these anxieties, please let me know.  I trust your leading, I am grateful for your goodness, and I offer myself to you.  In the blessed name of Jesus!  Thank you!  Amen.

October's Thoughts

A Very Long Walk: On the Development of A Spiritual Life
Luke 24:13-35

Many of us treat God like a water well that stays in one place.

We think we must keep coming back to God to refill our buckets__ but the truth is God is with us wherever we go.

Those disciples on the road to Emmaus, thought they'd left God back in the tomb__ were they ever surprised!

But eventually they discovered the truth__ God had never left them__

In God's plan for us, as we move through life, we are continually growing and changing, becoming all that we were created to be, discovering who we are and what we are about. 

I like to think of life as a car trip with God.

God's driving, and we are like children in the back seat.  We keep asking, Hey, God, are we there yet? And God, in God's infinite patience, says, No, child, not yet.

We ask God that question when we are young. We there yet?

No, child, not yet.

We drive on a few more years, and we ask again. We there yet?

No, child, not yet.

We keep asking, all through our life__We there yet?

No, child, not yet.

Maybe, just maybe, we begin to learn that our walk of faith is not about getting (there), wherever there is… rather it is about the journey, and about how we share that journey___

Think about the walk you are on__think about the people with whom you have shared that walk, the people with whom you have shared your life. 

As a child we walk with our parents through early life. Then one day, our path separates from theirs. 

We begin to strike out on our own.  We walk with our best friends. We walk with our teachers. We walk with employers. We meet people, new people, and different people.

When we marry, we share our walk with the person we love.  When we have children, they walk with us, just as we walked with our parents.  Perhaps as our parents grow older, we bring them into our homes and we walk together again.

It is a long walk, our walk through life.  We share it with others, but it is our walk, and it will be different for each and every one of us.

But the one affirmation can make that is true for every long walk through life, is this: God is present in our walk.     

Sometimes, God's presence is easily recognized.

We think of those times: our baptisms, our conversions, and our confirmations, our rituals and rites of passage.  It is easy to see that God is with us in these moments.  Other times, though, we forget that that God is here with us.  We are as oblivious to God's presence as are the men in the scripture.

The two men were on a walk. They were going from Jerusalem to Emmaus. 

You have heard the story. They were talking about Jesus as they walked, when they meet a stranger along the road.  He joined them and they continued to discuss the scriptures and all that had happened in the weeks leading up to Easter.  They did not recognize the stranger until, at last, he broke bread with them, and Jesus was made known in the breaking of the bread.

Every one of us is on a road, a journey, and whether we realize it or not, we are walking that road with God, sharing the journey with Jesus. 

What a shame if we walk with our eyes shut and our minds closed to God's self-revelation! 

I can give you some hints: things I've discovered that help me remember that God is with me on my walk through life. 

Do you know that God walks with you? 

Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, we get so caught up in things that we do not see God in our midst but he is there. 

May God open our eyes and our hearts to see Him more clearly and to follow in His will each and everyday.

November Thoughts

Living in Holy Times: Hebrews 11:1-12:2

When I was growing up, we always watched 'The Waltons.' Now when I think back, I say to myself, 'Those were the days!' But then I start to wonder_which days, the Depression era in which the show was set, or the 70s when half of America shouted, 'Good night, John Boy!' as we went off to bed each night?

When it comes to living in holy times, there is no time like the present.

These are holy times?

How can that be when ours is a time filled with horrors and tragedies, with things like war and disease, terrorism, uncertain economies with job loss and the fear of economic collapse when we run out of oil.

Ours is a time with an ever-growing divide between rich and poor.

Our time is filled with a hardening of human culture, rudeness and a lack of courtesy and compassion for our fellow human beings.

Our time is marked by a massive movement resulting in the end of the extended family.

We see drug abuse, homelessness, and crime in every major city in our nation. Our families struggle with issues of changing cultural attitudes about sexuality, mental illness, education, and procreation.

Few families are not touched by things like mental illness, elder dementia, and teenage pregnancies. Surely, with all that we know to be wrong with our world, we dare not call our time a 'Holy time.'

When I was growing up, my parents would tell me that the world had changed since their day. 'The world has changed and life was better back in the seventies and eighties when I was growing up.'

Someday my kids will tell their kids that the good old days were back in the early 2000s.

And I'm sure my parents were lectured by my grandparents about how the world had changed for the worse and how things were so much better back when Teddy Roosevelt was president.

Take it back as many generations as you like, it has always been this way! Go all the way back! Go back and listen to Adam and Eve tell their children, 'Oh, if we could only go back to the good old days in the garden!'

I wonder if it is true that the world changes?

Oh sure, the particulars progress with progress.

But are we right to believe that our time and our place is not what it once was, that it is not as good, not as refined, not as holy as some other time and some other place?

That idea is called nostalgia_ the word came into general usage back in the 1700s, when nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition, basically understood as homesickness.

If we remove the lenses of nostalgia, we will soon realize that, though the details indeed change, the world has always been the world, and every generation and every place has known despair and hope, health and sickness, riches and poverty, war and peace, good and evil.

But there is no denying that there remains in our hearts a longing for a time or place where things are right, where all is pure, where sin is not.

That longing comes, I believe, from the fleeting glimpses of holiness that we have seen and experienced and imagined.

It comes from a seed God planted in our hearts when God first conceived us.

We long for a holy land, a holy time. Essentially, we long for God.

He gives to all God's children, in every age , the opportunity to be holy people.

God calls to us down through the ages, commanding, 'Be Ye Holy!' The scriptures are filled with the challenge:

December's Thoughts

Reflection for December 2008
Something like Scales: Acts 9:1-22

When I was young, about 11-13 years old, I used to sit in church on Sunday morning and wonder, "Why are all these people here?" 

At that age the sermons were a little bit dull to me, and I would keep myself occupied by counting the panes of glass in the windows, the number of tiles on the ceiling, or the number of times in a sermon that the pastor would say the word “Jesus.” 

But it was that question, "Why are all these people here?" It really got me to thinking about faith and about the church.  I looked around and I saw all these smart, successful people, and I began to watch them in the way they interacted with each other, the expressions on their faces as they prayed, as they listened to the sermons, as they sang the hymns.  And as I did, I began to understand that these people were there in that church, not because their mothers made them be there, but because they wanted to be there, because they were getting something vital out of the experience.

Because I remember being 13 years old, I try real hard to keep worship exciting, so that no one has to count the number of panes in the windows in our church, or the number of rows in the paneling behind the altar, or the number of times I say 'Jesus' in a sermon. 

And because I remember being 13 years old and asking myself the question, "Why are these people here," I try to never forget the potential the church has for being something vital in one's life.

The dramatic story of Paul's conversion along the Damascus Road is probably the best known story in the Acts of the Apostles, and certainly one of the best known stories of the Bible.  Perhaps it is too well known. The author Flannery O'Connor once said of Paul's conversion, in her typical Southern style, 'I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.'

There's just one problem__ the New Testament never mentions a horse! Yet that's the way most of us learn the story. Horse or no horse, this is a great story of conversion. 

What is it that Paul is getting into when he becomes a follower of Jesus Christ? What is it that any of us are getting ourselves into when we become followers of Jesus?

Paul was public enemy number one for the Christians, wasn't he?  According to Luke, Paul was 'breathing murderous threats against the disciples.'

He was not a nice guy.  But all of that changes in an instant when Paul is knocked to the ground, blinded by an unknown power, and humbled when he realizes that the power is the same Jesus whose followers he has been persecuting.

'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' cries out the voice that Paul hears. Imagine Paul's confusion when he receives the answer to his question: 'Who are you, Lord?'

'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.'

And so Paul sat in the darkness, waiting, for who knows what, but knowing in his heart that he could never be the same that everything had changed.

With this demonstration of God at work in his life, Paul knew that he could no longer go on persecuting the church, persecuting Jesus.  In the darkness came the realization that what Paul had once persecuted he now must become__ a follower of Jesus.

Paul probably thought that he was an expert on the young Christian church, yet he knew it only from the outside looking in. As he sat in his tortured darkness in Damascus, he must have wondered how he would be accepted and how he would ever fit in. 

It wouldn't be long before he would find out, for a man by the name of Ananias was on his way to Paul. It was Ananias' task to restore Paul's vision.

The story indicates that reluctantly, Ananias comes to Paul, reluctant because Paul's reputation preceded him.  But Ananias does as he is instructed by God and lays his hands on Paul.  As he does he says, 'Brother Saul, the Lord__Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here__has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.'   The Bible says that immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he could see again.

What was it that Paul saw when something like scales fell from his eyes? What did he see?  He saw the church , and he saw Jesus.

The church and Jesus are often one and the same. After Jesus ends his time on earth; after his life, his crucifixion, his resurrection; and after the Spirit comes upon his followers, the church begins to embody who Jesus is for all future generations. The church becomes the eyes and ears and voice of Jesus.  The church becomes the hands and the feet and the heart of Jesus.

So what was it that Paul saw, when the scales fell from his eyes, and he saw for the first time, the church as God intended him to see it? 

He saw a fellowship that was accepting. 

We all know that the church struggles with issues of acceptance.  Still, if the first century church can accept a man like Saul of Tarsus who stood by and watched approvingly as St. Stephen was stoned, then surely we today may be more accepting of those who we find to be different from ourselves.

So, when the scales fell from his eyes, Paul saw acceptance. He saw a fellowship of believers that was big enough to include him.

I've had people say to me in the past, 'I don't belong to the church because I don't believe in organized religion.'When I hear that, I laugh and say, 'Well, come on down to my church! We've never been organized!'

It is true that many people see the church as a bureaucracy, as an institution, and treat it with contempt and sarcasm, and at the very least indifference.  And, of course, in some ways the church is an institution, but not in the things that matter.

In the ways that matter, the church is people. 

An institution cannot pray. People pray. 

An institution cannot sing hymns. People sing. 

An institution cannot love people.  People love people.

The church is people, and it is personal. When the scales fell from Paul's eyes, he saw Ananias and Judas, not a building with a sign out front that read United Methodist Church of Damascus. The church, at its best, is people caring about other people. 

   
Sometimes, like Paul, we are blind to what a wonderful thing we have going on here in the church. Sometimes, scales cover our eyes and we do not see the church as a place that is open and accepting of people who are different from ourselves. Sometimes, we do not see a church that is really people first--program and buildings a distant second.