The Voice of Truth

Well, yesterday I got hearing aids. I’ve had a hearing problem for much of my life due to encephalitis as a child. For years I have compensated well because one ear did well with high tones and the other with low ones. But, alas, age creeps up and after going to three specialists, here I am with both ears amplified, and the world is very different.

This morning I went for my usual one hour prayer walk and heard things I’ve never heard, like the interstate traffic, Ft. Jackson’s bugle, and the birds. I thought I was in Hitchcock’s movie, “The Birds.” Above the cacophony were crows with their distinctive “caw, caw!” It was overwhelming. I’m learning when to take them out, like when I go walking, even though I heard a car coming well ahead of the danger of being run over. You know they say it’s not the first car that gets you; it’s the second one that you didn’t hear. I’ll risk it.

Trying to position a phone at the right angle and distance next to my ear is weird, to say the least. So I’ll use my better ear and take the hearing aid out of that ear. Now I can hear everything my secretary says, the toilet flushing is like Niagara Falls, and all of a sudden I can hear the refrigerator, the squirrel scurrying over the roof, and water pipes creaking and moaning. It’s a new world and I didn’t know how much I was missing!

My fear is whether or not too much hearing ability will cause me to miss God’s “still, small voice.” As we are about to go into our intensive week of clergy appointment-making, it will be wonderful to catch all the names and nuances without wearing myself out reading lips and faces ad infinitum but, who knows, maybe it’s being a blessing not to hear some things so I can tune into God alone. Having the world I’ve been missing come in loud and clear may actually prove to be distracting.

Don’t get me wrong. I am thrilled to hear again, but my brain has to relearn what the world sounds like. That’s exciting, but I don’t want to forget the voice that hasn’t changed and never will!

Same Seasons Same Reasons

Someone once said that God’s incarnation in Jesus was just as the Apostle John phrased it in his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and theologians have been trying to explain it away ever since. If Christmas is beyond the ability of human language to explain, then Lent and Easter are totally beyond us: How could God-in-the-Flesh suffer, die, and return to life? Our feeble attempts to explain the unexplainable detract from the Christ’s poignant Passion and the miracle of his resurrection.

About Easter, St. Francis said, “Listen, my child, each year at Easter I used to watch Christ’s resurrection. All the faithful would gather around His tomb and weep, weep inconsolably, beating on the ground to make it open. And behold! In the midst of our lamentations the tombstone crumbled to pieces and Christ sprang from the earth and ascended to heaven, smiling at us and waving a white banner. There was only one year I did not see Him resurrected. That year a theologian of consequence, a graduate of the University of Bologna, came to us. He mounted the pulpit in church and began to elucidate the Resurrection for hours on end. He explained and explained until our heads began to swim; and that year the tombstone did not crumble, and, I swear to you, no one saw the Resurrection.”

Therefore, let’s leave Lent and Easter as they are: the most marvelous mystery imaginable. It is beyond our comprehension that God suffers with us and that death can be conquered, that evil can be overcome, that justice can roll down like a river, and that peace will someday reign. But, we believe in spite of our grief, our frustration, our lack of empirical evidence, and the gnawing fear in our gut that faith is but a sham.

Jim Harnish, a pastor friend from the Florida Annual Conference told the story of a little boy who was, “not exactly happy about going to church on Easter Sunday morning. His new shoes were too tight, his tie pinched his neck and the weather was just too beautiful to be cooped up inside ... As he sulked in the back seat, his parents heard him mutter: ‘I don't know why we have to go to church on Easter, anyway; they keep telling the same old story and it always comes out the same in the end.’”

This reminds me of a book I read recently about the Battle of Gettysburg. It is a revisionist history of the battle by Newt Gingrich, of all people. Author Harry Turtledove has other revisionist histories of the Civil War that are also interesting, but what made Gingrich’s Gettysburg so fascinating is that General Robert E. Lee acts decisively and wins. That’s a switch for any Southerner who has visited this site of such abject defeat. I have a love-hate relationship with visiting Gettysburg. I had ancestors who fought there, and I know they left defeated and broken. My Great-grandfather, Daniel Byrd McClendon was there and then a year later on July 9, 1864, 25 miles down the road at Monocacy Junction outside of Frederick, Maryland, he was shot in the back of the head and captured, treated by Union doctors, and then survived a Union Prison before making his way back home. He went through abject loss in the battles of Gettysburg and Monocacy, plus the ruin of the South after the war.

Nevertheless, no matter how many times I visit both battle sites I know the outcome. I know what happens and I am still drawn back to those hallowed grounds. Sure, it’s easy to know how things turned out in both battles. There are a lot more Yankee monuments than Southern ones at both places because the winners usually have more reason and more money to do such things. Nevertheless, even though I know how Gettysburg and Monocacy always come out, the trek is worth it. Both battles were pivotal in my personal and our national narrative. By the way, Monocacy is known as the “Battle that Saved Washington, D.C.”

Similarly, I keep coming back to church for more of the same at Lent and Easter. The message, though always the same, is one that I need to hear, some years more so than others. This is one of those years. I have a lot on my mind. I’m tired and weary with the weighty issues that face our district churches and our denomination. Our family has been through so much since last year’s Lent and Easter, too. Cindy’s mother’s illness and death were and continue to be cause for reflection for us all. So I desperately need this Lent and Easter this year. These are days that are the penultimate hinges in history, cosmically and personally. Thank God it always ends the same. That’s a sameness that I can bank on year after year, day after day, and minute after minute, and I am grateful.

"Stained Glass Ceiling Unfair to Clergywomen"

I have been traveling to all the churches in the Columbia district that are anticipating clergy moves. Unfortunately, even in this day and age, I continue to hear gender bias and the dreaded phrase, “Some of our people won’t accept a woman as their pastor.” The church has long caused clergywomen to hit the “stained glass ceiling” of serving smaller parishes with lower salaries. As a justice issue, we should all agree that equal work should result in equal pay.

The church hasn’t always been this way. In the early church, women earned positions of prominence. During Jesus’ life it was primarily the largesse of working or wealthy women that provided the support that Jesus and the disciples needed (Matthew 27:55-56; Luke 8:2-3). Women were the first to hear the news of the resurrection. Women were there at the prayer session in the Upper Room that led to the birth of the church at Pentecost. Phoebe was a Deacon in the church at Cenchrea that Paul greeted in Romans 16:1 and the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist prophesied/preached (Acts 21:8). And where would the church be without Mary, the mother of Christ? Paul sums up the equality of Christian community in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It was also Paul who reminded St. Timothy of the source of his faith, “which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice,” and, how “from infancy you have known the holy scriptures (2 Timothy 1:5; 3:15).”

Therefore, if women were so indispensable at the beginning of the church, how can we imagine women being left out today? Unfortunately, the early church acceptance of women dissipated all too rapidly into an enculturated male-dominated entity. We have sadly experienced 2000 years of allowing the secular world shape the sacred. All the more reason to celebrate, rather than disparage the influence of women in the church. If it weren’t for the faith of my mother, grandmother, wonderful female Sunday School teachers and mentors (I never had a male teacher in grade school or at church), my faith would have either been nonexistent or desperately inadequate. Women are the core-supporters of many churches. United Methodist Women are invaluable as leaders in ministry and mission. I thank God for what they do in the Columbia District, the Annual Conference, and General church!

We need more women leaders (men, too, for that matter). Thank goodness the United Methodist Church has long supported the call of women into ordained ministry. Still, however, clergywomen are a minority and there are those who wish to keep it that way. Here’s my response to churches that don’t want a female pastor, “Get over it!”

Gender issues and discrimination should be a dead issue in every profession. We have made great strides, but there is room for growth. In 1888 there were only 5 laywomen and no clergywomen at the United Methodist General Conference. After approximately 90 years of almost no representation, in 1976 there were 10 clergywomen and 290 laywomen out of 1000 delegates at General Conference. In 1992, it was 81 clergywomen and 303 laywomen out of 1000. In 1996, it was 107 and 328 respectively. In 2000 the numbers were 112 clergywomen and 212 laywomen. In 2008, of the 996 delegates, 148 were clergywomen and 220 were laywomen. Forty percent of the total delegates were female. The church certainly has more than 40% women despite the number of those elected. It seems that the gospel hasn’t caught up with us yet in the church. The secular world has laws and changing attitudes in its favor, but we have something even greater - God’s Spirit! The Church should be the leader, as it was in the beginning, in women’s rights!

Core Principles of the UMC - MD4C

Many of you know that I'm on the Worldwide UMC Study Committee. There are 20 of us who are trying to discern the direction and shape of our denomination across the world. We are progressing with our work by beginning with a very important question: What are the core principles of the United Methodist Church?

I can think of many such as connectionalism, the constitutive principles of conference and general superintendency, personal & social holiness - sanctification in personal life and justice ministries in the world, evangelical witness (Making disciples for Jesus Christ/MD4C), Wesley's Scripture Way of Salvation (Stages of Grace), the Quadrilateral as a means of doing theology, hymnody as a vehicle for doctrine, itenerancy and sent ministry, our Doctrinal Standards, the General Rules, minimum standards for credentialing clergy, accountability by local churches and clergy to our covenant community, inclusivity, gender equality, proportional representation, and multiculturalism. I know there are more core principles, but these are the ones that jump out at me.

The question posed to us that is also EXTREMELY important surrounds the reason we're working on our ecclesiology. You may remember that this study committee arose from the constitutional amendments that were put before each annual conference over the past year. Those amendments would create one or more (Judicial Decision 1100) US regional conferences. The votes have not been certified by the Council of Bishops and won't be until their May 2010 meeting. The last numbers that I heard were that they were failing by a huge majority.

There are those on the left (However you define such labels) who would love for the US to have the ability to adapt the Book of Discipline (Par. 543.7) as the Central Conferences outside the US do. The primary goal as stated by several members of our committee is so that a separate US regional conference would be able to change its position on self-avowed practicing homosexuals. Conservatives don't mind the shift to regionalism for a much different reason: money. Right now the areas outside the US pay very little into apportioned general church funds; only a sliding scale amount into the Episcopal Fund. While conservatives would love to keep African votes on human sexuality, the economic downturn has made the price too steep. Unfortunately the same argument works even in the US. There are some from the US Jurisdictions that are larger who are tired of paying the freight for jurisdictions that are declining. Either way, and I KNOW that what I'm saying is overly simplistic, the rationales for moving away from our connectional polity are driven either by sexuality or money, AND THOSE ARE TERRIBLE REASONS TO CHANGE OUR ECCLESIOLOGY.

It seems to me that it would be more simple to change Par. 543.7 and be more clear about what is adaptable and what isn't, and call all central conferences "jurisdictions." I don't want us to lose the non-negotiables of what I think are our denominational hallmarks/core principles at the expense of rearranging the deck chairs on the UMC Titanic, creating regional conferences that are antithetical to Wesley's "The World is my Parish." The bigger questions about all of this are "Why are we doing this? What is our vision why this will enhance the missional effectiveness of the UMC?" Duh?

But as quick as I am to pooh-pooh the whole effort, I have to admit how complex this is. Sure, we don't need a US-centric hierarchy or focus; but I ask the question: Would we still legitimately be UNITED Methodists if we allowed too many regional permutations of who we are? What is unalterable and what is adaptable? What are our core principles that should remain intact. Help me out, weigh in!

I'm Headed to Hallmark!

St. Valentine’s Day is this coming Sunday. I hope all the love-birds out there are ready for the big event. St. Valentine has been purported to be the patron saint of lovers for centuries. Pope Gelasius in 496 A.D. set aside February 14 to honor St. Valentine. However, the history behind the actual person and his actions is cloudy at best. Some say he was a priest who secretly married couples during the reign of Roman emperor Claudius II. Claudius had outlawed marriage so that he could conscript more single men for his army. Supposedly after Valentine’s arrest he sent notes to Christians that were signed, “From your Valentine.” There are stories of his officiating at his jailer’s daughter’s wedding, too. According to tradition Valentine was beheaded by the emperor on February 14, 269.

What makes all this so interesting is that February 14 is the same day that had been dedicated to Roman love lotteries for over 800 years. Love lotteries were a Roman matchmaking scheme whereby eligible singles in towns and villages drew names of the opposite sex so that they could be paired for a specified time period. These love lotteries were held on the day before February 15, which is, of course, the 14th, the day dedicated to the Roman god Lupercus, so that couples could be matched. I guess they didn’t need eHarmony.com.

Needless to say 800 years of a coupling custom was hard to undo even when the empire became mostly Christian. After all, love is what makes the world go round. Therefore, whether there was ever a guy named Valentine who sent love notes or not is immaterial to the greater worship of love. So, conveniently, Valentine, or the story of Valentine, was canonized and made a saint so that Christians could usurp yet another pagan holiday and turn it into something good.

Ironically, the suspicious origins of Valentine’s Day caused the Roman Catholic Church to drop it as an official Feast Day in 1969. In reversal of the church’s co-opting of a Roman mating ritual, our contemporary pop culture has completely bought into the original intent of February 14 – a day with an emphasis on Lupercalian tokens of love. The irony is that what was pagan-turned Christian has now been co-opted by the candy makers and greeting card companies, plus a host of other suppliers. So we’re not sure if it’s love that makes the world go round or money.
Valentine’s customs through the so-called Christian centuries have been celebrated in a variety of ways. In the Middle Ages, for instance, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their Valentines would be. They wore these names on their sleeves for a week. It’s where we get our notion about people “wearing their hearts on their sleeve,” meaning that it’s easy for other people to know how they’re feeling.

Here’s how I feel about Valentine’s Day, saint or not. I’m all for showering our true loves and loved ones with expressions of affection. It never hurts to let people know that they are appreciated, valued, and loved. As a matter of fact, it’s time for the church to take Valentine’s Day back from the pagans. When it comes to love we don’t need to prop up some semi-historical figure like Valentine when we can do better. There’s no better example of love than Jesus. Let’s love people like Jesus and chocolates will be in order year-round!

Killing the Giants Against the Church

I'm at the Southeastern Jurisdiction DS Consultation and the leadership has been from the Turner Institute at Vanderbilt. It has been very thought provoking. Dr. Doug Meeks suggested this morning that our denomination, Christendom in general, and us as individual Christians have been overwhelmed by the "Giants in the Land" of Libertarianism, Utilitarianism, and Communitarianism.

All three thrive on a promise of false security by playing on our fear of death and guilt. Libertarians and Tea Partyists view everything as a property matter and it's MINE, not yours and certainly not the government's. I see this in the UMC and local churches and individual Christians as a silo mentality that is micro-congregationalism and anti apportionments; who devalue connectionalism and the view that I think is key: "Together We Can Do More!" General agencies are also libertarian in their turf protection. Utilitarianism focuses on public over private property and has great faith in governments and institutions to deliver us. It's works-righteousness and leaves out sin and evil. Communitarians are believers in the tribe or clan's ability to save us. No wonder that many of our church's are tight-knit clubs/villages that won't welcome a new idea or any risk-taking.

The Gospel is risk-taking and Jesus offends. The narrative of the Gospel promises real security through the resurrection message and grace. We cannot save ourselves by our human machinations as either Libertarians, Utilitarians, or Communitarians. The Gospel offers Jesus to a going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-world in a radically different way than the culture's panaceas. The source of our salvation is from God to us via the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection.

Our problem as a church, from my perspective, is having laity who are either libertarians who watch Fox or are Communitarians who want their church to be their homogeneous clan chapel; and clergy who are Utilitarians who are hooked on CNN or MSNBC and believe the notion that we are so innately good (not by the grace of God) that we can save ourselves and the world: be good, be good, be good (the essence of most children's sermons). Jesus' uniqueness and Christology are left out and resulting worship is a humanistic dull elegy not a resurrection experience.

Where have I been? All three, but I want to be an Easter person and trust Jesus to save the cosmos. He is the only giant in this farcical landscape of wannabe's.

Groundhog Day

The movie "Groundhog Day" is one of my favorites. I can't remember how many times I've seen it. It is intriguing and funny. It has action, romance, and ends well - all key ingredients for me. The idea of "Love-Deja Vu" is fascinating. The notion that Bill Murray's character can't manipulate or fake love is at the heart of the plot line. He doesn't get to move on to the next day until he truly loves Andie McDowell's character.

I wish it were so for us, at least for me - that I have to get it right before I can move on. Maybe the secret for me is whether I MAKE it right so I can move on. Too often I let things slide, go unsaid, get through the day and carry the same baggage to the next because I haven't resolved the junk from one day to the next.

I think the Bible has something to say about each day having enough trouble of it's own, and not letting the sun go down on your anger. Both of which seem to say to me to live in the present, get it right, and tomorrow will take care of itself.

There is more pondering to be done about tomorrow's real Groundhog Day and the movie, but I think the message to me is that love doesn't give up until it is sheer love, not manipulation or masquerade. We are blessed, not doomed, to repeat each day so that in the end we become who we can be, not for ourselves, but for someone else.

So here I am again receiving God's great gift of grace - another chance. I'm better than okay with that!