The Way Forward: Worship

(A sermon for Sunday, January 31, 2010. Note: this is the first of a six-part series on "The Way Forward" in which I am helping First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald plot a course for our future ministry.)

Scripture: Psalm 150

I have suggested that the way forward for the First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald can be successfully navigated as we define ourselves as follows: “The fellowship of believers gathered as the First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald will live out its identity by worshiping God, by following Jesus, and by being formed by Scripture.”

As we move along through these next few weeks I hope it will be made clear that the three components of that statement really can’t be separated—worshiping God, following Jesus, and being formed by Scripture fit together and feed into one another; after all, the Christian life is a holistic life. At the same time, though, the ordering of those the three components is intentional and important.

So why do we put “worshiping God” first?

It is because the church is all about God as God is revealed to us in his Son Jesus Christ and so everything that we are and everything that we do is based on the one basic fact that God is worthy of our praise and devotion. Indeed, the basic meaning of the Old English word from which our word “worship” derives is to attribute worth to someone. So when we say that we worship God we are in fact saying that God is worthy of our praise.

Why? The answers to that question are legion, but the primary answer is that God is worthy of our praise because God has, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, privileged us to have a personal relationship with God that gives us real life, that gives us eternal life. God is the primary fact of the universe, certainly, but more to the point, God is the primary fact of our lives. God is the Lord of the universe but also the Lord of our lives. God is our all in all, the one without whom we cannot do, the one who gives meaning to everything. We are because God is and without God we are not. How, then, can we help but praise God?

God is the focus of all our worship because God is the ground of all our worship. Many have spoken of worship as involving the revelation of God and the human response to that revelation. As Catherine LaCugna has said, “One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we would find on our own would not be GOD” [Catherine M. LaCugna, cited in Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead, 1998), p. 109]. We can worship God only because he has revealed himself to us. We can’t find God on our own; we can only be found by God.

And God has revealed himself to be our Savior. The Hebrews worshipped God on the other side of the sea because they had just been saved by God. The women at the tomb fell down and worshiped the resurrected Jesus because they knew that in his resurrection something wonderful had happened and that something wonderful was salvation and eternal life. In all of the events of our lives, including our experiences of corporate worship, we are responding to God in accordance to God’s self-revelation. We are constantly responding with our lives and with our praise to God in God’s fullness.

God is the instigator of our worship. As Psalm 51 puts it, “O Lord, open my lips; and my mouth shall show forth thy praise” (v. 15 KJV). It all begins with God; it is all about God.

If worship is going to be focused on God’s revelation to us then our worship must necessarily give much attention to the Bible. As many have noted, the supposed allegiance of Protestants, including Baptists, to the Bible is not reflected in the small amount of time given in the service to the reading of Scripture. Some would say, “Well, we give half the service to preaching that is (hopefully) based on the Bible.” Yes, but there is no substitute for reading and hearing the Word for yourself. The synagogue practice, from which the early church drew most of its worship practices, was to read significant passages of Scripture. We learn about God through his word and our services should be structured around our biblical texts for the day.

If worship is God’s revelation to us and our response to that revelation, then it follows that worship is a dialogue. Dialogue is by definition a conversation between two or more people. As one worship manual puts it, “In Christian worship we respond from the depths of our being to God’s mighty acts, particularly to the act of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation in Jesus Christ. Thus worship is a dialogue between God and God’s people” [John E. Skoglund and Nancy E. Hall, A Manual of Worship, new ed. (Valley Forge: Judson, 1993), p. xvii]. God shares God’s self with us and we share ourselves with God.

Have you ever wondered why we call this activity a worship “service”? The German word for worship (Gottesdienst) means “God’s service and our service to God.” Our word “service” is from a Latin word meaning to serve as a slave. As James White said, the German word “reflects a God who ‘made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave’ (Phil. 2:7) and our service to such a God” [James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), p. 23]. Christ emptied himself and took the form of a slave; in worship we serve God by emptying ourselves and giving ourselves to him.

Thus our active participation in worship is so important. Worship is not a spectator sport; as Soren Kierkegaard said so many years ago and as has been repeated by many, in worship the audience is God, the actors are the congregation, and the prompters/directors are the worship leaders. Our worship is to be active, not passive. That’s one reason that congregational singing is so crucial. We open our mouths and let our service to God ring out in our singing. Is your singing imperfect? So is all your service—celebrate what God has enabled you to do!

The importance of active worship is one of the reasons that it is important to include congregational readings of various kinds in our worship services. Baptists worship in the Free Church tradition; that is, we have no set forms of worship prescribed for us [Cf. Skoglund and Hall, Manual, p. xiii]. We are free to worship as we please. Our tradition is to worship God with a simple dignity that is God-focused and Scripture-based. Still, participating in responsive readings and litanies and confessions is a good way for us all to be involved actively in worship.

For example, we have begun each Sunday to speak together a brief and basic affirmation of our faith. That affirmation reminds us of the central reality on which our lives as Christians are based; it is the reason we are here. Such an affirmation also contributes to our dialogue with God. As Franklin Segler, who taught for many years at Southwestern Seminary, said, “Such an affirmation of faith may help to keep worship alive in dialogue with the living God” [M. Segler, Christian Worship: Its Theology and Practice (Nashville: Broadman, 1967), p. 159]. But the main point I am making is that our worship should be active and not passive. We are to be actively engaged in the entire service: sing when we sing, pray when we pray, read when we read, proclaim when we proclaim, give when we give, respond when we respond.

The dialogue of worship is first and foremost a dialogue between God and us. But it is also a dialogue between those who are worshiping. Referring to Ephesians 5:19, Milburn Price said, “Though the divine-human dialogue is central to an understanding of worship, there is another ‘conversation’ within the context of worship…. In writing to the church at Ephesus, Paul gave an admonition to ‘speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph 5:19, NIV)” [Gary A. Furr and Milburn Price, The Dialogue of Worship: Creating Space for Revelation and Response (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1998), p. 3]. So in our singing and speaking together we are encouraging one another in our faith, hope, love, and service. The praise of God is the main thing worship is about but a side effect of the worship of God is that we acknowledge our oneness in Christ and we encourage one another in our pilgrimages.

You may have realized along the way that everything I have said about worship this morning could be said in general about our lives as Christians. There’s a reason for that. Our entire lives are lives of worship because our entire lives are lives of service. Worship is not an occasional activity; worship is a lifestyle. We are the saved people of God who, because of his sacrificial service to us, now offer our sacrificial service to him. Our life “in here” and our life “out there” are of one piece. In all of it we are responding to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. In all of it we are praising God. In all of it we are growing more and more into the image of God.

As Christians we want to immerse ourselves in the ways of God and in the life of Christ and we are taught of both of them by Scripture. I will have more to say about it next week but let me say today that this is why we are building what we do around the Christian year and the seasons of that year such as Advent, Lent, Holy Week, and Pentecost. By intentionally following the Christian calendar in our worship we intentionally immerse ourselves in the ways of God, in the life of Christ, and in the teachings of Scripture.

The approach to worship that we are taking also speaks to why our emphasis will be on the week-to-week, day-to-day worship of God—that is exactly the schedule on which we follow and serve and live.

But it all begins with the worship of God because of who God is and what God has done and how God has revealed God’s self to us. Thanks be to God!

From Imprecation to Intercession

(A sermon based on Psalm 137, Matthew 5:43-48 & Luke 23:32-34 for Sunday, January 17, 2009)

It matters that we Christians read the Bible. It also matters how we Christians read the Bible. It furthermore matters—it matters very much—that for us Christians Jesus is Lord. Put all of that together, and we are left with this: it matters that when we read the Bible we read it with the mindset that Jesus is Lord of our reading and Lord of the living that results from our reading. It is vital, in other words, that we Christians read our Bibles and live our lives through the Jesus lens—through the lens of the teachings, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus.

The importance of such reading was underscored this week in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti when a prominent television minister opined that the earthquake—indeed, the entire difficult history of the nation of Haiti—can be directly connected to long-ago supposed sin of those people.

Now, it is true that choices matter; it is true that actions have consequences; it is true that God judges sin. It is also true that the Bible contains stories about God destroying places and the people in them as judgment for their sins.

It is also true that Haiti sits right on top the fault where the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates meet.

It is finally true, though, that our Bibles teach us that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and that “in Christ God was reconciling the world unto himself” and “in (the Son) the fullness of God was pleased to dwell”—it is finally true, in short, that Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God, which means both that all of Scripture is fulfilled in him and that all of Scripture is to interpreted through him.

So we must take very seriously what Jesus said in Luke 13:

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did’ (vv. 1-5).

Jesus said that to ask about the guilt of people who suffered relative to that of people who didn’t was to ask an inappropriate question. He went on to say that we are all at risk because of our sins, the implication of which is that we are better served to consider and deal with the sins of which we know we are guilty rather than to spend time speculating about the sins of which someone else may be guilty.

And then there is John 9: “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (vv. 1-3). Again, Jesus says that questions of fault or blame are inappropriate; what matters, as the subsequent words of Jesus reveal, is that we who follow Jesus function as conduits of the works of God—God’s grace and mercy and love—in light of the situation in which people find themselves. Our place is not to assign blame—our task is to bring the mercy and grace of God to bear in the lives of hurting people.

You see, how we read the Bible—whether we read it as Christians, as people for whom Jesus is Lord—makes a difference not only in our understanding but in our attitudes, our beliefs, and our lifestyles.

Let’s consider a matter that might hit a little closer to home for most if not all of us: the matter of dealing with those who have hurt us. The question is, are we entitled to hold a grudge and to desire retribution or must we forgive?

The Bible has passages in it that seem to condone holding grudges and desiring retribution; an excellent example is Psalm 137, a psalm written after the Babylonian Exile that looked back on that terrible experience at a time when the scars were still much in evidence. The psalm is sad throughout and beautiful up to a point, that point being when it turns from the passion of lament (“By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion”) and the promise of remembrance (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!”) to a plea for vengeance (“O daughter Babylon…. Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!”) that culminates in a gross and cruel imprecation or curse (“Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”).

Grossness and cruelty notwithstanding, I should note some things about this imprecation. First, it is a plea for justice and justice is a necessary thing in society; the psalm asks only that what was done to the victims be done to the victimizers. Second, it expresses very real human reactions and emotions of which we are all capable and that are understandable; the expressed desire for revenge comes from the anger that is associated with grief [cf. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., A Theological Introduction to the Book of Psalms (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), p. 118] and all of us have been there, are there, or will be there—I can remember times of grief in my life when it would have been a great relief to have been able to express no-holds-barred anger against somebody other than myself and God.

So how do we read such a text through the Jesus Lens, through the words, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus who is our Lord and who is the living Word and who is the ultimate revelation of God?

Well, I’ll go ahead and put it out there: I don’t believe for a nanosecond that Jesus would have thought or said “Yay for those who dash against the rock the heads of the children of the priests who set me up and of the Romans who nailed me up!” It is not enough, though, to say that Jesus invalidates this imprecation, this curse—indeed, it is not even right to make that claim because Jesus fulfills the Scripture, he does not invalidate it.

The examples that we have in the Gospels of Jesus’ interpretations of Scripture show that he favored the ideal over the concession—that Jesus stressed the ideal will of God for humans in their relationships rather than the concessions that God has made because of our sin—in other words, Jesus in his life and words and death opened and paved and pointed toward the way that God ultimately desires to deal with people and that he would have us deal with each other.

In Psalm 137, the speakers do not ask for the opportunity to take vengeance themselves; they turn their desire for vengeance over to God—a desire that was justifiable, mind you—which raises the question of what would God ultimately do with it? Clinton McCann has suggested in his discussion of both Psalms 109 and 137, using the life of Elie Wiesel as an example, that the honest expression of grief and rage can ultimately lead to compassion for humanity and, he continued,

It is clear that a process of remembrance that develops beyond grief and anger to embrace compassion is based ultimately on forgiveness, as is God’s compassion. If we are correct in assuming that vengeance submitted to God results eventually in forgiveness and compassion, then we must conclude also that Psalms 109 and 137 point finally to the cross. (McCann, p. 120)

The cross of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection ultimately show us what God has done and will do with vengeance and grief and rage—God takes them onto God’s self and overcomes and redeems them. That is what God has done, is doing, and will do.

And God, because the Kingdom of God is present among us, because the life of Christ is living in us, because the Holy Spirit is dwelling among us, is through and in us overcoming and redeeming grief and rage and vengeance.

So we must take very, very seriously the twin facts that Jesus asked forgiveness for those who were crucifying him and that he taught us to pray for our enemies.

The forgiveness of those who have hurt us, then, is the ideal toward which God in Christ is moving us. Jesus told us to forgive and Jesus forgave—so we forgive. Jesus prayed for his enemies and told us to pray for our enemies—so we pray for our enemies. It’s a lifelong journey and it’s not easy but this way from vengeance to forgiveness, this way from imprecation to intercession—it is the way that reading—and living—through the Jesus Lens causes us to go.

But, you might say, Jesus was Jesus, and you would be right.

Still there is Stephen who prayed for forgiveness for the men who were stoning him. And there is Corrie Ten Boom who, a couple of years after the end of World War II, encountered and forgave a Nazi guard from the camp where she watched her sister die. And there are so many others.

We need one more.

Haiti’s Fault

The reason that a massive earthquake struck Haiti this week is found in the geological characteristics of the area in which it is located and not in a legend about a deal with the devil made by one of the leaders in the Haitians’ drive to rid themselves of French rule over 200 years ago.

As explained in a story on NPR, Haiti is situated on the boundary of two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Caribbean plate; as the Caribbean plate moves about a quarter inch per year in relation to the North American plate, stress builds up until it is finally released, which causes an earthquake. Since this was the first major quake in that area in around 200 years, a great deal of energy was released.

If you need an explanation, then, for this awful event that claimed, by the most recent Red Cross estimate that I have seen, some 50,000 lives, it can be found in the facts of nature.

Pat Robertson offered a somewhat different explanation on a 700 Club telecast when he said,

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal.

Robertson went on to say that Haiti has been cursed ever since. I won’t bother to comment (much) on the historical inaccuracy of Robertson’s statement (the French ruler at the time was Napoleon Bonaparte, not Napoleon III, although I guess Robertson covered his bases somewhat with “or whatever”), his assigning of the possible actions of one group at one time to the Haitian people as a whole (although there are accounts of a voodoo ceremony that gave impetus to the rebellion), and his rather shocking willingness to give the devil the credit for giving the Haitians liberty from the French.

If we follow Robertson’s logic, then given the way that the American settlers of European descent treated the Native Americans, we’d better watch out; I mean, there was Manifest Destiny and all, but you can make a pretty good case for doing devilish things in God’s name as being worthy of a mighty serious curse.

Now, to be fair, as a damage control spokesperson for Robertson tried to explain, Robertson did not directly attribute the earthquake to the “curse,” but he sure did give the impression that the quake was the latest manifestation of the evil that the Haitians brought on themselves through their “deal with the devil.”

Still, when a disaster strikes, should one of a Christian’s first responses be to try in any way to lay the blame on the people whom the disaster has struck?

I know what some of you are thinking: the Bible contains stories about God destroying places and the people in them as judgment of their sins. That is correct. I am not saying that there are not consequences for actions and I am not saying that God is not interested in justice; I am saying, though, that we, being fallible and frail, are all too capable of putting two and two together and coming up with five when it comes to such matters.

Where were we, after all, when God laid the foundation of the earth, not to mention when the Haitians won their freedom from the French?

This much I do know: I know that my Bible teaches me that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and that “in Christ God was reconciling the world unto himself” and “in (the Son) the fullness of God was pleased to dwell”—I know, in short, that Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God, which means both that all of Scripture is fulfilled in him and that all of Scripture is to be interpreted through him.

So I must take very seriously passages like the one found in Luke 13:

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did’ (vv. 1-5).

Jesus said that to ask about the guilt of people who suffered relative to that of people who didn’t was to ask an inappropriate question. He went on to say that we are all at risk because of our sins, the implication of which is that we are each better served to consider and deal with the sins of which we know we are guilty rather than to spend time speculating about the sins of which someone else may be guilty.

And then there is John 9: “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (vv. 1-3). Again, Jesus says that questions of fault or blame are inappropriate; what matters, as the subsequent words of Jesus reveal, is that we who follow Jesus function as conduits of the works of God—God’s grace and mercy and love—in light of the situation in which people find themselves.

In other words, when a tragedy occurs, our place is not to judge sin or to assign blame; our place is to deal with our own sins and to extend grace, love, mercy, and help to the victims of tragedy.

So there you have it: we can say with absolute certainty that the nation of Haiti was struck by an earthquake because it sits on a fault; but, based on the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, we have no cause or call or justification to say that it was because its people were at fault.

So if we think we do—well, then, about whose fault do we really need to be concerned?

It’s a Small World

That’s the name of the most terrifying ride in any amusement park anywhere.

It’s also become a modern day truism as communication and information technology have made it easy to know what’s happening on the other side of the world—so easy, in fact, that most of us spend more time checking out what’s happening on the other side of the world than we do checking on the folks who live on the other side of the street and more time virtually hob-knobbing with our Facebook “friends” than we do actually relating to the people who live around us.

I have met the enemy and he is me.

Still, occasionally I am reminded of the wonder of real live human relationships; last weekend offered several such reminders.

Debra and I travelled from our home in South Georgia to the great frozen north—Atlanta—where I was scheduled to lead a Bible study at the Northeast Baptist Church; I regaled the good folks there with my research into a fascinating approach to biblical hermeneutics that I call “The Jesus Lens.” The reason that I was invited to Northeast—for a second time, as a matter of fact—is that my friend, colleague, and fellow traveler Brian Wright is their pastor.

Before he was any of those things, though, he was my academic advisee during my period as a Professor of Religion at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. My first encounter with Brian was before he matriculated to the university; we had a preliminary advising session in which he claims I tried to convince him to take Calculus when he was barely Algebra-ready. We compromised on pre-Calculus, a course taught by Dr. Mike Pinter, a superb Professor of Mathematics, and it turned out to be a good experience.

Brian was one of the more astute advisees I ever had; he resisted enrolling in one of my classes until his senior year—I retaliated by requiring him and the unfortunate other students who were caught up in our little drama to read Walter Brueggemann’s then just-published Theology of the Old Testament which Brian says took him weeks to understand and which I still don’t understand.

After graduating from Belmont, Brian went to McAfee School of Theology and, just before graduating with his M.Div., became pastor of Northeast, where he has done a good job at guiding the congregation through a lot of transition; I am very proud of the ministry that he is doing and leading the church to do. In a few months he’ll be “Dr. Wright” when he receives a D.Min. from McAfee—again, I’m proud.

Debra and I thoroughly enjoyed our time with Brian and the good folks of his church.

On Saturday night, we enjoyed dinner with two old friends, Randy and Jennie Berry. Our story is too long to tell in full but I’ll share some pieces of it.

Randy and I grew up together in Barnesville, Georgia; we went to the same schools and we attended the same church. We were for two years roommates at Mercer University. I think it’s fair to say—he’ll read this and he can argue with it if he wants—that we were good friends because we were at the same time very alike and very different. Jennie Coppage was a Mercer classmate and was for a time the roommate of Debra Kay Johnson and when we finished Mercer we all married each other—Debra married me and Jennie married Randy, to be specific; that was in 1978, 32 long years ago.

The simplest way to describe what happened next is that our families went their own ways—Randy and Jennie serving in churches and in business and in education in Florida and Georgia and having three children, Debra and I going off to seminary for a long time and then being blown about by my various vocational winds, all of which had to do with preaching/teaching/pastoring, and having our two children. We saw them at Randy’s father’s funeral and at my father’s funeral, which occurred in the Spring of 1979, just months after we married and within a few weeks of each other, and then a handful of times over the next few years but it had been more than twenty years since we had been together.

The dinner last Saturday was the kind of reunion where it felt like we had just seen each other yesterday but that about 141 million things had happened in the meantime. It was really fun.

I am happy to report that Jennie and Debra still look great; Mercer friends who have not seen them since college days would immediately recognize them. Randy and I, on the other hand, would have to introduce ourselves and then show identification and perhaps contribute a DNA sample. See for yourself:



When I looked at the Northeast Baptist worship bulletin on Sunday morning, I noticed that a man named Chuck Abbott was offering a prayer and that a woman named Karen Abbott was reading Scripture. I wondered if they were related and thought nothing further of it. After my mesmerizing presentation during the Sunday School hour, a fellow who turned out to be Chuck Abbott walked up to me and said, “You said you are from Barnesville; do you know any Abbotts?” to which I replied, “Know any? I’m half Abbott myself” (explanation: my mother was an Abbott).

It turns out that, the best we could figure, Chuck’s something like my fourth or fifth cousin; I think that my grandfather and his great-grandfather were brothers—at least that was the theory we arrived at before my headache set in. Karen is his wife and later we met their glorious daughter—and my fifth or sixth cousin—Kirsten. They went to lunch with us and it was good to get to know them.

Like I said, it’s a small world.

And I’m happy to say that I’m a Facebook friend with Brian, Jennie, and Chuck.

If Debra, Randy, and Karen will get with the program, maybe we can keep these relationships going!

Introducing Prayer 365

Regular readers of On the Jericho Road are aware that I have since the turn of the year been publishing a daily prayer; this is part of a commitment by me to place greater emphasis on my prayer life and to lead the church I pastor to place greater emphasis on our prayer life.

Rather than continue to post those prayers at On the Jericho Road I decided to start a new blog dedicated solely to them.

That blog is named Prayer 365 and is now up and running.

If you would like to read the daily prayers, please visit Prayer 365; they will no longer be published here.

I will continue to post sermons and other reflections here at On the Jericho Road.

Thanks for reading.

Prayer for Thursday, January 7, 2010

Many words will come my way today,
some from talking people,
some from printed pages,
some from glowing screens,
some from my own wandering mind and thundering imagination.

Grant me the gift of discernment, O Lord,
that I may know the good from the bad,
the true from the false,
the helpful from the hurtful,
the constructive from the destructive,
the benevolent from the self-serving,
the useful from the manipulative—

the information from the noise.

Above all, O Lord, grant me the discernment to recognize those words that are the best words—the ones that are your words—wherever I may hear them.

Amen.

A Prayer for Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Hundreds of choices I will make today, O Lord--
--some I will make after much thought, others I will make without a thought;
--some will seem large, others will seem small;
--some will appear significant, others will appear insignificant.

But they will all matter, because in each case I could choose another way--maybe even many other ways--and another way chosen could lead to a different outcome.

I do not ask that I always make the right choice or the best choice for experience and history and honesty tell me that I will not, that I cannot.

I only ask that by your Spirit that is in me that my motivations--the forces that drive my choices--be the same as those that drove those of the Lord Jesus, that I be compelled by grace and love and mercy and obedience to choose what I choose this day.

Amen.

A Prayer for Tuesday, December 5, 2010

Guide my steps, O Lord, this day.

Sometimes I will step backwards, trying to retreat or to escape, driven back by guilt or pushed back by fear or compelled back by failure or nudged back by fatigue, perhaps fleeing the light that reveals more of the way forward than I want to accept or that reveals more of me than I want to face, maybe preferring the darkness to the light--when I step backwards, O Lord, guide my steps, whether or not I can see my way clearly.

Sometimes I will stand still, trying to comprehend where I am, attempting to understand how I got there, perhaps unsure which way to go, maybe afraid to go any way at all, at times needing the courage to step into the darkness, at other times needing the strength to step into the light--when I stand still, O Lord, guide my steps, whether or not I can see my way clearly.

Sometimes I will move forward, trying to find my way, groping in the darkness, trying to follow the light that at times seems so very dim, or trying to avoid the light that at times seems so very bright--when I move forward, O Lord, guide my steps, whether or not I can see my way clearly.

Guide my steps, O Lord, this day.

Amen.

A Prayer for Monday, January 4, 2010

I will need grace today, O Lord--

Grace to remember that I am your beloved child;
Grace to remember that they are your beloved children.

Grace to know that all things work together;
Grace to know that it is not my place to know how.

Grace to be forgiven;
Grace to forgive.

Grace to trust;
Grace to be trustworthy.

Grace to know that nothing matters;
Grace to know that everything matters.

Grace to be of earth and of heaven;
Grace to live so that at the end of the day it matters little in which I find myself.

Amen.

©2010 Michael L. Ruffin

I'm On the Inside; On Which Side Are You?

(A sermon based on Matthew 2:1-12 & Ephesians 3:1-12 for Epiphany Sunday 2010)

I’d like to state my church credentials for you: I was born to Christian parents who went to church every time the doors were opened, I was taken to church for the first time when I was ten days old, I was baptized when I was seven, I was licensed to preach when I was fifteen, I was ordained to the ministry when I was seventeen, I have three degrees from two Baptist schools, I have pastored six Baptist churches, and I have taught full-time for one Baptist college and part-time for five Baptist colleges and one Catholic college.

So, with apologies to Paul, I think it’s fair to say that if you think you have reason to be confident in your “churchiness”—I have more! As Walter Brennan used to say on the television show The Guns of Will Sonnett, “No brag—just fact.”

Yes, when it comes to church, when it comes to the things of God, when it comes to knowing what it’s all about, I am the consummate insider. A lot of you have excellent credentials, too, so you are also insiders—you’ve been in it a long time and so you know what it’s about.

Here’s the thing, though: being an insider doesn’t mean that you will necessarily recognize what God is doing when God does it and, on the other hand, being an outsider doesn’t mean that you will necessarily fail to recognize what God is doing when God does it. We don’t want to miss the amazing things that God is doing, but if we are not careful we can let a sense of privilege and an attitude of smugness get in the way.

I have great concern for myself in this regard; let me share that concern with you through a lyric effort to summarize what happened when the Magi followed the star.

The Magi came to Jerusalem to worship the King
because they figured, naturally, that the capital was where the King would be.

There they found a king, one who called himself “great,”
but he was not the one they were looking for because, after all, he wasn’t a baby.

The great one deigned to help them out,
so he called for the theologians, the learned ones, the holy men, the ones who knew the Scripture.

“Bethlehem,” they said, “is the place to find the one you seek,”
“for it says so right there in the book of the prophet Micah.”

One of them pointed a long, trembling finger at the place in the scroll,
the line that he and they had studied so long and knew so well.

The Magi, being polished and refined and polite, thanked the scribes,
then collected their things and organized their caravan and set out.

They set out to find the baby, to find the king, so that they could worship him,
because that is what they had set out to do so many months and miles ago.

The scribes—the theologians, the learned ones, the holy men, the ones who knew the Scripture, did not go,
and I do not understand why they did not leave everything and run to him.

Were they so content with their knowledge, with their books, with their theories,
that they felt no need to go to him?

Did they really think that knowing what the Book said about him was enough,
that knowing him was not required?

Could they not come down from their place to kneel, could they not close their books to worship,
that they might move from theory to practice?

How might things have been different, how might they have been changed,
if they had accompanied the Magi, if they had seen the baby?

If they had gone to the baby and worshiped him, if they had seen his flesh and heard his cries,
would they have seen people differently—would they have seen him in them?

And then there is the thing that really troubles me, the dread that weighs on me—
I am a scribe.

It can be so dangerous to be on the inside, to be an expert, to be situated, to be settled, and to have such an investment in the way that things are and in the way that you think that things are supposed to be. Really, now, why did some of the scribes not go with the Magi to see the Child? They had studied the Scriptures and so they knew that the prophets looked forward to the coming of the Messiah—they even knew where he was to be born—and yet when these Magi show up to say that the Child has been born none of the scribes—not one of them, mind you—goes along with them, and Bethlehem was closer to Jerusalem than Ocilla is to Fitzgerald!

Is it possible that sometimes we are so busy and content with reading about Jesus and talking about Jesus and singing about Jesus that we miss Jesus?

We need to get our minds and our hearts and our lives around this most remarkable thing that God did in sending Jesus Christ into the world; God in Christ made salvation—participation in God’s people, citizenship in the Kingdom of God, living in eternal life—absolutely available to absolutely everyone on absolutely the same basis, namely, the grace of God. As Paul put it, “In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:5-6). The Magi—Persian astronomers, most likely—foreigners, Gentiles, outsiders, certainly—were the firstfruits, the sign and seal, of that new reality of which we are still trying to get hold today.

After all, we still have “Gentiles” today—the outsiders who, it seems to us, have no claim on or chance at what we have in Christ. After all, how easily and lazily we come to depend on our “insider” status to label us as bona fide believers.

Let’s not try to fool ourselves, though—we who have it made are the most likely ones to make a mess of it when it comes to detecting and pursuing and embracing the still surprising comings of Christ into our world, into our neighborhood, and into our church. And those on the outside—those who ought not see and believe, those who don’t know what we know, those who have not been privileged as we have been privileged—may just be the most likely to detect and to pursue and to embrace.

What a vexation it must have been for the kings, that the scribes who gave them the news they wanted remained quiet in Jerusalem! We are being mocked, the kings might have thought. For indeed what an atrocious self-contradiction that the scribes should have the knowledge and yet remain still. This is as bad as if a person knows all about Christ and his teachings, and his own life expresses the opposite. We are tempted to suppose that such a person wishes to fool us, unless we admit that he is only fooling himself. [Soren Kierkegaard, “Only a Rumor,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), p. 289]

Who are you trying to fool?

A Prayer for Epiphany Sunday 2010

Remind us that

The Wise Men thought they were coming to worship the son of Herod
but instead they found the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Son of Mary,
the one born to bring down the powerful from their thrones and to lift up the lowly,
to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich away empty.

Cause us to worship that One today--
not the son of Herod.
Cause us to be the sisters and brothers of that one today and all days--
not of the son of Herod.

Amen.

A Prayer for Saturday, January 2, 2010

Thank you, O Lord.

But thanks seem hardly enough when I owe it all to you.

It is easy to say "Thank you" and then to go on my way, thinking more of me than I do of you--or of others.

So overwhelm me--flood me--drown me--in gratitude, that I may lose myself in it, in you, and in others.

Sweep me this day from words of thanks into a lifestyle of gratitude.

Amen.

A Prayer for the First Day of 2010

As I look forward--

Align my plans with your purpose;

Transform my fears with your faithfulness;

Expand my view with your vision;

Dissolve my guilt with your grace;

and

Fill my poverty with your plenty

even as you

Replace my plenty with your poverty.

Amen.