Many have heard this story told in different settings and with different characters involved, but I think it has meaning for today:

One morning, a woman was walking on a beach where hundreds of stranded starfish had been washed ashore during a storm the night before. She was picking up one starfish at a time and throwing it into back into the ocean. A man came upon the scene and was overwhelmed by the number of live starfish who would soon die. He saw her throwing a starfish back in the water, and he asked, “Why are you throwing them back? Can’t you see that there is no way to save them all? What difference does throwing one back make?”

At that, she picked up a starfish, threw it back in the water and said, “It makes a difference to that one.” At that, the man picked up a starfish and threw it in the water, and they continued on their journey now saving two starfish at a time.

And my point is that, while her effort seemed small, it was doubled by her sharing with another person who then joined her in her quest.

We are witnessing yet another General Conference caught in a quagmire debating whether to continue excluding homosexual persons (and by implication perhaps those with differing gender identities) from the mainstream of the church. By claiming that the lives of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are somehow incompatible with Christian teaching, I wonder if that exclusion itself might be what is most incompatible with the teaching of Jesus.

We are now raising a generation of young adults, teens and children for whom the reality of differing sexual orientations and gender identities is a part of life and who deem the church as irrelevant when we bog down in this debate. They do so because they themselves see this as something that doesn’t mesh with their image of a Jesus who went way beyond the boundaries without judgment to those who were excluded from the mainstream.

We are frantic. We see this huge mess lying on our shores. We are determined to clean it all up in one fell swoop … one General Conference, but this never seems to effect change as dramatically as we wish it would.

I heard a presentation this past Sunday that talked about using our political connections to effect change. Josh Houston, with Texas Impact, said something that really made sense. He said that we tend to worry so much about national elections where our influence is so greatly diminished, but that our local efforts tend to have both more impact and raise up those people who eventually serve us at county, state and federal levels. Based on typical voter turnout in local elections, when we vote, our one vote can count for thousands of people. His message was to think small on our impact, and we will begin to effect more change than we ever thought possible.

In the 24th chapter of Luke’s gospel, when Jesus authorized his disciples to continue his ministry, Luke tells us that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Then he taught them what was written about the Christ and that “a change of heart and life for the forgiveness of sins must be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Even Jesus said to start small in order to go large.

Jesus healed one person at a time, even when he was in a large group. The gospels tell us stories about Jesus encountering large crowds, but if you read closely, you realize that most of the stories told are either about his small following of disciples (both men and women who traveled with him) or his encounters with individuals along the way.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells us about the disciples as they encountered individuals. Paul began house churches. They were not cathedrals, by any stretch. They were small groups that led to the creation of other small groups. Many of them were underground churches during the time of persecution. Thousands were brought to faith, but it happened through individual relationships.

The interesting thing is that the notion of converting entire nations on a wholesale basis did not happen until after the Council of Nicaea in 325, and that was largely not for religious or faith-based reasons. Emperor Constantine needed to unite his empire, and Christianity had become the tool by which he would do so. Claiming the cause of Christ, people’s lives were in peril if they did NOT convert to Christianity.

In my mind, there is a distinct difference between Jesus and Constantine. Jesus was not about conversion … he was about transformation. Jesus was not about conformity … he was about relationship. And it all began from Jerusalem and moved outward!

In our own time, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was one who exhibited this practice so well. While she later influenced nations with her addresses and her fame as a Nobel Prize laureate, her ministry, from the beginning, was always focused on one person at a time. She founded the Missionaries of Charity, and her work has inspired thousands of others likewise to care for one person at a time.

So where does this lead us? For us to have the greatest impact on the church, it is vitally important to start with relationships and transformation. It is not a secular political process that involves debate, voting and pronouncements. It is a process of faithful following that brings us into conversation, relationship and acceptance of the other. Change comes with each single encounter and then broadens as those encounters lead to other encounters where love and respect are the norm for our conversations.

At Wellspring, we have instituted a series of holy conversations that are aimed at just such encounters. The model we have used is a model where we agree to a covenant of respect and listening to one another. It is a model where we can talk about our differences without debating one another. It is not about debate and conversion; rather, it is about conversation and transformation.

When we share the love of Jesus one person at a time, we create community. It is in that community that we live out our motto: “All are welcome! All are accepted!” And we always add: “All means all.” One precious soul at a time!

 

After worship recently, one of my members challenged me about something I said in the sermon. I had said that “our salvation is completely dependent upon what Christ has done for us and there is nothing we can do about it.” This concerned her because the bible has quite a bit to say about what we do as Christians, and it came off sounding like it is as easy as standing around with our hands in our pockets (my words, not hers). She told me that she is a disciplined person and that she believes we are called to lived disciplined lives. And that’s when I began to really think more deeply about this.

While I still proclaim emphatically that our salvation itself is not about anything that we do, she had a very good point. As a Methodist, I am very well steeped in what we know as The Discipline. That is what we call our law book for our denomination.

Discipline, however, is more than the legal prescriptions and parameters of our denomination … discipline is the way of life for those called Methodist. It is about acting in ways that help us experience our faith more fully, and it is about living into the life to which we are called as Christians. Ultimately, discipline for me functions as a way of putting myself directly in the pathway of grace … what we often call the “means of grace.”

Grace, you see, is essential to the people called Methodist. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, taught about three distinct types of grace: prevenient, justifying and sanctifying. Prevenient grace is where God is already in our lives before we even know it. It is God acting on our behalf even before we have experienced God personally. Justifying grace is that which I am proclaiming when I say that our salvation comes as a gift. It is when we are made right with God only by what God has done through Jesus and without regard for anything we have done.

Then there is sanctifying grace. That is the grace that transforms our lives to be reflections of Jesus, who himself, we believe, is a pure reflection of God. With sanctifying grace, it is simply not possible just to be our old selves without beginning to live more like this one whom we worship. To be sanctified is to be made holy, and as sanctified children of God, we are capable of reflecting Christ to our world in powerful ways.

But it is simply not possible to have such a profound experience of grace without putting ourselves in the way of grace. It is like saying that we want to experience cleanliness without ever putting ourselves in the water … it just isn’t going to happen.

And to put ourselves in the way of grace is to live a disciplined life … a life that includes things like holy communion, corporate and private worship, prayer, fasting, hospitality, mission, fellowship and a host of other activities that put us in touch with God.

I have served as spiritual director for the Walk to Emmaus on numerous occasions. (It is a 72-hour spiritual retreat that I am glad to share with anyone who is interested in knowing more about.) As the head spiritual director, I give a talk called The Means of Grace. In that talk, I explore with the pilgrims on the walk what it means to practice these means of grace. We talk about our sacraments (baptism and holy communion) and those things which are “sacramental” (holy actions) that enable us to experience the fullness of God’s grace. When I talk about the means of grace, I am talking about ways that we can intentionally put ourselves in the way of grace … in the water … in such a way that the grace of God is fully realized within us.

When I was a youth director many years ago, I would share a story that I think describes the effects of the means of grace very well. There was a small village in a distant land, and it was along the banks of a mighty river. Across the river was a mountain onto which time and nature had etched the outline of a face. A certain village elder began early in his life telling stories about the “Great Stone Face.” He would talk about the kindness and love this face represented. He would talk about how this face represented the best of humanity and how it shaped community. There were people who would travel miles to see this stone face, and the elder would sit with them on the cliff overlooking the river to the “stone face” mountain.

One day, a visitor to the village sat with the elder looking across the river when suddenly she spoke up to the rest of the people in the circle: “Do you see it? Look at the mountain and then look at the elder!” When the people looked, they saw it. The elder had the exact same visage of the face on the mountain … he was the one who practiced kindness and compassion … he himself represented the best of humanity and helped bring about the best in community. As he told the stories of the face on the mountain, he became the face on the mountain.

And that, friends, is what it means to get in the way of grace. When we live disciplined lives, we begin to show the face of Jesus to a world that desperately needs a savior. So my beloved friend is right … a disciplined life is important if we are effectively to share Christ with the world. What we do really is important!

Get in the way of grace, and your life will never be the same!

I have just one sermon. If you have listened to me preach more than a few times, you have probably figured out that sermon. It is encapsulated in the simple (often overused) motto: “Let go and let God.” Yes, it can be trite if we are not paying attention to what it means, and it can be devoid of Christian conduct if we do not fully appreciate the power of “letting go.”

It was many years ago that I came to understand the power of this phrase. I was serving in a large church with its many demands. I was spending all of my time chasing something that was, quite frankly, uncatchable. I was trying to find happiness and fulfillment by doing more … and more … and more. I was depressed and anxious.

It was during a series of conversations with someone who became for me a spiritual advisor of sorts (and she was someone who was very astute at diagnosing spiritual ailments) that I gained clarity. She looked at me one day and said, “You will never catch whatever it is that you are trying to catch. Even if you did catch it, it likely won’t bring you happiness or fulfillment or even a clear sense of identity. What is it you are trying to grasp so tightly anyway?”

I thought about it for a bit. I tried to talk about the fulfillment of my calling and career. I tried to talk about my feeling of self-worth and how this hard work will one day give me what I am looking for. For each of those explanations, she played what we came to call the “BS Card.” (Sorry, there is no clean or nice way to talk about that.) She told me exactly what she thought of my excuses.

She asked me again: “What you are trying to hold onto so tightly?”

And finally, I said, “God.”

That was when she offered me the best insight ever. “Your journey, my friend, isn’t about you getting your hands around God, but rather you figuring out how to let God get God’s hands around you.”

And she had me. She knew it, and I knew it. I was never going to get where I wanted to be by trying so hard to get my hands around God. My journey was forever changed when I stopped trying to get my hands around God and let God just get hold of me.

As I have gone farther on this journey, I have realized that “letting go and letting God” doesn’t mean it is a passive venture, by any means. As a matter of fact, it is an “active” letting go that finally puts us in the place where we can most effectively follow Jesus. Actively letting go means, among that other things, that:

• we are reminded that faith and trust are the same thing while belief is a whole different animal. Christians have long used belief as the litmus test for whether you belonged to this group or that group … whether you were suited for the glory of eternal life or for the throes of eternal damnation … whether you were validated as good or condemned as evil. Belief (getting our minds around some doctrine or theological statement) is about how we are divided and set apart; whereas, faith (trusting even without knowing why) is what offers everyone a place … a chance … true hope that we are beloved Children of God. We don’t enjoy citizenship in the beloved community by belief, but by faith.
• we are brought into holy relationships with God and one another. The commands to love God and one another are more about letting go than they are about taking hold. To love God is to empty ourselves and give ourselves wholly (heart, mind, soul and strength) to God, and it can’t happen without letting go of self. The same is true of love of neighbor: we can’t get there if we are clinging tightly to the stuff of our own lives. This is what fasting is really all about … emptying ourselves.
• we seek justice based on the notion that all of life is a gift and not a right. God has given this gift to us all, and when we let go of those things to which we feel we are entitled (to which we have a right) then we can live in holy relationship with one another. This means that we are free to pour ourselves out for others and seek their welfare … sometimes even above our own … when we love our neighbors as ourselves and make more room for God.
• we become better followers of Jesus, who really understood what it meant to be fully embraced by … be at one with … God.

Letting go is not easy. It is not for the faint of heart, and it certainly requires a lot more strength than holding on ever required of me. This is a story I told in a sermon recently, and I think it is relevant now:

Several years ago, I had a group of people who had studied a book on living the Christian life. The church we were in had its share of conflict, and there were people who were all holding onto their own beliefs and positions on just about every topic that ever came up.

After the study, the group decided they wanted to make tee shirts that made their thoughts clear. On the front of the shirt, it read: “It’s not about me!” When they turned around, on the back it read: “It’s not about you either!” Then lower on the back, the final statement read: “It’s about God.”

As we journey through our lives, may it be more about God and what God is doing with us. May your journey be a journey of “letting go and letting God.” When you finally realize you don’t have the strength to get your arms around God, let God take hold of you with the arms of grace. When that happens, you will find you are capable of some truly amazing things!

Happy Shrove Tuesday! It’s Mardi Gras, and everyone is getting ready to celebrate! What many people do not realize is that this day is considered holy. Shrove Tuesday … Fat Tuesday … whatever we want to call it is the day that we indulge ourselves of all the good stuff we will have to give up for Lent. It’s about feasting before the fasting. Ultimately, anyone who has ever truly fasted can tell you that feasting the day before is really not a good idea, and generally the stuff we feast on is stuff we really can do with less of anyway.

For us, Super Bowl Sunday was our Mardi Gras, of sorts. We pulled out all the stops with chips and dips … good stuff to eat and drink. Of course, there were only five adults and one two-year-old, but it didn’t matter. We feasted from afternoon until the end of the game.

But now Lent is here, and we are ready to give stuff up. Most American Christians really take Lent as kind of a restart on their New Year’s Resolutions. We think that maybe this is the time to give up stuff that makes us gain weight or that otherwise makes us unhealthy. Some use it as a spiritual endeavor to give up bad habits … letting God help them break the addiction or give up bad things. Nothing really wrong with those endeavors, but it really isn’t what the season is about, is it?

We are people who are so busy figuring out how to let go of those things we enjoy but that we know we should do without that we forget the real reason of this journey. It isn’t as much about giving up as it is about taking up. As Christians, we are called to take up The Way.

The earliest Christian movement wasn’t called a church. It wasn’t institutionalized. There were no doctrines or dogma that explained the intricacies of how God and Jesus related to each other. There were no ecclesial structures telling us who has authority and who doesn’t have authority. Such matters were decided in each community of people who were known as followers (not believers … followers). They didn’t go by fancy names like Wellspring or Holy Cross or Trinity, and there were no “First” Churches … they simply called themselves The Way.

They lived a radical life of communal sharing. They cared for one another. They declined to be involved in government or the military. They were subversive in that they clearly proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, which was their one common confession throughout all of the communities of followers. It was subversive in that their proclamation was that Jesus was Lord instead of Caesar, and it led to the persecution of the earliest followers.

So here I was planning to get ready for Easter in the usual fashion when a friend and leader in our church family handed me a book called The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus by Robin Meyers. George knows I get deeply invested in what I read, and he figured that this would be a good step to my own growth as a spiritual leader. (At least I hope that’s why he did it, because any other motive would have just been mean.) You see, what he doesn’t know is that this has caused me a great deal of heartburn and stress … not because Meyers is wrong, but precisely because he is right.

It is so easy to just give things up. As hard as it is to give up chocolate or carbs or cigarettes or liquor or fattening foods or meat or even whole meals for that matter, it is so much harder to take up The Way.

The Way of Jesus you see means that we give up ourselves entirely. We hand everything over to God that we might follow Jesus more closely. We take up mission and ministry in an intentional way that moves us toward engagement with people we might otherwise avoid.

So what would happen if, instead of just giving up Starbucks for Lent (yeah, that is a hard one for me), I took the money I spend there and committed it to providing job training for low income people who have no skills training? What would happen if, instead of buying that fancy dinner out, I decided that I could give that money to help build bridges between our family of faith and those whom we normally shut outside our doors? What would happen if, instead of going to that dinner out, the family went to work the evening at a homeless shelter or give back at The Caring Place or some other outreach ministry in our community? Following is a whole lot harder than just believing. Even doing these things don’t take us nearly as far as Robin Meyers would push us in taking up The Way.

Lent suddenly just got serious for me. It was so much easier when I just had to give stuff up to be a good believer, but then I realize that Jesus didn’t ask me just to believe.  Jesus asked me to follow. There are times when, as a believer, I just get in the way. When I follow … when I follow Jesus … it is then that I begin to take up The Way.

May your journey in Lent be that of giving up on “just believing” and then taking up The Way as a follower of Jesus Christ!

Lately, I have been feeling unmoored. A ship is moored when it is safely anchored … when it is attached to the dock by mooring lines or when it is held in place by one or more anchors on the ocean floor. Being unmoored isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When a ship sets sail, there is a time to unmoor it and let it go on its journey.

Then there is the unmooring that is more like being adrift. When the ship is passively being moved and tossed by the waves and currents … when there is no one at the helm … then being unmoored is not good.

Matthew and Luke both tell a story about a time when Jesus and his disciples were in a boat and crossing over the lake known sometimes as the Sea of Galilee. While they were sailing across, Jesus fell asleep in the bow of the boat. Then gale force winds begins to sweep down on the lake and the boat was filling with water. In that moment the disciples knew they were unmoored. They began to panic to the point that they themselves had become spiritually unmoored … filled with nothing but fear.

They awoke Jesus shouting, “We are going to drown! Don’t you care that we are drowning?” At that Jesus got up, gave orders to the winds and the waves. The storm died down and calm overcame them.

Then , according to the story as told in Luke 8:25, he looked at the disciples and said, “Where is your faith?”

We live in a time of great fear. The rhetoric of our national political landscape is based on fear. Terrorism leaves us frightened and looking for bigger sticks with which to defend ourselves. Crime and violence of all kinds darken our landscape. We fear when unexplained things happen, and we live in fear that we might not be in control or have enough security or enough resources to survive the day.

And fear tends to take hold in the church. In Texas, we have new gun laws that permit licensed gun holders to openly carry guns, and we continue to grow more fearful about acts of hatred and violence spilling over into the church. We live under the threat of church shootings and other random acts of violence.

In our own church family, we are talking about how to be more inclusive of all people, no matter who they are, and that includes people who are often excluded from other churches. With that comes fear of the hate rhetoric that disguises itself as Christian dialogue. Just having the conversation creates fear because we don’t know how people will react to our talk about radical hospitality and a love that is truly unbounded.

After attending a training conference on security in places of worship, I was again confronted with the darkness that covers our world. After eight hours of videos and stories that warned of things that can happen in church, it’s not easy for me to clear my head. I was again seeking to be moored to something solid … something secure and certain.

Just as my head was clearing, a friend of mine just had two people (who were dressed oddly and who were of a race different that most of the people in his own congregation) come to church on Sunday and interrupt the service to “give a warning” to the church using the book of Revelation. This created fear among people (not only within his church but in other churches in the community). When I spoke with him about it, however, my friend has chosen to think about their “prophecy” as a witness to their understanding of scripture instead of hearing it as a threat.

He is moored. I am not so sure I would be as moored … as grounded … to be able to interpret something that scary as perhaps being a very real message from God to a church. He even reminded me that Jesus scared people in his own religious community and was driven out because of the fear they experienced.

And it suddenly occurred to me that the dock I was moored to is a dock made of human strength and might. It is made from money and power and resources that I know how to use. It is my own brand of security … whether we are talking about money, real estate, guns, prestige, power or anything else that I count on for security.

Now we’re in the middle of the lake in a storm and all we have is Jesus … and Jesus is asleep.

The storms are blowing and our ship is filling with water. Worry and fear crowd our minds. So we awake Jesus and shout, “Don’t you care that we are dying here?” And with a word, Jesus calms the storms and then asks one of the most cogent questions he ever asked: “Where is your faith?”

Where is my faith? Oh, yes, my faith was only in that dock that I built with my own hands. The one I frantically created out of my worry and my fear about safety and security. And Jesus bids me look once again at where I am right now. I’m unmoored, but the sea is calm … the storm is over … Jesus spoke the word. In truth, I was moored all along. I just didn’t see it.

I was moored to Jesus … my faith was the mooring line … and I was just about to let go of it when Jesus asked me where it was. It’s right here. It is based on the love of a God who will never let go of me. It is based on the knowledge that following Christ is not easy and can be pretty scary sometimes. But more importantly, it is based on the knowledge that when we are moored to Christ, nothing … NOTHING … will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Moor yourselves to Christ! Find your mooring line … your faith … and then face the darkness and the fear. Ultimately, the boat got across the lake and the disciples discovered that they had been safely moored to a Savior the whole time! Where is your faith?

 

Thanksgiving. We talk about it as though it is something that just automatically makes sense to anyone who sees the word. In our culture, it is often associated with those things that we are glad we have … plenty to eat … plenty of money … plenty of material blessings. But as I reflect upon what is happening in our world, I am not content to thank God for those things that I have that others don’t have. I am frankly disturbed by the notion that God would bless me with something that others, by circumstances beyond their control, simply have no ability to access. Perhaps, as we consider the Lord’s Prayer, we can thank God who provides us with enough.

So in this season, I am thankful that God has blessed me with enough bread for the day. I am thankful that God has provided me with enough love of family and friends. I am thankful that God has provided me with enough struggle to live beyond my own sense of entitlement. I am thankful that God has provided me with enough talent to serve faithfully.

I am thankful that God has provided me with enough forgiveness that I might be led to forgive those who have wronged me. I am thankful that God has led me face to face with those whom I consider enemies that I might learn how to love them as much as God loves them. I am thankful that I have been given the opportunity to serve the many people I have served, for they have (sometimes unknowingly) served me more than I have served them.

So in this season of Thanksgiving, my challenge is for us to be thankful for the God who is enough for us … who provides us with enough … who gives us the opportunity to serve those who don’t have enough. Then when we have served those who don’t have enough … those who are the least of these …  we will have served the Christ who is himself enough for us!

May your Thanksgiving be enough!

Change is inevitable! It’s the one thing I have learned in ministry. Change is the only true constant I have ever discovered. When I first took my vows of ordination 30 years ago, the bishop asked me a question: “Are you going on to perfection?” The only acceptable answer to that question is, “Yes.” But I didn’t realize then that going on to perfection meant that I was in for a life full of changes. I don’t like change. I want things to get to a good place and then stay the same. I’ve come to realize that the reason we so often hearken back to “the good old days” is that we want a time when things were somewhat predictable and patterned, but it is difficult to hold onto those “good old days.”

Some of the change I have experienced in my life is small … gradually growing older or slowly learning new skills. But many of the changes I have experienced are paradigm shifting. One of the biggest paradigm shifts is the reality that we no longer worship in our grandparent’s church. Church was once the locus of the community … it was the place where we focused our lives … around worship, fellowship and fun. It was where we went for our inspiration and our entertainment. But the church is no longer that for very many communities. As a matter of fact, the church is considered largely irrelevant for many people in our culture.

Historically, the church made a dramatic paradigm shift when, in 380 CE, Christianity was fully transformed from being a countercultural (outlawed) faith to being the official religion of the Roman Empire. From that moment through our modern era, the church has enjoyed not only protection by the government, but a place of prominence in most western nations for over 1,600 years. This form of Christianity has often been called Christendom (a combination of the words Christianity and Kingdom).

That is now changing, and we are in a post-Christendom era. As much as many of our politicians may appeal to their own understanding of the claims of Christianity, our world is simply no longer dependent upon Christianity as a central reality in our lives. For many, Christianity is simply irrelevant.

For the church, this has caused a shaking of our foundations. Our new house is in southern Georgetown, and we are not terribly far from a rock quarry. During the week sometime around midday, we will feel the house shudder as they blast in the quarry. The walls shake and the foundation reverberates with the blast that is happening. That’s what I feel like when paradigms start to shift and when change begins to occur. My foundation is shaking!

BUT SUCH CHANGE IS NOT ALWAYS BAD!

Yes, you read this correctly. Change is inevitable. More importantly, God is inevitably working through change to lead us on to perfection.

Vital Congregations abound, and we have many people who are addressing vitality within the church. Bishop Robert Schnase wrote a book several years ago called Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, and in that book, he taught us about churches that practice radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk-taking mission and service and extravagant generosity. There are many others who are helping lead the church to a new reality … a new paradigm that is very different from the church in which I grew up.

My own thought here is that Christ is calling us back and beckoning us forward.

Christ is calling us back! Christ is calling us back to understand the radical nature of his teaching. He is calling us back to his radical nature of reaching out to those who are in the margins. He is calling us back to God’s providence where we can trust that God will provide for us if we will just “let go and let God” be God. He is calling us back with a warning that people who misinterpret “religion” as that which gives them power over others are threatened with the fires of hell. I often like to point out that the only people whom Jesus routinely condemned to hell were the religious leaders, so I usually start my day with the admonition to myself this is dangerous stuff … handle with care! Ultimately, Jesus is calling us back to the simple faith of following and trusting only in God.

And Christ is beckoning us forward! We are being called to be a church that reaches out in new ways. We are called to be a church that sees where the world needs a savior and offers that savior to the world. We are being called forward to be the leaven in the loaf as we give rise to the kingdom of God in the world. We are being called to welcome those who have been rejected … yes, even by the church.

Above all, we are being called to look for Christ in those whom we serve. One of the greatest paradigm shifts for me happened in the more recent past as I suddenly realized that Jesus wasn’t telling me to be Christ to the least of these … Jesus was telling me to serve the least of these and discover the Christ in them!

Change is so hard for me! Yet I know the bishop was right … it is the path on which I journey toward perfection. Change is inevitable, but so is the grace of God that passes all understanding! Let the foundations shake … the foundation upon which I stand is the foundation of God alone!

We all witness to something. In our series at church, we have been discovering how to take the next step on our Disciple’s Path as we move more deeply into our vows to uphold our church by “our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service and our witness.” For those who are United Methodist, this should sound familiar to you.

Many years ago, we only had to commit to the first four of those vows: prayers, presence, gifts and service. As a matter of fact, my hymnal still has only those vows and I have to remember always to add “witness.” Almost like an afterthought … it was added when we realized that perhaps it wasn’t enough just to do those first four things … we needed to pledge to be witnesses, as well. So it goes at the end, as though we almost forgot it and had to get it in there in order to make our commitment complete.

What I have discovered over many years of ministry, however, is that WITNESS is primary. It is the culmination of all that we do. It isn’t just an afterthought. It is what happens when we fulfill all the other vows. We witness through our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. It becomes the overarching umbrella of all that we pledge to do when we commit our lives to Christ.

The truth is that we all witness to something. Whether we like it or not, we are witnesses to whatever it is that we believe in. Unless we live a cloistered existence, when we interact with others, we share our witness. There are times when we witness to greed as we seek to get all that we can for ourselves. We witness to political strife and all the cultural angst of living in our modern world. We witness to the hatred and bitterness caused when we cease being good neighbors and make efforts to extort from our neighbors what we can’t get with any integrity for ourselves.

But we also witness to the good in our world. We witness to the power of love when we care for one another in sometimes surprising ways. We witness to the power of a kind word when we speak lovingly to those who are marginalized or hurting. We witness to the power of forgiveness when we demonstrate love instead of retribution for our enemies. We witness to good stewardship when we seek to care for our earth and its resources.

Ultimately, we witness to the power of Christ when we dare to be Christlike in our world. This past week, I was truly moved when I saw the picture that had gone viral. It was a picture of young Jenny Faber, who is an Iowa State football fan suffering from diplegia cerebral palsy, sitting in her wheelchair with (opposing team captain) TCU quarterback, Trevone Boykin, kneeling in front of it asking her, “What’s your name?”

Trevone said that God placed it on his heart to reach out to her, and it became a witness of what can happen when someone like Trevone reaches out to one of the “little ones” whom Jesus calls us to touch. That simple picture and those three simple words witnessed to what can happen when we sense that God is speaking something into our lives. Because of Trevone’s witness, a crowd funding campaign has begun to help Jenny’s family raise funds needed for her care and treatment. That was a witness that has really produced fruit.

So Church, what is your witness? Will you witness to the power of God to transform lives? What fruit will your witness bear? Will you witness to hospitality and love that reaches outside of our comfort zone? Will you witness to the power of Christ to reach back to us from the throng of “the least of these” our brothers and sisters? Remember, when we reach out to the least of these, they are reaching back with the arms of Christ to embrace us, so our witness is more than what we can do … it is what Christ offers to us as a gift of grace.

May our witness be to the power of Christ to save our world! By God’s grace, that will be my witness today, as well.

We all make vows. We make commitments to one another … to God … to ourselves, and inevitably, those vows get laid aside from time to time. Vows are intended to be ways in which we bind ourselves to those whom we love, yet so often in our world, we find those bonds constantly breaking. Sometimes they are broken by circumstances beyond our control … the spouse who leaves the relationship or irreparably harms the relationship … the church that harms us or that closes or that simply ceases to be the church we thought we had joined. Sometimes it is as simple as the vow to lose weight that becomes less important that the many other stresses in our lives, so our vow to diet and care for ourselves better becomes less important. But so often we are the ones who break the vows and fail to live up to the promises we have made.

Someone remarked to me recently that we just don’t take vows as seriously as we used to … that our culture doesn’t honor vows like we did one upon a time. As I have reflected upon that, I am not sure I agree.

A quick look at scripture reveals that the fundamental relationship between God and the people of God is covenant. Covenant contains vows made by two parties … in this case, they are not equal parties … to devote themselves to one another.  God has promised to be there for the people of God in all things, and the people of God have vowed to have no other gods before the one true God … to create a community where God’s love can be made known … to do good and to do no harm to God’s creation. Yet throughout the story of the Bible, the people of God find it nearly impossible to keep those vows because their immediate benefit is not obvious.

I am reminded of a great scene from a movie called The End starring Burt Reynolds, where Reynolds, the main character, has decided to end it all by swimming into the ocean away from shore. Suddenly, he has a change of heart and realizes he doesn’t want to die. He then begins desperately trying to get back to shore and realizes that he might not make it. So he begins to bargain with God promising at first to give everything he has to God if he can just make it to shore. As he nears the shore, that percentage begins to decrease from 100% to 75% to 50% until as he crawls upon the shore, he basically takes it back and offers only a simple thank you instead of honoring any commitment he made while in the midst of drowning.

Too often our vows are that way. We make pledges to God at various times in our lives when we are either moved by a great religious experience or when we are feeling desperately alone and cut off from God. Then as things begin to return to normal, those vows, like our New Years resolutions, become little more than distant memories.

In our worship, we are right in the middle of considering the vows we make as United Methodist Christians to uphold the ministry of our church by “our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service and our witness,” and we are taking a deeper look at what those vows mean. During this time, I am avoiding the “should” statements because we all know what we “should” do. Instead, I am focusing us upon what it means at a deeper level for us to engage God through prayer, practice presence with one another, discover the joys of taking risks in the ways we give and the ways we serve, and experiencing God anew as we discover how we might witness to the love of Christ in our world.

The primary focus of this series, however, is to remind us that, even when we fail to live up to our vows, God will never fail to live up to the vows God has made to us. God will always engage us and attempt to reach us. God will always be present with us. God will continue to remind us of the gift of life we have been given in Christ Jesus, and God will offer us the richest blessings when we discover this Christ who served us much as he washed the feet of his disciples.

Finally, as God engages us in our daily lives, we are given the opportunity to witness what God is doing and then share that witness with others. Even when we fail to share that witness, God will continue to perform mighty acts right in front of our faces in hopes that perhaps we will remember that the best gift we can give others is simply to share.

Years ago, I had an ant farm, and one of the things I learned about ants is that, when one of the ants who is out hunting finds food, that ant then returns to the ant mound and through a unique style of communication shares with all the other ants where that food is. Then together they all go and begin to bring food back to the colony. By that simple act of witnessing where the sustenance can be found, the one ant enriches and provides sustenance for the entire colony.

So maybe that is what it is about. Providing for community. I wonder what happen if we were to uphold our vows within the church. It is my guess that the world will be a better place because we practiced our faith through our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness and thereby provided for a stronger community firmly grounded in the love of Christ.

So how about it? God is still keeping God’s vows to always provide for us. What would happen if we made a conscious effort to keep our vows to God?

It’s not often that I feel lost, but there are those times when I am completely out of my element. In southern Louisiana, for instance, surrounded by high humidity and mosquitoes and heat and mosquitoes and a beautiful bayou and mosquitoes and some of the most amazing people I could possibly meet … oh, and mosquitoes! I love the Texas gulf, and I have spent much time there. I just haven’t travelled far to the east to spend time on the bayou, but that I did when I went with a group from our church and our conference on a mission trip to the Sager Brown UMCOR Depot.

The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has been around for many years and was made a permanent part of the General Board of Global Ministries in 1972. The work of UMCOR is to provide aid and disaster relief both locally and around the world, and the Sager Brown campus has been used by UMCOR with the construction of a 40,000 square foot warehouse since 1992. Sager Brown itself was originally a school and orphanage for African American children in southern Louisiana that functioned as such for more than 110 years. Sager Brown is located in Baldwin, Louisiana, in the St. Mary Parish, which is the poorest parish in all of Louisiana. It was here that we found ourselves working along with another 4,000 or so people who come here each year to help provide for those in our world who are devastated by poverty and natural disasters.

I had almost forgotten how massive 40,000 square feet of warehouse can be, and this is only one of several places that UMCOR prepares to meet needs around the world. It is in this warehouse that we stock cleaning buckets (previously called flood buckets) to help with cleanup after anything from hurricanes to fire to floods. We stock school kits sent to children in impoverished countries for whom basic school supplies are generally only a dream. We stock things such as birthing kits and layette kits that we don’t even think about because of modern healthcare and an abundance of supplies for parenting. We stock healthcare or hygiene kits that amount to little more than a quick trip to our local pharmacy yet which are considered extreme luxuries for people in poverty. This is the ministry that is Sager Brown.

Yet there I was complaining about the mosquitos and the heat. As I told the congregation the Sunday after we returned, I had actually been complaining about how much my back and arms hurt while packing and stacking several pallets of both layette kits (the lighter box) and school kits (the heavier box) until I found out that a 92-year-old man did my job only one week prior to my being there. So I was left only with the complaint about the mosquitoes.

Then because mosquitoes weren’t enough for me to worry about, one of the members of our team got a shot of the other danger in the bayou … alligators.

Now I had more to add to my list. Then it happened. On our last morning there, I got up early and went outside. The sun was radiant, and I found myself moving toward the dock overlooking the bayou and there it was … a place of beauty like none other. In that moment, I was like the prodigal who was in a foreign land and then suddenly came to himself.

Here I was on the Bayou Teche looking at one of the most magnificent views I could have ever hoped to see. It was then that I could see it … beyond the heat and the sweat and, yes, even the mosquitoes was the message. In the poorest parish in Louisiana, God was at work taking everything that we consider by the worlds standards to be lacking … poverty … powerlessness … hopelessness … weakness, and God saw that as strength and beauty and a richness that we can barely begin to fathom.

It is the message that I have been preaching in recent weeks. We don’t welcome the “little ones” or feed the starving or reach out to the marginalized because they need us (the rich and powerful) to make their lives better. We reach out to “the least of these, [our] brothers and sisters” precisely because they hold the keys to the kingdom. We offer hospitality in hopes that we will be welcomed by them into the kingdom of heaven.

And I was immediately at home … with my surroundings … with myself … with my God. So my prayer is for UMCOR that it might always remind me that we are called to reach the poor with the hope that the poor will somehow reach us.