Morning Minutes this Week

Monday, October 27
Last week, I spent a few days back up on the campus where I spent my seminary years studying: Duke University. There is something about that place. It isn’t just the beauty of the Gothic-style architecture or the uniform granite facades of the buildings. It isn’t just the beauty of the trees and flowers and shrubs. It isn’t just the liveliness of the young undergraduates.

There is something else that I love about the place: it feels like home. It was a place I was nurtured and formed in the Christian faith. And at its center stands the amazing Duke Chapel, built like a European Gothic Cathedral from centuries past, but serving as a sanctuary of peace for generations of students, including me.

At the center of Duke’s campus stands a beautiful church building, with spires reaching high heavenward, directing all eyes and hearts up to God. At the center of the campus, at its heart, is a huge and tangible reminder. Focus your attention to the Lord.

What is the “Duke Chapel” of your life here? What is it that, when you see it, directs your attention heavenward? Is it a place, a person, an object? I hope it is something, for always, our hearts can find refuge when we focus them upward to God.

Tuesday, October 28
In recent weeks, we’ve heard a lot about the “credit crisis” that we are hoping and praying is soon to resolve itself. I heard something of it from Adam Hamilton at Duke the other week when he spoke there. Rev. Hamilton is the Senior Pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leewood, Kansas, a church of 14,000 members that was started with about 14 people gathering in a funeral home about 16 years ago.

But Rev. Hamilton wasn’t talking about the church’s story while we were gathered at Duke. Instead he talked about leadership in difficult times. As he spoke about the current economic situation, he quoted an economist as saying that the current crisis is a crisis of faith, and then he pointed out that the word “credit” is the same word as “credo” in Latin, which means “I believe.”

Our whole credit system is based on a belief, a trust, that the person who borrows money will be able and willing to pay it back. When that belief, that trust, is gone, the whole system fails.

Today, where does our belief and trust lie? The markets can fail. Our hopes and dreams based in this world can die. But there is one who never fails us, who never let us down. Will we believe in and trust that One, our Lord today? If so, no crisis can shake us.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008
When I heard Rev. Adam Hamilton speak at Duke he talked about a lack of leadership in such difficult times.

We all know that the world is not the way God intended it. We as humans have messed things all up. In the beginning, God created a garden of peace, a place of tranquility for us, but we tried to grasp what wasn’t ours to have and thus destroyed it all. God created one human race to live in harmony, but we have divided ourselves by tribes who fight and kill each other.

In Jesus, however, God came among us to invite us into a new way of being. In Jesus, God came among us to show us how to live in the peace that was originally created and intended. In Jesus, God gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit to help us live into this vision for humanity.

Rev. Hamilton pointed out that much of our problem as a church and a nation is that we have plenty of people in authority, but too few visionary leaders who can help us move from the brokenness we are in, to the vision of peace that God intends. Today, let’s pray for God to raise up such leaders, and let’s commit ourselves to following them in the way we know is right.

Thursday, October 30, 2008
On Monday, the United Methodist pastors of our area gathered together for prayer, fellowship, and learning. We had the pleasure of hearing from Orangeburg’s Chief of Police, and we were enlightened. As he spoke, he talked about the partnership necessary between Christians and the police, as we both seek to do battle against the evil in this world. And then he talked about one of the most profound manifestations of evil: criminal gangs.

As with most things evil, the evil of gangs is perpetuated by its preying on the young and vulnerable. The recruitment starts in elementary school, and it targets those who feel broken, who are desperate for a place to belong and to feel like a part of something, and don’t know where else to find it.

We have heard our Lord say when he was challenged for keeping company with sinners: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.” We have heard him say, “I was lonely, and you visited me.” We have head him ask us to care for the least, the last, and the lost.

The battle against gangs that prey on our young is a spiritual one against the force of evil. It is about bringing healing and help to those who need it. How can our community and our churches do spiritual battle in this area? I pray we commit ourselves to doing so.

Friday, October 31, 2008
Today is All Hallows’ Eve. That’s what the church calls it. You may call it “Halloween”. Today, Christians can rejoice that our Lord Jesus Christ has defeated evil and death in all their forms. Today, Christians can face the reality of evil still present in the world and say with confidence: you have no power over us, and you will not win this battle. Today, Christians can rest assured that our God is and always will be triumphant over the forces that seek to destroy us.

This is the meaning of Halloween for me. The holiday may have traditions associated with pagan rituals of the past, but for the church, it has become a time to face the reality of evil and to rejoice that God gives the people of Christ victory over it, and protection from its power.

Thus, we can enjoy the simple pleasures of the holiday: giving good treats to children just as God gives goodness to us, and letting little ones enjoy the fun of being a princess or a cowboy for the night.

And we can put candles in our pumpkins, reminding ourselves that we are all like one, a creature out of whom God has scooped the nasty stuff, given a smile to, and put the light of Christ inside, so it can shine for the world. So tonight, have some wholesome fun, and give thanks to God for victory.

Stewardship Sunday Sermon

Giving Ourselves to the Vision:
Consecration Sunday: Proper A25: Deut 34:1-12; 1 Thess 2:1-8; Matt 22:34-46
Kristen R. Richardson-Frick
St. Paul’s UMC
October 26, 2008

Yesterday after our two-day uplifting leadership training, I took my son to Greenville for his “best little buddy’s” birthday. Long ago I grasped the vision of him having a life-long friend in my closest friend, and that involved being at each birthday party. It involved my son jumping with his friend in the jump castle his mom had rented and enjoying seeing his far-away bud. So I spent the money on gas, food, present, and I spent an entire afternoon and evening making it happen. The vision of the day and the friendship had grasped me, so the rest was secondary.

Last night while coming home and driving through Columbia, I heard the old George Harrison (former Beatle) song: “I Got My Mind Set on You”. You remember the lyrics: “I got my mind set on you…gonna take time, a whole lotta precious time...it's gonna take money, a whole lotta spending money...it's gonna take plentya money to do it right, child.” At least in the song, the vision of George courting this lady, of them being together, had grasped him. So spending the time and $ to make it happen was not an issue. The cost was worth it. The sacrifice was simply what was necessary to make the vision happen.

We live according to the visions that grasp us, you see.

A couple dreams of having a family, grasps a vision of making that happen, and they begin to make a priority of it. They talk about it. They try for it, and when they are expecting a little one, they spend time and money at the doctor’s office, making sure everything goes just as it should. The woman makes and effort to take prenatal vitamins. They clear out a room in their house and begin spending lots of time, effort, and $ on making it just the perfect nursery they see in their minds. The vision has grasped them, so the sacrifice is worth it. The time and money spent is secondary, not even an issue.

Or a family gets a vision of a dream home, so they buy a fixer-upper of a house start spending all their extra time and all their disposable income on planning, on lumber, or cabinet builders, or new furniture or watching HGTV to get ideas.

Or a man retires with a vision of traveling. As soon as his party is over, he hops a plane to travel a whole day to get to some exotic location, where he spends exorbitant amounts of money on luxury.

Or a woman desires peace and quiet after she’s raised children and cared for a sick husband. So she buys books and creates a quiet sanctuary in her home filled with a new comfy chair and beautiful potted plants and a view of trees. It takes a good bit of time and money to get it right, but she doesn’t care. She has been grasped by the vision, and the rest is secondary.

Do you see what I mean? We give ourselves to our vision of what the world, our world should be: time, energy, money, blood, sweat, tears…We willingly give them to create the vision.

Often we have no trouble on the kind of visions I’ve described so far, secular ones, not necessarily bad, but having little to do with God’s kingdom creation in the world.

But what about when the vision is God’s for us and the world, and not ours for ourselves? It seems that often we have more trouble on that front.

Tony Campolo, whom you know is one of my favorite preachers, describes how he saw this first hand (in his book Let Me Tell You a Story). Having taken a red-eye flight across the country, exhausted from days of speaking and needing rest, he was met one morning by his secretary who promptly apologized for failing to cancel an early speaking engagement that had previously been on his calendar. It was a World Day of Prayer service for a large group of women. He had to go, even though he was exhausted.

His secretary drove him, and he sat trying to stay awake as the service began. The prayer time came before he was to speak, and the presider brought a request from a missionary woman in Venezuela. She described this missionary, a doctor, who desperately needed $5000 to build an addition onto her medical clinic because there were so many people who needed treatment that she had to have many of them outside, her building was so small. The woman turned to Tony and said: “Dr. Campolo, could you please lead us in a prayer that God will provide the $5000 our missionary needs?” Not thinking clearly because of the exhaustion, Tony could not control his tongue before he said, “No, I won’t. But what I will do is take all the $ I’m carrying on me and put it on the altar and ask everyone else to do the same. No checks, just whatever cash you’ve got. Then I’ll ask God to write out a check for the difference.”

Tony had only $2.25 in cash in his wallet, but he put it down. The presider smiled and said, “Well, we’ve gotten the point,” but Tony said, “No, I don’t think we have. My $2.25 is on the altar—it’s your turn now.” The woman was taken aback, but she pulled out $110 from her purse and put it on the altar. “We’re on our way,” Tony said, and looked at the next woman. One by one, he took 25 minutes to have every single woman present come forward and lay her cash on the altar. At the end they counted: $8000+. Tony said, “The audacity of asking God for $5000, when He has already provided us with more than $8000. We should not be asking God to supply our needs. He already has!” He sat down and said nothing else.

Yes, it can be hard to give ourselves to God’s vision, to embrace God’s vision as our own. It takes a transformed mind, one that is set completely on loving God and neighbor with everything we are and have. Just as Jesus said: the first and greatest commandment is this: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

When our heart, soul, mind, strength is set on this: on loving God and neighbor centrally in lives, when we’ve grasped that vision--God’s vision of a world where the divine will reigns and where people love one another as God loves all of us--then the sacrifice necessary in building God’s kingdom on earth becomes secondary for us. We willingly give ourselves: time, energy, money, blood, sweat, tears, to create God’s vision. For God’s vision has become ours.

Think it doesn’t happen today? To people like us? Consider Gayle Williams, a British woman about my age, who moved from her comfortable life, giving up worldly pleasures and all her time, to live and work in a dangerous place among people who were desperate. She worked for Serve Afghanistan, “which helps young boys and girls who have lost limbs to land mines and bombs” in that war-torn nation. Gayle had been working there because God’s vision of love of these particular neighbors had grasped her. She loved God with all her heart, soul, mind, strength, and these neighbors as herself, so the sacrifices necessary to show these children and adults with them Jesus’ love, and tell these people who had never heard about Jesus’ love all about Him…the sacrifices were secondary—the time, money, effort—not an issue. They were just what was necessary to make the vision a reality.

Gayle was killed this past week by the Taliban in Afghanistan for, as they said, “spreading Christianity.” Her mother Pat told the newspaper The Independent: “Gayle was serving a people that she loved, and felt God called her to be there for such a time as this. We know her life was blessed and she was a blessing to those around her. No one could have asked for a more humble daughter with a more loving heart. She died doing what she felt the Lord had called her [to] and she is definitely with him.”

This week, Gayle joined the long line of Christian Martyrs who were killed for following Christ, for witnessing to him in a hostile world, but she had willingly gone into harms way, because God’s vision had become hers. God’s kingdom vision had grasped her, and she was willing to give it all to see that vision become a reality.

Gayle had entered the line of those like Moses, whose burning bush vision from God had grasped him so thoroughly that he was willing to walk away from his comfortable life with wife and family to face Pharoah in Egypt and then wander with a stubborn ornery people for 40 years in the desert, without food, water, clothing, permanent shelter, in the sweltering heat, just so he could see God’s vision of the Israelites prosperous and free in the Promised Land come to pass. For his faithfulness, before his death, Lord gave him that glimpse. And the time, sacrifice, effort, it was all worth it.

Gayle followed those like Apostle Paul, whose vision of complete love and devotion: heart, soul, strength for God and neighbor--whose faithful following of Jesus his Lord in the way of self-giving sacrifice for the salvation of the world--had so completely grasped him that he gave up his life of power and privilege within the Jewish community of the Pharisees to become a wandering preacher who lived among the “unclean” Gentiles so he could show them the love of God in Jesus, so he could tell them about Christ’s love, so he could invite them into relationship with Jesus and form communities of salvation for them, with them. “So deeply do we care for you,” he wrote to one of those groups of people, the one in the city of Thessolonica, “that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”

This kind of self-giving love of Paul, that was his imitation of Jesus, that he imparted to the Christian communities he formed, became hallmark of early Christian churches. The earliest historians tell us so.

Theologian Daniel B. Clendinen quotes two (on his journeywithjesus.net website): A generation after the first believers, the theologian Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) summarized the appeal of a "holy" Christian community: “Those who once delighted in fornication now embrace chastity alone. . . we who once took most pleasure in accumulating wealth and property now share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with men of different tribes because of their different customs now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them and pray for our enemies.” Similarly, Tertullian (AD 155–220), who wrote, "Our care for the derelict and our active love have become our distinctive sign before the enemy. . . See, they say, how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other."

My friends, God’s vision for the early church is still God’s vision for our church today. God’s vision of salvation for the world through Jesus Christ--God asks for us to make our very own vision. The Lord today has a vision for St. Paul’s UMC as a place where people are so in love with God: heart, soul, mind, strength, and so love with brother, sister, neighbor, stranger, that we willingly give ourselves: time, money, effort, energy, everything, to see that we show that love to people everywhere: from here in our own neighborhood to the other side of the world.

When God’s vision for St. Paul’s becomes fully our own vision: when we care so deeply about seeing that we are a vibrant, holy, Holy-Spirit-filled, actively-ministering-in-Jesus’-name, offering-salvation-through-Jesus’-love-to-the-people-around-us by inviting them, embracing them, serving them, loving them…when that happens, then we won’t have to have a stewardship emphasis month anymore. Because God’s vision will be ours, the giving of our money, our resources, our talents, our time, or energy…it will all be natural, just what we know we’re called to do.

Today, God invites us to begin, or continue in a more dedicated way, the journey with Jesus into that vision. Today, God invites us to embrace the divine vision for St. Paul’s. Today, we can come to the altar and give ourselves to living it. What do you say? Will you embrace the vision? Will you give your lives to it?

Morning Minute 10/21: About Laity Sunday

Sunday we celebrated Laity Sunday in our church. I as the pastor got to sit out in the pews and worship, while one of our lay speakers led worship and delivered God’s word. It was a joyous time, an important day.

Laity Sunday is not a day celebrated by just one church; it’s a universal celebration by many, and it is all about lay people. If you don’t know what a “lay person” is, it’s a person who is a baptized member of a church, a believer in Jesus, but not an ordained minister of the Gospel. But every lay person is indeed a minister.

See, whenever someone is baptized into the Christian faith, that person is made a representative of Jesus in and for the world. That person is given a life-long job to do, a vocation to participate in God’s salvation plan for the world.

On Laity Sunday each year, we lift up and thank God for the ministry of all lay people. But our lifting up and thanking God for the work and ministry of lay people is certainly not limited to one day a year. Today, I give thanks for the ministry of all ministers, ordained and not. Today, let us all commit ourselves to representing Jesus in the world, to serving him with our lives, to offering his saving love to others.

The Squirrel Story

I've wanted to blog about the squirrel. But instead a couple of weeks back I wrote "Morning Minutes" about it. Before I begin to share the day-to-day "Minutes" here, I want to share the series that was all about the squirrel. Here they are:

Wednesday, October 1
Saturday night, I heard a loud squeaking sound outside our house. I had to go see what it was. When I stepped out, I spotted our cat on the driveway, hovering over a baby squirrel.
Of course I couldn’t leave the baby to this fate, so I removed the cat and took the tiny thing into my hands. I inspected him, and I held him. When I loosened my grip just a bit, he tried to scurry, so I thought he might be fine if I could get him back up in a tree. Maybe, I thought naively, he can run right back into his nest and be fine.
I put him on a branch, cuddled in some leaves, and went back inside. I also went to work on the computer, researching how to care for baby squirrels, and by the time my husband came home a few minutes later, I had a plan. We were going to take the squirrel in if it was still on the tree branch. Of course, it was, and when we brought it in, it hit me: what we had done for the baby squirrel is what God does for us in Jesus. God rescues us from the power of whatever would destroy us, and holds us close. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

Thursday, October 2
My husband and I took in a special animal on Saturday night: a baby squirrel about 5 weeks old that had been captured by our cat. Luckily, the cat had not done much damage, just a small cut on the baby’s side, which we cleaned and covered with antibiotic ointment as the squirrel rescue website directed. The site also told us how to tell if the baby was dehydrated, which it was. As the site prescribed, we made an electrolyte solution and began to feed the baby what it needed. We cared for it through the night.
As I said yesterday, what we were able to do for that baby squirrel is exactly what our Lord does for us. Evil, sin, and chaos are out to destroy us each day, to kill our souls, just as our cat was out to destroy the baby squirrel. And when those powers get a hold of us, what happened to the baby squirrel happens to us. We get frightened, and spiritually dehydrated, and injured.
But if we will not fight the divine hand, if we will let God hold us, our Lord will pick us up, hold us close, and nurse us back to health and wholeness in love, caring for us all through the night and every day. Won’t we let God rescue, hold, and heal us today?

Wednesday, October 8
Last week, I told you how my husband and I rescued a baby squirrel from our cat and took him in. Since then, some of you have asked me how he was. Here’s the answer. Last Saturday night we kept the baby squirrel, nursed him. But on Sunday afternoon, my husband and son took him to Columbia to a wildlife rescue center.
We had to do this because everything we read stated that, if a baby squirrel has been caught by a cat, it has to receive antibiotics, and that only people trained in wildlife rescue know best how to rehabilitate wild animals. So we had to take our baby to people who knew what they were doing. It was in his best interest.
This is, of course, how God designs things. There are reasons we need wildlife rescuers and veterinarians, doctors and lawyers, ministers and linesmen, secretaries and nurses, judges and government officials, custodians and teachers. None of us is called or equipped to do everything that needs to be done. We get in trouble when we try to do things God did not intend or gift us to do.
So today, as you go through the daily routine to which God has called you, as each of us seeks to do what we have been asked and gifted to do for the world’s good, let us know that we are valued, that we are gifted, and that the world needs what we have to give.

Thursday, October 9
One more story about the baby squirrel: when one woman heard the story of our rescue and the delivery of the baby to Columbia’s wildlife rescue center, she said: “well, I don’t think I’d have driven all the way to Columbia for a baby squirrel.” Now there’s some good wisdom in that statement. Was one sick rodent’s future really worth the gas money, the emissions into the environment, and the hours it took to drive to that center? I can’t answer those questions. But I can tell you what went through my head when my husband told me about the comment.
I thought about God. I thought about how God chose to come among us in Jesus to save us and provide an eternal future of glory and joy for us. I wonder if, when God’s plan of salvation was announced to the heavenly beings, some of the angels said: “God, do you really think you need to go to those lengths to save those broken sinful obstinate little creatures? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme? Will it really be worth it in the end?”
I don’t know about you, but I am so grateful that the Lord of all creation did not count the cost or consider the plan of salvation too extreme, too much of a sacrifice. Otherwise, who knows where we’d be? Let us give thanks to God today that the Lord chose to go to go to such lengths to save you and me.

Last Sunday's Sermon (and yes, I sang at the end)

In Times Like These:
Proper 23A: Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
Kristen R. Richardson-Frick
St. Paul’s UMC
October 12, 2008

This is a hard week to preach. Every time I have turned on the computer, the TV, even the radio, all I’ve heard is terrible news. You’ve heard it, too. It’s impossible to escape: talk of a new global Great Depression, people who’ve lost everything in the stock market, talking heads debating constantly what to do or what’s going to happen next. As it has all happened, I have remembered a conversation I had almost 7 years ago, with a man who gave me a free financial planning session because I was his Associate Pastor. As repeated for the fifth time how I needed to invest more of my income each year into the stock market through our 401k plan, I finally asked: “But, what if the stock market is doomed to fall? What if we’re like ancient Rome, and eventually the empire will crash?”

He dismissed my question by laughing, pointing to his chart that showed how all through history the trend of the market was to growth, and telling me my fear was unfounded. Today, I think of him and of financial planners everywhere. I pray for them, because they, too, are feeling the same anxiety that the rest of the world is feeling, or more, as we all wonder if our stock market will indeed eventually fully recover, hoping that it will in time. People everywhere anxiously watch the economic indicators every day, every hour, and it is hard not to panic or fall into depression ourselves. And, in times like these, it is hard not to wonder where God is in it all, what God’s desire for us is. Surely the divine will for our lives is not fear and anxiety, is it?

Enter our Epistle Reading for today. Did you hear it? Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice…The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Did you hear it? Now granted, Paul was not talking to people who were anxious about an economy in crisis. He was not writing to men and women who had lost half their money in a stock market crash. He was not speaking to those whose fears were financial.

But he was indeed addressing people who were afraid for their children’s or grandchildren’s futures in an uncertain world, just as we are. He was indeed speaking to friends in Christ who were up against seemingly impossible odds, just as we are. He was indeed talking to his family in the faith who were trying to understand just where God was and what God wanted from them in their precarious life situations and anxious world, just as we are. And so his words are just as much for us today as they were for Paul’s 1st century congregation. And he makes three main points that I think we, too, need to hear today.

At the end of a letter filled with encouragement and instruction, Paul first urges two women at odds with each other to “be of the same mind in the Lord.” And while at first this may seem like a specific command to two individuals about a particular situation that doesn’t apply to us today, I think it is more than that. We must remember these defining words from the middle of the letter: “Let each of you look not to his own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself…”

Here at the end of the letter, Paul reminds two feuding women, and with them the rest of the congregation, how brothers and sisters in Christ are to think and act: “Be of the same mind in the Lord, have the same mind as the Lord, humble yourself before God and each other. Think not of yourself first, but others.” Today, some of us in this sanctuary may be facing difficult times. We may have lost much of our savings, we may wonder about the future. We may be grieving or facing ill health. But, my friends, there are others too whose futures in jeopardy, perhaps much worse than ours. There are many who have lost, are will lose, their homes, who have no money or job to provide for another place to live. There are men and women with young children to feed and clothe who cannot find work. There are people among us, and around us, who desperately need to know that those who have more resources will be there for them who have less.

Did you know that one of the young men who came last week to our Barnabas breakfast told those of us at the table with him that he could not remember the last time he had eaten bacon? Bacon, my friends, is a luxury. For that man, one Sunday School class cooking bacon was a way to experience the abundant blessing of God. Simple things can make a tremendous difference.

So what does Paul’s direction to two feuding women in Philippi have to say to us today? “Be of one mind in the Lord.” In the Lord, be of one heart and mind. In the Lord, find common ground. In the Lord, humble yourself and look more to the interests of others, who are more in need, than you look to your own interests, which are less. In the Lord, let us unify in the desire of God to care for the widow and the orphan, to care for those in distress, and to take care of one another in our need. In the Lord, let us be one…in caring for each other, and in showing care to God’s other children in need, especially in times like these.

But Paul did not stop with this word. His second word was, in essence, Rejoice in the Lord, for the Lord is near. So “don’t worry about anything, but pray about everything” (CEV), with thanksgiving. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. From these words of Paul comes the old expression that I keep reminding myself: “If you’re gonna worry, don’t pray, and if you’re gonna pray, don’t worry.”

While we may say at first, “That’s easy for you to say, Paul,” it’s important to hear the basis of Paul’s exhortation. Paul doesn’t say, “Rejoice, because everything’s gonna be OK one day.” He doesn’t say, “Throw your cares to the wind and just sit back and relax.” What he says is: “Rejoice in the Lord. Pray about everything, with thanksgiving for what God has done for you in the Lord Jesus.” And again we hear the echo: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Paul’s point was that we who are in Christ Jesus, who have been born anew in the Lord, have a confidence and a life that nothing in this world can threaten or shake. We who “stand firm” in the Lord are held up by a strength that is not our own, and that is not of this world. We who are “clothed in Christ” and in his righteousness and blood are clothed in a glory that nothing in this world can tarnish. We simply have to remember that we are “in Christ the Lord,” and not in this world. We simply have to act, behave, and think as those that no fears or anxieties of this life can shake. We simply need one thing: to clothe ourselves in Christ and his mind, his holiness, his life, his self-giving love, anew.

When Christ and His mind are our clothing, we know that we will always be clothed correctly to enjoy the wedding feast of the God’s eternal kingdom to which we’ve been mercifully invited, never thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. When Christ and His holiness are our wedding robe, we can be assured that no threat of destruction will unseat us. When Christ and His righteousness, rather than society and its schemes, define our way of walking, talking, trusting, and behaving in this world, we can rejoice with assurance that we are not worshipping some dead golden calf that cannot save us, but rather we are serving and living for the living, active holy Creator and Judge of all.

And this gets us to Paul’s third word to the Philippian church: “Finally, beloved,” he says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing [to God], whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me [as I have tried to show you by word and deed what it means to be humble and to live with the mind and behavior of Christ Jesus], and the God of peace will be with you.”

My friends, in the midst of all our uncertainty and all the false claims and false idols that have failed us, we still know the One who is true. We know the One who is honorable, and just, and pure. We know the One who is excellent and worthy of praise. And today Paul encourages us to think about Him, to focus on him, to allow our hearts and lives to be clothed in Him, to allow His mind to transform ours until we are one with Him and with each other in His service. What more appropriate word could there be for us, in times like these? “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…think of Christ…and the peace of God will be with you, will guard your hearts and minds. Rejoice! The Lord is near.”

It reminds me of the woman I used to hear singing as I worked with a youth group team on her dilapidated house. She was seventy-something and had spent her life earning next-to-nothing washing richer people’s clothes. She had taken in her handicapped grandchild and cared for him in her home. Her life was hard, and she had almost nothing most of us would consider necessities. But every time I was in a room near her, I’d hear her singing, always the same thing:

Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home,
when Jesus us my portion? My constant friend is he:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

“Let not your heart be troubled,” his tender word I hear,
and resting on his goodness, I lose my doubts and fears;
though by the path he leadeth but one step I may see:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

Whenever I am tempted, whenever clouds arise,
When song gives place to sighing, when hope within me dies,
I draw the closer to him, from care he sets me free:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,
for his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.

A New Leaf

Long time, no blog...

Sorry.

I can blame it on lots of things:

busyness,
lack of reflection,
lack of focus,
a preschooler who demands all my non-work time,
and did I mention busyness?

I can also blame it on the fact that I have a new "journaling out loud" outlet in this new appointment, namely

Morning Minutes.

Each Monday--Friday morning, if you live in this area, you can hear me two times waxing reflective for one minute on general spiritual issues that I see arising in the world around us, and/or on the Scriptural witness for our lives specifically.

This church has a long tradition of providing "Morning Minutes" from the pastor, and it's something I have very much enjoyed. I have also had several people ask me for copies of what I've said, and so:

I'm turning over a new leaf in blogging.

I decided on it while I was at Duke this week for Pastor's School and Convocation.

From now on, I will post most of my "Morning Minutes" after they have run, for anyone to enjoy. This will accomplish two things:
1. allowing anyone who wants a copy of what I've said to download it, and
2. keeping me blogging on a regular (daily) basis!

Of course, there are no "Morning Minutes" for the weekends, so I'll have opportunities to share other thoughts and "Jedisms" then.

Who knows? I might even post some sermons!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the look and feel of the "new leaf."

I'll start tomorrow sharing some of the previously aired "Minutes".

Hope you enjoy!

And for those of you who read this primarily for "Jedisms", here's one for today, along with a glimpse into our family's world.

Each morning when "Jed" wakes up, he calls me (or Daddy if Mommy's away at the hospital or some continuing education event). Here's how he does it:

He opens his cute little mouth and sings, yes sings...
Moooommmy, come in my beeeedddd-rooooom!

What a beautiful way to start the day!