My Sunday Off

It is Sunday. I am still in bed. It is weird.
I know that I have not been pastoring too log but it does not take very long to hammer into your psyche that if you are still in bed at 7:oo AM something is very wrong. Yet here I am laying in bed at a Holiday Inn in Cherry Hill, NJ waiting for the day to unfold. I think that I am going to try to view this Sunday as a Sabbath. Given that I am here to help with my brother and his wife's move from Philly to Altus, OK I think that possibility of not working will be slim but still this will truly be a sabbath.

I think that a lot of people see the idea of Sabbath as something of a coma to slip into where you cannot do anything for 24 hrs. If this is the case then it is no wonder why sabbath is never really enjoyed or undertaken. For my own life I think of Sabbath as a God-given break from the routine and the rat race. The days that have been most sabbath-filled in recent memory haven't been where I sat around doing nothing but rather have been when I have been active doing the things that my work doesn't provide me the space or time to do. I mow the lawn - certainly work yet it is a break from my labor. Today is the perfect example. It is going to be hot and sweaty all day long. I am going to grow tired and perhaps sore but I will toil in another vineyard (to put it bibically) and at the end of the day I will have taken what I think is a true sabbath - a day from the work of my call yet not a day in a coma of inactivity.

I would like to challenge you to enjoy your Sabbath. Find something you want to do, work at, or be a part of and claim the space in your day to get your hands dirty doing something wholly-other than what the normal 9-5 has in store for you the other days of the week.

Tonight I will be headed to the Circus with my family. I am thinking that the clowns don't put their make-up and floppy shoes on when they don't have to.

Peace, Brett

On Vacation

As I write this I am sitting in my hotel room in Cherry Hill, NJ killing time before my Dad arrives and the family heads out for Laura, my sister-in-law's graduation from Optometry school.

Given my impending vacation, I am going to change the usual format of the blog and give you a little bit of a travel log of my road trip from Marlton, NJ (right outside Philadelphia) to Altus, OK. I am a big fan of road trips and so I hope to bring you some thoughts and updates from the open road.

Enjoy your weekend and I will see you on May 31st!
-Brett

Searching for God Knows What

I am reading a new book. It is called Searching for God Knows What and it is written by Donald Miller. I am not very far into his book but I am already thinking that this is one I will be thinking about for sometime after the last page. His argument is that rather than a formula for getting in God's good graces God is interested in a relationship with us which is much harder to pull off.

In the second chapter he is speaking about those who act/live as though they know everything there is to know about God and thus feel free to decide who is right and who is wrong. Miller believes that Jesus throws a major monkey wrench in this outlook. He writes...

"And that is one of the things that you notice about Jesus in the Gospels, that He is always going around saying, You have heard it said such and such, but I tell you some other thing. If you happen to be a person who thought that they knew everything about God, Jesus would have been completely annoying,"
Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller (pg. 21)

Wanted to leave you with that thought for today.

Peace,
Brett

Sermon: Foul Pole - A Reflection on John 15:9-17

NOTE: Like many pastors, the sermon I write and the sermon I preach end up having many points of departure. Below is the manuscript of the sermon entitled Foul Pole but please note in does not include the final paragraph which was unscripted. Thanks

I think just about everybody now knows that I am something of a Baseball fan. It is true – I like baseball and just about everything about it. I think that it is poetic that the defense has control of the ball, I like that there is no time clock and that if you totaled up the total time the ball was actually in play during those 9 innings you would get a number perhaps just over a minute. But it is not just the game. One of my true love affairs with Baseball is centered on the Stadiums where there game is played. Walking into a ballpark especially if I have never been before is something like the first bite of the chocolate cake that you have spent the whole day craving. I love the little details of the parks, each with those things that make the stadium unique and for some wacky. Now most ballparks look the same more or less infield-wise. Rules mandate that bases remain a certain distance apart and that the pitchers mound stay a certain height but for all the rules in the game there are virtually none that mandate the construction of the outfield. If you tour ballparks this becomes an obvious fact. Some parks like old Tiger Stadium had an extraordinary deep center field but a relatively normal right and left. Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros play have an incredibly odd hill that center-fielders have to navigate as they chase down long drives to straight center. Yet with all the idiosyncrasies there remain constants and the Foul Pole is a great example.

The Foul Pole is hard to miss. Two long yellow poles reside at the coming together of the foul and fair territories and the poles indicate which is which. Sticking straight up in the air at the corners, these poles are there to help, but the truth is that they don’t help out all that much. Balls curve around the poles and in places like Wrigley Field where there are no stands to offer contrast to the poles themselves it is rather difficult to use them well. In fact, the only time that these poles offer a clear-cut, objective ruling is when a ball strikes one dead center anywhere. When that happens every fan will tell you that is a round-tripper (aka. Home run).

I bring this up (because talking about baseball is easy and writing a sermon is hard) because as I read our scripture for today Jesus’ words are something like their own foul poles. His words to love one another reside right at the intersection of good “religion” and real life, splitting the two and drawing sides. On one side is real life where loving everyone doesn’t make much sense and love can get in the way of clear thinking, goal attainment, and security. We don’t love everybody over here, we love some people sometimes and perhaps a handful of people most of the time but no matter what poetry or greeting cards say there are very few, if any that we love all the time. The world doesn’t seem to be capable to withstand loving everybody all the time so we don’t. On the other side of that pole then is good “religion.” Filled with its rules and regulations, it divides up the world into sectors, into groups that may or may not be ok to love, or ok to hate. It creates dogmas and doctrine that direct us on the path that we walk pointing the way that detours us past those places or people that someone/something rationalized it was good to avoid. Good Religion makes these decisions for us, it asks us to follow its signs and go where they take us. And right in the middle of these two sides, at the intersection of real life and good religion is the pole that divides them, a relatively skinny and small target compared to the enormity of the other sizes and yet it is only when the ball strikes that skinny yellow pole that we have a clear-cut indication of what is to happen. It is only when the perfect situation arises, when a well struck ball hit’s the pole square that we feel free to reach out in love and risk modeling Christ. It is only when the decision is made for us by the perfect combination of variables - maybe for you it is age, gender, or maybe background or orientation - that we can safely love. But the truth is in the year 2000 there were a total of 5,693 home runs hit in the major leagues - a record - and out of all those home runs only a handful by comparison hit the foul pole.

If this is feeling a little too theoretical or perhaps my analogy is breaking down allow me to tell you about someone I met in Kenya named Christine. Christine’s mother-in-law had Gang Greene in her right foot. The smell and the decay was more than she could handle and so she contacted the clinic where I was helping out. I was asked to come along with the Doctor because at 60 years old he wasn’t able to carry the feeble woman through the Corn field back and back to the van. With my duties completed I tagged along for the remainder of the ordeal so that I might document it for an independent study I was working on about short-term international medical missions. The doctors and the mother-in-law were busy bribing their way into the local hospital and Christine and myself waited at the van until things were secured. We waiting a very long time. Making chit-chat along the way, Christine asked about America and expressed her desire for her children to one day live in America and become rich. At this point Christine took out a folded photo of two beautiful smiling children, a boy who was young, and a girl who was just a bit older. Christine raised these children alone after her husband and the children’s father was killed along the road one day. She alone was unable to put sufficient food on the table and relied on the generosity of her late husbands cousins and extended family. Looking down at the photo, touching the part that displayed her daughters giant smile she said that her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth would move to America and go to school to become a Doctor. She would marry a man who would treat her right and they would have many healthy children. Elizabeth’s success here in the states was a foregone conclusion for Christine, she was confident that it would happen and it was just a matter of time. But like someone flipped a switch in the hope that Christine had between the fate of her daughter and the fate of her small young son, her whole demeanor changed. She said that she too hoped that her son would go to America but rather than being a Doctor and having a large family she expressed her desire for this small, young, innocent child to perhaps grow up to be a janitor or something like that. Like many of you right now I wondered why. Here in the USA we say that anyone can grow up to the President, to be rich and to have every opportunity in the world and so I asked, why a janitor? I will never forget her words. She looked up at me like someone who fears the situation is out of their hands and said to me that her beautiful boy was named Osama and her only concern was if we would hate him. Osama was born in July of 2001, just months before the attack on the World Trade Centers. She was convinced that because his name was Osama that the world would hate him, limit his success and keep him from ever experiencing love and the joy of a limitless future.

So, brothers and sisters, shall we love this little boy? He doesn’t look like many of us. He isn’t from around here. He speaks another language or English with a heavy accent. He is poor and whenever someone says his name many people will grow with an anger that some would deem righteous. So shall we love him? Real Life says no way. Good Religion says might say yes but only if he changes. If we leave it up to life or religion he misses the mark and yet I am in the pulpit of this very church for all to hear that Jesus loves this child. Jesus loves him more than you or I could ever imagine. Jesus loves Osama and Jesus loves all the other Osamas in the world that fall short or can’t earn our love because of the sin that grips us and the excuses that fuel us. The love that Jesus commands us to show is not something crafted at Hallmark. The love that Jesus abides in comes from the source of all Love, God and in God love is born. Where the world gives reasons not to love and the thing that we call religion gives us signs indicating who is able to be loved and who isn’t God offers us the only real thing in the world that we can tie into, the only hitching post that remains steady and does not change: radical, universal, superabundant love that can never be depleted and can never run out. For God’s love, poured out on all of Creation creates something not of human hands, something that we can never forge in the mills and the factories of our academies: equality beyond measure.

Sermon Writing @ Stauf's Grandview

Today being Friday and me preaching Sunday I figured I would spend the heat of the day holed up here at Stauf's Grandview writing my sermon. As I type this I am taking a break to gather my thoughts.

My sermon in entitled Foul Pole and it talks about that small place where real life and good "religion" come together and give us a clear indication what it is what we should do. To illustrate this I am using the example of the Foul Pole from the Baseball world to talk about the rare chance that a perfect candidate for loving emerges. It is my opinion that Christ wants us to imitate him in our loving of the world. To do this we must inquire as where Christ gets his example of love which I believe comes from understanding what God's love is like. It is my hope to lift up the word and idea of superabundance, that is love without the possibility of depletion, as our model.

I hope to post the completed manuscript here sometime this afternoon. Hope to see you Sunday!

Peace, Brett

All-You-Can-Eat Day

Today is what my Dad refers to as "All-You-Can-Eat" Trash Day here in Grandview Heights, Ohio. Every Wednesday the good folks who come by and get our trash pick up the standard fare of lawn bags and whatever fits in your standard garbage can but today is different. Today, the Wednesday after the Grandview Annual Garage Sale is All-You-Can-Eat Trash day. The guys who pick up what we leave behind were met today with furniture, old bikes, and just about everything else that didn't sell at the sale and now finds itself on the heap that awaits our "Sanitation Engineers." Residents of Grandview are given this privilege - to throw away just about anything - once or twice a year and by the looks of the trucks and the piles they really take advantage of it.

While there is a comment perhaps to be made about materialism and being good stewards of our money and resources I am going to avoid making it. Rather as I drove around Grandview today I was struck by the shear physics of it all...where did these people find the space to store all this junk? But then it hit me as I passed the broken down dresser next to the pile of what I assume used to be a trampoline, I have my own massive pile of "discard" hanging around my life. I have junk up to my eyeballs and if I curbed it all it would compete right along side Grandview's finest. Yet I think that there is something to be discovered deeper here, something that we can learn from All-You-Can-Eat Day.

How much junk do you fail to curb every time you get the chance? How many grudges or wrongs do we store right along side the love that we hold within us. The truth is that all of us need to do a little Spring Cleaning. Part of what we believe as Christians is that when we confess to God, those things that continued to build the gap that separated us from God, are wiped away and the walls that separate us from God and one another are totally destroyed. For God, sins are not only forgiven, they are forgotten. Imagine the pile of junk that could sit outside our homes waiting to be carried away forever? This is the beauty and wonder of confession - every day is All-You-Can-Eat Day! Let's put it all out on the curb.

Peace,
Brett

The T Word

I was a Philosophy major in college. OK, stop your snickering.
One day one of our beloved professors was recounting a story of a flight he took back from the east coast and happened to be seated next to a very inquisitive and talkative man. All the way from JFK to Seattle's Airport this guy talked and talked. At one point the conversation turned towards relationships and our talkative friend recounted an experience from dating the woman who would eventually become his wife. As he closed the story he said, "well I guess birds of a feather flock together." Not two minutes later he launched into yet another tale from his love life and concluded with the adage "I guess opposites attract." Up until this point our Philosophy Ph.d had generally played the role of the listener but it was here that he in chimed pointing out that not two minutes ago he had said that he and his soon-to-be wife were birds of a feather flocking together AND attracting opposites which led him to wonder "which is it?"

There is a lot of life that we readily hand over to remain unexamined as Socrates would say. It is a whole lot easier to not have to dig in and examine every aspect of our lives to determine what it is that we thought, believed, understood, or accepted about the world and our role in it. Truthfully I don't really know what I think or believe about a great deal of actually important stuff and so when it comes around to it I am happy to defer to "experts" or memorable catch-phrases like "opposites attract" or "different strokes for different folks." In my opinion this kind of reliance on safe pop-wisdom gets you in me in a great deal of hot water when it comes to some of the ultimate things in life like love, justice and our own faith. Being quick to leave faith unexamined leaves us easily swept up in the ebb and flow of life but even more than that it almost totally cuts us off from the richness that comes when we truly seek, when we try to pair faith and understanding. There is a richness (that is not without pain) when we begin to seriously think about the God that formed us and our life as we seek to live it and as we begin that process we are doing something scary...we are becoming theologians.

The church today needs theologians more than they need CPAs, MBAs, or JDs. Theology is for the people. Theology is for the church and if we let Theology reside solely in the halls of Academia then it isn't real. Real theology happens when everyday people think about the ultimate things in life. In this way we are all theologians. Open yourself up to thinking!

Peace,
Brett

Thinking about Sunday

As some of you might know James is heading out of town this weekend which leaves me with the sermon for Sunday. I always enjoy opportunities to lead worship and deliver the sermon but for some reason I am especially pumped for this Sunday. I think that it has to do with the scripture. Here is what I will be preaching on...

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (John 15:9-17)

Check back during the week for some thoughts and reflections on the sermon writing process as well as the "normal" articles.

Hope this Monday brings blessings to you and your family. Also please remember to keep the family of Annie Craven in your prayers. Her step-grandfather's funeral begins in 20 minutes.

Peace, Brett

Pastor Friday: Reflections on my Thursday

As many of you know, my "days off" are Friday and Saturday of each week. With Friday being kind of like "normal" Saturday and my Sunday being like "normal" Monday we can logically deduce that Thursday is like "normal" Friday...hence the term Pastor Friday. Today I spent my Pastor Friday out making visits to some Boulevard members who are unable to attend worship and other events due to their health. Based off one of the conversations I had today I wanted to leave you with a little wisdom.

Sitting on her couch and me in a Lazyboy recliner, I asked about her microwave. She told me that she purchased that microwave in 1987 and today it cooks/heats things today as well as it did when she took it out of the box. She went on to say that for whatever reason all of her loved ones have spent the better part of the new millennium trying to convince her to toss that old microwave and get a newer, smaller model with more power and more functions. Her response? "The old one still works just fine and until I need a new one I am going to stick with this one." In my friend's opinion people are quick these days to get rid of the old for the sake of it being not-new no matter how well it works. I couldn't agree with her more.

Our world is one where young is gold and old is a four-letter word. We crave the newest, the most updated and the freshest product available and while this might be a sound strategy for buying bread, for dealing with the world and living out our faith it is rubbish. As a faith community we seek to live out this microwave-wisdom. By singing hymns that are hundreds of years old and hearing scripture that has been read aloud by generations and generations we make real connection to the foundation that has been available for a very long time. To toss such a foundation for something new just for the sake of it being new is akin to getting rid of a perfectly good microwave just because it has seen it's fair share of bags of popcorn or frozen Lean Cuisine.

Enjoy your "normal" weekend and I hope to see you Sunday.

Peace, BJS

Rainy Day Contemplations

With the rain chasing off the last of the lawnmowers and screaming preschoolers, the outdoors (as I know them from outside my office) have come down in volume substantially. So in the pseudo-silence/white noise of the rain I have become a little more introspective and thus prone to thinking.

I am reading this book entitled Credo which is a compilation of wisdom and writing by one of the giants of recent American pastors, William Sloane Coffin (Click here to learn more about Coffin). Coffin writes...

"I love the recklessness of faith.
First you leap, then you grow wings."

The other day I saw the movie Earth. This Disney production spends most of its time showing the beauty and the harshness of the world that we live in. In one "cute" scene baby ducks, prompted by their mother, must leap from the hole in the tree where they have spent the first month or so of their lives to a ground covered in leaf-litter. The drop for this duck family looked to be about 2 stories up. As I write this I am about 2 stories from the ground and no matter how much prompting my Mom would give me (unless the building is on fire) I am not jumping. I don't think I am going to die, but I am not sure I am going to walk again...I don't trust that I will land safely and unlike the ducks I am not hard-wired to fly which would make jumping a whole lot easier. The reality is that I am not supposed to jump, nothing in my nature compels me and nothing in my culture reinforces me to take that leap. I think these same factors are what make that Leap of Faith so very difficult and counter-cultural for humanity.

The belief in the Love and the Grace of God requires people to trust. Trust that their faith and the life that they will pursue in accordance to that faith is not just some seventy-ought years chasing a fairy tale. In other words, the leap that we take in faith, in order to survive must be equipped by wings and a flock to fly with. Yet in what Coffin calls the "recklessness" of our faith, wings only come after your are no longer touching the ground which are the safe confines of our culture and our nature. We must become airborne, prone to falling, under no power of our own, before we become equipped and empowered to stay up and even fly higher. Such is the way with God, that each is equipped for the journey of faith and life only once the journey has begun.

Something to think about for this rainy day...

Stranger in a Strange Land

Yesterday Kate, my Dad, and I walked through the free, outdoor section of the Music as a Weapon 4 Tour that made a stop at the LC Pavilion last night. Here we are, knee deep in people clad in combat boots, black eye makeup, and t-shirts displaying about 35 different screen prints of essentially the same skull and fire mock-up, and then there is me. Sticking out like a soar thumb with my khakis, button-down collared shirt, and no tattoos visible or otherwise, I accompanied Kate and Dad as we saw the sights, heard the music and went in search of the tattoo artists that were "inking" their clientele right there on the scene. With each step I took I had the Sesame Street song "One of these things is not like the other/One of these things just isn't the same" running in the back of my head.

The funny thing is that my Dad, who is no longer with the circus and works for Ernie Ball (maker of electric Guitar strings and owner of the stage that Dad is responsible for getting to where it needs to go) was right at home. This is everyday for him. The skull t-shirts and tight fitting pants, the tattoos, the hair-gel, the loud music incapable of being understood, the combat boots, and everything else is just another day in the office. Being able to get past the visual, the stereotypes, and everything else that springs to mind allows you to start seeing these people as people and not just black t-shirts and combat boots.

I think that there is a rich parable in here for the church. The reality is that people come in all shapes, sizes and appearances. Some look like us, talk like us, think like us (mostly) and therefore we often think about those people as normal. Yet, as "normal" as I am usually, I was truly the "freak" yesterday. We are very quick to decide who is in and who is out but at the very core all of us are people. The guys that I met yesterday, guys my Dad calls friend, were a whole lot like me in a whole lot of ways that mattered a lot more than the color and tightness of their pants. As a church, as a people, and for the betterment of both it is time for us to resist the urge to group and dismiss rather than the advice that comes to us from the scriptures of "taste and see."

Some Sneak Peaks...

On Saturday, May 2nd the Christian Education Planning Retreat came to a close with scripture and prayer and in so doing wrapped up a very productive weekend. Thanks to the hard work of Grace Parks, our committee chair, Amy Smith, Kathie Bailey, and Ginny Fisher we were able to find a direction for the upcoming year. So without further ado I am proud to give you a couple sneak peaks at what you can expect for the 09-10 Sunday School year.

• The theme for the Rotation Sunday School is "God's Family"
• We will be offering 3 All-Church learning events based off the Lectionary (Fall, Winter, Spring)
• James, our Head Pastor, will be teaching 3 classes during the year
• and many more exciting opportunities to deepen your faith and engage in fellowship

Stay tuned for updates on the 09-10 season!

The Main Event: Christian Ed. Planning Retreat

Today is the WORK DAY of the Christian Ed. planning retreat. After a great night of dinner, fellowship, and planning we have all gathered in the meeting room of the Holiday Inn Express Marysville to begin the planning session of the retreat.

Last night we sat down, reviewed our materials and set some goals/guiding principles so that we might maintain focus and direction for our 9am-3pm planning marathon. Lest we think that we are doing this on our own, we will beginning this time together with prayer and a short devotion DVD from Nooma. I can say that I am looking forward to this...

Stay tuned for updates from the retreat!

Chrisitian Education Planning Retreat

Today the Christian Education Committee (CEC) is holding our annual planning retreat for the 2009-2010 Sunday School year and therefore I am writing to you "on-location" from the Holiday Inn Express in Marysville, OH. Over the next day we will be meeting and discerning the direction God is taking the Sunday School program for the approaching 09-10 year. Our goal is to have a rough calendar of classes for Preschool through Adults and address others special events like Confirmation classes, guest presenters and things of the like.

I will be updating you as the retreat progresses and so...this just in: I am going to rest and relax for the next 30 min before the group heads out to dinner.

I would like to invite you to take a moment and pray for wisdom and for God's guidance as we meet and try to find out where God will be taking us.

Peace, BJS