The Most Important Christian Discipline

Somebody asked me the other day what I thought the most important Christian discipline was.  I actually kind of hate that sort of question because faith isn't about tips and tricks, nor going through a handy list of "things to do".  You can be technically good at a lot of things that look holy and still not be very faithful.  Thus the injunction in Matthew, Chapter 6 where Jesus says, "When you fast and pray, do not...(etc.)".  Nevertheless I want to honor the question, so here you go.

I think the most valuable Christian discipline a normal person can pursue is one suggested by Martin Luther in response to the commandment about bearing false witness.  As part of following this commandment he urged people to explain the actions of their neighbors in the kindest possible way.  Whatever your neighbors do or say, interpret it in the most charitable way possible and react accordingly.

This seems easy, but it actually requires you to exercise most of the major faith muscles.  It involves forgiveness, reaching out to understand and care about others, sacrificing oneself and one's prerogatives, abandoning the "holier than thou" and "my way or the highway" attitudes, sharing Good News instead of bad, viewing others with graceful eyes, and trusting in God and the people around you.  Just doing this one thing you learn to do just about everything needed to witness the life of faith.

Conversely failing to do this thing reveals a lack of trust, a willingness to promote oneself at the expense of others, a tendency to regard one's own opinion and outlook as the definition of "right" and "good", failure to recognize that God has made us important and beautiful, grasping at that importance and beauty through other means, defining others by their shortcomings, holding grudges, and making the world worse by bringing it down to the lowest possible definition.

How you interpret, explain, and witness about your neighbors' actions says far more about you than it does about them.  It reveals the core of your faith and your relationship with God in a way that no amount of fasting or church attendance (or any other discipline) can change.  The litmus test isn't whether you're right about your neighbors or faith or anything else.  None of us is ever completely right.  The test is what you'll do  in your not-right state.

Will you continue to be graceful to others, pouring as much love, understanding, and forgiveness into your relationships as possible, binding people together despite their shortcomings and differences?  Or do you prefer to define people by those shortcomings and differences, explain things in the worst way possible, and drive folks apart?

In the very next chapter of Matthew, in verses 7: 1-2, we read:

7 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

It doesn't say we're never to judge anything.  It says the way we judge other people (i.e. talk about and interpret their actions) is also the way God will judge us.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking charitable is the way to go here.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Events Tonight and Saturday!

Our re-scheduled Gospel Group meets tonight at Linda Chilson's house at 7:00 p.m.  This group is designed to examine the Gospel readings with an eye towards providing deeper insight for sermons.

Our final Theology on Tap meeting is this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. at the parsonage!

Hope to see you there!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

HUGE EVENT SUNDAY!

Sunday night at 7:00 p.m. we're going to show the Bible Story movies our Sunday School classes filmed throughout the year.  The evening will include the World Premier of "The Story of Jacob and Esau".  Several dozen of our children and youth star in these films.  I don't know any other words to describe them but amazing, Spirit-filled, and an absolute MUST-SEE.  I can't even describe the combination of humor, faith, and Spirit that comes through these 10-15 minute movies.  The music, the acting, everything...you have to see them to believe them.  This is NOT your normal Christmas Pageant stuff! (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Not only should you come on Sunday night, you should invite friends, family, neighbors, everyone.  If you want to see faith, real evangelism, scripture, love, learning...everything our community is supposed to be about all bundled into one fun-filled evening, you can't miss this.

All six short films strung together total 80 minutes, about the length of a normal movie.  We'll have popcorn and drinks just like a night at the cinema.  It's going to be great.

Hope to see you there!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Important Lesson Week: Evangelism Disciplines You, Not Your Neighbor

The second installment of Important Lesson Week will be old hat to some of you, but it bears repeating.  It deals with Evangelism, hands down the most misunderstood word in the theological lexicon.

As I talk to people hither and yon I bump up against this definition again and again:

1.  Evangelism is about changing other people's behavior.

2.  Specifically, it's about getting them to change their Sunday morning behavior by coming to your church.

Every time I encounter this (and it's often enough that it feels like I'm beating my head against a brick wall) my reaction is the same:   ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

Oh, sorry.  That's wasn't theologically correct.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!

There.  That's much more accurate.

This all-too-common definition of evangelism carries several assumptions:

1. Your behavior is fine, holy, the standard for God Stuff (or at least as close to the standard as one can get).

2.  Other people's behavior is less fine.

3.  If other people just behaved and thought more like you they'd not only be better, but more God-like.

4.  Church functions as the endpoint for Evangelism.

5.  Attendance is the measure of a church's success.

6.  As long as we can get people to come to church, by whatever means, we've done our job.

Here's the problem with all that.

1.  Your behavior isn't fine, especially if you frame it selfishly as in, "I need to get more people to come to my church so I can be happier and feel validated!"  That's as self-centered as it gets.  You're using both the church and your neighbors to feed your own sense of well-being instead of giving up your sense of well-being for the sake of God and your neighbor.

2.  How do you know if other people's behavior is less fine than yours?  You don't even know them.  How do you know that your church is speaking to them if you haven't bothered to build a relationship with them first? As a matter of fact, you're operating under the assumption that your church is good for everybody just like it is.  Even if these people came to church you probably wouldn't let them affect much.  They're objects to you and your church.  They're the "less enlightened" people in your little drama, folks who are "walking in darkness" who need the guiding light of your congregation.  But again, how do you know they're in darkness?  What if you and your church are walking in darkness as well but are blind to it?

Even if you assume other people's behavior is less fine than yours, is that how the Christian church defines folks?  Is that how God sees you?  Does he judge you by your faults or did he send his Son to die for you so that he could forgive you and uplift you despite your faults?  Isn't it odd that you depend on God to forgive and view you this way but you insist upon viewing your neighbors by their faults?

3.  Point 3 above, about other people being more God-like if they'd just believe and behave more like you, is idolatry pure and simple.

4.  The church isn't supposed to be the ENDPOINT of ANYTHING.  It's supposed to be a beginning, and inspiration, to propel people along a holy journey that happens for the most part outside its walls.  Assuming that whatever we do here is both right and the ultimate destination for our faith journey is the beginning step to abandoning that faith journey in favor of slowly dying in place.

5.  Attendance doesn't matter if the whole church is approaching thing backwards.  Getting more people to do the wrong thing is bad, not good.

6.  Defining your job as getting people to come to church--calling the most effective means of doing so "good" by definition--has nothing to do with Christ's definition of goodness or the faith community.

Evangelism assumes that our behavior isn't fine, but that it's forgiven and that our calling is ultimately more important than our doubts or mistakes.

Evangelism assumes that our neighbors are also beloved Children of God, bearers of God's Spirit, and are forgiven as well.  We don't ask our neighbors to follow us, we follow them by listening, caring, embracing, and reaching out in time of need.

Evangelism doesn't tell people they should become more like us.  It shows people our struggle to become more like God as we love the world the way he does.

Church reminds us of our calling, helps us translates that calling into our daily lives, renews our spirit, blesses us through God's Spirit, provides strength for the daily journey, brings help, companionship, and compassion for each other.  It does not exist for itself.  It's not an endpoint unto itself.  It exists for the sake of the world, to propel us into the Godly life of service.

Attendance means nothing in itself.  What people do and experience in church matters more.

The goal here isn't getting other people to come into our church, it's getting our church people to go out and share.  Evangelism happens when your church and its members turn inside out, give themselves up for the sake of God and neighbor, and devote their lives to sharing the Good News of Christ's salvation and forgiveness in whatever way their neighbors most need.

Almost every icky impulse and experience you've had in, around, or through a church has come from people defining the church's purpose backwards.

Almost every great experience you've had in church has come from people overcoming that backwards purpose through love and living out God's gospel.

And yet every time I speak the world "Evangelism" in public I can see the bad, old wheels turning.  "How does this benefit our church?  How can we get our church more popular?  Our particular worship in our particular place is the most important and truest reflection of God ever!  If it doesn't make my (institutional) church 'successful' then why should I even bother?"

We have got to change our definitions.  The only way I know to do that is to live in a different way and then explain (over and over again if necessary) why we're doing so.  That may be the most important theological step our church will ever take.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Gospel Group Tomorrow!

Our Gospel Group meets tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. at Linda Chilson's place.  Come and join us to discuss the Gospel readings for the next few Sundays and to help shape our sermons!

Also don't forget the final Theology on Tap of the year, Saturday, June 15th at 7:00 p.m. at the parsonage!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Important Lessons Week: Dealing With Failure

Over the last month I've had lots of opportunities to have unusual conversations with people.  It's like a whole theological world has opened up via e-mail, websites, in person...all of a sudden everybody is talking about life and God and church all at once.  As I was going over all this in my mind on Sunday afternoon I decided that this week should be Important Lessons week on the church blog, covering some of the topics folks have been talking about all around us.  We'll look at all the ways these things relate to life, faith, and church.

Dealing with failure seems like an odd place to start but it's becoming a lost art today.  That's a shame because it's a critical part of success!

This train of thought started while I was talking to one of our fine youth about video games.  We were sitting down to play together and all of a sudden I went Grandpa on him with a "Back in the Day" speech.

Nowadays everybody plays video games in their living room on a video game console.  You buy the game and expect to play it for at least 30-40 hours over the course of its lifetime.  You can save your progress along the way so when you quit and start again, you just pick up where you left off.  Saving your game also helps when you make a fatal mistake and lose.  Instead of starting from the beginning you just re-load from wherever you saved last.  If you play long enough you're going to win the game.  You may have to re-load a hundred times to do it, but it'll happen.  Everybody wins eventually.  This is what you expect when you buy a game.  If you can't win you call the game "too hard" and get mad at the people who made it.

This was NOT the story back when I was a kid.  Only the rich people had game consoles in their homes and even then they weren't very good.  The real action was in the video game arcade.  You dumped quarters into a machine in order to play.  One quarter equals one game.  If you lost you didn't re-load.  You stuck another quarter in and started from the beginning, doing it over and over until you either learned how to play or ran out of money.

And believe me, the purpose of those games was to take your money.  They didn't want you getting so good that you could play for an hour on one quarter.  They wanted you dumping another quarter in the machine every three minutes max.  So those games were HARD.  They would whup you up one side and down another, especially as you progressed.  There was no such thing as "winning".  Every quarter ended in a loss sooner or later.  You judged the experience by how much fun you had and how much you learned while losing your quarter.

These repeated failures taught us something...not just how to play a video game but how to learn, interpret, anticipate, strategize, and make value judgments about whether something was worth continuing or whether it was time to give up and try something else.  (Just imagine, our parents thought these games were ruining us! Quite the opposite!)

Nowadays we live in a world of helicopter parenting, grade inflation, and money-back guarantees on everything.  If you don't get an "A" something's wrong.  If a product is otherwise fine but just doesn't live up to your expectations you want the store to take it back, no questions asked.  Every child is a genius and every piece of their doodle artwork should be hanging in a museum.  All the big lumps in life are still there--sickness, aging, death, accidents, etc.--but we don't get the daily lessons anymore.  We've adopted the expectation that life will be a series of near-perfect experiences, meeting our standards and satisfaction.

This expectation has some good side effects.  People support each other more than they used to.  In general kids are kinder.  And hey...it's nice to be able to take back those curtains because they didn't match with your carpet as well as you thought.

But this expectation also costs us.  Nothing important in life is ever perfect.  No marriage, no family relationship, no job, no political choice, nothing will ever live up to our standards, nor should it!  Our standards aren't perfect, after all.

It's not so much that we don't understand this.  Few of us find a life that's flawless.  Having the way paved for us so smoothly has robbed us of the ability to deal with imperfection well.  In a world where a store refusing to take back an item without a receipt is a cause for a temper tantrum and a major rant on a blog, we're becoming less capable of judging between minor infractions and major issues.  The consequences in the retail sales world are small but transferred to, say, a romantic relationship that lack of judgment becomes a big deal.  Folks find themselves incapable of sustaining relationships because small disagreements become huge problems.  Conversely, some folks who probably should pay attention to red flags waving everywhere think maybe it's a minor deal, their own fault.

Being out of practice in dealing with (and overcoming) failure also robs us of success.  I don't know anybody who succeeds wildly without risking wildly, and thus failing wildly, somewhere along the way.  If you never do it wrong, how do you figure out what's right?

Recently a long-time pastor asked aloud why the church is so content with mediocrity.  The answer to that is pretty simple.  People don't want a church that succeeds wildly...or really does anything wildly.  Somewhere along the line the definition of "good church" became "nothing goes wrong".  But if nothing ever goes wrong nothing ever goes right either!  We end up living in some mushy middle that everybody can sort of agree on and where nothing ever changes.  It's really convenient because you can just go for an hour and be done with it, no investment required.  There's no real Spirit required either.

We mentioned helicopter parenting above.  How many of our clergy regularly engaging in helicopter pastoring, making sure that ministry stays contained in safe, approved programs that won't offend (or challenge) anybody?  We don't get rewarded for allowing things to go daringly right.  We get praised when nothing goes wrong.

Our own liturgy speaks against this kind of thing from the get-go.  The first thing we do in every service is admit that we fell short and went wrong!  Confession and forgiveness is integral to our expression of faith and our lives.  Another way to look at the absolution God gives us every Sunday is, "I hear you and you did do wrong.  But I love you, I can cover that with forgiveness, and I want you to go out and try again."  Somewhere in the midst of that daily struggle things end up going right, or at least right enough for great ministry and faith to happen.  If the message from God was, "Stop doing anything that fails!" our week--and our faith lives--would look quite different.  We'd be called into inaction instead of action, the opposite of our mission as people of faith.

It's worth remembering that the greatest success in all of history--God's salvation and gift of eternal life shown on Easter morning--followed right on the heels of humanity's greatest failure and tragedy: the cross.

When raising our children, dealing with society, negotiating our relationships with each other, and living out our mission in the church we need to hold up the value of--and grant wide permission for--failure.  Everything going right is not the barometer of faith.  It's better to fail at one worthwhile endeavor than to succeed at a hundred inconsequential things.  No life ends up more anemic and pale than the one in which nothing goes wrong.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)  

Worship Moves to 9:30 Tomorrow!

Don't forget that Sunday worship moves to 9:30 starting tomorrow!  It'll continue at 9:30 through August!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)