Mystery Meat Ministry

I've been kicking the story of Aaron and the Golden Calf around in my head for about a week now and have decided it is a great metaphor for the life of ministry.



Aaron is in charge because Moses has gone up the mountaintop to speak with God. Moses is taking longer than anyone is expecting, so the people start clamoring for Aaron to do something. "Make us some gods," they yell.



From a reader's persective it is pretty obvious that Aaron is just winging it. He really has no idea what he is doing. Anxious, and perhaps even a little scared, he goes with the first thing he sees. "Your earrings, give me your earrings," he says. The Hebrew women all take off their earrings and drop them in the cauldron Aaron is mixing up. Aaron then makes a molten calf out of the melted earrings. His eureka borders on the ridiculous: "This is the god, O Israel, that brought you out of Egypt."

Rrright.

The first casuality in a time like this is always intentionality. People want God or gods, whichever they can have right now. So, like Aaron before us, we wing it. I call it mystery meat ministry, because it reminds me a lot of whatever they served on Fridays in my elementary school - a mixed bag of whatever was available all thrown together and then nuked for safety's sake. This is how blended worship services and hydra-headed youth pastors and scary Jesus pictures made their way into the church. "This is what will lead our struggling little church out of Egypt. This be your god, O Church of America."

The alternative is of course much more unsettling. The alternative is to move slowly and carefully. The alternative is to attend to the ancient spiritual practices. To fast. To pray. To break bread with one another. The alternative is to wait on God.

I covet your prayers. Our church has come out of Egypt but we haven't quite made it to the Promised Land. And Moses is nowhere in sight.

Pray that we will resist the temptation to make ourselves some false gods. Pray that we will instead have the patience to wait on the real one.

More Farm Bill

Today the Burlington Free Press printed an Op Ed piece I wrote calling attention to all that is at stake in this year's Farm Bill.

Lurkers, I cannot stress to you enough how important this legislation is for rural America and for farmers in the developing world. Please write your congressmen and tell them that you would like to see change in this year's legislation. Go to Oxfam America or Bread for the World to learn what needs to be fixed.

Advocacy is a hidden, romanceless, thankless job. But it is how the world will be changed.

Food Stamp Challenge

When I was doing Young Life we would sometimes take off a week or two during the winter and go and work at Wilderness Ranch. We did the dishes for a hundred or so ski trip campers in exchange for a place to shack and a couple of lift tickets.

Hovering over the kitchen was the ultimate of dares called the Pit Challenge. Only the most courageous or stupid would even consider taking up the Pit Challenge. For those bold enough to accept the dare required one to scrape into a single glass all of the food (and God knows what else) from the bottom of the Hobart, add water and then chug.

The reward, we were told, was immortality.

Well, we young evangelicals have grown since then and now some of us are taking on more meaningful challenges. One of Bread for the World's regional organizers and her husband have accepted The Food Stamp Challenge.

Elise and Mark are limiting themselves to $3 a day in food expenditures - the average amount of assistance Food Stamps recipients actually receive. They have some great stories recorded on the BreadBlog.

I suppose the point of the Food Stamp Challenge is two-fold. First it is raising awareness about how little assistance Food Stamps recipients are actually receiving. (Here in VT the per meal amount is about 87 cents.) But more than that, The Food Stamp Challenge also shows us how much the rest of us actually overconsume.

I never felt bad about not taking the Pit Challenge. Other peoples' wet seconds was never my idea of a good time.

But it is only with a severe sense of discomfort that I look at what Mark and Elise are doing and say not for me. I have read the words of the prophet Ezekiel too many times for it to be any other way:

"And this was the sins of your sisters Sodom and her daughters: They had pride and excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and hungry."

Remembering the Anonymous

I came up to the church for a little while on Memorial Day and saw dozens of people coming to pay respects to their dead in the cemetary out back of the church. Quietly they would step out of the car as a family and carry a half dozen petunias past the gate into the church yard. Younger children would trail behind with a small American flag in their hands. I watched them from the window in my study as they would bend down on all fours and dig small holes and plant the flowers and then groom the earth. As I watched them I hoped that whoever it was that they were coming to see knows that they were dearly loved and deeply missed.

In response to that Memorial Day ritual, I thought that I might do a little remembering of my own. Pictured above is the tombstone for the Rev. Ansel Nash, the first pastor of our church, and his wife. "His wife". Now that I think says a lot about the tough job pastor's wives have had over these past several centuries. In life they are subject to a lot of gossip and carping and seldom if ever get recognized for the importance they played in keeping their husbands sane. Then, in death, they are served with the sentence of total anonymity.

"There were five thousand men fed that day, not counting women and children."

Well today women and children do count. So thank you Mrs. Nash. And thank you Irie. And thank you Gabrielle Zipporah. God will not forget the sacrifices that you have made for this Gospel.

New Baptist Covenant

I must have been no more than five or six. Mom was driving the Buick. We called it the Blue Bomb. I can tell you exactly where we were too. We were driving through Tech Terrace, right by Tom Sawyer's house. Somewhere out from the backseat came my question.

"If it were old timey days, would we have been on the Confederate side or the Union side?"

Mom's answer was the one I was hoping for and knew I would get. "I guess we would be on the Confederate's side," she said with some uncertainty in her voice.

A rush of warmth came over me. "Ahh, blessed assurance."

Twenty-five years later I know that my mom was right. Unless we had been bold abolitionists we would have been on the Confederate side. Even if we did not own slaves (two-thirds of whites did not) we would have agreed that the Southern way of life was being threatened. And as Baptists in 1845 we would most certainly have been in favor of withdrawing our covenant with northern baptists and taking part in the establishment of the new covenant between southern baptists which came to be known as the Southern Baptist Convention.
It is no longer blessed assurance that rushes over me when I think of what side of history we as a family might have been on in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is instead, pure, unalloyed holy terror.

President Jimmy Carter is putting together a new initiative to bring a wide body of Baptists - black and white, southern and northern, conservative and liberal - together. The initiative is aptly called the New Baptist Covenant. It is President Carter's hope, and the hope of many others, that this new covenant of Baptists will witness to the Christ who cares deeply about issues of race and poverty and the systems of economic injustice which continue to keep masses of people in de facto slavery even today.

As a boy raised in a Southern Baptist household I have to look honestly at my own history and admit that it was my forebears who broke the first Baptist covenant. And being even more candid and personal I have to admit that if I had been there I would have done the same. Now we have been given an opportunity to renew the covenant - to pick up the pieces of our earthen vessel and put them back togehter again. This New Baptist Covenant is a chance for southern Baptist boys like me to grow up and become more than southern Baptist men. It is a chance for us to grow up and become Christians.

Confounding Calculus

Last week on Speaking of Faith I heard George Ellis, a quaker from South Africa, speaking about the struggle against apartheid in his country. He says that what happened in South Africa "confounded the calculus of rationality." By this I suppose he means a miracle happened.

I was thinking about what it must have been like to be sitting in Sowetto in the mid-1980s or Selma in the late-1940s, having no idea that freedom was right at the doorstep. Then suddenly, the sound of many waters can be heard thundering its way through and the world is turned upside down.

It is the Saints who sit and wait in darkness and dare to imagine a new world where the rationality of our present calculus will no longer hold sway.

There are a few of those Saints at the United Church of Colchester - folks who sat and prayed through dark hours and just simply refused to let the doors be closed. There are a couple of those Saints beating the pavement on the east side of Lubbock High School in the name of Jesus the Incarnate - just daring enough to believe that being faithful is more important than being big. And there are a few Saints who gather every month in the youth room at First Baptist Church of Burlington to sing and pray and create a space for grace to work its way through the chinks of the panoply of a region at war.

The Saints teach me to confound the calculus of my own rationality and hope in the day to come.

Farm Bill 2007

Some of you know I have been working with Oxfam America and Bread for the World trying to raise awareness about what is at stake in the 2007 Farm Bill.

I have written an article at ethicsdaily.com.

I ask you to read it and then write your congressional representatives.

They actually read those letters!

Wonder

I look at this picture and think about what the Psalmist says about us being wonderfully made. I usually take that word wonderful to describe God's activity - God's creative action. But seeing this picture of my kid I have to think it describes more than God. It also describes us. Think about it. We were wonderfully made. In other words, wonder was on hand when we were being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Wonder is a basic part of our genetic makeup. We are quite literally "wonder full".

Part of the tragedy of the human fall was our loss of wonder. When we ate the fruit, and began knowing things that only God had beforehand known, we grew smarter but lost that sense of absolute awe that makes us so giddy that we can do nothing but break out into doxology:

O the depths and the riches and wonder of God. Who has known his mind and who has been his counselor?

James Baldwin once wrote that the purpose of art is to lay bear the questions that have been hidden by the answers. Looking at this picture of Gabrielle I long for that lost womb of God's imagination, where I knew nothing and all was possible.

Dismas House

Saint Dismas

Last night Irie, Gabs and I attended the Dismas House of Vermont annual dinner. I delivered the invocation - which means that I provided the first awkward moment of the evening. "And now, let us pause from the fun we are having and remember that God is still watching. . ."

Our church has been sending a troop of six or so people over to Dismas every month or so for a while now. (Props to Mary Lynch for taking on the organization of that.) Dismas is a transitional home for people who are re-entering our community following a jail or prison term. I have had a great time every time I've gone and have discovered that I am willing to fight for dinner rolls just as much as the felon sitting next to me.

Olin Robison, professor emeritus of Middlebury College, gave the keynote address. That didn't impress me much. But the fact that he was a Baylor alumni made me think he might actually have something of substance to say. I'm glad I listened. His speech was shorter than I would have liked, but his thoughts imaginative.

Robison talked about the request by James and John to sit with Jesus, one on his left and one on his right, when he came into his kingdom. "That is not mine to grant," Jesus said. Robison made the point that James and John assumed Jesus would be draped in royal garments and seated on a throne of glory when he came into his kingdom. They were wrong. When he came into his kingdom he was hanging naked from a cross - not so very becoming for a king.

For whatever reason, James and John were spared the agony of having to die with Jesus. Instead, two common criminals held the places next to Jesus when Jesus came into his kingdom.

I think what Robison was getting at was this: It could have been James. It could have been John. It could have been them hanging naked next to Jesus. And except for grace, it could have been us too.

Catholic tradition has it that a man named Dismas was one of the two criminals next to Jesus when he came into his kingdom. It was Dismas who turned to Jesus and begged him to remember him when he came into his royal power. Dismas' request stands the request of James and John on its head. They were asking out of a desire for glory; Dismas was asking out of a longing for grace.

A lot of politicians and talking heads on TV earn their living by getting some people riled up about needing to be tougher on crime, etc. They make anyone who has ever served time out to be less than human. Its bread and butter for them.

But places like the Dismas House keep reminding me that convicts and felons are human also. I know that because I keep bumping elbows with them as we pass the dinner rolls around.

And I look up from my plate and think, "You know, it could of been me. But for grace, it could have been me."

Sinners at the Table of an Awesome God

"The Lord's Supper" Fritz Eichenberger

Pastors-to-be go to seminary and talk about the radical nature of Jesus' call - how he gathered the sinners and tax collectors. We decide that that is exactly the kind of community we are going to gather when we pastor.

It turns out, however, that Jesus has already gathered that community in the church. Misfits and miscreants and juvenile delinquents and alchoholics and gossips and holier-than-thou tax evaders are all there waiting for us in the pews.

The trouble for us in ministry is that we read a story like Jesus having dinner at Levi's house and pretty much put ourselves in Jesus' place. But the fact is we are a lot more like the sinners and tax collectors and are in constant jeopardy of being like the Pharisees - awfully surprised by who has shown up for dinner. At some point we have to come to the realization that we are not so much the gatherers, but rather the gathered.

I have been reading Eugene Peterson's book Leap Over A Wall. I love what Peterson says about the church in all of its rag-tag messiness. "For myself...I refuse to either apologize for the church as it is or attempt to improve its image. Apologize for David's crew-the distressed, the debtors, and the malcontents at the cave of Adullam? Improve the image of Jesus eating with crooks and whores?"

Like Peterson, I am not going to apologize anymore; and I am going to try and quit demanding apologies also.

A Confession of Faith, Bizzarely Stated

I believe we were made for God and each other. All of us. Male and female, God created us - to know and love God and to know and love one other. The sky was beautiful that day. In the tragedy of the human condition, however, we, like sheep, all went astray. The seamless garment of our humanity was ripped in two - then to pieces. A spell was cast. A deep, impenetrable darkness again returned to hover over the face of the deep and cloak the beauty of the world. We all put on masks, hewn out of fig trees. We could no longer bear the thought of anyone seeing us as we really are. We were ashamed.

Then a light turned on. The Light, really. The one Light from whence the sun got its burn and the moon its glow and the stars their twinkling wink. The Light turned on and there was a man standing at the door. His name was Jesus. It was all very surprising. He asked to come in and have dinner - with us. With me. He feasted lavishly and laughed a lot. A little too much for some. Someone asked what in the world he thought he was doing with us sinners. He looked at them incredulously, as if they had missed the whole point. "Who else would I eat with?" he asked. "I came to be with the sinners, not the righteous."

He came to other houses too. He healed people and talked about the coming of a new age. He taught with authority. He spoke with power. He was NOT boring. It was all good news. Someone asked him if he was the Messiah - the anointed one of God. He just winked. But I swear I saw the twinkle of the stars in that wink. Then they came for him. At midnight. Under the hushed cloak of darkness; the powers of a cruel world came and took him. But he did not resist. He told us to put away our swords. By that afternoon he would be dead - convicted on a bunch of false charges. He was executed as an enemy of the state.

The sun mourned. The moon cried. The stars lost all their twinkle.

Then, on the third day he rose again. From the dead. And not just his ghost. But his body. Tom touched his hands to make sure.

This changed everything. Death has been swallowed up by life. The darkness has given way to the Light. A whole new world has been born over. There is a new creation.

So what do I believe?

I believe that we are the bearers of the hope of this new creation. We have been entrusted to announce the coming of a new age where hatred gives way to love, sadness gives way to joy, strife is overcome by peace and death will one day, for all of us, give way to resurrected life. We have been graced to carry on Jesus' ministry and to be his ongoing presence in the world.

The Village Church

I love the village church. It is a sign of the faith of generations' past. I wrote an article about the history of our church for the Colchester Sun earlier this year.

Since the Sun didn't post that article online I have decided to post the text myself. It is long, but worth the read I think. . .
My wife and I are celebrating our one year anniversary as Colchester residents. We moved here last February from North Carolina when I accepted the call to be the pastor of the United Church of Colchester. Ours is the brick church in the village with the tall, spired steeple. We share the parking lot with the Burnham Memorial Library.

One of my first tasks as a pastor in a new church and a new town was to familiarize myself with both the history of the congregation and the history of the community. Joyce Sweeney, a longtime resident of Colchester and member of the United Church, handed me Ruth Wright’s book Colchester Vermont From Ice-Age to Interstate. Wright includes in her book an excerpt from the diary of Rev. Nathan Perkins, a Connecticut minister who toured the region in 1789. In those days ministers were among the most highly educated in society and their surviving journals oftentimes provide invaluable insight into the temperament of a particular people at a particular time in history. I was hoping I could glean a little insight from Reverend Perkins’ experience and parlay it into my current context. His description of the topography, terrain, and fauna was just what I expected:
Moose plenty on ye mountains over against Jericho, Essex and Colchester – people hunt them – eat them in lieu of beef - & get their Tallow. Bear and wolves, plenty – timber, beach maple, – pine, hemlock, cherry-birch & some oak and Walnut – land extra ordinary good . . .

What I had not expected was Rev. Perkins’ account of the people of this area, which was altogether shocking:
[P]eople nasty – poor – low-lived – indelicate – and miserable cooks – All sadly parsimonious – many profane –yet cheerful and contended – the women more contented than ye men turned tawney by ye smoke of ye log huts – dress coarse & mean & nasty & ragged.

I often wonder if the construction of what is now the United Church of Colchester either precipitated or resulted from the end of all that meanness and nastiness. In either case the construction of what is now the brick church must have been quite an undertaking for such a “sadly parsimonious” group. Yet despite whatever personal difficulties they might have had, the Congregationalists and Baptists pooled their resources and ingenuity in 1838 and built themselves a fine church which outlasted Rev. Perkins and several other generations of ministers after him. The church is a grand building with a picturesque New England village church steeple on top. On occasion I will slip up into the attic just below the belfry and marvel at the construction. The lumber was all hand chopped and precision fitted. Only the sturdiest of pine and hemlock was selected. It is obvious that the builders intended to craft something that would last. In commenting about the construction of the building one person in our congregation recently said to me, “You know there was probably no blueprint at all for this building, but someone sure as heck knew what they were doing.” Indeed they did.

For twenty years the Baptists and Congregationalists shared the building until the Baptists raised enough to build their own white church down the street. Sixty years later the two congregations merged to become one single congregation – the United Church of Colchester. The United Church continued to use both buildings for several decades until the white church was sold to the town in the 1990s. That building now serves as the Colchester Meeting House.

When I was officially installed as the pastor last May I began thinking about what kind of footprint I might like to make over these next few years. I again turned to Ruth Wright’s book to see what kind of legacy the ministers before me had left. What I read there shocked me once more.

According to Wright, the first minister of the United Church, Stephen Talbot, knew how to preach a serious sermon. The congregation, however, was apparently more captivated by his young son Andrew’s attempts to escape the confines of a pew – by any means necessary. Rev. Delbert Donnocker’s sermons packed a punch but he was “more remembered for his wife’s culinary skills, and for his personal love of a fast horse.” These, and the flop of a clambake he proposed. (Perhaps things would have turned out differently had he solicited the counsel of his wife in the matter.) But my favorite has to be Rev. A. Ritchie Low, whose erratic driving apparently left a real impression on the hearts, minds and yards of the congregation.

After reading these accounts I was beginning to suspect Joyce Sweeney had acted with malice of forethought in not disclosing this book to me before I answered the call to come as pastor. But then I read a little more about Rev. Low’s tenure and realized that indeed I was called as pastor of the United Church of Colchester for a very distinct purpose. According to Wright, in 1929 Rev. Low “began working out plans for interracial fellowship at the child level.” An interracial fellowship at the child level in 1929? What that would have meant I do not even know. What I do know is that my wife Irie and I are expecting a little girl sometime next month. I am white and Irie is black and when that child is born a dream that was begun way back in 1929 will finally come true. We will have interracial fellowship at the child level at the United Church of Colchester.
I suppose that is the really wonderful thing about belonging to a church as old as ours. You are always living out someone else’s dreams.

Much has changed since the Baptists and Congregationalists first dreamed of building themselves a church in the early 19th century. The moose in these parts have disappeared. And so have the log huts. The poverty, though not completely eliminated, is much diminished.

But for all that has changed about the context of our ministry, one thing remains the same. We are still working to create a place where others can come and find grace. That is what it meant to be church when the brick building went up in 1838; and that is what it continues to mean all these many years later.

In that sense you might say we are still building the “brick church.” There are still no blue prints. We only have the dreams of those who came before us. And our dreams as well. And faith that someone knows what the heck they are doing . . .

Green Step

Our friends Annie, Michael and Sam live across the street from the church and have just begun a weekly email that lets others know what kinds of things can be done to conserve energy and reduce pollution around the house. The email is called Green Step and gives us one small step a week to make a difference.

With absolutely no permission from any of them, I am pasting a copy of step 1 below. To receive other steps email green.step.email@gmail.com.

Green Step 1: Unplug the power vampires in your house

Since a number of people read our invitation letter and asked why we
unplug our cell phone charger, we thought we'd start by passing along
what we've learned about household power drains. Many appliances that
appear to be officially "off" are actually consuming energy. Although
some folks blandly refer to these as "standby power appliances," we
prefer the more intriguing names of "vampire power" or "phantom
loads."

Any device that has a big plug (known as a wall pack or more aptly as
a "wall wart") is a power vampire, using energy when merely plugged
in. An appliance that continues showing a light or clock when off,
anything with a standby feature, or one with a remote control is too.
Here's a quick list of assorted vampires: cell phone chargers,
computer chargers, ipod chargers, Game Boys, televisions, vcrs, cd
players, battery chargers, flashlight chargers, hairdryers, power
tools, printers, baby monitors.

Although these items seem like small energy drains, they add up, both
in your electricity bill, and in their contribution to global warming
pollution. Wasted energy adds up to 10% of your bill, and as An
Inconvenient Truth's website reports, "the energy used to keep display
clocks and memory chips working accounts for 5 % of total domestic
energy consumption." While that number may seem small, it is
responsible for sending out "18 million tons of carbon into the
atmosphere every year." Or as worldwatch.org puts it: "vampire-like
standby devices…suck 26 power plants' worth of electricity every year
in the U.S. alone. That's 26 power plants spewing pollution and
disrupting our climate just so the vampires can sit at our beck and
call."

What can we do? Be vigilant about vampires at home: unplug any
appliances you aren't using right then and there; unplug chargers when
they are done; plug your tv and vcr into a power strip connected to a
wall switch and turn the switch off when you are through so the whole
unit is off; use the sleep mode on your computer and turn off your
computer and monitor when not in use.

What else can we do? Tell a friend, tell a colleague, tell your
roommate. We're taking this quote from Goethe to heart: "It is not
enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must
be itself a goal and a step likewise." We hope this step has helped.
If it has, please pass it on or pass along our email address. Thanks
for being a part of this effort to share information. If you have any
suggestions, questions, or ideas, please let us know. We hope you'll
be in touch.


Peace,
Annie, Michael, and Sam
green.step.email@gmail.com

Tony Two

I've been in a conversation regarding my last post about Tony Campolo. He took a lot of flack for ministering to Bill Clinton during the whole Lewinsky thing - as did Bill Hybels of Willow Creek. Too bad that isolated them from some evangelicals. But I have found it interesting in recent years that secular media just latch onto the fact that they did what they did. I can't figure out if it is a part of the cult of personality that surrounds Bill Clinton or if, down deep inside, there is something that is telling them that if an evangelical Christian could stand by the side of a guy who did what Clinton did then maybe what I thought about the message of Jesus might be worth listening to again...for the first time.

A Red Lettered Jesus

Its worth checking out the link below where Tony Campolo was on The Hour last night. I think he does an incredible job of talking about who Jesus is to a very secular audience.

Jesus hangs out with sinners and tax collectors and even Canadians. Imagine that.


http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1073

Pastor's Page

This is a rough draft for the pastor's page on the church website. I am interested in feedback. Does this say something which might compell someone enough to get the kids up on Sunday morning and try church again - maybe for the first time?

Hello and welcome. Or, as I leaned to say growing up in West Texas, “Howdy, stranger.”

Stranger. That’s a pretty good place to begin. It is my hope that this page will give you, the stranger, a brief introduction to who we are and will serve as an invitation to come and get to know us the old fashioned way – in person.

I like to tell people that we are a church that is becoming.

Actually, we’ve been a becoming church for a long time now really. Since 1804 in fact. When the bricks were laid for what is now the United Church of Colchester, the building tripled as the Baptist church, the Congregationalist church, and the town meeting hall. Like a lot of other New England churches, our church was the place to be.

But things changed; a whole generation of New Englanders quit going to church and there came a day when the members of the United Church of Colchester didn’t know if they were going to make it. Then a really cool thing happened. A small group of faithful people came to the conclusion that they still had something good here and decided not to quit doing life together. So they kept on gathering and kept praying and somehow they kept the lights on. And they survived the storm.

Now we’ve turned a corner. On any given Sunday a steady stream of children’s feet can be heard pattering up and down the halls. Adults gather on Sunday mornings and regularly throughout the week to pray and study scripture together and talk about work and home and rest and play and piece all those things together into the arrangement I like to call spiritual living.

We believe we were made for relationship with God and each other. With that in mind we are trying to do two very simple things. Love God and love neighbor. Bottom line.

If you come to visit us you will discover we have done our best to preserve the character of the church we inherited from generations past. With wooden pews (cushioned now) and stained glass and a beautiful steeple on top, our church is indeed a traditional Vermont village church. For over 150 years people have gathered in our humble sanctuary to marry, bury, laugh with, listen to and love one another. Sometimes when I need a break I will go in there to sit by myself. I always get this peculiar feeling that I am not alone, but that a cloud of witnesses sits with me. Our sanctuary is more than a quaint space. It is a sacred one also.

We are Baptists, and wherever two or three Baptists are gathered there will be food. So we eat together a lot – not because we love food (we do) but because we love each other and because we believe something really special happens when people break bread together. I think this is why a lot of the parables Jesus told about the kingdom of God were about banquet feasts.

A seat will be left empty for you at our banquet. No matter who you are. No matter where you have been. No matter what you have done. We will welcome you. We will say, “Pull up a chair. Tell us your story. Share with us in this feast called life.”

Your children will be welcomed too. We will welcome their laughter because it gives us buoyancy. We will teach them our stories because it gives them faith. We will not stop telling them that God loves them – without remainder.

We are truly a church that is becoming. And we hope you will become along with us.

Strangers no more,


Ryon

Connectivity

My friend and mentor Charlie Johnson has begun a new blog. Charlie is one of the best Baptist preachers around and we are all hoping this new forum will give Charlie's voice a larger audience. It is a voice that needs to be heard.

I remember the first time I heard Charlie preach. I was in college and had been invited to speak to the high school Sunday School class at Second Baptist Church, where Charlie was pastor. Second B was the church I had attended as a boy before my family quit church altogether.

When I arrived at Second B my most consistent adult experience of church had been the seeker service kind. Some praise songs that got us all in the mood and then a very "relevant" sermon - usually with three points, illustrating the three "principles" we could all take home from the scripture.

Charlie's preaching was entirely different. He didn't preach a how-to sermon. Instead his preaching was more a kind of unleashing. Whereas so many others preach about the gospel, Charlie understood that the preaching act itself is in fact part of the gospel. For the first time I realized that to proclaim the Gospel is to let loose the power of God which first spoke life into the world. "Let there be..."

Sermon: Letting Children and Others In

Letting Children and Others In
Rev. Ryon L Price
United Church of Colchester
September 24, 2006
Mark 9:30-37


I turned thirty this week. It has been a long while since birthdays were a big deal. Twenty-one was of course a significant milestone – from what I remember of it anyway. But the last eight have just sort of come and gone. Hum drum.
Needless to say I didn’t see it coming. I thought thirty would be another yawner; but I was wrong. Way wrong. Apparently for everyone else in the world thirty is a really, really big deal. My health insurance jumped up by nearly half – which should concern you because you pay my premium. For the first time I received a birthday card that began with a statement like, “It doesn’t matter how many birthdays you’ve had…” That was supposed to be reassuring but it sounded patronizing. Backhanded even. If it doesn’t matter then why remind me? And then, to top things off, my mom called and she just couldn’t quit saying, “Thirty years.” “I just can’t it’s been thirty years.” “It just doesn’t seem possible that it has been that long.” My mother of all people. I kept thinking, I used to get candles and cake; now I get insults. “Gee, Mom, thanks!”
Yet I wonder if the profound reality is that my mom might be wrestling with the truth that if I am thirty years old, she is now thirty years older. That did little to comfort me of course.

We live in a culture where youth has unprecedented power. Just look at all the activities our kids are involved with their infinite practices and ballgames and recitals and we can see that we are not only kid-friendly, but we can sometimes be kid-run. This is why we have to have “toy free” checkout lanes at the grocery store. Some of you parents look at me knowlingly.
If we are to get what Jesus’ is trying to say we must imagine a very different world from our own. From the very beginning I think it is important for us to realize that children in Jesus’ day belonged to a much lower station in life than their contemporaries today in the first world. In fact it is much better to compare the children of Jesus’ day to the children of somewhere like third-world Africa. It is these children who are the most vulnerable to death and disease and the abuses of corrupt military and political powers. If we can imagine the kind of lives these children live then we might well come close to imagining the kind of lives children lived in Jesus’ day.

We have been talking about how in the eighth chapter of Mark there is a dramatic turn in the course of events. The first half of the book is characterized by a certain rocket-like combustionable force. Jesus bursts onto the scene of Galilee like British rock stars busted onto the American shore in the 1960s. Reading all the signs correctly, Peter confesses to Jesus his belief. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” But then the rising action climaxes with sudden and surprising foreshadowing of a dark turn in the narrative. “Then,” the scripture says, “Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer and die.”
The disciples were having none of it. They refused to hear what they did not want to hear. Their vision was too clouded by their own religious, political and ideological preoccupations and the delusions of their own grandeur to see Jesus for who he really was. As they walked along, the disciples began arguing about who amongst them was the greatest. Jesus knew something was up. Perhaps he heard their muffled rumblings. “Me” “Mine” “Greatest” “No team in I” When they reached Capernaum, Jesus had had enough. It was time for an intervention. “What were you arguing about on the way?” he asked. Embarrassed silence was their response.
He sat down and called the twelve to him, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be last and servant of all.” Then he took a child, and set the child before them, and put his arm around him and said, “Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name, welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the Father who sent me.”

I have a friend who coaches seventh grade basketball at a middle school in Dallas. Now I have to tell you that most kids don’t grow up idolizing their seventh grade coaches. Us kids who played basketball in junior high all thought we were going to grow up and be the next Michael Jordan. The Nike commercial still plays in my head. “Be like Mike, if I could be like Mike.” Somehow it never occurred to us that not all of us could be like Mike, but that some of us were going to grow up and be like my own seventh-grade coach, Coach Arterburn. As much as I loved and respected him, “Be like Arterburn” just didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Coaching seventh grade wasn’t my friend Jayson’s idea of making it big time either. Nevertheless there he found himself two years ago suffering through a winless season coaching one of the worst teams in the history of Dallas ISD sports history. And just to add insult to injury to that ill-fated season, the team was getting drowned by thirty in the final regular season game. It doesn’t get any lower than this.
With a few minutes left in the game Jayson decided to clear the benches and let some kids who seldom saw any playing time have a chance to run up and down the floor a few times. He even put in the manager, Timmy, who was physically and developmentally disabled and had a penchant for shooting the ball anytime he touched it – no matter where he was on the court. I don’t think Jayson ever really thought that Timmy might actually touch the ball; instead he thought the other kids would keep it between themselves. But as fate would have it, with just over a minute left in the game someone was desperate enough to pass Timmy the ball. He was standing just inside the half court line when the ball fell into his hands and he turned reflexively and heaved it toward the bucket. I can imagine that in the brief second it took for that ball to sail toward its goal all of the darker human emotions of shame and repugnance reared their ugly heads in the hearts and minds of Timmy’s teammates and coaches. And yet hidden beneath those dark emotions I believe there was also a sprig of human hopefulness and longing, buried like a mustard seed in the depths of the dark earth. If you had to put words to that tiny, hopeful feeling it would sound something like a prayer. “Please, Lord, for Timmy’s sake, please.” As the ball arced toward its final destination all breath was held within the gym and then released in a sudden, collective and unmistakable burst of sound. S-W-I-S-H.
The game came to a complete stop. Parents and fans and both teams rushed the floor and hoisted Timmy into the air. Suddenly for my friend Jayson and for all those others gathered there life had been put into perspective. Winning and losing didn’t matter so much anymore. Being on the bottom of the coaching ladder did not matter anymore. Not only did the question of “Who is greatest?” no longer matter; the question no longer even made sense. For the lowly had been raised up. Yes, for the sake of the lowly. But for Jayson’s sake also. And for the sake of all people in that gym. And for our sakes too. And for the sake of the entire world.
“Let this little child come in,” the hymn says. And not just for the sake of the child. But for the sake of us who allow the child to come in and find space and change our lives. “For whoever welcomes a child, welcomes me,” Jesus says. The scriptures tell us that we must open ourselves and our homes to the stranger because in doing so people have sometimes entertained angels unawares. Jesus’ teachings today go even beyond that. He says that in opening ourselves up to the lowly, we open ourselves up to God.
The Biblical word for this is hospitality. It means creating an open space for others to come into. Our challenge as the community of God is to work toward creating that space so that single mothers might feel that they can give birth to their children and that the alien and foreigner among us might also find a place to be him or herself in spite of differences in theology and worldview. Simone Weil said that creation is that space where God ceased to be all things so that we might be some thing. And so it is with us.

You may or may not have noticed that many of today’s music pieces revolve around the theme of water. That is quite appropriate given the events of my life this past week. As another piece in my rite of passage into old-age this week, I baptized someone for the first time. Now I have to admit that up until now I have felt a little phony as a minister. Yes, I had married and buried but not yet dunked anyone – which is the primary charge Jesus gives his followers at the end of the book of Matthew. “Go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” A minister who is only burying old Christians but not baptizing new ones soon learns that he is working himself out of a job. So I am very glad to have now dunked someone in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Brad, the young man who I baptized is home on leave from the war in Iraq and the son of two Kevin and Jill McKinstry who are both a part of our congregation. Most of the time this would have been a more church-wide affair and would have involved him joining our church as a member as well. Since Brad will not be staying here but heading back to a base in California however, we felt it was appropriate that we were baptizing him into the Christian body at-large. As we sat along the banks of Lake Champlain, contemplating our courage to enter into the chill of the early-fall waters, I talked to Brad and his family about the importance of this moment he was entering into. I said that being baptized is being baptized into the life and death of Jesus Christ and then raised into his resurrection. It is a death – a kind of burial itself – where the shell of our old lives are washed away and we are raised into new life with Christ. It is a submission of our lives to the claim of Christ – a promise that the Way of Christ will be our way. It is a promise to strip ourselves of all our pretences toward greatness and leave them on the banks of the shoreline and enter into the waters, adopting the words of the first baptizer John the Baptist as our own, “He must increase. I must decrease.” “What is your profession of faith?” I asked between the cold rattle of my clattering teeth. “Christ is Lord,” Brad responded.
As we were leaving that spot along the banks, I secretly pocketed a small, stone from among the shoreline. Thousands and perhaps millions of years of waves lapping against the shore have worn this rock flat and smooth. The course edges are gone. The rough edges have been flattened, and buffed.
When we submit ourselves to the waters of baptism we in faith say no to the false dreams we might have made of ourselves and yes to the dream God has for us in the womb of his imagination. The coarse edges of our lives are made smooth. “Have Thine own way Lord,” we sang earlier, “Have Thine own way, Thou art the potter and I am the clay.” To say yes to God is to say yes to whatever form God desires to make out of us.
To be baptized is in the end to come to a profoundly new understanding of who and what is great. When we fall back headlong into our Baptismal waters, the whole world is turned upside down. The lofty are brought low and the lowly are raised up. And there is only one answer to who is the greatest and that name is Jesus Christ our Lord.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On the "Principles" of Christian Education

At Michael Westmorland-White's http://anabaptist418.blogspot.com has some interesting thoughts on the tragedy of Biblical illiteracy in the church. He has some ideas of how we might go about turning the tide.

My comments were the following:

The real objective is to get our whole community hearing and reading the scriptures again that their lives might be shaped by the narrative. But what I have found in most youth and children's curriculum is not a primary emphasis on the story (ie - Jonah and the fish) but on the "Biblical principle" that story is meant to teach. The question of course is, just what is that principle? And once we "get it" do we throw out the husk and keep the kernel?I think that is what we have primarily done and that is why we are in such a crisis right now in the way of Christian ed. We have stripped the scriptures of all their own creative powers and settled for good "Christian principles" like "be nice" and "share." No wonder kids think the Bible is so boring.

The idea of the creative power of story is really central to what I think we as the church most need to be teaching. If we can train our churches toward the point of what Richard Lischer calls "thinking in Bible", much like a native French speaker thinks in French, then I think we may come a long way back toward really seeing ourselves as living in the world of the Bible. Stories seem to have a much more compelling force than do "principles", which lack the imaginative power to testify to a God who creates something from nothing and raises life from death.

Perhaps G.K. Chesterton articulated best what I am trying to say in his book Orthodoxy (Harold Shaw Publishers 1994, p. 28)

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

The virtues of being a good boy and then growing up to be a nice gentleman simply fail at the point of creativity. And in that sense they are maddening because they are dull. And nothing is more maddening than dullness.

And here is my big concern - one MWW said he shares with me - The church can and should not count on an unbaptized secular school system (no matter how good it is). The church must be the one to teach us to pray and read the scriptures and love our neighbor as ourself.

Sermon: Under the Table and Into the Fire

Under the Table and Into the Fire
Rev. Ryon L Price
United Church of Colchester
September 10, 2006
Mark 7:24-37; Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23

Irie and I have returned from our jaunt to the Maine coast. I am embarrassed to admit that our trip completed my transition. With the volume of fish and clams I consumed I can now no longer classify myself as a vegetarian, but am now a full-fledged "pescetarian."

As we drove down the Maine coast what we found most peculiar were the monuments erected to the men who fought for the cause of the Union. Irie and I grew up with monuments dedicated to men on the other side of that terrible war decorating our town lawns. It is almost unimaginable that this one nation under God was at one time so bitterly divided. And I thank God that those wounds continue to find healing.

Jesus is on a trip of his own in today’s Gospel story.
He has entered the region of Tyre, which was largely a gentile region – and a despised one at that. There was more than a friendly rivalry between the Jewish people and their neighbors to the north. This was not Duke–UNC or Colchester–Winooski. The hostility between the people of Tyre and the people of Israel was long, bitter and bloody. Tyre was infamous among the Jewish people for its complicity in the slave trade that saw thousands of Israelites stolen from their homeland hundreds of years earlier. The Jewish people had not fully forgiven them for that. Many still hoped for one day when the Lord’s condemnation of Tyre would one day come to pass:

I will thrust you down with those who descend into the Pit, to the people of
long ago, and I will make you live in the world below, among primeval ruins,
with those who go down to the Pit, so that you will not be inhabited or have
a place in the land in the living.
Ezekiel 26:20

There really is no mincing words here – according to Ezekiel Tyre can and will quite literally go to hell.

It is to this land of all places that Jesus has come in today’s gospel reading. We are not told why he has come or what he plans to do while he is here. Yet, I suspect, it may have been sheer weariness that brought him here. He had just suffered an intense encounter with a group of Scribes and Pharisees who had come from Jerusalem and were questioning what appeared to them to be his rather lax morals. "Why do your disciples not wash before dinner, but eat with defiled hands?" "Do you not respect the law?" "Where is your sense of decency?" I suspect that after an encounter with a group of teetotalers like this, Jesus was slipping off to Tyre for a little rest. Perhaps not unlike a pastor slipping off to Maine to have a couple of beers where nobody will recognize him?

Yet that seems to be just Jesus’ problem in the book of Mark. Scholars refer to the "Messianic Secret" because Jesus is always telling folks not to say anything about him being the Son of God. The irony of course is that it is that the secret isn’t really a secret. Everyone seems to know or suspect that Jesus is the Messiah – everyone but the religious authorities, that is.
Apparently this woman in the story is in on the secret too. Or perhaps she’s just heard whispers. Perhaps because her daughter was possessed by a demon she is desperate enough to try anything or anyone. What else is a mother to do but hope when she thinks the devil is in her child? Hearing that Jesus has come to Tyre she scurries to find him and ask that he might heal her daughter.

Here is where things get a little unsettling. This woman is a Syrophoenician; meaning that she’s not a good Jew like the ones who came from Jerusalem to hassle Jesus about his lax morals. This woman doesn’t keep kosher. She’s not clean. Her daddy wasn’t circumcised on the eighth day. She is therefore certainly no child of the living God. "Save my baby," the woman cries out. But Jesus plays the fox, "Let the children be fed first," he says, "for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs."

But this woman will not be outfoxed, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs."

I suppose mothers will go to most any length to see that their children are well. The great writer and thinker G.K. Chesterton told the story of a man who was something of a rogue who died and was cast into hell. His business associate, a deacon in the church and an upstanding citizen in the community, went to the gates of hell and in the most professional and courteous way politely asked, "Please, let my partner out of there." The devil declined. Then the condemned man’s priest came and begged, "Please, for mercy’s sake, let that man out." Again, the devil was unmoved. Finally, the condemned man’s mother arrived on the scene. Without so much as a bat of an eye she charged up, rattled the gates and surprised everyone when she did not beg to have her son back but instead yelled, "Let me in there!"

The Apostles’ Creed tells us that that is exactly what Jesus did for the sake of God’s children:

I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and in his only
Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the
virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead and buried. He descended
into hell.

This is the depth of Christ’s love for us. That he would descend even into the Pit to save us.
David Steinmetz, one of my seminary professors, told us in his Church History lecture course about a Presbyterian who had come to Duke to do her divinity degree and really suffered for that choice later when she came before the Presbytery to have her fitness for ministry examined. First there was the problem of her being a woman. And why did she not go to Princeton, the Presbytery wanted to know? Or Westminster? But, Duke of all places, a Methodist school? The grilling went on insufferably like this for several hours and the young woman grew more and more aggravated by what she thought was an unfair trial. At last the final question was to be asked – the question which would serve as the litmus test for whether or not this person was indeed a true Calvinist Presbyterian or a Methodist wolf in Presbyterian wool. "Would you be willing to be damned to hell for the sake of the Gospel?" the inquisitors asked. "Yes, I would be damned for the sake of the Gospel," the would-be minister responded. "And I would even go one step further," she said. "I would even be willing to have you and the entire Presbytery damned to hell also…but only for the sake of the Gospel of course."

That woman trapped her inquisitors in their words much like Martin Luther says the Syrophenician woman trapped Jesus in his. "You want me to be a dog? Then I will be a dog. For my daughter to be well I will be a cat or a dog whatever you want me to be, and I will go through whatever you want me to go through." Her love was unqualified, and unconditional, and totally self-effacing. And it absolutely broke Jesus’ heart because it reflected God’s own self-effacing love for his children. The fact that this woman would willingly become a dog for the sake of her child mirrors, in all its startling beauty, the fact that God – for the sake of his own children – became a man. And because of that her daughter was healed.

In the summer of 2001, I was a "tour liason" in New York City. Tour liason was a neat little euphemism my employers dreamed up to explain why I was directing large groups of people up the World Trade Center or over to Yankee Stadium without an official New York City Tour Guide License. "No, officer, I am not guiding this group of people. I am directing them. I am not a tour guide; I am a tour liason." All the work for half the pay.

At any rate it was a wonderful summer for this boy from Lubbock, Texas to take in the sights, sounds and seediness of the Big Apple without having fully taken on all the responsibilities of adulthood. Near the end of my stay I eerily reflected in my journal, "I can always come back to New York, but I will never come back to right now. There is no way I could have known at the time how true that would be. We can all of us always go to New York, but we can never go back to June, July or August 2001.

As we enter these next forty or so hours together we prepare to enter into a holy time of remembrance of those whose lives were lost five years ago – those who cannot go back to New York at all. We remember where we were and how we felt when we heard the news. We were scared. We were mournful. We were angry. Our thirst for vengeance resembled Ezekiel’s curse against Tyre: "I will thrust you down with those who descend into the Pit."
These were and are our feelings and part of the natural grieving process is allowing ourselves to feel them so that we can move on. Yet, whatever hatred and enmity we might feel, we must not presume that God feels just as we do.

What made Harry Emerson Fosdick famous in the first part of the last century was in part the fervency of his preaching which rallied young men from all across the nation to take up arms to fight in the First World War. Fosdick later arrived at a more nuanced theology of war. At the end of his life Fosdick wrote in his book The Living of These Days that when he imagined Christ in the warring world he did not see Christ arrayed in the panoply of battle, but on his judgment seat, high above the fury, sitting in condemnation of us all – aggressor, defender and neutral all alike – who by our communal guilt have somehow all contributed to a way of life that is so estranged from the way of life Jesus taught us to live.

I too imagine Christ seated on the judgment seat looking with horror upon the demon-possessed nations. Yet I also see the image of the Syrophenician woman standing beside him. Her child is in her arms. She comforts Jesus. Ministers to him. She reminds him of his own love – even for the demon possessed.

Perhaps that is why I am not so bothered by the monuments erected in the South in honor of the "Boys Who Wore the Grey." My how glad I am that they lost, lest in the tragedy of history Irie and I would never have been allowed to meet and fall in love and marry as one fully human woman and one fully human man. Yet I understand the monuments, and I am glad that they stand because the boys who wore the gray too had mothers who loved them and lives that mattered to Jesus Christ.

When I think of September 11, 2001, I think of its heroes. I think especially of New York City’s firefighters who raced into the smoke and flames. Their mission was clear and unencumbered by geography or religion or ideology. Their mission was to save lives and valiantly they sacrificed their own lives to do so. I think that is the truth about Jesus Christ we must live with most deeply today. The truth that Jesus has come to save lives regardless of geography or ideology. The truth that his heart breaks for the thousands of mothers who lost children on September 11th and for the many more tens of thousands of mothers who have lost children since. Good or bad, Christian or Islamic, Jew or Gentile, black or white. They matter to Jesus. And so however we might respond to 9-11, in order to be faithful to the true Jesus, we must resist the temptation to strip him of that universal compassion because in the end he is the one who has raced into the fire. He is the one who became a dog. He is the one who for our sakes even went into hell.

And on the third day he rose again.

And because of that, so shall we.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On Hearing My Child For the First Time

I heard you yesterday. For the first time. Your sound was quick and healthy and alive. One hundred and seventy beats a minute.

Ba-bump, Ba-bump, Ba-Bump

It really was amazing to sit and listen to you. Your mother smiled and squeezed my hand. Light flashed from her eyes. She loves you already. So do I.

It takes a lot of hope to bring a child into today's world. The world is dark. Even darker than where you are right now. It takes a lot of hope, but darkness is not dark to your Daddy.

Here are some of my hopes:
That you will know you are a gift
That you will like to read
That the same tingles I get when walking into a sanctuary will find their way to your spine also
That you will change the world (I know, perhaps that's a little too much)
That you will forgive me
That you will get the whole potty training thing really early
That we will be friends
That you will have your mother's smile, and that light will flash from your eyes also
That I will never quit listening to you

NIMPs

This article originally appeared as a column at Ethicsdaily.com.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary, has written an interesting assessment of the current state of women in Baptist ministry. Citing a study titled "Baptist Women in Ministry", Mohler says that though moderate Baptists publicly affirm the right of women in ministry, they are relunctant to actually call a woman to serve as pastor of their church.

Though I have not seen the data upon which Mohler bases his claims, my suspicion is that he is probably right. There are a lot of Baptist churches that I refer to as NIMPs - Not In My Pulpits. These are the churches that affirm women in ministry abstractly, but have a hard time walking the walk in any kind of concrete way. NIMP churches also have a hard time calling ministers outside the dominant racial and ethnic makeup of the congregation.

A personal anecdote serves well here. I am a white man married to a black woman. We were both raised in the South and after I graduated from divinity shool we began looking for a church in which I could serve as either pastor or associate pastor. Since most of our connections were in the South we naturally began looking for baptist churches in that part of the country. In the process I was introduced to a woman who serves as the congregational contact person for one of the major moderate Baptist divinity schools in the country. She told me that it may be a very long time before I would find a home in the South. She said even most moderate congregations, which perceive themselves as being open to all races, would trip over the stumbling stone of a white pastor and a black wife. It was evident how painful it was for this kind woman to tell me that; but she wanted me to know the truth. "The search committee will look at your resume and they will all agree you are a great candidate," she said, "but they will say the community just isn't ready for something like that."

The problem, of course, is that our communities might never be ready. Communities tend toward remaining within the of parameters what is comfortably familiar. We need more moderate Baptists, both clergy and laity, to help our congregations see how imperative it is to step out of the boat - ready or not.

I took the hint and began entertaining the idea of serving a church outside the South. We are now happily serving in an American Baptist Church in Vermont - the second whitest state in the Union. How proud we are of our congregation for saying, "Yes, in our pulpit!"

Mohler may be giving moderate Baptists the same reality check that woman gave me. Rather than wrangling with Mohler about how substantive the differences between moderate Baptist life and hardline fundamentalism is or is not, moderate Baptists should all agree that there needs to be greater tangible evidence that we are committed to women in ministry. I think moderates should thank Mohler for this challenge, and then be about the business of conforming our lives to our convictional talk. I include myself in this challenge; and I plan to go to greater lengths to include lay women in worship and invite ordained women to proclaim the Word in our church.

The old refrain still echoes, "How long?" How long will it be before we moderate Baptists begin making conscious decisions to practice what we preach about women and people of color? The answer to that question matters, not only for the sake of our integrity as moderate Baptists, but also for the sake of the Gospel we proclaim.

Baptist Peacemaking (corrected)

Mercer University's August Baptist Studies Bulletin has just come out and there is an excellent article by Glen Stassen. With humility and keen perceptivity, which have become the trademarks of this misfit evangelical, Stassen calls for Christians to reaffirm Jesus' central teachings about how we are to live.

Stassen's point that we as Christians must continue to take the initiative toward making peace with our enemies is valid and timely, not only for our country's Christian leaders, but also for us in the local church. What Stassen in other places calls "transformative practices" may very well melt the heart of whoever is forcing us to walk two miles. But even if not, they are still worthwhile in their own sake insofar as they make real and historical the ethical practices that are the "kingdom coming."

Yet the real bugaboo for most of us Christians is that in daring to live out the ethical commands of the Sermon on the Mount, we must be willing to renounce whatever recourses we have to power and coercion. That is why Stassen's point that living the Kingdom Ethics and adult baptism are so intricately bound up with one another. To turn the other cheek is to confess that I am not a god - that my ultimate allegiance is to Jesus Christ and not my own glory or success or security. A profound and sobering call that requires deep consideration and commitment.

As we seek to practice these commands as individual Christians in local bodies it is necessary that we realize that doing so may very well cost us our efficiency and effectiveness in the eyes of the world. A small body of Christians practicing this kind of enemy love may never grow to be a huge church or have a huge bank account or a bug in the ear of our representatives in Congress. And the question we are all asking ourselves is, "Will we dare?"

Centrist Baptists? Who are They?

Robert Parham has written an editorial for EthicsDaily.com calling for Cenrist Baptists to begin blogging more diligently.

I lament the fact that so much of what we see from televangelists is fake and unnuanced and much of the time just downright mean-spirited. But perhaps that is what plays to the crowd, while the faithful take to more humble tasks like working for peace and caring for the sick.

I hope that more "Centrist Baptists" will come online to change the discourse of what it means to believe in Christ, that the darkness of this world might see the light of Christ's community, and not just a different shade of night. I think we can do this by following the insights Jerrod Hugenot, from the Roger Williams Fellowship, shared in his article Ethics of Blogging.

So, yes, let us "Centrist Baptists" blog on. But let us do it with humility and with the purposes of Christ and His kingdom in mind.

Centrist Baptists? Who are They?

Robert Parham has written an editorial for EthicsDaily.com calling for Cenrist Baptists to begin blogging more diligently.

I lament the fact that so much of what we see from televangelists is fake and unnuanced and much of the time just downright mean-spirited. But perhaps that is what plays to the crowd, while the faithful take to more humble tasks like working for peace and caring for the sick.

I hope that more "Centrist Baptists" will come online to change the discourse of what it means to believe in Christ, that the darkness of this world might see the light of Christ's community, and not just a different shade of night. I think we can do this by following the insights Jerrod Hugenot, from the Roger Williams Fellowship, shared in his article Ethics of Blogging.

So, yes, let us "Centrist Baptists" blog on. But let us do it with humility and with the purposes of Christ and His kingdom in mind.

Six Months

August 8, 2006

Friends,

Grace and peace!

Six months, if you can believe that. That's right, we've been on this journey together for six months now and the first leg of our journey has been full of excitement and hope for the future of the United Church of Colchester. We have prayed together, broke bread together, served the poor together and we have even climbed mountains together.

As we begin our second six months together and begin to climb even greater mountains I pray that we will each dedicate ourselves to being more intentional in finding time to be shaped by the stories of our faith. Our Scriptures are not just an account of lives lived, they are the definitive account of life itself. I pray that we will begin to more completely see our own stories in the stories of faith, and share those connections with one another. The leadership of the church is working hard to create more opportunities for shared study and I hope everyone will make a genuine effort to be involved in this important piece of Christian formation.

Sunday worship is becoming an exciting event. And indeed it should be. Worship should reflect the life with God, which is anything but boring. It is my hope that each Sunday we will hear and sing great music which reflect the time-honored tradition of the church, that we will pray with and for one another, and that the hope the resurrection will be preached in a fresh and inspiring sermon. Pray as we seek to make put together a worship service that is all-at-once welcoming to outsiders, reflective of who we are as a particular part of Christ's church, and true to the great tradition of our faith.

Finally, as we continue our journey together, let us set our minds on continuing to be a people dedicated to loving one another and to seeking the peace of the community around us. A vision for being the beloved community should inspire us to share our lives more with one another, and with our neighbors. We are the broken fragments of Christ's body and we offer ourselves to one another as tokens of the promise of His salvation.

Alan Jones writes, "The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty." The American Church is addicted to the certain. "Little ventured, little lost" seems to be its motto. But when I look out on the faces of the United Church of Colchester, I see a body of people who look like they are ready to take a giant leap of faith - together.

Who knows what we will leap off into? And who would want to?


Proud to be your pastor,

Ryon

Buying the Field

Last week, after about a month of phone tag, an old friend and I connected for what turned out to be a really inspiring conversation. He told me he used to read my blog and that is what has me in front of this screen right now.

We were roommates for a couple of years in college and very close. After college we lost contact due primarily to the time I spent making my bed in the depths. A valuable friendship was broken. Though I know the fragments will never be put back together in the same way, I pray that they will indeed be pieced back together again. And I pray they will come together to make something beautiful. Different, yes, but beautiful.

It turns out that after spending a couple of years in the corporate world - a world I always found ill-suited for my friend - he decided to go back to school and get his teaching accredidation. He is now teaching 7th grade science and coaching various middle school sports. He told me that every morning at 7am or so a few kids make their way to his classroom nearly an hour before school begins. They talk a little about science and a lot about life. And most of all my friend just loves on them the way all kids deserve to be loved on and the way most kids are not. And it is good.

The funny thing is that when I was in 7th grade there was no bigger joke than a middle school coach. In my mind these were the guys who couldn't coach worth a damn so ended up teaching kids how to put on jock straps. Apparently a lot of guys still think that same way. My friend said that not long ago he ran into some friends who asked how things were going at Conquest, or whatever the name of the real estate company was that he used to work for. He told them that he quit Conquest and was now teaching 7th grade. He said you could have heard a pin drop.

But when my friend told me the news I swear I had a lump in my throat as big as Dallas. I was so proud of him and I felt so sorry for all the people out there who wonder why anyone would go off and ruin a good career like that. And I felt sorry for the little 7th grader in me who once thought that middle school coaches did what they did because they couldn't do anything else, rather than because they wouldn't do anything else - even if they could.

As we hung up the phone I thought about that story that Jesus tells of a guy who went out into a field and tripped over a treasure sticking out beneath the ground. And then he went out and sold everything he had just to buy that field. I have to think that field was a pretty rotten one as fields go. Rocks. Thistles. All in all, it probably looked a lot like Lubbock. But the treasure was there.

And where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Sermon: The Lord is With You

The Lord is With You
Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38
By the Rev. Ryon L Price
Lowe’s Grove Baptist Church
Fourth Sunday Advent
December 18, 2005

My grandfather, Bill Price, passed away two years ago this past week. The thing I regret most is that he died right before I could get home for Christmas - a time he loved to celebrate. Every year we would reenact the same drama. After finishing our Christmas breakfast and washing it down with a handful of chocolate covered cherries – Bill would say, “Well kids, I don’t know about ya’ll but I think its about time to bust them presents.” After which we would all gather around the tree and commence to bustin’. And then, along about the time he was bustin’ his first package, with a twinkle in his eye, he would say, “Yep, it’s like I always say, ‘it’s better to receive than to give.’”
In seven days most of us will enter into that grand drama of bustin’ those packages. It is a drama written in the genre of mystery. Like a treasure buried deep inside the cloak of an enchanted forest, there the package is, hidden beneath the tree, waiting to be discovered. We enter into that forest, and we take the present – the great mystery before us – and raise it up, inspecting its size and shape. We weigh it in the palm of our hands and tilt it, delicately, to see if it shakes or rattles or rolls; or, perhaps even, barks. Eh, kids?
And then, when the time is right and all the rituals have been sufficiently performed, we move in like vultures and bust that package wide open. And amidst the swift and furious strokes from our hands, which much to our surprise have suddenly morphed into sickles, the mystery is finally unraveled before our very eyes…Socks and underwear.

When the bible uses the word mystery, mysterion, it does not mean some dark secret which will never be revealed. When we encounter a mystery in scripture it is never who shot JFK or what happened to Amelia Earhart or what’s in the meat at Lowe’s Grove Middle School. Mystery instead describes something which was once hidden, but is now divulged to God’s people. In the gospels, mystery, is always used in reference to a teaching hidden to the masses, but revealed by Jesus to his followers,

To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables, so they will be always looking but never perceiving, and always hearing and never understanding.


For Paul, Christ himself is that great mystery – the treasure once hidden, by now revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Today’s epistle reading makes this clear:

Now to the one who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret for long ages, but is now revealed and through the prophetic writings is made know to all the nations

Christ is the great acting out of God’s mystery – the unfolding of the human drama God began in the garden and has now consummated in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ we have the great unraveling of God’s mystery before us. In Christ we have God’s gift unwrapped, busted wide open, through the power which raised Jesus Christ his son from the dead.


In Luke we find this gift hidden away in the most unlikely of places. God sends his angel Gabriel to a young peasant girl from the sticks. “Greetings favored one. The Lord is with you.” This is, of course, no ordinary salutation. This is a prophetic announcement. The Lord, the Lord of Lords, is indeed literally with this young girl, growing and gaining human form inside her womb.
Incredulous, Mary rushes off to see her cousin Elizabeth who just so happens to be pregnant with a son whom we will all later come to know as John the Baptizer. As Mary enters Elizabeth’s house and greets the family, little John recognizes Mary and Jesus, and leaps with excitement from inside his mother’s womb. Immediately Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and recognizes the child Mary is carrying is indeed the Christ-child, the anointed one.

This beautiful tale reminds me of a story Henri Nouwen tells a of a former student who, after some years, came back to visit Nouwen in his study (Henri Nouwen Ministry and Spirituality, Continuum: New York, 1998, pp.202-203). The man said, “I have no problems this time, no questions to ask you…I simply want to celebrate some time with you.” After the two men got past the nervousness and suspicion, which so often precludes us from entering into genuinely intimate friendships, they were able to sit for a while in silence and soak up the goodness of what it means to dwell in the presence of a brother. Finally, from the silence Nouwen’s visitor said, “When I look at you it is as if I am in the presence of Christ.” And without rebuff or protest, Nouwen wisely answered, “It is the Christ in you who recognizes the Christ in me.”
Think about it a moment. It is the Christ in you who recognizes the Christ in me.
Lowe’s Grove, it is the Christ living inside you that recognized the Christ in me. It is the Christ in you that discovered and unraveled the great Mystery, which is Christ in me. It is the Christ in you that caused my spirit to leap from inside me.

And so I come today with one word to describe the past two years with you. That word is grace. It is a word that well portrays the story the virgin birth, and it is a word which characterizes the plan God has for this community. Grace, according to Thomas Merton, is the unlocking of our “potency waiting to be developed” (Thomas Merton The New Man Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York: 1961, p.44). It is the awakening of the likeness of God which has been imprinted upon us. Grace is the freedom to say yes, as Mary said yes, to the God who desires to be born in our lives. And it is here that the story of Mary can well serve us as a parable for the place and calling of our church.
I confess, for us who have grown up hearing this story the shock of this pronouncement can sometimes be lost. This was a young girl, a peasant of modest means – her face would not be too different from some of the indigenous girls we ship packages to every year for OperationChristmasChild. Not the one the world would choose to bear salvation.
Yet God upsets the expectations of the world. What the world says is without value, a mere commodity, to be used, exploited, and then left behind, as so many young poor girls are in this world, God says is precious. What the world says will never make a difference, ends up making all the difference in the world. And this is why we, as the people of God, will always find our own story in the story of Mary and we will always stand up on behalf of the poor, and the marginalized, and the oppressed. Because God, in the words of poet Scott Cairns, has found a virgin and has asked her to be his mother. (From the poem, “The Translation of Raimundo Luz: My Imitation” in The Christian Century, Feb 27, 2002). Mary, small in stature and demure and as unsuspecting as any of us could ever be is in this hour called to be the bearer of the divine.

Can you see your own story in the story of Mary? Not rich, not famous, not one the world would expect much out of. Yet, by grace, pregnant with the greatest gift the world has ever known. The Lord is indeed with you. The Mystery that is Christ Jesus has been conceived inside you and is waiting to be born. The Christ in you wants you to say yes. Let this little child come in.
I do not believe you have even begun to realize the potency, the very pregnancy, of the Christ which is in you. We look around and we still see the trappings of a little country church. Yet there is a spark of the divine in you for sure. It was the Christ in you that recognized the Christ in me. And we remember Christ’s words - the Kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed which will one day blossom into a great tree. It takes only a little yeast to leaven the whole loaf. The mystery is just waiting to be unraveled. The Lord is with you.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.


And Mary said,
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

A Story on Race

Below is a story I have drafted for the Alliance of Baptists. The Alliance is requesting personal narratives of "acts of faithfulness in confronting racism" to be shared at the Alliance Convocation in April. I thought Irie's and my story might help to inform, and perhaps inspire, fellow sojourners:

In the fall of 2003 I was assigned to a small baptist church in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park area. The assignment was a part of Duke Divinity School's field education program, which required all students to serve in a local congregation as a prerequisite for graduation.

The church I was assigned to was organized at the turn of the 20th century by several farming families in the area. By the time I arrived the tobacco farms had all been bought out and turned into suburbs, but the church retained its distinctively Southern rural feel. The people were good folks, I was told, but they had their prejudices. Chief among these was racism. For a white progressive like myself – who thought he had put away all his problems with race – this was an unforgivable sin.

Mostly it was subtle hints and code words that clued me in on to the walls which had been put up to keep blacks and others out. The pastor, who wanted very much to see the church become more diverse and was occasionally bold enough to weave this hope into his sermons, told me there was talk of putting up a fence to "protect" the church property from the hundreds of black middle-schoolers who attended the school across the churchyard. Folks in the church talked about how gracious it was of their parents and grandparents to build another church for the "coloreds" down the road. Finally there was the paper trail. Stipulated in the official correspondence between the church and Duke was the request that the divinity school student assigned to the church be white, because "at this time" the church was just not ready to let its white children receive spiritual milk from a black minister.

For most of the first semester things went pretty well. I casually mentioned God's love for all his children - black, white and brown - in my children's messages. And when allowed to preach the Sunday sermon, I again called for us to be a more inclusive people as we sought to bring God's kingdom near. So long as nothing too threatening was said or done, everyone pretty well tolerated an occasional prod from the pastor and myself.

By Christmas, however, things began to heat up. A young black boy and his mother began coming to our church and things grew tense. Finally something blew. On the Monday after the young boy was baptized in the church, the pastor received a visit from an irate member. Apparently folks in the community had been talking and this gentleman and a few others in the church, who didn't have the courage to come forward, had had enough. They wanted to know just what our pastor thought he was doing baptizing blacks (the language was stronger) in our sanctuary. After things cooled, the visitor was able to flesh out his feelings in a more coolly. According to this gentleman it wasn’t so much that the church didn’t want to welcome blacks. Most knew it was time to do the right thing and become a more welcoming body of faith. But apparently the church was beginning to get a reputation. And we ministers just didn’t understand how hard it was for some of our church members to face the scorn of their racist friends in the community.

By and large, however, most accepted the baptism - albeit with a degree of suspicion. Most thought a lot like the gentleman who told me he didn't mind blacks coming to church and joining, so long as they weren't doing it because they wanted something. I saw this statement as a mild mark of progress, and decided not to point out that things like that were never said when whites joined the church. It never seemed to occur to this gentleman that we all want something when we join a church - namely, to be a part of the Body of Christ.

Apparently whatever the family was looking for - whether it be a helping hand or a hand out perhaps just a sense of belonging - was nowhere to be found in our little church. As Christmas came and went and we drifted into the cold bleakness of winter, they stopped coming altogether.

All of this was happening in my church world while at the same time, ten miles away in my school world, I was falling in love with a black woman.

For almost four months I kept the two worlds apart. Since I would say a sweet goodbye to the church upon my graduation in May I figured I would spare the congregation and my girlfriend, Irie, from having to deal with one another. It was the most pain-free solution for all parties involved I supposed.

The biblical precedent for such duplicity was not exactly positive. In Genesis, Abraham takes Sarah into Egypt and, when suspecting that the men there will kill him for the right to his wife, Abraham asks Sarah to pretend to be his sister. This was a low point in the patriarch's story, as he so fears for his own life that he is willing to wager Sarah's honor and the promise she holds in exchange for his own security. In this classic example of the human condition, a giant chasm exists between God's promise and the reality of Abraham's life. There was a kind of schizophrenic disassociation between the Abraham who could take radical steps of faith in accord with God’s promise, and the Abraham whose fear and lack of trust could at other times provoke shockingly incongruent decisions.

By keeping Irie and the church at a safe distance from one another, I had created my own schizophrenic worlds. I was really no more over my own problems with race than was that gentleman who burst into our pastor’s study in such an uproar. We in essence shared the same fundamental problem. Fear was the primary motivating factor behind his hate-filled eruption and my concealment. Each of us in our own ways was responding to the prospect of having to face the scorn of a world torn apart by racism.

After a lot of soul searching, on Easter Sunday 2004 Irie and I pulled onto the cemetery road where a small gathering of church members were huddled in the cold, waiting for me to preach the sunrise service. As we stepped nervously from the car salvation was at stake. I had to do this, for the sake of the soul of that church – and for the sake of my own soul as well.

The end of the story was a happy one for us all. Though a little nervous at first, most people welcomed Irie with open arms. After graduation, I accepted the call to stay on as minister of youth and children at the church and Irie joined the church the next fall. And in May 2005, Irie and I were married in the sanctuary of that little church.

This is not to say the church solved all of its problems with race. We were not able to take any further steps toward integration in the church. While we have had other blacks in our congregation (and a church half full of people of color at our wedding!), no other African Americans have joined the church. The church continues to wrestle with the effects of its long and hard history with the problem of race.

I too continue to wrestle with that history. On the day Irie and I returned from our honeymoon to discover someone claiming to represent the KKK had burned three crosses in prominent places in our city. I was again gripped by fear of others’ contempt. And I know I will most likely again have to face this fear again as I seek to live my life with faithfulness and courage and undivided loyalty to myself and my wife.

Yet I know that it is here, in small but significant acts, that the dividing wall of hostility is being chipped away, and we as humans are being reconciled one to another.

Colchester Letter of Acceptance

Brothers and Sisters,

With great gladness I wholeheartedly accept your call to be the next pastor of the United Church of Colchester. I consider it a great honor that you have entrusted me with the leadership of your flock. I covet your prayers and partnership as I learn to be your shepherd. Without doubt, the Holy Spirit has orchestrated our coming together; what exciting plans are in store for us as we learn what it means to be deeper and more faithful followers of Christ together.

From the time we stepped off the plane to the moment we boarded back on, Irie and I felt right at home in your company. Christ has given you a vision for the making of His Kingdom among you. We are excited about this vision and want to be a part of the good things God is doing in your lives.

As your new pastor, I hope to build upon the foundation Steve has built over the last two years. We were made in the image of our Triune God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The image is one of pure relationship. The church is called to reflect that image in a relational way. I look forward to leading, guiding and directing the people of United Church of Colchester into deeper and richer relationship with God and one another.

We are already making plans for our arrival early next year. We will head to Texas to visit my folks for Christmas and then begin packing for the journey into the Great Northeast. First among the things we are packing are our snow shovels, our snow boots, and our snow Bibles. We can hardly wait.

As we journey along this Advent season, we celebrate what it means to wait upon the coming of our Lord. Let us enter into this time with prayerful hearts and great imagination as we wonder at all that Christ will do in and among us over the coming years. ‘Tis the season.



Rev. Ryon L Price

Resignation Announcement

The following is a letter I read to the congregation this morning after worship officially announcing my intention to resign from Lowes Grove in order to become the new pastor at the United Church of Colchester, Colchester, Vermont:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On Sunday November 20, 2005 the United Church of Colchester, Vermont voted to call me as its next pastor. I have accepted this call and will begin serving there in February. I will conclude my duties as Associate Minister of Youth and Children at Lowe’s Grove on Wednesday, December 21.

Irie and I are both very excited about this call and feel our new congregation is a people we can each belong to in meaningful and life-giving ways. We also feel my particular skills and gifts are well-suited for the church’s needs. We are thankful for this opportunity and are praying the Holy Spirit will help us to make more and deeper followers of Christ in Colchester. Your prayers are coveted as we embark upon this new voyage.

We are so very thankful for the role Lowe’s Grove has played in our lives over these past two years. No matter where the years might take us this place and this body of people will always bring back fond memories. It was before you that we covenanted ourselves in marriage and it was among you that I covenanted myself in ministry. I was headed toward a career in law when I washed ashore here at Lowe’s Grove, and somehow I came out a minister on the other end! I am indebted to you all for giving me the space and the grace to find my true calling.

I am most grateful for Forest’s constant encouragement and willingness to share the joy of ministry with me. You have been a trusted confidant, mentor and partner in the Gospel. Blessed are you, my friend. Thank you.

Finally, to the youth, children and parents of Lowe’s Grove: you have all loved us so well and we have loved you too. We believe the seeds which have been planted will one day bear much fruit. The kingdom of God is within you. Water it and let it grow.

With deepest thanks and continued prayers,


Ryon