Soul Food

Soul Food
Okay, be honest…How many people ate more than they should have on Thursday? There’s always so much food on Thanksgiving! There’s turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, bread, green bean casserole, other vegetables, pumpkin pies, and other various desserts…And let’s not forget about the leftovers! There’s always so much food…
The story from John where we encounter Jesus, he has just performed the miracle of feeding the five thousand…Feeding five thousand men, which didn’t include the women and children…And when he goes away and rest, they keep trying to find him! Poor Jesus…He can’t seem to get a break! Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I have to chuckle when we start with this passage…We’re not sure how many people “they” are…It may have been the whole five thousand plus…Maybe it was 12…Maybe it was just a couple…But, when I paint the scene in my head, I picture that they were following Jesus the whole time, knowing exactly where he was and when he turns around to see them, they say, “Oh, Jesus! When did you get here?” Whether that’s really how it happened or not, it’s how I see it!
And Jesus tells them, “You’re not here because you saw a miracle…You’re here because I fed you!” It certainly seems like not much has changed…Whenever food is offered, you can be pretty guaranteed that people will gather…For some Thanksgiving is that time…There’s an undercurrent in society of people not really wanting to get together with their families…The holidays are some of the most stressful times of the year, partly for that reasons…In some families, there are arguments, physical fights, people who refuse to get together, or just plain don’t like each other…And yet they still gather together for the holidays…So, you have to wonder…Is it the food that brings them together? Jesus surely said that it was the food that brought the group of people back to him…Feed them and they will come?
The people then go on and ask Jesus what they need to do to perform the works of God…Are they asking what they can do to multiply food for themselves? So that they can acquire more for themselves? Now this group may be a group of people who really don’t have that much money and to be able to multiply food would be an enormous help! But…This group of people and Jesus aren’t talking about the same things…
Jesus’ response is that they need to believe in the One that God sent…They need to believe in Jesus…And then the question that they ask is one that is also still as relevant today as it was when they asked it…It is still a question that is asked today…I would be willing to guess that it’s a question that most of us have asked ourselves…Maybe not in the exact words and maybe not dwelled on it…But maybe we have…Maybe it’s the basis for some people’s faith…
The question that they asked Jesus after he told them that they needed to believe in Him was, “What are you going give us?” What are we going to get out of this? So, we believe and then what? What do we get? Do we get riches? Do we get glory? Do we get a free pass at life? Do we get a new car? Do we get athletic skills? If there are more than 5,000 people there, we’ve got a lot of questions….What do we get out of this? What do I get for believing?
It is so obvious that this group that is talking to Jesus and Jesus are almost not speaking the same language…the group is talking about something physical…They want something to show that they believe…The want Jesus to give them something…They may still be hungry and want to be fed more…They bring up Moses…
The story of Moses and the manna comes when the Israelites had escaped from Pharaoh and the army and were no longer slaves…They were following Moses & his brother Aaron and they were seeking the land that God had promised them…The Promised Land…But their escape from Egypt was very quick and they didn’t have much food with them…And they were in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights…That’s a long time to go without food…So they asked Moses to give them some help with the food situation and Moses turned to God…So, there came manna from heaven and quail as well…They were given specific instructions about the manna…They were supposed to eat all that they gathered and couldn’t save any of it because there would be some the next day…They were supposed to gather enough on the day before the Sabbath so that they didn’t have to work on the Sabbath…
And this group that is with Jesus has this story of Moses and the manna as a part of their history…And seeing Jesus as someone who is as important as Moses…They say that Moses gave them bread, so what is Jesus going to give them? What are we going to get out of this? What are you going to give us?
And Jesus tells them, first of all it wasn’t Moses who gave the bread…That bread came from God…The bread of God which comes from heaven and gives life to the world…And the people still can’t stop thinking about the physical…So they ask again for the bread…And Jesus, who has already told them that they need to believe in Him…Says to them…I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
The argument continues in the chapter…Jesus trying to tell the group that he is the bread of life and the group still wanting something…
When Jesus said that whoever comes to him will not be hungry or thirsty, he didn’t mean physically…There are times when we are hungry or thirsty even when we believe…Even after a filling meal like Thanksgiving…Or a meal of fish and bread….Physical hunger and thirst are a fact of life…So it’s not that we can just not eat or drink because Jesus said we wouldn’t be hungry or thirsty…Or that we should feel like we don’t believe strong enough because we get hungry or thirsty…
Jesus wasn’t talking about physical food….Jesus was talking about soul food…And I’m not talking about southern cooking…Soul food…Food that feed your soul…
When my family gets together in for Thanksgiving, we have the traditional foods or at least traditional for our family…Sometimes there’s something new tossed in there, sometimes not…Three years ago my brother Matt and my cousin Sean made the claim that they saved Thanksgiving. That year, we almost didn’t gather as a family to celebrate Thanksgiving together, but they worked hard to make sure that it happened. Since they performed the act of “saving Thanksgiving” they decided that they could also rename the holiday to be “The Funniest Day of the Year.” And as we sit together, we laugh and share our lives…Sometimes we play games, some watch football, Matt & Sean make jokes and entertain us constantly…Our stomachs and physical appetites are filled by the food…But my soul is filled by the conversation and laughter…
That’s what Jesus is talking about…Not something physical that you can touch or maybe not even see…But your soul will be full…That’s what you “get out of this.” It’s not something physical like food, a new car, or riches and glory…Your soul is full…
The day after Thanksgiving is a kick off for the Christmas season…Or at least the consumer Christmas season…The stores open early and crazy people wait outside in the cold, far earlier than they would get up on any normal day for the bargains that they can get…What they can get out of it…Now, I have to admit that I am one of those crazy people…My dad and I go out shopping every day after Thanksgiving…We wait in the lines and rush through the people…And yes, sometimes we’re buying Christmas gifts…But that’s not really the beginning of the Christmas season…Because Christmas is not about what we can get out of it…What physical things that we receive…It’s not about the presents under the tree or the sales and bargains…
Christmas is about the One whom God sent…The One in whom we need to believe in and be full…The One who is the bread of life…The One who feeds our souls…

The Good Old Days...

The Good Old Days
Ah, memories…Can you think about your favorite memory? Be nostalgic for a few minutes…What is your favorite memory? (wait for responses) Why is it your favorite memory?
There’s usually some kind of emotion that’s connected to our favorite memories…Joy, excitement, love…There’s something kind of feeling that’s connected to those memories…If we have something physical to remind us of that, it serves to remind us somewhat of the memory itself, but more to remind us of the emotions that we feel…
There’s nothing wrong with memories…The ones that we’ve shared today have been ones that have meant so much to us and still mean much to us right now! The problem comes when we only live in the memories…Watch this clip as Uncle Rico talks with his nephew Kip…(clip)…
Now, it’s funny to watch Uncle Rico living in 1982 as he tries to recapture his high school football days…It’s funny because they’re obviously playing it to an extreme! But if we dissect the clip a little bit more…Uncle Rico can’t leave that moment where they lost the football game in 1982 and he wasn’t even playing in the game! He fantasizes that if he had been playing, they surely would have won…Being trapped in his memories, he throws a steak and hits his other nephew Napoleon in the head…Staying trapped in his memories not only kept Uncle Rico from moving on, but it caused physical injury to Napoleon…Uncle Rico was living in his memories…
There’s nothing wrong with remembering, but when that remembering the good old days paralyzes from moving on, it becomes dangerous…
Sometimes it’s easier to live in the “good old days” because it’s comfortable…We know what those were like because we’ve lived them…And we’ve obviously survived those good old days to be here now…There’s a song by Christian musician Chris Rice, who himself is in his late 40’s, and his song recounts his 8th grade year. The chorus of the song goes like this, “Why does the past always seem safer? Maybe because at least we know we made it.”
So, we’ve talked about our favorite memories…We’ve seen a video clip about the dangers of living only in our memories…We’ve talked about why it’s easy to live in the “good old days.” But surely those people in the Bible wouldn’t live like that…The Israelites…The disciples…They surely wouldn’t live only in the good old days!
Well…I hate to break the news to you…But the people that are written about in the Bible…Well, they’re not perfect…And that’s what makes them so amazing…That they weren’t perfect, and God who is, worked in and through them…
The Israelites, the Jewish people…They are coming to an important juncture in their lives…They’ve been taken from their homes again and again…And at this point, they’re in exile from their homes…And they’re looking at the task of rebuilding their lives, their communities, their homes…And it’s looking to be very difficult…Can you imagine being torn from what you know is your home and where you’ve been most comfortable and being placed in a new land and you have to start all over? It’s scary…It’s so much easier to look to the past and to live in the good old days…
The Israelites were supposed to be rebuilding the temple…The temple where they would worship God and where they were to give a home to God…Well, that’s what they were supposed to be doing…But they stopped working…Because it all seemed too hard…So they stopped trying…Because it was scary…
Do you know what it’s like to look and see a new place, a new time, a new culture and not recognize…And have to make your home in it? I would guess that we all know that feeling more than we recognize it…Because this world that we live in is like that…We look at the world and it’s not the same as when we grew up…There are all kinds of evidences of it…From the way schools operate…To the programs on television…To the music on the radio…To the way people talk…Do you know what it’s like to look and see a new place, a new time, a new culture and not recognize anything?
It can be scary and hard to look around and see a world that we don’t recognize…Can you see why it’s so easy and tempting to live in the good old days? “Why does the past always seem safer? Maybe it’s because at least we know we made it.”
The Israelites were stuck…They’d given up…They wanted to live only in the good old days…We’re not sure exactly how long they had stopped working, but it was a considerable period of time…It took at least a month from the time they were spoken to by the prophet Haggai to continue…
Haggai gave them a message from God that they were supposed to be working on this temple…Their place of worship…That they had stopped working on because it was too hard…And God wasn’t exactly pleased…Why do you think that God wasn’t pleased? It’s not because that meant that they didn’t have a temple or a place to worship…Or that God didn’t have a house or a place on earth…
God wasn’t exactly pleased because by stopping work and living in the good old days, they had stopped trusting God. By living in the good old days, they had stopped believing that God is not only the God of our past…but the God of our present…And the God of our future…In fact, it is because of God that we have a future…The Israelites had limited God to only be a part of their past by living in the good old days…As Luke reminds us, God is the God not only of the dead, but of the living…
When you look at your own lives, are there places where you are living in the good old days? The places where you are inviting God only to be a part of the past and not the present or the future…Where are you living in the good old days?
When we look at our life as Sheridan-Norway United Methodist Church, are there places where we are living in the good old days? The places where we are inviting God only to be a part of the past and not the present or the future? Where are we living in the good old days?
There’s nothing wrong with remembering…To look at the past and remember…Just like the memories that we shared, we don’t live in those…But we connect with the emotions…And instead of wanting things to be like they were in the good old days…We should want to help others connect with the emotions that we felt…Joy, love, excitement…Not just the way that we did in our memories, but so that they have their own memories…And we may just add a few more to our own…
We can’t live in the good old days…It’s not fair to anyone…It’s not fair to the world…It’s not fair to ourselves…It’s not fair to God…We live in the good now days…We live in the good yet to come days…God is the God not only of our past, but the God of our present, and the God of our future…Let’s live like it…

Cloud of Witnesses...

Cloud of Witnesses
Today is All Saint’s Day…All Saints is a day of remembrance for the saints, with the New Testament meaning of all Christian people of every time and place. We celebrate the communion of the saints as we remember the dead, both of the church universal and of our congregation. John Wesley, who was the founder of the Methodist movement, noted in his journals that All Saints was one of his favorite days in the Church of England, but for some reason he didn’t include it in the calendar that he provided to Methodists in North America. It has been in more recent times that the United Methodist Church has reclaimed this day not to be like any other denomination, but to reclaim the belief that John Wesley also held that we are a part of the great cloud of witnesses to Jesus Christ who makes us saints through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Did you know that you are a witness to Jesus Christ? Now, some of you may be thinking that you can’t possibly be a witness to Jesus Christ…You weren’t there when he lived and died…A show of hands of who was there?? And yet, we are all witnesses to Jesus Christ…We are all witness to the work that God does in the world…Where have you seen God active in your lives? (Wait for answers)…You are part of the cloud of witnesses! We are all a part of the cloud of witnesses!
Today we remember those who have died and who have joined in the communion of saints…These people who are part of the greater cloud of witnesses…A cloud that contains not only us, but all those who have lived and died and are witnesses to Jesus Christ.
Of those who have influenced you in your faith journey in your life, what was it about them that helped to influence you? Maybe it was something that they did…Maybe it was something that they said…Maybe it was both…Maybe it was something that they didn’t do or didn’t say…Turn to the person who is sitting closest to you and tell them about the person that you consider a saint and what it was about them that made them a saint…
Those people that have been influential along our faith journey are important for so many reasons…They taught us many lessons along the way…Lessons about life, lessons about faith, and lessons about how to apply the two together…
The thing about lessons is they’re not supposed to remain stagnant…Not only are we supposed to apply the lessons that we have been taught, but the lessons that we were taught are supposed to be passed on…Have you done that? That’s part of what it means to be a part of the cloud of witnesses…To witnesses to the acts of God in the world by sharing the lessons that have been given to us…
As Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, he is writing to encourage them. He’s not writing to encourage a small group of people, but he’s writing to encourage the whole congregation…The whole congregation is the cloud of witnesses…Paul doesn’t say that Sunday school teachers heard the Word of God and were marked by the Holy Spirit…Paul doesn’t say that those who are in charge of committees heard the Word of God and were marked by the Holy Spirit…Paul doesn’t say that those who attend Bible study heard the Word of God and are marked by the Holy Spirit…Although all those people have heard the Word of God and are marked by the Holy Spirit…Paul says that you heard the Word of God and are marked by the Holy Spirit…You are a part of the cloud of witnesses…
Those saints that we remember today, they have taught us some wonderful and amazing things…There are those saints like Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Catherine, Paul who have helped in establishing the Christian tradition and sharing the message of the Gospel to the world…There are those saints like Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, John Paul II who have continued to share the Gospel in new and different ways to people who hadn’t heard it before! There are those saints that we remember from our own stories that have helped to show us the Christian faith as best as they know it, who have provided opportunities to know God & the love that God has for all of us…Those who have invited us to join the cloud of witnesses…
To be a witness means that you have to do something…You have to witness to God’s grace…If no one had told you about God’s love, would you be here? If no one had offered to bring you to church, would you be here? If no one had welcomed you, would you be here? One of our responsibilities as Christians is to encourage others to join the cloud of witnesses…Just like there are a variety of saints that have gone before us, there are a variety of ways that the invitation happens…It may be through a movie, a class, a song, a friend, an invitation, a letter, a visit…The responsibility to witness to God’s grace is all of our responsibility…We are a cloud of witnesses…

We Rock the Show in Stereo....

Last night was fantastic! There were 174 trick or treators who came to my house! We handed out 84 cups of cider...How awesome is that!?! I even dressed up this year! I woke up yesterday morning and decided that I wanted to be in costume, so I was a gypsy! Something that I didn't even need to go out and get anything for! Between the jewelry that I've been hoarding and the various pieces of clothing for various events, I was able to pull it off! I could be a pretty good gypsy...I wanted to sing the Cher song, "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" but I didn't think that would be a good idea...

Even with all the craziness with Halloween and trick or treat, I've been doing some pontification...I can't seem to shut it off! It would be nice if I could...Seriously...

So, I've been really reflecting on what was formational for me in my spiritual development...I have always been a member of the United Methodist Church, but unfortunately for me, in Junior High & High School, the youth programs were not that strong. They did the best that they could, but it was not formational for me...Seriously...In 7th grade we locked our Sunday school teacher in the closet and someone set the table on fire...In 8th grade, I was scratched on the face playing balloon basketball...The people who worked truly had a good heart, but they probably didn't have the spiritual formation needed to lead a group of rowdy teens!

So, in high school I looked elsewhere...I retained membership at FUMC and I was involved for the most part at FUMC, but for my own spiritual development, I was craving something that wasn't there...So, I particiapted in the Bible studies and faith groups that were available at school and occasionally went to the youth service at the Assemblies of God church in Rockford. It was what I was craving...To go deeper and to have a further understanding of my faith. Unfortunately, I was not able to really explore my faith, but I was told what to believe and it was so what I was craving that I soaked it up and I soaked it in...I actually don't think that it was until seminary that I really explored my faith and found out what I believe...I suppose I did it some in college and the foundation was rolling...There were things that I was uncomfortable with believing, but I was told that I wasn't a Christian if I didn't believe them...I know that now to be false...

I am struggling with finding a faith community of my own...The churches here are wonderful and challenging, but not a place where I can continue to wrestle with my faith questions, at least not out loud...While I can participate in faith communities who don't necessarily share my theology, I am reminded of my past formation and I recognize where I am today...There are times in more conservative circles that I can recognize aruguments that I used to use and that I used to make, but that I just simply cannot believe anymore or wrap my mind around why I thought that way...

I'm not a "flaming liberal" nor am I a "flaming conservative"...Sometimes I'm moderate, and there things that I am more conservative on and some things that I am more liberal on...I'm a mixture of a lot...I would probably say that I'm more liberal than conservative, but only on some things...It's unfortunate that we only have the two polars by which to gauge theological temperature...

It's hard to find a faith community where I can wrestle with questions of faith and not be seen in a different light simply because I am a pastor. I suppose that the only group that this is truly possibly would be with other pastors or seminarians...I could be wrong and I could be persuaded otherwise...I know for sure that I cannot be a part of a superficial faith community...One that informs me what my beliefs should be and if I don't believe that, I am somehow less of a Christian...I've done that before and I wasn't really growing...I need some room for growth and I'm not sure where that is going to come...

I am absolutely taking my day off tomorrow...No question about that one! I can't decide if I'm going to spend the day sleeping or if I'm going to escape for a little while...I'll probably decide when I wake up in the morning...