What's in a Day?

With the ice days this week, I've been given the gift of rearranged time. Not extra time, since all the work I miss while spending more time with my family will have to made up somewhere, but my days were definitely rearranged. Instead of heading into the office, hearing the busy, happy sounds of our Children’s Day Out, meeting with event planners and premarital couples, visiting the homebound and the hospitalized, and all the other moving parts of pastoral ministry, I've been at home.

And unlike some of my colleagues, who don’t have young children at home, my work has had to be put on hold for the most part. Even as a write this article, my 5-month-old son is asleep on my chest and I’m balancing the laptop on my legs while reaching around him to type. It’ll work for a while, until he wakes up, but my “productivity” is definitely down.

Instead, I've made painter’s tape spider webs with my 4-year-old and tossed cotton ball “flies” into it. I've taken naps with my baby. We painted toast and made cookies. It’s good stuff. The days slip easily by, with no one paying too much to the hours.

But there was one day, one 24-hour period, that changed the world. This year at the Krum Church, to observe the season of Lent, we are going to walk beside Jesus through the last 24 hours of his earthly life. Jesus is believed to have died at the age of 33.

And while the gospel writers devote most of their attention to the last 3 years of his life, each one devotes the most attention to the day he was crucified. The last 24 hours of Jesus’ life is the continuation of the love story between God and creation. God would take it upon God’s own self to lay down his life for our sake.

Beginning on Thursday evening after sunset, Jesus would eat the last supper with his disciples, pray in the garden of Gethsemane, be betrayed and deserted by his friends, be convicted of blasphemy by the religious authorities, be tried and sentenced for rebellion by Pontius Pilate, be tortured by Roman soldiers, and experience crucifixion, death, and burial.

When the apostle Paul summarized the gospel for the Christian community in Corinth, he said, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” The suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus represent the heart of the gospel and the completion of God’s saving work.

This past Sunday, we started with the Last Supper. If you missed it, you can head over to our Facebook page (Krum First United Methodist Church) to watch a video. Through that meal, Jesus transformed the Passover Seder, the reminder of the Exodus and God’s central saving act for the Jews, into our Holy Communion, the reminder of Christ’s sacrifice and God’s central saving act for us.

This meal is how we remember the story of who we are and whose we are. And, if we let it, it can reshape our lives. Just as the Passover Seder moves those at the table from slavery to freedom, our Communion can move us from slavery under sin and death to freedom in Jesus Christ.

We all have stories that define us. Words spoken over us or about us come to become the voice within us, defining not only our past, but predicting our future. But instead of the hurts, injuries or insults we may cling to, God invites us to let Communion define who we are. Through it we remember that someone saved us. We remember that God, walking in human flesh, suffered and died for us to be free.

In breaking bread with his disciples, Jesus taught them one last time. He showed them his love. He gave them a meal by which they would remember him for the rest of their lives. And from that time on, every time Jesus’ disciples have shared this meal, it binds us together and reminds us that he is never far away.

This Sunday, we’ll continue on to the garden of Gethsemane. There the betrayal that Jesus had predicted over his last meal will come to past and his closest friends will desert him. It’s a dark day to keep pace with our Lord. But, if we let it, the gospel will continue to transform our lives. 

Water-washed & Spirit-born

A couple of Sundays ago at the Krum Church we did two fun things: 1) we celebrated Epiphany (when the 3 wise men, kings, or magi – whatever you want to call them – came to worship the Christ child) and 2) we started our new Sunday schedule with two worship services (11am and 5pm). I came home Sunday night intoxicated on a blend of joy, Holy Spirit, and exhaustion. It was magnificent.

Last week was no less exciting as we launched into our new series – “from Water to Glory.” As a liturgical, connectional church, we keep the Christian calendar. This means that last Sunday was the time we were called to remember the Baptism of the Lord. Jesus, who knew no sin, came to be baptized by his cousin, John, in the river Jordan. And in that moment, as he came up from the water, the Spirit appeared like a dove and the voice of God spoke, "You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). 

In the sacrament of baptism, we are born anew by water and the Spirit (John 3:5). We are water-washed and Spirit-born, brought into a special covenant as God’s grace is poured out upon us.

As United Methodists, we understand God to be the one who acts in baptism. Yes, we show up, we profess our faith, we present our child, but ultimately baptism is something God does with, for, and to us. As such, we don’t baptize someone more than once, although we do take opportunities, like this Sunday, to remember our baptism and be thankful.

Because I believe that God speaks over each of us in our baptism and beyond, “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well-pleased.” Of course we feel inadequate, we may try to quibble and say that those words only apply to Jesus. Most of those protests come from the place of shame, because we don’t feel like we deserve for God to feel that way about us. After all, unlike Jesus, we’re not perfect!

But hear this good news, brothers and sisters – God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you are ever baptized, God is just crazy about you, so much so that God will keep calling you and calling you and calling you, like a suitor who won’t take a hint. God wants a relationship with you!

Not because you did anything to deserve it. None of us deserve it. But simply because God made you for God’s self. You are God’s beloved child and God wants to be in your life like any good parent does.

As much as I get frustrated, tired, and otherwise less than good in my parenting relationship, it’s been a place of unsurpassed divine revelation for me. When I look at my boys, when I hold them in my arms, when I observe their wit, their curiosity, their humor – my heart swells with love. And if my little old heart, puny and human, can feel this depth of love, I can’t even begin to imagine what God feels for each of us. God’s love is an ocean compared to my water drop.

We make a covenant in our baptism and when we accept God’s grace that we will grow by faith toward perfection in love. Make sure you heard that correctly – perfection in love, not the world’s standards of perfection which are all warped and tangled up with fame, wealth, success, etc. God in Jesus Christ doesn’t promise those things. Being a follower of the crucified and risen One doesn’t come with a lot of guarantees of worldly comfort.

But being perfected in love is a different story. It means letting your heart grow, letting your love swell to encompass not just your family, your friends, your tribe. If you let God really get ahold of you, you find yourself loving strangers, enemies, those the world finds unlovely and unlovable. It’s an uncomfortable spot, because when you love others, really love them despite everything else about them save that they are God’s own child, you can’t treat them the same way anymore.

That’s the ground we’ll cover at the Krum Church these next few weeks. How do we grow from the waters of baptism to the glory of resurrection? We’ll look to the pioneer and perfecter of our faith as the trailblazer for our own journeys. May we have the grace to let God work in us!

How do We Know?

When we come to faith in God, our response is to witness to God, to help others know the God we have come to know. And yet, God is so transcendent, so other and yet so near, that we can never wrap our minds completely around this mystery.

We often get stuck in post-Enlightenment thinking that lifts up analysis, descriptions, and theories as the best or only ways of knowing. It’s head knowledge.

But you know as well as I do that there are lots of other ways of knowing things, ways that come through our spirit, our gut, or our intuition. Limiting our ways of knowing to our heads downplays what we might learn in other ways.

We are minds, to be sure, but we’re also bodies. At this time of year, when we celebrate God’s incarnation, when God consented to life in a body, it’s worthwhile to see how our bodies might teach us.

Bodies have ways of knowing that are different from and yet intimately connected with the mind’s ways of knowing. Some neurobiologists hypothesize that we automatically, almost reflexively, confront an unknown stimulus with the question “What is it?” If we think of God as the ultimate first, we can understand our constant questioning, trying to understand “what is it?”

Even as our minds are constantly trying to know the world, the primary way we have to do this is through our bodies. While Enlightenment thinking would tell us that we can use “pure” reason, realistically we know that everything we consider with our minds passes through the filter of our bodies.

The ancient church had a saying for this - lex orandi, lex credenda – which just means that what the people do truly reflects what the people believe. If we say we believe in serving the poor, clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry, yet do nothing toward these beliefs, you can be pretty sure we don’t really believe those things.

One intentional way we teach ourselves through our bodies in through ritual. Theologian Theodore Jennings writes that “ritual action is a means by which its we discover who we are in the world and ‘how it is’ with the world.” Or, to put it more simply, the way we learn to do things is by doing them.

Sounds ridiculously simple, right? But consider learning to ride a bicycle. If I were to say to someone, “Here is a bicycle. There are two wheels, which are attached to a metal frame. The brakes stop the wheels by friction by either pads or discs and are controlled by levers on the handlebars, which you hold with your hands. To ride the bicycle, you sit on the seat and balance on the wheels. To move forward, place both feet on the pedals and push them around in circles.”

This is only one silly example of how many times people learn how to do things by doing them, rather than by explanation or instruction. Jennings goes on to say that “the performance of a ritual, teaches one not only how to conduct the ritual itself” but also how to behave “outside the ritual space – in the world epitomized by or founded or renewed in and through the ritual itself.”

To put it another way, just as a bicycle teaches us how to ride it, the bread and cup at the Lord’s Table teach us how to be fed and share with one another. In baptism, we gently, carefully use water to symbolically wash a body, knowing that there’s also a soul being renewed. It’s simple, but indescribably beautiful.

We can be transformed by the rituals we follow. The hope of all of our Christian rituals is that the way we are in worship – loving, kind, patient, attentive, joyful – might become the way we are in the world. In worship, we practice being a citizen of the Kingdom of God so that we can carry our passport into the world, re-presenting God to all we meet.

Christmas Eve is a rich time for ritual. When I was a child, we baked cookies and put the best ones out for Santa Claus with a big glass of milk. When I became a Christian, I added the ritual of worship – hearing the story of the Christ child in the manger, sharing communion, and lighting candles. If you want to know God, consider joining us at the Krum Church at 7pm. There’s always a place for you at God’s house!