Updating our Labels

   Riley Middleton, my friend and partner in the ministry of making and fixing things, met me at the parsonage to work on a short list of items to be repaired or replaced. I am working through the list of nagging projects that we've too long overlooked. It finally takes the deadline of moving to motivate me to address the list!
   After returning from Home Depot with all the necessary parts for our projects - replacing a wall outlet fixture, repairing a wall outlet cut-in box, and replacing the two decorative exterior front porch lights after one suffered damage from an errant Frisbee - it was time to get to work. While the last project on the list had the most curb appeal (I could not resist the pun), it was also the easiest to get safely underway, since power to the lights ran through a switch; turn the switch off and no power runs through the wires. The other two projects, involving wall outlets, were a different story. They required us to turn off the correct circuit before grabbing onto the wires. But, finding the correct circuit meant....
   On some level, we all go through life assigning labels to things. We teach children to know what is too hot to touch, or what foods are good for them. Some of us label people we know as good or bad, friend or foe, helpful or harmful. Other people label products, restaurants, destinations, even highways as preferred or not. The list of labels is exhaustive, and the good that can come from using our prior experience to guide our future choices can be very helpful. But, what happens when prior experience is wrong? What happens when things or people have changed, and the label no longer fits? What happens when we adopt the labels someone else was using, without checking into their veracity?
   You guessed it, some of the labels in the parsonage circuit panel were not correct. Actually, half of the labels were wrong. Riley and I spent a few extra minutes this week correcting the labels someone had written in the space provided alongside the circuits. Which prompts me to ask: what other labels in my life have I been using and assuming to be correct? What other categories or boxes have I placed things into that no longer fit there?
   Jesus came and fulfilled many of the descriptions and labels predicted of him: wonderful counselor, prince of peace, etc. He also shattered a thousand others. To follow in his steps means offering grace to ourselves and others as we all live into and out of the labels we're assigned. Grace and peace, Scott

Starting New with a Strange Jesus

    In the beginning, woman and man walked in a paradise garden with the Creator (Genesis 2). This was the highest form of communion. It did not last, as their choices, predictors of the same choices we would make every generation after that first one, moved them away from God's best desires for them and out into the fallen state our world has remained in for most of history (Genesis 3 and 4).
   Not too long afterwards, Abraham and Sarah were visited by three men they did not know. They were strangers, though we know now that they came as messengers from heaven (Genesis 17). Later still, a story was kept about their grandson, Jacob, wrestling with a stranger in the night. That stranger would be revealed to be God (Genesis 32).
   These earliest stories seem to suggest that heaven worked, at least on some occasions, through strangers. What if heaven still worked that way? What if heaven's greatest work, culminating in the events of that first Easter weekend, is about our relationship to strangers? Particularly, to one stranger?
    Rowan Williams, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican church, wrote this in his book Resurrection,

One of the strangest features of the resurrection narratives is precisely this theme of the otherness, the unrecognizability, of the risen Jesus. Three major stories - Luke's Emmaus episode, John's account of Mary Magdalene at the time, and the 'Galilean fantasia' which concludes his gospel - underline the point. Whatever the experiences of the disciples at Easter were, it is hard to deny that this element must've played a part – that for some at least, the encounter with the risen Jesus began as an encounter with a stranger.

   Williams goes on to say that the disciples must relearn Jesus, as if from the beginning. This could not be any more clear than in the way that John closes out his Gospel. Jesus finds the disciples in their fishing boats, as if the previous three years with Jesus had never happened. They must start over, from scratch. 

   I'm greatly touched by this. Very distinct from the nostalgia of some tired Easter theology, we are confronted with how different God is than we've long tried to convince ourselves. Maybe Easter is intended for us to realize that our journeys, every year, start new with Jesus. Further, the book of Hebrews suggests that God's pattern of coming to us as a stranger continues (13:2). When we entertain and offer hospitality to strangers we are possibly offering it to heavenly beings.  

   How is God moving in your life through a stranger or person you didn't immediately recognize as familiar? What happens in your heart when you consider that God acts in ways beyond your understanding or control? 

   Grace and peace, Scott
 

What To Think When Time Passes Too Quickly

  I have known for months now that my watch was missing. I don't remember where I put it or the last time I had worn it. Of course, this is less of a hassle considering almost everyone now carries around a time-keeping device in their pocket or purse, also known as a cellular phone.
   We were riding back across the state of Georgia on Sunday afternoon, returning from the wedding weekend of my cousin Wade. We were in some South Georgia metropolis - Odum, Surrency, Graham, or Chauncey - when I went rummaging through the contents of the console between the two front seats of Julie's GMC Acadia. There, beneath some CDs, sunglasses case, and enough pens and pencils to rewrite the IRS tax laws, my fingers happened upon a metallic object. What was lost, had been found. Glory, hallelujah.
   I marveled at my watch upon returning it to its rightful place upon my wrist. After a few moments, I took note of something I had missed in the hoopla of finding this timepiece now reappeared; the hands were only a minute off. It was then I was struck by the duration of my watch's absence! I had misplaced it before the clocks had fallen back in November, because it was again showing the correct time after they had sprung forward this past March.
   Back in 1818, Washington Irving wrote a short-story about a similar occurrence of being out of sight and out of mind for a period of time. It is the tale of Rip Van Winkle. Asleep for twenty years, he returns to find the scale of tumultuous change that occurred over the twenty years that the story encompasses. Rip discovers that life has passed on without his presence. Could you imagine? There are worse things than being left behind, though. Waiting on time to pass slowly or dreading as it flies by too quickly can be equally tough.
   The opening verses of Genesis are literally marked by the passage of one day after another. Time is woven into the story of Creation. We are told in Ecclesiastes 3 that "for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." And, some of the last words of Jesus to his disciples before he ascends back into heaven in Acts 1 are for them to wait a few days for the Holy Spirit to come, but know that the exact timing of events in the future is a mystery kept by God. We live with time, but we also wonder about time.
   My world seems driven by time right now. How much time is needed to pack? When will this meeting happen, or these answers come? I cannot believe we only have so many days left before saying good-bye. Yet, however distant answers seem or uncertain the future might be, I know the timing will work out right in the end. Psalm 31 says, "I trust in you, O Lord; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hand."  I believe this promise is offered to packing preachers and all who call on the name of the Lord. May God's grace and peace be on us all, Amen.

She was a Giant

   I've seen the California Redwoods up close. Our family visited Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco, when I was in high school. The trees there reach over 250 feet into the sky. Their trunks are massive - can you picture images of cars driving through them in decades gone by? You can appreciate their size only so much when you are standing beside them. You have to get some distance to really get a sense of how large they are when compared to others around them.

   This is how I am feeling today. I was asked, a few weeks back, to write the official memoir for the South Georgia Conference records for my grandmother, Augusta Carruth. She was, of course, a pastor’s spouse in the Conference, and their lives are memorialized along with the pastors. But, she was, in many ways, more than a spouse and more than a mother and grandmother. Along with raising three children of her own, she volunteered in every church they were in as a Sunday School teacher and MYF counselor. For 40 years she worked with teenagers and children. That makes her a saint, right? She was active in the Methodist Women’s groups of her local church dating back to when she was 27 years old. She remained active until Alzheimer’s took that away in her late 80s. She died of that at the age of 92, but it never made a dent in the legacy she’s left behind. Beyond the local church, she was a leader at the District and Conference level for decades. She was elected to represent South Georgia at General Conference six times, and three times attended the World Methodist Conference. She wrote curricula for women in Latin America, and helped oversee the global work of the UMW for 8 years as a lay director. She read every day and was sharper on current events that any person I’ve met in years. She was passionate, and kind, and had a smile that could turn complete strangers into fast friends. She did a dozen more things and loved the Gospel in a hundred other ways. She stood no taller than 5'1", but she was a giant in my eyes.

   I've been given a 500 word maximum to try and cover her life. It cannot be done. Like the redwoods on the West Coast that are too tall to appreciate without some perspective, the eleven months since her passing have only helped me to fully grasp her soaring reach in my life and in the world. I am in awe of how one life can mean so much. 

   And then I think of Epworth. Epworth has been shaped by lives that are larger than any brief word can do justice. Epworth continues to be led by those whose reach is enormous and whose faith is rooted deeply. May we stop, from time to time, to appreciate those around us. Grace and peace, Scott

Prayer for Lent and for Us All

   While I was a seminary student at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, the Dean of Worship compiled some of the prayers written by students and faculty that were used in the worship held there every week. This prayer for Lent was written by a classmate, Katye Fox, around the year 2000.

O God of Wounded Body,
You know what it is
          to be wracked with pain and anguish
          for you came and experienced that utter misery for us.
Rub your salve of forgiveness and healing love into
          the gashes of our hearts,
          the slices in our souls,
          and the scars on our flesh,
so that we may be freed from our sufferings
and be moved to bring recovery to our neighbors who endure torment.
In the name of Jesus,
          who brings us wholeness through your woundedness and grace.
Amen.

   We departed worship this past Sunday with the story of the Passion of the Christ ringing in our ears. It is a story of betrayal, of suffering, of despair, and of apparent failure, that finally closes with little semblance of hope. In fact, there is really no hope at the end of Friday's events, except for a couple of words Jesus offered back on a Galilean road about rising again and a prediction he made earlier this week about rebuilding the Temple in three days. Like those first disciples, most of us would choose despair in light of the sparse evidence before our eyes that the story could possibly be redeemed.
   Yet, when we gather again on Friday, to prepare our hearts for what is to come, and again on Sunday, the story does continue. My prayer is that the hope offered by the very Word of God will carry us this week, and every week, as we confront daily the evidence of the brokenness of our world. God, in Christ, is at work even now putting all of this back together. May the grace and peace of waiting and anticipating be ours. Scott