-Rev Melissa Fain- Those who exploit the powerless anger their maker, while those who are kind to the poor honor God. Proverbs 14:31 CEB Alexander Campbell was deeply invested in the Presbyterian Church. Both his dad and he were in ministry within the denomination. Only... that homeless man. He wanted to have communion, and nothing was stopping him. He had done everything he had to do. Yet, he couldn't. He was stuck in two very real questions: Where is God, and are the people able to get to God? God was in communion, but there were those who couldn't come to the table. The homeless sat outside, unable to feast. Alexander Campbell knew he was called to follow God. Where was God? God was outside the church, without a home. Campbell ultimately displaced himself in search for God. We can connect to God when we reach out to the displaced in our world. Pray with me:
Dear Lord, from our security help us help those who are insecure. Amen. -Rev Melissa Fain- 18 Weeds and thistles will grow for you, even as you eat the field’s plants; 19 by the sweat of your face you will eat bread— until you return to the fertile land, since from it you were taken; you are soil, to the soil you will return.” Genesis 3:18-19 CEB It was Ash Wednesday many years ago, and I rather naively asked the Elder, "What are those ashes made of?" "The palm fronds of last year's Palm Sunday. They're dried out, and burned to ash for Ash Wednesday." What was mere curiosity turned to horror. I loved Palm Sunday! As I kid, I enjoyed marching into the Sanctuary (ahead of the the choir, by the way!) Now I was staring at the remains of that wonderful experience. Only dust. Burned to nothingness. God was in that event! I felt the Spirit as I sang "Hallelujah!" I knew God's presence was real. Now it felt dismissed and discarded. Only, I saw it wrong. The ash is a reminder to let go of what God was, to allow us to see how God could be. Don't mistake this as something easy. This isn't some moment of celebration, or understood joy. This is a lament; a funeral dirge. What was, can no longer be. It's not anything that can be brought back. Holding on to those remains will not bring them back. It will only keep what is to come from arriving. So Ash Wednesday we mourn and say good bye. God exists in those moments. God is ash. Pray with me:
Dear Lord, help me reflect as I mourn. As I fondly remember what once was, let me accept the ash so I may let go. Amen. -Rev Melissa Fain- 13 But Moses said to God, “If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they are going to ask me, ‘What’s this God’s name?’ What am I supposed to say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.So say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:13-14 CEB Where is God? We force this question into an answer, because contemplating it too long scares us. We yearn to know, but only if the answer suits our needs.It seems our collective wonder only dives to a surface level testimony. Beyond that, we quickly push any ideas aside until it’s too late. God’s fine because we are fine. We’re fine. I’m fine. It’s all fine. In reality, there is no way to fully understand God. Either we pull out so much there is nothing we can say that doesn’t go beyond generalities, or we focus to the point where we fail in our explanations. It’s like a child drawing a picture of her parents. As humans we know there is no way a child could correctly capture the truth of her parent, and in that context we understand. Her abstract stick person is a beautiful parent in the eyes of her loving mom. We can’t extend the same grace when our fellow brothers and sisters try to do the same thing with God. A few years back I ripped into the art of Thomas Kinkade. In my mind his art was too perfect. I wanted to see the slushy snow, the dying leaves, and the dust. I kept this view until I heard he committed suicide. He was living with crippling depression. His painting was a desire to find perfection even when everything looked dark and lost everywhere else. My naive desire to see God my way, failed to see God his way. I wanted to take it back. We weren’t fine. It wasn’t fine. We’re not all fine. God is everything. God is. The radical notion of God telling Moses, “Tell them ‘I Am’ has sent me to you.” allows us to look beyond ourselves to something greater. Whenever someone declares who they are, we can see a piece of the Divine. I am a minister. On a deeper level, God is a minister. I am a sister, mother, daughter, and friend. On a real level, God is our sister, mother, daughter and friend. We say this not because I’m God, because I am completely and utterly am not. We say this because God calls us to see the Light within each other. Draw us to the greater need, because that which we did not do for the least of these, we did not do for God. God is, I Am. I couldn’t see God in a Thomas Kinkade painting, but God was in a Thomas Kinkade painting the whole time, even if I was too naive or arrogant to see it. God was crying out for us to find perfection in a broken world. How foolish I was. We spend countless hours trying to understand how we were made in the image of God. There is something beautiful in that endeavor. I’m not going to tell you to stop. It’s just, it’s Lent. Lent is the forty days, excluding Sundays, before Easter. It exists for a very simple reason: To prepare the Body of Christ for a Risen Christ. It’s a preparatory time. We should push ourselves and ask tough questions. Who is God? God is. God is what? God is. In the places we like to go to most. God is. In the places we like to go to least. God is. And those difficult dark places are the places we are called to during this time. The least of these. That’s where God is. Today we prepare for preparing. Today we set our course. To find God on a broken tree, we must first look at our communal failings. Where those find their loss, God is. Pray with me:
Dear Lord, prepare us. Draw us close enough to see, while not getting burned. Help us see you in new ways. Amen.
-Rev Melissa Fain-
"They told me they would leave the church if I didn't vote their way," she lamented as we both wept.
"They lied," I said between deep sobs. "They lied to so many because it was what they wanted." I knew something was up when the deacons said they weren't allowed to the called board meeting. They were told only Elders were allowed. They had come anyway; sitting off to the side like unwanted clearance items. They were not only allowed, but the bi-laws said they had a vote. Welcome to church- where we want to be the mother that gives up the baby to keep it alive, but most of us are ready to hack it to pieces anyway. There are moments in Christianity where the lines are drawn in impossible ways. Those lines lay as chords across Church's foundation. We tip toe around them, but eventually someone trips over and so many get hurt in the process. We can rip them up and take them out, but that would cause a mess. Instead, we tell people to avoid them, and punish those who try to remove it, or get caught up and tangled. While my first illustration might be from my own experience, it's not just my experience. The faces and places might be different, but the story remains the same. Worse than that, unchecked it's cyclical. As I heard many years ago from someone I can no longer name, "The initial damage is like a scratch in a record. It just keeps playing the same song and dance, and the same scratch keeps coming back to rip through and destroy everything." That's my problem. It's not that I was hurt. I can process my pain and move forward. It's the system that caused the problem- that murders it's prophets and crucifies scapegoats to avoid dealing with the real problems. I'm okay being alone in my pain, but when my pain is also other's pain, then we have a problem. Here's my other problem, I love my church. We're not dealing with "easy" bad guys here. Well, let me take that back. It is easy. Take your finger and point to yourself. It's okay, I'll do the same thing with myself. The problem is systemic, or communal sin. Everyone's to blame. I'm learning more and more that most of our problems are the result of bad communication. As a child I loathed the board member that spent twenty minutes asking questions that I assumed had obvious answers. Today I wish I could put her in every church board room across the country. Whether we agree or not, she forced conversation, and a lack of it is why the church hurts so much today. The UMC Church- The signs of bigger problems
On February 26th the UMC General Conference met to make a groundbreaking vote. Would they marry same sex couples, and allow non-celibate gay clergy?
I went to a UMC seminary. Candler is one of the big ones in the southeast. Before the vote I assumed the answer was going to be "yes." My school was filled with many openly gay seminary students. In fact, I assumed the answer was already "yes," because of their fervor and passion. I didn't realize they were actually tip toeing over a trunk of a chord, doing the correct dance to live into their call. This vote was about doing one of two things.
Conservative Christians Just Retook the UMC How faithful Africans saved the UMC from accepting Gay 'marriage." The lines had been cemented into the foundation, and this truly did rip them out. It didn't matter how they had been ripped, it was going to push out whoever was on the wrong side of the vote. Rev Rebecca Yowler, an ordained minister and ministerial librarian had this to say on the matter before the vote went down:
I WANT the UMC to split. They can't do any good as they are and too many refuse to change. There i no longer any semblance of belief in "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors." They showed me the door 10 years ago, and I'm grateful to have locked it on the way out.
The vote went Traditional, and now we're here. We've had a few days to angerly celebrate or deeply lament. Let's now do a little processing from an outsider looking in.
A traditional critique: You have just spent decades silently allowing something you don't Biblically think is right. To now, throw down the law like it's some kind of final word is not caring for God's sheep, it's bringing them to slaughter. If you can't get the slaughterhouse analogy just realize when you pass a field of cows, they may be peacefully grazing on that grass, but they are not there to be part of the family. That is exactly what the traditional vote looks like. A progressive critique: It was easier not to explain. I've seen it enough. Our sermons are tied to our checking account. It is better to talk love and understanding, and not rock the boat too hard. I know it was difficult. I sat in front of a group of Christians and laid out both Creation Narratives. I saw the fear on their faces as they realized Genesis was not a historical account. Those are the conversations that should have happened thirty years ago. No one can talk about those difficult passages until the foundation of Biblical Interpretation has been soundly laid and understood. No one understood your story of acceptance, because they didn't speak your language. Prepare the Way of the Lord
Eight years ago I learned a very tough lesson: God is the employer, and the Church is the accountant. God may employ you to be a shepherd, but the Church might still choose to not pay you for that job. Who God calls, and who the church pays doesn't have to be one in the same. That was personally a tough lesson for me because the people in the church were my safety blanket. I had that blanket taken away, and I was left with only God. Basically, I used to think everyone who came to church were in it for God. We were all on a path to understand that Truth with a big 'T'. I discovered people go to church for a plethora of reasons, only one of which is to seek God. Sad as it is, I had to see the reality of Church, to discover the reality of God.
Whether you are UMC, DOC or something completely different- Church is being called to something radically different. So what if we are outside the buildings we love? God is calling you outside anyway. That's where the widow is giving away her last cent. That's where the need on Sunday morning isn't being met because we've been cloistered safely in our pews. It's where the people are because they stopped going into our sanctuaries, which stopped being sanctuaries many years before. You are not alone. I've been here, and I am here. Prepare the way of the Lord. There's a calling out here in the wilderness. |
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