Question on my mind tonight

The disciples followed Jesus long before they figured out who he was. They followed him even though they were completely wrong about who he was. They followed him to the cross, where their faith was shattered and they ran. They huddled in locked rooms. Even on Easter, some of them did not believe or did not recognize him at first. Then the Holy Spirit came upon them with power, and they changed the world.

John Wesley followed Jesus when his heart was cold as a stone. He followed when he thought what Jesus wanted was hard work and sincere effort. He followed until his faith as nearly broken by failure and abandonment. And then Jesus came to life within his heart and the Holy Spirit came upon him with power, and he changed England.

How do we help United Methodists who have started this journey — like the disciples and John Wesley — but have not completed it?

Wise words on latest Driscoll controversy

Have you heard about the latest Internet firestorm over Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church? It is all about how the community disciplines a member.

This blog has an exceptionally good response to the whole matter.

Demi Moore and the unclean spirit

I don’t often comment on pop culture, but something attributed to Demi Moore caught my eye today. Moore is an actress who is in the news right now after a high-profile divorce and hospitalization for “exhaustion.”

In an interview published last week, she said this:

Demi added: ‘What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being love. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.’

The lectionary this week has me spending a lot of time pondering the man with the unclean spirit. I hear in Moore’s statement above a kindred spirit to the man in the gospel lesson this week.

More lectionary reflections – Mark 1:21-28

I find myself this week going back and forth over how much I should engage the “unclean spirits” and the modern mind problem in my sermon.

We are not told whether the man with the unclean spirit has a mental or physical ailment. It may be that the spirit is hidden from others. Perhaps the congregation is stunned when the man bursts out because he seemed so “normal” up to that point.

Whatever the case, the exorcism in the middle of a Sabbath service stirs things up. And, I am told, for 21st century people stirs up all kinds of questions. People come to this text with questions about faith healing and science.

Are these questions getting in the way of Jesus and the gospel or are they the doorway to Jesus and the gospel?

How explicitly should the sermon engage these questions?

And how should they be engaged?

Since the next couple weeks with Mark we will be getting a series of healing stories, it might be best to bring these questions up and deal with them directly this Sunday. Or is this falling into a mistake by placing the emphasis on the wrong things?

These are some of the questions I’m thinking about and praying about this week thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary.

Lectionary reflections – Mark 1:21-28

I bet they had a good crowd at worship the next week. What an interesting thing to have happen in the middle of the sermon.

I once had the organ player have a bit of a spell during the sermon. She swooned a bit. We stopped what we were doing and attended to her. The rest of the sermon was gone. I preached it, but no one remembered it. They were all watching our organ to player to see if she was okay.

Jesus had a similar problem at the synagogue that day. Notice the Scripture does not give us any clue what he taught. The only thing we remember from that day was this remarkable outburst and exorcism. Here, indeed, was the real teaching of the day.

Where the messiah goes, the demons flee.

Are you expendable?

Sky McCraken has some words for us.

I think some very hard realizations are going to hit us as a denomination. If we are going to make the shift to be about making disciples instead of making church members, there are people who are not going to be happy. In discipleship mode, neither clergy nor congregations are”cared for” – we become resources. Maybe even expendable resources.

For those of us who recently renewed our Wesleyan Covenant, his words echo in that prayer.

The Bible answer to why people need Jesus

Adam Hamilton somewhat famously lays out three questions every local church needs to answer.

• Why do people need Jesus?
• Why do they need the church?
• Why do they need this particular church?

Hamilton’s answer to the first question goes something like this: Jesus Christ is the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart. In relationship with Jesus we discover the key to a life filled with joy, love, and hope.

It is a great answer. It makes me want to know Jesus better.

In the book where I read it, Hamilton does not go into the Scriptural basis for this answer. I was trying to think where I’d go to develop that.

“I’m the way, the truth, and the life,” seems like an obvious brick in that theological house.

Where else would you go in Scripture for this?

Where do you see Scripture making this answer difficult to maintain?

Do you have a different answer than Hamilton?

Why did you keep this from me?

A Pentecostal friend once teased me that Methodist teaching on salvation was two words: “Try harder.”

I thought of that when I read a remarkable letter John Wesley wrote May 14, 1738, just 10 days before Aldersgate. The letter was to the Rev. William Law, who had been something of a spiritual mentor and teacher to the young Wesley. In the letter, Wesley recounted how law’s teaching had led him to preach the law.

For two years (more especially) I have been preaching after the model of your two practical treatises; and all that heard have allowed, that the law is great, wonderful, and holy. But no sooner than did they attempt to fulfill it, but they found that it is too high for man: And that by doing “the works of the law shall no flesh living be justified.”

To remedy this, I exhorted them, and stirred up myself, to pray earnestly for the grace of God, and to use all the other means of obtaining that grace, which the all-wise God hath appointed. But still, both they and I were more and more convinced, that this is a law by which a man cannot live: the law in our members continually warring against it, and bringing us into deeper captivity to the law of sin.

Here is the “try harder” Christianity that my friend spoke of. If we cannot be good and holy and loving people, the solution is to redouble our efforts. Hunker down. Put your back into it. Try harder.

But here is what Wesley wrote to Law.

Under this heavy yoke I might have groaned till death, had not a holy man, to whom God lately directed me, upon my complaining thereof, answered at once, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all they heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee. This faith, indeed, as well as the salvation it brings, is the free gift of God. But seek, and thou shalt find. Strip thyself naked of they own works, and thy own righteousness, and fly to him. For whosoever cometh unto him, he will in no wise cast out.”

And I love what Wesley wrote next, the young disciple to the mentor and teacher.

Now, Sir, suffer me to ask, How will you answer it to our common Lord, that you never gave me this advice?

I my mind’s ear, I hear the sound of one who had struggled and strained terribly. He had despaired of relief. And then one day someone offered him a key to unlock the chains that bound him down. It was liberating and exciting, but in a moment the thought occurred to him. “If this was so easy to do, why did no one do it before? Why was I forced to toil in such darkness when the light was so close at hand?”

Part of the goal of the letter, so it appears to me, is to challenge Law’s own faith, so the tone is not so innocent as I suggest here. There are barbs aplenty.

And yet, I wonder how many people sitting in our pews might throw the same question up at us. How many people who have heard the ungospel of “try harder” from our pulpits might ask us “why have you never told us this before” if we were to preach more faithfully the gospel of, as Wesley puts it, “the living, justifying faith in the blood of Jesus”?

How many of our people stumble onward with the kind of faith Wesley had: “that speculative, notional, airy shadow, which lives in the head, not in the heart”?

Bonhoeffer – Nouwen, God – self

Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer one day and Henri Nouwen the next is a bit like riding a see-saw.

Bonhoeffer tells us that the path to our true self is to find and follow and obey God.

Nouwen tells us that the path to God starts by delving into our inner and true selves.

When I read John Wesley, I hear Bonhoeffer’s voice much more strongly than Nouwen’s in the background.

What congregations do

For a while now, Taylor Burton-Edwards has been talking about the historic competencies of the congregation. If you haunt about the same blogs and Facebook groups he does, you would have picked this up. But until now, he has not wanted to share in a public way the framework he has developed.

Over at the Emerging UMC blog, he posted today the framework. It includes four things a congregation can and should do well: offer public worship, teach basic doctrine, care for members and participants, and be a reliable institution in the local community. (At the blog, he adds a fifth aimed at Methodists and other missional bodies.)