John Meunier

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!

My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad
The honors of Thy name.

Jesus! the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
’Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
’Tis life, and health, and peace.

He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood availed for me.

He speaks, and, listening to His voice,
New life the dead receive,
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice,
The humble poor believe.

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.

In Christ your Head, you then shall know,
Shall feel your sins forgiven;
Anticipate your heaven below,
And own that love is heaven.

Photos here.

More than once I’ve been told there is no such thing as a part-time pastor. Usually, the people saying it are acknowledging the fact that the United Methodist Church has thousands of “bi-vocational” and part-time pastors but has very little of its institutional apparatus set up to support or sometimes even acknowledge their unique status.

Reading John Wesley’s “A Father Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” gives me pause to think that Wesley did not really believe in part-time pastors either.

In it, he takes to task pastors who do not expend all their energy in watching over the souls of their flock. He chides the pastor as seeing his office as preaching once or twice a week and then being done with it. Preaching is an awesome and great responsibility, he says, but then goes on:

But great, inexpressibly great, as this is, it is perhaps the least part of our work. To ‘seek and save that which is lost;’ to bring souls from Satan to God; to instruct the ignorant; to reclaim the wicked; to convince the gainsayer; to direct their feet into the way of peace, and then keep them therein; to follow them step by step, lest they turn out of the way, and advise them in their doubts and temptations; to lift them up that fall; to refresh them that are faint; and to comfort the weak-hearted; to administer various helps, as the variety of occasions require, according to their several necessities: These are the parts of our office; all this we have undertaken at the peril of our own soul.

Wesley asks, “Who can do this, unless his whole heart be in the work; unless he desire nothing but to ‘spend and be spent for them; and count not his life dear unto himself, so he may present them blameless in the day of the Lord Jesus?’”

Sounds like a bit more work than Sunday sermons and working in pastoral visits and church meetings when I can. I think Wesley would say my soul is in peril for all the work I’ve left undone.

Here is a talk given by Duke professor Randy Maddox on the doctrine, discipline, and spirit of Methodism.

(Hijacked from The Methodist Thinker)

The situation at Foundry UMC has me trying to get a handle on the bounds of acceptable dissent within a body like the United Methodist Church.

For an institution to have any vitality at all, it must have diversity. A block of limestone never has to worry about schism, but neither does it do very much.

But for an institution to have integrity, it must have boundaries. Pierce the membrane of a water balloon and you have a puddle.

(Warning: I make an anatomical reference to sexual organs in the post. If you would find that offensive, please do not continue.) Read the rest of this entry »

The poet and preacher paint such different pictures of heaven.

The poet James Dickey imagined “The Heaven of Animals” as a place where predators hunt with perfect violence and prey die in glorious compliance, only to rise and walk again.

Here they are. The soft eyes open.

If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

John Wesley’s sermon “The New Creation” imagines quite a different new heaven and new earth for animal life.

How many millions of creatures in the sea, in the air, and on every part of the earth, can now no otherwise preserve their own lives, than by taking away the lives of others; by tearing in pieces and devouring their poor, innocent, unresisting fellow-creatures! Miserable lot of such innumerable multitudes, who, insignificant as they seem, are the offspring of one common Father; the creatures of the same God of love! It is probable not only two-thirds of the animal creation, but ninety-nine parts of a hundred, are under a necessity of destroying others in order to preserve their own life! But it shall not always be so. He that sitteth upon the throne will soon change the face of all things, and give a demonstrative proof to all his creatures that “his mercy is over all his works.” The horrid state of things which at present obtains, will soon be at an end. On the new earth, no creature will kill, or hurt, or give pain to any other. The scorpion will have no poisonous sting; the adder, no venomous teeth. The lion will have no claws to tear the lamb; no teeth to grind his flesh and bones. Nay, no creature, no beast, bird, or fish, will have any inclination to hurt any other; for cruelty will be far away, and savageness and fierceness be forgotten. So that violence shall be heard no more, neither wasting or destruction seen on the face of the earth. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” (the words may be literally as well as figuratively understood) “and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: They shall not hurt or destroy,” from the rising up of the sun, to the going down of the same.

Whether we imagine God’s kingdom as the poet does or as the preacher does matters a great deal.

Part of us thrills to the violence and blood-letting around us in the world today. The thought of tooth and claw perfected and the image of a tiger leaping in slow motion on the back of a deer heat the blood in us. This is why action movies do so well in the summer movie theater.

Part of us cannot imagine God’s kingdom without violence of some sort or another. Sure, we will not kill each other, but the Green Bay Packers will still play the Chicago Bears in heaven, right?

But will they?

If death and pain and violence are the very things that Christ has come to replace, then isn’t the picture painted by the preacher the more Scriptural one? And if it is, is not the thrill in our chest at the poet’s words, the action hero on screen, and the bone crunching hit across the middle of the field a sign of the darkness that dwells within?

Is our love of struggle itself a sign of the fall?

If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen. (1 John 4:20, TNIV)

Something someone wrote to me this evening brought this passage to mind.

We spend entirely too much time in the church failing to love our brothers and sisters. These fellow Christians – these flawed and annoying people – are the ones we can see. If we cannot love them, then how can we love the invisible God?

What happens too often, I think, is that we set up a false ideal – and idol – of what church must be like before we can love the people in it. We decide we cannot love the flesh and blood children of God who take our parking spaces and believe outrageous things and vote for the wrong political party and fail to show enough appreciation for the bean casserole we brought to the pitch in.

But if we cannot love them, how can we expect anyone to love us in all our flawed humanity?

If we cannot love them, 1 John says, we cannot love the unseen God. What we love instead is a false God. For our God is the God who loves all these losers who hang around in church with us. Our Lord spent all those years tramping around in the wilderness and towns of Judea with that pack of self-centered, stupid, and silly disciples who never seemed to understand anything he said and ran out on him when things got hard.

That is our God. He is the God who works in the ordinary lives of really ordinary people. It is slow work sometimes, but it is glorious work. If we cannot see that, if we cannot rejoice in that, if we cannot love the brother or sister we can see, then the God we claim to love is not really God at all.

John Wesley wrote and preached about the need to continually preach the doctrine of salvation by faith. His experience was that it was almost always greeted as a new or novel doctrine, one that people often resisted because it did not fit with their understanding of faith.

The new Pew survey on religious knowledge that is getting lots of headlines for the finding that atheists know more about religion than religious people has a little noticed finding that confirms John Wesley’s concerns.

One of the questions on the survey was whether salvation by faith alone is a doctrine traditionally taught by Protestants, Catholics, both, or neither. Among Mainline Protestants – that would be us United Methodists – 14% of respondents got the question right. The numbers are not much higher for evangelicals and even worse for many other strains of Christianity.

In other words, the doctrine is still not clearly understood by most Christians.

Does that mean we should preach it more – as Wesley would – or that we seem to get by with 8 in 10 having little idea why Protestants exist at all and should therefore not trouble ourselves with it?

In 2000, the United Methodist News Service reported that one in four congregations were served by what they deemed “local pastors,” who had not gone to seminary but were instead put in place by their local bishops to serve a specific congregation.

From a story in an Alabama newspaper about churches sharing pastors.

Only one in four United Methodist churches are served by local pastors? Is that possibly right? In Indiana, I believe, the number is much, much higher. I thought was half or more in my state.

Foundry UMC has voted to allow same-gender weddings.

From the church web site:

On Sunday, September 26, 2010, the members of Foundry United Methodist Church voted to allow same-gender marriages performed in its building, and to support any member of the Foundry clergy who chooses to celebrate a same-gender marriage at Foundry or elsewhere.

The vote to adopt this policy was 367 to 8. It took place at a Church Conference duly convened under the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. The vote was preceded by a four-month-long period of discernment during which the congregation spent much time considering this policy in prayer, study, discussion and congregational conversations.

The Foundry congregation believes that the consecration of committed, loving relationships is an important part of our ministry, witnessing to the joyous gifts of God’s love. As disciples of Jesus Christ living out this decision we will continue to work to deepen our faith, engage as Christian community, and transform the world through service and witness. We welcome all to join us in fulfilling this call.

Bishop Schol, the ball is in your court.