Sermon- Topsy-Turvy Gospel

Topsy-Turvy Gospel

( July 6, 2008 ) Jesus uses surprising turns of phrase to get people’s attention and point them to deeper truths, in this case that the responsibility of discipleship, while still a burden, is one we bear easily and gladly. (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

Post-Church Fun

I stole this photo mosaic idea from new reader and fellow Vermonter sonja.

The rules are thus:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

The questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name (or if, like me, you don’t have one, your blog name or handle or whatever).

If you do this, leave me a comment so I can check it out.

Okay, I promise not to spam you with little memes like this. Really. How unprofessional of me. But man, was it fun.

Embodied Stress

I must say that I feel about a million times better, having announced to my church that I will be reappointed. This appointment was finalized pretty quickly (because it’s so late in the year, especially), but it still felt like an eternity from my first contact with a District Superintendent about the churches to the time I could actually make the announcement. That meant two Sundays (one with only an inkling– “would you be not totally opposed to considering a new appointment…” an one knowing that I had said yes to the interview and was about 99% sure I’d be moving) where I couldn’t say anything to anyone in my church about it, not to mention the meetings and potluck supper and phone conversations and visits.

So for about two or three weeks, I was carrying around nervousness and anxiety and sorrow and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I had nightmares. When I graduated from college and again from seminary, I had dreams each time of my friends dying. Obviously, my not-so-subtle subconscious’ way of working though the fear of losing relationships with people I care about. The four intervening years of pastoring, however, have made my brain more detail-oriented. Most unfortunately, these nightmares were more complex, involving detail about my friends and congregants and their own fears. Yikes!

So I was a little short on sleep. Let’s not even talk about the comfort food and drink, shall we?

And then there was the normal repository of stress: the muscles of my shoulders and back. Apparently, my shoulders got filled up and a little numb. Sunday morning before I announced I was leaving, I literally thought I was having a heart attack for a second, so intense was the squeezing pain in my chest, which I then realized was actually a muscle behind my left shoulder blade going into spasms and radiating forward. Nice.

By the time I got home from church on Sunday, my back felt fine. I took a nap. Since then I’ve enjoyed dream-free sleep. I’ve even stopped eating massive amounts of chocolate.

All this is to say that ministry is a tough and stressful job sometimes, made moreso by the system itself and the commitments and confidentiality that have to be kept. At the same time, as pastors we make a commitment to care for our own health, too, and that is no small task! Especially not when sleep is nightmare-laden, unspoken words knot up in our shoulders, and the Ben and Jerry’s is close at hand.

And so once again, I find appropriate irony in this week’s lectionary. I’m ready for an easy yoke and a light burden.

What stresses you out? How do you take care of yourself in a stressful situation?

Hospitality of Strangers

One of several strange and uplifting stories that came out of my trip to Montpelier and interview with the Montpelier and Plainfield churches. As with most strange (and stressful) stories, this involves my handful of a kid, Ari.

We arrived in the Montpelier area early on Thursday so that my husband could do some paperwork at the Department of Education and get his fingerprints taken at the Sheriff’s Department for his teaching job-hunt. Then we met up with his sister and brother in law for lunch at a great Thai restaurant (wait, wait, I’m moving to a town with a great Thai restaurant?!?!), and then to a coffee shop.

While at the coffee shop, my daughter took a little walk with her aunt and her papa, and got a little curious on one of Montpelier’s many bridges. Hoping to see some fish in the little river, she stuck her head between two of the metal rails on the Langdon Street bridge. And, of course, she couldn’t get it back out.

She was stuck for maybe five minutes. It felt like an eternity, but it was only about five minutes, I think. My husband ran (back) to the Sheriff’s station, and within half a minute, there was a cruiser on Langdon Street and sirens indicating the approach of the fire department and the ambulance.

In the mean time, however, something happened that I did not expect. Here in Albany, had something like this happened, I imagine a few passersby would have offered to call 911. That’s not how we roll in Vermont.

The shops on the street emptied.

Cooks came from their kitchens in their aprons, carrying tubs of butter and vats of cooking oil. Observers offered suggestions. One barefoot man, smelling of old beer, ran to a construction site on the next street and returned with four big construction workers and a crowbar. The construction workers, however, grabbed the bars from opposing sides, two above her head and two below, and pulled, creating just enough space for Ari to pull her head free.

A doctor stopped on his way by and examined the back of her head, and then the EMTs arrived and took her blood pressure and pulse and gave her a teddy bear.

Half an hour later, in a toy store a few streets away, a couple recognized us and asked if she was okay.

Ah, yes. This is (one of many reasons) why I think I’ll love Montpelier.

Announcements, anouncements

Having (tearfully) made the announcement in church this morning, I can now tell all of you that it is the intention of Bishop Hassinger and the Cabinet of Troy Conference to appoint me to Trinity United Methodist Church in Montpelier and Grace United Methodist Church in Plainfield, Vermont, effective September 1.

Clearly, there were a great number of tears this morning at the conclusion of the service, not a few of them my own.

Perhaps equally clearly (for anyone who knows me and/or Montpelier), I am very excited about this. My family and I are going to love living in Montpelier and I think there’s exciting ministry to be done there and in Plainfield. I’ll be closer to my mom and my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, and hopefully (soon) my sister and her husband will wind their way back, too.

I gave a kick-butt sermon, too, about something entirely different, but I don’t know that I could have been as honest without the freedom that comes from a tiny bit of exciting behavior.

Of course, not many people will remember the sermon (so listen online!), since I made The Announcement after that.

Sermon- Lessons in What Not to Do

Lessons in What Not to Do

( June 29, 2008 ) Does God give us permission to question, to debate, to dialogue about the words we believe come from God? I believe so. I believe God tells us this strange and disturbing story to teach us that we must always question words that condone violence, even– perhaps especially– if those words claim to be God’s. (Genesis 22:1-14)

Signs of life

Sorry about the dead air for a bit there. A few things going on that I will share soon.

A great story about hospitality that will have to wait a day or two.

A pondering: what to call this week’s sermon? I’m positive I’m the only person in the sanctuary who would have understood the title I thought of first: “parenting, ur doin it rong.” Instead, I went with “Lessons in What Not to Do,” at least, until I change it.

I could reflect on why it’s hard to title sermons and stories and such for me, but that might take some time.

For now, it’s about the most beautiful day ever, and my little girl wants to run outside. Who am I to argue with that?

Eureka!

Replying to my sister’s comment from my previous post, and still thinking about it, I got the nugget. I think I figured out not only my sermon, but how I can live with this text (and I didn’t even have to hunt down a copy of Leonard Sweet’s out-of-print book, although I still have a request in to the inter-library loan for it). All it took was wrestling with that passage long enough for the Spirit to bless me (even if I think my hip is a little out of joint!). I know I’ve found good inspiration when it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

So what bugs me about the passage is not the child sacrifice (actually pretty common in Abraham’s time and place), or even Abraham’s blind obedience, inconceivable as it is. What bothers me is the praise. This was the right thing to do, and I just can’t believe that.

What I want God to say to Abe is, “Good effort, and I appreciate your faithfulness, but you’ve missed the point of being faithful. Remember when you bantered with me for the sake of a city full of rude strangers? That’s true faith. Dialogue with Me. Relationship with Me. Not blind following. Have you become so overpowered by the blessings you’ve received from me that you’ve forgotten to engage your whole self– body, spirit and mind in your worship? This is what I ask of my faithful ones: that you talk with me, argue with me, use your whole being in service to me. Ask questions. Recoil from evil, even when it comes from my lips.”

That’s what I want. I want God to tell us that something in us should recoil from a God who asks us to kill our children. I want God to say, loud and clear, this should make you uncomfortable. This should make you doubt. Never be so complacent as to think that I demand mindless automatons (is that the right word? I never know. I can’t say it right).

How would God tell us this? Tell us that we should question even the things we think are God’s words when they tell us evil things?

God would tell us this by telling us a story. A story about someone who gets obedience right and faith wrong. A story that makes us so sick to our stomachs that we have to question whether it (and by extension, any other parts of the narrative that say God is a God of death and malice and evil) can be God’s Word.

Oh, and guess what. God did.

Lectionary woes

Really, seriously, what are we supposed to say about this?

What can we say about a God who asks a father to sacrifice his son? What can we say about a father who agrees? How do we not turn this into further violence by saying God later does the same thing to God’s own son, except without the providing-an-alternate-thing-to-slaughter bit?

Before I give up on this passage and decide to preach, er, Romans or something, I want to mull it over. Is there a word of grace here? Thoughts, people?

Murphy’s Law Sunday

Well, I posted my most recent sermon, Handful of Sparrows. Sermons are now in 64kb, which means longer download time for anyone on dialup, but a more standard podcast quality. Which of course means you can hear my mic feedback at a higher quality now. Yeah, sorry about that.

Some Sundays the world just seems not to want things to go well. Microphone problems and PowerPoint problems were in full force. I felt distracted and out of sorts, and still a bit mopey. Maybe it was the weather, because a tremendous thunderstorm erupted about a third of the way into the sermon.

I’m never sure. Should one interpret thunder claps as applause or dissent when one is preaching?

I’m bloody exhausted.Thankyou thankyou thankyou for Sabbath Mondays.