The Gift of Fathers

Today, at 7am, as I was driving to church with Sandy my cell phone rang. I knew as soon as I saw on my caller id that it was my brother Roger with the news that I had been expecting for several days, my Father had died during the night. Dad's health has been declining for the last couple of years, and it was his wish to make it through this Christmas, and, by the Grace of God, he did.

The Holy Spirit was at work this week, text I preached on today contained this line from Paul's Letter to the Colossians, "Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart." This line fits my Dad pretty well. He encouraged me, challenged mentored me, protected me, and in his generation's way, he loved me. I cannot remember Dad every saying "I love you" but I never doubted that he did. Dad showed his love for me, and my brothers and sister in the way that he raised us.

I will have the opportunity to preach at his funeral, something that I am very happy to do. I can't help remembering though, a good friend of mine from my previous parish who always got on me for my funeral sermons. "You have to preach the Gospel Pastor, you need to preach 'fire and brimstone' at a funeral sermon. There are a lot of folks who never attend church who attend funerals and if all they hear is how great the guy in the box is they will think 'if that guy is going to heaven like the pastor says then why bother going to church.'" Well, I didn't always say the "guy in the box" was going to heaven, as a matter of fact I rarely implied that, but I wasn't preaching with smoke coming out my ears so it wasn't good enough for my friend. Problem is, when a person attends church and all they hear is "hell fire and damnation" it is just a reminder for them why they don't attend church more often.

Dad showed his love for us in the way he lived his life. Mom taught us the Faith; Dad taught us the love of family, community and country. He showed us, by example, the importance of attending church as a family. Dad was raised a Roman Catholic. When Mom refused to have us kids raised in that church he could have simply not attended with us, but he chose to come to church with us. He knew how important it was to go to church as a family, and attending worship in the Branstiter family was never optional. However, it was not drudgery either. I never heard Dad complain about going to church. The only time I heard him complain was when someone sat in our pew (second row from the back, pulpit side, next to the Gaummer stained glass window). Dad never really stopped being a Roman Catholic; he simply loved his family more.

That is what Paul is asking us to do in the reading today, love one another.

COMING OUT OF THE BASEMENT

Today's sermon was the last in the series "Encounters with Jesus". I chose for this final sermon, the story of "Doubting Thomas." This text, traditionally the text for the first Sunday of Easter is misnamed. Thomas was a doubter (a better translation is unbelieving), but, he is also simply human. Which one of us, returning home to family and friends and being told that a person we loved, who died three days earlier, had suddenly appeared would not have the same reaction as Thomas.

I have always wondered about why the disciples were in a room behind locked doors, "for fear of the Jews". We Christians, for a variety of reasons have either locked ourselves, or others in rooms ever since.

Someone once said that "America has sobered up in the basement of churches" and this is very true. Since the earliest days of Bill W. and Doctor Bob, AA and other 12 step groups have been meeting in churches, most often church basements. We think we are doing them a favor by putting them down in the basement. Down in the basement their coffee won't stain the thirty year old carpet in the "Ladies Aid Room" and of course up until a few years ago they needed a place to be able to smoke. And then, we figured, there is that thing about anonymity; they needed, so we thought, to be someplace where they would not be seen, looked at, or for that matter spoken to. We lock the AA groups in the basement, out of sight and out of mind, another ministry of the church, a ministry that gives us that good liberal feel good feeling, but a ministry that we would rather lock up somewhere else, and not in the church basement.

I visited an open meeting once and asked one of the men at the meeting if anyone from the church had ever come downstairs and invited them to church. He kind of chuckled and said, "No, we aren't allowed upstairs." Interestingly, "They (the AA people) were in a locked room, because the Christians of the church were afraid of the AA people" a twist to the John text.

What does the church have to fear of an alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict or gambler if they are in recovery? Maybe, like some who fear homosexuals, their disease may rub off on them and then they will need to go to rehab. We talk about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, but do we ever invite them upstairs to worship with us. Do we ask them their name, do we sit down next to them at the Thanksgiving dinner and talk to them or do we find one of our regular members, you know, the givers, and sit down next to them. Members of AA and other 12 step groups feel like they are invisible when they walk into most churches. People look at them, but not really at them, if one of these people speak to one of these AA members it is normally to ask them, "May I help you?" with the look of terror in their eyes that say, "I sure hope not."

It is time for churches to start inviting people to church. Next time your AA group meets in your basement, go down, introduce yourself to them, and invite them to next Sunday's worship. Chances are you won't, and thankfully these wonderful people will eventually find their way to Recovery Worship where they will be welcomed.

Merry Christmas, see you Thursday night

 

Breaking the Law

Today at Recovery Worship we took a look at the healing of the man by the pool from John 5. In Jesus' day there was a pool where people went, hoping to experience miraculous healing. The pool, called Bethesda, was a large pool surround by five covered porches. There would be crowd of sick people who would lay around the pool and wait for the water to "bubble up" and thus receive healing, at least according to tradition.

Jesus shows up at the pool one day and asks an interesting question to a man who was laying beside the pool. "Would you like to get well?" Jesus asks the man. The man tells Jesus that he had been waiting by the pool for thirty-eight years, however, he did not have family to help him, so when the pool began to bubble up, other people, many who had family there to help, were able to beat him into the water.

Jesus then tells the man to "Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!" The man obeyed, stood up and picked up his mat. The Jewish leaders objected because the man was carrying the mat on the Sabbath, they also objected that Jesus had healed the man on the Sabbath.

In John's Gospel stories Jesus is called Rabbi over and over again. Being a Rabbi, he would have known it was "against the law" to heal on the Sabbath. He also would have know that it was "against the law" to have the man pick up and carry the mat.

It is obvious from the text that Jesus and the Jewish leaders did not see eye to eye when it came to the law. Could Jesus have waited a few hours until after the Sabbath to have healed the man? Sure, but why should he, it is apparent that the Jewish leaders had turned one of the Ten Commandments around from what God had initially intended it to be. The fourth Commandment is "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," is about what we do, not what we don't do. Do we really "keep it holy" by not doing something?

Jesus was willing to break the law by healing on the Sabbath. Jesus was also willing to tell the man to break the law by picking up and carrying the mat. Jewish leaders knew the Scriptures backward and forward, yet they were spiritually dead. We have people in the church today who know the Scriptures backward and forward and they are also spiritually dead. They think that simply because they can quote Scripture that they are living their lives by the "Word Alone" yet they are living a life of Spiritual death. Jewish leaders used the law to keep people in line and obeying the Sabbath had nothing to do with keeping the Sabbath Holy. People today in our churches us the law to try to keep people in line, to conform, and when they don't they will use Scripture to condemn, all in the name of Christ.

When I was in Israel several years ago I was in a building that had several floors. One of the elevators was labeled the "Sabbath Elevator." On the Sabbath day the elevator would stop at every floor on the way up and every floor on the way down. The purpose was so that a person would not break the Sabbath by pressing the button of the floor they wanted off on, thus breaking the law by "working" on the Sabbath. There are some laws that need to be broken, this, I believe, is one of them. There are a lot of different ways to keep the Sabbath day holy, let's not get carried away with law keeping.

People in recovery have to break the rules sometime in order to live a life of recovery. The family rule is "don't go for help, fix your own problem" or "people in our family don't drink, you can't be an alcoholic." They don't seek help because of the law of the family, and sometime even the law of the church. "There is no such thing as addiction, you just have a weakness."

Jesus calls us to break the rules sometimes, especially when it helps us, or others to live a life of recovery, and Spirituality.

See you next Sunday

The Woman at the Well…Heroine or Slut?

At Recovery Worship this morning we continued our series on "Encounters with Jesus." The woman at the well was our topic; a woman, like many women in the Bible, is not always presented in the kindest of ways. I can remember at seminary when I listened to a classmate rake her across the coals. She was an outcast, going to the well at noon because the other women didn't want anything to do with her. After all, she had been married five times, and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Of course, as was pointed out this morning, if a woman has been married five times in our culture we would call her a "movie star." But this isn't today. This story took place in Jesus' day, so two thousand years of Biblical tradition have pretty much made her a slut. As my favorite preacher Fred Craddock observed, "Evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word." Sandra Schneiders states the case more bluntly: "The treatment of the Samaritan woman in the history of interpretation is a text book case of the trivialization, marginalization and even sexual demonization of Biblical women." (Thank you Frances Taylor Gench "Encounters with Jesus")

I would think it is time that we threw away the Biblical tradition of trashing women and take a fresh look at the woman at the well. Yes, she had five husbands, and was living with a man. Well, from my perspective, if I had been married five times I think I would have taken a break. The text doesn't tell us anything about her five husbands - maybe they were jerks. Maybe they physically or mentally abused her, maybe they simply ignored her. Maybe, and I think more likely, her five husbands were brothers who simply passed her down after the death of the first one, this was not uncommon in those days. It didn't take much for a man to divorce a woman in those days. A man just had to say, "I divorce you" and that was pretty much it. There were no divorce courts, alimony, child support or pre-nuptial agreements.

I see this woman as smart, and brave, a heroine, not a slut. She gets in a dialog with Jesus and she can carry her own weight. Where Nicodemus seemed confused by Jesus' talk of being born again, or from above, this woman follows Jesus in his conversation about living water. She also sees the possibility of Jesus being the promised Messiah. She doesn't hesitate in doing what Jesus tells her to do at the end of the text, she goes back into the village and tells people what she has seen and heard.

In this story Jesus does not condemn the woman for her past, he accepts her as she is. He doesn't require her to express faith, repent sin, or any other act, other than to go and tell. This story works well in the recovery community where people are accepted for who they are today, not what they were yesterday.

For a contemporary view of this story check out this link on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49BbfgJbto

Vikings are coming on…..see you next week.

Spiritual Experience or Spiritual Awakening

During Advent we are looking at individual's encounters with Jesus. This week we heard the story of Nicodemus from John 3. Nicodemus was the Pharisee who came to visit Jesus in the dark. Nic gets beaten up pretty good in most commentaries for his late night visit to talk with Jesus. Most commentaries point in the direction that Nic didn't want to be spotted talking to that radical Jesus. I tend to take a more realistic view of Nicodemus. Maybe he worked days and didn't have the freedom to leave his desk at the Temple to go and have theological debates with some rural Rabbi from Galilee. Maybe, to use modern day "church growth" language he was a seeker. He had heard some of Jesus' teachings but he wanted to learn more. Maybe what Nic was looking for was some kind of Spiritual Awakening. However instead he hears from Jesus that he "must be born again" if he wants to see the Kingdom of God.

In Recovery, the AA Big Book says that a person needs to have a Spiritual Awakening in order to be able to turn their life and their will over to the care of God. After a closer read of the Big Book it seems that the author uses the terms Spiritual Experience and Spiritual Awakening interchangeably. To quote the Big Book: "The terms "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening" are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, show that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms." People who are early in their recovery often think that they need a burning bush type of Spiritual Awakening, and when these type of Halleluiah - seeing Jesus' face in your iron or pancake doesn't happen, they feel disappointed.

Reality is - most Spiritual Awakenings come slowly with God speaking to us in whispers, not with shouts from a burning bush. God most often works slowly, guiding us in our spiritual life. I think this is what is going on with our buddy Nic. Nic knew Jesus was special but still wasn't sure. I think with Jesus, Nic was experiencing a Spiritual Experience but wasn't to the point where he was willing to become a follower of Jesus.

Following John 3 we encounter Nic again in John 7:50-51. Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus before, and who was one of them, asked, 51'Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?' They replied, 'Surely you are not also from Galilee, are you? Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.' Here Nic is coming to the defense, in a timid kind of way of Jesus, but yet he is still unsure of how deep he should get involved.

Then finally, in John 19 we see Nic joined with Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus. This time Nic's appearance is in broad daylight, no longer in the dead of night. I am guessing that, in witnessing the trial and death of Jesus, Nic had his Spiritual Awakening.

Regardless of what we call it, experience or awakening, to get a good start on the road to recovery, or a life following Jesus, we need to have our own Spiritual Awakening, which will open up for us a life of Spiritual Experiences!

See you next Sunday

A True Thanksgiving

Last night at Recovery Worship we experienced the true sense of Thanksgiving. In all honesty, it was kind of an afterthought on my part. We normally have a small group meet for soup and a Bible study on Wednesday night, so we thought that we could cook up a turkey, mash some potatoes and enjoy a quiet evening. As word got out I heard from several people who said they would attend, so I invited Father Lew from Recovery Mass and started working on the service.

Yesterday morning I received an email from a member of First United Methodist Church of Fargo. She had a friend who "needed a meeting" and she wanted me to know if I knew of any in town. She told me her friend would be at the worship service and would like to attend a meeting either before or after the service. I forwarded her the schedule of two meetings in town and then emailed the folks on the Recovery Worship to see if it would be possible to put together an impromptu meeting following worship to help this person, within 10 minutes I received three emails telling me it could be done!

We had around fifty people show up for worship. The topic for the sermon was "Just another Thursday" and we talked about the struggles people who are in recovery have during the holiday season, the testimonies were very moving. Following the service the food was laid out and as the folks went through the line those who wanted a meeting went into the room while the rest of us fellowshipped around tables. The response to the evening was fantastic. People shared their food, their stories and their love. Several of those in attendance either did not have family in the Fargo area, or they did not attend family holiday functions because of the drinking. One man, with tears in his eyes told me that "this is the first Thanksgiving I have had with a family in a long time." We started a new tradition last night, worship services the night before holidays along with a meeting to help our friends cope with the stress of these days.

While some churches argue about sexuality and other "earthly" issues, it is nice to be part of a ministry whose concern is for their neighbors, and concern with "heavenly" issues. "Love the Lord with all your heart and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Happy Thanksgiving, see you Sunday.

Pastor Ray

Reflections on Sunday

I had the opportunity to preach at Trinity Lutheran Church in Moorhead, MN yesterday. As the director of Lost and Found Ministry, it is important for me to visit them, at least once a year, to share with them the ministry of Lost and Found, and what is going on at Recovery Worship.

It is always an interesting experience for me. This is the first time in almost a year that I have worn my Alb, I even had to Google "Christ the King Sunday" so I would wear the proper colored stole. In many ways, preaching at Trinity was a flash back for me. For seven years I served eight congregations in rural North Dakota. Each congregation was wonderful, but each had its own, distinct, personality.

The difference between the 8am and 9am service at Trinity in Moorhead reminded me of the days that I would preach in Sutton and Hannaford, ND. Sutton would always be the first service. I would arrive at church about a half an hour prior to the service. One or two folks would show up about fifteen minutes before the service, and then, just a few minutes before the service began, everyone (normally about 15 people) would arrive and take their places in the church, of course in their assigned pews.

It was near impossible to get the folks at Sutton to smile, laugh, clap (impossible to clap) during worship. Regardless of how many jokes, intended or otherwise I had in my service, they would not laugh. And of course, only at Sutton did I ever have anyone sneak up to me during the sermon hymn to question something I had said in a sermon. The amazing thing about this story is, the people of Sutton, following the service would head for the basement for coffee and conversation. The men would sit on one side of the basement to discuss farming, hunting, and sports, and the women would sit on the other side and discuss quilting, cooking, and complain about the men. They would laugh, smile, and joke with each other, a truly wonderful group of people. However, in church, they were the model, staid, Norwegian, congregation.

Following Sutton I would make the drive to Hannaford, thinking all the way, that my sermon bombed. Then in Hannaford the people would be talking and laughing and visiting while communion was being prepared and Sunday school was being let out. In Hannaford, the congregation would laugh when I said "Good morning" and would not stop until the service was over. They clapped for the special music, regardless of the quality of the music, the clapped during the children's sermon, and they laughed at my jokes, regardless if the jokes were funny or not. They were generally happy to be there.

The eight o'clock service at Trinity was much like the Sutton congregation. In the middle of my sermon I wanted to shout out, "Why are you people here? What made you get up this morning, put on your suits and Sunday dresses, and come to church this morning?" The expression on the faces at 8 am was not unlike those faces you see in a dentist's office waiting room on people waiting for a root canal.

The nine o'clock service at Trinity was much like the service in Hannaford. People were smiling, they clapped for the youth choir (however why they don't clap for the other music is beyond me) and they laughed. I got the sense that they were really happy to be in worship.

Now there are a lot of reasons for this difference, mostly generationally, but I will save that for another blog. I enjoyed worship at Trinity, but I was really glad to be back with my folks at Recovery Worship at two o'clock to share with them memories of a friend who died last week. I am really glad to be the pastor at Recovery Worship. I wish I knew of a way to bottle up their enthusiasm for worship and sell it to the "cathedral congregations" in Fargo/Moorhead.

See you next Sunday.

Women Under the Law of Moses

During the course of religious debate we hear people quote scripture, Luther, Calvin, and occasionally Wesley. Now I have read my share of Luther, especially when he talks about beer. I find Calvin hard to read, much less colorful than Martin, so I have to have a really good reason to read him, and Wesley, well he wrote good hymns.

I try to quote scripture sparingly, not because God's Word is irrelevant, it isn't. It is generally because I don't want to sound like all the other folks trying to fit scripture into their world view, or, trying to fit their world view into scripture. If and when I do turn to scripture during religious debates I like to focus on the New Testament. The Old Testament, especially the books of the law, well, (sit down you fundies) just is not relevant to our world today.

Today at Recovery Worship we heard from the 8^th Chapter of John, the story of the woman caught in adultery. The "teachers of the law and the Pharisees" quizzed Jesus on what they should do with her, based on the Law of Moses. Well, for a moment, let us look at the verse from Deuteronomy they were talking about; "If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel." Pretty severe punishment if you ask me. We discussed that it was strange that they only brought the woman to Jesus; we all wondered where the man disappeared to. Someone suggested that perhaps the man was one of the Pharisees, an interesting hypothesis. However, can we say this law pertains to us today? I hope not, if so we would run out of stones. But even more striking than this law are the laws that follow in Deuteronomy.

"If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, ²⁴you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

25 But if the man meets the engaged woman in the open country and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. ²⁶You shall do nothing to the young woman; the young woman has not committed an offence punishable by death, because this case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor. ²⁷Since he found her in the open country, the engaged woman may have cried for help, but there was no one to rescue her." (23-27)

Under the Law of Moses a woman is simply the property of either their father or their husband. Is this a model of law we wish to hold up in our world today? I don't think so. I honestly think people who quote the Law of Moses today would not be in favor, for the most part, of totally observing all of the Law of Moses today. If we are not ready to embrace all of the Law of Moses, I suggest we not pick and choose the portions of the law that we want to hold against others.

See you next week.

Bibliolatry

A couple of years ago, during a less than comfortable conversation with a parishioner concerning Biblical interpretation, she became very angry when I told her she was interpreting a text literally that was meant to be read metaphorically. She picked up a well worn copy of her "Good News for Modern Man" Bible, held it high in both hands and said, "I believe every word in this Bible, every word is true, I worship this Bible." Well, that about says it all doesn't it?

Eric Gritsh in his book "Toxic Spirituality" would call this "Bibliolatry." Gritsh defines Bibliolatry as "an excessive adherence to the literal interpretation of the Bible" also known as "Fundamentalism." (page 45). Fundamentalism is toxic, it destroys people who do not agree with its premise, and in time, it destroys those who believe or are fundamentalists themselves. The other problem with Bibliolatry is that the person so wrapped up into it turns their worship, and the Bible into gods, a modern day form of idolatry.

Now, if you are a fundamentalist you are probably hyperventilating by now. Well, calm down, first of all, despite what you are probably thinking, I believe the Bible is the Word of God. However, it is not inerrant as you would like to think; there are contradictions, and in a couple of cases just plan goofs.

The notion of an inspired, inerrant Bible can be traced to the first Greek Jewish converts, known as "Hellenists" and has continued down through the ages, picking up steam in the United States by the likes of Dwight L. Moody whose commentaries are still quoted today in fundamentalist congregations.

The danger is threefold: one, the Bible was never meant to be read literally because it wasn't written literally. The Bible is full of stories told as metaphor. Some stories are taken from ancient myth and formed into stories of faith, most stories have been written down generations following the events, passed down generation to generation via the oral tradition. Another danger is that people who read the Bible literally often do what my parishioner did; she "worships" the Bible. The Bible was never intended to be an object of worship, rather a tool of worship. The Bible points us to who we are to worship, not the object of our worship.

The final danger, and the danger that I believe is the one most prevalent today, when read literally, the Bible becomes a weapon. Fundamentalists use the Bible to beat down people who are different than themselves. Of course this only applies when pointing out the sins or lifestyles of others. When the text points out their sins, well then it is ok to stretch the reading just a bit.

Let's read the Bible as God's Word and through it see how God wants us to live our lives.

See you next Sunday

“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

In the Gospel this week we hear Jesus tell us that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. At the end of the text he tells the "teacher of the Law" that he in his wisdom, "is not far from the kingdom of God." Being close to the kingdom of God is comforting, not being close to the kingdom of God can be, uncomfortable.

What follows is an example of both.

I heard a story this past week that is very disturbing. Bishop Bill of the Eastern North Dakota Synod was visiting a Lutheran Church in a small town in the northeast corner of North Dakota. Like many ELCA congregations, this church is struggling with the ELCA's decision to ordain openly gay individuals, who are in a lifelong, publicly accountable relationship into the ministry. During the conversation, Bishop Bill explained that Jesus never encountered a gay person in such a relationship, "That's because Jesus killed 'em all!" came a voice from the congregation. My goodness, how much further can you be from God's kingdom than this? Regardless of where you are in this debate, the idea of Jesus killing anyone is unthinkable. Jesus tells us to "love our neighbor as ourselves." How can a person sitting in God's house get it so very, very wrong?

On the other hand, Saturday night the folks of Recovery Worship got together to celebrate our ministry. Our second annual gala was held at the Moorhead Armory. What a display of love and support. I have never had so much fun, with such a large group of people than I do when I party with people in recovery. Not a drunk among us, all sober, happy, and alive with life! A local pastor wrote in the Fargo Forum yesterday that "true Christians" don't celebrate Halloween. Well, let me tell you, we had witches, ghosts, pirates and their ladies, you name it, they were there, and that was as close to the kingdom of God as you can get!

Before the dancing started we celebrated recovery by asking how long people had been in recovery, with the loudest applause going for those with the shortest amount of time. A young mother, with one week of recovery, received a copy of the AA Big Book and the Life Recovery Bible. Smiles, tears and dancing, all from folks who have been to the edge, and now live a life of recovery!

Thanks be to God!

A Bag of Poop for Jesus

One of the joys of serving Tri-County Ministry in rural North Dakota was my one Presyberian congregation. One year they allowed me to go with a group from the Presbytery of the Northeran Plains to visit the Chagoria Presbytery in Kenya. It was a trip of a life time for this old sailor, who has done a lot of traveling, the people I met and the things I saw will stay in my mind as long as I live. The spirituality of the people of Kenya was refreshing, and inspiring.

During our visit we were able to worship with a parish that, due to its growth, was having to break up into smaller congregations. This was certainly different than the North Dakota experience of banding together to share ministry because of shrinking congregational size. During this service I was asked to stand with the pastor as the offering was being brought forward. There were about 300 people at this worship and as each usher came forward I took the offering plate and placed them on a table. (Due to the large number of people the service was outside). After the offering plates were gathered together the ushers began bringing us bags. I looked in the first bag and there was a pineapple, the next bag had tea, then next some potatos. The pastor told me that this offering was from those folks who had no cash, but were giving "in kind" gifts to the church. I continued takeing the bags and placing them on the table.

Once all the bags had been collected, the pastor had me bring him a bag, one at a time, and he began to auction them off. It was really amazing, wathching him aution off pineapples, coffee, tea, corn and other items of produce. Finally I came to the last bag on the table. I picked the bag up and untided the loose knot and looked inside. To my surprise the bag was full of cow poop! Someone had given the church a dried "cow pie" as an offering. I am sure the people saw the surprise in my face as I looked at this gift. The pastor auctioned this wonder gift to God's chuch, cow poop, for a sum of about $2.00.

Following the service the pastor told me he knew exactly who had donated the cow poop. It was from the lady pictured below. She is a widow who lives in a mud hut on the edge of town. She has no family, and only a very thin cow in which to sustain her in life. Her only income is from the milk (barters would be a better term) and the dried cow poop she gets from this one cow. Having seen the cow, I suspect that it does not provide all that much milk, or for that matter, poop, to sustain her much above bare sustainability.

However, her gift, from the Biblical perspective of stewardship is huge. Today we read the story of the Widow's Mite from Mark. Her bag of poop was truly more that a mite, it probably represented a full "days wage."

Next time you think about cutting back, or even redirecting you giving to the church I hope you I hope you think of this little lady from Chagoria, Kenya. Each Sunday she gets up, lights her cigar, shovels up a bag of poop and heads for church. That is gratatued!

Go and do likewise!

See you next Sunday,

Pastor Ray

The Drum Major Instinct

The Historic "Drum Major Instinct Speech" was delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 February 1968 by the Rev, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The text for this sermon was from this week's reading from Mark 10. In the reading, two of Zebedee's sons have Jesus one of those questions we have heard from our kids. "Hay Jesus, we want something, and we want you to say yes before we ask you the question." (I am taking some liberty with my translation).

In many ways, the world of Martin Luther King and 1968 seem so different than today, however in other ways it seems the same. In his sermon Dr. King wrote, "Now very quickly, we would automatically condemn James and John, and we would say they were selfish. Why would they make such a selfish request? But before we condemn them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for importance. That same desire for attention, that same desire to be first. Of course, the other disciples got mad with James and John, and you could understand why, but we must understand that we have some of the same James and John qualities. And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life."

Truth is, many of us are James and Johns. We want to sit at the right had because when you are seated so close to the power, power is sure to run off on you. If you sit next to the king you will be served right after the king is served. When you sit next to the king you have the king's ear. When you sit next to the king you get first dibs on the leftovers. As Mel Brooks wrote in the History of the World, "It's good to be the king." However, as history tells us time and again, right next to the king can be dangerous.

Unfortunately in the church we are often surrounded by people who suffer from the Drum Major Instinct. People want to run the church in the way that they want the church to be run, not necessarily the way that God would want the church run. If they have power in their private lives, they want power in the life of the church. However, according to Dr. King, that is not the way it should be.

Dr. King writes; I know churches get in that bind sometimes. I've been to churches, you know, and they say, "We have so many doctors, and so many school teachers, and so many lawyers, and so many businessmen in our church." And that's fine, because doctors need to go to church, and lawyers, and businessmen, teachers—they ought to be in church. But they say that—even the preacher sometimes will go all through that—they say that as if the other people don't count.

And the church is the one place where a doctor ought to forget that he's a doctor. The church is the one place where a Ph.D. ought to forget that he's a Ph.D. The church is the one place that the school teacher ought to forget the degree she has behind her name. The church is the one place where the lawyer ought to forget that he's a lawyer. And any church that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold church, (Yes) and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.

When the church is true to its nature, it says, "Whosoever will, let him come." And it does not suppose to satisfy the perverted uses of the drum major instinct. It's the one place where everybody should be the same, standing before a common master and savior. And recognition grows out of this—that all men are brothers because they are children of a common father.

I was reminded once again this morning that the Anonymous in AA or NA or SA or OEA doesn't mean that the people in the meeting don't know who you are, but that once you walk in the door you are equal, there is no room in an AA, NA, SA or any other twelve step program for a person with "Drum Major Instinct Speech." The Church can learn a lot from twelve step programs in this area.

See you next Sunday!

Sunday Morning Afterglow

This morning at Recovery Worship we took a look at the story of the little children coming to Jesus in Mark 10, the text following the divorce text. Jesus rebukes the disciples for keeping the little children from him with the following words, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of god belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth; anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." Last week we talked about how the divorce text from Mark 10 has been used against Christians who are divorced, now I am wondering how many times this story has been used to hurt people.

One warm summer day several years ago I had just completed a funeral in Sutton, ND. Following the funeral I was being shown around the cemetery by one of the lifelong members of Mabel Lutheran Church. She pointed out the various tomb stones of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the congregation, names that I recognized from the local history book and names that are still common in the church today. As we walked along I noticed a marker on the edge of the cemetery, right where the neatly cut grass ended and the bean field started. I pointed it out to my tour guide and walked over toward this little stone, all by its self. "Oh, that stone has an interesting story" I was told. Looking at the single date on the maker, 1917 my guide said, "A baby, born to a mother who became pregnant out of wedlock is buried here, the baby died during delivery." "At one time" she continued, "a fence ran between here and the main part of the cemetery, as young girls our family would always point to this marker outside the fence and tell us that a baby born out of wedlock could never inter the kingdom." I asked what scripture verse they used to justify such a claim, and she quoted this scripture from Mark. "The baby" the pastor would tell us, "was not baptized, and un-baptized baby's can never enter into heaven." "That isn't true is it pastor?" she asked. "No" I responded, "Do you really think Jesus would condemn such a child to hell?" The woman almost had tears in her eyes as she said, "I never thought so, and it's just that my pastor told me so I had to believe him didn't I?"

It is scary to think that as a pastor my words can carry such weight. Jesus is telling us to be like little children, simple, believing and powerless. When we admit our powerlessness to God we open the door to God's power coming into our life, and transforming us into the person that God wants us to be. It is little wonder that this verse is so closely tied to the first step of recovery, "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable." Like little children we are powerless and our life is unmanageable, but with our Higher Power we can accept the things we cannot change, and have the courage to change the things we can.

See you next Sunday

October 10, 2009

Good morning people of Recovery;

I just got home from a gathering of the Association of Lutheran Resource Library directors at the ELCA office in Chicago. One of the best presentations for me is concerning the Internet. This year we talked about Blogs and how to utilize them in our ministry. So, for the next several weeks I will try to keep up with posting what is going on at Recovery Worship. If you have found your way to this blog, let me know, it is important. If no one uses the blog I can use this time doing other things, like updating my Facebook.