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.