midweek message

Sing Praises

 Posted by on May 16, 2012
May 162012
 

I’ve been thinking a lot about worship lately, especially as we approaching this big change to our worship schedule. (On June 3, we’ll start worshiping in one service at 10:00.)  It will be a big change to our congregation. We’ve worshiped at 8:30 and 11 o’clock for many years. But I was reading the psalm for this Sunday, psalm 47, and I was reminded that people have been worshiping God for hundreds and thousands of years.

Listen to these ancient words: Sing praises to God, sing praises; Sing praises to our king, sing praises. 

Since the beginning of time, people have worshiped God out under the stars and around campfires. People have worshiped God in small sanctuaries and under vaulted cathedral ceilings. People have worshiped God in tiny homes and big mansions. People have worshiped God at all times of the day, morning, noon, and night. It’s pretty incredible when you think about it to imagine ourselves as part of such a history.

As we’re making this change in our worship schedule, I have an invitation for you. Please think about a worship service that was particularly meaningful to you. Maybe it was here at church or church camp or somewhere else entirely. Maybe it was a holiday or special occasion or just a regular Sunday service. Write it down and email it to me (pastor@fccgreensboro.org). I’d like to collect and share some of those stories as we are celebrating and marking this change in our congregation’s worship life. Let us sing praises to our God.

With Gratitude

 Posted by on May 9, 2012
May 092012
 

Dear Friends,

What a blessing these last nine months have been.  I am filled with gratitude.  Thank you for allowing me to learn how to lead worship, to practice preaching, to pray with you.  Thank you for being willing to try things you hadn’t done before (like talking to each other during a sermon).  Thank you for letting me share my experiences from around the world.  Thank you for your love and affirmation and for offering me the opportunity to learn from my mistakes whether I got ahead of myself in worship, or missed a meeting that I had said I would attend or spoke carelessly.  We learn not only from the things that we do right but also from the things that we do wrong.  And you all have been such wonderful teachers this year!

A huge part of learning to be a pastor is having the chance to be one, and that is something that we are given, not something that we can claim for ourselves.  Your willingness to treat me as your pastor, to attend the Sunday School class or Lenten series that I led, to let me preach and listen to my sermons, to invite me into your homes and hospital rooms, to allow me to enter into your lives and the life of the church as a minister – this is what enabled me to learn what it means to be a minister.  I think this takes trust and faith: trust that with God’s help, we could grow together, and we would get through whatever challenges faced us.  These last few months, you have taught me so much about what it means to be a community of faith: learning, growing, discerning, disagreeing, worshiping, and walking together as brothers and sisters in Christ with mutual respect and love.

As I return to Chicago where I will be working as a hospital chaplain this summer and then beginning classes at the end of September, I will go having been nurtured by all of you and by your witness into the minister that I will be.  I will go with joy, knowing that you will continue to do the working of teaching and nurturing Christian leaders (be they ordained or lay) in the years to come.

With such gratitude, your sister in Christ,

Thandiwe

God and Love

 Posted by on May 2, 2012
May 022012
 

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, translates 1 John 4:20-21 this way:

If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.

It got me thinking: we can’t see God, sure. We have a hard time imagining what God looks like. For some of us, we can’t help but picture an old man with white hair living in the clouds. Others of us think of God in more abstract terms: a spirit, a wind, a breath – those images that are harder to capture with paints and pencils on paper. We can’t see God.

But we can see our neighbors. The neighbors who live next door to us, or down the street. Across town or across the world. We know what they look like.

And I’d venture to guess that we know what love looks like. It looks like making sure the hungry are fed. It looks like  listening carefully to those we disagree with. It looks like tending to the sick and visiting the lonely. It looks like standing up for justice and working for peace. It looks like calling up a friend you haven’t seen in awhile. It looks like taking a casserole to a family after a death. It looks like welcoming the stranger.

So maybe, maybe, we know what God looks like after all.

Growing Together

 Posted by on April 25, 2012
Apr 252012
 

Sunday night, at the Growing Together campaign dinner, I was looking at some of the pictures from last summer’s steeple raising party. Remember that day? We had all gathered in the parking lot to watch the giant crane hoist the new steeple – with the old cross on top – up to the very top of our roof. It’s funny how we come in and out under that steeple every day now, and hardly think a thing about it (though someone did notice how shiny it sill looks!) One of my favorite pictures from that day last August is the one where we’re all standing in front of the new steeple before it got lifted up. Ed Wagoner is there, and Lib Murray, who were around when the first steeple went up. There were folks who’ve been around the church for decades and members who just joined last year. My daughter was there (my son was, too, technically, though he had not yet made an appearance on the scene), and several other kids. Looking at that picture, I was reminded—not for the first time—just how blessed we are to be part of this faith community.

As you know, we’re now in the second phase of the Growing Together campaign, and we’re all being asked to extend our commitments or make a new gift so we can finish the final project: a new portico outside the front door and a renovated entrance and gathering space outside the sanctuary. Our entryway needs a facelift. It is, frankly, a little dated. (Another church member used the word “historic” to describe our entryway, which was kind of her.) Thandiwe said Sunday that when you walk in our front door, you don’t really get a sense of who we are: a generous, loving, laughing, friendly, multi-generational, creative, enthusiastic, compassionate, hard-working, dedicated group of people doing our best to love one another as God has loved us.

The $225,000 we need to raise is no small amount of money. But we can do this. I know that we can, because I’ve been witness to your generosity before. I’ve been witness to this congregation doing things we never thought we could do. I’ve seen how you care about each other and care about this church.

I hope you’ll join me and my family in making a pledge to this phase of the campaign. I can only imagine the party we’ll have when the work is done.

Christ is Risen!

 Posted by on April 11, 2012
Apr 112012
 

Christ is risen!  What good news this promise of hope and life is for each of us and for all the world.  On Easter Sunday, we lifted our voices in shouts of Alleluia.  We listened to violin, trumpet and song.  We received the good news of the empty tomb. We celebrated the baptisms of April Murray and Molly Stewart, remembering our own baptisms and the new life of discipleship into which those waters of baptism immerse us.

This Easter and Lent have been particularly special and meaningful for me – being a part of this community of faith, journeying with you, leading our Lenten series on spiritual discipline, and exploring the stories of God’s covenant with us during worship.  Easter is, in many ways, the culmination of those stories of covenant: the bread and cup of communion are signs of this new covenant, reminding us of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice.  Easter reminds us that death and despair are not the end of our story: indeed, the hope of resurrection and new life shines light into the darkest of times – it offers us hope in the face of illness, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, even in the face of death.  This is such good news!

As I think ahead to my last month here at First Christian Church, I find hope in the midst of the sadness of this particular ending remembering Pastor Lee’s words from Sunday: that endings and beginnings are often the same, that fear and hope are often the same.  As we each look forward to changes within our own lives and within the life of this community, I hope that we can find ways to share our sadness at endings, also acknowledging that these endings bring the excitement and possibility of new beginnings.  Change is not easy.  But we do not walk the road of change by ourselves.  God is with us always, accompanying us, guiding us, supporting us.  And we also have one another.  I, for one, am so honored to be a member of this congregation – to be able to claim this loving, courageous and, yes, imperfect family as my faith home – a place that has and continues to nurture and support me on my faith journey.

May we each strive to nurture and support one another through change: endings and beginnings, fear and hope, remembering that Easter Sunday is but the beginning of new life with the risen Christ among us and within our hearts.

Midweek Message: An Invitation

 Posted by on March 28, 2012
Mar 282012
 

Last week, I did something I’ve never done before: I put a political sign in my front yard. I’ve never wanted to before, to be honest. I generally prefer to keep my political opinions to myself, wary, I suppose, of offending friends and neighbors. But this time, something’s got me convicted, and I can’t seem to help but speak my mind, so there’s a sign in my yard. I’ll be voting against Amendment One on May 8.

If you’re not familiar with this, here’s the story: On May 8, voters in North Carolina will be asked to decide if we want to amend our state constitution to state that marriage between one man and one woman will be the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in our state.

Amendment One raises all kinds of questions – about marriage and love, about sexuality and gender orientation, about civil rights, about biblical interpretation – and it’s safe to assume that we’re not going to agree on how to respond to them all. But it is imperative, I think, that if we are going to be followers of Christ, we have to think about how we live in the world; we are Christians, certainly, but we are also citizens of our city, state, and country. Jesus himself was engaged in the social issues of his time, and we should be, too. Our right to vote, freely and fairly, to have a say in how we live together, is one of the most important freedoms we have, and it is hugely important that we take these decisions seriously.

We’ve been wrong before, in this country, about how we treat each other: we were wrong about slavery. We were wrong about denying women the right to vote. We were wrong about segregated schools and interracial marriage. I think this amendment is wrong. Continue reading »

Blogging Through Lent: Fasting

 Posted by on March 27, 2012
Mar 272012
 

Throughout Lent, we’ll be posting a series of reflections from members of our church community. This week’s post comes from Lesley-Ann Hix, who is currently a student at McAfee School of Theology.

It was a really ambitious Lenten practice to take on, I admit.  But even through its challenges, a bit of fasting has been transformational for me so far.  In my spiritual formation class, we’ve been discussing different spiritual practices that could be nurturing to us, no matter if our home tradition encouraged their exploration.  They are things like fasting, different kinds of prayer, songs, and silence.  Since I had little exposure to the practice of fasting, I decided to fast once a week during Lent, and I set-out to follow the ancient church practice of beginning the fast every Friday at noon and breaking it on Sunday mornings.  They practiced this fast every week, reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus.  But for an unpracticed person, fasting that long is way more than I could manage every week.  So it quickly (and by quickly, I mean the very first week) turned into fasting all day on Saturdays, and I simply dismissed the half day of no food on Fridays.

The hunger pains are easy to move past.  It’s the consequential headache and incredible decrease in energy that makes it hard to accomplish anything on Saturdays.  It’s amazing how the human body shuts down after not receiving food, and mine just gets incredibly irritable.  I’ve tried reading or doing homework, but the only thing that seems to work during my fasting time is focusing on what God has to say to me.  My roommate is very aware of my Lenten practice (she’s drinking nothing but water until Easter), but that did not stop her from settling on the Food Network one Saturday.  She asked me how difficult it is to fast for a whole day, and I told her that besides the headache (which might be just a symptom of lack of caffeine), it’s not bad until I wake up the following morning.  “There’s an ache that just takes over my whole body,” I told her.  With a face full of worry, and obviously thinking about those who go without food on a regular basis, she said, “Oh, that makes me hurt so bad.”  How easy it is for me to move on with my regular week, eating as I would normally eat, and forgetting the struggle for energy that ensues every Saturday.  How easy it is for me to consume and consume, stressing about how to make ends meet, and forgetting that there are millions living happily on a fraction of what I do.  How easy it is to go about normal life and let the knowledge of hungry people everywhere, that seems ever so present on Saturday, slip my mind.

I’m learning a lot about myself during this season of Lent.  I’m learning that forgiveness and reconciliation and honesty is sometimes difficult to face but necessary for strong relationships.  I’m learning that I spend too much time spending and too little time offering the gifts God gave me to those who might need them.  But more than anything, I’m finding that God is where my mind turns when I shut off the pressure of world.  And God then turns my mind back to the world with a different conscience than I first approached it.  My journey to the cross this season, through a fasting practice, has been transformational for me, even if I am counting down the weeks until I get to have Saturday morning pancakes again.

Walking Together

 Posted by on March 21, 2012
Mar 212012
 

If you were online at all last week, you probably came across the Kony 2012 video. If you watched it, you were probably moved by the plight of the Ugandan people who have lived at for too long at war. And then you were probably confused by the backlash and criticism received by the film’s creators. The whole episode raised questions about what truth is, how we share information, how we inspire people, and how we best help people in our broken world.

My friend Laura Jean, along with her husband and two daughters, has been serving as a Global Ministries missionary in Nicaragua for the past year and a half. Global Ministries is the joint missions effort of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. When Laura Jean heard about the Kony 2012 video, she noted that she wrestles with some of these same questions in her work with the church in Nicaragua.

You can read her whole reflection here (and you should…), but here’s an excerpt:

[O]nce people are inspired to help, what kind of action makes a positive difference? The Kony video pushes an oversimplified picture of a very complicated situation. The action it calls for boils down to this: pushing the Ugandan military to intervene, and perhaps equipping it with even more U.S. guns than it already has. And the video’s call to action may well serve the filmmakers themselves most of all.

In short, “just doing something” can sometimes be worse than doing nothing. So how can we know what, specifically, to do?

For the mission and development agencies of the mainline churches, the answer to countless varieties of this question is the same: build relationships with local partners.

The people living amid armed conflicts, clean water shortages and inadequate health care know the full story. They know what solutions will work in their context; they know what they need.

Laura Jean, and other missionaries like her, describe the work they do as accompaniment: “walking with partner churches in a process of mutual give and take rather than bringing them answers.”

This is the same sort of work that Thandiwe’s parents were doing when she was growing up in South Africa and Zimbabwe. It’s the sort of work Thandiwe herself did in India a few years ago. It’s the sort of work that makes me glad that our congregation sets aside a portion of our budget every year to support the Disciples Mission Fund. Some of that money goes to support missionaries like Laura Jean and her husband Tim, and many others around the world. You can read some of their stories here.

Those are the stories that don’t always make the rounds on Facebook. But they are the stories that make me awfully glad to be part of this church.

Blogging through Lent: Reckless Love

 Posted by on March 19, 2012
Mar 192012
 

Throughout the season of Lent, we’ll be posting a series of reflections from members of our church community. This week’s post comes from Alison Simon. Alison is a student at Texas Christian University, and is studying abroad in Spain this semester.

Have you ever made a decision without knowing why, and then later discovered that “why” piece of the puzzle you were missing?  For Lent this year, I decided to take on a new attitude.  My attitude was not awful; however, I wanted to adopt an angle on life without fear of embarrassment.  I am an independent person, but only as long as I am positive I will not be embarrassed.  My decision to change this life approach was in no small way influenced by my being abroad in Spain.  I thought that I had made this commitment for a new approach so that I could absorb as many experiences as possible over my five months in Spain, and I had been doing a pretty good job of it.  But, I still seemed to be missing part of the “why.”

Standing in line to get into the Flamenco show with a group of TCU students, my friend Allie began videotaping us and asking everyone questions specific to their experiences in Spain.  When she got to me, she did not ask, “What is your favorite part of Spain?” or “What is your favorite food so far?”  No, she asked me, “What is your inspiration?”

My immediate response was, “my travel book,” but the question kept bugging me because I realized that I really did not know the answer.  Why had I really decided to take on this new attitude?  As I prepared to write this article, I read John 12:20-33, and the Message used a translation of verse 25 which I had never considered: “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”

Suddenly, I knew the “why.”  I wanted to change my outlook because I no longer wanted to hold onto life just as it is; I wanted to “let it go” and explore new options.  I wanted to be able to accept change (and embarrassment) so that I can experience this “reckless love” that makes life real.  Hopefully, this is a commitment I can uphold for longer than just these forty days of Lent.

Blogging Through Lent: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

 Posted by on March 13, 2012
Mar 132012
 

Throughout the season of Lent, we’ll be posting a series of reflections from members of our church community. This week’s post comes from Erin Fox:

In the last year as I have gotten healthier, so many of you have been supportive and encouraging of my progress. I thank you for that kindness. While the compliments are much appreciated, I am striving to remember the purpose behind a more active lifestyle and nutritious diet.

In spring 2010, I took on the challenge of a half marathon and fundraising project for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My mom is a Hodgkins Disease survivor, as is my best friend Margie’s mom, and Margie talked me into signing up for the race even though I didn’t think I would actually accomplish it. Throughout the training program, I doubted what my body could do and struggled to keep to my fundraising schedule while Margie eagerly did extra workouts and met her fundraising goal early. However, on race day Margie hit the dreaded “runners wall” as a terrifying, intense thunderstorm hit the Nashville area, while I suddenly felt absolutely determined to finish the race, storm or no storm. If our moms could beat cancer, we could do a little thing like run/walk 13.1 miles. We both completed the race that day, crossing the finish line together and receiving our medals just a few minutes before they closed the race route.

I have never felt such intense physical pain as I did during the last mile that day, but I kept going and tugged Margie along with me, and two days after the race we both felt fine. Through that experience, I had a profound realization that my body was an amazing gift with undiscovered ability, endurance, and power beyond my understanding. That summer I kept up with my exercise, even getting up and running each morning during our family’s annual beach vacation (a big surprise to all of us!). However, I wasn’t making great choices about how to fuel my body, and as the school year started up I stopped exercising.

In October 2010, I got another jumpstart. Lee gave a sermon based on Psalm 139 that really struck me: I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Do you still have the card she gave us that day? I keep mine in my car as a reminder that my body is a creation of God, in His image, deserving of the utmost care and respect. Since that lesson, I have made it my goal to take care of my soul’s current vessel. I exercise most days of the week, I stick to a healthy diet, I take my vitamins, and I drink a lot of water. I also drive a little more slowly and try to be conscious of how my words and actions impact others.

I believe that God meant for us to enjoy this beautiful and delicious life, so I haven’t given up occasional pizza nights or holiday goodies, but now they are treats, not everyday choices or a mindless way to deal with the stress in my life. I will confess that I hit a speedbump recently – I did well sticking to the plan through the holidays, but with colder weather the last two months I have been reluctant to continue my morning runs, and it’s a slippery slope to let one weekly treat become a daily treat.

This Lent I have again committed to taking care of the body I live in, not to achieve a smaller size (although that’s an added bonus!), but because when I take care of me, I recognize the gift of life and the simultaneous power and fragility of mortality. Taking care of me also allows me to use my gift of serving others, because I stay able and achieve a more willing, thankful spirit. This seems to me a fitting practice for honoring Christ’s experience, vision, and sacrifice.

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