Tuesday, July 29, 2008

There are No Small Roles on the Stage of Life

Today, one of our members recalled how the superintendent of the school system visited with her and her husband one afternoon to ask them to contribute to the purchase of the large pipe organ that resounds through our worship space every Sunday morning. This was over 50 years ago. The Baby Boomers were just hitting kindergarten and, when he found out that both this woman and her husband had both been trained as teachers, he urged them to go back into teaching. She said that her husband didn’t take his advice, but she did and she went back to the classroom and taught for decades before she retired – influencing a couple of generations of schoolchildren; some of whom are now the leaders of our community.
 She said, “It’s funny that a chance encounter like that changed my life”.
 In Genesis 37, Jacob sends his son, Joseph, to look for his 10 older brothers who are tending their sheep in Shechem, he thinks. But when Joseph gets to Shechem, he doesn’t find his brothers.
 Then the Bible says “a man” whose name we don’t know, asked Joseph what he was looking for and when Joseph explains that he’s looking for his brothers, the man says that he thought he heard them saying that they were going to Dothan.
 This is a very minor detail in the dramatic story about how Joseph’s brothers, jealous of their father’s preference for Joseph, sell Joseph into slavery. It’s easily overlooked.
 But, when you think about it, if it hadn’t been for this unnamed man, Joseph would have gone home and told his Dad that he couldn’t find his brothers, and Jacob would have shrugged his shoulders and all the dramatic events of Joseph’s life: his slavery and imprisonment in Egypt, and his remarkable rise to become Egypt’s Secretary of Agriculture whose wise policies would save, not only Egypt, but his father and brothers and their families so that they could become Israel, would never have happened.
 Aren’t there chance encounters in your own life in which minor players, perhaps people whose names you did not know and you only met once, changed your life?
 I remember a single conversation with a professor sitting across the table from me at lunch in the seminary cafeteria who insisted that I take a certain course that I thought was unnecessary because I intended to be a pastor in rural churches and he said there was no way I could know that and this course would prepare me for urban ministry as well. Little did I know that for most of my ministry I would serve in urban and suburban churches – partly because I took that course.
 Almost everyday, you have a walk-on part in somebody else’s life story. They say in the theater that there are no small roles, just small actors. Who knows what might happen if you were a big person with a small role in another person’s life?
  
Posted by Roger Talbott at 21:41:04 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Just as I Thought

This will be short. I just want to call attention to a new study that shows that people in the pews are a lot more moderate on the issue of homosexuality than their leaders think they are.
I’ve always wondered about the amount of heat generated by that issue at national and international church conferences. I’ve been a pastor for 37 years and have never seen such heat and anger in a local church. I’ve seen some real pain generated by the debates at the national level as insensitive leaders trample on the feelings of gay and lesbian men and women and their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends - up to half of any given congregation are closely related to people with a homosexual orientation.
For that matter, I’ve served six congregations and all of them - from the small rural churches in which I started to the two large urban churches that I’ve served have had members - usually key members - who are gay or lesbian. They are often people who grew up in the church. They don’t flaunt their sexuality before their fellow parishioners anymore than heterosexual people do - in fact, often less. I’ve seen our culture move toward more openness about talking about these issues, but I’ve always been impressed by the acceptance and kindness and respect most of these people have received from their churches.
I have so many friends who tell me about clergy who are clearly gay or lesbian serving churches in denominations (like my own) that make a huge deal about FORBIDDING such people from serving in the ministry who are just quietly going about the business of preaching the gospel and building the Kingdom and their congregations, many of them made up of people who could be stereotyped as rednecks, love and appreciate them.
It is true that not all of these folks in the pews are ready for gay marriages to be performed in their churches and probably half of them beleive that a fully-expressed homosexual relationship is some kind of sin, but they also know themselves to be sinners and aren’t persuaded that some sins are worse than others.
So, it might do us all good to ask who keeps making an issue out of this? What are the publications that keep ringing alarm bells and who are the “spokespersons” who keep making an issue out of this non-issue. The next time a glossy newsletter that you never paid anything for lands in your mailbox, get on the internet and begin to investigate the organization that publishes it. Who are their donors? Follow the money, and you will be very surprised to discover what all this hullabaloo is really about - and it won’t be “Scriptural Holiness”, I can guarantee that.
Posted by Roger Talbott at 04:05:29 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Wrestling with God

As many of you know, my daughter-in-law is a Rabbi. My son, Jim, converted to Judaism before he and Rachel married and their little son and daughter, who are two of the four cutest kids in the world, are growing up in a devout Jewish home.

People might wonder what I, as a Christian minister, do with this?

One response I have to people who ask that question is to send them to Jim’s mother who says, “Do I believe God wants me to stop loving my son because he converted to Judaism – No, She wouldn’t make me do that!”

Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology withers in the face of a Mother Bear’s love. If God doesn’t love us as much as Jacquie loves Jim and his family, we are all in trouble.

But Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology is still going to ask what I think Jesus meant when he said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).

Answer: I struggle with it. I wrestle with it. Just like Paul does in chapters 9, 10, and 11 of the Book of Romans. Paul is so disturbed that his fellow Jews have not believed that Jesus is the Messiah, that he says he would be willing to be accursed by Christ if that would, somehow, save his people.

I’ll come back to this dilemma in a couple of weeks, but right now I’d like to talk about wrestling with God. The Old Testament Lesson for August 3rd tells about Jacob wrestling with “a man” in the middle of the night. They wrestle all night and neither can make the other say, “uncle”. As dawn breaks, the Stranger tells Jacob to let him go, and Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”.

The Stranger then tells Jacob that his name from then on will be “ Israel ”, which may mean, “the one who wrestles with God.” And the Stranger also leaves Jacob lame in one hip. When the Stranger leaves, Jacob calls the place: “I-have-seen-God (and lived to tell about it)!”

We wrestle with God when we have big questions like: “How do I resolve John 14:6 with my son’s obvious devotion to God and his wife’s clear calling from God to be a leader in the Jewish community?”

Other people have other questions:

“How can a good God allow good people and innocent children to suffer and even die before their time?”

“How can the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination when my friends’ love for each other and faithfulness to each other puts to shame a lot of heterosexual couples I know?”

“Does someone who lived a terrible life but accepts Jesus as their savior at the last minute go to heaven and someone who lived a wonderful, caring, loving and highly ethical life but never said, “Jesus is my Lord” goes to hell?

I’ve wrestled with all of these questions and continue to wrestle with some others:

“Do I need to sell all I have and give it to the poor in order to really follow Jesus?”

“What does it mean to love my enemy and turn the other cheek when my enemies fly airliners into big buildings full of innocent people?”

The purpose of wrestling I think is less to get an answer than to get stronger. What gets stronger is not the ability to think theologically – in fact, I think that gets lamed, because we lose the cocksure arrogance of the True Believer who knows he’s right. What gets stronger is that part of us that holds on to God. I’d call it “faith” if that hadn’t been hijacked by those who want to make “faith” to mean “the intellectual assent to a list of doctrines”. So let’s just call it “The-Part-of-Us-that-Holds-On-to-God”.

I can’t tell you how many people I know who tell me that they are agnostic or atheist but who are people who hold on to God – and do so with greater tenacity than some good church folks I know. I used to kid one atheist friend that he talked more about God than most of the people I know who devoutly believe in God.

So, for now, let’s just say that I hold on to my love for Jesus and I hold on to my love for my son, Jim, and his family, even though some would say I am betraying my Lord and condemning my son to eternal fire. If you believe that religious faith is about logical consistency, you and I belong to different religions. If you believe logical consistency is unimportant, you and I belong to different species. When we hold on to God in the darkness of confusion and contradiction and even despair, our grip on the Eternal grows stronger, our confidence in our religious “answers” grow weaker, and we become part of Israel – wrestlers with God.

 

Posted by Roger Talbott at 04:01:55 | Permalink | Comments (2)