Ministries

“Waking Up Our Spiritual Senses”
1 Samuel 3:1-20
Belmont UMC—January 15, 2012
Ken Edwards, preaching

There must have been times when the young Samuel wondered what his mother had gotten him into; he had spent virtually his entire childhood assisting in the temple at Shiloh, training to become a full time servant of God, loyally waiting on the priestly family of Eli.

But not once had he perceived God’s presence in the temple or God’s purpose for his life. Samuel had been dedicated to God, but where was God? What was he supposed to do now? The text says that there were not many words from God being heard and there were no frequent visions to guide him. It was a quiet, barren spiritual environment.

Because Samuel did not yet know the Lord, he must have been directionless, wondering, and confused. Why was he at the temple? Why was his life dedicated to this barren life? His role models for life did not offer much encouragement either. As priests, Eli’s sons were greedy, gluttonous and completely self-centered. They cheated the people, stole from the temple and desecrated it.

Eli was Samuel’s mentor. Apparently, he was kind, wise and obedient, but he was incapable of controlling his sons’ behavior and the sanctity of the temple had not been maintained under his leadership. He was a weak leader. With no vision or experience of his own, all Samuel could hope for was a lifestyle like that of Eli and his corrupt sons.

Samuel lived in Shiloh and Shiloh was thought to be God’s dwelling place, where the light always burned to symbolize that God was at home and where an oracle could always be obtained by priestly rites and rituals. At Shiloh the Israelites believed that they had God’s presence as a captive audience. At Shiloh Samuel literally slept in front of the Holy Ark of the Covenant. But the word of the Lord had not been revealed to him. It was a visionless, voiceless, experience. Where was God? Why was Samuel in Shiloh? What was God’s purpose for him?

And then one night the word of God came to young Samuel in an exchange that was both comical and tender. It was comical because Samuel thought Eli was calling him and he woke the old priest up three times before Eli was convinced that the word was from God.

What had God been all this time? Have we not asked ourselves this question at one time or another? Where was God during difficult days? Where was God when answers did not come? Where was God when depression or confusion came over us? Where was God when we went to church week after week and felt nothing of God’s presence?

The Psalmists often asked God this same question. Were you hiding from me God? Were you asleep? Did you turn your face away from me? Were you angry? Will you always remain silent?

Is God no longer around? Does God have no words to speak to our generation, our culture, our church? Does God no longer offer us visions of hope and direction for our future? Will God reveal God’s purpose for us?

These are fair questions but they may be the wrong questions. It’s possible that we, like Samuel, have been face to face with the holiness of God but unable to perceived God’s presence because our spiritual senses have been dulled by a dark night of the soul or our busyness, or because we have forgotten how to come into God’s presence and hear God’s word.

A relative shared with me his experience of quitting smoking after 40 years. He said, “I smell things. I taste things. My senses have been awakened and it’s amazing.” We need our spiritual senses to be awakened to the reality of God.

Where has God been? God has been in Shiloh, near the Ark of the Covenant. But the vision and hearing of the Eli, his sons and their attendant and trainee, Samuel, have been dulled to the possibilities of communicating with this revelatory God.

Where is God? God is here! And God has a word and a vision for the people of God, but we will need to have our spiritual senses awakened! God has been here all along. God has a purpose for our lives and we will need to have our spiritual sense awakened to see it and to hear it. From the text we find a prescription for awakening our spiritual senses.

The first prescription is to lie down! Be still! Samuel did not hear God in the moment of activity or when he was going about his daily temple duties, he heard God when he was lying still in the quiet of the night, alone, at rest, at the shutting down time of the day. We will need to be still, stop moving, stop our frenetic activity, our multitasking. Or we are like Mary Pipher who describes her journey to wholeness in Seeking Peace. She was learning to practice meditation and learning to be fully present to one thing at a time. She writes, “I have a long history of doing two or three or seventeen things at once. I am cooking, but planning my next road trip. I am talking on the phone but wondering if I have a can of tuna handy for lunch. I am bird watching but wondering if I have offended someone. I am walking, but even as I smell the French lilacs in the air and notice a heron on the lake, I am thinking of presidential politics.” (p. 218) Our minds are multitasking even if our hands are not.

Through the Psalmist we hear God say, “Be still and know that I am God.”
If you are like me you have trouble being still. We have a work ethic that does not want us to take moments of stillness and quiet—it always seems like wasting time to us. There are times when I’m alone in the car, or running (not still physically but quiet and experiencing some level stillness is inside of me), at times when the house is quiet and I’m caught up with work or too exhausted to keep going. And in those moments I may experience some clarity about the God’s presence and purpose in my life.

I used to sit down and pray something like this each morning, “Okay, God, tell me what you want me to do today? What can I add to my already extensive list?” I never heard an answer to that prayer.  I have changed my prayer practice. Most mornings now I will find time to sit in my favorite chair and say to God, “Here I am again. Allow me to be in your holy presence.” I don’t talk a lot and tell God what to do; I try to allow myself to be with God, to be still, to be quiet, and to wait. And God prepares my heart and mind for the day ahead and for what may come.

We need to be still! And we need to be quiet! I think it was Soren Kirkegard who said that if he were a doctor and were allowed to prescribe one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, he would prescribe silence. I doubt we need to elaborate on this but most of us fill our homes and our ears with sounds and most of us find silence a little unsettling. But Elijah heard God in the stillness and the silence of the holy mountain, at a time when he was too exhausted to go on his own energy and he had to rely on God. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. heard God in the quiet of his kitchen, late one night after receiving a threatening phone call. “I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.”

When we are still and quiet we will want to listen! I’m not suggesting that I have ever heard God speak in those moments of quiet stillness, but sometimes in those moments there will come an inner knowing, a certitude, about something. Sometimes I come away knowing that I need to be quiet and still more often, but that’s a good message for me to hear. Sometimes I am inclined to check on a friend or a church member because they came to mind in those moments of quiet. Sometimes I hear that I need to let something go or pay more attention to my family. Sometimes I simply enjoy the quiet stillness and that is enough.

If we are seeking God’s purpose for our lives, we will want to look! People ask me what God’s purpose for their life is. Obviously, I don’t know, but I encourage them to look close to where they are. Our tendency is to assume God is going to send us to some exotic place to serve. Samuel made his bed near the altar of God but could not see God’s purpose for his life. Look around you. Look at your family, your friends, your church. Look for the places God is already using you to fulfill the purposes of God in the world.

When I was a teenager I was pretty sure I was going to college and then to the Peace Corp and I had all the information on how to make that happen. One day a young woman spoke to our Sunday School class about her time in the Peace Corp in the Philippines and I was enthralled. I met with her later in the week to get more information and she told me a story that changed my life. She told me that her greatest adventure came when she had to return home to care for her dying mother and in the process she found God for the very first time. It was not long after that conversation that I experienced a renewed relationship with God and  I knew God was calling me to pastoral ministry, not in some far land, but here in Tennessee, among people I knew and understood and loved.

Today a story about a boy named Samuel allows us to imagine God calling our name in the quiet, stillness. God is calling us to fulfill God’s purposes in our world. God is calling us to something beyond ourselves. God is preparing us for the words, “Here I am!” “Speak, Lord, for your people are listening!”

The Heavens Torn Apart
Mark 1:4-11
Baptism of the Lord Sunday—January 8, 2011
Belmont UMC
Ken Edwards, preaching

It was cool, sunny day in early December. Our tour bus pulled up beside a popular tourist spot somewhere along the Jordan River. It was suggested that this place, or a place much like it, could have been the place where John the Baptist preached and welcomed people into the waters of repentance.

On that day in December I took off my shoes and socks and rolled my pants up to my knees and waded into the cold water. I tried to imagine hundreds of people lining the banks of the unimpressive little river—people as far as I could see in my minds eye, people from all over Judea and from Jerusalem.

I could hear John preaching, loud and authoritative, and I could hear the quiet rumble of agreement and astonishment among the crowd. Occasionally, I could imagine hearing the voices of playing children, oblivious to what was happening on that river bank, and I could hear the hushing from their elders.

And then everything became quiet, like the quiet before a storm. I could see a man walking down the bank and into the river. He was walking toward John and everyone’s eyes were on him. This is the one whom John predicted would come, the one more powerful than John, the one who will baptize with God’s Spirit.

I could see the man covered in water as John poured water it over him. I looked up and I imagined the heavens being torn apart and something like a dove descending on the man. Then the silence was pierced with a voice that came from the opened heavens, “You are my child, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

On that day the heavens were torn apart!  This is an interesting phrase and I suspect it’s a phrase that we gloss over as we read this text and others like it. The heavens being split apart indicates that God is about to speak or make God’s self known in some way. The Irish might call these moments “thin places,” places where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer that it is possible to step through.

This is the season of Epiphany and the season begins and ends with these heaven splitting stories of baptism and transfiguration. During Epiphany we begin to get a clearer understanding of how the life of the Christmas baby will unfold. We understand that this is God’s child and God is pleased to share this child with the world.

We began the Christian year on the first Sunday of Advent and with a lament from the prophet Isaiah. He speaks to God, “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down. You could make the mountains quake, and the waters to boil and the nations would tremble at your presence.” (Isaiah 64) The prophet wants to choreograph God’s activity. There is a plea in this lament, a plea that comes at the time of exile, for God to do something dramatic. How many times have we offered that same plea? “God, rip open the heavens and do something extreme to rescue us!”

But the Prophet admits, “But you did things we did not expect.” The prophet admits that God is the potter and we are the clay and God’s activity cannot be choreographed or manipulated. Epiphany is a time for us to watch and see what God is doing in Jesus Christ and in the world, and often what we see from the birth of a baby in a manger to the mountain of transfiguration is the God who does things we do not expect.

I was struck by contrasting images over the holidays. I saw images of shoppers storming a store and shoving each other, just to buy a pair of Air Jordan shoes. I saw images of people being pepper sprayed in shopping malls and at an Occupy Movement site. These were troubling images and they got lots of attention in the press. One day I read a story about a widow, whose husband died last year, and who didn’t plan to celebrate Christmas. One day she walked into a K-Mart store and she paid off all the lay always for people who could not afford to do so, and she walked up and down the line at the check out and gave people $50 bills to help them buy the toys in their carts. It was the unexpected and as I read that story and I looked up I think I saw the heavens split open, just a little bit, just a glimpse, but there it was.  

Another observation: I’m concerned about how quick we are to identify people as our enemies! We seem uncertain of ourselves unless we can point to a group or groups and call them our enemies. In our culture we have wrongly identified people from the immigrant and Islamic communities as our enemies. And they have victims of our hatred and even violence. Sometimes this hatred is perpetuated by political leaders. And what is worse, sometimes this hatred is perpetuated by groups claiming the name of Christ. This is antithetical to Christ’s teaching that we are to love everyone and Christ’s blessing of those who are peacemakers. May we hear God calling in this New Year to live into Christ’s teaching and find time to get to know those we might want to call enemies.

But there was an unexpected moments when my wife and I saw the movie “War Horse” over the holidays. The movie features a horse named Joey raised and trained by a young boy from Devonshire who fell in love with the horse. But when the Great War came to England and they found themselves at battle with Germany, Joey was sold to the British army to make money to save the farm. Joey winds up serving in both the British and German armies as a war horse, but a sympathetic German soldier sets him free at the height of battle. And Joey runs and runs until he gets tangled in strands barbwire used to slow the enemy. Caught somewhere between the foxholes of the German and English soldiers, fierce enemies, he is rescued by a soldier from each side, and in a beautiful moment of peace making the two soldiers free the horse, shake hands, share personal information and wish each other well. When peace is made, when weapons are laid down, when enemies are loved and forgiven, the heavens are split in two and the grace of God descends like a dove.

Today we baptized a baby boy, son of Justin and Carrie Hall, brother of Caroline. The Halls love this church and they are loved by all of us. They have given their time to serve as youth counselors. Carrie served as an interim youth director while we were searching and finding Chris Allen. Justin has served as Chair of our Board of Trustees. There are typical of the committed Christ followers who come here each week and seek to live this unique and often countercultural life. Their presence here today reminds us that it is indeed a privilege and a joy to be a part of this faith family. And today as we shared with them in the service of baptism and answered the questions of discipleship with them and watched as the water is placed on the head of Ian Marcus Hall, the heavens opened up and we experienced the profound grace of God.

When Jesus entered into the Jordan River that day, something new and radical and challenging was entering the world. And from that day on being a disciple of Jesus would be filled with adventure and surprising grace. Throughout our lives we will experience the God who does what we do not expect, who acts outside of our narrow mindset, who surprises us with moments of grace even though our tendency is to focus on the darker things going on around us.

This God invites us into the refreshing water today to renew our baptismal vows, to remember who we are and whose we are, and to watch the heavens split apart—even just a little—and hear God say, “You are my child, I love you, and nothing pleases me more than to call you my child.”

Thanks

John 1:1-14
Christmas Day
Year B
December 25, 2011

A Mystery To Be Lived

We have journeyed together through the four weeks of Advent until today, Christmas Day, the climax of our preparing. Today is the beginning of the season when we celebrate that Christ is born. But what is Christmas about? For some Christmas is about crisply wrapped presents with delicately tied bows. For others Christmas is about beautiful songs that are only sung once a year. The abundance of twinkling lights and evergreen may lead others to believe that is what Christ is about. Others may argue it is about keeping Christ in Christmas or avoiding the pitfalls of consumerism. For 18 years of my life to me Christmas was about a candlelight Christmas Eve service with my family at our home church. God’s presence on Christmas was made known to me each year through the lighting of the candles to Silent Night and recessing out to Joy to the World. In 10 years, I imagine if you ask the youth what Christmas is about to them many may share about their participation in Feast of Lights. The closing hymn of Children, Go Where I Send Thee will resound in their memories and stories of Christmas for years.

The gospel writers themselves do not completely agree about Christmas. For Matthew, Christmas is grounding Jesus in his Jewish roots through opening his account with a lengthy genealogy that Jesus connects as a continuation of the stories from the Old Testament. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, Jesse, David, Bathsheba, Solomon, Joseph, Mary…Matthew is saying the coming of the Messiah is significant because of God’s covenantal relationship with the people of Israel.

Luke’s account is the story most familiar to many of us. Without Luke, we would be short quite a few Christmas carols. “Sing choirs of angels”… “Angels we have heard on high”… “Hark the herald angels sing” Here, Christmas centers on the angel Gabrielle visiting Mary to announce to her pregnancy and later an angel of the Lord makes an announcement of good news to shepherds in a field tending their flock. These angelic announcements make it known that even from Jesus’ birth he is the Son of God and will topple the empire’s systems of oppression.
For Mark, Jesus bursts onto the scene as an adult being baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist. The dramatic scene of the heavens being torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove then God’s declaration of Jesus as God’s Beloved Son.  In this account the significance of Christ’s coming is directly linked to his baptism.

Then there is John, who also begins his account without any of the typical Christmas images you find in Matthew and Luke. Instead, John begins with a poetic hymn, a hymn filled with images and metaphors. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  The lack of a baby, a manger, some shepherds, and no mention of the Magi redirects our attention to what John believes Christmas is about. For John, it is about Christ coming, taking on flesh, and dwelling among us. The Christmas story is not a momentary, flash in the pan visit by the divine but the beginning of the story of how God, in the word’s of Wesley, “tabernacled among us on earth, displaying his glory in a more eminent manner, than even of old.” God making God’s home among us is as if God comes and puts up a tent in your yard and says I am here. God is with us! Emmanuel is here!
The opening verse begins with the familiar words “In the beginning.” It is here, we are immediately reminded of Genesis’s openings words. In repeating these words from Genesis, the gospel writer is intentionally framing this account around the opening chapters of Genesis.[explain more] Yet, John pushes us into a different direction. There is a building tension as John links together what should be contradictory announcements of light, life, and flesh. John introduces us to this perplexing character, the Word. Somehow the Word is identified with God, yet different from God but in communion with God. Even John’s use of the Word, which in the Greek is translated as logos, carries with it a multitude of meanings. The word logos evokes the image of God speaking life into creation, the later Old Testament concept of wisdom, and the Hellenistic thought of ordering the universe. Logos also carries with it a mean of personal action. God’s Word is not simply spoken but acted.

Past Belmont Senior Pastor and current District Superintendant John Collet shared at a recent Nashville District gathering that when Vanderbilt introduced Coach James Franklin last December the administration and Coach Franklin both used the phrase “all in.” “All in” was used to describe their commitment to each other, the university, and the football program. On gameday, Facebook statuses, restaurant signs, and tailgating posters all shared in this “all in” commitment to Vanderbilt football. God born in a manger, God the Word becoming fleshing and making his home among us is God saying God is “all in.” God is “all in” for all of humanity and all of creation. God is “all in” from the manger to the resurrection. Thanks be to God!

Over this past summer, I traveled with 13 of Belmont’s youth and 6 adults to participate in the Appalachia Service Project. Our center was based in Harlen, Kentucky. I was teamed with 5 youth and one other adult. We were assigned the home of Pat and Kelvin. The first day we arrived on site with the seemingly simple task of replacing the floor of a small porch. This task was supposed to take one day. The project seemed simple enough: we would lay some plywood and then tile the 4x5 space.

In no time at all Ryan Deising, Aren Edwards, and myself found ourselves over our heads. Each nail we drove in created an additional problem that we had to solve. Kelvin, the homeowner, rarely left our side as we worked. I do not mean he snooped over our shoulder to ensure we were finishing the job properly to his satisfaction. I do not mean he constantly offered suggestions. What I mean when I say Kelvin worked alongside us is he stood with us on the porch swinging a hammer harder and more vigorously than any of us. In no time at all he would be sweatier and dirtier than any of us. Needless to say, he was “all in.” That is what God tabernacling among us means.
So where does this lead us? Between “In the beginning” and the climaxic close to our reading where “the word became flesh and lived among us,” there is brief mention of John the Baptist, who “came as a witness to testify to the light.” God’s “all in” does not require a response from us but elicits us to respond. A response to be “all in” as well. John is an example to us who have seen the light and now by grace are called to witness to the light.

This Thursday, I received this quote in my email inbox. It reminded me of the fact that we first must stand in awesome wonder of the Christmas story, the incarnation, whether it is from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Here is the quote from Dietrich Bonheoffer: “No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origins in the wonder of all wonders that God became [human].” An incarnational faith is not something that has to be figured out and explained in a cohesive theology or a creed. The incarnation, God dwelling among us is just that, an action. The incarnation something understood by doing it. To experience the mystery of the incarnation is to live it. Paul Tillich says living the incarnation “does not mean being obedient to the commandments, accepting them and fulfilling them. Doing the truth means living out of the reality … True discipleship is participation.” We are to experience Christmas, God with us by participating in the incarnation, living out the reality of the God who has said I’m “all in” to us. The generosity expressed through the Christmas Miracle Offering and the Chrismon tree gifts cannot be packed up like ornaments when Advent is over. Christmas is about a lived reality. It is coming to the manger like the shepherds, seeing the New Born King for themselves like the Magi, experiencing the mystery of the Word becoming flesh, and going as witnesses to the light. Amen.

A Living Nativity
Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve 2011-Belmont UMC
Ken Edwards, preaching

We learned a lot of Bible stories when we were children: Moses in the bulrushes, Daniel in the lion’s den, Elijah on the mountain, Peter walking on the water, Jesus feeding the multitude, and more, but the Christmas story was the only story we became a part of through our pageants and living nativities.

Over the last two Sundays at Belmont our children have participated in a living nativity. They have donned costumes of Mary and Joseph, shepherds, the magi, angels and sheep and have stood in the stable found in our foyer. There they lived out the story that was read tonight from the Gospel of Luke.

As a child we always participated in Christmas pageants in our church. The children would be dressed in their costumes—robes made out of old cloth or bathrobes, halos fashioned from gold Christmas garland, and angels’ wings made from coat hangers and crepe paper. A farmer would offer straw for the manger and someone would bring their best baby doll for the baby Jesus. The story from Luke would be read, sometimes interspersed with appropriate carols or anthems. These pageants and living nativities represent the real world, because though they are staged, something usually goes a little wrong and the onlookers are reminded that God came into an imperfect world. Jesus’ arrival in Bethlehem was not staged or flawless.

I remember one church that had an outdoor living nativity each year hosted by the youth. The youth would spend a couple of days setting it up and they would line the winding drive to the church with luminaries made from paper sacks, sand and candles. People, mostly parents and their friends, could drive through the church parking lot and view the scenes from their warm cars. There were three different scenes--the holy family in a crude stable near the entrance of the driveway, shepherds and angels on the hillside not far away, and the wise men were over in the east near the church dumpster. One year the luminaries fell over in the wind and started a small grass fire. It was quickly extinguished but people noted that it added to the astonished looks on the shepherds’ faces.

With his permission I relate the story our oldest son’s first Christmas pageant. He was 4 years old and he had a baby brother. When we knew the baby was coming we bought a baby doll for him because he kept asking how big the baby would be. We used the doll to teach him how to hold the baby and he held his baby brother many times. At the Christmas pageant he was assigned the role of a shepherd and he came home from rehearsal frustrated that the little girl who had the role of Mary did not hold the baby correctly. “She would make a terrible mother!” he exclaimed. I tried to reassure him that it didn’t matter.


The night of the pageant I noticed that Mary did hold the baby Jesus as though she were trying to palm a basketball at her side, but somehow her sweetness made up for it. We were in the audience with the other church members, and Lars was trying to get our attention to show us what Mary was doing wrong. Then he handed his shepherd’s staff off to another shepherd and I gulped, “Huh oh!” Before I could swallow he had snatched the baby Jesus out of Mary’s arms. Then he whacked the Mother of God on the head with the doll and said, “You are doing it wrong! Hold the baby like this!” He proceeded to show the now tearful Mary how to hold the baby Jesus correctly, handed the baby back to her, took his staff back and went back to his shepherdly duties. My wife and I tried to pretend we were invisible. This is why those stereotypes of wayward pastor’s children get perpetuated.

That first living nativity was not staged and it was not picture perfect. There was a bit of chaos; nothing went as had been planned or hoped for. There were noises and smells and lots of reality.

The beautiful thing about the living nativity is that we are not merely reading a story we are part of the story and the story has become part of us. We are the shepherds, frightened by the angels’ singing; we are Mary and Joseph, joyful over the birth of a child and wondering about the future ahead of them, and we are the angels offering “glorias” from above, and we are the curious visitors on their way from the east.  We are the animals and the innkeeper, bystanders in God’s story.

We are the living nativity. We don’t dress up in costumes and pretend, but we know that we live as a part of this story every time we extend God’s love to others, every time we hold out hope for someone who is in despair, every time we offer an act of kindness, every time we model the words of the angels, “Peace on earth and good will to all.”