Is prayer an action?

I have been wondering this as I observe the United Methodist Church's response to the earthquake in Haiti. The big response is first: pray. Then, we will figure out the next step.

I have to admit that I love this.

But I would guess that it gives us a certain sense of helplessness, this entire tragedy, this whole crisis. It is all so completely out of our control, and I know that we are a people who like to be in control of things. We are also a people who like to respond with "doing." We like to go and clean up or rebuild or do something.

Prayer seems so passive.

I wonder how many people, how many Christians, how many United Methodists have actually responded to this crisis with prayer. Gutteral, passionate prayer. Desperate, longing, bewildered prayer. How many of us are falling on our knees throughout the day as we are continuously overwhelmed by the news, by the grief, by the destruction? How many of us are praying fervently for a call to serve in some way, for a call to help in the restoration and the healing?

How many of us actually see prayer as an action?

(By the way, prayer is still the first response but not the only response. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) is accepting donations for recovery and development. 100% of the money that you donate to UMCOR goes to the actual project; there is nothing taken out for overhead. You can donate through your church or do it online here.)

A taillight or a headlight?

I have been pondering this week about what would've happened if John Wesley and Martin Luther King, Jr. had met.

Granted, they lived in different centuries and different countries. But as I have been reading Rev. Dr. King this week after reading so much Wesley last week, I wonder if anyone has ever looked closely at their writings and work together. (If you are reading this and know of anything related, please let me know!)

Rev. Dr. King gives me that same feeling of heartburn that I blogged about last Friday. His words make me shake my head and respond out loud. I've had a tough time trying to pick small tidbits to share daily with my bible study group, because I feel like entire paragraphs and pages are necessary and soul shaking. And I've written about three blog drafts in the last week that I have then saved instead of posting, because I can't seem to express this feeling I have when I read Rev. Dr. King's work.

I think that my favorite document by Rev. Dr. King is the Letter from Birmingham City Jail. One reason I love it is because he speaks so explicitly to the church, to people who claim to follow Jesus Christ. It seems that the life of discipleship is the heart of much of King's work, but this letter writes it plainly, sharp and simple as an arrow.

This is the passage I highlighted today for my bible study group, and it is such a great text to have soaking in our heads on Sunday:

"In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice."

-Letter from Birmingham City Jail

Have we learned anything since Rev. Dr. King wrote these painfully true words? Are we spouting the same old "pious irrelevancies" while people are struggling and dying in front of our eyes? Is the church today a taillight or a headlight?

Triflers and the trivial

"Do nothing on which you cannot pray for a blessing. Every action of a Christian that is good is sanctified by the Word and prayer. It becomes not a Christian to do anything so trivial that he cannot pray over it."

-Random John Wesley quote (meaning, I don't know where it's from)

“May it not be one of the consequences of this, that so many of you are a generation of triflers; triflers with God, with one another, and with your own souls?”

-Sermon 4 “Scriptural Christianity” (1744)

A generation of triflers; ouch.

I read this last week while I was preparing to preach and while I didn't bring in up from the pulpit, it has been stuck in my head ever since. John Wesley was definitely not a man who wasted time on anything that he considered trivial. He was a man driven by urgency, the urgency of the gospel.

We talked about this last week as we discussed the Gospel of Mark as a whole. The word "immediately" is characteristic in Mark, occurring over and over again, and this makes the gospel feel urgent, pressing.

I wonder if we truly grasp the urgency of the gospel, the drive that God has to make all things new, the overwhelming passion of God to complete the work that God has begun in us and in the world that God has created.

There are many days that I look back and think, where did the day go? How is it 5:00 already? or 11:00 already? What have I been doing? And I wonder if I am really using the time that God has blessed me with to the greatest extent that it can be used.

I know this: I do not want to be a part of a generation of triflers. I don't want to waste my time on the unimportant, the petty arguments, the pointless discussions. I don't want to waste my time surfing the web or channel surfing. There is no time to waste! If I can't pray for God's blessing in it, maybe I shouldn't do it, no matter how small it is.

What would it be to live like this?

Heartburn: A Side Effect of Methodism

No, I'm not just referring to the abundance of food in a Methodist gathering and the sluggish way you might feel when you waddle home afterwards.

I'm talking about the burning deep down in my heart that I get when I read, well, just about anything of John Wesley's.

I have been reading a good deal of John Wesley here recently, catching up on a some books that I have owned for a few years but haven't read. This inspired me to term our Wednesday worship services in the month of August "Wesley Wednesdays" because the burn that I felt as I read some of Wesley's work could not help but get expressed in the sermons that I preached. A combination of John Wesley's sermons and the book of James...that's enough to light you on fire!

I have also recently been working on the Bible study that I am designing for my ordination application. I have chosen, between the options of Mark and Job, to teach from Mark and to focus on the Way of Discipleship. As I have been working on this, praying about it and immersing myself in preparation, I had a thought that felt particularly inspired. Since we are talking about discipleship, what if we also heard from folks who lived their discipleship in powerful ways over the years, not just disciples from the biblical witness but those who have lived the faith since then?

I looked at my outline, nine weeks worth of Markan texts teaching about and calling forth discipleship, and started brainstorming about nine disciples whose life embodied or embodies this radical kingdom lifestyle. I will say, shaking my head, that I never cease to be amazed at the way that God works, and how beautifully everything comes together for God's glory!

So everyday, I am emailing the Bible study group with quotes from the weekly disciple. The week's quotes are particularly focused on the texts that we will discuss at the end of the week and they all express discipleship in the person's context.

Week one, of course (you all knew this was coming!) is John Wesley.

And we are back where we are started: heartburn. This week I have been combing through his sermons, journal entries, and notes about him to pull out tidbits and quotes for my class, none of whom have studied or read much of Wesley's works.

I get drawn in to this work and find it hard to stop. I read his sermons and shake my head, reading parts out loud and saying things like, "preach!" or "well." I just can't help myself. The Spirit of God continues to move in his words even today, over 300 years later. My heart burns within me as I read the challenging words that he spoke to people in his sermons and then instructed his lay preachers to preach as they rode their circuits.

It wasn't an easy word then, and it isn't an easy word now. I was reminded today as I read through his journal entries in May 1738 how often he was asked never to come back after he preached in a church, especially in well established, significant churches. Over and over again he writes about how he preached in such and such church and then was asked never to return. So the next day, he did the same thing. And then the next day. And then the next. The establishment wasn't too crazy about him. And this is particularly interesting because for his whole life and ministry he worked against the notion of starting a new church. He had no desire to split from the Church of England, but rather, he called people to faithful discipleship within the church, even while he was eventually willing to preach in fields and marketplaces to people who the established church did not reach.

I could go on and on, but perhaps I will save the rest of my heartburn for another blog.

And stay tuned for nine weeks worth of interacting with a few of the men and women who have inspired me and many others over the centuries in the way of discipleship.

Palpable Pain

Since moving to the Shenandoah valley, I have become a Shakespeare junkie.  

Shakespeare had never really been my thing, until I found myself living 20 minutes away from the Blackfriars Playhouse, the world's only recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theater. I went to see The Christmas Carol, which they perform every year in December, but my world wasn't rocked until I saw Cyrano de Bergerac in May. Ever since then, I find myself drawn to this theater whenever I have a free night.

The acting is outstanding and I often find myself moved to hysterical laughter or gut wrenching tears, sometimes in the same show. Shakespeare didn't write his plays to be read in classrooms, he wrote them to be performed on stage, and I think it is impossible to approach understanding of his brilliance until you have seen his work incarnate.

This afternoon I attended a performance of Titus Andronicus, which is said to be Shakespeare's bloodiest, most violence work and is very rarely performed. The feeling I sat with throughout the entire show was: pain. Gut-wrenching, want to tear your heart out pain. The pain was palpable on the stage and even in the audience, where all of us were affected by the depth of grief, hatred, and evil that almost every character exuded.

Theater is a powerful medium because unlike film, a theater goer is a participant, a part of the story that is being told. It is very difficult to remain aloof or apart from live performance, especially at the Blackfriars, where the actors intentionally draw the audience in and make us part of the play's world.

So I walk away from the theater today feeling a deep sense of loss and grief in the pit of my stomach. Having witnessed the evil that comes from revenge, which is the basic plot of this play. Having seen the ways that cycles of violence only beget more violence, pain, and destruction. To think that this entire tragedy might have been stopped by the forgiveness, the pardon of Titus at the very beginning. And yet, Titus found it necessary to uphold the practice of retributive justice, let the punishment fit the crime.

I will not come to see this show again, though it was brilliant. I don't think my heart could take it. I come away with my heart broken by the way that a lack of forgiveness can give birth to pain and destruction beyond compare, without end.

May we learn to forgive.

My Call to Ministry

If you would've told me five years ago that I would be pastoring a church, I would have laughed. But much of my life is like that, unexpected in the way that grace often is.

I always have a hard time with this question, because my understanding of call goes back to the very beginning of my Christian story. Or maybe that is just very Methodist, since we believe that all bapized Christians are called to ministry.

I was baptized as an infant at Kingsway United Methodist Church in Springfield, MO. My parents, however, were not really into church, so with a couple of exceptions, I was unchurched as a child. I had my awakening to faith when I went to camp the summer before 6th grade, and when I came home from camp, I immediately got involved in the church.

We moved to Virginia when I was a sophomore in high school, which was traumatic but a blessing. As I started to look at colleges, my main focus was the physical therapy program. I knew that whatever I did as an occupation, it would be ministry because of the way that I did it. I felt compelled to help people learn how to walk again, after accidents and injuries, and I figured that I would work in clinics and lower income settings so that I could be in mission.

As I worked my way through college, however, I was miserable with my path. Cellular biology was the turning point; or, at least, that semester was, the spring of my sophmore year. I had a hard time believing that I would be so miserable if I were really following my call. I took one class that year in the religious studies department: Black Religion with Dr. Mark Wood. I loved it! Essays and not scantrons! Reading and interacting with the texts and my classmates! It was like coming up for air if you are drowning.

I began to really discern whether I was going in the right direction. I was active in leadership at my home church as well as the Baptist Student Union on campus. I loved this one class. And yet, in my other science classes and volunteer work in the hospital, I was miserable. I talked with my campus minister, Bill Berry, who had no doubts about my call to some kind of ministry. And I signed up to go on the study abroad trip with Dr. Wood to Havana, Cuba.

The two weeks in Cuba changed my life. When I got on the plane to come back to Virginia I knew two things: 1. I was going to come back to Cuba, and 2. I was not going to be a physical therapist. It's funny to look back on this, because this was not a "mission trip," not a churchy trip at all. But I felt God's presence so strongly in Havana, and I heard God speaking so clearly through the scripture I was reading.

When I returned to school, I changed my major to religious studies. I felt called to be a missionary, to work with people in Latin America or specifically in Cuba as we struggled to be the people of God in the world. After I graduated, I went to Guatemala to study Spanish, knowing that I needed to be fluent for my call, and then to Wesley Seminary. I felt the need to be ordained, though I did not plan on being a pastor.

My sense of call was further refined in seminary when I went to First United Methodist Church in Hyattsville to serve as a pastoral intern. I had never even considered the possibility of being a pastor. And yet, as I served at this amazing church, I discovered gifts that I never knew I had. It was another awakening experience, another great surprise of grace.

When I worked at the hospital in Washington D.C., I told this story to one of my colleagues and she said: "You are just like St. Francis!" St. Francis of Assisi heard God's call to "build my church" and thought that God meant that literally. So St. Francis found a broken down church and began to rebuild it. He later realized that God meant for him to rebuild the whole of the church, not the physical building. I heard God's call to help people learn how to walk, and so I began a path toward physical therapy. It wasn't until later that I realized God was calling me to help people walk in a much different sense, as disciples.

My call story is long because God has transformed me along the way, refining, polishing, and sometimes scrubbing with microbeads. And I don't feel like it is finished. In many ways, I continue to seek God's call everyday and to discern where and how God wants me to serve in ministry.

I do know one thing for sure, I am here only by the grace of God. I am constantly amazed that God would bring me here, that God would care so much for me as to call me to serve and to provide for me throughout my journey. I echo Paul's sentiments, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and God's grace toward me has not been in vain" (1 Corinthians15:10).

Biblical Personality

One of the last days that we were in Brazil, Mario asked me if I would give him my Bible.

The Bible he was referring to is a pocket-sized NRSV that I have travelled with for probably 10 years. The feature I loved most about this Bible was that it had a zipper, so that the pages didn't get creased or bent in my suitcase or backpack, and it also allowed me to keep all sorts of mementos inside.

Of course, I told Mario I would give him my Bible when we left, so the night before our departure, I cleaned out all of the clippings from this Bible. I had a ticket from last year's mission when we rode up the train to visit the Cristo Redentor statue in Rio de Janeiro. I had my nametag from the event that I attended on the border in Mexico. I had a creased song sheet from back in the day when we led music at Frank Pais camp in Havana. I had a bulletin from my grandfather's funeral. I had a note from a young girl in Cuba. I had a boarding pass from Miami. I had a sheet of star stickers from who knows when. But I left a mark on the Bible, the masking tape nametag from last year's trip to Brazil, afixed on the outside leather.

In my experience, every Bible has a personality. I have a rose colored NIV that is terribly beat up, full of different colored underlining and dates that I read certain passages. I got that Bible when I was in sixth grade, right after I had an awakening experience to faith and committed myself to follow Jesus Christ, and I used it up until I graduated from high school. When I went to college, I got a hardback RSV, and my campus minister commented that this meant I was going to seminary, because that was the version all the seminarians read. I laughed at him; I wasn't going to seminary. When I was in seminary (who is laughing now?) I bought a cheap paperback NRSV, which is what I currently have beside my bed. It is absolutely falling apart; everything after Acts has become unbound and falls out if I'm not careful. (Side note: this is a great way to learn the order of the books in the New Testament!) I have written all over it, questions, dates, connections, themes.

It is sad to me when I think that many people's Bibles don't have a lot of personality because they are not used. You might not be as tough on your Bible as I am, but is there evidence that you have read it, studied it, grappled with it, been challenged by it or changed by it? Of does it still look nice and pretty, up on the shelf collecting dust or safely protected from wear?

When I gave my Bible to Mario he asked me, what is the first passage I should read? Good question. (And may I add, that this is a young man who recently turned 18). After a moment, I said decisively: Isaiah 43.

"But now this says the LORD,

he who created you, O Jacob,

he who formed you, O Israel:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,

I will be with you;

and through the rivers,

they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through the fire

you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.

Talk about personality.