Pastor's Column, January 2009

One of the comments I hear most often is, “our church has gotten so busy!” We’ve got an awful lot going on, and the period around Christmas has a particularly full calendar. When we get busy, it’s easy to get caught up in the rush of activities and lose focus on the point of all our business. That’s never a good thing, and it’s especially dangerous in a church, since our work only matters if we keep it connected to our reason for working. None of our services, events, or meetings matter if we don’t keep them focused on God.
This Christmas Eve, we’re focusing on both God and our neighbors. We will be giving our offering for the Christmas Eve service to the Salvation Army. More importantly, we will be posting flyers about the service around the downtown area and the neighborhood, and will specifically invite the families who come to the Lord’s Table on Christmas Eve to join us for worship. Please take a moment to invite your neighbors—friends and strangers both—to our service.
After church on December 28, we’ll be having a special congregational meeting to vote on the appointment of five new elders. This might seem like a dry formality, but I want to lift up the significance of that meeting. In our church, elders are called and ordained. When we ordains a ministers—pastoral ministers or elders—we are saying that we recognize and affirm a gift of God given to specific people to build up the community. And one of the basic principles of our church is that the gift of ministry has to be recognized and affirmed by God’s people. We have all sorts of boards, committees, and individual leaders, but all of those are secondary to the whole people of God. And so this business meeting is a holy time, a moment when we join together to speak the Word of God.
On January 4, the next week, the church will be celebrating our 175th anniversary. We will be learning about and reflecting some of the history of our church, and our celebration will be completed by the ordination of our new elders—a step into the future that will start the next 175 years of our church history. Afterwards, we’ll have a light lunch. All this will give us a chance to consider where we have been and where we are going, to think about the heritage that we are
January 11, the week after that, we’ll be introducing another step into the future. Back in November, the board decided to get involved in a process to help us open up to God’s calling for us, as a church and as individuals. Over the next year, we’ll be working with other Disciples churches in Indiana, regional staff, and an expert in church transformation. A group of church members will be the guides who lead the church through this process, and we’ll be lifting up them and the whole church.
So please take time to be involved in these celebrations, and pray with me that our business doesn’t turn into “busy-ness,” that we continue to do the Lord’s work and not just church work.

Pastor's Column, December 2008

If you come to church, you’ll notice that we’re ready for “Christmas.” The garland is hanging, the tree is up, the lights and ornaments are on. And, just like every year, the green cloths have been replaced by purple ones. In churches all around the world, these changes are part of “Christmas.” But even though most people call this “Christmas time,” a church calendar will show you that “Christmastime” is the time after Christmas—like in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” What we call Christmas was only Day 1; the Christmas season went from December 25 to January 6. In church, we celebrate that by switching from purple to white for that time of year. But this time—the time before Christmas, is called Advent, which you could translate to mean “Coming In.” Advent is meant to be a time to prepare for the day when Jesus will come, to prepare ourselves to meet Jesus.

Since we make such a big deal about Christmas, it’s easy to think about “meeting Jesus” as waiting for the baby to come—and if you’ve ever known an expecting mother, that’s an amazing time. It is a time to marvel at what God did for us. There are many descriptions of encounters with God before Jesus was born, and most of them describe totally awe-inspiring and overwhelming events. When people encountered God, they usually fell on their faces and begged for their lives. But God wanted to meet us where we were, and so God came into this world as a little baby, tiny and defenseless. That strange idea, that God came into the world and lived a human life with us, is at the heart of everything else that Christians do and say. This is a time to celebrate it, lift it up, and deepen our relationship with that person.
But “meeting Jesus” doesn’t stop with that baby. That baby grew up, died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and none of us can know him now. But Jesus told us that someone else was coming—the Holy Spirit, God who is with us each and every day. Today, our closest and deepest knowledge of God comes through the Holy Spirit who lives in each and every one of us. You might have heard people talk about being “filled with the Spirit.” The truth is that you’re already filled with the Spirit, but you may not know it! God, the Spirit, is with you all the time, even though most of us barely notice…but the Holy Spirit is there, waiting for us, waiting to introduce us to Jesus. And so, through the Spirit, we can use this time to look into our own hearts and meet Jesus there.

And even beyond that, the Scriptures talk about a time when everyone will meet Jesus. I don’t put any stock at all in the various schemes of “end time prophecy” that are floating around, but Jesus and his followers didn’t leave any doubt that the day would come when the whole world would meet Jesus. So when we think about meeting Jesus, we should take some time to remember that when everything else is gone—when everything we know, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve worked for has passed into dust—we will meet Jesus.

The Scriptures don’t say too much about what things will be like on that last day, but they do talk about one more way to meet Jesus. Jesus told his followers that he would remind them of all the times when they met homeless people, hungry and thirsty people, people in jail, sick people. And he said that every time we did, we were meeting him. He told us that we didn’t have to go back to Bethlehem to meet him, or wait until the last day. He told us that we meet him all the time, and that he wouldn’t forget how we treated him.

So, when you take some time to prepare for meeting Jesus this Advent season, by all means celebrate Jesus’ birth, and take some time to think about what you’ll have to say when you meet Jesus on the last day. But Jesus himself told us that we really need to think about meeting Jesus here and now, in the suffering, neglected, and abused people who are all around us. So, this Advent, don’t wait for Jesus to come to you. Go out and meet Jesus. We have food pantries for hungry and thirsty people, free clinics for sick people, shelters for homeless people, prison ministries for people in jail. Don’t wait, and don’t think that Jesus wanted you to write a check…go out and meet him where he is.