Archive for December, 2010

This holiday season I decided to move into the New Year in a more contemplative fashion. While those around me are discussing new years resolutions and such I have decided to pray my way into the days post Christmas. I attended a retreat several months back were we prayed the liturgy of the hours. Yes, just like the monks, in this case the monks of Genesee Abbey.

I travel to Africa quite often to meet with African academics and church leaders. Recently driving from one worship service to another with the president of a local Seminary, we discussed the difference between these local church worship expressions and those more influenced by western denominations and missionaries. He said the difference in these local churches is that at every worship service there are one to two hours of thanksgiving. Each Sunday, various members of the congregation come up front and offer testimonies of praise and gratitude for what God has done for them that week. Two hours I asked? Thinking—the only thing I can do for two hours on Sunday is watch pro football. Yes, two hours of appreciating God’s activity in their lives and neighborhood, he replied. I remember the cognitive dissonance I experienced. What I experienced was poverty, hunger, garbage, and crumbling infrastructure not an environment which offered a compelling case for two hours of honest gratefulness.

Are you ready for Christmas? When most people ask that question, they are inquiring about shopping. Which reminds me, in case you are still struggling with what to get me, most anything from Bass Pro Shop will be fine or cash is always nice. Despite all the holiday hype, somewhere along the way, most Christians remember that we are celebrating the birth of Christ – the coming of Messiah! We seem to agree that Christ came but can’t quite work out why? Even the Apostle Paul’s explanations/illustrations of Christ’s work leave me with as many questions as answers. For example, I know that I was bought with the price of His precious blood, but from whom?

Click here to read Part One of “The Advent Onion”

Never Sit on any Committees or Cacti

The pastor search committee was having some difficulties and asked if I would be willing to sit in on their meetings. True to form and against my better judgment, I said yes. In our first meeting, we were reviewing resumes and having a high old time when one of the younger deacons pulled out a resume’ from a young man who seemed to be tailor made for the position. He was 33 years old and had thirty years of experience. He had two doctorates but didn’t want anyone to call him doctor. He was independently wealthy but had taken a vow of poverty. His average sermon was fifteen minutes and although he preached hard against sin, never hurt anyone’s feelings. He and his wife had been married ten years and had 2.5 children ages 7, 3, and .5. The pastor had enclosed a photograph of his family and they all looked like they had been cut out of GQ, LQ, CQ, and FQ (Fetus Quarterly) respectively. He loved working with the youth of the church but spent most of his 15-hour work-day visiting the elderly and sick. He would seek out the lost and un-churched but would always be available in the church office. He preferred cutting the church grass and doing the janitorial work because it helped to keep him humble. His references were impeccable with glowing recommendations from seminary professors, former employers, the current president and both houses of congress, democrats and republicans.

The Perfect Pastor – well almost

I might be stretching it a little bit but this guy really looked like an amazing man who loved the Lord and was sincerely seeking the right place to serve. I could tell that the young deacon who was presenting the resume looked as nervous as a one legged hen locked in a dog pound, and then it came out. The minister in question had been divorced. The deacon knew the minister’s story. It was one of those situations where he had married too young, too quickly, and two times. His first wife had left him for another man after less than a year.

To the deacon’s credit, he had done a thorough exposition of I Timothy 3:2, which is the passage that is usually used to argue that a man who has been divorced can’t be a pastor. The NIV translation of I Timothy 3:2 is

Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach

No problems, but the King James translation is:

A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach

Problem.

Our deacon/expositor had printed a copy of his notes for each of us. He explained that the phrase, “the husband of one wife” in Greek literally says “a one-woman man” and most scholars think that it is more a prohibition against a man with wandering eyes than a man with two marriages. In my opinion, he made his case as plain as a black rabbit hopping through the snow and most of the committee seemed duly impressed.

Here Comes the Judge

There was one elderly lady on the committee who had been on every pulpit committee since the turn of the twentieth century when she retired from the prison. This lady started shaking and rising to her feet saying over and over, “You mean to tell me, you mean to tell me…” It has been my experience when a person begins with, “You mean to tell me”, that they don’t mean for you to tell them anything. Once she got wound up, she blew in like hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi coast. She was speaking about ten words a second with gusts up to fifty. The best I could make out, she was against the idea of having a divorced pastor. She paused to get her breath and the chairman of the committee turned to me and said, “Let’s hear what Dr. Reid has to say about this.” I felt like a twenty point buck on opening day but forged on. I began to explain that the deacon was correct and that I was pretty sure if Paul had intended this to be a prohibition against divorced people, he certainly could have used language to make that clear. I began to explain the Greek phrase when our lady got her breath again. She shouted, “I don’t care what the Greek says, I care what the Bible says and it says right here in my King James Bible that a pastor should be the husband of one wife and you can’t be divorced and be the husband of one wife.” To reinforce her point, she sited several ministers, local and televised that agreed with her. She assured us that these were true men of God. What were we – chopped liver?

The entire committee was as cowed as a freezer full of beef and even the young deacon began to crawfish. I realized that it didn’t matter what was said at that point. She wielded enough power in the church to stir up real trouble if they presented this man as a candidate for pastor. The committee made it clear that they weren’t willing to do that. After she calmed a bit, the lady told of a time about 30 years earlier when they had a young feller fill in for a while. She said that everybody loved him and the church was growing like toadstools in a wet yard when they found out that he had been married before. She said, “We got rid of him quick, fast, and in a hurry cause this church wouldn’t stand for a divorced preacher then, and we won’t stand for it now.”

There are times that I experience something and am so flooded with emotions that I don’t know what I am really feeling, but that day, I knew exactly what I was feeling. I was sad. Now that I think about it, I was also afraid. Old women have always scared me. Okay, maybe I was little angry and disappointed but mostly sad with afraid running a pretty close second and frustration (did I mention frustration) a distant third. I digress. I was terribly, tragically, sad. I was sad for this woman and so many like her that had been in church all of her exceptionally long life and still didn’t know what it was all about. I was sad for the church that just might have been sent a pastor thirty years ago but a select few sent him away. He might have helped them earn a reputation in the community for something besides intolerance and achieve a net growth of more than .5 people per year.

I am open for people to interpret I Timothy 3:2 any way that they want to even if they conclude that divorced people aren’t supposed to be pastors. I just don’t want them to be happy about it. How would a Father feel if one of His sons was disqualified from working in the family business because of a mistake that he made? I have daydreamed about how I would like for the meeting to have gone. I would like for this powerful leader in the church to have responded with genuine enthusiasm, “Gentlemen, this sounds like wonderful news to me – almost too good to be true. I have been heartbroken by so many young men, gifted and called, who have made a mistake in a bad marriage and according to what I have been taught all my life, they have been disqualified from ministry. It has never felt right in my soul. Now I am going to have to pray about this and look into it further but it sounds to me like you have just given me a way to remain honoring to the authority of scripture and still not throw away so many fine ministers. Can we table this resume’ until our next meeting?”

Daydreams can’t change reality; otherwise, I would have a boat docked down at Lake Alatoona. In reality, this poor lady was angry that we would dare suggest that scripture couldn’t be used to deny the young minister a second chance.

I can’t help but wonder if she ever asked herself why, if Jesus came to set us free, was the church still putting people in bondage? I don’t know what was at the core of her Advent Onion but I’ll tell you this, it makes tears come to my eyes every time I try to peal it.

My Advent Onion Memory was about the church misusing scripture to hold someone in bondage to sin from which Jesus had already set him free. At the core of my advent onion you will find freedom. Jesus came to do the work that sets us free. The memory has caused me to again examine my life, my relationships, and the way that I represent Christ to those who know me. If they had to guess what advent means to me, I hope that a word like “freedom” comes to mind.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Peal Your Onion

Okay, it’s time to get out your own Advent Onion, along with a sharp knife and a box of tissues. Go for the core. Try to reduce your beliefs to a word. I suspect that there are a lot of really fine words that could be used, but which word best fits your understanding of Advent? Why did Jesus come? I know that this season will be enhanced for me as I dwell on the many ways that Christ has set me free. Near the top of my list will be: freedom from sin and its power over my life, freedom from the law, and freedom from the opinions of legalist old women.

Because of my Advent Onion Core, you might hear me singing a hymn that is not usually associated with Christmas. I don’t remember the entire hymn but this part is clearly and permanently etched in marble in my mind. I will never forget these words.

Free from the law, O happy condition

Jesus has bled and there is remission

Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon

Christ has redeemed us once for all (Bliss, P. P., 1925)

Freedom—now “that” is what Christmas is all about!

Join the Conversation

What is the core of your Advent Onion?

This Saturday before Christmas
I drove past malls with their flocks
of people swooping up stuff – red
velour blouses with bells, double
rich chocolates, musical snowmen –
to the quiet welcome of Villa de Matel.
I stole away for a secret celebration
with my Beloved, and womblike waiting
to imagine Mary’s startled willing
heart filled with so much to ponder.
The music there was silence, with
a persistent bass line sounding joy.
I feasted on the Word, rich with dreams
of angels that danced into my own nap.
Outside the sun lit up a lone tree’s red
leaves as the wind flashed their green linings.
He may well be at the mall now,
this incarnate One, calming anxious mother
hearts or warming bell ringers for the poor.
And I will soon enough return, but I need
this day to prepare my answer to all the
season’s inquiries, “Are you ready for Christmas?”
On this my holy Saturday, I do not wrestle hell but
escape it for a taste of heaven before my reentry
with Immanuel into the bustling world.

My high school choir director was a diminutive man who had a big vision for his students to learn some of the great pieces of classical music. One Advent he had us memorize and perform Bach’s Magnificat from Mary’s song in Luke 1.

I have a good friend who has made an interesting observation about the book of Isaiah[1].  Its 66 chapters parallel the 66 books of the Bible in at least one fascinating way. After the first 39 chapters of Isaiah and the first 39 books of the Bible, things dramatically change: In the 40^th division of each we meet Jesus, the anticipated Messiah, the One who will bring comfort and joy.

I was recently asked to write an endorsement for Phil Zylla’s new book, Virtue as Consent to Being: A Pastoral-Theological Perspective on Jonathan Edwards’s Construct of Virtue.  Phil is a pastor, poet, and scholar.  His book is a substantive treatment of virtue theory and its interface with pastoral theology.

What does this have to do with Advent, you ask?

“When we enter into periods of silence, we start to see things with greater clarity. We come to know ourselves, and get in touch with the deepest part of ourselves. That is our soul.”

Abbot Christopher Jamison

This week the Lyfe group at Bible Society (England and Wales) have been exploring the discipline of silence.  It was interesting that the eight of us all chose the same exercise—simply a common need for some simple R & R—or were we all in desperate need of an antidote to the head rush of caffeine-fuelled, busy, distracted, everyday living?

My home is quieter than it’s ever been. I say that, not knowing whether it’s true, but because it seems so. Our children are grown and gone. Our dog’s deaf, blind and sleeps most of the time. Plus, my wife and I don’t make a lot of noise. We begin most days silently praying together. Then we exchange kisses before heading into a busy day in a noisy world. Most evenings we arrive home from our work feeling satisfied and weary.