Middletown United Methodist Church

Dear Members and friends,

I have told you, now and again, about some of the highlights of journeying in the Holy Lands. I have mentioned primarily the big things, the beautiful things, or the highly symbolic things.  One of the small things; one of the details that you might notice as you travel around the central hill country and throughout the Judean Wilderness is that there are no fences to mark off ownership of property; at least, not many. That has partly to do with laws and customs concerning ownership of the land but it is also about the nomadic heritage of the people. Many of those who live in the countryside have a Bedouin background or are themselves still Bedouins. These are the people of the land who live in tents and who move around the region with their herds and flocks, following the grazing grass. In such a society, things like boundary lines and fences become irrelevant. At most, you’ll see, from time to time, small piles of rocks that mark the edge of one person’s acreage and the beginnings of another’s. Even those are largely informal nods to convention and have little or no meaning for day to day living.

Fences are primarily the instruments of those who have a fair amount of material things they want to protect or who have a modern and western sensibility about the ownership of property. Somehow, this world that God has entrusted to us has become an asset that is “ours.”We do what we think we have to do in order to keep what belongs to us. Don’t worry; this isn’t a treatise on the evils of private ownership coming from someone who owns no property. In fact, we, as United Methodists, acknowledge the right of individuals to own property. Article 15 of the United Methodist Doctrinal Standards in the 2008 Discipline reads: “We believe God is the owner of all things and that the individual holding of property is lawful and is a sacred trust under God. Private property is to be used for the manifestation of Christian love and liberality, and to support the Church’s mission in the world. All forms of property, whether private, corporate, or public, are to be held in solemn trust and used responsibly for human good under the sovereignty of God.” (¶103)

So owning things, owning property is just fine. The problems arise out of our skewed understanding about the relative value of the things we own. We create fences and safes and burglar alarms in order to keep what we have.

Dear members and friends,

Now that Memorial Day has passed and summer has begun we would do well to remember a few things.  One has to do with our attendance at worship.  Of course the summer weather and the end of school for most necessarily means a change of family schedules.  The church schedule also changes.  Beginning with June 27, we will go from two services to one service that will be held at 10:00 a.m.  As we did last year we will be alternating traditional worship and praise services, beginning with praise on the 27^th. Sunday School will be held during the summer with the children being dismissed from worship at about 10:15 to go to what we think will be a fun and nurturing program for them. Celia Cummins will lead Summer Sunday School using a curriculum called The Gospel According to Dr. Seuss by Rev. James W. Kemp. Celia writes:

Come one, Come all,

We're going to have a ball!

Reading the stories of Dr. Seuss to please us,

And learning the lessons of Our Savior Jesus.

We'll read, talk, laugh, and have fun,

Being with our friends and following The Son!

It will all happen in the Double Classroom in the education wing. Everyone welcome K-6^th grade.

The Christian’s need to worship God and to have Christian education doesn't take time off during the summer.  Obviously our schedules have an impact on what we do and where we are but it is important that we give priority to our commitments to God.  For the person of faith these ought not to be optional, to be tended to if and when it is convenient.  Bearing the cross of Christ is not a matter of convenience but of obedience.  Beyond that, we need the ongoing fellowship of being with our church family.

Dear Members and friends,

Some of the men have just come back to Middletown from our weekend away at the Keswick Retreat Center. We had a rewarding time of fellowship and fruitful discussions and devotions around the theme of “Connections.” To give a framework for our time, we first watched the film “A River Runs Through It.” The storyline suggested several sub-themes: Identifying ourselves with each other and God; forgiveness; and patience and waiting for God’s timing. These were all tied to how we are connected to God and one another as people of faith in a nurturing community.

As I have been thinking about it since, I have turned back to a book titled “Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations,” by Robert Schnase. In the book, the writer lists radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk taking mission and service, and extravagant generosity as the hallmarks of healthy and dynamic congregations. In the section on Passionate Worship, Schnase writes:

“Vibrant, fruitful, growing churches offer Passionate Worship that connects people to God and to one another. Lives shaped by God’s Spirit become the nucleus for congregations with extraordinary warmth, graciousness, and belonging.” I can’t help but be reminded that worship, at its best, is relational; it connects us. I’ve long known that this is the case but it is good to have it reaffirmed now and again.

What do we do when we come together for worship? The Worship Team and the Praise Band work with me to try to create opportunities for this touch to take place in every service. What I’d like all of us to consider is how we participate in the worship as congregants. Each person has a part to play in the service. Do we come ready to worship? Are we focused on God, putting aside other concerns for the time being that we might open ourselves to the presence and work of the Spirit? If not, we’ll have a less than rewarding experience. A vessel cannot be filled that is already full of something else and if we come with our own agendas to worship there will be no room in our hearts and minds for God.

Dear Members and Friends,

Recently, my wife and I have had the opportunity to see performances of two operas, two very different operas. One we saw at the Met, the other was broadcast on PBS’s series, “Great Performances.” The former was Verdi’s “Attila” about the conquest of the Roman Empire in its death throes by Attila the Hun. The latter was “The Tales of Hoffmann “(Les Contes d'Hoffmann) by Jacques Offenbach. My purpose in mentioning them is not to give you a detailed review of the performances; however, I do want to mention the contrasting styles of the productions for a moment. “Attila’ was staged in a very uninvolving way; the performers barely related to each other as they appeared and sang. They rarely interacted with each other except from a distance and though I realize this is a style of production favored by some, I personally don’t care for it. It left the audience as uninvolved as were the characters on stage. On the other hand, “The Tales of Hoffmann” was opera as it should be (at least as I like it). The characters’ interactions and the intensity of their relationships were powerful and it seemed to drive the performers’ singing.

All of this is simply to illustrate the difference between acting separately and with only tenuous connections compared to acting in concert and with unity of vision and purpose. The Church at its best is like the latter. We are not simply a collection of people with loosely defined goals and values acting separately toward some unspecified future. We are the Body of Christ, a unified community of believers whose goal is making disciples and transforming the world. We may have our own ideas about how things should be done in the Church and by whom, but for the good of the body and the Kingdom of God, we must be willing to accept that sometimes things aren’t going to be the way we’d like them to be. In addition, that has to be okay with us. There may be hymns you don’t like on a given Sunday, but perhaps they speak to someone else. As the body of Christ, we should give thanks that they have meaning for someone else. A decision of the Administrative Council may be one with which we don’t agree but our theology of the Church is that the collective discernment of the council usually has a better chance of being what God wants for the Church than the wisdom or desires of any one individual. More...

Dear Members and friends,

In spite of the fact that, as of this writing, we’re buried in snow, March is upon us and with it comes the promise of Spring and warmer weather. This is also the period of the Christian year called Lent. The forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter is meant to be a time of reflection, prayer, meditation, and worship. The goal is to prepare ourselves for Easter, so that when we celebrate the Resurrection, we may do so with hearts that are open and able to receive the great gift of Eternal Life in Christ.

While normally we do not go to Socrates for insight into the Christian life, one of his most well known quotations is this: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I think Socrates is right about that. If we do not regularly take inventory of where we are and where we might be or of who we are and who we might be, we cannot grow. For the Christian, this takes daily prayer and meditation, Scripture reading and study, regular worship and fellowship with other believers, fasting and self-denial.

These make up the core of the disciplines of Lent and without them we would not be ready for the Resurrection celebration and the ongoing presence of Christ within us. World renowned author Henri Nouwen makes a comment similar to Socrates’ in his book, “Can You Drink the Cup?” when he writes, “a life that isn’t reflected upon is not worth living. It belongs to the essence of being human that we contemplate our life, think about it, discuss it, evaluate it, and form opinions about it. Half of living is reflecting on what is being lived.” This small book by Nouwen is one I recommend to you, especially in this Lenten season. The title comes out of Jesus question to a few of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane; “can you drink the cup that I drink?” (See Matthew 20: 20-23) It was an invitation to them to examine their devotion and commitment to Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

The answer was, of course, no. They thought they could and even said they could, but the disciples were not prepared for what was to come in the days ahead. They didn’t understand who Jesus really was and they didn’t accept his mission. When the time came for them to demonstrate their faith and readiness to follow, they fled.

The goal toward which we move is to be like Jesus. That is the aim of the Christian life. It takes time for the transformation from helpless sinner to devoted follower to take place. It also takes practice.

Dear Members and Friends,

The story of the Christian faith as well as the story of our roots in Judaism is one of victory over seemingly impossible odds. From Moses’ duel with the Pharaoh and his magicians to Gideon’s unlikely conquest of the Midianites to David’s vanquishing Goliath; to Jesus’ own victory over death, the biblical narrative is one that inspires hope. Of course, the very definition of faith includes the belief that things are going to be better even when there is no rational reason to think they will; especially when there is no reason to think they will.

As of the 8^th of October, I will have been a pastor for thirty-one years and the churches I have served have seen their share, and sometimes more than their share of difficult times. There have been tragic deaths to children and youth. There have been marriages rent asunder that were seemingly happy. There have been sudden and devastating losses of income for families. There have been those who were struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol. All of these things and more have been a part of the tapestry of the years. My churches were not, of course, unique in this regard. Every congregation goes through hard times sooner or later because misfortune is simply a part of life.

The challenge, as always, is in how we respond to the trials and tribulations of life as individuals and as a community of faith. There a number of options. We could choose surrender; just throw up our hands in defeat and simply fade away. We could make just enough concessions to the circumstances to get by but without any expectation that things will improve. We could make some radical changes in how we are constituted as a church and in how we do ministry that would enable us to continue and thrive but in a way that would break with our history and tradition. Or, we could solve the root causes of our current troubles by taking an honest look at ourselves to discern where we are strong and doing well and also to discern where we are in need of God’s transforming power.

One church I served some time ago took the congregational inventory that is one of the initial steps in the Natural Church Development program that is available through our conference.  The inventory measures eight areas that define a healthy church. The basic principle is that if a church is strong in a majority of these areas, it will most likely thrive.

Our former bishop Alfred Johnson used to say that churches are called by God to unity, not uniformity. It’s a way of saying that it is inevitable that we are going to have differences, but that we should NOT allow those differences to divide us. We are one in Christ. My experience, and I’m sure the experience of many, has been that this way of being the Church has not always been realized. Too many times over the years I have seen members of churches engaged in mean-spirited quarreling, shouting down those who disagree with them at meetings, talking behind peoples’ backs in the parking lot or elsewhere, and generally behaving as if they’d never heard of the concept of being one in Christ.

Some of you have heard me tell the story of one man in a church that slammed his hand down on the table around which we were having a trustees’ meeting and (finger pointed in my face) threatened to leave the church if we painted the doors red. I’ve seen fistfights at Administrative Council meetings (twice!) There have been numerous instances in which people threatened to reduce their giving or that they would leave the church, or call the district superintendent if they didn’t get their way. One wonders what they listen to on Sunday morning…

Unity in the body of Christ is essential for a healthy and vital congregation. Without it, the morale of the people erodes and the presence of the Spirit becomes difficult to discern. (It’s not that the Spirit isn’t present; it always is. The problem is that when we are divided it becomes nearly impossible for us to collectively recognize that presence.)

We are not going to agree on every question or issue that arises out of the life and work of the church. While we try to arrive at a consensus (that consensus includes God) about as much as we can, there are frequently going to be times when we think differently, feel differently, and hear God differently. Those are the times when the true character of our church is revealed.