Middletown United Methodist Church

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. Many times the council has information that the individual may not and they have the benefit of having discussed whatever the issue may be in some detail before coming to a conclusion.

The question is: are we willing to put the good of the Church ahead of ourselves? If we remember our membership vows, the answer ought to be yes. Jesus was faced with the dilemma of whether or not to place himself above the good of others. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he struggled with the desire to avoid the torture and death that was coming his way. He would have preferred to not be imprisoned, betrayed, deserted, whipped, humiliated, and crucified. Instead, he put the needs of humankind before his own: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22: 42) I think these are the most important words ever spoken. Without Jesus’ determination to accept what we call The Passion; without his death on the cross and rising from the tomb, all of us would be lost.

How sad that in the Church, where we bear the name of the One who gave everything for us all, that we still sometimes behave selfishly. Of course, we’re not Jesus and we are going to fall short of the mark at times. That’s when we ask for forgiveness and try again. That’s when we remember what Jesus did for us and recommit ourselves to living in community with one another in loving, self-sacrificing service.

Grace and Peace, Glenn Ferguson