Putting Flesh on our Faith

Recently, I posted the following comment in an online chat group of parish pastors:
“The difficulties in moving from seminary to parish, from classroom to ministry, from in the church to outside the church - are all brought on from a failure to realize two inter-related things. 1) The Bible and the church's statements of doctrine are NOT the good news of God active in the world - they are words about the good news. We get hung up in words and forget that the words are about true events of a God who is active deep into our lives. Creation, Covenant, Exodus, Promised Land, Exile, Return, Birth, Life, Cross, Resurrection; all these are words about actual involvements of God in the life of the world.

#2) - We are too long on being conversational about the faith and too short on being incarnational of the faith; the call upon us is to live the story out, not sit inside and talk the story to death.”

I ended the post by saying I was going to think about this some more. It received a lot of “likes” and several comments, most of which were to the effect that I had got it right the first time and should not overthink it. Alas, I am an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator (look it up on Wikipedia) and I am constitutionally incapable of not overthinking things. So here are some more thoughts on the subject.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who pointed out the difference between 1) looking at a map of the Amazon River and 2) actually taking a trip to Brazil and traveling up the same river. Too often, we pore over the map without ever plunging into the river of life with God.

Soren Kirkegaard wrote about two young lovers, one English, the other German, who met on the beach in France where they spoke to one another in high school French. They returned home and soon the English young man received a letter from the young woman, written in her native German. He laboriously translated it using a dictionary and a grammar. Kirkegaard points out that it is only because of his personal experience with the girl that the young man bothers to translate it at all, and it is through the actual experience of knowing her that the letter itself has meaning that only the young man understands.

So it is with our Bibles and Prayer Books; we only bother with them and truly understand them because of some encounter with or hunger for that mysterious holiness that lies behind and beyond them.

In recent years there has been a lot of talk among church growth types about how important it is for the church to move from trying to be “attractional,” to being “missional.” Attractional means trying to get people in the world to come to you, missional means being purposeful about going into the world.

I believe being missional is the same thing as being “incarnational.” We are called to put flesh on our faith in the midst of other people’s lives. That is the reason Jesus built no buildings and started no organizations and spent his time in the streets and by the lakes and in the dining rooms and backyards of notorious sinners.

Now, we are not Jesus and we need a place to meet together with others who are attempting to follow Christ. Even Jesus went to synagogue every week and took a community of folk around with him that evolved into the church, the body of Christ in the world.

It is those words, “in the world,” that we should pay attention to. Each congregation is called to plan its ministry in such a way that it is focused more on the community and less on itself –and each individual believer is called to be what Luther called a“little Christ” to other people in our everyday lives; to be kind and generous and forgiving at work and at the store and in the neighborhood and with our families. It is in those spaces that we can really become “the truth that we confess,” the body of Christ "in the world,”

Peace, Delmer

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

"Put not your trust in princes" the psalmist tells us. (Psalm 146:3) In the modern world, "princes" applies to presidents and governors, members of the US Congress and state legislatures. The Bible tells us to obey the government and the Book of Common Prayer encourages us to pray for government leaders, but neither says we should "trust" them, at least not in the final, ultimate sense we are invited to trust in God.

The Psalmist reminds us that our final and lasting hope is in God and God's goodness alone - all else falls far short. As Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever devised; except every other form we have created." The last several year's sharp political divisions in this country are frustrating to all of us, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and whatnot alike, and they are a reminder of the truth of Churchill's observation.

Whatever else we can learn from these past few decades in our nation's history, we can at least all agree that they serve to teach us that there is nothing new under the sun (check out Ecclesiastes 1:9 on that one), and that whoever is in charge of the governing of others - be they emperors, kings, tsars, princes, presidents or members of congress - they are all human, and therefore they are all fallible, sinful human beings.

Notice, I didn't say they are evil, I said they are sinful. There is a difference. One can be sinful without being intentionally evil. To be evil is to set out to harm others for one's own pleasure or benefit and to feel no pity for those whom you might hurt in the process. Being sinful is often much more complicated. We may set out to do good, but some combination of an inability to control the outcomes of our actions, mixed in with a lack of humility about either the limits of our knowledge or the self-centeredness of our desires creates a recipe for disaster. So we see posturing, and the drawing of lines in the sand, and finger-pointing from grownups acting like first-graders arguing over the slide at recess.

As I write this in late September 2022, I hope and pray that somewhere in the leadership of our governments there are people with the wisdom to lead us safely through these perilous times. In the meantime, I am reminded that while I will vote for, pray for, and to some extent hope for, the goodness and wisdom of politicians; I will always and only put my eternal trust in God and God alone.

Peace,
Delmer

Crossing Lines to Spread the Gospel

There is an almost unique situation in our local Episcopal and Lutheran churches. Messiah Episcopal Church in Murphy has a Lutheran minister, the Rev. Dr. Maggie Rourke; and the Lutheran church in Andrews has an Episcopal pastor, Father Horace Free. And Good Shepherd Episcopal Church has a Lutheran pastor hanging around as Theologian in Residence - who also recently served as the interim pastor of a Presbyterian Church. To many of us this ministerial jumping across denominational lines feels like something very new. In a book on Lutheran church history in North Carolina I discovered it isn’t so new after all.

In the mid 1700’s a young man named Robert Miller was born in Scotland. Although the state Church of Scotland was Presbyterian, there was also a small Episcopal denomination in Scotland, derisively called by the Scots, “The English Church.” The Miller family were members of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Young Robert was very religious, so much so that he was an active participant in the Methodist Society weekly meetings in his local Episcopal parish and became a certified Methodist Lay Preacher. He intended to go to University to study for the ministry but an economic downturn in the country led him to emigrate to America with his family. Not long after they arrived, the Revolution broke out and he served in the Continental Army. After the war, he settled as a farmer in western North Carolina, in what is now Lincoln County, northwest of Charlotte. There he became active in White Haven Church, an Episcopal parish whose priest had left for England during the war. The congregation’s situation was dire: they had no priest and there was no Episcopal bishop or even a diocese in North Carolina to provide them one. On the plus side, the local Lutheran church worshiped in German and the younger people in that church wanted to worship in English so they came to White Haven for services. Most of the White Haven church members had been active in the Methodist Society before the war, but they didn’t want to join the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church, preferring to remain Episcopalians. So, when they found out young Mr. Miller was a lay preacher, they persuaded him to lead worship and preach.

All was well for a while, until the congregation began to yearn for communion more frequently than the occasional visits of a wandering priest or Lutheran minister, and for someone to baptize their babies. Though the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA had been formed, there was still no bishop or diocese in North Carolina, so the good people of Lincoln County hit upon a very practical plan - they petitioned the North Carolina Ministers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church to ordain Robert Miller. And the six Lutheran pastors meeting together in Concord NC in 1794 agreed to do so, writing in German on the back of his ordination certificate, “We hereby ordain Robert Miller to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Episcopal Church;” a very interesting choice of words. Pastor Miller spent the next 24 years serving a number of Lutheran congregations as pastor, well as several years as Synod President (Bishop). When the Episcopalians got organized in North Carolina in 1820, Robert Miller was ordained as an Episcopal priest and served among them for another 15 years.

Why did the Lutherans of North Carolina ignore all rules and precedent to ordain a Methodist lay preacher as an Episcopal priest? Because it seemed to them, at the time, the right thing to do under the circumstances for the sake of the gospel. In Lutheran terms, it was an “emergency decision,” bending the rules when to do otherwise would deprive people of the Gospel. They took seriously the idea that people needed the preached Word and the celebration of the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion in order to live; that these things are as necessary to the life of the soul as air to breathe and food to eat and water to drink are to the life of the body. They looked at the situation and decided that ordaining Robert Miller was the only way these essential needs of the people of White Haven Church in Lincoln County, NC could be met.

In 1998, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America finally caught up to the far-sighted wisdom of the Metho/Lutho/palians of Lincoln County. Our two church bodies entered into CALLED TO COMMON MISSION - an agreement that clearly stated it was created to make it easier to find and share clergy in places and situations where people would be deprived of the gospel without it.

I invite us to do two things. 1) Celebrate and pray for our sister congregations in Cherokee County as they move forward in mission and ministry in these excitingly creative circumstances. 2) Open ourselves to the leadership of the Holy Spirit as it invites us to think creatively about what other “emergency measures” we might take to make sure everyone around us hears and experiences the Good News of God’s love for us in Jesus who is the Christ.

Peace, Delmer