The way we decide

 Acts 1:1-17, 21-26

Things have been a little weird and intense for the disciples since Jesus was murdered by the state and came back from the dead. Judas has died by suicide.  The community has been pretty much in hiding.  Then the risen Lord started popping up places.  He’s kind of the same but different, both unrecognizable and completely familiar, both available and not. For a little over a month, he’s been showing up here and there, walking along with some of them down a road, coming through locked doors and eating fish, hanging out with them day after day and teaching again like before. And now, he has just literally vanished into the sky before their eyes.  
 
This weekend we celebrate the Ascension – the day Jesus disappears into the clouds and leaves the disciples staring up into the sky with their mouths hanging open. They can feel his absence where his presence once was. And yet he promises he will be there with them in a different way, guiding them nonetheless.
  
So now a new adjustment, a new assignment: Jesus said to Stay Put and Wait for the Holy Spirit, whatever that means.  That’s their job.  So that’s what they are doing. Constantly devoting themselves to prayer, it says, coming together, helping each other learn to trust that God is here now, and God will lead them into what is next. 
 
And then we are given a bizarre and delightful illustration of this trust in action. They are trying to decide who should replace Judas in their leadership.  And they have two good options before them, Justus, and Matthias, both followers of Jesus, who knew Jesus in the flesh, both men of integrity, both willing to serve. Whom should they choose?  
 
Do they make pros and cons list? Debate with Robert’s Rules of Order?  Launch campaigns and take a vote, the 120 or so of them?
 
No! They draw straws! They flip a coin, roll the dice, “cast lots.” They use a game of chance to take things out of human hands.  
 
There is nothing intrinsically spiritual or holy about this.  We don’t think flipping a coin at the beginning of a football game is asking God to choose which team should start. We don’t think God is involved when we play paper, rock scissors over who has to put the kids to bed.  Casting lots was just used by the soldiers two months before to divide up Jesus’ clothes among themselves while he hung dying on the cross, so it’s not like lot casting is some inherently God-seeking process.  But when it comes time for the followers of Jesus to pick a leader in witnessing to Christ’s resurrection, they roll the dice.
 
They don’t ask themselves WWJD – What would Jesus do if he were here?  Because Jesus is here!  He’s as real among them, among us, as when he walked the earth in the flesh. They’re learning to trust that this is so.  So why not ask Christ to pick and then flip a coin? 
 
The Ascension means that Jesus can’t be captured and boxed up, marketed, claimed, or relegated to the past as a venerated historical figure we make reference to but never address directly.  Jesus is risen and ascended.  Now the community has to learn how to live in the paradox of our faith: that Christ is not here but is HERE. They have to look for Christ, learn to be present to the presence of Christ, listen for the voice of Christ, in and through, and alongside one another. We can’t see him, we can’t touch him, and yet, when we are present with each other, acting with and for one another, Jesus Christ is right here in that space, energy, connection between us.  We are the body of Christ.
 
How do we hear God?  Sometimes it feels like a quiet little nudge that leads us just the little next step, or the wisdom that sinks into our soul when something in us says, “Yes. That is right.” But mostly, we hear God by listening together. By surrendering together.  Waiting for the Spirit to direct us. And then acting.  
And then surrendering and waiting again.
 
This way of discernment is brazenly different than the world’s way – which is fast and decisive.  Wayne Muller reminds us (in his book Sabbath), 
 
"The theology of progress forces us to act before we are ready. We speak before we know what to say. We respond before we feel the truth of what we know. In the process, we inadvertently create suffering, heaping imprecision upon inaccuracy, until we are all buried under a mountain of misperception. But Sabbath says, Be still. Stop. There is no rush to get to the end, because we are never finished. Take time to rest, and eat, and drink, and be refreshed. And in the gentle rhythm of that refreshment, listen to the sound the heart makes as it speaks the quiet truth of what is needed." 
 
We talked this week in catechesis class about trust – how trust is the core of it all. Our security in life or status with the divine not about cracking a code, earning a prize, or figuring out the rules. To be in relationship with a living God must begin with trust—that God is real, and that God wants to lead us all toward love, toward healing, toward forgiveness, toward righting wrongs, and bringing justice, and birthing hope right in the places of utter despair.  
 
So maybe God makes the coin flip one way and not the other.  God is certainly capable of that.  May we too have such trust in God.  
 
Or maybe God thinks it is cute that they are so intent on replacing Judas, as though having 12 disciples like Jesus had originally chosen when his ministry began, a reflection of the 12 tribes of Israel, is essential for what is to come. As though their structures and containers are vital. Of course they have no idea that just days from now that wild Holy Spirit is about to bust the gospel out of its confines and jumpstart it’s spread to the ends of the earth through witnesses who have never seen the human Jesus with their own two eyes, nor heard his voice speaking in a language they wouldn't understand anyway, but who will definitely hear the message their hearts recognize beyond all else, and see the risen Lord transform their very souls.  And they don't know it yet, but the 12 are actually the 120 of them, and about to become 3,000 in one day, and Matthias is never mentioned again in the bible.  
 
So perhaps when they cast lots God chooses for them.  Or maybe it doesn’t matter one way or another to God, but God appreciates their intention just the same.  God is with them even now, as they faithfully seek to do God’s will, and that in itself is beautiful and holy. Whether their decision has any effect on things or not, that they would surrender and seek is shaping them all the same.  
 
Their imaginations can’t begin to grasp what is to come, and so they faithfully make their decision, and then suddenly the whole landscape shifts, and then they will seek God’s direction for the next thing. What more faithful way to live is there than that?
 
We are not building a movement, standing up for values, or shoring up an institution. We are joining in the Kingdom of God. We are witnesses to resurrection, learning to recognize and share in the healing work of the living Christ that is happening right now.
 
Yesterday the youth cleaned out the sanctuary, or got started, at least. After 14 months of emptiness and clutter, regular dust and construction dust, and spiders gleefully given free reign, it was a big, big job, and the youth made a big dent in it. When they peeled down the images of the bible characters we began journeying with in Advent 2019, and unpinned the Psalm river hanging on the back wall from not last summer but the summer before that, I was struck by the ways we’ve grown in our own faithfulness and discernment.  There are things we thought mattered a great deal that turned out not to be important at all. And there are things we had no idea would be significant that have turned out to shape us considerably. 
 
We are not the same congregation we were when we last sang and prayed together in that space. Case in point, when we left the building we had only just discerned, after a year of prayer and listening, that our building was indeed part of our mission, and we would say Yes to the preschool.  Now we will return to their presence already among us.  And we ourselves are different. We have lost beloved members and gained beloved members.  Our ways of feeling connected have changed and, in many ways, even deepened.  
 
When the whole landscape shifted we never, ever could have imagined what was to come, so we had to seek God’s direction, surrender and wait for the Holy Spirit, and then act. And here we are again, on the cusp of another huge shift, a new adjustment.  And our imaginations can’t begin to foresee what is coming.  But as witnesses to resurrection, who know the power of the risen Lord to bring new life into our lives and our world, we will keep helping each other learn to trust that God is here now, and God will lead us into what is next.  And we will keep learning to recognize and share in the work of the living Christ that is happening right now. 

And what more faithful way is there to live than that?
 
Amen.
 

To keep listening and obeying

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Samuel

His whole entire life has been for one purpose – shepherding the people of Israel. Samuel is the prophet who speaks for God. Year after year he moves from tribe to tribe, arbitrating conflict, giving instruction from God, returning home occasionally to Ramah to judge the people, and this is how his life has gone, since he was quite young. 

God told Samuel to find Saul and make him King, so Samuel did. He counseled him and led him. And Saul – who was, by the way, the tallest and handsomest guy in all Israel, real king material – unites the tribes to fight against their enemies and they start winning some battles.  

Then Samuel, by now very old, figures his work here is done and throws himself a retirement party.  He gives a big speech, “I’ve led you since my youth and you begged for a king and now you have one. Hurrah. Is there anything I’ve done that I need to make right?” No, Samuel, you’ve been great. “OK, now remember who God is – and your crops are dry, you need rain? I’ll ask God to send rain.”  So he does, and God does, and the people are like, We get it, Samuel and God are tight. God is the one looking out for us, and we owe allegiance to God.  And they all said, Pray for us Samuel! and he was all, “Don’t worry, do right and honor the Lord, and you’ll be good. Peace out!”

But then Saul starts messing up. He gets impatient when Samuel is late to a sacrifice and does it himself.  God doesn’t take kindly to that. And Saul starts getting more and more sure of himself, and less and less willing to listen to what God is saying. His army is fighting battles on all fronts, and the successes are going to Saul’s head. 

Finally after overt disobedience to God’s commands, God has had it with Saul. God tells Samuel that God regrets making Saul king.  God regrets it.  (sidenote- God has regrets!).  

Saul is not the king God hoped he would be.  

When Samuel hears this he has a full on fit. He cries and rages at God all night.  

But God’s mind is made up. He’s done with Saul. 

And so, Samuel is pulled out of retirement and sent to anoint a new king of Israel. 

Today is our annual meeting – in this, our 98^th year, we’ll gather look back at the year that has been and ahead at what is coming.  We’re deliberately in a year of questions that began in September, asking things like, What does God want with us in the coming decade? Will it include this building, and if so, in what way?  Will it include partnerships with other churches, and if so, in what way?  

Neuroscientists tell us we are wired to give 10x more attention to negative information than positive. It was a matter of human survival, to watch out for danger. But it also means we instinctively gather warnings and worries and predict doom.  In life we mostly think about what could go wrong and try to prevent it.  

 Samuel did that himself.  And he was not wrong to – he could have been killed for what God told him to do.  While they were at war with other nations, he essentially is sent to betray the king he had crowned, mentored and advised, to anoint a new king, years in advance, with no next step in sight.  

But Samuel does it.  God leads and Samuel trusts.  He does the thing in front of him – even if he can’t see how it will pan out down the road. He listens and obeys God.

In my experience, this is most often how God works. God sees down the road, we see just the next step.  And in the midst of it, we imagine all the bad that could happen, but God asks us to take the step in front of us and trust.  

So we keep trying to listen to God, and stay open to whatever God directs us to do, and trust that it will lead us where God wants us to go. 

Our task is to listen and obey.

Ok, great! Let’s do it! 

Wait, what God is directing us to do? 

How do we know the next step God is asking us to take?

I’m going to wager that for most of us it’s not clear cut like it was for Samuel – Go to this place and tell them these words…  It’s not this guy, not this one either.  He’s the one!  

 So how do we hear God?  

How do we listen and obey? 

We start by practicing noticing.  It looks like this:

When we ask at our meeting, What have I loved this year?  That’s not just nostalgia, or even celebration.  We are doing the deeper work of noticing – listening for what God is doing.  We are watching for patterns, learning to recognize what is from God, finding out how to sense the next steps when they are asked of us. We are lifting up the moments of joy, connection, aliveness -  those are indicators of God’s activity. They point us to our purpose. 

When we ask, What was difficult this year? It’s not just to complain or air our grievances– it’s to pay attention. Where were the places of discomfort that challenged us and helped us grow? Or, what were our missteps? How did we ignore or overlook what God was calling us to?  

This noticing - we do this together.  It takes all of us to hear God’s voice.  We need all our different perspectives and experiences.  We need to listen to each other, and not be afraid to speak up. That’s what we believe as Presbyterians, that we hear God better together; this life of faith is not a solo act. 

In our new members class this week, we talked about how, as a congregation, we have to constantly be adapting – there’s no setting it in motion and coasting.  But there wasn’t for Israel either, or for Samuel, or for David, as we’ll see next time.  Because the point of being church together – the point of life! - isn’t to reach somewhere, achieve something and be done.  The point is to stay connected to God along the way.  To live faithfully and fully.  To love one another. 

This is ongoing, this is right now, and then right now, and then right now.  

To do this it’s vital to stop on purpose to look back together and ask, Where have we come from? What have we learned? How have we grown more connected to God? More connected to each other?  More invested in loving this world?  

This little church will keep changing: new diagnoses, new homes, new babies, new losses, new jobs, new challenges, new hurdles - the needs among us keep changing, the needs of the world keep changing, the needs of our neighbors keeps changing.  We are not trying to figure it out so we can arrive and be done.  We are trying to stay connected to God, each other and our purpose, so we keep on changing as life keeps on changing.

Samuel is an old man. Anointing David is his last prophetic act.  (He does come back briefly as a ghost, but for his life’s work- this is it).  He thought he’d achieved it with Saul, gotten them somewhere, achieved something, and that wasn’t the case. Now he anoints this kid and has to trust that when he’s gone God will continue to lead them. And trust that his life was good, and his was purpose fulfilled not by arriving, but by staying connected to God and loving the people all along the way.  

Because this isn’t Samuel’s, or Saul’s story, or David’s story, or Israel’s either. It’s God’s story – the story of God’s provision and care and faithfulness, and how in the midst of it, people keep finding their way back to their true place with God and each other.  God keeps coming, keeps blessing, keeps calling – join me, be with me in this, let me use you to bless the world.

So we keep listening and obeying.

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 


(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)

To trust and be ready

I am an impatient person.  And it turns out healing takes time. 

So do things like gestation.  And discernment.  And transformation.  

Three weeks ago I had surgery on my foot.  A bone spur shaved down, arthritis cleaned out, stitches and a bandage, two weeks in a Velcro shoe and lots of limping.  I was a picture-perfect patient the first week, less so the second.  I wanted it to be all-better a week ago.  I’m realizing it may be a couple of months. 

I am restless and irritable with impatience.

Our little church is in a weird time. 

Moving highs and baffling lows.  Dropping numbers and flagging energy, right alongside amazing connections, flashes of rich and glorious life and glimmers of potential, though we maybe give more attention to the fearful things.  

Last week I was expressing frustration and concern to a friend who teaches at a seminary in another state.  She was on lunch break from conference with clergy, and when I finished talking she told me that just an hour before she had asked the question, “What in the church today is giving you hope?” And someone answered, of all things, "Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church.”  

Having been with us for years before moving away, she smiled, and said to them, “I know that church!” And then she'd told them what she thought had characterized us: we lived out of a spirit of abundance instead of a mindset of scarcity. 

Hearing her say this felt like being plunged into a warm bath.  Right…abundance. God's abundance. I had momentarily forgotten. I’d let the low-grade fever of anxiety lingering among us infect me with the mindset of scarcity, and I was maybe even contagious, infecting others.

Nearly a year ago I returned from my three month sabbatical – and while I was away the congregation lived very thoughtfully into sabbatical themselves, pondering what made them tick and how God meets us, as they did the work of the church together without their pastor.  

But since I’ve been back, it’s been a strange year, a strained year, a year of fatigue and flailing.  Our old committee structures have ceased to function, and we haven’t figured out what structure will work best to facilitate the unpredictable life and ministry that is ebbing and flowing within us, bubbling up some places, draining dry others. 

It’s as though the sabbatical broke us – that three months of functioning radically differently accidentally upset things just enough that we can’t seem to regain equilibrium.  The last edifice of effectiveness as the 90-something year old, mainline, relatively stable, reliably institutional, obligation-driven, well-oiled machine we’d always been is collapsing, and we’re yet to figure out what we are now or will be. We’re watching the endowment fund trickle away, and we keep asking God and each other what’s next and getting tiny, teeny answers, instead of a great big comforting picture.

Here’s how broken down it feels: We don’t even have a clerk of session. 

(If you’re Presbyterian you'll know what this means).

In a congregation with nearly a century old tradition of people stepping up and doing things for the greater good, sacrificing themselves to roles they couldn’t escape without quitting the whole church, not a single person has answered the call to be clerk of session in over three months of asking.  And they’re saying no to other things too!  And in a funny way, I’m proud of them.  Everyone is contributing, and nobody is taking on something they don’t feel called to.  It’s very healthy of them, actually.  But let’s be honest, it’s hard to run an effective, mainline, relatively stable, reliably institutional, obligation-driven, well-oiled machine without the people willing to be taken advantage of, willing to do the work out of duty instead of joy, willing to answer to compulsion instead of calling.

But to switch metaphors suddenly, today a very wise person among us cheerfully named it for me when she said, grinning at me in a way I can only describe as "cheekily," 

“Sabbatical dumped us out of the boat!” 

And so it did.  

We’re in the water now. 

Flailing and floating, trusting and forgetting, bobbing along and wondering what it all means. 

Sometimes it’s restful and floaty, with views of the stars and a sense of God’s great glory.  Occasionally it’s fun and splashy.  But it’s also sometimes scary and overwhelming, and we’re exhausted from treading water and keeping our heads up.  Most of all it’s irritating and frustrating, and we just keep grasping toward the boat, bewildered and wishing we could figure out how to climb back in. 

But if we’re learning anything on our journey through scripture these days, it’s that the water changes us – gives us new identity and all that.  And if we’re really being honest, the truth is, the boat was crumbling and leaking, kind of sinking even, and any security it gave us was a short-lived illusion.

So here’s the hard and good news I am telling to myself and my courageous, creative, faithful congregation: This is God’s church, people, not mine, not ours; it doesn’t belong to those who went before or even to those yet to come.  It’s not ours to preserve or protect.  It’s God’s.  

Always and securely, we are God’s.

And the boat is gone. We are in the water, it's true.  

And God is up to something, that's true too.  The Holy Spirit is for sure messing with us.  And these kinds of things – discernment, healing, transformation and all that good stuff - they take time. 

So as I limp tenderly through my days, breathing for patience as my foot heals and gets stronger, I am hopeful.
And I am praying that I can be patient and attentive and brave.  I want to accompany these amazing people with vulnerability and courage.  I want to remember God's abundance and be filled with wonder, and I want to trust and be ready.

Here we are God!  What are you going to do with us?

A Community of Discernment

At the beginning of April, I got to share a bit of the story of the community where I pastor, Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church, at the NEXT Church National Gathering.  Here is a video link to my presentation.