Life is short and…

Yesterday’s church service opened with a prayer which asked that God will increase in us true religion. That phrase “true religion” catches my attention each year when it turns up on Sundays at the end of August. I wonder what it means. The phrase struck me in a special way this year, as those of us who represent organized religion seem besieged by grim statistics and institutional failures. When people share with me that they don’t participate in organized religion because the church is filled with hypocrites, I can only say guilty as charged.

A recent case in point emerged last week from the hacking of the website AshleyMadison, online facilitation of extramarital affairs, with over 124 million visits per month this year. I read from a number of sources, including Christianity Today, that 400 pastors of many denominations would be tendering resignations yesterday because their contact information showed up on this website. I don’t know if any or all those resignations happened, but as I read these articles describing the transgressions, I noted the tagline for the AshleyMadison website: “Life is short. Have an affair.”

It reminded me of other quotes I’ve heard beginning with the words “Life is short.” As I puzzled about the phrase “true religion”, it occurred to me that what we add to the statement: “Life is short” is a kind of religious statement, a theological, ethical, philosophical affirmation, perhaps even a creed. Our sense of the implications of the shortness of life provides a way to talk about what we value, what we hope for, how we wish for our lives to unfold, what we’ll do with the time we’re given. It is a way of talking about our vision of true religion. “Life is short. Have an affair.” is one such statement. But there are others.

For a number of years, as I have had the privilege of presiding at the eucharist, I have concluded church services with a blessing that I first heard from Marcus Borg, but which I gather traces back to a French priest in the 1800s. It seems to touch people when they hear it, as it touched me when I first heard it. I can see people in church writing it down as I say it. It goes like this:

Life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind, and God’s blessing be with you always.

This blessing notes the holy implications of the shortness of life. It calls us with some urgency to be of service, to love, to show concern for the other. It’s a call to kindness.

So try this experiment. Start with the phrase: Life is short. What are the implications for you for this Monday morning, with this day you’ve been given, which will be over shortly? What are the implications for all the Mondays that will follow? (None of us know how many there will be.) Chances are, the way you build on those three words will say a lot about your your vision of true religion.

– Jay Sidebotham 

For more thoughts on true religion, read the New Testament letter of James, which includes the following: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world (James 1:27).

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

There’s a painful privilege that comes with being a pastor. It’s the opportunity to walk with people through the waning moments of life. In those moments, over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to witness remarkable trust and courage, love and hope. Those moments are often quite private. But not always. The world was welcomed into one of those moments when former President Jimmy Carter held a news conference to talk about his diagnosis and prognosis, which could hardly be called good news. I could write a lot about him and what he had to say. In the coarse conversation of our current political climate, he provides a different model of public persona, thanks be to God.

But this morning I want to focus on his answer when asked about his regrets. He spoke about the failed hostage rescue and how he subsequently lost reelection. I’ve read enough of his biography to know that the failure to secure a second term was a great disappointment. The days after he left the White House were depleting and depressing. But in his news conference, he said that if he had won a second term, if he had been a success in the ways most people regard success, he would not have started the Carter Center, which has had a great healing impact on the world. From behind that news conference desk, he acknowledged that in hindsight, he would prefer the path of the Carter Center to the path of a second term in the White House. The loss opened the way to something better. But I’d bet he wouldn’t have known that the morning after the election in 1980.

Think of the biblical character Joseph, of technicolor raincoat fame. He was sold into slavery by his brothers, then imprisoned under false accusation in Egypt. There were any number of moments when disappointment and betrayal would spell defeat. And he had started out with such a bright future. It was not until years later that he could take a look in the spiritual rearview mirror and see providence. In the poignant scene when he meets his brothers who had treated him with cruel intention, he is able to say to them: “You meant it to me for evil. God meant it for good.” In the way that President Carter has led efforts to bring health care to parts of the world that never had it, Joseph’s circuitous journey meant the salvation of his own people, and other nations, from starvation. Who knew?

I’m not saying this happens all the time. But it happens enough to make us think about the possibilities that might unfold, the good that might just come out of the challenges we face. It may be that this Monday morning, you face a challenge or defeat or failure that seems definitive. Maybe you feel like you made a bad choice, even a stupid one, and you can’t forgive yourself. If so, offer that challenge or defeat or failure to the one we call redeemer.

It may be that this Monday morning you can take a look in that spiritual rearview mirror and see that providence was at work. If so, offer thanks for the ways that transformation has happened. Maybe even share that with some one, by way of encouragement.

Below, find a favorite quote from Phillips Brooks, a great Episcopal preacher (no, that is not an oxymoron). You may have heard it from me on a previous Monday, but it bears repeating. It talks about how God uses all of our experiences, indeed redeems them. Maybe you already know that to be true. Maybe in the thick of it, you need a reminder that God is in the business of redemption.  I’ve seen it happen. Dead ends can become thresholds.

– Jay Sidebotham

You must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing. -Phillips Brooks

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

Saints serve.

For a number of years, I was privileged to travel with a group of pilgrims to Honduras for an annual August mission trip. We traveled to work on one of several clinics run by a holy ministry called Siempre Unidos. This Episcopal effort aids people with AIDS in a country where the stigma is strong, treatment is rare, diagnosis is devastating. We learned a lot. We received more than we gave. But that’s how the gospel works. The members of our motley group had many gifts, but construction skills were not at the top of the list, in most cases. So we honored the Hippocratic Oath and pledged to do no harm. We worked hard. We tried to leave the place better than we found it. We also knew that the Honduran workmen laboring alongside of us would repair (or redo) the work we did each night after we left. We realized through a translator that they regarded our fumbling work with both mystery and mirth. They taught us about grace.

Our mission group made our best offering, despite limited skills. We traveled in the name of Jesus. We began each day with Morning Prayer. And because we went the same week each year, we remembered a series of saints who show up in this particular week in mid-August. Year after year, the same saints would teach us about the spiritual growth that comes with service. So even though I am on hiatus from these Honduran adventures (They will resume!), I think of our group of pilgrims when mid-August rolls around. (You know who you are!) And I think of the following saints, another motley group whose feast days appear in the week ending today. They include:

• Laurence the Deacon, who was martyred on August 10, 258. As archdeacon of the church, he was ordered by persecuting authorities to hand over the treasures of the church. He pointed to the poor and needy served by the church. He said that they were the treasure of the church. That didn’t sit so well with the emperor, who in short order had him killed.
• Clare of Assisi died on August 11, 1253.  At age 18, she heard St. Francis preach and asked him to help her live out the gospel. She renounced the resources of her wealthy family and established a monastic order, devoting her life to holy service to the poor.
• Florence Nightingale was a nurse and social reformer who died on August 13, 1910. She was an Anglican who saw the gospel as a healing ministry, who took that healing ministry to care for soldiers in the Crimean War and then returned to England to establish the profession of nursing.
• Jonathan Myrick Daniels was a young seminarian who left Boston and headed south to serve in the civil rights movement. He was martyred exactly fifty years ago on August 14, 1965 as he took a stand between a young black woman and the angry white man who had aimed a shotgun at her.

These saints helped guide us in the work we did in Honduras. They come from different times and places. They embraced varied ministries that addressed the needs they encountered. They used the gifts, the resources they’d been given. They did it because in some way they each knew and followed Jesus.

On this mid-August Monday morning, look for opportunities to be of service. How will you respond to the needs you encounter? Thank God for the models of servanthood you’ve been given. Who are those people? Then think of how you can be a model of service for those around you, because saints serve.

– Jay Sidebotham

So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ – Mark 10 

Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. – Martin Luther King Jr.

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

“What happens on Sunday morning is not half so important as what happens on Monday morning. In fact, what happens on Sunday morning is judged by what happens on Monday morning.”

Last week, I came across this quote from Verna Dozier, teacher and theologian and biblical scholar. She died in 2006 at the age of 88. I hadn’t thought much about her in recent years, but I was taken with the words about the Sunday-Monday connection because that’s what I try to explore in this weekly email. She said that what we did from Monday to Saturday was most important, so that we come to our Sunday experience to be refueled. In a world where people increasingly ask about the point of going to church on Sunday, this makes sense to me.

I never had the privilege of meeting Verna Dozier. I did get to hear her speak once in Washington, D.C. She wrote with such great authority that I confess I was surprised by her diminutive stature. She was about four foot nothing and when I saw her at the National Cathedral, she looked to me to be about a million years old. She climbed the steps to the pulpit in that great sacred space, a place where giants like Martin Luther King had held forth. I thought she’d be swallowed up by that enormous piece of church furniture, but she took the helm with strong witness to the mission of her life, to proclaim and teach and challenge us to realize that we are all ministers in the church (not just those who wear clerical collars), that each one of us is called to be part of the fulfillment of God’s dream for the world. She was an ardent advocate for spiritual growth. She elevated expectations, calling every member of the church to a sense of responsibility for their own spiritual journey. She spoke about equipping the saints for ministry. As an African American growing up in segregated Washington, she argued convincingly, knowingly that spiritual leaders too often ignore social justice in their focus on spirituality. She advocated contemporary discipleship, claiming that God wanted people to follow Jesus, not merely worship him. One friend wrote: “She challenged people to accept the authority they received in baptism, and to live out their faith in their homes and offices.”

One of her great contributions was to emphasize engagement with scripture. When she was in junior high, she got a Bible as a Christmas present. She read it cover to cover twice, but didn’t get much out of it. That led to her conviction that a disciplined program of study was key to understanding the Bible. Just dipping into one part or another could make you think that the Bible is just a “grim recital of do’s and don’ts, a diatribe against women, or a polemic for the status quo.”  She challenged Episcopalians to go deeper. And she developed ways to approach the scriptures, specifically a way to study the Bible in small groups without clergy or biblical scholars or experts. She said you could ask three questions of any biblical text:

• What does it say? (i.e., What is going on in the story we’re reading)
• What do you think it meant to the people for whom it was written?
• What does it say to us as we read it in our own context?

I came to appreciate this method because it called for taking the scripture seriously, if not literally, an engagement which is critical for spiritual growth. And it includes the “so-what” factor, a vision of how the text informs our life of faith, not just on Sunday but Monday through Saturday as well.

I went back to read her obituary in the Washington Post. It’s a moving tribute, concluding with a brief sentence, standing in a paragraph all alone. “She had no immediate survivors.” I beg to differ. I am not alone as inheriting a deeper faith through her witness. And I’m wondering what thoughts she spurs for you as you consider your Monday through Saturday ministry.

– Jay Sidebotham

Samplings of the wisdom of Verna Dozier:

Faith always includes the possibility that we could at any given moment be wrong, and that is why it requires courage. Kingdom of God thinking calls us to risk. We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong. The God revealed in Jesus whom I call the Christ is a God whose forgiveness goes ahead of me, and whose love sustains me and the whole created world.

It is important that we understand the Bible as model for how we live our lives, not as a rule book. The issue that the Bible raises is, in light of what God has done in history, what kind of response do I make in my daily life?

Back when I first started talking about ministry, it was seen as something the ordained did. Lay people had no ministry at all except as they participated in the work of the institution. If you taught in the Christian education program, you had a ministry. If you taught in the public schools, you ‘did time’ five days a week until you could get to your ministry. When I began my second career, people would say, ‘You taught school for thirty-two years; then you began your ministry.’ In my unredeemed way, I would steel myself and reply through clenched teeth, ‘No, I continued my ministry.’

The important question to ask is not, ‘What do you believe?’ but ‘What difference does it make that you believe?’

Contact:

Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org