Perceptions from a Pewboy

Yesterday, I attended the funeral service of Reverend Francis Ayuk. He was my colleague in ministry. More importantly, he was my friend.

In our various interactions, whenever I would ask Francis how he was doing, he would always (and I do mean always) offer the same response: “God is good.”

“How are you, Francis?”

“Oh, my brother, God is good!”

“How is ministry going, Francis?”

“Let me tell you, my friend, God is good!”

“How is it with your soul, Francis?”

“God is so very, very good.”

In our conversations, Francis always seemed more comfortable affirming God’s goodness than he was elevating his own accomplishments. I loved that about him. I intentionally tried to sit near Francis at district gatherings and meetings. I knew that, even if things became tense or tedious, Francis could redeem the day with his contagious spirit of joy and his relentless affirmation of the goodness of God. That is a rare and beautiful gift.

Francis and I once roomed together at a Jumonville retreat. It was then that I discovered that Francis snored as loudly as he laughed. It was what I like to call a Pentecostal snore—a swirling like the rush of a mighty wind, filling the entire house! The next morning, Francis greeted me.

“Good morning, my brother!”

“How are you, Francis?”

“Oh, my brother, God is good! Did I snore last night?”

“Uh…yeah…a little bit.”

“Oh my. I am sorry for that. People tell me that I snore loudly. I give them this reply: It is my nighttime way of praying without ceasing!”

Yesterday’s funeral service, held at Washington First United Methodist Church, was a beautiful celebration of Francis’ life and ministry. We remembered his devotion to prayer and worship. We remembered his laughter and vibrancy. We remembered his love for people and his stubborn refusal to overlook the broken and the marginalized. We remembered his passionate devotion to Jesus Christ and the counter-cultural ethics of his kingdom. We remembered his regular affirmation of the goodness of God. We remembered the courage with which he dealt with the aftermath of his stroke—a stroke that left him incapacitated for the last 2 1/2 years. We remembered his radiant eyes that always seemed to sparkle with the joy of a man who knew the grace and love of Jesus.

I will miss him in the life of our annual conference. I will miss him in my personal life. I find comfort, however, in imagining a conversation between God and Francis in the heavenly realm. Perhaps that conversation goes something like this:

“How is it with your soul, my child?”

“Oh, my gracious God and Savior, you are so good!”

A religion without the Holy Ghost, though it had all the ordinances and all the doctrines of the New Testament, would certainly not be Christianity. (William Arthur)

Culture is good, genius is brilliant, civilization is a blessing, education is a great privilege; but we may be educated villains. The thing that we want most of all is the precious gift of the Holy Ghost. (John Hall)

I firmly believe that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and self-seeking and every thing that is contrary to God’s law, the Holy Ghost will come and fill every corner of our hearts; but if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and self-seeking and pleasure and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God; and I believe many a man is praying to God to fill him when he is full already with something else. (Dwight Lyman Moody)

O Holy Spirit, descend plentifully into my heart. Enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling and scatter there Thy cheerful beams. (Augustine)

A blessed experience of Pentecost to all of you. May the Holy Spirit fall afresh upon us in a wonderfully surprising and transformational way.

I had just turned eleven. By that time, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours of my young life had been spent watching reruns of TWILIGHT ZONE and LOST IN SPACE and reading powerfully evocative comic books. The crew members of the Starship Enterprise were like family to me. In fact, the STAR TREK narrative was so much a part of the DNA of my youthful imagination that I devoted a good portion of my childhood to figuring out a reliable means by which to velcro my plastic phaser and communicator to my “phaser belt” (which, in actuality, was an old seat belt that had been detached from our Chevy Impala and wrapped twice around my waist).

My steady diet of science fiction served to make me uniquely receptive to a very special film that was released thirty years ago today. That film was STAR WARS. (Episode IV, to be more precise.)

I was living with my mom and dad in Grove City, Pennsylvania at the time. They were well acquainted with the cinematic proclivities of their eleven-year-old son. They knew how desperately excited he was to see STAR WARS (ever since he had seen the first television advertisement for the film during an episode of HAPPY DAYS).

On a Monday night during the first week of the film’s release, my dad and I traveled to a movie theater in Sharon, Pennsylvania, stood in line for half an hour, and made it in. We purchased our popcorn, found two seats in the middle of the theater, and made ourselves comfortable for the cinematic experience. Little did I know that, for the next two hours and five minutes, I would be hyperspaced into a phenomenon that would forever change the way I relate to movies.

Within the first three minutes of the film, I was utterly captivated. I had never before seen anything like the scrolling introduction: “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire…” The dramatic scroll then gave way to a cinematographic image that I will never forget: A small Rebel space ship, chased across the screen by a huge Imperial Star Destroyer. (It felt like it took a minute-and-a-half for the Star Destroyer to come into full view from the top of the screen!). Oh my, the spectacle of it all. I was mesmerized. When the quintessentially ominous Vader made his first appearance…well…fahgettaboutit! I ceased to be merely a spectator and became a participant—a skywalker, if you will—in an epic story that took me to another galaxy and made me to understand the power of movie-making.

Two hours and five minutes later, as the credits rolled, I looked down in my lap and saw a full bag of cold popcorn. I had been so thoroughly focused on the film that I forgot I was holding it. I kid you not.

I proceeded to see the film eleven times over the course of five months.

I am not blind to STAR WARS’ shortcomings as a film. Its dialogue is often choppy and ham-handed. Its characterization and plot-development are far from profound. But the film hit me at the right time. In fact, it hit our culture at the right time. In a culture that was still endeavoring to make sense of Vietnam and Watergate, STAR WARS challenged us to consider the possibility that some rebellions were righteous and that some heroes could still be trusted.

Right this minute, thirty years after the release of the film, I am sitting in a comfortable chair in our television room, with my beautiful wife on one side of me and my cat on the other, watching…you guessed it…Episode IV of the STAR WARS saga. (The Millennium Falcon was just pulled into the Death Star by the tractor beam!). The DVD looks pretty darned good on our 63-inch high-definition set! It reminds me of an experience I once had thirty years ago.

It is Pentecost weekend, a weekend in which Christ-followers give particular attention to what might be called their spiritual “force.” An unseen God, fully present in the human condition, dynamically active in human affairs, always advocating for human souls. As I celebrate the person and work of the Holy Spirit, it feels strangely appropriate for me to be devoting a couple of hours to STAR WARS, the film through which the Holy Spirit was once at work to deepen the imagination and broaden the perspective of a wide-eyed eleven-year-old boy.

I think that that boy is still inside of me. Somewhere.

Did anyone see yesterday’s episode of THE VIEW in which Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck got into a heated argument about politics and other matters?

I don’t watch the show. Quite frankly, the incessant chatter makes my head hurt.

But I did catch the “fight” on YouTube. Pretty interesting stuff for daytime television.

The video of the show confirmed something that has become increasingly clear to me over the years, and that is this: The tone and spirit of our communication is every bit as important as the content of our arguments, if not more so. When the debate between Rosie and Elisabeth became heated, one could sense the palpable shift in tone and atmosphere. It was no longer an exchange of ideas between friends. Rather, it had become a contest of emotional one-liners, a competitive effort to get in the best and last word. As a spectator, I stopped caring about which person seemed to be articulating the best arguments. I was simply glued to the spectacle-making train wreck of this televised exchange.

I cannot help but feel that the debate between Rosie and Elisabeth is a relational microcosm of the kind of interactions that happen regularly in marriages, in workplaces, in school board meetings, in Church Council and Trustee meetings, and (dare I say it?) in sessions of annual conference. So often, such exchanges are more about passionate rhetoric than an earnest discernment of truth. Participants in the exchanges are often far more interested in winning the argument than they are in listening to the thoughts and ideas of another person. The danger, of course, is that such exchanges can become an emotional outpouring of vitriol instead of an authentic effort to “speak the truth in love.”

Some might say that I am making too much of a television show. But here’s the thing: Television shows tend to reflect the mood and temperament of the culture and audience for which they are made. I don’t think that I need to convince anyone of the fact that the “anger quotient” in our culture is extraordinarily high. We see it manifested in everything from road rage to parental behavior at little league games. My fear is that, in the midst of an angry and violent culture, the church too often simply mimics the anger and violence instead of modeling a different kind of interaction.

I have attended too many church meetings that have felt more like town meetings than a gathering of the saints. I have listened to too many people in public discourse who identify themselves boldly as Christians but who speak with dismissive and condescending tones (which, of course, makes me not want to listen to what they have to say, even if I happen to be in agreement with the basic content of their arguments). I have seen too many “Christian” debates that were far more about ego than they were about discernment.

I don’t even know what I’m calling for in this post—just something different, I guess. At Pentecost, as we celebrate with unique fervency the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, I’m praying that the Spirit will bring about in my heart (and in the hearts of a few others) a freshly-realized desire to be one who creates more light than heat in the area of communication; one who listens patiently to others instead of dismissing them in condescending fashion; one who, when he speaks what he believes to be the truth, always does it with a tone that communicates love and respect for those who see things differently.

As our church makes ready to celebrate Pentecost, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking and praying about the fruit of the Spirit described in the fifth chapter of Galatians.

Several years ago, I led a Bible study on Galatians. When we arrived at the fifth chapter, a woman in the Bible study spoke up. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been needing a new way of looking at the church, and I think I just found it.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“Well,” she continued, “it’s like this: I’ve gotten too comfortable with thinking about the church as an institution–or, even worse, as a spiritual club for the already-convinced. But the book of Galatians gives me a new image that helps me think about the church in a whole new way.”

“What image is that?”

“It’s right here in the fifth chapter,” she said. “The church is a fresh fruit market.”

“A fresh fruit market?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Think about it. The church isn’t an institution. It isn’t a club. It’s a fresh fruit market. It’s a place where the fruit of the Holy Spirit is always on display in the lives of the people.”

I don’t know how you feel about that imagery. Personally, I like it. I find it to be as memorable as it is biblical.

Even as I type these words, I am praying that the Holy Spirit will fall afresh upon your congregation and mine, that we might become the fresh fruit market that Jesus Christ is calling us to be.

“…The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22)

I officiated at my 196th wedding on Saturday. But who’s counting?

Saturday’s wedding was a joyful event for me because it afforded to me the opportunity to stand with two of my dear friends who also happen to be people of deep and authentic faith. It was not so much a ceremony as it was a worship service, a rich expression of praise in which the bride and groom understood themselves to be secondary to the glorification of Jesus Christ. I was thrilled, humbled, and honored to be a participant in such a blessed event. It was a wedding that I will never forget.

Because the experience was so good, however, it served to highlight some of my other wedding experiences that were less joyful for me. What was the difference? What makes some wedding experiences more meaningfully memorable than others for the officiating pastor?

I have come to believe that part of what sometimes prevents me from feeling fully invested in a wedding service is the collection of contemporary wedding trends, some of which I see as enormous stumbling blocks in the way of creating a Christ-centered worship experience. Three of the wedding trends to which I am making reference are these:

-THE CULTURAL INSISTENCE UPON SEEING THE WEDDING AS “THE BRIDE’S DAY”
When did this begin to happen? The danger in seeing the wedding as the bride’s day, of course, is that the bride’s (or groom’s) preferences can very easily become the governing mechanism by which the entire content of the service is determined. What happens, however, if the bride’s preference in music favors the romantic over the worshipful? What happens if the bride and groom decide that the existing liturgy is less than satisfactory and that they want to write their own vows to make them more personal? What happens if the bride and groom make the decision that Jesus’ name should not be mentioned throughout the service, since there will be some Jews and Muslims in attendance? My point is this: Allowing any individual bride or groom (or pastor, for that matter) to make his or her preferences the only governing mechanism in the planning of a wedding is a seductive and dangerous course of action. These days, I do my best to make clear to brides and grooms that the wedding is neither their day nor my day. Rather, a Christian wedding is the church’s day. We are merely being invited to participate.

-THE LAYERS OF CULTURAL EXPECTATION THAT WE CONTINUE TO PLACE UPON YOUNG BRIDES AND GROOMS
It was once the case in America, during the frontier days, that a wedding was all about the vows and the prayers surrounding them. Then, the family and friends of the bride and groom would hold a picnic or a house party. There would be celebration and laughter. There would be good food and intimate friendship. Weddings these days, however, are expensive cultural events. The reception hall is chosen before the church is even contacted. The money spent on wedding garb and limousines could provide a downpayment for a house. Guests are invited, not necessarily because of their friendship with the bride and groom, but because of the social and political weight of their presence. Brides and grooms are encouraged to make their wedding more elegant and more “unique” than the last wedding that they attended. Overbearing parents of brides and grooms micromanage the process in an effort to experience vicariously through their children the wedding that they themselves were never given an opportunity to enjoy. We certainly have done young brides and grooms a huge and expensive disservice by allowing these layers of cultural expectation to accumulate upon the wedding celebration. Each of these layers, I think, has the potential to make it even more difficult to reach the spirit of worship that is at the heart of Christian marriage.

-THE EVER-EXPANDING ROLE OF WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS AND VIDEOGRAPHERS
It is not at all my intention to disparage those good people who make a living in this industry. What I have come to find, however, is that, when weddings are treated more as ceremonies to be photographed than worship services to be experienced, the role of the photographer/videographer becomes distorted. These days, brides and grooms are willing to shell out thousands upon thousands of dollars in an effort to capture every minute of their wedding day. The problem, however, is that we can become so obsessed with CAPTURING every minute that we diminish our capacity to EXPERIENCE every minute. Photographers and videographers have their place. My concern is that their presence at a wedding, if not carefully restricted, can tamper with the spirit of reverence that a worship service demands.

Saturday’s wedding was a great experience for me. It made me believe that an experience of worship and a sense of the holy are still to be found in wedding celebrations. There is still the potential for a glorification of the covenant-making presence of God, even if we have to search for it beneath several layers of nuptial extravagance. Endeavoring to create a meaningful and worshipful wedding, in other words, is still worth the effort.

I won’t bore you with statistics about biblical illiteracy in our churches. Suffice it to say that, although the idea of being “homo unius libri” (a man of one book) is strong in various portions of the Christian tradition, we have become a church that doesn’t know its Book very well.

It is as though some of us have come to believe that the Bible isn’t deserving of our study and searching and meditation any longer. Perhaps some of us are of the opinion that, with the exception of John 3:16 and the Twenty-Third Psalm, the biblical story no longer has anything powerful or unsettling to offer to us.

I found some degree of amusement in the following story, which appeared in a Hong Kong newspaper:

More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as ‘indecent’ due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.

A spokesperson for Hong Kong’s Television and Entertainment Licensing authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible by noon Wednesday.

The complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site — www.truthbible.net — which said the holy book ‘made one tremble’ given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest.

It is not my intention to make light of the issue that the article highlights. But, quite frankly, I guess that I’m a bit encouraged by the fact that at least some people still find things in the Bible worth trembling about and censoring.

Do you know what I mean?

So, Tara and I plan to see “28 Weeks Later” sometime next weekend. “28 Weeks Later” is the cinematic sequel to the 2002 film “28 Days Later.” Both films focus on a society overrun with blood-spewing, flesh-hungry zombies.

Why would we go to such a film? Well, to tell you the truth, both of us enjoy frightening films. Wait…allow me to modify that. Yours truly enjoys frightening films. I always have, ever since the days of Chiller Theater on Saturday Nights. For Tara, it is more of an acquired taste–one that she has graciously developed for the sake of her peculiar husband.

What a wife I have!

Anyway, I am intrigued by our culture’s current fascination with zombies. According to Fangoria magazine, a record number of zombie films have been made since 2002. Here are a few:
-28 Days Later
-28 Weeks Later
-Dawn of the Dead (remake)
-Land of the Dead
-Day of the Dead
-Shaun of the Dead
-Dead & Breakfast
-Dead Meat
-Dead Men Walking
-Diary of the Dead
-Grindhouse
-House of the Dead
-House of the Dead 2
-Outpost
-The Plague
-Planet Terror
-Resident Evil
-Resident Evil: Apocalypse
-Resident Evil: Extinction
-Slither
-When Zombies Attack
-Dukes of Hazzard (This isn’t really a zombie film, but the actors were so wooden that I felt as though I were watching zombies.)

And these are just the movies! Don’t get me started on the zombie-related books and video-games.

One of the comic books that I am currently reading is called THE WALKING DEAD. It is a black and white comic book that focuses on a group of survivors making their way through a world overrun by zombies. Interestingly, the reader finds out over time that the title of the comic (”The Walking Dead”) is a reference, not to the zombies, but to the survivors. One by one the survivors come to understand that, prior to the zombie crisis, they were living lives that were completely devoid of passion, vision, and vitality. They were like social zombies, walking aimlessly and inattentively from workday to workday, soccer game to soccer game, appointment to appointment. Not until the zombies came did the survivors realize how zombie-like they had become.

I wonder if this comic book is onto something. Is the recent influx of zombie-related entertainment nothing more a manifestation of Hollywood’s penchant for cashing in on hot trends? Or, as the comic book suggests, is there more to it than that? Might the recent zombie interest be a byproduct of our culture’s well-used capacity to produce zombie-like citizens—people who are so hyperactively busy and so oppressively overscheduled that they find themselves living without any real passion, vision, or focus? Might some of us enjoy zombie movies, in other words, because we are subconsciously able to see ourselves in the faces of the zombies?

Halford Luccock, the well-known biblical scholar, once made the comment that the most dangerous “ism” facing the contemporary church is not racism or sexism or ageism. Rather, said Luccock, the most dangerous “ism” facing the contemporary church is somnambulism—that is, sleepwalking. People walking aimlessly from worship service to worship service, meeting to meeting, Bible study to Bible study, with no real passion, no real vision, no real sense of vibrant and transformational life in Christ.

So…do you see any sleepwalking happening these days?

Do you see any zombies?

I find these questions to be significant, especially in light of the fact that we serve a Savior who came that we might have abundant life. I wonder where the disconnect is?

One of my favorite phrases in United Methodist liturgy resides in a prayer found in the Service of Death and Resurrection (the funeral liturgy). The phrase to which I am making reference is this prayerful petition: “Help me to live as those who are prepared to die.”

That phrase hits me hard every time I speak it. It compels me to ask some tough personal questions. Am I living as though I am prepared to die? Is my life structured as though I am ready to stand before the One who breathed life into my lungs? Are my priorities arranged so as to bear witness to my recognition of how precious and fragile and fleeting the human journey really is? Have I honored Christ with the life that has been entrusted to my care?

The other day, I ran across this story:

A British man who went on a wild spending spree after doctors said he only had a short time to live wants compensation because the diagnosis was wrong and he is now healthy — but broke.

John Brandrick, 62, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago and told that he would probably die within a year.

He quit his job, sold or gave away nearly all his possessions, stopped paying his mortgage and spent his savings dining out and going on holiday.

Brandrick was left with little more than the black suit, white shirt and red tie that he had planned to be buried in when it emerged a year later that his suspected “tumor” was no more than a non-life threatening inflammation of the pancreas.

There is something strangely humorous about that story, I think. When confronted with his own mortality, Brandrick chose to live it up, blow it all, and throw a year-long party. What would I do if I believed that I only had a year to live? Or a day? How would I spend my time and money? What would I say to my beloved Tara? Mom and Dad? The people of the church? What kind of legacy would I leave behind?

Here, I suppose, is my deeper question: How might I begin to live with a sense of urgency and anticipation without having to be diagnosed with a terminal illness? How might I build a life of ever-increasing attentiveness to the things that matter most–the kind of life that bears witness to the eternity that God has prepared for us in Jesus Christ?

“Help us to live as those who are prepared to die.”

That is the prayer of my heart this day. Maybe every day.

As a continuation of the baptismal reflection that I began in my last post, it is on my heart to share with you some of the “pillars” that I endeavor to communicate to people in our church’s pre-baptismal gatherings and teaching sessions. The wording is my own. The ideas, I trust, are both biblical and Wesleyan. At least that is my goal.

What Is Baptism?

1. Baptism is God’s initiative and act of grace in the life of the church. Baptism, in other words, is not something that WE accomplish. It is entirely dependent upon the activity of God. This is why United Methodists (along with several other Christian denominations) encourage the baptism of infants. We believe that the effectiveness of baptism is dependent upon God’s gracious initiative and not our capacity to respond. Therefore, infants are welcome at the baptismal water, since God’s grace surrounds them even in their infancy.

2. Baptism, if it is to come to fruition in a human life, must be looked upon as a lifetime ordination to discipleship and ministry for the cause of Jesus Christ. It is not sufficient to allow baptism to become nothing more than an isolated ceremony, marked on the calendar and then quickly forgotten. Rather, baptism must be “lived out” in faithful discipleship to Jesus Christ, if it is to become everything that God wants it to become.

3. Baptism is an entrance into the faith community, the church. Through the water of baptism, the one baptized is recognized as being sacramentally connected to the Body of Christ. This, of course, does not mean that we shun or reject those who are not baptized. It simply means that, by virtue of baptism, we are uniquely and supernaturally joined to one another.

4. Baptism introduces a process of the washing away of sin that will manifest itself regularly throughout the life of the one baptized. If the one baptized is old enough to have repented of sin, then baptism celebrates that repentance. If the one baptized is not old enough to have repented of sin, then baptism anticipates that act. Either way, baptism manifests the washing away of sin that only God’s grace in Christ can bring about.

5. Baptism is God’s permanent watermark of grace on a human soul that never has to be repeated. This watermark of grace serves as a lifelong proclamation of who we are, WHOSE we are, and at what price we were purchased.

Baptism Is NOT…

-Baptism is not, for lack of a better expression, a heavenly insurance policy. United Methodist tradition does not teach that those infants who die before they are baptized will be denied the fullness of God’s salvation. We believe that the prevenient grace of God (the grace that covers us even before we can speak) is sufficient for such precious children.

-Baptism is not only for the benefit of the parents (in the case of infant baptism). Unfortunately, many United Methodists believe otherwise. They believe that baptism is only a symbolic happening and is therefore beneficial only to the parents who make the promises. This notion, however, reduces the meaning of infant baptism significantly and is not in alignment with what our tradition teaches. Granted, the promises that the parents make are covenantal and powerfully significant. But, though infant baptism, God places a mark of baptismal grace upon the soul of the infant. This sacramental marking is dependent upon God’s activity, not the parental promises.

These “pillars” have led me into some wonderfully meaningful sacramental conversations with those preparing themselves for baptism.

What are some of your “pillars?” I’m anxious to hear and learn about them.

After all, as Wesley phrased it in his Treatise on Baptism, “By baptism, we enter into covenant with God; into that everlasting covenant…we are admitted into the Church, and consequently made members of Christ, its head…we who were ‘by nature children of wrath’ are made the children of God.”