Pastor's Page
Web Devotions from Pastor Steve
Welcome! The devotions below are short pieces I'm writing each Monday through Friday. We'll keep up the last five days at a time, so if you miss a day, you will always be able to see the last several devotions and get caught up to re-enter the conversation. Over time, we will engage voices within Scripture and within the Christian community from the past and present--theologians, saints, mystics, and holy fools. See below for a description of the current series of devotions, or jump right in here for today's devotion. I invite you to read these just as one more conversation partner in your own reflection about faith, life, and the Reign of God who grasps us in Jesus. I would invite your own contributions to that conversation, too. I would invite your e-mails at pscbond@gmail.com.
Seamless: Becoming Disciples with Our Whole Selves
Starting in February 2013, we are walking together on an adventure we are calling Seamless, that is focused on three basic ideas:
-
Jesus is in the business of making us whole, and wholly his.
-
Christians are disciples of Jesus, not merely spectators or club members.
-
Everything in the Christian life is about everything else.
So, to explore how Jesus makes us disciples with our fullest selves as seamless wholes, we are going to spend most of 2013 delving into seven basic Christian practices that have shaped the followers of Jesus for 2,000 years, and the Scriptural roots fo each of those practices: prayer, worship, witness, hospitality, forgiveness, simplicity, and sabbath. Come along with us for this journey, and see how it transforms you. You are invited to follow along here on this website, or if you would like to receive these devotions via email, to write to me at pscbond@gmail.com and ask to be added to the list.
The House of God Forever—Tuesday, June 18, 2013
“Surely goodness and
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in
the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23:6)
Tell me if this
sounds familiar: you are ok with talking about God in church, but
outside the walls and stained glass windows, away from other “church
people,” you clam up.
A lot of us have this
tic: we can talk about God when it is safe… and it is “safe,” we
figure, only when we are in God’s house. Get out from
underneath a steeple, or outside of the circle of other Christians
at a Bible study, and we had better keep our mouths shut, we
think.
But here’s the thing:
you are never not in God’s house.
This is one of those
obvious facts I should never have forgotten, but it took a reading
of Dallas Willard’s classic The Divine Conspiracy to bring it
back to my mind: the whole universe is under the reign and
rule of God, and the whole universe is filled with the immediate
presence of God, too. The universe is God’s house, not just
the brick building with the pointy bell-tower where you go on
Sundays.
That’s not even to
say that the universe itself actually encompasses or could
contain God, so much as it is to say that the whole universe
is fair game for naming the name of God, not just the circles where
people already believe, and not just the building where
believers-in-God already gather. You never leave God’s
house—it’s all God’s, and it’s all God’s “turf.”
Of course, good old
Psalm 23 has been saying this to us all along, in its final words.
“I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” (or “all my days,”
or literally in the Hebrew, “length of days,” or just a good
old-fashioned, “always,”). The psalm is attributed to King
David—what does David have in mind when he talks about dwelling
in the house of the Lord forever? Well, not that he is
going to lock himself in the Temple, that’s for sure. Not
that he will stay inside a church building all of his life.
David has come to realize that everywhere is the house of
God, because God both owns and resides everywhere.
You can’t not be in “the house of the Lord.” The
question is whether you will recognize it, and the follow-up
question is whether you will live in that house like a beloved
member of the household, or whether we will act like strangers in
it, like people in a waiting room awkwardly paging through
magazines, or like thick-headed conquistadors thinking they are
“discovering” a land that someone else already lives on.
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” (Gen.
28:16) says old Jacob, before naming the spot where he lay
“Beth-el,” which means, “the house of God.” He was more right
than he knew.
So, if we are going
to be people who recognize that we are constantly,
inescapably, unchangeably, already in “the house of the
Lord,” then we are always in the right place to pray, to name
the name of Jesus, and to talk and act like members of the
household. If we are uncomfortable or afraid of speaking up as
someone who believe in Jesus, then here is a reminder of something
that we should never have forgotten: we are already in the
house of Jesus. All the time. Every day. Always.
What were we afraid
of saying before? What did we think we had to be “in God’s
house” in order to say safely? Why were we sheepish about
mentioning the One to whom we belong when we are out on the street
or talking with a family member or listening to a friend? Why,
in other words, did we used to think we have to be inside a church
building or insulated by other Christians to talk about Christ?
Today, let’s start
the day aware of our full address. As Thornton Wilder puts it
in that famous passage of Our Town, where the letter is
addressed, “Jane Crofut; The Crofut
Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States
of America; North America; Western
Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of
God,”
we are never not
in the dwelling place of God.
We might as well say so.
We might as well act like it.
Who knows—that might
just grab the attention of someone else nearby you who didn’t
realize where we already are. They might want to
find out more about the God whose house they have been dwelling in.
Lord God, here we are
in your universe, in this world you have made.
Let us rejoice and recognize where we are, and give us the boldness
to say so to the other tenants of your house whom you will send to
cross our paths today.
Some Familiar Words—Monday, June 17, 2013
“For God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in
him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did
not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order
that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17)
Funny how some words
can be tired out from overuse, and others can be known by heart or
recited from memory without becoming cliché.
People tire of
hackneyed expressions. Most people in the business world that
I know would be happy if they never had to hear the phrase, “Think
outside the box” again, for example. Or we might all lament
the way an old, majestic word like “awesome” was watered-down by pop
culture so that a word we used to use for things like the Grand
Canyon or a snow-covered landscape under a clear blue sky is not
used to describe pizza or someone’s tennis shoes. Words like
“outsource,” “downsize,” “win-win situation,” “paradigm-shift,” or
“game-changer,” have all become so tired that people’s eyes start to
roll when they see or hear them. They are words and
expressions that have been emptied of their meaning because they
have been overused.
So… what can we say
about verses like John 3:16-17? Are they so well-known that
they have become cliché? Or are they so essential to putting
the Christian Good News into words that they are worth learning by
heart? The world around us clamors only for what is “new” and
“novel,” but aren’t there some things that are so essential, so
basic, that they are worth coming back to? After all,
everybody inhales the “same old oxygen” every day, but nobody thinks
that breathing is cliché or overrated.
Could we zero in on
these familiar words from John’s gospel in the same way? Could
we take them like oxygen? Could we hear them and for a moment
bracket out all the ways these verses have been pushed to the brink
of banality? Could we forget for a moment the rainbow-wig-clad
sports fans just holding up the Bible reference “John 3:16”
at games but who never actually gave us the words?
Could we set aside the fact that many in our culture know the phrase
“John 3:16” without knowing the words to which it refers? And
instead, could we hear these verses again as a pretty good starting
point for putting the Gospel into a few sentences?
Because really, for a
lot of us, that’s the real hang-up. We know, at least
intellectually, that we are supposed to share our faith and
make disciples and spread the Word. But… we have trouble
figuring out what we are supposed to say. Where do we
begin? How do we make sure we don’t lose the forest in all
those trees with names like Ephesians and Romans and Ecclesiastes
and Lamentations?
Well, we start by
learning, or better yet, internalizing, those words that have stood
the test of time as expressions of the Gospel’s good news (and
remember, the word “Gospel” just means “good news,” so if your
understanding of the gospel leaves you feeling empty or
disappointed or afraid rather than full, joyful, and free, you had
better revisit just what the gospel is). We
start with places like the well-known John 3:16-17 and just let them
hit us in all their force.
It really is an
amazing claim, isn’t it, that the Creator of the universe—a universe
that is so mind-bogglingly big and complex and beautiful that we can
only take in a small sliver of it with our best tools and
technology—actually cares about the inhabitants of one small
blue-green-brown planet around a middle-sized yellow sun?
Isn’t it the kind of statement that should stop us in our tracks
cold? The infinite, almighty, all-knowing Maker and Source of
all things, loves us. And not just “us” good
(self-proclaimed, right?), well-behaved religious people, but “the
world”! As in the same “the world” that keeps rejecting God;
as in the same “the world” that has already turned away from God!
God loves “the world” and has sent Christ into that “the world,” not
to condemn us all to hell, but in order to redeem, to restore, to
rescue, to save.
That by itself is
worth spending some time on, because sometimes we don’t even get
that part of the verse right. Jesus doesn’t say, “For God
so loved the already-existing list of dues-paying
members-in-good-standing that he gave…” but rather that God loves
the world in all its messiness, in all its rejection of God, in
all its bitterly persistent habit of making other idols to worship.
That is news that is worth telling someone! That is worth
learning by heart!
The next time you
find yourself in a conversation with someone who “doesn’t bother
with religion” or who can’t get beyond pews and candles or
southern-drawled TV preachers in expensive suits, maybe this is a
place to start, even if the other person thinks they have
heard this all before. You will be the one to tell them of a
love so wide it embraces all of us, even when we were the
enemies of God. You will be the one to tell them of a love
so committed and deep that it didn’t just beam down a list of
rules for good behavior, but came into our world in a human life.
You will be the one to tell them of a love so long and enduring
that it lasts even through the grip of death—not only Jesus’
death, but ours as well—and brings us to life without end.
You will be the one
to tell them, if you are willing to start in the well-worn places
like this one: God so loved (loved so widely, so deeply, so
long) the whole world that God sent Jesus to save the whole
creation, not to condemn it. Sounds like something both
refreshingly new and good.
Lord Jesus, let us
hear the old familiar words with all their time-tested vibrancy and
power, and give us the words to say when we have the opportunity to
tell others about you.
Meeting Jesus—Friday,
June 14, 2013
“When [Jesus] was at
the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave
it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized
[Jesus]; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each
other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking
to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ That
same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the
eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying,
‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they
told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known
to them in the breaking of the bread.” (Luke 24:30-35)
You know, there
really is a reason to invite someone else to worship with
you sometime: you meet Jesus there.
Sometimes we get very
confused, frankly, about why we would ever bring someone along with
us for a Sunday morning service. We can get caught up in
wanting to just have a bigger congregation because we want to see
the lines and bar-graphs on charts going in the right direction.
We can be tempted into wanting to turn the church into a club for my
like-minded friends and me. We can do it out of a sense of
earning “prizes” from God one day for all the people we brought to
church or souls we have “won” (as if it were really us, and
not Christ on the cross, who does the winning of
anything or anybody).
Or, on the other
hand, we can get very confused by a list of reasons why we
wouldn’t invite someone else to worship. What if they
don’t like our style of music? What if they don’t like the way
the musicians play the hymns? What if they are put off by the
standing up and sitting down (okay, Lutherans get that a lot more
than maybe other traditions might)? What if the sermon is
a dud—or the preacher in general? What if the person doesn’t
“get anything,” like a helpful tidbit of life advice, or a warm
fuzzy feeling, out of the service on the day that they come?
Like a lot of things,
it seems like we could talk ourselves into or out of—or
both back and forth—inviting someone to worship, and still not take
into consideration the real question: Will we meet Jesus
there?
The answer to that
question is delightfully unrelated to matters of musical-style,
length of sermons, number of times you stand up or sit down, or the
attendance trends over the last six months. The answer to that
question is entirely up to Jesus himself, and where he has promised
to show himself.
For the earliest
followers of Jesus—all the way back to that first Easter evening in
the Jerusalem suburb of Emmaus—the place they kept meeting Jesus was
at the table. The stranger takes the bread, blesses the bread,
breaks the bread, and gives the bread… and what do you know, but the
two others at the table realize that it is Jesus who has been there
all along in their midst! Something like that has been
happening among disciples of Jesus for 2,000 years now. In
whatever form it takes, whether spoken or sung, with big, puffy
bread or flat, crackery stuff, with a common cup or little cups or a
morsel of bread dipped in the wine, the followers of Jesus have been
meeting Jesus where he showed himself to those two heartbroken and
hopeless disciples at the Emmaus dinner table. We find Jesus
is among us when we come to the table.
That is true whether
or not anybody “got” anything from the sermon on any given Sunday.
That is true regardless of whether an organ or a guitar or a piano
played the music. That is true whether the house is full or
the pews are half-empty… or three-quarters… or more.
In fact, the one
thing you can really count on, that is more dependable than
any of those variables in preacher, accompanist, and attendance, is
that Jesus will be there at the table, revealed to us “in the
breaking of the bread.”
So, why invite
someone to worship? How about for the one reason that can’t be
commandeered or turned into our accomplishment—namely, that
Jesus has promised to show himself at the table? How about
with the promise that our hearts will burn within us, regardless of
whatever else does or doesn’t go right on a Sunday? Meeting
Jesus sure sounds like enough of a reason to me.
Lord Jesus, be
present where you have promised, and give us the eyes to recognize
your presence among us in the breaking of the bread.
The Courage to Stay—Thursday, June 13, 2013
“But Peter, standing
with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, ‘Men of Judea
and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen
to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose,
for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what
was spoken through the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will
be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men
shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams”’.”
(Acts 2:14-17)
He could have just
laid low, you know. Or safer yet, he could have run.
Peter could have just
walked away, or kept his head down, or—to use a tactic he had some
experience with—just denied even knowing the other disciples and
ducked into a doorway somewhere until the fuss was over.
After all, it had to
be a little bit embarrassing, and more than a little bit risky, to
speak up on behalf of his fellow apostles to an agitated crowd.
Less than two months before, they had lynched Jesus in a similar
scene. And public opinion about the whole scene on that
Pentecost Day was dangerously mixed: some just stared in
befuddlement saying, “What does this mean?” and some were as sure as
anything that the disciples of Jesus were just drunk.
Tough crowd to play to, eh?
So there are lots of
reasons Peter could have just said, “I’m not going to speak up this
time—I always get myself in hot water when I open my trap, so this
time I’m going to learn my lesson and keep silent.” Peter
could have just said to himself, “Look, there’s no reasoning with
these people, so I had better save my breath, not stick my neck out,
and just quietly go on my way.” But he doesn’t. The
difference, of course, is that the Spirit is the one driving him,
and his fellow disciples, out into the world to tell the news of
Jesus with as many people as they can find. It is the Spirit
who gives Peter courage—and, appropriately, that is exactly what
Peter says back to the crowd: “This is the Spirit of God you
are witnessing! The Spirit is being poured out everywhere
today—and this is what it looks like!” Peter could have
slipped back into his old ways of running and hiding when things got
hairy, but the Spirit gave him the courage to stay and tell the
news.
All right, so courage
is key for us if we are going to share our faith with people, too.
Some of the details are different between us in the twenty-first
century and Peter in the first, but in a lot of ways, our lives and
culture feel very much the same. It can be a little bit
embarrassing, can’t it, to be the one to speak up about our faith.
It can be more than a little risky to name the name of Jesus.
So many people only have a picture of Christianity from the
religious charlatans on television and radio, that we are afraid of
getting lumped in with them… the ones who seem to slick and
oily to be really in touch with the living God who gives good things
away for free by grace. So many people are afraid of getting
pegged as “the religious person” at their workplace, or of saying
something that will put their job in jeopardy, or will alienate a
friend or a coworker. We need courage.
More to the point, then, we need the
Spirit.
Well, good news!
The same Holy Spirit, the same living Breath of God that gave life
to us in the beginning, is, in fact, within us. And
that same Spirit does drive us outward with the courage to
tell people about the God we have come to know in Jesus. Now,
the bad news: we are darned good at talking ourselves out
of what the Spirit leads us into. We fight against the
courage-giving, faith-strengthening presence of the Spirit.
So let’s ask
ourselves one more question: what might help lead us away from
drowning out the Spirit’s voice at our year? What might help
us hold onto the courage the Spirit is willing to give us?
How about love?
You have surely seen in your own life that love gives us courage to
do all kinds of things beyond our comfort zones. Love leads
new parents to risk having their lives turned upside down for the
sake of a child. Love leads children to take care of their
parents when the roles from their youth are reversed and care-givers
become care-receivers, and everyone trembles at the newness of the
terrain. Love leads people to follow someone else across
country. Love leads you or to show up for a friend across town
in a crisis. Love is not the same thing as courage, but it
certainly can be the engine that drives courage, the spark
that kindles our bravery when we could have been chickens
comfortably staying back and keeping our heads down. Love—the
Love we have heard call us by name in the voice of Jesus—gives us
the courage to take on all those risks, and to take them on
joyfully.
You have to think
it’s the same with Peter. Love is what leads him to stick
around, when you know a part of him was screaming to run away.
At one level, that’s Peter’s love for Jesus… but even more than
that, it is Jesus’ love for Peter that gave him the courage to tell
other people about that very love on Pentecost.
Today, where might
the Love named Jesus give us the courage to speak up and tell
someone about the God we have met in Christ? Who might you
finally have the nerve to talk to about the difference Jesus has
made in your life? What could you and I do not to
stifle the courage-giving power of the Spirit on a Thursday morning
in June? How will we let love ground us into bravery?
Love does that, you
know. Love has a way of giving you the courage to stay, and to
speak.
O living Christ, give
us the Spirit’s courage and love so that we will not chicken out
this day but can be bold enough to share your love and hope with
someone else today.
The Courage of Vision—Wednesday, June 12, 2013
“Agrippa said to
Paul, ‘You have permission to speak for yourself.’ Then Paul
stretched out his hand and began to defend himself: ‘I
consider myself fortunate that it is before you, King Agrippa, I am
to make my defense today against all the accusations of the Jews,
because you are especially familiar with all the customs and
controversies of the Jews; therefore I beg of you to listen to me
patiently…. To this day I have had help from God, and so I stand
here, testifying to both small and great, saying nothing but what
the prophets and Moses said would take place: that the Messiah must
suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would
proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.” (Acts
26:1-3, 22-23)
It takes courage to
tell stories about God’s work in your life. It takes courage
even to put your finger on an event in your life and say, “Yes,
here, this was God’s presence in my life.”
After all,
we worry, what if we’re wrong about it? What if I say,
“God did this in my life,” and then it turns out later that I
was wrong about what God was doing in my life at the time? How
do I really know that God was really behind it? How do
I muster up the courage to say, “I recognize God in this episode
from my life-story!”? Where do we get that kind of boldness?
You probably have
heard the famous remark of Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart about obscenity that he didn’t have a precise definition for
what counted as “obscene” in a movie, “…but I know it when I see
it.” Sometimes it feels like that with our ability to
recognize God in our lives. We can’t quite put into words a
single “litmus-test” for how to tell if God is behind the scenes in
this or that moment of our lives… but we just know it when we see
it. There are times when we can’t help but recognize divine
fingerprints on our lives—even if it is only in retrospect and with
the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
So, yes, it takes
courage to tell someone else about where God has been working in
your life, because it takes courage first even just to see
God in your life and say so out loud. There are always those
nagging voices around you or in the back of your mind that will say,
“Nah… it’s just inkblots. You’re making up whatever you see of
God’s hand in your life.”
It’s that courage I
want us to see, and to seek after, in the stories of Paul’s defense
in Acts. In the later chapters of this book, Paul gets trial
after trial, and in those situations, he uses his time on the stand
to tell the story of how God rescued him and turned him around to
draw him to Christ. And that takes courage, not only because
Paul knows his life hangs in the balance, but also because aside
from his supernatural Damascus road experience with the flash of
light and the voice from heaven, most of the time God’s hand in
Paul’s life has been a lot less obvious. Paul is able to tell
King Agrippa that God has been leading him, not only in the
flash of light on the road, but all along and ever since.
That takes courage.
“To this day I have
had help from God,” Paul says. And even if Paul doesn’t then
offer a formula for proving that it has been God and not just luck
or fate or random chance, Paul dares to say it boldly. “I know
it has been God who has guided me. I know it has been God who has
led and supported and held me. I know it when I see it.”
Today, maybe the
biggest challenge for us in sharing our faith is working up the
nerve to learn to recognize God’s presence in our lives. Dare
to do it. Stretch your faithful imagination to see where those
divine fingerprints are. Dare to say it out loud to someone
else—“There may not be a lot I am sure of in this life, but I have
seen and known the presence of God here… and here… and here.”
Sometimes, after all,
it’s only when you have to say it out loud to someone else that you
realize just where you have been seeing God. Life is like
that: sometimes you have to say the truth out loud for you to
realize that it is the truth.
So today, let’s work
up the nerve to tell someone else where you have seen God directing
and holding you, blessing and preserving you, rescuing you and
making you new.
Let’s find the courage to speak and the
courage to see.
Lord God, train our
eyes to see you, and give us the confidence to name where we have
met you.
June/July 2013 Pastor's Letter
Seamless Continues:
Witness and Welcome
“Evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread.”
—D.T. Niles
During
these summer months, we are not taking a nap or a vacation or a
tired shrug on the Kingdom life. We are digging
deeper into the life of faith together with Seamless, and in these
two months we are looking at witness and hospitality as two
essentials of what it means to follow Jesus.
Here’s the scoop, and here’s how you can get on board:
June-”Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven…” (Witness)
Being a
witness is living your life in such a way that we reflect the light
of the God we have met in Jesus. We do it by
telling the News of Jesus, sharing our own faith-stories, and by
showing people what God’s Kingdom is like in actions that make
people scratch their heads in wonder, and in our day to day
routines.
In June,
I am making a special invitation/request of you.
On Sunday mornings, there will be an insert in your bulletin with a
blank back and a question about your faith-life.
This is not a test. This is about stretching our muscles to be able
to share our faith with other people. The
questions will be simple and basic, things like, What is a favorite
Bible story of yours and why? Or What was a time
that you saw God show up in your life? Or Why are
you a follower of Jesus? Or How do you know that
you are loved forever by God? Take a minute, either on
Sunday, or during the week later, and put down a sentence or a
paragraph (if you are feeling up for it) and turn the page in, so
that we can compile a set of people’s responses into a booklet of
faith-stories as we all learn how to share our faith better and more
freely with other people. What do you say… will you give it a try
with me?
July-”Give us today our daily bread...” (Hospitality)
You want
to know how to grow in love for someone? Share a
meal with them, sitting across a table.
Christians practice hospitality (literally “love of strangers”)
because we know what it is to have been received as honored guests
by Jesus, and because we have the sneaking suspicion that Christ
might just show up at the door when we let others into our lives.
Our
focus in July on hospitality will be put into practice as all from
our two congregations are invited to share a meal up at New Life
while it hosts guests through Family Promise. We
will discover that when we sit at the same table with friends, with
fellow Christians, and with new faces, the divisions that our
society places between people melt and we find Christ in our midst
at the table. I dare you to join us for that meal
(July 28)… and then to look at how you can open your life to the
needs of others around you, and maybe even your table, too.
It’s all about sharing bread, right?
Come be a part of this
ongoing adventure called Seamless this summer.
—Christ’s Peace, Pastor Steve
