Hagiography: What?

I am a pastor of a church.  Frequently I conduct funerals or memorial services for church members and others who have died.  Through the years I have discovered that while this can be a difficult task it is often very rewarding.

One of the members of one of my former churches said to me once that I preached better funeral sermons than Sunday morning sermons (one of those conditional compliments!).  Her comment, however, made me reflect on why that might be so.  When a Christian dies I think the responsibility of the pastor is to honor the memory of the person and to witness to the presence of God in that person’s life.  I want to tell the truth about a person’s life, of course, but the truth as God sees it.

We all know that people are flawed.  The Bible puts it this way:  “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)  Christians are not without sin.  Yet it is “the God’s truth” that God delights in each one of us.  God even delights in those persons who deny that God exists.  God even delights in those who don’t believe.  God delights in every creature.  (Zephaniah 3:17;  Psalm 149:4; Genesis 1:31)  So, what I try to do is to see the person who has died through the eyes of God’s unfathomable and uncontainable delight. 

In the early church there was a popular literature called hagiography.  This is a fancy word for describing the study of holiness, particularly holy people, whom we often call saints.  The lives of the saints made for interesting reading at one time.  I think it still does. 

There are two ways of defining saints:  those who are holier than anyone else, and those who are considered holy by God simply by virtue of the fact that God created them.  I prefer the study of everyday saints.  As I have learned to see the deceased through the eyes of God’s delight I have learned also to see living people through that same lens, to see the holiness that is in them (as much as they might deny it).  Perhaps my best sermons are nothing more than an attempt to see the delightful glory of God in the most ordinary of folks.

It sometimes takes practice to tune your vision in this way.  But it is great fun, as well as amazingly humbling, to see people the way God sees them.  Try it.  It may also change the way people see you.

Why Jesus? (Being Part of the Big Picture)

I know I just asked the above question a few blogs ago, but there are many answers to this question, so plenty of blog-fodder. 

I was thinking about my cousin, Mary Ann, presently on a short-term journey to the Central African Republic to conduct a Bible school (for adults) and to encourage the Christian community in the region of Zemio.  The Christians there can use all the support they can get as they have had to deal with the terror campaign of Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. 

Mary Ann  and her husband, Les, served in Africa as missionaries for over 40 years and in retirement they keep going back for short-term projects and programs like the present one.  The question you may ask is, “Why would anyone do this?”  After all, when retirement comes don’t we all want to put  our work behind us, especially if it puts us in a place that could be a threat to life and limb?

Now, I admit that one of the motivations for travel is the fact that Les and Mary Ann have children still serving in that region, but that is not the only reason they return again and again. They return because they love the people there – after forty years one can’t help but establish a bond.  But they also return because God has called them to something beyond themselves, and they feel both compelled as well as exhilarated by that calling.

Which returns me to the question, “Why Jesus?”   Mary Ann and Les might articulate this differently,  but I think they would agree with me – Jesus calls us out of an unsatisfying life of self-absorption into a life that plays itself out on the grand stage of history.  Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was  breaking in upon the world.  The apostle Paul picked up on the theme by declaring that through Jesus God was doing nothing less than restoring the fullness of creation.

So, maybe all you want out of life is a decent job, a happy relationship with your significant other, or time off for good behavior.  Maybe all you care about is beating your best score in World of Warcraft.  Maybe your biggest dream is to make the cheerleading squad.  Or maybe all you want to do is retire so you can play golf.  Go for it.  Sounds stimulating.

But if you want to be part of something bigger than yourself, if you want to be part of a movement that is changing history, indeed, transforming  creation itself, then that’s “Why Jesus?”  If you haven’t heard this grand vision in the words and life of Jesus, then I suggest you haven’t really been listening.

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

I couldn’t help it.  While she was still walking across the parking lot, before she had said a word, I was sizing her up.  The way she was dressed, the cut of her hair, the proportions of her figure – too fat, too thin – all these were measures running through my critical faculties.  And then there was the handshake (too firm, too limp), and the sound of her voice (refined or unpolished) that went into the mix of my judgments upon another human being.  None of this was deliberate.  It simply was.

I don’t think I’m that unusual in this regard.  Our tendency to judge one another comes with the territory of being human.  I believe in sin.  I’m agin’ it, as the old preacher used to say, but I am inevitably tied up in it.  If sin is a novel concept to you, or if you think it is a hopelessly outdated idea, then I suggest you have not been paying attention.  All I need to do is see the political news for the day, not to mention all the other news of a sordid nature, to remind me that sin is rampant among us.

 

I am fortunate, though.  I had parents who taught me better.  My parents, too, believed in sin and our need to fight it with every fiber of our being, and to surrender our wills to God in order that we might avail ourselves of divine assistance to overcome sin and recover the image of God in ourselves, AND, to restore the vision to see that image in someone else.

So, from a very young age I was instructed to curb my judgmental tendencies and to train my eyes to see others through the eyes of God.  I was raised to not distrust people who looked or thought differently from me, but to distrust prejudice itself.  I was raised to not measure people by external circumstances but to give people the benefit of the doubt.  In short, I was raised with what we often call The Golden Rule, as I paraphrase it, “treat others the way you want to be treated.” 

Jesus had many things to say about judgment, most of which were warnings that judgment belongs to God, for instance, Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”

As Fathers’ Day arrives this Sunday, I am giving thanks for my Father and Mother who both taught me to measure people with the same grace that I trust God measures me.  I still have to fight my instinct to judge others by the most superficial of standards (sin lies ever ready to rear its ugly head).  But God has worked me over a good bit in my life, helping me to attend more faithfully to the divine image of the person in front of me.  And there’s always the voice of my parents saying, “until you’ve walked a mile in someone else’s shoes . . .”   

  

What We Want and What We Need

We all want something out of church.  Let’s admit it.  Some want the fellowship of good friends who share common values.  Some want moral instruction for their children.  Some want spiritual guidance for their teenagers.  Some want answers to difficult questions.  Some want easy steps to happiness. Some want consolation for life’s troubles.  Some want an energetic worship service with music that makes you want to dance.  Others want just the opposite – worship that is solemn with music that leads to meditation.  Some want a sermon that speaks to the intellect.  Others want a sermon that speaks to the heart. 

I hope it is obvious that no one can have everything they want in a church.  There are too many competing expectations.  How do we manage to have church in the midst of all these differing desires?  Perhaps because we realize, somehow deep down in our heart of hearts, that church is not really about what we want at all, but about what God wants. 

Jesus says, “take up you cross daily and follow me.”  And the more we seek to put aside what we want out of church in order to take up our daily cross the more likely we are to be a church that satisfies our souls.  We sometimes discover that what we wanted was not nearly as important as what we needed, and God always provides what we need as we follow Jesus in this life of daily cross-bearing.

Oh, churches still have squabbles.  And sometimes we have knock-down, drag-out confrontations.  But the more we bear the cross the less we’ll sweat the small stuff and the more likely we’ll find common cause. 

Take a look in the mirror and be honest with yourself.  You want something out of church.  What is it?  Then ask yourself, “What does God want from me?”  When you get in the habit of seeking the answer to that second question you will be closer to helping the church be a gateway to the kingdom of God, and you may find exactly what you need, if not what you want, out of church.

Avoiding Consumption

Jesus prays that his disciples might be one so that the world might believe (John 17:21).  I suspect Jesus knew what a challenge it would be for the church to ever be united so he made it a central part of his prayer life to envision unity for all God’s people.  I am a minister in a denomination that puts unity in the very title of our official name (The United Methodist Church), but I am reminded of a photo of a local church marquee which, surely through a typographical error, boasted itself as the “Untied” Methodist Church --- and sometimes we are.

We are often untied by our difference of opinions, and evidence of that was obvious at our recent General Conference of United Methodists as protests and counter protests on various church petitions were voiced.  And we are often untied in the local church by arguments among ourselves regarding everything from the menu at fellowship suppers and the dress code for the ushers at Sunday services.  Good grief.

And if we are that untied within denominations, it stands to reason that we are perhaps not only untied but snarled in a tangle across denominations.  The very existence of different branches of Christendom stands as a judgment on our failure to achieve unity.

I peruse the purportedly Christian blogs on cyberspace in hopes of finding signs of unity and voices of good news only to find authors taking potshots at other authors for their failure to measure up to standards of orthodoxy and “truth,” as they so define it.  And it grieves me that we Christians have so often targeted each other as the enemy.   Is it any wonder that the world at large still doesn’t believe when we show such lack of love toward fellow believers in Christ? 

In Galatians 5:15, Paul makes an observation, “if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you be not consumed one of another.”  Instead of pointing out the errors of doctrine in our sisters and brothers in Christ, why not look for the ways they are serving Christ in their words and deeds?  Rather than looking with disdain at our unorthodox cousins, why not point out the spiritual gifts they bring to the table of the Lord?

Let the people of God, who call themselves followers of Jesus, instead of “consuming each other” seek to live in answer to the prayer of Jesus that “they may be one . . . so the world might [indeed] believe.”