This Madness Must End

There is a scene in AMC’s Hell on Wheels, a series set in the 1860s around the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, where the conversation between a few characters turns to God:

“Do you not believe in a Higher Power?” asks one, incredulously.

“Yes, sir. I wear it on my hip,” another replies, lifting his jacket to reveal his six-shooter.

“Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” That line, spoken by the Prince of Peace, echoes the truism that violence begets violence. Through his life and death Jesus shows us another way. Time and again, prophets of old and new, call us to turn our swords into plowshares, our weapons of destruction into implements of creation. As followers of Jesus, we are called to lead by example.

I urge you to write your legislators:

• To support a ban on assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines
• To support background checks to help restrict those with histories of gun; violence, links to terrorist organizations, and histories of domestic violence from purchasing firearms;
• To commit to improving mental health treatment.

I also invite you to consider relinquishing any firearms you may have in your possession. But that may not be easy. I’ve been in conversation with a community official about Dayspring partnering with the Tempe Police Department on a firearm “turn-in.” I was aware of the 2013 state law that prevents police from destroying guns from “buy-backs” but was astonished to learn the law applies to guns voluntarily surrendered as well.  While the State of Arizona is clearly not interested in reducing gun prevalence, I believe more and more people in our community recognize the presence of guns in their homes poses a far greater risk to themselves and household members than a potential break-in. I just learned that a 16-year old girl died today from an accidental firearm discharge in her home in Tempe.

This madness must end.

According to Mahatma Gandhi, ‎”Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of humankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of human beings.” Jesus was Gandhi’s model for nonviolent resistance. For too long we’ve professed belief in the kind of “higher power” that can be worn on one’s hip. It is high time we chose Jesus’ way.

Pastor Jeff

I have come to deeply appreciate the name of our church and the wisdom of those who were behind its naming. A Middle English word meaning ‘dawn’ or ‘first light,’ dayspring first appeared in the 13th century. Clearly the term is laden with a sense of hope and promise. A U2 refrain comes to mind: “It’s a beautiful day / Don’t let it get away / It’s a beautiful day.” The translators of the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, applied the term ‘dayspring’ to Jesus in Zechariah’s prophecy toward the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. In the early 20th century, W. B. Yeats wrote of “the dayspring of their youth,” referring to the beginning of a new era or order of things.

Do you ever wonder about the health and future of the church at large? The United Methodist Church isn’t alone in its 50-year-long membership decline. Millennials (ages 18-35) continue to leave the church in alarming numbers. Their stated reasons: it’s homophobic, anti-science, exclusivist, hypocritical and judgmental. In his book The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus, Robin Meyers writes:

“Now for the good news: the church of Jesus Christ in the Western World is in terrible shape. That’s right—the good news is the bad news—and that’s good news. Why? Because, according to the distinguished scholar of religion Phyllis Tickle, apparently about every five hundred years the church holds a sort of giant rummage sale. It must decide what goes and what stays, what is dispensable and what is irreplaceable. Five centuries after the Protestant Reformation, we find ourselves passing through precisely such a time. Think of it as a kind of spring cleaning. We are sorting through our theological stuff and asking painful and disorienting questions about where it came from, what it’s worth, and why the once lucrative market for creeds and doctrines seems both depressed and depressing.”

As a progressive church, I like to think that Dayspring is helping to usher in a new era of Christianity, one that is open, inclusive, non-exclusivist (honoring other paths to the sacred), justice-oriented, and faithful to the person and vision of Jesus, “the dayspring from on high [who] hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (KJV Luke 1:78-79).  May it be so!

Pastor Jeff

The season of Lent is upon us. The forty-day period before Easter offers Christians pause to reflect on our spirituality and take an inventory of our lives. Why forty days? The number forty is derived from the traditional forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. Lent has traditionally been associated with self-denial, fasting, and penitence.

Have you ever wondered why purple is the traditional color for Lent? It was the color of royalty, wealth, status and power – that much I learned from my Bible dictionaries. But why it’s the color of Lent was still a mystery to me, so I consulted Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple, to see if it might offer a clue. It’s rather interesting to see how she uses the color. There are several passages where purple is mentioned.

One is where Celie, this poor rural black woman with a terrible self-image, oppressed by society, and especially by men, meets a woman named Shug, who is proud, and free, and beautiful, and loving, and life-affirming. Celie falls in love with Shug. She adores and venerates her. Shug gently leads Celie out of her imprisonment, her self-imposed bondage, and frees her. In one scene Celie envisions Shug, her redeemer, dressed in purple.

In another scene Shug is talking to Celie about God:

“I think it [ticks] God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. God made the color purple to please us, just to be beautiful. Most people think that our purpose in life is to please God, but God is trying to please us. That’s why God made the color purple”

It’s customary to give up something for Lent. I don’t want to take that away from anyone who is really looking forward to a wonderful season of suffering! But let me suggest Lent need not be a time when we carry our little crosses. Maybe we could use the season as a time of intentional reflection to see the world in a new way. To see “God in all things and all things in God,” as the mystic put it. To see “Christ on the face of each other,” as the contemporary gospel song puts it. To see how “God is trying to please us.” Call it forty days of wonder. Life-affirming, Spirit-infused wonder. Or, if you prefer, you could always give up chocolate.

Pastor Jeff

Head of Christ *oil on panel *25 x 21.7 cm *circa 1648

You may be surprised to learn that the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection includes a portrait study of Jesus by Rembrandt, the very study the Dutch master used for his Supper at Emmaus. Curator Graham W. J. Beal’s dream to see the works side by side was realized a few years ago with a special exhibit at the D.I.A. called Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus. I was fortunate to see that exhibit while visiting Janice’s family for the holidays.

Organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musée du Louvre, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibit included paintings, prints and drawings of Jesus by Rembrandt and his students from museums throughout the world. I marveled at the seven or eight small portraitures of Jesus. They were simply breathtaking. I’d seen one of them previously in Berlin, but it was extraordinary to see them together for the first time since they were created in his studio.

Breaking from the traditional, idealized form based on Greek sculpture, Rembrandt painted an all-too-human likeness of Jesus. Moreover, he used a Jewish model, probably a Sephardic Jewish immigrant. (Rembrandt and his wife lived in a Jewish section of Amsterdam). Rembrandt literally changed the face of Jesus. What you get is a humble, human, caring Jesus. A servant, not a superhero. A life marked by compassion that was simply divine.

I want to invite you to join me on Monday nights at 6:30pm or Thursday mornings at 10am beginning January 25 for “Meeting Jesus Again: Part 1,” an exploration of a credible Jesus for the 21st Century. We will be joined by 25 experts for a conversation around the relevance of Jesus for today in this video-based study. Together let’s learn more about the One we’re called to follow.

Pastor Jeff

Go tell it on the mountain . . .that Jesus Christ is born!    

– African-American Spiritual

‘Tis the season of gifts and giving!  More than that, Christmas is a time to get in touch with what it means to give. When we give, something happens to us, as well as to the recipient!

Many of the gifts we give at Christmas are wrapped and placed under the tree. But there are so many others . . . the gift of friendship to someone who is lonely, the gift of compassion to someone who is hurting, the gift of forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, the gift of patience for those who are anxious. These gifts are everlasting. Long after the toys have been cast aside, the sweaters worn out, the perfume used up, these gifts will yet remain. They are eternal.

I want to suggest another unique way for us to give this Christmas, one that also could have lasting value. There’s a story about William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. Booth spent most of his years reaching out to the destitute on the streets of London. This story may be apocryphal, but it has an important message:

Each Christmas there was a tradition in London that the churches would send out representatives to the streets to invite the poor to a Christmas celebration. Huge crowds would gather for this annual burst of generosity. The Anglicans would begin by announcing, “All of you who are Anglicans, come with us.” Then it was the Roman Catholics: “All who are Catholic, come with us.” Then the Methodists, the Lutherans, and all the other denominations announced, “Whoever belongs to us, come with us.” Finally, when all of the church representatives had made their invitations, a large crowd of people still was milling about. At that point William Booth would shout out to the people, “All of you who belong to no one, come with me.”

Hospitality is a hallmark of Dayspring UMC. We might well shout on the streets, “All of you in the East Valley who belong to no one, come with us. All who have become disillusioned with organized religion come with us. All who have been rejected by others, who are weary and heavy-laden, come with us, and God will give you rest. All who wish to be a part of a community where everybody is somebody, come with us.”

Let your gift, then, be an invitation. Invite your friends, relatives, neighbors, associates & acquaintances who may be looking for a faith community to one of our five Christmas Eve services – 3, 5, 7, 9 & 11pm – which promise to be inspiring and inclusive worship experiences. And there’s no safer time than Christmas to invite someone to church!

You might also consider inviting family, colleagues and neighbors to the Dayspring Chorale Christmas Concert on Dec. 6 at 7:00pm and our Children’s Christmas Pageant on Dec. 13 at 8:30 & 10:00am.

May the love, hospitality and generosity of the one whose birth we celebrate at Christmas touch your heart and fill your life with meaning and purpose.

In the Love of that First Christmas,

Pastor Jeff

Our United Methodist Men’s group used a book by Harold Kushner, Living a Life That Matters, for their retreat last month. I’m a big fan of Kushner’s work. I don’t know how many copies of When Bad Things Happen to Good People I’ve given away over the years. That book has brought comfort to millions of people by helping them cope with some of life’s most shattering tragedies. As a by-product of his bestselling book, Kushner was pushed and pulled into prominence, achieving a measure of fame and fortune few ever taste.

Ironically, it was out of this position of prominence that Kushner penned his second book with the surprising title When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. His thesis being, even if you do “get it all” you won’t be satisfied, simply because life is created for something more significant than success.

As much as we’d all like to have the chance to prove him wrong, most of us will never have the opportunity. All of us know what it’s like to feel unfulfilled at one point or another in our lives. If the Bible is to be believed, from Jeremiah to Jesus, the real art of meaningful living is learning how to live life bravely, and even beautifully, on the basis of never getting “all you ever wanted.” As DeWane Zimmerman says, “Meaningful lives are those who have learned the great and graceful art of living with leftovers, even with the left over memories of loved ones who have died – or have left in other painful ways.”

This is the season of Thanksgiving. It begins and ends with a heart of gratitude. While aerobic exercise may be good for your heart, practicing gratitude is a spiritual exercise to develop a grateful heart. Grateful for all we already have – even leftovers.

I think I was in high school when I became troubled by exclusive truth claims professed by some Christians. Perhaps I wondered how my good friends who happened to be Jewish would be left out of heaven. Or how Christians of a certain stripe could have a monopoly on the Divine. The notion of an all-loving God coexisting with a place of eternal damnation especially left me short. Slowly I began to see the Sacred in a new way, characterized as having an ongoing love affair with the world – a God who participates and delights in creation and calls us into holistic ways of being and relating to each other, the Spirit, and all of creation.

Brian McLaren relates a similar journey. He came to see that the narrative arc of the Bible isn’t about saving sinners from hell. “No,” McLaren says, “The Christian faith – and the basic message of the Bible – is that we human beings are in a mess. We’re in a mess individually, but we’re in a mess as a species and we’ve plunged the whole planet into a desperately serious crisis. And God is with us, and God is guiding us, and God is leading us to deal with it in constructive ways. The story is about God’s love for the world and healing of the world. “

This realization can be liberating. We don’t have to live in fear. God is for us! Isn’t that the Gospel in miniature? And it’s an invitation to actively participate in what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, what our Jewish sisters and brothers call tikun olam, “the healing of the world.”

As McLaren says, “I can’t help but think that if we participate with God in God’s redemptive healing, reconciling work then whatever happens after we die is gonna’ be ok. But, if we become so preoccupied with our own little eternal outcome, so that we don’t care about what God’s doing in this world, we don’t join in it, that can be pretty counterproductive.”

I too believe the overarching message of the Bible concerns God’s ongoing care for creation and invitation to all to help bring about God’s dream for the world. “Please join me,” it’s as if God says to each and all. “I need you!” Each and all, blessed to be a blessing!

Pastor Jeff

I was once challenged to read nothing but the Bible for a month. I think my friend was genuinely concerned for my salvation. One day she came to me and said, “Jeff, it’s obvious that you read a lot of books. But I’m wondering if you spend enough time reading the Bible. I’d like to challenge you to spend a month reading nothing but the Good Book.” Somewhat intrigued, I told her I would give it some thought and prayer.

I later called her and said, “I’ll do it. But I have a request of you. While I’m reading the Bible, I’d like for you to read three books of my choosing!” My friend agreed, and we decided to meet each week of that month and share our discoveries.

So the following month I read nothing but the Bible. No newspapers, magazines, books. I had Janice read me my mail and I joke that I got lost every time I got in the car, not being able to read street signs and all. And I must say it was a fantastic experience! My friend and I both learned a great deal about ourselves, each other and the texts we studied. The experience cemented our relationship in mutual respect. I fell in love again with large parts of the Bible, Isaiah and Luke, in particular. And I was reminded of huge swaths of prejudice and violence that somehow made it into the canon.

And, of course, I realized my friend was right: I don’t spend enough time reading the Bible.

September 13 is Bible Sunday. We will give Bibles to our children and we’ll consider how we are a people, as John Wesley said, “of one book.” I hope you’ll plan to be present in worship.

You may be wondering what titles I put in my friend’s hand. If you’ve been around Dayspring the past year you can probably guess the authors of two of them! I asked her to read: The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction, by Frederick Buechner, Jesus: A New Vision by Marcus Borg, and, of course, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John Shelby Spong.
Blessings, Pastor Jeff

http://www.old.dayspring-umc.org/events/easter-2019/