Things came together calendar-wise for a message that both celebrated American freedom and pointed out that living as a citizen of the Kingdom is not the same as being a citizen of the USA. And it was a sermon based on pronouns.  Or the lack of them. Week 2 of "On The Up And Up," this one as called "The Right Stuff" and landed here: Having the right doesn't give you the right.   ------------------------------------------- This is a Sunday of all Sundays to think together for a few moments about rights. Most people in the room had SOME sort of celebration last night for the 4th. Talk about “on the up and up” – many of you set off or at least looked at sparklers & explosions as they headed … well, up and up. But, really, the 4th of July and the Dec of Independence is only meaningful because of the Continental Congress, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights that followed it (well, that and the winning the Rev War part!). Without the establishing of a govt. and the ensuring of freedom that followed the Dec of Independence was just that – a Declaration. It’s the rights that followed which gave teeth to what got declared.   If you grew up in the USA – and even moreso if you didn’t and so you had to learn this by intention and not by osmosis – you have been immersed in your rights. Both the Bill Of Rights (1st 10 Amendments) and those that that have been added to: right to free speech, freedom of and from religion, right to a trial by jury, to keep and bear arms. Later, civil rights regardless of race, voting rights regardless of gender & property, more recently marriage rights debated regardless of make-up of the couple. If you’ve ever traveled to a developing country with an incomplete infrastructure and no environmental policy, you’ll be really glad the USA has a de facto right to clean air and garbage collection! Everywhere you look in this culture, we have rights, written AND assumed, articulated AND internalized. And Lord knows, with most folks you don’t want to trample on their rights in the least or you will quickly discover another deeply held American right: the right to sue.   Well most of you right now are welling up with gratitude for me and my middle school civics lesson, so YOU’RE WELCOME. But you might also be wondering: why in church? Why today? What does this have to do with anything? I’m glad you asked because the intersection of Psalm 122 and this today, this biblical song and this national celebration really has everything to do with how our faith. The cultural reality of our rights influences how we understand the spiritual reality of this psalm. Now, to remind you: Ps 122 is part of what is called The Songs of Ascent, a collection of 15 folk songs (120-134) that people would sing as they trekked from their farms, towns, and villages up to Jerusalem 3x a year for religious feasts: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. They went those three times because the Jerusalem temple was the central religious location for all faithful Jews then. And Jerusalem was (and is) physically at one of the highest georgraphic places in all of Israel. So the journey from those towns, villages, and farms more literally was a climb. A gradual climb but an relentless climb nonetheless. To go to Jerusalem with a crowd of fellow piligrims was, literally, to go on the up and up.   And these 15 folk songs functioned almost like We Shall Overcome (AV) in the CR era or like This Land Is Your Land during the Dust Bowl era (AV): folks actually sang them as they marched together on the up and up. One of those sections of the bible when you can see how vividly biblical writings had a life before they made it into the bible. And Ps 122, which appears to be sung when the journey is “up” and done and is particularly enlightening in terms of rights . . . because of what goes on with the pronouns. Yes, the prounouns. Check it out at Ps. 122:1a: I rejoiced with those who said to me,     “Let us go to the house of the Lord.” Can we acknowledge that on the Sunday after July 4, in churches ALL ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN, we preachers are simply glad when ANYONE comes to the house of the Lord? But note the “I” there . . . because you’re not going to see it again for a LONG time in this psalm. And as the psalm writer begins his song, think of all HIS rights: it says it is “of David” which means either the king hisself wrote it or someone from his inner circle did. In either case, he is a VIP. He’s a Jew, a member of the chosen people. He’s travelled to Jerusalem, so he is religiously faithful if not all-the-way elite. And he has survived a long, hot, dangerous hike and so as the psalm begins it seems as if he has every right to put up his feet, pour himself a cold one, and if he goes to church at all, at least have a service he likes! But that’s not really what happens. Look at 122:1b-2: “Let us go to the house of the Lord.” ² Our feet are standing     in your gates, Jerusalem “I” has quickly become “OUR.” In the face of God, his individuality has been swallowed up into his community. The self has become merged into the whole. And then 122:3 is so interesting: Jerusalem is built like a city     that is closely compacted together. It seems as the though the city was designed and built in such a way as to maximize community. The architecture and the urban planning reinforce the theology that the faith is teaching: ME comes to life only as it is part of WE. Architecture is shaping life, shaping religion.   And then look at 122:4: That is where the tribes go up—     the tribes of the Lord— to praise the name of the Lord     according to the statute given to Israel. Tribes. Notice? It’s all about the group and not at all about the individual. It’s WE who ultimately go up to Jerusalem, who head to church, not just a collection of ME’s.   So let’s take stock of where we are and where we’re headed. Here’s a guy, either a king or a king’s assistant – in a time when they spoke of the DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS! – who after a long trek to Jerusalem finds his ME overwhelmed by the WE of the community. The “I” pronoun has disappeared in favor of “us” and “we.” Instead of asserting his rights – rights he was born into and rights he earned – the disappearing “I” pronoun shows he is instead relinquishing them. A psalm that could be about his personal religion instead becomes a song about our collective faith. So here’s what we take from a king taking that approach on the day after July 4th! Having the right doesn’t give you the right. Just because you have the right legally or even morally doesn’t mean you have to use it. Especially when it comes to worship & church & faith & relationships.  Having the right doesn’t give you the right.   Psalm 122 is the greatest example of how regular, consistent worship is the best preparation for life as a whole because in this collective experience of Having the right doesn’t give you the right. we actually learn how life beyond church works the best. Because you could assert your ME – which is the kind of thing in America we are brought up to do – but when you do that God answers back with WE. Let me show you what I mean and how it radiates out from this exp to all of life. See, on a Sunday a.m., for example, you have preferences. Some of you would prefer more gospel/urban gospel music. Others would prefer more classical, churchy music. Some prefer an edgier, louder, more churning sound (if you’re my age or older, for example, and you think we’re almost over the edge, we’re not. Lotta churches a lot louder and a lot darker than us.) Some of you would prefer a pastor who preached verse-by-verse or wore a suite or even a clergy collar (AV of me?!?!) But what I’m saying is that in the GS community most of you who call GS home are essentially “at home” . . . but only because you’re willing to sacrifice an area or two of your preferences. More of your taste. For the vast majority of you, the ME has surrendered to the WE. You have the right to insist on everything done the way you like, but because of Christ’s blood and the ethos of Psalm 122, that doesn’t give you the right to assert everything you have. It’s funny . . . sometimes people will tell me they chose GS because it “fit” or it felt “comfortable.” That’s great. I love it. We don’t want to be difficult. But know what I’d love? If people told me, “I’m looking for a church where I will be UNCOMFORTABLE. Stretched, poked, prodded.” That’s the spirit of Psalm 122 – where those of us living in a ME world are part of a WE church. REF. My gosh, that’s why our mission talks about a LIVING rel with Jesus Christ and not a PERSONAL one. Now: you have a personal rel with Jesus . . . but it can never STAY personal. That means it’s private. Faith is lived on the up and up & together. Having the right doesn’t give you the right. Some years ago a man’s parting words to me as he left the church were “I’m not getting fed.” That’s devastating for a simmering cauldron of insecurity like me. But you know what I’ve learned since? There have been five subsequent churches where, apparently, the same guy wasn’t “getting fed.” Oh. Sometimes the problem is not with the food; it's with the eater. It’s an endless quest for a ME church; a loop of my rights.  Having the right doesn’t give you the right. (And just once, someone should leave because “you’re not leading enuf people to Christ!”)   Look at 122:5 again: There stand the thrones for judgment,     the thrones of the house of David.  That means that we gather at this time and in this place to focus on the decisions that God has already made. We don’t come here so much to for affirmation as for reformation. We celebrate God’s decisions that even if they cramp our style nevertheless save our lives. It’s like this: REVEAL car seat. Man I remember those days: kids objecting, squirming, screaming, HATING you for putting them in . . . and yet putting them in that car seat is the most loving thing you can do. It’s the same with the Commandments! We buck, we squirm, we question, we even HATE God for them. But they are the ultimate act of protecting, preserving love. We have the right as American to post these or not, to follow these or not, to follow these or not . . but that doesn’t give us the right as Jesus’ ppl to do any of that. Having the right in the USA doesn’t give you the right in the kingdom. In fact, to celebrate that we gather to focus our attn. on the decisions of God, let’s read the Ten Commandments  now: READ AV Having the right doesn’t give you the right.   All that is why worship is such preparation for life. If you realize WE is bigger than ME in your marriage . . . think you’d be a better mate? If you realize it’s not about your preferences but his purposes, think you might have more patience with your spouse? Your kids? Your co-workers? Speaking of work, what would it be like if that space was free of “right-asserting”? If no one said, “what gives YEW the right?!” Less infighting and backbiting and more kingdom building, no doubt. Being glad that you’ve come to the house of the Lord (122:1) isn’t about generating phony enthusiasm for a Sunday morning; it’s about a deep satisfaction that in worship you get a weekly reminder that your preferences are secondary to his purposes, that even though you could doesn’t mean you will; that ME is secondary to WE, that the phrase “my rights” are seldom if ever on the lips of a Xn. All that to say that you could say Ps 122 is one of the least America-focused psalms ever . . . and one of the most kingdom-centered of them all.   Do you remember in May, in Garland TX, they held that Mohammed Cartoon art contest? And it was attacked by terrorists who were killed by security? No one shed many tears for those deaths. And Xns rightly pointed out that Jesus is ridiculed and blasphemed and cartoonized every day in religion classes across our land but no one protests via mass murder. So the even rightly pointed out a double standard and we were grateful that terrorists and not “artists” got killed. It was the kind of thing that as an American you could feel OK about. We can make cartoons of Mohammed if we want to . . . we have the right.   But what about as a member of the Kingdom? What does Col 4:5-6 say about purposely antagonizing a billion Muslims? ⁵ Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. ⁶ Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.   How can you invite people into a living relationship with your Savior when your first ridicule their prophet? Might those words, along with Ps 122, say on July 4 and beyond Having the right doesn't give you the right? And where better to experience that week after week than in the place and among the people where your preferences are submitted to his purposes and where your ME turns into his WE?

So last Friday, I wasn't going to Tweet about it. I wasn't going to get on Facebook and argue about it. I wasn't even going to change my Sunday sermon to address it directly. Instead, I've located some wise voices to speak into what it means that marriage equality is now the law of the land. As some of you know, my opinions regarding what the church should teach and how the church should minister in the area of human sexuality are quite strong.  Just last week, for example, this piece ran in the United Methodist opinion portal Ministry Matters. But in terms of the church's intersection with culture, government, and the law, my feelings are much more ambivalent.  I greeted Friday's ruling with more of a sigh than a snarl. So: here are five voices speaking some wisdom into my sighs.   1.  Carey Nieuwhof.  Of course!  A Canadian evangelical is going to know better than any of us in the USA how to have a healthy perspective in our new cultural context.  You can read him here.   2.  Chappell Temple.  Chappell is a United Methodist pastor in Houston with degrees from Rice, Perkins, and Gordon-Conwell.  In other words, he's really smart.  His piece called What Love Has To Do With It proves the point.  (And I've always wanted to call him "Sanctuary Synagogue.")   3.  Tim Tennent.  Whenever I read one of Dr. Tennent's essays, I am both glad and proud that he is president of Asbury Seminary.  You can read his SCOTUS reflections here.   4.  JD Walt.  My friend from Seedbed Publishing "crushes it" with this daily text called The End Of Christian America.    5.  OK, after two Asburians, I have to include another perspective.  How's this from Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times, who posits a position I don't agree with but will be wary of here. Well, now we know.                      

Yesterday afternoon, I went to jail. Then to a hospital room. Then to another hospital room. Then to a nursing home. I was out of the office and away from my computer for several hours straight. That's really not that unusual -- at least for the course of most of my 25 years in ministry it's not unusual. But in recent months, my work days have revolved more and more around my office and its computer. There have been books to finalize, blogs to write, a denomination to wrestle with, friends to contact, parishioners to email, and tweets to twit. On Wednesday, however, I knew of several situations that absolutely needed my pastoral presence and so for the bulk of the day my computer and I were disconnected from each other. And you know what I realized? Ministry is not on the screen.  It's with people.

My young friend Aaron handed me this note on Sunday:   Here are some highlights of his prose:

• I hope it would help to invite readers to come to Good Shepherd to be invited into a living relationship with Jesus Christ.  He KNOWS & REPEATS THE MISSION STATMENT!
• I cannot wait to read your 2 other books.
• I thought 'Head Scratchers' was gonna be my birthday present but it wasn't.
• Hope to look for the 2 other books in the fall.
• I have enclosed a list that you might want to be published . . . List of series you maybe want to be published:
  • 4U
  • BrainWashing
  • Beyond
  • Wash Me!
  • Trending
  • (These may be too many books to publish, I guess.  :/)

We'll take those last few up with my friends at Abingdon!    

The final message in the BrainWashing series wasn't so much a sermon as a guided series of movements. Working off the premise that To Clear Your Head, Lift Your Heart, I wanted people actually to experience that ways in which various acts of worship led to more level-headed thinking. So I didn't deal with one text in depth.  I didn't follow the ME WE GOD YOU WE format that I usually do.  I gave away the bottom line much earlier than usual. And then, of course, on Wednesday the church massacre in Charleston happened.  Thankfully, Chris Macedo had a brilliant idea to change the concluding movement from what we originally planned (an open mike time) to something much more appropriate (writing prayer notes to the Emmanuel Methodist family that we will mail in bulk later this week). Here it is:  Clear Your Head. --------------------------------------------------------- So we’re winding up a series on BrainWashing. But in light of that, do you know what some of the most difficult thinking you’ll ever do is? When you’re coming out of a fog. Like no one ever makes a life altering decision in the middle of waking up from anesthesia. You just don’t. No one wakes up from a coma and jumps right into calculus. No one gets up out of a deep REM sleep ready to drive a race car. It takes a while to go from cloudy to clear, from foggy to focused.  It's why the least rational people in the world are those who are newly in love -- hormones and emotions waft up and enshroud brain waves in romantic confusion. And one thing I hope you’ve all seen from the series is the ways in which all of us have thinking that has been muddied, been made cloudy, by the culture & the world. Both the content of what pours into us through the media – be it left wing, right wing, or the whole bird. Conventional wisdom. The right side of history. And by the process of passively absorbing all this information and input while we sit, slack-jawed, in front of our screen. Watching whatever it is so intently we don’t even noticed the drool coming from our lips. Content and process. The reason we need brainwashING is because we’ve already been brainwashED – we just don’t realize it. And that brain wash impacts our relationships, our money, even our understanding of who God is and what God is about. Without intervention, it puts us in a permanent fog. And so today will be totally different from a “usual” Sunday at GS. Because the ultimate antidote for foggy thinking ON FATHERS DAY has to do not with re-programming your mind but with redirecting your heart. It has to do with this thing called worship. What a gathered community does together under the authority of God, most often on a Sunday morning but other times as well. Now I know: some of you – and, yes, men in particular – will say things like “Oh, I can worship God just as well on golf course on Sunday morning.” Well you can say that all you want but the truth is that what’s really going on is that you worship Golf on God’s course because you switched the object of your worship. And the bible is so consistent at connecting corporate worship with clear thinking. Heart direction with mental health. The best known “connecting place” is here in Romans 12:1-2: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. ² Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Regular worship. Renewed minds. It’s as if one flows directly into the other. And so you know what that means for you and for me on this Father’s Day? On this day in which I’m telling you what I’m going to tell you MUCH EARLIER than usual so that we can get some practice DOING what I’m talking about? It’s this: To clear your head, lift your heart.  Get out of the fog by getting in community. Because worship – this thing we are doing together right now – has this clarifying ability to show you what you are not. Like when you and I properly understand and experience worship, it shows you that YOU ARE NOT ALL THAT. Maybe you’ve heard of that SS teacher who was trying to teach hygiene to her class of 7 year olds. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she continually told them. Over and over. Finally, at the end of the class she wanted to quiz them and said, “Now remember, cleaniness is next to what?” After some silence, a little girl said, “Impossible.” And it is, spiritually speaking! Look at Psalm 51:10-12: Create in me a pure heart, O God,     and renew a steadfast spirit within me. ¹¹ Do not cast me from your presence     or take your Holy Spirit from me. ¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation     and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me   Create a CLEAN heart, David says. Why? Because he writes and sings this Psalm just after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged to have her husband killed in battle. Listen: all of us have places where we’re not clean. They may not be as dramatic as David’s – or they might – but we’ve got them. So part of what happens in honest worship is recognizing that: confessing sin, admitting weakness, acknowledging how completely dependent you are upon God. I love that church that has a sign in front that says: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A SINNER TO ATTEND OUR CHURCH. BUT IT HELPS. One of GS’s weaknesses is that we don’t often do prayers of confession together. And one reason we don’t is that a lot of us grew up in church traditions that HAD those kind of prayers and one of two things happened: 1) they immersed us into a kind of guilt from which we could not leap out and 2) more frequently, we were in those churches where we just raced through those prayers, not considering how powerful and poignant they really are. But not here and not today. We’re gonna recite this one S L O W L Y because it’s true and it’s painful: Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray. Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Dissolve AV, one line at a time, lingering). To clear your head, lift your heart. And YOU’RE NOT THE FIRST. Man, this entire series has (I hope) served to remind you that newer isn’t better, urgent isn’t important, and modern isn’t brilliant. We are not smarter than the people who wrote the bible! Nor are we smarter than a whole host of ancient saints who followed them and gave shape and direction to our faith. And that’s why we can sing, pray, and declare words that we inherit rather than words we invent. Did you realize that? As part of this ancient faith, we worship God, we bring clarity to our thinking when we used inherited rather than invented words. You’re not the first to try to figure this faith out, some really smart, really faithful people have plowed the ground before you, and we walk and speak in a path they prepared. That’s worship. Head clearing worship. So we’re going to worship now by declaring together words we inherit: APOSTLE’S CREED To clear your head, lift your heart.  This kind of gathering also reminds you that YOU’RE NOT ALONE. I remember years ago, a brand-new Xn, playing in a tennis tournament and on the court next to me a friend was playing. He’d actually been instrumental in leading me to faith and so as we walk by each other that day, he just said to me, “Keep the faith.” (If you know about the antics of spoiled tennis players, you know how much that was needed!) But what a moment of solidarity. There we were, in competition, in battle, and yet bound together by this shared faith in a suffering Savior. There was strength in solidarity.   And you come into this place, often emerging out of all kinds of battles in the world, and we want you to know the peace and strength of solidarity. Ephesians 5:19 says it this way: ¹⁹ speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, Ah, yes. There is something in the intersection of lyric, melody, and harmony that goes deeper than mere speech. Deep down you believe stuff about God and even the manliest, most reserved of you, even the ones who can’t sing a lick, deep down yearn to sing it out. You believe things about God that are so personal, so profound, it bubbles up and bursts out. You’ve been loved. You’ve been bought. You who deserve hell, who have put others through hell, have been promised heaven. You’re singing already, so let’s do it now to each other And then Chris Macedo led one side of the room in singing "How Great Is Our God" to the other side & vice versa.  Then we all sang together.   This Sunday, we also want to let another community know they are not alone.  That why Methodists in Charlotte are going to spend the next few moments writing prayer notes to Methodists in Charleston. When you're done, bring yours up to the steps where we will gather them and mail them later this week . . .