HOMILETICS

The ChurchBody Principles

Statements of Rights and Responsibilities:

We are building the church to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. The church promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide the church in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the church.

1. Freedom to Share and Connect
[This is what the church is all about: to be in relationship, to connect, to share, and to do so freely without criticism or judgment at the same time respecting biblical boundaries]

2. Ownership and Control of Information
[The church is not a place where we gossip about each other. It’s a place where a person’s privacy and integrity are respected.]

3. Free Flow of Information
[People should know what is going on. Financial, policy and leadership decisions should be public knowledge.]

4. Fundamental Equality
[In the ChurchBody every person is valued and affirmed for the role and ministry to which they’ve been called.]

5. Social Value
[The church is a community and as such it is both a location – bricks and mortar—where people] have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence [or standing in the ChurchBody] removed for reasons other than those [that are proscribed by transcultural and timeless biblical principles.]

6. Open Platforms and Standards
People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone. [People should know how their church is governed and have a participatory and representative voice in how that happens.]

7. Fundamental Service
[The church is about ministry. When the church ceases to be a place where ministry, service, affirmation, support, prayer, and teaching are taking place, it has failed in its fundamental reason for existing.] People should be able to use [the church] to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the [the church] regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution[s placed in the collection plate].

8. Common Welfare
[The ChurchBody should articulate] the rights and responsibilities of [the church and these rights and responsibilities] should be described in a [Mission] Statement [which should not be inconsistent with these Principles [set forth herein].

9. Transparent Process
[The ChurchBody] should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. [The church]  should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of [participation] to encourage input and discourse on [its mission and purpose].

10. One World
The [ChurchBody] should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be [reach] in the world [with the Good News.]

NOTE: Some of you gearheads and tech wizards may recognize the above as “The Facebook Principles” just released by Facebook which, with 180 million members worldwide is the fifth largest “nation” on the planet.

In every case where the word Facebook appears, I have substituted the word “ChristBody” or church. Likewise, the words in brackets are mine.

It seems to me that as we enter the Lenten season, it might be a good teaching tool to talk about the ChurchBody principles with the Facebook phenomena as the cultural backdrop against which this discussion can take place.

Worldwide, there are more Christians and Facebookers. But both are communities and both are struggling with what should be, and must be, the guiding principles going forward into the coming years.

Ash Wednesday and the Death Map

It’s Ash Wednesday, and it strikes me that something’s about to die.

At least, that’s the idea behind the concept of Ash Wednesday. A day of repentance and contrition. The beginning of a 40-day period of discipline and confession.  “Sackcloth and ashes.” Often those ashes were the ashes of a sacrificial animal. The ashes you take upon your forehead are the ashes of a palm branch that once was alive and doing its thing on a palm tree.

I just read about a death map which plots where people are mostly likely to die of natural hazards. Mother Nature is most likely to kill you if you live in the South along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

You’re much safe from natural disasters in the Great Lakes area or the  Northeast.

What I am reminded of by Ash Wednesday is not where Mother Nature is going to kill me, but where and when my own nature is likely to kill me.

I tell you, I am my own worst enemy. And Ash Wednesday is as good a time as any, yea, perhaps a better time than most to say goodbye to what Paul calls “the old nature,” and reduce it to ashes.

Of course, it’s not so easy.

But when I take the ashes tonight, I want to say to God: “I am ready to die.” Or, “I am ready to let something die, shrivel up, be reduced to ashes. And I am ready to live…to allow your life to grow slowly and inexorably within me.”

It’s Ash Wednesday. Something’s about to die.

But someone’s about to live.

Thanks be to God!

Weird life is among us

My colleagues in the pulpit or the theological academy have all studied eschatology at some time or another with more or less enthusiasm. Some had pursued the arcane discipline with a passion and have developed eschatological time-tables and the like.

Others, while willing to admit that the kingdom is future, also assert that the kingdom is among us, taking a position sometimes called “realized eschatology.” There is an “age to come,” but the age which is to come has already, in another sense, come and is among us. And it is among us in the world in the form of the church.

Christians—taking their cue from Scriptures, see themselves as aliens, foreigners, sojourners in an age and culture which is, or ought to be, hostile and inhospitable.

This is the background against which I read with interest the presentation of Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University. In his paper at a meeting in Chicago of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) he argues that there may well be organisms existing in a so-called “shadow life," hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents.

Weird life could be living among us, he says. "We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life. "It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses," said the physicist.

All Davies needs to do to be convinced of “weird life” among us is to visit a few congregations of a Sunday morning, or follow these same individuals throughout the week.

And therein lie the homiletical possibilities. We’re called to be weird in a way. Jesus himself warned us that it was highly unlikely that anyone who was called a friend of his, would be well-liked by the world. (Here we might revisit Hauerwas and Willimon’s book Resident Aliens).

So Christians, by their very calling, are called to be weird, and/or to recognize their alien status.
But on the other hand, being disliked by the culture is not an infallible sign that the Christianity we express and the spirituality we embrace is authentic or meaningful in any way.

Some Christians are weird and an utter embarrassment to everyone. That this is the truth is argued by no one. How can this be corrected?

The church: a living organism living a shadow life in an alien culture. Sounds like the these of a good paper—or even a sermon—or the subject of an invigorating discussion group.

Winkies, Toilets and Holy Places

Gotta tell you about this new book out.

WINKIES, TOILETS AND HOLY PLACES: One Family's Story of Life on a Sabbatical -- Europe-Istanbul-Bethlehem.

It’s the story of a preacher on a sabbatical, traveling with wife and two small boys—off to Europe for six weeks, then three months in Istanbul, and the 10 days over Christmas in Bethlehem when Israel’s turning the town over to the Palestinians—Arafat and all.

Happened fourteen years ago.

Written in a fast snappy style, full of tales humorous, poignant, informative and even on occasion inspirational.

The author—that would be me.

Here’s what Paul Shepherd, former Writer-in-Residence and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, whose debut novel, More Like Not Running Away was the winner of the 2004 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction had to say about it:

“A classic travel tale, with adventure, misadventure, and curlie-q unexpected turns in the road. But more than that, it’s a voyage in which a family discovers what matters most to them — across America, and Europe, without a dime to spare — this is not the travel of pretty picture books: from marital squabbles to homesick children, from a haunting island monastery to the pure pleasure of simple farmhouse fare. They travel moment to moment — some, staggeringly beautiful — gently swinging in cable car above the Swiss Alps — and others, staggeringly real, as when the cable car ride makes one of the boys sick to his stomach, with nowhere to go. All of this, Merrill recounts with the gentle humor of an experienced pastor, the wavering resolve of a stepfather, and the openhearted joy of a man rekindling his wanderlust. Read this tale if you’re seeking a window to the Europe not of guidebooks and picture books, but of human hearts finding that home is everywhere.”

Good read whether you’re at home in your study, or on an airplane. And if you’re contemplating a sabbatical, or have taken one or two, you’ll perhaps relate to the experiences we had as a family setting out with nothing but the packs on our backs and two changes of underwear.

You can get the book from iUniverse.com (www.iuniverse.com): just type in my name, “Timothy Merrill” in the search box and it will come up. It's also available online, just Google the title for various outlets including Amazon (UK), Target, and others. I’m working on getting on Amazon (US) soon.

This is only time I’m going to toot this horn, although I will probably post a link in the sidebar of this blog.

Thought you’d be interested.

Starbucks to Sell Instant Coffee

Word on the street—actually I got this from Walletpop—is that Starbucks will soon begin selling soluble coffee, called Via, in stores for $2.95 for a pack of three and $9.95 for a pack of 12—whatever a “pack” is.

Here’s the in-house e-mail:
From: Partner Communications
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 2:21 PM
Subject: Breakthrough Product News
Dear Partners,
This afternoon, a number of media outlets have reported that Starbucks will be introducing a new product next week. Here’s what we can tell you:
We are hosting exclusive events next week in New York and other cities where we will unveil the product. We have been working on this project for over 20 years, and have a patent pending on the technology that enables us to absolutely replicate the taste of Starbucks coffee in an instant form. And as Howard has always said, “The proof is in the cup.”
The instant coffee market is a $17 billion global market and it offers us a significant opportunity as we launch this transformational product.
We wanted to share the key points and get primed for next week. Details and samples will be arriving in stores by Wednesday, so that you can discover first-hand what all the excitement is about.
Best,
Vivek Varma
svp, Public Affairs

Didn’t Sbux used to be a coffeehouse type of place where you could meet for a good brew with your friends before heading home or the office? Now Ssux is just another corporate behemoth worried about profit margins, new product lines and the bottom line.

Instant coffee. Who would have thunk it?

Ssux used to be valued because it offered “real” coffee, the best flavor coaxed from the best beans imported from the best coffee fields.

The backlash and distain many of us feel for this discouraging development is precisely the disillusionment people on the street feel every time people of faith turn out to be of the “instant” variety rather than the slow-brewed version.

I like what Maya Angelou once said when told by someone that she’d become a Christian only the day before. “Really,” Angelou said, “that fast?”

Is the world really looking for a better instant coffee? And if it is, is it looking for it from Sbux?

Is the world really looking for fake Christians? Or would they love to know people whose faith and experience are slow-brewed, rich and deep?

The Figge Farce

I wrote a couple of days ago about Jennifer Figge and her trans-Atlantic swim for which she was hailed as the first woman to accomplish the feat, a distance of over 2000 miles.

Turns out, she swam IN the ocean, but did not swim ACROSS the ocean.

She got in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa and just as quickly got out of it.

Rather than swimming 2000 miles, she swam not too much more than 200 miles.

Two hundred miles is still pretty awesome. But the claim was false. Astute readers of the story began to do the math from her start date in Africa and her end date at the leper colony. Not even Michael Phelps on steroids or hash could swim that fast.

I had suggested that we could use her story to reference the apostle’s Paul discussion of the discipline of the body in order to win the race in 1 Corinthians.

Now, we can use her story as illustrative of other texts … like “counting the cost,” and “putting your hand to the plough and looking back…” or Ananias and Sapphire in Acts 5 and no doubt others.

Happy Birthday, Darwin!

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin.

Darwin is one of a handful of persons who by himself ignited a conflagration of controversy which still simmers and sometimes erupts even today.

He changed the way we think about the natural world. He worked in the post-Enlightenment period still influenced by the primacy of reason and the Deist notion that God, having made the clock, had now retired to let the contraption run down on its own.

Some have argued that he himself was a deeply religious person. He is also said to have been aware that his work—when published (Origin of the Species, 160 years ago)—would be controversial and therefore he went to great pains to make his case as airtight as possible.

If you are interested in reading more of Darwin, you can visit a Web site devoted to his efforts at: http://darwin-online.org.uk/ (The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online).

For a faith-based adult discussion group lesson on Charles Darwin and the link between Faith and Reason, visit The Wired Word at www.thewiredword.com. Last Sunday’s lesson is devoted to Darwin and Lincoln (also born on February 12).

Henry Brinton is a long time contributor to Homiletics, and while also the Senior Minister of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia, he is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and USA Today. You can read an article of his, “Darwin Goes to Church” in a September, 2005, issue of the Post, and I thought he had something in USA Today last week. But I can’t find it. I’ll check and let you know.

Brinton says that the long and short of it is that while science answers the “how” questions, faith attempts to respond to the “why” questions. Darwin may tell us how life got here, but Jesus tells us why life got here.

Faith and science need not be in conflict he says.

That why the goofballs from the Freedom from Religion Foundation who’ve been putting up “Praise Darwin” billboards in some parts of the country, don’t get it. They no doubt know little about Darwin, and nothing about faith.

I take that back. I am sure some members of FFRF are intelligent people—and nice people too. But I couldn’t make that statement as a certainty; I believe it is probably true.

But the sub-text of the sign reads: “Evolve beyond belief.”

Living a life “beyond belief” doesn’t sound like evolution, or progress, to me. And how do you do that?

Can you live without belief? Is it possible?

 

Figge and the One Stomach Rule

File this post under 1 Corinthians 9:24-27: “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.”

“I punish my body and enslave it …”

Two related items come to mind. First: Have you noticed the ubiquitous little banner ad that proclaims the “Flat Stomach Rule” and says that if you obey this one rule you can take 20 inches off your waist in like—two hours or something? The little ad is everywhere, and I have steadfastly refused—just because it’s in my face every time I log on to the Internet—to click on the link to see what this one little rule is.

I am sure whatever the rule is, it doesn’t include throwing in a Snickers bar into the grocery cart en route to the checkout lane, or super-sizing the cheeseburger and fries.

The second item is Jennifer Figge’s remarkable feat which hit the news last week. Figge, an endurance athlete from Aspen, Colorado, slipped into the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Africa and started swimming and washed ashore on a former leper colony about three weeks later after swimming some 2,000 miles across the Atlantic in waves that sometimes crested at 30 feet. Details can be found on the web using her name as a search term.

Oh, also—she’s 56 years old. 

And she’s a she, i.e. a man has done it — in the opposite direction. In 1998, Benôit Lecomte of France swam the Atlantic in 73 days traveling the 3,716 miles from Cape Cod to Brittany. But a woman has never accomplished what Figge did.

Talk about punishing the body. Self-control, discipline, training and perseverance.

And, for the apostle Paul, the punch line is: “I want to practice what I preach. I don’t want to say one thing, and live another. I don’t want to live a lie. I don’t what to be telling others how to swim the channel, and then get a cramp the first 20 meters out.”

Good advice.

God, a Child and a Kitten

I'm preaching tomorrow at Trinity Congregation in Shanghai, China. Here's a story I'm going to use. I found it -- surprise -- in Homiletics where there's a ton of illustrations.

There’s no way this story is true, so if you tell it, tell as a fable: There once was a pastor who went into his back yard one day to do some gardening, to find that a kitten had climbed up a tree and was afraid to come back down. The pastor tried coaxing, reaching up for the kitten, even offering warm milk, but to no avail, because as we all know, cats do not listen to the voice of reason, and because if it is clear you want them to do one thing, they will definitely not do it, and do the very thing you don’t want them to do.

The tree was not sturdy enough to climb, so the pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his Toyota pickup, attached the rope to a sturdy branch of the tree and then pulled away from the tree, he could get the tree to bend down so that he could then put the truck in PARK, get out, reach up and get the kitten.

He did all this, checking his progress in the truck frequently, then figured if he went just a little bit farther, the tree would be bent sufficiently for him to reach the kitten. But as he inched forward, suddenly the rope broke. You can guess what happened next.

The tree went “boing!” and the kitten went sailing through the air out of sight. The pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood, asking people if they’d seen a little kitten. No one had. After awhile, he prayed, “Lord, I just commit this stupid little kitten to your keeping,” and went back to his gardening.

A few days later the pastor was at the grocery store and met one of his church members. As he stopped to say hello, he happened to look into her shopping cart and was amazed to see cat food. He knew that this woman, like himself, was not fond of cats, so he asked her, “Why are you buying cat food when you dislike cats so much?”

She replied, “You won’t believe this,” and told him how her little girl had been begging her for a kitten, but she kept refusing. As the begging continued and Mom got tired of hearing it, she finally told her daughter, “Honey, the only way you’re getting a cat is if God gives you a cat, and that ain’t gonna happen. Deal with it.”

She told the pastor, “I watched my child stomp out of the house and into the back yard near the swing set where she got on her knees, and asked God for a cat. And, incredibly, this is going to sound crazy, but a kitten suddenly came flying out of the clear blue sky, with its paws outspread and landed right in front of her!”

Okay. I will follow that story with this reference to J. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) a Brit who went to China during the Qing dynasty and who founded the China Inland Mission, which at his death included 205 mission stations with more than 800 missionaries, and 125,000 Chinese Christians. He began every day with prayer and once said, “Do not have your concert first and tune your instruments afterward. Begin the day with God.”

Prayer Poll Final Results

The Inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president is in the history books.

The parties are now a faded memory. The euphoria, which hung like a fog over the political landscape for a couple of months since the November elections, while not completely dissipated, shows signs of lifting.

Anne Hathaway and other Hollywood types who attended the gala events wearing an anti-Rick Warren button, have changed wardrobes, one assumes. Don’t know what kind of protest Hathaway registered re the rabbi who also prayed at the Inauguration, or the imam—but I digress.

We posted a poll question about Obama’s decision to ask Rick Warren to offer the invocation at the Inauguration. Approve or disapprove?

In the most popular poll that we’ve posted, Homiletics readers approved the choice by an over-whelming margin: 81% to 19%

So now you’ll notice another poll. We won’t keep this up as long. It simply asks you to identify the top story in the news right now—the story that as a pastor and preacher you find most interesting and noteworthy.

Punch the button. Vote. We’ll give you the results soon.