What's Your Theme?
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"What's Your Theme?" by C. David McKirachan
"The Difficulty of Letting Go" by Lamar Massingill
What's Your Theme?
by C. David McKirachan
Ephesians 3:14-21
When I was twelve I decided I wanted to be a minister. It was inevitable. My father and my brother were both ordained by that point, so my adolescent consciousness was flooded with all kinds of messages about call and preaching and turning the world upside down. Not long after my decision was made, we received information from a parishioner who did some research while on a trip to Scotland that we were from the Stewart clan, our name had something to do with standing stones and/or kirk's, that is churches, and we had been bards and druids back in the foggy days before the 1600s when we came to the New World. (Since then one of my parishioners did more research and poo-pooed that connection, but it was a great myth for a thirteen year old.)
By the time I had succumbed to the congenital disorder and received my first call, my father had given me quite a bit of advice, almost all of it good. One that stuck in my mind was this: "Choose a theme for your ministry. Follow it. Use it. Let it guide you in setting priorities and sorting moments of confusion. If you realize over time that you need to go somewhere else, change it, but don't do it lightly."
I labored strenuously over this. I thought about it for months. It brought me into the midst of the maelstrom of ministry that bombards us at every turn. Everything needs doing. There are few things we do that aren't important to the health of the institution, to the needs of our people, or to the ministry of our Lord. I realized that I may have learned a lot of theology, polity, counseling skills, pastoral moves, and schmoozing techniques, but I was so busy, most of the time reacting to the moment, that I didn't have much of a strategic focus for doing this ministry.
I don't think ministers are the only ones who suffer with this malady. There is so much flying around and demanding attention that even sitting still is exhausting. We work because we need to eat. We take care of our kids because that's what parents do. We exercise and go to the dentist and take the car to the garage because we don't want to break down. Add grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, and our time is taken. How thematic does that sound? To try to focus on anything but survival in a hurricane is ludicrous. Our existential moment is submerged in the tidal surge of Tuesday.
I have known people who were focused. They knew what they were doing. But sometimes they seemed rigid and so much that wasn't on their agenda went right by them. I didn't want to live that way. See what a hassle this was?
I was reading this passage at a funeral one day and the family thing wormed under my skin. What does the writer mean? I never came up with a definitive answer to that question, but I'd been bitten by a bug. I realized that our family had been largely defined by God's call. Then I realized that all families, if they want to follow the Lord, are defined by a similar call. Then I realized that the church was the family of God, defined by our relationships with God and with each other. You get the drift. My Theme, capital T had found me. FAMILY.
It's stuck now for almost forty years and boy has it helped me in my labors. So, I'm glad to be able to write on this passage. I hope it speaks to you. What's your theme?
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
The Difficulty of Letting Go
by Lamar Massingill
John 6:1-21
Jesus knew all too well the tendency in human beings to let someone else handle their thinking, doing, and being in the world. In this passage, many who got fed followed Jesus because they were getting fed. Also they followed him because of the signs he was doing for the sick (v. 1). They refused to get any deeper in their thinking and being in the world than that. In short, they would take the benefits of Jesus but refused to take the risk to practice his teachings. They were too difficult. They followed because they were needy and wanted somebody to be strong so they could continue to be weak. Because some were healed, they followed him to make sure nothing would hurt them anymore, which was a very unrealistic -- not to mention immature -- way to live. To some he gave answers to their deepest dilemmas, but instead of letting what Jesus said free them unto personal responsibility and identity, they formed an unhealthy relationship with Jesus and desired for him to take care of their problems forevermore.
I once heard a story about a boy who could not move a stone and asked for his father's help. His father came and the boy moved the stone without his father even lifting a hand to help. The suggestion was that the mere presence of his father inspired the boy to use what he already had within him to do.
These who followed Jesus just for the benefits missed the point Jesus was trying to make. Jesus didn't come into the world taking power, but by his mere presence, freeing power, and there is a difference. His desire was not to give people all the answers, feed them when they needed to be fed, but to enable them to come to their own answers -- to free them up to live full and responsible lives in the freedom with which they were generously created.
But some simply could not handle the freedom and still clung to him. They even sought to make him their king by force (v. 15), so they would not have to take responsibility for their own lives. Freedom is a hot potato: we would rather someone else hold it than to hold it ourselves.
In other words, give the responsibility to the teachers to take care of our children. Give the responsibility to the president to take care of our country; the congressmen to take care of our state. Give the responsibility to the preachers to take care of the church. Give the responsibility to the CEO's to take care of the corporation, give the responsibility to the psychologists to solve all our problems, but don't ask us to use the freedom created within us to ask deeply spiritual and moral questions about our own responsibilities. That's too much.
These types of folk who cared no deeper than their bellies and bodies got to be such a problem that Jesus constantly desired a low profile and charged people to tell no one about his healing and feeding people. He desired to point people to God, not himself, and that is a journey of trust and sometimes painful introspection, a journey which most people were not willing to take.
We still have tendencies to cling to anything or anyone who will take care of us. This was even a problem with a few of his disciples. In Matthew's account, Peter had to make sure it was Jesus before he would take a leap out of the boat (Matthew 14:28), when all the while he had what was created within him to trust, as implied in Jesus' words to him, "Why did you not trust?" Oh my, how many times Jesus has said that to me and maybe to you too.
As we make that long arch from the world of Jesus to the twenty-first century, I think part of the problem is the sort of world we live in. Like the boat that Peter and the others were in, our world seems stalled in a storm as well. Like children scared and full of terror, we run to anyone who we think has the miracle to save us. We want that one to be strong so we can be weak and needy. What we don't realize is that we have been created with all that is needed to change our world, if we only took the risk to trust that God gave it to us, and we are free to love and care.
I think we are in what Herman Melville called the "Dark Ages of Democracy," a time when, as he predicted so many years ago, we would feel what he called "the arrest of hope's advance." But we are the ones who have the passion and compassion to change things for a creative "better" and create that hope again. The same invitation to people in Peter's day has not changed, and the people who walk away from that invitation has not changed either; but the invitation remains: "Feed my sheep." Love, care, share, be the hope for the world. That is the invitation of Jesus to his church. Sadly, perhaps Jesus is still saying to us as he said to Peter, "Why did you not trust?" In other words, "Why did you begin to sink and not trust that you had it within you to come to me and in so doing inspire others to know that what I have given you, I have given them as well?"
Sometimes I think we humans are not only like Peter but also somewhat like the paralytic in the gospel of John who spent 38 years at the verge of the pool of Bethesda, a pool rumored to have healing powers, waiting for someone to help him in to be healed. We, too, seem content with living at the verge of the pool also, so needy and dependent on others to do things for us. It seems we fear the cure more than the illness. That's a comfortable and familiar misery but not a responsible sharing. For this man, the pool and someone to help him there, held the cure for all his problems. Can you imagine how this man felt when Jesus suggested to him that consent to health and healing was within himself, if he would just take the responsibility to trust and get up on his own two feet and start walking? Thirty-eight years waiting to get into the pool, only to find out that, finally, he didn't need the pool!
It's no wonder that when people finally trusted they could be healed if they exercised the responsibility of a little faith, they leaped and danced and gave praise to God. They found their lives again; the key which was within them, long dormant, came alive; they realized that resource did exist within and became grateful to God for the freeing of those resources. But it never came without taking the risk of trust; of letting go of their fear and being the human beings they were. Unfortunately, some never realized that their faith healed them, and they clung to Jesus like a needy child to a parent. They never heard with ears of the heart those liberating words of Jesus: Your faith has made you whole. They simply found it too difficult to let go and find their responsible selves. And clinging to others rather than responsibility for ourselves is still an issue with human beings. At bottom, it is a refusal to trust, to let go of childish things, and be fully human. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to take personal responsibility for, not only our own our beliefs, but trust that the gifts and resources the Great One has given us will create changes in our world.
Jesus didn't come to make us into clinging people who can't live unless someone else is living for us. He came to make us free; reunite us with the beautiful creation that we are, together with all the resource that came with us at the morning of creation. We rarely use what we have at our fingertips, given as gifts from God. We are as people riding on an ox, in search of an ox. We wonder where God is, and we find he is present always in the gifts he has given us to live. It is only in that realization that we will let go of our clinging to things or people we think will heal us and begin to fully live. It is only in taking that kind of responsibility that growth for any of us will come.
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, July 29, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"What's Your Theme?" by C. David McKirachan
"The Difficulty of Letting Go" by Lamar Massingill
What's Your Theme?
by C. David McKirachan
Ephesians 3:14-21
When I was twelve I decided I wanted to be a minister. It was inevitable. My father and my brother were both ordained by that point, so my adolescent consciousness was flooded with all kinds of messages about call and preaching and turning the world upside down. Not long after my decision was made, we received information from a parishioner who did some research while on a trip to Scotland that we were from the Stewart clan, our name had something to do with standing stones and/or kirk's, that is churches, and we had been bards and druids back in the foggy days before the 1600s when we came to the New World. (Since then one of my parishioners did more research and poo-pooed that connection, but it was a great myth for a thirteen year old.)
By the time I had succumbed to the congenital disorder and received my first call, my father had given me quite a bit of advice, almost all of it good. One that stuck in my mind was this: "Choose a theme for your ministry. Follow it. Use it. Let it guide you in setting priorities and sorting moments of confusion. If you realize over time that you need to go somewhere else, change it, but don't do it lightly."
I labored strenuously over this. I thought about it for months. It brought me into the midst of the maelstrom of ministry that bombards us at every turn. Everything needs doing. There are few things we do that aren't important to the health of the institution, to the needs of our people, or to the ministry of our Lord. I realized that I may have learned a lot of theology, polity, counseling skills, pastoral moves, and schmoozing techniques, but I was so busy, most of the time reacting to the moment, that I didn't have much of a strategic focus for doing this ministry.
I don't think ministers are the only ones who suffer with this malady. There is so much flying around and demanding attention that even sitting still is exhausting. We work because we need to eat. We take care of our kids because that's what parents do. We exercise and go to the dentist and take the car to the garage because we don't want to break down. Add grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, and our time is taken. How thematic does that sound? To try to focus on anything but survival in a hurricane is ludicrous. Our existential moment is submerged in the tidal surge of Tuesday.
I have known people who were focused. They knew what they were doing. But sometimes they seemed rigid and so much that wasn't on their agenda went right by them. I didn't want to live that way. See what a hassle this was?
I was reading this passage at a funeral one day and the family thing wormed under my skin. What does the writer mean? I never came up with a definitive answer to that question, but I'd been bitten by a bug. I realized that our family had been largely defined by God's call. Then I realized that all families, if they want to follow the Lord, are defined by a similar call. Then I realized that the church was the family of God, defined by our relationships with God and with each other. You get the drift. My Theme, capital T had found me. FAMILY.
It's stuck now for almost forty years and boy has it helped me in my labors. So, I'm glad to be able to write on this passage. I hope it speaks to you. What's your theme?
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
The Difficulty of Letting Go
by Lamar Massingill
John 6:1-21
Jesus knew all too well the tendency in human beings to let someone else handle their thinking, doing, and being in the world. In this passage, many who got fed followed Jesus because they were getting fed. Also they followed him because of the signs he was doing for the sick (v. 1). They refused to get any deeper in their thinking and being in the world than that. In short, they would take the benefits of Jesus but refused to take the risk to practice his teachings. They were too difficult. They followed because they were needy and wanted somebody to be strong so they could continue to be weak. Because some were healed, they followed him to make sure nothing would hurt them anymore, which was a very unrealistic -- not to mention immature -- way to live. To some he gave answers to their deepest dilemmas, but instead of letting what Jesus said free them unto personal responsibility and identity, they formed an unhealthy relationship with Jesus and desired for him to take care of their problems forevermore.
I once heard a story about a boy who could not move a stone and asked for his father's help. His father came and the boy moved the stone without his father even lifting a hand to help. The suggestion was that the mere presence of his father inspired the boy to use what he already had within him to do.
These who followed Jesus just for the benefits missed the point Jesus was trying to make. Jesus didn't come into the world taking power, but by his mere presence, freeing power, and there is a difference. His desire was not to give people all the answers, feed them when they needed to be fed, but to enable them to come to their own answers -- to free them up to live full and responsible lives in the freedom with which they were generously created.
But some simply could not handle the freedom and still clung to him. They even sought to make him their king by force (v. 15), so they would not have to take responsibility for their own lives. Freedom is a hot potato: we would rather someone else hold it than to hold it ourselves.
In other words, give the responsibility to the teachers to take care of our children. Give the responsibility to the president to take care of our country; the congressmen to take care of our state. Give the responsibility to the preachers to take care of the church. Give the responsibility to the CEO's to take care of the corporation, give the responsibility to the psychologists to solve all our problems, but don't ask us to use the freedom created within us to ask deeply spiritual and moral questions about our own responsibilities. That's too much.
These types of folk who cared no deeper than their bellies and bodies got to be such a problem that Jesus constantly desired a low profile and charged people to tell no one about his healing and feeding people. He desired to point people to God, not himself, and that is a journey of trust and sometimes painful introspection, a journey which most people were not willing to take.
We still have tendencies to cling to anything or anyone who will take care of us. This was even a problem with a few of his disciples. In Matthew's account, Peter had to make sure it was Jesus before he would take a leap out of the boat (Matthew 14:28), when all the while he had what was created within him to trust, as implied in Jesus' words to him, "Why did you not trust?" Oh my, how many times Jesus has said that to me and maybe to you too.
As we make that long arch from the world of Jesus to the twenty-first century, I think part of the problem is the sort of world we live in. Like the boat that Peter and the others were in, our world seems stalled in a storm as well. Like children scared and full of terror, we run to anyone who we think has the miracle to save us. We want that one to be strong so we can be weak and needy. What we don't realize is that we have been created with all that is needed to change our world, if we only took the risk to trust that God gave it to us, and we are free to love and care.
I think we are in what Herman Melville called the "Dark Ages of Democracy," a time when, as he predicted so many years ago, we would feel what he called "the arrest of hope's advance." But we are the ones who have the passion and compassion to change things for a creative "better" and create that hope again. The same invitation to people in Peter's day has not changed, and the people who walk away from that invitation has not changed either; but the invitation remains: "Feed my sheep." Love, care, share, be the hope for the world. That is the invitation of Jesus to his church. Sadly, perhaps Jesus is still saying to us as he said to Peter, "Why did you not trust?" In other words, "Why did you begin to sink and not trust that you had it within you to come to me and in so doing inspire others to know that what I have given you, I have given them as well?"
Sometimes I think we humans are not only like Peter but also somewhat like the paralytic in the gospel of John who spent 38 years at the verge of the pool of Bethesda, a pool rumored to have healing powers, waiting for someone to help him in to be healed. We, too, seem content with living at the verge of the pool also, so needy and dependent on others to do things for us. It seems we fear the cure more than the illness. That's a comfortable and familiar misery but not a responsible sharing. For this man, the pool and someone to help him there, held the cure for all his problems. Can you imagine how this man felt when Jesus suggested to him that consent to health and healing was within himself, if he would just take the responsibility to trust and get up on his own two feet and start walking? Thirty-eight years waiting to get into the pool, only to find out that, finally, he didn't need the pool!
It's no wonder that when people finally trusted they could be healed if they exercised the responsibility of a little faith, they leaped and danced and gave praise to God. They found their lives again; the key which was within them, long dormant, came alive; they realized that resource did exist within and became grateful to God for the freeing of those resources. But it never came without taking the risk of trust; of letting go of their fear and being the human beings they were. Unfortunately, some never realized that their faith healed them, and they clung to Jesus like a needy child to a parent. They never heard with ears of the heart those liberating words of Jesus: Your faith has made you whole. They simply found it too difficult to let go and find their responsible selves. And clinging to others rather than responsibility for ourselves is still an issue with human beings. At bottom, it is a refusal to trust, to let go of childish things, and be fully human. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to take personal responsibility for, not only our own our beliefs, but trust that the gifts and resources the Great One has given us will create changes in our world.
Jesus didn't come to make us into clinging people who can't live unless someone else is living for us. He came to make us free; reunite us with the beautiful creation that we are, together with all the resource that came with us at the morning of creation. We rarely use what we have at our fingertips, given as gifts from God. We are as people riding on an ox, in search of an ox. We wonder where God is, and we find he is present always in the gifts he has given us to live. It is only in that realization that we will let go of our clinging to things or people we think will heal us and begin to fully live. It is only in taking that kind of responsibility that growth for any of us will come.
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, July 29, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
