Dan's Marinations

Years ago, a friend of mine had introduced me to the notion of taking a night near Christmas to go for a run just to look at lights.  No real planned route or distance, but just to see the lights.  This was always a really enjoyable way to spend a few minutes on a chilly December night.  Last week I decided that I needed to revive that this year after a several year hiatus.  Then came Friday. Tonight was the night that I had set aside to look at lights in windows, Angels in yards, fake Santas, and all the rest.  As I settled into the run my mind turned to the horror of Friday.  Equal amounts of grief and anger set in.  I wished that I could be there in Newtown to put an arm around every Mother or Father who'd lost a child.  Who'd lost posterity.  Unlike previous school shootings in high schools or at Virginia Tech, these student victims had hardly even begun life.  For these there would be no little league baseball, no first dance, no prom queens or high school quarterbacks.

In worship this week we continue the sermon series, "Two Words" about the I AM statements in John.  What is special about this Sunday is that we will be focusing on Jesus' statement, "I AM the bead of life," from John 6.  Here he makes the bold proclamation that his flesh is food, and that this food is far more nourishing even than the manna that God had provided their ancestors in the Wilderness.  In a parched, arid land this divine provision kept them alive from day to day.  Those who eat this food Jesus describes don't live for another day, but forever.  John's Gospel doesn't really describe the Last Supper as the synoptic Gospels do, but this passage in ch. 6 is very Eucharistic and one cannot read it without thinking of the Lord's Supper.  In this table, Jesus is both host and meal as we joyfully eat his flesh and drink his blood, represented by the bread and cup. Particularly significant for this Sunday's worship is that we are readin

A little over a year ago at a workshop for leadership in the mid-size church as we discussed committee work in the church it struck me how many committee/councils my own church had.  Back in the room, I tried to list them all, and found it difficult to do because there were so many.  When I finally completed my list there were eighteen different ones.  At the next session we brainstormed about how to streamline the structure of the local church and we all began to see that without touching the committees whose function and role are defined in our Discipline that there is wide latitude in how to organize the local church. My own experience in two plus years with this marvelous church has also shown me that there must be a better way to get the essential work and ministries of the church accomplished.  Too many people wore too many different hats.  Too frequently, the same project or idea was bandied about by multiple committees, none really knowing who should be doing it with the resu

This is admittedly a topic that is worthy of a good book, and has been the subject of books.  Nonetheless, I've been musing on the subject of why we do the good things we do, and perhaps just as importantly, what we say about the good that we do.  Having just returned from a Salkehatchie work project several weeks ago, this is a topic that is fresh on my mind. Let's begin with the Biblical basis for doing good.  Contrary to what many contemporary Christians may think, one can get an ear full about it without even cracking the New Testament.  Look at the Holiness Code from Leviticus.  Look at Amos.  Look at portions of Isaiah.  It is there repeatedly, you better not mistreat the poor or God's not going to be happy.  You better take care of the folks who are unable to provide for themselves, the "widows, orphans, and aliens in your midst."  The New Testament gives us the judgment of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25, we find the example of the early church in th

Not too long ago someone joined our church and we returned to the liturgy for new members which reminds us that the church of Christ is open to "people of all ages, nations, and races."  This simple statement recalls Paul's admonition that in Christ there is "neither male nor female, free nor slave, Jew nor Greek."  We know (or should know)  that these circumstances of birth matter not in the Kingdom.  The trouble is, that in our daily lives churches do a rather poor job living out this part of our liturgy.  Unfortunately, we  segregate ourselves  far too often  in the church, walling off ourselves from others.  This essentially makes the church all about me and people just like me. A couple of months ago I read a blog post on a United Methodist outlet by a college student who was looking forward to being a delegate to our General Conference held last month.  In this post he argued passionately that the future of the church was its youth.  Everything from wors

Now for true confessions.  I frequently, when typing out "United Methodist Church," actually type "Untied Methodist Church."  In light of our most recent General Conference, this silly typo must surely be considered Freudian in some way.  Those ten days in Tampa showed that the denomination I love may at times be more untied than united.  With the exception of altering guaranteed appointments, when it was all said and done this General Conference actually made very few lasting changes.  Sometimes it's not entirely bad when a governing body makes no changes, since potential changes may actually be worse than the status quo. The trouble for us as a church is that the status quo isn't looking so good.  Our membership rolls and worship attendance have shrunk steeply in the 44 years since the merger that created the United Methodist Church.  A large percentage of our churches fail to take in a single new member by profession of faith in a year's time.  On t

As Paul would have put it, "in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye" part of the framework of our system of clergy was abolished by the 2012 General Conference.  The conference ended the long tradition of guaranteed appointments for ordained Elders without even floor debate on the issue.  The proposal to end guaranteed appointments for Elders came as part of a larger body of legislation that comprised the United Methodist Call to Action.  The Call to Action initiative is a response to the precipitous forty-year long decline in membership. In addition to the ending the guaranteed appointments, the initiative also called for a significant restructuring of denomination's commissions and agencies, and the creation of a so-called "set-aside" bishop who would not have episcopal residency, but would effectively act as a CEO for the church. Admittedly, I cannot approach this objectively because I have a stake in it.  With that disclaimer, yesterday's decision

It's long-standing tradition that when someone dies, friends will bring food over to the family of the deceased.  We find something of this even in Shakespeare's Hamlet from five hundred years ago, when Hamlet observed, "how coldly do the funeral meats furnish forth the wedding feast."  I have observed this carried out countless times in my life, both in my ministry and personally.  As most of us know these meals are sometimes very somber morose affairs, but may occasionally be quite rollicking. My own personal introduction to this practice came in childhood lo these many moons ago.  Being the generous and thoughtful person that she was and still is, my mother always carried food over to the home when someone we knew had died.  It became her custom to make a delicious casserole with meat, pasta noodles, and cheese, etc.  In fact, she made this so frequently for funerals that when the rest of the family saw her making it we asked who had died.  The casserole that the

I ran ten miles this morning, and it really seemed fairly easy except for being unusually warm for early January.  This was the last longish run of training for the Charleston Marathon next weekend.  Those who've run a marathon will appreciate how good this last semi-long run feels.  Today, it didn't matter how I felt, or how fast or slow I ran.  Today's run was simply cover the distance, get from point A to point B without hurting something in the process. What lies behind the run today made it so seemingly easy to do and relatively unimportant.  In the previous four months I've run nearly 500 miles, including a half marathon in Spartanburg,  three fifteen mile runs, an eighteen mile run, and three twenty mile runs.  I've run after dark in the evening, before the sun has come up, in the rain, when there's frost on the pumpkin, and when it's been so warm that I've shed my shirt before I've finished.  No, I'm not in the best shape of my life, bu