Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Waiting in line = a spiritual discipline
Some time ago Raul, a fellow minister at Arlington heights UMC, shared with me a bit from a sermon he heard in which the preacher was sharing the story of Jesus being baptized.
Most of the sermons and thoughts on this story I have heard focus on the act of baptism, or justify their church's position on the way to baptize (dunking, sprinkling, or pouring). This preacher had a different take, one that will stick with me for the rest of my life. It is my hope my articulation of his thesis is respectable, because I am hearing it second hand.
Jesus stood in line in order to be baptized. He joined all the others that day and waited his turn to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. Jesus could have used his family influence, John being his cousin, and moved to the front. Jesus could have said, "excuse me, I am Jesus and I would like to have a special service for my baptism." No, he stood in line.
Poor people stand in lines.
Those with resources can and do our very best to circumvent as many lines as possible. From the DMV where we can renew our drivers license online to pagers at theme parks which upon buzzing send allow us to walk by scores of people and take our choice seat on popular roller coasters.
If you want to know how rich you are, count how many lines you stand in. The fewer the richer.
Perhaps the next time you have the option of calling a reservation in or waiting for the next available table, we might choose to take some time and stand in line.
For when we stand in line, we stand with all people who stand in line for food, water and visitation rights.
Who knows, the next time we stand in line we might be standing next to Jesus.
Call of wisdom and Roosevelt
In Proverbs 9:1-6, Sophia calls to the passer-byers "You that are simple, turn in here!" At this point she invites these simple people into her house so that she might impart the wisdom of God to them.
When this text was read on Sunday for some reason I could not get that quote from Eleanor Roosevelt "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
All I could picture was Sophia calling out to all of us in America who talk more about American Idol than American policy, "You that are simple, turn in here! Turn in here and I can help you move your simple mind, clamoring about people and events, to a great mind."
Perhaps this is why Jesus spent so much time in parable teaching. It allows us simple minded people to hear about people and events, but at the same time challenges us to talk about the ideas behind these people and events?
Perhaps Jesus spoke in parables, not to be cryptic, but to call us to expand our mind... to become Great.
When this text was read on Sunday for some reason I could not get that quote from Eleanor Roosevelt "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
All I could picture was Sophia calling out to all of us in America who talk more about American Idol than American policy, "You that are simple, turn in here! Turn in here and I can help you move your simple mind, clamoring about people and events, to a great mind."
Perhaps this is why Jesus spent so much time in parable teaching. It allows us simple minded people to hear about people and events, but at the same time challenges us to talk about the ideas behind these people and events?
Perhaps Jesus spoke in parables, not to be cryptic, but to call us to expand our mind... to become Great.
Carpentry makes for lousy parables
Talking with the ministers the other day about theology and whatnot and in the course of the conversation we began to talk about the Church's mission to help people gain meaning for their lives. In that pursuit, the Church must be able to help people discover language which helps articulate a meaning for them to embody. We commented how we each felt about how the Church is doing (not too well at the moment) and then discussed the influence of scientific atheism in the culture.
In the course of the conversation something struck me about Jesus and his ability to speak to the people he was with. He never once used a parable dealing with carpentry.
Parables of coins, strangers, sheep, sons, grain, goats... sure. Parables of hammers, tables, crafting, designing... no.
The only one I could connect to carpentry was the saying where we should not talk about the splinter in our neighbors eye with a plank of wood in our own. But that is a weak connection at best.
By all accounts Jesus was a carpenter. In fact the "Passion of the Christ" has Jesus making the first table people sit down in chairs at to eat a meal. But he hung out with fishermen, farmers, and the socially estranged of society. Thus his parables and language reflect this.
Perhaps the Church could take a lesson from this and stop trying to control a conversation and force it to always be about God. Not everyone is comfortable or even knows theology or God-talk. But everyone has an area or a world which they know and can relate with and the Church could possibly connect with more people if we were only willing to stop talking about God with our own insider language and talk about God with the language of the people we are in relationship with.
Either that or Carpentry makes for lousy parables.
In the course of the conversation something struck me about Jesus and his ability to speak to the people he was with. He never once used a parable dealing with carpentry.
Parables of coins, strangers, sheep, sons, grain, goats... sure. Parables of hammers, tables, crafting, designing... no.
The only one I could connect to carpentry was the saying where we should not talk about the splinter in our neighbors eye with a plank of wood in our own. But that is a weak connection at best.
By all accounts Jesus was a carpenter. In fact the "Passion of the Christ" has Jesus making the first table people sit down in chairs at to eat a meal. But he hung out with fishermen, farmers, and the socially estranged of society. Thus his parables and language reflect this.
Perhaps the Church could take a lesson from this and stop trying to control a conversation and force it to always be about God. Not everyone is comfortable or even knows theology or God-talk. But everyone has an area or a world which they know and can relate with and the Church could possibly connect with more people if we were only willing to stop talking about God with our own insider language and talk about God with the language of the people we are in relationship with.
Either that or Carpentry makes for lousy parables.