Vol 2 No 40 - S & P Edition

CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU ALL! I'M SO HAPPY FOR THE OPPORTUNITY YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN THIS WEEKEND AND I AM EAGERLY ANTICIPATING SEEING YOU SUNDAY MORNING.

Huh? What? Has he finally lost it? Did he ever have it? What in the world is the pastor writing me on this Thursday morning about congratulations on the upcoming weekend?

In case you missed it, this Labor Day weekend is the Shrimp & Petroleum Festival in Morgan City. It will be a wild and crazy weekend just down the street here in Lawrence Park. Thousands of people will come from all around to enjoy the festivities. The place will be crawling with people, including our parking lot.

So why am I congratulating you? Because I am supremely confident that you will take advantage of the opportunity to be a part of our congregation's activities. We will be working the parking lots of the church facilities Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday, helping our youth raise money for their activities. We will also be gathering for worship as usual @ 10:00AM, and this is where the note of congratulations comes in. For many, the temptation will be to miss morning worship and the observance of the Lord's Supper due to the crowds and congestion, even though we will not be opening our parking lots to public parking until 10:45AM. Many will use the excuse that there are too many people and too much confusion to make it worth going to worship this Sunday.

But you, dear reader, I am confident, will resist this temptation. And why will you resist this temptation? Because you know that the sacrifice by a man carrying a cross a couple of thousand years ago makes the little inconveniences of festival traffic and congestion pale in comparison. :) You also know that in our society, many friends, families, and loved ones have paid the ultimate price to defend our right to freedom of religion to insult them and their sacrifices by not taking advantage of the very right for which they fought.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 39 - Intimate Issues

Intimacy. It's one of those words that provokes different images in different people. I would venture to say that most often, we look at it in individualistic terms, as in our intimacy with someone else. This could be a physical intimacy, it could be an emotional intimacy, it could be an intellectual intimacy...the list can go on for a little while. It's a loaded term to be sure, but one that I think that we should spend more time thinking and praying about. Intimacy issues dominate so many areas of our lives, and yet it's one of the areas that we display our dysfunction the most. False images and ideas of intimacy corrupt our relationships with ourselves, our families, significant others, our church, and our God, causing us more grief and pain than we could ever imagine.

The Lord our God is extremely concerned about our intimacy, and cares so much about it that in the holy scriptures he lays out guidelines for the boundaries of intimacy in our lives. The most common vision that comes to many people's mind when you use the term intimacy is in a physical sense, and this is an area in which God addresses us very bluntly (and far too often, people who claim God bluntly violate this). We are reminded that physical intimacy is to be shared only with one other, and that intimacy is to be shared only within the bounds of marriage, AND that we are not even to harbor thoughts of being intimate with anyone other than our spouse (Christ was very specific about this.)

However, to leave the discussion of intimacy from a Christian perspective only in the physical realm is to shortchange ourselves and our God. I love Mirriam-Webster's definition of intimate (adj): "1. Belonging to or characterizing one's deepest nature." The folks at m-w.com have got a much better grasp on intimacy that we in the church do, I am afraid to say. Whether we like it or not, the lives we live are a showing of our deepest nature. The lengthy discussions that Paul has about the necessity of the community of faith known as the body of Christ leave us with the reality that when we have but a superficial relationship with those whom we gather for worship, fellowship, and mission as the church we have missed the point of why God calls us together. When we fail to truly know one another, and fail to allow others to truly know us, we have put ourselves in position to miss out on what all we have been given by the Divine in one another.

However, I think that to put the discussion of intimacy from a Christian perspective only in the physical realm or the realm of fellow Christians gathering together in the church is also to shortchange ourselves and our God. During this season of life where I am your pastor, my routine has developed to where I spend a great deal of Tuesday each week reading, studying, praying, writing - allowing others to feed and nourish my soul. This week, I spent some time listening to the podcast of a well-known United Methodist Bishop who made the statement (when talking about how much God wants to work in our lives), "Many of you sitting here are living off of spiritual capital you accrued when you were 12." My man hit it dead on - we get to the point where we allow ourselves to think that we do not have to do much more with God than go through the motions, since, after all, we attended Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, religion classes, or whatever formal training we were given/forced to endure as a child. Don't believe me? Take a good look at the Sunday School & Bible Study attendance numbers. Take a look at where our minds wander during worship, if they even entered worship with our bodies.

When will we get it through our thick heads that one of the main points of this whole 'God thing' that we are a part of is that God desires for us to be in an intimate relationship with him, where he, to use the definition above, characterizes our deepest nature? When will we stop playing all the games about our relationship with God and finally allow our deepest nature to be that which God has put into us? When will we realize that this is not just a discussion about you as an individual but also about the congregation as the body of Christ?

I will make a promise to you; an iron-clad, 100% guarantee. When you allow God to get you to that point where your most intimate relationship is with Him, it will put all of the other intimacy discussions in perspective. As Paul reminds us in his beautiful way, when it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me. Until we get to that point, or when we get content enough where we are in our journey with Christ that we feel we don't need to invest anymore of ourselves, quite bluntly my friends, we are just going through the motions. Then we will knock off the false intimacy that we engage in, be it of a physical, emotional, or other form. We will knock off and quit making excuses for ourselves and others who engage in acts of intimacy that are not engaged in according to the guidelines God gave us and by which we profess to live (wink, wink).

Easy? No. Then again, if it was easy, why would Christ have sent the Holy Spirit to be with us? If it were easy, why would God have sent Christ to show us that yes, indeed, even a human being can do this. If it were easy, we wouldn't be called to live by faith. (See Hebrews 11:1).

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 38 - Upon Further Review...

Your mid-week message is coming out late this week because I spent yesterday looking at what will be going on around here in the fall with respect to my Sunday School class and the pastor's bible studies. Sitting down to plan these things, I did not expect it to take very long - as many of you are aware, very rarely do I do anything spontaneously. However, as I started looking over the various materials, I could not shake the feeling that what I initially had in mind was not what needed to happen. Thinking and praying about this a little more, I wound up going on completely different directions with respect to the Sunday School curriculum and the bible study curriculum; reflecting on these again this morning it is obvious that I am much more at peace with these decisions than if I had gone with my initial instincts.

You will hear more about the particulars of these studies further down in this e-mail. The reason I mention them here is that once again, sometimes what we think will happen, and what we think will make sense, does, after some thought and reflection, turns out to be exactly the opposite of what should happen. The dominating thought going through my mind as this is written is along the lines of wondering what our lives, our congregation, and our world would look like if we always went with our first instincts, and did not engage in thought and reflection before making decisions. If honesty is important to us, each of us will admit that many of the best decisions we have made in life were indeed those that we wound up doing a little different than we first imagined.

During this next week, may you find yourself putting a little more thought and reflection into the decisions you face. You never know how God may use that time to show you a better way.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 37 - A Forgotten Commandment

The Lord our God commanded us to take a Sabbath and keep it holy. For six days, God went about creating the universe and then took a day of rest. He also commanded us to do the same - take set time away from our normal activities and spend some Holy time focused solely on him.

Rather than write a column today for you to think over and ponder, I want to invite you to take a mini-Sabbath. For the next 2 minutes (time it if you have to), just sit back and meditate on God's goodness and mercy, and close in a brief prayer of thanksgiving for God's work in creating the heavens and the earth.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 36 - Don't Forget the Lyrics!

Summertime television has been historically known as weak at best and unwatchable at worst. For many years, there was no original programming on any network and the only thing that you could look forward to was every four years having the Summer Olympics. The past decade has seen a vast reversal of this trend, and it seems almost every network has some good summertime programming. One of these shows that has wound up becoming an automatic on my TiVo is FOX's "Don't Forget the Lyrics." Everyday people are invited to come on and sing along with the studio band, singing various songs from different categories, with the lyrics on the big screen - karaoke-style. Then at some point during the song, the words on the big screen are replaced by blanks, and the contestant has to continue singing the right words from memory. I cannot explain why I am finding this show so hilarious - but I find myself laughing out loud pretty much every time.

Last night when I got home from VBS, we started watching the most recent episode, and I was incredulous at how easy some of these songs were - when the two selections for each round would come up, and the contestant had to pick one, I was thinking, 'man, he can't go wrong with either of these, for EVERYONE knows these songs.' In the immortal words of Lee Corso of ESPN, 'not so fast, my friend'. This ol' boy last night chose Fleetwood Mac's 'Don't Stop' as his next song. Now, you need to understand that Fleetwood Mac is one of my favorite groups, and I have all their stuff on my iPod. 'Don't Stop' is one of their signature songs. The contestant just blanked out when it came time for him to complete the line - and, much to my surprise, I forgot them as well. This is a song that I have listened to on a regular basis for well over 10 years, and I didn't know it nearly as well as I thought, which got me thinking...

I wonder if part of what the church faces from time to time is the reality of going on auto-pilot and assuming we know everything we need to know? Kinda like someone who listens to the same artist for a number of years, only to discover that they didn't know the artists songs nearly as well as they thought. Your Long-Range Planning Committee will be recommending that we spend the better part of the fall and spring returning to the basics of what it means to be a church - and the more I think about it, I think they are very wise. It can become very easy for a church to just assume that we know the basics of being a church - but if we don't spend time revisiting those every so often, they can often get away from us. When we allow ourselves to lose sight of the basics of the faith and allow our conversations and actions to drift from the essentials to the superfluous, we can wind up like so many churches do (including this one) at some point - talking a great deal about very little that has to do with fulfilling the great commission.

I invite you to join me as we consider the implications of forgetting basic lyrics to a song we think we know well - the life of a Christian community that has Christ at the center, empowered by the Holy Spirit, living for nothing more and nothing less than the will of God to be done in all things.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 35 - Prejudicial Matters

One of my firm beliefs about life is that each and every day, indeed at least each and every year, we should find ourselves in position to be confronted by, and transformed through, the thoughtful deliberation of ideas and concepts that challenge our thinking on even the most basic of things that we take for granted. I rarely write about the same topic for two consecutive Mid-Week Messages in order to stay out of a rut, but I must say that I am being thoroughly renewed and refreshed by the group study of Psalm 96 that we have been engaged in for the past couple of weeks. There were several things I had in mind when I started the group, primarily, as I have mentioned earlier, to give us a biblical perspective on all things worship. A secondary motive was to make sure that every one in the congregation had the opportunity to be a part of the discussion as I reflect on the new worship schedule we have had this summer and the possibility of making it a permanent change. One of the biggest mistakes we make in the church is that we all want to have our opinions followed but we seldom want to be a part of a discussion, open to differing points of view. So, by making sure that we had a common starting point for the discussion (2, actually; Psalm 96 and the author's commentary), and that there were two opportunities each week (one in the morning and one in the evening) to be a part of the discussion, we would have almost completely eliminated the excuse that someone's voice would not be heard. We would also be following the idea that instead of one-on-one discussions/confrontations, we would be in the midst of Christian conferencing with our brothers and sisters.

What makes these conversations especially difficult is that each of us has our own deeply-held convictions about what is the right way and the wrong way to do things. It also is easy to move into the idea that if it is what we want, then it must be what is best for the church. I have LOVED the first two weeks of conversations that we have had, for we have seen a wide variety of viewpoints, some agreement, some disagreement, and some arguing. The reason I have loved these discussions is that we are confronted with the reality that we all have different ideas of what needs to be done, and we all think we have good reasons for feeling this way. All of you receiving this e-mail are at the point in life where you know that the basic human condition is to resist all change, and then to resist change that is not our idea. Where the biggest growth has occurred in these discussions, it seems to me, is the realization that even those of us who are the most open-minded are faced with the fact that we bring our own biases and prejudices to the table.

Why bring all this up right now? I've been your pastor for a little over a year now, and God has done many great things in the time I have been allowed to be with you. This congregation has the potential to do many great things for the kingdom of God, now and in the future. However, we must put ourselves, as individuals and as a congregation, in the position to realize that our biases and prejudices can be good (in that the more viewpoints we have in the discussion, the better), but can also put us in the dangerous position of things having to be our way or the highway. As people of the Christian faith from the Wesleyan tradition, we must be vigilant in upholding our doctrine and disciplines, but acknowledge that far too often, we allow this zeal to transcend things that have nothing to do with whether or not people will spend eternity with the Father or not (like times and styles of worship).

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 2 No 34 - Precious Memories

Looking through the headlines delivered to my newsreader program this morning, one stuck out to me: "Thanks for the Memories...Whatever They Were." From wired.com, this article goes on to talk about a report in the latest Journal of Psychiatric Research that talks about a group of scientists from Harvard & McGill Universities who have done very limited trials involving a drug that might help you be able to forget the bad and unpleasant memories of life. I have enjoyed reading some of the things that Wired puts out, because they are not only a technology magazine, but also dabble in technological ethics. The writer of the piece, Tony Long, notes that, "The pain and sorrow of life, and how you deal with their effects, is part of what fuels your humanity. It's part of what lets you continue growing throughout that life, part of what gives you wisdom in your old age."

In one of our study sessions on worship this week, we had a lively discussion about where all we learn about God, and the fact that as Wesleyans we believe that God is revealed to us in Scripture, but we use tradition, reason, and experience to reflect upon and interpret the Scriptures, as well as experience and live out the Christian faith. Every one of you reading this message has gone through the highest highs and lowest lows of life in your own way, and every one of you, if you are honest with yourselves, will admit that those experiences help make you who you are today. As those of the Methodist tradition, we do not subscribe to the idea that everything that happens is a direct result of God's action (that is, God doesn't sit around and decide that your life shall become a living hell; rather, the things that happen in life are a result of living in a post-Genesis 3 world, a world not as God intended it), but we do believe that the way that we respond to the many dangers, toils, and snares of life are a reflection of our faith.

This is one of the most perplexing questions that people have for those of us in pastoral ministry, 'Why?' And what really is hard is that the truthful, honest, answer - and the one that any pastor should give you is, quite bluntly, "I don't know." What I do know, however, is this: Without all the memories of my life, good, bad, and indifferent, I would not be who I am today. If, God forbid, a cruel disease comes along that saps my memory, that is one thing, but I would hate to voluntarily get rid of any of my memories - for I would not be who I am, or who I am to become.

The challenging thing for us is not to eschew the painful memories of the past, but to celebrate that we have a God who redeems us from the past to prepare us for a glorious future that will be fulfilled only when the Son of God returns again.

See you Sunday!
Lamar