It happens daily.  As a Pastor, at some point each week various people, on differing days, will make comments to me about the music at church, or the monthly newsletter, or the sermon in worship, or something I said in a meeting, or an error in the bulletin, or my schedule, or...or...or...the opportunities are endless!  As a man who makes his living from words, peoples' comments are important to me.  I take comments to heart.  I've learned that those comments can take two forms: compliments or complaints.

Here's the problem:  if I accept the compliments, and think that they are legitimate, then what do I do with all the complaints?  I should accept the complaints too, if I'm accepting the compliments.  After all, not all the complaints are ill-founded.  Some of them must be legitimate, right?  This presents me with a conundrum.  How do I determine which complaints to take to heart, and act upon, and which ones to acknowledge and dismiss?

Handling criticism and complaints is hard.  I can feel for Moses and his situation in Exodus, when the people are without water in the wilderness.   After all, I'm judging that their lack of water is a legitimate complaint.  Everyone needs water.

Moses is feeling under pressure to perform!  Yet what is he to do?  He can't bring "blood from a turnip," as the old saying goes.  There are no conveniently located Stripes gas stations, where he can pick up a 44oz sweet tea.  There are no desalination plants, nor water sanitation facilities.  Moses can't do a thing!  He says, "These people are getting ready to stone me!"  (Exodus 17:4).  I imagine him thinking in a panic, "What can I do!?!  What do they think I can do with their complaint?!  I can't get water from a rock!"  The situation looked impossible, and only a bad outcome could be envisioned.

Like a good leader, Moses assesses what he CAN DO: which would be nothing.  Moses can't bring blood from a turnip.  He can't bring water from a rock.  He can't defend himself from the complaints. So Moses is left with only one option: turn to God in complete submission.

What to do with compliments or complaints?  Do what Moses did!  Turn them over to the One who can handle them.  God is the one who causes His rain to fall upon the just and the unjust.  He alone judges the hearts, and knows our motivations, our desperations, and our desires.  When the compliments and complaints become too many, and too much to handle, then pray through them with God.  Do what Moses did and call a meeting with God.

Ultimately, God alone can bring water out of a rock, or bring His chosen people through the Red Sea on dry ground when the Egyptians are in hot pursuit, or grant safe passage in an ark on the waves of the catastrophic flood.  Will the water quench or will it kill?  It all depends on doing the one thing necessary: turning to God in submission -- like Noah, like the people of Israel, like Moses in the parched wilderness.

What is your flood-like catastrophe?  Is something (or someone) bearing down on you, like an Egyptian army, and you've got no place to turn?  Do you feel like you're thirsty, lost in a hot and arid place?  May God bring water out of a rock for you.  May He float your boat.  May He bring you through life's sea of compliments and complaints to trust fully in Him.

http://christopherotten.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/you-cant-get-blood-from-a-turnip/

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1464949806

What about you?  Are you ready to go "...home by another way"?  Here's the article...

An epiphany is not an idea. As D. H. Lawrence said, people can do anything they want with an idea, but a truly new experience changes everything. Before you can do anything with it, it does something with you!

Most of us prefer ideas and words; we are afraid of any authentically new experience. Unlike the Magi, we do not tend to allow stars to divert us to a new and unknown place. Most of us stay inside our private castles and avoid such questionable adventures. Yes, we avoid death supposedly, but we also avoid birth. We miss out on the great epiphany.

An epiphany is not an experience that we can create from within, but one that we can only be open to and receive from another. Epiphanies leave us totally out of control, and they always demand that we change. We would rather have objectified religion, which leaves us potentially in control and never having to change at all

Religion without epiphanies becomes digging in your heels; religion with epiphanies becomes living on your heels, ready to go wherever God manifests. One wonders if the three kings ever went back home at all. Home base had been taken from them.

The feast of the Epiphany tells us that from the very beginning Jesus was someone to be personally experienced, and not just mentally agreed upon, proven, accepted or argued about. The categories are entirely different: True human experience demands that the whole person be present and active. In that light, one wonders how many people reallyexperience things since we are hardly ever present to experience our own experiences.

If you are like me, you are usually somewhere else than here. God wants more than our mind, it seems. As Jesus put it, we are to give God our whole mind, our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole strength (see Mark 12:29-30). In other words, we offer not just our assent to proper ideas about God, but our very selves as persons. It’s love rather than mere duty; surrender and trust rather than mere obedience.

The Magi bring themselves and their assumptions on a perilous journey, and only then can they offer their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And it all leads to an encounter that rearranges their lives, their self-images and seemingly even their pocketbooks.

They enter another group and religion from their own, they trust their own skills as astrologers (and God uses their secular profession to bring them to God!), they interrupt their daily regimen at great length and, if they were kings, they submitted to another one! It’s all quite extraordinary imagery and lesson, one might even say veryun-religious kind of practice.

Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) makes very clear in the first chapter that God is primarily revealing not ideas, dogmas, moralities, but God’s very self: “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself” (#2). Biblical revelation is a personal category of encounter, a biblical knowing, not just a classroom study. It is transformation more than just education.

This is very different from mere revelation of ideas. In fact, it implies that experience is the very condition for revelation even to happen! We are involved in a personal encounter in the Bible. Vulnerability is therefore much more important than mere intelligence. As Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, put it,all real living is meeting.

It is fairly easy to discuss and have opinions; it is much harder to be present to another and to meet them. The first allows us to maintain ourselves as we are; the second demands surrender and getting ourselves out of the way. The first is the nature of the ego; the second is the nature of the Spirit.

Ideas can be weighed, proven and dismissed, but how do you know if you carry the encountered spirit of another? How do you know if the God encounter has rubbed off on you, or if it was an authentic God encounter at all? The fact is, you never do know. You only seek, hope, trust and seek again, which is probably why most of us prefer words to faith. That’s exactly why the Word became flesh.

This is probably why Jesus’ only category for judging persons is by what comes out of them (see Mark 7:20). Jesus never seems to judge people by the mere words they say, or even by what group they belong to, but by the very quality of their being, their spirit. Holiness refers to the who that is acting more than thewhat that they do. One can tell the difference when it is Jesus who is acting, and when it is merely defensive ego.

No surprise that we often settle instead for the apostles’ tribal mentality (see Mark 9:38), or for the moralisms of the scribes and Pharisees (see Mark 7:5). Language and group symbols we can control. Ideas we can police. The spirit of another only God knows. Epiphanies we have to wait for, discern, trust and honor. The word became flesh but, to be honest, we would rather just have the word.

As I drove away, I thought about two recent incidents.  Something dawned on me: in the last month, I've witnessed the generosity of God's people to fund His mission, in excess of a million dollars.  One gift was to the school where my son, Elliott, attends.  The other gift was to St. Paul Lutheran School, where I teach and serve as a pastor.  While the two gifts were not MEGA-Millions, I've seen over a million dollars either invested or pledged to God's mission.  It was awesome!  I've been praising God for the generosity and the "largeness of spirit" of those donor/stewards.  I've also thought a lot about greed and consumption.

Here are some things that I don't understand:

1)  Why do people complain about giving to church, and say that they don't have money, and then buy lottery tickets?

2)  How come people find it difficult to rejoice with others in the amazing things that God is doing for someone else, without feeling that somehow they were ripped off, or shorted?

3)  Does it ever dawn on folks who are upset about church fundraisers that maybe they could give up their trip to Las Vegas to gamble?  Or sacrifice their expensive hunting trip?  Or forego that vacation to Disney?

4)  When people criticize the church for its expenditures, do they realize that they pay more to go to the movies on Friday night, or out to dinner, than they put into the offering plate at their local house of worship each Sunday?

5)  Last of all, I hear many people say, "Pastor, I can't give, I'm on a fixed income."  No kidding?!  Aren't we all?!  I could tell you exactly what I was going to make each year for the past 15 years.  Unless you are a commissioned salesman, or a waiter, you're on a fixed income.  We all are!

6)  It just cracks me up when people say, "If I win the lottery, I'll give."  If you win the lottery, you probably won't give in the future, and you probably never were a giver in the past.  Giving is a state-0f-mind.  It's a habit of the heart.  Giving is an act of worship; not a result of chance.

Do I want to buy a Mega Million Lottery ticket, he asked me?!  You got to be kidding!  That clever fellow at the gas station this morning, while he may be a good salesman for the state lottery, has NO IDEA who he's talking to.  I'm a child of the King.  I belong to the God who created and sustains everything.  I am dearly loved beyond any price tag or human jackpot. And I want my life, like the generosity of these people who have recently given such beautiful gifts to God's mission, to flow out in endless song...

I am moving my blog to another web location for the sake of effectiveness.  Sometimes this website works really well.  Other times, not so much.

You can find me on the Internet at...

http://christopherotten.wordpress.com/

I am on Facebook also.  I look forward to staying-in-touch online.

Sincerely,

Christopher

Today the Scriptures had a common theme in worship:  wisdom!  Solomon prayed for it.  Jesus had it.  We need it.  Yet our world seems so devoid of wisdom, despite the fact that God formed His creation according to His wisdom, and reveals His wisdom through His Word, and through His Word-made-flesh.

So where do we turn to gain wisdom?  Obviously, to the Scriptures and to worship...just like Jesus.  It should be noted that when his parents lost their 12 yr. old son, how did they find Jesus?   By retracing their steps!  Retracing my steps is what I do whenever I lose my cup of coffee in the morning.  Hmmmm.  Did I leave it in the bathroom, where I was shaving?  Is it out on the patio, where I read my Bible?  Is it in the kitchen, where I was making breakfast?  By retracing my steps, I find my cup of coffee.   By retracing their steps, Mary and Joseph found Jesus.  He was in the temple, where they had been, worshipping!  There, Jesus was interacting with God's Word, hashing out its message with the rabbis, teachers, and other men.  He was a "man-among-men" even before he was 13!  Jesus worshipped and steeped Himself in God's Word, even as the Word-made-flesh.  So the Gospel writer tells us, "...he grew in wisdom."

How do we grow in wisdom?  By reading ourselves into Scripture.  By living out the Scripture in daily life.  By praying Scripture.  By gathering around the Scripture to hear God speak to His people in worship.

Walter A. Maier (1893-1950) said it this way on a past New Year's Day in the sixth year (1938?) of The Lutheran Hour Radio program.  I used his quote today in my sermon with some liberties (in parentheses below).  I hope Dr. Maier's words will inspire you to get into God's Word this year and read your own name into its every passage!  Here is the way in which Dr. Maier put it...

"By the over flowing love of God we have not only a general promise of redemption - you and I have also an individual and personal guarantee of our salvation.  God tells us today: 'I have called thee by name,' and by this remarkable pledge we know that the Savior not only loved humanity as a whole, but each one of us in particular.  With this faith we can take any passage of grace and read our name into its love; for it is Christ Himself who underlined this assurance when He told His disciples and still tells His followers: 'Rejoice because your names are written in heaven.'  It is His apostle who comforts his fellow-laborers with the assurance that their 'names are written in the Book of Life.' And by the faithfulness of the same Savior it is my privilege to strengthen all who take Jesus into their hearts and lives as their Redeemer, with the promise that God knows His own individually, that their name has been inscribed in heaven's Book of Eternity, that their Savior, who in spirit is blessing these words and this broadcast, now says to them: 'Fear not;...for I have called thee by name.'  You may be only a number in some public institution or in the necessary system of relief and security, but if you are Christ's, He calls you by your name.  You may have made your own name a reproach to yourself and others, but the Christ whose grace abounds the more where sin abounds, will never be ashamed to take your name upon His holy lips.

Can you measure on this New Year's Day the blessing of knowing that, if you have Christ, your name is recorded in the Book of Life?  If doubt threatens to overcome you; if temptations loom alluring, the grind of life disheartening, the daily disappointments overwhelming, the ease of life distracting, the demands of business and pleasure all-engrossing, then banish these fears as in the strength of your faith you hear Jesus, not simply calling, but Jesus designating you, promising every one who loves His precious name the redemption, peace, (grace and wisdom), which Jesus signifies!

These past 4 months have reminded me of August 2008, when I was installed as the Pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church & School in McAllen, Texas.  St. Paul's School was kicking off a new year.  The church calendar was quickly approaching Advent.  There were significant issues to address.  It was overwhelming.  

Here's my unsolicited advice to other pastors: don't have an Installation right before Advent, or Lent, or before an academic year begins.  That's what I did.  That's what happened after my deployment too.   While I am thankful to press the "reset" button, I've got to be ready to go!

That being said, I just posted to my blog and to Facebook.  You can follow my rambling thoughts here, or link to me on Facebook.  Either way, it's good to be back-in-touch with YOU!

The Lord be with you + Christopher

What do I do?  I listen and I read.  It's what I do.  I can't help myself.  To whom do I listen?

I really appreciate the writings and preaching of The Rev. Will Willimon, Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methoidist Church.  Bishop Willimon is an excellent preacher.  He is studious.  Personally, I relate to him as a southerner.  He worked in North Carolina for years and years.  Furthermore, he cares deeply about the church.  For those reasons, and several more, I like him.

In a recent post, his writing reminded me that the church is not about conferences or conventions but the great commission.  The church is not about meetings but mission.  The building of the church is not about bricks and mortar but about flesh and blood, and changed lives.   The church is not about constitutions & by-laws but about the Holy Spirit working through the Word and Sacraments.

Bishop Willimon made me think. I pray that that God will remind me every day to focus on what HE is doing, where HIS Word is working, and to celebrate HIS sacraments, so that His people will be empowered by the Holy Spirit and unleashed to embody "...God's relentless, restless movement to retake the world."

Here is how Bishop Willimon puts it, in his post about the Biblical Book of Acts.  I hope you enjoy it too.

"A Peculiar Prophet <http://willimon.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr>>  by William H. Willimon on 12/6/10

The Acts of Apostles is addressed to a church in trouble. Reading between the lines of the text, here was a church that was constantly clashing with culture, a church that was holding on by its finger tips, a church with severe money problems. How does Luke, author of Acts, inspire and ignite a troubled church? By reminding them that church isn’t about us in the first place. What is “core” of church, what is the basis of the church’s life and mission? It’s the Holy Spirit descending, convening, and sending.

So much so is the Holy Spirit the chief actor of Acts that some have said we ought to rename it to “The Acts of the Holy Spirit.”

For instance, if one were to ask the church in Acts, “How did you decide to leap over all traditional boundaries and launch a mission to the Samaritans?” the church could have responded, “We didn’t. We didn’t decide, plan or program any of the Samaritan mission. The Holy Spirit dragged us out of our churches and into that mission.”

After the first martyrdom, the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, a great persecution arose against the church. The church ran away to Samaria. Surely nobody would pursue them there. And while they were there, Philip did what Christians do – Philip told some people about Jesus. To the church’s surprise, the Holy Spirit descended and the Samaritans, outsiders to be sure, were baptized.

My image of the church that appears in the Acts of the Apostles is a church that is being dragged kicking and screaming into ever expanding areas of ministry, breathlessly attempting to keep up with the movements of the risen Lord. That’s evangelism, that’s mission – attempting to keep up with the movements of the Holy Spirit, attempting to keep up and not lag too far behind God’s relentless, restless movement to retake the world.

There is little biblical justification for a church that’s located, situated, bound to one place either geographically or organizationally. “Location, location, location,” was never a statement made by Jesus. How sad that the mission of many of our churches is the acquisition of and the upkeep of real estate.

The major reason given for the non participation in our Conference’s program of fair share mission and connectional giving? Real Estate. It’s a sad irony that our churches that built buildings for ministry have now allowed their ministry to be consumed by buildings.

We have found that when a church attempts to reach a new generation of Christians, Christians under 35, we know of no young Christians who respond to the appeal “Come! Help us to keep up our building!”

As Bill Gandy (DS in Mountain Lakes District) keeps reiterating, “The main difference between a growing church and a dying church is INWARD / OUTWARD.” A Church that focuses mostly on inward concerns falls under the judgment of a God who says, “For God so loved the world that God gave . . . . “

In the Acts of the Apostles, the church is always on the move, always pushing out, always outward rather than inward, always being drawn, pulled and pushed by the Holy Spirit into “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1).

By God’s grace we are that church. By God’s grace, and the pulling and prodding of the Holy Spirit, we can be that church!

Will Willimon

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