A Midlife Musing

            A good friend of mine once posted this question on Facebook.  “What’s the difference between a midlife crisis and a midlife awakening?”  Plenty of answers were offered, but the one I remember most vividly was this, “A midlife awakening creates a midlife crisis.” 

            I can relate to that.  Reaching the age of 45 almost two years ago spurred my own midlife awakening, which in turn brought on a major (!!!) midlife crisis.  I was completely unprepared for this turning point in my life because I lived in denial that I would ever experience one.  I was not going to be the kind of person who was so desperate to hold onto a rapidly receding youth that I would do anything I could to pretend I was not aging.  I wasn’t going to be a caricature of a midlife crisis.

            Then I turned 45.  Now let me explain.  I did not wake up on my 45^th birthday in mourning for my lost youth.  It was just another day.  I’m not sure that I was consciously aware of anything out of the ordinary on that day, other than I wasn’t happy that I was spending another birthday overweight, overtired and unsure of what I wanted out of life.  My awakening was an evolving process that culminated in the realization that 45 years had passed in the twinkling of an eye.  If I was lucky enough to live till I was 90, how did I want to spend the next 45 years?  Especially, ESPECIALLY, knowing how fast that time would go.  How did I want to spend the next 45 years of my life?

            Even though I had sworn never to engage in classic midlife crisis behavior, I did undergo some pretty dramatic physical transformations.  I lost a lot of weight, which I’ve written about in a previous blog.  I grew out my benign but age appropriate bob of a haircut.  I colored my hair even before I turned 45, but I generally stuck to the safe brunette shades of my natural color.  Not anymore people!  I didn’t realize how dramatically different my hair color is until I returned to Iowa a few weeks ago.  Friends, acquaintances, even my own parents didn’t recognize me at first because according to them I’ve gotten so blonde. 

            Fear not.  I have not embraced my inner Marilyn Monroe.  I am not sporting a platinum coif.  I like to describe my hair as a combination of warm honey, caramel and some blonde highlights.  But I digress.  My hair is several shades lighter.  Why?  Why not? 

            I think those last two words are the crux of my midlife crisis.  Why not?  Greater than any physical transformation I have undergone is the mental, emotional and spiritual transformation I have made and am making.  What struck me most about turning 45 was that I had lived a great deal of my life in fear.  I was afraid of taking big risks.  What if I failed?  And if I did take a risk and it didn’t pay off the way I thought it should then my fear quadrupled.  One example of this was that I applied to some graduate programs about seven years ago and didn’t get in.  Instead of trying some other schools, I gave up, convinced I just didn’t have the right stuff for doctoral work because I couldn’t bear failing again. 

            But it seems to me that life is all about failure.  Failing at something means I risked something.  I tried something.  If I’ve failed then in some strange paradoxical way I’ve succeeded.  Failure means I didn’t let fear keep me from investing myself in something or someone.  Failure means that in small ways or large I’ve acted with courage.  That’s what I’ve realized in this time of midlife crisis.  Fear may have dominated a large part of my first 45 years.  But it will be courage that lives large in the next 45.  After all, why not?

Friendship Outside the Box

John 15:9-17/Acts 10:44-48

May 13, 2012/Mother’s Day

            It was the first day of our Group Processing Class at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, otherwise known as PSCE.  I had been mentally kicking myself for registering for the class since I walked through the door.  Somehow I felt tricked, although I couldn’t figure out who had tricked me.  I had been told by friends who had taken the course in past semesters that it was an important class.  It would serve me well in my ministry.  I would gain new insight into what made people act in the way they did, and I would gain new insight into what made me act in the way I do. 

            That last part put a nervous knot in the pit of my stomach; then as I was getting ready for the first day I found out that group process was not just a lecture, take notes and study for the final kind of class.  No.  We would be put into groups.  We would have to figure out group process while we were literally in groups processing.  The knot in my stomach grew exponentially when I heard that information.  I realize that it sounds self-evident that group process would require work in groups, but as the old joke goes, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.  It was alive and well in me. 

            So it was the first day of class.  Our professor, Gwen Hawley, had given us an overview of class expectations, grading, attendance, etc.  We’d received a copy of our syllabus, and now Gwen asked for volunteers to give an example of what working in a group could be like.  I did not raise my hand.  But others did.  We moved our chairs into a larger circle around the smaller circle of volunteers and watched as they tackled a decision making exercise together. 

            As I watched these people struggle to work together, I zeroed in on one particular person. I’ll call him Phil to protect his identity.  I’ll put it plainly.  I thought Phil was an idiot.  He quickly became the clown.  He was loud and opinionated and he talked over everyone else.  I remember that the one thought going through my mind was, “Please don’t let him be in my group.  Please don’t let him be in my group.  Please don’t let him be in my group.” 

            Guess what?  Our group assignments were made at the next class.  Phil was right there.  In my group.  My best friend Ellen, who many of you met when she was here participating in my installation, was also in the class, but she wasn’t in my group.  She told me that if I had so much resistance to the class than obviously I needed to be there.  I took that as a challenge, so even with Phil in my group I decided to stick it out.

            That is one decision that I’ve never regretted.  Group process became one of my favorite of all the classes I took in seminary.  At the end of the semester, Gwen Hawley asked me to be one of her teaching assistants, which meant that I had to take an Advanced Group class to prepare for it.  I loved it!  But what about Phil?

            Phil and I actually became friends.  I wouldn’t say that we became best friends or best friends forever, otherwise known as BFF’s.  But working in that group with him gave me a chance to see another side of Phil.  The process of forming a group forced us to see beyond our public faces, the personas we showed to the world.  Phil and I became friends. 

            Phil and I haven't stayed lifelong friends.  But I still have a great deal of respect for him and for his ministry.  Seeing him as a friend is one of the many times I’ve been surprised by God and by the people God puts in my life. 

            That introductory group process class forced me to think outside the box in many ways – in leadership, collaboration, mediation and what a friend can mean.  I learned to see Phil and the other people in my group outside of the box that I put them in when we first came together. 

            I realize that it’s probably a stretch to say that Jesus was telling the disciples to think outside the box when it comes to friendship.  Although I do believe that Peter in our story from Acts was pushed to do just that.  It is a rare event though to hear anything about friendship in scripture, so I wanted to take the opportunity to address it while I could. 

            I read a comment this week, from a fellow preacher, that friendship has been cheapened by social networking such as Facebook.  If you have any connection to Facebook at all, you may have already realized that it’s very easy to be friends with people that you don’t have strong connections to, perhaps none really at all.  I’m certainly guilty of that.  I have “friends” on Facebook that I don’t know that well.  Some of my “friends” on Facebook are people that I haven’t always liked that well.  Some of the people I'm friends with on Facebook are people from high school who didn’t give me the time of day when we were actually in school together.  Girls who didn't see me as part of their circle, and boys who wouldn't ask me out, now check in with me on Facebook.  We weren't good friends then, but now we’re all one big happy Facebook family.  Or at least that’s the image that’s portrayed. But we've all grown up now.  We've all had our heartaches, and been through tough times.  We don't put each other in the same categories or use the same labels anymore.   

            Maybe social networking has cheapened the idea of friendship, but in spite of that, I stay with it, because it’s also helped me connect with friends I thought I’d lost.  And I do think more outside the box when it comes to friendship.  There are people I’m friends with on Facebook that I wish I’d worked harder at being friends with when we interacted daily.  They are intelligent, creative, funny people who lead interesting lives.  I wish I had been more willing to really see these people as my friends once upon a time; to see them as children of God trying to figure out this life the same as I was.  Facebook has helped me think outside the box when it comes to friendship.

            As I said earlier, I know it may be a stretch to say that Jesus was telling his disciples to think differently about friendship, but calling them friends was in fact a sort of status change for them.  They weren’t just disciples to a teacher or servants to a master, they were friends.  But being friends to Jesus was more than just a label or category.  It was a relationship in God with God.  Friendship meant abiding in God as well as with one another.  Friendship meant obeying commandments.  And what was the number one commandment that Jesus gave?  To love one another.  You are my friends, you abide in me.  I abide in the Father.  We all abide together in love.  So love one another as I have loved you.  That is what I command.  Love one another as I have loved you.  And what does this kind of love look like?  Love is laying down your life for your friends. 

            Obviously this is what Jesus does for his friends.  But think about it.  Jesus doesn’t just lay down his life for the disciples or the people of Galilee or the folks from his hometown of Nazareth.  The cross was and the cross is for the world.  Earlier in this gospel we hear the words “for God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”  It is for the world that Jesus was willing to die.  The cross was for the world.  Jesus not only preached but lived sacrificial love.  And that love was for the world.  So if I’m not stretching the analogy too far then the world consists of Jesus’ friends, or at least all sorts of people that Jesus calls to be his friends.

            In our text from Acts, Peter also gets a new understanding of what it means to be friends.  The entirety of chapter 10 consists of Peter being forced to see through new eyes what it means to be clean and unclean, pure and impure.  It starts with a centurion named Cornelius and Peter’s vision of a sheet with animals that by the standards of the Law were considered unclean.  Peter wanted to obey the Law, to stick with what he knew and understood about what was right and what was wrong.  But God insists through this vision that Peter see beyond the box that he previously dwelled in.  This wasn’t just about clean and unclean food.  This was about people.  God called people, all kinds of people.  Saul, who persecuted believers, was called.  Cornelius, a Roman Centurion was called.  And as we read in our particular part of the chapter, the Holy Spirit descended even upon Gentiles.  In other words, a whole lot of people were called and answered the call to abide in God through Christ.  A whole lot of different kinds of people were now friends. 

            I know that this goes beyond social networking and the shallow kinds of friendships that we experience on a daily basis.  I know that we can’t befriend the entire world, nor are we necessarily called to.  But I do think that these passages remind us of the fact that loving God means loving God’s people.  And it seems to me that when we really seek to love God, we also seek to see God, to recognize God in the people we meet.  Loving God means seeing a potential friend in all of God’s children.  Jesus commanded his disciples to love one another as he loved them, to share in the friendship of that love.  Peter realized that God, through love, was breaking down every barrier between people that humans constructed.  When we love God, we love God’s people. It sounds easy, but we know for a fact how hard it can be.  But we are called to try regardless.  So let us give thanks for God’s love for us, love that pushes us and challenges us to see outside of the friendship box.  And let’s give thanks that the world is quite literally filled with friends.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Get Up and Go

Acts 8:26-40

May 6, 2012/Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

A couple of years ago, I collaborated with a good friend and colleague of mine on a Bible Study on this passage from Acts.  We created it first for our presbytery council, and then for the presbytery.  My friend, Margaret and I were part of a new committee called the Transformation Outfitters.  It wasn’t so much a committee as it was a visioning team for the presbytery.  The presbytery, with the Transformation Outfitters leading the charge, had committed to becoming an intentional missional body.  For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term missional, I’ll do my best to explain it. 

My understanding of this word is probably one of many, but as I grasp it, the idea of being missional is the people of God seeking to be the church wherever and whenever we are.  For example, if I want to be missional, then I’m going to try and figure out how God is calling me to serve in this particular place and time as opposed to what I did when I served the church in Minnesota.  My context of ministry has changed.  In Minnesota I served a small church in a small town that was shifting from being primarily farming and agriculture to a different kind of community.  For some of the residents it was a bedroom community.  The work was in Rochester or Mabel, so they lived in Canton, but worked elsewhere.    

The context is different here, isn’t it?  Shawnee is much larger.  We have urban problems.  I realize that not everyone sees us as particularly urban, but this neighborhood has very real urban issues.  There are hungry and homeless people all around us.  Literally.  At least one, if not more, sleeps right out there on our porch.  There are universal human needs, no matter what context we live in, but the way these needs manifest themselves here is different from my former church in the Midwest or New York or Maryland, etc.  So as a minister, I have to figure out how God is calling me to serve here. 

The idea behind the missional church is that individuals, congregations and governing bodies like presbyteries discern how God is calling them to live and serve right where they are. 

Sounds like common sense doesn’t it?  But the truth is that more than often than not in my time as a minister I’ve come up with programs, plans, ideas and said, “Hey God.  This is what I want to do.  Actually, this is what I’m going to do.  I need you to bless it.  Make it work, and if you want to join in, that’s okay too.”  How do you think God has responded? 

Sometimes the programs I’ve created and co-created with others have worked.  Sometimes not.  If I wasn’t listening to the needs around me and just trying to fill what I considered to be my new program quota, the ideas flopped.  I’ve seen this happen with others in congregations.  I’ve seen it happen in presbyteries.  We come up with some great program that we think will make everything swell and it doesn’t work.  The program idea may be sound, but if it doesn’t fill the need that God is trying to meet in that time and place, it just doesn’t work.  Even with the best of intentions.

That’s how I understand missional.  That’s what the presbytery I served in back in Iowa and Minnesota wanted to model.  Missional.

So that’s how we come to today’s passage.  My friend Margaret and I used this passage from Acts as our focus.  Why did we choose this?  Because we discerned in this story of what the Spirit does in the calling of Philip and his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch as what we also hoped for in our churches and in our own lives. 

Philip’s story alone is pretty remarkable.  Just a few chapters before this one he and twelve others, including Stephen, were commissioned to feed and care for the widows in the community.  They were the first deacons.  The apostles needed time to pray and spread the word so they laid hands on these twelve so that they would also be empowered by the Spirit to do their own unique work.  But the Spirit is never to be underestimated and it blows where it will.  It moved Stephen to speak to the powers and principalities even though it meant his martyrdom by stoning.  And Philip?  After Stephen was killed, Saul led a severe persecution against all the believers in Jerusalem.  So with the exception of the apostles, all the other believers were scattered.  Philip went into Samaria.  Even though he wasn’t commissioned to preach or to evangelize, that’s what he did.  He preached to the Samaritans.  His preaching expelled unclean spirits from those who were possessed.  Folks who were lame or paralyzed walked again.  Philip even converted a magician named Simon.  He was baptized and he stayed by Philip’s side for a long time.  Although Simon once performed acts that amazed all those around him, now he was amazed by the miracles and signs that happened through Philip because of the Holy Spirit.

Seems a little different from what the original intentions for Philip and the other twelve were, doesn’t it?  The Spirit blows where it will and it directed Philip in a completely different way than any of the apostles or Philip could have imagined.

So we come to this particular chapter in Philip’s story.  Philip is told by an angel or the Lord to get up and go south.  Take the wilderness road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza.  I suspect that Philip might have found this command odd.  Why a wilderness road?  Just the name implies that it wouldn’t be well traveled.  What use would God have for Philip there?

But Philip didn’t question.  He just got up and went. 

Turned out a ministry was waiting on that wilderness road.  I doubt it was one that even Philip expected.  An Ethiopian eunuch, an official of the court of Queen Candace was in his chariot leaving Jerusalem for home.  The Spirit tells Philip to go over to the chariot.  Philip ran to it and when he did he heard the eunuch reading aloud from the prophet Isaiah.  Philip asked him if he understood what he was reading and the eunuch invited him to join him and guide him in the interpretation. 

Philip began with that Isaiah passage and told him, to quote the old hymn, the story of Jesus.  When they came to some water, the eunuch was moved to ask for baptism.  More specifically he said, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  We don’t have a record of Philip’s exact response but it must have been a “yes.”  The chariot was ordered to stop.  They got out.  Philip baptized the eunuch.  When he and the eunuch came out of the water Philip was snatched up by the Spirit and taken away.  The eunuch didn’t see Philip again, but went on his way rejoicing.  Philip found himself in Azotus and went through each town proclaiming the good news.

Pretty powerful story isn’t it?  Philip hears the call, answers the call and a conversion happens.  It’s the kind of story that I love because it’s all completely unexpected.  Philip himself was unexpected.  The eunuch?  Absolutely!  He was of a different race, a different culture.  Yet he had gone to Jerusalem to worship, so he had been exposed to Judaism in some way or another.  There were plenty of reasons to prevent him from being baptized.  First and foremost he was a eunuch.  The Law stated that someone with his unique physical condition could not worship in the temple.  Philip was Jewish.  He certainly knew the Law.  But he didn’t hesitate to baptize him.  This is a wonderful story of conversion.

But who is really converted here?  In a blog I read this week by a fellow pastor in Denver, that was the question.  Who was really converted?  Yes the eunuch was converted; that’s the obvious answer.  But there had to have been a conversion for Philip as well.  A conversion in how he thought and believed and in the assumptions he made about who belonged and who didn’t. 

It seems to me that conversion, like repentance, is not just a change in belief but a change in heart.  Philip’s heart had to have been changed for him to hear the Spirit and listen to the Spirit and approach the person the Spirit told him to approach, eunuch and all.

It’s really easy for us who are already believers to think that our call is to convert others, but I wonder if the real call is for us to be converted.  Maybe that’s the whole point of being missional.  It’s not just discerning God’s will for us where we are, it’s discerning that God is calling us to open ourselves to whatever really new thing that God is doing in whatever time and place we find ourselves in.  It’s God calling us, through the Spirit, to change our minds about who belongs and who doesn’t.  It’s about being willing not just to tell the story of Jesus to someone else, but to hear that story from someone else’s perspective; to see that story through someone else’s eyes. 

Philip was told to get up and go.  He did.  And in that process he converted an Ethiopian eunuch.  But I suspect Philip was changed as well.  Not just him but the whole course of the ministry from that point on.  In the language of our gospel lesson, new branches were growing from the true vine.  Branches that none of the original disciples could have possibly forseen.  But that’s how the Spirit works, isn’t it? 

Just like Philip we are called to get up and go, to proclaim the good news, to share the story of Jesus.  We are called to be missional, to discern God’s work right here and now.  We are called to evangelize and baptize and even convert.  But in that process we are also called to be converted, to see that the new thing God is doing means we will change and be changed.  But we are not alone in the process.  We are loved.  We are emboldened.  We are empowered.  The Spirit does not leave us alone.  The Spirit calls.  So let’s get up and go.  Amen.