The Passing of Seasons

I didn’t park the car and go in with him; I left him curbside at the terminal.  I was taking my older son to the airport after Christmas to fly to California to visit with his girlfriend’s family.  From the time our children learned to crawl and then to walk, we have been letting them go, setting them free to become who God created them to be.  As I dropped my son off, I realized that the day would come when his mother and I will not be the primary relationships in his life. I became aware of the passing seasons in our life together.  The writer of Ecclesiastes noted this long ago:  “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven [3:1].”

²We are always transitioning through a particular season--saying goodbye to what is familiar and comfortable and embracing that new and unknown thing that God is bringing.  We live in this matrix of grief and hope.

Marie, the narrator in Alice McDermott’s book Someone, is lying in a hospital bed in Brooklyn with both her eyes bandaged after surgery; and she writes:

Somewhere in the room during those long days of bandaged blindness, my children sat, talking mostly to one another, mostly about where they had managed to park their cars and what time they had left home, what time they should head out again to avoid the traffic: tunnel or bridge, the Southern State or the L.I.E.  I heard the bustle of their winter clothes, zip and unzip, buckle and snap.  There was the jingle of car keys and the odor of exhaust.  I listened to their familiar voices with a vague indifference.  Rattle and clink.  It was my first sense of their lives going on without me.

There is something reassuring about the realization that the world will go on without us.  Our lives are a sequence of seasons that someday will exhaust themselves, but the families we have built, the people in whom we have invested, and the churches for which we have sacrificed will all go on without us someday.  The investments we make will enrich a future we will never see.   

As you pass into the season of a New Year and all that it will bring for you, may the faithfulness of God surround you and the hope embodied in the Christ child sustain you!

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister, American Baptist Churches of New York State

This Story Makes a Difference

Like many of you, I enjoyed a Christmas pageant in church on Sunday.  We had shepherds and sheep, angels and wisemen, Mary and Joseph, and a baby Jesus played by a plastic doll.  I witnessed the well-known story full of familiar characters, a story I could recite from memory by the time I started kindergarten.  Yet I loved hearing it anew, even if the sheep forgot to “baaah” on cue most of the time.  Why is something so familiar still so powerful?

It dawned on me why this story matters so much as a woman sang the haunting Christmas piece:

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?

Did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters? 

Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?

This child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you?

(Lyrics by Mark Lowry & Buddy Greene)

If this were not a true story—in other words, if it were just another ancient fable that warms the heart and gives some wisdom for living—everything in my life would be deflated, and washed out.  The brilliance of the sun would become for me a dirty fluorescent bulb.  Without the coming of this child, what would be left for us who believe?  Not much I’m afraid.

Long ago a child was born to a Hebrew peasant girl.  He grew to be a man totally dedicated to God.  He showed us what God is like in an unprecedented way.  He was “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. [Heb.1:3].”  As what he said and did sank into those around him, they realized there was something unprecedented going on here.  In amazement they concluded:  “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth [John 1:14].”  But I get ahead of the story here.  At the moment of birth, the child is all potential, a future just beginning to unfold.  This child is a package generously received yet unopened.

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?

Did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand?

Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?

And when you kiss your little baby, you’ve kissed the face of God

For now, let us simply hear again about the shepherds and the angels and the parents and the baby.  Let us realize anew the difference this story makes for us who believe.  Without it, our lives would be lost in triviality and tedium and emptiness.  With it, our lives are found in purpose and wonder and hope.  This story matters.

May you experience the incredible power of the story as we make our way toward Christmas,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

Where is the Peace?

This time of year we talk a lot about peace.  Zechariah told us that the coming Christ would “guide our feet into the path of peace [Luke 1:79].”  The angels sang at Christ’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those whom he favors [Luke 2:14].”  Yet each morning the news tells us of new conflicts, of refugees displaced by war desperately seeking a safe haven, and of senseless random violence.  In our own country people suffer under the violence of crime, poverty, and injustice.  Violence seems to be the pervasive currency of power in our world.  So where is the peace?

In a beautiful poetry of history, this past weekend when congregations were celebrating “Peace Sunday” as part of their Advent observance we were also mourning the death of Nelson Mandela.  Mandela fought for a just peace and against a social system that was the very epitome of systematized violence trying to pass itself off as civil society.  During his trial, with the certainty of imprisonment before him, he said:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.  I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.  It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.  But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. 

Mandela realized that the peace that Zechariah and the angels spoke of must be waged; it must be sacrificed for; it must be grasped fragment by fragment.  Mandela seized upon his moment and won some peace for his nation.

The war for peace is already won through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but there are still some battles to be fought.  Oscar Cullman put it in this way.  When the allied troops made it off the beaches of Normandy and into the hedgerows and villages of France, the outcome of the Second World War was essentially decided.  As their boots moved from sand to dirt, the thing was settled.  The Allied armies would ultimately prevail.  There were still battles to be fought, blood to be shed, people to be displaced, and loss to be endured.  There was still a lot of “mopping up” to do, and that would be messy.  The Allies, however, would win the war.  Peace would come.

Our situation is a bit like that.  This coming Christ through his faithfulness to God has won the peace.  God’s campaign for peace is “off the beaches” and into the “hedgerows and villages.”  We are now in the “mopping up” stage.  It is still dangerous and costly.  Nelson Mandela faithfully fought his battle and moved the peace forward.  He made a place for some new light in the darkness that lingers yet.

The author Robert Louis Stevenson had a difficult childhood, due to poor health. One night his nurse found him out of bed, his nose pressed against the window. “Come back to bed” she said to him. “You’ll catch your death of cold.” But he didn’t move. Instead, he sat, motionless, watching a lamplighter slowly working his way through the black night, lighting the gas street lamps along his route. Pointing to him, Robert said, “See, look there; there’s a man poking holes in the darkness!”

 This is our task for now, to poke holes in the darkness wherever and whenever we can.  The light has won; the fullness of the promised peace is coming.  There are still battles to be fought and losses to be endured.  Mandela fought the battle that was his.  We are to fight the battles that are ours, to poke some holes in the darkness.  This gives to our lives purpose, and this purpose brings with it its own sense of peace.

May you experience the peace of Christ in your heart and your family and your communities this Christmas season and commit anew to poking holes in the darkness.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

On a Lost Wedding Ring, an Inherited Painting, and Church Buildings

A Lost Wedding Ring

I got to the top of the stairs at the New York Region office and realized my wedding band was gone.  For nearly 23 years it had been around my left ring finger.  I had just finished washing my hands, so I returned to the sink and took the pipe underneath apart; but the ring was not there.  The two women with whom I work seemed to be more concerned about this loss than I was.  The ring had deep meaning for me, but it was not irreplaceable.  I had not lost my wife; the marriage was still in tact.  Debbie and I could go together to buy another ring and create for ourselves a new memory.  I found the ring that evening in a glove where it had become snagged.  It now, once again, rings my finger in gold.  It has sentimental value, but it is not irreplaceable.

An Inherited Painting

Both my parents have died within the last year.  I have a painting in my house that hung in their breakfast room for the last several decades of their lives.  Many times when I was home to visit, I would sit at the table and talk with my parents as I ate my breakfast below that painting.  They had grown hard of hearing and were accustomed to shouting their conversations; they did not realize they were shouting at each other.  I would turn the volume on the TV down each time; for me it was too early in the morning for both the shouting and the TV.  That painting is now a daily reminder of them and those loud conversations over Cheerios and coffee.  I cannot have any more of those conversations; I cannot make any new memories with them.  That painting keeps fresh for me something that is irrecoverable, thus the painting is for me irreplaceable.

Church Buildings

Church buildings are a bit like that painting.  They are the repositories of memories.  Weddings, funerals, Christmas pageants, and baptisms—they carry emotional echoes of these important milestones in our lives.  The pews and the windows and the walls make palpable the presence of bygone joys and sorrows, of deceased friends and family.  The nursery is the place where, perhaps, we first entrusted our newborn child to someone else’s care.  The Sunday School rooms are, perhaps, the places where we made our first friends.  These buildings ring of a time when our lives were expanding and life was more potential than past. The people and experiences that these buildings mediate to us in feeling and thought are irrecoverable, thus these buildings are irreplaceable.

Sometimes congregations come to a point where they must leave these structures behind.  It becomes impossible to continue to bear them any longer.  You cannot take all things on all journeys; sometimes we must leave some things behind.  However true this might be, we must not dismiss these powerful places as simply structures of brick and wood that can be easily swapped for another.  They are irreplaceable because they mediate to us the remembrance of things that are irrecoverable.

Gil Rendle wrote that we don’t resist change; rather we resist loss.  So how do we process the sometimes-necessary loss of these special spaces?  Gratitude is a good aroma to mingle with our grief.  We can give thanks for what happened in these places, how we were formed and supported and loved and renewed within the embrace of their walls.  We can remember how they animated our lives and gave song to our joys and comfort in our losses.  And those of us who were not there can listen to, appreciate, and learn from the stories these buildings evoke from those were there.  These buildings are irreplaceable places because of what happened to us within them.  In letting them go, grief and gratitude are appropriate.

Then Joshua summoned the twelve men from the Israelites, whom he had appointed, one from each tribe. Joshua said to them, "Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan, and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder, one for each of the tribes of the Israelites, so that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, "What do those stones mean to you?' then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever."  (Joshua 4:4-7)

Our buildings tell stories.  We would do well to listen to those who remember them.

Blessings on you,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

Generosity is a Christian Family Value

We at the Region are working on a plan for funding our ministry for 2014.  We often call this a budget, but I prefer to think of it as printed outline of what we feel God is calling us to do in the coming year.  If you are not personally working on a plan for funding your church’s ministry for the coming year, you can be sure that someone within your congregation is doing so.  Perhaps your worship is focusing on stewardship these days.

The way we approach and handle money is usually a reflection of how we were raised.  It is one of the “family values” we inherit.  We choose to follow the practices of our parents or, in some cases, react against what we were taught.  The family value I inherited was frugality.  Any waiter or waitress that asked if we still “had room for desert” was wasting his or her time.  Such an unnecessary expenditure would have been unthinkable.  One always tried to limit the damage and get out the door.

For much of my life I believed that generosity was the luxury of those who lived with excess.  People with more money than they needed could afford to be generous.  People with spare time on their hands were free to take advantage of opportunities for volunteering.  This unfortunately limits the practice of generosity to the very few.  How many of us feel we have too much money or time?  Not many of us I suspect.

I then read something in the Bible that broke something loose in my heart.

We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia; for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints—and this, not merely as we expected; they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us, (2 Corinthians 8:1-5).

Paul was taking up a collection from the Gentile churches to help out the church in Jerusalem that had fallen into poverty.  Paul uses the example of the Macedonian churches giving out of their poverty to move the Corinthian church, a church of some wealth, to contribute to this offering.  Generosity is not just for the well off among us.  It is to be practiced by all of us—the rich and not-so-rich, the busy and not-so-busy.

I am trying to be a more generous person, more generous with both my time and my money.  God is always challenging us to grow; this is one of my current growth areas.  For me, it is a form of liberation from fear and anxiety to faith and joy.  This is a good time of year, when the Region and churches are planning for ministry in the coming year, for us all to be thinking about generosity.  Generosity is a Christian family value, for the whole family—both the well off and the not-so-well-off.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of New York State

Things Just Work Out

I began work as your Executive Minister, just over a year ago, and last week was the one-year anniversary of our moving into our house here.  In the shadow of these mile markers, I have been giving some thought to the past year and how we ended up here. 

My mother–in-law is prone to say when reflecting upon life that “things just work out.”  If you know her, you know that she doesn’t mean exactly what she is saying; there is a subtext.  She is a person of abiding Christian faith who knows most of the stories in the Bible and can actually tell you where to find them—book and chapter.  So when she comments “things just work,” you know she is not saying that we are simply victims of the vagaries of historical accident.  Someone is working them out; that is what she means.  She sees the hand of God in the daily rhythm of our days.  As I look over the past year in the life of the Kelsey family, I have to say: “Things just work out.”  I believe that God brought us to New York.  This is not simply good fortune, a lucky break.  God has planted us here.  Thus we are stewards of the opportunities and life that we have found in this place. 

Don’t take this too far, I don’t believe everything that happens in the world is God’s will.  Paul wrote: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28).  This does not necessarily mean that God causes all things or that God wills all things.  It does mean that God can redeem all things to serve some good purpose.  A good bit of what happens in this world can be chalked up to human beings making poor choices.  We broke the world a long time ago, and some day will set aright anew.   For now it is something less than what God wills.  Jesus warned us to be careful about drawing too direct a line between what happens in this world and the guilt of those to whom it happens (Luke 13:1-5).

There are times, however, when we sense that God has been at work in some particular way in some particular place at some particular time.  I feel that as I look over the last year.  Our lives are held in the hands of a loving God.  I am so convinced of this.

Things just work out.  We say that with a knowing nod because we believe that there is One who is working out some of those things in our lives.

Blessings,

Jim

I Did Not Intend That

In the center of the campus where I attended seminary was a large grass quad bounded on four sides by the main academic buildings.  We called it the “Josephus Bowl” after the first century Jewish historian Josephus.  Students were constantly cutting across this grassy area as they moved from one building to another.  One day signs appeared on the edges of the Josephus Bowl saying, “Please walk on the grass, but don’t make a path.”  We were invited to walk on the grass but to do so responsibly, mindful of how we were impacting the community in which we lived and studied.  It was a simple request.

Sometimes, however, things are not so simple.  Suppose you were walking across the grass enjoying the beauty of the day and, for some reason, you looked behind you and see with horror that you have, indeed, been making path.  You didn’t intend to make a path, but you did so, nonetheless.  It is too late to repair the unintended damage.  (I often mused over whether this could be considered sin; for it was only in retrospect that one realized that one had done damage.)

How can we as church leaders avoid doing unintended damage that we must then try to repair?  Boundary Training is about avoiding unintended damage.  We all know that gross violations of professional ministerial boundaries—such as assault, infidelity, or embezzlement—are devastating to pastors and parishioners.  We have clear rules about these things, and common sense can guide us.   A majority of problems, however, arise not from these gross violations but from the crossing of more subtle boundaries.  It is here that we make those “unintentional paths in the grass.”  The violation of these less obvious boundaries can place at risk our relationship with parishioners and, at a minimum, create discomfort and confusion.  Often, church conflicts grow out of boundaries not being honored by clergy and parishioners alike.

Boundary Training involves gaining an awareness of the enormous power differential between pastors and their parishioners.  It also helps us clarify whose needs are being met in the clergy/congregant relationship, which helps ministers separate out their own needs and be intentional about where they get those needs met.  Boundary training helps us have a keener sense of how our behavior makes others feel.  It helps ministers avoid doing unintentional harm to themselves and others.  It is harder to make simple rules about these softer, more subtle boundary issues.  That is why church leaders need training. 

Jerrod and I are going to attend a boundary training workshop in Albany on November 7^th.  If you are interested in attending with us, please use the following link to register.  If you cannot attend this training, the Region will make more training opportunities available within the coming year.

Our goal is that none of us look back and see that we made an unintentional path in the grass.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister