The Right Word at the Right Time

It was the autumn of my seventh year of school, my first experience of the wider world of middle school with its changing classrooms and multiple teachers.  It was a time of blessed transition from the strictures of grade school.  The world was a place of broadened opportunities.

I was lying on the living room floor watching our 19” black and white Zenith TV.  A Pepsi commercial came on, and the voice sang “You’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give…because Pepsi helps them come alive.”  I heard that ditty many times, but for the first time I knew what they were singing about; I understood. In that moment a door opened for me.  The world had become a place of endless opportunities. You see, I was in love—as much in love as a 7^th grade boy can be. Her name was Theresa, and she had long hair and was on the cheerleading squad.

My infatuation faded as I realized Theresa was just leading me on for her own gratification. After a month, I found a new girlfriend; Shannon was her name.  She was truer of heart.  But it was not the same, Shannon was not my first love.

In my infatuation I was ready to embrace a new piece of the person I was becoming. The Pepsi commercial spoke to a new capacity in me.  It was the right message at the right time.

Seven years later I was a freshman in college, and life was opening up around me again.  I had left behind the provincialism and tedium of High School.  My professors were opening up to me new vistas of knowledge and giving to me the freedom to think my own thoughts.  I found I was a standout accounting student and already could see a comfortable career as a CPA, a job where I could make a good living and not get dirty or risk debilitating injury.  I could see myself to having everything I could ever want, yet I sensed there had to be more to life. 

I was not attending church anymore.  I come to believe in a God who only instilled guilt and fear, both of which were designed to make us behave.  It seemed to me that all this talk of God’s love for us only served as a pretext for God’s judgment of us when we rejected that love.  Nonetheless, I did believe in God and thought that God had created me.  So I began to read the Bible, thinking I might find something there to make sense of life.

My parents were away on fishing trip, and I was alone in the house; it was a Tuesday night.  I read the story of Nicodemus in my red-letter edition King James Bible that I had received in the fourth grade for memorizing the books of the Bible in order.  The story recorded there stunned me.  The beauty of the Gospel washed over me.  For the first time I got it.  The words in red took on transforming power. I handed myself over to the grace of God without reservation.

I had heard countless sermons, attended endless Vacation Bible Schools, and sat through years of Sunday School.  Yet I had never really gotten the message.  In that brief exchange between Jesus and a Pharisee, it all broke open to me.  It was like waking up from a coma to a sunlit room on a fresh morning.

I was ready in that moment to embrace a new piece of the person I was becoming. That story spoke to a newly-birthed capacity in me.  It was the right message at the right time.

God is always birthing new things in our lives, pushing us to grow, to risk, to rely.  I think this should make us patient, patient with ourselves and with those around us.  We all are on the way to becoming someone we have not yet been.  And, yes, we each are at different places on that journey.  The important thing is to walk through the next door when it opens.

Jim Kelsey
Executive Minster-American Baptist Churches of New York State

 

Speaking the Truth in Love

The 2016 biennial planning committee was discussing the literary context of the theme verse for the gathering, Ephesians 4:16, seeking guidance for our planning process.  We moved to a discussion of 4:15 and the meaning of “speaking the truth in love.”  We discovered that speaking the truth in love is not always a simple and straight forward process.  We asked if there is an inherent tension sometimes between truth and love.

We associate love with supporting others, encouraging and comforting them, easing their pain and hardship.  In other words, we associate love with caregiving; but love and caregiving are not necessarily the same thing in every case.  Love makes demands, has expectations, both opens up new avenues and closes off others.  At times it is difficult to love and to be loved. God’s deep love for us can be probing and unsettling.  It can make us uncomfortable with what we have done and who we have let ourselves become.  Love is not always the same thing as caregiving.

We can speak the truth in many voices, and not all of them are loving.  We can use truth as a weapon to diminish others, to create distance, to gain power, to self-justify, and to wound.  Truth is easily misused in the service of ego and pride.  Both the Pharisee and the tax collector speak essentially the truth in Luke 18:9-14, but God heard in their words very different things.  Truth can reveal more about us than we wish to admit; but it can also liberate, clear the decks, and make room for the future.  It all depends on the voice we use.  Paul admonishes us to use the voice of love as we speak the truth. 

Speaking the truth in love is all about how and why we speak.  Do we speak the truth because it is the best thing for the other person or this community to hear?  Will it open a future to them that they cannot now envision?  Will it move them in the path of joy and wholeness?  Is it about their being built up or about our being vindicated and reassured of our own righteousness?  The truth is the truth, and love is love.  Speaking the truth in the voice of love is the challenge.

We sometimes must say difficult things because loving can mean advocating for change.  This is true in our families and in our churches. We all have had conversations that were difficult but necessary, conversations we would have preferred not to have had and for a while avoided.  Our churches sometimes need to have these conversations.  We need to talk truthfully  about who we have become, how our community has changed, and what new things God is wanting to do among us and around us.  We avoid these conversation because they will necessitate change, and change feels a lot like loss.

Maybe speaking the truth in love is about telling one another what time it is when we have lost track of ourselves and the world around us.  When my sons were young and we would be reading together or playing with Legos or lying in front of the fire telling spooky stories, I would have to say “Boys, it is time to go to bed.”  I didn’t want to say it, and they didn’t want to hear it; but it was the truth.  It was the best thing for them.  It laid the foundation for a better tomorrow for them.  Maybe that is speaking the truth in love.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

Waking Up Hearts

Ministry used to be simpler it seems.  You had your kids, your youth, your adults, and your seniors.  You could tell who was who simply by looking at them.  Then you knew what to do.  Kids? Playdough, cookies, and Bible stories would get the job done.  Youth?  Some pizza, ping pong, and discussion topics got you through it.  Adults?  Go with small groups, a Valentine’s Day banquet, and a marriage enrichment seminar.  Seniors?  A trip to an art museum with a nice lunch, pastoral visits in the home, and Sunday School did nicely.  Those were simpler times.

Ministry is not so simple anymore; you need a program to tell the players.  Boomers were not such a big complication; if someone was not a child, a youth, or a senior, they were likely a boomer.  Now we have Builders, Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z.  David Kinnaman (You Lost Me—Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church) writes about Nomads and Prodigals and Exiles (pp. 61—86).  Don’t forget about the Nones, as in “none of the above” on surveys about religious devotion.  This increasingly "none of the above" portion of our society has no tethering to any type of faith community and has little feeling for any clearly articulated religious convictions.  In the midst of all this good analytical work, we who care about congregations and faith sometimes feel overwhelmed.  With the growing numbers of Nones, we can live under a cloud of discouragement.  At those times I remind myself of Andries.

I met Andries at De Pelgrim Evangelische Baptistengemeente in Oostende, Flanders; I was interim pastor there for several years.  Flanders is a wonderful place to live. The Flemish are intelligent, caring, hardworking, and masters at baking bread and making chocolate.  The schools are great and the traffic orderly.  The Flemish care well for the elderly, the young, and the poor among them.  Flanders is, however, thoroughly secular.  Religious faith has been eschewed by all but a small minority.  They see the church, historically, as an oppressive institution and are glad it has been pushed to the margin of society.  One man said to me:  “We worked for so long to be free of the church, why would we want it back?”  They consider God, in a practical sense, dead.

Andries was a typical Flemish man:  reserved, private, sober, and thoroughly secular.  He believed God was the main character in a fairy tale that modernity and science had put the lie to.  When I met him was still a pretty sober guy but no longer secular.  He had, some years before, become a Christian convert.  He shared with me that before he became a Christian he felt nothing deeply.  He did not feel fear or hope, sorrow or joy, anxiety or peace.  He was numb in his heart, he said.  When he became a believer, he said that he “became alive in my heart for the first time. “  He began to feel things deeply—joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, longing and contentment.

I remember Andries when I consider the present trends in our society.  He was the very personification of agnosticism in a deliberately secularized society.  Yet the spirit of God got through to him.  There was a beachhead of vulnerability within his anesthetized heart.  He had a spiritual capacity for responsiveness that he did not know he possessed.  I find that hopeful.

When I encounter people that have no interest in religious faith and no regard for communities of faith, I try not to think of them as bad or pagan or rejecters of God.  Rather, I try to think of them as numb, as people who do not fully appreciate what lies dormant within them.  I believe there is a capacity in each us capable of yielding to God and embracing the beauty of the gospel—even if we do not all yet know it.  When I remember Andries, I feel hopeful, and I try to wake up some things in people.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister--American Baptist Churches of New York State

A Humility Born of Fire

We are several weeks into Lent.  Are you feeling bad yet?  We can experience Lent as a time of sober self-reflection leading to self-recrimination leading to a guilty discouragement.  A Lenten observance driven by guilt has little power to transform us, and that is the point of Lent after all:  transformation.  On the other hand, a Lenten observance driven by a humility born of honesty opens a door to change.

I learned about humility six months into my marriage.  I came into the marriage with a 1980 Datsun 210 station wagon.  The car had no optional equipment whatsoever.  I installed a radio myself.  I made floor mats out of AstroTurf remnants and upgraded to radial tires at some point. This car was the very picture of basic transportation.  My wife came into the marriage with a recently-painted 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix with air conditioning, an automatic transmission, and quite likely the last working 8-track player in America.  It was a nice ride.

One day while she was at work, I decided to replace the fuel filter in her car.  The job turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined.  So I gave up and retightened the fuel line, planning to take it to a professional. As I retightened the fuel line, I heard a distinctive “creak.”  I thought this was the sound of a tightly connected joint.

When I started the car, I found the “creak” was not the sound of a tightly connected joint; rather it was the sound a metal fuel line makes when you crack it.  The engine began to shoot gasoline onto an increasingly hot exhaust manifold.  Within a few moments the engine was on fire.  As the engine kept pumping more gasoline onto the manifold, flames engulfed the car.  A pumper truck came and put out the fire.  What had quite likely been the last working 8-track player in America was now toast.  As I stood there looking at the charred relic, the firefighter said:  “So now we’ll see if she really loves you.”  I suggested he not become a grief counselor.

I went to pick up Debbie at work and with sobs told her I had incinerated up her car.  There were no recriminations, lectures, or icy silences.  That weekend we bought a car, one with an automatic transmission, a radio, and air conditioning.  These were accommodations I needed to make.

I learned about humility that day.  I am not perfect.  I have made other mistakes since then, and I am sure I still have a few more mistakes in me. Being forgiven for destroying something precious gave to me the freedom to live my life at ease, not always fearful of error.  I knew that when I messed up, I would still be accepted, trusted, and loved.

This is economy of Lent.  We take an honest look at ourselves, owning up to the destructive things we have done and the good things we have left undone; and we realize that we are not done messing up.  We make this candid appraisal within the larger frame of God’s mercy and continuing love for us.  God has not given up on us.  So we do not give up on ourselves, nor do we give up on those around us.  In this fertile framework newness can be birthed in us and in others.  Lent is about new and better things growing out of the failures of our living.

Blessings,
Jim

On Carpentry and Prayer

Debbie, my wife, and I have been watching “This Old House” and “Ask This Old House” each Thursday night for three years and have recently found the confidence to undertake some small projects.  We put crown molding over the sliding glass door and around our bathroom mirrors.  We bought a fireplace mantle from MantlesDirect.com and mounted it.   We removed several ceiling-mounted kitchen cabinets and even worked with drywall to patch the holes. In most of these projects, power tools were used.  The scope of our expertise is expanding.

Truth be told, in reality I am recovering from decades of regression.  My father was a talented carpenter and cabinetmaker, and my younger brother works as a carpenter and builds cabinets and furniture.  I never had the talent of either of them, but I could be productive on the jobsite.  I could sink a nail into subflooring with three or four hammer swings.  I could nail down shoe molding along a floor with two hard and one soft swing of the hammer.  I have lost that ability; my present hammering is of unpredictable aim and unreliable force.  I have lost the muscle memory I once had.  Muscle memory comes through repeatedly doing a specific motor task until a “memory” is developed in your muscles, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort.

I believe our minds and hearts can be trained in the same way.  The “Jesus Prayer” is one way that believers can create a type of “muscle memory” of faith and obedience in their minds and hearts.  The prayer is quite simple: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”  This prayer dates from the 5^th century.  It has always been more popular in the Eastern Orthodox Church than in the Western branch of Christianity.  In thinking about sin, Eastern Christianity has preserved a greater emphasis on the dynamic of sickness/ weakness and healing.  We in the West are more prone to give a central place to the dynamic of guilt and forgiveness when contemplating our sinfulness.  Repentance in Eastern Christianity is fueled more by a belief that we can change and less by the need to have our sense of guilt disarmed.

I see the “Jesus Prayer” less as a reminder that we should be continually wallowing in our guilt and more as a reminder that we can change.  The prayer begins by invoking the name of Christ, who is the ground of all hope in our lives. We ask for mercy, the only durable way forward for us.  Then we acknowledge the truth about ourselves:  we are sinners.  This confession does not discourage us because we have already initiated our way forward through the prayer bathed in the healing mercy we find in Jesus.  The prayer is a candid but hopeful confession.  Repeated recitation of the prayer conditions our hearts and minds to live our lives under the mercy of God, fueled by an honest admission that we do not have to remain the way we are; we can change.  I am working to create a “muscle memory” in my heart and mind that frames each day with the mercy of God and creates a hopeful urgency that lets God change me. 

I am also continuing to condition my eye and hand to achieving a greater level of carpentry skill.  Next will we replace the fronts on the bathroom cabinets or the broken faucet.  Neither will necessitate the use of power tools, unfortunately.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey

Giving Joseph his Due

Joseph gets the short shrift this time of year it seems to me.    In our crèches Mary sits close to the baby at the center of the scene, and Joseph often is standing behind and to the side looking on as a spectator.  In Luke, Mary does  get most of the attention.  But in Matthew’s Gospel Joseph is where the action is.

Mary and Joseph are engaged; but before they consummate the marriage, Mary is “found” to be with child [1:19].  One has to wonder how she was “found.”  Did the neighbors notice?  Did Joseph get suspicious at her expanding girth?  Was her mother the first to catch on?  In any case, this appears to be what we would describe as an unplanned out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy.  We, the reader, and Mary know what has happened; but no one else in the story knows what we know—least of all Joseph.  To them, Mary looks like a girl who “got herself in trouble.”

I worked at a hospital while in seminary, and one night a woman brought her teenage daughter, who was having severe abdominal pain, into the emergency room .  The nurse quickly discovered that the girl was in labor.  The girl’s mother refused to believe it.  After the delivery, the doctor showed the woman the baby.  She accused them of trying to foist someone else’s baby on her daughter.  She asserted: “That can’t be my daughter’s baby; she is not married.”  Perhaps Mary’s mother struggled to find an explanation as well.

Joseph discovers his wife to be is pregnant. How he came to know we are not told; but certainly the news would have spawned feelings of betrayal, embarrassment, and probably anger.  But Matthew tells us Joseph is a righteous man; therefore, he chooses to break off the betrothal quietly, minimizing any pain or embarrassment to either family.  He could have chosen otherwise.  He could have publically accused her and had her stoned.  Because he was a righteous man, he chose simply to walk away.

There was one option that was not available to Joseph.  There was one course of action that never would have entered his mind.  There was one choice that would have been impossible in his world.  He could never take Mary as his wife and raise someone else’s child.  That was absolutely forbidden.  He was, after all, a righteous man.

Yet that is precisely what the angel of the Lord tells Joseph to do, and he does it straightway. Joseph appears to have had a predisposition to the more refined definition of righteousness that will be developed in Matthew’s Gospel, a predisposition that made him a good candidate for his role in the Christmas story.

Later in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus will say “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven [5:20].”  I suspect that his listeners looked at one another and thought they had no chance of making the cut.  The scribes and Pharisees were the epitome of law-abiding Jews, a standard that most people would never equal, let alone exceed.  Yet as we move through this Gospel, Jesus redefines righteousness.  Close to the end he will say to the religious leaders:  “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill, and cumin.  But you neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness [23:23].”  There is something more important than a meticulous following of regulations; that more important piece of obedience is found in justice, mercy, and faithfulness. 

In chapter 9 Jesus says:  “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”  The leaders did not learn their lesson because in chapter 12 he accuses:  “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”  This is what Joseph knew intuitively, and that is why he showed no hesitation in taking this pregnant woman as his wife and raising this son as his own.  He knew that greater righteousness grounded in mercy.

Like Mary, Joseph was an extraordinary human being used by God to usher in a new chapter in God’s pursuit of us.  Joseph heard the voice of mercy instead of the voice of sacrifice.  He already knew what God was doing through this baby.

Merry Christmas,
Jim Kelsey, Executive Minister--American Baptist Churches of New York State

The Real Presence of Christ

I could never keep them straight:  consubstantiation versus transubstantiation.  Luckily, in 25 years of ministry no one has ever asked me about this--one of the benefits of being Baptist.    There is sometimes a little discussion about the nuances of an ordinance and a memorial, but people soon lose interest and move on to what desserts will be at the potluck next week.

This past Sunday I gained a new appreciation of the meaning of the “real presence of Christ” during a communion service at the Zomi Christian Church in Buffalo, New York.  I noticed at the front of the sanctuary a large plastic tub with what looked to me like sawdust.  Early in the service, a young girl brought up a jar and poured something into the tub; I then realized it was rice.

After having led the observance of communion, I ended the service with the following benediction:
     You have been fed; the bread gives you new life born of God’s love.
     You have drunk; the cup gives you freedom born of God’s forgiveness.
     Live this week alive with God’s love and free in God’s forgiveness.
I wanted our observance to bring the felt presence of Christ in their lives that week

As I talked with church members after the service, I asked about the rice.  They said that each time a family prepares a meal they scoop up a handful of rice, put it in a jar, and bring the jar to church when they come.  The rice is then used to feed the poor. 

I thought:  “Now this is ‘real presence.’”  When the rice is shared with a needy family, Jesus is present in a palpable way.  He once said, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat…Truly I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,

you did for me [Matt. 25:35 & 40].”  Jesus is present in the poor when they are given rice.  This is “real presence” even a Baptist can affirm.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State