The Power of "You"

I always enjoy leading in worship.  In worship leadership, one speaks on behalf of the congregation, articulating the thanksgivings, requests, confessions, hopes, and convictions of the worshippers.  One also shares the Word of God with the congregation, expressing words of forgiveness, hope, challenge, comfort, and guidance.  There is power in the corporate experience of worship.

There is also great power in personalized, individualized moments in worship.  Some of my most moving moments in worship leadership are when the service narrows its focus down to a solitary individual.  When people come forward to take communion, one of these moments is created.  I look into the person’s eyes, perhaps calling them by name, and say:  “This is the body of Christ broken for You” or “This is the cup of Christ poured out for You.”  In that moment the weight of those words come to bear directly on a single person; the rest of the world falls away, and they stand robed in the mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Another one of those moments can come on Ash Wednesday.  The worshipper leader physically touches the worshipper, making the mark of the cross on their forehead, and says:  “From dust You have come and to dust You shall return.”  These words should be experienced as depressing, discouraging, and diminishing; but they are not.  We experience them as liberating and encouraging; they in some way lighten the load of our lives. Why?

They remind us that life in this world is not the only thing.  It is fleeting and fragile; but that is all right with us.  We were created for something grander, more lasting, deeper and broader.  This reminder gives us permission to hold our lives and ourselves more lightly.  G. K. Chesterton wrote:  “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”  Those ashes give us permission to fly a bit.

The ashes come to us in the shape of a cross.  This reminds us that someone has done something wonderful for us.  It is true that from dust we have come and to dust we shall return, but we are a great deal more than dust.  Through the cross we have become the daughters and sons of God.  The cruciform ashes remind us of who we really are in spite of present dusty appearance.

So we begin our 40 days of preparation for Holy Week and Easter with a reminder of what we are—dust.   We are also reminded of who we are—a great deal more than dust.

James Kelsey

Ash Wednesday 2013

On Cell Phone Coverage and Congregations

Have you seen the AT&T wireless commercial where a man is talking with some young children around a table and he asks: “What’s better bigger or smaller?  Would you rather have a big tree house or a small tree house?”  The kids want a large tree house because they could have a disco and get a larger TV in it.  The assumption is that the question is silly; bigger is always better.  When it comes to cell phone coverage, this is undoubtedly true.  A larger coverage area is better than a smaller area.   When it comes to churches, the answer may not be as obvious.

Steve Willis, in his book Imagining the Small Church—Celebrating a Simpler Path, makes a case for the special qualities of a small church.  He writes that small churches find their “unique resiliency in the loving depths of its people’s relationships and its commitments to the special place where it resides.”  When people in a small church think about their congregation, they see the faces and the specifics of the place.  They talk about love, belonging, and faithfulness (pp. xii-xiii).   People are important in these churches; they remember that great cloud of witnesses who spent a lifetime learning to love one another in that place (p. 34).  “Checking in” with one another is a central piece of congregational gatherings, more important that program (p. 50). 

He writes about the simplicity of life in most small churches; what is non-essential is stripped away.  Willis says that they are not places of pretense (p.18).  Small churches are not afforded the luxury of indulging in things that don’t matter.  They cannot afford to invest resources in things whose purpose is to flatter the image of the congregation.  In small churches people know what is and what is not important.

Small churches are places of remembrance; they elicit memories and feelings that people had in the past.  Conserving the relationship between people, place, and remembered events is a source of strength in these congregations.  Small churches are not against change; they simply feel that conserving memories of the past is important (p. 36).  Conserving the past and preserving the past is not the same thing.  To conserve the past is to protect and honor the memories; to preserve the past is to try to live in a time and place that no longer exists.

Our internet-driven, television-altered minds are addicted to changing scenery, sounds, images, and patterns p. 40-41). Wendell Barry writes that novelty is a new kind of loneliness.  Novelty is the faint surprises of minds no longer capable of wonder (Wendell Barry, What Are People For?, p. 9).  We view continuity as a sign of bored indifference.  Yet small churches provide a sense of continuity to our lives.  Is this not something we long for—to see that our lives are part of a broader web of relationships, a longer story than our short years?  Small congregations can help to heal the fragmentation and alienation that many in our society feel through their attention to people, place, and formative stories about those who came before us in this particular place.

Willis makes a good case for the distinctive and enviable characteristics of small congregations; but they seem so small, so powerless, and so insignificant.  They are so easy to drive by, pass over, dismiss.  Three stonemasons were preparing stone for a cathedral.  A visitor to the stone yard asked them what they were doing.  The first one replied: “I’m busting rocks.”  The second replied:  “I’m making blocks.”  The third one replied:  “I’m building a cathedral.”  This third mason would never walk under the arch of the completed cathedral, but he knew he was part of something bigger than himself and more lasting than his own life.  Small churches are part of something bigger than themselves and the lives of their members.  They are a single block in a magnificent cathedral.  That single block is worth our love and dedication and esteem.

Jim Kelsey

February 2013

IF Baptists Had Saints

I had not been in Belgium very long before I saw the advantage of living in an officially Roman Catholic country with a long history of the intermingling of church and State.  We got lots of holidays; it seemed as if every other week our kids were out of school for some saint’s birthday.  I developed a new appreciation for the process of canonization.

As Baptists, we don’t canonize saints.  We maintain that all believers are saints and that all of us are being made into the image of Jesus Christ on the anvil of our daily living by the power of God.  But if Baptists had special saints, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be at the top of the list.  Dr. King was many things—sociologist, community organizer, and political activist; but first and foremost he was a Baptist pastor and a theologian.  He cared for people, and he interpreted their lives through the lens of the Gospel.

What did he teach us?  He taught us that nonviolence is the way of the strong, not the refuge of the weak.  He taught that accepting unjust suffering rather than inflicting it on others is a form of power.  He wrote in The Strength to Love:

 “I have lived with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.  There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, others consider it foolishness.  But I am more convinced than ever that it is the power of God to social and individual salvation.”

He showed us that the proper goal of our conflicts is not the humiliation and defeat of our opponents but reconciliation and community; we are to be fostering understanding and friendship with our enemies.  In the same book he wrote: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering.  Do to us what you will and we shall continue to love you.”  He believed that he had an ally in the soul of his adversary, and he never ceased appealing to it, wrote columnist Paul Greenfield. 

He believed that we battle greater powers than human error and ignorance.  He believed that we contend not against “flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, the rulers of darkness, against spiritual hosts of wickedness”—to quote the Apostle Paul.  He saw the oppressor as a victim as well.

In the face of his struggle, he maintained a vibrant hope in God.  He wrote “There is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspect of reality into a harmonious whole”  (Strive Toward Freedom.)  He loved to the end; he hoped to the end.

He showed a pastoral interest in the soul of the oppressed as well as the soul of the oppressor.  That is, perhaps, his greatest contribution to our understanding of Christian faithfulness.  We are all saints on the road to maturity.  But some of us are farther along than others of us.  Martin Luther King was well on his way.

James Kelsey

Executive Minister American Baptist Churches of New York State

Questions That Will Not Be Asked--Conversations That Will Not Be Had

This coming Saturday, Debbie, Ben, and I will go to Ohio for a memorial service for my mother and father.  We will pick up Luke along the way.  My father died in October and my mother on New Year’s Eve.  A piece of who I am must now be reformed.  I used to be my parents’ son—an adult son but a son nonetheless.  How are things different now?

I find myself aware of the questions I will never ask my father.  Our house has a septic tank.  What should I do to care for it?  I would’ve asked him that.  Roughly, how much would it cost to put in a gas fireplace?  Another question I would’ve asked.  What kind of tomato plant would do well in a colder climate?  He would’ve known.  These are questions I will never ask.  I still live with the sense that at some point I will have the opportunity to ask these accumulated queries.  I suspect, with time, that sensation will fade; but for now he lives on in these unanswered questions.

There are conversations I would have had that will never be.  I feel as if I should have taken a picture of how deep the snow is and sent it to my parents and then called them and exaggerated a bit.  Our dog got stuck in the snow on our deck; he is a small dog.  I would tell my mother about that, and she would laugh.  Now she will never know.

Practical questions never asked, mundane conversations never had—these are the ways I sense their growing absence in my life.  There is something so irreversible, so unrecoverable about death.  It was nice having them there for 56 years.  I was blessed; I had a faithful presence in my life that I did not deserve.  I can’t think of a single thing I said to them that I regret.  I can’t think of a deliberately hurtful thing they said to me.  They did the best they could given who they were and what they had.  We cannot ask anything more of anyone.

I know that they are at peace now.  I know that they have inherited the life for which they were originally created, a life of wholeness and unbroken joy.  I know that they have seen the face of God in all its unimaginable beauty and radiant mercy.  Oh, the things they could now tell me! I don’t grieve for them, but I do miss them.  I will continue to have questions, things to tell them; and they will not be there.  I guess this is good thing—that I am hungry for more conversation with them, that I was not yet done telling them things.  The curtain between my parents and me will grow thicker with the passage of time.  I feel an urgency to say more to those who still live and fill my life with conversation and love and laughter—those people for whom there is no curtain.  These moments are not forever, thus, they are precious.

Jim Kelsey

Epiphany 2013

From Pregnancy to Parenthood

I became a parent when our first son was born, but months before that day my life began to change.  Although Debbie did the heavy lifting, I was also in a way pregnant.  We anticipated and prepared; we made a place in our home for our coming baby.  We sketched out how the routine of our lives would change.  As the pregnancy progressed, our lives were already being altered.

Advent is a period of pregnancy in the rhythm of the church year.  We anticipate anew each year the coming of Jesus.  We wonder what Mary and Joseph experienced during this marvelous pregnancy that would change so many things.  We dream about how Jesus grew into his calling and then launched his ministry (Luke 1:80).  We know where it all went and where it will yet go.  Advent is about preparing ourselves to participate in what Jesus began.  What did Jesus begin?  In what are we participating?  Rudy Wiebe put it this way:

Jesus says in his society there is a new way for [people] to live:

You show wisdom, by trusting people;

You handle leadership, by serving;

You handle offenders, by forgiving;

You handle money, by sharing;

You handle enemies, by loving

And you handle violence, by suffering.

In fact you have a whole new attitude toward everything, toward everybody. Toward nature, toward the state in which you happen to live, toward women, toward slaves, toward all and every single thing.  Because this is a Jesus society and you repent, not by feeling bad, but by thinking differently. [The Blue Mountains of China (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970) pp. 215-216.]

Pregnancy is the prelude to parenthood.  One quickly learns that parenthood is about a great deal more than sharing pictures on Facebook and buying cute baby clothes.  Advent is the prelude to Christmas.  As we read further in the story, one quickly realizes that the coming of Jesus is about a great deal more than a cooing baby and some dough-eyed farm animals.  It is about a new way of living, of being in the world.  This is what we are preparing for during these weeks of anticipation.

James Kelsey

Advent 2012

Weeping for Our Children

We all know that the world can surprise us with unexpected beauty and healing warmth.  We also know that the world can shock us with unimaginable cruelty and savage indifference.  This week we are acutely aware of the latter.  Twenty precious young children, six caring educators and a mother are dead.  Suddenly there is the sound of gunfire where there should be the sound of laughter.  In little more than a moment there are lifeless bodies where there should be wiggling arms and legs full of surplus youthful energy.  In the place of Christmas parties and Sunday School pageants, there are funerals and weeping that seems as if it will have no end.  How do we make sense of this?  What do we do?

First, we don’t try to make sense of it.  We simply look it in the face and say:  This happened not far from us, to people like us.  It is not that these could have been our children or this could have been our community.  As Christians we believe that we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.  These are our children; this is our community.  Although none of us pulled the trigger, none of us ever wanted this, it has happened in the society that we have built.  We cannot distance ourselves from what has happened.

We can ask what caused this.  We can devise a plan to reduce the likelihood of future schoolhouse slaughters.  We can start blaming one another and line up along our well-rehearsed social and political divisions.  What we cannot do is make sense of this.  There is no neat lesson to be learned here except that there are powers loose in our world that want to destroy what God has so lovingly made.  Christian faith does not minimize human suffering; it does not deny loss; it does not whitewash tragedy.  Rather, faith looks something in the face and gives it the proper name.  Faith gives us the courage to tell the truth about what has happened.

The cross is what the Gospel provides in times like this.  All the loss, all the suffering, all the death, all the ugliness, all the savagery is taken up in the cross of Jesus, absorbed into the heart of God.  God has taken to himself all the pain.  And God goes on absorbing it all, until the end of time.

Elie Wiesel stood in a crowd of prisoners in a concentration camp and watched as some prisoners were hung for stealing a piece of bread.  One of the culprits was a young boy who did not weigh very much; it took him a while to die.  He struggled as he hung there.  Someone in the crowd of prisoners asked: “Where is God now?”  Another answered:  “Hanging at the end of a rope.”  This is the answer of the Gospel to the ongoing presence of evil in our world.  God is among the victims.  God does not deliver himself from the tragedy.

Should we have a sober conversation about guns and ammo clips?  Should we talk about how we care for the troubled among us, how we support parents who face enormous challenges in child rearing?  Should we ask what this tragedy reveals to us about the broader community that we have built?  Yes, we must; but don’t expect any of this to make sense of what happened.  Just know that, in a way, God died anew hiding under a desk in a first grade classroom in Newtown, Connecticut.

"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;  he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation 21:1-4)

James Kelsey

Executive Minister

American Baptist Churches of New York State