We Have a Responsibility to Get it Right

The wives of African leaders meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, saw an unlikely pair of speakers on stage together last week.  Current First Lady Michele Obama and former First Lady Laura Bush were there.  A black woman married to a Democratic president and a white woman married to the former Republican president stood side by side as a team at the African First Ladies Summit, a gathering organized by the George W. Bush Institute.  The African women in attendance found it encouraging that these two American women could stand side by side as partners working on women’s health issues in Africa.  It gives them hope for reconciliation and cooperation in their own countries, countries often divided by deep political animosities.

While working with African immigrants in Italy, I discovered great affection for America among many of them.  They see America as the “promise land,” a place of great opportunity where nearly anything is possible.  If you can just get here, which oftentimes an enormously difficult thing to do, you can have a life where your grandest dreams for your family can be fulfilled.  When talking of someone who had gotten to America they would say: “Yeah he’s sitting in America eating hamburgers all day.”  In others words, he is on easy street living the good life.  They imagine a scene from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Americans know that this is an idealized view of life in our country.  We know that we still battle multi-generational urban and rural poverty.  We know that race relations can still be tense.  We know that fear of violent crime still hangs like a cloud in many of our cities.  We know that the most unsafe place for a woman is in her own home.  We know that our public schools sometimes fail our most needy students.  We know that affordable healthcare is not accessible to many in our nation.  We know that we have seniors who worked hard their whole lives and now cannot afford medicine.  We know that gambling and alcohol and drug abuse routinely destroy lives and families.  We know that unemployment continues to diminish lives and devastate communities.  We know that deep divisions over many issues can prevent us from having meaningful dialogue.  We are not naïve about our nation.

Yet a black woman and a white woman, each married to avowed political opponents, can stand together and partner for women’s health in a faraway continent.  We are getting some things right around here; those African First Ladies noticed that.  I often heard from my African brothers and sisters that if something can happen in America today, it could happen someday in their country.  People are watching us and building or dismantling their aspirations based upon what we do here.  We, as a nation, have a great responsibility to get things right, to be working to do a better job in our nation, to be building a better community, to be creating a society where people’s dreams for their children can come true.  Jesus once said:  “From everyone to whom much is give, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded [Luke 12:48].”  We have the freedom to make our nation a better place; in many lands people don’t have that freedom.  The world is watching what we are doing with this opportunity.  We have a great responsibility

For the church in America, the situation is even more pointed.  We are salt and light for our nation; we are to be the light of world, like a city set on a hill.  We are to demonstrate how a loving God wants us to treat one another and to witness to the type of national community God wants us to build.  We are to point the way to more loving communities, a more just nation, and a more nurturing world.

The world is watching us; we carry a great responsibility to honor their aspirations by how we treat one another and the type of society we build.

God bless you,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

Hope is a Verb

As American Baptists of New York State, we will embrace God's future with these core values: honesty, connectedness and hope. We will uphold our operational values in every aspect of our common ministry.

Hope is one of the declared core values of our Region.  Whenever I see hope mentioned, I read more closely.

Throughout Gil Rendle’s book Journey in the Wilderness he challenges us to rethink, reformulate, reposition, and reprioritize.  In other words, to do that thing we don’t like to do: change.  Then in the last paragraph of the epilogue, he writes about hope.  He observes that hope can be passive, as in “I hope you have a good trip.”  We do nothing to insure that the trip is, in fact, good.  And if the trip is not good, it does not affect our lives.  He then comments that for believers hope should be an active verb.  He reminds us that Saint Augustine wrote that hope has two beautiful daughters—anger and courage.  Hope depends on (1) anger over what could be but is not and on (2) courage to make it different.  This is a different type of hope.  This is hope that makes a difference in our lives.  It is this active hope that spurs us to do that thing we find so uncomfortable: change.

Hope is also a part of the program for congregations put forth in Peter L. Steinke’s book A Door Set Open—Grounding Change in Mission and Hope.  Steinke observes that hope can get a congregation over the threshold of saying “we can’t.”  It is an invitation to act in adventurous ways, to risk some things, to step off some banks not knowing how deep the water is.  Sometimes we say “I can’t” when we really mean “I’m afraid.”  Anyone who has coaxed a young child to learn to swim knows this.  Hope as an active verb needs courage.

Hope takes the long view.  Steinke points out that contemporary culture has led us to prefer the magical.  Magic is direct and immediate and requires no change or effort.  Abracadabra, all is fixed.  We look for immediate gratification and embrace avoidance.  We seek an analgesic that will numb the discomfort without dealing with the underlying issues:  five easy keys to a happy marriage; four simple steps to well-behaved kids; or three quick practices to grow your church.  Temporarily we feel better thinking we have done something, but long term there is no lasting change.  Practices that lead to deep and lasting healing oftentimes hurt a bit.  Anything less is simply denial.

In the Hebrew Bible, hope is often coupled with lament.  Hope is not about denial; it is about looking reality in the eye, finding it wanting, and having the courage to take action in spite of the way things appear.  Hope is the outgrowth of a dissatisfied realism.  It is an active verb.

My church in Philadelphia formed a partnership with a Haitian church 20 blocks south of us.  Each month new Haitian immigrants would arrive in Germantown by way of Brooklyn, and this congregation would help them get established.  The church bought a deserted building that once had housed a large thriving congregation.  The sanctuary that seated 500 people had large holes in the ceiling.  The stained glass windows were gone, sold decades ago.  The baptistery was full of leaves, a regular compost pit.  The floor was coated with the droppings of pigeons that had taken up residence there.  Pastor Santine showed me the sanctuary and talked about their plans to rehab it.  I thought:  “This is a dream: give it up and go rent a storefront.” They salvaged materials, asked the homeless men who ate at their feeding program to work 2 hours for each meal received, and kept taking in the arriving immigrants who worked at the project and gave out of their meager earnings. 

To make a stirring story short, two years later Pastor Santine invited me to preach at the dedication of their refurbished worship space.  I stood up and confessed my initial doubts.  I admitted that I never thought I would see the day when I would stand in that pulpit and not have to dodge pigeons and be careful not to fall through the rotted floor.  As I stood there and looked around at the worshippers that day, I could barely believe what had happened in that place.  I talked that day about hope, not a passive “I hope that works out for you” hope but a hard-nosed keen-eyed hope that makes a plan and gets to work.  Pastor Santine was no dreamer; he was a realist.  His life experiences had taught him how to fuse loss with hope, great challenge with initiative.

This is the kind of hope I want for New York Baptists—not a passive “I hope that works out for you” hope but an active hope.  I pray that in our churches and our Region will keep alive hope’s two beautiful daughters— anger over what could be but is not and the courage to make it different.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13).

In hope,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

The American Baptist Churches of New York State

A Creation That Groans

As we read about the devastation and suffering wrought by the tornadoes in Oklahoma, we may feel frightened by the capricious of the creation.  We are reminded that in a stroke all we have and the settled patterns of our lives can be wiped away; most sobering is the realization that those we love and who love us can be taken from us in a moment.  We read of infants and seniors, mothers and children who were killed by the violence of the storm and realize that there are some pieces of creation that are not friendly.  The Apostle Paul told us as much long ago.  He wrote in Romans 8:

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Something long ago went wrong in our world, so wrong that the creation itself is askew and seems to know it!  The creation “waits with eager longing” to be set free from this state of affairs.  It is “groaning with labor pains.”  Like us, the creation knows things are not the way they are supposed to be.  These tornadoes simply make vivid what we already knew.

I heard a story once about a father whose daughter was injured during a softball game.  The ball hit her square in the face, and she lapsed into a coma.  Her father sat by her hospital bed in agony asking himself heartbreaking questions:  “Why did this happen?  Was I not listening to God and this is God’s way of getting my attention?”  A friend walked in and said:  “Calvin, I can tell you why your daughter is lying there in a coma.”  The father thought that he finally would get an answer to his questions.  The friend went on:  “God has a rule.  A face and a softball cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”  The world in which we live is dangerous.  Sometimes we are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the givens of our world hit us square in the face.  As the singer Mary Chapin Carpenter laments: “Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug.”  This is not what we want to hear.  We want to hear that everything has a good reason; nothing is random.  This illusion gives us the false hope that we can control all those forces that affect our lives.  We want to believe that if we make the best, brightest, truest, holiest, most responsible choice every time, we can insulate ourselves from the vagaries of our tragically broken world.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a hospital chaplain who was talking with a mother whose daughter had a brain tumor and likely would die.  The mother said that she knew why her daughter was dying.  God was punishing her, the mother, for continuing to smoke.  The chaplain assured the mother that God did not take the life of young girls because their mothers would not stop smoking.  The mother responding angrily, asserting that this was, indeed, what was happening.  Taylor observed that the mother preferred a God who punished a young girl for the nicotine addiction of her mother to a world where children get sick for no good reason.  This is how strong our desire is to make sense of the senseless.  We cannot cautiously protect ourselves from the senseless.

The Apostle Paul, after lamenting the futility of life at its worst moments, finishes by asserting: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  Paul carefully avoids saying that God causes all things that happen or is pleased by all things that happen.  Rather, he asserts that God is Lord of all things that happen and can use them in redemptive ways to bring good out of them.  Tragic things are simply tragic.  There is no health in dressing them up as anything else; our faith does not demand that of us.  Rather, we accept that we live in a world where a softball and a face cannot occupy the same space at the same time; sometimes they collide.  We can become comfortable living in a world where we cannot insulate ourselves from all tragedy and loss when we come to believe that even in the worst moments God is working to redeem and renew.  Loss is not the last word, even in a world with tornadoes.

Yes, the creation groans and so do we.  We know that things are not supposed to be this way; something has gone wrong.  We, along with the creation itself, wait for that better day.  We call this patient waiting in hope “faith.”

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

James Kelsey

Executive Minister

The American Baptist Churches of New York State.

Not Natural Enemies

He said to me, pointing to the friend with whom he had just arrived:  “We were enemies.  We hated one another; we would have killed each other on the street on sight without even thinking.”  His friend smiled and nodded in agreement.  I don’t think his friend understood any English, but he appeared to be in the custom of agreeing with the other man.  I could tell there was a history between these two; they had made some difficult journey together and now were in the habit of trusting one other.   We were all sitting in the shade trying to escape the worst of the midday sun, waiting for the worship service to begin.  We passed the time talking, drinking that ubiquitous thin green tea, and trying to imagine a breeze.  We were 20 miles from the Cu Chi tunnels that had served as a place of refuge, a tool of ambush, and a means of movement for the Vietnamese guerillas during both the insurgency against French colonialism and then later during the war involving the Americans.   For the Vietnamese, these tunnels still stand as a symbol of their national resilience and resourcefulness.  They still harbor ghosts and carry echoes from more troubled times.  I sensed the same thing in these two friends sitting before me.

The man went on to explain that he had been a colonel in the South Vietnamese army and that his friend had been a colonel in the North Vietnamese army during the war.  He said that his friend is still a communist.  Then shrugging his shoulders he said, almost apologetically:  “But what can we do?  We are both Christians now.  We must love one another and live as brothers, children of the same father in heaven.”  Again, his friend smiled and nodded an expression of trust without understanding.

I looked at these two men, and questions began to percolate.  They were both about the same age; they looked quite similar—black hair, brown skin leathered by a life lived in the sun, skinny with lanky legs and arms.  They looked as if they had both grown up in a village, securing from the land nearly all that they had needed.  And in spite of their natural warmth of character, faces showed the traces of a sorrow that comes with the losses of war.  Theirs eyes would wander now and then to a spot beyond the horizon, as if they were looking for the return of something long ago lost during a youth too quickly taken from them.  They had so much in common; it seemed to me that their interests were so aligned with one another.  They were not natural enemies.  So how did they end up enemies?  Well, that is a story far beyond the confines of this simple reflection.   The thing we can carry away is this: the reconciling power of the Gospel is stronger than all the things that set these two men against one another.  Isaiah told us as much long ago:

^11:6 The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹ They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

People in churches do not always agree with one another.  That is to be expected; this is natural and even healthy.  If two people agree on everything, one of them is simply unnecessary.  Disagreements are born of good people caring about things that matter.  But how do we become enemies?  How do we lose the capacity to listen to one another, to compromise, to seek the well-being of each other?  Why do we sometimes go to war, in a way, with one another?  Again, the full answer lies beyond the confines of this simple reflection.  I did, however, learn one thing from those two humble faithful men on that hot afternoon in the Vietnamese countryside.

In our churches, we are brothers and sisters, children of a common God.  In our Region, we bound to one another by our shared faith and commitment to ministry.  The bonds that unite us to one another are deeper and broader, stronger and more lasting than anything that might divide us.  We will never agree on everything; that is not the goal.  But like the man said:  “What can we do?  We are Christians now.  We must love one another and live as brothers (and sisters), children of the same father in heaven.” 

May we know both passion of conviction and love of one another in our churches, in our Region and throughout our lives.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

American Baptist Churches of New York State

THE SPACE BETWEEN - HOLY SATURDAY

The Apostle Paul places a pause between Good Friday and Easter.  He writes in 1 Corinthians: 

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures (15:3-4). 

With the words “and that he was buried,” Paul leaves some space, a little light, between the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Alan E. Lewis writes: “Here resurrection is not permitted to verge upon the cross, instantaneously converting death into new life” (Between Cross & Resurrection-A Theology of Holy Saturday, pg. 37). We call this interval between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, this pause between death and new life, Holy Saturday.  Many of us will gather for a Good Friday service and reunite for an Easter service.  (The really dedicated among us will arise in darkness for a sunrise service.)  We will pass through Holy Saturday without noticing it.  We would do well to note its place in the sequence of these days, this in-between time.

We live our lives in the in-between time.  Christ has died; our sins are forgiven.  We are no longer slaves to sin and the powers of this world.  This has been accomplished.  Yet the fullness of resurrection for us and all creation awaits some future day.  Paul writes in Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:18-23).

Paul is describing the in-between time, Holy Saturday, after the thing has begun but before it is finished.  How do we live in these days?  When we get up on Sunday morning, the world will look very much the same as it did when we went to bed on Saturday night.  War, poverty, infidelity, sin of all sorts, tornadoes and floods—they will all persist right through this holy weekend.  If we look at our world, we could get the idea that the cross is the last word in the story.   We could resign ourselves to the reality, in words of Frederick Buechner:

…that the world holds nothing sacred; that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that men have had—ideas about love and freedom and justice—have always in the end been twisted out of shape by selfish men for selfish ends (The Magnificent Defeat, p.85).

It could look as if death has won, that the cross is the last word.  This is the way it looks on Holy Saturday.

We know this is not true.  We know what follows on the heels of Holy Saturday; we couldn’t forget it if we tried. Paul ends the passage in Romans 8 with these words:

For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one hope for what he also sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait for it (8:24-25)

We are people of hope.  We live between Good Friday, what God has begun in Jesus Christ, and Easter Sunday, an image of what we and all creation shall become someday in Jesus Christ.  For now we live in a perpetual Holy Saturday, that in-between time.  We know Good Friday is not the last word, but we are still awaiting the final punctuation of God’s sentence of salvation.  We wait in hope because we know the last thing is always the best thing with God.  Easter has already taught us that.

May hope fill your hearts and drive your living,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

As American Baptists of New York State, we will embrace God’s future and these core operational values: honesty, connectedness, and hope

There is a Reason Why They Call it Holy Week

It is only a matter of days, less than a week now, until we will take up our palm branches.  What do we call it: Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday?  It is hard to properly name this day of such stark contradictions. 

Luke tells us that as Jesus approached the city of Jerusalem, the crowd of disciples began praising God joyfully with a loud voice.  Matthew tells us that the crowd spread their coats and palm branches on the road before him.  We can envision this noisy parade as Jesus approaches the city for the biggest Jewish festival of the year.  The city would already be jammed with tourists and pilgrims.  The Roman soldiers would be on high alert with such a large crowd. It was like New Orleans during Mardi Gras, the Temple precinct like Bourbon Street.  Palm Sunday is a good name for this day.

But as Jesus reaches the top of the Mount of Olives and for the first time can take in the city, Luke draws the camera in close.  The sound of the crowd breaks off raggedly, and we hear the strangest thing.  As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it (Luke 19:41).  Jesus is crying; the ground beneath his colt is damp with the tears of the Son of God.  We realize that we are standing on holy ground; the sound of the parade around us fades away.  We might want to turn away, act as if we don’t hear him.  But we need to pause here and see what his sobbing can teach us. 

The crowd sees the sun glistening off the golden dome of the Temple, the commerce in the streets, the happy families, and old friends being reunited after a year apart.  Life is good.  It is morning in the land.  But Jesus sees something quite different.  He sees a city that will make a terrible choice in the coming days.  He knows the violence that waits in the wings; he knows this parade will be short-lived.  He knows that those who cry “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord” within the week will cry “Crucify him.”  He knows where it all will lead for him and for these people.  He laments:

"If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. 44 They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God." (19:42-44).

Passion Sunday is a good name for this day that introduces a week that races toward betrayal, desertion, and death..

This Sunday opens our eyes to the tragic choice those people will make, how quickly their happy enthusiasm will dissipate in disappointed fearful betrayal.  We become aware of the tragic fearful choices that we, too, are prone to make in our lives.  We, too, are often oblivious to those things that make for peace; our eyes are blind to the visitation of God.

One Sunday, I was standing at the rear of the sanctuary greeting people as they left the service.  A woman paused as I shook her hand and said, “Dr. Kelsey, sometimes when I leave here I’m not happy.  Worship should make me happy.”  I felt disturbed.  I didn’t want worship to depress people.  I wanted worship to encourage and strengthen people.  I thought about what she had said for several days.  I felt I owed her something, perhaps an apology.  After some reflection I came to a realization.  I called her up and told her that I hoped she found encouragement and joy through her participation in worship, but I went on to say that the primary purpose of worship is not to make us happy; the primary purpose of worship is to make us holy.  I wanted us all to be happy, but there was a higher, nobler purpose to what we were doing:  holiness.  The path to holiness sometimes involves challenge and loss; at some pints we are called to make painful changes in our lives.  It is not always a happy holiday at the beach.

Parades are fun, but the Christian life is not primarily a parade; it is a pilgrimage.  The journey demands some things of us along the way; we have to leave some things behind that we should like to retain.  As we travel, the journey changes us; we are being made more into the image of Jesus Christ.

As we journey through Holy Week, we are on a pilgrimage to Easter Sunday.  On the way to resurrection, we pass through some difficult days.  This is no parade, but at the end lays renewed and greater life.

May you be changed in the week ahead. 

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister

American Baptist Churches of New York

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