Where We Saw God

Jasmin found herself in a tiny sinkhole painting this week.

As we were debriefing the week last night, sharing ups and downs and highlights from the devos, I asked this question: where did you see God this week?

Here are some answers:
-In the faces of the homeowners
-Sitting on the beach by myself
-In the calm in the midst of the chaos of the students working
-In the random people that shared their stories with us
-In the random people who thanked us
-Persevering through the ups and downs the week brought
-In the staff of the Epworth Project as they organize and serve those in need

I have three.

One, in the faces of the homeowners. I got to chat with one of them, Jacki, and she was so ecstatic to have us there, moved to tears multiple times as she told her story that God had finally sent her reliable help. That moment for me made all the stress of the week fall away.

Two, in the faces and actions of the students. From happiness to sadness to joy to sorrow, they were a perfect reflection of the God who made them that way and the God who feels the same way. The students were moved to ask how to make things better, how to work more efficiently and to serve more people in the time given. All of that is by design.

Last, in the random people who shared stories and said thanks. Due to our tight schedule, we were frequently running around town in our painting clothes and people naturally asked what we were doing. Once we told them, they were genuinely thankful and shared their stories. There were many holy moments in WalMarts and swamp tours!

It was an awesome week to serve folks in the name of Jesus! I think he is very proud of this team.

 

It’s Just the First Coat!

A few times this week, our students found themselves saying “it’s only the first coat” meaning we could fix any errors because we had to go over it again later. So true!

Our first house finished some great inside trim at their location as well as sheetrocked some holes. The homeowner was very pleased with the results!

Our second house has a new exterior color as well as completed trim on the inside. This homeowner was pleased as well!

Last but not least was the house at the very beginning stages of reconstruction. It is now completely gutted with a new exterior color and some moisture locking panels in the house.

We met Jacki the homeowner today. She cried as she saw the home she raised 12 children in come back to life after 7 years of sitting with no progress and being ripped off by some contractors.

Today the students are realizing we are just one link in the process of rebuilding these homes and all the homes affected by Katrina. Some thought we would rebuild whole homes but we were needed in some spots to do detail work, to move the house forward into next week. At times it felt like little mustard seed steps forward.

And we know that those little mustard seed acts ultimately lead to God’s Kingdom coming! Jesus said, so it must be true.

We are just the first coat; there is more yet to come!

 

Classic Mission Trip

Another great day serving the people of New Orleans! We had some classic mission team moments happen over the past two days.

One of our teams learned a new skill: patching holes in Sheetrock. A few girls now are going home able to work with Sheetrock and fix errors.

Learning a new skill: classic mission trip.

Our second team made great progress painting the exterior of their home. However they came to find out, two hours into the project, the directions were wrong in their folder. So today they now spend time fixing that misstep.

Miscommunication on projects: classic mission trip.

Our third house has had to use creative methods to finish projects because they have no power (and no functioning bathroom). A hand saw to cut Sheetrock, an ax to break up tile, and working in a dark, unlit house are just three examples.

No power: classic mission trip.

And the final classic moment of the day: our evening trip to the beach. We were unable to find a parking lot and were so excited to go we parked the huge vans on the sand. You can watch what happens below.

Getting the vehicles stuck: classic mission trip.

We’re having an absolute blast serving God!

 

Demo-Paint-Trim

The work began today and we split our group into 3 locations all over New Orleans.

The first group spent time finishing one house nearly done on the inside. They were painting the trim and getting ready to sand & paint the outside of the home. They are located just a few miles from where we are staying.

The second group was also finishing a mobile home that need some trim painted and some holes in the Sheetrock patched. They are 20 miles west of where we are staying.

The final group is finishing the demolition in one house and gearing up to paint the outside. A ceiling, water heater and outlets came out of the house today. They are located 20 miles southeast of where we are staying.

The level of destruction from Katrina was enormous. Miles upon miles destroyed. Our partner group, Epworth Project, has helped to rebuild more than 20,000 homes. But 400,000 were destroyed. 400,000 people live in New Orleans today; 1.1 million before Katrina.

In the face of stats like that, one can get discouraged but I don’t. We are a part of God’s rebuilding efforts one house at a time; that is how the Kingdom works! Jesus said the Kingdom is like a mustard seed, the smallest seed, but becomes the largest of all plants.

We can get discouraged that we don’t do enough on mission trips, the cleaning isn’t enough, the painting isn’t enough, we needed more time. But it is all small acts building to the Kingdom God is bringing about. Those small acts we do every day to serve one another are leading to something this world has never seen before!

I’m so glad this team gets to be a part of building God’s Kingdom on earth!

 

The Road Trip, Part 1

We started our journey to serve the people of New Orleans at 7 am Saturday. We had a very free schedule, simply needing to get to our hotel for the night in Springfield, MO. We also wanted to do church Saturday night instead of Sunday to save driving time for day 2.

It became clear early that, due to small bladder sizes, we would need more stops than planned. So we decided to attend the Saturday night worship at Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS.

It was awesome! Not only was worship great, we were warmly welcomed by all. Adam, their senior pastor greeted us from the front and asked the students a few questions, stumping them on what church they all attend.

He also used us as a sermon illustration. Adam noted that when Jesus says “in the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father” (Matthew 5:16 NLT) the Greek is actually beautiful deeds. Our students giving up their break to serve is a beautiful deed of the highest sort.

As if that wasn’t enough, they stretched out their hands during the benediction to pray for us and Adam met us after worship to chat with us and pray with the group one more time. He even offered to meet a need if we had one (we didn’t).

From the ushers to people seated near us to Adam, it was a great example of Christian community and a willingness of a church & pastor to adjust to a group that just dropped in their midst.

We couldn’t have planned it better.

 

Pixar & the Future of the Church

I’ll admit it; I am a fan of all the Pixar movies from Toy Story to Cars 2. Yes, even Cars 2. I don’t believe every movie that comes from Pixar has to make me cry; I also love movies that are just action with a little character development (see my love for the Back to the Future movies). This past week I watched “The Pixar Story,” a documentary from 2007 that chronicled how they went from a tiny computer company to the behemoth that cranks out winning movies time after time after time.

John Lasseter had a passion for characters, for telling a great story and saw new possibilities in computers to tell those stories. He got his dream job working for Disney and, just after he makes his pitch to make a computer-animated cartoon, Lasseter is fired from Disney. Frankly they didn’t know what to do with this guy that was urgining them to try something new, to enter a new direction and it scared many of them.

I know way too many stories of pastors that have either left the United Methodist Church or gone into different denominations because they are just too far out there, too outside the way we have done things before, and they leave or are forced to leave. They get so disappointed with a church and a system that is incapable and/or unwilling to change despite the fact that these entrepreneurs (we’d call them prophets) are the way we return to the abudant life God calls us as the church to have.

Other people see in Lasseter some great potential, one of them being Steve Jobs of Apple fame. His expertise is computers and sales but believes & sees there is something to this idea of computer-animated films with great stories. Jobs invests a great deal of money into this vision to see a computer-animated film done well. He takes a risk on Lasseter and it is a bumpy road on a shoe-string budget for a long time.

Church, where is our risk-taking? Where are we making bold choices going into neighbors that need us, that need to know that God still loves them and cares for them? Where are we trying new things, new ways, new methods to reach people that feel further and further disconnected from the God who really does love them? Sometimes it requires us to step way outside what we’ve done before or ever thought of doing.

Jesus says “No one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins” (Mark 2:22). There are times God calls us to start new ways of doing church we never thought we would be doing; new wine, new methods, calls for new wineskins, new vehicles, for it. Have you taken any Pixar-sized risks lately?

Toy Story is a huge success and Pixar continues their streak of hit after hit movies that tell stories in amazingly creative ways. Down the line, Disney buys Pixar and puts John Lasseter, the man they fired, in charge of all animation. The student has now become the teacher.

In the church, we’ve already started learning from people that have been wildly successful after leaving the United Methodist Church. Why couldn’t our system have kept them? What is wrong with us that made them leave? We better fix the problem soon; otherwise there will not be any United Methodists around anywhere. They are leading amazing movements of God so why not keep them in our denomination to do it?

Perhaps the greatest lesson of Pixar is their ability to tell great stories. Church, we’ve got the best story ever and so many times we butcher the way we tell it. It doesn’t matter how great your story is; if your medium is awful, if the way you tell it is sub-par, if the way you communicate is in a language different than the people you serve, it will not be heard. The medium is the message. Make sure you are using mediums appropriate to the culture and people you are trying to speak to and to reach.

I love movies; I love Jesus more. Let’s do the story above all stories justice by telling it in a way that looks much more like Pixar tells stories and just watch how people respond.

 

God & Science – September 1, 2011

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:1-4 NLT).

“He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist (Acts 17:24-28a NLT).

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.  All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:11-13 NLT).

 

We are going to spend the first part of our semester together looking at questions that people of one of the fastest growing “faiths” in our country ask: atheists and agnostics, those who believe God does not exist at all and those who are unsure whether God does or does not exist. Our topics will center on those questions thinking atheists ask, and frankly Christians and everyone alike, have from time to time.

Today we will explore the connections between God and science; next week as we approach the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 we will explore the times when religion goes bad and religious wars and violence. Towards the end of September we will explore the Bible’s disturbing passages, how we deal with God & suffering, and finally we will explore the case for God. There is no way we are going to cover in depth all these issues; they could be a college course in and of themselves. My hope in asking some tough questions is to help you to grow a deep and examined faith, a faith that grows through doubt and asking questions, one that is able to sustain you in the years and decades ahead.

Because there is nothing wrong with having doubts and questions. Alfred Lord Tennyson said “There lives more faith in honest doubt than half the creeds.” If we have doubt that means we are struggling to grow in some area of our faith and that means we will actually grow; struggling is a form of growth. Martin Luther said “Only God and certain madmen have no doubts.” Luther had a great way with words, very pithy and to the point. When you are bored, Google some Luther quotes and I think you will be amazed at just some of the stuff he said. And last, but not least, CS Lewis, a great thinker/writer/author of the 20^th century put it this way: “If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified we were believing what is clearly not worth believing. If doubt is answered, our faith is grown stronger, it knows God more certainly, and can enjoy God more deeply.” Through our journey together, may we look doubt in the face and believe what is clearly worth believing.

It is appropriate, and not planned actually, that one week after you sat here, officially hearing that we are building a brand new science center, that we discuss the relationship between God & science. You chose to attend or to work at a University that has as two of its core values: faith & learning, faith & science. From an institutional standpoint, we believe these two do not contradict one another; in fact they can complement, support and even enhance one another: faith leading to a new perspective in science and science helping to lead to a deeper faith.

I believe that as well and even had a phase where I entertained a career in the sciences. In high school my top three science classes were, in order, chemistry (I enjoyed developing chemical formulas and making chemicals that might explode), physics (I remember a notable experiment where we proved the Doppler effect by running the teacher’s old GMC Jimmy down a main road and laying on the horn) and biology (I despised insect collections; sorry Dr. Patrick). Yet my very first and one true love is astronomy. I strongly recommend you take the class here from Dr. Farney as it is quite entertaining as most Dr. Farney classes are!

I’ve never been one of those folks who has seen or experienced a deep conflict between science and faith. I’ve enjoyed learning in science classes and especially as I’ve looked up to the stars admiring and standing in awe of what God has done and made in the universe. Our image this morning is the Orion Nebula. When I look at M42 situated 20 light years from earth knowing it is a stellar nursery, making new stars and maybe even planets, formed from hydrogen and other trace gases, maybe a supernova, I stand in awe of what God has made. There are some people who study science and see the absence of God in it but I see just the opposite. Science teaches us the mechanics, how and why things work in our universe, but faith teaches us about the mechanical engineer who designed all the systems we have today. When I look up into the night sky, I can’t help but think God made the Orion Nebula and saw that it was very good!

Today there is an anti-science vein running through our society and in some Christian circles. The new atheists, as they are so-called, have picked up on this and are responding to it in almost an evangelical manner, meaning they want you to become atheists as well. Two books I checked out this summer: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins & Letters to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Dawkins in particular is an evolutionary biologist by training and as he watched his life’s work kicked out of certain classrooms, he fought back. I’ve seen Sam Harris interviewed before and he, like Dawkins, are very bright and smart gentlemen. They cannot possible see how anyone could believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and not see the facts of evolution around them. As such, they see faith and science to be completely incompatible while, as you might guess, myself and the University you attend disagree.

Both science and faith have changed, have developed, and have evolved over the past centuries. For example, the church did not do well with the notion that the earth revolves around the sun advocated by Galileo; in 1616 the church declared that this view was heretical and Galileo abandons support for it. Yet his quest for truth made him write his most famous work about it and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. This quote of his is one of my favorites: “‎I don’t feel obligated to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

One hundred years ago, sitting in your science class, you would have been taught that the universe is eternal. This means the universe has always been here and will always be here. Then a French priest postulated this idea that the universe had a beginning, that everything started as mass no bigger than a dime, and expanded outward from that moment and continues to expand to this day. Scientists were leery of it as first as it smacked too much of Genesis 1 where God said let there be light and there was light. But the theory is now widely accepted today. We’ve adjust our scientific theories as our understanding of our universe has evolved.

Christian theology, our understanding of God, has also changed and adjusted through the ages. There have been periods of history, still people today, who believe God sends good things to people that do well and bad things to people who act poorly. God sends rain to those who do well and lighting and destruction to those who do poorly. We seem to have a built-in need, hard-wired for justice, and this is one of the ways people try to make sense of it. One of the folks running for president said this week that the earthquake and hurricane on the east coast were God’s judgment for how our government is being run and now is trying to backpedal from those comments because many people are asking: is that really how God works?

Yet we know through science that storms and rain comes as the result of pressure systems coming together; that earthquakes happen when the plates in the earth move; and that tornadoes and hurricanes form when conditions are correct. Not to mention that Jesus tells us both the good and the evil get sunlight and rain. In another story, when Jesus’ followers, looking at a blind man, asked Jesus who sinned so this man would be born blind, Jesus said that’s not how it works. We’ve adjusted our understanding of God to say it is perhaps more likely that the natural disasters might in fact by necessary for the earth to regulate itself properly and that God might in fact be even more loving than we originally thought, not sending destruction each time we mess up. The words of Jesus and science have helped us advance how we view God.

One of the more hotly debated topics today in the realm of faith and science is the conversation between creation & evolution. This stems from the first few chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1-3, where we have poetry describing how the world and everything in it came to be. Those that call themselves creationists believe God made the world in 6 days as described in the Genesis 1.

There are variations among the creationists; some are young earth creationists who believe the earth is 6,000 years which is found when you take all the dates in the Bible going backwards. It should be noted that the creationists theorize when Adam & Eve and Noah may have occurred as there are no dates mentioned for them. There are also old earth creationists who believe the earth is as old as science says it is but do not believe in evolution. Intelligent design also falls into this camp allowing for some designer but jettisoning evolutionary theory and does not name who the designer might be. This group as a whole lifts the Genesis story to the level of historical and scientific fact while disregarding all the scientific evidence of the age of the earth and evolution as incorrect.

On the other side of the spectrum you have varying degrees of evolution from those who say it was a completely unguided process over billions of years to those who allow for a guide to those who name of the guide as the God of the Bible, the God of the Christians. A famous believer in theistic evolution, Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project over the past decade, started a foundation to encourage the education of evolution and faith together. These folks as a whole take seriously the scientific evidence and to varying degrees either completely write off the Genesis account or take a different reading than a literal account.

Many scholars today would say Genesis 1 is not an historical account of creation but epic poetry that teaches us theology, how God works, and something about humanity’s place in the universe as well. It is originally written in Hebrew and you notice the poetry even in English as it repeats things like God said let there be light and there was light and it was good. God created humans and it was good. Biblically speaking, you have more evidence to say that this poetry, not a scientific account of creation, but a 3200 year old poem that shows us what people that long ago taught about God and about each other.

I think for many creationists to give up a literal reading of Genesis 1 means God is somehow less powerful and they feel like the Bible loses its power if everything is not taken absolutely literally. The logic follows if Genesis 1 isn’t literal then does that mean the whole Bible is just a story a metaphor? We will discuss how we interpret the Bible in the weeks ahead but you need to understand the Bible is not one book but a collection of books of poetry, of story, of history, and of songs. You need to know what you are reading to apply it correctly to our world today.

You rightly get the sense that I personally would fall into the theistic evolution camp, saying it is likely a form of evolution but that it was guided in some sense by God as revealed in Jesus Christ. However, I’ve got friends who would debate me to the twilight hours of the morning to say that it is, without a shadow of a doubt, literal creation as described in Genesis 1. They’ve been to the creation museum in Kentucky and do all they can to support their position.

In both disciplines, in the pursuit of God and in the pursuit of science, there must be an acknowledgement that we see through a mirror dimly, we do not always have the full picture and things evolve, things change, both in theology and in science. What we know 100 years from now, even 10 years from now, may change how we understand the universe and help us see God more clearly. Paul wrote those words to a church that was fighting about which spiritual gifts, which talents they had, were the best. In the midst of a passage typically read at weddings, we read the atypical part that explains to us that we grow the years and that we need to acknowledge we only understand the world and God partly. We will get things right and we will get things wrong; we favor some perspectives over others; we all have certain tendencies. We need to grace and love and patience to one another as we have divergent views on this and many other topics, as love is what we are called to do in the Scripture! We are called to model love to one another in all things, a love that is much more respectful than the discussions we see on the national stage today.

The other passage found Paul speaking to the intellectuals in Athens (by the way you all in college are the intellectuals of today!) and in the midst of his message, he points out an altar they have setup to an unknown god. Paul describes the unknown god as the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the one who made everything. God made everything we see and it is in God and through God that we find our purpose and our being.

Even though God made everything around us, God is not far if we honestly try to seek God out. As Paul is speaking to the intellectuals of his day, he does not tone down the message of Jesus, speaking about Jesus’ resurrection and perhaps our ultimate resurrection from the dead as well. While God & science do complement each other that is not to say we may have some divergent ideas as the core tenet of Christianity centers around the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not really a repeatable scientific principle!

Yet I still believe you can indeed be a successful and devoted scientist and be a Christian in our world today. You do not need to check all your scientific knowledge at the door nor do you need to check your faith when you go into the lab. For me, as I see the vastness of our universe, understand the perfect and exact conditions that allowed life to develop in our world, to see just how perfectly our bodies, the atoms, work together to support life, the more we understand just how complex we actually are and the universe is, I can’t help but be led to worship the God who made us so wonderful and so complex.

I do know for many atheists they would like hard scientific proof that God exists but if Paul is indeed correct, that in God we live and move and exist, that God is everywhere, we might miss the forest for the trees, we might miss what is right in front of our faces. It might be a little like this story. Now I need you to use your imagination on this one: There are two cells talking in your body, an older and a younger cell. The younger cell is having a hard time believing that you exist. The older person believes beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a human being. The younger cell argues that we don’t need the human being hypothesis anymore; cells seems to be spontaneously generated, we know about DNA, mitochondria and the process of mitosis  The younger cell does not see any evidence of a human with arms and legs and eyes and a mind. The younger cell gets so frustrated with the older cell’s belief he cries out “If the human being would just come down here, be one of us, the human being could explain it all to us and prove beyond a shadow of any doubt that they exist.”

We draw our very life from God and when we ask for God to show up when God is everywhere, I think God might laugh at us a bit. Why can’t God just show up? In fact we Christians believe God did just that through Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago. It is him we worship, it is him we model our lives, it is him we remember and seek to follow today. Let us pray together…

*Some elements borrow from Adam Hamilton’s message of the same title

 

“Hope” – All College Church 2011

     This is what the LORD says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,” says the LORD. “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land” (Jeremiah 29:10-14 NLT).

     After they [the disciples] gathered again in Galilee, Jesus told them, “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of his enemies. He will be killed, but on the third day he will be raised from the dead.” And the disciples were filled with grief (Matthew 17:22-23 NLT).

My family and I went to a wedding last weekend and since it was out of town, my wife and I reminisced about our time here at DWU so far between the screams and cries of our children in the car. I think my wife likes to get me in the confined space of the car so I am forced to chat and share my feelings.

We are entering on 6^th year here which, looking back at the other campus pastor tenure’s puts us in 2^nd place for the longest tenure in recent history, going back at least to 1988, maybe even beyond that. When we moved here we didn’t have 2 children, a 6-year old husky/lab dog or almost half the stuff we have acquired since then. We moved from a 700 sq. ft. duplex that was plenty sufficient for two newlyweds to a 2000+ sq. ft. house that feels smaller as the family keeps getting bigger. It is true that you grow to fill whatever space you are given! Life is about change and transition.

I realized three things changed for me personally this past year. In January I was reading an article to be used in the Wesleyan Today (a publication the university produces) where I was quoted and it read “Brandon Vetter, 30.” I almost did a spit take as I was reading the article; I knew I was turning 30 this year but it was just… so… final to see it in print, in black and white like that. Second, I remember my hair stylist back in my early 20s finding gray hairs already and said I would be completely white by the time I was 30. Ha! She was wrong. But I am finding more and more not-black hairs each day. And, last, just this month, August 10^th to be exact, I have spent more time on earth without my mother than with her, as she died of cancer when I was 15 years old.

Some changes we go through are incredibly painful like when we lose people we love whether through death or distance; these events transform us and mark us forever, making us different people today than we were yesterday. Sometimes the changes are humorous because we’ve all been there or will be there; they are just a part of life like white hair, aging, middle school, and going to college for the first time. Sometimes the changes we go through are both humorous and painful.

In the midst of all the stuff we go through, all the noise that is out there, there is a voice calling out to us in a whisper, if we slow down long enough, turn off our technology long enough, we can hear it telling us that no matter what we go through, there is always hope, always a future with good in the plan, not disaster. Even when it might feel like all that is left for us is disaster, the voice whispers to us “you are wrong. There is hope.”

Our first Scripture this morning is pretty familiar to those who have Christian relatives who give them Christian-themed gifts. This is a well-used graduation verse that rightly instills hope and excitement into recent high school graduates as they move on to experience post-graduation life, which for many ends up being college. However, as you study this passage and read the story around it in the book of Jeremiah, it is a very interesting choice for us to put on greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks and bracelets.

The book of Jeremiah in the Bible is the longest one by word count (for the trivia buffs out there). Jeremiah lived around the turn of the 6^th century BCE, so somewhere around 625 BC – 536 BC in what would be present-day Israel. Jeremiah’s job was God’s prophet; he was charged to speak God’s word to get God’s people back in right relationship with God. Something the Israelites were doing were not up-to-snuff, not in their best interests for healthy relationships, so Jeremiah was trying to get this right before everything fell apart.

Unfortunately everything falls completely apart. While the country of Israel is one nation today, in Jeremiah’s day it was split into 2 countries: Israel and Judah. Israel had fallen more than100 years before to the Assyrians and Jeremiah said the same thing would happen to Judah from the Babylonians. Babylon is present-day Iraq and Judah was just holding on as their own sovereign nation. But it didn’t last.

Around 587/6 BC Babylon invades Judah, captures and/or kills all their leaders, takes a good chunk of the population back to Babylon never to return, and leaves a remnant, a poor remnant, with Jeremiah that was beaten down physically, emotionally and spiritually. You can picture Jeremiah standing among the ruins of his city watching a train of his people walk away from the ruins to leave to never return again. This is one of the reasons why he is known as the weeping prophet.

For the visual learners among us, here is a map of Jeremiah’s day. This is the Middle East, you can say present-day Israel on the left with present-day Iraq on the right. The entire blue section is the area controlled by the Babylonians after they had conquered Jerusalem and the country of Judah. To give you an idea of the size, from Jerusalem to Elam is about 800 miles.  Who is from Texas in the room today? You traveled farther to be here than those exiles who were taken from their home in Jerusalem never to return again.

Since we travel with relative ease around the world today, to put this story into 21^st century terms would look something like this. We lack the ability to travel between the stars. One day, aliens from the other side of the galaxy come to capture or kill all our leaders in every country, decimate our structures and cities, take most of our people across the galaxy never to return and leave a remnant, a beaten-down remnant, on earth to begin again.

This is Jeremiah’s depressing story and this is the story behind the Scripture that we freely share with each other during graduations and during times when we are asking God, asking each other, what is the next step I should take? Where should I go to school? What major should I choose? Where can I best use the talents God has given me? Congrats on your graduation and here is a Bible verse that tells the story of the weeping prophet because that is what going to college is like! We use some very interesting Scriptures to encourage each other!

And yet, despite the depressing tale that is Jeremiah’s story, there is a word, a lesson, for us in it today. Jeremiah writes to the exiles carried away to Babylon to come to grips with the fact they will be there for a long time, 70 years or so. That is at least a generation if not two that will not see Jerusalem. They are a people ripped from their homeland to a foreign land with a foreign tongue with foreign practices that simply do not make a lot of sense!

This weekend we welcome freshman and all new students to a place that may seem like a foreign land at times even if you came from not just another US state but from another part of SD (what is the deal with all this corn in SD? Why do you staple it to a building? And, really, people serious stop to look at it and buy a popcorn ball?) We have a foreign tongue (we have initials for everything: SAB, TRIO, SMC, MCC, LOA, LST, PEP, CIA, FBI & KGB) and occasionally foreign practices (you will come to learn what the beanie king and queen are, why we sing the song called the Scotchman that is not a drinking song, and the simple awesomeness that is grocery bag bingo). You very well may feel a bit like an exile from time to time, like the Israelites did living in Babylon.

What was Jeremiah’s advice to these people ripped from their homeland and all that they know? Earlier in chapter 29 he tells them to build houses, live in them, plant gardens, take wives, marry, have your children marry, grow in numbers, and pray for the people and they city in which you live. In essence, live your lives; eat, drink and be merry! Your descendants will see home again but you need to come to grips with where you are so live your lives where you are.

You all will see your homes, your friends, and family again; you will not be gone for 70 years. But Jeremiah’s advice for adapting to foreign places does apply; get engaged! Do not hole up in your dorm room or ignore all of the activities that are happening around you. Get to know new people, check out the welcome back week activities each night this week, check out worship Thursdays at 11, FCA, Koinonia, go to football, volleyball, soccer, basketball games (all the sports) and maybe leave your dorm room door open when you are there to get to know the people around you.

When you do all that you can to be engaged in this place, to make friends with people here and not lament all the fun your friends are having back home that you see on Facebook, you will much more easily transition from feeling like an exile to becoming a fully engaged Dakota Wesleyan student. Get engaged and you will very soon not feel like an exile anymore.

While you all do get to see your homes again, you are not gone for 70 years, there is a sense that you do never go home again. All of your family, your friends, will be still be there but college and the simple process of growing up, of becoming an independent person, of making new friends here, puts you in a different relationships, makes a different kind of connection with your parents and the friends that you left back home. It is not a bad thing at all, it is the process of maturing and how our relationships change as we age.

I remember my freshman year of college, heading home on any extended break that we got. It was nice to see friends and family, to keep those connections going, but as the year went along and as I got more fully engaged here, the less and less I ran home; it became very minimal as I became an upperclassman. The connections, the relationships, were still present; I still called home once a week, still connected with friends when I was back in Bismarck but the relationships in college became more central because this is where I spent most of my time.

I think this transition is probably the hardest on parents. If you are traditional college-aged, for 18 years, they have been able to watch and to experience everything with you; now they only live through phone calls, Facebook, and the occasional text messages. I remember my wife’s parents, when she came home from college, expected her to keep the same curfew she had in high school when she had kept her own schedule, her own bedtime in college for many months. It can be tough on parents to make this change. So, please, do not do what a recent college grad did: he only called about once a month and the parents found they got more timely information from his Facebook page. I believe they found out there first he was going on one of our international mission trips. Find that right balance of keeping your parents informed on a regular, not over or under communicating to them.

College puts you in a different relationship with parents, friends and family. There will be some bumps ahead but know that they are perfectly normal as everyone adjusts to this new place in life that you continue to mature into all that God has made you to be.

So, maybe this story of Jeremiah that we put on all kinds of graduation themed gifts isn’t so bad after all. I still find it rather odd that this story of death, destruction and despair is what we use to motivate graduates to go take hold of the future that God has in store for them, a future with hope in it. You can bet the Israelites would have preferred a future without exile but their choices led them other places. We also need to realize that the picture we have of our preferred future, of where we think we will be after we graduate or what will happen in the next 4 years, may not be what actually happens.

Our second Scripture reading this morning finds the disciples, the early followers of Jesus, meeting with him. This teacher whom they’ve learned and grew and experienced all kinds of things for 3 years now says he will be killed but no worries he will be raised again in 3 days. Now, let’s just let the weirdness of that settle in a bit because resurrection does not really factor into a regular course syllabus. Your professor whom you take a few classes from over the next 3 years says they will be killed but no problem they will come back to life to teach another Calculus class. Weird right?

The disciples are filled with grief because that is not the picture of the future they’ve had. They’ve enjoyed being with Jesus, they’ve learned in the good times and the bad, and just might have thought he was going to be around for a long time. But something much bigger is going on; God has set into motion the redemption, the healing, of humanity and the entire planet and it starts with Jesus coming back to life, showing death has no more power.

The disciples end up becoming the early church leaders and a movement that began 2,000 years ago is still alive today. This was not what they had pictured when they signed up with Jesus but, I’m going to guess, was so much better than anything they could have ever imagined! God indeed had a future with hope for them; now, it included all kinds of ups and downs, challenges that they would likely have rather skipped, but they lived out their God-given talents and design to launch a movement of Jesus followers that still exists today.

So, where you sit today, this picture you have of your future, may or may not be where you end up in 4 years. You may change majors, you may adjust your out of classroom activities, and you might even find yourself adjusting what you believe. That is all normal and an excellent piece of experiencing college. You may find new talents you did not even know God had given you, enter a completely different career path, and find yourself living into a completely different kind of future than you could have ever imagined. And it is a future with hope.

We are all so excited you all are here today. We will do all that we can to help you stop feeling like exiles to feel like you are indeed a member of the Dakota Wesleyan community where we do all that we can to discover and to develop the God-given abilities inside each one of us, so we can fully participate in the rebirth of humanity, of the world, and of us made possible through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let’s pray together…

            God, we are filled with all kinds of emotions today: excitement, fear, uncertainty, joy, sadness and hope. We are glad to be in this place but we are not quite sure of what is going to happen next; what classes will be like or what kind of relationships we will ultimately make? We miss what we left behind but we go forward knowing you go ahead of us with a future filled with possibilities, hope, and things we could have never dreamed or imagined. Help us live in a way that makes the most of all that You have made us to be and follows in the footsteps of your Son Jesus. It is in his name we pray, Amen.

 

Einstein on the Church

We’re spending 6 weeks in worship in the the fall exploring a new series called “Conversations with an Atheist.” A few of those weeks we will be diving into issues where faith and science have come into conflict.

I found this post today on Mark Sayers’ blog doing some research. Enjoy!

In a time when Christians and the Church are obsessed with improving our standing in the public eye, the below quote is a timely reminder that we as the people of God need to be less focussed upon window dressing, and more motivated by what God has called us to be in the world.

Albert Einstein had every reason to despise the Church, first he was a world leader in a profession which for centuries had held a difficult relationship with the Church. Secondly and more importantly he was a Jew, a people group who despite being at the centre of the biblical witness had for centuries been persecuted by Christians.

“Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks.

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

Albert Einstein. Time Magazine Dec 23, 1940

 

Omega in Peru… Photos

As of Tuesday morning at 2:30 a.m., all 28 students and 4 leaders made it safe and sound back to the United States! God is so faithful, you all have been so faithful in praying for us, in giving of your resources and your time to make this trip a reality. We cannot say thank you enough.

Now, a few photos from Team Omega’s experience in Peru.

Framing the clinic (also known as community center) – Cody, Jess, Tyler, Jerry and others I can’t quite make out in the photo!

The clinic in progress

Working the stucco

Kelsey & Jess working some cement & stucco with Peruvians

It is not a mission trip unless there are shovels, wheelbarrows and something to mix!

Matt taking a break from leading to spin a child – note their worksite bathroom in the background!

The sunsets over the Satellite City where Team Omega spent most of their time!