Sacred Vessels

 January 12, 2021

Good winter morning, church family 😊

I love this time in the dark and the quiet, with the fire going and the hot coffee next to me, and content puppy dogs under my chair all fat and happy after their breakfast. I am definitely a morning person, but I do like to start the day slowly and quietly, with prayer and thanksgiving and scripture. 

You may be more of a night owl, or find your best energy mid-day. Either way, I hope you’re finding a time in your day to spend regularly in prayer. Like an appointment with God. (Is that the right word?? That sounds so clinical. But “date” sounds a little weird too...well, you know what I mean.) If you don’t yet have a regular prayer habit, let me encourage you that you will, I guarantee, find it really helpful. Especially now, when the rhythms of worship and church life are so different, and when anxiety and loneliness are high, it is essential to our heart and mind and soul that we are intentional about our practice of prayer. Like taking time to eat and sleep, prayer and sabbath are critical pauses to tend to our spiritual health.

I have been pausing a lot lately, thinking and praying about what is happening in our country right now. Some of you may feel that a pastor does not need to worry about that (or at least not talk about it), since a pastor’s focus should be on the spiritual life rather than the political life. But our spiritual life is deeply impacted by our life in the world, and our life in faith becomes dry and empty when it is divorced from what is happening in the world around us. Our words and actions are fueled by the state of our hearts, and vice versa (Luke 6:45, Matthew 12:34, Proverbs 4:23), so both must be healthy and faithful.

One thing I know is that there are people of faith on all sides of our different concerns, who truly believe that they are acting out their faith and honoring God by their actions. Even when I disagree with those beliefs and when the actions seem clearly wrong to me, still I see the passion for righteousness and love of God in the intentions. I hope you do, too, and that you are keeping that knowledge in the forefront of your minds when you consider the beliefs and actions of your fellow Christians, and your fellow citizens. Though people with evil intent certainly exist, for the most part we are all trying to do what is right here.

However.

Just because our intentions are good or we deeply believe a thing doesn’t mean we are right. History shows that well-meaning Christian people with passion for their faith and love for righteousness sometimes get it really, tragically, catastrophically wrong. Sometimes that happens because we have gotten our facts wrong; always it’s because we have gotten our hearts wrong.

So this is what I will say, with full confidence that I am mostly preaching to the choir here. It is never, not ever, NOT EVER FAITHFUL to take the life of someone – or even threaten anyone – unless they are actively trying to take the  life of someone else. Even when those who sought to kill Jesus came to arrest him, Jesus refused to respond with violence and did not allow his friends to do so either. Those who stormed the Capitol and sought to murder Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence, no matter how righteous they feel their cause might be, are wrong. Those who killed or deliberately injured police officers and others during the riots last week are wrong.   Those who are writing words about violent, murderous revolution, or making vile “jokes” about doing violence to President Trump or members of Congress or anyone else, and those who are reading and enjoying and sharing those words, are wrong. WRONG. This is nonnegotiable. I know that we all, as people of faith and representatives of the gospel of Jesus Christ, will speak firmly with one unified voice in condemning such things when we encounter them.

We at Epworth UMC, in our community, and in our country disagree regarding what is true and what is false, on a whole lot of topics. We can’t all be right, so some of us – most likely all of us, to one degree or another – have our facts wrong. I am praying earnestly that we quickly become better able to discern truth from falsehood, and gain in wisdom. I hope you will join me in that prayer.

But while we continue to grow in wisdom, it is vital that we get our hearts right. When we focus on fighting what we hate, we find our hearts grow dark, hard, and shriveled pretty quickly. That anger and hate, even when we intend it to fight evil, can become all-consuming and spiritually destructive. It can steal wisdom from us, steal peace from us, lead us far from God, and cause us to become the very thing we seek to destroy. 

If, on the other hand, we resist evil by focusing on saving what we love, our words and actions are altogether different. We still might have our facts wrong, but we are better informed by the Gospel, and better able to be vessels of God’s miraculous lifegiving grace. Self-righteousness becomes impossible. Violence, in word or action, becomes unthinkable. Obeying Jesus’ command to love one another, even our enemies, becomes easy and instinctive. And the Gospel is made manifest.

The greatest revolution on earth is one of uncommon, irrepressible love, and peace beyond all understanding. Its source is the living God, made known in Jesus Christ. As my friend Ed Stallworth said the other day, we have seen what hate can do. Let’s show the world what love can do. 

 

In God’s amazing grace,

Pastor Dawn

Worship at Epworth and at Home

Sacred Vessels

Last week in worship, we renewed our baptism together and our covenant with God as we remembered Jesus’ own baptism and God’s promises to us. These next few weeks, we will talk together about becoming healthy, holy vessels of the grace that God has poured into us. Using Jesus’ command to love the Lord our God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, we will talk together about the importance of caring for our body, our heart, our mind, our soul, and each other. Our bodies are a temple, after all, and together we are the body of Christ. January being a time when lots of us resolve to take better care of our physical health, we will start this week with our physical body: how to honor God by keeping our body as healthy as we can, and why tending to our physical health is an important spiritual practice. As you prepare your heart for worship, you might like to read and pray with Psalm 139:13-16, or (and!) 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.  

Worship will meet in person, at 9:00am in our sanctuary for those who prefer, and on Facebook and KVLV at 9:30am. We can give GREAT thanks to God that, due to our care in sanitizing and masking and whatnot, we have had NO spreading of the virus in our church, even though a couple of members have gotten the virus elsewhere. Keep it up, beloved! It is a great way to follow God’s commandment to love one another.

New Year and Sabbath Rest

Happy New Year, beloved of God!

I love my drive to work, and home again. It would be much more convenient, and probably smarter in several ways, if Dennis and I lived here in Fallon rather than in Fernley, but if we did I would miss the drive. As I came in this morning, I was especially aware of the peacefulness of it...thirty minutes or so in the quiet, to relax and pray and listen to the radio. After the rain yesterday, everything looked and smelled clean and good. The snow on the mountains around us is beautiful this time of year, too.

As I drove, my mind wandered to the First Nations people who lived here hundreds and even thousands of years ago, when the land looked much different. And the pioneers who passed through this desert 180 years ago or so, looking for adventure and prosperity and a new life. And the people who decided this harsh but beautiful desert river valley would be a good place to stop, and make a home. And the people who decided what they needed most of all was a church.

Last Sunday in worship, before the sermon, we talked a little bit about the Wolf Center and the church and the different ministries we do, and how we wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for folks decades and generations ago who worked and prayed and gave what they had to serve the Lord. It was a previous conversation that got me thinking about it, with a woman at a graveside service for her good friend. She pulled me aside and handed me a donation for the church, and expressed how good and kind the church had been when she had attended events here in the past, and how much she appreciates the things we do. She said, specifically, that our facility (she meant the Wolf Center, mostly) was a great blessing to the community. Thank God, I thought, for those whose faithfulness and vision made it a reality.

This new year, that’s what’s on my heart. What legacy are we leaving for those who will follow us? What blessing are we creating now that they will benefit from, and grow with? As you pray, and worship, and study, and serve the Lord in your own way, I hope that you will consider that all of it matters. Not just for you, but for everyone you meet who will sense that little spark of God-light in you. 

Nurture that light, friends. Let God lead you, and fill your life with a renewed sense of belovedness, and purpose. 

In God’s amazing grace,

Pastor Dawn

Worship at Epworth and at Home

Sabbath Rest

Aaaaaahhhhhhh. After the busyness of the Christmas season, January can be a lovely sort of re-set. Some of us might be thinking about new ways to do things in the coming year, and we here in the church office are no exception. Worship in January will focus on that: how to really love the Lord our God by nurturing a healthy heart, mind, soul, and body. This Sunday, we will begin with a renewal of our life in faith, beginning with a re-commitment to keeping the Sabbath holy. 

 

Worship will meet in person, at 9:00am in our sanctuary for those who prefer, and on Facebook and KVLV at 9:30am. We can give GREAT thanks to God that, due to our care in sanitizing and masking and whatnot, we have had NO spreading of the virus in our church, even though a couple of members have gotten the virus elsewhere. 

Keep it up, beloved! It is a great way to follow God’s commandment to love one another.

Creation. Uncreation. Re-creation. Harvest

Hello, beloved church family and friends!

This week at Epworth UMC we finish our worship series about...well, the entire meaning and purpose of life, I suppose. The wonder of God’s good creation, the way everything got broken, God’s power to fix it, and our place in it all. On Sunday we will give thanks for all of that, and consider our own place in God's world and God's plan...our own little piece of creation that we get to care for; our corner of the Kindom of God that we get to help build. Our scripture this week comes from Jesus' final message to his disciples on the eve of his arrest...you'll find it in John 15, verse 5. As you get ready for Sunday, you might like to take some time praying with and reading this passage and the chapter around it:

"I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing."

Last Sunday was World Communion Sunday, which is one of my favorite non-holiday things. We didn’t spend a lot of time in worship talking about it this year because we had other things we needed to focus on, but it is a great joy to me. I find it inspiring to be in fellowship with people of vastly different faiths, and to see how other Christians around the world worship and express their faith. I can count scores of times when my own faith and the practice of it has grown and deepened thanks to time spent with people who believe and worship very differently from me. That’s why it’s so important to me to find ways to work together with the other churches and pastors here in Fallon, Christian or not, and to fellowship and serve together in whatever ways we can. It warms my heart in a way that few other things do, and I feel the presence of God in it powerfully. As you read our column in the Fallon Post (click here to find the latest one https://www.thefallonpost.org/news/2377,faith-and-life-a-column-from-local-faith-leaders) or participate in different ecumenical or interfaith projects, I hope you are inspired by it, too.

World Communion Sunday was begun in 1933 by the pastor of a little Presbyterian church in Baltimore. As they described it at the time, it was their “attempt to bring churches together in a service of Christian unity... to know how important the Church of Jesus Christ is, and how each congregation is interconnected one with another.” Paul’s description of the body of Christ in his several letters (1 Cor. 12 is one example) doesn’t just apply to individual members in a particular congregation, but also to the different expressions of the Christian faith across time and around the world. No church or denomination is perfect in its understanding of God nor its practice of faith, including our own; rather than being in competition with or opposition to each other, we gain a great deal when we remember that we are all vital parts of the Body of Christ with our own corner of the Garden to cultivate and care for.

One of the things we talked about on Sunday was the example of a woman named Wilma Mankiller, who served as the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in the 1980s and 1990s. In reading about her life and her unshakeable Christian and traditional Cherokee faith, I was reminded of a beautiful prayer in our United Methodist Book of Worship that comes from the Lakota people. You may know it as the Great Spirit Prayer; it was translated into English in 1887 by Chief Yellow Lark. I know you will hear the echoes of our own Christian faith in it, and I hope that it inspires your time in prayer this week as it does mine.

“Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the wind, whose breath gives life to all the world. Hear me; I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things you have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Help me to remain calm and strong in the face of all that comes towards me. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. Help me seek pure thoughts and act with the intention of helping others. Help me find compassion without empathy overwhelming me. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy: myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes. So when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.”

Especially as we consider what part of the Garden we have been given by God to cultivate, I find the peace and wisdom and humility of this prayer deeply meaningful. 

Have a wonderful week, friends. I pray that God is blessing you richly, and that you find yourself surprised by touches of divine grace each day.

In faith, hope, and love,

Pastor Dawn

A Response to President Trump's Open Churches Order

Dear readers,

Yesterday morning (Friday the 22^nd), I posted a video devotion that began with an announcement that we are having drive-in church. Though it’s nowhere near as good as being physically together in worship, it is certainly a good step in the right direction. I spent the rest of the day finalizing the arrangements for that (thanks, Grant, Steve, Jake, and Jackie for your help!), and writing a letter to our neighbors to let them know it’s happening. When I got home, I saw news about President Trump’s order that churches be open. Whew, things happen fast in a pandemic!

Friends, you have heard me say how much I deeply miss being in worship together, and I know you do, too. I go through periods of deep sadness not seeing the faces of so many wonderful people, and sharing hugs, and singing and laughing together. My heart breaks especially that we can’t grieve and support each other in the ways we so deeply need...phone calls and video chats are just not the same. And as much as I have become accustomed (sort of) to preaching to a camera and just envisioning your faces in the pews while I do so, I’ll be honest: it is no fun at all. I miss your input, your feedback, your laughter and tears and furrowed brows and impatience when I talk too long. I miss singing together! Church is absolutely not about the building, and worship is not confined to any particular place; God is much too powerful and real for that. But I am more aware than ever that something deeply holy happens when we worship TOGETHER. Something that happens nowhere else, in no other setting. The presence of Jesus Christ when the body of believers gathers together in worship is a miraculous thing.

But. And. The fact that worship has shifted to our homes does NOT mean that the Church has ever been closed. The Church has always been praying, and worshiping, and loving, and serving, Nothing but nothing could stop that. And I love you all far too much to rush us coming back to in-person worship before we can do so safely. 

Within hours of President Trump’s announcement, our Bishops (along with local pastors and faith leaders all over the country) published their responses. Attached is the one from our Bishop Minerva Carcano, and a few other things that I found helpful. Our Bishop and the Cabinet are working hard to put guidelines together for us, to help us provide a safe place to worship. We will need time to put good practices into place, and our District Superintendent will need time to see that they are done well, before we will be given the green light. Each church in town will open on a different timeline, so you may see some open before we do, and others open after; please be in prayer for all of us, as we do our best to make the right decisions for our community. 

In the meantime, as always, I and the members of Epworth UMC crave your prayers and your patient understanding. Our perceptions of this pandemic and how to navigate it intelligently and care-fully, our reactions to President Trump and the priorities of this current administration, our opinions about how and when to hold in-person worship services again all vary widely among us, for very good reasons. I pray that we resist the temptation to settle into “camps.” I pray that we assume the best in each other, and remember that even when our understandings and reactions differ they are rooted in deep, deep faith and a desire for things we all want: freedom, health, happiness, and the joy of worshiping together. Pray often, beloved, more often than ever. And above all, love one another. It is the primary way we express our love for God (Matthew 25:40, Matthew 22:36-40; John 15:12).

See you on Sunday for drive-in worship! Online, too, on Zoom at 9am and then on Facebook Live and KVLV AM980 at 9:30.

Leaning on His everlasting arms,

Pastor Dawn

http://calnev-email.brtapp.com/viewemail/2604282

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organizations/index.html

http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/ncc-urges-churches-to-exercise-extreme-caution-before-re-opening/?fbclid=IwAR3c5z242uX4IKTB__PUCTF-WUvJjJJ3LrXZdWVwv4CNUUSlj0pXIoy_JjQ

The Inner Room

"But when you pray, go into your inner room, close the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." ~Matthew 6:6

One of the many things we learned on our recent trip to Israel was a bit more about the meaning of this passage, so often read at Ash Wednesday. It comes, this teaching of Jesus, in the midst of a long sermon characterized by a call for deeper, more authentic faith. On the strength of this passage, religious people in the early church (and today, too) set aside a small, dark space like a closet in their homes where they could go to pray. John Wesley is known to have spent the first 2 hours of every day in a space like this, beginning at 4am. (I was reading recently that his mother Susanna, not having the benefit of such a space within their home and maybe being a bit hesitant to lock herself away in a closet with so many children running around -- she had 19, though 9 died in infancy -- just threw her apron over her head and sat in a chair in the kitchen to pray.) All of this is very good, but our guide in Israel gave us some really interesting information that lends some color and deeper meaning to Jesus' command here. As we looked at the stone remnants of homes and neighborhoods in the area of what was probably Peter's mother-in-law's home, he explained that the front room of the average home was for guests to be welcomed and shown hospitality. The next room in was the sleeping area and/or kitchen area, and then at the back of the home the storage area and stable. The word Jesus uses in the passage about praying in secret refers to this store room: quiet and dark, and not part of the busy-ness of the ordinary day. Jesus' instruction here is not about setting aside a special prayer room but about ensuring yourself uninterrupted space and privacy. Today, this could be anywhere...and really, in a certain sense Susanna Wesley came closest to what Jesus meant here.

Prayer closets are still cool, though.

You may have heard me at one time or another mention that I once considered being a hermit. As a child, I fantasized about living in a tiny house in the woods with only God and the animals for company, living off whatever I could harvest or grow myself. Sometimes I thought it might be pretty cool to live in a monastery, one of the ones where the women worship and work and eat together but rarely if ever speak, and where they spend the majority of their time alone in prayer. As I got older I discovered that this wasn't my call, not exactly, but there is still a yearning in me for the quiet and the solitude and the structure and the uninterrupted time with God. So during Lent, I am making a special effort to make room for that in my own life: an inner room in my home and my time, to attend to the inner room of the heart.

All of us are made differently, and so your own yearnings might be very different, but this need to attend to the inner room of the heart is a universal thing. Only you and God will know what your own heart most needs...whether it is a new kind of service, a stretch in giving, a time of fasting, a commitment to more regular Bible study or worship, or something else. Whatever it is, the point is to make room: to be vulnerable and even a bit afraid, so that space is made to be face to face with God. And whatever it is, prayer is most certainly a part of it.

Hundreds of years ago, and in some monasteries today, the daily life of religious people was marked by certain specific times of prayer. It was, and is, an effort to obey Paul's exhortation to pray without ceasing...a constant interruption of daily activity to build the habit of being prayerful in every moment, in every activity. A few years ago, Rachel Held-Evans wrote in a blog post about giving up sleeping in for Lent, and how much she learned by getting up before dawn to pray in the darkness. I couldn't help but be reminded, as I read that, of the Muslim call to prayer we heard at 5:15am every morning in Jerusalem, which in turn reminded me of the church bells at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the bells at humble Christian monasteries around the world that call the faithful to prayer at dawn, at 9am, at noon, at 3pm, at 6pm, and at 9pm before bed. In some places, the bells are also rung at midnight and 3am. It's called "praying the hours," and I am inspired to pray this way during Lent. The beautiful Arabic music in Jerusalem so early every morning was a song that declared love of God and encouraged prayer saying "prayer is better than sleep, prayer is better than sleep." I'm not sure whether I will successfully manage the midnight and 3am prayers -- though as I age, frankly I am awake at those hours more often than not anyway -- but I am inspired to try.

One ancient tradition is to read and meditate on a psalm at each time of prayer. For those who pray 5

times per day, that means all the psalms are read in 30 days. In village churches and monasteries there are simple liturgies, prayers, and hymns that go along with the hours; at home or in private, you can structure the time however you'd like. Google "praying the hours" and you will find lots of resources to guide you...or, just choose a private, quiet place to pray however your heart leads you.

May this season be one of deep, soul-healing renewal for you, friends. Whatever you try, know that God will join you in it, and will make that inner room a place of joy and peace, "vast, spacious, and plentiful" (Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582).

In God's steadfast love,
Pastor Dawn

Oh, and PS...in worship this season we will be talking about the 5 essential practices of the Christian life, based on Jesus' own walk of faith. Join us Sundays at 9am at Epworth UMC in Fallon, NV for worship, or at 9:30ish on Facebook Live or KVLV radio for just the sermon. Click here to find our Epworth UMC Facebook page.