“After the boy is weaned, I will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always.”
1 Samuel 1:22

To whom can we entrust our children and their future, but to God alone? If we are then to lend them to God daily, should we not dress them appropriately? Can we put “priestly garments” on our children understanding that as they are growing in faith they too can be agents of God?

Listen to the mp3 download:
Glad Surrender:
Loaning your child to the Lord

Mennonite Church of Normal
Sermon: Sunday, December 30, 2012
1 Samuel 2:18-20 and Luke 2:41-52.

It was like that moment in the Wizard of Oz where the wizard says, “Don’t look at the man behind the purple curtain…oh, hey there.” I’m not sure that she believed my answer at first when I told her that I am on Facebook surprisingly little each day.

In the virtual world it is more possible now than in the past to have a nearly constant social media presence without actually being viscerally present at the computer or on a mobile device thanks to apps that allow for the scheduling of posts.

My current set-up is a bit convoluted, but it works for me…

1) Save it for later: If I run across an article or post which I think is worth sharing, I send the link from my web browser to my Android tablet using the Chrome-to-phone plug-in and there it sits to viewed later.

2) Scour the blogs: All the posts from blogs that I follow are queued for browsing on my Android tablet using the Google Reader app.

3) Skim the queue: Whenever it is convenient, I can scan the queued posts and see if any of them are worth sharing with others. I may read them while I’m waiting for my kids to fall asleep, or while eating breakfast, or while waiting in line for an oil change.

4) Sort and share: Share-worthy posts are loaded into the queues of my Hootsuite app. I can post to any of my social media outlets: the church young families page, my own Facebook wall, the Twitter account of the non-profit I volunteer with–any of them, all at once. I can choose a specific time that the content will be posted, but more often than not I let Hootsuite auto-schedule the posts at the times of greatest readership based on the specific outlet. I have the same ability in WordPress to schedule my blog posts.

5) Send replies: I usually respond in quasi-real-time (i.e., daily) to messages coming direct from people, or to comments which people post related to my content; I put the most time into these direct, person-to-person conversations.

Information-sharing is something that comes so naturally to me that it would seem odd to do otherwise. My generation sits at a crossroad; remembering life before home computers, cellphones, CDs, DVDs, and the internet, but having been immersed in burgeoning technologies from a young age as they arrived. Innovation was the warp, and sharing the woof, of computing culture.

When we were writing code in second grade, we shared snippets to improve each others’ programs. When home video game systems appeared, we shared “cheat codes” to enhance game play. When dial-up internet allowed access to text-based “Bulletin Board Systems,” we shared Dungeons and Dragons characters or esoteric trivia about Led Zeppelin or plans for PVC potato cannons.

When processing speed increased and graphics improved, we swapped “shareware” programs on 3.5″ floppies like candy at school. When HTML, “Hyper-text Markup Language,” allowed for image-and-text websites, we edited and debugged each others’ ultra-cool, flashy homepages. With email, in online “chat rooms” and with “instant messenger” we communicated lightning-fast over vast distances with family, friends, professors, research librarians, politicians and celebrities.

The concurrent arrival, after the dawn of a new millennium, of social media websites and “smarter” phones threw us for a loop, though. We were suddenly sharing anything at any time and we did; funny things our kids say, urban legends about margarine, recommendations for colonics, confessions of guilty pleasures, amazing photographs, stupid movies, and on, and on.

We were overtaken by over-sharing and we are still figuring out how to self-regulate on social media.

But a tool is just a tool; how you use the tool is what matters. Here’s what I am learning:

• Social media’s capacity to make anyone a celebrity can make anyone into a narcissist. In Greek mythology, Narcissus, a guy who couldn’t get over himself was lured by an enemy to a pool wherein he saw his own reflection in the water’s surface. Captivated and unable to remove his gaze, Narcissus died. Try to keep in check how much you post about yourself. Facebook, in particular, invites intimately personal sharing by asking, “How are you feeling?” in the status update box. Save those exchanges for personal messages not viewable by all umpteen-however-many friends on your full list. Seek to contribute, by posting, to good of the whole. You have a willing audience of potentially hundreds of people at any given moment; seize the opportunity to speak to your passions, your convictions, or to offer smile-inducing humor or inspiring stories.

• Identity is currency in social media; back yours with gold and prevent counterfeiting. Your “online” identity has ramifications for your “offline” identity; whether you intend it or not, people take away impressions from social media and layer them onto you in person. If a video clip posted by someone else seems so sensational that you have second-thoughts about clicking on it, THEN DON’T. Viewing that “You won’t believe what she was caught doing in the locker room shower” video can make you a victim of ‘click-jacking’; you unknowingly gave them permission to announce to the world that you ‘liked’ it and to re-post it to your wall. I saw this very video title appear on the Facebook wall of three retired pastors within a span of twenty minutes one day.

• Exchanges by way of social media are only half of the conversation. Friend and pastor @HarryJarrettJr talks about the necessity of the virtual being balanced by the visceral, namely, it’s vital that disembodied, computer-mediated communication be a supplement to and not a substitute for interpersonal exchanges in-the-flesh. Case in point, Harry and I became acquainted on Twitter before meeting in person at a church convention. I walked up to him there and introduced myself as “@itspastormatt,” to which Harry replied, “Oh, Matt Hickman, so great to finally meet you in person.” Our embodied conversation, then, was informed by the prior social media exchanges and in the same way continues to feed conversations online. In my congregation which is quite geographically disparate–over an hour’s drive from furthest congregant to furthest congregant–social media is one means by which the congregation comes to have a fuller sense of who I am and, likewise, by which I learn about the folks for whom I am pastor.

What lessons, hard or otherwise, might you share with others about using social media?

The Sacred Meal by Nora Gallagher, part of The Ancient Practices Series (Thomas Nelson, 2009) edited by Phyllis Tickle, is a memoir about the author’s experiences of communion. The Sacred Meal is an invitation to join the author in breaking bread and has a surprising Anabaptist ring to it.

When asked by series editor Phyllis Tickle to write this volume on communion, Nora Gallagher did not know that communion was considered a “practice,” but not having been successful at other religious practices, the idea intrigued her. “A practice,” she comes to say, “is not about finding exactly the right set of rules that will make you “good,” but is instead meant to establish a habit of connection to a world that is both tenuous and surprising, outside of time and in it.”

Sacred Meal set me to studying the theological differences between Episcopalian (the tradition from within which Gallagher writes) and Catholic understandings of the Eucharist, something which I had not engaged in prior.  What piqued my curiosity was that some of the ideas expressed by Gallagher seemed to resonate with Anabaptist understandings of the Lord’s Supper.

The Episcopal (Anglican) and Catholic churches hold much in common in their beliefs about communion; enough so that a dually-representative body was able in 1971 to draft an agreed statement on eucharistic doctrine. One big difference, put very simplistically, is that when it comes to understanding the metaphysics of how ordinary bread and wine come to be Christ’s real presence when consecrated, Episcopalians would just as soon embrace holy mystery as suss out the doctrinal details.

Among Episcopalians there are held both the belief in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist (and so it bears salvific qualities) and the conviction that, in remembering, the people are unified as the Body of Christ truly present. It is the latter notion–that of human interrelatedness and connectedness around the sacred meal–that has an Anabaptist ring to it and upon which Gallagher dwells.

In the high church traditions the link between the Eucharist and salvation can naturally bring to bear overmuch emphasis on the individual. Jesus, asserts Gallagher, wanted his disciples and everyone after to summon in each remembering the vision of what they had together. As much as Jesus wanted them to know his body was given for them, he wanting them in communing to hear as well, “This is my body. Look around you.”

The spiritual malaise which overtakes church-going Christians is nothing close to what Jesus meant the life of his followers to be like. The table of Christ was and is the base of Kingdom-culture that stands in counterpoint to empire and oppression. Thinking about Jesus without acknowledging his ministry’s location in place and time, Gallagher admonishes, is like trying to understand Martin Luther King, Jr. without grasping the impact of slavery, reconstruction and segregation on African-Americans. “The regular practice of communion,” she says, “is meant to help move us from being the citizens of the empire to citizens of Heaven.”

Insomuch as Gallagher orbits around the same concern as Anabaptists, in this regard, she levies a critique at Christian traditions which tie communion-participation to having been baptized, and as an occasion for rule-setting and boundary-making: “you can get to the point where taking communion boils down to making sure a soul is freshly laundered and squeaky-clean before its body can take the bread and wine into its mouth.” As a pastor in a believers baptism tradition, I continue to wrestle with this very challenge.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

“The capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is called prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups or society as a whole. Psychologists, neurobiologists and even economists are increasingly interested in the overarching question of how and why we become our better selves.

How do children develop prosocial behavior, and is there in fact any way to encourage it? If you do, will you eventually get altruistic adults, the sort who buy shoes for a homeless man on a freezing night, or rush to lift a commuter pushed onto the subway tracks as the train nears?”

[full article at NYTimes.com: Understanding How Children Develop Empathy]

Follow pediatrician and writer Perri Klass on Twitter and read more of her posts on NYTimes.com.

At the beginning of the book of Matthew (the first of the four books called Gospels, and the first book of the New Testament) we find the list of the ancestors of Joseph the husband of Mary the mother of Jesus. Mixed in with the same old “so-and-so was the father of so-and-so” are the names of five women…

• Tamar (Genesis 38),
• Rahab (Joshua 2),
• Ruth (the book of Ruth),
• “the wife of Uriah” (Bathsheba; 2 Sam. 11 & 12),
• and Mary the mother of Jesus.

That women show up is uncommon but not unheard of; there’s a genealogy in 1 Chronicles 1:1-2:4 in which four women are named. What makes this one significant is that the women who are named found themselves in very difficult situations and—with exception of Mary—are all Gentile women.

Now ‘Gentiles’ simply meant ‘the nations’ and was the name given to those peoples who did not belong to God’s chosen people, Israel. Even though—and precisely because—these other nations had all the advantages of wealth, power and military prowess, God chose a people with no power to be his chosen people.

God’s promise to Abraham: “I will certainly bless you. I will multiply your descendants beyond number, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will conquer the cities of their enemies. And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.” Genesis 22:17-18

God revealed his will and word to the Hebrews and held a special relationship with them so that they might bless the nations. But over time, God’s chosen people tried to gain power on their own and become like the other nations (1 Samuel 8), neglecting their special relationship with God and forgetting that they were to be a blessing to the Gentiles.

But the account of the ancestors of Joseph in Matthew makes an exciting and bold statement that God’s plan includes the Gentiles—and has since the beginning! Matthew, the Gospel writer, is helping the people to understand that the plan of God has been brought about through history in unanticipated, “irregular” and even scandalous ways. Jesus, as we learn from the Gospel stories, came to fulfill both the hopes of God’s people and Gentiles.

Pipes photo by Flickr user bobex_pics

“Could you come and look at something near my car,” asked the preschool teacher at my office door?

I followed her out to the church parking lot to see what was up.

“This is going to sound like I’m crazy, but I want to make sure that the thing near my tire is not a pipe bomb,” she explained.

Now, thinking back to my munitions class at seminary…NOT A WHAT?! PIPE BOMB?!

I did what any rational pastor would do: mentally ran a risk assessment.

1. Target assessment: Preschool teachers do not rank on the likely-to-be-assassinated chart. They are more likely to have a pair of underoos explode near them when a child doesn’t make it to the potty.
2. Clientele assessment: It could be that she had someone with a grudge against her, but the parents of preschoolers are not likely to have the motivation to build and place a pipe bomb as an outcome of a grudge.
3. Object assessment: It was a short length of pipe. It had no odd residues or powdery substances on it and no odor; no wires, drill holes or etchings from being worked. It looked randomly dropped and was very visibly situated.
4. Location assessment: Our church and the adjacent residential community has handymen coming and going all the time; it would not be unusual to find here something which had fallen off a truck.

So, I kicked it. It did not explode. Someone had fashioned a length of pipe with end caps as a pencil holder.

One would think that matters of public safety are few and far between in ministry, but they happen with surprising regularity. My mental risk assessment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but as a pastor one has to be prepared to respond to issues in the moment, with a clear head and non-anxious presence. It sounds absurd to say that one should practice one’s responses to absurd, unplanned-for emergencies before they happen, but it is helpful. What WOULD you do if, say, a deer burst through the plate glass front door of the church building and ran amok in the halls? It happens!

In my time in the program department at Amigo Centre, a Mennonite camp and retreat center in Sturgis, MI, I had the opportunity to inform worship consultant, speaker and writer Sally Morgenthaler that her presentation might be interrupted by a gunshot.

Fifteen minutes into her seminar, the maintenance director peeked in from the side door and beckoned me. There was a raccoon ambling around near the retreat area acting strangely. It was a rare Saturday in that the maintenance director, the cook and I were the only year-round staff present; we had to make a decision about the raccoon. A call to the Department of Natural Resources filled us in on a distemper epidemic that had been running through adjacent counties in Indiana; risk of aggression and biting came with the increasingly disoriented animal.

After informing Sally, I announced to the gathering of pastors, seminary students and lay leaders, “I’m sorry for the interruption. We appear to have a diseased raccoon wandering around outside the building. The DNR said it likely has distemper, which is not contagious to humans, but can cause an animal to become aggressive. You are going to hear a gunshot; we will be killing the animal and disposing of it. Again, our apologies. Back to you, Sally, with more on worship planning.”

My camaraderie with this particular crow began well over a year ago when I was drawn outside by the one of strangest animal sounds I’d ever heard; it was a sound like a thumbnail being dragged down the teeth of a comb, or pebbles being rattled, that was followed by a meowing sound. The meow was feline enough that I searched around expecting to find a cat that had been struck by a car and in its death throes. I caught sight of a crow in the maple tree in front of the church doing this weird, low bow and stretching its neck out and realized the sound was coming from the bird.

This clip I found on YouTube captures another crow making an almost identical noise, but far more subtly than my crow:

Crow–as I addressed it, non-presumptuously, not knowing its sex–would be sitting silently outside the church every morning, sometimes with a few other crows, as I would walk across the lawn and appeared to note my arrival with this same unusual call. I began to greet Crow and it wasn’t long before I could pass near the full group as they foraged on the lawn without them taking flight. It has been documented that crows can recognize individual human faces and will treat those people according to how they have treated the crows.

My commute from home to work is a few blocks long and most days I am on foot. The first time I encountered Crow off of the church grounds was in a tree about a block and a half from church. It was a chilly, silent morning  broken suddenly by Crow’s rattle-meow from above in the tree under which I had just walked. “Morning, Crow,” I returned, and Crow took flight for the church maple and greeted me when I approached the building. My commute fits well within the near-10 acre territory occupied by an urban crow.

Come spring, Crow started hanging out with a companion in the Scots pine outside my office window, at the corner of the church; the tree was scraggly with broad-spreading, forked branches. They were building a nest. It was Crow’s heavy hauling that gave away his sex as he laid stick foundation of the nest. I might have figured out Crow’s sex earlier had I run across the Bulletin of the Essex County Ornithological Club of Massachusetts from December 1923 in which Charles W. Townsend described the courtship behavior of male crows that includes low, sweeping bows and a rattle-call.

Crow and his mate, normally raucous, were quite still around the nest. The small cohort, four to six birds total, that hangs around the church is likely comprised of the 1-3 year-old offspring of Crow; younger birds remain with their parents and act as helpers until they depart and seek mates of their own.

After some time had passed, I noted one afternoon that two adult crows were feeding three smaller juveniles on the church playground.  The Mennonite crow congregation had grown to between nine and ten individuals. Crows are communal roosters gathering by the hundreds in central locations at dusk, particularly in fall and winter, and then dispersing again at daybreak. The campus of IL State University, the Constitution Trail south of Uptown Normal, and the trees along Sugar Creek near the church are common roost sites for our local corvidae.

The Scots pine in which Crow had made the nest began to show signs of Pine Wilt disease and was slated for removal. I worried that cutting down Crow’s tree would mean I would not see him around anymore. Crows would frequently alight in the trees of our neighborhood and I wondered often if Crow was among them. I missed his greeting.

I decided to try and attract the crows to our backyard with a designated crow feeder; a flat board on a post with a red McDonald’s fry box stapled to the top for crow enticement. The next morning, crows started gathering in the adjacent trees till there were about a dozen birds trying to assess what the fry box held. I walked out to fill it up with in-the-shell peanuts and was greeted by a very distinct rattle-meow; I confess that I was elated. It turns out that crows don’t usually nest in the same tree from year-to-year, so the Scots Pine removal won’t be a deal-breaker; our neighborhood is still Crow’s turf. He yet greets me about once a week and I still do get worried if I haven’t heard from him. Birds of a feather, I guess; we flock together.

Psalm 147:7-9   Sing to the LORD with thanksgiving; make melody to our God on the lyre. He covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth, makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry.

Luke 12:24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.

• Learn more about the natural history of crows at Cornell Ornithology Lab’s site All About Birds
• More on crow memory, tool usage and powers of deduction at Ars Technica

Photo by Flickr user sekhmet1776

The capacity of songbirds to engage in repetitive, harmful behavior astounds me. The nature center of a church camp at which I worked has a bird observation window that is mirrored on the exterior; guests may enjoy close-up bird-watching without spooking the birds. The window pane was slightly titled so that the sun’s rays would not be reflected directly back at the surrounding trees. This angle allowed for a glare-free reflection of the tree canopy and the sky beyond to be displayed.

Now occasionally, birds would bump into the window when startled by a hawk zooming through on the hunt; this was understandable.

But one day, a ridiculously tenacious, bird-brained, male cardinal undertook the task of repeatedly flying into the window. Now, I can already hear you avid birders saying, “That’s what male cardinals do, Matt. They see their reflection as another male competing for resources and territory.” I thought of that, too.

No, this particular male cardinal was leaving his perch at an upward angle toward the window, wings fully spread, as if he was headed somewhere. Over and over again during the hour-and-a-half in which I observed the bird it was launch-THUMP-flutter-perch, launch-THUMP-flutter-perch, launch-THUMP-flutter-perch.

He was flying toward what looked like sky.

The “eavesdropping” microphone outside the window picked up the flurry of a chipmunk in the woods that caused the cardinal to turn around on his perch and face the opposite direction. Seeing the sky there as well, he again took flight, but this time with no THUMP.

Romans 1:19-21  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;  for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

I empathized with this bird-brained cardinal. I have taken off in the wrong direction many times; thankfully with less THUMPs. My misdirection has typically come from not paying attention to the movement of God’s Spirit. Prayer is meant to be conversational; you talk, then you listen. Plenty of times my prayers have been like a string of rapid-fire text messages with no gap allowing for God to “message” back. In my haste, I sometimes answer myself on behalf of God and take that as truth because it came about in prayer: launch-THUMP-flutter-perch. Like my bird buddy, it often takes my being startled before I head in the right direction; seems like I could spare myself some turmoil by taking time to see false skies for what they are.

A common assumption is that ‘free church’ and ‘high church’ are opposite ends of the ecclesiology (“churchology”) spectrum; two incompatible ways of understanding the nature, constitution, and functions of the church. Reformation and renewal movements are often set on a trajectory by which they mean to supplant the prior understanding of church if it is possible. The conundrum associated with these movements is their eventual end, seeming either to become completely disordered or so highly ordered as to have become the very church they hoped to replace.

Sian and Stuart Murray Williams, co-authors, return to this conundrum numerous times in their primer on alternative ecclesiology The Power of All: Building a Multivoiced Church (Herald Press, 2012). The Wiliamses, both English Baptists,  define multivoiced church (vis-à-vis monovoiced)  “as an alternative to the dominant tradition in which large numbers of the Christian community are passive consumers instead of active participants”; emphasizing broad versus narrow leadership and involvement.

The Power of All is a springboard for thinking about the best life of the church. Biblical and historical precedents are provided and implications of multivoiced ecclesiology are laid out in four categories:

• Multivoiced worship values the narrative voices of many believers over a single narrative from few.
• Multivoiced learning preferences practice over presentation.
• Multivoiced community prizes mutual accountability and mutual support over superficial or institutional connectedness.
• Multivoiced discernment has the whole community seeking the mind of Christ together as opposed to decision-making by a small body.

True to its subject matter the format is conversational and multivoiced; interspersed with congregational stories and the authors’ own wrestlings. It proved a stumbling block for me, though, to have the conundrum of uncertain ends rear its head so often. It began to feel for me like a rhythm of here’s-the-good-news, now-the-bad-news. The text of the back cover summary throws it right out there: “Whenever renewal occurs, everyone in the church is drawn into involvement in the church’s mission. But within a generation or two, vitality wanes and ministry is left to religious specialists.”

I wanted to put the book down, but I pushed through. I’m glad I did. In the last chapter, which would have made a better first chapter, the authors provide a solid and concise case for implementing multivoiced practices:

“…active participants in healthy multivoiced churches are much more likely to be confident in sharing their faith with others, ready to engage in social action, hospitable to their neighbors, alert to pastoral opportunities beyond the church, and able to participate in gracious dialogue with people of other faiths or none. The skills we learn in multivoiced churches are transferable to other spheres of life. The responsibility of being active participants, rather than passive consumers, will stand us in good stead as we interact with others in different contexts…” (p 170)

I began to think that perhaps this was a case of right description, but wrong prescription. Let us set aside for a moment what seems to be the assumption of this book: that free church (which seems equated with “multivoiced”) and high church (which seems equated with “monovoiced”) oppose each other on an ecclesiology spectrum. Then let us ponder the consequences of saying instead that neither one is meant to be an end unto themselves, but both exert a positive influence to pull the church to its most fruitful middle.

Philosopher and historian George Frederick Hegel conceptualized this interplay as a dialectic. Hegel believed that a cycle begins when the contradictions inherent within an existing element (or thesis) create the direct opposite of that element (its antithesis). In the conflict between the two emerges a new element (or synthesis) with its own inherent contradictions and the cycle begins again. Each cycle is forward-moving, not circular, but spiral; advancing further than the prior thesis.

Identifying multivoiced churches as “an alternative to the dominant tradition” muddies the water. Anxiety about the short-lived nature of renewal movements can be alleviated if ‘corrective’ or a synonym thereof is exchanged for ‘alternative’. If an ideal of being multivoiced can be understood to function more like an immune system for the church, as opposed to something akin to a regime change, then its fruit can bear out in all manner of congregations.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary advanced reading copy of this book from the publisher, Herald Press. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”