Ash Wednesday Homily

I had the pleasure of preaching tonight at AUMC's Ash Wednesday Service. Below is the outline of the homily. I hope your Ash Wednesday was God-haunted!

Ash Wednesday Homily
February 25th, 2009

Three thoughts about death. Depending upon your sense of humor, you might find some of them funny!

1. Ryan’s story: On the Florida/Georgia Border a farmer has painted a large sing that hangs next to the interstate that says: “Welcome to Florida! State mortality rate: 100%”
2. Your sign on the dorm room door in college that I now recant as bad theology: “Don’t take these things too seriously, no one gets out of here alive anyway.”
3. “Memento Mori”: a Roman way of reminding the greats that they are only human.

I. Death

Just like the Ancient Romans, we remember our own mortality tonight.

No matter how good you are at what you do, love, good shape you are in: you will die.

It is an inevitable part of life. We are mortal, we do not live forever.

God made us from dust, breathed the breath of life into us and it is to dust that we will return. We are truly humble creatures in this respect.

That is why you will have the option of dust placed on your forehead tonight.

From dust you came and from dust you will return.

II. Sin

We also remember tonight and during this season of Lent that we are sinful people, that we are broken.

We don’t like to recognize, nonetheless talk about our sin, because it’s embarrassing, hurtful, perhaps humiliating.

But recognize it we must. Because this is what sin does:

Sin dis-integrates our life with God.

In the very beginning of the Bible we see the perfect picture of what life with God is like: God made us to partners with God in tending to God’s creation, to be helpers, stewards, caretakers.

But our sin causes us to push ourselves away from God.

It is important to note that God NEVER leaves us because of our sin! God’s grace is always radically present in us in the form of previent grace.

You see, God has dreams for God’s creation; God has hopes and plans for you, and for the world. But when we sin, we take what God has planned for us and we remove ourselves from it.

We dis-integrate our lives. God calls to be a part of what God is doing in the world, to live a fully open and integrated life that partners with God. When we sin, we push ourselves away from God.

And so, we must acknowledge our sin because our sin is devastating us. Whether our sins are personal or corporate or both, they are keeping us from being fully apart of what God is doing, right here and right now in the world!

III. Metanoia

That is why we God heard through the prophet Joel calling the people of Israel to return to God.

One of the most important words in the New Testament is from the Greek language and the word is Metanoia.
We often translate that in English to the word “repent.” But metanoia means more than just repentance: it means a fundamental change of mind, a reorientation, and a transformation of outlook and of life.

We are called tonight to metanoia: to leave behind the roads that lead us to a dis-integrated life with God and to choose new life, and new paths and new ways of being.

We must recognize our sin, the things that keep us from living fully in God’s plan for our lives and then we must turn away from them and lead lives that integrate our story with God’s story.

During this season of Lent we have the opportunity to try to lay the things that hold us down, that keep us from being truly free to love God and our neighbor, to the side, and to embrace life-giving and freeing practice.

That’s why some people things up for Lent. The spiritual discipline is that you give up something that is not good for you in order to spend time with God and embrace practices that lead to life.

Our worship tonight is not supposed to be fun, but rather solemn. And that can be a tough thing for us. But, it is necessary to truly walk with Christ on a day-to-day basis. For if we don’t acknowledge our mortality and our sin, and our need to turn to new life then the grace that we claim to receive is cheap grace.

We want to move right to Easter but new birth requires death. It requires it. In order for us to take the joy of Easter seriously, we have to take the rest of the story seriously as well.

IV. The Cross

Tonight we will impose ash on your foreheads, if you wish. But we won’t impose in just any old way.

We will make the sign of the cross on you. Because death and sin isn’t all there is!

There is so much more, because our hope as followers of Christ is that, Jesus, through his life, death, resurrection sending forth and ascension has defeated death, sin, and the powers and principalities!

God wins! God is in the business of making all things new! God’s ultimate plans for God’s creation, including you and me, cannot be ultimately defeated!

And, so, even in recognizing our own mortality, our sin, and our need to be reintegrating our lives into God’s Life, we proclaim that God loves us and that God is making all things new!

So during this season of Lent, remember that you are a mortal being. Remember that we are called to live justly and righteously, and that our faith should impact how we life on everyday basis.

Won’t you turn from the things that hold you down and embrace the way to life and freedom in Christ?

God has made you for wonderful good things. God has plans for you, God has ministry for you to do. Because God loves you, God loves you so much that He doesn’t want leave you the way you are. But rather wants you to become what God made you to be: fully human, fully alive, fully free, and fully integrated into a life with God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer, may it be so. Amen.

Going to see Branford tonight!

Tonight, Branford Marsalis is playing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and I am headed there to check it out! Branford Marsalis is one of the leading saxophonists of our generation. I have loved and admired his playing for years. He can play in seemingly every style, from classical (tonight he is playing, among other things, the Glazanouv Saxophone Concerto, which is one of my favorite works for saxophone) to straight-ahead jazz, to funk, to rock with Sting! That's the kind of musician I aspire to be! The concerto that he is playing tonight is lovely! I had the opportunity to learn it and play it in undergrad. Rare is the time when a saxophonist can attend the symphony and have played the concerto is on the bill!

The Most Recent Soul Cafe

Two days in a row! Watch out! This posting thing could become a habit!

Three Sunday's ago we held another Soul Cafe worship experience at Argyle UMC. This time around the choir led the congregation in a choral evensong. My lecture notes are below. If you'd like to see the ordo, leave a comment and I'll send it to you!

Soul Café
A Choral Evensong
January 25th, 2009

I. Prayer and Worship
• “(worship is) the glorification of God and the sanctification of humanity.”
--Pope Pius X, 1903
• “setting forth of God’s honor or glory and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and Godly living.”
--Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

II. Two Traditions of Corporate Worship
a. Lord’s Day Services (from the earliest days of the Jesus movement we find examples of Christians meeting on Sundays. We see Paul in both Acts and 1st Corinthians participating in and encouraging services on Sunday.)
b. Benedict’s Daily Office (also used in a modified form for personal devotion time and is a complement to the Sunday service)

III. St. Benedict and the Daily Office
St. Benedict’s Daily Office
(circa early 500’s—Vatican II)
• Vespers-end of the workday
• Compline—before sleep
• Nocturnes (Vigils, Matins)—middle of the night (midnight and three a.m., respectively)
• Lauds—sunrise
• Prime—early morning
• Terce—mid-morning
• Sext—noon
• None—mid-afternoon
• In the Benedictin model, the entire Psalter was read once a week. Post-Vatican II is was read once a month

IV. The Liturgy of the Hours
• Morning and Evening Prayer are primary!
• In addition to its use in monasticism and in certain denominational services, the Liturgy of the Hours is often used as a private devotional time now.



V. Thoughts and Practices from John and Charles Wesley
• As Anglican Priests, John and Charles Wesley were very familiar (and both practiced) morning and evening prayer, as Thomas Cranmer had combined matins, lauds and prime in Matins as well as putting vespers and compline into Evensong in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
• John Wesley believed that daily prayer was such an important spiritual discipline that in 1733 he complied his “A Collection of Forms of Prayer for Every Day of the Week.”
• This text has been updated to modern English by David A. deSilva and is available at Cokesbury.

VI. How do we organize our daily prayer life?

• The daily office?
• The Psalms?
• The Upper Room? (founded at Travis Park UMC)
• One hour a day as well as writing down our confession?
• John Wesley’s and the Church of England’s indications?
• The Didache (and early Church manual, circa 100, that contains orders of worship and instructions by baptism, communion, and the Christian lifestyle) tells us to pray the Lord’s Prayer Three times a day.

VII. Tonight’s Worship Experience

VIII. Song Practice

IX. Web resource
• The daily office online: www.apostleschurch.org/spirituality_daily.php
• Daily Lectionary www.pcusa.org/lectionary/

A few random thoughts for a this Sunday

This is a strange sensation for me! I am more prepared than usual on a Sunday morning and am finding myself with 15 minutes of free time before worship begins! Crazy! So, a few quick thoughts before I head out to visit with folks (which I should be doing instead of blogging right now).

1. I've somehow managed to spill hot coffee into my left eye this morning (don't ask), which, while painful, has washed the irritant that was previously lodged in my eye, out!

2. Tonight I get to go to a John Bell BIG SING, which is one of the greatest things in the entire world! If you ever get a chance to participate in one, don't miss it!

3. Radiohead, B.B. King, John Mayer, Coldplay, U2, etc. all performing at the Grammy's tonight! Thank goodness for dvr!

4. I read in the paper yesterday that the number of suicides in the U.S. Military eclipsed the number of those killed in combat in January. There is so much to be said about this, from the actual task of being a soldier to the lack of appropriate transition procedures to pastoral care for veterans, the list goes on and on. Terrible.

5. Even in the midst of darkness, God is faithful.

Have a blessed Sunday!

The blog is not dead!

Yeah, I've been neglecting the blog. Sorry about that! The last few weeks have been crazy! I've been to Buda, Texas, where I had the privilege of working with the Buda UMC Praise Band and catching up with the amazing Paul Harper and Teresa Wellborn, leading a Soul Cafe, working at the church, of course, checking out Dmin opportunities and attending Ministers Week at Perkins. Minsters Week this year is excellent! Karen Ward, Doug Pagitt, Tom Sine, Elaine Heath and Mark Stamm are a few of the amazing speakers that we've heard so far: tomorrow is the last day. I feel right at home!
Some of today's content is really challenging me to re-think the idea of "programming." More and more I am becoming convinced that I need to build the worship, music, and the arts ministries at Argyle through organic means. I will hopefully write more about that later!
I am also going to re-ignite our liturgy guild. The time has come!
I hope life is treating you well, if any one still reads this blog! Have a great few days!
Joe