Today is my father's 100th birthday. He died two short of this celebration, two years ago. I was with him for his birthday, holding a piece of cake in his hospital room in Harrisburg. The single candle was unlit in recognition of the oxygen tank that was helping him breathe. He said, "I don't like chocolate cake", which would have surprised mother. She baked him many chocolate cakes for birthdays of many years ago. So I ate the piece of cake as we talked together for his last birthday in his aging body.
Today, 100 years! Born 14 June 1919. David Elbert Climenhaga. My sister has told his story here, or at least the outline of it. Today, I remember him. I remember the INFJ (Myers-Briggs letters to give a snapshot of one's personality) who "overworks work re-working it". I remember someone who remembered more than I possibly could.
He wrote his memoirs (at one point called "Keep Lying to a Minimum"), in which I marvel at the precision of memory for events many years ago. I have his datebooks near me as I type, which help explain how he could state so clearly events from many years ago. He wrote things down! And he remembered things.
I remember his love and care -- for God, for the church, and for his family. These came together as we were driving to Phumula Mission in 1964. Dad was taking Bishop Elam Stauffer of the Mennonite Mission in Uganda to visit this outpost mission hospital 120 miles over sand roads into the bush. I was half-asleep in the back seat when I heard Dad say, "I wouldn't say this if Daryl were awake." Instantly I was awake, and completely still. "I know that the church has many problems, but I love the church deeply." I was unclear why I shouldn't overhear that and went back to sleep. But I remember it 55 years later. Dad loved the church deeply.
And Dad loved us deeply. In my desk, I have a letter he wrote when I missed the bus to Annville-Cleona High School. I was a 16-year old senior, and I overslept. Mother had to take me to school, throwing her day's schedule off. Dad sat down and wrote a letter to encourage me to be better and do better. Several pages. Some wisdom. Some just Dad. A visible memento of how deeply he cared for his children. [We, his children, could write letters about things that bugged us about Dad. No need to. He was also human, as we are.]
He loved mother even more. And in later years after mother died, Verna Mae. I remember his love and his care -- and his endless stories and puns and jokes, which we would try to derail, but never could. Today I remember, David Climenhaga was born 14 June 1919. One hundred years ago. I remember, and I love him.
Friday, June 14, 2019
Sunday, June 09, 2019
A Pentecostal Picnic
What a thought! A Pentecostal Picnic for Dutch-German-Prussian-Russian
Mennonites. Can you imagine us speaking in tongues and being slain in the
Spirit – all before we sit down to a good picnic lunch with Farmers Sausage?
What a thought!
Of course, Pentecost Sunday is not about “speaking in
tongues”. Certainly, that particular phenomenon took place on that first
Pentecost, but tongues are not the point. Let’s take a few moments this
Pentecost to ask what the real point is, and to commit ourselves to paying
attention to what God wants us to do.
Genesis 11
Genesis 11 tells how the unity of peoples at the beginning
of the chapter are scattered into the plurality of peoples in which God called
Abraham and Sarah to form the People of God. The human family had a common
language, which enabled them to work together. This is seen as a good thing, a
gift of God’s grace. Then, as happens throughout the biblical narrative, the
human race used God’s grace to establish themselves and undermine God. They
said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that
reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we
will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
God saw the threat of human independence
and countered it by confusing their languages. No longer able to understand
each other, people spread out across the earth. God’s judgment separated people
from each other so that they could again begin to find God. The rest of
Scripture details God’s search for the human race, reconciling all people to
God’s self.
Acts
2
Pentecost is so named because it comes 50 days after the
Passover – so, for Christians, 50 days (seven weeks) after the crucifixion and
resurrection. [For Jews, the Feast of Weeks (see Deuteronomy 16).] In Acts 1:
3, Luke tells us that the ascension followed the resurrection by 40 days, so Pentecost
came about 10 days later.
The disciples were waiting in Jerusalem for God’s Spirit to
come (Acts 1: 5). When the Spirit came, they were gathered together – perhaps
in the upper room of Acts 1: 13, or perhaps in the Temple area more generally
as Acts 2 seems to suggest. Signs of the Spirit’s presence were tongues of fire
and the sound of a mighty wind, and then the dramatic sign of speaking in other
language. A crowd of pilgrims from around the Jewish world responded to the
sign and to Peter’s sermon, leading to the first church in Jerusalem.
The Point
We often think that the point of Pentecost is that the first
believers spoke in tongues. They did, but that is a fruit of the real point,
not itself the important point for us to take. So, what is the real point? Go
back to the way that this passage is paired off with Genesis 11. Genesis 11
shows how and why God judged the human race. God judged the human race for its
pride and rebellion in trying to establish itself without God [trying to take
God’s place], and God judged the human race by confusing their tongues and
creating many languages.
This fact of judgment suggests that at Pentecost, God heals
the judgment of Babel. That suggestion is true, but not in the way that we
might have expected: God does not reverse the judgment. A simple healing would
have been to restore the original language to all the people present, so that
everyone would have found themselves speaking God’s language. [German, maybe?]
That is not what happens! The text says that they started speaking in various
languages, so that the people listening said, “Aren’t all these who
are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our
native language?”
Aside: Actually, the text is ambiguous. It
states: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other
tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem
God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this
sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own
language being spoken.” The disciples “spoke in other tongues” and the hearers
heard their own language. It is not quite clear that the disciples spoke the
languages that the hearers understood. There may have been as much a miracle of
hearing as of speaking.
Confusion is healed by anointing
each language and culture and making it the vehicle that bears God’s
revelation. What was experienced as judgment in Genesis 11 is experienced as
grace in Acts 2. This is a profoundly important point: God uses the problems
and difficulties of our lives to reveal grace and mercy and love. God does not
deliver us from our problems, but rather God uses our problems to bring us into
closer relationship with God.
You observe that God’s Spirit came on the disciples while they
were waiting for the Spirit. Jesus told them to go to Jerusalem and wait for
God’s Spirit (Acts 1: 4-5). After the ascension, they did just that, walking
from the Mount of Olives a Sabbath Day’s walk back into Jerusalem.
As I said earlier, they probably waited for about a week and
a half, but there was not much in what Jesus said to tell them how long they
would need to wait. All he said was this
(Acts1: 4-5): “Wait in Jerusalem … [and] in a few days you will be baptized
with the Holy Spirit.” How long is “a few days”? I don’t know. It turns out to
have been a week and a half, but they didn’t know that. I once asked a South
Korean student if she thought that North and South Korea would reunify soon.
[This was just after East and West Germany had re-unified.] She said, “Yes.” I
said, “How soon?” She said, “About 30 years!” Her idea of soon was different
than mine.
Well, God’s idea of “a few
days” may be different than ours. All they knew was that they were going
to wait for God to act. As one preacher put it, “Don’t just do something. Stand
there!” More often, we think of what we can do to bring in God’s reign, while
God wants us to wait for the moving of the Spirit.
Living with the Texts
So, what do we do? We see
where these two ideas take us: 1) We need the presence of God’s Spirit to
experience God’s healing; and 2) God’s healing comes through the problems of
our lives – not simply by removing them, but by working through them for our
benefit.
My first thought is that
these passages call us to acknowledge our own pride and our own desire to do
God’s work ourselves. Like the people at Babel, we want to establish ourselves
and make a name for ourselves. I experience this desire as much as anyone here,
but the fact is that none of us can make life work just right. Sooner or later,
life is too much for us, and we run into trouble. Then we make our problems
worse by insisting that we can fix them ourselves. Asking God to do in us what
God wants to do is hard, because God might want to do something we don’t want.
Step number one, then:
Admit our faults and failures. Admit that often enough we are responsible for
our own problems. For example, I say sometimes that I’m not a good organizer.
That is certainly true, but I was listening to someone in one of the committee
meetings I go to. He said, “When I get up in the morning, one of the first
things I do is look at my schedule so that I remember what I need to do today.”
I thought to myself, “I’ve never done that!” Well, who should I blame for not
being a good organizer? At least some of my trouble with organizing is simply
my own fault.
Step number two: Seek God’s
Spirit. Wait for the Holy Spirit. Waiting is an expectant, intentional act. It
is not simply doing nothing and trusting that God will fix everything some day.
God will fix everything some day, but another word for that time is “Judgment
Day”. Malachi speaks sternly to people who take that day lightly: “Who shall
abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appears?” Waiting is
not an aimless careless attitude towards life.
To wait for the Holy Spirit
is to trust God to take care of us. To wait for God is to act in the present
based on what we know today, trusting that God will show us tomorrow what we
should do. To wait is to examine ourselves and make sure there is nothing in us
to hinder or grieve God’s Spirit. To wait is to anticipate and long for and
believe deeply, “God is coming!”
Confession and repentance
and trust combine in the community we call the church as we wait for God to
break in. When the Spirit comes, God uses the problems that we have been
struggling with to heal us. At Pentecost, God used the problem of broken and
fractured languages that we call “culture”, and God baptized cultures and
languages and used them to reveal the coming of God’s Spirit. That’s what God
does. God heals us not from, but through, our problems.
When that happens, God’s
Spirit bursts out among us, and people gaze in wonder at the transformation
that takes place. You can’t predict what God’s work will look like. You can’t
predict who God’s Spirit will fall on. You can’t predict what will happen to
SMC in the next ten years. All we can do is wait – anticipate and long for and
prepare ourselves for God to work.
A Closing Picture
A few weeks ago I attended a conference on the Global
Anabaptist Identity. John Roth, director of the Institute for the Study ofGlobal Anabaptism in Goshen, Indiana, was our resource speaker. He came up with
an unusual image of what the church looks like as it spreads through the work
of God’s Spirit. He by-passed the usual images that we think of such as a
building, or a body, or a community [although all of these are true and good]
and suggested a different picture instead. He compared the church to a rhizome.
Now, perhaps the only people here who know what a rhizome is
are the gardeners. Here is Wikipedia’s definition of a rhizome: “In botany and
dendrology, a rhizome is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out
roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks
or just rootstalks. Rhizomes develop from axillary buds and grow horizontally.
The rhizome also retains the ability to allow new shoots to grow upwards.”
More simply, everything from aspens to quack grass: Plants
that share a root system, so that they are one organism, while growing as many
plants. The Mennonite Church in Ethiopia shows us how resilient such an
organism is, led by the Holy Spirit. The first Mennonite workers entered
Ethiopia in 1945, and the first Ethiopian converts were baptized in 1951. In
1974, the country came under Communist rule in a military coup, and the
government placed increasing restrictions on the church. In 1982, the
government closed the 14 Mennonite congregations then in existence and
confiscated the church’s property. People were forbidden to meet n groups any
larger than five. There were about 5,000 Mennonites at that time, and they
organized themselves in small cell groups of five people.
Over the next 10 years, believers met in homes in these
small groups, and finally a new government came to power. In 1991, the church
was allowed to meet in larger groups and their property was restored. When they
came out into the open, they found that they had grown from 5,000 to 34,000 –
the ultimate example of a rhizome! You think you have stamped it out, when all
that has happened is that it has gone underground and spread widely.
Most important in that example is the fact that the Holy
Spirit used what seemed to be great tragedy and distress to do God’s work. That
is the lesson I want to learn. God works through what feels like judgment to
bring grace and new life. Our part is to wait in God’s presence and remain open
to God’s work.
A disclaimer: What I am saying can easily be turned into a
destructive triumphalism. Someone loses a loved one, and we say, “Wait for what
God is doing in your life!” Ouch! Paul tells us to weep with those who weep.
Our first response in the face of tragedy is to grieve and weep together. Not
to explain. Please, not to explain! Or someone might say, “You have lost your
loved one so young! What did you do that God is punishing you for?” Please no!
Do not explain! First we grieve together.
Within the hard times and tragedies of our lives, I can hold
out this word of hope: God works God’s grace and comfort and gives us joy, even
in the darkest night. Wait for the Lord. Wait for God’s Spirit. God will come,
and we will grow with the Spirit’s growth as God heals our confusion and gives
us life.
Steinbach Mennonite Church
Church Picnic
9 June 2019
Genesis 11: 1-9
The tower of Babel
11 Now
the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As
people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled
there.
3 They
said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They
used brick instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then
they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to
the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be
scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But
the Lord came down to
see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people
speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan
to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us
go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So
the Lord scattered them
from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That
is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the
whole world. From there the Lord scattered
them over the face of the whole earth.
Acts 2: 1-21
The
Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost
2 When the day of Pentecost came,
they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a
sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole
house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what
seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of
them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy
Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing
Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 When they
heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard
their own language being spoken. 7 Utterly amazed,
they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 Then
how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? 9 Parthians,
Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and
Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts
of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both
Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs – we hear them declaring
the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ 12 Amazed
and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
13 Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They
have had too much wine.”
Peter
addresses the crowd
14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice
and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let
me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. 15 These
people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! 16 No,
this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
17 “In the last days,” God says, “I will pour out
my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men
will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. 18 Even
on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and
they will prophesy.
19 “I will show wonders in the heavens above and
signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. 20 The
sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the
great and glorious day of the Lord. 21 And everyone who
calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Monday, June 03, 2019
A Bit More About Missions
Throughout the past year we have
been reflecting on a recent sermon. Usually, our morning speaker goes back to
the previous Sunday’s sermon and presents ideas and questions that occurred to
home. I’m going back three weeks to my own sermon – on the way that God calls
us into mission. I emphasized the comprehensive nature of God’s call. It
includes everyone, what John the Revelator calls “all nations and kindreds and
peoples and tongues”.
Near the end of the sermon, I
made an important point – that we cannot give away what we don’t have. We are
witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection only if we have experienced Jesus’
resurrection ourselves. I want to reflect a bit on this thought, as we come to
the end of our Men’s Prayer Breakfast Year. To do so, I’m going to read an
extended excerpt from the Break Point commentaries, started by Chuck Coulson.
This commentary was written by Dustin Messer.
“I’ll say this
for you, you’re not a jerk.” That comment changed the way I thought about my
faith and the way I go about sharing it. Some context may help. I was sitting
across the table from a friend who was exploring the Christian faith. She had
no background in Christianity except for a fire and brimstone style evangelist
she’d occasionally hear preach on the quad of her college. The conversation
started around the difference between the Christian understanding of grace, but
quickly moved toward the Christian sexual ethic.
She politely but
firmly told me that she found the ethic I hold … was regressive, oppressive,
and otherwise morally bankrupt. The up side: she left thinking I wasn’t a jerk.
The down side: my “unjerkliness” made no difference with regard to her faith,
or lack thereof. … Our winsomeness won’t carry the luggage we think it will
because people aren’t rejecting the faith because they don’t feel welcome, but
because they don’t want in. …
… Let’s go back
to the conversation that got me thinking about this. By saying I wasn’t a jerk,
my friend was telling me I wasn’t the obstacle. The reason she wasn’t
interested in Jesus wasn’t because of who I was, it was
because of who He was. In his brilliant little book Indispensable, David
Cassidy emphasizes this very point:
Whoever Jesus was, he was not a ‘nice’ person spouting lofty platitudes
about peace; no, Jesus was a threat, despite his goodness—or, rather, precisely
because of his goodness. Jesus was good but was considered as good as dead by
his opponents, both religious and secular, because he was everything they
weren’t and the people knew it. For those leaders, it was ‘Jesus or me,’ not
‘Jesus for me’! …
Our kindness
comes from our love for God and neighbor, not because we find it to be an
effective strategy. In this way, the post-Christian world in which we find
ourselves in today isn’t that different from the pre-Christian world of
yesterday. Now, like then, people stay home on Sunday not because
they view themselves as deficient, but because they
view Jesus and the church as deficient.
You hear that critical line:
“people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as
deficient, but because they view Jesus and the church as
deficient.” To put it another way, if we people around us think that Jesus has
nothing to offer them and that the church is irrelevant, we’re wasting our time
inviting them inside.
So, are we the problem? Is Jesus the
problem? Sometimes the deficiency in the church is just that we don’t follow
Jesus well. We aren’t any different than people outside the church, and they
rightly wonder why they need to become a Christian to be just like they are
now. The cure for that deficiency is to follow Jesus. That’s the idea behind my
saying earlier, “We can’t give what we don’t have.”
There’s another more serious
problem though. Sometimes the problem that people see is what Jesus wants,
indeed requires, of us. Jesus says over and over again, “Follow me.” We use
words like, “Jesus is Lord of my life.” Really? Well, who wants that? We call ourselves
“slaves/servants of Christ.” That feels like a problem to people in our
society.
The watchword of our society is
“Look out for number one.” Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone push you
around. The idea that we should be “slaves of Christ” is not attractive to a
self-confident inner-oriented society. That we should give our lives on behalf
of others and on behalf of someone who died 2,000 years ago just is not
attractive at all.
What’s the cure to this
deficiency? How do we reach out to people who don’t want what we have? Let me
suggest two simple and vital steps.
1)
Be good. Be kind. The way that the writer I quoted begins is good: “I’ll
say this for you. You’re not a jerk. Given that many people around us think
Christians are jerks, it’s worthwhile when we develop relationships in which
they can learn to know us and trust us. If we have strong relationships, we may
even be able to make the case for Jesus.
2)
Being good is not nearly enough: Be vulnerable. Be honest about
yourself. Life is hard, and everyone – sooner or later – experiences the
brokenness that goes with being alive. If we have been good and kind, and if we
have shown that following Jesus is intellectually credible, and if we are
honest about our doubts and hurts and our own broken times, then, when a friend
falls under the wheels of life, they may hear what we’ve been saying and check
us out. Then they find that Jesus and the church no longer appear deficient. Then
we can give what we have.
1 June 2019
Men’s Prayer Supper
Steinbach Mennonite Church
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