For the next two-and-a-half months, we are going to explore the theme of faithfulness in the 10:30 am worship service. While there is always a theme of faithfulness to every worship service, this series is going to explore examples of individual faith, corporate faith, prophecy, and tools to help in developing faithfulness. The goal by the end of the two-and-a-half months is to understand how you can develop your faithfulness to be stronger.
This Sunday we start the series looking at the “Father” of the faith, Abraham. The call of Abraham is both simple and profound. It is simple in that God is very direct and clear in what he is expecting from Abraham and profound in that God is ultimately calling Abraham to go to a land that he had no knowledge of. This meant that he had to risk everything, more than that as he found when he arrived. God did not send him to an uninhabited part of the world, but probably one of the most established important parts of the time, the land of Canaan, a place that was already an important area of barter and commerce because of being the prime trade route for Egypt. The faithfulness that is described in Genesis is a two-way relationship between Abraham and God. God follows through with protection and safety for Abraham as he makes his move into the new land and Abraham keeps his promise by taking the first action in his new home to build an altar to God. With the establishment of the altar and the community, Abraham, as an old man, begins work on this new civilization based in faithfulness to God, of which he is the prime example. The Hebrews text lifts up Abraham’s call and uses his life as an example for the early Christians, showing that when Abraham kept his faith God kept his promise. The relational aspect to faithfulness becomes essential to the life that is to follow, for when Abraham kept his faithfulness, God followed with his promise. However, it is important to note that when God follows, it is not a “Reward” as we understand. The modern rationale of “if I am a good person and stay faithful to God; God will make my life easier” is not at all the gist of what is going on. In fact, there is no sense in the story that God is going to make Abraham’s life better or easier; rather, it is that when Abraham is faithful, God will provide him with his needs. So we see that out of trust, Abraham is able to walk away from everything he knew in order to seek faithfulness to God. In his pursuit, he accepts that he will have to put behind his life and commit to the new one with utter and unquestioning trust that God will follow through with his promises. Hebrews uses this as an example of what our Christian lives ought to be like, giving ourselves over to Christ, trusting in a life that is beyond the trappings of this world. The difficult part for us is that the Glory, which we are promised, is not something that is reached immediately. In fact, the Glory is something that we accept of pure trust. This is where faithfulness becomes our guide, for when we accept our calls fully we recognize and accept that we are no longer living for ourselves and begin the difficult process of living for God. This means that we often find a great struggle in seeking what is right, what is wrong, and most of all what God is calling us to do. As you prepare for worship this week, ask yourself if you could do as Abraham did; could you leave everything to follow God. And if your answer is no, why?
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In seminary, with Chapel most days preached by tired pastors, students, or Faculty (who often preached their class lecture) sermons were quite forgettable or they were remembered for all the wrong reasons. However, in the three years of worship there I do remember a handful, one of which was a great sermon on the Prodigal Son. To that point I can honestly say that the story of the prodigal was virtually meaningless. It was referring to a reality that was foreign to me, or so I thought.
Early in the sermon after a small amount of exegesis and the eyes hazing over for most of the students the preacher said, “Living in California, you are by definition the Prodigal Son.” He went on from there to give us examples, and though some were sketchy at best, I had never really thought of myself that way before. Knowing the statement to be provocative, the pastor reeled us in to an equally provocative understanding of the prodigal son story that pointed to the focus of the story within the modern interpretations to be completely wrong. In fact, he, for the first, time made the suggestion that this story hit on a fundamental aspect of the reformed tradition that whether we stay or whether we fall away from God, we become prodigals. Turning the story on its head you could say that this is a question of the vastness of God’s creation. There are those who from the beginning of time have kept the faith, and there are those who have fallen away (either in their choice or through choices of previous generations). Those who have kept the faith are given a perpetual gift of living in the full richness of God each and every day of their lives. Though their lives are by no means easy they know that the reward is great. The son that runs off taking the inheritance and spending everything that he has finds himself not only broke, but also lost in life. Interestingly, the motives for the lost son to come home were not from a longing for family or need for recompense, but for the selfish desire to make more money and live a slightly better life than he was living. In reality, the son that leaves is an example of selfishness, living for himself and his own exploits. This is where the whole story gets murky because we the reader place such a negative judgment on the son that leaves, forgetting to see what is going on with the son that stays. If we reread the passage, placing our judgments aside, we can recognize that the son who stayed was not acting altruistically in his choice to stay. In fact, it could be said that he was staying to reap an even larger reward. We know this by the reaction of the son who stayed and had essentially said “How can you come back and take what is mine!” From the dialogue of the father and the son, we see that both sons have fallen away, just in different ways, because they both began to live for themselves. One of the great problems that many non-church goers have with the church is the “holier than thou” attitude of Christians. While essentially, the attitude is not the problem, the fact that we do not recognize that our practices and our actions often come off as hypocritical and selfish in their own right becomes a turnoff to those who may be seeking a way back, even if it is not for the most spiritual of reasons. As you prepare for Sunday, think of the ways that you are a prodigal. Are you the one who stayed close to God, only to become resentful of God’s grace towards others, or are you the one who went off a burned your grace only to come back later seeking full restoration, or some combination thereof. In Christ, Bryan Have you ever hugged a tree? No really, I know that we joke about tree huggers being crazy environmentalists, but I am not talking about that I am asking if you have ever gone out and physically hugged a tree? A while ago sitting in a spirituality class the professor suggested that we all take a moment and hug a tree. Thankfully, the awkwardness of the action subsides quickly when a couple dozen classmates are scattered around the quad each hugging a different tree at the same time.
Once the strangeness of actually hugging a tree fell away, I started to notice something happening, almost as if I were becoming one with the tree, feeling the strength of its trunk and its vulnerability as the wind blew back and forth. After the exercise, we were all amazed at how connected we felt to the trees we had been assigned; we also were amazed at how in almost every case, we felt a spiritual connection to God through nature. For many in this world connecting to God is a very difficult thing. For many in our society, the hustle and bustle of daily life leaves no apparent time to connect. I tend to think this is an excuse more than the reality. Often when I find people struggling with God, they are experiencing this struggle with a mix of various issues from worry about correctness to fear of being vulnerable. Sometimes I find that people who are struggling the most with spirituality do so because they are either consciously or subconsciously afraid of what God will do when they truly give themselves over to Him. Nevertheless, it is scary to place trust in God. When we do that we have to let go of what we think is proper and give ourselves over to a reality that, well, is probably unknown and can be extremely scary. I remember the day I called my Dad and told him my decision of pursuing the ministry. To say that he was thrilled would be a lie. Having been responsible for church finances and served as an elder of the church I grew up in, he knew what I was going to have to deal with, probably more than I did. However, when he tried to talk me out of it, I said, still being a junior in college, “we will see where God takes me; I still have a long way until I am ordained.” After he heard my first sermon a few weeks after that conversation, he was very supportive. However, I can say that going into the ministry was probably harder on my parents than it was for me, since I know that God had some plan, and though I could never, nor still can I put my finger directly on it, I know God is there and I place my trust in God fully. This does not make life easy; however, when times are difficult, and I pray often God will show me a way, when I trust God. Though even as a pastor, sometimes I get lost in trying to make others happy or rate my success based on the opinion of others. Amazingly, every time I do that, after a while, I notice that I have fallen far afield and find myself spiritually disconnected from God. The interesting thing is that the easy thing to do much of the time is to do what is wanted or expected. To work to make myself or others happy rather than working towards the greater goal of a relationship with God because we do not trust that through the pain or struggle or even just time, God will be there and his Glory will shine. I guess that was the connection I felt when I hugged the tree. I know that when that tree was planted, God had a purpose for it. Standing strong as it did the day I hugged it, I knew that when it was young, it had to endure natural disasters and other storms. However, it was living into what God had intended for it to be as I am living into what God intends for me. When I trust God, I can see how the Church (the whole church) is struggling to live into what God intends from her; we just need to trust and connect. I have been spending a great amount of time since coming to the church trying to discern where God is calling us to go as a congregation. It is interesting listening to the congregation and reading about the times when the church has been up and looking at the times that the church has been down. What I really found interesting was what happened when the first church building became uninhabitable, and they finally broke ground on this spot creating the new Westminster Presbyterian Church.
At the time this church was built, the congregation of the then Second Presbyterian Church was struggling. With a drop in attendance due to their facility and other reasons, the congregation was at a cross roads, and a vote was taken to close and disband, to merge back with the First Presbyterian Church which seeded the congregation many years before, or to rebuild. Obviously, they chose to move west and rebuild in the new up-and-coming Alameda community. From its opening, Westminster Presbyterian was an anchor for the community. It was a place where people met; more importantly, it is where the community would worship. The tie to the community for this congregation defined our ministry and identity. Unfortunately, this identity began to wane, and the community began to change as well as the church. By the late 90’s the majority of members were driving to the church with almost all the members living outside the two-mile radius of the church. This remains the same today, though we are starting to see a change in this, as new members from the local community are being attracted to our church. Having served rural, urban, and suburban churches, there is a unique identity that defines the congregation. While some may argue that we are not really urban, we are. Within the few blocks of our church, we have every social status and family situation you can think of. With a high density of Gay and Lesbian individuals and families, families with young children, Spanish-speaking households, and high density living, including three homeless shelters we do not have to look far to see the needs that are right in front of us. Moreover, our community looks to us as an anchor. In recent community discussions on the future development of the Alameda, they speak of the Westminster Church being the western anchor of the developing community, with the new Whole Foods being the eastern anchor. While this is talk, it is interesting to hear that this is how the community views us. Nevertheless, this makes sense, as we are the meeting place for many of the groups and organizations. In fact, especially in the last few years, we have become a safe place for a lot of groups giving us the designation as the community center for many who live around us. This is good, and bad, in that I have literally had conversations with people who knew everything about our church except for the fact that we were a church. The neighborhood around the church is becoming renewed with the majority of people moving in being attracted to the strong community within this neighborhood. As many of the close neighbors have moved out, young families have moved in and are looking forward to strengthening this neighborhood, and many in the community are looking at the church to be that anchor. Some ask “what is our mission” as we look forward; maybe the best way is to look back and remember why we were created, to minister and worship God as a community, to be a refuge for people in search of faith, and most of all be connected to the needs of the people who are around us. |
AuthorRev. Dr. Bryan James Franzen Archives
September 2018
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