Holy Land Bound

From the time I was in high school, I subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Review.  It was a passion my Dad and I shared.  When I got to graduate school, he would come out to Claremont whenever there would be a visiting expert on archaeology in the Holy Land.  Every time I read the magazine I would think about studying in the Holy Land.  Or spending a summer on a dig in the Holy Land.  Or just traveling to see the Holy Land.

There are lots of people who want to "walk where Jesus walked."  That's not my prime motive.  I wanted to sense what life was like for our Old and New Testament fathers and mothers.  I wanted to see the great monuments, the magnificent ruins, the wells where ordinary people drew water and the remains of ordinary houses and orchards and graveyards.

Later, as study of Jewish life and Torah became a part of my education, I wanted to see what Israel had become under the stewardship of 20th-century people making it a new and growing land where the horror of the Holocaust might be redeemed and humanity could always remember the evils we are capable of perpetrating on one another.

About a year ago, our Choir Director, Stephanie Feder, was showing me the photos from her most recent trip to Israel.  I was so moved by her stories and the joy she shared about that trip.

Then she taught me something I didn't know (but should have.)  Somehow, I had the idea that the Wailing Wall was the western wall of the temple that was destroyed in 70CE.  It's not.  The Wailing Wall is the western wall that was built to create the temple mount.  It's actually a huge retaining wall, but it was all that was left of the great temple that was the center of Judaism. 

Recently, however, a small portion of a temple wall was discovered and is visible to tourists.  It's underground and when Stephanie showed me the picture I realized that fulfilling this dream of mine was long overdue.

In January I am leading a tour of the Holy Land through Educational Opportunities, a well-respected tour group that specializes in the Holy Land.  Final plans are being made now and I hope many of my friends from churches and elsewhere will join me.  I know it's a hard time economically, but this is a very reasonably priced tour.  For more information, please ask me. 

In the meantime, please pray for those of us going that God will renew our faith as we travel in the Holy Land.

Pastor Paula

Who Is Your...

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Summit hosted by Willow Creek Church. It is two-day gathering of hundreds of leaders both secular and religious from all around the world who share a common goal - to lead with diligence (Romans 12:8) for the sake of something bigger than themselves!

After two outstanding days of speakers and fellowship I have lots (too much!) to share with you. Let me start with one phrase that really stuck.

Craig Groeschel of livechurch.tv said, “We all need a Paul and we all need a Timothy.”

He meant that we all need someone from whom we are continually learning, someone whose life is filling us, teaching us, inspiring us, encouraging us.  Maybe someone close to us.  Maybe not.

When I taught writing (briefly) at CSUNorthridge, I took classes from a brilliant Bible scholar named James Goss.  He influenced me at least as much as any of my seminary professors.  Twenty-eight years later, when I arrived at Northridge UMC in 2005 to be their pastor, he was there!  During my time there we studied together every other week.  It was a time of great learning and much joy. 

Groeschel’s reference to Timothy meant that we also ought to have someone into whom we are pouring our life.

I know lots of us think, “Well, that’s what I’m doing with my children.”  I’m convinced he meant something different.  In fact, as influenced as we may be by our parents, we are often impacted by other folks.

Who is your Paul? Who is your Timothy?  

If no one comes to mind, think about it this week and seek to find yours.

Highlights from Sunday’s Sermon on Step 10 of Twelve Step Living for Everyday Christians-- “Everyday problem to God”

Highlights from Sunday’s Sermon on Step 10 of Twelve Step Living for Everyday Christians-- “Everyday problem to God”

The spiritual journey isn’t like pizza--something you get in the mood for once in a while and then you go to your favorite church, uh, I mean, pizza restaurant, and get your itch scratched. And for sure you can’t just dial up the phone and get a spiritual life delivered to your doorstep.

I have been sharing the Twelve Steps with you because I find them to be a spiritual tool that helps us regain balance and order and leads us to improved health and increased happiness through a renewed relationship with God.

So, if the spiritual life isn’t like pizza, what is it like? Maybe a garden?

There’s an advertisement where someone needed her landscaping done right now and the landscapers got the flowers beds planted in time by doing the work all night by the light of their vehicle headlights?

OK. Sometimes you can get a dramatic, conversion experience garden overnight. But, usually, in the ordinary course of things one plans, prepares and plants to get a garden. Then, constant care is required to keep the garden clear of weeds, which could retake the garden if allowed.

Our spiritual journey is similar to a garden. Our lives once belonged to the weeds--our self-defeating behavior--but God has helped us plant a garden in our lives.

We do not learn from experience, we learn when we reflect on our experience. Only when we take the time to reflect on how we are living now will we experience real character change.

Here are a few possibilities for you:

• Spot check. Postcards on the bathroom mirror, prayer magnets on the refrigerator, a bookmark with spiritual thoughts in a novel or spiritual reminder hanging from the rearview mirror. These are ways to check in with ourselves many times a day, briefly.

• Daily inventory. Here’s what I do: When it’s time for bed, I give myself a little time to reflect. Is there something that lingers, that is unsettling? If there’s something, I ask myself if I got tangled up in one of the seven deadly sins. I use the 7 deadlies because they’re pretty comprehensive and I have a good mnemonic for them: PAGGLES; P--Pride; A--Anger and resentment; G--Greed; G--Gluttony ; L--Lust; E--Envy; S--Sloth.

• Periodic long-term inventory. A day or a couple of days in peace and quiet. Reviewing how far we’ve come, how we’re doing. There are good tools in The Twelve Steps for Christians book that many of you bought and is available in our church library.

We must not judge ourselves too harshly. We need to recognize that nurturing ourselves emotionally and spiritually requires daily vigilance, loving understanding and patience.

The Tenth Step makes it clear that reflection by itself is not enough. There’s that second part of this step: “when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”

If we want to keep making progress personally and spiritually, we need to build something else into our lives. We need to face up promptly to any wrong that we may do.

So, our spiritual life isn’t like pizza, it’s more like a garden, planned, prepared, planted; tended, weeded, watered. I guess that makes us a garden club:)


Brief History of The Twelve Step programs

Alcoholics Anonymous began on June 10, 1935 and was co-founded by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith.
Wilson’s method was heavily influenced by the British Oxford Group movement and its American leader, Episcopal clergyman Samuel Shoemaker.
The framework and inspiration of the 12 Steps are solidly based in Christianity. Part of Bill Wilson’s genius was to break down the Christian experience into 12 Steps that could be understood and worked with diligence without requiring a specifically Christian spiritual experience.

May the music of the spheres, God's voice, sing to your heart today

I walked back to my hotel recently while on vacation from Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville humming. I was humming a tune with my lips, but my body was also humming. There's something about powerful music that sets my whole body thrumming. I'm sure some physicist could explain how that works, but I don't care. I just don't care.
I sat and listened to Marcus Hummon and Beth Nielsen Chapman as they shared their faith and their music. Both have written such hits as "This Kiss" for Faith Hill (Beth said it paid her way through college.) Marcus has written for the likes of the Dixie Chicks. It was all great. What talent they had and I sang along contentedly from the fourth row.
But, what had set my whole body and soul afire wasn't that. It was Ashley Cleveland. You may not have heard of Ashley, but we sing lots of her stuff in our early worship service. A recovering addict, Cleveland has one of the most compelling and powerful gospel voices I've ever heard. Her love of old hymns infuses them with new life, powerful spirit that moves the singer and listener both closer to the dangerous Holy Spirit.
Hearing Ashely live, as I have done several times over the last decade and a half, always brings me to tears. I thought about that as I walked home in the Nashville night, the breeze cooling me a little from the crowded hot sanctuary. I wondered why that night's particular rendition of "Come thou fount of every blessing" should be so moving.
"Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love." How easily my spirit wanders.
Is it the morning rush of thoughts, the mental to-do list that boots up as soon as I'm conscious that's causes my mind to wander?
Is it the ancient scars of hurts long past or bruises still recent that invite me to mull over my many hurts, wondering how God can let me suffer so?
Is it the fears of financial insecurity? The horrifying stories of abuse that a woman shared in my office last week? The struggle of a beautiful, honest, hard-working man who tears up when he tells me he can't find work without moving his family to the mid-west?
"Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love." How easily my spirit, my mind, my heart wanders."
And when I sit listening to Ashley Cleveland sing of the "Power of Love", the healing power of God, the old hymns of Jesus' love, I release and am healed. Perhaps for a day or a week.
And the music is always there to bring me home to God when I have, yet again, wandered.
Welcome home, her voice sings to me. Come back to Jesus, her guitar cries. Be strenthened, be encouraged, be comforted, I am here, God sings to me.

May the music of the spheres, God's voice, sing to your heart today.

Shalom, Pastor Paula

Ps I’d love to hear what you think!

Praying through the Seven Deadlies

At our Wednesday Prayer experience last week, we used our hour of prayer to explore compassion as a form of prayer.

Because Lent is a time of introspection (actually, when is our spiritual life NOT a time of introspection?) we spent a little time contemplating what obstacles stand between us and the compassionate people we want to be as Christ-followers.  

I am including here the meditation guide we used.  I invite you to pray through these.  We spent about 5 minutes contemplating each one, reading it twice during that time.  You may even want to journal your responses.  Sometimes God's voice comes through the pen to the paper and we discover wonderful things.

Let me know what happens for you.

The Seven Deadly Sins--PAGGLES (Wikipedia, “The Seven Deadly Sins”)

Pride

In almost every list pride, or hubris, is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and indeed the ultimate source from which the others arise. It is identified as a desire to be more important or attractive than others, failing to acknowledge the good work of others, and excessive love of self (especially holding self out of proper position toward God).

God of grace, show me where pride is standing between you and me.  Teach me the difference between humility and humiliation.  Show me how to be humble, but not self-abasing. 

God--how is my pride preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

Anger

This is historically considered to be the desire to seek revenge outside of the workings of the justice system (vigilantism), but is also generally wishing to do evil or harm to others.  Collecting resentments is sometimes considered to be part of anger, sometimes part of envy.

God of grace, show me where anger is standing between you and me.  Teach me how to stand up for myself without becoming angry.  Teach my how to work for justice with a “holy anger” rather than a sinful anger.

God--how is my anger preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

  

Greed

Greed, also known as avarice or covetousness, is, like lust and gluttony, a sin of excess. It is spending our energy trying to get more things, influence or power.  "Avarice" is more of a blanket term that can describe many other examples of greedy behavior. These include disloyalty, deliberate betrayal. 

God, show me where greed is standing between you and me.  Which of my “appetites” is driving my hunger and obscuring my real “need”?  Teach me to see my appetites as a longing for you.  Show me how to feed my hunger for you.

God--how is my greed preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

Gluttony

Depending on the culture, it can be seen as either a vice or a sign of status. Where food is relatively scarce, being able to eat well might be something to take pride in. But in an area where food is routinely plentiful, it may be considered a sign of self-control to resist the temptation to over-indulge.

Medieval church leaders took a more expansive view of gluttony, arguing that it could also include an obsessive anticipation of meals, and the constant eating of delicacies and excessively costly foods. CS Lewis includes constantly inconveniencing others with our particular preferences to be a form of this sin.

God, show me where gluttony is standing between you and me.  When is my gluttony disguised as something else?

God-how is my gluttony preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

Lust

Lust or lechery is usually thought of as excessive thoughts or desires of a sexual nature. Aristotle's criterion was excessive love of others, which therefore rendered love and devotion to God as secondary.

God, show me how my lust is standing between you and me.  God, show me where I am overly dependent on the love of others, the approval of others.

God--how is my lust preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

Envy

Greed is largely associated with material goods, where as envy may apply more generally. Those who commit the sin of envy resent that another person has something they perceive themselves as lacking, and wish the other person to be deprived of it.  

God, where is my envy standing between you and me?  When do I sin against others by wanting them not to have something so I can have it?  When do I sin against others by wanting them to be deprived so I can feel better about myself?  When do I sin against you by wanting things I don’t need.

God--how is my envy preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

Sloth

The belief that things should come easily, that our lives should have no difficulties.  Indifference to the difficulties of others.  Unwillingness to work hard for what we want.  The failure to utilize one's talents and gifts.

God, where is my laziness standing between you and me?  Help me know when you are calling me to rest and when you are calling me to work.  Help me avoid just being busy.  Help me stay encouraged to do your work.

God--how is my sloth preventing me from being the compassionate person you call me to be?

What I Almost Missed--2010.01.01

Most of us who lived through “the 60s” actually missed “the 60s”--which weren’t really the 60s at all, but more like the late 60s and early 70s.  Or, kind of starting in the 50s.  Depending, I suppose, on whether you’re talking about politics or culture.  The two don’t always intersect exactly.

I was definitely impacted by both the music and politics of what we loosely refer to as “the 60s” but in a backwards kind of way.

Born in 1956 to a family where both my parents might have described themselves as Goldwater republicans, my parents were never involved in the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, at least they didn’t ever talk about it.  Ours was not a family where the nightly news issues made it to the dinner table.

On the other hand, my dad seemed very conscious that his mother was quite a bigot, bless her.  And from an early age we had black folk, hispanic folk, asians and even a Mormon or two as intimate family friends.  As a child, I didn’t have any idea how unusual this was.

Somehow, without ever talking much about politics my parents instilled a strong sense of justice and fair play in both my sister and I.  I think it was confusing for them that we both went on to have strong political opinions about justice and equality for people of color, women and gay folks that took us pretty far away from their politics.

But, as I got out of college and into graduate school, I had a nagging sense that something important had happened that I had just barely missed.  The country seemed to have turned some kind of a corner, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Of course, the JFK assassination was powerful, even for a 6-year-old in a Republican household.  I knew about the Vietnam war, but never knew anybody who had protested it, only a couple of friends who had older brothers who had served there.  I watched President Nixon give his resignation speech on the television, but, at age XX, could not have comprehended the depth and breadth of what had happened.

Perhaps living on the Pacific slope, mostly in California, meant that the impact of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement wasn’t as striking to me.  I had never been around people who hated others because of their color (at least not in my hearing) Certainly, I was told from an early age that I should aim high academically and professionally.  In fact, my parents’ biggest stumbling block with my choice of profession wasn’t that I was a woman going into what had been until then strictly a man’s profession (still is in some churches, as we know), it was more that they doubted my ability to support myself in this job.  (They were mostly right about that.)  I can remember my fury when a high-school friend with straight As said she wasn’t going to college because her parents didn’t think women needed a college education and they were going to spend the money on sending her druggie younger brother.

Anyway, in recent years I’ve been attracted to books that reveal this period of our country’s and culture’s history.  I’m not an academic historian, so my reading has not been systematic, except to try to research what I plan to read so I don’t waste my time on poor scholarship or excessively biased accounts.

Last year I began tackling Taylor Branch’s daunting, Pulitzer-prize winning trilogy about America in the King years: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan’s Edge.  I say daunting because the three volumes are 1062 pages, 746 pages and 1039 pages respectively.  Too big to take on a plane, my best opportunities for undistracted reading time.

I’ve plowed through the first volume and found Branch’s account to be fascinating and more than thorough.  His work isn’t just a biography of King, it’s a biography set in the context of America’s history.  It’s got an enormous cast of characters.  It was especially fascinating to read about the part James Lawson played in this.  Rev. Lawson is a retired member of our Annual Conference and I have been acquainted with him for all of my ministry and listened often to his impassioned preaching at Annual Conference and other places.  While not a personal friend or mentor, his ministry heavily influenced mine and I had never really never known his part in the civil rights movement.

I was neither surprised nor disturbed to learn of King’s marital indiscretions.  These are neither played down in Branch’s account, nor are they given tabloid-type attention.  What was hard for a life-long Kennedy admirer to discover was the extent to which John Kennedy, and, to a lesser extent his brother Robert, were brought kicking and screaming into the civil rights movement as players for justice.   Having read [Manchester’s??] biography of Bobby Kennedy many years ago, I wasn’t shocked over his slowly awakening social conscience.  It was the resistance, the arrogant resistance, of Jack Kennedy to doing the right thing that was uncomfortable for one who wished to believe that if only JFK hadn’t been assassinated all would be well with America.

It’s not news that music played a big part in the civil rights movement--folk music mostly.  As an early (I mean EARLY) fan of Joan Baez (I sang along to my first Joan Baez album in 1959, when my parents brought it home and have been mad for Joan and everything she does, musically and politically, ever since) I knew about the connection and my musical journey inevitably because intertwined with issues of social justice.

More able folks than I have attempted to make the connections between the civil rights movement, the musical revolution brought by the rock and roll of Elvis and the Beatles and the influence on post 1968 rock/popular music of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin King, Jr.  But, those connections have provided a kind of free-associative track for other reading.

Some years ago, David Hadju wrote Positively 4th Street (Press, Year) a history of the interwoven relationships of Joan Baez, her sister Mimi Farina, Mimi’s late husband Richard Farina and, notoriously, Bob Dylan.  It was just the sort of stuff that I had missed by spending my time in school, church and Girl Scouts instead of reading gossip magazines and tabloids in Junior High School.  I knew a good bit of it from tracking Joan’s career (and, by extension Bob Dylan’s) in Rolling Stone magazine.  I confess, my interest in the acclaimed Mr. Dylan stemmed strictly from his connection to Joan Baez.  I eventually learned to appreciate his music greatly, especially if someone else was singing it.  This book expanded my appreciation for Dylan and for the much-lesser known, but not lesser talented Mimi Farina and Richard Farina, whose early death impacted all the remaining three and their music.

In the last couple of years I have also read Girls Like Us (Who, PRess, Year), a biography of Carole King, Carly Simon and [Joni Mitchell?] and their under-appreciated influence on the music of the 60s and the 70s.  This expanded my understanding of what was happening to American music and culture while I listened to the radio and sang along.  The career of Carole King, especially, was revelatory to me as I began to understand how rock and roll transitioned from its initial influences in Elvis, Buddy Holly and Chuck Barry to incorporate country and folk into the powerful influence of the music of the later 60s and 70s.

Long believing that little good music was made in the 80s (and not much more in the 90s, either) I found myself looking backward--reading and learning more about American roots music--stemming from my love of folk music.

In college I did a senior seminar on American Southern Literature and discovered country music (before Nashville became NashVegas).  About that time, Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm and The Band produced a documentary of their final concert in the Martin Scorscese film The Last Waltz.  From that followed reading that never quit.  And music listening habits that took a sharp turn south and into the black church.

Most recently, I ran across the coffee table book that was published as a companion piece to the PBS 4-part special called American Roots Music.  A lavishly illustrated book, with infinitely more information than the television special, I found myself swimming again in the wonders of all kinds of American music and the interplay between our cultural products and the politics of the same era.

Finally, XX’s book Laurel Canyon tells of the Los Angeles contribution to the music that most shaped me, that produced by the “California Sound” that dominated the popular music of America following the Kennedy assassinations and the liberation movements that were born from the civil rights movement.  Such people/groups as Crosby, Stills, Nash, the Byrds, the Mamas and Papas, Linda Ronstadt, Frank Zappa.  It’s a slightly gossipy account historically, but great musicologically in explaining both the ethos and the business practices that created an industry from a musical movement and produced some of the richest, most creative, most densely intertwined music in American history.

As one long-time music industry friend of mine (closely associated with Crosby, Still and Nash for many years) like to say, “It was an amazing time.  People are still playing our music and still playing with our music as we move ahead.”

Most who have survived the eras pharmaceutical excesses are now in recovery and making better music than ever before (Eric Clapton, Steve Earle come to mind).  And, the reading I’ve done has helped me look with more open eyes and ears into what’s been a-brewing in the last decade or so, with the (welcome) passing of 80s disco into the authentic sounds of Amy Winehouse and Ashley Cleveland, a mainstream appreciation for country music as a source for some of the most finely crafted song-writing and extraordinary session musicians, a fascination with how Woody Guthrie’s “talking blues” has become rap music and how folks are still crossing over from the church to the pubic arena (Jennifer Hudson).  Even 80s music isn’t sounding so bad as Glee reminds us of the joys of vocal co-operation and reigniting enthusiasm for choral music.

This reading has sent me back for more music and more books.  I’m doing my part to keep that part of the economy thriving.  And, if you want to borrow my DVD of PBS’ documentary of Joan Baez’ life, “How Sweet the Sound”, just let me know!