Our Finest Hour

We are responding to the affects of the storm over the long haul. Mike Stonbraker, Superintendent of the Northwest District offered these thoughts about our work after the storm. I wanted to share them with you. - Will Willimon

In my weekly emails to the Northwest District pastors preempting Easter, I encouraged them to prepare their church families for the most meaningful Easter season the church had ever encountered, especially during Holy Week. I challenged them to take their people through the daily recorded scripture that was offered to them focusing on the final days of Jesus’ earthly life. I pushed for them to examine the temple (their church) for the money changers and con artist that spoil the holiness of the Father’s House. Upset a few tables and whip a few if you must! From courtyard teachings to final betrayal, mock trials to crucifixion, I shared with them to ready the canvas of the mind’s eye for the sunrise burst of Easter Morning.

So, just over three weeks ago our churches were celebrating the resurrection story of Jesus. My last email in the Easter series begged the pastors to invite their congregations to journey deep into the opened tomb and examine for themselves that it was truly empty. Pray for Jesus to meet with them and call them by name. My final sentence in that email stated something to fact that preaching a sermon about a resurrection encounter with Jesus is one of the easiest things for us pastor’s to do. But once the church has met the resurrected King, that’s when the real work begins. It’s not so much the Easter Sunday morning that counts…but more like the Monday ministry that follows…that’s where the real work begins. If I could ever find someone that can writes good books, I would love to tell them, listen, Willimon’s “Thank God It’s Friday”, or even Capalo’s “It’s Friday But Sunday’s Coming!” is just the beginning, write one that’s entitled “Thank God It’s Sunday, but Monday’s Coming.” To meet Jesus in worship is the easy stuff, taking Jesus home and into the streets is where the difficulty begins.

The command to Mary from Jesus in Matthews Gospel was, “go and tell the boys I’ll catch up with them in Galilee.” I think that was the Master’s way of saying to Mary, “you have seen the Resurrected Lord, now Mary, the real work begins.”

On Easter Sunday little did any of us know what work really lay ahead of us. How many times have you met Jesus in the past 19 days? My youngest son Matthew is a football coach at Smith’s Station High School. I have heard him say to his boys on many occasions, “The way you respond to winning will show your knowledge, the way you react to loss and adversity will show your character.” This Cabinet, the leadership of the North Alabama Conference along with her churches has shown their character. We have risen to the call. Jesus has met us at every turn. But the real work still lies ahead. If you will pardon my recall, I want to semi-quote a phrase and add a few words that have been part of me for many years. On June 18, 1940, while preparing Britain for war, in his speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bare ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth (the North Alabama Conference) last for another thousand years, her people will say, this was their finest hour.”

Mike Stonbraker

An Open Letter

As Patsy and I have traveled about the Conference to witness the work of our churches in storm recovery many pastors have told us of their frustration that Spanish-speaking friends in the hard hit areas have been reluctant to take help from the church because they were afraid of possible reprisals from the state.

We thought this sad and hoped their fears were unfounded.

Then our state passed the meanest immigrant legislation bill in the nation.

The bill is an embarrassment to our state and does not represent the spirit of hospitality of our churches.

While I'm confident that the bill will be overturned I am proud that a number of our Methodists - those committed to evangelism and mission - are speaking up in the name of Christ to oppose this ill conceived bill that does nothing to help our state and does great harm to our sisters and brothers.

Many of our clergy plan to sign the following letter that will be sent to the governor, legislators and local newspapers. For clergy to add their signature to the letter, please email Rev. RG Lyons at rglyons@gmail.com with your name and church affiliation. We also invite all United Methodists to attend an ecumenical prayer vigil on June 25 at 6:30PM at Linn Park in downtown Birmingham. At the vigil we will pray for those affected by this new law as well as voice our opposition. In the coming months, we will also call for open dialogue concerning this law, our faith, and it's implications. For information on these opportunities, please check the conference website soon.

Will Willimon

An Open Letter to Governor Robert Bentley, Senator Scott Beason, and Representative Micky Hammon:

Forty-eight years ago, while sitting in a Birmingham jail cell, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that, just as Christians have a moral duty to obey just laws, they also have a moral duty to disobey unjust ones. We are a group of United Methodist ministers from all across the state of Alabama who believe that HB 56 is an unjust law. Both proponents and opponents of the bill have described HB 56 as the “toughest immigration law in the country.” Among other measures to halt illegal immigration, it gives police the ability to stop anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” may be here illegally. It requires schools to verify the immigration or citizenship status of students. It denies bail to anyone arrested for being here illegally. And, it makes it a crime for a citizen to associate with someone who is here illegally, whether that be inviting them to one’s home or church or giving them a ride in a car.

We know that many who support this law are well-meaning individuals who are seeking to find the state's best interest at heart: they are people who are worried about employment in this fragile economy and some feel that the state is strained to pay for services like health care, police and fire protection, and education for those who may be here illegally.

These are all valid concerns. We believe, however, that many elements of this law are not in the state’s best interest. Teachers and principals are already stretched thin and have suffered tremendous budget cuts. Requiring them to also verify the immigration status of students will, in all likelihood, cost rather than save money and can only distract them from their most important task: preparing our children to succeed. Prohibiting bond to people who are here illegally means that more and more people will be kept in jails that are already overcrowded and understaffed. Finally, this law will most certainly be challenged in court and could cost the state millions of dollars at a time when nearly every state board and agency must accept budget cuts in this economy.

As Christian ministers, however, we not only believe that this law is not in the state’s best interest, but we also believe it contradicts the essential tenets of the Christian faith. Scripture is filled with examples of God’s people wandering as “aliens and strangers.” In the Old Testament, God reminds the people, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).” Jesus told parables about people like the Good Samaritan – someone who was not considered a true Jewish citizen – stopping to help a battered and beaten man while the leaders of the people passed him by. And the apostle Paul taught us that in Christ there is “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).”

We believe that God’s call for the United Methodist church is to be a church for ALL people, to be in ministry to ALL people. HB 56 would define many of our churches and many people in our churches as lawbreakers. United Methodist across the state welcome all people, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, to our churches, activities, and programs. Many of our fastest growing churches are Spanish-speaking, and we do not check people’s immigration status at the door. In response to Jesus’ admonition in the parable of the Last Judgment to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger, many churches have ministries to care for those who are poor by providing them with food, shelter, and transportation. Again, we do not check people’s immigration status before inviting them into our church vans and cars. We United Methodist clergy will continue to be in ministry to all people and we call on all United Methodists to do the same.

In Christ’s Peace,
__________________

Don’t Be Afraid

This is my sermon for the Service of Ordination at this year's Annual Conference at Asbury UMC in Madison. We had a grand, informative, inspiring Conference. This sermon was my charge to our newest clergy.

5 The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” 8 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
6 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
-- Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20

We’re still in Easter, still in shock that crucified, dead Jesus has been raised. The women go to the tomb early on Easter while it was still dark. Where were the men disciples you ask? Don’t. Their’s is not a pretty story. Let’s just note that the first witnesses of resurrection, the first preachers of Easter, are women.

(Take that, you denominations that mistakenly teach that women shouldn’t preach!)

At the tomb, the women are met by an angel. And the angel says, “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. I’ve got some fearful news to tell you women. Brace yourselves for some terrifying information. Here I go with the frightening news: he is not here. He is risen. He is going on before you.

Question: why would the Easter angel say to the women, “Don’t be afraid”? He gives them the most unimaginatively joyful news and follows by saying, “Don’t be afraid?”

I think it’s because right after the angel says to the women, “He is risen!” the angel says, “Go preach!” Go and publicly proclaim: God wins! Jesus is raised!

Later, when the women meet the risen Christ, he also says to them, “Don’t be afraid.”

You would think he would have said, “Rejoice! I’m raised from the dead!”

But the first thing the risen Jesus says to them is, “Don’t be afraid.” And the next thing he says is, “Go preach! Tell those cowardly male disciples (hunkered down behind lock doors) I have been raised!”

Some kind of connection is being made here, not simply between “He is raised” – “Don’t be afraid” but rather between, “Don’t be afraid” – “Go preach!”

If you have difficulty understanding the link between fear and vocation, between terror and the call “Go preach!” then ask any ordinand here tonight. He or she will explain it to you.
I meet with all our ordinands before I lay hands on their heads. In those encounters with soon-to-be deacons and elders I’ve heard:

“I’m afraid that God may have gotten me mixed up with somebody by the same name from another county.”

“I’m really scared that I don’t have the training I need to oversee a congregation.”

Or, “Sometimes I fear that seminary didn’t really train me to lead anybody anywhere.”

In Christian leadership, fear comes with the territory. Scripture says that it is a “fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.” Presumably, it isn’t fearful to acquiesce into the arms of a dead god, a god whom we use to get what we want. But it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God who uses us to get what God wants.

Well, the male disciples do as the women proclaim. They go to Galilee and, just as he promised, the risen Christ appears. Matthew says that when they saw Christ, “they worshipped him; but some doubted.” Anytime the church gathers to worship Jesus, along with prayer and praise, there’s also doubt. But here it’s not just any old doubt.

What did they doubt? The risen Christ stood right in front of them, had been with them for weeks, say some of the gospels. Surely they didn’t doubt that he was resurrected. What did they doubt?

The answer is in the specific words Jesus speaks: “All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

His resurrection is authorization by God Almighty that Jesus Christ has complete divine authority. But authority to do what?

That is answered by his next words: “Go, therefore,…make disciples, baptizing and teaching all that I have commanded.” Jesus’ authority is the authority to commission, to send these fearful, doubting disciples into the world to make disciples.

I think that’s why “some doubted.” They didn’t doubt that he was resurrected. They doubted Jesus’ authority, or at least his good judgment, in commissioning a rag-tag group of losers like them to, “Go…make disciples….baptizing…teaching….”

Lori, Mark, Alex, Joy, Wade and all the rest, I bet (if Methodists were permitted to bet) that you know exactly why “some doubted.”

How can it be that a crucified, resurrected Lord would summon fearful, doubting people like us to do his courageous, revolutionary work?

Tonight, in this service, that’s what the church tries to say to you:

Don’t be afraid. God knows what God is doing when God calls you for ministry.

Don’t doubt. Jesus believes that you will be faithful to his call, even more than you may believe in you.

In your ministry after this night, believe that. Believe not only that dead Jesus was raised, but that resurrected Christ immediately began calling women and men like you to help him save the world.

After thirty-nine years of ordained ministry the only claim I have for authority, the only hope I have that my pitiful ministry counts is this: I’ve been summoned by a Savior who confounds the wisdom of the world by calling fools like us to grow his Kingdom.

Upon my arrival here, when I laid out my plans for what I wanted to do, a wise, old, experienced pastor asked, “What gives you the right to tell us what to do? D you think that these changes will make a difference? We’ve been declining for a decade and I don’t think you are good enough to turn things around.”

And in the face of his justifiable incredulity at my episcopacy all I could say was, “I believe, despite my fears and doubts, I’ve been called. I believe that this was God’s idea before it was mine. I’m not the smartest or most experienced bishop you could get, but I’m the only one God sent. So there.”

Don’t be afraid! Believe in Jesus’ vocation more than you believe in your human limitation!

I recall the woefully frightened young pastor who was sent, for his first appointment, to a congregation universally acknowledged to be the meanest in the South Carolina Conference. That poor young preacher nearly had a breakdown when the bishop appointed him there.

First Sunday summoning forth his courage, he went out to the church and somehow managed to tremble and shake through his first sermon, terrified to look up from his notes at some of the mean looking Methodists.

Finally he stood at the door, bidding farewell to the stone-faced, cold handed members as they exited. The lay leader of the church paternally put his arm around him and said, “Son. We know what you have heard. We ain’t going to hurt you.”

The terrified young preacher went limp with relief.

“We ain’t going to harm you,” reassured the lay leader. “But we aim to kill that fool bishop that sent you.”

True story.

Newest sisters and brothers in our Conference, my charge to you tonight: “Don’t be afraid. There is no daunting task that Christ sets before you that he will not also give you what you need faithfully to fulfill his summons. Don’t doubt. Jesus has this uncanny gift for calling the right people to do his work.”

Tonight your church rejoices that once again, the risen Christ sends us just the people we need to give our church a future, to enable us Methodists to be faithful. Don’t be afraid.

- William H. WIllimon

Healthy Congregations

It’s a typical Sunday morning for me and Patsy. We drive past fallow fall fields, trustworthy GPS coaxing us down the rural roadway. Just over an hour outside of Birmingham we descend a low hill, the trees part, and we see a little white frame church, a building that is type cast as everyone’s idea of a church. An hour before the service only a few pickup trucks have gathered in the church’s gravel lot. Spotting an aging Ford Taurus parked in the shade, I comment knowledgeably, “At least the pastor is here.”

“Though this county has lost a third of its population, it now has the third highest influx of Spanish speaking people. That building was built after the fire – in the Forties – they still call it ‘the new church,’” I say, showing off my reading. It is my custom to ask for a summary of the demographic context and the congregational history when I make a Sunday visit. While my sermon preparation is helped by knowledge of the congregation’s past, the truth is that most of our congregations have more history behind them than future before them.

The majority of our congregations, like the one where I’m the visiting preacher today, are located where they were planted a century ago. In every case, the community that gave them birth has relocated. Though the people around the congregation have changed, the congregation has remained fixed on the same land where it was established and, in many cases, fixed in the same rhythms of congregational life that worked for them decades ago, but no longer work today.

That’s one of the things people love about a church – it doesn’t move. It blooms where planted and, long after it has ceased to be fruitful, stays planted. We build our churches to look at least two hundred years older than they actually are. Inside, we bolt down the pews and make the furniture heavy and substantial. That the world around the church is chaotic and instable is a further justification for the church to be fixed and final.

One of my younger churches worships in the “contemporary worship” idiom. The pastor complained to me of boredom: “We are singing the same songs, using the same pattern of worship that we’ve been stuck with for the past twenty years. Worst of all, we call it ‘contemporary’!”

“Why not change?” I asked naively.

“This is a highly mobile suburban neighborhood,” he explained. “Only a couple of my members have been here longer than I. The last thing my people want is for church to force even more change. Contemporary has become our hallowed, immutable tradition.”

In a time when many feel overwhelmed by change – the government’s economic attack on the middle class, high unemployment among our young adults, shifting political alliances, soaring debt to pay for the biggest military in the world, the demise of once sound institutions, changing social mores, the information explosion – the church is tapped to play the role of island of stability amid a sea of change.

What is incomprehensible is that we call this stability-protecting, past-perpetuating institution “the Body of Christ.” All the gospels present Jesus as a ceaseless peripatetic. Never once did he say, “Settle down with me.” No, with vagabond Jesus it was always, “Follow me!”

Consider the first days of Christ’s resurrected life. Not content just to be raised from the dead, the risen Christ is in motion, returning to the rag-tag group of Galilean losers who had failed him. (Matthew 28:16-20)

And what does Jesus say? “You have had a rough time. Settle down in Galilee among these good country folk with whom you are most comfortable. Buy real estate, build a church, get a good mortgage, and enjoy being a spiritual club”? No. The risen Christ commands, “Get out of here! Make me disciples, baptizing and teaching everything I’ve commanded! And don’t limit yourselves to Judea. Go to everybody. I’ll stick with you until the end of time -- just to be sure you obey me.”

How like the rover Jesus to disallow his people rest. Refusing to permit them to hunker down with their own kind, he sent those who had so disappointed him forth on the most perilous of missions. They were, in Jesus’ name, to take back the world that belonged to God. There is no way to be with Jesus, to love Jesus, without obeying Jesus, venturing with Jesus. “Go! Make disciples!”

The theme of this year’s Annual Conference is “Healthy Congregations.” We are going to reflect on our Conference priority of building healthy churches. One way to tell if a person is in good health is if that person is out and about, if that person is able to be a person in motion.

One way to tell if a congregation is healthy is that it is on the move, trying to keep up with the machinations of the risen Christ. Thanks be to God the majority of our churches, thought they may have been planted where they are a century ago, show a wonderful willingness to be in motion with the risen Christ.

William Willimon

The Joy of Ministry

A highlight of worship at Annual Conference will be our services of Ordination and Commissioning. In these services our church recognizes God’s gift to us of a new generation of United Methodist pastoral leaders.

Ministry, in any of its forms, is always God’s idea before it is ours. While we pastors may come to enjoy our clerical vocation, we do it first of all not because it causes us bliss but rather because it is the job to which God has called us. God loves to summon people to painful, impossible tasks. Service to Christ and his church begins in Christ’s call. That’s why reflection upon ministry in any of its forms begins with baptism – the laying on of hands is a baptismal gesture that only later, and regrettably, became almost exclusively associated with ordination. All Christians are “ordained” through baptism to share in Christ’s ministry in the world. A few of the baptized are designated by the church to equip and to mobilize their fellow Christians to share Christ’s ministry – these are called clergy.

All Christian leadership begins in God’s determination to have a people in motion helping God retake God’s world. For those of us in ordained leadership in our church, sometimes the great challenge is to believe in us half as much as God in Christ believes in us; though laity can be forgiven for watching us pastors in action and thinking lots of things before thinking, “gift of God.”

My former boss at Duke, Nan Keohane, defines leadership as “providing solutions to common problems or offering ideas about how to accomplish collective purposes, and mobilizing the energies of others to follow those courses of action.”[1] This is as good a global definition of leadership as I know -- except for one missing element -- God. A faithful pastor allows God the Father to define our common problems, asking Jesus Christ for the grace to find solutions that are compatible with the Christian view of reality, and then assists the Holy Spirit in mobilizing the energies of fellow disciples to do the work. All Christian leadership is under obligation to keep our leadership theological rather than a-theistic (attempting to lead as if God were not).

When Rowan Williams was made Archbishop of Canterbury the press asked if he had doubts about accepting the new post. Williams replied, “You’d be a maniac not to have doubts…..it’s a job that inevitably carries huge expectations and projections,… you live through other people’s fantasies in a way, and to try and keep some degree of honesty, clarity and simplicity in the middle of that is going to be hard work – so that frightened me a lot.”[2] Fear and trembling come with the summons to ministry of leadership of the church, fear of God’s demands, apprehension of the church’s fantasies and expectations, dread of your own limits.

Considering our present obsession with leadership, it’s odd that the New Testament has so little to say about the subject. For instance in one of the few places where scripture bothers with bishops, the First Letter to Timothy says:

Now a bishop must be worthy of reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money. (1 Timothy 2:2-3)

Well, at least I am the husband of one wife.

While I take comfort that First Timothy has modest ethical expectations for bishops, these days, it isn’t easy being bishop. The Bishop of Rome continues to twist in the wind due to almost daily revelations of sex abuse by priests under his care. The Archbishop of the Church of England isn’t doing so hot either – he’s just been forced to make another public apology. Both I and the Pope could learn from Williams’ skilled self-flagellation before the media. My heart goes out to the Archbishop. Though I’m far from the depth of his intellect, like Rowan I came to the episcopacy from academia and, like him, have difficulty being comprehended. I am also an anti-establishmentarian now forced to prop up and to defend the establishment. And like the good Archbishop I can’t find a way fully to please either conservatives or liberals.

But being a specifically Christian leader has never meant first of all to be easily understood, popular and well liked, or pleasing to peoples’ expectations. It means first of all to serve God, to work to move forward God’s purposes, and earnestly to try to do what God wants before serving what we want.

It’s a vocation full of peril, failure, and frustration to be sure. But I’m happy to report, after four decades of my own attempt at ministry, and from what I’ve observed (particularly in the past four weeks in Alabama) that it is a profession full of great joy. It is a joyful thing to feel that ones life is being used by God for godly endeavor.

I spent some time a few weeks ago, attempting to help a young woman discern if God might be calling her into the United Methodist ordained leadership. That morning I had spent some time at one of our disaster relief centers, working with Methodists attempting to help people after the storm. I had seen some of our pastors leading some remarkable work in some very difficult situations.

I said to the young person exploring vocation, “I don’t know at this point whether or not God is calling you into ordained leadership. But you need to pray that God will call you into the pastoral ministry. It’s a great way to go!”

William H. Willimon

Reading Job in a Whirlwind

In the Hebrew scriptures “whirlwind” designates a variety of destructive, violent winds. Tornadoes are rare in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was a tornado that swept up Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). To my mind the most notorious whirlwind in scripture is the violent “great wind” that swept across the desert and destroyed Job’s house, killing all of Job’s children. (Job 1:19) This destructive wind is the catalyst for Job’s moving poetic lament and his protest against the injustice of the pain and tragedy that have taken all of his goods and his beloved family as well.

In the past weeks we in Alabama have had cause to renew our friendship with Job. We have witnessed, and many personally suffered, the havoc and calamity of a series of great and mighty whirlwinds. Standing with Pastor Ryan Rosser in the ruins of our Long Memorial Church in Cordova, I saw how an ill wind destroys. We were to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Long Memorial next year. Now this historic, beautiful church with its exquisite windows and noble belfry is in ruin.

The next day, while thanking a team of United Methodists from Adam Hamilton’s Church of the Resurrection in Kansas for their work in one of the impoverished, devastated areas of Tuscaloosa, a veteran chain saw operator showed me the peril of cutting into a huge tree that the tornado had crashed into the top of a house.

“The tornado, in just a few seconds, takes these big trees and twists them, twisting the wood like a coiled spring,” he explained. “Put a chain saw to it, release the tension, and the tree can literally explode, sending the chain saw back in your face.”

The awesome, awful power of the biblical whirlwind, seen in contemporary Pleasant Grove with hundreds of ruined homes is terrible to behold. In the past weeks, in the fevered activity at dozens of our church disaster relief centers, I have seen innocent lives twisted by a great, evil wind.

And yet, not until my most recent reading of Job did I notice: the terrible whirlwind that destroys Job’s life and blows him into misery in the end becomes the very voice of God. After thirty-six chapters of Job’s lament and his friends’ false consolations, God at last speaks. And how does God speak?

“Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind….” (Job 38:1) God speaks to Job from the whirlwind. The horrible, destructive, death-dealing wind becomes a means of divine-human communication. Not that Job likes hearing what God says to him “out of the whirlwind,” and not that God’s words to Job are completely comprehensible or undo the tragedy Job has suffered. Still, God speaks. Job has pled for God to come and speak. At last God does – “out of the whirlwind.”

In these past three weeks I have witnessed this phenomenon. Pastor John Gates, as we surveyed the remarkable response of Pleasant Grove UMC, said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I feel so privileged to be able to serve during this time.’” John says that on Sunday, in their devastated community, in their badly damaged church, they had the largest crowd they had seen in years with regular Pleasant Grove communicants joining their voices in praise and prayer with Methodists from all over the country who had come to help us in our need. John preached a three way sermon with two visiting preachers, one a Methodist from Pennsylvania and another a Church of God pastor from Texas whose teams had spent the week working out of Pleasant Grove.

Too many pastors and laypeople to mention have told me, “This has been the greatest experience of ministry. Our church is closer to God and more engaged in the true mission of Christ than ever because of the storm.”

How amazing that a redemptive God can transform the worst of ill winds into a revealing, divine breath. What grace that a God can take a death-dealing wind and, in church, use it to speak to us.

Will Willimon

Invite someone in your community to join us in relief work this week at one of our dozens of disaster relief centers.

Also, we have started a Disaster Response account for all our efforts in responding to the storms here in North Alabama. Direct gifts to this fund can be sent to our Conference Treasurer’s Office at 898 Arkadelphia Road, Birmingham, AL 35204. Make your checks payable to “North Alabama Conference” and mark “North Alabama Disaster Response” in the memo line.

Prayer of Hope

I am offering the following prayer of hope after the storms of April 27, 2011.

Lord Jesus Christ,
You are our Savior who saves us amid the storm.
You are our Comforter who comes to us in our pain.
You are in life, in death, in life beyond death our only hope.

We pray this day for all those who suffer in body or soul, particularly our sisters and brothers among us in Alabama who have suffered pain and loss because of the storms that ravaged our state. We ask your comforting presence among those who struggle in the destruction and the loss. We pray for your guidance for those who feel overwhelmed and over burdened by the aftermath of the storms.

We give you thanks for all those who have given money and time to help the victims rebuild their homes and their lives. Thank you for motivating so many to reach out to us in our time of need.

Lord, you have never left us alone in our need. Time and again you come to us amid the storm. Thus we have hope, hope not in ourselves or our own devices but rather hope based upon your faithfulness and upon our experience of your steadfast love.

Amen.

This prayer is now among the notes of thoughts and prayers from many from United Methodists around the world who posted comments throughout the Conference website that they are praying for North Alabama following the spring storms. These comments from United Methodists in North Alabama, youth and children in Slidell, LA; Rev. Adam Hamilton of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas; pastors in Texas, South Carolina and Oklahoma and others – have been collected on the North Alabama Conference Disaster Response Prayers page.

To read all the prayers visit the Disaster Response Prayers page.

To add your own prayer, while viewing the prayer page, click the submit prayer link in the left menu.

The Limits of Explanation

Last year Professor Bart Ehrmann of the University of North Carolina cranked out yet another book, God’s Problem. Dr. Ehrmann breathlessly announces that he has discovered that God has a big problem – suffering. Ehrmann dismisses various futile attempts on the part of God to explain why there is suffering, pain, and disaster in the world – the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Ehrmann reaches the conclusion that God comes up short in regard to a plausible explanation for suffering. Dr. Ehrmann says that, even though he personally does not believe in God, he can’t figure out why so many otherwise intelligent people persist in the notion that God is good – look at all the suffering that God can’t explain.

Now, I’m all for explanations, have attempted some of them myself. I have spent much of my life trying to figure out answers to some of life’s toughest questions, write books on what I’ve discovered, and convey explanations to my students and my parishioners.

In the past two weeks I’ve learned again that terrible, destructive, undeserved tragedies are, on the whole, inexplicable.

Pine Grove UMC (pastor, Don Burgess) was built over a hundred years ago, with stone that was pulled up the hill by mule teams. Now, those huge stones have been cast all over the hillside and Pine Grove Church has been leveled to its foundations. That same day I stood among the volunteers working at Pleasant Grove Church (pastor, John Gates) and saw nearly equal destruction of one of our beloved churches.

No one around me at those locations of terrible destruction asked, “Why me? Why God?” Most of them were too busy, drenched in sweat, and dust from the rubble to pause to engage in philosophical speculation. Their most persistent question was, “How can we do more to support and work for the victims?”

And that seems very Christian to me. Jesus was not a great philosopher who came with a set of noble precepts and brilliant ideals. Jesus never said, “Think about me.” Rather it was always, “Follow me!”

Jesus was among us as a victim of horrible injustice. He offered us few explications of suffering and injustice; he offered himself as fellow sufferer. As Hebrews says, Jesus not only came to us but suffered with us. He offered us not reasoned explanations but rather empathetic, life-giving presence with us. He gave us not a great way to think about tragedy but a way of acting in and through tragedy.

Professor Ehrmann, believe it or not, that’s as close as Christians come to a true explanation for suffering. God in Jesus Christ does have a real problem – this God cannot desert us, cannot not keep coming back to us or refuse to stand with us.

We Wesleyan Christians have never been known for our great speculative theologians. We have been known for our warm hearts and active hands. John Wesley considered that any theology that can’t be put into practice wasn’t worth thinking. Thank goodness our churches didn’t wait to ponder the eternal implications of the horrible storms that swept through our state and destroyed so many of our churches, homes, and families. We went right to work. We were first on the scene and we reassured our devastated communities like Fultondale, Forrest Lake, Tuscaloosa, Phil Campbell, and Cullman (and others listed on our website) that we will remain with them throughout the long, arduous process of rebuilding.

And that, my fellow Wesleyans, is better even than learned explanations.

Will Willimon

The Body of Christ in Motion

I wish that all of you could have been with me for the last couple of days. Yes, the devastation in places like Tuscaloosa, Fultondale, Sand Mountain, Cullman, and Phil Campbell is terrible to behold.

And yet….the response of our people in the United Methodist Church is an even greater wonder. I began the weekend bragging that United Methodists were feeding five thousand people a day, but quickly revised the number to ten thousand. In Tuscaloosa our churches like Forrest Lake and Southside were badly damaged – and had staging areas and dining tents set up in their front yards. At Phil Campbell you could hardly see our horribly damaged church for the dozens of workers, tents, and disaster response trailers the Northwest District had assembled out front. We have shown that we can respond quickly and effectively to meet the immediate needs of the victims and the volunteers. Our churches are housing many hundreds of utilities workers and those who have lost their homes.

Tom Hazelwood of UMCOR spent the weekend with us, helping us to organize for the longer term. The North Alabama Conference is leading this recovery for the long run. The Reverend Matt Lacey will continue to train and to equip our responders. Linda Holland, our new Connectional Ministries Director, is mobilizing our Connectional Ministries to give all their focus over the next couple of months to the recovery. The Reverend Tom Duley will coordinate and place all volunteers coming into North Alabama from elsewhere.

Today I’m also appointing the Reverend Bob Alford as the Director of our Disaster Recovery effort. Throughout the Conference I’ve heard that we need an experienced, senior person to serve as the overall coordinator and director of our efforts, one person who knows exactly what we’re up to and where the help is needed. If you need information on our staging areas, places of need, and how your church can plug into our far flung efforts, beginning May 4 we will have a dedicated number to call. The number will be posted on the conference website (www.northalabamaumc.org). Director of Communication Danette Clifton will also continue to keep information constantly updated on our website. If you have questions and need answers, go first to our website, then call the 800 number.

Many of you know that I have long been a critic of some of Methodism’s overly articulated organizational structure. We’ve got so many rules, so many layers of bureaucracy. This past week, I’ve rediscovered the beauty of our name – Methodists. We have a methodical approach to discipleship. We believe if there’s good worth doing in Jesus’ name, it’s worth rightly organizing ourselves to do it well. I give thanks that the North Alabama UMC didn’t wait until a disaster struck to get ready for a disaster and that, with our connection in good working order, we were ready to respond when the time came for us to step up and testify to our faith through our deeds of mercy and love.

Will Willimon

Even Amid the Devestation; Christ is Risen!

The Second Week of Eastertide will long be remembered by us as the time of terribly deadly storms that ravaged Alabama. We have lost over a dozen of our churches, a number of parsonages, the homes of many of our people, and worst of all, the lives of many sisters and brothers. We are heartbroken.

In times like these God gives us the opportunity to rediscover the redemptive work of God in Jesus Christ. By God's grace, we believe we shall look back on the next few weeks as a time when -- even admid our tragedy -- we experienced the presence and power of the Risen Christ. Our loss is huge, but we may find that the gifts of God are greater even than our loss. Still, Light shines.

Over the past harrowing forty-eight hours, I've been proud of our churches and our pastors as they move into prayer and into action -- Matt Lacey's teams have shown the wisdom of hours of training and preparation for such a time as this. The North Alabama Conference has had all too much exposure to natural disaster. We have developed one of the most extensive and well prepared network of staging areas, disaster response teams, equipment facilities and trained people who are able to respond in force. Through UMCOR and our connectional giving, we have not waited until disaster struck. We are connected, organized, and in action in Christ's name. Over the last forty-eight hours, the Cabinet and I have been engaged with our churches and pastors who were hit. Methodists from all over the country have been sending messages of concern and will receive funds to help us. I've heard from pastors in North Carolina, Maryland., Indiana, and Washington who will be receiving offerings for us on Sunday. Even in the storm, our connection is testifying to our faith in God's ability to redeem even this. We are not alone!

We shall build back our devestated churches. We shall stick with our ravaged communities. We shall offer funds and hands-on-work for those in need. We gave over half a milliion dollars to help with Katrina relief and days and days of work. We shall do even more now that disaster has come our way.

And we shall claim all Wesleyan good work as visible proof.that, even in the storm, even amid the loss, "Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!"

I'll be in our hard hit Southwest District this weekend, and will preach at our Forrest Lake Church (even without electricity and badly damaged, Forrest Lake has taken in those who need shelter). We shall pray, shall receive a special offering for the victims, and we shall testify to our faith in a God who keeps coming back to bless us, to raise us up, and to be with us.

Will Willimon

Easter: God Comes To Us

The Resurrection is not only an event in the past; it has present implications. Easter is a sign of what God is up to in the world. The same resurrected Jesus who came back to his defeated disciples continues to come to us. This meditation is selected from my book, “Why Jesus?”(Abingdon, 2010). Happy Easter.

On Easter evening, when the disciples gathered behind the locked doors and the risen Christ came and stood among them, two of the twelve were absent. Thomas was somewhere else. Judas wasn’t there either and we know why: he was mourning his own betrayal of Jesus into the hands of the authorities. Judas believed in the power of the authorities, or the power of money, or the power of revolution or something else he deemed more loveable than Jesus. (In my experience, this is the way it is with some disbelief. It’s not so much that we don’t believe; it’s that we deeply believe that something or someone else is much more of a “god” than Jesus.)

Thomas also disbelieved. But his disbelief had a more willful tint than Judas’ disbelief. Thomas told the other disciples, when he heard that Christ had appeared to them, “If I can’t touch the holes in his hands and jab my fist through the wound in his side, I will not believe that the apparition that you saw was really Jesus.”

The next thing you know the risen Christ reappears, telling Thomas, “Go ahead. Jab your hand in my side. Stop your unbelief and believe.”

How do we know that the one who is raised from the dead is Jesus? Jesus, God crucified, has nail prints in his hands, a gaping wound in his side.

John doesn’t say that Thomas took Jesus up on his offer. I like to think that he didn’t. Just having Jesus compassionately reach out to his disbelief, just hearing Jesus say, “You need proof? I’ll give you proof,” was all Thomas needed to exclaim, “My Lord! My God!”

The Resurrection is a sign that Jesus is determined to give back the whole world to God, including you. He will stoop at nothing, even a cross, even allowing you to make a crude poke in his side, to get to you. So, if you’re having trouble believing in Jesus as the Son of God, don’t worry. It will come. He isn’t done with you or with the world yet. The King is determined to have sway over your life. The divine Lover will stoop to anything to get what he wants. Keep looking over your shoulder. He wants you.

William H. Willimon

P.S. Our Conference Lay Ministry Team has coordinated daily devotionals written by lay people from across the Conference to help us prepare for Annual Conference 2011. The devotions are on our Conference website as part of the Lay Ministry Blog. They will run from today, April 25, thru June 8. Go to www.northalabamaumc.org/ac11devo to see the devotionals each day.

God's Peculiar Love

Over the next few weeks, I’m reflecting upon Jesus as God’s salvation. These meditations are selected from my book, “Why Jesus?” (Abingdon, 2010). Lent is the season of the cross. The cross rearranges our definitions of God – God defined not as almighty power but rather as suffering love.

The night before his death on a cross, Jesus cries out in Gethsemane, in prayer, “I don’t want to die,” he, who was one with the Father, shows the peculiar nature of God’s love: God’s love is not sentimental or sweet; it is costly love that is free to love completely, even unto death. Jesus in Gethsemane also embodies God’s freedom: God is free to walk away from the horrors of humanity or to love even down to the dregs of suffering and death. In love, God chooses to love all the way to the end.

Still, from what we know of Jesus, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything less than drinking the cup of suffering down to the bottom and being obedient to the Father for, in so doing Jesus is being true to his deepest self. The God whom Jesus reveals in Gethsemane is not being less-than-godly in this anguish in the Garden but is rather disclosing true divinity – suffering, sacrificial love, all the way to the end. And the God who loves humanity enough to die with and for humanity reveals what true humanity really is – obedient, trusting love. Here is a God who is truly known only in Gethsemane as the cross looms before him. So when, after the Garden, the next day as Jesus breathes his last and the soldier says, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!”[i] we hear a statement that can only be made at the foot of the cross after a night like that – Jesus is fully human and fully God, God truly human, humanity truly caught up into the divine heart, Mount Calvary become Mount Zion, the veil in the temple ripped in two.

A wonder as great as his resurrection was his death on the cross. The miracles he performed were wonderful but they were temporary fixes, holding death at bay for just awhile. Jesus did more than love the world through an occasional good deed here and there – a random act of kindness to somebody’s mother-in-law, the restoration of sight to one blind man. On the cross he accomplished something cosmic, decisive, something that went right to the heart of the matter.

By the way. Where were Jesus’ disciples during all this sweat, tears, and anguish in the garden? Once again, true to form, they are sleeping like babes, thereby aggravating Jesus to no end. It isn’t like he asked them to die for him; all he asked was that they watch and stay half awake one hour for him while he prayed.[ii]

Repeatedly Jesus predicted his death but his disciples found it impossible to believe.[iii] Perhaps having seen so much good and so much God in Jesus, it was inconceivable to them that the world would eventually turn on the God who had so graciously, in Jesus, turned to us. Perhaps it was that they just couldn’t conceive of anyone named “God” acting in such a way as to get crucified.

So when soldiers come to arrest Jesus, his lead disciple, Peter, swings into action, takes matters in hand, draws a sword (Jesus had earlier expressly commanded his people not to take extra baggage while walking with him[iv]) and nicks a piece of an ear of the High Priest’s servants. Jesus rebukes Peter telling him to put away the sword, not because Peter is such a lousy swordsman but because this isn’t at all the way God’s reign comes.

“Do you think,” Jesus asks, “that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me twelve legions of angels?”[v]

But that would be the way of Caesar, not Jesus. Rome promised their allies and subject peoples peace, security, good highways and the best legal system in the world. But at a price: high taxes, an oppressive bureaucracy, a far flung military, a few worship services to honor the Emperor, and much crucifixion of Jews.

Jesus went to the cross between vacillating but dangerous Pilate and the colluding religious authorities. Rome had an economic and military stranglehold upon the whole known world; Jesus commanded his followers never to take up the sword. Jesus’ sovereignty was different from Rome,[vi] as is dramatized by the Romans mockery of Jesus just before crucifying him, putting a royal robe upon him and shouting, “Hail king!”[vii] Rome solidified power with the whip, nails, and a cross; Jesus accomplished what he wanted to do through nonviolent, suffering love.

To the mob crying, “Crucify him!” Pilate said, “Behold the man,” not knowing his double entendre. Pilate is no real man in his dithering appeasement of the crowd. This bedraggled, whipped rabbi before whom Pilate smirks is the real man, the model for true humanity. Yet Pilate is not alone in infamy. Pilate tells the chief priests that he is inclined to release Jesus, for this little rabbi is no real threat to the Empire.

And the reply of the religious authorities? “If you let Jesus go, you are not really a true friend of Caesar,”[viii] they say, implying that they are Caesar’s friends. They seal their apostasy with the astounding claim, “We have no king but Caesar.” They thus forsake the teaching of the whole Old Testament. How many times did the God of Israel need to say, “I am the one, the only Lord. All the world is mine. I am King”? The cross is a sad reminder to religious leaders of any age about the cost of subservience to the government and the predominate order, the substitution of Jesus’ way for Caesar’s.

In Gethsemane and on Calvary’s hill, Jesus redefined the sovereignty of God. The one we expected to be the royal Victor became the tortured Victim. The one who looked like the failed Victim became the divine victory. As Paul said, Christ “humbled himself…. Therefore God has highly exalted him….that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”[ix] The King who reigns from a cross redefines power for the Caesars of all time, be they democratically elected or not. Early Christian preachers, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John told the story of Jesus in such a way that subverts the stories of Augustus, Louis XIV, Queen Victoria, and all the imitators of Caesar closer to home. Divine sovereignty redefined on a cross.

William H. Willimon

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[i] Son of God! Mark 15:39.
[ii] while he prayed. Mark 14:32 ff.
[iii] impossible to believe. Matthew 20:18.
[iv] walking with him Luke 10:1 ff.
[v] legions of angels?” Matthew 26:53-54.
[vi] different from Rome. John 18:13-40.
[vii] “Hail king!” John 19.
[viii] friend of Caesar,” John 19:12.
[ix] Christ is Lord.” Philippians 2.

P.S. Our North Alabama Annual Conference will meet June 2-4, 2011, at Asbury UMC in Madison. We are asking all our churches and individuals to be in prayer for this time of Christian Conferencing. We have a prayer sign up on our Conference website – www.northalabamaumc.org/ac11prayer.

Also, beginning the last week of this month, our Lay Ministry Team will provide daily devotionals leading up to Annual Conference. These will be posted on our Conference website beginning April 25.

God On A Cross

Over the next few weeks, I’m reflecting upon Jesus as God’s salvation. These meditations are selected from my book, “Why Jesus?” (Abingdon, 2010). Lent is the season of the cross. The cross rearranges our definitions of God – God defined not as almighty power but rather as suffering love.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus gathered with his disciples in the Upper Room, sharing a meal with them. Jesus called the Passover bread his “body,” and urged his disciples to feed on him for the remission of their sins. He passed around the cup of wine, telling them that the wine was now the sacrificial blood poured out like the blood was dashed upon the altar in the temple.[i] Whereas the temple was where Israel celebrated the Old Covenant, the “Old Testament” between God and Israel;

• now this cup, this bread was sign of the New Covenant, the “New Testament” God was ratifying with the whole world.
• now, in Jesus, people didn’t need to perform an ancient ritual act, blood sacrifice or engagement in some certified spiritual practice as doled out by the priestly experts at the temple.
• now the necessary ladder from heaven to earth and back again, the movable Tent of Meeting, the great high altar on Mount Zion was among us as Jesus.
• now the world need not come to the temple. God’s “temple” had, in vagabond lover Jesus Christ, come out to the whole world.
• now the appointed means to enable humanity to get to God and God to get to humanity was provided by God – God’s own Son, Jesus. The work that Jesus did on the cross was redemptive, bringing-us-close-to-God work, which he did for all time, for all people.

All that being said, it’s still a shock to see God on a cross. It’s not at all what we expected. Can the problems between us and God be so deep that they can only be set right by God submitting to such human violence? Once again we see that we cannot affirm “God is love” without risk of grave misunderstanding, anymore than we can say, “Jesus is both God and Human” without nuance of what we mean by human and divine. The cross signifies that deep paradox is built into any accurate picture of Jesus because we don’t expect God to go to such lengths to get to us.

The gospels preach this. For instance, the first thirteen chapters of Mark’s gospel show Jesus the powerful Magician, the all-knowing seer, the divine one who casts out demons and commands the wind and wave, “Be still!” Jesus comes across as a human being but with remarkable divine powers. When Jesus heals a paralytic, the religious leaders ask, “Who is this speaking blasphemy? Who is powerful enough to forgive sin except God alone?”[ii]

In chapter 13 the mood shifts and Jesus becomes the human, anguished one who is tormented by thoughts of his imminent arrest. In Mark 14, dining in darkness at the home of Simon the leper (apparently no healthy person would receive Jesus at this late hour), when an unnamed woman shows up and adoringly pours expensive sweet smelling oil on Jesus, his disciples (feigning concern for the less fortunate) protest, “she should have sold this oil and given the money to the poor.” Jesus tells them to show compassion for the poor anytime they want but tonight, “she has anointed my body for burial.”[iii]

The next night Jesus shares a last meal with his disciples.[iv] During the meal, Jesus tells them that when the going gets rough all of them will scatter. Peter self-righteously protests, “Though these eleven cowards desert you, you can count on me.”[v] Before dawn, when challenged by a little serving girl, Peter curses and three times denies even knowing Jesus.[vi] The night ends with Peter (nicknamed “The Rock,” by Jesus) weeping in the darkness like a baby – the first in a long line of Jesus’ best friends who were grave disappointments to their Master.

Jesus then enters the Garden of Gethsemane, sees the prospect of his looming execution, sweats like great drops of blood, and prays to be delivered.[vii] “Oh God, I don’t want to die!” Is this any way for a God to act? It’s as if, in these later chapters of Mark, Jesus the God-Human One is Jesus the All-too Human One wrestling with God. Remember that our story began in a garden, the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were tested and flunked the exam, disobeying and rebelling against who God created us to be.[viii] Now, in another garden, Jesus is confronted with a fork in the road. Jesus can be obedient to God’s way, at grave risk deliver God’s love letter to humanity or he can act like our primal progenitors and safely go his own way. He can stand up to his adversaries and suffer what they have in store for him, or he can cut and run.

Jesus’ anguish in the garden is a great mystery in which the gospels enable us to peer into the depths of divine love. Of Jesus it can be said, “Truly he is the Son of God,” and yet he is no robot unflinchingly plodding toward his death on a cross. He is truly flesh and blood. He does not play-act in Gethsemane; he wrestles with his destiny, crying in anguished dereliction. He is ready to play his part in the divine drama of redemption and he asks to be delivered from it. He is obedient to his Father’s loving but risky rescue operation for the world and anguished that such painful lengths must be traveled in order to reach the human race. Nobody takes Jesus’ life – in free obedience he gives it. In short, he is in his anguish, as the church believed him to be, truly God and truly human. And in his obedience, in his complete unity with the Father’s loving determination to get back the fallen, murderous human race, he is truly God.

William H. Willimon

[i] altar in the temple. Leviticus 17:11.
[ii] God alone.” Mark 5:21.
[iii] for burial. Mark 14:3-9.
[iv] with his disciples. Mark 14:17-31.
[v] you can count on me. Mark 14:26-31.
[vi] even knowing Jesus. Mark 14:66-72.
[vii] to be delivered from it. Mark 14:32-42.
[viii] us to be. Genesis 1:26-2:25.

P.S. Our North Alabama Annual Conference will meet June 2-4, 2011, at Asbury UMC in Madison. We are asking all our churches and individuals to be in prayer for this time of Christian Conferencing. We have a prayer sign up on our Conference website – www.northalabamaumc.org/ac11prayer.