July 29, 2009

This is going to be brief.
   I was putting the finishing touches on this week’s Dear Friends yesterday morning when the screen went blue and I got one of those dreaded little messages that informed me that my little laptop had returned to the great Bill Gates In The Sky.  Hopefully, someone who knows their way around those things will be able to recover some of my files because yes, I do not always back everything up the way I should.
   But here it is, Thursday morning, and in a couple of hours my brother and I are departing for the General Assembly of the Christian Church that will be meeting in Indianapolis.
   In the last DF, I talked about why I enjoy assemblies.  The gist of it was that these biennial gatherings of Disciples from all over the country (and world) reminds me that the church is larger than my particular experience of it.  Absent an experience like that every now and then, I might come to the mistaken conclusion that my way of being Christian is normative, that what I think, believe, value and do is what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
   Driving around town this week I noticed one church that had the message on its sign out front, “Church the way it used to be.”  Now I know a little bit about that congregation, and so I thought to myself, No, church was never like that to me.  And some Disciples would look at the way I worship and the way I affirm my faith and say the same thing.
   It is important for me to see that the church is larger than my experience of it because that reminds me that God is bigger than what I imagine God to be.  Barbara Brown Taylor makes the point that every time we try to construct God to be what we need or want God to be, we find ourselves disappointed.  Then she says, God is greater than my imagination, wiser than my wisdom, more dazzling than the universe, as present as the air I breathe, and utterly beyond my control.  That, in short, is what makes me a Christian.  I need a mediator, an advocate, a flesh-and-blood handle on the inscrutable mystery that gives birth to everything that is.  While Jesus is, in his own way, just as inscrutable, he is enough like me to convince me that relationship with God is not only possible, but deeply desired by God, who wants me to believe that love is the wide net spread beneath the most dangerous of my days.
   That’s a good reason to come together to worship.  If God is larger than my current idea of God, I need to worship with people whose vision is broader, wider, and deeper than mine.  Without you, I might think that I know all there is to know of God, and never be challenged to live beyond my own small vision.
   Assemblies help me remember that, as do you.  And that’s why I’m glad to be your pastor.
   Michael Mooty, Senior Minister