GreggTownsley.com

Inviting the New 2/18/06

I had the opportunity recently to speak at our home church in Forest Grove, Oregon. Nancy and I have weathered a long awkwardness with traditional churches—evidenced by my leaving the Presbyterian Church, (USA) as a “Minister of Word and Sacrament” in January of 2001and our founding the Faithspring Community in Portland in October of the same year.

As our distant mentor and friend John Shelby Spong calls it, we’ve been a part of the “church alumni association” ever since then, skipping the traditional meetings of Christian folks more active than us on Sunday mornings because of the pain it brought us, while enjoying the warmth and intimacy of the Faithspring meetings in our home on Sauvie Island.

A couple of months ago we found an “open and affirming” congregation in our hometown of Forest Grove and sensing that we might contribute something there, and perhaps receive something in return as well, we made a covenant with that local community of faith as new members and friends.

The congregation we’re attending—and where we’re doing our healing incidentally from some of the pain we’ve suffered in the traditional church—is attempting to resurrect its “alternative” worship service. We’ve been active in a group that is serving to get the Sunday night service back on track. Two weeks ago, as I started to say, I was asked to share something about our Faithspring ministry in Carson City, Nevada and to lead the committee’s Sunday evening devotions. It was an interesting experience.

As most of you are aware, it wasn’t that long ago that I was the pastor of a large, suburban church in Portland’s west hills, administering a staff of over thirty part and full-time individuals and a annual budget of just under a million dollars, helping to lift the loads and lives of more than a thousand saints and sinners.

I say “loads and lives” because it doesn’t take long for any of us to realize in our journey toward the Divine that the boat doesn’t sail toward our eternal bliss without a fair amount of baggage. And that if we’re going to get to the destination’s end—at one time in my personal and professional life I thought the goal was heaven, now I’m fully convinced it’s the compassion each of us are supposed to live and lend long before we ever get to heaven—that we’re not going to get there without experiencing a goodly amount of pain and discomfort.

Not to take away from the greater point, but it was with a small amount of discomfort a week or so ago that I spoke to a small gathering of the Forest Grove congregation. It had been a little over five years since I’d stood before a traditional community of faith and I had wondered what it would take to make it through. But we did, didn’t we?

For the most part, we all do, don’t we?

God is doing a new thing.

Reading from the Revised Common Lectionary, tonight’s prophetic text from the book of Isaiah encourages us to think that the LORD God—whatever we conceive the LORD God to be—is doing a new thing.

The One who made heaven and earth, the One in which we “live and move and have our being,” as the apostle Paul puts it in the Christian scriptures, the One who parts the waves like a waste can sorting the good and the bad, and the pieces of our lives about which we are most proud and prideful like a long-suffering desert and a raging new stream, invites us to consider what it might mean for “the new” to take place in our lives. Not the redone and the undone, but the totally, brand-spanking new or never-done. Think about it. Isn’t that an exciting possibility?

We had a family over to our house last night. One of our studio families in Sherwood where Nancy and I operate an American Family Karate & Fitness Center, I asked their oldest child to view one of the world’s best cowboy movies, Tombstone. The boy had performed in such a way during class that I suggested, if the truth be told required, that he see the scene where a coughing, wheezing semi-good guy Doc Holiday mimics the spectacular gun twirling of bad guy Johnny Ringo. Nancy and I are just plain nuts about cowboy movies, watching a couple of them a week as we relax at night.

We were thrilled most recently to see the scenery of Broke Back Mountain, which before you get too excited let me point out that we didn’t enjoy it all that much and that it is in fact about sheep herders not cowboys, which is a totally different deal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So there we were, six or more of us gathered around the living room TV, when Nancy’s twenty year-old said quite suddenly, “Well, how old do you think I am?” to the clearly mesmerized five year-old who was just along for the ride but enjoying every minute of the young woman’s attention. She got a totally irrelevant answer like thirty or one million before she retorted with a tiny bit of adult attitude, “Well how old are you, fourteen?”

The little guy said, “Not me, I’m practically brand new!”

Five year olds. You can’t leave them—they’re too little—and you got to love them.
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Brand new isn’t easy.

“Brand new” isn’t easy. It pulls something out of us to forget what we used to be or to push out of our minds what we used to do.

It’s not the easiest thing to leave cherished events, things, places and people—to recite just a few of the objects of love and concern mentioned in this ancient text—and to launch out, faithfully forward, toward what a former Presbyterian minister friend of mine, now a professional marriage and family counselor, said in Carson City a long time ago, “God’s good future.”

But launching out toward the new is so necessary. And it’s so much easier than dragging the old stuff behind.

Speaking of films, you might remember the 1986 movie called The Mission. This popular, award-winning film, starring Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, pictured the ill-fated effort of 18th century Jesuits who wanted to nurture and protect a South American Indian tribe from the cruelty of enslavement by colonial Portugal.

If you saw the film, you’ll not soon forget the scene where Jeremy Irons drags his old soldier armor and weapons up an Amazonian waterfall as penance in order to be accepted as a Roman Catholic priest? It was an amazing scene.

Panned by some and appreciated by others—it is perhaps my most favorite spiritual film, as much as Tombstone is one of my most favorite westerns—the picture provides a great starting point for our discussion about inviting the new into our lives, or into our fellowship’s life, or into the new Sunday night worship service at the Forest Grove UCC church.

When we invite and welcome the new into our lives, or the life of our children, or our communities of faith, or simply our foibles and frustrations, we welcome God into our lives as well. We encourage God to begin something different in our lives. In a more accurate sense, we cooperate with what God is already doing in our lives, as if it were possible to resist God’s irresistible newness anyway!

In the Forest Grove Sunday night group—what could easily become a second community of faith for us on those evenings we’re not sharing our faith with you—one has got to ask how much of the old is our Forest Grove community going to want to carry forward in its effort to divine the devotional life desired by a new generation of alternative service-minded folks?

Dragging the old forward is so difficult it ought make us wonder why we ever try to do so.

Can we ever make our family what it used to be? Is there a way to bring our business back to what it was before its down turn or changes? Can I have the body I used to have or the feelings I used to enjoy or the future I used to hope for? No, no, and no. We can reclaim none of these things. We can only have the new.

The Old Testament prophet wants us to believe that God’s spirit is in the new. He or she is no longer in the old or not only in the old. Should we want to cooperate or appreciate or perpetuate what the Divine is doing in our lives and those that we love, look must consider and embrace what God is doing in the new.

Imagine a future.

It’s not an easy thing to wrestle with an angel. It wasn’t for our twenty year-old daughter the other night, grappling with the faith and foibles of our “brand new” five year-old friend and guest, though it was clearly fun. And it can be fun for us as well as we think about the new and now appearing.

I challenged the former Backdoor crowd, as the Sunday evening service had been called a few years back in Forest Grove, ministering an alternative spiritual path to those in the Forest Grove congregation. “Imagine a future where ‘the Pioneer Church,’ as Carolyn Buan called the United Church of Christ in Forest Grove in her book about the congregation, ” I said, “once again takes up the role of caring for folks in the community instead of catering only to its members and friends!”

“Imagine a future,” I encouraged those gathered, “where a welcoming Church, as so many in the Forest Grove community see the UCC congregation, continues to open its doors and lets new people, different people, tough people, annoying people, crazy people, or whatever the feared-for people are, to be part of a new kind of faith and family!”

And I guess I’d challenge us the same way.

Imagine what it would be like if we reframed who we are as the Faithspring Community in Carson City, Nevada and began to picture instead a new and challenging reality to what we say and do!

Wow. It wouldn’t just be your grandma’s church anymore, would it?

Imagine what it would mean for us to cooperate with what God is doing in the new tomorrows of our lives, or appreciate the movement of God in the still-to-personal to mention new aspects of our lives?

How exciting it would be to trust the still-moving Spirit in that way, wouldn’t it?

In the end, if we focus on the new, letting the old be the old while allowing the still evolving to amuse and surprise us, we will keep faith with the words of the apostle Paul who said, “this one thing I do:

Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly calling…”

Amen.