Samaritan House Third Friday Supper Club: May SpringFest!

Our next Samaritan House 3rd Friday Dinner will be Friday, May 18 and we are having a  May SpringFest!  Our menu is full of comfort food!

Main Dish: Fried Chicken Tenders (Maybe Cane’s? other suggestions?) We need chicken tenders to serve 35 – 40 people.

 Main Side Dish: Macaroni and Cheese — We need 4-5 Macaroni and Cheese dishes (8-10 servings each; bring your favorite recipe! or Stouffers makes a great one in the frozen food section

Side Dish: Cooked Broccoli — We need 6-8 frozen 16-oz packages of broccoli.

 Dessert: Cake and Ice Cream — We need 3 cakes and 4 half-gallons of vanilla ice cream.

 Volunteers: Please contact the church office at 817/927-8411 for more informmation. Financial donations are welcomed.

Samaritan House Third Friday Supper Club

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church’s Annual Music Day Camp is set for Monday –  Friday, July 29 – August 3, 2012.  Children ages Kindergarten – post 6th Grade will learn an entire religious musical in ONE WEEK with a PERFORMANCE on Friday, August 3,  6 p.m. including supper.

This year’s musical is “Camel Lot”, a play by Cyndi Nine, Rob Howard & David Guthrie.  It’s about a young girl and her father; the father owns a car lot and can’t attend his daughter’s Christmas pageant.   After one  rehearsal, the daughter takes a nap and a dream takes her to Bethlehem to encounter camel shoppers, shepherds and a family celebrating a birth.

Christmas in August!

Forms online: www.ststephen-pcusa.com

(under Church Life; Children’s Ministry)

Children’s Music Day Camp, July 30 – August 3

Sunday, May 20, Parish Hall

May 20, “Taco Domingo”  Venga aqui !!!  Come enjoy street tacos and ice cream in the Parish Hall immediately after the 11:00 service.  This is a great opportunity to meet new members and your representatives on the session!  Good Mexican food for all ages, compliments of the Fellowship Committee.

A big thank you to those who prepared the lunch for everyone on Good Friday, specifically  The Presbyterian Women’s Council, our wonderful Eddie Shaw, Jane and John Hawkins, Becky and Jerry Moody and Booty Jones. Your time and talents on that beautiful day were really appreciated!

“Taco Domingo” Venga aqui !!!

Come one, come all to the Annual Vacation Bible School and Afternoon Camp, Monday – Friday, June 18 – 22.  Children ages 3 years old – post 5th grades (as of June 2012) are invited to join us!

Parents have two options for participation:  a.  morning,  9 a.m. – 12 noon; or b. all day, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.   Costs are $10 for morning; $75.

Registration forms are located under “Church Life”, then “Children”.

Children will be given a VBS shirt and enjoy a Puppet Show Opening, Music and fun with Mr. Scott, Bible Stories with water themes, Recreation inside and out,
Crafts, Science projects, Mission and Cooking.  That’s just in the morning.

Those staying all day get to bring swim suits for afternoon play in the sprinklers, movie time, nap time (for our younger classes), more crafts and more music!  These kids need to bring lunches and swim suits and towels daily.  Bring a white shirt to tie dye on Thursday.

Special Days: Tuesday – Petting Zoo, Wednesday and Fridays – Snow Cones, Thursday Afternoon – Tie Dye Shirts, and a Friday program at 5 p.m. with Hot Dog dinner following on the Plaza!

For More Information, contact Beth Fultz, Director of Christian Education, 817-927-8411 office, 817-875-9704 cell.

Vacation Bible School & Afternoon Camp, June 18 – 22

One of our own frequent visitors, Sharon Curry, has returned for a six week hiatus from the newly formed country South Sudan.  She has agreed to come and talk with our church family and any visitors on Sunday evening, May 20th, 6 – 7 p.m. in the Eastminster Room of the Education Building.

Sharon will show slides, share great stories and tell us about her move within , the South Sudan.

A dinner of local cuisine will be offered to all who participate.   Fava Bean creations and bread, tomatoes and onions will be on the menu.

If you need more information on the event, contact Beth Fultz, 817-927-8411 office or 817-875-9704 cell.

Missionary Sharon Curry to Speak About South Sudanese Experience

The Youth of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church are leading the worship services at both the 8:30 a.m. and the 11 a.m. times.   Scott Campbell, senior, will provide the sermon.  All other youth will participate as liturgists, ushers, musicians, and vocalists during worship.

Glory to God!

Youth Sunday, May 20, Both Services

Who is This Really About?

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

May 7, 2012

When Margaret and I were visiting in Israel several years ago, our guide was Lee, a brilliant, vibrant lady in her seventies who was originally from Chicago and seemed to have boundless energy. Lee’s day job was as a social worker helping assimilate Jews migrating to Israel under the aliyah, Israel’s “law of return.” The law of return means that Israel will accept anyone into their country as a citizen who can make any legitimate claim to be Jewish, whether racial, religious, or cultural.

Lee’s area of expertise was also one of the most difficult of the aliyah. She was integrating immigrants from Beta Israel, the term that is used for Ethiopian Jews. Though world Judaism is surprisingly diverse, comprising languages and ethnicities and skin colors of all sorts, Ethiopian Jews have run into prejudice because of their black skin. They’ve also had problems because people question their right to claim to be Jewish. For one thing, they have been largely cut off from world Judaism, and as a result some of their practices and beliefs seem alien and strange. Secondly, they arrive poor and often uneducated, and thus in need of support from the Israeli social safety net.

But for another, there are questions about their origin. The origin of Ethiopian Judaism, or the falasha as they call themselves, is lost in antiquity. Some claim that the Queen of Sheba, the famous consort of King Solomon, bore a son by Solomon who brought Judaism to Ethiopia. That would place their founding as far back as the 9th century BC, but that’s unlikely. Another theory places the rise of Ethiopian Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple, half a century after the death of Jesus. A third places it later still.

All this means that anyone with a puritanical or racist streak in Israel can find the falasha an easy target. Lee’s job was to make sure that the absolute mandate of the aliyah succeeded. As far as she was concerned, the falasha, Beta Israel, were Jews, no matter how anyone else defined Judaism, and they have a right to live in the Jewish homeland.

“This is about who Israel is, and who we will be,” she told us at one point.

There’s some scholarly confusion about who the Ethiopian eunuch is. And to give you an idea of the perils and frustrations of writing a sermon, I went into this one with a pretty clear idea that I would be talking about a eunuch, a victim of a barbaric practice of genital mutilation that was quite common in the ancient world. Often the slaves of rulers and the powerful were mutilated so that they could serve without threat to women in their charge, and without any family connections that might tie them into the complex political machinations going on around them. In many cases this mutilation happened when they were very young. Often eunuchs could rise to positions of great authority, as is the case of this Ethiopian eunuch, who served the Candace, or queen of Ethiopia.

So I was thinking, this poor Ethiopian eunuch! What a horrible life he’s been through! And my whole sermon was going to start from, “Woe be to the poor Ethiopian eunuch!”

Then I discovered that actually he might not be a eunuch at all! See, by the time of Jesus, “eunuch” had become a term for anyone who served a powerful person in an official capacity. It’s like the term nurse, which once meant a woman nursing a baby, but now can mean a male health care provider.

And actually it doesn’t add up that he would be a physical eunuch. A physical eunuch would have been unclean. He wouldn’t have been allowed in the temple. He would have known that. It would have been pointless for the man to have travelled all that way only to be turned away at the door.

Nonetheless, Luke, the author of Acts, wants us to understand that the Ethiopian eunuch is a fringe character. He places the conversion of the eunuch in between the conversion of Samaritans and the conversion of Cornelius, the Italian centurion. Samaritans were considered really fringe Jews. Cornelius is the first “official” Gentile convert. So the eunuch is something worse than a fringe Jew but not quite a righteous Gentile–a man from a faraway, mysterious country, who may be a Jew or may not be, who may be a eunuch or may not be, who is totally unlike anyone that has been evangelized before. When he arrived in Jerusalem, would he have been greeted as a celebrity, because he was so unusual, or viewed with suspicion, for the same reason? And if he was a true eunuch, did the priests sneer and laugh, or recoil in horror? Did he get to enter the Temple grounds or was he, like the modern falasha, discriminated against, perhaps even relegated to the fringes as a pretender?

What we don’t know about him seems far more loaded than what we do know. Who is this man? But the Holy Spirit seems to think that converting the Ethiopian eunuch says a lot about what Christianity is to become.

The Spirit whisks the apostle Philip to the side of the eunuch’s chariot just as the man is reading the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 53, one the great “suffering servant” passages of Isaiah. The eunuch is so grateful to have Philip’s help in interpreting this scripture, he invites Philip to sit in his luxurious chariot with him. And whatever else we don’t know about the Ethiopian eunuch, we now know this: the man is what we call today a seeker, somebody who longs to know God, whose heart is thirsty to discover who God is in the world. In that culture, as in ours today, there were plenty of seekers. As do seekers today, they often practiced what’s called “cafeteria style” religion–they’d take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and come up with a belief system that worked for them. But they are always longing for more. They’re always aware of what some have called “the God-shaped hole.”

He is a seeker, and the Holy Spirit has sought him out. In a kind of Divine aliyah, God has sought out the lost eunuch and said, “I don’t care how much on the fringe you are, Jesus Christ is your home. You belong to here, by my side. You belong to Christ.”

The passage that perplexes the eunuch is perplexing to many of us. “As a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth… In his humiliation justice was denied him…” This is one of five “suffering servant” passages that we Christians ascribe to Christ, but that Jews ascribe to Israel itself. The idea is that this servant is suffering for the sake of the sins of the world and by his suffering, the world will be saved.

If the Ethiopian was indeed a physical eunuch, this passage might have resonated with him in a powerful way. He would have been mutilated as child of ten or eleven, forced to live a life of servitude in which he ultimately rose to the top, but always with the awareness of what he’d lost. If he was a physical eunuch he would have found himself turned away from the Temple, viewed as a sexual deviant, a scarred half-human unwelcome by God; so to read that someone in the bible felt and was treated as he was would have moved him profoundly.

But what if he wasn’t a real eunuch? What if he was just a really rich guy who’d always had a good life?

Well, let’s not engage in class warfare here. Rich successful people suffer. Everyone suffers. Everyone has need. Maybe it’s physical or social, but it’s also spiritual, emotional, and mental. The servant passages move us because they meet us where we are. Here’s a servant of God, suffering. Why would a good person suffer? Why is there suffering at all?

German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had more than his fair share of suffering and disappointment. By 1942, he’d sought unsuccessfully to resist the rise of Nazism and its anti-Semitic and imperialistic tendencies, first through the German Church and then through the ecumenical movement. Both had failed. He was by this point part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler and overthrow the government, which for him felt like a failure–he’d hoped he could overcome Hitler through nonviolence. Over the years he’d seen his friends and students arrested or killed in a war they were forced to fight. He would soon be arrested and ultimately executed. Bonhoeffer was an introspective man and had a slight tendency for melancholy, and he had every reason for despair. But he wrote his niece Marianne, who was going through confirmation, that,

There are so many experiences and disappointments that can lead to nihilism and despair, especially in a sensitive person. So it is good to learn early enough that suffering and God are not a contradiction, but rather a unity, for the idea that God is suffering is one that has always been one of the most convincing teachings of Christianity. I think God is nearer to suffering than to happiness, and to find God in this way gives peace and rest and a strong and courageous heart.[1]

It was to the suffering God that Philip introduced the Ethiopian eunuch in that richly appointed carriage between Jerusalem and Samaria. “Who is this about?” The man asked, and Philip replied, it’s about Jesus–the son of God who is with us in our suffering, whether it is suffering because of cruelty or social norms or somebody’s definition of deviance or racism or extreme sensitivity to the suffering of others, or grief, or the overwhelming power of temptation.

God meets us on the common ground we all share. We often say that common ground is sin–but that’s the one thing God doesn’t share in common with us humans. What God in Christ shares most in common with all humanity is suffering. We all suffer, ultimately, because we’re so far away from our spiritual homeland, the Kingdom of God. We all sense that we are exiles, far from God. We are all, in that sense, seekers, as lost from our spiritual roots and true home as the Ethiopian Jews of Beta Israel, living far away and unconnected in Africa for hundreds of years, must have felt.

But God’s aliyah seeks us out and welcomes us back. God’s aliyah meets humanity not at the point of reward, or victory, or certainty, but at the point where we are most weak and most vulnerable and feel furthest from God–suffering.

It’s important for the church today to remember this. We live in a world of seekers–a world of Ethiopian eunuchs. They are as diverse and exotic and alien to us churchgoers as the Ethiopian eunuch seemed to the Jews of Jerusalem. They could also to us, appear to be just as unclean.

But we are agents of God’s aliyah. We don’t have the right to discriminate, because God doesn’t discriminate. We tend to want them to be like we think churchgoers ought to be. Part of the game we play with ourselves is to believe that somehow we are exceptional or special and have the answers and are at some level above the suffering of others.

But what the Holy Spirit wants us to remember is that we and the seekers of the world meet god at the same place–the point of suffering. We aren’t a fenced-in enclave for the well, but a hospital for the sick, and that hospital has an open-door policy. We’re servants of the Holy Spirit who sought out the Ethiopian eunuch who was seeking God, and if we’re going to serve Jesus who taught that he came to seek and save the lost, then we’re called to do the same thing–whoever those seekers are, and wherever they may be found.

Who is This Really About?

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Acts 4: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

April 29, 2012

Recently I think we were all impressed by the mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, who defied his security detail by running into a burning building to save the life of his next door neighbor. It’s hard not to be impressed by somebody like that. The very fact that he is willing to put his life on the line for somebody else makes you want to take what he says or does as a politician that much more seriously. And a friend on Facebook found something he said worth noting:

“Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me how much you love all His children; before you preach to me the passion of your faith, teach it to me through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I’m not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give.”

It sounds like Mayor Booker lives by the standard he promotes. Actions speak louder than words.

That is the situation the apostles are in in our reading from Acts today. They have demonstrated the power of their faith and compassion through their actions. They’ve gone to the temple and in front of a huge crowd, they have healed a man lame from birth. Now that they’ve done that, the crowd wants to hear what they have to say.

They say they have the power to do this because of Jesus Christ. “This man whom you see was made strong because of faith in Jesus’ name,” Peter tells the crowd.

But Peter then says, “You handed Jesus over to be killed,” he says. He tries to take the edge off a little. “My friends, I know you didn’t realize what you were doing. Neither did your leaders.”

At this point, Peter’s words, never mind the healing of the lame man, have drawn the attention of the very leaders Peter just mentioned. The headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, were located right there on the Temple grounds. Several of the very men Peter is referring to, the ones responsible for the death of Jesus, are hearing what Peter is saying. They are nonplussed, and for a number of reasons, and not just because Peter is preaching the resurrection, which they don’t believe.

But Peter is also making what could be viewed as veiled accusations about their complicity in the death of Jesus. If Peter gets the crowd to believe that Jesus was a prophet sent by God, that puts the people who had him killed in a pretty awkward position. They decide they need to shut him up.

But the problem is, that the reason Peter’s words carry so much weight is that everyone has seen his actions. The Sanhedrin can’t just announce: these people are lying and can’t be trusted. People will say, well, what about the healed man?

So what to do?

They take Peter and John into the chambers of the Sanhedrin in private. Acts tells us who is there, and we need to pay attention to the list. “Annas, the high priest, was there. So were Caiaphas, john, Alexander and others of the high priests family.”

There’s a history problem here in that Caiaphas should still have been high priest, not Annas, but I’m betting the mistake was made because Annas, Caiaphas’ father-in-law, was the real head of the family. He’d been high priest 20 years before, and it was he who’d turned the high priesthood into a family-run crime cartel.

The author of Acts, Luke, wants us quite clear who Peter and John are dealing with: cold, vicious men who somehow think they have God’s sanction for criminality. To these the people Peter says, “You nailed Jesus Christ to the cross, but God raised him from the dead.” Peter challenges them, and they, these powerful people, don’t really know what to do. They try to order them not to preach about Jesus, but Peter and John say, “we’ll preach what God calls us to preach.”

And these powerful, cold blooded men can do nothing, because the healed man is standing right there with them.

Actions speak louder than words, but actions also give the words that we say power. Peter’s preaching wouldn’t have been a threat if the lame man hadn’t been healed first.

But the healing changed everything. It gave these unlearned preachers’ words power that they wouldn’t have otherwise. People were more likely to listen to what they said because of what they did.

Never underestimate the power of doing good.

But we do. We so rarely believe that doing good has any power at all, that it makes any difference at all. Whereas we tend to believe that evil has all sorts of power, and is extremely effective.

Let me suggest that our tendency sometimes to believe that evil is bound to be more successful than good is a kind of faith—a terrible, cynical, negative faith that buys into the power of death and denies the power of resurrection. I don’t mean to sound harsh here, but that’s what it is. Every time we say, that good thing won’t make a difference; every time we say, I better not try to help my neighbor, there’s too many risks; every time we think that helping the poor or the weak or loving our neighbor or our enemy is fruitless and a way for them to exploit us—we’re falling into a cynical faith in the power of death and the meaninglessness of the resurrection of Christ.

I’m not saying, don’t be realistic or practical. I’m not saying, run into every burning building because that’s what Cory Booker did. What I am saying, though, is that from the Christian perspective, buildings are burning all around us; people need saving right and left. And God calls us to do what we can, and to believe it makes a difference. Maybe it’s something we do by ourselves. But more likely, we form a bucket brigade with fellow church members. We do what we can, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But we cant just thro words at it: the building is burning, somebody needs to do something! We are called to act in compassion, trusting the power of the resurrectin.

the one thing Christians can’t do is believe that the fire of evil is undefeatable, so let’s hide away and protect ourselves. The world tempts us to believe in this negative faith, that good will never overcome evil in order to stop us doing what’s right. But we’re called by God, by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to practice a different sort of power, the power of good. The Biblical witness is always that doing good is hard and risky—there could even be a cross at the end. But if doing good was easy, it wouldn’t be so necessary. The people of the resurrection are called to have faith in the power of doing Good in the name of Christ.

Some friends of mine had that faith sorely tested recently. I did, too. When I was on the board of Presbyterian night shelter, we hired as an assistant executive director a man who had a criminal record but who, once out of prison, had reformed, been to grad school, and become a leading expert on homelessness in the state. We thought Dwayne would set a good example. I thought of Dwayne as a friend.

About a month ago, Toby Owen, the executive director of PNS, called to warn me that they’d initiated a criminal investigation against Dwayne. Turned out he’d been using two dummy corporations he’d invented to steal money from the shelter and from our vendors.

It was a shock to those of us who’d trusted and believed in Dwayne. It was tough on people like Toby, who is a strong Christian who truly believes in the mission of the shelter and believes that they are doing God’s work.

It was awful to see the headlines in the paper: “Former Shelter Executive Arrested.” Those words hurt. This is the sort of thing that other people notice and they say, see? That’s what’s wrong with the whole system.

They don’t notice that the Shelter has been placing clients in housing and in job training and in real actual jobs, that the Shelter is providing real hope and opportunity for vets and recovering addicts, that the lives of real people are being changed. Ironically, some of the most effective programs were designed by Dwayne himself. In spite of the evil he’s done, the good he has done is also making a difference.

No doubt there are people who think that the whole mission of the shelter is undermined by this. But not Toby. Not the other folks who work there. They’ve been shaken, by evil, but evil hasn’t derailed them, and it hasn’t overcome their faith in the good that God is doing through them. They still believe.

And because they believe, more and more lives will be changed. Quietly, without any headlines. But that’s okay.

Because actions speak louder than words.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Good Religion

 Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

 Acts 3: 1-10

April 22, 2012

Political and cultural columnist Russ Douthat of the New York Times has written a book called “Bad Religion,” about the decline of Christianity as an influence on American culture. Douthat is a devout Roman Catholic and his thesis is that the fact that Christians no longer share some core beliefs that transcend “conservative” or “liberal” labels has contributed to the splintering of the nation as a whole.  

One of his points is that today American religion emphasizes doing good works but at the cost of relating it to worship. It’s as if we are good at “doing justice and loving mercy” but have lost track of “walking humbly with our God.”  

The story of the healing of the lame man in Acts 3 ties directly to this problem. The Bible says John and Peter meet him at the Beautiful Gate.  Problem is, nowhere else in the Bible or in history is there a Beautiful Gate mentioned in Jerusalem or the Temple grounds. So there are all kinds of theories. One popular one is that the Beautiful Gate was really the Nicanor Gate, which was located past the Court of the Women and near the altar where sacrifices were made. That would put it right at the holy center of the Temple Mount.

But that’s really unlikely. For one thing, the whole purpose of “unclean” laws was to separate the sick, the disabled, and the imperfect away from God and the community of God. The Nicanor Gate is almost right at the Holy of Holies—it would mean the lame man was actually closer to God than even the most reverent woman was allowed.  

For another thing, the scripture itself says the man followed Peter and John into the temple courtyards. If he was at the Nicanor Gate, he’d already be in the temple courtyards.  

The more likely candidate is what’s known as the Shushan Gate, located on the east side of the Temple grounds. There’s plenty of evidence that the lame, the sick, the “unclean” would gather on steps near gates directly outside of the Temple Grounds to beg.  There they could take advantage of the generosity of religious people, without actually polluting the Temple grounds with their imperfections. 

The normal routine, of course, would have been for the lame man to beg, and for people to give him money. Then those generous church-goers would enter the Temple grounds, feeling really good about their relationship to God, and the lame man would be carried home with his money. 

But Peter and John change that. First of all, they heal the man—that’s a bit more than a handout. But then, they and the newly healed man enter the Temple grounds together. Justice and good works lead naturally and joyfully to entering into the worshiping community and into God’s presence.  

This biblical story makes Douthat’s point: we shouldn’t separate worship and good works. It isn’t enough to do good or to be good. If that’s all there was to being Christian, what we’d be is a sanctified social agency. But as most of us know, there’s this church-going thing we do, too, where we gather and worship God. 

In fact, that particular thing is what makes religious institutions most different, and most unlike, anything else that goes on in the world. Religious people not only emphasize the horizontal relationship between human and human, but the vertical relationship between human beings and God.  

We don’t only talk about what’s earthly that needs to be fixed and made right, we talk about what’s otherworldly.  We talk about and seek mystery. We deal with humanity’s deep-seated longing to be bound up in something larger than ourselves. We pursue union with God. 

Douthat sees a larger problem for Americans today:  we emphasize “the God within” and forget that God is also outside of us. God is larger than you and me and all of us together. God is larger than our normal experience. If we just believe in the God within, then we can pretty much justify anything we do or believe and say that it is of God. We have to believe in a God that is larger than ourselves—and not just of us as individuals, but larger than all humanity, larger than all that is, with the potential to unify us to all that is.  

The lame man’s problem was that he was cut off from God, from mystery, from the holiest of holies. And he was cut off for any number of reasons.  

For one thing, society, even religious people, said he was inadequate. He was unworthy, not because of anything he had done, but simply because of who he was. In that sense, he was like any number of us who feel that somehow we have some innate disability that keeps us from being acceptable. Most of us struggle with that feeling deep inside anyway, but when you add to that that everybody else is looking down on you, then it seems the weight of the world is dragging you down. Somebody like that often benefits from claiming “the God within”—that in God’s eyes they are just as beautiful, just as loved, as anybody. 

If “the God within” was all any of us need, then Peter and John could have healed him and he could have thanked them and been on his merry way. He was good enough, he was whole enough, and he could probably figure out ways to worship God on his own, far away from all the religious people who’d told him his whole life that he wasn’t good enough.  He could go off to an ashram, or go to exotic restaurants and find joy in food, or find love in a faraway country. He could be as happy as anybody, and then write a self-help book about it.

Likewise, Peter and John could have congratulated him and moved on, happy that they’d done their good deed for the day. Like a lot of us have said over the years: Jesus wants us to do good for others, but let’s not try to force religion down anybody’s throat. That’s their personal choice.

But Peter and John knew that wasn’t enough. They weren’t about to force the formerly lame man to go into the Temple. They wouldn’t have handcuffed and dragged him in. But they knew that no one’s wholeness is complete unless they’ve also entered into the presence of God.

 Fortunately, John and Peter don’t have to convince the lame man. He goes into the Temple courtyard willingly, jumping for joy. I suspect that technically, he still wasn’t supposed to go into the courtyard. He probably needed to be officially pronounced clean by a priest and to take a ceremonial bath. But those were details that neither he nor the Apostles saw much need for.  As far as God was concerned, the man was ready. The question was, would all those religious people be ready to receive him?

 The formerly lame man had now experienced something that all those religious people in the Temple desperately were searching for: he’d experienced mystery. He’d experienced wonder. He’d experienced the healing love of God. It was completely outside himself. He was surprised by joy, as CS Lewis described it—he’d experienced the unexpected and unearned grace and love of God through Jesus Christ. That’s so often true of people who’ve been through the hard knocks of life—of addicts, or of those who’ve struggled with life-threatening illnesses or loss, or abuse or deep personal pain, and have found their way to the other side. They know that they didn’t do that by their own strength, or by the God within. There was a God outside, a God larger than their own personal resources, who pulled them up when they were cast down.  This God larger than human understanding has called them into the deep mystery and wonder of God’s presence.  

But sometimes the church has a hard time seeing that.  

The formerly lame man dancing and skipping into the crowds in the Temple grounds is a messenger sent by the God who is larger than the God of the church. He represents God who is larger than our limited perception—the God of mystery, the God who bedevils us because God never fits into our neatly diagramed theological or cultural definitions of God.  The American church over the past few decades has been deeply troubled by this God who is outside of us. She danced out of the segregated court of the women and demanded that God’s people treat Her as an equal. He marched up the sidewalk and banged on the door of our segregated white churches and demanded we stop treating Him as a second-class citizen. He showed up with his partner and asked to be able to worship God as a couple the same way a married couple can come worship God. She showed up in her wheelchair and challenged us to make it easy for her to come to church and worship God like people who can walk on two normal legs.  

And our sense of who God is and where God is and just exactly how large God is has expanded every time this has happened. The mystery of God has been deepened for us because we’ve found that mystery in our own community, in our differences, in our distinctiveness, in the ways we’ve helped broaden one another.  We, you and I, are God to one another, the God outside, challenging each other to grow and to change.

By expanding our worshipping community, we’ve made our worship more meaningful. We’ve delved more deeply into the mystery of God.  

Ultimately I think Douthat is right that we have made a mistake in segregating social justice and worship. We need both. But I’m not convinced yet that our splintering and differences is completely bad. I think God is challenging us from the outside, through massive societal change, through people we have always been able to ignore, through threats and opportunities undreamt of in our former philosophy.

 The church today is in a process of discovering in new and exciting ways, through challenging ideas and people, the height and depth and breadth of the love and mercy and grace and mystery of the God we know through Jesus Christ. And if we trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we know that ultimately, that can only be a good thing.

Good Religion

The responsiveness and generosity that characterize our community of believers is fully evident in the current capital campaign “To the Glory of God.”  Financial gifts large and small are making possible the realization of long-overdue and necessary replacement and repairs.  The generosity of individual members, families, friends, and our children and youth is significant.  In a remarkably brief period of time, our congregation has committed to the work ahead.

Two challenges remain:  the first is assuring that the entire membership of our congregation demonstrates commitment to this campaign; the second is honoring the commitments that have been made.

It is now time to begin to translate that commitment into the giving of gifts, To the Glory of God.  Several payment options were provided, one-time and at intervals throughout the duration of the campaign.  These can be delivered to the church office, mailed to the church, or placed in the offering plates.  Simply note “campaign pledge” on the check.  Payments via PayPal are welcomed—but note that the fees associated with such payments are deducted from the amount the church will receive.  Contact Dolores  Morgan in the church business office if you have any question about pledge payments.

The church’s capital campaign “To The Glory of God” has revealed the generous and supportive nature of our community of believers.  One would not have imagined such success! Thanks to all of you for your love of St. Stephen and support of it’s work in the community and the world!

FULFILLING OUR PLEDGES… TO THE GLORY OF GOD