Washing Judas' Feet

I Found this awesome article "At Judas' Feet"  Here's a piece of it:

That is what servanthood is -- cleaning up other peoples' messes. That is what the Lord came to do. He spent his life cleaning up the messes that we make, putting things back together. He was a servant; he poured himself out even to the point of death.

The thing that is instructive to me is that Jesus poured himself out as a servant even for Judas. All the way through Jesus' association with Judas he was reaching out to him. He knew from the very beginning who it was who would betray him. Many times, through allusions, he would try to draw Judas toward him. His comment in the Upper Room that he was aware of what was going on was one of these attempts. Toward the end of his life, as he approaches the cross and sees Judas moving irrevocably toward betraying him, Jesus reaches out for Judas. Then, in this incident in the Upper Room, he washes the feet of Judas, the betrayer.

Evidently, all through their association, Jesus never gave any hint to any of the disciples that he knew it would be Judas who would betray him. The disciples were not aware of who the betrayer was when Jesus said that one of them would betray him. No one knew. The Lord loved Judas. There was never a hint of resentment, never even one note of bitterness. He just loved him and kept reaching out to him.

What beauty!  How awesome is Jesus?!?!  Loving even Judas to the very end, washing his feet even knowing what Judas would do within the next couple of hours.  God loves us with this kind of amazing, grace-filled love.

Then Jesus commands his disciples to do the same, to be servants after Jesus' heart.  

So, could you wash Judas' feet?  

Could you wash the feet of a hypocrite? a traitor? a murderer?

Could you wash the feet of a Boko Haram or Taliban or ISIS leader?

Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies and wash each other's feet.  Big stuff, hard stuff, life changing stuff of God.

Meditation - A part of Ancient Christian Tradition

Since the Great Enlightenment in the 18th century, Western culture has continually tossed away emotional and spiritual expression for logic and science.  This cultural shift led us to forget, and in some places, reject large parts of of our spiritual heritage.  This is why meditation and other Eastern practices seem new to us -- our foreparents didn't pass down our own heritage of meditation and spiritual connection.

Prayer is Talking to God - sharing your fears, hopes & dreams

Meditation is Listening to God -
God's fears, hopes and dreams for you and the world

Contemplation is taking a phrase or piece of scripture and going over it in your mind letting it sink into your heart


How to Meditate

Create "Holy Space", a quiet comfortable spot away from the phone and other distractions.  If you are a beginner then having a picture, candle or incense to look at may be helpful.  Having a comfortable chair or cushion to sit on is important too.  If you have a timer, set it in the other room so you aren't tempted to look at it, but can hear it when it dings.  5 minutes is a good starting time.

Get comfortable, but not lounging-back straight and feet flat on the floor or folded.  Stretch your arms up and then let them rest lightly on your knees.

Let your eyes and face relax and your gaze be soft, not really looking but resting on your candle or other focal point.

Clear your mind.  Think of your mind as the surface of the lake.  Any ideas that pop up are leaves floating on the surface that you gently push away.  Focus on your breathing, in and out in deep long breaths.  Picture light from heaven shining down onto the top of your head, into your body, down into your heart and lungs, your breath is moving that light throughout your body.  Into every finger, into every toe.  Feel the warmth of God's light and the warmth of God's love for you.
Keep breathing, keep picturing that light, keep feeling warmth in your head, heart and body.

You are meditating!


If, after you meditate, thoughts/memories/feelings surface that trouble you, this is the Holy Spirit helping you work through things you have suppressed.  Please call your pastor!
Talk about those things, and keep meditating.  God the Great Physician is working on your heart and mind to help you get rid of things you don't need.

Resolve for Spiritual Health

Most of us think of New Year's resolutions for physical health:  lose weight, eat better, move more, drink water etc.

Spiritual health is just as important as physical health.  In fact they are interconnected.  Our physical bodies and spiritual bodies are a part of each other.  We can exercise  and eat right but if we don't take care of our spirit/soul then we are still missing a piece of optimum health.

So what does spiritual health look like?  This is a good question.  I googled spiritual health and came up with 99% pictures of people doing yoga.  And I have to laugh because yoga is good, I love it, but its not the only way to be spiritually healthy.  Its just the biggest fad, and it new to our culture so it is easy to point out.  Prayer, compared to yoga, seems boring.  Worship, compared to yoga, is so unhip.
hmmmmmm.    So many seekers try yoga and drift to Buddism, without trying some of the spiritual practices of Christian tradition.

Over the past 2,000 years Christianity has produced many spiritual masters such as Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Benedict, more recently there have been CS Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Barbara Brown Taylor.   These are only a few.  They have produced masses of books, poems, songs, prayers, meditations and philosophies for us to learn about spiritual health.   Pick a person, read about them and their spiritual practices.  And then practice.

The most important thing about spiritual health, like physical health, is not what you know  but whether you practice.  Practice prayer.  No one is perfect in prayer.  We practice it.  Practice meditation.  Practice worship.  Practice giving your worries and struggles to God.  Practice your faith.

Resolve for spiritual health in 2015 by resolving to practice a way to draw nearer to God and more in balance with body-mind-spirit.

Hear an audio introduction to Christian Meditation here by Laurence Freeman, an Benedictine monk who has made his life practice to teach meditation.

Happy Hanukkah!

Hanukkah, or the Festival of the Dedication, is a Jewish holiday that remembers how God was with the people during a time of great struggle.  The Greek Emperor Antiochus persecuted the Jews and wished to make them give up their identity, their God and their temple worship.  His troops swept into Jerusalem and took over the temple,  bringing in statues of the Greek gods and making an offering of pigs -- heretical to the Jews.  The people revolted, and took back the temple.  In order to rededicate the temple to the One God, they needed oil to relight the eternal flame.  But in the sacking of Jerusalem they could only find enough oil for one day.  God made the oil last 8 days, when supplies came to refill the oil.  Therefore, during Hanukkah we light candles for 8 days and eat oily foods to celebrate God's miracle of keeping the holy light going.

Jesus was a faithful Jew, who celebrated the Jewish festivals.  

He would not have celebrated Christmas, or his own birthday,

 but celebrated Hanukkah.

Hanukkah is mentioned in our Gospels, in John 10:22 Jesus is walking in the temple during the festival of the Dedication.   There is a nasty confrontation with some of the leaders, and Jesus has to flee their wrath.  But clearly, Jesus is at the temple during the festival and assumedly participating in the spiritual life of the Hanukkah holiday.

So what?

Well, here is another opportunity to celebrate God at work during this holy-days season.  Take some time to look up Hanukkah traditions, light a candle tonight and eat some oily fried foods (remember, its all about God making the oil last!)  Remember that we are brothers and sisters with our Jewish neighbors and that our God is their God.

Hanukkah is more Biblical than Rudolph, Frosty or even (gasp!) Santa - so go ahead and light some candles and praise the God of light!

All Saints (& Sinners)

I've been reading Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber, an ELCA pastor in Denver, CO.

Nadia is an awesome pastor, and person of faith who has taken the long journey away and back to Jesus.  I love how her story takes us, who have grown up in the church and never strayed,  behind the scenes to how the people God loves live in our world.  She takes us into a Wiccan ceremony, "drug house",  AA meetings and into the mind of someone who looked at Christianity and said "yuck!"

This is indeed where Jesus invites us to go too.  Into the lives of people who are different from us, and yet so much loved by our God.  So many of us are afraid.  I'll admit it, I'm afraid of being in places I've never been before and talking with people who are different from me.  While I have had a lot of experiences typical Iowans don't have, like living in Africa and being in an interracial relationship, there are many places of socio-economic difference that I have not experienced.  Nadia's book is a personal challenge to me to be a pastor after Jesus' own example - eating and drinking with sinners, to bring healing and new life.  God help us all to follow Him!

As we prepare to celebrate All Saint's Day this weekend and remember the whole company of those people who have left us to enter God's heavenly realm, lets not sugar-coat their lives.  They were all saints, and all sinners - just like us.  All were beautiful children of God, with brokenness as well.  If we were not broken, we would not need Jesus to save us, heal us, make us whole.   Praise Jesus, the Great Physician, who heals all of us, taking sinners and making saints.

For another great blog about Nadia's work read the Biker Bishop here

Do not be an "Indian" for Halloween

Halloween is coming, and after that Thanksgiving.  But first Columbus Day.

What do all of these have in common?  Unfortunately each has a lot of terrible mis-representations of history and mis-appropriation of Native American culture.

Columbus Day in a nutshell:

 Columbus came to the islands south of Florida. (400 years after Lief Erickson was the first European to set foot in the Americas)   Found a gentle and kind people living there and made them slaves starting a 400+ year history of abuse of Native American peoples.   He personally whipped, chained and set dogs on native people before taking 300+ back in his ships to sell in Spain.  This is not a holiday or a person we should be celebrating.  Instead we should mourn for the sins that European-Americans have committed against Native American people.

Thanksgiving in a nutshell:

Europeans come to America, claim land that already is occupied.  Nearly starving their first winter they are then are fed by native peoples.  Once they are strong again, the Europeans go back to killing native peoples and taking their land.    The Thanksgiving dinner is a celebration of a moment of peace in the midst of a history that is violent.   While I don't suggest canceling Thanksgiving.  I do suggest that we remember the whole story, good and bad.   And while we give thanks for all that God has given us, we also ask for forgiveness for racism.

Halloween - what does it have in common with these other two?  Well, all to often in all three we see kids (and adults) dressing in native costumes.  DON'T dress like an Indian!  Don't have a "Pow-Wow".  Its very disrespectful to this group of people who have already been trampled and hurt enough.  Headdresses have a very specific meaning in native culture.  Only people who have earned them, can wear feathers.  When we dress our kids in fake feather headdresses and they do little dances it is making fun of people.

This LOOKS cute and harmless.  But what it is teaching kids is that the native culture is something we can play with, it is not serious, native peoples can be used without regard to their feelings.
Native peoples have proud traditions and beliefs.  They don't want to be made fun of, they don't want people to dress up like them.  They don't want their traditional clothing that is special and meaningful mocked by children begging for candy.  Just don't do it.  Be a fireman, cop or Batman instead.

Don't want to just believe me?  heres a great article written by a native american woman on the topic.

Was Jesus a friend to all sinners?

This past weekend we talked about Mark 2: 13+ where Jesus comes and calls Levi to follow and then goes to Levi's house where Jesus eats with Levi's friends.  Jesus annoys the Pharisees by doing this - they ask, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?"  

Some suggest that Jesus didn't really just hang out with "sinners".   Perhaps he was only hanging out with those who had decided to change or were in some way in the midst of changing their lives because of the invitation to the gospel.  The Pharisees were wrong, these were not sinners but repentant sinners.

My belief is the opposite.  That Jesus did really just go hang out with "unsavory" people.  That he did not put conditions on he presence with them but simply wanted to be in relationship with people.   They did not have to acknowledge they were wrong, or ask for forgiveness or change.  Jesus was with them as they were.  This does not mean that Jesus approved of everything that every person did.  Rather, it means that Jesus prioritized relationships over conduct.  In other words, it is more important to just get to know people as they are, then to worry if they are doing something wrong that you should help them change.

This is really the key to Calvary UMC and my call as your pastor.  When we proclaim our mission, "Accepting all through the Unconditional Love of God",  we proclaim that caring for people and being in relationship with each other is more important than defining actions as right/wrong.

This image is one I fell in love with on the web. I can't find who made it, so if you are a good google digger please help me find the artist who did this.  I love it because it translates the image of Jesus eating with Levi and his friends into today's world.  How else would it look for Jesus to eat with sinners?  Scandalous, yes, but thats who Jesus was -- God help us to find ourselves in pictures like this.

Here's another guy's perspective on this topic, a very well written and well researched piece.