– Hericlitus

I just read a good post about leadership. Here’s the juicy bit:

You can’t step into the same river twice.”

I believe there’s a creative strategy in this insight: “Escape from obsolete ideas.” Follow along, and see if this applies to anything you are currently doing.

Like a river, the world is constantly changing. New laws are enacted and others are no longer enforced. New styles of behavior and expression become fashionable and others are relegated to the dust-heap.
Thus, the strategies we employ need to be appropriate to the problems and opportunities before us.

For example, it’s said that the Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712-1786) lost the Battle of Jena even though it was fought in 1806. This means that for twenty years after his death, the Prussian army perpetuated his successful organization instead of adapting to meet the changes in the art of war. Had his generals questioned Frederick’s military tenets, they might have fared better against Napoleon.

Remember: every right idea is eventually the wrong idea.

Innovation means not only generating new ideas, but escaping from obsolete ones as well.

As you think about a current problem or issue, you might ask yourself these questions: “What assumptions should I update? What is no longer true and should be discarded? What’s now possible?”

(emphasis mine)

from CreativeThink via jonnybaker

As I reflect on this day’s events, I’ve noticed a theme emerging between a whole spectrum of conversations today, including the sermon and Bible Study.

This morning as we looked at Psalm 127, I repeated a phrase several times about what the Psalm was telling us: we should not sacrifice children and the cause of God for any social, economic or political reasons, agendas or aspirations. When we do, God has no trouble destroying those Towers of Babel in our lives that we have built without his consent, approval and participation. “Unless the Lord builds the house… unless the Lord guards the city…”

Tie that together with several other conversations I had today and I began to realize something: we are seeking to transition from an institutional/organizational congregation to an organic form of the Body of Christ. While we have seen continued decline of institutional forms, we are seeing growth in people who are willing participants in the discipleship process. People who have participated in the discipleship process have developed as leaders in ways they never saw coming, never perceived, never knew were possible.

This growth is the foundation of our current ministry together and will be the basis for continued growth in Christlikeness as disciples of Jesus. Despite the lack of obvious programmatic growth and the continued decline of attendance at Worship on Sunday, First Baptist Church is growing. Lives are becoming more like Jesus and people are expressing the call to ministry and the gifts for ministry. Moreover, within those gifts and call I see the seeds for even greater ministry down the road.

Thanks be to God!

In our struggles, we find that God has been there all along. We expected life to look one way; we discovered God had other plans. But the other plans are grace, not domination. We find life in them, hope and joy. That is what I saw today.

Thanks be to God.

Pentecost Proper 27, Year B

First Reading: Hebrews 9:24 – 28

Sermon: Psalm 127

Handwritten / No Notes

Today I spent most of the day at Cleveland Browns Stadium for the Warren City Schools Warren G. Harding Raiders game against Lakewood – St. Edward’s. Preceding that game was one between Cleveland-Glenville and Mentor.

Mentor beat Glenville; and the Harding Raiders beat St. Ed’s. It was a close game.

It was good to spend some time with a couple of guys today just doing something non-church, while still having a good, relaxing social time. (Except, of course, when in the last 2 minutes of the game St. Ed’s picked off a pass on Harding’s 5 yard line and Harding held them for the duration of four downs.)

’twas a good day, all around. Rain notwithstanding.

I am told that this was a HUGE upset, and Harding will play Mentor next week. Lookin’ good, folks.

Today is the 523rd birthday of Martin Luther.

After the last post, John, I hope you’re happy.

Happy birthday, Marty!

Today is the feast day of Pope Leo I, The Great.

Leo I Magnus is famous for two things: asserting Papal Primacy over other dioceses, including the other four Patriarchates, and for producing the Tome that was the basis for the Christological Definition at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

More on Leo may be found at wikipedia.

Jim Herrington kept using this phrase to describe the necessity for congregational change. The source is referenced here by DashHouse:

It was sometime last year when I started reading Patrick Quinn’s book Deep Change. Quinn essentially teaches that every person and organization is either in the process of a slow and sometimes painful death, or else, at every moment, undergoing a transformation at the deepest levels.

Quinn argues, “Anyone can become a leader of change, but to do so requires the transformation of self.” At the heart of deep change is what Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership. In this state, we let go of control, and become purpose-centered, internally directed, other-focused, and externally open.

(more)

Aha.

I’ll have to check that one out, too.

Update:

I’ve been checking more out:

Quinn argues, “Anyone can become a leader of change, but to do so requires the transformation of self.”

Quinn says that most of us (individually and in organizations) enter into the normal state of being through entropy. In this state, we are externally driven, internally closed, self-focused, and comfort-centered. In this state, we lose energy and eventually experience slow death. Most of us live in this state because of fear and self-preservation. Most people and organizations in this state don’t know what to do to get out, so they try harder and use techniques or behaviors to change, which does not work. (I’ve got bookshelves of books that try this approach.)

The way out is not through technique. It is through deep change. The cost is high; our organizations cannot change until we change. We cannot change until we move past techniques and actually deal with some fundamental issues.

At the heart of deep change is what Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership. In this state, we let go of control, and become purpose-centered, internally directed, other-focused, and externally open.

This isn’t a super-human state. In fact, we’ve all lived in it. Quinn provides some good advice on how to spend more time in this state (it’s never permanent).

(more here)

And still more:

I like its emphasis on organizational change springing out of deep individual change – inside-out and deep rather than external and incremental. This quote made me think this morning:

Each of us has the potential to change the world. Because the price of change is so high, we seldom take on the challenge. Our fears blind us to the possibilities of excellence – and yet another formidable insight. This insight concerns the price of not making deep change. That price is the price of slow death, a meaningless and frustrating experience enmeshed in fear, anger, and helplessness, while moving surely toward what is most feared.

Our two choices are “slow death” or “traveling naked into the land of uncertainty.” All of a sudden the second option, and the change that goes along with it, sounds very inviting.

(source here)

Oh, how I have seen this in my life this past month and a half! And I need more. Do I dare ask God to take me there? Or do I fear the outcome even of that?

Ok, so I was reading this passage this morning…

Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually. (Psalm 69:23, NRSV)

… and I thought to myself, now, what would this look like in a little bit more literal language?

Hmmm…

How’s this look?

God, give them cataracts and perpetual diarrhea!

Yeah, I think that’s funny.

Ok, so “trembling in one’s loins” could mean a whole lot of other stuff, too, like an overactive bladder, nausea, or other stuff. NIV translates it “may their backs be bent forever.” A Quasimodo curse, perhaps?

Most Christians have a little trouble applying the “Imprecation Psalms” (or, for the hoi polloi, the “Curse Pslams”). We (rightly) don’t feel comfortable asking God to make someone go blind and give them permanent gastroenteritis. We feel so uncomfortable, in fact, that Bible translators shy away from translating these things literally.

Which is too bad.

Oftentimes we do, in fact, feel those things – those feelings of “God, do something drastic, they’ve really hurt me!” But we feel guilty to express those feelings, even to God. We feel that if we do, it demonstrates that our hearts aren’t right.

Not so in the Psalms. The Psalms are filled with the extremity of emotion. Whether it is a cry to God to throw Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9) or the desire to “Bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked,” (Psalm 58:10), the Psalms display intensity and anger and even violence.

Perhaps we do not feel comfortable with these Psalms because we do not see “the way of Christ” reflected in them. We see our own divided hearts and our desire to curse another prematurely written in these prayers. And yet, in doing so, we deny the validity of our own emotions and refuse to permit God to do anything with them.

Yes, there are days when I want to say to God, “break the teeth in their mouths” (Psalm 58:6), and desire that those who “pervert justice” in my life (Psalm 58:2) will be like “the slug melting into slime” and like a stillborn child (Psalm 58:8). The emotions are there. Perhaps these Psalms tell us that God can deal with these emotions.

Nevertheless, throughout the Psalms, these emotions are invariably expressed toward God so that God will act and God’s name will be glorified. David does not pray for his own glory, although he often prays for his own vindication. Rather, his prayers express the basic desire that God will reign.

“Our God Reigns” is, in fact, the theme of the Psalms in general. These emotions expressed – in the extremity of anger, despair, sadness, happiness, exultation, and fear – always rest in the greater context of “Our God Reigns.”

So next time you pray that someone gets perpetual diarrhea, don’t worry. Just pray that it will be a demonstration of the Reign of God.

When we truly pray the Psalms, we can truly worship. Even when we are angry enough to curse.

Ok. This is funny.

It’s a Lord of the Rings video montage set to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.”

LOL

And then set to “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Finally, set to a dance mix – none other than the “Hamster Dance”

Psalm 127
Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved.

Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

– - NRSV, via oremus.

This is the passage I will be preaching on this Sunday. I find Psalms particularly difficult to manage when trying to preach and teach from them. As I have often told people, when I preach, I hope to reflect the message of the Scripture into our lives so that we may hear and respond to do the message.

This is a relatively easier task with narrative, parable, and epistolary texts (although I daresay Judges is just difficult all around). With the Psalms, however, not only are they ostensibly prayers directed to God, but they are nearly contextless. Their superscriptions are little help in determining the sitz em leben of the particular Psalm. Moreover, they are a hodgepodge – written at all different times by different people for different contexts, anthologized at a later date by unknown people for little-known purposes, and employed in the worship at the Temple (at least most of them, and to a degree), which were only really “canonized” after the destruction of said Temple in 70 by Titus Flavius, Filius Vespasiani.

For this particular Psalm, we have some direction because it is a “Song of Ascents”. This means that it was employed in the pilgrimage up the steps to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is therefore possible that the “house” of which the Ascender speaks is The House of the Lord, i.e., the Temple; and the “city” is Jerusalem, or even the Zion quarter thereof. Interesting background, yes. Relevant to the message? Probably not very.

It is also “Of Solomon.” This means it was either written by, written about, written to, or written in the style of Solomon. It also could mean that it is a “wisdom Psalm.” Well, now there, we’re getting somewhere. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of questions.

The questions that rose in my mind immediately upon reading this Psalm (again) were “Why is this all in one Psalm? What connection does the first half have with the second? In fact, why wasn’t this split into two Psalms? Why did the Psalm-editor consider this to all have connected meaning? Why did the Psalm author join them? Why were these two halves joined in practice?”

At first glance, vv. 3 – 5 are a non sequitur from vv. 1 – 2. Upon reflection, however, it seems that these two pieces do deserve to be joined and speak to the same message.

It has long been understood by historians and sociologists that the most affluent countries have the lowest birthrates and the highest levels of stress in the world at any given time. While they also have the longest lifespan and the highest standard of living, they also are plagued by diseases and psychological issues that most of the rest of the world never experiences. With great wealth comes the diseases of the wealthy and a declining birthrate.

This story has been told over and over again, in culture after culture. Rome, is of course, the classic (and classical) example par excellance. One of the major difficulties Rome faced, especially after the Julio-Claudian period, was that the Senatorial and Equestrian orders (the wealthiest and the second-wealthiest classes of society), were not fecund enough to produce enough legitimate heirs to carry on the government and military leadership for which they were both responsible and privileged. They ended up having to PAY Roman women to have children, even during the Augustan period.

Examples can also be given of the Japanese aristocracy during the Shogunate, the Chinese aristocracy under the Han [I think, the Han], and of course the classic case of King Henry VIII Tudor of England. Henry had no trouble making sons. Henry had trouble having sons with the woman with whom he was legally matrimonially linked at the time.

Now, of course, with Western Europe standing to be decimated by an abysmally poor birthrate – even with a very liberal immigration policy – and the U.S. not far behind, we must ask ourselves if there is any connection between the birthrate and excessive work and the affluence it brings. One only has to look at a sattelite image of the US and Western Europe to see how many lights are on all night. Moreover, it is significant that in the US there are 850 000 legal abortions every year. So we have toil that leads to stress and “unwanted pregnancies” – that are really unwanted children.

Within all of this, there is still another Biblical connection that may be made between this Psalm and the greater story of Scripture. In Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel draws these two elements together as well. First, the people decided to build a city and a tower to reach to the heavens, against the will of the Lord. They toiled, but since the Lord was not in it, they were scattered. Second, they defied the command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28, etc.) by gathering in Shinar “so that they might make a name for themselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen. 11:4, NIV, par.)

Here we see the connection between building a city apart from the Lord and the defiance of the command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Babel symbolizes humanity’s desire to defy God. But it also symbolizes a desire to make a name for ourselves and to raise up monuments to ourselves in defiance of God’s command. Moreover, Babel demonstrates a carelessness toward children that this Psalm seems to counter.

When we connect the apex of civilization with defiance of God and the dismissal of children – all leading to the ultimate failure of the civilization project, we have to ask how we fit into this. The words of Tony Campolo ring out in this context: “America is the best Babylon on the face of the earth, but it’s still Babylon.”

There is, therefore, an obvious national connection to Psalm127. There is also a clear congregational connection to Psalm 127: any congregation that toils and toils and spends hours and hours in meetings and discussion and fails to grow must be trying to build its house apart from the Lord. Furthermore, if, in that process of discussion and perhaps even fighting it manages to sideline children such that they are either unwelcome or uncomfortable in worship, then such a congregation has managed to carry out both halves of Psalm 127.

Where are our towers of Babel that bring about both divine frustration and a denial of the value of the young? Any nation whose success sidelines children or merely makes them pawns for politicians (such as Ohio Issue 3 – slot machines for education), all the while toiling to keep the economy expanding, day and night – such a nation will experience the judgment of God. And while the Psalm is attributed to Solomon, it seems like it could be, in fact, more relevant to the exilic and post-exilic communities that saw the Lord destroy Jerusalem.

Any congregation that becomes unigenerational – that is, made up of a single generation, predominately older, has somehow managed to deemphasize their children and the children of others who do need to hear the Good News; they have, furthermore, managed to retain one generation’s power over another such that the desires, needs, and perspectives of one generation dominate the scene.

In our lives individually, we see our toil being fruitless when we do it apart from the Lord as well. Often, especially in academia, personal success comes before family, and especially before children. This is a liability, especially in a college town.

++++

Well, some or all of this may be in the sermon on Sunday. We’ll just have to see where it all develops.

This afternoon I met with two guys whom I’ve been discipling and we talked for an hour or so about a number of good discipleship topics.

– Why do people try to drag new Christians back into old behaviors?
– Why do people make up rumors about the new Christians?
– Why do we lie to people we love?
– What do we do when we struggle with sin in the long term?

Good discussion. Totally ad-hoc. Really good stuff.

This evening, I wanted to post something to keep up my string of posting once a day. Well, technically that’s posting once between long sleeps, since it’s almost 1 AM.

But who’s counting, right?

What I’ve realized today is that to produce something of quality for others to read here or otherwise benefit from, I really need more time of quiet reflection than I got today.

I got very little today.

Some days are like that.

I suppose that this is yet another reminder of the need for reflection and quiet to be built into the day SOMEHOW even on the busiest of days.

Grace and Peace!

This morning, in my time for prayer for the congregation, I was able to begin to set some vision and goals for the next phase of congregational development. I greatly appreciate having the time to do this, since it seems like I have been in high gear for so long. I needed the space.

One of the necessary pieces to this, I believe, was the time of quiet over the weekend. As much as I didn’t initially want things to be so quiet, it settled enough down that I could look at things today in a better light.

Thanks be to God!

By Guest Blogger, Joyce L. Thomas:

Yep, the strange rumor you heard as church was letting out this morning is true. Our neighbor, Barb, came down to the church and found Mike to tell him that witnesses had seen a deer jump through one section of our big picture window, bungle around inside the house for a few minutes, and then jump back out through another section of the same window. She wanted to catch us before we came home to all that bloody mess and had to play CSI to figure out what had happened.

Apparently, the people who saw this were driving by. They saw it go in, went down to the intersection and turned around, and saw it come out as they arrived back at our house. They went check on us, and finding us gone, called the police and began knocking on neighbor’s doors. The guy two doors north of us was home, and he told them he would keep an eye on the house until we returned. Then Barb, who lives between us, came home from the store, and she said she knew exactly where we’d be. So she drove to the church.

The police never did find the deer, by the way. They recieved a report of a badly wounded six point buck in the courtyard of Carle Arbours (about a mile south of us), but by the time the deputy got there, it was no where to be seen.

Meanwhile, we rushed home. Grant and Traci followed, since our plan had been to meet for lunch at Culver’s. The house was just a mess, with glass and blood – lots and lots of blood – everywhere. He apparently thought he could get out the back sliding-glass door, because there was a lot of blood and some hoof-scrapes on the glass, but he didn’t break it, which is good, because he just would have been trapped in the sunporch. He knocked most of the furniture over in the dining area and pushed the table up against the wall by the garage door. When he turned around and ran back out, he must have launched himself from the piano bench, because there was a hoof mark and a lot of blood on the Sunday paper that was laying on the bench.

The Halls came by as we were inspecting the damage, and very kindly went and got us Subway sandwiches, since we really couldn’t make use of the kitchen at that point. Then Robin arrived to do her laundry. So, Mike and I, Grant and Traci, and Robin, started dealing with the mess. Traci took Mike in her truck to Lowe’s to get plywood; Robin scrubbed and mopped the blood up in the kitchen, Grant and I put on leather work gloves and began picking up glass. Our neighbor lent us their shopvac. We all worked full tilt for 3 solid hours. and in the end the house was livable, beleive it our not.

Really, it could have been much worse. I have to admit the my first concern had been for our new leather couch that sits in front of the window, but it was only slightly scratched despite being absolutely covered in glass shards. Though there is some blood on the living room carpet, most of it was in the kitchen where the floor is tile. And the piano bench was protected by the newspaper. I was able to get the blood off the couch with the cleaner that came with it when we bought it, and the blood on the piano, walls, floor, tablecloth, sliding-glass door, etc. could all be washed off. There was some music piled by the piano that will always be blood stained, and of course the two big windows will have to be replaced ASAP, and that will be expensive. Insurance will help.

I’m glad I wasn’t home when it happened! And our fierce attack-kitties were no help, cowering under Robin’s bed for hours after the event. Last time I depend on them to guard the house while we’re gone! Anyway, once the windows are replaced and the carpet cleaned it will all fade into a very surreal memory. Robin used to call these kinds of events “Adventres With Robin”….so here’s the new chapter, Robin!

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.