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Rev. Ed Moore's monthly letters from Covenant's newsletter, archived here for your reference.
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Walking through the basement the other day, I realized it's time again to wax the fire truck. My toy fire truck, that is, the one I found under the Christmas tree when I was ten years old. It's solid metal, about two feet long, with ladders that crank up and down. Very low tech, as toys go now, but a source of great joy to me when I received it. All I needed were some time and a great deal of imagination.
Joy depends upon imagination: not imagination in the sense Disney has defined it for American culture, but imagination that is deeper, more mature. Genesis says that humanity was created in the Divine image. Most scholars of the Old Testament agree that those words mean we are created with the capacity for knowing right from wrong, for ethical decision-making. That's why God could hold Adam and Eve accountable: they should have known better. But being made in God's image means something else, too: it means we have the power to conceive of a future, to imagine what might be.
It is in this capacity to imagine - to conceive what can be, what will be when God's reign finally comes - that Christian joy is found. When Martin Luther King, Jr., preached his famous "I have a dream . . ." sermon, he was imagining a different world, one that someday will exist. He preached out of his joyful assurance of the coming of God's Kingdom.
Some of us are disappointed when our faith does not always give us happiness. But happiness is not what we have been promised; we have been promised joy, the same joy that empowered Dr. King's preaching. That joy sustains us when sorrow, disappointment and disillusionment come. It remains the bedrock of our relationship with God, even when happiness seems elusive. To be created in God's image is to have the power of living in joy.
This New Year begins with challenges for people of faith. The war in Iraq continues. The gap between rich and poor widens. Controversies over evolution and creationism deflect the church's energy from more compelling issues. But, in the midst of it all, we can still be people of joy. We were created with the power to imagine the New Jerusalem. That's Gospel.
Grace and peace,
Ed Moore
A few days ago I was wandering through an electronics store when I ran across a gadget that, I must confess, I've always wanted. Usually it's called a metal detector, though I'm sure there is a more technical term for it. People who buy these use them to search for old coins or other artifacts buried under the ground. You've seen these folks walking along the beach, wearing headphones, waving their detectors above the sand, waiting for the telltale beep of buried metal.
They're not used only at beaches, though. Recently I read about an historian who had used his metal detector to help pinpoint the site of an ancient battle, a battle between Roman Legions and German tribes during the time of Caesar Augustus. He turned up bits of swords and spears, fragments of helmets and shields, convincing evidence of a desperate, protracted struggle. That battle, he wrote, was seminal in shaping the history of Europe. The present order of things, he said, makes sense only in the context of that ancient struggle. The artifacts he had found were not just old rusty bits of metal: they were predictors of the world we now know.
We're already well into preparations for Lent at Covenant. There will be special studies, services of worship, and other opportunities for the church family to gather in celebration of the journey that begins Ash Wednesday and concludes at Easter. The church encourages a careful observance of Lent because it confesses that its present hope makes sense only in the context of an ancient struggle. The artifacts of that struggle - Jesus' last days in Jerusalem, his arrest, trial before Pilate, crucifixion - these are not just dusty bits of Roman history; they are foundational to the Christian hope of eternal life and the final establishment of the Reign of God. The world we now know as Christians was won when the forces of death were defeated at the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
If I had an exquisitively sensitive metal detector and knew just where to look, I might be able, after two millennia, to locate the rusty remains of Roman nails that once were used to execute a criminal, Jesus of Nazareth, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. To a secular historian, they would be nothing remarkable; others like them have been discovered and written up in the academic journals. But, to the church, they would be signs of a sacred struggle, the struggle that made possible the church's hope of glory. Those nails would be, for us, artifacts of the battle that defeated death. They would be predictors of the world we now know.
There's an old Easter hymn entitled, "The Strife is O'er, the Battle Done." Perhaps we'll sing it at Covenant this year, after Lent has led us, once more, to resurrection. Give thanks, friends, the battle really is already "Done." That's the Good News!
Grace and Peace,
Ed Moore
The vocabulary word for the day is blogosphere. It has been around for awhile, though my spell checker just highlighted it as a word it doesn't recognize. Blogosphere, which turned up in today's Washington Post, refers to the international community formed around blogs (the spell checker just alerted me again - doesn't know blogs). Blog is, in turn, a contraction of web log, a log someone maintains on the web (internet). Blogs are personal musings open to the entire world through the web, so a blogosphere is the result: a world of blogs, thousands of websites where people write back and forth on topics of shared interest. Do an internet search on "UMC blog" and you'll turn up hundreds of blogs related to the United Methodist Church. You will have joined the blogosphere. Read as a spectator or join in the fray as a writer. Blog on!
On the same page where blogosphere appeared, the Post had an article about the controversy between President Bush and Congress over the pending sale of a port management company to a firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates. Among the points it made was this: the notion that a business is necessarily tied to a particular nation is an obsolete idea. Large corporations, multinationals (spell checker knows that one), seldom recognize the boundary lines drawn on maps. Their allegiance is not to the United States, Great Britain, Ghana, the U.A.E. or France; their allegiance is to the shareholders, who live everywhere around the world.
These two articles share a common theme: what we have traditionally thought of as community is passing away. If I am a blogger, I may communicate more frequently with an online friend in Europe or Asia than with my next door neighbor. I may know more about that blog friend's life than I do about the life of the person who lives across the street. A multinational based in Nebraska has a greater sense of obligation to shareholders in Germany than to people who live around its headquarters in Omaha. The meaning of the word community is changing very quickly. Perhaps that is part of the stress we sense all around us on the highways and in the marketplaces: we're not community anymore.
Lent, in the midst of all the blogging and political skirmishing, calls us back to the primal community that identifies us: we are the people defined by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. When we recite Jesus' journey through Galilee, Jerusalem, and Pilate's judgment hall, to the cross, the grave and resurrection, we remember who we really are. We are at home in that story, and our community is all those whose lives, like ours, are shaped by that sacred narrative. Don't fret the blogosphere and the multinationals; your community is safe and sound. Be at peace!
Ed Moore
For the past several weeks a number of us have been working through a Lenten study of the sacraments, baptism and the eucharist. We've been meeting Tuesday nights, exercising our minds and spirits. We started with baptism, which is God's way of initiating us into his body, the church. We had to explore the original meaning of that word, church, because it has undergone a significant transition from its origins in the New Testament to everyday usage in our culture. It has been citified along the way, toned down, stripped of its radical edge.
The word we read as "church" in our Bibles was, in the Greek of the New Testament writers, εκκλεσια. Transliterated it is ecclesia, the root of our word ecclesiastical. And that is a pretty dull, dusty word. Would you read a magazine article with "ecclesiastical" in the title? You get the point.
The original word - the one Paul, Matthew, John and the others knew - was neither dull nor dusty. For them εκκλεσια had a clear, dynamic meaning: the "called-out community." This is the point at which our modern notion of church loses so much in translation. To be "called out" means that God is the initiator of church, the one who does the calling. Because we're immersed in a culture that offers us a variety of choices on every hand, we tend to think of the church as a voluntary association - something we choose to join. But this is not the New Testament understanding, not at all.
We become part of the church because God's grace precedes us in our thinking, our reflection, our deliberations, paving the way for us to be part of God's witnessing community. At the appropriate time, in the context of this preparatory grace, God calls us by name. Yes, by name. That is why, in baptism and confirmation, we announce the name of the one God has called: the call is to a specific life, a singular soul. We are called out of slavery to sin and death, into the community shaped by the resurrection. It's the Exodus again, with a grander finale.
John's account of the resurrection has Mary Magdalene in the graveyard just before sunrise, looking for the body of Jesus. She finds the tomb empty, but doesn't know what it means. Even two angels cannot dispel her sorrow. But then she meets Jesus, risen from the dead. At first she cannot recognize him, but then something very important happens: Jesus calls her by name: "Jesus said to her, 'Mary!' She turned, and said to him in Hebrew 'Rabbouni!' (which means "Teacher)." That is from John 20:16.
When Jesus called Mary by name, the church was born. And Mary went directly from that naming to say to Jesus' disciples, "I have seen the Lord!" That is what the called-out community always does: finds those who have not heard the Gospel and says to them, "We have seen the Lord!"
You were called by name when you were baptized or confirmed: the call was not generic, but to your life, your soul. You are valued as highly as was - as is - Mary Magdalene. Now get on with the work, as she did. And may grace go, as always, before you!
Ed Moore
Suppose you had an additional $11,000 per month to spend as you wish. What would you do with that money? Would you fund some dreams that have been put on hold? Finally get the blueprints for that home addition your family needs? Invest for your own future, or your children's? Underwrite a mission that has a special place in your heart? That $11,000 every month could do a lot of good, couldn't it?
Covenant's mortgage payment is about $11,000 a month. That is $132,000 per year, more than one-fourth of our entire church budget. That is money given by our church family, money we cannot use for ministry and mission. We pay it to the bank, and, under our present debt structure, will be doing so for nearly thirty years.
Your church leaders believe we can begin a new era at Covenant by eliminating the mortgage, paying it off entirely over the next few years, making the church debt-free for the first time since the sanctuary was built in 1984. That is why we are in the midst of a capital funds campaign we have named Leaving a Legacy.
We began Leaving a Legacy with a goal of about $2.4 million, enough to eliminate the mortgage, enlarge Fellowship Hall, build a new narthex, and tithe $240,000 to missions. Every family in the congregation will be visited during the campaign, and asked prayerfully to consider sacrificial giving in support of our goals. Every gift will be important, regardless of the amount.
Mark your calendar for May 11, a Thursday evening, when we'll gather at Covenant for a dinner in celebration of our capital funds campaign. Yes, children are welcome, and we'll have special activities for them while the grownups are gathered in Fellowship Hall. There will be no soliciting of funds on May 11, just a time for us to meet in celebration of the new opportunities for ministry and mission that God has offered us. We'll remember the journey we have come as a congregation, and look toward a future of living and proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel.
Yes, I've been thinking about what we might do with an additional $11,000 per month to support our ministries. I'll offer just one suggestion. Early one recent morning, Barbara and Jim Wells began serving coffee and donuts to the folks gathered at the bus stop on Wightman Road, just outside Fellowship Hall. The response was amazing. People could not believe a church would do that sort of outreach. A busy mother got breakfast for her two young children (Barbara found something more suitable than coffee and donuts in the kitchen at CUMC). People asked for more information about the church. Registration forms for Vacation Bible School were handed out. In short, the Good News was preached in a new way. There is so much that could be done. See you May 11!
Grace and Peace,
Ed Moore
Pastor
The beavers are back! Well, at least one of them. Just down the hill from our house is a small lake, one of those Montgomery County flood control ponds that doubles as an interesting nature preserve. All sorts of critters live in and around our lake, and most folks in the development enjoy walking the paths beside it to have a look. This is just what Mary and I were doing a few days ago when we saw the beaver.
Now, we've had beavers before. A couple of years ago we had a family of them abiding in our lake, doing what comes naturally to their species. This included felling numerous small trees, building materials for their dams and domiciles. Alas, some of the building materials came not from wild growth stock, but from carefully tended saplings in homeowners' yards. Complaints were filed, the homeowners' association sent memoranda to the beavers, the beavers were unimpressed, and finally the natural resources folks came, trapped the beavers, and relocated them under new identities.
But now one of them is back, and I'll bet he's angry.
The lake, of course, is the beavers' natural habitat; they're just trying to reclaim the homeland. It's the human squatters who are the problem. From the beavers' perspective, gnawing through some ornamental tree is an act of patriotism, a rodent rebellion.
A few hundred yards from the contested lake Great Seneca Highway crosses Muddy Branch Road, an intersection recently rated by The Washington Post as the third most dangerous in the metro area. I go through it, with appropriate fear and trembling, at least twice a day. During rush hour it frequently resembles a rehearsal for Armageddon.
I wonder if we're outside our natural habitat, trying to live in an alien environment. Perhaps that is what lies at the heart of the hostility we experience on the roads, the decay of simple courtesies once taken for granted, the outrage that beavers would have the effrontery to live in a lake and gnaw a tree.
The Great Fifty Days of Easter (Easter through Pentecost) will soon be over. We've tried to recover the ancient church's understanding of Easter as a season - not a single day - because Christian folks need to be reminded that the resurrection is our homeland, the place which compels our souls to journey onward until we are whole. The homeland has an anthem, you know, the greeting we use in worship on Easter: "Christ is risen!" says the worship leader, and the rest of us respond, "The Lord is risen indeed!"
You can say it by yourself, anytime the chaos threatens. It is an act of pure, Christian patriotism, the song of the homeland. For heaven's sake, sing it!
Ed Moore
Pastor
A few days ago I saw another article on global warming, this one claiming that consensus among the best scientists is that, yes, earth is heating up. In fact, this article claimed, our planet is now warmer than it has been in at least 400 years, and the bulk of this increase may be laid at the feet of us bipeds. Our insistence upon burning fossil fuels accounts for most of the problem. Thus spake the article.
My own inexpert view is that this latest report is probably accurate in its broad findings, and that climate change ought to be a topic for intelligent, reasoned conversation among our elected leaders. It's bound to be some day - sooner would be preferable.
It's easy to understand why some folks either don't wish to discuss this issue, or else prefer to stay in denial. The processes involved in global warming unfold across decades, even centuries, and their effects are incremental, not immediate. So it's been warmer the last twenty years and the polar bears are buying sunblock? Could be a fluke, not a trend. You know the rhetoric.
We're able to adjust to slow, incremental changes in the environment, and that's a useful skill, a survival tool. But if the more vocal scientists warning about the severe consequences of global warming are correct, we may be near a "tipping point," a place where a cascade of environmental changes will kick in, changes over which we will have no control. Our accommodations to the gradual changes will have, ironically, put us in danger.
Randall Balmer, who teaches at Barnard, has a new book, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America. Though I've read just an excerpt (the book hasn't come out yet), I believe Dr. Balmer is on to something very important. Any time the church too closely identifies itself with the standing political order, he says, it runs the risk of incrementally losing its identity. Bit by bit, it forgets its calling to be the body of Christ, and becomes just one more interest group on Capitol Hill. When that process has gone on long enough, a "tipping point" is passed, and the holy vocation of being church is lost.
Jesus told Pontius Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." He didn't mean his followers were to disengage from their prophetic calling to be God's witnessing people in the here and now, but he was warning them of the terrible price of being co-opted by Caesar. Or by Republicans. Or by Democrats. There will come a tipping point, beyond which you lose your soul. The cascade effect may be irreversible.
Pray for the polar bears: they really are in trouble. And for the church, the whole church.
Grace and Peace,
Ed Moore
A recent visit to the beach reminded me of a trip to Cape Hatteras a couple of years ago, just after the Hatteras Lighthouse had been moved several hundred yards [nps.gov] inland to keep it from collapsing into the Atlantic. This was no minor engineering project. The Hatteras Lighthouse, built in 1869-70, stands almost 200 feet tall, is constructed of granite and brick, and weighs about 6,000 tons. It was built to stay in place: the people who designed it never imagined it would be put up on iron rails and towed to a new location. But it had to be moved if it was to be preserved, since beach erosion had put it in range of the surf, and it was feared that the next major hurricane could topple the venerable monument into the sea. The landscape for which the lighthouse was built had literally disappeared.
Shifting landscapes are in the news almost every day. Ford Motor Company, a classic American institution, may not survive. The blogosphere (know what that means?) is the primary source of information for an increasing number of people, replacing newspapers and the "legacy" networks (CBS, etc.). The ongoing tragedy in Iraq calls into question the very notion of the modern nation state, and raises the specter of reversion to a tribalism long thought to be on the wane. And what of terrorism? Where and how is it to be confronted? The landscape for which many of our institutions were built is eroding very, very quickly. Hatteras Lighthouse is symbolic of a pervasive problem.
You've noticed that we always print the Lord's Prayer and the Doxology in our Sunday bulletins. While most folks who regularly worship at Covenant know these from memory, we include the texts as a welcoming gesture to visitors. We cannot assume they will know these texts, because the landscape has shifted. The language of the church is no longer part of the larger culture's vocabulary, and it's easy to grow up in America without having heard the Lord's Prayer, much less memorized it.
When people visit us, we have to assume that they may be unfamiliar not only with our worship language, but also with the basics of the Christian faith. They may not know what we mean by grace, forgiveness, the Holy Spirit, baptism or communion. We must assume they have come through the doors hungry for an experience they cannot yet articulate. The shifting landscape has forced us to change a lot of our assumptions.
It cannot be business as usual for the church. Our structures were built for a time now past, and we may well collapse unless we move in response to the new environment.
May the Spirit open our ears to hear the waves lapping at the foundations.
Grace and Peace,
Ed Moore
Pastor
One of the quirks of the United Methodist Church is the title we give our ordained clergy. We call them "elders," a word some other denominations use for the lay people who lead their congregations. In the Presbyterian Church, for example, elders are the folks who serve on their equivalent of our Church Council. I've stopped signing marriage licenses using the title elder, since - every now and then - someone in the Clerk of Circuit Court's Office calls and asks why layfolk are doing weddings at Covenant. It's just easier to sign as pastor; everyone understands that.
This bit of United Methodist background is necessary to highlight a real problem we're facing as a denomination. Here's a word from Lovett Weems, Director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary:
There has been a dramatic drop in the number and percentage of United Methodist elders under the age of 35 in the last twenty years. The number of elders under 35 declined from 3,219 in 1985 to 850 in 2005. Young elders as a percentage of all elders dropped from 15.05% in 1985 to only 4.69% in 2005. For example, the annual conference with the highest percentage of young elders today has 10%, still five percent below where the whole denomination was just twenty years ago.
To put it bluntly, the number of young pastors is in serious decline. It is not unusual for the average age of people ordained elder at our annual conference gatherings to be in the late forties. While these are well qualified pastors who have completed all the requirements for ordained ministry among us, they will have far fewer years to serve before retirement, and to gather the experience necessary to serve well in particularly demanding parishes.
There are, of course, the predictable studies underway to try to identify reasons for the decline in the number of younger people who feel called to the pastoral ministry. Why is it, we wonder, that so few now go directly to seminary after undergraduate school? Is there something we're doing - or not doing - with the younger Christians among us that has contributed to the decline?
We often speak of stewardship as one of the most important Christian disciplines, and so it is. But an oft-neglected aspect of stewardship is a congregation's identifying those in its midst whom the Spirit is calling into pastoral ministry. The gifts we see in them, perhaps only beginning to bud, are sown there by the Spirit for God's use in blessing and sustaining His church. It's up to us to name those gifts, nourish them, and share them. May the Spirit sharpen our eyes and ears, for the ministry of discernment.
Peace,
Edgar Moore
Pastor
"What should a properly educated college graduate of the early 21st century know?" So began a recent article in the Washington Post by John Jenkins and Thomas Burish, President and Provost, respectively, of The University of Notre Dame. They excerpted a report by the Harvard Curriculum Committee, which concluded that a thorough college education ought to include courses offered under the general heading of "Faith and Reason." The campuses of many colleges and universities, the article noted, had become "profoundly secular," despite 79% of college freshmen arriving with a belief in God.
Jenkins and Burish said that Notre Dame, a church related University, had historically done what Harvard now was proposing, and hoped the movement would get a hearing in other academic circles. Then they said this: "If faith is shunned by the institutions whose role it is to foster reason and the life of the mind, we shouldn't be surprised if unreasonable or fanatical forces gain influence in communities of faith." Wise words for such a time as ours.
I had been reading the prologue to John's Gospel a day before finding this article in The Post. John has no account of Jesus' birth; instead he offers us a soaring, lofty narrative of the Word's becoming flesh and living among us. I always go to John just before Advent, because his story of the Incarnation does not easily lend itself to the sentimentalization and distortion wrought upon Luke's and Matthew's versions. John forces us to think about what it means for the mind of God to have lived and walked among us, for our world to have been invaded by heaven and holiness. He forces us to think about what that means, not just respond to it emotionally. In other words, John is into faith and reason, recently rediscovered by the folks at Harvard.
John Wesley, founder of Methodism, understood all this back in the 18th century. Good Methodists, he said, lived a life balanced between "knowledge" and "vital piety." He encouraged those in his group to learn all they could, and then process that knowledge through the lens of the Incarnation. The Word had become flesh, he was convinced, and everything else in life was derivative of that faith conviction. Now live that, he said.
We've planned a full schedule of Advent and Christmas services here at Covenant. We'll have fellowship and study opportunities for people of all ages. We'll hear Matthew's and Luke's stories again, and also the cosmic hymn John's Gospel sings. There will be times for celebration and for admitting to pain and loss. The Bread and Cup will be offered to all of us by the One who astonished the disciples on the Emmaus Road.
There's a sad tendency for the celebration of the Incarnation to fade as winter descends and the mundane needs our attention. But every day, John reminds us, unfolds in a world already invaded by the Word and headed toward the New Jerusalem. Remember your baptism, and be thankful.
Grace and Peace,
Ed Moore
Late in Luke's account of Jesus' birth - long after the angels have sung the last encore in the fields outside Bethlehem and returned to heaven - we meet an elderly prophet named Simeon. He has been waiting for years to see the Messiah, and rejoices when Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus into the Jerusalem temple to dedicate him to God. Simeon takes the boy from Mary's arms and sings a song of joy:
"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel."
Then, just a few verses later, he admonishes Mary, "a sword will pierce your own soul too." True to his prophetic calling, Simeon has seen the crucifixion in the Incarnation. The two are inseparable, as any prophet in touch with God's Spirit knows. For Simeon to claim that he has seen, in Mary's boy "your salvation," he must add the word about the "sword." Faithfulness to the Word requires it.
The early Christians understood Advent to have two foci: the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; and the Second Coming, when the exalted Christ will return to redeem God's broken creation and set all things right. There would be no reason even to mention Bethlehem, they understood, apart from the hope of the Second Coming. The baby needs to grow up, confront the cross, euthanize death, and then consummate history. This, they knew, is what it means to proclaim Jesus the Lord. Nothing else suffices.
We'll have an unusual gift for Advent worshipers at Covenant this year, a gift intended to help us recover that early church understanding of Advent. It's a nail. You hang it high up on your Christmas tree, where younger children can't see it. Then, when they've grown tall enough - and old enough - to ask why it's there, you tell them the two meanings of Advent. You tell them what Simeon knew when Jesus was just a few days old. You tell them the Gospel, and let the Holy Spirit take it from there.
Have a blessed Advent, and a most Holy Christ's Mass.
Grace and Peace
Ed Moore
Pastor
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