Open Invitation to the Wesley Experiment

The Servant Council has decided to meet only once a month for church business, but we are also going to meet once a week for spiritual disciplines. Every Wednesday night at 7pm, we will meet at Brenda Pitonyak's house to continue the Wesley Experiment. Everyone is invited to join us. There is no beginning or end to the Wesley Experiment; it will be an ongoing event, so please join us when you can. Members of the servant council will not be able to make all of them, either. This is a lifestyle that we undertook in the fall of 2010, and we all grew closer because of it. We want to try to regain that closeness.

The big question that everyone has at this point is what exactly is the WesleyExperiment? What does it entail? Here it is in a nutshell, compiled from all the literature we have. Note that this may seem overwhelming, and you can follow as little or as much of these disciplines as God leads you or you can handle, but the more we accomplish, the closer to God and our neighbor we become.

By God’s help, I will not deviate from these 5 disciplines:

i. Meet once each week to pray together (this is the Wednesday meeting at Brenda's house).

ii. Give two hours time each week to God (self-surrender) which may include working on a project specifically assigned (teaching, visitation, preparation for worship—altar guild, music, bulletins, giving witness, an area assigned at “boot camp”, etc.); and/or leading someone into a relationship with Christ by sharing the Word and prayer, and inviting and bringing them to share Christian fellowship.

iii. Give God one tenth of my earnings (self-denial). Putting God first requires that, like the discipline of starting each day with God, I first give my best and surrender to God a tithe as the Word directs me… Hebrews 7; 13:8; Matt 23:23; Luke 11:42; Matt 5:19

iv. Spend 5:30-6:00 or ½ hour before my morning usually begins each morning in prayer and meditation (self-control) (The half hour is divided up below).

Let each of my prayers petition God for:

a. A sense of divine direction for my life

b. An understanding of the need of total surrender to His will

c. Strength of mind for the development of self-discipline

v. Witness for God my experience to others and…

a. Be aware of my witness and of my need of God as I pray the Lord’s Prayer daily every morning

b. Recommit to the 10 Commandments and call the attention of others to them

c. Offer a thanksgiving before every meal.

d. At my bedside (kneeling if possible) ask forgiveness, be thankful for God’s mercy and grace, remember family, friends and strangers; offer prayers before getting in bed and getting my rest

The half hour in part iv above can be divided as follows:

First 10 Minutes: after reading carefully, pray and meditate on the assigned scripture for the day (see below). Write out in less than 50 words how this passage applies to your life.

Second 10 Minutes: Write out one totally unselfish and unexpected act of kindness or generosity that you will do today. Name the person—then act during the day, vigorously and with love and compassion. Keep a written record of the reaction of the person and the effect of this act upon you personally.

Third 10 Minutes—Write out carefully how you would like to build and develop your life. Go into detail; take your time. Be thoughtful and prayerful. One well prayed out thought or sentence per day would be excellent progress.

And now, the current scripture schedule:

As our chief aim is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, the theme this month has to do with our calling and gifts along the Way.

February 1 - Romans 12:1

February 2 - I Corinthians 1: 26-29

February 3 - Ephesians 4: 7-8

February 4 - Psalm 90: 17

February 5 - Romans 11: 29

February 6 - Proverbs 18: 16

February 7 - Proverbs 29: 28

February 8 - Romans 12: 3-5

February 9 - Philemon 6

February 10 - I Corinthians 2: 11-12

February 11 - John 4: 10

February 12 - II Timothy 1: 7

February 13 - II Timothy 1: 14

February 14 - I Corinthians 13

February 15 - I Corinthians 12: 4-11

February 16 - James 1: 17

February 17 - James 1: 22-25

February 18 - Hebrews 13: 20-21

February 19 - I Corinthians 7: 21-24

February 20 - 2 Corinthians 4: 7

February 21 - 2 Corinthians 9: 8

February 22 - Psalm 89: 1-2

February 23 - Deuteronomy 14: 2

February 24 - Psalm 138: 1-3

February 25 - Isaiah 60: 1

February 26 - Ezekiel 34: 11-16

February 27 - Matthew 7: 21

February 28 - Ecclesiastes 3: 9-14

February 29 - Revelation 22: 12-13

Call me at 207-4050 if you need directions to Brenda's house. The open invitation to the Wesley Experiment starts immediately.

Ash Wednesday Service

Our Ash Wednesday service will not be at Grace Lutheran this year. We will be be having the service at Brenda Pitonyak's House at 7pm, in place of the Wesley Experiment. Please call 207-4050 for directions, and I hope to see you all there for the launching of the 40 days of Lent.

Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper

The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday--February 22, 2012--is Shrove Tuesday, when we have our Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. Last year, we had it at the Barrett House, but this year we will have it at Grace By-The-Sea. The members of Grace Lutheran have been invited to join us. Cathi will be providing the pancakes, and she will be contacting other members of Good Shepherd to bring syrup, sausage, and other breakfasty things. We begin serving at 6pm, but there should be an ongoing supply--pancakes are like that--if you are tardy. Hope to see everyone there!

Healing Service This Sunday

The Lectionary Readings this week are all about healing, and so I have decided that we will move our Healing Service up from the third Sunday of the month to THIS Sunday. It will be a Full Kenyan healing service, and we will have the laying on of hands. Please come to this spirit-filled service. I pray that everyone can make it.

Jesus + Genesis

There's a scene in the gospels where Jesus asks his disciples who people think he is. They respond that most people think that Jesus is a mere prophet, like John the Baptist or Elijah or Jeremiah. Jesus then asks the disciples, “who do YOU think I am?” Peter responds, “you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Ok, we know this, we tell ourselves, but listen to what Jesus says to Peter in Matthew 16: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” We can't reach the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God on our own. The Father reveals this to us, and when we look around today and see who the current inhabitants of our planet think Jesus is, we realize that things have not changed.

In order to understand who Jesus really is, we have to read the gospels through Genesis 1. Jesus is eternally connected with the creator God, the only living God. And what the world does is it separates the two, and we end up with a false representation of both the Father and the Son.

As it says in John 1: Jesus was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. Jesus is connected to creation, he was there at the beginning, and everything we read about Jesus needs to be seen through that context.

If we strip Genesis 1 from Jesus, Jesus ends up like a crazy Buddha: someone who has some wise things to say about life, but ultimately is nuts, because he kept saying insane things about himself being God.

Or the world turns Jesus into a magician, a trickster. Someone who is deceiving everyone. When we look at our Gospel reading, and see all the things he did in that one day: healing the sick and driving out demons, if we don't connect Jesus with Genesis, we have an illusionist, or a fortune teller, or an Eastern mythicist, or someone really in touch with nature.

When Jesus retires to a deserted place to pray away from everyone, we may think that he could be off planning his next round of trickery, or he's Ralph Waldo Emerson and he's communing with nature like a hippy. Indeed there are articles as recent as in the last decade that speculate that Jesus walked on water because he knew that the Sea of Galilee was icing up at that time of year. There have been many movies made that Jesus was nothing more than a sensitive hippy who was in love with mother nature.

This is what happens when we strip Genesis away from Jesus. When we keep the two together, the healings and the driving out demons are now in the proper context. Since all things were created through Jesus, his healings are not trickery, his miracles are not magic. This is the living God restoring creation. Anything that has become corrupted, he is restoring. Nature submits to him, not the other way around. He goes off alone not to worship nature, but to reconnect to the Father beneath which all nature bows. Nature worships him.

Isaiah 40 reminds us: this is the living God, the one who created everything. We have images of a massive individual who holds the whole world in his hands. People are like grasshoppers—probably more like ants. The rulers of the earth are nothing. Remember the term “living God.” When we uses the term “true God,” which I have in the past, there is an implication that there are false gods, but they are gods nonetheless. The term “living God” is more powerful, because the implication is that the other Gods are “dead” gods—non-existent. This is the true image of the creator God that we should have in our heads, and Isaiah 40 puts that image there.

But what happens when we go the other way? What happens when we strip Jesus from Genesis, and have the powerful God of Isaiah 40 without the personal nature of Jesus Christ attached? We get an aloof, old man in the sky. Have you heard that before. Unbelievers think we see God as an old man in the sky, looking down on us, just watching, not interfering, maybe taking a tally of our good and bad deeds from afar. You usually see this in comedy, like comic strips or stand-up comedians.

The goofy vision of an old man with a white beard in the sky is what unbelievers see and laugh about. What about believers? With believers, Genesis without Jesus gets you deism, a God that is so powerful that he doesn't have time to care. The Muslim idea of God is like this—Inshah Allah: the will of God. Whatever he arbitrarily decides is so. Even the Jewish version of God is like this, because theirs is a Father without a Son, and a Father without a Son is not a Father at all. Even the Greek and Roman Gods, along with the Hindu Gods, are powerful without the compassion, so they are mischievous and rude but not personal.

A few verses after Peter professed the true nature of Christ—that he was the Son of the living God—the transfiguration happens, when Jesus is transformed and he begins talking across time and space to Moses and Elijah. Peter suggests that they build three tabernacles for the three “gods.” Peter disconnected Jesus from Genesis and the result was becoming temporarily a pagan, wishing to begin a pantheon. It wasn't that he took the power away from Jesus, but he took the personality away from God. When we take away God's personality, we get detached from the living God, and we begin to worship any sort of human vision of what God is, and the world does not get God right.

And like I said before, these aren't Gods. There is only one living God, and that means that these others are dead, non-existent. Only the Jewish God Yahweh as a Father with a Son named Jesus Christ, in a relationship with each other, make a living God possible. Only a powerful God, like we read about in Isaiah 40, and a compassionate and personal God, like we read about in Mark 1, is the only possible living God. All other visions of God are dead.

Only a powerful but merciful God could love the world so much that he gave his only begotten son on our behalf, to die in our places, so that we would not perish but have everlasting life, everlasting life in the presence of that same, living God, who restores creation, healing everything, because that was how he envisioned it and implemented it and rejoiced in it from the beginning.

AMEN