Monday - Thursday: 8:30 - 3:00
Closed Friday
Telephone
(503)640-1775
168 NE 8th Street
Hillsboro, OR 97124
The Spire Newsletter
Click here for directions
Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - May 16th, 2010
Belief in God is Belief in My Self
Rev. Gwen Drake
Luke 24, Acts 1:1-11
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through Scripture you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
I used to want to be invisible, especially in school. School was scary. People were there. Most of the time, I was invisible. I followed the rules. I got pretty good grades, did my homework, and stayed out of trouble. Sometimes I was totally visible, embarrassingly visible. Like when I got in trouble. In first grade I colored on some brand new books. What was a first grader to do? Right in front of me were color crayons and this pile of brand new books. It was my first time at coloring outside the lines! I thought nothing of it until one day, the teacher saw my artist creativity on those books. Wow! It may as well have been the end of the world! The teacher made us stay in during recess until I finally confessed to being the one who ruined those books. Then, there was the time in the third grade when I got caught by the substitute teacher in downtown Heppner during the noon hour without a note from my Mom. I was with a friend who convinced me to go with her. She said no one will ever know! I believed her. Then there was the time when I passed a note in sixth grade and the teacher caught me and read the note to the whole class, even the part that said I liked a boy named George. I thought I was going to die on the spot. I really wanted to be invisible that day.
I used to believe in a God who was like the teacher who made me confess to coloring on school books when I was 6 years old. God was like the teacher who saw me on Main Street, ran out of the Dime Store, grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me and yelled at me. God was like the teacher who read that note in front of the whole class while I buried my head inside my desk.
When my father was killed in a hunting accident, I believed in a God who let that happen. I believed in a God who would have stopped the bullet that killed him IF I had been a better Christian, if I had said my prayers every night, if I had prayed out loud in front of people like other people did, if I had not been invisible.
I was also really good at tether ball in grade school. One time during recess, I was the champion tether ball player—not even the boys could beat me. I had a hard time getting them to play tether ball with me after that. In junior high school, I stepped up to bat in a softball game, all the boys moved in close, because, well, there was a girl up at the batter’s plate. And, I hit the ball way over their heads…homerun! They didn’t do that again! I loved those visible moments when I surpassed everyone’s expectations and sometimes my own. There was a time in junior high when I was the only one in the whole class who got a 100% on a spelling test that everyone else in the class failed and had to take over again. Those were moments when I loved being visible.
I struggled with my desire to be both visible and invisible. My faith in God didn’t help me. I believed in an all-powerful judge who controlled everything. God was most like my Grandmother. She was all-knowing, all-powerful larger than life. I watched her skill at manipulation. She was the matriarch of the Drake family and no one stood up to her. No one, they found ways to get around her instead.
So, I rebelled against God and walked out into my wilderness years. Not that I stopped struggling with the same stuff. So, what did I do? I became a teacher where I had to be visible to be effective. I had to find my own authority. Sometimes I failed miserably. Sometimes I succeeded. I had this one class of 3rd Form boys when I taught Phys. Ed. in Australia. Third form is the same as 8th grade. They were experts at controlling me and they knew it! I dreaded that class. I had them once a week, late in the week, the last period of the day. It was a formula for failure and I never did learn how to handle them. I wanted to be invisible—I couldn’t be.
We have an invisible God. And today is Ascension Sunday, the day that we read in the Scriptures about Jesus being visibly raised into heaven to sit by his heavenly Father. It is the day when Jesus became invisible right before the disciples eyes.
In times of tremendous challenge, we sometimes look to the heavens for answers to our questions…we look outside and beyond ourselves and up to the all-powerful, in-control God. I’ve done this. I’ve bargained, I’ve challenged, I have dared God to do something. I’ve tried to gain control over this heavenly being.
The Rev. Barbara Lundblad says this: “We can stand looking up into heaven or we can believe the promise of Jesus which is ‘you will receive the power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses.’” In other words, she says, “You will make footprints in and through ordinary, imperfect communities of faith that seldom get it right. Ascension Day is not a call to look up. It is a call to trust that Christ’s promise is down and in and around us.”
St. Augustine considered the Feast of the Ascension the crown of all Christian festivals. Today, we don’t really know what to do with it. I don’t know how many of you believe that Jesus rocketed or “beamed” upward into space and I’m not so sure the author of Luke and Acts had that in mind either. It was a time a re-imagining everything—“all rule and authority and power and dominion.” It was a time to re-imagine life without the flesh and blood presence of Jesus.
When I look back on my life, I can see how every obstacle, every person, every crossroads, every change in my life has been a choice, a call for visibility. God’s call into the ministry—be visible, Gwen, God needs you to be visible. So, I went to seminary and became visible. Up front and center stage every Sunday whether I liked it or not. I’ve learned to like it. In fact, I love preaching which was the one thing I told God I couldn’t do when I started this journey. I was a lot like Moses. “But God, I’m not good at speaking in front of groups—not without a volleyball in my hands or some other piece of sporting equipment.” Did God listen to my excuses? No. Nor did God give me a brother or sister who could speak for me like he did Moses.
Yet, I have learned that visibility is not just being seen by others. It is being seen by me! One of the biggest challenges in my life is for me to look at me and believe in me. And I don’t mean in a narcissistic way. I mean, in the way that God believes in me.
You see, Jesus didn’t ascend into the heavens and disappear from earth forever. Jesus did something much more powerful than that. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension was a dispensation of himself into all of humanity. Instead of up, up, and away…it was up, up, and inside!
When I take Jesus off the heavenly pedestal, I see Christ everywhere. When I began seeing the divine inside of me, I began loving myself. And when I began to love myself, I began believing in myself. It has been a long, long journey and I’m still not there.
I have a coach now that I’m about to start the next phase of my training in being a coach. I’m going for certification which doesn’t involve traveling. It involves conference calls, supervision, and practicing! Anyway, my coach dared to ask me, and he knows I’m a pastor of a church. He asked me, “What do you have faith in?”
The first thing I said to my coach, I’m a skeptic. And I am a skeptic. I have more questions than answers. I have had this long and winding journey through doubt. It took me a long time to accept that doubt was a part of faith. I’ve often wondered why God called me, a skeptic. Is it because God has a strange and wonderful sense of humor calling me, little invisible me, to be up in front for God and everyone to see!
God called me and I had a zillion excuses—I’m not good enough, smart enough, articulate enough. I still have those excuses. Only now I’m getting tired of listening to them. And they don’t have the same power over me. I am learning to turn those tapes off. I am finally at age 57 starting to believe in myself.
What do you have faith in, my coach asked me. My answer was: I believe that the divine is in all of us, all of us, and if I truly have faith in that, then I’m not exempt. I have the divine in me. I believe the divine is in me. And if I truly have faith in that, then I have to believe in myself.
For hundreds of year, poets and sages have reminded us of the truth of God being right here, everywhere. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth is crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God…” Mother Teresa, another skeptic, we have learned since her death and the publishing of her journals said, “…you can hear God everywhere—in the closing of the door, in the person who needs you, in the birds that sing, in the flowers, in the animals.”
There is one more piece of this journey, I’m still on. If God believes in me and I believe in myself or belief in God is belief in myself, then there is no invisible God or invisible me. There never was. There never will be. So there is no more standing on the sidelines, no just watching life go by, there is no more keeping my mouth shut either, there is no more disengaging from the process, there is no more playing life small and safe. I challenge all of you to do the same.
And today happens to be Volunteer Sunday! In the Fellowship Hall is a whole room of opportunities for you to make a difference. We are a typical church—we do a lot, with a handful of very dedicated workers and leaders. This is typical for most organizations. A lot of people come to church and do what I used to do when I went to church. I used to go to church and soak up the message. I didn’t volunteer for anything. I was invisible. Well, let me tell you, God isn’t calling you to be invisible. God isn’t calling us to be a typical church! And let me warn you, if you don’t get yourself into the fellowship hall and volunteer for something you might end up like me—preaching from the pulpit almost every Sunday!
So, here’s what I believe about the Ascension of Jesus. It isn’t really about Jesus at all. It’s about the disciples. It’s about you and me. It is about our own ascension right here and now into something bigger, into making a difference to a homeless family or an ESL student, or our own children. It is about living with greater consciousness now! It’s about stretching and growing and being all of who you are. God believes in you, too, you know, just as God believes in me. God believes in us. It is time for us to believe in ourselves!
Amen!