Not Alone

Not Alone

September 29, 2024
John 13:34-35, 1 John 4:7-17

“I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.  This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

 John 13:34-35

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2024-09-29 - Not Alone

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A story is told of a pastor who trudged through the snow to a rustic log cabin where a parishioner lived.  It had been several months since this hermit of a man had stepped foot in the church, though church members often saw him around town.  The man welcomed the pastor in, offered him a hot cup of coffee and they sat down together in the warm glow of a crackling fire. 

Following their brief but cordial greeting, silence settled over the space.  Not an awkward silence, mind you, rather a holy silence, filled with the whispers of the Holy Spirit to both pastor and parishioner alike.  After a while the pastor reached out and, with a set of wrought iron tongs, he pulled a burning ember out of the fire and placed it carefully on the stone hearth.  The light from the tiny wood chip faded and smoke began to rise.  In no time, this little isolated fire had gone out.

The pastor then carefully placed the smoldering ember back into the fire and in an instant, it glowed brighter than before. 

As he stood up to leave, the parishioner finally broke the silence.  “Thanks for the sermon, preacher.  I’ll see you on Sunday.”

Just like the man hidden away in the warmth of his secluded cabin, there comes a point when our isolated embers will burn out.  We are indeed the church scattered as we live out our faith in our everyday, individual lives, and we must be the church gathered, remaining in the Holy Fire of God’s love  expressed through the love of one another in community. 

If God is love, then relationships are the necessary channel through which that love is expressed and known. As those who seek to follow Christ’s example, we cannot pick and choose who we will love based on preference, affection, similar interests, or agreement of opinions.  We must love as Christ loved us.  We must be vulnerable, serve one another, and open our hearts to the stranger. 

John O’Donohue invites us to bless the space that exists between us so that the walls of division may have no place to stand, and that love will bind all of creation together in the heart of God. 

As a popular benediction from the United Methodist Hymnal declares,

Go now in peace to serve God and your neighbor in all that you do. Bear witness to the love of God in this world, so that those to whom love is a stranger will find in you generous friends.

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Consider a time when you felt the most lonely or isolated, when you felt like a stranger.  How did you experience God in that season of your life?

What does “community” mean to you?  Where do you most experience authentic community in your life?  Where do you truly belong?

Honest Faith

Honest Faith: Moving from Certainty to Trust

September 22, 2024
Hebrews 11:1, James 2:14-26

Faith is the reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.  The elders in the past were approved because they showed faith.   By faith we understand that the universe has been created by a word from God so that the visible came into existence from the invisible.

Hebrews 11:1-3

My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it?  Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat.  What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs?  In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.  

James 2:14-17

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Craig J. Sefa

Honest Faith

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“When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at ‘the house of the dying’ in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, ‘And what can I do for you?’ Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

‘What do you want me to pray for?’ she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: ‘Pray that I have clarity.’

She said firmly, ‘No, I will not do that.’ When he asked her why, she said, ‘Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.’ When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, ‘I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.’”

~ excerpt from Ruthless Trust, Brennan Manning

For far too many Christians, faith is simply a matter of believing that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died to forgive our sins so that we can go to heaven when we die.  Salvation is a simple transaction, his life in exchange for ours. 

Scripture knows nothing of this transactional faith.  There is nothing about believing  a particular theological truth to get some eternal reward in return.  Rather, faith in scripture always results in faithful action, in some sort of movement, or as Kierkegaard scholar Aaron  Simmons puts it, “Faith is Risk with Direction.”

In some ways, Kierkegaard’s Denmark was similar to today’s American South in that so many people simply assume they are Christian by virtue of being born into a Christian home or a Christian culture.  He was convinced, however, that such certainty on the sole  basis of where we were born had no resemblance to the kind of faith Jesus asked of the discipled when he said, “Drop your nets.  Come, follow me.” 

Honest faith moves us to action.  It does not give us certainty, but rather hope in possibilities we cannot yet see or know.  Faith always requires risk.  Are we willing to trust when the path is uncertain; to risk everything to truly follow Christ for the sake of love?

The Sin of Certainty

The Sin of Certainty

Reflections on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral - Experience
September 8, 2024


1 John 1:1-3, Romans 8:16

see also:
John 5:39-40, Matthew 7:15-23

We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life.  The life was revealed, and we have seen, and we testify and announce to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.  What we have seen and heard, we also announce it to you so that you can have fellowship with us. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

1 John 1:1-3

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Craig J. Sefa

The Sin of Certainty

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“We announce to you what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life.”  In other words, what we proclaim to you about God is what we ourselves have seen, heard and touched.  Or to put it another way, we are sharing with you our “experience” of God.

Some have said that we cannot trust our experience because we are fallen human beings tainted by sin.  While there is certainly truth to the ways sin skews our perspective, it is equally true that we cannot know  anything except through the lens of our lived experience.  There is no idealized form of any object that can be described apart from the way one perceives it.  If ten people were to describe a particular tree, for example, there would certainly be similar elements such as color, parts like bark, leaves or branches, perhaps certain textures, etc.  And yet each description would be so unique in other ways that one might wonder if they are all describing the same tree.  One person might notice tiny holes from bugs that were eating at it, and another might notice the moss along the base.  Still another might zero in on a birds nest or a particular knot where a branch seemed to grow in an unlikely direction.  All of these details say as much about our experience of the tree as they do about the tree itself.

If each person would notice different aspects of a tree, how much more will each person have their own unique experience of God.  Even scripture is not “immune” from the impact of experience.  The Biblical writers to not have an objective source of information about God that is universally accepted as scientifically tested and verified fact.  Rather, they each write through the lens of their own experiences of God in their lives.  Abraham encounters God in the visitation of three strangers.  Moses experiences God in a burning bush.  Elijah sees God in the all consuming fire, hears God in the silence, and is nourished by God through bread and rest under the broom tree.  

People experience Jesus differently too.  The lepers and the tax collectors, for example, have a very different perception of who he is than the Jewish leaders who put him on trial.  Everything we know about God is mediated through someone’s experience and more likely, through the culmination of many people’s experiences throughout the centuries including our own.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul says that we “...received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children.  (Romans 8:15-16). 

God sent the Spirit so that we could fully experience his loving presence and share that experience with others along the way.

We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are

~ Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.)

When the Bible isn't "Biblical"

When the Bible Isn’t Biblical

Reflections on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral - Reason
September 1, 2024


Romans 12:2, Acts 17:11

see examples of problematic scriptures such as:
1 Samuel 15:1-3, Exodus 21:20-21, Ephesians 6:5-6

Craig J. Sefa

When the Bible Isn't "Biblical"

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This is what the Lord of heavenly forces says: I am going to punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel: how they attacked the Israelites as they came up from Egypt.  So go! Attack the Amalekites; put everything that belongs to them under the ban. Spare no one. Kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.”  

1 Samuel 15:2-3

Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.

Romans 12:2

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When reading the passage above from 1 Samuel 15:3 about God commanding the slaughter of every man, woman, child and even infant among the Amalekites, one would think someone might pause to question whether this is actually what God desires.  It doesn’t exactly sound like the loving God we see in Jesus, or even the God of the Old Testament who brought his people out of slavery and walked with them even through the valleys of the shadow of death. 

Yet to my shock and horror, I actually sat in a church meeting where church leaders said that all Muslims should be killed before they kill us and mutilate our children, or at the very least be run out of our country.  I’ve heard pastors say that gay people should be locked up behind electric fences and separated from society.  And I’ve been personally told by a church member that he should beat me to a pulp until admitted that my stance against violence was foolish and that I must fight back if I wanted to live.  In each instance, they used passages like the one above to justify their positions.

Like the text in 1 Samuel, these are extreme examples and fortunately do not represent the majority of Christians.  Nevertheless, passages like this and other “God ordained” violence throughout scripture have been used time and time again to justify violence of every kind: “Holy  Wars”, oppression, slavery, and even genocide. 

Other texts have been misappropriated in different ways; to subjugate women both in the church and in the family and society, to elevate our nation to the status of “God’s chosen” or “The promised land” over and against every other nation, or to justify abuses of power and authority in the name of God’s will, among others. 

The point is simply this.  When we turn off the rational minds that God gave us and interpret scripture at face value with no consideration for context, history, trends and progressions, literary style, and any other number of factors, we can quickly assume that every verse is a prescriptive example or instruction for how to live in all times and all places.  Certainly there are such passages, such as the greatest commandment, to love God and neighbor.  But most reasonable people do not assume that passages about genocide, slavery or other forms of oppression are offering us universal principles for all times. 

We need reason to understand how to appropriately interpret and apply scripture to our lives and in our world and we need the Spirit to renew our minds so that we may discern with humility and wisdom.