Is here.

So, we’re into our third week in Madison, and i’m in my second week at First Baptist.  And I thought it would be a good time to give an update.

The move went incredibly smoothly.  My folks were awesomely helpful and Ethan was a true champ.  We had a touching moment about an hour outside of Madison when Ethan wanted his mom to draw a picture of our old house, got sad for about five minutes and said he wanted to go home.  And then it was over, and we haven’t heard anything like that sense.  He misses some of his old friends, but he gets to spend so much more time with us, particularly with mommy, that it seems to be making up for it.

Which brings me to my next observation.  Our new life rhythm rocks!  We have every dinner together, and they’re good, and we’re done in time to do something together as a family afterwards.  I had two full days off last weekend (Sat. & Mon.), and I mean off.  No email, no calls, no meetings, no sermon prep, nothing.  And the biggest change is that Tara is rested, and happy, and has had as much mommy/ethan time as she wants, and that alone makes the move the right thing to do.

As for my new job, i am still very much figuring things out.  I feel a bit out at see, and a lot of pressure to figure things out, and quick.  Most of that pressure, i think, is self inflicted, but it’s there none the less.  I know there are things that need ot change, but I am not sure what is: A – possible, B – my responsibility, C – worth it.  I have to balance my own general lack of patience, and the fact that i am used to being ”in charge” (sorta) with the humility that I have a lot to learn about this place before i can make wise decisions.  Those of you who know me will know that patience isn’t necesarily a natural strength of mine.  So, you know, its good to grow. 

And lastly, madison is pretty cool.  There are parks everywhere, and coffee shops, and restaraunts, and all kinds of cool stores.  And (this will make sense to some of you) I can drink the water!  I miss the diversity of Hyattsville, and the size of DC.  But i certainly don’t mind that it takes me all of 6 minutes to get to work and that the people at the grocery store don’t mind talking to me about which Wisonsin cheese is the best.

I miss all of you, and would love to hear about what’s going on wiht you.  Comment or email or give me a call.  Or heck, come visit, we’ve got an extra bed!

Grace,

jason

This is the sermon I preached for my last service as pastor of New Leaf Church.  It attempts to give an overveiw of the theology we have developed as a community over the years.  I tried, hard, to include the video, but was foiled.  I might try again at some later date.  But for now, here’s the text:

New Leaf Church                                                             (get wipe board)

April 15^th, 2012

The Gospel According to New Leaf

• I really didn’t know where to start when I sat down to write this, my last sermon as the pastor of New Leaf church.
  • How do you write your last sermon to a group of people that you have loved for the better part of a decade?
  • I thought of telling the story of New Leaf, but I did that a few months ago.
  • I wanted to say goodbye.  But I need to do that later, or else I might start crying and not be able to do anything else.

• I wanted to give some last words of advice.  But really I’ve been doing that over the last few months, and it’s pretty simple, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet:
  • Love each other.
  • Trust each other.
  • Take care of each other.
  • Also, let me add, trust your leadership.  The LT is a good group.  I know it’s not ideal that you didn’t get to nominate them, and I apologize for that, that’s my fault.  So be annoyed with me if you want.
  • But they are a really strong group.  Mature, smart, faithful, they love this church and they are committed to looking out for what is best for all of you.

• I’ll add one other thing – if and when you do hire someone new to be you’re pastor.
  • Be patient with them.
  • You can, at times, be an intimidating bunch.
  • And their gunna be dealing with their own fears and anxieties.
  • So try to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least for a little while, as they get settled in.
  • And don’t compare them to me, for good or for ill.
  • Don’t expect them to do what I do, the way I do it.
  • They will need to find their own way of fitting into their role as pastor of New Leaf church
  • And they’ll do it differently than I do it.
  • So give them space to figure that out.
  • Ok?  Fair?

• So, now, were done with that stuff.  But that only took like two minutes and I certainly don’t want my last sermon to be only two minutes long.
  • So, I have decided I want to do what, theoretically, I do best.
  • I wanna preach some theology.

• Over our years of ministry together we have, I think, developed a certain theology together.
  • A certain way of understanding God
  • A certain way of reading God’s story.
  • So I thought I would talk about that today.

• In his letter Paul talks often refers to “his gospel” and I think it makes sense to talk about the Gospel according to Paul.
  • So today, I want to share what I see as the “gospel according to New Leaf”
  • Or better, the “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason”.
  • Because part of what makes New Leaf, New Leaf, is that we each have our own unique ways of proclaiming the gospel.  And I think that’s a good thing.
  • And yet our different understandings don’t live in isolation, when we are at our best, our different interpretations, our different ways of telling the interact and re-interpret one-another.  It’s always been like that.
  • And, on our best days, we all come away with a deeper and truer, though not necessarily more similar, way of understanding of the gospel and the Bible’s the story of God.
  • At least I know that is what has happened for me over the years.
  • I like to think that it’s happened for many of you, as well.

• So get comfy, this gunna take a few minutes.  And grab those notebooks; there’ll be a lot to comment on.

• Let’s start at the beginning.
  • The beginning of Genesis, I believe, tells us something about this world we live in: that God thinks it is good.
  • Over and over again the text records God saying that the world God is creating is good, good and very good.
  • At the very heart of the “gospel according to New Leaf, according to Jason” is that it is optimistic.
  • It is based in a fundamental belief that the world, and everything in it, including you and me, our neighbors and even our enemies, according to God, are, at their core, good.

• Genesis 1 also, I believe, gives us a sense of God’s mission in the world.
  • Go out, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, start families, make babies.
  • There is, from the very beginning a vision of a world where humanity is co-care takers of all of creation, with God.
  • This vision is, I think, the precursor to what we would call God’s Kingdom.
  • God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, I believe, was the plan from the beginning.
  • Over time, it develops, and changes, as the imagination of the faithful continually reinterprets that vision for their own time and place.
  • Until in Revelation we see a beautiful city where the streets are lined with gold, and there is no temple, because God is
    all and in all.
  • The second thing that I would say characterizes the “gospel according to New Leaf, according to Jason” is that the gospel is in its nature, expansive & future oriented.

•  So, to review, creation is good.  And creation is headed somewhere.  (Draw on board)

• But we also know of another reality too.  We know of the reality of sin.
  • We understand that all is not as it should be.
  • The world is broken.
  • And we ourselves are broken right along with it.

• I’ve talked about before how this brokenness hits us on three levels.
  • It hits us on the societal level – wars and famine, and oppression break our hearts every day.  And we know, in our bones, so to speak, that this is not the world god envisioned when God was in the act of creation.
  • It hits us on the relational level – we know that we do not act towards others the way we want to act, the way God wants us to act.  That, in fact, we all too often hurt those we love the most.
  • And we experience that this brokenness hits us at the level of our identity.  That we don’t always know who we are.  We don’t know how to be in the world.  And we don’t know how to see ourselves as God’s beloved creations.
  • The third characteristic of the “gospel according to New Leaf, according to Jason” is that it is Honest about who we are and our brokenness.  As individuals, and as a community.

• All this brokenness causes creation to veer off course away from its goal of the Kingdom of God.  (Draw on board)
  • This isn’t only true just of our personal experience with God.
  • This has always been true.
  • Throughout all of time God has been calling people back into relationship with God’s self.
  • God has been calling humanity to abandon its rebellion and live in accordance with God’s vision for a world, where the lion lays down with the lamb.
  • Through prophets and commandments, plagues and invading armies, and whatever else God could think of to get through to us, God has reached out to God’s creation and tried to call us to God’s self.

• And when all of that didn’t work.  God came down.  In the flesh.  In human form.  And tried to teach us how to live in accordance with God’s kingdom.
  • Jesus shows us what it means to live in and act in this rebellious world, as if we were citizens in God’s kingdom.
  • And we, as humanity, rejected Him.  Rejected his teachings.  And nailed him to the cross.
  • And yet this, somehow, was God’s greatest act of love.
  • That, somehow, in this sacrificial act, all that lay between us and God was swept away, and the path back to God and God’s vision for the world was made clear (draw).

• And now, all that is left for us to do to rejoin God, is to repent and to believe, and to receive the reality that we are forgiven.
  • The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is grounded in forgiveness.
  • We tell the story of forgiveness, proclaim forgiveness to each other and also live in a habitual expectation of forgiveness of and from one another.

• At the same time, however, the “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is Christ Centered.
  • In that, I mean, it is interested in the whole life of Christ, not just the cross.
  • We have always taken seriously the radical invitation to an alternative way of life that Christ offers.
  • A life of love that rejects violence and demands sacrificial generosity.
  • A life that embraces the other, that welcomes the stranger, that cares for the least of these.
  • We know that Christ calls us to a life that we can never fully achieve and thus we must always fall back on our forgiveness, but we don’t use that as an excuse to stop striving towards the example that Christ gave to us.

• And of course the life and death of Christ, would lose much of their punch if it wasn’t for the resurrection.
  • The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is dependent on the hope of the resurrection.
  • It is, at the end of the day, why we do what we do.
  • It is the resurrection that tells us, even on our hardest days, that all this is leading to something, something good.
  • The resurrection points us back to the original vision of a kingdom where God is all and in all, where the lion lays down with the lamb and swords are beet into plow share (draw on board)
  • The resurrection tells us that the end of the story has already been written, and the in the end the KOG will triumph.

• Because of the way Christ lived his life, and ultimately because of the resurrection, The “Gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” believes that God is a boundary breakingGod
  • God has, and will, and can, break through every boundary that lies between people and between people and God.
  • “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman”.
  • Through God’s activity in the world all is being reconciled.

• The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is not an individualistic gospel concerned only with an individual’s relationships to God.
  • The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is Communal.
  • Meaning that we are on this journey together.
  • That our faith is about more than just our own individual relationships with God.
  • But it also has everything to do with how we live in this world together.
  • The rubber of our gospel hits the road in community.
  • In the way we treat each other, treat strangers, and treat our neighbors.

• The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is both Biblical and Spiritual.
  • It is based on the grand narrative that is presented to us in the Bible.
  • And it is dependent on the help of the Holy Spirit to guide and inform and correct us as we struggle to understand and apply this ancient text.

• Ok, one last, last thing.
  • The “gospel according to New Leaf – according to Jason” is I believe evolving.
  • Not that the gospel itself changes, but that as we grow and change our understanding of the Good News of God in the world, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, grows and changes as well.
  • And to say that what we understand today to be true or to be most important is the same thing we will think is true or most important tomorrow is to stop growing.
  • We never want to tell God that we have nothing left to learn.  ‘cuz he’ll find a way to teach us, whether we like it or not.

• So that’s the “the gospel according to New Leaf – according to me”.
  • Optimistic
  • Expansive & Future oriented
  • Honest
  • Grounded in forgiveness
  • Christ centered
  • Hope
  • Boundary breaking
  • Communal
  • Biblical & Spiritual
  • Evolving

• So what I’d like to do now, a little different than a normal discussion.
  • I’d like to open it up to ask me anything.  It can have to do with the sermon, or not.  Have to do with me leaving, or not, It can be about Baseball, for all I care.  Whatever.  For the next 20 minutes or so, its ask Jason anything.

Benediction:

Ok, now I’m gunna say goodbye for real.

A half a dozen years or so ago, Tara and I asked a hand full of you to go on a crazy adventure with us.  And much to our surprise, you said yes!  And throughout the years more and more of you have said yes to this adventure.  TO this grand experiment in what church can be.

I spent last night reading all the amazing things y’all wrote to me in the photo book, and the CD and the blessings.  And I was moved.  And I have to say that everything you said to me is true from me to you as well.

Whatever I might have taught you – y’all have taught me more.

However I have cared for you – you have cared for me more.

However I have touched your hearts – you have touched mine more.

I am not only a better pastor for having been on this journey with you.  I am a better Christian and a better man.  I thank you from the bottom of my heart; I will never ever forget you.

Thank you.

We’re around for the next week, I’d love to see folks, if you wanna just swing by sometime and say hi, or help put things in boxes, that’d be great.

Also, on last thing, I am a big fan of Facebook, so if you’re not on their, get on their, and if you are and we’re not connected, look me up.  I’m gunna try to get Tara on their too, so you can keep up with what’s going on with her too.  I also plan to blog some over the coming months, so you can look that up under the blog title, “Ethan’s feet”.

And now friends, one last time, receive the benediction:

I want you to know that you are a God blessed people stepping out into a God blessed world with a message of God’s blessing.

Go in God’s grace.

Go in God’s peace.

Thanks be to God!

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I love art galleries.

I find them to be something akin to sacred space. And I mean that in the most mundane way possible.

I stand there in the presence of something that is not merely beautiful (in fact, sometimes it’s not beautiful) but cherished by many many people.

This piece of work has been chosen for me to appreciate by people who care. The lighting has been set just right to put me in a mood to honor the piece. And people stand around making sure I don’t touch the piece.

Now, i understand that all of these norms can, and should at times, be deconstructed. But I appreciate them.

As someone who spends his day trying to make the sacred seem as accessible as possible. I appreciate every once in a while being in a place where things are made to feel ‘set apart’.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

It’s still a choice we are asking people to make.  It’s still a choice between the path that leads to life and the path that leads to death.  Now, the choice doesn’t look like the false choice forced on so many of us in our youth.  This choice is not the simplistic, moralistic, foundantionalist choice between one narrow interpretation of our story verses another.

This is a choice between the path to life and the path to death.  And it is unique to all of us.

But, on the other hand, its also, usually, not that complicated.  Your best friend can tell you what your choice is, and they can tell you which path you are on.  And if they can’t, find someone who can.

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life.”  – God.

This in an interview i did about church and faith in our culture.  It’s short.  It comes from a project that a Wesley student is doing.  She is interviewing 40 Christians over Lent and putting the interviews on You Tube.  Her goal is to show a fuller picture of What Christians are really like then what is often portrayed int he media, especially during an election cycle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61CnWrkIdac&context=C3270704ADOEgsToPDskJPftk79_MF3mUe8CW6INQA

Last Sunday I put ashes on my friends foreheads and asked them to remember that they are dust and that to dust they will return. I have done this every Sunday after Ash Wednesday for the last half a dozen years or so.  I think of it as a gift, to remember that we are not God, to rest in the simple fat that we are finite, and fallible, and in a sense, delicate.  Precious to be sure, loved, honored by our creator.  But finite.

But then the children’s church worker came upstairs and surprised me by asking me if i would come down and give ashes to the kids.  Of course i said yes. But boy, telling a group of 4 – 8 year old kids, all full of life and innocence, to remember that they will return to dust was something i wasn’t completely prepared for.  Even worse was saying it to my very own son, who i would rather imagine being made out of impenetrable diamond that will last forever, then the as temporal dust that is here today but tomorrow, gone.

But if I believe this stuff, and i believe it is good for people to consider, then i must believe it for my own son as well, right?

I have often said our theology needs to pass the 4 year old test — if it sounds ridiculous or horrifying to a 4 year old (I’m looking at you TULIP) then we’ve probably gone wrong somewhere.  I might need to apply that to my understanding of liturgy as well.  If i wouldn’t say or do something with my 4 year old, I probably shouldn’t ask my adult friends to do it either.

I have recently decided to take another church job and leave the church I helped start.  It was one of the harder decisions I have ever made, but also necessary.  The following is the sermon I gave on the Sunday I announced that I was leaving.  It briefly tells the story of New Leaf up to now and sketches my reasons for leaving.

“Today I want to do something a little bit different.  I just want to tell you a story.  This is a story that we are all a part of; it is our story, the story of New Leaf Church.  This is our story, but admittedly it is our story from my perspective.  It would be fun to get to hear this story told and retold from each of our perspectives.  But today were going to hear mine.

I’ll never forget the day the idea of planting a church came into my head.  It was almost exactly 6 years ago actually, I remember because it was Valentine’s Day and I had failed to get Tara a card, and I got in a little bit of trouble for it.

I had had kind of a bad day actually.  I had just gotten some disappointing news about their not being a place for me on staff at Cedar Ridge after I graduated. Cedar Ridge was the place where I was interning and where many of us met (I had kinda been led to believe there would be).

I was early for a meeting (because I am always early for meetings).  The meeting was with this young couple that I had just met at a retreat just a few weeks before.  They were interested in starting a small group for young adults in their apartment and we were meeting to talk about what that might look like.

I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of their apartment complex in Laurel (I was seriously like 30 minutes early) thinking about the disappointments of the day, and wondering what in the world I was going to do after graduation.  And I kinda felt like God asked me a question.

“What about this?” God said.

“What about what?”  I thought.

“What about this?  What if this is what you are to do after you graduate?  These people, the neighborhood you live in, the ideas you have, the friends you’ve made.  What if this is what you do next?”

Interesting, I thought.  And stored the idea away in the back of my head.

I then went on to my meeting with the O’Roarks about starting a small group for young adults.  Which we did.  And it was a cool group.  The Caruso’s were there.  Brian, Nat and others.

We met Sunday evenings and we would discuss the sermon from that morning.  And we learned a lot about each other in those days.  We learned about what each of us held to be most true and what was negotiable; what we thought of as sacred and what we didn’t; what made us laugh or cry, what we each did for fun; we learned what each of us thought about church and faith and life.

During this time I was finishing up my seminary degree at Wesley.  And I was interviewing at various established churches.  And I got a few offers.  But I couldn’t shake this idea that what I really wanted to do was start something new.  To plant a church with these people that I already cared about.  A church that would be a place that reflected their passions and priorities, that was a place for their skills and talents to shine.  To start a place where, together, we could thrive in ways we really couldn’t in any other church that I had seen.  A church more us.

So Tara and I talked about it, thought about it, prayed about it.  And we figured it was now or never.  So we decided to go for it.  It was a decision we came to together.

You need people to start a church.  So we invited everyone in the small group to join us in this adventure, and to our delight a little over half the group said yes!

We started meeting in Tara and I’s living room (this was a little bit before Ethan entered the picture).  And we started dreaming about what we wanted church to be.  Our old line was that we were doing church at the same time we were talking about how we wanted to be doing church.

We weren’t trying to make the perfect church.  We were just trying to make the church that was more perfectly us.  That was, of course, not as easy as it might sound.  There were only nine of us at the time but there was never a shortage of ideas about what church could and should be!

Those early weeks and months were filled with lively conversations about everything from what kind of music we wanted to play to what we wanted to spend our money on.  We talked about outreach and service, and liturgy and theology and the Bible, and, and, and.  I think one time, if I remember right, I even made us have a discussion about what discussions we should be discussing.

Some of the decisions we came to are still with us today.  And some are not.  But I think the most important thing that came from that time in our history, was not so much the decisions themselves.  But that we learned how to love each other through the process of making a decision.  How to stay committed to one-another even when we didn’t get our way.  How to put pour relationships over our ideas.

I think more than anything else the legacy of those early years is a culture that puts relationships above agreement.  (Because, really, where else is that true? Where else do you see that?) And that’s a legacy that we continue to draw on year after year.  And one that will only increase in importance in the coming months and years.

Over the years people have come and people have gone.  Friendships have been made and friends have moved on.  Families have joined and families have been started.  People have chosen careers, gotten new jobs, begun educations and completed them and begun them again.

Ministries have been developed, small groups started, experiments tried.  Some things have flourished, some things have lasted for a season, and some have fallen flat on their faces.  And we have learned from all of them.  And through all of them we have remained true to who we are.

When I think back to why I wanted to plant a church.  What I wanted to be different about this church from all the churches I saw around me.  When I think of those things, then I look around New Leaf today, I see them all.

I see people who wouldn’t normally hang out, who wouldn’t normally be at the same church, people with different backgrounds, different beliefs, different politics and different ethics.  And I see us not just tolerate each other’s difference, but embrace each other as brothers and sisters.  That’s rare.

I see volunteerism and service at a level I’ve never seen in any other church or organization I’ve ever been a part of.  Everyone participates in some way.  Everyone pitches in.  Everyone takes responsibility.  It is the norm here to volunteer, not the exception.  That is rare.

I see a place where individual unique expressions of God are welcomed and embraced.  A place where everyone has a chance to be heard.  And the only thing that is judged is judgment itself.  And that is so precious to me, so fundamental to why I do what I do.

Because you see I believe the church at large, has in many ways, lost its voice.  At least it’s lost its voice to a certain generation of people outside the church.  I believe that because we allow for all of our voices to speak about God, New Leaf has a voice, and can proclaim the gospel in a way that many people around us need to hear and will only hear here.

When I look back at the last 6 years of my life.  I couldn’t be happier with what we’ve created.  I couldn’t be more proud of who we have become.  And I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.

But…

The last 6 years have come with their fair share of sacrifices, for all of us.  All of us have poured time and resources and energy and love into this place.

And it has taken its toll.  Specifically it has taken a toll on my family.  It has meant that Tara has had to work very hard for long hours in a high pressure job to support us.  It has meant never having quite enough time to be together as a family.  It has meant a pace of life that has been for us at times unsustainable.

Now, let me be clear, we stepped into this with eyes wide open.  We have no regrets and we blame no one.

But, we have recently come to the decision that for the health of our family we need to make a change.

I apologize for any of you for whom this is coming as a surprise I tried to get together with as many of you as possible, I just sort of ran out of time.

But a few months ago I started looking for another job, and I’ve found one.   That’s where I’ve been the last couple weekends that I’ve been away.  I have received and accepted a call to be the Associate Minister of Community at First Baptist Church in Madison, WI.

I start May 1^st, so we will be heading out at the end of April and I will be wrapping up my time here at New Leaf sometime in the middle of April.

………..

I imagine there are lots of thoughts and questions running through your head right now.  And I’d like to ask you to hold on to them for just a bit.  I want us to go into our time of mediation, prayer and worship and then after church we will have a short meeting to give us some time to answer any initial questions you might have, or comments you might want to make.  And let me assure you, there will be many more meetings and opportunities for all of us to discuss and consider what happens next.

But let me just say that I will continue to be your pastor right up through April.  And that I will help, along with the LT and staff and others to establish a plan for transition.  And let me be clear right from the beginning that I have every confidence that New Leaf will not only survive this transition, but thrive.  And actually that I expect New Leaf will come out the other side of this even stronger then it is today.

I’m going to turn it over to Amy now to lead us in our time of meditation.”

Hey Friends,

I am attempting to revive my blog.  This is just a test.  Nothing to see here.  Check back later.

jason