Paul Nixon's - The Manger and Metro:

This weeks' blog is courtesy of Paul Nixon, our guest preacher this week. Paul is a Methodist Minister, published author, church developer, church planter and on staff with the national church on the Board of Discipleship's Path One. Paul has been praying for the creation of the Village long before it had a name, let alone a location.

The Manger and Metro: How Jesus keeps showing up in the Darndest Places and What it means for the Village"

The struggle of Mary and Joseph that surrounded the birth of Jesus is enough to stress a parent out. It was hard. And yet a night packed full of amazing surprises! Decades later, Paul and Barnabas, followers of Jesus who were seeking to spread his teaching across the Roman Empire reiterated this fact: that living a faithful life is just plain hard. A hard life, but I might add, a life filled to the brim with magnificent surprises.
In August of 2006, United Methodist Bishop Charlene Kammerer invited me to spend a week walking the streets and praying about moving to the Washington DC area in order to help plant a new faith community. It took me just a couple days to conclude that the project would be very hard, and I began to think how exactly I would word my response to her, that “It’s a wonderful place, but the work looks too hard.”
I was working on that little speech in my head as I rode down the escalator into the Dupont Metro at rush hour on a hot August Friday night. As I waited for the train, I noticed a woman waiting nearby, strapped into a wheelchair, with a brown Labrador asleep at her feet, on a leash. The woman was beautiful, her hair blonde and her smile almost beatific as she moved only her fingers in order to read a Braille magazine – and again, this is DC, so it was probably something like Nuclear Physics Today. I began to wonder how many times she and that dog had practiced this route from work back home before they tried it all by themselves. And then I thought “What courage – to immerse oneself in a sea of strangers in a big city at rush hour, unable to see anybody, unable to run, able only to trust that her dog would help her find the door to the train and ultimately, the way home.”
Well, we got on the train – we packed on like sardines – and as bodies filled the gap between me the woman, I could no longer see her. Oddly, when the people in front of her exited the train at Metro Center, neither she nor the dog was there. I have no idea where they went. I have watched for her on other Friday nights at 6:30 at Dupont; but I have never seen her again.
Well, that night as I went to sleep, I fantasized about how easy it would be to accept the call to work in DC if only Jesus would appear to me in a vision while I slept. I laughed about how easy life would be if we could have visions of Jesus and audible voices and so forth. A few hours later, I awakened at maybe 2 in the morning – and the first thing I thought was “No vision of Jesus.” I rolled over to go back to sleep and then my eyes were wide open. And I saw her – the woman and her dog – faithfully and courageously living life as God called them to live it – a life that is hands-down harder than anything God has ever called me to. “But God, this work you set before me – it looks too hard.” And yet I knew then that my work was not going to be as hard as her work. And I knew that “too hard” was not going to wash. “Too hard?”
Paul Nixon, have you been sleeping all those times through the stories in the Bible? What was it that we read a moment ago, what was it that Paul and Barnabas were saying to all the young Christians across Asia Minor – “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Eugene Peterson paraphrases it with his customary in-your-face style: “Anyone signing up for the kingdom of God has to go through plenty of hard times.” Period.
Where on earth did we ever get the notion that when God is in it, it all becomes easy? That is just plain silliness. The Gospel Way is hard. This work to which so many of us have been called – sharing good news with our world - folks, it’ll wear you out. This church, this Village, you folks are planting here in Toledo, its hard work. True?
Three things I want to say to you today – you tenacious Village People of Toledo -
1. THE WAY IS HARD.
When I say the Way, I am talking about the Way with a capital W – the journey of faith to which God calls us as we seek to follow in the steps of Jesus. People, the Way is hard.
In the Book of Acts, a couple chapters after Paul and his friend Barnabas commented on the way being hard, we find Paul and another friend, Silas, flogged (as in whipped), then thrown in a dank Roman jail – singing hymns and happy songs in the middle of the night. Have you ever known anyone who was crazy enough that you can imagine them doing this if they were in such a situation? If so, that’s a friend to hold onto.
I work with church planters all over the USA, developing systems and resources to make their lives easier – and still it’s hard. None of my planters have been flogged yet. Nor have they or I caught pneumonia from riding their horse in a January rain – which is how one of my ancestors died, the first Protestant missionary to cross to the west bank of the Mississippi over 200 years ago.
And it moves far beyond the Cheri Holdridges of the world. Folks, I’m here to report, if you doing what you are supposed to be doing, it’s hard. It’s always hard.
In a lot of cases, where the Apostle Paul and friends got into trouble with the authorities, it was due to misunderstanding – people were typically mad at Paul for stupid reasons, because of their own issues that caused them to take offense at something he did or said. Life hasn’t changed in 1900 years, has it?
On the other hand, if your way is a little too easy these days – if you are feeling a little too comfortable, a little too close to the top of your game, if you are feeling like you are really getting the hang of this ministry thing, BEWARE. When the way becomes easy it means you could well be drifting off course.
The Way is hard, when you are trying to do the right thing, and follow the direction that God has for you. And yet I want you to consider tonight’s second big idea:
2. ABOUT MIDNIGHT, YOU CAN EXPECT GOD’S BEST WORK.
We are aware that life in Bethlehem got very interesting after midnight, when angels showed up, and a bunch of shepherds threw an ad hoc birthday party. God has a history of good work done in the black of the night.
In the case of our church planter team, Paul and Silas, in the jail – it was an earthquake that came in the middle of the night, changing the whole plotline. I could keep going on this theme of the good stuff God does in the wee hours, the dark hours. Stuff like…. Easter.
A couple years ago, Jim Forbes from Riverside Church in New York, spoke in DC at a church just down a few blocks from my home. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Forbes preached again for us the same basic sermon he had preached the Sunday before, when he had been at Trinity UCC in Chicago (Obama’s old church – a church that was getting bashed by the media that week in a bad way). His sermon was entitled “Good News in the Night Season.” That sermon was a doorway, through which I was able to better understand the whole experience of the night season.
Forbes says that God’s best work comes in the middle of the night, in those moments when we simply can’t see what is going on –when the path is not clear at all, and the best we can do is hold on and trust. I think he is right.
You know every person on the planet lives half their life with the sun above the horizon and half their life with the sun below the horizon. No matter what your latitude, it all averages out. If you live 80 years on this earth, 40 of them will be in the dark. That is true spiritually and emotionally as well. God made the world this way – the night is not evil – now it holds the potential for mischief, but it is not evil and it is not a tragic season – it is just that time in our life when stuff happens that we do not understand. I got to thinking during that sermon that in the years prior to my coming to DC, life had been a long summertime in the Yukon for me – lots of light, minimal darkness. But you read the spiritual autobiography of Mother Teresa, a book entitled “Come Be My Light,” and you will see a woman plunged in the longest dark night of the soul ever recorded, wintertime at the North Pole, so to speak. And yet, look what she accomplished in the night! It was not a tragic time at all. Painful, oh yes. Very painful, but a very good season. In the early years of the darkness, when Teresa no longer felt the presence of God, she spent a lot of energy trying to recapture the good, fuzzy feelings of her earlier spiritual journey. In terms of human ecstasy, as a young adult, Teresa sailed about as close to touching God as any have ever described. However, her writings reveal that as the night season wore on, she grew more accepting of it. In fact, it was her longing to touch Christ that propelled her and her team of sisters to go each day to the dying in the streets and to hold them and to love them – it was only in holding the least of these and the last of these our brethren that Teresa found any sense of God at all for the last three decades of her life. Teresa’s life could well go down as one of the 20 most remarkable people of all time – that is how powerful a life she lived…. In that elite dinner party of 20, Jesus and Buddha would share with her around the table.
But friends, such lives …the great lives are not formed in the midst of perpetual sunshine. The best lives emerge through hardship and some sense of struggle, always. Perplexity often! Great people are spiritually formed in the night season. Just like 13 year olds do their best growing at night. You can expect God’s best work in the middle of your night.
Sometimes when we collapse to try to pray in stressful moments, we fall asleep. In the greatest of all night seasons, in the Garden of Gethsemene, the disciples were supposed to be sitting up with Jesus, who was deep in prayer and waiting to be arrested, and… they fell asleep. Jesus scolds them repeatedly. But we cannot hear the tone of his voice in the page of the Bible. Somehow, I don’t hear anger in his voice, more resignation, even a hint of disappointment. Those guys were not dying the next day, they were in a different place than Jesus… but they were stressed to the max in their own ways. I take a minority viewpoint on this subject, but I think they needed their rest. God was still at work in Peter, James and John, even when they had pushed as far as they could go faith-wise and energy-wise. They each had better days coming; each of them later would have their own night in the garden, so to speak.
In the meantime, often all we can do, and the best thing we can do, is to get some rest in the arms of God, while God keeps working. There will be moments in the life of the Village when you will need to remember that!
And then, one final big idea: You can indeed expect God’s best work after midnight,…
3. BUT, EVEN WHEN YOU EXPECT IT, GRACE STILL WILL SURPRISE THE SOCKS OFF YOU!
I came to Washington DC in large part to help create a new faith community. And the project floundered. After four months, I was up to four souls in my people-gathering mission in Washington, God and I had some long talks out on the deck in the mornings. After my first six weeks, reality was setting in, and I began to wonder what on earth I was doing in downtown Washington DC. And then one afternoon, grace surprised me.
Do you remember the story that was on the news last year about the man who sued the dry cleaners for millions of dollars because they lost his pants? It was one of those stories so ridiculous that it made for good human interest material. Jeannie Moose of CNN covered the story – and they gave us the blow by blow on NPR radio for weeks.
Well, here I am in a new city, and I am trying to make conversation with anyone I can, so I step into the dry cleaners near my building to pick up some clothes and I am looking for any handle I can find to make small talk. So out of the blue I ask, “Whatever happened to the man who sued the dry cleaners for millions of dollars? How did that come out?” I had lost track of the story and figured the woman at the dry cleaners would know. She looked at me with a very serious look. And she asked, “Did you see him?” “Did I see who?” “Mr. Pearson.” “Who is Mr. Pearson?” “The man who sued the cleaners.” “No, I have no idea who he is – I was just curious.” And then she cut me off, to say, “You just passed him as you came in here.” “Huh?” “The man going out the door as you came in, that was Mr. Pearson.” I said, “Noooooo.” She said, “Yaaahhhh, we are his new dry cleaners.” I said, “Noooooo.” She said, “Yahhhhh” She proceeded to tell me that he had been coming in for about a year, ever since he had the problem with the other cleaners, but that he had always paid cash and used a pseudonym, because I mean what dry cleaners in their right man would want to do business with a man who will sue them for $20 million when they mess up his $400 pants? So it turns out, they had just figured out who he was.
I asked, “Are you scared?” And she said, “A little – but we prayed about it – and we knew that he is not a happy person. He’s had a bad divorce. Someone needs to pray for Mr. Pearson. So we decided that we would take him as a customer, so that every time he came in, we would be reminded to pray for him.”
So, picture this – just after the moment when these two Christian business women, having prayed about it, decide to courageously serve a man whom no other dry cleaner in her right mind would touch – and they have just given him the speech, “Now Mr. Pearson, please understand that sometimes we can make mistakes, etc” They have just finished that encounter – and in walks this new Methodist preacher in town, who out of the blue asks about Mr. Pearson – people, people, people – what are the odds of that?
For them it was confirmation that God wanted them to serve this difficult man. For me it was a reminder, that even when I feel like I am wandering in circles in Washington, God is ordering my steps. It was a typical surprise by grace.
Now, a couple years later, after several starts and stops, we are progressing to create a new faith community in Washington – totally Plan B. Grace again has surprised me.
I know this much. It’s not about me. And it’s not about Cheri. It’s not about you. It’s not even about the Village. Nor about the Apostle Paul… Not to offend any Catholic friends, but it’s not even about Mary and Joseph.
It’s about what God is up to in the world. God calls us to do what we can do – and worrying is not on the list of helpful things that we can do. God calls us
…to faithfully show up, day by day.
…to give it our best,
…to work and think as hard as we can,
…to push out beyond our comfort zones –
…and then to wait upon God… …for the next surprise of grace.