By Deacon Beth Galbreath, lifetime member of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.

 This year, 2012, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. celebrates the 100^th anniversary of the movement in the United States. It was on March 12, 2012, that Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low, back in Savannah, GA from her years in England and her experience as a British Girl Guide leader, phoned a friend and said, “Come right over! I have something for the girls of Savannah, and America, and the whole world, and we’re going to start it tonight!” What she started was radical and challenged the stereotypes of her day.

Admittedly, I’m a fan of Girl Scouting. Growing up, I never had a birthday in the same place twice till I was 13, but I always knew there would be a church (usually Methodist) and a Girl Scout troop wherever we were. Some were better than others, but the older I got, the greater the friends and the bigger the adventures I had. Girl Scouting, for me, was a refuge from the bullying and challenges to my self-worth that I experienced as the new kid in every school. And it was a chance to make plans and carry them out, as a leader.

So I made sure that our daughter Lee’s troops had the leadership to take on challenges and great adventures. (Yes, I also volunteered in Boy Scouting. And Lee received the Girl Scout Gold Award, and Kurt the Boy Scout Eagle Award, in the first Boy Scout-Girl Scout award ceremony ever held in Rockford. I don’t know about the rest of the country!)

In the 100 years since 1912, Girl Scouts have grown up to become doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, public officials, corporate leaders, scientists, community leaders, and astronauts. The best estimate is that there are probably 50 million former Girl Scouts in the U.S. today. Now, in the 21^st Century:

More than 50,000 girls are served by grant-funded initiatives that include Girl Scouts in Detention Centers, Girl Scouts Behind Bars, Girls in Public Housing, Girls in Rural Outreach, P.A.V.E. (Project Anti-Violence Education), uniquely ME (funded by Dove), and GoGirlsGo!, a program on health, nutrition and self-esteem.

Membership is becoming even more diverse than ever, with growing African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American membership.

A “Defy self-doubt. Defy the Stereotype. Defy Peer Pressure. Defy the Ordinary” media campaign has been launched. 

In 2006 the program levels were realigned. They are Girl Scout Daisy, K-1, Girl Scout Brownie, 2-3, Girl Scout Junior, 4-5, Girl Scout Cadette, 6-8, Girl Scout Senior, 9-10, and Girl Scout Ambassador, 11-12. A dizzying (for this retired leader) array of new program materials is designed to keep girls learning, growing and leading. And gone are the green, blue and brown uniforms you may remember – for most age levels now, girls simply wear white shirt, khaki pants and an official sash or vest.

But what doesn’t ever change is Girls Scouting’s unique and crucial focus on girls. On its 100^th birthday, GSUSA is launching To Get Her There (www.togetherthere.org ), an effort to go beyond the group-level program to partner with companies and organizations for serious social change. The stated audacious goal is “to achieve gender-balanced leadership—in every industry and every community—in a single generation.”

The website says: “Research shows that 61% of girls are either ambivalent about leadership or say it's not important to them at all.

“Studies also reveal that girls idealize leadership qualities and skills, like being talented, caring, honest, hard-working, confident, good listeners, and team players. But only 21% of girls believe they have the qualities required to be a good leader. In other words, she knows what it takes to lead, but doesn't have the confidence to do so….

“She is lacking role models and mentors, especially in high-paying STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] fields. She is confronted by unhealthy images about female beauty. And the bullying mentality of peers holds her back. An unsupportive environment gives her discouraging messages starting in grade school, and continuing beyond. If this situation goes unchecked, millions of girls will never realize their full leadership potential. They'll opt out of pursuing their ambitions and never dare to believe in their own potential.”

ToGetHerThere is an effort to enlist companies and organizations as partners in working for healthy role models and mentoring for girls.

This church has been blessed with a strong history of women pastors and women in leadership roles alongside men. This church has been involved in efforts against modern slavery, much of which is in the sex trade and abuses young girls. On this 100^th anniversary of the nation’s leading girl-centered organization, it’s worthwhile taking some time to think about how we can do an even better job to encourage young women’s leadership both here and in our places of work the other six days of the week!

   “Some assembly required!” Words to strike terror into some parents’ hearts; words to cause sleep deprivation on Christmas Eve; words to raise the stress level as soon as they are read on the box!

   We all know that Christmas has a lot of assembly required. And in the days after Christmas, there is more. “Why do people give gifts that you have to make? I don’t DO needlepoint!” “The flowers will be lovely, but now I have to find a pot and potting soil for these bulbs.” “How do you set up this mp3 player again?”

   And if hardware is required, you know there will be at least two trips to the building supply store. Never in the history of the universe was there a do-it-yourself project that did not require at least one, and often several, trips to the hardware store.

   The New Year’s weekend has been for Pastor Jim and me a time of “Some assembly required.” With scrounged wood and pegboard and a leftover PVC pipe from another project, and two trips to Home Depot, we built a teleprompter. (Well, it’s actually a portable eye-level stand for a laptop, on which will be running a powerpoint, for the shooting of my cell-phone-delivered Biblical storytelling lesson series. Stay tuned!) And I managed to plant the paper-white bulbs. And everything is, mostly, cleaned up.

   But on Christmas Eve, and Christmas, we celebrated the mystery of the Incarnation, God with us, the incredible free gift of Jesus Christ to us. There he is, and here is the Church he founded, and we rejoice in God’s love and in one another’s love. We celebrate Holy Communion and the free grace of Christ given to us by Holy Spirit. Free. No assembly required. There is nothing we can give or do to make God love us; nothing we can do to make God stop loving us.

   And yet... even here, there is “some assembly required.” Christians of the Wesleyan tradition believe that although Christ’s grace is a free gift to all humans, we can’t receive it unless we open our hands and our hearts to accept it, unwrap it, open the box, take it out and use it every day, every moment of our lives. There is a place for us humans in the great divine dance.

   Faith is “some assembly required.” Faith grows when we make spiritual disciplines such as Bible study, prayer, journaling, small group accountability, spiritual retreats, and worship together as the Body of Christ part of our lives. Faith grows when we give our resources, or talents, our spiritual gifts and our witness in the work of Christ. Faith grows when we stretch ourselves to see where Christ is leading us, possibly into new and challenging ministries (like cell phone storytelling lessons).

   Worship is “some assembly required.” Worship is not a show that we watch or consume – or, as leaders, “perform.” Worship is an invitation to take one hour to lean toward God. Expectantly. Openly. Bringing our whole selves to the enterprise.

   The experimental Sunday evening worship is “much assembly required!” There are many expectations, not all fulfilled all of the time! A team of folks is experimenting with different styles and different elements, but with the same goal of enabling connections with God. In the 21^st Century, I and many prophetic voices are convinced, worship will grow more and more clearly from the people.

   So whether you’re looking for the Sunday evening service to take off and grow and become your main worship service, or whether you love the sacramental focus of 9 a.m. or the more traditional 10:30 a.m., remember this year that all worship is “some assembly required.”

   Whether life right now for you is smooth or rough, remember that the great gift of grace, the gift of faith, is “some assembly required.” And start planning your trips to the supply store.

   May the mind of Christ grow in you strongly in 2012!

I’m really enjoying our all-church study of Adam Hamilton’s The Journey this Advent! It helps me focus at a time when I tend to be so focused on church stuff that Jesus gets squeezed out (yes, it’s just as possible for Jesus to get squeezed out by church as by shopping, especially for clergy and musicians!)

But I wish Adam had consulted Mr. Holy Land Geography himself, James Fleming, veteran of decades of work for peace in Israel-Palestine through training tourist guides (that’s a whole lot of other stories). James could have told him what the wise men saw as they traveled south and slightly west to Bethlehem, when “there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising (or, “in the east”), until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overwhelmed with joy…”

Puzzling over this, Fleming decided to plot and follow the ancient route from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The main road ran south and west until the “Bethlehem local” left it and turned back east. The magi were probably not traveling by full moon, so they could see the stars clearly. That means they could not see clearly the unfamiliar, rocky, hilly road, and probably were traveling about as slowly as a person can walk. And remember that they could not see any lights of the town from afar; even if oil lamps had been lit they would not have shed any light outside the homes, which were either built over or around caves, or opened only onto a central courtyard.

Meanwhile, the stars move sedately from east to west across the southern sky. Whatever the star or heavenly portent was, it went “ahead of them” and then “stopped.” Now these magi were astronomer-astrologers. They knew exactly how the stars moved. What could it mean, “the start stopped?” Why did they rejoice when the star stopped?

Plotting the route carefully along with sightings of the way stars appeared as he traveled at about the same speed, Fleming saw that along the main highway, the stars moved with him as he traveled west, and whatever the magi were following was in the southern sky, toward Bethlehem. But when he turned east, on the smaller track to Bethlehem, the stars appeared to stand still for a time, relative to sightlines over the town, which by then could be identified. So the magi took it as a sign that this was, indeed, the town they sought! How cool is that?

“Proving” this or that puzzling Scripture passage scientifically neither “confirms” nor “disproves” faith. Our faith is based on much greater and deeper realities than our understanding of any particular Bible verse! But I do enjoy discoveries that say to us “modern, sophisticated” people: Hah! Our ancestors were not “stupid, unsophisticated” people. It’s us who, blinded by our certainties, can’t figure out what they were telling us.

May this Advent season be filled with many, many guiding stars for you, and may you not miss them, nor fail to rejoice when they stop!

Recently our church hosted the funeral, or “homegoing,” of Ivor Jackson, beloved wife of Oree Jackson, our wonderful custodian…while I was also thinking of the very different Presbyterian funeral I cannot attend, of the husband of my friend Donna Marie in North Carolina. And Sunday we celebrated all the saints whose lives have pointed us to God, now gone from our sight. So many passages.

Jim and I have taken our morning walk in the rain this week. The golden leaves of the silver maples make lovely filigree on the shiny black tar of the parking lot. We avoid the hundreds of earthworms on the path. We do our civic duty clearing a storm drain of leaves. We wonder whether our friends in the rural areas have been able to finish the corn and soybean harvest before these very Novemberish rains have begun. The year is passing.

A trimester or semester ends; students begin again. Passages.

This year we will not be hosting Thanksgiving and we will not be traveling afterward to second-thanksgiving with Jim’s folks in Indiana. Instead, we’re heading north to the home of the new assistant professor, his wife the grad student and our grandson the preschool student. For the first time, I won’t be baking or cooking anything! Passages.

As we walk in the rain we think about canoe trips in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of northern Minnesota: rain-slick portages, eden-fresh mornings, fighting headwinds, breathtaking orchids, heartwarming campfires, bears. And we doubt whether aging bodies will allow us to experience such travels with our grandson, now three. Passages.

We identify passages - the concept of life changing - more readily with losses than with gains. When exciting things are happening, things we want, we rarely stop to reflect about how they will change our lives – the notable two exceptions being marriage and a new baby!

Yet God calls us to remember that there is no perfect time, there is no eden anywhere. Life is a journey. The bone-deep understanding that life is linear is reflected in ancient myth – and current video games (unless the programmer chooses otherwise) – where those who rise from the grave are only “undead,” not “alive.”

That life is a linear journey is a gift, not a curse. When moments cannot go on forever, when we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, we have the choice to appreciate each lovely gift and moment more than we would otherwise. Yet we forget to do it. Passages, up or down, give us reminders, nudges, to remember our blessings, and be thankful!

Christ says – and proved it! – that we are precious in God’s sight and that beyond this life there is not “undeadness,” but the offer of “super-aliveness”! Our lives matter to God, amazingly! It is God’s goal that we grow in grace until all our motives are rooted in God’s love – sanctification. And that growth, that passage, goes on forever, long after the growth of muscle in the gym or the easy acquisition of new intellectual skills has been left behind.

My fellow elders, what legacy of faith are you gathering together now, in the time of harvest, for those to come? My younger friends, how are you reflecting on and appreciating the passages of your lives now? People of faith, how are we living the Kingdom of God in this community, today, and as we work to change for tomorrow?

Melissa Meyers is associate pastor of Orland Park Faith. Like a church planter, she has been out meeting people at Panera (and elsewhere) and inviting them to church. She posts this in Facebook:

Paneradventure-- A group of women at the table across the restaurant is discussing one of their upcoming wedding and complaining about the pastor... "He's just so frustrating. I mean just because we're getting married in his church, he thinks that he can say God and Jesus. I mean, I don't have a problem with them, but I don't want to invite them to the wedding, you know what I mean?"

“I don’t want to invite them to the wedding.” Then why have the wedding in their house? Why have it officiated by one of their servants? The arrogance – and the sad, sad ignorance and lost-ness – of this beloved child of God takes my breath away.

I’ve been reading the works of Kenneth Bailey (Jacob and the Prodigal, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Paul Through Middle Eastern Eyes). Bailey lived and taught in seminaries in the Middle East for 40 years, in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel-Palestine. He has a wonderful ability to open the cultural underpinnings of Biblical stories so we see what we haven’t before.

And Jim and I have watched his movie, Finding the Lost. It’s a low-budget but powerful drama of the “lost” parables of Luke 15: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons, also known as the good shepherd, the good woman, and the compassionate father. The last is also the story I told last Saturday at the School of Evangelism. There isn’t time to mine the riches he uncovers for us – maybe in an adult study sometime!

But one thing he says that I didn’t realize before – and changes the way I tell it: Though we all realize that the older son didn’t know he was lost, lost from the close, loving relationship his father yearned for, we usually think that the prodigal realized he was lost and “repented” when he was sitting among the pigs.

Bailey shows that, culturally and Biblically, that was not the case. He makes plans to manipulate his father into giving him a job so he can pay back the money he lost. He did not understand his complete lostness until he arrived at the edge of the village and saw his father running down the road, humiliating himself in the eyes of the village, but full of incredible love. Up to that point he was still full of himself – “I’ll get a job and work to pay back the money I lost.” That is when he repents. That’s why he doesn’t finish his planned speech. The father’s incredible, inhuman love – this is no oriental patriarch, but God himself, and Jesus himself! – has found his son.

He invites him home and invites him to a banquet, not in honor of the prodigal, but to celebrate his success in finding the lost. And he again humiliates himself and pays a great price to invite his older son to the banquet – the son who is a “good person,” but doesn’t see that he also is lost from his father’s love.

Two weeks ago I was at the Kairos weekend at Dwight prison. There, over the course of the weekend, again and again we see women who realize they are lost. But at Panera, the bride can’t see how lost she is.

Who is inviting whom? “I don’t have a problem with God and Jesus, but I don’t want to invite them to my wedding.” “To my life.” “To my Thanksgiving/Christmas family gathering.” Guess what – They’re the ones inviting you! They’re the ones inviting me! And they’re the ones inviting our neighbors, too. How can we help extend the invitation?

On this World Communion Sunday, Pastor Jim is preaching about “Problem Tenants” which are, so often, us, as tenants of God’s beautiful planet earth. But today I’d like to share some of our more mundane journey as tenants to the Woodridge parsonage, 2725 Mohawk Avenue.

For all of Jim’s ministry, we have lived in parsonages. Our children have both owned homes, but we never have. Ah, the stories we could tell! In every church, we have focused on helping the church building improve; we have never asked for anything more than basic maintenance on the parsonage – which has led to such exciting parsonage-family stories as The Shocking Electric Stove, The Collapsing Ceiling(s), The Amazing Wallpaper, The January Fireplace Campout, The Dripping Asbestos, The Fishing Tackle Collection That Was Sold for $5 Because the Church Rummage Sale Took Over the Garage…

But here, there’s been a different story. Woodridge folks have poured out their hearts and opened their wallets as well for our journey home to the parsonage. Thank you!

Thank you for renting the lovely temporary house at Wolfe Drive where we lived for a year, and where all our children, grandchild and a nephew spent a wonderful Christmas. Thank you for all your work in cleaning and preparing it for us, helping us move in, then helping us move out to the Pack-Rat containers, and cleaning afterward.

Thank you for your prayers during the time we were homeless. Thank you, congregation, for letting us cook and live in the church – although much of the time, we didn’t have to cook because you brought dinners! (Once before we’d lived in a church for six weeks, but we were a lot younger then and a sofabed and sponge bath were just part of the adventure. So thank you, Walt and Pat Read, for opening your home to us for sleeping and showers.)

Challenging though that time was, it was also a powerful learning time. I learned that homelessness is not just about not having a warm place to sleep. In this culture, to be homeless is to be invisible to the bureaucracy. Without a permanent residential address, there were issues with the Department of Motor Vehicles around our vehicle licenses and driver’s licenses. There were issues around insurance.

And I remembered how once years ago, when another church was trying to sell the parsonage, our three-year-old suffered anxious insecurity until the “For Sale” sign was removed. It gave me a deeper empathy for the men, women and children we serve at the PADS shelter, many of whom have cars and/or jobs, but no place to call home.

Thank you, Woodridge folks, for your tremendous work in renovating the parsonage! We were able to help only a little before we had to leave to help our son’s family move, and when we came back we could not believe our eyes! The entire house had been scrubbed, wallpaper-stripped and repainted. New, high-efficiency fixtures had been installed in every bathroom, along with modern vanities, cabinets and mirrors. The kitchen floor and two bathroom floors were replaced. (A new, high-efficiency washer and dryer had been installed in the spring). The weeds outside were cleared and the beds were mulched, and flowers planted in the front. Curtains and curtain rods were purchased and some hung. All of the work was done with a plan of serving not just us but many parsonage families for many years ahead.

And then you helped us move everything from the containers to the house, in a single afternoon! Thank you!

Since then, Jim has mounted an extra cabinet in the kitchen, and the driveway is going to be repaired and sealed. We’ve been unpacking, slowly – funny thing, Sunday and other work still happens every week – so it’s been a slow process. We’re still moving in, but in two weeks, ready or not (and I hope we will be), on the 16^th at noon, you are invited to a open house to see your parsonage. There will be a self-guided tour through your parsonage. There will be food. (Several folks have said they want to help with food, and since I’m not a very good cook, I welcome that!)

And we will gather for a brief liturgy to reconsecrate this home to the glory of God here at Woodridge United Methodist Church. How great it will be to have another place for meetings and groups, when every room at the church is full!

Thank you all for all your help on this journey home.

I trust that by now in our series of studying our roots in the Methodist movement, the renewal movement started by John Wesley, we’ve begun to see that it was indeed a movement. Wesley wanted to reform the Church of England, not destroy it or start a new church. He was a priest of the Anglican church. He loved its sacraments, its liturgy.

Wesley sent out hundreds of lay preachers, including some women, to spread the good news of God’s love. But laypeople couldn’t administer the sacraments, by longstanding church law and tradition. So he continued to urge Methodists to participate in their local Anglican churches. But the churches became more and more threatened and unwelcoming to the Methodists. So eventually, Wesley was forced to ordain clergy for his people and edge toward becoming a “church.”

Now we have to ask: so what? What does this all have to do with us?  

It strikes me that the Anglican church in Wesley’s time feared the same thing many of us 21st Century Christians fear today: the “E” word. For Anglicans, the E-word was enthusiasm! Enthusiasm meant emotion in worship, feeling close to God, joyful singing, breaking decorum! In short, what happens when our hearts and our lives are filled with joy because of the good news—the evangel—the gospel—and want to share it with others! It’s closely intertwined with today’s e-word.

Today’s E word—evangelism—is enough to make a whole lot of United Methodists break out in a cold sweat.

We have come to associate evangelism with the in-your-face variety practiced by folks knocking on the door and street-corner tract-pushers. We associate the word with those little comic-book tracts you sometimes find left in public restrooms, warning of hellfire if you should die tonight without having repeated the prayer helpfully provided for you at the back of the tract. We’ve come to associate the word with TV evangelists and a particular kind of politically active church. Whew! Gives me the shakes just to list those!

But the evangel really means “good news.” What is the good news? This is it, according to Jesus himself:

“The Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and believe this good news!”

Of course, that simple declaration of God’s authority, God’s nearness, God’s taking a hand in human history, isn’t all we mean when we say “gospel.” We also want to include the very good news it is possible to repent, to change our hearts and lives, because Jesus Christ died for us and rose again. Therefore we, too, may have a new way of living in the Kingdom, living in God’s love, that starts now and goes on forever!

Take just a moment to consider: What are your own experiences with true evangelism? When did you first become aware that this gospel really was good news for you? Was another person involved?

What did you do with that good news? Did you want to embrace it and embrace God and run out to tell everybody in your family, everybody you knew?

Or did you hide it because you didn’t know how folks would respond?

That was me. A dyed-in-the-wool coward.

And then seminary happened, and the second course I took, in summer of 2003, was Evangelism. It’s a required course! But I was terrified of the assignment to spend an hour talking about my faith with a non-Christian.

I was seriously thinking about blowing off the assignment, since it was only 15% of the grade. Finally I threw up my hands and said, “OK, God, if you want me to do this—you’ll have to make it happen!” Then I left my dorm room and went downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch.

Since I was new at Garrett, I was trying to introduce myself to as many people as possible, so I went over to a young man obviously of south Asian descent, sitting by himself at the window.

He turned out to be a new PhD working on a post-doctoral fellowship in the nano-lab across the sidewalk. He said he came to Garrett for the good food—in those days the cafeteria was run by Marriott. And then he said, “What is this place?”

And we talked. We talked about Christianity and we talked about Hinduism. We talked about a church his friend took him to and about Jesus. We talked about his wife’s health problems and our spiritual journeys. We talked so long we got kicked out of the cafeteria and talked another half hour in the lounge. At the end, I asked if I could pray with him for his wife’s healing, and he grabbed my hands so tightly I thought he’d never let go, and we prayed.

Now this young man did not become a Christian that day. His journey and his search continued. I sent him a Hindi Bible, but I never heard from him again—I didn’t expect to.

But I know two things for sure: that God was calling to him and chasing him with love, and that God let me be part of that journey by meeting my own need to overcome my fear of the E-word.

Last time we considered how both science and faith rest on unprovable first principles, and how scientific methods of knowing can neither prove the truths of faith nor disprove them, and how current discoveries in quantum physics and astrophysics make us gasp with wonder and delight at God’s handiwork. But this certainly isn’t the first era in which science blossomed!

John Wesley also lived at a time of tremendous explosion of scientific knowledge. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Although to my knowledge he never directly addressed the issue of evolution (apparently he didn’t feel Christ was threatened by Darwin’s thought), he was fascinated by science and technological advances such as electricity.

Wesley published tracts and articles on science, including a booklet called Primitive Physick, a home health and medical handbook. And he opened free clinics, since in his day, the poor had no access to health care. Some things haven’t changed so much.

And Wesley strongly advised maintaining health through keeping a regular schedule including 8 hours of sleep, a varied but simple diet, plenty of exercise, and keeping one’s body and surroundings clean—a radical idea in his day, and not so easy without automatic washing machines! But very scientific. Some things haven’t changed at all!

All of this Wesley called plundering the Egyptians, a reference to the Israelites’ asking for gifts when they were being driven out of Egypt (Exodus 12:33-36). By this he meant taking from science all that was valuable. Although his worldview was that of a clergyman, he saw no contradiction between faith, and Scripture, and the new discoveries of science. Because his God was big enough to be the creator of the universe!

This is the core of the argument: Is our God big enough and powerful enough to have created this beautiful home of ours four billion years ago? Or do we limit God to the last four thousand?

Is our God big enough and powerful enough to have created billions of galaxies, stars and planets, or just our own? Is Christ the Word of God, through whom all this was created?

And is God loving and clever enough to have created beings, through evolution, whose consciousness somehow connects with God’s consciousness? And is this God loving enough to constrain the way all this power is expressed, in order to set us free, to give us free will? And can we believe that this God is crazy in love with us and yearns after us by sending Christ to live with us?

This is the issue, I think, for faith people. It’s so incredible to realize that this unimaginably huge God reaches down and loves tiny little me that we have trouble holding both ideas in the human brain at the same time. So we humans divide up the job. We let scientists develop faith beliefs around the hugeness of the universe that cut us down to the size of a chemical process. And we let religious people cut God down to a size they can relate to.

But both these viewpoints are insults to God!

If we really believe that God is the Creator of the universe, then every new discovery simply fills us with wonder at how great God is! The Psalmist says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God!” Scientific discoveries are the footprints of God. We have nothing to fear from science. Likewise, then, science should have nothing to fear from religion.

Now, we can’t leave this issue without considering the Methodist understanding of Scripture. Wesley lived in the days before scholars began to study Scripture with the tools of archaeology, history, literature, and sociology, so naturally his writings refer to scripture in ways that seem quaint to us.  

For example, Primitive Physick begins with an explanation of how sickness is the result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Genesis. And yet, how deeply true that is on a psychological and spiritual level! Wesley seems amazingly modern a few paragraphs later when he warns that “the passions” - that is, emotions and stresses—are the source of much disease! Can we respect Wesley as an amazingly forward-thinking man of his time rather than asking him to be like us?

And when we study the Bible, do we respect our Spirit-inspired ancestors who told sacred stories, eventually wrote them down, edited them, and passed them on to us? Do we respect them enough to say, “They were amazingly in tune with God, and the Holy Spirit spoke through them in ways that they could understand, and the Holy Spirit still speaks to us through their stories, their testimony?”

When we remember that the Holy Spirit enables Christians to speak all languages, can we remember that the Holy Spirit also speaks scientific?

“Our son Kurt is an evolutionary biologist.” I enjoy saying that when I’m getting to know new acquaintances within a church setting. I watch their eyebrows. Whether they go up or stay in place tells me something about their relationship to science.

So what can we say about science and faith? First, we admit that faith asks us to bet our lives on a few thingsthat are, frankly, beyond experimental testing. We cannot prove that God exists. We cannot prove that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. We cannot even prove that a human being is more than flesh, that a human is an embodied ruach, psyche, a living spirit—that this spirit is more than the wetware of chemicals interacting in our brains. We cannot prove any of this by scientific methods of knowing. Instead, they call on deeper kinds of knowing.

Last time, we remembered how the Methodist Episcopal Church in America was organized right after the Revolution, grew up with the nation, and organizes itself along the same three-branches model as the U.S. Constitution. We noted that our church is as ethnically and politically diverse as our nation.

Mark Fowler, one of my profs at Garrett, told about how his church in Massachusetts was so closely identified with the Republican party that the local Republican Committee held meetings there. One day one of his parishioners came into his office, closed the door, leaned over his desk and whispered, “You know, some of us in this church are Democrats.”

We echo the nation! We echo the world! We are extremely diverse! (Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are both United Methodists.) Praise God! So was Jesus’ entourage.This is not a church for those who want to worship only with folks who look and think alike. And man, it is hard for me to love somebody who I know is on the opposite side of my favorite issues! As hard as it was for Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot to love each other.

So, what do we as United Methodists believe about government in general, and the United States government in particular? What do we hold in common?

Jesus lived in a very different political structure, but it was just as chaotic. His enemies tried to trap him with this question about paying imperial taxes. He wouldn’t be trapped, but his answer leaves us with more questions: “Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, and to God what belongs to God.”

Doesn’t everything belong to God? Then it would be wrong to participate in any political realm not ruled completely by those who worship God like us—as the Zealot insurgents argued. Does everything, including our spirituality, our loyalties, our souls, belong to the political realm, as the Romans argued? Or does the follower of Jesus owe the nation some participation, taxes, and support, while giving final loyalty to God - and how much?

United Methodists, in general and historically, believe that the follower of Jesus has both a right and a duty to be engaged politically and obey the law. Wesley’s rules about “doing no harm” included an express prohibition against buying smuggled goods on which the taxes hadn’t been paid. The question about taxes is dealt with by Jesus, by Paul, and by Wesley!

We also believe that the teachings of Jesus should affect our political beliefs. We believe that the church can and should struggle with public issues, uncomfortable as that may be.

But we always remember that in those struggles, we are trying to apply the Wesleyan quadrilateral—Scripture, tradition, experience and reason, and that the answers we come up with are not holy writ! They are partial, and they may change, so we must continue to love one another and be in covenant with one another.

United Methodists participate in government—Peter Cartwright was not the only Methodist preacher to run for office, and thousands of Methodists continue to hold public office. Professor Fowler told of one hotly contested state race in the South one year in which both candidates were members of the same United Methodist church. In Pecatonica one year while Jim was pastor, both candidates for mayor were members of our church!

But we do not believe that it’s our job as followers of Jesus to literally take over the government completely and exclude others, as some argue.

We also believe Jesus calls us to “be perfect,” to move toward all our motivation being rooted in God’s love, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with others who differ, striking deals that move toward the good, rather than insisting on such purity and perfection that we fail to achieve any good. United Methodists struggle together toward the common good.

For example, the Methodist Church supports public education for all. We do not try to create a system of parochial schools for the good of our own children and those who can pay, but we work to improve the public schools. 

We believe that Christians have a responsibility toward the planet. Global warming is a threat to all life on God’s good creation, and so we work with others on energy policy and living green. We believe Christians must obey Christ’s order to heal, so we work with others in hospitals and medical missions and efforts such as Imagine No Malaria. Our UMCOR agency not only responds to disasters but works with many other agencies on long-term development worldwide.

Most of all, we don’t believe that God is a Republican or a Democrat. We Wesleyans don’t believe that the finger of God wrote the U.S. Constitution, as one TV commentator claimed. We believe that God works within human political systems, through faithful people, toward the common good.

And we believe that the utopian dream of no government is a fantasy. Short of the Kingdom of Heaven, people need law, people need to come together to tax themselves to accomplish together what they cannot do for themselves, or else life is nothing but hell. We have only to look at Somalia, a nation which has had no functioning government for 19 years, to see the daily terror that results when there is no civil order.

St. Paul argues in Romans 13 that civil authority is to be honored and civil laws are to be obeyed, because God is in favor of civil order. He is not saying that the Roman emperor was anointed by God! (Later, when the Roman emperor was persecuting Christians, the church had a different view of that emperor, as reflected in the book of Revelation.)  

Jesus was not saying that the Roman form of government, which was both beneficial and oppressive, was God’s will! Wesley didn’t oppose the Revolution out of love for monarchy. And Asbury and his church did not pledge loyalty to this nation from any idea that the United States, marred by slavery, was the consummation of the Kingdom of God! We are still working on fulfilling the promises of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Whatever your political viewpoint, I invite you to participate in the life of the community out of a powerful sense of loving God and loving your neighbor. I invite you to consider your political actions through the lens of scripture, tradition, experience and reason. I invite you to honor veterans and those who gave their lives for this country by working, not for self-centered political goals, but for the common good.