Library
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Reassess and Reconnect
Second in a Series on Rethinking Church and Rethinking Life
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 New Revised Standard Version
1For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
Two weeks ago we began to look at how important it is to rethink church and rethink what is most important in life. I want to tell you some stories today about some people who have done that rethinking and reassessing of life and who have reconnected with some deeper values that can get lost in our busyness.
The first story comes from my daughter in New York City. Meredith plays softball in a sports league that is just a few years old now and that league is making a huge difference for thousands of young adults in Manhattan and is also raising money to help heal persons with cancer. It began because a successful young businessman named Rob Herzog was late getting to his office on September 11, 2001 at World Trade Center Tower number one. As he was approaching his building he saw the plane hit the building in the exact spot where his office with the Marsh and McLennan firm would have been.
He took much time off after that to take a new look at life and to reassess and reprioritize his time and his life. He was sitting on a beach trying to figure out what to do next, and he decided to utilize the outpouring of generosity and goodwill he had witnessed after the events of September 11 2001. He decided to reassess his life and to take a new direction and build on the three values that were most important for him: sports, social networking, and charity. He soon launched an effort called Zogsports, a “charity focused, co-ed, social sports club that promotes charity and social action among young professionals in New York City.”
Since the beginning of Zogsports, over 40,000 people in their twenties and thirties have participated in different athletic activities and volunteer opportunities. A portion of the proceeds and entry fees from these teams is given to different charitable groups, and in the first five years alone, the teams involved in Zogsports (football, dodge ball, kickball, softball), have donated $410,000 to various groups including the American Cancer Society.
Robert Herzog says, “For the first time in my life I have a real sense of purpose. We are giving young professionals athletic, social, and social action opportunities, and at the same time showing them how fun and easy it is to donate to charity. That new generosity and social involvement would not have happened unless Rob Herzog had reassessed and taken a different look at what is most important in life and turned his life in a different direction.
To everything there is a season, Ecclesiastes says, and a time for every purpose under heaven. For Herzog, there came a time to cease what he had been doing and to turn, or to return, to what matters most. Turn is an important word because it is the word at the beginning of the song that was performed based on these verses from the book of Ecclesiastes.
This fall we are encouraging each other this fall to turn, to return, to reassess and reconnect with God and with our spiritual roots and with the best in ourselves. Many of us have been involved in that sort of turning and reassessing the past two years of the current economic downturn, and that redirection and reconnection is one of the healthy results of the economic pain most of us have felt.
One of our member couples told me their example when I mentioned this fall’s sermon series on rethinking life and reconnecting with God and with our spiritual roots. They have recently downsized their home from about 3000 square feet to about 1500 square feet. They are living more simply. They are walking more and driving less. They feel good about the direction they have taken to simplify life. They are in a different season in life. They have turned and returned to some basics that we all know about, but somehow have let those basics get lost. They have decided to be in a different season of life.
I heard of another church member who did that reevaluation and reassessment a few months ago when a family member was very ill. She stepped back and looked at life differently. Her faith was strengthened and she took another important step in being formed into the likeness of Christ.
It does not take a crisis to cause us to take a new look. I have given away many copies of the book, Halftime: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance, by Bob Buford. Buford had a very successful business career and then in his late forties decided that he did not have to work in the same way or in the same business anymore. He reassessed life and heard God’s call to do something entirely different. Just as Rob Herzog said, Buford feels that his life has a deeper sense of purpose and meaning than ever before.
We see that same reassessment going on in the life of several of the heroes of our faith. Jacob, in the Bible, had been a scoundrel and a cheat. He was forced to reevaluate his life when he was fleeing his father-in-law and going back to where his brother Esau lived. He was going in fear because the last time he was with Esau, Esau threatened to kill Jacob for cheating him. The redirection and reassessment Jacob does is when he wrestles all night with God or with an angel and leaves that wrestling match a new person with a new purpose. Perhaps that image of wrestling with God is what some of us have felt or will feel when we look at the next season of our life.
This reassessment and reconnecting does not have to be this dramatic. It can be as simple as deciding that after we have left a childhood experience of God, and of church that was not mature enough, we began to explore a more thoughtful and more engaged expression of faith that lets us serve people in other ways. It might mean that we decide to find that ten or fifteen minute time period at the beginning of each day so that we open our minds in prayer and ask God to help us see God in the people we will meet that day and in the opportunities to do good and to practice kindness and humility and compassion. We all know that when we take time for prayer and meditation, our days just look different to us at the end, but knowing that and making time for that time are different.
What season of life are you in now, and what season of life do you want to be in? Where do you see an opportunity to reassess and reconnect and return or turn to some sources and some practices that feed your soul and your heart?
I had the sad honor and privilege last Tuesday of being one of the pastors officiating at my father-in-law’s funeral service. Judy’s dad lived to be almost 93. He was a successful small business owner who worked very hard, along with Judy’s mom, until he retired in his late 60’s. They took time in their retirement to play and to travel. They lived modestly and were not pretentious. We talked in the funeral about the salt of the earth values of the members of “The Greatest Generation,” Elwood’s generation—modesty, duty, hard work, humility, honesty, integrity, character, and civil discourse, family, sacrificing for a cause that is larger than self. We did not have to contrast those deep lasting values with what we see too often around us, greed, self absorption, and living by a different golden rule that says, whoever has the gold makes the rules.
We all see that sad contrast. But I pray and hope that as we remembered the stories about what made Judy’s dad a successful human being, a successful husband and father and grandfather and friend and mentor and father figure for others, that as we recalled those stories, others would reassess and reevaluate and return to the sources of life that are eternal.
We find those sources when we do what people of faith have done together for 3000 years, when we worship with each other (even when a construction project makes it temporarily inconvenient), when we pray, when we study together, and when we serve those who are in need. I hope that if you have known why all those spiritual practices are important in the past but you have been neglecting some of those, I hope that you will let yourself enter a new season now and return to the spiritual disciplines that will feed your heart and soul.
For many of us this will mean a RETURNING, but for others it may just mean a turning, a decision to start going a new direction. Which is it for you, a returning or a turning for the first time to God?
A friend of mine told about the experience of his father’s turning to God for the first time and of the difference it made in my friend’s life. My friend is Kent Millard who is the lead Pastor at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. He told us his personal story a couple of weeks ago at a gathering of Methodist pastors. When he was a boy of nine or ten, his family lived in a small town in North Dakota. His father was a farmer and was not very successful because he had a serious problem with alcohol. Kent remembers, even as a young child, having to go and get his father from the local bar when his father had too much to drink. He remembers that on more than one occasion his father would be placed in the town jail so that he could sober up. His father would be deeply ashamed and would vow to his family that it would never happen again, but it did happen again.
Somehow, one of the folks in that small town invited Kent Millard’s father to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. His father attended for a few times and began to take seriously the twelve steps. His father was working in his field one day as he was thinking through the twelve steps. He acknowledged the first step that he was powerless, on his own, to stop his alcohol abuse. He knew the next step, he could say the words, but he had no involvement in church or little spiritual life to connect the words to an experience. There is a power greater than myself who can help me change my life. He said the words and said aloud in anguish, if only that were true!! And then Kent says, he felt the presence of God surrounding him and felt peace and light; he fell to his knees in prayer there in his field and after that experience he never drank again.
He went to his family and told them, we need to begin to go to church now in order to thank God for what God was doing in his life! And so they started attending church at the small Methodist Church in their town. The Sunday came when they joined the church! Kent Millard was ten years old. The family stood up front at the end of the service. They took the membership vows. Kent says that he cried because he felt the shame of his father’s past behavior, but the people in the church all came up to them and hugged them and welcomed them. Kent says on that Sunday morning he did not know much about God and Jesus but he felt grace and love from the folks in that small Methodist church. He said his family’s turning to God and to that congregation changed his life. It was the congregation Kent grew up in and nurtured in him a call to ordained ministry which he has followed now these past forty plus years.
The prophet Hosea says it this way in Chapter 14 of his book of the Bible: Return O Israel to the Lord your God, you have been stumbling along, and it is only in God that we find compassion and new life.
In the book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, tells us the same; to every thing there is a season and a time for every purpose; a time to weep and a time to laugh, and perhaps a time to reevaluate and reassess and to return to the only One who is the Source of Life at its best.
Is this a day that you can make that decision to turn or to return to faith, to disciplined prayer and worship and service and generous giving to the One who has given you the very gift of life?