Archive for category: News

A small boy, after being tucked into bed for the night cried out, “Mommy, I’m afraid to be alone in the dark. I want somebody to stay with me.” His mother replied, “Don’t be afraid. God is with you.”

The little boy then added, “I want somebody with skin on his face.”

Up until the Holocaust & WWII in the 1930’s and 40’s the central question people asked was “Who is God.” No more. Since then, the central question people ask is “Where is God?”

In John, Jesus answers “I will not leave you orphaned.” Jesus’ last words in Matthew are, “Lo, I am with you always.” Both gospels announce God is always with us, no matter what. God is omnipresent, ubiquitous, everywhere!

But when tragedy strikes any of us, the temptation is to doubt Jesus’ promises of God being here for us. It’s easy to be glib that God is with us when all is going well. But a tour through the hell of grief tests our certainty. Grief tests our faith more than anything else.

And, frankly, death and despair can lead us in opposite directions. Many folks will understandably deal with the grief by defaulting quickly to the position that their loved one’s death was “God’s will.” I’ve heard countless people say this. This default position brings them comfort.

But when people assign their tragedy or loss to God’s will they don’t realize they are implying God caused their suffering. They don’t realize they are implying God is the cause of evil in their life. It’s like evangelist Pat Robertson 20 years ago saying, “9/11 was an act of God’s will to punish America for accepting homosexuality.” I wonder if he ever really thought through the awful theological implications of his statement. I doubt it.

On the other hand, there are those who in their anger and anguish give up on God entirely because they feel God was behind their loved one’s death. They blame God for their suffering and give up on God. They abandon any belief in God and become atheists, a word which quite literally means “without God.” This is not to be confused with “antitheism,” which is antagonism against God, though their new-found hostility to God comes pretty close to this. But they proceed to live their lives as though God is dead and never existed. They often become atheists, people who write God out of their heart and minds.

So, where is God when things go bad?

A few weeks ago, René mentioned the little-known word “Paraclete,” another word for the Holy Spirit in her sermon. She pointed out Paraclete also means “Advocate” and “Comforter.” She said that the people who surround us with their love and comfort at a time of loss are like the Paraclete. They are our advocates and comforters.

Well, the little boy who wanted “somebody with skin on” probably makes us think of Jesus. He is the Gospel of John’s “Word made flesh.” He is Isaiah’s “God-with-us.” He is God’s skin in the game of our life and our world.

We have heard these phrases so often we may have become immune to their impact. We’ve become so accustomed to hearing them, their power is lost on us. Because the idea that God chose to humble Godself to share our humanity, to be human as well as divine, is truly radical and amazing! God becoming a flesh and blood human in Jesus means God has come to us “with skin on.”

Ultimately, when God became a human being in Jesus, God really complimented our humanity. When God became human in Jesus God showed how deeply God cares for us, sharing our wounds and our grief.

And this very fact changes how we see ourselves and others as not merely human, but the presence of the divine, of God, in our midst!

Yet, if you are like me, there are too many days I fail to see how people embody the very presence of God. They incarnate God and make us realize God isn’t far away, but near to us. I just don’t see their divinity when I should, with the result I get too easily caught up in the despair and chaos of our times. My hunch is you do too.

And when, on those rare occasions I take a deep breath and pause to understand how near God has chosen to be to us, I become what all of us Christians ought to be: “panentheists”! Not “pantheists” who believe God is all things, but “panentheists,” with the understanding that God is with-IN all things! Notice the two little letters “e” and “n” that distinguish the word “panentheism from “pantheism.” They are key in recognizing how present God is to us.

An unexpected experience occurred for me with the on-set of COVID which reminded me how much God is IN all things.

Soon after COVID-19 struck and staying-in-place, with so much time at home, set in, René and I put up a bird feeder we’d purchased many months before. At the same time, we bought a book about “Birds in Kansas” so we could identify our feathered visitors.

It didn’t take long before we were being amazed by visits from cardinals, doves, Carolina wrens, woodpeckers, chickadees and so on. We found such joy seeing them and noting in the book those we were seeing, we bought and put up a second, different kind of feeder when gold finches and other small birds started visiting. Finally, we got a hummingbird feeder and delighted seeing them right outside our kitchen window.

I credit these birds and the joy of doing something positive for creation by putting up the feeders that I felt their presence as a gift to me. They reminded me how God is all around us IN the nearly infinite forms of creation we take for granted every day. The birds reminded me that God is also in every person, many of whom have no awareness that God is within them!

So, when we grieve, God comes in the ordinary, everyday form of friends and family and even strangers who color our lives with God’s boundless hope and love. They are “little Christs,” as Protestant reformer Martin Luther would say. They are the Paraclete, our advocate and comforter, the Word Made Flesh, the spirit of Christ all about us and, yes, in us.

You see, our world is chocked-full of God’s presence: in the birds, in the trees, in the skies, in the earth and in the flowers, in us everywhere. All because God wears all kinds of skin in all kinds of colors and variations.

“Where is God?” we ask? God is everywhere! The real question is: Are we paying attention?

Blessings! Rick

CONGREGATIONAL MEETING SEPTEMBER 12 TO VOTE ON CALLING NEW PASTOR!

The Search Committee is recommending a candidate to be the new Senior Pastor of Shawnee Community Christian Church.  This candidate was unanimously approved by the Board and now must be voted on by members of the congregation.

Because the candidate is still serving a congregation and has not formally tendered their resignation, we cannot announce their name at this point.  The candidate’s name, their background, and information about why the Search Committee believes this is the best person to lead our congregation in the future will be shared at the congregational meeting.

The meeting will be after worship on Sunday, September 12, in two formats.

• In-person congregational meeting immediately following worship
• A virtual meeting on Zoom at Noon. A link will be sent out.

Both formats will offer an opportunity to ask questions and to vote by secret ballot.

Please pay close attention to communications for the church on additional information, especially regarding the virtual meeting.

The Search Committee has worked very hard for nearly a year and we extend them our deepest thanks and appreciation.

Andy Petrowsky, Chair

Seth Sonneville

Marvin Sommerfeld

Morgan Spoor

Sharon Cantrell

Bobette Sawka

If you haven’t already sent in your “investment card” for Shawnee Community’s “Where Love Grows…Investing in Our Church’s Future” Over & Above Campaign, here are some thoughts about giving in general and why it is important to be generous whether to our church or a favorite charity or non-profit philanthropic organization.

If you are like I was when I started out in ministry, I didn’t have a clue about generosity and what many churches and church members call “stewardship,” meaning management of all our resources, including our treasure.

The reason I didn’t have a clue is that I didn’t grow up in the church and my folks never really talked to me about giving or generosity, though I knew Dad contributed to Boys Town in Omaha. Furthermore, seminary rarely, if ever brought up the issue of financial stewardship. So here I was at 25 years of age encountering for the first time in my life what churches call their “annual stewardship campaign” along with special offerings for disaster relief (Week of Compassion) among many other offerings. What to do?

I greeted the news that I would likely be fund-raising in churches with both fear and trepidation. I had no idea that churches relied on financial contributions to make ends meet or even that my own salary came by way of the church’s coffers. I was like a babe in the woods.

I was smart enough to realize I couldn’t ask other people to give without also giving. But that raised the issue of “How Much?” At the time—this was nearly 50 years ago—my entire financial package was—are you ready–$10,000/year, which included everything: salary, housing, pension, insurance, continuing education, and some business expenses. It did help that René, not in ministry yet, held a minimum wage job, but that paid only about $3.00/hour.

Complicating matters is that someone—I don’t remember who—sprang on me that there is this thing called “a tithe,” or 10 percent of our gross income. Some denominations fudge on this and refer to the “modern tithe,” which is 10 percent of a household’s net (after tax) income.

More sobering yet was hearing one of our global partners, the then president of the Christian Women’s Fellowship in Thailand say that in their churches the word “offering” refers to any gift which exceeds the tithe! Meaning that anything under a 10% tithe doesn’t have a name at all!

Hearing this I felt humbled and scared: Humbled because I never thought of generosity in this way. Scared because I was intimidated by the idea that if I gave too generously René and I might not be able to pay our bills—our rent along with the then typical 3-year car note on our new car! To be honest, it was a kind of “Oh, God!” moment. What were we going to do? And we hadn’t started our family yet!

On the upside, those memories helped me feel some sympathy for today’s young couples and families, who are burdened more than René and I ever were with draconian-level college loans and for the cost of childcare, which exorbitant as it is pays the lowest wages for childcare workers of possibly any industry except maybe servers and dishwashers in restaurants! Those days of scrimping to get by—which lasted more like decades—have given me at least an inkling of what poor people working several jobs to make ends meet have to go through. Still not the same!

But here’s the real irony. Studies on church contributors indicate that in general the most generous folks in America are the poor, not in terms of real dollars BUT in the percentage of their gross income they give to their church and favorite charities. The explanation often given for this is that poor people’s constant battle with poverty makes them more compassionate toward others fighting indigence. These same studies show that across the United States, the average percentage of income people contribute to all charities runs between 1.4-1.8%. More generous givers contribute on average 2 to 2-1/2%. Really generous folks give around 2.5-3.0%.

Among the largest ten mainline denominations in the U.S., our denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is next to last in average contributions of households and what we pay pastors. Only the Church of the Brethren gives and pays pastors less. The most generous givers come from the much more theologically, politically, and culturally conservative churches like the Mormons and Southern Baptists. It’s been a while since I’ve seen these statistics, though I doubt much of this has changed over the years.

But back to my original narrative, I slowly learned to be more generous. Two key turning points occurred to help me overcome my fear. First was a conversation I had with my mentor Dr. Forrest Haggard, founding pastor of Overland Park Christian Church, when, noting how green I was as a Christian and as a pastor, he said with a laugh, “You ought to be paying the church for all it is teaching you!”

The other is when I heard the redoubtable great preacher and former Deputy President of our denomination Dr. George Earle Owen say, “The word and practice of the tithe ought to be in everyone’s vocabulary and in everyone’s budget.”

From there, René and I began to look at how deeply blessed we were with our first beautiful child, the education we had received, the great families we had grown up in along with, our first mortgage, our first car payment, and of course, the good health we enjoyed. We both began to acknowledge that our lives were and still are far more blessed than we could have ever deserved, hoped or imagined.

It took us a while to reach 10% of our gross income, but we made it, at least for a time. Today, I am at least partly ashamed to say, we contribute to the church and to various church units and other charities around 8% of our gross income. I understand to this day the ambivalence most people feel about giving more than we think we can.

What sweetens this thought, though again not at the full 10%, is that we were audited in 2013 by IRS for our 2011 income for two reasons. The first was because we deducted the allowable, then, 7%, of our income for health due to a stroke I had in October 2011, which made those out-of-pocket expenses skyrocket.

The other was because IRS decided we gave too much money away in 2011!!! That also flagged our tax return for audit. Because I color-coded with highlighter all our receipts and statements to justify all the deductions we reported for that year, we got a kind letter back from IRS indicating that we not only didn’t owe them any money, but that they owed us!

I said last Sunday, the 22nd, that “Money may make the world go round, but it’s love that makes it worth the turning.” Knowing that we are loved by God, by our family, our friends, and enjoy lives that likely are the envy of many, ought to fill us with the deepest spiritual gratitude.

We don’t have to look or listen very far to recognize how blessed we are each day to be alive. This October 22nd I will have lived 10 years beyond my stroke. I was told by a physician then that if I hadn’t exercised as rigorously as I have over the years, I’d be dead.

So, we give to the church, not because we have to, but because we want to, not because we must, but because w may. We don’t give to earn God’s favor. God always loves us. And even if all we can give is the widow’s mite, Jesus spoke of her giving from all her heart, not from any riches, which she didn’t have, anyway!

So, Jesus says: “Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, running over, will be poured into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” We give because God first gave. And what are our gifts, anyhow, but our “Thank you” notes to God?

Blessings! Rick

Let us surround the Marvin & Lori with love and support as they mourn the loss of their son, Jonathan. You can sign up to provide a meal here:

https://www.mealtrain.com/trains/nkdwzo