Nurture Faith with Dr. Doug Hood

When the king in Alice in Wonderland was asked where to begin, he said gravely, “Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Begin at the beginning. Naturally, that guidance seems reasonable. That is, until you have to actually open your mouth, and speak. With thoughts racing from one place to another, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many fine places to begin. Jesus tells his disciples, here in Acts, “you will be my witnesses.” Where do the disciples begin? Where are we to begin? Sharing our faith in Jesus seems reasonable until we actually confront that moment – that moment when we are asked, “Who is Jesus?”

That moment came to me one Easter morning. I was enjoying breakfast in a Doylestown, PA diner, looking over the message I would preach in just a few hours. Mary, the waitress assigned to the table where I was seated, approached with coffee and said, “I guess this is your big day, pastor!” “I guess so,” I remarked. Then Mary asked, “What is Easter all about anyway?” Initially, I dismissed her question, not thinking she was serious. But I was mistaken; Mary was very serious. It was then I took the time to really notice her, to look into her eyes and really see her. I will not forget those eyes—eyes that betrayed her silence; silence of considerable pain. “Where do I begin?” I thought. I began with her pain. “Easter means that you can stop beating yourself up. Whatever guilt you may have now, whatever mistakes you have made in life, Easter means that you are to stop immediately from beating yourself up. God has removed it all.”

“But there is more,” I said to Mary. “Easter is an invitation to pay attention to Jesus.” I shared with Mary that as she paid attention to Jesus, by reading of him in the Bible, she will discover that she will want to be more than she is now. “Pay attention long enough to Jesus and you will experience a compulsion to be something more; you will begin to live differently.”  Mary needed to hear that Jesus doesn’t leave a life unchanged. Any significant time spent with Jesus always results in a desire to be made new. “Your whole world will appear different. You will want to be different.”

“Finally, Mary, begin to follow Jesus as you learn about him.” I shared with her that what that means is to “do what he asks in his teaching.” Imagine Jesus as a mentor in life and do everything that is asked of you. Something inexplicable happens when someone commits to doing all that Jesus’ asks: they receive an uncommon power to do so. People who obey all that they understand of Jesus’ teachings receive a power from outside of themselves; a power that actually makes them something so much more than what they were. Mary began to cry and asked how to begin. That is when I knew I had come to the end. And there, in a diner in Doylestown, PA, Mary gave her life to Jesus.

Joy,

The following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son,

Nathanael Hood, MA, New York University; MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary

“As Jesus came to the city and observed it, he wept over it.”

Pause a moment, and consider the city of Jerusalem as Jesus once saw it. Jesus the man—the Nazarene rabbi—looked upon an already ancient city straining under the yoke of Roman imperialism. Centurions elbowed through marketplaces crowded with Samaritans and Sadducees; self-righteous Israelites prayed in the squares as scabrous lepers scurried through the outskirts. In a few hours, he would be welcomed as a savior by the oppressed masses who would lay their coats and palm branches before him, singing the Psalms of David in joyous delirium. In a few days, those same crowds would scream for his death, demanding his execution at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

There is a small Roman Catholic church on the spot believed to be where Jesus wept in the nineteenth chapter of Luke—shaped like a tear drop, it sits on the Mount of Olives east of the city. Not too far from it is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be situated on Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. Did he know, when he looked upon that city, that in a week’s time he would be seeing a nearly identical view, this time tortured, beaten, and nailed to a cross? Yes, Jesus looked upon the city that would be his doom and wept.

Now consider Jesus the Divine, the physical incarnation of the holy Godhead, the living Word that is and was and will be. See the city he saw, the city first inhabited 6000-7000 years ago by shepherds thirsty for freshwater springs. See the city ruled in turn by Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, dashed by waves of invaders and dynastic restorers. See the city whose legacy is warfare and carnage, as even God’s chosen king David took it by force from its Jebusite inhabitants. See the city that would be ravaged by emperor Vespasian less than a century after his death, the second temple reduced to ashes and a single wall while over a million civilians lay dead with another 97,000 enslaved. See the city conquered by Muslims in the seventh century, contested by crusaders in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, controlled by Ottoman Turks until the nineteenth, and torn between Israelis and Palestinians to this very day. See the city originally named the “dwelling of peace” which would know none for countless generations.

How can we see this city and not weep? Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus had mourned the sacred city upon learning of Herod’s plot to murder him:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who were sent to you! How often I have wanted to gather your people just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that.” (Luke 13:34 CEB)

Two thousand years later and the chicks have still not come home. We look out and see a world more bitterly divided than ever, edged on the brink of cataclysm. How similar it must have felt for first century Jews living under the thumb of Rome where a single order from the emperor could ravage their holiest of holies as was done in the time of Jeremiah. Yet let us not forget that it was out of this swirling void of chaos that God chose to unmake the world itself with a new covenant, one that transcended all the sorrow and brokenness of this life with the promise of a new one. These times are not the end, merely a transition from which to emerge like a certain lowly carpenter all those years ago towards a great glory.

Joy,

The following mediation is by Dr. Michael B. Brown, former senior minister at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

We’ve all been told time and time again that life is 10% circumstance and 90% perspective. I’m not sure the stats are that dramatic, but it’s probably close. We hear it all the time: “It is what it is.” Life happens. It’s how we interpret it that makes the difference between happiness and hopelessness.

Jesus told a fascinating parable about how we see things (Matthew 23:24-43). The owner of a field and one of his chief servants were standing side-by-side looking through the same window at the same plot of ground. The servant was alarmed, pointing out that an enemy of the farmer had come and sowed weeds in the wheatfield. There were weeds were everywhere. Might as well just set fire to the whole acreage. The owner, however, replied that if his servant would take a closer look, he would also see wheat growing in the field alongside the weeds. HIs advice was to wait till the day of harvest, gather the wheat, and then burn the weeds. One saw a disaster. The other saw a harvest. Two men looked out from prison bars. One saw the mud. The other, stars.

Fred Craddock was asked what gift he would give to each of his children if he could give them only one. He immediately replied: “That’s easy. I would give them the gift of a grateful heart because that will determine how they experience everything else in life.” There are weeds in every field, if that’s where we decide to focus.

• No person is perfect. You may recall the story of a husband and wife driving home from church one Sunday. The minister had preached on the text, “Be ye perfect, even as God is perfect.” The husband said to his wife: “I wonder how many perfect people there actually are in the world.” She answered: “One less than you think!” No person is perfect, but they (we) always exist alongside the assurance of grace.
• No job is perfect. There will be bumps and bruises, but they always exist alongside the reality of senses of accomplishment, purpose, fulfillment, and personal pride. 
• No marriage is perfect. But husbands and wives always exist alongside the vows “to love and to cherish” even in spite of the wheat of “ in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer.”
• No church is perfect, but every church exists alongside the biblical truth that “we have this treasure in clay pots” (II Corinthians 4:7), and though imperfect, they are still holy. In every church I’ve ever served there were saints—not sinless people, but good and decent and faithful people who made the world a better place.

We could go on and on with this, but you get the point. Life happens. It’s how we interpret it that makes the difference between happiness and hopelessness. Craddock was right—A grateful heart will determine how we experience everything else in life. 

I often encourage people to create A Thanksgiving Journal. That’s simply a book or notepad which you put next to your bed. Every night before the lights are turned off, write down one good thing you experienced or witnessed that day. Admittedly, it may have been a long, tiring, or difficult day. Even so, there is always at least one blessing we can recall. Write it down. Then write down another the next night, and another the next. On the final night of every month, read aloud the entries from your journal. Doing so will remind us that when we pay attention, we will always discover blessings. In time, that practice will create within us spirits of gratitude which will determine how we experience life itself. It will help us, in spite of the weeds, to see the wheat and celebrate it.

Joy,

The following meditation is by Dr. Bruce Main, Founder & Executive Director of Urban Promise. It will appear in the forthcoming book, A Month of Prayer & Gratitude: Five-Minute Meditations for a Deeper Experience of Gratitude.

“They are polar opposites,” shared my host. We had just finished discussing his intentions for the retreat I was about to lead. Now he wanted to talk about his family. “One is loving, outward focused, a joy to be around. The other is so self-centered and drains the life of us whenever she’s around.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was creeping close to 11 pm and I was beginning to feel the effects of a long day of travel. “Another cup of coffee?” he poured without waiting for a response. I could tell this conversation was not ending anytime soon.

“Why do people age so differently?” posed my new friend. A professor at a small Liberal Arts college, he was sharing some of the challenges he and his wife were facing with aging parents. “My mother-in-law is a piece of work,” he continued. “And she’s robbing the joy and life out of my wife. Everything is a crisis. Everything is about her and about making her life better. I mean, the things she’s complaining about are so petty. Fortunately, she lives three hours away from us. But she’s talking about moving close. That would be a disaster.”

“Tell me about your mother,” I beckoned. “Completely opposite,” he began. “To give you an example, she has eleven grandchildren. Each grandchild has gone through college.” He paused for a minute and took another swig of coffee. “This is remarkable,” he chuckled. “While in college, she would write to each grandchild, every week, and enclose $5. That’s a lot of notes. That’s a lot of $5 bills. That’s a lot of stamps. Every grandchild talks about their grandmother with such fondness,” he concluded. “They call her all the time. They check in on her. They give her credit for helping them through tough times.”

“You are the light of the world,” says Jesus at the conclusion of his most famous sermon we know as the beatitudes. To a Jewish listener, these words would have been unsettling. After all, the Torah was the light. Jerusalem was the light. God was the light. This truth was affirmed through the prophets and Old Testament. But Jesus flips the script and reminds his listeners—you carry the light of God. And we all know that light gives life. Only with light can living things grow and flourish. Receive God’s light. Reflect God’s light through your acts of love, gratitude, and generosity. The world needs you.

Joy,

On February 14, 1990, some 3.7 billion miles away from Earth in the great cosmic dark, a small, humble construction of math and metal spun itself around to gaze back upon the world from which it came. Using the last of its dwindling power, it steadied itself, snapped a photograph, transmitted it, then silently continued its eternal journey far, far beyond our solar system. The photograph shows a field of black streaked with thin bands of dull, faded color like some ghostly rainbow. There, near the middle of the band furthest to the right of the image, is a tiny speck less than a pixel in size. This speck, this microscopic mite of brilliance amid the darkness of space, is none other than our planet, our interstellar home.

Nicknamed the “Pale Blue Dot” photo, this image taken by the Voyager 1 space probe is one of the most moving and famous in the history of cosmic exploration. A few years later, American astronomer Carl Sagan published a book by the same name in which he reflected on the photograph with a poetry and reverence usually reserved for the greatest works of art. Juxtaposing the presumed self-importance of its people with the planet’s insignificance within the grand scope of the universe, Sagan gently, almost lovingly, chastises readers to abandon the idea that anything—or anyone—might be coming to save us from ourselves. It’s our planet, Sagan insists; we alone can save it and us from ourselves.

Sagan, of course, isn’t wrong. Where once humanity believed our planet to be the center of the universe—both literally and figuratively—advances in science have proven that we are indeed a fleck of a fleck of a fleck in the grand scheme of creation. However, this need not mean people of faith are wrong for putting their trust in a God who craves a direct, personal relationship with each of us. If anything, religion gives not a different answer but an additional perspective on humanity’s place among the stars. We may be tiny, the great religions explain, but that makes us no less important in the eyes of the eternal. We see this reflected in the Bible where the prophets and poets of old stared into the night sky much like Sagan would millennia later and saw not proof of God’s absence but evidence of God’s majestic power. It was with the same hand that scooped and shaped the dust of Eden into the first humans that God sculpted the infinite galaxies and nebula. The same God who, with a word, brought forth Something out of Nothing, wove each of us in our mothers’ womb and called us by name. What is our worth as a species, the Bible asks? “Only slightly less than divine,” the Psalmist answers.

I write all of this because, at this moment in time, the state of our Pale Blue Dot seems tragically precarious. Wars are raging, economies threaten collapse, our environment gets sicker by the day, and more and more people are surrendering themselves to despair. Perhaps what many of us lack is perspective. Maybe we should, like Sagan and the Psalmist before him, remember that we are small but infinitely precious pieces of a larger whole. But if not even a sparrow falls without God’s knowledge, how much more does God pay attention to the problems and fears, hopes and uncertainties, of those who call God’s mighty name?

Joy,

We are all living a deeply entangled, complex life. As complexity increases, so does our exhaustion. We run faster, master complex planning calendars that were designed to make life less cumbersome, and come to the end of many days feeling that we have been defeated. Present is a growing nostalgia for a simpler world—a desire for a plainer, clearer path forward. This general desire includes the spiritual realm. The hope is that the church would provide a rediscovery of God, a reclaiming of God’s strength for daily living, and direction for a larger purpose to which we may attach our lives. Unfortunately, what many find are cumbersome requirements for membership and multiple invitations to serve on committees that multiply our exhaustion. With church participation, we discover that there are now more oars in the water that requires our attention.

How can we return to a simpler time? Jesus is instructive. Notice that Jesus does not invite people to register for a six-week new member class. Jesus does not make committee assignments. Jesus does not examine doctrinal purity or demand conformity to creedal statements. Jesus quite simply asks that we follow him. To follow Jesus is to share life with Jesus in the fullest sense: to go where he goes, to listen to what he taught, and to participate in practices and disciplines that were important to him. An invitation to follow is the suggestion that there is something of value to be found. Naturally, to accept such an invitation begins with an acknowledgment that the present life isn’t working anymore. Unless we really believe that another approach to life is required, we will continue trying to make the present one work.

The one other thing that Jesus asks for is a posture of humility, a desire to learn, and a willingness to participate in Jesus’ work: “and I’ll show you how to fish for people.” All the work of Jesus is about one thing—looking for those who have wandered far from God and bringing them back home to the Father. As with any great work, there are multiple functions that must be accomplished. None of us are asked—or equipped—to do them all. Some of us are to be teachers, some will show hospitality, and others will be administrators, caregivers, and evangelists. Others will provide care and comfort to the broken. The various jobs to be done are many. But one goal remains: “to fish for people” so that they may return to God. Jesus will show us the way.

None of this suggests that boards and committees are without value to Jesus. Leadership boards must be populated with those who have demonstrated the capacity to respond to the promptings of God, to show people where Jesus is moving and call them to follow. Committees provide a responsible means for organizing a great workforce for accomplishing all that Jesus seeks to do in a particular community. But, in this over-complicated world, the church must not add unnecessary complexity to the simple call of Jesus to follow him and to participate with him in his grand redemptive purposes: a cup of cold water to the thirsty, a helping hand on the roadside, an encouraging word softly spoken. These are all within our reach. Nor are we called to carry the whole world on our backs. Our chief function is to point to the one who does, Jesus Christ. That is the Gospel, plain and simple.

Joy,