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pastor dan's weekly memo for march 26, 2015

3/26/2015

Spring Break for our families, with children in the Eden Prairie schools, coincides this year precisely with a week in the church we call, “Holy Week.” Holy Week will begin this Sunday-Palm Sunday and extends through next week and next Sunday, which we know as Easter; we have a total of six services next week. I’ve already talked to several families who are looking forward to going away somewhere with the kids. This is another one of the instances where the scheduling of our culture’s events and the significance of our spiritual life together can conflict.

I’d like to weigh in on the conflicted feelings many families are experiencing this week. I mean after a long winter of routine, some sort of break, any sort of break; just not having to go from 6:30 in the morning until 8:00 or later at night three or four nights a week is a welcomed break. When it comes to scheduling…Easter is the day that keeps changing. Easter can be any Sunday between March 22nd and April 25th. And yet, we know when Easter is every year, and I’m just assuming if you are still reading this that you believe there is significance to Holy Week. So what is a family to do?

We all make and live with our choices. Sometimes one choice excludes another and we live with missing out. Then there are times when we are forced to choose between two very good things. Being with your family on spring break is a very good thing. Attending a special service (or two or three) during Holy Week is also a very good thing. Sometimes it is just hard to choose and we are conflicted. And so we live questioning or sometimes continuing to struggle even as we are doing one thing or the other.

I want to encourage you to recognize not only what you are choosing but why and then to live with your choice. Completely ignoring that it is Holy Week, the week Christians across the planet are recognizing the last week of Jesus life and his resurrection simply because you have other plans for the weekend is not exactly a faithful response. Putting off your family time because you feel obligated to recognize Holy Week, may not be the best…may not even be the God focused choice, given that you have no control over the scheduling of either of these two weeks and your family is absolutely desperate for a time together.

As we all make our choices about Holy Week/Spring Break may the God who came to this world to both endure conflicted schedules and provide for the renewal of our souls be with all of you.

Have a great spring break and a blessed Holy Week.

Keep the Faith!

Pastor Dan

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pastor dan's weekly memo for march 19, 2015

3/19/2015

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A reminder that this Sunday at EPUMC is not to be missed! You may want to come early, especially if you want your regular seat. We are having four baptisms in the same service. That is a lot of water. I’m thinking about hooking up a hose to the Baptismal Font to make sure we have enough. We’ve had to recruit “Baby Carriers”. It’s going to be wonderful and I want to encourage you to be a part of it. Besides the picture directories are in and will be available for you to pick up.

OK, I know not all of you enjoy sports. Many of you don’t care to spend any more time than you absolutely have to hearing about sports. If you fit into one of these categories please feel free to stop paying attention to this particular memo. For those of you who are even slightly attentive, or perhaps like myself and cannot bear the thought of a world without ESPN, there is only one question to consider this morning (I was asked it three times before 8 o’clock this morning) and it is: Who do you have in your bracket?

If you don’t know what this bracket is but are following along; the bracket I’m talking about is the grouping of Division I men’s college basketball teams into an end of the year tournament that determines the national champion. There is also a bracket for women’s basketball but – what I’m asking about is the men’s tournament. There are 68 teams that are divided into four regions. Like other sports tournaments this one plays down until there is the “The Sweet Sixteen,” “The Elite Eight” and then finally, “The Final 4.” On TV they call it “March Madness,” even though it doesn’t finish until April 6th, which is the day after Easter. This means that in order to watch the semi-finals on April 4th I’ll need to have preparations for Easter ready before Saturday night. Please pray for me.

This year when the coach of Hampton (the team that is the lowest ranked) found out his team must play the highest ranked team, Kentucky (a team that has yet to lose a single game this year) did something interesting we’ve all wanted to do from time to time. Listen to this according to Yahoo! sports: “Hampton coach, Edward Joyner Jr. knows the odds against his team are astronomically long, so he decided to appeal to a higher power. He pretended (we assume he was pretending) to get Jesus Himself on the phone. But when the coach asked Jesus about how to handle Kentucky, Jesus apparently hung up. Even Jesus is taking Kentucky.”

A majority of people are taking Kentucky in their brackets; there are those who are taking either Wisconsin or a few going with, get this…. Iowa State. I always go with Duke. Forgive me, I know that is a less then popular pick but I like the way they play, they have a Minnesota kid in the starting line up and get this, Duke is a United Methodist School. I have no idea who Jesus is taking but, and with respect to Yahoo! sports and half of the country (and my guess is the entire state of Kentucky isn’t rooting for Louisville, either) I am convinced that he would not be taking Kentucky.

Jesus would be taking Hampton or Costal Carolina who nobody is giving a chance. If you ask me, Jesus would be taking somebody like the Minnesota Golden Gophers who are not even in this year’s tournament. Jesus is always siding with the underdog, the men and women of the world who no one gives a chance, the ones who are left out of a chance of making it at life. Jesus is always pulling for us when we don’t give ourselves much of a chance in the challenges of our life’s bracket.

With all that is going on in our world, with all that is going on within our church for that matter, commenting on who Jesus would be taking in this year’s bracket may seem trite at best and blasphemous at worst. But in the spirit of this sometimes tongue in cheek memo, there is something important in remembering that Jesus doesn’t “take” any one team or person over another. It’s a basketball game! Not a world crisis. And by the way, Jesus has never hung up on anybody, the coach was just pretending. Go Duke.

Keep the Faith!

Pastor Dan

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pastor dan's weekly memo for march 12, 2015

3/12/2015

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Thursdays are the only day I depend on an alarm. Every once in a while the alarm fails me or, should I say, every once in a while I fail to turn on the alarm. That happened this morning and so I was running late. Now I don’t know how your life works but here is how mine works. On mornings where I am running early I get every single green light between my house and my pre-dawn destination. On mornings when I am running late, the opposite happens and I sit and wait at every red light.

When this kind of thing happens I am of the type of person who usually reacts swiftly. I may have grown up from voicing aloud my displeasure at every red light; but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about saying something.

As you might guess I was running rather late and all the lights were red this morning, especially the longest one at Pioneer Trail and Flying Cloud Drive. I was sitting there calculating how late I was going to be and what I was going to say about it when something came to my attention. I saw all the headlights and thought of all the people behind those headlights who were headed off to their jobs, some of them with time clocks to punch or managers who watch the clock. The sun was just starting to come up, which if I had been on time, I would have missed the sunrise which was really quite beautiful.   And with that extra shot of adrenaline that comes with running late I felt very refreshed, awake and ready for my day.

I believe what came to my attention sitting there for a while at Pioneer Trail and Flying Cloud Drive was what we call perspective. Perspective is that take, that viewpoint, that outlook on life, which informs and guides us. Keeping things in perspective helps us to understand that you can’t stress out over everything; you get to choose. A good perspective is one that allows you to take the time to ask the needed question not just the first one that pops into your head.

A clear perspective recognizes that the view I may have is not that of everyone else. Like this morning: I was meeting with a guy who didn’t care that I was running late and who was willing to wait for me. As he said when I arrived and started to apologize, “Quit beating yourself up, we’re good.”

Last week, I invited you to consider a place where you have sought out a clearer perspective. This week I would like to invite you to consider situations where/when perspective has snuck up on you. Sometimes what is sneaking up on us is a whole other way of viewing our life and our world. And sometimes that whole other perspective is – in part – God’s perspective. Recognizing and trying to live in God’s perspective is what Jesus taught and lived. We call it grace and this Sunday morning our worship will explore why an understanding that our perspective is not always God’s perspective is so important.

Keep the Faith!

Pastor Dan

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Pastor dan's weekly memo - march 5, 2015

3/5/2015

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Last week, I experienced something of a different perspective in my life. I really prefer not to go somewhere that it is warm for a break during the winter because well… you have to come back to the cold. And so most of the time we go some place where you can enjoy the snow. This year, we returned to one of my favorite places on the planet, Red Lodge, Montana.

There is just something in my soul that sometimes soars when I’m in a different landscape than the one to which I am accustomed. It certainly happened when I first saw this mountain in Montana. But it also happened on the drive out as we were heading west across the great high plains of North Dakota. The weather was clear and the sun was setting. The landscape there is so different, so flat and with no trees or buildings or anything to get in your way; you do feel like you can see forever. And it is that sense of being caught up in the vastness of the plains that I think sent me soaring. It lasted just a moment (mostly because I was driving) but in that moment something was stirred that moved me at such a level that words fell short as I tried to describe what I was feeling to Katie. I simply said, “Boy, you can get perspective out here.”

I want to encourage you to consider what in your life provides a needed sense of perspective. Perspective might be described as how you see or feel about the world or your life or your place in creation. It’s deep stuff. And I think in the unfamiliar vastness of the great high plains and the majesty of those mountains I recognized at a deeper level that words cannot always convey that I am, we are something more than the things we do, or the obligations that consume us, or the roles that identify us, or even the passions we pursue. We are connected somehow to all this, to the setting sun and the soaring mountain.

Now I know that this isn’t particularly relevant to many of you reading this, and yet nothing could be more relevant on a Thursday afternoon at what we hope is the tail end of a long winter. You see when we are blessed with the experience of perspective I believe God is revealing in fleeting glimpses to us what really matters in our life.

For the next several weeks in worship we will be exploring how God provides perspective and how we can not only connect to, but also participate in what God has intended for all of creation.

Keep the Faith!
Pastor Dan

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