Lunch with Simon

I was so blessed to hear from Roger DeYoung last week that he'd be in town talking with folks about their church's relationship with RCA mission, and with the extra grace that he could bring Pastor Simon Muntolol along with him. I met Simon last year on my trip to Kenya, so it was good to renew our friendship. Things are very, very tough in Kenya at the moment; drought has wracked the country with the death of thousands of animals. In a country where your wealth is measured in cattle and goats, that's a big, big deal. Simon's herds are right now somewhere in Tanzania, where they are able to graze. It's said that rain is coming, but it's feared, as well, that it will come in buckets. (Kind of like Georgia -- long time no rain, then rain all at once)
When I talked to Simon, I mentioned my Advent project of raising money for his daughter's surgery. He was very appreciative, and just a few seconds ago I received this e-mail from Simon (who is at the moment at NBTS for an evening meeting):


Hi Pst Paul.
What are good time I have meeting you this afternoon and we eat Lunch spent time together refereshing our memories about Africa and the different both in culture and style in life. I am happy that you want to use your time to speak about the water problems in maasai land. Again, about the fund raising for my daughter's hospital bill. I was really moved by your love. It was a relief, like a big truck has been removed from my life. This was my prayer always, for this bill to be paid off.
Thanks alot; keep in touch.

Well, so that's why I'm trying to raise money for Simon. He had been planning to sell off a part of his herd to pay for the bills. Then the drought has cost him several dozen cattle so far. If you can help in any way, please do so! Thanks!!! (Simon is up there to the right ----)

Hi. I hope you're visiting because you're curious about why I'm raising money for a friend. Last year I visited Kenya to see what's going on with the well-drilling project there. While there I met Simon Muntolo, a minister/evangelist among the Massai people in the Rift Valley. Simon's daughter had had surgery, and he and his family continue to labor under the weight of unpaid obligations for that surgery. I'm trying to raise around $4,000 total to help pay to relieve Simon from these debts. (While $4,000 sounds like a lot to us, in Kenya the equivalent is more like $40,000!)
During the season of Advent I plan to post something each day -- a poem or poems, a song, a lyric, a photograph, or some other image of something I've created -- to help stimulate your imagination as you observe the season. I'll be basing my works, for the most part, on the Daily Office. (I'll include Scripture links each day)
If you're blessed by what you read and experience, please send a check to Pascack Reformed Church (make it out to the church, not to me!!!!!) and note it on the memo line as the "Simon Muntolo Fund." The address is 65 Pascack Road, Park Ridge, NJ 07656.
I'm hoping we can relieve this debt by the time Christmas comes, so please, tell your friends to come to this blog and give it a look.
Thanks! -- I'll be sending facebook reminders as we draw nearer to the season of Advent....

Here's a song written for the third Sunday in Epiphany, 2009. Its theme is repentance. If you'd like music for this, e-mail me at paulgjanssen@verizon.net.



Lord, from this day I'll live a new way,
A way of love that says to fear "Be gone!"
I'll turn away from anger, suspicion, and contempt,
And I'll live love, O Lord, from this day on; from this day on.

Lord, from this day I'll sing a new song,
A song of hope that lifts my heart to praise.
I'll no more let the shadow of pain control my life,
And I'll sing hope, O Lord, from this day on; from this day on.

Lord, from this day I'll speak a new word,
A word of peace that makes a place for all.
I'll speak the word of Christ, saying "Do not be afraid!"
And I'll speak peace, O Lord, from this day on; from this day on.

Lord, from this day I'll take a new name,
The name of Christ who welcomed strangers in.
I'll welcome everyone who comes to my door for grace,
And I'll be "Christ", O Lord, from this day on; from this day on.

A sermon on Jonah, from the angle of the relationship between Jonah and God:

Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
Jonah: Patron Saint of the Spiritually Stuck
Dearly Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ the Lord,
It’s hard to get much out of the story of Jonah unless you actually know the story. So, let me remind you.
God says to Jonah, “Go to Nineveh, and cry against it. It’s sending a stink up my nose.” Not surprising, because Nineveh was well known as atrocity central. You think of anything vile, and something worse happened in Nineveh. Jonah boards a ship in the opposite direction. He lets out in casual conversation that he’s running away from his God. He takes a lower berth and goes into such a deep sleep that when the Lord sends a ship-wrecking storm, he doesn’t even wake up. The captain, apparently having exhausted every other means of saving his boat, wakes Jonah: “Get up and pray!” The sailors are a bit more practical-minded. They toss the dice to figure out why they’re about to go down for the last time, and the lot falls on Jonah. “Who are you?” they ask. “I’m a Hebrew. I honor the God of all creation.” “What’s wrong with you?” the sailors ask. “You’re running away from your God! No wonder this storm’s killing us! If your God is God of the sea, how can we calm him down?” “Toss me in,” says Jonah. But they row harder. Doesn’t work. They toss Jonah in, along with a prayer: “Don’t hold this against us, God.” The sea calms down. Jonah treads water and they hold an impromptu thanksgiving service. Enter the fish.
The fish swallows Jonah, who writes an elegant psalm there in the belly. The fish, having served its purpose, spit up Jonah on dry land. God speaks again: “Try again.” So Jonah went this time, and delivers the most effective sermon in the history of preachers. Eight words: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” They believe. Everybody repents. The king repents. The court repents. The army repents. The peasants repent. The farm animals repent. The field mice and bunny rabbits – everything repents. You may remember who repents last. God repents. “OK, you won’t be overthrown.” Jonah is not happy. “I told you this is what would happen! Just kill me now!” God says, “Where is this anger coming from?” Jonah goes out to see what happens next.
Here’s what happens: God sends a plant to make shade for Jonah. Finally, Jonah’s got something to be happy about. That night, a worm attacks the plant. No more shade. To make it worse, the sun and wind make the day unbearable. Replay the last conversation: “Just kill me now.” “Aren’t you getting the whole plant business just a wee bit too seriously? You didn’t make the plant. And yet you’re getting all worked up over it. Any reason I shouldn’t get worked up enough to save a city of 120,000 people I made who are unfortunately clueless about me, to say nothing of their cattle?”
The end.
Strange little story, nearly unique in the history of the prophets. There are lots of ways to read it, as an allegory in which Jonah plays the part of Israel, or as a parable in which God tries to teach a lesson to a people who were increasingly focusing on themselves rather than on their calling to be a light to the nations. But because I said last week that we’d be listening for the voice of God to speak to us through various characters, today we’ll just stick with how the story portrays Jonah, and see if we can wrestle a little gospel out of the way his story is told.
If we were to appoint Jonah as the patron saint of any group of people, I’d say he’s the patron saint of everyone whose relationship with God has ever gotten stuck. He can’t bring himself to do what makes God happy. God can’t seem to do whatever it would take to make Jonah happy. He’s stuck.
He’s stuck between God and the Ninevites, for one thing. Jonah is a prophet, and like any prophet, he sees more deeply than the rest of us can see. He sees who the Ninevites really are: not just enemies of his tribe, but bloodthirsty wretches, the kind of people who would just as soon slit your throat as shake your hand. He knows the kinds of things they do: sacrifice children to their idols, have sex out in public and call it a sacrament, kill old people and toss them outside the city wall where the vultures and dogs can lick their bones clean. Jonah knows what they deserve. They deserve to be punished, ransacked, destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth. No mercy. Just vengeance. That’s why he doesn’t want them to repent. Nineveh used up its last chance 1,000 chances ago. Which is why Jonah doesn’t want God to repent, either. Why should God have mercy on them? Why should God let them off the hook? What would a little sackcloth and ashes do to atone for the tens of thousands of innocents the Ninevites had killed? What kind of God would do such a thing – forgive the worst of the worst? Seems like a no-win situation.
So Jonah is stuck between his calling and his desire. Jonah is a prophet, and like any prophet, he has something to say. That’s what he’s been put on earth to do: to speak. You’d think, then, that when God tells him to speak, he’d be happy to open up his mouth and let fly with what Nahum got to say about Nineveh on God’s behalf: “I am against you, and I will lift up your skirts over your face and let others look at your nakedness, and I will throw excrement on you and treat you with contempt, and everyone who looks at you will cringe and say, ‘Nineveh is wasted. Ah, who cares?’” That is a juicy little bit of prophecy. All Jonah gets is eight rather nondescript words: “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” That’s all he’s called to say, and that is precisely what he has no interest in saying. Why should he be the one whose name would go down in history as the instrument of salvation to such a rotten regime? Maybe he’d look good to the Ninevites, but never to his own people. Poor old Jonah; he’s stuck between the only thing he knows how to do and the only thing he doesn’t want to do.
He’s stuck, you see, between being a mouthpiece for a consistent God on the one hand and a compassionate God, on the other. Jonah knows full well what God should be like: God should know who does right, and who does wrong, and should dispense blessings to the good and punishment to the evil. Not that God should be angry: just the opposite. God should be dispassionate, uncaring, detached. The only problem is, that’s what a pagan god is like, not the God of Israel. Apparently Jonah didn’t quite master the calculus of a God who is slow to anger. Of course God gets angry: not miffed, not petty, not petulant or self-interested the way our anger works. But passionate, deep, burning, from down-in-the-gut is God’s anger (we used to call it wrath): the energizing force that kindles the ferocity of God’s love, the love that doesn’t whimper like a kitty but roars like a lion. Any one of us who’s ever loved anyone knows how anger coexists with love – but our anger gets messed up in all sorts of self-seeking and violence. God is love, we say, which means, God is passionate, reckless, extreme. Jonah wants a safe, predictable, consistent God. But God will be God. Who will sometimes repent. And sometimes not. But who will always love. Always, love.
So Jonah’s stuck. What’s the good news? What’s the take-away?
I can’t help but notice that Jonah keeps talking to God. He runs the other way, but in the belly of the fish, he keeps talking. He gets angry at the Lord, and says so. He falls into the pit of narcissism more than once, but he keeps on talking to God. Surely that tells us something. We all get stuck with God at some point. Sometimes we can’t figure out what God wants from us. Sometimes we can figure it out and we don’t want to do it. And there are times when we do what God wants us to do and it makes God look like a patsy and makes us look foolish. And we don’t want to take one more step with God. Jonah kept walking, and talking. He maintained a kind of faith, a changing faith, a growing faith, a faith that didn’t want to be where it was, but was where it was. So maybe all Jonah ever got from God for the rest of his life was a lover’s quarrel. So be it. It was a lover’s quarrel. And you could do worse than talk to someone who loves you.
What might be more surprising is that God keeps listening. Of course, God didn’t have to listen to this pusillanimous pup of a prophet. Didn’t have to indulge his narcissistic anger. But God kept listening. Doesn’t this tell us something about the character of God? At least Jonah got that part right: God is gracious and merciful. Mind you, I can’t imagine God listens to us because we’ve got all that much that’s new or interesting to God. God listens because of who God is, not because our stories are so side-splittingly joyful or so heart-breakingly sad. You could do worse than have someone to listen to you.
And here’s one last thing to notice: the book of Jonah ends with a question mark. There’s only one other book in the Bible that does so, but that’s Nahum, which ends with a nasty question. This one is different: “Shouldn’t I have mercy?” says God. Shouldn’t I be me? Who else would you have me be? What’s your idea of what I should do? Some interpreters say it’s a rhetorical question, but I doubt it. I think, instead, that it’s an invitation to continue the conversation. It seems to me to be the voice of God calling for a genuine response. Maybe we answer “I don’t know, God.” Or maybe we have pretty firm ideas of what God should do. The point is, the conversation goes on. The relationship keeps going. There is a space for grace between us and the maker of the heavens and the earth, a space where we can talk and listen and God will listen and talk, a space that’s warmed by God’s passion and kept dry by God’s Spirit. You could do worse than to have such a place to be. Just, to be.
What do you call such a space? It’s that place where justice and peace embrace, that place where your cup runneth over with joy. It’s the place to which God invites you, a place where you may come so undone that you can get unstuck. That place, that precious between-you-and-God place, is but one little corner, the corner you know, of the kingdom of God.
Amen.

Rev. Paul G. Janssen
Pascack Reformed Church
January 25, 2009

You've heard, no doubt that the GS adopted the Belhar. Here's its official action:

R-50 AdoptedTo adopt the Belhar Confession provisionally for two years, testing it:
in worship through RCA liturgy,
in teaching through formation and nurture of faith for RCA witness and mission,
in discernment as a theological foundation for the RCA call "to follow Christ in mission in a lost and broken world,"
in confessing the themes of unity, reconciliation, and justice by "participating in God's transformation of our lives, our congregations, and the world"
for report to the General Synod of 2009 through the Commission on Christian Unity.

Its other action re: Belhar was thus:

R-64 Adopted as AmendedTo urge the seminaries, colleges, classes, and congregations of the RCA to develop strategies for studying the Belhar Confession and to incorporate it in worship and policy making.

Common to both actions was the "testing" of the Belhar in RCA liturgy (an interesting way of putting it, but we'll just let that one go), or the "incorporating" of the Belhar in worship.

As people who have interest in the Belhar, or who have done creative work in crafting the words spoken or sung by the people of God as they gather for worship, or who are well connected with other people who do, I am writing, of my own initiative, to encourage you to pick up the Belhar and discern whether and how you would encourage a congregation to confess the Belhar in worship.

I have extended to the 'powers that be' that I am willing to be a repository for such creative work, and to keep a project going for presentation to the 2009 General Synod. Since the action indicates that the report of 2009 would come through the Commission on Christian Unity, I've checked with its staff person, Doug Fromm, to ask whether my volunteering would be welcomed. He says that it is.

That said, I need to indicate from the outset that it's no guarantee that everything that is submitted will ultimately be used. Sometimes things just don't work very well, no matter how hard we try, and we do want to be sure that whatever is presented to the church will be of highest use-ability, quality, and theological integrity.

I do intend to contact someone within the URCSA to find out if they have also published liturgical resources. I hope that such can also be included.

Do you have other ideas or suggestions? I would love to hear them.

e-mail me at paulgjanssen@verizon.net.