This Fall at C2G

Today, Dr. Troy Smith wraps up his preaching series on healing. Excerpts from his sermons are available on his YouTube channel.

Coming up on Sunday, September 16, we will be meditating or 'praying the scriptures,' with C2G's own unique version of Lectio Divina. 

Then on Sunday, September 23, we welcome talent from the community to share sacred songs, stories, poems, dances, jokes, what have you, with another installment of "Open Mic for the Soul." 

As always, we blend supper and the service, gathering from 5-7pm most Sundays while Tech is in session in the fellowship hall at First Presbyterian Church.

For Churches & From Our Church: A message for Upper Cumberland Pride

Come ToGather joyfully supported the first Upper Cumberland Pride on Saturday, May 5, 2012.

Embrace all persons as children of God, created in the image of God, unconditionally loved by God & of sacred worth, including yourself.

Seek out & join companions who are passionately committed to ending discrimination, offering sanctuary, & achieving equality for LGBT persons & their families.

Break the silence & challenge the conspiracy of false witness borne against LGBT persons & their families in both church & society.

Nurture a theology & practice of hospitality within your church family, ministry, &   community.

Create & foster safe, welcoming, & affirming spaces for LGBT persons, parents, &     families to come out, to live with integrity, & to tell the truth of their lives & faith stories.

Start conversations about love, sexual ethics, marriage, & faithful relationships for all   persons regardless of sexual orientation or gender.

Celebrate your life & faith journey as a gift from God & be the change you seek to make in the church & world.


Adapted from More Light Presbyterians.
http://www.mlp.org/

Pass It On / Love,Love,Love - Michael Humber Sings On Easter Sunday at Ensor Sink

Cotton Patch Gospels: Reading, Discussion, & Worship

On Sunday nights for eight weeks, from mid-January to early-March, C2G will meet to read the Cotton Patch Gospel by Clarence Jordan. 


 Then, for a few days on Spring Break week (3.7 to 3.11), we will visit the community in Georgia that Clarence Jordan founded: http://www.koinoniapartners.org/; a few spots are still available for the Georgia trip. 


 Each meeting will include potluck supper, reading, discussion, & communion. When musicians are available, they will join us too. 


 On Super Bowl Sunday (2.5.12), we will meet at a member's home for worship before the big game.

Prepare Ye The Way (Advent Awaits Us)

A reading from the Gospel According to Mark, verses 1 through 11. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.’”

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is the word of the Lord

I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together.

Let us pray: Lord God, May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing unto you, in the name of the resurrected Christ who is our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

                                                                                                                              

The title of this sermon and this service is “Prepare Ye The Way” because….

According to my parents, my preaching and teaching career began at a very young age. We had gone to see the musical Godspell in the theater—you may be familiar with this 1970s rock n roll rendition of the gospel. As we sat in the audience that night, I was ready for the opening of this play, which involves John the Baptist coming forward for the invocation, the epic, beautiful refrain “Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord.”

As the people in the theater sat quiet and John the Baptist started to sing, an eager young child interrupted the proceedings and shouted at the top of his lungs, “That song is on our record.” And according to my Daddy’s retelling, the entire cast joined the audience in stunned laughter at my spontaneous disruption. Thus began my preaching career at age four.

Each Monday afternoon before I go to seminary at Vanderbilt, I drive about 80 minutes in the car from Cookeville, Tennessee down Interstate 40. I see John the Baptist in the billboard that stares down at me and asks, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?”  As I arrive at the exit ramp to Broadway, downtown Nashville, I see the same man every week, selling street sheet called The Contributor, and he’s harkening to us to “prepare ye the way” for new perspectives on homelessness and homeless folk.

All across American today, from California to New York to even little old Cookeville, ragtag bands of first-amendment thumpers continue to proclaim “Occupy” in the name of the poor and the unemployed and disenfranchised.  In their signs, in the placards, in their cement campgrounds, we see John the Baptist proclaiming “Prepare Ye The Way” for peace, “Prepare Ye The Way” for hope, “Prepare Ye The Way” for justice. Now more than ever, we need to “prepare ye the way” for the Lord of the Poor, the Prince of the Peasants who comes to town on a donkey to confront the powers that be in an Occupy Jerusalem parade.

If we quiet our hearts long enough to hear the world groaning and moaning for change, we can hear the voice of John the Baptist issuing an eloquent yet shrill call for collective and relational repentance from within the asphalt arteries and alienated cubicles of the American cultural wilderness. Jesus needs John the Baptist. We need John the Baptist. Mark tips us off to the revolutionary implications of the relationship between John and Jesus, Jesus and John. We don’t have a Christ—or a Christology—without first working through and with John the Baptist.

Marcus Borg suggests that John was a “teacher” and “mentor” to Jesus. Perhaps Christ followed John to a sort of wilderness training camp to have his call clarified, his mission honed, his ministry discerned. We don’t have a good God movement without a recruiter, without an instigator and an agitator. That’s the beatifically brash and rhetorically harsh harbinger we find in this passage with John the Baptist—the carnival barker of the Jesus movement. He is the wild man wearing the cloak of camel’s hair. He is the warning to the rich and powerful to repent.

Jesus needs John the Baptist. Jesus needs John the Baptist like the Beatles needs Elvis Presley. Jesus needs John the Baptist like Elvis Presley needs Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Jesus needs John the Baptist like Eric Clapton needs Muddy Waters. Jesus needs John the Baptist like Martin Luther King needs Mahatma Gandhi. Jesus needs John the Baptist like Martin Luther King needs Rosa Parks. Every good movement needs instigators and agitators to energize, to prepare ye the way.

According to radical theologian Ched Myers, this passage is an induction ceremony into the movement for Jesus. This is not like our baptisms in some churches today, where baptism is like joining an elite country club of the frozen chosen. This is joining a movement of resistance and revolution; this is joining the rank and file of the God movement.

So, the story of Christ begins not with the cozy niceties of our Christmas cards, the scrubbed up nativity narratives of made-for-TV specials but with the beckoning baptizer, asking us to repent, repent meaning more than confess your dirty deeds that were done dirt cheap, but repent meaning change your heart and mind and turn your life around, repent meaning transform sin-consciousness into God consciousness, selfish consciousness into selfless consciousness. In other words, free your mind and the rest will follow. But not only does Christ’s baptism induct him into the revolutionary subculture of the God movement; Mark’s gospel marks Christ as one of us and embeds him in the fabric of all creation as card-carrying member of a cosmic community, the inclusive web of harmonic infinity. Jesus submitted to being more like us, and we need to submit to being more like Jesus.

I think of my own baptism as an infant in the inner city of Chicago at the Church of the Three Crosses in early 1968, just months before our clergy and lay leaders would take a large wooden cross from our sanctuary into the streets and over to Lincoln Park where they tried to prayerfully and peacefully mediate the conflict between police and protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. The preachers and laypeople were unsuccessful negotiating a peace between mostly unarmed yippies and well-armed cops. Our peace delegation was dispersed with the protesters, and the large wooden cross was lost in the process. While some church members criticized this action, many members of that congregation saw the cross symbolizing the sacred interrelating with the secular in the protests in the park as an extension of Sunday morning ritual into the streets.

Like 1968, religious folks are in the streets again, speaking like John the Baptist, joining the occupy movement. In the drastic economic differences between the 1% and the 99%—or as one commentator explained it the 99.8% and the .02%—it’s tempting for some of us to employ the prophetic voice as we join the protests, to redress and redistribute, to turn the tables on the moneychangers, to fill the 99% with good things and send the 1% away empty. But I expect that Christ’s unconditional and radically inclusive love might correct our math and see how God’s revolutionary reconciliation includes even the powers-that-be and the powerful that can’t see, making no percentage but 100%. Even the powerful can experience powerlessness in the presence of God and might be empowered by relinquishing the power that harms in favor of solidarity with the power that heals.

So we’re called to be John in order know Jesus. If we don’t prepare the way, we can’t bring the kingdom come. But admit it—some days we just don’t want to do the work. Lest we lose our first world creature comforts, we don’t want to go to the real or imagined wilderness and as Shane Claiborne suggests “purge ourselves of empire.” We don’t want to join John the Baptist at radical activist wilderness boot camp or hang out with men wearing wild clothing and living off foraged food.  Heck, many of us wouldn’t even want to take an Advent or Lenten fast from our Facebook accounts. But God, grant us the serenity to accept the fact that we might not change the world and the courage to try anyway. God, grant us the courage to Prepare Ye The Way.

Somewhere right now, addicts and alcoholics are getting clean and sober and are preparing the way to restoring their lives. Somewhere right now, divorcees are getting counseled and are preparing the way to reclaiming their lives. Somewhere right now, victims and veterans are getting comforted and are preparing the way to rebuilding their lives. Somewhere right now, underpaid and underemployed workers are getting organized and are preparing the way for fighting for their lives and livelihoods.

To be baptized is not to privatize your salvation. Don’t rationalize or believe the lies of the comfortably civilized! In the Godman Jesus, divinity gets democratized, and in Christ’s body the church, His work gets collectivized. To repent is to realize and accept God’s surprise. The redeemed will self-actualize and keep our eyes on the prize. Of course Jesus will submit to be baptized in the dirty water of the Jordan River. But From the water as from the tomb, he will also rise. And we will see Him with our very own eyes and hear a song: Can’t No Grave Hold My Body Down.

Somewhere right now, someplace like right here, we’re experiencing a revival of the revolutionary spirit of the New Testament. When we submit to Jesus, we submit to others. When we empower the voice in the wilderness against power and for peace and economic justice, we invoke John the Baptist. When we repent, we change our attitude and use our gratitude to make a change in the lives of others. Advent awaits us. Are you ready? Prepare ye the way!

9.11.11 4 Peace @ C2G

We had a deeply moving worship experience on 9.11.11 as we remembered September 11th, as we prayed for, sang for, & preached about Peace.

Walking Home

The following short story was performed by Jonathan Frank at C2G's 'Liturgical Performance Festival'   on April 17, 2011. When we return to First Pres Cookeville on August 28, 2011, our first event will be an Open Mic For The Soul, & we invite everyone to come & anyone to perform. 







Justin West nervously drummed the pen on his desk as he sifted through a backlog of emails on his laptop. This one was from yet another student in the church facing an unplanned pregnancy. He grabbed the church pictorial directory and thumbed through the pages so he could put a face with the name on the email. There she was. He touched his hand to the page and whispered her name. The phone number for the crisis pregnancy center was written on a post-it note somewhere amid the piles of papers on his desk. Now if he could only find it.

Justin could feel himself becoming numb to these scenarios. This was, after all, pretty standard fare for a youth pastor in a large church. For him, it was another day at work, but somewhere a scared, 16-year-old girl’s world was coming undone.

The weight of everyone else’s problems had depleted Justin of the strength he needed to face his own. The very nature of the job seemingly disallowed being real. He had to always be “on,” always be strong, project a certain image and message. And whenever he needed a cigarette, as he did right now, he had to walk to the far corner of the parking lot, behind the shed, lest he cause anyone to stumble . . . or worse, the senior pastor find out.

“Why did I ever become a youth pastor anyway?” Justin wondered in silence. He wanted to help people. He so desired to be an honest, vulnerable human being, sharing openly about his imperfections and weaknesses, and reaching out to those hurting people, disenfranchised with religion and tired of trying to be good enough. Instead he was pushed into the insulated, Christian bubble. He was tired of the game, the pious religious power brokers, the hypocrisy, the arbitrary human scale of sins that welcomed, if not encouraged, the gluttons and gossips but assigned scarlet letters to the homosexuals and divorcées, and the deacons that successfully lobbied to end the homeless ministry out of concern for its possible effects on the newly reupholstered pews.

Justin’s mind flashed back to the present, where a handful of new emails had suddenly emerged in his inbox. He didn’t have time to think about his grievances. Not today. As soon as he was done solving everyone else’s problems, he figured he should try to make an appearance at home and work on some of the many simmering there.

Then the phone rang and everything else in the world stopped. Justin’s past had decided to come back for a visit.

“I’m calling about your friend, Kurt,” came the voice on the other end of the line. She identified herself as a nurse at the General Hospital across town. “He’s very sick and he would really like to see you before . . . ” her voice trailed off. She didn’t want to finish her thought and she didn’t have to. Justin knew what she meant.

Justin clenched his teeth and then finally let out a deep breath. Memories he had spent years trying to block out quickly came flooding back. Kurt was one of Justin’s best friends growing up, but life would take them in very different directions. While Justin faced his own private battles and rebelled in his own ways, Kurt threw himself headfirst into the trappings of the young adult world, and Justin had resented him deeply for it. So many phone calls had gone unanswered. So many times when he needed the support of his old friend he was left feeling alone. He wanted someone to stand alongside him, to join him in his efforts to escape the years of life with some shred of innocence left and to help him be strong in the face of so many other shiny distractions. Without ever knowing it or even meaning to, Kurt had refused to be that person in Justin’s life.

Just as Kurt was emerging from the muddied haze that was his youth and starting to reassemble the pieces of his life into something that made sense, Kurt received devastating news. He tested HIV positive.

Kurt successfully hid his condition from everyone around him for years, but the truth was forced out of him on the day of his car wreck. He walked away from the scene of the accident, but was a bloodied mess. An acquaintance that saw the accident unfold pulled his car over and ran to Kurt to offer assistance. “Don’t touch me,” Kurt pleaded as the man approached him. “You can’t.”

News travels fast in a small town. Stereotypes were made, assumptions abounded, and one by one the church doors quickly shut to this modern day leper.

“I have children and I do not feel like explaining this to them!” exclaimed one of the deacons at Justin’s church during a conversation about the newly discovered social pariah’s involvement in their congregation. “I want someone keeping a close eye on him,” added the children’s pastor. Normally Justin would feel compelled to speak out, but many wounds had yet to heal, and though he knew his church’s rejection of Kurt was wrong, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything in his defense. He never expressed agreement with the decision that was made, but instead sat by in silence, which ultimately had the very same effect.

That was fifteen years ago, and that is exactly where Justin wished to leave those memories. But with news of Kurt’s deteriorating condition, a Pandora’s box was opened and every painful remembrance reentered his mind. The ways that Kurt had betrayed him, and worse—the ways that he had betrayed Kurt, were thrown back in his face. Could he really revisit that world?

“Sir, are you still there?” asked the voice on the phone. “Yes, yes. I’m sorry,” said Justin, his mind shifting back to reality. “I’ll be glad to come see him sometime soon.”

“I’d hurry,” said the nurse. And with that she hung up the phone. Justin let out another deep breath and then he cried. It was time for that cigarette.

The following afternoon, Justin got in his car and headed to he hospital. Upon arriving there, he said his first prayer in a long time that was not spoken while standing behind a microphone. He gripped the steering wheel of his car and looked to the sky, searching for words. “God, you see the real, broken person behind the mask I wear. I am not good, strong or pure, but you are. I can’t pretend right now. I don’t have words to offer. I am hurting, but I need to bring something sacred, something of worth to a person who is hurting so much more. Help me.” And then he got out of his car and walked in, repeating the last words of his prayer under his breath the whole time.

As he saw that he was getting closer to Kurt’s room, Justin’s footsteps became slower and softer, and his heart began to beat louder and faster. What would he say? His mind had gone totally blank. And then he saw him. If his heart was racing before, it had now all but stopped as he peered through the narrow, glass window on the door. There he was, sitting alone in a sterile, white room, his only company an IV drip and a series of monitors and machines humming along. His body was wasting away. He didn’t have a hair on his head and his face was weak and drained of color. Kurt knew that he didn’t have much time left. His glazed, tired eyes told the story. He understood that AIDS would soon claim his life. In many ways, it already had.

Justin slowly opened the door and walked into the room. Suddenly emerging from his comatose state and aware of his surroundings again, Kurt turned to look towards the door and their eyes met. Justin ran to the bed and clasped Kurt’s frail hand in his. “I’m here,” he whispered. Kurt began to sob. Justin turned towards the nurse that had just entered the room with a look of concern. She gave a knowing half-smile. “You’re okay,” she said. “It’s just that this is the first time anyone that didn’t work here has touched him.” The realization of Kurt’s loneliness and isolation broke Justin’s heart wide open. He buried his head in the side of the bed, crying alongside his friend.

“I’m sorry,” began Justin, wiping away tears. “I’m sorry for the things they said. For the way they hurt you; for the way I hurt you. We walked away when you needed us the most. When you needed love, we only offered judgment. You were never meant to walk this road alone. I’m here now, and I’ll walk with you.”

Kurt strained to speak. Slowly, the words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where am I going?” Kurt asked, managing a feeble grin. Justin gazed out the open window of the hospital room as the sunlight streamed in on a warm September day. He looked back at Kurt and returned the smile. “Home,” he said.

“I’m scared,” said Kurt, through labored breaths. Justin looked his friend in the eye, and once again took his hand. “Kurt, if only you could only see the roads I’ve snuck down, the shame I’ve known, the dark places I hid. I threw stones, pretending that my mistakes were somehow lesser than yours. But now I see that we’re just the same: imperfect people in need of grace. And God is always ready to offer that, even when Christians aren’t. When everyone else walked away, someone still loved you. He sang over you, he stood beside you, he carried you when you couldn’t stand, and he caught every tear you cried. You are not alone, and you are not unloved. Don’t be afraid.”

Kurt smiled and nodded. He tried to speak, but no sound was made. He had already spoken his last. Justin could see the life behind his eyes starting to fade, and then they closed. Kurt mustered up all of the energy in his body to squeeze Justin’s hand one last time. Moments later the heart monitor beside Kurt’s bed switched from short, pulsating beeps, to one long, steady tone. A lifeless body remained on the hospital bed, but Kurt was no longer there.

Kurt had held on for so long, afraid of what would come next if he finally let go and allowed himself to embrace the mystery of his acceptance and fall on the grace and love of someone bigger and stronger than him. With Justin’s gentle words of truth, Kurt could finally let go. He had made it home, freed from the prison walls of his illness and dancing alongside the one who had loved him all along.

“Save a place for me,” whispered Justin. “I’ll be there soon.”