Media in worship at The Meadow

Those who worship at The Meadow on Sunday mornings know that digital media is part of the liturgy used in our experience. The visual mediums could be still imagery, video imagery, or a mixture of the two.

More often than not, the experience starts with Scripture and a theme, such as with "Kudzu Christianity: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." The text was Isaiah 5:1-7, a portion of "The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard." Many summers we travel south to Florida for a week's vacation. Along the way there are untold acres of kudzu. We see it around East Tennessee. For the most part, it is an unfruitful vine, but some creative Southerners have uncovered various ways of making it fruitful. Thus the image of kudzu ...



There are times when still imagery is just not enough. Maybe it's a song that comes into my head and I begin to think of that song in a spiritual context. It could be a contemporary Christian song, a rock song, or even country music. While I have my favorites, there are very few genres that I can not appreciate in some way.

I have not yet purchased a digital video camera and analog-to-video is too cumbersome and time-consuming for me. So, many of my self-created videos are still imagery set to music. I began doing this with PowerPoint and a script in 1996. Today, given that I have not yet been able to afford a Mac, I use Windows Movie Maker.

Following a tornadic rampage earlier this year that killed nearly 60, I was struck by the stories of survival and created a video for worship, using news images and the music of Casting Crowns, "Praise You In The Storm." I would show it here, but there is the possibility of copyright infringement since this is not "a house of worship or other religious assembly." A good reference for what is allowed under the Copyright Law of 1976 is "Handbook for Multisensory Worship" (c 1999 Ginghamsburg Church). Which begs the question: How do those folks on YouTube get away with all of those copyrighted images floating across their pages?

As a bivocational pastor, it is difficult to create the experience that you pray will help people experience God. There is the issue of time, but there is also the issue of resources -- particularly if you are serving a small church, such as The Meadow, where resources are scarce. Large churches often have teams of people who are either paid staff or are drawn from a large pool of engineers. In a small church, neither of those resources exist to a great degree -- that is, money for staff and a large pool of volunteers. Because of that, I long ago decided to draw upon a number of resources so that we in The Meadow can fully experience God's revealing Word:

It starts with The Word

Sometimes I use the Lectionary, which allows me to use a variety of worship planning resources, such as the United Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship worship site, TextWeek, and Desperate Preacher, and ESermons, the latter of which is a paid subscription site. (I chose that one to subscribe to because Len Sweet, one of my favorite contemporary theologians, has material on that site. My congregation would readily recognize his name, as well as Brian McLaren, Henri Nouwen and Rob Bell.)

Sometimes God leads me to another Scripture, in which case I search for a theme or metaphor within the text. Slowly reading and looking for words and phrases that jump off the page and into my spirit. I then look to commentaries, such as those within the New Interpreter's Bible, "The New Daily Study Bible" series, or other commentaries.

Then, there are times when something I am reading will strike a chord. That is what happened with Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz." I was reading that book in the summer of 2005 and one chapter led me to create a worship experience entitled "Christian Belief is Like Penguin Sex." It was around the same time that "March of the Penguins" debuted, which certainly made it timely. It also provided much needed imagery, thanks to marketing materials. (Again, I would show the imagery here, but there is that copyright law ...

Movies and music also draw me to certain themes. The no-brainer movie theme of the past few years has been the "Chronicles of Narnia" series. I have yet to see the "Prince Caspian" release, but like many pastors I built a series of worship experiences on the former movie. The not-so-obvious movie that I built a message upon was "The Shawshank Redemption." It was a great study of hope during Advent one year. Music has spawned a number of ideas, with songs like Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A Changin'" and Brooks and Dunn's "Red Dirt Road."

In short, I believe God is open to creative liturgy and uses a great deal of pop culture to get his message across.

I'll close with a few suggested resources for visual liturgy:

Sermon Spice: www.sermonspice.com
Lumicon: www.lumicon.com
The work of the People: www.twop.
Jonny Baker Blog: jonnybaker.blogs.com

Grace and peace ...

The Elvis Cup and 'Hotel California'

I’m not the pop culture aficionado I was a few decades ago. Despite my vocation as a journalist, I sometimes get lost in the blur of names and faces that roll past the screen.

Maybe it’s age.

But I surfed over to on People magazine’s Web site a little more than a week ago and here were just a few of the headlines: “Angelina and Brad’s adoption of Pax Finalized,” “Hepatitis Scare Hits Ashton, Demi and Madonna,” and “Johnny Knoxville Recovering from Motorcycle Injury.”

You could surf over to about another half-dozen or more related stories on Angelina Jolie, and even get a glimpse of “Brad & Angelina’s Date Night.”

We obviously can’t get enough of celebrities — particularly, I suppose, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; however, we’re now into celebrity offspring.

A couple of years ago, we couldn’t get enough of Shiloh Jolie, when People magazine paid $4 million for the U.S. rights alone to shoot pictures of the baby. Within the past month, Christina Aguilera debuted her newborn son, Max, on the cover of People for a reported $1.5 million. Not to be outdone, it was recently reported that Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony were negotiating a $6 million deal for exclusive photos of their twins.

Danielle Friedland, who runs Celebrity Baby Blog, said the craving for celebrity news is fueled by the tabloid media.

“Celebrities always have children ... it's just that we're paying so much more attention to them right now,” Friedland told The Associated Press. “The more that we see of them, the more we want.”

But why blame the tabloid media? We’re the ones who can’t get enough of this stuff.

Celebrities have been turned into little gods on big screens, and now we are worshipping the children of little gods.

We live in a culture of celebrity worship, but it apparently doesn’t take a whole lot to achieve the status of celebrity. The late social historian Daniel Boorstin, who died in 2004, wrote, “Anyone can become a celebrity if only he can get into the news and stay there.”

And that is what many of them do best: They get in the news, and stay there, and we glorify them all the more … sometimes, even after death.

Refusing to let a celebrity die in peace, the culture of celebrity worship creates conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths to keep them alive. Urban legends abound maintaining that Elvis is not really dead, nor is Jim Morrison of The Doors. We assign these celebrities the status of immortality, for it is difficult to let little gods die.

Len Sweet tells about the vial of “Elvis water” that sold on E-bay for $455 a couple of years ago. The water was the property of Wade Jones of Belmont, N.C., who said a police officer gave him a Styrofoam cup as a souvenir after a 1977 show by Presley in Charlotte. Inside the cup were a few sips of water. Jones writes on his eBay posting that after he got home he put Saran Wrap over the cup, put a rubber band around it, and placed it in a freezer. He auctioned off the remaining three tablespoons of water for $455.

Later, Jones auctioned off a one-time appearance by the cup, which was won by Nutballz, a company that makes food products free of wheat or refined sugar and who used the appearance as a benefit fund-raiser. The Elvis cup was in the house for all to bow down and worship.

Celebrity worship is detrimental to our own spirits, for only God is worthy of our worship. Celebrity worship is also detrimental to the object of our affections. Look at what happened to Elvis, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Look at what’s happening to Britney Spears.

When mere human beings made only in the likeness of God are set up as objects of worships — as little gods — it’s no wonder so many of them end up living, and dying, as classic tragedies.

And look at the lives we are setting up for the children of these little gods. We pay $6 million just to see their images. Surely there is the temptation for them to later view themselves as little gods.

The year I started college at ETSU, The Eagles released the album “Hotel California.” There was an incredible amount of urban legend surrounding that album. There were rumors that the title cut was about a Christian church that was abandoned in 1969 and taken over by an occultic group. There were even rumors that The Eagles were Satan worshippers and that the image of the Satanic High Priest Anton LeVey could be seen in one of the windows of the building on the cover.

My wife gave me The Eagles’ double-CD set for Valentine’s Day. In the liner notes, Glenn Frye had this to say about “Hotel California”:

“ … we did not start out to make any sort of concept or theme album. But when we wrote ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and started working on ‘Hotel California’ and ‘New Kid in Town’ … we knew we were heading down a long and twisted corridor and just stayed with it. Songs from the dark side — the Eagles take a look at the seamy underbelly of L.A. — the flip side of fame and failure, love and money.”

These lyrics point to the flip side of celebrity worship:

“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door/I had to find the passage back to the place I was before/‘Releax,’ said the night man, ‘We are programmed to receive. ‘You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!’”

Once you see yourself as a little god, once a culture has placed you in the residence of worship, it must be difficult — if not impossible — to check out of that hotel, to live a normal life, to see yourself once again as a child of God. As believers in the one true God, let’s open the door and set the idols free.

Let’s evict them from Hotel California.

Missed calls ...

Those of us who live in the world of cellular phones know the meaning of the words "Missed Calls."

You pick up your phone, see the words "Missed Calls" and immediately understand that someone has tried to reach you and you weren't available.

I wonder how many times God has called and we were either not available, or merely chose to ignore the call altogether.

For the past few years, the week after Christmas has been a time to retreat and relax after the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas dash. For the most part, I was able to accomplish that this year.

I retreated into the mountains of Upper East Tennessee and spent some time in contemplation, as well as using it as a time to just "be" with my family.

We ate. We talked. We ate. We talked. We ate ...

At some point in our sharing of stories from days gone by, my mom said, "You came home one day and told me you were going to be a preacher."

That was news to my memory and so I probed her, asking, "When was that?"

"It was when you were going to church with Uncle Russell."

That would have been 1969 or so, when I was baptized.

An older gentleman who knew my Uncle Russell had been picking me up on Sunday mornings and taking me to Hatcher Memorial Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. I stayed connected to the church for about year after that, I suppose.

I don't specifically recall saying, "I'm going to be a preacher," but I have no doubt her memory is clear on the matter.

I now wonder whether that was a missed call.

Off and on in my life, there had been this sense of calling, even though I likely would have never used that word to describe the impression ­ that is, at least not until my "heart was strangely warmed" at the age of 29.

I have this theory about the large number of baby boomers entering the ministry later in life: We allowed the noise of the 1960s and '70s to drown out God -- either never hearing the call in the first place, or allowing it to fade into the distance.

Some of us might even seek to fulfill that sense of calling through other endeavors, not even considering the possibility that the drive within our spirit is a movement of God.

Twenty-twenty spiritual hindsight being what it is, it's theologically reasonable that I would have felt a move of the Holy Spirit following my baptism.

Those of us who get into such things know that this past Sunday was "Baptism of the Lord" Sunday on the church calendar.

We read the story of Jesus' baptism and understand his calling, because we know the story: John baptizes Jesus; the Father says, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."

The call came and Jesus responded.

He gave up his home and consecrated his life to the mission of God's Only Son.

It was a dangerous mission.

He took up the call of the cross, which he carried all his life and on which he eventually died. He became a homeless man.

Those of who have been baptized in the Christian tradition identify with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The grace that baptism makes available is the atonement of Christ -- we are "at one" with God.

Baptism involves our own dying to sin, newness of life, union with Christ, receiving the Holy Spirit, and incorporation into Christ's Church.

As I look back on my own baptism, it was far too easy to conform to the world and not allow myself to be transformed by the Spirit of God. It was some 15 or 16 years later that I allowed God to transform my life, eventually leading to the acceptance of his call.

When we truly allow the Spirit of God to move in our life, the sacrament of Baptism transforms our lives and we think, speak, live, and act in ways that "re-present" the image of Christ to the world.

But there is a part of baptism that is the calling. We receive the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit endows us with gifts that are to be used in the service of God.

As baptized believers, we are called by God.

God has a claim on our lives.

The work that many of us call "ministry" is a response to that call, and that claim, that God has on our lives.

If we can not point to such a work, then we have missed the call.

As I said, I was baptized at the age of about 13; but I believe my true acceptance of grace came at the age of 29 in 1985.

It was Christmas 1990 or so that my niece, Wendy, looked at me and said, "Uncle Buzzy, I think you would make a good missionary or preacher, or something."

I was a bit taken aback, but said, "Well, Wendy, I think if God wants me to do something like that he¹ll let me know.²

In that sweet, little Virginian voice she said, "Well, maybe he is ..."

I let it pass, not giving it a great deal of thought.

About three or four years later, I was asked to speak to the "Liars Club," a group of older men from Middlebrook Pike United Methodist Church who met weekly at the West Town Mall Chik-fil-A.

Afterward, one of the older gents said, "You know, you'd probably make a pretty good preacher. You ever think of that?"

I was taken aback, but said, "Well, sir, I think if God wants me to do something like that he'll let me know."

The old saint said, "Well, maybe he is ..."

It was still five or six years before I gave in. But in 2001, I finally decided to run with it, rather than run from it. In religious-speak, I tried to "let go and let God."

My question today is this: What is God calling you to do this year, or even with the rest of your life?

Discover what it is, and then run with it -- don't run away from it. Believe me, if my experience is the norm, you will not be complete until you do so.

And what is God calling this community of faith in The Meadow to do next?

God declares through the prophet Isaiah, "See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare ..."

In the days of Isaiah, the new thing is the new exodus out of Babylon.

In the days of John the Bapitst, the new thing is the new exodus inaugurated with the coming of the Messiah, Jesus the Christ.

I sense that God is calling us to a new thing.

What is this new thing?

May we seek it together, may we discover it, and may we run with it.

To the glory of God!

Grace and peace ...

Advent ...

I have always been fascinated with UFOs, likely due to a massive number of hours spent watching “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and other such shows as a youngster.

I had a pretty good imagination about such things and can even recall running home and telling my parents I had seen a flying saucer in broad daylight.

It was probably a weather balloon.

I have lots of memories associated with looking into the sky.

There’s this memory of my sister, Sheree, pointing into the night sky from a window at my grandparents’ house, explaining the word “satellite” to me. Was she explaining the moon as a satellite, or something NASA sent into space? My memory is not that good …

But there are also some pretty strange memories of seeing things in the sky that were neither UFOs, nor satellites.

The year was 1968 and my mother, her second husband, Jim, my sister Sheree and I were camping on Cocoa Beach near Cape Canaveral Pier.

Calling it camping was something of a stretch, since all we had was a car and blankets.

And it was probably less out of a sense of adventure than it was not having money for a motel room, but still wanting to be at the beach.

Sometime during the night we could see an orange glow on the ocean’s horizon. The glow was slowly growing larger … it may have been minutes … it may have been an hour … and we were mesmerized.

“What is it?” Sheree and I asked.

We were getting scared and feared some apocalyptic event was at hand, even asking each other, “Is the world coming to an end?”

Jim and my mother seemed baffled as well.

We watched people strolling along the beach and it seemed they were unaware of this fantastic sight, paying no attention whatsoever. The strollers’ indifference to the obvious made it even more ‘Twilight-Zonish.’

It seemed an eternity before we realized the glow was simply the rising of a harvest moon.

We felt quite foolish.

I still look to the sky in expectation.

Perhaps it’s because I never know what I’ll see.

It was Christmas Eve 1975 that I saw the most awesome cosmic event in my life to date.

I was stationed with the training squadron VA-174 at Cecil Field, Florida, and had been assigned line watch that night.

The watch zones were configured in intersecting circles so that three or four of us would meet up every once in a while. We would chat for several minutes and then continue on walking the watch perimeter.
It was sometime early Christmas morning when one of us pointed to the star-studded sky, asking, “What in the world is that?”

We all looked in the same direction to see a fiery object moving quickly toward us — and the airfield — on what appeared to be slightly less than a 45-degree angle.

It was growing larger and larger, coming closer and closer, until it appeared it was going to crash onto the flight line.

The watchmen scattered away from the flight line — that is, all except for me.

Like the orange glow on the horizon at Cocoa Beach, I stood mesmerized and watched the fiery ball flatten like a beam in a laser light show. It appeared to somehow bounce off of some unseen shield, streaking away in the opposite direction.

The sky was filled with falling stars for quite some time.

All I could say was, “Wow …”

There was a brief in a newspaper a day or two later that noted others had seen the same sight.

It reminds me of a song by Larry Norman, the grandfather of modern Christian rock. It’s called “U.F.O.”:

“He’s an unidentified flying object.
You will see Him in the air.
He’s an unidentified flying object.
You will drop your hands and stare.
You will be afraid to tell your neighbor.
He might think that it’s not true.
But when they open up the morning paper.
You will know they’ve seen Him too.”

We are ending the first of four weeks of Advent, the name for which is derived from the Latin word adventus, which means “coming.” During this season, we celebrate the coming of Christ — his birth, his continual coming in Word and Spirit, and whose final coming in victory we anticipate.

In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Jesus tells us, “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

The Spirit within me watches for his “coming” in many ways — the faces of the congregation as they lift someone in prayer, the actions of those engaged in social justice, the glow on the face of a newly baptized believer, and the sharing of the bread and cup during Holy Communion. There are many other “comings” as well, and I watch for his coming in unexpected places … including the sky.

What about you?

Grace and peace ...

'Another Sunday Morning Comin' Down'

Some years ago, I had the idea for a worship service that centered on Christ, but used popular country music. My friend Randy Atchley and I were talking about the various songs that had Christian themes.

"What about 'Sunday Morning Comin' Down?" I asked him.

"Do you remember the words to that song?" he replied, somewhat startled.

"Not really ..."

He suggested they might not be appropriate in worship. Still, some time later, Donna and I were traveling to Ripshin when the song came on the radio. I turned it up, and after listening decided that it would, after all, preach. Sure it talks about getting stoned, and drinking, but it points to the loneliness of a life without community and Christ.

This Sunday, Christ the King Sunday, I will be asking the question, for whom do the church bells toll?

Here's the chorus from that Kris Kristofferson classic, "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," which Johnny Cash drove to a No. 1 spot. It has been listed as No. 43 on the Top 100 Country Hits of All-Time":

"In the park I saw a daddy
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the songs they were singin'
Then I headed down the street
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'
And it echoed thru the canyon
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday."

Grace and peace ...