This past Sunday we started on a long, perhaps even permanent, process of finding words that express our faith. People of faith have been doing the same thing for centuries. No sooner had Jesus returned to His Father than his friends started talking and writing about what they believed about Jesus. Groups of the faithful followers would get together and talk endlessly and write copiously about the faith Jesus had awakened in them.

Some of those documents are still with us after hundreds of years. You may know one of those statements as the Apostles Creed. It was spoken of as early as the fourth century, but many believed its origins were with the twelve friends of Jesus who first followed him. You may have said the Nicene Creed each week in your church. It was written in 325 AD in Nicaea, Turkey, by a group of faith people who had met to talk about what they believed.  People have been meeting, talking and writing about their faith ever since.

In talking about our faith at Soul Café we are simply continuing that ceaseless tradition.

No doubt our statement will not supplant the Apostles or the Nicene statements. However, the words we use about our faith may have some differences that could be seen as advantages. Not because our words are better, or more precise, or more correct but because they will be our words. They will be our Ledbetteran dialect. They will be in the metaphors that have meaning to us.

Secondly, our words of faith will not be words that come from the top down telling us what we MUST believe. They will be words that come from the bottom up about what we have come to believe through struggle and doubt, the birth of new calves and the planting of gardens, hard knocks and beautiful sunsets as seen from our front porches. They will be words used in humility. Like a creed without dogma. Like a statement of faith that opens a door for people to come in rather than a test of correctness to keep them out. Here is the reality: We don’t know almost everything. A good statement of our faith should remember that.

Here will be a big difference that will perfectly picture the kind of people you are. It will be a faith expression connected to a real world. An expression that will connect us not just to God but to our work, to our play, to our family, to our neighbors and ultimately to our world. We will have no time to talk about abstract theological ideas that cannot shake hands with a neighbor and make a deal that is as good as your “word”. Our talk about our Heavenly Father must connect us to our earthly neighbors and to our earthly habitat. Words of faith that do not make that connection soon turn moldy green with rancid smell. All God talk must become talk about how we treat and behave toward one another.

There is no telling what this process will produce. It will be messy because we are a mess. It will be incomplete because we are incomplete. So, we will make certain to write our words with a number 2 pencil on the pages of a Big Chief tablet to facilitate the inevitable changes we will want to make following our next illness or loss. After the birth our next kiddo or after our next fishing trip. After all the things that give opportunity for our faith to grow and mature.

No one will be asked to sign this document. I wouldn’t even sign a document that I had written. This is just an attempt to find common ground from which we can take our next step toward God and toward our neighbor.

We started this past Sunday with the most elemental beginning. God IS. That’s it. It’s not all. It’s just where we can begin. Let’s get together Sunday to talk about what difference that makes.

New Year beginnings are always invigorating for us. For unknown reasons, we reach down and touch hope again. We nudge faith to awaken it to possibilities. We uncover dreams kept warm with winter blankets just enough to cast their vision on the spring that is around the corner. I love the new year beginnings. It is so much like the perennial and persistent grace of our Father.

At the beginning of 2018 I have a dream for us. It still revolves around the idea of continuing to shape the kind of the kind of community that we all want to live in. At the core of that dream is the task of becoming people of grace rather than judgement. Love rather than hate. Courage rather than protectionist. Hope rather than despair. All cultural transformation begins with the kind of people we are becoming. People who are becoming more and more afraid plan for and do what fear will do. Hateful people will plan for and do what hate will do.  However, people who believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe and connect to the God who IS love will gently and tenderly begin to do what love will do.

I have an invitation. It is to become a follower of Jesus. Not religion. Jesus. Let’s let our heavenly Father continue to shape us individually into the kind of people who do good things. Willing to act on behalf other’s physical, emotional, and spiritual welfare even if it costs us something.

I want to continue to heal the disintegration of the connection between what we say we believe and what we actually do. We are going to do that by writing some words about what we believe about God and translate that into an ethic. All Christian theology bears ethics as its fruit. Morality is just about passively being nice. Ethics is about proactively being the presence of God’s grace, love and reality in a broken world.

We will begin this Sunday by writing our first faith possibility. It is to profess that God is and that He proactively demonstrates His existence in the act of creation. Coming to that place of faith has profound and far reaching implications. That faith alone will head you toward salvation and the salvation of your community. Please start the new year with the Soul Cafe people and the opportunity of reaffirming what you have known all your life. We are here by the breath of God.

I Peter 5: 10 – 14

Peter’s friends are going through tough times. So, he writes them a letter filled with words of encouragement and hope. He acknowledges that their pain and loss is hard to bear. The promise, however, is that our Heavenly Father has a very special kind of grace to help us when we are at our lowest times. At the very end of his letter he can’t resist restating his encouragement one more time and in doing so gives us additional insight into how that grace comes to us. Surprise of surprises, God’s grace often comes to us through friends. In Peter’s case, it was through Silas, who he considers a “faithful brother”. And Mark, who he calls, “my Son”. We may be in for the greatest days any of us have ever seen. Or, we may be in for the worst days any of us have ever seen. In either case our friendships are loaded with the grace that God gives to move us to “strength and steadfastness.”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s just me.” (Jesus to a boat load of frightened friends who were caught in an unwelcomed storm. Matthew 14:27)

As we look out the window at Harvey’s presence, the words of Jesus spoken to a terrified boat load of traveling companions pleads for our attention.  Words that have mollified the calamities of two centuries have come to be a life line of hope to us. The words don’t seem to come from some distant shore, however. Not as an echo from a story long past. They are words spoken as close to us as our worry, our fretfulness, and our fear.

It is a spiritual mystery that words so provoked by a specific storm on an identifiable back water pond in Galilee could have such universal gravity. “Don’t be afraid. It is just me.”  Will there ever be an eon when these finitely spoken words become boringly unwelcome? Or do they express the heart of the Infinite Lover so clearly that they become eternally true? Those words come for you.

Our prayers bring to mind individuals all over the Gulf Coast who need the words of Jesus. Let’s pray now that our own hearts are soaking wet so we can be tributaries of those words to others. I’m already hearing stories of Soul Cafe folks being on the road, walking on the water so to speak, helping others in our community. It is not an accident that the proactive meaning of the words ‘Don’t be afraid’ are “Be courageous”. 

Love God. Care for His children.

~Doug

Ledbetter is one of the great communities in Texas in which to live and raise a family. Of the many tributaries that flow into the river of community, the act of intentional inclusion may be one of the most important. To be included is at the heart of essence of community.

When I was about ten years old, living in inner city Houston, Jimmy Strickland, Bobby Watson and Manfred Gobert conspired to form a secret club. I have no recollection of why it needed to be secret or what the secret was that we were keeping. I do remember that the clandestine nature of the club raised the level of intrigue and importance of club membership.  We singed a benign oath in spit using a stick that Jimmy Strickland had sharpened with his Old Timer. We were going to sign in blood but we downgraded the severity of the initiation rite because Bobby refused to use Jimmy’s knife to make his finger bleed. That seemed to dilute the oath that obligated us to be friends for life to a blurry commitment to be pals until we graduated from David G. Burnett Elementary.  

The first order of essential business was to build our club house in the vacant lot behind our house. With an eye for permanence we gathered every scrap board we could scrounge from the trash piles around the neighborhood and a piece of tin siding that had fallen off the chicken house at
Bobby’s house. We worked for a week on that club house every day after school.  With the metal roof tied down in place we were ready for our first meeting. Only two necessities were needed to protect our opaque agenda.  One was that we needed a look out. Every secret club needs a look out. We elected my six year old sister, Gaynell, to fill that post.  I think we promised her that she could throw a foil wrapped potato in the fire the next time we bake spuds. I don’t know what has come over parents not letting their ten year old sons play with fire.

The other club necessity was a sign that I personally designed and executed with a brown Crayola on a cardboard shirt insert from the cleaners that I got from my dad. The sign plainly read: NO GIRLS ALLOWED and I nailed it to front door. There was no boy among us older than eleven. We had no clue what it was that we were prohibiting with this juvenile assertion of our maleness but we had now declared our identity a boyish declaration of who we were excluding.

Few clubs can functionally survive with a commitment to exclusion. Ours didn’t. And where ever there is true community you quickly discover that spoken or unspoken there is an open armed commitment that values inclusion. No one is left out.

Exclusion is a regressive immaturity. It can, as in our club’s case a chronological immaturity. We hadn’t grown up. The only way

Matthew 6:9   Pray, then, in this way:

“Our Father, Who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.”

If you are lost at sea this part of Jesus’ prayer can help you become oriented again.

“Our” helps us find ourselves in community and in relationships.  God is neither inert nor an impersonal, cosmic energy.  God is essentially personal and relational, and your grandest communion with God is in a community we have learned to call “ours.”

“Father” overwhelms us with the kind and quality of relationship we have with God.  We are no longer hopelessly adrift.  We find ourselves led and loved by the life-giving Father.

“Who is in heaven” turns your compass needle to true spiritual north and our soul’s ultimate destiny.  How can we make course corrections if we don’t know where we are headed?

“Hallowed” is a rather obscure word to us today.  It has within it the idea of something that is sacred, something that is holy.  It might even be used to describe something that contains the whole.  It is complete.  Nothing else needs to be addressed.

“be Your name.”  The name of someone in the times of Jesus was intended to describe their character and essence.  It was to tell who they were.

Now put that together with Hallowed.   

“Father, Your very character has nothing lacking.  You are wholly and complete.”  

Now your sailing ship not only has a direction but you find yourself facing the Father who longs to supply all of life’s needs out of who He is.

If on someday you feel lost let these words help you get your bearings.  You are not alone or adrift.  Your Father can point the way and even supply bread for the journey.