Have you ever wanted to grow in your spiritual life but wanted to know how to get started? Dave suggested that I might tell you a little more about our Tuesday Spiritual Group. You wouldn’t be attending church if you didn’t love God and recognize that Jesus’ life and death show God’s love for you. Most of us know that we aren’t serving God as well as we could. The challenge in our busy, challenging lives is finding a way to feel God’s joy, and doing a better job of loving God by serving others isn’t easy. There are many writers, some current, some from the past, who have found ways toward “spiritual transformation” that we study and learn from, some as recent as Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen, but others as far back as John Wesley and the Desert Fathers and Mothers from the fourth century. They all tell us that they didn’t lead perfect lives, but the effort leads to fuller, more productive lives. We know that God desires a close relationship with us and that the Holy Spirit helps us communicate with Him. We believe that God knows each of us by name and endows each of us with unique talents and expects each of us to share and serve the world in our own way. The question is how to get closer to God’s will. A closer relationship with God helps us to know God’s will for our life. I think the members of our group would agree that our time together has helped lead us to a closer relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. It can also be a source of inner strength for life’s challenges. It certainly was for me. Our practice builds on four principles: The Bible is essential and we explore deeper ways to ask the Bible to speak to us, rather than “studying” or asking an expert to explain it to us. The practice of spiritual reading is called Lectio Divina. Prayer is also essential and we put more focus on listening for God’s message to us personally than asking God to grant us our needs. The practice is sometimes called Centering Prayer. The presence of a community is essential. As Paul was spreading the gospel through the pagan world, he formed communities. We study together, pray together and share our thoughts. This is one of the most valuable parts of the experience. And, if we learn to pay attention we can see God’s presence in our everyday lives. In John’s gospel we hear Jesus’ words, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:11) Come join us! We meet Tuesday evenings at 6 pm in the church library. Dr. B.W. Ruffner

If you could go back in time and offer some advice to your younger self, what would it be? Recently, I have gone back and read through my journal from 1995. By that time, I had been keeping a daily journal for ten years (I started January 1, 1985 – one of my few New Year’s resolutions that actually stuck). It was the year I graduated from college. My dad had just died the previous December from cancer. And I was still figuring out what exactly to do with my life. Reading through my journal from those days, I feel a welling-up of compassion for that young man. I realize now that I was more anxious about the future than I wanted to be, I was more deeply entrenched in grief than I was aware at the time, I was disappointed that my post-graduation plans weren’t materializing like I’d expected, and I was more opinionated than I thought I was. So what would I say now to that young man then? When I posed this question at our HeBrews men’s coffee group on Tuesday morning about what advice would you give to your younger self, one of the guys chipped in immediately with “relax!” I think my advice would be similar. I would want to tell my younger self to relax and to lighten up. To lighten up on myself, and on others, and to trust that I would eventually find my way, and that healing would come. To trust more in the words of a passage of scripture I was beginning to be drawn to even then, that “we know that God works all things together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Because in the thirty plus years since then, that promise has proven to be true. So what would you want to say to your younger self? And if you could project yourself out another thirty years from now, what do you imagine your future self telling your present self?

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When I ask folks what they love most about this church, one of the most frequent responses is “the music.” And they’re right! The music at this church—in both our 9AM Crest service and our 11AM sanctuary service—is both inspired and inspiring! Consistently so. And it seemed especially so this past Sunday. In the sanctuary service, Andrew sang a song that I don’t believe I had ever heard before—“Four Days More.” He had told me he had picked out the perfect song for the scripture, and no lie! It went right along with the story in John 11 of Lazarus’ death and Martha’s frustration that it took Jesus so long for him to get there. But “isn’t it great,” the song inquires, “when He’s four days late, He’s still on time.” What reason even is there for anyone to preach after we’ve heard a song like that? (By the way, that was a rhetorical question!) And in the Crest service, Margee sang a song that I’m not sure I remember hearing either. It is called “Still Waters (Psalm 23).” The lyrics grabbed me from the very first line: “Great Aunt Maurine said at a hundred and three / Write scripture on your heart for when you need it / ‘Cause anxiety hates Psalm 23 / So just say it to yourself ‘til you believe it.” As soon as I heard Margee sing that line “Write scripture on your heart for when you need it,” I was reminded of an old Hasidic Jewish story that goes something like this: A disciple asked their teacher, “Why does the scripture tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why not tell us to place them in our hearts?’ The teacher responded, “It is because, as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And that’s where they stay until, one day, when our heart breaks, the holy words can fall in.” As far as I’m concerned, the words of Psalm 23 are as good as any for us to place on our hearts. As the writers of “Still Waters” paraphrased it, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He leads me by still waters ‘til my fears are gone Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death Oh, I know You are with me, my Father, my friend Your goodness and mercy will follow me all of my days I know by Your still waters, I’m safe

Over the weekend I finished another book that’s been making the rounds lately, Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden. Mr. Levi lives in a small town in Georgia, and he was here on Signal Mountain a couple of years ago as the guest author at the local library not long before the book really hit it big. I saw it was Katie Couric’s book club pick this month. It seems like just about every person I talk to these days has read it or wants to! In the book, a mysterious and strangely foreign older man called Theo moves to a small southern city called Golden, where he gets to know some of the townspeople at the local coffee shop, bookstore, and park. It’s an endearing story about kindness, generosity, and close attentiveness to the people we find ourselves with at any given moment. Several of my clergy colleagues who’ve read it have commented on how it’s full of sermon illustrations, so you might have to hear about this book again. One of the characters we meet is a minor character named Grandmother Whitaker. She is the mother of one of the more prominent characters, Kendrick, who is the night custodian at the local college, and the grandmother of Kendrick’s young daughter Lamisha, who was badly injured in a car accident. Before the sentencing of the man who was driving the car that injured Lamisha and killed her mother, Kendrick is pondering what kind of victim’s statement to offer. He asks his mother what he should do. Here’s what Grandmother Whitaker tells him: “Baby, they’s justice and they’s mercy. If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don’t hurt nearly like bad justice, and always remember, the eye of God can see.” I don’t about you, but that sounds like gospel to me. And since this is reported to have been shared in a town called Golden, maybe we could consider it another “Golden Rule.”

A couple of weeks ago, one of our church’s preschool teachers let me borrow a book I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It’s an epistolary novel, meaning it’s a bunch of letters written over the years that tell the story of a fictional woman named Sybil who spends her life exchanging letters—with her brother, with her daughter, with her best friend, with her neighbor, with a customer service representative at a genetic testing company, even with real-life authors like Joan Didion and Ann Padgett. It’s completely engrossing to come to know this captivating, complicated woman through her vast correspondence with so many others in her life. In this world of social media and text messages, it can seem like sitting down and composing a letter to someone else is becoming a lost art. But for Sybil, it was a discipline that she set aside time for around 10 o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and occasionally Saturdays as well). I can’t tell you the last time I sat down to write a letter to someone. Oh sure, I’ve penned a few thank-you cards and short notes here and there. But not the kind of longer, more reflective, expressive kinds of letters like she shared. But the book did get me thinking about some of the letters that I’ve seen or exchanged myself over the years. My dad grew up one of six children, and for years, long before there was such a thing as email (this was in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s), his parents and siblings exchanged a circular letter they called the “Round Robin,” where one of the members of the family would start a letter, send it to the next member, who would then add their own news, and then send the composite letter on to the next member, who would add their own news, and send that on down the line, and so forth. Several of the entries in my grandfather’s daily diaries from those years included notes like “The Robin came round today.” A few years ago, cleaning out my childhood home, I found a box containing some of the letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was in the Army, from both before and after they got married. Who knew that they were real people before I was born? I have also kept in a box several of the lengthy emails that Tracy and I exchanged when we were dating, before I moved to Atlanta to start seminary. I often think about getting those out and rereading them. Would I still recognize the authors? Do you have any special letters that you have kept, that you cherish? Who are they from? What is it about them that makes them so special to you? If you could receive a letter from anyone in the world, living or dead, who would it be? And what would you hope they would share with you? If you could write anyone a letter today, who would it be? What would you want to share with them?

My wife Tracy and I recently finished watching the first season of the award-winning medical drama “The Pitt,” which is set in an Emergency Department in a Pittsburgh hospital. It stars Noah Wyle, who played an emergency physician in the hit show from long ago “E.R.” It’s a fast-paced, intense show. It’s hard to keep up with all the medicalese. But one thing that I noticed is how the health care providers always have a stethoscope draped around their neck. Amidst all the sophisticated medical equipment like ECMO machines, so often it is this simple tool that they turn to first to diagnose the patients’ conditions and start getting them the help they need. A stethoscope is a listening device. It is a tool that is used for listening to the heart, the lungs, and the gut for any abnormalities that might indicate what the patient’s problem might be. It strikes me that the first thing a health care provider does is to listen. Before they pronounce a diagnosis or prescribe a cure, they listen. That’s a good reminder for a preacher like me who talks a lot for a living, and maybe it’s a good reminder for all of us. Before God wants us to speak a word for God, maybe what God wants most from us is to listen to God—to listen to God’s heartbeat, to listen for where God’s Spirit is moving, to listen for who and what God is compassionate about in God’s gut (the New Testament word for compassion comes from the word for bowels). Our first job as disciples is to listen to God. Thankfully, we have several tools at hand for us to use to listen to God. We have scripture. We have prayer. We have worship. And we have one another in the community of faith. These are our spiritual stethoscopes! I want us to spend some deliberate time together this year listening to God and where God would like to lead us as a congregation in deepening our discipleship and expanding our witness. Our staff will be gathering next month for a visioning session to gather some of the hopes and dreams God is placing in our hearts. We also have formed a Vision Team here at the church in which a group of members from across our congregation will be discerning together what God might like to do among us and through us. If you have a dream or a vision for what might happen here at Signal Crest that glorifies God and grows disciples, I hope you will let me know. I would love to listen! Our broader church is in a listening process as well as we seek God’s guidance into our life together. Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett is inviting church members across our denomination to participate in a survey in which you can share what is best about the UMC and what your hopes are for our future ministries together. I’ve completed the survey myself. It will take you about 5-10 minutes, and it will be available until February 15. You can access it at this link or at the QR code below. Our collective input will be shared across the denomination in the months leading up to an October leadership gathering and will inform the future priorities of our denomination’s ministry together. So let’s all put our spiritual stethoscopes on and listen together for the leadership of God’s Spirit!

Earlier this week we observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In his sermon this past Sunday, Pastor Drew referred to King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, where King envisioned a day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King also talked about “the Beloved Community,” where all God’s people, of all creeds and colors and conditions, can join hands and work together, can sing and stand and struggle for freedom and justice together. While I certainly want to believe we have made some strides since King’s day toward making that dream come true, it cannot be denied that it remains a dream that has yet to be fully realized in our own communities. There is still more work to be done together, more life and love to be shared together, more freedom and justice to be sought together. One of the things I try to think and pray about every year on and around MLK Day is what can I do, me, personally, to help make Dr. King’s dream of the Beloved Community come true in our world today. And it’s not just Dr. King’s dream; it is essentially what Jesus described as “the kingdom of God” and others after him have called “the kin-dom of God,” the family of God, the kinship in Christ. It’s the world that the Apostle Paul described where “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). That’s what we’re all aiming for, isn’t it? So what can I do to help us get there? What can you do? How can you and I use what influence we have, and what gifts we have been given, what networks we inhabit, to fulfill this vision, this dream today? Pastor Drew described one opportunity for us to consider this past Sunday—his dream of our church’s expansion of our youth ministry in partnership with our friends and neighbors in the southside of Chattanooga. We can help host and serve the weekly meal we help provide student-athletes at the Howard School on Wednesday evenings. He’s in need of more volunteers to be a part of this ministry; let him know if you can help. Another thing we can do, in this skeptical, cynical old world, is to believe—to believe in this dream. And this is no small thing. Several years ago, a newspaper columnist in Knoxville, Ina Hughs, compiled some of King’s words into a kind of creed, a belief statement. I cut that column out of the paper and have kept it to this day. Here are some of King’s words that she shared: “I refuse to believe that we are unable to influence the events which surround us.” “I refuse to believe that we are so bound to racism and war, that peace, brotherhood and sisterhood are not possible.” “I believe there is an urgent need for people to overcome oppression and violence, without resorting to violence and oppression.” “I believe that we need to discover a way to live together in peace, a way which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of this way is love.” “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” “I believe that right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.” “I believe that what self-centered people have torn down, other-centered people can build up.” “By the goodness of God at work within people, I believe that brokenness can be healed, ‘And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.’”

Have you ever had, or needed, a fresh start? A reset? Have you ever wished you had a “Control-Alt-Delete” button you could push to give you a restart (if you don’t get that reference, then ask one of your elders to explain it to you!) I was listening to a report on the radio last week that talked about how professional baseball players who are traded to a different team in the middle of the season get a fresh start, a reset, that often results in a bump in their performance after the trade. Their batting average, for example, might jump from the 200s to the 300s. Researchers found that this bump was even more pronounced when the player was traded from one league to another. Why might this be the case? There are two different leagues in professional baseball, the National League and the American League. When a player is traded to a team within the same, that players’ statistics carry forward. But when a trade takes place from one league to the other, the players’ statistics automatically reset. It’s like they’re starting again from scratch. So a cross-league trade offers the player a completely fresh start, and that reset often results in improved performance. I found this report fascinating, and it made me wonder: Have you ever experienced something like this, a fresh start, a reset? Maybe it’s a new school, or a new job, or retirement, or a recovery from an illness or injury, or a new season in your life. I think every time I’ve moved to a new appointment, it’s been something of a fresh start, a reset for me in my ministry. I also remember when we moved here to Signal Mountain and Wesley was going into his junior year in high school. I worried about how moving in the middle of high school would affect him, but he was actually looking forward to a fresh start. It would be an opportunity, he said, for a reset. Maybe one of the reasons we celebrate a new year is that it provides an opportunity for a fresh start, a reset. It’s a time to wipe the slate clean, return all the ledgers to zero, let the past be the past, and look ahead with new energy and enthusiasm. And unlike baseball players who are traded from one team to another, it doesn’t necessarily require a physical move from one place to another. It’s more of a spiritual mentality. Every single day, every new morning, in its own way, offers a fresh start, a reset. And maybe that’s why I love the prayer of thanksgiving for the order of worship for morning prayer that we find in the back of our hymnal (#877): New every morning is your love, great God of light, and all day long you are working for good in the world. Stir up in us desire to serve you, to live peacefully with our neighbors, and to devote each day to your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.