 Warm greetings to all of you meeting in person and online. It's good to be with you from my home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Though we are separated by geography, I'm grateful for God's spirit that joins us together as we gather around this theme of reimagining ministry. Last month, I received an email from a high school student in Texas. He introduced himself and wrote this. As part of my junior year research project, I'm looking into Christian thought surrounding self care. This research has brought me to your book for gifts. Part of my assignment is to conduct an interview with an expert in the field. So I wanted to ask if you are available and willing to have an interview over Zoom about 30 minutes before the end of February. As a writer, I don't always know where my words will go or who will read them. So I was amazed and grateful to hear from this high school student. Not that I consider myself an expert. I think what Thomas Merton says about spiritual disciplines applies to self care too. He said, we do not want to be beginners, but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners. I'm definitely still learning about self care and I was eager to find out what could I learn from this high school student. So I emailed him back, yes, I'd be happy to talk with you and could you please send me some questions in advance so I would know the direction our conversation might take. Some of the questions he had were really more about writing because his research project was part of an advanced placement English class. But here are his questions that relate to our overarching theme of reimagining ministry. Do you think the coronavirus pandemic had an effect on attitudes towards self care? Is the popularity of self care bad for society in regards to productivity and so on? Are pastors and churches addressing self care the way they should? How big of an effect does self care have on mental health? Is mental health given the correct amount of attention in churches? These are all great questions, real life questions and they serve as background for what I would like to share with you over these next few days. How is self care related to reimagining ministry? Are we addressing self care enough and in what ways? This morning, my focus is on what we might learn from Jesus example, from how he imagined and reimagined his ministry. That could go in a number of different directions but I'd like to highlight just three today. I note first of all that even before Jesus began his public ministry, before he started preaching and teaching and healing and going about the countryside, his ministry to come was shaped by time with God in the wilderness. In the Bible, the wilderness was often the place to meet God. That's where Moses led the people of Israel, where they received the 10 commandments, where they were formed into the people of God and it was in the wilderness that God prepared Jesus for his ministry. For Jesus, this was not self care in the sense of enjoying a nice meal and a hot bath and a good night's sleep. There's a place for those things but that wasn't here and it wasn't self care as self indulgence or self pampering. As the gospel of Matthew tells it, Jesus time with God in the wilderness was actually physically demanding in his fasting and praying. It was spiritually demanding in Jesus wrestling with deep questions about life and ministry. In that way, his time in the self in the wilderness went beyond any kind of superficial self care to a deeper level of soul care. It was a time of testing and defining his character and his values. It was a time of testing and defining who he would be as a ministering person. In the language of this conference, we might say that it was a time for Jesus to imagine and reimagine his ministry. It was also a time for him to receive God's care when at the end of his trials, God sent angels to care for him. In Jesus' first trial, the devil tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus had already been in the wilderness fasting for 40 days so surely he was now entitled to eat. Why not turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger? What could be wrong with that? But the trials we face in life and ministry are not always between right and wrong, between good and bad. Instead, the test of character may be focused on doing something good for the wrong reason or at the wrong time. The day would come when Jesus would eat. When he would multiply bread and fish to feed a crowd, but alone in the wilderness, he chose not to use divine power to satisfy himself. That's what the devil imagined for him. Instead, Jesus insisted on waiting for God's word in God's time. For the second trial, the devil did not deny that Jesus was the son of God, but he tempted him on exactly that point. What kind of son of God would he be? Would Jesus use God's power to draw attention to himself, to attract followers by having God perform a miracle? That's what the devil imagined for Jesus. And again, the time would come when Jesus would perform many miracles, many signs and wonders, calming storms, casting out demons, healing people, even raising the dead, but not for public acclaim or human approval, not for money or for personal gain. In fact, Jesus would sometimes ask people to be quiet about the miraculous things they experienced. His miracles were not advertising, but they were signs of God's kingdom meant to bring justice and hope, salvation and peace. Here in the wilderness, Jesus refused to play the devil's game of tempting God. Finally, the devil took Jesus to a high mountain and offered him all the kingdoms of the world in return for his allegiance in worship. Think of all the good that Jesus could do with all that power. He could rid the world of political corruption, poverty, slavery, war, every kind of abuse and oppression, but once again, Jesus set aside what the devil imagined for him. One day, Jesus authority over all things would be clear, but only after his own suffering and brutal death, only after his resurrection, ascension and coming again. In the meantime, he would not take the devil's shortcut. Three separate trials, three separate victories for Jesus, and yet each temptation was really a variation on the same theme. In the first, Jesus faced the temptation to doubt God's provision and instead to look after his own needs. In the second, he faced the temptation to doubt God and seek the approval of other people. In the last, he faced the temptation to doubt God and take the easy way out. Those temptations might sound familiar to any pastor or leader. We may not have the power to turn stones into bread, but we may also be tempted to doubt God's provision and try to get what we want in our own way and in our time. We may not be tempted to test God by throwing ourselves off a building, but we might be tempted to misuse God's power for our own ends or to please other people. When we're faced with challenges, we may find ourselves tempted to take the easy way out instead of relying on God's strength and leading to see us through. We too know the temptation of doubting God and going our own way, but when trials come, we can learn from the way Jesus relied on scripture in the wilderness. He remained grounded in scripture and we can learn to remain grounded in scripture. Of course, quoting scripture is no guarantee that we've got it right. In the gospel account, the devil misuses scripture to tempt Jesus and we know that scripture has been misused throughout history and even today to justify racism, oppression, war, and other forms of injustice. But the misuse of scripture gives us even more reason to read carefully and to study, to immerse ourselves in the word as Jesus did, to know it deeply as our guide to faith and life. From Jesus' time in the wilderness, we also learn the importance of remembering who we are and whose we are. Just before his time in the wilderness, Jesus had been baptized by John and the spirit of God descended on him like a dove. Divine confirmation came in a voice from heaven. This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. As the beloved son Jesus went into the wilderness empowered by the Holy Spirit and knowing who he was, who's he was. Remembering who we are as precious children of God also shapes us and strengthens us for ministry. We are created in God's image, empowered by the spirit to bear the image of God into our world and into the challenges we face each day. From Jesus' time in the wilderness, we also learn to worship God alone. We are not to worship money or success, conveniences or consumerism or any other idol. Even the good things of life, family, friends, church, work, community service and every other blessing, these things find their best place in our lives in light of God's kingdom. When we say yes to God first, other things take their rightful place and the no's that we need to say become clearer. As Jesus dismissed the devil, his words also challenge our priorities for life and ministry today. You will challenge, you will worship the Lord, your God and serve only him. As we sang earlier, you are God, you are God, you have no competitor. For Jesus, this time alone with God in the wilderness, set the tone and direction for his ministry to come and throughout his ministry, Jesus would continue to take time to make time to get away from the crowds and away from his disciples to spend time alone with God. Some of you know part of my personal story that last year my husband was in treatment for cancer and what we thought was a bad reaction to his chemotherapy turned out to be something much more and he unexpectedly died from cancer related complications. This Sunday will be the one year anniversary of his death. So as you can imagine for me, this last year has been a kind of wilderness. Even though I've eased back into speaking and writing again, I am still wrestling with some heavy questions. I'm still needing to reimagine many things about my life and ministry. So when I accepted the invitation to speak at this conference, knowing that this weekend would be the one year anniversary of my husband's passing, I thought once the conference is over, I really need to deliberately take some time to be alone, to be alone with God. I won't physically go out into the wilderness up a mountain somewhere. Right now for me, the wilderness and the chaos that I feel is more internal, but like Jesus, I will take some time to be alone, alone with God. So this Sunday, I won't be preaching for my church or for any other church. I won't be co-hosting our Zoom worship as I often do. Instead, I will retreat from those things to be grounded in scripture and prayer, to remember that I am loved by God and empowered by the spirit, to sit with, to wrestle with the big questions that I face at this time, to receive and to rest in God's care. The challenges and questions you face are quite likely different from mine, but as you reimagine life and ministry, I commend to you Jesus' practice of taking time alone with God in the wilderness. Maybe you can't get away for 40 days, but maybe you can take a few days or a few hours or a few moments. One of my former colleagues in ministry would regularly a few times a year go alone to our church camp for an evening and overnight and the next day. That was his wilderness time to be alone with God. A friend of mine regularly gets up early and goes out to her patio and watches the sunrise all year round in every kind of weather. That's her wilderness time to be alone with God. Well, in addition to listening to God in the wilderness, Jesus' ministry was also significantly shaped by other people. In the Gospel of Matthew, a Canaanite woman begged Jesus to heal her daughter and Jesus said to her, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. From the start of Jesus' public ministry, he focused his ministry in that way. After his time in the wilderness, the Gospel of Luke says that Jesus returned to Galilee and began teaching in the synagogues throughout the region. So when he went to Nazareth, he taught in the synagogue. When he went to Capernaum, he taught in the synagogue because the synagogues were at the very heart of Jewish life. They were part meeting place and part prayer hall and that's where Jesus began his ministry. At the synagogue in Nazareth, he met with some early success. It was after all his hometown. His disciples had come with him and when they went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, Jesus began to teach. Many who heard Jesus were astounded. How had Jesus learned to speak so well? How had he gained such wisdom? And when they heard of the marvelous healings that he had performed, they were astounded at his power. Here was one of their own having gone away and done mighty things now back home, accompanied by a band of followers and teaching like a rabbi in the synagogue. Yet the people's favorable response quickly turned. They knew Jesus and his family. He was a tradesman who worked with his hands, not a rabbi. He was the son of Mary. Perhaps they thought of him that way because his father Joseph had already died or perhaps they questioned the legitimacy of his birth. And so instead of acknowledging, according to the custom as a son of Joseph, they called him the son of Mary. In any case, they knew Jesus' brothers and sisters and they thought they knew him. He was one of them, not a wonder worker. So the people took offense at him. Who did Jesus think he was? He might have brought followers with him. He might be teaching in the synagogue. He might be styling himself as a prophet, but they refused to accept his claim. They didn't believe him. What a drastic change from Jesus' first success among them. This was still early in his ministry, but the Pharisees and Herodians were already conspiring against him. The scribes from Jerusalem had already come down and accused of Jesus of having a demon. Even his family didn't understand his ministry and now his hometown, those who at first seemed glad to welcome him soon turned away. But the people's reaction did not put an end to Jesus' ministry. In the face of opposition, instead of giving up, instead of lashing out at those who refused his message, Jesus left Nazareth and expanded his ministry in a new way. Instead of teaching only in the synagogue, he pivoted to the surrounding villages. He called the 12th and he began to send them out two by two. So they also went about preaching, teaching, healing and casting out demons. Jesus demonstrated that same kind of ability to pivot throughout his ministry. When the Canaanite woman begged him for help, yes, he did say to her, I have come only for the lost sheep of Israel, but when the woman persisted, Jesus healed her daughter. When a centurion came to Jesus about his desperately ill servant, Jesus didn't send him away because he was Roman. Instead, he commended the man for his faith and he healed his servant. Jesus didn't hesitate to talk with a Samaritan woman at the well and she went on to evangelize her whole town. Clearly Jesus' ministry was not only for the house of Israel, he stepped outside of it more than once. When Jesus taught in the synagogue in Nazareth, he read these words from the prophet Isaiah. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Today, said Jesus, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. With that bold claim, Jesus set himself squarely in the prophetic tradition in the house of Israel and for the house of Israel. And yet immediately after reading these words and making that claim, Jesus followed this with two stories about people from outside of the house of Israel, how in the midst of a severe famine, God provided food for a widow of Zeraphat, how God cured Naaman the Aramean from his skin disease. They were not part of the house of Israel, yet Jesus pointed to them as examples of God's favor. For Jesus and for us today, the stories, the questions, the challenges, the persistence of the people around us can also contribute to our imagining and reimagining. In my own experience, I never imagined becoming a pastor. As a child, I loved books and dreamed of becoming a writer. In high school and university, I began to imagine myself as a social worker. But when I didn't get into the school of social work, I did an internship with a city magazine that rekindled my love of writing, my dream of writing. So I wrote and I studied, I taught English and Bible at a Bible college and I kept writing. I had found my calling. In those days, my husband and I were also becoming part of Immanuel Mennonite Church in Abbotsford, just down the road from the college where we both taught. We knew the church was having some difficulty because the pastor had left earlier in the year, left very abruptly, literally there one Sunday and then gone the next Sunday. But I had been a guest speaker at the church a couple of times. We were getting to know people and decided to become members of the church anyway in spite of the turmoil. The church still didn't have a pastor. They were relying even more than usual on members to be involved. So when I was asked to plan and lead the four worship services in Advent, I was quite willing to do what I could. So I planned, led those worship services and after the first Sunday, a woman came up to me and said, how would you like to be the pastor of this church? And I left. That was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought I already found my calling to teach and to write and to be an active member of the church. Pastoral ministry was nowhere on my radar screen. But what I had never imagined for myself, other people began to imagine for me because over the next weeks as I continued to plan and lead worship, other church members began asking me the same question. What about pastoral ministry? The chair of the search committee called me. Suddenly, the church and I were reimagining ministry together and we continued to imagine and reimagine ministry together for over 25 years. I can hardly believe it even now that I pastored for over 25 years let alone 25 years in the same church. But of course, it wasn't the same church over all those years and I wasn't the same pastor, the same person. What I had never imagined for myself, God imagined for me. The church imagined for me and we imagined together. So along with taking time in the wilderness to be with God, I also see a place for listening to the people around us. In the face of opposition, do we persevere in the same direction or do we pivot and reimagine something else? What good questions and challenges do other people raise for us that might spark our reimagining? Our encounters with other people can help stretch our imaginations. Our imagination for ministry can also be shaped by our context. The world Jesus lived in significantly shaped his ministry. He lived in a world inhabited by people, planting seeds, baking bread, lighting lamps, looking for lost things. And these things made their way into his teaching in the real-life situations that he addressed in the stories that he told. Jesus' parables of the kingdom give evidence of his creativity and imagination. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a tiny mustard seed that grows into a large bush. He used exaggerated language to make his point, calling the mustard seed the smallest of all the seeds on earth and the mature plant the greatest of all shrubs. Some seeds are actually even smaller than the mustard seed and some shrubs larger than the mature mustard plant, but Jesus' point was clear. Just as a tiny seed can grow into a large bush, the kingdom of God starts small and becomes great. That was amply demonstrated in the life and ministry of Jesus. His earthy life began in a small way with his birth as an infant. Even as a grown man, he was not considered great in the eyes of the world. He was just one voice preaching and teaching to the crowds. He died a humiliating and painful death on a cross. Humanly speaking, the kingdom of God looked very small. Yet from that humble beginning came a tremendous result. Jesus rose from the dead. His disciples were transformed by from being in fear behind locked doors to spreading the good news to everyone who would listen. Jesus' lone voice long ago has echoed through the centuries. And today there are people all over the world who sing his praises and who follow him in daily life. What began small turned out to be significant. That's God's kingdom. What's more, Jesus' choice of the mustard seed tells us that the kingdom of God won't look the way we might expect. In his day, the people had great expectations of the coming kingdom and what it would mean for them. They believe God's kingdom would be a great and mighty kingdom that finally their enemies would be under their feet and they would be delivered from oppression. If the crowds were to have chosen a symbol for this mighty kingdom, it would more likely have been a stately tree, maybe a cedar of Lebedon. But Jesus made an unexpected choice. The lowly mustard plant must have caught their attention of his listeners. It made them listen and vividly demonstrated that God's kingdom would look different than anyone might have expected. And again, that was true in Jesus' life and ministry. People might have expected their king to be born in a castle, but Jesus was born in humble circumstances. When he entered Jerusalem, people might have expected him as a king to ride a mighty horse, but he entered the city riding on a donkey. Instead of a great display of power, Jesus died on a cross. Humanly speaking, none of those things looked like a mighty kingdom, but that's exactly what God's kingdom is like. It starts small, it grows big, it doesn't look the way we expect. Today, some people might look for God's kingdom in a grand dramatic style. They might look for it in a mega church and in signs and wonders and they might well find God's kingdom in such places. But as Jesus imagined his ministry in his parables, in his context, he saw real kingdom power in things that were quite ordinary, like a seed growing into a large bush. That was part of Jesus' imagination for ministry, drawn out of the ordinary things in his immediate context, drawn from seeds and planting them in the ground and watching them grow. Three years ago, if you had asked me if my current church would consider worshiping online, I would have said, I can't imagine that. We were a small liturgical worship community grounded in the reading of scripture and prayer and the classical music tradition. We read scripture and songs, sang songs from the liturgical booklet that our worship team put together each week, printed, stapled and handed out in person to everyone on Sunday mornings. Our focal point at the front of our worship space was this cross, crafted with great respect and care out of yellow cedar by a skilled carver in the stallow tradition, since our church meets on the traditional lands of the stallow people. There was no screen at the front of our worship space for song lyrics or slides like this. The church was up close and personal with no apparent desire to expand their use of technology. Today, we are still a small liturgical worship community, but our use of technology has changed. Now on Sunday mornings, we have a hybrid worship service both in person and on Zoom, sometimes lovingly referred to as our back row. During times of congregational sharing, we hear from those in our physical worship space and those online. People serve as scripture readers and speakers, both in person and online. What I wouldn't have imagined three years ago has become our reality. I can't say that the church went through a deliberate process to reimagine ministry in this way, perhaps in our case, it's more that our immediate context of the pandemic reimagined us. At the height of the pandemic, when we were not able to meet in person, the church suddenly became more open to experimenting with technology. People who had never heard of Zoom were willing to give it a try. When we were able to start worshiping again in person, we decided to continue with Zoom to allow people to return to in-person worship at their own pace. And some still remain online due to mobility or other issues that keep them at home. Some live at a distance too far to commute. Some mainly worship in person, but connect online when they're out of town or recovering from COVID or recovering from surgery. One Sunday on Zoom, we had two people in Australia, very early Monday morning their time. We had one person who was traveling in France Sunday evening her time and the rest of us locally on Pacific time. I don't know when or if that would have happened for us as a church without the pandemic, but that immediate context shaped us, it spurred us on to imagine ministry in a new way. Well, there are many things that can help spark or spur us on to reimagine. Worship, music, art, personal reflection and prayer, small groups, and many other elements that are part of this conference. From Jesus' own earthly ministry, let us also reimagine with God in the wilderness. Let us reimagine by listening to and discerning the voices of those around us. Let us reimagine by being aware of our own context. Enjoy the rest of the day as you continue to reimagine ministry.