 One of the things that will help us in terms of our ministry together is from whom we're going to hear and it's not at this time Reverend Danielle shoyer lives in Dallas and many of you know her because of her writings and her books I want to commend one especially to you and that is she's the author of the boundary Breaking God an unfolding story of hope and promise which is written in 2009 this past year She released the book where Jesus prayed illumination on the Lord's prayer in the holy land And I'm looking forward to this book which is coming out this year the original blessing putting sin in its rightful place Danielle is a graduate of Baylor and also Princeton Theological Seminary She lives in Dallas with her husband and her two middle schoolers one who is going to be a High school student next year or this coming year and will be a classmate of Jones and my niece We discovered last night at dinner and so That's important piece. She is the theologian and residents of the journey Which was in the first independent emerging communities of faith where she did serve as the past for eight years She's appeared in many of the churches in North Texas conference And I am looking forward to hearing from Danielle shoyer at this time. So Reverend shoyer. We welcome you Let's give her a great North Texas welcome as she prepares to present for us Well, hello My kids I was driving them to my aunt's today and to drop them off for the day and they said mom What are you doing today? And I said I'm gonna hang out all day with a bunch of great Methodists, they said oh great. So they send you their welcome. I want to thank Bishop McKee and the planning team for inviting me here today It's just a great honor to be among you and to to get to listen in to a little bit of what you do to make The United Methodist Church in this realm of the world keep going and I'm so grateful for your witness I also want to tell you I'll be praying for your bishops in the years to come as they embark on their task Know that they are deep in my heart and I pray for the unity of the Methodist Church and for its witness So as an outsider as a theological mutt, I'm really grateful to be here serving in the illustrious role of the guest preacher You know what my job is right? I get to say some of the things that maybe the home preacher doesn't want to say or doesn't get to say because of fear of the Monday morning inbox and I was thinking that I might be a little bit too harsh, but then last night I was really grateful gosh Got to hear the bishop talk about fear and I think that's kind of the the elephant in the room, right? And it's just to dispel the rumors. It's not just in traditional churches I pastored an emerging church for eight years and have been a part of that conversation for a long time and The struggles are the same So I think fear is an issue for all of us So because we can't bear witness or even ask what it means to bear witness where we stand without talking about where we Actually are in reality. I'll start by being the guest preacher who just says the thing That we don't want to say which is people aren't much coming to church these days ooh They're just not coming and That's causing a noticeable strain on every last one of us in this room Because we've given our lives in service to this church 300 years just today we saw and we want to know why Some people have blamed post-modernism some have blamed the youth sports culture. How many articles have you heard about that? There are apparently endless ways to blame the Millennials. God bless them You've got to be nicer to those Millennials you guys. It's not all their fault Right say it's because church is boring others say it's because America has become immoral others say well If you do a study people think that Christians are hypocritical and judgmental and who wants to get up on a sunday morning for that To be honest americans are at this point overtired and overworked and over stressed And who wants to get up on a sunday morning for anything at all? But it's actually and I promise it will get better It's actually even a little bit worse than that because it's not actually just that people don't want to get up on a sunday morning It's that they don't believe the same things in the same way Anymore if they believe it at all The barna research group says that the number of people who qualify as post Christian has risen seven percent in two years, which in case you don't spend your days doing statistical research is an extraordinary shift Seven percent and what does post-christian mean anyway? It means Yeah, someone doesn't identify as Christian, but it also means that they don't consider faith to be important They don't practice faith anywhere. They don't tie. They don't read the bible They don't pray they don't volunteer with the church and they don't share their faith with others Because it doesn't sound like they have much of one And the only reason we use the term post-christian instead of just calling them atheists or agnostics Is because most of them came from christian families And all of them came from a nation that is the representation of western christianity to the world at least for now So we come together and ask ourselves what it means to bear witness to the world in which we live Not in 1950s america or the world of the protestant reformation Not the world of john westley not the world of the disciples and not the world that we wished we lived in What does it mean to bear witness in the world of isis and the november presidential election and global warming And black lives matter and the refugee crisis and gun violence and a seven percent rise in americans without faith What does it mean to bear witness in a world that has stopped watching Ministers and community leaders who are used to having all eyes on us Are coming to the harsh and difficult realization that most eyes these days are more likely to be on the real house wives Or people's facebook feeds And many of their eyes don't envision faith at all any longer no matter where it is that they happen to be looking It is very very hard on us Because it makes us sad and angry and frustrated and despairing sometimes all at once And when we feel those things it's so easy to let fear take over And when fear takes over we can become like anxious energizer bunnies pounding our drums and stomping our feet And making all kinds of noise, but never really moving anywhere, but in circles Everyone why aren't people coming to church? What can we do to get them to come? I know who's fault it is Why aren't people volunteering more? How are we going to fix that leak in the children's wing? Why isn't the pastor doing more to help out? Where is he anyway? What are we going to do with this shrinking budget? Who is going to tell us how to fix this now? When we're fearful We're more likely to take what I call the buzz feed approach Which is to use whatever means necessary to get people's attention Here are 12 things that might happen to you if you become a christian and you won't believe number nine You can almost imagine that's on facebook somewhere already, right? Oh my goodness the gospel can become a promotional package with us as the advertising agents Who come up with as many ways to get our message out louder and better and more repeatedly than all of our competitors And what this amounts to is a lot of noise It does nothing to quell our fear when our head hits the pillow at night And it's a game that nobody wins because if people actually click through or listen or show up on a sunday Whatever pizzazz we did to get them there. We have to keep it up to keep them there It's a lot of stress someone chooses something else We feel hostile at worst and frustrated at best because there's just no pleasing these stiff neck people On us to do anyway, right? It's just a sign of more fear which is born out of desperation I was reading luke 7 recently and I heard jesus say to what do I compare the people of this generation They are like children sitting in the marketplace calling out to each other We played the flu for you and you didn't dance We sang a funeral song and you didn't cry The children were frustrated to live in a world where they set the rules But nobody was willing to play by them Some of us know how they feel The church has set the rules in american society for a good while It's been a good stretch But that time is coming and has come to an end And we can try to get louder flutes with flashing lights potentially We could try to hire Beyonce to sing in the music video for a funeral song and that might help But at the end of the day, we're just still sitting in the marketplace Demanding people to respond in the way we want them to In the way we are used to them responding And when I say we as I said at the beginning, I mean it I may have spent the vast majority of my time on the fringes And the pastorate of an emerging church But the same frustrations live there when I sit with the friends that I have in big steeple churches and every possible denomination You can think of People came every week and didn't tithe You spent four hours on the phone with that woman and she's never followed up by coming up to your church The quickest lesson I learned as a pastor was how my level of intention Didn't always meet with equal results And that way the church is like every other organization I imagine except for it church We actually pour our heart and souls into it Is it too much to ask for people just to show up? We do this out of love. We love god and we love god's church And we don't want people to miss out on this wonderfully abundant life Of faith And it's part of our calling. Matthew tells us at the end of his gospel that we are to go and make disciples of all nations But we're called to go and make them disciples of jesus And jesus was nothing like an energizer bunny Nothing like a person entangled with fear Nothing like a person who seeks attention in the center of a marketplace Jesus is a mystery man Who healed people in plain sight only to command that person to not say anything about it He's the one who slipped unnoticed through the crowd even after he was the one they had gathered to listen to in the first place He's the one who asked his disciples to confess him Which was not a small task and then told them not to say anything He's the one who chose silence Even in self-defense Even when his life depended on it B. Y. And witnesses jesus tells us How do we bear witness to this elusive jesus? We remember in the book of acts when jesus appeared to the disciples and though we sometimes like to think that our current situation is Complicated and difficult. We remember that the disciples were living in a world where a dead man had recently come back to life Um and yet he still refused to do any of the things that they expected of him Which i think is really unfair like i'm a live guys Maybe give me a break about all the other things He wouldn't stay he wouldn't become the political leader He wouldn't give them any answers at all really so the disciples came to him and they asked lord Are you going to restore the kingdom now to israel? You would have thought that would have been a clear no by this point, but expectations die hard And jesus responded It isn't for you to know the times or the seasons the father has set by his own authority Rather you will see power when the holy spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses and jerusalem and judia and samaria and to the ends of the earth And then he was gone and they were as confused as ever Power from where what what are we supposed to do with this power? Holy spirit what what kind of witnesses how? So we can take heart when we grapple with what it means to be christ witnesses jesus's followers have been confused about that since the very beginning What does it mean to bear witness to jesus? There's this lovely painting that used to hang in the stairwell of my seminary library mic you might remember it It was a picture of john the baptist It was not this picture Because i couldn't find this picture, but it was of john the baptist and it had this picture of john the baptist pointing toward jesus I may not have ever actually noticed this painting even though i spent an inordinate amount of time in that library But um one of my professors often pointed it out to us He said This is our job He used this as a description of our role You will graduate from this place and you will go and serve where all eyes will be upon you And your job is to turn their gaze past you and put it on jesus right He must increase and we must decrease We know this well. This is our job To bear witnesses to tell others what we have seen and heard It's just as simple and as difficult as that One of my favorite examples of scripture Uh of this is the blind man who was healed and he was brought in front of the court and he said All I know is I was blind and now I see I don't know what kind of other weird political thing that i've just gotten accidentally myself involved in I'm just gonna stick to what I know There's power in pointing to jesus and in telling the stories of all I know I find that story so compelling because it just cuts a knife through the particulars And keeps the focus entirely on the saving work of jesus And god knows that sometimes when we bear witness we give jesus a wink and a nod While mostly bearing witness to our own church our own denomination or our own cells We point to jesus with one hand, but we pointedly wave the other one at ourselves Our penchant to subvert our witness into promotion Is probably the reason that painting of john the baptist hangs in my seminary library, which is filled with overachievers It was a smart move So we shouldn't bear underestimate the power of bearing witness to jesus in the way that healed man did I don't have to tell you method is that it's one of your great Strengths and gifts. I grew up sort of around the baptist world. And so we understand that to be true as well, right testimony Gosh those Presbyterians and Episcopalians. They're like, oh, we're not gonna talk about that But method is you get it you get that you get it The power of telling our story is itself a transforming experience It's the reason we're all sitting here today Did you think about that? None of us would be sitting here today if there hadn't been this great cloud of witnesses Generation after generation after generation who said all I know Is this jesus who's met me All I know is I was blind and now I see all I know is I was lost and now I'm found All I know is I felt broken and now I feel whole all I know is I was so angry and now I found some peace We bear witness to jesus because it's all we know And though we have no control over whether the world is watching or listening to our story All we know is that we must tell it We are called to be like john the baptist faithful witnesses to christ Pointing his way even when eyes are on us But i'm not convinced that that is the entirety of our calling I wonder if we have too long focused on what it means to bear witness to jesus Rather than asking what it means to bear witness Like jesus In the buddhist tradition to bear witness means to turn towards others And to allow their experience to enter our hearts It's to bravely sit with human suffering To bear witness is to live a life of compassion This is difficult work for a number of reasons which i am sure you are deeply acquainted Because it requires us to abide when everything else inside us longs to flee It requires us to listen When really we would do so much better if we could just teach Or preach or talk or pray really anything but listen And it requires us to sit Just to sit when we would much rather be doing something to act or fix Feel worthy Maybe most difficult of all there's no prize In bearing witness There's no measurable result to speak of But jesus didn't seek results I jokingly say when people would say goodness your your church is really small I'd say well if you think about it jesus's disciples wouldn't have even really counted as a small group in most big churches nowadays so I think we're doing okay Jesus didn't seek results. He lived as a transforming presence in this world And he did so by being someone who bravely bore witness to human suffering He did so by powerfully bearing witness to the humanity of those around him When all the other men saw a woman As an adulteress deserving of death Jesus bore witness to her humanity and her dignity When jesus saw a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath He bore witness to his suffering and healed him defiantly rejecting the Pharisees When jesus entered the town of nane and saw a great crowd carrying out a man who died He saw that mother And he had compassion on her and he came up to her and he said don't cry And he placed his hand on that young man and made him raise to life When lazarus died do you remember that story and mary met him on the road and she just comes out to Jesus in All this grief and she says lord if you had just been there he wouldn't have died And jesus does not try to fix the problem first. He bears witness to her grief and he weeps When children come to jesus the disciples see nothing but a distraction But jesus saw their joy and their energy and their curiosity and their passion and he bore witness to them As signs of the kingdom When a widow offered two small coins jesus may have been the only one to notice her deep generosity Because of these and so many other things Revelation 1 5 describes jesus as the faithful witness We live in a world that is increasingly post christian We live in a world that doesn't automatically honor us as leaders in the church and may in fact scorn us for it We live in a world that is stopped watching But that is of no consequence As the people of god Our responsibility Is to bear witness to them Not because it produces results not because it will bring people into our churches But because if we are followers of the way of jesus We are to become people of compassion Who faithfully bear witness to the image of god in every single person walking this earth When we bear witness in this way we put actions behind the three beautiful words. I see you I see you And do we not trust that that transformation becomes possible when we look upon people In the way that jesus did with attentive eyes and open hearts Otto charmer asked in his book presence What does it mean to act in the world? And not on the world Oh friends sometimes I look at the way that the church has acted in my lifetime and in lifetimes long before me And I think yeah, we were acting on the world imposing Something on the world And yet our savior did not do ever such a thing But instead acted as god with us in the world Bernie glasman is the founder of the zen peacemaker order He's jewish and buddhist Which gives him an interesting perspective in life And years ago he brought a group of people to auschwitz to stay and live there for five days To bear witness every afternoon. They would enter berkenau for meditation Can you imagine They would sit in a circle around the railroad tracks that had carried in the cars of men Women and children that would never have been carried out And in the center of that circle was a red lacquer box and inside that red lacquer box was the death book The name of all of those who lost their lives at auschwitz And in their time of meditation daily, they would take turns chanting the names of the dead glasman says as he writes about this they chanted the names carefully laboring lovingly and attentively over their long and sometimes strange sounding syllables hildegard agner reinhardt samuel ahen true a dalbert errenfeld When they finished they would take the death book and put it back in the red lacquer box And they would blow the shofar and leave in silence Was an incredibly difficult experience to sit in the middle of berkenau And bear witness to the horrors the deep horrors of human experience That requires resilience And to sit there with the full knowledge that there is nothing you can do Nothing you could possibly say Nothing you could possibly fix all you can do is bear witness. That's enough In a world that has stopped watching bearing witness may be the most powerful thing that we can do But resurrection people have the resilience to go into a place of death and bear witness to goodness and life and beauty and hope And the the deep promise of new creation If not us to do that work, who else will sit in those places? Nicole flores is a catholic latina theologian and I heard her speak earlier this year about the dangers of cultivating a sense of apathy And desensitization to suffering on social media. Think about it. We are just totally bombarded With difficulties from every corner of this globe and sometimes it just feels like too much, right? We just have to shut it down But I was talking to Nicole and she I said, what do you think it does to us? When we actually practice a liturgy of scrolling past human suffering I said, Nicole, what do you think that's doing to our souls? And she said, I don't know but it worries me And again, I think of jesus who saw widow offering just two small coins And because jesus asked me to I consider the lilies of the field who do nothing And yet live because god their creator bears witness to them Bearing witness may be the most sacred act we can offer to a distracted world So here is my unsolicited advice for all of us. Maybe we stop trying to save the church guest preacher email bishop mckay What if we just stopped worrying about it stopped strategizing about it stopped long-term planning around it What if we just stopped What if we ground that little energizer buddy to a total halt trying to save the church? And instead with all that anxious energy and all that fear and all that anxiety We just funneled all of that energy to bearing witness To all the suffering and goodness in this world What if what if we used our deep reserves of resurrection goodness What if we used our connection to the holy spirit that lives inside each of us and instead said We don't have to save the church the crusades happened and somehow god got us through that Maybe we can trust that we should just be the church Regardless of whether anyone is watching Glassman says when we bear witness When we become the situation homelessness poverty violence illness death He says when we do that the right action arises by itself We don't have to have a meeting about it. We just know We don't have to worry about what to do We don't have to figure out solutions ahead of time once we listen with our entire body and mind Loving action arises But loving action which is at the heart of this church loving action Which is why you are going to sit through a meeting that is important and necessary loving action begins with our gaze It begins with attentive eyes and open hearts And you don't have to travel to Auschwitz to bear witness For all of its intrinsic holiness bearing witness is also a remarkably everyday act If you've been to the Dallas museum of art, you may have seen this painting that's called that gentleman By Andrew Wyeth has anyone else seen this if you have you may have stood in front of it and has this amazing capacity to just Captivate your eyes and draw you in and you you find that you've been standing in front of this man that you don't know For kind of a long time a little slightly embarrassing amount of time. I think gosh, who is this guy? Andrew Wyeth says well in his little placard about the about the art His voice is gentle his wit keen and his wisdom enormous He's not a character, but a very dignified gentleman Who might otherwise have gone unrecorded? It's a portrait of his neighbor tom clark As people called to bear witness we are called to be like john the baptist by pointing toward jesus and proclaiming all we know And And we are also called to be like Andrew Wyeth By honoring the people right in front of us Who might otherwise go unrecorded? One of the sacraments of our faith came into being as the act of a suffering man Asking us to remember him When we gather at his table and break the bread and remember him and his broken body Do we not bear witness to the suffering of every broken body? When we share in his cup Do we not bear witness to the blood that has been spilled from cain until this very day? Remember me Jesus said Because bearing witness With open hearts Is a sacred and holy Love the lord your god with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind and all your strength Bear witness to god bear witness and love your neighbor As yourself tell them i see you Bear witness to them This room is filled with people from all across this region large metropolitan areas tiny rural town Wherever you are your calling is to bear witness to the people around you And you know as i do that for some people the church is the only place Where people see them much less know their name And you also know and if you don't yet you will soon That every town neighborhood block street corner and community is still filled with lots of others who may never Once come through our church doors But who still long more than anything to be seen and maybe It will be you who still bear witness to them It is our calling No matter whether the world is watching It's our calling nevertheless So may you go and bear witness To those in your community And as you do so May you remember the beautiful words of romans 8 16 Which assures us that the spirit of god bears witness with our spirit That we are indeed children of god What a gift that is And it is not a gift that we are meant to keep to ourselves God has borne witness to us By sending his son jesus and by giving us the power of the holy spirit Now may we go and do the same To all of god's children Amen