Help support the vision of Woodland Hills Community Church!

Help support the vision of Woodland Hills Community Church!
For those of you who would like to support the vision & ministry of Woodland Hills Community Church (the faith community I serve that continues to encourage me to minister outside the box), please click on the link just above.

Saturday, January 17

Today’s Readings: Psalm 123; Isaiah 47:1-15; John 1:19-34; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Psalm 115

I have an important anniversary coming up in my life. Next Sunday – January 25 – represents the fifth anniversary of the date I was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. So what made me think of my anniversary a week out? Well, it just so happens that today’s reading from 1 Corinthians was the passage I used as the Scripture for my ordination service. I know that I raised some eyebrows when I selected the text since the text reads: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose those ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’?” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28 from The Message). In the days leading up to my ordination, there were those who tried to portray me as a somebody to make it appear I was worthy of being ordained (i.e. “salutatorian of his high school class, president of his high school class, graduated with honors from college, appointed to the human rights commission for the city in which I was raised, politician, etc). I refused to go there because I knew that the same people and structures that had supported and encouraged me on my way up, were the same ones that turned on me when I came out as a gay man. They were the ones who took delight in turning me from “a somebody” to “a nobody”. God did exactly the opposite. God embraced me during my so-called “nobody” days (actually well before then, but that’s fodder for another blog entry) and transformed me into something else: a “somebody”! So today – I can proudly say: “It wasn’t my intelligence or talents that qualified me to be a minister – it was my willingness to embrace my status as “a nobody” that opened me to embrace my call.” So where are you at with all of this? Are you still trying to live your life as “a somebody”, or are you willing to entertain the notion that – apart from God – you are “a nobody”? Til next time…

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