Matthew 25 In Action - Voter Registration Drive

This is a transcript of our ‘Moment for Mission’ from July 16th, 2023 from member Elaine Elsloo Dodd.

Good Morning Matthew 25 Congregation,

I was hungry and you gave me food.

I voted in Mayoral and City Council elections for elected officials who will pass ordinances that will decrease the number of hungry in our community.

I was thirsty and you gave me drink.

I voted in Oklahoma State and Federal elections that will protect us with clean water legislation.

I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

I voted in US House/Senate elections and Presidential elections for candidates who would enact fair immigration policies.

I was naked and you gave me clothing.

I voted in school board elections for policies that would provide children clothing from schools so that children would not be bullied and could have the opportunity to learn.

I was sick and you took care of me.

I voted in OK House and Senate elections and Gubernatorial elections for persons who would enact access to quality healthcare in our state.

I was in prison and you welcomed me.

I voted in judicial elections for judges who would be honest, impartial, and fair in sentencing the guilty and releasing the innocent.

I voted because I was a registered voter.

We will assist you in providing voter registration forms to update your voter registration (change of name, address, party) or to register voters who are not currently registered. We challenge all of us to register at least 1 new voter. Pastor Olivia has already met the challenge.

What does the Lord require of us: to seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.

Prayer for Trauma

Dear Southminster, 

I wrote the following prayer for an interfaith vigil held last week at Morning Star Baptist Church for victims of Buffalo and Uvalde. What stood out to me from that gathering is how desperately we need space to gather and grieve and lament, and how the rapid and on-going pace of gun violence is destroying our ability to do so. I share these words below because I too need the support of our collective lament, and because I believe God is calling us as people of faith to be a strong voice for gun reform. 

O God of weeping people, right now it feels like too much to wrap our broken words around the shattered families left in the wake of this latest gun massacre. Where our words fail, be with them. 

For as people of faith, we affirm your presence with us. 

You hold us in confusion. 

You hold us in grief. 

You hold us in our trauma. 

You hold us in war. 

You hold us in political unrest. 

You hold us in disconnection. 

You hold us as we acknowledge the ways we have perpetuated systems of harm, complacency, and patriarchy, and you do not celebrate our pain, but meet us with deep compassion. 

Help us O God. Help us not rush through this horror and become numb to the violence of our nation, we have a problem. In our grief and our brokenness we cling tightly to the life of individual freedom and safety, we idolize our guns thinking they are the answer to our fear. But this is idolatry. We cannot live this way and we refuse to die this way. 

Bring us back to relationship, to community, to presence. In this deep woundedness, tend our bodies and minds and souls, like a patient gardener, help us as people of faith not to offer cheap affirmations of “thoughts and prayers” but as John Lewis put it, “when we pray, we move our feet.” 

Since the struggle deepens, since evil abides, and good does not yet prosper, let us gather what strength we have, what confidence and valor, that our small victories may end in triumph, and the world we long for, be the world we attain. Be with us as we weep, and work, and walk for your world. Amen. 

Pentecost

“Pentecost” comes from a Greek word meaning fiftieth day. On this day, the Holy Spirit came with wind and flame, empowering the disciples to proclaim the good news of the risen Lord to all people. Falling on the fiftieth day of the season of Easter, Pentecost represents the culmination of the church’s seven-week celebration of Christ’s resurrection. As the Lord's Day is sometimes called the “eighth day” of creation, Pentecost is a day of new creation—all things transformed and made new by the Word and Breath of the living God. On the Day of Pentecost we give particular thanks for the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, who gathers the church as the body of Christ and sends us to share in Christ’s mission throughout the world. 

The notion of Easter as a season of fifty days is patterned after the ancient Jewish period of seven weeks that extend from the beginning of the barley harvest, after Passover, to the end of the wheat harvest at the Festival of Weeks (in Hebrew, Shavuot). In Jewish tradition, Shavuot also marks the giving of the law to Moses at Sinai, a connection that may inform Paul’s discussion of the law and the Spirit. —Book of Common Worship. Westminster John Knox Press, 2018.

When we think of Pentecost, we usually think of dramatic visuals: tongues of fire, a cacophony of voices, a blowing of wind, or maybe a jeering crowd accusing the disciples of drunkenness. But the spectacle isn’t really what this moment is about. Floating tongues of flame aren’t the main point. They’re ornamentation that draw us in, miraculous visuals really, but the heart of the story is about breath and words. 

We often celebrate Pentecost as the birth of the church, but in the non-western traditions, there is an understanding that the church has existed since God created, and that Pentecost is not in fact just a birthday celebration, rather, the Acts Pentecost is a linguistic event which displays the power of the Holy Spirit. In the wake of Jesus’ ascension (Acts 1:9–10) we hear the Pentecost story as evidence of Jesus’ promised presence through the power of God’s own linguistic event.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about languages, about how we hear one another. Something happens when we speak each other's languages — be they cultural, political, racial or liturgical.  We experience the limits of our own perspectives.  We learn curiosity.  We discover that God's "great deeds" are far too nuanced for a single tongue, a single fluency. I have always loved ecumenism, because when I listen to and learn from my colleagues in different denominations and traditions, then I see just how expansive God is for the world. The troubles of our day—global, national, and catastrophic—cry out for the bravery of a bold and creative Church who is willing to learn to speak the languages of people all around them. Willing to listen, to pursue a phenomenon of understanding. 

It is no small thing that the Holy Spirit loosened tongues that Pentecost day. In the face of difference, God compelled people to engage. To open their mouths and with their breath expel truth, to tell of the one who came and is coming, to literally share the Good News with all people. From Day One, the call was to be present, to listen, and to meet people where they are.

At Pentecost, understanding of one another’s languages is gifted, not through human learning or manipulation, but through the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.

We serve a God who meets us in the full truth of who we are, who knows our intimate stories, our realities, who invites us with a gentle push into telling this story to others. We can be truth tellers about the story which was and which is to come, and we can learn what it means to know the stories of those around us. As we share this experience, may it ignite an experience of healing for our world.

Mission in May 2022

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, a stranger and you welcomed me.” – Matthew 25:35 



On Sunday, May 1st, I shared with the congregation about our commitment to being a Matthew 25 congregation. The Matthew 25 vision depends on passing down our faith to each generation and engaging all ages in the message of ministry with those living in the margins. Here at Southminster, we have a long history of faithfully engaging with care for our community and the world, and over the past few years, a lot of that engagement has changed. Since coming to Southminster, I have wondered about the future of our shared life and how our understanding of mission and practice would be shaped by these changes, so I am thrilled for us to step into intentional work through the Matthew 25 initiative, as we respond to God’s love for us. 

Southminster Presbyterian Church provides many ways to respond to God’s love through service to our neighbors, near and far. Just as God came to the world in love, we too are called to dedicate our lives to loving service through Christ’s body the church. During the month of May, we have an opportunity to engage deeply with our missional identity, and to plan for our collective work as we move forward. Join us during the Christian Education hour throughout the month as we discern and learn for our future. 

Grace and peace, 

Pastor Olivia

Holy Week Letter from Rev. Olivia Lane

Dear Congregation, 

It is all too easy to fast-forward from our triumphant celebration of palms into the joy of Resurrection Sunday. It’s easy to skip the brokenness and burial that lies between. But when we do, we miss the promise of a God who is with us in the hardest stuff of our lives.

There is nothing about Holy Week, or our observance of it, that is easy. Holy Week invites us to abandon the narrative of success on our own terms, of protecting our image and our power and our authority, and choosing instead a life of active surrender. We follow a Jesus who chooses to show up in the most humble of circumstances. He was born to an insignificant family under the weight of scandal, he gathered a ragtag band of people with objectionable lifestyles and trades, with obvious character flaws, to represent God’s way. Even knowing he would die, he rode into the fortress of his enemies not on a war horse, but on a common ass, pointing us toward another way of being in the world. 

We can allow our fear of death to keep us in destructive cycles of denial and self-preservation, or we can learn from this example of Jesus. Yes, they might kill us, that is the truth, but either way all of us will die. Until that time, we can live fully now, open to the pain of others, conscious of the price that is paid for our power, practicing the wonder and possibility of living fully, loving extravagantly, and becoming all that we were created to be. 

This Holy Week, we reflect on the Saviour who insists that we follow the wisdom of peace through justice, generosity over greed, selflessness over selfishness, mercy over vengeance, hope over fear, and above all love over hate. This is certainly an inconvenient way of living in 2022, our culture might even call it ludicrous, because living in a way that invites God’s kingdom here and now might mean that we don’t come out on top, that people will take advantage of us, it might mean sacrifice on our parts, it might even mean that we get killed. But like Jesus we will not die. For love never dies.

That is the story that reaches through generations and transcends time. That is the promise of unstoppable grace and unflagging hope. This is the story of our faith – the foundation on which the church stands – the sacred truth that conquered our chaos through the relentless, redeeming love of God. Nothing, not even death itself can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and that is a story that continues long beyond our final breath. 

As followers of Jesus Christ, we stand in faith – anchored in hope – as we journey through Lent and walk toward that glorious Easter morning. We know the road reveals brokenness and burial. We know the road reveals loss and lament. And we know – we believe – the road reveals the presence of God at every turn.

With hope and in gratitude for God’s presence,

Pastor Olivia 

Call and Response

By now, information should have reached you about the next chapter in my ministry. If it has not, I have been selected as the candidate to be the next General Presbyter for Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery. The presbytery will vote on May 31 at the Tri-Presbytery meeting in Oklahoma City and I would start June 1. This is a journey that I begin with much excitement and with great sadness over leaving Southminster. This is a church that Kati and I love. It is a place that we have found to be a home and a home for our boys. This was a process filled with a lot of prayers and tears, but it is where I believe God is calling me to serve the larger church, including Southminster. 

One of the words you have heard a lot from me over the last three years is that word “call”. “What is your call?” “How are you fulfilling your call?” “What might God be calling you to do today?” In a reformed, Presbyterian faith that stresses the priesthood of all believers, call is central to our identity. It is the place where our gifts and possibilities meet God’s plan for our lives and the needs of the world. It is there that we are faithful, not just to a moral or ethical code, but to God’s will for us in our whole like. Discerning how we are called (along with actually doing it), becomes one of the central aspects of our discipleship. Faith is more than mere theological assent, it is prayerful action in the world.

The Lenten devotional book we have been reading in the adult Sunday School class has touched on this topic many times already in Lent. The title even speaks to the theme: A Way Other Than Our Own by Walter Brueggemann. In Lent, particularly, as we introspectively look at the state of our faith lives, we encounter anew God’s leading. In Lent, we become aware of the distance between where we are and where God is and is going. Often we are called to a way other than our own. 

It is also the biblical story. It is the call and response of Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, of disciples and apostles, Peter, Paul, and James. It is the story of Jonah running away from his own call only to finally fulfill it. It is the Good Samaritan feeling the call to help and responding. Our lives are filled with these questions. How do we go? Where do we go? Where is God calling us now?

I told somebody the other day I could not preach and teach about call if I was not willing to follow that call as well. As Lent continues, Easter approaches, and the journey of faith continues for each of you, I hope you find and follow your call too.

Spring, Rebirth, and Resiliency

Earlier this week, Sharon Coffman inspired me with thoughts of spring in her devotional study at the Session Meeting. The change back to winter with ice and the possibility of snow has not dampened that mood for me as I sit down to write this month's newsletter article. 

I have always planted a garden as a homeowner. From a few pots to a few raised beds and an entire flower garden, it is a calming and therapeutic task most days. Evan is of the age now that he thinks gardening is fun. He likes playing in the dirt, planting seeds, watering, and even pulling weeds. - That may change one day, but I will take advantage of it while I can. - This winter, we got ambitious with our garden: we would grow the tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and more from seed. In late January, we started planting tiny seeds in seed starter pots and watering them religiously. We rejoiced as the first buds started to break through the dirt. We celebrated as they touched the roof of our tiny greenhouse and we had to move them to bigger pots.

They did not thrive in their new home, however. The dog knocked over a pot investigating one day and the plant was hopelessly damaged. Simon tried to “help” his brother and I by pulling off leaves. We lost a couple of quick growing pumpkin plants that way. We moved the trays of seeds into a sunny window and the combination of the sun’s rays and the heater vent's blowing air dried out the plants more than we could water them. Some are still holding on, but it looks like this batch of plants will be a total loss except for some very hearty peppers. Evan had great fun seeing the process, so it was not a complete waste of time. 

One of the lessons I am teaching my kids and that I have found invaluable in the church is resiliency. All is not lost when the plants all die. We can plant more and start again. All is not lost when X, Y, and Z happens in the church either. They always have happened and always will. What matters is that second part about starting again, renewing efforts, looking with fresh eyes, and trying something new. As I look out at the church and all the places where there is truly lifegiving work being done in the church, often it is where there have been a lot of failures and trying again. The opposite is also true. Many times the churches that are stuck in a rut or are on the verge of closing are there because of some distant wrong that always stuck around and the church never got past.

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday on March 6. It is a time of renewal. It is also a test of resiliency. It is a time of dying and rising again. Refining. What must die in us and in the church to be reborn again? Where do you or we need a new chance, a rebirth? How do we build resilience into the DNA of our faith and church? How might we grow and thrive if we do just that?

Celebrating Welcome

Monday nights are usually a madhouse at Southminster. Tuesdays and Thursdays can be too. Saturday is filled with people utilizing our church. If you are only here on Sunday, you might miss how busy and active we are seven days a week. For example, six different groups were using the building last Monday, including the Session Meeting. The Boy Scouts held a Court of Honor Ceremony for an Eagle Scout, which meant they used the sanctuary and the dining hall for a celebratory reception. We had meetings and support groups spread throughout the building all night. People were here until 9:30pm that day and that was an early evening compared to others.  

One of the things I celebrate about Southminster is our sense of welcome. We do this on Sunday morning. You all are great at warmly greeting one another and new faces. You notice when people have been gone. You perk up when there is somebody new. The Passing of the Peace goes on forever because we are so invested in making each individual feel like they are valued and welcomed here. We also live into it throughout the week. It is part of the culture around here. Southminster opens up its doors to a plethora of support groups and outside organizations. Life Senior Services brings a wide variety of activities and participants to our doors. The Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts meet here. The Brookside Neighborhood Association gathers here. I suggest Southminster to host events for the presbytery and church organizations as often as I can, because I know we will do a great job and make people feel at home. In fact, we are hosting the Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery meeting in a few weeks. Even if it is just putting out coffee and cookies for a group, we do our best to care for others. 

Being welcoming is more than just being good hosts. It is a biblical value. It is a way of proclaiming the good news. In Matthew 25:35-40, Jesus says, “for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?" And the king will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Continue to welcome in Christ’s name.