Renovations to the FCC parking lot entrance are underway.
The renovations will include a ramp to allow easier access to services, events and meetings held in the FCC sanctuary, chapel, parlor, and meeting/gathering rooms.
We look forward to sharing updates along the way.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 22, 2018
Lectionary Reading: Matthew 5: 21-26.
Several years ago, Richard Rohr and James Marchionada, both priests, one Franciscan and the other Dominican, were attending a memorial service in remembrance of the September 11 disaster. Richard Rohr wrote a prayer. James Marchionada wrote a song.
Here is the prayer:
“God of all races, nations, and religions,
You know that we cannot change others,
Nor can we change the past.
But we can change ourselves.
We can join you in changing our only
And common future where Love ‘reigns’
The same over all.
Help us not to say, “Lord, Lord” to any nationalist gods,
But to hear the One God of all the earth,
And to do God’s good thing for this One World.”
For the song, the refrain goes like this:
“It’s not up to God alone to listen to prayer.
It’s not up to God alone to answer.
But when the people of God become what we pray,
the kingdom of God is revealed.”
Then Julie Ann Johnson read a difficult passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 21-22):
“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”
In the next paragraph, Jesus goes on to say pretty much the same thing about adultery (Matthew 5: 27-28):
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Jimmy Carter isn’t the only one. He’s just the only one who has admitted it. According to this, we are all guilty of murder and adultery. Every last one of us!
There is only one way I can understand this, and it has to do with the way in which our thoughts precede our actions.
Jesus directly says that our inner attitudes and states are the real sources of our problems, heralding our outward behaviors. Most religion is obsessed with a small number of such potent activities, and we clergy think it is our job to disengage them.
This is largely a waste of God’s time and ours. Jesus says not only that you must not kill, but that you must not even harbor hateful thoughts and feelings (Matthew 5: 21-22).
He clearly begins with the necessity of a “pure heart” (Matthew 5: 8), a pure mind and conscience, knowing that the outer behavior will follow. It always does. Too often we force the external behavior, and the inner force remains fully operative within us like a cancer.
This explains why so many Christians are still racist, classist, sexist and homophobic, and are apparently proud of it.
I’m touching on politics this morning. Going on vacation very soon, so this seems like the right time.
A few things:
1. Everyone has their own political views.
2. Politics is inextricably linked to morality.
3. How do I prevent my personal views from leaking into our worship service?
4. The only solution I have found is incomplete and imperfect but workable. It is to go underneath any given political issue, whatever it may be (gun violence, immigration, gerrymandering, Russian interference), and then speak to the undergirding spiritual principles that ought to guide our lives.
5. I find politics distressing. Sometimes I just want to scream, and sometimes I just can’t seem to escape it — radio, television, internet. I’m highly motivated to make Sunday morning, in this beautiful sanctuary, a politics-free zone. A sanctuary in the old, classical sense — a holy place to escape and be safe. I will preserve that holy status until my dying day. Yet we must also speak of moral living.
6. Therefore, I try to speak of the undergirding spiritual principles. For example, the linkage, cause and effect, between our thinking and the world we create is such a principle.
I would like to share one more thought with you this morning. It comes from Charles Peguy (1873-1914), a French poet and essayist.
One thing fascinating about him is that he is quoted and beloved by the hard left and the hard right of the previous century. Quoted regularly by several liberal Swiss theologians, at the same time he was a favorite of Benito Mussolini.
I think what he meant is that our experience of God — not any standard received teaching, no dogma, no catechism but rather our first-hand experience of God — ultimately informs how we then act in the world.
Our inner heart and soul and mind experience of the holy, the sacred, the divine is the ultimate energy behind how we then act and behave.
Here is what Richard Rohr, the Franciscan Priest, had to say about this:
“Transformative change in politics depends so much on having a clear view of the desired end. Where does that vision come from? Possibilities may be offered by various ideologies, or party platforms, or political candidates.
But for the person of faith, that vision finds its roots in God’s intended and preferred future for the world. It comes not as a dogmatic blueprint but as an experiential encounter with God’s love, flowing like a river from God’s throne, nourishing trees with leaves for the healing of the nations (see Revelation 22: 1-2).
This biblically infused vision, resonant from Genesis to Revelation, pictures a world made whole, with people living in a beloved community, where no one is despised or forgotten, peace reigns, and the goodness of God’s creation is treasured and protected as a gift.
Such a vision strikes the political pragmatist as idyllic, unrealistic, and irrelevant. But the person of faith, whose inward journey opens his or her life to the explosive love of God, knows that this vision is the most real of all. It is a glimpse of creation’s purpose and a glimmering of the Spirit’s movement amid the world’s present pain, brokenness, and despair.”
Years ago, I had a rare opportunity to get some training from the Alban Institute in Washington, D.C., on what was called Conflict Management.
I envisioned, foolishly in hindsight, of potentially being a consultant to conflicted churches rather than a pastor. After all, every church I had served was in some type of conflict. I took both the basic and advanced training, and consulted with several congregations for a time.
For ease of understanding the broad spectrum of conflict, the institute divided it up into four categories:
Level I Not so bad. Two people or groups disagree on how to proceed about an issue.
Level II More than disagreement, the other group is characterized by exceptionally low IQ and deeply morally compromised. Some name calling.
Level III Reputations are ruined. Reconciliation is seen more as capitulation. The other is seen no longer as stupid, but rather clever and evil. Any hope for peace is nearly gone.
Level IV Guns (or other weapons) are involved.
Here’s the rub:
The core mistake, both in churches and in politics in general, is the view that conflict, that is all conflict, is bad.
Whereas in reality, Level I is wonderful. Genuine disagreement, yet civil and respectful, can and does lead to a third way, not initially envisioned by either group.
Quaker theologian Parker Palmer has a hopeful, but not Pollyannaish, view. He writes:
“Human beings have a well-demonstrated capacity to hold the tension of differences in ways that lead to creative outcomes and advances. It is not an impossible dream to believe we can apply that capacity to politics. In fact, our capacity for creative tension-holding is what made the American experiment possible in the first place. . . . America’s founders—despite the bigotry that limited their conception of who “We the People” were—had the genius to establish [a] form of government in which differences, conflict, and tension were understood not as the enemies of a good social order but as the engines of a better social order.”
That attitude is medicine for our times.
1) Be Careful How to Think of Others;
2) Mysticism Informs Politics;
3) Disagreement is not Bad.
Be careful how you think about others. Jesus was rather clear on the importance of this. How you think leads directly to both how you then treat and interact with others, as well as to the general health of your own soul.
Second, your mysticism informs your politics. Your experience of God, your vision of God’s world informs how you then act in the world, including how you vote.
And third, disagreement is not bad. Rather, civil disagreement can lead not just to more pragmatic solutions, not just to solutions capable of garnering enough votes, but to holier solutions, engines of a better social order.
As it said in that refrain: God help us to become what we pray.
Amen.
Download this sermon in PDF form here.
Featured Image Credit: Conflict / Duality. PD image thanks to John Hain via Pixabay.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs, preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 15, 2018.
A New Graduate from Seminary Is Self-Assured Enough to Know the Problem in the World Is Sin.
Today’s sermon is actually a continuation of last Sunday’s preachment. On July 8, we had Margie Price in the pulpit. (She had also been a guest preacher here last summer.)
Last week, she decided to speak on sin, which I don’t do often, so I’m listening to Margie intently while sitting in the pew, with my mind going around in a dozen different directions.
That’s probably what you’re doing right now, but two things rattled around in my mind while I was paying attention to the sermon on sin, and one was a memory on the same subject.
I shared this with you before, but it’s one of those things that sticks in my memory:
This happened many years ago, when I was invited to dinner by a single mom who was a member of my church, and her only son had just graduated from seminary. Being immensely proud of her son, who was returning home to visit one weekend, she invited him and his wife for dinner to meet Tracy and me and a few other people as well for a meet and greet get-together.
The new graduate was, to put it bluntly, very ego-secure.
He had an ability that would probably serve him well in a church where he could command people’s attention. When he spoke, others stopped their small talk and listened to him. The conversation was going back and forth at the dinner table, and talk turned to some of the problems in the world. You’ve got problems in the Middle East, problems here, problems there.
Finally, the newbie barged in with a self-assured, overweening statement as though it were a question, “You know what the problem is in the world!”
You’ve heard the expression, a pregnant pause? Well, this pause was going to give birth to triplets. Emphatically, he repeated, “You know what the problem is in the world!” And he waited. All eyes were on him.
Then he announced, “It is sin!”
I am really glad I didn’t chuckle. Yes, the problem is sin, but it’s like the most worthless answer you can imagine.
One other thing that came to mind while Margie was preaching was that wonderful Greek word that’s translated as “sin” in the New Testament, ’amartia.
As some of you know, it’s an archery term, meaning “missing the mark.”
It has the sense that there’s the bull’s-eye and you didn’t hit it. The feeling of it is a mistake or an error. It has the sense of an imperfection but it doesn’t have the feeling of a deep, fatal flaw in our souls that’s driving us to hell. Rather, this is a notion of needing improvement; you can do better.
Tillich Reforms the Notion of Sin as an Existential State Characterized by the Estrangement of Humanity
In her sermon, Margie referenced Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and the notion of sin as separation. I would like to expand on that idea a little.
Paul Tillich was an immigrant from Germany, by the way, and most of his time has been spent as a professor in the United States at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He expanded the notion or revised it or reformed it as to the notions of both sin and of God. Let me go into both of those just a bit.
● First, sin. He says first and foremost that sin isn’t any given act like stealing or gossip, but it is rather an existential state in which we find ourselves, characterized by separation or estrangement. (Prescient — vis-à-vis Conversations With God and A Course in Miracles.)
It’s never “sins” in the plural, but rather the overarching state of being separate from God, separate from our fellow human beings, separate from our neighbors, and sometimes even separate from ourselves.
According to Tillich, our basic human condition is a “state of estrangement of man and his world from God.”
It’s implied, he wrote, in many different places in the Biblical symbolic descriptions of humanity’s existential plight.
For example, the expulsion from the garden; the hostility between humans and nature; the hostility between brothers, going all the way back to Cain and Abel, like the very first brothers and all the brothers since and sisters too; the confusion and estrangement among the nations; ever since the Tower of Babel, one nation has been against another nation; and even the prophets complain against the kings, and they complain about the people over idolatry.
There is lots of separation, lots of estrangement. You don’t have to look hard to find examples.
Tillich also Reforms the Notion of God as Being – Itself in the Ground of Being as an Existential Idea.
● Second, Tillich also reformed our definition of God. This is probably the concept he is most famous for, in which he understood God as being-itself, and he used the phrase the ground of being.
This metaphor is of God as the ground of our being. There are three ways you can take this:
1. One is an analogy. What ground is to a plant is what God is to a human being. You can let your mind fertilize that thought.
2. A ground state also means fundamental, like the basis or foundation. So on a fundamental ba-sis, there’s the ground level and everything above it, and it’s foundational or fundamental.
3. The third way of understanding this phrase is linked to Genesis (Chapter 2, Verse 7). This is the second crea tion story: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
For Tillich, “the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything. . . . It is possible to say that [God] is the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of beings.”
Consistently, Tillich refers to God as an idea, an existential idea in which God is the foundation of existence and meaning.
As an aside, this is linked to the name of God, given to Moses, when he said, “Who is sending me?”
And God answers, “YHWH,” which means “being, existence.” It means “I am.”
So God isn’t a separate entity up in heaven but rather is existence itself. So if something exists, then it is rooted in God. If you exist, then of necessity you are rooted in God, as the ground of your being. If a plant exists, then of necessity it is rooted in God, the ground of its being.
Sin is not being aware of it, of feeling separated, estranged. Not true whatsoever, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling that way. And all of us have felt that way, plucked up, uprooted, alone in a meaningless universe, separated and estranged from God, our fellow humans and nature, and sometimes even ourselves. But there’s not a whit of truth to it.
The cure, the healing, the salvation, is the realization that we are loved, accepted, united all along, despite having felt or thought otherwise.
Tillich calls it “grace.”
He writes compassionately:
“And if that word [God] has no meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depth of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. . . . (The one) who knows about depth knows about God.” For Tillich, that which gives meaning to and is of ultimate concern in life, actually is God.
This is a very compassionate observation from a sermon Tillich gave:
“You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!
If that happens to us, we experience grace.
After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.
In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”
Okay, now let’s get practical. Enough theory.
Sin Is Separation, Estrangement; the Reconciliation Is to Love Thy Neighbor; Church Is Safe to Do so.
God is the ground of our being. Grace is becoming aware of our connection, our rootedness, our being enfolded into the family of God.
At the Annual Meeting of the United Church of Christ of New York, in Syracuse about a month or so ago, the keynote speaker was Emily Heath, a New Hampshire minister.
She wrote a book called Glorify, and she talks about estrangement in one of the chapters. In it, she references a book called Bowling Alone by political scientist Robert Putnam, who writes about the fragmentation of our society. He uses “bowling alone” as both a fact and a metaphor.
“Between 1980 and 1993, the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent.”
Even as the sport grows, more and more are bowling alone.
But then he goes on. Between the 1960’s to the 1990’s:
Freemasons are down 71%,
American Legion is down 47%,
Red Cross Volunteers are off 61%,
PTA membership is off 60%, Rotary is down 25%.
You get the picture.
Between 1975 and 2000, when the book was published, family dinners dropped by 43 percent. Having friends over to the family house, regardless of why (dinner, wine and cheese, cards, watching the game), fell by 35 percent.
It is a deeper separation, a more profound estrangement. To state something every one of us knows intimately, we are also doing religion alone, and that is a problem.
It is our very interaction with others that our faith, our spirituality, our sense of interconnection and interdependence is deepened.
So now, let’s get very practical.
I’m going to ask you to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time.
I want you in your imagination to envision somebody you don’t like. Somebody who ticks you off, somebody who votes another way.
Somebody who, every time you say something, says something contradictory. Imagine such a person.
2. And then, on this side, the commandment: Love your neighbor.
How do you reconcile that?
We all have this tension in our lives.
Love thy neighbor, one of the great commandments. Jesus was not fooling around when he said that. All of the law and the prophets depends upon it. Love your neighbor. Yet there are specific neighbors whom we can come up with.
How do we reconcile them?
Let me suggest this: Church — a relatively safe place to practice loving God, self, and neighbor. And by practice what I mean is getting up again after we have fallen down, trying again after we have missed the mark, loving and forgiving, loving and forgiving, loving and forgiving some more until one day we actually find ourselves being Christlike. It happens.
Imagine every oppositional person as a gift from God to strengthen and expand your ability to love.
Actually, that graduate from seminary was right. The problem with the world is sin.
But to hell with the problem.
Let’s attend to the healing, to the reconciliation, by coming together, forgiving one another, forbearing with one another, extending grace to one another, practicing kindness and compassion to one another, over and over and over again, and the result is love conquering the world.
Amen
Download or view the full Blest Be the Ties That Bind sermon in PDF format.
On Sunday, July 8, 2018, F.C.C. invited the Rev. Margie Price to be our Guest Pastor while Pastor Art is on Sabbatical.
Good morning. I’m so glad to be here with you all this morning.
I love getting my annual summer preaching invitation here with my extended church family. I have had a fairly busy year since I was last time I was here.
As Art said, I have been formally accepted as a Member in Discernment with the Metro Association and I have also been licensed in the Garden City Community Church.
And, maybe the biggest event, as many of you may know, I got preach a sermon in front of Rev. John Dorhauer, the general minister and president of the UCC. It was completely unexpected and rather intimidating, but, hey, I’m always up for a challenge and he was very encouraging so it all worked out in the end.
So, if you read the Pastor’s Perspective that Pastor Art wrote in the May Forecaster, you will notice the similarities in the sermon titles of that sermon and today’s.
I figure, since you heard the reaction to the sermon back in May, I’d share the actual sermon with you today.
In that light, would you please take a moment to pray with me?
Ever-present God,
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you. Oh god my strength and my redeemer.
As I have said before, I like to preach off the lectionary.
Rather than come up with a topic of my own to preach on, I like to read the scripture and let it present me with the topic.
I don’t know if maybe I’m just being lazy in not having to come up with my own topics, but I figure it’s a descent trade off because over the course of 3 years, using the lectionary, you hit most of the scripture in the Bible, and do it during the relevant seasons.
So whether I’m being lazy or not, it still works. This is what I started to do when preparing this sermon.
And then I read through the scripture set I was presented with and the topic that jumped out at me was the topic of sin and I thought to myself, “Nope, not being lazy.”
I’m kind of happy about this, though, because it’s not something I really talk about often. I mean, I frequently hear, Jesus died for our sins, everybody likes to remind us of that, but that doesn’t really tell us a whole lot about sin.
I have friends and classmates that can recite chapter and verse of all the different kinds of sin and what the consequences may be to committing those sins. And people will do it frequently. To the point where I start to become afraid to do anything for fear that I might commit one of the myriad sins they enumerate.
And then there is the UCC, where we don’t tend to talk about sin a whole lot, at least not what makes it up. We talk more about what we should do, than what we should not: as we read in Micah, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God, things like that. If we focus on what we SHOULD do, how we SHOULD act, that would keep us from doing the things we should NOT do. Right?
So in light of the scripture set of the lectionary, I decided to take a bit of a closer look at sin and what these scriptures are saying about how Jesus relates to it.
You know, one of those nice light topics for a summer Sunday morning.
So I couple of issues right off the back when talking about sin:
First, I have to admit I don’t really deal well with concept of Original Sin: this concept being that I carry the shame of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after God specifically told them not to.
I don’t see how the God we always talk about, the loving God that welcomes and embraces us, the one who freed God’s own people from Egypt, this God we are the children of, as we are reminded in our scripture this morning in 1 John, that this God could be so harsh as to punish us for something we couldn’t have hoped to have had a hand in.
How many of you here have children, nieces, nephews or other grandkids or other kids you have been around, even just babysitting? Now who here would hold something their parents did long before they were even born against them? Who would punish a child just because their grandparent made a mistake and disobeyed his or her parent? I don’t expect anyone would. So why do we think God would do the same with us?
My other issue with sin, as I always understood it, is that there is not a single thing I can do that God won’t forgive me for if I just ask for that forgiveness.
When Jesus walked the earth he taught long and hard about forgiving each other, when asked he said we should forgive 70 times 7. And it was not that the end number was the important part of that teaching, it was that we were to keep doing it.
So if we, in theory, have the ability to do this, why wouldn’t God be able to? And God would be so much better at it than we will ever be, after all the practice with the millions of people who came before us and all the petitions God must have received well before I came along.
So in thinking about this concept of sin and applying it to the fact that Jesus came to save us from sin, it just didn’t match up for me.
So, what did I do for the longest time?
Find out – Continue reading for a fresh perspective on ‘Sin’.
Featured Image Credit: Sunrise on the Beach in Florida. Courtesy of Paul Brennan, PD Pics.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Feast Day of Saints Peter and Paul, June 24, 2018.
A Feast Day for Saints Peter and Paul; A Gesture for Friendship, but no Reconciliation or Union Arises.
Today is the feast day for Saints Peter and Paul. This is observed not so much by Protestants but more by the liturgical traditions, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and so forth.
Don’t expect a real feast, but the occasion is a commemoration of their martyrdom under the reign of Nero in Rome.
It is a special day for Roman Catholics in particular because this is when representatives of the Eastern Orthodox church travel to Rome to be with the pope as they celebrate this important day.
It is a token gesture toward friendship renewal, although not anywhere close to reconciliation or union, which was broken during the Eleventh Century when Pope Leo IX in Rome demanded allegiance from the independent Eastern church in Constantinople. Rome will return the favor on the feast day of Saint Andrew in the autumn by sending a delegation to Istanbul.
Most of you probably don’t generally care much about such ecclesiastical matters.
I only care minimally, but I thought you might find the Great Schism of 1054 interesting.
Gestures toward friendship where there has been enmity for over a millennium are important, and actually could be of great importance.
In addition, I thought it might be an opportune time to look at some of the teachings of Saints Peter and Paul on this revered feast day.
Team of Rivals Is a Fascinating Moment in History; Creative Genius Springs up in Both Camps.
First, I need to tell you about some facts I learned from a marvelous book I have been reading. In 2005, Doris Kearns Goodwin published Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
“The book is a biographical portrait of Lincoln and some of the men who served with him in his cabinet from 1861 to 1865. Three of his cabinet members had previously run against Lincoln in the 1860 election: Attorney General Edward Bates; Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase; and Secretary of State, William H. Seward. The book focuses on Lincoln’s mostly successful attempts to reconcile conflicting personalities and political factions on the path to abolition and victory in the American Civil War.” — Wikipedia
It is, of course, a fascinating moment in our history.
But there is one facet to the story that left me utterly astounded. It had to do with the creative genius, not of Lincoln, but rather of the men who didn’t want to give up slavery, and envisioned a dozen or so different ways to thwart, eviscerate, delay, or otherwise prevent abolition.
Here are three quick examples:
1. Let’s make abolition a “states’ rights” thing, where, rather than a national law, let the states decide, some allowing it and others not allowing it.
2. Let’s keep the slaves for the time being. However, on a given date, sometime in the future, children born to slaves would be free.
3. The U.S. Constitution already had language to the effect that those who were bound in some way were to be accounted as three-fifths of a person.
Proponents of this lunatic but serious stunt tried to find a way to grant to slaves some of the rights of free people, but just not all of them.
Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution reads: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons. (Boldface type added.)
A position somewhere between 100 percent legal slavery and 0 percent legal slavery was propounded by various politicians who envisioned a dozen or so different ways to land somewhere in the middle, to avoid the theological, legal, and moral statement that slavery should no longer exist in our land.
Southern Politicians Also Show
Creative Genius; Peter and Paul
Show Holy Spirit Within People.
As I read Goodwin’s book, I felt historically naïve. In my grade-school imagination, I somehow thought it came down to a vote of whether to have slaves or not.
That would have been so simple. But rather, it was this extraordinarily difficult political process of withstanding all those many “reasonable” compromises — compromises that made garnering the necessary votes more likely easier, but that stopped short of ridding the land of slavery.
What astounded me was the creative genius of southern politicians in coming up with those gutless, halfhearted, and morally deficient compromises. It was their genius pitted against Lincoln’s genius.
I see the same genius at play in the way in which human beings avoid some of the clear teachings of Peter and Paul.
I will happily acknowledge that both Peter and Paul wrote many things that are difficult to swallow.
Both Peter and Paul were completely and profoundly dualistic in their view of the world and specifically what a human being is — that is, both sinner and saint.
(Sometimes it’s hard-core sinners capable at least of being a saint, and at other times it’s saintly people lapsing into sinnerdom.)
On this feast day, however, let me at least point out some of the things the two apostles said about you and me, four of them:
Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become partakers in the divine nature.”
The Church Understands Spiritual Worth of Humanity; 19 Authors Thwart, Eviscerate, Delay, Prevent.
In preparation for this sermon, I’ve been reading a book entitled Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions.
It is a compilation of essays edited by a pair of Methodists from Drew University, Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung. It’s a comprehensive collection of 19 essays by Eastern Orthodox authors, some by Roman Catholics, some by Protestants.
Never have I been so enticed by the promise of a good book. That is how the church in all its variety has understood such passages as I just read pointing to all the supreme spiritual worth of every human being.
The volume focuses on a theological understanding of what the Church Father Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, said so many centuries ago, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
Never have I been so utterly let down upon reading this book to realize that the authors would all have made excellent compromising politicians in finding new and creative ways to keep slavery.
The words that I used before — thwart, eviscerate, delay, prevent — that’s what the 19 authors did to those passages.
• You are a temple of the Holy Spirit. At a minimum, that means that the God of the Universe, however you conceive of such an entity, dwells within you, abides with you. Perhaps not limited by you, by any stretch, but fully present inside your very being.
• You are a child of God. At a minimum, that means that you are of the same species — parents don’t give lives to a kid that’s of a different species. Whatever divinity is, that’s what you are also, at least in some mystical sense. It also means a relationship with parents and children, in which the child is unbelievably precious to the parent.
• We are being transformed into the same image of God. One of the great mystical teachings of virtually every religion is that we are made in the image of God, “imago Dei” in Latin. B’tselem elohim in Hebrew.
I did my entire doctoral dissertation on what it might mean to be created in the image of God. The word for transformation is “metamorphosis.”
In your own mind, try to get a feeling for what this verse might be saying. At a minimum, we are metamorphosing back into that primal, Edenic image of God, fueled by the Spirit dwelling within and further fueled by our royal status as children of God.
• We are partakers of the divine nature. At minimum, this means . . . Wow!
Do We Believe Any of This Stuff? Don’t Be Afraid to Embrace Who You Are; Love Yourself and Others.
Or do we instead believe the narrative that we are miserable sinners, lucky to be getting by?
Chances are that we are somewhere in the middle.
Actually in the middle, just like those politicians trying to preserve some semblance of slavery.
And I’m going to soften my tone about them. It may be the case that they were just afraid. Perhaps some of them were genuinely mean people, who simply didn’t care about an African man or woman, let alone their children. Perhaps a few of them really believed they were subhuman, somewhere around three-fifths.
But I doubt that was true of all those politicians. Rather, they might have been afraid. They might have been thinking . . .
“We won’t be able to get this passed unless we compromise. Everybody knows that.”
“If we get rid of the slaves, it might bring financial ruin upon half the country.”
“If we pass abolition, it might unleash an angry and violent mob of Africans upon the white population. They will want revenge.”
It might have been they were afraid, and in their fear all those potential compromises have a certain appeal.
Don’t be afraid to embrace fully who you are: a Temple for the Spirit, a child of God, being transformed into the full image and glory of the Divine, and a partaker of the Divine Nature.
That is who you fully are, and once you embrace who you fully are then realize that this is also true of the next person of a different race, a different gender, a different class, a different orientation.
It is because we do not fully embrace who we are that all the isms exist at all. If we can’t see it in ourselves, how can we see it in others?
Embrace who you are. Love yourself. And then love others as yourself.
Amen.
Download or view the Proceeding Fearfully sermon as a PDF.
Featured Image credit: Dove with Olive Branch, universal symbol of peace and Holy Spirit. PD image courtesy of George Bog, Wiki.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 17, 2018
Some Passages of Scripture Stretch Our Believability . Past the Credulity of Stories.
Let me begin with a quote from Loren Eiseley. Some of you might recognize the name. He was a naturalist, a philosopher, and he died 15-20 years ago. I looked up his obituary in The New York Times, where he was referred to as a modern-day Thoreau.
Here’s the quote:
“While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. ‘He doesn’t know,’ my friend whispered excitedly. ‘He is passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know.
Maybe it’s happening right now to us.’ ”
I have long known there are passages of scripture that stretch our believability and strain our credulity.
Most people venerate the Bible, and they try to believe what it says.
This is with full knowledge that at least some of the stories of the Bible are fictional from the beginning but with the intention of teaching through the story. The fable of Jonah and the Whale comes to mind, or perhaps the Book of Job.
There are also some people who simply have trouble believing certain things in the Bible, miracles, typically, such as the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection or some of the healings or turning water into wine.
Even though they might take a pass on some of the phenomena, they are just fine with the general message of the Bible.
Those aren’t what I’m talking about this morning. I’m talking about some of the things that sound okay, but the more we think about them, the more outlandish, the more impossible, and the more utterly nonsensical do they seem.
Two Examples Include the Peaceful Kingdom and the Greater Works Promised by JC.
I’m going to give you three examples. The first two won’t get me in trouble, but the third one will.
Example number one. The Peaceable Kingdom (Isaiah 11: 6-9). You hear it at Christmastime:
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over
the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put
its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the
knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.”
It’s hard to believe that the wolf shall live with the lamb or the lion shall eat straw, at least in a literal way.
You know wolves and leopards and lions are meat eaters. They have canine teeth well-adapted for killing, and I don’t see them eating straw anytime soon.
Neither shall a nursing child safely play over the hole of an asp.
Example number two. This is in John 14, a famous passage beginning with Jesus speaking to his disciples after having foretold his betrayal:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”
Then in response to a remark from Philip, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied, Jesus said, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”
“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
This is the “greater works than these” passage.
Upon sober reflection, we look at some of the things that Jesus did: He healed people who were paralyzed, and he restored sight to people who were born blind. He turned water into wine; that was pretty cool. He walked on water, also cool. Resurrection after having been slain, not so bad.
And then my absolute favorite of all Jesus’ wonders, telling one of his disciples to cast a line and catch a fish, and in the fish’s mouth was a coin large enough to pay a tax. Now I’m sorry, but that is way cool.
But then he says that you and I can do even better, and I’m just not so sure of it. I haven’t seen anybody move a mountain or pay their taxes that way.
Here is the third example that might get me into trouble. From the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6: 25-33). [Note: The Roman and boldface type are from the Bible; the italic type is commentary by AMS.]:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, [Everybody who hasn’t ever worried, please raise your hands.] what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; [They don’t do a lick of work, and they’re doing just fine.] they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing?
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; [They don’t do any work either, and look how beautiful they are.] they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ [Gentiles do all that stuff. Instead, keep the kingdom of God and his righteousness.] And all these things will be given to you as well.”
But this doesn’t match our experience at all.
We’ve all seen poor people who certainly don’t look or smell like lilies. Will God not much more clothe you? I want to be respectful, but apparently not, because we’ve all seen many without proper clothing, proper food, proper shelter. We know it well. Many of such poor have striven mightily for the kingdom of God.
It makes me, and maybe you, a little jaded and a bit numbed because we take these passages — the Peaceable Kingdom, the Greater Things than These, Consider the Lilies —with a grain of salt.
Maybe Jesus is exaggerating, perhaps trying to make a point with hyperbole. I don’t know, but it’s pretty hard to take such teachings seriously and literally.
Now I’m Going to Ask You to Combine Two Thoughts; One Is Easy, One Is Harder.
I want you to meld the two separate thoughts and make them into one thought.
Here is the easy one:
I want you to think about imagination. Reason about the human ability to contemplate something that isn’t in existence and imagine it as though it were in existence. Intellectualize the way in which we have that ability, and we use it every day.
Think John Lennon’s song Imagine:
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/VOgFZfRVaww” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for todayImagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, youYou may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as oneImagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, youYou may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.(Songwriter: John Winston Lennon)
“While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. ‘He doesn’t know,’ my friend whispered excitedly. ‘He is passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.’ ”
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 10, 2018
Two Unitarian Universalists are arguing about religion.
The first one squares himself and mouths to the second that he is so ignorant about religion that he probably doesn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer. He puts $5 on the table and says, “I bet you $5 you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.”
The second Unitarian Universalist broadens his face with a grin, puffs himself up and retorts, “Oh yes, I do. ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ ”
At which point, the first Unitarian Universalist drops his shoulders and admits, “Okay, darn it. Here’s your five bucks.”
About two years ago, believe it or not, I was asked to preach on the Lord’s Prayer. Better late than never, I suppose.
This prayer is, of course, by far the best-known piece of Christian scripture ever, recited perhaps billions of times around the globe every Sunday morning.
However, being extremely well-known, it is also very easy to say it and never once think about what is being said.
The Lord’s Prayer goes deep inside us, way deep.
I was once asked to visit a church member’s father, who was in a nursing home in Syracuse. The father’s time on this earth was drawing close, and he was profoundly wrapped in Alzheimer’s dementia.
During the time I visited him, conversation was completely impossible, but every once in a while, he would mumble something way underneath his breath.
Once I leaned over him and tried to understand what he was gibbering, what the man was muttering, and it dawned on me that he was trying to recite the 23rd Psalm.
“Wow!” I thought. I mentioned that to the nurse as I was leaving. “Do you realize this guy knows the 23rd Psalm?”
She answered quickly, “Oh yes! He knows the 23rd Psalm; he knows the Lord’s Prayer; and believe it or not, he also knows the Syracuse Fight Song.”
Now let me tell you some facts about the Lord’s Prayer that you might not have known. Then I also want to look more closely at a few of the lines within it.
• The Lord’s Prayer is found twice within the Bible, albeit in reduced form as we know it now.
We read the Matthew 6: 9-13 version, and then there’s a slightly shorter version in Luke 11: 2-4. It is not found in Mark or in John.
• In Matthew, the context is the Sermon on the Mount, Chapters 5 through 7, in which Jesus in this particular form is talking about praying in non-hypocritical ways, so as not to seem ostentatious or wordy or pious by others.
In other words, don’t pray in the end zone right after you’ve scored a touchdown so that you’re seen by everybody, but rather pray in your closet off your bedroom.
• In Luke, the context is the disciples asking Jesus how to pray, and JC says, “Do it this way.”
The Lord’s Prayer is original with Jesus, but only up to a point. The theme or concept in every single line of the prayer can be found in the Hebrew scriptures, in his Jewish tradition.
There are only three things generally referred to as “the Lord’s,” which would be the Lord’s Prayer, the Lord’s Supper, and the Lord’s Day.
It is probably not a coincidence that those three occasions do more to unite the global church than probably anything else.
On that one day of the week, celebrating holy communion, praying the words that he taught us, Lord’s Day, Lord’s Supper, Lord’s Prayer.
You might have noticed when Deb Miller read the Matthew version of the Lord’s Prayer in the pre-Sermon scripture reading, it didn’t have the final sentence, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.”
It was not in the Luke version, either.
What happened is that the phrase, called a doxology, was added to the prayer in the Byzantine liturgy going way back to the Fourth and the Fifth Centuries.
A whole millennium later, in the early 1600’s in England, at the time when the King James Bible was being prepared for publication, the oldest manuscripts accessible to the translators of the period were from the Byzantine liturgy.
With some reason, they thought the phrase was original from Jesus himself. That’s why the scribes at the time put the doxology into the original editions of the Book of Common Prayer.
Three centuries later, translators had much earlier exegeses of the Lord’s Prayer at their disposal, and they realized that their predecessors had jumped to a conclusion and had been wrong. But by that time, the form of the prayer had been set, and it had caught on permanently. It’s a nice ending anyway.
• The 1611 insertion of the doxology in the Lord’s Prayer in England’s Book of Common Prayer occurred first.
That version was used by the Anglicans and the Episcopalians and eventually the Protestants, but not the Catholics.
The Roman Catholic Church did not add the doxology to their prayer until well past the middle of the Twentieth Century, which of course made it interesting when Protestants and Catholics worshipped together.
Toward the end of that prayer, the Catholics would look up and wonder why the Protestants were still praying even after the prayer was over. And the Protestants looked up and wondered why the Catholics stopped early and didn’t finish the prayer.
In 1969, however, the Catholics blinked first and added the doxology to their Roman Rite Mass.
Deciding the difference between using the word “debts” or “trespasses” is definitely amusing, no matter which word you choose.
You might like to try that when you’re worshipping away from your home church. Try using the wrong word on purpose. It’s always a lot of fun.
For English speakers, the word “debts” comes from a translation by John Wycliffe going back to 1395.
But then, well over a century later, William Tyndale did a translation in 1526 and decided to use the word “trespasses.”
The word in Greek, and actually in each of those two different English words as they were understood at the time, didn’t mean just financial debt or trespassing on somebody’s property.
The words mean more generally what we might call sins or offenses. There are so many ecumenical versions of the prayer that now in modern times, many churches just use the word “sins.”
Let’s look at some portions of the Lord’s Prayer, a few of the phrases in it, but I would remind you that Jesus spoke in Aramaic.
The Aramaic version was translated into the Greek, and then the Greek was used for the English version that we’re used to.
However, I will be referencing some erudition by the Aramaic scholar, Neil Douglas-Klotz. He has at least four books out, examining the Aramaic words of Jesus. In particular, I’ll be quoting and using his book, called Prayers of the Cosmos, which looks at the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes.
What I have come to learn from his research and from studying it is that this prayer is not merely practical.
It’s not just that people will need to be forgiven or will want something to eat today and every day, but rather, the Lord’s Prayer has a powerful mystical side to it, a very deep spiritual side to it, which I hope you will understand.”
Want to know just how powerful a prayer The Lord’s Prayer is intended to be … and can be? The Aramaic version holds clues.
Download or view the full sermon PDF now …
Featured Image Credit: Jesus Preaching the Sermon on the Mount
Gustave Doré. PD Wikimedia Commons.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 3, 2018
A Gothic Cathedral Spurs Psalm, “Better Is a Day in Your Courts Than a Thousand Elsewhere”
There is an official Congregational Meeting after church today.
Is it appropriate to spend $100,000 of the church’s money, which by the way is actually your money, to redo the entrance off the parking lot?
Well, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but there is no way I’m going to answer that question.
However, I do want to talk about church buildings, at least a little. As a matter of fact, it was a sanctuary that was my first clue that I was destined to be a religious person. It was at my parents’ church, and I was of kindergarten-age.
Prior to the worship service there was an adult discussion group that met fifty minutes or so for the previous hour, and my parents would plant me in the sanctuary — no baby sitter, no supervision necessary. I would just sit there in the pew and look around, sort of soak it all in. I remember it to this day, and I loved it.
Nowadays, whenever visiting a new city, I have an urge to go to one of the local churches to check it out.
Once when I went to visit our kids in the Raleigh-Durham area, I went to Duke University to visit the chapel there, a gothic cathedral, huge, gorgeous, impressive, and I had to see it in person. That little line from Psalm 84 came to mind. “Better is a day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.”
I’ve always felt that way, with one exception — a day in the courts is roughly equal to a day in nature, sitting by a stream. But then those days in nature might be God’s courts as well.
Look at them: the huge spaces, the stained glass, the woodwork.
Why do we spend so much effort and money to erect places of worship?
Churches, temples, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, ashrams — all of them, I would suggest, do something symbolic for the soul. That is, they connect heaven and earth because you can walk right in at ground level.
You can feel the functional foundation, built ever so securely, often out of stone. And the way they are built, with spire and vaulted ceiling, draws your eye upward. You can’t help it. They’re rooted in the earth, but with spire and ceiling, you feel the connection between heaven and earth.
On the communion table, you will see a bronze candlestick there with a white taper in it. It comes from my personal altar in my living room, and it’s something I’m fond of, not only because it’s old but also because of its symbolism.
Even though my candlestick is only about a hundred years old, it is modeled after a pair of candlesticks of the same style and appearance from a Zen monastery in Japan from the Fourteenth Century. It has two turtles on the bottom, a mother and a tiny turtle right beside it, and on the back of the larger turtle is a crane and in the beak of the crane is a lotus flower.
The symbolism of the candlestick is exactly the same as the symbolism of a sanctuary, which connects heaven and earth. The turtle has its feet in the mud and its head in the air. The crane has its feet in the mud and its head in the air. The lotus flower has its roots in the mud and the flower up in the air. In each case, putting them together is designed to remind the viewer there’s a connection, they’re linked.
Two Core Symbolisms of a Ladder: Connections Between High/Low, Incremental Rungs for Ascension.
This brings us finally to the scripture for today — the story of Jacob’s Ladder.
(As an aside, I will be glad when we can move on to a different scripture passage at some point. “We . . . . are . . . . climbing . . . . Jacob’s . . . Ladder” is an unbelievably slow song because he had a long dream.)
Rather than applying exegetical techniques to this passage, I would actually like to apply dream symbolism to it. So Jacob fell asleep, and he had a dream about this ladder with angels ascending and descending on it.
For dream symbolism, you never want to get fancy because you don’t want to get nuanced, you don’t want to get complex about it. It’s straightforward; here’s what it means.
What is the symbolism of a ladder?
It connects something high up, out of reach from where you are, planted on the ground. You’ve got a leaky roof, and there you are, standing on the ground, looking up at it. It’s the ladder that is the connection between the high and the low, between the out-of-reach and what’s at hand.
But ladders actually have two core symbolisms: One is the connection between the high and the low; the other one is that there are rungs on the ladder to ascend. There are increments, one at a time as you rise.
There’s a phrase, “He’s climbing the corporate ladder,” meaning he’s got a job. What’s the next job? And when he gets that one, what’s the next job after that?
Take one or both of those symbolisms — connecting the high and the low, or the rungs for the incremental steps. Take those and look at life from the point of view of Jacob, or better yet, look at it from your point of view, your life.
Here you are, sitting in a church pew, inside a sanctuary, and in the back of your mind are your problems, the things that are always there, cooking around in your mind as well as in your heart.
Then, because your issues overpower the sermon, you nod off and fall asleep for a while. But then you wake up with a sense of assurance, a sense of joy that heaven and earth are connected, that all your worries are understood by the divine, and you have access to the power that heaven and earth are connected. And as if that weren’t enough, you realize that the actual place where you’re sitting is the connection between heaven and earth. You’re back to a spot where they’re connected, and you knew it not!
So you build a memorial, and you name the place Bethel — House of God. And you exclaim to everyone that this is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.
Do you perceive the way this story is an archetype for everyone’s story? The way it applies to each and every one of you in your individual circumstances — feet on the ground, soul linked to God, and you knew it not.
Churches are our memorial. Churches are our Bethel, the House of God and the Gate of Heaven. And sometimes we just don’t know it. Sometimes we forget.
(Read the full sermon for excluded text. Link below.)
Embracing Christ-consciousness, putting on the mind of Christ wakes us up aware of what already is. And what already is, is that heaven and earth, God and humanity, Spirit and flesh are already connected, already linked, Spirit infusing all materiality existing within spirit.
Until the day we awaken to the fact; until the day we incorporate that gospel truth into our souls; until that day, we will read Jacob’s story and try to incorporate the symbolism into our lives, let it sink in; until that day, we will place candlesticks with turtles and cranes and lotus flowers upon our altars.
And until that day, we will build churches and cathedrals with towering spires and vaulted ceilings to remind us because for now, we need reminders. As a rule, we know it not, but we are waking up.
Amen.
View or Download full The Gate of Heaven sermon.
Featured Image Credit: Mosaic of Pentecost in the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis. Photo by Pete Unseth. CC-SSA, Wikimedia.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on Trinity Sunday, May 27, 2018
(Memorial Day Weekend)
Christianity Is a Latecomer to Trinitarianism; if Three Equals One, Anticipate Some Problems.
Several things are going on this Sunday. The obvious one is Memorial Day Weekend. A little less obvious is that this is also Trinity Sunday, the final Sunday of the church year, beginning in Advent and then concluding today.
The rest of the time from tomorrow up to the first Sunday of Advent in December is unimaginatively called Ordinary Time.
An even less obvious thing is that for a certain minister originally from Indianapolis, to- day is Race Day. Couldn’t care less? Okay, that’s me.
The sermon has two parts to it: The first is academic, at least a bit. I’ll try not to allow it to be too boring. The second part of the sermon is a pair of stories, one from history, another is personal. Hopefully, I can bring these two together.
Concerning Trinity Sunday, trinities are actually found in a lot of places, not just in the Christian version of it.
For example, six centuries before Christ, Plato envisioned divinity as an interflow, an interplay of truth, beauty, and goodness. I try to reflect that in the prayer for the dedication of the offerings almost every Sunday, thanking God for truth, beauty, and goodness.
There are many others. Within the pantheon of the Greeks, there was a trinity at the top. Same thing for the Romans; same thing for Egypt. The Germanic tribes had trinities; so did the Persians.
Christianity was simply the latest version of trinity. However, when you were going around saying, “Three equals one,” pretty much you should anticipate some problems. Judaism, out of which Christianity emerged, was clearly monotheistic at this time.
But the Christians had a problem in that dozens of places in the New Testament, things are worded in ways that very strongly lead the reader toward trinitarian thinking.
For example, we are instructed at the end of the gospel to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Or Paul says bless the people in these words, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you this day and forevermore.”
And Jesus talked a lot about God and his Father and then also about the giving of the Son.
Anyway, by 451, the church had it all settled. Christianity would be technically monotheistic, one God presenting in three different ways, and they used a technical term that I won’t dwell on, but it’s called homoousias, ousias meaning “essence” or “being” and homo meaning “same.” But God presented in these three different ways but one essence, one being behind it all.
I was satisfied with this answer for a long time, for the vast majority of my career, because after all, centuries of work went into it. The church struggled with this for centuries, and then finally in 451 settled upon that, and this understanding is venerated to this day: the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed.
Brand-new clergy are generally enjoined to write a statement of faith, and it had better be in a trinitarian formula: Here’s what I believe about God; here’s what I believe about Jesus; here’s what I believe about the Holy Spirit. Break from that form at your peril when you are in the process of being ordained.
However, I did feel that a deeper answer came when trinity met the Eastern religions. The Tao, for example. There’s one Tao, yet it is in all things. It is in nature, human beings, sentient beings. It is in the All. Buddha Nature is in all things. It’s in the Buddha. But it’s also in all people, all sentient beings. It’s in all created order.
It was the Hindus, actually, who spelled it out a lot more. They had their one big god that they called Brahman. But then there was a trinity: There is Brahman the creator and then there is Vishnu and Shiva, Vishnu being the preserver and Shiva being the destroyer. Vishnu being order, and Shiva being chaos. And so things are created, they last for a while, they dissolve, they die, they get recycled. It’s whether you’re a human being or a washing machine.
It’s pristine and brand-new but has its life cycle and returns. Brahman creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys.
But underneath those three are three more and underneath those nine are bunches more until you have one and then you have three and then you have nine and then you have 10,000. Then at the end is the infinite, and they gave a name to it, the Atman, which is also Brahman, to be found in all things.
So here’s a quote for you: Brahman is homo- ousias with the Atman. Now I had found it in all things.
Is this what Jesus was hinting at when he prayed that “They might all be one even as I and the Father are one”? Is this what it means when a tripartite human being — body, mind, and soul — is made in the image of God? Is this what it means when God is in all things, Christ is in all things, the Spirit is in all things?
Okay, that’s the lecture. Now that I’ve nearly lost all of you, thanks for staying with me so far.
Now a pair of stories, one from history and one personal. I can’t think of Trinity Sunday without also thinking about the biggest split that the church has ever had. It happened in the year 1054, called the Great Schism, and it had to do with trinitarian understanding. It had to do with a lot of other things as well, but that was one of the big ones. I want to tell you just a bit of that story. It’s actually pretty interesting.
The Eastern church was based in Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Western church was based in Rome, of course.
In Rome, there was Pope Leo IX, and over in Constantinople there was the Ecumenical Patriarch by the name of Michael Cerularius. There was growing distrust, growing differences between the Western center and the Eastern center, mostly having to do with theology, which I’ll touch on in a minute. But it also had to do with language; one was Greek, the other was Latin.
Furthermore, it had to do with some political differences, the way in which they organized themselves, and it also had to do with geography. One was European, and one was more Middle Eastern or even on the border of Asia. So anyway, that happened in 1054.
The year before, in 1053, Pope Leo IX, feeling full of himself and knowing that he was the supreme ruler of all churches across the entire globe, learned that there were Greek churches in southern Italy, using the Greek version of the mass rather than the Latin mass. So he ordered all those Greek churches throughout southern Italy to convert to the Latin mass. Never mind that they didn’t speak Latin, they spoke Greek.
As anybody with an ounce of common sense and any experience in church life knows, that didn’t go over well. These churches immediately cried foul, not to Rome but to Constantinople and told Michael Cerularius what Pope Leo had done, and wasn’t that awful? Then Cerularius immediately closed down all of the Latin churches in Constantinople.
It reminds me of schoolyard arguments. It’s that level of quarrelling going on between the two heads of churches.
Leo IX sends a delegation to Constantinople with two purposes: One is to inform Michael Cerularius that he must bend the knee, that he must submit to the authority of the Pope under all conditions. The delegation also had one other task, and that was to argue for money because Leo IX was waging a war for some reason in Rome, and he needed more money for it.
Here are the two things: Bend the knee and submit to the authority of Pope Leo IX, and by the way, could you come up with some cash to cover Romish expenses for a war against upstarts.
So what do you think that Michael did?
Find out (and read the personal story, plus the 2 ‘morals of the story’) …
Download or View the full sermon PDF.
Featured image: The Trinity as it could have been seen before 1904 (a photomontage). The painting is covered by the riza and coated with a layer of drying oil. Troitsa Collage, 2008, by монтаж участника shakko. Creative Commons, Wikimedia.
“We tend not to think that way, and yet there it is: the power, presence, guidance, and love of God found physically everywhere in the cosmos, as well infusing and surrounding you.”
Pastor’s Perspective
By the time you read this, we will be at the very end of the church year. It begins with the first Sunday of Advent back in December, and concludes with two of the lesser Christian festivals, Pentecost and then Trinity Sunday, which this year coincides with Memorial Day Weekend.
The “pente” in Pentecost stands for five, in this case being fifty days after the Resurrection.
Pentecost was the time when the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus at the Ascension, was poured out upon the people. it therefore is considered the birthday of the church.
I mentioned above that it is one of the lesser festivals. It in no way compares with Christmas or Easter. There are probably multiple reasons why, but one of them has to do with our general non-understanding or misunderstanding of the Spirit.
Throughout twenty centuries of Christian experience, only a tiny fraction of all those sermons, articles, and books have been about the Spirit. Really, only in the 20th Century did this begin to change, notably with a book on the Holy Spirit by Billy Graham (1978).
Perhaps also it is a different and difficult way of thinking to realize that divinity is literally everywhere, yet invisible.
We tend not to think that way, and yet there it is: the power, presence, guidance, and love of God found physically everywhere in the cosmos, as well infusing and surrounding you.
The Psalmist wrote, “Where can I flee from your presence?” and mentions both heaven and hell, but no, God is there as well. Jesus said at his Ascension, “Behold, I am with you always, even to those close of the age.”
Several symbols have been used over the centuries to help us apprehend such thoughts. The Spirit has been likened to a dove (bringing peace and newness as in the story of Noah) which is why the uppermost stained glass on the rear wall is of a dove.
The color for Pentecost is red, symbolizing the flame of fire as at the day of Pentecost recounted in the Book of Acts. Clergy wear red stoles at an ordination, as a prayer that this new minister would be guided and filled by the Spirit throughout his or her ministry.
But the best symbol is our very breath. God breathed upon Adam and Eve and they became more than clay, but living beings. Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Even the very word in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for spirit also means breathe, or wind.
But thinking of the Spirit as infinitely present, yet invisible, yet also the very manifestation of God’s power and love, is just plain difficult.
We tend not to think about our breathing. It is automatic, and our mind is elsewhere. But when you do find yourself thinking about your breath, perhaps in meditation, or perhaps you’re trying to swim the length of the pool without surfacing, think also of the presence of God. Our creator, redeemer, and sustainer is inescapable, with us to the close of the age.
Blessings upon you all,
The June Forecaster also includes news of the Trustees presenting an initial design to create an access ramp from the parking lot into the facility through new doors placed where the current library windows are located.
FCC also participated in this year’s Sacred Sites TourPreservation Association of the Southern Tier coordinated by the .
The June Forecaster also includes news of upcoming musical (and other) events scheduled for the coming Summer months.
(June Forecaster coming soon in PDF for download)
