Zach Dubord shared a sermon that aligned with some of the major issues and concerns of our time.
Here’s the start of the sermon, and you can listen to the full sermon just below, or download the full sermon (PDF) to read.
“Our Gospel today comes from Luke 19:1-10 which is on page 63 of your pew Bible. It is yet another story involving Jesus and a tax man.
He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.
The Conversion of Zacchaeus, Bernardo Strozzi (1581 – 1644). {{US-PD}} Wikimedia.
When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”
So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”
Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
The Word of the Lord.
Let me tell you a true story. There was an influential man who rose to power during a time of great political division. He was the second of twelve children and grew up in a two-bedroom house with one bathroom He began working in the family business at 8 years old, and was the first person in his family to go to college.”
Find the PDF download below to read, or listen to the full sermon here.
Visit Zach’s Soundcloud for this sermon, or his recent “No Fun Allowed?” FCC sermon.
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 theMetro 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.
Lectionary 183, 10th Century. The Walters Art Museum.
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.
Russian Icon of the Prophet Micah, early 18th Century. conostasis of Transfiguration church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, north Russia.
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.
Illuminated Manuscript, Gospel of John. Walters Art Museum.
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.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 10, 2018
The Lord’s Prayer Is the Best-Known Christian Scripture. It Goes Deep Inside.
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.
Aramaic inscription on a funeral stele from the seventh century B.C. in the Louvre. PD Wikimedia.
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.”
An Accident Brings the Doxology to the Lord’s Prayer — It’s not in Jesus’ Original.
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.
This is a Peshitta (NT Syriac translation) from Iraq dating to the ninth century AD.
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.”
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread Winds up in a Long String of Words
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 Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, based on Neil Douglas-Klotz’s work. Abwoon Resource Network.
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.”
Here are some examples …
Want to know just how powerful a prayer The Lord’s Prayer is intended to be … and can be? The Aramaic version holds clues.
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.
Chapel at Duke University Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Duke University Cathedral.
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.
Why Are Sanctuaries so Beloved? Why Are They Built so Magnificently?
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.
Pair of antique Japanese bronze candlesticks, cranes on tortoises & lotus flowers, circa 1870. Image courtesy of Carter’s Antiquities Guide.
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.
Jacob’s Dream by William Blake (c. 1805, British Museum, London). PD Wikimedia.
(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!
An Archetype for Everyone: Build a Memorial to the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.
Stairs to the top of the tower, Duke University Cathedral. Image courtesy Duke University Chapel.
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.)
Putting on the Mind of Christ Awakens Us to God & Humanity, Spirit & Flesh Already Connected.
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.
Stained glass window, historic sanctuary at First Congregational Church, Binghamton, N.Y. Photo by J. Walters.
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.
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.
Adoration of the Trinity, c. 1791-1792, by Vicente López y Portaña (1772–1850).
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.
The Trinitarian Formula Is a Must for New Clergy. A Deeper Answer Comes with Eastern Religions.
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?
Trinity Sunday Has Memories of the Biggest Split Ever in the Church — the Great Schism.
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.
Year 1054 Arrives when Rome Goes to Constantinople. Two Big Issues — Bread and Argument.
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’) …
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.
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 4, 2018
This is the third in the series of sermons on The Good Book. Here is the Rev. Dr. Art Suggs’ Pink Smoke sermon.
Four Brief Bible Passages from the New Testament
First of all, over in my left-hand corner, we have The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 14: 33-35:
“As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
Also over in my left-hand corner, is The First Letter of Paul to Timothy 2: 11-12:
“Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”
Now, over in my right-hand corner, we have The Gospel According to John 20: 18:
“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”
That’s the passage that makes Mary Magdalene the first apostle.
Also over in my right-hand corner is The Letter of Paul to the Galatians 3: 27-28:
“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
A small Bible printed by Robert Barker in 1614, belonging to St Mary’s Church, Datchet.
Here are four passages that reflect the tension within the Bible itself.
They remind me of an old W.C. Fields joke.
He was quite the reprobate, you know, and there he is, on his death bed, when a priest comes in and finds him leafing through the Bible. The priest asks, “What are you looking for?” And W.C. Fields replies, “A loophole.”
When I was in seminary in the early 80’s, women preachers were coming into their own, and in many ways, it was hard and not welcomed.
One of the spiteful remarks that went around among the men was that female preachers were like a dog walking on two legs. They don’t do it well, but you’re surprised they can do it at all.
I laughed at that joke back in those days, but I was raised sexist, racist, and homophobic.
Having reflected all of those beliefs in the early part of my life, I soon realized that did not comport with the likes of Cynthia Jefferts, associate pastor of the Nassau Presbyterian Church, or Barbara Brown Taylor, a guest preacher in the area from time to time, who were among the finest preachers I’ve ever heard.
Then as now, over 30 years later, they are still two of the finest preachers I have ever heard.
Cursory Readings of the Bible Reveal Strong Women
Continuing this series on the Bible, the topic for today, the Bible and women, is brought to you by a white male.
Actually, it’s strange that the Bible has been used to subjugate women.
Just a cursory reading reveals that you have in the Old Testament Eve, whose name actually means “life.” Yet here is the mother of all living humans.
There are the wives of the patriarches, all of whom were forces to be reckoned with: Abraham had his Sarah, Isaac had his Rebekah, Jacob had his Leah and Rachel. You have the books of Esther and Ruth, the stories of brave and faithful women, their wisdom and their leadership.
Saint Sophia, Almighty Wisdom, by Nicholas Roerich. Roerich Museum, NYC.
And then there is the mystical text, found in Proverbs, regarding what is now called the Lady Sophia. The way the story is told is that you have God working with Wisdom, and Wisdom is entirely feminine. The Lady Sophia, or the Hokmah in Hebrew, represents feminine energy working with God in order to create all that exists.
Prominent Women in the New Testament
In the New Testament, you have stories such as Lydia in Acts 16, a seller of purple goods, basically a professional businesswoman, who was very involved in the early church in a leadership capacity.
There is Phoebe, recounted in Romans 16, referred to as having significant titles as adelphe, a brother and sister in Christ. She was called a deaconos, from which we get the word deacon, except, at that time, the word also meant leadership in the sense of preaching and teaching, also with the elders. Furthermore, she was called a prostasis, what we would call a patron, a benefactor.
In other words, she was a material supporter and establisher of the church.
Holy Women at the Sepulchre, 1611-1618, by Peter Paul Rubens. PD Wikimedia.
We also have the story of Priscilla and her husband Aquila, also found in Romans. The pair preached, taught, and established churches, and “risked their necks” for the early church.
These were some of the prominent ones mentioned in the New Testament, but beyond prominence there are two women who were venerated, the two Marys.
Venerated Women of the New Testament
You have Mary, the mother of Jesus, given two titles that are the highest the church can confer, the highest of all, well beyond the title of pope. Mary the mother is exalted in the Eastern church, to use their word, called theotokos, God bearer, the mother of God, and she is also given the title of the First Theologian because of her pondering the nature of her child.
Then you have the other Mary, Mary Magdalene, given the title of the First Apostle because she was the first one after the Resurrection sent out to bear the news of Jesus’ life after death. In addition to that title, Mary Magdalene was in all probability the wife of Jesus.
Except for the possibility of Mary Magda lene being the wife of Jesus, all of these women are recognized throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Christ in the House of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, Jacopo and Francesco Bassano, c. 1576–77.
Alas, there is one detail that eclipses all of that history, one that for some reason is seen to be of greatest importance. And that detail is Jesus’ choice of twelve men for his disciples.
Never mind that he traveled with an entourage that included not only the twelve but additional men and women, but no matter, the disciples were all men.
The interpretation of that was slam-dunk proof, Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum). Thus and therefore and henceforth, yea unto the end of time, the church shall be ruled by men only.
Featured Image Credit: The Bible used by Abraham Lincoln for his oath of office during his first inauguration in 1861. PD image by Michaela McNichol, Library of Congress.
Because Jesus was teaching spiritual freedom in a time of brutal occupation and slavery, where there was no sense of justice for oppressed peoples.
As Pastor Art notes in the sermon, “So this cute story, with animals and angels, and wise men and shepherds is at the root of a parabolic overture to a deeper and grander story of spiritual freedom and spiritual healing for all of us.”
In the second sermon in his series on Christianity 2.0., on October 29, 2017, the Rev. Dr. Art Suggs (a.k.a. Pastor Art) started with a provocative excerpt from Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith.
As the title of this sermon suggests, Pastor Art’s sermon delved deeply into some of the stickier questions that confront and invite spiritual growth among contemporary Christians — including one questions that changed the life and ministry of a Michigan mega-church pastor.
