We Are Not Alone

A Sermon by the Rev. Janet L. Abel
Preached on Sunday, July 13, 2014

 

What Jesus Didn’t Say

We are not alone.  A great passage of Scripture and one of my personal favorites is the excerpt from Matthew 11: 28 that I just read (NRSV):  “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens.”  There are times in our lives when we know that this excerpt hits us in a special way.  We need these timeless words.  Other times we may be less vulnerable and less receptive to them.  So what makes a burden heavy?  By its very definition, a burden is always heavy.

Here’s what Jesus didn’t say:  Come unto me all you who are skipping with happiness.  Come unto me all you who have not a care in the world, you who are completely happy.  Know that this invitation is issued to those who have some burden they are carrying.  The weight of the world is on their shoulders.  In the Greek – which I often bring up since I suffered through an entire year of Greek – it translates as “all those who toil and having been laden.”

We’re all toilers at something at some time.  Thankfully, however, work doesn’t always feel like toil, does it?  Every job, inside and outside the home, can sometimes feel like toil, and at other times it’s a blessing.  Aside from the obvious, work has seasons, like life.  At times work is wonderful; it gives us purpose, something to do, and it goes well.  At other times it really feels like toil.  It’s both, a little like toil, nothing major.

You know I have two cats at home.  One, named Steve, is two and a bit of a character.  We’re close, and I occasionally joke that Steve is my fiancé.  People at work are confused because I sometimes wear my mother’s diamonds.  When he’s bad, which is frequently, I take the ring off.  This morning when I got up, the curtains were on the floor, with the curtain-rod brackets down somewhere on a chair.  I thought, that’s just great!  The last thing I wanted to do was to hang curtains before going to work.  But I did.  It was a bit toilsome, but not bad.

The Seasons of Life Include Both Toil and Rest

Life has its seasons, and, like life, work is sometimes toil and sometimes not.  The second half of the invitation is for all those who are carrying heavy burdens.  What might those burdens be?  What is it that can make life heavy?  But burdens are a fact of life, aren’t they?  A burden is a load that we’re given or that we take on.  We can assume a burden either way.  It can result from a diagnosis of disease, from a job that ends with no other job in sight, from a new job that’s just beginning, from a new term of office here at the church, from a family member who’s in trouble, or from any one of hundreds of other causes of a new burden.

I have a friend for whose husband we prayed for a long time.  He died in early May.  Then just a couple of weeks ago, her sister came to my friend’s front door at 5:30 in the morning – you know that’s not a good sign – and told her that her grandson had been in a serious car accident.  He lingered between life and death for weeks in the ICU, and it felt too heavy for my friend.  She was being handed too much, on top of grieving for her husband.  She was additionally burdened with worry about her grandson, not knowing whether he was going to make it or not.

Sometimes we’re given too many burdens at once.  It’s been said that we’re not given any more than we can carry, but that’s not true, is it?  Occasionally we get too much.  And then there’s the thing itself that happens, the cause of the worry and anxiety that surround it.  That too is a terrible burden.  Sometimes I think it’s often worse than the thing itself.  Anxiety and fear cut us off, isolate us.  That’s also an awful burden.  I had been thinking about illness itself, but isolation is one of the worst things about being sick.  Whether mentally or physically, we feel cut off.  We feel as though no one understands what we’re going through when we’re ill.

A Prescription for Rest

“Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  Oh, that word “rest.”  That’s a much more agreeable word, isn’t it, than “burden”?  What comes to your mind when I say the word “rest”?  What is your favorite image of rest?  I think there’s nothing more restful than lolling about in a hammock on a summer day, when you should be doing yard work.  If you come to my house, you can tell I’ve made my peace with weeds.  I’ve decided that they deserve as much of a chance at life as do plants.

There’s something about hammocks.  I sleep better there than almost anywhere else.  My couch also comes to mind when I think about rest.  It faces the TV, the stereo, and the fireplace.  I love my couch, I really do.  And as I get older, I have to tell you, there are times when I’m toiling that I picture my couch and can’t wait to get home to it.

Vacations are a special treat in these summer months.  A lot of you have been away or might be going away.  Beach or mountains, camp.  Swimming and grilling, picnics.  Good sleep at night is good rest, and that is a blessing when we realize that insomnia deprives some of us of sleep.  That’s a burden, not being able to sleep.  And after a good rest on vacation, there’s less pain on sitting or standing.  Some of us know what that’s like on a daily basis.  And perhaps the ability to rid ourselves of anxiety, of fear, of isolation.  That’s no easy thing to do, is it?

“Take My Yoke Upon You”

In the three last verses of Matthew 11, Jesus is getting at how to do just that.  Don’t we all want to hand over our burdens?  Don’t we want to worry less?  Don’t we want the load of what we’re carrying at least to feel lighter?  But frankly, we can’t always hand off what we’ve been handed in life.  It’s our load to carry.  But Jesus said to us, “Take my yoke upon you.”  Excuse me?  When I first read that, I thought, “How does that lighten our load?”

And what is a yoke anyway?  You’ve seen it in the movies, or maybe some of you know from a farm what a yoke is, how oxen are yoked together.  It’s a big two-piece wood-and-metal contraption that curves over the base of the necks of a team and under their necks, against which the force of drawing is exerted by their shoulders.

And Jesus is saying, here, are you heavy-laden?  Clunk.  Sounds odd, doesn’t it?  How does that lighten our load?  Well, two oxen wear that yoke so they can pull and plow more effectively together.  Their load is theoretically cut in half.  Not only does it keep them together, but it also spreads out the burden of whatever it is they’re pulling, the plow or the cart.

In a similar manner, humans can bear their burdens more effectively by working together.

In the Ancient Near East (ANE, shorthand for the time period in which Jesus lived), during the old days of Israel and the Middle East, this mechanism was used on human beings in order to control them as prisoners or slaves.  You’ve probably seen that in the movies too, when actors wore those wooden contraptions with their arms attached to them.  It’s not a pretty image to think of these things in use on humans, even in the early days of our own country.

A yoke was a symbol of control, ownership and service, and early on it became a mark of slavery, which was common.  Marks or brands were also used to identify slaves.  Earrings too, as well as tattoos.  Forced economic or political labor was known as “bearing the yoke,” as Israel bore the yoke of Imperial Rome.  Is that the kind of yoke that Jesus meant?  “Take my yoke upon you.”  I don’t think so.

The Yoke as a Symbol:  You’re Never Alone

So what Jesus really means is that we’re never really alone.  Our heavy burdens can make us think so, but Jesus is right there because we are all connected.  And if we feel that connection, for that’s what the yoke represents, then we know, deep in our soul, that we’re never alone.  We’re all here to help carry each other’s burdens.

And that’s why our last two hymns today are “Abide with Me” (you’re right here with me) and “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.”  Take my yoke upon you, and there you will find rest for your soul.  What kind of rest is that?  It’s not just putting our feet up, is it?  Not the kind we get from lying on a beach in Hawaii.  But it’s the kind of rest we feel inside, no matter what is going on in our lives.  The knowledge, the sure knowledge that all will be well and we that have nothing to fear.  We are never, never alone.

So “Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” says Jesus.  “You will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Amen.

A MOVEABLE FEAST

A Sermon by the Rev. Janet L. Abel
Preached on Pentecost Sunday, June 8, 2014

 

Happy Pentecost!

This is one of our three big church holidays.  But does it really feel that way?  Christmas and Easter and Pentecost.  However, we really don’t do much for Pentecost.  There’s a hint of red out there in the congregation.  That’s one of the ways we say it’s Pentecost.  No Pentecost trees, no Pentecost gifts, and that’s probably a good thing.

It’s a holiday weekend, but there’s no need to rush home and put the ham in the oven or make sure everything is decorated.  Christmas is a lot of work.  I love it.  It’s my favorite time of the year, even though it’s work.  And Easter is glorious, but once again there’s some effort involved, not to mention that we get up very early for the sunrise service.

I really enjoy Pentecost and what it celebrates.  The Holy Spirit.  As mysterious as that can be, this is a celebration.  The church’s birthday is on this day.  The people gathered together, and they became one.  That is certainly something to celebrate.  It is a Moveable Feast because the date changes every year.  Some years we agree with the Orthodox churches, and this is one of those years when our Easter and Pentecost fall on the same days as theirs.  So why does it move?  We’ll be getting to that.

My Priest Has Never Told Me That!

A while ago, I worked with a lady who is a resident at St. Louise Manor, where I am on the staff.  She tried out my Bible Study group that meets there on Thursday mornings.  One day we got into a discussion about how Easter is fixed and why that date is so moveable.  Christmas is always on December 25^th, but it moves around the days of the week, although the date always remains the same.

You’ll notice, however, that there’s a huge spread in the different dates when Easter is celebrated.  The dates can fall a month or more apart because of the way the specific date was decided long ago.  Over the centuries, the church fathers have called enormous councils to decide important religious matters.

All right, then, this is orthodox; this is what we’re all going to believe.  Because the dates are so spread out, and there’s no such thing as the printed word, we’re trying to get uniform dates down on paper.  (They didn’t yet have printing presses.)  People are disagreeing with each other.  They’re running around in all directions.  So we’re going to call these councils and get everybody on the same page.

One of those pages was to fix the date of Easter inasmuch as it was being celebrated all over the calendar.  Some people were celebrating it every week, and that was just too much.  But because Pentecost depends on Easter, how was Easter decided?  The church fathers decided to place it on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  This is a perfectly natural reason:  To celebrate new life after the first day of spring.

Well, my lady, who still resides at the St. Louise Manor, didn’t enjoy hearing this.  She took off her glasses and screeched, “My priest has never told me that!  You’re lying!”  And I said, “I’m so sorry I’m upsetting you, but this is the real reason.  Have you ever thought about why Easter . . . .”  “No, I’ve never thought!  I don’t question God!”  She was furious.  I’ll never forget it.  She hasn’t really spoken to me since, and it’s about three years now.

Some people have problems with their memory, but not this lady.  Oh no.  She’s the one who said Easter moves around.  And it’s got to do with the first day of spring, which sounds like goddess worship or something.  So she doesn’t come to Bible Study any more, as you can imagine.  What does that say about her faith?

If it moves, it’s not stable, is it?  It’s not believable.  It’s too human.  Yet I love the fact that the date of Pentecost moves.  Pentecost is based on Easter, 50 days afterward.  And because Easter moves, because spring moves, because the full moon moves, so does Pentecost.  They all move around.

What Is Pentecost?

Let’s look at our Bible story a little more.  What happened here?  After Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are told to wait, and angels are there, looking up to heaven.  There goes Jesus, now what do we do?  The angels say, go back to Jerusalem and wait, and they did.

Ten days later, they’re all gathered together, and more people are obviously joining in.  There are a lot of people here, men and women, including Mary, and certainly more than 12 disciples, or 11 in this case.  There’s a multitude, the Bible says.

Then something major happened.  Hard to describe, but the Bible uses words as though it were like wind, a mighty wind that filled the whole house.  It was like fire, but not exactly, and it rested on each person.  Everybody started to talk.  The language was confused, but all understood that they were one.  And there were many symbols.  Wind and something like fire and words and languages from all over the earth, and yet there was understanding.  These were all symbols of the Holy Spirit, and now the church could truly be born.

There are many images for God used all the time.  A lot of them are from the Bible.  Last Wednesday, reading from The Jewish Annotated New Testament, we looked at some central symbols used for God.  “Handles” as Deb said in the children’s message, God’s big.  You can get a handle on it, you can get a piece of it:  Yahweh, Jehovah, Father, Mother, Abba, Breath, Spirit, Wind, Fire.

Also, the Holy Breath, Ruach in Hebrew, Wisdom from Proverbs.  Holy Wisdom is pictured as being with God at the Creation.  In John, the author picks up that thread in the prologue to his Gospel, which begins very differently from the other three Gospels:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Another image, the spoken word, and then John goes on to say that in Creation, God spoke, and the world began.  These images are helpers.  Somehow, God, one God, is understood and experienced in many different ways.

The Word Dwells Among Us, Filled with Wind and Fire

That’s what Pentecost celebrates.  Then John says in his prologue, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, filled with grace and truth.”  These images are used in our Pentecost story in something like fire and words in a speech, different languages becoming one.  Each image speaks a little differently about what the spirit is and how we might experience it.  I’ve used wind a lot to talk about God’s spirit in and among us.  Wind is something you don’t see, but it’s everywhere.

Have any of you ever gone on line to the Google Wind Map?  Up comes an outline of the United States, showing all the winds, how strong they are, and colored lines that get brighter while they’re moving.  It’s such a cool picture.  You see why our Midwest has so many more problems with wind than we do here in the East.  Nothing’s stopping that wind coming down from Canada, which is much stronger as shown by its patterns.

I looked at the Wind Map the day tornados were spinning in the Midwest, and you could see them.  Go to the East, and we have much gentler winds blowing across New York State and the eastern seaboard.  Look it up on a day of storm, and you’ll really see it.  You can’t see wind, but you can certainly see what it does if you watch television news.  You can see flags flapping; you can see trees and branches down and whole houses uprooted.  It can get pretty powerful and sometimes scary, as in a storm at night.

God’s spirit can be like that.  It can be like fire, warm to the touch, moving, passionate.  And God’s spirit can certainly be like words.  We use words a great deal in our church services whenever we gather.  We read words in our books, we hear the Word, we sing, we pray.  And notice the different languages becoming one.  There are all these languages, Parthians and Medes, and yet they all understand.  Understanding.  Connection.  And the Holy Spirit is everywhere.  It’s moving all the time, which is why it’s great.  Because Pentecost is a holiday that moves like Easter.  New life moves too.

But what does that say about our faith?  If it moves, are we like the lady at St. Louise?  It’s not stable.  It’s not believable.  It’s too human.

My Theology Is Dangerous; the Holy Spirit Is in Too Many Places

A long time ago, I went to seminary.  Not as long ago as Art, but we went to the same place, and I was there after him, ’92 to ’95.  I decided right in the middle of the three-year Master’s program that I would take the Presbyterian ordination exam in my second year rather than the third year.  Presbyterians have to take what they call ordination exams.  I should have skipped to the UCC right then and there.

But of course the Presbyterians believe in tests, and they are very hard tests.  They’re like the LSAT and the medical boards, so they’re similar to a board, a really difficult thing that must be passed.  It’s not so much that it’s hard, but you have to kind of agree with the party line.

Despite not having been raised Presbyterian and thus not really indoctrinated in Presbyterian theology, I nevertheless decided to take my theological board a year early.  So I took that test and guess what.  The essay was about the Holy Spirit.  Uh, oh.  When I got it back, I have to tell you with some embarrassment that, although it was a great lesson, I had failed it.

I had never failed anything this important.  But I failed logic in college; that was a big mystery to me.  And some of my labs.  I hated chem lab.  Anyway, I failed the Presbyterian ordination exam and was shocked and chagrined.  One’s ordination rides on this.  I had a whole year more, but I sat on the steps just crushed.

And I have to tell you one of the quotes from my examiner.  Presbyterian ordination exams are sent out across the country to various people who grade them.  The Elder who reviewed my test had scrawled a big remark on the front:  “Well, I am not passing this person.  She puts the Spirit in way too many places, and her theology is dangerous.”

I never forgot that.  I did install the Holy Spirit in too many places.  I put it everywhere.  (But the Holy Spirit did not face me down for my presumption.)  What the Elder was looking for, however, was in the pulpit, in the Bible, in church, and that’s pretty much it.

You know you’re starting to get kind of dangerous if you think the Holy Spirit is just down the street.  It could be anywhere then, right?  In a bar, on a beach, in some other book besides the Bible.  In some other office, in a song, in nature.  How could the Spirit be there?  You’re likely to get into dangerous places that way.  Newton, New-Age philosophies, Paganism, you name it.  So she doesn’t get ordained.

Luckily, I had a whole year to read a book called Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie.  It is a classic about Presbyterian theology.  Since I was raised Baptist, I really needed to steep myself in what the examiners wanted to hear.  And I passed with flying colors, I want you to know.  My very next year, I took all the ordination exams together.

What was the Elder afraid of?  What made my theology dangerous to him or her?  What made this person seem like the lady at St. Louise who doesn’t want to hear that the Spirit could possibly move around, just like Pentecost and Easter.  It’s unstable, unbelievable, and not human.

Theology Hardens, Gets Put in a Box

The history of the Jewish people is instructive.  We learn early on in the Old Testament, in Genesis, that the Jews are worshipping all over the place.  They set up rocks by a river, there by a stream called a wadi, maybe on a mountain because mountains remind people of God, so they go up there to worship.  But then Moses comes along with the people, and they are being driven out of Egypt, out of bondage at last, to go to Israel.

On the way, Moses gets word that he is to build a tent to house the Ark of the Covenant.  This is where the Jews are going to worship.  The tent’s very fancy, all right, and there are a lot of instructions.  I’ve read the Bible a couple of times and found lots of descriptions about the linens and stuff that must be in the tent.  Now what is it about a tent?  Is it in one place?  No, you take it down, and you move it around.  That’s how God’s sanctuaries started.

It was much later that the Temple was built, and that’s where God is.  The Ark of the Covenant is like a throne where God rests, and that’s the holiest place within the Temple.  The mountains where the Samaritans go?  Well, they’re just plain wrong!  How could God be there when Solomon built this beautiful Temple?  It’s something you do, isn’t it?

When Christianity became legal in 313 A.D. and Emperor Constantine was converted, what happened to all those places where Christians were meeting with people who were so new they called themselves “The Way”?  They were down there in the catacombs, in caves, in people’s houses.  Baptismal fonts have been found in regular houses.

What happened to all those places?  They were closed, right?  Churches, big beautiful cathedrals were built.  And that’s where God is.

Sorry, Canon’s Closed; the Age of Prophecy Is Over

It’s the same thing that happens to theology itself.  Over many years, our thinking about God gets hardened, put in a box.  Church councils have been part of that, we’ve got to agree.  We must have one doctrine and one canon.  We’re going to pick this Bible, this is the Holy Bible.  This other stuff, well, does it make it into the Bible?  Canon’s closed.  That’s it.  The Age of Prophecy is over, some have said.  Is the canon closed?

Is there any other book, any book you’ve ever read that speaks to you about God or faith or soul in a real or profound way?  Any person you’ve ever heard speak who has done the same thing for you?  A piece of music that’s moved you and spoken to you of the Divine?  Have you ever been out in nature?

We had a big church meeting in Niagara Falls, Canada, and it’s beautiful there.  I remember once driving into Canada and feeling how arbitrary the border is between the United States and Canada.  Someone put it there, though.  Either it’s a river or a mountain range or something that’s fixed.  Doesn’t move around.  It’s human to do this, but things really do move.

Things are sometimes in very surprising places.

The Mighty Comma

One of my most fundamental reasons to become a UCC pastor is the comma.  It’s simple and profound.  We were quoting Gracie of Burns and Allen, and she said, “Never put a period where God has put a comma.”  So I put on my big Comma pin this morning.  Commas move around.  They’re not stable.  Not always.  As Kim said in Bible Study, commas can save lives.  You know, “Let’seatgrandma.”  Or, Let’s eat,      grandma.”  We’re grateful for that.

Commas are very helpful, but sometimes we’re much more comfortable with periods.  That was then.  The Age of Prophecy is over.  The canon is closed.  But never put a period where God has put a comma.  So we celebrate profoundly on the day we approach the mysterious movement and workings of the Holy Spirit.  God is still speaking.  God moves around.  God is human and in us and among us, still at work in us and the world.

Pentecost is a Moveable Feast, as we are, as the church is, and may it ever be so.

Amen.

FRANCHISING CHRIST

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
On Sunday, April 6, 2014

 

I have attended church all my life.  As a kid, my parents took me to St. Andrews Presbyterian on the northwest side of Indianapolis.  Then as a college student, the first thing I did was to look for a church, found one a few miles outside of town, and attended that for the seven years I was there.  After that, off I went to seminary, where I served two different churches while there, one of which was fascinating, the chapel at Fort Dix, New Jersey.  Then I entered the ministry.

The Decline of the Church Universal

One of the great sadnesses of my life, after fifty to sixty years of being involved with churches, is that the reputation of the Church, not any particular one but the Church universal, has declined over those decades.  Among the causes have been the drop in the number of people who come to church, the scandals that have plagued the church over those years, and the impaired reputation it now has.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been at a cocktail party, meeting new people, and they’ll ask, “What do you do?”  When I reply, “I’m the pastor of a church,” they’ll say, “Oh.”  It’s like they stop themselves before they can say, “I’m so sorry.”  They feel as though they need to send me a card or something.  It’s sad that over the years the reputation has continued to decline.

I was ordained in 1984, and the middle of the 80’s was sort of a formative time for me as a brand-new minister.  I was enthusiastic, idealistic, and optimistic as all get-out.  I was also clueless, with no idea what I was getting into.  And one of the things that has affected me deeply came in 1986, when I’d been a brand-new minister for only two years at that point.

Infidelities in the Church

In 1986 televangelist Jimmy Swaggart began making on-air accusations denigrating other televangelists, notably Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker.  You might not have heard of Gorman, but he was well-known, and you all remember Jimmy Bakker and Tammy Faye.  I’m not sure how he did this, but Swaggart had uncovered the fact that Gorman had been having an affair with a woman in his congregation.  Swaggart decided to tell about it on his television show.  He also helped to expose Bakker’s infidelity, which actually was arranged by a colleague.  It was a sting operation when Bakker was out of town.  These exposures, you will remember, received unbelievable media attention.

Gorman retaliated in kind – now these are Christian ministers, mind you – by hiring a private investigator to look at Swaggart’s life and found out that he had been using prostitutes.  Swaggart was subsequently forced to step down from his pulpit, only for a year, and he made a tearful televised apology in February 1988.  And I quote; it’s a great quote.  This guy’s good.  “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgiveness.”  Gosh, what I wouldn’t give to have that kind of talent.  Forgiveness comes when you apologize, I suppose.

Swaggart was caught again by California police in 1991, only three years later, with another prostitute.  Her name was Rosemary Garcia, riding with him in the car when they got pulled over because they were going the wrong way down a one-way road.  The cop asked why she was with Jimmy Swaggart, and she replied, “He asked me for sex.  I mean that’s why he stopped me.  That’s what I do.  I’m a prostitute.”  So this happened during my formative years, and I guess I’ve been damaged ever since.

Abuses of Charitable Funds

All this came bubbling back up for me last week, when I heard a story on the radio.  NPR was telling about a ministry, which it called a “church” in quotation marks.  I’m not sure if it really is a church or not.  But it is some type of ministry that over the last two to two-and-a-half years has brought in $210,000,000 in donations and out of that has given away $30,000,000 to all sorts of ministries, relief efforts,  and various projects.

This ministry has nonprofit status because it is technically a “church.”  But bear in mind, it has no sanctuary, no congregation that fills it up, no weddings, no funerals, and no baptisms.  There’s no fellowship dinner, no popcorn for the local parades, no hospital calls, no nursing-home visits.  Just a studio that promotes beautifully what this ministry has done with the $30,000,000.  No doubt it can do a lot of good with $30,000,000, but you’re never told about the full $210,000,000 and how, with generous contributions, it could do so much more.

I’m so mad about this abuse of charitable funds that I can hardly stand it.  I can scarcely see straight, and I almost have to pull to the side of the road because I’m so upset.  I’m thinking the same thing you’re thinking.  What about the $180,000,000 remainder?  What happened to that?

Searching for God in the High and Low Places

Sometimes I skip church completely when on vacation.  It’s as though I’ve had it with church.  But other times I attend to different religious needs that I have.  I like the way we do church here.  But there’s a twin impulse that I like to satisfy when on vacation.  One is that I often go to an Anglican church, an Episcopal church, where there’s a procession and every single word said from the pulpit is being read.  It’s been preprinted, the sermon is read, the liturgy is read, and it’s all very well organized.  Very high-church.  I like that now and then, once a year.

And then I’ll also go to the other extreme by attending an Assembly of God church, a Pentacostal sect.  I wave my hand, praise Jesus, and get that kind of thing out of my system.

The Hidden Secret of Megachurches

Once, while on vacation, I went to a megachurch.  It was a smallish megachurch, with only 700 or 800 people, but still a megachurch.  And what an experience that was!  The music was awesome – somewhere between 40 and 50 voices, good voices, and they sang beautiful anthems.  On multiple screens, the words of the anthems showed up in video.  Along with beautiful scenery, panoramic views, and with the words of the anthem came the experience of not just listening to and seeing the choir but also beautiful images and highlighted words.

Then came what we would call a Minute for Mission.  It was an extremely professional Power Point presentation about one of the ministries that this church promotes.  Once again there were different images that went with this very proficient talk that the Minute for Mission person put on.

Finally came the sermon.  Now I care about sermons.  I pay attention to them.  They’re part of my business.  So I listened to this sermon very closely and found it almost perfect technically.  Never a misspoken word, never an “uh” anywhere in it.  The theology was exactly what you would expect – 100 percent orthodox evangelical Christianity, which is that you are going to Hell.  But there’s Jesus.  If you believe in Jesus as your lord and savior, you’re in luck.  You don’t go to Hell, and you can then have a better life.  So the minister highly recommends calling Jesus into your life as lord and savior.

So that was the gospel message, but I detected something vaguely unsettling in the sermon.  It occurred to me there was nothing in it that had to do with this particular congregation and nothing that had to do with this particular minister.  I noticed it but didn’t go down that road.  So I left the service with an overriding feeling of envy.  Good grief!  The time it takes to put together and rehearse a technically perfect sermon, the time it takes to put together a Minute for Mission, the time it takes to integrate the anthem music and several other pieces of music with the message.  All this must be a prodigious undertaking, so I felt envious.

How do they pull it off?  It was later that I found out how, and boy, did I feel stupid.  Many megachurches subscribe to a DVD service.  They are part of a franchise.  You pay a fee to a company that provides music for the anthem a month or two ahead of time.  You get the music to the choir.  It comes with the text for the Minute for Mission and the Power Point to accompany it, so all you have to do is play that and find a well-spoken person to deliver the text in a compelling way while the video shows.

Exactly the same thing for the sermon.  The sermon is there in the DVD.  Print it, and the minister reads it ten, twenty times, and practices the text three, six, nine times until the sermon is down pat, almost memorized.  The minister is then able to deliver it convincingly without having to write it, research it, or integrate it with the Minute for Mission or the music.  The megachurch is thus a franchise.  It is told what to say.

Now, why have I told you this?  These are some of the big, successful church stories that are going on in our world right now.

Searching for God in Our Home Church

So I thought you’d like to know what you get here at our church.  This is where it’s important.  What you get is crystal-clear finances.  There is not a dime hidden anywhere in this church, unless it’s underneath one of those pew cushions.  You want to know where your money goes?  Just ask.  All the money that comes in and where it goes is significant.  Every single facet of our church’s finances is available 100 percent to every single person in this church.  We don’t always print it up for everybody because we’re trying to save a few trees, but it’s all available.  As to your Mission dollars, when you give a dollar, one dollar goes where you want it to go.  Not 99 cents, not 95 cents, not 50 cents.  A dollar.

Because the church pays for all of the overhead, your donations follow your wishes.  Have we made mistakes before?  Yes, but they have been corrected, and your intended beneficiary receives all of your allocation to it.

The sermons you get here – some are good; some are not so good.  I’ve seen yawns like you wouldn’t believe.  Big, contagious yawns!  But the sermons are real, they are born out of the life of this congregation and this minister, integrated into the gospel of Jesus Christ and the news of our day.

Another thing you get in this church is that, should you decide to kick the bucket, you will be buried by somebody who knows you and will strive mightily to say something good about you.  And your friends and family who attend your service will not have to endure an evangelistic message to a captive audience, which is one of the most immoral things that churches can do.

The last accounting of what you get here is not 100 percent true, but it’s mostly true.  And that is “Cheers.”  Like the TV show, this is a place where everybody knows your name.  It’s an extended family such that, when something really bad happens in your life, there are others who are there for you, like a deep bench, waiting to cry with you.  And if something really good happens in your life, they’re there to rejoice with you.

Fallacies and New Understandings About God

So that’s what you get, but actually that’s what anybody gets if they’re part of a reasonably healthy church.  And here’s something else you get, a kind of value added in addition to all the other stuff.  And that is you get a “God is still speaking” message.  What God is saying lately, integrated with what God has been saying in the past.  Part of what bothers me about the standard evangelical communication that you sometimes get at funerals is that the megachurch message is based upon suppositions that aren’t true.  Let me air a little dirty laundry here.  There are five fallacies about God:

1. God needs something, as in God needs your obedience and your worship.

2.   God can fail to get what he/she needs.  So if you’re not obedient and you don’t worship right, God is sort of upset.

3.   God has separated you from God’s self because you haven’t given what God wants.  The Deity can’t tolerate sin, can’t be in the presence of sin, so God has separated himself/herself from the sinner.

4.   God still needs what God needed so badly all along, your obedience and your worship.

5.   God still requires obedience and worship from your separated position and will destroy you if you don’t provide it.

All five on this list are false.  All five are the basis of negative messages from many pulpits.

Reexamining Old Beliefs in the 21^st Century

Let me give you another example of the kind of thing that God is saying of late:  God has been encouraging people all across the globe to reexamine some of our old beliefs, to entertain the notion, to permit ourselves to think that maybe what we have believed about God and life isn’t working and may not even be right.  God may be asking us to explore the possibility that there might be something we haven’t understood about the Deity.  Maybe we got something wrong about God and life, the understanding of which could really change things.

And then we must be willing to accept a new understanding of God and life to be brought forth, reluctantly and with much criticism, but nevertheless an understanding that could produce a new way of life on this planet without wars and intrareligion hatred.  We must be courageous enough to explore and examine new understandings.  If they align with our inner truth, our inner understanding, our inner knowing, we must have the fortitude to enlarge our belief system to include these new understandings.

Finally we must choose to live life as a demonstration of our highest and grandest beliefs rather than being in denial of them.

This, my friends, is new.  It’s of this century.  The Book of Hebrews says, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves.”  Ministers have used that exhortation for centuries to encourage people to come to church.  Here’s why:  In the assembly, in the community, when you gather together, that’s where the healing takes place, that’s where the growth takes place.  We believe the image is so compelling that you can take all these rough stones, every single one of us, put them in a tumbler, and they come out polished.

Amen.

 

ROCKS, WATER, TIGERS, AND MICE

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
On Sunday, March 23, 2014

Moses Strikes Water

We have just heard a reading from Exodus 17.  It’s a beloved story, near the middle of the entire Exodus chronicle, in which the children of Israel are wandering in the wilderness, and they begin complaining because they are thirsty.  That’s understandable, I suppose.  If you were wandering in a desert and with you were women, children, old people, and a lot of baggage, of course you would get thirsty.  So Moses strikes the rock at Horeb with his staff, and out comes water.  The people are saved once again.

This story works on a number of levels.  It works as a basic narrative in that you’ve got a really strong bad guy, the antagonist in the person of the pharaoh, with his people and the army chasing the Israelites.  And you’ve got a really good guy in that Moses is powerful.  He’s got great connections.  But he’s also flawed.  It’s a compelling saga that holds your attention and your interest in what happens to the people.

The epic also works beyond basic narrative at the magical level.  Supernatural, mysterious things are going on.  Moses’ staff will be used to save the people from poisonous snakes, and he used it to free the people from Egypt.  You might envision Charlton Heston in his flowing robes holding the staff, or you might picture Gandolph and the way he’s constantly saving the Fellowship with his staff.

Go Deeper, to the Archetype

But I would ask you this morning to go down yet one more layer to the archetypal level.  There’s some deep symbolism going on here, the opposites of desert wilderness and water.  There’s an old expression of being caught between a rock and a hard place.  Well, a desert is a hard place full of rocks.  It’s both.  It’s hard, it’s dry, it’s unforgiving, and it can be deadly.  Traveling through the desert can be dangerous and burdensome.  Water is crucially important.  It symbolizes the opposite – softness, life, refreshment, coolness, growth – all made possible by water in an unforgiving environment such as a desert.

Coming into this archetypal setting, travelers encounter the opposites of the danger of the dry desert and the need for water to stay alive as they pass through it.  In the context of this story and as multiplied by others, we get a take-home message not only from this vignette but also from the whole story of the Exodus:  It is that God sees, God hears their complaints and prayers, and God cares.  God can solve any problem.

If you’re a bunch of slaves, unarmed, burdened with baggage, cattle, old people, children, and you’re fleeing an army on horseback and in chariots, you’re in quite a pickle.  Yet God saw, heard, cared, and delivered them.  Saved them by parting the Red Sea, or the Sea of Reeds.  Now you are in the desert, and you’re in trouble again.  God sees, hears, cares, and delivers the Israelites yet again.  Moses, hit that rock with your staff!  And out comes water, miraculously.

The take-home message?  If God can solve those two dilemmas, God can solve any problem.

Can You Really Take That Message Home?

Hold on just a minute.  Is the take-home message really true?  Is it believable?  Are you convinced?  Are you persuaded so far that God solves such problems?

Let me give you four contrary examples:

1.  What about a 48-year-old middle manager who lost his job in 2008, right at the beginning of the economic downturn, and has been chronically unemployed or underemployed ever since?  About two years after he lost his job, the marriage started to fall apart.  They had to sell their car and get a cheaper one.  They had to sell their house and move into a less-expensive place.  They had two kids, who continued to grow up.

Eventually the marriage dissolved.  He still can’t find work, and – this is probably the part that hurts the most – his two kids view him as a loser.  Several years have passed, and he’s now in his mid-fifties, that stressful time of trying to find a career-level job.  So he gets by on a McJob and his heart is broken.  He loved his wife, and he loves his children, all of whom don’t think very much about him.

2.  Or what about the parents of a teenager who seems hell-bent on trouble.  We’ve all known this kind of teenager.  Some kids are like that, rebellious and anti-authority to their very core.  Much more interested in drugs, sex, or alcohol, completely at the expense of school and studying.  Totally opposed to a job, making some money, saving for college.  Wholly against any delayed gratification.  The parents are worried, really worried.  Deep inside, they’re not sure that this kid is going to be okay, that he’ll end up someplace bad.  And they worry.

3.  Or fathers of preschool children.  Think of a single parent who lost his wife, their mother, to breast cancer while she was in her thirties.  I’ve known three of these fathers in my time, all with similar stories.  And for all three there is a hardness, a bitterness in their hearts.

4.   Finally, consider a case of the second wife.  A man marries young, and it’s not a good marriage.  It lasts only a few years.  Then, after the divorce, he’s single for a time until he meets a new person who is much better-suited for him, a much better marriage.  They end up being married for nearly thirty-five years when he has a very sudden heart attack and is gone before anybody knew what had happened.  Next, after the funeral when the second wife starts dealing with all the affairs of having lost a husband, she discovers that he never changed his will.

 This is one of those old-fashioned families, in which the house was completely in the man’s name.  Both cars the same.  The investment accounts, the retirement accounts, yes, all in his name.  A phone call is made, and the original wife from thirty-five years ago is finally found and informed that she has just inherited quite a bit.  I’ve known two of these second wives to whom this has happened.  They experienced sadness and bitterness and anger – serious anger that has settled into the hearts and minds and souls of those two women.

Now think about these four examples:  a 48-year-old middle manager whose kids think he’s a loser, the parents of a hell-bent teenager, the fathers of preschool children who are suddenly motherless, and two bereaved and bereft second wives.  Do you tell these people the story about Moses striking the rock in the wilderness and out comes water?  Do you tell them that God can solve any problem?  Would you tell them that?  Would you look them in the eyes and say, God sees, hears, and cares?  God can solve any problem?  What would be their response to you?

Now I’ve Painted Myself into a Corner

Which is it?  God sees, hears, and cares, can solve any problem?  Or is there really an inherent sadness, bitterness, anger in our world?  Is there any resolution between these two poles?

Relevant to  this predicament, I would like to read you a story.  It’s very simple, Zen in nature.  For years I have enjoyed reading yarns from two different religious traditions, Hasidic and Zen.  Even though I relish them, I’m often disappointed.  Sometimes they purport to be deep and meaningful, but I just don’t get it.  They may seem rather silly or shallow instead.  However, I enjoy reading them, and I came across one that is in my opinion one of the deepest stories I’ve ever come across.  It didn’t appear that way to me at first, and it probably won’t seem that way to you at first, either.  But once I started looking into the tale, I began to get it.  It’s called The Parable of the Strawberry:

A man was wandering in the wilderness when a tiger appeared and began to chase him.  Panicked, the man fled and came to the edge of a cliff, with this ferocious tiger on his heels.  Spotting a thorny vine rooted on a rock, he swung himself down over the chasm.  Above, the tiger roared and pawed at the rock.  And then, looking down, he saw the gaping jaws of a second tiger, pacing below him.  Apparently these two worked as a team, and he didn’t know it.

Looking up at the first tiger, looking down at the second, the man noticed suddenly a white mouse and a black mouse that had appeared and had begun to gnaw away at the vine.  But the man did not care.  He no longer paid attention to the two tigers or the two mice for he had found a plump red strawberry growing on the face of the cliff.  Holding onto the vine with one hand, he plucked the fruit with the other and popped it into his dry mouth.  Oh, how sweet it was.

That’s the end of the story.  I came across it in a Zen children’s book, and believe it or not, it’s also a pop-up book.  As you open and close the page, you can see the man on the vine with the tiger below jumping up and the tiger above trying to reach down to get him.  I’m not sure how advisable this book really is for small children, to be honest with you.  Anyway, there it is.  An ancient story, well over two millennia old.

Here’s an Interpretation of the Parable

The tigers.  The first tiger that began to chase the man represents the problems of your youth, of your childhood, if you remember those times.  For example, when you had a crush on one of the other students in class your heart was broken for the first time in your life.  Or if you were at all like me, I was a mouthy kid and got myself in trouble.  And I got myself beat up or sent to detention multiple times in my school career.  Or dealing with your parents, those “stupid” parents every kid has.

The tiger below, into whose jaws the man will fall, represents the problems of your old age.  Feebleness, failing memory, all sorts of ways in which your body begins to let you down.  Being in the hospital, needing surgery, falling and breaking a hip.  Then you can’t remember things, and it seems as though sometimes the only correspondence you get is information about some old friend who has died.  Not always golden years for some elderly people.

Then the two mice, one white and one black.  There is something typically Zen about the story in that the white mouse represents the good things, but  the “good” things that happen to us, according to Zen tradition, aren’t always so good.  For example, a man gets a promotion and a raise, and now he is further entrapped by a job that’s not so good for him.  But now that he’s got a promotion and a raise, it’s all the more difficult to leave the job and make a change in his life.

The black mouse represents the bad things that can happen in our lives.  But again, in the Zen tradition, “bad” might not necessarily be so bad.  Like the famous story of the young man who fell off a horse and broke his leg.  That would be bad, except that two days later the army came through conscripting all the young men to go away to war, but they didn’t take him because he had a broken leg.  So what’s bad and what’s good isn’t always so clear, and that’s why both mice are gnawing away at the man’s vine.

So What’s It All Mean, Man?

Here’s a deeper explication of the story:  Hanging on that vine is the predicament of every human being.  And for every single one of us, in front of our face is a strawberry.  There is no interpretation for the strawberry because what it means is what it means to you.  The strawberry represents the desire of your heart, the longing of your soul, and it’s different for every one of us.  You have to decide what the strawberry means to you.

All of us can be distracted by our perils.  Those four examples – the 48-year-old middle manager, the parents of the teenager, the father of the preschool kids, the second wives – those four were very much distracted by the tiger above and the tiger below and the two mice chewing on the vine.  They were so distracted that they probably never saw the strawberry in front of their faces.

And the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness?  Yes.  They were definitely distracted by the tigers and the mice, complaining as they went and not seeing the strawberries along the path.  All of us can be distracted by our perils.  The two tigers and the two mice are the common lot of all humanity.  But so is the strawberry.

Amen.

REVISING EXPECTATIONS

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2014

 

Instant Karma Will Get You Back

The sermon is a little unusual this morning in that it is both for the children and also for the adults, so wish me luck.  I was ill last week, and one of the consequences of being under the weather is that I spent a bit too much time surfing the net.  I came across a website that was tears-in-your-eyes funny, having to do with what’s called instant Karma.

Do you know what Karma is?  It’s a notion that, if you send out something bad, bad comes back to you.  So if you put out a bad word, a bad thought, or especially a bad action, bad sort of finds its way back to you.  Not always instantly, but like oatmeal, sometimes there’s instant Karma.  Other times it takes a while, but it always comes back.  The same thing happens with good.  Good words, good comes back to you.  Good actions, good comes back to you.

So this website was about instant Karma.  The story involves an unsuspecting girl standing in a gym class facing the bleachers, which had been pushed back against the wall to make more space on the floor.  She’s minding her own business when another kid, a little bigger than she, begins sneaking up behind her holding one of those pink balls that you find in gym classes.  He’s getting ready to hurl the ball at the back of her head.  A perfect target, facing the other way and completely unaware.

Now is that a nice thing to do?  No.  Okay, it’s funny.  I’ve done it before, I admit.  But it’s still not nice to sneak up behind somebody and throw a ball at the back of their head.

Nevertheless, that’s what he’s fixing to do.  But just at the very moment he cocks his arm to fire the missile, his target suddenly stoops down to pick up something off the floor.  He lets go with a fastball.  It just grazed the top of her hair so she noticed it but was not hit by it.

Instead, the ball hit the bleacher hard, rebounded straight from a board on the bleacher, whizzed right over the girl’s head back to the thrower, and smacked him right in the face.

That’s instant Karma.

An Angry Driver Stars on Camera

Another story on this website was also reported on the news about a woman who was driving in Florida.  She’s minding her own business driving along, when she sees behind her a pickup truck whose driver is really mad trying to get past her.  Flashing his lights, honking his horn, trying to get around.  She’s going the speed limit so she’s not really motivated to go a lot faster for this guy.  It’s like, deal with it.  However, he’s evidently so angry that she whips out her cell phone, which has a camera, and within moments she is videoing him.

With her left hand, she aims the camera over her right shoulder through the rear window while steering with her right hand, looking in the rearview mirror, watching the truck, staying on the road, and driving normally.  All the time she’s videoing this guy.

Well, the next thing you know, her single lane widens into two lanes.  The woman stays in the left lane.  The pickup truck swoops into the right lane before she can move over, and instead of just passing, he pulls up beside her and makes an obscene gesture.  It was a negative thing, a very mean gesture.  By this time, though, she’s filming the guy through her passenger window and catches it all on camera.

Suddenly, in a steaming fit of self-righteous rage, the guy tromps on the gas pedal, zooms leftward in front of her, and cuts so hard that he loses control and goes spinning down onto the median between the roads.

The woman slows down and continues videoing as the guy goes off the road.  She got his license number.  She got his face when his hand wasn’t in the way.  She filmed the whole thing and sent it to the police.

That’s instant Karma.

Two Birds Hang Up and Crack Up

This one made me remember a case of instant Karma that I saw myself.  I was walking toward Bon-Ton’s in the mall, about ten feet behind a pair of girls.  They were together on one phone call, leaning close to each other so as to share the phone while talking to a third person on the other end and paying no attention to their surroundings.  We’re getting close to Bon-Ton’s entrance.

It was a very energetic conversation.  I couldn’t hear the words, but the two were extremely upset about something and were intent upon their conversation.  Finally, as they neared the door, the girl holding the phone hangs up abruptly, turns to her friend, and explodes with some very profane words.

She had called the party on the other end a string of very bad names and was heatedly recounting them to her companion at the very moment the two of them strode obliviously into the plate glass doors of Bon-Ton’s.

That’s instant Karma.

 Karma in a Four-in-Hand or on a Donkey?

I have just given you three cases of negative Karma.  It is equally positive, though, and I want to give you an extraordinary example of putting good Karma out into the world and good coming back.

First let me set the scene for you.  The first three pictures show modern armies marching.   For comparison, the fourth image represents the ancient army of the Roman legions.

The Chinese Army Marching

The North Korean Army Marching

 

The United States Army Marching in Iraq

The Roman Legions Entering Rome (from the Movie “Gladiator”)

The three preceding modern armies are all modeling themselves after the Roman legions pictured above.

You may not recognize it right away.  Have you ever seen the movie “Gladiator”?  Okay, many have seen that movie; it was very popular.  This is an early scene showing the triumphal entry of the Roman legions into Rome after it had battled to an overwhelming victory against the Germanic tribes in northern Europe.  They were completely routed by the Roman legions.

Those legions then returned to Rome.  They celebrated their military victory by staging a parade as they entered the city upon their return.  In the front of the picture are the Senators, and in the background is the Colosseum.  On the sides are the soldiers, all in battle array in a massive display of force and power and armament.  In the back, on the other side of the pillars, is the crowd.

The conquering general is in the middle of the picture, standing in a chariot drawn by four horses.  He is receiving tribute for their victory and will soon make his way amid thunderous cheering up to the Emperor, who is there with the Senators to receive the glory and accolades deserved for the triumph.

Modern Armies Model Roman Practice

Armies to this very day emulate this ancient practice that goes back many ages to the rise of the Roman empire.

Now I want you to think for a moment.  Compare the next two pictures.  The first one shows the Emperor Titus in a bas-relief carved into his sarcophagus.  It’s over 2,000 years old so there’s a lot of damage, but you can see the chariot and the four horses.

The Sarcophagus of the Emperor Titus

Marcus Aurelius with an Angel on His Shoulder

The immediately preceding picture is a relief depicting Marcus Aurelius, who happened to be the Emperor portrayed in the movie “Gladiator.”  Here he is seen entering the city of Rome as the conquering general and emperor, with four horses and a chariot.

The reason I wanted to show you this particular picture is that there’s an angel perched on Aurelius’ shoulder.  In Roman times that angel, who is depicted as giving the general divine advice for victory, was named Genius, from which we derive the modern word.

What Was Jesus’ Message About the Donkey?

Now compare all of these Roman and military scenes to the following picture from a Sunday-school book about Palm Sunday.

Jesus Entering Jerusalem on a Donkey

The question I would like you to ponder is why Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey.  Everybody knew the proper way to enter a city to reap the glory of victorious battle.  Why did he do it this way?  There are no armaments at all.  Nobody is in Rome, following their rank.  There are women and children and old people and young people.

Why did Jesus enter on a donkey rather than in a chariot drawn by four warhorses?  What was he trying to get across?

I would like to answer this question for you, but I really shouldn’t.  It would be like telling the punch line to a joke.  It’s more appropriate for you to answer the question yourself when you compare the Roman way of entering a city with Jesus’ way of entering Jerusalem.  What is in your heart is what’s right for you at this time.  I can give you a Biblical answer; I can give you a theological answer.  But it would only be my answer.  You have your own thoughts about why Jesus entered his city in his own special way.

A Renaissance Woodcut of Jesus Entering Jerusalem on a Donkey

This picture shows the same kind of thing as the one before it – the donkey, average people, a chaotic crowd.  It’s not orderly, there are no armaments, no chariots, no spears, no tanks.  Once again, why did Jesus do it this way?  What was his message?

Now I want you to hang on to the answer you have developed about why he did this.  Just put it in your short-term memory for a moment while I tell you two more stories.  Then I’m going to ask you to think about three things – the answer you have formulated in your mind as to why Jesus entered Jerusalem in a special way and the following two stories.  I’ll ask you to put the three together.  It’s not going to be easy, but I want you to try.

Don’t Drop It, Tom; It’s Very Very Heavy

This story is much different, an extraordinarily rare photographic image.  Back in January, it was published in all sorts of scientific journals.  It is the very first image ever seen of another planet outside our solar system.  They’re called exoplanets.  We’ve got pictures of Jupiter, Mars, and others, but they’re all in our solar system, all nearby.  Here is a planet orbiting a star that is nevertheless very close to us in terms of the cosmos.  Our nearest star, the sun, is four light-years away.  This one is 63 light-years away. 

Photo of an Exoplanet Taken at a Distance of 63 Light-Years from Earth

This exoplanet’s sun is the big dot in the middle of the photo, but the blue area that’s all around it in the center, where all the brightness of the star should be, is blocked out by software.  The planet is the little white dot at the bottom right.  It’s about 32-60-some pixels wide, and that’s as big as it is.

By the way, here is a picture of the team of astrophysicists rejoicing at the existence of this photograph.   They say this exoplanet is 63 percent larger than Jupiter and is obviously very close to its sun.

Astrophysicists up in the Air at Success of Photo Taken at Incredible Distance

Here’s a planet that should be extremely volcanic due to its proximity to that sun.  The gravitational forces of a huge planet so close to a giant star would have to be incredibly strong.  This planet is therefore being squeezed and pulled, and squeezed and pulled as it orbits around this sun.  The two bodies are very close to each other, and both are enormous.  For comparison, Jupiter is our biggest planet, and the newly pictured planet is 63 percent bigger than that.  So we’re talking about a very volatile place, larger than Jupiter and 63 light-years away.

I pulled out my calculator.  Taking a photograph of that planet would be like making a photograph of your face except that your face would be two-thirds of the way to the moon.  It is the equivalent of taking a photograph of a grain of sand except that the grain of sand is in Los Angeles.  Also, I want you to appreciate the technology and science that were necessary to take this photograph.

Now please turn around and face the rear of the sanctuary.  There’s Tom, one of our deacons, standing in the back of the sanctuary.  When he went out to ring the bell this morning, I asked him to bring in a single grain of sand, and he’s holding it up for you to see.  You can’t see it?  Okay, he’s holding the grain of sand; you can guess how big it is.  “All right, Tom, it represents a huge planet.  Just don’t drop it.”

Now if I were to whip out the little camera on my phone and take a picture of the single grain of sand,  would you be able to see it?  No, not even close, and it’s only a few yards away.  So imagine the special camera, the science and technology that enabled the astrophysicists to take a picture that ended up giving us a view of a grain of sand, except the grain of sand is in Los Angeles.

That’s what this photograph is like, and it’s the first time it has happened in the history of humanity.  It should be in a church, if you ask me.

Female Quail Sacrifices Self to Brood

One more story to tell you.  Does anybody know what this picture shows?  It’s a quail, a male quail on the right, and the female on the left.  You’ll notice that the male is better looking – one of those universal things in nature.  (Um-m-m.  Uh-h-h.  Ha!)

Female Quail at Left; Male Quail at Right

Quail Chicks

This story happened last summer.  There was a heat wave out West, and in northern California there was a big forest fire.  After the fire had burned through and was put out, some rangers were cleaning up debris where the fire had gone through.

Up against a tree one of the rangers spotted a quail.  It was completely black.  It had been burned but was still standing right up against that tree with all its feathers completely charred.  The whole bird was thoroughly blackened.  The ranger went over and touched the quail, but it didn’t move.  It just toppled over, and out from underneath the hen waddled three little chicks.

What the mother hen had probably done was to make a terrifying choice between fleeing the fire and abandoning her covey or choosing to stay to try to protect the flightless brood.  Her choice was a primal one.  She opened her wings, the little ones climbed underneath, and all four stood by the tree awaiting the fire.

The fire came roaring down over them.  The mother quail died.  Her chicks lived.

What I want you to do now is to put these three images together.  Try to imagine the kind of love the mother quail had for her little ones, and combine that thought with the kind of tenacity, the kind of technology, the kind of human force that we can put behind a project to achieve something important to us.  And to succeed at accomplishing a significant undertaking such as a photograph of a planet 63 light-years away.

Then I want you to meld those two ideas and join them with the concept of humility, of nonviolence, of a desire to change the value system of a violent society.  To upend the way in which people routinely do business, to know that the prince of peace rides in on a donkey, not being drawn in a chariot by four stallions.

If we would take that message and combine it with unconditional love and the fortitude of which human beings are capable, that, my friends, is what Palm Sunday is about.

Amen.

KNOW ME

Preached on Sunday, March 30, 2014
A Sermon by the Rev. Janet L. Abel
 

Getting Started

This sermon is entitled “Know Me,” and I would start by saying I believe that to be known is nearly as deep a need as water.

Those of us who attended college were compelled to pick a major, usually in the junior year, in a field of study in which our knowledge would flourish.  I picked economics but am not sure why.  Perhaps because I thought it would be practical.  My interests led me to English, literature, history, and religion, but my parents said I really should be practical.  So I started out with biology but quickly changed my mind.  Art is far more scientifically-minded than I am, and I knew enough to pick something else after taking several courses in science, so it was economics for me.

Going to graduate school required further, more concentrated studies, which led me to aim for a school that was focused on an area specific to my interests.  I decided to go for a Master of Divinity degree.  Although the name implies that those who go to seminary, like Art and me, will become masters of divinity, I don’t know that one ever masters anything like divinity.

Even so, how we come to know God and come to our faith is a unique story for every one of us.

Our Different Stories

Art’s story, as he’s told us, is one of math and science, that the beauty of mathematical equations led him into his faith.  I traveled a far different path.  I admit that I prayed a lot in math class to pass, among other things, but I didn’t quite see God in my study of math.  I was more panicked.  It’s numbers and I.  I don’t even do Sudoku.  Numbers just don’t speak to me.

My faith developed differently.  Through people, to be honest, and animals.  The need to take care of our pets at home.  Visiting the hospital and the nursing home.  Setting the communion table for church.  My Sunday-school teachers, my parents.  Learning the stories of people who lived long ago – David and Solomon and Joshua, Leah and Rachel, Moses, Jesus and Paul, Peter and John.  Music also has a big part to play in my faith.  And art, including photography.

As a little girl we always got National Geographic, and I loved looking at the pictures although at first I didn’t read it.  I viewed Mutual of Omaha on television, watching animals get tagged.  I remember men in particular sitting in the bush keeping an eye on other animals, taking pictures of elephants and tigers.  And the movies.  I admit that a great deal of my faith formation as a child came from King of Kings, Ben Hur, The Robe, and The Ten Commandments.

I know Art has quoted Einstein heavily in his sermons, and I have yet to do that.  I don’t know that I fully understand E  MC², and maybe that is a blessing, but I have quoted names in Cabaret, and I’m working on others.

We do come to know ourselves and each other and God in different ways, and that’s okay.  It’s a wonderful thing, really, and we believe differently as well.  That too is okay.  How do we keep learning, keep our knowledge growing?  Many of us might watch a special on television or go to see a certain movie, and we’re compelled to learn more about a certain subject.  You get the relevant books out of the library or order them and then read and reread, study and relearn.

As a kid, history bored me silly.  It seemed to be a series of wars and dates empty of excitement.  Yet now I love it and spend more time reading about people, events, and happenings.  I read about Scotland and the year 1776 in our nation, about the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania and about Alexander Hamilton.  You name it.  You have too, I’m sure, and my knowledge about these subjects, people, and events has grown some.

I enjoy biographies as well, having just read three very different books in a row:  Steve Jobs, I Am Malala, and Joan of Arc.  I realize that’s quite a list.  It runs a gamut, in both age and people.  Just now I want to talk a bit about Steve Jobs.  It’s a new biography for Steve Jobs’ life story and the founding of Apple.

The Steve Jobs Story

It was an interesting read.  I learned a little more not only about Steve Jobs the man but also about Silicon Valley and how personal computers really got started.  This huge explosion of personal technology affects us all as we acquire smart phones, iPods, and the like.  Jobs himself wanted a thousand songs in his pocket.  Think how revolutionary it was when he and his team came up with the iPod, which has turned the music industry upside down and has changed how we browse the Web.

Jobs had a particular challenge, as his biographer put it, in coming up with products that we want before we know we want them.  When products by Apple came out, people would watch and say, I want that.  It’s sleek, and it’s cool-looking.  Feels good in the hand.  Product development at Apple proceeded in a room with a table filled with facsimiles of new products that Steve and his team played with.  They would walk around examining prospective products, holding them and putting them up to their ears.  They had to feel good as well as look good and be endowed with strong technical advances.

Steve was also a difficult person.  As described by his biographer, he had a nasty edge that hindered more than helped him.  He had more than an edge.  He was truly offensive.  Who knows why?  Jobs was adopted, and he felt that keenly.  However, he ended up meeting his birth mother and his biological sister, and he and his sister became very close.

He hurt a lot of people, often being devastating in business and distant at home.  A factoid about Steve Jobs tells you a lot about the man.  Every day he would go to work in his car without license plates.  He refused to put them on and would park crooked in handicapped spots every day.  That’s the kind of guy he was, and that’s before he got sick.

Knowing and Caring Are Divine Acts

So why talk about this?  I have come to understand, thanks to our passage in thinking about it, that knowing is a divine act.  It’s an act of love.  It’s an act of God.  Here in church we all talk a lot about love.  (I do too.)  God is love.  We have to love one another as we love ourselves.

And sometimes it’s good to think about love in practical terms.  How do we show love?  How do we give love?  How do we feel love?  One of the facets of love is to know and be known.  Knowing takes time.  Takes interest.  Takes study.  Takes caring.  You do have to care and take the time to get to know one another right here in church.

Practical Magic

I’m going to tell you a simple story that I told the residents of the nursing home where I work as a chaplain.  It’s called “Practical Magic,” and I’d like you to think about taking the time to know somebody.  It’s by a woman, a granddaughter named Christy Caballero.  The people on the corridor didn’t know.  How could they?  Nurses and doctors and orderlies, interns and patients, all in a rush to get someplace.  While some hurry from point A to point B, others move in slow motion, measured steps, their grip on the handrail turning their knuckles white.

Glancing into the nondescript room as they pass by, people would have seen a gray-haired patient, looking like a grandfather in his 60’s, and they might have noticed a pretty young raven-haired woman sitting near him, about the right age to be his granddaughter.

But none would understand the miracle taking place in this drab world.  It was subtle and easy to overlook, mistaken for a typical visit between a patient and a visitor, probably a family member.  Yet it wasn’t typical.  It was magic of a potent, all-too-uncommon kind, far too important to detect in a passing glimpse.  As the moments passed by, the frail man painted pictures of his lifetime.  His words were his brush strokes, and that was only half the magic.

The real magic was that the woman listened and heard him.  The clock of his life was winding down.  He struggled to walk across the room, but his words still had power.  So it was with words that he whisked his visitor off to times long past and places that were half a world away.  Times and places that he hadn’t been able to take anyone to for a very long time now.

His family didn’t mean to keep the man in a box.  They were just too busy or too preoccupied with his illness.  Take a break and meander into the room along with the staff.  They already knew his stories backwards and forwards, but they didn’t understand that he had to share his memories so that in sharing them he could feel alive again.

The Patient Spreads His Wings . . .

As the woman sat in the sturdy, no-frills hospital chair, she listened.  The man stood in the footprints of a lanky high-school boy, ashamed that he hadn’t ever left the state of Oregon.  On his eighteenth birthday, there was only the lazy Columbia River between him and the state of Washington.  He dove in and swam hard enough to reach the other shore.  After collapsing and resting for a while, he swam back.  He rooted about in his memories and found every treasured arrowhead over again.  And he lived the rescue of a long list of injured animals.

As the minutes passed, the man turned into that tender recruit who went to World War II in military service.  On the day two of his buddies were drafted into the army, he decided he wanted to determine his own destiny, and he enlisted in the navy.  The only obstacle was the 60 miles between him and the recruiting station.

It was a bitterly cold winter day, and he turned his face toward Portland.  He climbed aboard his bike with big fat tires and pedaled.  And pedaled all night.  The hours passed by as he froze.  Stopping in a Portland diner, the young man counted his change and ordered a chili.  It was the only thing he could afford.  His navy stories were rich and vivid, full of Australia, a country he came to love.  And the visitor saw him at his best, the way he was before the world wore him down.

The patient saved his most precious story for last.  He sank back into a day in Norfolk, Virginia, walking along a street, making his way back to his submarine to ship out.  He suddenly spotted a woman who instantly took his breath away.  He didn’t even know her, and he didn’t get the chance to meet her.  But somehow she made his heart ache.  His heart ached for that lovely stranger for another decade until the night he met that same woman face-to-face at a dance in Alaska, half a world away.  He decided that very night he was going to marry her and told his best friend he was going to do just that.  Six weeks later, they said their “I do’s.”

The young woman beside the hospital bed sat and listened.  The magic grew stronger.  Because she listened, he was transformed.  Because she was interested, he managed to sleep behind the tubes and the monitors and the pain.  Because she heard what he had to tell, he was able to make a journey of his own.  The old man stepped out across time, and for a few moments he could feel the cloth of a younger man’s shirt on his back.  The arms of a young sailor holding his bride.

. . . Until the End

He received a great gift that day.  His closest family members hadn’t stopped by on that particular day and so weren’t present to provide this chance for their beloved relative to relive his life, simply in its telling.  Yet he wasn’t the only one gifted; the listener also received a treasure of the retelling of a life.

The patient died soon after that special visit.  But in the chilly twilight hours of his life, he had more than hospital linen to keep him warm.  The event seems quite ordinary, but he had found the strength to share himself one more time.  That man in the hospital room was my grandfather, and I wished I had been the young woman in the chair.

The Story of the Woman at the Well

Jesus was sitting by a well somewhere in Samaria, which was a country between northern and southern Israel.  As you’ve heard before, the Samaritans and the Jewish people didn’t get along very well.  The Jews looked down on the Samaritans.  They didn’t go to temple.  They weren’t really part of the faith.  They had intermarried.

The disciples went into Sicar to buy food.  It was noon but noon is not the time people in those days went to the wells.  They were mostly women with their big water jars, first thing in the morning, when it was cooler.  Of course, that’s when they would also see their neighbors and friends and catch up in these days before mass communication.  Or they went in the cool of the evening as the sun was setting and dinner was done.  Then they’d go back to the well and talk some more.

What’s this woman doing, going to the well all alone?  We’ll be told later in the story, but Jesus surprises her deeply.  He surprises his disciples too.  He breaks basically every taboo that existed at the time.  You didn’t talk to women, especially women to whom you aren’t related.  And you certainly didn’t talk to Samaritans.

But of course he does.  He takes the time.  He demonstrates that he knows her very well, yet he welcomes her and talks to her.  They actually have a theological conversation, and she gets it.  Come see a man who’s told me everything that I have ever done.  He cannot be the Messiah, can he?

Take the time to welcome, to come, to know ourselves and each other and God.  Some of the residents where I am chaplain sit all day, saying over and over, “God bless you.”  I imagine they are saying, “Know me.”  Stop a minute.  Stop a second.  Look into my eyes.  Treat me like the person I am, even if I can’t talk to you.  Take my hand.  Take the time.  Know me.

Bumper-Sticker People Ask for Notice

Why do people put bumper stickers on their cars?  Have you noticed the latest stick figures?  Mom and dad or mom and mom or dad and dad.  Three kids, two boys, and a girl.  A dog and a cat.  Even sports:  soccer balls and baseball bats, you name it.  Why do they care what I know about them?  They want to be known.

And why do people put memorial stickers on the back of their cars?  Actually, for people who have lost young persons.  We no longer as a society wear black clothing to show the world that we’re in mourning.  The black veil or armband is occasionally worn for funerals but is no longer de rigueur.

What we want is that we desperately need people to know what’s happening in our lives.  To know what we’ve lost and who we love.  Find the people who write blogs on their computers.  What if they go on “Judge Judy” and “Doctor Phil,” for goodness’ sake?  They’re desperate to be known.

We all need to be known and to know.  It’s an act of love.

Amen.

A Sermon Preached by Arthur M. Suggs

On Sunday, February 23, 2014

 

Evolving on Evolution Sunday

For thousands of churches, Evolution Sunday is the nearest Sunday to February 12, the birthday of Charles Darwin.  Representatives of churches participating in that observance are typically signatories on the Clergy Letter Project, consisting of approximately 13,000 clergy across the country, including rabbis, Unitarian Universalists, Buddhists, and soon Imams.

These clergy have signed a letter which says, simply, that there is no inherent conflict between science and religion.  A few lines from that letter:

“Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth.  Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

“We, the undersigned clergy [I was a signatory about five years ago.] from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.  We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests.  To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

In addition, the United Church of Christ, more than any other denomination, has embraced cooperation, collaboration, and even friendship between science and religion.  (Think about that for a moment.)  A couple years ago the UCC drafted a three-page letter that is, in my opinion, amazingly eloquent for having been produced by a committee:

“Evolution helps us see our faithful God in a new way.  Our creator works patiently, calling forth life through complex processes spanning billions of years and waiting for us to awaken and respond in conscious participation in God’s own overarching dream for all living things.”

And from near the end:

“Many today are hungering for an authentic spirituality that is intellectually honest and at home in a scientific era.  They are searching for a new kind of wisdom to live by, one that is scientifically sophisticated, technologically advanced, morally just, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually alive.”

The UCC even went so far as to publish portions of this letter as advertisements in the Harvard Medical Journal and in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.  It was pretty much unprecedented for a Christian denomination to publish such material as this in leading medical journals to bring to the attention of scientists that not all religions are anti-science.

The Link Between Lincoln and Darwin

As you may know, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day in the same year – February 12, 1809.  And in a sense, what they spent their lives dealing with, what they are remembered for, is the interpretation of one sentence from the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, written by Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In this sense Abraham Lincoln spent his life, and is remembered for, dealing with the notion of all being equal and possessing the right of liberty. 

Charles Darwin dealt with the notion that we are created.  But how?  In England he actually knew and cared about Lincoln’s struggles on the other side of the Pond.  A year before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863, Darwin wrote in his journal:

“I have not seen or heard of a soul who is not with the North.  Some few, and I am one, even wish to God that the North would proclaim a crusade against Slavery.  Great God, how I should like to see that greatest curse on Earth – Slavery – abolished.”

At nearly the same time, in an address to Congress in 1862, Lincoln said:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.  As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

A good question to ask at this point in our history and our pilgrimage is:  Who today has the courage of a Lincoln or a Darwin who is able to lead us out of the dogmas of the present into the stormy future where we might yet prevail?  I think that the scientists who denounce all religions are as myopic as the religious fundamentalists who reject science.  So what kind of religion would we consider appropriate and valuable to both the tenets of modern science and the spiritual needs of our species?  Right now I don’t know of any such political leaders, but there are dozens and maybe hundreds of academics who are brave enough and who are leading us if we listen to their voices as they stare extinction in the face.

What Is Individuation?

Peter Todd, an Australian research psychologist and author of The Individuation of God, possesses one such voice.  He has written compellingly about this collaboration, this cooperation, and indeed this friendship between science and religion.  The term “individuation” is very important in psychology.

A child, for example, grows up attached to the parents in the sense that its identity is completely linked to them.  But in the process of maturing, the child undergoes the process of individuation.  It becomes an individual, a unique person, and eventually no longer dependent upon the parents.  In The Individuation of God, Todd writes that the notion of God being merely a human being writ large is no longer adequate for our thinking.

What Is the “Revolution of the Spirit”?

Dave Pruett, a NASA computer and math professor and author of Reason and Wonder:  a Copernican Revolution of Science and Spirit, is another such voice.  In reading the book, one realizes that the Copernican revolution Pruett is writing about does not so much concern science – he’s already been there, done that – as it concerns the spirit.  This begs the question:  What is this revolution of the spirit?  Its importance stares us in the face.

Here are two of the main facets of this spiritual revolution that we’re in the midst of right now.  Two ideas that are not commonly held in the Church today but that need to be – indeed must be – abided by the Church if it is to survive and even to thrive:

1.  God Is Within Us.  Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within us, and he said it with emphasis.  Paul wrote that we are a temple.  Even though these are simple sentences, they are monumentally profound ideas.  What can it possibly mean that the kingdom of heaven is within us?  Or that we are a temple, implying that’s where God lives and God lives in us?

Even so, that’s only half of it.  The other half is that we are within God.  We exist within divinity, and divinity is that within which “We live and move and have our being.”  The psalmist asks, “Where can you flee from the presence of God?”  How can both halves of the truth be so?  It seems contradictory.  How can God dwell within us, yet we dwell within God?  As Einstein points out, if you encounter a paradox, a dilemma, a contradiction, that’s a surefire sign that the truth can only be ascertained at a higher level.

“We Must Disenthrall Ourselves,” in Lincoln’s wonderful words, from the notion of separation – separation between people, between Republicans and Democrats, between races, between genders, between people and God, and between people and nature.  Yes, we have to expand our thinking.

2.  “God Is Still Speaking.”  The vast majority of the Church does not believe this.  But it should, and it must.  Never place a period where God has placed a comma, as Gracie Allen so memorably said.

What does that mean?  I submit to you that we have not plumbed anything but the shallows.  If it really means that God is still speaking to us, then we need to ask a question:  From what sources do you hear the word of God?

• The Bible?  Sure – no problem here.
• What about the Gnostic texts discovered in 1945?
• The Dead Sea scrolls and many others?  Are those the Word of God?
• The Koran, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, or Bhavagad Gita?
• Or on the radio, with the lyrics of a beloved song?
• Or a phone call from a friend, spookily just the right thing at the right time?
• The chirping of a bird?
• The rustling of leaves as October breezes begin to blow?
• The silence on a hot, humid August evening, not a breath of a breeze, broken only by the sound of crickets?
• The ker-plunk of a frog into a pond?

Are these the Words of God?  Over the centuries many thousands have thought the answer is yes.  So two questions:  From what sources do you hear the word of God?  And what then is God saying to you?  If it’s only the Bible, the preacher can reasonably be expected to answer that question.  He or she goes to seminary to learn how.  But what if God is really talking to us in other ways?  Then the preacher doesn’t know.  Only you know, because these are private conversations.

• We must disenthrall ourselves, not from the Bible itself but from the exclusive devotion to a text that accepted slavery as normal, and therefore can be used to justify it.
• From a text that somehow concluded that gender differences justified treating women as second-class people.
• From the idea that love between two people who happen to be of the same sex is somehow perverted, sinful, unnatural.  Unnatural?  This despite the fact that nearly 300 species of mammals exhibit homosexual behavior regularly, as do thousands of non-mammalian species.  In other words, that seems rather natural.
• That justified not just racism but also genocide and holocaust because God somehow loved only one race.

Now we know better, precisely because God has continued to speak.  A few of us, and then many more, have begun to listen.  It’s time to move on.  But to really move on, we must disenthrall ourselves from what we have so long believed – that God is separate from us and that the Biblical text is the only thing God has to say to us.

I’ll conclude with this quote by Terrence McKenna, from his book Eros and the Eschaton:

“The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists; The world is a living mystery.  Our births, our deaths, our being in the moment – these are mysteries.

“These are doorways.  They are opening onto unimaginable vistas and mysteries.  Our culture has killed that.  Made us products of shoddy ideas and shoddy ideals.

“The hour is late; the clock is ticking.  We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball.  We are inheritors of millions upon millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.

“Now the challenge passes to us; it means that the yet-to-be-born will have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.

“There is nothing as capable of transforming the mind and the planet as the human imagination.  Let’s not sell it short.  Let’s not sell ourselves to nitwit ideologies; let’s not give our control over to the least among us.  Rather, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light.

“The tools are there.

“The path is known.

“You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the program of a living world.

“And a re-empowerment of the imagination.”

Will you please join me in prayer?

IGNORING A COMMANDMENT

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs

Preached On Sunday, January 12, 2014

 

Fear Comes in a Cardboard Tube

I concluded last Sunday’s sermon with a quote from John 1, “Perfect love casts out fear,” and talked about that a bit.  Following the service and throughout the week, a number of you told me some of your stories and experiences with fear, and so I would like to continue that conversation this morning.

My own interesting story about fear was a real gut-wrencher for me when it happened in 2002.  I was about ten miles north of San Francisco in San Anselmo and was working on my doctorate at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  It was a bright and beautiful Saturday in summer.  I had the day off, and I, along with some other students, had gone into town, and we were having lunch at an outdoor cafe.

For context, remember the summer of 2002, when 9/11 was still fresh in our minds.  President Bush had given his War on Terrorism speech, and there was a horrible anthrax scare in Washington D.C.  The Department of Homeland Security had been established, and it had decided on four colors to indicate the level of threat.  It was red at the time, meaning maximum threat.

As I said, I am with friends in the sidewalk section of an outdoor cafe, having lunch, minding our own business.  At mid-lunch, from our table on the sidewalk, I looked at the exterior wall of the restaurant beyond our table.  Nothing much there at all – just a sidewalk, a brick wall, and, leaning against it, a cardboard tube.

Looking at it, I thought, “What’s that, sitting there all by itself?”  Nobody nearby, no backpack or bicycle nearby, nothing except a cardboard tube leaning against the side of a public restaurant.  My mind, conditioned by threats, assumed the worst.  I had a horrible sinking feeling, so I said to the others at our table, “Look at that.  What do you think it is?”  Immediately, my friends quietly asked, “Is it a bomb or not?”

The people at the next table overheard us, looked at the tube, got up, and left suddenly.  They were noticed by the occupants of two other tables, who also got up and left quickly.  My friends and I were not sure what to do, but I still had that horrible sinking feeling.  I knew then why they call it terrorism.

While we were deciding what to do, along came a bicyclist, who swooped in, picked up the tube, and left.  We concluded it was probably only artwork.

A Snowflake Targets You

Fear.  In the pit of your stomach.  Whether it’s an intruder in your house or you’re scared about potentially losing your job or you have an appointment with your doctor and might be told something you don’t want to hear.  Fear.  And there’s actually a lot to be afraid of in our era.

Right now we have Al Qaeda, which certainly thinks ill of us and wants to harm as many of us as possible.  There’s global warming and weird weather.  The economy has been problematic at least since 2008.  The dysfunctional government that preceded 2008 continues to this day.  And we have accidents or disease.  Speaking of which, are you covered?  Are you sure?  And so we worry.

Then comes the Weather Channel, of all things.  We have a phenomenon called a polar vortex, which I’ve never even heard of before.  The Weather Channel’s symbol for a polar vortex is a snowflake in the shape of a target.  So it’s not like we’re going to get cold weather.  No, no, no.  This thing is aiming straight for you!  It’s aiming for the Midwest.  And for upstate New York.

No, this storm has you in its sights.  Really!?  A snowflake has a target?  And it’s you personally?

Leavening the Lump of Fear . . .

So in that context, here are some interesting quotes to leaven this lump a little:

• “Fears are educated into us and can, if we wish, be educated out.”  – Karl Menninger, founder of the Menninger Clinic.
• “The enemy is fear.  We think it’s hate, but it’s fear, because when we’re afraid, those feelings of hate and anger and disdain arise within us.”  – Mahatma Gandhi.
• This one I love.  “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he’s often surprised to find that it comes off in his hand and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• We pay attention to this because of who said it.  “Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”  – Helen Keller.
• From the Hindu scriptures, this one is suffused with theology.  It has the essence of how not to live a fearful life.  “Who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings loses all fear.”    – From the Issa Upanishad.
• From the Scriptures we have Isaiah 43, which concludes with “Do not fear.”
• We also have Revelation 1, which concludes with “Do not fear.”
• There are a bunch of other quotations as well, but to put them in an extended Scriptural context, we look in the Torah, where we have the 613 rules, or commandments.  In Hebrew they’re called the mitzvah.
• Ten of them are very special.  They’re called the Ten Commandments.
• And two of the mitzvah are really special, being ones that Jesus quoted to his followers:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
• Scattered throughout both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, there are lots of other rules.

They’re not merely good advice, and they’re not just commandments either, but injunctions, rules, powerful suggestions.  For example, in Thessalonians Paul says, “Pray without ceasing.  Rejoice always.”

Jesus himself gave us some new injunctions that we generally forego.  They’re so hard to follow that we don’t stand much of a chance, so we forget about them and tuck them aside.  The two most disobeyed commandments, the two most ignored and forgotten commandments in the entire Scriptures are:  “Judge not” and “Fear not.”  Has anybody among you obeyed them?  Ever?  Nobody?

. . . And Irrational Phobias

There are of course phobias, which are generally irrational but not always.  Fear of heights?  Probably a good thing.  Arachnophobia?  Also probably a good thing.  It can be irrational if you have to jump up on the dining-room table to escape, but having a healthy respect for spiders is undoubtedly wise.

Fear of closed or open spaces?  Now it starts to get a little irrational:  Fear of public speaking clocks in at 97 percent of the population.  Fear of death clocks in at 95 percent of the population.  It makes you wonder about that 2 percent difference.  Apparently, they really would rather die.

Now it’s quiz time to see if you know this phobia:  It is the fear of being chased by a wolf around your kitchen table on a newly waxed floor, and you’re in your stocking feet.  Do you remember the Far Side cartoon?  Luposlipophobia.

But the Scriptures are very clear.  They almost never say, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  They do say that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the understanding of it is not so much fear but respect or reverence.

In Deuteronomy, as the children of Israel go through their wanderings into the Promised Land, you can read “Do not fear” six times.  In Isaiah, fifteen times.  In Joshua, as they actually enter the Promised Land, two more times, just for good measure.

In John 4:18, there is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear.

Our Imperfect Perfect Love

The question for us is:  Why are we so afraid?  You know we are.  I think one thing can be concluded about our fears, and that is that they have not been cast out by perfect love that has been attained.  We have not reached a level of perfect love such that we can stop being afraid.

Our fears seem to be rooted in a faulty theology.  Let me give you an explanation.  Consider the following list of Biblical promises that are very hard to achieve and that are often lost in the struggle of living life:

• The promise of eternal life that has been made over and over again.
• Add to that the promise of providence that God will provide, will look out for you.
• Add to that the propensity of grace to trump law over and over again in your dealings with God.
• Add to that that God knows and cares.  God knows the fears we have, the issues we’re dealing with, and cares.  Remember the sparrows and the lilies of the field.
• Add to that resurrection.  Not the Resurrection but resurrection-ness.  It’s not that death follows life, not that you live, go on a few diets, then die.  It’s that life follows death, over and over again.
• Add to that the guidance of the angels and the gift of the holy spirit.
• And add to that the final words of the Gospel of Matthew:  “And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

And yet we act.  We have the blood pressure and the antidepressants and the anxiety to prove it, as if we don’t believe a word of it.  “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he’s often surprised to find that it comes off in his hand and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”

Helen Keller was right:  “Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”  Then consider the theology of that Hindu verse:  “Who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings loses all fear.”  Thus, it follows that whoever considers the interconnectedness of the web of life is a person who loses all fear.

May I suggest that we begin by believing some of the ancient doctrines of resurrection, of providence:  That “Christ is with us, to the close of the age.”  That grace trumps the law.  That God cares for the sparrow and the lily of the field and even more for you.  That we might consider obeying the commandment:  Fear not.

Amen.