Monthly Archives: July 2018

Sermons

SERMON: Political Tension (God Help Us Become What We Pray)

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 22, 2018

Lectionary Reading: Matthew 5: 21-26.

A Prayer, a Song and a Bible,
 Do They Mark Us Guilty
 of Murder and Adultery?

Several years ago, Richard Rohr and James Marchionada, both priests, one Franciscan and the other Dominican, were attending a memorial service in remembrance of the September 11 disaster. Richard Rohr wrote a prayer. James Marchionada wrote a song.

Here is the prayer:

“God of all races, nations, and 
 religions,
You know that we cannot change 
 others,
Nor can we change the past.
But we can change ourselves.
We can join you in changing our only
And common future where Love 
 ‘reigns’
The same over all.
Help us not to say, “Lord, Lord” to 
 any nationalist gods,
But to hear the One God of all the 
 earth,
And to do God’s good thing for this 
 One World.”

For the song, the refrain goes like this:

“It’s not up to God alone to listen to 
 prayer.
It’s not up to God alone to answer.
But when the people of God become 
 what we pray,
the kingdom of God is revealed.”

Then Julie Ann Johnson read a difficult passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 21-22):

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Pair in conflict. PD from Geralt via Pixabay.

In the next paragraph, Jesus goes on to say pretty much the same thing about adultery (Matthew 5: 27-28):

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Jimmy Carter isn’t the only one. He’s just the only one who has admitted it. According to this, we are all guilty of murder and adultery. Every last one of us!

Jesus Seems to Be Rather
 Loving and Forgiving, but
 What Is Going on Here?

There is only one way I can understand this, and it has to do with the way in which our thoughts precede our actions.

Jesus directly says that our inner attitudes and states are the real sources of our problems, heralding our outward behaviors. Most religion is obsessed with a small number of such potent activities, and we clergy think it is our job to disengage them.

This is largely a waste of God’s time and ours. Jesus says not only that you must not kill, but that you must not even harbor hateful thoughts and feelings (Matthew 5: 21-22).

He clearly begins with the necessity of a “pure heart” (Matthew 5: 8), a pure mind and conscience, knowing that the outer behavior will follow. It always does. Too often we force the external behavior, and the inner force remains fully operative within us like a cancer.

This explains why so many Christians are still racist, classist, sexist and homophobic, and are apparently proud of it.

I’m touching on politics this morning. Going on vacation very soon, so this seems like the right time.

I’m in a Predicament, Having
 Political Views Linked to Morality,
 yet I Speak of Spiritual Principles

A few things:

1. Everyone has their own political views.

2. Politics is inextricably linked to morality.

3. How do I prevent my personal views from leaking into our worship service?

4. The only solution I have found is incomplete and imperfect but workable. It is to go underneath any given political issue, whatever it may be (gun violence, immigration, gerrymandering, Russian interference), and then speak to the undergirding spiritual principles that ought to guide our lives.

5. I find politics distressing. Sometimes I just want to scream, and sometimes I just can’t seem to escape it — radio, television, internet. I’m highly motivated to make Sunday morning, in this beautiful sanctuary, a politics-free zone. A sanctuary in the old, classical sense — a holy place to escape and be safe. I will preserve that holy status until my dying day. Yet we must also speak of moral living.

6. Therefore, I try to speak of the undergirding spiritual principles. For example, the linkage, cause and effect, between our thinking and the world we create is such a principle.

I would like to share one more thought with you this morning. It comes from Charles Peguy (1873-1914), a French poet and essayist.

One thing fascinating about him is that he is quoted and beloved by the hard left and the hard right of the previous century. Quoted regularly by several liberal Swiss theologians, at the same time he was a favorite of Benito Mussolini.

“Everything Begins in Mysticism
 and Ends in Politics,” According 
to the Poet and Essayist Peguy

I think what he meant is that our experience of God — not any standard received teaching, no dogma, no catechism but rather our first-hand experience of God — ultimately informs how we then act in the world.

Our inner heart and soul and mind experience of the holy, the sacred, the divine is the ultimate energy behind how we then act and behave.

Here is what Richard Rohr, the Franciscan Priest, had to say about this:

“Transformative change in politics depends so much on having a clear view of the desired end. Where does that vision come from? Possibilities may be offered by various ideologies, or party platforms, or political candidates.

But for the person of faith, that vision finds its roots in God’s intended and preferred future for the world. It comes not as a dogmatic blueprint but as an experiential encounter with God’s love, flowing like a river from God’s throne, nourishing trees with leaves for the healing of the nations (see Revelation 22: 1-2).

This biblically infused vision, resonant from Genesis to Revelation, pictures a world made whole, with people living in a beloved community, where no one is despised or forgotten, peace reigns, and the goodness of God’s creation is treasured and protected as a gift.

Such a vision strikes the political pragmatist as idyllic, unrealistic, and irrelevant. But the person of faith, whose inward journey opens his or her life to the explosive love of God, knows that this vision is the most real of all. It is a glimpse of creation’s purpose and a glimmering of the Spirit’s movement amid the world’s present pain, brokenness, and despair.”

Conflict Management Divides 
into Four Categories, not All of Which Are Baneful.
Equanimity. CC from John Hain at Pixabay. See link below.

Years ago, I had a rare opportunity to get some training from the Alban Institute in Washington, D.C., on what was called Conflict Management.

I envisioned, foolishly in hindsight, of potentially being a consultant to conflicted churches rather than a pastor. After all, every church I had served was in some type of conflict. I took both the basic and advanced training, and consulted with several congregations for a time.

For ease of understanding the broad spectrum of conflict, the institute divided it up into four categories:

Level I Not so bad. Two people or groups disagree on how to proceed about an issue.

Level II More than disagreement, the other group is characterized by exceptionally low IQ and deeply morally compromised. Some name calling.

Level III Reputations are ruined. Reconciliation is seen more as capitulation. The other is seen no longer as stupid, but rather clever and evil. Any hope for peace is nearly gone.

Level IV Guns (or other weapons) are involved.

Here’s the rub:

The core mistake, both in churches and in politics in general, is the view that conflict, that is all conflict, is bad.

Whereas in reality, Level I is wonderful. Genuine disagreement, yet civil and respectful, can and does lead to a third way, not initially envisioned by either group.

Quaker theologian Parker Palmer has a hopeful, but not Pollyannaish, view. He writes:

“Human beings have a well-demonstrated capacity to hold the tension of differences in ways that lead to creative outcomes and advances. It is not an impossible dream to believe we can apply that capacity to politics. In fact, our capacity for creative tension-holding is what made the American experiment possible in the first place. . . . America’s founders—despite the bigotry that limited their conception of who “We the People” were—had the genius to establish [a] form of government in which differences, conflict, and tension were understood not as the enemies of a good social order but as the engines of a better social order.”

That attitude is medicine for our times.

1) Be Careful How to Think of
 Others;

2) Mysticism Informs
Politics;

3) Disagreement is not Bad.

Be careful how you think about others. Jesus was rather clear on the importance of this. How you think leads directly to both how you then treat and interact with others, as well as to the general health of your own soul.

Second, your mysticism informs your politics. Your experience of God, your vision of God’s world informs how you then act in the world, including how you vote.

And third, disagreement is not bad. Rather, civil disagreement can lead not just to more pragmatic solutions, not just to solutions capable of garnering enough votes, but to holier solutions, engines of a better social order.

As it said in that refrain: God help us to become what we pray.

Amen.

Download this sermon in PDF form here.

Featured Image Credit: Conflict / Duality. PD image thanks to John Hain via Pixabay.

Paul Tillich, Pentecost, Sermons

SERMON: Blest Be the Tie That Binds

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs, preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 15, 2018.

A New Graduate from Seminary 
Is Self-Assured Enough to Know 
the Problem in the World Is Sin.

Today’s sermon is actually a continuation of last Sunday’s preachment. On July 8, we had Margie Price in the pulpit. (She had also been a guest preacher here last summer.)

Last week, she decided to speak on sin, which I don’t do often, so I’m listening to Margie intently while sitting in the pew, with my mind going around in a dozen different directions.

That’s probably what you’re doing right now, but two things rattled around in my mind while I was paying attention to the sermon on sin, and one was a memory on the same subject.

I shared this with you before, but it’s one of those things that sticks in my memory:

This happened many years ago, when I was invited to dinner by a single mom who was a member of my church, and her only son had just graduated from seminary. Being immensely proud of her son, who was returning home to visit one weekend, she invited him and his wife for dinner to meet Tracy and me and a few other people as well for a meet and greet get-together.

The new graduate was, to put it bluntly, very ego-secure.

He had an ability that would probably serve him well in a church where he could command people’s attention. When he spoke, others stopped their small talk and listened to him. The conversation was going back and forth at the dinner table, and talk turned to some of the problems in the world. You’ve got problems in the Middle East, problems here, problems there.

Finally, the newbie barged in with a self-assured, overweening statement as though it were a question, “You know what the problem is in the world!”

You’ve heard the expression, a pregnant pause? Well, this pause was going to give birth to triplets. Emphatically, he repeated, “You know what the problem is in the world!” And he waited. All eyes were on him.

Then he announced, “It is sin!”

I am really glad I didn’t chuckle. Yes, the problem is sin, but it’s like the most worthless answer you can imagine.

One other thing that came to mind while Margie was preaching was that wonderful Greek word that’s translated as “sin” in the New Testament, ’amartia.

As some of you know, it’s an archery term, meaning “missing the mark.”

It has the sense that there’s the bull’s-eye and you didn’t hit it. The feeling of it is a mistake or an error. It has the sense of an imperfection but it doesn’t have the feeling of a deep, fatal flaw in our souls that’s driving us to hell. Rather, this is a notion of needing improvement; you can do better.

Tillich Reforms the Notion of Sin as 
an Existential State Characterized by the Estrangement of Humanity

Paul Tillich.

In her sermon, Margie referenced Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and the notion of sin as separation. I would like to expand on that idea a little.

Paul Tillich was an immigrant from Germany, by the way, and most of his time has been spent as a professor in the United States at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He expanded the notion or revised it or reformed it as to the notions of both sin and of God. Let me go into both of those just a bit.

● First, sin. He says first and foremost that sin isn’t any given act like stealing or gossip, but it is rather an existential state in which we find ourselves, characterized by separation or estrangement. (Prescient — vis-à-vis Conversations With God and A Course in Miracles.)

It’s never “sins” in the plural, but rather the overarching state of being separate from God, separate from our fellow human beings, separate from our neighbors, and sometimes even separate from ourselves.

According to Tillich, our basic human condition is a “state of estrangement of man and his world from God.”

Isolation. PD Image courtesy of Pixabay.

It’s implied, he wrote, in many different places in the Biblical symbolic descriptions of humanity’s existential plight.

For example, the expulsion from the garden; the hostility between humans and nature; the hostility between brothers, going all the way back to Cain and Abel, like the very first brothers and all the brothers since and sisters too; the confusion and estrangement among the nations; ever since the Tower of Babel, one nation has been against another nation; and even the prophets complain against the kings, and they complain about the people over idolatry.

There is lots of separation, lots of estrangement. You don’t have to look hard to find examples.

Tillich also Reforms the Notion of
 God as Being – Itself in the Ground
 of Being as an Existential Idea.

● Second, Tillich also reformed our definition of God. This is probably the concept he is most famous for, in which he understood God as being-itself, and he used the phrase the ground of being.

This metaphor is of God as the ground of our being. There are three ways you can take this:

1. One is an analogy. What ground is to a plant is what God is to a 
human being. You can let your mind fertilize that thought.

2. A ground state also means fundamental, like the basis or foundation. So on a fundamental ba-sis, there’s the ground level and everything above it, and it’s foundational or fundamental.

3. The third way of understanding this phrase is linked to Genesis (Chapter 2, Verse 7). This is the second crea
tion story: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

For Tillich, “the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything. . . . It is possible to say that [God] is the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of beings.”

A rose (or question mark?) made of galaxies. Hubble Heritage Project.

Consistently, Tillich refers to God as an idea, an existential idea in which God is the foundation of existence and meaning.

As an aside, this is linked to the name of God, given to Moses, when he said, “Who is sending me?”

And God answers, “YHWH,” which means “being, existence.” It means “I am.”

So God isn’t a separate entity up in heaven but rather is existence itself. So if something exists, then it is rooted in God. If you exist, then of necessity you are rooted in God, as the ground of your being. If a plant exists, then of necessity it is rooted in God, the ground of its being.

Sin is not being aware of it, of feeling separated, estranged. Not true whatsoever, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling that way. And all of us have felt that way, plucked up, uprooted, alone in a meaningless universe, separated and estranged from God, our fellow humans and nature, and sometimes even ourselves. But there’s not a whit of truth to it.

The cure, the healing, the salvation, is the realization that we are loved, accepted, united all along, despite having felt or thought otherwise.

Sunset over Antarctica, by Dave Mobley, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, PD NOAA.

Tillich calls it “grace.”

He writes compassionately:

“And if that word [God] has no meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depth of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. . . . (The one) who knows about depth knows about God.” For Tillich, that which gives meaning to and is of ultimate concern in life, actually is God.

This is a very compassionate observation from a sermon Tillich gave:

“You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!

If that happens to us, we experience grace.

After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.

In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”
Okay, now let’s get practical. Enough theory.

Sin Is Separation, Estrangement; 
the Reconciliation Is to Love Thy
 Neighbor; Church Is Safe to Do so.

God is the ground of our being. Grace is becoming aware of our connection, our rootedness, our being enfolded into the family of God.

At the Annual Meeting of the United Church of Christ of New York, in Syracuse about a month or so ago, the keynote speaker was Emily Heath, a New Hampshire minister.

She wrote a book called Glorify, and she talks about estrangement in one of the chapters. In it, she references a book called Bowling Alone by political scientist Robert Putnam, who writes about the fragmentation of our society. He uses “bowling alone” as both a fact and a metaphor.

“Between 1980 and 1993, the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent.”

Even as the sport grows, more and more are bowling alone.

But then he goes on. Between the 1960’s to the 1990’s:

Freemasons are down 71%,

American Legion is down 47%,

Red Cross Volunteers are off 61%,

PTA membership is off 60%,
 Rotary is down 25%.

You get the picture.

Between 1975 and 2000, when the book was published, family dinners dropped by 43 percent. Having friends over to the family house, regardless of why (dinner, wine and cheese, cards, watching the game), fell by 35 percent.

It is a deeper separation, a more profound estrangement. To state something every one of us knows intimately, we are also doing religion alone, and that is a problem.

It is our very interaction with others that our faith, our spirituality, our sense of interconnection and interdependence is deepened.

So now, let’s get very practical.

I’m going to ask you to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time.

I want you in your imagination to envision somebody you don’t like. Somebody who ticks you off, somebody who votes another way.

Somebody who, every time you say something, says something contradictory. Imagine such a person.

2. And then, on this side, the commandment: Love your neighbor.

How do you reconcile that?

We all have this tension in our lives.

Love thy neighbor, one of the great commandments. Jesus was not fooling around when he said that. All of the law and the prophets depends upon it. Love your neighbor. Yet there are specific neighbors whom we can come up with.

How do we reconcile them?

Comfort through a hug. PD image courtesy of Pixabay.

Let me suggest this: Church — a relatively safe place to practice loving God, self, and neighbor. And by practice what I mean is getting up again after we have fallen down, trying again after we have missed the mark, loving and forgiving, loving and forgiving, loving and forgiving some more until one day we actually find ourselves being Christlike. It happens.

Imagine every oppositional person as a gift from God to strengthen and expand your ability to love.

Actually, that graduate from seminary was right. The problem with the world is sin.

But to hell with the problem.

Let’s attend to the healing, to the reconciliation, by coming together, forgiving one another, forbearing with one another, extending grace to one another, practicing kindness and compassion to one another, over and over and over again, and the result is love conquering the world.

Amen

Download or view the full Blest Be the Ties That Bind sermon in PDF format.

 

Guest Pastors, Sermon Transcripts, Sermons

SERMON: Sin – A Light Summer Sermon (Guest Pastor Margie Price)

Guest Pastor Margie Price, July 2018.

On Sunday, July 8, 2018, F.C.C. invited the Rev. Margie Price to be our Guest Pastor while Pastor Art is on Sabbatical.

Good morning. I’m so glad to be here with you all this morning.

I love getting my annual summer preaching invitation here with my extended church family. I have had a fairly busy year since I was last time I was here.

As Art said, I have been formally accepted as a Member in Discernment with the Metro Association and I have also been licensed in the Garden City Community Church.

And, maybe the biggest event, as many of you may know, I got preach a sermon in front of Rev. John Dorhauer, the general minister and president of the UCC. It was completely unexpected and rather intimidating, but, hey, I’m always up for a challenge and he was very encouraging so it all worked out in the end.

So, if you read the Pastor’s Perspective that Pastor Art wrote in the May Forecaster, you will notice the similarities in the sermon titles of that sermon and today’s.

I figure, since you heard the reaction to the sermon back in May, I’d share the actual sermon with you today.

In that light, would you please take a moment to pray with me?

Ever-present God,

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you. Oh god my strength and my redeemer.

Lectionary 183, 10th Century. The Walters Art Museum.

As I have said before, I like to preach off the lectionary.

Rather than come up with a topic of my own to preach on, I like to read the scripture and let it present me with the topic.

I don’t know if maybe I’m just being lazy in not having to come up with my own topics, but I figure it’s a descent trade off because over the course of 3 years, using the lectionary, you hit most of the scripture in the Bible, and do it during the relevant seasons.

So whether I’m being lazy or not, it still works. This is what I started to do when preparing this sermon.

And then I read through the scripture set I was presented with and the topic that jumped out at me was the topic of sin and I thought to myself, “Nope, not being lazy.”

I’m kind of happy about this, though, because it’s not something I really talk about often. I mean, I frequently hear, Jesus died for our sins, everybody likes to remind us of that, but that doesn’t really tell us a whole lot about sin.

I have friends and classmates that can recite chapter and verse of all the different kinds of sin and what the consequences may be to committing those sins. And people will do it frequently. To the point where I start to become afraid to do anything for fear that I might commit one of the myriad sins they enumerate.

Russian Icon of the Prophet Micah, early 18th Century. conostasis of Transfiguration church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, north Russia.

And then there is the UCC, where we don’t tend to talk about sin a whole lot, at least not what makes it up. We talk more about what we should do, than what we should not: as we read in Micah, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God, things like that. If we focus on what we SHOULD do, how we SHOULD act, that would keep us from doing the things we should NOT do. Right?

So in light of the scripture set of the lectionary, I decided to take a bit of a closer look at sin and what these scriptures are saying about how Jesus relates to it.

You know, one of those nice light topics for a summer Sunday morning.

So I couple of issues right off the back when talking about sin:

First, I have to admit I don’t really deal well with concept of Original Sin: this concept being that I carry the shame of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after God specifically told them not to.

Illuminated Manuscript, Gospel of John. Walters Art Museum.

I don’t see how the God we always talk about, the loving God that welcomes and embraces us, the one who freed God’s own people from Egypt, this God we are the children of, as we are reminded in our scripture this morning in 1 John, that this God could be so harsh as to punish us for something we couldn’t have hoped to have had a hand in.

How many of you here have children, nieces, nephews or other grandkids or other kids you have been around, even just babysitting? Now who here would hold something their parents did long before they were even born against them? Who would punish a child just because their grandparent made a mistake and disobeyed his or her parent? I don’t expect anyone would. So why do we think God would do the same with us?

My other issue with sin, as I always understood it, is that there is not a single thing I can do that God won’t forgive me for if I just ask for that forgiveness.

When Jesus walked the earth he taught long and hard about forgiving each other, when asked he said we should forgive 70 times 7. And it was not that the end number was the important part of that teaching, it was that we were to keep doing it.

So if we, in theory, have the ability to do this, why wouldn’t God be able to? And God would be so much better at it than we will ever be, after all the practice with the millions of people who came before us and all the petitions God must have received well before I came along.

So in thinking about this concept of sin and applying it to the fact that Jesus came to save us from sin, it just didn’t match up for me.

So, what did I do for the longest time?

Find out – Continue reading for a fresh perspective on ‘Sin’.

Featured Image Credit: Sunrise on the Beach in Florida. Courtesy of Paul Brennan, PD Pics.