Second UCC Sermons

A Sermon in the Series on Practicing our Faith: Courage, Change, Hope

2017-11-13T14:03:00.004-08:00

REFORMATION SUNDAY
A Sermon in the Series on Practicing our Faith: Courage, Change, Hope
JUDITH B. BRAIN
TEXT: PSALM 130, ROMANS
OCTOBER 29, 2017
SECOND CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF BEVERY, UCC ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
Because today many churches are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, I decided to preach on how that reformation resonates with Second Church. When Martin Luther challenged the dominant ways religion was practiced he was advocating a huge change. And in demanding that change, he had to be a man of courage. Courage and change, courage to change. Those were the practices of faith I thought I’d emphasize.

This congregation has had to make some daring choices. It is said that the greatest disloyalty one can offer to our pioneers is to refuse to move an inch from where they stood. In order to survive, we must embrace change; in order to embrace change, we must be brave. So, change it was. And I thought change and courage were the qualities we would have to draw on in the coming year. But then, I got stuck. Every time I turned my thoughts to what it meant to be courageous, or how we navigate change, there was this neon sign flashing in my brain. It said HOPE … HOPE!

Yes, I think hope needs to precede change. Hope needs to motivate courage. We don’t take a leap of faith if we do not believe there is something worth leaping into.

I’ve chosen a Psalm of hope to anchor this sermon. But it sure doesn’t start out very hopeful. In fact the whole Psalm comes from a place of deep pain. And I think that is important. Hope isn’t a rosy optimism that denies reality. Hope is often rooted in despair.

Read the Psalms. They are full of anger, misery, fear, grief, impatience, blaming. Yeah, we know those emotions. We read them in blogs and tweets, we hear them from our children, we express them ourselves. They are in the air we breathe. War and terror, killings and chaos, leaders let us down, institutions crumble. So much negativity. It was the same for the writers of the Psalms. They complain for themselves, they complain on behalf of their people, and mostly they complain to God. But it's important to realize that the Psalms don't stop with the complaint. They go on to hope. Listen to these excerpts from Psalm 130

PSALM 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in God's word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with God is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

SLEEPING WITH BREAD
During the bombing raids of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned and placed in refugee camps. Even though they received food and good care many who had lost home, parents, everything … they could not sleep at night. They feared waking up to find themselves once again homeless and without food. Nothing seemed to reassure them. Finally, someone hit upon the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold at bedtime. Holding their bread, these children could finally sleep in peace. All though the night the bread reminded them, “Today I ate and I will eat again tomorrow.” (Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life. Dennis, Sheila and Matthew Linn)

HALLELUJAH ANYWAY
The Psalms function as our bread. They remind us of God's faithfulness in the midst of despair. These poems may be laments but they almost always end with bread to hold on to; inspiring statements of confidence that God will provide because that is their experience of God. God carried them through dire times in the past, God will do it again. Somewhere in a cathedral in New York City this inscription is carved on a wall. "Hallelujah anyway! God is with us." That’s kinda the lament Psalms in a nutshell.

One of the reasons we come to church is to hear testimonies of hope. These are the crusts of bread that help us sleep at night. These are the reminders that God has given us what we need in the past and will do so again. We hold this bread so that we can have courage in the midst of change.

BREAD FROM OUR WITNESSES During our stewardship campaign, people in our congregation have offered us bread – testimonies of God’s faithfulness made real through the church.

Martin Luther gave us bread in his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” He was often in danger. The emperor declared him an outlaw and made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give him food or shelter. He permitted anyone to kill Martin without consequence. Yet Luther sang, “Our help is he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.”

Mahatma Gandhi offers us bread from his tradition: He writes. When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.

And here is a piece of bread from the Benedictine theologian, Joan Chittester: Despair says that there is no place to go but here. Hope says that God is waiting for us someplace else. Begin again.”

In a church I served, there was a family – parents and two teen-aged daughters. Three of those four family members were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. The mother wrote:
It's overwhelming, tiring, and discouraging. There is worry and fear. But, now that everything is stripped away, I know what really matters. I know what family means, how true friends behave and how many true friends there are— even among people I don't know. And I know more about God than I ever thought I would.
Bread of hope from a family besieged.

HOPE IS MULTIPLIED BY PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
We can become paralyzed by despair or cynicism, enslaved by fear to the point that we cannot act. Hope presents us with the belief that things can be different. Hope gives us courage.

The historian Howard Zinn writes:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. But we must remember those times and places —and there are so many— where people behaved magnificently. This gives the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this … world in a different direction. …. To live now as we think a human being should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. And this is what the church encourages; to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us.

Stories of hope are sustaining to all of us. We feed on them. And there is something even more sustaining. This is the trustworthiness of God. The truly safe place is that quiet center within us where God resides. And that safe place remains whether our body lives or dies.

We may "hope for" certain outcomes and successes and sometime our hopes are fulfilled and sometimes we do not get what we hope for. But what never fails is "hope in." My soul hopes in the Lord. God is the mighty fortress, the bulwark never failing. Have hope in God in times of trouble. With this assurance we too can say, "Hallelujah anyway! God is with us."

BENEDICTION:
One: Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

All: No! For we are convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Give to God What is God's

2017-11-13T13:46:00.001-08:00

SERMON: GIVE TO GOD WHAT IS GOD'S
tewardship Sunday ~ Practicing Our Faith ~ Generosity JUDITH B. BRAIN
TEXT: MATTHEW 22:15-22
OCTOBER 15, 2017
SECOND CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH BEVERLY, MA—UCC ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
The scene is the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus is surrounded by many of his followers. He is there to make his religious pilgrimage, to pray, and to teach. There was a delicate status quo at work in Jerusalem, this outpost of the Roman Empire. Religious leaders made deals with the Roman conquerors keeping their own people in line in order maintain a fragile peace. They had to make compromises to avoid violent oppression. Who could blame them?

But not everyone was pleased with this arrangement. Jewish rebels, separatists, and insurrectionists wanted to overthrow the Roman government. These rabble rousers had to be nipped in the bud. Rome would come down hard on them but their own leaders tried to keep them in check too. Some regarded Jesus as a threat to this fragile detente, not because he advocated violent revolution, but because he was an ally of the poor and a critic of tyranny wherever he found it—among the Roman occupiers or the rigid authoritarianism of his own religion. He is being watched; the goal is to silence him. Here's what happened the day they set a trap.

MATTHEW 22:15-22 PAYING TAXES
The Pharisees plotted a way to trap him into saying something damaging. They sent their disciples, with a few of Herod's followers mixed in, to ask, "Teacher, we know you have integrity, you teach the way of God accurately, you're indifferent to popular opinion, and don't pander to your students. (Wow, they're laying the flattery on pretty thick.)

So tell us honestly: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

Jesus knew they were up to no good. He said, "Why are you playing these games with me? Why are you trying to trap me? Do you have a coin? Let me see it." They handed him a silver piece.

"This engraving—who does it look like? And whose name is on it?"

They said, "Caesar."

"Then give Caesar what is his, and give God what is God's."

The Pharisees were speechless. They went off shaking their heads.

IS IT ABOUT SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE?
A simple story that seems to confirm American ideology of separation of church and state. Keep state taxes and religious loyalties strictly separated. But there's more here than meets the eye. Jesus taught about human dignity, about how important people were in the eyes of God, even the poor. Especially the poor! He taught people to seek God's best for themselves. This would not have been bondage to Rome. The authorities regarded this teaching as dangerous.

Thus, the trick question. "Should we pay taxes to Caesar?" If he said, "No, Caesar is a tyrant," as they were pretty sure he would, the Roman soldiers would arrest him on the spot. If he said, "Yes," he would lose the confidence of the people who loved him and looked to him for courage and guidance. He couldn't win.

I like this story. We often think of Jesus as serious and concerned only with saintly things. We also imagine that he was brave to the point of being foolhardy—putting himself in danger constantly. This story shows Jesus as a trickster with a sense of humor; and a person who would just as soon stay out of trouble with the bullies, thank you very much.

What was his answer to that trick question? Remember the response? "Give to the state what belongs to the state. Give to God what is God's."

They couldn't arrest him for that, could they? Caesar's picture was on the coin, that meant the coin belonged to Caesar. But somehow, the crowd didn't turn on Jesus in disgust. Wasn't he saying they should support that evil government? Why didn't they regard him as a traitor to their cause? How do you suppose he got away with that answer?

I think I know why. The clue is found in a Psalm. "The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. The world, and all who live in it." Many of them there that day would have been able to quote the psalm: “The earth is Lord’s and all that is in it. … ” Everything is God's! Nothing belongs to Caesar.

Not the earth, not their homeland. Not their bodies. Not their minds. Nothing belongs to Caesar. They belong only to God! We belong only to God! Give to God what bears God's image, which is nothing less than the whole of us. I can imagine the faithful Jew in that mob who would have caught on to that clever response. I hear him whispering “Touché” under his breath.

WHAT DOES THIS STORY HAVE TO DO WITH STEWARDSHIP
Today we kick off our stewardship campaign. Today I give what one of my friends calls “The Sermon on the Amount.” But when we encourage ourselves to pledge to the church, we are talking only about part of our stewardship – the way we use our money.

CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP IS NOT FUND-RAISING, IT'S A WAY OF LIFE
Christian stewardship is not fund-raising, it is a way of life, an expression of who we are. This story is about a basic spiritual orientation. New Testament Professor, Donald Senior writes, " … one of the crucial meanings of money in our culture is self-expression." One could translate that, "We are what we spend." Our credit card printout is probably a better window into our character than our Facebook profile.

GIVING IN A FINANCIAL CRISIS
I remember launching a church stewardship campaign at the lowest point of the financial crisis in 2008. One of our Sunday school teachers was an editor of the Harvard Business Review. She knew a thing or two about finances. I asked her advice about how to encourage giving. She replied, "We need to say that the investments that we make here at the church never lose their value."

We heard a moving testimonial from Doug today and we will be hearing more from other members of the congregation about those investments—our commitments to caring for one another, our reaching out in solidarity to those in need, providing solace in worship, music, and prayer, a beautiful, sacred space in which the community can gather. We'll be hearing about feeding people body and soul and extending a welcome that knows no boundaries. And we’ll hear about teaching our children these values. We need to know that when we give, we're supporting something that is worthy.

EXAMPLES OF GOOD STEWARDS, GIVING FROM THE TOP
I remember a 100-year old saint. Depression era survivors she and her husband were people who did not know the meaning of luxury. They never had more than one car, lived simply, and cared for their belonging so they would last a lifetime.

Every year, they would assess their finances to decide if they could take a vacation. Whether they did or not was based on their church pledge. Unless they knew there would be enough money for the church, they did not take a vacation. Their pledge was a priority.

Their kindness and generosity was a way of life. And then there were the young parents of two kids. A military family, they lived on Hanscom Air Force base. I was with them at a booth selling children’s religious books. They were discussing two books that they thought their daughters would love. Which one should we get? I jumped in. “Get them both!” “No,” Annie responded, “our budget only allows for one.” Later that year, I was to discover that this frugal family gave one of the five largest pledges to the church.

I have to say, that our 100 year-old lady and the young family were some of the most contented people I know. They did not find meaning in things but in joyful giving. To this day, their examples inspire me. And, I felt accountable to them. I wanted to make very sure that the church was worthy of their sacrifice.

It is also very important to acknowledge that there are seasons in our lives when we are capable of giving lavishly and seasons when any pledge is a stretch. Stewardship is who we are: That’s where our “Body of Christ” image comes in again. We carry each other.

People in my generation with our children grown, our houses almost paid for, and some money in the bank, we can afford to pitch in a little more to cover for our brothers and sisters who are drowning in college loans. People bowed down with debt need to find a place at church where they are free from anxiety about money and held with respect no matter what their financial circumstances.

GIVE TO GOD WHAT IS GOD'S, NOTHING LESS THAN OUR WHOLE SELVES
So, I’ve shared some inspiring stories about giving and not just money. Giving to God what is God's is how we express our personality in positive, life affirming directions.

Stewardship has been defined as “what we do with what we have all the time.” I could not, in good conscience, ask you to support the maintenance of this building, the salaries of the staff, and the programs of this church, if I hadn't already asked you to be faithful to Jesus Christ with what you have all the time.

I would not be able to muster much enthusiasm for any church if I did not believe that we are part of something awesome. What we hold here; the message of God's love and faithfulness is sustained by financial gifts yes, but it is utterly priceless.

Ways to Pray

2017-11-13T13:22:00.004-08:00

WAYS TO PRAY

PRACTICING OUR FAITH ~ PRAYER JUDITH B. BRAIN

TEXTS: JAMES 5:13-16 AND ROMANS 8:26

OCTOBER 21, 2017

SECOND CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BEVERLY—UCC ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

Today’s sermon topic in the series on “Practicing our Faith” is “Prayer.” Here’s a question we hear a lot. “Do you believe in prayer?”

Hmmm, would we fill our worship with prayers if we didn’t believe in them? In this Sunday’s worship bulletin alone, there are 8 prayers if you count the hymns addressed to God as prayers set to music.

The book of James talks about the importance of prayer in a church community. He says we need to pray for each other.

13 Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14 Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.

PRAYER: A CORE CHRISTIAN PRACTICE

Prayer. In a 12 minute sermon, one can hardly crack the surface of this deep and vital Christian practice. It is one of the cornerstones of faith. It is what makes a church different from a support group or a community action network or a self improvement seminar. We want to help others, better ourselves, learn, promote justice. But we do that not only by our own efforts or with our own energy. No, we add prayer! We call on the resources of God so we can be powerful and effective.

1. INTERCESSORY PRAYER

Do you believe in prayer? It’s often asked with a skeptical tone. What’s behind that question? Sadly, it often means, “Do you believe that God intervenes supernaturally and changes the course of nature in order to answer prayer?”

Well, I certainly believe in miracles. No-one could spend decades listening to the stories of prayerful Christians and not know that there is something mystical happening in the connections between human beings and God. People testify about coming through scary medical procedures with a sense of peace. They say, “I know I made it because of all the prayers that surrounded me. I felt them!” People talk about directly experiencing the “touch” of God through prayer.

Or there is this story: “I was so discouraged. Then out of the blue I got a note that said just the right thing and set me on the right track. It was too perfect to be coincidence. I know it was an answer to prayer.”

Yes, we are more “soul connected” than we recognize. There is a spirit that flows among us and out of us, to each other and to strangers. That connecting essence is God. God is not “up there,” God is right here.

And yet, all prayers are not answered the way we hope. The “healing” and “saving” and “raising up” that James promises may not mean we are restored to perfect health. I met someone recently who told me. “I lost my faith a long time ago. I prayed and prayed that my father would not have to go through chemotherapy for cancer. But he did. He got some good years, but finally he died of the disease. God didn’t answer my prayer at all. I don’t believe in prayer and I don’t believe in God.”

THE UNEXPECTED ANSWER

You know, how many of your wishes are granted is not a very good test of the value of prayer. Life is filled with random illness, death, pain, and losses. If you measure God’s effectiveness by how well you manage to escape these inevitabilities, God will always lose out. Nobody escapes. It’s not good theology to regard God as a fairy godmother that grants wishes or a “cosmic bellhop” as Martin Luther King names it.

The Rolling Stones neatly summed it up. “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try some times, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Undoubtedly, the most common form of prayer is the one we practice every Sunday. Intercessions and petitions. It’s what James encourages us to do.

But there is more to prayer. Prayer is, at its core, coming into the presence of God. As Woody Allen says about life, the most important part is showing up. So it is with prayer. I believe in that kind of prayer too. It has nothing to do with supply and demand or asking, asking, asking. So what are some other ways to pray?

2. LISTENING PRAYER

Coming into God’s presence with thanksgiving doesn’t mean talking God’s ear off. Perhaps the deepest form of prayer is listening. The time we take to just be with God and listen is invaluable in determining the next step when the way is not so clear. I like that hymn, “Here I Am Lord.” It’s just about putting ourselves in a place to attend to God. Quiet listening is a too-often neglect form of prayer.

3. PRAYER OF ADORATION

There is also the form of prayer that seems to have no utilitarian purpose. The prayer of adoration. It’s a prayer about developing a relationship.

I have a friend who is a Catholic priest. Every day he observes what he calls his “holy hour.” One day he showed me the place in the sanctuary where he sits before the cross. “What are you thinking about?” I asked him. “Nothing,” he said as he gestured to the crucified Christ. “I just look at him and he looks at me and we love each other.” Here I am.

4. CONVERSATIONAL PRAYER

“Here I am.” Prayer is mindfulness. Constantly turning the mind toward God. Constantly reminding ourselves that we are in the presence of God no matter when or where. That might be the time for conversational prayer.

The writer Annie Lamott, has a very prosaic practice of prayer. She talks to Jesus while she drives on the L.A. freeways. From her conversation with Jesus, it sounds as if he’s buckled into the seatbelt right next to her. She might say, “You know, Jesus, I’ve been a real jerk today. That perfect mom in my son’s kindergarten class is getting on my nerves. I know I shouldn’t dislike her because she wears size 8 Calvin Kleins and makes Pokemon cookies for each kid in the class with their names written on them. But I feel jealousy taking root. I’m definitely going to need your help here.”

“Here I am.” We can pray always—conversing with God as a friend as we goes about our work. We can even emulate the Psalmists and rage and cry and shake our fist in anger when we feel lost, abandoned, scared, and lonely. Just let go with all our negative feelings. God can take it.

THE WORDLESS PRAYER

One can pray wordlessly. Perhaps the most meaningful prayer of all happens when words are beyond us. When we are so distraught or depleted that we cannot think, never mind put a coherent sentence together. Would you believe that the Bible tells us then God prays for us?

To me, one of the most hopeful and comforting Bible passages on prayer is found in Romans 8:26.

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

That’s a promise to hang on to. And I do!

Redeeming Laughter

2017-02-09T13:28:00.004-08:00

Psalm 126

Redeeming Laughter

Christmas Eve 2016

I have a friend who, every Advent, posts really, really bad Christmas jokes on her Facebook page, jokes so punny and bad they would make Bob Lague proud. Here are a few examples, and tell me if you don’t agree:

How much did Santa pay for his sleigh? (Nothing – it was on the house.)

What do you call a singing elf? (A wrapper.)

What kind of hat does a snowman wear? (An ice cap.)

What did the Gingerbread man pull over his bed? (A cookie sheet.)

When are old Christmas trees like clumsy knitters? (When they drop their needles.)

See what I mean? Some of them are so bad they actually make you laugh.

Psalm 126 is a psalm about holy laughter. “When God restored the fortunes of the people, we were like those who dream. Our mouths were filled with laughter, and our tongues with shouts of joy. Then it was said throughout the world, ‘The Lord has done great things for them!’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.” The Lord has done great things for us: “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy for all the people – to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” This is a time filled with joy, with good news, and with holy laughter.

Tonight of course, we are also mindful of those things that work against gladness and laughter and joy. We are mindful of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey; we are mindful of the terrorist attack in Berlin; we are mindful that our LGBT brothers and sisters still face obstacles to full equality and inclusion; we are mindful of the friends and neighbors we have lost to the epidemic of addiction; we are mindful that for many people, these are stressful days and uncertain times. And none of this is easily wished away, not even on this holy night. But because of this night, we are confident that the One who is born to bring joy and peace, justice and redemption, compassion and healing, not just to us but to all creation, makes us better people and our world a better place.

Through this season of Advent here at Second Church we have been reading through and talking about Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Christmas Carol. I’m guessing nearly everyone here has either read it or seen one of the many movie or television versions of the story. Tonight we come to the very last chapter: after Ebenezer Scrooge has been visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet-to-Come, he awakens Christmas morning with a new sense of himself: “I am as light as a feather,” said Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. “I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world.” In the fifth and final stave, or stanza, Ebenezer Scrooge is a changed man. And the most palpable sign of the change in him is laughter. As Dickens puts it, Scrooge let out a laugh that, “for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.” And he literally laughs his way through to the end of the book. He laughs as he sends the poulterer’s prize turkey to the Cratchit family. He laughs as he goes to Christmas dinner at his nephew Fred’s house, accepting an invitation he had earlier spurned with a trademark “Humbug!” He even laughed at the laughter of others who had never seen Scrooge act quite this way before. And the following day, he laughed when, in response to Bob Cratchit’s being late for work the day after Christmas, he doubled his salary. “His own heart laughed,” Dickens writes, “and that was quite enough for him.”

There are many lessons to be drawn from Dickens’ classic story, and the one we take away from this last chapter is that Scrooge’s laughter is a signal of his redemption. Scrooge is a changed man, and we see it and we hear it in his laugh.

Actor Peter Ustinov once said that “Laughter is the most civilized music in the world.” There is a lot of music associated with Jesus’ birth, and I don’t just mean the Christmas carols you and I sing every year. There are also four different Christmas carols in Luke’s gospel, and it is important that each song includes the message of salvation and redemption. When Mary learned she had conceived and would be having a baby, she sang, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” When her cousin Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah named his son John, who would grow to be John the Baptist, Zechariah sang “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for God has looked favorably on us and redeemed us.” When Simeon saw the infant Jesus brought to the temple for his dedication, he sang, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” And of course, on that first Christmas night the angelic chorus sang to the shepherds, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will.” There was a lot of singing and music surrounding the events at the manger. And if laughter is the most civilized music in the world, what could be more musical than the laughter of a little baby. We’ve all heard babies giggle and coo and laugh – and it’s magical, it is like no other laughter in the world. Among all the other sounds that first Christmas night, the sounds of livestock and of a woman in labor, I imagine that both the cries and the laughter of an infant were among them. And in that moment, in that laughter, was the promise of the redemption of the world.

We all know what it means to call someone a Scrooge. The name is synonymous with parsimony, penny-pinching and skinflintery. As Bob Cratchits’ wife puts it, to be a Scrooge is to be “odious, stingy, hard and unfeeling.” But this is not how the story ends. The story ends with a Scrooge who is generous, lavish, charitable, and most of all, filled with the kind of great-hearted laughter that signifies his own redemption. This is the Ebenezer Scrooge who remains standing at the end of the tale. While there is scarcely a trace of religion to Dickens’ story, this is how it concludes: “[I]t was always said of [Scrooge], that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if anyone alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!”

Let us pray.

Christmas Presence

2017-02-09T13:27:00.002-08:00

Isaiah 35.1-10

Luke 1.46-55

Christmas Presence

(God Bless Us Every One!- III)

Third Sunday of Advent

When I was seven or eight years old, there were times that I was so excited about Christmas that I couldn’t get to sleep. So instead I would tiptoe down the hallway in the wee hours of the morning past my parents’ bedroom, turn the television on very softly, and watch whatever happened to be on – and since those were there was only a handful of stations, and since it was usually around 2 or 3 a.m., this meant whatever happened to be on were mainly old movies – which is how I was first introduced to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I remember it vividly - it was the 1951 version that featured Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, and it became the standard by which I measured all other versions of the story. There was one earlier version, in 1938, with Leo G Carroll as Marley’s ghost and a young June Lockhart as one of the Cratchit girls. Others came later: There were two animated versions, one in 1962 starring Mr Magoo and the voice of Jim Backus, and one in 2001 with the voices of Nicholas Cage and Kate Winslet; and at least two other live-action versions that I know of, the 2009 one with Jim Carrey not only playing the role of Scrooge but also all the ghosts but Marley’s; and the 1984 version with George C Scott as Scrooge, the version we’re going to be showing this Saturday night right here in the sanctuary. Now, I’ll admit it is probably because I saw them both before the Froggatt house had a color television, but it is the two earliest versions that I tend to prefer; I guess Victorian London just seems more authentic in black and white.

Our two scripture lessons this morning are twins, of a sort, and I think you could hear that when we read them. Both passages are songs of redemption: “The wilderness and the dry land will be glad,” Isaiah proclaimed, “the desert will rejoice and blossom… the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” It describes a time when God will lift up the weary and heal infirmity. In a similar way, Mary’s song, the Magnificat, draws a like picture: “[God’s] mercy is for those who revere God from generation to generation… [God] has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things.” In Mary’s song, which could also be called her prophecy, the one who is about to be born will be a champion of the poor and outcast, will lift up the weary and will heal the infirm.

In certain theological circles, both these passages reflect what has sometimes been called God’s preferential option for the poor. As Catholic canon law puts it, “The Christian faithful are obliged to promote social justice, and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor.” When I was in seminary, Latin American Liberation Theology leaned heavily in this direction. But I confess, I was more than a little surprised to find the same sentiment in Dickens’ Christmas Carol as we have been reading through it this Advent. As the Spirit of Christmas Present leads Ebenezer Scrooge through the streets and homes of London on Christmas Day, and they are jostled by people coming and going to and from church and on to their Christmas dinners, the Spirit invisibly sprinkled what Dickens called a kind of incense on the passers-by and on their dinners from the tip of the torch he carried. As Dickens tells it,

“There emerged from scores of by-streets, lanes and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners… The sight of these poor revelers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him at a baker’s doorway, and taking the off the covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinner from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it was! “Is there – is there a peculiar flavor in what you sprinkle from your torch?” asked Scrooge. “There is [the Spirit replied], my own.” “Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?” asked Scrooge. “To any kindly given,” the Spirit said, “To a poor one most.” “Why to a poor one most?” asked Scrooge. “Because it needs it most.”

It appears that the Spirit of Christmas Present also possesses a preferential option for the poor: imagine, finding Liberation Theology in a nineteenth century novel! Now to be sure, Charles Dickens was not a particularly religious man; in fact on more than one occasion he expressed his contempt and disdain for visible religiosity, particularly of the evangelical and Roman Catholic varieties. Dickens was more prone to Unitarianism, and for a while attended Anglican services. But his was really a civil religion, and this is what comes through most in his Christmas Carol. Scrooge reflects Dickens’ conviction that salvation comes from an authentic encounter with the self, and is achieved through loving one’s neighbor, and offering a cup of water to one who is in need. As Steven Rost wrote in Christianity Today, “The New Testament teaches that such acts are the result of spiritual conversion; for Dickens they were the means.” To Rost’s citation of the New Testament, I would add that the same can be said of the Old Testament prophets, Isaiah included.

But what really begins Scrooge’s transformation in this third chapter of the story is not the Spirit’s encounter with the poor, but rather Scrooge’s encounter with himself as seen through the eyes of two families at Christmas dinner – the Cratchit family, and that of his nephew Fred, whose invitation to join them Scrooge spurned with his characteristic “Humbug!”

At the first, Bob Cratchit raises a Christmas toast to his employer – over his wife’s strenuous objection. Lifting his cup, Cratchit says,

“I give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!” “The Founder of the Feast!” cried Mrs. Cratchit; “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it!” “My dear,” said Bob, “the children! Christmas Day!” “It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,” said she, “on which one drinks to the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do… I’ll drink his health for your sake and the Day’s, not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas and a happy new year. He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt.”

And they all drank a toast to Mr. Scrooge.

The scene at Scrooge’s nephew’s home is a similar one. The conversation turned to how Scrooge had been invited there for Christmas dinner, but rudely declined. Fred’s sisters have little good to say about their uncle, but Fred, a good humored young man, refused to defame him. “He’s a comical old fellow,” Fred said,

“that’s the truth; and not so pleasant as he might be… [But] I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won’t come and dine with us. What’s the consequence? He don’t lose much of a dinner… I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better of it – I defy him – if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year and saying ‘Uncle Scrooge, how are you?’”

These two scenes which unfolded in the presence of Scrooge and the Spirit constitute a kind of turning point in the story. While they had every reason to find fault with Scrooge, as the women of the families did, both Fred and Bob Cratchit found something positive to say about the man. And as if to punctuate this, Fred finally convinces his sisters and household to toast the man: “He has given us plenty merriment I am sure, and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, ‘Uncle Scrooge!’” “Well, Uncle Scrooge!” they cried. “A merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old man, whatever he is… Uncle Scrooge!” And then Dickens reports, “Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light of heart that he would have pledged the unconscious company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech, if the Ghost had given him time.”

If those people most adversely affected by his penny-pinching and meagerness can find something good to say about Ebenezer Scrooge and find something good in him, odious, stingy, hard and unfeeling as he may have been, there is the beginning of Scrooge’s redemption, such as it is. And turning of his own heart to the needs of the poor are the means of getting there.

Turning our hearts to the needs of the poor – both Isaiah and Mary use this kind of language as a way of preparing to receive the promised one of God. “Strengthen the hands of the weak,” Isaiah said, “make firm the feeble knees.” Mary sang, “God brings the powerful down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; God fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty.” God’s clear preferential option for the poor. If we are still looking for ways to make this Advent season meaningful, this is a very good place to begin.

Let us pray.

Opening Lines

2017-02-09T13:26:00.003-08:00

Isaiah 2.1-5

Matthew 24.36-44

Opening Lines

(God Bless Us Every One – I)

First Sunday of Advent

Let’s have a little literary fun this morning to start the season. I’m going to give you the opening line to a well-known piece of literature, and ask you to tell me the title of the work.

“Call me Ishmael.” (Moby Dick)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities)

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (The Bible)

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without

taking a fish.” (The Old Man and the Sea)

“It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.” (1984)

Sometimes an exercise like this is easier when it is done with poetry. Let’s do a few poems, shall we?

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of

forgotten lore /while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping,

rapping at my chamber door.” (The Raven)

“Whose woods these are, I think I know / His house is in the village though –”

(Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

“Sing in me, O Muse, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered

Troy’s sacred heights.” (The Odyssey)

“Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / the Carriage held but just Ourselves /

And immortality.” (Because I Could Not Stop for Death)

“Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon

a table.” (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” (Sonnet 116)

It is very often the case that the opening lines at the very beginning of a work foreshadow and even shape the theme of entire piece, whether it is poetry or prose. And so as you and I stand at the very beginning of Advent, with Thanksgiving’s leftovers likely still chilling in the fridge and the entire expanse of the season of waiting and anticipation spread before us, what are the opening lines for us this Advent that will foreshadow and perhaps shape the entire season for us?

During Advent, Tara and I are taking our cue from another well-known piece of literature in order to examine Advent’s meaning for us. Our opening lines are these:

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

And these are the opening lines to...? Of course, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The first lines are memorable ones, partly because they are so dark, and partly because we know the story so well we know we will not remain in darkness throughout – although, this being Dickens, it isn’t until we come nearly to the very end that of the story that we are allowed to glimpse the light. So the dark tone in the opening lines really permeate the work in its near-entirety.

Now to be fair, it isn’t just Dickens who opens this season with notes of foreboding and darkness and yes, even death. This morning’s lesson from Matthew paints a similarly dark and foreboding picture. Where so much of the world, in its anticipation of that certain holiday come December 25 is all candy and confection and merriment and light, the church contrariwise begins in a dark place, with but one solitary candle to pierce the darkness of Advent and near mid-winter. Matthew writes,

“For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field – one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together - one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day the Lord is coming.”

I guarantee you will not find these verses on the inside of any Hallmark Christmas card. And it isn’t just that Matthew is having a bad day either. Every first Sunday in Advent the church’s prescribed scripture lessons, or lectionary readings, have a similar theme. The parallel reading from Mark’s gospel includes these verses: “But in those days, after the suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” And Luke’s lesson for the start of Advent tells us “There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world…” It’s funny – most of the time folks in the church can be heard complaining that Christmas comes too soon, but after reading a few passages like these, we might be persuaded that it cannot come soon enough!

But perhaps there is the lesson in this: before we can welcome the light, it is necessary to walk for little while in darkness. It is not for nothing that Isaiah reminds us, in one of the passages most closely related to the birth of the messiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light - those who have lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.”

Early on in A Christmas Carol, a lonely soul, a poor shivering caroler stands outside the door of Scrooge and Marley – Scrooge being too stingy even to remove his dead partner’s name from the office door – singing the carol that will end our service this morning, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” As Dickens tells us, the caroler, “…gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of, ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!’ Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.”

Sometimes it is necessary to walk for a little while in the cold, dank frost before we can know the light that will bring warmth and life to the world.

When I think of the cold and the frost I think of those people who have come together at Standing Rock in an attempt to preserve the sacred ground of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, bearing the bitter cold, soaked by water cannons in the freezing night. I wonder what the good people of North Beverly would do if an energy company began to plow up the cemetery out there to plant a pipeline? In a kind of parallel to Matthew’s dark prophecy, the Sioux also are inheritors of a dark legend, which tells of a giant, winding black snake that would one day rise and slither into the sacred lands to destroy the earth. You can understand why the arrival of an oil pipeline might remind them of this ancient prophecy / giant winding black snake. For the Sioux nation at Standing Rock, these are indeed cold dark days, both literally and metaphorically – which helps explain why people from around the country, including more than a few from our own United Church of Christ, have chosen to join them, bringing food and medicine and supplies and perhaps more than all this, a sense of respect and dignity for what the Sioux believe to be holy.

It was, of course, the ghost of Jacob Marley who came to warn old Ebenezer that, if he continued his life of avarice and the pursuit of profit at all costs – including the ruination of lives such as Bob Cratchit’s and Tiny Tim’s – then he himself was also doomed to ruin. But it did not have to be like that; change was possible, though not guaranteed to be easy. In fact Scrooge was required to come to grips with his past, his present and his future if there was to be any hope for him.

The season of Advent is only a few hours old this morning, and Christmas is still fully four weeks away – exactly four weeks from today. Where are the places you and I need to walk together in order to be ready to greet the light of the world that is born to all people everywhere? Where are the hungry, the cold, the frightened, the threatened, with whom we might stand, or whom we might feed and bring warmth, encouragement and hope? And is there any resentment, any bitterness, any barrier to generosity within ourselves that might keep us from doing so? If so, that’s all right – we have an entire season to walk through whatever dark places exist for us and come into the light. The light itself is slow in coming. One candle this week, two the next and so on – it isn’t much, but at the end it brings us to the brightness of a star that will reveal to us not just God with us, but also our own better selves.

But for now, it is enough to stand in a place that is illuminated only faintly. The entire story is still waiting to be spread out before us. Marley’s midnight visit to Scrooge is only a foreshadowing, a hint of both Scrooges- and Christmases-yet-to-come. For him and for us, it is the start of a journey, the opening lines that both anticipate and shape the story of our own Advent preparation. How will that story unfold? For every person and for every Advent the story will be different, but what is certain beyond all doubt, is that it begins today.

Let us pray.

Lost Luggage

2017-02-09T13:25:00.003-08:00

Luke 4.1-15

Mark 6.4-13

Lost Luggage

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

So, Jesus, let me get this straight: you want your disciples to go out in the world and do your work, to heal the ailing, welcome the stranger and declare the gospel, and your specific instructions amount to this: we can’t bring any food with us, we can’t carry any money, no change of clothes, not even a hotel reservation. Would anybody here undertake a journey like this? I’m not at all certain I would, and I have a little bit of experience in this kind of thing. It was right around this time last year, on the cusp of our trip to Greece, that I will admit to having lost a few nights’ sleep when I learned the Greek currency crisis was about to close every bank in the country, on the very day of our arrival, for an indeterminate amount of time, which turned out to be nearly three weeks. So I can’t begin to imagine what my state of mind would have been if someone had told me that not only would I not have access to cash, but that I couldn’t take any food or any clothing except for what I wore when I left. Yet essentially, these are Jesus’ instructions to the disciples when he sent them out into the countryside to minister. “He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.” And yet guess what? The disciples were successful – the disciples were successful: “They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” Perhaps it is possible to do God’s work in the world without carrying a lot of baggage.

Dana Ciolli is a childhood friend of my daughter Clare, and was returning from a conference last month in the Virgin Islands when she found herself sitting in the Miami airport, waiting for her connecting flight home to Hartford. She was flying American Airlines, and had downloaded an app to her phone that let her track her luggage on the trip. So just to be sure that her bags were on the same track as she was, she opened the app as she sat in the departures lounge, just in time to watch her suitcase taking off for Trinidad and Tobago. Immediately she went to the closest airline rep and told her what was going on only be given the Zen-like reply, “The app lets us know when mistakes happen; it does not fix them!” No wonder people try to stuff all their things in a carry-on!

Now, a close look at our text this morning shows there were some good, practical reasons why Jesus sent his disciples out for mission and ministry with so few provisions. For example, they were told not to bring a bag for the journey because that was something that common street preachers, who were prevalent in those days, often carried with them, begging for money in return for their message. They were like street performers - they’d put their beggars’ bag out, and stand there and preach, like a busker in Harvard Square. So Jesus said, don’t bring a bag – that’s not who we are. He also directed them to bring not to bring any food or a second tunic, which would have been for warmth at nighttime, because Jesus expected them to be reliant on the hospitality of others. And they didn’t need money because this was to be a missionary journey, not a shopping trip. Like I said, just underneath the surface of the story lie some good practical reasons to deliver the gospel message practically empty-handed.

But the practical reasons only touch the surface level of the story. With just a little more imagination we might discover some other, equally sensible explanations for these unusual travel instructions. For example, taking a lesson from Clare’s friend Dana, you can’t lose your luggage if you don’t bring any, right? That’s why a lot of travelers put their valuables – jewelry, prescriptions, money and passports – in their carry-ons; the only person responsible for your carry-on is you. As somebody once said, “Don’t take any more than you need, and you won’t miss what you don’t have.” But Jesus’ direction to the disciples also suggests that they really aren’t traveling very far. Yes, they required a place to stay – “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.” But most of their work was done in nearby villages, where they could expect to receive hospitality – a welcome, a meal, a roof over their heads. These were villages and neighborhoods they knew, that were part of their own wider community. Perhaps the implication here is that some of the most successful work of discipleship can be done not very far from home. Who are our neighbors? Who is our community? These places are where some of the disciples’ most fruitful work was accomplished.

And of course the whole metaphor of excess baggage is at work here as well. What are the things we carry around with us that we know deep down inside we would be better off without? Worry and anxiety? Possessions and prestige? The weight of the past or the familiarity of the status quo? What are the things that prevent us from being our best selves, that tempt us to settle for second-best? What baggage do we carry that keeps us from being true disciples of Jesus Christ? The things Jesus asked the disciples to forego are worrisome, are they not? Go out there without food or money or enough layers to stay warm against the chill of night? Are you serious, Jesus?

This morning after church you and I are going to begin the most exciting and the most possibility- and opportunity-laden chapter of our Crossroads/New Beginnings conversations. We have already assessed our church’s past and we have taken the measure of our present; this morning we are going to begin both to dream and to design the shape of our future and the continuing ministry of Second Church. We too are about to embark on a journey not all that different from the one the disciples undertook in Mark’s gospel. Who are our neighbors? Who is our community? And if these are the places where some of the disciples’ most fruitful work was accomplished, then what is the Christ-centered mission and ministry we might undertake that will reveal God’s good news and good deeds within this community of faith, and convey them into the community around us?

And to put it in the context of this morning’s gospel story, what is the luggage, or baggage, we need to take on this journey, and what do we need to let go? If the disciples’ experience is illustrative, then we need to be prepared to travel lightly. There are likely to be some things we think we need, because we have always carried them with us before, but these may be the very things that slow us down or prevent us from being fully engaged in God’s mission. For the disciples, it was food and money and an extra layer – an insurance layer – of clothes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the disciples thought to themselves, “That’s crazy talk! How can we be the church and engage in effective mission without food and money and an extra layer of comfort?” But here’s the clue: they were successful – they were successful – precisely because they left behind the things they thought they needed to carry with them.

Our other gospel today is the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. He too went out into a place set apart without food, without any visible means of support, and came into deep communion with God, when temptation intervened. What is telling about this encounter is the form the temptations took. The tempter made Jesus three offers: he could have food in abundance, he could have kingdoms and wealth, and he could have command of the angels. But Jesus reminded the tempter that in each instance there was always one thing better: living by the word is better than living by bread alone; honoring God is greater than the honor and adulation of kingdoms and their glory; and trusting God is superior to commanding all the legions of heaven. We might say that in each case Jesus was tempted to settle for penultimate glory, for what is only second-best. But settling for second best was never an option for Jesus, and his insistence on focusing on the realm and righteousness of God led to this conclusion: “[He] was filled with the power of the Spirit, [he] returned to Galilee… word about him spread through all the surrounding country, [and] he began to teach in the synagogues and was praised by everyone.”

Easy answers will always be tempting. Quick fixes will always be tempting. Low-hanging fruit will always be tempting. Second-best solutions and penultimate proposals will always prove tempting. But we know from experience, and we know from the disciples’ success in their own ministry, that maintaining our focus on the realm and righteousness of God, and on God’s mission for our church, will lead us, not into temptation, but into the next chapter of life and vitality for Second Congregational Church. As Tara likes to say, May it be so, dear Lord – may this ever and always be so.

Let us pray.

God is Not the Answer

2017-02-09T13:24:00.004-08:00

Genesis 18.9-15

John 20.24-29

God is Not the Answer

Second Sunday of Easter

When it comes to this morning’s story about doubting Thomas, well, just call me a doubting Thomas. That is, I don’t believe the story really happened the way John says it did. The gist of it, as we just heard, is that Thomas, who was not with the other disciples when they saw the risen Jesus, doubted their story. And actually, the word “doubt” never appears in this story, or for that matter anywhere else in John’s gospel – the word that is used here is “unbelieving,” or “disbelief.” So Thomas did not believe that the others had actually seen Jesus, and said the only way he could believe it was if he actually saw and touched Jesus’ crucifixion wounds for himself. This is the first part of my problem – in every other story about the risen Jesus, he was so transformed by the resurrection that he was unrecognizable. Luke tells not one, but two different stories of Jesus talking with his disciples after the resurrection, and in both stories the disciples didn’t have any idea who he was, until they sat down at the end of the day to eat, and, as Luke put it, “Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” And John himself tells us that the person who was the closest to Jesus, the one who knew him best, Mary Magdalene, not only didn’t recognize him, but mistook him for a gardener. Don’t you think that if Jesus still bore the scars of the crucifixion, Mary and the disciples might have noticed?

But the main reason I take the story of Thomas with a grain of salt is that nearly every other witness to the risen Jesus is based on faith, and not on observable, perceptible evidence like flesh and blood. “Faith is the … conviction of things not seen,” Hebrews insists, and as Jesus himself said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” In other words, prima facie evidence, to me is exactly the opposite of what faith, at least biblical faith, is all about. A story about Jesus providing physical, incontrovertible evidence of his resurrection simply does not square with the rest of the biblical story. The evidence of Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind that would stand up in a court of law – it is based on belief – the inclination of the mind and heart - rather than something you can perceive with the senses. This is why I don’t buy the story of Thomas sticking his fingers in Jesus’ wounds – it just doesn’t square with anything else in the Bible. According to our New Testament lesson, Thomas’ doubt was completely swept away by Jesus’ physical presence; but a faith that does not admit at least elements of doubt, is a faith that is not really being honest with itself.

There was an opinion piece in last Saturday’s New York Times that offered an intriguing twist on the subject of the relationship between doubt and faith – it was actually about the relationship between doubt and unfaith, if we can call it that. William Irvin, professor of philosophy at King’s College, wrote, “Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all!” Imagine: an atheist whose doubt actually leaves room for faith. It is a neat corollary to the kind of faith that leaves room for doubt.

Ronald Knox, a Monsignor in the Anglican Church in the mid-twentieth century, also wrote detective novels and dabbled in doggerel; Knox once wrote this little ditty of a prayer in the form of a limerick:

“O God, for as much as without thee,

We are not enabled to doubt thee,

Help us all by thy grace

To convince the whole race

It knows nothing whatever about thee.”

I don’t think we necessarily have to agree with the last line, that, “the whole race knows nothing whatever about thee,” but the first couplet still entices: “Without thee we are not enabled to doubt thee.” Most people don’t consider doubt, especially doubt about God, to be a God-given characteristic. But I believe it is, and I believe it is essential. Inasmuch as the human body contains microorganisms or antibodies that in greater abundance would prove toxic, yet at just the right level actually keep other more serious toxins at bay, so the admission that we don’t know everything that there is to know about God and exactly what it means to be faithful can serve to make ours a stronger faith that it otherwise might be. I would be willing to wager that everyone in this room has room in our faith for doubt, for uncertainty, for an ambivalent confidence that everything we think we ought to believe about God is actually true – including the story about Thomas this morning. And this is a good thing; doubt is healthy. Questions are good, and the kind of faith that believes it has all the answers, in my mind, borders on the disingenuous. Where there is no doubt, there is no self-awareness, no self-actualization, and in the end, even a compromised faith.

In 2013 author Kamel Daoud wrote a book titled The Meursault Investigation as a kind of semi-sequel to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The book’s protagonist, the brother of Muersault’s murder victim in the first book, has an interesting take on the notion of God: it is his opinion that “God is a question, not an answer.” God is a question, not an answer. I like this. I like this because it often seems we spend so much of life looking for answers, right? And once we have the answer – or at least once we think we have the answer – what usually happens? We stop asking the question and go on to something else. However, if God is not the answer, but rather the question, then the question is the place where you and I live, and we have permission to keep asking, to keep wondering, to nurture a healthy and constructive wonder. And while it may sometimes be an uncomfortable place to inhabit, it is the question that keeps us seeking, that keeps us growing, that keeps us sharp. You all have been asking lots and lots of questions in the whole Crossroads process, good questions, constructive questions, critical questions - and that’s wonderful – it means we are moving forward as a congregation. Because what would happen if we believed we finally found the answer? What would happen if suddenly we all came to a nice, neat, satisfying conclusion together and said to ourselves, “Whew! I’m glad that’s finally done!” What would happen? We would stop asking questions, we would stop moving forward, and we would grow stale. And the best part of living in the question is that we don’t always have to know the answer – we are free to admit, “I don’t know,” or, “We’re still figuring it out,” or “I still need to work on that, to pray about it, to try it on for size.” It’s OK to live with uncertainty – it’s OK to live with doubt – it’s OK to live with wonder – it’s OK to admit there are answers out there we haven’t discovered yet. It’s OK never to see the wounded hands and feet, but wonder just how the resurrected Jesus can continue to live in our lives, in our church, in our world. Woody Allen made a wry joke, I think it was in the movie, “Annie Hall.” He said a relationship is like a shark – it has to keep moving forward in order to stay vital and alive. And then he said to Annie about their relationship, “I think what we have here is a dead shark.” Something similar can be said about the church. We have to keep moving forward in order to remain vital and alive. The minute we stop moving forward – the minute we believe we have found the answer – that’s when we have a dead shark on our hands. And it is a faithful, lively, critical doubt – living in the question – that propels us forward. This is why I think it’s helpful to think of God as the question and not the answer – because the question is the place we live and grow and strengthen both our faith and our witness.

Sarah doubted. Sarah did not believe she could or would ever have a child at her advanced age, and when God suggested she would, she simply laughed. And that laugh – laughter which gave birth to Isaac – showed that Sarah took God seriously. Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich writes the “The element of uncertainty in faith cannot be removed, it must be accepted. And the element in faith which accepts this is courage… In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.” To live in the question is courageous, dynamic and bold. This is the kind of church we want to be.

Let us pray.

Easter

2017-02-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Job 19.23-27

I Corinthians 15.20-26

Present Perfect

Easter Day 2016

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

About once a week, my eighty-eight year old father will get into his car – even though his legs are a bit wobbly, he is an excellent driver – to make the drive from Old Lyme, Connecticut to Meriden, the city where I was born – to have a conversation with my mother. He’ll talk to her about how his week’s been, some of the things he’s done around the house, maybe describe his daily constitutional through the park at the mouth of the Connecticut River, and he’ll tell her how much he misses her. The trip from Old Lyme to Meriden’s Walnut Grove cemetery and back is between seventy and eighty miles, depending on the route he chooses to take – Dad is fond of the back roads, they’re the same back roads he used to bicycle as a young teen seventy-five years ago – and he’ll spend about thirty or forty minutes with her before he gets back in his car for the ride home. For me, the ride to Walnut Grove is about a hundred fifty miles each way, and it’s a trip I’m going to make not long after we leave church today. In the spirit of Easter, I can’t think of a better day to spend some time with my mom and remember that death does not and cannot keep us apart, but rather in many senses it brings us closer together.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

However - if you’ve ever stood with me at a graveside service I’ve conducted, you’ve heard me talk about visiting loved ones after burial – the phrase we usually use is “paying our respects.” We can do this in a lot of different places: we can pay our respects right out there, at Walnut Grove, or wherever the final resting place might be, but we don’t need to visit a cemetery to pay our respects. You may find yourself looking out the kitchen window at the birds building their nests in spring; you might hear a familiar song on the radio; you may be reminded of a certain phrase, or a story; or you may find yourself saying or doing something exactly the way your mom or your dad or your spouse or your good friend did while they were still alive. And if you’ve stood with me at graveside you’ve heard me say that these too are the appropriate times and the places to pay our respects; and in those moments we stop and offer a small prayer of thanksgiving to God for the life we knew and loved.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

I hope you read the final entry from our Lenten devotional this morning. Technically speaking of course, Lent was over yesterday, but I’m glad that the UCC’s Stillspeaking Writer’s Group decided to extend it to Easter Day, because Matt Fitzgerald’s essay is outstanding. It begins, “Mary Magdalene stumbled through the dawn until “Christ is risen” destroyed her faith in the grave. Mary heard it first, early in the morning. Death had been defeated. Not just Christ’s but, because of his, hers as well.” She stumbled through the dawn until “Christ is risen” destroyed her faith in the grave. What would it be like if our faith in the grave were destroyed? What would we be like if we decided that death is not something to be afraid of, but rather just another fact of life? “Death had been defeated;” Matt wrote, “[and] not just Christ’s but hers as well.” And not just hers, but yours as well. And not just yours, but mine as well.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

Let me add quickly that I don’t mean to diminish death by any means. The recent bombings in Brussels, in Ankara, in Mogadishu, in Istanbul, in Jakarta, in Paris and other cities around the world are horrific, and we pray this morning not only for those who were closest to the victims, but we are also bold to say and to pray enough! As Jim Antal, Minister and President of the UCC’s Massachusetts Conference wrote in his blog this week,

“We know that this week of tension will be resolved when the power of universal love is fully revealed. But first there will be misunderstanding, stumbling, sacrifice, sorrow and grief… And in a mystery beyond our understanding, as Holy Week unfolds, let us join our hearts with the victims… with the suffering refugees… with peace-loving people from every faith tradition, and with the least of these among us.”

As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

This is a curious use of grammar, isn’t it: Christ is risen; rather archaic, actually. Today we would be more likely to say, “Christ has risen,” or “Christ rose,” or as the creeds put it, “Christ was raised.” But no, Christ is risen, the present perfect tense, a present verb with a past participle. I still remember my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Nadile, a true grammarian if ever there were one, telling us about the present perfect tense: it indicates something that happened once in the past whose effects are still ongoing in the present. Usually it takes the helping verb “to have” instead of “to be,” but in this instance it makes perfect sense: Christ is risen: something that happened once, 2000 years in the past, whose effects are still being felt today; and not just being felt, but shaping the way that our world is ordered as well as the way that you and I live today, how we make our choices, how we prioritize our time, how we apply our talent, and yes, how we invest our treasure. Both grammatically and theologically, Christ is risen states an eternal truth that not only did he rise once all those years ago, but he remains risen to this day, and that risenness inflects and impacts you and me and everyone and everything in creation.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

We know the effect the risen Jesus had on Mary Magdalene. She received the news with a combination of fear and joy, which is why the first words out of the angel’s mouth were, “Don’t be afraid.” Jesus said the same thing when Mary first saw him: “Don’t be afraid.” And her fear slowly melted into gladness as she brought the good news to the disciples. We know the effect the risen Jesus had on Mary; what effect does he have on us? If the good news of Easter, He is risen, is based on something that happened in the distant past whose ripples are still being felt today, those ripples don’t just occur over the course of history in general, but like Mary Magdalene and the disciples they have a direct impact on you and me in particular centuries after the fact. What does the risen Christ change in you? Has it eased your fears, like Mary? Has it emboldened you to do good things, big good things? Has it opened up your sense of generosity? Has it awakened you to the abundance of life, the blessing of life? Has it destroyed your faith in the grave? Has it slowed you down, as you take a fresh opportunity to appreciate your surroundings, your family, your neighbors, your friends, and not just the people around you, but the trees, the skies, the sea? And I make a point of using the word “you” instead of “we” because I can’t answer that question for you; you can only answer it for yourself. For myself, I can say the risen Christ has reminded me there is no reason to be anxious about death. The end of this life is not the end of eternity, it’s only a step along the way. Because he is risen, death does not have the last word anymore; “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” And this is why I’m going to have a conversation with my mom later on today. Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ has rendered the past determinative, the future guaranteed, and the present perfect.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed.

Alleluia and Amen.

Let us pray.

3 + 1 = ∞

2016-05-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 6.1-8

Mathew 28.16-20

Romans 8.12-17

3 + 1 = ∞

Trinity Sunday

I was sitting at the light down at the end of Conant St. a few weeks ago when I noticed on the car in front of me a clever vanity plate from New Hampshire. It read, “+ Beyond.” (And beyond). It took me a moment to figure it out, and it finally came to me that I was sitting behind a Nissan Infinity, so what I was looking at was an infinity and beyond. Since that light takes so long to change, I took a quick photo of it with my phone and posted it up to Facebook later, adding it took me a minute to figure out, but I didn’t provide the solution. It was our own Gail Morris who came up with it first, asking if the car might belong to spaceman Buzz Lightyear from the movie “Toy Story;” if you’ve seen the movie, then you’ve heard Buzz exclaim, just before takeoff, “To infinity and beyond.” It has always struck me as a clever turn of phrase: I mean, since infinity is, well, infinite, what can possibly be beyond it?

Infinity. I wonder what would happen if we woke up one morning – either as individuals or as a church – and found that a rich old uncle we never knew we had left us an inheritance whose size is simply unimaginable – infinite, perhaps. That we had suddenly become possessors of such wealth that we would never have to go to work to earn any more income for the rest of our days. What would we do with such wealth? Or more to the point, what, if anything, would we do differently? How would we employ our newfound windfall? How much would we invest – although we would already have so much that investing would be a purely redundant exercise? How much would we share? If we knew our future were absolutely secure with no possibility of financial worry, how would that affect our attitude and behavior and understanding of our present?

The apostle Paul suggests that this scenario is anything but an impossible dream. I know you all talked about the Holy Spirit last Sunday, and were invited to dream dreams and imagine visions for ourselves as people of faith, and as a church. These are the things God’s Holy Spirit, which poured down as tongues of flame in a one-of-a-kind baptism, make possible. You called on the power of the Spirit to bring the dreams and to equip us to achieve them. In our reading this morning from Romans 8, Paul reveals to us that the dreams and the visions are real. “Everyone who is led by the Spirit is a child of God… When we cry Abba! Father!, it is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs, heirs to God and joint heirs with Christ.” You and I are the children of God – the inheritance is already ours, riches beyond imagination, and more durable than any fungible good. We are not heirs to the flesh, as Paul insists, but rather heirs to the Spirit. At Pentecost, we the church received the gift that keeps on giving, the Spirit that brings life and community.

Today, the Sunday after Pentecost, is considered by the church to be Trinity Sunday. That is, since we celebrated the coming of the Spirit last week, today we have the leisure to consider what it means that God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, our community and our strength, work together as one. Actually, the whole notion of the trinity is something that the church formulated only retroactively. The idea itself only occurs twice in scripture, one a verse in Hebrews that was clearly shoehorned into the text years after it was written, and the great commission at the end of Matthew, which is also most likely a later addition. We’ve already heard the words twice this morning, once in our New Testament lesson and again at Nathaniel’s baptism: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything I have taught you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Now I recognize, the Trinity is one of those things most church members don’t lose a lot of sleep over; in fact, if any sermon topic is guaranteed to cure insomnia, it is the sermon on the Trinity. Millions of words have been printed about it, thousands of books have tried to parse and explain it, and it still remains one of the more inscrutable yet foundational theories in Christian theology. How can God be God, Jesus be Jesus, the Spirit be the Spirit, and yet the three are at the same time one and the same yet unique and different? Kenn Storck, a retired pastor and sometime poet, admits to the absurdity of the whole idea in a poem he calls simply “The Holy Trinity,” part of which reads, “Go ahead: draw your pictures / color your triangles / Speak of the Three-in-One / And the One-in-Three. / Use the Athanasian Creed litmus test / of Father / Son / Spirit / But all the while do not trust / the limit of language / the confinement of metaphor / the simplicity of simile.”

I think there’s an easier way though, and we may have talked of it this way before. The trinity is simply a picture of God in relationship. God in relationship. Here’s what I mean. I’m a Dad, right? I have two beautiful daughters, and they have two wonderful men in their lives – I’m a father-in-law to one of them. I’m also a husband. I’m a son! I’m fortunate enough to still have both my parents living not-too-far away. I’m a brother, a nephew, an uncle many times over. I’m your pastor. I’m your friend. So does this mean there are nine different Alans for the roles I play? Good Lord, deliver us! No; it simply means I have different relationships with different people in different circumstances. Now this is, I admit, a degree of oversimplification, but not too much so. God is Creator in relationship to Creation, which includes you and me; Jesus is brother, savior and friend, and provides another avenue, or approach to God distinct from God’s creating; and the Spirit is that which binds you and me together as the church, as brothers and sisters, and opens up ways to God that are unique to the Spirit – I’d say things like prayer, song, meditation, and the heartfelt joy that comes from loving God and living in community. As Lutheran Theological Seminary President David Lose writes, “You can’t fully or finally understand God without talking about relationship – that God is so full of love that there has to be some way of talking about that love shared in and through profound relationships.”

But it is not just about God’s relationship with Godself, or God’s relationship with us, but our relationships with others that is one of the sure marks of the spirit’s presence and work among us. And as I looked at the visions and dreams for Second Church that everyone wrote down on those flame-shaped slips of paper last week, the visions and dreams inspired by that same spirit of relationship and community, I noticed something not only unusual, but downright uncharacteristic. I counted forty-seven flames and tongues of fire that were written on and placed on the board, and of those forty-seven visions and dreams for Second Church, guess how many had to do with relationship and community-building and reaching out to the world around us? Sixteen, or a hair over one-third of them. That is so unlike us! (Then again, only one mentioned God, and only two mentioned Jesus, but that’s another sermon for another day.) Last Sunday’s reading from Acts 2 describes how the Spirit brought people together from all around the region – from Cappadocia and Phrygia and Pamphylia and all those other unpronounceable places – and made them one body, one community. It describes how the Holy Spirit of God creates community and relationship. If it is the love of God that brings us together – if it is our love for Christ that brings us together – if it is the love that is breathed into our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit that brings us together, then everything we do wants to be about sharing that love. As David Lose put it so simply yet profoundly, “it is simply impossible to think about love that is not shared.” You and I are the heirs to an incredible fortune, an embarrassment of riches of love, of compassion, of redemption, an embarrassment of opportunities to build the same kind of spirit-filled community that same spirit built in the second chapter of Acts. The over-abundant inheritance of the spirit releases us from any and all self-imposed or self-inflicted confines, and frees us to look beyond ourselves with the love that cannot not be shared with those around us. If the Spirit is present in this community, this is what the Spirit does.

Knowing this, how will the things we do and the decisions we make this week reflect the boundless and irrepressible wealth of love that has been bequeathed to us? How might our relationships with the people around us be transformed – our family, our friends, our co-workers, the next stranger we meet? How might this boundless and irrepressible inheritance of love shape and transform our dreams and visons for Second Church? And what kind of risks will be willing to take once we know that we are heirs to a fortune that is inexhaustible?

The prophet Isaiah once heard a voice a long long time ago; it was the voice of God, asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am – send me!” The power of the triune God – the three – coupled with the conviction of even one person of faith – Isaiah, or you, or me – results in a community-creating, compassionate power of love that is greater than all our combined abilities and imagination put together. Or, to put it into an equation, three plus one equals infinity – and beyond.

Let us pray.

I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

2016-05-05T12:39:00.002-07:00

Exodus 33.12-23

Luke 24.36-53

I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

Second Sunday of Easter

Feelings are notoriously difficult to put into words, aren’t they? For example, we can explain why we’re happy – maybe we just got our IRS refund, or we had a great day with the family yesterday, or it’s finally feeling like Spring, or the Red Sox’ home opener is tomorrow and all things are possible, or maybe there’s not any particular reason for it, but we’re just happy. But to try to explain what happiness feels like, what a good mood is, is a lot more difficult. Is it the smile in my heart? The feeling of lightness that lifts me up? Does it qualify as sheer unadulterated happiness, quiet contentedness, ebullience, elation, ecstasy or euphoria? How would you describe the feeling of happiness? I think the only way we can convey that feeling is if the person we’re talking to has also felt the same way, and can identify with what we’re saying.

The same goes for the flip side of happiness, that deep subjective feeling of melancholy or sadness that is sometimes called “the blues.” People with real jobs talk about “the Monday morning blues,” though since Monday is my day off, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about. But as it is with happiness, the blues are a tough feeling to explain or describe to somebody. I mean, we all know what it means to be blue, to feel down in the dumps, to be bummed out, but what are the blues? How do we describe them? What makes us feel dispirited? With April 15 mere days away, those of us who did not receive refunds probably don’t have to think too hard to be able to answer this question. The blues are what you feel when that big family outing you’ve been planning suddenly falls through. The blues are those stubborn piles of snow that just will not go away. The blues are when you have to have your pet put to sleep. The blues are when your partner in a business venture suddenly disappears, or when one of your closest friends dies.

And if we can identify with either one of these last two examples, then we can understand how, when Jesus was suddenly gone from their company, and their lives, the disciples came down with a vigorous case of the blues. Here was a small band of people with varying degrees of skills who coalesced around the one person who helped them discover the potential they had when they all worked together, who brought out the best in every one of them. Not only were they good business partners, after a fashion, but they really enjoyed themselves when they were on the job together. Jesus made them laugh, he made them think, he gave them work to do, and they achieved a real sense of satisfaction whenever they did the job right, and made him smile. They certainly shared a good deal of affection for one another, and made lasting friends of people they would never have met had Jesus not brought them together in the first place. It was a good group of people working together, doing good things for people all over the countryside. And then, just as they were beginning to hit their stride as disciples, to understand the importance of their work and of Jesus’ deep and abiding love for all of them, he was gone. Now that’s the blues. There used to be a television commercial that said “It doesn’t get any better than this,” but for the disciples, I don’t think it was possible to get any worse.

It might strike us, at first thought, that the flip side of the blues would be elation. But if the blues are what follow after we’ve hit what seems to be our lowest point, consider what happens after we’ve reached our highest. Not as we’ve reached our peak, but after - what comes in its wake.

Several of you have told me you really liked the Children’s Message I gave a couple months ago when I brought our youth and some Scouts into the balcony and suggested we could all just sit up there for the rest of the service. It’s a story that actually had its roots in a trip I took one summer of my college years, when some buddies and I went camping for a week in the White Mountains, and the highlight of the trip was going to be our climb up Mount Washington. It was a drizzly morning, when the clouds were so low you couldn’t see even the first thousand of Mount Washington’s six thousand foot ascent. And as we began our climb, you might say we were a little apprehensive, wet with the morning mist and wondering about the approachability, if not to say the existence, of the mountain peak none of us could see. But up we trudged, and at about four thousand feet we finally broke through the cloud cover to a glorious, sunny vista, which, as a thoroughly inexperienced climber, I hadn’t even imagined. Climbing closer to the top, we caught sight of other nearby peaks, not quite as tall, but each one poking its head through the clouds, offering a view that day unseen by the wet world below. When we finally reached the pinnacle, we sat for a while, and rested, ate a leisurely lunch, cast our youthful self-satisfied sneers in the direction of those who drove to the top. You’ve seen the bumper sticker that said, “This vehicle climbed to the top of Mount Washington?” We wanted one that said “These legs climbed to the top of Mount Washington!” We chatted with other climbers, and generally tried to put out of our minds the fact that we couldn’t really stay there; eventually, we had to descend. You see, we knew what awaited us at the base of Mount Washington: the same damp drizzly day we had left, our familiar and probably by now muddy campsite, the return to the everyday world we had left behind. Sure, there were other mountains we intended to climb later that week, but none would be as majestic nor as satisfying as Washington, and each of us knew it. So you can understand why our descent, when we finally undertook it, seemed to us a rather anticlimactic experience. We had just climbed the highest peak in New England, and stood over six thousand feet closer to the sun. Literally, it was all downhill from there.

You’ve felt the same thing in the wake of the elaborate dinner party you’ve spent weeks preparing, or after that great trip to Disney World - who wants to go back to work when you’ve seen the enchanted kingdom? It is inevitable, that whatever pinnacle we reach, whatever exaltation we’ve experienced, whatever comes in its immediate wake has to seem second rate, if even that. It takes a while to escape the afterglow of such an experience, and as that interim time passes, anything else is simply blasé. Mounts Liberty and Lincoln were spectacular in their own ways, but it took a few days’ distance from Washington for us to appreciate them. After such intense and happy times, we tend to cope by simply going through the motions, trying to avoid the inevitable feeling of let-down.

I used to think there was a deep theological or liturgical meaning to the term “Low Sunday,” an occasion which occurs twice a year: the Sunday after Christmas, and the Sunday after Easter. But I have come to discover there is nothing theological about it - the “low” in “Low Sunday” simply refers to church attendance on those days, the levels of interest and of effort in getting ready for church the Sunday after Christmas and the Sunday after Easter. And in a way it’s understandable, because it follows the pattern of so much else in life. After the seven week preparation of Lent, the activities of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, sunrise Service and Easter morning, a lot of fine church-going people have hit their peak, and a case of those notorious post-resurrection blues tends to settle in. After all, what could be more exhilarating than the victory over death of one of our own, Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary? What could possibly surpass the resurrection for good news? Once we have been to the pinnacle, seen the glory of Easter morning, heard the inspired hymns and anthems, inhaled the fragrance of the lilies, experienced the resuscitating word of the risen Christ and shouted our Alleluias in the midst of so many of our brothers and sisters we haven’t seen in quite some time, any other Sunday morning is bound to seem a little humdrum by comparison. And I’ll confess right now that when I got to the office Tuesday morning, my first day back at work after Easter, I kind of puttered around, cleaning up the accumulated papers on my desk, catching up on a little reading, but not quite ready yet to move beyond the aura of a busy but immensely satisfying Holy Week.

Of course, part of the reason for this might also have something to do with our own expectations. Do we as a congregation find ourselves suffering a kind of let down, a benign case of the blues, because we know we can’t expect the Hallelujahs and the bulging balconies and a friendly game of connect-the-dots every week of the year? In its own way, every Sunday is a “little Easter,” but maybe after the Big One we figure we’ve seen everything there is to see, so we may as well pack in and sleep in for a week or two.

But we are here, aren’t we. There are all kinds of remedies for the blues, but one of the best is simply meeting life straight on, and letting each day bring what it wants to bring. With four different resurrection stories in the Bible telling us about what Jesus did on Easter and beyond, I think it is revealing to consider what Jesus did not do after the resurrection. For example, he did not gather the downcast disciples into the Upper Room and give them a pep talk: “Don’t worry Peter, skies are always darkest before the dawn. And remember, James, into every life a little rain must fall.” Don’t you just love advice like that? It is a terrific way of saying something without saying anything at all. But Jesus wasn’t known to waste people’s time with meaningless words. Nor did he indulge the disciples’ self-pity: “Go ahead, Bartholomew, tell me how you’re really feeling deep down inside - you’ll feel better if you get it all out.” And notice that he doesn’t dodge the issue with an anecdote: “You know, the same thing happened to my old uncle Zechariah, cut down in his prime by a Roman chariot - you’ll get over it too - eventually.”

No, Jesus’ cure for the blues at the end of Luke takes seriously his disciples’ spiritual and emotional sense of despond. First he let them see that he was for real. He wasn’t an apparition, a product of collective wishful thinking. The disciples were not deluding themselves that, well, yes, in some undefinable and ineffable way, Jesus is always present. No, there is nothing ineffable about a fish, which is what Jesus ate in their midst. They needed to know Jesus was there and was real, and he assured them of that.

But he knew they needed more than reassurance, so Jesus gave them something to do. Remember when Moses asked God for a little reassurance, God promised that the divine presence would be with him? This wasn’t a kind of presence you could see, and Moses knew it, and God knew it, so God proved it by doing great things through Moses. Food appeared as if from out of nowhere; water was drained from a rock; a company of thousands was sustained through a barren desert. God worked through Moses. Jesus worked, and works, through his disciples both then and now. “Repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in my name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are the witnesses of these things.” The disciples have a job to do. Jesus intends for us to keep busy, and by the fruit of our work his presence is known.

What do you and I find when we descend from the mountaintop experience of Easter? We find the Hernandez trial and the Tsarnaev trial. We find a video of a police officer killing an unarmed black man, and a video of a black man shooting a police officer in the face. We come back down into a world that cries out for justice and mercy; and so what do we do? How are we living into this week that starts off with the so-called “Low Sunday?” Like the disciples before us, we get busy doing the work by which the presence of God can be known. And so this morning we are setting up to house homeless families in our church home for another week. On Friday we will sit with the kids & staff at Recovery High School. On Saturday night we will invite the community over for supper. And on Tuesday and Wednesday nights we meet with the boards and committees that make so much of this happen. We come down from the mountain. Life goes on, and in the bright light of our mission and ministry the blue fog of despond gradually evaporates.

Even though Easter is past, there is still a lot of work to be done in God’s world: the work of justice, the work of prayer, the work of feeding and sheltering and loving... The disciples didn’t wait around until they were in the mood to go out and do something for God, and they didn’t just move around in their old comfortable circle of friends. In fact we know that a lot of their work was as decidedly uncomfortable as it was discomforting. But it was work – it was hard work – it was good work: it was just what the doctor ordered. When we find ourselves singing the blues, we should look around and find ourselves something to do instead, because there’s a lot of good to be done out there, and Easter reminds us that we are among the best-equipped to do it.

Let us pray.

Something Greater Than Ourselves

2016-05-05T12:38:00.003-07:00

Something Greater Than Ourselves

Christmas Eve 2014

I did a double-take when I saw the headline: NASA Emails a Wrench to International Space Station. Did you see that in yesterday’s paper? NASA Emails a Wrench to International Space Station. How do you email a wrench? Evidently, you email a wrench the same way you email anything else, if you have the design on the sending end and a 3-D printer on the receiving end. It was a monumental moment, because it demonstrates that you don’t necessarily need a space shuttle to move material objects from earth to space any more. And if we can digitally send objects to the space station, then we can send them to a base on the moon, and we can send them to a base on Mars, and we can send them beyond the solar system. It was less than three weeks ago that the Orion spacecraft was launched, the first test of a capsule designed to take human beings on trips millions of miles and multiple years long. To some of us, this may come as a mild surprise, because it’s been forty-two years since a human being last stood on the moon, and the whole idea of space travel has slowly disappeared from our consciousness; there’s just too many other things going on in our world and our lives to occupy our minds. But there is no denying the human desire to explore and expand our boundaries, to breach the frontier and to look to the stars. From the very beginning, humanity has yearned to seek out something greater than ourselves.

And I think this is one of the things Christmas does for us. People all over the world will come to worship tonight and tomorrow morning. Some are people of deep and abiding faith, some are still working out their own idea of God, and some come simply because it is Christmas. And every reason is a good one. This is a good place to be tonight and tomorrow morning, because it reminds us that no matter what our lives are like, no matter what we’ve had to deal with since the last time we were together in this place, in this moment you and I yearn to seek out something greater than ourselves. Whether we are scanning the sky for the star, checking Santa’s progress with our children on the NORAD web page, or taking these precious moments on Christmas Eve to look deep within our hearts to discern the presence of the Christ child’s spirit, you and I are drawn into the presence of God because it is God’s spirit that beckons us, the same spirit that beckoned the shepherds and the magi two thousand years ago.

In fact, it was two thousand years ago that the skies commanded humanity’s attention in a manner unlike any other. It was the host of heaven that sang the Gloria in Excelsis: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, good will among humanity.” And when the angels departed, they returned into the heavens. On that first Christmas, it was the reach of the skies and the depth of the heavens that spoke to the shepherds. And the magi – the wise ones – were in fact astrologers, studiers of the stars and the skies, and it stood to reason that if anyone noticed the star in the east, its import and meaning, it would be they. Throughout human history, humanity has felt compelled to look to the heavens in order to make sense of life on earth, from the time of the ancients who looked to the skies and saw the archer and the water-bearer and the dippers and the twins and the ram, to our contemporaries who dream of travelling beyond the moon to the planets and stars, we yearn to seek out something greater than ourselves.

But as I suggested, sometimes this can be found, not millions of miles above us, but deep within our hearts and spirits. Last Friday a handful of us sat with the students and staff at Recovery High School, a school for young people with drug and alcohol dependencies. We had a conversation with them about the second of AA’s twelve steps, and asked them, “Who or what – to you - is the power greater than ourselves?” Now, we are usually very careful to avoid specifically religious topics, because Recovery High School is a public school, and as such can’t compel any kind of organized religion on its students – although as we often say, we’re the UCC – our religion is about as unorganized as it gets! But that morning, the question about the power greater than ourselves evoked a conversation deeper and more profound than any we’ve had in the four years we’ve been reaching out to them. One of the students talked frankly about his wrestling with God, and his inability to make it through even one day without God’s help. Another talked about the community being her higher power, her family, her friends. Another talked about her complicated prayer life, how it has to spell out for her each and every relationship in order bring her meaning. It was truly astonishing to hear these kids, who by the way liberally season their sentences with four-letter words and phrases that would make both your Aunt Gladys and your Uncle Henry blush, talk about how they understand their higher power, that piece of their lives which not only provides spiritual succor, but helps them get through that day sober. Most of the time. I didn’t say this on Friday morning, because I wasn’t quite aware of it yet, but their words during that discussion actually helped me to write tonight’s sermon. Because their thoughts and their easy way of telling difficult truths, revealed in a unique way, the common human yearning to seek out something greater than ourselves.

It was on Christmas Eve in 1968 that human beings first slipped away from earth’s orbit and circled the moon. Astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell took the first photograph of an “earthrise,” a shot of the earth “rising,” over the curvature of the lunar surface. I was a freshman in high school, and I can remember watching the television broadcast through the din of our annual family Christmas Eve party, and hearing the voices of the three astronauts as they took turns reading from the opening chapter of Genesis:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light;’ and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

On that Christmas Eve 1968, whether it was a literal watching out the window or the figurative following it on television, millions of human beings around the world looked to the skies, because in that moment, we were collectively engaged in something greater than ourselves.

And so it is on this Christmas Eve 2014, forty-six years later, when you and I know that now at this time, close to the stroke of midnight, and here in this place, we can find the object of our yearning. Whether it is in the venerable hymns we can sing from memory, or hearing the comfortably familiar nativity stories, or sitting once again with family and greeting dear friends, or knowing that the presence of Christ, alive in our hearts, at once transforms us as it transforms our world, there is something greater than ourselves that calls us, that makes us one in this moment, and that brings the depth of meaning that is sought by every human heart on this night of nights.

Will you join me in the closing prayer, one that was first spoken by astronaut Frank Borman on that Christmas Eve forty-six years ago:

Give us, O God, the vision which can see your love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts. And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.

The Missionary Impulse

2016-05-05T12:37:00.002-07:00

Acts 17.22-31

Rev. W. Alan Froggatt

The Missionary Impulse

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I’m going to read this morning’s scripture a little differently today. This passage from Acts is one of my favorite passages in the New Testament, and in a few minutes you’ll come to see why. So instead of reading it straight through, I’m going to offer an introduction and some running commentary along the way to help us understand the context and contour of the story:

Paul undertook three missionary journeys during his career – this passage takes place during his second, and it is set in Athens, in particular at a place called the Areopagus. The Areopagus was – and is still – a large outcropping of rock a stone’s throw from the Acropolis in Athens. In ancient times the city’s council of elders met there; it also served as the site of legal trials – in playwright Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Orestes was tried for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra at the Areopagus. But by Paul’s time, it no longer served as a court of sorts, but rather it was a place where public debates were held. “All the Athenians and foreigners would spend their time at the Areopagus in... telling or hearing something new,” Acts tells us. Being so close to the Acropolis, Paul could clearly see the Parthenon, which is the Temple of Athena; and closer to hand he could also see an altar inscribed, “to an unknown God.” Taking his cues from his surroundings then, Paul begins his address:

People of Athens, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.

Now, the use of compliments was not permitted at the Areopagus, so these words of his are either simple statement of fact – or, and I think this is more likely to be the case, Paul is being mildly sarcastic: People of Athens, I see how extremely religious you are in every way!

For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.”

Paul is very good at picking up on the cues of those things the Athenians already believed. Greece had so many gods & goddesses, they were afraid they might unintentionally forget one, so therefore they created an altar and dedicated it “To an unknown God.”

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

“Grope for him;” this vision of reaching out and searching for something that ought to be right in front of your eyes indicates Paul may have had in mind Diogenes the Cynic, who famously walked the streets of Athens with a lantern in broad daylight, claiming to be searching for an honest man.

Then Paul employs the first of two quotations that would have been familiar to Athenians: For “In him we live and move and have our being;”

We know Paul was a well-educated man – he was a rabbi, a teacher – thus he would have been familiar with Greek philosophy, and here Paul is quoting Epimenides of Crete, a sixth century BCE Greek philosopher (the whole quatrain from which Paul is quoting can be found on the back of today’s bulletin). In fact, Paul used another part of the same quotation in his letter to Titus, chapter 1 verse 12: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts [with] idle bellies (or “lazy gluttons”). Maybe he left that part out because, if compliments were disallowed at Areopagus, perhaps insults were as well. Then he offers the second quotation:

as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.” This quote comes from Aratus, a lesser known poet from the third century BCE.

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

By saying this, Paul calls attention to the idols and altars in the Greek pantheon.

While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which the world will be judged in righteousness by the one whom he has appointed, and of this God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’

Did you notice? Throughout this entire speech, Paul has been able to articulate the entire gospel message without ever mentioning the name of Jesus.

+ + +

Acts 17.22-31 for today

(And so I wonder, if Paul were to make a similar speech today, let’s say in the middle of the Farmer’s Market some Monday at Veteran’s Park down by the Depot, what he might say...)

People of Beverly and beyond, as I move through your towns and cities, I see that you are an extremely – well, very – or mostly – at least occasionally religious people:

your currency, your coins and your bills, are emblazoned with the words, “In God We Trust.”

you salute your national flag with the words, “One nation, under God.”

you lift up your voices and sing at baseball games, “God bless America!”

why, even your football players kneel in prayer after a touchdown.

Yes, I perceive that you are a generally religious people in so many ways.

Yet what you generically call the God of your currency and your flag and your baseball and football stadiums, I am here to proclaim to you that this is not a God in a far-off realm, but a God who desires a close, personal relationship with you.

This is a God who cannot be kept at arms’ length, waiting patiently to be called upon for weddings and baptisms and funerals, this is a God who knows you better than you know yourselves, and who insists that you pay attention. This is a God who became human and who feels the way you feel, who laughs when you laugh, who weeps with you in your sorrow, who holds your hand and your heart in your time of deepest need and whom you fill with joy whenever you stretch out that heart and that hand to someone else in holy love.

As even one of your philosophers has said, “It is only with the heart that one can see clearly – what is essential is invisible to the eye.” I pray that you will have the eyes of your hearts enlightened, even as I wrote to the Ephesians.

Because “you have got to serve somebody – it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’ve got to serve somebody” – as one of your own poets has said.

Since we have to serve somebody and since what is essential is invisible to the eye – then the claims of the idols of this world, those things we can see and touch – fade into irrelevance because it is here [heart] not here [eyes] that we serve the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

For we know that God calls all people everywhere into community, a community of welcome and a community of care and a community of service; God calls us into lives that are shaped by grace and compassion, so that everyone who looks at us with their eyes will see clearly that we wear the heart of God, the God who loves us beyond measure, the God who loves us without fail.

+ + +

Is this what Paul might say? We can only wonder, but what’s notable is that there at the Areopagus we find the intersection of the Christian gospel with Greek philosophy – the philosophy of Epimenides and Diogenes – and with ancient poets and playwrights like Aratus and Aeschylus.

This is one of the reasons this passage in Acts has always had a special place in my Bible; and as I read it, I think to myself:

How cool would it be to be able to stand where Paul stood and look around and see that intersection of classical poetry and philosophy and Christian theology.

How cool would it be to stand in the Areopagus and look up and see the Parthenon and be on the very spot where Paul stood when he offered this address?

How cool would it be to stand in some of those places where the earliest Christian churches stood – not just in Athens, but places like Corinth and Thessalonica?

How cool would it be to sail the same seas Paul sailed when he made these missionary journeys that took him to places far from Jerusalem and Antioch?

How cool would it be to see for myself if the people of Crete are really gluttons and liars and beasts, as Epimenides said... if the people of Crete are really – well – Cretins?

And then it occurred to me: this is precisely what sabbaticals are for: to have the kind of experience that brings stories like this alive in a way nothing else can. And you, the good people of Second Congregational UCC were very clear when you called me, that after every five years of ministry, you want to provide me with the opportunity for three months of sabbatical, in part for this very reason - and I confess, I’ve been remiss in this part of my ministry. Because next year I will have been your Senior Minister for fifteen years, and so far my only sabbatical was the trip we took to Italy in 2008. So as I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to stand in the Areopagus and look around and witness for myself that intersection of classical poetry and philosophy and Christian theology, and to visit places like Corinth and Crete and Thessalonica and to sail the southern Aegean Sea....” I also thought: this is what sabbaticals are for!

Now even though math is not one of my stronger suits, even I can do the simple division and know that fifteen years divided by five means another sabbatical is due, if not overdue, and having received the approval – and blessing - from our Board of Deacons earlier this month, next summer I will be going to Greece to do just the kinds of things we’re talking about here today. I will be spending at least a week, possibly more, in Athens, a week sailing the southern Aegean Sea, a week with the gluttons and liars on Crete, and several days in both Thessalonica to the north - with a stop at Mount Olympus along the way – and in Corinth on the Peloponnesian peninsula to the south. My sabbatical will begin at the end of June and extend for three months to the end of September. As plans develop I will share them with our Deacons and with all of you, but I do want to say once again how deeply grateful I am for your generosity, your support for my ongoing education and experience, and the provision for sabbatical you have given me.

One of my dear colleagues, Dennis Calhoun at Old North Church in Marblehead, put it well: he said, “Vacation is about getting away – sabbatical is about coming back.” As much as I’ve been able to share the fruits of my last sabbatical to Italy and my study week last fall in Istanbul, I can’t wait to share with you all there is to be experienced in Greece next summer.

So whether it is the experience of Second Church’s young people at places like the Heifer Farm; or whether it is the making of disciples at the font in the name of the Creator, Christ & Holy Spirit; or whether it is Paul spreading the gospel from Jerusalem to Athens to Rome to all the world; the missionary impulse is a powerful one, and continues to bear witness to the living God in all ages, times and places.

What Would Jesus Tweet?

2016-05-05T12:35:00.004-07:00

Proverbs 17.1-12

Matthew 13, selected verses

What Would Jesus Tweet?

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Gail Doktor and I were talking about the classes she is taking this semester, and she mentioned she is taking a class in Systematic Theology at The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge – probably because the Episcopalians do systematic theology better than Harvard’s Unitarians. Systematics is the field that integrates the major traditional doctrines of the church: the nature of God, the trinity, sin and atonement, revelation and reconciliation, in a historical and comprehensive manner. Noting the depth and breadth of such a class, Gail both lamented and genuinely wondered how it could even be possible to squeeze two thousand plus years of theology, history and doctrine into one class in one semester. I mentioned to her she doesn’t have to actually master it all in one semester – she has a whole vocation in front of her when she will be wrestling with those topics. And it reminded me that one of the many reasons I so appreciate Second Church’s relationship with our seminarians is because it helps me connect their preparation for ministry with my own, and our conversation last week brought to mind my own experience with systematic theology.

In the late 1970’s German theologian Helmut Theilicke produced his three volume systematic, The Evangelical Faith. And one of the things I will always remember is when Debbie and I went out to our first church in northern Michigan, we didn’t have a television, and there was no morning newspaper, so I decided to read Theilicke’s theology from start to finish – the perfect accompaniment to those dark, snowy mornings on the Upper Peninsula! And some of you will remember back in 2009, on the occasion of the 500^th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, I took a week of study at Princeton to research and reread Calvin’s four volume systematic, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Then, a few years ago, I was finally able to save enough money to go out and purchase Karl Barth’s fourteen volume systematic theology which he called, Church Dogmatics. And no, I haven’t read the whole thing. Yet. But you can see Gail’s dilemma – how do you distill centuries of thought and thousands of pages of deep theological reflection into one class in one semester? I guess if anyone can do it, the Episcopalians can.

But it’s ironic, don’t you think, that so many words have been written, not to mention trees sacrificed, in the attempt to unwrap and unravel what we find in this comparatively brief work of sixty-six chapters. And so much of it is predicated, not on all sixty-six chapters, but on just four, the gospels that tell the story of the brief ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, basically over a three-year span. Surely there has to be a simpler way of going about it.

I’ve shared with some of you before that I have a friendly running debate with our Northeast Area Minister, The Rev. Wendy Vander Hart, about the church’s use of social media. If you were here the Sunday Wendy preached a couple years ago you likely caught a whiff of it. It is Wendy’s conviction that the church should be able to get its message across in a Twitter tweet – that is, to proclaim what is essential in one hundred and forty alpha-numeric characters. If you can’t boil it down to that, Wendy says, then it probably is not worth saying. But I would ask the question why the church should agree to let the gospel be boiled down to an arbitrary number of characters defined by Twitter’s limited ability to transmit a message? Is it really necessary, or even desirable, to dumb down our message in order to tailor it to fit one specific social media platform?

But then I turn to the building blocks on top of which all systematic theology is built – the words of Jesus. And even though they do not persuade me to agree with Wendy – completely anyway – Jesus’ way with words suggests that Wendy does have a point. This morning’s readings from Matthew 13 are just a small sample of the way that Jesus taught, but it is a representative sample. More often than not, Jesus employed brief, memorable epigrammatic lessons couched in short phrases that were easily understood and repeated by his followers. For example, George read, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened,” which is exactly one hundred characters long, (87 in Greek). So does it tweet? Yes, it does. Do we understand Jesus’ point? Of course we do – it is simple and elegant. Here’s another: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” 125 characters: another tweet. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” 126 characters. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.” Ah, here’s one that is too long at 162 characters... and 183 in Greek! “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” 131 characters. Maybe Wendy Vander Hart is on to something.

Jesus’ way of speaking in brief, memorable lessons is reminiscent of the Proverbs. I asked Gail to read from Proverbs 17 today because they are random, mostly unrelated individual maxims that are nonetheless as memorable as they are succinct. “Better is a dry morsel with quiet, than a house full of feasting with strife.” We know what this means without having to wrestle very long with it, and I’d guess that most of us would agree. “Those who mock the poor insult their Maker.” Shades of the minimum wage debate we mentioned last week! And here is one that, once heard, we don’t soon forget: “Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly.” You can say that again! Brief epigrams, each one vivid, all of them potent – a wonderful and time-tested teaching tool. And every one of them well within Twitter’s 140 character maximum.

Jesus knew as well as anyone how to teach an effective and enduring lesson with a minimum of words. In fact, in so many instances he used words simply as a means to draw pictures that would stay fixed in our minds. For example, when I say the prodigal son, or the Good Samaritan, or the sheep & the goats, these are brief phrases that conjure up a story considerably longer than 140 characters, and not just the details of the stories themselves, but also the deeper meaning behind them. We probably each have our own mental image of the father spying the returning prodigal in the distance, and running out to meet him; and of the Samaritan going out of his way to help his enemy the Jew who had essentially just been mugged; and of those faithful people who feed the hungry and visit the sick and advocate for the prisoner, welcomed into God’s waiting and loving arms.

And so powerful are these phrases and stories that many of them have escaped the bounds of scripture alone and are ingrained in the vernacular. Charles Dickens’ tale of Great Expectations, of Pip, and Estelle and Miss Havisham, is essentially the story of the prodigal son transported to Victorian England. The act of a good Samaritan is what turns Jean Valjean’s heart from venal to valorous in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. And the parable of the last judgment, of ministering to strangers even to one’s own detriment is a theme that Albert Camus employs not only in The Stranger, but in The Plague as well. And the reasons these themes continue to resonate, not just among people of faith, but among humanity at large, is in part because Jesus’ stories are easily remembered by virtue of their brevity, which I think contributes to their universality.

So what would Jesus tweet? Quite a lot, it would appear. But at the end of the day, I’m still not convinced it is in the church’s best interest to try to confine our message to the length of a tweet. In fact I think there are two completely opposite reasons for this. One is that Jesus’ words, as brief as they are, constitute the building blocks for who you and I are as people of faith. Each lesson, every proverb or easily recalled one-liner, becomes layered upon the previous one in order to create a portrait of what it looks like to serve God and God’s children in our world. We don’t require a fourteen volume systematic theology in order to live lives of faith and service, but consciously or not you and I continue to bear witness to the multiple stories and experiences, not only of people in biblical times, but of also of all those who have come before us. Yet the exact opposite is also true, that it is possible to bear witness to the love and generosity of God with no words at all. As St Francis may or may not have said, “Preach the gospel at all times – and when necessary, use words.” When a single act of kindness or compassion or simple humanity is witnessed, it often speaks more eloquently than the most articulate sermon – and that’s a good thing. And it is also something no tweet can ever do: reveal the love of God in Jesus Christ – with no words at all.

Remind me to tell that to Wendy next time I see her.

Let us pray.

Songs of Justice and Peace

2016-05-05T12:34:00.002-07:00

Amos 5.21-24

Micah 6.6-8

Luke 1.46b-55

Songs of Justice and Peace

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Having spent the better part of this week scouring the many obituaries and wonderful tributes and testimonials to Pete Seeger, I could not help but notice a rather glaring omission. It was Thursday night, May 25, 1995, when Pete performed at White Hall on the campus of Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. Pete’s brother John was, and remains, an active member of a Congregational church a few miles north of Danbury, and Pete had agreed to perform a benefit concert for the church, which was in the process of purchasing and installing a new organ. As part of the concert, the church’s choir gathered on stage and sang as Pete’s backup vocals, though if you’ve ever seen a Pete Seeger concert, you’ll know that one of his trademarks is that he likes to get everyone singing, so to sing backup with Pete is as much to take the lead as it is to sing behind him. Now this particular performance was the only time in his ninety-four years that Pete ever got to sing with that church’s minister – me – and yet for all those many obituaries and wonderful tributes and testimonials to him in the past week, somehow this seminal and formative moment in Pete’s musical history was overlooked. Consider it rectified.

Pete had great faith in the power of music and song to transform individuals and society alike. Here’s an excerpt from an introduction he wrote to a book of popular music:

“Take a lung full of air and push it out with some kind of song – it’s an act of survival, whether you’re singing in a shower, a car, a bar, in a chorus, at a birthday party, at a church, or wherever. Try it – you’ll live longer. Of course, it’s harder to find songs all folks want to sing together, but that’s alright. Little by little, we’re learning to like each other’s songs and getting less enthusiastic about killing each other... and (maybe) industrialized, polluted, TV-addicted people will learn to sing again. Hooray!”

That final “Hooray” is typical Pete. His music was always imbued with enthusiasm for the song itself, and it was almost always influenced by the passion and politics of the world in which he – and we - live. This is one way we can remember Pete as a prophet – not only did much of his music offer a critique of society, whether it is the anti-war “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Little Boxes,” a song that warns about cultural homogenization, or the pro-union “If I Had a Hammer” – not only did his music offer a critique of society like many of the Old Testament prophets, but like many of those prophets he couched his prophecy in song.

The scripture passages Gail and Jack read for us this morning are all words of prophecy, and they are all couched in song – technically, we would call them hymns. If we were to look up those passages in our Bibles, we would see they are scanned out as poetry, which for the Hebrews would mean they could be sung as much as spoken. And each one is a powerful indictment of injustice and oppression, and each one sets out to draw a picture of justice and peace. Take the scathing opening words of Amos’ prophecy, who spares no feeling and takes no prisoners: “I hate, I despise your festivals, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” Amos, by the way, is speaking to the religious establishment, who care more for their customs and traditions than they do the well-being of the people around them; “Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Our opening hymn this morning, Pete’s “If I Had a Hammer,” is one of those that is so old and familiar, that we forget it too was considered a scathing indictment of injustice, composed in the 1940s as a song in support of the labor movement. On the basis of that song, Pete’s folk group, The Weavers, was blacklisted by the FBI, and at a concert in Peekskill NY, Pete and Paul Robeson, and a handful of other performers, were ambushed and beaten up by a mob who thought they were all a bunch of communists because of the music they sang.

Amos and Micah were ostracized by both the religious and political establishment because of their message of justice and righteousness; Pete was censured by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But Pete was more bemused by things like this than anything else. There was a great story to that point in one of his obituaries this week. Pete was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He and the Weavers had been blacklisted because of their supposed communist sympathies, and held in contempt of Congress in the late 1950s. It was difficult for any of them to perform, and no concert manager would give them a venue. Pete testified before the HUAC, saying, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.” But instead of answering the Committee’s questions, Pete offered to sing the songs that had been listed by those congressmen in their subpoena; the committee declined to hear them, and cited him for contempt. By refusing even to hear them, the HUAC tacitly admitted the power of song to convict and transform.

The passage from Luke we heard this morning is a familiar one, one we are used to hearing at Christmas time, Mary’s song of praise on learning she was expectant with God’s messiah. And when we hear it every December, we hear in it a song of peace and of hope. But maybe it bears hearing in other seasons of the year, because it is also a hymn of revolution and insurrection, a vision of turning the political and religious status quo on their heads. “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; God has brought down the powerful from their thrones; [God has] lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things; [God has] sent the rich away empty.” The elevation of the poor and outcast and the condemnation of the rich and powerful are as radical as anything Pete ever sang, but somehow we miss the fact that Mary’s rejection of the way things are constitute the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.

The biblical notions of justice and righteousness echo through the centuries and millennia, and their timelessness is evident in the words attributed to Solomon three thousand years ago that still resonate today. The question is, do we remember the words because Solomon wrote them, or do we remember them because Pete Seeger put them to music?

“To everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate, a time for was and a time for peace: Turn, turn, turn.”

Again: do we remember the words because Solomon wrote them, or do we remember them because Pete Seeger put them to music?

The hymns of Micah and Amos, and the writers of the psalms, and Solomon and Mary and all the biblical song-writers whose words have endured throughout the years; we might say we can still find their living souls in the life of their poetry. Pete Seeger recognized the power of music – not just his own, but everybody’s – to endure far beyond the mortality of a human lifetime. Here’s a bit of a song he wrote in the late 1950’s titled, “To My Old Brown Earth:”

“To my old brown earth and to my old blue sky, I’ll now give these last few molecules of “I.”

And you who sing, and you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry.

Guard well our human chain, watch well you keep it strong, as long as sun will shine.

And this our home, keep pure and sweet and green, for now I’m yours and you are also mine.”

Let us pray.

Wordplay

2011-10-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

            For a few years while I was in college, my hometown buddies and I had a Thanksgiving weekend tradition of getting together that Friday afternoon for a football game. We played wherever we could find some open space: the high school track, the golf course, somebody’s back yard. A couple of us were decent athletes, though most of us were more like me, and the games results were usually more the fruit of luck than skill. Case in point: I remember one play where my friend Alan – and actually, three of us in our group of friends were named Alan – Alan went out for a long pass that somehow wound up getting stuck in a tree. And while we stood there wondering how to score that one, Alan – the receiver – grabbed one of the lower branches and started shaking it violently until the ball fell out of the tree, and into his arms, whereupon he ran into the end zone for a touchdown. “You can’t do that,” we told him, “the ball got stuck in the tree.” Alan smiled and replied, “Hey, doesn’t it say the Bible, ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves?’”
            Well now, on this morning, even our second graders, who now have Bibles of their own, will be able to tell you that, no, “The Lord helps those who help themselves” is not a Bible verse. Nor are certain other cherished phrases that we tend to associate with the scriptures, like, “To thine own self be true,” “God works in mysterious ways,” and – my mother’s personal favorite - “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Today is World Communion Sunday, a day when Christian communities around the world come together around the table and celebrate the fact that though we are many, and though we are different, we are all one in Jesus Christ. But it is also true that as Congregationalists, we are heirs of the Reformed tradition, and while the Lord’s Supper is important, it is the Word that is central to our worship life together, even on World Communion Sunday. So today we celebrate both Word and Sacrament, with the sharing of the table and the presentation of Bibles to our young people.
            And as a way of doing this, I’ve chosen a passage from Luke that brings both to life. Barb read for us a section of Luke’s gospel that we’ve listened to so often that we may not actually have heard what Luke wrote. In a way it’s like the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance, something we know so well that we don’t really pay close attention to what the words are actually saying. Did anybody notice something a little unusual in Jesus’ words at the table in Luke’s Last Supper?    “And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said ‘Take this and divide it among yourselves…’ And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them… And likewise the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’” Luke has Jesus passing the cup around, not once, but twice – both before and after the bread. How many times have we heard these words from Luke, and how many times have we noticed the two cups? Did Jesus really pass the cup around twice, or is Luke trying to tell us something through repetition?
            I’ve found myself thinking this week about my early experiences in each of the three churches I’ve served, probably because I’ve also been thinking about Angie starting in her new church next week. One of the things she and I talked about before she left is that every church has its unanticipated obstacles, little land mines that you don’t find out about until you get there. In my first church it was the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The issue was not what I said about the election campaign, but rather – and you can be forgiven for not believing this – it was that I didn’t say anything at all about it. Some of the elders expected me to come out and endorse the challenger, and because I didn’t, I was somehow suspect. In my second church, the unanticipated landmine was an overly saccharine portrait of Jesus that was donated by a church family in memory of a recently departed relative. And it wasn’t the portrait itself so much as where they wanted to put it – right up here smack in the front center of the chancel. And even to politely refuse their idea was in their mind to disrespect the memory of the dearly departed. And yes, when I arrived in Beverly eleven years ago I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a turf war going on in the kitchen, an experience that made me so cautious about the territory that to this day I still don’t know how to run the dishwasher. The church is an oftentimes curious animal – we can differ about the humanity of Jesus, or the presence of God, or the unity of the church, but don’t you dare take liberties with the kitchen!
            In the early days of the church it actually was the humanity of Jesus and the presence of God that was the not-so-hidden minefield which threatened the church’s unity, hence our two cups this morning. You might remember last month when Kate Pinkham preached, she alluded to some of the differences that divided the church back in its earliest days, and one of the biggest differences had to do with the nature of Jesus: was Jesus fully, 100% a human being, or was he a divine being come to earth in order to bring salvation to humanity?   There were strong opinions on both sides of the question, so strong that, one or two generations after Luke wrote, certain biblical scribes decided that Luke’s original account of the last supper was an insufficient depiction of Jesus’ humanity – like my silence about the election was an insufficient endorsement of Reagan - and so took the liberty of adding about a sentence and a half to make the matter crystal clear. Luke’s original telling ended in the middle of verse 19, “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them.” Period.   But some later readers didn’t think this showed Jesus at his most fully human, so they added language which referred specifically to Jesus’ body and his blood. The revised version then goes on after the words “he broke it and gave it to them,” and has Jesus say, “This is my body which is given for you… and likewise the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup…is the new covenant in my blood.” For later generations, the last supper is not complete without mentioning that Jesus had a real body that could be broken and that he bled real blood, which meant of course he was fully, 100% a human being. And, inadvertently, the addition resulted in Jesus’ passing the cup around the table, not once, but twice, once before the bread and once after.
            Of course, this is only something we notice if we open our Bibles and actually read them. And this is one of the reasons Heather and I decided to give Bibles to our young people now, at the beginning of the church school year, instead of the way we have done it in the past, giving them out at the end. The Bible is not a reward for a certain level of achievement, or for good Sunday School attendance, or anything else – it is the opportunity to read for ourselves that wonderful, ongoing story of faith which is not just about the people in these pages, but about you and me, and where we see ourselves in these stories. This morning we saw a good intersection of Word and Sacrament, how the words that were written can influence the flavor of what we enjoy at the table, like some fresh-cut parsley can bring new life to a soup or a sauce. As Gail read for us from Isaiah, “the grass [may] wither, and the flower [may] fade, but the word of God will stand forever.” We put that word into our children’s hands so that they, and we, may discover that freshness for ourselves. But it will only happen if we open our Bibles to see what they have to say to us; after all, as it is written somewhere, The Lord helps those who help themselves!
            Let us pray.

Our Community, Our World

2011-10-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

          The questions started coming in the middle of the summer, as people began looking at their fall calendars: “Did you know that Sunday One falls on September 11 this year? Are we going to do Sunday One on September 11?” And the answer, obviously, is Yes to both: I realized the two dates would coincide as far back as last year, when Sunday One fell on the 12th, and it really makes the most sense to start church school the Sunday after Labor Day, rather than, say the Sunday before, or the one after. Still, I completely understand the feelings behind the question: these are two very different occasions, one of which, to borrow Franklin Roosevelt’s apt phrase, marks a day of infamy, and the other a day of celebration and new beginnings. How do we afford each the honor and appropriate attitude it deserves?
            Now if this were the only coincidence of ideas, I could probably handle it. But I was also reminded of the fact that today marks the beginning of the third year of our Church Vision, when we said we would focus our emphasis on mission and outreach, on ways of engaging more deeply in our community and our world. Then my friends on the Pru Board asked me to include a few words about the coming Capital Campaign which will honor our history and provide for our legacy. Others think now is the time to begin talking about ways of celebrating Second Church’s 300th anniversary which is less than two years away. And if all this weren’t enough, today we find ourselves in the midst of multiple transitions as we bid Godspeed to Angie in two weeks and welcome Barb and Judy to our staff. All of these were suggested to me as the appropriate theme for this morning’s sermon. It’s like one of those Steven Soderbergh movies – the director who made “Traffic” and the new film “Contagion,” - Soderbergh’s movies look like seven different movies all going on at once until you finally begin to understand first, that they are all intertwined, and then later, how.
           But the most appropriate starting point for any sermon worth its salt is the Bible, and the passage that first came to mind earlier this week as I considered the confluence of Sunday One with September 11 was the familiar one from I Corinthians, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and, individually, members of it.” It’s a verse that speaks well to both observances this morning. You and I have lots to celebrate together today, including seeing all our young people, seeing all of you, being together in the loving presence of God this morning, sharing the community of faith and fellowship, looking forward to a cookout and a picnic, and plans for a great year together ahead of us. When one of us has something to celebrate, we all celebrate together. Yet we are also mindful of the suffering in our world, the deep mourning that the remembrance of that gorgeous Tuesday morning exactly ten years ago brings, shattered as it was by nearly inconceivable destruction and death. And as a community and as a world, as Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, we all suffered together.
            But I think Paul’s words to the church at Rome are better suited for today, because love is stronger than death and good is stronger than evil: “Let love be genuine,” he wrote, “hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love each other with mutual affection; outdo each other in showing honor. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.” These are the things that make us a community, whether we are talking about this church community, or the world community. One of the remarkable goods that came out of September 11, 2001, was that for a while at least, the world was united, and perhaps more to the point, the world understood that it was united. Our nation, so badly scarred, enjoyed the empathy and goodwill of nearly the entire family of nations. More than one world leader said in those days, “We are all New Yorkers; we are all Americans.” We were one world community.   Human nature being what it is, those sentiments did not last forever, and the world’s nations soon turned back to their own agendas and self-interest. But even when we are not paying attention to it, or when it is difficult to see clearly, even when most visible evidence indicates otherwise, we are still a world community. Regardless of whether we share the same goals, or whether we agree with each other, regardless of who happens to be at war with whom, or where peace might be found, we remain citizens of the same world, inhabitants of the same planet, children of the One God.
            I shared this story with you ten years ago, but today is a good day to share it again. The first Saturday after September 11 I performed a wedding on Nantucket. Debbie and I caught one of the first planes flying again on Friday, which meant we would be able to get back to Beverly in time for Sunday morning worship. The bride was Jewish and the groom was Christian. And the significance of their union on that weekend, of all weekends, was not lost on anyone. For in spite of the fact that the nineteen hijackers believed their religion called them to death and destruction, there in that small chapel on that warm Saturday afternoon, surrounded by families with considerably different history and experience, two young people of different faiths said by their union that, No, faith does not call us to death and division, but rather to love and to unity and to wholeness. I remember chatting with the father of the bride before the ceremony began. He was a proud man and a faithful one, and he observed to me, “These two young people – they are teaching us something here today that the world could learn a lesson from.” Our young people are able to teach us something that the world could learn a lesson from.
            This is one of the reasons that it is actually quite fitting that Sunday One falls on the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Because it is from our children that our world has something to learn. I can remember during our Open and Affirming discussions that the young people of our church, my daughter Blythe among them, wondered what the big deal was. Our children already understood that you treat everybody the same, that you don’t single out any class of person and tell them they aren’t as good as someone else. For them, it was a non-issue because they couldn’t imagine their friends or their world any other way. Our young people are able to teach us something that the world could learn a lesson from. And in a little while, at the end of our Service of Remembrance and Hope, our children will return to our midst because they are our future, and there is still something we can learn from them.
            The Psalm that Barb Schreur read this morning is the same lesson we heard on that first Sunday after September 11 – and if you want to see more of that morning’s reflection, you can find it on Second Church’s Facebook page. So on a day that we remember changed the way we understand our world, as well as in the days following torrential rains, a tropical storm and even an earthquake, the words of Psalm 46 – especially verses one through three, which I am actually going to read as verses three to one - sound as fresh as this morning’s headlines: “[For] though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its water roar and foam, though the very mountains tremble with its tumult, we will not be afraid, for God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in time of trouble.”

            Let us pray.

The Muscular Ampersand

2011-09-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

And so earlier this week, I was updating my database of sermons and scriptures and hymns from the past six months, and I noticed a pattern emerging in my sermon titles, and I’m wondering if you noticed it as well: January 16, “Sticks & Stones;” January 23, “Aprons & Bibs;” March 27, “Wisdom & Innocence;” April 10, “The Forest & The Trees;” later that same day, at Leanne Sterio Walt’s installation, “The Yoke & The Mantle;” June 26, “Caprice & Covenant.” And it wasn’t just my sermons which displayed the affliction: on February 27 Angie preached on “Revolutions & Wildflowers,” and on April 3, “Solitude & Solidarity.” And to top it all off, on January 30 the whole congregation got into the act when we voted to become “Open & Affirming.” The word “and,” or more specifically, its diagrammatic symbol, the ampersand, has gotten quite a robust workout here at Second Church in the past six months. And I realized that perhaps someone was trying to tell me something, and it occurred to me that, of all my sermon topics over the past thirty two years, I have never preached on the most commonly used word in the Bible, and it is high time I did!

The UCC has lately been fond of punctuation; our denomination has adopted the comma as a symbol, quoting Gracie Allen’s memorable words, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma;” God is still speaking. But as much mileage as we have gotten out of the comma, I do believe the ampersand is stronger and more muscular - partly because it has gotten such a good workout lately, and partly because it is a more powerful conjunction. For example, when we use the word “Lord” in church, we naturally think of Jesus, and when we talk about Simon, we think of the chief of apostles. And this morning you are going to help me demonstrate the power of the ampersand. I’m going to give you a word, and you are going to give me its partner. Let’s think of some famous pairs joined by the ampersand, starting in the world of entertainment: for example, when I say Abbott &, you say, Costello. How about Laurel & (Hardy)? Good! Ginger Rodgers & (Fred Astaire). George Burns & (Gracie Allen). How about some famous musical pairs: Rodgers & (Hammerstein) – Lennon & (McCartney) – Simon & (Garfunkel) – see, the ampersand made you think of someone besides Simon Peter! How about the family dinner table – what is every kid’s favorite meal? Macaroni & (cheese). Or possibly spaghetti & (meatballs). And for lunch? Peanut butter & (jelly). One more stop, the world of retailing. We can shop at Sears & (Roebuck), or Abercrombie & (Fitch), or Lord & (Taylor) – and the ampersand made you think about somebody besides Jesus when I said “Lord” from the pulpit. That little ampersand must be a pretty powerful symbol if it can keep you from thinking of Simon Peter and the Lord Jesus in the course of a single paragraph.

And, for all its ubiquity, can be a powerful little word. In fact it is a key word in the gospel of Mark, though contemporary translations won’t necessarily reveal it. In fact, Mark uses the word and so many times most translators look for alternatives just to relieve the repetition. You may have noticed that every sentence of today’s New Testament lesson begins with the word, and: “And when the sixth hour had come...” “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out...” “And some of the bystanders... said...” “And [some]one ran, filling a sponge...” “And Jesus uttered a loud cry...” “And the curtain of the temple was torn in two...” “And when the centurion... saw he breathed his last...” Mark begins every sentence of this brief passage with the word, And. We will see why in a moment. But in what is generally the better translation, the New Revised Standard Version, the editors try to mix things up a little: “When it was noon...” “At three o’clock...” “When some of the bystanders... said...” “Then Jesus gave a loud cry...” Clearly somebody – perhaps an English teacher - decided there were too many ands, so added some variety. But believe it or not, and is one of the key words in Mark’s gospel: he uses it 507 times in his 666 verses. Five of every six verses has the word and. In spite of its brevity and ubiquity, and can be a muscular conjunction.

Consider three sentences. First, “Ruth and Alan are doing the readings today.” This is the weakest and. You could exchange the order of our names and the sentence would mean the same thing. “Alan and Ruth are doing the readings” means the same thing as “Ruth and Alan are doing the readings.” Then there is the stronger and: “Ruth returned to her seat and Alan started to preach.” Here you can’t just exchange the names and get the same sense, but it falls short of cause and effect; Ruth’s returning to her seat did not cause Alan to start preaching. But then there is the muscular and: “Alan finally finished his sermon and Ruth shouted, ‘Hallelujah, it’s about time!’” In this sentence the word and signals cause and effect. Right? The end of Alan’s sermon caused Ruth to shout “Hallelujah!” And is no longer a weak, benign conjunction, but a powerful, causative one.

Much of the time when Mark uses the word and it is in one of the former senses, as a simple conjunction joining ideas. This is especially true in the earlier chapters of his gospel. But soon after his story of the transfiguration, after Jesus appeared on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, Mark changes the way he uses the word. It becomes less a way of connecting ideas, and more a verbal tool for creating a sense of urgency, of crisis, of one event crashing into and shaping the next one. It is Mark’s way of saying to the reader, Time to sit up and pay attention, because something really important is happening here. This is what we heard taking place in chapter 15: “And when the sixth hour had come... and at the ninth hour... and one of the bystanders said... and somebody ran and got a sponge full of vinegar... and Jesus cried out... and the curtain of the temple was torn in two... and the centurion said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” It is like the climax of a Beethoven symphony, or the final battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or the final scene of Romeo & Juliet. This is the strongest use of the word and, in its most robust causative manifestation - this is the muscular ampersand.

And it is not just a grammatical curiosity, as Ruth’s reading from Ecclesiastes revealed to us. I mentioned earlier how the UCC has adopted the comma as one of its symbols, but I personally think that in doing so our denomination has forgotten its history. The United Church of Christ is the product of four historic ancestors, the Congregational Church, the Christian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the German Reformed Church. In 1931 the former two denominations merged to create the Congregational & Christian Church, and three years later, in 1934, the latter two denominations merged to create the Evangelical & Reformed Church. And then in 1957 the Congregational & Christian Church merged with the Evangelical & Reformed Church to create the United Church of Christ. You might say the UCC has ampersands in our very bloodstream. Four faith traditions have become one.

There is strength in numbers, and this is the point of Ecclesiastes 4: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other, but woe to anyone who falls alone and has not another to lift them up. Again, if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone? And though and enemy might prevail against one who is alone, two will quickly withstand.” And then comes the kicker: “A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” In other words, every time you add another person to the equation, you become stronger. I will often use this lesson in marriage ceremonies which involve blended families, because even though two are becoming one, this scripture celebrates the importance of any children from a previous marriage. Every time you add another person to the relationship, the relationship becomes stronger.

This is why our Second Church welcome is an extravagant one. It is why we say that “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you have a church home here.” Every single person, every individual in this church family, is necessary, and we still have brothers and sisters who haven’t come through these doors yet who will someday be equal partners in the work and worship of our ministry. No addition to this faith family is a weak and, just another name to add to the rolls so that our roster of members becomes longer and longer. Each person who comes into this family of faith is a robust & muscular addition, brings unique gifts and ideas, and is as important a member as any other. Our fifty and sixty year members and the person who may be visiting for the first time today each brings a distinctive contribution to the character of Second Church.

It is because of the importance of this little three letter word that God keeps adding to the great cloud of witnesses. And it is why today’s sermon will likely be the only one I ever preach that begins and ends with the word, and.

[Hallelujah! It’s about time!]

Let us pray.

Vision Test

2011-09-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

Is anyone else quietly relieved that the stock markets are closed on Saturday and Sunday? I think I’ve come down with a mild case of vertigo this week from watching stocks rise and fall like one of those corkscrew roller coasters at Six Flags, the kind that not only climbs and drops, but flips you around and around and turns you upside down and empties your pockets – an apt analogy – before you come to the end of it and wonder what in the world just happened to you. Down 600 points on Monday, up 400 on Tuesday, down 500 on Wednesday, up 400 on Thursday, and up another 100 on Friday. Yet for all of that frenetic activity, the market as a whole is only down 175 points since it all began. And I’ve noticed that everyone has an pet theory: it’s because the President is not providing stronger leadership; it’s because the House Republicans decided to play chicken with the debt ceiling; it’s because Italy and Spain are in danger of following Greece into default; it’s because the Fed is keeping interest rates so low; it is because we, the consumer, are not spending enough and it is because we the consumer are not saving enough. In other words, don’t even try to figure it out, because it is probably a combination of these and a host of other factors I don’t understand. But I did appreciate the words of a news commentator the other night who tried to put it into perspective. I’m a huge fan of NECN news; it’s the only local news I watch, and the station’s financial analyst Jennifer Lane offered some solace the other night. She said, basically, to ignore the short-term. She had been getting letters and phone calls and emails from panicked investors asking what should they buy and what should they sell, and her response was basically, if you have fluctuation fluster, get out of your chair, turn off the TV and go outside for a walk. For while the daily gyrations of the stock market are not meaningless or inconsequential, it is always best to take the long view. If the market falls today, it will rise again; if it soars today, it will come back down to earth. Pause, take a deep breath, don’t panic over yesterday or tomorrow, but look toward the horizon and know that better days are coming. Or as Jesus said in a different context, “Let the troubles of the day be sufficient to themselves.” Take the long view.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord...” We heard John Knott read these words of Jeremiah, not once, not twice, but three different times in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch... The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when it shall no longer be said, As the Lord lives... The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” The days are surely coming, says the Lord, but they are not yet. There lies the tension. We don’t know what the days that are coming will bring, which is often the source of anxiety. But we do know that the days that are coming, come from the Lord.

At the time these words were written, Israel was in exile. Entire communities were uprooted from Israel and Judah and forcibly marched to Babylon and Assyria, where they lived as refugees. It would be as if the entire population of Beverly and Salem were compelled to gather whatever belongings we could fit in our cars and forced to settle in Woonsocket, or maybe Central Falls. It was like that for three generations, and in the early days of the exile, Jeremiah, against all empirical evidence, tried to reassure them and comfort them, saying that things may look difficult and unsettling for now, but better days are coming: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord...” Like NECN’s Jennifer Lane, Jeremiah advised taking the long view: don’t panic because of what yesterday looked like or what tomorrow might bring, Jeremiah counseled, but look toward the horizon, look toward the God of hope, and keep God’s faithful vision before you, because better days are coming. Jeremiah brought Israel a vision, and in doing so he brought them hope.

As a church, God also bring us vision and hope. You and I are coming into our third year of the Vision we adopted two years ago, and I think that every now and then it is helpful to take stock of where we have been and where God is leading us. The focus of our first year was Extravagant Welcome, this past year was Congregational Life, and this coming year we will turn our focus to Mission and Outreach, but as we look back, we recognize that while we intended to focus on one aspect each year, all three have been in fact intertwined, since none of them really stands alone. Our weekly study groups have used Unbinding the Gospel and Living the Questions as ways of deepening our own faith and learning new ways of articulating that faith among others. We’ve hired Judy Levy as our new Assistant Administrator for Electronic Communications, and Judy is currently redesigning our church web site, which will be up and running next month, and we will be seeing other communications upgrades, both among our congregation and out in the community as well. We decided to make it crystal clear that Second Church welcomes all God’s children into our church family, and became an Open and Affirming Congregation. We have deepened our relationship with God in our Faith Empowering Group, and with each other with a variety of lay ministry projects. We sent a mission team to Washington DC, we gave Dane Street Beach a good spring cleaning, we became involved with Recovery High School, and we strengthened our relationship with already established mission partners, from Beverly Bootstraps to the Casa San Jose. And, miracle of miracles, there are even signs that God is beginning to reveal to us that elusive holy grail of congregationalism, namely new and creative ways of governance and organization. Because God brought to us our church vision, our eyes have been lifted from the day to day, which is to say, where we are today - to help us look toward the horizon, which is where we are being led; God gave us a vision of who we are as a congregation, and who we can still become.

Three weeks ago, you and I got a letter in the mail which brought news that can best be described as bittersweet: the good news is that the Federated Church of Cotuit, on Cape Cod, is getting a wonderful new minister in the fall. The bittersweet side of it is that their wonderful new minister is our wonderful current Associate Minister, who has served our congregation for almost exactly six years. We are excited for you Angie, at the same time we will be sorry to see you go. The time for farewells and testimonials is not quite yet, since you’ll still be among us through the end of September. But it is time to begin considering God’s vision for us, vis-à-vis pastoral ministry, and what that will bring. At a time like this I am reminded of words of the seemingly immortal Susan Shelmerdine, who has said to us both on more than one occasion: “Ministers come, and ministers go, but I’m still here!” Susan may as well have been talking about the church as about herself. But even though ministers come and ministers go and the church is still here, it is often the shape of ministry that changes, and it is God’s vision and desire that draw the contours of that shape. Both our church staff, and some of our church leadership, our board chairs and moderator, have begun conversations about the transition ahead of us, and the Board of Deacons as well as the congregation as a whole will be determining what our next steps will be. As we do so, I think we would do well to pay attention to the words of Jeremiah, who counsels us, even as we attend to the passing of days, to keep our vision fixed on the horizon as well: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with you... it will not be like the covenant which I made with your ancestors... I will write my words upon your hearts, and I will be your God, and you will be my people, and you shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, and I will forgive your transgression, and remember you always.”

While our vision is looking to the days ahead, there is one more ship on the horizon that is sailing our way, and that is the celebration of Second Church’s 300th anniversary. In 1713, the Colonial Council in Boston granted a charter to the Parish of Salem and Beverly; in 1714 the original church was built, portions of which still stand in the viewing cupboard against the cemetery wall; and in 1715 The Rev. John Chipman was called to be our minister, and served for 60 years. This means that, in two years, we will have three years of celebration ahead of us, and plans are already underway to celebrate our heritage and to provide for our future.

The story Angie read from Acts this morning is a story of multiple visions. God spoke to Ananias in a vision, and sent him to a man named Saul. Saul, who was temporarily blind, had a vision in which someone named Ananias would come to him. And when Ananias reached Saul, he placed his hands upon him and Saul’s vision was restored, and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Saul’s name was changed to Paul, and Paul became, even more than Peter, the spiritual and theological architect of the Christian church. All because Saul, and Ananias, and many who came before them and many who have come after them, saw God’s vision before them. In the days before us, as we continue to live into our Vision, to lean into our transition, and to look toward our tercentennial, may we be as receptive to the vision God has for us, as Jeremiah and Ananias and Saul were to the one God had for them.

Let us pray.

Yes, We Have No Zucchini

2011-09-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Guiseppe and Guiditta Vumbacca emigrated from a small village in Calabria to the promise of a better life in America. Once they passed through Ellis Island, where an immigration officer who didn’t understand Italian chopped the final vowel off the family name so that Vumbacca became Vumback, they moved to central Connecticut and resumed the only life they knew: they started a farm. And because a farm needs farmhands, they produced ten children, the eldest of whom, Thomas, was my maternal grandfather. Tom had mixed feelings about growing up on a farm: it was his job every morning before school to go out and milk the cows, and at the end of the day, he had to grab a chicken, wring its neck and pluck the feathers for that night’s dinner. Which explains why, as an adult, he never drank milk and never ate chicken again.

But Tom Vumback loved his vegetable garden. And it is probably because of this that ever since I was little, I always had a vegetable garden too. I can remember lazy summer afternoons helping my grandfather in his garden with easy chores: planting beans, picking tomatoes, hoeing around the eggplant. And when we were finished he would set up two chairs, light his cigar, hand me a bottle of root beer, and we would sit and talk and just listen to his garden grow.

I also worked in my dad’s garden when I was young, but unlike my grandfather, my dad actually made me work. I had to turn the garden over by hand each spring, shovel the chicken manure he had delivered... have you ever worked with chicken manure? Dad insisted it was superior to cow manure, and it certainly was in the department of aromatic pungency... its ordure is forever tattooed on my olfactory. I also had to weed my Dad’s garden, and thanks to the chickens, there were weeds aplenty. I had to stake the tomatoes, pick the beans and keep the zucchini under control. But still, I remember Dad’s gardens fondly, and it is the reason why, in my adult life, I have still always had a vegetable garden. I dug one in our back yard at our first house in Calumet, Michigan, I dug one in the back yard of our parsonage in Bridgewater, Connecticut and I dug one in back of our garage on Conant St.

And it has always been an Italian garden. I’ve planted tomatoes, pole beans, zucchini, several varieties of peppers, eggplant, and onions; my herb garden has oregano, basil, parsley, chives and dill. It’s great to be able to just go out in the back yard and pick what you need when making dinner, because let’s face it - if all of a sudden you’re just jonesing for some dill, and the stores are closed – it’s so nice to just walk out the back door and pick it fresh.

But I’ve come to notice something a little different about my Beverly garden: it only grows what it wants to grow. When I first started it ten years ago, I tried planting what I’ve always planted, with decidedly mixed results. My eggplant was disappointing. The peppers bore fruit, but to paraphrase the apostle Paul, that fruit did not abide. Tomatoes grow great, and I’m sure that’s thanks as much to Jake as it is to anyone. Most herbs grow pretty well, though the basil only grows so big and then stops. My garden loves to pump out the beans – I have three different varieties this year. But oddly enough, one thing that will not grow in my garden is zucchini. Zucchini! Everyone can grow zucchini! You can throw a couple seeds out the church window and have enough zucchini to feed a small nation. But zucchini just will not grow in my garden. I get lots of squash flowers: they grow into bright yellow trumpets that mock me in the morning – but no fruit, no zucchini. So after years of stubborn planting, forming the little hills just so, making sure there is fresh soil and, yes, manure each year, fertilizing as it grew, I’ve given up. And in doing so, I finally learned an important lesson about gardening. You’ve got to listen to your garden. You’ve got to listen to your garden.

Suzanne Munore read us one of those biblical stories that we hear so often, and think we know so well, that the point of it usually gets lost. “Listen!” Jesus said, “A sower went out to sow...” And what do we usually call this parable Jesus tells? The parable of the sower and the seeds, right? But the parable is not about the sower, and it is not about the seed. Listen:

“Some seed fell on the path, and the birds ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it sprang up quickly, and when the sun rose, it was scorched. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns chocked it. And other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.”

Jesus’ parable is about soil – about the different kinds of soils in which the seed is planted. The sower in each instance remains the same: it’s safe to say that the sower is either God or Jesus, and we get that. Likewise the seed in each instance remains the same: it is the gospel, the good news, the message of redemption that Jesus brings. The only thing that varies in the parable is the soil, the medium into which the seed is introduced. And that soil, folks, is us. It’s not about how good a sower God is, or how fruitful the word-seed is, it’s about us and how receptive we are to God’s speaking to us. The UCC likes to say, “God is still speaking;” the parable Suzanne read asks us, “Are we still listening? Can we hear what God is saying to us?” Are we the well worn path, the place that everybody walks right on by and doesn’t notice that God is trying to say something to us? Are we the rocky ground, have we hardened our shells so that even if we hear God speaking to us, we are too sophisticated to think we need to do anything about what God is saying? Are we the thicket of thorns, where there is already so much going on in our lives that there isn’t room for God to grow in us? Or are we the rich soil, filled with the nutrients and open to the sunlight that wants to stream into us and help us grow and mature into the fruitful people God knows we can be?

Notice that Jesus begins and ends this parable with the same word, “Listen.” And you know, as it turns out, I was not listening to my garden. I was planting what I wanted to harvest, and darn it I was going to keep planting zucchini year after year until those flowers finally produced fruit. But all along, my garden was trying to tell me what would actually grow there, it was giving me beans and tomatoes and onions and such, yet I kept insisting on planting what my garden was trying to tell me would not grow. It is a parable about the soil, and in this instance at least, the sower wasn’t listening to the soil at all.

The same thing sometimes happens to a church. Some things will grow, and some things will not, and we need to listen to the garden before we start planting seeds indiscriminately. I think this is something our Vision process did for us; it taught us to listen to each other, learning what kinds of things would make for fertile soil and fruitful growth, instead of just latching on to the latest church growth strategies and assuming that what works for another church would work for us. The Right Reverend Kirk Smith is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, and six or so months ago he wrote a great reflection on the things that really make a difference in healthy, vital churches; here is some of what he said:

Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, unless you are already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a group of ninety year olds who like crocheting and Beethoven, by God be proud of it.

Actually read the Bible. Start with Genesis, it’s pretty cool, and don’t worry, it’s OK to skip the boring parts.

Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism and consumerism.

Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God is not going to die even if there are no more Christians at all. Don’t forget, it’s not all about you; it’s all about God.

Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

Listen to God, listen to Wisdom, listen to Love, more than you speak your opinions.

These are the kinds of general things that prepare the soil, if you will, that will make the conditions ripe for growing. How often though the church is tempted to go out and buy the magic beans that promise to grow the stalk that reaches into the clouds. “Let’s get a Christian rock band; let’s replace the entire front of the church with a projection screen; let’s meet on Saturday nights instead of Sunday morning.” These are things that might work for some, but I think what Smith is saying is that there are some things that are appropriate for the church as a whole, and there are some things that are appropriate only for particular churches. Listen to your garden; it will reveal what it needs to grow.

This is the lesson of Revelation. I was a little reluctant to choose a reading from Revelation so soon after the rapture failed to materialize, since so much of that conversation grew out of a gross misappropriation of the last book of the Bible. But now that the Bruins have won the Stanley Cup, the rapture can come any time it wants, and we are free to understand that this morning’s New Testament lesson is actually a key to understanding both the book of Revelation, and to what we are saying about the church this morning. Revelation is a letter, a general letter written by John, addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor. Chapter 1 and chapters 4-22 are written to everyone in all the churches. They are words of warning and words of encouragement to those churches; they are not a prediction of the future, but rather a word of guidance to the present church of John’s day. Words, as I said, meant for everyone. Chapters 2 and 3, however, contain words of advice addressed specifically and individually to each of the seven local churches that John names in the first chapter. There is a specific message for the church in Ephesus, there is a specific message for the church in Smyrna, there is a specific message for the church in Pergamum, and so on for the churches in Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea – because each individual church also needed to hear something different. John’s words in Revelation are not one-size-fits all: what works in Ephesus may not work in Philadelphia. Rather, John understood what each church needed to hear, and so he provided it, first to each, then to all.

Listen to your garden. Understand what the soil will bear. Don’t try to plant zucchini in a tomato garden, even if all your neighbors have such an abundant crop of zucchini that they are giving it away to friends and strangers alike. Heck, do them a favor and take some off their hands! When we listened to our garden here at Second Church, we discovered the fruit it would bear. We became an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. We are sending a mission team to Washington, D.C. in July. We have just hired an Assistant for Electronic Communication. We are exploring more creative models of church organization. We are expanding our local mission, and we heard last week about one of our newest partnerships, with Recovery High School. This is just some of the fruit of our Vision. What works for us may or may not work for others, and what works for others may or may not work for us. But if we listen to our gardens, and understand that growth is more about the soil – about us - than about what gets planted in it, then the harvest will be a rich one, and God will be known, and this, God’s garden, will be blessed.

Let us pray.

Imagine There’s No Heaven: Easter Day 2011

2011-06-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

When our two girls were growing up, part of our family’s Easter morning tradition was to hunt for the Easter eggs they had cooked and colored the day before. Debbie and I hid some in obvious places like on a living room end table or the dining room mantle, and we hid some in harder to find places, like behind the throw pillows or way up on top of a bookshelf. And then, only after all the eggs were found, Clare & Blythe looked for their Easter baskets, usually hidden in a closet or in a far corner of the room behind some plants. Occasionally they would come up an egg or two short, but that usually had less to do with their egg-hunting skills and more to do with Lily, our old black lab who had an appetite for, well, pretty much everything. But still, it was only after all the eggs were accounted for, more or less, that the girls could look for their Easter baskets; that was the prize for a successful hunt, and so while we made sure that the game was in the searching, we also saw to it that the eggs weren’t too difficult to discover.

This morning’s gospel reading from Matthew is kind of a resurrection sandwich. Matthew layers his account of Jesus’ resurrection with an unusual story, a story that only Matthew tells. A few minutes ago we heard AJ read the start of the story of the guards at the tomb, then Angie interrupted, as did Matthew, with the story of the resurrection, and then AJ finished telling us the rest of the story about the guards. It seems that in the years following the resurrection, rumors began to circulate that Jesus was not really raised from the dead, but that his body was stolen by his followers in order to give the illusion that he was raised. So Matthew tells us this story about Pilate’s placing extra guards at the tomb to ensure the body stays where it is. But even with the guards posted there, Jesus was raised, so in order to save face, the guards were bribed to say they fell asleep and the body was stolen. Whether it really happened this way or whether it was the product of Matthew’s active imagination, the point of the story is clear: even with armed guards posted at the tomb, Jesus was able to escape the bonds of death. An unusual way to tell it, to be sure, but Matthew’s point is taken.

Rob Bell is a rock star among evangelical Christians – there’s no other way to put it. You may have read about Rob Bell in Time magazine last week; he is a preacher, a speaker and a writer who has gained tremendous popularity over the past few years because he has a fresh way of presenting the gospel. Here at Second Church we have seen and discussed Rob Bell’s videos at Bible study, last Spring our seminarian Nathan Willard held a workshop on one of Bell’s pieces, and as Angie will tell you, Rob Bell is a cult hero to some of our youth. Just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Mars Hill Bible Church, where Bell is minister, attracts ten thousand worshipers every week. But the reason Bell appeared in Time last week is not because of his church, but because he recently dropped a theological bombshell smack in the middle of the evangelical world with the publication of his new book, Love Wins. Bell’s seemingly outrageous premise is that God loves everybody – pretty controversial stuff, right? Bell believes that God loves everybody so much that it is not God’s desire that even one human soul should be lost, but that it is God’s intention to bring every single human being to salvation – and since God is God, God succeeds. In other words, Bell suggests, in the end, not one soul is lost, not one soul is condemned for eternity, but every one of us eventually finds a way to God’s eternal presence and embrace. What this does of course, is it makes hell both unnecessary and superfluous. And for this outlandish suggestion, Bell has become the object of criticism and scorn among his colleagues. What is ironic is that most of his peers have decided Bell is going to hell because Bell says there is no hell. Hmmm: Bell’s compelled to dwell in hell, for Bell’s dispelled the knell of hell. There’s got to be a limerick in there somewhere...

But is this such an objectionable idea? That God’s plan is to save everybody, and that what God wants, God tends to get? I think what is really objectionable is that there are some church communities for whom hell is such a pivotal, indispensible notion, who can’t accept the fact that God desires everyone to come to love and faithfulness, that their whole theological system falls apart if Bell is correct. Think about this for a moment: a world without hell. A creation without damnation. For Bell, this makes a lot of sense: at one point he writes,

“When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are... At the center of the Christian tradition since the [very] first church, have been a number who insist that history is not tragic... and love, in the end, wins, and all will be reconciled to God.”

You have wonder why this is so offensive. Why does part of the religious world cling to the idea of hell so tenaciously in the first place? It isn’t like any of us believes we’re going there. Hell is always for other people, right? It is the threat of punishment that the church has used for centuries to try to get people to behave, well, the way the church wants them to behave. Or to put it in clinical terms, hell has usually been employed as a kind of ecclesiastical avoidance therapy; the thinking is that we will do whatever needs to be done in order to avoid going to hell, so we turn to the church to learn what that is; and unfortunately, for most of the church’s history the simple answer has been, “If you don’t come to church, then you’re going to hell.” Am I right? Bell suggests this is, more than anything, an invention intended to pursue a given story line, like the story Matthew invented about placing guards at the tomb so Jesus’ followers can’t steal the body. But the body disappeared anyway. Placing guards at the tomb to prevent a resurrection makes about as much sense as threatening people with eternal damnation to get them to love God. God just doesn’t work this way.

In fact there is a good deal to suggest that hell is primarily an invention of the Christian church. To begin with, it is a purely New Testament idea. There is no hell in the Old Testament, no eternal damnation in Hebrew scripture or tradition. In the psalm we read together this morning, we said, “If make my bed in the depths,” or more accurately, “in Sheol, God is there.” And we tend to assume that Sheol as a kind of hell for Old Testament folks. But Sheol is actually the place everyone goes after death, the good and the evil alike – Sheol is simply what comes after life; it is not a place, but rather the state of not living any more. There is no place of everlasting punishment, nor is there a place of everlasting reward, in the Old Testament. When you die – you’re dead. It is what you have made of life that makes the difference for the faithful Jew, not what happens to you once you are gone.

Our church has spent the season of Lent reading through the gospel of Matthew. And we have seen that one of the major themes of the gospel can be captured in the repeated phrase, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of heaven is at hand. As we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus is not saying the kingdom of heaven is what awaits you when you die, nor is it off in some distant future when Christ comes again; the kingdom of heaven is at hand: it is among us, it is both imminent and immanent, it is in our midst. The kingdom of heaven is among you: it is the community you make, it is the faith that you live. What if the prevailing cultural ideas of heaven and hell, which come to us more from Milton and Dante than they do from the Bible anyway, miss the mark? What if heaven is not up in the sky, or God’s way of greeting us when we die? What if heaven is not the reward for doing all the right things, in the same way hell is not the punishment for doing all the wrong things? What if heaven is not the great big Easter basket filled with goodies that we have earned by virtue of collecting all the pretty eggs we have discovered along the way? When Jesus said, time after time in Matthew’s gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” what if he actually meant what he said?

What really surprises me about the reaction to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins, is not that so many people in certain church communities are scandalized by the possibility that there might not be a hell, but rather that they have completely missed the corollary: that is, if there is no hell in the traditional understanding of eternal punishment for having made the wrong choices, then maybe there is no need for an eternal reward for having made all the right ones. Maybe this life is our blessing, and the presence of God in our lives, from this moment on through eternity, is what the kingdom of heaven is about. Maybe Jesus actually meant what he said, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Is it possible for us to choose the good without needing the fear of hell to scare us straight, or the promise of heaven to lure us to a reward? There was an article in the Ideas section of last Sunday’s Globe that revealed Rob Bell isn’t the only one who has earned the enmity of his peers. Eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is also taking quite a lot of flak from his own scientific community for an article he published in last August’s edition of the journal, Nature. For much of his career, Wilson has done some of the seminal work on the nature of altruism. What is it that causes people to choose to do good, even when it is sometimes to our own detriment? For many years, the scientific community believed, as did Wilson, that it was due to “kin selection.” That is, we are hard-wired to choose the good even when it sometimes goes against our own personal self-interest, in order to ensure the survival of our descendants, a kind of genetic Darwinism. But in rethinking his own theory, Wilson decided he was mistaken; he has rejected the conventional wisdom and come up with a new idea. The key, for Wilson, has become the community. Technically speaking, under certain circumstances, groups of people who cooperate for the common good out-compete groups of people who do not cooperate for the common good, with the resulting good serving to benefit the survival of the community. Or to put it simply, when we choose to do what is right, it is not for the goodies we get at the end of the game, but rather it is for the common good of everyone. To put this in biblical language, we love God, and we love one another, not because of the promise of the afterlife, but because it makes the world a better place. And because it is the right thing to do. And because the kingdom of heaven is among us.

The relevant question, I think, is not, Do heaven and hell really exist? John Lennon did not sing, “There is no heaven,” he sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven:” choose to do good because it is good, not because you’ll get a prize for making the right choice. The relevant question is, Does God really use the threat of punishment or the promise of reward in order to get us to do the right thing, to love God and each other? Or does God equip us and inspire us to do the right thing simply because God loves us? Which comes first, God’s love or our faithfulness? On Easter morning, the answer is right there at the empty tomb. God loves us first, and foremost, and a God who would send his son for us all does not require a system of punishment and reward in order to demonstrate that love. Or as another gospel writer put it, “God so loved the world that God sent the only Son, that whoever believes will have eternal life. God sent the son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia and Amen.

Let us pray.

Now’s the Time: February 20th, 2011

2011-06-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

As most of you know by now, my daughter Blythe is spending her Spring semester at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was kind of difficult to send her off that far away for that long, but what has proven even more difficult is to try to figure out what time it is, for that matter, what day it is, for her at any given moment. I started out trying to add sixteen hours to Beverly time, but that proved too taxing for someone who last had a math class in high school. So what I do now is subtract eight hours and add a day: so if it is 10:00 am in Beverly on Sunday, then it is 2:00 am in Sydney on Monday. So in this sense, I’ve got the time all figured out; what I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that she left San Francisco last Saturday night and arrived in Sydney – fifteen hours later – Monday morning. Where did Sunday go? I suppose she’ll find it on her way home in July.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of time this week. How do we spend our time? In what ways have we put it to good use, and in what ways have we wasted it? I think it’s helpful every now and then to evaluate what we do with our time, since time is an entirely nonrenewable resource; once a moment is gone, we can’t get it back. Besides, so much of our efforts to manage our lives, and to make sense of the world around us, has to do with time. You might have seen the article in yesterday’s Globe about how eighteen busy Bostonians save time. And we do try to control our time, to understand it, in some cases to predict it, and in nearly every instance, to master it. We would prefer to make time serve us, instead of, as is so much more often the case, our serving it. Since earliest days, humanity has endeavored to divide time into increments, the better to orchestrate and manipulate it. The ancient Egyptians invented the Nileometer, a crude device for measuring time by gauging the rise and fall of the Nile River; medieval Europeans listened for the bells of the cathedral, which marked the hours - very much the same way our own church bells on Sunday morning awaken the small corner of our world at the junction of Conant and Cabot. And today the digital displays of our clocks wake us up, they brew our coffee, they reheat our leftovers, and ironically they have rendered the notions of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” virtually anachronistic!

So there is a tension here. For all the great ideas you and I, and in particular our merchandisers, conceive of to control time, to get the most out of our time, the reality too often turns out to be that our time is controlling us. Our experience is analogous to the football field and the basketball court where the team that is behind late in the contest is “playing against the clock.” We allow time to control us during the week so we can enjoy the weekend, or during the year to earn our vacation, or during our lifetimes to reach retirement. And yet for all our time-saving strategies and devices, it still seems, as every one of us has been heard to lament, that nobody has enough time. How many people cannot make a decision without consulting their calendar, or their Blackberry, or their iTouch? Even as we try to economize and streamline our time and juggle our responsibilities with our desires, we wind up filling in the few blank spaces we have, and discover to our chagrin that we have even less time than we started out with.

“Behold, now is the acceptable time,” the apostle Paul once wrote; “behold, now is the day of salvation.” The Bible makes much of the notion of time, so much, that there are actually multiple words for it. The time we have been talking about so far is called chronos, or chronological time, time which is measured by the hour, the day, the month and the year. There is another kind of time though, which, though less commonplace, is no less familiar to us. In Greek it is called kairos, kairos, or what we might call the “right time;” the favorable, propitious, opportune moment for doing something. An example of this might be the couple who decides that it is time to have a child; presumably, they have not come to this decision by consulting their watch, yet nonetheless, they believe the time is right to begin a family. This is what we mean by the kairos, the appropriate time. Another example might be the old commercials for Miller beer, which managed to squeeze both notions of time into its pitch. Chronologically speaking, after work let’s say, it’s “Miller Time,” time to crack open an ice cold Miller Beer; yet in the broader sense, the commercial also wants us to think that it is always “Miller Time;” that regardless of the hour or the day, the time is right to become a Miller beer drinker. For a Harpoon drinker, this is where the analogy breaks down.

The Bible has many examples of this kind of time, the right time, the appointed time, for every facet of human life, and there is no place where this is more evident than the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which Brad read for us this morning. “I have seen the business that God has given to his children to be busy with,” the writer declares. “God has made everything beautiful in its time; God also has put eternity into the human mind, yet so that one cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” The right time, we learn, is divinely prescribed. God knows the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time for war and the time for peace. “For everything there is a season,” we are told, “and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Even as a document, the Bible leans more toward the notion of the “right” time than it does chronological time. For while it is true that the scriptures are arranged from the creation of the world in Genesis, to the vision of the last days in Revelation, neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is organized along a strict chronological pattern. The most ancient reference to the creation is found in the book of Jeremiah, which doesn’t appear until nearly two-thirds of the way through the Old Testament. Likewise, Jesus offers a vision of the last days as early as the gospel of Mark, which, although it is the first gospel, still doesn’t appear first in the New Testament. In fact the earliest New Testament book, I Thessalonians, doesn’t show up until nearly two thirds of the way through its particular part of the Bible. The Bible’s concern is not so much with chronological time. The most prevalent use of the notion of time in the scriptures is the kairos, the chairotic moment, the particular, decisive, definitive point in time. Indeed, the Bible betrays little abstract conception of time; in the Bible, time consists of what is contained within it, of what makes up those definitive and decisive times which comprise the important moments of life.

We talked a little about this kind of time at our staff meeting this week, for example, how there can be a time for both weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing together, and Bob Lague hit on a good illustration. Bob raised the idea of what takes place at a funeral, or a memorial service, perhaps because he attended two of them last week. A memorial service usually has its share of weeping and mourning – that’s what it’s for, after all. But a true memorial is also a celebration of life, and very often that celebration brings laughter in its wake. We had some good hearty laughs at Rose Brady’s service a few weeks ago, and one of the reasons is that Rose often brought a smile to our faces. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing, and occasionally the time is right and ripe for both.

The notion of the chairotic moment can also be seen in what’s been going on in the Middle East of late. Every now and then, history seems to be telling us that the time is ripe for change. We’ve seen it in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, and who knows where it will strike next? Wisconsin, perhaps. In one sense, we might say that revolution is in the air and its flames are being fanned by the internet. But it is also true that there are times in history when people rise up against oppression. Remember that at the same time the American Revolution was gearing down, the French Revolution was ginning up, and even though a third revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was taking shape at the same time, I don’t think the internet had much to do with any of them. Sometimes the time is simply right.

In John’s gospel Angie described Jesus’ brothers trying to encourage him to put his time to better use, to be bolder in displaying his works, to be more assertive and direct in declaring himself and his mission. They urged him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!” But Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come; but your time is always here.” Jesus was waiting for God’s time, for the “right time,” to be fulfilled, and that time had not yet arrived. For his brothers, though, Jesus admitted that their time had indeed come, that the moment was ripe for them to display their own convictions in what Jesus was saying and teaching about God.

And you and I often find ourselves waiting, and truth to tell, not always waiting patiently, for God to get to work. We are anxious for God to do something in our lives - or in someone else’s life. We are eager for God to heal, or to straighten out an unpleasant situation; we don’t see why God should wait to bring peace to our world and to fix broken or displaced lives. But part of this frustration, or impatience, if you will, is because we are dealing with the two different expressions of time we have been talking about this morning: our waiting for God consists of chronological, or measured time - it’s why we wish God would hurry up and do all those things we things God ought to be doing in our world, and in our lives. We feel as though we have waited long enough, and it is high time God acted. But as that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, God works in God’s own time, knowing when the right time is to work; and remember that even when it comes to all those nasty things we especially wish God would remedy, things like war and hate and killing and death - Ecclesiastes reminds us that these, too have their time, as little as you or I may like it. There is a time for every matter under heaven. We need to remember that God will take God’s own time regardless of what our watches, analogue or digital, might want to tell us.

And like Jesus’ well-meaning companions in John’s gospel, if all we’re doing is sitting around waiting for God to do something, we may well be missing our own opportunity to seize the time. “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.” While we’re waiting for God to do God’s good work, there is a lot of good work you and I can be doing in the meantime.

I think this is what Augustine meant, who wrote that the only significant time is the present, the “now.” The past does not exist except as we call it to memory, Augustine wrote, and the future exists only as we predict or envision it in the present. And it may be part of what Bertrand Russell said, when he later agreed that we may not confuse memory or envisioning with the past or the future themselves, since it is the present that really counts. And who knows, it may even be what the immortal Charlie Parker was trying to get at, whose signature tune, “Now’s The Time,” musically incorporates the chairotic with the chronological. And I think it is clear this is what Paul meant, who summed it all up when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Which in a sense means it doesn’t matter if the sermon goes over twenty minutes or the church service goes over an hour, because you can’t put a stopwatch on God’s Holy Spirit. What gives meaning to this moment, to any moment, is when you and I seize upon it because it is indeed the right time.

Let us pray.

Sticks & Stones: January 16, 2011

2011-06-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

Before we begin this morning, I need you to do something very important for me, so that we don’t miss any of what I have to say today. At no point during this morning’s sermon should you be thinking about a purple elephant with pink polka dots, OK? Can I get you all to do this? Nobody think about a big purple elephant with large pink polka dots. Not even in the balcony. OK, so nobody’s thinking about that elephant, right? Great, let’s get started.

We have a lot of creative people in our church. We have knitters and quilters, we have bean-bakers and chili-makers, we have painters of many stripes, from still-life to wood trim, we have musicians and singers, we have carpenters and product engineers, we have a lot of people who are able to create wonderful works out of nothing more than their imagination and a simple medium.

I have always envied those of you who can take something ordinary and make it look beautiful, because the only way I can claim to be creative is with something that can be neither seen nor touched, something that appears only for a moment and then is gone. I – and Angie – create with words. I just created that purple elephant with pink dots that none of you is thinking about. Now, in a certain sense a word is ephemeral. It is heard once in the course of an instant, and then disappears. So in one sense those of you who make quilts and paintings and bookshelves and jet engines make something that is much more enduring than the words we put together on a regular basis. I remember taking a class in seminary where one of the assignments was to create something that could be used as an aid to worship, so I thought for a while, and wrote a liturgical poem that could be used in multiple worship settings. Everybody else made banners, and icons and other symbolic pieces from wood and cloth and other equally constructive materials. But I made something with words alone, and as a result, I received the lowest grade in the class. The irony is that it was my preaching professor who preferred the material to the verbal.

So there is a sense in which words are fleeting. But there is a deeper sense in which words are far more permanent than anything made of sticks or stone or steel. John begins his story about the life of Jesus in exactly the same way the Bible begins the story of creation: “In the beginning.” In each of the first six days of creation, it is more than just God doing the creating; it is the word of God doing the creating. The Hebrew litany falls into a familiar pattern: “God said, ‘Let there be...’ and there was... and it was good.” God spoke – and it was – and it was good. So in the same way that God’s creative word is at work in Genesis, God’s creative word is similarly at work in the gospel: “In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... all things came into being through [the word], and without [it], not one thing came into being.” I like the way the RSV phrases that last bit, “without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the power of the word.

A word is something powerful. A word can do things that bricks and stones and mortar and wood cannot do, and it is more enduring as well. This is why right now someone in the choir still can’t get that purple elephant with pink polka dots out of their mind, because once a word is spoken it takes on a life of its own that lasts considerably longer than the things we can fabricate and see and touch. Anyone here who has ever blurted something out in the heat of the moment that we wish we had never said knows this is true: whether to a spouse, or a child, or a boss or a co-worker, we know that a word, once spoken, takes on a life of its own, and cannot be called back. And though we may try our best, once spoken, no explanation or apology or justification can ever make that word completely disappear.

I was reminded of the enduring power of words as I followed the news about last weekend’s shootings in Arizona. You don’t have to subscribe to the theory that Jared Loughner went on a senseless rampage because he listened to too much Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to understand that words still have the power to make a difference. After all, I suppose too much NPR and “All Things Considered” might have the same effect on some. But whether the shrill tone of public discourse contributed to the attack on Gabrielle Giffords, whether those were crosshairs or surveyors marks on the map of Giffords’ district, whether one side of the ideological spectrum or the other employs the most war-like metaphors, there is still the cold reality that words make a difference. Words have power, words have endurance, and it would be a mistake to pretend they do not. When Jesus said it is not what goes into a person that can defile, but what comes out, he was thinking of the words we speak to each other, their power and their lasting effect.

When we hear Jets’ cornerback Antonio Cromartie curse out Tom Brady in a public interview earlier this week; when we engage in an honest debate about the value of language in Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn; when a critical conversation about end-of-life decisions becomes a “death panel;” when we pause before a meal to bless the food on our table and the people around it; and this weekend, when we remember the legacy of a man whose inspiring words led to a non-violent revolution and greater equality for people of color; we recognize that words possess an enduring power and a lasting effect far beyond the simple speaking of them.

Gail read this morning from the book of the Proverbs, words that take us back to the very creation when the Word began its work:

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago... when he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above... when he marked out the foundations of the earth, there I was beside him, like a master worker, delighting in the human race.”

From the very beginning, it is the word of God’s wisdom that has given meaning and shape to all creation, to the heavens and the earth, and to all of human life. By the spoken word God created, and by the incarnate word God is creating still.

As the details of last weekend’s shootings emerged, it became clear that it was much more a combination of Loughner’s own mental and emotional instability coupled with his access to guns and ammunition that led to the tragedy, much more than any politically-charged language. And so in a sense, trying to corral and parse whatever words might have been spoken or written before last Saturday is not altogether helpful. But what surprises me is what we have heard since the shooting. Gratefully, there have been a good number of thoughtful, level headed leaders who have spoken evenly, and civilly, and compassionately, who have urged the same in our better lights. I appreciated the President’s words, as well as his observation that speech matters, at Wednesday’s memorial service when he said,

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

Yet without pointing fingers or naming names – though, forgive me Lord, but Barbara Anderson just drives me crazy! - without pointing fingers or naming any other names, we have reason to be disappointed in those who have used the occasion for division and polarization, for blame-calling and self-aggrandizement, rather than for healing and compassion. Listen to what John says about the potential of the Word: “From its fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” It is possible – and it is not just possible, it is responsible, it is incumbent and it is faithful – to see that the words we speak, and the thoughts which motivate them, are vessels of grace. One of the things I really appreciate about the discussion we have been having around becoming an Open and Affirming congregation is that the conversation has been a thoughtful, responsible, and grace-filled conversation. There was a time in our church’s life that such a conversation would have generated more heat than light, but one of the things we have learned together is how to talk to each other with a mutuality of respect as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. “From the fullness of the Word, we have all received grace upon grace.” This should be the aim of our words, of what we say to each other, and I don’t think it is unrealistic to hold ourselves, and our leadership, both our ecclesiastical and our civic and political leadership to this noble, honest and respectful standard.

Purple elephants notwithstanding.

Let us pray.