Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: 2 Samuel 6: 1-5, 12b-19, Psalm 24, Ephesians 3: 3-14 and Mark 6: 14-29

An article in a recent newspaper caught my attention. It reported an archeological discovery of 35,000 to 40,000 year old flutes carved from bone and ivory. Apparently music flourished among our kind even in prehistoric days when just surviving was a full-time job! It’s good to read a positive account about our common humanity especially as we encounter our gospel lection for this Sunday and its hard picture of human corruption and cruelty.

The story, of course, tells of the arrest and beheading of Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist. Running through that account, my commentary tells me there is a parallelism between John and Jesus as well as between Herod and Pilate. Both John and Jesus are innocent truth-tellers who suffer at the hands of powerful political figures of weak character and flaccid moral stature. Both Herod and Pilate allow themselves to be manipulated and trapped by external pressures. Their cowardice permits the respective deaths of John and Jesus. The negative but accurate message that comes through this reading is that truth-telling is often very dangerous work. While Herod quite admired John the Baptist just as Pilate could find no fault with Jesus, they provided little security when they confronted by personal or political pressure.

That human dynamic is repeated throughout human history. There is a side of our humanity that incarnates goodness, love, courage, creativity and moves in a direction of astounding flourishing. One of my heroes, Dag Hammarskjold looked for hope in the successes of Jesus’ mission to resistant audiences. He asks: “Was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all [human beings], indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?” Walter Wink speaks of the execution of the early Christians rebelling against Rome’s empire. These unarmed Christians could not challenge the kill-power of Rome, and yet, even in dying, they became witnesses to a truth that would overcome even imperial tyranny.

Today, of course, we witness a similar dynamic contrast between that side of our humanity that reflects goodness, our God-given drive for truth and human flourishing and that darker side that is corrupted by the same quality of fear that was experienced by Herod and Pilate. The obvious illustration now working itself out in Iran is the effort by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to prevent greater freedom within that nation. Once again innocent human life is threatened by the kill-power of an insecure state.

Our own nation is no exception when it comes to the perversion of the good. Innocents are dying every hour because so many of our political leaders fear the power of the American Rifle Association and its corrupting interpretations of our Constitution. Today, according to a New York Times’ editorial (6/25/09) “70 percent of 20,000 weapons recovered in Mexico were traced to legal gun shops and unregulated gun shows in Texas, California and Arizona…” Also, how tragic it is to listen to daily reports of the killing that takes place on the streets of our major cities in Connecticut and elsewhere by those who so easily gain access to abundant and seemingly endless supply of hand guns. Where is the outrage among the good people in our churches and where is the courage among our elected leaders? It’s been reported that since the election of President Obama, the sale of automatic weapons, the only purpose of which is to kill human beings, has sky-rocketed. No other Western nation permits such kill-power to be placed in the hands of border-line mentally disturbed or fanatical people with an often corrupted political agenda. Why do we?

At this point we should caution ourselves that in some ways John the Baptist was himself a fanatic. There’s little doubt about John’s courage or his ethical commitments, but looking at what we know about him he tended to divide people into either saints or snakes and there was no one in between. He said the kingdom of heaven was going to come his way, or it wasn’t going to come at all. A good illustration from the Christian Bible of this can be found in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan where the priest and Levite were fanatics about getting to the Temple in Jerusalem and going about their religious duties. So much did they feel their religion was the performance of liturgical ritual that they wouldn’t take the time to help the person in the ditch. Fanatic about their duties in the Temple, they judged the person in the ditch as unworthy of their help. Meanwhile, the Samaritan helped the person in the ditch despite his difference in race and religion.

As we approach our gospel lection this week, may we be realistic about the demons that continue to assault our common life, but may we also have the courage to resist any kind of fanaticism that demands with unreasoning fervor an absolute claim to “their” truth as the only truth.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Ezekiel 2:1-5,
Psalm 123, 2 Corinthians 12: 2-10 and Mark 6: 1-13

“… when (God) spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet…He said to me,…I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day… I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” Ezekiel 2 (selected verses)

Prophecy in the warnings of Ezekiel was his “no” to what he saw in the life about him. He was among those exiled to Babylonia after Judah’s conquest by Nebuchadnezzar in 595 BCE. What he witnessed flew in the face of what he understood as God’s purposes for Jerusalem. In helping us understand such a prophetic witness, Rollo May in his book Love and Will might be of help. He writes that “human will in its specific form always begins with a ‘no.’ To be human, from the time of the infant’s first squall is to protest against a world we didn’t make, and to assert one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform it.”

Some of the most profound contemporary prophesy, the inspired “no” in the face of a felt or experienced violation of a responsible stewardship of the created order often arises in quite secular forms. The New York Times (6/14/09) around this time of the year often includes segments of a variety of commencement speeches I find speaking in this prophetic tradition. Just two examples:

The first is from Stephen Chu, the nation’s present Energy secretary speaking at Harvard. “Climate change is not new; the Earth went through six ice ages in the past 600,000 years. However, recent measurements show that the climate has begun to change rapidly. The size of the north polar ice cap in the month of September is only half the size it was a mere 50 years ago. The sea level has been rising since direct measurements began in 1870, but that rate is now five times faster than it was at the beginning. These changes are not due to natural fluctuations. For the first time in human history, science is now making predictions of how our actions today will affect the world 50 and 100 years from now.” He’s telling us that we need to change our way of living in a big way!

Then at Rice University Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International told that university’s graduates, faculty and friends “Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff without knowing where you will land. Sixteen years ago, I jumped. It was 1993. I was 23 years old and horrified by what I was seeing in the news about rape camps in Bosnia. I couldn’t find anyone doing something about the astounding injustices women were experiencing, so I decided to do something myself. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed my efforts. I was not getting paid, and a lot of people said: ‘Stop doing that. Go get a real job, and get paid.’…At 25 years old I was honored by President Clinton at a White House ceremony for my grassroots work. Even then I would not have imagined that 15 years later, Women for Women would be assisting hundreds of thousands of women in countries all around the world…If I, an immigrant woman from Iraq with no money, can do this, you can too.” She’s telling us that we are indeed our brother’s keeper.

But just as in our lection from Mark, when Jesus began to teach in his own hometown and amazed many by his wisdom, there were those who murmured among themselves that a carpenter’s son with brothers so familiar to them couldn’t be that insightful. They were offended by him and turned away. Responding to that rejection, Jesus simply responded that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kind, and in their own house.”

Our Gospel lection is a powerful reminder about how difficult it is for us to listen to warnings that threaten our self-image or self-interest. When contemporary prophets begin to say “no” to violations made upon our environment, or “no” to the subjugation of women in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world, we can count on a similar kind of resistance that Jesus, Ezekiel and the other prophets experienced in their time. After all, Jesus wasn’t crucified by being “gentle, meek and mild.” He spoke hard “no’s” and took strong action against the Jerusalem establishment supported by the imperialism of Rome and the unfairness and suffering created by them. In a similar way, the best of modern theologians are often people provoked by injustice. H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, made this comment in the late 1920’s and ’30’s when the Kingdom of God was equated by many of our church people with our nation. He wrote that, “A God without wrath brought people without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

The Church is called to remind us of our final accountability to a power higher than ourselves, to remember the prophetic tradition that has inspired the best of our religious and secular leaders to proclaim their “no” to violations of divine purposes. I close with the same words of Martin Luther King Jr.’ that I quoted last week: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.”

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: 2 Sam. 1:1, 17-27, Psalm 130, 2 Corinthians 8: 7-15 and Mark 5: 21-43.

Miracles and healing challenge us in our Gospel lection for this Sunday; the first being the miraculous healing of the woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for many years while the second, even more dramatic, is the raising of Jairus’s little daughter who had just died. There are similarities between these two encounters of Jesus. For one thing, both Jairus and the woman are not passive but take the initiative. For another, a close reading of the story indicates that both were also told by the “experts” that their cures were not possible. Yet despite all of this, both come to Jesus in faith with the expectation of the miraculous healings that occurred.

It is possible that such miracle stories can base our faith on very shaky ground. For example, a few years ago in Florida, a woman, whose child was recovering from an organ transplant operation, got on the radio and said some rather inappropriate things,… at least to my mind they sounded inappropriate. She said that because of her faith, she knew God would come through for her, that her prayers would be answered, that the hospital would find the necessary organ for her daughter. “It was a miracle,” she said, “that this organ was found just in the nick of time.”

Meanwhile back in Texas, a grieving mother and father tried to cope with the tragic death of their daughter, the innocent victim of a drunk driver. In an effort to resurrect some meaning out of this terrible experience, they offered one of their daughter’s organs so that someone else might live. This “someone else” was, of course, the daughter of that woman in Florida.

If this is what we mean by “miracle,” then I have to say, “No, I don’t believe in miracles.” Of course, there is a miracle in this story; several in fact. But the miracle wasn’t in God reaching down out of heaven, suspending the natural laws of nature, causing a young girl to be killed by an intoxicated driver so that some other young girl, by virtue of her mother’s prayer, might live. No, the miracle was in the goodness of that father and mother who, in spite of their grief, or maybe because of their grief, wanted to do something for someone else. The miracle is that they weren’t selfish and bitter and cruel at the time of their daughter’s death.

The healing miracle is in the wonder of God’s creation, the human body, which despite its vulnerability and limitations has incredible, one might say “miraculous” powers of healing and regeneration. The miracle is in the human mind and in the developments of medical science, all the research, all the technology, all the imagination, all the God-given, God-created, God-inspired ingenuity that’s present in such a procedure as an organ transplant.

The Greek and Hebrew words for “miracle” don’t mean magic or something supernatural, so much as it does something wonderful, something powerful, a sign or a symbol of God’s presence. And by that definition, anything that excites us to wonder and move us to action, anything or anyone that reminds us that God is with us, is a miracle!

One very positive meaning that comes out of our lection from Mark is that Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage took the initiative. They weren’t passive but had an expectancy that showed itself in action. The woman fought through the crowd to get close to Jesus and reached out her hand. Jairus took the initiative, the first step in coming to Jesus for help. Biblical faith is always pro-active in its most profound expressions with a high degree of expectancy.

The implications of this can be dramatic and miracle-inducing! For example, if we have faith that God values human life through non-violence and the responsible use of guns, we’ll move ourselves to responsible action in opposing the irresponsibility of the NRA in every way possible. If we have faith that God desires decent health care for all of the citizens of our nation we’ll work to support legislation that makes it possible. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”

Remember, it was active faith and expectancy of healing that caused Jesus to praise Jairus and the woman with a hemorrhage. It is such faith that can give us the determination to more than “hang in” but rather to be among those who in spite of the odds participate in building God’s kingdom.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: I Samuel 17: 32-49, Ps. 9:9-20, 2 Corinthians 6:1-13, and Mark 4: 35-41

Centuries ago while crossing over the Sea of Galilee on a small boat Jesus encountered a heavy storm that terrified his companions. Remembered in all of the synoptic gospels, it was a telling event! Although in no way identifying himself with Jesus, Andrew Jackson, may well have identified with our lection from Mark’s Gospel. Once traveling to his home in Tennessee “riding by steamboat down the Chesapeake, the seas were rough. A fellow passenger named James Parton recalled a man who ‘exhibited a good deal of alarm.’ Jackson was preternaturally calm. ‘You are uneasy,’ he said to the worried man. ‘You have never sailed with me before, I see.’” (Meacham: American Lion, p.255.) In this incident, we might discern the courage of our seventh president. But what, aside from its drama, is the meaning of the story in Mark? Is it simply a display of courage with the addition of a miracle? I suspect the answer is “yes” but more than that.

If we were able to consult with a psychologist like Carl Jung or a cultural anthropologist like Joseph Campbell, they might help our understanding of our lection this week from Mark’s Gospel. They might tell us, for example, that what we have here is a universal symbol. It’s a story that speaks profoundly to a truth inherent in life itself. Life is a voyage where we can’t escape times of tempestuous sea. Throughout the Bible it’s the sea that symbolizes chaos and all that it means in terms of anxiety and confusion for all of us within the human family. And as Kate Layzer reminds us in a recent Christian Century (6/16/09) article, in such storms of chaos when “offered a choice between fight or flight…Jesus speaks to the storm and utters that word of power…greater than the wind and the waves, greater than our fear of conflict, greater than our drive for power and dominion, greater than sin, greater than death.”

That voice of engagement and exhortation, however, is often the voice we don’t want to hear; for that voice urges us forward to new and different and at times difficult and very challenging tasks.

I don’t know about you, but I believe we need stories like the one Mark tells. Because what it teaches is that eventually, every one of us will come close to the end of our own human resources. No mater how great those resources are and no matter how intelligent we may be; no matter how great the capability of our human spirit, all of us, at one time or another will find ourselves engulfed in some serious storm that shakes us to our core. It may be the turbulence of a personal crisis of sickness, or financial trouble, or family tragedy, or the breakup of a marriage. In all of these storms that afflict us, if the mind of Christ and the spirit of God is alive and well within us, then somehow, says this universal story, somehow there can be a Peace and passes understanding. There can be an inner calm very hard to understand — except that it’s there. There can be a quiet strength that resists fear and confusion and sees us through to the farthest shore.

Earlier in my ministry on Long Island and through work on the local council of churches, I met and developed a friendship with the Bishop of the Episcopal diocese, a man almost thirty years my senior. He was a fine biblical scholar and on the first Sunday in Advent for several years it became a near tradition for my congregation to hear him speak on some aspect of our faith. Finally, the time came when he retired, and after a few years more and a severe heart attack, he prepared to move to New England. But not many weeks before his move, as he was driving his car on an errand, something happened. He blacked out, lost control of his car which jumped up onto the sidewalk and struck and killed a young man who was just walking along, minding his own business.

My first thought when I heard the news was that such a tragedy would certainly kill my friend as well! Even though he didn’t have control over what happened, how could such a sensitive man live with himself through the chaos of a storm like that in his life?

But he did, and in a humble way and with great courage he faced into that tragedy. The years of spiritual discipline brought that mind of Christ and spirit of God closer, so that he was able to trust God while squarely facing up to that unfortunate event. Then, he calmly ministered to that young victim’s family as well as to all of us who were so shattered by what had occurred.

The inscription beneath the lectionary assignment for this Sunday in my UCC Desk Calendar is “In the Boat Together.” As members of the human family we are “in the boat together” where we are beset by much chaos and many a storm. Sometimes it’s pretty scary, and sometimes we want to cry out, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk.4:38) It’s then that this story can help us to understand that God is with us; that there is strength beyond our own individual strength that can enable us to confront our fear and move beyond it, and that, yes, while there is a limit to our own human resources, with God nothing is impossible.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: I Samuel 15: 34-16:13,
Psalm 20, 2 Corinthians 5: 6-10 and Mark 4: 26-34

“The Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he doesn’t know how.” (4:26-27) Jesus lived and taught through the images of his own time. Therefore, in our lection from Mark’s gospel, the sower becomes an image of eternal truth for Jesus; what we often call the “really real.”

A few years ago in late September I, too, scattered seed. Landscaping was one of the necessary steps in the renovation of our cottage in East Hampton. And so after much shoveling and raking, I went to a local hardware store, bought a few pounds of grass seed, rented a fancy machine that you hang over your head with a pouch for the seed and a crank on its side, and I went “a sowing.” The seed flew! It sprayed over potential lawn and stone wall, even to the gutters and leaders on the roof of our house.

When I was finished, I went out the next day and the day after that to kneel down in the good, brown earth to see if anything was sprouting. I quickly identified with that sower who as Jesus told the story excitedly went outside and brushed back the soil just a little bit to see if he could see that beautiful sight — the curl of a seedling just beginning to force its way through the soil. “…as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, said Jesus, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he doesn’t know how…” (4:26-27)

Anyone of us who has planted a lawn or a garden can identify with the child-like enthusiasm of the sower in this parable. Even as we sow the seed, our minds are filled with the mental images of the wonderful green lawn or the bountiful harvest we’re going to enjoy.

But the key to this parable is found in the next verse where Jesus says” The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” (4:28)
It is likely that the key words in this story of Jesus are the words, “of itself.” The earth produces “of itself.”

We need to remind ourselves that Jesus was speaking in parables. He was using the language of metaphor and poetry. As such, he was talking about the Kingdom of God and not green grass or ears of corn or “Big Boy” tomatoes that might win a prize at the local fair. Rather Jesus was saying that the earth, the creation, the universe produces the Kingdom of God, “of itself.” In other words, this parable of Jesus is teaching us about the inevitability of God’s purpose. Jewish and Christian understandings of creation and life itself always posit a goal. In scene one, God creates the Garden where all is beauty and joy and harmony, but in scene two the human family loses its way and begins to wound and be wounded. But in scene three, God sends us a roadmap and shows us again the goal that we call the Kingdom or the Realm of God. It’s that Kingdom to which we hope and believe the human family is moving.

A few years ago, I listened as a Rabbi closed a meeting by reading a prayer that was written for his own ordination. It struck me how close it comes to our own understanding of what we mean by the Kingdom of God. It goes like this:

And then all that’s divided us will merge.
And then compassion will be wedded to power.
And then softness will come to a world that’s harsh and unkind.
And then both men and women will be gentle.
And then both women and men will be strong.
And then all will be rich and free and varied.
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many.
And then all will share equally in the earth’s abundance.
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old.
And then all will nourish the young.
And then all will cherish life’s creatures.
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the earth.
And then everyone will be called Eden once again.

When we feel discouraged by headlines and broadcasts that make such a vision seem impossible, we need to return once again to Jesus’ words “the earth produces of itself”

What it tells me is that, yes; I am a sower of God’s seed. Therefore, I do need to be responsible and faithful in all the choices and decisions I make. But I also need to remind myself that the earth beneath, the universe, God’s creation, life itself has within it the incredible power of God’s spirit. In one of his poems, T.S. Eliot says, “Take no thought of the harvest, but only of proper sowing.” And in another he says, “Ours is in the trying, the rest isn’t our business.”

That, it seems to me, is at the heart of the gospel message this week.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Isaiah 6: 1-8,
Psalm 29, Romans 8: 12-17 and John 3: 1-17

John Updike tells a very sad story about a suburban, upwardly mobile Massachusetts family. As a young man, Brad Schaeffer was attracted to his future wife Jeanette at a Christmas party. He overheard the office Romeo telling her the only thing that really mattered in life was making money. She responded announcing that more important to her was the salvation of her soul. Brad was smitten, the two eventually married, moved to a large home in Newton, raised four children, joined a church with he more involved than she. The decades passed all too quickly and eventually Brad retired. Their hopes were largely rewarded in conventional ways until when at the age of 71 Jeanette was diagnosed with terminal cancer. When Brad encouraged a visit by their minister, however, she turned him down. “He makes me tired,” she said. And when he recalled her remark at that Christmas party so many decades before about the salvation of her soul and her life of faith, all she had to say was, “Oh darling, doesn’t it just seem an awful lot of bother?”
(God: Stories: Curtis, ed. 1998)

My suspicion is that Trinity Sunday also seems “an awful lot of bother” and goes mostly uncelebrated in most liberal Protestant congregations. During my many years of pastoral ministry, I may have discussed this revered but complicated Christian understanding of the Godhead a few times, but mostly I did not. It’s been my experience that the subject lends itself to not producing the most exciting or interesting of homilies — or blogs! For while our Trinitarian understanding of God has evolved in the life of the church “from reflection on biblical witness and Christian experience,” (Breuggemann et.al.) for many it is a “bothersome” mystery. And so we tend not to talk about it very much either within our more intimate circles or with those more distant to us, perhaps for fear we may have to attempt an explanation.

Fortunately, this week’s lectionary assignment from the Gospel of John, which predates later controversies and claims concerning the Trinity, can help in this effort.

SPIRIT: In our gospel lection Jesus announces that the only way to enter God’s realm comes from above. He tells Nicodemus that “flesh can give birth only to flesh.” (3:6) In other words, there is in human life the freedom to be completely separated from the presence of God. Yet all through the ages, human beings have experienced the unpredictable activity of God that disrupts the purely human and which allows for new insights and fresh, renewing perspectives. John’s gospel is teaching that such winds of the Spirit can actually change the personal and social structures that presume to get along very nicely, thank you, without God. So that aspect of God we name as Spirit is essential to our understanding.

SON: A friend shows us a picture of herself climbing the rock face of a mountain and tells us it can be done, and we say to ourselves, “I believe you.” We accept the proposition. We give our intellectual assent, but that doesn’t interfere with the way we live our lives, because it’s all in our heads.

But there’s another level of faith that’s much more visceral. Instead of showing us the pictures, that friend invites us to go rock climbing with her. And as she checks the knots on our harness and runs a safety line through the mountaineers’ catch on the belt around her waist, she assures us that everything will be all right. The proper response at that point isn’t “I believe you,” but “I believe in you.” The reason for that trust is by that time we’re way past anything like intellectual assent. We’ve set ourselves in a relationship with that person and we’re trusting her with our very lives.

Nicodemus was halfway there. He came by night to interview the Son of Man. He knew Jesus was a good teacher, but he wanted more information. He wanted the teacher to say something that would take away his doubts and make it easy for him to say yes, but the teacher wouldn’t cooperate. Nicodemus was puzzled. “How can this be?”

Here’s how, says Jesus. Watch me. Put your hand here. Now bring up your foot. Don’t think about it too much. Just do as I do. Believe me. Believe in me, and when you get to the top, you’ll know what it’s all about.

That’s an interpretation offered in Christian Century article by Barbara Brown Taylor. She’s helping us understand that in order to fully engage in living life now we need to participate in Jesus’ way. The Son of Man is the link between heaven and earth. Just as the ladder in Jacob’s dream at Bethel enabled the angels of God to go back and forth between heaven and earth, so the Son of Man is the ladder making possible communication from the opened heaven to earth. (John 3:13)

GOD: Finally, John’s reference in 3:16: “God so loved the world.” Here God becomes the subject, the one who out of love for the human family initiates the redemptive activity so essential in our world. In the words of my lectionary commentary, “God refuses to remain content with a world in the process of self-destruction, a ‘flesh’ futilely trying to maintain itself.”

A bothersome mystery is our Trinitarian understanding of God — but oh, how essential!

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 2: 1-21,
Psalm 104: 25-34, 35b, Romans 8: 22-27, John 15: 26-27, 16:4b-15

Pentecost, of course, remembers the birthday of the Church. The dramatic rendering Luke offers in this week’s lection from Acts speaks of the “rush of violent wind” filling the house where the disciples had gathered. “Tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and…rested on each of them.” While Genesis 11 depicts the confusion of tongues created by the arrogance of Babel, the opposite is evidenced among these early followers of Jesus. The sudden ability to speak and understand many other languages is meant to demonstrate to us all the power and energy of that new beginning.

Yet is seems the challenges presented to first century Christians have continued unabated to confront even those of us who live twenty centuries later. Witness Phyllis Tickle in her recent book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. She describes both the large and small changes that have changed and challenge us today. Attention is called to the dramatic changes that occur about every five hundred years. In 451 CE there was Chalcedon, an ecumenical council that shaped our definition of Jesus’ nature in the incarnation and created all kinds of turmoil and division in the process. About five hundred years later in 1054 CE the Patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy in Constantinople hurled his anathemas at Leo IX in Rome who responded with his bulls of excommunication so dividing Christianity into East and West. Five hundred years after that in 1517 CE there was Luther and those who followed him. Once again both church and world were changed by the Protestant Reformation. Tickle points out in her book that every five hundred years or so the church has undergone dramatic change! And, interestingly enough, now another five hundred years has nearly passed, and it seems certain that the whole church, including our small element within it named the United Church of Christ will either adjust to the huge change that is taking place in our world or at best face the danger of fading into obscurity.

Tickle sees a large part of the problem as a nibbling away of our credibility. Galileo or Darwin, for example, didn’t have anything against the church, but their new insights threatened some within the church and divided it. Freud and Einstein did the same. Our credibility suffered in our different interpretations of sacred scriptures on questions of slavery, women’s rights, prohibition and homosexuality. A proud and contemporary atheist, Christopher Hitchens, and others like him blame religion for about everything that’s gone wrong in the world. And just as profoundly, we’re in danger of further marginalization by the i-pod or the Sony Walkman. When I see young people, their ears soundly plugged, walking down the street with their fingers clicking, their feet jazzing and their eyes half closed, I wonder about the hymnody that’s served us so well during my lifetime.

I, who love tradition, now access my information through reading newspapers on line. Recently I bought an amazing device called a Kindle. It allows me to access books in less than two or three minutes at half the price and no need for more bookcases. All of these realities are changing us. They’re shaping the future whether we like it or not.

Which brings me to another lection assigned for this week: Paul’s letter to the Romans offers us that magnificent verse, “all things work together for good” which the best translations now tell us should be read as a demand that people find the good in everything — which must mean even all the change that continually shapes our world.

I believe that the future is exciting and can evoke the energy and power of the church in exciting ways. For example, Stanley Fish in a recent New York Times article quoted an English critic, Terry Eagleton, who wrote this: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can every be properly raised.” These are questions of meaning, questions like “why is there anything in the first place?” And questions like that can best be asked and struggled with in a setting very much like the local congregation, like Immanuel Church.

Someone has said that the church is like an anvil that’s outworn many a hammer. I believe that’s because as human beings we need the encouragement of a questioning, dialogical faith, the depth of human experience that we find in covenant communities, having the privilege of listening to music of quality, and the very human and healthy satisfaction of serving others through various programs of mission and benevolence.

So while Pentecost marks the power and energy of a new beginning, there’s no reason why that energy and power cannot be released again and again as we tap into the source of that energy and power through our participation in Christ Jesus as his twenty-first century followers.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 1: 15-17, 21-26, Psalm 1, I John 5: 9-13, John 17: 6-19

My determination to follow the lectionary readings and hopefully to add interesting and helpful comments on them is receiving a test this week. With the exception of Psalm 1, I find them at least initially neither inspiring nor helpful. (Praise God the United Church of Christ takes the lectionary seriously but doesn’t legalistically mandate following it every week!)

The reading from Acts describes the process of replacing Judas with Matthias. There was one other contender in the running, someone named “Joseph, called Barsabbas,…also known as Justus.” (1:23) Apparently even prayer couldn’t help Peter and the other disciples to choose one over the other, so they cast lots and the winner was Matthias. What does the lesson teach us? That we choose leaders by casting lots? That chance points the way to effectiveness? Or that by casting lots God magically intervenes and determines the outcome? Maybe the lesson is about bringing the number of disciples back to the original twelve in keeping with the traditional twelve tribes of their Hebrew ancestry. Or maybe it’s about how to be a good loser. What did happen to Joseph, called Barsabbas…also known as Justus? Or to the winner Matthias for that matter?

What we know is that neither of them attracted much attention. There was a now-lost Gospel of Matthias that was condemned as a Gnostic heresy. One legend about Barsabbas was that he was able to drink poison and come to no harm. Both seem pretty irrelevant bits of information and not preaching material. A positive spin, however, is put on both of them by Biblical scholars. They tell us that the two spent the rest of their lives witnessing to Jesus and to the power of the Resurrection in unheralded and persistent ways winning much of the Roman world to Christ. Paul simply got most of the credit. Maybe so, but no one really knows. Again, perhaps what’s most helpful is that there were clearly many witnesses and laborers in the early church we know nothing about whose character and whose faith provided a great gift to a cruel world. And when thinking about it, that’s still the case, isn’t it? The contemporary Matthias’s and Barabbas’s still hold it all together — thanks be to God!

In reading a commentary by Walter Breuggemann, the lessons from I John and John’s gospel also challenge my usual homiletical interest. He and his colleagues write that both the Gospel and the epistle “castigate those who are unable to make a decision about Jesus.” There’s a harshness about the demand for faith in these passages that is “off-putting” and “otherworldly.” Are honest doubt and the struggle for understanding to be condemned? In the high-priestly prayers John puts into the mouth of Jesus he seems Gnostic-like and demonstrates a radical otherworldliness that other accounts of Jesus’ life contradict. While that otherworldliness may indeed protect a person from the corruption and distortion of contemporary values, we should also recognize that in this world for every terrorist, torturer and thief, there are a thousand people willing to risk their lives to help and act with justice and love. It is within the worldly struggle that we are saved and not a part from it.

These are the kind of passages from scripture that need a group discussion in which such ideas expressed above can be challenged and perhaps better insights than my own can be gained.

Among the lections assigned for this Sunday, if we read only Psalm 1, we’d be well fed. It’s been and continues to be sage counsel that offers perspectives on how to effectively and faithfully form ourselves in life. The Civil Rights song so often sung about a tree planted by the waters that provides such sustenance that we shall not be moved in our quest for justice comes, of course, from this Psalm. It deserves our attention and reflection.

Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of he righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Psalm 1

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 10: 44-48,
Psalm 98, I John 5: 1-6, John 15: 9-17

“You are my friends if you do what I command you…go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” (John 15: 14, 16b)

I read a book last week by Amy Goodman and David Goodman entitled Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. It’s a book that profiles ordinary people who under difficult circumstances stand up for what they believe. One of the ordinary people the book describes is Malik Rahim, a community organizer and a Muslim, but one, who is surely a friend of Jesus — confirmed and demonstrated by bearing the fruit of just love and service in his leadership following the 2005 “Hurricane Katrina.” Most of us watched the unfolding of that tragedy with a sense of disbelief that nature could be so cruel and government so ineffective. The stories slowly emerged of huddled survivors, terrified, beset by hunger and thirst, and loads of governmental neglect laced with profiteering of the highest order. (Recall the no-bid trailers, for example, with asbestos-creating cancers supplied by Halliburton.)

Out of that maelstrom, Rahim did what he knew best and formed an organization named “Common Ground” which would produce fruit that a dependency on government denied them. Beginning with the provision of food for children, he and his emerging organization preached self-sufficiency. With three volunteers and fifty dollars a medical clinic was soon opened in a mosque. It was the beginning of an effort that attracted racially diverse volunteers from all over the world. Malik said of this effort: “I think history will recall this as the greatest humanitarian effort by Americans to Americans. Never before in the history of this state have you had thousands of whites come down into a black community that didn’t come as exploiters or oppressors…they have brought justice.” (Standing Up…,p.24) More recently, Common Ground has planted fifteen thousand indigenous trees and has begun an effort to detoxify the soil contaminated by flood waters in addition. The organization now serves more than five thousand people.

The point of the above “longish” paragraphs is to indicate that bearing fruit in Jesus’ sense of the word has little to do with religious affiliation but a lot to do with religious motivation.

A similar effort begun in response to human need was recently undertaken by members of Hartford’s Immanuel United Church of Christ. They traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico and engaged in the building of new homes for the poorest of the poor who live on the mountainous fringe of hazardous rubbish. These, too, were people who “stood up to the madness” that dispossesses so many in our world. And they too are “ordinary heroes” living in “extraordinary times.” Their recent reflections of the personal and social transformation that occurs when individuals make it their business to participate in helping to heal a part of the human family reminded me that John’s gospel in the lection for this week points to a permanent God-given reality: That such participation, whether as knowing friends of Christ or not, is a pathway to a future where human fulfillment has a chance. Whatever our religious or non-religious ties may be, salvation (wholeness, health) lies in building ties through the selfless love of neighbor.

For those of us who intentionally seek to be friends of Jesus, there are at least two things to keep in mind:

First, as followers of Christ we’re not in a position to dictate when and how we’ll act like friends or to demand this or that benefit from the relationship to satisfy our own felt needs. Whatever our situation in life, we are called to become aware of our neighbor. Be kind, for we never know the burdens another carries. The Apostle Paul calls this participating in Christ Jesus and John describes it as an important element in being a friend of Christ.

Second, being a friend of Jesus means loving with intentionality. According to commentaries I’ve read, John’s gospel speaks of love as commandment. While the usual definition of love seems to lack the duress that commanding something implies, here it means the script that comes from God and which guided Jesus’ life. And if all of this talk about friendship and loving begins to border on weak sentimentality that “macho” pride sometimes distains, recall that in John’s gospel love like that receives a reaction of hate and oppression. After all, that’s why Jesus was crucified. He was a loving meddler who sought after justice and love. And he inspired a long succession of those, who standing up for justice and love in their world, continue to pay a heavy price for their discipleship.

Ralph Ahlberg

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 8: 26-40
Psalm 22: 25-31, I John 4: 7-21, John 15: 1-8

In digging through my files recently, I discovered the substance of an interview with a faculty member of a graduate business school. He pointed to a survey that was taken which asked corporate chief executive officers what qualities and abilities they look for in business school graduates. Ethical/moral values and social responsibility ranked ninth, and integrity ranked eleventh, far below such things as financial skills, the ability to think and make decisions, marketing knowledge and motivational skills. These priorities, said the associate dean of this business school, might suggest why stock swindles, “soft” money and banking bailouts have so afflicted us in recent months.

So, given the competitive culture in which unethical behavior seems more the norm than the exception, asks an interviewer, how does one teach ethics to business students? The answer came in the form of a collection of the best he’d come across in a career of studying ethics. He said he’d studied how ethical systems developed among Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindu’s and found common among them what we know of as the Golden Rule. “Do to others as you’d want them to do to you.” He says he gives his students typically ambiguous business situations and asks them whether the Golden Rule can be applied. He said it applies about ninety percent of the time.

But to the interviewer that sounded simplistic. So he continued to press the business school dean and faculty member. “How does an individual hang on to personal ethical principles — honesty, personal integrity, respect for the commonweal, the ‘greater good,’ in the middle of all the pressures and expectations and impersonal forces of today?”

Before answering, the associate dean of this business school went to his desk and picked up a letter that was on top of a stack of papers. He read a couple of paragraphs out loud. The letter was from a businessman who was currently serving time in jail for fraud and other illegal business practices. The businessman said that being in the banking industry is like driving along a suburban parkway. The posted speed limit is fifty-five. Everyone knows that. But it seems that everyone is driving at seventy and up. So that you’re not going any faster than anyone else. You’re just keeping up with traffic. But when the red light flashes and you’re the one who gets pulled over, you’re the one who’s guilty, even though everyone else is doing the same thing. He’d been in prison for four years.

So, again, “what do you tell students who are about to step into the world of banking, brokerage, computer technology and all the rest?

An important answer comes in the gospel lesson from John assigned to us this week in the common lectionary. The danger is that the words we read are too familiar. We’ve read or listened to them until they seem almost another cliché. Even the explanations are so familiar that we’re in danger of missing the profundity of their meaning. “I am the vine and you are the branches…abide in me…every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” (15: 1,2)

The answer this business school faculty member gave to his interviewer — at least in terms of meaning…was almost precisely what was just quoted from the Gospel of John. He said the best thing anyone facing the ethical pressures of today’s world could do was to find the quality of mentor who possessed integrity and moral balance. He or she was to abide, to draw strength from something or someone greater than oneself.

The imagery of abiding and having a connection to the vine carries with it the notion of corporateness. The command to “abide” is directed in the first instance to the church. “I am the vine. You are the branches.” Psalm 1 speaks about the person who is rooted in God being like a tree planted by the stream, a tree that can’t be uprooted or moved. “I’m like a tree, planted by the waters, I shall not be moved,” was how we sang it during the Civil Rights years.

For the original hearers and readers of the gospel assigned for this week, our world of instability and turbulence had nothing on them. They were on a journey of discipleship that was then just as ethically conflicted as is our world today.

And what kept them on track was their willing in themselves the disciple to abide in Jesus and his ethic of selfless love and relentless responsibility to their neighbor.

Ralph Ahlberg