Jeremiah 1: 1-10
Luke 13:10-17
Often times in reading from the Bible, we skip over the references to who was King, who was Priest, who was keeping the flame, in which provinces of a long ceased Nation. We read the Bible, particularly words of Prophecy as God's Word to us, like some ancient horoscope, the mysterious words of Nostradamus foretold long ago. The reference to Kings and Priests and Provinces are markers of time, reference points, allowing us to know this was a real circumstance in the lives of real people.
In school we were taught the Scientific method, extrapolated from Natural Sciences to Social Sciences, that GIVEN certain THEORIES we can articulate HYPOTHESES, we can then create tests and experiments and PROVE the TRUTH of what we have wondered about. But about 1985 two researchers from the University of Michigan demonstrated that we could never actually prove anything, there are always spurious anecdotes which do not fit. Instead, they determined that all we can ever do is describe what we have seen and what we know to be true, hoping that others in a different time and place will find single points of truth in our circumstance that match and undergird their experience.
The Ancient Greeks had two different understandings of TIME, CHRONOS and CHIROS. Chronos is where we have acquired the understanding of Chronology, in Human Society there are clocks and calendars for measuring Minutes and Hours and Days and Years, time is always moving froward from the Past into the Present determining the evolution of the Future. One of the greatest inventions of human society was the clock which measures the regular passing of seconds and minutes and hours, before which the Church was responsible for tolling the hours, controlling when people went to work and when they returned home. According to Chronos, time can never go backward, because we might change circumstance and undo what has been done. We can never go back, we can only go on. But there is also CHIROS, God's Time, which is not bound by Seconds or Centuries, but remembered in lifetimes and experiences of faith. When in Seminary, students question and try to define ideas as ABSOLUTE TRUTHS: What is Evil, What is Good, is Righteousness time bound and cultural or True?
Some of us are hardwired to arrive early, others are perpetually late but all this is according to Chronos. Chiros is about the Quality of time. To look into the eyes of a newborn and recognize that one day this child of God will be a Grandmother herself, to witness a couple in their nineties holding hands with all the love and affection of newlyweds.
Similar to The Call of Jeremiah, I had a wedding recently, where the Groom asked me just before entering the Sanctuary, that he had been asking everyone if we had any advice about getting married, without missing a heartbeat I said “Don't do it!” He looked at me outraged, sputtering that if his bride heard the minister say this she would be furious. And I responded, if you need to listen to others' about how to live your live, what to do and not do, then you are not ready, Marriage needs to be a conviction that you can do nothing else but be committed to one another. Each of the ancestors of faith describe their Calling, as being something they tried to avoid, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah all protested that they could not take this on, Jesus in the Garden at Gethsemane, described “Lord, Take this cup from me, allow it to pass by. But if it is your will, then allow me to be used to fulfill it.”
Jeremiah's Call describes not only that God has a use for us, a plan, but by describing “before you were formed I knew you”, God affirms that there can be a God ordained purpose for our lives, a purpose we did not recognize or choose until the circumstance is before us. Most of us hear the encouragement, “Do not say I am only a child, for God is with you” and also “See I have put my words in your mouth, I have set you over Kingdoms and Nations.” The added burden most of us fail to heed is that God's Word is to PLUCK UP, BREAK DOWN, DESTROY and TO OVERTHROW in order to BUILD and to PLANT. We want to create without letting go of what has been. Often times, we cannot embrace resurrection without first memorializing the Death.
Ingrained in our psyche is a reaction that to Pluck Up and Break Down, to Destroy is somehow EVIL. Part of our acceptance of all things new and different, is a questioning of if there is Evil in the world? Our deConstruction of History, our Global perspective, listening to so many different pundits make us question whether all heroes actually have a shadow self of weakness and corruption, whether all villains are without humanity?
Prior to coming to Central New York, we lived in the western suburbs of Milwaukee in the late 1980s and early 90s. There was a young man in his 20s named Jeffrey Dahmer, who was preying upon homosexuals. Regardless of your feelings about homosexuality, Jeffrey Dahmer was murdering these men and committing cannibalism. Like Hitler and Musselini, he was the personification of evil. But one morning an older woman came to worship, frail, mourning and grieving for her grandson, the child she used to read to and bake cookies for. She did not excuse or make excuses for what atrocities he had done, but she wept for the loss of the grandchild she had loved.
I remember receiving a phone call when our eldest was toddler, it was on a Day off, and having no babysitter I brought him along to sit in my lap and play on the floor. The couple began to describe that their daughter had suffered pos-partum depression. She had risen in the middle of the night, taken her baby to her husband's favorite golf course and drown the baby in the water hazard. She had been arrested and eventually served ten years for taking the life of her child. I remember feeling embarrassed and yet that it was somehow especially poignant to have our infant crawling into the lap of this grandmother as she wept for her child and grandchild.
Controversy arose when in the midst of this settled Western European Suburb in the Midwest, Buddhist monks wearing Saffron colored robes wanted to build a Temple. The City Government was outraged and attempted to block any development claiming this was a Judeo-Christian Community. Rarely do I wear a Clerical Collar, but I recall attending that Community Hearing as people spat racial epitaphs and fears. I was one of the last to be able to speak that night, and addressing our Mayor and Council described that to deny a religion the right to create a place of worship, meant all the other places of worship, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, should also be denied. That routinely, we had taken our Confirmation Class to Jewish Synagogue and Catholic Mass, so as to have our children able to explore and ask questions both of other faiths and their own, to make an informed and conscious choice of what they believe, and that I would look forward to bringing our Confirmands to the Buddhist Temple.
One Sunday morning a car pulled into the parking lot several hours before worship. A woman came to the Pastor's office dressed in a Nurse's uniform, she described having worked several shifts back to back, and last night was hectic in the Emergency Room. In the midst of several crises, a family came in with a sick child. The Doctor had ordered up Codeine, and going to the Pharmaceutical cabinet she had mistakenly taken a vial of Cocaine instead. The child went into convulsions and she realized what she had done. They were able to fluch the drug from her system and stabilize the child. But surely the parents and hospital would sue her. She envisioned the loss of her job, her license, her career, she had been working multiple shifts because her husband was out of work. I don't know why, but something possessed me to ask: “If the family were members of the Church, rather than strangers, would it make a difference? Could you ask their forgiveness, could you forgive heir anger at you?” She left, and a short time later another car drove in, with a young couple who described a terrible night in the ER, as their child had received the wrong medication. For the next 18 months, because she was not wearing a uniform at church, and they were not parents in crisis, but simply a family in the congregation, the two worshipped beside one another unaware. On the day of the Hearing, they faced one another, and recognized one another, and heard each other's pain and forgiveness.
There is evil in the world, when we ignore one another's humanity, ignore one another's needs, let alone their human rights.
Bill Mauldin was an Editorial cartoonist during and after World War II, especially known for his characters Willie and Joe who were soldiers in a foxhole. He described having published a cartoon, titled MICKEY MOUSE CIRCUS at STATE FAIR. In the cartoon were several very hagard looking mice, which obviously had been white but someone had dyed their fur pink and green and bright blue. The cage was filthy and the rodents severely neglected. Mauldin described that more than any other editorial, he received response to this. People were outraged, wanting to report whomever this depicted to the American Society for the Protection From Cruelty to Animals. He described feeling puzzled, that on days prior to and for months after, he had had editorial cartoons about would be immigrants living in deplorable conditions, malnutrition and war, wanting to be set free to come to America, and America debating closing our borders.
On the Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in one of the Synagogues. And there was a woman who had suffered for 18 years with an infirmity, who was hunched over and could not stand upright. When Jesus saw her, he Called her and said “You are set free from your infirmity.” The ruler of the Synagogue was indignant because it was not the time for healings, it was the Sabbath.
What I had never seen in this passage before was Jesus reference that her “infirmity” had bound her, like a donkey or ox tied to a post, like being bound to evil. And all of us would have compassion to allow an animal to drink, so why not to set free a Child of Abraham from sin. It is easy for us to respond to the need to set free the oppressed, to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. But in this circumstance taken from the life of Jesus, he saw someone oppressed by circumstance, needing to be set free from evil, restricted by the hours of the day that she had not come during healing hours, and he offered her forgiveness and healing and raised her up as a Child of Abraham.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
"WHAT ARE WE YEARNING FOR?" , AUGUST 1, 2010
Hosea 11:1-11
Luke 12:23-31
Our Call to Worship this morning from Paul's Letter to the Colossians, includes a a verb that changes everything in our lives. Whether because our parents saw us as the Center of their Universe, or the constant barrage of ad campaigns in our culture that promise you are THE GREATEST GENERATION, you can HAVE IT ALL, Just DO IT, GO FOR IT, we have conceived of everything as objects, our possessions. Our Lives, our parents, our children, our job, our school, our church, our friends, everything has become a reflection of us, as if we were the center of the universe and everything, everyone revolved around us. Paul directs the Colossians to “Be SUBJECT to one another, as is fitting in the Lord.” What a simple and dramatic shift, from the cosmos revolving around us, to acknowledging the reality of others and making ourselves in relationship to their universe. Be Subject to one another.
The parable of the Rich Fool, is not that he cheated, or lied, or stole. He worked hard and did what was expected. He planted and watched as the rains and sun came, and the crops were full and plentiful. But late at night, when planning his future, he did not thank God for his blessings. He never acknowledged the life giving nutrients of the sun, or the gentle rains providing moisture, or the fertile earth, or the workers who shared in the planting, cultivating and harvest. He never saw the pests or insects that were kept from his bounty. The Parable of the Rich Fool is that when alone, he saw himself to be all alone, and rather than speaking to God, he talked to himself. I have more than MY barns can hold. What shall I DO with all I POSSESS. I KNOW, I shall tear down MY barns, and I shall build Myself Bigger ones.
ATHEISM is believing there is No God. Choosing to believe only in what we see and touch and taste, smell and feel, what we can control, what we can make for ourselves. The Classical Philosopher Descartes reasoned : I Think , therefore I Know that I AM, I Exist within my own Reality. ATHEISM denies the reality of God, thereby making ourselves into our own God. But even among those who acknowledge and confess faith in God, there can be a PRACTICAL ATHEISM, of living as if we worship God at 9:30 Sunday mornings, then go about our business the rest of the week.
What is the center of your universe? What do you yearn for? This circumstance the Gospel of Luke is relating is of siblings arguing over an inheritance. Who gets what, and is there fairness in the dispersal, but this denies the more basic reality, that we are siblings, sisters and brothers sharing in our identity from the one who has died. How different, if we begin by naming what we have in common in the love for our parent, our shared memories, and all that each of our lives meant to them; than if we work out our sense of loss in what was taken from us in their death, by dividing their stuff.
Several years ago, a member of the Church sent me an email following the Annual Congregational Meeting. There have been numerous visual changes and measurable outcomes. What do you believe are the Church's greatest non-tangible needs? In essence, our barns are full, everything this congregation has discussed or imagined, for the last Century has been fulfilled.
The roofs are dry, the masonry strong, there is good and ample drainage;
We replaced the center of the Church creating spaces for the community and access for all;
We corrected the problems with our Sanctuary, adding lighting, centrality, gorgeous musical instruments, and have raised up children to be adults who lead us;
We have had our lives changed by prayer in the midst of Cancers, illness, war and prison;
We have created and served at food pantries, clothing with those in need, providing for elders;
As far away as SubSaharan Africa, Haiti, Malawi and Madagascar, we have changed the world of others.
We have listened to the pain of those who have been abused;
We have made the resources of our church available to all who desired to believe.
The Non-Tangible is always that we are human, so we divide ourselves from one another, that by experience, by politics, by friendships and commitments we are separate, unique. We separate ourselves by our brokenness. We fail to realize how brief our time of life, how fragile our relationships, how powerful our words/even our shadow.
A group of successful business leaders sat down with me one evening, they described that with great efficiency we have harvested the “Low-Hanging Fruit”. There have been presenting issues, that have been cared for and responded to. But the task before us, was to identify, where on the tree should there be branches, flowers and buds for future fruit, that had not yet ever borne? How do we nurture, what we know in our hearts ought to be, and because earlier circumstances bruised the tender shoot, because of neglect for other concerns, for what ever reason, had never developed?
Every time I approach Skaneateles from the West, I have this quaint, nostalgic, heart-warming feeling. At the Top of the Hill, before descending into the Village, you see the Church set at the Center of all that is. Poking up from amidst the trees, with the lake, and stores and businesses, schools and homes, we are the Church in the Village. Yet, the world around us has radically changed. We could be isolationist, and imagine the world does not reach us, that this is a Stress-Free Zone, a Place Apart, the Anglicans stay on their side of the street, the Catholics to the North and Pentecostals outside the Village to the far East, but we have a Calling, a responsibility to witness and to lead. Where churches across the country and around the world have consistently been burying their members three times as fast as baptizing new ones, quietly gossiping about divorces and rarely recalling that that room was once used as the Bride's dressing room. We AS The Church in this place and time have continually married 20 and 30 and 40 couples each year, baptizing nearly the same number, and thankfully, while many of our new members have been beyond infancy and confirmation, and some have surpassed the Century milestone, we have had so few mortal passings as to treasure the life of each, giving them back as a gift to God. We now are known for Music and Mission, for Marriage and Baptism. We are far and away the largest of Churches, which is not reason to raise our fingers as being No. 1, but rather responsibility, because we have the ability, to subject ourselves to the needs of others.
There is a rich maturity to Hosea's Prophecy. This is not the Book of Genesis, where all is created new, pristine and pure. Not Moses' Books of Law, trusting dependence on God in the wilderness. This Word begins with horrible, painful, ugly intimate circumstance of betrayal. While claiming to be a family, Hosea's spouse seeks satisfaction of desires and pleasure from everyone else but Hosea and is unable to commit. The Lord's anointed so despises his own children as to name them: Soon to be Punished, Not to be Pitied, Not my Children. Yet, beginning here, the story evolves with Hosea making decisions for the rest of his family. As objects, unloved, reflections of the one at the center, he distances himself from each, institutionalizes them, and tries to put them away. But God cares. God yearns to love. No matter the brokenness, no matter the betrayal, no matter how separate and divided, wounded and inhuman, we have ever been to one another, there is still in each of us (from God) the yearning to forgive, to be made whole.
What is the Non-Tangible? What is it we yearn for? To continually become the Body of Christ in this place and time. Not only family, not only of shared lineage and ancestry and residence, but yearning for forgiveness to be whole. That is both a challenge to us as The Community of Faith to live as we claim to believe, and to reach out.
There was a time, a generation ago, when to marry outside the faith, was not for a Christian to marry a Muslim, or to marry a Buddhist, or Jewish, but often persons were excommunicated for marrying outside the faith was to wed someone who was Catholic, or Pentecostal, Episcopalian, or God help us a Methodist! We have come a long distance in acceptance of one another, I am never clear whether this has been because of what we have forsaken or what we have reclaimed. I hope the latter, to choose to see in one another a conviction and commitment and faith, and to consciously subject ourselves to the needs and desires of one another, as is fitting in the Lord.
Luke 12:23-31
Our Call to Worship this morning from Paul's Letter to the Colossians, includes a a verb that changes everything in our lives. Whether because our parents saw us as the Center of their Universe, or the constant barrage of ad campaigns in our culture that promise you are THE GREATEST GENERATION, you can HAVE IT ALL, Just DO IT, GO FOR IT, we have conceived of everything as objects, our possessions. Our Lives, our parents, our children, our job, our school, our church, our friends, everything has become a reflection of us, as if we were the center of the universe and everything, everyone revolved around us. Paul directs the Colossians to “Be SUBJECT to one another, as is fitting in the Lord.” What a simple and dramatic shift, from the cosmos revolving around us, to acknowledging the reality of others and making ourselves in relationship to their universe. Be Subject to one another.
The parable of the Rich Fool, is not that he cheated, or lied, or stole. He worked hard and did what was expected. He planted and watched as the rains and sun came, and the crops were full and plentiful. But late at night, when planning his future, he did not thank God for his blessings. He never acknowledged the life giving nutrients of the sun, or the gentle rains providing moisture, or the fertile earth, or the workers who shared in the planting, cultivating and harvest. He never saw the pests or insects that were kept from his bounty. The Parable of the Rich Fool is that when alone, he saw himself to be all alone, and rather than speaking to God, he talked to himself. I have more than MY barns can hold. What shall I DO with all I POSSESS. I KNOW, I shall tear down MY barns, and I shall build Myself Bigger ones.
ATHEISM is believing there is No God. Choosing to believe only in what we see and touch and taste, smell and feel, what we can control, what we can make for ourselves. The Classical Philosopher Descartes reasoned : I Think , therefore I Know that I AM, I Exist within my own Reality. ATHEISM denies the reality of God, thereby making ourselves into our own God. But even among those who acknowledge and confess faith in God, there can be a PRACTICAL ATHEISM, of living as if we worship God at 9:30 Sunday mornings, then go about our business the rest of the week.
What is the center of your universe? What do you yearn for? This circumstance the Gospel of Luke is relating is of siblings arguing over an inheritance. Who gets what, and is there fairness in the dispersal, but this denies the more basic reality, that we are siblings, sisters and brothers sharing in our identity from the one who has died. How different, if we begin by naming what we have in common in the love for our parent, our shared memories, and all that each of our lives meant to them; than if we work out our sense of loss in what was taken from us in their death, by dividing their stuff.
Several years ago, a member of the Church sent me an email following the Annual Congregational Meeting. There have been numerous visual changes and measurable outcomes. What do you believe are the Church's greatest non-tangible needs? In essence, our barns are full, everything this congregation has discussed or imagined, for the last Century has been fulfilled.
The roofs are dry, the masonry strong, there is good and ample drainage;
We replaced the center of the Church creating spaces for the community and access for all;
We corrected the problems with our Sanctuary, adding lighting, centrality, gorgeous musical instruments, and have raised up children to be adults who lead us;
We have had our lives changed by prayer in the midst of Cancers, illness, war and prison;
We have created and served at food pantries, clothing with those in need, providing for elders;
As far away as SubSaharan Africa, Haiti, Malawi and Madagascar, we have changed the world of others.
We have listened to the pain of those who have been abused;
We have made the resources of our church available to all who desired to believe.
The Non-Tangible is always that we are human, so we divide ourselves from one another, that by experience, by politics, by friendships and commitments we are separate, unique. We separate ourselves by our brokenness. We fail to realize how brief our time of life, how fragile our relationships, how powerful our words/even our shadow.
A group of successful business leaders sat down with me one evening, they described that with great efficiency we have harvested the “Low-Hanging Fruit”. There have been presenting issues, that have been cared for and responded to. But the task before us, was to identify, where on the tree should there be branches, flowers and buds for future fruit, that had not yet ever borne? How do we nurture, what we know in our hearts ought to be, and because earlier circumstances bruised the tender shoot, because of neglect for other concerns, for what ever reason, had never developed?
Every time I approach Skaneateles from the West, I have this quaint, nostalgic, heart-warming feeling. At the Top of the Hill, before descending into the Village, you see the Church set at the Center of all that is. Poking up from amidst the trees, with the lake, and stores and businesses, schools and homes, we are the Church in the Village. Yet, the world around us has radically changed. We could be isolationist, and imagine the world does not reach us, that this is a Stress-Free Zone, a Place Apart, the Anglicans stay on their side of the street, the Catholics to the North and Pentecostals outside the Village to the far East, but we have a Calling, a responsibility to witness and to lead. Where churches across the country and around the world have consistently been burying their members three times as fast as baptizing new ones, quietly gossiping about divorces and rarely recalling that that room was once used as the Bride's dressing room. We AS The Church in this place and time have continually married 20 and 30 and 40 couples each year, baptizing nearly the same number, and thankfully, while many of our new members have been beyond infancy and confirmation, and some have surpassed the Century milestone, we have had so few mortal passings as to treasure the life of each, giving them back as a gift to God. We now are known for Music and Mission, for Marriage and Baptism. We are far and away the largest of Churches, which is not reason to raise our fingers as being No. 1, but rather responsibility, because we have the ability, to subject ourselves to the needs of others.
There is a rich maturity to Hosea's Prophecy. This is not the Book of Genesis, where all is created new, pristine and pure. Not Moses' Books of Law, trusting dependence on God in the wilderness. This Word begins with horrible, painful, ugly intimate circumstance of betrayal. While claiming to be a family, Hosea's spouse seeks satisfaction of desires and pleasure from everyone else but Hosea and is unable to commit. The Lord's anointed so despises his own children as to name them: Soon to be Punished, Not to be Pitied, Not my Children. Yet, beginning here, the story evolves with Hosea making decisions for the rest of his family. As objects, unloved, reflections of the one at the center, he distances himself from each, institutionalizes them, and tries to put them away. But God cares. God yearns to love. No matter the brokenness, no matter the betrayal, no matter how separate and divided, wounded and inhuman, we have ever been to one another, there is still in each of us (from God) the yearning to forgive, to be made whole.
What is the Non-Tangible? What is it we yearn for? To continually become the Body of Christ in this place and time. Not only family, not only of shared lineage and ancestry and residence, but yearning for forgiveness to be whole. That is both a challenge to us as The Community of Faith to live as we claim to believe, and to reach out.
There was a time, a generation ago, when to marry outside the faith, was not for a Christian to marry a Muslim, or to marry a Buddhist, or Jewish, but often persons were excommunicated for marrying outside the faith was to wed someone who was Catholic, or Pentecostal, Episcopalian, or God help us a Methodist! We have come a long distance in acceptance of one another, I am never clear whether this has been because of what we have forsaken or what we have reclaimed. I hope the latter, to choose to see in one another a conviction and commitment and faith, and to consciously subject ourselves to the needs and desires of one another, as is fitting in the Lord.
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