August 1
Issue: Violence
Psalm 55 (NRSV)
1Give ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication. 2Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in my complaint. I am distraught 3by the noise of the enemy, because of the clamor of the wicked. For they bring trouble upon me, and in anger they cherish enmity against me. 4My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me. 5Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. 6And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; 7truly, I would flee far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; Selah
8I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind and tempest.” 9Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech; for I see violence and strife in the city. 10Day and night they go around it on its walls, and iniquity and trouble are within it; 11ruin is in its midst; oppression and fraud do not depart from its marketplace.
12It is not enemies who taunt me—I could bear that; it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me—I could hide from them. 13But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend, 14with whom I kept pleasant company; we walked in the house of God with the throng. 15Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol; for evil is in their homes and in their hearts.
16But I call upon God, and the LORD will save me. 17Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice. 18He will redeem me unharmed from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me. 19God, who is enthroned from of old, Selah will hear, and will humble them—because they do not change, and do not fear God.
20My companion laid hands on a friend and violated a covenant with me 21with speech smoother than butter, but with a heart set on war; with words that were softer than oil, but in fact were drawn swords.
22Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.23But you, O God, will cast them down into the lowest pit; the bloodthirsty and treacherous shall not live out half their days. But I will trust in you.
Pow! Bam! Zonk! Smash! Crash
These words are drawn into the action of our super heros
Cartooned into our imaginations as we read about superman, Batman and even Bugs Bunny
The Road Runner goes “Beep, Beep” while the Wiley Coyote falls into the canyon and is squished accordian-like into a humorous image
But violence is not funny like in cartoons, it is a awful fact of life!
Today’s issue is violence!
As this morning’s quote for our silent meditation indicates, violence seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition.
As Jim Wallis says: “The world appeared to be dominated by a whole cycle of injustice and viloence, of iexploitation and maniputlation…”
He grew up in America…in a middle class home…in a nation dedicated to freedom and justice, not in a natioin torn daily by conflict!
We have police to keep the order; we are a nation of laws
Yet somewhere, deep in our very psyches, we are violent
Violence is a problem in every community
Domestic violence is a conundrum we can’t seem to solve: Battered wives, abused children are reported much too often (in our XN camp training, we are prepared to notice the “signs” of abuse)
Gun crimes make the news almost daily
Even in smaller cities, they keep count of the murders, rapes and assaults
Whereever people interact, whereever values are in conflict, opinions divide…violence is possible.
Too often today we are desensitized to violence: its become our entertainment!
TV is more graphic than ever (CSI?)
Children see thousands of acts of violence in their most formative years!
Video games promote it
Sports embrace it…
Even the peace and security of our “nation of laws” ultimately depends on violence or the threat of violence to maintain the peace (remember Colt’s peacemaker…a .45 caliber 6 shooter)
The balance of power amongst the nations depends on the greatest threat of massive violence…up to and including nuclear warfare
Our scripture this morning is the well sung prayer of a person caught up in the midst of a violent world
Fear and trembling, heart felt anguish, overwhelming horror
And in this case the violence comes not from outside the psalmist’s world
But from a friend, a companion
Someone that went to the same church
Someone from whom it is almost impossible to escape
I heard some years ago, that most murders were done by a person whom the victim knew…and knew well
And that the most common murder weapon was the telephone (probably different now with size of cell phones and the general availability of guns)
The scene that comes to mind…is someone calling for help, who has the telephone wrested from them, and used to bludgeon them to death
It is no wonder that the psalmist calls out a curse: “let them go down alive to Sheol, for evil is in their homes and in their hearts!”
The human condition: creatures prone to self interested domination, prone to acting violently
If we are really honest with ourselves…we see the potential within us, given the right moment, the right conditions for us to be violent
From spanking our children to the death penalty
Dominance requires violence…or does it?
Wallis makes another comment:
“The thing that struck me so powerfully about the claim and meaning of the Gospel was that, in Jesus Christ, the cycle of death in the world had been broken. The gospel presented in the NT is a scandal to the values and standards fo the world whose condition is dominated by the cycle of death.”
Lisa Cahill reminds us:
Early Xns were pacifists and discouraged military service for a variety of religious and social reasons…a pacifist strand always has been present in Chrisitanity…the question is posed, is violence ever justified?”
She goes on in her article to show how the development of such theories as “just war” and the need to keep order in the civil realm went from the pacifism of Tertullian to the justification of war in Calvin, whose theology has so dominated American Protestantism.
It seems that the longer the church exists it moves further from its original and radical understanding of Jesus
In a few moments we are going to remember a meal from long, long ago
It is a meal which preceeded a violent action
Jesus is about to be arrested, tried and executed in a manner most brutal
Yet even at the moment of his arrest,
he declares “Those who live by the sword, shall die by the sword”
he tells his disciples to put away their weapons
He heals the wounds of those who arrest him
…and offers no resistance to the horror which he must have been certain would soon follow
Jesus was no violent revolutionary (like the Zealots); the kingdom he proclaimed was one in which violence was unavailable
It was a kingdom in which the so called natural order of the world, the reality of lex talionis (revenge) was put aside and peaceful, right relationship was installed instead
It was a kingdom that people entered when they were changed by God’s Spirit
When like Jesus, they could face violence and offer forgiveness
A change of human nature that only God can graciously effect
Over the centuries of Xn experience, there have been examples of non-violent resistance to the cycle of death that the world offers
Mennonites, Quakers and more recently Baptists, like Dr. M.L. King, Jr
To really address the issue of violence in our lives, and in our culture, we have to reexamine our own selves…deep down within to identify and confront our own penchant for violent words, attitudes and actions
Then we have to, like the Psalmist, cast that burden of fear and retaliation on God, who alone can change our hearts and give us the courage to move beyond the cycle of death and destruction that is the pervasive model of the world about us.
Only when we can, like Jesus did, resist striking back, can the cycle end
Only when we become more like Jesus can God’s peaceable Kingdom come
Only when we are changed within can we become paradoxically warriors for peace, and live abundantly, offering the fruits of the Spirit: love, patience, kindness, gentleness, understanding and self control.
Only when we choose to be different, allowing God to change us, can we move into a world that is non-violent and life sustaining.
Only then will violence vanish as an issue.
Aug. 8
Issue: Immigration
Leviticus 19:33-34
33When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. 34The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
Cartoons Sheet
Quote: from Psalm 120
The speaker is an alien living in an alien land
His home is far away…
His desire is to be at peace with his new neighbors
But they would have none of it. Left to right, top to bottom
1st cartoon reminds us of our colonial roots!
Reminds us of promise of America as seen from less developed nations
Reminds us of illegality of unauthorized entry
Then that there are some who might be confused as illegals even though they are here legally!!
A humorous look at why we have for so long tolerated illegals
A reminder that our nation is a melting pot (Ellis I.) of many ethnic heritages.
I wanted to start with a sense of humor a discussion that can produce conflicted emotions
It is (as in all of my series on “issues”) not to take a particular position, but to contribute to the theological understanding that is useful in the conversation
As per our previous discussion, there is a wide range of opinion and a diversity of legitmate concerns
I would continue the discussion with some imaginative pondering: What must it be like to immigrate?
For most of us to leave our home would be difficult
Just to visit “over the bridge” to one of our near by cities is sometimes challenging
For suburban or rural people a trip to the city is uncomfortable
But to leave our homeland!
To leave New England with its mountains and ocean shores
To leave its freedoms and privileges
We could hardly image what it would take to up root ourselves, sell what we could not carry, sort for our most precious possessions and move to a land full of foreigners
But this is precisely what immigration does!
…so those who do it must have powerful motivations
The conditions underwhich they live must be intolerable
The hope that they have for bettering their lives would have to be powerful, powerful enough to wrest them from familiar, family, heritage…
To leave one’s homeland to go to a land far away must be either an act that combines both desparation and extreme hope
A lack of confidence that life will be good in the homeland
A hope against hope, that life must be better there in that “other” land
To leave one’s place of origin, legally entails all of the emotion and rigors of displacement that one can imagine
But to leave one’s place of origin and enter illegally must add to the emotional turmoil a great level of anxiety and risk that would require more than courage, more than bravado, but would require, it seems to me an internal drive that pushes to the emotional extremes of behavior beyond reason
So…Why is it important to think about immigration:
Emerson Powery…
“A discussion of the ‘neighbor’ (and the ‘alien’) is a propos given both attention to the idea in the Biblical ‘world’ and the ongoing political conversations about national identity, boundaries/border, ethnicity, socio-economics, etc….
As I note in the quote in our bulletin…the church needs to address contemporary issues, to provide thoughtful resources,
because we are in our “real lives” called upon to act as Xn citizens and participate in political decisions through our vote
It seems to me that we should investigate our Judeo-Xn heritage to find ideas that inform us in our choices
Interestingly enough, when I mentioned my series on “issues” two of my colleagues said that they would absent themselves from worship as such topics were addressed
Both tended toward the conservative (my assessment)
But both, to me, exhibited an unsettling trait within our contemporary church environment:
an avoidance of the uncomfortable intrusion of topics which pertain to the realities in which we live
Or the mere possibility that the preacher would say something that they would disagree with, thus taking them out of their comfort zone.
So…I went to the Bible and found this passage, way back in Leviticus
It seemed clear in its message and articulate in its reason
Although it does not address the issue of immigration from the point of legal or illegal, it does provide a beginning for us in our discussion
In most ancient times (OT) borders were not as “secure” as we can make them now…people wandered around, and through foreign lands
Escaping famines
Looking for fortune
Or just as sojourners on life’s adventures
Our passage reminds us that our heritage comes from the rather loose collection of sojourners and hoi poloi the‘apiru or the Hebrews…who were once wandering families, nomads who had drifted down into Egypt, at a point sometime after Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery…going there to find relief from an awful famine
But in the fortuitous way in which God does things, Joe had achieved some social recognition and political influence
So he was able to save his family and establish them in a socially comfortable manner
But then, “there arose a Pharoah that knew not Joseph” and the Hebrews became enslaved, and the people who were the children of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph were oppressed and mistreated
Then, if you have seen the movie, God sent Moses, liberated the people and on their journey across the desert they became the nation of Israel
And kept the memory of their experience embodied in the stories we find in the Pentateuch and practiced that story with their “laws”…the code of Holiness we find in Leviticus
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. (s/he) shall be as a citizen…remember you were aliens!
Powery ties this levitical expectation to the other one we are much more familiar with: Leviticus 19:18 which Jesus was fond of quoting when asked what are the more important expectations for us from God: Love your neighbor as yourself!
Powery encourages us to think about the neighbor and the alien as co-equal terms
That the love of neighbor, like the love exhibited by the Samaritan, is the standard practice of the Xn community
He helps us understand that when Paul interpreted to the Roman church this basic teaching of Jesus, that he used the greek word “heteros” “other” different, foreign, alien because the context of Paul’s world was one in which many ethnic groups were in fact neighbors, literally and figuratively
Clearly in the early Xn experience, love of neighbor was both expectation and challenge!
But the helpful little article that Powery wrote reminded me on one other critical piece of thinking that was prominent in the ancient Xn world
They thought of themselves as aliens…as “others” living in a alien land…the world, culture around them
They were sojourners through this world, on their way to the Kingdom promised by Jesus as he shared his last meal with them….that Kingdom that is coming
Early Xns thought of themselves as strangers in a strange land, as a wandering community of the end time, struggling to find their homeland in the time to come, the time of perfection and completion
These images too, add to our conversation as we think about the immigrant experience
As we live today, as we gather ourselves in worship…and as we are soon to return to our homes and busy lives…
Let us again appreciate our heritage…
We come from people who were aliens and immigrants (both in the history of our religion and society!!)
We are living only for a moment in that great parade, that great journey from God to God
And we are given the opportunity to live here as God has instructed us fairly clearly: both in the OT and NT
We are now the ones who must interpret the faith we have to others, to practice our faith in a real world that is full of issues…like immigration
Let’s just remember where we came from!
August 15
Issue: Environment
Genesis 2: 15-17
15The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Being outside: eco-systems
I love being outside; I have since I was a child
Some of my earliest memories are of the biggness of “outside”
Driving across Wyoming, in the night, for hours and hours to arrive at the Grand Tetons, jagged mountains imposing over the vast flowered valley
Standing at the edge of the “grand canyon” of the Yellowstone, with its yellow & rust walls plumeting hundreds of feet to the raging river, at the far end…a waterfall cascading off the precipice
Standing at the rim of the Grand canyon, majesty in every direction, larger than imagination, multicolored rocks adorning multileveled strata of geological history
Rivers in colorado, clear to the bottom that was full of rainbow trout
Some of my more pleasant memories are also as an adult
Crossing the knife edge at Katahdin…the drop on either side thousands of feet, the view from the top, hundreds of miles
Sitting alone in the woods to hear footsteps approach…crunch, crunch, crunch…oh, it’s a bear
Drinking water from a spring at Guyot campsite, running pure and cold from a mossy wooden spigot, so cold it makes your teeth hurt…so refreshing there’s nothing more quenching
Paddling a canoe over vast lakes on the Allagash, moose in the middle of the rivers, lazily munching stuff (moose food) from the river bottom amused at our appearance
Standing in virgin forests, where no one has damaged the creation that God is still creating…
Standing on a hill top in N. Calif, where the air is clean and dry and you can see each star in the milky way, and let your imagination soar like a bird between star clusters and planets
In these and many other experiences, I felt a small but important part of God’s creation, the biggness of it all, the importance of being, the value of being included in the vastness
In each of these experiences…the environment was welcoming, affirming of my being, supportive and nourishing…
But mostly we live indoors; the moments outside are few and precious
Most of us live being inside: in houses, with walls and windows, running water and electricity
Living in a “post-modern” society we tend to loose our connectedness to nature
The rythms of our routines no longer are patterned by the ebb and flow of the natural world (of light and dark, of wet and dry, of cold and heat)
We are protected by our techologies to the point where we do not have to think about what happens “outside”
And we begin to think this is better…
Maybe we need to be reminded, by folks like John Muir…that to be fully human we need to put as little as possible between ourselves and the reality of the natural world
He often traveled naked in the woods
Once he tied himself to the top of a redwood in a storm to experience its full intensity!
In the past few weeks we have seen on our TV, Google News and newspapers the development of one of the greatest ecological accidents in our history:
the gulf oil spill
The “spill cam” showed us millions of gallons of sticky crude gushing into the heretofore pristine waters of the Gulf of Mexico
and suddenly thousands of lives are changed…some for ever
This is but one more reminder about the interconnections between how we live and the environment in which we live
Even the words we use economy & ecology come from the same Greek root: oikos…home
Ecology is the study of homes, of the inter-connected ness of how we as humans
and how those other creatures are protected, fed and live in a web of life, creatures depending on each other,
creatures depending on access to the resource of the natural world in order to sustain themselves
Economics has to do with the management of the homes resources
While we tend to think of economics in terms of money and stock markets or consumer spending or federal budgets
At its foundation, economics is about how we manage the natural world and its resources
For if we mess it up…we will no longer be able to sustain our homes
There is another word tha comes from oikos, ecumenical
It’s a word that is most often used in a religious context, meaning the gathering of like minded faiths
But I would use it to describe the human situation: we are all living in the same “home” the planet earth
We all share the web of life, the total eco-system that sustains us all
When problems occur in one part of the world, they affect us all, environmentally and economically…such is our ecology
Our lesson this morning tells us about the understanding which the ancient folks of our faith had: about being a part of the Garden, the first home
We take our behavioral cues from scripture…we attempt to live from the moral guidance we find there
And over the centuries, particularly in the industrial and modern periods…we have tended to take our cue from the first story: to have dominion over the natural world…
This was often expressed as assuming the right to exploit the natural world, to treat it harshly, to wrest from it that which benefited us humans without a sense of the consequence of taking
Western European thinking that came to this land upon which we now live, was in such contrast to the native folks who kept a better balance between the taking…and the giving…between being sustained and allowing the earth to sustain itself
Now theologians like Ken Cauthen, whose interest was in the conflict between science and theology, reclaims for us the other story of the beginning…the command to keep the garden, to tend it so that it sustains us
…and the value that emerges is that of sustainability
and the question becomes can we continue to do as we have done without eliminating humans from the planet?
Al Gore a few years ago, raised the question from the scientific and moral point of view…when he put together his chilling, but Nobel winning documentary: “An Inconvient Truth”
Other scriptures indicate two things
that God is praise by nature itself: the moutains will sing, and the trees will clap their hands (the psalms are full of such images)
That the whole earth, and all that is in it shall receive from God their salvation and their continued blessing
In the prophet Isaiah the image of the future is of a restored nature: lambs and wolves, bear and lions and cattle…and little children unharmed by poisonous snakes.
Paul suggest that all of creation is in turmoil and travail until God acts finally to bring wholeness to the entirety of the cosmos
Post modern dilemna: Keeping or dominion?
The issue of “environment” must prompt us to ask:
Do we continue to exploit nature, without regard to the consequences?
Or do we seek to find some way to keep it…to sustain life upon the planet in a healthy and whole manner
Why these questions are important have also to do with the matter of Justice
I saw a book report some years ago on TV; the book was entitled Living Down Stream”
It had to do with the way that economically, the people who had little, who were marginalized almost always lived in environmentally degraded places
The economics of “dominion” created poorer living conditions for the “have nots” while the “haves” were immured from the unpleasantness of their waste stream, indulging themselves in the great american “toilet assumption”…push the handle down and it simply goes away!
The issue of environment, of ecology and economics has had a lot of play in our schools, in the media, even in our churches…
But it is still an issue that we need to get our selves around…personally, as families, as churches, as industries, as a planet
That is why I think it is good for us to go into the wilderness
As we are about to this week
To connect ourselves to the natural world
To climb up upon a mountain to see how big the world is
To explore a stream to count the trout to sense the preciousness of crystal clear water
For the way we teach our children, will be the way they learn to keep the world we leave them to live in
August 22 this Sunday was a sermonic dialogue
Issue: Health Care
Background:
Context: James is a “letter” full of wisdom sayings written toward the end of the first century to a well structured Christian community to address the issue of “faith vs. works.” The problem appears that some within the community were neglecting their duties to the sick and poor for a more “inward” religion.
The letter encourages as discipline that stresses the ties of faith and affection which bind a community together. It was written to further explain Pauline theology and was ascribed to the authority of James, the Lord’s brother.
Illness in the first century was commonly believed to be the consequence of sin. Shared prayer, common confession and the annointing with oil were the “technology” which forgave sin.
The text: James 5: 13-16 (NRSV)
13Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14Are 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. 15The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16Therefore 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.
The points for reflection…
Responses to the text...questions…feelings…words/images?
How many of us believe that “health care” is a real issue?
How many of us here work in the “health care system”?
Can we name the parts of “the health care system”?
Of the following, which is of the most concern:
( ) health insurance
( ) availability of doctors
( ) the cost of medicines
( ) being able to talk/communicate with your doctor
( ) stigmas against mental illness
( ) nutrition
( ) uneven access to health coverage
( ) governmental policies in dealing with health issues
( ) developing technology and new medicines for new treatments
What role should the church take in health care?
( ) advocating for equal access to health insurance?
( ) visiting and praying for the sick?
( ) providing mental health counseling?
( ) encouraging healthy life styles?
( ) establishing clinics?
( ) practicing and modeling good nutrition at coffee hours?
( ) involving all the leaders (“elders”) of the congregation in health related ministries?
Matthew 10: 1
1Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.
How seriously do we take these instructions of Jesus?
What “unclean spirits” can we identify that cause illnesses today?
How many of us feel qualified/authorized to “cast out” unclean spirits?
If the cure of every disease and sickness is a part of the church’s mission, what do we need to do to change the church to accomplish this?
Let’s reflect on this quote from Time’s article on organic food…
“The Wages of Eating: The biggest reason not to ignore the food purists is that in a lot of ways they’re right. Our diet is indeed killing us, and it’s killing the planet too. Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta released a study revealing that nearly 27% of Americans are now considered obese (that is, more than 20% above their ideal weight), and in nine states, the obesity rate tops 30%. We eat way too much meat—up to 220 lb. per year for every man, woman and child in the U.S—and only 14% of us consume our recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Our processed food is dense with salt and swimming in high fructose corn syrup .. Currently, enough food is manufactured in the U.S. for every American to consume 3800 calories per day—we need only 2350 in a healthy diet…”
August 29
Hymn Sing...you kinda had to be there!
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