Milo's Sermons And Other Musings

CHANGES IN THE NEW YEAR

2008-01-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

The calendar turning to a New Year seems like a good time to make a blog change. While I was interim pastor at Chugiak, Alaska this past summer I posted my sermons each week. Since it was necessary for me to leave when I was only halfway through a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, continuing to post the rest made some kind of sense. I have continued posting one each week through the last Sunday of December.

Since I am not actually preaching them, using a sermon format feels a bit awkward. So I am changing the format to one new to me, one in which the postings will be briefer and more frequent. But that’s not the biggest change. As a pastor I felt it inappropriate to use preaching as a “bully pulpit” on political issues. The line between that and prophetic preaching is not a clear one. Since I am no longer pastor of a congregation, I want to speak to those issues directly and without restraint.

I hope you will click on the link below and check out my new blog site:
http://milosjanusoutlook.blogspot.com/

I will leave this sermon site up for a while, but it is not my plan to add other sermons.

I want to thank all of you who have taken time to read the sermons and all of you who have so graciously added your insights. I hope you will read and contribute your wisdom on the new site.

WHEN THE STAR IS GONE THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS BEGINS

2007-12-30T09:37:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-23

What happens now? Although according to the Christian calendar Christmas continues for another week, for the commercial world and many of us, Christmas celebrating ended on the afternoon of December 25th. The New Year is upon us. One of the spiritual giants of the twentieth century was Howard Thurman. Born in 1900 of parents who had been slaves, Thurman was Dean of Chapel at Boston University in the middle decades of the twentieth century. When I arrived there for graduate study, Thurman had just retired. He died in 1983, but his eloquence and spiritual insight continues through his writings. He wrote these words for the moments after Christmas:

“When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the wise men and shepherds have found their way home,
[that's when] the work of Christmas is begun.” [1](1)

What is the “work of Christmas?” After their visit to the stable where the Christ child had been born, the shepherds returned to their sheep on the hillsides "glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen." Now everything they did had new meaning, even the daily routine of caring for the sheep on lonely hillsides. They would never really be lonely again.

One wonders about the innkeeper who was perhaps too preoccupied with making a living to extend much hospitality to Mary and Joseph. Maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on him; maybe he gave what he had—a place in the stable. I wonder if he had any idea of what went on in that shed that night. Like many other busy people before him, he might have lived the rest of his life having missed the opportunity of a lifetime only a few feet away.

The Magi, who had read the signs, followed the star, and found their way to Bethlehem, offered their gifts and worshiped the Christ child. Their first "work of Christmas" was to go home "by another road." They had been warned in a dream to stay away from Herod. One suspects that it was not just the danger of Herod, but that all who find their way to the Christ child cannot but go home "by another way." These educated scholars could never be the same after the visit to Bethlehem. Would that it would be so for us after our visits to Bethlehem.

And, then, there was Herod. The "work of Christmas" for Herod was to find the Christ child, not to worship him but to destroy him. And just as he had murdered members of his own family because of his jealousy for power, so he didn't hesitate to order the murder of all the boy babies of Judea to get to the Christ child. Ironically, soon after the birth of Jesus Herod would be taken from the throne not by a rival but by death, a rival he couldn't kill. There are still those who are willing to trample on others in order to protect their positions and status.

What of Mary and Joseph: what was the "work of Christmas" for them? They had to go into hiding and become illegal aliens in a foreign country in order to protect the Christ child.

But what is the "work of Christmas" for us? The two Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are like great paintings. We look at the paintings and see different things. We look at the paintings from different angles and in different light and see new things. As the writer of the Gospel of John struggled to find words to express the heart of the Christmas story he wrote, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us…" In some way that words can never express, God risked all the vulnerabilities of being human so that we could hear the message of love. God did not have to take this risk, but did because this God loves us. And because God loves us, we can love others.

This is not some kind of sappy sentimental love; it is love that takes risks; it is love that can give with no thought of receiving; it is love that can act on behalf of others even when it is not in our self-interest. If the expression of this love was God's work at Christmas, is not our "work of Christmas" -- now that the song of the angels is stilled, the star in the sky has gone, the kings and the shepherds have found their way home -- to tell the story of this great love, especially by modeling it in the way we relate to other people?

Modeling this kind of love is a challenge, isn't it? You can probably think of a hundred places where this love is needed. I hope you will also think about our nation after five years of war. The human toll these wars—both among families of soldiers here in this country and among the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan—is immeasurable. How do we model real love in the face of these realities? And then there is the presidential primary season that is upon us? How do we model real love in the face of this reality?

For people of good will who want to be good citizens and trust the political process, the question has been raised anew, "Is it possible for a person to act apart from his or her own self-interest?" Take care how you answer the question. If your answer is "No," then the promise of Christmas is a lie and we have no hope of modeling the love that God has shown us. If the answer is "Yes," then I think we know what the "work of Christmas" is.

In 1932 a theologian by the name of Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book titled, Moral Man and Immoral Society[2] Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, but he was not an "ivory tower" theologian. For thirteen years, he was pastor of a church in downtown Detroit where he ministered to all kinds of people and also learned about economic and political realities in a large city. Like many others of his time, Niebuhr was frustrated by developments in Europe after World War I. The "war to end all wars" not only didn't end war, but Niebuhr could see Europe and the rest of the world moving toward the catastrophe that would be Holocaust and World War II.

In his book, Niebuhr argued his thesis that while individuals have the capacity to act morally, organizations do not. What Niebuhr meant by "moral" was the capacity to act beyond and even contrary to one's own self-interest. "Society," he argued, did not have that capability: organizations always act in their own self-interest, whether nations, political parties, or churches. That does not mean that they always act badly. For Niebuhr, though, it meant they could not act contrary to their self-interest. Only individuals have that capability, he argued.

Do not conclude that Niebuhr was an "idealist." He was not called a "realist theologian" for nothing. He was very critical of the liberalism of his day and the optimism of the pre-depression years that things were just going to get better and better. He wasn't an idealist when it came to the individual, either. He was fond of saying that "the doctrine of sin was the one Christian doctrine which could be empirically verified." An individual, he argued, has the capability to act morally, which is to act beyond and even contrary to one's own self interest.

Niebuhr died in 1971 at the climax of the Vietnam War. It should not surprise you to know that Niebuhr was vilified both by the political right and the left. He was unsparing in his criticism of the war, but he was equally critical of the "peace movement." Those who felt the sting of his criticism tended to dismiss him as old and tired. In retrospect, it seems clear that he simply understood the situation. No other theologian has had the impact on the social sciences that Reinhold Niebuhr had. You may not have known Niebuhr's name before today, but you probably knew these words of his, known as the "Serenity Prayer:"

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." [3]

We began today with Howard Thurman's lines about the "work of Christmas. In the conclusion of his poem, he describes that "work:"

“to find the lost and lonely one to heal the broken soul with love,to feed the hungry children with warmth and good food,
to free the prisoner from all chains, to make the powerful care,
to rebuild the nations with strength of good will,
to bring hope to every task you do,
to dance at a baby's new birth to make music in an old person's heart,
and, to sing to the colors of the earth!”

Niebuhr reminds us that we can and should expect more of our political leaders and judges, that we can and should expect more of our pastors and church leaders, that we can and should expect more of ourselves; and that we should not expect more of others than we expect of ourselves. God has given us the capability to love, not just to love in safe ways, but to take risks and even to transcend our own self-interests in order to do what is right. When you do that, whether the matter is great or small, you will be doing the "work of Christmas."

[1] Howard Thurman, "The Mood of Christmas," adapted by Jim Strathdee into a song titled, "I Am the Light of the World," © 1969 Jim Strathdee, Desert Flower Music, Ridgecrest, California, 93555.

[2] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932).

[3] "The Serenity Prayer," The United Methodist Hymnal, 1989, # 459.

THE UNQUALIFIED 'YES'

2007-12-22T16:15:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:26-38: Galatians 4:4

Advent is about waiting and preparing to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child. It is also about waiting and watching for the God who has come in our past, who will come in our future, and who, even as we speak, comes in our present closer to us than the breath in our lungs. And when in some mysterious or plainly humdrum event that presence bursts in on us, how do we respond? Advent is about that too.

In your imagination travel with me once again back to the centuries before Christ was born. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and the people were carried away into exile in Babylon six hundred miles away, it seemed as if that might finally be an end to the people who Moses had lead out of slavery in Egypt and had come to be called “Israelites.” Nations and peoples with their own unique identities have disappeared from the earth, like creatures who move from the column of “endangered species” to “extinct.”

But it was not to be for the people of Israel. In a miracle of epic proportions, the people taken away in exile were granted the freedom to return to their homeland. Some of them did. They rebuilt the Temple and the Jerusalem city walls. But they did not find a restored political kingdom of David with the wealth of Solomon’s Empire. What their children’s children found was Persian rule replaced with Greek rule and then, about a hundred years before the birth of Jesus, incorporation – against their will, of course – into the Roman Empire.

Through the years of domination by one great power after the other the prophets’ visions of a Messiah kept the people’s hope alive. The great prophets -- Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel -- had seen visions of a Messiah, but it was the writings of Isaiah that captured the imaginations and kept the attention of most people. There are four or five poems in the book of Isaiah which envision the entrance of one called “the servant of the Lord” onto the stage of history.[1]

Although you may not have recognized them as “Servant Songs,” you are probably familiar with some of them:

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
He will bring forth justice to the nations.” (42:1)

And in 49:6

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

If not these, then probably these lines often read around Easter:

“He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.” (53:3)

The identity of this servant has exercised the minds of scholars perhaps more than any other single Old Testament issue. The "servant of the Lord" is sometimes clearly identified as the nation Israel,[2] while in other passages Israel is not mentioned and the reference seems to be to an individual.[3] It seems clear that the poet meant the "people of God," Israel, to be the servant of God, or a faithful remnant of them. And at some point(s) in time that faithful remnant might be reduced to one faithful servant. Think about it: a remnant of one listening for God’s direction. This was not pessimism, but rather confidence that in any given time there would be at least one person on whom God could count. There are those who look at Jesus as the one person remnant of Israel, the one person who was faithful to God.

These visions of the “Servant of the Lord” were so powerful, and so present in the hopes of the people down through the centuries before Christ, that when the New Testament writers looked back on the life, death and resurrection of Christ, nothing else so described him as these poems. Was the prophet Isaiah looking ahead over five hundred years to the coming of Christ? Or was the prophet simply faithfully describing the One God would send sometime? And why was it when Augustus was Caesar in Rome, when Quirinus was governor of Syria, when Herod was the puppet king in Judea, that was the time when God fulfilled the promise made to Isaiah? The apostle Paul said it this way: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent [the] Son, born of woman…” (Galatians 4:4)

In her book, The Gospel According to Abbie Jane Wells, Abbie Jane offers an interesting and important perspective on Paul’s notion of “the fullness of time:”[4]

“Paul…and just about everybody else tends to forget that it took a “yes” from Mary before God could “sent forth his Son” – and if there is any truth to that “when the time had fully come,” it is that Mary’s time had come when she went into labor at the end of her pregnancy: that’s when the time had fully come – that is when Jesus’s time to be born had fully come!

“As for ‘Had Jesus come to a different people in a different place at a different time…’ I don’t think you can juggle his place in history – or Mary’s – that way; and since Jesus was born of Mary, you’d have to get her as well as Jesus into ‘a different people in a different place at a different time’ – which isn’t humanly, or Godly, possible.

“Of course, it is possible for God to have a Son of a woman ‘in a different people in a different place at a different time’ – but that wouldn’t be Jesus, for Jesus was Mary’s son as well as God’s – which lotsa people tend to forget at times.

“For all I know – for all anybody knows – God may have ‘proposed’… through the ages but, as far as we know, Mary was the first one to say an unqualified ‘yes.’… ’When the time had fully come,’ and the ‘Time had fully come’ only because the woman Mary said ‘yes.’”

That seems to be the way God works in history. God waits for “the unqualified ‘yes’” from the most unlikely people to fulfill God’s promises in the world. That should give most of us who see ourselves as “unlikely people” some hope. It should also give us some pause. For what unqualified “yes” is God awaiting from us?

That seems to be the way God works in history. God waits for “the unqualified ‘yes’” from the most unlikely people to fulfill God’s promises in the world. That should give most of us who see ourselves as “unlikely people” some hope. It should also give us some pause. For what is God awaiting an unqualified “yes” from us?

In the early 1870s, a young partially sighted girl known as ‘Little Annie’ was kept locked in a room in the basement in a mental institution outside Boston. This was the only place, said the doctors, for those who were hopelessly insane. In Little Annie’s case, they saw no hope for her, so she was consigned to a living death in a small cell, more like a cage than a room, which received little light and even less hope. About that time, an elderly nurse was nearing retirement. She felt that there was hope for all God’s children, so she started taking her lunch into the basement and eating outside little Annie’s cell. She felt that she might be able to communicate some love and hope to the little girl.

In many ways Little Annie was an animal. On occasions, she would violently attack the person who came into her cell. At other times, she would completely ignore them. When the elderly nurse started visiting her, Little Annie gave no indication that she was even aware of her presence. One day the elderly nurse brought some brownies and left them in the cell. Little Annie gave no hint she knew they were there, but when the nurse returned the next day the brownies were gone. From that time on, the nurse would bring brownies when she made her Thursday visit. Soon after, the doctors in the institution noticed a change was taking place. After a period of time they decided to move Little Annie upstairs. Finally, the day came when this ‘hopeless case’ could return home.”

This elderly nurse, without a name, said an “unqualified ‘yes’” to God and to Little Annie. She reminds me of so many nurses, teachers and parents I have known, persons whose “unqualified ‘yesses’ went far beyond what anyone might have expected of them.

There is one other thing about “Little Annie.” Although free to return to her parents’ home, she did not. She chose to stay at the institution so that she could help others. And she did. She gave an “unqualified ‘yes’ to God and another girl somewhat like her. And through her teaching of a little girl who was blind and deaf, the woman known as Little Annie became the teacher of Helen Keller. Little Annie’s real name was Anne Sullivan. She was able to break through the silence and darkness that surrounded Helen, and gave the rest of her life to teaching and caring for her, enabling Helen Keller to become a distinguished lecturer and one of the great heroines of this century. It was “Little Annie’s” unqualified “yes!” that made it possible.

On the fourth Sunday of Advent, we give special thanks for Mary’s unqualified “yes” to the angel Gabriel: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38) We also give thanks for all those others who have gone before us whose unqualified yeses have contributed to who we are today. What unqualified yes is God asking of you for some task that only you—remember the remnant!—may be able to accomplish? Will you respond as Mary did with “let it be with me according to your word”?

[1] The “Servant Songs” are generally considered by scholars to be the following: Isaiah 42:1-4 (or 1-9); 49:1-6 (or 1-13); 50:4-9 (or 4-11); 52:13-53:12; and sometimes 61:1-3.

[2] 41:8ff; 43:8-13; 49:1-6; and others.

[3] 42:1-4; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12; and sometimes 61:1-3.

[4] The Gospel According to Abbie Jane Wells. (Thomas Moore Association, 1985) quoted in Rueben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck’s A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People (Upper Room Books, 1990), pp. 32-33.

THE SEASON OF CHANGING OLD SCROOGE'S PERSPECTIVE

2007-12-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

Ebenezer Scrooge had a heart colder than winter and a spirit dreary as the London fog. It’s been said even blind dogs crossed the street to avoid the man who preferred the company of money to all else. But, as Scrooge would discover, some of the world’s most profitable riches aren’t found in bank accounts.

After his journeys with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, Ebenezer Scrooge finally learned this lesson. His last journey, the one with the “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come,” was a confrontation with his mortality. More fearful than a vision of his death, the ghost showed him a future that was shaped by his actions in the past. We may be more uncomfortable with that vision than with the journeys through our pasts, however painful they were and are. What Scrooge learned is that we can’t change the past, and the future is not here yet. All we can change is the present, but changing the present creates the future. And that made all the difference for Ebenezer Scrooge.

From the sleep of dreams or a ghostly journey, Scrooge awoke. “Yes! And the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own in which to make amends! ‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!’ Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. ‘The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this!’”

I don’t know why it is so hard for us to hear this word from God. Maybe it is because we are ashamed, ashamed of all the time we’ve spent going to the markets where we thought we could buy happiness or buy our way out of disappointments. "I'd like to buy a friend," we said. "Well, we don't have any friends for sale, but we can sell you a companion for the night." "I'd like to buy a home." "Well, you can't buy a home, but we've got a nice house on the market." "I'd like to buy a little time," we said. "We can't sell you any time, but we've got a nice clock here." "I'd like to buy some happiness," we said. "We can't sell you any happiness, but the wine shop is just around the corner." "I'd like to buy some peace of mind." "Well, you can't buy peace of mind, but we can sell you some life insurance." "I'd like to buy some salvation." "Well, you can't buy salvation, but we have this nice Bible here we'll sell ya." It is embarrassing to go through life with a fist full of twenty-dollar bills only to discover at the end that the most important things in life are absolutely free by the grace of God. And it is true!

We can’t control everything that happens to us in life—the bad, the good, the indifferent—but we can control how we respond to whatever happens.

This year the week after Thanksgiving, I was sitting in a doctor’s office with Connie as she waited for her name to be called. The cell phone rang and it was news of the death of her mother in Fairbanks. It was not unexpected, but it happened twenty-five hundred miles from where we sat. Connie’s name was called. I watched other patients and their families come and go, none of them looking any more joyful than I felt. Besides that, there didn’t seem to be any interesting magazines with which I could pass the time. When the woman waiting a few seats down from me had her name called, she laid her magazine down on the table between us. It was a large print edition of Reader’s Digest. I’ll read the jokes I thought as I picked up the well worn magazine.
Instead of the jokes, my attention fell immediately on an article titled, “The New Science of Thank You.”[1] Although I was not feeling particularly grateful, it was the week after Thanksgiving. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down.

I was especially interested in a study conducted by two professors of psychology, Robert Emmons, at the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami. They took three groups of volunteers and randomly assigned them to focus on one of three things each week: hassles, thing for which they were grateful, and ordinary life events. The first group concentrated on everything that went wrong or was irritating to them. The second group focused on situations they felt enhanced their lives and for which they were grateful. The third group simply recalled what they did through the week.

The results of the study were striking! The people who focused on gratitude were “flat-out happier.” They saw their lives in favorable terms. They reported fewer negative physical symptoms such as headaches or colds, and they were active in ways that were good for them, spending almost an hour and a half more per week exercising than those who focused on hassles. “Plain and simple, those who were grateful had a higher quality of life.”

People around the participants noticed the difference. Of those who focused on gratitude, “they noticed that these people had more joy, more energy. They could see that they were becoming more optimistic.” The grateful group “even seemed to be perceived as more helpful toward others.” This surprised Emmons: “This is not just something that makes people happy… A feeling of gratitude really gets people to do something, to become more pro-social, more compassionate.”

After their study was published in 2003, the professors took their project a step further. Instead of having people focus on hassles or blessings on a weekly basis, they rounded up a group of college students to do it every day and had similar results. In a follow-up study, those who found something to appreciate every day were less materialistic—less apt to see a connection between life satisfaction and material things. They were more willing to part with their possessions. The bumper sticker that reads ‘The one with the most toys wins’ was unlikely to be found on any of their cars.

According to the Christian calendar, tomorrow, in the middle of the season of Advent, is “Gaudete Sunday.” Some folks know only that in some churches the Advent candle for this day is pink, not purple. That candle is always lit on the third Sunday of Advent. In the ancient church Advent was intended as a time for abstinence, self-examination, fasting, and penitence, all as a part of the preparation for celebrating Christmas. In Latin gaudete means “to rejoice.” Gaudete Sunday was intended as a break in the serious inner preparation of Advent to remember the joy of the event for which we are preparing.

Just in case Thanksgiving passed by too quickly, maybe Gaudete is an occasion for us pause in our Christmas preparations to be grateful. As I sat in the doctor’s office I decided I would follow up with one of the final suggestions in the article.

“Take a moment during the day—right before bedtime is usually best—to jot down three things that happened that day for which you are grateful. Anything that made you feel uplifted, that brought a smile to your face or your heart, or will contribute toward your future happiness, works.”

Writing before bedtime doesn’t work for me, but writing first thing in the morning does. There is now a special section of my daily journal reserved for remembering those things for which I was grateful on the previous day. It does have a way of making the day ahead look different.

But you already knew that, didn’t you? You probably learned it from Ebenezer Scrooge. If not, let this Gaudete weekend be a time of “Advent Attitude Adjustment.” You just might be changing the future!

[1] Deborah Norville from her book Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You. (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, 2007). Reader’s Digest, October 2007.

CHRISTMAS CELEBRATING - NEW GROWTH FROM OLD STUMPS

2007-12-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-6

Is there going to be anything new in your Christmas celebration this year? I don’t believe the old saying that “there is nothing new under the sun,” but I have a suspicion that new growth may well come out of old stumps.

The prophet Isaiah knew about “old stumps.” He saw the destruction of Israel at the hands of Assyria in 722 B.C., scattering whatever survivors there were to the ends of the empire. He then lived in the shadow of the threat that this most barbaric of all ancient powers would do the same thing to his tiny nation of Judah and its capitol Jerusalem. In the face of this threat and desolation all around, the prophet spoke for God: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

I think what the prophet Isaiah meant was that something new was going to come out of the old stump of David’s kingdom. Jesse was David’s father. David’s kingdom ended after his son Solomon’s death and the split of their empire into the two small nations of Judah and Israel. Although the two nations had their own kings, they were too small and weak to defend themselves against their more powerful neighbors, like Assyria and Babylonia. What the prophet saw is that out of the old dead stump of David’s empire will come something new, not just something but also “someone.”

Whether Isaiah is speaking about a king just coming to power, like Hezekiah, or perhaps speaking words written for the inauguration of such a king, is not clear. It may also be that this is Isaiah’s vision for a king in some unspecified future who would embody the Davidic royal ideal. Eight hundred years later followers of Jesus would see in Isaiah’s words a foretelling of Jesus’ coming. In either case, something new was coming from something old.

In the Gospel of Mathew, John the Baptist, like Isaiah, believed that something new was happening: the kingdom of God was coming near. It was John’s role to prepare the way by calling people to repent, or “turn around”, to pay attention to the new thing that was about to happen in history.

Can there be anything “new”? The people of Israel came to being in a world that was locked into a circular view of history, a view of life in which there was never anything new but just a recycled part of the past. The future would necessarily be a repetition of the past. In this world even gods couldn't do anything new. This worldview of endless cycles was not just in the Middle East, but worldwide. If we are to believe Thomas Cahill in his book, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, we and the rest of the world are in debt to the Jews for the concept of “new.” The God we worship is a God who does new things in history. Because of that, the future is not predetermined, but open to new possibilities.

The question about new possibilities is not so much a question about God as it is about us. In this season of Advent God seeks to break through our jaded and cynical spirits to remind us that NEW is possible; and we may be in special need of that word in this season as we approach Christmas.

If we are to believe Isaiah, the new does not just come out of the blue, but it comes out of the old. I would like to suggest that there are some old stumps in our Christmas traditions from which new growth is appearing, if we have the eyes to see.

The first old stump is our gift-giving tradition. Christmas is about giving; we remember with gratitude God’s great gift to us in Jesus Christ. The Magi brought gifts to give to the Christ Child. Gifts are ways we express love to one another. But in our society, I wonder if our practices have not become old stumps that need new growth. Given human nature and the commercialization of Christmas, "getting" sometimes seems more important than "giving," and giving to "our own" sometimes has more importance than giving to the one whose birthday we celebrate. Our practices of gift giving have also been affected by consumerism. As even The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette recognizes, "Today, in our materialistic society, the custom [of gift-giving] has grown to exaggerated absurdity...." I suggest that “exaggerated absurdity” might be the name for this stump: giving gifts that aren’t really needed; gifts that are given out of obligation instead of love; giving gifts that harm the environment, giving gifts that we cannot afford, etc. The list can go on and on. Is anything new possible, or are we forever locked into an old way of doing things?

Many people are discovering that genuinely needed gifts are ways to express love and caring. For that “person who has everything,” which is a euphemism for people who have more than enough and that includes a lot of us, an appropriate gift is a contribution to a good cause honoring the recipient and the one who’s birth we celebrate on December 25th. In one family I know well, the adult children are all receiving shares in scholarship for a young woman in Uganda in training to become a nurse. She wouldn’t be in school without it. The scholarship is in the form of a loan to be paid back and held for a future similar loan. Could it be that changing our gift-giving practices are new growth from an old stump?

What would happen if you talked with your larger family about doing something like this? You might be surprised. I can almost guarantee two different responses from different family members. First, there will be one who says that there shouldn’t be any change in “the way we’ve always done it.” But second, there will be one who says “Why haven’t we considered this before?” Are there any new shoots coming out of the old stumps of your gift giving traditions?

The second old stump is our Santa Claus tradition. Can anything new come out of that old stump? That tradition began with Saint Nicholas. Little is known about him except that he was the Bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey, in the fourth century. Of the many stories about this saint, one of the most popular tells about his generosity in giving gifts anonymously to the poor. According to the story, this young monk learned of a poor family who had no money for dowries for their three daughters. Without dowries the daughters could not marry and would have to be sold into slavery because the family couldn’t afford to feed them. Nicholas, so the story goes, learned about the families plight, took gold from the monastery where he lived, then dropped three bags down the chimney of the family’s home so the daughters would each have dowries. From this came the Christmas tradition of giving to those in need and giving gifts anonymously.

Is it possible that something new might come out of recovering this tradition with our children? Perhaps this story of St. Nicholas could be told again to our children, highlighting the importance of imitating St. Nicholas instead of simply waiting for gifts from Santa. Perhaps children could be involved in family decisions about special gifts that honor the one who's birthday we are celebrating. Are there any possibilities for “new growth” in the “old stump” of our Santa traditions? You might be surprised.

The third old stump I think about is our family gatherings at Christmas. Can anything new come out of that old stump? Gatherings with families and loved ones at Christmas can be renewing; they can also be depressing. Part of the problem is the unrealistic expectations we place on ourselves for these celebrations. After all, we are daily bombarded by the mass media with scenes of “blissful happiness” of families gathered for the holidays. I call it the “Happy Family Syndrome.” Even though we know life isn’t like that, under the bombardment we may measure our families’ behavior by these false images. Is the new growth to lower expectations of these occasions? Is it new growth to find new ways to gather and find ways to include in our celebrations persons who would otherwise be alone? You might be surprised.

This past summer we stopped for the night in Squamish, British Columbia (think “Men in Trees”) on our way to Alaska. We planned on waking up for an early start but we were waked up by noise outside in the park next to the motel. Tents were being erected and fires were being built under large black pots filled with oil. The women were dressed in saris and many of the men wore turbans. A contingent of twenty-five or thirty Indians were preparing for an annual holy day for their God. They were doing it by preparing all manner of Indian food that they would offer free to the townspeople all day.

When we were packing the car to get on the road, they invited us to come have some of the delicacies they were preparing. A group of women were cooking an Indian version of tempura in large black pots. They insisted that we take some of the goodies with us and filled a large paper plate to overflowing and gave us cups of hot sweet tea with milk. I asked one of the men if they were all from Squamish and he said they were. They intended to have some kind of ceremony at ten o’clock but for the most part they were celebrating their most holy day by offering wonderfully prepared food for the town. Such hospitality! I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if on one of our most holy days (Christmas Eve or Easter morning) we went to the center of town, prepared our most special foods, and serve them to the people where we live.

The fourth old stump is holiday busyness. Do you suppose the term “multi-tasking” was coined in the Christmas season? Being frantic having to do so many things at the same time, or at least be thinking about them, may be a cherished holiday tradition for some. Recent studies of multi-tasking suggest that the result is that few of the tasks are done well.

I wonder if this old stump may result in what Susan Monk Kidd has called “an attention deficit disorder of the soul.” The author of the bestselling novel, The Secret Life of Bees, (one of the best novels I have read in the past ten years), has just published First Light, some of her early inspirational writings. She tells about arriving at the airport in Atlanta in the midst of an ice storm. The airport shuts down and she has to find her way to a relative’s house on MARTA, the city rail system. As she comes closer to the end of the line she notices a middle age woman sitting across from her who is crying. She wipes tears with the back of her hand and gazes at Susan. “She’s asking for my attention. She wants me to fling open my heart and take her in. I feel sad for her, but what can I do? She’s carrying her troubles and I can’t fix them. My inhibitions rise sharply, then blend into tiredness, anxieties about the storm, disappointment about not getting home. I look away from her, retreating into the murmur of the train. Quietly, uncomfortably unavailable.”[1]

For the next two days, locked in away from home in the ice storm, she can think about little but the woman on the train. Even when the ice melts and she goes home, she can’t forget. One morning she comes on the words of the great Christian mystic, Mechtilde of Magdeburg:

“How should one live?
Live
Welcoming
to all.”

She decides to practice being utterly available to the one before her, whoever that might be. She calls it “mindful availability.” “When you sit with a crying woman on a train, just sit with her. Do it with all your mind and heart and soul. Be fully present to her without this other agenda going on at the sidelines. In other words, do it without passing judgment on her, wanting to convert her to your point of view, desiring her appreciation, wondering what others on the train might think, worrying about the weather, or getting caught up in one’s feelings, desires, and opinions of the moment. Do it the way Mary sat at the feet of Jesus—with an undivided heart.”[2]

Mindful availability is the new growth from an old stump that I want to nurture this season of Advent. How was it that some ancient in the 15th century put it in words translated from German:

Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse's lineage coming, as those of old have sung.
It came a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
when halfspent was the night.

This beautiful carol reminds me that God’s great gift to us was in the form of new growth from an old stump. Because God is a God who does new things in history, who brings new sprouts from dead wood, even life from death, I won’t be surprised to see new shoots even in the middle of the night in deep winter, even in the Christmas season. As we prepare to celebrate God’s gift, will you be watching and ready to nurture the new growth with which God is surely ready to surprise you?

[1] Susan Monk Kidd, First Light: The Early Inspirational Writings, (New York: Penguin Books, 2007) p. 48.

[2] Kidd, pp. 50-51.

WORLD AIDS DAY - REMEMBERING

2007-11-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, December 1, for the twentieth year, communities and congregations around the world will be pausing to reflect on the impact of HIV/AIDS. Statistics reveal the stark reality:

57 million people will have died from AIDS-related diseases in 2007; 68,000 are still being infected daily, of whom 12,000 are children under the age of 15 and about 29,000 are women 15 years and older. http://www.worldaidscampaign.info/

I know the numbers are important, but this year my observance will be to remember faces, faces of people I knew, faces of people with the disease, as well as people who cared about them.

The disease is often identified with homosexuality, especially homosexual men, but even at the outset of the epidemic in 1981 health authorities learned that nearly half of those infected were not homosexual men. Fear of the disease and homophobia flowed together to create near panic in the first decade of the epidemic. In that hysteria I learned about what was then a unique church in Atlanta.

Someone asked me if I had heard about a United Methodist Church where gays were welcome. I hadn’t and was doubtful. My son and I visited this church near downtown which itself was the result of bringing together two small churches that had been casualties of urban decay in the area surrounding downtown.

What I discovered on my first Sunday at Grant Park-Aldersgate United Methodist Church was that half the congregation was over sixty-five, and as I would learn later "straight," as was their pastor, Sally Daniel. The other half of the congregation was made up of young and middle aged gay men and women. The church was not dying; it was thriving!

I asked Sally to lunch in part because I was curious about why she had chosen to commit “vocational suicide” by opening the church to gays and lesbians. She was a tall blond former ballet dancer who had come into the ordained ministry at mid-life. She told me that she hadn’t done anything special. Two years before, the Metropolitan Community Church in the city had been burned to the ground by arsonists. An appeal went out to the clergy of the city to show up at the site in solidarity with the people of the church. Only four clergy showed up. Sally was one of them. She told me that one of the members of the burned out church asked her if he could come to her church. She said, “’Unaccustomed to being asked if someone could attend the church where I was pastor,’ I said ‘Of course!’” That man came and was followed by many others.

Years later I learned that hadn’t been the beginning of her special ministry. When she was doing her pastoral care training at a local hospital as a student at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, she found a young man dying of AIDS in one of the beds. The panic over the developing epidemic made even the medical personnel reluctant to be around him. He was dying alone. Against the warning of the floor supervisor, Sally entered the room, sat beside his bed for hours holding his hand, mopping his brow, and leaning close to his ear telling him that he was loved. She refused to leave until the young man had taken his last breath.

On our third visit to Grant Park-Aldersgate, my son and I sat a few rows back from a young man whose appearance you couldn't miss. His head, face, and hands were covered with lesions, or sores. "Horrible" was not too strong a word to describe his appearance. The young man had AIDS, and not too long to live.

After the sermon, he was called down to the front where the pastor baptized him and received him into the membership of that church. Then, as she always did when new people were received into membership, she invited the congregation to come forward to give this new member "a real Grant Park-Aldersgate welcome." I was transfixed as I watched the entire congregation of about 50 or 60 get up out of their seats and go down the aisle. Older people, young people, middle-aged people, one by one, took this young dying man into their arms and hugged him. No handshakes, just hugs and warm embraces. And, it was almost as if I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, "Pay attention, Milo, this is what the church is supposed to be." When this man died a few weeks later, he died knowing that there was a place and a community of people who loved him, who didn't treat him like a leper, who weren't afraid of his disease, who didn't condemn him because he was gay, and who treated him as the precious child of God he was. After that experience I could never be the same again.

Sally died in 2006 at the age of 75. On Saturday I will be remembering and giving thanks for her.

Not long after my experience at Grant Park-Aldersgate, in 1992 I became pastor of a church in Juneau, Alaska. The church had half the name of Sally’s church. I took that as a good omen. Aldersgate was a five year old United Methodist Church the majority of who’s sixty or so members didn’t have previous experience in any church. Linda was a member of the congregation.

Linda was sick with the flu and felt terrible, but she was on the plane coming home to Juneau, Alaska from Seattle. Her husband and their six and nine year old girls were waiting for her. It’s bad enough having to fly when you feel that bad, but to fly “the local” – making stops in Ketchikan and Sitka before landing in Juneau – might be regarded as “cruel and unusual punishment.” Besides that the plane was full and the only seat she could get was a middle seat between two men. They introduced themselves as Jim and Tom. Somewhere along the way, somewhere between stops, somewhere between bouts of nausea, Linda learned that both Jim and Tom were HIV positive; they both had AIDS. She told them about her church in Juneau and asked them about theirs. They didn’t have one. Jim had never been in church. Although Tom was raised in a Christian family, he felt that his family disowned him when he contracted AIDS.

Linda always invited people to church, and she invited Jim and Tom. They lived ten miles from the Mendenhall Valley where the church was and where Linda and her family lived. Jim and Tom didn’t have a car. Never mind! Linda and her husband Steve went into town to pick them up – Sunday after Sunday. In the small congregation Jim and Tom were welcomed. They shared freely about their medical condition. Within a couple of weeks, they asked to be baptized and to become members of the church. And they were. Transported by Linda and Steve, they came to worship regularly.

Within a year Jim died, and in another six months Tom was dead. As both of them said many times, in this congregation they felt they had “come home.” We believed that they had – all because a woman sick on an airplane didn’t hesitate to reach out to them. The members of the congregation also welcomed them. None of them had had any experience with persons with AIDS, but they wrapped their arms around Jim and Tom in such a way that the word got out into the AIDS community and the church found itself in ministry to others with the disease. They learned that this was a place and people where they would be welcome.

On Saturday I will be giving thanks for Linda, Jim, Tom, and the Aldersgate congregation.

Another member of the congregation—Gay was in her 80s—told us about her neighbor, a young man with AIDS. She asked him if he would like a visit from her pastor. He said he would and one afternoon Connie and I went to see him. He looked up at us from his bed and said, “I have AIDS. I want you to help me learn to pray and how to die.” We visited with John regularly and when he felt up to it he had someone bring him to the church where he would sit in the sanctuary by himself meditating. He told us he wished he had started this process earlier in life. He was all of twenty-five. He never joined the church. That wasn’t important to him or us. He had learned to pray and was ready to die.

We had his funeral at Aldersgate. Since he had never attended a service there, except for his neighbor, the people in the church didn’t know him. Four elderly women from the congregation prepared a lavish reception with all kinds of salmon spreads, cookies, cakes, and coffee. The friends of John who came to the funeral were about twenty scruffy looking bikers. They joked about never having been in a church before. Others might have been intimidated, but not these four seniors. Before the afternoon was over they had charmed the guests with their food and hospitality. The young men didn’t want to leave.

On Saturday I will be remembering John, Vi, Vickie, Mae, and Gay.

"An old rabbi once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun.

'Could it be,' asked one of the students, 'when you see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it's a sheep or a dog?'

'No,' answered the rabbi.

Another asked, 'Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it's a fig or a peach tree?'

'No,' answered the rabbi.

'Then when is it?' the pupils demanded.

'It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.'"

SEVEN GOOD REASONS FOR HOLIDAY DEPRESSION

2007-11-24T16:32:00.000-08:00

No Christmas season is complete without psychologists and therapists of various sorts hitting the airwaves to give advice about coping with the "holiday depression syndrome" (HDS). Unfortunately, the "season of joy" becomes for many a season of sadness and depression.

I have no quarrel with what I usually hear on these programs, but it seems to me that there are some important contributing factors to HDS that the holiday experts seem to ignore. Those factors are all related to our cultural images of the "good Christmas" that begin to rain down on us like an artillery barrage just about the time we are carving scary faces on pumpkins. What does this have to do with HDS? A lot! I suggest that there are several good reasons for holiday depression:

First, if you are going to be alone, you must confront daily reminders from ads and programs that celebrating Christmas is for family and friends. You don't measure up to this society's standard for "a good Christmas." Being lonely is bad anytime, but being constantly reminded of your situation is worse. This may be a good reason to be depressed.

Second, even if you are going to be with family and friends, you have to contend with the images of "happy family and friends." What many of us know is that when our family gets together there are tensions. We know that when Aunt Minerva and Dad get together there will be hostility. If we measure ourselves by the "happy family" images, of course, we come up short and feel guilty. "Why can't my family be like that?" we wonder. This may be a good reason for depression.

Third, if you want to observe Christmas as a holy season, you realize that all around you the center of attention is the advent of Santa Claus, not the birth of a baby two thousand years ago. It's more than Santa Claus. Our most sacred symbols and images are exploited to get us to buy. Advertising's behavior modification specialists have taught those who sell that playing "Joy to the World" in the mall in November and December will bring joy to the producers and sellers, and that "Silent Night, Holy Night" will do it even better. Even though we know better, we are seduced by the manipulation year after year. And that makes us feel used, and a little dirty. This may be a good reason for depression.

Fourth, if you happen to be Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or profess no religious faith, you may well feel under a religio-cultural attack during the month of December. Three quarters of the annual advertising dollar is spent in the last quarter of the year. Christian religious songs and symbols are the “weapons” used in this “campaign.” Under such pressure, your children may be asking why you can’t celebrate Christmas like everybody else. This may be a good reason for depression.

Fifth, if you can't afford to spend money at Christmas, you're in trouble. Although we are told that Jesus' coming was "good news to the poor," the way we celebrate his coming in this society could hardly be so described. As a friend of mine once wrote, "No, Virginia, Santa doesn't come to the ghetto." If you have some money you may feel pressured to spend a lot more than you can afford. Sometimes it is only when you see all of the stuff under the tree that you realize just how far you have gone into debt to provide a "good Christmas." If Christmas morning doesn't do it, the arrival of the bills in January will. This may be another good reason for depression.

Sixth, finally, even if you have money, and can buy whatever you want, joy at Christmas does not automatically follow. We fall prey to advertising's insidious suggestions that buying things brings happiness. And we are disappointed when they don't. Once the packages are all opened on Christmas Day, instead of joy there is often a void. But our culture has an answer for that, too. We are programmed to think: "If I had just bought that bigger and better model..." This may be another good reason for holiday depression.

Seventh, if you are a woman, and if as is often the pattern in our society, you bear the responsibility for preparing for Christmas at home -- cleaning the house; buying, wrapping, mailing the gifts; preparing a Christmas dinner for family and friends, all on top of your other responsibilities -- you may express those oft heard sentiments, "I'll just be glad when it is over." That may be another good reason for holiday depression.

All in all, there are many good reasons to be depressed at Christmas time. I suggest that the Holiday Depression Syndrome is like the red warning light in our car: it comes on to let us know that something is wrong. The problem with many of the HDS advice programs is their common assumption that the problem is inside our heads, that there is something wrong with us to make us depressed during the holidays. I am sure that there is some truth in that. I am just as sure that HDS is also caused by a sickness in our society. Our spirits are smothered under an avalanche of expectations that have little to do with the real world, or the real sources of joy and fulfillment.

With the holiday season now upon us, I suggest that if folks begin to get a little sad and depressed, they might consider that the screw that's loose might not be in their heads, but in our society. If it is true that much of depression is a cover for unexpressed anger, I suggest they might even consider getting mad and that they begin with those who attempt to manipulate their emotions and exploit Christmas for profit. I suggest that they save some of that anger for churches and religious leaders that have not helped them recognize the commercialized Christmas scam for what it is. Instead of turning their anger inside so that it becomes depression, I suggest that they direct it where it should go.

I’m not big on sloganeering about the “commercialization of Christmas.” We cannot be held responsible for what our culture does around Christmas, and I, for one, give thanks that the religious community does not have the authority to enforce the kind of “blue laws” that were enforced around Christmas in Puritan England and New England. What we are accountable for is for the way we celebrate in our households and in the household of faith. In both of those places, we can change the way we celebrate Christmas.

This is the time to remind ourselves that we don't have to measure ourselves by our culture's unreal Christmas expectations. You may not be able to change the culture, but you have a lot to do with how Christmas is observed in your household and in your heart. Look again at the seven causes of HDS and see which of those expectations you can change this year. Then, perhaps, just before you go to sleep on Christmas Eve, you will hear the voice of the angel from long ago saying, "Do not be afraid [or depressed]; for see -- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people…" That "you" also means you! Merry Christmas!

THANKSGIVING, NOT SELF-CONGRATULATING

2007-11-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

So you’ve bought your turkey, the cranberries, and pumpkin pie filling. The guests have already been invited. You’re almost ready for Thanksgiving.

Or, are you?

Harvest festivals have been part of human history since the beginning of agriculture. With harvesting completed and food stored away for the winter months, those early tillers of the soil celebrated the results of their labor. They also recognized their dependence on elements and forces beyond their efforts that made harvest possible.

Jews celebrated harvest thanksgivings in several periods throughout the year. In medieval times many Europeans observed the Feast of St. Martin of Tours on November 11, and in England "Harvest Home" celebrations began in the sixteenth century. Today, we no longer call these "Harvest Home" celebrations, but "Thanksgiving." Thanksgiving Day is observed on the second Monday of October in Canada, while in the United States it is on the fourth Thursday of November.

At Thanksgiving, we sing hymns like "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come"[1]:

"Come, ye thankful people, raise the song of harvest home;
all is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin."

Let's face it, at this time of the year here on the high desert in central Oregon, let alone Alaska, it is a little difficult to enter into the spirit of an agricultural "harvest" festival. Here, the harvest was gathered in September and October. And, if the truth be told, the celebration of a "harvest festival" at the end of November is late, even for Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Actually, the "first" Thanksgiving in America is subject to debate. Some Native American tribes had been having harvest thanksgiving festivals for centuries, as had the Europeans who came to these shores. Perhaps the first observance of the latter was entirely religious and involved neither harvest nor feasting. On December 4, 1619, 39 English settlers arrived at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. Their charter required that their arrival date be observed yearly as a day of thanksgiving to God. Their thanksgiving was not for bounty, but for the fact that they had survived. That was reason enough for an annual observance of thanksgiving.

Most people, however, associate the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims who arrived a year later on November 11, 1620. Escaping religious persecution in Europe, these colonists attempted to reach the Virginia colony. Their sixty-seven day voyage ended instead several hundred miles north on Cape Cod -- in what is now Massachusetts. At a recently vacated Indian settlement, they discovered corn set aside for spring planting. Already on a starvation diet, they were more concerned about their immediate need for food than for anyone's future crop, so they took ten bushels of the Indian's seed corn in order to survive the winter.

In the summer of 1621, less than a year after their arrival and after a terrible winter when half of the colonists died, hope was renewed by a good corn crop. Squanto, a member of the Wampanoag nation who had previously visited England and knew how to speak English, helped the colonists during their first winter and spring, showing them how to prepare the fields and plant corn. He was also the Pilgrims' go-between with other tribes, helping arrange the pact that allowed the Pilgrims and Indians to live in peace.[2]

The first corn harvest brought rejoicing, and Governor William Bradford decreed that a three-day feast be held. Chief Massasoit was invited to share the celebration, and share he did. Ninety members of the tribe came with him -- probably to celebrate their traditional harvest feast. The Pilgrims didn't have enough food for three days of feasting with such numbers, so the Indians went out and brought back most of what they ate at the feast: Five deer, many wild turkeys, fish, beans, squash, corn soup, corn bread, and berries.[3] Sweet strong wine from wild grapes supplemented the feast.

The feast lasted for days, with little attention to religious services. Some believe that the Pilgrims chose to keep their harvest festival secular because they disapproved of mingling religious and secular celebrations. It seems to have been a one-time occasion, with no thought to future celebrations. Although not a religious observance, the Pilgrims celebrated their surviving that first disastrous year and the bounty of the land they had discovered. It was also a celebration with the people who had made their survival possible. It was a grateful acknowledgement of the way their life, indeed survival, was dependent on the Native Americans.

Serious questions have been raised about the nature and purpose of Thanksgiving Day observances in the subsequent one hundred years. William B. Newell, a Penobscott Indian and former chair of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, says that the first "official" Thanksgiving Day was proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 -- fifteen years after the Pilgrims' celebration at Plymouth. The purpose of this celebration, says professor Newell, was to celebrate the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children at their annual Green Corn Dance (their Thanksgiving) in the previous year.[4] The murder of a white trader and Indian-kidnapper had been the excuse for the Puritans to make war on the Pequots.[5] After that there were massacres on both sides. For the next hundred years, says Newell, "every Thanksgiving day ordained by a governor of Massachusetts was to honor a bloody victory thanking God for the battle won."

One hundred and fifty years later on November 26, 1787, President George Washington issued a proclamation for a day of thanks, but for many years afterward there was no regular national Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Thanksgiving did not become an annual observance until 1863, during the darkest days of the Civil War, when President Lincoln proclaimed it an annual national observance.

If celebrations give voice to the values and ideals by which we are trying to live, perhaps -- in view of the history of the way Thanksgiving has been observed -- it may be easier to first think of how we ought not observe it.

First, let it not be a day for thanking God for our affluence while others go hungry. The notion that it is God who gives affluence to some and poverty to many not only ignores the role that humans have played in arranging patterns of affluence and poverty, but flies in the face of the Biblical God of love and justice.

Second, let Thanksgiving not be a time to claim God's special blessing on any nation. As a persecuted minority religious group in Europe, the Pilgrims knew only too well the problems that occur when the interests of God and nation are identified by a dominant religious group. It was a lesson they themselves forgot as they became the dominant religious group in New England, and it was the Native Americans who suffered.

Third, let Thanksgiving not be an occasion to romanticize the cooperation between the Indians and the settlers, unless to recall as well—and in sorrow—the subsequent centuries' genocide of Native Americans.

Fourth, let Thanksgiving not merely be a day of rest and football before the two largest shopping days of the year, when giving thanks is swept out the back door so we can "shop till we drop."

If we want Thanksgiving as a day that gives voice to our values and our highest ideals, how might we observe it?

First, let Thanksgiving be a day to remember with gratitude and humility that we alone are not responsible for whatever bounty is in our lives. Let us not forget to be grateful.

Second, let Thanksgiving be a day to acknowledge that part of our bounty has come at the expense of others, including Native Americans, slaves, farm workers, family members and hosts of others we do not even know. We might even try to consider how illegal immigrants contributed to our Thanksgiving dinner—on the turkey farms, in the processing plants, in the harvesting of the vegetables,…you get the idea—and give thanks.

Third, let Thanksgiving be a day when we share what we have with others, and include in our celebrations those who might otherwise be alone.

Finally, let Thanksgiving be a day when we anticipate a world like that hoped for in 1621 when Native Americans and Pilgrims sat down at table together, a world where hungry children are fed; the homeless have homes; and those who suffer from discrimination because of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or age are respected; and where we live peacefully with those who hold different opinions about important matters.

If this can be what we celebrate, then we will recapture the all-too-short-lived spirit of that Thanksgiving in 1621. Happy Thanksgiving!

[1]"Come, Ye Thankful People, Come," Words: Henry Alford, 1844; George J. Elvey, 1858. The United Methodist Hymnal, 1989, P. 694.

[2] Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6. (The Center For World Indigenous Studies Project, c/o The Fourth World Documentation Project, P.O. Box 2574, Olympia, Washington USA 98507-2574)

[3] Ibid.

[4]Akwesasne Notes, Mohawk Nation. Vol.12 - August 1980, p. 3.

[5]Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980. p. 14.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS CONTROVERSY

2007-11-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

A CONCLUDING POSTSCRIPT

The good people at Chugiak United Methodist Church, just outside Anchorage, endured a ten-part sermon series on the Ten Commandments that began on September 2nd. Well, they didn’t have to endure them all because I had to leave when I was only half finished, I agreed to write and post the last five as I might have delivered them had I been there. Now that I’ve done that I probably ought to leave well enough alone. But I did the series without once mentioning the great “Ten Commandments Controversy.”

Unless you have been living on another planet over these past ten years, you know what I’m talking about. The controversy has not been about our failure to observe the commandments, nor has it even been about our making a key cultural and economic value out of violating the last one, the one about coveting. No, the controversy hasn’t been about any of that; it’s been about whether plaques of the Ten Commandments should be hung on the walls of courthouses and in public schools.

This is a matter about which people of good faith can and do disagree. There can be little doubt that the Ten Commandments played an important formative role in the history of western civilization. Some folks say that the Ten Commandments should be posted in public buildings because this nation was founded on “Christian principles.” Others have argued that the practice would violate the separation of church and state. Still others have argued that it wouldn’t violate that principle because as State Senator John Andrews of Colorado said, “the commandments are not religious, but educational and civic.”

You remember the saga of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, don’t you? Back in 2003 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ordered Moore to remove his two and a half ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments removed from the courthouse. He refused. The Alabama Court of the Judiciary then removed Judge Moore from the Bench. Moore ran for governor in the 2006 but was defeated in the primary. Professor Marcia Hamilton is an internationally recognized on constitutional law and frequently advises Congress and state legislatures on the constitutionality of pending legislation. She clerked for Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Hamilton wrote that Moore was not a fit justice, wouldn’t be a fit governor, and belonged in the private sphere. Check out her article on “Judge Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments” at http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20031118.html.

Alabama hasn’t been the only state where there have been attempts to put the Ten Commandments in public places. Kansas, Kentucky, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and I’m sure others. When a bill was put forward in the Colorado legislature to put the commandments in the public schools, the faculty members of United Methodist Iliff School of Theology in Denver protested. They argued that the posting of the Ten Commandments was a violation of the separation of church and state. They offered eight reasons why the commandments should not be posted.

1. The commandments make numerous references to God.

2. The commandments are part of a covenant God makes with a particular people.

3. There are two different versions of the commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), so who would decide which would be posted?

4. Jews and Christians don’t agree on what counts as the first commandment, so who decides?

5. The commandment to observe the Sabbath causes confusion for Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians.

6. Posting the Ten Commandments without reference to all of the 613 rabbinic laws is an insult to Jews.

7. Most commandments are stated without explanation; would explanation be provided, and who would provide it?

8. The consequences of violating the commandments (frequently death) are given elsewhere in the Bible. How will teachers answer questions about consequences?

On “Judaism 101,” a website designed to answer basic questions about the Jewish faith, the “Ten Commandments Controversy” is addressed. Agreeing with the reasons put forward by the faculty at Iliff, “These may seem like trivial differences to some, but they are serious issues to those of us who take these words seriously. When a government agency chooses one version over another, it implicitly chooses one religion over another, something that the First Amendment prohibits. This is the heart of the controversy.”

It goes on to add, “But there is an additional aspect of this controversy that is of concern from a Jewish perspective. In Talmudic times, the rabbis consciously made a decision to exclude daily recitation of the Aseret ha-Dibrot from the liturgy because excessive emphasis on these statements might lead people to mistakenly believe that these were the only mitzvot (commandments) or the most important mitzvot, and neglect the other 603

(Talmud Berakhot 12a). By posting these words prominently and referring to them as "The Ten Commandments," (as if there weren't any others, which is what many people think) schools and public buildings may be teaching a message that Judaism specifically and consciously rejected.” Check out this site at http://www.jewfaq.org/10.htm.

While the concerns expressed by Marcia Hamilton, the Iliff faculty, and the Judaism 101 website might surprise some Christians, I don't think they would have surprised Thomas Jefferson who drafted our Declaration of Independence. As suspicious as he was of the unchecked power of government, and he was, Jefferson was even more suspicious of the power of unchecked religion to coerce others. He knew well the history of the intolerance of churches that were “established” or identified with the state in Europe and he feared for what might happen in America. He wanted a high “wall of separation” between church and state so that neither infringed on the responsibilities of the other. In 1817 when Congress passed the Elementary School Act, Jefferson insisted on this provision: "No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination." I think we can guess where he would have stood in this controversy.

However important the Ten Commandments are to Jews and Christians, the posting of them on the walls of public schools or courtrooms seems to me not only a violation of church and state, but also a misuse of God's name. Don't misunderstand me! I think it is important that Christians know the Ten Commandments. The commandments should be taught in churches and synagogues and by believing parents in their homes. We should not, however, want the state in the business of teaching them. More important, it seems to me that the very best way we can commend the commandments to others is by obeying them ourselves.

I would like to know what you think.

10. NO COVETING

2007-11-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:17; Micah 2:1-2; Matthew 6:25-34

Since September 2nd we have been on a journey exploring the Ten Commandments. From my conversations with you, my mail and my email, I know that some of you have at least been thinking about the commandments. Several of you gave me copies of an ad for a wall hanging under the title, “Country Commandments,” with these as the ten: “There is only one God, No False Gods, No Cuss’n, Gather on Sunday, Mind your Ma and Pa, No Kill’n, Cheatin’ is forbidden, Ya’ll Don’t Steal, No white lies or gossip’n, and No hankerin’ for others stuff.”

One of you gave me a cartoon in which a child says to the Sunday School teacher, “My Mom says the Ten Commandments are ‘settle down, stop that, wash your hands, be quiet, go to sleep, eat your vegetables, drink your milk, sit up straight, pick up your room and listen to your mother and father.”

Today, we have come to the Tenth Commandment -- "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." (Exodus 20:17) According to the dictionary, the word "to covet" means "to desire eagerly, especially something that belongs to someone else." There was an expression common when I was growing up in Texas that seems to have the sense of what it means to covet: "I wish I had [something that belongs to you], and that you had a wart on your nose." That expression was probably limited to West Texas.

We need to be clear: there is nothing wrong with the act of "coveting" itself. The term is used in a positive sense in the expression, "I covet your prayers," which means, "I eagerly desire your prayers." So what does this commandment actually prohibit? One of the most respected Biblical scholars in the world, Walter Brueggemann, on whom we have depended at several points in this series, says that the text knows that humans are driven by desire and that the commandment itself does not regard desire in and of itself as good or bad. Whether the desire is good or bad depends on its object and how “eager” is our desire for it. The prohibition in this commandment, says Brueggemann, is the neighbor’s "house," which in a patriarchal society included the wife, slaves, and working animals. The commandment expects that within the community of faith ”the drive of desire will be displaced by the honoring of the neighbor, by the sharing of goods, and by the acceptance of one’s goods as adequate.”[1] This commandment is not focused on general envy but on a kind of acquisitiveness that disrupts the lives of others.

When the prophet Micah interprets this commandment, he focuses on its implications for “the development of large estates at the expense of vulnerable neighbors.”[2] Read again his words: "Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance." (Micah 2:1-2) Just as Jesus' comments on the commandment on adultery -- "whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart" -- were addressed to men who had the power to take women for their pleasure without regard to their wishes, so the tenth commandment seems especially addressed to the "eager desires" of those who have it within their power to take vulnerable people's property.

So then, for example, what does this commandment say about "hostile takeovers" in the corporate world? There may be no other point where the Ten Commandments are more in tension with the operative values of our society than with this tenth commandment. We live in a consumer society where consumption is based not on need but on the need to consume. The purpose of advertising is less to inform about products than to generate "eager desire" for new products, whether we need them or not. While few of us do not want the newest products -- whether food, cars or computers -- we know that they come at a high price, not just to us but also to the rest of the world. While citizens of the United States make up only 6% of the world’s population, we consume 25% of the world’s energy. While, of the nations of the world, we have some of the most stringent laws to protect the environment, our rate of production and consumption make us the largest producers of waste and garbage in the world. There is a popular assumption in our society that we should be able to have these products, no matter the consequences to other people or the environment. Or, as James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communications at Rutgers University, has put it, "If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.".

This ideology – and it is an “ideology” -- has its own history in our society. Other societies have their own ideologies. At this point I am not interested in comparison but simply to understand how we got the one we have and its implications for us today. In 1776, the year the Thirteen Colonies declared independence from Great Britain, a Scottish economist and philosopher published a book that became the classic statement advocating free market economics. Adam Smith (1723-1790) in his book, The Wealth of Nations, argued that market forces should be allowed to operate without interference. Smith said that the well being of all would be best served as everyone pursued their own self-interests. The market forces were guided, he said, by an "invisible hand." Smith's "invisible hand" was not a theistic notion, but simply a mechanism of the market. Smith's conclusion was that each person should pursue their own self-interest, regardless of how those interests affected others, because in the end the well being of all would be best served.

That the well-being of all was best served by everybody pursuing their own self-interests without restraint proved to be wishful thinking. Another rationale was added to justify the unrestrained pursuit of one's self-interest. In the nineteenth century Adam Smith's ideas were merged with those of the "Social Darwinists." "Social Darwinism" held that society evolved on Charles Darwin's biological model -- an inference, by the way, not at all shared by Darwin himself. Social Darwinists explained economic inequalities among people as natural and inevitable by the law of the "survival of the fittest." The result was a popular ideology, which held that persons should pursue their own self-interests no matter the cost to other people. One of its main advocates in the United States, William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), said that such a system resulted in the "beneficent elimination of the ill-adapted." That is, no tears should be shed for those who were vulnerable and hurt by others pursuit of their self-interests. The world was better off without such "weaklings."

Today, not many economists or industry leaders would advocate "the unrestrained pursuit of self interest" as the best economic or social policy. Even among the most ardent supporters of a free market economy, some restraints are seen as necessary. The tenth commandment is a warning against the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, whether at the level of corporate or government policy, or in how we use our resources as individuals and families. Just because you want something that belongs to someone else doesn't mean that you have the right to get it.

The positive intent of this commandment may well be what we learned as Jesus’ “Golden Rule:” “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) While there is nothing wrong with pursuing our own self interests, when those pursuits impinge on others, people of faith will not do anything to others that they wouldn’t want done to themselves. That sets the bar pretty high, doesn’t it?

The commandment not to covet may be the last of the Ten, not because it is least important, but because "eagerly desiring what belongs to others" may be the primary path that leads to the violation of the other nine.

This brings us to perhaps the most critical questions of this series. Do the Ten Commandments require so much that we can’t possibly hope to live by them? Or, are they the necessary boundaries for the full and meaningful lives we have been created to live? In every age obeying the commandments has meant living out of step with the values and practices of the prevailing culture. It is no different today. If we believe the commandments really are God’s expectations of us, we will do our best to obey them, won’t we?

In his book, The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill writes that the commandments are written not for the past nor for the future, but for the present. Listen to his words: "… this gift of the Commandments allows us to live in the present, in the here and now. What I have done in the past is past mending; what I will do in the future is a worry not worth the candle, for there is no way I can know what will happen next. But in this moment -- and only in this moment -- I am in control."[3] We can decide that in this day we will obey the commandments. Recovering addicts of all kinds have learned that the only way to recovery is "one day at a time."

Perhaps our prayer today should be in the words of Marijohn Wilkin who wrote a country gospel song with that title. "Yesterday's gone sweet Jesus, and tomorrow may never be mine. Lord help me today, show me the way" [to obey the commandments], "one day at a time."

[1] Walter Brueggemann, "Exodus," The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 849.
[2] Ibid. p. 852.
[3] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews (New York: Nan A. Talese / Anchor Books Doubleday, 1998) p.146.

SPEAKING OF LYING - AN ADDENDUM

2007-10-29T19:07:00.000-07:00

Are we still talking about the ninth commandment, the one about not lying? I get upset any time I find gross misrepresentations of persons' views for propaganda purposes. I get livid when it is done by people in the name of Christ!

This afternoon I received an email from a friend who was forwarding it from a friend, who was forwarding it from a friend, who was... It was about what Ben Stein supposedly said on CBS Sunday Morning commentary. I'm not reproducing because over half of it is a forgery. If you are interested enough to read it you can find it, along with what Ben Stein actually said at http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein2.asp.

By the time I got to the last half of the email, I recognized paragraphs I had seen in numerous other emails and decided to check the source. The actual commentary by Ben Stein and recited on CBS Sunday Morning news was only about half the length of this one. The second half of this document was forged by someone else to try to make something of Ben Stein's name.

I don't know if the quote from Anne Graham Lotz is true or not. We know that Stein did not repeat it. If she did say it somewhere, I am sad that her view of God is so small and nationalistic. The God of the Bible has nothing to do with "gentlemanly" actions.

The writers of the forged document had the audacity to sign it with "Honestly and respectfully, Ben Stein." Do they believe that the ninth commandment doesn't apply to them. The scariest part is that they may actually believe that their lying is justified because they are in a battle against non-believers.

I weep for our nation, but I weep even more because of people who are willing to lie in the name of Christ. There are days when I am ashamed to be called a Christian.

I would like to know what you think.

9. NO LYING

2007-10-27T09:37:00.001-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:16; Psalm 15, Ephesians 4:14-16, 25-32; Matthew 15:10-20

In each of these sermons I have said that in their original form the Ten Commandments were probably only one or two words each in Hebrew, and that the words around them, together with the other 603 rabbinic laws interpreting the commandments, were written centuries later. Jesus did not equate the authority of the "Ten" with the 603 other rabbinic laws nor with the tradition of oral law that preceded them. Jesus and the early church clearly and intentionally violated or rejected some of the rabbinic laws found in the first five books of the Bible -- the kosher laws, for example, as reflected in the Matthew 15 reading.

I think it is for good reason that we have disregarded many of the rabbinic laws of the first five books of the Bible. Just because the rabbinic law approves of buying slaves just as long as you buy them from neighboring nations, that doesn't mean slavery is OK, does it? (Leviticus 25:44) Just because the rabbinic law says that a person who works on the Sabbath should be put to death, that doesn't mean that it is OK to put such people to death, does it? (Exodus 32:2) Just because the rabbinic law says that witches are to be put to death, that doesn't mean that it is OK, does it? (Exodus 22:18) Just because the rabbinic law says that eating shellfish is an abomination to God and forbidden, that doesn't mean that we should refrain from eating shrimp and king crab, does it? (Leviticus 11:10) And just because the rabbinic law condemns homosexuality as an "abomination" to God -- the same level of condemnation as for eating shellfish -- that doesn't mean that we should also condemn it, does it? (Leviticus 18:22) Are we to give equal weight to the 603 rabbinic laws as we do the Ten Commandments? The answer of Jesus seems to be a clear "No!" We have to decide these matters on grounds other than their being rabbinic laws in the Bible.

We looked at the first five commandments with a view to what they could tell us about our relationship to God, and we are looking at the last five with a view to what God expects of us in relating to our neighbors. We said that the sixth commandment, the one forbidding murder, recognized of the value of human life. We said that the seventh commandment recognized the importance of sexuality in human life. We said that the eighth commandment recognized that certain goods are necessary for life with dignity, and that the goods of another person must not be seized.

Reflecting on the command not to steal, one of you wrote to me with another dimension of "stealing." You said that we can also "steal" another person's peace of mind by a careless word, that we can "rob" another person's sense of well-being by hurtful words or gossip. I wondered if that did not lead us to the ninth commandment.

The ninth commandment—"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."—is an acknowledgement that viable human community depends on truth telling. Since I have not preached at Chugiak these last Sundays I wasn’t tempted to do what one pastor did when preaching on this commandment. On the Sunday before, he asked the members of the congregation to read the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark as preparation for the sermon. One week later, when he began his sermon, he asked how many people had done their assignment and had read the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Hands went up all over the sanctuary. Then, the pastor said, "There are only sixteen chapters of the Gospel of Mark. Today, we will talk about telling the truth."

But if I told you that the ninth commandment is not concerned with "white lies," little lies, or inconsequential lies, would you be disappointed or relieved? I think Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann is correct when he writes, "This commandment is not concerned with 'white lies,' but the public portrayal of reality that is not excessively skewed by self-interest or party ideology. The primary reference is the court, where witnesses speak and testimony is given."[1] I suspect the reason for Brueggemann's conclusion is that in Hebrew there are other more common words for "lying" than the more specialized term used here, more like our legal term "perjury" -- the giving of deliberate false evidence while under oath.

Brueggemann explains further that this commandment "understands that a free, independent, and healthy judiciary system is indispensable for a viable community. The courtroom must be a place where the truth is told and where social reality is not distorted through devious manipulation or ideological perversion. It is remarkable in this list of prohibitions that concern the sanctity of human life, the mystery of sexuality, and the maintenance of property, that courts should be so prominent."[2] That courts should so clearly figure into the Ten Commandments may be remarkable, but Brueggemann recognizes, as I think we do, "that community life is not possible unless there is an arena in which there is public confidence that social reality will be reliably described and reported."

I understand the sentiment that says one of our problems today is the lack of the public's confidence in our courts and judicial system, and that by and large the public does not believe that the courts succeed very well in distinguishing truth from falsehood. Some complain that the very laws intended to get truth while protecting the innocent result in weighting the balance in favor of the guilty. Some complain that "money" not "truth" is the final arbiter of guilt and innocence in our court system.

There is a crisis of public confidence in our judicial system today, and the way to restore that confidence is not clear. I am suspicious of simple answers for problems that are very complex. I am also suspicious because the human propensity to distort reality (the "facts") to suit our own interests is deep and pervasive. Because of that propensity, there will always be people finding ways to abuse the law and the court system. Rather than cynically accepting this reality, we can determine that if we are called as witnesses in court we will "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." We can decide that we will obey the ninth commandment, regardless of our vested interests.

This commandment has implications for truth telling far beyond the confines of the court system. It has to do will all the institutions of society on which we depend for information. Much more than public confidence in our court system, the real crisis of our time may be our mass culture's transformation of truth into propaganda that entertains. In 1986 Neil Postman wrote a book the title of which nearly says it all: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.[3]

Postman was Chair of the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University. His study concludes that in our mass culture truth is held hostage to entertainment. This hasn't happened according to George Orwell's chilling vision of the future in his book titled, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1949.[4](4) In this book Orwell predicted that we would be overcome by externally imposed oppression, and coined the term "Big Brother." Postman says that the danger is from a slightly older, less well-known view of the future -- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written in 1932.[5] I suggest that both books are good reading for us in this first decade of the twenty-first century.

According to Huxley, Postman points out, no Big Brother is required to take away our freedom, our maturity and our history. Huxley said that people would come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Orwell feared that books would be banned. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban books, because no one would want to read them. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared that truth "would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."

Some would say that Huxley has aptly described modern television and the Internet. What I would like to know is how did Huxley -- way back in 1932 -- so clearly anticipate television at the beginning of the twenty-first century? As one who uses the Internet regularly to find information, I can testify to the "sea of irrelevance" through which one must swim to find hard reliable data. What is true of the Internet is also true of the mass media, both print and electronic, including the main source of news for many people -- the talk shows on radio and television. While the radio talk shows I hear on local AM stations regularly castigate the news media for not telling the truth and for hiding it, they do not acknowledge that they are as much hostage to making truth entertaining as the rest of the media. Under the guise of public forums for finding truth, they are models of the way in which truth is compromised by making it entertaining. "Bearing false witness" is caricaturing those who differ with you and not telling the whole truth, and it is an indictment of our mass media. If we want truth in our time, we will have to work to get it, and not expect to be entertained by it.

Last week I reminded you how -- eight centuries before the birth of Christ -- the Hebrew prophets became the social and religious conscience of the people of Israel. When the courts and other institutions compromised truth, these prophets denounced them. That's why Jesus could talk about a tradition of "stoning the prophets." But they were just as vigilant when religious leaders succumbed to deception to advance institutional interests. The prophets' harshest condemnation is for religious leaders who say the things that the authorities and persons in power like to hear, or as the prophet Jeremiah said, religious leaders who cry "'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace." (Jeremiah 6:13-14) Such religious leaders didn't even know how to blush, said the prophet. We who say we will obey God's commandments have a special obligation not to let truth be compromised by partisan interest.

For all the failures we see to live up to it, the ninth commandment assumes a viable alternative to deceptiveness in life. That absence of deceptiveness is to be modeled in the community of faith. The apostle Paul could have been speaking directly to us in our age when he wrote the words from Ephesians read earlier: "We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…" (Ephesians 4:14-15)

We are to speak the truth to one another. We should not have to take an oath on the witness stand for our words to be credible. Notice what Paul says, "speaking the truth IN LOVE." This brings us back to where we began today, with what one of you told me about how we can "steal" the peace of mind of another person by careless words, even words that are true. In the community of faith we are obliged not only to speak the truth, but to speak it in love, not as a weapon to hurt and embarrass.

Today, let us recommit ourselves to the honesty called for in the ninth commandment: that we will not speak falsely against our neighbor; that we will not bend the truth to serve our own self-interests; that we will not caricature those with whom we disagree; that we will speak the truth as we know it, and speak it in love.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, "Exodus," The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) p. 851.
[2] Ibid., p. 848.
[3] (New York: Penguin, 1986)
[4] Published in 1949, it is now out of print but the text of the whole book is widely available on the Internet.
[5] Brave New World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co. Inc., 1932.

8. NO STEALING

2007-10-20T09:04:00.001-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:15; 22:1-14; Matthew 19:16-26

Each week we have reminded ourselves that in their original form the Ten Commandments were probably only one or two words each in Hebrew, and that the words around them, together with the other 603 rabbinic laws interpreting the commandments, were written centuries later. As a part of our quest, we have sought to understand how the ancient Israelites first understood the commandments, how Jesus understood the commandments, and the way they were interpreted in his day. We have done that to help us think about what the commandments mean for us in our day.

We looked at the first five commandments with a view to what they could tell us about our relationship to God, and we have started to look at the last five with a view to what God expects of us in relating to our neighbors.

The first of the last five commandments, the one forbidding murder, is a recognition of the value of human life. The seventh commandment is a recognition of the importance of sexuality in human life. The eighth commandment -- "You shall not steal." -- is recognition that certain goods are necessary for life with dignity. Those goods of another person, say this commandment, must not be seized.

Some scholars have pointed out that the verb "steal" used here in Hebrew also means, "stealing a person," or "kidnapping." Some have even suggested that the forbidding of "stealing a person," was the primary meaning, thus having the capital crimes of murder, adultery and kidnapping the sixth, seventh and eighth commandments. Most scholars, however, assume that the commandment forbids stealing in the broadest sense.

That was certainly true of the ancient Israelites when they wrote down what they understood this commandment to mean hundreds of years later. In the passage from Exodus 22 there are the laws of restitution and punishment for stealing. For example,

- When someone stole an ox and slaughtered it, they had to repay the owner with five oxen. If the ox was recovered alive, then the thief only had to pay double. (22:1)

- If a thief was discovered breaking and entering during the night, the occupants could kill the thief without being liable for murder. If it was during the daytime, the occupants could be liable for murder. (22:2)

- When someone's livestock got loose and grazed over someone else's field, restitution was to be made from the livestock owner's best field. (22:5)

One might assume that the eighth commandment is the simplest and least ambiguous of all the commandments: "Don't take another's property and don't steal a person." When the Hebrew prophets emerged as the social and religious conscience of the people of Israel eight centuries before the birth of Christ, they had a lot to say about "stealing," but most of what they had to say was addressed to rich and powerful people "stealing" from poor people, not the poor stealing from the rich. The prophet Isaiah's harsh criticism was that people with money and power made and used the laws to take advantage of the poor. Listen to his words: "Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!" (Isaiah 10:2)

What Isaiah and the other prophets wrote about centuries before Christ, Woodie Guthrie sang about in the first half of the twentieth century. Probably the most important folk singer of the first half of the century, the Oklahoma-born Guthrie saw first-hand the devastation wrought to the land and people by the "Dustbowl" and the "Great Depression." But, like the Hebrew prophets, he saw how rich and powerful people took advantage of poor people in these catastrophes. In his song about the Oklahoma outlaw, Pretty Boy Floyd, he sang what he saw: "Some men will rob you with a six-gun, other men will rob you with a fountain pen."

We understand what the prophets railed against and what Woodie Guthrie sang about -- how "white collar crime" deprives vulnerable people of the goods necessary for life with dignity. We understand that this is a reality of our day and we understand that "stealing" done in the name of corporate policy is still "stealing," don't we?

There is another way that theft is practiced: it is what I call "stealing the future." When we take actions that will unfairly deprive people who come after us of the goods they need for life, that too is "stealing." For several years, I lived on a small farm in Georgia. I did my best to preserve the land on which I cultivated, both for fruit and vegetables. I didn't use herbicides and I tried not to use pesticides. (However, I never did figure out how to grow peaches in Georgia without the use of some pesticides.) For my children and their children, I wanted to leave the land in just as good condition, or better, than I found it.

One day a neighbor called and told me to turn on the television. When I did I saw pictures of a farm just up the hill from mine. Hidden within a grove of trees along the bank of a creek where water flowed down toward our property, there were fifty to sixty barrels of what would later be determined to be toxic waste. The barrels were leaking and the waste was seeping into the creek. An elderly widow who hadn't farmed the land for years was the owner. Two men had come to her and offered to rent the land, telling her they wanted to farm it. But they didn't want it for farming, but as a place they could dump toxic waste without having to dispose of it properly. I took some satisfaction from the fact that the two men were the first to be convicted under a new Georgia law making the dumping of toxic waste a felony. They went to jail, but the effect of their actions would be destruction of the environment far beyond their jail terms and beyond their lifetimes. By their actions, they had stolen the future both of the land itself and those who would farm it after me.

The eighth commandment forbids our taking the goods necessary for the life of other people, whether simple theft in the night, armed robbery, or by manipulating the law. As one of you often reminds me, the commandment says "Thou shalt NOT." Some scholars have said that the negatives of the commandments have implications for positive actions. The rabbinic law in Leviticus 19:18 states "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord." You love your neighbor as yourself by not committing violence against them, by not committing adultery, and by not taking from your neighbor what is not yours. But when Jesus took this rabbinic law and made it the second of the "Great Commandments," I think he meant more than simply refraining from negative action toward our neighbor. He made that clear in his conversation with the rich young man who came to him wanting assurance of eternal life. The young man assured Jesus that he had obeyed the Ten Commandments. Jesus' response to the rich young man was that God expects more of us than not hurting others: God expects us to do good to others.

Would Jesus expect us not only to refrain from stealing others’ futures but actually “give futures” to others? Do we give futures to others when we care for the land so that it will be productive for those who come after us? Do we give futures to others when stop asking for more studies of global warming and begin to take measures to slow it?

What if I told you that for $10 you could help provide a future for an African family? You can! Those of you at Chugiak United Methodist Church on Sunday, October 21st, will hear all about “Nothing But Nets.” A unlikely coalition of organizations including The United Methodist Church, the National Basketball Association, Sports Illustrated, the United Nations Foundation, and other organizations have come together to provide bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria in Africa.

You will hear about how Malaria infects over 500 million people a year, how it kills more than a million people each year, and how it is the largest killer of children in Africa. You will also hear how malaria is both preventable and treatable. Inspired by a columnist in Sports Illustrated “Nothing But Nets” seeks to provide families and individuals with insecticide-treated bed nets to sleep under and taking steps to kill mosquitoes where they breed and when they enter houses to feed at night. Each bed net is designed to last for at least four years. With its long history in Africa, The United Methodist Church is uniquely positioned to help get these nets to people with the proper instructions for their use. Yes, fresh water and medicines are still needed throughout Africa, but for $10 a bed net you can help give a future to a family in Africa. If you don't happen to be at Chugiak on Sunday you can find out more at NothingButNets.net.

The eighth commandment prohibits taking the goods necessary for another person's livelihood: "You shall not steal." We love our neighbors not only when we do not steal from them, but when we take steps to see that all persons have the goods necessary for life with dignity. What we do here today may seem like very small acts, and they are. But from such small acts things happen, the results of which we cannot see. Natalie Sleeth has expressed it well in “The Hymn of Promise”:

"In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree;
in cocoons, a hidden promise; butterflies will soon be free!
In the cold of snow of winter there's a spring that waits to be,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see."[1]

I hope you won't miss the opportunity you have today to plant some seeds for the future.

[1] "Hymn of Promise," The United Methodist Hymnal, 1989, # 707.

7. NO ADULTERY

2007-10-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Note: This is not a sermon I will be preaching in Chugiak on Sunday. For health reasons, I have had to return to our home in Bend, Oregon. I will continue to prepare and post (not preach) the rest of the sermons in this series. My plan is to post them on Saturdays as I have in the past. I encourage you to read the Scripture texts before you read the sermons.

Exodus 20:14; Matthew 5:27-32; John 8:2-11

We looked at the first five commandments with an eye for seeing what they tell us about our relationship to God. We are looking at the last five with an eye for what God expects of us in our relationships with each other. And as we considered the first of these—the sixth commandment, "You shall not murder"—we considered how actions that result in the death of another person are in a special category. Of all the things we can do to each other, there is finality about murder that is different from the other four. Once a life has been taken it cannot be given back, no matter how great the sorrow, no matter how great the punishment. But I also suggested that perhaps commandments six and seven were in the places they were because "murder" and "adultery" may be unique in the amount of destruction they do to individual lives, families and communities.

Just as the sixth commandment points to the value of human life, the seventh commandment points to the place of sexuality in human life. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes of this commandment, sexuality is "enormously wondrous, and enormously dangerous. The wonder of sexuality is available in a community only if it is practiced respectfully and under discipline. The danger of sexuality is that it is capable of evoking desires that are destructive of persons and of communal relations."[1]

When the ancient Israelites interpreted the commandment about adultery, they understood it in a very limited sense: it was a prohibition against sexual relations with the wife of another man. It was not understood to prohibit sexual promiscuity on the part of the husband, unless of course the husband became involved with the wife of another man. Women were understood to be the property and trust of men. This violation of another man's wife was viewed so seriously that it was a capital offense. Leviticus 20:10 reads, "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death."

This old patriarchal understanding of the seventh commandment has continued to have its supporters even into the modern age. When I was growing up in Texas, I learned that there was a "certain understanding" in the courts that a husband who killed his wife, or a man suspected of committing adultery with his wife, would never be convicted of the crime in a Texas court. It was said to be an adoption from Mexican common law, but I'm not sure if that was the case. I do know that it was a common understanding about a husband's rights. That "common understanding" did not include a wife's rights to shoot her philandering husband and partner. Please understand me; I am not an authority on Texas law. I am speaking of “an understanding" common when I was growing up. I have a suspicion that Texas was not the only place where such views were held. That understanding, wherever held, was a legacy of the old patriarchal view of the seventh commandment, not necessarily of the commandment itself.

The patriarchal understanding of the commandment did not go four thousand years unchallenged. In Jewish and Christian communities it was later broadened to include men as well as women. That development may have happened because of Jesus. In the Gospel text Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:27) Remember what I said about Jesus' view of the commandment not to murder. He was not talking so much about the sixth commandment itself but its interpretation over the centuries. He was not equating "murder" with "anger," but pointing out that one could not take refuge in the system of laws interpreting the commandments. One might not be legally culpable for "verbal abuse," but Jesus said that we were accountable to God however we hurt other each other.

In discussing the seventh commandment, Jesus addressed his comments to men. He was not warning women about the sin of adultery, but men. Jesus was objecting to the sexual injustice that had been codified in law. In the matter of divorce, which Jesus also addressed, in his day a man could obtain a get, or a "writ of dismissal," for such a trivial reason as bad cooking. But there were no grounds under which a woman could obtain a get against her husband.[2] Jesus said that the one legitimate cause for a man to divorce his wife was adultery.

But what did Jesus mean about adultery? Did he really intend to equate the act of adultery with lust? In his book on Jesus, Thomas Cahill facetiously writes, "Earth to Jesus: Hello!" but then goes on to explain that what Jesus was objecting to was not "spontaneous arousal but sexual oppression—the ease with which any man of the ancient world, especially a well-connected one, could arrange to satisfy himself on any woman he wished, her wishes in the matter being beside the point."[3] I think Cahill is right. Jesus was not equating the act of adultery with lust, but was contesting the authority of the legal codes interpreting the commandments, which legitimized sexual injustice toward women. What do you think?

Jesus' criticism of the accepted pattern of discrimination against women is made even clearer in the story of the woman charged with adultery in the eighth chapter of John. Recall the story. A woman is brought before Jesus. She was caught in the act of adultery. The text makes clear that this is a trap for Jesus. They make her stand in front of Jesus and the assembled crowd. The scribes and Pharisees reminded Jesus that the penalty for committing adultery was death by stoning. They wanted to know what Jesus would say. He said nothing to the accusers. He did not argue the law with them -- the one from Leviticus we read earlier that sets death as the penalty for a wife and her lover guilty of adultery. Nor did he ask the accusers the obvious question: "How can you catch a woman in the act without catching her male partner?" He didn't say that. Instead, the text says that he bent down and wrote with his fingers on the ground. I wonder what he wrote.

The accusers probably assumed that his non-response meant that he could say nothing. Thinking they had Jesus where they wanted him, they persist in demanding a response. Then the text says, "He straightened up" and said ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.' And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground." He had gone straight to the heart of the matter: the guilty consciences of each of the men present. The accusers knew that they were guilty of bringing only the woman for punishment, not the male partner. They sought to trap him, but Jesus trapped them in their hypocrisy. They had no option but to drop their stones and walk away.

But the story does not end there. The woman is still there. She had not said anything. No one asked her anything. She was simply a pawn in a game to trap Jesus. She had witnessed the hypocrisy of the failure to bring her male partner. She had no rights. She could not contest anything. She was more sinned against, than sinner. Then again, the text says that Jesus "straightened up" and spoke to the woman. Jesus looked up at her and said, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" And for the first time, she speaks, "No one, sir." Then Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."

Sexuality is a wondrous gift. The seventh commandment is a warning not to use this gift outside of a committed relationship. Remember what one of you said to me some weeks ago, "The commandment says, 'Thou shalt NOT." Jesus' teaching about the commandment warns that it applies to men and women alike, and that committed relationships are ones of authentic mutuality without abusive behavior. Jesus' teaching is also a warning about our temptation to be hypocrites in judging others, and that God expects more of us than the letter of the law.

Finally, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery contain two words that many of us need to hear: First, some are so filled with guilt about their own violations of this commandment that they need to hear, "neither do I condemn you." This is not the permissive "you do your thing and I'll do mine" creed popular in our society. It is the promise of God's willingness to forgive us for our sin, and it is indissolubly linked to the second, "Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." This is the good news from God: God forgives you. Get on with your life. Don't do it again.

Contemporary hymn writer, Ruth Duck, has written lyrics based in part on the story of Jesus and the woman. Will you make it your prayer?[4]

God, how can we forgive when bonds of love are torn?
How can we rise and start anew, our trust reborn?
When human loving fails and every hope is gone,
Your love gives strength beyond our own to face the dawn.

When we have missed the mark, and tears of anguish flow,
How can you still release our guilt, the debt we owe?
The ocean depth of grace surpasses all our needs.
A priest who shares our human pain, Christ intercedes.

Who dares to throw the stone to damn another’s sin,
When you, while knowing all our past, forgive again?
No more we play the judge, for by your grace we live.
As you, O God, forgive our sin, may we forgive.

[1] The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) p. 848.
[2] Thomas Cahill, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (New York: Nan A. Talese Doubleday, 1999) p. 82.
[3] Ibid., p. 83.
[4] Words by Ruth Duck, Hebrew Melody, Words©1996 The Pilgrim Press. Reprinted from The Faith We Sing, # 2169

"THOU SHALT NOT KILL, EXCEPT IN A GAME AT CHURCH"

2007-10-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, when we might have been talking about the sixth commandment but were interrupted by my departure sermon, one of the lead articles in the New York Times was titled, "Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Game at Church." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html?th&emc=th

Written by Kevin Moloney, the article begins this way:

"First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

"Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo."

I may be hopelessly out of touch, but for me the use of violent video games to attract young people gives our blessing to our culture of violance and defeats the reason for wanting them in church. Some pastors and churches obviously disagree with me.

Check out the article and see what you think. You're welcome to post your comments here.

A SUBSTITUTE SERMON

2007-10-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

[The second of two sermons posted this weekend]

Deuteronomy 34:1-7; John 12:20-24

This is not the sermon I planned to preach today. Many of you have already heard that a heart condition has rendered me unable to fulfill my responsibilities as your interim pastor. I have gone through anger, denial, deal-making (can’t I just make it through November?), and now acceptance of my need to return home to Bend, Oregon to continue the treatment there. Please understand that I am not leaving because of better treatment Outside; there are few places in the world that are better than the Heart Institute in Anchorage. I am leaving so I can be at home for the convalescence that will be required.

Our Superintendent, Rachel Lieder Simeon, has arranged for preachers in the next few weeks before an interim arrives on November 11 who will stay until your permanent pastor is appointed in June.

Since this is my last Sunday with you, I decided not to preach the sermon I had prepared on the sixth commandment. I have been asked to complete the series of sermons on the Ten Commandments and post them on my blog. I will do my best to prepare and post one a week over these next five weeks. You will find the sermon on “no murder” already posted. Like a TV soap I wouldn’t want to leave you without finding out what happens when you get to the tenth commandment. I hope you will continue to talk back to me through the comments.

While we are not going to talk about the commandments today, we are going to begin not far in time and space from where the people received the commandments at Mt. Sinai. We don’t know how long it was after Moses presented the people with the Ten Commandments, but the time came when the wandering in the wilderness neared an end and the Promised Land was not far away.

As I thought about my leaving, my mind was drawn to the story of Moses in the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy. I tried to imagine what it was like for him. He must have been exhausted. In his earlier years this climb would have been nothing for a man of his strength and endurance. But he was not the man he once was. He was dying and he knew it. But something—God!—beckoned him up to the top of the mountain, a mountaintop from whose peak he could see over to the other side of the Jordan River to “the land of milk and honey,” the land toward which he had spent most of his life leading people.

I wonder if this old man—the text says Moses was 120 years old—protested this indignity to God. Why couldn’t he have used his last energy to go from the Plains of Moab on over the Jordan River and into the Promised Land? It was not to be. Moses was led up the mountain to see the land, but not to enter it. Having seen the Promised Land from the top of the mountain the old man lay down and died without finishing what he began.

We too shall die without finishing what we begin. Moses lived for one hundred and twenty years. He was strong and vigorous. More to the point is that he was God-sensitive and God-led. Even that was not enough to enable him to finish what he had begun. And many do not have a full lifetime to get done what they long to accomplish.

I wonder if that occurred to Jesus as he made his way to Jerusalem. The journey had begun just days before when he himself had been up on the top of a mountain. Now, he had to come down. He was at the peak of his “career.” People all over the country had heard about him: how he called plain people as his disciples, how he healed sick people, how he taught and proclaimed a message of a God of love, and how his ministry seemed to move toward a cavalier disregard of the accepted patterns of discrimination that made some people “insiders” and others “outsiders.” He couldn’t go anywhere without large crowds pursuing him, hanging on his every word. But Jesus knew it couldn’t last. He knew he wouldn’t have seventy years, let alone Moses’ one hundred and twenty. He knew that he would do well to have thirty-five. I wonder if he thought about that as he walked the dusty road to Jerusalem.

Years later, when the writer of the Gospel of John looked back on Jesus’ coming to Jerusalem, he remembered his words: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” It sounds to me like Jesus understood that he wasn’t going to finish everything, but that what he had done would “bear fruit” after his death.

We can never accomplish what we begin in a lifetime, whether in 18, 35, 69, or 120 years. If Thomas Cahill is right the deepest of all Hebrew insights may well be that “accomplishment is intergenerational.”[1] In his book, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Cahill recalls the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century. The Centering Words in today’s bulletin are his. Will you read them aloud with me? "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love." Moses and Jesus both knew that. Please do not mistake what I am saying to be a message that accomplishing all we can for good in our lifetime is not important. Our best efforts are critical! What I am saying is that there are no quick and easy fixes for accomplishing what is truly worth doing.

For several years I lived on a small farm southeast of Atlanta, Georgia. There were a few acres of orchard and a few acres for vegetables. Around the house there were eight or nine large pecan trees. Once I discovered what a “pecan-picker-upper” was and got one, my back recovered from the stooping to harvest the trees’ abundant crops. The pecans were a paper-shell variety and a delight to eat.

One of the spiritual giants of the twentieth century was Howard Thurman. Born in 1900 of parents who had been slaves, Thurman was Dean of Chapel at Boston University in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He retired the year before I arrived at the university for graduate study. You will understand that when I heard this story by him, it had special meaning for me and my pecan trees.

Thurman said, “I watched him for a long time. He was so busily engaged in his task that he did not notice my approach until he heard my voice, then he raised himself erect with all the slow dignity of a man who had exhausted the cup of haste to the very dregs. He was an old man as I discovered before our conversation was over, a full 81 years. Further talk between us revealed that he was planting a small grove of pecan trees; the little treelets were not more than two-and-a-half or three feet in height. My curiosity was unbounded. ‘Why did you not select larger trees so as to increase the possibility of your living to see them bear at least one crop of nuts?’ [Pecan trees take from 10 to 20 years to bear fruit.]

“He fixed his eyes directly on my face with no particular point of focus, but with a gaze that took in the totality of my features. Finally, he said, ‘These small trees are cheaper and I have very little money.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you do not expect to live to see the trees reach sufficient maturity to bear fruit?’”

“No, but is that important? All my life I have eaten fruit from trees that I did not plant. Why should I not plant trees to bear fruit for those who may enjoy them long after I am gone? Besides the person who plants only to reap the harvest has no faith in life.”

How many pecans had I picked up, given away, and sold? How many had I roasted in the oven with honey and curry? I was able to do that because someone long before me on that piece of property in Georgia had planted the trees, and perhaps had not lived long enough to enjoy the fruit. It is not just so with pecans. We are always standing on others shoulders, benefiting from the labors of those who have gone before us. The important question for us today is not whether we will live long enough to see the results of our earnest endeavors, but whether or not we are planting trees to bear fruit for those who come after us.

The old pecan farmer understood what makes accomplishment possible—something Moses and Jesus also understood: the past is gone and the future is a mystery. All we really have is today.

In the churches I served in Juneau and Fairbanks, I was surprised to discover that much of the leadership came from Coast Guard, Army, and Air Force families, who were stationed there for two or three year assignments. What I observed was that often when a new military family arrived at the church, they would be ready to join and be put to work within just a couple of weeks. I asked one of them about it and this is what he said “If we waited around to get acquainted we would be on the down side of our tour before we got to work. We don’t have that luxury.” Truth is, none of us has that luxury. They understood what is true for all of us, whether we’ve been here fourteen weeks or fifty years. What we do with the “present” will determine what we accomplish within and beyond our lifetimes. That will be true for me as I return to Bend, as it will be true for you here at Chugiak.

With visiting preachers here for the next few weeks and another interim, you may be tempted to take it easy and simply coast until you receive your regularly appointed pastor in July, sort of like what we did when we had a substitute teacher in school. I hope you won’t do that; none of us has the luxury to waste the “presents” God gives us. In these next weeks, BE the Church God has called you to be: healing, teaching, nurturing, and reaching out. And if you are new, don’t wait. Jump right in and get to work. There is much to be accomplished.

I am honored to have been among you as we planted trees together, and I give thanks for you. Keep on planting!

[1] New York: Anchor Books, 1998. pp. 170 -171.

6. NO MURDER

2007-10-05T13:49:00.001-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:13, 21:12-17; Matthew 5:21-26

[The first of two sermons for this weekend]

As we have moved along through this extended reflection on the Ten Commandments we have mused about the significance of the order, or if there is any significance to the order at all. We have seen a kind of order emerge: first, a commandment about loyalty to this one God; second, a commandment about not trying to remake this God into our own image; third, a commandment about being very careful how we use the name of this God; fourth, a commandment about "ceasing work" so that we may rest and remember who this God is and who we are; and fifth, a commandment about the means by which the knowledge of this God is passed from one generation to the next -- honoring our heritage by passing it on to our children.

At least to me, there seems to be a progression there, all related to preserving our relationship to God. Does it seem that way to you? It also makes a certain sense to me that there are five for our relationship to God and five for our relationship with our neighbors. That makes it neat when you look at your two hands and ten fingers. We'll never know if that was what was originally intended in the order.

Whatever significance you attach to the ordering of the commandments, it seems clear that the final five are the fundamental pillars that govern all human relationships. I also believe that while the final five are the indispensable elements of any meaningful community life, that the commandments not to murder and not to commit adultery head the list of five because murder and adultery are the greatest destroyers of individuals, families, and communities. This is at odds with the current values in our culture: our culture for the most part takes murder seriously but it tends to wink at adultery. We'll talk more about adultery next week.

We would probably not question the command not to murder being in the number one position of commandments having to do with human relationships. Of all the things we can do to each other, there is finality about murder that is different from the other four. Once a life has been taken it cannot be given back, no matter how great the sorrow, no matter how great the punishment. In that regard, murder is in a class by itself.

Having stated what we agree on about this commandment, stating what else we might agree on is more difficult. The stark simplicity of the command, "no murder," raises as many questions as answers. How are we to understand this commandment in issues that face us today: capital punishment, war, euthanasia, and abortion? When the people of Israel tried to understand what it meant for them to obey the commandments they didn't conclude that this commandment forbad capital punishment. As you heard from the reading from Exodus 21, the chapter following the one containing the Ten Commandments, you heard about those conditions under which another life could be taken. Premeditated murder, the striking of one's mother or father, kidnapping, and even cursing one's parents were all crimes punishable by death, as well as a whole host of others we didn't read. The people of ancient Israel didn't understand this commandment to forbid killing in wartime, and perhaps not in euthanasia or abortion.

Whether or not you agree with them, these harsh laws of capital punishment are offered in defense of human life, to preclude actions that would destroy community. If we've learned anything in our time it should be that "valuing human life" is not simple. The proponents of capital punishment, those who accept the sometime necessity of war, those who advocate some practice of euthanasia, and those who oppose abortion, all value human life. But of course, those who oppose capital punishment, those who are pacifists, those who oppose euthanasia, and those who are labeled "Pro Choice" in the matter of abortion, they too, value life.

Although our disagreements over these issues are deep and complex, our discussion of them is made more difficult by the tendency to demonize our opponents by saying that they do not value life. As we wrestle with the public policy implications of these issues, I wish we could acknowledge that both sides are represented by people trying to be faithful to the valuing of life implicit in the sixth commandment.

In the 20th century there may be no one who struggled with the questions of violence and valuing human life more than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When Hitler took power in Germany in the 1930s, this brilliant scholar left the security of the United States to return to his own country where he became one of the leaders of German Christians who refused to accept Hitler's doctrines of National Socialism and even entered into an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested, kept in prison, and executed in April 1945, just before the Allies liberated the area where he was imprisoned.

Bonhoeffer's expertise as a theologian was in the area of Christian ethics ("Ethics" is the study of values and principles that guide one's actions). His "valuing of life" led him to the conclusion that killing Hitler would save many lives. In retrospect, that seems so obvious to most of us, doesn't it? So seriously did Bonhoeffer take the sixth commandment and all of the teachings of Jesus that he is said to have confessed to a friend, "I know that I may burn in hell for this action." I think Bonhoeffer was wrong about his fear, but I know he was right in his extreme reluctance to take a life, even in such a justifiable situation. If we followed his example we would be more reluctant to execute people on death row, more reluctant to make war, more reluctant to engage in "mercy killings," and more reluctant to have abortions. I didn't say that those things were never the right course of action. The sixth commandment and Bonhoeffer's example all warn that "valuing human life" requires that such acts be taken only with the greatest reluctance and with the knowledge that we have to answer to God for those actions.

"But what did Jesus say about murder?" you may be asking. If you are looking to Jesus to give you a legal code like that of the 613 rabbinic laws in the Old Testament, you will look in vain. Those who have taken his teachings in the New Testament and tried to make a new legal code of love have, in my opinion, misunderstood him. He did not remove the inherent ambiguity of this commandment. Out of respect for the commandments the people of ancient Israel attempted to work out a system of regulations, both written and oral, that could tell a person the "right" or "wrong" action in every situation. The result, however well meaning, was to establish a massive set of regulations that only religious professionals could hope to keep. The regulations became a way of categorizing people into "good" and "bad," "righteous people" and “sinners." A system designed for moral uprightness had become small-minded pettiness, a practice that Christians have all too often repeated.

That was the situation into which Jesus was born. His teaching about the Law is directed to the abusive system of rules and ordinances that had been institutionalized over the centuries rather than to the Ten Commandments themselves. In the passage we read this morning Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment…" Jesus was not equating "anger" and "murder." It was a statement that physical violence was not the only way to hurt someone: "anger" can also do damage. Jesus' words were intended to show the limitations of the legal system erected to interpret the commandments. It is as if he were saying, "You think that the legal system has all the answers as to what constitutes violence to another person. I'm telling you that even verbal abuse is violence and makes you liable to God's judgment." Jesus was not giving a new law: he was saying that even adherence to their intricate system of law did not cover all the ways that they could hurt each other. In our culture where so much of our violence is "domestic violence," it is well to be reminded that God cares not only about physical abuse, but also about verbal abuse. We may not be legally accountable for verbal abuse, but we are accountable to God.

If Jesus were to talk today about expanding our understanding of violence, as he did in the first century, he might point to the ways God may hold us accountable for "murder" indirectly committed by government or corporate policy. Suppose, for example, an auto manufacturer knows from statistical projections that a defect in one of their cars will result in five additional fatalities in a year and that as a result of those five deaths the auto manufacturer will have to pay out $20 million in liability settlements. The manufacturer also knows that to have a recall and change the defects would cost $40 million. If the manufacturer knows this and doesn't make the change to save $20 million, is the manufacturer guilty of murder? If stockholders know this and continue to hold stock in the company are they also guilty of murder? At what point are death-causing government or corporate policies "statistically insignificant" and at what points do such policies constitute "murder?" In our high tech and interdependent world, actions that kill people can be very indirect, but just as deadly.

We should not take comfort in the fact that neither the commandments nor Jesus' teaching gives us clear answers for all the ethical dilemmas with which violence confronts us. While individuals and societies in each time and place must work out what the "valuing of human life" requires and restricts, Jesus insists that the absence of rules governing every situation does not exempt us from responsibility to God for our actions. God expects us to use our heads and our hearts.

5. HONOR PARENTS

2007-09-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:1-4; Mark 3:31-35

You haven’t forgotten the commandments have you? In their original form they were probably not more than one or two words each, the rest of the words around them and the other 603 rabbinic laws in the first five books of the Bible being how they were interpreted by later people. The first commandment is about loyalty to one God. The second commandment is about not remaking God in our image. The third commandment is about not making careless use of God's name. The fourth commandment -- the first of two stated in positive terms -- is a command to rest and remember. The fourth is as much about our relationship with God as the first three. If we don't "cease work" every seventh day so that we can "remember," then in time we will forget who we are and whose we are.

That brings us to the fifth commandment: "Honor your father and your mother." Honoring and caring for one's parents was important in ancient Israel, just as it is in our society today. When the commandments were given to Moses at Mt. Sinai, there would have been even more particular concerns. At that time, the people of Israel were nomadic, perhaps even refugees, always on the move with no land of their own. What happened when the seniors were no longer able to keep up with the rigors of the constant march in the wilderness toward the Promised Land, unless cared for by their children?

We can draw our own pictures of the needs of senior citizens in our time. I think it is fair to assume that provisions for seniors in our society have come about in response to the respect for age suggested in this commandment. One of the realities of our day is that more parents are living longer than ever before. With the Baby Boomer population beginning to retire, the number of seniors is increasing even more rapidly; so rapidly that many young people worry that there will not be enough resources to care for them when they are old.

These are all important issues that cry out to be addressed in our time, but I believe that the fifth Commandment is about more than caring for aging parents, important as that is. Why would "honoring parents" be ahead of the commandments not to murder and not to commit adultery? I think it is because the commandment to "honor parents" was as much about people’s relationship to God as it was for their relationships with each other. At heart, the commandment about honoring parents has to do with the means whereby faith can be passed from one generation to another. In a pre-literate nomadic society, how was the knowledge of God's great saving act in liberating them from slavery in Egypt to be passed down to future generations, if not from parents passing it down to their children? I think this is why a scribe added to these words to this commandment: “so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” If people didn’t remember who they were and whose they were, they would lose the land that God was giving them.

The struggle between the generations is inherently filled with tension and one of the most critical aspects of life. Without the passing on of the faith from one generation to the next, faith will be lost. The generational covenant breaks down when one of two things happens: either when the parents do not pass on the faith to their children, or when the children refuse to accept it and do not pass it on to their children. Some in this room would tell stories about how your parents did not pass the faith on to you and how you had to come to faith some other way. Others in this room would tell stories about how your parents were faithful in passing the faith on to you, but you left the church when you left home and have now found your way back. Some of you in this room would tell stories about how you tried to pass on the faith to your children but they didn’t honor you by receiving it and passing it on to their children.

The responsibility of parents to pass on the faith to their children is at the very heart of the meaning of the Fifth Commandment, not just children's responsibility to honor their parents. In the Gospel text we read today, Jesus had just begun his ministry, had healed several people and cast out a demon. Some people said he was crazy, or was demon-possessed. Jesus' mother and brothers apparently believed that, or at least were so concerned about Jesus' embarrassing the family, that they came to get him. Jesus doesn't let them get anywhere near him. He says to the crowd, "Who are my mother and brothers?" Then, looking at those sitting around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." These sharp words of Jesus are reminders that the commandment to honor parents is a two-part covenant: parents are to be honored when they are faithful in their parental responsibilities, and that includes passing the faith on to their children.

It might have been at that meeting of the Central Texas Annual Conference when, at age 18, I was first appointed to pastor two rural churches west of Fort Worth. At each Annual Conference in June there was always a guest preacher who would preach four or five times during conference. I don’t remember his name, but he was some high powered preacher from a large church somewhere. I don’t remember any of his other sermons at the conference, except for one point he made.

There must have been a thousand people—lay and ministerial members of conference—gathered at First Church in Fort Worth where we always had Annual Conference. I’m not sure I had been listening before, but he got my attention when he said, “I’m DAMN tired of fathers telling me that they have fulfilled their parental responsibilities by putting food on the table, clothes on their backs and seeing that their children get to school.” Despite the fact that this was Texas, I think I can be fairly sure that four-letter expletive had never before been uttered from that pulpit. And from the silence that followed, I’m pretty sure that none of the other members of the conference had ever heard such language from a preacher in a sermon. Having gotten our attention, he went on: “Parents who do not provide for the spiritual growth of their children have failed in one of their primary parental responsibilities.” The preacher had used that four-letter word for effect, and it was effective, at least with me. I’ve often wondered how many of the others who were there still remember this point he made. For people of faith, parenting includes the responsibility to provide for the spiritual growth of our children.

When I was a teenager I didn’t want to go to church, but my mother made me. I made things pretty tough on her. It seemed like we had an argument every Sunday morning about going to church, but she always swept aside my arguments with the maddening, “Of course you want to go.” I went unwillingly, and years later, I was glad that she made me go. Even though I could not hear God calling me to worship, she could. And she fulfilled that part of her parental responsibility. Today, I give thanks that she did.

The spiritual nurture of children has never been easy, and it’s even more difficult today. For one thing, the structure of the family has changed since the time that preacher spoke. Families with two parents in the home are now in the minority and by the year 2010 less than 30 percent of our children will have two parents at home. That makes the job of parenting, and “Christian” parenting, even more difficult.

We can lament this situation with all kinds of “Ain’t it awful” complaints, but that is not going to change anything. It seems to me that the need for help in the spiritual nurture of our children is one of the critical reasons for being part of a community of faith, like this one on the Old Glenn Highway. In every age, but especially in this one, we need support in the all-important task of passing on the faith to our children.

In this community of faith, those of you who are not married, those of you who are married but not biological parents, those of you whose children are raised and gone, all have an opportunity—no, more, you have an obligation—to be models for our children of what it means to be Christian. Those of you who are parents and in the process of raising your children, what you do with your children and how you provide spiritual nurture for them is not only important for them, but for all of the children and young people in this congregation.

We have many programs here (Sunday School, Youth Group, etc.) to assist in the parent’s responsibility for the spiritual nurture of their children. Today, we presented Bibles to the third graders. There are many adult classes and groups where adults can be nurtured and thus be better prepared for the task of spiritually nurturing your children and answering their questions when they do read the Bible. When someone invites you to work in Sunday School, Children’s Choir, or in one of our youth ministries, I hope you will seize the opportunity with enthusiasm. You can help bridge the generations and contribute to all of our being faithful in observing the fifth commandment.

I have a special word for those kids and young people who may be here today because Mom, Dad, or someone else made you. I want to tell you that they made you come because they believe they wouldn’t be good parents if they didn’t. They believe that just as they have a responsibility to see that you are fed, clothed, cared for when you are sick, and go to school, they also have a responsibility to see that you learn to pray, that you learn about the Bible, and that you learn what it means to be a Christian. I don’t know what you will decide about your own faith when you grow up. You’ll have to make that decision. In the meantime, if there is an intergenerational struggle going on at your house, I hope the struggle is to honor and love.

That is, of course, not the only intergenerational struggle in today’s households. Families often include elderly parents in the home or in managed care facilities. These relationships have their own dynamics and struggles. If you are experiencing the intergenerational struggle at this level, I hope that struggle is also to honor and to love.

We sang these words earlier in the service: “O Lord, may church and home combine to teach thy perfect way, with gentleness and love like thine, that none shall ever stray.” Would you let those words be your prayer today?

4. OBSERVE SABBATH

2007-09-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Mark 2:23-28

The Ten Commandments, God's means for ordering our relationship with God and with our neighbor, were probably only one or two Hebrew words each in their original form, the rest of the words around them probably being later additions to explain their meaning in different times and living situations.

Some of you have mentioned to me that you learned the Commandments in slightly different ways. I said last week that some groups number them differently. First, if you have a Jewish background you probably learned that the first commandment is what we have called the "Prologue:" "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." In Jewish tradition, the second commandment includes both "You shall have no other gods," and "You shall not make for yourself an idol." The rest follow as we have learned them.

If you have a Catholic or Lutheran background you probably learned that the first commandment combined what we have learned as the first two: no other gods and no idols. That means that they have only nine commandments, right? No. They follow the text of the commandments found in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy and see in the commandment about coveting two commandments where we see only one: first, a prohibition against coveting your neighbor's wife, and a second, a prohibition against coveting your neighbor's property. We will talk more about that distinction when we consider the last commandment on November 4th.

If God gave the Ten Commandments today I am sure they would be printed with numbers and hanging indents so that there wouldn't be any mistaking which commandment was which number. But they were given in ancient times to a pre-literate people who didn't have much time for the luxury of things like hanging indents. Even so, the Ten Commandments are clear, both in their version in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5.

I can understand why, in the Jewish tradition, the first commandment might be considered those words at the very beginning: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." While this is certainly not a "Do" or "Do not" commandment, it is a reminder of what I have said each week: the Ten Commandments are as much about "grace" as about "law." Having those words as the first commandment is a reminder that the commandments are about grace: God's saving love that goes before the law. The commandments are not "rules" made up to make our lives miserable. They are the framework for meaningful life as children of the God who created us. They are given by a God who has loved and cared for us before when could do anything on our own. We obey the commandments out of gratitude. The converse is also true: disobeying the commandments are acts of ingratitude for all that God has done for us.

The first three commandments make clear the terms for our relationship to God: First, we are to be loyal to this God, and no others. Second, we are not to try to remake this God over in our image. Third, we are to take care how and for what purposes we invoke the name of this God. I want to suggest that the fourth commandment is just as much a part of the terms of our relationship with God as are the first three.

The fourth commandment is stated in positive, not prohibitive, terms: "Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy." In the ancient world before this time, no society had a day of rest. They had occasional and set festivals during the year, but no day of the week when they were to rest. Perhaps that is why this commandment is stated in positive terms. Most of the commandments are set in the negative, or prohibitive, terms presumably because their intention was to “set limits.” But if people had no concept of what a day of rest was because there had never been one before, then it would have been difficult to cast the commandment in prohibitive terms. "Sabbath" in Hebrew literally means "ceasing." On one day of the week people were to "cease" from work, and that included children, servants, and even animals.

There are two rationale offered to explain this commandment. The first is offered in Exodus 20:8: God needs rest, and as children created in God's image, we do too. The text reminds us that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day rested. This is a remarkable image, that even God needs rest. The message is clear: if even God needs to be refreshed by rest, how much more do we need it?

The second rationale for the commandment is found in the version in Deuteronomy 5: "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day." (5:15) As slaves in Egypt, the people did not have the luxury of taking a day off. They were forced to work every day. Not only did that use up their bodies, but it also hindered them from remembering who they were. Now a free people, they are to cease from work one day a week, not only so they can be physically and mentally refreshed, but also so they can "remember" who God is and who they are.

Observance of the Sabbath is a public statement about this community's loyalty to God. I think that is why it is listed with the other commandments defining the terms of a relationship with God. Keeping the Sabbath "holy" (which means to "set apart for God's use") means to take this day in time and "set it apart" for both rest and remembering —“remembering” is what we do when we worship. Observance of the Sabbath includes two things: rest and worship.

This commandment and the texts we read about it today raise two important questions. The first is, "Why was the punishment for not observing the Sabbath so severe -- the penalty was death?" We might have asked why the penalties for breaking any of the commandments were so severe. I don't have a good answer to that question, except to acknowledge that bridging the thousands of years that separate an ancient nomadic people and our post-modern world is very difficult. What is clear in the meaning of the commandments for us, however, is that observance of the Sabbath was as important as the rest of the commandments. It was not, as some might think, a kind of "optional extra" commandment to do or not do as one chose. The observance of the Sabbath was regarded as a critical public statement of one's loyalty to God. How important is observing Sabbath for you?

The second question raised is "Why do Christians observe Sunday instead of Saturday as Sabbath?" Jesus and the earliest Christians observed the Sabbath on Saturday, just as the rest of their Jewish brothers and sisters. In the first three centuries after the resurrection, when Gentiles became more numerous in the church, relations between Christians and Jews became more strained, and the two faith communities separated. Increasingly, for Christians the focus of Sabbath observance moved to Sunday, the day when Christ had been raised from the dead. Sunday was not formally made "the Sabbath" for Christians until the fourth century, and then it was to emphasize the separation between Judaism and Christianity.

Where is Jesus in the observance of Sabbath? In the passage we read today from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ disciples are accused of violating the Sabbath because they were plucking heads of grain as they walked through a field on the Sabbath. Now we might debate about whether this was a violation of the fourth commandment, but in Jesus’ day there was no question. Within the 603 other rabbinic laws in the first five books of the Bible and the thousands of accepted interpretations that had come down through the centuries with the same force of law as the commandments there were provisions making it clear that this was a Sabbath violation. On several other occasions, Jesus healed on the Sabbath, which was also a violation. He apparently did so purposefully. Jesus rejected the narrow legalistic interpretation of the Law. To the charge against his disciples, he said, "The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27) While the Sunday observance is a painful reminder of the separation between Jews and Christians, I have a hard time imagining that God cares much about whether the Sabbath is observed on Saturday, Sunday or any other particular day of the week. But I think God does care about whether or not we observe Sabbath.

In his book, The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill writes of the fourth commandment: "The Sabbath is surely one of the simplest and sanest recommendations any god has ever made; and those who live without such septimanal punctuation are emptier and less resourceful."[1]

You probably know that here in the Alaska Missionary Conference there is an annual retreat for the clergy and other professional church workers every January or February. The Oregon Idaho Annual Conference has a similar retreat except that it is in October. A couple of years ago, the theme was “Sabbath” and the question was how were we who are clergy doing in observing Sabbath ourselves? Since for clergy Sundays are “work days,” when do we observe Sabbath? There is the old joke, which sometimes is not really a joke, offered by some who are not clergy, “Well, since you only work one day a week, observing Sabbath on one of the other days of the week shouldn’t be so difficult.” The truth is, of course, that clergy are as prone to overwork as any other persons. One of the speakers at the retreat observed that some church members actually like it when the pastor works seven days a week because it justifies their working seven days a week. If that is the case, when we clergy don’t take breaks, it not only harms our lives but we set a bad example for those we are supposed to lead.

One of the pastors at the retreat spoke of how he had fallen into the trap of thinking that he had to work seven days a week. Then, he said, he bought a new car. I think he said that it was the first “new” car he had ever purchased. He read the owner’s manual and he read the instructions about how you are supposed to change the oil every three thousand miles. If this regimen is strictly followed, said the manual, the car will run better and last longer. He began to think about this in terms of his own failure to observe Sabbath in his personal life. He held up the Bible and said that this “owner’s manual” said that we should take strict care to observe Sabbath, not because it was a rule, but because when we observe it we will “run better and “last longer.”

The first commandment calls us to declare our loyalty to God. The second commandment warns against remaking God in our own image. The third commandment warns us to take care about how we use God’s name. The fourth commandment calls us to “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” This could have been relegated to a lesser position, perhaps in the “top 25 or 50” commandments, but here it is in the “top ten.” Deep down, I think we know why: we need the Sabbath to keep our relationships to God alive and healthy, and we need the Sabbath so that we will “run better” and “last longer.” The question is this: can we recognize that need and decide to accept God’s gracious provision of Sabbath?

[1] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way everyone Thinks and Feels (Nan A. Talese / Anchor Books: New York, 1998) p. 144.

3. NO MISUSE OF GOD'S NAME

2007-09-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 19:1-6; 20:7; Matthew 5:33-37

This last week has been a little scary because of a health problem I have. But because of wonderful medical resources in Anchorage and the wonderful support of the people of this church, I am well and thankful.

The fundamentals of our relationship to God and neighbor are encapsulated in the Ten Commandments. Originally probably only one or two words for each, the commandments were simple enough to be counted on the hands and memorized by anyone. We have said that over the centuries there were elaborations on the commandments, the words around them in Exodus 20 and the other 603 rabbinic laws in the first five books of the Bible. We also said that elaboration was a necessary part of understanding how to obey the commandments in a particular time and place. What we are doing in this series of sermons is to better understand what it means for us to obey the commandments in our time and place.

In order to avoid confusion as we began, I didn't tell you that there are two versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible. The one most often cited is from the twentieth chapter of Exodus. The second is found in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy. You might want to compare them and see if you can find how they differ. And, there are different ways of counting the ten in Exodus; but we’ll talk about that on another day.

The last two Sundays we have reminded ourselves that the Ten Commandments are as much about "grace" as about "law." The commandments are not the whims of a capricious sovereign to make our lives miserable but rather the framework for full and meaningful living by a God who, as we are reminded in the prologue to the commandments, rescued this people from slavery in Egypt. We are to obey the commandments because they are given by God who created and loves us.

The first commandment, "You shall have no other gods," is about loyalty to one God amid the competing claims for our loyalty from other gods. We make a vow to be loyal to God when we are baptized and join the church. Loyalty is a choice that we have to make over and over, a choice we make every day.

The second commandment, "You shall make no idols," is a warning not to try to remake God in our image, something less than God really is. Once we have declared our loyalty to God, one of our temptations is always to try to remake God into our image. The second commandment is a warning not to attempt that with God. Counselors tell us who choose to commit to a life partner that it is not a good idea to do with them either.

The third commandment is "You shall not misuse of the name of the Lord your God." Of course, most of us who memorized the Ten Commandments when we were kids did not memorize this one in this form. Perhaps you memorized it from the old King James Version of the Bible: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain."

When I was growing up, this commandment meant, "no swearing." I understood that to include a whole variety of four-letter words, of which "love" was not one. I heard a story about a preacher who was riding his bicycle down the Old Glenn Highway when he met a kid pushing a lawn mower in the opposite direction. The preacher greeted the kid and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he wanted to trade his lawn mower for a bicycle. The preacher needed a lawn mower so he said, "How about trading for my bike?" The kid said, "Can I ride it first?" "Sure," replied the preacher. While the kid was riding the bike, the preacher tried to start the lawn mower. He couldn't get it started. When the kid came back with the bike, he said, "I'll trade." The preacher said, "I tried to start the lawn mower, but I couldn't get it started." The kid said, "You have to cuss a lot to get it going." The preacher said, "I don't think I remember how to cuss," to which the kid responded, "Just pull the rope a few times and you'll remember." I think it was the English author and critic, G. K. Chesterton, who said about swearing, "He knew not what to say; therefore he swore."

I was a bit older when I realized that the third commandment might be about more than loosely using the name of God when I was frustrated or at my wit's end. In his book, The Ten Commandments, John Holbert, who will be here at the Lay Academy next week, suggests another translation of the third commandment: “You must not raise up the name of YHWH your god for nothing…”[1] He says that the term “raise up” is key to understanding what this commandment intends. Just before Moses is given the commandments, in one of the passages read today, he is instructed to say these words for God: “You have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” (Exodus 19:4) The message is the same as the prologue to the commandments, but here the image is of being carried, like a mother eagle bearing her chicks aloft to teach them to fly. The image is one of love, support and protection. The same word is used in the commandment about “raising up” or “carrying” the name of God. Thus, in the way that God brought the people out of slavery on eagle’s wings, so the people who are to “raise up and carry” the name of God do it only in love for that God, in support for the ways of that God, and to protect the honor of that God.[2] This commandment is a warning not to “raise up” or “invoke” the name of God for trivial purposes. Or, as Andrew Greeley has suggested, the commandment speaks of the consequences of “frivolous and hypocritical religion.”

There seems to be a natural progression in the first three commandments. The first commandment warns us not to run after other gods but to be loyal to this God. The second commandment warns us not to try to remake God over in our image, which is idolatry. The third commandment is a warning to take care about how and for what we invoke God's name.

I want to suggest that obeying the third commandment entails at least three things. You’ll have to decide whether or not you agree with my three.

First, we don’t need to invoke God’s name to tell the truth. In the ancient world an oath invoked the name of a deity to guarantee the truth of what was said. Under oath, what was said or promised had to be true and what was vowed had to be done. This is somewhat analogous to the legal distinction made in the United States courts between statements made under oath and other statements that are not. In our legal system to testify falsely under oath is a crime. “Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” If you knowingly don’t tell the truth you may be charged with perjury. However, when Jesus spoke about this commandment in the text that was read today, he abolished any distinction between words said under oath and words said without oaths. Persons were to speak the truth with all their words and to stand behind all that they said without any need for emphasis or validation by using the name of God. Jesus’ disciples were to be known as people who stood behind all they said without invoking the name of God.

Second, we are to pay attention when we do lift up God’s name. Do you think about the words you say, the words that you sing and pray in worship? We say the words and sing the verses so often that we may not pay attention to what we are saying or singing. The Hebrew prophets are noted for their anger at people running after other gods and failing to practice justice. But what really got their blood to boil was when people were content to say all the right things in worship but ignored the implications of those words for their lives. More than anything else, perhaps, such failure to pay attention was “raising up” the name of God for “nothing.”

Third, we are to think twice about what we use God’s name to bless. Is it something that God really wants to bless? Sometimes it’s just little things. I once knew a woman who when she drove to the city to shop would always pray that God would find her a parking place. She said that God always found a place for her. I’m not sure but that might not be “raising up” the name of God for “nothing.” More than little things, God’s name has been invoked to bless some of the most ungodly acts imaginable, completely contrary to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. This commandment is a warning to think twice before you invoke God’s name for some cause.

The third commandment is not a commandment against invoking the name of God, but rather a call to be serious and intentional when we “raise up” that name. When we are known as people who speak truthfully, we are obeying the commandment. When we come to worship with a sense that we are standing on holy ground and that somehow the week ahead of us will be different because we were here, we are obeying the third commandment. When we are careful about what we invoke God’s name to bless, we are obeying this commandment.

Today, we remember how God has raised us up like a mother eagle teaching her young to fly. We also remember that we are called to “raise up” God’s name with care, love, and respect.

[1] John C. Holbert, The Ten Commandments (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002) p. 37.

[2] Ibid. p. 41.

2. NO IDOLS

2007-09-08T17:00:00.001-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:4-6: 32:1-6; Matthew 22:34-40

Will you try it again this week? Hold your hands out in front of you with palms facing toward you so that you can see all the fingers and thumbs. Start on the right with your thumb: No other gods. Then take the right index finger: No idols. Take the middle finger: No misuse of God's name. Take the right ring finger: Observe Sabbath. Take the right little finger: Honor parents. Take the left little finger: No murder. Take the left ring finger: No adultery. Take the left middle finger: No stealing. Take the left index finger: No lying. Take the left thumb: No coveting.

I began this series of sermons last week by saying that it was likely that in their original form -- as they might have been on the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain -- each commandment was only one or two words in Hebrew, simple enough to be memorized by anyone and the convenient number corresponding to the number of fingers on the two hands.

I also said that the Ten Commandments are as much about "grace" as "law." The introduction to them makes that clear: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…" These are not the commands of a God who wants to burden us with laws, but are the conditions of meaningful life given by the God who has loved us before we could do anything on our own. For Christians that's why the Ten Commandments have not been set aside or superseded by Jesus. They remain the fundamentals for any who would enter into covenant with this God.

We looked at the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me." If we choose this God over all the other gods competing for our loyalty, then why is there any need for the second commandment? "You shall not make for yourself an idol." The temptation addressed by this commandment is not to follow a rival god, but rather the temptation to domesticate God into a visible, controlled object. The difference between the first and second commandments is like the selection of a life partner. The first has to do with selecting and being loyal to one particular partner. The second addresses the temptation that comes after the selection: it is the temptation to remake that person into what you would like the partner to be.

In premarital counseling I try to get the couple to look at how they see each other and how they view such critical issues as money, family, sex and faith. What they are tempted to do when they see serious conflicts in how they view these matters is to think to themselves, "Oh, with time I will change him or her." Such assumptions are, of course, recipes for disaster in any serious relationship. Many marriages and friendships flounder on the attempt to remake the other into what we want them to be. The second commandment is a warning against the temptation to try to remake God into what we want God to be.

The story of Aaron and the making of the "golden calf" while Moses was up on the mountain receiving the commandments was not an attempt to forsake the God of Moses for another god. (Exodus 32) It was an effort to remake the mysterious God of the Exodus into something more tangible and visible. When they reduced God to a golden calf, however, disaster was the result. If they could remake God into their own image, then they could also remake the rules of their relationship with each other. What they intended to be a celebration of God turned into a drunken orgy.

The second commandment is a reminder that God is greater than any of our preconceived notions and that we dare not try to reduce God to something that is more manageable and makes fewer demands on us.

We have been talking about the negative because the second commandment is so stated. I believe it is so stated because it is a boundary: whatever else you do, do not try to remake God in your own image. But there is a positive way to talk about loyalty to God and not attempting to remake God. If the people of the Jewish faith had a creed, there is little doubt that it would be these words from Deuteronomy, called the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all your might.” (5:4-5) Loyalty to God is to be expressed with our whole-hearted love, just as is loyalty to our spouse. When Jesus was asked what commandment was the greatest, he did not cite one of the “Big Ten,” but rather the Shema from Deuteronomy. And to that he added the words from Leviticus: “And a second is like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

How do we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds and our neighbors as ourselves? At the most fundamental level, don’t we love God by not having other gods, by not making idols, by not making wrongful use of God’s name, by observing Sabbath, and by honoring our parents? Also at the most fundamental level, don’t we love our neighbors by not killing them, by not committing adultery with their spouses, by not stealing from them, by not lying to them, and not being preoccupied with wanting what they have?

Have you seen that bumper sticker that says, “The Ten Commandments are not multiple choice”? Together, the commandments provide the framework for what it means to love God and love our neighbor. They are not optional and they call for commitment.

Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has rightly observed that we are all "children of Feuerbach." Ludwig Feuerback (1804-1872) was a nineteenth century philosopher who articulated the assumption made popular during the Enlightenment, "that God is in the end a projection of our best humanness."[1] This temptation to make God like us can be seen in two extremes. On the one hand, there is the temptation to make God "warm and fuzzy," so domesticated that this God would never challenge anything we do. If we are not careful, when we use expressions like "God has no hands but ours," we may be putting God into a mold that is alien to the awesome God we see liberating a people from slavery and calling them into an accountable relationship. The other extreme of our attempts to make God like us is to reduce God to a set of fixed propositions that give certitude and stability, and forget that the God we say we worship is a God who is always doing "new things" in history.

The tragedy of remaking God into our image is not so much that it is an insult to God. I assume that God has more to do than to get irritated and enraged by our misconceptions. The tragedy is that the reduced God, the god made in our own image, prevents a meaningful relationship to the real God.

There is a danger in comparing our relationship to God with our most intimate human relations. We are not equal partners with God, as we are with our significant others, for example. But the most intimate human relationships can give us clues about our relationship with God. When we try to remake our significant other into our image, we no longer know the real person. Divorce is often the result, but sometimes it means lifetimes of being lonely because two people don't really know each other.

We do not set out to remake somebody else in our image. Sometimes we do it out of fear. When my stepmother Isabel was dying of cancer, my father could not admit to himself or to her that she was dying. In a way, he remade his image of Isabel into someone she was not because he could not confront the reality that she was dying. In the months before her death, the relationship between my dad and Isabel became more superficial. They could not share the deep things they needed to confront. Isabel could not talk about her fears of dying. Dad could not talk about his fears of living after her death.

What happened to my dad is what happens when, for whatever reason, we try to reshape our significant other into something they are not; the relationship between the real persons dies. That's the tragedy of trying to remake God into our image. We end up losing the relationship with God.

How do we avoid remaking God into our image and losing that most important of all relationships? An important part of the answer is a lifetime of learning with others in a prayerful openness to God. On this day that we begin a new church school year you have an opportunity to consider a myriad of different learning possibilities. While much of our learning and openness to God is done alone, we are seriously lacking if we do not have others to help us test what we think we know about God. We need to risk putting ourselves in situations where, as the writer of 1 Peter says, we have to give account of the hope that is within us, and listen to their accounts. Some adults, even some who recognize the importance of life-long learning in their career paths, may be content with the equivalent of a third grade education in their spiritual lives. Some of those folks say with pride that they went to Sunday School when they were children; and they think that’s all they need. A third grade education is great for a nine year old, but woefully inadequate for adult. We know that acquiring knowledge and building relationships require effort. Where did we ever get the notion that such effort is not needed for our knowledge of, and relationship with, God? The good news is that we have classes for all ages, and for adults, we’ve got classes on Sunday and on different days and hours of the week. The bad news is that you may not be registered for one or more of them. One of the most important things you can do to avoid making God in your own image is to put yourself in a discipline of study and prayer with others in the congregation. Don’t miss the opportunity you have today.

Let us leave this place today determined not make idols, determined to resist the temptation to try to remake our life partners or our God into our own images. Let us be open to the wonder, newness, and mystery of authentic relationships; and cherish the intimacy that openness makes possible.

[1] "Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections on the Book of Exodus," The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) p. 843.

1. NO OTHER GODS

2007-09-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments as Grace and Law

Exodus 20:3; Matthew 5:17-20

Hold your hands out in front of you with palms facing inward so that you can see all the fingers and thumbs. Start on the right with your thumb: No other gods. Then take the right index finger: No idols. Take the middle finger: No misuse of God's name. Take the right ring finger: Observe Sabbath. Take the right little finger: Honor parents. Take the left little finger: No murder. Take the left ring finger: No adultery. Take the left middle finger: No stealing. Take the left index finger: No lying. Take the left thumb: No coveting.

It is presumptive in the extreme for us to assume we understand why God does things the way God does, but you will have to admit that to be able to get the absolute fundamentals of life onto the ten fingers is pretty remarkable. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that the people to whom these fundamentals were given were a primitive nomadic tribe who did not yet know how to read or write.

Scholars pretty much agree that in their original form the commandments were just as brief as we stated them, perhaps one or two words each in Hebrew. In fact the word used in Hebrew to refer to the "Ten Commandments" is "words" -- the "ten words." These utterly primitive basic injunctions were simple enough that they could be easily memorized by anybody. That is probably what was on the original tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. So, if you are wondering about the rest of the words around the commandments, like God's vengefulness in punishing not only the wrongdoers but the wrongdoer's children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, you are welcome to consider them as later scribal elaborations on the meaning of the commandments.

I do not intend to disparage elaboration on the meaning of the commandments. Elaboration is what happens when you try to figure out what the commandments mean for you in your time and place. Just as it was necessary for the people of Israel to understand the implications of the commandments for their life together, so will it be necessary for us to consider their implications for our life together here in Chugiak, Alaska. We will do that with the modesty that understands that people who come after us may wonder how we arrived at the interpretations we did. That likelihood, however, makes it no less necessary for us to try to understand what God intends for us to hear and do from those original "ten words." Because of the work we have to do, it is highly unlikely that we will all agree on the meaning of the commandments for all the issues we face. That's okay because we don't have to have to agree on everything.

We do, however, begin with the assumption that these "ten words" are God's words for us. We recognize that there is a sharpness to their meaning well expressed on that billboard somebody put up in California: "The Ten Commandments: What part of 'No' don't you understand?'" That sharp negative must not be lost or minimized any more than a road sign that says "Stop!" These are not "Caution" signs: they are "Stop" signs. They are the boundaries that define the life of God's covenant people.

It is not accidental that the first commandment is "You shall have no other gods before me." This commandment is about loyalty, loyalty to one God. This is about loyalty in a far more profound sense than our loyalty to country as we express in the Pledge of Allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to United States of America and to the republic for which it stands."

Notice that I didn't say THE one God, for when these commandments were given the idea that there was only one God (monotheism) had not yet been born. The people of Israel lived in the midst of many gods competing for their loyalty. The names of the other gods changed from Baal to El to Astarte to Tammuz, but these gods were not Yahweh. Because this God, Yahweh, had saved them from slavery in Egypt, they would have had to be fools to turn to other gods. But turn to other gods they did. In a sense, the rest of the Bible can be read as one story after the other of people seeking other gods.

John Holbert is a professor on preaching and Old Testament interpretation at Perkins School of Theology at SMU in Dallas. It is our good fortune that he will be teaching in the Lay School of Theology hosted here at our church on September 21 and 22. In his book, The Ten Commandments, Professor Holbert suggests that in the original Hebrew this commandment may not only be translated “you shall have no other gods before me,” but also as “you must not become other gods.”[1] This is similar to the words of the snake to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The snake said that if they ate of the tree of knowledge they would “become like God,” or “You will certainly become God!”

However one chooses to hear this phrase – whether as “You shall have no other gods” or as “You shall not become other gods” – the point is clear: Yahweh demands loyalty. Yahweh is the God who brings you and me out of our slavery, out of the houses of our bondage. No other gods – least of all those of us who think we can be our own gods -- have the power to save us from ourselves.

Who are the gods that compete for our loyalties? It might be said that anything may become a “god” for us: food, sex, drink, drugs, television, the Internet, video games, and on and on. When Jesus spoke about the matter of competing loyalties, he spoke clearly: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 5:24) I don’t think Jesus had anything against wealth per se, but when wealth, or security or power blind us to the gifts of the God who cares about people in slavery and calls us to live lives of justice and compassion, “wealth” has become a god and cannot be tolerated. While we may not be slaves like the Hebrew people were in Egypt, we may find ourselves enslaved to other gods and in need of liberation.

In my column in the newsletter, which may or may not have found its way to your box yet, I spoke of our need to see the commandments as both “grace” and “law.” I will not repeat what I said there. You can read it when the newsletter finds its way to your box, or you can read it on the blog. I was talking about this to a Jewish friend of mine and he said, “Did you know that mitzvoth, the word in Hebrew for ‘commandments,’ also means ‘blessings’”? Grace is not only God’s love that goes before us and meets us on the way, but grace is also God’s love that blesses us with the commandments that, as the Psalmist says, can revive our souls.

In her best-selling book titled, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,[2] Ann Lamott tells the story of her early life lived in a counter-cultural home environment in California in the 60s and 70s. Hers was the picture of a girl lonely in her own family, seeking solace for her loneliness in love affairs, alcohol and drugs. The death of her best friend seemed to make her struggle with drugs and alcohol an impossible one. But then she happened onto St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Marin City, California.

She listened to the singing coming from the church from across the street long before she entered the door. It was, as she said, "the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open." "Somehow," she said, "the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated." "No one tried to con me," she said. The people radiated kindness and warmth. They just made a place for her in the church. Her struggles with alcohol and drugs didn't end, nor her other struggles, but she finally came to the place where she said to drugs, "I quit," and to Jesus, "All right. You can come in." She declared her loyalty God. Her troubles weren't over, but she now had something to hold onto. She said that she and her son didn't miss church ten times in the next twelve years.

Anne recalled a story told by Veronica, the tall African-American woman who came to be the pastor at the church. Veronica said that one day when she was about seven, her best friend got lost. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn't find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’”

"And that,” said Anne, “is why I have stayed so close to mine -- because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home." (p. 55)

I think that the word of grace Anne Lamott received from the folks in that church was not different from the word of grace those former slaves in Egypt received when Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets, “I am the God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Grace is unearned love – the love that goes before and greets us on the way. Only after we have heard that word of grace can we understand that the commandments are given because God loves us and that they are for our benefit. Only then can we declare our allegiance not to have any other gods.

Anne Lamott’s experience is not only about grace and learning about how the commandments are for our benefit; it is also about the community of faith where she was able to hear that word of grace. Almost every Sunday we have people visiting our church. What do people find when they come here? Are they welcomed like Ann Lamott was in her church? She experienced the grace of God at the hands of the people in her church. Do visitors to our church experience the grace of God in the form of genuine kindness and warmth, with no cons? Only when we have experienced that grace can we understand that the commandments are God’s gift to keep us from destroying ourselves and to give us a framework for full and creative living. Then, no matter what we’ve done or how bad we feel we will be able to find our ways home.

[1] John C. Holbert, The Ten Commandments (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002) pp. 18-19.
[2] Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).

TEN COMMANDMENTS AS GRACE AND LAW

2007-08-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

On September 2nd, I will begin a sermon series on the Ten Commandments. What’s your first response? Be honest. Is it “This is a great opportunity to learn more about the commandments?” Or, is it, “Is this ever going to be a downer? He’s going to be talking about how bad we are?” Or is it, “Oh good, he’s going to lay it on the line about bad people?”

There is no question but that the mention of the Ten Commandments generates all kinds of different responses, from jokes to adamant defense. Despite the fact that it is unlikely that many Christians can actually recite them, and even fewer recite them in the order they appear in Exodus 20 or in Deuteronomy 5, the Ten Commandments have always been regarded as a core expression of our faith, much the same as the Lord’s Prayer.

Over the next weeks we will consider each of the commandments. We will try to understand what they meant in their own time and what they might mean for us in ours. Were the commandments important to Jesus? As Christians, are we obliged to obey them? Some have concluded that the commandments are out-dated and are no longer binding on us today. You may be surprised to find yourself in that category on some of them. If you stay with me through this series you will not only learn the commandments in a way that you won’t soon forget, but you may decide that they have something to say about your life here and now. At least, that is my hope. As we go through these weeks, I welcome your comments and questions on the blog. I will try to respond to questions in the sermons.

A question you might already have is this: “Didn’t all of the cultures and religions of the ancient world have laws like those in the Ten Commandments?” The answer is “No.” In his book, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Thomas Cahill rightly observes: “There is no document in all the literatures of the world that is like the Ten Commandments. Of course, there are ethical guidelines from other cultures. But these are always offered in a legal framework (if you do that, then this will be the consequence) or as worldly-wise advice (if you want to lead a happy life, you will be sure to do such-and-such and avoid so-and-so).”[1]

That many people have taken the commandments as laws like other laws they have known is understandable, but the Ten Commandments are not just “Law;” they are also “Grace.” One of the ways Christians have most consistently misunderstood the commandments is the way we have often misunderstood the Hebrew Bible, what we call the “Old Testament.” Many of us were brought up to believe that the God of the Old Testament is a God of “Law,” while the God of Jesus and the New Testament is a God of “Love,” or a God of “Grace.” That’s been a temptation to which Christians have often succumbed to set themselves apart from our Jewish heritage. If the commandments are to have anything positive to say to us in our time, I think we will have to rediscover how the commandments are as much about “grace” as about “law.”

You've probably heard the expression: Justice is getting what we deserve. Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we don't deserve. That word of “grace” is the very first word in the commandments: "Then God spoke all these words. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Just a few years before these words were spoken, the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. They had no identity and they had no hope. But through Moses, God freed them. Now they were in the wilderness at the foot of Mount Sinai. God calls Moses up on the mountain and gives him the commandments. But before the actual commandments are given to the people, there is a word about the God who is giving them. These “laws” are not simply the requirements of a whimsical superior who demands loyalty just because she or he is bigger and more powerful. They are the commandments of a God who has saved a "nobody" people from slavery. They are the commandments of a God who loved and cared for this people before they could do anything on their own. Those opening words tell us who this God is and who we are. The commandments are given out of the loving grace of God, not the capricious whim of an absent sovereign. We are to obey the commandments out of gratitude for the grace of God who loved us enough to save us from certain destruction and who now gives us a framework for full and creative living.

I am looking forward to thinking with you about these fundamental elements of faithful living. I hope you are too.

[1] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (New York: Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books Doubleday, 1998) p. 140.

BEFORE WINTER COMES

2007-08-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; II Timothy 4:9-22; Luke 14:15-24

"For everything there is a season," said the writer of Ecclesiastes, "and a time for every matter under heaven." (Ecc. 3:1) Living in Alaska after living in Oregon for six years, I am reminded that folks here may have special insight into the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes. Those who read the fireweed have seen the signs that winter is coming. There are even a few patches of yellow where only a few days ago it was all green. If they haven’t already, the geese that are not permanent residents will have completed their practice flights and head south. These are nature’s signals that the seasons are changing. On Friday when I was at the barbershop in Eagle River—and yes, I do need occasional visits to such establishments—I listened to the barber say that in these days she doesn’t look up at the mountains when she commutes back and forth to Anchorage; she doesn’t want catch a glimpse of the first “termination dust.” And, of course, there are other signals, most notably the beginning of school this past week.

Some have been scurrying to get fish for the winter and are ready to do the same with moose and caribou. Others have lists of tasks to complete before snow and temperatures make them difficult if not impossible. A pastor friend of mine who served a number of years here in the Great Land dubbed the summer as Alaska’s “Manic Season.” Some welcome the change in season as much as others are anxious about it. Whether welcome or anxious, even in the face of the uncertainty of what warming will mean for this winter, we know that winter is coming.

I think we in Alaska may not only have special insight to bring to today’s text from Ecclesiastes, but also to the words we read from Paul’s second letter to Timothy, especially in its references to winter. Many scholars doubt that Paul actually wrote the first and second letters of Timothy. They seem to reflect a later time in the life of the church than during the life of Paul. Few, though, doubt that the two letters include fragments of actual letters of Paul and the passage we read today seems to be at least part of one he wrote to Timothy.

Paul wrote these lines from his prison cell in Rome where he was awaiting final judgment by the Roman supreme tribunal, perhaps even Caesar himself. Paul does not expect to live much longer. before he closes, he has a special request of Timothy, his son in the faith and perhaps his closest friend. This is not a letter of instruction to a church, but a personal plea to a trusted friend: “Do your best to come to me soon… When you come, bring the cloak that I left...at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.... Do your best to come before winter...."

Why come "before winter?" Although we are not certain where Timothy was when he received this request, we may assume that it was not too far from Troas where he was supposed to pick up Paul's coat. Troas is in present day Turkey, about 1,200 miles by boat from Rome. Twelve hundred miles is a long journey, especially in the first century. A twelve hundred-mile voyage on the Mediterranean Sea was perilous anytime, but in the winter, such voyages became unthinkable. Traffic ceased in the fall and did not resume again until the next spring. Paul's request to "come before winter" means that if Timothy didn't come in the fall, he wouldn't be able to come for another six months. The tone of Paul's letter is that he wouldn’t be alive when the spring came.

One of the realities of life is that there are times or seasons in which some things must be done, if they are to be done at all. I'm speaking about more than winterizing the car and getting the furnace checked.

I was seventeen and in my first year at Texas Wesleyan College when I received a note from Mrs. Jeter. Mrs. Jeter was the mother of my first girl friend when I was in the ninth grade. The relationship with the girl friend didn't last too long, but my relationship with her parents did. That seemed to be the case with a several of my girl friends. It had been three years since I had seen or heard from Mr. and Mrs. Jeter. Mrs. Jeter’s note said she had heard that I had decided to enter the ministry and that she wanted to offer her congratulations. She also told me that she was seriously ill. I was pleased to hear from her but distressed to learn about her illness. "I'll write her right away," I told myself. A week went by, then two, then a month. One Sunday afternoon I sat down and wrote a letter to her, telling her how much I had appreciated her friendship and her confidence in me. I didn't know what to say about her illness. "I'll finish it tomorrow," I told myself. Two days later I learned that she had died about the time I was writing the note. There are some things that have to be done before winter, or not done at all.

Perhaps it was that experience that -- 25 years later -- when I learned that my father had been diagnosed with colon cancer and was to undergo surgery that I quickly rearranged my schedule and went to Texas to be with him. I arrived the day before his surgery. It was to be a fairly routine procedure, but Dad had a feeling that he would not come through it. Since my dad had talked about dying for as long as I could remember, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take what he said. It had gotten to be a kind of standard way of saying goodbye after a visit, “Well son, I don’t know if I will still be here when you get back.” I think it is something parents are tempted to do to generate a little guilt in their grown children who live away from them.

But I stayed at the hospital and we literally talked all night. Even though I didn't really believe there would be any problems, I said all of the things I wanted to say to him. We talked about death, even the funeral service he wanted. But we also talked about what we would do when he recovered from the surgery, and how we would have a family reunion next summer at the annual rodeo in Clarendon. When he was in recovery the next day, something happened. He just didn't come out of the anesthesia. Instead, he went into a coma. He died two weeks later without ever regaining consciousness. It was just a freak thing that sometimes happens. But that night together was a gift for which I will ever be grateful.

I had some hesitancy in telling you about these two experiences. Some of us -- perhaps most of us -- are hounded by guilt about things left undone, obligations left unfulfilled, opportunities missed. We have trouble accepting the fact that we cannot do all those things we would like or feel we ought. But this sermon is not meant to engender guilt.

We can never be fully prepared for our relationships with others to end, or for other opportunities that we miss. There will be times when we wished we had acted sooner. There will be times we did act and be grateful. Life is like that. Many of our choices about the use of our time and energy are not choices between the important and the unimportant, but between the important and the essential. Timothy had to decide between the important and the essential. He doubtless had many obligations and opportunities where he was when he received Paul's letter. He chose what he believed to be essential. He apparently got to Rome before winter, was able to be with Paul in his last days, and was able to assist Paul in writing at least three important letters in the Bible: Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. And for that we, too, are forever in his debt.

Although our text doesn't do so directly, we are reminded that we do not have unlimited opportunities for decisions about making changes in our personal lives or in our relationships with God. This may seem to be at odds with the good news of the gospel that the future is open, and that at any moment we can begin to live a new life. But although God is always with us, we can put ourselves in a place where God cannot reach us.

In the Gospel text read this morning, Jesus told a parable about how God’s grace is like the invitation to a great banquet. God’s love and forgiveness are available to all. Somehow, though, some of those who were invited found other things more important to do first. One had bought some property and said he had to go see it. Another had just bought five yoke of oxen and had to go try them out. And another had just gotten married and so declined the gracious invitation. The hard truth about the parable is those who declined the invitation failed to distinguish between what was merely “important” in their lives for what was “essential.” The parable doesn’t suggest that God’s offer of grace is ever withdrawn, but it suggests that we can put other concerns first for so long that we put ourselves beyond the reach of God’s love and grace.

When I was a pastor in Juneau, one of the members of our church introduced Connie and me to a neighbor of hers, a young man with AIDS. The first time we met John he told us that he was going to die and that he wanted to do something about his relationship with God, something he said he had put off during his earlier life. He was all of about twenty-five. He wanted to know about God. He wanted to know how to pray. Most of all, he wanted to know how to die. Over the weeks and months that we talked and prayed with John, he sometimes said that he wished he had started this process years before. But in those months John did -- in the apostle Paul's words -- "work out his own salvation." When the end came, he was ready.

With everything else we have to do, it seems easy to put off time for reflection, prayer or Bible study. John had the reality of AIDS to give him a new sense of priorities in his life. We may not have such clear signals to help us distinguish between the "important" and the "essential" in our lives. But Paul's plea to Timothy can be our reminder that there are some things that, if they are to be done at all, must be done before winter.

There may be a phone call you want to make this afternoon, or a letter you have been intending to write. Do it. There may be things that you want to do to make this world a better place. Don't put them off. There may be a decision about your spiritual life that you’ve been postponing. Make it.

We will never do all the things we hoped to do. Perhaps the most important words of this text are "Do your best...” These may be the words with which you send your child off to school each day. Paul repeats them twice: "Do your best to come to me soon," and "Do your best to come before winter." God does not expect of us things we cannot do. Nor should we expect of ourselves things we can’t do, so don’t go away from here this morning feeling guilty about things you didn’t do in the past. The past is gone and we don’t know what the future will bring. All we have is the present and it is a gift; that’s why we call it the “present.” God expects us to "do our best" in the present. And when we do our best, God will take care of the rest.

Perhaps our prayer today might be in the words of Marijohn Wilkin who wrote a country gospel song with title, “One Day at a Time:” "Yesterday's gone sweet Jesus, and tomorrow may never be mine. Lord help me today, show me the way one day at a time."

FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, POWER AND GLORY

2007-08-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 7)

Revelation 1:4-8; Matthew 6:8-13 (KJV)

Today we conclude this series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer. With the end of the series I hope you have not finished praying or learning about this prayer. Before we come to the conclusion, let’s take a few minutes to see where we have been since July 21 when we started. We began with the recognition that the Lord’s Prayer is the single most used element in Christian worship, and we asked why that was the case. What is it that is so special about this prayer that one may safely assume that at any one moment in time someone or some congregation somewhere is praying it? You will have to decide if what I have suggested over these weeks answers that question and, more importantly, if what I have said has shed any light on the meaning of the prayer for you.

On the first Sunday we looked at the God to whom Jesus asked his followers to pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I suggested that the word “father” and “in heaven” are both keys to understanding. First, Jesus used the intimate term for “father,” which may be best translated “Daddy,” and that we are invited to pray to God as a loving, caring parent. Second, “in heaven” reminds us that this is a God beyond the limits of our minds to conceive. I cautioned about restricting the idea of God as being “male.” God in heaven, is surely beyond our categories of gender, and that we should be open to addressing God in feminine as well as masculine terms.

In the second week, we considered the petition, “Hallowed be thy name.” This petition is a reminder that prayer is God-centered. At heart, prayer is simply paying attention to God, and in paying attention we “hallow” God’s name. We talked about Brother Lawrence “practicing the presence of God” as a way to pay attention to God no matter what we are doing.

On the third Sunday of the series we came to what I suggested is the central petition of the prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” God’s kingdom, we remembered, is not a piece of geography, or an institution, or something that is in the distant future. The kingdom of God is whenever and wherever God’s will is done on earth. This should be the first and last of all our petitions in all conditions, even as it was for Jesus on the night of his arrest: “not my will but your will be done.” All of the petitions of this prayer are to be interpreted in the light of this single petition.

When we came to “Give us this day our daily bread” we recognized the difficulties in the translation. Nonetheless, we recognized that this is not a prayer for “my” daily bread, but for “our” (all of God’s children’s) daily sustenance. I also suggested that the petition may be more than that; it may be a prayer for “a taste today” of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

Then, we came to the petition for the forgiveness of our sins. We acknowledged that the Presbyterians are probably right, that the original words Jesus used were “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” We said that “debts” and “trespasses” are simply two different ways of talking about “sin.” We said that God’s love and willingness to forgive are never ending. At the same time, asking God to forgive us while we are unwilling to forgive those who have wronged us is simply unthinkable. As we are forgiven, so are we to forgive.

Last Sunday, we came to perhaps the hardest of the petitions, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I suggested that it may be the hardest, not because we don’t understand it but because it is not pleasant to think about “temptation” and “evil.” “Lead us not” I suggested is not an accurate translation because God does not tempt us. The more accurate translation is “Bring us not” or “Allow us not” to be in a situation of such great temptation or trial that we are in danger of losing our faith. This petition, I said, reminds us to take “evil” seriously, or as Professor Jose Miguez Bonino said, “Call it whatever best suits your ideology. Just don’t trivialize it by considering it mere human weakness.”

There remains one last line in the prayer as we pray it, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.” Have you noticed that line is not in the prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as we have read them over the past weeks? When the earliest English translations of the Bible were done (like the King James Version translated in 1611) the earliest manuscripts of the books of the New Testament were from the seventh century, meaning that they were copies, of copies, of copies, of copies, of copies, etc. Since the seventeenth century, earlier manuscripts of the books of the New Testament have been discovered, some dating to the second century. That still means that they are copies of copies of copies, but not nearly so many times far removed from the originals as those used by the scholars translating the King James Version. In the manuscripts those scholars worked with, mostly Latin versions of the Greek, this conclusion to the prayer was present, but in the earliest manuscripts it is not.

If this was not in the prayer as Jesus taught it, where did it come from? The words appear to be based on David’s prayer in 1 Chronicles 29:11: “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.” While this concluding doxology was probably not a part of the prayer as Jesus taught it, it is not a distortion of the prayer.

When we have hungered for a taste today of God’s will being done on earth, we are given the great assurance – “THINE is the kingdom.” Our prayer is not futile because it is God’s kingdom, not ours. If we seek the taste today it will be granted.

When we have confessed our guilt for debts and transgressions that we can never make good, this prayer takes us into the radiance of God – “THINE is the glory” -- where the shadows are dispelled. Our life has not been wasted. Nothing is irrevocably past and gone. God can forgive our sin, remove our guilt, and enable us to forgive others.

When we are overcome by the fear of temptation, when we realize we can’t stand up under the pressure, this prayer leads us into the presence of One who can help us – “THINE is the power”. Once we have experienced it we don’t have to remain prostrate in our defeats, but rise from them to new lives.

We are not talking easy answers here. This prayer is a song of resistance, not a song of conformity. In the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Acts there is a story about how when Paul and Silas went to Philippi in Macedonia, they were arrested, tortured, and thrown into prison. As they lay there in their chains, they prayed and at midnight, we are told, they praised God (Acts 16:25). Why did they praise God in prison, of all places, and in the darkest hours of the night, of all times? They did it because they found God there in their dark cell; because God was with them; because they felt the joy of God’s presence more vividly than the chains on their ankles.

In the 17th century Marie Durand, with other French Protestant Christians, was locked up in a tower for thirty-seven years. Every day she refused to deny her faith, which would have won her freedom. She etched just one single little word into the wall of the cell next to the window through which she was able to look out onto the free world: it was the word "Résistez" - resist! How was she able to resist? Because daily she praised the God whose nearness and warmth kept her spirit strong.

What do we have to resist? If we hunger and thirst to see God’s will done on earth, then there are issues we will be called to resist. That we don’t all agree on these issues is irrelevant. We have to act out of our own faith perspectives. At a more personal level, perhaps we are chained to alcohol, drugs, or other self-abusive habits. Perhaps we feel “imprisoned” facing debilitating or terminal illnesses. Perhaps we feel “chained” to personal or professional situations where we don’t belong.
Despite the seriousness of all these conditions, resisting self-pity may be our biggest challenge. This danger is far more subtle, but no less real. Someone has said that the terminal illness of our day is, “It’s All About Me.” Some choose to see only their difficulties. “No one else suffers like I do.” That is surely just as much a prison as that of Paul and Silas and Marie Durand. “It’s All About Me” is about more than self-pity; it is also about pride. We pray this prayer in a world where people and powers make gods out of themselves: “Mine is the kingdom, and mine is the power, and the glory belongs to no one but me.”

Whether about self-pity or pride, through the Lord’s Prayer God can lift us above that deadly syndrome. In this we are taught not to pray to “my” but “our” Heavenly Parent. We are taught to pray not for “my” but “our” daily bread. We are taught to pray not for the forgiveness just of “my” sins, but “our” sins, and to forgive those who have wronged not just “me” but “us.” And for being rescued from the “evil one,” we are taught not to pray for “me,” but for “us.” This prayer speaks directly to our great need today, to resist the “It’s all about me” syndrome. When we pray this prayer with “our” instead of “me” we will be able to resist. We can pray with confidence because the kingdom for which we long and for which we labor is GOD'S kingdom, and is brought about by GOD'S power, and the glory is GOD'S glory. Or, as the writer of the Book of Revelation put it, “’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8)

Those of you who have dutifully prayed this prayer each day during this series are now released from your assignment. Now, you will have to decide for yourself when and under what circumstances you will pray the prayer. Keep praying!

LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION

2007-08-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 6)

Matthew 6:13; 26:36-42; James 1:12-16

Next Sunday we will conclude this sermon series on “Praying the Lord’s Prayer.” If you have questions about the prayer you haven’t asked, I hope you’ll post them on the blog. I am grateful for those of you who have shared your prayer experiences.

Two weeks ago, I suggested that the prayer for daily bread is not only a prayer for daily sustenance for ourselves but a plea for a “taste today” of the day when God’s will is done on earth and all people have enough to eat. Last week, I suggested that we are being taught to pray “daily” for the forgiveness of our sins and to forgive those who have wronged us, especially so that our guilt and hurt will not be obstacles to God’s will being done on earth.

This brings us to today’s petition, which is also connected to the prayer for daily bread and forgiveness by the conjunction “and.” When we pray the prayer, we say: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:13) You have doubtless noticed the difference between the way we say the prayer and the way it is in Matthew: “And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” In the shorter version in the Gospel of Luke, the petition is simply, “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” (11:4)

This petition may be the most difficult for us, not because it is so hard to understand but because we may be reluctant to think about “temptation” and “evil.” Let’s look at the two parts of this petition.

First, what does it mean to ask God to “lead us not into temptation”? Does God ever tempt us? In the passage we read this morning from the book of James, the writer may well have been speaking to some Christians who he believed misunderstood this petition of the Lord’s Prayer. He began by saying that anyone who endured temptation was blessed, but he rejected the idea that God tempts us: “God cannot be tempted by evil and [God] tempts no one.” He went on to say that we are tempted by our own desires. “Do not be deceived,” he concluded, presumably speaking about our tendency to blame God or others for our temptations. James would probably agree with that person who has said, “Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is, and we will find it.”

But why are we instructed to pray that we not be led into temptation? The prayer as we pray it says, “Lead us not.” That is based on a later Latin translation, and not on the original text that actually says, “Bring us not” or “Allow us not.” When Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane on the night he was arrested, he wanted the comfort and support of three of his closest disciples—Peter, James and John. He asked them to stay awake with him while he prayed. He went a few steps on fell to the ground and prayed that most difficult of all prayers: “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” He returned to the disciples and found them asleep. He couldn’t believe it—“Could you not stay awake with me one hour?” Then, he asked them again to stay awake and “pray that you may not come into the time of trial [or temptation].” Perhaps he meant the time of trial he himself was undergoing? Maybe he also meant that their time of trial right then was the danger of falling asleep when he needed them to be present to him. In either case, he is not talking about their “being led” into temptation, but he asks them to pray that they not “come into” temptation, or the time of trial. Do you see the difference?

We will come back to this first half of the petition, but let’s go now to the second half, “deliver us from evil.” As the actual text in the Bible makes clear, Jesus was not talking about “evil” generally, but “the evil one.” This is where some of us get uncomfortable. Most of us are reluctant to think of evil as personified in Satan or as the Devil, yet this recognition of the autonomous power of personified evil is part of the Lord’s Prayer. I think we are right to be cautious about attributing evil to Satan or the Devil because most often in human history such attributions have been for very human acts of evil, sometimes with the plea, “the Devil made me do it.”

Reinhold Neibuhr, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century who was called a “realistic” theologian in part because he was such a careful social historian, defined “evil” the way that you found it in Centering section of today’s bulletin:

“Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard for the whole, whether the whole be conceived of the immediate community, or the total community of humanity, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels.”

Neibuhr’s seriousness about “evil” was born out of the horrors of World War I and II. He was quite explicit in his definition of “evil” in very human terms. Neibuhr was fond of saying, “the one Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable [that is, “provable”] is the doctrine of sin.” Or, as the old comic strip character Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” But Neibuhr did not reduce all evil to human actions. There is more to evil than we can readily explain, he said. He put his finger on it when he said that the phenomenon of evil in the world is inadequately explained as simply the sum total of the individual evil acts of people.

That judgment is echoed by Professor Jose Miguez Bonino who until he recently retired was pastor of two small Methodist churches in one of the poorest sections of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is also one of the world’s foremost theologians. Professor Miguez has said that the Gospels portray the ministry of Jesus as a conflict, as a battle against the power of evil, or Satan. “Call it whatever best suits your ideology,” he said, “but don’t trivialize the struggle by considering it merely human weakness.” [1] Miguez says that this struggle is not fought outside history in some distant cosmos, but within ourselves and in the concrete issues we face in this world – in our interpersonal relationships, in our homes and communities, in social and political issues, and in how we vote at the ballot box. If we take seriously the concern of the Lord’s Prayer for God’s will to be done on earth, then this petition means that we are to be involved in just such issues.

So where have we come with this petition of the Lord’s Prayer? First, Jesus teaches us that we are to pray not to succumb to the temptations that will surely come. Second, Jesus teaches us to pray for deliverance from the power of evil. I think the connection between the two lines of this petition is that “ordinary” temptations are not petty or insignificant, but are manifestations of the ultimate power of evil. We are not to take them lightly. We are to view them as threats to faith and to pray for God’s deliverance from them.

Maybe there are two classes of temptations, or perhaps two levels. The first level we might call the “ordinary.” What would be on your list? Consider these:

a) Procrastinate by watching TV;
b) Think your work is so demanding that you don’t have time for your family and friends;
c) Put off doing a necessary task;
d) Avoid a painful situation that is important to confront;
e) Sedate feelings with drugs or alcohol;
f) Fall back into old prejudices (such as not liking somebody because of his or her color or sexuality or ethnicity).

Would any of these be on your list?

The second level we might consider as “soul” temptations, which may come from regularly succumbing to “ordinary” temptations:

a) Apathy—simply being unfeeling and uncaring;
b) Ignoring warning signs about physical, mental, or spiritual health;
c) Thinking, acting, and voting your self-interest without regard for the whole community or the total community of humanity;
d) Being satisfied with the status quo.

What would be on your list of “soul” temptations?

In the most important prayer we pray, Jesus urges us to take evil seriously. This seriousness is echoed in the vows we take at baptism. Two of the three baptismal questions focus on dealing with evil. If you don’t remember them, you can find them on page 34 of the Hymnal. The first question is this: “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness and reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?” The second question is stated positively: “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?

If we are right about the central focus of this prayer being for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, perhaps we could pray this petition with something like this in mind:

"Let us not be distracted, let us not be side-tracked by temptations? In this hour (today) keep us from the evil one, from the demonic powers, from corporate evil, from our preoccupation with success, security or popularity, that we might remain focused on what is most important -- doing your will on earth as it is in heaven."

This prayer reminds us that our most important prayers for God’s guidance are for the strength to resist temptation and not be swallowed up by evil; or as we will sing in that old spiritual, “Guide my feet, while I run this race, for I don’t want to run this race in vain.” We have been promised that when we ask for guidance, God, our loving parent, will provide it. Keep on praying!

[1] José Míguez Bonino, "The Two Fronts of Mission," Mission Papers, April 1991 (GBGM, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115).

FORGIVE US...AS WE FORGIVE

2007-08-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 5)

Matthew 6:9-15; 18:21-35

What does it mean to pray the Lord’s Prayer? After last Sunday some of you may be wondering if I am making a simple and straightforward prayer too complex. I hope not. My hope is that this series of sermons will help you “unpack” the prayer so that you will be led into dimensions of praying you haven’t experienced before. I’m not talking about your “head” here as much as I am talking about what you actually experience in prayer. If what I’m saying doesn’t open up new prayer experiences, you still have the understandings of the prayer with which you came, and probably will be more appreciative of them than before we began.

When I was working on this prayer once before, a friend who is an officer in the Coast Guard based in Washington D.C. sent me his counsel about the petition we take up today. He said, “I assume this is the hard part, about forgiving our sins “as we forgive those who sin against us.” I think the conjunctions are interesting, the way different parts of the prayer are linked. “Give us this day, our daily bread, AND forgive our sins, AS we forgive those who sin against us,” for example. It seems as if the lines of the prayer, like the many aspects of following Christ, are intertwined and not to be separated.” I think my friend is right; there are two key conjunctions in our text today. You probably recall from English class that “conjunctions” are words that join together sentences, phrases, clauses, or words.

First, there is the “AND” that connects the prayer for “daily bread” to the prayer for forgiveness of sins. Last Sunday I suggested that the petition for “daily bread” is not just a prayer for our own daily sustenance, but our own urgent plea for the day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven and all people will have enough to eat. I suggest the conjunction “and” is not there by accident; I think it suggests that we need “daily forgiveness” as much as we need “daily bread”? What do you think?

Before we go any further, I should tell you that this week I almost changed the title of this sermon to “The Presbyterians Are Right! It Is ‘Debts’ And Not ‘Trespasses’.” “Debts” is probably the original word in this petition. “Trespass” is an old English word that means, “crossing over the line.” We are reminded of its meaning whenever we see a “No Trespassing” sign. The meaning is clear: “trespasses” are those occasions when we have crossed over the line in our relationship with God and our neighbor, or violated God’s law. Is that how you have understood it?

There is nothing wrong with that understanding of “sin,” but the word used in this text is “debts.” Sin is here thought of as a debt to God. All that we have done wrong mounts up as a huge debt; this is a petition to lift that load from us, a load we ourselves cannot remove. I don’t propose that we change how we say the Lord’s Prayer but we should know what was probably in the prayer as Jesus taught it.

The second conjunction used in our text today is “AS” meaning, “in or to the same degree in which.” Does this mean that we are being taught to ask God’s forgiveness “to the same degree” that we offer forgiveness to others? God’s forgiveness is unconditional and precedes human forgiveness of other humans, and is the ground and cause of our being able to forgive others. I think Eugene Peterson has it right as he paraphrased in the today’s words for centering in the bulletin: “In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.”[i]

In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone. “Seven?” Peter asked. Jesus’ responded, “Seventy times seven,” and told this story about a chair of the board of a large corporation. Actually, Jesus said “king” but I think if Jesus told the story today this is how it might sound. You’ll have to be the judge of that. Anyway, the Chair of the Board decided to have the company books audited. When the audit showed that the Chief Executive Officer of the company had run up a debt of millions of dollars of unauthorized personal expenses and couldn’t pay them back, the Chair fired him, repossessed all the man’s company perks (house, car, credit cards, and stock options). The CEO pleaded with the Board Chair, promising that if he just had the chance he would pay it all back. The Board Chair was so touched by the man’s plea that he let him off, restored him to his old position, and erased the debt.

As that CEO went out from being forgiven, he came upon a clerk in the mailroom who owed him a hundred dollars. He grabbed him and demanded, “Pay up! Now!” The clerk pleaded for a chance to repay the money, but the CEO fired him on the spot. Someone reported this to the Board Chair. The Chair called the CEO back to him and said, “I forgave your entire debt when you begged for mercy. Shouldn’t you have been merciful to the clerk who owed you a measly hundred bucks?” The Board Chair then required the CEO pay his entire debt. Jesus said that is what God would do for those who don’t forgive when their brothers and sisters ask them for mercy.

We need to be very careful here. The admonition to "forgive" has often been misunderstood. For example, how many women have entered a pastor's study with stories of being abused by their husbands, only to be told to "go back home and forgive your husband?" No vulnerable person should be advised to go back into harms way. The counsel to forgive does not mean to acquiesce to injustice. Where there is no genuine repentance, no real evidence of changed behavior, as there was not with the CEO in Jesus’ story, forgiveness becomes “cheap grace,” which only encourages the guilty party to keep on sinning. But for us to ask God to forgive us without our being willing to forgive those who have wronged us is simply unthinkable. I think that’s what the conjunction “as” means in this petition.

Is this petition simply a prayer for forgiveness, or because the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the realization of God’s reign on earth, is there something more here, as we saw in the petition for “daily bread”? Consider this: Is anything so detrimental to our keeping focused on the realization of God's rule among us as the weight of guilt and fractured relationships? One scholar has suggested that the reason why the Roman Catholic order of the Dominicans prays this prayer twice a day is the importance of forgiving and being forgiven. Perhaps the most pervasive factor that prevents us from giving ourselves to others is that we are so bound up with internal problems that we cannot look beyond our own needs. When you pray this week, you might try something like this:

"God, let go of the things you are entitled to hold against us, and teach us to let go of the things we think we are entitled to hold against others that we may not be obstacles to the doing of your will on earth as it is in heaven, that we may not miss the taste of your reign.”

“God forgive the sins that weigh me down like a huge debt hanging over my head, even as I ease the burden of guilt of those who have wronged me, so that neither of us will be so preoccupied with our own problems that we miss the taste that you have for us today of your will being done on earth.”

Do you think these might be something of what is “packed” in the petition, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”?

Did you see the story on NBC News a month or so ago about Amy Biehl from Milwaukie, Wisconsin? This young woman had gone to South Africa in 1993 as an advocate for non-violence against apartheid. She was caught in the violence and murdered by a black mob. Her parents came to South Africa where they saw the oppression of Black South Africans and made a promise to their daughter that they would try to do something important in her name. They established a foundation to help the community where Amy was killed. Then, when four men were tried for her death, the parents asked for amnesty, not the death penalty. If that wasn’t remarkable enough, when the court did grant amnesty, the parents hired the four young radicals to work in their foundation. The forgiveness of the parents transformed the four young men. Amy’s father has since died of cancer, but her mother continues to travel the world as an advocate of non-violence, and she travels with one of her daughter’s killers.[ii]

On this day, when we think about forgiveness, it is fitting that we celebrate Holy Communion. In taking the bread and the cup we are reminded that God is present and in this moment ready to forgive our sins. We take the bread and cup as a “taste” in this day of that forgiveness, a “taste” that will enable us to forgive today those who have wronged us. Keep on praying.

[i] Eugene Peterson paraphrase of Matthew 6:14-15 in The Message

[ii] NBC Evening News http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=f3a45ff9-c6f5-469f-bf0f-63ead1bdc840&f=00&fg=copy

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD

2007-07-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 4)

Exodus 16:13-18; Matthew 6:7-11

Today we continue our journey exploring what it means to pray the Lord’s Prayer. I remind you of the three things I asked you to consider as we started this series: 1) pray the prayer each day at least until we conclude the series; 2) make notes about any new understandings you have about the prayer so they can be incorporated into your prayer time; and 3) share your prayer experiences and questions with the rest of us on the sermon blog.

Just in case you haven’t been around these past weeks since we started the series, or for those of you who might have catching up on much needed sleep during the sermons, I began by saying that the opening line of the prayer – “Our Father, who art in heaven” – is a reminder that the God to whom we pray is one as close and intimate as a loving parent, but whose nature is beyond the limits of our minds to conceive. In the petition – “Hallowed be thy name” – we are reminded that all prayer is God-directed, not human need directed, and when we pray we recognize that we are called to honor and respect the name of God. Last Sunday, when we got to the petition, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” I suggested that this is the central petition of the prayer and that all of the other petitions of the prayer must be understood as part of this one petition. I also said that the fundamental meaning of “the kingdom of God” is whenever and wherever God’s will is done on earth.

That brings us to today’s petition: “Give us this day, our daily bread.” I think I am right in suggesting that for most people this has been a prayer for daily sustenance, a prayer asking God to provide us with the basic necessities of life each day. One of you told me your daughter loves this petition because she loves bread. Another of you paraphrased it as, “Give us this day, our daily Red.” Has the prayer meant something like that to you? Understood in this way, it evokes the image of God’s provision of manna for the Hebrew people wandering in the wilderness after their liberation from slavery in Egypt. There, according to the text we read from the book of Exodus this morning, God provided Quail and manna, a fine flaky bread-like substance that settled on the ground each night like dew. There was enough for each day, not enough to horde and sell on the market, just enough for each family to get through that day. Is this petition a prayer that God similarly provide just enough for us today?

If the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the coming of God’s reign on earth, what does this petition mean? After all, we have just been warned in Matthew's introduction to the Prayer: "In your prayers do not babble as the pagans do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard. Do not be like them: your Heavenly Parent knows what you need before you ask. So you should pray like this...."

Doesn't it strike you a little strange, that just a few lines later in that prayer, we should be taught to ask for our daily needs? Besides that, this line presents a particular problem in translation. Epiousios, one of the key words -- the one translated as "daily" here – occurs not just twice in the Bible but just twice in all of Greek literature, and both of the uses are in this prayer. In the second century one of the early church fathers suggested that Jesus or the Gospel writers created the word.

How does one decide what a given word means? You look in the dictionary, right? But how do the people who write dictionaries know what a word means. They know by the way the word is used. But if you have a word that is used in just this one place in all of literature, then what do you do? What you do then is look at the different syllables of the word and try to guess what was meant, but you cannot be sure. It is usually translated "daily” suggesting a petition for meeting our need for daily sustenance. But the line may best be translated as "give us the bread of the coming day." (You may have a note in your Bible at home giving this as an alternate translation.)

In the Old and New Testament the coming of God’s reign on earth is often pictured as a great banquet with abundant food. Perhaps this is not a petition for ordinary daily sustenance as we have supposed. If the fundamental petition of the prayer is for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, then perhaps this line means something like, "Give us today a taste of the messianic banquet," or "Give us today a taste of God’s reign on earth."

Last week I told you that my own quest to better understand this prayer began with a Lay Leader’s sermon one Sunday in Staten Island, New York. She was preaching a sermon on the Beatitudes in the 5th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, just across the page of my Bible from Lord’s Prayer in chapter 6. It is what she said about one of the Beatitudes that caught my attention: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (chapter 5, verse 6) “Righteousness” is one of those old words, like “kingdom”, which lends itself to misunderstanding. This woman used a translation – I can’t remember which one – that had this line read, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail, for they will be filled.” I don’t recall what happened next, but my mind went immediately to today’s petition of the Lord’s prayer, and I thought: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see God’s will done today on earth as it is in heaven, for they will be filled.” Suddenly the whole prayer had a sense of urgency that I had not experienced before.
Do you remember a time when you were a child and your mom or dad was making cookies? As the dough was mixed, you couldn’t wait to stick your finger into the bowl to get a taste even before the cookies had been formed or baked? The taste would keep us going until the cookies got out of the oven. I think Jesus wanted his followers to have such a desire to see God’s reign on earth that this petition is an urgent request for a “taste” right now in this day. We are not simply to long to see right prevail eventually, but that we be granted a foretaste today; that we be granted a taste of mercy, justice and righteousness today. Far from moving from a prayer for the kingdom to a prayer for daily food, this petition gives the prayer a sense of urgency. Try this:

"Give us today a taste of your kingdom, your reign on earth -- a hungry child being fed, a homeless family getting a home – which will help us remember that when your will is done on earth as it is in heaven hunger and homelessness will be no more.

“Give us a taste of your kingdom, your reign on earth – an abused child brought to a safe place – that will help us remember that when your will is done on earth as it is in heaven “child abuse” and “wife battering” will no longer be words in our vocabularies. Let us in THIS DAY have a taste -- and be a part of -- that which IS coming."

When this is our prayer every day, our eyes are open to see the “tastes” of goodness, mercy and justice all around us. The “tastes” will keep us going until the “cookies” are out of the oven.

Does this mean that this prayer is not a prayer for daily food? No, but I think it puts that petition in a whole new context. When we started this series of sermons, one of you sent me these words that I had seen years ago. I suspect that many of you are already familiar with the words. It goes like this:
You can’t say the Lord’s prayer in first person –
You cannot pray the Lord's Prayer and even once say "I."
You cannot pray the Lord's Prayer and even once say "My."
Nor can you pray the Lord's Prayer and not pray for one another,
And when you ask for daily bread, you must include your brother [and sister].
For others are included ... in each and every plea,
From the beginning to the end of it, it does not once say "Me."

When we pray this petition, “Give US this day, OUR daily bread,” we are praying in a world there is enough food to feed everyone, but where 854 million people are malnourished, and where 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes every day.[1] We are praying this prayer in a nation where as many as 13 million children under the age of twelve have difficulty getting enough food for normal physical and mental development. But we are also praying this prayer in a world where the number of overfed people now almost rivals the number of underfed.[2]

What does it mean to pray this prayer to the God who is the loving parent of us all? When we pray this prayer, we are praying for God’s reign to come, that God’s will be done on earth. When we pray this petition, we are praying for just a glimpse, a taste, of that day when some of us will not eat so much that our health is threatened and when all of God’s children will be fed enough that they can grow into healthy adults, a day when senior citizens will not have to choose between food and medications or heat in the winter. When we pray this prayer, we are asking that we actually “hunger and thirst” for that day to come, and that we receive just a “taste” today of that day which is coming. And if the Beatitude from chapter 5 is right we are promised that those who have such “hunger and thirst,” and are eager for a “taste today,” will “be filled.”

I think that may be close to the meaning of the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." We’ll never know for sure. What do you think? Keep on praying!

[1] “International Facts on Hunger and Poverty,” Bread for the World Institute. See website at lhttp://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html

[2] World Watch Paper # 150:” Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition,” 2007 World Watch Institute at http://www.worldwatch.org/node/840.

THY KINGDOM COME

2007-07-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 3)

Isaiah 2:1-4; Luke 11:1-4; Matthew 5:10

Today we continue our conversations about praying the Lord’s Prayer – and they are turning out to be “conversations.” I am grateful for the responses you have sent about your experiences praying the prayer as well as for your reflections on some of the things I have said. Some of you said that Brother Lawrence’s idea of “practicing the presence of God” while you are doing your daily tasks opened up a new vista on the meaning of prayer. In a couple of cases, it validated something you had already discovered in your own prayer life. A couple of you wrote about the prayer and children. You can see those comments and my responses online on the blog.

Let me again ask you to do the three things I asked of you at the outset of this series: first, pray the Lord’s Prayer each day until August 19th; second, make notes during the service that you can incorporate into your prayer time; and third, continue to share your prayer experiences and questions on the sermon blog.

For many years I prayed this prayer by rote, not excited about what I thought it meant and wondering why the church prayed it so often. That all changed on one Sunday morning in a worship service I was attending at a United Methodist Church on Staten Island, New York. A laywoman was preaching that day, and her topic was “the kingdom of God.” Something she said so jarred me awake—there are a lot of ways to “sleep” in church and I think I have tried all of them—that I went home and began to do some serious study of this prayer, study that I probably should have done years before. I began to see why this prayer had been prayed so often. Thanks to the spark she provided (You’ll hear about what that spark was next Sunday) the Lord’s Prayer began to take on meaning and an urgency that I had never before sensed and that has stayed with me through the intervening years.

What I came to believe is that the petition, “Thy kingdom come,” is the very central petition of this prayer; that this prayer is a very particular, not generic, form of prayer, and that all of the petitions of the prayer must be seen in relation to this petition. If I may paraphrase Jesus’ words at the beginning of the prayer as it is found in Luke, I think this is what is intended: “Whenever you pray, pray for the realization of God’s kingdom.”

What is the “kingdom of God”? This is archaic language that sometimes gets in the way of our understanding what is being said. The “kingdom of God” means the “reign” or “rule” of God. In the past some folks have thought that the “Kingdom of God” was a piece of geography, like other kingdoms of the world. Some even thought that the “kingdom” and the “church” were the same thing. Some have thought that it would only be sometime in the future. If you look at the petition as it is in Matthew 6 and compare it with the version in Luke 11, I think you can get the idea of what is meant by “kingdom of God.” In Luke the petition is simply, “Your kingdom come,” but if you look at it in Matthew you see that it reads, “Your kingdom come,” and then is added “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Is the prayer for God’s will to be done on earth a different petition or is it a part of “thy kingdom come”? I believe that this is a translation of what in Hebrew or Aramaic was a common poetic construction called “synonymous parallelism,” in which one line (“thy kingdom come”) is restated in the second line with words that add to or clarify the meaning of the first (in this case, “thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”). If you want a simple definition of the “kingdom of God,” it is whenever and wherever the will of God is done. The heart of this prayer is for God’s will to be done.

However, the prayer is more than for God’s will to be done; it is a prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth. In this sense, the petition is much like a prayer that Jesus would have prayed in the synagogue, and that Jewish people continue to pray to this day. It is from the Synagogue Kaddish and it goes something like this: "May God’s kingdom be established during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel."

To pray the Lord’s Prayer with this petition at the heart means that God cares about what happens on earth – in our families, in school, in our community, and in our world. I assume it also means God cares about what happens to the earth itself. To pray this prayer is for us to long for the realization of God's kingdom on earth: It is to long to see right prevail; to desire to see justice done in the courts, to yearn for fairness in the marketplace. We are called to make as the center of all our prayers a deep longing for the will of God to be done on earth.

This is the petition that was on Jesus’ lips at the time of his greatest temptation, when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, waiting to be arrested: “My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but thy will be done.” (Matthew 26:39 and 43) “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” should be the first and last petitions of every prayer we pray, no matter what our situation.

This is probably hardest petition we are asked to pray. It seems somehow easier to pray for God’s kingdom as some far off future event in a way that doesn’t affect us here and now. But to earnestly desire that God’s will be done on earth is something else. It reminds me of a story I heard about a ten-year-old boy in a revival meeting. The preacher was preaching about “heaven” and he described the gates of pearl and the streets of gold. As preachers sometimes do he got so excited about what he was saying that he shouted, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” All the people put up their hands, everybody except that ten year old boy. The preacher saw it and shouted again, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” Again, everyone but the little boy put up hands. Unnerved -- that’s what sometimes happens to preachers when people don’t respond the way they anticipate -- the preacher spoke directly to the boy: “Son, don’t you want to go to heaven?” “Sure,” responded the boy, “I just thought you were getting up a load to go today.” Sometimes we are tempted to pray, “Lord, let your will be done in my life, just not today.”

We have had a wonderful week of Vacation Church School. You got just a taste of it as you heard the kids sing. They sang songs, prayed, and played games; they also heard Bible stories and talked about what they meant. Seeing parents get their kids to experience this said to me that they wanted their kids to learn about doing God’s will on earth. Seeing all of the adults that took precious time, just when the red run might be starting, said we have adults committed to learning about doing God’s will on earth. But I must tell you, seeing our young people, from the sixth grade up, here working with the kids, teaching them; that said to me that we have young people who care about doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, and teaching it to our children. And I thank God for all of them. I hope you express your thanks to God and to them for what they did here this week.

In the morning and evening we also had adults in classes. We studied one of the most familiar of all Jesus’ stories; it was the story of the good Samaritan. (Luke 10:25-37) You remember the story, don’t you? A man was walking along the road to Jericho only to be beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. Two religious leaders came walking on the road, saw the man lying there, but passed by on the other side. A hated Samaritan came after them, saw the man, cared for him, took him to an inn, and paid for his care.

You probably remember the story, but you may not recall why Jesus told it. Jesus was teaching when an expert in the law came up and asked Jesus about how he could receive eternal life, or how he could get into God’s kingdom. The man was a religious leader, so Jesus turned the question back on him and asked him what the scripture said. The expert gave the answer that most good religious folks would have given in Jesus’ day. He quoted the Schema from the Hebrew Bible: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your minds; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus responded that the man had answered rightly and that if he did this he would live, and he might have said “you will live in the kingdom.”

The man wasn’t satisfied. He said “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered him with the story of the good Samaritan. At the end of the story, Jesus asked the man which of the three—the two religious leaders on the road or the Samaritan—were neighbor to the man lying on the road. The man responded, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus told the man to “Go and do likewise.”

God’s kingdom is whenever and wherever someone shows mercy or acts justly. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that. When we pray this petition, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are not only looking to the day when God’s reign will be over the earth, but we are committing ourselves to working for that day by acting with justice and mercy.

This petition involves all of the decisions we make—how we raise our kids, how we vote, how we are involved in the community, how we spend our money. If we long to see God’s will done on earth, then nothing on earth is beyond our purview, and we are accountable to God for the decisions we make. Jesus teaches us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth. We know that involves us, all of who we are, and all the resources with which we have been entrusted. Keep on praying!

HALLOWED BE THY NAME

2007-07-14T16:39:00.001-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (Part 2)

Ezekiel 36:22-27; Luke 11:1-4

Last Sunday I began a seven-part sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. I want to thank those of you who have offered me your experiences in praying this prayer. I asked you to pray it each day between now and August 16th when we finish the series. Several of you told me that you already pray the prayer daily and what it means to you. Last week, I said that in the opening line Jesus teaches us that the God to whom we pray is as close and intimate as a loving parent but also greater than anything our minds can conceive. Some of you said that it was important and freeing to be able to address God as “Mother” as well as “Father.” Others said that, while you didn’t believe that God was in essence “male,” you didn’t see anything wrong with restricting the terms of address to “Father” and using masculine pronouns to refer to God. One of you said you substituted “God” for “Father” when you pray the prayer to avoid the gender issue altogether.

I hope you will continue to pray the prayer each day at least until the end of the series, that you will make notes for incorporation into your prayers during the week, and that you will share your experiences and questions in praying on my sermon blog. The Internet address is in the bulletin.

One of the problems in praying this prayer is that it uses some words that we do not use very often. Today’s petition has one of them: “Hallowed be thy name.” How many times this past week did you use the word “hallow”? Do you know what it means? Two kids were discussing the prayer in a Sunday School class. One boy said he thought it meant that God’s name was “Howard” – as in “Howard be thy name.” A girl corrected him saying that it meant, “Our Father in Heaven, How did you know my name?” The fact is that neither our children nor we use “hallow” often in our conversation. The Greek word behind the English “hallow” is agiadzo and it means, “to make holy,” “to dedicate or consecrate,” or to “treat with reverence.” This petition is for God to be honored as God, the Holy One.

In the Old Testament, when the people of Israel were being held in captivity in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel anticipated a day when the name of God would not be profaned but would be honored by the nations. The prophet made clear that the reason why God’s name had been profaned was not because of the other nations, but because of the failure of God’s own people. The word of God through the prophet was that God’s name will be honored before all the nations “when through you I display my holiness before their eyes” (36:23). So also in the Lord’s Prayer the petition is "Let your name be hallowed, or let your name be set apart from all other names by those you have created." For us to pray this petition is to acknowledge God's nature as nurturing parent as well as to accept this God's claim on our lives; it also means that we are praying for the day when God’s name will be recognized and honored by everyone everywhere.

At this point, we could have a conversation about whether or not God’s name is “hallowed” by having “in God we trust” on our money, by having the Ten Commandments on public buildings, or by having prayer in public schools. We will have that conversation, but not today. The prophet Ezekiel was not concerned about whether others “hallowed” the name of God; it was the people of God he was concerned about. And his conclusion was that it was they who profaned it. Jesus, too, was concerned about his followers hallowing the name of God, not anyone else. As people who want to see ourselves as people of God, we need to assume full responsibility in our homes and in the church to “hallow” God’s name in prayer?

How, then, does this prayer help us? “Hallowed be thy name,” is a reminder that prayer is God-centered. Prayer is not, as some suppose, having a laundry list of concerns to present as though God were a glorified bellhop. At heart, prayer is simply paying attention to God, and in paying attention we “hallow” God’s name.

Some of our Greek forefathers and foremothers in the faith in the second and third centuries believed that the starting point and the final achievement of a life of prayer was to be absolutely silent before God. In this state all the faculties of the body were completely at peace, perfectly alert yet free of any turmoil or agitation. They often used a "pond" as an image for God and the human spirit. As long as the wind is blowing and there are ripples on the water, we can't see beneath the surface. Or, when the water of the pond has been stirred, mud from the bottom makes it impossible to see. Our spirits are like the pond, they said, rippled and muddied by daily concerns and anxieties. We need to be able to relax and allow the ripples to dissipate and the sediment to settle. In such silence and stillness we are ushered into the presence of God.[1]

Some folks treasure silence and stillness. Others are terrified by it. The Meyers Briggs Personality Typing has been a means of differentiating personality types, our differing needs and strengths. Not surprisingly, there are also different spiritual types, with different needs and strengths. Some folks desire quiet and solitude and are renewed by it. Others find their renewal in interaction with others and are uncomfortable with silence and solitude. I was powerfully reminded of this one Sunday when, in a church I once served, we received Holy Communion in silence, as someone had requested. After the service, I received a barrage of complaints from folks who didn’t like the idea of silence during communion at all. Now, that didn't mean that they didn't want to pray or to pay attention to God. It meant that they were used to and more comfortable doing it in another way. We don’t all have to pray the same way.

Nicolas Herman was born to a family in Lorraine, France in the early part of the seventeenth century (about 1611). In his youth he became a soldier but was forced to abandon that career when he got a wound that really made him unsuitable as a soldier. By most accounts, he was a simple and uneducated man. For a while he served as a footman for a carriage driver. Because he had been brought up in an actively Christian family, he eventually entered a monastery and became a Carmelite monk.

That seemed to be a good decision. His heart was full of faith. Because of his lack of education, he was not assigned to work in the scriptorium (the large room where other monks meticulously copied old manuscripts of scripture and other ancient texts). He was not assigned to work in the choir because he had no training in music and his voice was not outstanding. He was in fact given what was considered one of the most menial of jobs in the monastery, and that was in the kitchen. He was a cook's helper. Day after day, year after year, he cut vegetables and washed pots. He didn't complain. In fact, those tasks suited him perfectly. He loved his work in the kitchen and he loved the time everyday when he got to go there for his work.

What he didn't relish, however, were the seven times during the day and night when the monks gathered for "the liturgy of the hours." In these times of structured prayer he found himself unable to pray effectively. He fidgeted through the readings, the chants, and the prayers. Since in the eyes of many, this kind of prayer was what monks were supposed to do, his disposition seemed just another indication that he didn't fit into the usual monastic life.

That experience didn't dim Nicholas' faith. In fact, it seemed to push him in another direction. When he would go to his tasks in the kitchen -- cutting the vegetables or scrubbing the floor -- he began to practice placing himself in God's presence as he did his tasks. As his practice became habit, he found that the distinction between time designated for "work" and time designated for "prayer" became blurred. In fact, Nicholas claimed "he was more united to God in his ordinary activities than when he devoted himself to religious activities which left him with a profound spiritual dryness."[2]

It was out of this utterly ordinary set of circumstances that came a life of profound holiness, making the mundane activities of daily life avenues into the presence of God. Of course, we don't remember him as Nicholas Herman, but as Brother Lawrence.[3] His little book, The Practice of the Presence of God, is actually no more than four transcribed conversations and letters. But that little book, from a person with a heart so full of faith and devotion, became a spiritual classic that has captivated Protestants and Catholics alike for over three centuries. So short that it can -- but never should -- be read in a single setting, this friar offered a deceptively simple form of prayer called "practicing the presence of God."

What Brother Lawrence recognized was that we can pray or "pay attention to God" anytime: while we are changing the baby's diapers, while we are doing accounts, while we are doing our homework, or whatever. The effort of thinking of God frequently throughout the day may at first appear easy. It is not, and it may even feel laborious and artificial. If it is to become a habit, it is something for which we have to train ourselves. And Brother Lawrence's way is doubtless not suitable for everybody. Some may need more structure -- a place, a time, and a form. Some need silence, away from the banging of pots and pans. Brother Lawrence was concerned that the desire to be in the presence of God not be a cause for anxiety. He was convinced that sincere efforts on our part are eventually met by gracious invitations from God. If we struggle to approach God, he said, God comes running to us, and what began as a deliberate act of the will on our part ends as an effortless delight.

Whether in times of quiet and solitude, or in the very midst of our daily tasks, when our attitude of prayer is to practice the presence of God, the Spirit will work through us to hallow God’s name. We will be anticipating the time when all people hallow the name of God. And when at home or at church we teach our children to do the same, we do not have to worry about what anyone else or any other institution does. Keep on praying!

[1] Anthony Bloom From Living Prayer, quoted in Rueben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck's A Guide to Prayer (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983) pp. 308-309.

[2] Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God, trans. John J. Delaney (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1977), p. 47.

[3] Robin Maas and Gavriel O'Donnell, eds, Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, (Nashville:Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 260.

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN

2007-07-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

Unpacking the Lord's Prayer (part 1)

Psalm 100; Matthew 6:5-13

What does it mean to “pray”? If you look in a dictionary you will likely find something like this: “to address God in word or thought.” Jesus felt that prayer was of such importance that his followers needed to be trained in it. On one occasion (in Luke 11:1), when Jesus was praying, one of his followers asked him to teach them to pray. Jesus responded by teaching them what has come to be called "The Lord's Prayer." In the Gospel of Matthew, (in 6:5-13) Jesus warned about the abuse of prayer and concluded by teaching them what we what was read today.

Jesus warned about hypocrites who pray in the synagogues and in the streets in order to receive the praise of others. The problem is not praying in synagogues or on street corners, but rather doing it to receive praise for doing it. Here Jesus is not saying something that most other rabbis of his day would not have said as well. Jesus also cautioned against “heaping up empty phrases” thinking that God would pay more attention if we are long-winded. “Don’t do that,” said Jesus; “God already knows what you need before you ask.” Then he instructed them.

Today, we begin a seven-part series of sermons on “Unpacking the Lord’s Prayer.” Those of you who have downloaded programs on your computer will know that sometimes the programs come in as compressed files because there is so much data in the program. Once downloaded to your computer they have to be “unpacked” before your computer can use them. I have a sense that the Lord’s Prayer is like a file that remains compressed in many of our spiritual lives and not usable. If we can unpack it we may discover that it means things and sustains us in ways we never before imagined.

I have a couple of special requests to make of you as we go through this series. Before we get to those, let me ask you: Did it seem at all strange when we read the Lord's Prayer from the scriptures? I am not suggesting that any such feelings might be caused by unfamiliarity with the prayer. We probably do not have a situation here like the two guys who were talking and one of them made a comment about prayer. The other scoffed: "If you're so religious, let's hear you say the Lord's Prayer. I bet you ten dollars you don't know it." His friend responded, "Yes I do: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep'." The other friend said, "Wow! I didn't think you knew it!" and handed him a ten dollar bill. Our problem is not unfamiliarity; it might be because we are so familiar with the prayer that we don’t think much about it when we say it.

As long as I can remember, even when I was a child, I was puzzled about why this prayer was prayed so often in worship. Being told that it was a “model” prayer was not very satisfying since there are certain elements of prayer that do not seem to be included -- thanksgiving, for one, and intercessions for others, for another. When I was older, I learned that the meaning of several of the petitions may not be as clear as I had first thought. The translation of one of the petitions is only a guess. These matters become especially significant if we are to take it as a model for all our prayers. For a long time, it has seemed to me like a very particular prayer, for a particular -- not a general -- purpose. And if it is a particular kind of prayer, how did it get its central place in the Gospels, and why has it been -- through history -- the most consistently used element in Christian worship?

The primary purpose of this series of sermons is not to give you new information about this prayer – although I hope to do that; the primary purpose is to assist you in praying generally and in the praying of this prayer in particular. To that end, I have several requests to make of you. First, I would like to ask that you pray this prayer at least once a day between now and August 16th when we conclude the series. Second, I would like to suggest that you make notes each Sunday on the meaning of the petition we are examining—use the white space on the bulletin where you usually doodle—and then during the week try praying the petitions in a variety of ways using your own words. Third, I invite you to share your comments on the sermons on my blog where each of the sermons will be posted weekly. Share your prayer experiences and questions there so others may benefit. You may make your comments anonymously. I will try to respond to the questions in the sermons.

Our task this morning is to ask about the God to whom we pray this prayer. What does it mean to pray to God as “Our Father”? In the first century both Jews and Gentiles frequently addressed God as “Father.” The common practice in the synagogue was to address God as “our Father, our King.” Jesus adapts the address simply to “Father.” The Aramaic term “Abba” is translated as “Father”. The meaning is a child’s term of endearment like “Daddy,” “Mommy,” or “Da-da.” It is also a term that adults may use in addressing their fathers. This is the term Jesus used for his own personal relationship with God. For Jesus, “Father” was not a general term for God but one specifically meaning his own relation to God. Jesus did not reserve it for himself but also included others—“When you pray, say ‘Our Father.’” As children of God, we are “brothers” and “sisters,” not only of each other but also of Jesus, sharing his personal relationship with God. God as “Father” means one who loves, one who forgives, and one who knows how to give children good gifts.

Does the use of the term “Father” mean that God is male? If our spiritual ancestors, the Hebrew people in the Middle East, and their ancestors, had prayed this prayer before 5,000 B.C., the term of address would probably have been "Mother." But by 3,000 B.C. in the Middle East, matriarchal cultures had become patriarchal ones, so that the faith shaped and articulated by the Judeo-Christian tradition tended to be in patriarchal terms. Does this mean that God is male, or was it that “Father” was simply the way God could be understood in that culture? Is the God to whom we pray gender-inclusive or gender-specific?

A few years ago a great brouhaha erupted over the references to God as "Sofia" at an ecumenical convocation of women in Minneapolis. Sophia was the name of a goddess in some Gnostic religions in the first century, but “Sophia” is also the Greek word for the portrayal of God as “Wisdom” in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon and other places. In the Greek language nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter. Sophia is feminine, as is the word in Hebrew from which it is translated. The word for “Wisdom” as an image of God in the Bible is thus feminine, as is the word for “Spirit.” I suspect that the controversy in Minneapolis had more to do with attributing feminine characteristics to God rather than any pagan associations with the word. At one of the meetings, a bishop – not a United Methodist bishop, I might add -- was heard to exclaim, "To call God ‘Mother’ is to make God a sexual being." Now that particular bishop had children. I would like to have asked him, "Are not fathers also sexual beings? Bishop, where do babies really come from?"

While “Father” was the most common image for Jesus, he and Biblical writers used other images that portray God in feminine terms beyond “Wisdom” and “Spirit,” such as a Mother Eagle, a Mother Hen, a Baker Woman, and many more. Have we not come to a time when we can use feminine terms to refer to God? I think the point in this prayer is that God is addressed as a caring and nurturing parent. When you pray this prayer this week, you might try praying “Our Mother,” some of the time or “Our Father and Mother.” For some it will mean praying with loving parents as models; for others it will mean using language for the kind of parents they never had and for whom the very images are painful. In the case of the latter, it will be praying to God who is like a parent you longed for but never had.

We pray not only to a caring and nurturing parent, but we also to pray to “Our Father in heaven.” The phrase "in heaven" makes an important counter-point to the intimacy and familiarity suggested by “Our Father.” In the Old Testament “heaven” not only meant the sky it also meant that which was beyond the physical heavens, beyond the moon, sun and stars. Heaven was the abode of God. As Solomon acknowledged in his prayer dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem, “the heavens and heaven of heavens cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.” (1 Kings 8:27) In Christian theology “heaven” is the dwelling place of God and ultimately of all the redeemed. To say that God is “in heaven” is a reminder that God is beyond and greater than all our ideas and conceptions. We can no more comprehend the magnitude of God than we can comprehend the magnitude of infinite space. God is not one we can put in our pockets, restrict to a shrine, or contain within the walls of a church, but the God who is in heaven, a God beyond what we can conceive. Jesus teaches us to address God who is as close and as caring as a parent, but not one we can manipulate or contain within the limits of our minds.

When we pray this prayer to this God, there is power. Barb Jones, a Regional Minister (sort of like our “District Superintendent”) in the Disciples of Christ Church in Arkansas, tells about a time in seminary when things were going really badly for her family. She went to the dean, who happened to be an Episcopalian, shared her story and asked him to pray for her. He said, "Sure. Let's say the Lord's Prayer." And the two of them bowed their heads and recited the familiar prayer. After the Amen, Barb looked at the dean with a puzzled look as if to say, "Is that it?" She had expected him to pray specifically about the concerns she had just shared with him.

Then the dean said, "You don't get it, do you?" And Barb admitted that she didn't. The dean then explained his belief about the power of that particular prayer. He said, "In saying the Lord's Prayer we are saying the most powerful prayer known to humankind. That prayer has been prayed continuously since the days of the early church. People all around our world have prayed that same prayer day and night for two thousand years. And when we pray it, we connect ourselves to all believers everywhere and in all time. We pull together the collective power of all those prayers." Barb said she left feeling that she had really been prayed for.

I have often prayed this prayer with persons who were dying. Sometimes, even when they were unresponsive to everything else that was said, when I began to say the Lord’s Prayer, their lips would move and you could hear them repeating the words—this sometimes after days when it seemed they no longer had the ability to speak. There is something special in praying this prayer. It is not magic; it is the power of God in praying a prayer, as the dean said, that connects us to all believers everywhere and in all time.

As you pray this prayer this week let your attention linger on the words of address, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and think about the God you are addressing. Give thanks to God, creator and sustainer of a vast universe beyond the farthest reaches of our minds, yet who is as close as a caring Father or Mother. To pray “Our Father” is to acknowledge that all of us are brothers and sisters, not just Christians but all people everywhere. Whether you are facing the routine tasks of the day, or life and death issues, this prayer is for you. Pray it in faith and confidence.

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

2007-06-30T16:56:00.001-07:00

Would They Have Been In Church Today?

Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:57-62

Thank you for your welcome! I’m honored to be in your midst. I’ve been told that “Chugiak” is an Athabaskan word meaning “place of many places.” Others have said that its Athabaskan origin is uncertain. What does that mean? A local real estate ad suggests that it means the gorgeous varied landscape of pristine waters and majestic mountains. Chugiak certainly is that. Someone suggested to me that it meant “a place where people from many different places meet.” That has possibilities. Whatever it meant originally, I’m glad to be here with you in this “place of many places.”

You might have seen the question under the sermon title about whether John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin would have been in church for worship on today. The short answer is “yes,” “no,” and “maybe”. We’ll come back to the question in a few minutes.

Freedom is a messy business. It is altogether neater if you have a law that covers every conceivable human decision, or if you have someone in authority who just tells you what you have to do in every situation. Paul discovered just how messy freedom could be in the church he started at Galatia. Freedom is at the heart of the good news about Jesus. In Christ we are free from living under the dictates of a law created and interpreted over a thousand years. The intricacies of observing all the details of this law had become a heavy burden on people. The alternative in Christ was to live by faith and in faithfulness to God according to the teachings and example set by Jesus.

At the church in Galatia there were folks that took Paul’s words about freedom in two opposite directions. First, there were those who feared that the new freedom meant that people wouldn’t be following the old ways, so they wanted to keep the old law as a requirement for believers. They thought everybody should do the same thing. Second, there were those who thought that since they were now free from the law they could do anything they liked.

To say that Paul was dismayed at these two different factions in the church is a considerable understatement. He knew that true freedom also meant responsibility, something both factions had failed to understand. His response to both factions was blunt. Those who wanted to re-institute the law, he said, were cut off from Christ and had “fallen away from grace.” (5:4) Those who wanted to use freedom as an excuse for self-indulgence would “not inherit the kingdom of God.” (5:21) “The only thing that counts,” he said to both groups, “is faith working through love.” And then he listed the characteristics of those who are led by the Spirit of Christ, those who exercise freedom with responsibility: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (5:22) That, he said, is to use the messy gift of freedom responsibly.

There is good reason to believe that those 56 patriots, who gathered in Philadelphia 231 years ago this Wednesday and signed a piece of paper that put a price on all their heads, understood that freedom was both messy and precious. When you try to imagine the core leadership of that Continental Congress, without whom the Declaration of Independence might not have been written and approved unanimously by the delegations from the thirteen colonies, what names come to mind? I know that we and historians could debate this for a long time without consensus, but I suspect few would leave out these three: John Adams from Massachusetts; Thomas Jefferson from Virginia; and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Would you agree?

This takes us back to the question I asked at the outset—Would these three patriots have been in church on Sundays before Independence Day celebrations? There is much made of “the faith of our founding fathers” that is much more a myth of how some folks wish it had been than how it actually was. In an email that might have turned up on your computer, the claim was made that 52 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of “established churches.” As you get to know me, you will find that it makes me uneasy when I see history being misconstrued and used as propaganda. In truth, there was such a diversity of faith perspectives among the “founding fathers” and “founding mothers,” some despaired of ever agreeing on the status of religion in the new country. Because the three giants I mentioned represent this diversity, I thought it perhaps useful that we inquire into their religious perspectives and what they contributed to the nation that came into being on July 4th, 1776.

John Adams and Abigail, his wife and best counselor, were devout Christians and independent thinkers who saw no conflict between church and state. John was one of the most sensible and powerful forces at the Continental Congress; it was John Adams that persuaded Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, and Adams who persuaded the Congress to allow Jefferson to do it. Adams became the second president of the United States. John was in church at least once on Sundays and often two or three times. His and Abigail’s own church was a Congregational Church in the Puritan tradition in Massachusetts. Adams was committed to the principle of everyone’s having the freedom to worship as they chose, but felt it was everyone’s duty to worship. There really had to be a crisis for the Adams’ not to be in church on Sunday. I think we would be safe in saying that the Adams family would have been in church on Sundays before the celebration of Independence Day.

Unlike Adams, Thomas Jefferson would not likely have attended church on the Sunday before July 4th any more than he attended any other Sundays. Jefferson was the one who wrote the Declaration of Independence and became the third president of the United States. Those who put religious labels on would consider Jefferson a Deist, those who believe that God created the world and then left it to run on the laws God had created. As suspicious as he was of the unchecked power of government, and he was, Jefferson was even more suspicious of the power of unchecked religion to coerce others. He knew well the history of the intolerance of churches that were “established” or identified with the state in Europe and he feared for what might happen in America. He wanted a high “wall of separation” between church and state so that neither infringed on the responsibilities of the other. In 1817 when Congress passed the Elementary School Act, Jefferson insisted on this provision: "No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination." Given this founding father’s deep suspicions of organized religion, I think we can safely conclude that he would not have been in worship on Sundays.

Benjamin Franklin was more casual about faith than Adams but not nearly as wary of it as Jefferson. Franklin’s creed was simple: serve God by serving others. What distinguished Franklin from Adams and Jefferson was his “good-natured religious tolerance.” Franklin was not a member of any church but supported them all. In his hometown of Philadelphia whenever a new church was to be built he would give to their building funds. It is little wonder that on July 4th, 1788 when Franklin was seriously ill, two years before his death, and couldn’t get out, the clergy of the city of Philadelphia including a Jewish Rabbi paraded arm in arm right under his window, a first not only for Philadelphia but perhaps a first in the history of Christianity.

Franklin biographer, Walter Isaacson, concludes that Franklin’s “good-natured religious tolerance was in fact no small advance for civilization in the eighteenth century. It was one of the greatest contributions to arise out of the Enlightenment, more indispensable than that of the most profound theologians of the era… In a world that was then (as, alas, it still is now) bloodied by those who seek to impose theocracies, [Franklin] helped to create a new type of nation that could draw strength from its religious pluralism. As Garry Wills argued in his book Under God, this ‘more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth.’”[1]

I think that it was the passions of these founding fathers and mothers—John and Abigail Adams’ passion for God; Jefferson’s passion for a “high wall” of separation between church and state; and Franklin’s passion for good-natured tolerance—that laid a good foundation for our country. The heritage we can claim and celebrate from our “founding fathers and mothers” is diversity and tolerance. If it is true that the meaning of Chugiak—a place of many places—is a place where all kinds of people can gather without fear of rejection and exclusion because of their beliefs, then it will be a place where we exercise freedom with responsibility. We will, in Paul's words, be loving others as we love ourselves. Aren’t you glad that you made it to worship today, that you have the freedom to do so, and that you have not compromised the freedom of those who chose to go other places of worship, or stay at home?

[1] Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) p. 491.

DAY EIGHT: TOK TO CHUGIAK

2007-06-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 28: If you saw the Day Seven blog you know that we did have access to the Internet at Tok. Not only did we have service, the Snowshoe Motel provided the best access of the trip. Here we were offered both wired and wireless connections. Keep the Snowshoe in mind the next time you pass through Tok.

Because of the time change from Pacific to Alaska Daylight Time the dogs and I woke up even earlier than usual. And when we wake up, guess who else gets waked up? At 4:00a the dogs and I thought it was 5:00, and they figured it was time to go eat and go out. It was as light as if it was noon. We could have played ball outside all night.

Since we had some extra time—after our walk through the woods across the highway—I looked at the lead stories in the online edition of the New York Times. One of the headlines read, “Study Sees Climate Change Impact on Alaska.” Global warming may be an interesting topic of discussion in other places, but in Alaska it is a reality. For reasons that are not clear to me, Alaska is warming more quickly than any other place on the planet right now. People here may debate the causes, but few debate the fact of it.

Conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage, this study concludes that “many of Alaska’s roads, runways, railroads and water and sewer systems will wear out more quickly and cost more to repair or replace because of climate change… Higher temperatures, melting permafrost, a reduction in polar ice and increased flooding are expected to raise the repair and replacement cost of thousands of infrastructure projects as much as $6.1 billion for a total of nearly $40 billion—about a 20 percent increase—from now to 2030.” And that doesn’t include costs for things like moving villages, protecting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, fighting wildfires or protecting private property that may be affected.

As we ate lunch at the Lone Rifle Restaurant on the Glenn Highway about 90 miles from Anchorage, we looked out at the magnificent Matanuska Glacier that lay only hundreds of yards below us. We wondered how it had been affected by global warming. Many glaciers are melting so fast that they are actually “retreating.” The young woman who served us said that the massive ice flow had retreated some and was thinner now. Connie remembers the glacier from her first trip here in 1987, and how much larger the glacier was then than now.

At 3:00 this afternoon we rolled into the parking lot of Chugiak United Methodist Church (# 3 on the map), 2,688 miles from Bend, Oregon. Some folks from the church were there to welcome us. They've put us up in the Eagle River Motel until Sunday when the parsonage will be ready.

Is it possible to say that we are really glad to have arrived without taking anything away from our delight with the last eight days? That's our sentiment!

Hope you’ve had a great day!

DAY SEVEN: WHITEHORSE TO TOK

2007-06-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 27: Ninety-six miles north of Whitehorse we arrived at Haines Junction, so named because it is a junction between the highway coming from the south in Haines, Alaska and the AlCan. Since we not only passed through the town on all of our trips up and down the AlCan but also whenever we took the ferry from Juneau and drove to Anchorage, Haines Junction was like an old friend. Several times we stayed in one of the two motels in town and probably ate at all (three or four) of the restaurants.

What we remembered most, however, was the Village Bakery, a small log house almost hidden in the trees a couple of blocks off the main street. It was a must stop whenever we went through town. Today was no exception. Since we had breakfast in Whitehorse not two hours before, we ate light—we split a mouth-watering cinnamon-apple fritter. They had brewed decaf! Connie had an amaretto latte. She pronounced the bakery a Four.

Haines Junction is in a beautiful green valley. To the west we could see the St. Elias Mountains, the highest and youngest mountains in Canada. Mt. Logan, the highest peak in Canada, is there at 19,545 feet. There are six other peaks over 16,000 feet.

Once we left Haines Junction we left behind the smooth road with wide shoulders. When we crossed the Donjek River we entered the section of the AlCan that was most difficult to build and maintain. According to an interpretative sign on the roadside, “Glacial rivers, like the Donjek, posed a unique problem for the builders of the Alaska Highway. These braided mountain streams would flood after a heavy rainfall or rapid glacial melt, altering the waters’ course and often leaving bridges crossing dry ground.” Swampy ground underlain by permafrost, numerous lakes, creeks, and rivers, plus a thick insulating ground cover, made this section especially difficult.

In recent years, the same section of highway has been the object of a massive, ongoing reconstruction project. It remains a particularly difficult section of road, as witnessed by the number of frost heaves in the new pavement. This is definitely the roughest road so far on the trip, as it has been on all of our other trips. We also think twice about getting out of the car when we are stopped by road construction. Yes, you guessed it. Even Velvet is anxious to get back into the car and away from the mosquitoes.

After 2,267.6 miles we went through customs and came out in Alaska. Fireweed is brilliant along the roadsides. We still have a hundred miles to go to Tok for the night. We have reservations at the Snowshoe Motel where there is supposed to be wireless access to the Internet. If there is, I may get to post this new blog.

Hope you all have had a great day!

DAY SIX: DEASE LAKE TO WHITEHORSE

2007-06-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, June 26: Mama Z’s Boulder Café in Dease Lake received Connie’s highest restaurant rating so far—a Four and a Half (out of a possible Five)! The why of that rating in this town of 650 people in one of the remotest parts of British Columbia began with dinner Tuesday night. Connie ordered fish and chips—cod that was delicious. I saw a mysterious item at the top of the menu called “The Petr” that said this was the chef’s choice of whatever he thought was excellent on a particular night. After the meal he comes out and flips a coin and the customer calls it. If the customer wins, the menu said, the dinner is on the chef; if the chef wins the customer pays double. I didn’t realize that if I ordered it the flipping of the coin was required; I had only wanted what the chef thought was the best item on his menu for the day. I ordered it and received a roasted half chicken with lightly steamed fresh vegetables and made from scratch mashed potatoes. It was delicious.

When we finished dinner, our waitress, a college student from Vancouver who wanted to see what it was like living in the north and make some money for college, brought the chef out in his white coat. We shook hands and he flipped the coin. It bounced out of his hand and onto the table“heads” as I had called. So, my dinner was free. It was fun and the food was good. The restaurant was clean with draped sheer curtains on all the windows. Connie decided that the quality of the food, the cleanliness of the place, and the entertainment (The Petr) merited a Four. By the time we finished breakfast this morning, the rating had gone up to Four and a Half!

We told Mama Z about Connie’s system and how she rated it. Mama Z began to cry. She told us how hard she had worked since going way out on a financial limb 18 months earlier to get the restaurant. Her hard work obviously paid off. If you ever make it to Dease Lake on the Cassiar Highway a stop at this restaurant will be worth your while. Try “The Petr”!

On route from Dease Lake to the junction with the Alaska Highway outside Watson Lake in Yukon Territories we came across Jade City, a wide place in the road with two jade businesses as the only community. Both businesses mine jade and design jewelry. According to The Milepost the Princess Jade Mine in the Cassiar Range about 80 miles from Jade City accounts for 75% of the world’s jade supply. Of course, we stopped to visit. Connie shopped while I walked the dogs and took advantage of their free coffee. That reminds me, once we left the Starbucks on every block in Vancouver, whenever we’ve asked for decaf coffee we get funny looks. Sometimes we are offered powered decaf. Clearly, there is not much demand for decaf in these latitudes.

We weren’t far on down the road from Jade City when we encountered a large bull moose running down the road. An hour after that we saw a black bear with a brilliant sheen glistening in the sun.

Whitehorse, a city of about 75,000 and the provincial capitol of Yukon Territories, is our resting place for the night. Hopefully, tomorrow night will find us in Tok, Alaska.

I haven’t received any fishing reports from the Old Goats. How about it, guys?

DAY FIVE: NEW HAZELTON TO DEASE LAKE

2007-06-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 25: Sunday night we stayed in New Hazelton, a small town that sits at the foot of a great mountain. Because nothing was open in town for breakfast, we stopped in the next town, Kitwanga, thirty miles down the road. First Nation people own the gas station/restaurant/general store. Each table in the restaurant was a work of art, hand-painted in tribal designs and covered with high gloss polyurethane. The waitress, a member of the Kitsan tribe, told us that each table had been painted in memory of someone in the tribe; their names were inscribed on each table.

Kitwanga sits at the junction of the Yellowhead Highway (Highway 16), which goes across Canada, and the Cassiar Highway (Highway 37). The Cassiar runs north 450 miles and terminates in the AlCan Highway near Watson Lake. The road passes through some of the most remote and awe-inspiring scenery on the continent. Wild rivers, deep canyons, glaciers, clear lakes, and abundant wildlife distinguish the region. We saw a black bear crossing in front of the car and a young moose cow with her calf trotting along the edge of the road. The Cassiar runs through unspoiled wilderness between the Coast Range and the Skeena Mountains, connecting the great northwestern rain forest with the spruce and jack pine forests of the Yukon. The regular rainfall obscures the sights on many days, but not on this one. We were most fortunate.

Today’s travel on the Cassiar reminded us of two of the realities of these latitudes in the summer. First are the mosquitoes. Everywhere we stopped to let the dogs out there were swarms of them. I had on the Off Connie purchased at Bell 2 where we stopped for lunch. I think the Off only encouraged them. DEET is supposed to work by corrupting receptors on the mosquito’s antennae. Quite unscientifically, I suspect that the recent evolutionary development of mosquitoes has enabled them to adapt so that it has ceased to repel and now simply advertises the presence of “human flesh” and dinner. At least it feels that way when I get out of the car.

The second omnipresent reality of being on the road to Alaska is road construction, flaggers, waits, and pilot cars. I don’t know why they have to tear up and repair the roads just when we travelers want to use them, but it may have something to do with having only three months when they can do that work. The other nine months, they are probably driving snowplows. In the last forty miles to Dease Lake today we went through over twenty miles of flaggers and pilot cars.

The delays made us especially happy to reach Dease Lake. Tomorrow, we hope to run the last 200 miles of the Cassiar and start on the AlCan.

DAY THREE: SQUAMISH TO QUESNEL

2007-06-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

Note: I had difficulty getting this blog on from Quesnel (pronounced, we are told, without the "s"). Couldn't do it on Saturday, but this morning. It seems to work. I took down the blog for Day One. It may be that the graphics are too much to load for the wireless system here at the Travelodge in Quesnel. Oh well... I may get to stick some graphics in later.

Saturday, June 23: We could ooh and ah over the beauty of the scenery on this route, but Connie and I agree that two events make our journey via highway 99 worthwhile.

At 4 a.m. this morning the people above us moving around and showering awakened me in the August Jack Motor Inn. You know what that’s like. By 5 a.m. we heard people working outside our ground floor room. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the yard was bathed in the two days after solstice light. Peeking out through the curtains we saw people setting up tents and cooking pots. Several of the men were wearing turbans and the women were wearing saris. Connie talked to one of the men working near our door that opened to the yard. A contingent of twenty-five or thirty Indians were preparing for an annual holy day for their God. They were doing it by preparing all manner of Indian food that they would offer free to the townspeople all day.

When we were packing the car to get on the road, they invited us to come have some of the delicacies they were preparing. A group of women were cooking an Indian version of tempura in large black pots. They insisted that we take some of the goodies with us and filled a large paper plate to overflowing and gave us cups of hot sweet tea with milk. I asked one of the men if they were all from Squamish and he said they were. They intended to have some kind of ceremony at ten o’clock but for the most part they were celebrating their holy day by offering wonderfully prepared food for the town. Such hospitality! I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if at Easter we put up tents and prepared food for the people of the towns where we live.

The second special treat on this route came after we had gone up on some of the steepest inclines (13-14%) in British Columbia as we went from Pemberton to Lillooet on highway 99. We had stopped to run the dogs at a trail head, gotten back in the car, and started up the road when I saw Black bear munching on some leaves not a hundred feet from the car. He was a Black bear, but as is often the case his color was brown. Not ten minutes down the road we met another Black bear by the roadside. By the time I got the camera on him he was in the bushes peering back at me not twenty feet away. Was I in the car? Of course!

Indian hospitality and seeing bears in the wild, what more could we ask? This has indeed been a special day.

First Sermon

2007-06-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

My usual practice will be to post sermons on Saturday evenings before delivering them on Sunday. Since we will be on the road north from Oregon to Alaska in the last week of June, I will post the sermon for July 1 sometime before Sunday morning.

The theme of the first sermon will be "Freedom and Responsibility: Would Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin Have Been in Church on the Sundays before Independence Day Celebrations?"