Christmas Carols

Reflections on two Christmas Carols from worship on December 27, 2009 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Morning Readings
Luke 2:8-20 Philippians 2:5-11

Story of a Carol – "Once in Royal David’s City"

We’re going to hear the story first, and then sing together “Once in Royal David’s City.” In invite you to turn to the hymn now, to have the lyrics in front of you as I tell at least a part of its story.

“Once in Royal David’s City stood a lowly cattle shed.” In just ten words, the first two lines of this hymn express one of the mysteries of Jesus the messiah. Bethlehem is Royal David’s city. David: who protected Israel from all harm, beginning from the time when he was a young shepherd who defeated Goliath to end the Philistine threat, through his later victories as a leader of armed men, and the prosperity he won for Israel as King, when he established the capital Jerusalem on mount Zion. David’s rule was the height of Israel’s peace and prosperity. In the twenty-eight generations since David, as Israel’s fortunes declined, as the people were fractured, taken into exile, and returned home only to be ruled by the Roman empire, people longed for another David, a messianic heir to the throne. Like the beleaguered people of middle earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the people of Israel awaited the “Return of the King.” Then Jesus came, and his closeness to God was obvious in his teaching, his healing, his power over the raging sea, and his confrontation with injustice. They began to call him the Christ, which is simply the greek word for messiah: the new king. But Jesus was not exactly what they all had had in mind. Most of them expected the messiah to overthrow Roman rule and restore the greatness of the nation of Israel, much as David had conquered their enemies long ago. That’s why, when the soldiers arrested Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciples were wearing swords. They kept waiting for him to be a new King David, and he kept showing them that there is a different way to overcome hatred, injustice, and oppression. Jesus overcame it with grace, with compassion and mercy. He said to turn the other cheek. He said that if a soldier forces you to carry a load for one mile, carry it for two, just to show him that your grace is more powerful than his order. He transformed the tax collecting cheat Zacchaeus by befriending him, and he overcame the brutality of violence by submitting to it. One way for us to understand all the writings of the New Testament is to read how all those people were trying to explain that the old idea of the messiah had been wrong.

And that’s what this hymn tells us in the very opening line. “Once in Royal David’s City stood a lowly cattle shed.” Yes, this is the messiah, born in Bethlehem and the heir to David’s line. But this is not the kind of king you expected. He was not born in wealth or comfort, but in a lowly cattle shed, and laid in a manger that was there for feeding the animals. The second verse compounds the irony. “He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all. And his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall. With the poor and mean and lowly lived on earth our savior holy.” There is a question lingering in the story of Christmas: What is God doing here in this poor and disadvantaged place? In a few minutes, Sandy will read for us a section of the letter to the Philippians, which may be the oldest section of the New Testament, because he is quoting a hymn from the very earliest years of the church. It is a hymn about this very mystery, that Jesus, who was equal with God the father, did not cling to his powerful divine status, but humbled himself and became one of us. This is not the way they expected to see God, but more on that later.

“Once in Royal David’s City” comes from an English poet, Cecil Frances Humphrey, the wife of a priest in the Church of England, and was originally published in a book for children. This carol is well known as the very first music of the Christmas Eve service at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England. It was at King’s College that the service designed around lessons and carols was first used for Christmas Eve. This service is broadcast live on radio around the world (it begins at 10:00 AM for us) and many churches have used this format as a model for their own Christmas Eve services, including our own 11:00 service. King’s College is famous for it’s choral tradition, including a boy’s choir who accompany the adults. “Once in Royal David’s City” has been the opening hymn since 1919, and, by tradition, the first verse is sung by a solo boy soprano. Imagine this old stone English Cathedral, on the festive day of Christmas Eve, with millions of people tuned in on the radio, and the service begins with one child’s voice piercing the silence. No pomp and circumstance, no triumphant sounds of trumpet and timpani, no blast of the organ, at least not yet. The service begins with one child’s voice breaking the quiet, just like the story of Jesus Christ.

A reflection on "Hark the Herald Angels Sing"

“Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is a hymn that tells the story that we heard in Luke, the story of an angel appearing to the shepherds to tell the good news of Christ’s birth, and how the angel is joined by a heavenly host, who praised God, saying “Glory to God in the highest.” The magnificence of that moment inspired Charles Wesley to write this hymn with the original opening line “Hark how all the welkin rings, glory to the king of kings!” The word welkin means “vault of heaven, so “Hark, how all the welkin rings” was a reference to what a wondrous sound it must have been for the sky to be filled with a heavenly host, praising God. Luke’s gospel doesn’t say that they were singing, but, in the way that sometimes happens, someone else suggested a new line and now the carol is known as “Hark the Herald angels sing,” and we always think of the angels as singing. Change can be a good thing.

Other than the first line, this carol was written by the great hymnist Charles Wesley, co-founder of the Methodist Church, and the writer of so many of our favorite hymns, including “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus” which we sing in Advent, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” which we all sing on Easter morning, and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” which I would like to sing as often as possible. Wesley is known for the poetry of his hymns, but also for the theological depth of them. In just a few lines, Wesley evokes and summarizes the richness of the scriptures and Christian theological tradition.

In these three verses, Wesley is focusing on that mystery we confronted in the words of “Once in Royal David’s City,” and which we heard in the words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. It is the mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of God becoming, literally “enfleshed” as a human being. Think of that line in the second verse: “veiled in flesh, the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity.” What we sing of, at Christmas, is the strange and wondrous idea that God, the deity, the creator and ruler of all the universe, was incarnate in this baby Jesus, and came into the world in the same vulnerable, awkward, and difficult existence that we all share. For some reason, God was, again in Wesley’s rich words “pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel.” God, as a human, dwells with the human family. If we were not so used to that concept, it would shock us. We might even find it heretical, as, indeed, many people did at the time.

And maybe it still does offend us. Maybe this isn’t what we really want from God, when we step back to think about it. Wouldn’t we rather have a God who sticks with the power and majesty? We want God from on high to fix things that cause us pain and grief. We want a God of power to vanquish disease and wars, to give us clear direction, and restrain those who would do us harm. We want a God of might to provide food for the hungry, clean water to dry places, and shelter for the weary. Why are we so pleased with Christmas and the baby Jesus? Why don’t we take that Nike slogan and throw it back to God “Just do it!” “Just wave your hands or speak a word and make things right!” What was this business of becoming one of us? We’ve got plenty of us – what we need is God the powerful and mighty to shake things up!

So, you can see why some people found Jesus to be blasphemous. The thing is, we may think that we want God to come in power and remake everything – many of our prayers sound a lot like that – but what we really need is for God to love us right through the midst of the most painful, darkest parts of our lives. We need God to love us when bad things happen to us and when we are the ones who have done bad things to others. And the best way for God to love us was to show us that we are worth more than all the power and glory of heaven, to show us that when all is said and done, and when death itself has passed, then all will be made well. When we sing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” notice that reference to Easter in the third verse: all will be well. God showed us by putting aside the status of divinity and becoming one of us. “Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die.” What a wondrous mystery, that God would do that for us.

In her book about raising her infant son, Anne Lamott tells the story of a friend of hers who was traveling with her own two-year-old son. They had rented a condominium on a lake, and one morning the mother put her son down for a nap in his playpen, pulled down all the shades to make the room dark, and went into the next room to do some work. A little later, she heard her son knocking on the door from his room, so she could tell that he had awakened and climbed out of the playpen to the door. When she got to the door, she found that it had locked. He had somehow pushed the button on the knob and then leaned on the door to make it close and latch. She called to him to jiggle the doorknob, but it was dark in the room and it was quickly dawning on the child that his mom wasn’t able to open the door and get to him. Panic set in, and he began to cry. The mother ran around, trying everything, left messages for the building manager and rental agency, poked and jimmied at the door, all the while calling out “I’m here, I’m here.” Finally, the only thing she could think of was to lie down on the floor and stick her fingers through that inch of space underneath the door. Lamott writes that “She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. And somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time – connected, on the floor, him holding her fingers in the dark” (Operating Instructions, 220) This was the only way she could reassure him during their wait.

The name Immanuel means “God-with-us.” Jesus is Immanuel – Jesus is God-with-us, and that comes with all of the great and crazy things that it means to be with us. In a way, Christmas is God’s fingers jammed under a locked door to where we are, so often scared and sad and feeling alone in the dark. It is God telling us in the language we most understand that all will be well in the end. That is the gift we most need.

Sermon - Cutting Down Trees

Preached on December 13, 2009, the third Sunday of Advent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Luke 3:7-18

Dedicated to Harry and Margaret Craft, my parents-in-law; and always to the glory of God.

Introduction
Every year in the season of Advent, we read scripture passages about John the Baptist preparing the way for Christ. This may seem like a chronological mix-up, because while we are preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas, John the Baptist is preparing the way for Jesus to begin his public ministry in adulthood. It’s not a mix-up, but a good reminder for us that when we celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas, a large part of what we aer celebrating is who Jesus became as an adult: the way he healed bodies and relationships, the compassion he showed for people living hard lives, the anger he had for injustice, the forgiveness he gave with every breath - including his last, the way he taught us how to understand God’s character in parables, instruction, and in the very way he lived. All of it is what we celebrate on Christmas, and John the Baptist is here in the season of Advent, preaching to the people of Judea long ago, and preaching also to us, about what it means to get ready for Christ. He’s talking about an axe at the root of the tree: every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down. Cutting down trees. That’s an image that stays with me, because I want to see where it leads.

Prayer
O God, revealed to us in the Christ-child’s life, grant us in this time of worship a place for our souls to be at rest and time to re-center our lives. Surprise us with insight and affirm our deepest hopes in you. Amen

When we moved into our home five years ago there was, by the back fence, this wonderfully tall elm tree that gave shade over the entire back yard. Every autumn, for several years, it covered the yard with leaves. But then this past summer the leaves started coming down months too soon. An arborist confirmed our concern with his diagnosis: Dutch elm disease. The tree couldn’t take up water, and the leaves dried up and fell off. For our safety, and that of our neighbors, we had to cut it down. It was a sad reality, and our sadness caused us to drag our feet for a while. We just didn’t want it to come down. And now that it is down, I miss it. You see, there is this problem we have about getting from the head to the heart. In my head, I knew the tree was dead and it had to come down, but in my heart I was still very attached to it. Most of the time, the best way to move a message from our head to our heart is to act as we know we should, and the practice of those actions will change our heart. We will learn to love what comes next as we had learned to love what came before. In other words, I am learning to love the expansive sky view of clouds and sun that I see now where the tree used to stand, and I look forward to whatever will grow next in the newfound sunshine.

Or, to put it another way, and this is really what John the Baptist is saying to us, I believe: when we remove the things in our lives that are not bearing good fruit, we will have more time, more energy, more space for the things that do bear fruit, and what a gift that will be to us and to those around us. To prepare for the gift of Christ is to look at our own lives as if we were cultivating an orchard. Some of the things on which we spend our time, and thoughts, and money, and energy are not bearing fruit. They just aren’t. Maybe they once did; maybe they never did. But we keep doing them because, at some level, we have grown attached to them. That’s why we don’t want them to be cut down. But we need to change.

If the image of trees isn’t working for you, then try this. Think about the rotation of a fan, especially a ceiling fan with those long blades that stick straight out from the center. (We’ve got ceiling fans in this sanctuary, and they are on this morning because as hot air rises, we want the fans to push it back down to us. In a tall room like this sanctuary, these fans are for use in the winter.) I’m thinking about ceiling fans as a metaphor for our spiritual lives. Think about how the very tip of the blade moves at such a fast speed; when a fan is really moving, it’s hard to keep your eye on the tip of just one blade. But if you look at a spot close to the center, the fan blades are moving much slower, and your eyes can keep up with them. It almost feels restful to move from the outside tip down to the center, where the motion slows down. So, where do we live our lives: out at the edge, or close to the center? The closer we stay to our center, the more at rest our spirit will be. But we spend so much of our lives away from our center, out on the periphery, concerned with things that aren’t really central to our lives, and when we live like that, we can feel like we’re running just keep up; we have trouble focusing, and we wear ourselves out. To go back to John the Baptist’s image, we are putting a lot of energy into trees that don’t bear any fruit. Advent is an invitation to return to the center of our lives, and at the center of our lives we find a child who is Immanuel, God-with-us, who shows us that the center of life is love, compassion, mercy.

Now, I’m not going to stand here and tell you exactly what you need to change in your lives. I don’t know what each of you can do to move toward the center of your lives. If I were a different kind of preacher, I’d pretend to know exactly what you need to do. (You, don’t spend so much time on this or that. And you, stop feeling like you’re responsible for everyone’s happiness, that’s not bearing any fruit for anyone.) Or maybe I could just give everyone a list of seven things you need to give up by Christmas. I can’t do that. Our lives are too different and complex for me to give you a simple, one-size-fits-all remedy. And even if I could, it would only rob you of the valuable work of discernment, which is a spiritual practice itself. I can’t tell you what you should do, but I think there are some guideposts to show us the way.

1. First, practice discernment. Take a clear look at your lives, and consider that which really deserves more of your time and attention than you have to give right now. Think about giving yourself to the trees with good fruit, and that will make it easier to figure out what can be given up in order for you to do that. Discernment is prayerful, thoughtful. Sometimes it works by trial and error, so give yourself permission to make a few mistakes and then to learn from them for next time.

2. Second, remember that this business of cutting down trees is not judgmental. The last thing John the Baptist had in mind was to say that some people are bad and others are good, and you are a bad person if you’re not bearing fruit. The truth is that all of us have parts of our lives that are fruitful and parts that aren’t. If John had wanted to condemn people, the first people he would have condemned were the tax collectors and the soldiers, the people who enforced the Roman oppression of Israel. But right there in this morning’s passage are soldiers and tax collectors, listening to John about the trees and then asking him “what should we do?” He tells them “keep your jobs and do them fairly; don’t use your power for gain at the expense of others.” All of us are complicit in injustice at some level. We can’t change the structural problems of the world by ourselves, but we can make changes in our own lives to live more justly, with more compassion for those who bear the heaviest burdens.

3. Finally, remember that we change in small stages. We live one day at a time. No one can cut down all the bad trees in one day, but we can think about this day, this week, this Christmas. What is one small change we can make that will allow more room for better fruit to grow, more room for Immanuel to be born within our lives? Begin there, and one step at a time, we will walk together to Bethlehem.

Thanksgiving after sadness

It had been a hard year when the pilgrims celebrated the great feast that would become our Thanksgiving holiday. Their voyage from England had been delayed the previous year, putting them into Cape Cod at the beginning of a harsh winter, low on food, weak from the journey, and lacking shelter or any idea of where they were. Between the ocean crossing and that awful winter, half of the brave Mayflower pilgrims died. It had been a hard year - so much loss, and yet there was Governor William Bradford, calling for hunted fowl to provide a feast so that they might rejoice together.

How do we approach these holidays of rejoicing if it has been a hard year? How do we face a dinner table with fewer places set? How do we give thanks when our heart has so much grief?

These are difficult questions, but I take comfort in the fact that they are not new. Perhaps old Bradford was on to something. Maybe he knew that a time to rejoice for the blessings they had was an important balance for all their times of shared grief. In the midst of all they had lost, they also needed to remember what they had, and what they had gained. A feast of rejoicing didn’t mean that they were done with grief and sadness. It just meant that they weren’t going to allow their losses to be their only story. Their story was also one of blessings. They had gained a foothold on a new continent. Plymouth was beginning to feel like a home, and not just an emergency shelter.

In some ways, their blessings were the same as ours. They had food to eat for the winter ahead, and a dry place to sleep. They had each other – a community of support to share the burdens and sorrows. They had faith in God, and their faith helped them to remember that their lives were part of a grand history that began before their births and would continue past their deaths. It is a history of God faithfulness and love for all people. It is a promise that everything lost will finally be found; all that is broken will be made whole.

So let us rejoice and give thanks, even when the year has been hard. It won’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last.

Sermon - Faith and Works

Part IX of XI in the sermon series "What Happened to the Church After Jesus: The Untold Story."

Preached on November 8, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.

Dedicated to my stepson Sam, on his eighteenth birthday; and always to the glory of God.

When the founders of Tallmadge came here to create a community, they envisioned a town which would be ordered around worship, charity, and community. Our nation had recently won freedom from the British Empire, and the congregational church, like its puritan ancestors, saw their freedom as an opportunity to submit themselves to the order and discipline of the Christian faith.

Notice how that sounds so out of sync with the way we talk about freedom in modern America. For our ancestors, freedom was not freedom from order, but a freedom to create order amid the chaos of life. For them, discipline was not a negative word; they desired the disciplines of the faith, freely chosen to bring structure, stability, and maturity to their lives.

You can trace a line from the ancestors of this congregation right back to John Calvin and Martin Luther and the time of the reformation in Europe five centuries ago. At the time they lived, one of the great mistakes of the medieval church in Europe was a bad understanding of what divine justice meant. If we may generalize, the people of the medieval church thought divine justice meant that everyone was appointed to their proper place in life and was to observe their station. Some were born to feudal nobility, and others were born to serfdom, while the tradesmen and merchants held the middle class. No leveling of the playing field was necessary. Desegregation would have violated God’s plan. You didn’t expect more for yourself, and you handed some charity to those on the lower rungs of the ladder. That was justice.

They saw the radical equality among all people proclaimed in the scriptures as the promise of heaven, and the church held the keys to the kingdom of heaven. If you were baptized in the church, if you did penance and received the communion bread at mass, and if you were buried in the church yard, then your salvation was obtained. The sacraments of the church became the works of faith. People became adjusted to the inequalities of society, and the church became comfortable with its power. Martin Luther and the other leaders of the reformation argued that it is not for the church to decide who receives God’s salvation. Luther claimed that we are saved by faith alone, not by works.

Dr. John has already preached about all that came into place for the reformation to occur in the church, so let us move ahead to the era of our own church’s founders and let me ask an important question that almost sounds like a church history riddle: If the protestant reformation was about being saved by faith alone, and not by works, then why were our ancestors so keen on ordering their lives and their entire towns according to the discipline of faith?

We have some baggage left over from the reformation. Luther said that we are saved by faith and not works, and people have taken that to mean that we are only saved by believing in Christ, not by being a good person. You’re not saved by being good; you’re saved by believing. But that’s not what Luther said. When he said we are not saved by works, he meant the works of the church: we’re not saved by whether or not the church gave us the sacraments, or whether people paid indulgences for us after we had died. And when he said that we are saved by faith, faith means much more than belief in Christ, it means a way of Christ-like living: practicing compassion, mercy, and generosity. Those practices of faith are a part of what faith is. In the gospel of Matthew, 25th chapter, Jesus tells a parable with the basic point that those who practice with love toward others are the ones who draw closest to Christ.

The reformation helped us to rediscover the practices of faith, reminded us that divine justice is for this life as well as the life to come. They discovered that God’s will was not for a great imbalance of wealth between lords and serfs. Indeed, God’s justice demanded a greater equality among the people. And, eventually, the people of the reformed faith came to Tallmadge, to establish a community based on equality, justice, the acts of faith, because faith is what saves us.

We need the disciplined practices of faith because our world requires nothing less. In this past week, we have learned of great tragedies, as police piece together the history of rape and murder in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, and as we learn details of the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. What are we to do with such horrific tragedy? One response is to ignore it, hoping that it will go away. I can tell you that I have sought to spare myself from the news often this week, because we do risk overexposure from too much media. We need sanctuary from the images and details of violence. But we cannot go to the extreme of ignoring human suffering as if it does not exist in the same world as us.

Another response is that of pessimism: the world is a place of random chance and chaos, and bad news only confirms our overly-cynical outlook. We can’t make the world different, we might think, so the best we can do is to protect ourselves. And so we get tough, and we build prisons, and we give up on the complex and costly efforts of treatment, societal reform, and rehabilitation.

Needless to say, neither the willful ignorance of evil nor the fortress mentality match up very well with the call to spread the gospel of God’s love.

These are the times when the practices of our faith can see us through. Our faith never promises to be easy, or to spare us pain, but it will see us through, and it will lead to our salvation. I believe that when we seek to order our lives around the kingdom of God, then we have the strength for the tragedies of these days. An active faith has a set of disciplines, or practices, that are strong enough to meet even a tragic week such as this one.

First, we practice trust in Jesus Christ, remembering that God has faced the worst of human suffering, tragic violence, fear, and even death, and has conquered them all. We practice humility when we confess that our own capacity for evil differs in degree, not kind, from the evil committed by others, and so we practice mercy, asking God’s forgiveness for those who do not understand what they do. We practice our work for peace-making, to spare all people the trauma of war; we practice care for our communities, so that all people might have the support of many mothers and fathers looking out for their well-being; we practice justice, so that everyone might have shelter, treatment for illness, the reward of honest work, and daily bread. The practices of faith, the order and discipline of faith, does not promise to prevent all tragedy, nor to free our lives of hardship. Nothing can deliver a life of ease, contrary to what we are constantly being told. But in the face of a world that is both wonderful and tragic, the practice of our faith leads us to live with the depth and maturity that a complex world deserves.

When our lives are ordered around the acts of faith, tragedy serves as a renewed call to order all of society around justice, peace-making, and security for all people, just as it died for our ancestors in this very congregation. They had seen great tragedy in their own lives, but they trusted that God had a different vision for our lives.

It is said that someone once asked Martin Luther what he would do if he found out that the world was ending tomorrow. “Plant a tree,” he said. May no tragedy or hardship ever prevent us from the acts of faith that God is waiting to in us, in our communities, in the world. Trust the spirit of God working within you. Take heart when you are disheartened. Act in faith.

Sermon - Hospitality

Part V of XI in the sermon series "What Happened to the Church After Jesus: The Untold Story."

Preached on October 11, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.

When we look at the Christians in the first centuries after the life of Jesus, we see that hospitality was a core practice of the early church. Hospitality is a word that needs some refreshing, because when we think of hospitality today, we might think of the hospitality industry. The service of providing food, lodging, and care has become a commercial industry, given to those who can pay for it. Or we might think of hospitality suites, where people are wined and dined to facilitate business deals, secure clients, and form partnership. But hospitality in the early church meant providing food, clothing, shelter, and care to others with no desire for payment. They remembered the words of Jesus, who advised throwing a banquet not for people who would return the favor, but for those who had no hope of inviting you to a banquet at their home, if they even had a home. That is the religious practice of hospitality.

In the second century, during the years 165 to 180, an epidemic called the plague of Galen claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. While most healthy people fled from the cities where the plague advanced, Christians stayed behind. They followed the example of Christ by putting a priority on compassion, even under the threat of death. Because Christians were often persecuted in the Roman Empire during those first three centuries, many Christian martyrs had already shown that they valued their faith with their very lives, and did not fear death, for they trusted in the resurrection of Christ. In the same way, Christians were the ones who risked their lives among patients of the plague to provide them comfort from pain, regardless of their religion, class, or status as a slave or free citizen. Hospitality for the early church was not white tablecloths and crystal. It was meeting basic humans needs and sharing gladly their meals and homes with all levels of society.

Hospitality is the answer to the historical question of how a religion could grow so dramatically within a society that persecuted it and forced it to operate so often quietly in people’s homes and secret meeting places. The sociologist Rodney Stark wrote that Christianity spread because it “prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.” Or, as translated by Diana Butler Bass, early Christians did “risky, compelling, and good things that helped people.”

This is a story that has continued throughout Christian history. In this congregation, we practice hospitality to those who cannot repay through the missions of shelters, soup kitchens, and food banks. In this building, we seek to practice the hospitality of welcome, of worship and ministries that are open and inclusive, accessible and inviting. And when we go forth from this building we seek to bring hospitality through the interfaith hospitality network, mission tours, and the many places where you give your time, talents, and dollars to others because of the spirit of Christ within you.

In the early church, hospitality was held as the primary virtue. At a time when Christians were bearing witness to their faith even in the face of death, their devotion was to a way of life that offered a radical alternative to the way of the world around them. People converted to Christianity in droves not because of the inspiring witness of the martyrs, but because of the church’s hospitality. How can you stamp out a religion by force and violence when it is growing by generosity and graciousness?

Then everything changed for the Christian church. The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 313. He rebuilt the city of Byzantium and renamed it for himself: Constantinople. Today it is known as Istanbul, in modern Turkey. There he built the Hagia Sophia, the “Church of Holy Wisdom,” which was and still is one of the most beautiful and ornate churches in the world. In a very short time, Christians found themselves moving from meeting in secret to worshiping in the most magnificent buildings of the cities. They changed from being an alternative minority within the empire, one that did not serve in the military service or in any way acknowledge the authority of the emperor, to being the religion of the empire and a requirement of all who served in the military.

Christians found themselves the beneficiaries of the empire’s wealth and influence, and, in some ways, the church has never recovered. In the parts of the world where Christians have held political and material power, the kingdoms and nations of Europe and our own nation, we have a long tradition of altering the Christian message so as to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. It’s that old maxim: power corrupts. This corruption is one part of our Christian history. But there is also another story, the often untold story that we are seeking to tell in this sermon series.

Let me give you one example. In the year 397, the bishop of Constantinople died, and a priest from the city of Antioch was called to succeed him. His name was John, and he was called John Chrysostom, which means “golden-mouthed” in honor for his great gift as a preacher.

John Chrysostom came to be Bishop of Constantinople eighty-five years after the conversion of the empire, and he preached a message of returning to the way of life among Christians before they had the power and wealth of the empire. He preached a sermon on the passage from Acts that we heard today, which told how the earliest Christians did not hold possessions and wealth privately, but shared them among the community. John preached a return to this practice, saying that “if this were done now, we should live more pleasant lives, both the rich and the poor. What abundance there should be!” John Chrysostom envisioned the Christian church using its newfound influence to change the distribution of wealth among the people, easing the difference between rich and poor, as they had done in the early years, when the church attracted so many people by its hospitality.

John Chrysostom saw the church beginning to grow complacent in its new condition of power. He preached to his city that “it is not for lack of miracles that the church is stagnant; it is because we have forsaken the angelic life of Pentecost, and fallen back on private property.” The life of Pentecost is the way of living described in the book of Acts, when they shared all things in common.

It seems to me that we are very much like the post-Constantine church in this country. Unlike the early centuries of the church, when they had no say or power over the governance of the empire, Christians in America have a say and a vote about how to shape the society we live in. I do not believe that we should put the church in charge of government, because that has been a disaster ever since the year 313. But I do believe that our faith calls us to see the world through the lens of hospitality, and our faith reminds us that our resources are to be shared with others as they have need. We do this on a small scale, individually and as a congregation through our budget, our programs, and our ministries, much like the pre-Constantine church. But when we also have influence over our governance, we can work to share hospitality on a large-scale level in our society, by making our will known, by electing those who will help to direct our nation’s wealth to everyone.

The church in America has a history of promoting hospitality at the comprehensive national level. It was Christians who promoted public education and public libraries as a benefit to all people, regardless of class or race or ability to pay. Christians led the movement to abolish slavery for decades before the President signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and later, Christians led the cause to end segregation and secure real civil rights for all races. Christians have been advocates for social safety nets to keep our elders out of poverty by the creation of social security when the Great Depression wiped out the savings of those who had worked and saved their whole lives, and for our society’s commitment to provide health care for our elders, veterans, and the poorest among us. Now we find ourselves in the midst of decisions about extending health care benefits to a much greater number of the vulnerable members of our society, with the costs to be shared by society as a whole, and especially by the wealthiest among us. I believed that my faith calls me to support this effort, and I see in it a reflection of the Christians in the book of Acts, and the 2nd century Christians who provided care during the plague of Galen.

Hospitality was at the heart of the early church when it existed tenuously within the hostile Roman Empire. And then when emperor Constantine empowered Christianity as the religion of the realm, Christians faced a great opportunity as well as a great temptation. Some gave into the temptation and twisted theology to justify their power and status over others; but there were also many who found their new influence and resources to be an opportunity to bring more hospitality to more people, to create equality of care among all people. This is our legacy, and this is our vision.

Sermon - Faith is a Journey

Part II of XI in the sermon series “What Happened to the Church after Jesus: The Untold Story.”

Preached on September 20, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Introduction:
Last week, John and I began a sermon series that will carry us until November about our Christian history. We are indebted to a book by the church historian Diana Butler Bass called A People’s History of Christianity. She claims, and we agree, that taking time to learn about the history of the Christian church is important, and well worth our attention. This is a historic year for this congregation, and we’ve enjoyed the celebration of our 200 years: the courage and vision of generations past. In this congregation, we have a good story to tell. But people don’t often feel that way about the history of the Christian church as a whole. Whether people are Christians or not, what they tend to remember most is the ugly side of church history: the Crusades that brought war to the Holy Land, the Spanish Inquisition, Witch trials, persecution of heretics, whether they were Protestant, Catholic, or non-Christian. There is a lot of ugly church history, and so for the most part we ignore our history and focus just on Jesus and the first generation of his followers: “sure, the church has messed it up, but if we go back to basics, we’ll do better,” we think. And that’s a real loss, because our history also has a story that has gone untold, a story of people who have sought to love God and to love their neighbors in courageous and creative ways. Next week, we will go back to the church in its early centuries and begin to work forward, telling the stories of those who have gone before us in faith and love. But we begin by looking at where we are today, and how we got here.

Dr. John began last week by describing how the church is changing in our generation, facing the challenges and opportunities of a time when even we Christians in Ohio are in close contact with people of other faiths and practices. Some parts of the church have responded to these changes with genuine curiosity and open minds, with respect and honor in addition to tolerance, while other parts of the church have become more insistent in their claims of absolute truth. Today we will look at what happened in the past few centuries that brought us to this point. This is the story of the church in the modern era, after the renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This is our story.

Prayer: O God of every age and generation, speak to us through the stories of those saints who have gone before us, who witnessed to the faith of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

In 1906, a minister and theologian by the name of Albert Schweitzer published a book titled The Quest for the Historical Jesus, in which he summarized two centuries worth of new theories about the real history of Jesus: how the historic Jesus of Nazareth might be different from the portrayal of Jesus Christ in the New Testament and in the theology of the church. This book tells us a lot about the way the church changed from the end of the medieval period to the 20th century. It started when the Roman Catholic church was challenged by the Protestant reformation, ending centuries of a single authoritative voice in western Christianity. In many ways this was a good development, but it also began a chaotic time in church history. With Protestants claiming that the Bible was the new authority for faith, Christians had to figure out “whose interpretation of the Bible?” and then, what happens when Christians disagreed, even to the point of persecution and war? Who was right?

Meanwhile, the successes of the scientific revolution in discovering new truths about the solar system, gravity, and disease, gave theologians the confidence that just as a careful study of the world could produce breakthroughs in understanding it, so a careful study of the scriptures and the history of 1st century Palestine could produce a true account of who Jesus really was, truer, perhaps, than what the church had been teaching about him. The quest for the historic Jesus: What did Jesus really say and what did that mean? Did he really perform those miracles, did his body really rise from the tomb, or are those symbolic stories, told to convey spiritual truths? You might recognize these as questions that remain active in the church today.

In 1906, Albert Schweitzer summarized the quest for the historical Jesus and added his own theory. As these theories were gaining prominence in the American church, there was resistance from a group of theologians whom we would call fundamentalists, because they decided on five fundamental beliefs as a test of proper Christian belief. They said that the Bible was inerrant, without error, and that Christians believed in the literal and historic truth of the virgin birth of Jesus, his miracles, and bodily resurrection. That was the beginning of Christian fundamentalism, one hundred years ago. To this day, the debate between the strict fundamentalist view and mainline theologies has been a divisive issue. But notice how recent it is. It is only in the modern era that people began to think that the most important aspect of being a Christian is the content of what you believe: whether you believe literally in certain things or believe them spiritually, in a more-than-literal way, as Biblical scholar Marcus Borg put it.

In the weeks to come, we will tell stories from the early church, the medieval church, and the church of the reformation, and I want to be clear that the Christians who came before us didn’t worry so much about the literal historic truth of our beliefs; they were concerned about the meaning of our beliefs. At Christmastime, they didn’t think about whether Mary was literally a virgin when Jesus was born. Instead, they focused on the meaning of that belief: a virgin birth means that God was powerfully present in Jesus of Nazareth. It means that God chooses to work with humble human lives like ours to do wonderful things. It didn’t even occur to them to ask whether the story was literally true or spiritually true, it was just true, because of what it meant. Although we think of fundamentalists as the conservatives in the modern debate, they are really a rather new development. What if we got beyond whether our beliefs ware literally accurate to a place where we are just believing them, and living out their meaning?

Keeping all of that in mind, our purpose in these sermons is to tell the good news about the untold story in the Christian Church. In the midst of debates over true interpretation of scripture; in the midst of persecutions and prejudice, there was another story. Let me tell you about a Congregationalist minister named Horace Bushnell, who spoke out in 1848 for an inclusive understanding among religious people. As Diana Butler Bass recounts, Bushnell thought that “Christian disagreement and sectarianism obscured the light of God’s love. While many of his colleagues were busy trying to prove that only their denomination was true, Bushnell argued the opposite point: that religious diversity does not undermine truth; rather, diversity can be seen as the pathway toward ‘a more complete whole.’” That’s a Congregationalist talking! Our heritage as Congregationalists has always been to emphasize Christian character in action rather than doctrine or tests of belief.

And what about Albert Schweitzer, who brought the debate about interpreting Jesus to prominence? It turns out that Schweitzer didn’t want to spend his life arguing about the truest interpretation of Jesus. He gave up his pulpit and his professorship and went back to school to become a doctor so that he and his wife could move to equatorial Africa to run a hospital, serving the poorest of the poor. And that is where he spent the rest of his life, not in debate, but in service. He did continue to write, and developed an ethical philosophy known as “reverence for life,” which affirms that all life is holy and worthy of our love and care. He once said that “example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”

Faith is a journey, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the journey has an end, a destination at which we have God all figured out, all our questions answered, and a faith that is without uncertainty. That kind of goal is the mistake of the modern era. I tell confirmation students that being confirmed as a Christian doesn’t mean that they fully understand Christianity. It doesn’t mean that all their questions are answered, because they should always have questions. The 20th century poet Rainier Maria Rilke said it best: “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” he wrote. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

The Christian life is not about having answers about the truth. It is, rather, about living our lives in the light of Christ. I believe that this is what was meant in this morning’s reading from the letter of James. “Who is wise and understanding among you?” he asks. “Let him show it by his good life.”

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”

Faith is a journey, and we are called to make this journey our whole lives.

The heritage of First Congregational Church of Tallmadge

When we study the history of our church, we trace a line that runs through churches in Connecticut, early Puritan Congregationalists in Boston, and the Pilgrims who established a community at Plymouth. All of our roots trace back to the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and to one eminent theologian of France known to us as John Calvin. If you were to ask the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or the founders of Tallmadge to identify their religion, they would tell you that they were Calvinists.

This year of our congregation’s bicentennial is also the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, and his legacy is in great need of restoring. It is unfortunate that Calvin, like the Puritans, has come to be viewed as overly strict, rigid, and harsh. With their plain churches, sparse liturgies, two hour sermons, and somber dress, our Calvinist ancestors may seem to us as if they were no fun. But these stereotypes are the result of a failure of historical imagination.

John Calvin and his spiritual descendants did not set out to be somber, but to be serious about celebrating the glory of God. There is a difference between being somber and being solemn. When they held themselves to high standards of action, it was in celebration of their freedom to bring order to their lives. In a disordered and chaotic world, having order was what they longed for. It was appealing to them to be able to structure their lives in a way that overcame the pitfalls of society, and left behind the status markers of wealth and privilege to live in a society of greater equality.

The Calvinists were serious and industrious – good workers – because they found dignity in their work, and their productivity allowed them the means to be generous toward their neighbors, strangers, and the poor. It was their delight to be of service to one another. It was also their delight to be educated, and to provide it to others. The idea of public school being available to everyone came from the Calvinists. The long sermons spoke to their hunger to learn, an activity formerly kept away from the middle and working classes.

If any of these attributes seem strange to modern America, it is not to the discredit of Calvinists. Perhaps it is easier for us to decide that they are just stuffy, holier-than-thou prigs than it is to celebrate their gifts, and allow their values to question the times in which we live.

Falling in Love - Sermon August 30 2009

Preached at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Song of Songs 2:18-13

Dedicated to Professor David M. Carr, who taught me about the Scriptures, and my wife Betsy, who taught me the rest, and always to the glory of God.

The Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon, is a series of poems about a man and a woman in love, about their consuming passion and longing for one another. It is a love story, and if you assumed that the Bible had no place for romantic writings, it is only because this book has been largely ignored in recent generations. The passage we heard today isn’t the half of it. Read a bit more this afternoon and you’ll see what I’m talking about. In our Christian Bibles, the Song of Songs is found next to the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. These writings are known as books of wisdom. They are not historical in the way that other scripture is, with references to people and places and events. Rather, these are poetic musings on the nature of the world, our lives, and God. However, the Song of Songs contains no mention of God by any name. It seems to be simply a poem about two people in love, which is probably the reason it is so often overlooked in favor of more Godly passages. But it was not always so.

“Rabbi Akiba, one of the founding figures of rabbinic Judaism, is reported to have said that ‘The whole of time is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All the writings are holy; the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.’” For years, when scriptures were copied by hand, the Song of Songs was copied more than any other book, and in the medieval Christian church, there are more sermons on the Song of Songs than on any other book except for the Psalms and the Gospel according to John. (David M. Carr, The Erotic Word, 2003, pg. 4) Obviously, there is something of value to be found here.

The Song of Songs is good news first of all because it affirms that God celebrates being in love. God is a romantic. I don’t mean that God is sappy, or sugary sweet. I mean that God is a romantic in the old way, like Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, except much older. The Song of Songs is an answer to the idea that that romantic love is only an illusion, a biological trick, and simply a prelude to heartbreak. Nor is romantic love a trivial thing, the stuff of chick flicks or the daydreams of youth. The Song of Songs stands in the sacred scriptures to proclaim that romantic love is wonderful, a gift of God to be celebrated. There is a Hebrew proverb that says when we die we will be judged for the good things God gave us which we refused to enjoy. In Dante’s version of hell, there is a place for those who were grave when they had cause to rejoice. As a sidebar, when Dante or a proverb speaks of the afterlife, it is only always a way to say something about this life. Dante doesn’t mean that God is waiting to punish us; he means that when we close ourselves off from the gifts of life, we create a hell in this life.

So we hear the Song of Songs in worship and we give thanks to God for love in all its wonder. But there is more. The Song of Songs is about much more than the celebration of love as a gift from God. The Song of Songs says that God is in love with us, and that we are falling in love with God. That message explains what the Song of Songs is doing in the scriptures, without a mention of God. It's there because, for millennia, Jewish and Christian readers have found in this love story an allegory of God’s love story with humanity. God is in there, they have found, and so are we.

Let’s step back and think about what it means to have a love story as a metaphor for our relationship with God. We have other metaphors found in scripture: Parent and child; Lord and humble servants; a Creator who fashions living creations; and Jesus called us friends. Each image describes something important about our relationship with God. Each one is an invitation to a new way of understanding our relationship to God.

So let us not overlook the metaphor of a love story, of the lover and the beloved. The image is hinted at in the prophets, in the letters of the New Testament, and in Revelation, when John has a vision of God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the city of Jerusalem, which stands for all of God’s people, appears as a bride for her bridegroom.

All this tells us that having faith in God is more than believing and giving yourself in humble service. Having faith is falling in love. What happens when we fall in love? (And as we ponder that question, think about falling in love with God.) When we fall in love, we find that our beloved is constantly in our thoughts. We go to sleep and wake up thinking about our beloved. We spend our days noticing things that she would notice, and finding reminders everywhere of things he has said or done.

When we fall in love, it is not only our beloved whom we find wonderful, but things and people all around us. Being in love gives us eyes to see goodness and beauty everywhere we look. We find greater joy in food, music, family, neighbors, the sun, and even the rain. It’s like that song from the Music Man, “There was love, all around, but I never heard it singing. No, I never heard it at all, til there was you.”

When Betsy and I fell in love, and we said over and over those words “I love you,” I actually found myself expressing love more often to others. It’s something about the practice, and the feeling of overflowing that love gives to us.

It’s a change to think about faith as falling in love. It suggests that you don’t choose faith in order to make you a better person - because it’s good for you, and you don’t choose faith because you’re worried about the possibility of hell, or God’s wrath. You choose faith because God loves you, God finds you, God comes to whatever it is that you are hiding behind, and in the words we heard this morning, “There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice. My lover spoke and said to me, ‘Arise, …my beautiful one, and come with me. See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.’”

God proclaims that the winter of our fear, or hurt, or plain old sinfulness and brokenness, is over. And we fall in love. We think about God day and night. Experiences in our lives, big and small, remind us of God. And the goodness we see spills over to joy, and is given in love to others. When love for God becomes a practice, it overflows to others, until we have love, as Jesus told us we would, even for our enemies, and for the least and poorest of our brothers and sisters.

Falling in love is followed by growing in love, in which we learn to know and understand our beloved more deeply. We discover how to maintain the practice of love through good times and bad, through illness and sadness, through changes and challenges: rich or poor, in sickness and in health. When we grow in love with God, it is sustained by our practices of worship, of service, of relationships with our community, and prayer.

When we grow in love with God, we become a fuller person. We become what God created us to be. Iraneous of Lyon, a bishop of the 2nd century, said that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” God loves you, and God’s love brings us to full life.

Three Wishes

What if you were granted three wishes, just as if you were in a fairy tale? What would you wish for? In John Crowley’s novel The Solitudes, Pierce has been working on this problem since childhood. It takes some work, because there are many traps and pitfalls, as we learn from all those fairy tales. Too much greed has a way of backfiring. Think of King Midas who wished to turn all that he touched to gold, only to lose the ones he love to gold statues. Too much altruism is also a problem. A wish for an end to war might be granted by making you the only living human on earth. If you wish for someone to fall in love with you, it will never feel like the love is real. Likewise for wishing to become a popular published author. Success can only be enjoyed if you feel that you have really earned it. Better, Pierce decides, to keep the wishes smaller, more predictable.

Pierce decides that his first wish will be for a full life of good health until a natural old age. His second wish is for a steady modest income, achieved without harm to himself or anyone else. He will phrase each wish carefully so that there can be no misunderstandings, no loopholes that could allow bad consequences.

For the third wish, Pierce think it would be good to wish for a complete loss of the memory that these three wishes were ever granted and fulfilled. Even the modest wishes of health and reliable income might have negative affects. Knowing that these wishes were granted would remove any experience of risk. No longer would one sense the fragility of life, or the motivation to healthful choices. Better, Pierce thinks, to have the wishes granted but not to know about it.

Then a new thought occurs to him. Maybe they already have been granted! Maybe he really has been granted three wishes and used them just as he is now planning. How would one ever know? It is a thrilling idea.

And it makes me wonder, what wonderful things have been given to us? Are there things about our lives that we would have wished for before we had them, but which are now too often taken for granted? Would you have wished for the place you live, for your family, your health, your friends? Would you have wished to have just a glimpse of the holy center of all things, the creator of the universe, who loves you as a parent loves a child? What if all of us have been granted wishes?

"What are you doing here?"

I heard a story recently of a person who had stopped attending her church. She didn’t stop for any one particular reason. She didn’t quit in protest of a church doctrine or the new color of the carpet. She hadn’t suddenly become an atheist, or disillusioned with what we sometimes call the institutional church (or, “organized religion”). It just kind of happened. She got busy and missed a few Sundays in a row, and then a few more, and by then she kind of had a new routine, a new weekend schedule. Like so many people, she continued to think of herself as a part of her church. It would certainly be the place she went to if she needed pastoral support, or if someone in her family died, or if she wanted to go somewhere on Easter.

This is a common story. It happens to people for months, years, or even decades. And then one day, something draws them back. Maybe they’ve run into someone from the congregation at grocery store. Maybe things aren’t going so well. Maybe they miss the community, the music, the quiet ritual of prayer. Maybe they’re lives just become less busy. Whatever the reason, this woman who had not been to church in a long time decided to return one Sunday. She prepared for church just as she had always done before. I don’t know for sure, but maybe she asked someone if the times for worship had changed (this does happen sometimes). She arrived, parked her car, walked in the door and was greeted by a woman who was serving as an usher that morning. This usher recognized her, and said to her “what are you doing here?”

Once again, this woman stopped attending her church. This time, there was a very particular reason.

We have all come to worship at some time with the sense that we didn’t really deserve to be welcomed there. We have all felt uncertain whether our presence at church would be questioned. If you haven’t felt this, just wait. I bet it’ll happen sooner or later. So thank God for all the people who stand at the doors to give a welcome as warm and accepting as the welcome given by Jesus Christ.

Sermon - Christmas and Exodus

Preached on July 26, 2009 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Exodus 1:22–2:10
Matthew 2:13-21

Dedicated to my parents; and always to the glory of God.

Introduction:
Once, when I was discussing with a group of students the stories of Moses and Jesus, a young girl spoke up to ask the question “were Moses and Jesus friends?” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I did explain that although they lived centuries apart, hers was a good question because their stories have so much in common. Both were born at a time of hardship for their people, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt at the time of Moses and occupied by the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus. Both were seen as threats by the ruler at the time of their birth – Pharaoh in Egypt and King Herod in Israel – and these rulers tried to protect their power by having all baby boys murdered. However, thanks to the work of God in the lives of some courageous people, both Moses and Jesus survived the infanticide, and grew up to grant freedom to their people.

The story of Exodus is a song that the people of Israel have always known by heart, so it is important for us to recognize how the gospel according to Matthew uses the melody of the Exodus story to tell the Christmas story of Jesus. Matthew’s story is rich in symbolic meaning, carefully chosen and beautifully written in order to proclaim the truth about Jesus Christ. Today, I want to listen carefully to this Christmas story, so that we might hear the truth for which this gospel was written.

Prayer: Gracious God, who sent your son Jesus into the world so that you might free us from our bonds and reconcile all the world to you, give us the ears to hear and the heart to understand the grace that you bestow in Jesus Christ.

Ever since it hit the silver screen in 1939, it seems that every generation has grown up with The Wizard of Oz. I wonder if you can remember with me the very beginning, when that MGM lion first appears, and gives its famous roar. And then the orchestra begins to play and the screen goes to a scene of sky and clouds in sepia tones and in grand letters, the credits appear: “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents” – “The Wizard of Oz” – “A Victor Fleming Production.” As the credits for cast, writing, music, and the rest are displayed, the orchestra continues to play the overture, which features those famous melodies of the important songs that will soon tell our story. As the credits roll, we hear “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” and “The Merry Old Land of Oz.” The overture functions as a kind of a overview of all the major themes of the story to follow, and by the time the camera opens on Dorothy and Toto running along the dirt road in Kansas, you are immersed in that magical world.

So it is with the Christmas story in Matthew, and also the one in Luke, which we’ll leave for another day. The Christmas story is an overture which previews the major themes in this gospel written to proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ.

The first theme that Matthew’s gospel proclaims is that Jesus is the Son of God, who comes to us as a new Moses. If you want to understand the work of Jesus, think of him as a new Moses, who was rescued as a baby, and came up from Egypt, only this time it was not to save his people from slavery in Egypt, but to save all people from slavery in sin. Remember that sin is anything that separates us from God, so Jesus is the one who frees us from that which separates us from God, delivering us from slavery to freedom. Matthew will continue this theme later in the gospel, for instance in the sermon on the mount, which reminds us of Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the ten commandments – the law which would guide the lives of this newly freed nation. So Jesus is also on a mountain, and his sermon on the mount is the giving of a new law. That’s why he keeps saying things like “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” This is a new law from a new mountain to people who are newly freed from sin.

So, why would Matthew want us to think that Jesus was the new Moses? For one thing, this gives people somewhere to start. Matthew is writing at the end of the first century to a lot of people who have barely heard about Jesus, if at all. They didn’t grow up with Christmas and Easter, they didn’t have the Nicene Creed, or the hymn “Amazing Grace” or the paintings of Rembrandt. They had no ideas about Jesus, so Matthew gave them Moses as a starting point. To say that Jesus is like Moses is to proclaim that, in Jesus, the same God who brought our people out of Egypt is at work again. There is a sense of connection to the past. To say that Jesus is the new Moses is to proclaim that, in Jesus, our journey from slavery to freedom in God is made complete. Whereas Moses brought the Israelites to an outward freedom, Jesus frees the entire world from the inside out.

2. The second theme in Matthew’s gospel, which is played in the overture of the Christmas story, is that we have a choice about how to respond to Jesus. Will we respond like King Herod and the religious leaders around him, or will we respond like the wise men, the magi, who came from far away to adore Jesus? Herod had been placed in charge of Israel by the Roman Empire. He ruled the Jews, and in turn, he was ruled by Rome. It wasn’t as good as being emperor, but it was as highly placed as he was likely to get in life. His position was privileged and powerful, and many of Jerusalem’s leaders got close to him, so that some privilege and power would flow to them. These are the people who reject Jesus. When the wise men come west, they explain that they have come to visit the newborn king of the Jews, whose star they have seen, and to ask where they might find him. But King Herod and his court are not impressed, heavenly sign or not. King Herod sees it as a threat. If this kid wants to be king, then he is a threat to Herod.

Faith in Christ means that we make God king of our lives instead of ourselves. For us to give up being ruler of our own little kingdoms means that we give up making our own success, profit, or security the highest good. The idea of me first is actually one of the sins that Jesus comes to free us from. And it is freeing, to know we have all we need from God without demanding more and more for ourselves at the expense of others. For Matthew, King Herod is a preview of how the rich and powerful will reject Jesus when he begins his ministry as an adult. King Herod is a preview of the important theme that the more we have going for us, the harder it will be for us to see how enslaved we are to everything that we have going for us. Success is a blinder and a hindrance in the upside-down view of the gospel in which the last are first and the first are last.

The other response we can make to Jesus is that of the wise men: adoration, honor, trust, and faith. They make a long journey, just as many of us may make a long journey to giving our ultimate trust to God. And the wise men come from a foreign land. Here is another preview of the gospel, in which Jesus will most often attract those who are outside the borders of society: tax collectors, sinners, the poor and powerless, the broken and dispossessed. Why is it that the ones who have the least going for them have the easiest time putting faith in God? I’ll bet you have answers to that question.

We all have the capacity to be either King Herod or one of the magi. Like King Herod, we can insist that the most important thing is me, not realizing that all the messages which reinforce that self-centered message are really the chains of slavery from which we need so desperately to be freed. These chains keep us from receiving God’s grace, keep us from receiving help from one another, and keep us from a true embrace of love.

Or we can be like the magi, beginning a journey of faith that will take us in directions as yet unknown, to meet new people, to have new experiences. Let me close by telling you about one person who made such a choice. In her memoir Take This Bread, Sara Miles describes how one day, at the age of 46 with no prior religious practice or belief, she entered a church and received communion, and it changed her life. She felt called to the ministry of feeding the hungry, organizing free meals and food giveaways in the church where she first shared that communion meal, and then in places around her city. Like the magi, hers was a long journey, in which she met “thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, and bishops,” she wrote, “all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to fed people, widening what I though of as my ‘community’ in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary.”

She made the journey of the magi. She was made free by the grace and power of Jesus Christ, and so can we. There is so much to celebrate at the season of Christmas. The birth of Jesus is the summit of God’s generosity, and it inspires our own generosity of cheer, good will, and gifts to those we love and those in need. But I also like this opportunity for Christmas at a strange time of year, because it reminds me that these Christmas stories are about more than the birth of Jesus. These stories are about the man he would become, the freedom he would bring, and the invitation he would make for our lives to be made new.

Summer is the time when many of us find those treasured days of downtime, and one of the things I most treasure is the time to get into some great books. If that’s the case for you, then allow me to recommend a little summer reading (and several of these are available for loan in our church library). I welcome conversation on any of these books, and your own summer reading or all-time favorites. Happy Reading.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. This is a wonderful novel, told in a series of letters written by an aging Congregational minister in a small Iowa town. His reflections on Christian faith, family, and forgiveness are profound.

The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, by Henri J.M. Nouwen. A Catholic priest and professor of psychology plumbs the depth of one of the greatest parables. Using Rembrandt’s painting of the parable’s reunion scene as a guide, Nouwen reflects on how each character reveals something about Christ and about us.

Atticus, by Ron Hansen. In this novel, the parable of the prodigal son provides the rough outline for the story of a modern Colorado rancher whose younger son goes missing in Mexico. It is part mystery, and part parable about the dedicated love of a father for his son.

If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person, by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland. Co-written by two ministers who describe the wideness of God’s grace in a way that you may not have considered before. Although the book may challenge you, it is written with such honesty, humor, and graciousness that it is easy to consider them good friends.

On my summer list for 2009…

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. I started this years ago, and picked it up again this spring. Almost finished, but I want to savor it.

Home, by Marilynne Robinson, the new companion novel to Gilead.

Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, by Sara Miles. This is the memoir of a non-religious person who happened upon a church one day, received communion, and found her life changed by the simplicity and generosity of this gift of food. This moment led her to an active ministry of feeding the hungry in her new church and across her city.

A People’s History of Christianity, by Diana Butler Bass. Originally this was to be called "After Jesus: How Christians Loved God and Neighbor Through Church History."

Sermon - Growing Wild

Preached on June 14, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, OH, UCC

Mark 4:26-34

Dedicated to my creative writing professor, whose name I am sorry to have forgotten; and always to the glory of God.

As I think back on my life, and how it is that I came to be standing in this place, I know that there were many people who planted seeds along the way, not knowing what they would grow into, or even if they would grow into anything at all. I think about the person who, when I was three years old and beginning at a preschool located in a church we had never heard of, invited my parents to attend worship there. It became our church home, and that brought me into contact with the people and experiences that would lead me to be confirmed, ordained, and married in that sanctuary. That’s one seed.

I also remember my English professor in college, whom I happened to run into one day at the sinks in the English building’s bathroom, where we stood and talked for about ten minutes about my progress in Creative Writing. His affirming and honest encouragement about my work made me realize that I was capable of more than I had thought. He has no idea of the confidence he gave me to pursue seminary upon my graduation.

Those are two people who touched my life at a decisive time. There are many more, and of course there are many people who had a much larger and extended influence in my life. But I think about those small encounters when I hear these parables of Jesus about seeds. They remind me of the people who affected my life in a significant way. And I am certain that what has grown in my life because of them is more than they ever imagined. That’s the wonderful thing about the image of planting seeds. The thing it calls for and celebrates is our action at a decisive moment. We just scatter seed, and the growth can be astounding.

Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like this. It’s like someone who scatters seed which grows on its own, without our even knowing how. We can trust God to make the seed, and we can trust God with the growth. All we are asked to do is to scatter the seed we have as widely and as generously as we can. And thank God for that, because when we forget that this is how it works, we get into trouble. When we forget, we get into at least two kinds of trouble, and you see where I’m going.

The first kind of trouble we get into by forgetting that the kingdom of God is like the growth of scattered seed is to imagine that it’s all up to us. It’s up to us to make everything work; we are self-reliant, independent, and responsible. The trouble is that when you’re doing all the work to be independently self-reliant, convinced that you can fix everything on your own (or convinced that you should be able to fix everything on your own), when we do that, then there’s no room to discover our divine dependence, our reliance on God and on each other. I wonder if this is why Jesus said that the poor in spirit receive the kingdom of heaven, because everyone else thinks that we can create the kingdom on our own. The poor in spirit are the only ones who know better.

It’s a wonderful thing to be successful, to achieve your goals, but the trouble is that those who are successful at achieving can be unsuccessful at receiving. When Jesus said that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, it was because the rich man who had achieved so much had trouble receiving the kingdom of God the only way that we can, as a free gift.

It is all too easy for good, responsible people who are filled with love for the world to find themselves holding the longest to-do list in the world. This parable reminds us that there is a balance between taking and letting go responsibility. It’s good to be responsible, and good that we have so many responsible people here, but let’s be sure to remember which part is our responsibility: scattering seeds. We are called to invite people to come to worship and join us for a meal, to work beside us on a mission tour or board, but it is not our job to make them accept the invitation. We are called to be friendly and welcoming and reach out to people we don’t know, but it is not our job to make them like us, or even to make them like God. We are called to serve people at times of funerals, for weddings and baptisms, to provide food and support, but it is not our job to do their work of grieving, or seeking, or committing to a new way of life.

As a part of a family, you are responsible for how you treat your parents, children, or siblings, but the growth of compassion, forgiveness, and patience in the rest of your family is up to them and to God. The same goes for your neighborhood, your country, and the world. What would happen if our nation based our relationships with others based on who we want to be, instead of responding in kind to how we are treated? All that you’re responsible for is your own seed to scatter, to give generously, and then to turn over to God the mysterious growth that happens whether we understand it or not. We get into trouble when we think that everything is up to us.

The second danger of forgetting about how the seed grows is the discouragement and cynicism that says nothing we do makes a difference. You know this feeling. It seems like I work and work, and nothing seems to be getting better or easier. When we don’t see the results, when we don’t see our work coming to fruition, we begin to think that nothing is making a difference. It may be that Jesus told these parables because the disciples were starting to get cynical. “Jesus, you keep saying the kingdom of God is at hand, but everything looks the same to us. The Roman empire still oppresses, the poor are still poor, you healed the sick in a couple towns, but you’ve barely made a dent in illness, and half your family still thinks you’re crazy.” So Jesus tells them that the kingdom is not like fireworks going off – it doesn’t happen in a bright, wondrous moment; it’s like a seed. Have some patience, some trust. Have some some faith. That’s what seeds are about, sometimes they’re growing even when we can’t see anything at all.

There’s another, better known parable about sowing seeds, in which a farmer scatters seed and some falls on rocky ground, some among the thorny weeds, and some along the path where birds eat them. The only place the seeds grow is in the good soil. So when we scatter seed, it grows in one place out of four. That’s a 25% success rate, and Jesus tells us that it’s enough. And just when the disciples are scratching their heads about this inefficiency, Jesus tells them that the seed in the good soil produces returns of 30, 60, and 90 fold. We’ve got to trust the kingdom, even when it seems like nothing is happening.

Who has scattered seed in your lives? Who has shown you, in some small way, that you are valuable? That you are accepted? That you have something to offer? In other words, who has shown you that God’s love is so great that God loves everyone in this room just as much as if you were the only person on earth to love?

Once, when Mr. Rogers was being honored for his work in television, he asked the same kind of question. You all remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He was the one who found a way to preach the gospel every day on his television show for children, when he would walk into his house singing about neighbors, take off his jacket and shoes and put on a cardigan and shoes more suitable for being at home (at wouldn’t it be great if we all did this?), and then he would look right at each child sitting at home and say “I like you, just the way you are.” Unconditional love – that’s the gospel. Well, he was being honored at one of these shows where the theater is filled with celebrities and the movers and shakers. And when he walked on stage to make his speech, he said that there were many people who had helped him along the way. And then he said “I bet that each of you can think of someone special who was very important to you. Let’s all take ten seconds to think about that person.” And then, with a smile, he said “I’ll watch the time,” and this televised broadcast went silent for ten seconds. Ten seconds is a long time on the air. Anyone else would think it was a waste. But no one was going to tell Mr. Rogers he couldn’t do it. As the seconds ticked by, there were moist eyes and tears all through the audience in the theater, and probably at home.

Now, since we can all think about people who made a difference, who made our lives and the world a brighter place, even when their actions were very small, how does that affect the way we think about what we can do? What are the ways that you can scatter seeds of love so that the kingdom of God can keep growing?

That’s the question for us to carry out the doors today. And with that question, we can carry our trust that the kingdom of God is growing all around us. God is at work, and if we can’t always see it, or if we don’t know how it could possibly happen, that’s okay, because seeds don’t need us to know all that they are doing for them to grow, and that’s just how it is with the wondrous, mysterious presence of God.

Sermon - A Light by which to Understand

Preached on May 31, 2009, Pentecost Sunday, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Ezekiel 37:1-14 & Acts 2:1-21

Dedicated to the high school graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.

The disciples that we read about in Acts believed that they had met God in the life of this son of Mary from Nazareth. They believed that in the life of Jesus, God was with them. But now Jesus was gone; not dead, but resurrected and returned to the heavenly realm, but not before he’d had the chance to tell them that God would still be with them, and that is what this day of Pentecost is about. The message for us today (and you can forget everything else if you remember this) the message of Pentecost is that God is still with us. God is with us, and the way that God is made real to us is as a Spirit, as a spiritual presence that we call the Holy Spirit.

I think that this day of Pentecost is important because it gives to us a story that helps us to see our own lives in a new way. It helps us to see what God is doing in our lives. I mean, it’s nice for me to get up and say that the message today is that God is with us, but what does that mean? If God is here, then what is God doing?

That’s where the story comes in. Now, this is an old story, told and heard by people in a very different time and culture than ours, so it will take a bit of understanding for us to hear what this story meant to them, and then what it can mean for us. That’s true for any part of the Biblical books, sometimes the language, ideas, and metaphors seem particularly foreign, and this is one of those times. So let us listen with careful ears to hear what God is doing as the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost was an interesting occasion for their first experience of the Holy Spirit, because Pentecost was a Jewish festival held fifty days after Passover, and a time when many Jews whose families had long since moved to other regions and kingdoms to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That’s why we heard that list of all those people and places that are hard to say and don’t mean anything to us, pronounced correctly or not. What that list meant to people in the first century was that a lot of foreigners were in the city that day. They spoke different languages and had little understanding of each other. This is an important list, and we’ll get back to it soon.

So here are all these people together at Pentecost, when suddenly they have an amazing religious experience of the spiritual presence of God. I love the way they it’s described in the book of Acts, because you get the sense that it was too amazing for words, and they just tried their best to explain it. There was “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind,” they said. It makes perfect sense that these words would come to mind, because they grew up hearing the scriptures that always talk about God’s spirit as a wind, or a breath. The Hebrew word Ruah can mean both spirit and wind, and so I’ll tell you what I tell the confirmation class every year: whenever you hear the words wind or breath in the scriptures, you know that they are symbolic of the spirit of God. So when the disciples have their own spiritual experience of God, they say that it was like the sound of wind, and everyone knows what they are talking about.

The next thing we read, as they search for some adequate language to describe the indescribable, is that “they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
Tongues of fire? Really?
“Well, that’s what it seemed like.”
Fire makes us think of warmth and light, power and energy for those days before electricity. It is as if they felt enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Maybe if the story were told today, we would say that the experience of God is like a light bulb clicking on above each of our heads. Aha! Now we get it! Now we have a vision for our lives, for our community. Now we understand what our lives are all about.

The light bulb went on for the disciples, and they began to share the good news that they had learned from Jesus, and now another amazing thing happens. All those foreign people from that long list understand the good news in their own languages. The Holy Spirit came to people who didn’t understand each other and brought about understanding.

Now, you may be wondering about what the story said about the disciples speaking in tongues. That’s something that gets talked about in the early church, and some churches still talk about it, but not really in our tradition, and so we often don’t know what to make of this speaking in tongues. I’m not going to get into it except to say this. Since we don’t know what it’s about, let’s accept that in the New Testament, they saw speaking in tongues as a gift from God. It was legitimate and it was a good thing when it became the means of producing understanding. Do you remember the beginning of the famous passage in I Corinthians chapter 13? Paul is writing to a church in which some people have gotten out of hand with speaking in tongues, even when no one understands what they’re saying. So he writes to them “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” This speaking in tongues is supposed to increase love, and if it doesn’t, it’s just an annoying noise. That’s true about everything in our lives, isn’t it?

So that’s all I’m going to say about the speaking in tongues because figuring out what that means is not the point of this story. The point is that the Holy Spirit brought about understanding.

Now we are back at our question. If the message today is that God is with us as the Holy Spirit, then what is God doing?

God is helping us to understand each other. God gives us a flame of insight – or a light bulb – which becomes for us a light by which to understand. If we want to look for the presence of God among us, then we should pay attention to wherever people are learning to understand each other. Or, to put it another way, we should look to how we can share the good news of God in a way that others will understand. I’ve never believed that showing up at someone’s door with a pamphlet, or telling people that Jesus is the answer does much good. You can’t say that Jesus is the answer if no one is asking a question.

I remember of St. Francis, who said that we should “preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” To me, that means that we might help others to understand the message of God more with our actions than with our words, and this came from a man who showed great love to the poor and the sick, who gave them the comfort of hands-on care. When we act to alleviate the suffering of hunger, homelessness, illness, or loneliness, our actions reach across barriers of language, culture, and creed. People understand the message of being cared for, of friendship and community. I bet you know about this in your own lives, and I hope we know about this in this church.

I remember being a child and hearing in church about a group of missionaries who found out that they would be allowed to work in a foreign nation only on the condition that they could not say anything about their religion to anyone. They thought about it, and finally said “that’s no problem. Everything we need to communicate about our faith is in our work to improve health care, water quality, and education.” And when people would come to them privately, to ask why they did what they did, they would say “because of what Jesus taught us.”

On this day of Pentecost we celebrate that the Holy Spirit of God is with us here and now, giving us light by which to understand. Frederick Buechner described this gift so well, and I will close with his words, which speak so well to our graduates today, as you begin the next part of your lives. And they speak to all of us who wonder what the next part of our lives will be.

“Jesus himself is beyond our seeing, but in the darkness where we stand, we see, thanks to him, something of the path that stretches out from the door, something of whatever it is that keeps us trying more or less to follow the path even when we can hardly believe that it goes anywhere worth going or that we have what it takes to go there.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, page 62.)

Different approaches to prayer

When we pray, what should we say?
What are the proper words?
What are the appropriate topics?

Let me suggest that one way to think about praying is to think of it like you were writing in a journal. Like a journal, prayer is something that no one will ever hear or see, and you can talk about just whatever is on your mind, without regard for grammar, punctuation, or even making sense.

Let me suggest that a second way to think about praying is to be silent. Imagine that prayer is a conversation in which you talk only part of the time, and spend the other parts listening. Like a conversation between people who are close, there may even be times when neither you or God is speaking, times when you are both just glad to be in each other’s presence.

Let me suggest that a third way to think about praying is to find prayer in the words you read or in music you make or hear. God may be speaking through these as much as in silence. Some of the words I listen to are those of the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote this about “praying” in her book titled Thirst.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Windows, and multi-tasking

I’m beginning to curse the windows on my computer. Who invented windows, and why did we think it was such a great idea? If you look at my computer, you will often see multiple windows with many tasks open: email, news, research, a letter, class plan, youth newsletter, and the column you are now reading. Of course, I’m not using all of those windows at the same time. We can only ever do one thing at time. When we have many things going at once (how busy is your computer screen?), we call it multi-tasking. But what we are really doing is single-tasking for shorter and shorter bits of time, switching from one task to the next rapidly.

For instance, after I finished writing the above paragraph, I stopped typing while I thought about how I would begin this second paragraph. But while I began to think about it, I also had the thought that I would, you know, just quickly check to see if I had heard back from someone by email, and then went back to a class plan I’m working on to add a few details. I actually think that I can do those things at the same time as I’m contemplating what to write next about multi-tasking. (Okay, that’s not true. I’m much to self-conscious to jump around while I’m writing about how I jump around too often. However, if I had been writing about something else, that is exactly what I would have done.)

I believe that the way in which technology functions encourages us to shift our focused attention too quickly from one thing to the next. Have you ever jumped from a face-to-face conversation to respond to a phone call, text, or email, and then jumped back (or tried to do both at the same time)? Have you ever followed two television programs at once, flipping back and forth when one or the other went to commercial? If so, at least you were watching one at a time. Now we have news networks that make us believe that we can pay attention to both the show and the breaking news headlines that scroll at the bottom of the screen (we can’t).

I believe that one of the much needed gifts the church can offer is the practice of focusing our attention on one thing at a time. This is what worship is about. No one can momentarily change the channel when a part of the sermon seems less relevant (much as you may wish you could). There’s no way to check something online if you happen to think of it during a prayer. Worship teaches us and reminds us of the value of stillness. To focus your attention on one thing is spiritual practice, and it also happens to be the best gift that we can give to each other.

The Great Commissions

At the end of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (28:19-20). This has come to be known as the great commission, and it is cited by parts of the church who believe our purpose is primarily to gain converts to Christianity. However, the scriptures are multifaceted and hardly ever summarized so easily. What we call the great commission is not the only commission Jesus gave.

Earlier in Matthew, Jesus sent the disciples out by twos, saying to them, “as you go, proclaim the good news ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast our demons” (10:7-8). This commission seems to focus less on getting other people to convert to Christ and more on bringing the love of Christ to others. This is a commission to heal, to restore those who are unclean and outcast to community, and to set the soul at ease. This is a mission of telling good news.

Sometimes the commission from the end of Matthew sounds to me like it’s all about telling people what they need to do and to believe in order to get right with God. At least, that’s how it has sounded in many hands in the history of the church. But when we see it in relationship to the earlier commission, which was focused more on bringing good news to people, we get a deeper understanding. God doesn’t commission us to tell other people how they need to be different. God commissions us to make their lives different through kindness, generosity, and healing. Instead of telling them what they need to do in order to enter the kingdom, we get to tell them that the kingdom has already come near. What would it be like for us to say to our relatives or our neighbors, when we see them playing and laughing in the yard, or comforting one who is ill, “I’m thankful for you, because right now I see the kingdom of Heaven.” Then we would be fulfilling the commission of Jesus to proclaim the good news that the kingdom has come near.

In the gospel of John, there’s yet another idea for the church. The risen Jesus meets with his disciples and says to them “receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” (20:22-23). And later, speaking to Peter, Jesus said “feed my sheep” (21:17). Our commission can never be understood narrowly as winning converts. The commission of Jesus started with caring for people, feeding, healing, and showing mercy. When you’ve done that, the good news kind of proclaims itself.