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.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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.
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.
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