Going to Boston

Tomorrow morning, I will leave from First Congregational Church along with six ninth grade students of our confirmation class for a weekend in Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts. My wife and two other leaders will complete our group for a long-planned pilgrimage to the historical places of the Congregationalist Church tradition. This has been an annual trip for this church's confirmation classes for about ten years now, and I have been leading the trips since 2008. It is a significant experience to visit our church's heritage and a great city with a new group of people. This year's visit will be all the more so.

We travel to Boston on April 19, four days after the bombing of the marathon finish line, and we will carry to Boston the support of many people here in Ohio. We know that although most of the city has returned to normal routines outside of the crime scene investigation, the spirit of the city is altered. From all of the people with whom I have communicated this week, I know that they are burdened by grief and betrayal of trust, just as they are strengthened by the courage and generosity of their neighbors, and bonded in solidarity by their shared experiences. They are grateful for our support, and they have much to teach us.

Our Boston trip takes us to the Congregational Library, the historic cemeteries, the Old South Meeting House, Plimoth, and Harvard University, among others.  These are the places where our ancestors in faith lived through difficult and heartbreaking times, and did so with bold faith, sacrifice, and a passion for God's peace and justice. I think it is important to learn from our history, because knowing the stories of our spiritual grandparents gives us the wisdom and the inspiration to meet the challenges of our own time.

Update: this trip was canceled when the city of Boston went into a lockdown mode on Friday, April 19. We had been scheduled to travel to Boston on Friday. The trip will be rescheduled for a weekend in the next year.

Sermon - Representation

Preached on April 14, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Introduction

This is the second sermon in a series on the core values and principles of this congregation, as discerned over the past few years with input from the whole church family.  These values are, for this church, both a vision and a description. They are a vision of what we seek to be but they are also a description of what we already are.

We’re spending two weeks on the first value, because it is foundational to the rest of them, and then we’ll spend one week on each of the next four. The first value is that “We embrace the role of representing Jesus in the world and we strive to learn and follow his teaching.”

The teaching we embrace is all the teaching of Jesus, including the teaching he spoke and the teaching he did by example, but the text we’ve chosen to focus in on in these two weeks is the collection of teachings that Jesus gave to his disciples in the sermon on the mount, gospel according to Matthew, chapters 5, 6, and 7.

You could spend a whole sermon series on the paragraph about loving our enemies. But there is also something to be said for hearing the scope of these teachings all at once. I have chosen excerpts of the sermon on the mount to serve as the scripture reading for our reflection this morning.

Scripture

Matthew 5:17, 38-39, 43-44, 48; 6:19-21; 7:1-2, 12, 24-27

5:17 ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 

38 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 

 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

6:19 ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

7:1 Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 

12 ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

24 ‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!’

Sermon:

We embrace the role of representing Jesus in the world and we strive to learn and follow his teaching.

You may have heard that and thought, well, isn’t that stating the obvious? Can’t you see the news headline? “Local church decides to follow the teachings of Jesus.” No need to stop the presses at the Beacon-Journal. The USA Today will not run that headline.

Two things are important here before we go further. The first is to notice the emphasis on following instead of believing. We’ve found that believing, by itself, doesn’t get you very far. People who believe in Jesus can still ignore Jesus. So this is a claim that what we care about is not belief, not the content of belief, the doctrine, or the strength of our belief.  What we care about is following the teachings. We care about the way we live. We choose to become representatives of Jesus in the world by learning and following his teaching. 

As we commit to this way of following, we are being very true to our Congregationalist roots, because it was the Congregationalists who decided to move away from creeds as the test of one’s faith, and focused on the character of our lives. Given the choice between one who believes rightly and does harm to others and another person who doesn’t buy into beliefs in the right way but who shows love to others, we’ll take the second person every time. And if you spend time talking to people in this congregation, you’ll see that I’m right.

The second important note is that the teachings of Jesus are a total package. It is more than a skill set among others to be applied in only one area of life. It is a way of living, a quality of being, a life that is different. Reading the sermon on the mount is an introduction to the comprehensive reorienting of life that Jesus teaches. And as we are reoriented, we discover that his teachings restore us to the people that God created us to be. They restore our true humanity – our God given dignity

In the gospel of John Jesus says “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” It was the southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who was also a woman of deep faith, who wrote that we should also say that “you will know the truth and the truth will make you odd.”