Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Wordplay

            For a few years while I was in college, my hometown buddies and I had a Thanksgiving weekend tradition of getting together that Friday afternoon for a football game.  We played wherever we could find some open space:  the high school track, the golf course, somebody’s back yard.  A couple of us were decent athletes, though most of us were more like me, and the games results were usually more the fruit of luck than skill.  Case in point:  I remember one play where my friend Alan – and actually, three of us in our group of friends were named Alan – Alan went out for a long pass that somehow wound up getting stuck in a tree.  And while we stood there wondering how to score that one, Alan – the receiver – grabbed one of the lower branches and started shaking it violently until the ball fell out of the tree, and into his arms, whereupon he ran into the end zone for a touchdown.  “You can’t do that,” we told him, “the ball got stuck in the tree.”  Alan smiled and replied, “Hey, doesn’t it say the Bible, ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves?’”
            Well now, on this morning, even our second graders, who now have Bibles of their own, will be able to tell you that, no, “The Lord helps those who help themselves” is not a Bible verse.  Nor are certain other cherished phrases that we tend to associate with the scriptures, like, “To thine own self be true,” “God works in mysterious ways,” and – my mother’s personal favorite - “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”  Today is World Communion Sunday, a day when Christian communities around the world come together around the table and celebrate the fact that though we are many, and though we are different, we are all one in Jesus Christ.  But it is also true that as Congregationalists, we are heirs of the Reformed tradition, and while the Lord’s Supper is important, it is the Word that is central to our worship life together, even on World Communion Sunday.  So today we celebrate both Word and Sacrament, with the sharing of the table and the presentation of Bibles to our young people.
            And as a way of doing this, I’ve chosen a passage from Luke that brings both to life.  Barb read for us a section of Luke’s gospel that we’ve listened to so often that we may not actually have heard what Luke wrote.  In a way it’s like the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance, something we know so well that we don’t really pay close attention to what the words are actually saying.  Did anybody notice something a little unusual in Jesus’ words at the table in Luke’s Last Supper?    “And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said ‘Take this and divide it among yourselves…’ And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them… And likewise the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’”  Luke has Jesus passing the cup around, not once, but twice – both before and after the bread.  How many times have we heard these words from Luke, and how many times have we noticed the two cups?  Did Jesus really pass the cup around twice, or is Luke trying to tell us something through repetition?
            I’ve found myself thinking this week about my early experiences in each of the three churches I’ve served, probably because I’ve also been thinking about Angie starting in her new church next week.  One of the things she and I talked about before she left is that every church has its unanticipated obstacles, little land mines that you don’t find out about until you get there.  In my first church it was the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.  The issue was not what I said about the election campaign, but rather – and you can be forgiven for not believing this – it was that I didn’t say anything at all about it.  Some of the elders expected me to come out and endorse the challenger, and because I didn’t, I was somehow suspect.  In my second church, the unanticipated landmine was an overly saccharine portrait of Jesus that was donated by a church family in memory of a recently departed relative.  And it wasn’t the portrait itself so much as where they wanted to put it – right up here smack in the front center of the chancel.  And even to politely refuse their idea was in their mind to disrespect the memory of the dearly departed.  And yes, when I arrived in Beverly eleven years ago I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a turf war going on in the kitchen, an experience that made me so cautious about the territory that to this day I still don’t know how to run the dishwasher.  The church is an oftentimes curious animal – we can differ about the humanity of Jesus, or the presence of God, or the unity of the church, but don’t you dare take liberties with the kitchen!
            In the early days of the church it actually was the humanity of Jesus and the presence of God that was the not-so-hidden minefield which threatened the church’s unity, hence our two cups this morning.  You might remember last month when Kate Pinkham preached, she alluded to some of the differences that divided the church back in its earliest days, and one of the biggest differences had to do with the nature of Jesus:  was Jesus fully, 100% a human being, or was he a divine being come to earth in order to bring salvation to humanity?   There were strong opinions on both sides of the question, so strong that, one or two generations after Luke wrote, certain biblical scribes decided that Luke’s original account of the last supper was an insufficient depiction of Jesus’ humanity – like my silence about the election was an insufficient endorsement of Reagan - and so took the liberty of adding about a sentence and a half to make the matter crystal clear.  Luke’s original telling ended in the middle of verse 19, “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them.”  Period.   But some later readers didn’t think this showed Jesus at his most fully human, so they added language which referred specifically to Jesus’ body and his blood.  The revised version then goes on after the words “he broke it and gave it to them,” and has Jesus say, “This is my body which is given for you… and likewise the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup…is the new covenant in my blood.”  For later generations, the last supper is not complete without mentioning that Jesus had a real body that could be broken and that he bled real blood, which meant of course he was fully, 100% a human being.  And, inadvertently, the addition resulted in Jesus’ passing the cup around the table, not once, but twice, once before the bread and once after.
            Of course, this is only something we notice if we open our Bibles and actually read them.  And this is one of the reasons Heather and I decided to give Bibles to our young people now, at the beginning of the church school year, instead of the way we have done it in the past, giving them out at the end.  The Bible is not a reward for a certain level of achievement, or for good Sunday School attendance, or anything else – it is the opportunity to read for ourselves that wonderful, ongoing story of faith which is not just about the people in these pages, but about you and me, and where we see ourselves in these stories.  This morning we saw a good intersection of Word and Sacrament, how the words that were written can influence the flavor of what we enjoy at the table, like some fresh-cut parsley can bring new life to a soup or a sauce.  As Gail read for us from Isaiah, “the grass [may] wither, and the flower [may] fade, but the word of God will stand forever.”  We put that word into our children’s hands so that they, and we, may discover that freshness for ourselves.  But it will only happen if we open our Bibles to see what they have to say to us; after all, as it is written somewhere, The Lord helps those who help themselves!
            Let us pray.

Our Community, Our World

          The questions started coming in the middle of the summer, as people began looking at their fall calendars:  “Did you know that Sunday One falls on September 11 this year?  Are we going to do Sunday One on September 11?”  And the answer, obviously, is Yes to both:  I realized the two dates would coincide as far back as last year, when Sunday One fell on the 12th, and it really makes the most sense to start church school the Sunday after Labor Day, rather than, say the Sunday before, or the one after.  Still, I completely understand the feelings behind the question:  these are two very different occasions, one of which, to borrow Franklin Roosevelt’s apt phrase, marks a day of infamy, and the other a day of celebration and new beginnings.  How do we afford each the honor and appropriate attitude it deserves?
            Now if this were the only coincidence of ideas, I could probably handle it.  But I was also reminded of the fact that today marks the beginning of the third year of our Church Vision, when we said we would focus our emphasis on mission and outreach, on ways of engaging more deeply in our community and our world.  Then my friends on the Pru Board asked me to include a few words about the coming Capital Campaign which will honor our history and provide for our legacy.  Others think now is the time to begin talking about ways of celebrating Second Church’s 300th anniversary which is less than two years away.  And if all this weren’t enough, today we find ourselves in the midst of multiple transitions as we bid Godspeed to Angie in two weeks and welcome Barb and Judy to our staff.  All of these were suggested to me as the appropriate theme for this morning’s sermon.  It’s like one of those Steven Soderbergh movies – the director who made “Traffic” and the new film “Contagion,” -  Soderbergh’s movies look like seven different movies all going on at once until you finally begin to understand first, that they are all intertwined, and then later, how.
           But the most appropriate starting point for any sermon worth its salt is the Bible, and the passage that first came to mind earlier this week as I considered the confluence of Sunday One with September 11 was the familiar one from I Corinthians, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.  Now you are the body of Christ, and, individually, members of it.”  It’s a verse that speaks well to both observances this morning.  You and I have lots to celebrate together today, including seeing all our young people, seeing all of you, being together in the loving presence of God this morning, sharing the community of faith and fellowship, looking forward to a cookout and a picnic, and plans for a great year together ahead of us.  When one of us has something to celebrate, we all celebrate together.  Yet we are also mindful of the suffering in our world, the deep mourning that the remembrance of that gorgeous Tuesday morning exactly ten years ago brings, shattered as it was by nearly inconceivable destruction and death.  And as a community and as a world, as Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, we all suffered together.
            But I think Paul’s words to the church at Rome are better suited for today, because love is stronger than death and good is stronger than evil:  “Let love be genuine,” he wrote, “hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love each other with mutual affection; outdo each other in showing honor.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.”  These are the things that make us a community, whether we are talking about this church community, or the world community.  One of the remarkable goods that came out of September 11, 2001, was that for a while at least, the world was united, and perhaps more to the point, the world understood that it was united.  Our nation, so badly scarred, enjoyed the empathy and goodwill of nearly the entire family of nations.  More than one world leader said in those days, “We are all New Yorkers; we are all Americans.”  We were one world community.   Human nature being what it is, those sentiments did not last forever, and the world’s nations soon turned back to their own agendas and self-interest.  But even when we are not paying attention to it, or when it is difficult to see clearly, even when most visible evidence indicates otherwise, we are still a world community.  Regardless of whether we share the same goals, or whether we agree with each other, regardless of who happens to be at war with whom, or where peace might be found, we remain citizens of the same world, inhabitants of the same planet, children of the One God.
            I shared this story with you ten years ago, but today is a good day to share it again.  The first Saturday after September 11 I performed a wedding on Nantucket.  Debbie and I caught one of the first planes flying again on Friday, which meant we would be able to get back to Beverly in time for Sunday morning worship.  The bride was Jewish and the groom was Christian.  And the significance of their union on that weekend, of all weekends, was not lost on anyone.  For in spite of the fact that the nineteen hijackers believed their religion called them to death and destruction, there in that small chapel on that warm Saturday afternoon, surrounded by families with considerably different history and experience, two young people of different faiths said by their union that, No, faith does not call us to death and division, but rather to love and to unity and to wholeness.  I remember chatting with the father of the bride before the ceremony began.  He was a proud man and a faithful one, and he observed to me, “These two young people – they are teaching us something here today that the world could learn a lesson from.”  Our young people are able to teach us something that the world could learn a lesson from.
            This is one of the reasons that it is actually quite fitting that Sunday One falls on the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.  Because it is from our children that our world has something to learn.  I can remember during our Open and Affirming discussions that the young people of our church, my daughter Blythe among them, wondered what the big deal was.  Our children already understood that you treat everybody the same, that you don’t single out any class of person and tell them they aren’t as good as someone else.  For them, it was a non-issue because they couldn’t imagine their friends or their world any other way.  Our young people are able to teach us something that the world could learn a lesson from.  And in a little while, at the end of our Service of Remembrance and Hope, our children will return to our midst because they are our future, and there is still something we can learn from them.
            The Psalm that Barb Schreur read this morning is the same lesson we heard on that first Sunday after September 11 – and if you want to see more of that morning’s reflection, you can find it on Second Church’s Facebook page.  So on a day that we remember changed the way we understand our world, as well as in the days following torrential rains, a tropical storm and even an earthquake, the words of Psalm 46 – especially verses one through three, which I am actually going to read as verses three to one - sound as fresh as this morning’s headlines:  “[For] though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its water roar and foam, though the very mountains tremble with its tumult, we will not be afraid, for God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in time of trouble.”

            Let us pray.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

The Muscular Ampersand

And so earlier this week, I was updating my database of sermons and scriptures and hymns from the past six months, and I noticed a pattern emerging in my sermon titles, and I’m wondering if you noticed it as well: January 16, “Sticks & Stones;” January 23, “Aprons & Bibs;” March 27, “Wisdom & Innocence;” April 10, “The Forest & The Trees;” later that same day, at Leanne Sterio Walt’s installation, “The Yoke & The Mantle;” June 26, “Caprice & Covenant.” And it wasn’t just my sermons which displayed the affliction: on February 27 Angie preached on “Revolutions & Wildflowers,” and on April 3, “Solitude & Solidarity.” And to top it all off, on January 30 the whole congregation got into the act when we voted to become “Open & Affirming.” The word “and,” or more specifically, its diagrammatic symbol, the ampersand, has gotten quite a robust workout here at Second Church in the past six months. And I realized that perhaps someone was trying to tell me something, and it occurred to me that, of all my sermon topics over the past thirty two years, I have never preached on the most commonly used word in the Bible, and it is high time I did!

The UCC has lately been fond of punctuation; our denomination has adopted the comma as a symbol, quoting Gracie Allen’s memorable words, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma;” God is still speaking. But as much mileage as we have gotten out of the comma, I do believe the ampersand is stronger and more muscular - partly because it has gotten such a good workout lately, and partly because it is a more powerful conjunction. For example, when we use the word “Lord” in church, we naturally think of Jesus, and when we talk about Simon, we think of the chief of apostles. And this morning you are going to help me demonstrate the power of the ampersand. I’m going to give you a word, and you are going to give me its partner. Let’s think of some famous pairs joined by the ampersand, starting in the world of entertainment: for example, when I say Abbott &, you say, Costello. How about Laurel & (Hardy)? Good! Ginger Rodgers & (Fred Astaire). George Burns & (Gracie Allen). How about some famous musical pairs: Rodgers & (Hammerstein) – Lennon & (McCartney) – Simon & (Garfunkel) – see, the ampersand made you think of someone besides Simon Peter! How about the family dinner table – what is every kid’s favorite meal? Macaroni & (cheese). Or possibly spaghetti & (meatballs). And for lunch? Peanut butter & (jelly). One more stop, the world of retailing. We can shop at Sears & (Roebuck), or Abercrombie & (Fitch), or Lord & (Taylor) – and the ampersand made you think about somebody besides Jesus when I said “Lord” from the pulpit. That little ampersand must be a pretty powerful symbol if it can keep you from thinking of Simon Peter and the Lord Jesus in the course of a single paragraph.

And, for all its ubiquity, can be a powerful little word. In fact it is a key word in the gospel of Mark, though contemporary translations won’t necessarily reveal it. In fact, Mark uses the word and so many times most translators look for alternatives just to relieve the repetition. You may have noticed that every sentence of today’s New Testament lesson begins with the word, and: “And when the sixth hour had come...” “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out...” “And some of the bystanders... said...” “And [some]one ran, filling a sponge...” “And Jesus uttered a loud cry...” “And the curtain of the temple was torn in two...” “And when the centurion... saw he breathed his last...” Mark begins every sentence of this brief passage with the word, And. We will see why in a moment. But in what is generally the better translation, the New Revised Standard Version, the editors try to mix things up a little: “When it was noon...” “At three o’clock...” “When some of the bystanders... said...” “Then Jesus gave a loud cry...” Clearly somebody – perhaps an English teacher - decided there were too many ands, so added some variety. But believe it or not, and is one of the key words in Mark’s gospel: he uses it 507 times in his 666 verses. Five of every six verses has the word and. In spite of its brevity and ubiquity, and can be a muscular conjunction.

Consider three sentences. First, “Ruth and Alan are doing the readings today.” This is the weakest and. You could exchange the order of our names and the sentence would mean the same thing. “Alan and Ruth are doing the readings” means the same thing as “Ruth and Alan are doing the readings.” Then there is the stronger and: “Ruth returned to her seat and Alan started to preach.” Here you can’t just exchange the names and get the same sense, but it falls short of cause and effect; Ruth’s returning to her seat did not cause Alan to start preaching. But then there is the muscular and: “Alan finally finished his sermon and Ruth shouted, ‘Hallelujah, it’s about time!’” In this sentence the word and signals cause and effect. Right? The end of Alan’s sermon caused Ruth to shout “Hallelujah!” And is no longer a weak, benign conjunction, but a powerful, causative one.

Much of the time when Mark uses the word and it is in one of the former senses, as a simple conjunction joining ideas. This is especially true in the earlier chapters of his gospel. But soon after his story of the transfiguration, after Jesus appeared on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, Mark changes the way he uses the word. It becomes less a way of connecting ideas, and more a verbal tool for creating a sense of urgency, of crisis, of one event crashing into and shaping the next one. It is Mark’s way of saying to the reader, Time to sit up and pay attention, because something really important is happening here. This is what we heard taking place in chapter 15: “And when the sixth hour had come... and at the ninth hour... and one of the bystanders said... and somebody ran and got a sponge full of vinegar... and Jesus cried out... and the curtain of the temple was torn in two... and the centurion said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” It is like the climax of a Beethoven symphony, or the final battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or the final scene of Romeo & Juliet. This is the strongest use of the word and, in its most robust causative manifestation - this is the muscular ampersand.

And it is not just a grammatical curiosity, as Ruth’s reading from Ecclesiastes revealed to us. I mentioned earlier how the UCC has adopted the comma as one of its symbols, but I personally think that in doing so our denomination has forgotten its history. The United Church of Christ is the product of four historic ancestors, the Congregational Church, the Christian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the German Reformed Church. In 1931 the former two denominations merged to create the Congregational & Christian Church, and three years later, in 1934, the latter two denominations merged to create the Evangelical & Reformed Church. And then in 1957 the Congregational & Christian Church merged with the Evangelical & Reformed Church to create the United Church of Christ. You might say the UCC has ampersands in our very bloodstream. Four faith traditions have become one.

There is strength in numbers, and this is the point of Ecclesiastes 4: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other, but woe to anyone who falls alone and has not another to lift them up. Again, if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone? And though and enemy might prevail against one who is alone, two will quickly withstand.” And then comes the kicker: “A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” In other words, every time you add another person to the equation, you become stronger. I will often use this lesson in marriage ceremonies which involve blended families, because even though two are becoming one, this scripture celebrates the importance of any children from a previous marriage. Every time you add another person to the relationship, the relationship becomes stronger.

This is why our Second Church welcome is an extravagant one. It is why we say that “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you have a church home here.” Every single person, every individual in this church family, is necessary, and we still have brothers and sisters who haven’t come through these doors yet who will someday be equal partners in the work and worship of our ministry. No addition to this faith family is a weak and, just another name to add to the rolls so that our roster of members becomes longer and longer. Each person who comes into this family of faith is a robust & muscular addition, brings unique gifts and ideas, and is as important a member as any other. Our fifty and sixty year members and the person who may be visiting for the first time today each brings a distinctive contribution to the character of Second Church.

It is because of the importance of this little three letter word that God keeps adding to the great cloud of witnesses. And it is why today’s sermon will likely be the only one I ever preach that begins and ends with the word, and.

[Hallelujah! It’s about time!]

Let us pray.

Vision Test

Is anyone else quietly relieved that the stock markets are closed on Saturday and Sunday? I think I’ve come down with a mild case of vertigo this week from watching stocks rise and fall like one of those corkscrew roller coasters at Six Flags, the kind that not only climbs and drops, but flips you around and around and turns you upside down and empties your pockets – an apt analogy – before you come to the end of it and wonder what in the world just happened to you. Down 600 points on Monday, up 400 on Tuesday, down 500 on Wednesday, up 400 on Thursday, and up another 100 on Friday. Yet for all of that frenetic activity, the market as a whole is only down 175 points since it all began. And I’ve noticed that everyone has an pet theory: it’s because the President is not providing stronger leadership; it’s because the House Republicans decided to play chicken with the debt ceiling; it’s because Italy and Spain are in danger of following Greece into default; it’s because the Fed is keeping interest rates so low; it is because we, the consumer, are not spending enough and it is because we the consumer are not saving enough. In other words, don’t even try to figure it out, because it is probably a combination of these and a host of other factors I don’t understand. But I did appreciate the words of a news commentator the other night who tried to put it into perspective. I’m a huge fan of NECN news; it’s the only local news I watch, and the station’s financial analyst Jennifer Lane offered some solace the other night. She said, basically, to ignore the short-term. She had been getting letters and phone calls and emails from panicked investors asking what should they buy and what should they sell, and her response was basically, if you have fluctuation fluster, get out of your chair, turn off the TV and go outside for a walk. For while the daily gyrations of the stock market are not meaningless or inconsequential, it is always best to take the long view. If the market falls today, it will rise again; if it soars today, it will come back down to earth. Pause, take a deep breath, don’t panic over yesterday or tomorrow, but look toward the horizon and know that better days are coming. Or as Jesus said in a different context, “Let the troubles of the day be sufficient to themselves.” Take the long view.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord...” We heard John Knott read these words of Jeremiah, not once, not twice, but three different times in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch... The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when it shall no longer be said, As the Lord lives... The days are surely coming, says the Lord... when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” The days are surely coming, says the Lord, but they are not yet. There lies the tension. We don’t know what the days that are coming will bring, which is often the source of anxiety. But we do know that the days that are coming, come from the Lord.

At the time these words were written, Israel was in exile. Entire communities were uprooted from Israel and Judah and forcibly marched to Babylon and Assyria, where they lived as refugees. It would be as if the entire population of Beverly and Salem were compelled to gather whatever belongings we could fit in our cars and forced to settle in Woonsocket, or maybe Central Falls. It was like that for three generations, and in the early days of the exile, Jeremiah, against all empirical evidence, tried to reassure them and comfort them, saying that things may look difficult and unsettling for now, but better days are coming: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord...” Like NECN’s Jennifer Lane, Jeremiah advised taking the long view: don’t panic because of what yesterday looked like or what tomorrow might bring, Jeremiah counseled, but look toward the horizon, look toward the God of hope, and keep God’s faithful vision before you, because better days are coming. Jeremiah brought Israel a vision, and in doing so he brought them hope.

As a church, God also bring us vision and hope. You and I are coming into our third year of the Vision we adopted two years ago, and I think that every now and then it is helpful to take stock of where we have been and where God is leading us. The focus of our first year was Extravagant Welcome, this past year was Congregational Life, and this coming year we will turn our focus to Mission and Outreach, but as we look back, we recognize that while we intended to focus on one aspect each year, all three have been in fact intertwined, since none of them really stands alone. Our weekly study groups have used Unbinding the Gospel and Living the Questions as ways of deepening our own faith and learning new ways of articulating that faith among others. We’ve hired Judy Levy as our new Assistant Administrator for Electronic Communications, and Judy is currently redesigning our church web site, which will be up and running next month, and we will be seeing other communications upgrades, both among our congregation and out in the community as well. We decided to make it crystal clear that Second Church welcomes all God’s children into our church family, and became an Open and Affirming Congregation. We have deepened our relationship with God in our Faith Empowering Group, and with each other with a variety of lay ministry projects. We sent a mission team to Washington DC, we gave Dane Street Beach a good spring cleaning, we became involved with Recovery High School, and we strengthened our relationship with already established mission partners, from Beverly Bootstraps to the Casa San Jose. And, miracle of miracles, there are even signs that God is beginning to reveal to us that elusive holy grail of congregationalism, namely new and creative ways of governance and organization. Because God brought to us our church vision, our eyes have been lifted from the day to day, which is to say, where we are today - to help us look toward the horizon, which is where we are being led; God gave us a vision of who we are as a congregation, and who we can still become.

Three weeks ago, you and I got a letter in the mail which brought news that can best be described as bittersweet: the good news is that the Federated Church of Cotuit, on Cape Cod, is getting a wonderful new minister in the fall. The bittersweet side of it is that their wonderful new minister is our wonderful current Associate Minister, who has served our congregation for almost exactly six years. We are excited for you Angie, at the same time we will be sorry to see you go. The time for farewells and testimonials is not quite yet, since you’ll still be among us through the end of September. But it is time to begin considering God’s vision for us, vis-à-vis pastoral ministry, and what that will bring. At a time like this I am reminded of words of the seemingly immortal Susan Shelmerdine, who has said to us both on more than one occasion: “Ministers come, and ministers go, but I’m still here!” Susan may as well have been talking about the church as about herself. But even though ministers come and ministers go and the church is still here, it is often the shape of ministry that changes, and it is God’s vision and desire that draw the contours of that shape. Both our church staff, and some of our church leadership, our board chairs and moderator, have begun conversations about the transition ahead of us, and the Board of Deacons as well as the congregation as a whole will be determining what our next steps will be. As we do so, I think we would do well to pay attention to the words of Jeremiah, who counsels us, even as we attend to the passing of days, to keep our vision fixed on the horizon as well: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with you... it will not be like the covenant which I made with your ancestors... I will write my words upon your hearts, and I will be your God, and you will be my people, and you shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, and I will forgive your transgression, and remember you always.”

While our vision is looking to the days ahead, there is one more ship on the horizon that is sailing our way, and that is the celebration of Second Church’s 300th anniversary. In 1713, the Colonial Council in Boston granted a charter to the Parish of Salem and Beverly; in 1714 the original church was built, portions of which still stand in the viewing cupboard against the cemetery wall; and in 1715 The Rev. John Chipman was called to be our minister, and served for 60 years. This means that, in two years, we will have three years of celebration ahead of us, and plans are already underway to celebrate our heritage and to provide for our future.

The story Angie read from Acts this morning is a story of multiple visions. God spoke to Ananias in a vision, and sent him to a man named Saul. Saul, who was temporarily blind, had a vision in which someone named Ananias would come to him. And when Ananias reached Saul, he placed his hands upon him and Saul’s vision was restored, and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Saul’s name was changed to Paul, and Paul became, even more than Peter, the spiritual and theological architect of the Christian church. All because Saul, and Ananias, and many who came before them and many who have come after them, saw God’s vision before them. In the days before us, as we continue to live into our Vision, to lean into our transition, and to look toward our tercentennial, may we be as receptive to the vision God has for us, as Jeremiah and Ananias and Saul were to the one God had for them.

Let us pray.

Yes, We Have No Zucchini

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Guiseppe and Guiditta Vumbacca emigrated from a small village in Calabria to the promise of a better life in America. Once they passed through Ellis Island, where an immigration officer who didn’t understand Italian chopped the final vowel off the family name so that Vumbacca became Vumback, they moved to central Connecticut and resumed the only life they knew: they started a farm. And because a farm needs farmhands, they produced ten children, the eldest of whom, Thomas, was my maternal grandfather. Tom had mixed feelings about growing up on a farm: it was his job every morning before school to go out and milk the cows, and at the end of the day, he had to grab a chicken, wring its neck and pluck the feathers for that night’s dinner. Which explains why, as an adult, he never drank milk and never ate chicken again.

But Tom Vumback loved his vegetable garden. And it is probably because of this that ever since I was little, I always had a vegetable garden too. I can remember lazy summer afternoons helping my grandfather in his garden with easy chores: planting beans, picking tomatoes, hoeing around the eggplant. And when we were finished he would set up two chairs, light his cigar, hand me a bottle of root beer, and we would sit and talk and just listen to his garden grow.

I also worked in my dad’s garden when I was young, but unlike my grandfather, my dad actually made me work. I had to turn the garden over by hand each spring, shovel the chicken manure he had delivered... have you ever worked with chicken manure? Dad insisted it was superior to cow manure, and it certainly was in the department of aromatic pungency... its ordure is forever tattooed on my olfactory. I also had to weed my Dad’s garden, and thanks to the chickens, there were weeds aplenty. I had to stake the tomatoes, pick the beans and keep the zucchini under control. But still, I remember Dad’s gardens fondly, and it is the reason why, in my adult life, I have still always had a vegetable garden. I dug one in our back yard at our first house in Calumet, Michigan, I dug one in the back yard of our parsonage in Bridgewater, Connecticut and I dug one in back of our garage on Conant St.

And it has always been an Italian garden. I’ve planted tomatoes, pole beans, zucchini, several varieties of peppers, eggplant, and onions; my herb garden has oregano, basil, parsley, chives and dill. It’s great to be able to just go out in the back yard and pick what you need when making dinner, because let’s face it - if all of a sudden you’re just jonesing for some dill, and the stores are closed – it’s so nice to just walk out the back door and pick it fresh.

But I’ve come to notice something a little different about my Beverly garden: it only grows what it wants to grow. When I first started it ten years ago, I tried planting what I’ve always planted, with decidedly mixed results. My eggplant was disappointing. The peppers bore fruit, but to paraphrase the apostle Paul, that fruit did not abide. Tomatoes grow great, and I’m sure that’s thanks as much to Jake as it is to anyone. Most herbs grow pretty well, though the basil only grows so big and then stops. My garden loves to pump out the beans – I have three different varieties this year. But oddly enough, one thing that will not grow in my garden is zucchini. Zucchini! Everyone can grow zucchini! You can throw a couple seeds out the church window and have enough zucchini to feed a small nation. But zucchini just will not grow in my garden. I get lots of squash flowers: they grow into bright yellow trumpets that mock me in the morning – but no fruit, no zucchini. So after years of stubborn planting, forming the little hills just so, making sure there is fresh soil and, yes, manure each year, fertilizing as it grew, I’ve given up. And in doing so, I finally learned an important lesson about gardening. You’ve got to listen to your garden. You’ve got to listen to your garden.

Suzanne Munore read us one of those biblical stories that we hear so often, and think we know so well, that the point of it usually gets lost. “Listen!” Jesus said, “A sower went out to sow...” And what do we usually call this parable Jesus tells? The parable of the sower and the seeds, right? But the parable is not about the sower, and it is not about the seed. Listen:
“Some seed fell on the path, and the birds ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it sprang up quickly, and when the sun rose, it was scorched. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns chocked it. And other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.”
Jesus’ parable is about soil – about the different kinds of soils in which the seed is planted. The sower in each instance remains the same: it’s safe to say that the sower is either God or Jesus, and we get that. Likewise the seed in each instance remains the same: it is the gospel, the good news, the message of redemption that Jesus brings. The only thing that varies in the parable is the soil, the medium into which the seed is introduced. And that soil, folks, is us. It’s not about how good a sower God is, or how fruitful the word-seed is, it’s about us and how receptive we are to God’s speaking to us. The UCC likes to say, “God is still speaking;” the parable Suzanne read asks us, “Are we still listening? Can we hear what God is saying to us?” Are we the well worn path, the place that everybody walks right on by and doesn’t notice that God is trying to say something to us? Are we the rocky ground, have we hardened our shells so that even if we hear God speaking to us, we are too sophisticated to think we need to do anything about what God is saying? Are we the thicket of thorns, where there is already so much going on in our lives that there isn’t room for God to grow in us? Or are we the rich soil, filled with the nutrients and open to the sunlight that wants to stream into us and help us grow and mature into the fruitful people God knows we can be?

Notice that Jesus begins and ends this parable with the same word, “Listen.” And you know, as it turns out, I was not listening to my garden. I was planting what I wanted to harvest, and darn it I was going to keep planting zucchini year after year until those flowers finally produced fruit. But all along, my garden was trying to tell me what would actually grow there, it was giving me beans and tomatoes and onions and such, yet I kept insisting on planting what my garden was trying to tell me would not grow. It is a parable about the soil, and in this instance at least, the sower wasn’t listening to the soil at all.

The same thing sometimes happens to a church. Some things will grow, and some things will not, and we need to listen to the garden before we start planting seeds indiscriminately. I think this is something our Vision process did for us; it taught us to listen to each other, learning what kinds of things would make for fertile soil and fruitful growth, instead of just latching on to the latest church growth strategies and assuming that what works for another church would work for us. The Right Reverend Kirk Smith is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, and six or so months ago he wrote a great reflection on the things that really make a difference in healthy, vital churches; here is some of what he said:
Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, unless you are already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a group of ninety year olds who like crocheting and Beethoven, by God be proud of it.
Actually read the Bible. Start with Genesis, it’s pretty cool, and don’t worry, it’s OK to skip the boring parts.

Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism and consumerism.

Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God is not going to die even if there are no more Christians at all. Don’t forget, it’s not all about you; it’s all about God.

Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

Listen to God, listen to Wisdom, listen to Love, more than you speak your opinions.
These are the kinds of general things that prepare the soil, if you will, that will make the conditions ripe for growing. How often though the church is tempted to go out and buy the magic beans that promise to grow the stalk that reaches into the clouds. “Let’s get a Christian rock band; let’s replace the entire front of the church with a projection screen; let’s meet on Saturday nights instead of Sunday morning.” These are things that might work for some, but I think what Smith is saying is that there are some things that are appropriate for the church as a whole, and there are some things that are appropriate only for particular churches. Listen to your garden; it will reveal what it needs to grow.

This is the lesson of Revelation. I was a little reluctant to choose a reading from Revelation so soon after the rapture failed to materialize, since so much of that conversation grew out of a gross misappropriation of the last book of the Bible. But now that the Bruins have won the Stanley Cup, the rapture can come any time it wants, and we are free to understand that this morning’s New Testament lesson is actually a key to understanding both the book of Revelation, and to what we are saying about the church this morning. Revelation is a letter, a general letter written by John, addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor. Chapter 1 and chapters 4-22 are written to everyone in all the churches. They are words of warning and words of encouragement to those churches; they are not a prediction of the future, but rather a word of guidance to the present church of John’s day. Words, as I said, meant for everyone. Chapters 2 and 3, however, contain words of advice addressed specifically and individually to each of the seven local churches that John names in the first chapter. There is a specific message for the church in Ephesus, there is a specific message for the church in Smyrna, there is a specific message for the church in Pergamum, and so on for the churches in Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea – because each individual church also needed to hear something different. John’s words in Revelation are not one-size-fits all: what works in Ephesus may not work in Philadelphia. Rather, John understood what each church needed to hear, and so he provided it, first to each, then to all.

Listen to your garden. Understand what the soil will bear. Don’t try to plant zucchini in a tomato garden, even if all your neighbors have such an abundant crop of zucchini that they are giving it away to friends and strangers alike. Heck, do them a favor and take some off their hands! When we listened to our garden here at Second Church, we discovered the fruit it would bear. We became an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. We are sending a mission team to Washington, D.C. in July. We have just hired an Assistant for Electronic Communication. We are exploring more creative models of church organization. We are expanding our local mission, and we heard last week about one of our newest partnerships, with Recovery High School. This is just some of the fruit of our Vision. What works for us may or may not work for others, and what works for others may or may not work for us. But if we listen to our gardens, and understand that growth is more about the soil – about us - than about what gets planted in it, then the harvest will be a rich one, and God will be known, and this, God’s garden, will be blessed.

Let us pray.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Imagine There’s No Heaven: Easter Day 2011

When our two girls were growing up, part of our family’s Easter morning tradition was to hunt for the Easter eggs they had cooked and colored the day before. Debbie and I hid some in obvious places like on a living room end table or the dining room mantle, and we hid some in harder to find places, like behind the throw pillows or way up on top of a bookshelf. And then, only after all the eggs were found, Clare & Blythe looked for their Easter baskets, usually hidden in a closet or in a far corner of the room behind some plants. Occasionally they would come up an egg or two short, but that usually had less to do with their egg-hunting skills and more to do with Lily, our old black lab who had an appetite for, well, pretty much everything. But still, it was only after all the eggs were accounted for, more or less, that the girls could look for their Easter baskets; that was the prize for a successful hunt, and so while we made sure that the game was in the searching, we also saw to it that the eggs weren’t too difficult to discover.

This morning’s gospel reading from Matthew is kind of a resurrection sandwich. Matthew layers his account of Jesus’ resurrection with an unusual story, a story that only Matthew tells. A few minutes ago we heard AJ read the start of the story of the guards at the tomb, then Angie interrupted, as did Matthew, with the story of the resurrection, and then AJ finished telling us the rest of the story about the guards. It seems that in the years following the resurrection, rumors began to circulate that Jesus was not really raised from the dead, but that his body was stolen by his followers in order to give the illusion that he was raised. So Matthew tells us this story about Pilate’s placing extra guards at the tomb to ensure the body stays where it is. But even with the guards posted there, Jesus was raised, so in order to save face, the guards were bribed to say they fell asleep and the body was stolen. Whether it really happened this way or whether it was the product of Matthew’s active imagination, the point of the story is clear: even with armed guards posted at the tomb, Jesus was able to escape the bonds of death. An unusual way to tell it, to be sure, but Matthew’s point is taken.

Rob Bell is a rock star among evangelical Christians – there’s no other way to put it. You may have read about Rob Bell in Time magazine last week; he is a preacher, a speaker and a writer who has gained tremendous popularity over the past few years because he has a fresh way of presenting the gospel. Here at Second Church we have seen and discussed Rob Bell’s videos at Bible study, last Spring our seminarian Nathan Willard held a workshop on one of Bell’s pieces, and as Angie will tell you, Rob Bell is a cult hero to some of our youth. Just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Mars Hill Bible Church, where Bell is minister, attracts ten thousand worshipers every week. But the reason Bell appeared in Time last week is not because of his church, but because he recently dropped a theological bombshell smack in the middle of the evangelical world with the publication of his new book, Love Wins. Bell’s seemingly outrageous premise is that God loves everybody – pretty controversial stuff, right? Bell believes that God loves everybody so much that it is not God’s desire that even one human soul should be lost, but that it is God’s intention to bring every single human being to salvation – and since God is God, God succeeds. In other words, Bell suggests, in the end, not one soul is lost, not one soul is condemned for eternity, but every one of us eventually finds a way to God’s eternal presence and embrace. What this does of course, is it makes hell both unnecessary and superfluous. And for this outlandish suggestion, Bell has become the object of criticism and scorn among his colleagues. What is ironic is that most of his peers have decided Bell is going to hell because Bell says there is no hell. Hmmm: Bell’s compelled to dwell in hell, for Bell’s dispelled the knell of hell. There’s got to be a limerick in there somewhere...

But is this such an objectionable idea? That God’s plan is to save everybody, and that what God wants, God tends to get? I think what is really objectionable is that there are some church communities for whom hell is such a pivotal, indispensible notion, who can’t accept the fact that God desires everyone to come to love and faithfulness, that their whole theological system falls apart if Bell is correct. Think about this for a moment: a world without hell. A creation without damnation. For Bell, this makes a lot of sense: at one point he writes, 
 
“When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are... At the center of the Christian tradition since the [very] first church, have been a number who insist that history is not tragic... and love, in the end, wins, and all will be reconciled to God.”

You have wonder why this is so offensive. Why does part of the religious world cling to the idea of hell so tenaciously in the first place? It isn’t like any of us believes we’re going there. Hell is always for other people, right? It is the threat of punishment that the church has used for centuries to try to get people to behave, well, the way the church wants them to behave. Or to put it in clinical terms, hell has usually been employed as a kind of ecclesiastical avoidance therapy; the thinking is that we will do whatever needs to be done in order to avoid going to hell, so we turn to the church to learn what that is; and unfortunately, for most of the church’s history the simple answer has been, “If you don’t come to church, then you’re going to hell.” Am I right? Bell suggests this is, more than anything, an invention intended to pursue a given story line, like the story Matthew invented about placing guards at the tomb so Jesus’ followers can’t steal the body. But the body disappeared anyway. Placing guards at the tomb to prevent a resurrection makes about as much sense as threatening people with eternal damnation to get them to love God. God just doesn’t work this way.

In fact there is a good deal to suggest that hell is primarily an invention of the Christian church. To begin with, it is a purely New Testament idea. There is no hell in the Old Testament, no eternal damnation in Hebrew scripture or tradition. In the psalm we read together this morning, we said, “If make my bed in the depths,” or more accurately, “in Sheol, God is there.” And we tend to assume that Sheol as a kind of hell for Old Testament folks. But Sheol is actually the place everyone goes after death, the good and the evil alike – Sheol is simply what comes after life; it is not a place, but rather the state of not living any more. There is no place of everlasting punishment, nor is there a place of everlasting reward, in the Old Testament. When you die – you’re dead. It is what you have made of life that makes the difference for the faithful Jew, not what happens to you once you are gone.

Our church has spent the season of Lent reading through the gospel of Matthew. And we have seen that one of the major themes of the gospel can be captured in the repeated phrase, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of heaven is at hand. As we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus is not saying the kingdom of heaven is what awaits you when you die, nor is it off in some distant future when Christ comes again; the kingdom of heaven is at hand: it is among us, it is both imminent and immanent, it is in our midst. The kingdom of heaven is among you: it is the community you make, it is the faith that you live. What if the prevailing cultural ideas of heaven and hell, which come to us more from Milton and Dante than they do from the Bible anyway, miss the mark? What if heaven is not up in the sky, or God’s way of greeting us when we die? What if heaven is not the reward for doing all the right things, in the same way hell is not the punishment for doing all the wrong things? What if heaven is not the great big Easter basket filled with goodies that we have earned by virtue of collecting all the pretty eggs we have discovered along the way? When Jesus said, time after time in Matthew’s gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” what if he actually meant what he said?

What really surprises me about the reaction to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins, is not that so many people in certain church communities are scandalized by the possibility that there might not be a hell, but rather that they have completely missed the corollary: that is, if there is no hell in the traditional understanding of eternal punishment for having made the wrong choices, then maybe there is no need for an eternal reward for having made all the right ones. Maybe this life is our blessing, and the presence of God in our lives, from this moment on through eternity, is what the kingdom of heaven is about. Maybe Jesus actually meant what he said, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Is it possible for us to choose the good without needing the fear of hell to scare us straight, or the promise of heaven to lure us to a reward? There was an article in the Ideas section of last Sunday’s Globe that revealed Rob Bell isn’t the only one who has earned the enmity of his peers. Eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is also taking quite a lot of flak from his own scientific community for an article he published in last August’s edition of the journal, Nature. For much of his career, Wilson has done some of the seminal work on the nature of altruism. What is it that causes people to choose to do good, even when it is sometimes to our own detriment? For many years, the scientific community believed, as did Wilson, that it was due to “kin selection.” That is, we are hard-wired to choose the good even when it sometimes goes against our own personal self-interest, in order to ensure the survival of our descendants, a kind of genetic Darwinism. But in rethinking his own theory, Wilson decided he was mistaken; he has rejected the conventional wisdom and come up with a new idea. The key, for Wilson, has become the community. Technically speaking, under certain circumstances, groups of people who cooperate for the common good out-compete groups of people who do not cooperate for the common good, with the resulting good serving to benefit the survival of the community. Or to put it simply, when we choose to do what is right, it is not for the goodies we get at the end of the game, but rather it is for the common good of everyone. To put this in biblical language, we love God, and we love one another, not because of the promise of the afterlife, but because it makes the world a better place. And because it is the right thing to do. And because the kingdom of heaven is among us.

The relevant question, I think, is not, Do heaven and hell really exist? John Lennon did not sing, “There is no heaven,” he sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven:” choose to do good because it is good, not because you’ll get a prize for making the right choice. The relevant question is, Does God really use the threat of punishment or the promise of reward in order to get us to do the right thing, to love God and each other? Or does God equip us and inspire us to do the right thing simply because God loves us? Which comes first, God’s love or our faithfulness? On Easter morning, the answer is right there at the empty tomb. God loves us first, and foremost, and a God who would send his son for us all does not require a system of punishment and reward in order to demonstrate that love. Or as another gospel writer put it, “God so loved the world that God sent the only Son, that whoever believes will have eternal life. God sent the son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia and Amen.

Let us pray.

Now’s the Time: February 20th, 2011

As most of you know by now, my daughter Blythe is spending her Spring semester at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was kind of difficult to send her off that far away for that long, but what has proven even more difficult is to try to figure out what time it is, for that matter, what day it is, for her at any given moment. I started out trying to add sixteen hours to Beverly time, but that proved too taxing for someone who last had a math class in high school. So what I do now is subtract eight hours and add a day: so if it is 10:00 am in Beverly on Sunday, then it is 2:00 am in Sydney on Monday. So in this sense, I’ve got the time all figured out; what I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that she left San Francisco last Saturday night and arrived in Sydney – fifteen hours later – Monday morning. Where did Sunday go? I suppose she’ll find it on her way home in July.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of time this week. How do we spend our time? In what ways have we put it to good use, and in what ways have we wasted it? I think it’s helpful every now and then to evaluate what we do with our time, since time is an entirely nonrenewable resource; once a moment is gone, we can’t get it back. Besides, so much of our efforts to manage our lives, and to make sense of the world around us, has to do with time. You might have seen the article in yesterday’s Globe about how eighteen busy Bostonians save time. And we do try to control our time, to understand it, in some cases to predict it, and in nearly every instance, to master it. We would prefer to make time serve us, instead of, as is so much more often the case, our serving it. Since earliest days, humanity has endeavored to divide time into increments, the better to orchestrate and manipulate it. The ancient Egyptians invented the Nileometer, a crude device for measuring time by gauging the rise and fall of the Nile River; medieval Europeans listened for the bells of the cathedral, which marked the hours - very much the same way our own church bells on Sunday morning awaken the small corner of our world at the junction of Conant and Cabot. And today the digital displays of our clocks wake us up, they brew our coffee, they reheat our leftovers, and ironically they have rendered the notions of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” virtually anachronistic!

So there is a tension here. For all the great ideas you and I, and in particular our merchandisers, conceive of to control time, to get the most out of our time, the reality too often turns out to be that our time is controlling us. Our experience is analogous to the football field and the basketball court where the team that is behind late in the contest is “playing against the clock.” We allow time to control us during the week so we can enjoy the weekend, or during the year to earn our vacation, or during our lifetimes to reach retirement. And yet for all our time-saving strategies and devices, it still seems, as every one of us has been heard to lament, that nobody has enough time. How many people cannot make a decision without consulting their calendar, or their Blackberry, or their iTouch? Even as we try to economize and streamline our time and juggle our responsibilities with our desires, we wind up filling in the few blank spaces we have, and discover to our chagrin that we have even less time than we started out with.

“Behold, now is the acceptable time,” the apostle Paul once wrote; “behold, now is the day of salvation.” The Bible makes much of the notion of time, so much, that there are actually multiple words for it. The time we have been talking about so far is called chronos, or chronological time, time which is measured by the hour, the day, the month and the year. There is another kind of time though, which, though less commonplace, is no less familiar to us. In Greek it is called kairos, kairos, or what we might call the “right time;” the favorable, propitious, opportune moment for doing something. An example of this might be the couple who decides that it is time to have a child; presumably, they have not come to this decision by consulting their watch, yet nonetheless, they believe the time is right to begin a family. This is what we mean by the kairos, the appropriate time. Another example might be the old commercials for Miller beer, which managed to squeeze both notions of time into its pitch. Chronologically speaking, after work let’s say, it’s “Miller Time,” time to crack open an ice cold Miller Beer; yet in the broader sense, the commercial also wants us to think that it is always “Miller Time;” that regardless of the hour or the day, the time is right to become a Miller beer drinker. For a Harpoon drinker, this is where the analogy breaks down.

The Bible has many examples of this kind of time, the right time, the appointed time, for every facet of human life, and there is no place where this is more evident than the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which Brad read for us this morning. “I have seen the business that God has given to his children to be busy with,” the writer declares. “God has made everything beautiful in its time; God also has put eternity into the human mind, yet so that one cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” The right time, we learn, is divinely prescribed. God knows the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time for war and the time for peace. “For everything there is a season,” we are told, “and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Even as a document, the Bible leans more toward the notion of the “right” time than it does chronological time. For while it is true that the scriptures are arranged from the creation of the world in Genesis, to the vision of the last days in Revelation, neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is organized along a strict chronological pattern. The most ancient reference to the creation is found in the book of Jeremiah, which doesn’t appear until nearly two-thirds of the way through the Old Testament. Likewise, Jesus offers a vision of the last days as early as the gospel of Mark, which, although it is the first gospel, still doesn’t appear first in the New Testament. In fact the earliest New Testament book, I Thessalonians, doesn’t show up until nearly two thirds of the way through its particular part of the Bible. The Bible’s concern is not so much with chronological time. The most prevalent use of the notion of time in the scriptures is the kairos, the chairotic moment, the particular, decisive, definitive point in time. Indeed, the Bible betrays little abstract conception of time; in the Bible, time consists of what is contained within it, of what makes up those definitive and decisive times which comprise the important moments of life.

We talked a little about this kind of time at our staff meeting this week, for example, how there can be a time for both weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing together, and Bob Lague hit on a good illustration. Bob raised the idea of what takes place at a funeral, or a memorial service, perhaps because he attended two of them last week. A memorial service usually has its share of weeping and mourning – that’s what it’s for, after all. But a true memorial is also a celebration of life, and very often that celebration brings laughter in its wake. We had some good hearty laughs at Rose Brady’s service a few weeks ago, and one of the reasons is that Rose often brought a smile to our faces. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing, and occasionally the time is right and ripe for both.

The notion of the chairotic moment can also be seen in what’s been going on in the Middle East of late. Every now and then, history seems to be telling us that the time is ripe for change. We’ve seen it in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, and who knows where it will strike next? Wisconsin, perhaps. In one sense, we might say that revolution is in the air and its flames are being fanned by the internet. But it is also true that there are times in history when people rise up against oppression. Remember that at the same time the American Revolution was gearing down, the French Revolution was ginning up, and even though a third revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was taking shape at the same time, I don’t think the internet had much to do with any of them. Sometimes the time is simply right.

In John’s gospel Angie described Jesus’ brothers trying to encourage him to put his time to better use, to be bolder in displaying his works, to be more assertive and direct in declaring himself and his mission. They urged him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!” But Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come; but your time is always here.” Jesus was waiting for God’s time, for the “right time,” to be fulfilled, and that time had not yet arrived. For his brothers, though, Jesus admitted that their time had indeed come, that the moment was ripe for them to display their own convictions in what Jesus was saying and teaching about God.

And you and I often find ourselves waiting, and truth to tell, not always waiting patiently, for God to get to work. We are anxious for God to do something in our lives - or in someone else’s life. We are eager for God to heal, or to straighten out an unpleasant situation; we don’t see why God should wait to bring peace to our world and to fix broken or displaced lives. But part of this frustration, or impatience, if you will, is because we are dealing with the two different expressions of time we have been talking about this morning: our waiting for God consists of chronological, or measured time - it’s why we wish God would hurry up and do all those things we things God ought to be doing in our world, and in our lives. We feel as though we have waited long enough, and it is high time God acted. But as that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, God works in God’s own time, knowing when the right time is to work; and remember that even when it comes to all those nasty things we especially wish God would remedy, things like war and hate and killing and death - Ecclesiastes reminds us that these, too have their time, as little as you or I may like it. There is a time for every matter under heaven. We need to remember that God will take God’s own time regardless of what our watches, analogue or digital, might want to tell us.

And like Jesus’ well-meaning companions in John’s gospel, if all we’re doing is sitting around waiting for God to do something, we may well be missing our own opportunity to seize the time. “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.” While we’re waiting for God to do God’s good work, there is a lot of good work you and I can be doing in the meantime.

I think this is what Augustine meant, who wrote that the only significant time is the present, the “now.” The past does not exist except as we call it to memory, Augustine wrote, and the future exists only as we predict or envision it in the present. And it may be part of what Bertrand Russell said, when he later agreed that we may not confuse memory or envisioning with the past or the future themselves, since it is the present that really counts. And who knows, it may even be what the immortal Charlie Parker was trying to get at, whose signature tune, “Now’s The Time,” musically incorporates the chairotic with the chronological. And I think it is clear this is what Paul meant, who summed it all up when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Which in a sense means it doesn’t matter if the sermon goes over twenty minutes or the church service goes over an hour, because you can’t put a stopwatch on God’s Holy Spirit. What gives meaning to this moment, to any moment, is when you and I seize upon it because it is indeed the right time.
Let us pray.

Sticks & Stones: January 16, 2011

Before we begin this morning, I need you to do something very important for me, so that we don’t miss any of what I have to say today. At no point during this morning’s sermon should you be thinking about a purple elephant with pink polka dots, OK? Can I get you all to do this? Nobody think about a big purple elephant with large pink polka dots. Not even in the balcony. OK, so nobody’s thinking about that elephant, right? Great, let’s get started.

We have a lot of creative people in our church. We have knitters and quilters, we have bean-bakers and chili-makers, we have painters of many stripes, from still-life to wood trim, we have musicians and singers, we have carpenters and product engineers, we have a lot of people who are able to create wonderful works out of nothing more than their imagination and a simple medium.

I have always envied those of you who can take something ordinary and make it look beautiful, because the only way I can claim to be creative is with something that can be neither seen nor touched, something that appears only for a moment and then is gone. I – and Angie – create with words. I just created that purple elephant with pink dots that none of you is thinking about. Now, in a certain sense a word is ephemeral. It is heard once in the course of an instant, and then disappears. So in one sense those of you who make quilts and paintings and bookshelves and jet engines make something that is much more enduring than the words we put together on a regular basis. I remember taking a class in seminary where one of the assignments was to create something that could be used as an aid to worship, so I thought for a while, and wrote a liturgical poem that could be used in multiple worship settings. Everybody else made banners, and icons and other symbolic pieces from wood and cloth and other equally constructive materials. But I made something with words alone, and as a result, I received the lowest grade in the class. The irony is that it was my preaching professor who preferred the material to the verbal.

So there is a sense in which words are fleeting. But there is a deeper sense in which words are far more permanent than anything made of sticks or stone or steel. John begins his story about the life of Jesus in exactly the same way the Bible begins the story of creation: “In the beginning.” In each of the first six days of creation, it is more than just God doing the creating; it is the word of God doing the creating. The Hebrew litany falls into a familiar pattern: “God said, ‘Let there be...’ and there was... and it was good.” God spoke – and it was – and it was good. So in the same way that God’s creative word is at work in Genesis, God’s creative word is similarly at work in the gospel: “In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... all things came into being through [the word], and without [it], not one thing came into being.” I like the way the RSV phrases that last bit, “without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the power of the word.
A word is something powerful. A word can do things that bricks and stones and mortar and wood cannot do, and it is more enduring as well. This is why right now someone in the choir still can’t get that purple elephant with pink polka dots out of their mind, because once a word is spoken it takes on a life of its own that lasts considerably longer than the things we can fabricate and see and touch. Anyone here who has ever blurted something out in the heat of the moment that we wish we had never said knows this is true: whether to a spouse, or a child, or a boss or a co-worker, we know that a word, once spoken, takes on a life of its own, and cannot be called back. And though we may try our best, once spoken, no explanation or apology or justification can ever make that word completely disappear.
I was reminded of the enduring power of words as I followed the news about last weekend’s shootings in Arizona. You don’t have to subscribe to the theory that Jared Loughner went on a senseless rampage because he listened to too much Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to understand that words still have the power to make a difference. After all, I suppose too much NPR and “All Things Considered” might have the same effect on some. But whether the shrill tone of public discourse contributed to the attack on Gabrielle Giffords, whether those were crosshairs or surveyors marks on the map of Giffords’ district, whether one side of the ideological spectrum or the other employs the most war-like metaphors, there is still the cold reality that words make a difference. Words have power, words have endurance, and it would be a mistake to pretend they do not. When Jesus said it is not what goes into a person that can defile, but what comes out, he was thinking of the words we speak to each other, their power and their lasting effect.
When we hear Jets’ cornerback Antonio Cromartie curse out Tom Brady in a public interview earlier this week; when we engage in an honest debate about the value of language in Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn; when a critical conversation about end-of-life decisions becomes a “death panel;” when we pause before a meal to bless the food on our table and the people around it; and this weekend, when we remember the legacy of a man whose inspiring words led to a non-violent revolution and greater equality for people of color; we recognize that words possess an enduring power and a lasting effect far beyond the simple speaking of them.

Gail read this morning from the book of the Proverbs, words that take us back to the very creation when the Word began its work:
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago... when he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above... when he marked out the foundations of the earth, there I was beside him, like a master worker, delighting in the human race.”
From the very beginning, it is the word of God’s wisdom that has given meaning and shape to all creation, to the heavens and the earth, and to all of human life. By the spoken word God created, and by the incarnate word God is creating still.

As the details of last weekend’s shootings emerged, it became clear that it was much more a combination of Loughner’s own mental and emotional instability coupled with his access to guns and ammunition that led to the tragedy, much more than any politically-charged language. And so in a sense, trying to corral and parse whatever words might have been spoken or written before last Saturday is not altogether helpful. But what surprises me is what we have heard since the shooting. Gratefully, there have been a good number of thoughtful, level headed leaders who have spoken evenly, and civilly, and compassionately, who have urged the same in our better lights. I appreciated the President’s words, as well as his observation that speech matters, at Wednesday’s memorial service when he said, 
 
“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

Yet without pointing fingers or naming names – though, forgive me Lord, but Barbara Anderson just drives me crazy! - without pointing fingers or naming any other names, we have reason to be disappointed in those who have used the occasion for division and polarization, for blame-calling and self-aggrandizement, rather than for healing and compassion. Listen to what John says about the potential of the Word: “From its fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” It is possible – and it is not just possible, it is responsible, it is incumbent and it is faithful – to see that the words we speak, and the thoughts which motivate them, are vessels of grace. One of the things I really appreciate about the discussion we have been having around becoming an Open and Affirming congregation is that the conversation has been a thoughtful, responsible, and grace-filled conversation. There was a time in our church’s life that such a conversation would have generated more heat than light, but one of the things we have learned together is how to talk to each other with a mutuality of respect as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. “From the fullness of the Word, we have all received grace upon grace.” This should be the aim of our words, of what we say to each other, and I don’t think it is unrealistic to hold ourselves, and our leadership, both our ecclesiastical and our civic and political leadership to this noble, honest and respectful standard.

Purple elephants notwithstanding.

Let us pray.