Holding Up Children
By Administrator | May 17, 2009
Holding Up Children
a sermon based on Mark 9:33-37 (Scholar’s Translation)
given at Palm Bay, FL on May 17, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
You just heard a reading from the Gospel of Mark at chapter 9 verses 36 to 37, from the Jesus Seminar’s Scholar’s Version Translation. I like this translation. It makes it clear that Jesus took a child, placed her in front of the disciples and put his arms around her and said “Whoever accepts a child like this in my name is accepting me.”
I not only like this translation, but I love this verse. It is among my favorites.
Jesus honors children by holding a child out in front of a crowd and putting his arm around her. This is remarkable. Even more so when you know that in Jesus’ culture children were perceived as non-persons with no right to appear in the midst of male disciples, let alone be embraced by an exalted teacher like Jesus.
But Jesus brilliantly defeats this perception in one fell swoop. As the exalted one he exalts those non-persons not only into personhood, but as the very envoys himself and God. “Whoever accepts a child like this in my name is accepting me. And whoever accepts me is not so much accepting me as the one who sent me.”
Jesus declares that receiving a child amounts to receiving him and God personally. Welcome one such child and you welcome not only Jesus, but God.
Jesus’ act of holding that child out to a crowd and embracing her was a huge and amazing act of grace in his culture, as was declaring her and all other children as envoys of himself and God.
Almost two years ago I discussed this scripture in relationship to the programs we offer to children. I am revisiting this verse in a similar vein today. Namely to discuss Community Family Players a ministry we will begin offering next Saturday as children and youth audition for a production of Alice in Wonderland.
This ministry’s intent is to take children and youth and place them in front of a crowd with our welcoming embrace in hopes that others will see and embrace and accept them as well.
Jesus’s embrace of a child demonstrates what a difference community can make in providing a place for children to be loved and to feel safe to be connected and respected by others. It shows the difference we can make with one embrace of a child.
While children and youth are not exactly considered non-persons by our culture, they do often get set aside, or ignored or even mistreated. I don’t know about you but I have seen youth ignored by clerks in stores and even followed around with suspicion in a very unwelcoming manner. Indeed the news media is far more likely to portray teens as criminals or suspect than as capable of doing good and great things. This is counter to my experience that teens are extraordinary people.
Jesus’s example teaches us to see children and youth as those we must embrace, honor, respect and love as his and God’s representatives and extraordinary people.
I have worked with children and youth for decades. In 1997 I had the great privilege of beginning a theatre program in Oregon that arose out of the very premise reflected in today’s verse. I felt youth were not being embraced or accepted by the culture and I wanted to connect them with respectable adults play, to treat them with respect in the process of putting on the play and in the end hold them out in high quality performances for the community to see and respect and embrace and accept.
I have also been involved with theatre for decades. I have found over the years that working on a play provides a myriad of experiences. Acting requires a great amount of discipline to memorize, rehearse and stick with all of the work that is needed to perform a piece. It makes you search your soul for not only an understanding of the written word that forms the literature of a play, but for an understanding of life, and how to breath that life into your character; using whatever you have within, that you are willing to explore–and then expose.
It truly develops character on many levels, and keeps the imagination exercised and in great shape in a day and age where our imaginations are exercised less and less. You learn in theatre to articulate words and thoughts. You learn about different cultures, different fortunes, great literature and other times and other places and other people.
As an actor you acquire a better understanding of emotions and how to call upon them from others or yourself and control them . . . just a little. You learn how to let go and look at facets of yourself and life that you might otherwise ignore. You create. You act as team with others in very emotional settings.
It takes a lot of discipline and hard work to be in a play. These are not skits, but full scale productions and by the end actors get that they need to be on time, prepared for the day and ready to work with others as a team, as equals, as someone who matters and is needed.
Theatre also makes actors learn how to summon up confidence and speak before crowds. And theatre is unique among the arts because it actually often includes all the arts: Writing, painting, poetry, sculpture and many times music.
To me the greatest most exciting thing about theatre is that when everything is just right you can move people in such a profound way they remember the act for life.
If you have not already heard, I spent my teenage years in plays, mostly musicals in my hometown in San Jose. I left San Jose to get a B.A. in Drama at a small college called California State University at Stanislaus. And I first moved to Oregon to work on an MFA in acting at the University of Oregon where I had a graduate teaching fellowship in theatre props (in addition to acting I can create or scrounge up just about anything for use on stage).
After about a year I was dissatisfied with the graduate acting program and moved to L.A., where for reasons I still cannot fathom the industry took a liking to some guy named Tom Cruz over me (some say it was Danny DeVito).
Although I did not stay in LA and went on to make a living in other ways I have always kept a connection with theatre. My biggest drama thrill was directing that theatre ministry in Oregon just like the one we are starting here, a ministry full of love and positive activities.
Need for positive activities in this community for our youth is, I think, self evident. There is a great void of places for our younger folks to belong, to have fun, to imagine and create, to dare to do new things, to interact with adults, to learn and grow and to work to give to the community – and to get positive responses from the community.
We have designed Community Family Players to help to begin to fill this void; and this is I hope only the beginning.
Community Family Players will provide wholesome theatre productions in a manner that provides the opportunities for families to work together and for youth to shine on stage while entertaining folks of all ages.
The cast and crew of each production will include a mix of adults and youth from throughout the community-with the youth generally out numbering adult performers three to one. The presence of adult performers is to provide in-cast teachers, friends, connections and positive role models for the youth, as well as to legitimize the production as “real” theatre in the eyes of the audience.
Perhaps more importantly, the presence of youth and adults in the cast and crew is to provide the opportunity for family and community members to work and play together outside the home. This first production will include a separate opening dance number choreographed by Amy Aumick (yes, that Amy Aumick, our office manager!) who among her many gifts, is an accomplished dancer.
The main show, Alice in Wonderland, is expected to feature the acting talents of the following adult members of our church: Billy Lane, an ordained minister and a manger at Pier 1 is the Caterpillar. Tony Misco, a retired college administrator and Stephens Minister is the Red King, Amy is the White Queen . . . and Shannon Whitten a professor at University Central Florida is the Red Queen.
Although the adult parts are cast anyone interested in helping out on this great new ministry is encouraged to let us know. There is a sign up sheet in the narthex listing the areas we need help with (costumes, props, sets, tickets, publicity, stage manager, etc.). Adults from this church who have already agreed to work behind the scenes on the play are Phyllis Rhinehart, Dick Rhinehart, Jack Carnes, Cathy Carnes, Paul Lucas, Pat Lucas, Lynn Chako, Joni Isaman and Mardi Sales. I also expect parents of the youth who audition will help as well.
Community Family Players is being operated and sponsored by this Church. While we have no plans to provide scripted doctrinal messages about life, or religion, or spirituality; we do want the youth to receive the over-riding message: that there is a lot of good in the world, that they are a part of that good, and that a whole lot of people care about them and respect them.
It is our intent and hope that our actions will not only provide theatre skills and experiences, but give clear resounding messages of love and compassion, of respect and charity, of hope and joy, and of community commitment to positive growth in all of us.
We plan to do this by providing community family theatre experiences on and off stage, and for the audiences. This may all sound too good to be true and idealistic, but I have been a part of just such a group before and it works, even better than I have described so far.
Let me share with you just two experiences from the past program:
The first summer show we did had a nine year old child in it. She was very sickly at the time, but kept at it and worked hard nonetheless and it paid off. She was great. At the conclusion of the play she wrote these words on a t-shirt the cast presented to me: “Thank you for the best summer of my life.” That child returned every summer for six years to be in each production. She is in college now and when I went back for my ordination she and one of the adults put together a skit about my journey to seminary that not only had everyone in stitches, but in tears as well.
We dealt with a lot of at risk youth; in fact we think that over half the kids were very at risk. One youth who was in number of shows was from a family with some young men who had a rough image in town. One day I was walking along a street by myself and I saw this rough looking fellow on the other side of the road. He looked up, saw me, and crossed over to my side of the street and headed directly for me. I stopped on the side walk and he came right up to me, and as he reached out his hand he said “I want to thank you for putting my brother in your plays. My whole family is so proud of him. Thank you so much. It means a lot to us. He loves being in plays.” I don’t think I have ever be more gratified to have been involved in a ministry than the day I heard those words by that young man on that street. Our aim is to have the same sort of impact.
In the Gospel of Mark at chapter 9 verses 36 to 37 we are told that Jesus took a child and had her stand in front of the disciples and Jesus put his arms around her and said to the disciples “Whoever accepts a child like this in my name is accepting me.”
This offers a perfect image of what Community Family Players is all about. To put children in front of a friendly audience with a warm and supportive embrace.
This is a heavenly project, designed to help those who are representatives of God, our children.
Your support of this project will change lives and not just the youths’ lives, but all who are involved.
Thank you for being a church that is willing to create such a ministry; to embrace youth and hold them out to others as worthy; to connect youth with community through the performing arts.
AMEN
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Spiritual Formation
By Administrator | May 3, 2009
Spiritual Formation
a sermon based on Luke 17:20-21
given at Palm Bay, FL on May 3, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Recently in church (from this pulpit) someone referred to me as the “Woo-Woo King.”
I looked “woo-woo” up in an on-line dictionary and found over twenty definitions. Woo-woo can mean anything from the sound a whistle makes to a 99.9% fruit drink to being stupid to being something great.
Notwithstanding these other meanings mostly I know “woo-woo” as a West Coast term for matters relating to spirituality (The person who made the comment assured me this was her meaning).
This definition, of course, begs the question: What is spirituality?
I once represented a Native American in a civil rights case and his brother was the Shaman of the confederated tribes. He defined spirituality like this: “Religion is for those who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.” Looking back I think the Shaman meant that religion can be a surface thing, but, spirituality requires a deepness that comes with living in the ups and downs of life.
The official theological definition of spirituality is in essence “being spiritual.” Spiritual, meaning concerning spirit or non-material things. So spirituality is defined generally as being concerned about the spirit or the non-material.
My own definition of “spirituality” within the context of Christian theology, however, is a little more specific. I understand spirituality to mean God’s beckoning within creation that calls us toward experiencing God’s love, and it is also how we acknowledge that call and reciprocate by actively participating in God’s love throughout creation.
In short, I understand spirituality to be about God’s call and our hearing and responding to that call– each of which is, when you get right down to it, all about love.
I base my understanding of spirituality on God calling us through New Testament verses that teach us to see that we are loved by God (John 3:16), that we are to love God (Matt 22:37) and that we are to love others (Matt 22:39).
Now I want to make this clear, God loves us whether we acknowledge God or not, and we all experience God’s love at some level just by our existence. Indeed I would go so far as to claim that anyone who believes in love believes in God even if they do not understand God as love.
At any rate, in order to best participate in God’s beckoning, most of us need to recognize a higher power (by whatever name we might call that power, “God,” “Sacredness,” “Holiness” “Allah” “Mystery” “Yahweh,” “The Web of Life,” Christ” “Love”). Upon recognition of that higher power, loving others is how we respond to that Love and participate in Love’s work.
Riviera United Church of Christ, a church in this community for one hundred-and-twenty years, has long been doing something called “Spiritual Formation;” the process by which humanity– all of us gathering here as church– affirmatively respond to God’s call for individuals and community, to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s work. Love’s work.
Spiritual formation amounts to the acts and methods we use to answer God’s call to be loved by God, to love God, and to love others.
Since I have defined spirituality as a beckoning or call by God, I tend to see spiritual formation as the mirrored response to that call. This fits in neatly with the Biblical idea of covenant. Which is not surprising since covenants are an exchange of promises, and in turn an exchange of promises is how lawyers understand contracts.
And contracts used to be the bread and butter of my law firm. In the law a covenant is a type of agreement. It is a fundamental principle of American contract law that agreements only come into existence when an offer is mirrored in the acceptance.
Using this contract analogy, Spiritual formation can be seen as humanity’s attempt to accept and fulfill our covenant with God, the promises we give to God which are a mirror, or to use another Biblical term, an image, of God’s love.
In other words, we are loved and are called to love and we accept this call – this offer– by trying to mirror it through our loving God and others.
My contract analogy only goes so far since breaches and enforcement are cosmic matters not courtroom matters. Nonetheless spiritual formation is about acting on our mutual promises with God. God’s “I will love you” is met with our “I will love you too” and because God is in others and each of us and all creation and God loves all of that, all there is, our “I will love you too” properly played out means we will try to love all that too, all there is. Which is what Jesus was teaching and calling us to do.
In today’s reading Jesus teaches those listening “that the kingdom of God is among you.” See, if we fulfill our promise to love all as God loves all, the realm of God breaks further in. It’s among us now fully potential, all we gotta do is love.
Marcus Borg, a popular theologian who did not practice law, has another simpler approach than my contract law analogy. He calls spiritual practices “paying attention to God and what God loves[,] ” 1
Dr. Karen Tye, a professor at Eden Theological Seminary considers spiritual formation a “process.” 2 She asserts that Spiritual formation is the process by which “our capacity as human beings to recognize and participate in God’s redemptive and creative activity in all of creation” is recognized and nurtured.
Whether spiritual formation is thought of as a process , practice or acceptance and fulfillment of covenant, spiritual formation boiled down amounts to how we respond to God’s love and call in reality. It is how we bring in the kingdom of God that is amongst us presently (just waiting to burst forth and full into the world!).
A key part of spirituality is to “Be aware of the wider identity of ourselves.”3 We have to be in touch with ourselves for sure, but also our oneness with everything else. I know that might sound like I had a little too much granola this morning, or that my inner-Californian is peaking through, but our identity includes not only our own individual gifts and limitations and person, but also the parts that include God, others and creation in our whole being.
When spiritual practices are done right we are “paying attention to God.”4 A part of this paying attention includes loving God and taking part in God’s passion, and “God’s passion is not the redemption and salvation . . . of individuals from the world, but the redemption and salvation of the world.”5
As Christians, then, we must intentionally and consciously include in our own identity the identity of others, and creation, and God. The more we get that we are one with the all, the more all matters to us, as it does to God, as it does to Jesus; and the more we fulfill our promise of fully bringing forth the kingdom of God.
While we may think that spiritual matters and spiritual formation are all about personal solitude and private soul searching actually it “is never a private activity”6 it always, always involves our identity with others, church, community, creation, and God.
I ran into Dr. Deb Krause, the Dean of Eden Seminary on my way to take my ordination exams, she happened to be in the airport and bought me a cup of coffee and explained all of this in five words “Just remember,” she said, “It is all about relationship.” She is not Dean for nothing! How we relate to God and creation, including others and self is precisely what it is all about. Spiritual formation necessarily includes the entire web of life and the process of God’s creating and creation.
All we do as church should be spiritual formation. That is, our church activities should always be intended as responses to God’s call to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation.
Theologians Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra agree with this idea when they write: “Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time in response to and in light of God’s active presence for the life of the world.”7
All we do as church, as the Body of Christ, ought to be spiritual formation. Spiritual formation should be taking place whenever and wherever Christian community is. It is the process of attending to our affirmative response to God’s call for us as individuals and community to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation. 8
Such a process includes “instructing and informing” through imparting knowledge and experience; “socialization” through a community of faith; “developing [and] nurturing” the faith community and its individual members; and “transforming” those communities and individuals toward the world God calls us to, the world where God’s kingdom doesn’t just exist as potential, but reigns as an everyday reality for everyone. 9
As a church we need to be intentional about our involvement as a place that helps guide folks on the journey through the process of spiritual formation. As Dr. Tye puts it “Educating for spiritual formation is the creation of landscapes, of space, where we are open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world” 10. She goes on to note that it is this creating of such a landscape that “we are called into”11.
In the months to follow we expect – to paraphrase Dr. Tye– to begin creating some new landscapes, of space, where we can be open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
One of these new landscapes is our family theatre production of Alice in Wonderland with auditions in May and rehearsals in June and a show in July we will connecting youth to community through the performing arts. This ministry shows youth they are loved and shows others that they ought to be loved.
Another landscape on the horizon is Shelle’s efforts to find children interested in singing choral music on a Sunday in June with hopefully the ever popular youth band playing as well. We are trying to provide a landscape that provides opportunities for us to shower love on children and youth and connect them to the community and God.
And it’s not just for the children that we are aiming for the creation of landscapes, of space, where we are open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world. We are hoping to hold a spiritual retreat here at the church one weekend in September. Not enough folks expressed interest in going away for a weekend, so we are going to try it out here. We envision a Friday night with a communal meal and other spiritual practices, then all going home and returning in the morning for a full day of contemplative and meditative prayer and practices, and meals together grounding us in hearing God’s call and responding to it.
In December we hope to have an Adult Sunday School course that also considers and focuses on such practices.
We are also having gatherings as one congregation each Sunday in June and July at one service to celebrate our one God together in worship, fellowship and spiritual formation.
Plus I will be preaching in the months ahead on matters on practices and ideas that might help us to be more open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
Since I have already confessed that all we do as church, as the Body of Christ, ought to be spiritual formation, you know spiritual formation is already at the heart of what we do and have been doing. We’ve long been at the process of listening to God’s call and attending to our affirmative response to it. As individuals and community we already experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation.
What we hope to do in the months ahead is add more variety, options and means to accomplish the creation of new landscapes, of space, where we can be open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
As always all are invited, all are welcome to these new opportunities for spiritual formation.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
1 Borg, 187.
2 Tye, Karen, Educating for Spiritual Formation, January 30, 2006 handout.
3 Tye, Karen, Educating for Spiritual Formation Course Lecture, January 30, 2006.
4 Borg, 188.
5 Ibid., 200 (the italics are Prof. Borg’s).
6 Tye, Karen, Lecture, January 30, 2006.
7 Bass, Dorothy, Practicing Our Faith, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (1997),5.
8 This definition borrows again from Karen Tye who defines education for spiritual formation as including a “process of attending with people to the activity of God in our lives and to our capacity . . . to recognize and participate in God’s . . . activity in all of creation.” Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, February 20, 2006 handout. I have added Dr. Tye’s “process of attending” to my own definition of spiritual formation (which as I note above I also came up with by borrowing heavily from Dr. Tye’s definition of spiritual formation ).
9 Tye, Karen, February 20, 2006 handout.
10 Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, March 6, 2006 handout.
11 Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, March 6, 2006 lecture.
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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An Irenic Spirit
By Administrator | April 26, 2009
An Irenic Spirit
a sermon based on John 17:18-23
given at Palm Bay, FL April 26, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
In seminary all of us UCCers had to take a course called “Polity” where we learned details about the United Church of Christ’s structure, history, formation and governance.
Most of us put off polity until the last year, and by the time we took it we had graduation and internships and job interviews and other classes on our minds. So I was actually pleasantly surprised at how interesting polity turned out to be.
Amongst the projects we did in Polity were a couple of papers on topics the professor assigned to us. She made the assignments very scientifically by carefully placing the topic in a hat and having us pull them out one at a time.
One of the topics I drew was to explain how something called an “irenic spirit” played a role in our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
I had never heard of an irenic spirit before the assignment and I assume no one else had either. So on the day I was to make an oral presentation of the paper I brought a huge glass bottle filled with a light brown liquid and placed in on the table. The bottle had a label with huge letters that read “Irenic Spirits” and XXX to suggest it was a moonshine, and then some nonsense about being made on a still of one the seminary’s presidents. I explained to the class that I found the bottle as I researched in the archives, and I read the label to the class and then gave the paper.
I share this with you, so you know that you are not the only church body that has had to put up with my, um, sense of humor.
I also mention it because on this final sermon relating to the capital campaign, I want to distill something. Now don’t get excited it’s not moonshine (the bottle I brought to class only had iced tea in it). I am not a moonshiner, I want to distill how an irenic spirit has influenced the United Church of Christ and how an irenic spirit plays a very big part in this church and our visions for the future.
You have probably figured out by now that an irenic spirit has nothing whatsoever to do with alcohol.
And you are right (I was just trying to wake up the class). The word “irenic” means: “tending to promote peace or reconciliation: peaceful or conciliatory” (Random). An irenic spirit, then, has to do with the character and tendency to promote peace and reconciliation.
In 1957 the United Church of Christ was formed by the union of the Congregational, Christian, Reformed and Evangelical denominations. Prior to this formation each of these denominations on their own had long had characteristics and tendencies of promoting peace and reconciliation in their respective histories, a characteristic and tendency which continues to this day.
The Congregational denomination, which this church started out in a hundred-and-twenty years ago, traces its roots to the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay who very early on made peace and reconciled with one another to form a united church and colony in Massachusetts.
Our founders sought to “knit together” a peaceful community where “the welfare of individual and society [were to] be vitally linked” (Johnson, 7).
Cotton Mather, a minister in early colonial Massachusetts, preached “unity in diversity” a form of irenic spirit that caught on in an even more expansive form in the centuries to follow.
In the mid-1800s a theologian named Horace Bushnell influenced Congregationalism to include liberal notions of unification through a unity of spirit and broad views of faith. This encouragement of diversity became a unifying principle that served to reconcile divergent views and maintain peace which developed into a polity of commitment to diversity as a means of discovering religious truth. (Sound like Riviera today?)
In 1865 the Burial Hill Declaration embodied this irenic spirit declaring the church was “ bound to keep ‘the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace’” (Ibid., 14).
This spirit carried over into twentieth century with more and more acceptance of diversity.
The 1934 Council for Social Action led to an agreement to “to work toward ‘a warless, just and brotherly world” (Ibid.) and eventually the Congregationalists joined with the Christian church and later the Evangelical and Reformed traditions to form the UCC through this irenic spirit.
It wasn’t just Congregationalists. An irenic spirit flowed in the early Christian denomination as well; even before coming together as a denomination they trace their origins to a peaceful unification of pioneer splinter groups from the Methodist, Baptists and Presbyterians, breakaway groups that kept close connections and on an off made efforts to unite from 1819 until the early 1920s. Their common glue before uniting “was love of freedom, passion and unity” (Johnson, 32).
It was their enthusiasm for Christian unity – an irenic spirit– that caused them to hold together a commonality and eventually unite as one in 1922 as the Christian Church, a body which accepted all followers of Christ regardless of race, background or intellectual belief (sound like Riviera UCC today?). It was a natural fit for them to join as one with the Congregationalists and then into the United Church of Christ.
The Reformed denomination has its roots in the Heidelberg Catechism whose genius has been said to “lay in [its] irenic spirit . . .”which cultivated love beyond the disputes of the churches (Gunnemann,126).
Beginning in the 1720s The Reformed tradition was infused with an irenic spirit urging a quest for unity and peace in America among German churches. Lutheran and Reformed churches throughout the 1800s tended to share church space in “union churches” (Maxfield, 185). (Sound like Riviera UCC today?)
In 1933 the Reformed church united with the Germanic rooted Evangelical church in an irenic spirit and zeal for cooperative Christianity, and eventually, of course, united with the Congregational and Christian traditions in the UCC.
The Evangelical church was also not only rooted in Germany but the irenic spirit and piety stemming from the Heidelberg Catechism. Indeed the Evangelical Church was born out of Frederick Wilhelm’s 1820 union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia.
A flavor of this sense of peace and unity appears in the Evangelical Eden Theological Seminary’s motto where I went to seminary. The motto is “In essentials unity, in non-essentials freedom, in all things charity”(Gunnemann, 25).
The idea of bringing peace and unity into the world can also be seen in the Evangelical tradition of living out a life immersed in the world and ministries like its Deaconess Hospitals. Again the desire for unity led to the union in 1934 with the Reformed church.
As you can hear the idea of Christians being a part of one church, one peaceful unity of humankind is deeply embedded in the history of the four traditions of the U.C.C., and this plays out in 1957 with the formation of our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
In 1942 as the they were working toward unity the magazine Christian Century noted how heartening it was that the Congregational Christian Church and Evangelical and Reformed Church had “a taste of union and want more” (Heritage, 541). And when the four traditions came together in 1957 they made sure to include “United” in the new name: the United Church of Christ.
The irenic spirit of unification and peace did more than influence the naming of the denomination, that spirit lives on today in much of what the United Church of Christ stands for.
The UCC logo is up on the screen is a symbol that reflects this irenic spirit. “The symbol of the United Church of Christ comprises a crown, cross and orb enclosed within a double oval bearing the name of the denomination and the prayer of Jesus, “That they may all be one” (John 17:21). (quote is from UCC.org)
(Just so you know, since we have the symbol up there. The cross in the oval is “based on an ancient Christian symbol called the “Cross of Victory” or the “Cross Triumphant.” The crown symbolizes the sovereignty of Christ. The cross recalls the suffering of Christ . . . for the salvation of humanity. The orb, divided into three parts, reminds us of Jesus’ command to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8; quote is form UCC.org.). )
And as the UCC website notes “The verse from Scripture [on the logo] reflects our historic commitment to the restoration of unity among the separated churches of Jesus Christ.”
Hear how that is an irenic spirit?
Examples of the continuing irenic spirit in our denomination include a commitment to developing peace and justice churches, a broad notion of ecumenism, and a drive to unite others in ecumenical conversations, covenants and journeys. This spirit can especially be seen UCC’s continuing conversations with other denominations to “forge ‘new relationships in all things . . .” (Heritage, 549).
Our history is, then, steeped in irenic spirit. I felt it is right that the last sermon relating to a capital campaign called Reflections and Visions ought to include a nod to this irenic spirit.
Last week we reflected on what our church has done and is doing and how we have reflected the image of God by being the hands and feet of love and compassion in our community; how thinking openly, believing passionately and serving boldly is what we do because it is what Jesus did and calls us too.
That was the reflections, so what are the visions? Certainly “Thinking openly, believing passionately and serving boldly” is our vision statement, but it in turn leads us right back to a vision of a future filled with an irenic spirit. Not unlike our denomination’s traditions going back to the 1620s.
Irenic, remember, means: tending to promote peace and reconciliation: it means peaceful and conciliatory. And we envision acting with an irenic spirit for another 120 years. By that, I mean the character we aim for is the same as God’s a tendency to promote peace or reconciliation. We are trying to do that now and will be trying to do that tomorrow. Bringing God’s reign to earth now, even if just in our corner of the world is where we bring it in.
For example we are offering education programs, tending to those in need and trying to better ourselves and being mindful and worshipful and thankful to God. We are even trying to bring more of an interfaith character to these hallowed grounds.
We share church with two other communities, a synagogue and a church, and we are seriously looking into turning our campus into a place where we can share open space and the woods, together in ecumenical community; not even necessarily as the same religion, but still united as one people under one God by whatever name we call God. It’s a beautiful thing that we are even looking into this – and looking into this with gusto, with an irenic spirit.
God has given us so much, it is right that we want to use it for God’s good to share it with other peoples of God to bring others together as one.
If you think about it, God has given us an abundant overflowing universe.
Everything we are and have and will become are gifts from God. As humans for sure, but also as church. Land, building, chairs, decorations, hymns, music, worship leaders, friends, members, neighbors, visitors, everything in this space and around this place are gifts, they are a part of God’s living presence and power amongst us.
I mention all of this because our capital campaign has been in great part about being aware of the overflowing abundance God showers on us.
We have so much to be grateful for at Riviera UCC. God’s love fills this place. A part of God’s spirit that fills us includes this irenic spirit I have been talking about, it calls us to push for peace and unity – and we do that here. We answer that call.
God has given us so much, not only a good bit of land and a fine building but a people full God’s grace and love.
As stewards of God’s church we are caretakers of all the bounty God provides.
Giving to the capital campaign is a part of all of this. We give because God gives.
We give because what God gives is so great.
But we also give to provide the means for God’s work to be done in the world.
Somehow the more we give increases not only what comes out of the church to others, but also what we get out of the church.
Our vision for the future is to continue to be Christ’s presence in the world.
Among the things our vision offers is a continuation of the irenic spirit, that age old tendency of UCC churches –and Christ– to promote peace and reconciliation.
We have been in the past, are now, and hope to continue to be, a church that aims to be peaceful– one that helps bring about Jesus’ prayer in our reading (and on the UCC logo) “that they may all be one.”
In short, we envision acting with an irenic spirit for another 120 years.
Can I get an AMEN?
SOURCES CONSULTED:
-Gunnemann, Louis, The Shaping of the United Church of Christ, Cleveland: United Church Press (1999).
-Noll, Mark, The Old Religion in a New World, Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company (2002).
-Maxfield, Charles, A Pilgrim People, Ithaca: Maxfield Books (2005).
- Laaser, Robert, Our Beloved Eden, St Louis: Eden Seminary (1993).
-Zuck, Lowell, A History of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, New York: Pilgrim Press (1990).
-The Living Theological Heritage of the UCC, Vol VII, Cleveland: United Church Press (1995).
-Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2nd Edition), New York: Random House (2001)(“irenic”).
-Theology and Identity, ed.s Daniel Johnson & Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Cleveland: United Church Press (1990).
-The Trinity Covenant RCUS web site at http://trinityrcus.com.
- United Church of Christ Capital Campaign Manual
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Reflecting on Reflections
By Administrator | April 19, 2009
Reflecting on Reflections
a sermon based on John 20:19-31
given at Palm Bay, FL April 19, 2009, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Most Christians of the world celebrated Easter last Sunday, as we did here at Riviera United Church of Christ.
Actually I thought that our Easter services were very nice, with lots of visitors and friendly faces and the joy of the day here was uplifting!
While last week we observed our annual Easter services and celebration, did you know that we actually celebrate Easter every week?
Sabbath means “to cease,” and originally was celebrated as the last day of the week, the day God rested and ceased work. The Sabbath is the day we are commanded in the Bible to ourselves cease and rest and keep holy.
Some Christian traditions still celebrate the Sabbath on the last day of the week –usually from dusk on Friday to dusk on Saturday, but most churches have their day of rest and holiness on Sunday the first day of the week. Why? Because that is the day of the week the first Easter occurred and so the Sabbath was moved to Sunday as a weekly commemoration of Easter.
Every week, then, in a sense we honor Jesus’s resurrection by celebrating the day of the week he arose. In other words, in a very real sense every Sunday is an Easter Sunday at most churches.
Of course the truth is a lot of people do not go to church any more, so a lot of folks are missing out on those weekly Easter celebrations.
One of the reasons folks are shying away from churches seems to be that much of what is touted about Christianity by religious leaders – in the media, at least– seems irrational or unreasonable, or worse unloving and in contradiction to Jesus’ teachings.
Like it or not those versions of Christianity that push notions like prejudice and exclusion are what a number of people end up thinking the church is about, and that is a lot of what they are trying to avoid by not coming to church on Sundays. Who can blame them?
Through no real fault of their own, people often think of Christians as for oppression, and that we can be hateful and mean. Christianity in the media is more and more portrayed by religious leaders in a way that is seen as distasteful, disquieting, disingenuous and even despicable. So more and more people have left the church or have never even stepped into one.
In case you don’t think we live in a time where church and the Gospels are having less and less influence listen to this story from Leadership magazine which reported:
A Denver woman told her pastor of a recent experience that she felt was indicative of the times in which we live. She was in a jewelry store looking for a necklace and said to the clerk. “I’d like a gold cross.” The man behind the counter looked over the stock in the display case and said “Do you want a plain one or one with a little man on it?” (from Hodgin, Michael, 1002 Humorous Illustrations, (2004), 112 ).
It’s not the man behind the counter’s fault if he did not know the man on the cross was Jesus. Nor is it any other non-churched person’s fault they’ve steered clear of church, and missed out on the stories in the Gospels about Jesus, the little man on the cross.
By and large powerful segments of Christianity have failed to bring the good news to the world so that Jesus’ name and his loving Way often go unknown or are intentionally avoided these days.
Powerful religious leaders words – and deeds– have scared or kept people away with bad news. Bad news for those who do not think like them.
Bad news that their God is violent to those who reject their version of Christianity.
Bad news that their God rejects people they reject.
Bad news that those who do not accept their way face hell by way of the judgment by their angry God.
How can any of that bad news, be the good news of the Gospels of Jesus Christ? Well, it can’t. I know, I was one of those who ran from the church based on the bad news touted by religious leaders.
It took me twenty years to find my way back and only then because I happened upon a denomination who’s words and deeds were not about bad news at all, but about good news, the Good News of the gospels that God is love, that God’s reign of Love can be brought to earth as it is heaven. That Jesus, Jesus (the little man on the cross) taught us a Way to do this.
I walked into a United Church of Christ one day in 1996 and my life was marvelously transformed; not by bad news, but by good news. The good news that God calls us to Love, not through coercion, but through persuasion; not through threats; but through steadfast love; not through acts done for personal salvation from an angry God and hell, but through acts done for salvation from a lesser world, through to God of steadfast love.
Our capital campaign is called “Reflections and Visions.” Reflecting on what Riviera United Church of Christ is, and has been, and promises to be, evidences that this church is a transforming place.
Like the UCC church I walked into one day in Oregon you all – this church– does not peddle bad news of condemnation. Riviera United Church of Christ is all about the good news; that God calls us to Love, not through coercion, but through persuasion; not through threats, but through steadfast love; not through acts done for personal salvation from hell, but through acts done for salvation for all from a lesser world and our lesser selves.
At Riviera United Church of Christ we strive to follow Jesus’ way to a better world and a better self.
One way to reflect on how we do this as church is by considering again our vision statement which reads: “Thinking Openly. Believing Passionately. Serving Boldly.”
We are called to think openly. Here you can challenge and question doctrine and tradition, the Bible, and, yes, even the pastor.
The United Church of Christ’s nation-wide motto is “God is Still Speaking.” And we want to be open at Riviera UCC to hearing what God is saying today. Who is God speaking through? Me? The lady down the block? You? The person sitting next to you?
In order to see a comma instead of a period – a full stop to the Word of God – we need open minds that think and question, ponder and take risks. So we do not check our brains at the door here, suspend rationality or our questions. We bring the world of thought in with us and it is welcome.
Open minds – thinking openly– allow us to hear what comes after the comma, to hear that God is still speaking – and listening to God now leads us to where God is calling.
Hearing God’s call – by thinking openly– has led us to be a church that helps feed the poor; a church that provides for those in need; a church that offers mental health counseling; a church that connects youth and community with the performing arts; a church with a Stephen Ministry; a church that helps at Daily Bread, Heifer International, Habitat for Humanity and Back Bay Mission; a church that makes sure communion is open to everyone, just as our doors are open to everyone.
Thinking openly allows us to reject religious notions that are oppressive or non-loving in favor of those that are justice and love oriented. Thinking openly lets us hear God’s call and be receptive to respond to it.
Our vision statement states that we also believe passionately. Believing passionately gives us the desire to act on God’s call. Our belief is in a Way and God of love. The Way of Jesus. The God of Jesus. Our passion is the same as Jesus:’ love of God and love of neighbor. We believe passionately in God, in Jesus, and in Love; and in doing something about it.
With such a passionate belief we cannot help but serve boldly. So many in this church give of time, money and other gifts and serve God boldly through Riviera United Church of Christ.
Hours are spent administering the non-profit corporate functions of the church as council members and officers and committee members. We have meetings here all the time and many of you work lots of hours carefully considering and deciding all manner of things to keep the church running, to keep us serving boldly.
And it is not just administration of the church that gets served by volunteers. People in the hospital and their families are tended to, as are those who are ill at home.
Monthly we staff a day at Daily Bread to help others eat. We help buy fair trade coffee to support those in need abroad. We are looking into trying to raise money for Heifer International to do the same thing. Here at home we are growing food in a huge beautiful garden to help feed our hungry neighbors. We send folks to work at Back Bay Mission to help rebuild homes damaged by Katrina.
We also provide to our neighbors a kind and competent mental health counselor who offers services on the premises.
We have Stephen Ministers at the ready to provide loving care too.
A compassion team is also ready to rush to the aid of those struck by illness or injury or stuck at home.
Youth leaders and cooks prepare food and lessons and games for teens.
Caring teachers prepare and teach Sunday school for children and adults
Vacation Bible School in the past has been planned and staffed by loving volunteers working hard for any and all children who attend, many of whom are from the neighborhood.
People show up every Wednesday to have fellowship, learn new things and share in open thinking at two different Bible studies.
Musicians donate many precious hours singing, playing instruments and preparing for choir and band and solo offerings during our services.
Sound booth folks set up and run the lights and sound for church and other gatherings.
Chairs and tables are moved for services and events with the precision of a marching band.
Repairs and modifications are provided to this building and our grounds.
The place is cleaned up, and the essentials for the services are brought in and arranged, and put in place.
Young ones are cared for in the nursery.
We share our space with Mateh Chaim, a Jewish Synagogue, and Renewed Hope Christian Fellowship, a new church.
We are in the midst of considering how to better use the Sacred Land we sit on to further house and develop an interfaith community right here on this Holy ground that God has provided to us – through no less than the offerings given in the capital campaign.
Week in and week out members of this community bring more than gifts of action to this place. There are many Spirit-filled folks here whose very presence provides peace and love. We bring much needed gifts in the form of offerings, spending hard earned resources not on ourselves, but gladly on God.
Serving boldly is how we touch others; it is how we act as God’s agents in the world. And it is not just in Palm Bay either that we serve and touch others and act for God, our offerings also go to help the Florida Conference and the National United Church Christ offices to do work in the nation and out in the world.
Our very important capital campaigns – like the one we are presently in– give us a place to do all these marvelous things. It’s not so much about paying our mortgage, as it is reflecting who we are, investing in this work and play and worship and love we do with God, and for God.
We boldly follow Jesus’s Way of Love by honoring and respecting other religions and creating a community that embraces all regardless of disability, color, gender, economic status, sexual orientation or past–wherever anyone is on life’s journey they are truly welcome and honored here just as they are.
Reflecting can mean to look at what specific activities we have done and are doing as church, but reflection can also be understood as looking at the image that is reflected in a mirror to us, and to the world.
In today’s reading Jesus remarks that those who believe without seeing Jesus in the flesh are blessed. We certainly believe (and passionately)! We are, then, certainly blessed.
And our blessings come in the form of our becoming Christ’s presence, Christ’s new enfleshment in the world today, through us.
You see we are made in the image of God. We are, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, called in the words of the Old Testament to be holy as God as holy.
The New Testament puts it a little differently, calling us to walk as Jesus walked. To do as he would do. To be Christ’s very image in the world today.
We are not a flawless church. But we are a great church. We may be looking in a mirror dimly, with a reflection that is not perfect, you can see in the reflection an image of Christ.
Jesus thought openly.
Jesus believed passionately.
Jesus served boldly.
Reflecting on our past and present we have done so too, and are doing so now.
AMEN!
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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God Is Good All The Time!
By Administrator | April 12, 2009
God is Good All the Time
a sermon based on Matthew 28: 1-10 & Mark 10:17
given at Palm Bay, FL on April 12, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
One Easter tradition in churches like ours is that the pastor says “Christ is risen!” and the congregation says “He is risen indeed!”
Okay let’s try that again, “Christ is risen!” (He is risen indeed!”).
Fantastic.
For those of you who have come to this church at all in the past year you probably have participated in another tradition that we do almost every Sunday in this church. I stand up here and proclaim at the beginning of our service, like I did today that “God is good!” and then you all reply, “All the time.” “All the time” “God is good.”
That was fantastic too!
I got to thinking about that weekly proclamation of ours. Like many things in Christian theology our proclamation that “God is good all the time” can have more than one meaning. It can be heard to mean that God is always good.
Listen for that meaning as we proclaim it: “God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.” I imagine most of us hear that meaning when we say it on Sundays. God is always good.
But we can also hear it to mean that all good is God– all good is God.
Listen for that meaning this time as we proclaim it again: “God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.” It’s little different. Good is God.
Understanding God as a good God most of us have down.
That all good is God is perhaps a less common take on the phrase. This is a little surprising since it is recorded that Jesus long ago told us that all good is God. It’s not an Easter story per se, but, in Mark 10:17 we are told that a man ran up and knelt before Jesus and asked him “Good Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ initial response was “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
God is good.
Good is God.
I mention this on Easter Sunday, not just because Easter is a day of great goodness –which it surely is– but also because in order to get to this day of goodness a lot of ugly stuff happened and goodness not only prevailed in the end but, all the time God was good and God was good all the time.
Even today in the stories of Jesus’ ministry, and especially in the Passion and Easter stories, God as goodness calls out to us from the pages of the Bible and the stories that form in our minds as we hear the Word read.
Jesus was by all biblical accounts a man of lowly birth and means. We forget that he was a nobody to the big wigs of his day. He was after all a criminal who was executed in a manner reserved for those Rome considered low-lifes.
Somehow this nobody to the powers-that-be in the Roman Empire is somebody that we still listen to today. Why? Because his message is all about love and God is love.
And it’s a good message, it’s good news, and God is good.
Jesus takes the Jewish concept of loving your neighbor and makes it so complete a love that he goes around and preaches the good news that even the neighbor who is your enemy is to be loved. This is good stuff, it’s God stuff.
Jesus does not just preach good stuff/God stuff he practices it. How? By bringing into his community every sort of neighbor you can imagine. Jesus embraces everyone with love, wholly. No one is left out. Jew and Gentile, Roman and Samaritan, male and female, poor and rich, religious and non-religious, criminal and pious, old and young, sick and healthy, disabled and non-disabled, friend and enemy. All get in. All are loved and treated with respect by Jesus. This is good stuff. This is God stuff.
Rome’s political and religious elite in Palestine got really, really worried about this good stuff, this God stuff. Equality and love for all clashed with the system of oppression they had established to make a very few wealthy on the backs of the very many.
Jesus’ Way challenged the status quo with ideals and conduct that threatened the structure which claimed wealthy patrons were the godfathers of their underlings. God as father, and all as equal, is a good Jesus preaches. But the powerful? Well, they did not hear it as good for them.
Even still we can hear in this clash between Jesus and the powerful that God is in the good that Jesus preaches and practices. We can feel God tugging us to that Way, calling us to the good.
We can also feel God pushing us away from the bad, things like Rome’s oppression and the powerful’s opposition to Jesus’ good God and good teachings.
The good stuff, the God stuff, is like a magnet for the soul. We know innately that in that story the pull is good and it is God. We want to move toward the positive pole of God.
While at the same time, we are repulsed from the negative pole of the awful things Rome did – which Jesus challenged– as well as the terrible things Rome and its stooges did to Jesus.
The Passion stories, of course, get really ugly. We wince and even cry at the pain and the darkness Jesus travels through. It’s nearly unbearable to consider.
Good calls out to us to keep us from teetering off into the abyss of the mess of Jesus’ mistreatment and death. We can barely stand to think on it. It’s awful. Jesus is brutalized. Crucifixion is horrible. It is difficult to imagine a worse way to die.
We feel repulsion from the horror of the story of Holy Week. That repulsion is due to goodness, to God who is good, calling us from the bad.
There are preachers and theologians who will tell you that Easter is the result of God personally requiring the human sacrifice of Jesus in order to redeem us from a sinful state, and that God intentionally sent his only Son, Jesus, to be sacrificed and brutally killed so he could rise again to save us.
In other words, some churches assert that God required and planned the horrors of Holy Week.
But, we are allowed to understand the story differently here at Riviera United Church of Christ. Our theology, like Jesus’, centers around the conviction that “God is Love,” that God is good, that God never desires harm or oppression, never plans, requires or compels violence or horrors of any kind.
We proclaim every week that God is good, that God is love.
Love and goodness are in direct conflict with the idea that God personally required human sacrifice to redeem us from a sinful state; that God intentionally sent his only Son Jesus to be sacrificed and brutally killed; and most especially that God sends to hell anyone who does not believe the Easter story a certain way.
As puny mortals with a thimble full of love compared to God’s oceans of love, we know that sacrificing humans is not a mark of Love, we could never send anyone to hell.
If we are images of God what sort of images does a human sacrificing God make us? What sort of God of Love could do that? Or send good people (or anyone) to hell. Where is the good-ness of God in any of that?
Jesus certainly sacrificed his life and God made the best of it, even resurrected him for us to find our Way to Love, but it’s okay to refuse to accept that God planned and demanded Jesus’ death from the start to fulfill a divine need, a hallowed blood thirst for human sacrifice.
We do not have to believe God intentionally sent Jesus to earth to be tortured and put to death as a sacrifice required by God. Such requirements fly in the face of our overriding convictions that God is love and that God is good– all the time.
One of the miracles of great good that we often overlook at Easter is that neither Jesus nor God responded with violence to the savagery inflicted on Jesus by Rome and its stooges. Rather the Divine responses were victories through non-violence.
If God and Jesus had the power to call in legions of angels to inflict harm and defeat Rome and its stooges with violence, they did not do so. What they did do was inflict love on them and everyone else– whether they wanted to be loved or not.
The power of Easter is pure love.
It’s not some kind of so-called tough love, that punishes or sacrifices humans to get results. It’s unadulterated, pure love. Jesus on the cross, with great pain, humility and complete rejection and criminalization by Rome was utterly loved by God, as were his disciples and his persecutors. And on that cross, Jesus– Jesus the man being brutalized– utterly loved us and God and his disciples . . . and his persecutors.
In death Jesus loved his neighbors, even his enemies, and we have none of us ever been the same since.
Easter is about the miraculous amazing end of the story resulting from Jesus’ execution, sacrifice, and death– and his love though it all. These things the world tends to think of as weaknesses are turned on their head and made everlasting strengths by God. Indeed, they led to Jesus’ resurrection; which in turn has led others (even now) to his Way of new life, of love for all.
Easter is about unqualified love. Regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality or enemy status God loves us. God loves us!
Easter proves this is true even in our darkest hours, even when are on a cross, even when we feel forsaken, even in death. And remarkably even when we are wrongdoers, God is good all the time and so loves us. That’s the good news, that’s the God news.
Christians do not have the only way to Empire of God, but we do have a Way. It is Christ who saves us from our lesser selves. At Easter we celebrate that Way of love and the transformation to our better self that we find upon that path. On Easter day we especially give thanks for that; and love God and Jesus back.
In all of this, of course is the fact that Jesus died, yet he lives. Christ is risen (He is risen indeed!)
Christ’s resurrection is clothed in mystery; and has been since that first Easter.
The resurrection, though mysterious, is nonetheless true on so many different levels.
Resurrection means “a rising again from the dead.”
It cannot be denied that Jesus was killed to stamp out his life and his cause. Yet both live on to this day. It is a miracle that a lowly man, a poor nobody to Rome was killed in the boonies of that empire yet still rose up in such a way that he lives on today.
Some argue that Jesus’ resurrection was a resuscitation, that is he was brought back to life resuming his previous existence. The idea of resurrection can, but, does not need to include the resuscitation. (Borg, Marcus from The Meaning of Jesus at p. 131).
Indeed resurrection in the context of the Gospel writers meant an entry into “a new kind of existence.” (Ibid.) From Easter onward Jesus has a new existence. He can no longer experience death. He is no longer confined by time or space. He lives on vibrating through time affecting lives and history even for non-Christians. That is a new kind of existence beyond ordinary humanness, it is a resurrection by any definition of the word.
The actual state of Jesus’ body is not what matters, it is the state of his being that is resurrected. This is nothing new, Paul reported experiencing the risen Christ, not as a physical body, but as a being.
What matters is that Jesus lives on after his death in a new kind of existence. In the Bible he is reported to have been experienced in unfamiliar and familiar forms. Mary sees him in a gardener. Two followers encounter him an unknown traveler on the road to Emmaus. He feeds his followers fish as a stranger on the beach.
But he also shows up in his familiar form coming through walls like a spirit, and is experienced as both touchable and untouchable to prove his rising. After his death Jesus stays and walks with and speaks with his followers. He did this that first Easter morn and he does this today. On Easter we remember and celebrate this.
We experience Christ today not only in the texts, and in varied and deeply personal encounters, but also here in the church. Churches have been known since the start to be the very Body of Christ in the post-Easter world.
And here is the thing. Good-ness, God-soaked experiences are the common thread in all of the Jesus stories, those in the Bible and, those we know from personal experiences, those that continue on in communities gathered in his name, just as we are this glorious Easter morning..
Jesus embodies love and goodness –Godness– in both the pre-Easter and the post-Easter stories of his life.
Any way you look at the meaning of his stories, of his resurrection, of Easter itself, is that Jesus provides an everlasting Way to connect us with God, who is love, who is good; all the time.
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!
AMEN.
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Wilderness as Holy Ground
By Administrator | March 29, 2009
Wilderness as Holy Ground
a sermon based on Mark 1:9-15
given at Palm Bay, FL March 29, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
For some reason a lot of people who know me find it kind of hard to believe that I was very introverted and shy as a child and in my youth.
My guess is that those who find this hard to believe just wonder how such a handsome guy with so much talent and amazing abilities in front of people could ever have been shy or introverted?
And that’s a fair question.
As is, why is Scott always so doggone humble?
It is true. I was very shy as a kid and I steered away from people growing up. I tended to hang out with our dog or play in our yard or when I was older ride my bike to creeks and ponds and lakes and parks and hike or sit and take in nature.
It’s where what I’d name to today the Spirit used to call me, and I liked to be with and in nature, very much so– and still do.
I am certain that I first became aware of God out in the wilds of the nearby orchards, parks and rolling grassy hills of Northern California.
Even today just set me in the wilderness and I feel almost instantly at peace and closer to God, it’s one of those thin places where the walls that get in the way of experiencing God are so narrow, so thin that God can be felt in our lives.
I have mentioned over the past few weeks that the ocean and this church building are places where I sense God better– where we can all sense God better. Well, the wilderness is also one of those thin places for me.
I suppose it’s beginning to sound like I can go anywhere and find those thin places. I wish that were so. And maybe one day it will be. Since God is everywhere soaking everything it’s possible to get yourself so oriented toward God – as Jesus did– that a person could find the local 7-11 as a thin place.
I am certain that 7-11 would have been such a place for Jesus, even the cross and death were thin places for him.
And did you hear how the wilderness is the first recorded thin place for Jesus in Mark?
He is baptized in the wilderness, the Spirit of God lands on him like a dove out there in the Jordan River and then what happens?
The Spirit drives him further into the wilderness and for forty days he is out there with wild beasts. Then in the wilderness with the beasts he encounters God in the form of angels.
When Jesus leaves the wilderness after forty days the Spirit sends him out to begin his ministry.
Lent is exactly forty days long in remembrance, and as a re-enactment, of Jesus’ forty days of preparation for his ministry in the wilderness. A ministry that in one sense ends on Easter, and in another begins. Even as the Jesus of history leaves earth, the Jesus of Easter stays with it.
We are, in these forty days of Lent, traditionally supposed to turn away from our lesser acts and beings and turn towards our better acts and being. It’s a time to prepare ourselves to follow the Way Jesus left us as a historic person and the Way the promise of Christ’ resurrection has taught us, the Way that the Jesus of Easter now and forever calls us to.
I love that Jesus goes into the wilderness (returns in a sense to Eden to be with creation and God) as he gathers himself for his initial ministry.
Jesus, at the start of what we know of his adult life is called, actually driven, into the wilderness, which turns out to be a Sacred, thin and holy place. The wilderness where God awaits Jesus is a springboard to Jesus’ ministry.
While I have yet to work out 7-11 as a thin place, I have found the wilderness to be soaked with the Sacred. And lucky for us from where we sit this morning, where I come to work all week long the wilderness is closer than the nearest 7-11.
This church’s quest for new property at the turn of this century ended perfectly with the amazing twenty-acres this building sits on.
The capital campaign that we have been hearing about is designed to help pay for the wealth of gifts from God, found not only in the building covered in last week’s sermon, but the gorgeous holy land God has given us.
As I mentioned last week, when I first visited here I found this building to be a very Sacred and holy place. Being a wilderness lover, an outdoor kinda guy, I found it interesting though on that first visit much of the twenty-acres the building sits on were overgrown and virtually inaccessible.
Something called palmetto (which I had never heard of before) made it impossible to walk around out there in the wilderness. Since coming here the palmetto and I have become good friends. I have come to know them almost as well as mosquitoes in Florida!
Before we even moved here I knew after my first visit (three years ago) that a part of my call was go to into the wilderness on this property, God’s given Riviera United Church of Christ and make its holiness more accessible.
In fact after I arrived I immediately began working out on the acres at lunch (and other time I could scrape up) making prayer trails and a drumming circle.
I had worked in the woods before, in Oregon. I was surprised, though that when I did such work in Florida that I sweated like I had never sweated before. It seemed like even my eyes and finger nails perspired out there.
And I also found out quite quickly that I was getting bit by things that have never bit me before, things I could not see–tiny insects with one of the best descriptive names ever: “no see ‘ems.” Which is exactly right, I never see ‘em, I just feel ‘em.
I even got a very weird rash out there in the woods, a serious rash all over my torso and arms that had me itching for weeks on end, baffling not just me but doctors.
To say the least, it has been an education working out there in the wilderness God has blessed us with.
I am not the only one who has worked out there on the trails. Jack and Paul, and my brother Darin and son Robin, the youth and a number of people needing to do community service have also worked in our woods.
Once the trails got started and clearings to gather were made other folks started wandering out there– or were dragged out there by me. We have held nature walks, drumming circles, meetings and vacation bible school in the woods, our wilderness. Many of you have walked and sat out there in the woods with me. It’s stunningly beautiful out there.
You do not have to walk far to enjoy the holy outdoors that God has provided us. The subject of our capital campaign, the holy land that we are helping to pay for, is now relatively easily accessible.
I encourage all of you who are able, as a part of this campaign, to go out and explore as much as you can of this invaluable resource, this gift from God of dirt and sand and flora and fauna, and its Sacred holiness.
Butting up to the building is land that has been carefully tended to with the caring and gifted hands of Marylou, Kenneth, Dick, Phyllis, Bonnie, Daryl, Walter and the youth. Interesting flowers and greenery surround the church and our parking lot and driveway. Their good health and good looks come not just from God’s good creation, but through the hard work of these wonderful members.
A little further away from the building on the outskirts of true wilderness we now have
reclaimed and cultivated our Matthew 25 Ministries garden. Matthew 25 has the verses where Christ notes how when you tend to the least of those you tend to Christ. In the Matthew 25 Ministries garden we are growing food for no less than Christ who is in those who are in need!
Without the land God gave us the garden part of this ministry would be impossible. It’s a glorious garden right outside the back doors. A holier place does not exist on these grounds. Jade, Lyn, Maya, Angela, Paul, Pat, Bob, Phyllis, Dick, Jack, Scott, Daryl, Bonnie, Nancy, David and others have worked hard to turn the sandy soil into a lush garden. The goodness of the hard work by humans and creation emanates from the earth and plants in that space. God walks that garden daily.
Just beyond the Matthew 25 Ministries garden down a packed and curvy marl trail our beautiful memorial garden is going up. A bricked in area with loved ones names has been carefully laid out and we have plans to put the ashes of loved ones out there as a final resting place. The names on the bricks, the beauty of the brick work and the gorgeous setting gives that corner of the wilderness a sense of the holy too.
Remarkable work has been done by the landscaper and the memorial garden team,
Priscilla, Ginny and Kay.
The drumming circle is just a little walk away too. Some benches nestled in the shade of a stunning oak and tall pines give a place of solitude and meditation where I assure you God can always be found. That place is just inside the wilderness and it too is on nothing short of holy ground. A set in a bench out there can lift a weary soul.
The prayer trails that we have are long and varied and one can spend hours walking outside in the wilderness or sitting in the shade in prayer or contemplation.
Since my permanent arrival just under three years ago I have seen a great variety of plants and animals on this wonderful property.
In addition to many, many, many palmettos I have seen wild grape and blueberry, long needle and short needle pines, oaks, deer moss, air ferns and lichens.
Of course I have also seen many wild beasts, including wasps, bees, fire ants, walking sticks, butterflies, dragonflies and spiders (one the size of a backhoe!). I have seen armadillos, brown snakes, indigo snakes, cooper’s hawks, blue birds, cardinals, woodpeckers, mocking birds, squirrels, adult gopher tortoises, baby tortoises, ducks, and sand hill cranes. I have also seen the footprints of wild raccoons, possums and pigs on our trails. And I‘ve passed by or sat under the homes of critters too, from nests to burrows to soft places in the vegetation.
At Lent many of us give up something to remind us of Jesus’ sacrifice, or as a discipline to help us focus on the journey to Easter. This year I decided not to so much give up something, as to do something. I decided to re-enact Jesus’ going into the wilderness, in a small but, for me, significant way. Everyday during Lent I have spent time with nature, with the beasts – and God– out in the wilderness.
Everyday that I have been here during Lent I have purposefully walked the trails and sat and experienced wild beasts and God’s presence in the angels of the trees and plants and nature out there on our holy sacred ground. It has been uplifting, refreshing and very Spirit-filled. I would not trade those Lenten moments in the woods for anything. It has been my best ever Lenten practice.
It’s an easy circle back from that thought to Chatter the squirrel and Anybody and Carol’s clever skits and our capital campaign.
For one, our capital campaign is aimed at making it possible for us to have such holy ground in our lives, blessing us with a place to rest this building and our souls. It is certainly good news for us to have such blessings.
And the Good News from today’s scripture goes hand-in-glove with that good news. Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness and with the wild beasts out there he experiences God. We can choose to learn from this lesson that creation, the wilderness, places like the outdoors on our property, can be thin places; places where God can be sensed and more easily experienced.
God’s ordinary creation, you see, is extraordinary! And there is a reason God has blessed us with this little corner of creation, it is to give us another thin place to better sense God.
My advice is that if you hear the Spirit calling you out to the outdoors, if you feel driven to go and sense the Sacred on the holy ground God has blessed Riviera United Church with, don’t put it off.
Go!
Chances are you will not be sorry.
Chances are you will be blessed with finding a thin place where you can feel closer to
God.
From the landscape, to the garden, to the drumming circle, to the memorial garden, to the prayer paths, to all of nature’s bustling with life out there God can be found.
These twenty acres are no less than holy ground gifted to you and me and this wonderful church community.
AMEN!
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Our Building is a Holy Place, a Thin Place
By Administrator | March 22, 2009
A sermon based on Matthew 18: 19-20
given at Palm Bay, FL March 22, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
A Sunday school teacher was teaching four and five year olds about Solomon’s temple and how when it was finished, the presence of the Lord filled the temple. Instantly the eyes of each child got wide and full of excitement.
The teacher soon discovered, however, that the source of their excitement was not joy that God had come to live in the Temple, but, rather delight at imagining a huge building filled with presents (gifts) from God! (Hodgin, Michael, 101 Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking, 373.)
Almost ever Sunday we come in here and participate in worship in the presence of God thankful for that presence and all the gifts (the presents) God gives to us.
I never get tired of it! This place is so full of love.
Did you know that three years ago this week I first walked into this place and preached from this pulpit as a candidate for assistant pastor?
I remember it well Nancy and I fell in love with you all; and here in this space I experienced a very special place of worship where it was clear God was in love with people and people were loving God back in worship.
If I had to name just one word to sum up the theology of worship here, I’d sum it up with a word I think may surprise you: courtship.
Really.
Think about it.
The lighting, music, setting, sights, sounds and sincere and meaningful words in Christian worship are meant to make for romance between the Sacred and the secular.
When you get right down to it the goal of worship is to cause the gathered (as the Song of Solomon puts it) to “drink and be drunk with love” . . . the Love that is God.
In 2003 after over 100 years in downtown Melbourne, and over two years in a warehouse on Palm Bay Road this church moved into these wonderful facilities. Facilities on a gorgeous twenty-acre parcel of holy land.
As I mentioned during announcements we had a wonderful gathering here last night to kick off our fourth capital campaign. Our dinner last night had many components of a successful courtship ritual: food, fun, good company and love . . lots of love.
Our capital campaign is not aimed at paying day-to-day operational expenses; it’s aimed at paying for this building and the magnificent property it sits on. It is here in this space that we do all kinds of work and play every day of the week, but, best of all it is here that we enter our community and individual courtship rituals with God every Sunday– courtship rituals, we call worship.
The building, walls, lights, setting and sounds are primarily the product of past capital campaigns. The church planned for five such campaigns and we are on the fourth. The goal is to raise money to pay for this house of worship, this place of courtship, where weekly we have a love-fest with God.
I know that courtship may seem an odd term. For many centuries Christian theories of worship have focused on what has been praised as the “inner and outer homage to God as a token of awe and surrender.”
These theories tend to imagine the worshiper as a servant who bows in praise to God as a separate dominating master or sovereign who requires or desires such homage.
In the context of cultures where kings were bowed to, considered representatives of God, the patriarch of the country and the center of life, this model may have made sense to get the “love” of a King. But, that model is counter-intuitive from the perspective of Americans with a long history of repulsion to monarchy, and staunch individualistic notions of equality and personal notions of love. Consequently images of God as Love and God as a demanding royalty are difficult to reconcile.
Furthermore, love on any healthy level in our culture simply does not demand humbling prostration and praise. So it is particularly hard for many of us to imagine a God of love demanding such homage. While a worshiper may certainly be moved to humble homage and praise, it is okay to think that “worship is not about God needing praise” or demanding it.
Worship is needed, but not to garner God’s love –we already have it – rather it’s purpose is to try and create a place and time that we can best sense that Love. Since Jesus has assured us that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” it would seem that all we have to do is gather together to sense the Love that is God.
But of course, it is not that easy. While Jesus certainly fulfills his promise to be present as Christians gather in his name, the gathered usually must still be wooed, and even coaxed, to be in the mood for God’s Love. Indeed, our standing date with God on Sundays may not end up always being the time and place we embrace, fall or even feel in Love with God.
Nonetheless God continues to court us everywhere and all the time, but, we can feel it especially as we gather in this wonderful house of worship we built to help as God “comes a courtin’ us”
If we think of worship as courtship, then the church worship team, the pastor, the music director, the office manager, the organist, the liturgist, the choir and the band can sort of be understood as a team of matchmakers who help bring people together with God for courtship.
The tools in our matchmakers’ repertoire include a number of sensory aids which couples in the secular culture rely upon for courtship. Seriously. We use flowers, candles, lighting, music, special space, and thoughtful words.
Worship leaders, of course, also rely on sacred tools, traditions and formulas for Christian worship which are not commonly found in secular courtship.
For instance, our pattern of worship typically follows a gathering with hymns and liturgy which often includes “[i]dentifiable, repeating, and remembered rituals and words . . . to reinforce and strengthen the worship experience.”
In addition, sacred words and messages relating to those rituals and words have long been shared among the gathered.
Furthermore, although the worship leaders have a role of matchmaker between God and the gathered, as one of the gathered they are also among the courted. But matchmaker is a fair image.
To put it simply, worship leaders are matchmakers between God and the whole of the gathered community, and they have at their disposal a set of combined tools, some known in the secular world to evoke love, others unique to the church community.
Regardless of the tools, all successful matchmaking involves more than making a connection for love. It also involves transformation. Somewhere between entering the room set up for romance and leaving the room change hopefully occurs. Two beings are closer than they were before.
In worship that somewhere is one or more of the special moments that hopefully open up as a result of happenings in church.
Unlike romantic human love, the transformation that occurs during the successful courtship of church worship involves not just individuals, but the community as well. It is common for people who pass through such moments with others to develop a special bond. . . a bond that transcends all social distinctions. Red, Yellow, Black and White we become precious in each other’s sight.
This special bond can be found amongst those who have shared similar experiences in church worship.
Such bonding is present in church communities that share common symbols, rituals, words and space.
Transforming worship not only bonds participants to one another, but to God – which is the main point.
Marcus Borg calls the locations of these connections where the reality of the visible world and the reality of the Sacred meet “thin places.” He writes:
“They are places where the boundary between the two levels becomes very soft, porous, permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us. “
Borg goes on to note that there are both secular “thin places” such as nature, music and art; and religious “thin places,” including worship. Borg says:
“Worship can become a thin place. Indeed, this is one of its primary purposes. Of course, worship is about praising God. But worship is not about God needing praise . . . Rather, worship has the power to draw us out of ourselves. Worship is directed to God, but it is in an important sense for us. . .Worship is about creating a sense of the sacred, a thin place. “
Liturgy has been modified over the years to reflect cultural changes so it could be better understood in the context of gathered’s culture. Just as the notion of God as a cosmic sovereign demanding bended knee and lofty praise makes for an image of a loving God that is difficult for present Americans to imagine and embrace, so too it is hard to create thin places in our cultural without use of things we are otherwise familiar and comfortable with.
You can see our efforts in this building with two services; one that reflects a more traditional worship and another than reflects a more contemporary style. One style may work better for some than others to facilitate human and Divine courtship.
A professor of mine at seminary (Rev. Tim Carson) noted that there are seven goals for worship, this courtship, that I am referring to this morning:
1) “create sacred space and liturgy where the Holy is experienced,” 2) “reclaim participation of the whole people of God,” 3) draw on “that which is old and new,” 4) “reclaim the use of powerful images,” 5) “take the context of the culture seriously and engage with it,” 6) “reclaim the place of communal rituals, “and 7) “connect the gathered pilgrims to the Great Mystery and to one another, sweeping them toward a future of hope.”
Each Sunday we try to meet these goals in a number of ways, including trying to retell the old, old stories through the “lens of [this] congregation” and by using multi-sensory aids, including words, symbols and our senses. And the only limitation to such aids is our creativity and the effectiveness of its use in creating a special space, that “thin place” where God and people meet.
God’s courtship requires current context and creative concepts to cultivate sensory connections.
The members of this church in 2003 completed the building of just such a place. Riviera United Church of Christ in Palm Bay, Florida, where you now sit.
This building is where we are wooed and where we worship and where we meet God through the thin places it and we and God provide.
All-in -all it is a wonderful building. Plenty of room, good acoustics, decent audio and video equipment, solid roofs and walls and very comfortable chairs with good views of what is going on. A half dozen years down the road it’s still a top of the line place to meet and worship and enter and into courtship with God.
Don’t get me wrong, God will court us anywhere, Jesus will be wherever two or more gather in his name, but here in this building we have a very nice house of worship. It’s well worth another capital campaign to support, and, of course, it has for six years served this congregation and God very, very well.
You know how you can tell? Our worship and our courtship have been successful. We are in love with God here!
In this holy and sacred place we can “drink and be drunk with love,” the Love that is God. The love that is in each and every one of you.
The presence of God, and the presents of God, fill this place.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
[1] Song 5:1
[2] 1 John 4:7
[3] Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 29
[4] Cf., Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew, (San Francisco: Harper, 1997), 68
[5] Marcus. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 2003), 157
[6] Isa 54:9-10; Eph 1:7; Titus 2:11; 2 Thess 2:16
[7] Matthew 18:20
[8] Timothy L. Carson, Transforming Worship (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003), 54
[9] Ibid. 5-12; R. Webber, Worship Old and New 41-49; Bradshaw, Jones, Wainwright and Yarnold, The Study of Liturgy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 210-212, 223-244
[10] Ibid., 60
[11] Ibid., 61
[12] Ibid., 42
[13] M. Borg, The Heart of Christianity, 155-156
[14] Ibid., 156-157
[15] T. Carson, Transforming Worship, 14-20; R. Webber, Worship Old and New, 95-107
[16] See, M. Borg, The God We Never Knew 62-71
[17] T. Carson, Transforming Worship,40-42
[18] Suzanne Rolen, Spectrum Worship Workshop, Eden Theological Seminary January 13, 2004.
[19] Ibid.
COPYRIGHT
Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Mission is Evangelism, Evangelism is Mission and Both Are Church.
By Administrator | March 15, 2009
a sermon based on Mark 16:14-20
given at Palm Bay, FL on March 15, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Today I’m going to be talking about “Mission” and “Evangelism” a couple of words we hear in reference to church and Christianity that can kind of make us uncomfortable; and so shy away from discussing.
Mission is often heard as how Christians recruit others in foreign lands, often by imposing our own foreign ways on them. Evangelism is often heard as how Christians impose our views on others we know or meet on the street. Being in another’s face about our religion. This is rather unfortunate. We do not have to view Christian mission and evangelism as something we inflict on others. We certainly want to share Christianity, but we don’t want to force it on anyone. We see God as love and our goals as love oriented and, well, the Love we know is not one of imposition and coercion.
Despite the often negative perception of “mission” and “evangelism,” they are actually words that can fairly be understood to have meanings we as God-is-love people can fully embrace. Mission is not actually supposed to be about imposing on others in strange lands. Mission is what God calls us to as church and as individual Christians, to bear good news. It is “more than and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God” 1 In today’s reading Jesus tells his disciples to “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”
Mission is about proclaiming love through our words and deeds– anywhere and everywhere. And we do this in partnership with God, 2 and in so doing we hope to affect “human transformation.” 3
In a nutshell mission’s “purpose is to change lives”4 for good and through God. In this partnership with God we are called to be the agents of God on earth. Scripture sums it up pretty well at Leviticus 19:2 which reads “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am Holy.” 5
Bishop Desmond Tutu has this great way of looking at it. He suggests this particular directive means [w]e are exhorted to work for a just order where all of God’s children will live full lives characterized by shalom. Concern for justice, righteousness, and equity is not fundamentally a political concern. It is a deeply religious concern. Not to work for justice, peace and harmony against injustice, oppression and exploitation is religious disobedience, even apostasy.6
St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century put it like this: Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.
You see mission includes “a delicate network of cooperation and interdependence” where we work for social change and act as God did with the Hebrews in Egypt, exodus-wise, by striving to deliver the oppressed and the poor from suffering. 7
And Christians are to act as Jesus did siding with the oppressed, advocating for love of all and acting with love for all.
And mission is more than working to deliver the oppressed and poor from suffering. Popular church theologian, Anthony Robinson, accurately notes that churches are seeing more and more that “everything the church does is, in some sense, mission.” 8
It stands to reason that if everything a church does is mission, then all of church is mission.
In other words, all we do as church should be “alerting people to the universal reign of God” 9 This, of course, is an ideal, as frankly some of what happens in church fails to alert folks to God’s reign, that is our human pettiness, prejudices and other foibles can and do fall short of any sort of good news, let alone the Reign of God.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the fundamental function of the church, it’s Body of Christ-ness, is missio dei, 10 that is, the mission of God. Church is supposed to always be doing God’s work.
Simply put, all we do as church is supposed to be Divine mission. “The Bible clearly commands world mission” for the church.11 As another theologian, David Bosch, beautifully puts it “[m]ission is the church sent into the world, to love, to preach, to teach, to heal, to liberate.” 12
Now historically mission work has been thought of as occurring in other countries.
In fact “[s]o closely identified were Western culture and the Christian faith that the tendency to think of the mission field as ‘over there’, ‘overseas’ – focused on non-Western and ‘foreign’ peoples and lands.” 13
While there has been a lot of church related aid provided on American soil, this aid for the most part was not considered mission work.
Consequently church-goers in America usually do not consider themselves missionaries, that term has instead traditionally been reserved for those who went abroad working with “others.” Mission has until recently been at best a line-item on churches’ budgets.14 This is changing.
As we begin to acknowledge that mission work includes tending to God’s Reign on the home front, our partnership with God must know no political boundaries, so that we work to deliver the oppressed and poor from suffering in our community and neighborhoods, as well as overseas.
Our work right here in Palm Bay is to proclaim God’s Reign with our words and deeds!
One of my favorite theologians, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, argues “ that God is calling us to a new and more intense form of mission activity in the world today – not to convert the world to our own religion, but to convert the world toward friendship.”15
Suchocki hears this call beginning at the local faith community’s level where “[b]ecoming friends means to share a meal together.” She suggests differing faiths in town invite one another to each other’s place of worship for meals and then during those meals become acquainted as neighbors ought to. 16 There is a fine example of this in the bible: Jesus’ open table. Jesus shared meals with everyone, absolutely everyone, at a time when tables were often closed. 17. Jesus’ meal mission brought together neighbors and enemies toa feast centered in Love.
Suchocki is on to something. Our churches could take a cue from Jesus and eat with other faiths and denominations together in peace. Maybe one of our first meals with our new kitchen ought to be with Mateh Chaim and Renewed Hope Church, the two faith communities that share our space with us. One is a Jewish synagogue, the other a new African American church. How great it would be for all of us to break bread together!
And a shared meal is only one of the many, many facets of church mission we can explore in order to “alert people to the universal reign of God.” Such an alert includes any Love-filled proclamation by word or deed of God’s Reign.
Jesus sets up the standard for us in the Gospels where he repeatedly instructs his followers that it is through the deed of loving your neighbor that God’s saving Reign breaks in.
Jesus clearly taught that those who take care of the poor and imprisoned will come into the Reign of God; and illustrated in the “Good Samaritan” that an exemplary neighbor takes care of those who are injured (even the enemy) – and Jesus tells us to “Go and do likewise.”
Mission, then, is not limited to verbal instruction about Jesus Christ. Nor is it limited to going out to “others” in foreign lands. Mission is much more than verbal proclamation far away. It is everything a church does, from tending to the oppressed and poor, to worship service, to community relations, to pastoral care.
Mission is a call by God to be God’s partner in creation, everywhere: abroad, within the walls of the church, in our own backyard and down the block. We are, all of us, meant to be doing mission in all we do as church.
And as I mentioned it is not just mission that we need to rethink, the meaning of evangelism can be heard differently too.
According to The Westminister” Dictionary of Theological Terms “evangelism” is “[t]he sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ through a variety of means.” 18 This definition is broad enough to cover all of mission, that is evangelism should also be mixed in with all our church does.
Anthony Robinson, sees evangelism as sharing the gospel through a variety of means. 19 It’s “sharing the good news of the gospel, the good news about God and what God has done and is doing in Christ.” 20 This good news, Robinson asserts, can be shared by people, by ministries, and by the congregation’s embodiment of that good news.21
Robinson seems to say in effect that all of a church’s activity (including all that I just described as mission) can “be [Jesus’] witnesses to the ends of the earth.”22 This not only comports with the definition in Westminister’s Dictionary, but it also finds support in Christian tradition:“The evangelistic activity of the early Christians . . . was not limited to preaching, for it informed and involved everything the church was called to be and do in its worship, fellowship and service.”23
Such a reading finds support with Walter Brueggemann’s claim that “evangelism . . . in large part consists of attending to and participating in the transformational drama that is enacted in the biblical text itself.” 24
For Brueggemann this drama is about evangelism as a process of victory by God over evil, proclamation of that victory by word or deed 25 and an appropriation of the story by the one(s) experiencing the proclamation. 26 In other words, the “come and see” and witness-to-the ends-of-the-earth commandment in the Gospels are not limited to vocal proclamations, but encompass all acts of mission– all the church does which proclaims the Reign of God.
Evangelism can be understood, then, like mission, to include all the church. We are to share the good news . . . or at least we ought to. Evangelism is, then, exactly like mission.
This way of understanding evangelism begins with Jesus whose life exemplifies what we as the church, as the continuing embodiment of the Body of Christ, should do.
Jesus did not just bring the gospel through preaching, he also brought it through personal acts of healing, compassion, gathering and praying. And it is no small matter that he emphasized that our conduct along each of these lines can also bring about the Reign of God (e.g., Luke 10:25-28, 29-37; Matt 25:31-46).
Paul’s letters point to a similar view of the proclamation of the gospel. In Romans Paul writes of being a “minister of Christ Jesus in the priestly service of the gospel” and he notes that his service, his “work for God,” in winning over Gentiles included Christ’s accomplishments not just through his preaching, but “by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God . . .”(Rom 15:16-19).
Similarly in Philippians, Paul notes that happenings, not just preaching, served to proclaim the good news: “I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually spread the gospel” (Phil 1: 12).
And, finally, in 1 Thessalonians Paul affirms that the gospel came to the Thessalonian church, “not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you” (1 Thess 1:5); and Paul specifically notes that the Thessalonian church’s acts its welcoming, and its turning to and serving God, and its imitating Paul and Jesus, all proclaimed the gospel to others. Accordingly Paul wrote: “the word of the Lord sounded forth from you” (Ibid., 6-10).
So when all is said and done the word mission can be understood as “alerting people to the universal reign of God; “and the word “evangelism” can be understood as “[t]he sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ through a variety of means.”
The difference between the two seems to be that mission shares news about the reign of God, while evangelism shares the good news about Jesus Christ.
But isn’t this really a difference without distinction since for us sharing the good news about Jesus Christ alerts us to the universal Reign of God and alerting people to the universal reign of God is about sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ? 27.
Mission and evangelism seem to be merely different ways of speaking about the same thing.
Call it mission, or call it evangelism, both mean our verbal or non-verbal acts of Love as a church and the message those acts convey to the world. This is true whether we’re tending to the broken-ness of the world, worshiping God or otherwise acting in community.
Such acts of Love always, always share the gospel and alert people to the Reign of God. And we as church are to do both in all we do.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
1.Bosch, David, Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1995), 33.
2. D. Tutu, “The Role of the People of God in Divine Enterprise,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research,1991, 33; see also, M. T. Thangaraj, The Common Task, Nashville: Abingdon Press, (1999), 65.
3. Robinson, Anthony, Transforming Congregational Culture, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, (2003), 33.
4. Ibid.
5. The quote is from Lev 19:2; but I got the idea from Bishop Tutu’s article.
6. Tutu, 33.
7. Ibid., 33-34.
8. Robinson, 74.
9. Bosch, Believing in the Future, 33.
10. Bosch David, Transforming Mission, New York: Orbis Books, (2005), 493.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Ibid., 412.
13. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Culture, 73
14. Ibid., 74.
15.
Marjorie Hewitt. Suchocki, Divinity & Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Nashville,Abingdon Press, (2003), 109.
16. Suchocki, 114.
17. A nice summary of Jesus’ meal ministries can be found in H. Anderson and E. Foley, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998), 154-156.
18. McKim, Donald, Westminister Dictionary of Theological Terms, Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press,(1996), 96.
19. Westminister” Dictionary of Theological Terms, 96.
20. Robinson, 120.
21. Ibid.
22. Acts 1:8.
23
The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Philadelphia: The Westminister Press (1983), 192..
24. Brueggemann, Walter, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism, Nashville: Abingdon Press (1993), 8.
25. See, Ibid,87-88, but see, 14.
26. Ibid., 129.
27. E.g., Patterson, Stephen, The God of Jesus, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1998), 93. “Jesus spoke of the Empire of God as here, now, arriving, already breaking in”
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Solomon and Jesus Clashlessly Considered Creation And Creator
By Administrator | March 8, 2009
Solomon and Jesus Clashlessly Considered Creation And Creator
a sermon based on Matthew 6:25-33
given at Palm Bay, FL on March 8, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
We humans tend to bandy about the word universe in a take-it-for-granted way, as if we look out our back yard and take it all in almost everyday.
The universe is, of course, well beyond our capabilities to see, let alone comprehend.
To get a picture of how vast the universe is picture earth as a marble. The sun in comparison would be the size of a beach ball nearly two football fields away. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system would be five blocks away and even on this earth-as-a-marble scale the nearest star would still be 22,000 miles away, and our galaxy would be 55 billion miles wide. And that is just our galaxy, the universe is filled with other galaxies!
Who could comprehend or even imagine the size of this shrunken model universe, yet alone the full size universe we actually occupy a tiny, tiny portion of? 2
The cosmos is beyond our ability to take in scientifically and theologically.
And, you know, forget about the universe, just understanding our own planet is not even within our grasp. One anonymous quote on creation I like puts it like this:
Science continues to do amazing things, but sitting under a tree, looking at cows in the meadow on a summers day one has to remember that the greatest scientists in the world have yet to figure out how to make grass into milk. 3
And please don’t’ hear me wrong, I like science and most scientists. In fact in January I wrote a column in the Hometown News about science and religion and how they don’t have to clash.
Of course, they do clash.
The clash in my experience usually seems to come when someone tries to fit the round peg of theology into the square hole of science.
Or someone tries to put the square peg of science into the round hole of theology.
A lecturing astronomer is said to have once declared “I have swept the universe with my telescope, and I find no God.” To which a musician retorted that “[that] is as unreasonable as it is for me to say that I have taken my violin apart, have carefully examined [it] with a microscope, and have found no music.” 1 Science on its own can no more prove general theological principles than it can make music.
On the other hand, religion has it’s limits too. As much as some in the church would like it to be otherwise, the Bible was not intended to be used as a science book. Rational, reasoned, detailed scientific theories are not outlined in the pages of the Bible. Religion can no more prove general scientific principles than it can on it’s own make penicillin.
There have been media reports over the years about church leaders opposing science and you get the impression from them that, in order to be a Christian you have to believe science conflicts with Christianity, but that’s not true.
First of all, (as I ‘ve noted before) science, like religion, pursues truth. The pursuit of truth is never bad. Science seeks truth through reason and experience to understand how creation works.
Religion, on the other hand seeks truth through reason and experience to understand our relationship with creation and that which created it.
Clashes occur when science insists its reasoning applies to creational relationships.
Clashes occur when religion insists its reasoning applies to understanding the details of how creation works.
Square pegs into round holes and round pegs into square holes conflict, they don’t fit.
But science and religion don’t have to be in conflict. As I’ve also noted before admitting the common ground of the limitations and ends of each helps. Science and religion are both limited by human understanding, and neither can explain it all. And it cannot be reasonably denied that while each begins with an aim toward truth, each also ultimately ends in mystery and awe.
Even the stories of science and Christianity need not conflict.
For example, one science story reasons that the universe began as a big bang of light and cosmic dust. This need not conflict with the Bible stories reasoning that the universe began with God’s light and the creation of life from dust.
Much good has also come from both science and Christianity. Scientists, when thinking openly, have brought many to a way of great wisdom, inventions and medicines. Jesus and his followers, when thinking openly, have brought many to a Sacred way of a great wisdom, love and morals.
All told, God, Messiah, morals, medicine, discovery and methods of science need not be understood as mutually exclusive they can work together to wondrous affect. Indeed, one can even choose to hear Jesus suggest study and appreciation of creation in today’s reading.
“Look at the birds of the air . . . Consider the lilies of the field how they grow”
Nice words that trip off the tongue of Jesus.
Mostly they are heard as secondary to rest of the verses’ reference to human needs being a part of God’s desires. Sometimes I like to hear them differently. God, herself feeds the bird. God himself clothes the lilies– and Jesus, well, he looks at the birds; he considers the lilies– he gets that they are God’s creation and under God’s care and so he studies them. He urges us to study them.
“Look at the birds of the air . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”
And did you notice how Solomon was mentioned in the reading? Among the proof that Solomon was wise 1 Kings 4 (29-34) lists his knowledge of nature. Verse 33 reads:
[Solomon] would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish.
34
If science aims for truth and brings about good, and if Solomon and Jesus studied creation, and Jesus tells us to consider creation, then there is no need to believe science must conflict with Christianity.
Indeed we can choose to hear scripture promoting the study of creation by holding up Solomon’ wisdom as including such study and by Jesus advocating that we consider how things like birds and plants function and grow.
God is, of course, everywhere; but there are places people go to feel closer to God.
Lent is the season we are now in. It’s forty days long precisely because Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days before his ministry began to focus on God’s call there.
We are at Lent to consider– among other things– how best to do our ministries as Christians and to focus on God’s call for us..
Lots of folks go to church or other buildings like this to find God.
Some folks also have a favorite park bench, or tree to sit beneath. Others still like to hike or bike or fish or lay in the sun by babbling brook. Somehow in such places the thin veil of everyday life that seems to separate us from God parts just a little and we experience God more profoundly, more personally, more passionately, more porously there, in those Scared places.
By considering the birds and lilies, acquiring even a little science about creation can enhance the appearance of the Sacred in the world.
For me the Light of God particularly peaks through the curtain of life and touches me intensely when I sit with nature especially near the ocean.
Part of it is I know a little bit about the coast. I often know where to look, what to look for, and what I am looking at. But there is a religious side to it too, the music of nature, sings to me there.
The rhythmic waves, screeching gulls, shells clinking together as the waves roll in and out all make for a symphony of sound. Those sounds somehow blends in perfect harmony with poetic smells and feelings of the salt water, the heat of the sand, along with the visual spender of the emerald, sapphire sea; blue or gray skies, white foam, tan sand, birds aloft. God’s just especially in all that for me.
I suspect that it has something to do with my consideration of things at the seashore. Iam not a scientist, but it helps that I have some knowledge of science of how creation works at the ocean’s shore
This was more so on the Pacific coast, in Oregon and California, where I know much more about things.
Here I see amazing animals I still know little about. A few months after we got here I saw a sea turtle the size of a pool table wink at me while I was in the waves.
A tarpon bigger than me got so close it scared Nancy and me out of the water.
A huge ray leapt out of the waves and glided back below the surface.
Pelicans constantly amuse me with their diving antics.
And dolphins and manatees frolic in and just beyond the green and blue breakers.
As I have considered all of these Florida fauna I have felt God’s presence spike up a tad. And that is one reason I try to go to the beach at least once a week. I better sense God there, it’s a thin place where I feel God’s touch on my shoulder.
While any ocean locale can bring me to the crossroads where God and I meet most intimately, there was one place by the sea in Oregon that really enhanced the sense of the Divine for me. At lunch I would often walk and visit an outcrop of land that jutted into the mighty Pacific bestride a huge sand dune.
The outcrop is called Cape Kiwanda. The name belies its small size. I’d be surprised if the cape is bigger than the twenty acres God’s provided Riviera UCC.
Aside from the huge sand dune, Cape Kiwanda is mostly rock with hardy trees and grass bent by never ending gusts. Rain falls there more often than sunshine. And the biting wind blows most everyday misting glasses, chilling bones and stealing your cap if you don’t hunker down and hold it to your head.
Out on the cape there’s a cliff surrounded by water for 280 degrees where you can sit curled up for warmth and watch the seas beneath a set of trees. It is there that I often felt in God’s presence as the buoy bell rang with the rise and fall of the waves in the shadow of a haystack rock. God never came in a burning bush or a thunderous voice, but always in the guise of nature as I considered it.
Sometimes it was just the waves. Pacific means “peaceful,” but the Pacific ocean on the Oregon coast is mostly a dangerous raw power. Huge, huge logs are tossed about like toy blocks. Water crashes so noisily its roar can be heard miles inland. Up on the cape that raw power was a thing of wonder tossing debris about and otherwise crashing into the cliffs with mighty fountains of water spraying high, high into the sky.
Miraculously animals live beneath the turbulent eddies and swirl, even surfacing for air or to play. Sea lions and seals, birds, fish and whales were, if you cared to look, almost always visible. In fact I do not recall ever going out on the cape without spying some amazing critter to consider.
One time I will never forget was when a gray whale and her calf surfaced in the waters just below my perch on the cliff. The two of them were so close I could hear their breath escape in a mighty gush through their blow holes. The mother came in close to cliff side and to my surprise rubbed her side against the rocks removing hitchhiking barnacles off on the cliff with her calf close by her side.
The majestic grey whale is not an uncommon sight, and I am pretty sure that a back scratching to a whale is common too. But somehow considering the whale’s itch and breathing and little family below made me smile from ear to ear. It made me feel in the presence of God.
Again, I am not a scientist, but, I knew enough about the whales from science to know where to look for them, what they were and what they were up to. Science taught me that.
At the time I was not much of a theologian, but I knew enough about the mystery of creation and Creator to know I was in the presence of both. Science and religion did not conflict they worked together and I was the better for it. I was in good company. I knew I was in the presence of creation and the Creator–and for a few moments I felt one with them both.
Solomon and Jesus clashlessly considered creation and creator too. And the good news is not that I am wise like Solomon or Christ like Jesus, the good news is that not only do science and religion not have to clash but together they can bring about places where the thin veil of everyday life parts just a little and we can experience God more profoundly, more personally, more passionately and more porously in creation which in reality contains as many Scared places as we care to stop and consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and how they grow.
Amen.
Endnotes
1. Hodgin, Michael, 1001 More Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking, Zondervan Publishing-House
(1998) p 90.
2. Morgan, Robert, Preacher’s Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations, Thomas Nelson, (2007), 156
3. 1001 More Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking, at p 89.
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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The Warrior God’s Reign Bow Hangs Forever in Peace
By Administrator | March 1, 2009
a sermon based on Genesis 9:8-17
given at Palm Bay, FL March 1, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
I love the Internet. One of it’s benefits is it’s a researcher’s dream (and a punster’s treasure chest!). Here’s just one of the puns I found on the Web
about Noah’s Ark: Humans were unable to play cards on the Ark because
the animals were on all the decks,You can find most anything on the Web. I not only found great word play,
but I found an anonymous note called “Everything I Need to Know, I
Learned From Noah’s Ark.” Listen to these ten bits wisdom gleaned from
just the surface of the story.
1. Don’t miss the boat.
2. Remember that we are all in the same boat.
3. Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark.
4. Stay fit. When you’re 60 years old, someone may ask you to
do something really big.
5. Don’t listen to critics; just get on with the job that needs to be
done.
6. Build your future on high ground.
7. For safety’s sake, travel in pairs.
8. Speed isn’t always an advantage. The snails were on board
with the cheetahs.
9. Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by
professionals.
10. No matter the storm, when you are with God, there’s always
a rainbow waiting.
That’s a nice bit of folk wisdom.
For those of you who were here last week I am so sorry, but the puns are over
for this sermon.
I know it was a real treat to hear all the word play during last week’s
sermon, but, today I have decided to back off a little (And it has nothing to
do with the fact that I was warned some of you brought in bags of fruit and
vegetables to throw).
Today I am going to talk about the evolution of God. Why? Well the
evolution of God is very cleverly symbolized by the rainbow in today’s
story.
Evolution generally means the process of changing from one form into a
better form.
It also has a particular meaning with respect to the theory of evolution, the
idea that biological life changes through natural selection– that is the most
favorable traits for survival are passed down over generations leading to
alterations in the species, and in some cases even new species.
So, if this sermon is about the evolution of God, has God evolved?
I cannot speak to the actual nature of God which is more Mystery than not,
but I can speak to how human perception of God appears to have evolved–
and evolution seems as apt a word as any to symbolize what’s going on with
God in the Bible.
People experienced God with differing traits in the Bible stories, and if we
listen we can hear an evolution occurring in the Ancient Near East cultures’
experiences and understandings of God.
As this evolution occurs we can even discern a symbolic natural selection of
sorts occurring, in that the most favorable traits of God are passed down
through the generations – and God, in a better form, is understood.
In short, the Bible suggests new understandings of God evolved from the
old.
Keep in mind that this is not about God actually evolving, but humans
perceptions of God.
We rely heavily on Bible stories to help us understand God and it is the
Hebrew people who give us the first stories. The early Hebrews seem to
have first experienced God as one among many gods. He was given the
name Yahweh and championed their causes.
Like many cultures in the Ancient Near East the god of the Hebrews was
understood to be a warrior who went to battle for them, defeating others and
their champions. You can hear this in this excerpt from Exodus 15
. . .Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD: “I will
sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and
rider he has thrown into the sea. 2 . . . The LORD is a warrior;
the LORD is his name. 4 “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he
cast into the sea; his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea. 5
The floods covered them; they went down into the depths like a
stone. 6 . . . 8 At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up,
the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of
the sea. . . . 10 You blew with your wind, the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters. 11 “Who is like you, O
LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders? 12 You stretched out your
right hand, the earth swallowed them. 13 “In your steadfast love
you led the people whom you redeemed; you guided them by
your strength to your holy abode. 14
God goes to battle. He is the champion of the Hebrews on the battlefield. No
other god is like him. He punishes the enemies of the Hebrews with defeat
and, of course, he punishes them with plagues and plights before the Red
Sea drowns their army.
But did you hear how in the excerpt I just read the warrior and punishing
traits exists side-by-side with trait of steadfast love?
God has steadfast love for his people and it is that love that is proven by his
punishing might on the battlefield against the Egyptians. The traits of this
warrior, punishing God are woven like threads in the tapestry of many
stories that make up the Bible.
One of the consequences of understanding God as punishing is that he does
not just punish enemies, but punishes you too. In Psalm 7 (12-13) you can
hear God shooting arrows of the fiery shaft of lightening at those who do not
repent “If one does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and
strung his bow; he has prepared his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery
shafts.”
A prominent thread of theology in the Bible is that bad things happen to
people – and peoples– as punishment: God’s shooting lightening bolts to
punish wickedness.
If God’s response to wickedness is destruction and harm, then destruction
and harm is seen as a response to wickedness.
It is this punishing God that brings about the flood and destroys virtually all
the world, every animal, every man, woman and child not on Noah’s Ark.
The warrior God is angry at all the awfulness of the world and so drowns
creation.
The story of the rainbow is believed to have been written in light of the
Hebrew’s experience of exile in Babylon. Israel is destroyed. Under the old
theology that destruction was understood with a view that God drowned the
men, women, children and all creatures on land.
In light of awful destruction, probably symbolic of the Babylon experience,
what happens to God in our reading today? God makes a remarkable one-
sided promise, a vow to all of creation to never, ever, destroy the world
again. Nothing is needed in exchange for this forever promise. Nothing is
needed.
And this promise breaks off the connection of human guilt to punishment by
God; evil and destruction still exist but they do not occur by the hand of
God’s judgment.
World reknowned Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it
like this:
The one-to-one connection of guilt and punishment is broken.
God is postured differently. From the perspective of this
narrative there may be death and destruction. Evil has not been
eradicated from creation. But we are assured that these are not
rooted in the anger or rejection of God. The relation of our
creator to creation is no longer a scheme of retribution. Because
of a revolution in the heart of God, that relationship is now
based on unqualified grace. 1.
. . .Unqualified grace!
God the warrior who slays the wicked with the slings and arrows of calamity
and catastrophe has evolved, Yahweh has changed in the Lectionary text
from one form to a better form.
We can even claim there seems to have been a symbolic natural selection at
work, in that the most favorable traits for survival of God in the experience
of the Hebrews is passed down.
If the capture and enslavement of men, women and children by Babylon is
God’s doing how are the people to love such a God, and where is the
steadfast love of that God for the people of Israel?
That God of Love is virtually impossible to find if he is the one who caused
the enslavement and destruction of Israel. But in today’s story the God who
ruled over the Hebrews ends up being seen in a wholly a new way. God has
been re-imagined. 2.
Yahweh the warrior with a bow that shoots lightening bolts of tragedy from
his quiver of judgment is no more. That Yahweh has hung up his bow on
the wall of the sky.
When storms brew and spew destructive forces, when they bring dark clouds
and trouble the bow hanging on the wall reminds the God of old, that he is
no longer in the doing-bad-things-to-creation business.
God cannot knowingly violate a vow and the rainbow comforts humans with
the knowledge that it reminds God so he cannot forget that vow either.
More importantly it reminds us that God’s hung up his weapon of
destruction and will use it no more on creation. We no longer have to
imagine God as vengeful and punishing. We can forevermore imagine God
as loving and good.
This story can be heard to tell us that from the flood on God will not and
does not and has not destroyed anything in creation. Ever.
We can hear that God has evolved and the rainbow – that splendid bow of
God’s hanging on the wondrous wall of the sky– reminds us of that
evolution. God’s old traits of warrioring and violence and punishment are no
more. God’s made an unbreakable vow to all of creation, that no human
being, no living thing need worry again that awful things in life are God’s
doing.
Natural selection of the most favorable traits for God to survive in light of
the Babylonian exile (or in our day something like the holocaust) can be
seen as selecting steadfast love as the most favorable trait that is passed
down from generation to generation of understanding God. God had to
evolve for us to understand Love in light of horrors. God cannot both be the
source of terror and the source of steadfast Love.
So we have before us today the God of steadfast love who does not terrorize
with the chaos of deep waters and punish bolts of lightening.
The God of steadfast love sides with the oppressed, seeks justice and calls
us to righteousness in hope of shalom for all creation. This is the God of
Jesus, the God who’s old reign’s bow hangs on the wall as an everlasting
symbol that divine retribution and destruction does not exist.
Did God literally evolve? We can choose to see it that way.
Or we can choose to see that human understanding of God has evolved.
Either way we end up with the same understanding, or ought to anyway. The
God of vengeance, of fire and brimstone, of floods and famine and
destruction and war is no more. The rainbow is proof of this. Yahweh is now
and forever the God of steadfast love who calls us to justice, to
righteousness, to love, and to shalom from wherever we are.
Even when we choose to create storms in our lives or the lives of others
God is not going to respond in violence. Rather God will always, always
respond with Love. That is what steadfast love is all about.
The good news in today’s reading is that we can rest assured that God does
not create storms or trouble in our lives, because God loves us steadfastly.
That’s God’s unbreakable and beautiful promise reflected in every rainbow
that you will ever see.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
1. Brueggemann, Walter, Interpretation, a Bible Commentary, Atlanta, John Knox Press (1982),84.
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