The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 12, 2011

And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
   your old men shall dream dreams,
   and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female servants
   in those days I will pour out my Spirit.

Joel 2:28-29

Scripture Lessons
Acts 2:1-13
John 20:19-23

The Gift of the Spirit

When I was in college, I had a profound experience of the transcendent presence of the Holy Spirit.  It happened on an Easter Sunday morning when I was in a Quaker Meeting.  Jane and I attended Guilford College, a small Quaker liberal arts college, in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Quaker worship, as in the United Church of Christ, can span a wide spectrum of practices.  The two main varieties are programmed and un-programmed meetings.  Programmed meetings have a minister who leads the meeting and preaches a sermon.  They are, in many ways, like many traditional other mainline Protestant worship services.  However, Un-programmed meetings are more traditional to the roots of Quakerism.

First of all, when you say Meeting, you could be talking about the specific gathering for worship for that period of time.  A meeting is also the institutional gathering of worshippers covenanted over time.  It is what we would call the congregation, parish, or local church.  For example, the members of the Society of Friends (the actual name for Quakers) gathered in Cambridge, is caller the Cambridge Meeting.  At Guilford, there was an un-programmed meeting on campus, and a programmed one across the street from the college that met at a Quaker retirement community.  When I attended Sunday morning Friends Meetings, I generally went to the un-programmed meeting on campus.

At an un-programmed Quaker Meeting there is no planned order of worship and no clergy.  All those gathered for the meeting sit in silence.  At Guilford, they gathered in the Moon Room in King Hall.  Pews were arranged in a semi-circle, with elders of the meeting seated at the front.  It was easy for just about everyone in the room to see one another.  The room, at capacity might seat fifty or sixty, maybe more. It was a simple room, furnished in early American style, with clear windows that looked out onto the campus.  You entered in silence and sat in silence.  Anyone who felt moved by the Inner Light could speak.  The Inner Light is what the Quakers call the divine presence that lives within all people.  For Quakers, the Inner light is an authoritative and ongoing source of revelation.  Sometimes several people might speak during a meeting.  Sometimes the whole service could pass in silence.  They generally lasted about an hour.  The end of the meeting is signified when the elders in front would shake hands, which began a general greeting among the people in the pews. 

One Easter Sunday morning, I was sitting in the Moon Room for the weekly Friends Meeting.  The first person who stood up to speak was Beverly Rogers, the wife of Guilford’s president at the time.  She spoke about how Easter is a time of happiness and light, but that it is joy and light that come out of darkness and death.  She talked about how important it is to face the darkness and not ignore it.  I began to reflect on her words, about darkness in the world, in my life, and the sources of light as well.  I was pondering this, as others spoke.  Though they were not responding to the other insights shared in a direct way, they all had a kind of unity of focus, and echoed the currents of my own silent meditations on darkness and light.  It was both uncanny and tantalizing.  For me, it was an experience of what Carl Jung called synchronicity.

As I sat there pondering darkness and light, it occurred to me that there were stories about Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha each having heard the voices of demons, and that having listened before they rejected them, they obtained a certain wisdom.  When that occurred to me, I thought about standing up and sharing it.  Then I dismissed the impulse as not sufficiently reverent - overly rational, more appropriate for the classroom than a worship meeting.  But then a strange thing happened.  The more I tried to resist getting up and speaking, the more I felt my heart race and my breathing become shallow.  Finally I stood up, spoke succinctly, and sat down.  The contrast between before I stood up and after I sat down could not have been more pronounced.  After I sat down, I felt a sense of calm wash over me. 

That feeling of calm brought with it a sense of heightened awareness and connectedness.  That Sunday morning was nearly thirty years ago.  It was only a brief moment in time, and yet I remember it vividly as if it were yesterday.  At that period of my life I would not have considered myself a Christian.  During high school and college I had wandered away from my Christian upbringing.  I was then a Unitarian Universalist, majoring in Religious Studies.  Quakerism is, in fact, a Christian tradition, but has a long history of welcoming seekers and dialoging with members of other faiths, without expecting conversion.  John Woolman, an 18^th Century Quaker, sought fellowship with the Native American tribes in Pennsylvania and had good relations with them.  In my late teens and early twenties, the Unitarians and Society of Friends provided safe places for me to explore my deepest spiritual questions in the context of a faith community.  It was not until after I arrived at seminary as a Unitarian student that I made an adult Christian commitment.  Now from my Christian perspective, I look on my experience on that Easter Sunday in the early eighties as a profound experience of the Holy Spirit.  I cannot call it anything else.

As I recall that moment in my twenties, I now see how important it was that it happened in the context of a faith community.  We see that the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles on Pentecost, first within an intimate group and then a larger faith community.  At first, the apostles all gathered together in a room when they heard the sound like a violent rush of wind.  The Passage tells us that it was the day of Pentecost, which is fifty days after Passover.  The Hebrew name is Shavuot.  It is an important holiday that celebrates God giving the Commandments at Sinai.  Jews from all over the world had come to Jerusalem to observe the festival.   After the Apostles had that profound experience of winds and flame, they went outside to share it with their wider community and the world.

I have always found this miracle incredibly moving.  The Apostles, when they went outside to preach the gospel, were so filled with joy that some in the crowd thought they were drunk.  But the miracle enabled these people from various countries to understand the Good News preached in their own languages.  It was like one huge come-as-you-are party.  The Holy Spirit can transcend the most confounding differences and bind people together to share in God’s love.  God’s grace gives us the ability to celebrate the rich variety of life and find opportunities where we could only see obstacles before.  In a very real sense, Pentecost is our most important holy day.  Our Congregational tradition is based on the fundamental belief that the Holy Spirit moves among us and guides us when we gather as a covenantal community in the name of Christ.

There will always be obstacles, and there are still opportunities.  We have good news that we are bound to share.  Here in this place we have been blessed by a long tradition of devoted service, faithful worship, beautiful music, and loving nurture to our children, youth, and elders.  We have been doing this in West Newton for almost 230 years and in this building for nearly a hundred.  We are the Body of Christ in West Newton with members from China, Japan, Germany, Ireland, England, and as far away as Waltham.  It is our mission to share the love of God with as many people as we can.  Pentecost is an opportunity to renew that commitment and rediscover all the possibilities God places before us, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 5, 2011

In the Shaker vision everything is gift – not just those realities of our lives which arrest our attention, but all the literally countless realities from the smallest to the greatest.  Ultimately we realize all is the Gift of the all-giving God Who is Love.      

                                                                                 ―Robley Edward Whitson, ed.
                                                                                  The Shakers:  Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection

Scripture Lessons
Acts 1:6-11
Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
John 17:1, 6-11

                                    What Are You Looking At?

It was almost comical.  What are you looking at?!  I like to imagine those angels in white who materialized next to the disciples as talking with heavy Brooklyn accents.  Did you ever notice how, in biblical film epics, everyone from the Pharaoh to Abraham to the Pharisees and the disciples seemed to acquire a BBC accent and Shakespearean diction?  This is probably the lingering influence of the King James translation, which was completed 400 years ago this year.  Jacobean English was the vernacular for Shakespeare as well as the scholars who translated the Bible commissioned by King James.  They were masters of the language of their day.  But Jesus and the disciples walked the earth about 1600 years earlier.  The disciples were not exactly university scholars; English did not yet exist.  They spoke Aramaic, perhaps a smattering of Greek, and were for the most part a pretty unpretentious if not downright rustic crowd.  Beyond that, imagining what the angels sounded like is fair game.  They are eternal.  What are you lookin’ at?

The disciples had only just seen their friend, their beloved teacher, the man who had been arrested, tortured, crucified and buried, then come back from the dead, leave them and float up into the sky.  I think a certain amount of rubber necking is justifiable.  Those disciples had been on an emotional roller coaster for several weeks.  Two weeks ago we heard Andrus with violinist Cynthia Freivogel perform the Mystery Sonata, The Ascension, by Heinrich Biber.  Andrus explained to me that that particular composition is a mixture of triumph and joy, but also melancholy.  Yes, the disciples had witnessed a glorious miracle seeing their teacher ascend into the clouds to join his Father in heaven.  They had also just lost him, yet again.  As we heard in the text, it is for them to stay behind and start all over again, with the Holy Spirit to guide them.

It seems like we’ve been gawking at the sky quite a bit lately.  Wednesday night’s Deacons’ meeting was held in the Living Room to the sounds of driving rain, thunder and flashes of lightening.  We all knew about the tornadoes in Springfield, Monson and elsewhere that afternoon, and the devastation in Joplin, MO and all over the country in recent weeks was not far from our minds.  It has been a wild spring.  But much of the sky watching has been decidedly theological.  You probably recall that two weeks ago the so-called Rapture was supposed to have taken place.  This was heavily publicized by a Christian media mogul, Harold Camping, who predicted the Rapture incorrectly for the second time in his illustrious career.  He set a date previously in 1993.  That date came and went.  This time he publicized the event with billboards and leaflets and electronic media.  It was reported that many of his followers spent or gave away their life savings and on May 22 were left wondering why nothing happened.  One enterprising atheist started a business to care for the pets left behind by people who expected to leave in the Rapture.  As you can imagine, there was an iron-clad no-refund clause to the contract.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether Camping was sincere in his predictions or not.  That is not for any of us to judge.  I feel nothing but sympathy for his followers who believed the prediction.  They watch the same news we do.  Earthquakes.  Wars.  Floods, Tsunamis and tornadoes.  Can you blame anyone for hoping that God would take them up into the sky before things got inevitably worse?  In a way, I wish I could believe it.

The belief that Jesus will come again is an ancient and orthodox Christian doctrine.  The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds both say that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead.  These are definitive and normative Christian eschatology (or theologies of the end times).  They date from the earliest centuries of the Church with solid scriptural grounding.  The idea of the Rapture, that the faithful will be gathered up into the sky and spared the death and destruction of the end of the world, is actually quite new.  It only emerged as a theological movement in the 19^th century.  The Rapture is based on extrapolating a few disparate verses of the New Testament and weaving in various apocalyptic texts from both testaments.  There is a description in Matthew that is quite vivid, “Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.  And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”  (Matthew 24:30:31)

For centuries doomsday prophets and messianic poseurs have claimed to predict the end of time, often amassing large followings.  We saw this at the turn of the century at the dawn of the new millennium.   It happened in the year 1000 as well.   This often happens at times of great insecurity.  But just before Jesus ascended into heaven, he cautioned his disciples, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7)  After describing the return of the Son of Man on clouds of glory in Matthew, when the disciples ask when this would take place, he warned that even he did not know, saying: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”  (Matthew 24:36)

You’ll notice that in our Ascension Sunday reading from The Acts of the Apostles, Jesus redirected their attention to the physical world where they lived at that moment.  Heaven could wait, so to speak.  He told them, “…you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  (Acts 1:8b)  That is why the angels asked the disciples what they were looking at.  The message to the church on Ascension Day and every day is that our job, our mission, is to serve God in the world where we are, and let God worry about the world to come.  Either way, we are in God’s hands.  God is trustworthy.

In all times, in all places, our responsibility is to ask ourselves, “Who are we now?  Who are our neighbors?  And who is God calling us to be?”  They are questions we would do well to pause and ask before we act, both individually and collectively.  They should be on our minds as we meet for the forum after worship to consider our future staffing needs.  The answer to those questions is implied when we pause in Fellowship Hall to write a card for the card ministry, and observe Gladys’ 100^th birthday, or come on a Saturday to volunteer for shelter cooking.  Though Jesus did occasionally talk about the end of days, he means for us to always live in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
May 29, 2011

Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.                            ―Franz Kafka

Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky.  ―Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist.

Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 49:8-16a
Matthew 6:24-34

Trust:  Vice or Virtue?

            Do you ever find yourself trying to argue with Jesus?   I hope you do.  Actually, I would encourage it.  If you argue with Jesus, it probably means you engage with the substance of his teachings, and are emotionally invested.  It means you take the Bible seriously.  The New Testament shows us that Jesus had great affection for people who argued with him.  There is the story of a rich young man who came to Jesus and pressed him to say what he really must do for salvation.  The text tells us that Jesus loved him. (Mark 10:21)  Jesus challenged the man to sell all his possessions, give the proceeds to the poor and become a disciple, which he could not bring himself to do.  The Syrophoencian woman, whose daughter Jesus initially declined to heal, contradicted Jesus.  Jesus then agreed with her and healed the girl.  Chuck Carlson, my New Testament professor at Andover Newton, called that instance the only argument Jesus ever lost.  (Mark 7:29; Matthew 15:28)

And why wouldn’t we argue with Jesus?  He made a lot of incredibly challenging statements.  “…do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  (Matthew 6:25)  Obviously, Jesus was not recommending starvation and nudism; at least that does not seem to be the cue his disciples and the early Church picked up on.  Neither would it be practical advice.  Jesus did not have a mortgage.  Jesus, despite various conspiracy theories, did not have a spouse or children.  He had a trade but for most of the gospels seems to have changed careers.  What did Jesus know about the credit reports?  What did Jesus know about entitlement reform?  What did Jesus know about international economics, global terrorism or international relations?  Actually, he lived every day of his life with international relations.

The historical Jesus lived in a small country, occupied by a huge and ruthless empire.  Rome brought some advantages like roads, aqueducts, and civil order of a sort, but that order was not tolerant of dissent.  Any hint of rebellion was put down with speed and severity.  Rome’s brand of law and order inspired violent resistance by various local groups such as the Zealots.  International commerce in Jesus’ day was perhaps not global, but it was far-reaching, spanning continents.  Galilee was at the very crossroads of trade routes, evidenced by the various people Jesus came into contact with throughout his ministry. 

As far as credit crisis goes, that’s nothing new.  The lending of money is recorded and regulated throughout the Bible, going all the way back to the five books of Moses, or Torah.  Jesus was certainly familiar with unscrupulous lenders, and spoke about them.  His lesson about giving your shirt when your cloak is asked of you refers to the practice of using a cloak as security for a loan.  Both Exodus (22:25-27) and Deuteronomy (24:10-13, 17) regulate this practice by allowing the debtor to reclaim the cloak to sleep in at night.  According to New Testament scholar Walter Wink, when we read shirt, it really means, give your creditor your underwear and shame him by the sight of your nakedness.  It should be noted that both Exodus and Deuteronomy prohibit the creditor from taking the garment in pledge in any kind of humiliating manner.  Jesus’ teaching does not prohibit the practice itself, but teaches the debtor a non-violent means of protest when the creditor does not meet the obligation to treat the debtor with respect as required by the Torah.

Yes, Jesus lived a long time ago.  Technology and communications were not what they are today.  But I do not really believe life was all that different, because all the elements of life were pretty much in place.  Yes, with cell phones, internet, airplanes and cars, life is faster.  Many tasks are quicker and easier, but I don’t think that means that life is really that different.  We move faster.  We make more noise.  But, I often think that technology has amplified and accelerated life way more than it has fundamentally changed or improved it.  So, we get our gossip on the internet or on TV instead of while we draw water at a communal well or at a village marketplace.  In the last 2000 years, life has not changed that much because, for the last 2000 years, human beings have not changed very much.  That is not to say the acceleration technology brings has not cost us psychically and spiritually.  Was not the idea of technology to spare us labor?  Instead, with communications technology being what it is, it is harder and harder to disengage from work and just be.  We see it in our home lives, and it affects our life as a church.

And yet, even in a world without advanced technology, a world that was slower, Jesus recognized that stress and anxiety took a toll.  He asked, “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Matthew 6:27)  That question comes just as Jesus redirected his disciples’ attention from the frenzied existence of making a living to the innate elegance of the natural order.  “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as one of these.”  (Matthew 6:28b-29)  This teaching is beautifully and elegantly stated.  He is talking about a kind of radical trust in God to provide.  After all, we are in God’s hands, whether we recognize it or not.  But I have to wonder, are human beings capable of that kind of radical trust, or do we have to be vegetation, like the lily?

Trust is complicated.  It is both necessary and dangerous.  Evil people prey on trust to exploit others in every way possible.  As soon as our kids are old enough to leave the house by themselves, we teach them to be suspicious of strangers.  But trust and gullibility are different.  Skepticism is healthy and often wise.  But it is important to draw a distinction between skepticism and cynicism.  I do not think it is possible to live a worthwhile existence without trust, and trust involves a certain amount of risk.  Ronald Reagan famously said to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Trust but verify.”  Facts can be verified, but the future cannot.  That is where faith comes into the picture. 

Jesus issued a stark warning, “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.”  (Matthew 6:24)  This is really tough and hits us right where we live, as a church in a wealthy nation in an affluent suburb.  Probably at this moment, in a recession with gas prices around $4 a gallon and grocery prices rising, we may not feel that affluent.  But in a world where billions of people are forced to exist on a dollar a day or less, we have to recognize that we have it pretty good.  But to recognize that we are fortunate should not be another source of anxiety.  We should simply be grateful for and responsible with what God has entrusted to us.

We should recognize, too, that having wealth does not preclude serving God.  In fact, Jesus and the disciples were dependent on wealthy supporters like Mary Magdalene, who funded their ministry.  The important thing is to serve God with what God has given: time, talent and treasure.  Material wealth can be a means of serving God, or it can be a hindrance, as it was for the rich young man Jesus loved.  As a church we are all needed to give proportionally to fund the expenses of this ministry.  But giving time and talent is important, too.  By our baptism, each of us is a minister, and we lose something if we don’t take on a ministry.  I say this fully recognizing that I have it easier than you.  Ministry is my job.  In our tradition I am the designated practitioner.  I stand in awe of the devoted service of so many of you ministering above and beyond your day jobs.

I sometimes say that, though Second Church has business to do, we are a church and not a business.  That said, we benefit mightily from experienced business men and women who help us conduct our business with skill, efficiency and creativity.  Though a church is a unique institution, often we could stand to be more business-like.  It makes us more predictable and more reliable in the way we serve our members, our community, our staff and our God.  It is a kind of stewardship.  It is a matter of honoring the trust placed in us by our forebears, who founded and sustained Second Church, and by God who called this gathering of saints together.  We all have different gifts to offer in our life and ministry.  Paul compared the Church to a living breathing body, the Body of Christ.  In his letter to the Romans, he wrote, “…in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.  We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.” (Romans 12:5-8)  The more we dig in and serve God together by serving one another, we come to know what Jesus meant by Abundant Life through the joys of fellowship and shared commitment.

When I talk about time, talent, and treasure, it is not as if they are entirely different things.  Time is perhaps the most important treasure we have.  No one ever said on their deathbed, “I wish I spent more time at work.”  It’s also true that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.  But what we do does not define us.  What we are defines us.  We are human beings, created by God in the image and likeness of God, placed into a creation that is good.  Woven into creation is a day of rest.  Even God rested after doing a good job.  Sometimes we have to just trust God and just be.  Take time to consider the lilies of the field, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
May 15, 2011

The table is one of the most intimate places in our lives.  It is there that we give ourselves to each other.  When we say: ‘Take some more, let me serve you another plate, let me pour you another glass, don’t be shy, enjoy it,’ we say a lot more than our words express.  We invite our friends to become part of our lives.  We want them to be nurtured by the same food and drink that nurtures us.  We desire communion.  That is why a refusal to eat and drink what a host offers is so offensive.  It feels like a rejection of an invitation to intimacy.

Strange as it may sound, the table is the place where we want to become food for each other.  Every breakfast, lunch or dinner can become a time of growing communion with each other.

―Henri J. M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

Scripture Lessons
Psalm 23
Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-11

In the Presence of Enemies

I have always found the most compelling line of the 23^rd Psalm, “He prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”  What does that mean?  For me, it prompts some vivid mental pictures.  They all presume the traditional attribution of this psalm as being authored by David.  One vision is a picture of the king, outdoors on a bright day.  He is seated at a large banquet table near the front lines of a great battle, perhaps on a rise overlooking a plain.  Two vast armies are arrayed against each other.  Standards glint in the sunlight.  Banners ripple in a light breeze.  The king surveys the field of battle, as he absently picks at overloaded platters of delicacies, ripe fruits, roasted meats, bread, warm and fragrant.  He reaches for an ornate goblet, and fine wine escapes its brim as the king lifts it from the table.  Secure in God’s favor and care, David smiles, amused by the sounds of bluster rising from both armies as they beat their shields with their swords and chant taunts, one to the other in the near distance.  Perhaps he thought how far he had come since his days as a humble shepherd boy, the youngest son of his father Jesse.

I can also picture a very different though not contradictory scenario.  When we imagine the life of a king, especially an ancient Middle Eastern king, enemies were never far away.  David, after all, served in his predecessor Sol’s court, playing the harp.  Later, David would challenge Sol for the throne.  David’s own son, Absalom led a rebellion against his father.  So when David said that God “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” he may well have been talking about enemies who sat at that table with him; treacherous enemies who coveted his power.  Perhaps some plotted his demise as they broke bread with their king.

 Actually, we echo that same situation every time we gather at Christ’s table to share Holy Communion.  Every time we consecrate the elements, we recall that Jesus shared his table with Judas.  We are very specific in evoking that first time Jesus asked us to remember him “On the night that he was betrayed.”  Throughout the Bible, in both testaments, the table is an important place.  Notice how the reading from the Acts of the Apostles twice mentions, the breaking of bread.  In fact, it says that these members of the early church “…devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)  It is hard to say that this is a specific reference to the Eucharist.  But then, I don’t know what else it would be referring to, especially when the passage describes devotional life of the community of Jesus’ early followers.  

Our scriptures remind us that we enjoy God’s blessings, material and spiritual, in a troubled and troubling world.  The 23^rd Psalm reminds us that even a mighty warrior and powerful king is merely a lamb in relation to God.  The beginnings of wisdom, peace and security are the recognition of our limitations, our vulnerability and our ultimate dependence on God.  We walk the valley of the shadow of death every day.  Even when we feast, enemies are never far away.

There is a public golf course in Brookline called Putterham Meadow that used to let clergy play for free on Mondays.  My friend Rabbi Gurvis and I would often take advantage of that opportunity during the summer months to spoil a good walk together.  As badly as both of us played the game, it was never exactly the valley of the shadow of death.  It was an opportunity to chase golf balls along green fairways and, too often, into still waters.  But no matter how play went, it was a good opportunity to get outside, get some fresh air and enjoy conversation.

Sometimes we talked about religious matters and our respective congregations, often learning about each other’s traditions in the process.  We discussed local politics, our kids, world affairs, the Red Sox, and anything else that mattered.  I remember distinctly one morning we were talking about recent events in Israel.  The Second Intifada was in full swing at the time.  You probably know how difficult it can be for Christians and Jews to have open and frank discussions about Israel.  It can easily become an emotionally charged conversation.  For many Jews the survival of the State of Israel is a visceral and existential matter, not an abstract discussion of foreign affairs.  But Eric and I have managed it from time to time because we share a strong foundation of trust and mutual respect.  We have a friendship that presumes good will.  That day I told Rabbi Gurvis that I was troubled by the recent incidents of targeted killings of Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories.  Of course, these leaders were not exactly Palestinian scout masters.  He looked surprised when I said it, and told me that the Talmud allows you to kill someone you know to be coming to kill you.  (Rodef, Tractate Sanhedrin, Babylonian Talmud)

I remember that conversation vividly, because it took place on Monday, September 10, 2001.  As we spoke, Al Qaida terrorists were in or making their way to Boston so that they could board planes at Logan Airport that they would hijack and crash into the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, killing thousands.  I thought about that conversation more than once since I heard the news that Navy Seals had slipped into Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden.  It was welcome news.  The man behind the most deadly attack on the United States mainland and who, as his captured journals have shown, spent part of each day trying to devise new ways to kill Americans, had been found and killed.  I was also glad to hear that, though the operation did not go entirely as planned, every one of the Seals on that mission returned safely.

Something that troubled me after news broke of bin Laden’s death was the spontaneous celebrations that erupted that night.  While I understand the impulse, it is spiritually corrosive to celebrate the death of any human being.  Clarence Darrow once said, “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”  We know that terrorism did not start with Al Qaida and it will not end with the killing of bin Laden.  Terrorism will always be with us.  At best, we have disrupted one notorious group of killers who would seize any opportunity to kill innocent civilians.  They are our avowed enemies, and we have other enemies out there as well.  We live in a dangerous world.  So did Jesus.

Jesus lived in a country occupied by idolatrous foreigners, and filled with zealots who took any opportunity to attack their enemies.  The Romans dealt with any perceived threat with violent and ruthless repression.  Jesus was crucified because the Romans saw him as a threat to their power.  Certainly Jesus could be confrontational, but not in a way that anyone expected.  He said "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?  Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48)

After 9/11 there emerged a common refrain that if we made certain changes to our lives, then “the terrorists win.”  If we didn’t get out and do our Christmas shopping, the terrorists win.  There were a thousand variations on the theme.  But Jesus reframed that theme with a difficult challenge that has nothing to do with winning or losing.  Jesus wants us to behave as children of God in a world that needs more love and less hate.  We may not have control over what evil people think about us.  We don’t even have control over what the people who are trying to protect us will do.  If people are going to try to blow up airplanes with exploding shoes, it probably is a good idea to wear loafers to the airport and try to be patient.

What Jesus asks of us is hard.  We are not wired to respond to persecution and hostility with love.  But it is eminently practical, even if it is not simple.  Sadly, violence may sometimes be the least bad option in a dangerous world.  But violence never put an end to violence.  In this troubled and troubling world, Jesus’ way of love may be our last best chance.  The priest and novelist G. K. Chesterton once said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."  Do you think perhaps the time has come to give Jesus’ way a try in a world without end?  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
April 24, 2011

Scripture Lessons
Jeremiah 31:1-6
Matthew 28:1-10

Angels to Urge Us Along

I love the funny papers.  Some people go straight for the sports section.  I used to go straight for the comics, though nowadays I generally save them for last.  I usually need a laugh after reading the news.  There are a few comics in the Globe that are like old friends who have been with me through various stages of my life.  Often the humor reflects knowing insights into real life experience and human foibles.  The strip Arlo and Janis has a sharp ear for the nuances of the married life of a middle-aged baby-boomer couple.  As someone who shares a house with a dog, I think Get Fuzzy has nailed the secret life and conversations many of us share with our pets when nobody is looking.  Sometimes at home we try to cast the vocal talent we would choose for animated versions of Rob the human, Satchel the dog and Bucky Gilbert Godfried Katt.  In their daily strip Zits, Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman somehow manage to portray how exasperating teens can be to their parents, and at the same time show how incomprehensible parents appear to their teenagers.  Doonesbury has always been a favorite.  I don’t think there is a comic strip that has a more complete cast of characters from every race, age and social station in American life than Doonesbury.  It is worth mentioning that Trudeau worked with the Veterans Administration to offer a realistic and respectful portrayal of a disabled vet when BD, a staple character for years, lost a leg in Iraq.  The funny pages are not always funny.

It took me awhile to warm up to Rose is Rose.  At first, I found it too precious for my taste.  But over the years I discovered there is more there than I realized.  The strip revolves around the Gumbos, a middleclass suburban family of three: Jimbo, Rose, and their young son Pasquale.    At his best, Pat Brady employs an element of magical realism.  Rose is a stay-at-home mom with a wild side lurking just beneath the surface.  She wears kind of frumpy glasses and dresses modestly as she manages the home front.  But when warm weather calls her to get out and seize the day or she has a craving for rattlesnake chili, Rose morphs into her alter-ego, Vicki.  Vicki is a biker chick.  She rides what looks like a classic Harley, has long, wild hair and a taste for black leather.  Her mini-skirt reveals a rose tattoo on her left thigh.  Vicki can appear in an instant, when daily life triggers Rose’s wilder instincts.

Her son Pasquale also lives life with parallel realities.  He has an ongoing relationship with his guardian angel.  As you might guess, Pasquale’s guardian angel is a source of protection and moral guidance.  Generally, Brady draws the guardian angel as a little kid with a buzz cut and little wings growing out of his back.  That is to say, he is the angelic version of Pasquale.  But when Pasqual encounters a potential danger, the angel is transformed into a colossal, fearsome winged figure wielding a huge gleaming broadsword.  I especially like this portrayal of the angel.  It is less the adorable cherub of Hallmark-cards, and more the superhero of a good comic book.

I think this kind of strapping, muscular angel was the sort the women met at the tomb in Matthew’s account of Easter morning.  The angel’s appearance, we are told was earthshaking.  He came to roll the stone away from the tomb, which he seems to have done quite easily.  Then he casually hopped on top of the stone and had a seat.  The guards at the tomb were so frightened by the angel they, “became like dead men.”  (Matthew 28:4)   I think it is safe to say that the angel made for an impressive and probably fearsome manifestation.  Matthew says his “appearance was like lightning.”  (Matthew 28:3)  The first thing he said to the women was, “Do not be afraid.”  (Matthew 28:5)

It is safe to say that these women did not frighten easily.  First of all, they were at the tomb three days after Jesus had been arrested, tortured, and crucified.  They were not deterred by the armed guards posted at the tomb.  They did not know whether the guards would arrest them, as well.  The men certainly were not willing to risk it.  From the Last Supper on, they had made a rather pitiful showing.  When Jesus prayed fervently in the Garden of Gethsemane, they could not even stay awake after he asked them to.  Judas, one of them, betrayed Jesus.  Simon Peter, on whom Jesus said he would found his church, hardly displayed rock solid devotion at the moment of crisis.  Three times he denied he even knew Jesus.  The rest of the men scattered.

Only these two women disciples, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” stayed with Jesus through his crucifixion or even dared come mourn him at the tomb.  The one referred to as “the other Mary,” certainly would not be Jesus’ mother.  She is most likely the sister of Martha, who was irked when Mary preferred to sit and learn from Jesus to helping Martha feed a house full of hungry disciples.  I am sure the two Mary’s were awestruck by the angel who appeared with a flash of lightning and an earthquake.  But as we have seen, they did not frighten easily.  In a certain sense, they had followed Jesus to the grave, and they would be the ones to proclaim his resurrection.  They were the only ones who could.

Imagine what the end of the week must have been like for the rest of the disciples.  Some of them had followed from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  Andrew, John, James and Peter had left their nets by the Sea of Galilee and followed him immediately.  When the final crisis arrived, they all failed.  Imagine the shame they must have felt.  They probably all trusted and loved Judas, and been devastated by his betrayal.  They must have been asking themselves how they could not have seen it coming.  They probably wanted to blame one another for the collapse of their ministry, even as they each blamed themselves.  Perhaps some got wind of Peter’s denial.  There were probably moments when they were angry with Jesus, kicking themselves for getting their hopes up, despite his wisdom, the miracles and his love for them.  This was the church, such as it was, at its lowest point ever.  Only these two women, by the grace of God, could pick up the pieces.

The angel told the women he knew they were looking for Jesus, who had been crucified.  A New Testament scholar with the unfortunate name of Eugene Boring, points out significant meaning in the Greek phrasing of the angel’s message.  “The perfect participle used by the angel identifies the risen Jesus as ‘the crucified one.’  Since the Greek perfect tense indicates a completed act with ongoing consequences, Jesus’ crucifixion was not a temporary episode in the career of the Son of God, a past event nullified, transcended, or exchanged at the resurrection for heavenly glory.  Even as the risen one, he bears the mark of his self-giving on the cross as his permanent character and call to discipleship.”  

The angel was not only there to declare the good news, but to urge Christ’s disciples on.  The angel urged the women to spread the word to the other disciples so they would pick themselves up and get on with the work Jesus had prepared them for.  As they turned to go, they met the risen Christ and worshipped him.  He called on the women to take the word to his brothers, promising they would also see him.  He had no recriminations; Jesus did not say what a disappointment they had been.  He called them brothers.  No doubt they would always remember the heartbreak of his arrest and crucifixion.  That would be their scar.  But the record shows that they went on to work wonders themselves, and would remain faithful even facing death.  It may be hard for us in the twenty-first century to wrap our minds around the resurrection, but for the ones who were there and carried on, their fidelity to their witness is hard to refute. 

We have to remember what miserable failures most of the disciples were at the moment of crisis.  It is an important part of the story because it was not the end of the story.  Things were a mess on that first Easter morning.  Things shifted when a beefy angel rolled away the stone and showed two brave women the tomb was empty.  The sisters were charged with calling the brothers back from the brink.  They needed to rediscover that the promise and hope had not disappeared; it was just harder to see at the moment.

Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address 150 years and about one month ago, talked about the “bonds of affection” that exist between all Americans.  The Civil War had not yet begun, but the Confederate States had already seceded from the Union.  And yet, Lincoln had the audacity to close that speech talking about the “Angels of our better nature.”  Divisions in our country now seem insurmountable, but nothing like 1861.  I read last week that Gary King, a Harvard Professor studied the communications of all members of congress, both parties, and found that they spend 27% of their time and energy taunting the opposing party.  That’s slightly over a quarter of their time.  Those are our representatives.  We elected them.  And I am not trying to get political but offer a snapshot of who and where we are as a nation, as a culture.  They are us!

Are there not enough real problems to face that we can afford to spend a quarter of our time on taunting and bickering?  As a church, as people called together by God and bound in a covenant of love, we have something important to offer.  No matter how badly we have failed in the past, we can embrace new life, face new challenges, urged on by the angels of our better nature, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
April 10, 2011

             We want God’s voice to be clear but it is not….We want it to be clear as day,  but it is deep
             as night.  It is deep and clear, but with a dark clarity like an x-ray.  It reaches our bones.

―Ernesto Cardenal

Scripture Lessons
Ezekiel 37:1-14
John 11:5-7, 17-36, 38-44

From the Bones

In my head, my heart and in my gut I will always associate these two Lenten Scripture Lessons from Ezekiel and John with the first time I had to preach on them.  It came about six weeks after Jane and I were married and had returned from our honeymoon to Concord, New Hampshire.  I was working on the sermon at home in our apartment.  I felt like I was spinning my wheels as I groped for ideas.  I was playing around with an imaginary scenario of Lazarus appearing on a daytime talk show like Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, or Oprah.  I imagined Lazarus defending the claim that he had been dead and in the tomb for four days, as John described.  I pictured audience members asking questions ranging from wide-eyed, hopeful fascination to dismissive skepticism.  I was trying to present a familiar story of Jesus calling his dead friend Lazarus out of the tomb in a way that would refresh the outlandishness of a story that has grown all too familiar.  Because we hear it knowing the ending so well, Lazarus has been reduced to a cliché and John’s testimony of resurrection has become a fable. 

I decided to call Kit, my mentor who had officiated at our wedding.  We had seen him a week after the wedding, when Jane, Max and I stopped at their house in Lancaster to pick up some things stored in their basement. I never needed much of an excuse to call Kit, especially since he had been receiving treatment for lung cancer over the preceding year.  When I called a neighbor answered the phone.  When I asked for Kit, he handed the phone to Laura.  She told me that Kit had died earlier that day.

I have mention Kit from him from time in sermons.  His full name was Webster Kitchel Howell.  Oscar’s middle name is Kitchel for him.  I honor his memory every time I end a sermon “…in a world without end” as he did.  He was much more to me than simply a vocational mentor, though he was the best kind of mentor I could have asked for.  I first met him when I was seventeen.  He was in seminary at the time doing an internship at the church where I was in the youth group.  He had been in the youth group at that same church; in fact he graduated from the same high school as me.  I worked for Kit and Laura in their home as a nanny the summer after my freshman year of college.  Kit preached the sermon at my ordination.

I was of course ordained in the United Church of Christ.  Kit was a Unitarian Universalist minister.  You may have heard the tired old joke that UCC stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.”  At my ordination, Kit preached a sermon that had that room full of Christians ready to shout “Amen Hallelujah,” albeit in a subdued New England sort of way.   Kit had a deep and mature faith in God, but never lost a sense of reverent goofiness.  He once wrote, "I need a lot of silly. If anyone is looking for a church, I'd say go to a church where people laugh."  Kit loved comic books, and for a while had a seven-foot inflatable Godzilla in his office at church.

            Though Kit was certainly playful, he was serious about standing before God as an adult.  He said, "When we try to put God into the position of being a puppeteer who either pulls strings to make events happen or chooses to sit back, the suffering and evil in this world do become God's responsibility, and we can rightly accuse God of being a dysfunctional parent. But then, this is a child's view of God. Perhaps it's time we realized that we are not just children of the universe. We are also adults of the universe. Instead of complaining about the evil in the world, or sloughing it off to 'God's will' and 'judgment day,' why don't we grow up, access the divine within us (our thinking, our reason, our compassion, our love), and do something about it?"

There was nothing I could do about it when I heard the news that Kit died.   I certainly didn’t feel like writing a jokey sermon about Lazarus on the Oprah Winfrey Show.  I thought long and hard about the Gospel Lesson.  I did not then nor do I now have the faith to call a dead friend out from the grave.  Christians are rightly taught to imitate Christ, but there is a limit.  Jesus was, after all, unique in human history.  Is that not why we follow him?  Yet, in that moment of raw, debilitating grief, I found no comfort in the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  In fact, it felt like a mockery.  I had just lost one of the most important people in my life.  What use to me was some kind of sacred zombie story and how was I supposed to write a sermon on that!?  I poured over the text looking for something I could get a grip on. 

It was then that something grabbed me.  Before Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, he sat and wept with Lazarus’ sisters.  He did not simply sit with them and comfort them, he shared their pain.  Jesus loved Lazarus.  Jesus talked of resurrection, knew its power and reality, but he did not pretend death was not real.  In the moments after I learned Kit had died, I was not ready to talk about resurrection or even speculate about what that means or what the resurrection feels like.  I just knew I was hurting.  A brilliant, charismatic man was gone way too soon.  Kit was only forty-four years old.  His daughters were teenagers.  But in that moment, as I sought the Word of God in the pages of scripture, I learned that the Word of God is life.  Real life, warts and all.

Think about that immense bone yard Ezekiel surveyed, human bones as far as the eye could see.  This story is a metaphor, but it refers to a real valley in the aftermath of a real battle.  We know similar scenes from our own time: the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the killing fields of Cambodia, the mass-suicide in Jonestown or the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or Rwanda.  The image the prophet used was a metaphor of a people devastated and beyond hope, and the reality behind it is one with which we are all too familiar. 

An important detail in the story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones is that the bones were dry.  They were as lifeless as anyone could possibly imagine.  This was a scene of utter hopelessness.  But the Word of God spoken by the prophet gave them life.  They rattled and came together, and stood to hear God’s promise.  Stranger things have happened, and I am not talking Hollywood special effects.  Who after the Holocaust would have imagined there would be a State of Israel?  Granted the reality is complicated, even problematic, but it is a reality on the ground.  Facts, as John Adams once said, are stubborn things and human beings are nothing if not messy. And still, if there was ever a time for people to respond to the Word of God, that time is now.  As Lent winds down, in a world that feels too often like it is winding down, we have to confront the forces of death that are arrayed all around us.  We have to face death before we can embrace new life.  In the song It’s Alright, Ma I’m Only Bleeding, Bob Dylan famously sang, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

This is a challenging time to be a person of faith.  We may understand our ancient scriptures from the perspective of a different world view from which they sprang and read them with a degree of skepticism.  But that is not necessarily a bad thing.  We have to accept the fact that we live in a world that looks on religion itself with suspicion, sometimes with good reason.  We have to respect questions that arise from an earnest search for truth, and we may share many of those questions.  No religion’s history (or present for that matter) is free from theological chauvinism, misogyny, war and violence.   We do not have to have all the answers, but we should respect all honest seekers, even when we don’t agree.  Most importantly we need to be vulnerable to the word of God.  We must let the word of God read us.

When we are feeling dry, brittle and lifeless, we have to allow the Word of God to rattle our bones.  That is how new life gets in.  The biggest problems with religion come when people manipulate religion rather than allow their faith to move them.  If we can allow the Word of God to read us as we share it in community in an honest and earnest search for truth spoken in love, we will find new life, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 20, 2011

Once or twice in a lifetime,
a man or woman may choose
a radical leaving, having heard
Lech l’cha – Go forth.
God disturbs us toward our destiny
by hard events and by freedom’s now urgent voice
which explode and confirm who we are.
We don’t like leaving,
but God loves becoming.

―Norman Hirsh

Scripture Lessons
Genesis 12:1-4a
John 3:1-17

New Eyes, New Ground

Listening in on the late night conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is really interesting.  The meeting between the two is extraordinary all by itself.  Jesus was a rustic, country preacher, an itinerate rabbi linked to controversial figures like John the Baptist.  Coming from Galilee could hardly recommend him, a rugged land rife with bandits.  Nicodemus was a respectable member of the community.  John referred to him as “a leader of the Jews.” (John 3:11)  Seeking Jesus out Nicodemus would have had to be discrete.  It is amazing that their meeting took place at all.  It reminds me of the one time that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are known to have met. They met in a Harlem hotel in March of 1964.  They were both religious leaders within a marginalized population which made them suspect to the authorities.  Both were part of the same movement, but had profound differences in their approach, theology and goals.  King was internationally respected, and had access to powerful men.  Malcolm X made a lot of people nervous, if not downright scared.  Martin Luther King may not have been part of the establishment, but he was acceptable to the establishment of his time.  Malcolm X was not.  Malcolm X was perceived as a threat.

Two different resources I consulted suggested that John’s reference to Nicodemus as a leader of the Jews meant that he was possibly a member of the Sanhedrin.  This was a seventy-one member supreme council that met in Jerusalem throughout post-exilic period.  The Sanhedrin had legislative power over the Jewish community, as well as some judicial authority at a time when Jews living in Judea were dominated by various foreign powers.  In Jesus’ time, the Sanhedrin would have had some authority over the community, but ultimately Rome held all the power.  If Nicodemus was in fact a member of the Sanhedrin, he was about as powerful and influential as a Jew could be under the Romans.  John did not explicitly identify Nicodemus as a member of the Sanhedrin, but by calling him “a leader of the Jews” this is likely what he meant.

There have been less-than-charitable interpreters through the centuries who characterized Nicodemus as a sneaky Jew coming to see Jesus under the cover of night.  We should remember that in this situation Jesus was the one to be regarded with suspicion.  Nicodemus was a man of position and influence, respected in the holy city of Jerusalem.  Jesus was a carpenter from the hill country.  Granted, he was an unusual carpenter, with great wisdom, and understanding, known to be a miraculous healer.  But Jesus had no formal religious training.  Nicodemus did.  He was a Pharisee, the closest thing to Jewish clergy outside the temple priesthood.  Jesus’ reputation undoubtedly preceded him.  That reputation likely thrilled and worried Nicodemus.  To invoke the twentieth century analogy I employed earlier, Jesus was more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King.  In John’s gospel, Jesus had thrown the money changers out of the temple the chapter before he met Nicodemus.

The fact that Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night is significant within the context of John’s gospel.  Darkness and light are repeated themes throughout the Gospel According to John.  In the very first chapter, John described Jesus, saying “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  (John 1:3b-5)  Though Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night, in the darkness, he was earnestly seeking enlightenment.  He addressed Jesus with the utmost respect, calling him “Rabbi,” which means teacher.  As a Pharisee, Nicodemus would likely have been addressed the same way.  Though a man with formal training and a position of prominence within the community, he treated Jesus as a colleague.  He recognized Jesus as an extraordinary man, and knew of the miracles he had performed, and referred to them as “signs.”  He openly acknowledged Jesus’ as ministry as unique and sacred, saying, “…we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  (John 3:2) 

What Jesus said to Nicodemus has particular significance to twentieth century Evangelical Christianity, especially here in the United States.  You might remember back to the seventies and eighties what used to be referred to as “Born Again Christianity.”  Jesus said, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." (John 3:3)  Some might characterize Nicodemus’ response as obtuse or perhaps even mocking Jesus, when he asked, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" (John 3:4)   Because Nicodemus was a learned man it is safe to assume he would be careful to understand exactly what Jesus was saying.  Jesus clarified that what he was talking about was the new life signified by a spiritual rebirth through baptism.  But, as is often the case, Jesus was speaking on many levels at once.

A number of years ago, David Jackson gave me a 1933 translation of the four gospels by George Lamsa, an Aramaic scholar. Though the gospels were written in Greek, Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus, his disciples and most others throughout first century Palestine.  This means that the gospels have always been translations.  All the conversations and sayings recorded in the gospels were originally said in Aramaic, and then translated into Greek.  Lamsa’s translation of the gospels is informed by his extensive knowledge of ancient Aramaic and its regional variations.  These variations came onto play in the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.  He translated Jesus statement, “If a man is not born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3)  Lamsa points out in a footnote, “Born again in Northern Aramaic means to change one’s thoughts and habits.  Nicodemus spoke Southern Aramaic and hence did not understand Jesus.”  Winston Churchill once joked that the British and the Americans were two great peoples separated by a common language.  Jesus and Nicodemus may have spoken the same language, but they used their words differently.

Jesus was certainly talking about rebirth at an esoteric and spiritual level, but I think Lamsa points to the practical implications of what such a rebirth would mean in everyday life.  Jesus talked about this elsewhere, as when he said you don’t put new wine into old wineskins.  (Matthew 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37)  Jesus knew that living with an awareness of the kingdom of God would change one’s daily life, the way we think, the way we perceive things and the way that we act – what the Puritans called a regenerative experience.

I have seen this kind of rebirth when people I have known have moved from addiction to recovery.  I have watched friends and loved ones transformed through AA or other twelve-step programs.  Recovery is not a once, and you’re done event, but an ongoing process that changes lives, one day at a time.  Recovery reorients a person’s life from revolving around addiction through an admission of powerlessness over that addiction.  A need to control is replaced by recognition of God, or a higher power.  You’ve probably seen the bumper stickers that say Let go, let God.  It is a fascinating paradox that so many lives are saved by an admission of powerlessness that leads people to take responsibility for their lives.  AA is not a Christian program, though I do not think it a coincidence that it began in a church basement.  One friend who is part of AA once told me that coincidences occur when God chooses to remain anonymous.   Meetings are held every day all over the world in churches and other locations.  Two AA meetings a week are held here at Second Church as well as one Overeaters Anonymous meeting.  My mentor, Kit Howell was a recovering alcoholic.  From the time I was in high school he taught me wisdom he gleaned from AA.  Fake it ‘til you make it* is one of my favorites. 

Fake it ‘til you make it is the essence of all true religion.  Like Nicodemus, we may not fully understand what new life we are being born into, any more than an infant does, any more than Abram did when he answered God’s call to leave his home and family and go forth.  It is hard to leave behind what you know, even when it is not healthy or even working.  But some time it is necessary to look at things in new ways, and cover new ground.  I am sure you have heard the definition of insanity as trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  There is one like it about churches.  The seven last words of a dying church are We’ve never done it that way before.

So, let’s be brave, or fake like we are brave.  God had given us to one another so that in our fellowship we might find courage and solace and joy.  Mixing rebirth with fake it ‘til you make it is child’s play.  I think the work of the Church is to play Kingdom of God.  We are called to be the Body of Christ in the world.  If we want to see the Kingdom of God, we have to be reborn, again and again and again.  Look around.  Are the old ways working for you?  Some do, some don’t.  I think we can discover the Kingdom of God is at hand by faking it, by playing at the Kingdom of God, in a world without end.  Amen.  

* In the pulpit I neglected to clarify that by using the word fake, I did not mean false.  By “faking it” I meant audaciously try something we may not yet know how to do.  Faking it means to boldly act in an as-if mode to bring about new realities.  Faking it can be a first step to transformation, rebirth. 

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 13, 2011

If you haven’t met the devil face to face,
you may be traveling in the same direction.

―The Reverend Zan Holmes

Scripture Lessons
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

How Do You No?

There’s an old joke about a minister who was married to someone who was a rather enthusiastic shopper.  She had particularly extravagant taste in clothes.  One night when the credit card bill arrived, the couple sat down and agreed they needed to get a grip on their expenses.  The minister assured his wife that he loved her.  He told her that he wished he could buy her all the fabulous clothes she wanted, but that was not possible or responsible, and she readily agreed.  He expressed his belief that the problem was more than just shopping and clothes.  The minister told his wife that clothes were just a way the devil had found to tempt her.  He urged her to be strong and fight the good fight.  The minister told his wife he had faith in her.  He said she could beat the devil.  He told her that when the devil came whispering in her ear, trying to tempt her, that she should be strong and say “Satan, get thee behind me!”

Feeling encouraged the woman hugged her husband and promised that she would try to be strong, that the next time she heard the devil whispering in her ear she would just say, “Satan, get thee behind me!”  A few days later the woman walked into the house looking stunning in a new silk dress.  Her husband looked up from the sermon he was working on and was dumbstruck.  He recovered enough to ask what he already knew.  “Is that a new dress?”  She said it was.  “I thought we agreed that we couldn’t afford all these expensive clothes.  I thought you said you were going to resist temptation and tell the devil, ‘Satan, get thee behind me.’”

“I did.  I was in the store and I saw this dress.  It was just so perfect.  I knew it was expensive.  But I heard this voice saying, ‘It doesn’t cost anything to try it on.’  That was true and it made sense, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt anything.  So I tried it on.  Then I heard a voice saying, ‘You look perfect in that dress.  It looks like it was made for you.’  You have to admit, it is my color and it is cut so well…”

The minister was shaking his head muttering.  His wife continued, “And then that voice said, ‘It really flatters your figure so well, you can’t afford not to buy that dress.’  I knew then it was the devil whispering in my ear and I said ‘Satan, Get thee behind me!’”

“So why did you buy the dress?”

“Well, he said it looked so good from the back.”

I just want to say a few things about that joke.  First of all, I know it’s not that funny.  For the record, the minister’s wife was not a librarian; it is just a joke.  Secondly, it perpetuates a blatant gender stereotype.  The one female in our house is the most disciplined shopper.  In the light of the story of the temptation in the Garden of Eden and the way some have interpreted it through the centuries, we should be careful to generalize gender attributes from it.  When there are only two humans on earth, one will be male and one will be female.

Too often, interpreters have concluded that because the woman sinned first, that proves the moral inferiority women.  But if we try to read into these two primordial figures essential and uniform gender traits, you could just as easily say that the Eden story shows that men are unlikely to have original ideas and when they get in trouble they look to blame someone else.  I think the essence of the Eden story is that human beings, both male and female, have a hard time mastering temptation.  Even when we have everything we need, when things could not be better, the one thing we are denied is precisely the thing we want.  No matter how good we have it, there is something about human beings that will spoil it.

That is the slithery amorphous nature of sin.  No wonder the tempter in the garden is a serpent.   Sin can turn something good into something bad.  Human sexuality can be a blessed expression of love within a covenanted relationship, or an obsessive manifestation of lust and even a weapon of violence.  Food is a necessity of life which can be a beautiful expression of family traditions as well regional and national cultures.  A meal can be an occasion for fellowship and sharing, an opportunity to offer God thanks and praise.  For Christians, breaking bread and sharing a cup is a religious experience, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

But in a country known as the breadbasket of the world, when people are starving all over the world, we are confronted with epidemic levels of obesity and all of the health problems that come with it.  Too often food becomes a substitute for spiritual and emotional needs that have not been met in appropriate ways.  In our consumer culture the fast food industry and the advertising industry are at every turn encouraging our worst impulses.  Think about McDonald’s latest slogan: I’m lovin’ it.   Does food really equal love? 

Anthony Bourdain, a former chef and travel author, has written about trying to raise his daughter to develop a healthy relationship with food.  He does not want her to get sucked into a fast food habit.  In his most recent book, Medium Raw, Bourdain is an unabashedly and fiercely protective father who calls McDonald’s “the enemy” to his efforts to raise a healthy child.

In Medium Raw, he wrote:  “McDonald’s have been very shrewd about kids.  Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market –and who drives it.  They haven’t shrunk from targeting young minds –in fact their gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers.  They know that one small child, crying in the backseat of a car of two overworked, overstressed parents will, more often than not, determine the choice of restaurants.  They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and brand loyalty with brightly colored clowns and smoothly tied-in toys.  They know that Little Timmy will, with care and patience and the right exposure to brightly colored objects, grow up to be a full-size consumer of multiple Big Macs.  It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus.”

Now, I can’t help reading that last sentence as an indictment of us, the living Church in our day and age.  If Jesus is less recognizable than Ronald McDonald, if it really is the case, we have not been as effective as McDonald’s in getting our message out.  Have we fed billions and billions?  It is also worth noting that Joan Crock, the widow of McDonald’s founder, left $90 million to the Salvation Army when she died.  And let’s not forget Ronald McDonald House, which allows families to stay together free of charge when children have to travel far away to receive life-saving medical treatments.

Bourdain is not suggesting that fast food be banned.  He writes, “It is repugnant, in principle, to me –the suggestion that we legislate against fast food.  We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we, as a nation, are infantilized to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers right out of our hands.”  Bourdain is simply being realistic about the subtlety and sophistication with which some commercial enterprises take aim at our wallets, even through our kids if it suits their purposes.  He recognizes the reality that the power dynamic is disproportional, but he is up to the challenge. He is not going to give in.  He is the parent.

The reason I bring it up is because temptation is always all around us.  Advertising has raised it to an art and a science.  In the interest of full disclosure, I spent five years of my life working in the advertising department of a newspaper.  I think advertising can be wonderfully creative, and can be used to good ends.  Often commercials are more entertaining than the shows they sponsor.  But they are designed to elicit a response, and that response is not always good for us.  Think of an alcoholic struggling with recovery trying to relax to a ballgame on TV, and a bottle of ice-cold beer pops open on the screen every ten minutes; or someone trying to stick to a diet which their life may well depend on, and a sizzling steak or mountain of ice cream flashes before their eyes in full color.  Temptation is always around us everywhere we go.  When you leave church today, see how far you get before you encounter some kind of advertising.

I don’t mean to beat up on advertising.  It is an easy target.  But it should not be underestimated, especially in a consumption-driven culture.  We face a multitude of temptations every day and human beings always have.  The reason that adverting is so effective is because we respond to it. There is something in human beings that does not like the word “No.”  We don’t like to hear it. We don’t like to say it.  Consider the Garden of Eden.  The first two humans had everything they could possibly need.  They had each other.  Yet, they could not resist tasting the fruit of the one tree they were told not to eat from.  I think the serpent only expedited things.  The man and woman would have gotten around to it eventually. 

In the case of Jesus in the wilderness, he said “No” heroically.  Jesus said, “No,” to breaking his fast, “No” to taking unnecessary risks, and “No” when bowing to evil offered political power.  “No” can empower a more profound and more important “Yes.”  We know Jesus enjoyed eating, drinking and the fellowship of a meal.  He commanded us to remember him with a meal.  Jesus refused to jump off the Temple to prove he was the Son of God, but we know he willingly took up his cross in obedience to God.  When it came to compromising his devotion to God, he chose the Kingdom of God over earthly power. 

The power and the ability to say “No” makes possible the most important “yes’s” in our lives.  Think of marriage.  We are saying “yes” to a commitment to one person for the rest of our lives, and “no” to a multitude of other possibilities.  Without all the implied and perhaps explicit “no’s,” the depth of commitment and intimacy could not happen.  The “yes” would be meaningless.

And just because we don’t like to say “No,” doesn’t mean we don’t have it in us, even from the beginning.  “No” is one of the first things we learn how to say.  Have you ever been around a toddler when they are discovering the ability to say “no?”  It is often exasperating for parents and caregivers, this stage, because it is often used inappropriately.  But it is the way children discover their voice and begin to learn to take control of their lives. 

We can still take control of our lives.  God gives us the power to master temptation and God gives us to each other to lean on when we need help.  We have God to lean on.  As Jesus fasted and was tempted in the wilderness, he prayed.  And he was not alone.  He had the angels who waited on him.  I believe that at crucial moments, we can be angels for one another, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 6, 2011

Mysteries are not dark shadows, before which we must shut our eyes and be silent.  On the contrary, they are dazzling splendours, with which we ought to sate our gaze.

                                                                   ―A Carthusian

Scripture Lessons
Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

Discovering Deeper Realities

In Colby Chapel at Andover Newton, where weekly chapel services were held when I was a student, there is a large, stained glass window depicting the Transfiguration.  It prominently features Jesus with Moses and Elijah, as Matthew described the scene.  In that window in Colby Chapel, Moses is pictured with horns coming out of his head.  This was not intended to imply that Moses was in any way demonic.  In fact, it was a common artistic convention.  Moses was portrayed with horns in countless medieval manuscripts, etchings and other works.  In the reference room of the Newton Free Library, you can see a scaled-down replica of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, with small horns growing out of the top of his head. 

So where did Moses get horns?  The Bible does not actually say that Moses had horns.  But when Saint Jerome, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, translated the entire Bible into Latin (known as the Vulgate) he made an educated guess about a Hebrew word that did not appear anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible.  The word was close enough to the word for horn so he translated it as “horn.”  Later translators would correct the mistake, but for centuries Christians would read or hear Saint Jerome’s version.

What Jerome was describing in his translation was what happened when the Glory of God passed over Moses on Mount Sinai at the end of Exodus 33.  After that, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, it says that “Moses did not know that his skin and face shone, because he had been talking with God.” (Exodus 34:29)  Matthew used similar language to describe the transfigured Jesus when he was on top of a high mountain with some of the disciples.  “And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.”  (Matthew 17:2)  Matthew probably had read the Greek translation of Exodus, which did not give Moses horns.

As far as the Transfiguration goes, I don’t think Matthew was simply making artful literary allusions.  I believe Matthew intended to describe an objective miraculous occurrence in which Jesus’ disciples witnessed Jesus transformed physically and conferring with the two greatest prophets of Israel’s history.  Moses had led the people out of bondage in Egypt and received the Torah at Sinai.  Elijah was believed to never have died, because he was taken to Heaven in a chariot of fire, and was believed to be the one who would prepare the way for a messiah.  The event demonstrates Jesus’ authority and his standing as God’s anointed.  As if there was any room left for guess work, a voice from the sky declared, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased; listen to him!”  (Matthew 17:5)  The Transfiguration linked Jesus and his disciples with two other holy mountaintop experiences:  Moses at Sinai, where he received the Law, and Elijah at Horeb, where he heard God in a still, small voice.

I once heard a story of transfiguration from an acquaintance at a party.  I was in seminary at the time.  Charlie had just graduated from medical school, and he was walking down a street in Brookline on a warm, spring afternoon.  Because it was a nice day, there were a lot of people out on the sidewalk.  A couple of women were walking just ahead of him.  One of them collapsed and was gripped by a seizure, shaking with convulsions.  Her companion was understandably distraught, at a complete loss for what to do.   Seeing what had happened, Charlie walked over and said to the stricken woman’s panicked friend five magic words: “Don’t worry.  I’m a doctor.”  It was the first time Charlie had used those words in a crisis situation, out in the world.  He was amazed at the effect the words had on the woman.  Her relief was immediately written on her face.  He experienced a deeper reality of what it meant to be a physician, something no one could have taught him in medical school.  It was not a mountaintop experience, like we saw in the two scripture lessons.  It was more of a street-level transfiguration.

Certainly part of what Charlie experienced was a change in perception of him.  He was no different than he was a moment before.  But he disclosed the reality of who he was and the woman acknowledged his authority and accepted his help.  He did not even have to appear to them in a dazzling white coat.  He simply uttered words that, if they did not exactly drive out all fear, went a long way to relieve anxiety.  I am not trying to reduce the Transfiguration into a subjective personal experience.  The Transfiguration was, as described in the Bible, a shared experience of the Holy.  But, then again, Charlie’s experience on a sidewalk in Brookline could not have happened without the two women who had been walking in front of him.  I think all three of them experienced transcendence that day.

We should always be a little suspicious of privatizing our religion.  Religion should always be personal, but if it is too private it has the potential of becoming unhealthy and a bit weird.  Judaism and Christianity both put a premium on worshipping and studying in community.  Jesus said “Whenever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am also.”  Jews have a kind of quorum, called a Minyan made up by the presence of at least ten adults.  Without a Minyan certain prayers will not be said, and the Torah scroll will not be removed from the ark.  Religion is necessarily communal.

At the same time, our faith should be personal, if not private.  Our spiritual lives would be missing something if we did not spend time alone in prayer, meditation, contemplation or some kind of devotional practice.  We all need to be comfortable in our own skins, and content to be alone with ourselves and our thoughts in order to be comfortable with others.  Solitary contemplation has born amazing fruits throughout the ages.  Paradoxically, those solitary insights achieve their greatest value when they are in some way shared with others.  I think immediately of the writings of Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Merton. 

Though it is not exactly solitary, I get in a lot of my contemplative time walking the dog in the early morning.  Sometimes I listen to the birds sing.  Sometimes I listen to a podcast.  I count that as contemplation, because it forces me to listen.  I am disengaged from the ability to interject.  The other day I was walking the dog through Wellington Park, and I was listening to the poet Stanly Kunitz describing an inspiration he had in his garden on Cape Cod.  He talked about how sometimes snakes will hang from the trees, intertwined.  He said that he has been aware of the phenomenon since he was young, and sometimes strokes the snakes as they hang from the branches.  His touch causes them to quiver.  He described this in his poem Snakes of September.  This is from the second half of the poem:

…In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love knot.
I pull out my hand and stroke,
The fine, dry grit if their skins.
After all, we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch, the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

 Just as the Transfiguration linked Jesus’ ministry to the mountaintop experiences of Moses and Elijah, Kunitz linked his Cape Cod garden with the Garden of Eden.  The snake was no longer a sinister presence, but a redemptive apparition that spoke of the covenantal relationship in all of creation.  No wonder so many of the prophets transmitted their oracle with poetry.  It is the language of deeper realities in a world without end.  Amen. 

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
February 27, 2011

Contradictions have always existed in the human soul.  But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem.  We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

―Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 49:8-16a
Matthew 6:24-34

                             The Worries of Today and Tomorrow

How many of us would give our kids the kind of advice Jesus offered at the end of the Gospel Lesson this morning?  It is not the sort of thing I heard from my parents.  It is not the sort of thing my boys hear from me.  My parents were more likely to say things like “What are you going to do with your life?” not “Do not worry about tomorrow…”  (Matthew 6:34)  It probably looked to my parents that I was more naturally inclined to consider the lilies.  I went through high school in the seventies, which often felt like a kind of hangover of the sixties.  You did not hear much talk of hippy hopefulness and political idealism.  We were left with the hedonism of disco and the nihilism of the punks.  In the seventies the Beatles, who told us “All you need is love,” had split up and were pursuing solo projects.  Elvis dropped dead of heart failure in his Graceland mansion at the age of forty-two, overweight and addicted to prescription drugs. 

Jesus’ imperative that we must not worry about tomorrow seems positively countercultural here in Newton.  Sometimes I think we start our kids building their college applications in the second grade.  We over schedule them in sports and arts programs.  Many child development experts bemoan the disappearance of unstructured play.  Some of this hyper-scheduling is intended to expose our kids to opportunities to discover their passions and develop their talents.  Part of this tendency is due to understandable concern over the pitfalls and temptations kids face at increasingly younger ages.  Our concerns over our kids’ tomorrows are born of both hope and fear because our children are our tomorrow.  Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today." (Matthew 6:34)  We hear it.  It is true.  But how do we make ourselves stop worrying?  Anxiety always felt to me like an involuntary reaction.

Jesus looked at anxiety from a realistic and practical level.  He asked, “…can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”  It is more likely that worrying, rising levels of stress, and many of the unhealthy ways that we use to cope with stress and to face the daily cares of life, are more likely to make us sick and actually shorten our lives.  But how do we simply stop worrying?

Jesus cautioned "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”  (Matthew 6:24)  That sounds like a stark and clear-cut challenge.  But it is not as black-and-white as it may seem at first.  When Jesus said that we cannot serve God and wealth, it echoes the first of the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 20:3)  We are forbidden to worship any other Gods, but God alone.  Jesus warned that we cannot serve two masters.  If we try, we will end up despising one or the other.  He is stating an observation about real life human nature.  But we should engage Jesus challenge with some imagination, and not be simpleminded about it.  We should never become slaves to wealth.  It is dangerous, on many levels, to idolize wealth.  But if it is true that we cannot serve God and wealth, we should never rule out serving God with wealth.

You all know the saying that money can’t buy happiness.  There are plenty of examples of this in our celebrity culture.  Michael Jackson was fabulously wealthy, lived an opulent lifestyle, brilliantly talented, and achieved a level of fame that made him a cultural icon.  But can you imagine a more lonely or unhappy man?  However, that kind of wealth and stardom is not something any of us will likely contend with. 

I would guess that most of our money concerns are far more mundane.  While I would assume that extreme wealth has its own pitfalls, I think most of our money worries are more along the lines of:  is there enough in the checking account to pay the insurance bill?  Will our savings cover tuition for the kids’ college or fund a dignified retirement?  Can I afford a long term confinement if my later years come to that?  These are all very real and reasonable concerns for many of us.

Of course, the world presents us with plenty other things to worry about.  In the past few weeks we have witnessed stunning revolutions across the Arab world as citizens have taken to the street and demanded their freedom.  The Tunisian people sent their corrupt dictator and his family packing off to Saudi Arabia.  Soon the Egyptian people brought down Mubarak. Watching the disciplined commitment of the protestors in Tahrir Square and the restraint of the military was really quite remarkable.  I found it heartening that a dictatorship that had lasted more than three decades ended as quickly as it did, and with minimal bloodshed.  The Egyptians themselves would be the first to remind us that their revolution is not over, but just beginning.  No one yet knows how this will end.

Success by protesters in Tunisia and Egypt sparked protest in Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, with varying reactions.  I am sure many of us were shocked but not necessarily surprised when Moammar Gadhafi dug in his heels and proceeded to fight viscously to stay in power, even as much of his support at every level of Libyan society crumbled around him.  It is hard to know what is actually happening on the ground there, yet Gadhafi’s brutality and the courage of the Libyan protesters are equally breathtaking. 

There is no question but that we live in a troubled and troubling world.  It seems that everywhere we look there is political turmoil, economic uncertainty and looming environmental crisis.  Living in a technology-rich society with internet, smart phones and 24-hour news on cable, the whole world is present in our homes (even our pockets) every day.  But Jesus does not want us to worry about it.   That may be easy for the Son of God to say. But it needed to be said.  We need to hear it.  We must not give in to despair, as tempting as it can be sometimes.

Jesus wants to calm our anxieties by redirecting our attention to the sustaining beauty and elegance of creation.  “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Matthew 6:26-29)

If worrying will not do anything for us, Jesus wants us to focus on smaller things and the larger context.  The birds of the air and the lilies of the field are provided for in all their beauty and vulnerability.  God can be trusted to provide for our needs, both physical and spiritual.  In turn, we find purpose and contentment by seeking out the Kingdom of God.  By searching, we discover the righteousness of God. That search, that journey is embodied, even guided by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:  I originally heard it as merely the first few lines.  I loved the prayer.  But there is more to it.  One of our Deacons used the whole thing to open a Deacons Meeting this past fall.  Here it is in its entirety.

God, give us the grace to accept with serenity
                  the things that cannot be changed.
                  Courage to change the things
                  which should be changed,
                  and the wisdom to distinguish
                  one from the other.
                  Living one day at a time,
                  Enjoying one moment at a time,
                  Accepting hardships as a pathway to peace,
                  Taking, as Jesus did,
                  This sinful world as it is,
                  Not as I would have it,
                  Trusting that You will make all things right,
                  If I surrender to Your will,
                  So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
                  And supremely happy with You forever in the next. 

Amen.

For my money, that prayer is a useful roadmap, in a world without end.  Amen. 

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
February 20, 2011

Christ appeared not as a philosopher or a wordy doctor, or noisy disputer, or even as a wise and learned scribe, but he talked with people in complete simplicity, showing them the way of truth in the way he lived, his goodness and miracles.

―Angela of Foligno (1248-1309)

Scripture Lessons
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
Matthew 5:38-48

                                        Faith Beyond Obedience

Last Sunday after worship, as I was greeting people by the Fuller Chapel door, one of our members took me to task for not addressing a particular issue in the Gospel Lesson she found troubling.  I would agree that there is a lot of challenging material in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.  This morning’s Gospel Lesson continues that sermon, the same discourse that includes the Beatitudes.  As we can see, the sermon is much longer than simply the Beatitudes, though that is the portion most of us probably remember best.  In last week’s sermon on the West Newton hill, I only specifically addressed Jesus’ teaching about how lusting after someone you your heart is equivalent to committing adultery in your heart. 

Jesus also made pointed remarks concerning divorce, relating them back to the same ancient prohibition of adultery, saying, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”  (Matthew 5:31-32)  The person who brought up this part of last week’s Gospel Lesson was not divorced, but was disturbed by the teaching.  She had suspected that people who had divorced and/or remarried sitting in the sanctuary last Sunday must have been troubled by it as well.  I am troubled by it, too.  By the standard of Matthew 5:32, I am an adulterer.  I am married to a divorced woman.  When I asked Jane for permission to mention this in the sermon, she was not thrilled.  First of all, it is deeply personal.  Even the most amicable divorce is painful.  She was also troubled by the fact that Christian teaching on sexual ethics generally often treats women as property.  Jane certainly had a point there. 

Generally Jesus was sympathetic to the predicament of women in the first century.  Among his disciples, women clearly held prominent positions.  Remember that when a self-righteous rabble were preparing to stone a woman for adultery, Jesus turned the issue back on the mob.  “Let anyone among you who is without sin throw the first stone at her.”  (John 8:7)  This is a familiar passage, often referred to in biblical scholarship as “The woman taken in adultery.”  We know there was no question whether or not the woman about to be stoned had committed adultery.  Guilt had already and clearly been established.  The passage states, “…this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.”  (John 8:4)  This begs the question:  where was her partner in crime?  Given the way that the woman was apprehended, the man in this intimate and compromising situation must have been readily available to the mob.  Why is it that only the woman needed to be rescued from stoning?  Scripture is silent on the question, and I would love to hear any theories you might have at coffee hour.

Jesus recognized that women were on the short end of the operative power structure of his time.  I think Jesus’ teaching on divorce is specific to those power dynamics.  Jesus knew that in hierarchical patriarchal society, women were dependent on men for physical and economic security.  In any given situation, Jesus sided with the most vulnerable and least powerful, whether women, Samaritans, slaves or lepers.  I firmly believe that the aim of Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce speaks to the rights of women in an imbalanced social context.  If we look at the way it was set in the Sermon on the Mount, we hear Jesus asserting an evolving understanding of various key commandments, including the prohibitions against murder, adultery, false testimony and the fulfillment of ritual practices. 

The ethics Jesus expressed in the Sermon on the Mount were not relative, because they could apply in a variety of cultures.  But Jesus understood that they had to be relevant and responsive to the specific context in which they were applied.  Jesus’ lesson on adultery and divorce must now be understood and interpreted with an understanding of the contemporary social and legal context of marriage as well as the rights and realities that apply to the covenant partners within marriage.  Marriage is understood today very differently than it was in first century Judea, just as the institution of marriage was different in the thirteenth century BCE in the Sinai wilderness when Moses received the Ten Commandments.

As far as marriage and divorce are concerned, every marriage is a sacred covenant and every divorce is a tragedy.  But I use the word “every” knowing that every marriage and any divorce is as different as the individuals who live them.  For over seventeen years I have counseled couples preparing for marriage.  From time to time, I have counseled individuals or couples contemplating divorce.  As tragic as divorce is, it is sometimes the best decision.  When there is abuse, and no commitment to change, abandoning a marriage can prevent a greater tragedy.  Divorce is sometimes advisable in less dire situations when couples come to recognize that the decision to marry was a mistake.  Divorce can set two lives back on track when one life together has become untenable.  I had a professor in seminary who said that divorce can sometimes be an act of repentance.  The Hebrew word for repentance is shuvah ( שובה ), which means “return,” as in returning to the right course.  Divorce is always tragic, but sometimes it is not nearly as bad as continuing what has ceased to be, or never really was a marriage.

In wedding ritual you can see both what marriage was, and watch as weddings catch up and adapt to what we hope marriage can be.  For example, bride and groom say the same vows, because (in the weddings I officiate) brides no longer promise to “obey.”  This reflects our more egalitarian understanding of marriage.  In the choreography of a wedding, you can see that marriage was once essentially a business transaction between two men.  The bride came into the sanctuary on her father’s arm and left on her husband’s.  In more weddings than not, the bride still walks down the aisle with her father, though in the first wedding I officiated, the bride came down the aisle with the single mother who raised her on her own.  I have also had both a father and step-father walk the bride down the aisle together.  More than once, I have seen the bride walk down the aisle with both parents.  Only when a couple insists on the traditional wording do I ask “Who gives this woman in marriage?”  What I prefer, and generally do, is ask the immediate families to stand so that I may ask them to voice their support for the marriage.  Family involvement and support have always been important.  The decision to marry must always be made by the couple, but the covenant of marriage joins two families into a larger extended family.  The biggest change in marriage that we have seen in our lifetimes is that the wedding couple is not necessarily a man and a woman, but can be two men or two women, united by love and promise.

Though our understanding of marriage and family life has changed through the years, not all of those changes are good.  Many of them are.  Certainly it is good that women have more rights in society though we still have a ways to go.  I am glad that our understanding of marriage is more egalitarian, both for the partners within a marriage as well as for those to whom marriage is available.  But just because our lives have changed since the biblical canon was closed, that does not mean that we ignore the moral guidance of the Bible.  Not all change is for the better. 

When a scripture presents a challenge we should follow the example and principles Jesus set in the Sermon on the Mount.  The Gospel demands that we move, in the words of German theologian Dorothy Soelle, “beyond mere obedience.”  We should struggle with our sacred text to discover its deepest ethical dimensions.  We also need to understand the historical, cultural and religious context from which the text emerged.  William Sloane Coffin used to say that no word of God, however inspired, is the last word of God. 

I am deeply grateful that a faithful member of our church took the time to reproach me for not addressing a difficult statement in last week’s Gospel Lesson.  She was right.  Her concern was born of all the right impulses, sensitivity to the feelings of others as well as a deep moral conviction that the passage did not connect with the way that we live today.  She felt strongly that it needed to be addressed.  Her faithful engagement and (I hope) fruitful challenge was a living example of the principle behind the United Church of Christ’s Still Speaking campaign.  The campaign symbol is a bright red comma, which refers to something that the prophetess Gracie Allen said.  You know Gracie Allen.  She was married to George Burns.  “Say, ‘Goodnight,’ Gracie.”  Gracie Allen once said, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”  God is still speaking.  Scripture is not the last word, but the beginning of a conversation, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
February 13, 2011

The Bible is filled with the companionship of the confused and seeking, men and women made of the most ordinary stuff who often fail to understand, who make mistakes, whose humanity is transparent, but who encounter the living God and whose lives thereby are changed.  When Paul says that he regards no one any longer from a merely human point of view, he means that in Christ the limitations of the human perspective are overcome.  People are not taken out of this life, but are given strength and power and purpose to live in it.

―Peter J. Gomes

The Good Book:  Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart

Scripture Lessons
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Matthew 5:21-37

Choosing a Life

I heard a good story the other day about a group that provides meals for the homeless.  From the way it was described, they go about it in a really faithful way.  They make every effort to respect the basic human dignity of the people who came to them for meals.  They worked hard to make the dining room a pleasant and hospitable space.  They put tablecloths and flowers on the tables.  They refer to the people they serve as guests and try to learn their names.  They require the volunteers who come in to serve meals to wear name tags so that the guests can address them by name if they wish.  Volunteers are encouraged to mix with the guests and make conversation.  I am sure that any of you who have volunteered in soup kitchens have encountered similar practices.  It was much that way at Project Hospitality on Staten Island, where we volunteered on the 2006 Mission Trip. 

It is a good and faithful Christian approach to an important ministry of compassion.  It echoes the spirit of Jesus’ lesson in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, when Jesus said what we do for the least of the members of his family we do for him.  But the person who told the story about the soup kitchen said that one of the guests objected.  The guest claimed that the organizers had not, in fact, respected the dignity of their guests.  The objection was that the soup kitchen did not provide an opportunity for the guests to contribute to the ministry that was providing their meals.  After that, the soup kitchen always set out a basket so the guests could make a contribution if they wished.  Not surprisingly, the guests did not have very much, but at the end of the day, there was always at least some money in the basket. 

The impulse described by that story speaks to the fact that we are created in the image and likeness of God.  A few weeks ago I talked about how I believe the human capacity to use language to convey meaning is an expression of the image of God in which humans are created.  In Genesis God spoke the very universe into being.  I also think that the inclination to give, which I believe exists within every human being, is also an expression of the image and likeness of God that makes us human.    Generosity is godly.  Human beings do not simply have the capacity to give in one way or another; we have a need to give.  We are created in the image and likeness of a generous God. It is more blessed to give than to receive, in the sense that blessed can mean happy.  I am sure all of you have had the experience of the happiness that comes by satisfying a genuine need through a gift.  Conversely, think about how difficult it can be to really need something from someone else.  Paradoxically, we also give a gift by receiving graciously.  We all need to give and receive, just as God gives abundantly and receives our offerings.  

I have been thinking about these things intensely for the last few days.  I heard the story about the soup kitchen at a seminar on Faith and Fundraising I attended in Waltham this past Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  Mary Barkley, our Stewardship Chair, and our Moderator Alfredo Kniazzeh attended as well.  There were pastors and lay leaders there from all over Massachusetts.  A central point that was made repeatedly during the seminar was that the starting point of reflection and discussion about giving should not be the budget, but the mission of the church.  I don’t want to imply that the budget is not important.  But why do we pledge our money to support the church in the first place?  Why would people make major gifts or put the church in their will?  It is about the way that the church makes real the love of God through relationships within the church and beyond it.

I mention this because we are going to be talking about both our mission and our budget after lunch today.  And it is important to talk about the budget, because it is integral to the how we accomplish and live out our mission as a church.  Together we have choices to make and we have to make them in an informed and open manner.  That is who we are and it has theological relevance.  Even something as prosaic as a business meeting is sacred work.  We gather in the name of Christ and we rely on the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide our deliberations and our mission.  This is essential to the life we have chosen by being together as a church.  Our lesson from Deuteronomy frames a similar choice.

The Book of Deuteronomy is a long farewell address that Moses gave before he died, before the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land without him.  The book begins with the description of the place where Moses gathered the people together, saying, “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan –in the wilderness, on the plain opposite Suph.”  Much of the book is a restatement of commandments that are recorded in previous books in the Torah.  For example, the Ten Commandments appear in Exodus, and again in Deuteronomy.  There is also new material as well.  Our passage this morning comes near the end of the book.  It has been a long talk.  Moses is in chapter thirty out of thirty-four.  He is summing up in stark terms, what it means to affirm and then live out their Covenant with God.  “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you…”  (Deuteronomy 30:15-16)  Our passage ends with the imperative, “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days.” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

It should be said that the book of Deuteronomy contains a rather stark theology.  We see it here in this passage.  Obey God’s commandments and good things will happen to you.  Forsake God, and bad things will happen to you.  I think we would all agree that life is rarely that cut and dried.  If you read the whole of the Bible, or even all of the Old Testament, a much more nuanced world view emerges.  The equation does not always balance quite as neatly as Deuteronomy suggests.  Read the book of Job and you find a recognition that bad things do happen to good people.  Jeremiah asked the agonized question, “O Lord, why does the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jeremiah 12:1)  Still, I would never suggest that we abandon the moral guidance of the Bible, even if the world we live in is complicated and ambiguous.  We are called to live in the tension between the world we’ve got and the world God wants for us.  Thankfully God gives us to one another to find our way together.

In the Gospel Lesson, Jesus shows us that the commandments themselves are not nearly as simple as they seem on the surface.  Some of us may remember when Jimmy Carter confessed to lusting in his heart in an interview with Playboy magazine during the 1976 presidential campaign.  Carter was taking seriously Jesus’ teaching that when you are looking at a person with lust you dehumanize them.  By doing so, you have already reduced them an object in your perception.  Perceptions have an ugly way of turning into actions if we are not careful.  I don’t think Jesus was talking about simply noticing or appreciating that you find someone attractive.  Lust is about control, possession, obsession and exploitation.  I think Jesus’ lesson can be understood in two different ways.  The way we look at and think about people can affect the way we treat them.  Lust can lead to exploitation, so keep on your guard.  At the same time, to whatever extend we may fall prey to the spiritual pitfalls Jesus described; it should perhaps inform the way we might judge others who act on them.  We should always try to recognize ourselves in others, good and ill.  Luther taught that we should always try to place the most charitable interpretation on our neighbor’s actions.

That brings us back to the concept of generosity, a different kind, but not unrelated.  We are all here, in one way or another, in response to a loving and generous God.  God gives us to one another so that we can find our way in a complicated, messy, sometimes troubling, often challenging world.  But we are here so that we can mirror God’s generosity by giving of our time, talent and treasure and by doing so, we discover joy.  We can find a center a spiritual contentment that comes from a spirit of generosity.  That spirit is in us, around us and moves through us, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
January 30, 2011

The more we live and try to practice the Sermon on the Mount,

The more shall we experience blessing.

―David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Scripture Lessons
Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12

Being Blessed, Be a Blessing

One morning last week, as I was getting ready to come in to church, I had the Today Show on in the bedroom.  They were running a story about a house on Long Island that was going on the market.  What made this newsworthy was that it had been used in the first Godfather movie as the location for the Corleone family compound.  Several key scenes were shot in and around the house, including the opening sequences of the wedding reception of Vito Corleone’s daughter Connie, to the old Don’s final moments as he was felled by a heart attack as he playfully chased his grandson around his vegetable garden.

At the very beginning of the movie we learn that it was customary that Don Corleone could not refuse any favor on the day of his daughter’s wedding.  Corleone quietly stroked a kitten as he listened to a visitor’s request.  Apparently, the man had kept his distance from Don Corleone, caution probably due to the old gangster’s reputation.  But his power was precisely why the visitor sought a favor from the Don who was also the Godfather to his own child.  The old Don met this request wearily, asking, “What have I done that you treat me with such disrespect?” 

I thought of that line when I read the question God asked through the prophet Micah, “O my people, what have I done to you?  In what way have I wearied you?  Answer me!”  (Micah 6:3)  Let me just issue a disclaimer right away.  I do not think God is a Mafioso.  I just happened to have heard that movie line recently, and remembered it when I read the Lectionary passages.  When you think about the actors who played the role of God on screen (George Burns, Morgan Freeman, Alannis Morrisette), you have to admit Marlon Brando could probably have pulled it off admirably. 

For obvious reasons this is a limited comparison.  But the power dynamics are instructive.  God, throughout the Bible, is compared to powerful men.  Given the place and time from which the text emerged, they were men.  God is the ultimate king and father.  God is described as being enthroned.  All these are metaphorical, not literal anthropomorphisms, but they speak of unimaginable power.  We know that God wields power that created the universe, power over life and death.  The Psalmist said that God “sits enthroned over the flood; The Lord is enthroned as King forever.” (Psalm 29:10)  Clearly, we are talking about much greater power than a mere mobster.  We presume and attribute superior moral authority that is wholly absent from Don Corleone, despite pretenses of supposed codes of honor and blood oaths of Cosa Nostra.  But what we saw in the Godfather’s study on his daughter’s wedding day was a very clear depiction of the dynamic between a powerful man and a supplicant, a man who wants and needs a favor.  But the man presumed on a relationship he has never valued before, and the Don’s, almost whispered rhetorical question is a stunning indictment.  “What have I done that you treat me with such disrespect?” 

The answer was somewhat more clear to God’s question to the errant Israelites, “…O my people, what have I done to you?  In what way have I wearied you?”  But that is where the similarities end.  The Creator made the case before the mountains and the hills.  Immediately, God reminded the Israelites how long and deep their relationship had been.  Through generations God performed wonders on the people’s behalf, rescuing them from bondage in Egypt and more.  God spoke of the prophets and priests sent to guide them.  References to King Balaak and Balaam are reminders of the time when the gentile king hired a sorcerer (Balaam) to curse the Israelites.  God sent an angel to intervene.  When the sorcerer opened his mouth to utter the curse, a blessing came out instead.  God wanted the people to remember “…what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” (Micah 6:5) when God brought the Israelites safely across the Jordan and into the Promised Land.

Confronted with God’s enduring goodness and reminded of specific acts that God had performed on their behalf, the people were understandably ashamed.  They were at a loss.  “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?”  (Micah 6:6a)  In an utterly human reaction, they went a bit overboard.  “Shall I come before the Lord with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”  (Micah 6:6b-7)  The prophet answered the people’s melodramatic query as if quieting a petulant child.  Micah reminded them, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  (Micah 6:8)

This one verse is a common sense touchstone of religious instruction, and moral guidance.  It reminds me very much of Jesus’ answer to the question of what was the greatest commandment in the Torah.  He summarized the whole book by citing one commandment from Deuteronomy and another from Leviticus: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  (Matthew 22:37-40)  Like Micah’s reminder, Jesus described balancing one’s relationship with God and our relationships with other people.  The implication being, we cannot separate a relationship with God from a relationship with our neighbors.  They are intrinsically and unavoidably linked.

One thing that is often overlooked in Jesus’ summation of the commandments is half of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  We have to be able to love ourselves in order to love our neighbor.  If we cannot love ourselves, or if we don’t love ourselves in a healthy way, what is the value of offering that love to others?  And, being created in the image and likeness of God, what is the quality of our love for God if we cannot love ourselves?  Yet at the same time, our love of God, and God’s love for us, gives us the ability to love ourselves and others.  Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.  Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.  These describe a way to spiritual and social health achieved through dynamic and fruitful tension with God, the world and the self.

Likewise, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus described people who have certain qualities or engage the world in particular ways.  I have to admit that I have always been puzzled by the first statement he made:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  (Matthew 5:3)  What does it mean to be poor in spirit?  Early Church theologians such as Hilary of Portiers and Saint Jerome seem to agree that Jesus was talking about humility, not literal poverty.  That would, not surprisingly, place Jesus squarely in agreement with the prophet Micah.  The poor in spirit walk humbly with their God in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Notice that Jesus spoke in the present tense.  He said “…theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Jesus was not making vague pie-in-the-sky promises of afterlife rewards.  Jesus was talking about a way of moving through life, here and now.  He was talking about the same quality that Micah described.  The poor in spirit bring the kingdom of heaven everywhere they go.

If you look at the totality of the Beatitudes we can see how interrelated they are.  If, in our humble walk with God, we dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven as we walk through our everyday lives, we cannot help but hunger and thirst after righteousness.  We will naturally be merciful and grow in purity of heart.  We will walk the path of peacemakers when we are at peace with ourselves, with our God and one another.  We also have to expand our notion of what it is to be blessed.  Blessed does not simply mean that good fortune has been bestowed on us, though it does mean that.  The term can also mean happiness or contentment.  Some translations of the Beatitudes have Jesus saying, “happy” are the poor in spirit.  Jesus was talking about discovering a deep spiritual contentment and happiness by serving God and neighbor.  Implicit in this model, for blessed living is that, as well as serving one another, we are called to rely on one another.  We discover blessing by becoming a blessing to others and being blessed by them, in a world without end.  Amen.  

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
January 23, 2011

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

―Samuel Smiles (1816–1904)

Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23

Risk, Failure, Grace and Hope

Last week I was trudging through the snow with our dog, Fletcher, listening to a podcast of a show called On the Media.  A particular statement caught my attention.  The novelist Nicholson Baker said, “Outsider’s underestimate the importance of learning how to fail at something very complicated over and over again, then finally make it.”  You might think Baker was talking about the experience of most published authors, who endure years of rejection from agents and publishers before they ever see their work in print.  But Baker was actually talking about video games.  It came as a surprise to hear a critically acclaimed novelist singing the praises and seriously affirming the cultural importance of video games.

I was in junior high when the first video games came on the market.  Remember Pong?  It was a one-and-one-game-only console that wired into a television set.  The graphics were minimally representative of a tennis or ping pong game with three lines and a small square that was supposed to be a ball.  By the time I got to college, there were dozens of video games in arcades that were more sophisticated, but still crude by today’s standards.  One I found amusing was called Frogger, in which the object was to navigate a frog by hopping across a busy street without getting squashed by traffic.  Gory, but it pales in comparison to the carnage you would see on many of the games you could find in stores and homes today.

Perhaps due to my contrarian nature, I never really got addicted to video games.  That is not to say that I was a stranger to the game arcades.  I was not above pumping quarters into a game.  It’s just that I preferred pinball to video games.  I liked that pinball machines tended to have some history to them.  Playing pinball you were actually playing ball; you engaged real physics and not simulated physics.  I liked that the sound effects were real bells and the rapid clicks of bumpers and flippers that sent the silver ball flying all over the table.  Unlike many contemporary video games, pinball always involves a specific element of the inevitability of failure.  No matter how good you are at pinball, no matter how many free games you rack up, sooner or later that last ball is going to fall straight down in between and out of reach of the flippers, and Game Over is going to light up on the board.

Play is important.  Play is the way we come to understand the realities of life and the world we live in.  Remember how Nicholson Baker spoke of the value of failing at something complicated over and over before actually making it.  No life is free from failure.  The Bible is filled with failures.  Adam and Eve were not expelled from Eden because they were such a raving success.  God did not destroy the world with a flood because humanity had done so well.  I find it interesting that the Gospel Lesson began with the news of John the Baptist’s arrest.  Would that make John a failure as a prophet?

I don’t think it would be right to call John a failure because he was arrested by Herod Antipas.  Should we call any political prisoner a failure for being persecuted by a tyrant?  Of course not.  Think of Nathan Hale.  Right before the British hanged him, Hale said, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”  Hale may have been a failure as a spy, but he was an exemplary patriot.  As in most things, we have to be clear about what we mean by success and what we mean by failure.  John the Baptist and Nathan Hale succeeded at remaining faithful to their principles and to their vision.  How you define success and failure depends on where you place the brackets. 

News of John’s arrest must have been painful and disappointing for Jesus.  Scripture tells us that John and Jesus were cousins.  John baptized Jesus.   At least one New Testament scholar, Bruce Chilton, argues that Jesus was a disciple of John’s.  Chilton believes that the journey described by Matthew in this morning’s Gospel Lesson was intent on escaping the same fate that befell John.  Chilton writes, “The morning of John’s capture, Jesus and the other disciples scattered; resistance against armed force was impossible, and they were relieved only John had been taken.  But even if [Herod] Antipas had not ordered the arrest of John’s disciples, they had become targets of opportunity for any soldier’s aggression or brutality.  The disciples knew the trails and hideouts of the Jordan better than the soldiers, and some simply hid, kindling no fire at night, avoiding the garrison posts along the pilgrimage route, sheltering in the brush, and in caves on the hillsides.” 

This must have been an incredibly discouraging moment in Jesus’ life.  Though we believe he was the Son of God, he was a human being as well.  That is the point of the incarnation.  Jesus was subject to the entirety of the human experience.  He laughed.  He cried.  He experienced temptations and he had his doubts.  Think of Jesus’ fervent prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest.  He expected what was coming.  He prayed that his Father in heaven might allow him to take another course, to let the bitter cup pass from his lips.  After John’s arrest, Jesus had a lot of time to think as he made his way back to Galilee.  I am sure he did a lot of praying then, too.  Perhaps he thought it might be time to get a real job, to be practical.  His cousin John, whom crowds of people came to hear preach and be baptized by him, had been thrown in jail and would have his head served up on a platter.  Jesus must have been thinking about a lot of different options on that long walk home.

As Jesus began preaching back in Galilee, he picked up where John left off, preaching repentance.  But Jesus’ message was a little different.  Along with a call to repent, he announced that the Kingdom of God had come near.  Rather than run from his mission, Jesus invited others to join him.  He came upon fishermen, Simon Peter and Andrew, casting a net into the Sea of Galilee.  He invited them to join him.  He said, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”  (Matthew 4:19)  The net is an important detail.  This is not fishing with a hook and a line.  Jesus was talking about gathering people together.  Matthew tells us that, in both the case of Peter and Andrew, as well as the brothers James and John, all four fishermen left their nets and followed Jesus “Immediately.”

After the trauma of John’s arrest, Jesus picked up and began his own ministry despite a lot of practical reasons not to.  After Jesus was crucified the disciples reacted similarly.  They headed back to Galilee.  According to John, these same four fishermen returned to their boats and their nets.  Peter must have been thinking about how, at the moment of truth, he had three times denied that he even knew Jesus.  Peter must have been feeling like a total and utter failure as Jesus’ disciple and as his friend.  But the Risen Christ asked Peter if he loved him, and asked Peter to “feed my sheep.” (John 21:17)  In a matter of a few weeks, Peter would stand in Jerusalem and preach to an enormous, international crowd. (Acts 2)

The history of the church is filled with such stories.  It is because we live by God’s amazing grace.  Through the ages, disciples like you and me have done amazing and important things even when things looked the darkest.  We just celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday on Monday.  How might history have been different if Rosa Parks had given up her seat and moved to the back of the bus?  What if Dr. King had thought that leading the Birmingham bus boycott was an inadvisable career move?

We all know that it is not easy being a mainline Protestant church in the early twenty-first century.  That does not mean it’s not worth doing.  The Nominating Committee has been hard at work for weeks now, and it is heartening to see how many of you have stepped up and taken on ministries on boards and committees.  With Annual Meeting three weeks away, there are still some slots to fill, but I do not remember another time we were this close to a full slate this early.  Just think of what we can accomplish when we are up and running and discover the chemistry of experience mixed with new blood.  It is exciting and what we do here is important.  Cooking meals for the hungry and homeless is important.  Visiting the sick and homebound is important.  Sending our kids to serve as missionaries in Washington, D.C., West Virginia and Detroit is important.  Gathering to worship God, pray, contemplate scripture and offer up beautiful music is important.  All these remind us that the kingdom of God is near, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
January 16, 2011

The basis of the Christian community is not the family tie, or social or economic equality, or shared oppression or complaint, or mutual attraction…but the divine call.  The Christian community is not the result of human efforts.            ―Henry J. M. Nouwen

If God has called you, do not spend time looking over your shoulder to see who is following you.                                                                    ―Corrie ten Boom

Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 49:1-7
John 1:29-42

Foundations of the Beloved Community

Last week I talked about how I regret preaching about politics in a way that was divisive.  Yet this past week we saw glimmers of politics of unity and healing worth lifting up.  In doing that, I rely heavily on the words of others.  The prophet Isaiah said that God has made his mouth like a sharp sword and has made him a polished arrow hidden away in his quiver.  After the events in Tucson last Saturday and the national dialogue that has ensued over the past week, I could not help but be struck by the imagery.  “He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.” (Isaiah 49:2)  It struck me because that passage could be considered, in the terms of the conversation of the last week in our country, to be overheated, violent rhetoric.  Kind of shocking when you know those words come from the mouth of a major biblical prophet. 

As we might have predicted, there has been a certain amount of recriminations and finger pointing.  But, I am so grateful I that the leaders of both political parties rose above politics and reached out in gestures of unity and healing.  When the House of Representatives convened for the first time since the shootings in Tucson, House Speaker John Boehner said, “This body has yet to fully register the magnitude of this tragedy. We feel a litany of unwanted emotions no resolution could possibly capture. We know that we gather here without distinction of party. The needs of this institution have always risen above partisanship.”  He observed that,

Our hearts are broken, but our spirit is not. This is a time for the House to lock arms, in prayer for those fallen and wounded, and in resolve to carry on the dialogue of democracy. We may not yet have all the answers, but we already have the answer that matters most: that we are Americans, and together we will make it through this.

There has been talk that, when the President delivers the State of the Union Address in a couple weeks, the members of Congress will sit all mixed together rather than by party across the aisle from one another.  President Obama spoke at the memorial service for the shooting victims in Tucson last week.  He too called for healing.

…at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.”  Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath…

Having offered that caution, the President, like the Speaker, appealed to the better angels of our collective nature, saying:

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud…

The fact is that there is no political, legal or legislative solution to what is wrong with the political discourse in our country.  If we were to attempt such a solution we would betray what is right with our country, and the Constitution would not allow it.  The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, protects our freedom of religion as well.  Should the government tell us that we have to remove all the sword and arrow metaphors from Isaiah?  Light continues to shine forth from scripture but there is a lot of heat there as well.  We all know that there is not a religion on the face of the earth that has not been misused by sick or evil people to violent and destructive ends.

But I firmly believe that our faith can save each one of us, and together we can change the world.  You probably know the song that goes, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.”  We can begin the long overdue transformation of our discourse by praying to God for the strength, resolve and inner peace to change the way we communicate on every level of our lives.  Who among us could not communicate more constructively and genially at home, at work or out in public?  As we were driving in to church this morning I made a joke about the way someone on the radio had phrased something.  Max mused, “I don’t know why you have to make fun of people on the radio.”  Having just drafted this sermon I managed to keep from justifying myself, hold my tongue, and realized he was right.  As far as political discourse is concerned, perhaps the most effective way to effect change is, not by complaining about the opposition, but by holding the candidates we agree with and who we are inclined to support to a higher standard.  That is how peace can begin with each of us.  We can all make it clear to candidates and public servants that they will not get our votes or contributions if they resort to deceptive or negative advertising or make ad homonym attacks.  We have to make it clear that we expect better.  We have to expect better of our politicians and we have to expect better of ourselves.

The Martin Luther King weekend comes at a time when we as Christians and as Americans need his example.  Dr. King confronted horrible injustices and he did it inspired by the radical love of Christ.  He never stooped to violence even when violence was turned on him and his followers.  We know how he died but we are still inspired by how he lived.  We still repeat his dream to our children.

You may have already heard it this weekend - part or all of the speech Dr. King gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963.  You may well hear it again.  I like to think of it as American scripture.  Please bear with me as I read that familiar and visionary final passage:

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters, this is an invitation from a great American Christian saint.  Dream big.  Dream boldly and love fearlessly.  We can be the change we hope to see in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
January 9, 2011

         You are not your occupation.  You are not your achievements, you are not your failings, nor your health, wealth or status.  All these things are connected with you, but are not you, for you do not cease to exist when these things disappear.  Ultimately, who are you?...

         You are a unique manifestation of God, who is closer to you than you are to yourself.  This is the truth of your being, the glory and wonder of it.             ―Gerard W. Hughes, God of Compassion

Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 42:1-9
Matthew 3:13-17

Baptism and Ministry

In all four Gospels, the baptism of Jesus marks the beginning of his public ministry.  That is the biblical basis for the conviction our tradition holds that every baptized Christian has a vocation to ministry.  It is interesting that the one whom we recognize as the head of our church also submitted to the act of baptism under the authority of another human being, John the Baptist.  John was Jesus’ cousin, and almost exactly the same age.  Luke tells us that their mothers were expecting at the same time.  When Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth, John leapt for joy in his mother’s womb.

(Luke 1:41)

John preached repentance and baptized the people who came to hear him at the banks of the Jordan River.  John gathered disciples around him before Jesus began his own ministry.  Jesus went to John to be baptized, and all four Gospels tell of John testifying to Jesus’ unique mission and greater authority.   John was a rugged figure who fed himself on wild honey and locusts and wore camel hair and a leather belt, which is to say, his clothes were functional, minimal, not for comfort or style.  Some scholars speculate that John may have been an Essene, part of an extreme Jewish sect of men who lived an ascetic and celibate life in the desert, studying religious texts and preparing for an apocalyptic war.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were likely an Essene library, hidden in caves in clay jars.  They were discovered by an Arab shepherd boy in 1946.

In Matthew’s gospel, John protested before he would baptize Jesus, saying, “‘I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?’  But Jesus answered him ‘Let it be so for now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’  Then he consented.”  (Matthew 3:14-15)  All four Gospels portray John as the fulfillment of a prophesy from Isaiah.  John had come to prepare the way for the anointed heir to the Davidic throne.  As Isaiah wrote, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” (Isaiah 4:3)

John prepared the way for Jesus by predicting and proclaiming his coming.  He prepared Jesus for ministry by baptizing him.  The symbolism is somewhat confusing.  Baptism is a symbolic cleansing of sin, of which Jesus was innocent.  That had to be part of John’s confusion and his objection to baptizing Jesus.  “I need to be baptized by you,” he said.  But John was the right one to baptize Jesus as a kind of ordination to his ministry.  John had preceded Jesus into the ministry of preaching.  Soon he would precede Jesus to martyrdom. 

John attracted crowds who came out to the Jordan to be baptized and hear him preach repentance.   When he suspected Pharisees and Sadducees came out merely as insincere curiosity seekers, he confronted them and called them out.  John called them, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”  (Matthew 2:7-8)  Not only did John take on the religious establishment, but powerful political figures as well.  Herod arrested John and threw him in jail for saying that it was unlawful for Herod to take his brother Philip’s wife Herodias.  Herod wanted to kill John, but worried about John’s popularity among the people.  But when Herod promised to give Herodias’ daughter anything she asked after she danced for him, and made the offer in front of witnesses, he could not refuse when she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.  By then Jesus had already begun his own ministry.

Scripture records some interesting and glowing remarks Jesus made about John.  He once told a crowd, “I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John…”  (Luke 7:28)  Jesus once pointed out the irony in the way others spoke of John and himself, saying,   “For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by all her children.”  (Luke 7:33-35)

In Jerusalem during the final week of his ministry, Jesus referred to John when the priests tried to match wits with him and trip him up.   “…the chief priests and scribes, together with the elders, came up to him.  ‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things,’ they said. ‘Who gave you this authority?’

“He replied, ‘I will also ask you a question. Tell me: John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin?’

“They discussed it among themselves and said, ‘If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Why didn’t you believe him?’  But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us, because they are persuaded that John was a prophet.’

“So they answered, ‘We don’t know where it was from.’

“Jesus said, ‘Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.’”   (Luke 20:1-8)

Jesus’ comment comparing himself to John shows us how well Jesus understood the fickle and contradictory nature of public opinion.  He saw how John was criticized for fasting while he himself was condemned for feasting.  In his exchange with the priests and scribes, we see an atmosphere so over-heated and so toxic that there was no room to exchange ideas, but only attempts to entrap. 

Isn’t it interesting how short the careers of these two models of Christian ministry were.  We don’t know exactly how long John the Baptist’s ministry was, but it certainly came to an abrupt end.  Tradition generally holds that Jesus’ public ministry was about three years before he was arrested and crucified.  Of course, Jesus never promised his disciples a pension plan.  He called them to take up a cross and follow. (Matthew 10:38)

This is one of the great paradoxes of Christian life and ministry.  We are challenged to take risks and sacrifice as well as be good stewards and live the Abundant Life.  We are called to proclaim the Gospel, even in the face of persecution, but we are also called to create community that is reconciling and renewing.  Jesus did not shy away from controversy, but he was also a healer and blessed the peacemakers.  We talk about baptism as being the beginning of ministry, and baptism itself is a symbol of death and rebirth; the central symbol of Epiphany is new light.  Light breaks through the darkness as the darkest period of the year gives way to longer days and more light.

In this season of new life and new light, I can’t help reflecting on my time in the ministry.  There are definitely things that I wish I had done differently.  While I think it is important  to preach about the moral issues of our time that weigh on our hearts and minds, I think there are better ways than I often have done it.  I have been criticized by some for preaching too often on political issues; I have been criticized by others for not doing it enough.  Clearly there have been times when my own partisan sympathies have been far too apparent, whether or not I have made them explicit.  I have come to realize that is a misuse of the pulpit.  I do not want to be part of the political culture of noise that pervades our society.  You all have come here to worship when you could just as easily have stayed home and watched the Sunday morning news shows.  Besides, I don’t believe people are convinced by even the most skillful or articulate political argument.  We tend to accept things we hear that we already believe, and harden our positions in the face of contradictory arguments.

I do think it is at times necessary for us to reflect on pressing moral issues of our time, even when they have political dimensions.  But I believe we can and must do that in a manner that reflects our faith commitments not our political affiliations.   Paul said that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, (Galatians 3:27-28) so certainly the distinctions of Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian or independent are likewise irrelevant to our discipleship.  We are called to be in the world, not of it.  Our corner of the world is already way too polarized.  I want Second Church to be a safe place concerned with the work of healing and reconciliation.  I know that by now, my own partisan sympathies are probably no mystery to most of you, and I regret that.  There is a place for lively political discussion, but that place is in a diner, a coffee shop, not the sanctuary.  From now on, I will strive for a level of discourse that is relevant to the lives we live here and now informed by our rich Christian traditions, Scripture and the teachings of Jesus.   That is how I hope we can begin to make sense of a complicated and sometimes confusing life of competing demands.  I hope we are all here to discover together where God is calling us, and to rediscover that God is ever with us, in a world without end.  Amen. 

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
January 2, 2011

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.         ―William Wordsworth

Scripture Lessons
Sirach 24:1-12
John 1:10-18

                                           Word and Wisdom                                          

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)  Volumes could and likely have been written about that single sentence.  In it we find a complex and compelling articulation, by John, of a world-changing event.  John wrote about nothing less than the incarnation of the Divine in the real world in real time, God entering human history.  The Word John speaks of here is not merely the Word of God, as in the Holy Scripture, or the words of God.  John was quite specific in stating in the very first sentence of his Gospel, that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)  Those first three words of John’s Gospel repeat the first three words of the Torah, the first verse of Genesis: “In the beginning.”  (Genesis 1:1; John 1:1)  John does not merely leave it to a resonant echo, but is explicit about this connection.  The Word was integral to the work of creation.  “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  (John 1:3)

The way that Word (Logos in Greek) is used in the opening of the Gospel According to John is complicated and multifaceted.   John explicitly asserted the divine nature of Jesus Christ that reaches back to the creation of all things.  We could spend all morning unpacking the theological nuances of the first chapter of John, and the meaning of the word “Word” as John used it.   But I don’t want to overlook the miraculous and mystical qualities of the words we use every day.  I find words and language, written and spoken, utterly fascinating by what they can do and their innate power. 

If I say the word “cat” c-a-t, the chances are some vision of an animal, a mammal, maybe wild, maybe domestic springs into your mind.  Perhaps you think of one of the great predators, like a lion or a tiger.  If you have a cat at home, you may well think of that particular cat that is waiting for you in your home, napping contentedly in a warm patch of sunlight on the couch or the rug in your living room.  Even if you do not have a cat, if you were paying attention to that last sentence, you may have summoned the sight or sensation of warm sunlight coming through a window.  Words can evoke, perhaps provoke, us to draw on our experience and tap into our sensory memories. 

The spoken word is amazing enough, yet consider the written word.  It boggles my mind every time I think about it.  The fact that marks on a page, ordered lines, and curves, strokes of pen, pencil or brush can convey specific words made of specific sounds which convey specific meanings and experiences, describe concrete realities should always amaze us.  Written words recorded in a variety of media can convey our thoughts and ideas for centuries long after the gray matter that conceived them is dust.  Words contain and convey the very essence of creative energy.  We use them practically every waking moment and they swim in our minds when we sleep.  The Psalmist asked God,

            When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

            the moon and the stars that you have established;

            what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

            mortals that you care for them? 

            Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

            and crowned them with glory and honor;

            you have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

            you have put all things under their feet.

                                                                                          Psalm 8:3-6

That Psalm locates us beneath God’s heaven, a little lower than God, and places God’s creation beneath our feet.  That is a terrible and wonderful place to be.  Psalm 139 declared, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  John said, the Word was with God at creation and nothing was made without the Word.  Genesis tells us that the spirit of God moved over the formless void and spoke creation into existence, “God said ‘let there be light’ and there was light” and everything followed from there.  (Genesis 1:3) 

When Genesis describes the creation of humanity, we are told, “… God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.  Male and female he created them.”  (Genesis 1:27)  I firmly believe that it is in our ability to create language and use words that we reflect the image of God.  The use of the gender specific pronoun “he” is nothing but a distraction from the truth that God’s image resides in all of humanity, “male and female,” as Genesis says.

It always comes as a pleasant epiphany when I read biblical wisdom literature and am reminded that divine wisdom is personified as female.  For centuries we have spoken of God using only masculine pronouns and metaphors, while God’s wisdom has from ancient times been consistently personified as female in the Hebrew Bible.  One of the Hebrew names for God’s spirit, Shekinah, is feminine.  The Early Church iconography often portrayed the Holy Spirit as female.  The words of scripture, however inspired, were written by real people in a real place and time.   Naturally they would be conditioned by the cultural and historical context from which they came.  Yet miraculously, the glory of God that transcends the limits of human language and definitions comes thundering through.  We were created in the image of God, not some graven image.  And like the Word, Wisdom herself is eternal.  She was with God at the beginning of creation.  She states in Sirach, “Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be.” (Sirach 24:9) 

Words are powerful and creative and, like anything powerful, they can be misused to hurtful and destructive ends.  I am sure we have all said things we wished we had not.  The effect of ill-chosen words does easily go away.  They hang in the air.  They burn in the mind.  They can break your heart.  Think about the way words are used in political campaigns.  Words are used to confuse issues and manipulate emotions rather than to find clarity or reach understanding.  Think of the story of the Tower of Babel.  Human beings used their creative powers not to serve God’s purposes, but to glorify themselves, indeed to compete with God.  God confused their speech, limiting their use of words.  Yes, human beings are created in the image of God, but we are not God.  Too often, we misuse the gifts God has given us.  Words are used best when they are coupled with wisdom.

Words can be hurtful, but they can also heal, encourage and inspire.  The prophet Isaiah said, “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”  (Isaiah 50:4)  And the Israelites to whom Isaiah was speaking were exceedingly weary.  They had lived in exile for a generation.  They had seen their holy city and Temple destroyed by a foreign army.  At the time of this prophesy, they faced the prospect of crossing a wilderness and returning home to rebuild a ruined city.  They were weary and in need of sustenance.  Isaiah spoke sustaining words, and those words endure. 

We gather here on the second day of a new year.  This is the time when people make resolutions.  Why don’t we start by resolving to use our words wisely?  Let our utterances be godly, and let us listen with care to the things that are said to us.  Let us resolve to use the gifts God gives us, our minds and our mouth and our hearts to build understanding.  We can use our words to heal and create, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton, UCC
West Newton Massachusetts
Gregory Mobley
November 28, 2010

The story about Jesus’ healing of the daughter of the Lebanese woman is a beautiful puzzle. 

The conversation has three parts, and the women speaking to Jesus says three memorable things to Jesus.

                 Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David;
                 Lord, help me.
                 Yes, Lord, but even the dogs.

For several weeks prior to the events in Matthew 15, Jesus had been touring the countryside of Judea and Galilee and Palestine with his disciples. We need at least two pieces of background about this tour in order to understand this story.

First, the press conferences.

Everywhere Jesus went on this tour, there had been Pharisees, religious experts, guys that knew the Bible and the Mosaic law like the back of their hands, and they had been grilling Jesus. There are so many of these stories, and they have a pattern.

Jesus and his band are bouncing around stirring up healing and spontaneous love. The Pharisees find some picayune matter on which Jesus and company had committed a religious misdemeanor. Jesus gets the last word by fighting fire with fire, giving them a taste of their own medicine, quoting scripture back to them.

In one of these encounters, narrated in Matthew 9, Jesus and company are eating with tax collectors and sinners, male racketeers and females of dubious reputations. Jesus and company are getting a slice in the North End with the Italian guys. The Pharisees complain, why is he hanging out with dirty people. That’s not what righteous people do? Jesus responds to this by quoting a line from the prophet Hosea: “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” That shuts them up.

In another encounter, in Matthew 12, it’s the Sabbath and Jesus and his disciples are walking through a corn field. The disciples pluck some corn right off the stalk and shuck it and begin eating it. The Sabbath Police are right there, eager to issue a violation: you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath, and plucking and shucking is work. Jesus responds: on the Sabbath, the priests work in the Temple, right? and it isn’t a violation. That shuts them up.

In Matthew 15, one story before our text for today: The pious journalists say to Jesus, “Why aren’t your disciples keeping Kosher? Why don’t they wash their hands in the correct ritual way before they eat?” Jesus resorts to barnyard humor in his reply, in vs. 10, “It’s not what goes into a person that makes him or her unclean. It is what comes out of a person.” That shuts them up.

This kind of story is so common in the Gospels where someone tries to out-score Jesus, one-on-one, in a game of Bible baseball or Targum tennis.

This is the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Bill Parcells or Bill Belichick having fun with the reporters.

That’s one piece of essential background for our passage today: the pattern of stories in Matthew’s gospel where a religious expert quotes the law, and Jesus outpoints them with a response that shows he’s forgotten more scripture than they’ll ever know, AND that they have missed the point anyway: they have missed the living tender heart of the thing in their concrete, rules-oriented interpretation.

So save that for a minute.

The second piece of background that we need for our story in Matthew 15:21-28 is a series of events depicted in Matthew 14. Jesus needs a little break from the concert tour.  Jesus needs some privacy and space to be creative and reflective and to work some things out between him and the Father. You can’t change the world with action alone; because the energy that leads to healing is an energy emanating from who you are deep down inside.

So in Matthew 14, Jesus goes off by himself on a boat on the Sea of Galilee. There are crowds everywhere. Everybody needs something. Everyone is so busy with requests and pleas and brokenness: fix this; heal me; rescue me, help me find my lost pieces; mend me.  Jesus leaves them all behind and goes onto the sea in a boat.

But as soon as Jesus gets back to shore, he finds that even more people have gathered and they’re hungry. Jesus here teaches the disciples about resourcefulness: Okay, what have we got? 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread. Man, Jesus says, that’s enough to feed Coxey’s Army. The disciples’ incompetence is just one more need.

So much for Jesus going out on a boat. Next, Jesus says, you knuckleheads go out on a boat. And Jesus slips away to a mountain by himself. But when he returns to shore, Jesus sees that the waves are stirred up and the disciples are doing a Keystone Kops routine on the boat. So Jesus walks on the water out to them, “Now, what?”

So that’s the other piece of background: Jesus could use a break from solving everyone else’s problems. In the crazy mystery of being fully God and fully man, Jesus is at the limit of his humanity and could use some R and R.

Could that explain why Jesus at first refuses to help the Canaanite woman with the daughter that is ill?

She says, “Please heal my daughter.” And Jesus ignores her. The disciples come to Jesus and tell him, “Get rid of her; she’s wearing us out. She’s just one more stray that would go home with anyone who will pet her.”

So Jesus says—and this is the crazy thing—something that sounds like what the Pharisees would say at those press conferences: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. My job is to rescue them from danger. Sorry, lady, your problems are not my job.  Go find some Canaanite miracle worker. I don’t take walk-ins and you ain’t got an appointment.”

Then the woman kneels down and pleads, “Lord, help me.” So simple, so persistent, so economical and perfect in its honesty and sincerity. “Lord, help me.”

And Jesus still doesn’t get it. This time we can’t blame the disciples for interfering. Jesus says to her, without any urging, “I’ve got some food here, but it is for the children; I can’t give it to the dogs when the kids haven’t eaten yet.”

Wow. Jesus is saying that the Jews are God’s children, and that the Canaanites are, at best, God’s puppies. and Jesus is also putting up a sign that reads THE DOCTOR IS NOT IN.

There are two words in Greek for dogs; there is kuon and there is kunarion. Both are linguistic ancestors of a word we know, canine. A kuon is a street dog, a junkyard dog and field dog and pack dog and city dump dog. A kunarion is a domestic dog, a house dog, a lap dog, somebody’s pet.

Jesus uses kunarion here. You don’t feed the pet before the children have eaten. Nobody would feed a street dog; mangy, straggly, jackal-ly.

This is not what we expect Jesus to say. And why is he even getting into a debate with this woman. Keep it simple. But jesus is the one in this story who is feeding the set-up lines and the woman is the partner who gets the comeback, the zinger, the joke.

And the third time the woman speaks to Jesus, she doesn’t kneel or beg or grovel; instead she uses her God-given intelligence and cleverness to formulate a comeback:

“Yeah, but even the house dogs, the kunarions, get the table scraps.”

This is amazing. This is one of those press conference type of stories, but this time, Jesus

gets the first word and a Canaanite woman gets the last word. This is a reversal of the pattern of the stories, and our faith preserves this story of the day that the great teacher himself is in need of correction.

I wish we could see Jesus’ face.

Was he winking? Was he smiling? Was he burnt out? Was he serious?

This is one the greatest stories in the Bible. The day that a Canaanite woman taught Jesus, brought Jesus around to his best self.

Let’s make a couple of points and then get out of here, because it is a beautiful day.

I love this Canaanite woman with her outrageous commitment to get what she needs.  Not to get what she wants, but to get what she needs. She doesn’t back down. She is undefeatable. She ain’t leaving till she gets help for her daughter.

How far will we go for love’s sake? Will we go so far as to question God’s justice and patience and mercy?

Why not? Abraham did, Moses did, Job did. Jesus himself told a story about a woman who kept coming to a judge for a hearing and wouldn’t be put off. Finally she wore him down and he granted her request. Then Jesus said, “That’s what prayer is. If you know it’s for love, if you know it’s right, you can’t let go, you can’t give up.”

I love this Canaanite woman with her outrageous commitment to get what she needs.

And I love this Lord, this Son of Man and Son of God, who did not consider always being right and getting the last word as something he couldn’t let go of, but conceded the point, taking the form of a Pharisee, and allowed this woman to get what seemed like the last word, so that he could give the absolute last word,

“Woman, your faith is very big. Let it be done as you wish.”

Jesus, at the limit of his humanity, displayed his divinity. For love’s sake, Jesus did a lot of incredible things. For love’s sake, here, Jesus is moved to change his mind.

This story is a rare snapshot of Jesus when someone else is the hero of the story.

And every snapshot of Jesus is a picture of the invisible Creator who gave us minds and words and wills and wants our help in mending a broken world.

If you want God to be at God’s best, you need to bring your best.

“Gracious Lord.”

When we say that, we usually mean that God has given us life, that He hath made us and not we ourselves. That God is merciful and bounteous.

Here’s another form of God’s grace: the grace Jesus shows in this story to admit, in so many words, that he had gotten off course, and to graciously accept the nudge of this Canaanite woman that got him back on track. She didn’t know the Jewish law; she didn’t quote Hebrew scripture to him, but she knew the law of love, the law of a parent who would do anything for a sick daughter, and Jesus heard her and knew she was right.

I love this Canaanite woman with her outrageous commitment to get what she needs.

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