“Failure is/is not an Option”

January 25, 2008

3rd Sunday After Epiphany

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Bible reading:

Isaiah 9:1-2
There will be no gloom for those who were in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness--
on them light has shined.

Matthew 4:12-17
When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles--
the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.”

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Introduction
Talk about Blue Mondays.
Social psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall named last Monday, January 21
the most depressing day of the year.

The idea is in part that by this day
we realize once again we’re going to cave in
on those New Year’s resolutions.

The lap pool as been traded for the whirlpool,
according to the Frazz comic strip.
There’s room on the Stairmasters at the fitness center.

The strict new budget is already getting
fuzzy around the edges.

We may be tempted to beat ourselves up
about success and failure.
The road from new beginnings to success
is a “long and winding road.”

Also, by January 21, we may be haunted
by little flimsy pieces of paper that mysteriously
all have our credit card number and signature on them.
It turns out you actually have to pay those amounts
from a real bank account.

And all those long nights, cold days,
snow piling on snow to become ice.

I’m not sure it’s true.
It sounds true. Kind of true.
What kind of doctor is Dr. Cliff Arnall?
Certainly not a “doctor of love” is he?
A doctor of ice and snow?

Actually, he’s a psychologist who
specializes in seasonal disorders at
the University of Cardiff, Wales.

And he’s just trying to help us be aware of the situation
so that we can take steps to address all the depression
that’s in the atmosphere.

Monday was a cold, snowy day. I lit a fire a worked
in front of it all day. I went for a long walk to feel
the full wintry force of the day.
And then back into the warm and the fire.

It’s just another day. Can we find people or fires or funny stories
to carry us through seasons. Can we find medical help?;
there is such better medication for depression now.

In every case, it’s most often
more about relationships and good people
than it is about success.

And maybe we should catch a cheap ride to Australia, or New Zealand or Argentina.
It’s summertime there, my friends.
Phoenix is okay. But how about those warm lands Down Under?

A Great Light
Our lectionary, lining up with northern hemispheric weather
offers a text of light for this darkest season,
when it’s still cold and dark and Christmas is over.

The prophet Isaiah offers beautiful poetry:
“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness--
on them light has shined.”

Matthew paraphrases Isaiah to tell the story of Jesus:
“The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned.”

Matthew offers the very direct “region and shadow of death”
in place of “land of deep darkness.”
This is perhaps an echo of Psalm 23:
“Though I walk through the shadow of death.”
(cf. Luke 1:79)

A great light.
Here Matthew is just beginning to tell us about Jesus.
He’s just starting out, about to start gathering his
community - Peter, Andrew, James and John.
Some friends to walk around with.

But even now, the story is not just a walk in the sunlight.
Jesus’ cousin John, known as John the Baptist
is arrested.

The Greek word translated as “arrested”
can be also translated as “handed over.”
The same word is used three years later in the story,

when Judas “hands over” Jesus to the religious leaders.
The same word used to say Jesus is “handed over” to death.
(Mt. 20:18; Mt. 26:2)

There is some old ice and snow in the story of Jesus
already, even as he begins to form his community of love.
Already at the announcement of the great light,
shadows appear and begin their inexorable lengthening.

This is not going to be a simple story
of new beginnings and amazing success.

Failure is an option
Speaking of success,
we’ve all heard various versions of the statement:
Failure is not an option.
Not only dubious follow-through with New Year’s resolutions,
but developments in Iraq and with the economy
may call this into question.

The Onion humor magazine gives us the headine:
“Failure now an option”

Offering a “Washington” dateline, the fake news piece begins:
“In a stunning reversal of more than 200 years conventional wisdom, failure—traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals—is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success, sources confirmed Tuesday....
“Overturning one of America’s most cherished and oft-repeated aphorisms is expected to have far-reaching implications....
“Some predict that a majority of the U.S. populace will now opt out of its previous obligation to give it 110%, and, in the coming weeks and months, give as little as 45%.

Jesus withdraws
Matthew tells us that “Jesus withdrew to Galilee.”
Almost all the time, when Matthew says that Jesus “withdraws” somewhere,
it is in response to threat.

Jesus is picking his moment for confrontation
with the religious leaders. But before he decides it is time,
he withdraws - tactical withdrawals.

You don’t have to fight every battle
that everyone tries to draw you into.
Think about your own mission, your own
sense of life and love.
Choose your battles accordingly.

And so Jesus withdraws.
In the optimistic Protestant American mythology,
we just all need to buckle down, try harder,
and we’ll succeed.

There’s a bit of folk wisdom on plaques
around the Midwest, that reads:
“The harder I work; the luckier I get”.
Maybe. But not always.

Sometimes you just start out, and the shadows
are already growing.
Especially when the new endeavor involves great love.
Because that always involves transformation.
And that just won’t go unpunished by those
inexorable shadowy forces of the status quo.

Success cannot be the only playbook in such a reality.
We need to risk for the sake of love, whether or not
there will be success or failure.

Sometimes we need to risk withdrawal for a time,
so that our mission of love can stay alive.
Sometimes withdrawal is the greater part of wisdom.

Hidden failures
The Onion article continues:
“A recent Interior Department report found that, although failure was not officially an option until this Tuesday, there have in fact been hundreds of billions of cases of [failure] over the past two centuries....
“Many scholars now believe that such failures have historically been obscured by optimistic slogans and so-called positive thinking....”
“[With the publishing of this report] now Americans can choose, without fear of being ostracized by society, to quit long before getting ahead.
(my paraphrase of article) Other data seem to confirm the Interior Department’s findings. A recent CBS news.... poll revealed that: 64% of Americans are comfortable coming up just short; 43% try only once, rather than again and again; 95% admit that after falling down, they’ve sometimes just stayed down.
(paraphrase continues) Most affected will be sports figures, CEOs of large corporations, military commanders and anyone who typically begins a meeting with the resonant pronouncement of the word “Gentlemen....”
(Gentlemen, failure is not an option.)

The Kingdom has drawn near
Can you imagine Jesus saying to the disciples:
“Gentlemen, failure is not an option.
The Kingdom has drawn near....”

Jesus brave and visionary statement,
“The Kingdom has drawn near”,
was spoken in full awareness that this was no
the great light was no bright star of success.

When Jesus spoke, I imagine his voice
was full of love and also the cost of love.
Ultimately great love and great loss meet
at the end of Jesus’ life, three years after this
hopeful announcement of the Kingdom.

In Jesus’ story, Good Friday shows the cost of love.
Easter declares that nevertheless it is worth it;
nevertheless, some things go down into the very heart
of life and love, and we do those things regardless
of the prospect of success.

Paradoxa
History is so full of paradoxes that
the declaration “failure is not an option”
looks simply like wishful thinking
embedded in exclamatory bravado.

P. J. O’Rourke plays with statistics from the Millenial Edition of
Historical Statistics of the United States.

He notes a sure ways to lower voter turnout:
Hold a vote in which the fate of the nation is at stake.

For example, in the landmark contest between
John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson,
turnout was 55.2%.

Twelve years later, after Andrew Jackson
had both made his stamp on the country,
and stamped on much of the country,
there was the contest between
Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison.

There were no important issues at stake here.
Voter turnout leapt up to 77.5%.

In 1860, when a vote for or against Abraham Lincoln
was connected with whether or not the nation
joined a Civil War, the vote was 72.1%.

Sixteen years later, when the lead contender was
the inconsequential Rutherford B. Hayes, voting
jumped over 10 percentage points to 82.9%.
(P. J. O’Rourke, “I sing of fizzy fluid retention” The Atlantic 2007, p100f)

History has a way of curving ironically,
giving outcomes that are unexpected, paradoxical.

But there is some wonder and delight
in these paradoxes too.
Succeeding the way we expect is not the only way
to a good outcome.

James Surowiecki notes that Tata Motors of India,
in the news recently for a new small car they’re launching,
are close to buying Jaguar and Land Rover.

This is a noticeable trend - companies from the
developing world buying companies from the wealthy west.

In 2005, the Chinese computer company Lenovo
bought IBMs PC division. One resulting product,
the Lenovo ThinkPad, seems to be well-regarded.

Surowiecki ends his article:
“When we persuaded developing countries to open
their doors to us, we also opened our doors to them.
Now they’re walking through.

In the arena of church,
one of the most interesting and vibrant new
church movements is the Emergent or Emerging church movement.

This was a movement arising among moderate
and even conservative evangelical Christians.
But these folks have a lot of interest, among other things,
in Greek Orthodox ancient rituals.
And now one of the most interested groups
joining the Emerging or Emergent church movement
are mainline and liberal Protestants.

Times change, possibilities change,
the successes we set out to create often
become something very different.

One final example.
Ellen Goodman tells about a 36-year-old woman—
Maya Soetoro-Ng—
who describes herself as “half white, half Asian...a hybrid.”

She is a Buddhist, married to a
Chinese-Canadian, the mother of a 2-year-old,
and a woman who is so routinely identified
as a Latina that she learned Spanish.

Goodman notes that we are used to having more
more traditional definitions of race as a kind of “home”
where they have to take you if you go there.

But these racial realities are becoming gloriously mixed.
Maya Soetoro-Ng is being noticed because her brother
is running for president - Barak Obama.

What different possibilities arise.
It seems like the Spirit of God in history
is always creating the opportunity for something
newer and more different than the successes
for which we struggle.

Repent
Jesus declares his wonderful, winsome announcement
“The Kingdom of God has drawn near”
by which he meant the best standards of love and justice
and compassion and hope are now coming into our lives.

And he begins this statement, with that word “repent.”
It’s a word that’s been glazed over by countless evangelists
using fear and social manipulation
to get people to line up to some religious
sensibility or movement.

So it’s a hard word to hear with sense of being
an invitation to something fresh and new.
But that is surely what it was.

The Hebrew-speaking listener would have heard
in that word, the Hebrew word “shuv”
which does not mean feel guilty and get in line.

Rather it means “turn.” “Get a new direction.”
“Get a new direction and then act on it.”

Even in the midst of what one writer (NPR, Perry, KS??)
called the hopeless waste of “JanuFeb”
where January slowly and darkly crawls into still
cold and still dark February....

literally in the weather and calender,
metaphorically in our souls,
all of us in our injuries, challenges, and incompleteness,
and especially for all those who are impoverished
around the world due to current arrangements....

even in the midst of all that
“in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.”

It is not the light of buckling down and finishing
the New Year’s resolution.
It is not the light of “failure is not an option.”

Rather, it is that delightful meaning of “repent”
to turn toward the light of Christ,
to turn toward the love of Christ,

Jesus goes ahead and decides to live according
to the light of love,

knowing full well that there would be shadows,
there would be kick-back, there would be sheer danger,
there would be perverse results and even failure.

But he knew that the Spirit of God is always moving,
always creating wonder and delight
despite the limitations and cruelties of human life
the Spirit moves and moves, creating that Great Light,
that great love.

I invite you repent, to turn toward this love;
let nothing stand in the way of seeking the love of Christ:
that inclusive, world-embracing, eternal, community-making,
every-giving, generous, beautiful, healing,
out-pouring love,

from the heart of God’s universe
poured out to your heart.

Success or failure, it is worth the risk. It is worth it. It is worth it.

“Change- Moving Forward”

February 3rd, 2008

Last Sunday After Epiphany

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Annie Lengacher

 

 

A few Sundays ago, Vern asked us, “Do you want to change?” and stressed that there is a whole different level of change out there, the kind of change is universal and inclusive, the kind of change that is not just for amusement but truly real change. He discussed change through a parallel discussion about Devonian shale, and segued into discussing the societal categories of victim and oppressor. He focused on how these dichotomies create a culture in which everyone has some sort of miry bog they have waded through, to the point that the most privileged can reach for victimhood because it grants a hearing and standing place. He claimed that we need soul, the kind of soul that steps beyond the lock step of victims and oppressors to becoming change agents and who bear forward liberation and move into God’s future and into a new song.

You’ll notice that my sermon title eerily echoes Vern’s. I am not in anyway attempting to recreate Vern’s sermon, especially not the Devonian shale bit. However, if you were there this particular Sunday, the spiritual movement that occurred in this sanctuary was palpable. We do not live as a community disjointed from one Sunday to the next. Rather, although we are scattered Monday through Saturday, we carry the dialogue forward. And, so like any good change agent, we continue the conversation and keep it going even a few weeks later. In continuing the conversation about change in this Sunday’s sermon, we have the opportunity to keep the momentum and move into God’s future and into a new song.

How do we foster this type of soul that has unstoppable power and the kind of soul that moves ahead into God’s future? How do we really change in a way that has heart and passion and voice?

When we begin to break apart this kind of change, we notice that most social change theories begin at the individual level. Functionalist theorists like Pareto and Parsons uphold the concept that humans have basic needs and societies constantly adapt themselves to meet these needs. It is from our individual experiences that we form our beliefs about the world, how it works, what we experience as good and bad, right and wrong, the best candidate or the worst one.

Who we are becomes an inductive process, contained by the realm of our personal experience. We draw conclusions about our unpredictable world through our personal experience and act upon these conclusions. The actions that best meet our needs are the ones we value the most. It’s all fairly logical.

Therefore, as we consider real change, we consider the real, individual narrative. Our narratives, individual stories and experiences represent a vital piece of our felt needs for change. We do not have a concept of need that is outside of this individual narrative. We do not mobilize behind “our issue” simply by flipping a coin. We do not develop soul or passion for change out of thin air. Rather, we feel it, know it, breathe it at a deeper level. And it touches us out of our own needs –no matter where it falls–from needing to feel loved to needing a Chipotle burrito for lunch. We also develop soul out of recognizing which needs we do have met and how we experience these met needs as privilege, even the privileges we cannot readily see.

It is Transfiguration Sunday, which has served as my own personal catalyst for even talking about a topic like change. Our biblical narrative focuses on the Transfiguration of Jesus. The word transfiguration is defined as a large change in appearance or form or a change that exalts or glorifies. The word in the Greek text for Transfiguration is literally metamorphoomai or what we know as a “metamorphosis”. The meaning in our English dictionary does not differentiate greatly between the terms. The difference is nuanced, but the term metamorphosis, especially as we know in nature, focuses on the process of the change. From caterpillar to butterfly, how we look as we enter the cocoon is not the same as when we exit when we experience a metamorphosis.

Perhaps what is most striking is the fact that in this narrative, Jesus’ transfiguration or metamorphosis is marked by the presence of Moses and Elijah, a direct reference to Jesus’ work being in continuity with and an extension of the Hebrew Bible story. Jesus transfiguration is surrounded by markers of his own personal narrative. As a Jew, Moses and Elijah represent narrative figurestones –a foundation of who he is and where he has come from. They are are reminder of his soul and they are bearing to witness to his change.

To translate into our own Mennonite narrative soul, on a Mennonite mountain top we would probably see Menno Simons and Hans Denck. Maybe even our Sunday School teacher who taught us “Jesus Loves Me” or the youth pastor who told us never to hold hands in movie theaters. Or the youth pastor who told us never to even go to a movie. It might include the infamous bishop boards with disapproving looks or our parents singing to us at night. Whether they embody a positive or negative experience for us, they are part of this narrative of transfiguration.

In addition, Moses and Elijah were both prophets, initially rejected by their people, and advocates of the covenant and Torah -essentially the narrative of the Hebrew people. Their presence in the midst of Jesus’ metamorphosis is not coincidental. Rather, their soul power mirrors and points to Jesus’ own soul power. Jesus functioned as a prophetic voice who also was rejected and yet called for renewing the covenant and Torah, in a whole new way.

So, as we consider real change, we also consider our real narrative. It is a narrative that we carry into a cocoon. It is a narrative that is still there on the other side as a butterfly. Perhaps we look different, act different, and think different. However, in many ways, that soul power that is connected with our personal narrative, family narrative and people narrative is still inherent within us –still standing on a mountaintop with us through the change.

Jesus’ move for social change did not end with his mountaintop experience –his moment of transfiguration and illumination. In fact, at the bottom of the mountain, his work gained rather than lost momentum.

And so, hoow are our personal narratives influencing change –real change? Too often we stop with the, “And here is my story. It was at the top of the mountain and some things happened. The End.” It is with this “The End” that we can easily slide into the victim/oppressor dichotomy as the final statement of our story. Instead, it is within the metamorphosis that we have the space to say “I have been victimized” and “I have been oppressed” or even “I have harmed others” and “I have oppressed others.” In our narrative, we ask one another to “Hear my story. Acknowledge what I say.”

But afterward, what if there was no “the end”, rather there was an “and then what?” How does your story continue? How does it break forth, even catalyze, social change? How does it translate into movement that is full of soul and of soul power? To allow change to be real change in that transfiguring, metamorphazising way, we cannot be permitted to sit through lectures about global warming, seminars on white privilege, read articles about immigration, or break out sessions on poverty without being asked “and now what?”

My father is introverted and not overly expressive. If he has something to say, he will say it. If he does not have anything to say, he won’t. I once took a boyfriend home to meet him and he did just that. He told me that he could tell that they would have nothing of value to talk about, and so he didn’t say one word to the poor guy the whole time.

Anyway, my father has something he calls a “word bank”. His word bank is a daily capacity for having conversation before his introvertedness completely overtakes him. If I call him at 5am, he is quite chatty. If I call him at 7pm, he basically grunts at me.

When we do talk on the phone, however, he answers the phone as though we are already in conversation. It usually begins with a “well, Annie, you know…” and then he launches in a subject. There is never a “hello”.

He is a master of listening to my narratives. He will simply sit and listen to me ramble on. Finally, when I am finished and take a deep breath, he always interjects “hmmm…and then “well, keep moving forward.”

The first few times it irritated me, and yet he is part of my narrative, so I cannot just discount it. He would leave the “keep moving forward” on my voicemail messages too. No hello or goodbye. Just the opening, “well” and the closing “keep moving forward”.

Slowly, though, I noticed a pattern. Whenever we would talk, I would find myself recounting to him how my narrative had changed or what I had tried differently in various situations. Somehow the sign off, “keep moving forward” actually did what it said. My narrative was heard, acknowledged, empathized with. Only after he had showed me that he heard me would he give the “and so what now?.... and keep moving forward”.

There is a challenge for me in his words. I don’t have any clear advice from him. I don’t even have any path of clear change or a plan on how to get there. In fact, all I am left with is a simpering phrase from a man whose word bank is depleted. Yet, I do have the encouragement and the catalyst to link my narrative, to link my individual experience, into a larger movement of change and growth.

Looking at what moves us forward, what moves us toward personal, local and global change requires examining our narratives –again the ways that we have been victims and the ways we have oppressed, and allowing them to be catalysts instead of points that stymie us. At times, this may requires reframing our narrative, just as Jesus reframed his Jewish narrative in order to come down the mountain and work among Gentiles who experienced oppression.

Social change theorists note that change only occurs after we can reframe a social problem. Or on a personal level, when we are able to look at our narrative and see it in a more integrated way, a way that acknowledges hardship and challenge. This pushes us to move and think and function in a new way outside of categories and dichotomies.

For example, years ago when the seatbelt law was being passed, it was framed to society as a “government issue”. You can imagine how well that went. Later, the issue was reframed as a “family responsibility issue”. Soon, little kids, prompted by lessons in school, were asking their parents to buckle up. Seatbelt usage soared from 15% to 65%.

I recall using the same line on my father as a little girl. With doe-eyes, I would say, “Daddy, you need to put your seatbelt on.” I’m not sure if his use of the seatbelt soared from 15% to 65% but it did work a good portion of the time. Now, in my absence, there is the little light that dings at him on the dashboard to put on his seatbelt. For a man who has a limited word bank, he finds plenty of words when that sound and light come on. In all seriousness, though, a dinging light just doesn’t create the same level of felt need as his little girl. It is the same with us.

It is much easier to stay in a place of victimization rather than integration and action. And with that place of victimization, we can use it to justify our own rationale for oppression. In Vern’s sermon, he quoted Miroslav Volf, who said “Once upon a time, we were injured; once upon a time, we were made victims.” And this is the rationale for violence.

Paulo Freire too echoes the same sentiment when he writes in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, “but almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or sub oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” This is the dichotomy, the categories of victim and oppressor.

We are called to grow beyond that initial stage of struggle –to listen to one another’s stories. To acknowledge. We also look closely at ourselves the ways our own narratives have been heard but are now stuck and stagnant in limiting categories.

We look at the ways that our lives have not shifted from the “and then, and then, and then” to the “and then what?” We keep moving forward when we do not just hear lectures about global warming, seminars on white privilege, read articles about immigration, or break out sessions on poverty, but we allow ourselves to be affected by them.

At times it means that we act “as if” the change that we yearn for has already happened. For example, maybe we act “as if” gas was $5.00 a gallon before it really is. Or perhaps we act “as if” our child is sitting in the back seat asking us to buckle up. We act “as if” our needs are at stake until we feel it on a soul level and until it becomes habit –letting behavior influence our thinking for change. We keep moving forward, even when we are not sure completely where we are going. We end our narratives with questions rather than “the end”. We ask one another the hard questions –the “so what nows”?

FMC, let’s continue the conversation. Let’s act “as if” we don’t say hello and goodbye. Let’s act as though we pick up the phone on Sunday and keep it to our ear, carrying on a continued but scattered conversation from week to week. This is the kind of conversation where we can say to one another, “Well, here is my story and on and on and on (pause)…..and keep moving forward.”

“Reflections on: Turning, Releasing, and Growth”

February 10th, 2008

Last Sunday After Epiphany

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Rachel S. Gerber

 

 

Purpose: To invite the audience to see and name areas of barrenness or stagnant growth in their own life, in order that they might turn to God to allow God to cultivate and tend them, so fruit might grow.

“Barrenness.
No fruit.
Judgment.
Cut it down.”
Ouch.

These are difficult words to hear. It’s not the part of the Bible that I enjoy reading. Not at all. Actually, I’d prefer if they weren’t there in the first place. But they are. These scriptures, for me, create a picture of a harsh reality of toeing some incredibly narrow line of good behavior.

“Produce fruit.
Or be cut down.”

It’s the ultimate ultimatum. Bear fruit...or else. Turn to God (while you still can)...or be banished forever. The God in these scriptures takes the form of a vindictive, ax poised, macho God that is waiting with anticipation for one slight slip that will send us to the fire. Sort of like “Dominator” the freakishly huge gladiator on the new prime-time show, American Gladiators. It’s the picture of God that perhaps most of us grew up with–were scared with–and are now trying to heal from. And you may be saying to yourselves now, “Thank you Rachel, for reminding me. Someone, get her off that stage.”

Or is it?

You know, I still don’t like these texts very much. But I have to be honest, it does makes me stop and think. It causes me to take pause and consider where I am in the story. It challenges me to consider areas of barrenness and areas of growth in my own life.

And maybe that is a good thing.

The longer I sit...
and listen...
and wait...

the more I wonder if this scripture isn’t trying to say something else. Something deeper than what we see at face value. That perhaps this isn’t so much about works, about good deeds, about toeing that incredibly narrow line, so that our future eternal salvation can be secured; as it is about our present day life in the here and now. That it’s not about enacting the should’s and shouldn’t(s) as it is about God’s dreams for us to “Live Your Best Life.”

Maybe, Oprah wasn’t the first one to coin that phase.

For when we listen to these texts, it’s about all the potential the tree in the garden has. It’s not dead. Actually, it doesn’t even say that it is sick or diseased, or failing in any other way. It just wasn’t producing fruit. It wasn’t living at the fullness of what it was created to be. It was okay with living a partial dream. It was okay with holding onto the seemingly stagnant branches because, perhaps it just always had. It was easy. It was comfortable. It didn’t know anything different. Or perhaps it didn’t want to let go, for fear of disappointing someone else’s expectations. Refusing to release, for fear of the unknown. Would something emerge in its’ place? So, maybe the tree was desperately trying to produce fruit, but didn’t realize that holding on to the other stuff was getting in the way of living its dream.

This makes me consider my own state of affairs. What am I holding on to? What branches are in my life that I cling onto, refusing to release? Out of fear, out of comfort, out of refusing to change?

Perhaps our branches represent past hurts or pains that we did, or that someone did to us. Maybe we cling onto them because we are still angry, or we are afraid that if we let them go, it will happen again, or we are embarrassed and can’t forgive ourselves. So, we better keep that cover.

Or, perhaps our branches represent lies we tell ourselves. That we have to have it all together. That we have to be the best in everything or else we are a failure at life. But how is holding on to this, actually keeping us from experiencing life, true life, that encompasses both the good and the bad?

No matter what your branches represent, it’s true. We all have them. In each of us, we cling to things that prevent us from living at our potential, from bearing fruit in all seasons of life. And so, in these next few moments, as we enter into this introspective Lenten season, I invite you to consider what branches you have (hold up branch). How is holding onto this, actually keeping you from living life at the fullest? From living out God’s dreams for your life? As you consider this, if and when you feel ready, you are invited to come forward to this basket and place your branch here, as a symbol of releasing that which is holding you back, so that fruit might grow in seasons to come.

As we enter into this time, I want to read to you a portion from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Address that names our need for releasing well:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that almost frightens us.

We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?”
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightening about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us;
It’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

We release, not only for our sake, but for the sake of the world. We release so that fruit might bear abundantly, so that we might not only feed ourselves, but also feed others. And we feed others by allowing them to see us living fully out of the core of who we are–out of who God created us to be–and in turn, invite others to do the same.

So come, come when you are ready.

“Migrations: the Wind Blows Where it Chooses”

Lent 2 February 17, 2008

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Lenten theme
Maturing in the presence of God: Risk and Hope

Bible reading:
Genesis 12:1-4a (NRSV)
Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

John 3:1-9
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, 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.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’

(This sermon took a different direction away from Christopher Marlowe.
The original connection was, however, that Marlowe,
a playwright in the time of Shakespeare,
was dedicated to telling real stories,
instead of the idealized plays of the Middle Ages.
He remains the inspiration for the sermon.)

One church along Lowell Boulevard
had this seasonal wisdom on its message board:
“Lent is the season to fill life’s potholes.”

In other words, it’s time to get down to the truths of life;
time to address those holes we might otherwise ignore,
time to take care of business in reality,
not just in wishful thinking.

Time, I would like to emphasize this morning,
to live into stories of reality,
not made up or pretend stories.

So in Denver we live in view of the mountains,
and we have potholes.
When you hit a giant pothole, you stop thinking
about the beauty of the mountains;
you meditate on depths rather than heights.

Real stories for Lent.
Not just the stories that make good ad copy.
But more of a dedication to reality, for Lent.

In our Bible readings, Abram,
and let’s also add his wife Sarai to our attention,
feel the call of God to go to a
“land that I will show you.”

So they go, like others who have gone exploring,
like those who crossed the Bering Strait in ancient times
to populate the land mass now known as
North America and South America.

Or who even earlier left the cradle of northern Africa
to head into the deep woods of Europe,
or across the vast grassy plains of the steppes of Russia.
Some of these went south into China and south-east Asia.

Or who set out in small boats, moving from island to island
across impossible expanses of water
to settle Australia, Polynesia or Hawaii.

Or who trekked south and east from northern Africa
across the Veldt and Savanna,
some toward the Cape of Good Hope,
some over desert sands to the great Ganges.

So the human race spread from it’s Afro-Arab
root-lands into all the world.
Some have read this stories as holy migrations
or evil migrations.
For Lent, dedicated to reality,
let’s just say they were migrations.
Some better, some worse.

You may read more about this in
Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Diamond does a good job, I think,
better than most, at attempting to tell a real story,
not an idealized or ideological story of the human migrations.

So, in reality, and for this season of Lent, let us note that
it is unlikely that any of these movements
however ancient or aboriginal,
have been fully non-violent, or utopian,
or qualifying in any way as a “golden age”.

More recent migrations of peoples
have documented histories of slaughter, courage,
more slaughter, amazing navigational science,
and, this is the human race, more slaughter.
Think about the Moors, the Mongols, Christopher Columbus.

So Sarai and Abram go into the land of Canaan.
And there is armed struggle there as well,
and also great wisdom and faith and courage.
They receive new names there: Abraham; Sarah.

All of these migrations are what they are:
some more destructive, some more creative.
None pristine nor fully glorious, few utterly evil.

All mixed in that story that, for Lent,
we call “reality” rather than ideological
agenda or wishful thinking.

Reality may seem like a dull story. But if nothing else
think of all the violence perpetuated by those stories
of innocence versus evildoers.

The spin goes on and on.
Spinning idealized stories spins
again and again into violence.

More generally, it’s just a fog,
a fog of stories not really related to reality,
but serving only another side, confusing
our children, making our resolve the
unfortunate servant of half-truths.

The story of Abraham and Sarah is told for its own sake in Jewish congregations.
It is a great story of migration.

It is told as one of many great stories in Muslim congregations.
Abraham joins Moses and Jesus and others as
great prophets preceding Mohammad.

For the Christian faith,
this story is a cradle for the story of Jesus.
In our Bible reading for today, Jesus is talking
with a religious leader named Nicodemus.

Jesus utters what I think is one of the most signature statements
about his own approach to faith and therefore about
the Christian faith:

“The wind blows where it chooses,
and you hear the sound of it,
but you do not know where it
comes from or where it goes.
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The wind blows where it chooses.
The wind is the reality of the Holy Spirit.
Not the idealized stories of religion or politics.
Not “the way we have always done things.”
Not mythologies of a past golden age.

With this wind,
there is no hands-on-hips “kids these days”
because children have always been children
and adults have always been adults.

The wind of the Holy Spirit knows that
most stories of the good old days,
and other stories about how things have to be,
are largely attempts to keep things comfortable
for the comfortable.

But the wind blows where it chooses.
The wind is the trade winds of reality,
bringing reality, not wishful thinking, not “just so” tales
about evil enemies and righteous friends.

The wind of the Holy Spirit is no respecter
of national boundaries established by force of arms
and protected from undocumented migrating folks,
new Abrahams and Sarahs.

The wind of the Holy Spirit does not need anyone’s
necessary doctrines and belief systems.

The wind blows where it chooses.
It blows through families playing the Mennonite game,
and makes it hard to hear all those German names.
When the wind blows, some of the names start to sound
Scottish, or Indonesian, or Kenyan.

The wind blows through nations.
Migrants of good heart feel the wind at their backs.
Wall builders realize the wind will be a challenge.

The wind blows through religious traditions.
The wind lifts the hems of religious leaders,
and asks questions about who is excluded by religious belief and practice.

The wind of the Holy Spirit rustles the hair of warriors and politicians.
The wind blows around barrios and ghettos.
It sweeps down forgotten alleys and through sagging doorways
and dusty villages.

The wind blows with the sound “Who, who.”
Who is being hurt? Who are you protecting?
Who has died in bombing?

The wind caresses children as they sleepily ride
in cars to another day of school.

The wind lifts dust in the Middle-East
and rustles grass into water-like waves on the Great Plains
and the Russian steppes.

The wind swells water into great waves on pristine beaches,
and surfers rejoice while whales spout sparkling spray
into the wind over ocean.

The voice of the wind speaks to say
“This is my Father’s world.”
“This is the world I watch over like a mother hen
caring for her chicks.”

“In reality, is my world not beautiful?
I have made it beautiful, let nothing harm it.”

The voice of the wind speaks to saty
this is the world of the Holy Spirit
who always seeks God’s beautiful reality.

This is the Holy Spirit’s earthly order,
Who never ignores the poor,
or those who are violated by the current order
and Who always blows refreshing change for all.

The Holy Spirit who blows through our addictions
to the way things are and makes it possible for us
to live as real people dedicated to real lives,

not lives of the advertising spot
or the perfect cultural or religious story.

It may feel hard, it is surely difficult,
it surely involves acknowledgment of pain,
violence, exclusion,

to let oneself live in real stories,
instead of the made-up ones,
but what a wonderful way to live.

How wonderful to awake to the dawn
of a real story, a real getting down to business,
in a real world of God’s beauty, not idealized stories.

As Jesus said to Nicodemus, it’s like being born again.
That’s how different and new it feels,
to live in the winds of the reality of the Holy Spirit.

“Beyond Innocence toward Healing”

Lent 3 February 24, 2008

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Lenten theme
Maturing in the presence of God: Doubt and Struggle

Bible reading:
Exodus 17:1-7 (NRSV)
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarrelled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’ So Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’ Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarrelled and tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’

Our Lenten scholar for last week was Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies.
Our scholar for this week is the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf.
This sermon is inspired by his book Exclusion and Embrace:
A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

Lent is about growing up
Our theme for Lent this year
is one of the great themes traditionally honored at Lent:
how do we grow up in the Spirit of Christ?

We’ve come together through the lovely celebration of new beginnings
with the birth stories at Christmas time.

Next was Epiphany with it’s recognition
of the act of setting out on new beginnings:
new light in the darkness,

Jesus’ baptism, our baptism,
baptisms of all sorts into new commitments,
hopes, dreams, and actions.

We celebrated the memory of folks like Susan B. Anthony
and Martin Luther King, Jr. who risked to go, to get moving.
Annie reminded us of this again in her sermon,
with her father’s signature sign-off phrase
“Well, keep moving forward.”

And the trick to keep moving forward,
is to be available for growth.
We need to be willing to grow up.

When we are children, we are relatively innocent.
We commit the sins of childhood - breaking things,
lying to our parents, being mean to siblings or friends,

But when we become adults, we look back at childhood
as in some ways a simpler time. Even if it wasn’t good.
Our choices were more limited. We had limited power.
Therefore, we were relatively innocent.

Christmas is the feast of childhood,
the child of God, the new beginnings
full of hope and innocence.

Lent is now our opportunity to “keep moving forward”
into the adulthood of our faith.

Embracing adulthood means embracing the
power that we have, the complexity of the world,
embracing the capacity we have to take responsibility
for making our lives something that brings glory to God.

When I was younger, I always thought I might,
in effect, be given a “manual” to adulthood,
at age 21 or at least by age 25.

It would have tips on relationships, marriage,
parenting, the aging of the body, etc.
What I have discovered is that so much
of adulthood is improvising.

I thought my parents knew what they were doing.
My children thought we knew what we were doing.
But we discover that it is a complexity,
full of decisions and judgment calls.

Innocence
For Lent, we are invited to become adults.
One of the first things we need to learn
to be adults who follow in the way of Jesus’ peace,
is to give up abiding notions of innocence.

It is a commonplace of old crime movies
to have the sag-eyed gangster,
now captured and in “police custody”
(say with gangster accent)

to say this line:
“I’m innocent, I tells ya... Innocent!
I didn’t do it.”

We tend to be obsessed with innocence and guilt.
Look in almost any part of the newspaper,
which seems to often be the police report
in the first ten pages or so,

And you will see the language of guilt and innocence,
perpetration and victimization written throughout.

Of course, some of this is perhaps legitimate news,
matters of import to the entire metro area.
But a lot of it seems to me to be something
that’s really fun to read if you’re innocent
and you’re reading about someone else.

The German language has a word for taking pleasure
in someone else’s guilt: schadenfreude.
I think the first ten or so pages of the paper should
be designated S-1 through S-10
for the schadenfreude section.

But innocence and guilt are tricky categories.
They are somewhat useful.
It is critical to catch dangerous people
and keep them from harming others.

We think especially of those damaged souls
who prey upon children.

But innocence and guilt are tricky categories.
They can leave other people—
people reading about the criminals in the newspaper—
sometimes imagining they are innocent,
that they would never do horrible things.

But ask any German, whose nation has been studied closely
for the question of collective guilt.
Or ask any person who survived the slaughter of the civil
war between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Or the people who were assaulted, raped, and murdered
by their neighbors when Christians and Muslims
went to war in Serbia.

Over and over again, it is ordinary people,
when circumstances change, who become the
perpetrators of atrocity.

In other words, innocence and guilt are tricky.
People are guilty of doing things.
They need to stop. They may need to be stopped.
They need to apologize and make restitution.

People who weren’t guilty of that one, however,
are often guilty of the next one, so to speak.
So often it is more true than we know that
“there but for the circumstances of my life go I
And certainly “there but for the grace of God go I”

Reading the first ten or so pages of the paper
can feel like a fairly graceless act. The guilty
are caught or are being pursued.
The innocent are trying to catch them
or have been victimized
or are reading the paper.

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf
looks at the atrocities of Kosovo and others,
looks at accusations and retributions,
and writes:

These were mostly decent people, as decent as most of us tend to be. Many did not, strictly speaking, choose to plunder and burn, rape and torture, or secretly enjoy these. A dormant beast in them was awakened from its uneasy slumber. And not only in them. The motives of those who set to fight against the brutal aggressors were self-defense and justice. The beast in others, however, enraged the beast in them. The moral barriers holding it in check broke down and it went after revenge. In resisting evil, they were trapped by evil. ...C. G. Jung wrote, "It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts". Evil engenders evil, and like pyroclastic debris from the mouth of a volcano, it erupts out of aggressor and victim alike. (86, 87)

Only a dedication to a kind of adult humility
that refuses innocence can stand against this reality.

It is so tempting to want to be an innocent bystander.
I remember riding in the car as a child.
My parents were in charge.

I could lean back and look up at the stars
out of the great slanting window behind the back seat.
The tires clicked over seams in the highway.
And I was at peace.

That is a wonderful moment.
I could just sit and let others drive,
sit and have a look around.

How tempting it is to stay in that
mode of childhood as an adult.
How tempting to imagine myself an innocent
bystander to the world.

It’s someone else’s department or fault or responsibility
the administration, the poor, the rich,
those other religious people.

Other people who are not innocent like I am,
not as innocent. Because I like to think of myself
as a pretty good guy.

We need to maximize responsibility
and minimize blame - in itself a great Lenten message.
But little used. Little followed.
Often, folk just want to be innocent bystanders.

But our Lenten scholar Miroslav Volf notes that:
“From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty perpetrators and innocent victims. The closer we get, however, the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations, and brutalities, each reinforcing the other.” (81)

Or as the apostle Paul wrote in Romans
“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

This reinforces what last week’s Lenten scholar shows us
with great movements of people.
Migrations in history tend to be named good or evil.
But they are always deeply mixed.
No people was ever purely good or purely evil.

Freed slaves
One way to tell the story of the Hebrew slaves is this:
Finally the innocent Hebrew slaves
get out of evil Egypt.

They escape from the evils of hard labor and even murder.
Moses, their leader, barely escapes being killed at birth
by the evil Egyptians.

In the Disney version, the large-eyed people
with their round open faces,
escape the long-faced evil ones
whose eyes are always narrowed
as they ponder their next evil move.

The good Hebrews ride across the desert.
The Red Sea opens up dry before them.
They cross where pursuing Egyptian armies cannot follow them.

The poet Miriam sings a song of joy.
‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15)

We know who to love in this story and who to hate.
We love the open faced innocent Israelites
and hate the evildoers - the Egyptians.

But this is dangerous.
Miroslav Volf notes that
our innocence becomes our combat gear. (103)
We strap on the guns and exact vengeful justice,
like every Chuck Norris movie ever made.

It’s as satisfying as a cheeseburger with fries.
And also as destructive in the long run.

Volf says that we do need victim and oppressor categories;
we need to identify oppression and liberation and address it.
But we cannot lock ourselves into definitions
of ours or anyone else’s innocence.

Otherwise, we will make terrible war.
And we will just continue the spin of violence.

In our Bible story for today, what happens if we jump to a later scene?
God has triumphed gloriously over the Egyptians.
But now what?

Now the slaves who have escaped the horrors of Egypt
are thirsty. Water in the desert is scarce.

So they begin to complain bitterly to their leader, Moses.
They not only grieve and lament.
He fears they will kill him.

With the spiritual guidance of God,
Moses is able to find more water.
But he names the place Massah and Meribah,
meaning “testing” and “quarreling.”

These are mild-sounding translations for what Moses must have felt.
How about “blaming” and “threatening” and “rioting”?

The Hebrew people have escaped terrible victimization,
oppression, enslavement, at the hands of the Egyptians.
And it turns out, as it always does in every human story,
that they’re still capable of their own mayhem and violence.

If we jump to a later scene still,
We see these same people who later on,
when they enter the land of Canaan,
will make terrible war - they will kill
every child, woman, and man in Jericho and other cities.

A new way of life keeps trying to emerge.
The Israelites, trying to mature in the presence of God,
try to do better than their Egyptian captors.

They try to welcome stranger,
they try to limit debt so that people do not become
permanent slaves.

They try to restrict the violence of retaliation.
Their prophets cast forth visions of justice,
and not only justice but mercy,
and not only mercy but kindness.

Miroslav Volf says we must learn a different way
if we are going to do anything other than
making perpetual war.

Why, he asks, should we emphasize that “all have sinned”?
He writes: “What gain does recognition of solidarity in sin bring? ... It pricks the balloons of the self-righteousness of perpetrator and victim alike and protects all from perpetuating evil in the name of presumed goodness. Solidarity in sin underscores that no salvation can be expected from an approach that rests fundamentally on the moral assignment of blame and innocence. The question cannot be how to locate "innocence" ... and work our way toward it. Rather,

and here is the nub of the matter:
“the question is how to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence.” (84)

“How to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence?”

And that is the basis for next week’s sermon
which will be about repentance
and the sermon after that which will be about forgiveness.

My prayer is for maturity in the presence of God in the season of Lent. Amen.

For further reading:
Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, especially pp. 111-125

“Peace and Repentance for All”

Lent 4 March 2, 2008

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Bible reading:
1 Samuel 16:6-7 (NRSV)
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’

John 9:1-7
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

God’s perspective
Samuel is looking for a king for Israel.
Eliab, older brother of David, looks good, has good stature,
but Samuel is told, “No, God looks at things differently than
people usually do. Keep looking.

The story continues beyond the portion read this morning.
Jesse, the father, finally brings out David.
The account notes: Now [David] was ruddy,
and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.

The Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’
Ruddy, handsome, beautiful eyes.
Apparently qualities you want in a king.
(I’ve always thought ruddiness is an
especially good quality.)

The writer can’t resist noting
what a fine physical specimen David is,
even though that’s not really supposed to be what God notices.

In any case, the point is well-taken.
God didn’t choose the obvious older brother.
It turned out the unexpected youngest
had the kingly qualities.

The root of the word “repentance”, which is a word
I will now raise at this point in the sermon,
the root of this troublesome word,
is a Greek word that means “to turn.”

I have mentioned this not long ago in another sermon.
The word “metanoia” means to turn.
To repent means to turn.

Samuel “repents” of looking at the obvious older brother;
he “turns” to see the youngest, so that he can see as God sees.
Because God looks beyond; God does not see as we see.

John White
“The Lord does not see as mortals see.”
Take for example the question of race.
We could use a dose of God’s perspective
regarding skin color, in our culture.

So we have the story of John White,
told in the New Yorker by the
wonderful writer Calvin Trillin..
(The New Yorker “The Color of Blood” March 3, 2008, pp. 30-39)

It unfolds like so many teenage dramas.
John White, wife, and teenage son,
live in a prosperous, but mostly white suburb
on Long Island.

The son, Aaron, has friends white and black.
And more tenuous connections with other teens, of course.
The usual social mix.

At a party, the younger sister of a white acquaintance
claims she feels very threatened by Aaron’s
presence at the party.

The older brother asks a friend to ask Aaron to leave.
He does. But then the friend finds out that
the girl claims Aaron threatened to rape her.

This turns out to be completely untrue.
But it launches events, nevertheless.

The bouncer friend, who had asked Aaron to leave,
now drives over to Aaron’s house with some friends.
They’re going to rough him up or some
ill-defined plan.

Aaron freaks when he finds out the friends are coming,
tells his Dad, who meets the friends on the driveway
with a gun in hand.

A bit of a struggle, possibly a racial epithet or two,
the bouncer friend is shot, and he dies
on the way to the hospital.

What is the meaning of race in this story?
What matters in this story?

The African-American family of John White
lived in a suburb that was mostly white.
But this suburb also was real strong on
property rights and self-defense.

As Calvin Trillin puts it:
“...public opinion seemed muddled by the conflict between two underpinnings of life in Suffolk County—a devotion to the sanctity of private property, particularly one’s home, and an assumption that the owner of the property is white.” (34)

Aaron, John White’s son tended toward the “preppy” in style.
The boys who came to confront him were
Italian teens who lived for their cool cars.

Nobody involved had any criminal record or even
a reputation for meanness or particular racism.

And here’s the main thing. John White went to trial
and was convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter.
The prosecutor had asked for a murder conviction.
There is some sense that perception that John White
was protecting his home mitigated the sentence.

But on the other side of matters, African-American leaders
argued that if it had been a white father accidentally shooting
an African-American teen coming toward his house
in confrontational style, there would have been no trial.

Race matters in the story.
We don’t know exactly how it matters.
The players try to not have it matter,
African-Americans can live where they want.
The boys weren’t necessarily getting worked up over race.

But maybe they were. Or maybe it changed the intensity.
And it does seem like it wouldn’t have gone to trial at all
if the race of those involved had been reversed,
white protecting against black.

That sounds more normal, and the fact that it does,
means that race matters.

Just think of this statistic:
One 9th of black men aged 20 - 34 are behind bars in the U.S.
(Rocky Mountain News editorial, March 1, p. 28A)
One in 100 Americans are behind bars.
Race does seem to matter. We haven’t untied the racial knot yet.

And yet there is more than race going on in the story.
These were peaceful neighbors who had far more in common
than they had differences. Hard working, responsible,
wanting security and a good home.
And yet in conflict, race springs to the foreground.

Our Lenten theologian for today,
who continues to be Miroslav Volf from Croatia,
notes that most often it is race, faith, or nationality
that spring to the foreground in times of conflict. (15)

Regarding John White, how shall we as a culture
repent of the shape of this conflict.
How shall we turn?

Man born blind
In another story like the story of John White,
where people are in conflict that may have to do with
personal qualities, rather than just behavior,
there is the story of the man born blind.

Religious leaders, hoping to trip-up Jesus,
find a man who has been born blind, and ask Jesus:
“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus refuses the question,
and says neither one sinned. That’s not what’s going on here.

Jesus refuses to the let the man or his parents be reduced
to sinners, or to let the only issue be blindness.
He answers that this is a chance to show the glory of God,
which essentially means there’s a lot more going on here
than you think, and it’s a chance for great goodness.

Miroslav Volf notes brilliantly that:
“The stronger the conflict, the more the rich texture of the social world disappears and the stark exclusionary polarity emerges....” (99)

There always a lot to each one of us.
For myself: Mennonite jazz martial artist anglo nerd preacher and so on.
Think about the list of your attributes.
Some of them are more optional. All of them
are subject to interpretation.

It’s like the Watercourse Restaurant.
I went there numerous times, never realizing it
was a vegetarian restaurant.
The food was so good, the meat didn’t matter.

The point is, what we notice and what matters
are fluid, always changing, always being interpreted.
There’s always something more going on about each one of us.
There’s always that chance to see the glory of God.

That’s what God notices.
The past, the future, the choices, the struggles,
the weaknesses and the strengths.
That “rich texture” of the social world.

God would “turn our attention” so to speak
to this rich texture. This is repentance.
This is being able to see the glory of God.

Woman at the well
One final story, also a well-known Bible story:
The Woman at the Well.

A couple of her descriptors make her a marginal person.
Samaritan - living on the borders of Jewish society.
Woman - living as the second sex, among men.

These matter. They matter a lot.
But again, that’s not all that’s going on.
Jesus could have said, “Well, you’re a Samaritan
and a woman, so what can I say to you.
You have enough trouble already.”

But instead, he addressed her as if there was more going on
in her life than just Samaritan and Woman.
She was a person with a life.

And it was as life that wasn’t working that well for her.
And Jesus knows it. He says: “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”
They talk about history and theology,
about Jacob’s well, about the Messiah to come.

She is amazed. He has treated her as a real person
part of what Volf calls the “rich texture of the social world.”
She is not just a victim: Samaritan and Woman.

She is a person who has been addressed as a person.
She runs in amazement to tell her friends.

Jesus did not let her be an “innocent bystander.”
Jesus does not treat her as a victim, although
in several ways she surely is one.

He could have refused to say anything,
or given her a pass because she has troubles enough.
He could have pitied her.

Instead, he engages her, they talk, he treats her as what she is,
a person, a person with agency, someone who matters.
Someone who might turn, someone for whom
there surely is the glory of God.

Repentance
Repentance. It means to turn. To see the new view
from God’s point of view.
To see the glory of God.

And this is what this Samaritan woman does.
She literally turns; turns from her refreshing talk
with Jesus and goes back to the village
with some new tone in her voice;
new posture in her body.

Miroslav Volf notes, as I mentioned last week:
“From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty perpetrators and innocent victims....”
But only from a distance. Close up, he notes, we are woven together.
We are a part of each other.
We just like to imagine we’re not,
because we don’t know how to make room
for each other in our lives. (81)

But we are a part of each other.
Across lines of race. Lines of faith. Nationality.

We are a part of each other across the border between
Mexico and the United States.

We are a part of each other across the very old
but still open wound of racial division in this country,
still aching from the injury of slavery.

We are a part of each other across that clear and present
divide between Christian and Muslim;
a divide across which we now make war.

And the answer to that war is not simple.
It’s not something simple like “no blood for oil”
or “get out of Iraq now.”

But the answer does lie within the affirmation that
we are a part of each other.

I sat across the table from a delegation from Iraq on Friday,
leaders of neighborhood councils from Baghdad.
They said they were risking their lives to
come to the United States.

They said one can be killed to be seen shaking hands
with an American in the city of Baghdad.

But they came, and they shook my hand,
and clasped their hand to the heart
in their manner of greeting.

And they affirmed over and over again
their desire for peace, and rejection of the ways
of violence that have wracked their neighborhoods.

I know it is complicated. I know there is much
left unsaid. But I also wonder how I will answer them.
What is there to come from my side of the handshake?
What is my affirmation of peace?

Repentance. To turn. To turn.
There is something for all of us to do.
Will we turn? Can we turn away from the ways
of the way things always are
with race, faith, and nation?

Are we strapped with inevitabilities?
Or will we walk in the path of that one
who said about the man born blind:
this is a chance to show the glory of God?

Will we walk in the path of the one
who sent the woman running back
to her village amazed?

If we are going to seek real peace,
we must repent, we must turn.
We must reject the simplistic categories
and old patterns.

We must learn to see the way God sees.
Because God does not see the way we see.
God’s ways are never the ways of bound-up inevitability.

Back to the John White story:
How is it the “glory of God?”
How might it be “the glory of God?”
What are the opportunities there?

It is a classic tragedy, a clashing of teenage impetuousness
suddenly torched with the presence of guns, of memory of racial harm,
of sensibilities about home and family.

Jesus would say “who sinned?”
Maybe the unspoken line here is “everybody; everybody sinned.”
“Of course.”
But what we are about at this moment in time
as we move forward
is the glory of God.

What do we have to do to untie the knots named
race, faith, nation?
What inflicting of harm stopped?
What injury healed?

John’s White’s conviction for 2nd degree manslaughter
is currently on appeal.
What is the opportunity for the glory of God here?

When the prophet Samuel was looking for a king,
he was pretty sure the oldest son was the one:
Probably had all the markings, a strapping youth,
accustomed to the privileges of the eldest.

But God does not look at the same qualities.
God always notices more going on.
So the youngest is the one that turns out to be king material,
with all the qualities including
beautiful eyes and being “ruddy”,
however cool that quality is.

Samuel is surprised. So might we be,
when blindness turns to sight,
when Samaritans go running off in joy.

But when you repent - that is to say, when you turn,
you see from a new perspective.
Sometimes you are able to see “the glory of God.”

For further study:
Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (chapters 1 and 2)

“Shaping in Regressing”

March 16, 2008

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Annie Lengacher

 

 

There exists in the world of statistics a phenomenon called “regression toward the mean” or what is sometimes known as the “law of averages”, “things will even out” or “a good day will come along eventually even when everything is going downhill”. In the midst of a bad or good day, we often quote “regression toward the means” when we quip “it can’t possibly get worse (or better) than this!” In other words, extreme experiences tend to be balanced by less extreme ones.
In the world of statistics, this appears in the way that subjects with extremely high or low scores on any sort of testing will, purely for statistical reasons, have less extreme scores in either direction the next time they are tested.
The anthropologist Francis Galton tested this theory in comparing the average or mid-parent height as compared to their children’s heights. He found that when the mid-parent height was taller than mediocrity (by which he means the median), their children tend to be shorter than they and when mid-parents are shorter than mediocrity, their children tend to be taller than they. In addition, in other parts of his work he investigated geniuses in various fields and noted that their children, while typically gifted, were almost invariably closer to the average than their exceptional parents.
It is difficult to comprehend this phenomenon, but all around us we see this dynamic play out. Take our recent Hillary/Obama race. Would Hillary have won Ohio and Texas if Obama had not been sweeping all other primaries? Was it as simple as a regression of the mean between the two candidates? Or with the economic stimulus package refund or the adjustment of interest rates. Is this a form of regression of the mean? Hoping that infusing funds into our economy might be a form of balancing out our recession?
Take our own Carmello Anthony of the Denver Nuggets. His rookie year in 2004 was outstanding and beyond repetition. Sure enough, in 2005 his numbers dropped slightly from his stellar rookie season. Statistical analysts have long recognized the effect of regression to the mean in sports; they even have a special name for it: the "Sophomore Slump." It will be interesting to see how Troy Tulowitski does this year for our Colorado Rockies based on the regression toward the mean.
I like to think that this has valid application for our church attendance as well. If you come for 5 Sundays in a row, you just need to balance out and take a week or two or five off. So, no longer feel guilty for not going to church!
Extremes do not provide us a conducive culture in which we thrive and grow. We can, for only so long, overfunction or underfunction in highs and lows before we naturally drift into our own sense of median and middle. We seem to continually be in a state of adjustment and counter-adjustment, whether we consciously acknowledge this movement or not.
We are entering Holy Week, perhaps the highest point of the Christian calendar year. It is a time of heightened emotion, drama and passion in the story of Jesus’ life. It is Palm Sunday, the time when Jesus was acknowledged by the masses as the Son of David and as a prophet –a sort of high point in Jesus’ short career. I like to think that Jesus probably said while being jostled along on the back of his donkey as he looked out over the waves of support, “it can’t possibly get any better than this”. Well, and he was right. It didn’t get any better.
How is it really possible that a crowd full of acclamation and exultation could in one moment herald Jesus into Jerusalem with shouts of “Hosanna”, paving the way with their cloaks and palm branches, to virtually moments later yell “crucify him!”
Euphoria and accolades must have a point of balancing out. Likewise, it seems that the oppressive and restrictive conditions the masses faced during the life and time of Jesus needed to balance out through the message of hope and restitution that Jesus embodied.
The passion story is full of irony. Perhaps it is part of regressing toward the mean. Almost a way of the crowd balancing out their message in a polar opposite kind of way. It is at times through yelling “yeah” and then a “boo” in moments of fervor that we understand a new path toward what it means to settle into the median. Palm Sunday’s fervor cannot viably last through to Good Friday without balancing out. In the same way, the violence of Good Friday must balance out into the story of the Resurrection.
I spent a week with my youngest sister recently who just had her second child in addition to the one year old she already has. This is not an example of regression toward the mean. There is nothing stabilizing and balancing out about having two young infants in the same household at one time. However, throughout the week, I watched my one year old nephew through his own journey of regression, in the form a psychological regression. Freud coined regression as a defense mechanism when our egos temporarily revert into an earlier stage of development. Isaiah, my nephew, was in the throes of regression when I arrived due to the recent arrival of his new sister, Chloe.
His abject frustration over the fact that Chloe was occupying his space and his corner on undivided attention had completely upended his world. Suddenly crawling was just too much for him. He wanted to be carried. The pacifier that he never really latched on to as an infant suddenly became his most prized possession because Chloe had one. He began waking up earlier in the morning as though Chloe might be capturing even more time and attention while he was asleep. When Chloe started to cry, he found reason to offer his own voice into the hubbub. He began exhibiting patterns of separation anxiety, a behavior he had been outgrowing. Needless to say, I went there for a semi-vacation of sorts. I think I would have gotten more sleep had I stayed in Denver.
As I watched his own regression unfold, I was aware that he didn’t know what he was throwing a tantrum for or why he was crying. He knew enough that Chloe was crying which was reason enough to join in. The fact that Chloe was awake at night was also enough reason to wake up early as well. However, toward the end of the week, one afternoon while burping Chloe he crawled up next to me on the sofa and began to pat her on the back, imitating my movement. I smiled at his mimicry. It was as though he took a moment to balance himself out and actually try to act beyond his years. This glimpse out of his regression lasted momentarily before he then tried to pull her pacifier out of her mouth, but it was a glimpse of his movement toward balancing out. The latest report from my sister is that he is still carrying out his regression in full force.
When we consider maturing in the presence of God and the shape of God’s presence, how does regression facilitate a path of maturity and growth in God’s presence? Usually a connotation of falling back, moving back into a previous stage, the term regression does not seem parallel with growth and maturity. However, when we consider the concept of regression toward the mean, we have a new framework for what it means to balance out, to act and counter act, to be shaped through regression.
I like to think that Jesus’ ministry had to feel like a time of regression for him. He spent hours speaking in parables to crowds with puzzled faces. He spoke of concepts that appeared backwards and unorthodox to a group of people who didn’t understand. He interacted with the masses who would throw their heads back, much like Isaiah, and cry “yeah” and “boo” in almost the same breath. Even Jesus riding on the back of a donkey, instead of the usual stately steed of other kings, appears as close to regression as you can get.
However, perhaps it was his willingness to step into this regressed role that actually was a form of balancing out. Jesus’ step into being called king and prophet allows us to further step into the experience of what it meant for a king and prophet to be crucified on Good Friday. Without the height of Palm Sunday, would we have the low of Good Friday? Would my nephew Isaiah ever attempt to burp Chloe without first throwing a pretty good tantrum? Sometimes we find our own sense of middle ground through our experience of both ends.
In looking at how we mature in the presence of God, we seek that balancing out, that acting and counteracting in order to settle in the middle. During Holy Week we consciously journey not just through the high of Palm Sunday but experience the low of Good Friday, the settling feeling of death on Saturday, only to swing back into the high of Easter Sunday again. When we skip from Palm Sunday to Easter, we miss the natural regression toward the mean that Holy Week entails.
It is in stepping into this progression that we understand in a new way maturing in God’s presence. Maturing in the presence of God is negotiating these regressions with ease and grace. We notice that the extremes of experience in God’s presence occur –that there are Good Friday and Palm Sunday experiences in any given week. All the while, we trust that there will be a settling in time. Instead of throwing a good tantrum for weeks on end, we take a tentative step toward burping our little sister.
Most wise sages and timeless mystics across all faiths write that the more we mature in the presence of God, the less we experience extremes. We no longer perceive intense periods of God’s presence nor empty periods of God’s absence. We tend to settle into a median of kind of jostling along through the spiritual life, hitting a few bumps and some smooth passages, but it no longer upends us and sends us into one extreme or the other. Perhaps it is with a sense of maturity in the presence of God that we can bounce along on the back of a donkey knowing that “it can’t get any better than this” Yet in that moment we stay on the donkey’s back and in the middle of an emotion-filled, tenuous crowd.

As we move into this week of passion together, may we all saddle up for the ride, knowing that we will regress toward the means, and that our Easter journey, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday to Easter, bears us into a deeper maturity in the presence of God.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman referred to regression to the mean in his speech when he won the 2002 Bank of Sweden prize for economics.
“ I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, "On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don't tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case." This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. We measured the distances from the target and could see that those who had done best the first time had mostly deteriorated on their second try, and vice versa. But I knew that this demonstration would not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency. ”

Rachel S. Gerber

March 23, 2008

FMC

Easter Sunday Reflections

 

 

Agony and Pain.

Darkness and Death.

 

This is how we left the story of Jesus on Friday.  By all accounts and purposes it seemed over.  Darkness had overcome, roll the stone, seal the tomb.  End of story.  You know, life can often feel like Friday.  We can feel overwhelmed with work, with endless transitions, with sickness, with grief, with broken relationships, with jealousy, with despair from Duke being outsted from the NCAA Tourney killing our brackets...but in all seriousness, each of us carries our own agony and pain in deep and real ways. To a certain extent, we all live in Friday.  The world lives in Friday.

 

Many of you know, that Shawn and I will soon be leaving to move to Goshen, Indiana.  This decision of moving and making this huge transition for our family has ushered in a lot of long, dark nights.  The grief of saying goodbye to such a wonderful church community, great jobs, countless friends, and bright beautiful constant sunshine has left us with a feeling of deep sadness, coupled with the overwhelming feelings of all the unknowns that still lurk in the darkness: will our house sell, will we break even, will we find another one, how will Owen transition to a new place, will we make new friends, are we making the right decision? 

 

I recognize that your Friday nights might look very different from mine.  However, as we live within them no matter the circumstances they entail, it can seem long and dark, for sure. 

 

Yet the story isn’t over.  Agony and pain, darkness and death isn’t the final word.  For Jesus refused to allow Friday to define him.  Instead, there is a Sunday morning.  There is new life, new hope, a new dawn, for the stone that once sealed in the darkness has been rolled away, and is now empty!  From this, I take heart that no matter where I am in my journey–no matter how dark the night seems, no matter how desperate my situation becomes, I trust that there is a Sunday morning...somewhere.  I might not be there yet, you might not be there yet, this world might not be there yet, and that is okay.  I don’t want to belittle the pain that the darkness feels like, when in the midst of it.  But, I know, and cling to the promise that it just doesn’t end there.  Jesus has made a way through the deep, dark Friday night, to the promise of new light found on Sunday morning.  That Sunday is there, whether we can feel it currently or not.  And just as Jesus met Mary with the words, “Do not fear,” so too, we don’t have to fear the dark, because it isn’t the end.  

 

Likewise, I trust that as we move to Goshen, that there will be another church family for us to love, family and friends in which to reconnect with, and a new adventures to be had.  And, I take heart that Christ goes before us, leading us into this new chapter of life, even despite all the unknowns. 

And for you, I invite you to consider today what the promise of Sunday morning might look like, as you wait in the midst of your own Friday.  What dawn is awaiting you?  Welcoming you to a  new day?

 

For the gift of a new morning, and for Christ who has overcome all fear and darkness.

Alleluia!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meaning of the Resurrection

Annie Lengacher

March 23, 2008

Please do not reprint or use without permission

There is a story in Japanese Zen Buddhism about the sage, Fuke. It goes as follows.

 

One day at the street market Fuke was begging all to give him a robe. Everybody offered him one, but he did not want any of them. There was a master who bought a coffin, and when Fuke returned, said to him: "There, I had this robe made for you." Fuke shouldered the coffin, and went back to the street market, calling loudly: "Rinzai had this robe made for me! I am off to the East Gate to enter transformation" (to die)." The people of the market crowded after him, eager to look. Fuke said: "No, not today. Tomorrow, I shall go to the South Gate to enter transformation." And so for three days. Nobody believed it any longer. On the fourth day, and Fuke went alone outside the city walls, and laid himself into the coffin. He asked a traveler who chanced by to nail down the lid.

 

The news spread at once, and the people of the market rushed there. On opening the coffin, they found that the body had vanished, but from high up in the sky they heard the ring of his hand bell.

 

Another resurrection story from another religious tradition and this is not the only place this parallel appears. This is my theory. When similar themes show up in different religious traditions, it speaks to perhaps one of our basest needs as humans. In other words, we all, no matter where we locate ourselves religiously need a resurrection experience. We need that rolling away the stone, opening the coffin, that “wow, that’s amazing” moment.

 

As in the story of Fuke, he spoke again and again of his impending death to the point that no one believed him. It is a even more marked in story with Jesus. All throughout scripture the death of the Messiah has been alluded to. From Isaiah to the words from Jesus’ mouth, there were plenty of hints toward this event. Yet, there is a piece of the disciples, the Jewish people, even us that are still shocked and surprised. Maybe we grow weary of waiting and watching for it. We forget. Never thought it might happen. It is the spirituality of informed yet forgotten surprise.

 

It is the spirituality of surprise that echos, “How did that happen?” “Did I miss something?” or surely “I should have seen that coming?” It is like walking toward the tomb in shock still pondering the how, where, why and when of all that had transpired on Saturday.

 

It is from this place that perhaps we need the resurrection the most. The resurrection offers us answers to these questions in the form of surprise. Because,  in reality, there often aren’t really good and satisfying answers to these questions. Even the most seamless of theologies have few loopholes. It is in living into a spirituality of surprise, that somehow those loopholes don’t seem quite so large or discombobulating any longer.

 

 When we roll the stone away, it is with this same mentality that we can also say in a moment of resurrection freedom, hope and promise,  “Wow, how did that happen?” “Or that’s great, but I sure didn’t see that coming” or “Who knew that things could turn around like that?”. We catch a surprised glimpse of the remarkable, the beautiful, of what is hopeful.

                         

It is the resurrection that provides a sense of respite to our need to know and need to explain. It is the resurrection that allows us to somehow move from Saturday to Sunday, from a place of despair to one of hope, without always answering all the questions of how, where, why and when in order to make that leap. It is after the deepest of Saturdays that we need a glimpse of Sunday’s resurrection to keep us moving through the questions of shock to questions of resolution.

 

It is a simple meaning we can glean from the story of Jesus and this Japanese Zen Buddhist Koan. It doesn’t always line up. Whether climbing in a coffin, nailing it down, and opening it up empty or wrapping a body in cloth, laying it in a tomb and rolling the stone away to an empty space, we just don’t know. Does this diminish the story or the ability for us to be surprised and awed by an empty tomb?

 

We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t plan on Jesus resurrecting. Our questions remain unanswered and we only have more questions in response. Still, the end remains the same. We are left with the risen Christ offering us new life and hope, no questions asked. We are invited to celebrate and rejoice with faces of pleasant surprise, no questions asked. We are left with a sense of bells and chimes ringing around us, no questions asked.

 

To summarize,  As Kahlil Gibran writes in his work, “Religion”,

 

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, and that which is neither deed nor reflection, is a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul,

 

He continues,                           

And if you would know God is not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see God playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see God walking in the cloud, outstretching arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see God smiling in flowers, then rising and waving hands in trees.

 

It is Easter Sunday. Be surprised. Pick up your questions, go play with your children. Let your minds walk in the clouds, outstretch your arms toward the sun and spread your palms toward the rain. Smile at the flowers and raise your hands toward the trees. Be surprised. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What is Resurrection?”

March 21, 2008

Easter Sunday

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

© 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

Annie, Rachel, and Vern - shared sermon

Structure:

Bible reading

Hymn #267

Vs. 1

Annie

Vs. 2

Rachel

Vs. 3

Vern

Vss. 4-6

 

Lectionary Text for this Sunday       Matthew 28:1-10 (NRSV)

 

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” This is my message for you.’ So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.’

 

 

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

This is the rhetorical flourish of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins

            and I believe it is true.

 

Actually, belief has very little to do with it for me.

I perceive that it is true.

            I experience that it is true.

                        For me, there is evidence that it is true.

And it is the ordinary evidence of the five senses.

At least it starts there.

            “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” as the Psalm says. (34:8)

 

We live in a world where we taste the fresh-baked bread.

The fragrance of baking rises as microscopic particulates,

            landing on the postage-stamp sized organ near our sinuses.

                        Nerves fire, flashing electro-chemical signals

                                   to a brain so complex we are only beginning to map it.

 

And this is before we ever lift the bread to our mouths.

The bread, or the tortilla in Mexico, or the khubz or samoon in Iraq,

            or injera in Ethiopia, or roti or naan in India, or balep korkun in Tibet.

 

All those people; all that bread.

So of course it goes beyond the five senses.

            It goes inside that sensorium and explodes it

                        with expansive imagination and hope.

 

“I am the bread of life.”

said one who wished to teach all those people

            to love each other.

 

We live in an ordinary world that practically vibrates

with greater meaning, greater portent, greater hope.

            We live in a world charged with metaphors of

                        a spiritual greatness and hope

                                    that we only taste and sip in smallest portions.

 

We live in a world where bread is crushed grain that nourishes.

And bread is life. Not only literally, but metaphorically.

            A rose is a rose, but a rose is also love.

An eagle floats over the mountains;

it is the picture of healing and strength.

            The mountains are wrinkles in the earth’s crust

                        and their heights reach for eternity.

           

The full moon disappears behind the mountains in the morning

because the entire earth, the home of all human history,

            is spinning in the vault of velvet space,

           

 

lit by the hanging lamp of the sun,

one celestial brilliance among the host of stars

            that wheel and float in time and space out of mind.

 

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

 

We live in a world when the hand of a friend and loved one,

is the warmth of blood and neural synapses,

            and is also almost mysteriously a place

                        where life itself is enacted.

                        .

Please note most of all that none of this is wishful thinking.

It is not “what you should believe”

            or what is necessary to believe or think.

 

Rather it is simply the world of our senses,

the perfectly sensible world,

            opening up to it’s fuller dimensions,

                        opening up to it’s inner powers.

 

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

 

In our gospel story of the resurrection this morning,

an angel appears like a thunderbolt, like lightning,

            like something out of a mighty fantasy tale like Lord of the Rings

                        like a great white eagle flashing down from out of the sky.

 

It is an event, a surprise, something that just happens

beyond all hope or expectation, and the women react accordingly:

            It says: “they left the tomb with fear and joy.”

 

These were not people with their hands pressed together

just wishing the resurrection would occur.

            They were coming to see death,

                        and instead, they were surprised by life.

 

The message is that the resurrection is the way the world is,

not deathliness or hopelessness but resurrection,

 

The world is full of metaphors of the grandeur of God.

The world is full of evidence.

 

 

Of course, one must train one’s vision to see it;

one must undergo spiritual formation;

            undergo spiritual education; undergo the educare,

                        the drawing out of understanding.

 

Otherwise, we may be tempted to think that

death is the greatest thing going on,

            that death is the ultimate, the only sure thing.

 

Which does not mean that we avoid looking at suffering.

This does not mean we skate along on “just so” stories

            about how things will turn out right.

 

This does not mean that we fail to see the world

with the eyes of the poor and hungry, for whom the status quo

            is an ongoing and mind-numbing disaster.

 

In fact, quite the opposite.

Because of love, we dedicate ourselves ever more to see,

            to respond, to connect, and care with places of pain and loss.

 

It is precisely when the women come to the tomb,

come for the sake of love planning to see death,

            the destruction of their dreams,

                         it is precisely there that resurrection meets them.

 

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

If this is so, then all moves of our life,

            loss, suffering, tragedy, disaster,

                        are all caught up in something greater,

 

something beyond our hope or expectation.          

This may only be only a whisper for us,

            This may be something which we ourselves

                        may be too harmed to hope for.

                                    There are those in our human family who have no bread.

 

Notice that Jesus himself cried out as one forsaken,

and he did not raise himself

            by his personal hopefulness.

           

 

 

But even in this moment of grave harm,

which came to him because of his great love,

            the greater love of the universe came back,

                        came back like the tide that renews the shoreline

 

like the sun rising over the great plains,

like stars being born and born in the celestial furnaces

 

Resurrection is there in the obvious beauty of the world,

the fragrant bread, and also resurrection is still there

            despite all harm and hopelessness.

 

Appearing again and again among us.

May we be resurrection people,

            here, and in all the earth.

 

It is the way the world is, the way God intends it, made it.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

 

 

 

 

For further study:

Two poems as metaphors of resurrection:

 

“God’s grandeur”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:  the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And thought the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

 

THE ONSET

-Robert Frost

 

Always the same, when on a fated night

At last the gathered snow lets down as white

As may be in dark woods, and with a song

It shall not make again all winter long

Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,

I almost stumble looking up and round,

As one who overtaken by the end

Gives up his errand, and lets death descend

Upon him where he is, with nothing done

To evil, no important triumph won,

More than if life had never been begun.

 

Yet all the precedent is on my side:”

I know that winter death has never tried

The earth but it has failed:  the snow may heap

In long storms an undrifted four feet deep

As measured against maple, birch, and oak,

It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;

And I shall see the snow all go downhill

In water of slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake

And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.

Nothing will be left white but here a birch,

And there a clump of houses with a church.

 

“Quietness, Apology, and the Heart’s Capacity to Forgive”

June 8, 2008

Common Time: Forgiveness Series #1

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

© 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

                       

Bible reading:

 

Mt. 6:9-15 (NRSV)

 

9 "Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven,

     hallowed be your name.

10 Your kingdom come.

     Your will be done,

     on earth as it is in heaven.

11 Give us this day our daily bread.

12 And forgive us our debts,

     as we also have forgiven our debtors.

13 And do not bring us to the time of trial,

     but rescue us from the evil one.

14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 

 

Quietness

This sermon is in three parts:

            Quietness, apology, and heart’s capacity to forgive.

 

Quietness:

Think of all the noise of your week

            trucks roaring, phones ringing,

                        the television speaking and showing,

                                    a schedule full of events,

                                                children calling, obligations

                                                            and voices and needs and busyness.....

 

 

 

 

But at the base of our lives is a great silence.

            The noise is part of getting on with life,

                        but we need to return to the silence

                                    as our source and first condition.

 

Think of the silence of trees growing in the forest

            the almost-silence of gentle wind in the branches

                        of the quiet watching eyes of wild animals.

 

The quietness of rain falling in the flower garden,

            of the voice of the parent

                        reading to the child at bedtime.

 

Think of the vast silence of interstellar space,

            and of the almost-silence of the nurturing womb.

 

Silence is our first and foundational condition.

            Silence is the great matrix of the universe,

                        and the original condition of our souls.

 

This poem by Baron Wormser touches

            well on this sense of silence, I think.

                        Notice how the many things in the poem

                                    all come together to result in quietness.

 

“A Quiet Life”

(Baron Wormser, Scattered Chapters)

 

What a person desires in life

   is a properly boiled egg.

This isn't as easy as it seems.

There must be gas and a stove,

   the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,

   banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.

There must be a pot, the product of mines

   and furnaces and factories,

   of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,

   of women in kerchiefs and men with

   sweat-soaked hair.

Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies

   and God knows what causes it to happen.

There seems always too much or too little

   of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping

   stations, towers, tanks.

And salt-a miracle of the first order,

   the ace in any argument for God.

    Only God could have imagined from

   nothingness the pang of salt.

Political peace too. It should be quiet

   when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums

   knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are

   ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and

   take it out on you, no dictators

   posing as tribunes.

It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear

   the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type

   of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.

Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain

   that came from nowhere.

 

Sing “Blessed quietness” (WB #301, vs. 1) 

 

What does quietness have to do with forgiveness?

            Well, one of the conditions of this blessed quietness

                        is forgiveness.

 

Quietness is a gift, like freedom,

            which must be won and re-won.

 

But “noise” keeps slipping into our lives.

            Some of it, much of it, even, may be creative.

 

But a certain fund of noise

            comes from “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”

                        accident, disease, and disaster

 

and also the way

            “you always hurt the one you love

                        with a single word you don’t recall”

                                    as the old song went. (title - “You always hurt the one of you love”)

And not only the ones you love,

            but they way we fight our enemies sometimes

                        in ways that make it difficult to impossible

                                    to recover grace and relationship.

 

So we need forgiveness to address the noise.

            We need to forgive life for the slings and arrows

                        of outrageous fortune.

 

We need to forgive others for how we are hurt

            by our loved ones, by our enemies

                        and everybody who is kind of in-between.

 

We need to forgive to set ourselves

            free to be quiet, to let go of the anxious buzz

                        of remembered harm, and return

                                    to our quiet source and foundation.

 

Some call this becoming centered,

            or returning to your self

                        or, I think, sensing the presence of God.

 

What a person desires in life

   is a properly boiled egg.

This isn't as easy as it seems.

There must be gas and a stove, etc....

 

Political peace too. It should be quiet

   when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums

   knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are

   ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and

   take it out on you, no dictators

   posing as tribunes.

It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear

   the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type

   of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.

Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain

   that came from nowhere.

 

Sing “Blessed quietness” (WB #301, vs. 3)

 

Apology

Part 2 - the quietness of forgiveness

            involves learning to apologize well,

                        to take our responsibility for unnecessary noise.

 

Of course, we cause noise that we later regret.

            We speak the word that hurts the one we love.

                        We fight our enemies in “take no prisoners” mode.

 

And so one of the key steps in learning forgiveness

            is to apologize.

 

This is, of course, very open to manipulation and abuse.

            Demanding apologies is a power play

                        that is all too common.

                       

And sometimes it is time to not apologize

            but rather to forge ahead.

                        Going around saying “I’m sorry”

                                    to everybody all the time is surely out of balance.

 

But there is something wonderful about

            a good clean apology.

 

In her article

"Learning to Apologize", Rochelle Melander notes that in a good apology

            “we take responsibility for our failure—intended or not.

                        We say, “I’m sorry.” We do not qualify our apology by saying,

           

(And she lists these qualified apologies):

“I'm sorry...”

. . . if you thought I was trying to hurt you.”
 . . . if you took offense at what I said.”
 . . . if you felt that way.”
 . . . if you heard me say that.”

 

 

 

 

She notes that, “when we qualify our apology,

            we avoid taking responsibility,

                        and we demean the other person.

                                    It’s as if we are saying,

                                               

“Well I had no hand in this hurt. I’m sorry you . . .”

. . . are so sensitive.”
 . . . expect so much.”
 . . . misunderstood.”
 . . . are confused.”
 . . . don’t hear well.”

 

She notes that “apologies do not need a lot of words.

            The best apology is a simple, “I’m sorry.”

                        (Alban Institute article 6-08)

 

 

The heart’s capacity to forgive

Part 3: the quietness of forgiveness begins with ourselves.

            We must learn to forgive ourselves.

 

Our Bible text for today is Jesus’

            instructions about how to pray.

 

And clearly one of the critical issues for Jesus

            is the question of forgiveness.

 

We must forgive in order to be forgiven.

            This sounds like a legal requirement.

                        God will not forgive unless you do.

 

There are many other passages that say

            you must forgive as you have been forgiven,

                        and you won’t be forgiven unless you forgive.

 

Now make no mistake. There is iron in this.

            Forgiveness is something we might fail to do.

                        We might need a forceful reminder.

 

But the heart of the matter is something else, I think.

            Namely, that we cannot experience the blessing

                        of forgiveness unless we learn to forgive.

 

Unless we learn to forgive, however imperfectly,

            however partial is our forgiveness,

                        we will not experience the blessing,

                                    the freedom, the joy, the quietness

                                                that comes with forgiveness.

 

Another way to say what is said in the Bible is this:

            God would like to forgive, is always trying to forgive us,

                        has already forgiven us.

 

But we just can’t connect with that forgiveness

            unless we walk the path too. So we must forgive.

                        Either we walk the path and get the experience

                                    or we don’t.

 

And it is more than a truism or old saying

            to say that we must forgive ourselves first,

                        or at least forgive ourselves as we also practice

                                    forgiveness with others.      

 

We all are the walking wounded, full of sorrow.

            We all walk around with anger.

                        We all walk with a deep sense of shame.

 

These situations must be addressed for us

            to find the quietness of forgiveness.

 

In her book Eat, Pray, Love,

            Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her discovery

                        that her heart had the capacity to confront

                                    her sorrow, her anger, even her shame. (p. 327)

 

She was on a silent retreat on an island in Indonesia.

            On the 9^th day of her silence

                        she realized that a moment had arrived

                                    for her to address her sorrow.

 

One by one, she identified instances of sadness, of sorrow.

            With each one she acknowledged its existence

                        and the horrible pain associated with it.

           

And then to each one, she said

            “It’s OK. I love you. I accept you.

                        Come into my heart now. It’s over.”

           

And then she would say “Next?”

            and the next grief would surface.

 

So this went. But then there was something else: her anger.

            And so again, she let each instance of anger be,

                        and she felt the injustice, betrayal, loss, and rage of each.

 

And then she would say to each

            “Come into my heart now. You can rest there.

                        It’s safe now. It’s over. I love you.”

 

She said she swung between a bone rattling moment

            as she felt the anger again, and then a coolness

                        as if each anger came into her heart’s door,

                                    laid itself down, and curled up by the others.

 

So this went. But then there was something more,

            the most difficult for her - her shame.

                        Things she had done, regrets, embarrassments.

                                    examples of selfishness, jealousy, and arrogance.

 

And so she addressed these as well, saying “show me your worst.”

            And she invited them into the door of her heart as well.

                        But these most of all resisted, saying

                                    “No—you don’t want me in there....

                                                Don’t you know what I did?”

 

But she nevertheless answered,

            “I do want you. Even you. I do.

                        Even you are welcome here. It’s OK.

                                    You are forgiven. You are a part of me.

                                                You can rest now. It’s over.”

And in the end, she says that she looked at her heart

            and she saw it’s capacity.

                        And she saw that it wasn’t nearly full. (p. 328)

 

Even with all the sorrow, and anger, and shame,

            there was still plenty of room.

 

And then she thought, this is how God loves us

            and receives us.

 

And if our hearts have this much capacity,

            what is the capacity of the heart of God?

                        What is the great spaciousness of God’s heart

 

to address and forgive our sorrow, anger, and shame....

            God with eternal compassion.

 

David Bentley Hart says that

            “...evil, which is finitude itself,... must pass away;

                        confronted by the infinite in Christ, it cannot persist.”

                                    (The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 206)

 

God’s infinite heart is like the

            vast quietness of interstellar space.

                        It is like the quietness of the womb.

 

It is our first and most foundational situation.

            and we may return to it again and again,

                        we need to return to it again and again

                                    by the pathways of forgiveness. Amen.

“Forgiveness, A New Dynamic”

June 15, 2008

Common Time: Forgiveness Series #2

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, David North

 

 

Prologue: First of all, Happy Fathers Day to all the Fathers. I am the Father of two small boys, Coen and Lewis, which qualifies me to give you advice on… absolutely nothing, because I have no idea what I am doing. I can give advice on rough-housing, teasing and why you should never, ever give a toddler an ice cube, even a small one. So if you have questions regarding these topics let me know; all other questions regarding child rearing should be directed to my partner Karyn. The other disclaimer before we get started this morning is that I am an experiential learner and my sermons reflect this. I can’t explain esoteric ideas that I don’t have direct experiential knowledge of. In a recent meeting Vern was talking of the importance of keeping up with thinkers and theologians of the day to makes sure that, as a preacher, he remains grounded with a strong theological foundation. I, as a lay person, am not necessarily bound by this tenet. So the sky is the limit this morning; personal experiences with no theological basis. I may need to ask for forgiveness at the end

God is Dead: One day the Zen master Lin Chi is approached by one of his monks. This monk excitedly tells him how he had just met the Buddha. Much to the monk’s surprise and dismay Lin Chi tells him “then you must kill the Buddha”. The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed, he will only stand in the way of your Enlightenment.

The song Amazing Grace has that line “…that saved a wretch like me”, and that phrase is a powerful memory of my youth. Without God’s grace I am nothing but a wretch. It’s a difficult feeling to get past, this wretchedness. An important part of my spiritual journey has been to throw off the shackles of worthlessness. I had to kill this God of my youth and it happened on a motorcycle ride to college along I85 between Chicago and Goshen. God was resurrected some 12 years later after a series of discussions I had with a good friend in a life that was about as far from my American reality as I could get. That is when I saw God emerge from God’s hiding place. And where was God hiding? For me, God was hiding in plain sight. I have tried to take Lin Chi’s advice and continue to sacrifice the God of my youth on the altar of my fear. God never changes but my perceptions do and I have to adjust my perspective as God reveals God’s self to me more fully.

There is a story that we all tell ourselves; the story of who we are, who God is, what motivates us and others, and on and on this story goes. The trouble starts when our stories collide. We experience the same event; I see it one way and you, another. Some see a tax increase as a way to help our failing schools; others see it as money which could be better spent on their own needs. Some see a war of liberation; others see a war of lies, deceit and destruction. It all depends on what your story of the role of government or your story of the role of peace and justice in society. Some times our stories run smack into the mystery of God and for a while our story can be bent and shaped and molded to fit; a square peg in a round hole. It is at this point that we realize that our stories of God fall inadequately short and have to be re-written or completely abandoned. I share all of this because Forgiveness is one of those words whose meaning God has had to reveal to me again and again.

My spiritual journey has taught me the importance of “the question”. There are ideas that are so confounding that I cannot even pose a question that encompasses it. During my high school days what I was taught I believed. Slowly at first, but then very quickly this faith built on a foundation of sand gave way and I found the waves of doubt lapping at the door, soon I was adrift in a sea of questions. Where does God live? Am I a Wretch? Is there a Heaven and Hell? Is there a way to avoid eternal damnation without believing the things that I couldn’t? Is there a “Book of Life?” What I didn’t realize at the time was that I hadn’t discovered “the question”; the question that defined my search. The questions that I was asking myself were questions that were posed in attempt to throw God a life preserver. It was during this series of discussions with my Peace Corps friend and my reading of two books The Tao of Physics and The Alchemist that I finally was able to give voice to my question. And at the moment I voiced “the question” God showed God’s self to me and said “Finally”, to which I replied “My heart always knew that I would find you here, hiding in plain sight”.

“Who is God?” This question always lead me in the direction of God as a person. Bishop John Shelby Spong sums up my dilemma this way; “If horses have a God their God looks like a horse.” That wasn’t my question. “Is there a God?” this question wasn’t working either, because I felt that there was. “What is God?” That was it. There was no “who” for me to discover instead, “what”. I suddenly recognized that there is a part of God in everything in the Universe; everything seen and everything unseen; Flora, Fauna, my friends, my enemies; God is in everything and everyone. Over a weekend God had been resurrected. This of course, is my own question and everyone has their own, personal question that will provide their own personal answer.

Forgiveness, A New Dynamic: In my youth I believed that the path to Forgiveness lay through, first of all repentance, and after a sufficient amount of repentance I would receive redemption. Early on in puberty I found that having significant facial hair was a blessing in disguise. I could walk into a liquor store, even at 18, and buy alcohol. Not that drinking has ever been a struggle of mine; I could just buy if I wanted to. Now being a good MYFer this “gift” was a source of guilt as well, this and my Kiss records. I spent many prayer sessions repenting of my backsliding and promising to do better in the future. As far as my Kiss records; I had pangs of guilt but I always skipped the Campus Crusade meetings when they lit the album burning bonfire so that we could incinerate our way to heaven. My goal was to be right again with the Lord. As if through some force of will I could create redemption for myself. Back then, being able to buy alcohol didn’t seem to be a big deal but the Church and the State of Illinois, saw it a bit differently. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that it was morally wrong I just couldn’t get my repentance to stick.

My perception of Forgiveness has changed over time and I now see that it is the experience of redemption that allows us to finally repent and ask for forgiveness or to forgive, not visa versa. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, and writer explains: “First you experience God’s saving love, and that’s what gives you the power for true repentance”. “Not our love for God, but God’s love for us” (1 John 4:10) Seeing God’s presence in conflict is the place where redemption starts and it is at that moment, when you see God hiding in plain sight, that the light bulb goes on. You feel it as soon as it happens and realize that forgiveness was always there, all you needed to do was ask. Now is the time for true repentance. Before the recognition of God it is just an “I’m sorry” but when you have seen God in the situation and recognize God’s face it becomes asking for and receiving forgiveness. God says, “Finally”, and I reply, “I always knew that I would find you here”.

Free-range God: There was change in the wind. No one knew exactly what was coming; only that is was drawing inevitably closer. If there is one thing that I know for sure about God it is that God is claustrophobic. God hates confined spaces. God has to have the wind in God’s hair and the grass beneath God’s feet. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that both Muhammad and Jesus had their ministries at a similar time in history. God had been feeling particularly penned in and needed to shake things up. The last time God had been feeling this way God revealed God’s self to a group of rag-tag nomads. It was out of these most unlikely wanderers that God created the nation of Israel. They paint a beautiful and disturbing picture of who God was. A God whom I have trouble relating to but just the God that was needed in a land of warring tribes to lead them out of bondage and into the promised land. And so, again, God was feeling God’s oats.

In the beginning there was God and God was a petulant teenager; often unreasonable, quick to anger, jealous, spiteful, full of bloodlust. God would just as soon smite you as give you the time of day. This is the God of a pre-modern time. I picture the movie Gladiator when I think of the God of the Old Testament. It’s kill or be killed. Superstition has yet to be supplanted by science and loyalty means everything. Jesus arrives during Rome’s golden age: Science, Mathematics, Government, and Philosophy. The winds were blowing and God was feeling antsy, God needed a change. Jesus sees something of God that no one before him had or maybe it was God revealing God’s self to Jesus. In either case Christianity sprang out of this redefinition. A fresh start, a blank slate on which we could…totally screw everything up. Because that is what religions are best at; they take the beautiful idea of Emmanuel “God is with us” and twist it into “God is for us”. Jesus redefined God for an entire civilization. It was hard enough for me just to do it for myself, I cannot imagine taking on that project for the world.

Jesus, for the first time, defines God’s never-ending forgiveness and challenges us to do the same. 70x7, that is how many times Jesus expects us to forgive another. Of course there are times when forgiving one time seems like too much: rape, murder, child abuse. Forgiveness for a misunderstanding that needs reconciling is one thing but how to forgive after a tragedy is on another scale. On the weekend of my graduation from Goshen College one of my cousins and his best friend were killed by a drunk driver. I know very little of the process that my Aunt and Uncle went through to forgive or if they even have 20 years later. I can’t imagine the long road that they had to travel to get from the phone call to a place of forgiveness. Without experiencing God in some profound way during times like this it would be hard to reconcile your new story with the one that you had assumed you would have. Keeping your story in tact would be next to impossible: Your story of God, your story of you, your family, why there is evil in the world; all of it in the trash. My God, why have you forsaken me! Where is God hiding and how will I find God?

I am torn, torn between the Old Testament God who demands “an eye for any eye and a tooth for a tooth” and the God that Jesus reveals; a God who commands us to “love your neighbor as your self and pray for those that persecute you”. As patriotic Americans we want a God who can stand up for himself and separate the wheat from the chaff, not a God of love and forgiveness. Don’t get me wrong, love and forgiveness are great during the good times, but when our national security is threatened by “them” or when someone hurts us, it’s time for the God of the Old Testament to take over, right? With the God of the Old Testament you know where you stand; you’re in or you’re out; you’re favored or you’re not; you’re on your way to the land of milk and honey or you’re wondering in the desert for 40 years. Jesus’ God is all about forgiveness and who needs that in this time of crisis? In an ironic way the God of the Old Testament is safer. We can live through our egos to be good little religious boys and girls with a powerful God as our father. In a love relationship, like the one we have with the God of the New Testament we cannot hide. We truly are naked.
Again Rohr: “Humans do not want a God of love, because a lover always makes demands. That is the very
nature of love and humanity doesn’t want it. We seek to hide from it and destroy it. So people sought to
destroy Jesus, brother to creation. The people did not want relationship; they wanted religion.
Humans do not want love relationships; we want religion and all its trappings because that is much more comfortable. A love relationship continues to challenge and make demands. It also offers a joy that we cannot tolerate: too near, too lavish, too spacious. What might we do with such freedom?”

Where do we go from here: How is God challenging us today here at First Mennonite Church? How much easier is it to come and be comfortable rather than allow God to continuously reveal God’s self to us in new, exciting and challenging ways. There are so many issues that we are facing: new staff, building projects and budget concerns. We will be tempted to retreat into the comfortable notions of ourselves, this community, and God. It will take real work to care for each other and participate in deep listening. It will take real work to seek God’s face and make room for redemption, repentance and forgiveness.

While Karyn and I lived in Vanuatu during our Peace Corps assignment another volunteer couple told us the story of a young girl who was walking along the sidewalk with an ice-cream cone she had just purchased. As she was about to take the first delicious lick a mini-van bus pulled up. The person in the passenger seat of this minivan leaned out of the window and asked for her cone. Not a “hey, can I have a lick?” kind of request but more of an “I’ll take that, thank you very much.” She walked over to the van and without hesitation, as the story goes, handed over her cone. As his head disappeared through the window, licking the cone, the van left the girl standing at the curb. The Peace Corps volunteers who witnessed this were horrified and related the story to our group in an effort to make sense of this event; to put it in some perspective that would help them to not hate the man in the van. As Americans in a foreign culture we were asking our leaders to help us to reconcile our story of how we treat each other in a “civilized” society, with what had been seen.

Five Year Plans, State owned business, bureaucrats who rule from the top down, keeping the best for themselves and giving the starving masses the leftovers. These are the ideas that are associated with Socialism. There are cultures in this world however, that have developed a unique kind of socialism; an equality and equity based on cycles of the harvest, and a sharing of resources to benefit all of society. In these cultures, if grapefruit is in season for one month and there is no way of storing or importing any in the off season then when the grapefruit are ripe, one eats grapefruit. In Vanuatu it is the Uncles who redistribute the wealth. Uncles name the babies, uncles are given gifts at weddings and uncles are responsible for helping the extended family in times of need. If you are walking through the bush with the season’s first grapefruit in your hand, freshly peeled and ready to eat, and you meet an uncle who asks for the grapefruit, you give it to him. It’s not that there is no other option; that is just how it is.

The girl with the cone had run into one of her uncles. My story and her story are worlds apart, and so it happens to each of us many times a day. I look at others and I just don’t understand their story; I look at others’ story of Gods and just don’t understand. Then there is that one time during one of these story collisions that I catch a glimpse of God, my world shifts, my story changes, evolves and just like that: redemption, repentance and forgiveness. My resurrected God says “Finally” and I say, “My heart always knew that I would find you here, hiding in plain sight”.
Again Rohr: God’s love is total, unconditional, absolute and forever. The state of grace-God’s attitude toward us is eternal. We are the ones who change.
Sometimes we are able to believe that God loves us unconditionally, absolutely and forever. That’s grace!
When we no longer believe God loves us, we can no longer love ourselves. We have to allow God to continually fill us. Then we find in our own lives the power to give love away.

Amen



Benediction: There is change in the air. Seek God; be open to a changing story and experience redemption, repentance and forgiveness.

“Forgiveness Steps”

June 29, 2008
Common Time

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Bible reading:
Matt 18:21-22 (NRSV)
21 Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" 22 Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

Luke 17:3-4 (NRSV)
4 And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,' you must forgive."

Years ago, Terry Gross, on her radio show “Fresh Air”
spoke with the action movie star Chuck Norris.
Chuck is famous for kicking and punching
his way to redemption against the bad guys
in “Walker, Texas Ranger” among other shows....
(rebroadcast Jan. 18, 2008)

Terry asked Chuck to describe the plot development
of his 1988 movie “Braddock: Missing in Action III”
which you can imagine is a movie that women everywhere probably
begged their boyfriends to take them to, on a date.

Terry noted that the female lead was killed off early in the movie
Why? No romance for Norris characters?

Norris answered:
“No, not really. I think the key thing is creating an emotion
that builds... whoever plays the bad role...

to build up him... you know... superbad
giving me a reason to retaliate
for the atrocities that have been inflicted
upon whoever it is in the movie with me
most of the time it’s a woman.”

My summer movie sermon-series has not
technically started yet, but I’m already
in summer movie mode.

And my observation is that action movies basically
have three motivations.

1) the mildest level of action-movie motivation is
prosecution. Here the idea is that an evil-doer
must be caught and punished to satisfy
a sense of justice.

This is more prevalent in television series
than in movies, probably because the big screen
demands big motive.

But shows like L.A. Law and CSI will often
end with capture and justice served,
like the old Perry Mason or Ironsides
or Cagney and Lacy episodes.

A movie that essentially ends in prosecutorial justice
would be Catch me if you can, The Bourne series

2) The second level of motive in movies protection
The Witness, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Saving Private Ryan,
The Indiana Jones series

3) failing protection, we arrive at the
ultimate motive for action movies - revenge for atrocities committed.
Boondock Saints, Kill Bill, any Chuck Norris
or Jet Li movie, soaks and thrills in the hot juices
of revenge served with gun-blazing chases
and explosions reflected in the RayBans
of some thug or tough cop.

It’s all about answering atrocity,
and what’s done to us often feels like an atrocity,
powerful emotions swirl out from the smallest
words and acts, when we feel humiliated,
ignored, or threatened.
And sometimes the words and acts are not so small.

And it is into this social reality, this milieux de guerre
this vale of burning emotional struggle,
Jesus speaks these words:

“And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,' you must forgive.”

Miroslav Volf notes “The climate of pervasive oppression
in which [Jesus] preached was suffused
with the desire for revenge.” (121)

Jesus was also all about confrontation,
challenging evil, especially clear and present
harming of others for the sake of religion or social order.

Matthew 18:15 “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone....” (Of course balancing this with “pull the log out of your own eye before you go to remove the splinter from someone else’s eye.)

Matthew 12 - The leaders and people want a sign from Jesus to prove himself. His answer: “An evil and adulterous generation wants a sign....”

And of course the famous tag line from Matthew 10 - “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Nevertheless, in the midst of all this confrontation,
Jesus develops this extraordinary practice of forgiveness.

His teaching on forgiveness is so radical, so distinctive,
such an outstanding characteristic,
that Hannah Arendt calls Jesus
“The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in human affairs.”
(The Human Condition: A Study of the Central
Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 1959)

But it is all about atrocity.
Volf notes “Deep within the heart of every victim, anger swells up against the perpetrator, rage inflamed by unredeemed suffering.” (120)

He continues that all of us in our victimhood would rather pray
instead of Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness,
“Forgive them not, Father, for they knew what they were doing!” (120)

Lewis Smedes notes that forgiveness is an outrage against
“straight-line-dues-paying morality” (Volf 120)
(Forgive and Forget, 1984, p. 124)

And our rage may feel like more than dues paying.
It seethes like the lava flow from a super volcano.

Jesus said “forgive seventy times seven”
but old Lamech, the Genesis warrior said
“I return 70 blows for everyone received.”

And that feels more like it.
Grind the perps into the ground.
“Crush and kill”, our wounded hearts may tell us.

And so then the question becomes:
How do we ever find the strength to forgive?

These sermons are supposed to be more on the practical side
So from Miroslav Volf’s work, in which he tries
to come to terms with the atrocities of war
between Serbs and Croats in the 1990s,
I have tried to distill three critical understandings
for forgiveness, and then three steps of forgiveness.

The three understandings, although I am calling them “understandings”
are more than a matter of intellectual or cognitive assent, however.

For forgiveness to succeed in breaking the powerful
cycle of revenge, these understandings are
essentially soul practices, ways of nurturing
and governing our whole selves
in the direction of forgiveness.

Then I will describe three spiritual disciplines
that arise from our lives of faith, mediation, and worship.

So three soul practices and then three disciplines.

Three Soul Practices
First, the three understandings or soul practices.
These are not in any particular order.

1) Volf notes that in order to learn to forgive, we must also learn to repent.
I have mentioned this before - we need to learn true apology.
Volf notes, and I have quoted him on this before
“Most confessions come as a mixture of repentance, self-defense,
and even some lust for revenge. We admit wrongdoing, justify ourselves, and attack, all in one breath.

In my previous sermon, I referred to the excellent article
by Rochelle Melander on “learning how to apologize.”
I would be happy to send you a copy of this article,
if you request it by e-mail.

So the first soul practice is true apology.
The experience of true apology not only
sets us on a path of reconciliation.

With apology, we take steps to enter a world
where we understand that we are part of
the greater web of human frailty and harm.

With apology, we choose to stand with
other humans, that is, people who fail,
who do wrong.

And this imparts a grace, a gracefulness to us,
because now we are free from the illusions
and strictures that somehow we are righteous
and okay in ways that others are not.

With apology, we learn an existential humility
that is one of the great postures of forgiveness
and certainly of the ability to make peace.

2) The second soul practice I am taking from Volf’s writing
is simply the choice to forego revenge.
Revenge is something we know at some level
will get us nowhere. But it burns in us again and again.

The difficulty is that all acts are irreversible.
The toothpaste has been squeezed out of the tube
and who can put it back?

Volf notes that even God cannot make events that happened
go away. They have a granite factualness to them.
And so the injury burns in our experience
with acid power to eat away the pictures of our lives.

Revenge, Lamech’s 70 blows for every one received,
makes sense - we can’t make the hurt go away
but we will cause some damage ourselves.

The problem, of course, is the spiral of violence.
Hannah Arendt writes that with revenge
“everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course;.... [vengeance] encloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

This is so brilliantly illustrated in the Kill Bill movies.
The Uma Thurman character, called “The Bride”
is horribly violated and then proceeds to wreak holy revenge
on all her enemies.

But one of the people she kills has a daughter.
And you can see that the daughter will grow up
and will seek revenge against “The Bride”.
But “The Bride” also has a daughter. Where will it stop.

This is the Greek tragedy of revenge.
We want it, but find it so difficult to stop.
It echoes in the U.S. war on terror, in the ongoing
strife in the middle-east, on and on.

It can be stopped. The “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”
in South Africa showed this. Some of the work among Hutus
and Tutsis in Rwanda showed this.
Some of the racial work in the U.S. with the Civil Rights Movement
showed this.

Revenge simmers for a long time before cooling down.
But forgiveness means nothing less than choosing
to forego revenge.

And this may shape in us a strange beauty and
existential elegance built of self-control, self-regulation,
and the hidden powers embedded therein.
But it is a great act to forego revenge.

3) Perhaps even stranger and more difficult,
is the third soul practice - to forego strict justice.

The difficulty here is what Volf calls “the predicament of partiality.”
This is that it is very difficult for all people to agree
to the meaning of an act, the cause of it, who did what,
what was important about it, and so on.

And not only that, but what justice can there be
when acts are irreversible? Is there anything that can
truly answer, not in terms of revenge, but even simply
in terms of fair payback?

When we are hurt, what is justice? What is adequate and fair?
It is very difficult to describe.

But it seems like we should seek justice. Isn’t the universe
premised on some form of justice?

Volf notes that in the framework of strict “restorative justice”
no reconciliation is possible, because who can agree
on what is fully restorative?

This does not mean, however, that we must give up justice altogether.
Forgiveness opens up the equation making and gives it a suppleness
and flexibility that do allow a re-approach to justice.

It turns out, if there can be the great gracefulness of
some sense of forgiveness,
that a conversation about restoration and justice
can occur.

And we see this all the time in the Victim-Offender conversations
that happen. People do find their way to some sense of justice
and restored relationship.

Volf only suggests that every time this happens,
there is some setting aside of the need for full strict justice.
There is always a giving up, a letting go of some measure,
in order to make life work again.

Three Spiritual Disciplines
But the question may remain:
what gives us the strength and motivation to be
able to accept and adopt those soul practices.

1) Volf argues that first of all we must bring
our injuries, our sense of hurt, into the presence of God.

This echoes the insights of Elizabeth Gilbert
in her book Eat, Pray, Love,
that I reported a few Sundays ago.
For her, in the practice of great silence,
she discovered a surprising capacity
of her heart and God’s heart to take in
absorb, and re-integrate even the greatest
hurts and shames.

Volf calls attention to the imprecatory Psalms,
those Psalms that cry out in anger in the presence of God.
He says that this is the proper location of our
grief and anguish.

As we struggle to do away with revenge and the cycle of violence
we need a place to address our great sense of hurt.
And so in worship and in private meditation
we may let the hurt be, let it be in the presence
of the infinite one.

This sense that there is room enough
in the great loving heart of God,
the great heart of the universe,
for all our hurts,

may be reinforced as well by that most fundamental
of worship practices, making our offerings.

In worship, the tradition is that we “pass the peace”
in order to prepare to make our offerings.

But the reverse is also true. Whenever we make offerings,
we are practicing the idea that we have more than enough.
We have enough to give away, enough to share.

What goes into our hearts from this constant practice of giving,
is that God’s universe is abundant, greater than we imagine,
full of extra possibilities, and new resources.

And this understanding teaches us of the infinity
at the heart of God, an infinity “greater than all our sin”
“greater than all our hurt” or all our
aching sense of need for revenge.

Again, it does not mean that nothing is done to evil.
Rather, it allows us a new, flexible place from which to respond
so that we do not simply go down the path
of the Greek tragedy of revenge again and again,
wasting our substance in hopeless pursuit.

2) The second spiritual discipline is eucharist
or joining together in communion.

What we learn here is that we are joined
with others in ways far beyond our imagining.

Jenna Fisher from the painful but funny
TV series The Office was interviewed
by Terry Gross.

She talked about her relationship with John Krasinski
who is her love interest in the story.

Terry wondered if they might be in love in real life.
Jenna said no, but she said it’s complicated.
She said there is some part of her self
that is in love with some part of John’s
self, and that is what they touch when they act.

In communion, I may struggle to join with love
all those with whom I am sharing the symbolic meal.
I may struggle to imagine myself in communion
with all those around the world who God
invites to the table.

But Volf suggests that something in me
may nevertheless have communion with something in you
even when I cannot fully accept that.

It is like the eastern greeting namaste,
which means “that which is God in me
recognizes that which is God in you.”

It is beyond my mere abilities and depends
upon the gift of God to find that in the other
with which I can join in communion.

The repeated eating of the eucharist together,
Volf suggests, is accepting over and over again,
that there is a relationship between me and even my enemy
that God is creating and in charge of, beyond my imagining.

3) And finally, there is the question of memory.
One of the greatest challenges of forgiveness
is the memory of hurt.

The phrase in answer to the Holocaust is “never forget.”
And this feels right.

Because when we are harmed, we never want to forget
how to try to protect ourselves again from that harm.
We never want to forget that social machinery
that brought it on us.

The sexual predators, the torturers, those who have
demonstrated themselves to be so capable of cruelty
and the way people walk into those pathways again and again.

But the challenge of memory of harm,
is that like revenge, it is that acid that can eat
away all the pictures of our experience.

The memory of harm can create the distortion
of all memories, all harms.
And so Volf suggests finally that we must
find ways of holy forgetfulness.

Ultimately, he says, in God, we may leave things
in the past entirely. This will be heaven,
when we no longer need to carry any of that with us.

But in this world, this is probably not
practical or wise. In a world still full of
perpetrators and predators,
a world in which any one of us may still
come to hurt the other,

we may, as Volf says, perhaps only set the shield of memory
slightly to one side for the sake of reconciliation
and moving on.

As with strict justice, so we forego absolute memory.
We remember, but we don’t burnish the memory.

And the discipline here is to let new life,
new memories, new experiences pour into our lives.

What we need is the fullness and muchness of community
to fill our lives with something new and greater.

It will never take away the old. But it weaves it,
embeds it in a fabric of goodness.

This is way it is important to sing good songs week after week,
to pray in the presence of beauty, to greet each other
with joy, to tell stories full of humor and hope.

Memory will not go away, and probably should not in this life.
But for the sake of life and the living of it, we may create
an ongoing abundance of new experience and therefore
new memory.

Conclusion
Well, this is a lot to take in.
It is an attempt to offer a Forgiveness 101 practicum.
Forgiveness of course is ultimately only a gift of God,
but it is the invitation to lives of peace for each one of us
and in all the earth. Amen.

“Hymn and a Movie 2008, Part 1:
The Terminal and Guide My Fee”

July 13, 2008
Common Time

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 

 

Hymn: “Guide My Feet” WB #546

Being 50
Garrison Keillor once said
that being a middle-aged white guy
is kind of a tragic figure.

You’re the perfect subject of jokes,
the ultimate non-minority, good for jokes about
pants falling down on the train, etc.

I know this. I try to be cool, wear my shirt out...
But then I come out of the bathroom
with my shirt tucked in. So much for cool.
(Hey!... didn’t you just have your shirt out?
I imagine the invisible cool police asking?)

One of the realities of nearing age 50
and I am now very near indeed,
is that I find I have no excuse for myself.

I have been doing what I am doing
for a very long time.
So I should be good at it by now, for Pete’s sake.

I’m not young and just starting out.
I’m not old and it’s time to retire.
I’m in it, and there’s no excuse.

These are the years of generativity,
and I had better be generative,
make my contribution.

So that’s one of the age 50 things to figure out:
how to live your life gracefully, playfully,
with joy, while knowing that you’re
in the soup, your doing the thing,
and if not now, then when?

How do you stay playful while being—
with every layer of meaning in the phrase—
“on the job”?

Or “In the house” “occupying office”
putting the “bureau” in the “ocracy”.
As Cake puts it - “He’s going the distance...,”
(“The Distance”)
or “She’s touring the facilities and picking up the slack.”
(“Short Skirt/Long Jacket)

In any case,
you look back on your life from this “no excuse”
vantage and look for how you have lived so far
in ways that matter.

Have you lived your life
or are you just passing through?
Have you lived with what existentialist philosophers
called “authenticity” or “engagement?”

My friend Sam Rockwell, who is a Four Square Church
pastor on the north side of town, puts it well in one
of his excellent sermons.

The title of the sermon is “Being Present:
Participating in Your Own Life.”

He talks about “skimming the surface” of his own experiences,
and he quotes a line from James Joyce
one of who’s characters is said to be
“living a short distance away from his body....”

He notes that Jesus basically asks Peter
“Are you going to live your life?”
“Peter, do you love me”... “Feed my sheep”

In so many words, Jesus is saying,
“Don’t give me piety or religious correctness.
But live the life God that has been poured out
for you as a gift from God.

But that’s just the thing. We tumble into life;
before we know anything, before we can stop to think,
before we can reflect about anything

What the philosopher Martin Heidegger called
our “geworfenheit” or our “thrown-ness.”
We are thrown into life and no what will we do?
(The concept of geworfenheit came to my attention from James’s
Morrow’s book - The Philosopher’s Apprentice, p. 101)

Geworfenheit
In our movie “The Terminal”
starring the brilliant Tom Hanks
his character—Mr. Navorski—
suddenly finds himself confined to an airport terminal
“thrown into” the terminal, if you will.

Thrown into his terminal life, even,
if one might play with the words a bit more.

It is a place where he doesn’t speak the language
doesn’t understand much of what is happening
grasping at the slimmest connections.

What has happened is that while he was in the air,
his eastern-European country, Krakozhia,
has experienced a revolution
and he no longer has a country to return to.
Therefore, the authorities require him
to remain in the terminal.

To arrange this, he’s taken to the back office and interviewed.
Here we’re treated to a wonderful sort of
Abbot and Costello “Who’s on first”
routine, only with Mr. Navorski’s
wonderful “Boris and Natasha” accent:

Officer: “What exactly are you doing in the United States, Mr. Navorski?
N: (reading from some notes he’s obviously had help writing)
“Yellow taxicab, please. Take me to Ra-mada Inn.
(Naming each number): 161 Lexington.”
(Pause)
Officer: “Staying at the Ramada Inn?”
N: “Keep the change.”
Officer: “Do you know anyone in New York?”
N: “Yes.”
Officer: “Who?”
N: “Yes.”
Officer: (Upward inflection) “Who?”
(Pause)
N: (Shaking head affirmatively, in warm, deep voice): “Yes”
Officer: (Gesturing) “No, do you know anyone in New York?”
N: “Yes. Yes.”
Officer: “No, do you know anyone in New York?”
N: (Higher inflection, reassuring) “Yes.”
Officer: “Who?”
N: “Yes.” (Long pause - Mr. Navorski takes out his flyer from the Ramada Inn and holds it out toward the officer): “161 Lexington.”

Mr. Navorski is “thrown” into his life in the terminal.
He does not speak the language,
does not even understand what are the basic
conditions of his life or reasons for it.
But here is where he must remain.

This is the human condition, according
to existentialist philosophers.
We are thrown into life, and then must learn
to live it well.

Heidegger noted that we are no longer at home
in the world as primitive people were.
We have lost what he called the
“nearness and shelter” of Being
and now find ourselves anxious
and feeling like outsiders.
(Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, “Heidegger”)

(And by the way, we must only use Heidegger
with caution, because he also supported the Nazi party
in Germany. Although his existentialist insights
became definers for two generations of important
philosophy, still a Nazi. So strong cautionary
filters must be observed.)

Heidegger said that we all find ourselves anxious,
alienated. We tend to experience our own
“Abbot and Costello” moments of confusion
as we try to make meaning in life.

(Conversation among three Mennonites: “1”, “2”, “3”)
1) Why are you a Mennonite?
2) It’s complicated.
3) The internet;
2) I was born here.
1) Here?
2) Yes.
3) Community!
1) Do you like being a Mennonite?
3) Good website.
2) Born here, so.....
1) What is a Mennonite?
3) Farmers?
2) Menno Simons?
1) Yes? A capella singing?
3) Yes.
1) Christians?
2) Yes?
3) Peacemaking?
1) Mennonite?
3) Yes.
2) Community?

We are thrown into our identities,
into our lives. We make reasons for them.
Some of the reasons of good.
Some are unspoken, many,
most, perhaps, unconscious.

Therefore, a great existentialist prayer might be
“Guide my feet.” If you are an existentialist
who prays. Which many of us are.
Because we have found ourselves in deep questioning
of our lives and faith. And we pray.

Luke 1:78-79 (NRSV) says:
“By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
(Zechariah, when he was able to speak again,
after his son John, later know as “the Baptist” was born)

Let’s be existentialists now, thrown into the world
and seeking to live well. Let’s sing together this prayer
“Guide my feet” (WB #546; first and last verse)

Living with authenticity
The Homeland Security director for the airport - Frank Dixon -
is a nervous, rigid man played by Stanley Tucci,
who is kind of making a cottage industry out of
playing nervous bureaucrats,
as he does again in the upcoming movie “Swing Vote.”

He knows too little beyond his need to be in control
and a desire to protect his reputation and advance in the hierarchy.

Mr. Navorski is merely a headache for Dixon.
He just wants him to go away,
become somebody else’s problem, as he keeps saying.

Over and over, he fails to offer compassion
and us even unable to receive kindness
from others. His life is all calculations and power vectors,
famous for his ability to spot a problem person
early and to deal with them in a way that
restores the status quo.

One of the questions of existentialism is
in living my life, what is authenticity?
How do I live inside my own life.

Ultimately, Dixon fails at this. Even at the end of the movie,
after all that has transpired with good-hearted
Mr. Navorski, all he can shout is “Arrest him!”

It is as if he saying, “my life is stalled,
and I must also stall his life.”
He is, like James’s character,
“living a short distance away from his body....”

Another key character is played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.
She is a flight attendant who accidentally meets
Mr. Navorski.

She slips on a wet floor and breaks
one of her heels on her high-heeled pumps.

He helps her up. He’s been in the terminal for some time now,
so he even knows that gate she’s looking for.

He has been teaching himself English.
And so he offers her a coupon he has collected:
“Payless Shoes.... Second floor.... Sensible heels.”

She is having an affair with a powerful man
with Washington connections. She has done this
many times before.

Mr. Navorski and the flight attendant meet again.
Here we learn his first name is Victor
and her name is Amelia Warren.
He is falling in love with her.

And here’s something:
She tries to fall in love with him. But she’s
addicted to her life with men of power.
She is also kind to Victor
and even helps him to get out of the terminal.

But Amelia also ultimately fails with authenticity.
Like Frank Dixon, she cannot let herself live her life.
She also is “living a short distance from her body.”
She must chase power in men,
and so misses her chance for love with Victor.

But Victor Navorski, the one who is most stuck
of all the people, in the most difficult situation,
is the one of makes the most of it.

He finds a way to start making money,
by returning baggage carts for quarters.
Eventually, we learn he is a brilliant carpenter.
He becomes an off-the-books valued
worker in airport renovations.

Now he is making more money per hour
than Frank Dixon, Homeland Security director.

He also becomes the messenger for a young food-service worker
who is in love with an immigration officer
that Victor comes to know in his many attempts to leave.

The food-service worker wants to be her “man of mystery”
which Victor translates as “man of misery” “because he
is so miserable in his love for you.”

This is a very sweet subplot, and shows us
the more uncomplicated genuine love
that is possible in the human condition.

Charles Sanders Peirce,
who pre-figured some of Heidegger’s thought,
noted that we all only know about the world from the inside.

And our knowledge and understanding of the world
have above all else to do with urgent needs that we have.

So Victor Navorski, stuck in the terminal
with a very unhelpful Homeland Security director
foiling his life at every turn,

figures out how to meet his needs and
at the same time to care for the urgent needs of others.

He figures out how to get food, how to create something of value,
he finds love, helps others find love, shows kindness
after kindness.

Victor is our existentialist hero,
creating from the nothing of his life stuck in the terminal
a rich fabric of relationships and beauty.

Being and Home
At one point, Frank Dixon,
Homeland Security director, has an idea.

If he can get Victor Navorski to declare that he
has fear of returning to his home,
he might be able to get him protective asylum.

Dixon’s main motive is to get Navorski out of his airport.
And it doesn’t work.

As Dixon tries to manipulate Navorski
to say he is afraid,
Navorski replies “Is home. I am not afraid from my home.”
As if this is self-evident.

But it isn’t. Not to Frank Dixon. Not to Amelia Warren.
Not to us. Because home is complicated.
Home may be where the heart is.
But it may also be where abuse was, or is.
May be a place of loneliness and despair.

To acknowledge this is a powerful driver of
the existentialist notion of anxiety or alienation.

When Jesus confronts Peter, after all the horrible
events of crucifixion and all the mystery of the resurrection
he simply tells Peter “feed my sheep.”

He is calling Peter out of alienation and into a place
where he will simply live his life,
in compassion, in showing love,
in living in basic, nurturing and supportive ways
among the people—in the life—that is his.

Perhaps the invitation comes to us this way:
Whatever home was for us in our families of origin,
whatever it may be now

We are invited to seek and to make a true home
in whatever place we find ourselves,
like Victor Navorski stuck in the terminal.

We may need help with this, support from others,
making new friends, seeking different resources,
throwing ourselves forcefully into the projects
of our own healing and the healing of others.

As much as possible, we seek to make a home
in this community of faith.

Adam Gopnik writes in the New Yorker
“We choose a religion, when we do, not for the tenets of a creed but for the totality of a circumstance, for a tone and a practice and encompassing condition: ‘It feels like home.’”
(New Yorker July 7 & 14 p58)

A “tone and a practice and encompassing condition” - that’s it!
That’s why we tend to be what we are.

Each one of us very much needs this.
We need to find and make community
that is genuine home for us.

Because all of us suffer from geworfenheit.
We have all been thrown together into this life
with no choice of our own, no manual given out
ahead of time, no blueprint on the side table.

And so we seek a community of the Spirit
in which we pray together
“Guide my feet, while I run this race.”

Conclusion
At the very beginning of the movie
Mr. Navorski is asked to step to one side,
his passport having failed inspection.

While he stands there, he pulls out an
electric razor and starts shaving

This is a premonition of what is to come:
which is that he lives his life.
He lives his life, whatever his “thrown-ness” may be.

Mary Oliver ends her poem - “The Summer Day”
with words that I think offer the best last word
about this movie, and perhaps about
existentialist philosophy in general:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(repeat)
Amen.

Sing verse one of “Guide my feet”

 

“Hymn and a Movie Part 2:
Joyful, joyful... & Ratatouille”

July 20, 2008
Common Time

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
Hymn “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee” WB #71

1) Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, praising thee their sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness; drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day!

2) All thy works with joy surround thee, earth and heaven reflect thy rays,
Stars and angels sing around Thee, center of unbroken praise.
Field and forest, vale and mountain, blooming meadow, flashing sea,
Chanting bird and flowing fountain call us to rejoice in Thee.

3) Thou art giving and forgiving, ever blessing, ever blessed,
Wellspring of the joy of living, ocean depth of happy rest!
Thou our Father, Christ our Brother, all who live in love are thine;
Teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.

4) Mortals, join the mighty chorus, which the morning stars began;
Love divine is reigning o’er us, leading us with mercy’s hand.
Ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife,
Joyful music lifts us sunward in the triumph song of life.

E-mail note sent out Thursday:
Folks, this Sunday's movie is Ratatouille, last year's Pixar hit (Their current movie "WALL-E", about, of all things, a sensitive, compassionate robot is another cinema wonder).

Questions to think about, in connection with Ratatouille (besides exactly how it is pronounced):
1) What is your most powerfully compelling food smell/taste?
2) What is the talent or gift you value the most in yourself?
3) If the world is full of such goodness, as a gift of God, how shall we respond as citizens of the human race, all creatures of God's love?

Happy viewing,
Vern

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 1

The Science of Cooking
In the wonderful book, On Food and Cooking:
The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee gets inside food and eating.

You can look in the book for answers.
Or you can just read it.

So for example, we have his article on “The Yak”
which we learn is the third important dairy bovine,
after the cow and the buffalo.

The milk of the yak is substantially richer in fat
and protein than cow’s milk.

Tibetans make elaborate use of yak’s milk
for butter and a variety of fermented products. (pp. 9, 10)
(Dan Jantzen has personally sampled the latter
and can tell you about it.)

There is an entire section on “The history of sauces in Europe” (pp. 581ff).
Also, a mini-essay “Why Some People Can’t Stand Cheese”
Also, we may read and learn that raisins
“have caramel flavor notes due to a combination of browning-enzyme oxidation of phenolic compounds and direct browning reactions between sugars and amino acids.” (p. 363)

This is important for myself as a Russian Mennonite to know.
So many of my historic dishes include raisins,
and now I know about that browning-enzyme oxidation.
It kind of lifts the culture to a new culinary level...

It is a book full of how the wonder of food
is granted to the senses.

What makes bread and coffee so wonderful?
It is something called the “Maillard Reactions” after
Louis Camille Maillard.

These reactions are responsible for the color and taste of
bread crusts, chocolate, coffee beans, dark beers and roasted meats.
(anyone hungry?)

They involve carbohydrate molecules and amino acids.
Change happens with cooking or baking or roasting
and the result is hundreds of by-products
mixing and re-mixing nitrogen, sulfur,
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Flavor names for these re-mixes include:
savory, floral, onion, earthy, nutty, butterscotch.

In the wonderful animated movie Ratatouille,
our hero is a rat—the movie’s central pun:
rat and ratatouille—named Remy.

Remy is a rat with a “highly developed
sense of taste and smell.”

So we see him sampling a discarded dessert.
He notes: “flour..., eggs..., sugar..., hmm—vanilla bean...,
Oh!—small twist of lemon....”

Remy is able to discern all these wonderful flavors.
We see splashing and dancing colors on the screen to show
how the flavors splash and dance in his
mouth and mind as he tastes food.

He loves the wonder and power of flavor,
mixing strawberry and cheese:
First the cheese: “creamy, salty sweet, an oaky nuttiness...”
Now the strawberry: “sweet, crisp, slight tang on the finish.”

So many names of food, descriptors for taste.
Including one cooked by thunderstorm that is “lightening-y.”

He notices all these things while the other rats
are just, as he puts it, “horking it down”.
What we begin to learn is: can’t creation be wonderful?

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 2

The Gifts of God for the People of God
In the classic communion service, this phrase is uttered
as the bread and wine are held forth:
“The gifts of God for the people of God.”

It echoes our offering blessing
“May these gifts be a blessing in the Spirit of God.”

Part of what makes creation wonderful are the raw materials,
such as food with all its atoms waiting to be transformed.

And part of what makes creation wonderful is the
human ability to work on it and play with it.

This too is the “gifts of God for the people of God”
All our diverse abilities.
Appearing even in unlikely places.

A few months ago, I sat across from a man
who does speed sheep-shearing as a sport.
Who knew? Diverse abilities...

The opening of Ratatouille
begins with a sample bit of the
French national anthem: La Marseillaise

and then an adoring newscast about how
“the best food in the world is made in France,
the best food in France is made in Paris
and the best food in Paris - some say -
is made by chef Auguste Gusteau.”
(French laugh...)

But here’s the thing - chef Gusteau’s best-selling
book is “Anyone can cook!”
From the heart of haute cuisine,
his idea is anything but elitist.

As we learn later in the movie, this
does not mean that everybody is just
as good at cooking as everyone else.

We all have gifts, but not all are cooks.
Rather, it means that the gift of cooking can
arise from unexpected places.

Which, as we soon learn, is exactly what
(French accent) our leettle story is about (French laugh)

In the case of the this movie, a rat can cook!
The rat—Remy—becomes the chef at Gusteau’s!
This is a discovery of biblical proportions!

Biblical because Jesus is the unlikely one too,
the unlikely peasant savior.
His ancestors include
Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba, Mary
(the five women listed in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus)

The stories in quick summary, respectively: dangerous, tricky, forward,
conniving and peasant teenager.
Not the stuff of the average lead article in “The Mennonite” magazine.

And of course all the unlikely men too:
Reluctant Moses who whined, delayed, complained,
indulged in temper tantrums.

And David, who can only be described as a bit of a loose
cannon in love and politics—to put it mildly—read the stories.

And this is good news. This is the glory of God. Why?
Because God will not be limited by our imagination
for where great goodness will arise.

And so the “gifts of God for the people of God”
appear where they will. And fortunate are we if we see them.

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 3 on my count (count off four) (sing with accomp.)

Bread and Wine: The Glory of God
My favorite Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart,
notes that the symbols of the Christian faith
are not occult [signs] or bull’s blood
or sipping brackish water from the wilderness...

Rather, the symbols of Christian faith are the
cardinal signs of human fellowship: bread and wine.”

He notes that Christian faith rejoices “in the order of creation
as gift and blessing..., an abiding sense of the sheer
weightiness... of God’s glory and the goodness of all that is.” (107)

It is in the material and physical realities
that we are invited to discover God.
What matters is “Not in some heaven light-years away,
but here in this place” as the hymn goes. (WB #6)

As Hopkins puts it “The world is shot through with the grandeur of God”
and so Hart notes that we don’t need the hidden
codes of the occult or secret societies.

There isn’t some coded or hidden grandeur;
You don’t need the DaVinci Code or The Secret

We don’t need some hidden spirit
(called “docetism” in classic theology) or
or special and secret knowledge
(called “gnosticism” in classic theology)

Hart says it’s the surfaces of creation that matter,
not some imagined invisible depths.

The beauty and power is right in front of your face:
first of all, in our movie: food!
A rat who loves the smell, the taste,
the magical power of food!

Jesus understood this too:
“I have come eating and drinking
He enjoyed himself with people;
In his work, teaching and food went together.
Food was teaching, and teaching food.

The beauty and power of bread, juice,
skin, eyes, houses, leaves, flowers,
all the wonderful nouns of creation.

And the love which we may have for these
and for the people and stories and memories
that they carry for us.

We do not need an alienating religion or abstract philosophy
that takes us out of this world.
This world is given to us as gift.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are invited
to enter the world whole-heartedly,
not to be above the whole flesh and blood thing,
to be people of earth.

People of earth!
Which naturally and seamlessly involves us
in peace-building and seeking justice
because the physical world that matters so much includes

my body, but also others’ bodies,
and the greater nest in which we live - the earth.

What you need is not secrets and signs
but rather a willingness to throw yourself
into the project of loving and being loved.

Last week I talked about the geworfenheit
of being thrown into our lives.

But we may chose that thrown-ness and recapitulate it,
throwing ourselves into the life
in which we find ourselves.

Throwing ourselves, risking, splashing on in,
for the sake of love. Not meting out life
in careful little nibbles and sips.

The psalmist says “Taste and see that I am good...” (Ps 34:8)
And also
“The earth and it’s fullness are the Lord’s” (I Cor. 10:26; cf. Deut. 33:16)

When you risk love, what you plunge into, what ocean of life,
is the sensual world, the world of the senses,
not some abstraction, but “food on the table” if you will.

In Ratatouille, there is a dreaded food critic named
Anton Ego. His nom de plume is “The grim eater.”
He is not in the least impressed with anything “Gusteau.”

But upon hearing that there is something new
and wonderful happening at Gusteau’s
with it’s new chef, he goes to check it out.

When asked what he would like,
in his best not-to-be-impressed, bored-with-life manner,
he asks the chef to “surprise” him,

as if he “smells a rat” in the kitchen...
...which he does, and will, but it is a smell—
and taste—which will amaze.

He is served the rural vegetable dish ratatouille.
It is an extremely unlikely entree in a fine restaurant,
but our rat—Remy—has worked his magic,
including his own version of one of those
European sauces that McGee writes about.

And so here is perhaps the most beautiful moment in the movie:
The camera zooms in on our ghoulish and skeptical critic
about to take a bite; and then he does

and—voilá—he is transported to his
childhood, to his country home
and his mother comforting him
with, of all things (of course) ratatouille.

As the gospel of Luke says of the prodigal son
the old critic “comes to himself.”
This disaffected old critic
now finds himself rejoicing in food
and now, we also notice, rejoicing in life itself.

He is no longer alienated, but re-enters
the world with all its capacities and loves.
In the final scenes he is enjoying himself
not in his fortress of a writing room,

but among joyful people in a new and wonderful
restaurant whose chef is our rat Remy.

Have you ever been transported by food?
Just as with Anton Ego’s taste of ratatouille
a taste of childhood food can recall for us
those times and places.

For me, something with raisins from southern Russia.
For you, perhaps a certain chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Or we may be taken to a country where we first ate couscous
or we remember slurping spaghetti on our first date.
Or the creme brulee at our own Le Central.

Embedded in the food is meaning, story,
a whole feeling and conception of being.
This is what makes it so powerful.

Food, and other basics of the stuff of life
and how we love each other with them,
are the “gifts of God for the people of God.”

This is the earth, and the “fullness thereof”
as the King James puts it.

After his transporting meal of ratatouille,
scary Anton Ego is moved to opine:
“Not everyone can become a great artist
but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

And we might add, democratically, and theologically,
that all have gifts that matter,
all have gifts that can add
wonderfully and significantly to the sum
of the world’s joys.

Let us be such people of the world,
let us be such people in the world,
thrown in, joyfully sharing love

people who discover and share joy in God’s creation. Amen.

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 4 a cappella; vs. 1 reprise with accomp.

“The Power of the Holy Spirit:
Research into the Right Brain”

August 10 , 2008
Common Time - Summer

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
Bible reading:
17 He said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep.
John 21:17 (NRSV)

8 Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." 9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
John 14:8-17 (NRSV)

Introduction
This meditation is ultimately about our church and conference:
Mountain States Mennonite Conference Annual Assembly
which happened last weekend,
first by way of a story, and by way of right brain hemisphere research.

Fire in the gulch
The fire broke out in Mann Gulch
right at the boundary where the plains meet the mountains
in the state of Montana.

It was a long, dry summer in 1949.
When the smoke jumpers were called, the blaze was small.
The firefighters approached the fire from above,
heading down toward water in the bottom of the gulch.

All at once, the wind changed; the fire jumped across the gulch
and came roaring up the gulch
toward the firefighters.

They began to run back to the top,
but to no avail.
Thirteen smoke-jumpers died in the blaze.

One did not. Their leader, with the unusual
and wonderful western-sounding name of Wag Dodge,
found himself suddenly staring at a wall of flame
50 feet tall and 300 feet deep.

He also began to run.
But he quickly realized the blaze could not be outrun.
And then he had a remarkable moment of insight.

He stopped running, lit a match, and ignited the grass above him.
He then stepped into the shadow of his new fire,
now surrounded by a buffer of burned land.

He wet a handkerchief with his canteen,
lay down on the smoldering embers,
closed his eyes, and breathed the thin
layer of oxygen near the ground.

Then he waited for the fire to pass over him.
While the others were caught in the blaze,
Dodge was able to stand up, after a few terrifying minutes,
and walk out virtually unscathed.

Jonah Lehrer, in his article "The Eureka Hunt"
tells this story and then asks the critical question,
where do insights like this come from?
(The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, pp40-45)

Left and Right brain
What Lehrer outlines, as he summarizes the work
of several neuroscientists and brain theorists,
is that there is a physiology of insight
and it is remarkable, elegant, and amazing.

The physiology of insight appears to be something like this:
First a problem is posed. For Dodge, it was an urgent problem:
a killer fire was approaching fast.

For others, the problem might be how to reduce inventory overhead,
or the best way to keep second graders engaged
for the science lesson.

Crossword puzzles are a common way to practice
the experience of problem and insight.

There needs to be an impasse, a problem
that gets the brain going.

But then something remarkable sometimes happens.
An insight arrives as if out of thin air.
And it is generally accompanied by
a great sense of certainty.
The person just knows it is the right answer.

As a result of very recent work,
combining the use of fMRI and EEG scans,
researches have begun to be able to watch
the brain light up with insight.

So a problem was posed to an individual wired for observation.
The person would struggle. Many times no solution would come.
But when it did, the person's eyes would often go wide,
and they would even say "aha."

All that was lacking was the little light bulb
appearing above their head.

But here's the cool thing: the light bulb was lighting up in their brain.
In the 300 milliseconds before the "aha"
there would be a spike of gamma rhythm,
the highest electrical frequency generated by the brain.

Gamma rhythm is thought to arise from something called
the "binding" of neurons, as cells across the cortex
draw themselves into a new network,
which can then enter consciousness.

This gamma shower in the brain is the light bulb.
As Lehrer says, "It's as if the insight had gone incandescent." (p43cA)

What happens, in roughest summary, is this,
and it's a right brain thing:
The anterior superior temporal gyrus
a small fold of tissue in the right hemisphere of the brain
becomes unusually active in the seconds
before insight is declared.

This activity is marked by a surge of electricity
leading to a rush of blood.

This marks the organizing of the new neural network.
And in the right brain, the nerve cells are longer
with more spines. This means that the cells
can more quickly search a larger cortical area,
bringing diverse and far-ranging resources into play.

These nerve cells are less precise than the left brain
but they are better connected.

That is the light bulb switching on in the brain.
But here's one more amazing thing:
It is amazing but you will quickly recognize it
as something you already know:
this process doesn't work well unless you relax.

That's why, Lehrer notes, so many insights
happen in the shower or upon waking.
The great mathematician Henri Poincare
received his key insight into non-Euclidean geometry
while stepping onto a bus. (p43cC)

Of course insight can happen literally "under fire"
as it did for Wag Dodge in the Mann Gulch tragedy.
But the best path to letting those well-connected long nerve cells
that aren't as precise but sure know how to bring together
new and unexpected brain resources
is to relax and let the brain work.

One final elegant and amazing thing about
the brain and the insight process, before we get to
Mountain States Mennonite Conference Annual Assembly.

It appears that the prefrontal cortex of the brain
orchestrates the brain like a symphony conductor.
What this means is that the brain will work on the problem
while we're no longer thinking about it.

Those long, less-precise, but well-connected nerve cells
in the right brain hemisphere are being directed
to fire right along, making connections
while we go on with our day.

Sometimes, they then reveal their answer
that evening in the shower, or the next morning
while the head is still on the pillow.

The prefrontal cortex recognizes the correct answer
and fires it into consciousness.
Lehrer says it is as if "We suddenly notice
the music that has been playing all along."

In this sense, he notes, the feeling that we often have is accurate:
our brains know more than we do.
Amazing, elegant, remarkable.

Annual Assembly - "By the Power of the Holy Spirit"
Last weekend was Mountain States Mennonite Conference's
Annual Assembly, at Boulder Mennonite Church and Monarch High School.

It was less well-attended than the previous year,
undoubtedly for a variety of reasons that all came together.

That is nothing to fret too much about.
Because much good happened there.
And most of all, much good is happening in our conference.
We just may not know it yet.

The theme for the Assembly was "By the Power of the Holy Spirit."
This is the second phrase in our conference vision statement:
"Pursuing God's dreams, by the power of the Holy Spirit,
in the way of Jesus Christ."

Last year was "Pursuing God's dreams."
Next year will be "In the way of Jesus Christ".

But this year, it was "By the power of the Holy Spirit."
Now I'm going to draw and rough and fast analogy here:
The Holy Spirit is the "brain" of our conference,
and she knows more than we do.
(I'll use the pronoun "she" since the Greek word
for Spirit is female gender.)

And not only is the Holy Spirit our "brain."
I believe our conference is on the brink of insight.

Why do I think this?
First of all, because we have a major problem
posed for us.

Our conference has always been on the small side.
It has not been growing much lately.

Numbers of participants is not the issue.
But you always get more participants
when something begins to matter and matter a lot
to a group of people.

Two and three generations ago,
the starting of a nursing school and then numerous
hospitals animated the Mennonites in this region.

But for the last generation, this project slowly went away,
as hospitals were sold to larger management companies.

Since then, the problem has been posed.
I experience it as a problem that arrives
restated and re-approached in waves
of greater and greater urgency.

Who are the Mennonites today?
Does this movement matter any more?
Does the whole idea of following Christ in life
still make sense in the modern world?
If so, what are we going to go about it
in the Rocky Mountain region?

We have our wonderful a cappella singing,
practiced here in this congregation as much or more so
than many places.

But that's a cultural aesthetic. It is wonderful.
But what it is tied to is something achingly profound:
the possibilities arising from a tradition long devoted
to rejection of war in a world still addicted to war.

The headline I've been using for myself is:
The Mennonites: An Alternative to War.
Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan are just the edge of something.
New global relationships are the real story.
Will they be horribly stained by violence?
Or will we find pathways toward new global communities?

Mennonites have some skills here...
Others have been noticing this same thing.

One is the international speaker and writer,
Greg Boyd, one of those increasingly complex
and interesting evangelicals....

He writes in his blog, and I will quote at length:
There is a beautiful and powerful grassroots Kingdom movement arising all over the globe that Mennonites in particular need to notice. Millions of people are abandoning the Christendom paradigm of the traditional Christian faith in order to become more authentic followers of Jesus. From the Emergent Church movement to the Urban Monastic Movement to a thousand other independent groups and movements, people are waking up to the truth that the Kingdom of God looks like Jesus and that the heart of Christianity is simply imitating him. Millions are waking up to the truth that followers of Jesus are called to love the unlovable, serve the oppressed, live in solidarity with the poor, proclaim Good News to the lost and be willing to lay down our life for our enemies. Multitudes are waking up to the truth that the distinctive mark of the Kingdom is the complete rejection of all hatred and violence and the complete reliance on love and service of others, including our worst enemies. Masses of people are waking up to the truth that followers of Jesus aren’t called to try to win the world by acquiring power over others but by exercising power under others — the power of self-sacrificial love.
What many who are being caught up in this movement lack is a sense of tribal identity and historical rooting, and many are looking for this. A central feature of post-modernity is the longing to “live in a story” that’s bigger than oneself. Many, therefore, are looking for a tradition they can align with.
The only tradition that embodies what this rising breed of Kingdom radicals is looking for is the Anabaptist tradition (which the Mennonites are heir to). This is the only tradition that consistently refused political power and violence. This is the only tradition that made humble, self-sacrificial love the centerpiece of what it means to follow Jesus. It’s the only tradition that isn’t soaked in blood and the only tradition that looks remotely like Jesus. Many (in fact, most) of the early leaders of this movement in the 16th century paid for their non-compliance with the Christendom paradigm by being martyred. This tradition is a treasure to be cherished. And it’s a tradition whose time may have come, for this is precisely the vision of the Kingdom that millions today are waking up to.
(read full posting at --- http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/a-word-to-my-mennonite-friends-cherish-your-treasure/)

Wow. It is a lot to think about.
It makes me think about resources I may have for responding.
It makes me think about how I get comfortably numb too frequently.
It makes me long for the deep simplicity of Christ's peace
and wonder if in fact we Mennonites can offer something.

It's hard to think about.
For one thing, we're not as good as he says.
We've let ourselves be beneficiaries of power politics and war
even while not actively engaging in it.

And we have a history of male dominance
and the usual domestic abuse and violence to answer for;
that is the common heritage of all faiths.

And we find our footing to be very unsure as
we walk out of our rural roots and into urban centers.

But I say all these things, and I can feel Jesus'
eyes fixed on me anyway, saying
"Feed my sheep."

Jesus saying, "yes all those things are true.
Are you going to do something about them so that you can...
how shall I put this.... feed. my. sheep.?"

Jesus saying "did I say perfection was the premise for your work?
now Feed my sheep."

Jesus saying "Are you mentioning all those things
as excuses, because I hope not. I hope you are
mentioning all those things because you are
trying to figure out how to.... what is it in French?....feed my sheep?!"

The problem therefore, posed by our conference brain,
posed by the Holy Spirit around whom we are organized
is this. What shall we be? How shall we matter?

For example, where are the Spanish language churches?
We used to have some.
And why are there still only 5-7 Anabaptist churches in such
a huge metro area as Denver?

And where is the Anabaptist school located in a large urban area?
And where is the Mennonite boot-camp alternative for
young vulnerable chaotic men and women
thinking of joining the military to get their lives jump-started?

Where is the great Anabaptist voice on global relationships
that will challenge all the protectionist talk about our way of life
in favor of seeking with all our hearts, souls, and minds
for Christ's way of life for all nations
and all peoples, no matter which side of the border
they were born on?

And here's the thing. Here's why our Mennonite conference matters.
It is a lovely and wonderful place of Mennonite cooperation.
With a lovely and wonderful vision statement:
Pursuing God's dreams, by the power of the Holy Spirit
in the way of Jesus Christ.

If you don't think that's so much, try comparing it to other
vision statements that are out there.
This statement gets the whole "live-it-with-your-life-thing"
This statement doesn't call you to believe something
or conform to something.

It identifies that there is a lively and living Spirit among us,
in whom we may breath fresh air,
who is dreaming, and dreaming with power,
and dreaming about things that matter to real
people walking around on real earth.

This is not afterlife religion, or Jesus-and-me religion.
This is not gay-bashing religion or abortion-politics religion.
This is not America-is-a-Christian-nation religion.

This is Anabaptism in some of it's best expression.
Resilient, powerful, calling for a new day in the Spirit of Christ,
something wholesome, transforming, and wonderful,
something full of relationships and community,
and healing, and hope, and gracefully
walking other pathways than the pathways of violence.

You want this faith. You want what this conference is really about,
sleepy though we may be, caught up in distractions or addictions,
trying to figure out what in the world it means to be
Mennonites in the city.

Jesus is saying "Mennonites in the city?
Are you still working on that? I'll admit, Jerusalem was tough.
But still - feed my sheep."

Another wonderful thing about this conference.
We have a conference minister who knows how to conduct it.
Herm Weaver gets this thing. He is working at relationships
so that something new may spring to life.
He works, he releases energy, he plays with it,
just like a good conductor working with beautiful music.
Important to this case: he understands that relaxation thing.
He knows that what we need most is to hang out with
the right people: each other, the poor, people of various
backgrounds, approaches, hopes, and dreams.

What you basically see with Herm and with our vision statement
are all the conditions of a brain working and working on the problem.
It is a brain that is firing. It is a brain whose organizing
principal is the Holy Spirit.

I believe that the "anterior superior temporal gyrus"
of the Holy Spirit is firing in our conference.
The gamma rhythms are going off the charts.

If there were researchers watching the scans at this moment,
they would be getting very excited.
Here it comes. Here comes the insight.
Look, the brain of the conference is going incandescent.

There's the conference minister conducting things
so that we can better recognize what the solution to
our problem is.

There's that new neural network appearing.
Let's call it a name... How about: "Pursuing God's dreams
by the power of the Holy Spirit in the way of Jesus Christ"?
One of these days we're going to say "aha"!
The light bulb will flash on and
God's will may be done on earth
yet again as it is in heaven.
Yet again.

So Greg Boyd says millions are looking for what Mennonites have to offer?
Well (we say to ourselves), that's not because of us.
So true! If it is really happening, it's the work of the Spirit.

Well (we say to ourselves), people say that stuff all the time.
You gotta watch out - people can say anything.
We've tried stuff before and it didn't work.
And we're still trying to adjust to the city.

So how about if we say this to ourselves?
What are we going to do, excuse ourselves to the sidelines
and the status quo? Never try anything again,
because we already tried it?
What, have we really already tried everything?

What are we going to do - anxiously cling to our existing congregations and existing lives,
hoping to shore things up a bit before we step out?
Is that really the way of Jesus Christ?
Is that really Pursuing God's dreams?
Is that really the power of the Holy Spirit?

I think the brain is firing and working on the problem
and pretty soon, if we let ourselves,
we will be hearing the music that's been playing
all along in those submerged neural networks.

The "brain" is the power of the Holy Spirit at work
among Mennonites in the Rocky Mountain region.
It is working to produce that powerful moment of insight.
Let us imagine that we are standing on the brink
of God's great insight to come pouring
into our lives, into our awareness,
into our conscious lives of faith.

8 Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." 9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
John 14:8-17 (NRSV)

May the Spirit be in you.
May the light of spiritual insight flash on among us.
Let's be Mennonites for today, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And I see Jesus looking at me and saying
"Excellent. So let's get down to feeding those sheep, shall we?" Amen.

 

“Hymn and a Movie: For the healing of the nations (HWB 367)
and Persepolis: Ideologies and Christ”

August 17 , 2008
Common Time - Summer

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
(Associated Bible reading: Colossians 2:6-10, 15, 18)
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.... He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.... Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking....

Introduction
Sing the hymn (vss. 1 &3)

The opening credits of the movie Persepolis
include four tympanic notes * * * *
followed by a lilting string melody.

This small musical pairing
foreshadows all that we will see.
The lilting wonder of a small girl's life
with parents and grandmother who dearly love her...

And the utter thumping terror of a
violent totalitarian regime
that seeks to insinuate itself
into every facet of life, public and personal.

The movie is based on the autobiographical novel
by Marjane Satrapi - it is a graphic novel---
if you're not familiar with that, it's like a comic book
only with a novel-length story.g
The movie is in animation - style based on the novel.

Satrapi won several awards for the novel.
The movie was granted the 2008 Cinema for Peace Award
for "Most Valuable Movie of the Year".
It is a powerful anti-war statement and much more.

The story is about Satrapi's girlhood
during and after the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The first scene with little Marji
shows her with her parents at the airport
receiving relatives who have just arrived.

The little girl wants to push the huge luggage cart
with all their luggage.
She is a girl who does things.

Then we learn that she loved fries with ketchup,
Bruce Lee, and Adidas sneakers.
Her two obsessions were to one day shave her legs,
and to be the last prophet of the galaxy.

This prophet thing is particularly wonderful.
Her little girl world is full of wonders,
but there are also some injustices she has noticed.

She creates rules that will make the world a better place:
Everyone must behave well, keep their word, tell the truth.
the poor must all eat one roasted chicken each day.

And one for her beloved grandmother:
Old women must never suffer again.
How will this happen?, grandma asks.
It will be forbidden!, Marji declares

with all the wonderful clarity and omnipotence
of a young child waking up to the power of
rules and society.

But all this childhood wonderment is happening
while the political weather is changing all around.

Her family is an urbane and relatively wealthy family,
living in Tehran.
At a party in the opening sequence,
Marji plays among the legs of the party-goers,
trying out her Bruce Lee stealth moves.

There is the usual drivel of discussion
about fashion and bodies. There is drinking and food.
At the same time, a relative speaks to Marji's father
about her husband, who is in prison.

The Shah is ruling Iran as a modernizing king;
he is the despotic son of his father, who also was a modernizing king.
There are political prisoners; there is rising discontent.

Marji's parents are critical of the Shah.
It turns out that her grandfather was a Qajar prince,
deposed when the Shah took power in 1923
with the help of Russia and the British.
(The Qajar's deposed the previous dynasty in the 1794)

Marji's parents and grandmother support communism,
at least to some degree, thinking it will bring justice.
They speak about how the grandfather
was a prince and communist.

That night Marji lies on her bed, wide-eyed
that her grandfather was a prince and what something
mysterious that she misunderstands as "cómmuniss."!

Now there are marches in the street.
In 1971, the Shah had celebrated the 2,500 anniversary
of the Iranian monarchy with luridly extravagant festival
next to the ruins of ancient city of Persepolis.

He wanted to use it as a way to better join the Western modern world.
But the extravagance was in glaring contrast
to the poverty in the surrounding villages.
In the wake of this event, protests began.

By 1978 and '79,when we join Marji's story,
the protests are becoming large,
and are being violently put down.

Persepolis, Communism, and Fundamentalism
Sing vs. 2 of "For the healing...."

The hymn verse speaks of longing for freedom
and the end of war and hatred.

The students and others protesting the Shah
also longed for these same things.
For many of them, communism was the answer.
For others, it was the making of a an Islamic state.

The history of Iran is one of the world's great histories.
Persepolis was the ancient capital of the Persian Empire,
which stretched from India in the east
and all the way west into Greece.

It was an awe-inspiring city, a city as political spectacle
and theater, a crossroad that amazed ancient travelers.
(For an excellent review, see National Geographic August 2008)

The Shah's were the Persian kings, heirs of the great
Cyrus, who figures in Biblical history as the king
who freed the Hebrew people from exile
and sent them back to the land of Canaan.

Now, protests are seeking to overthrow the king of Persian,
who is the Shah of Iran. He has used torture and terror
to maintain power.

Torture does give you power.
But it also destroys your credibility.
It makes you much less the light of the world
for democracy or enlightenment or cultural greatness.

But what about communism?
What about religion as a pattern for government?

In one sequence in the movie, the Shah's tanks roll,
in answer to the protesters. The metal treads
fill the screen with dark oblivion.

Soon a young protester is shot and killed.
Other's follow; the martyr's deaths
are the seed of the revolution.

And at last, the statues come down
and the Shah runs into exile.
The old way in Iran was wealthy families
deposing each other and ruling.

The new way is the great ideas:
for some, communism; for others, Islam.

The protests succeed.
Marji's uncle, who has been a political prisoner,
visits. Her tells her tales of prison
and gives here a swan he made
out of prison bread.

She is amazed at his passion and integrity.
He is certain that the people will bring
in a new day of rule by the people
in a free communist state.

But soon a new horror arises.
Men, that in the animation of the movie
have dark beards that cover the entire
lower half of their faces
start broadcasting.

"We will purge anti-revolutionary elements.
Only one law will prevail: that of blood."

And so the hierarchy of terror crystallizes
before our eyes, in the form of an Islamic Republic.

Now much more than the suffering of old women is forbidden.
Everything is forbidden.
As the old joke went when Oliver Cromwell
set up a Christian fundamentalist state in England:
"Enjoyment is forbidden, by order of Lord Cromwell."

Were there 3,000 political prisoners with the Shah?
Now there are 300,000.
And into the chaos, steps Saddam Hussein's Iraq
which seeks to invade Iran.

And this gives the new republic it's ultimate cause: War!
Nothing lines up the people and damps
critique and thought like war.

Soon, bombs are falling and tanks are rolling
in the glorious defense of the glorious nation.

In a horrifying sequence, which is historically accurate
(see, among others, The Threatening Storm, by Kenneth Pollack)
boys are employed to run into the battlefields
ahead of the tanks as human minesweepers
going to their glorious deaths for the nation.

This history, as with so many political tales,
is a deep and tragic case of "be careful what you wish for."
So many great ideas become the worst cases of terror.

The letter to the Colossians in the New Testament
has language that sounds remarkably addressed
to the situation of a political and religious revolution.

"See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. ...you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.... He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.... Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking...."
Apparently people in ancient Greece, in the wake of Jesus life,
have started meeting together in these groups called "churches".
They are celebrating a new way of life, characterized by love, especially,
and by a refusal to honor the old social divisions
of race, gender, wealth, social class of any sort.

But it is about these new relationships.
It is not about a grand new idea.
The people have a relationship with God in the Spirit of Christ.
And they have relationships with each other.
And that is that. There is no larger scheme.
There is no plan to rule the world
or grand plan for any national greatness.
In fact, all there is are these groups of people meeting
in these new groups called "churches"
and trying to figure out the meaning of Christ's love.

It may seem odd in a world of grand schemes,
and in a political season full of grand declarations
which it seems politicians must make in order to get elected.

It may seem odd to note that, surprisingly, Jesus is not a grand scheme.
Yes, there is the hope and even belief that the world
will be changed in the Spirit of Christ.

But the starting point was not a strategy with
flow charts and evaluations of assets.

The starting point was new relationships of love.
Love because of forgiveness and new hope in Christ.
Love in new relationships that would have been
unbelievable before.

Jesus does not fix everything. There are still hard times and suffering.
Jesus does not end history - life still goes on, children are born,
people need to make a living.

There is no grand scheme, only that constant question:
How may I love. How may I make this a moment for
the glory of God?

Joining the human fray
Sing vs. 4 of "For the healing...."

Nicholas Lemann writes about a book that used
to be a classic of political science which came out in 1908:
The process of government by Arthur Bentley.

The book's essential premise is that all politics
are the result of activities of groups.
We would like politics to be more than that,

to be more wonderful and transcendent
than the simple and hard work of organizing
for what you care about.

But that's it, according to this book. Groups organize.
The idea that interest groups are a bad idea
is simply a failure to understand: that's
how politics moves forward - group's act.

Politics is the constant struggle for advantage
among various groups.
Politics does not need to be the great moral order.
In fact, over-moralizing about how
we need a wonderful, radiant politics
that rises above the struggle of all these groups
is a problem.

In fact it is the problem that we see in our movie.
Soon Marji's uncle, the communist so excited to see the revolution come,
is arrested by the new regime.

From prison, he is allowed one visit.
He wants to see little Marji, and she agrees to go.
When she sees him in his rat-infested cell
she is horrified.

But her uncle loves her. He calls her the daughter
he always wished he had. He calls her "star of my life":
étoile de ma vie

He is still confident in his communism,
confident that the people - the proletariat - will one day rule.
He is soon and tragically executed.

But here's the thing that Colossians might say to him
and regarding politics in general.
It is in fact not mostly about grand schemes.
It is mostly about people, about people encountering people
about people keeping it with people,
struggling with other, engaging each other,
meeting each other.

As Bentley puts it
"Intelligent action, emotional actions, linked actions, trains of action, planned actions, plotted actions, scheming, experimenting, persisting, exhorting, compelling, mastering, struggling, cooperating--such activities by the thousand we find going on around us in populations among which we are placed."

"Populations among which we are placed."
We find that we are in fact people among people.
And there is no escaping them.

As Colossians says,
See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

There is not a great idea that can save us from all this mess.
Rather, Colossians knows that Jesus just entered this mess.
Entered and stayed with it and love it.

Loved it until those around him recognized that grand schemes
were all defeated. Grand schemes were all put in their place
by that love.

No great religion, no great political plan is going to
end all of the struggle.
Rather, what we may do is join the struggle
with the ways of love as our guide.

Jesus does not try to escape the mess
of human interactions, human politics.
He goes all the way to the ground with it.
He refuses to any more or any less than to care
about human relationships.

When he is horribly executed by the government,
what is so amazing is not that he suffered.
The Bible uses language a lot that makes
it sound like suffering is somehow what saves us.

But it is short-hand for something else.
What really saves us is that Jesus was willing to suffer
for the sake of all that love in all those ordinary relationships.
The world is full of people and Jesus jumped right into the fray.
He did not seek to clean things up
but rather to love into things.
And that made all the difference.

Our hymn has the line
"Dogmas that obscure your plan"
and that says a mouthful.
Because grand scheming has caused so many to suffer.
Whether it is a Shah restoring the greatness of Iran

Or communists bringing about the rule of the people.
Or all kinds of interventionists and people who know too much,
people who end up being torturers and deceivers.

What we need rather are people who will join us
in our simple struggles with each other,
and our basic ways of learning how to love.

What amazes me in the movie Persepolis
is that in the midst of so much horror, totalitarian ravings,
ridiculous anti-woman rulings, paranoid religiosity,
brutal and cruel control machinery,

in the midst of all that, a girl still grows up,
still becomes a young woman - horribly injured by some of it
but still a young woman who has now written us a story
from which we may grow and learn.

Beyond all schemes and plans that have gone down to the grave
and have become the grave of so many
beyond all that political machinery, life springs forth.

Speaking of life spring forth,
it is worth noting that there are people in Iran.

From the introduction to Rumi: Bridge to the Soul
here are "A few things Americans may not know about Iran"
written by the translator, Coleman Barks
---Gas is fifteen cents a gallon
---There is no income tax and no sales tax, only a small real estate tax
---Tehran is a city of twelve million that does not seem to have any slums. Maybe there are some on the south side..... It is mile after mile of twenty-story yuppie apartment buildings.
---Shiraz has three million people. Isphahan has four million. That one city lost three hundred thousand men in the Iran-Iraq war.
---Everyone drives a medium-size late-model car. All the men wear dark suits and no tie.
---Eighty percent of the courses at the Universty of Tehran are taught in English.
---The amazing traffic is more like a continuous concrete version of dirt-track stockcar racing in the southeastern United States. It takes unbelievable courage to participate in it. To make a left-hand turn is unthinkable. It is a chaos that somehow works, with very little, almost no, honking of horns. And Iranians do not seem to bother much about fender benders or filing insurance claims and all that. They just wave and keep going.... Most of their side mirrors are broken off.
---If you are riding a motorcycle, you do not have to wear a helmet, and you can ride against traffic, go on the sidewalk, through the markets, anywhere. Sometimes certain cars also go against traffic for eccentric reasons I never understood......

The point of all this really (for my reflection)
is that there are people in Iran,
a complex layered society of people.
And if you bomb them, they die.....

Conclusion
The movie does not have a very happy ending.
The young adult Marjane ends up leaving Iran, leaving her grandmother,
who dies in those years.

But the ending is of course that she has lived,
that she has told us her story.
From that place she was launched to share
the story with the world, and she did,
a story of life and love in the midst of totalitarianism.

May we also be those who live into such stories,
and tell them. And become people in whom
as the hymn goes "earth its destiny may find."

Amen.

 

“Exaptation and the Holy Spirit”

September 14 , 2008

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
I'm sure most of us are aware of the train crash
that in Los Angeles, with sudden loss of life there.
And this week was the 7th anniversary of the terror
attacks that occured in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.

This makes us think about the fragility of life,
how quickly it can go.
And how shall we live?

The poet Hopkins wrote:
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...."

On this 7th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks
I remember how it was to walk into that morning.

The thing of it is
that everybody wakes up in the morning
to the sun brightening all the surfaces of the world

and so we did that morning
here in Denver, the skies were blue, not surprisingly
It was morning all over this part of the earth

the alpenglow sunlight playing against the tops of trees here
in the Rocky Mountain west
and in the midwest on tall corn

and it played on the great towers in New York city,
and on the tops of airplanes getting ready to take off.
And suddenly the scene collapsed all around us.
The newscasters were shocked, inarticulate, crying in some cases.

Accustomed (perhaps too well) to the stories of harm from around the world
we were shocked by this harm brought so near,
brought so close to the symbols of the life that we love
brought so close to the life that we love.

We soon learned that it was a harm born of hatred and despair.
Incredible acts of suicide designed for the deaths of thousands.

And it was horror and sorrow, we all made inarticulate,
rendered into that-which-is-beyond-speech

As X.J. Kennedy recounted it, for example,
Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands....

Soon enough, and rightly enough, horror became sorrow
became anger. And then, and this makes sense too,
but now there is great danger here,

anger became rage. And rage remains unrelieved still....
We have these huge brains, an example of what the evolutionary biologist
Stephen J. Gould calls "exaptations".

In other words, these brains evolved for a reason or many reasons,
but now have the capacity for thousands of reasons. Tens of thousands.
Now we have the capacity to imagine ourselves
into whole new worlds, with a million synapses firing.

So how shall we live with anger constantly morphing into rage?
What firm hand shall we take?
Which conversations need to be had amid the firmness?
What resolve? What memory? What new thing?

We have so much capacity of heart, mind, and soul.
How much more can we think or do or say than
"the only thing they understand is..."
or "we have no choice but to...."

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."
or the grandeur of great Spirit, if you prefer.
It is charged with capacity, as Gould would say,
and how shall we use it?

What new and shining thing shall we make of this world,
in the wake of terror upon terror
in history, today, piling upon itself
like the snow upon snow of long winter?

We who live on this 7th anniversary of what we now simply call "9-11"
have the privilege of the sun again
day after day, and what shall we do?
How shall we love it enough?

Today we celebrate the formation
program of First Mennonite.
We celebrate formation in this spiritual community.
And we also have the privilege of the sun,
and the privilege of days.
The Light of Christ is our sun.
And the day is this time,
this new morning in our congregational life.

And how shall we love it?
Like the human brain, First Mennonite Church of Denver
evolved for a reason or reasons at first.
But like the human brain, it has far more capacity
than the original reasons for which it evolved.

Adaptations for the brain might have had to do with
hunting for food on short grass savannah.
Now the brain can build a jet or paint like Picasso.
That's an exaptation.

First Mennonite may have started to provide
a home for Mennonite nurses in the city.
But now we may be a home and engine
for the great work of peace and service and community
of modern urban Mennonites.

Those are our exaptations.
First Mennonite had reasons to begin.
But by beginning and thriving
we now have far more reasons.
Thousands. Tens of thousands.

In the gospel of John, Jesus turns to his friends and says
you will do these works and works greater than these.

The gospel of John understood that God was a God
of the future, and that the possibilities for goodness,
health, and wonder were myriad and unending.

So let us, in this, our day in the sun,
our new congregational morning,
teach, connect, pray, share money,
share resources.

Let us be children who are learning how to be good.
Let us be people who give ourselves to create our place
in which "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

The world needs strong and wonderful responses
in times and horror and terror, and in times of
of uncertainty.

The world needs us to be in it as people full
of the exaptations of the Holy Spirit,
the possibilities of God's grandeur.

We might say "I sing in exaptation"
(from the hymn "I sing in exultation")
Our world is full of the possibilities of the grandeur of God.
That is what we are about here, today.
Let us give ourselves to it, rejoice in it, love it.
How shall we love it enough?

 

“Mission Owns Church: Church as Relational Process #1”

September 28 , 2008

Common Time - Autumn

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
Bible reading: Nehemiah 7:73b - 8:12
When the seventh month came—the people of Israel being settled in their towns— all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.
Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought t he law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up.
Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen’, lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
A nd Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, ‘This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. Then he said to them, ‘Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.’ So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, ‘Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.’ And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.

Introduction
This is the first sermon in a series that will be running
through the fall for Annie and my preaching,
even while we make room for other
events as they come along.

The series is entitled: "The church as a relational process"
and has to do with approaching again what it means for us
to be a people with each other.
If you like theological words,
this is a series on ecclesiology.
What is the church?
What is this church?

Nehemiah
Well, I have to say, it's been awhile for Nehemiah and me.
I had to remember - is this little book by the minor prophets?
Is it one of those guys in the ball park of Proverbs?
There it is, tucked right in after Ezra, and right before Esther.
They both start with "E" so that could help me remember,
but they perhaps aren't the "greatest of E's".
(So it may not work.)
(Those are Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes...)

Now I won't kid you or try to make Nehemiah better than he is.
He's an old-fashioned Hebrew-centric prophet with a temper.
It doesn't do to pretend otherwise.
In 13:8 he goes all Bobby Knight on the priest Eliashib,
saying "And I was very angry, and I threw all the
household furniture... out of the room.
There's more to say about that story - but still.

And he goes along with Ezra's national-purity plan
where all the men are commanded to divorce their foreign-born wives
(Ezra 10; Nehemiah 10:30).
Now this has it's own ancient context;
they were recently returned exiles struggling for identity.
But still, this is scary, especially after the 20th century
with all it's really scary race-driven killing.
And the people that didn't divorce, and continued their
mixed-ra ce ways in Canaan came to be known as Samaritans.
And we know what Jesus said about Samaritans:
They could be good, better than the purebreds.
And it's always all about the men with Ezra and Nehemiah;
always commanding the men to do this or that with their wives
as if the wives are not full persons.

Fortunately the Bible has much more going on than that.
And not just in the New Testament. All kinds of powerful women
figured among the Hebrew people, from Miriam to Ruth.

Joy
Anyway, I don't mean to go all negative to start out.
I want to keep this campaign... er... sermon positive.
And so let me say that this particular passage from Nehemiah
has one of the most powerful phrases written in the Bible:
"the joy of the Lord is your strength."

Not "the commandments of the Lord" good though they are.
Not the ethics or theology or spirituality or anything else
but the "joy". That's cool. They idea that joy somehow
goes all the way down in things; that joy is somehow
winging it's way from the center of God's universe
into our hearts. T hat does feel like strength.

So in our passage from Nehemiah,
the scribe Ezra is asked to read the law.
The people, it says, ask him to read the law
because they are seeking a new life.

So it's by popular request, at least according to the person who wrote this.
And he reads it in the presence of men and women;
So women. Listening to the law. So that's something at least.

And all who could understand,
which may mean also children who were old enough
to understand the words.

All the Levites stand up there with Ezra.
Solidarity forever - we're here with you Ezra.
This is an event of the power of community.

And so they list all those names.
We could do a list - the list I always like here are all
the names that begin with "Ar---":
Ardell, Arden, Ardiss, Ardith, Arlen, Arliss, Arlo, and Arzella.

Or since Levites were leaders among the people,
we could list our council members:
Anita, Anna, Craig, Dawn, Jennifer, Leon, Ligia, Linda, Myrna, Steve, Sylvia

So we may imagine all these dear people all standing with Ezra,
as he read the law to the Hebrews.

And so the law was read to them, and must have struck a chord,
because the people began to weep.
Perhaps like those who cry when they read
again a letter from the father or mother who is long gone.
Or like reading the Gettysburg Address aloud:

"...from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Something like that. And the people remember themselves,
come to themselves, remember their better selves beyond all the wounding,
all the politics, all the fear,

the Hebrew people hear their scribe read words that are precious to them,
from their law, perhaps the last words of old prophet Moses before he died,
standing on the edge of Canaan finally:

"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live,... loving... God,... so that you may live in the land.... [of your] ancestors:... Abraham [and Sarah], Isaac [and Rebecca], Jacob [and Leah and Rachel]." Deut. 30:19, 20 excerpt.

So the people weep. But tears are a release from numbing fear,
tears mean the days of domination are over,
and so they are close to laughter.

And the leaders remind the people of that, remind them
that these holy words go down to the root of joy,
and that these words mean they may rejoice,
may set their hands and hearts to their future
with joy, lifting each other up in joy.

The mission of the church owns the church
In the Focus newsletter, which will come out next week,
Anita, our congregational chairperson, has submitted an
article from Dan Hotchkiss.

This article asks who owns the congregation.
Is it the members? Is it the board? Is it God?
He says that it is not the members, nor the board,
=0 A
and while it might ultimately be God,
the more immediate owner of the church
is that expression of God's mission in that
particular congregation.

God for our time and our place as First Mennonite.
That is who owns First Mennonite Church of Denver.
None of us. We exist as co-creators in this mission.
But the church is the subject of God's dreams.
We are Christian friends in it.
But we20live in the midst of something greater,
the very expression of creation and all of life
for this place and this time.

The mission of any congregation owns that congregation,
says Dan Hotchkiss.
And so the mission is sort of like our "law"
sort of the "word to us" like the Hebrew people
heard the "word to them" read by Ezra.

What does that mission say to us?
I cannot bring anything to you this morning like
the Gettysburg address or like Moses' last words.

But here are a few things I think our mission,
the mission of First Mennonite is saying to us.
I don't want to burden you with too much either,
so I will only name three - that magic storyteller number,
and then we will go from there in the coming weeks.

These notes from the mission of the church
are to be joy to us. Think about your own list of names
of people who would be saying these t hings to you.

Be in charge of your theology
And so here we go for just a bit:
Thus saith the mission of First Mennonite
First of all, you shall be in charge of your own theology.
It is helpful to have someone preach who has given
all this some thought.
But you have your own relationship
with the divine. Learn it; let it speak.
Let your life speak, let your theology speak.

In the plant world, each plant has its distinct phototropism,
it's way of turning toward the light, following the sun.
Each of us has our own tropisms, given to us by our
conditions of life from early on.

These are a mixture of injury and blessing.
They become our tropism, or form of responding to life,
and therefore to God.

As the writer Paula D'Arcy puts it,
"God comes to us disguised as our life."
Our life with it's particular tropism,
each one of us and our way of finding the light
our phototropism.
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We are at our best, when we let that be, when we let that speak,
that particular phototropism that is ours,
our life, the disguise through which God has come to us.

The world needs the blessing of each of these tropisms;
so let yours speak.

Do not use the other
Thus saith the mission of First Mennonite secondly,
You shall not use each other, task each other,
nor manipulate, nor lock into roles or styles or patterns
nor make others into means toward and end.

For each one is irreducible. Each one is Christ-bearer
"Christo-pheros" - those-who-bear-anointing,
each is a lamp of God, and therefore
may not be used, may not be tasked,
may not ever become collateral damage;
not even your enemies may be killed
even if by all good lights they certainly have it coming.

No human may grieve them, but our ways are not God's ways,
and God's sees where we cannot or will not see,
and so we walk in humbleness before God,
and let God dream for each perso n, friend and enemy.

You shall not use the other in your church
but rather turn to each other, and show your face,
and perceive their face and let it be in your life.

And even if they say "will you let me be your servant"
say "'thanks for the offer' but I'd rather have you as a friend;
or if that's what you mean by servant, then 'yes, okay'".
Even as Jesus said to those with whom he gathered
"I no longer call you servants but rather I call you friends." (John 15:15)

Be a people of spiritual practice
And thirdly, thus saith the mission of First Mennonite,
that which is God's dreaming in our midst, in this time and place,
you shall be a people of spiritual practice.

What good is all this for you if you are not being
redeemed, transformed, saved,
if you are not being made a better person,
a better people?

The world does not need more fear-mongering, more tough talk,
more posturing, pretending to know everything or pretending
to know nothing. The world does not need more regular
people who are "just folks" or media elites,
or innocent Americans or any of the other political
caricatures that strive to fill our brains.

The world needs honest people who face fear, say their prayers,
become courageous while holding on to humility.
And never self-righteous. Never self-satisfied.

People who do not say "all we are saying is give peace a chance."
but rather people who say
"What we are saying is we are going to give peace a chance."
And here's how. Not be wishful thinking or naive assumpti ons.
But by tried methods of traversing conflict
tried methods of moving by smart and strategic and creative patterns
through the shifting pathways of conflict
to new, better, and often unexpected results.
Results that look after the safety of all involved,
and look after hope for a better shared future.

A place made different by true sharing:
where we share our money - who would go to a church
where they don't want to share their money among the people?
and where we share our time - who would go to a church
wh ere they don't want to spend time doing things among the people?
I wouldn't waste my life in such a church.

No, but rather you, First Mennonite, shall be
of God's dreams in this place and this time,
being made a people of genuine practice, a distinct community,
a contrast community.

Meaning you are informed by this community
in the way that you are a parent, in the way you watch TV,
in the way you drive, and go shopping, and eat,
and read, and hold your friendships and marriages,
and how you live in your families
and all manner of things are informed by
the dreams of God which are the heart of this place.

And so we may turn toward the light with each other,
because it is between the our faces and the faces of our friends
in this place and time that the mission of First Mennonite springs to life.
We need a barbecue and a movie outing and a brunch or so
to get a feel for that mission.
We need joyful worship.

And we become people formed by a mission,
and it is our joy, among us, the joy of God,
which is our streng th, our very own phototropism,
turning us toward the light.

For further study: Dan Hotchkiss, "Who owns a congregation?" Alban Institute, pub.

 

“The star of internationals”

January 18, 2009

Epiphany 2

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

© 2009, Vernon K. Rempel

 

Bible reading: Numbers 23:7-10; 24:15, 17a

Then Balaam uttered his oracle, saying:‘Balak has brought me from Aram, the king of Moab from the eastern mountains: “Come, curse Jacob for me; Come, denounce Israel!” How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom the Lord has not denounced? For from the top of the crags I see him, from the hills I behold him; Here is a people living alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations! Who can count the dust of Jacob, or number the dust-cloud of Israel? Let me die the death of the upright, and let my end be like his!’

 

So he uttered his oracle, saying:‘The oracle of Balaam son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eye is clear, I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near—a star shall come out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel....

 

 

Balak vs. Balaam

In perhaps the most interesting story of the book of Numbers

            (which tends to run on a bit about

                        counting cattle and tribal populations)

 

we have an epic contest between a king – Balak

            and a seer – Balaam

 

Balak has observed this migration of people

            and he's worried about his national identity

                        and sovereignty.

 

So he hires a consultant, a seer from back east, in Mesopotamia

                                   (see Access Bible, OT p. 197)

            a seer from the old country, the country of origins.

 

The consultant is supposed to speak words

            that will encourage the king and cause

                        fear and trembling among the migrants.

 

But Balaam is one of those rare consultants

            who adopts an approach of true independence,

                        even from the person paying him.

 

Balaam takes one look at the situation,

            and after some negotiations with his donkey

                        (you will have to read the story for yourself)

                                   he concludes that God's future is with the migrants

                                               and he gives the king the bad news:

 

“Here is a people living alone,
 and not reckoning itself among the nations! 


            Who can count the dust of Jacob,
 or number the dust-cloud of Israel?”

 

That is to say, here is a migrant people with no nation.

            And they are numerous; more numerous than you might think, O king.

 

To this Balaam the seer/consultant adds:

            “
I see him, but not now;
 I behold him, but not near—


                        a star shall come out of Jacob,
 and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel....”

 

(A passage of such poetry that it inspired Mendelssohn

            to compose his glorious musical chorus “There shall a star”.)

 

Balaam sees a people numerous, without a nation,

            and who one day will be great – a star shall come out of this people,

                        out of the people of Jacob and Leah and Rachel.

 

 

Internationals today

Today we live among people who are internationals,

            people whose identity bridges national borders,    

                        who hold dear close family and friends in

                                   two or more nations,

 

for whom, in ways that people more localized to one nation

            can scarcely imagine, live as global citizens.

 

Fareed Zakaria in his book The post American world

            notes that more and more nations and national structures

                        will only be part of any solution.

 

Increasingly, real solutions need to involve a much broader coalition

            that includes the private sector, nongovernmental groups,

                        cities, localities and the media.

 

He says in fact in a globalized, democratized, decentralized world

            we need to connect with individuals!

                        Individuals. People who personally may have

                                   complicated transnational alliances.

 

Zakaria argues that taxes, tariffs, and wars are the old ways,

            and that we need more subtle and sophisticated approaches.

                        The UN, the IMF, the G-8 are all outdated.

                                   There is so much more in the world now,

                                               so many more sub-groups,

                                                           people who who relate to the international

                                                                       scene in completely remixed ways.

                                                                                  (pp. 37, 38)

 

We have two young women among us

            who I think are something of an example of this:

                        Lani and Lari Rupp.

                                   They mother Nina is from China,

                                               they have close relatives in China,

                                                           and they have grown up very aware of          

                                                                       and appreciative of two nations.

 

They have agreed to be interviewed this morning.

            Lari and Lani, come on up, and welcome.

                        Thanks to both of you for being willing to do this.

 

Interview questions:

Lani and Lari questions:

 

When was your recent visit to China, and what all did you do there?

 

What are one or two things you first noticed about China in your recent visit?

 

What did you notice about what it's like to be a teen/young person in China?

 

How is it to be teens with a strong connection to another country, mother from China, life full of awareness of China?

 

You come from a church here in the United States. How do people tend to think about or see God in China. What are the main ways people express faith or relationship with God? Is Christianity very big there?

 

We notice that “everything” is made in China now. What do Chinese people think about that? What do they think about their relationship with the U.S.?

 

What would you like to say about China in the future and about U.S.-Chinese relationships?

 

Thanks, Lani and Lari for sharing with us.

         Very much appreciated.

 

 

A couple of additional notes

Just a couple of additional notes.

         Internationals, people who live among nations

                   in ways that are more intimate and interactive than ever

                            are surely like the “star that shall come from Jacob”

 

Their situation will likely be more common in the future, not less.

         It is a cultural change of vast proportions.

 

One final note: the world is full of people

         of all different colors of skin.

                   Lighter skins tones have been dominant for some time.

                           

There are complex reasons for this.

         One of the best accounts is Guns, Germs, and Steel

                   by Jared Diamond.

 

In very broad sweeps, in the last 200 years this is probably

         an expression of the dominance of the British Empire,

                   next translated into American dominance.

 

White anglo-saxon Protestants were the magnetic

         core culture of U.S. society.

                   German immigrants wanted to be “white” in that way.

                            So did the Polish and the Irish

                                      and the way these different cultures became “white”

                                               is something you can read about at length.

 

But dark skin color has been a functional and fiercely

         enforced barrier in our society and in Europe

                   for hundreds of years.

 

Still, the world is full of skin colors.

         And the world is now more and more “us.”

 

In an amazing Atlantic Monthly article

         entitled “The end of white America”

                    Hua Hsu (so not a WASP).

                            (January/February 2009, pp. 46-55)

 

writes about how this magnetic center is shrinking

         and how the many ethnicities that have circled around it

                   are now become the culture itself.

 

For example, it used to be a commonplace euphemism

         in advertising to talk about a “general market”

                   which meant “whites” and then satellite ethnic markets.

 

Now increasingly ad campaigns are adapted to highly

         individualized tastes including groups like   

                   “skaters” and “hip-hoppers”

                            as well as “NASCAR” and

                                      contemporary country music fans.

 

The global variety of skin color is increasingly becoming

         the variety of the marketplace. Lighter shades now

                   dance and contend in the market with darker shades.

 

And so we have an amazing event this week.

         About 46 years ago, on August 28, 1963,

                   Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

                            preached the word:

 

“ 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.”

 

And on Tuesday, we have an unparalleled skin-color event,

            in which a dark-skinned man will become president of the nation,

                        one person who has been judged not by skin color but by character.

 

 

 

I hope there is bipartisan rejoicing that this is happening in our nation.

            I am not talking about politics but about race.

 

We as a nation in the highly symbolic office of the president,

            will now look like the world in ways we never have.

 

As the New Yorker magazine noted a few weeks ago,

            when Michelle and Barak Obama step off of Air Force

                        one on some other national soil in the near future,

                                   the visual effect itself suggests that a massive shift

                                               in the politics of race has happened.

 

This is not salvation, of course.

            This is not the end of racism or the end of history.

                        But it is like women getting the vote.

                                   Or like the Civil Rights Act. It's big, and it's real.

 

When the seer Balaam says to king Balak

            “there shall a star rise out of Jacob”

                        he is talking about a people who were not at the center

                                   now becoming ones who truly matter.

 

In this moment of change in race in our nation,

            which also may be a moment of different international relations,

                        and with so many truly and differently internationals

                                   living among us,

 

We need to take a spiritual breath,

            and seize this moment for the glory of God.

                        We are called, as always, to make of this something

                                   good, something that will shine with God's beauty.

 

Let us make of it what we can as best we can

            we understand the promises of God

                        who always dreams of justice and peace for all,

                                   for all peoples whose star will yet one day shine out. Amen.

"How to remain internationally useful"

1/25/09; Season of Epiphany

For First Mennonite Church of Denver

©2009 Vernon K. Rempel

 

The Bible passage is.... Deut. 26:5-7; 10, 11; 18, 19.

         ...You shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

         So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

         Today the Lord has obtained your agreement: to be his treasured people, as he promised you, and to keep his commandments; for him to set you high above all nations that he has made, in praise and in fame and in honour; and for you to be a people holy to the Lord your God, as he promised.

 

 

Hear O Israel

When the earthquake and tsunami hit in 2004,

         it was far from the shores of the U.S.

                   And yet it was closer to us than

                            any event originating off the waters of Sumatra

                                      might ever have been before in history.

 

How may we see the faces of the world

         face to face?

                   Today, we will hear from one who witnessed

                            the effects of the tsunami in person.

 

We are in the middle of a worship emphasis

         on international relationships, during this season

                   between Epiphany and Lent.

 

Annie and I are using the strategy of interviewing

         folks among us who've had international experiences recently.

 

 

It is a challenge to bring the faces of the world into the U.S.

         We live behind a glorious protective curtain

                   of military, cultural, and economic might.

 

In so many ways, the blue globe of the world

         has been our oyster in the last several generations.

                   So it has been easy for us not to know what all

                            is going on in the world.

 

Because in a sense it feels like the U.S. has been the world.

         Ours has been the dominant story.

 

Ann Wilson Schaef points out that the dominant culture

         always knows only it's own story,

                   but other cultures will know their stories

                            and the dominant story.

 

This seems to be the case.