First Sunday in Advent, November 29, 2009 (Beginning Year C)

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Jeremiah 33: 14-16, Psalm 25: 1-10, I Thessalonians 3: 9-13 and Luke: 21: 25-36.

Our gospel lection this week challenges us to think about the anticipated second coming of Christ. It begins by telling us “there will be…distress among nations…People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world…Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down… and that day does not catch you unexpectedly like a trap.”

Considering the wars that impoverish us, the economy that divides us, the environment that pollutes us and the normal negativities of viruses, sickness and death that never leave us unthreatened, I’d say that we seem to be moving in the direction of this prophecy. Despite our resistance there seems to be a persistent awareness our world is about to smash into something. According to apocalyptic imagery and myth, when conditions get sufficiently out of hand, God will pronounce a great “no” or an ending in which there is both terror and promise. The terror is the judgment of God for abandoning God’s ways, and the promise is that God will vanquish evil and set things eternally right.

But what do we do until then? If the “worst” is to happen, no one really knows the day or the hour, so scripture admonishes us to be ready at all times. It seems that we’re in a period of trial and that the outcome is uncertain. Long ago, when Luke wrote the warning of our lection for this week, he almost seems to instigate despair, but then gave words that can provide us with a hope that won’t betray. For he continues, “And then they shall see the Son of Man coming on a cloud with great power and glory. When all this happens, stand upright and hold your heads high because your liberation is near.” (Luke 21:27-28)

So what can we do until then? We can stand upright and hold our heads high. We can remove needless, crippling fear. We can steer clear of either bland optimism or destructive pessimism.

I’m told that in boating, when there’s a danger of running aground there is often a safe channel marked by red and black markers. To steer between them has become a proverb for laying a prudent course with disaster waiting both to the right and to the left. Navigators know what it means when one says, “Red right returning.” As we move toward whatever the Second Advent of Christ means to us, we can steer between the red marker of optimism and the black marker of pessimism.

It is true that we live in perilous times. If it’s not the environment and the dangers of climate change, it’s the threat of fundamentalisms producing people of venom and hate who regard others as somehow less than human. For most of us with any semblance of conscience in our nation, it’s the disparity of rich and poor heightened by increasing unemployment, or the absence of adequate health care for millions of our citizens. Yes, we are facing some serious crises which are not helped by the bland optimisms or avoidance mentalities of many a religious leader. But if the role of the optimist is played out, so is the role of the disgruntled pessimist. Either way we have people who have quit doing anything. It doesn’t seem to me to be responsible to allow the wave of the future sweep over us with no preparation and no response. There is a course that will build order out of faith in God and a reverence and respect for human life — an order strong enough to resist assaults from without because it is strong enough to resist disintegration from within. While it may be that all of our efforts will be of no consequence in the framework of what God’s intends, if we look to the authority Christ as a direction and guide, we can stay between those black and red markers and trust the future.

The narrative for this week tells us that Christ is coming. It tells us that the Second Advent will destroy the remaining power of Satan (evil) over the human family. Until then, our story directs us to participate in the healing of creation and to trust that God’s purposes will in the end overcome the evil personified by Satan. And in this every one of us has a constructive role to play. The conviction of God’s providence comes only by looking as steadily as we can at Jesus and the love that stands so steadfast in him. When we see this we’ll join those early Christians, who didn’t say out of some kind of despair, “look what the world has come to!” but rather, “look what has come and continues to come into the world.”

Advent reminds us that we will yet “see the Son of Man coming on a cloud with great power and glory.” Until then and when all this happens, “stand upright and hold your heads high because your liberation is near.”

Our confident story from Luke this week tells us that ultimately our future is in God’s hands.

Ralph Ahlberg

Last Sunday after Pentecost/Reign of Christ, November 22, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: 2 Samuel 23: 1-7, Psalm 132: 1-12, Revelation 1:4b-8 and John 18: 33-37.

So, continuing from last week, if foreign wars benefit our corporate economic system; if, indeed, that system depends upon a war economy to provide jobs and profits for so many within our nation, doesn’t that raise the theological question that our lections from Revelation and John confront, which is: who or what has the power to rule?

I was struck by David Brook’s New York Times’ article (11/10/09) where he writes that among the many things we don’t control, we do control and determine which narratives or stories we’ll use to make sense out of our lives. Such stories help us to set our priorities and to judge what is important in our world, what is not so important and what is actually destructive.

The passages on this Sunday suggest that for Christians making the stories and narrative concerning the kingship and reign of Jesus Christ central to our lives are of critical importance. In fact, the terms, “king” and “reign” imply power, and all of the lections this week have to do with kingly power and authority. A king supposedly reigns and his subjects obey; they are subject to the king’s rule. So, the question of this lection from John becomes, “how powerful is Christ’s reign in us? And what power and authority does that reign have over, for example, the shaping our values and what is of critical importance in our lives. It would certainly influence, for example, who we vote for and how we respond to the disenfranchised poor, the stranger or foreigner, in other words those responses that cohere with the life and teaching of Jesus.

Of course, we may think that in voicing our political and economic convictions, making our case to our friends, we’re simply rendering to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar as citizens of a democratic republic. But in fact we’re doing something more. We’re involving ourselves in our particular piece of human history. The authors of our lections this week knew that human history is God’s chosen arena of activity. They believed that in the here and now, God has disclosed in the story and reign of Christ life’s meaning, direction and destiny. They sought to convince us that our immediate future and the future of humankind, in part, are in our hands and in the particular decisions we’ll make.

In this regard, I love the story Soren Kierkegaard tells about a man who was very frustrated with his minister. So he said to him something like this: “Pastor, you’re always talking in generalities about the betterment of humanity and the world’s situation. Why don’t you talk about the issues where we live?” True to form, the next Sunday the minister kept talking about God’s concern for the human condition in terms so lacking in specificity and so abstract that the layman gain was completely frustrated. As it happened, they were both invited to attend a meeting in the capital city of Denmark. Compared to the small town from which they’d come, it was a large and complex city, so the minister expressed concern about getting lost. He wondered aloud how they were going to get around. “Oh,” said the layman, “don’t worry, don’t concern yourself. I’ve got just the thing for you.” And with that, he reached into the back seat of his carriage and pulled out a globe of the world! He knew full well you can’t find your way through Copenhagen with anything like that. You need the specifics of a city map. I often wonder if the minister caught on.

The truth is we all need more than generalities. And yet in terms of our attempts to submit to the rule of Christ in our lives, the specifics sometimes require tough choices. They’re choices where of necessity we need to interweave or correlate both or inner lives and our common life together paying attention to the reign of Christ with all that it implies about justice and mercy. In our larger public life, that means doing what seems most appropriate to shape our political and economic and social life in such a way that all of us can have a chance at the abundant life which Jesus said he came to bring.

If we take the reign of Christ seriously, the question that constantly applies is whether in our attitudes, values and votes we’re giving help to our neighbors far and wide, as we understand it from the prophets and from Jesus as our ultimate guide.

It’s a tough assignment, but as David Brooks reminds us, we do control the narratives that make sense of our lives.

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 15, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: I Samuel 1:4-20, Psalm 16, Hebrews 10: 11-14 and 19-25 and Mark 13:1-8

Our gospel lection this week “is replete with apocalyptic images and language, in concert with previous Jewish writings of the same genre. Yet it is helpful to read the chapter not so much as a predictive message about the future, but as a word addressing the issues pressing the Markan community at the time of writing. The events depicted in the chapter do not come out of the crystal ball of a divine soothsayer, but are the stuff of the community’s everyday life. The violence of war, the impending (if not already completed) destruction of the Temple, the perilous existence of the church under persecution, the enticing voices of false prophets and false messiahs were urgent concerns for the Christian community, and Mark 13 speaks directly to them.” (From Breuggemann et.al.: Texts for Preaching.)

I’ve been reading the story of an authentic American hero whose story is told in Jon Krakauer’s recent book about Pat Tillman, entitled, “Where Men Win Glory.” It is a story that also includes the violence of war and the struggle of an individual and a nation caught up in the tragedy and deceit that inevitably accompanies war

As I read this book, what impressed me was Tillman’s development as a human being. A “macho” hyper masculine character in high school whose life centered on football, he seriously injured another young person in an irrational brawl among fellow students. The price he paid included confinement in a juvenile prison. But he credits this as a time when he began to develop a habit of reading and study. Recruited by Arizona State University and again excelling as a football player, he graduated summa cum laude and then earned a starting position on the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals. In part even greater fame came to him after 9/11 when moved and angered by the assault on our nation by terrorists he walked away from his $3.5 million professional football contract and a lifetime of security to enlist as a member of an elite military force known as the Rangers.

During his time of service he was driven by often contradictory understandings of duty, honor, justice, patriotism and masculine pride. On April 22, 2004, a barrage of bullets fired by his own fellow soldiers in Afghanistan ended his life. His superiors, however, lied about his death and proved the wisdom of the remark that the first thing to disappear in war is the truth.

While our lection from Mark occurred about two thousand years earlier, there are similarities to our own time where we live in a nation of false prophets whose preeminent god is also the god of war and obfuscation. Chris Hedges, a Harvard Divinity School graduate and former reporter for the New York Times now writing for Common Dreams supports that argument in reporting that while “the first major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people passed last week,” it was “attached to a $650-billion measure…which includes 130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The bill, he says, is clever marketing: The Democratic leadership can tell their conservative members who are “squeamish” in supporting gays and lesbians that their vote supports the war. On the other hand, liberals uneasy about the war could defend their vote by arguing their vote supports civil rights. Congress has arranged it so that everybody “wins”! It’s not difficult to imagine simmilar trade-offs in ancient and imperial Rome.

Especially when we discover that much of that now voted war budget will not support our nation’s legitimate military forces but rather our corporate mercenary forces. Thomas Friedman tells us (New York Times, 11/4/09) that every year, more and more of our national security is contracted out to private corporations. Some of those mercenaries were on hand at Abu Ghraib engaged in torturing prisoners. Friedman quotes from a new book by Allison Stanger entitled, “One Nation Under Contract” that 57% of the work of providing security for key personnel, sites, food, clothing, housing, training of army and police units — in other words, outsourcing the very core tasks of government. The article concludes that we’re building “a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. It appears that continuing wars benefit our profit hungry corporate system!

So the world hasn’t changed very much since Jesus wept over Jerusalem and warned his people of the coming turmoil “when no stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:44) In this passage, however, it is helpful to remember that our lection is not attempting to describe future events. It is dealing with what was the here and now of that ancient Jesus community’s perilous daily life with its risks of persecution and its encounter with the many false prophets assailing it.

So, what we find as a positive message in this rather gloomy and pessimistic passage is its call amid its trials for perseverance, patience and hope within the Jesus community. Pat Tillman personified those qualities in his personal passion to maintain his integrity and his love for his family, friends and nation during the turmoil of his last years. He was a soldier who went to war keeping Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance” as a steady reference. Indeed, he is a true and unusual American hero, worthy of our respect.

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, November 8, 2009

Lessons designated by the common lectionary includhe: Ruth 3: 1-5,
Psalm 127, Hebrews 9: 24-38 and Mark 12: 38-44

“The story of Ruth seems a simple ‘once upon a time’ kind of tale. Two women in dire circumstances remain loyal to each other and find happiness through the love and generosity of Boaz. But the conclusion to the story points forward rather than backward. Boaz and Ruth belong not only to Israel’s past, but to the future God has in mind for Israel and, indeed, for all humankind.” In Psalm 127, the “psalmist wisely observes that a life that does not contribute to the future is a life ‘in vain.’” Warning is also given that apart from God the future holds little promise for abundant living. The conclusion in the passage from Hebrews is that the sacrificial love of Jesus offers us a paradigm and promise for the health and wholeness of the human family. And the story of the widow’s penny in Mark 12 reminds us that “those who work to secure their own positions but neglect to recognize God (as do the religious leaders and the wealthy in the story) live only in the present, acknowledging neither God’s care in the past nor God’s sovereignty over the future.” (Quoted material from Brueggemann et. al. “Texts for Preaching”.)

A few years ago I was waiting for a flu shot and while standing in line I joined in a brief conversation with the one standing beside me. That person has just heard a speech by an advocate for children in the United States. Our children, he said, fare more poorly in our country than in any other industrialized western nation and commented on the tragedy of our misdirected national stewardship.

The conversation reminded me of a student at Brown University in Providence, who for many days was fascinated by construction workers walking high above the city along the steel girders of a new skyscraper. Then one morning he saw what he’d most feared. A worker fell from one of the girders to his death in the street below. A fellow worker, probably the foreman, came down from the top of the building in a crude elevator, looked at the body and said sadly, “Tom was leaning against the wind, and he wouldn’t listen. He was new at this work.” Later, the student had the courage to ask the man what it meant when he said, “leaning against the wind.” “Well, you see,” said the foreman, “along the coast here in the morning hours there’s often a strong wind blowing from the ocean at fifty or more miles an hour. It’s easy to be tempted to lean against that wind. But you can’t depend on it; because it can drop off at any moment. That’s what happened to poor Tom. He was leaning against the wind when it suddenly let up.”

Of course the point of this story is that we, too, can lean on things that in the long run let us down. We can lean on material things. We can lean on our class or school or club ties. We can become dependent on a culture of consumerism and accumulation. The only certain thing I know of upon which we can lean and not get hurt is God in Christ, who commissions us as stewards to look closely and deeply at our own lives and at the life of our society.

In our gospel lection, Mark urges his readers or listeners to raise the question of values. He lived in an exploitative society where the wealthy and even the religious elite, in this case the scribes, lived comfortable lives among the misery of the vast majority. This passage provokes us to reflect on the contrast between a poor widow who gives sacrificially out of her devotion to what she understands as noble and elevated in her world and the scribes who “devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.”

As it was in Jesus’ time, so it is today. Breuggemann argues that the traditional way to interpret our lesson is to lift up the widow as an ideal figure, an exemplar of generousity. Recently, however, some commentators raise the question of why the widow should be commended for supporting an institution (the Temple) that contributes to the exploitation of the poor. “Does she not rather serve as a concrete example of how innocent people are victimized by the Temple authorities?” The advocacy of Jesus in this lection is therefore both a lament on the plight of the vulnerable within his world and a condemnation of those who callously remain indifferent to them.

In the long run, when our society leans into the false values of excessive materialism, we eventually lose. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us years ago, “the moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.”

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, November 1, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Ruth 1:1-8,
Psalm 146, Hebrews 9: 11-14 and Mark 12: 28-34

“At the Heart of our Faith”

“One of the scribes came near and…asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12: 28-31)

In our lection this week, we hear Jesus quoting from the Shema (Deut. 6:4-5) Mark, however, adds the phrase “with all your mind” thus making the commandment an even greater single-minded commitment on the part of those who would follow the path and teaching of Jesus. The commandment is intended, according to my commentary, not for the general public but for that community choosing to follow Jesus. Our lection this week is at the heart of our faith and its challenge is humbling to the bravest and smartest and most talented among us.

We’re to treat others as we ourselves would be treated. That command is more than a hint about getting along with others we know. Rather, it is intended to go way beyond individual “making friends and influencing people” kinds of interaction in isolation from the larger national and world community. One recent insight into this truth came to me during a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hundreds of thousands of visitors travel to this remote New England town to savor the work of this profound illustrator and artist as he tells stories in the work he has created. From 1916 through 1967 his art framed the covers of “The Saturday Evening Post” and the hundreds of them give great insight into the history of our nation. But the room of the museum that especially attracted me was devoted to Rockwell’s paintings illustrating the “Four Freedoms” articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 at a time of increasing national anxiety. Belgium, Holland and France had been impaled by Nazi Germany and Norway just invaded. Japan was threatening. In an address to the congress, Roosevelt laid out some objectives that he hoped might arise from building a lasting peace. He called for “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear — which translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.” These are words that can hardly be considered out of date.
So that when our nation thinks seriously about “nation building” in places like Afghanistan today, one of my first questions is this: If we can’t build our own nation, “securing economic understandings which will secure …a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants,” how can be build one whose culture and history we know so little about?

Let me quote from Bob Herbert in his recent (10/13/09) column in the New York Times. He writes: “Whether it’s Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, Camden, N.J. — take your pick — we’ve looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise.”

Herbert continues: “We’re having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America’s third largest city…While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan we’ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.”

You get the idea. As a nation, we’re doing a great job in violating the basic challenge of Jesus to treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. We sit passively as our congress awards itself a magnificent health care plan while so many in that body seem willing to capitulate to the special interest moneyed lobbyists of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. We watch while our military representing a tiny and unrepresentative portion of our population fights wars in places and among people they clearly do not understand. And with a tired army supplemented by career mercenaries paid by “for profit” corporations like Blackwater, a name that became so infamous and sinister its name was changed to something abstract and innocuous. All of this does make one wonder whether we’d be engaged as we are if there were a universal draft and a more representative military. But our society no longer has the stomach for that. Too many of us allow an increasingly desperate job-despairing and disappearing middle-class or the easily hooked by promises of adventure inner-city youth fight these battles! Not exactly the message and command of Jesus, is it?

Still, we come again to the “heart of our faith” and its command not suggestion that we are to treat our neighbor as we would like to be treated ourselves. It’s our “impossible possibility” as well as our eternal task!

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 25, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 42: 1-6 and 10-17, Psalm 34:1-8, Hebrews 7: 23-28 and Mark 10: 46-52

The story Mark tells in our lection this week is about the process of recovering sight or vision. Of course, like other biblical healing stories, the story of Bartimaeus is subject to widely divergent interpretations. For some, it is a story about a man who was literally blind. Bartimaeus is a person with no chance whatsoever of passing an eye examination at the Motor Vehicle Department. He is certifiably blind and cannot see. If we read the story that way, we could argue that just as Jesus healed the paralytic who then takes up his pallet and walks; just as he restores the sanity of the violent Gerasene demoniac; just as he raises the little daughter of Jairus who has died — so he cures the blindness of Bartimaeus.

We all have our own ways of reading the Bible, but to read it as stated above it can lead to the perverse belief that if only we had sufficient faith, the woes and physical problems we suffer would suddenly disappear! It seems not a helpful way of thinking about Mark’s story.

Rather, what I believe Mark is sharing with his audience was his absolute conviction that the quality of Jesus’ selfless love has enormous healing power. It can restore wholeness. It can breathe new vision into the human soul. In other words, when we have become blind to the world and its beauty and potential, the tough and caring love that characterizes Jesus can restore our sight. It helps us, for example, to recognize the present danger of “scarring” that occurs as a result of child poverty, which in turn is the result of our nation’s dangerous unemployment rate, now approaching 9.8 percent by 2010. (Krugman, NY Times, 10/2/09)

What Mark understands Jesus calling forth from us is a vision that allows us to understand the unhappiness, the brokenness and abuse that arises in a world without the capacity to see the misfortune of our neighbor. William Shakespeare was well aware of this kind of spiritual vision. He makes the point in that famous scene where, out on the heath King Lear cries out to the blinded Gloucester, “you see how this world goes?” And Gloucester responds, “I see it, feelingly.”

So, to my mind, the healing of Bartimaeus is Mark’s way of showing us that when we reconnect with the person and spirit of Jesus, we reconnect with spiritual wholeness and health and that human capacity we all have to see “feelingly.”

A few years ago, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman was published. In his own autobiography, “True Compass,” the late Ted Kennedy references the book as an inspiration to him as a senator. For it tells how spiritual vision grows. After coming to adulthood, Truman spent from 1903 to 1905 working in a bank. But then, because he was needed, his next ten years before the First World War were spent at the very hard work of farming in rural Missouri on the family homestead. As a boy, he had memorized the beatitudes and other parts of the New Testament, much of which have to do with neighborly love and respect for God’s creation. Even so, his attitude towards African Americans came right out of a bigoted environment where he was influenced for a time by members of the Klu Klux Klan. But the point McCullough makes that inspired Ted Kennedy is that Harry Truman grew as a human being. He came to understand that the content of character and not the color of skin is what are important in a human being. That new vision opened his eyes and eventually gave him the moral power as president of the United States to take the strongest position in regard to civil right since Abraham Lincoln. Harry Truman connected in a new way to those truths he’d memorized and to the love that shines out of the life perspective of Jesus.

The meaning of the key word in our lection from Mark this week is the word, “blind.” It derives from a word which means “opaque” or “enveloped in smoke.” It points to a blindness that allows us to see the speck in the other person’s eye but not the two-by-four in our own. It is the kind of blindness represented by the Pharisees, as in their supposed moral superiority they move to stone a woman caught in adultery. It is the kind of blindness we see today in the political pundits who pander to the baser instincts of the human soul in their attacks on Barack Obama.

Hopefully, our vision as nation will be clear enough to see the increasing desperation of those without adequate health care, without the opportunities many of us enjoyed to get a good education or earn a living with the promise of a dignified retirement. All of these and much more are possible if — as with Bartimaeus — we discover that vision of God’s kingdom on earth; a vision of the love of God made flesh; a vision of the love of God made flesh in you and in me.

Ralph Ahlberg

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 18, 2009

Lesson designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 38: 1-7, Psalm 104: 1-9 and 24 and 35c, Hebrews 5: 1-10 and Mark 10: 35-45

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” (Job 38: 1-2, 4) “You stretch out the heavens like a tent, you set the beams of your chambers on the waters… You set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken.” (Psalm 104: 1b-3, 5) “Every high priest, chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf…to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness…” (Hebrews 5:1-2)

There is a hymn widely loved and often sung in congregations of our order. In the “New Century Hymnal” it is numbered 26 and based on the 104th Psalm, one of our lections for this week. The last stanza reads: “Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, in you do we trust, nor find you to fail; Your mercies how tender, how firm to the end, our Maker Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!”

Might these words seem trite or over-sentimental? Perhaps, but many a hurting and perplexed human being has been supported and strengthened by such prayerful poetry. I think, for example of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. While reported to be a well-adjusted, emotionally stable man, he was well-acquainted with trouble. His first wife died very suddenly while they were practically on their honeymoon traveling in Europe, and his second wife, after eighteen years of marriage died very tragically when her dress caught fire. As grief-stricken as he was in both cases, he was blessed with a faith and a spirit that refused to be defeated. No doubt he was speaking to himself when he wrote to a friend saying that “there are natures whose native strength and elasticity enable them to endure the worst, and yet live.”

In 1854 Longfellow was invited to speak at his fiftieth reunion at Bowdoin College. In one of his poems he reflects about all those he and the remnant of his class have known who are no longer with them; and then he gets into old age and he writes:

“Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.
It is not strength, but weakness, not desire,
But its surcease…”

Then he adds:

“What then? Shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not yet come, we are not quite
Cut off from labor by the failing light;
Something remains for us to do or date,
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

For me this poem reflects the human need for a quality of faith that allows hope and meaning to enter in. In this regard, a New York Times Sunday Book Review (10/4/09) by Ross Douthat offers an excellent reflection on Karen Armstrong’s new book, “The Case for God.” In terms of our lectionary readings of the week, it does seem on target reflecting both our human need for a faith perspective and the contemporary difficulty in acquiring it. The reviewer describes Armstrong’s argument for a better appreciation of liberal religion which in recent decades has fallen on hard times. She contends that many moderns have come to understand our faith and theological convictions as a set of propositions which require affirmation. When contemporary science challenges those understandings, all too often the reaction comes to take the form of either a nihilistic “cultured despiser” of religion or a biblical literalist. Armstrong proposes neither atheism nor fundamentalism but a path that emphasizes the perspective that Job arrived at towards the conclusion of his painful journey. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” She points to an approach to our faith that calls for the pursuit of an unknowable God rather than a quest for theologically “right” answers of orthodoxy.

Great thinkers of our Christian heritage like Augustine or Aquinas, we are told, “understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as ’something that people thought but something they did.’” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and ‘apophatic’ theology, apophatic being a word that even my computer spell-check found questionable. It means an emphasis on what we can’t know about God, so that faith development has more to do with developing skills like meditation and prayer and living out the praxis of justice in daily life than it does the cloistered-like recitation of creeds!

Even in the Hebrews lection there is to commend in high priests who deal gently with the ignorant, and there is much to value in the discipline of reading the Psalms and generally seeking meaning from the weekly lectionary readings from Scripture. At least in my old age, I find it most rewarding!

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 11, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 23: 1-9 and 16-17, Psalm 22: 1-15, Hebrews 4: 12-16 and Mark 10: 17-31

Jesus was setting out on a journey when the young man described in our gospel lection ran to catch up with him. “Good teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” It is an answer that provides a helpful perspective for thinking about life. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

One of the weaknesses of history and politics is that it tends to categorize its subjects into either black or white: People become villains or heroes, evil-doers or do-gooders, bad people or good, champs or chumps — all depending upon their political and/or economic loyalty. Yet, often time has a way of tempering our judgments, blending the black with the white into a grey that is probably more accurate than either extreme.

One historical illustration of this tendency is one of the most maligned of American theologians, the 18th century Congregational minister and educator, Jonathan Edwards. Recalling his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and his graphic image of hanging like a spider on its web above the fiery torments of hell, many have labeled him a dour, life-denying moralist. A recent biography by George Marsden challenges and portrays him in a more balanced and appreciative light. We learn Edwards taught that the real world is essentially relational where the highest or most beautiful love is selfless and sacrificial. It is that quality of love which is the true center of the reality to which we humans are called.

With that said, I am sure Edwards, like all of us, had his bad days! For it is true that while all of us like picturing ourselves as pure and good, the truth is none of us really are! After telling his questioner that no one is good except God alone, Jesus prompted him by saying, “you know the commandments, don’t murder or steal or lie…” And the young man stopped him and in effect said, “Look, I’ve always kept these rules…”

I can imagine a sad smile appearing on Jesus’ face as he looked at him and said, “There is one thing left: Go, sell what you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come, follow me.” My take is that while the young man had kept the rules, he forgot all about service. He forgot that goodness and faith and virtue are all tied up with doing.

So does Jesus make it clear the imperfection that inhabits the human soul. Our path lies over a gray ribbon of history that ties human follow to historic fortune. On PBS this week I’ve been watching Ken Burns wonderful film narrative of how our national parks emerged, just barely, from the wonton greed and ravaging conduct of the vast majority of our citizens whose inclination was only to exploit that great beauty and wonder of the Sequoias, the Redwoods, the grand canyons and mountains and rivers that make our land so unique. We should praise the courage and insight of people like John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright whose heroic efforts kept them from untold degradation and harm.

So what helps us to rise above the self-absorption and greed so common to our history? And how do we get beyond our inadequacies long enough to leave some measure of goodness as our gift to the future? After a lifetime of historical reflection, Arnold Toynbee said that it is “religion, not civilization that is the serious business of the human race.” He understood the human need to seek depth and to find meaning in the midst of the mystery and struggle that life is. In other words, our highest calling as human beings is to love God and to prove it by the way we relate to one another.

Ella Wheeler wrote some words that seem and appropriate way to end this brief meditation.

“There are two kinds of people on earth today,
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say.
Not the good and the bad, for ’tis well understood
That the good are half bad and bad are half good…
No! the two kinds of people on earth I mean
Are the people who lift and the people who lean!”

May we all become more like lifters and not leaners!

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 4, 2009

Lessons designed by the Common Lectionary include: Job 1:1 and 2: 1-10, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1: 1-4 and 2: 5-12, Mark 10: 2-16

In the lections assigned for this week, the reading from Job begins a discussion about his trusting God even during the calamity of undeserved suffering. Psalm 26 supports the first reading in its prayer for one whose life is under threat and who, aided by his prayerful appeals, is able to trust God. In Hebrews, according to my commentary, we find “the most polished piece of rhetoric in the New Testament,” telling us that God speaks to the human family most authentically and decisively through Jesus, who is exalted even above the angels in heaven. It is a very high Christology, indeed! In Mark, we find that hard teaching of Jesus about divorce which over many centuries has created such an abundance of guilt; but it also contains his seminal teaching that values the powerless and vulnerable above the powerful and well-placed. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:14b-15)

I suppose those who selected these lections saw a connection between the trust Jesus saw in children and the trust he recalled in the figure of Job in his willingness to confront God over his experienced unwarranted injustices. What has occurred is that the evil Satan (“a transcendent being who acts independently of and contrary to God’s will”) points out to God that Job is good only because life has been good to him. God accepts that challenge to Job’s goodness by allowing all manner of misfortune to fall on him. He loses all the foundations of what made him a happy human being: possessions, a close-knit family; even his physical health and well-being are allowed to dissipate with a debilitating skin disease that rendered him ritually unclean, which had to have been a devastating and threatening possibility for the Jewish audience being addressed. But even with all of these extremes of suffering, Job remains the age-long exemplar of faithfulness and integrity.

So the question that seems to be asked is how we measure up in terms of our own faithfulness and integrity when confronted with undeserved and innocent suffering. There are many positive examples of such faithful living. I think most immediately of Dietrich Bonhoeffer locked up in prison for his opposition to Hitler’s evil government. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” he confesses his faith that “God will give us all the power we need to resist in time of distress. But God never gives it in advance, lest we should rely upon ourselves and not on God alone…” Even so, Bonhoeffer remains haunted by the temptations of doubt, depression and fearfulness. In an eloquent and heartfelt poem entitled, “Who Am I?” he seeks to understand himself in his own situation of suffering.

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house…

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine,
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

Yes, there are always Job-like figures in life to challenge and to inspire us. In reading Bruce Gordon’s recent biography of sixteenth century John Calvin, I discovered that same quality of patient faith in his throes of conflict and suffering. And I was intrigued in reading “American Lion,” Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson and Edward “Teddy” Kennedy’s autobiography, “True Compass” to discover those same human qualities of growth and faithfulness arising from the cauldron of tragedy and consequent suffering. Suffering and doubt are a part of every life.

Job will always remain as a human testimonial and a paradigm to the possibilities of integrity and faithful living in the throes of tragic circumstance!

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 27, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Esther 7: 1-6 and 9-10; 9: 20-22, Psalm 124, James 5: 13-20 and Mark 9: 38-50

“…the awareness of being God’s elect has often bred a form of elitism, a sense of self-importance that subtly builds barriers between groups and persons rather than bridges. For whatever reasons, the experience of being loved can lead to an unhealthy feeling of specialness, which questions others (as if God’s love were somehow limited to a few) and at the same time fails to be self-critical. The problem is apparently not peculiar to the modern church, since the Gospel lesson designated for this Sunday is aimed at such a sense of self-importance among the original disciples.” (Breuggemann et. al., pg. 529 in “Texts for Preaching – Year B”)

In our Gospel lection, John reports to Jesus about the disciples’ recent mission where they reported observing someone “casting out demons in your name.” They tried to stop him because, as they reported, he “wasn’t following us.” Jesus corrects the disciples, warning them of the dangers of a too narrow understanding of what it means to follow him: “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mk. 9: 39-40) My commentary suggests the danger of overestimating our own position as the uniquely chosen of God.

In my reading of Bruce Gordon’s recently published biography entitled, “Calvin,” which in part celebrates this year the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, I was struck by how much the great reformer was also captive to a seemingly obsessive need to punish those who disagreed with him. Perhaps the most notorious negative incident in Calvin’s life was his successful effort to support Genevan magistrates in their condemning Michael Servetus to death by being burned at the stake for his heresy. (He would have preferred the use of a sword!) Those critical of Calvin use this as an illustration to complain about what they believed to be his tyrannical and intolerant character.

Unquestionably while Servetus was considered a heretic by the standards of both Rome and Geneva, the leaders who demonstrated a tolerance way beyond their time were humanist thinkers and teachers such as Niklaus Zurkinden and Sebastian Castellio who warned that “one should be very careful about who is named a heretic, for Christ himself had been executed on such a charge.” These men opposed Calvin on three fronts. First, they were disgusted by the execution of Servetus; second, they rejected the very principle of punishing heretics; and third they found Calvin’s doctrine of predestination unacceptable. That doctrine which had such a hold on our Puritan forebears taught that God determines before time all who will be saved and who will be damned. Recall the impact that Jonathan Edwards’ teaching of this rather intolerant idea had on early New England!

I am reminded of this danger whenever I discover in myself a too ready willingness to be overly critical of those whose theological and political positions are at variance with my own. How different am I, I have wondered, from those first disciples who felt threatened by others doing similar work. About twenty years ago, for example, I was invited to Arizona by a friend whose family there was deeply involved in a fundamentalist church of more than ten thousand members. At worship, our initial greeting was given by someone I judged as a “stand-up” comedian, warming up the congregation. A full symphony orchestra accompanied a two hundred member choir and when it came time for the sermon by the lead minister, a hydraulic pulpit rose up from the center of the chancel! All of the demons that I can imagine assaulting John Calvin were assaulting me in my judgment of this congregation and its leadership. Later on, I was introduced to this lead pastor and became better acquainted and even played a couple of sets of tennis with him. I discovered that he was and I assume still is a good and sincere human being! But at the time through my narrow perspective I felt him a rival and opponent — not a collaborator in God’s work.

It was then that I stood in need of this Sunday’s lection from Mark. Eventually it got to me — partly through my study and experiences at Hartford Seminary and sharing in its work in interfaith dialogue — and I began to understand how dangerous is the tendency towards self-righteously taking oneself too seriously and (laughably) believing that somehow I possessed a superior understanding of God’s truth.

Our lesson this week reminds us of Jesus’ inclusive message that “whoever is not against us is for us.” That quality of generosity of spirit is a great part of our hope for a more loving and more peaceful future!