Confederate flag and violence column

With the furor over the Confederate flag being displayed in the South, I was reminded that forest Park has a statue commemorating the confederacy. Then, I remembered that we have a 58 foot high obelisk in a Confederate Cemetery, on Rozier Street that marks over 1300 confederate prisoners who died of smallpox and other illnesses in the prison in Alton. Remains of the prison wall can be seen not all that far from the site of the last Lincoln-Douglas debate.

It is remarkably unadorned. The grass is thick and was recently mown when i was there. Some stately trees grace the entrance walk up the hill with a few hosta plants. Nothing lauds the Confederacy; the monument lists the names of those who died in the prison.

When I lived in North Carolina for a few years, I shopped for groceries at the Winn-Dixie, where they sold Dixie beer. It was reached on the Jefferson Davis highway (his statue is in the Capitol building in Washington). A statue of a Confederate soldier stood at one of the main entrance sot the University of North Carolina. Now, Saunders Hall, named for a Confederate soldier and historian, but also a founder of KKK in North Carolina, was just voted by the trustees to be renamed, just a month ago. Maybe we are reaching a watershed moment, similar to the antismoking wave years ago, with a sudden consensus emerging against Confederate symbols, after 150 years.

Eminent Theologian Paul Tillich thought long and hard on symbols. “Symbols point beyond themselves to something else...It participates in that to which it points: the flag participates in the power and dignity of the nation for which it stands. Therefore, it cannot be replaced except after an historic catastrophe that changes the reality of the nation which it symbolizes. An attack on the flag is felt as an attack on the majesty of the group in which it is acknowledged. .. a symbol  opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us. Symbols which have an especially social function... They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the "king" grew in a special period of history, and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.” He fully realized that symbols can be confused with what they are to symbolize, and they become important in themselves.

Symbols make up part of what Robert Bellah called civil religion. Relics are venerated and displayed, but symbols carry real potency. Yes, they can be multivalent, as one sees heritage and ancestors, and another see a flag whose purpose was to protect and expand slavery.

While I am pleased to see Confederate symbols taken from public buildings in the South, I remain stunned that it is taking up the oxygen of another potent force in American public life: gun violence. I just read that in this new century at least 48 of our citizens lost their lives to purveyors of racist invective and action. The President has been a pastoral presence in statements of 14 different mass slayings. I wonder about our sudden desire to sanitize the public space from Confederate symbols, but we seem to be able to gather little energy in dealing with the plague of violence in our homes and communities. Removing confederate symbols may honor the dead in Charleston and give racism one less symbol, but the violence of our country hangs over all of us, like a shroud.

Week of June 28 devotion pts

Sunday- Ps. 130 is one of the great laments. Who hasn’t been in the depths: illness, despair, in the middle of a difficult situation? It starts with the humility of knowing that all separate from God’s way. What depths drive you to prayer? What depths do you hope prayer can uncover and help you to discern?

Monday-Dear Lord, it is scary when I don't understand. It is unsettling when I feel out of control, or actually am out of control. I don't want to hurt. I don't want my friends to hurt. Especially today, I don't want  ___ to hurt. They are on my mind. I care. Don't you? I mean, I know you care—but I don't understand. Calm the winds of my fear and the waves of their distress. Please. In Jesus' name. Amen.Dave Brauer-Rieke

Tuesday-It's been said, "The Sabbath represents an oasis in time as Eden is an oasis in space." Nothing can be more important than creating a time and place soul renewal. Then amazingly, prayer can happen in all times and all places."Ponder: What spaces or places renew your soul? "To catch one's breath" is one meaning of the Hebrew word Shabbat. Which day of the week is "sabbath" for you? How do you experience its communal dimensions? How do you incorporate mini-sabbath spaces into your daily routines. Ira Kent Groff

Wednesday (from Abbey of the Arts) We often think of these in-between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, rather than opportunities to return again and again, to awaken to the gifts right here, not the ones we imagine waiting for us beyond the next door. But what if we built in these thresholds between our daily activities, just for a few minutes to intentionally savor silence and breath?

Thursday- Can you celebrate what God has done? Can you be loud and shameless, joy-filled and jubilant? Can you take the time to notice that God has been busy—do you have time to dance? Thank you, O God, for those healing touches and resurrection moments you offer. Teach us the bold joy of noisy rejoicing, and prepare us for your boisterous resurrection party that exceeds imagination! Amen.Chris Kramer

Friday-I am interested in the powerful response to the new animated movie, Inside Out. It explores the workings of the emotional life of an 11 year old girl whose family has moved.It centers on the role of joy and sadness in life. It has a focus on whether joy can seek to ostracize other emotions in life. It welcomes, as does Paul in his view of the body of christ, the complex interplay of different elements for the whole to flourish.

Saturday- We saw Love and Mercy recently, on the Beach Boys leader, Brian Wilson. It shows  his musical ability even as he struggled with the beginnings of serious mental illness, and it could not have been helped with the use of drugs and alcohol. He has not found full healing, but he has continued his life in the last twenty years. May mental healing be granted to many others.

sermon notes June 28

June 28 Mark 5, 2 Cor. 8

I don't like to talk about money in church.. I am always amazed at Christians who downplay the Old Testament requirements but love to resurrect tithing as a sign of spiritual maturity, as the saying seems to go. One of the standard complaints about church is that we always have our hand out for donations. Many of us resist the pressure to give to the needs of the church as structure. Indeed some use gifts as a tool of protest or even a weapon if they do not get their way.Nothing shows the power of money as a symbol, but I would like to fouc son the virtue of generosity today, more in terms of time and spirit. That leads to financial generosity, I think. notice how Paul refuses to command a collection, but sets it before them.

Gift giving is important in relationships. Some regard the price of the gift as crucial Paul is pushing a new view of economics, let’s call it christian economics. the very word refers to managing the household. Men sometimes neglect gifts, or have to be told what to do. Paul is telling the folks to make up their own minds about generosity, but to do so in the light of the abundant love of god shown in Jesus Christ.David shows immense generosity of spirit to Saul as well as his friend Jonathan.Saul tried to kill him as an enemy of the state, pushed him into exile, but here he honors him in death. I do wish we were generous in our comments and relations with others before they died, instead of sharing stories and events at the visitation.

Few days go by when the phone does not ring in the office or the buzzer sounds. It rarely seems a good time. When i am spinning my wheels, silence. When I am in a flow, bam, an interruption.It seems to me an interruption in spiritual pathways. Then I read this passage where the interruption seems to be the key item. A core element in Christian spiritual practice is the linkage of the everyday to the spiritual. the spiritual infuses the everyday, a smuch as it offers relief from its burdens.Interruptions are always irritants, but they may be a signal to us.

The teen is around 12, and the woman has suffered for 12 years. jairus face jesus directly,but the woman doesn't even speak. One is the daughter of Jairus, but jesus called this woman his daughter Neither gets excluded, but Jesus has a sense of what needs attention and in what order.The kingdom of God is shown to be wide open and not competitive. Recall that the word made well here is the same word as save..

Jesus is generous with time in our passage. Jesus is on an emergency mission to save the life of a little girl. Her father is a prominent person. On the way, jesus spends time with a woman who has suffered for as long as the little girl has been alive. Jesus could come back to her, but he spends time with her, as the seconds are ebbing away for the little girl.This technique of sandwiching a story is called intercalcation by some. which is the more important, the bread or the meat? do they have to be viewed together to get the point?

I don’t buy the idea that we multi-task well, as I think it is a way guaranteed to do a number of things poorly. On the other hand, intercalcation pushes us to recall that life does not come in discrete bit as much as it hits all with differing demands at the same time.

Column for trinity Sunday on council at Nicaea

For many Christians, this Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Preachers tremble at the thought. Most of us find the discussions working with the Trinity to be either too erudite or so abstract as to induce eye-rolling. My daughter disliked the Nicene Creed for one reason: it is longer than the Apostles’ Creed that we usually read in church service. Her first commandment of liturgy is: shorter is to be preferred.If many of us have given it much thought, it may be due to The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown’s unreliable narrator’s  dismissal of the council of Nicea ( and later Constantinople in 381 ) of 325. The Nicene Creed is a standard for many christian churches, so I thought I would give a little background to it. How do we speak of the relationship of the human Jesus to the divine? How do we make some order out of the bits and pieces of Scripture that address God in terms of Father, Son, Spirit?

Under Constantine, the young church had moved from the shadows to protected status within the Roman Empire. The church in the East was being roiled by disputes about the relation of Jesus to God. One popular approach was taken by Arius, who saw the Son as a God who emerged at some point after creation with the slogan, “there was a time when he was not.” Opponents feared that such a construct could lead to a second class God offering a second class salvation. Put differently, could God’s “only begotten” be another part of creation, or not?

John 1:14 says in the beginning was the Word, God’s (logos) logic, vision, perhaps idea or even plan.

Constantine called for a church gathering, a council, to seek to resolve the dispute, to establish good order and peace. Somewhere between 250 to 318 bishops attended the conference, and they met in a city meaning Victory,in present day Turkey now Iznik, where a mosque stands where they met. To secure the divinity of the Son, they used a phrase, of the same, one substance, one being, one essence (homoousious). Another way of saying this would be the same identity, perhaps.Arius apparently said that Christ was of similar substance (homoiousios). the historian gibbon thought it  hilarious that the letter i, an iota in Greek, threatened to split the church.This is an attempt to make sure that the church was holding to the great confession of israel: the Lord our God is one. The phrasing is not in the Bible, but it was a way of trying to make sure that the Son, the one sent was not a demigod. Indeed, the phrasing was one preferred by the Emperor Constantine. The word itself seemed to be the cause of many church disputes, even provoking fights as tempers grew hot and flared.

Put another way, the Nicene Creed doesn;t define God, as much as it tells us what to avoid when speaking about God. It is a lighthouse beacon telling us  where we should stay clear of dangers.

For Christians, God is made apparent in Jesus Christ. If you wish to know the nature of god, look to jesus Christ.God is for us, for the healing, the salvation of humanity.Nicaea is the touchstone as the church continues to always need to struggle with how to speak of the person of Jesus Christ and the relationship to God.Even an ecumenical council can err. Its work cannot be frozen in time, or encased in amber, as succeeding generations and cultures seek to affirm traditional teachings in ways that we can grasp, that we can translate. In the end, jesus told us to love God with all we have, including our minds. The attempts to speak of Trinity is our feeble attempt to do just that when speaking of the Christian god.

Sermon Notes on Trinity as Capacious Divinity-Is. 6, John 3, Rom. 8, Ps. 29

May 31-John 3:1-17, Rom., 8:22-7, Ps. 29, Is. 6:1-8

This year, I am not even going to attempt to give a doctrinal discussion of the doctrine of the trinity. All of our readings speak of a complex God at work in different ways/How do we encounter God,and how does God encounter us.

Is. 6:1-8, -this is a worship vision.It invokes a large God whose hem fills the temple area. (our sanctuary is larger than the temple area.Worship reaches for the ultimate, contact with the beyond.God, God is present in this place. God allows us the space to be in contact with the divine. worship is our response to a God we cannot grasp or control. We worship then a large complex god, not a small The Isaiah passage brings to light an important feature of discussion of divinity: holiness. .Holiness is distinct from the everyday, as it is in the realm of the sacred. In our time what does holiness mean in terms of separation for a special purpose?

In a related vein, how do you see the lips being touched, maybe purified by a coal from an altar.  This could be a great place to discuss how we use our lips, or how we do not speak of God at all.

It brings up the related issue of transcendence, when we are in an immanent period.

The seraphim may well have been more fearsome than our domesticated  imagination. William Placher bemoaned our puny religious imagination in an age when our imaginations are able to be seen with the magic of CGI in movies. “Human reason cannot figure its way to such a God, since a God we could figure out, a God fitted to the categories of our understanding, would therefore not be transcendent in an appropriately radical sense. We can know the transcendent God not as an object within our intellectual grasp..” Think of the bronze serpent with wings.

Glory has a sense of presence for me, but it also has a sense of gravity, weightiness, splendor as would befit the divine.

For Trinity Sunday, this is an image of a God who breaks all of our boundaries, a God who cannot be boxed in by our mental or emotional containers. 

Psalm 29-I often sneer at people equating god with the beauty of a sunset alone, but with Ps. 19I do see the a handiwork of god in nature.

Some scholars see a link to Canaanite patterns of prayer reflected in this psalm. This shows the boldness of Hebrew worship as it was willing to use other models to proclaim a prayer.On the other hand, it shifts the image of Baal’s contest with the waters; they are mere instruments at god’s power.The storm language also resonates with the storm at Sinai before the giving of the 10 commandments. God’s power and purpose g can be glimpsed in nature.

Rom. 8:12-17 a god of interaction and sympathy with this creation, Paul says even God’s spirit cannot find words for interceding for us in our need.

John 3:1-17-new birth/life not to condemn but to save/heal. Perhaps that is a good divine image to consider. How does it affect the more punitive figure that lurks within many of us?Last week in John we read of the spirit as advocate, helper comforter.Placher spoke of a god of reckless love, who presence in the life of Jesus still confounds our capacity to fully grasp, even speak clearly about. Irt leaves Nicodemus stammering, how can this be? He is face to face with a love so divine that it is incarnate in this Jesus with his baffling words about new birth and Spirit.

Week of May 31 devotional points

Sunday-Ps. 29 features God the creator as part of Trinity sunday. It probably is a reshaped prayer from the religion that used the stories of Baal, and to me has an ancient sense. How would you write this psalm with 21st century words from science?

Monday-One of the most significant chant settings is only five lines long, but is filled with hope and faith,titled "In the Lord I'll be Ever Thankful." At Taize it is sung repeatedly from memory, in many languages by people from many cultures, and followed by silence. Sometimes it is part of worship at which thousands of young adults hold lit candles in silence in the presence of the mystery we call God. Don Rudrud

Tuesday-To be fully human and alive is to know the tension of our dustiness, our mortality, to be called to a profoundly healthy humility where we acknowledge that we can know very little of the magnificence of the divine Source of all. .. Pentecost is a story of the courage that comes from breaking established boundaries.We may limit our vision through cynicism, but equally through certainty or cleverness. Sometimes we fear doubt so much that we allow it to make our thoughts rigid, we choose certainties and then never make space for the Spirit to break those open or apart. The things we feel sure that God does not care about may be precisely the source of healing for a broken world.(Abbey for the Arts)

Wednesday-The dove descending breaks the air/With flame of incandescent terror/ Of which the tongues declare/The one discharge from sin and error./The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre- /To be redeemed from fire by fire./Who then devised the torment? Love./Love is the unfamiliar Name/Behind the hands that wove/The intolerable shirt of flame/Which human power cannot remove./We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.” ― T.S. Eliot,

Thursday-PRAYER POEM: "THE SPARK" Pay attention. Because any moment can create/the spark that lights the long, slow fuse to liberate/your own novocained soul,/your dysfunctional family system,/this half conscious nation,/this swiftly tilting planet.Ira Kent Groff

Friday-God loves us in our incomplete humanity even though we are always running away trying to rid ourselves of defects, wounds and brokenness. If we could only see that God is there in the cracks of our splintered human lives we would already be healed." —Ilia Delio, The Humility of God

Saturday-Sometimes, I get quite productive right before I leave for a trip. Deadlines have a way of giving focus.I wonder if I can use that realization in ways helpful to spiritual practices? How can I learn to procrastinate less in actively pursuing spiritual practices?