Luther column for reformation 500

We are nearing Halloween, the greatest holiday in the Alton calendar. Today is Reformation Sunday to mark the 500^th anniversary of Luther’s alleged posting of the 95 points of debate with the Roman church, on Halloween. I would like to look at Luther himself a bit more.

Years ago Harold Lasswell explored how public figures project inner needs on to the public stage. Like anyone, he was a mixture of attributes, and he dealt with, prejudice, depression and anger.  He seems a tortured, tormented soul. He spoke of being tried, tempted, assaulted by forces beyond him, but I think they were despairing internal struggles that Luther called anfechtung (assault). When he spoke of suffering, of living the cross, he rarely referred to physical suffering, he meant inner suffering, inner pain, inner struggle. Luther did not speak of Hell very much. His personal hell was facing death. Maybe we could call it Fear itself, as FDR said.

That accusing inner voice repeated: Never enough, never good enough, always a failure. At his worst, Luther would write on a blackboard-I am baptized. He realized that he was relying on a promise, not something fully executed, but it gave him a place to stand.

He realized that company helped keep the cloud of depression and angst away, with beer. Martin enjoyed company and conviviality, so he could talk more. He sought solace in the arms of his wife as shield for the terrors of the night.  To fight off depression he counseled: distractions and work. Music helped at times as well to escape the doldrums.

Psalms were made his own. After all, he sang them daily as a monk. He taught the Psalms in class, contrary to the notion in Protestant circles of the lack of biblical practice among Catholics. He saw his own spiritual struggle is reflected in the psalms.  The assaults were terrible gateways to spiritual insights. In deep despondency-God’s no signals us to a deep hidden yes. My God, my God from Ps 22 is a confession of faith within despair. When he was at his worst in 1527-1529 he could write the hymn, A Mighty Fortress-based on a psalm.

“God hates melancholy.” Yet, for Luther the assaults were “so great and so much like hell...he would have perished completely and all of his bones would have been reduced to ashes. “ Spiritual distress and temptation are unavoidable in this life, and we must bear tribulation, yes even be in the midst of it. But that is why we pray not to fall into and drown in it. That is why it is different to feel spiritual distress than to accept temptation and say “yes” to it.’

We all live within the valley of the shadow.  Only in the deepest valley can we hope to appreciate catching a glimpse of light. The dark periods may well be horrific and prolonged.  However, Luther insisted that it was important to understand Trouble is not a sign of God’s displeasure or condemnation. The lies at the heart of this experience must not be believed. As he wrote around 1528, "when God sends us tribulation Satan suggests: “See there God flings you into prison and endangers your life. Surely He hates you. He is angry with you; for if He did not hate you, He would not allow this thing to happen.” Luther’s inner revolution in his understanding of God gave him what measure of peace he could find and the courage to do it. An imperfect man led an imperfect Reformation, and in so doing, found a measure of wholeness through the God who in Jesus comes not to judge but to save.

Devotional Pts. for Week of Oct. 29

Oct. 29-Sunday-Ps.90 is an examination of time, in part. It reflects on God’s view of time and our own. It places hardship right at the divine doorstep.when does time go quickly and when does it seem to drag on and on for you? When can you take the long view?

Monday-Martin Buber-Rabbi Barukh’s grandson, Yehiel, was once playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of his hiding place, but the other was nowhere to be seen. Now Yehiel realized that his friend had not looked for him from the very beginning. This made him cry, and crying he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. The tears brimmed in Rabbi Barukh’s eyes and he said: “God says the same thing: ‘I hide, but no one wants to seek me.’”

Tuesday-Michael Jinkins on music and the Green Frog Cafe-High-flying Greek terms like perichoresis have been drafted into Christian theology to describe the subtle interplay of divine being originating in the one person of the triune God and returned to another, first penetrating, then merging, blending without confusion, like streams of sparkling water or rivers of rich hot blood, giving life and love to all that is. But for me, it will always be the music that says it best without resorting to words... But I do wish you could have heard those old guys from the Green Frog Cafe who played us into the presence of the mystery of the world in a buddy's derelict shack on a very ordinary afternoon.

Wednesday-What he absolutely does not understand, however much he cudgels his brain, is why it is that while communication technologies continue to develop in a genuinely geometric progression, from improvement to improvement, proper, real communication, from me to you, from us to them, should still be this confusion crisscrossed with culs-de-sac, so deceiving with its illusory esplanades, and as devious in expression as in concealment José Saramago, The Double [205]

Thursday-Michael Jinkins-According to John McLeod Campbell, God is the ultimate loving parent whose heart's deepest will is for us to share God's own Spirit of love and life. Christ came to earth to empower the children of God to know and to live the love of God, showing us the way of life for which we were intended and sharing with us the Holy Spirit who would make that divine love possible in our own hearts. God does not suffer from a split personality, demanding the satisfaction of his furious anger with a sacrifice of blood to "make" God merciful. Rather, from the heart of the divine parent comes the eternal child of God who lived God's life of love among humanity and was slain by humanity in its fear, ignorance, pride and vanity. In the unjust death of Jesus, we look into the very heart of the triune God... Jesus of Nazareth we also see the life of a human being lived the way God wants us all to live. ..Jesus Christ is the love and life of God in human flesh.

Friday-Abba says to a seeker, 'Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.'

Saturday-Mother Teresa-Be happy in the moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more. Be happy now, and if you show through your actions that you love others – including those who are poorer than you – you’ll give them happiness, too.

Column on Hamlet at STL Rep

Mr. Culture is on a roll lately. We had the fine Great Rivers Choral group here at First Presbyterian last weekend with an elegant new program. On Wednesday, we were able to see the St Louis Repertory Theater’s production of Hamlet.

First, it made me feel so old, as I realized I had first read it 47 years ago, roughly around the time of Shakespeare himself. I’ve seen video since of Kevin Kline and Mel Gibson in the role. Yet, we approach a great work in a different vein of mining meaning than we do when younger.

Jim Poulos looks a bit like Benedict Cumberbatch, who just played Hamlet to capacity crowds in England in 2015. Be prepared, this is a fuller presentation of the long play, but Poulos burns through the dialogue at some speed. So it may good for the audience to get more familiar with the play before entering the theater. (It also helps to alert us to the language itself, even as we miss a good deal of it due to the age of the language itself).

Second, the play itself continues to speak volumes. Even if one is not familiar with the play, bits of dialogue are familiar as quotes often heard years ago. This production is a more profound meditation on grief than I had recalled. I thought of the play more as a meditation on revenge and the difficulty of Hamlet to engage in such a fateful act. Here Ophelia is clearly driven mad by grief. Hamlet perhaps feigns the degree of madness in his melancholy after the death of his own father.

Claudius- “ our dear brother’s death the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe…”  Some reading this recall the reaction of the country to the terrible spate of assassinations in the 1960s. Most of those reading this recall vividly our national mourning after 9/11. Grief gets freshened (green) as we witness losses, personally and publically.

When Hamlet seems to pour out his thoughts and feelings, he captures a sense of the book of Ecclesiastes that life seems meaningless, absurd in the face of loss: “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,… O God! God! / How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

"How is it that the clouds still hang on you." says King Claudius to Hamlet. After a few weeks, both mother and uncle wish that Hamlet would be back to normal, not locked in the sadness of appearance and affect of grief. We are so afraid of grief that we insist on calling funerals celebrations of life.

I’ve been reading a lot of Martin Luther as we move toward the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation on Halloween. Luther kept mortality front and center in his theology. “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.” Uncertainty about life after death drove Luther to put his trust in divine promise. We cannot reason our way toward relationship to the divine post-mortem.

To Hamlet that uncertainty propels us into living this life, with its enticements but its hardships and sorrows as well. “The dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn (river, as in river of time) No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of?”

Art connects us to our common humanity, through the centuries. We cheat ourselves in ignoring it to coalesce and challenge our perspective on this brief and precious life.

Sermon Notes 10/22 Ps. 99, Mt. 22:15, Ex. 33, I Thes. 1

Ex. 33:12, Moses models prayer for us, prayer that is not afraid to hold God to God's promises, prayer that is not afraid to appeal to God's love for God's people, even over and against God's holiness. Moses, through this audacious prayer, succeeds in securing God's promise that God will indeed abide with the Israelites throughout their long wilderness wandering.

Moses, in other words, wins the argument.

But that's not the end of the conversation. There is this other matter about seeing God's glory. The fact that Moses' request is not granted reminds Moses, and us, that God is still God. . He cannot see God fully; he can see only God's back, the "afterglow of the effulgence of His presence," as Robert Alter describes it. Brueggemann claims that Israel is really experiencing a “crisis of presence.” The good news of this passage is that life keeps going after the calf. God stays with God’s people, and God propels them forward on a journey that is to be characterized by faithful obedience. However, that wasn’t readily apparent to Moses or the Israelites. Their temptation was to resort to fear: fear that God would abandon them, and fear that they would cease to exist as a nation.

As their leader, Moses knew that their survival depended on presence: the presence of YHWH and the identity the Israelite community found in YHWH” Moses does affect God. He sounds like Abraham bargaining for Sodom and Gomorrah.We hear different element     s of the divine character lifted up here in anticipation of the great announcement in the next chapter.

Ps 99 praise and its difficulty. How little we hear praise of anyone or anything, even God. If we do, it is the numbing repetition of words such as awesome.

Beginning with the last -- the endurance of hope -- the Thessalonians seem to be particularly good at hoping. At the close of the first chapter, Paul asserts that they are waiting for God’s son from heaven. Paul’s well-known discussion about the return of Christ in chapter 4, shows that they have no doubt Jesus will come again; they only need some reassurance about those who have already died without yet seeing him. Finally, they are encouraging each other with the hope of the return of Christ (5:11).

Paul also expresses gratefulness for their labor of love. Paul doesn’t really even need to teach them about loving each other because God has been their teacher. They have heard it and now done it, loving not only one another, but the whole of the family of God throughout Macedonia (4:10). There is always room for more love, but this is an element of their faith, and to Paul, a vitally important one (think 1 Corinthians 13), in which the Thessalonians excel.

The work of faith-Paul gives thanks for their work. He lifts himself and his fellow Christians up as examples of those who worked with diligence even as they were proclaiming the gospel (i thes. 1:1-10 -WPreacher)

Mt. 22:15-22 confronting each of them with an unspoken question hanging in the air: “And you, my friend: Whose image do you bear?”pledging allegiance-We don;t wish to offer much to God; we don't wish to offer much in taxes to the government, but we are willing to offer our adult children in battle. We are willing to lose many to the cult of the gun. We are not given much help in what belongs to Caesar and to God. when do they overlap, if at all? Pledging allegiance- to the flag. Paul sees them pledging allegaince to a new way  of life.

Devotional items for Week of Oct. 22

Sunday-Ps.99 -ends a series of psalms with God as king.the image doesn't work well in our time. It is a metaphor for god’s majesty, again an element of the divine that is difficult for us. How would you try to describe it in more contemporary language.

Monday-Everyone who struggles for justice, everyone who makes just claims in unjust surroundings, is working for God’s reign, even if not a Christian. The church does not comprise all of God’s reign; that goes beyond the church’s boundaries. The church values everything that is in tune with its struggle to set up God’s reign. A church that tries to keep itself pure and uncontaminated would not be a church of God’s service to people. Oscar Romero

Tuesday-"The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with prayers of crying out to God. Prayers of Lament give form and voice to our grief, a space to wail and name what is not right in the world in the context of prayer. The prayer of lament is first and foremost truth-telling, it begins by challenging the way things are. Lament names that something is not right in the world."--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Wednesday-André Trocmé (He protected Jews in a small town during WWII)Politics per se are not the church’s business. The church is not to preoccupy itself with results. It has not even to practice “pacifism,” that is, reject arms with the object of stopping war. No, God expects only one thing of it: that it walk in obedience to the gospel, refusing violence in whatever form because of that obedience, without concerning itself with the consequences, good or bad, that such refusal may involve. Such faith puts into practice the justice that marks God’s kingdom. The church’s business is not to establish peace between the nations, but to bear witness to the love of God, to live in his peace and righteousness.

Thursday-It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.”~ Thomas Merton

Friday-Kallistos Ware-God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes all humans to be saved. He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept the love and do not respond to it. And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us; it is a place where we put ourselves. The doors of hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside.

Saturday-"The season calls me to let go of false assumptions, wrests my too-small images of God from me as I enter the Mystery of dying and rising. Autumn demands that I release what I think is important to do and returns me to the only thing which matters that I remember—to love and to allow love to sculpt me, even as it breaks my heart."--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  

Sermon Notes-Oct. 15 Ex.32, Ps. 106, Phil. 4, Mt. 22

Oct. 15-Ex. 32, We a look at different modes of celebration this morning in the texts. Like college freshmen, the Israelites indulge in what the story calls revelry. Idols-false gods, ersatz gods. In a culture of divine representations, it could not have been easy to worship this invisible god in the desert.they were filled with worry,and now they get to let loose for a bit.

Moses tries to protect them from the anger of God toward their celebration of a god of their own making. In crisis, he shows his insight into the character of God,. In vv. 11-13, he speaks to God of the divine promises to the ancestors of the people,  urging God to be faithful to those promises. He also speaks of the terrible waste represented in bringing the people out of Egypt just to destroy them... Moses is reminding God of the tremendous investment God has made in saving the people. Thus, Moses serves to remind YHWH of God’s own character. Moses is praying in his contention with god. He is appealing to the best parts of god;’s nature and history with this recalcitrant people. Ps. 106 says that Moses stood in the breach before God. He would plead their case like a trial lawyer before a jury.

Mt. 22:1-14 Barth put the matter: “In the last resort, it all boils down to the fact that the invitation is to a feast, and that he who does not obey and come accordingly, and therefore festively, declines and spurns the invitatio.” Worship is that feast.should worship look like a party, a scene from the golden Calf? Life together could be that festal time. Pres.Outlook-That should give us the courage to say a resounding "yes!" to the call of God no matter when it comes or where we are when we hear it.We should drop everything and come as we are, but we should also never expect to remain unchanged. Just as the first disciples dropped their nets and followed, we respond to God's invitation immediately and fully, trusting that once we do Jesus will welcome us as we are and transform us into who God intends us to be: clothed, in our right minds, witnesses to the generosity and goodness of the One who called us.Our whispers of assent mingle with the roaring wind of the Holy Spirit. And, somehow, God transforms us from Cephas to Peter, from those who catch fish to those who cast their nets to bring in people.(Pres. Outlook/Working Preacher)

Phil. 4:1-9,I don’t know about rejoicing in the midst of hard times and I certainly don’t get it when it says always to rejoice in the Lord. Where is the difference between the rejoicing around the Golden Calf and rejoicing in the Lord? Worry I know about, but it seems to say to replace worry with prayer. Then it promises an elusive peace.For instance, they would “not worry about anything” , referencing what Jesus had said in the Sermon on the Mount: Instead, trust in God leads to prayer.

So what is there to rejoice?We spend immense amounts of time searching for ersatz pleasures and  distractions and call it enjoyment.  joy comes from the confidence that, no matter what happens, we are inseparably connected to God and saved. It has to do with where the focus of one’s life

Paul advises: Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near” Gentleness is not an honored virtue in our land, especially in the white House. It sound too soft, We may well be more gentle with pets than we are children. Gentlemen and gentle lady.

Column on Listening

We started a series on civility at First Presbyterian recently. Its theme was civility is a demonstration of respect. One of the key items of respect is to listen to them.

Men are sometimes accused of selective hearing. I do enjoy a finding that as males age, we do not pick up the frequency of a woman’s voice as easily as we do other sounds. Men often do better at listening when they sit next to someone, but don’t look directly at them, as in a bar setting.

To offer a listening ear is one of the great gifts we can offer another. To listen for understanding, without  coming up with a counterargument, unless asked, without judging the person, without coming up with options to fix an issue, unless asked acknowledges the speaker. We often feel silenced. We often feel unheard. In our time, we then try to gain attention by adding emotional intensity to our words.

I was going to get a jolt of coffee and yes something sweet at Luciana’s recently and ran into the czarina of Sierra club on her way to the yoga studio to “get her Namaste on.” The word is basically a greeting, but for many it has a sense of greeting someone soul to soul in a gesture of respect. Listening puts Namaste into practice.

One of the best listening skills is to notice the emotional change and temperature of a speaker, without them s feeling the need to shout it. When that gets reflected back to them, it not only shows that you are listening, but you may well be giving them information about themselves of which they were unaware. In other words, we can listen with our mind for content; we can listen with our heart for tone.

Listening to another, especially one with whom we disagree can be a taxing task. On the other hand, listening can sometimes be pure pleasure. Music’s pleasures go beyond the aesthetic and may become therapeutic.

Listening can be a gateway into the spiritual, just as the visual. When I was a boy in Catholic school, the catechism said that prayer is talking and listening to God. The senses can lead us into another realm of experience. With the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation approaching, I have been reading a lot of Martin Luther. Hear him on music: “I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God…The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them.... In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits...”

In older Protestant churches, the ear is the vital sense organ. In the “worship wars” the battle was joined mostly on music itself between more classically oriented tunes and more contemporary folk and rock-based tunes. In both camps, our focus on the tune has led to not paying much attention, not listening, to the lyrics of the hymns.

As the seasons change, so do the sounds of the fall. Not only can we watch the leaves turn on the river road, but we hear them crunch underneath when walking at Pere Marquette Park. Maybe it offers one of the deepest forms of listening: silence.. Even with the birds and insects and the rustle of the leaves, we can be encased in silence. For a while the clatter of phones and the clamor of noise shut down. In the silence, we may well hear intimations of the divine.

Week of Oct. 15 pts

Sunday Oct 15-Ps.106:1-6, 19-23  is at the end of Book 4 of the Psalms..Reight relations and doing justice are its core ethical statements at the start. Then it goes through a logn digest of Israel’s relations with God, including the Golden Calf episode. Our tradition has stressed idolatry. When do you make a god of your own design?

Monday“St. Teresa of Avila said to the sisters of her community: ‘The Lord walks among the pots and pans.’  We make artificial divisions between sacred and secular, between what is worthy of our awe and gratitude and what is not.” --- Christine Valters Paintner,

Tuesday-Unlike the sweet unfolding of spring, or the swaggering excesses of summer, autumn comes like wood smoke, quiet as the leaves that drop without a sound or float like amber boats upon the darkening pond. In the autumn our hearts lean into the joy and tenderness of now and the curious promise of limited time. Carrie Newcomer

Wednesday-"This is the journey toward spiritual maturity – to grow in our capacity to hold paradox and tension. We are thrust into times of terrible loss and many times those experiences do reveal treasures we could not imagine. But that does not mean the loss was visited upon us for this purpose, that is the paradox of it."--- Christine Valters Paintner

Thursday-Henri J. M. Nouwen-There is no such thing as the right place, the right job, the right calling or ministry. I can be happy or unhappy in all situations... I have felt distraught and joyful in situations of abundance as well as poverty, in situations of popularity and anonymity, in situations of success and failure. The difference was never based on the situation itself, but always on my state of mind and heart. When I knew I was walking with God, I always felt happy and at peace. When I was entangled in my own complaints and emotional needs, I always felt restless and divided.

Friday- Dorothy Day was very drawn to Therese’s 'little way' of infusing all daily activities with a prayerful awareness and intention, and a spirit of love. She loved the phrase 'duty of delight' which comes from nineteenth century critic John Ruskin. She repeated it often as a reminder to herself to find beauty in the midst of every moment."--- Christine Valters Paintner

Saturday-Pope John Paul II- In contemporary society people become indifferent “not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder” (G. K. Chesterton).…Nature thus becomes a gospel which speaks to us of God: “from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13: 5).…But this capacity for contemplation and knowledge, this discovery of a transcendent presence in created things must lead us also to rediscover our kinship with the earth, to which we have been linked since our own creation (Gen. 2:7). If nature is not violated and degraded, it once again becomes man’s sister.

THOUGHTS FOR WEEK OF OCTOBER 8

Oct. 8-Sunday-Ps.19 is a great hymn on creation. What does creation tell you about God? How does silent creation speak (v.2-4)? Why do you think the psalm then moves to looking at God’s teaching/torah?

Monday-God is the living flame within each of us. We each contain a spark of the divine, a holy fire that leads us to greater love.  Sometimes our inner fires seem to die, to fizzle out.  At these times we are often overworked, overcommitted, or undernourished by the things that bring our soul alive."--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Tuesday-"All traditions went out of their way to emphasize that any idea we had of God bore no absolute relationship to the reality itself, which went beyond it. Our notion of a personal God is one symbolic way of speaking about the divine, but it cannot contain the far more elusive reality. Most would agree with the Greek Orthodox that any statement about God had to have two characteristics. It must be paradoxical, to remind us that God cannot be contained in a neat, coherent system of thought; and it must be apophatic, that is, it should lead us to a moment of silent awe or wonder, because when we are speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do." (Spiral Staircase, p. 292)

Wednesday-We experience the viriditas in our souls, which Hildegard counseled. In that safe space of being met by other pilgrims who also have a love of contemplative practice and creative expression, we are able to start to drop down to a deeper place and let a part of ourselves come alive that we may keep hidden in daily life. We can welcome in the moistening of our souls. This is the greening power of God at work. We find ourselves vital, fertile, alive and saying yes in new ways, affirmed by our fellow companions. Abbey of the Arts

Thursday-Practice simplicity first. When we find this simplicity, they believed, we find true life.”

--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  

Friday We can only keep it together when we believe that God holds us together. We can only win our lives when we remain faithful to the truth that every little part of us, yes, every hair, is completely safe in the divine embrace of our Lord. To say it differently: when we keep living a spiritual life, we have nothing to be afraid of. Source: Bread for the Journey

Saturday-Philip Britts-In the face of the strain of tasks beyond our strength, we must turn inwards to the source of strength. If we measure our human strength against the work we see immediately ahead, we shall feel hopeless, and if we tackle it in that strength we shall be frustrated…and fall either into torpor or exasperation. There is no healthier lesson we can learn than our own limitations, provided this is accompanied by the resignation of our own strength, and reliance on the strength of God.

Sermon Notes-Oct. 8 Ex. 20, PHIL 3:4, MT. 21:33

Oct 8-In History of the World., Mel Brooks has Moses come down with 15 commandments, but he drops one of the tablets and announces these 10, 10 commandments.Ps. 19, creation and science and telos/goa/endpoint-It seems an odd combination-the order of the heavens and the order of God’s instruction, God’s blueprint for human life. God is a god of order, of arrangement, of aligning life. We can adopt the sheer beauty of nature, but we hear this wordless voice encoded in science as well. We have untangled the blueprint of life in DNA. We have probed the atom; we can see our brains respond in different ways to stimuli, even religious ones in reward centers. Over time, religion has a hand in sculpting our brains over time..God as creator will not give up on this creation.God forgives. God redeems our faults, mistakes, and missteps.We treat the first tablet shabbily. Other than the coveting prohibition, the second tablet is part of being a proper human being;nothing out of the ordinary.We do not honor the Sabbath. We treat god;s name  as an expletive or even worse as useless. We construct ersatz divinities all of the time, our of celebrities, and our own ideas and fantasies.

Human life is of two tablets: god and neighbor. Jesus is of two tablets: the human and the divine. Love god; love the neighbor. Respect God; treat the neighbor with respect.

Phil 3:4b-14,citizenship in heaven-I don't think he means that we no longer have status and concern here on earth-allegiance may be  his concern-as way to deal with first tablet of 10C-are we aliens here or is dual citizenship- rights and responsibilities-seek the common good- I tis one thing to be a citizen or a slave or an alien, or  an american citizen, but to be a citizen of heaven, of God's own commonwealth (see3:30)that transforms body of humiliation , goal of destruction to a life worth living.Eastman-In practical terms, this means that we are not only  our past or our memories.  From the standpoint of the grace of God in Christ, Paul  is no longer defined only by that history, because only God provides full identity papers, a passport for travel.

Paul's life  is not primarily about him. It's about God... Jesus Christ is the threshold where our past and our future meet. Jesus is the one who nullifies the power of our own history and liberates us for a new future.  Christ himself makes us righteous and thereby brings us into the life-giving presence of God. When Paul yearns to "be found in" Christ, he is responding to the self-giving love of Christ who was "found in human form" (2:7).

Finally, Paul uses the image of a race to describe the Christian life.Maybe the 10C can be called the starting line. We are on the move;the runner  keeps her "eyes on the prize" will stay on track. Similarly, the runner who mistakes the halfway marker for the goal and stops there, saying "I made it!" will drop out of the race. Paul says that he has not "already reached the goal" (3:12). The phrase is literally, "have already become perfect or mature."  Paradoxically, "mature thinking" means recognizing that we're not yet mature! We're not yet perfect, and if we think we are, we are deceiving ourselves. Rather, we are always in the midst of the race, carried forward from the past to the future in union with Christ.How can one be a whole person. Where do you find the capacity to go on? Christ is our companion.

Column on Early Principia college

As I noted previously, a group of men meet here at 10 AM on Mondays. This fall, they are seeing how other religions can teach us about our own faith. Upriver, Principia College is a jewel on the bluffs over Elsah. It is the only college in the country based on the religious thought Of Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science. We have a treasure  in our midst, but one we pass by with a bare glance on the way to music of Grafton, or the fine Pere Marquette Park. (I have yet to bring myself to pronounce pere as peer). Mind over matter is a phrase from Christina Science. I would wonder if our current emphasis on perception and reality has its roots in Christian Science’s cultural impact. Christian Science works with Paul’s admonition to “be transformed by the renewal of your minds.”

It started as an elementary and secondary school based on Christina Science principles. Mary Kimball Morgan started homeschooling her own children, but it developed into a school based on Christina Science principles toward educational reform. “Right thinking leads to successful living.” It became a junior college and plans were drawn up to expand into the only college based on the principles of Mary Baker Eddy. They found that their fine St Louis site would have a new road constructing “right through the center of the proposed chapel.” The Depression was starting, but the founding spirit, Mrs. Morgan, was undeterred. She followed Mrs. Eddy’s injunction that “Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind.” Mrs. Morgan saw human beings as channels for Divine Wisdom. From that source, education meant “to think truly and therefore effectively.” further, education leads us in “developing the power to think accurately, wisely, and with intelligent discrimination; cultivating the ability to dissect thought and to discard that which is not constructive in daily living.”

F. Oakes Sylvester, a poet and painter, worked at the Principia high school. He had a studio near Elsah, and they found that a good bit of land was available from there toward the Chautauqua site at a fair price, including the estate of Lucy Semple Ames, the wealthy businesswoman and advocate of women’s rights. The planning architect, Bernard Maybeck,  San Francisco-based, had said that the new site could be better, and he was thrilled with it as it looked over the river. His buildings work with the contours of the land and re-create the feel of an old English village. “The buildings cannot compete with the beauty of the [Elsah] location, but should fit in without effort.”  Somehow, as the Depression was wrecking fortunes, they raised money and construction started. As promised, the chapel was the first building erected. It shows the New England roots of the faith, as it is a stone version of a meetinghouse.

She was able to see the project to completion as she insisted on a motto of one of the classes: Principle not Persons.” She saw our energies too much directed to vagaries in preferences and opinions., to self-interest and self-centeredness. Divine principle “shows no partiality” and is therefore impersonal, applicable to all. She saw education as more than the acquisition of facts but a step toward wisdom.  . She did not compartmentalize her life, with her religion occupying a small corner. Hers was a thorough-going attempt to do her best to integrate her life, her whole life, with her faith. To make a vision a reality can be miraculous. To create an institution that reflects that vision, that endures through the years is a living testament and connection to those who precede us; we who stand on the “shoulders of giants.”

Review of Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal

Mark Lilla is an intellectual historian at Columbia. His new book, The Once and Future Liberal is a bit of a screed. At the same time, it is the type of cultural criticism that I treasure, a book that gives us a lens to view the state of political life.

For me it crystallizes a vague disquiet that I have had for years but did not have the wit to notice well. I first noticed it in Gary Hart in 1984. He was addressing himself to the suburbs more than to the working class. I later recall the taunt of Paul Tsongas that liberals love jobs but dislike employers. I had a bad feeling when the latest Democratic convention brought o up group representatives but did not include obvious labor or working class representatives. Democrats assumed a bump in support for Sec. Clinton, but still, a majority of women voted for the president.

He places the burden of his argument on what he terms identity politics. He sees the Democrats as representing disparate groups of people, but that lack common concerns, a sense of the public interest. (See Lowi on interest group liberalism). At the convention, Democrats will tend to bring up representatives of different groups as illustrative of their concerns, but often lack a policy agenda for those concerns. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders could quickly speak of aid to college students and universal health care in every speech. In so doing, Democrats have abandoned their long standing base of support, the working class.

He makes an analogy to the new wave of political discourse to religion. It has a passion for purity, not compromise. It has a high priesthood in a hierarchy of values. It excludes others, even allies, if they do not demonstrate a dogmatic commitment to its creed of the moment. He directs most of his ire toward campus limitation of robust discussion into an echo chamber of language games. For me it would be crystallized in the notion that “dead white men” should have their work disparaged or ignored due to their race and gender. I would add that his work dovetails into my concern for discussion of privilege as a political loser. I am open to the clear signs of privilege as advantage, as unearned, undeserved advantage, and my eyes are not as open about “micro-aggressions.” to privilege the under-privileged would not necessarily lead to better information and decisions. Quite simply, it would not speak to someone in southern Indiana who is dealing with a collapsing economy and community fueled by meth and opiate abuse.

In so doing we have adopted the politics of theater, symbolic politics, more than the difficult, even agonizing work, of pounding out legislation and regulation. For me, the classic instance was Democratic representatives holding a sit-in within the very halls of Congress. From my vantage point, did any substantive change emerge, from their job as legislators, from this stunt?

Lilla suggests that we try to re-introduce the language of citizens as possessing rights and duties as a way to energize political results for the entire nation. In his views, citizens work together for common purposes. Equal protection is his lodestar for assessing the reality or appearance of privilege.

Column on World Communion Sunday

In the Great Depression, a pastor in the Pittsburgh area had an idea. The economy was in shambles, and people were struggling mightily. To see generosity and sharing in the midst of desperation, he proposed sharing the sacrament. To open foreshortened horizons, he proposed celebrating a World Communion Sunday.

Almost all Christian churches celebrate the Lord’s Supper. As a sacrament, as a ritual of unity, it marks our divisions. Some churches open the sacrament to all, and some close it to its own members in the church. In our time, many Christians share the ritual of the sacrament, but do so thoughtlessly, as part of a religious checklist.

As we approach the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, maybe this is a good time to review some interpretations of it.  What doe sit mean when Jesus says this is my body when he broke the bread at his last Passover meal? Does something happen in the bread and wine? The Roman Catholic Church made a decision to follow Aristotle’s understanding of the world as a way to explain it: transubstantiation. (I’ve often thought that Catholic schools do well, in part, as children are exposed to words such as this at a young age). Even though it looks the same in outward appearance, its basic form changes, is transformed.

Most American Protestants emphasize the sacrament as part of the phrase- do this to remember me. If we think about it all, we use it as a memory aid to recall the death of Jesus. This is good, as far as it goes, but it neglects far too much of the sacrament’s links to our past, present, and future.

I was raised Catholic, but find the Reformed wing of the church as struggling to present an acceptable view of the sacrament. After all, when we are talking about a sacred ritual, we are trying to speak about inexpressible depths. Some of the arguments about communion stem from questions that emerge from trying to describe and analyze a liturgy. The Reformed wing sees the Holy “spirit as elevating us into the presence of Christ through the sacrament. So we are elevated with enhanced elements, instead of speaking of the risen Christ descending to us as contained in the bread and cup.

Whether or not one participates in World Communion Sunday, whether or not one happens to receive Communion this Sunday, the sacrament is a presentation of an ongoing miracle. It is a sacrament of communion, of community, of mutual participation, of bringing together. It is built into the Christian view of divinity, as the cross is the story of a continued movement to our level. It then is reversed to draw us up toward God. This enacts communion because we share in each other’s lives and the life of Christ. It points the way that we are being reformed, reshaped, conforming to the very image of Jesus Christ. This is mutual indwelling. Christ enters into the lifeblood, the current of our lives. What could be more humble than to have a broken body and spilled blood as a constant representation of the divine life? What could be more humble than to share, to   continue to demonstrate the life of Jesus Christ in a crust of bread and a thimbleful of wine? Just as Jesus bridges both divinity and humanity, this sacrament bridges the gulf between earth and heaven. In Our tradition, the spirit acts to bring us into full contact with Christ. We also see ourselves and each other as Christophers as bearers of Christ. What respect, what reverence we would then present to one another.

reflections-Week of Oct. 1

Oct. 1-Sunday-Ps. 78 is a rendition of the stubbornness of human nature when it asks, what have you done for me lately. Look at vv. 38-9, however. There God seems to realize that mortals will live in constant forgetfulness.when have you forgotten the work of God? When do you remember god as our rock(v. 35)?

Monday-"You have traveled too fast over false ground; now your soul has come to take you back." - John O'Donohue

Tuesday-Calvin-“The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.”

Wednesday-The Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is laid. Martin Luther

Thursday-we begin to realize that Jesus’ gaze, burning with love, expands to embrace all his people. We realize once more that he wants to make use of us to draw closer to his beloved people. He takes us from the midst of his people and he sends us to his people; without this sense of belonging we cannot understand our deepest identity.Source: The Joy of the Gospel

Friday-Christine Valters Paintner-How might living from the conscious reflection that one day you too will die affect the way you move through your day? Do you think it could change the way you perceive things and how you react to all the challenges a day brings?

Saturday-Craig Koester: "Forgiveness is the declaration that the past will not define the future. . . . Forgiveness is not acceptance of the past. . . . With that gift of forgiveness Christ Jesus opens up a future that is defined by love."

world Communion sunday-

Oct 1-As we move toward the 500th anniversary of the reformation, this day reminds us that one of the issues that split the reformation, almost immediately, was the interpretation of the sacrament of the Lord’s supper. The reformation offered a fresh start on manner matters of faith, but once again human nature took hold of an Edenic opportunity, a moment where the promised land was in sight, and we immediately set to squabbling, even over something we could scarcely grasp.Luther held to a view closer to that of the Catholic church with a focus on the literal meaning of this is my body at the last supper. The  emerging Reformed wing of the church took  a position that this is more a spiritual statement, redolent with deep symbolic meaning, more than a statement of physical state of the elements of bread and wine (see Hunsinger).

Ex.17:1-Paul says the rock was Christ.All ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink. This complaining was remembered by israel as a dangerous moment. Perhaps it is linked to the Lord’s  Prayer save us from putting god to the test.God sustains the people in the wilderness.the Lord’. We may well come to the sacrament with deep spiritual thirst, spiritual disquiet and think that complaint is our proper response.We are being pulled into christ’s orbit, a life of sharing and generous giving of ourselves.So supper should be an antidote to quarreling. Here too, God stands in front of us, with us, within us in the sacrament-yes God is with us.

Phil 2:1-13, empty/fullness at work in us-the passage is about learning to share and being emptied of egotism. A new christian perspective through Christ-Communion does not seem like nearly enough to face personal and social troubles.(see Gorman). Christ continues to pour out himself to us in communion. What does he pour out? A broken body is presented that matches broken lives, a broken world.does not selfishly exploit equality with the divine for personal advantage. God both hidden and revealed in the eucharist. Here we participate in the life of christ in our lives joined. God is truly with us here. Miracle is that God reached out to us at our level of being.

Mt.21:23-32- power and refusals is power getting people to do what they do not wish to do?what sort of power is present in communion on World Communion sunday, so it is not power over.

Ex. 17, Phil. 2, Mt. 21:23

Work on communion meaning, including participation and theosis in communion theosis is kenosis. It is built into the Christian view of divinity.the cross is the story of a continued descent to our level. It then is reversed to draw us up toward god.this communion because we share in each other’s lives and the life of christ.It points the way that we are being reformed, reshaped, conforming to the very image of Jesus christ. This is mutual indwelling.Christ enters into the lifeblood, the current of our lives.What could be more humble than to have a broken body and spilled blood as a constant representation of the divine life? What could be more humble than to sh  continue to demonstrate the life of jesus christ in a crust of bread and a thimbleful of wine? Just as jesus bridges both divinity and humanity, this sacrament bridges the gulf between earth and heaven. In Our tradition, the spirit acts to bring us into full contact with christ.we also see ourselves and each other as christophers as bearers of christ.What respect, what reverence we would then present to one another.