MLK/ RFK column

In the April spring of 1968, I was on the cusp of graduating, well being freed,  from Catholic elementary school. It appeared that we would not be able to afford  a distant Catholic high school, and I had trepidation about facing a public junior high. I was against the war in Vietnam at that tender age, in part, because I was an altar boy at too many funerals for young soldiers. I was for McCarthy, so I resented RFK. I was pleased the MLK had turned against the war.

I remember a real sense of loss when the news reported the assassination of Rev. King. I don’t recall the first time I heard of RFK’s speech in Indianapolis that awful night, but I have visited the site as an adult. It can be heard and seen , that five minute extemporaneous marvel on you tube. Looking back, I am struck by the respect RFK showed the crowd that night. Twice he quoted the ancient Greeks. For a moment his grief over his brothers melted into that public loss: “in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”  It had a touch of the prophetic, both in the sense of looking into the future but also speaking the truth about a situation. He saw us at a crossroads: increased polarization and bitterness or a path toward replacing violence with compassion and love to deal with the “stain of bloodshed.” Indianapolis did not have the riots of other cities that night. Kennedy would not live into the summer, so he could not help “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” We graduated 8^th grade that day.

I am convinced that King had a premonition of his death that night of his last speech in Memphis. The speech  has the feel of a valedictory, as he recounts milestones in the struggle for civil rights. King spends time recalling a life-threatening stabbing in New York about 10 years before the speech. He also goes into sermonic mode. I had forgotten that he does an extended extension of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He used it to speak of a “dangerous unselfishness.” King derived an interesting lesson why the two religious figures passed by the stricken man: Maybe it was due to important religious rules and work; maybe it was due to their desire to focus on large issues, the causal root of trouble and not a victim, they were afraid. they also wondered what would happen to them, if they stopped to help, King responds that our question should be what would happen to the person hurt if we do not act. One has the sense that King was addressing his own fear that night.

The famous end of the speech, of course, draws for the story of Moses receiving a glimpse of the Promised Land. He draws on 3,000 years of Biblical history to make a heartbreaking peek into the future.

Instead of treating our fellow citizens with respect for their intelligence, we have descended to a sorry spectacle of aiming at the lowest parts of our nature, from oratory to rants on twitter. 

We have made great strides in our country. criminal violence escalated for years, but for a quarter-century, its rate declined. State-enforced segregation is lost in a misty past. So many have been integrated into educational and political attainments. Poverty’s persistence continues to dog too many of our fellow citizens. The environment is so much cleaner. the Promised Land beckons, but it dawns closer for us all.

April 8 Sermon Notes Acts 4 I John 1, John 20:19-31

Easter doesn't have the  lull that Christmas leaves many of us.

Acts 4 Easter life has worship life look like public life-new Eden in the midst-live like you have forever to live-My guess is that Luke is already looking to the past as a golden age.

I John 1 light, life, darkness sin and walking the talk are all mixed together in the first chapter.

Just like the gospel of John the physical and spiritual are bound together, even if at different levels. So this is a direct assault against some socially acceptable rhetorical ploys of our time. You don't have to go to church and be christian-Ok but that doesn't mean that one may consistently avoid church and claim the name either. Christians are hypocritical-Ok-so what i else is new, but here it makes it plain that doctrine and a way of life are conjoined twins, if you will. I am so tired of the division we have permitted between head and heart when it comes to religion.   Jesus did not save one element of life alone. Jesus saves us entirely, body and soul and mind together so that we can follow the great commandment of loving god and neighbor.

1 John's Black- importance of genuine fellowship (koinonia) "with us" and "with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ" (...Easter is God's refusal to leave the world in the lurch, . West WP-at stake is whether our actions testify to the truths we confess, whether our lives line up with our beliefs. In the view of 1 John, the truth is something we think or believe and it is something we do.  And the "doing" includes confession of sin. It opens our lives up to the "cleansing" of our actions, to new ways of being and doing.The bottom line for 1 John is embodiment and incarnation. How do we know we walk in the light? The evidence is in our embodied relationships, that is, in our fellowship with and our love for one another (cf. 3:18). If we are doing the truth, then the community becomes a kind of incarnational evidence. If we sin, that, too, is manifested in community. What happens in the body matters, whether in the koinonia-body or in individual bodies (1:7). What happens in how we think through the faith matters. Yes, what happens in the heart matters, but it is not the test. That Is especially true when people have the gall to speak of worship as what it does for them emotionally but not asking if the worship is proper toward God.

John 20,-Pres. outlook-John has a focus on Thomas because he is the prime demonstration for the basic mistake in the gospel: a relentless focus on the physical alone without making a spiritual step. Notice the sensory emphasis see, touch. Jesus gives him what he desires, but please notice that it is when they are all together that his eyes see and his eyes are opened. We're all hovering between Easter and ordinary life, having glimpsed resurrection but still wondering if it is too good to be true. We're all waffling between forgiveness and resentment, confession and covering up our sin, sharing and hoarding. But living, breathing, took-on-our-sin, defeated-death, Jesus walks into all of those in between spaces, even when we padlocked the door. Easter life starts with forgiveness according to John. Forgiveness gives new life to relationships that have died or are on the brink. It is the first gift of new life Jesus brings to his disciples. After all, most of them had fled and all were in self-imposed house arrest. His act forgave them as it led them into Easter life themselves.

Week of April 8 Devotional Pts.

Sunday- Ps. 133 is a brief prayer. Think of the oil as a sign of celebration of a gathering. What are signs of a good celebration? I notice women wear tiaras for birthday parties lately. When should worship feel celebratory?

Monday-In the tumultuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where when we enter their harbors we reclaim our dignity. Abraham Heschel

Tuesday-Biola Devotions-Meditate means to reflect, mull over, ponder, ruminate or chew over (i.e., like a cow chewing its cud). Meditate is from the Latin meditatus, past participle of meditari, which means “to think” or “reflect upon”. Meditate is also related to mederi which means, “to heal,” “to cure,” or “to remedy.” In other words, meditating on God’s Word and finding JESU, heals, cures, and remedies our lost state, bringing life to our souls.

Wednesday-“Why do I smell burnt coffee?” I ponder aloud. “AA is setting up,” the teen tells me. “AA?!” What are they doing he. . .  oh . . . it’s Sunday night.” And it hits me. Soon 27 children will arrive to get ready for the bathrobe drama and 250 people will start streaming into the sanctuary. AA? Tonight?... Not possible. I walk over to the people setting up chairs and setting out pamphlets. “I’m so sorry, You can’t meet here tonight. It’s Christmas Eve. I mean, there will be children down here running around and lots of people upstairs and the parking lots full and” . . . and I see their faces, strained and stunned. And I stop. And I start again. “And it will all be fine. You’ll be down here and we’ll be upstairs and it will be fine.” And it was. Angels and shepherds and donkeys and drunks. All thrown together one Christmas Eve. In a place of God.

Thursday--Jer. 15 In his affliction, Jeremiah finds solace in the God who, in contrast to the faithless and forgetful people, understands, cares, and remembers: “Lord, you understand; remember me and care for me.”  We, too, who are called by God, who know the delight of his word, and who, perhaps, even know the pain of holding fast to it when it may incite derision, even hatred, are invited to pray the prayer of Jeremiah. From Biola

Friday-I still doubt that anger makes a reliable engine of motivation for justice. Anger clouds our minds and in extremity does result in a kind of madness. Even (maybe especially) righteous anger tends to narrow our vision, thwart our moral imaginations, and divide humanity into simplistic categories beyond just right and wrong: Good person/Evil person. Victim/Victimizer. Godly/Ungodly.Anger allows us to praise some and damn others with impunity and without remorse. Anger tends to calcify into hatred. And however much anger may motivate us to get up and march, hatred will inevitably lead us to march in the wrong directions; and to march, sometimes, with a single-minded compulsion and obsession, disregarding and treading underfoot anyone who gets in our way. Michael Jinkins

Saturday-"My soul desires are not motivated by scarcity. The soul holds expectations loosely and is not attached to the outcome. The soul takes her time, embraces the slow ripening of things, and savors what is to be learned from the process. I can take a deep breath and feel a sense of spaciousness around my soul desires."-- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Easter Column 2018

Easter is one of the days when the most experienced pastor steps into the pulpit with a desert for a mouth. Its gravity is too much. At the same time, I can handle all of the Easter gimmicks. Most of them center on new life, after all. I do object to them showing up before Easter, but that is another cultural clash between the calendar and the church progression of days. I do have some concern that putting up Easter symbols before Easter serves to downplay the terrible events of Holy Week. “Jesus no longer belongs to the past but lives in the present and is projected toward the future; Jesus is the everlasting "today" of God.” Pope Francis

I do agree with the objection that the Easter symbols lack the gravity of the season. Easter is not an expected turn of the page, like the spring. It is a most profoundly anti-natural     event. Nature slides into entropy and death. Tombs are not the wombs of new life. Death comes to all, not new life.  for that reason, I have grown to cherish the Easter reading of Mark 16:1-8. (As a spiritual exercise, go through the initial gospel accounts of Easter morning and look at how the narrative blossoms with details.) “Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.” (NT Wright)

I knew a Catholic priest how got into a bit of trouble for giving a heart welcome to the alumni on Easter. It seems right that this is one Sunday that draws people to worship. In many churches we read two ancient affirmations of faith, the Nicene Creed (325) and the Apostles’ Creed (a more flexible document whose present form is from the 800s perhaps). That creed speaks of the resurrection of the body. In other words the tradition about the empty tomb and later appearance accounts emphasize that it is Jesus who is raised. Paul speaks of a spiritual body (I Cor. 15) to try to speak of the transformed post-resurrection. It does not speak the way we do about a soul, a spiritual element, leaving the body, sometimes castigated as a mere shell, to find its proper place. (It is intriguing that those who pound on a bodily view of resurrection seem so cavalier about its meaning for everyone else).

The appearance accounts do give a sense of a transformed body, especially John. They all point to the continuing identity of one recognized as Jesus of Nazareth. I struggle with this and think of resurrection for all as the maintenance of one’s lived identity, the one that is bound up body and soul, mind and hear together. Crossan has a new book on resurrection and point strongly to a neglected facet of the faith-Easter points toward a general. Here’s another spiritual exercise. If you can’t get the book from a library, go to Google images and look at harrowing of hell. There you will find Jesus, the Victor leading people out of the grasp of death’s domain. In some, he has Adam by the hand, and in at least one, he grasps the hand of Eve. In some Eastern Orthodox depictions, Jesus is carrying the sick into the afterlife. Usually, Jesus has a cross. After all, the Healing One is the Crucified One, is the Risen One.

If Easter candy can remind us of the sweet savor of life, even with all of its troubles, then I can live with its weak symbolism. If bunnies help us with the fecundity and viridity of God’s creation, then I am fine. I would merely ask that we take some time to reflect on the enormity of the message of this day.

Easter Sermon Notes Mk. 16, Lk 24:36, Is. 25:6-9

Easter 2018-Yeah, yeah, Easter is on April Fools’ Day.Like many people, I sneer at the far too early Easter decorations during Lent and wish that they would continue on into Pentecost if possible. The little Easter egg hides and holds life.

God has a cosmic sense of humor as new life emerges from a grave. The gospel of Mark is  a stark one, especially compare dot the soft focus children’s candy holiday we have made of it. Beyond proofs, he is not here-he is risen-Easter is a feast of the maternal aspect of god the life giver, the bearer of new life into a world of death. Karl Barth reminds us that in the Creed when we say buried, the person is robbed of a future and is not long in the present, but appears as an apparition only in the past.Easter has a floating date according to the Passover and the moon.It is for a new day, a new way of measuring time, as Christians change their Sabbath to sunday-one day past the traditional one.

For many of us, God seems so distant as to be dead to us. On Easter we get jolted that it is Death’s funeral-Is. 25 amy erickson we are well acquainted with the powers of death., God’s power of life is “Easter power, not mere sentiment. the Hebrew word for death (mwt) is related to the word that designates the god of death (Môt), whose appetite for human life is insatiable, his vast mouth, which threatens to swallow up life in the span of a breath. In Canaanite mythology,  the storm/weather god Baal defeats Môt (Death) as well as Yam (Sea). This myth of the defeat of Death is cast on a cosmic, future stage. And here God opens up God's tremendous throat to swallow the swallower himself.

God is on the loose-this time perhaps incognito if using Mark 16-with a new body. We ignore the credal insistence on a resurrected body by making Easter a vision of a resurrected soul, a spiritual rising.The empty tomb radiates the light of life.

See Pauw (Wisdom Ecclesiology) on rejoicing-”Easter is God’s seal on a future of life and peace. Every church service is an Easter whisper, but on this day is has shouts of acclamation. God's joy in life itself, in new life is carried over by us with the choirs of heaven itself. That joy bid sus to join in the celebration of this life and its small or full occasions for enjoying life.   ‘

We rejoice with nature itself-shining of our very life- Edwards infinite beauty of God's life and love- radiates from it- Yes we rejoice in this life too,. Even if incomplete-Berry-be joyful even in the face of all the facts.- on the road to imperishable life- tasteless to eschew the joys, pleasures, comforts of this life

I get anxious when the hymns blare out a promise that death has been defeated. If it is, Death certainly seems to retain a lot of power. No, it old Death  continues to stand as the great opposition to God's covenant with life. Easter does not have us rise above struggle in life and with death as much as it allows us to live in unfeigned hope that God is with us in life beyond Churchly life as Col. 3:30 says is hidden in Christ with God.Communion exemplifies that.The joke is on /Death with Easter on April Fools’ Day. Easter smiles, ;laughs a in the face of reality. We foolish people know what Death fears. Life, new life, wins in the end.