sermon notes july 14 Amos 7:7-17, Lk. 10:25-37

July 14 Amos 7:7-17, Lk. 10L25-37

With Amos. we are compelled to examine the distinction between justice and charity. Here, however the issue seems to be one borne more of idolatry and being an outsider threatening punishment than a justice isssue per se.  If one holds to the idea of divine punishment for corporate acts and inaction, should we fear the hand of God in the way we treat our brothers and sisters or congratulate ourselves on the immense steps toward justice made in most of our lifetimes?

My issue out of an Amos perspective is that we use the Good Samaritan story to justify our important charity work but we neglect justice often. Justice would work to make the dangerous road to Jericho crime-free. Justice would break up the bandits. Justice would have a proper hospital for the wounded man to find care.Justice deals with structures and the public realm, and charity is the helping hand for a basic human need. quite simply, the need for charity would be far less if public justice were more evident in our land. Before social security programs, the poverty rate with the elderly was enormous. So-called poor houses or old age homes were filled with folks being housed as they waited for death.In the TV show, the West wing, the staff was considering making some incremental changes in policy. they were not seeking perfect jsutice, but thye were seeking to make life a little easier.

Sometimes we miss the punch of this story because we are unaware of the ethnic and religious prejudice between Jews and Samaritans. we could approach it by calling it the good meth maker and dealer, or the kind pornographer, the generous strip club booker. In other words, the story packed punch because this was the last person the hearers of Jesus would ever expect being the hero of a story. It would be like Republican celebrating that only Presdient  Clinton presented budget surplus in his last budget proposals.It would be like Democrats realizing  that Richard Nixon signed the EPA and Bush the Second created a vast expansion of Medicare with prescirption plans. In Places in the heart Sally field creates of community of the marginal to try to save her farm, where the people are bound together in common need. In the story by jesus, the Samaritan seems to be motivated beyond any hint of self-interest, but sheer compassion.

When I wonder what Jesus would do if he were alive today, i sometimes like to think that his parables would be transformed into movies. Schindler’s List was turned into a movie. The last person one would consider as a helper, a womanizing munitions maker and overall corrupt deal maker would save the lives of over 1,000 people during the Holocaust.When we read that the Samaritan felt compassion or pity, the word is better read as punched in the gut, gut wrenching. for Schindler it was the sight of a little girl in a red coat being shot for sport by a nazi uniform.

Last week, we spoke about Paul’s admonition fo rus to carry our fair share of the load. that means that we find a balance for carrying our own burdens as best we can but also reahcing out with a helping hand for those whose burdens threaten to crush them.Today, I would extend that to trying to keep the balance between the concrete side of active charity, an act of the compassionate heart, and the more abstract, impersonal call to justice. In the end, our readings today push us toward considering the Christian role of healing: the violent bleeding, the social wounds, the open space to provide healing at home, hospital, or hospice.

OT Notes Amos 8:1-12

1) What would be some good contemporary alternatives to the ripe fruit?

2) I wonder how much actual impact religious festivals and injunctions had on commerce in this day? why does hte bible have such a concern for proper measures?

3) Do you think we have done things that God will never forget?

4) How do you work through the idea of the environment being linked ot moral uplift or decay?

5) How much does apocalyptic imagery affect you? Do we need to rework it do you think?

6)V. 10 has ritual that would fit mourning or repentance, or both, I suppose.The end of v. 10 is particularly chilling, I think.

7) at the close of the lection, do you think we live in such a time? If so, where?

OT notes Amos 7:7-17

This is later than usual, I do realize. I helped our daughter move and the time shifted, so I was more confused than usual.

1) Amos, of course moves us to considerations of justice. We may do well to consider the distinction between justice and charity, justice and compassion, justice and love.

2)the famous plumb line is a complete guess on meaning. If you keep it, what are area for you that seem to be out of alignment in contemporary life: public needs, values, odd things taken for granted as shared assumptions

3) The ripostes of Amos and Amaziah are templates for the temptation of religion to appeal to the pwoerful and consensus views.Preachers may be tempted to use this as a cue to berate their people. I wonder if that ever works. I wonder where we come off as if we are above their petty concerns, when it really means we disagree or hold their view in derision.

4) before going off on a justice tear, please note that the passage is focused on idolatry.In cultural terms, what is idolatrous in our time?

3) look at the linkage of worship and jsutice here. I sthat noticeable in our time?

4) the word is harsh here. Most mainline churches avoid such language now. How do you work with it?

5) does rhetorical condemnation and threat work as a tactic for change?

devotional points week of July 7

Sunday July 7-Ps. 30 has so many memorable phrases, mourning into dancing,out of the depths, rejoicing comes in the morning, ,hid your face.” Although, i tend toward the sad in Scripture, I will note the changes toward the good in the prayer. it recounts a healing, a reversal in the body, but the stress is on the mental, emotional, and spiritual changes that it has brought.

Gratitude for a healing moment in life makes the healing more secure in awareness, no?

Monday-Family crisis can bring out the extremes. people who are not close get bonded more closely. Underlying or overt bitterness may come pouring out in the face of the death of someone they both love, perhaps the only thing they agree on. We do well to manage our own thoughts and feelings and not insist that others follow our path. Crisis does not always bring us together, but it can be the occasion for a explosion that rips a relationship apart.

Tuesday-I’ve been catching bits and pieces of the movie by the Dardennes, The Kid with a Bike.It has a hint of the Good Samaritan story. The boy has an absentee father for whom he constantly tries to contact. the last woman in the world whom you would expect takes  him in and offers him not only food for his body but helps to nurture his heart as well.

Wednesday-Promises get honored or broken as a “pocketful of mumbles” as Paul Simon said.A vow is a speical religious promise. Have you made one and were you able to maintain it? What are some promises kept for you that are especially meaningful for you? What were some broken promises that weakened your trust in people’s resolve and showed the “spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” What promises have you kept and what broken promises by you still nag at you?

Thursday-Music touches us, sometimes deeply. Music soothes, at times.What are your favorite songs? Are they all happy or sad, or a mix? Why are they your favorites? Do you have any recent favorites. do you find yourself going back in time when you hear an old favorite song. Do you sometimes get transported to a spot when it was important to you in marking a time in your life? what are your favorite and least-favored hymns?

Friday- That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth. ~Frederick Buechner,Listening to Your Life

Saturday-Dan Fogelberg sang: “lessons learned are like bridges burned/you only need ot cross them but once.” I am not sure about that. It seems to me that we replay past mistakes for a good long while in some circumstances. Even when we know that we are getting nowhere, we keep repeating the same pattern.Where have you learned to break an unhelpful pattern? when do you regret or treasure a burned bridge? What were lessons learned for you in success and failure?

July 7 sermon notes Gal. 6 @ Kings 5

After the 4th of July comes a text that has some real relevance for any community. President Clinton used this passage as his text for his first inaugural address that was a really sermon. It was little noticed as that. It is a difficult text both for American citizens and American churchgoers. Its speaks of bearing one another’s burden. At the same time, ti says that one should bear their own burdens.When I started work on this, I had performed a community funeral service. The Midwestern woman had a motto: “it will be fine.”  Midwestern stocisim emphaiszes that we do not want people to go to any trouble, since I’m fine; I’m all right.it will be fine.” We don;t want to be a bother, don;t want to burden others. Community responds with the great line from Boys’ Town: “he ain’t heavy; he’s my brother.” Indeed, in our polarized time, the right emphasizes a heightened individualism, and the left places weight on  community responsibilities.

I do realize that when we help someone out we are taking the risk of being played and manipulated. Some folks do look for others to carry burdens for them that they could shoulder themselves. On the other hand, captivated as we are by outward appearances, we may not be able to peer into their minds and lives to sense some of the very real disabilities they may be carrying already.

Part of being a mature individual is to carry our own burdens. part of learning to accept community is that point when we realize we cannot carry o a burden on our own and when others seek to provide some help, help that we may yet be unable to admit or have not yet brought themselves to recognize.

In a way, the story of Naaman is all about bearing another’s burdens. The slave moves past her own insular views to extend an offer of help to the family she serves.The servants of Naaman know him so well that they help him perceive his own good by appealing not to his petulance, not his self-interest, but his egotism. They perform what amounts to an intervention with him to keep him on track.The king of Israel is afraid that he is going to be held responsible for a healing, something out of his control. He fears that his failure to bear the burden will be used as a pretext for an attack from Syria.

Notice people seek to help Naaman, but he does not seem to seek much aid for himself, except to receive permission to seek a cure in Israel.I cannot tell from the story if the enormous amount of presents he brings are his own or from the king of syria who provides him with a letter of introduction to his counterpart.One of the expectations that I dislike in myself when we deal with folks at our feeding programs is that I expect them to be grateful and not demanding and find myself grow angry when they complain and do get demanding.

Everybody should try to be responsible for one’s life. At the same time, everybody can use a helping hand sometimes.regardless of gender ethnicity, or class, our sotries today remind of our our equality in the face of personal boundaries or being afflcited by troubles, many of which go past any sense of individual fault alone.In one way or another, we seek healing. to me this is especially true of matters of the heart and soul.

friday column-notes on beuaty

OK, I admit it; I read a bit in the bathroom. Right now, the book is merely title Beauty by John O’Donohue. At my continuing education program this year, I took a class on the arts and theology. So, lately, I have been playing around with the notion of beauty in life. I appreciate getting this space as it allows me to try to work through some points at the outer edge of my ability to even put my finger on something I take for granted constantly. Beauty seems to apply to a pleasing pattern of elements that create a sense of harmony and completeness. In particular, when can we even use the word in a world where preferences get bandied about like facts? Do we have areas in life where we can agree on the beautiful, or are we consigned to only individual perceptions of beauty? After all, we no longer can agree on the factual, as major public figures continue to deny the best evidence we can muster if it disagrees with their previous position.

With the media age, we see pictures of beautiful people all of the time. I do not get inured to it, but repetition can make even the breathtaking mundane, I suppose. At the same time, we make qualifications, a natural beauty, an enhanced beauty, a face alone or a sculpted body. For models the ideal body type seems to approach a painful thinness and gorgeous women are consigned to the “plus-sized’ model category. the words itself gets thrown around enough that women seem to doubt it when it is applied to them.

Someone asked me recently what I thought about the Alton area. My first response is tha the grinding poverty depresses me. My second response is that I enjoy being able to take in the bluffs upriver and riding my bike along its levee. To clear my head at work, I will walk along the river and take in it changing contours. (In fact, I am drawn to it when I finish this piece and polish my sermon a bit).  What draws me to it? I am always taken by h its sheer width to Missouri. At the same time, its variety catches my eye: its eddies, its surface changes, its shifting colors, even the trees that floated and collected during the floods.

As I write this, we are getting ready to read the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.  I would say that the Samaritan did a beautiful thing. We see the ugliness of violence day after day. Here our eyes are assaulted by the rusting hulks of factories and the decay of once fine public building within shouting distance from the City Hall. The act of the Samaritan is both good and beautiful. it makes actual an aspiration toward compassion. to me, it is a beautiful thing to do as its sequence fits a pattern that makes the compassion whole. The parts of the act fit together toward its enacted good. Just this week, our eldest daughter’s friends acted beautifully in helping her move.

At a spiritual level, I suppose that beauty is an element of the holy itself. I Our youngest turns 21 next Saturday. I recall that she was born in the late afternoon. so the sun struck her body as it emerged from the womb. To be present in the face of a wrinkly, red, squalling infant is a beautiful moment. It was a holy moment, as was the first time I got to hear the whoosh, whoosh of her heartbeat on the early ultrasound device that heralded the presence of a new life forming. This is an appropriate time to close. What are beautiful moments, acts, and sights in your life right now?

OT Notes @ Kings 5 Naaman

1) Naaman, in Hebrew means pleasant/joy , the male form of Naomi, I suppose.
2) Is the servant of Naaman an example of divided loyalties?
3)Naaman rejects the ritual place and method. when do we question ritual so much that we lose a sense of its impact?
4)Leprosy cover a multitude of conditions. it could be Hansen's disease or any number of skin afflictions.
5) Power dynamics run through this story. reflect on how well his servants manipulate his ego.
6) To get a bit of the scandal of the story, imagine how we would react if an Al Qaeda lieutenant came over here for treatment.
7) How does the story remind you of baptism?.
8) Why does God employ simple tools toward healing, do you think?
9) One could do a good comedy turn on the politics of Elisha, Israel, and Syria then.
10) How do you approach healing in 2013?
11) Why does Elisha use intermediary communication?