thoughts for Sept. 18 Week

Sunday- Ps.79 is not an easy prayer. Yet, the words could come in a time of crisis. Note  toward the end, it desires 7 fold revenge on those who ruined Jerusalem. Jesus says to forgive seventy times seven times.

Monday-She dashed across the road, And disappeared into the woods Leaving me breathless With a feeling of visitation Of Holy Communion,Like I'd been touched Ever so briefly,By something wild and completely unbroken.And ever since that evening,The world has felt less weary.And I’ve felt surer of the promise,That what I do not know,Or I might not see coming,Could leap out in unexpected glory At any given moment.By Carrie Newcomer

Tuesday-May the weaknesses and sins I see in others become a school of self-knowledge for me. Teach me tenderness for the frailty of others for they may be mirrors reflecting my own face. Clothe me with garments of compassion, encouragement and love. May it come to pass.

Wednesday-(Heschel) The whole bible might be summarized in one word: Remember We've remembered 9/11 fifteen years ago this weekend. Psalm 78:11-12 calls us to remember... recollect... meditate... muse... on God's presence even in the absence... in the dark times... until like a Rembrandt painting we see hints of light. On his last night, Jesus said, "Do this to remember me." The thief on the cross prayed,

"Remember me when you come into your Kingdom." Remember your successes and joys that rekindle the spirit. Remember sadness and failures that have taught you to grow. When you do, you re-member your own scattered self and soul and you re-member relationships.  Ira Kent Groff

Thursday-"It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness … " - Henri Nouwen

Friday-"One of the marvellous ways nature offers us her wisdom is through our attention to the seasons.  We live so much of our lives sheltered and indoors, that the seasons are sometimes more a passing awareness than something that has a deep impact on our ways of being. Yet, there is incredible insight available to us by witnessing the way the world moves through its annual cycles of flowering, fullness, releasing, and resting."

--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Saturday-Lament expresses human grief, sadness and disappointment in the face of loss, devastation and oppression. Lament can become a vessel that carries wrathful denunciations of injustice, certainly, but also ironic tweaks of the nose to actual and would-be tyrants. The person lamenting can deliver her message through tears of sorrow or with a voice choked dry from having cried far too long. Lament even has a place for mocking scorn and the sort of laughter that puts the proud in their place. Lament appeals to a higher bar of justice than any earthly court and demands that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than momentary self-interest.

Thoughts on 9/11 memorials

The fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 arrives. I was getting ready for a class on Psalms on a gorgeous September morning when the news started to reveal the extent of the damage. Fifteen years ago, many high school sophomores were not born. It reminds me of people saying Pearl Harbor when it was 13 years before my birth. We all live in the shadow of events that precede us, but they have an impact on our culture.

Those children live in a different country: more fearful, more anxious, and more uncertain. We accept inspections that were not considered possible before the attacks. We charged into a war in Iraq and now struggle on the care of those how fought there and in the more justified war in Afghanistan. Living under a shadow of threat affects our capacity to make good decisions and it makes us prone to become dependent on someone who can promise a tough, protective image when the fears grow stronger. 9/11 brought an awareness of vulnerability to our shores, hence the name homeland security, for the new bureaucratic entity.

In other ways, I am so proud that President Bush and other government officials were determined not to permit terrorism to become a religious war. We continue to try to work through the demands of due process and an iron fist for public safety to threats.

When I was in seminary, I would declare myself dean and take a day to tour New York City. I always knew we were close when we took a curve and there were the twin towers. After 9/11, I took the same train and found myself looking for towers that were not longer there. The World Trade Center building has been erected to a height of 1,776 feet.

On the site of the original twin towers is a museum and memorial dedicated to 9/11 that takes up half of the 16 acres of the original area. The names are inscribed, in bronze, of the dead around twin pools of water. Contri8butions have been made to give a glimpse of the life of each individual killed that fateful day. A pear tree, a Survivor Tree, was found in the rubble and the Parks Dept. cared for it. So it is replanted with its gnarled remains and smooth new growth on the same tree. So we have rebuilt with a powerful symbol of strength and aspiration and provided a memorial for mourning the loss of innocent people on 9/11.

In a rural area of Pennsylvania, the National Park Service has a park dedicated to the passengers and crew that crashed a plane to avoid it being taken into the nation’s Capitol. At the Pentagon, care was taken to remember the names of the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. It is oriented by age and each bench has a water element involved in it. A section of the Pentagon that was struck by the plane is lit by blue lights on the anniversary. Following the pattern of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, all of the memorials list the names of the fallen.

Bruce Springsteen was urged by fans to write songs that reflected the post 9/11 landscape. I can’t help but hear parts of the rising when I see a picture of that glorious building and the memorials: Spirits above and behind me/Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright/May their precious blood forever bind me/Lord as I stand before your fiery light

I see you Mary in the garden/In the garden of a thousand sighs/There's holy pictures of our children/Dancin' in a sky filled with light/May I feel your arms around me/
May I feel your blood mix with mine

Sermon Notes for Sept. 11-Jer. 4, Lk 15:1-10

Sept 11 Jer. 4, Lk. 15:1-10

Jeremiah’s words certainly portray God as a national punisher. Stulman clarifies, “All three indictments assert that the community is on the way to destroying itself by its social malaise and infidelity. For now, God does everything possible to get Israel’s attention. Through images of heaven and earth in disarray,   images of cosmic disorder suggest a reversal of creation in order to convey the hopelessness (and helplessness) of the situation. Put differently Jeremiah is saying that the chaos faced in public life reflects a godless outlook. Without a foundation, our structures totter and fall. We are left utterly at sea in the storm and the dark.Terence E. Fretheim : God is in relationship and is not a neutral dispenser of justice, not dispassionate, but passionate about life with us. God works in the dense interconnections of life and that sweeps up people in its wake.Walter Brueggemann : that prophetic discourse “is not a blueprint for the future.an attempt to engage this numbed, unaware community in an imaginative embrace of what is happening ... because ... evil finally must be answered for. He emphasizes the anti-creation character of this: a return to pre-creation chaos, disorder, disharmony, march toward death and not life.Losing something heightens  our awareness and anxiety. Losing a phone captures this well. Lost in the midst of chaos-part of that chaos is not being god’s favorite or that God can use very human instruments-God leaves an opening-i will not make a full end-(Note for contemporary end of the worldists) So life and death are locked in constant tension-Perhaps we can look at the Incarnation of Jesus as another opening that God uses.Being lost in the sense of nowhere to turn, not being oriented the direction- (Boy Scouts and knowing north still did not help me if I did not know what direction to go) 9/11 chaos

While the Jeremiah text is clearly about national repentance, the stories of Jesus are about seeking out, search for an individual.Anxiety of seeking and anxiety of being the lost one Calvin would insist that we are already found.So god is not acting in economic rationality to chase after the one and possibly put the 99 in danger. Is It a waste of time and effort searching for the $50?

Looking foir a phone, or a credit card, or a checkbook.One could ask why bother with that amount of money? Why bother with one sheep and endanger possibly the 99? After all, it is but 1% of the flock.Instead of using Jeremiah’s tactic of scaring people in repentance, that did not work, Jesus goes at a different approach. He asks us to go outside of ourselves through the little stories and find ourselves in them. He emphasizes heaven joy instead of us grousing about the time and effort  engaged for the lost.

Neither passage depicts a passive god. Both passages try to present a divine eye view of our circumstances. . This is an active responsive God. Jesus sees God as chasing after us to welcome us into the fold, not to punish.Jesus pictures god as being involved wiht individuals while at the smae time working toward the kngdom of heaven, the way of God in the world, the honoring of god’s realm.It breaks the divine heart to see what we do to each other, what we do to ourselves , our society when we ignore the way of god to make human life worth living in this time and place.could it be that God would feel a bit lost without us? I suspect that for God, nothing and no one is irretrievably lost. Nothing worth finding and saving will be lost.

Points for Week of Sept. 11

Sunday-Ps.14 is one selection for the day. It is nearly the same as Ps. 53. V. 2 has god seeking  for the wise who search for God. How has God sought you over the years? How do you seek for God? How are you wise?

Monday-Vocation is not what you do but who you are becoming. The highest reward for your toils is not what you get for it but what you become by it, to paraphrase John Ruskin,

Tuesday-Nothing is wasted when it is shared with God. God can bring beauty out of the ashes of lost dreams. He can glean Joy out of sorrow, Peace out of adversity." (Sarah Young)

Wednesday-Michael Jinkins-The story of Christianity is the story of good news that will not respect the walls erected by human hands, but opens the eyes of people to the fact that every partition we erect is called into question by the neighborhood of Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14). The Spirit of Christ runs counter to the spirit of the tribe, calling us to let go of the fears and self-hatred that separate us and to find in Christ the humanity that revels in God's love for everyone God created.

Thursday-If God’s vision for the human enterprise is to unfold in all fullness, we need a people ready, willing and able to embrace that which is timeless and carry it forward. And people ready, willing, and able to subvert what needs subverting.-Br. Mark Brown

Friday-"Creativity is essential to the world, to imagine new possibilities. Yet, so many of us lead lives that are so full, there is barely room for God’s newness to erupt in us, or for us to even recognize those stirrings when they happen. The monastic path offers us guidance in this direction."- Christine Valters Paintner,

Saturday- “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”

― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister

Column on Memorials for 9/11

The fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 arrives. I was getting ready for a class on Psalms on a gorgeous September morning when the news started to reveal the extent of the damage. Fifteen years ago, many high school sophomores were not born. It reminds me of people saying Pearl Harbor when it was 13 years before my birth. We all live in the shadow of events that precede us, but they have an impact on our culture.

Those children live in a different country: more fearful, more anxious, and more uncertain. We accept inspections that were not considered possible before the attacks. We charged into a war in Iraq and now struggle on the care of those how fought there and in the more justified war in Afghanistan. Living under a shadow of threat affects our capacity to make good decisions and it makes us prone to become dependent on someone who can promise a tough, protective image when the fears grow stronger. 9/11 brought an awareness of vulnerability to our shores, hence the name homeland security, for the new bureaucratic entity.

In other ways, I am so proud that President Bush and other government officials were determined not to permit terrorism to become a religious war. We continue to try to work through the demands of due process and an iron fist for public safety to threats.

When I was in seminary, I would declare myself dean and take a day to tour New York City. I always knew we were close when we took a curve and there were the twin towers. After 9/11, I took the same train and found myself looking for towers that were not longer there. The World Trade Center building has been erected to a height of 1,776 feet.

On the site of the original twin towers is a museum and memorial dedicated to 9/11 that takes up half of the 16 acres of the original area. The names are inscribed, in bronze, of the dead around twin pools of water. Contri8butions have been made to give a glimpse of the life of each individual killed that fateful day. A pear tree, a Survivor Tree, was found in the rubble and the Parks Dept. cared for it. So it is replanted with its gnarled remains and smooth new growth on the same tree. So we have rebuilt with a powerful symbol of strength and aspiration and provided a memorial for mourning the loss of innocent people on 9/11.

In a rural area of Pennsylvania, the National Park Service has a park dedicated to the passengers and crew that crashed a plane to avoid it being taken into the nation’s Capitol. At the Pentagon, care was taken to remember the names of the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. It is oriented by age and each bench has a water element involved in it. A section of the Pentagon that was struck by the plane is lit by blue lights on the anniversary. Following the pattern of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, all of the memorials list the names of the fallen.

Bruce Springsteen was urged by fans to write songs that reflected the post 9/11 landscape. I can’t help but hear parts of the rising when I see a picture of that glorious building and the memorials: Spirits above and behind me/Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright/May their precious blood forever bind me/Lord as I stand before your fiery light

I see you Mary in the garden/In the garden of a thousand sighs/There's holy pictures of our children/Dancin' in a sky filled with light/May I feel your arms around me/
May I feel your blood mix with mine

Column on labor day

St. Benedict’s program for monks centered on the twin duties: to pray and to work. Centuries later, Freud said that human life existed to love and to work. When I was in school, Max Weber surmised that the “Protestant work ethic” came into being as a secular proof of salvation for an afterlife. Few things in our country are as admired as the capacity for hard work. Few things are frowned upon as shirking the responsibilities of work.

Upper Alton got a head start on Labor Day parades last weekend. As summer ends, it is good to close the vacation season with a long weekend. Labor Day was a response to violence between labor and owners that continued to mar relations for over a generation.

Lyman Trumbull, author of the 13^th Amendment, had a house in Alton for years that still grace our town. As an old man, he was called to help defend Eugene V. Debs. During the Pullman strike that was a factor in Congress creating Labor Day in the first place. Debs tried not only to organize Pullman workers but started a boycott of trains with Pullman cars in railways.  President Cleveland sent in federal troops to Illinois. With Clarence Darrow, he went to the Supreme Court in defense of Debs and the right of laborers to withhold their labor in his view. The Debs case stood for years as a signal that the Supreme Court was willing to go to great lengths to use the power of the government to support business against the demands of labor. After the Debs case, thousands of injunctions were ordered against strikes. It would take the Wagner Act in the mid 1930s to try to try to level the forces at a negotiating table instead of violent confrontations.

The two major parties continue to be split along the fault line of labor. Gov. Rauner’s proposals are stuck in an economic view of the world of the fifties: blame unions. Only around 11% of the work force is unionized. So many of the industrial union jobs have disappeared in the global marketplace. My uncles were high school dropouts who made a middle class living in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania. Plus they had the best health insurance plan available at that time. Now people in managerial salaried positions are asked to work 50-60 hours a week, with no overtime as a matter of course.

Americans are understandably concerned that the hope that one’s children are better off economically and socially seems in peril. That shortened horizon of the future has spawned some of the disgust with our economic performance in the last generation.

Sabbath is an important concept since we work so much. Indeed it reflects the memory of slavery in Israel to insure that at least one day was devoted to rest: physical, m emotional, spiritual rest in God. Pope John Paul II: “The word of God's revelation is profoundly marked by the fundamental truth that man, created in the image of God, shares by his work in the activity of the Creator and that, within the limits of his own human capabilities, man in a sense continues to develop that activity, and perfects it as he advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation. We find this truth at the very beginning of Sacred Scripture, in the Book of Genesis, where the creation activity itself is presented in the form of "work" done by God during "six days"²⁸, "resting" on the seventh day.”

The capacity to be competent and productive  in tasks set before us is a constant inner tension, if we are young or well into retirement. At any age, we seek a balance between work and rest, creation and recreation. Work helps define us and our very identity. May we honor labor in all of its forms as we mark the close of another summer.

Devotional Pts. for Week of Sept. 4

Sunday-Ps.139 is a  long deep prayer. Let’s spend some time with the last 2 verses. It opens to a fearless examination of the soul, the heart and mind of us. Jesuits would call this an invitation to examine the soul, a daily task for them and those who walk a spiritual path such as Ira Kent Groff.Try it for at least a week and keep track of what you found.

Monday-This means that we are each a unique creation that has nowhere else and never before has been created, and will never again in the future. No one else now, ever before or ever again, carries the same combination of gifts, talents, resources, opportunities, and challenges.

Tuesday-the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it; the church is not a fortress set apart from the city. The church follows Jesus, who lived, worked, struggled and died in the midst of a city, in the polis.”

Wednesday-"We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there...: dark nights, dark thoughts,. If we could just defend ourselves better against those things, we think, then surely we would feel more solid and secure.  The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our own reluctance to learn to walk in the dark."~From Learning to Walk in the Dark

Thursday-You are above us, O God,you are within.You are in all things,yet contained by no thing.Teach us to seek you in all that has life that we may see you as the Light of life.Teach us to search for you in our own depths that we may find you in every living soul. - Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter

Friday- We want it to be meaningful that things be remembered. If we do not remember what has happened before, then we are powerless to give meaning to what is, day by day ... In fact, he continued, memory is not the heart of the endeavor. That is the human secret.   Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory.    Jesse Ball

Saturday-You always arrive bringing light.Carried in chipped pitchers,And dented buckets,

Sloshing all that luminous liquid Out like soapy water Washing down the muddy floorboards

Of my weary or worried days. -Carrie Newcomer