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.