Reflection Pts for Week of June 10

Sunday-June 10-Ps.138 is not in my ever-failing memory bank. I like its line (v.3) you have increased my strength of soul. Where is your soul weak or strong?

Monday-Philip Britts-Sonnet I-How often do we miss the fainter note/Or fail to see the more exquisite hue,Blind to the tiny streamlet at our feet,/Eyes fixed upon some other, further view./What chimes of harmonies escape our ears,/How many rainbows must elude our sight,/We see a field but do not see the grass,/Each blade a miracle of shade and light. /How then to keep the greater end in eye/And watch the sunlight on the distant peak,/And yet not tread on any leaf of love,/Nor miss a word the eager children speak?/Ah, what demand upon the narrow heart,To seek the whole, yet not ignore the part./1947

Tuesday-Thresholds can be uneasy places, often frightening. They demand that we step across to a place and way of being different than what we have accepted until now. They demand that we awaken, again and again, to all the ways we allow ourselves to fall asleep." -- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Wednesday-Jim Forest-Humility is not a denial of my value as a human being but rather seeing myself in relationship to God. Humility results from being in a state of gratitude rather than envy, resentment, or bitterness. Do I boast about myself? Do I respect others? Do I listen with attention and a readiness to learn? Do I resent good advice? Do I accept correction with gratitude? Or do I defend myself even when I am in the wrong?

Thursday-Peace is Shalom - well-being of mind, heart, and body, individually and communally. It can exist in the midst of a war-torn world, even in the midst of unresolved problems and increasing human conflicts. Jesus made that peace by giving his life for his brothers and sisters. This is no easy peace, but it is everlasting and it comes from God. Are we willing to give our lives in the service of peace? Friday-“Carolyn Wiley of Roosevelt University reviewed four similar studies of employee motivation conducted in 1946, 1980, 1986, and 1992. In each of the studies, employees were asked to rate the factors that motivated them. Popular answers included ‘interesting work,’ ‘job security,’ ‘good wages,’ and ‘feeling of being in on things.’ Across the studies, which spanned 46 years, only one factor was cited every time as among the top two motivators: ‘full appreciation of work done.’ Saturday-Abbey of the Arts-How many times in our lives do we reach out our hands for a particular purpose, and something else arrives? It is something that may cause discomfort, something we may want to pull away from, but in our wiser moments we know that this is a holy gift we are invited to receive.

Column on Mister rogers

When I was little, before the days of public television, WQED in Pittsburgh ran a children’s show conceived by and starring Fred Rogers, The Children’s Corner. Eventually, it would be broadcast nationally. Fred Rogers was ordained in the Presbytery of Pittsburgh to be Mister Rogers. While he was working on the program he went to one class a term at the Pittsburgh Seminary. During the same time, he did work in child development at Duquesne in Pittsburgh.

A new documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, will be available soon at the Landmark Theatre group in St Louis. When it was shown at the Sundance Festival early this year, it received a standing ovation, where hardened critics applauded with tears in their eyes. I plan to see it, but I doubt it can affect me as deeply as Tom Junod’s masterpiece in Esquire years ago, 1998, that dared to call him a hero on its cover. (It is the inspiration for a movie about Fred Rogers with Tom Hanks as the star).

Fox, of course, had a piece against him, since he was the embodiment of civility and restraint. He was such a “holy fool” that he was more than willing to become the  target of so many jokes, even on SCTV and Saturday Night Live. While Rodney Dangerfield received no respect, Fred Rogers did his best to respect everyone.

Dear Mr. Rogers is a collection of letters sent to him with his responses over the years. One of the first ones asked if he were real, or if he were in a costume like Big Bird. He answered every letter he received from a child. He would visit a child when he took trips for the program, based on letter he received.

Once he visited a teen with cerebral palsy. The boy thought God hated him because some of the caretakers who abused him told him so. He was so nervous when Mister Rogers came to visit that he started hitting himself again, hard. Fred Rogers waited and asked the boy if he would do something for him. The boy typed yes on a screen. The Rev. Rogers asked him to pray for him, could he do that?  Yes, he said and was good to his word. He thought that Fred Rogers was close to God and if asked him to pray that meant God loved the boy too.

I admire him so as he respected his audience of children so. He did not talk down to them but he struggled so to speak at what he perceived was their level of comprehension. What triggers tears in many of us is the image of our missed past. Few aspire to treat even those whom we profess love with the respect and dignity they so richly deserve. Maybe he brings back some of the innocence of childhood before the slights start to dig deep. Maybe he knew that grace could help heal the wounds too long carried. Maybe he treated his audience the way the saw themselves in the recesses of their hearts, as worthy of love, to be accepted as Paul Tillich said.

Fred Rogers was a sacred and secular saint. That does not mean perfection, but it does mean a model toward which we can aspire in our own lives. How would he have used social media, for instance?

I have wondered repeatedly how Jesus would work in a modern era. I have wondered if he would make movies: Sch8indler’s List as an exemplar of the story of the Good Samaritan. Maybe Jesus would have a program for children.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

RFK Column

“Even 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.” Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King

The night before we were released from St. Procopius grade school, its last graduating class, Robert Kennedy was declared dead. Death hung like a pall over 1968, Martin Luther King, riots, and the Thursday night death tally in Vietnam, when over one hundred young men were dying per week. I think something died in our land that first week of June. I recall being moved by the little knots of people standing by the tracks for his funeral train, even nuns pulled children out of school to pay their respects.

His father considered him the runt of the litter and took years for him to accept his son’s abundant talents. To gain his mother’s approval, he was the most devout Catholic of the children. So, he had a dual nature: a “ruthless” side that mirrored his father and a religious side, attracted to the world of the spirit. He would serve Mass at different campaign stops and his family said their daily prayers. That side grew much stronger as he faced his grief at losing a second brother to death.  The side of Catholic social justice grew in those last few years. 

RFK was his brother’s campaign manager and Attorney General, where he walked a political tightrope on civil rights. JFK entrusted him to conduct a negotiation with the Soviet embassy that helped ease the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as he admirably demonstrated in his book 13 Days. On the 26th of October, the Soviet leader made an alluring offer:  removal of missiles in Cuba in exchange for a promise that the United States would never invade Cuba, as well as the removal of U.S.  missiles in Turkey. Robert Kennedy himself actually delivered the United State's message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, as he accepted the offer but demanded the missile removal had to be secret.

Obviously, he was from a rich family, but he developed a concern for the poverty that beset our land. As Senator, he visited poor areas of his new locale of New York. He toured the Mississippi Delta, where he wiped away tears after venturing into a family’s shack and meeting a child with a distended stomach who was listless from malnourishment. Kennedy traveled to eastern Kentucky’s coal country, where a doctor told Kennedy that 18 percent of the population was underweight and 50 percent suffered from intestinal parasites.

In 1966, the Richard Goodwin helped write a speech for South Africa. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.' "

Even though he participated in Vietnam’s escalation, he came to oppose the war: “past error is no excuse for its own perpetration.”

RFK developed a sense of being a citizen of a great country, where all deserved fundamental fairness. That sense if threatened. Perhaps what I lost in 1968 was a sense of optimism about the future, that glowing sense of forward movement that lit our land with JFK. “There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.”

Week of June 3 reflections

Sunday June 3- Ps. 139 speaks of the thoughts of God (vv17-18).  What thoughts of the divine can we grasp? What seem beyond our reach? What sort of religious sense does this inspire within you?

Monday-“The monastic cell is a central concept in the spirituality of the desert fathers and mothers.  This outer cell, which is the room where the monk lives, is a metaphor for the inner cell, a symbol of the deep soul work we are called to do to become fully awake. It is the place where we come into full presence with ourselves and all our inner voices, emotions, and challenges, where we strive to not abandon this soul work through distraction or numbing. It is also the place where we encounter God deep in our hearts.” -- Christine Valters Paintner

Tuesday… a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. Flannery O’Connor

Wednesday-"Humility invites us to let go of our hold on productivity as the measure of our worth and discover the deeper value of who we are." -- Christine Valters Paintner,

Thursday-Simone Weil-We have to cross the infinite thickness of time and space – and God has to do it first, because he comes to us first. Of the links between God and man, love is the greatest. It is as great as the distance to be crossed. So that the love may be as great as possible, the distance is as great as possible. That is why evil can extend to the extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good disappears. Evil is permitted to touch this limit. It sometimes seems as though it overpassed it.

Friday-"What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as 'play' is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance." ~ Thomas Merton,

Saturday-“In cultivating photography as a contemplative practice, the camera becomes a tool to develop our ability to see more deeply, clearly, and truly, beneath the surface realities of the world around us and into the sacred presence shimmering in the world.”
 -- Christine Valters Paintner,

May 20 Reflections

Sunday-May 20 Ps. 104 is a hymn on creation. God the sustainer is evoked well in vv.27-28 as an open handed, open-hearted god. It sees life as having breath or spirit, all life. Does faith inform your view of our environment?

Monday-After firmly holding the cups of our lives and lifting them up as signs of hope for others, we have to drink them. Drinking our cups means fully appropriating and interiorizing what each of us has acknowledged as our life, with all its unique sorrows and joys.How do we drink our cups? We drink them as we listen in silence to the truth of our lives, as we speak in trust with friends about ways we want to grow, and as we act in deeds of service. Drinking our cups is following freely and courageously God's call and staying faithfully on the path that is ours. Thus our life cups become the cups of salvation. When we have emptied them to the bottom, God will fill them with "water" for eternal life.Nowen Tuesday- Music helps us to overcome any division we experience between body and soul, because the purpose of music is to the heavenly and earthly, the invisible and visible closer together." -- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD wednesday-It is never the brothers right next to us, but the brothers in the abstract that are easy to love.Source: Escape Routes Thursday-"We are each called to have [an] inner discerning presence that knows what or who to let into the fold and what or who to keep out. We each have times when this boundary becomes weaker and we say yes to too many things, experiences, or meeting other people’s needs. We all have experienced trying to avoid the wisdom of our inner gatekeeper and let in commitments that steal our energy, that lead us to become strangers to our deepest passions, until one day we may realize we don't even recognize our lives anymore." -- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD Friday-Forgiveness is a door to peace and happiness. Forgiving is not ignoring wrongdoing, but overcoming the evil inside us and in our world with love. To forgive is not just a command of Christ but the key to reconciling all that is broken in our lives and relationships. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity.Source: Why Forgive? Saturday-Friends cannot replace God. They have limitations and weaknesses like we limitations they can be signposts on our journey towards the unlimited have. Their love is never faultless, never complete. But in their and unconditional love of God. Let's enjoy the friends whom God has sent on our way.Nouwen

Pentecost column

All over the country, churches will try to infuse a bit of Pentecost energy into services today. Many will wear red as a symbol of Pentecost fire; some may have different languages heard; some may launch balloons or have recorded tornado sound blast through speakers, and cupcakes may celebrate the “birthday of the church.”  We will sing some hymns of the spirit that will be opened again next year. It can be a dispiriting experience.

Other more charismatically-oriented churches will hear speaking in tongues and see and experience being slain the spirit in religious ecstasy. Envious of the energy in Pentecostal services, some churches attempt to infuse services with a non-stop flow of energetic activity and words for a spiritual high. The Spirit gives purpose and energy. Look what frames Pentecost in the book of Acts: the selection of a new apostle and the work of the church in worship and teaching. The spirit is the center of ordinary life in the church.

In baptism we claim the Gift of the Spirit of Isaiah 11, ones of inspired decision. Pentecost has the capacity to harvest the fruit of the Sprit (Gal. 5:22). The life envisioned by God has these virtues, these powers, th4ese elements of the good life.

Creation-One of our readings is part of Ps. 104 today. In all likelihood it reflects other creation prayers. For me it helps to provide a biblical approach to creation. It gives religious meaning to the environment. In its way it sees entropy as the standard unless god renews the face of the earth, unless the Sprit is there to animate creation. Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “the day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire. “

Every week we pray for the illumination of the spirit when we read the Scripture. Otherwise, they are merely words on a page. The Spirit continues to reveal God’s work in the word as it unfolds in our history. The light of the Spirit allows us to perceive Christ in ourselves and others. In John 16 the spirit of truth is one of continuing processive revelation as we move into the scope and depth of God’s way in the world. That selfsame Spirit is our attorney, our advocate and counselor, our helper, the one who speaks for us when we are unable to defend ourselves. The Spirit helps us to see the dual nature of Jesus Christ.

New life-Another reading today is Ezekiel 37, the famous valley of the dry bones that is captured in the old song. He has a vision of a battlefield of bones, not even a cemetery. The dry bones become reanimated. The spirit gives life to them. In other words, only god can bring new life out of death. What we see as relic can be raw material in the breath of the spirit.

The God of new life hates dullness, the dreary sense of trying to get through life in a rut in a dismal gray sameness. Pentecost has a sense of a spring cleaning, of shaking out the obstacles to the fruit of the spirit/It exorcises the dull drab spirit of complacency and routine and makes room for the spirit “who seizes hold of us but cannot be seized…who gives but cannot be owned (Hans Kung).” The ancient prayer Come Holy Spirit asks the sprit to warm what is cold, to bend what is rigid, to water what is barren, to heal what is wounded, and to give direction when going astray.

May 6 Sermon Notes

May 6 Acts 10:44 Many churches struggle with  identity and boundaries. How do we decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’? The PCUSA has paid a price for including gays more fully into our ordained ministry. It is also an opportunity to reach out to a group of folks who were and are thrust to the margins of social life. In an effort to keep out those with whom we disagree, or those who are different than we are. The question each church and denomination must answer is, will we have the courage, like Peter, to reject traditional distinctions made on the basis of religion or culture in favor of welcoming everyone into God’s family?, Barreto writes, "ethnicity is a projection of our own anxieties and hopes, an inclusive impulse to identify who we are but also an exclusive effort to distinguish between 'us' and 'them.'

I John 5:1,  love to the emphasis on belief, it is clear that love of God is inseparable from love of one's Christian sisters and brothers. Does it extend further as in the Good Samaritan story or the story of Acts? At the end of the previous chapter (4:20-21), the author argued that one could identify love for God by whether or not there was love for the brother or sister. One loves God's children by loving God and keeping God's commandments.  Love for God and love for God's children are integrally connected...one love cannot exist without the other.

John 15:9-friends the interaction of abiding-the vine can only be understood in light of its definition as an abiding in love, and the fruitfulness of this love, as described in John 15:16 only makes sense in light of the vine.natural image of life(and love)no longer slaves but friends, not on the basis of anything that they have done for him but on the basis of what he has done for them. He has made known to them everything that he has heard from the Father. In John, love (the belovedness of friendship, the depth of comrades, of a military unit/buddies,a team as in that championship Season)) “Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow-Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead-Walk beside me… just be my friend” ― Albert Camus“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.” ― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web mutual knowledge, like love and commandment-keeping, go hand in hand.Perfect on a sunday when we are giving scholarship to students on the cusp of adulthood.

Jesus’ initiative is underscored in John 15:16. He does the choosing, against American creed of choice. We have been singled out as friends of Christ.. And for those of us who wish to abide in his love, this is surely good news, that we do not carve out a position as Jesus’ branch-friend and that our abundance does not depend on us; we might not even be able to imagine precisely what it will look like since we aren’t the ones doing the pruning and can only see our part of the vine. We merely choose to abide in the love that has drawn us in, and then we blossom.Stamper

The music you will hear this morning during the anthem  will not only be the carefully considered work of Greg and the choir but this particular piece has an interplay that gives us good insight into the image through the ear with its interlocking intertwining music and vocals.