A Prayer for All Saints Day 2009

 

On All Saints Day we count our losses,

too many of them for most of us: parents and other family,

friends and celebrities we knew more about than friends.

We miss them at odd times, a hint of fragrance open the floodgates

of memory and longings.

 

We are told that we are all saints, in your household. O god.

We are skittish about it, for we think saints are perfect.

No saint was, or is, perfect, but all have something to admire,

a virtue toward which we aspire.

 

It is true that loved ones are in a better place.

We pray that visions of heaven sweeten hard times.

May we find room to hope amidst the rubble of pain.

May we try to bring bits of heaven down to earth every day.

With you O god, it is never over; we are never gone.

 

On All Saints Day we count our blessings.

Lives touch each other, embrace each other.

We seek to recall the good that the departed brought us.

Even if we forget, we know that you do not forget, O Divine Storehouse.

All lives remain connected to you, the Great Connection

Sermon All Saints 2010-Rev. 21:1-6, John 11

A lady at Crown Pointe said that she needed to hear of heaven more, as she was too upset to hear about it at funerals. So, All Saints Day fits her need and our need to hear more of heaven when we recall those who have gone on before us. Death's hand haunts all pastors, and turning 55 has turned my thoughts to mortality even more.I visited Chicago for a discussion of the christian funeral last month and read the poet/funeral director Thomas Lynch's book, the Undertaking.  I've looked into making my own casket but then wonder about storage. I was pleased to see that Walmart now has a number of caskets for less than $2000 on its web site.

All Christians talk a good game about death being defeated at Easter, but the old Halloween Grim Reaper scares us most of the time. Yet, "our eyes are fixed on a distant horizon" (Long Accompanying: 40).

 

Our readings this morning look forward to that distant horizon when Death will be banished from the kingdom of God. As Moltmann said one day Death will die and Hell can go to hell." (Long: 44) At long last, the last enemy will be cast into the outer darkness. The cause of so much pain and misery will be removed. All of us are surely in need of that hopeful vision, as we endure too much loss in this world. At the same time, we are in love with this world, maybe too much. Nathaniel Hawthorne said that passengers on the celestial railroad stop at Vanity Fair, our version would be the mall and call the stop the true and only heaven; they have no interest in the shining city  over the horizon. However the streets of Vanity Fair, the world of the mall, would be filled with churches. In heaven, eternal life and worship life will be mingled together, in a seamless garment of life.

 

With God bringing us into a new world, our lives will count  for something more than the discrete sum of events and experiences. they will be connected to the life of God and the countless other lives on this planet. In eternity their sound will echo and their effects will ripple through time. Our baptism will be complete. As our deaths will be gathered into the death of Christ, our new life will be gathered into the new, resurrection life of Christ. I am the resurrection and the life says Jesus. Notice the present tense, even as Martha speaks of a future state. In heaven the resurrected will live with the Living Resurrected One.

 

God has all the time in the world for us.Revelation says that God's dwelling place will be with us. Our lives will be with God, in God, united in the peace and restoration of God. Those afflicted with dementia will have their memories and their best selves restored. those who wake up in the morning with pain could run and dance again. In heaven, we will have all the time in the world to come to know God and each other, face to face, without all of the masks and defenses we need for protecting our fragile selves. I love the phrase I first heard in process theology, "in God nothing worth saving is ever lost." I don't pretend to know of heaven beyond the few tantalizing biblical images and hints. I do believe in the life of the world to come. We yearn for a place where are dreams for peace, justice, fulfillment will meet in salvation's halls. In the end, heaven is all about life with God, so the images we draw of all the good we associate with God gets imagined in heaven. Heaven will be what we need, how we need it, as we live together in what our souls crave, for all the time in the world.

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

 

1) I picked the All Saints reading for last Sunday. The regular reading was the introduction to the story in chapter 1.

2) I've always like the Trible essay in God and the rhetoric of Sexuality

3) Death stalks the characters in chapter 1. Naomi, a female Job (see Janzen's thoughts in his new book on Job) loses to Death,2 sons and a husband. Orpah and Ruth lose husbands and a chance for children by them

4) Where we start off, one could talk about the phases of grief where one starts to reconstruct a new future in the absence of the loved one.

5) One could also choose to emphasize the end, how family issues can ramify into important social considerations down the road.

6) One could speak of the connection of Jesus to Ruth.

7) One could use it to speak about inclusion/exclusion as Ruth was a foreigner. I suppose one could talk about conversion to the faith as well.

8) One could use this to introduce inner-Biblical dialogue, as the story stands against the divorce decree against non-Israelites in Ezra.

9) Ch. 3 Ruth needs security, a safge secure place (manoah)

10) The plan is bold. It is laden with sexual tension, if not power, The bit about sleep, uncovering feet could well be a sexual allusion (Gen. 19, Lev. 18, Ezek. 16, Dt. 28:25) Spread your wing/ cloak kanap goes without saying

11) Nice word play in unocver gala and redeem ga al.

12) Boaz is generous and he works through the system to defeat possible obstacles to marriage to this foreigner.

13) Notice Naomi is herself again and even young again, the oppositie of what she told her duaghters in law in ch. 1

14) Ruth is a eset hayil, a worhty woman, the companion to Boaz a gibbor hayil, often translated as mighty man of valor. Note Boaz was a temple column.

15 So many ways to go with the emptiness, economic, social now being filled.;

 

1) This passage is picked for All Saints. I think about something an old woman told me. "The only time we talk about heaven is at a funeral, and I'm too upset to hear much."

2) The New Int. Study Bible has good material in its notes on the religious views of Cananaan that may be reflected in the passage. 'm then not sure that it is Mt. Zion, the mountain of the north of Baal, now taken over by Israel's faith, or a mountain that calls up old memories.

3) One could sieze on banquet imagery all over the NT as well. In our presbytery, a form of the Emmaus walk is called the Great Banquet. See also Ex. 24:9

4) This passage is within a "little apocalypse" of chs. 24-27.

5) I'm wondering why well-aged wines is repeated. In life, we think that in life, we are not well aged, as we grasp at youth.

6) Note how v. 8 is picked up in Rev.7 and I Cor. 15:54.

7) Think of how the shroud of death hangs over our world in violence, and now maybe in the looming catastrophe of global warming.

8) In this time, Death was seen as a swallowing force, but now it is being swallowed.

9)

Job 42 returns us to prose, away from the poetry of the bulk of the book. It fills the frame of the first prose section.

1) Immediately, one needs to decide for this day, which of the many possible translations of Job's exclamation is close to the mark. See the NIB for a full listing. Basically, is Job apologizing, or is he repenting turning from his mourning and lament? See Donald Capps in Reframing as well.

2) Job gets a lot restored. Does restoration somehow make up for the loss of his first set of children? Do new riches make up for the loss of a fortune?

3) Does Job have 10 kids with Mrs. Job?

4) v. 5 now my eye sees thee. What does the creation speech do to Job's image of God? What does it do to yours?

5) Why comfort now from brothers and sisters? Why money?

6) Spell out why God is angry at the friends. How has Job spoken of God what is right? (v.7) Why is this repeated at 9?

7) See ch. 7 of G. Janzen's new book, At the Scent of Water.

 

Baptism Sermon Benjamin Enoch Parker Job 38, Heb. 5  October  18, 2009 Kingston Presbyterian Church, Greensburg, IN 

God gives Job a tour of the known universe. Our universe has vastly expanded. We can click on a computer and see pictures whose light has taken almost the entire history of the universe to reach us. We have seen into the structure of our heredity. In the immensity of this cosmos, God is looking at us, in deep focus, because Benjamin Enoch Parker is joined to the church of Jesus Christ. Lately, I picked up up a new book for the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing, Rocket Men. One of the striking thing is that taciturn engineers turned into poets when they looked at the earth from the lunar perspective. One said (274) that it looked like a Christmas tree ornament, so fragile and colorful in a black background. God see the globe as a whole, but God sees us as individual as well; so we are never merely statistics in a pattern, but always a unique creation. Out of the entire universe, God is paying special attention to the sacrament of baptism in Kingston Presbyterian Church.

 

Both of this boy's name are Old Testament names. Benjamin is a powerful name, the son of the right hand, the side of right and might. Benjamin would be the name of a tribe of Israel from whom sprang its first king, Saul. The name Enoch is more complicated. One instance of the name is the father of the ancient Methuselah who walked with God and was taken up by God. It has the sense of someone devoted or dedicated but it could also be a play on words as an enlightened one, a teacher perhaps.This is more than a dedication. Baptism brings him from the water into a new life, even at his young age. All of his life, he can face the east, the rising son that marks that God's mercies are new every morning. Maybe he will live into the 22nd Century and continue to live in the presence of God in heaven.

 

As Hebrews says, we need instruction in the faith to match our stage of development. just as Benjamin can handle milk right away, we can provide him spiritual sustenance in a way he can handle. As he grows, as he can handle sterner stuff, so too will his faith have a chance to mature and grow. Jesus can deal gently with us, even when we are the ignorant and the wayward. Baptism will not make him perfect, but it opens a door for him to find reconciliation time and time again. Baptism lasts a lifetime. Its beacon led his folks from Ohio to the place of Lola's baptism and their wedding. Its beacon can light the way of his life, and ours. It shines a light on this. God chooses. elects, selects us to be adopted into a new family, the household of God's very own. Benjamin did not choose to be born, to be named, to be a citizen of the United States. these are givens in his young life. God has reached out to grasp his little fingers, and as you know, a baby can hold on tight. As he grows, we know that he lives in the light of baptism, in a life claimed by God's path as shown in Jesus, the light of the world.

 

I always imagine that heaven takes a breath today. I imagine that that great cloud of witnesses, that gathering of the tribes, strains forward to look at the baptism of Benjamin this morning, ancestors near and far great grandparents and those distant in time beaming proud smiles as another citizen of the kingdom of heaven is added to the divine roll call. He is part of the communion of saints, as he is brother to all of this creation of God.

Sermon Sprinhill Job 38, heb. 5 October 18th, 2009
Job and his friends go back and forth for over thirty chapters. Finally God answers Job. It is in the form of a challenge. God is acting as a hostile witness. God may be on defense, but God is not going to let Job set the terms for the debate. God does not answer Job directly, but God does approach Job's complaints obliquely.

 

God takes Job on a long tour of creation. I think that this has the outcome of showing Job that he is not the center of the universe. God essentially challenges Job to make a better world than God created. It moves him past the "oceanic ego" of the suffering victim. It has the intent of moving Job out of depression by giving him a tour beyond his own suffering. Think of how we say that taking a trip does one good. We speak of not being able to see the forest for the trees. God wants Job to expand his horizon from his intense suffering to the bigger picture. If you will, it is a God's eye view of the world. The world is a living place of change. God gives creation the room to grow and change. Sometimes that change does harm some of the pieces of a puzzle. Can we seriously expect God to interrupt the flow of planets and suns to be at our beck and call, to subvert the careful balance of so many forces to prevent us from coming to harm?

 

I picked up a new book on the Apollo 11 flight, Rocket Men, as we marked its 40th anniversary in the summer.  It emphasizes the intense planning in creation, along with its immensity and complexity. Apollo 11 had some near misses, but it also had the astronauts marvelling at the sight of the earth from space. I sometimes think that the environmental movement gained steam when we saw the picture of earth rising from the moon view. In the midst of all that black emptiness is a jewel of a place for us. On a later flight (274) Bill Anders said "It reminded me of a Christmas tree ornament. Stu Roosa said, "it's the abject smallness of the earth that gets you, or "all I know, it's down there on that little thing, and it's so insignificant in the great big vastness of space." 

 

If this is such a terrible world, then why joy and happiness? God does note that the world is complex. It has wild animals and tame ones. It has storms and calm. It has suffering and the sheer, exultant joy of nature. The shift in perspective will allow Job to count his blessings and his pain. God is not commanding him to grin and bear it. God is not telling him to not complain. God's perspective will allow Job to count his blessings along with his pain. It is just as unrealistic to look at the world with grief-tinged glasses as rose-colored glasses.

 

Our section concludes with a discussion of something we still do not control, the weather. God makes an argument about human incapacity to manage creation. We do not control as much as we would like. We are often unable to control ourselves.In one sense, Job could feel very small and insignificant at this point. On the other hand, wait. God has responded to him in the midst of this buzzing hive of universal activity. For Christians, out of all of the worlds yet unknown to us, we know that God  worked through one of us, Jesus Christ, to bring a message of healing and hope. God so loved the world. this world, that Jesus was born and raised into it. Through that life, you know, you know that God knows you, not something about you. God knows you. God follows your life, in the midst of a universe, God knows you.

 .

Job 23:1-10, heb. 4:12-16 Sermon October 11 2009

At this point Job's friends have gotten nervous about job complaining that it is not fair that he suffers so. They have defended God by telling him that he must have done something terribly wrong. he insists on his innocence, but he is falling into deep despair. The trial image  keeps a suicidal Job alive is his desire for a trial. He wants to face his accuser. he wants habeus corpus, a face to face encounter. God is ineffable and elusive. How do you serve a legal notice to God? God sees us , but we don't see God. Sometimes prayer seems as if we are talking to the wall. We feel nearsighted in our prayer, unable to focus  through the separating distance. Seeing is different for the hunter and the hunted? In its way, liturgy is a form of trial. Is Ps. 139 being parodied? Is this an accusing eye, a loving eye, a searching eye? Who wants a punishing God to be close? We do want the helping God to be close to our needs and condition.When we lose someone, we have unconscious searching behavior. We think we see that person in someone else.

 

As we said, Hebrews is written to give encouragement to people who are tired of trying so hard to be good. Now they hear that someone is on their side. Hebrews imagines a sympathetic high priest, or a judge who is sympathetic more than objective, or critical and accusing. This high priest sees inside of us.He can slice through our defenses, the layers upon layers of protections and find our core self. This high priest knows intimately what we go through. This high priest knows what we do not or cannot face about ourselves. I would like to imagine that the prayers of Jesus on our behalf are ever bit as potent as Job's challenge. This passage tells us to be bold in our prayer, as bold as Job in his desire for a divine trial.

 

Is Job's complaint bitter or defiant? In the end, it doesn't matter. God supports Job in his fervent desperate prayers for justice. In other words, the relationship between us and God is so strong that our prayers can be full-throated pleas for help, frustrated arguments, as well as songs of praise and adoration. In relationship with us, God is open to our full lives, in ups and downs, in their pleas for making sense of things when they are unravelling.

 

After seeing Bill Smith before his surgery, I went to CTS. I couldn't resist going to the bookstore, and I picked up a new book on  Job by Gerald Janzen who taught there. He had written, 20 years ago, one of the best, if not the best, commentary on the book of Job. The nice lady at the counter said that he had been fighting prostate cancer but was doing well.Then, the new Dan Fogelberg CD came in the mail. It was composed when he was fighting the cancer that took his life. People suffer as did Job for no clear discernible reason. It is part of our common human experience. Hospital doors do not shut out God.  Nursing home locks do not exclude God. God has the distance to see us clearly, and is close enough to know our inmost thoughts.If god didn't keep some distance, we would be engulfed, overwhelmed. At the same time, God is as near as the next breathed, or shouted, prayer.We are never far enough away from God so that God is not much more ready to hear us pray than we are to pray. Whenever we pray, we are heard by someone sympathetic to our plight and our cause, a reliable listening ear.

Job 23:1-9

1) It may well be that Job is contemplating suicide. One thing is keeping him alive,k the thought of having a trial where god is on the defensive.

2) By the way, with the passing of william Safire, ntoe that he wrote a book on Job as dissident.
3) Job has just been told that he must have done something wicked to deserve all this pain, but he persists in his integrity.

4) Not submission for Job but a dispute contest, a rib, in hebrew.Job wants vindication.He is definat (meri) I don't know if that is close to the bitterness of mar, as in naomi, a female Job, wanting to be called marah, bitterness.Lament is insufficient.Job needs a contest to show justice. this is protest within a structure.

5) Surely God will give him a just verdict (v. 7) See Wiesel's The Trial

6) We worship an elsuive God, however. All religious people fluctuate between the revealed, accessible god, and the distant, mysterious, elusive God

7) So, if he can't find god, God certainly finds and knows him. the trial undercuts the hunter and prey aspect of God's sight into one of vision.

8) Job chooses a motif, of metal being tested, that is picked up in the NT struggle with suffering.

9) I don;'t recall if I mentioned last week that my favorite Job book is by Janzen of CTS in the Interpretation series. In Theology Today or Princeton Sem. bulletin, he goes over some of the arguments again.

Sermon Job 2:1-10 and Heb. 2:1-10 October 4, 2009

 

No theological issue captures me as much as the issue of God and human suffering. Job is the most sustained piece in the Bible on this topic. Our prose beginning is a way of framing the issue, of getting us started, but I certainly don't take it to be a transcript of a heavenly conversation. I do not recognize this arbitrary God as the God we see in Jesus Christ. In the same way, one can hardly see the cruel response of Mrs. Job as a loving response. Still, I will give some leeway to her for she has lot property and children the same as her husband. She cannot face another problem; the straw has broken the camel's back, and she lashes out in anger at her ill husband. As Hebrews quotes Ps. 8, we are a little lower than the angels, so I cannot imagine God treating us as mere playthings for a wager. It is set up to see that Job cannot possibly deserve suffering. How will he respond to unjust, arbitrary suffering? It is a way of setting up Rabbi Kushner's great question about when bad things happen to good people. 

 

Jesus is comparable to Job in suffering, but at least Jesus grasps the meaning and import of his suffering. Job is left out in the cold. If anything should tells us that no one is immune from suffering, Job and Jesus show us that. To cry out why and find only silence or poor answers is hard to bear.

 

In Communion we take in, receive,the life, death,and resurrection of Jesus. It is more than a mere recitation of the first Lord's Supper. In Hebrew to remember, zakar, has the sense of the past coming alive in the present.That life included suffering. We are in communion in joy, but also in sorrow; this we share with all of our fellow human beings, just as in the marriage vows. In baptism, Paul says that we carry the death and resurrection within us. In Communion we carry the life of Jesus within. Communion joins us to the emblem of the cross so that it  lives within. Jesus is in communion with us in sorrow and joy, want and plenty, sickness and health. Sometimes i wonder that our hymns sound too mournful for communion. this Sunday, they have the right feel, as I am wondering if the lament, that biblical cry of pain and protest is a Communion song as well. Brothers and sisters in Christ gather around the family table this morning. Our entire lives are joined to the life of Christ in this sacrament.

 

so communion gives us one aid in suffering: we are not alone. Second, the examples of Job and Jesus tell us that god is not about the business of hurling divine thunderbolts at us to gt our moral attention. We can and do learn through suffering, but the lesson is not that we are unworthy wretches who deserve punishments for sins, real or imagined. Third, we are not above other people, but as Jesus said the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Suffering is part of the human condition. finally, may we act on the sources of lament after communion. We who are fed to the brim in this spiritual feast should shake our fist at the thought of hungry in this country. We who receive the sacrament of healing should sit dumbfounded at a system that consigns one in five of our citizens to poor health care and more if we include dental and mental health services. Suffering is not the last word in our faith, healing and restoration are. Know that as you receive bread and cup, we get a taste of the heaven where suffering at long last is ended.