Week of April 19 devotions

Sunday-We sing Ps. 4as a chant in worship today. Please read its paraphrase or a more careful translation in your Bibles. Peaceful sleep was a need in OT times as well as our own. It too sees anger as inhibiting sleep but also a gateway to sin. At the same time, it does not forbid anger but how it is used. In its way, it is a therapeutic approach to prayer of lament. when do spiritual patterns help you deal with everyday concerns?

Monday-Joy, isn't "concealed at the bottom of the cup of intoxication" but "smiles up at us from the bottom of the bitter chalice" ~ Kierkegaard

Tuesday-As we stand at the precipice,As we ponder on the next step,As we hesitate on the cliff of change,So too do we exalt at each rise and fall.So too do we rejoice at each losing and gaining.And while we may mourn at the end, So too do we delight as we begin again. Always we begin again.From Abbey of the Arts

Wednesday-Pause... and reflect on some time in your life when you have pulled back in the middle of a project or plan-some emptying of your onward movement. Can you see some new life or movement in the trajectory of you spiritual journey? Some new vocational direction? Some new sense of purpose? Some connection between personal growth and social justice?  Ira Groff

Thursday- The church, after all, is a community built on faith in the resurrection of the Lord. The resurrection was not an achievement that sprang out of a determination not ever, ever to be defeated, but rather a gift made manifest in that One who did not choose to launch a fierce defensive battle to save his own life.” Byars, “Finding Our Balance: Repositioning Mainstream Protestantism,”

Friday-“Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting a bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.” ancient Jewish humor and wisdom

Saturday- Father Thomas Keating says: "God's first language is silence. Every other language is a poor translation."

Column on Jefferson's birthday

Column on Jefferson's birthday

I botched a sentence here previously. Here is a corrected line in the first paragraph.

Thomas Jefferson;’s birthday is April 13. Years ago, I drove to Monticello on my birthday in a mist. when I made one of the last turns up the serpentine driveway, there it appeared out of the mist. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday.

Jefferson’s reputation has suffered. In all likelihood, the widowed Jefferson fathered a number of children of his deceased wife’s half sister, a slave. (His father-in-law- had fathered her through his slave, Betsy Hemmings). Jefferson not only held slaves but sold them, as he realized that was the best source of income for his continued profligate personal spending habit.Slavery and its terrible crimes are a blot on him forever. Still, can that evil system define him? Jefferson;s words shone like a bright guiding star for this country, and I wish to note some on his birthday.

Lincoln’s political creed was based, in part of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, especially, all men are created equal. In speeches he referred to the Declaration often, and its words are the core notion in the celebrated Gettysburg Address. In the last debate here in Alton, Lincoln noted that African-Americans had to be included in the Declaration or else they could not strive to be treated as human beings. In a letter he wrote: “All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln, a consummate stylist, knew a fellow politician who could write well. Listen to the last letter Jefferson wrote when he could not attend a fiftieth celebration of the Declaration of Independence: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.”  

I do note above, his slam against “monkish ignorance.” Jefferson was no orthodox Christian, and he tended to equate suppression of inquiry with the censorious hand of religion. He was an apostle of secular hope. Human beings, if left free of obstacles, would progress.In his old age, he founded the University of Virginia. his personal library became the base for the Library of Congress. the old revolutionary  lived on aspiration  and the dream of a better life for our country. As he told John Adams in that remarkable series of letters in their old age, that: “Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. ... What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on,”

Sermon Notes on Frogiveness 4/12-I John 1, John 20:19-23

April 12 John 20:19-23, I John 1,2

Worship helps us to experience resurrection. For many of us,worship is dutiful, something we slog through. We may mistake bells and whistles and high energy as an Easter experience. when I do a service in an assisted living facility, I find myself calling the declaration of forgiveness the most critical part of the service.In going over some movies for a collection of essays on faith and film, I selected the Railway Man as it is a journey into forigvienss. We use the word a lot in church, but we do not seem to have been successful with demonstrating a process of forgiveness.

Living in the Easter experience is the gospel of the second chance, of forgiveness.OK, it is a gift of the spirit but can we take some steps to clear the way? First, we do well to recall that we hurt others, just as we have been hurt. Usually, we hear of forgiveness in terms of us extending it to others. We do well to decide not to retaliate. I think is to pray for the well-being of the one we hurt or the one who hurt us. Even more so good relationships undergird all the readings-Volf-.“If on the bottom line of our lives lies the principle that we should get what we deserve, whether good or ill, forgiveness will sit uncomfortably with us. To forgive is to give people more than their due, it’s to release them from the debt they have incurred, and that’s bound to mess up the books.” (p. 203)

Why do we refuse the God-given bridge that would transport us from selfishness to self-giving, from vengeance to forgiveness? (224) William Willimon calls it “Preemptive Forgiveness.” God’s forgiveness precedes repentance. God’s forgiveness is the first word in the Divine-human conversation. “It’s as if,” Willimon says, “when the Father began creating the world, the first word was not, ‘Let there be light,’ but rather, ‘Let there be forgiveness’” (p. 6).

”Ambivalent, tentative, and hesitant attempts are not yet full-fledged forgiveness, but they are a start. If she doesn’t trample underfoot the tender plant of forgiveness that seeks to break through the crust of vengeance with which she has protected herself, if she waters that plant with the living water of God’s goodness, one day it may grow sturdy enough to bear fruit.” (p. 207)-when we are forgivers we are restored to our full human splendor. We were created to mirror God. .” (p. 209)-Do you want to become a forgiving person? Seek the company of forgiven forgivers!” (p. 214) That is an issue when we tell ourselves that god has a pretty good deal with us when it comes to the Declaration of Pardon, of forgiveness, of Reconciliation that we have every week. In an age where we call sin mistake or a bad choice, we lose both its power and the full wallop of forgiveness.

Bishop Tutu fought the South African system of segregation for years. He then led a truth and reconciliation program to help bind the nation’s wounds through forgiveness. -When I no longer hold his offenses against him, and can also forgive myself, those memories of him no longer exert any control over my moods or my disposition. His violence and my inability to protect my mother no longer define me. I am not the small boy cowering in fear of his drunken rage. I have a new and different story. Forgiveness has liberated both of us. We are free. In the movie Railway Man and in the beautiful closing to Unbroken, two men find their broken humanity in discovering a capacity to forgive. They live in Easter light.

Week of April 12 quotes

Sunday-Ps.133 is a great short blessing. Prayers need not be long. Some of our most heartfelt prayers are short. Please consider writing a similar prayer in your own words. Monday- Isaiah 42:1-9. I need to pay attention to sources.Thankfully this great announcement in the book of Isaiah is up front with its source: "Who says?" God says! God, the Lord, the Creator, the Heaven-Stretcher, the Earth-Spreader—not just some smooth-talking schmo, but the one with demonstrated prowess in showing compassion, credible power to not grow faint and the verified practice of bringing justice—a reliable source, that's who.Trey Daum Tuesday-We don't have to be anxious that the larger our understanding grows, the smaller God will become. God is not a delicate fabric we must keep out of the hot water of human inquiry. God is strong enough and durable enough never to be threatened by the increase of our knowledge and the expansiveness of our curiosity.. The expansion of human wisdom leads to deeper awe of God not to lessened faith.Michael Jinkins Wednesday-If you're not enjoying your life, you're missing one of the main reasons God created you. (Leonard Sweet) Thursday-"Eat. Drink. Remember who I am.Eat. Drink. Remember who I am So you can remember who you are.Eat. Drink. Remember who I am So you can remember who you are And tell the theirs.Eat. Drink. Remember who I am So you can remember who you are And tell the others so that All God's people can live in communion… Holy Communion." ( by Ann Weems from "Kneeling in Jerusalem") Friday-Anne Lamott retells a classic Hasidic story that has stuck in my mind. It is about a rabbi who always told his people "that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts." One of the rabbi's people asked him, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?"  He answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside."1Lamott's comments remind me of Leonard Cohen's wise observation that the light gets into our lives through the cracks in them. Saturday-The call of Easter is this simple invitation: to step forth across the threshold, to release all you thought you know, to hold your palms open, to say yes to what comes.Do not hold too tightly to what you think the outcome should be. Let yourself be surprised. Release your expectations and be turned inside out. It is in the places of profound unknowing that we let ourselves enter into Mystery. The resurrected life is at heart a great and mysterious process. It is not something we can understand on logical terms, it is only something we can live into and experience.

April 5 Week devotional points

Sunday-Ps 118 shows how the Easter experience changes a reading of Scripture. It moves from protection and healing to an open door to the new life of Easter. Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and descended to the abode of the dead. He did not stay there but God raised Jesus. We are included in that great promise. Death will not hold us either.

Monday-It is time to stop/ tinkering with borrowed dreams/that you wear like an/ill-fitting dress—stiff-collared, pleated skirt,/your arms limited/by taffeta sleeves.From Abbey for the Arts

Tuesday-Time is the measure of things that come to an end, but where time itself ends, eternity begins . . . . In the end, there is no end. The ends of time are near the roots of eternity, and the ends of the Earth touch on the other world or the world behind the world.--Michael Meade

Wednesday-"What was personified in the body of Jesus was a manifestation of this one universal truth: Matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew." —Richard Rohr

Thursday-We are always already found by God. How could we ever be lost to the omniscient and omnipresent God of unalterable and unconditional love? Miroslav Volf

Friday-William Countryman writes that this border country is one we all carry within us. There is a fault line running down the middle of our lives that connects our ordinary reality with its deeper roots. The border country, he argues, is what gives our lives meaning:This border country is a place of intense vitality. It does not so much draw us away from the everyday world as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is like the surface . . . To live there for a while is like having the veils pulled away.

Saturday-Ideally, a human life should be a constant pilgrimage of discovery.  The most exciting discoveries happen at the frontiers.  When you come to know something new, you come closer to yourself and to the world.  Discovery enlarges and refines your sensibility.  When you discover something, you transfigure some of the forsakenness of the world.—John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes:

Easter sermon notes Mark 16:1-8

Easter 2015 Mark 16:1-8

Mark’s gospel is like a lot of my sermons, as it stops more than ends. Put differently,  it is open-ended in the extreme as it would go in English as they were afraid, for…It moves out into an indefinite future. What was it like for those first few hours after the tomb had been found empty?  

This story of new life and light happens in the dark, so it may well want the future to be difficult to see, to remain hazy. Women come to honor death but find themselves to be given the message of new life, but they are astonished, frozen in surprise. I tend to think that this is a better literary device than we used to think.Mark is drawing us directly into the resurrection story, and it is an open question about our fear and our capacity to tell this remarkable event. The women are like us.  Jesus not not appear to them at all, as the empty tomb and a  message is all they are given.It must have been a period of alarming uncertainty, half hope, half terror; which of us would really rejoice at that would make us rethink most of what we had taken for granted?

The silence of the women invites curiosity. It invites speech to try to give closure to the open-ended indeterminate ending of Mark’s gospel.Easter is a funeral for Death itself. Silent awe is perhaps a better response than all the shouted alleluias. Maybe better still, we are tasked with providing words and music for Easter in our reception of new life.

Empty tomb empties  the dead hold of the past..Here and now, God holds on to the lives of all the departed - including the lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression R Williams)  All have worth in his sight. We do not need to freeze at the empty tomb any more than we remain transfixed by the cross alone. Easter makes us all people of the dawn,of a new morning.He is not here. he is not in the place of death, the grave. His lifeless body is no longer to be found. he is out and about, cut loose from this mortal limitation into a new dimension of life.

Some may sing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” on Easter. Perhaps.”In  a recording, a Viennese group, instead of giving a thundering, triumphant, cymbal-crashing rendition, offers a modest, tentative version. When the chorus sings “The glory of the Lord is upon thee,” the word thee is hardly sounded, as if the human creature can scarcely bear the weight of God’s glory.,and in  the grand “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hesitant style conveys the truth that human beings can only dimly see and longingly hope that God is even now wresting victory from suffering, chaos and captivity; a critic writes they go  back to a pianissimo of heartbreaking faith. . . . Something here aches, longs, needs.” Mark would approve. Go back to Galilee and read again. There you will see him, the risen but still hidden Christ, his saving hand extended to all human aching, longing and need.(Thomas Long)

Death does not get the last word;. Life does. the final chapter is not written in a life when death occurs. God seems to open doors much more readily than decisively closing them.R.Williams Perhaps part of the message of Easter is very simply, Be ready to be surprised; try clearing out some of the anxiety and vanity and resentment so as to allow the possibility of a new world to find room in you.Only god can make the tomb a womb of new life. Only God can make life out of death.easter 2015 sermon notes Mark 16:1-8

Sermon Notes for Wednesday of Holy Week Mt. 23:37

We cannot  be certain about the chronology of Holy Week. some call Wednesday, the day before Holy thursday, silent Wednesday or Spy Wednesday, where the final plans were laid to arrest Jesus.. Tomorrow we may receive Communion, first inaugurated when jesus was facing his death as surely as the Passover lambs just consumed.Jesus would see two more sunrises  on this day almost 2000 years ago. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus laments over Jerusalem as part of a long set of teaching in the Temple area in the last days of his life. (apocalyptic images) In some ways, it was a Wednesday, maybe a typical day for the rabbi jesus.

I love this image of Jesus fussing over us like a mother hen. Jesus would die with real regrets. It also shows that Jesus died with regrets, just like we do.Jesus imagines what it would be like for Jerusalem to flick to him, but they do not.

In the Middle Ages, a spiritual practice was to rehearse facing death. How would we spend time if we knew death would be approaching? What could be a fitting prelude to the days that lie before, Holy Thursday, good Friday,Holy saturday? did Jesus’s soul feel like we do when we sense that tornado weather is present in the juiced weather? How do we face the terrors of death, given the promise of Easter? I wonder if he was trying to soak up every bit of experience that Wednesday, or maybe that is how Jesus lived all of the time? Was he struggling to find the words to say goodbye, even to his own life?

After the triumph of Palm Sunday, it could have been a fairly ordinary day for Jesus.Most of our lives lie between the twin towers of Palm sunday spectacle and Good Friday suffering.

Shelter of the wings is a maternal image and made explicit here, see Ps. 17 It is a sweet image, as the mother hen warms the chicks and hides them and chases away some of the other birds, but is quite ineffectual against dangerous predators.  Jesus would be dead on the Sabbath of his people, did he take a Sabbath day as death approached? Did he consider those he had raised from the dead? Did he think about how his disciples would try to manage without him?

Instead very soon Jesus will cry out in abandonment in quoting Ps. 22 my God, my God why have you forsaken me. L A prayer of lament was one of the last words on the lips of jesus. God is open to our communication, including our deepest cries. Praise is not the only music in our lives, or in church.the blues fit most of life better.Jerusalem, Jerusalem.Could that lament be heard in heaven now at the way we conduct our lives? does jesus regret the cross at what we have done with his name?

this is another Wednesday in Holy Week.God sanctifies every single day in our lives.God is with us in the palm sunday peak days and the Holy week sufferings and all the Wednesdays in between.for that matter, I suppose we can see every moment oscillating between triumph and tragedy, every moment tied to the past and expectant of the future.Still, I would ask that we spend some time in prayer and if possible church observance these special days before Easter.We fritter away or ur precious forty days of lenten preparation in a haze of living life as usual. Now for the rest of the week, let us dive into the deep end of the pool and experience the capacious boundless love of God.