Gen 17 for second Sunday of Lent 2012

1) We move to a far different covenant, with Abraham and his progeny. It is explicitly everlastng.
2) Circumcision takes seriously the old phrase in Hebrew, to cut a covenant. If ypou are interested in the old divisions, this looks to be P, Priestly material.
3) OK, this is material just ripe for jokes. The eminent CRE Mick Saunders (in his case it means committed rousing emperor) reminded me of an old, old, old, joke. Priest, Baptist pastor, and a rabbi make a bet to convert a bear. They all ended up in the hospital. The priest spoke to the bear about the catechism and got attacked. finally, he sprinkled holy water on the beast and it calmed. The bear is now going to confirmation class. The Baptist preached the Bible and the bear swung at the bible. They wrestled up and down hills in the forest until they toppled into a river, and the pastor immersed the beast , and he calmed.The bear is now a deacon. The rabbi looked up and sighed. I guess I shouldn’t have started with circumcision.

Circumcision is also used to refer to someone’s heart not being committed to God as in uncircumcised heart. Col.2 uses it as a gateway into baptism. Jesus himself was circumcised. Originally, it may have been a rite of passage at puberty.
4) Circumcision was practiced in ancient Egypt, and it was performed by other Semitic peoples.
5) We are connected to the promise of progeny extended to old age.
6) Abraham means father of many. Abram means the father is exalted. Sarah means princess or female leader.
7) El Shaddai’s meaning here is uncertain, God of mountain, perhaps related to breasts to emphasize sustenance,
8) Janzen (Abraham and the Families)m 50-1) speculates on circumcision as somehow symbolic of social organization and male power.
9) At any rate, circumcision is a sign of being in a community. it is an identity marker v. the “uncircumcised.”
10) God loves working from the small, as well as the large scale. here form this couple will come a multitude, even thought they are far past childbearing age. for a new novel on this topic see Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

Sermon Feb. 26, 2012 first sunday Lent Gen. 9:8-17, I Peter 3:18-22

February 26,2012
Our other readings take us away from what we would normally consider to start the season of Lent as a struggle against temptation and the building of spiritual resources. Lent is a new season of the church year, and we can use that as a prism with the readings.

In older English, Lent comes from the words for spring, as it precedes the spring festival of Easter. What would Noah’s rainbow have to do with Lent? This year it appears that we are marking signposts of God’s deep and abiding partnership with the people, what Presbyterians usually call a covenant, a sacred bond or pledge, so we are moving to the climax of those relationships in the cross and resurrection. The readings lead us to consider ways to renew our covenant commitments, a spiritual renewing of the vows. The rainbow was a symbol of power in ancient times, a divine bow. Noah’s flood was a story of God going back to the drawing board in a sense, sweeping off the old ways in this primeval history. Our passage drastically changes it into a symbol of peace. In other cultures, it is the bridge between heaven and earth, more of a barrier than a bridge. here it is a sign of union between heaven and earth. Ezekiel and Isaiah both pick this up as a covenant of peace with God and all of creation.The rainbow is a sign for God as well as creation.God realizes that human heart is prone to evil, but God swears against destruction as a weapon against human evil in any event. God will work with us as the divine bow is put away. God will remain faithful, in solemn peaceful covenant with us, but destruction is off the table.

Our reading from I Peter places us in mythic territory that is touched on in the Apostles’ Creed. The spirits in prison seem to be those who perished in the time of Noah, but I am not sure who they are. It reminds me a bit of Greek stories of facing the abode of the dead whether it is Heracles or Orpheus. Allied with other biblical quotes, this passage influences the declaration in the Creed that Jesus descended into hell. The Reformers saw this descent as starting at Gethsemane, of the process of being forsaken or at least distanced form god on the road to crucifixion. Even death does not separate us from the love of Christ.

Baptismal founts are sometimes shaped as little arks as a link to our passages this morning.We remember the waters of the flood in our baptismal prayers. they often have eight sides as a result of this passage reminding us how small a remnant was saved in the story of Noah. In our tradition we link baptism to the sign of the covenant in circumcision, an eighth day practice. Also, it links to Easter, the so called eight day, the new creation where the tomb could become a womb for new life. In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge will take on to Asgard, the abode of the gods. As a kid, we would make rainbows in the light spectrum when we were washing the car. Maybe we should paint a rainbow , now a symbol of diversity, on baptismal fonts as a sign of the inclusive nature of the church. (here add material on spiritual practices?)

The rainbow is a reminder for God to a commitment to human life and all life. The bow, a weapon, now can be seen as a shield of protection. It is a sign of divine forbearance and protection. Even with all of our flaws, God is sticking with us and our cause.

devotions week of Feb.25

Feb.25 Sunday-Ps. 25 mentions the paths of God a good bit. By v. 10 we read that the paths a of the Lord are the characteristics of Ex. 34:6, steadfast love (or loyalty or loving-kindness) As I read it the paths of God are not set out for us brick by brick. we can recognize detours or ramps that are entrance or exists to the ways of life or the ways of sin. More to the point we can use the characteristics of God as tests about the quality of our path.

Monday- It just hit me that we can use the phrase, soul searching, as a Lenten phrase. When we usually say it, we mean deep reflection for a decision. In Lent, we could take it to mean real sustained spiritual reflection. For some reason my mind switched to a picture of a pearl diver going down deep, for a long time, to discover a precious pearl. lent gives us time to do that diving. We have many tools to go soul searching, to peer within our deepest self. We are fearful that we may not like what we will find, buried under repression. With God’s grace we will also glimpse our own true best self.

Tuesday-A fundamental spiritual practice is learning to say yes and no. Maybe a fancier way to put it would be to develop our sense of boundaries. What was the hardest, most demanding yes, you have uttered? What was a difficult no for you to utter? What are easy places for you to keep a boundary firm? when are they too permeable, or too rigid?

Wednesday-We have an extra day today for leap year. When we are in crisis, when we mourn a loss, we may well say, if only I had more time, if only I had one more day. OK, here it is. We get this gift but every four years and today is it. Please carve out some spirutal time for this day. Consider using this precious extra day to do something you have been putting off. Perhaps you can check off one item on your bucket list.

Thursday-yesterday I preached on a hymn. I selected In the Cross of Christ I Glory. In part some of the phrasing attracts me: “wrecks of time…head sublime…..sun of bliss…bane and blessing. Let me quote v. 2 in full (#84 in blue hymnbook) when the woes of life o’ertake me/hopes deceive and fears annoy/never shall the cross forsake me/lo, it glows with peace and joy.” When have hopes deceived you? What fears continue to annoy? In Christ, you need not fear. in Christ, your best hopes shall be realized.

Friday-My calendar calls today the World Day of Prayer. It is an outgrowth of the work of women. Malaysia is a focal point this year, and the theme is “let justice prevail.” I went to our BCW and found this international prayer (797) from Zaire “we bring before you the absurd violence….that breaks the courage of people…human greed and injustice which breed hatred and strife. Send your spirit to renew the face of the earth; teach us to be compassionate to the whole human family.”

Saturday-Economics comes from the Greek word for household management. Some people find it helpful to get a handle on their household management by making a group to go over their decisions in three area, essentials, non-essentials, and in-between/uncertain. Read through your recent spending in light of Lk. 12:22-34. Did you learn something about your relative priorities?

Column for Feb.24

We may have recovered from Mardi Gras by now; the ashes are washed off foreheads ( in my case one need a paint brush to cover it), so we are fully into the season of Lent. I was raised Roman Catholic, so I associate the season with “giving something up for Lent.” One of the few joys of facebook is that it reconnects us with people from our past. I was reminded by a grade school friend how we had a difficult debate if BBQ potato chips could be eaten on Friday since the name implied meat.

The name, Lent, comes from the season itself. The word is drawn from spring in Old English, as it moves toward Easter. It may be related to a German word, to lengthen, to see precious daylight making longer days after the solstice. In a bow to my baby boom generation, allergic as it is to any word remotely concerned with sacrifice, permit me to suggest that we use that natural image to approach the spiritual season from a different angle.

Think of this time as preparing and planting in your spiritual garden. Just as this is the time to start getting a garden ready for planting, look at this as a time of preparation. Look at yourself and start selecting from a spiritual seed catalog those blossoms that you would like to see in your life. (I may need to do a spiritual inventory to find out why I consistently mistype the word, spiritual).

Next, I walk a bit of a tightrope. The usual message from the church is that we need to keep do more, more across the board to help the vast array of crying need we encounter. It may be a response, again, to baby boomers, as one of the generation’s signal desires is that they are not to be ever told they could be wrong, and heaven forfend if we use the word sin to describe an attitude or action,. To be fair, the latter means that it should never be used toward them, but it is fine to use it toward others, with whom they may disagree on important preferences such as clothing or musical styles. I would suggest that we consider during the Lenten season to do more of a good thing we already do, just by a little, perhaps. Consider strengthening an existing virtue and be grateful for its presence in life. If you have the gift of patience, note it and be pleased that you can apply it in a variety of situations. I just got off the phone with someone who degraded a gift they have. In Lent, we can appreciate a virtue and be grateful for its presence in our lives.

Finally, I will cheat a bit a refer to our Ash Wednesday sermon here at first Presbyterian. Yes, the ashes remind us of our mortality. that does not mean a morbid preoccupation with death. It is a mark of humility. It reminds us of our common human nature, frail as it is. it reminds us that we are mortal, therefore vulnerable to all sorts of assaults. To be humble is to learn to accept human limitations. Humility is not being humiliated or to humble others. Years ago, the great theologian Paul Tillich preached a sermon, You Are Accepted. Tillich translated the word justification into a more familiar one, acceptance. Humility is born from realizing that we are accepted by God. With all of our faults, we are good enough to be in relationship with God, to receive the love of god. In that light, it is time to give up the notion that we do not measure up to some abstract standard and accept ourselves. that could grow into the greatest Lenten gift.

Ash Wednesday Sermon Joel 2, 2 Cor. 6

All living beings share that condition. In the second creation account we are told that we are from and of the earth, of the soil, of farmland. Ash Wednesday marks us as grounded in the soil. Often, the human response is to claim that we are the crown of creation- that we should be above it all. The other response is what I urge on us today: the virtue of humility.

Then very word comes from the soil, the humus. Humility is a virtue that grounds us for who we are: human beings. Let’s be clear. I am not speaking of Ash Wednesday as a day of self-abasement, of being humiliated or humiliating ourselves. We are still made in the image and likeness of God, and nothing or no one can change that signal religious fact.

Joel reminds us of proper humility in our worship. Of course we need a pattern to follow, but human beings have a way of displacing the goal and mistaking the means toward the end as the most important thing. Tearing a garment was a sign of grief, and it was a sign of repentance, of contrition for the wrongs we do and the good we fail to do. The point is that worship frames our spiritual experience. The rending of garments is a sign of a heart, a life torn apart by sin.

Part of the inner deal with make in faith is a hidden contract with God. If I am good, I should be immune from trouble. I should be above it all. No lonesome valleys for me, I deserve only mountaintop experiences. Paul disabuses us of that quickly with his listing of the troubles we face. If Jesus would face temptation and trouble, where would we get the diea that we should be shielded from it all? This continues to follow from his basic metaphor in this section, that we have treasures in frail vessels, clay jars, and earthenware vases.

We have limitations. Ash Wednesday starts us off in a period of the church season where we work on and through our imperfections. If we were perfect we would have no need of deliverance from the things that assail us, no need for salvation. I am working a a Bible study on the injunction to judge not. A local professor, Terry Cooper has written on being judgmental. he makes the case that our judgmental attitudes may appear to be full of pride, of a supercilious air. he wonders if they are all a cover for a deep seated sense of being unworthy, of not being good enough, of not ever measuring up to some internal ideal that we can never achieve. Humility, an acceptance of limitations, of our own imperfections and misunderstandings, frees us. We don’t have to be right all of the time; we don’t have to prove ourselves to be the superior one; we lose the need to put other people down, to humiliate others in a desperate bid to prop up our fragile sense of self, always in comparison with someone else.

Martin Luther was an earthy guy. he was also afraid of death, and afraid of god. When he started to see god’s justice as leaning toward mercy, and instead saw God’s movement toward us as justifying, centering us from our extremes, he found solace. Paul Tillich, centuries later, saw the word lose its potency, in its stead, he replaced the word, justify, with the word acceptance. God accepts us, welcomes us, draws us into one big family.
If we are good enough in the eyes of God, earthy, earthly, creatures whome we are, then we can be good enough for each other.

OT notes first sunday in lent Gen. 9:8-17

1) First, please consider if you find this an odd reading with which to start Lent. we used this for Illinois side pastors as an exercise in a preaching roundtable at a recent lunch. I will try to remember to cite individual contributions and apologize if I missed a contribution. Preaching Master Janet Riley observed that Lent’s end marks a “new covenant in Communion, so it is fully appropriate to notice this covenant to start what may be a series of them in the OT readings.
covenant comes in variety, but it is surely a pledge of loyalty.

2) Lent means spring, perhaps that will help one enter into the story.

3) Rainbows occupy different meanings in myth. The Norse saw it as the bridge to Asgard. We all know the story of the pot of gold at the end of it. Here it could be a buttress for the great chaotic expanse of water in what we would call outer space. It also seems to have a sense of the cosmic bow and arrow. In light of Baal, or Zeus, or Thor, maybe lightning was the arrow (Ps. 7) . Here its stands for an empty bow of peace. It may pick up the image of a broken bow of peace in the Psalms. Noted exegete Mark Strothmann noted that a rainbow is in part an optical issue of limitation. From the air, it takes on a look of a circle.

4) Julie Gvillo Wood River CRE told us about her participation at the CE conference in Grand Rapids. She recalled the story of Rabbi Sandy Sasso on how we engage Scripture through midrash, through stories to fill in holes or questions from the text. We told her story of Naamah, Noah’s wife, who was assigned the task of getting plants while Noah herded the animals.

5) Paul Frazier and Don Stribling pushed us on the story showing a change in God by making covenant in full knowledge of our human weakness. Don reminded us that when God relents it goes toward mercy, not punishment being increased or being arbitrary. jnaet Riley then reminded us tha twe must be careful to explore all dimensions of god’s persoanlity and character in Scripture. thsi was seconded by Pam Laing’s going to the Exodus definition of god’s character that she saw as stable but responding to creation.

6) Toward the end, we asserted the ecological import of the story as the covenant is made with all flesh, all living creatures, not humans alone. (See Fretheim’s God in Creation). Paul noted the anti creation aspects of the flood story and Genesis 1. Janet noted that the flood story had more echoes of the Tiamat conflict account than the orderly progression of Genesis 1 as a counter to that initial story of primal violence. Please note how broad this protective element toward creation is here.

7) It was noted that we pick up flood imagery in the baptismal vows and made some linkages then to the read from I Peter 318-22. So one could pick up different sorts of water imagery from the rainbow and water itself. Don noted that we see a rainbow only from a certain perspective.

8) We discussed the issue of remembering in light of the rainbow as a sign to God as well as humanity. In Hebrew parlance, to remember is to bring the past into the present. For the eternal One, we have a difficult time trying to imagine a being in whom time flows together.

Column for Washington's birthday

Presidents’ Day combines, I suppose, the Washington and Lincoln birthdays, and perhaps all presidents. Those of us of a certain age recall that the 22nd is Washington’s birthday.

First, I admire Washington because he followed a lifelong plan and pattern of self-definition. He was plagued with temper all of his life, but made a youthful determination to control it. He wanted to look the part of a gentleman and assiduously worked to create the impression of being a gentleman by following a code of manners that he copied by hand.

Almost alone among the founders of the South, he freed his slaves upon his death. That was not an easy task, as Virginia law made it difficult to do so. In An Imperfect God, we can read of his care in going over the will with painstaking care to assure that his wishes would be followed. So many of those who were so loud in demanding American liberty never could see fit to grant liberty to the enslaved.

He knew the value of example and precedent. As the first chief executive for the country, he get that value uppermost in his mind. When a Revolutionary War hero approached him for a position, he replied: “as a friend I would offer up my life for you, but as president, I am unable to offer you a position.” So, he acted with a sense of posterity in view, not only the immediate political situation of the moment. Look at an administration that would have Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the same cabinet. When they disagreed, Washington asked them to prepare careful reasoned analyses of the their views before he made a decision.

He was able to relinquish power. That included using religion as a basis for policy decisions. In a letter to a synagogue in Rhode Island “all alike share in liberty of conscience…no longer is toleration spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people…the government gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Article 11 of a treaty with Tripoli negotiated under his administration noted that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. At the same time, he saw religion as bolstering the public spirited morality that a democratic republic requires.

Cincinnatus was a much admired story of someone returning to the plow after having power in Rome. At the time, everyone thought that power, once grasped, was not easily released. Even George III marveled that he left the military to return to Mt. Vernon and that he left office after his second term. In part, that was designed to allay fear of monarchical tendencies in the office, part of his sense of setting precedent. When he died, Admiral Nelson ordered a salute and Napoleon ordered a moment of silence.

In that same letter to the synagogue in Rhode Island he ended with these words: “may the father of mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths.” Washington used common language to promote common ground. He had the humility to realize that he would make mistakes, as would the nation he led. He knew that the light would shine more brightly on this country when we find common ground. He saw what parochial loyalties did to the emergence of a functioning nation spread over so much territory. He himself became a symbol of that very national common ground and common purpose. He deserves to be on the money, deserves to have a monument, deserves the great honor of being called: “father of his country, first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”