Sermon for July 17, 2016

UCC Beliefs: God Is Still Speaking

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. 2 Timothy 3:16 (NLT)

Do you ever wonder if God still speaks to people? I once had a friend who heard the voice of God. His name was Willie. Willie always made me a little nervous because the things God told him were not very pleasant. God told Willie a lot about judgment and death, plagues, and deadly diseases. No, Willie’s God was not a happy God, and Willie let us know it. For the most part, the messages he shared made me nervous for selfish reasons. I was afraid God was going to tell Willie some secret detail of my past, and I didn’t want to be around if the voice of God was going to embarrass me, with Willie as God’s mouthpiece. Let’s just say I haven’t always been the angel I am today.

Now, when people say God spoke to them, I wonder if they just heard what they wanted to hear, or whether those voices and visions were the product of all that spicy food the night before. We walk a fine line when trying to figure out whether God speaks. If someone claims to hear the voice of God directly, we usually consider the person to be a fanatic or demented. The other side of the line is that we want to hear from God. In our age of competing spiritualities, we want to know that the God we worship is real and involved in our lives. We desire God to communicate a message of love directly to our hearts.

T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist trained in psychology had the same questions. She wondered: How is it that otherwise rational and logical people are convinced they hear from an invisible being—in the face of profound and vast evidence to the contrary? Luhrmann took her research into the field. She attended services and various small group meetings at a local charismatic church. She interviewed worshippers, sat through prayer vigils, watched people do bizarre things in attempts to communicate with God, and walked away with a profound sense of mystery and awe in people’s experience of the divine. About a third of the people she interviewed reported an unusual sensory experience they associated with God. While they found these experiences startling, they also found them deeply reassuring. After her experience, Luhrmann said she was impressed with the thoughtfulness with which people talked about hearing from God. They were acutely aware they might be wrong. In her research, there was a sense of discerning God's voice, which meant that people were not to take what could be hurtful to other people or to oneself as a word of God.

In the UCC, we have a slogan that sums up how we think about God’s willingness to communicate with us. We say, “God is still speaking,” Now, there’s a punctuation mark in our motto. God is still speaking {comma} … not {.} … not {!} … not {?} … but {,}. In grammar, a comma places a badly needed pause between parts of sentence.  It’s a moment of brief suspense, a quick rest to prepare for the next clause. In the UCC, that comma summarize how we listen for God’s action in the world.

Many of us were taught that God stopped speaking to us when the Bible was closed to any additions around 390 CE. We were taught God placed a firm period on any new revelation. Everything we need to know about God’s will is found in the Bible. Period. In the UCC, we say, “Everything we need to know about God’s will is found in the Bible, comma ... but there is still more light and truth to break forth from God’s word.” When we think that God only ends sentences with periods, we get ourselves into the old Christian habit of excluding people.  The continuing witness to Jesus Christ that we proclaim today is that the old prejudices that functioned to deny God’s grace for some people are false and sinful, even when they find some isolated, flimsy textual support in the Bible. We proclaim that love overcomes legalism every single time. God’s love is universal and unconditional.  All are welcome at God’s table regardless of gender, race, sexual identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, or any other feature of a person’s particular humanity. Once we shift how we punctuate our faith, we have hope and inclusion instead of an immovable boundary. Have there been times when you punctuated your faith with a period rather than a comma? I’m sure we are all guilty of that….many times guilty of that. The UCC believes we should never put a period where God has put a comma, because God is still speaking.

Here are three quick reasons why I think God still speaks to us today. First, God is not done with you yet. There's more good news to be heard in your life!

• No matter how old you are, God is not done with you yet
• No matter how insignificant you think your problems are, God cares about them and is working within you to work them out. God is not done with you yet.
• No matter what your limitations, there is a way for you to participate in fulfilling God’s aims for the world. God is not done with you yet.
•  No matter how uncertain you are about what comes next, God knows there is hope for your future. God is not done with you yet.
• On those days when you think you are a lost cause, even if you have given up on God, that’s when God does her best work. God is working in the waiting, in the silence, when it seems that nothing is happening. God is not done with you yet.

Second, God is not done with the church yet. There's more good news to be heard in our life together! There are no perfect churches and no perfect pastors. But God who is love, God who is good, is not done with us yet. God’s love is changing our lives and building us into a community of love and faith. It’s the example of Jesus that keeps us going. It’s the Spirit who stretches us and empowers us to be lovers of all, healers of hearts, channels of peace, seekers of truth, and laborers for justice. Each of us here – we are imperfect people who’ve experienced God’s love and chosen to follow God’s way through Jesus. We’ve seen God’s love and work in our own lives and in our church, and we can’t wait to see what she will do next. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin reminded us, “ … trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time.” In other words, be patient. Have hope. God is not done with us yet.

So, God is not done with you. God is not done with us. Lastly, here is an important, wonderful, confusing reason why God still speaks today. God is not even done with God yet. God has more good news for God’s self.

Some of our Christian ancestors handed us an untenable orthodoxy. They taught us that God is omniscient, omnipresent,  and omnipotent. In other words, God is all-knowing and all-powerful, everywhere, at all times. When we use words like almighty and omnipotent, we almost always connect that with controlling everything. We start confusing God’s power with the power of force rather than the power of love. At best, we experience god like an over-functioning parent who never leaves a child alone, but constantly hovers, over-protects, guides, and counsels. The intimacy of this omnipresent god is stifling, as this god plans every detail of our lives without our input. That’s the best scenario.

At worst, the all powerful, all knowing, every-present god we’ve been taught to fear is silent to tears of injustice and the venom of violence that poisons our world.  If god is all-powerful, then god sees injustice and chooses to ignore it. How could there be suffering if god really does care about us and has the power to make it better?  When I see someone I love suffering I want to make it better and will do what is in my power to help.  Why doesn’t god? I think the all-powerful god failed us. It’s time for us to abandon the adolescent belief that god gives good to the good and sends the plague upon the wicked.  An omnipotent deity is not capable of genuine relationships or love.  Loving relationships require mutual openness, shared vulnerability, and shared risk.  The god of unlimited power always asks us to yield our selves, but doesn’t seem to give much in return for our unwavering obedience.

The God I worship is a God of relationship –a God who shares power with us instead of using power to punish us. My God is present in all things, but God’s presence leaves room for growth, creativity, freedom.  In my experience God is that creative and transforming power in my life, ever new, ever leading me to put my faith and trust in the beckoning future.  And if our relationship is truly mutual, then God grows as I grow, as you grow, as we all grow into a more compassionate, peace-building humanity.

As people of the still-speaking God, we affirm the ways that God still moves through our world, even through us—opening new possibilities, bringing healing to places of violence and despair. With God we can transform the dominating culture of death into a life-sustaining community of grace and peace. God still leads us to places where hope, faith, forgiveness and justice have been abandoned.

In other words, God is not done with you yet. God is not done with us yet. God is not even done with God yet. We are, together as God and humanity, still listening, still growing, still changing, still speaking.



Sources:

• http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/deeper-walk/features/29394-does-god-really-talk-to-people#v7lTAfkQZwrlCqIB.99
• http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/29/my-take-if-you-hear-god-speak-audibly-you-usually-arent-crazy/
• http://liberatingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/11/continuing-testament.html
• PROCESS THEOLOGY AND LIVED OMNIPRESENCE: AN ESSAY IN PRACTICAL THEOLOGY by Bruce G. Epperly http://www.ctr4process.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/29_2%20Epperly.pdf
•  http://www.kuc.org/sermons/god-is-still-speaking-we-just-need-to-learn-gods-punctuation/
•  http://uubinghamton.org/2012/01/power-and-process-theology-2/

Sermon for July 10, 2016

Anti-Opression Values

“Today, we are the most frightening people on this planet.”

Those are the words of Arthur Schlesinger, the American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. He spoke them in 1968. Hundreds of urban riots had wracked the country, the war in Vietnam was grinding up lives. The country has witnessed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had just been murdered within two months of one another

Many people wondered about America and its character, about what kind of country – and people – we were. As New York Mayor John Lindsay said at the time, “This is a drifting, angry America that needs to find its way again.” His words, like Schlesinger’s, feel regrettably relevant to this era, almost 50 years down the line.

Columnist Leonard Pitts writes,

“There is a sickness afoot in our country, a disintegration of the soul, rottenness in the spirit. Consider our politics. Consider the way we talk about one another – and to one another. Consider those two dead black men. Consider those five massacred cops. Deny it if you can. I sure can’t. Something is wrong with us. And I don’t mind telling you that I fear for my country.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Maybe what I’m feeling isn’t fear. Maybe it’s more like despair – the feeling that hope has been divided and scattered into a million fragments.

I’m a pastor. I tend to see people and situations through a pastoral lens. Pastors teach and counsel. We plant and nurture. We mend the rifts and wipe the tears. We are the kind of people who see good in others. We listen, and we desire to see the people in our care grow and flourish. We are people who keep hope alive. Sometimes, that outlook can be skewed. It’s not a bad way to see the world. But it’s also not complete. I’m learning to balance my pastoral perspective with another perspective.
Sometimes I put on my oppression glasses and imagine the stories of both victims and oppressors. I try to understand people who are locked in patterns of being silencers, or racists, or abusers -- and those who are silenced and abused. I try to think about those who have internalized a sense of inferiority and those who have internalized a sense of racial superiority. How did they get there? With whom do I resonate and by whom am I repelled?  If it’s true that the Gospel of Christ brings liberation for all people, both the oppressed and the oppressor need consistent, strong and graceful work to find freedom. My faith surges, freeing me to see my connection to each and every story, each person, each quiet call for help or hope of healing.

So, I try to wear my pastoral lens and my anti-oppression lens together. When I do that, I can be even more effective in helping groups humanize, care for, and commit to learn from one another. These lenses help us to see Christ in each other and call us to be Christ for the other. I wonder what your lenses are? How do you see the world? What would happen if you pair your worldview with an anti-oppression outlook on life?

Of course, it’s not enough just to see the world anew. As part of my commitment to Christ, I commit to living anti-oppressive values in the communities I am a part of. It takes not just new lenses, but new patterns; a new set of ongoing, habitual reactions when I see oppression. You see, I know myself. I know when I’m faced with the news of the murder of Black men by police, and the murder of police by a sniper, I want to shut out the violence. When faced with the killing of 49 gay men in a bar in Orlando, or the gunman and hostage situation in Bangladesh, or the death of 200 innocent people in Iraq by a suicide bomber, or the bombs going off in the airport in Istanbul, I want to give in to the despair. That’s fear at work.

Fear does not get to define my values. If my behavior is not in line with my values, I need to do something different. I think giving in to fear can be a luxury – an indulgence – a privilege.
Living anti-oppression values means when we witness, experience, or commit an abuse of power or oppression, we address it as proactively, either one-on-one or with a few allies, keeping in mind that the goal is to encourage positive change.

Living anti-oppression values means challenge oppressive behaviors, not the people themselves.
Living anti-oppression values means when someone offers us criticism, we treat it as a gift rather than an attack. Give people the benefit of the doubt.

Living anti-oppression values means understanding that we will feel discomfort as we face our part in oppression. Be brave. It is a necessary part of the process. Being part of the problem doesn’t mean you can’t be an active part of the solution.

Living anti-oppression values means contributing time and energy to building healthy relationships, both personal and political, both one-on-one and in the community.

Living anti-oppression values means challenging ourselves to be courageously honest and open, willing to take risks and make ourselves vulnerable in order to address racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other repressive dynamics head-on.

I want to close by saying two more things. First, racism is processed in the brain as trauma. Race-based trauma literally leaves bruised spots on the brain.  So, when people of color are exposed to repetitive acts of racism a kind of post traumatic stress syndrome can develop. Race-based trauma can come in several forms: Witnessing ethno-violence or discrimination of another person, historical or personal memory of racism, institutional racism, micro aggressions, and the constant threat of racial discrimination.

Like and traumatic event, racism can be marked by an acute state of fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. If the trauma is not addressed, or is not diffused within a reasonable time frame, it can develop into post traumatic stress disorder. To our African American members and friends, please take good self-care during this time. Make sure to connect with people who are empathetic and supportive and process your feelings with them. And if you find yourself unable to cope, let’s find a trauma-competent therapist or group to help you out.

In times of trauma, we all can hold space for one another. Holding space means we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for people, we open our hearts, we offer unconditional support, and we let go of judgment and control.

Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom.
Don’t take their power away.
And keep your own ego out of it.

When people feel that they are held in a deeper way than they are used to, they can feel safe enough to allow complex emotions to surface that might normally remain hidden. Holding space means you allow others to make different decisions and to have different experiences than you would. Holding space is about respecting each person’s differences and recognizing that those differences may lead to them making choices that we would not make.

In all of this, I remember the words of the Apostle Paul: 

“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies Yes, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus, so that the life of Jesus will be evident in our dying bodies. So we live in the face of death, but this has resulted in eternal life for you” (2 Corinthians 4:8-12 NLT).   All is not lost. All is not hopeless. With resilience, hard word, hand-in-hand, and heart-to-heart, the sickness around us can be made whole.

Sources:
http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODN/BellinghamHerald/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=BHD%2F2016%2F07%2F09&entity=Ar00601&sk=B5325881
http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/anti-oppression/
http://justjasmineblog.com/self-care-for-people-of-color-after-emotional-and-psychological-trauma/
http://upliftconnect.com/hold-space/

Sermon for June 19, 2016

UCC Beliefs: Searching for God

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.
My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.
But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword, they shall be prey for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouths of liars will be stopped. ~ Psalm 63

It happens most days, lately. I drop my kids off at school and say a prayer. Please God, let them be safe today. When my older children started their school careers many years ago, I said different prayers. I prayed they would learn. I prayed they would be kind and receive kindness. I prayed they would grow. Now I drop my kids off, remind them to be safe, and as they walk through the doors I pray, “God, please keep guns out of our schools today.”

I thought it again on Friday, when a host of county police, including a K-9 unit and a helicopter, chased four men through the woods of our neighborhood after two car crashes on New Hampshire and Randolph Road. Drugs were involved. Two people were caught, two were still at large. All of this happened during drop off time at school. My first thought was, “Will the schools shelter in place?” That’s what I think of now -- Shelter in place. It’s a warning that violence is at hand. In a explosive world, Shelter in Place signifies the looming possibility of danger and the need for finding refuge from those who would willfully harm human life.

Please God, let them be safe today. I don’t even know if God has anything to do with keeping guns and criminals out of schools. I’m can get so worried for the safety of my children, I’m willing to ask. It’s what we do when we no longer feel safe.  We hear the cry to God:

O God, you are my God, I seek you.
O God, you are my God, I seek you, my flesh faints for you.

Like many of you, I've been scanning social media and catching the latest news, trying to make sense of the massacre in Orlando. The familiar mix of emotions that I've felt during previous massacres comes back to me: anger, sadness, fear, and discouragement. I want to fix the problems and run away from them all at the same time. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, like many gay bars, was supposed to be safe space. Owner Barbara Poma opened Pulse nightclub with a mission: to honor her brother who died of HIV/AIDS and to create a safe space for Orlando's gay community. That image of safety is now shattered.

This week, we also marked the one-year anniversary of the shootings of church members and their beloved minister during a Bible study at a venerable church in Charleston, SC. Emmanuel AME Church, like all of our houses of worship, was supposed to be safe space.  Our community havens no longer feel safe. Public schools, college campuses, neighborhood gathering spots like movie theaters, churches, military bases -- they have all been desecrated by violence. That image of safety is now injured. We hear the cry to God:

O God, you are my God, I seek you. my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Life can certainly feel like we are living in a dry and weary land with no water. It can surely feel like we are thirsty for some love and compassion in the deserts of violence; parched for even the possibility of peace. In these cruel times, there are dry deserts that have yet to see flowing waters of righteousness.

The difficult things in life are hard to endure. They can press on the chest like an asthma attack and you can’t find space to breathe. In the midst of them it can feel like you are running through a rain-parched, dusty land, kicking up dust as you look for an oasis of plenty.

For sure, events like the killings in Orlando shake us out of our oasis of plenty – those places where we try to hide and ignore the thirsty cries of the desiccated world around us. Like I said, I get it. I want to hide, too. The issues we know of seem so vast at times, so complicated, so impossible to solve, no matter how many of us seem willing to confront society’s problems.  We encounter systems that we don’t know how to change. We think of issues like domestic abuse, mental health issues, and gun violence. We think of political finance reform and pay-day lending. We think of the pernicious racism, classism, and anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation that still divides our country and is endorsed by leaders from ministers to political candidates. And we don’t know. We don’t know what to do or how to fix it. Are we going to learn to embrace our differences and passions to stare down those evils in our community that make us squirm, run away, or cause fear? Can we learn to hold onto the tension and anxiety of encountering these things together. Can we pray together? Can we act as one?

O God, my soul thirsts for you, for your overflowing love, for the kingdom you promised where every tear will be wiped away, and where our soul’s are slaked in the flowing river that makes glad the city of God. 

I’m thankful the psalmist put our feelings down in poetry. The writer of Psalm 63 knows the dangers of this world. It’s a plea for God to show up and hold us strongly when we wander the driest deserts and we’ve all but given up hope.  Poets have a way of speaking truth in compact and unrestrained ways. This is how poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s deals with our hungry, thirsty, unkind world:

Oh say, poet, what you do?
I praise.
But what about the deadly and monstrous?
How do you keep going, how do you take it all in?
I praise.

Psalm 63 puts it this way:

O God, you are my God.  My lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live.

Here is one thing we affirm today. In the United Church of Christ, we are seekers. We really believe it. We believe that each person is unique and valuable. We want every person to belong to a family of faith where they have a strong sense of being valued and loved.

We believe that each person is on a spiritual journey and that each of us is at a different stage of that journey. Here is the key. We are not individual seekers. We’re not just coming together to have our individual spiritual needs met. We are seekers in community. Each of us is unique and on a spiritual journey, but we journey together. We need each other. To go it alone puts us at risk.

After an event like the violence in Orlando, that's what we have to offer at CCC. We create sacred space where everyone belongs, where all are welcome, where we honor and celebrate people of all races, cultures, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, and gender identities. We offer sacred space where anyone can attend -- with our pains and joys, with our fears and hopes, with our experiences of rejection and our longings for wholeness -- and know that we are embraced by empathy and understanding.

O God, you are my God. I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

I really believe that we inherited a universal instinct to create protected, sacred spaces in which we can heal, reorganize and regenerate the aching fragments around us.

In 1948, The General Assembly of the World Council of Churches developed the idea of “responsible society” as the ultimate goal of Christian action. The assembly wrote:

A responsible society is one where freedom is the freedom of [persons] to acknowledge responsibilities to justice and public order and where those who hold political authority as economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it … For a society to be responsible under modern conditions, it is required that the people have freedom to control, to criticize, and to change their governments, that power be made responsible by law and tradition, and be distributed as widely as possible through the whole community.

That’s what we practice here. Call it responsible society, call it sacred space, call it holy ground, call it democracy, call it community. We become a place where all can practice justice in the ways we share leadership, resources, and common life. We realize that in God, the many are one, each contributing to the others and receiving from others in the unity of God. The fragmentation of each of us seeking God in isolation from the others is opposite to the kingdom. It is not enough to confine oneself to one’s own task: one must contribute to others and receive from others throughout the breadth of the work.

We are creating a Sacred Shelter in Place. With all of our variety, no matter how we got here, no matter who we are, no matter what we believe (or don’t), we belong to one another. We protect one another. We cherish one another. We find ways to help each pother grow and thrive. We commit to the well-being of the other. We work for peace together. In dry and weary times, we sustain each other. That’s relationship. That’s compassion. That’s sacred. That’s God.

A Pastoral Letter on the Killings in Orlando

 

Safe Spaces or Sacred Spaces?

Like many of you, I've been scanning social media and catching the latest news, trying to make sense of the terrorism attack in Orlando. The familiar mix of emotions that I've felt during previous massacres comes back to me: anger, sadness, fear, and discouragement. I want to fix the problems and run away from them all at the same time.

The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, like many gay bars, was supposed to be safe space. Owner Barbara Poma opened Pulse nightclub with a mission: to honor her brother who died of HIV/AIDS and to create a safe space for Orlando's gay community. That image of safety is now shattered.

This month, we also mark the one-year anniversary of the shootings of church members and their beloved minister during a Bible study at a venerable church in Charleston, SC. Emmanuel AME Church, like all of our houses of worship, was supposed to be safe space. That image of safety is now injured.

Our community havens no longer feel safe. Public schools, college campuses, neighborhood gathering spots -- they have all been desecrated by violence. Even in our church's Indian Spring neighborhood, I heard from a resident who is a lesbian. She has been approached recently by a homophobic neighbor who wants to "save" her and her wife. Our neighbor remarked that she doesn't feel safe on her own property.

However, she also noted how many others have shown love, sympathy and support. She may not experience safe space right now, but she has experienced sacred space. In the midst of her suffering, she has been embraced by empathy, and understanding. I think that's the embrace of God.

After an event like the violence in Orlando, that's what we have to offer at CCC. We create sacred space where everyone belongs, where all are welcome, where we honor and celebrate people of all races, cultures, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, and gender identities. We need it now more than ever! We offer sacred space where anyone can attend -- with our pains and joys, with our fears and hopes, with our experiences of rejection and our longings for wholeness -- and know that we are embraced by empathy and understanding. again, I think that's the embrace of God.

In response to our need for sacred space, Rev. Jennifer Glover of Pilgrim UCC in Wheaton and I will host a prayer vigil on Thursday, June 16, from 7 to 10 PM in the CCC sanctuary. Our open and affirming sacred space will provide a place for prayer, solace, and listening. We will open our time together at 7 PM with a brief public prayer service honoring the lives of those slain in Orlando. Afterwards, our sanctuary will be open for ongoing community prayer. Pastor Jennifer, Pastor Gloria Grant, and I will be available to meet with any individuals who wish to pray and talk with a minister.

On Friday, June 17 at 6pm, the Young Adults and Families of Pilgrim UCC (2206 Briggs Rd at Layhill Rd, Wheaton, MD) invite any and all to join in a Potluck Dinner. It will be a time of fellowship, conversation, and community connection. A movie will be set up for the kids. Singles and families of every kind are welcome. Bring a dish or beverage to share, or just bring yourself.

On Sunday, June 19, CCC will continue to honor and re-affirm our Open & Affirming Covenant during our worship service at 10:00 AM (note the time change). This month marks the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that made marriage equality the law of the land. Brings your friends and join us for a time celebration in worship, giving thanks for the ways in which we see the Spirit restoring equality and dignity to all and recommitting ourselves to open and affirming ministry.


Yours on the Journey,
Pastor Matt

Sermon for June 5, 2016

UCC Beliefs: All Are Welcome

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, NRSV

I can imagine there are some people in our church for whom taking communion was shrouded in fear. If you took communion, and your soul was not in a state of grace, look out! For while, I went to a church where the minister put a lot of emphasis on being worthy to take the Lord’s Supper. “Had I thoroughly repented of my sins? Was I even worthy to take communion?” I received the message loud and clear from my church: unrepentant sinners were not welcome at the table of the Lord. Only those who were “right with Jesus” were invited. The text I just read from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was quoted as proof. It was never clear, however, how I could know for certain that I was “right with Jesus” or what makes a person worthy. Moral purity, which I believed was the requirement for being worthy, was an ever-receding horizon that I never felt  I could reach.

Paul writes to a Christian community torn apart by various factions. Some members of the church in Corinth consider themselves superior to others. They are wiser, more spiritually gifted, more socially acceptable, and they have more money.  They look down on others whom they see as less. They take all of the good pews at church. At the church potluck suppers, they go first in line and take all of the best food. They grab all the homemade fried chicken for themselves (which was probably lovingly prepared by one of the people who was seen as less wise, led, spiritual and less acceptable). Those who are poorer get stuck at the end of the line and eat whatever is always left over at potluck dinners – probably the ancient equivalent of greasy green bean casserole cooked in that gray sludge.

At their potlucks, the Corinthian church also serves communion. But their meal reinforces social hierarchies that divide the community against itself. While some to revel in excess, others get nothing. The rich confuse their economic power with moral superiority. The rich exercise their privilege and humiliate the poor in the process. Paul says that the vulnerability of the poor church members -- their weakness, illness, and death -- serves as a judgment against the rich for their failure to “discern the body of Christ.”

It’s an odd phrase to me, “discerning the Body of Christ.” Let’s think about it for a minute.

There are all types of people who have been excluded from communion -- those who have been historically branded as sinners. The UCC believes something different. All are welcome. All are invited. Period.  Discerning the body is about becoming vulnerable enough to unite with those have been excluded from communion.  As far as I’m concerned, we are worthy to receive communion when we refuse to participate in faith-based exclusion – we don’t make one person’s salvation dependent upon another person’s condemnation. Our union with God is not based on the moral superiority of a powerful few, but with how we receive God’s gifts and experience Jesus in the most improbable people.

How do we know if we are doing it right? Paul has another interesting phrase. He tells the Corinthian Church to to examine themselves.  The word “examine” comes from the Greek word dokimos. Dokimos is related to our English word “decent”. To understand what Paul is saying, we have to understand how money worked in Paul’s day.

In the ancient world there was no banking system as we know it today, and no paper money. All money was made from melted precious metal, which was poured into molds and allowed to cool. When the coins cooled, money makers shaved off the uneven edges to make them smooth. Some money makers went too far and practiced something called clipping -- shaving off an extra portion of the precious metal coin for profit.  Over time, the precious metal shavings could be saved up and melted into bullion or used to make new coins. 

Some money changers had integrity. They refused to accept underweight money. They put only genuine, full weighted money into circulation. Such men were called "dokimos" or "approved".
Paul uses a form of that same word when he talks about eating at the communion table. Be dokimos, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. We must be dokimos, checking and double-checking our integrity, asking, “Is our celebration trustworthy, excellent, and pleasing?” If we are not dokimos, if we are not circulating with integrity, then we eat and drink judgment on ourselves.

We eat and drink judgment on ourselves when anyone is excluded by the so-called morally superior members among us.

We eat and drink judgment on ourselves when we reserve the best for ourselves and don’t share with others.

We eat and drink judgment on ourselves when the pursuit of false purity dupes us into thinking that we get to tell God who is in and who is out, or who is first and who is last.

The great preacher Fred Craddock  told about the first church he served in the eastern Tennessee hills, not too far from Oak Ridge.

When Oak Ridge began to boom with atomic energy, that little bitty town became a booming city just overnight. . . . People came in from everywhere and pitched tents, lived in wagons. . . . Our church was not far away. We had a beautiful little church—white frame building, one hundred and twelve years old. After church one morning, I asked the leaders to stay. I said to them, “Now we need to launch a calling campaign and an invitational campaign in all those trailer parks to invite those people to church.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think they’d fit in here,” one of them said. “They’re just here temporarily, just construction people. They’ll be leaving pretty soon.”

 “Well, we ought to invite them, make them feel at home,” I said.

We argued about it, time ran out, and we said we’d vote next Sunday. The next Sunday, we all sat down after the service. “I move,” said one of them, “I move that in order to be a member of this church, you must own property in the county.” Someone else said, “I second that.” It passed. I voted against it, but they reminded me that I was just a kid preacher and I didn’t have a vote. It passed.

When we moved back to those parts, I took my wife to see that little church, because I had told her that painful, painful story. The roads have changed. The interstate goes through that part of the country, so I had a hard time finding it, but I finally did. . . . there, back among the pines, was that building shining white. . . . The parking lot was full … And out front, a great big sign: “Barbecue, all you can eat.” It’s a restaurant …  The pews are against a wall …  the organ pushed over into the corner. There are all these aluminum and plastic tables, and people sitting there eating barbecued pork and chicken and ribs—all kinds of people. I said to [my wife] Nettie, “It’s a good thing this is not still a church, otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.”

In the UCC, we don’t like to talk about who doesn’t belong. We don’t prefer language like insider and outsider. Everyone belongs. All are welcome. No matter who you are or where you come from, you are welcome here. That’s what gives our communion table legitimacy. That’s what gives our Table integrity.

Our table has integrity when people of all races, cultures, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, and people of all spiritual, emotional wellbeing find welcome here, as they would find welcome by Jesus.

Our table is trustworthy when those who have been excluded by other religious traditions know that divisions can be overcome and all have a home here.

Our table is pleasing when the last come first, and the first serve the last.

Our welcome is extravagant when we our celebration is marked by justice, peace, and mutual, self-giving love.


Sources:
https://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/dojustice/j337.html
http://www.firstcongoappleton.org/blogs/notes/2014/01/30/open-communionopen-church/
http://www.ucc.org/beliefs
http://www.ucc.org/worship_communion

Sermon for May 29, 2016

UCC Beliefs: United & Uniting

"My prayer for them is not for them alone, but for ALL who hear my message...that ALL of them may be one.”  John 17:21

When Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died, we heard a lot about his robust conservatism. I was most touched to hear the stories of his friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  The justices, who were often polar opposites on the bench, managed to form an unlikely friendship. At his funeral, Justice Ginsberg referred to Justice Scalia as her “best buddy.” When talking about their lifetime appointments, Scalia once said, “If you can’t disagree ardently with your colleagues about some issues of law and yet personally still be friends, get another job, for Pete’s sake.” And Justice Ginsberg once said about Their friendship, “As annoyed as you might be about his zinging dissent, he’s so utterly charming, so amusing, so sometimes outrageous, you can’t help but say, ‘I’m glad that he’s my friend or he’s my colleague.’ ”

How hopeful to remember that people can disagree and still be friends.  Hey, maybe they learned this in church! Because, at our best, that’s what we do here every week. We don’t always agree. We don’t always like what others say or do. But we can be friends. This idea is actually a core belief in our church’s identity. The UCC understands itself as a “united and uniting church.” Why, do you suppose we would use both these words – united and uniting?

One of the key features of our churches is a belief in the self-government of local churches. Since there is no hierarchy in the UCC, a local congregation is the basic unit of church life. But even at the local level, we don’t always feel like a united church. We struggle and differ with each another over all sorts of issues, many of which have come up over the past few weeks: The priority of mission, the appropriate portion of our music budget, the care of our facilities and grounds, our need for staff, our ministry to our children and youth, increased outreach and service, commitments to the wider church, the purpose and use of our endowment, and the use of our assets. Sometimes different people have different visions of how we operate as a local church. And yet … and yet … we manage to gather together every week in our work and worship. Some mysterious force draws us together beyond our struggles.

Disagreement and division are nothing new to the Christian community. Managing our differences is tiring and disheartening (at least it is to me).  We will always have issues on which we disagree. That does not mean we are not united.

The UCC has a fierce commitment to unifying people, even people who are about as far apart as you can imagine. Some quick UCC history: Four distinct groups from four distinct parts of the world somehow managed to form the United Church of Christ in 1957. We call these four groups, or four streams, the Congregational, Christian, Reformed, and Evangelical churches. The leaders and members of those distinct communions did not agree on everything. Yet, they came together. They found unity. The 1957 Basis of Union states, “In all our expressions of that faith we seek to preserve unity of heart and spirit with those who have gone before us as well as those who now labor with us.”

Unity is still a part of who we are today. The UCC is still out there, uniting with more and more people – uniting in mission, uniting in peace and justice efforts, uniting across national and international boundaries, and uniting with other faith traditions.

So, what’s going on here? Why would local church members like us at CCC be us willing to meet together week after week when we don’t always agree? Why would a denomination like the UCC work so hard to bring more diverse experiences and points of view into our faith and life?

The UCC believes that God calls us – as our very top priority - to pull people together, to seek and celebrate similarities rather than differences, even when that’s the hardest thing to do.

Those four distinct streams that merged into one, the Congregational, Christian, Reformed, and Evangelical churches, never could have united if they first had to hammer out some sort of common doctrine or dogma. If they formed a four-way ad-hoc committee to hammer out a common statement of faith before they could unite, the union never would have happened.  Instead, they focused on their common mission. They chose to emphasize their actions of love, mercy, and justice in the world. The UCC is committed to bringing people together –different, differing, disagreeing and even disagreeable people. We live out Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17, “My prayer for them is not for them alone, but for ALL who hear my message...that ALL of them may be one.” John 17:21 may be the most important scripture passage in the UCC.

Unity does not mean we all need to believe the same thing, or sign the dotted line of a creed before we become a member. We cannot be a united and uniting church, and, at the same time, insist that everyone believe the same way.  Our unity has nothing to do doctrine. The UCC is far more concerned about feeding the hungry, taking care of the poor, and working toward justice for all people, regardless of their beliefs, their religion, or their nationality. To put it another way: In essentials, unity; in non-essentials,diversity; in all things, love.

I really think that what pulls us together each week, what makes us united and uniting, is not about what we choose to agree and disagree on. We gather because, despite all that, we need each other. We are broken, hurting people who want to heal our broken, hurting world. We know we can gather together with our brokenness, our sin, and our hurt … we can remember God does not just love the good, pious, faithful parts of us that we share at coffee hour, but also loves the grungy, grumpy, disheveled, and disordered parts of us as well.

Only in our brokenness is our true love revealed.  Only when we are fully known, can we be fully loved.

United and uniting, in love. On a practical level, it means, also, that we must value each another with such care and affection that we always treat one another with respect, honesty, and kindness.  It means that we speak directly to one another – not indirectly through others or in hiding behind one another’s back.  It means we must have the courage, confidence, and respect to relate openly and kindly to one another – never through gossip and back-biting.  It means we are intentional about our care and treatment for one another. It means fostering a community of healing in which everyone exists to support others in our brokenness. The modern-day mystic Joan Chittister call it “mutual obedience”. She says:

Mutual obedience --
the willingness to listen
to the needs
and the hopes,
the dreams and the ideas
of those around us
rather than promote our own
by ignoring
everyone else's--
is surely the foundation …

It is what we need
to be able to think newly
because we think
with the others
about their ideas
rather than simply
about our own.

It is the way we come to learn
respect and reverence,
for the insights of others
are meant to become
the foundation
of the next step
on our own path …

“Obedience to one another”
is the strength of community,
the brilliance of community,
the voice of community
in the midst of which
we can now hear
the voice of God.

In 2015, in what the news called “The Miracle at Quecreek,” nine miners were trapped for three days 240 feet underground in a water-filled mine shaft “decided early on they were either going to live or die as a group.” The 55 degree water threatened to kill them slowly by hypothermia, so according to one news report “When one would get cold, the other eight would huddle around the person and warm that person, and when another person got cold, the favor was returned.” As one miner said, “Everybody had strong moments. But any certain time maybe one guy got down, and then the rest pulled together. And then that guy would get back up, and maybe someone else would feel a little weaker, but it was a team effort. That’s the only way it could have been.” They faced incredibly hostile conditions together–and they all came out alive together.

What a picture of being united and uniting. Not uniformity, but mutual care and attention. Mutual commitment to the survival and flourishing of one another so that we not just come out alive, but we do it together. We are all different, diverse, and we even disagree, and we still find ways to articulate and live out our common identity as followers of Jesus. We do it in a thousand different ways. Let our unity be one like the seas that salt a thousand shores.  Let our unity be one like the wind is one, though whisper, though rush, though roar.  Let our unity be one like a symphony orchestra is one as it plays a thousand different notes at the strokes of a conductor’s baton. Let our unity be one like the birds are one, though they sing a thousand songs.  Let our unity be one as our prayers are one, though voiced in a thousand tongues.  Let our unity be one, as light is one, though made of a thousand hues of the spectrum.  Let our unity be one as God’s love is one – God’s love for a thousand times a thousand times a thousand people, known and unknown. Let our unity be one as God’s love is one God is one: Creator, Christ, and Spirit.

SOURCES:
http://www.christchurchgp.org/worship-music/sermons/division-and-unity
http://firstuccgaylord.org/docs/2016.04.24.ThreeThingsILoveUCC.pdf
http://www.emanuel-ucc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/May-8-2016.pdf
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/14/read_justice_ruth_bader_ginsburg_s_touching_statement_on_scalia.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/13/what-made-scalia-and-ginsburgs-friendship-work/

Sermon for May 22, 2016

UCC Beliefs: The Triune God

I still have many things to tell you, but you can’t handle them now. But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, she will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. She won’t draw attention to herself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said. She will honor me; she will take from me and deliver it to you. Everything the Father has is also mine. That is why I’ve said, “She takes from me and delivers to you.” John 16:12-15 (The Message, modified)

When I have conversations about CCC, and the United Church of Christ in general, there is one question I get more than any other: What do we believe?

My answer: It’s complicated.

On one hand, we are not the kind of people who like to impose our beliefs on other people. When you come to a church like CCC, there is no doctrine to which you need to ascribe. We are not going to read the Apostle’s Creed and ask you to sign on the dotted line with your affirmation to be a member (I know churches that do ask their members to do that, though). For some people who came here from creedal religious traditions this can be difficult. If you were brought up Catholic, your experience was ordered by church dogma that has been passed down for centuries. If you were brought up Presbyterian, the church was governed by creeds and confessions, which are standards of faith and practice, subordinate only to scripture itself. We don’t have that in the UCC. Our spiritual ancestors were English separatists who fled from the creedal traditions and abusive authority that they thought oppressed the human conscience. In the UCC we have no centralized authority or hierarchy that can impose any doctrine or form of worship on its members.

On the other hand, we listen closely to historic creeds and confessions. We think they have something to say to us today. It’s just that we believe they are testimonies of faith, not tests of faith. It’s more important for us to live together in covenant than it is for us to believe the same things. In other words, our church is held together by people coming together in agreement on who God calls us to be a community, not on what we believe about a particular creed or statement of belief.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

But we do believe things in the UCC. In fact, we believe in the Trinity. “We believe in the triune God: Creator, resurrected Christ, the sole Head of the church, and the Holy Spirit, who guides and brings about the creative and redemptive work of God in the world.” I lifted that right from the UCC webpage.

Do you know what the “Trinity” is? Can you describe the Trinity?  Could you tell someone else what the Trinity means? Most times, it has no significance in our daily lives. I have yet to be stopped on the street and asked to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. It has never come up at a family holiday meal.  I’ve had to talk about other difficult things: racism, environmental catastrophe, bad politics, and why bad things happen to good people. I’ve never been asked to defend the Trinity.

In traditional language, the Trinity refers to God as Father, Son, & Holy Spirit – three specific “persons” who share one “essence”. We proclaim it every Sunday when we sing the Doxology, whether we use the traditional language or inclusive language; Creator, Christ and Spirit. Every Sunday, we bear witness to a belief, a reality beyond words, even if we don’t quite know what it really means. And like a lot of things we cannot fully explain or understand, we use stories, and parables, and metaphors to try to get it to make sense.

Legend has it that St. Patrick used a shamrock to teach about the Trinity –three identical leaves with a common stem.

Another metaphor is that the Trinity is like the Sun. Just as looking directly at the solar disk of the Sun is to risk injury to eyes, so it is that the Heavenly Sovereign should not be taken lightly. Just as the Sun’s light illuminates the world, so has Jesus enlightened the world through his life and teachings. Just as the Sun’s heat enables life on Earth, so does the unseen activity of the Holy Spirit give life.

Another metaphor is water, which can take the form of liquid H2O that irrigates farmlands, steam that powers engines, and ice that forms majestic glaciers. As H2O has the same molecules but takes on different forms,  so it is with God – three persons, one substance.

Or, imagine God as an egg. You have the yolk, the shell and the white part. All the same egg, but very different from one another. The shell is not the yolk, the yolk is not the white, you get the idea.

Some relate the Trinity with metaphors of birth. God, the creator, gives birth to Christ the eternal Word. The Spirit is the midwife of the new creation, who receives the word and give it to the world, nurturing and strengthening it along the way. This is how I understand what Jesus says in John 16. Jesus shares everything with the One he calls God the Father. The Spirit takes the work of Jesus, sent to us by God, and delivers it to us.

Of course, each one of these metaphors is associated with a historic heresy of the early church. Many teachers were denounced, ostracized, and excommunicated. If the UCC was around back then, we would have taken them in as members. At any rate, if you want an explanation of the Trinity, then pick your heresy. Or else affirm an untenable orthodoxy.

If I was going to be an early church heretic, I might pick a theology called “modalism”. Modalism said God is a single person who, throughout in three modes or forms; Or you could think of it as God revealing God’s self by wearing three different masks or personae; sometimes as Parent/Creator, sometimes as the Christ, and sometimes as the Holy Spirit.

God the Creator generated worlds within worlds from amoebas to zebras, genomes to galaxies, from the universe to the multiverse.

God the Christ walked among us to show compassion in the grace and grit of human life and demonstrate the power of suffering love, wholeness, and salvation.

When we experience the work of God the Creator and God the Christ in life-transforming ways, when we have visions of a more just, humane, compassionate world and find the courage to put those dreams into action, that’s the work of the third person, God the Spirit.

That’s my heresy. You pick yours. The key here is that we do believe something. We may not always be on the same page. I don’t require you to parrot my beliefs to be part of the church. And I don’t allow anyone to bind my conscience. What we can do is affirm the basics.

It’s not just that we believe it. We think we need to live it out. In our church, we believe the idea of God as Trinity should have some transformational effect on how we live our lives together as a community at work in the world. That work begins with loving, healing relationships.

God is not one single, solitary, self-sufficient monarch on a throne issuing orders that must be followed. If God is a Trinity, God’s being is love. God’s being is community, and the different persons are dependent on one another. That’s why we try to use different kinds of language for God, when we pray, when we sing hymns or when we write all those words in the bulletin. It’s easy to get stuck with just one image, or one word even. If you get stuck thinking of God as the old grandpa in the sky – or a mean judge waiting to punish you, or an absentee parent, then the doctrine Trinity helps shake us out of that sludge.

The Trinity helps us embrace diversity in ways that honor God and one another. The Trinity is a way to help us understand what it means to have unity in the midst of diversity. Like God, we all take on different forms. Some of us have a passion for peace; others, a passion for political freedom. Some of us have a passion for life and its sacredness, others, a passion for forgiveness and mercy. Some of us have a passion for a literal interpretation of the Bible, others a passion for a more open interpretation of the Bible. Some have a passion for evangelism, others, a passion for justice. We are diverse, but of one substance. We are all created out of love and meant to relate to one another in love. Love is the essence that connects those three persons of the Trinity. And love connects is as we look for common ground and universal threads that bring us together without demanding that we all be the same.

We were created to be a wondrously variegated church, a delightfully diverse community, a people of differences and of relationship. Look around at who the Spirit has brought here. It’s incredible. Go forth and discover more of those marvelous differences. And may God, Creator, Christ, and Spirit be in each one of our relationships with each other.

Prayer: God … Mother and Father; Savior and Friend; Spirit and Teacher, Unity and Trinity; Lover and Judge; Wind and Whisper; Liberator and Captivator; Lamb and Lion; Suffering Servant and Almighty, enable us, to celebrate our oneness in you and the shared inheritance of your world. Prosper our work as we seek to build bridges of love, understanding and cooperation, that, transformed and renewed by your Holy Spirit, we will be no longer strangers to one another. Together, as diverse members of your world, we always give you glory. Amen.


Sources:
http://uccatv.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/1/0/22105038/053115sermon.pdf
http://drybonesarise.blogspot.com/2008/10/sermon-for-october-5-2008-world.html