Readings FIRST LESSON The first lesson is an excerpt from Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile by John Shelby Spong When we define God’s almighty nature in terms of being all-knowing or omniscient, other equally difficult issues arise. The Bible, the Church’s sacred textbook, portrays the God of antiquity as acting in ways that violate both our knowledge and our sensibilities today. If an all-knowing God had really made many of the assumptions that the Bible makes, then this God would be revealed as hopelessly ignorant. For many biblical assumptions are today dismissed as simply wrong. Sickness, for example, does not result from sin being punished. Nor does a cure result from our prayers for God’s intervention or from the sense that we have been sufficiently chastised so that the punishment of our sickness might cease. In the disciplines of medicine, we deal today with viruses, bacteria, leukemia, and tumors. God, called in the creeds “almighty,” appears in our time to have little or nothing to do with either our sicknesses or our cures. In our generation, we attack viruses, germs, leukemia, and tumors not with appeals to an almighty God, but with drugs, chemotherapy, and surgery. To appeal only to the almighty power of our God in the face of these crises of the human experience would be regarded as naïve in the world that we inhabit. That is just one of the vast changes in the perception of reality that separates our world from the world in which the creeds were written. We must get beyond the superstitious and mystical aura that believers have allowed to gather around the Gospels through the centuries. At least part of the problem lies in the excessive claims made for these scriptures. The Bible is not the word of God in any literal sense or verbal sense. It never has been! The Gospels are not inerrant works, divinely authored. They were written by communities of faith, and they express even the biases of those communities. The Gospels are not without significant internal contradictions or embarrassing moral and intellectual concepts. The Gospels are not static. They reveal changing, evolving theological perspectives. They are not even original. They lean far more than has been realized on the work of Paul and on the inspiration of the Hebrew scriptures. They are not the words of eyewitnesses, as so often has been claimed. Most eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus were long dead before the Gospels entered history. The Gospels were also shaped by the events of their own time, perhaps even more dramatically than they were by the events of the time in which Jesus actually lived. For example, the capture and destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army in 70 CE is a powerful reality in the background of each of the Gospel narratives. Seeing the Gospels in a proper historical perspective is therefore our first step into biblical knowledge. SECOND LESSON The second lesson is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 14, Verses 1 and 7 through 14 Just then, in front of him, there was a man who had dropsy. Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees, “Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not?” But they were silent. So Jesus took the man and healed him, and sent him away. Then he said to them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?” And they could not reply to this. When Jesus noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the disabled, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” |
This Week's Sermon Date: August 29, 2010 Title: What Will Our Sacred Texts Say About Us? Message Delivered By: Rev. Dr. Joe McMurray There is an e-mail chain letter going around that a growing group of churchgoers has been sending. They claim to have finally discovered a formula to ensure that churches will be able to secure the absolutely perfect pastor. Apparently, this has been going around for quite some time, but the data has been assembled and the formula turns out to provide exactly what every congregant wanted. Now, I know I share this with you at a great risk, but I have tried to convey to you that I have always wanted what’s best for this church. So, please know that I will understand that you may wish to go in another direction after you hear about this information. So here are the results: The perfect pastor is one who averages about 28 years of age, and who has been preaching for approximately 30 years. His or her sermons are exactly 15 minutes long; the sermon condemns sin but never upsets or disturbs anyone—ever. The perfect pastor works from 8:00am until midnight, and also serves as the administrative assistant, the janitor and the gardener. He or she makes no more than $60 per week, wears attractive clothes, reads good books, drives a nice car ... and donates $50 per week back to the church. The pastor is wonderfully gentle, compassionate and good-looking. He or she has a burning desire to work with teenagers, but spends all his or her spare time with senior citizens and the poor. The perfect pastor smiles all the time with a fixed face because an appropriate sense of humor keeps him or her seriously dedicated to the work. He or she makes fifteen calls a day to church families, shut-ins and those who are hospitalized. The perfect pastor has mastered the impossible of being in more than one place at one time, and is expected to do that 3-4 times per day – at the same time. The email goes on to say, “If your pastor does not measure up, simply send this letter to six other churches that are tired of their pastor, too. Then bundle up your pastor, and send him or her to the church at the top of the list. In one year, you will receive 1,643 pastors and one of them should be perfect. WARNING!!! Keep this letter going! One church broke the chain and got its old pastor back in less than three months.” The lesson in all of this is that you should think twice before you delete that e-mail chain letter! It might prove to be very enlightening. Please pray with me: Good and gracious God, instill in us all a sense of what is appropriate; give us the stamina to search for and wait for what is best— for what we know is necessary to further our spiritual growth in you. May our intention to be closer to you never waiver; and may we find you in the places where we least expect you to be. May my words and all of our thoughts bring praise and honor to you. Amen. Today’s Gospel is filled with what preachers like to call “teaching moments.” These are opportunities we can easily apply to one’s own life experience that cannot help but influence the listener because they convey a remarkable symbolism that is rich, meaningful and relevant. These “hints” about life, though seemingly obvious, are not always recognizable by us. (And a perfect pastor always takes advantage of a teaching moment!) We heard yet another story about healing on the Sabbath. The teaching moment of this particular lesson, as we’ve heard quite often most recently, is that God could care less about human timetables that presume to know God’s agenda. The whole point of the existence of God is love, and the point of love is healing and wholeness for all God’s people. A second teaching moment warns us about our desire to set aside our human temptation in order to feel important and superior, and instead to readily and happily don the robe of humility. A third teaching moment in Luke’s gospel reminds us that unconditional generosity—that is, a generosity free from an expectation of acknowledgement, repayment or reciprocation—is a form of generosity in its purest form—one that brings its own righteous reward. And in our first lesson, as he does so well, Bishop John Shelby Spong reminds us of the origins of the scriptures—that they were written by people within communities of faith to reflect their hopes and dreams, their beliefs about God, about Jesus, and about their relationships with them and with each other. We are mistaken if we think that the Bible is a fixed document that denies the possibility of change and the promise of transformation. We are mistaken if we believe that prophets ceased to exist when the writing we know as Biblical texts ceased to be written. And we are hugely mistaken if we think that our sacred texts are only found in the Bible. Rather than imagining that the best days of our theological and ethical teachings are behind us, we must imagine that we are participant in creating our own theology of the future. It is an errant notion that suggests that the most sacred experiences of our lives are connected only to the past and not to the future. The prophets are not dead and gone. We are continually visited by prophets from all centuries and from all walks of life. Many of our finest writers, artists, theologians, labor organizers, priests, healers, justice seekers, and peacemakers are or were prophets in their own time. All too often, our contemporary prophets are not given their due. They might be underappreciated merely as innovative thinkers, or dismissed as eccentric wanderers listening to words and voices that the typical human mind cannot comprehend. But they are as much a part of us and have as much to say as just about anyone or anything that has ever been written or handed down through the generations. I couple of weeks ago, Joan Higgs said, quite accurately, that a prophet is a “truth-teller.” Fortunately, that doesn’t’ necessarily rule all of us out. For example, even the prophets of old came with their own baggage. In other words, they were imperfect, too. I am not suggesting that we are all prophets in the typical way we think of prophecy. The word prophet also comes from the root word “nabi” – which means “to bubble forth, like foam from a fountain.” So the question is, has the fountain dried up? Or are we still “bubbling forth”? And so if prophets and prophecy did not stop in the first century, if sacred writings have, all along, been written and continue to be written to this day, what will the sacred texts of today, written about the prophets of today and yesterday, say about us? What will those who read about us 2000 years from now, have to say about who we were, the choices we made or didn’t make, our allegiance to God and to God’s creation, and above all, how we treated one another as fellow sojourners made in the image of God? So let’s imagine together – as I read now an excerpt from the writings of the Prophet Brianna, circa 2065AD, who writes about an ancient port city called “Nawlins”: “In those days, the people turned away from God. Admiration among lovers and friends had disintegrated and disappeared from the land. The once-close connection between God and the people was irrevocably broken. And all other meaningful connections between husband and wife, parents and children, lovers and friends were undernourished or starved to death; and they were eventually abandoned; self-survival was the road most traveled. And those who claimed to prophesy in the name of God declared that destruction was imminent because great evils had been committed. “Festivals, pageants and the worshiping of false gods such as the human body have angered the Lord,” they said. “Hedonism and lasciviousness, the integration of difference and the disintegration of sameness now guarantees their doom.” And the followers of the false prophets turned one against the other; brothers abandoned sisters; and all were placed at the margins and succumbed to separation and isolation. Starvation and death became commonplace. Suffering and pain replaced love, which was nowhere to be found. As false prophets had warned, God’s punishment rained upon the people—or so it seemed: women, children and men wept in a great chorus of sorrow, but no solace could be felt; no remedy could be found. Meanwhile, its powerful leaders turned a blind eye to the suffering of the people; their long-held disdain of the undeserving was revealed. Purveyors of privilege viciously severed the lifelines of those they deemed unworthy. But neither did they themselves escape God’s punishment for no one was safe; no one was secure. And the destruction God wrought upon the sinful rendered the city uninhabitable for many years to come.” Now let’s imagine a different age and a different time as I read from the prophet Dylan, circa 3022AD: “And humankind once again survived the mayhem that nature wrought upon the earth. Nature had risen up against God’s people, for the people became destroyers of all life. And when humanity admitted defeat, the people paid homage to God again, and the great earth God had provided smiled upon them once more. Humanity became humbled and promised to walk the path of mutuality with the earth. And they worshipped God, and gave thanksgiving by utilizing the wisdom and power God had long-ago gifted to them. And they began to know and to understand; to accept and surrender. Lessons had been learned and the experiences of past generations were put to good use for the betterment of civilization. Once more, humanity intervened for good upon the earth. They filled the deep craters created by their own destruction; they cleared the waters that had been muddied; they took live creatures and helped them to multiply and thrive once more; and humankind repaired the protective dome that kept the earth secure from stifling heat and intense cold. And humanity became good stewards of God’s earth as never before. They cultivated the earth, they planted and sewed, and reaped harvests in quantities that had not been seen in all of human existence. And peace reigned across the land for the first time since the first creation. And all could finally envision the depth of God’s love, and the scope of God’s gift of the earth, and the measure of eternity. And the people honored their promise to God, as God had honored the promise to them: the promise of life, abundance, goodness, mercy and longevity. Humankind learned to respect all of life, to honor the connections of one human being to another. Judgment was reserved for God, and humanity’s occupation became to lift one another over the hurdles that fell in their way. No one was hungry and no one felt abandoned or alone. And all cynicism and negativity were wiped away as joy reigned within people’s hearts; none were left wanting; none were in need for there was an abundance that the world had never before known. And God saw the wisdom and goodness in it; and humankind dispelled evil from its presence so that the true cycle of life could continue unhindered. There was no more pain; suffering became of the past; loneliness dissipated; and the embrace of God was felt by all souls; and all souls loved unconditionally once more.” And so—once again I ask, “What will be written about us? What will our sages, our seers, our prophets, our truth-tellers … what will those whose words and thoughts bubble forth have to say about our engagement of the world, our relations with one another, and our love and devotion to God? Will humanity succumb to the disappointment of that which is reserved for a selfish, uncaring people? Or will we finally ground ourselves in a life-giving movement toward goodness and graciousness? May we live out the lives that are most worthy of honoring God’s great gift to us. And may we continue to follow where God is leading. Amen. |
Selected Past Sermons