The Musings of Young Pastor Matt

Moving the "musings"...

2010-08-05T14:50:00.003-06:00

Hi all,

I've decided to move my "Musings" over to Tumblr: http://youngpastormatt.tumblr.com/

Why, you might ask? Well, it seems like Tumblr might be a more natural fit with the form I'd like my "musings" to take: sometimes, my "musings" will be more traditional blog-like writing (like I've shared here on Blogger before), but sometimes my "musings" are simply that I want to post a quick quote from the book I'm reading at the moment, or link to another blog posting I've seen, or share a video clip. Tumblr seems like a easier and more natural fit for this in-between 'sometimes-blog-sometimes-other' format.

So, come see me on Tumblr: http://youngpastormatt.tumblr.com/
And feel free to "follow" me on there (just like you do with somebody on Twitter), or Tumblr also lets you get the RSS feed, so you can subscribe with your favorite blog-reader (I use Google Reader, myself, for no better reason than that I use GMail for my email).

Peace, all, and see you on Tumblr,
--Matt

A Pastoral Letter on the August 24th shooting at Kingdom Authority Church in Rockford

2009-08-27T18:53:00.005-06:00

On August 24th, 2009, Mark Barmore, a 23-year-old African American, was shot and killed by two white police officers while inside the House of Grace Day Care run by Kingdom Authority International Ministries Church in Rockford (a predominantly African American church a mere two blocks from my congregation). You can find basic news coverage of the incident and the controversies that have arisen in its wake at the website of the Rockford Register-Star: http://www.rrstar.com/

The following pastoral letter was distributed to my congregation's whole-church email list and copies will be made available at worship on Sunday.

August 27, 2009

Dear Friends,

By now I suspect most all of you have heard or seen coverage of the shooting and death of Mark Barmore at Kingdom Authority Church this past Monday afternoon. Because of how this incident, and the reactions and controversies surrounding it, affect all of us in the Rockford community, I have had a growing sense of obligation to share some of my own reflections.

As some of you may know, Kingdom Authority is a predominately African American congregation located less than two blocks from our own church facilities, in the 500 block of North Court Street. Many of us regularly drive by the brown-brick building on our way to-and-from Second Congregational, and Kingdom Authority’s pastors, Melvin and Sheila Brown, have been involved in past conversations around neighborhood concerns. A tragic incident like this anywhere in our community has deep impacts, but I know that I, for one, am all the more conscious of it given that it happened ‘in our own backyard’.

I do not presume to “know the facts” about what happened any more than you probably do. As the media reports show, the various accounts from the police department and from persons present at the time of the shooting do not all agree with one another. Ultimately, it may never be possible to establish an account of exactly what happened that will be completely beyond suspicion by some in our community.

I had the opportunity to attend a good portion of yesterday afternoon’s press conference at City Hall along with First Presbyterian’s pastor Bob Hillenbrand and Emmanuel Episcopal’s rector Pamela Hillenbrand. As media coverage indicated, the press conference did not provide as much in the way of answers as it did serve to highlight the variety of emotions and reactions flowing through our community.

I may not have any answers about “the facts”. But I have been impacted by the strength and emotion in the reactions around our community, and as I have thought through others’ reactions and my own, a few reflections have come to me:

First of all, regardless of the precise details, Monday’s incident was a tragedy. It is always a tragedy when a death occurs through the use of force. Mark was a real human being and child of God, regardless of the particularities of his life journey. I have been greatly disturbed to read comments posted on internet news article feedback boards that say he “deserved what he got.” No one deserves to be killed. Even when a police officer does engage in ‘justifiable’ self-defense and rightly takes actions they think necessary, nevertheless a life is ended and that is cause for mourning. Furthermore, not only were Monday’s events tragic for Mark and his family, but also for the police officers involved, as they must deal with their own trauma and emotional strain.

Second, real people are hurting with real pain. Of course, it goes without saying that Mark’s family and friends have been thrown into the pangs of grief. But there are also the day care children and others in whose presence the shooting occurred, and they have the emotional effects of that to process. Then, there is the community of Kingdom Authority, who must cope with their own sacred space being the location of such a tragic occurrence.

But the impact and the pain of this event reaches farther than that. This event has again brought to light the tensions and distrusts between police and other authorities and the racial-ethnic communities of our society, a dynamic that is not unique to Rockford. Sure, it is true that relations among the various racial and ethnic groups in our country have improved in our time, but that does not erase overnight the long histories of systemic injustices that certain communities have endured at the hands of those in power. Even as injustices and prejudices decrease, building trust is a much longer process that requires hard work. The reactions and controversies over Monday’s shooting clearly show that those bonds of trust are still lacking in our community. Without that foundation of trust, events like this cause perceptions and suspicions that lead to a pain that is very real to those experiencing it. Regardless of whether we agree with someone’s perceptions of a situation, we must all realize that the kind of pain that arises from those perceptions is no less ‘real’ than other kinds of pain.

Third, race is undeniably a factor in this whole situation. Let me be clear: I am not saying that race was a motivating factor in the actual shooting. But it is very clear that race is playing a large role in the reactions and controversies that have arisen since Monday’s events. Racially-biased accusations are now being flung about by people in both the white and black communities. Regardless of the motivations and justifications of any of the parties involved, it is hard to miss the imagery of two white police officers chasing a young black male and shooting him in front of mostly black day-care children—and hard to deny how this image could stir up memories out of the long history of racial discrimination in our country. Again, I am not saying that race was a motivating factor in the actual shooting, but as I said earlier, the emotion and pain that come out of perceptions (accurate or inaccurate) are just as real for those experiencing them as any other pain.

Finally, all that has happened makes it clear that we still have work to do. As I mentioned, this week’s events have made it clear that relationships and bonds of trust between various parts of our community are missing. Thinking of our particular context here at Second Congregational, I am aware that we sit no more than half-a-block farther away from Kingdom Authority Church than we do from, say, Court Street United Methodist—and yet the difference in our relationship and knowledge of those two congregations is tremendous. Relationships and trust-building are two-way streets, and we must re-commit ourselves to making sure that we are doing our part. We cannot expect trust when relationship is lacking, and we cannot expect real relationship without the hard work it takes on all sides to make it happen.

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me…” Our whole Rockford community finds itself in a dark valley this week. Neither answers nor healing will come overnight. But indeed, we are assured of God’s presence with all of us as we journey through this moment. But in that assurance, we must also hear God’s ever-present call to stand in solidarity with those who are hurting and in pain. We must hear the apostle Paul’s reminder that “the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body,” and that no part of the body can say to another part that “I have no need of you.” We are one body in Christ with all our Christian sisters and brothers across this whole community—and, you might say, one body in community with all people across this region—one body regardless of race and regardless of perspectives and perceptions about what occurred this past Monday. As a Christian people, part of that one body in Christ, our call is to be agents of mercy, understanding, and reconciliation—a long and hard journey, but the only one worth taking.

Yours in the journey,
The Rev. Matthew C. Emery

Update on Prayer Request

2008-11-04T15:45:00.002-06:00

Friends,

To anyone out there who saw the request I put up a couple months ago requesting prayers for my friends who were facing a major complication with their pregnancy: many thanks for your prayers.

As for an update, Joshua Harold Ross was born August 27th, 2008, about 2 1/2 months early (28 1/2 weeks gestation). At birth, he was 2 lbs., 12 oz. He was in the neo-natal ICU, where he went through some ups-and-downs, but overall did fairly well. This past Saturday, November 1st, he got to come home!

Your continued prayers will be much appreciated, though, as I'm sure he will continue to face some challenges due to his situation. But for the moment, things look like they have gone well given the circumstances.

Pastoral Prayer: Oct 12

2008-10-12T15:50:00.003-06:00

A Pastoral Prayer for October 12th, 2008, alluding to Exodus 32:1-14 (semi-continuous OT reading for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, RCL Year A)

Faithful God ...
... we give you thanks
that indeed you do not give up on us,
even when we give up on you.

We too make for ourselves
golden calves
that we worship instead of you.

For some of us,
it's money.

For some of us,
it's patrioticness,
that leads to unquestioning allegiance
to our country,
even when you alone, O God,
are worthy of our allegiance.

For some of us,
our golden calf is
our illusions of self-reliance,
while for others of us,
it is the illusion of our worthlessness,
forgetting that we are your beloved child,
formed in your image.

But you, O God, do not give up.
You keep inviting us to turn back to you.
You keep holding out a vision of new life, of a different kind of world.

Oh, how a vision of a different kind of world
is what we need in this moment, loving God.
We keep turning on the news
to a never-ending tale of woe in our world's economic systems.
We open our mail to find bills we struggle to pay
and hard-earned treasures vanishing before our eyes.

But you, O God, run a different kind of economy--
it is always a bull market on the indicies of your love and grace and faithfulness.
You, O God, manage a different kind of investment fund--
an account with our names on it
that you continually grow with the capital of your Spirit,
whose dividends are an invitation to new life in you.

O God, our refuge,
the economy is not the only thing about which we yearn
for a vision of a different kind of world.
We remember that our world is one
where 10 years ago, your beloved child
Matthew Shepherd
laid dying on a Wyoming fencepost
simply for who you created him to be.
You, O God, have given us a vision
where all people are welcome
at your banquet feast--
pour out your power on us as we try to live more and more into that vision.

God our healer, even as we pray and hope for a different kind of world,
we also pray for your work in this world.
We ask your healing on all who are hearing...
We ask your comforting touch on all who are lonely or struggling...
We ask your empowering touch on all who are downtrodden and in chains.

Holy One, we pray all these things
by the power of your Holy Spirit,
that Spirit that interceeds for us with sighs too deep for words,
and in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord,
that One who was your different kind of world
walking the face of this one,
the One who taught us to pray together:
Our Father ...

Need your prayers - an update

2008-08-05T07:17:00.001-06:00

Thank you to all who have been praying for my friends and their child.

As an update, it looks at the moment like things are headed in a positive direction. According to my friend: on Saturday, the day after the surgery, the ultrasound showed 3 cm of amniotic fluid, and on Monday afternoon it showed 6 cm, which is a good sign. ("Normal" is apparently 12 cm or above.) They are in the process of moving the mother from IV medications to oral.

Although it looks like things are moving in the right direction, they are by no means anywhere near 'out of the woods' yet. Your continued prayers for all of them will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Need your prayers

2008-08-03T20:41:00.003-06:00

Hi all (whoever it is out there that reads this!),

I know that I haven't posted on here in quite a while, but today I've come to ask your prayers. An extremely close friend of mine and his wife are currently expecting their second child, and are right now at about 25 weeks. On Friday evening, while my friend was out of town at a conference, his wife had to have an emergency appendectomy. During the surgery, her uterus was nicked and her water broke, both of which, as one might suspect, have put the pregnancy at extreme risk. Although she did not start having contractions right away, by Saturday morning, she did. Right now, she is on I.V. medications to reduce/prevent contractions, and they are hoping that the amniotic sac will re-seal and fluids will begin reforming, but they won't know if that has happened until probably Tuesday. At this point, she (the mother) is doing ok, but what will happen to the baby--and/or what the effects to the baby will be if he/she does make it--won't be known for a number of days at the very least, and probably longer. My friend is terrified and preparing for the worst.

Your fervent prayers for all of them will be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Catechismal Gems

2008-05-21T20:12:00.008-06:00

You know, often times among us progressive/liberal Christians, things like creeds, confessions, and catechisms get a bad rap. There are definitely folks in the UCC who are overly-gung-ho about the idea that the UCC is a "non-creedal" church. I'm not sure I exactly agree with that claim, but even if I were to give them that, I still insist that this doesn't mean we are a 'non-confessional' church. We recognize the ancient ecumenical creeds (namely the Apostles' and the Nicene) and the confessions and catechisms of the Reformation as a true part of our theological heritage--it even states this in our UCC Constitution and other foundational documents.

I really do think that some of our historic creeds, confessions, and catechisms have some real gems of faith expression in them. I've been at a worship service where I've cried (in a good way) through saying the Apostles' Creed, and specifically the third section: "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." I'm sure entire books could be written (probably have been written) on all the wonderful things about God and about us that are implied in and connected to those 27 words.

Now certainly there is much in the historic confessions that I would certainly not say, or at least not say in the same way, today. In particular, I don't tend to agree with the Reformation-period Reformed confessions' tendency toward a penal substitutionary atonment theory or their extremely high view of God's providence. But those caveats don't negate the riches in them.

Anyway, over a few posts, I want to share what I think are some of the greatest 'gems' in the catechisms and other confessions of our UCC heritage. Today I begin with the Heidelberg Catechism--the primary confession from our German Reformed heritage, although it is interesting to note that an earlier version of Heidelberg (similar to, but not the same as, the version we know now) was originally intended as an attempt at a confession that both the Reformed and the Lutheran sides of the Reformation could agree to.

1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. ...

Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.

This opening question of Heidelberg may be (in my opinion, of course) the greatest gem in all the confessional writings.

21. What is true faith?
True faith is
not only a knowledge and conviction
that everything God reveals in his Word is true;
it is also a deep-rooted assurance,
created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel,
that, out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ,
not only others, but I too,
have had my sins forgiven,
have been made forever right with God,
and have been granted salvation.

I really like this question for a couple reasons:

a) "True faith ... is also a deep-rooted assurance, created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel": the affirmation that even faith itself is not something we do or achieve, but is what God does in us, but also the movement of faith out of the realm of "knowledge and conviction" to "deep-rooted assurance"--the same move from faith as 'intellectual assent' or 'believe' more toward 'trust' that many of us in the late 20th- and early 21st- century are trying to advocate for, away from the excesses of rationalistic Enlightenment thinking;

b) the way it phrases "that not only others, but I too, have had...": it's so fascinating and yet so poignant how it takes for granted that I understand that others have been forgiven, made right, etc., and that the challenge, the thing that I need to come to grasp is that "I too" have these things; truly I think there is definitely truth in the way it turns that phrase--plenty of people today bear the weight of believing that others are the holy ones while they themselves can't be good enough. O sister, O brother, not only others, but you too, have had your sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation. Can it get anymore Gospel than that?

32. But why are you called a Christian?
Because by faith I am a member of Christ
and so I share in his anointing.
I am anointed
to confess his name,
to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks,
to strive with a good conscience against sin and the devil
in this life, and afterward
to reign with Christ over all creation
for all eternity.

I'm not sure I have much to say on this one; it's content seems self-evident.

44. Why does the creed add, "He descended to hell?"
To assure me in times of personal crisis and temptation
that Christ my Lord,
by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul,
especially on the cross but also earlier,
has delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell.

Part of my own 'high' Christology is that God God's-self experienced the entirety of human experience, including the absolute depths of human pain and suffering, and so stands in complete solidarity with us through all. Perhaps Heidelberg doesn't completely capture that with this question, but it at least gets at some of it.

49. How does Christ's ascension to heaven benefit us?
First, he pleads our cause in heaven
in the presence of his Father.
Second, we have our own flesh in heaven—
a guarantee that Christ our head,
will take us, his members,
to himself in heaven. ...

This sort of goes along with the previous one (44), particularly the 'second' benefit.

52. How does Christ's return "to judge the living and the dead" comfort you?
In all my distress and persecution
I turn my eyes to the heavens
and confidently await as judge the very One
who has already stood trial in my place before God
and so has removed the whole curse from me.

Now, I don't necessarily identify with the substitutionary atonement implied in this question, but I like the way it points to that wonderful passage from Romans 8 (here with my own interpolation): "Who is to condemn? It is [only] Christ Jesus, who [already] died [for us], yes, who [already] was raised [for us], who is [already] at the right hand of God [for us], who indeed [already] intercedes for us."

81. Who are to come to the Lord's table?
Those who are displeased with themselves
because of their sins,
but who nevertheless trust
that their sins are pardoned
and that their continuing weakness is covered
by the suffering and death of Christ,
and who also desire more and more
to strengthen their faith
and to lead a better life. ...

This is not the feast for the perfect, but for the sinner!

95. What is idolatry?
Idolatry is
having or inventing something in which one trusts
in place of or alongside of the only true God,
who has revealed himself in his Word.

Oh how this is not any less of a danger today, even if our choices of what to 'have' or 'invent' are different!

105 - 107. What is God's will for you in the sixth commandment?
I am not to belittle, insult, hate, or kill my neighbor—
not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture,
and certainly not by actual deeds—
and I am not to be party to this in others;
rather, I am to put away all desire for revenge. ...

Does this commandment refer only to killing?
By forbidding murder God teaches us
that he hates the root of murder:
envy, hatred, anger, vindictiveness.
In God's sight all such are murder.

Is it enough then that we do not kill our neighbor in any such way?
No.
By condemning envy, hatred, and anger
God tells us
to love our neighbors as ourselves,
to be patient, peace-loving, gentle,
merciful, and friendly to them,
to protect them from harm as much as we can,
and to do good even to our enemies.

Hmm... perhaps a much needed corrective on our attitudes toward others, not only individually, but as a society or nation.

110. What does God forbid in the eighth commandment?
He forbids not only outright theft and robbery,
punishable by law.
But in God's sight theft also includes
cheating and swindling our neighbor
by schemes made to appear legitimate,
such as:
inaccurate measurements of weight, size, or volume;
fraudulent merchandising;
counterfeit money;
excessive interest;
or any other means forbidden by God.
In addition he forbids all greed
and pointless squandering of his gifts.

Hmm... I'm thinking of credit card interest and oil-industry profits!

Sermon: "Sacred Conversation" - Trinity Sunday - May 18, 2008

2008-05-18T11:38:00.007-06:00

Ok, I know I haven't put a sermon up here in a while, but given this whole "Sacred Conversation on Race" thing, I thought I'd put today's sermon up--I guess to enter the blog-o-sphere conversation.

Sermon: “Sacred Conversation”

A 'Sermon' for Holy Trinity Sunday, Year A

Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20

By The Rev. Matthew Emery

Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois

May 18, 2008

I’m guessing that you’ve noticed, as I’ve pulled out a chair to sit down here on the floor level with you all, that I’m choosing not to occupy the traditional place of preaching here this morning. Well, what I’ve set out to do here today is not a traditional ‘sermon’ as such.

The national setting of our church, the United Church of Christ, together with the folks at the National Council of Churches, which represents 35 denominations across the spectrum of mainline Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and historically African American churches, they have invited us to use this Sunday to begin what they call a “Sacred Conversation on Race”.

This comes out of some of the controversy over the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, but really it’s larger than that. This isn’t about Dr. Wright, it isn’t about Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton or John McCain, either). This is about realities we face in this country and conversations we too often shy away from.

I want to emphasize a couple things:

First, I said begin a sacred conversation—what I have to say today is not the end-all, be-all on the matter. I hope, as does the UCC and the National Council of Churches, that what happens today is just the beginning of us together addressing these issues of race and racism.

Second, this is supposed to be a conversation—sure, I will have plenty to say to you myself this morning, but you have voices and views too, and together we have views and voices to share in dialogue with people in other churches and in no church. We all must come to the table with what we bring.

And thirdly, this will hopefully be a sacred conversation—a conversation that is born out of mutual respect for one another; a conversation that takes seriously that all of us, with our gifts and our brokenness, were created in God’s own image; a conversation where we bring our own views, yes, but also one where we try to listen for God’s views, for the voice that God is still speaking amidst our lives; and a conversation where we seek out what our calling—our vocation, our job—might be in response to what happens.

All right—so, were does a sacred conversation on race and racism begin? Well, I’m inclined to think that such a conversation has to begin with truth-telling, authentic truth-telling, and first, authentic truth-telling about ourselves. I don’t think we can come to something like this simply by stating our views about concepts in abstract. And I really don’t think we can come with just our feelings about other people. We gotta start with ourselves, our real selves and our experiences—both the good and the bad. So that’s where I’m going to begin—I want to model the work of truth-telling about ourselves by being vulnerable and open with you about experiences.my own

To begin with this truth-telling about myself, I might start by saying that I want to be on what most people would consider the ‘good’ side of things. I want to not be racist and I want to believe that I am not racist. Going further, though, I want to be an ally to people of color, be they Black or Latino or Arab or Asian. I want a person of color to know not only that I don’t have prejudices against them and that the communities that I am a part of would welcome them, but that I want to be an advocate on their side.

But, you know, if I were to just leave you there, that wouldn’t be truth-telling. The truth is that it just ain’t that easy, folks. These things I’ve said may be what I want, but to borrow some words from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans “For I do not do the good I want, [and] the evil I do not want is what I do.”

The truth is, no matter how much I hate racism and want to be an ally to people of color, I still catch myself thinking things and doing things that reflect the ever-so-subtle prejudices in our society. For instance, I know that I have caught myself—not all the time, but occasionally—locking my car doors when driving through a poor black neighborhood. And I can ask myself, ‘now would I have just done that if this were just as poor a neighborhood that was mostly white?’ And the answer, quite frankly, I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not.

Or, as another example, when I’m getting out of my car here at the church and I see someone walking toward me that looks a bit disheveled or poor, maybe seeming like they’re drunk or on drugs—does the question ‘are they going to ask me for money?’ come quicker to my mind if that person is Black or Latino than if they are white? I don’t know; sometimes probably yes. And I hate that—working here at the church, I of all people know that we get just as many white people in here asking for money as black or Latino—and yet I know I still every once in a while have those thoughts, and I hate that. I hate that about myself, and I hate what our society has done to me that causes that.

I want to widen my truth-telling, though, beyond these more obvious things. In some ways, those were the easy things to see. What’s a lot harder to get at is how as a white person I bring certain assumptions to things that come out of what’s called “white privilege”—the things those of us who are white can assume and count on that, for the most part, people of color just can’t take as givens. First I want to do so by way of a story of an experience I had while I was in seminary.

My second year in seminary, I was part of a program that had 15 of us seminary students working part time in one of three different UCC churches in Chicago—a fairly poor black church, a sort of economically-in-the-middle Puerto Rican church, and a fairly affluent white church. I myself was working at the Puerto Rican church. As part of this program, the 15 of us students also took half of our academic coursework together, drawing on what was going on with our work in these three churches as part of our ‘source material’ for the classes.

Oh, and I need to point out that of our group of 15 students, 4 of us were white, 1 of us was an international student from the Philippines, and the other 10 of us—fully 2/3s of the class—were black.

One of the classes we did together was called “The Bible and Economic Ethics” and early on in the semester, our professors—who were both white, I should add—had asked us to read a book titled What are they saying about Scripture and Ethics? The class day came for us to discuss the book, and for the first 45 minutes or so of the 3-hour class, we had a good discussion on what was presented in the book, but something seemed a little odd that morning, almost like there was an ‘elephant in the room’, so to speak. Really, that whole time, it had only been the professors and the 4 white students and the Philippino student talking. Finally, one of my African American classmates had the courage to speak out and name the ‘elephant in the room’, and over the remaining 2 hours of class many of us had our eyes widely opened to a new reality.

You see, in the book we were discussing, in one of the chapters the author talked about how a field called “liberation theology” had affected the conversation around scripture and ethics. Liberation theology, which came into serious view starting in the late 1960s, is a way of talking about theology and ethics that starts from the assertion that God is on the side of the poor and marginalized and oppressed. There are different kinds of liberation theology, drawing on the experiences of different groups of poor or marginalized or oppressed people—there’s Latin American liberation theology, black liberation theology, Asian liberation theology, feminist liberation theology, and even lately gay liberation theology. Really though, the two kinds that are recognized for starting the whole liberation theology movement in the late 60s were Black liberation theology and Latin American liberation theology.

Anyway, in this chapter about liberation theology, the author mentioned these two roots—Latin American and Black—and then went on to basically dismiss Black liberation theology as not as interesting or fruitful for his exploration and pretty much never talked about it again. My black classmates couldn’t believe their eyes. In that class, they told us that for many of them, this was the first time in their lives that they were in a serious academic setting where they as African Americans were in the majority—remember, they made up fully 2/3s of our class—and yet, yet again they had been asked by white professors to study something that dismissed their experience, one of their most prominent theological traditions. The white people got to set the agenda yet again--and these are liberal, progressive, social-justice minded people at a UCC seminary, and still this kind of thing happened. And we white students just played along—we didn’t question it; we had to wait for them to bring up the issue. As I remember, one of us white students—it may have even been me—asked why someone didn’t speak up earlier. But you see, as they then pointed out, as a white person, and especially as a white male, I have been enculturated to believe that of course I should speak up, and of course I’ll be listened to when I do. Black people, women, people with disabilities don’t have that luxury. Too often, and sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, they are told to keep quiet, and when they don’t, too often they aren’t listened to.

This whole story is just one piece, one example, of what white privilege can mean. As a white person, if I’m in a store somewhere and I get treated poorly by the clerk, I almost never have to ask myself the question of whether they treated me that way because of my race. A Black woman or a Latino man faces that gnawing question in the back of their mind every time. Sure, the clerk may have very well been a jerk who treats everyone badly. But they don’t know that. And it’s those sorts of back-of-your-mind questions that can eat away at your soul.

So, I’ve done a little bit of truth-telling about myself, but to tell the truth about myself also includes the groups and communities that I’m part of—which includes this congregation and this city of Rockford. Together, we too have some good things to say. I’ve mentioned before, but I think this congregation is to be commended for taking the risk a few years ago to build the activity center, and to invite in the kids of this neighborhood—who for the most part do not look like us.

But to tell the harder truths, we also have to admit that we can be very quick to judge when something goes a little bit wrong. Like when the window by the parking lot got broken in to. Like when we wonder why some of the parents aren’t more involved, when in reality some of them are single parents working two or three jobs just to stay afloat—and, I know, not all of them, some of them do have issues with drugs or alcohol and the like, and I’m not giving them a pass. But gosh, we can be awfully quick to judge. Like when we criticize for things maybe not being kept quite as tidy or clean as we’d like—even though our community of Rockford doesn’t exactly set any good expectations, when we let the streets and infrastructure of downtown and the West and South sides decay and crumble while we spend plenty of money building streets for subdivisions of expensive houses out on the far East side—we’re not exactly keeping their places tidy either. And even in the sentence I’ve just said, I’ve fallen into a tendency that we sometimes get caught in here, of talking about “us” and “them”. Many of us, and I’m not excluding myself here, sometimes get caught talking about how we do so much for ‘them’, the neighborhood kids, and not enough for <quote> “our” kids—forgetting that when we decided to stay downtown after the ’79 fire, we were making the decision that the ‘neighborhood kids’ are ‘our’ kids.

Ok, so I know I’ve spent quite a bit of time here talking about some of the harder truths about myself and about us together when it comes to race and racism. I guess if I can get across nothing else today, I want to say that this stuff is hard. There aren’t any easy answers. We can’t just say something that will erase 400 years of history. We can’t just imagine that ‘not being racist’ changes the inequalities that creep around the shadows of our society, like the reality of white privilege and decades of educational and economic inequalities. Myself, I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and never again occasionally have those thoughts in my mind about the disheveled guy walking up to me in the church parking lot.

Where is there hope? Where is there hope? Well I have to say, from my experiences in seminary in particular, that there may be few other things that I find myself turning to God about than this one, throwing myself on God’s throne of mercy, pleading for the Holy Spirit to come and work within me and within all of us. The story I told about that book in my seminary class, that was definitely not the only time our group had conflict that involved race that year. Voices got raised. Tears were cried. And yet somehow in the end, we still managed to be in community with one another, to care for one another. Looking back on those times, I have no explanation of how we were able to do it, other than by God’s providence and Christ’s grace and the Spirit’s power.

Really, I shouldn’t be surprised by that. When it comes right down to it, this has a whole lot to do with what the Holy Trinity is all about. I can’t explain the Trinity, and I’m not going to try, but what I do know is that by speaking of God as Trinity, we’re recognizing that community—and not just community, but community with both diversity and unity at the same time—this is inherent, central, to God’s being. And if we all are created in the image of God, as our Genesis story proclaims, then this sort of community is inherent to us too as humans. In the ‘Creator – Redeemer – Sustainer’ community, in the ‘Father – Son – Spirit’ community, in the ‘Compassionate Mother - Beloved Child - Life-giving Womb’ community, we have a glimpse of a true diversity community and we have the promise this possibility is in us, too. The creation story is all about God bringing order out of chaos, and in continuing to engage in truth-telling and join with others in sacred conversation, we join with God in bringing order and beauty into the chaos of this world. We join with God in creating the sort of community that indeed is God. And so, may almighty God, the blessed and holy Trinity, pour out power and grace and mercy upon us for the work set before us.

Daily Journal - April 16

2008-04-16T07:57:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Jeremiah 23:1-8
Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. (vs. 1-4)

Other readings:
Matthew 20:17-28 (Jesus came to serve) and Psalm 100 (We are the sheep of God's pasture)

Hymn: "Gather Us In" by Marty Haugen
Prayer: O God, we confess that religion can be divisive and leaders more contentious than compassionate. Banish fear, engender healing, and restore trust to those who have been damaged by religious manipulation.

Reflection
It is so interesting that this reading from Jeremiah would come up in the daily lectionary this week, given how well it connects in with something that has happened this week here in my congregation.

My sermon this past Sunday, which I will post at some point, was titled "Gatekeeping". I worked off of Jesus' statement in the John 10:1-11 reading that "I am the gate". I said that, if Jesus is the gate, then perhaps that means that we, the Church, are the gatekeepers. I played that two different ways: first that, in fact, we have all too often made ourselves into gatekeepers trying to slam the doors shut, keeping people from an experience of God, from entering into the realm that Jesus opens. But then, also, even as we repent of that kind of gatekeeping, perhaps we are being invited, called, into another kind of gatekeeping, into being the kind of gatekeepers that see someone coming down the road and call out to them, 'hey, let me hold this door open for you.' Perhaps 'usher' is an image we better connect with this than gatekeeper, but either way, we the Church are supposed to be the ones inviting people to enter through the Jesus gate.

In talking about being this kind of welcoming, ushering sort of gatekeeper, about being an "open-gate community", I mentioned that we in the United Church of Christ have been at the forefront of opening the gates of the church to gay and lesbian people, who for too long have had to deal with far too many of that 'other' kind of gatekeeping Christians (the gate-closing ones). I later received an email from a individual for whom this past Sunday was their second time visiting our congregation, and they wrote to thank me for my sermon, because they had been waiting 35 years to come to a church where they were welcome.

So, thanks be to God, that I have the privilege of being among those of whom Jeremiah says "I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them," at least in as much as I get to be so and do so for anyone who walks through the doors of this community and finds welcome. And thanks be to God that people do indeed find a home and a place to journey with God, that "they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed". And long we still await that day when "nor shall any be missing", because indeed, we know that many, many folks have still not found that place where the gatekeepers are doing their real jobs, the hold-the-door-open, welcoming-in, ushering job.

Oh, and I just love Marty Haugen's "Gather Us In":

Here in this place the new light is streaming, now is the darkness vanished away; see in this space our fears and our dreamings brought here to you in the light of this day. Gather us in, the lost and forsaken, gather us in, the blind and the lame; call to us now, and we shall awaken, we shall arise at the sound of our name.

We are the young, our lives are a mystery, we are the old who yearn for your face; we have been sung throughout all of history, called to be light to the whole human race. Gather us in, the rich and the haughty, gather us in, the proud and the strong; give us a heart, so meek and so lowly, give us the courage to enter the song.

Here we will take the wine and the water, here we will take the bread of new birth, here you shall call your sons and your daughters, call us anew to be salt for the earth. Give us to drink the wine of compassion, give us to eat the bread that is you; nourish us well, and teach us to fashion lives that are holy and hearts that are true.

Not in the dark of buildings confining, not in some heaven light years away--hear in this place the new light is shining, now is the kingdom, and now is the day. Gather us in and hold us forever, gather us in and make us your own; gather us in, all peoples together, fire of love in our flesh and our bone.

(Marty Haugen, copyright (c)1982 GIA Publications, Inc.)

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

My Book Library

2008-03-26T16:48:00.001-06:00

You may have noticed not too long ago the appearance of the "Random Books from my library" section in the right-hand column on this page.

I'm using this pretty cool site called LibraryThing to catalog my library of books. I'm still working my way through, probably only a little over half-way done (certainly not yet to 2/3rds).

You can see my whole library at:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/emerymat
and my LibraryThing profile at:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/emerymat

Check it out!

Daily Journal: February 21st

2008-02-21T10:15:00.002-06:00

Today's Reading: Psalm 95
O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed. (vs. 1-5)

Other readings:
Exodus 16:1-8 (Israel complains of hunger in the wilderness) and Colossians 1:15-23 (Christ, the reconciliation of all things)

Hymn: "Let All Things Now Living"
Prayer: Creating God, give us eyes this day to see the wonder of what you have made. Help us to appreciate this awesome beauty in everything that lives and breathes and moves around us.

Reflection

Giving thanks to God for creation is perhaps a little bit difficult this time of year in the upper Midwest, as we are in that point of the winter when we are all very sick of cold and ice and snow, and yet we know that spring is still a bit too far off. This winter here in Rockford, when we're not suffering through single-digit or even sub-zero temperatures, we're getting overly-generous amounts of snow (or occasionally ice, even) dumped upon us.

But alas, it is still a creation that supports and sustains all life, include our own, and for that we are thankful to God. Perhaps in our complaining about this year's winter weather, we are inching ever too close to the whining Israelites in the wilderness that we find in the Exodus reading given for today.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

On Bible Versions/Translations

2008-02-20T11:53:00.004-06:00

So I have been a die-hard fan of the NRSV for as long as I can remember. (For those who might read this that don't know what NRSV stands for, it is the "New Revised Standard Version" translation of the Bible.) I think this is probably reflective of the fact that I have been a "mainliner" my whole life--the NRSV is by far the preferred translation among clergy, publications, scholars, and other resources in most mainline Protestant denominations. It's one of the few recent English translations whose translation committee was not dominated by evangelicals. (Other notable exceptions would be the New Jerusalem Bible, which is Roman Catholic, and the Revised English Bible, which is British--and these are both translations I appreciate as well, especially the REB.)

In the last year or so, though, as I've been doing a lot more work with high school youth and 8th-grade confirmation students, I've been finding that the reading level of the NRSV is simply too complicated for many of my youth. Now, it is the case that some of my high schoolers struggle some with reading, but I think the NRSV may be a bit challenging for most high schoolers, particularly the 8th, 9th, and 10th grade levels.

So, I've been exploring the idea of finding an easier-to-read translation and getting a new set of Bibles for our youth room and confirmation classroom. This has been perplexing, as there aren't great options. Do I forsake much of biblical language and poetry and go with an overly-simplistic translation like the CEV? Do I go with one of the evangelical translations that clearly has theological biases--some even come right out and state their theological biases in their forwards, like the "Holman Christian Standard Bible"? I definitely don't want to go with a complete paraphrase like The Message, or even the almost-complete paraphrased New Living Translation. What to do, what to do...

Well, in the midst of all this, I came across this brand new audio Bible called "Inspired by... The Bible Experience". Check out the website: http://www.zondervan.com/tbe This audio Bible is a really high quality production, and its reading is really engaging. I thought, 'hey, maybe this is an answer, to utilize something like this so as to not challenge their reading abilities so much, but also to add the really engaging presentation it offers.

So, this new audio Bible uses the text of the TNIV, the Today's New International Version. For those who don't know, this is a recent revision of the practically-ubiquitous NIV translation that was released in 1979. In part because of the marketing power of Zondervan, the NIV has become the most widely-available and most-purchased English translation out there. I've kinda had a bias against the NIV for a long time. Part of this is because I preferred the language of the NRSV, and I resented how dominant the NIV has become while the NRSV has to practically fight its way to get one or two copies onto a bookseller's shelf. The NRSV is probably a more 'accurate' translation than the NIV. And, the NRSV was a more inclusive-language translation.

This new revision, though, the TNIV has addressed much of the inclusive language issue that you find with the NIV. There are some places where they've fixed some things to be more 'accurate'. And, given that this TNIV seems to be quite a bit easier of a reading level than the NRSV in many places, it's actually fairly amazing how much of a 'traditional' biblical-language sound it still manages to maintain. Now, I am still conscious of the fact that this is primarily an evangelical translation, although the committee at least is truly interdenominational, spanning all of the different denominational/theological traditions. I will still probably find myself 'watching' things in comparison to the NRSV, but I think I'm actually coming to like this TNIV.

So, Monday I went ahead and purchased this audio bible I'm talking about, along with a print TNIV that goes along with it (it has references at the top of each page to which CD and Track numbers to go to). Having surveyed everything for the past couple of days, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go ahead and get some of these TNIVs for our youth room and confirmation classroom. It was time for new Bibles there anyway, as we had some paper-back NRSVs that are practically falling apart, and the rest were old RSVs!

Daily Journal: February 20th

2008-02-20T11:34:00.002-06:00

Ok, so sorry again for the long delay. I have been partaking of the daily Lent devotional emails from http://www.uccvitality.org/ which have been pretty good, and also based on the RCL Daily Lectionary.

Today's Reading: John 7:53-8:11
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ (8:3-7)

Other readings:
Ezekiel 36:22-32 (God will renew the people) and Psalm 128 (God promises life)

Hymn: "Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling"
Prayer: Forgiving God, how is it that we are so ready to condemn others even when we are obviously convicted of wrongful behavior ourselves? Help us to refrain from questioning your mercy and imposing our own moral judgments on the lives of others.

Reflection
First, and this isn't a reflection so much, but I think it is interesting to note simply that this story, the famous "let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone" story, is considered by most scholars to not have been an original part of the Gospel of John. The footnotes in many Bibles indicate that many ancient sources lack the passage, some have the passage at this location, and some have this passage at other locations, such as following John 7:36, John 21:25 (which is simply after the end of the gospel), or even after Luke 21:38. It's clearly a well-known and, for the most part, well-liked story; I'm not sure what to make of this detail of textual criticism, or whether it is even important to 'make' anything of it.
I think the lesson/teaching we get from this story is an important one. Even for me, as one who is not often caught up in trying to make judgments of personal morality against other people, certainly this story may have something to say to me when I find myself too easily criticizing the efforts or work of another.
In the UCC's email Lent devotional today, David Powers offers a very poignant question, I think: "But Jesus simply bent down and wrote with his finger in the dust. Was he stalling for time as he considered what to do? Or was he offering a moment of grace by doing and saying nothing?" This is an important word to hear for those of us, myself often included, who can get caught in the addiction to the need to "do something".

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 31st

2008-01-31T16:25:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Psalm 2
I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to me, ‘You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
with trembling kiss his feet,
or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way;
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
(vs. 7-12)

Other readings:
Exodus 6:2-9 (God promises deliverance through Moses) and Hebrews 8:1-7 (Christ, the mediator

Hymn: "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus"
Prayer: Almighty God, creator and ruler of the universe, the powers and divisions of this world melt away before your glory. We humbly thank you for calling us your children and showing us that nothing can separate us from your love.

Reflection
There's a double-play with psalm language like this, "[The Lord] said to me, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you.'" We can read this as though it refers to Christ--which is I suspect the reading implied by the lectionary gurus, with this being the Psalm specified for the Transfiguration, when Jesus' status as God's beloved son is again proclaimed by the voice from heaven. This sort of 'christological' reading of the Psalms is more typical of the Lutheran tradition than it is of the Reformed. Then, on the other hand, we can read the psalm as though we ourselves are speaking/praying this language. 'I, Matt, will tell the decree of God: God said to me, "You, Matt, are my child, today I have begotten you.'
I think there can be a danger in tending too hard one way or the other on this. To empower people to pray the psalms as their own, this can be a great and gospel-bearing thing. On the other hand, it can be too easy to always claim God's blessing for ourselves (see, for instance, that whole 'Prayer of Jabez' hooey). Of course, if we open up all the Psalms in our voice, then there is great diversity--sometimes we are the blessed ones, and sometimes we are in the pit.
The message that we are God's beloved children, it can be disheartening to think about still how many people in our world need to hear that simple gospel message. And, in large part, this is because of the way that Christians have distorted the gospel over the years. I'm not even just focusing on conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist types here. For a good part of the 20th-century, even the liberal mainline churches turned the central message of Christianity into moralism. You were a good Christian if you were a good citizen, a "good" person. I'm sorry, but I thought the central message of Christianity--the reason it's good news--was about God's grace, and what God did through the cross, and God incorporating us into Christ, and all that. Not so much about us and how good we can be. And I don't care if your form of works righteousness is that of the fundamentalists (the conservative moralisms against sexuality, drinking, swearing, etc.), that of the old liberal mainline (being a good upstanding citizen and a good person), or that of the social justice / progressive style liberals (working for justice, not buying things from unfair labor or from eco-insensitive production, etc.). All three forms are still works righteousness, if you've come to think any of it is a measure of how 'good' a Christian you are. There are days when I think conservatives and liberals alike need Martin Luther to come nail some theses on their doors.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 29th

2008-01-29T16:21:00.000-06:00

So, I'm doing really well with this daily thing, aren't I?

Today's Reading: Philippians 2:12-18
Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Do all things without murmuring and arguing, so that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the world. It is by your holding fast to the word of life that I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain or labour in vain. But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you— and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me.

Other readings:
Judges 7:12-22 (God leads Gideon to victory) and Psalm 27:7-14 (Take courage in God)

Hymn: "Rejoice in God's Saints"
Prayer: Father of light, through the ages your prophets, saints, and martyrs have taught us by their lives of dedication. Shine through us, too, that we may make a difference in the lives of others, encouraging them in your word.

Reflection

The line in the Prayer, "Shine through us, too, that we may make a difference in the lives of others, encouraging them in your word" strikes me today. Probably because we did our annual "Snow Camp" winter retreat weekend with the middle- and high-school youth this weekend, and I do hope that indeed these things make a difference. Actually, I feel pretty good about this one that it in fact did.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 21

2008-01-21T13:19:00.000-06:00

My apologies folks for my week or so hiatus.

Today's Reading: Psalm 40:6-17

Sacrifice and offering you do not desire,
but you have given me an open ear.
Burnt-offering and sin-offering
you have not required.
Then I said, ‘Here I am;
in the scroll of the book it is written of me.
I delight to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart.’

I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
see, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your saving help within my heart,
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.

Do not, O Lord, withhold
your mercy from me;
let your steadfast love and your faithfulness
keep me safe for ever.
For evils have encompassed me
without number;
my iniquities have overtaken me,
until I cannot see;
they are more than the hairs of my head,
and my heart fails me.

Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me;
O Lord, make haste to help me.
Let all those be put to shame and confusion
who seek to snatch away my life;
let those be turned back and brought to dishonor
who desire my hurt.
Let those be appalled because of their shame
who say to me, ‘Aha, Aha!’

But may all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you;
may those who love your salvation
say continually, ‘Great is the Lord!’
As for me, I am poor and needy,
but the Lord takes thought for me.
You are my help and my deliverer;
do not delay, O my God.

(The italicised part is the section offered in Bread for the Day)

Other readings:
Exodus 12:1-13, 21-28 (The passover lamb) and Acts 8:26-40 (Philip teaches about the lamb)

Hymn: "Lord of Glory, You Have Bought Us" by Eliza S. Alderson (1818-1889)
Prayer: Life-giving God, when we consider the sacrifice you have made to bring us back to you, the reality brings us to our knees. How can you love us this much? You have redeemed us, and we are truly yours forever.

Reflection

I'm finding myself without a lot to say today, which seems to happen more often when the reading for the day is the Psalm reading. Hmm... probably something to think about there.

Today's selection of readings, the psalm featured above and also the additional readings listed, are supposed to be in some way a 'reflection' back on this past Sunday's (yesterday's) readings--particularly the gospel reading from John. I preached yesterday--I should be able to put the sermon up tomorrow--and I was interested in how most of the folks reflecting/commenting on the John passage seemed to weigh in much more heavily on one half of it or the other: either the first half, where the emphasis is the title of Jesus as "Lamb of God" (this being the only place in the Bible where that language is used so directly), or on the second half of it, where it would seem the emphasis is on the disciple's question "Where are you staying?" (actually more like "Where do you abide?") and Jesus' invitation-as-response "Come and see." I myself was guilty of this in my sermon, as I pretty much didn't address the whole Lamb of God issue at all, other than exploring the action dynamics of John yelling things every time Jesus comes near (you can see what I mean when I get the sermon up here). As much as I am one within the UCC who thinks that UCCers are far too hesitant to deal with issues of Christology, and generally speaking tend to have far too low of a Christology, in this case, given the two possible emphases here, even I am inclined to think that in today's context, the issue of where Jesus 'abides' (a more accurate translation of what we read as 'staying') and the gospel news of Jesus' invitation to "Come and see" are probably more important that christological titles. Although perhaps this is because I'm not entirely sure what to make of the 'Lamb of God' title, or I'm a bit hesitant around it because I worry about how one uses this language with run-of-the-mill non-theologian laypeople without descending into bad sacrificial substitutionary atonement sorts of theologizing. But, on the other hand, I still think it's important language.

But anyway, all this has been interesting because it's been pretty apparent that most of the Lutheran commentators and resources have focused on the Lamb of God part than the 'Come and see' part. (Some people will be very impressed at this point that I've found something in which I'm actually not going along with the Lutherans!)

Well, anyway, none of that was really so much about today's readings, hymn, or prayer, but oh well!

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 12th

2008-01-12T12:22:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: 1 Samuel 7:3-17
Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’ So the Philistines were subdued and did not again enter the territory of Israel; the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. The towns that the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel, from Ekron to Gath; and Israel recovered their territory from the hand of the Philistines. There was peace also between Israel and the Amorites. (Verses 12-14, as given in Bread for the Day)

Other readings:
Acts 9:19b-31 (Barnabas introduces Saul/Paul in Jerusalem) and Psalm 29 (The voice of God upon the waters)

Hymn: "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing"
Prayer: Almighty God, you grace us with strength in the midst of turbulent days, and where you are, peace abides. Grant us the wisdom to recognize your presence in others, that we may never exclude others who also call you Lord.

Reflection

Well, first of all, I guess this gives a clue finally to the ponderous lyrics at the beginning of the second verse of "Come, Thou Fount...": "Here I raise my Ebenezer: 'Hither by thy help I've come'". That would be a recasting of verse 12 in this passage, where Samuel set up a stone and named it Ebenezer, "for he said, 'Thus far the Lord has helped us.'"

The point in the text--at least as implied by the prayer of the day--is that God provided peace for the Israelites. It's a little troublesome to me, though, because when you read through the whole passage for today (I only have verses 12-14 above, following the lead of Bread for the Day), the "peace" seems to be simply that the Philistines were scared witless to attack the Israelites because "the Lord thundered with a mighty voice that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion; and they were routed before Israel. And the men of Israel went out of Mizpah and pursued the Philistines, and struck them down as far as beyond Beth-car." (v. 11) It would seem to be the sort of peace of the Cold War--not so much a "real" peace, but a peace based in the fact that either side was afraid to attack the other. Of course, 'history is always told by the victor', and I think that applies even to (perhaps especially to) biblical history, and the Deuteronomistic history in particular (1st Samuel is part of a larger section of the Bible known as the "Deuteronomistic History", extending from Joshua through the end of 2nd Kings, excluding Ruth and arguably including the book of Deuteronomy; it is so named because biblical scholars believe these history-telling books come out of the same tradition or community as the writer of Deuteronomy). So, in this case, as long as Israel is not being attacked, or not losing, from Israel's perspective there is peace.

This is perhaps the classic error in American history, and especially that chunk from the end of the Cold War until 9/11. In America during this time, the overall concern for "world peace" was, in my estimation, pretty low--we, after all, were not getting attacked and lived in little fear of being attacked. So for us there was already peace. As my own seminary Hebrew Bible professor, Dr. Ken Stone, pointed out in a Convocation address the semester after I graduated, one of the things in our present context that the Deuteronomistic history may best do is shine back a not-too-flattering reflection on our own actions (he was speaking specifically of the book of Judges, but it could apply to much of it). This is particularly true of our all-too-often desire to claim God's blessing upon our country or our actions--or at least to say that if we are not getting attacked, for instance, it is because of God's protection (and thus, if we are, that God has removed that protection). Here I share some interesting quotes from Dr. Stone's address:

[D]o those of us who are committed to fostering peace in our world need to consider the possibility that the normalization of violence in the book of Judges, a book that associates violence with both God and the people of God, has some complicated but nevertheless real relationship to the conflicts that continue to rage among branches of the Abrahamic traditions?

[O]ne way of reading difficult biblical texts is precisely to read them as a mirror. If we read Judges as a mirror, we may find in it, first of all, not an occasion for condemnation of either the text or our neighbor, but rather an occasion for critical self-reflection. That is to say, in a world of conflict, how do we, who long for justice, find ourselves acting just like these judges? Where do we see, in the book of Judges, reasons for caution about our own worst tendencies, particularly those of us who, as Christians, wish to heed Jesus’ command in Matthew 7:1-2 not to judge?

For the case of Jephthah, in particular, may suggest to us that being involved in a just cause and being used by the spirit of God are no guarantees against doing terrible and foolish things. Indeed, Jephthah’s story indicates that those involved in just causes and acting under God’s spirit are quite capable of sacrificing persons close to them while refusing to take responsibility for their own harmful acts.

I encourage you to read the whole address (follow the link above).

But that academic tangent aside, where does that leave us with the claim in today's prayer of the day, that God "grace[s] us with strength in the midst of turbulent days, and where [God is], peace abides." What kind of peace is this? A 'personal' peace? A 'real' peace? A respite from hate and violence? What are the signs of God's peace breaking into the world already?

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 11th

2008-01-11T11:18:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Acts 9:10-19a
Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, ‘Ananias.’ He answered, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The Lord said to him, ‘Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.’ But Ananias answered, ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.’ So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.
For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus,

Other readings:
1 Samuel 3:10 - 4:1a (Samuel receives the word of God at Shiloh) and Psalm 29 (The voice of God upon the waters)

Hymn: "Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound"
Prayer: O God of truth, your light will always banish darkness. Let us never be afraid to speak your word in the face of opposition, for it is your power--not ours--that will save your children, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reflection

As I think I mentioned a couple days ago, I've been reading through Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism by Martha Grace Reese. The areas of new nember welcome/inclusion and 'evangelism' are supposed to be one of the 'focus areas' of my particular position as associate pastor. It also so happens that I've been prepping for our next set of "Inquirers' Classes" or "New Member Sessions" (I recommended the former name to our Membership Board about 6 months ago or so, to encourage the idea that people should be able to come to these sessions to learn more about our congregation before they have to decide if they want to officially join).

So, it is striking to me that today's scripture reading would be given the title/tagline "Ananias receives Saul into the church". In the passage, the actual 'joining' of the church is mentioned fairly quickly: "Then he got up and was baptized". There are certainly people in my congregation who think the new member joining process should be as quick, easy, and non-involved as possible--as few 'classes' as possible, as soon after someone inquires as possible, and so forth. This applies to people being newly baptized too. I'm not casting any particular judgment on those in the congregation with this thought, as their attitude reflects what was in fact the practice here at my church for many, many years. I've been told by someone who joined maybe 15 to 20 years ago that there weren't any sessions/classes for new members when they joined.

But it may be easy to miss in this passage from Acts that Saul/Paul has most definitely had a significant, life-altering encounter with the risen Christ. Now, I don't believe anyone is probably going to have such an encounter in new member classes, regardless of how many we have or what we include. But we do believe, as Reformation Christians (this is my term that groups together the Reformed and Lutheran traditions), that God / Christ are encountered in the life, work, and witness of the gathered people of God, in the Word and Sacraments proclaimed and celebrated amidst a real-life worshiping assembly. So, I'm not sure the impulse to have people join the membership at the earliest possible moment, maybe even if they've only been here a couple times, is the best idea. And, it would seem anecdotally that we have seen some evidence in our own congregation. Due to a variety of factors, about a year ago we waited some 7 or 8 months between inquirers/membership classes. Most of the folks that joined in that class had already been attending here some 4 to 6 months, and were already becoming integrated and committed into the life of the congregation. We've seen a much higher "retention" rate (new members remaining active) with that class than with many others over the past 4 or 5 years.

The narrative of Saul's conversion together with this text makes me think about what we in the churches are doing that will lead people into a Saul-like encounter with the risen Christ. Sure, theologically we claim this can/does happen in Word and Sacrament, but practically speaking, there is a lot of what passes for mainline Protestant worship, things that look like Word and Sacrament, that do everything but provide an encounter with the Gospel and with the risen Christ. Or, for those who come to us having already had some call/encounter, can we reach out like Ananias and heal the blindness/brokenness they come with, thereby opening them up to the full life that God has called them to? Can we be the hands of healing and transformation, even if God or others have already worked the call / encounter?

Aside from reflecting on the mechanics of how we welcome new members and new Christians, though, there is something else of challenge in today's reading. Ananias complains to the Lord because he knows of "how much evil [Saul] has done to to your saints in Jerusalem". This is the last guy we should go healing! And yet God affirms that "he is an instrument whom I have chosen". We have a hard time believing that those with whom we disagree might be being used by God. Conservatives have a hard time with the claim that liberal-progressives or gay clergy or any host of others could be ones God is using. But we liberal-progressives have a hard time seeing that God might use our opponents, too. Of course, in the story, Saul undergoes a conversion, so the claim is not that God was using him as an instrument while he was still persecuting. Is the lesson not so much that God may be using our opponents, but instead that by the grace of God, the door for transformation is always open?

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 10th

2008-01-10T12:33:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Psalm 29
Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name;
worship the Lord in holy splendour.

³The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over mighty waters.
⁴The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

⁵The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
⁶He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.

⁷The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
⁸The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

⁹The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl,^*
and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’

¹⁰The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever.
¹¹May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!

Other readings:
1 Samuel 3:1-9 (Samuel, a boy, says "Here I am") and Acts 9:1-9 (Saul on the road to Damascus)

Hymn: "Before You, Lord, We Bow" by Francis Scott Key
Prayer: God, you called the young boy Samuel from his sleep, and you called Saul, the persecutor, out from his darkness--and their lives were never the same. Teach us to recognize your voice, and make us bold in following your commands.

Reflection

I'm finding myself without a lot to say in this journal today. The psalm reading, which is the psalm for this coming Sunday, was selected because of the "voice of the Lord is over the waters" phrase--it is the Baptism of Our Lord this Sunday, after all. I do love that voice upon the waters language, and I love a song by Marty Haugen that echoes it:

Wind upon the waters, voice upon the deep,
rouse your sons and daughters, wake us from our sleep,
breathing life into all flesh, breathing love into all hearts,
living wind upon the waters of my soul.

What does it mean for God's voice to be upon the waters? We as Protestants--well, us non-Lutheran, non-Anglican Protestants, anyway--have for too long domesticated, ignored, or lost faith in the sacraments. So what would it mean if we truly believed God's voice, God's word, was upon, within, amidst the waters of baptism?

It seems that the other readings for today all have the theme of hearing God's voice. In my own experience, though, the hearing of God's voice is one of those areas where Luther's (and others) 'hiddenness of God' is very applicable. When I was sensing the call to pursue seminary and ordained ministry, I definitely thought that it would be much easier of God sent emails or made phone calls, rather than trying to make me figure out why I had a knawing in my stomach and a lump in my throat whenever I thought about the issue of ministry. I think we can never actually be sure it is God's voice we're hearing, and yet we still have to act on the voice we hear, deciding whether it is God's or not. I'm sorta Bonhoeffer-ian here--in an actual instance of ethical decision-making, we can never know (or at least never be sure) what the right choice is, and yet we still must choose, and throw ourselves upon the mercy of God.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 9th

2008-01-09T10:40:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Luke 13:31-35
At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’

Other readings:
Micah 5:2-9 (One who is to rule Israel) and Psalm 72 (Prayers for the king)

Hymn: "When Twilight Comes" by Moises B. Andrade, tr. James Minchin
Prayer: God of the ages, your word is at once powerful and gentle, ancient and new. Your children pull together and tear apart, loving each other and causing each other pain. Gather us under your wing, O Lord, and renew us.

Reflection

I must confess that among my first thoughts in reading today's text has to do with the killing prophets theme and last night's results from the New Hampshire primary. Yes, I am a Barack Obama supporter, and no, not just because he's UCC (although that certainly adds to it). Up until about a month ago or so, I was sort of non-committal about the whole thing: yeah, maybe leaning toward Obama, but not all that strongly, and not with any particular dislike of Mrs. Clinton. Quite frankly, I found Obama's speech at our UCC General Synod this summer a bit disappointing. Something changed, though, in December, and I came to have a certain distaste form Mrs. Clinton's campaign and became increasingly electrified by how I perceived Obama. I really think if we want substantial change in our country, Mrs. Clinton is just too establishment for that to happen. (Now, that said, if she wins the nomination, I'll still vote for her, just not with the same fervor as I would Obama.)

Now, I want to be clear that Obama is not the messiah and Mrs. Clinton is not Herod. But I can't help feeling a certain parallel from the prophet getting killed to the potential for Obama's campaign to fail. Mrs. Clinton is not Herod in this case, rather "the system" is--the 'establishment', the American electorate that buys into fear about a potential terrorist attack and the question of whether someone like Obama would not have enough experience in that event, and all the other factors that contribute to "the system". 'Jerusalem' is the system: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!" And this is all the prophets, lest anyone think I'm reducing this all to electoral politics or trying to make Obama the prophet extraordinare (which he's not--remember, I was actually disappointed in his General Synod speech, and while I think he's the best choice, I'm not expecting any divine miracles if he gets elected).

I'm not really sure what to make of Jesus' statement that "it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem."

The 'gospel, as well as the judgment of 'the law', in this passage seems to be Jesus expressing his desire: "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under wings, and you were not willing!" How do we hold on to that promise, that Jesus wants to gather us in? How do we communicate--evangelize--that gospel message to the un-churched / potential new Christians?

Bread for the Day's suggested hymn, "When Twilight Comes" by Moises Andrade echoes the language from today's reading in it's first and second verses.

When twilight comes and the son suts, mother hen prepares for night's rest.
As her brood shelters under her wings, she gives the love of God to her nest.
Oh! what joy to feel her warm heartbeat and be near her all night long;
so the young can find repose, then renew tomorrow's song.

One day the Rabbi, Lord Jesus, called the twelve to share his last meal.
As the hen tends her young, so for them he spent himself to seek and to heal.
Oh! what joy to be with Christ Jesus, hear his voice, oh! sheer delight,
and receive his servant care: all before the coming night.
(Moises B. Andrade, tr. James Minchin, tr. ©James Minchin, admin. Asian Institute for Liturgy & Music)

For a while now, I think we in the liberal/progressive Mainline have been uncomfortable with language like "Oh! what joy to be with Christ Jesus, hear his voice, oh! sheer delight". I have often shared that discomfort. For me, the discomfort is partly a reaction to evangelicalism, and their tendency to use a lot of so-called 'personal relationship' language and 'Jaezzuss' language. But I also think this discomfort is to our detriment. Indeed, it should be good and joyful to be with Jesus, the one who loved us before we could love. Sometimes our 'head' religion has gotten in the way of the response of our hearts. Over the last few years, I have become a little more comfortable with this kind of language. It's interesting to note how some of this same more emotively connective language permeates a lot of those old 16th, 17th, and 18th century Lutheran chorales, albeit in some different kind of verbiage: "Jesus, priceless treasure, source of purest pleasure, truest friend to me: ah, how long I've panted, and my heart as fainted, thirsting, Lord, for thee!" or "Lord, thee I love with all my heart; I pray thee, ne'er from me depart; with tender mercy cheer me. Earth has no pleasure I would share, yea, heav'n itself wer void and bare if though, Lord, were not near me." I don't know if its simply been some maturing in my faith, or my exposure to this latter kind of language (again, thanks to the Lutherans!), some combination thereof, or something else entirely that has lowered my resistance to more emotive, relational faith language.

Sure, there's the danger of descending into maudlin sentimentality, but for those of us in mainline Reformed tradition churches, with our typically intellectual Theo-centric expressions, we benefit, I think, from opening ourselves a little more emotional Christo-centric language. God is relational and compassionate, after all, and we as humans are emotional, relational, and embodied beings.

O Christ Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. Help me to love you and trust in your promises. Open me, all that I am, to you. Amen.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Daily Journal: January 8th

2008-01-08T12:05:00.000-06:00

Today's Reading: Ephesians 4:7, 11-13
But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Other readings:
1 Kings 10:14-25 (Solomon's splendor) and Psalm 72 (Prayers for the king)

Hymn: Lord, You Give the Great Commission
Prayer: Sustaining Lord, you equip each of us with specific gifts for the building up of your kingdom. Grant us the wisdom to identify these gifts in ourselves and others, that your church may be empowered for service in your name. Amen.

Reflection
What an interesting juxtaposition to think about the 'gifts' for ministry we have been given right next to the story of the magi bringing their 'gifts' to the Christ child. It really is a reminder--one we need often--that all the gifts we have to bring were in fact gifts given to us first. We pastors are sometimes just as much in need of that reminder as anyone, perhaps more so. I want to think that I am capable, I am good at what I do, I am gifted. Well, indeed, I am "gifted", but not in the way we normally say that, rather I have received great gifts--everything, really--from God.

Daily lectionary readings from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, ©2005 Consultation on Common Texts. Hymn suggestions and prayer for the day from Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers, ©2007 Augsburg Fortress.

Why I want to some daily journals

2008-01-08T11:43:00.000-06:00

So, I've been reading Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism by Martha Grace Reese, and one of her strongest emphases, particularly in part two of the book, is on the critical importance of prayer--within the congregation, on the part of the pastors and evangelism leaders, and all around. This is connected to the idea the way churches operate and do evangelism is connected to a "trinity of relationships": individuals' relationships with God, relationships between church members, and relationships with people outside the church. Although she tries to describe it as a "trinity" of interdependence, it is clear from what she says that there is a certain priority to the 'relationships with God' part: stronger relationships with God will contribute to better relationships between church member, which in turn will help with relationships with people outside the church.

Importantly, she writes, "If we pastors don't talk about our lives with God, if we don't have substantial prayer lives, it is not likely that members of our churches will develop much of a spiritual life, either. If members are not afire with love for God, it is inconceivable that they will do much to share their faith."

So, I figure I'm going to try to be more intentionally disciplined in doing some sort of daily (or at least rather frequent) "devotional"/reflectional scripture reading and prayer. And, as much as I have usually been resistant to "journalling" through my school life, I figure trying to be committed to doing a regular daily blog post might actually keep me disciplined.

My 'discipline' or guide for at least a while is going to be based on the fairly new Daily Lectionary of the Revised Common Lectionary. While the Revised Common Lectionary has been out since 1992, it was only in 2005 that the Consultation on Common Texts finally released Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings. The readings for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are intended to reflect back upon Sunday's readings (esp. the gospel reading) and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday's readings are meant to be in preparation for the coming Sunday. There are two readings for each day, as well as two psalms each week (one for Mon - Wed and a different one for Thurs - Sat).

Augsburg Fortress (I love the Lutherans!) has taken this daily lectionary and prepared a devotional book called Bread for the Day 2008: Daily Bible Readings and Prayers. On each day's page, they give the text of one of the readings, list the other readings, and also provide a hymn for the day and a prayer for the day. It's really quite neat, and so I'm going to work with that.

I'll let you know the reading(s) for the day, give the hymn and prayer, and then share some reflections, prayers, or whatever comes to me to share with you. Some days my reflections might be a bit more prayerful/devotional and other days they might be a bit more intellectual/theological in nature, but indeed the intellectual can be a prayer path too.

“What Child is This?” - A Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Year A

2008-01-08T11:27:00.000-06:00

“What Child is This?”
A Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Year A

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 -- 'Let your face shine, that we may be saved.'
Romans 1:1-7 -- Called to mission by the gospel of Christ
Matthew 1:18-25 -- Joseph is told that Mary will bear a son, a savior

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
December 23, 2007

Now, I’ve titled this sermon “What Child is This?”, but something tells me that was probably not Joseph’s first question. Just because Matthew is rather brief and to the point in telling this story, that shouldn’t let us miss the real scandal and drama here.

“When Mary … had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” So, imagine yourself in Joseph’s place here. You’re engaged to this young woman, and you haven’t quote “lived together”—and now, all of a sudden, she’s quote “found to be with child”. In other words, the two of you have not had sex and yet somehow Mary’s pregnant. I myself have never been in this position, but I’m inclined to think that Joseph’s first question was probably less “what child is this” and more “who’s child is this”? I mean, if we think this situation would be a little scandalous today, how much more so in a society 2,000 years ago where not simply your relationship, but your entire honor and status as a man, could be ruined by such a turn of events.

As if life weren’t already getting complicated and strange enough for Joseph, pretty quickly—while Joseph is figuring out how to minimize the damage—this angel shows up. The angel seems to have the answer, though, to the question of whose this child is: “The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Huh? Now it seems like we’ve moved from the realm of daytime soap-opera drama into an episode of Dr. Who. The Holy Spirit? God has made her pregnant?

As Stanley Hauerwas, one of Pastor Mike’s favorite teachers, points out though, this shouldn’t be so surprising to us. If we affirm that God created the whole world, the whole universe, without needing our involvement—and we do affirm this as Christians, even if we don’t all agree on how God creates—then creating a single new baby certainly is not outside the realm of possibility. (Hauwerwas, 34)

Hauerwas goes on, though, to say to us “What should startle us, what should stun us, is not that Mary is a virgin, but that God refuses to abandon us.” (Ibid.) Like the angel speaking to Joseph in the story, Hauerwas’s observation moves us from the question of who’s this child this to who this child is. This child is God coming to us in human flesh. This squirming little embryo in Mary’s uterus is the clear statement in cells and blood, flesh and bone that ‘God refuses to abandon us.’

I will admit that I have been at the mall and in other stores a number of times recently—and, no, I’m still not entirely done with my Christmas shopping yet. Of course, in some of these places they have been playing holiday music since well before Thanksgiving. Some of these songs are, shall we say, more annoying than others. While there are many candidates to pick on, the song “A Holly, Jolly Christmas” struck me yesterday as both fairly annoying and so utterly disconnected from this story in Matthew, or really anything else biblical about Jesus’ coming. I mean, imagine this scene in a movie: Joseph finds out his supposedly-virgin fiancé is pregnant, starts making plans to break off the engagement, and then this angel shows up, saying that the child is God’s. Then maybe some other hosts of heaven show up in the background and break into song: [singing] “oh by golly have a holly, jolly Christmas this year”.

Obviously, that is not the scene Matthew paints. No, the angel shows up to tell Joseph that this child is from the Holy Spirit. And then the angel goes on, not to some maudlin, sentimental “holly jolly Christmas”, but to say not only that this is a sign, a proof, that ‘God refuses to abandon us’, but that this child will save his people from their sins. As one commentator puts it, “If Jesus is Immanuel [—God with us—] then we realize we don't have to go anywhere to meet him other than the hurly-burly reality of our Monday mornings and our Thursday afternoons. We don't have to go find him in some other realm because he has already found us in exactly this realm and this world. Immanuel is God-with-us in the cancer clinic and in the Alzheimer’s ward at the local nursing home. Immanuel is God-with-us when the pink slip comes and when the beloved child sneers, "I hate you!" Immanuel is God-with-us when you pack the Christmas decorations away and, with an aching heart, you realize afresh that your one children never did call over the holidays. Not once. Immanuel is God-with-us when your dear wife or mother stares at you with an Alzheimer's glaze and absently asks, "What was your name again?"”(Calvin CEP, n.pg.) And I say, there’s a reason these angels that appear to announce Jesus’ birth keep having to say “do not be afraid”. This is big stuff, stuff of life and death, hope and salvation, fear and redemption.

I suspect Joseph was still a bit perplexed. Perhaps he was even more confused after this angel had shown up than before. Maybe he was satisfied with this apparent answer to whose this child was. Or at least he dared to trust the angel dream enough that he didn’t follow through on his plans to dismiss Mary quietly. But, even with that, I bet he was still wondering about this other question, ‘what child is this?’ It’s like the contemporary gospel song by Mark Lowry, recorded by dozens of others, that asks of Joseph’s counterpart “Mary, did you know?”

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?
This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

Joseph and Mary may not have known all these things, but as Christians, we do know the rest of the story. We have been invited in to the whole story of Jesus the Christ, that same gospel of God that Paul wrote about to the Romans: God’s promises through the prophets, Jesus’s as truly human as a son of David and truly God as shown in his resurrection, the gifts of grace and discipleship that is offered to each of us and all of us as we people called to belong to Christ. We get to follow one who gave sight to the blind and water to the thirsty. We get to know the inside scoop on the One who came that we may have life, the One who came—and still comes—to save us from our sin. We hear the psalmist cry to God “let your face shine upon us and we shall be saved” , and then we get to give our witness, our testimony, back in response, “we have seen his glory … full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Indeed, we do get to know the rest of the story. We do get to bear witness to the world to something more, something life-giving, something about what child this is that we celebrate. Knowing the story, we trust in the One who welcomed the outcast and advocated for the poor. Knowing the story, we have the privilege of being the ones who long for and await Christ’s coming again, the ones who have hope in the promise that God’s reign is in fact coming to transform and renew this world.

And yet, even we ourselves are invited to learn the story ever and ever again. We are called to be one standing with Joseph asking ‘what child is this?’. Even knowing the story, we can join in yet another Christmas song—we are still the voice that sings:

(singing)I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, did come for to die:
for poor ord’n’ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

Citations: [1] Stanley Hauwerwas, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006). [2] From the comments on Advent 4A, 23 December 2007, on the “Center for Excellence in Preaching” website of Calvin Theological Seminary: http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/index.php; accessed 22 December 2007.

"Christ the King?" - A Sermon for the Christ the King (OT 34), Year C

2008-01-08T11:16:00.001-06:00

“Christ the King?”
A Sermon for the Christ the King / 34th Sun. in Ordinary Time, Yr C

Jeremiah 23:1-6--Coming of the shepherd and righteous Branch who will execute justice
Luke 23:33-43--Jesus is crucified between two thieves: you will be with me in paradise

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
November 25, 2007

I hope that I am not the only one here who has figured out that today is filled with more than just a little irony. Irony—something unexpected or, more precisely, something exactly opposite what we expect. First of all, the turkeys have been eaten and the stores have been filled with their “Black Friday” shoppers, and yet it is not Advent yet. Only those few years when Thanksgiving is not the last Thursday in November does this happen. Rather, instead of being the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new year in the church’s calendar, we are today at the culmination the year, Christ the King Sunday. Each year we journey through Jesus Christ’s birth, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, and here at the end of it all, we celebrate that Christ reigns with God over all creation. As the cycle begins anew next Sunday, we will remember our longings for Christ to come again as we move toward remembering his first coming at Christmas.

The fact that today is Christ the King, or Reign of Christ, Sunday instead of the beginning of Advent is really only a little piece of today’s irony, though. It strikes me as far more unexpected that on a day titled Christ the King, we would find ourselves amongst the crowds at the place called The Skull, standing at the foot of the cross. I don’t think we’ll find too many royal history books that will commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s reign by picturing her on her deathbed. So I think this image of Christ the King as the tortured and almost dead Jesus hanging between criminals on the instrument of the Empire’s oppression is rather ironic, to say the least.

But, of course, hearing the story of the crucifixion today is not the only irony. The crucifixion itself is ironic. It is foolishness and a stumbling block wrote the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church. The leader of the movement just isn’t supposed to get killed. And more, even, the body hanging on that cross is the one we believe and proclaim to be God in the flesh, and what kind of God goes through that whole mess?

The scene as Luke tells it is filled with all kinds of signs and words of royalty, but all of them too are given in irony. Perched on his central high throne, Jesus has companions seated at his right hand and his left. The plaque above his head proclaims his title, “the King of the Jews.” Luke makes no mention of a crown of thorns, but earlier in the story, Herod’s soldiers had given Jesus an elegant robe as they mocked him and led him away.

The royal figures in the story—or, well, the ones with king-like power—they too are victims of the irony of the situation. Caiaphas, the recognized leader of the Jewish people, the chief-est of chief priests, he probably didn’t like being occupied by the forces of Rome much more than anyone else, but the price of resistance was way higher than the cost of compromise. If this Jesus guy stirred things up, there could have been a revolt and many people could die. As renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor put it, “No matter how he did the arithmetic, it came out the same: better that one person should die than many. … Caiaphas was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was just doing his job.”

Pilate, the official representative of the Roman Empire, the de facto king, in a sense, he didn’t have it much better. He didn’t even want to get involved. But there was no sense in letting Rome think he couldn’t keep control. If killing Jesus would keep the rest of the people quiet, so be it. He too “was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was just doing his job.”

God has been challenging this kind of bad leadership all along. A few hundred years earlier, the kings of Judah, whether stuck between a rock and a hard place or not, had clearly not succeeded in just doing their job. Judah fell to the Babylonian Empire, and the people were led off in exile. In the words of Jeremiah, we here God’s judgment on them: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture. … It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.”

Of course, the kings of Jeremiah’s time were not the first to exhibit bad leadership, to do evil in the sight of God. And the Caiaphas’s and Pilate’s and Herod’s of Jesus time were not the last. While we may not have anyone titled “King” in our society today, there is still a whole mysterious complex of multi-national corporations and economic policies and government leaders and citizen apathy that works to scatter people all around. The economics of the world today force people to migrate from place to place to find work, and then when they get somewhere, we punish them for being there “illegally”. We “improve” neighborhoods by pushing poor people somewhere—anywhere—else: we have UCC brothers and sisters in a congregation I worked at in Chicago who, for some of them, have seen their community pushed around to three different neighborhoods by the forces of ‘gentrification’.

Like the kings of Jeremiah’s time, we have not attended to the flock of God’s people as we turn a blind eye to war refugees from Iraq and genocide victims from Darfur … or even right here whenever we fail to actually welcome someone into our community when they’re not enough like us or because they might change us. We may not have kings, but we certainly have all the trappings of their misdeeds.

The cross that stands at the center of today’s passage from Luke stands as judgment on all of this. In their own time, it betrayed the farce that was the so-called power Caiaphas and Pilate held. In our time, it still betrays all the hands at which the innocent are killed—whether they die physically or simply die inside. It pronounces judgment on all who scoff and mock like the soldiers and first criminal, the ones who look into the face of pain and torture and say “save yourself.” And it casts its dark shadow over all of us who, like the people in Luke’s telling of the story, stand by watching while our leaders do evil and get away with murder.

Judgment is not the only word we hear from this cross, though. In the midst of the darkest hour, in the voice of one in deepest despair, we hear two signs of a new kind of kingship. We hear the words of mercy and of promise to the outcast. “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” With the signs of earthly kingship standing around him in irony and mockery, Jesus still has one royal prerogative to exercise, the power of pardon. In contrast to the rulers who condemn the innocent, forsaking their power to pardon, Jesus takes it up, asking forgiveness for his executioners. Luke’s gospel is filled with Jesus offering forgiveness and restoration, and that word still sounds forth at the end. Luke’s gospel is also the story of one who stands with the marginalized, welcoming them into a new community—and this sign of Jesus’ reign sounds forth too. “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” To the outcast and to the guilty, even torture and death cannot erase the promise. For the criminal hanging next to Jesus, it was more than he had even asked for, the fulfillment of God’s promise way back in Jeremiah’s time that “I myself with gather the remnant of my flock … and I will bring them back to their fold.” For us, it is the very hope upon which we stand: the promise that the one in whom we put our faith, the one we have been joined to in our baptisms, that he invites us today into a new kind of kingdom, his kingdom.

The Crucified One as the king at whose cross-shaped throne all other kings’ power is proven false? The reign of one who speaks mercy and promise? Ironic? Perhaps, but God wouldn’t have it any other way.

Let us pray.

O God, our true life,
to serve you is freedom,
and to know you is unending joy.
We worship you, we glorify you,
we give thanks to you for your great glory.
Abide with us,
reign in us,
and make this world reflect your divine majesty,
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen.
(Prayer of the Day for Christ the King C from Evangelical Lutheran Worship, copyright 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, admin. Augsburg Fortress.)

Too Funny

2008-01-04T11:52:00.000-06:00

I found this quote rather humorous for some reason:

"[A]s many have noted, the only one among the early Republican frontrunners with a history of just one wife was the Mormon, Mitt Romney..."

--Jim Wallis, SojoMail, January 3rd, 2008

Sermons coming

2007-12-28T17:55:00.000-06:00

Sorry that I've been a bit delayed in getting sermons up recently. I preached on November 25th (Christ the King C) and December 23rd (Advent 4A). Really, my biggest excuse is that the closest-to-final versions of them are on my computer at the office, and I most often post to this thing from home.

So, anyway, they'll be up soon, say in the next week or so. Thanks for reading!

Birthday!

2007-12-11T14:15:00.000-06:00

Yes, that's right: those of you who've looked at my blog before may notice that the headline bar at the top changed to "... from a 26-year-old ..." It is indeed my birthday today, which so far I've celebrated by having to get up entirely too early so I could attend the monthly (retired) Men's Fellowship breakfast, eating a Western Chicken breakfast skillet at said breakfast, driving through the rain-ice mix from today's ice storm, and working on things in my office at the church. Gonna go have lunch now. Exciting, eh?

Thoughts on Advent Music

2007-11-19T15:51:00.001-06:00

As the Advent season approaches, there's a debate going on in my congregation about what the appropriate hymns to sing are during these four weeks leading up to Christmas. Really, this is not a new debate: my congregation has had some of it before, and many congregations face a similar dilemma.

The struggle, as it were, is basically this: the pastors (myself and my senior pastor colleague), the music staff, and a portion of the congregation want Advent to be Advent, holding off on Christmas carols/hymns until the Christmas Eve services and for the Sunday(s) following that are the actual Christmas season. Another section of the congregation, though, doesn't seem to have much connection with the Advent season or its hymnody, and feels that we should be singing the Christmas carols in those Sundays leading up to Christmas. And, of course, there's probably the silent 'broad middle' of the congregation that doesn't have particularly strong feelings one way or the other on the matter.

In the debate going on in my congregation, I think there are actually a number of realities and issues playing into the dynamics of the debate--issues not directly connected to the debate at hand--and so I'm not sure it's helpful or appropriate to go into great detail about the specifics of how this debate is playing out in this place.

What I want to do instead, though, is give some of the reasons why I feel Advent is important, why I feel we need to let Advent be Advent.

1. -- There's a fairly basic issue about the integrity, harmony, and wholeness of the liturgy itself. Our congregation uses the lectionary to determine the scripture readings for each Sunday. As a preacher and worship planner, I find that worship services are much more powerful and meaningful when all of the elements fit with one another. Specifically, I try very hard whenever I am planning worship to see that the hymns and other music we sing fits well with the scripture readings, the sermon, and any other themes for that day (special celebrations, liturgical season, etc.). Sometimes this "fit" is more direct (a hymn whose text quotes or tells the story of one or more of the readings, for instance) and sometimes this "fit" is more of a 'coordinated' or 'complementary' relationship (a hymn that expresses the same or similar themes, for instance). During the 'festival seasons' (that is, the part of the church year that is not simply Ordinary Time), often choosing most of the hymns out of the repertoire for that season is a sufficient level of 'fit' to bring the sort of harmony I look for. The hymn that follows the sermon, though, (the "Hymn of the Day" as it is referred to in the Lutheran tradition) definitely needs to 'fit' the readings and sermon, for me--little is more jarring than a post-sermon hymn that deflates, contradicts, or is simply unrelated to the sermon and scripture that precedes it (unless for some well-thought out reason a contradictory message is planned intentionally).

So, during the season of Advent, it makes little sense to me to completely ignore the whole nature of what the scripture readings are during this season. For instance, the Gospel reading for the 1st Sunday of Advent this coming year is from an apocalyptic discourse of Jesus, Matthew 24:36-44: "Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." For that kind of text, something like the well-known "Sleepers Wake! A Voice Astound Us" (a.k.a. "Wake, awake, for night is flying") to the also-well-known tune WACHET AUF is something that fits well. Or, while not being quite so direct a fit, Marty Haugen's "Awake! Awake, and greet the new morn" would fit in a complementary way. Or even "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" complements this text--Jesus is saying "you do not know on what day your Lord is coming" and in response the church prays for him to come. Flipping through one of the hymnals I have at home right now, though, I cannot find a Christmas carol that fits at all with this kind of text.

The situation is the same with many of the Sundays of Advent in all three years of the lectionary cycle. We hear beautiful and powerful prophetic visions from Isaiah about the wolf lying down with the lamb and God saying 'peace' to those under oppression. We hear Jesus speaking of his second coming, not his first. We hear John the Baptist crying out to prepare and repent. How many Christmas carols speak of repentance?

2. -- The church does not need to play into and support the over-commercialization of Christmas and our society's addiction to immediate gratification. As this debate plays out in many churches, there are always folk who say "well, they're playing Christmas carols everywhere else, why can't we sing them in church?" Well, part of the vocation of Christianity and the church is to invite people into "the way", a different way of seeing themselves and the world and a different set of practices. Recently there has been a lot written about the recovery of "Christian practices" in mainline Protestant churches. The way we mark time, as Christians, is part of the different sort of practices we engage in as the church. We set aside one day each week for 'sabbath': worship, rest, and service to others. And we observe a liturgical cycle that deeply connects us with the life of Jesus: his coming, his birth, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, his presence by the Holy Spirit, and his coming again. It is not that we don't celebrate Christmas or sing Christmas carols, but we do so in their own time and place. Advent gives us the opportunity to be immersed in Jesus' "coming"s: his first coming and his coming again.

The demand that we sing Christmas carols during Advent stems from at least two phenomena in American society and American Christianity. One of these I have already named: the combination of commercialization with our American addiction to instant gratification. Why should I have to wait when I can have it now? A second piece, though, has to do with the phenomenon of the American civic religion and the loss of Christian distinctiveness in America. Many in our congregations do not connect with Advent, or with much of the liturgical/lectionary year, because in the so-called glory days of American Protestantism, most Protestants had little to do with such things. Observance of the church year and use of the lectionary is something that most mainline Protestants (the Episcopalians and some Lutherans excepted) only began reclaiming in the late 1960s. It was probably not until the 1980s that you could say it had caught on to a large degree in a majority of the churches. (And, I will add, my particular congregation was especially late in this, as regular use of the lectionary didn't start until around the year 2000.) The idea that the distinctive, historic practices of the larger Christian tradition could have important formational function went largely unrecognized, or thought unimportant, by mid-20th century civic faith Protestantism. It was simply assumed that everyone was Christian and that everyone knew what it meant to be Christian. The idea that Christianity was about inviting people into an alternative way of life, faith, and practice would have been thought odd at best (and perhaps 'ludicrous').

Well, folks, this isn't the 1950s any more. Most mainline Protestants have been engaged in the liturgical renewal movement for at least 30 years. Marking the liturgical seasons, using the lectionary, reclaiming the sacraments, all this is not new. Secondly, we do need to be formed in the faith, to be drink deeply at the well that is the life-death-and-resurrection of Jesus, to be invited into a distinctive community called the church.

3. -- This final piece is connected to the second one, but from a different angle. I'll say it this way: We need Advent. I think the root feeling/theme at the heart of Advent is longing. Simply as humans, we have longing. We long for comfort, for peace, for an end to warfare and hunger, for love. The haunting melody of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" is a wonderful musical embodiment of that longing. As Christians, though, we are especially a people of longing. We are the ones who "proclaim the Lord's death until he comes"--the focus of which should be at least as much on the "until he comes" part as on the "Lord's death" part. Our basic faith affirmations include "Christ will come again" and "I believe in ... the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Our basic prayer is "Our Father in heaven ... your kingdom come." Quite frankly, if we are not a people of longing, then we have definitely lost our way as Christians. If we are not a people of longing, then we have lost sight of all those in this world who are hungry, dispossessed, and enslaved. If we are not a people of longing, then the gospel itself is nothing to us, for we apparently have all we need and all we hope for within our reach. (This is part of the connection to the commercialization of American society theme, because in America we do have everything within our reach, or at least so it seems.) If we are not a people of longing, then we have no use for God at all. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God," saith Augustine.

We need Advent. We need it in order to reconnect with the longing that haunts inside us, to give voice to our hope for ourselves and the world, to empower us to authentically cry out "Come, Lord Jesus!"

"How the Pilgrims Were Wrong" - A Sermon for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-11-19T15:31:00.001-06:00

A Sermon for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Pilgrim Sunday / Stewardship Sunday
Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
November 18, 2007

(It must be noted that in my congregation, the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving is observed as "Pilgrim Sunday", a remembrance of the 'Pilgrim heritage' of the Congregationalist tradition.)

A few years ago, May of 2000 to be exact, I had the opportunity to stand where the Pilgrims once had—literally. I was on a European concert tour with the Men’s Glee Club from Michigan State University, a tour that began with a week in the Netherlands. On our very first day, we were driven to Leiden, a university city not very far from Amsterdam. In Leiden, there still stands Pieterskirk, St. Peter’s Church. Stepping inside, you can see the beauty of the gothic architecture, take in the noble vastness of the space, and perhaps even hear some melodies from one of Pieterskirk’s two pipe organs. What you can’t do, though, is actually attend church there, as the building was deconsecrated as a church some years ago. But, as you continue your walk around this grand building, you’re likely to happen upon the reminders of some of the people who once did attend church there. You might see a plaque with a hauntingly familiar-looking boat on it, memorializing one John Robinson. Intrigued, you take a closer look and read the plaque:

In Memory of
Rev. John Robinson, M. A.
Pastor of the English Church Worshipping Over Against
This Spot, A. D. 1609 - 1625, Whence at his Prompting
Went Forth
THE PILGRIM FATHERS
To Settle New England
in 1620
- - - - - - - - -
Buried under this house of worship, 4 March, 1625
[At the age of] [49] Years.
In Memoria Aeterna Erit Justus.
Erected by the National Council of the Congregational
Churches of the United States of America
A. D. 1891”

Indeed, this John Robinson was the pastor of the congregation of Puritans that left England for Holland in 1609 to worship without persecution, the same congregation from which some 35 people (which was actually only a minority of the congregation) set sail for the new world on the Mayflower in 1620. And this Pieterskirk where we find this plaque is the church in which that congregation worshipped.

Knowing what I know now, that I would find myself standing in a Congregationalist pulpit, I am honored that I had the opportunity to place my feet in the very church where the Pilgrim’s feet had trod, to reflect on the Pilgrim pastor—the one who told them as they left that there was “yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s word”—glad to imagine that faithful community at worship in those walls, to glimpse a little piece of their story. And, had I known what I know now, I probably would have taken better pictures.

It is a right and good thing to remember and celebrate the heritage from which we come, whatever that may be. But in honoring our heritage and reflecting on our tradition, we only do so faithfully when we remember with a critical mind, a willingness to recognize that what our forebears did may not have been right, or at least not be the best thing for us to do today. It’s the difference between tradition and traditionalism.

The reason I bring this critical memory thing up today is this: as I’ve been thinking about the Pilgrims alongside the two scripture readings for this morning, the topic—the sermon title, if you will—that keeps popping up in my head is “How the Pilgrims were Wrong.”

I think the Pilgrims may have been wrong because they didn’t quite dream big enough. Now, yes, yes, I understand that understand that leaving everything behind to set sail for a relatively unknown land thousands of miles across the ocean is rather a big thing. So I do not mean to imply that they did not risk a lot—in fact, the Pilgrims risked far more for their faith than most of us here today have had to risk, quite possibly more than many of us might be willing to risk. But my question is not about what they risked, but what did they dream? What was their vision?

In this piece from the last section of Isaiah, God offers a vision, and not just some small vision, but a pretty darn big one. The Israelites have come back from exile in Babylon, and they’ve found out that life is not the rosy walk in the garden that they thought it would be. The city of Jerusalem was still in ruins, they weren’t a self-sufficient kingdom led by someone from the line of David, and even the temple itself was still a wrecked mess. They still vividly remembered their people being plucked from the land they toiled over, driven out of the houses they labored to build. But even as the people despaired and began loosing their vision, God was not done. God had a new vision for them, actually a new vision for the whole creation. “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things”—that is, the despair, the humiliation, the exile—“shall not be remembered or come to mind.” God is going to create a new Jerusalem, a new city on the hill that would be a light to the nations.

When we hear these promises, this vision, I think it’s hard for us today to really have a sense of how big this is. Sometimes I think it’s maybe easier to think about some heavenly paradise. Ah, yes, in some far away place in some far away time, there’s this place of wonder and peace. I can limit God to heaven and believe that God has some pie in the sky awaiting us. That’s easy. But it’s that ‘new earth’ part of the vision that makes it big, I think. This is a vision about real infants that die too young and real labor that seems in vain. If I were to imagine this vision in today’s terms, it would have something to do a new creation for the very real children we know who grow up in dangerous neighborhoods or maybe the mentally-ill woman I see a few times a week walking down the middle of the street past my apartment, yelling at the traffic that goes by her. Dreaming God’s big dream about this real world is not easy. I mean, come on, that whole wolf and lamb thing—we all know that wolves and lambs don’t go together, and when they do only one of them is get out of it alive… and usually it’s the wolf.

For the Pilgrims, though, in the midst of their struggles with fellow Puritans and the Anglicans and the Catholics, they seemed to have trouble too. They set off to the Americas to create their own city on a hill, their own New Jerusalem. It is as though they lost sight of God’s vision and promise that the New Jerusalem was God’s work, work they were invited and called to be a part of, but still God’s creation in the end. It doesn’t seem as though they had a sense of God’s vision encompassing everyone, all creation and all peoples. And like I’ve said, I think the hard part about this vision is that it is a vision about this world, a promise from God that the very people and land and cities we know will be transformed. And yet, for the Pilgrims, they decided that they had to separate from the church and the world that they knew—they were even called Separatists by other Puritan groups, even by the Puritans that would join them in Massachusetts only 10 years later. From all across the witness of the Bible, we see again and again the promise that God is not done with this world—even to the very end in the book of Revelation, where in the second to last chapter, the loud voice from the throne proclaims “See, the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them, and they will be [God’s] peoples.” So, looking back at the Pilgrims I think it is fair to question their decision to separate themselves from the rest of the church and from their society.

On the other hand, it is only fair to look back with the critical eye on the Pilgrims if we are willing to turn that critical eye on ourselves as well. Are we too guilty of not dreaming big enough? Often I think yes. When most of us hear the kind of big vision that God has through Isaiah’s words, well… we have trouble dreaming that that kind of radical transformation is possible in our world… and, even if we thought it were, for many of us we have too much at stake with the way the world is now that we don’t want to dream that. We don’t want to be too intentional about engaging with the real practices of Christianity and the church, because then we might just start seeing the world differently. We might start having big dreams. And besides that, if we started being intentional and committed about church and discipleship and Christian practices, then we’d be different—we’d be weird.

Well, friends, the gospel is weird. The gospel says that the world doesn’t belong to those who have money or power, rather it belongs to God. Pretty weird. God not as some hard-nosed distant despot, but rather the gospel speaks of the God loved all of us and all the world enough to come as one of us to be a part of it. Pretty weird. Death as not the final word. Pretty weird. A God who still comes to us through real, concrete, this-worldly things like spoken words, water, bread and wine, communities of real, less-than-perfect people. Pretty weird. God invites us to dream big and then to live as though those dreams were already happening. Pretty weird.

You know, that’s actually one of the good things about the Pilgrims, one of the things they did right that we can learn from: the Pilgrims were pretty weird, too. They weren’t afraid to be known for their faith. They weren’t afraid to let their faith—to let God, even—affect every part of their day-to-day life. They weren’t afraid to engage in practices of faith that made them distinctive as Christians. They weren’t afraid to give everything—their money, their talents, their lives—in response to God, to give thanks for all God’s work. (There, for those of you who were expecting a stewardship sermon today, that sentence was for you.)

What can we do in response to all God has done for us? What’s the biggest, craziest, most lavish vision we can dream of what God is doing in the world? And what’s the weirdest thing we can do, the weirdest people we can be, living out that dream?

Amen, weird dreamers, Amen.

"Have we failed the Reformation? Thoughts on Bread and Forgiveness" -- A Sermon for Reformation Sunday 2007

2007-11-19T15:26:00.000-06:00

“Have we failed the Reformation? Thoughts on Bread and Forgiveness”
A Sermon for Reformation Sunday 2007
Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
October 28, 2007

Reformation Sunday is probably one of my favorite days on the church calendar each year. Now, this may seem like a strange thing—Reformation Day doesn’t have the pizzazz of Easter Sunday or any special sentimental feelings like Christmas can have. It’s not even a day that everyone in our own denomination, the United Church of Christ, would be very familiar with—even though it is listed on the official UCC calendar book every year. I suspect that many of you probably don’t know much about Reformation Sunday, either, this day that commemorates the very beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, when people like Martin Luther and John Calvin back in the 1500s started trying to reform the church, but instead created one of the biggest divides among Christians ever, the divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

So why is this somewhat obscure day one of my favorites? Well, let me first say that it is not because I think it should be an easy opportunity to bash the Roman Catholic Church. Now, while there is much that I do not agree with, there are certainly things about the Roman Catholic tradition that are good. I know this might be scandalous to say here, but there are even things that they do better than us Protestants, and we might just have something to learn from them. So anyway, for me, Reformation Sunday is not about anti-Catholic feelings.

Some of my friends from seminary and others who know me well might say that my fondness for Reformation Sunday is about my fondness for things Lutheran. Indeed, this day is one that is most commonly associated with Lutherans and, even though I have never been a Lutheran, it is true that I do like many things from the Lutheran tradition—their more liturgical worship and greater focus on the sacraments, and their rich heritage of music and hymns, including our closing hymn today. Of course there’s also that great Lutheran tradition of beer-drinking, but that’s another matter.

But anyway, all of that said, the real reason I like Reformation Sunday so much is because the Reformation was all about reclaiming the central things—identifying again the real, core, central good news of Christianity and focusing in on the practices that proclaim and make real that good news—and then making sure that those central matters are actually what’s at the center of our life together as a church. This is a question that I try to keep in front of me all the time. It’s very easy for us to let matters that are really secondary overshadow what should be at the core of our mission and purpose—and certainly I can be as guilty of that as anyone else. But that’s the gift of Reformation Sunday, to let the question of the central things to challenge us once again into faithfulness.

So, what are the central things? How do we discern what should be at the core of our life together? We could try to talk about the central concerns of the Bible, which in fact we do do fairly often. We could try to look at the creeds and confessions of faith. But I want to propose another way, something perhaps more accessible, certainly something closer to our hearts. In fact, something most of us know by heart, and something we find on our lips every Sunday: the Lord’s Prayer. What can the Lord’s Prayer show us about the central things? **

First, I want to be clear that I’m not simply being arbitrary by focusing in on the Lord’s Prayer. It has been so central to Christian practice throughout history that it’s connected to all our praying, all of the church’s worship and liturgy. It’s connected to baptism, as a “gift” people are taught as they are preparing for baptism or as they affirm their baptisms though confirmation. It’s also connected to Holy Communion, as the final table prayer we pray at the end of all our great thanksgiving-and-praying in preparation for the feast. And it’s something we find amongst our prayers in the morning, in the evening, in Sunday services even when we’re not celebrating a Baptism or Communion. If there is one thing that Christians do together, one thing the Church does, it is pray and worship, and the Lord’s Prayer has such a common and important place that it could in a sense be a symbol to stand for all of our worship and prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer is first and foremost a communal prayer. “Our Father”, “give us”, “deliver us”. And, not only is it the prayer of a community and not just an individual, it is a prayer that expresses the deep longings and hopes of all humanity. It speaks with honesty of the human condition we all face: “longing for God, in need of mercy, justice, and life, hopeful, fearful, likely to fail.” O God, your reign come. Your will of justice and mercy and peace be done. Do not bring us to the test, for we fear we will fail. We pray these things looking to the future, waiting for the day of the Lord that we both hope for and fear. And we pray it along with all humanity—us as priests, praying on behalf of all the people. So this is one thing central to the Prayer, our calling to pray and cry out for others and all people.

But along side everything in the Prayer that pleads the hopes and fears of all humanity, there are two things that stand out as different, that set us apart as Christians from others. Two signs that the “expected, longed-for Day [of the Lord] has already dawned in the life of the [Christian] community itself.” Standing right at the center of the Prayer are two central things that mark us as Christians, as the Church: bread and forgiveness.

“Give us today our daily bread.” Or, maybe it should be “Give us daily the bread for the journey, the bread that sustains”. In visions of the end-of-times, of the coming reign of God, whether in our the book of Revelation or even in the Jewish writings that were around in Jesus’ time, one of the images of God’s reign is a rich banquet table where the great multitudes freely eat of the feast of new, rich, everlasting, abundant life—the bread that sustains. This vision is transformed, though, when we as Christians dare to pray to God to give us that bread, that feast, today, now. We dare to believe that the great, life-giving feast is already breaking forth here, in this place. We are the people who hold a meal together that we believe is already God’s meal—that’s what Christianity has been from the earliest times, a meal fellowship. We receive what God is giving us in the resurrection feast, and then we are sent out to share food with the hungry, to fill the actual needy with actual good things.

The other thing that stands at the center of the prayer—forgiveness—is also about God already doing what we expect in the end-times. ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ Or perhaps better, “Forgive us now with your final forgiveness, just as we are turning to each other, ministering forgiveness to those who sin against us.” This is the place where Sunday after Sunday we hear the presence now of God’s promised forgiveness. “Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.” Not, ‘we will be forgiven’, but ‘we are forgiven’. That’s who we are as Christians, the people who believe that God already started God’s reign in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. But more, we’re the ones who turn to each other, full of that already breaking-forth power, and minister forgiveness to each other. “The peace of Christ be with you all.” And, of course, we are called to carry that forgiveness out into the world, that others may experience what we know of God already at work.

Of course, forgiveness was one of the central themes for the Reformers, folk like Martin Luther and John Calvin. “Salvation by God’s grace” is the big deal that most people associate with the Reformation, and especially with Luther. Convinced of his own unworthiness, Luther finally came to understand God’s love for him and all people in reading the writings of the apostle Paul. The message we heard this morning in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome, that all of us have fallen short, and yet we are justified by God’s grace as a gift—this was the key to all that Luther and his fellow Reformers stood for, all that the good news of the gospel still means for us today. And, I think it is no small matter that we as Christians are the people who pray and speak and act out of the conviction that God is already working such grace and forgiveness among us.

Bread and forgiveness, that’s what stands at the center of who we are, if the Lord’s Prayer is any clue. If the concern of the Reformation was about renewing our focus on the central things, then to ask if we are living into the spirit of the Reformers is to ask ourselves about our bread and our forgiveness. Does “bread and forgiveness” really describe who we are at the core?

Sometimes I worry that it doesn’t. Or at least that it doesn’t seem clear to the rest of the world that bread and forgiveness is what we’re all about. In a new book titled unChristian, David Kinnaman shares the results of some recent studies of young adult non-Christians, 16 to 29 year olds who do not consider themselves Christian. The results are rather sobering: 87% of young adult non-Christians believe that Christianity is “judgmental” and 85% say it’s “hypocritical”. Somehow these aren’t words I’d use to describe something that’s supposed to be about forgiveness. And even more, 91% of them, along with 80% of church-going young adults think that Christianity today is “anti-gay”. Clearly they don’t see the rich, open, hospitable banquet table spread with a life-sustaining feast given for all, the bread that the Lord’s Prayer points us to. Instead, we’re apparently a closed-off, rule-oriented, un-reconciling, judgmental, hypocritical group that “no longer looks like Jesus.”

Are they right? Have we become like the religious leaders that Jesus is talking to in this morning’s reading from John? They had forgotten where they had come from. “We are descendents of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.” You almost want to say “Hellllloooooo, remember that whole Exodus thing? Pharaoh, Moses, the plagues, the Passover? Was that just some nice vacation in Egypt?” And more than that, Jesus seems to be saying, we all become slaves to our brokenness, our sin, to the facades we try to put up and the appearances we try to keep up. But there is hope, because in the Son, “we will be free indeed”, as John’s Jesus says. In fact, free we are, already, in the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who taught us the prayer with bread and forgiveness at the center, the one who is the bread of life we receive at the table, the one whose peace we pass on to others in forgiveness.

Inspired by our Reformation heritage, that is the freedom we are called to live in to, the freedom we have in Christ. It is the freedom to lay aside in God’s grace all that enslaves us, all the secondary things that keep us from the central things. The freedom to pray for God’s forgiveness already at work and for the bread of life to be broken in our midst. Indeed, here in this place a word and a feast are set out for us, and here in this place are empowered to be bread and forgiveness for the world—light to the whole human race.

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

** This exploration of central things is deeply indebted to “The Pastor in Preparing to Preside: The Lord’s Prayer” in Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor: A Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).

From the Associate Pastor...

2007-09-17T16:36:00.000-06:00

From the Associate Pastor…

Most Sundays at the conclusion of our worship service, you will find me near the door of the sanctuary greeting people as they leave the church for the day. Often as I talk with people at that moment, I will hear comments like “good sermon” or “I really enjoyed the service today.”

Now, on one hand, it is good to receive direct feedback. Our congregation is working on overcoming a long-standing “problem” of people not directing their feedback to the people actually responsible for something, instead just talking (complaining, usually) within a circle of friends—so that maybe the feedback reaches the person responsible third- or fourth-hand, giving that person no good way of actually responding or dialoging about the issue.

On the other hand, though, as a pastor these “good sermon” or “enjoyed the service” comments sometimes make me cringe a little bit. Part of this is for some reasons of principle: as a preacher, I don’t hope for a sermon to be “good” so much as I hope that the sermon conveys God’s goodness. I don’t hope for you to “like” the sermon so much as I hope the sermon moves you to faith, or to re-affirmation of your faith, so that you are driven to respond in some way. As a worship planner and leader, I don’t care as much about whether you “enjoy” a service as I do about whether the service enabled your prayer and praise to God. Worship is not like a concert or a lecture or a sporting event that you go to watch and then decide whether it was “enjoyable”; rather, it is something you participate in, something you receive signs of God’s grace through, and something that ultimately is directed toward God, not us.

Perhaps in our tradition within Christianity we have lost the ability to think and speak about worship and preaching in this way. By the 1950s, we had reached such a great misunderstanding of our tradition that worship had become simply about “going to hear the preacher”, an understanding of worship from which we are (slowly) working ourselves away. We lost the sense that people needed to be “formed” as Christians, which is one of the things worship helps do, because society simply assumed that people already were Christians and already knew what that mean (which, it turns out, was a very misguided assumption). Or, on another thought, perhaps our worship still is not participatory enough for us to be able think about worship as the worshipper’s actions and as receiving from and giving back to God. (As a side note, though, to those of you who too readily agree with the idea that our worship is not participatory enough, it seems that as soon as we do try something in worship that involves more active participation, that is when we get accused of doing things that are “too Catholic”.) Or perhaps Mike and I need to do more to ask you about why you liked a sermon or a worship service.

But anyway, aside from these issues of principle, there is another reason I am sometimes disheartened by the “good sermon” or “enjoyed the service” comments: quite frankly, I am not the one you should be telling that to. If you think a sermon, or preaching at Second Congregational in general, is good, you need to be telling that to all the people who aren’t in worship here. If you found a worship service “enjoyable”, there is someone who wasn’t here that needs to hear that. We need to generate excitement about what goes on in worship among the 300 to 400 of our members that aren’t in worship on any given Sunday—give them the sense that they’re missing out on something. Many of these people are people you already know and talk to: tell them about the “good” sermon or how “enjoyable” the service was. And, not only do our own members need to hear this, to be reminded that they’re missing something really fabulous whenever they’re not in worship, but we need to be spreading this word to others who aren’t yet part of our church community. You think Mike or I give “good sermons”? Great, now tell that to someone you know who’s never been here to hear them. You think our worship services are “enjoyable”? Great, I’m sure one of your friends or coworkers or relatives or teammates would find them enjoyable too. Really, it’s no different than telling them how “good” the food is at your favorite restaurant or how much you “enjoyed” the concert you went to last week.

So, by all means I do not want to say that you shouldn’t give Mike and I feedback, even if it is just “good sermon” or “enjoyed the service”. But, for every time you say that to us, I challenge you to say it to at least one other person who wasn’t here to experience it.

Peace, Pastor Matt

This is an article I've written for this week's church newsletter.

"'I may be the most famous deity you don't really know.' --God" -- A Sermon for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-09-17T16:29:00.000-06:00

“‘I may be the most famous deity you really don’t know’ —God”
A Sermon for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
September 16, 2007

Have you ever wondered why certain things are so popular and well-loved? Like, a particular food or soft drink. Or, maybe a certain baseball team even though they haven’t been to the World Series in 62 years (that's a reference to the Chicago Cubs). Well, this week I’ve been wondering about a hymn—yes, a hymn… don’t worry, I do have a life—namely the hymn “Amazing Grace”. “Amazing Grace” is probably the most widely-known hymn in the English-speaking world—mainline Protestants like us sing it, conservative evangelicals sing it, Roman Catholics sing it (this I know first hand, having been at a Roman Catholic mass where it was sung). Certainly even some people who are not Christians find the song compelling. But why is it that people love “Amazing Grace” so much?

Now, for me, I am someone who usually says I like a song more often because of the music than the words. There are plenty of songs on pop and rock radio stations that I like even though I never paid attention to the words. With “Amazing Grace”, though, I’m inclined to think that it’s more than just the music. I mean, the tune is lovely enough, but from a musical standpoint, it really isn’t all that interesting.

Besides that, you can take the tune and put it with any number of other lyrics, but the results just aren’t quite as compelling. For instance, you can sing our opening hymn this morning, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” to the same tune we use for “Amazing Grace”: [here I sang to demonstrate this] Now, that’s perfectly nice, but at least I don’t think it’s quite the same.

So, anyway, what that gets us around to is that there must be something about the words themselves. The message or story that the words to “Amazing Grace” convey connects with people at a very deep level. No matter what mask we try to wear or what airs we try to put on, I think most all of us have some experience feeling lost or abandoned, some ‘dangers, toils, [or] snares’ that we know or fear. When we are willing to let our guard down just a little, we see brokenness inside us or brokenness around us that we cannot help but participate in or brokenness that we have been the victim of. As much as we sometimes don’t like the word ‘sin’, and as much as we try to pretend that we aren’t guilty of sin—and even as much as we know that there are some Christians who use the language of sin to wrongly assault and victimize people—even with all that, when we are willing to look at the truth of our experience, we know what it means to be lost, to be less than what we were created to be, to be a “wretch”.

Of course, if “Amazing Grace” were all about being lost, I’m sure it wouldn’t have nearly the popularity it does. “Amazing Grace” is also the story of being found—in fact, it is first and foremost about being found. As much as I believe that most or all of us have some experience will feeling lost and broken, it is my hope that we also know what it is to be found. Somewhere along the way, we have felt a warm embrace, an set of open arms, a light amidst the shadows, a word spoken at just the right moment in our lives—the grace of God. Even for those of us who have grown up amidst caring communities and the life of the church, I suspect there has been an experience when this grace became more real, more tangible—even if it was only someone handing you a piece of bread and saying “the body of Christ, given for you.”

So, if our attachment to “Amazing Grace” is because it tells a story of being lost and being found that we know ourselves, I would think it should be easy for us to identify with the two parables Jesus tells in this reading from Luke this morning. The sheep is missing. The coin is no where to be found. And—just like how in “Amazing Grace” the words never speak of searching out God’s grace, but rather simply of being found—the sheep and the coin don’t do anything. Rather, the shepherd and the woman go looking for them. The shepherd even leaves his other sheep at risk in order to restore the lost one to the whole. And the point is fairly clear: God is that shepherd; God is that woman. God lights a lamp and searches her house to restore us into her treasury. God risks danger and offense to one part of the flock in order to find us, so that the flock may be whole again.

But, even though it would seem that we have an easy time hearing and identifying with these stories, it was not so with the Pharisees who first heard them. They didn’t want to hear about restoring the whole, bringing the outcast into the community, welcoming the sinners. It’s not that the Pharisees were evil, heartless, legalistic men, as sometimes Christians have claimed out of the evils of anti-Judaism. Rather, in the midst of the compromises that had been made under the thumb of the Roman authorities, the Pharisees needed to be clear about how the Jewish community was defined. If they let just anyone in, like Jesus was doing, it threatened the whole system that ensured some illusion of ‘security’ and that kept the Pharisees in power. And so, for the Pharisees, their religion and, as a result, their image of God was about law and purity and boundaries and respectability, at least as Luke pictures it (see note at end). The God they knew was solely interested in the righteous.

You know, though, I can’t help but thinking that we get caught there ourselves sometimes. For many decades, churches like ours all across this country got caught up in being ‘respectable’, in trying to maintain their place in American society. Even today, there are too many of us who worry about speaking up about the controversial issues of the day because someone might get offended. We can’t stand up against the evils of war, we can’t welcome into our midst the illegal immigrants or the gay people or the single mothers on welfare because what would people think of us then? For too long, the God we seemed to know was mostly concerned with making us “nice” and forming us into good citizens and giving us some pointers on how to live a good life.

But, like a certain presidential candidate complaining about her impersonal image recently, God has come to us saying something like “I may be the most famous deity you really don’t know.” If the God we think we know is about rationality and rules and respectability, then I think we don’t really know God very well after all. That’s certainly not the God we see in today’s parables from Luke. Just the images alone begin to shatter that picture: God as a shepherd in a culture that saw shepherds as poor, shifty, and unclean; God as a woman in a time when women had almost no status in society. But even more than that, we have God taking the initiative to find the lost, to restore every last part of the community to wholeness, even putting the many at risk to save the one. It’s that same irrational God that hear about in 1st Timothy, the God that would choose the foremost sinner to become the most famous apostle. It’s that same irrational God that we sing about in the words of “Amazing Grace”, a God that would save a wretch like me … and that same God that would choose ordinary things like spoken words and water and bread to be the instruments of divine power among God’s people. And of course, it’s the same God that did that most irrational and un-God-like act of all: to become human, one of us, and even to die for the life of the world.

The challenge is before us: We can get caught in that image of God to which God says “you don’t really know me”, or we can live in the knowledge of the God who seeks us out, the One who finds us even when we aren’t looking to be found. And likewise, we can grumble like the Pharisees when we see that same God seeking and finding others, even at our risk, or, remembering the joy at our own finding, we can join in the party God is throwing. And as we join the party, we can take on our calling to join with God in sheep and coin finding ourselves, that there might be even more rejoicing.

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

Note on my disclaimer "at least as Luke pictures it": I include the “at least as Luke pictures it” disclaimer in recognition of the fact that some scholars believe that the picture of 1st century Judaism in the New Testament is skewed to serve the interests of early Christian communities in conflict with their non-Christian Jewish contemporaries (the roots of what we know now as rabbinic Judaism). It is important to acknowledge that Luke’s picture of the Pharisees may not be accurate, and that some of the images of Judaism (or at least the Jewish leaders) given in New Testament texts like this one have contributed to centuries of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and their resulting atrocities.

"You Want Us to Go Where?" -- A Sermon for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-08-27T09:45:00.000-06:00

“You Want Us to Go Where?”
A Sermon for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Jeremiah 1:4-10

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
August 26, 2007

I have two stories I want to tell you about today—two pictures to paint, if you will—and so I’m going to jump right in with story number 1.

This first story is the story of the calling forth of a prophet, specifically today’s story of the call of the prophet Jeremiah. We as liberal mainline Protestants aren’t always as up on our knowledge and understanding of Old Testament prophets—or really much of the Old Testament—as perhaps we should be, and so I think this story deserves a few moments for us to unpack, to explore, to delve deeply into what is going on here.

The first thing we hear in this story of the calling of a prophet is God coming to Jeremiah. “Now the word of the Lord came to me.” Jeremiah does not tell us that he went looking for God, that somehow he sought out the Lord, that in some way he started asking for God to speak to him. No, rather, quite the opposite—God sought him out. God took the initiative. God made the way. And this is certainly not the first time we find God making the first move. Perhaps you remember the “Early Word”, our children’s message, three weeks ago where Pastor Mike took on the role of Samuel, and ran over in the middle of the night to Eli the priest (aptly played by our own Ian Woody) because he, Samuel, heard the voice of God calling to him. Or maybe you recall Moses out in the wilderness tending his father-in-law’s sheep, when God called to him out of a rather flame-resistant bush. And there are others too: Abraham, Gideon, Isaiah, Ezekiel—all of them, like Moses and Samuel and, in today’s story, Jeremiah, found themselves being found by God.

Having been found by God, and now being spoken to by God, what does Jeremiah hear? Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. Wow, this is the kind of language in the Bible that can take my breath away. Imagine these words addressed to yourself, as Jeremiah would have heard them. I suppose you could be thinking, ‘well, yeah, God’s God—all powerful, all knowing, blah blah blah—of course God knew Jeremiah,’ but I think there’s something much more intimate going on here. ‘I knew you’—‘I chose you—not others, but you.’ ‘I am watching over you and caring for you.’ This intimate kind of knowing is the only kind of knowing I can imagine happening in the waters of a mother’s womb.

There is more: the word of the Lord that Jeremiah hears does not only tell him that God knows him, but that God has consecrated him. God has chosen Jeremiah. God has set him apart, dedicated for a particular mission. Scholars will point out that in the Old Testament, consecration was something usually said about priests. A priest was consecrated to be the mediator of God’s holiness in the temple or sanctuary. Here, Jeremiah is a bit different: he’s been consecrated to proclaim God’s holiness out in the world, in the streets of Jerusalem. But even with this difference, God has still set him apart; he was born with the promise of God already upon him.

Now, of course, all this—it is a lot. A big calling. A huge responsibility. And Jeremiah sees this, and so he objects, even protests or complains. Certainly not me. How could I be up to the job? Or, as Jeremiah puts it, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” ‘Aaahhh, but it’s not about you, is it?’ seems to be God’s retort. The words Jeremiah is to speak—God will give them. The opposition Jeremiah will encounter—not a problem, for God will be there too. The calling of a prophet, it would seem, not ultimately about how adequate or skilled or experienced the prophet is. The calling of a prophet is about what God intends for them.

And then, finally, as if to prove or seal all this talk—or maybe, more rightly, to enact it—God reaches down and touches Jeremiah. Through a real, visible, tangible action, God puts this call into Jeremiah. “Now, I have put my words in your mouth.” And not simply the words of the call, I think, but the words that drove Jeremiah out into the streets and the words that he proclaimed when he got there.

So, that’s the first story, the story as we have been told it of the calling of a prophet.

The second story I have come to tell today is the story of your baptism. Now, I know that, except for a handful of you, I was not there when you were baptized. In fact, while I was certainly there when I was baptized, I confess that I do not remember it, as I was only a few months old at the time. But, even with that, I think I can tell the story of your baptism, or at least a version of it.

Let’s see now… Your baptism… Well, to begin with, it started not with you. Now, for those among us who, like myself, were baptized as infants, that’s pretty easy thing to say. Our parents, or someone else significant in our lives, did what was necessary to have us baptized. For those among us who were baptized at an older age, you might protest, though, saying that you did what was necessary to be baptized. But, in either case, I still insist that the story of your baptism didn’t begin with you, and it didn’t begin with your parents, either. The story of your baptism began with God. And I don’t mean that in some sort of theological sense that God gave us the gift of the sacrament of baptism, even though that is true. Rather, I believe that for every one of us here, our baptisms began with God taking the initiative. There was something that led you to try out that church for the first time, and something that kept you coming to the point that you wanted to pass through the waters. Or there was something that got your parents into the church, or your parents’ parents, and kept them there and something that led them to have you baptized. And that something, well… as Blaise Pascal, a man better known for his contributions to math and computer science than religion, put it: “Console yourself: You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me.” To say it plainly, I’m staking the claim that that something was God—or at the very least, that God had some hand in it, even if God’s hand had to work through some strange or mysterious ways. Regardless of any of the details of how it happened, I believe that the stories of all our baptisms have God’s initiative right at the start.

The story of your baptism also includes God’s claim upon you. If you take a look at the prayers and other words said when a person is baptized, one of the things you’ll see again and again is that in baptism, we are joined to Christ. We speak of our going down into the water as dying along with Christ, and our rising from the water as our rising together with Christ. This idea of baptism as God’s claim on us gets emphasized more strongly in our particular tradition within Christianity than in probably any other. Back in the 1500s, the folk in Germany who wrote the Heidelberg Catechism, a document we recognize in the United Church of Christ as part of our historic tradition, they put right at the very beginning this question: “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” The answer? “That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” So important this is, that those writers built their whole statement of Christian faith and belief starting with that affirmation. And there is probably nothing else we do as church that more strongly states that claim upon us than baptism.

Now, something that was not part of the story of your baptism was your having to be good enough. Thankfully, ‘No Child Left Behind’ does not affect churches—we have no achievement tests for admission to baptism. You can be male or female. You can be a really devout mystic or a questioning, overly-intellectual seeker. The church has baptized black people, white people, people with autism, people who use wheelchairs, gay people, straight people, rich people, poor people, old people, young people. All in all, your baptism was as much about you as it was about God and God’s plan for you.

And, finally, I know there’s much more to the story of each of your baptisms, but one last thing I’m confident in is that there was some water involved. The priest poured water from a shell over you, or the pastor sprinkled some water on your head, or the preacher led you down by the riverside where you waded in and were dunked under. However it happened, as if to seal or prove or enact all these other things about your baptism, some real, touchable, mess-making water was used. It touched you, and then there was a community of real, touchable, messy people there to welcome you in.

So, there you have it. The two stories I want to tell this morning. The story of the calling of a prophet and the story of your baptism.

Hmmm… Come to think of it, maybe these aren’t two stories. Maybe there’s only one story here. God’s having the first intimate knowledge and taking the first initiative. Check. God’s claming and setting apart. Check. The un-importance of one’s adequacy and ability. Check. Some sign and seal of all these promises of God. Check. Indeed, it would seem that the calling of a prophet and our baptisms add up to one and the same story.

...

If you were paying attention to the reading from Jeremiah, you may have noticed that there was a piece I left out as I walked us through it. God knows and consecrates and claims Jeremiah to be “a prophet to the nations”, and the words God places in Jeremiah’s mouth are so that Jeremiah will pluck up and pull down, and for him to build up and to plant. As Jeremiah’s life goes forward, we find that Jeremiah has to go in front of his people to warn them of the errors of their ways, to call them back to the kind of community that God intends for them, and even to journey into exile and despair and yet to proclaim hope in the midst of it. It would seem that the story is not finished without the message God has given us to proclaim and the work God has set us apart to do.

"Your Life is Being Demanded of You" -- A Sermon for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-08-20T12:46:00.000-06:00

“Your Life is Being Demanded of You”
A Sermon for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
August 5, 2007

Texts: Hosea 11:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

I have a confession to make to you this morning. I don’t know. Now, I know that many people—and especially us Protestants—come to church on Sunday to hear the preacher tell us what she or he thinks the scripture text means, or what we should believe or think or say. Not a few of us expect the pastor to have all the answers. So, that is my confession today, that I don’t entirely know. And, just as a side note, if you are someone who thinks that pastors have all the answers, I would encourage you to spend some more time around some pastors.

But, anyway… Let me start with some things I do know. We have shared two readings from the Bible today, and both of these passages are readings where God speaks. By that, I don’t mean that God speaks in that sort of philosophical way that we claim God speaks to us through any story from the Bible. Rather, in both of these readings, we actually get the active voice of God speaking—“and God said …” So, what is it that God is saying?

Well, first in Hosea we heard God thinking and talking about Israel—actually, to be more precise about the passage, we hear a mother God looking out on her gathered people as her child. She begins by testifying her love for her people: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” She is the mother who guides her child through life with kindness and bends down to feed her people. But, like many a mother, she is keenly aware of all the ways that her child has gone astray. “The more I called them, the more they went from me, they kept sacrificing to [other gods]. … The sword … devours [them] because of their schemes.” But God is a loving mother in this passage from Hosea, never willing to give up on her child no matter where they go. She may have to be a ‘tough-love’ mother at times, even roaring like a lion, but through it all, her compassion warm and tender, she asks “How can I give you up? … How can I hand you over?”

I know I am often amazed at the stories that I see and hear of someone’s faith and faithfulness despite all the odds. With our high school youth last week in Washington DC, I was able to yet again see such faithfulness. We spent the evening on Wednesday playing in the beautiful Meridian Hill Park, a park that only 5 or 6 years ago was the most dangerous and crime-ridden park in all of Washington—and now because of the faithful work of the ‘Parks & People’ group that some of our youth worked with, it’s crime rate has dropped fully 99% and it’s simply a great place to take a stroll or play frizbee with 60 of your favorite high schoolers. Or, there was Mr. James Burton on the staff at the 1,350 bed homeless shelter we worked at, a man who’s been through all the ups and downs that the shelter has seen—from lost court cases to government dignitaries who thought they were too good to eat the same food that the shelter served its residents. And yet, through all of that, Mr. Burton is still convinced that “the almighty God” was using our little group of youth from Illinois as part of the “ongoing unfolding of creation.”

And yet, the faithful conviction from which Mr. Burton spoke was simply a reflection back of the faithfulness of God that he knew, the faithfulness of a God who was—and is still—using our youth as part of the unfolding of creation, the same faithfulness that we hear this mothering God herself speaking in the pages of Hosea, the same faithfulness of the God who came to be among us as Jesus, the same faithfulness in death itself and in resurrection triumphantly that we remember and proclaim and enact as we gather around this table. So, this is one thing God is saying in the readings today, and this is one thing I know.

But, as we turn to the story from Luke, it would seem on first appearance that God is saying something rather different. In the parable, the story, that Jesus is telling, we see a rich farmer who has ended up having a really, really big harvest. So big, in fact, that his barns cannot hold all his crops. Now, having grown up in a farming community myself, I can’t say that this is the sort of problem that most modern American farmers are running into. But, given that this is his situation, this rich farmer has to figure out what he is going to do, and so he decides that he will tear down the barns and build bigger ones. And, having devised this seemingly intelligent plan, he continues on this conversation with himself, saying “Self, you have stored up all you need: relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” It’s there, at the end of this rich farmer’s conversation with himself that we hear God’s first words in the story: “You fool!”

“You fool?!?” What happened to the mother crying for her child? This may not be God coming in wrath, but it certainly doesn’t sound like Mr. Nice God. It would seem that our faithful, compassionate God has gone away, and the rich farmer’s left with an angry, or at least annoyed, God, because it’s not only “You fool!”, but God goes on to say “This very night your life is being demanded of you.” It’s easy to assume that this parable is about God demanding the rich farmer’s life. It is certainly true that much of Luke and, in fact, much of the Bible doesn’t take kindly to rich people who hoard all their money and possessions with no regard for anyone else or for God.

But I think there may be something more here. If you pay close attention to exactly what God says to the rich farmer, it isn’t God demanding the rich farmer’s life here. Many experts on this passage point out that the way the sentence reads in the original language, the thing demanding the man’s life is not God, but in fact the crops and goods that he wants to store up and eat, drink, and be merry about. I suspect many of us know how true that can be—our lives can become consumed with all the stuff we want or have, or they become overrun by the jobs we have to toil at in order to afford that stuff. Or maybe it’s something else demanding our life: an obsession or addition, a broken relationship or the quest for a relationship, even our own egos. Even as a church, we can fall into this trap—while I wouldn’t call this building merely a “barn”, how easy it is to get sidetracked from the life and ministry God is calling us to by an obsession with our building or our traditions or even our programs. Whatever it is, whether as a group or as individuals, “it” is out there and “it” is demanding our lives from us.

And so, to us as to the rich man, God comes to us like a good friend or a wiser older sibling, saying “You fool!” Or maybe “Helloooo!!!!!! Don’t you see what’s going on here? I want you to have real, true, abundant life and all this stuff is demanding it away from you.” Sometimes we need the wake up jolt. In the time of the parable, an over-abundant harvest was a sign of something bigger, a sign of God’s coming kingdom, and this rich farmer missed it. And so God comes in, saying “You fool!”, God being a friend to one who needed to hear “Wake up, dummy!” This is another thing God says in the readings today, and this is another thing I know.

So, what is it that I’m confessing to you that I don’t know? Well, in the midst of what I do know—that even through a whole laundry list of wanderings and offenses and unfaithfulness, God is faithful and that even when we get blinded to real life by misplaced priorities, God comes with a “You fool, Wake up!”—in the midst of these two gracious gifts from God of faithfulness and re-orientation, what I don’t know is how you will choose to be rich to God in return.

Pictures!!!

2007-07-12T07:57:00.000-06:00

Hey,

1. If you want to see some pictures of me during my recent trip to the National Gathering of the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns, as well as one from General Synod, go here. (For other pictures from National Gathering, you can go to the Coalition's website at http://www.ucccoaition.org/.)

2. If you want to see some pictures from life around Second Congregational UCC, check out this.

3. Finally, if you want to see some pictures from my Ordination and from my Installation, go here.

More is coming...

2007-07-08T14:42:00.000-06:00

All right, all:

So, as I was away most recently for our United Church of Christ's General Synod, I found out that there are in fact at least a few people out there who do read this blog. It was interesting having someone(s) I didn't know come up to me to say that they'd been reading my blog. Anyway, for all of you who are reading this, do know that I am planning to write more about my time away back in May (I went to the Princeton Forums on Youth Ministry and to the Festival of Homiletics) and also my most recent trip which included the National Gathering of the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns and the UCC General Synod. For now, I did just post today's sermon and the wedding homily/sermon from the wedding I officiated yesterday (my first ever!).

Peace,
--Matt

A Sermon for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-07-08T14:32:00.000-06:00

A Sermon for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
2 Kings 5:1-14 (The Healing of Naaman) & Luke 10:1-11,16-20 (The Sending of the 70 Disciples)

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
July 8, 2007

But Naaman’s servants approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean'?"

My friend John is pretty good at catching me in some “Naaman moments”, that is, when I’m sounding an awful lot like this guy Naaman in our 2nd Kings reading, trying to make something rather simple into an excruciatingly complicated ordeal. Usually, it starts out with me talking about something I’m planning to do, and my story will involve like 46 steps, the reinvention of the wheel, and weeks of planning. And John, in a sometimes overly ‘older brother’ sort of tone, chimes in like Naaman’s servants: “but why don’t you just _____ (something amazingly simple)”. Then, of course, comes some sort of defense: “but if I just do that, then x, y, and z won’t happen.” “Yeah, and…” usually follows from John, at which point I realize that x, y, and z really aren’t that important anyway, that the job will be accomplished just as well with the simple solution, and that, indeed, the world will not come to an end.

I am willing to hazard a guess that I am not the only person here today guilty of having at least an occasional “Naaman moment.” Some household chore you’re trying to avoid, some long-standing dispute with your brother or your in-laws—really there are any number of situations that can blind us to the solution right in front of us that seems too easy to be right, to simple to be possible, too good to be true.

As Christians, and especially as American Christians of the late 20th and early 21st century, we have so often fallen into this trap. Some 80 to 90 percent of Americans say that they believe in God—probably 60 to 70 percent consider themselves at least nominally Christian—and yet the vast majority of us have completely missed the too simple to be possible, too good to be truth that is the real core of what Christianity is all about. I suspect if you took a random survey of a handful of people who consider themselves at least nominally Christian, whether they go to church regularly or not—if you asked them what it means to be Christian, they’d probably tell you it’s something about being a good person or being nice or doing what is right. And this has a dark flipside: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say that they can’t go to church because they’re not good enough—they swear too much or they’re a lesbian or they smoke and drink or they don’t pray enough or they’re a single mother, or, or, or… all because of this conception of what Christianity is all about. Even among those of us who do go to church at least occasionally, many still think that what we say and believe and do is not really too important as long as we’re generally “good people”, so to speak.

Where are Naaman’s servants among us? Who are going to be the ones to call us all back to the too gracious, too wonderful to be possible, too fantastic to be true core of our Christian faith? That core that says ‘it’s not about you or what you’ve done, it’s about God and what God has done.’ The truth that rings out “God loves you” and “Christ died for you” and “Christ was raised to new life for you and for your new life” and “Another world is possible—and not some slightly better version of this world of hatred, injustice, prejudice, and despair, but truly another world, a new world.” The light that reveals that churches are not museums of saintly do-gooders, but rather that place where one hungry, broken sinner shares bread with another hungry, broken sinner. The trumpet blast that declares “not only that there is a God, but that God actually cares…actually gives a damn…” about you and about me and about us and about our world. (Quote borrowed from a sermon by David Lose at Luther Seminary and included in the introductory volume of Luther Seminary's In the Company of Preachers audio series.)

Can it really be so simple? Can Christianity and the church really be about God’s love and God’s care and God’s healing and God’s grace? … Is this not what the whole story of the Bible is about? God who creates order and light out of chaos and shadows. God who hears the cries of God’s people and leads the slaves out of Egypt. God who sends prophets to call for justice and faithfulness when the people are entangled in idolatry and profiteering. God who comes to us to be one of us. God who goes all the way, even to death, with us. God who sends the Spirit to sustain us and apostles like Paul to remind us of God’s “grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:24) God who shows us a vision of the end of all history of a new world where tears are wiped away and thousands upon thousands feast at the banquet table. Can it really be so simple? Can it really be true? Maybe, just maybe, it’s so wonderful and so fantastical that it can't not be…

The opportunity stands ever before us: “Wash and be clean”. We can take our Naaman selves and walk down to that river bank and immerse ourselves in the abundant waters of God’s grace. We can emerge out of the waters healed and renewed. But, having done so, the opportunity also stands before us for us to take on a different role in the story, for you and me and us to be more like Naaman’s servants, saying to each other and to those outside this place and to the world that it doesn’t have to be so difficult—just come and wash and be healed. Where are Naaman’s servants among us?—we are they. Or, maybe more fully than just Naaman’s servants, we are Jesus’ disciples. Sent out to all the people as in the passage from Luke this morning; sent out not with grand complicated plans and preparations—remember, it doesn’t always have to be so difficult—and sent out simply to teach and to heal and to say that the kingdom of God has come near. Reclaiming the simple yet wonderful and fantastical reality that lies at the heart of our identity, all that remains is for us to go forth in its power and to return in joy, amazed at the demons of the world that fall at our feet.

People of God, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean' … and go forth.

Wedding homily/sermon for Sarah Klint & Jonathan Frankel

2007-07-08T14:27:00.000-06:00

A Homily/Sermon for the Marriage of Sarah Klint & Jonathan Frankel
July 7, 2007 - Geneva National Golf Club, Lake Geneva, WI

John 2:1-11 -- The Wedding at Cana

Aside from any that I have been an “official” part of recently, I know that I for one have been to quite a lot of weddings in the past few months. There’s even another wedding going on as I speak at the church where I serve as pastor down in Rockford. It must be the season, as they say, for those of us in our 20s, since I know that Sarah and Jon have said that they’ve had a wedding or a bridal shower or something wedding related practically every weekend for the month or more leading up to this day.

Anyway, across all these weddings that I’ve been some part of lately, I can say that nothing quite like this story from the Gospel of John has come true—none of them have run out of wine (or beer or whatever they were serving) during the festivities. This was fortunate, I think, for the sanity of the people putting on these receptions—and perhaps also fortunate the next morning for drug stores selling Excedrin.

And yet, even though I’ve never seen a wedding that has run completely out of wine—and I’m not led to believe that it happens all that often—still this story is one that comes up in connection with weddings. Of course, that’s because the story is not really about the wine running out. I’m not sure it’s about the so-called ‘miracle’ of Jesus turning water into wine, either.

Rather, this is a story of transformation. Jesus took some old clay jars and rededicated them for a new purpose as the container for something new and wonderful. Our prayer this day is for that kind of miracle to happen here at this wedding feast: that these old and honored traditions of wedding celebration—the dresses, the food, the pictures, the party—that these can hold and celebrate the new marriage we witness today. But even more than that, we pray that these lives before us, Sarah and Jon, and the life they have shared together up to this point, that they can be transformed into containers for something new and wonderful by what they do today and by the power of God we invite upon them today.

This is also a story of abundance. Jesus did not simply make a glass of wine or a bottle of wine or even a jug or a keg of wine. He made somewhere upwards of 150 gallons of wine. In the time when this story was written, wine was a sign of God’s kingdom—God’s reign of abundant love, abundant justice, abundant mercy, and abundant peace. Our prayer this day is for that kind of miracle to happen here too. In a world filled with broken relationships, nations at war, and people hungry and oppressed, may the love we witness and celebrate, the risky commitment Sarah and Jon are about to make, and the feast we are about to share, may these things be signs and foretastes of that God’s coming kingdom. And even more, may the new stage that Sarah and Jon are entering in their relationship, may it help them partner with one another and with all of us as we work together with God in bringing about such abundant love and justice and mercy.

Finally, this story of abundance and transformation is the story of Jesus and of the God we know through him. Taking the old clay jar and making it the vessel for something new—this is a glimpse of who God is. Transforming something as ordinary as water into the abundant wine of a new life of peace, mercy, and justice—this is a glimpse of who God is. And, of course, as the story began, this all happens “on the third day”, a reference, I think, to that first Easter day when Jesus was raised after three days death—Christ’s self-giving love on the cross and powerful triumph of new life on Easter being the surest glimpse of who God is. And so, our prayer this day is for this kind of miracle to happen here too: that among all these friends and family gathered and amidst our acts of promising and praying and celebrating, that the presence of the God of new life will be known to each of us.

Sarah and Jon, I don’t hope that you run out of wine, but I do indeed hope this story comes true today. Amen.

"Unexpected Ministry" -- A Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter

2007-05-26T23:11:00.000-06:00

[Sorry for the delay, this is the sermon from May 20th, the 7th Sunday of Easter (a week ago)]

“Unexpected Ministry”
A Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter, Year C
Acts 16:16-34 (with allusion to Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21)

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
May 20, 2007

We are pretty good, here in the church, at saying that God works in mysterious ways. We tell one another that the love of Christ is broader than our minds can possibly imagine. We speak of a God whose will and ways are supposedly unknowable. We claim to believe that the winds of the Holy Spirit blow when and where and how they please. And yet, when we get outside of formal confessions and away from statements of what we think we should believe, most of the time we act as though God is under our control, living inside a box to which we have the key. We live with no room for the unexpected.

During my second year of seminary in Chicago, I participated in a unique experiment my school was attempting, an experiment in bringing our academic course work into closer conversation and relevance to the real lives of congregations in diverse settings throughout Chicago. As part of this program, I myself was working and worshipping among a predominately Puerto Rican UCC congregation on Chicago’s West Side. I was expecting to be challenged by working in a congregation very different from the ones I grown up in. I was expecting to be challenged in making connections between our studies and the churches we were working in. I was expecting to grow in my sense of myself as a pastor. I was expecting to struggle a bit as I worked with some community organizations the congregation belonged to in that inner city neighborhood. Certainly, many of those things happened; many of those challenges were there to be had. All that said, though, these were not the places where the greatest transformation happened. My eyes were opened the widest by the strife I did not foresee right there inside our classroom with and among my fellow classmates.

You see, the year we spent together in this experiment was the first time most of us had been in an academic environment where white people were in the minority. Of the fifteen students in the program that year, four of us were white, one of us was an international student from the Philippines, and ten of us were African American. The unfortunate reality is that this sort of situation just doesn’t happen in almost any graduate school in this country. And the yet more unfortunate reality is that, even in this environment, white privilege and white racism still reared their ugly heads. In the opening weeks of the year, we were asked by our professors—both white—to read a seemingly well-written book on the relationship between ethics and the scriptures. That is, seemingly well-written to those of us who were white. On the day we were to discuss the reading, it took almost an hour before the first of my black classmates found enough courage to break the tension that lingered in the air, so thick you could cut it with a knife. The moment was a story of hopes dashed and the pain of old battle wounds opened yet again. You could sum up my classmates thoughts as saying, ‘For the first time, we are in a place where we as African Americans are in the majority, and yet these white professors have assigned us a book that dismisses black liberation theology as a less-interesting example and hardly worthy of discussing at length.’ Or even more succinctly, ‘Yet again we have been downgraded, dismissed, ignored, thrown to the curb. How dare you?’ Still clinging to our unrecognized privilege, those of us who were white made feeble attempts to reclaim the book. ‘Well, yes, but aside from that, though, isn’t the overall point the author is making good?’ But the point wasn’t about the book. The point was about us. Were we too blind to see the reality of this community of people, too cold to care about their lifetime of pain and rejection?

Over the course of that year, that would not be the only painful conversation among the 15 of us. Somehow, though, I believe that through that year, through those experiences, I was being ministered to. I was having my eyes opened to truths previously unseen, my heart opened to realities previously unknown. Surely, words of judgment were given, and yet some gospel of grace was there too, as my classmates had the courage to walk with us as we finally learned how to walk with them.

I’m sure the jailer who kept watch over Paul and Silas did not expect to be ministered to by his captives. This jailer had the authority of the Roman Empire behind him. Moreover, this jailer had the literal keys to their prison cell, the power over whether Paul and Silas would stand or sit or walk or eat or drink. And yet, as William Willimon puts it, “Having the key to someone else’s cell does not make you free.” (Acts, Interpretation commentary series from John Knox Press) In fact, the jailer was certainly not free, as both he and we realize that his own life was at the mercy of the empire. Furthermore, no position of power makes us immune from the power of God to work through unexpected faces.

In times past, the established church was not immune from the Spirit of God calling it to stand against slavery and segregation, and is still today learning the riches of the gifts of the African American in our midst. In this time, the established church is not immune from the Spirit of God calling us to welcome and affirm lesbian and gay persons into the life of the church. And furthermore, we have just begun to see how this calling is pushing moderate and liberal Christians to new clarity about how we understand the Bible and what we believe the mission of the church to be. New voices will always call to us—to us as individuals, to the church, to our society—from some darkened prison cell with the possibility of life. The question seems to be whether we can open ourselves to a word of grace, a word of peace, a word of challenge, a word of compassion, a word of the Lord that sounds forth from outside whatever little box in which we’re trying to hold God.

This is a high calling, an honor, a gift, to open ourselves to the unexpected ministry we can receive from the Pauls and Silases in our midst. And yet, this is not the only way this story plays. Unexpected ministry is not only a gift for us to receive. Indeed, unexpected ministry is also the calling ever placed before us, the gift for us to do and give. If we’re trying to place ourselves in this story, we are not only the jailer, but we are also Paul and Silas, on a mission with the good news of the gospel to share with folks not expecting the gift we can offer them.

Paul and Silas speak a word of freedom and new life to two different people in this story. At the beginning of the passage today, we find them being followed by ‘fortune-telling girl’. Now, our scientific modern and post-modern minds might question this whole idea of her being possessed by some spirit or daemon—we might rather think of her as unbalanced or mentally ill—but regardless of the specific details of her condition, she is being used and abused. Her masters are using the spectacle of her condition as a way to make money. In calling the daemon out of the girl, Paul sets her free from the ability to be used in this way. Now, like what happens in many of the ministries we do as individuals and as a church, we don’t actually know what happened to the girl after Paul’s action. We don’t know if she remained a slave, perhaps to be treated even worse by her masters, or if maybe, just maybe, the budding Christian community in this town took her in. Likewise, we don’t know much about what may have happened to the jailer that Paul and Silas welcomed into the community of Christ. In both cases, though, a word was spoken, though, and a new possibility opened.

We here, this gathering of people known as Second Congregational United Church of Christ, we too have taken on the calling to be as Paul and Silas on our little corner in Rockford, speaking a word by which new possibilities open. And not only have we taken on this calling, but the ministries we do here, as individuals and together as the church, have all sorts of unexpected effects. Who of us can know what affect a caring phone call or a compassionate greeting could be having? How can we know today what life we may have opened up for the children and youth we serve through the Boys & Girls Club? Or perhaps even more unexpectedly, would you have guessed that the work we are doing as a congregation on clarifying our identity and mission, and improving our hospitality and welcome, and raising the vitality and centeredness of our worship, and becoming more intentional about scripture and mission-work and forming one another in faith is doing as much to improve our church’s youth ministry as anything we do at 4:30 on Sunday afternoons up on the 4th floor? At least that’s what some of the newest and most exciting research into congregations that are doing exemplary youth ministry is telling us. (You’ll hear more about this and other things from my recent time away in the coming weeks.)

Our whole reason for being is to invite people into God’s story of new possibilities in this world, to call out ‘daemons’ that keep people in bondage, to sing and pray until that final earthquake comes that will fling wide open every door of captivity and shake loose every chain of injustice. And just what is that story of God that opens new possibilities? Where do we find our authority to cast out the daemons of the world? What is that final earthquake that we await, and where comes our strength to sing and pray until it’s coming? That story, that authority, that earthquake, that strength is none other than the Christ who claimed us, like the jailer, in the waters of baptism. None other than the Risen One in whom God embraced us all even into the pain of death. None other than the One who came not to be served but to serve, whose coming again we await with the Spirit and the bride and everyone who hears. The infant One, the 12-year-old in the temple One, the healing One, the hunger-feeding One, the living-water-at-the-well One the table-turning-over One, the bread-of-life One, the crucified One, the Risen One, the reigns-and-prays-for-us One, the coming-again One.

As the last line of that old American hymn goes, “All things are mine since I am Christ’s—how can I keep from singing?” As the people so loved by this One, the people with the gift of the story of this One to tell, the people who already “trust in the Lord Jesus”, the people with the courage to be ministered to and the strength to minister—how, like Paul and Silas, can we keep from singing?

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

Time Away, Part 1: Cleveland

2007-05-10T12:17:00.000-06:00

All right, it seems like I should do something bloggy (reflective, etc.) about my recent time away. So, I shall attempt to do so in a few parts.

I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 27-29, at the UCC "Church House" (our national offices) in Cleveland. I was there for a conference titled "Called Out for Good: Ministering in the United Church of Christ", which was a denomination-wide gathering of clergy (plus a couple seminarians) who are openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, same-gender-loving, queer, etc. (Random thought 1: clearly our vocabulary is quickly failing us, as seemingly we who fall in these categories keep adding more and more terms to the list, while those 'outside' the community can't even handle the acronymns GLBT or LGBT without a blank stare.)

Any gathering of people from across the denomination in the UCC is, shall we say, interesting--and predominately LGBT ones even more so. People who are clergy and others in lay leadership in this denomination bring such a diverse mix of social, theological, liturgical, etc. viewpoints, which is simultaneously a great gift and a great weakness of our church. I'm also never quite sure that such gatherings are truly "representative" of the overall character of our denomination, since these gatherings are populated by those people attracted to such gatherings. There does seem to be a growing (ever so slightly) number of us who, while remaining committed to the diversity and the issues of justice, are more 'traditional' or 'orthodox' in our liturgical and theological leanings. For instance, in a conversation about the denomination as a place where "all are welcome", I am no longer the only voice raising the questions "Well, yes, but what exactly are we welcoming them into? Simply welcoming them into a place where all are welcome? Or is there something deeper, broader, beyond that--i.e. the gospel of Jesus Christ (a gospel which is not only 'you are welcome here')?" (Thanks to my friend Greg Morisse for being the one to raise this!).

Overall it was a good gathering. I remain astounded at Phil Porter's skills in facilitating group process (Phil is the Minister of Liturgical Arts and Communications Coordinator at First Congregational Church of Berkeley). Set before him was a gathering of diverse people with no particular agenda for the time, and he was able to guide the group into focusing its time around a couple key areas of discussion and facilitate those discussions in a way that was peaceable, respectful, voice-enabling, and all-around just plain wonderful.

Two of our periods of discussion left me with some things I surely need to reflect upon. The first was a presentation of some research around churches that hire openly gay pastors, and the second was our group discussion around self-care (physical, spiritual, and relational), personal life, and integrity.

One of the areas of reflection for me coming out of both of these sessions is about 'outness'. In my life and ministry at Second Congregational, I would not say that I am "closeted", but I am also not fully "out", or at least not as 'out' as I could or probably should be. We made the decision at my hire that we would not put a "I am gay" statement in the introductory materials that went out to the congregation; part of this was a logical argument that we wouldn't put a "I am straight" statement if that were the case. Since I was not at the time in any sort of relationship (and still am not), there wasn't a particular "need", so to speak, to make this sort of broadcast announcement. However, I also sensed that there was still some worry over the tension/anxiety that arose when my openly-lesbian predecessor was called; her orientation was fully 'broadcast' so to speak at her hire, at least in part because she had a partner. This decision, though, was predicated on an understanding that I was/am not willing to be 'closeted', that if the topic arose I would be open, that if I was asked about, any respondent was to be open. Also, since I was 'out' on my profile, the search committee and the entire church council knew/knows my orientation. And, being a church with an active 'rumor mill', certainly many others know. It was also included on my biographical info, both at my hire and on new-member Sunday back in February when I officially joined the congregation, that I am a member of the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns (but again, referencing my random thought above, there are a lot of people who don't know what the LGBT acronym stands for).

Now some 8 1/2 months later, I find myself growing somewhat more uncomfortable with the current state of affairs. Who knows? Who doesn't? I said that I was going to be open about myself when the topic arose, or the appropriate context presented itself, but when/what is that appropriate context? Why is it that, for the most part, I have yet to find any of those 'appropriate' contexts myself--I'm drawing a blank as I try to think of a time that I have disclosed my orientation to people within the congregation whom I didn't know already knew. My senior pastor, Mike, says that he has mentioned it on at least a couple occassions, which is perfectly fine, but that doesn't address my own disclosure. When will the time arise when I can make a passing reference in a sermon, be it to an event I was at, a relationship I had, whatever? How do we get to that time? Is it acceptable if that time never comes? (Already know the answer to that one: NO).

I am not talking about this as someone who wants to be defined by this aspect of my identity. It's not like that, once I think everyone knows, I would make some reference in every sermon or began every sentence in a group gathering with "As a gay man, I ...". On the other hand, it is the case that this part of my identity has contributed significantly to my journey as a Christian and as a pastor. I have already had to overtly 'neuter' a sermon at least once, maybe twice, in my time here.

At this point, I don't know whether the decision we made back in August was the "right" one. At one level, it quite possibly could have been 'easier' to have just taken care of this whole issue back then. On the other hand, I am usually a believer in "working the system", and maybe that's what we're effectively doing here, working through the disclosure within the positive impression and relationships I have already created with the congregation, instead of having had my orientation set up as a "hurdle" to jump on the road to those relationships. But is my own comfort, integrity, and self-care ending up as the sacraficial lamb in the process of "working with the system"? On yet another hand, will people be curious/doubtful/mistrustful/upset about the motivations for not sharing this from the beginning?

Obviously, the bed is now made as it is, and we (I and the congregation) must lay in it. But as we go forward, I still am really puzzled as to what those so-called "appropriate" moments are. In the eyes of the heterosexist world, no moment is "appropriate". In the eyes of liberation, every moment is "appropriate". In the eyes of Second Con? Who knows!?!

At heart, the crux of all of this from a theological/pastoral lens comes down to this: How can I make the claim that the Church is supposed to be a place where we can be who we truly are, when I am still have worries and anxiety about the dynamics (whatever they may be) of people finding out who I truly am?

Annual Report 2007

2007-04-25T19:05:00.000-06:00

I don't really think too many people will want to read this, but I'm rather pleased with what I wrote for my annual report to the congregation for their annual program meeting this coming Sunday. So, here it is:

ANNUAL REPORT TO THE CONGREGATION
The Rev. Matthew Emery, Associate Pastor
April 29, 2007

Grace and peace be with you all!

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” In the opening chapters of the book of Acts in the New Testament, we read about those very first moments in the life of the Christian church—-that period when the earliest Christians had to figure out exactly who they were and what their mission was as followers of the risen Christ empowered by the Holy Spirit. As the very first converts joined the community of the disciples, the author of Acts shares this description of just what the church was: a gathering of people whose identity consisted of their devotion to “the apostles teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

I believe that we, this gathering of people known as Second Congregational United Church of Christ, are ourselves on a journey of re-discovering our true identity as an authentic Christian community of disciples and on a mission of renewing our commitment to live into such an identity. As this journey and mission goes forward, I think we will find that this identity and life together looks an awful lot like that earliest description in the second chapter of Acts. In other words, we are finding ourselves called once again by God to be a community “devoted to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

Our work of re-devoting ourselves to this identity takes many forms. One of these is through our worship life: our reading of “the apostles’ teaching” in scripture, the preaching in our midst of the still-speaking Word of God, our prayers for the world and all in need, and our gathering around the table of grace for the “breaking of bread”. I am thankful for the numerous opportunities I have already had to preach among you, and hope that the ministry Pastor Mike and I both carry out in this area continues to faithfully call all of us deeper into the Word that God speaks to us today and the life demanded of that Word. I am also very thankful for the ministry of Paul Laprade, Bob Bates, and all of our church’s musicians in supporting our worship together, and particularly for their commitment to connecting the music with the scriptures of the day and with the overall ‘work’ of the whole congregation in worshipping God. A number of members of our community have offered their gifts and time to visually enhance our worship space for each season of the church year. This church has together explored a few new and renewed ways of enriching our liturgy (the pattern of the worship service); I offered much input, planning time, and logistical execution in the renewal of some of the ‘special’ services on the church calendar: Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, Palm/Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Easter Sunday. Our continued work to live more fully into the rich practices of Christian worship helps us journey toward the identity to which God is calling us.

Of course, the “apostles’ teaching” and the “breaking of bread” around which we gather in worship also calls us from inside the church walls to live out that teaching and that gracious meal in the world. Many ministries of mission, justice-seeking, and community outreach continued here at Second Congregational United Church of Christ. I believe our partnership with the Boys and Girls Club has and will continue to transform lives, both among the Boys and Girls Club youth and among the people of our own congregation. Even though mission and outreach is not part of her official job description, I continue to be amazed at the behind-the-scenes “social work” our own Becky Erbe does when a crisis arises, for both church and Boys and Girls Club families. Our very capable Board of Missions has taken the lead on many other areas of our mission ministries. One area of this work in which I have been more directly involved, though, is the process of re-visioning the purpose and work of the cooperative downtown ministry currently known as ‘Neighborhood Ministries’. As of this annual report, it remains to be seen what new form this ministry might take. As concerns all of our mission, justice, and outreach work, though, I am thankful for the growing awareness among us that the mission of the church out in the world is essential to the vitality and life of the church within the church walls.

Our devotion to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” also shows itself in our ministries of Christian education and formation. It has been good to see a growing interest in education/formation opportunities for adults as we began including adults in our Wednesday night programming thanks to the work of Fred Krauss. I am sure you will read much about this and other Christian education/formation ministries in the reports from Becky Erbe and the Board of C.E. As for myself, though, I have been directly involved with these ministries by leading our high school youth ministries and by assisting with the confirmation program. Our high school youth ministries have been in a sort of ‘re-building’ phase for this year, as the recent years’ turnover in associate pastors has taken its toll on both the program and on the youth themselves. I am encouraged by the relationships I have been able to build with our current 9th-graders, as well as with this year’s 8th-graders in our confirmation class—these two classes together will form our core group of high school youth for the next few years. Our annual junior-senior high Snow Camp was again a huge success. This year also saw the beginnings of a semi-regular newsletter to all of the youth connected with our church, a newsletter currently written by myself but which I hope will begin to include contributions from the youth themselves in the future. As we face the changing landscape of our society and our youth, we will need to continue to expand our vision of youth ministry beyond the confines of simply youth group. For example, some of our older high school youth have been active this year in other ministries within our congregation, including worship, music ensembles (Sanctuary Choir and Martin Ringers), and fellowship and athletic activities. In the coming years, we will need to challenge ourselves into a more comprehensive vision of the ministry possibilities with and among the youth of our congregation and our neighborhood.

Our increasing efforts to welcome new members into our church community forms part of our sharing in “the apostles’ ... fellowship” and our sharing of “the apostles’ teaching” with them. Our own morale and sense of positive excitement as a congregation-—the evidence of vitality within—-serves as a key component in our efforts to welcome newcomers. It has been wonderful to hear from many about the sense of new energy and positive mood shift within our congregation in the last year or so. No doubt that as we live into our true vocation as a Christian community, this will continue. Newcomers and guests among us will see and sense that there is some good thing here that they want to be part of. In fact, this is already happening. Since our last annual meeting, we have welcomed 21 new members into our congregation, and we have seen a higher percentage of them remaining ‘active’ since their joining than in some recent years. It was a joy for me to teach our January-February inquirers classes, and I look forward to another series in June for which we already have 8 to 12 potential participants. We will also welcome up to 10 new members on May 6th as our current confirmands affirm their baptismal vows and join our fellowship. Other efforts within my work around ‘new member welcome and evangelism’ have included active participation with our Board of Membership and Church Growth and Vitality Task Force, work on our forthcoming church website reconstruction, the creation of the guest stations and guest information packets located in our two narthexes, and participating in our March evangelism event with David Schoen. As always, though, all of these efforts are only secondary; our primary task as a congregation is to continue to live into our true identity as that community dedicated to those teachings, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers that mark us as a community of the Gospel. Only when others can experience the substance, gift, and good news of this kind of life together will they find themselves seeking to join us.

Finally, my work since coming here in September has included much in the way of ‘fellowship’ and ‘the prayers’ as I have accompanied you all in various fellowship activities and attempted to connect with those in need in pastoral care situations. Pastor Mike and I have begun using a more structured schedule for our own visitation of shut-ins, and we look forward to seeing some renewed effort in ‘lay visitation’ in the coming year. As always, the cycle of life on earth comes full circle for some people each year; since coming here in September, I have conducted four funerals myself and co-officiated four others with Pastor Mike.

I want to express some special thanks to some of the folks with whom I have worked most directly over the past year: Pastor Mike, Becky Erbe, Paul Laprade, Bob Bates, church secretary Mary Jensen, bookkeeper Nancy Yoeckel, Deacons chair Linda Tolodxi, Membership chair Dick Nielsen, Moderator Karen Olson, all the adults who helped with Snow Camp, and so many others. And most of all, thanks to the wonderful search committee that brought me here to be among you all—-were it not for their efforts, I would not have the gift of working and living among the wonderful people and staff of Second Congregational United Church of Christ.

Looking Forward

In addition to the continuing of the ministries I’ve discussed already, I am very excited about some of the things we are looking forward to for the coming year.

As I mentioned above, I am encouraged about the possibilities for greater vitality in our youth ministries this coming year, with the rather cohesive group of youth that are currently 8th- and 9th-graders forming the core body of the youth group and other ministries with and among the youth. I hope that our mission trip this summer to Washington, D.C., will provide a formative experience for the participants that will be a springboard into the fall. Also, on the date this annual report is being presented, I will be doing some continuing education time at the Princeton Forums on Youth Ministry, and I hope that this experience will also impact our program.

In addition to continuing with our high school youth ministries, I will be taking the lead in our 8th-grade confirmation program beginning in the fall. Mike, Becky, and I have selected a new curriculum for this program that I hope will greatly enrich the confirmands’ experience. Also, with me taking the lead for confirmation, Pastor Mike will be more available to teach as part of an upcoming expansion of the adult education/formation opportunities offered during our Wednesday night programming.

We are looking forward to some greater intentionality around various forms of small groups within our congregation in the next year or two. We already have some types of small groups here, such as athletic teams, circles, the book club, fellowship groups, and so forth. As we move forward, though, we hope to both diversify the types of smaller groups available for our members to plug-in to and help make all of our small groups into supportive communities where folks can engage in conversation and exploration that can deepen their faith journey and provide support and care in times of need.

In our efforts to welcome new people in our midst, I hope that over the coming years we can begin to think about what it means not only to welcome people from other churches, but what it takes to invite people into Christian faith in the first place. A majority of people in my own age bracket have never been part of a church at any point in their life. As Christians, we believe that we have good news to share, a reason that someone would want to part of a church community (never mind whether it is our church community specifically). Much of our society, though, doesn’t know this-—and doesn’t know what it means to be Christian in the first place. If we are really going to be serious about inviting people into our congregation, we are going to need to challenge ourselves to stop providing merely education about our church and to begin providing formation into our faith. There are many possible answers of how we can begin to live into that challenge, and I hope that together we can explore some of them over these next few years.

As a congregation, we are definitely moving in the direction of that early Christian community we read about in Acts: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Our congregation’s new mission statement expresses that direction quite well:

Second Congregational United Church of Christ is a welcoming, historic, and progressive Christian community in the heart of Rockford.

As a people gathered in response to God’s call, our mission is to proclaim the good news of God made known in Jesus Christ and to courageously live toward Christ’s inclusive reign of justice, mercy and peace.

In fulfillment of this mission, we covenant to…
-- join together faithfully in worship of our Triune God, through preaching, prayer, sacrament, and music;
-- grow continually in our understanding of our faith through ministries of Christian formation;
-- deepen our discipleship through service, justice-seeking, and reconciliation;
-- act as stewards of the abundant gifts we receive: physical, spiritual, financial, and relational;
-- intensify our commitment to the downtown Rockford community; and
-- celebrate and strengthen each other’s faith through friendship, compassion, and care in times of sorrow and rejoicing.

I am excited to continue watching this congregation live into these words—-and for me to live out my calling to help enable you in that work.

Yours in the journey,

The Reverend Matthew C. Emery
Associate Pastor

Peeps for Passover

2007-04-12T13:59:00.000-06:00

Peeps for Passover

For your enjoyment as we celebrate the 'Christian passover', Easter: the 10 plagues portrayed by peeps.
(Warning: graphic content. May be unsuitable for those who love peeps...or Kermit.)

Faith needs doubt

2007-04-12T09:36:00.000-06:00

"Past = Present = Future = Here": A sermon for Maundy Thursday

2007-04-10T15:17:00.000-06:00

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14: Israel celebrated its deliverance from slavery in Egypt by keeping the festival of Passover. This festival included the slaughter, preparation, and eating of the Passover lamb, whose blood was used to protect God's people from the threat of death. The early church described the Lord's supper using imagery from the Passover, especially in portraying Jesus as the lamb who delivers God's people from sin and death.
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19: "I will lift the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord." (vs. 13)
1 Corinthians 11:23-26: In all of Paul's letters, the only story from the life of Jesus that he recounts in detail is this report of the last supper. His words to the Christians in Corinth are reflected today in the liturgies of churches throughout the world.
John 13:1-17, 31b-35: The story of the last supper in John's gospel presents a remarkable event not mentioned elsewhere. Jesus performs the duty of a slave, washing the feet of his disciples and urging them to do the same for each other.

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois, on April 5, 2007

You might say that tonight is one of those times when everything comes together for Christian faith. It’s one of those places where we can best see the past meeting the present and both meeting the future—one of those experiences that most brings together the experience of our life today with the story of life in the scriptures and points toward a path of life for tomorrow.

Tonight we visit the past as we join with the Israelite people in remembering the mighty acts of God. Just as God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, so too has God broken all the chains that hold us captive to sin and injustice and all that keeps us from being the people God created us to be. And that past becomes the present tonight as we heard once again the promise and the reality of God’s forgiveness and saw our Ash Wednesday confessions consumed before our eyes. And like the Israelites and the Jewish people to this day who every year re-enact the Passover, the preparation for their walk of freedom across the Red Sea waters, we can take this present into the future by preparing ourselves ever and ever again—making ourselves ready to take part in the freedom, the redemption, God’s redemption, that is taking place in our midst. We could think of what we do here as merely ritual—or we can hear and feel and see the ritual moving and pulling and calling us into trust and faith and action. We can think of the story as past—or we can live as if the story, as if the salvation we anticipate, is a present reality and we can live as if it is the path of life for the future.

Tonight we visit the past as we join with the disciples in the upper room with Jesus. That past becomes present because, just as Jesus commanded his disciples to love one another, this command to love one another is ours today. And that past becomes present because, just as Jesus serves and loves his disciples in the shadow of his coming death, so we too come here to this place tonight and we too are invited to serve and love one another, even in the midst the pain and death and destruction in our lives and in our world. And this present becomes our future as we await that day when the whole creation will be transformed into the servant community and that day when the glory of God will be most fully known—and we are called to live into that future hope as though it is were not simply the future, but also the present, and not merely hope, but indeed the truth.

Tonight we visit the past as we hear the apostle Paul recalling the story of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. Like the Corinthian church, we too have received this tradition that has been handed on to us. As we join around the table, we remember the past event of Jesus sharing the Last Supper with his disciples. But indeed this past becomes the present tonight too as we gather around the table, because we gather not simply to remember the Last Supper. We gather to meet Jesus here and now, in this place, in these see-able, touch-able, taste-able things of bread and cup. Two thousand years ago, in the shadow of death, some disciples gathered around a table and Jesus was present among them, giving thanks and sharing a meal. A few days later, two disciples came to know Christ in their midst in the breaking of the bread. And this night, we trust that Christ is present yet again in this bread, in this cup, and in this community as we come to this table. And this present is about the future because, as Paul reminded the Corinthians, every time we share this feast, we proclaim both Jesus’ love for us to the end, even death, but also that ultimate promise that Christ will come again.

And yet, there is even more. Tonight, this table is also where all of these pasts and all of these presents and all of these futures come together. This table is where we join together to prepare ourselves for God’s redemption. And this table is where we proclaim God’s redemption already happening. This table is where we give thanks like the Psalmist for the mighty acts God has already done for us. And this table is where we lift the cup of salvation to see our sin washed right now. This table is where we remember Jesus, his love for us and his command to love one another. And this table is where we join together in that love of one another and where we receive the nourishment we need to go out as servants, washing the feet of the world. This table is where we remember the Last Supper, the meal Jesus shared with his disciples some 2,000 years ago. And this table is where we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, the ongoing feast of the Risen Jesus, receiving Christ himself into ourselves, right here, right now. And this table is where we await the banquet table of God, that everlasting abundant feast in the fullness of God’s reign—and we have the gift and privilege of celebrating that future feast right now.

Past meets present meets future. Remembrance meets life today meets the coming future. Ritual re-enactment meets faithful trust meets grace-filled promise. Friends, come to the feast: taste and see that the Lord is indeed good!

Sermon © 2007 by Matthew C. Emery. All rights reserved. Introductions to the scripture readings from Sundays and Seasons 2007, copyright © 2006 Augsburg Fortress.

Potluck Gormet

2007-04-09T07:34:00.000-06:00

Potluck gourmet

By Lillian Daniel

Why it is that people eat food in church that they wouldn’t eat anywhere else? Read more...

"Extravagantly Dying" -- A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C

2007-03-27T13:28:00.000-06:00

Isaiah 43:16-21: The Lord gives water in the wilderness to the chosen people.
John 12:1-8: Mary anoints Jesus for his burial.

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois, on March 25th, 2007

“Extravagantly dying.” I think it’s safe to say that this is probably not the most common pairing of words in our thinking and speaking. We more often speak of “extravagantly living”—regardless of whether you think that living extravagantly is a good or bad. And there are other things that we think we should do extravagantly: extravagant loving, extravagant welcome, extravagant generosity. But extravagantly dying? Is there such a thing?

Certainly the power of death seems abundant in our world. This past week marked the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, and its stench of death seems to cling to almost every word in our newspapers and minute on our newscasts—the CIA leak case and the Scooter Libby trial, the Walter Reed Hospital scandal and even the entirely-too-early build-up to the 2008 presidential campaign. And yet, even with all that, we still find ways to shy ourselves away from really dealing with it head on, banning the display of coffins of US war casualties and numbing ourselves to battle scenes on TV. Even the Register-Star’s cover on Monday that featured a rather candid testimony from my friend Nick McCord, who spent a year as an Army specialist in Iraq, seems more the exception than the norm.

Of course, it seems somehow “easy” for me, the preacher man, to stand up here and talk about government actions happening thousands of miles away. What about the forces of death at work right here? What about sitting in a parking lot crying as you’ve never cried before, when that first true love just told you they’re HIV-positive? What about the moment the doctor comes back into the exam room with that less-than-cheery look on their face? What about watching the coffin being closed for the last time?

In the midst of all these, how can I speak of extravagantly dying—or, even more, how dare I?

[pause]

Of course, I do dare speak. I dare to speak because I too am just as caught in the world’s web of brokenness and death that entangles us all. But more so, I dare to speak as one who has already been given over to a different kind of death in the waters of my baptism. [pause] A different kind of death? An extravagant death. A death-destroying death. A perfume fragrance kind of death.

You see, there is a competition of sorts going on in and around this story from the gospel of John. Unfortunately we don’t get quite the full picture of it from the selection appointed by the lectionary for today. If we were to have been reading along in the story, though, in chapter 11 we hear the story of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus after being ‘in the tomb four days’. At the end of that story, someone goes and tells the religious authorities about what Jesus had done, and so the religious authorities decide that they are going to try to kill him. Then, in the few verses after this morning’s reading, we hear that the religious authorities decide that they need to kill Lazarus too.

But here, in the middle of this building plot, in the midst of the forces of ‘bad’ death, so to speak, we see something different: a moment of calm, an intimate, passionate, compassionate gathering. We hear the anticipation of ‘a new thing springing forth. Do you not perceive it?’ Do you not see the warm caress of body to body, flesh to flesh as Mary anoints Jesus? Do you not see the joyful feast, thankful friends and followers preparing food for Jesus?

And, as people who know the rest of the story, who live the rest of the story, who are the rest of the story, we can see how this story points forward to the ultimate new thing that God has done. Mary touches Jesus feet just as Jesus would touch the feet of his disciples in service to them a few days later. The feast is prepared for Jesus just as Jesus would give thanks and share the meal in an upper room a few days later. Even Judas is seen betraying himself and his own interests in these days before he betrays Jesus. And all of this is said to happen 6 days before the Passover, the day when the Passover Lamb was to be selected.

This something different—this scene of abundance and extravagance—all seems to point onward to another something different. In the midst of the cheep, tawdry forces of ‘bad’ death, we are pushed forward to the extravagant death on that Friday we call ‘good’. We see the One who is here embraced by friends ‘lifted up’ to embrace us all. We see love poured out that we might be the fresh scent of extravagant perfume for the world. We see that the attempt to kill by the forces of bad death ends up in the death that kills death itself, which pushes on to the life the raises all to life.

[pause]

So, again, these two words: “extravagantly dying”. It isn’t so much that they are a prescription for self-help, that in the midst of death we can figure out some way to do it that some how will make it less ugly, less painful, less gut-wrenching. Rather, in a place such as this, can we be extravagantly dying in the waters of our baptism, that we might extravagantly rise to new life in Christ? Can we be the ones extravagantly pouring ourselves out in service to Christ, only to find ourselves being served by him? Can we be the ones joining in a meal that proclaims the extravagantly dying One, only to find ourselves greeted at the table by the Risen one? Can we be a people of such extravagance in the midst of the death within us and all around us that our whole story is crafted to point to the extravagant dying that destroys all death, the new life that raises all creation to life?

Sermon © 2007 by The Rev. Matthew C. Emery. All rights reserved.

“The Road of Truth” - A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, Year C

2007-03-27T13:20:00.000-06:00

“The Road of Truth" -- A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, Year C

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (The annual harvets festival called the Feast of Weeks provides the setting for this reading. This festival celebrates the first fruits of the produce of the land offered back to God in thanks. In this text, worshippers announce God's gracious acts on behalf of Israel.)

Luke 4:1-13 (After being filled with the Holy Spirit at his baptism, Jesus is tempted by the the devil and defines what it means to be called "the Son of God.")

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
February 25, 2007

A battle is being waged. Sound the trumpet. Gather the forces. The stakes are high. Prepare for engagement. Envision the victory.

One face of the battle has been seen every day for years now, in our newspapers and on our televisions, our radios, and our computer screens. Is Iraq suffering from an insurgency or a civil war? Should we have gone into Iraq in the first place, and now that we’re there, should our military “stay the course” or do we “surge” or do we pull out? Are we, the United States, truly the world’s last and only ‘indispensable nation’—and, if so, what does that mean?

A battle is being waged.

One face of the battle goes on behind the pages of our newspapers, for it is the face of what doesn’t get covered by our mainstream media. The genocide in Darfur; the gatherings of poverty-fighters protesting in Washington; the closed-door meetings of multi-national conglomerates that operate outside the laws of any nation. Or how about the fact that the same number of people who were killed in the Tsunami a couple of years ago die of AIDS every 18 days—150,000 people every 18 days, all year ‘round, every year. You didn’t hear about the AIDS crisis on the TV news this morning, amidst the probably 10 or more minutes they dedicated to telling you about the weather? Neither did I.

A battle is being waged.

Another face of the battle, a gentler, milder looking one, could be seen at our Friday Forum that we had with Mayor Larry Morrisey this past Friday—and no, I’m not talking about the battle over sales taxes. The mayor believes that the story this community chooses to tell about itself and its potential is perhaps the most important factor in the continuing revitalization of the whole of Rockford. This past fall, I pointed out a similar observation to our congregation’s Church Growth and Vitality Task Force, namely that as long as we continued to allow ourselves to think of our downtown location as an obstacle to overcome, it will continue to be one—and that as soon as we began to see and believe that our downtown location is an asset, it would indeed become an asset.

A battle is indeed being waged.

Another face of the battle played out in the desert wilderness. The battle wasn’t about the ravages of the wilderness. The battle wasn’t about being hungry, even though the story tells us that Jesus was indeed hungry. I don’t think that the battle was even chiefly about Jesus overcoming the devil. Rather, the battle that we hear played out in today’s reading from Luke, and that we see playing out in all these other faces today, is the battle for the truth.

I see this battle for the truth most strongly in the second temptation by the devil recorded in today’s story:

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’

It’s interesting, this temptation, because it isn’t even about a temptation of something Jesus wasn’t supposed to have. We often talk about temptation in that way—‘I was tempted to break my diet and eat that piece of cake,’ or ‘I really wanted to lie to her about what happened yesterday, but I resisted the temptation.’ But, power and dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, this isn’t something bad for Jesus; indeed, that is part of the faith we proclaim as Christians, that blessing and honor and power and glory and dominion ultimately belong to Christ.

But, you see, we have this battle raging, the battle over truth—and the truth that seems to be most at stake in the battle is the truth about our identity, the truth about who we really are. And so, likewise, in the episode of the battle we see Jesus in, the truth about who he is—what he is, how he operates, why he’s here—this truth of Jesus’ identity is on the line.

Whether you follow the order of the story from Luke as it appears in the Bible, we just heard the truth of Jesus’ identity proclaimed to us. In the order of stories in the Bible text itself, we just read the story of Jesus’ baptism, that day just before the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry where the Holy Spirit “descended on him … like a dove” and where the voice from heaven proclaimed “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” From there, this Spirit-filled beloved Son is next found—still with the Holy Spirit, or perhaps even because of it—in the wilderness. Even though the lectionary schedule has had us skipping around the story a little bit, we still just heard that same identity affirmed last Sunday, with the remembering of Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountaintop, where again a voice came from a cloud, saying “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

And so, this identity, Jesus’ connection and commitment to the God of Israel, this is on the line in this battle. Like Jesus asks the disciples later, “who do you say I am?”, the challenges of the devil in this story seem to ask Jesus, “alright, Mr. Jesus Guy, who do you say yourself to be?”

Jesus clinging to his identity in God, the LORD God of Israel, this is what the people of Israel had been called to do from the ancient times. Today in the reading from Deuteronomy, we find a ‘liturgical formula’, a pattern for worship, that was set out in the covenant of the whole nation to help the people remember the truth about their identity. What’s taken as a given is that Israel is a nation of gift-givers who give in response to God's provisions of order and identity. And when they come with the gifts of their first-fruits—when, not if—when they come with the gifts, the covenant calls them to recall the whole of their story, the truth about who they are—their roots back to Jacob (that’s the wandering Aramean, by the way), their growth in Egypt, God’s deliverance from bondage and slavery in Egypt, God’s gifting them with a prosperous land.

Part of what we do as Christians in worship is much like this kind of ‘rehearsal’ of our identity and history. We come into the worship space, and we see the font of baptism—some churches even have it near the entrance, so you have to see it—we see the waters and remember that we are the people claimed by the promises of God, sealed in the waters. We read the scriptures together, not because they are some text book we learn lessons from, but because they tell a story that we find ourselves in and amidst and a part of. When we gather at the communion table, if you pay attention to the praying that goes on—the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, we call it—you’ll hear that a central part of that praying is a recalling of the history of God’s work in the world, from the creation of the world, to the Exodus, to coming to us in Jesus, to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. We recall all these things when we bring our offering of bread and wine, just like Deuteronomy called upon the Israelites to tell aloud a version of their story when they brought their harvest offerings.

This season we have entered now, the season of Lent, is similarly an opportunity for us to reaffirm the truth about our identity. Lent began this past Wednesday with the services of Ash Wednesday. As we are marked with ashes, and hear the words, ‘remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return’, we are forced to face a part of the truth our identity—the truth that we live as broken people in a broken world. This is not so easy a part of our identity to face—if you don’t want to hear yourself that you’re going to pass away back to dust, just try being the one placing those ashes and saying those words to one of your good friends or to a 6-year-old child.
Of course, Lent is not just about Ash Wednesday. Lent has historically been the season when we lead new Christians to baptism and when we remember our own baptisms—once again, that water-sealed identity just keeps popping up! Lent has also for many people involved prayer disciplines, and simplifying our living, and acts of giving to the poor. Again, we reconnect with our identity as a people having been given much by God, and thus giving much in return.

There’s another truth being battled over in the second temptation Jesus faces from the devil. Yes, there’s this issue of whether Jesus would take up an identity of power over the nations—even though that would mean giving up his identity as the Son of God. But I don’t think that’s not the only truth at stake here. Even the very premise of the devil’s temptation takes up the battle over truth. “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me.” Has it? Has the glory and authority of all kingdoms of the world been given over to the devil? Was that true in Jesus time … and more importantly, is it true in ours?

A battle is being waged. Sound the trumpet. Gather the forces. The stakes are high. Prepare for engagement. Envision the victory.

The battle, of course, is over the truth about who you are, who we are. The forces are raging, trying to deny the truth that you are the community of God’s people, loved and beloved. The battle is also over the truth about what the church is, and what we’re called to do. The forces are raging, trying to deny our calling to be Christ’s body in the world, trying to deny that our identity should make us at odds with some of the world’s values, trying to deny that our doors can be open to the whole people of God. And the battle is over the truth about our world, what it is, what is possible for it. The forces are raging, trying to deny that the world belongs to God, trying to deny that life is possible for all people, trying to deny that we can live in peace.

So, friends, the way ahead is not an easy one amidst this battle. We must choose which way we will go amidst the crossfire. Shall we choose the way of misinformation, of denying our identity? Or, gifted with the grace of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit, following Jesus’ path this Lenten season toward the cross, shall our way be the road of truth, the road of true life?

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

Sermon © 2007 by The Rev. Matthew C. Emery. All rights reserved.

Insanity!

2007-02-10T10:06:00.000-06:00

"In the first ten hours of 2004 the U.S. spent more on weaponry than it would on food aid to the global poor all year."

-- From blog entry on food by Jason Byassee on Theolog: The Blog of The Christian Century.

A thought...

2007-02-08T09:41:00.001-06:00

"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?" - Ernest Gaines

“Wholly Holy People” - A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-01-21T18:49:00.000-06:00

“Wholly Holy People”

A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
January 21, 2007

Most of you know that not too long ago I spent a year working on the pastoral staff of a UCC church right outside Washington DC. I must say that I think Washington is a great place, and I really enjoyed my time there. Some people, though, find Washington—or I should say, more specifically, the people in Washington—rather irritating. “The first thing anyone ever asks you,” they say, “is ‘what do you do?’” That is, ‘what’s your job, your position?’ In the minds of these Washington detractors, nobody seems to care about anything other than if you can get them somewhere or do something for them because of your job or position. You are what you do—your job—apparently.

Now, I’m not sure I entirely agree with this criticism—I seem to think that “what do you do” is a fairly natural social icebreaker in many situations, a typical (although by no means required) bit of polite conversation. But that is not really my point here. Rather, I wonder, ‘How do you know who you are?’ Are you your job? Are you a name on a driver’s license? Are you simply a money-spending, stuff-consuming machine, as our whole culture of advertising and shopping and, often times, throwing-away would have us believe?

Over the past few weeks, I must confess that I have found myself spending a bit of time on the internet, looking at various people’s weblogs (or ‘blogs’) and profiles on “social networking” websites like MySpace. It is interesting to me what people do on these personal webpages and profiles to create and show a sense of their own identity. It begins with their answers to the stock getting-to-know-you sort of questions: where do you live, what are your hobbies and interests, where did you go to school—that sort of thing. But then, there’s often more. People personalize their pages with music and video clips and personal journal entries. There’s the endless personal survey responses, where folks reveal everything from what they ate for breakfast to … umm … probably some things they don’t expect their mother to be reading. And then, my favorite, are the little “quiz” responses—what the results were when they took the “what ice cream flavor are you?” quiz or the “which horror movie stereotype are you?” quiz.

So, anyway, all this is to say that there’s a lot of effort that seems to go into figuring out just what sort of image one wants to portray to the next random internet user that wanders by. But I’m not sure that knowing what flavor of ice cream some random survey has determined that you are really says much about your true identity. I mean, I’m guessing that no one started weeping when they heard that one.

We, of course, know of a people who wept when they heard who they were, when they were reminded of their true identity. All the people—men and women and all who could understand—stood in the square by the Water Gate and wept when Ezra and others read and explained the law to them. Now, in this passage from Nehemiah, the writer is not talking simply about ‘the law’ like we think of a legal code, but rather about what the Jewish tradition calls ‘Torah’, the books of the law, which correspond to the first five books of our Christian bibles: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And so, these people, a people that had been taken away to exile, they wept as they were reminded of the stories of who they were and where they came from: of God creating all humanity in the image of the divine; of God choosing them, the children of Abraham, as a chosen people to be a light to all the nations; of God breaking the chains of bondage and bringing them into freedom from their slavery in Egypt. And surely there was probably some legal code in there too, but a legal code that showed them a way to live as a people set apart, chosen and loved and freed by God—a legal code that called upon them to forgive debts and release captives in the jubilee year, the year of God’s favor. And the people, all the people, they wept as they remembered who the chosen people of God that they were, as they remembered the ways they had failed to live into that identity, as they saw before them the opportunity for a new start at living as the people God called them to be.

Being reminded of who we are is a powerful thing. I remember being at a large gathering of Christians in Philadelphia a little over three years ago, the second “Witness Our Welcome” conference. The first evening, our somewhat rag-tag group of people, brought together because we knew the disdain of society and the rejection of the Church, we sat in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on the city’s famous Rittenhouse Square as another group that called themselves Christian protested our gathering, in fact our mere existence, outside the church doors. And as we gathered in that magnificent space that evening, the Book was opened, and the Word was proclaimed, this time from 1st Peter: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of [God] … Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people. What more wondrous Word could be spoken to such a group? What more wondrous Word could be spoken through their own books of the law to the Israelites returning from exile? Indeed, what more wondrous Word could be spoken here, in this place, to you, to me, to us?

And perhaps as wondrous as that Word itself is how that Word is proclaimed. The Book is opened in the midst of all the people, before all the members of the body, the men and the women and all those that might understand, those more honorable and those less honorable. All the people gathered in from exile to hear again exactly who they are and whose they are—the whole people made into the holy people and the holy people becoming whole people once again.

Moreover, this is the assembly that we form here, Sunday after Sunday. We gather together, all of us, returning home from the exile that we live day-in and day-out, coming to find who we are. Sure, there may be only some 200 or so of us in this particular room, but we gather around this Word proclaimed together with Christians across the street and around the world. And like at the synagogue in Nazareth, we find Christ among us, fulfilling that Word as it is spoken and heard. And that one we find among us, anointed by the Spirit to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives sends us out to prepare ourselves as a feast to share with those who have nothing prepared.

At the Water Gate in Jerusalem, a community gathered, the Book was opened, and a people heard themselves and the promises of God anew. At a church in Philadelphia, a community gathered, the Book was opened, and a people knew themselves and the promises of God anew. In a synagogue in Nazareth, a community gathered, the Book was opened, and a people saw the promises of God fulfilled in their midst. So maybe, like those folk in Washington, who we are is about what we do. Or maybe something even more than that. Maybe we do what we do as a sign of the One to whom we belong, the One in whom we know ourselves to be whole people and holy people—and in doing what we do, we find that One, that solid rock upon which we are built, standing in our midst fulfilling ever again the promises of God.

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD,
NOW AND FOREVER.
AMEN.

Sermon ©2007, Matthew C. Emery. All Rights Reserved.

At least someone in the media gets it!

2007-01-17T15:35:00.000-06:00

All I can say is, Wow, I haven't seen the secular media weigh in this well on the issue in a long, long time (if ever)!

From THE PALM BEACH POST:

Friday, January 12, 2007

The cat is out of the bag. It is about sex, after all.

The breakaway parishes in the Episcopal Church make all the right noises about their struggle for theological orthodoxy, biblical purity and traditional Anglican values. Cut through all the verbiage, and their issue is sex, specifically homosexuality in the church's leadership, with a side order of bias against women.

The clergy in Truro Church and Falls Church in northern Virginia led their flocks out of the American Episcopal Church last month. In an extraordinary expression of self-righteousness, they aligned themselves with the Anglican Church of Nigeria and created a jurisdictional nightmare. They joined a renegade mission of the Nigerian church called the Convocation of Anglicans in North America that now boasts 21 parishes, according to The New York Times.

The group is under the insensitive direction of Nigerian bishop Peter Akinola, who reads Scripture literally and claims it says what he wants it to say. He equates gay leadership in the church with "a satanic attack." Akinola supports a bill in Nigeria that would make any public expression of homosexual activity a crime punishable by five years in prison. He wants to bring his prejudices to this country. To that end, he has consecrated an American priest, MartynMinns, rector of the Truro Church, to be a bishop in the Convocation. Minns will work under the authority of his Nigerian master in the vineyard of the American Episcopal Church.

That is the height of ecclesiastical arrogance borne of mind-numbing hubris. Bishops of different jurisdictions do not muck about in another bishop's territory, but this sanctimonious crowd observes no such niceties. They alone, they claim, know the truth and read Scripture accurately.

The great danger in all this — apart from the disgraceful treatment of homosexuals — is the growing power of bigots to use the Bible to condemn those who are different. Christians have long done that against Jews, blacks and women.

They use their religion "as a fig leaf to cover their naked prejudice," said the Rev. Peter Gomes, preacher to Harvard University who is a black, Republican, Baptist, gay minister.

His simple presence would make Bishop Akinola and his American minions apoplectic. His words condemn them.

(Steve Gushee, Staff Writer)

"What a Guest!" - A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

2007-01-14T02:44:00.000-06:00

“What a Guest!”

A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
January 14, 2007

Those of you who were here two Sundays ago likely remember the somewhat unusual sermon preached that day. In the reading from the Gospel of Luke, we heard about Jesus at age 12 in the temple, sitting among the teachers listening and asking questions. And so, in some sense creating a sermon together in our midst, we did likewise, sitting among each other as teachers, listening to one another and asking questions that lay deep on our hearts. There were many good questions that we shared in that time, many of them the sort of questions for which the only answer is a lifetime of living the journey of faithful exploration, discernment, and discipleship.

Questions usually have multiple layers. For instance, when someone asks “why did God let this happen?”, there’s almost always a deeper, more critical question lurking underneath it; that is, “how can I go on now that it has?” We like to hide those more vulnerable places, too afraid to even ask about our true yearnings. Or sometimes, the questions we ask reveal the doubts and anxieties we have ourselves.

One of the questions shared two weeks ago is just such a question, I think. As I recall, it went something like “how can Christianity compete in a world with multiple major religions?” Or, bringing the scale down a little bit, many people today ask about how the mainline Protestant churches—churches like ours: a part of one of the historic denominations of this country, rooted in historic traditions and practices, and yet vitally open to differences in theology and beliefs and faith—how can mainline-liberal-progressive churches like ours survive in the midst of the so-called competition from our more charismatic conservative-evangelical counterparts? That is, how can Church Street [our congregation] compete with Colonial Village [Heartland Community Church]? Even for all the very respectable pragmatic concern behind questions like these, I’m inclined to think that they’re not the real matter on our hearts. Or at the very least, that there is something deeper behind them.

What might that be, you ask? I think rather than surviving or competing against others, we want to know that there is new life possible here. We want some sign that our faith has not been in vain, and that indeed a living, vital relationship with God can be had. We seek to see that these vessels we call church—this path of belief and practice, this community of people—that these are still good and still have purpose, and that these can still bear the presence of God to us and others. With our anxieties and doubts combined with the trappings (or sometimes the baggage) of our traditions and history, we might just be a bit like empty jars at a wedding feast.

It’s a little interesting when you look at this story from the Gospel of John to see what the author spends their time telling us about. For the first few verses, they zip right through with plot—there’s a wedding feast in the town of Cana, Jesus is there with his mother and his newly called disciples, the wine runs out, and Jesus and his mother get in a little tussle about what to do. (This latter piece will have to be for another sermon.) And then, having zipped right through all this, in the middle of the story we find the author of John spending an awfully long time telling us about … jars, of all things. How many there were (six), what they were made of (stone), how big they were (20 or 30 gallons each), and what they were for (the Jewish purification rites). In pausing here, on something seemingly insignificant, we see a little glimpse into how Jesus works. He takes something old and solid and good—remember, just last week we heard of Jesus going through a Jewish purification rite himself—these old, solid, good things he transforms into the vessel for the gift of something new and wonderful, and does so in abundance; I mean, 120 to 180 gallons of wine is a lot of wine. I must note, here that, while for us today we see wine can have a dark side that people sometimes must struggle with, the people first receiving John’s gospel drew upon many images from the Old Testament and from their culture of wine as the sign of rich, abundant new life. And so, the miracle here is not simply that water was turned into wine, but that Jesus takes old, solid, good things that stood empty and waiting and makes them into the bearers of new life, and new life in abundance. What a guest!

And so, what about us? Is there new life to be seen here in this old building, in this solid community of people, in the midst of good things created for purposes of perhaps times past? Well, is that not what we’ve already seen? Have we not seen the Spirit, the continuing presence of Christ, in the creation of our unique Congregationalist and United Church of Christ traditions out of a past that wasn’t working anymore? Do we not know of the Spirit calling out to the church to open itself to women and gay people and persons of color—and seen ourselves rise to that purpose? Have we not heard of the Spirit calling to out to a congregation to open its doors to it’s community and provide a safe place for neighborhood children to gather (that would be us, you know)? The story goes that St. Jerome, the early church father who translated the Bible into Latin, was once asked whether all of that wine got consumed at the wedding feast. His response? “We are drinking from it still.” Indeed, right here, in the story of this denomination and this congregation, the festive drink of new life has flowed abundantly.

The Spirit still calls to us today, asking this old stone jar to be re-dedicated to bear the fruits of new life. And like the apostle Paul looking upon the church in Corinth, I look out among us and see a treasury of gifts to be used in the service of this task. Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, prophesy, discernment, even miracles—these gifts are here, among you—each of us having been given something by the Spirit. In Corinth, there was an ongoing debate over which gifts were the best, and Paul wrote to tell them, ‘No, even those gifts that some of you seem to think are least important—all of them are gifts of the Spirit, and thus all of you have something to offer in the service of God.’ All of you. All of you.

Having been so abundantly gifted by God’s Holy Spirit, we cannot help but be standing ready for Christ to be the guest among us, transforming us to new purpose, calling upon us to bear new life ever again. But wait, there is something more that happened at the wedding feast that day. Remember that chief steward? What was it that he said? Oh, yeah—at this wedding, the best wine had been saved for last. What makes us think that it will not be so with the new life that we shall bear, too?

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

Sermon ©2007, Matthew C. Emery. All Rights Reserved.

The Holy Spirit: It or She (or He)

2007-01-13T16:26:00.000-06:00

So at the moment, I'm working on writing tomorrow's sermon. I decided to actually write out a "sermon purpose statement" this week, which is something that I do think is a good idea to do (as my preaching professor Dow Edgerton recommends, along with folk like Fred Craddock and Frank Thomas)--although I must confess that I probably only end up actually doing it about a quarter or a third of the time.

The form of sermon purpose statement I'm using goes something like:

- To those who... (who do you take the people you're preaching to be)
- I want to say... (what do you want to say--the message itself)
- I want to do... (what do you hope the sermon will do)
- So that... (what is the response you hope to generate)

In working on the final piece ('So that..."), I first wrote:

the community might place their trust in the abundant Christ, in order that they might be open to the working of the Spirit and its various and diverse ways of working

But then, I looked at it and changed it to:

the community might place their trust in the abundant Christ, in order that they might be open to the working of the Spirit and her various and diverse ways of working

Anyway, all this is to say that I am a little amazed at what an effect the difference between the Spirit as "it" and the Spirit as "her" made in my own perception of the statement, my own imagery, my own feeling about it all. I think the biggest difference is in the personal vs. impersonal, and not about male vs. female ('he' vs. 'she'), although I must admit I've never much thought of the Holy Spirit as a "he"--only an 'it' or a 'she'.

Food for thought!

Oh, and for those who are curious, here's the complete sermon purpose statement:

Texts: 1 Corinthians 12:1-12 (Many gifts, one Spirit) and John 2:1-11 (Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding in Cana)

To those who are: feeling anxiety about change in the congregation, and about the place of ‘traditional’ mainline Protestantism in the world/church
I want to say: through the abundance of Christ and the varieties of the gifts of the Spirit, new life is possible (likely, in fact) through the ‘old’ vessels of this community
I want to do: affirm the gifts of the Spirit already present in the community, affirm the ways that God/Christ has already in the past worked ‘miracles’ of transformation and new purpose
So that: the community might place their trust in the abundant Christ, in order that they might be open to the working of the Spirit and her various and diverse ways of working

"Through the Waters" - A Sermon for the Baptism of Christ, Year C

2007-01-12T21:39:00.000-06:00

“Through the Waters”

A Sermon for the Baptism of Christ, RCL Year C
Isaiah 43:1-7 & Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, IL
January 7, 2007

I don’t think Phil was very happy with me. When I finally happened to see him yesterday--after probably more than three weeks of no contact--he was looking a little down... Not at all perky... The zest of life zapped right out of him. No words were exchanged in our brief little encounter yesterday, but none were needed. After all, Phil’s appearance alone said it all: “look at me... when you forget to give me water for this long, what do you expect a little guy like me to do but turn all wilt-y and brown?”

Of course, “Phil” is my houseplant, a philodendron that I’ve owned for not quite two years now. And, I must confess that I am not very good about keeping him watered. Maybe it’s because he sits off in an area of my apartment that I don’t necessarily walk by every day. Maybe if I had more houseplants--something I’ve thought about, as I think they would make a nice addition to my apartment--maybe if I had more than just one, then I’d be more likely to think about it. Maybe if I kept some sort of watering can out on my kitchen counter, maybe that might remind me.

Well, anyway... Observations about my houseplant gardening skills aside, what happens when we forget about the water? Now, I think it wouldn’t be too likely for us here in this building to forget about water. I mean, in just the four-and-a-half months I have been here, we’ve had a pipe burst that flooded our dining room and a roof leak here in the sanctuary that damaged part of our pipe organ. So there’s been water to think about a plenty.

But, then again, I wouldn’t think that the Israelites would forget about the waters either--the people who God led out of Egypt and through the waters of the Red Sea, God’s chosen people whose promised land lay across the Jordan River. Surely they wouldn’t forget about their journey through the waters and covenant God made in carrying them through. But, years later, we hear The Prophet preaching to them after they had forsaken that covenant. The new life they were given as they passed through the waters now stands withered away, brown leaves on dead branches.

But The Prophet proclaims the promise, God’s vow offered anew. ‘Cross the rivers, and I will be with you. Wade through the waters again, and I will raise you up. You may not know whether they are the floods of trial and terror or the pathway to freedom, but do not fear, for I have redeemed you.’ So The Prophet reminds the Israelites in exile of the message that the waters carried all along: ‘new life’, ‘the promise of the covenant’, ‘you belong to God.’

[pause (slight)]

Even with our recent overabundance of water flowing around this building, I believe that ultimately we too need reminding of the waters. We need to taste the cool sip of a refreshing drink in the desert heat. We need to feel the strange tingle of droplets, like that fine mist on a spring morning, like that touch that the baby coo-s at when the pastor’s wet hand comes near. We need to remember how good it is to wash ourselves off, to watch the sweat and muck of our lives disappear down the drain.

We need to remember that in the end the waters don’t depend on us. The faucet will pour forth water no matter who it is turning the spigot. The rain will come no matter how dirty or clean your car is. Even the prisoner--or perhaps especially the prisoner--is given water to drink. Are you old? These waters have washed over you. Are you young? In these waters, you too have passed through the river to the promised land. Are you rich? Are you poor? Are you white? Are you black or Latino or an immigrant? Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you a pastor? Are you a lay person? Are you differently-abled? Guess what--it doesn’t matter, the promise still calls out from the waters, for you too are baptized.

But there is something more here. We remember the waters, yes. But we also remember who is in the water with us. Glistening wet, hair dripping onto the sand, we find Jesus, right along side us and all the people. We remember and tell again this story from Luke, the account of Jesus being baptized, not only because we need to remember the waters, because we want to recall the fact that we are baptized. No, rather we tell the story--this story--of the One who wades into the water with us. John the Baptist warns of one who comes with power and might, Spirit and fire, and instead we find Jesus joining the ranks of the sinners who have come in repentance. The one who is supposed to come as our judge is the one who joins with us in our journey through the Jordan.

This is the “dirty little secret” that we have to share with the world. Jesus has stood beside us and all the people. When we pass through the waters, God will be with us. The Beloved One has chosen us. All humanity belongs to God, the One who calls us by name and loves us. And over this river of living water, the voice of God’s promise still rains down from heaven.
So, I think it’s a good thing we have this ‘watering can’ right here, so we don’t forget about the water.

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

Sermon Copyright © 2007, Matthew C. Emery. All rights reserved.

Quote for the Day #2

2007-01-12T21:35:00.001-06:00

"The truth of God is not limited to any cultic speech or vocabulary (ours or theirs). It is equally at home and equally difficult everywhere. ... Speaking of the truth of God, therefore, is not somehow speaking of a special truth at applies to a special realm and that is sayable only in a special language, to be understood by those with special training, and communicated to those with a special status, for whom it promises some special future."

--W. Dow Edgerton, Speak to Me That I May Speak: A Spirituality of Preaching (Pilgrim Press, 2006), p. 100.

Quote for the Day

2007-01-12T21:34:00.000-06:00

"It is precisely in the tension between the seemingly impossible news of the gospel and ordinary life that Christian existence moves. Even the most atonishing claims and promises of the gospel must be held in relationship to ordinary life, and it is there in the contradition that both ordinary life and the gospel are what they are."

--W. Dow Edgerton, Speak to Me That I May Speak: A Spirituality of Preaching (Pilgrim Press, 2006), 46.