Our brother's words

Friends,

I want to post the first three paragraphs of Tom's sermon for Easter in Jamestown.

I love the clarity of expression and the deep wisdom of what Tom says here.

It strikes me that such clarity is a fringe position, the idea that this life is our one life and that we can simply trust in God and say that our sight reaches only to the horizon.
****************
One of the saddest and most diabolical distortions of religion occurs whenever it is used to distract us from living lovingly, justly, and faithfully in this life. Religion that redirects our focus from this life to some other life after this one has little in common, it seems to me, with the religion of Jesus. Easter is not primarily about transport from this life into another one just as eternal life is not about living forever, but living deeply in the present moment. Eternal life, properly understood, is not an expression of infinite time. It is about living our lives now in such a way that their effects for good radiate outward forever.

About what happens to us when we die at the end of our days on earth I do not have much to say today because I do not know. No one does. A lot of preachers say they know, but they are not at that point telling the truth. No one knows. That is why I simply trust God with my life and my death and my loved ones. I trust God. Period. Scripture says that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death, and that is good enough for me.

Meanwhile, resurrection is for the living. I am utterly convinced of that. The Bible has almost nothing to say about what happens to us after this life because its writers did not know either. Rather, through the stories of our mothers and father in the faith, it tells of our human encounters with God, our engagements with the sacred, our experiences with the divine in this life. It exhorts us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly in this life. It encourages us to live toward and into our true and full humanity in this life. So it is a wonderment to me how and why so many parts of the church go to such great lengths to teach us to concern ourselves with heaven when Jesus was so deeply interested in earth.

Resurrection

For our midweek preaching series in Lent this year at First Pres, Jamestown, I asked five people...three clergy, two non-clergy...to compose an original poem, present it, and offer preaching reflections on it. "Five Poems for Lent" turned out to be wonderful, so much so that I suggested to our staff that we follow it with "Four Poems for Holy Week and Lent." Jon Rieley-Goddard's previous post was of the Good Friday poem he wrote and presented as well as the sermon he preached on it. The pastoral associate at First Pres did Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. I figured it might be good for my job longevity if I weighed in with at least one poem...so I am in the pulpit on Easter. As I post this Friday evening, I haven't a clue yet as to the sermon I will preach around this poem, but, here, with my best wishes for the presence of Easter in your life all the year long, is the poem.


Tom


P.S. to Steve Phelps - I have not forgotten my phone call to you...soon and very soon!!



Resurrection

Sometimes we give our hearts to something or someone
and then it or they are gone.
Loving deeply,
the letting go is wrenching,
a searing, scarring agony entombing us
until one day,
amid or after the weeping and wasting,
we are set free:
alive again.

(TAS - Easter 2008)

Good My Lord

Here are a poem that I wrote and my sermon outline for Good Friday at First Pres. Church in Jamestown.

Good My Lord

Today is for
despair.

Yesterday is for
hope.

Tomorrow is for
expectation.

Joy hangs in the balance,
dizzy with dread.
Three days upside down.

Good Friday?
Good, my Lord?

***

Today is for despair.
Get into the depths of it.

Go to the crossroads,
and choose your way.

Today is for despair.
Be your best.

***

Touch the face of God.
Hide under God's strong wings.

Choose this day --
the tomb, or just after.

One day for despair,
and one day only.

***

See through the ink that wrote
"King of the Jews".

Open your eyes;
there will be no difference.
Ink will stain your orbs
and dye your spirit.

Learn the far edge of Good.
Learn the lesson of giving up.

***

Stand still and feel it.
This is the threshhold
of joy. Laugh at allthat would destroy you.

Believe that you have
the strength of the one
whom you follow.

Laugh now.
Stay in that place of pain
and gain. Laugh.

***

Good my Lord.

Oh, yes, very, very good.
The best.

The_best_laugh_last.

************************************************************

Today is the one day that we, as followers of God in Jesus Christ, have full permission to give in to despair.

There is God’s absolute genius in this, because that means we have both permission and the expectation that on all the other days of the year, and every year, we will sing God’s praise and do God’s will and say,

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!

But on this one day, when the sun became a black hole that swallowed up all that was good in the Creation,we are invited, and we are encouraged, to feel the full despair of the occasion.

Our Lord, dead on the Cross.

His followers, stunned and terrified.

The Cross has power for you, in proportion to your ability to understand the despairof this occasion.

The text that I chose is short and ugly, stark and frightening:
Mark 15:25: It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him.

Matter-of-fact.

No exit.

No future, and no hope.

For the space of this one day, allow the facts to teach you of despair.

Tomorrow, jump up with joy, for your salvation is near.

And Sunday? Put despair on the shelf for another year,for there is no place like that in the Kingdom of God,except for the space of this one day.

Sunday is for laughing, and dancing, and singing.

Today is different.

But still, and all, this, too, is the day that the Lord has made.Let us rejoice and be glad in it,

and let us feel the occasional, as well, in that matrix of joy.

Poem for my church's newsletter

Stop.
Making Sense

Alright, then, I will.
Or won't.
Maybe, then. I will/won't.

Stop.

Crying in The Chapel

On Sunday, February 17, I attended the 9 a.m. worship service at The Chapel at Cross Point, way up where I-990 meets Millersport Road. I would not call the place “fringe-friendly,” but I had an extraordinary experience. A description of its features, and particularly its sermon, may, by its contrast to our hopes, add clarity to the need for new forms of spiritual community.

A worshiper needed no bulletin. The “worship folder” was filled with information, but none of it pertained to the service taking place, which opened with two songs, led by a 10 piece band, accompanied by an 8 piece orchestra. Four cameras constantly played over the musicians; somewhere, a video technician selected which camera to project on the two immense video screens. One of the cameras appeared to be managed by a man on a wheeled vehicle of some kind. Once every minute or two, he swiftly passed the camera across the full 100 foot length of the stage floor boards. The resultant moving image on the big screens felt like Superbowl halftime coverage. The whole service was being signed for the deaf or hearing impaired

Announcements of pastoral concern followed, leading into prayer, which was followed by an anthem sung by a choir of 60 or so. Then two more songs were sung; the congregation, if that is the right word, stood for all the songs. Many, perhaps most, of the 1500 people in attendance were singing along, reading words displayed on the screens; however, I could not hear their voices above the band even though I was sitting toward the back of the immense auditorium and the band was about 200 feet away.

Now came the sermon. Jerry Gillis, the “lead pastor,” was dressed very casually, in the mega-church tradition. He is in his late 30s, I would guess. The sermon’s title was “Jesus and Politics.” He opened up by warning the congregation that they might not like what he was going to say, thus seeming to lay hold of the prophet’s mantle. His first claim was that there is “an alarming politization (sic) of faith in America.” His further argument was that left and right wings of American politics are equally guilty here; both claim that Jesus is on their side. He offered no data to support the idea that the left wing is eager to claim God on its side, and, given the audience, he hardly needed to give details to show that the right-wing has done this. Thus did he arrive at his central teaching, that a “Christian’s first allegiance is to God and his kingdom, which trumps allegiance to the United States.”

It took a long time to get to this simple point, but it is sound, and I was intrigued that he was offering it to his audience. They appeared to be working class and lower middle class, not generally college-educated, but not poor. I saw one person of color in the room. Of course, the cars in the parking lot were new and expensive and, probably, not paid for.

After the big point was made, I waited to hear the behavioral consequences or character of having “God and his kingdom” take priority over all other allegiances. This did not come readily from any of his Scripture readings or interpretations. Using Daniel primarily, he asserted that God is totally in control of the destiny of nations, causing them to do his will. He did not peel back any difficulties in believing this assertion.

The next major point was that the Scriptures reveal a clear limit for the scope and powers of civil government. The texts were drawn from 1 Tim 2, Rom 13, and 1 Peter 2, which, as you know, more or less argue that everyone ought to do exactly what the government tells them to do, for it is God who has given ruling power to rulers. Paul goes so far as to say that only evil-doers have anything to fear from the civil government. (Pity poor George W, who seems to have found a warm home for his little mind in that idea.) Once more, this preacher did not explore the ambiguities and conflicts of the idea. That withholding of genuine thought permitted the following tragic conclusions to be washed over the ears of a frequently applauding congregation.

The roles of government are twofold, he asserted: 1) to protect from and to punish evil; and 2) to preserve an ethic of life and freedom. Regarding the first, he suddenly and for the first time inserted a behavioral consequence for right relationship of heavenly and civil governments. “It is right,” he said, “for the government to prevent illegal immigrants from coming into the country.” He then stated that illegal immigrants commit more than 4000 murders every year, “more than all the people killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war.”

(I have researched his claim on the Internet. A US government Bureau of Statistics page states that neither federal nor state governments keep records of the ethnicity of non-black murderers. That data lacking, a right wing individual invented his own murder-measure methodology. He assumed that illegal immigrants commit murders in the US at the same rate as do their countrymen in the countries of origin. Extrapolating from an assumed 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, the partisan arrived at his notion that illegal immigrants are responsible for approximately one third of all murders in America. A right-wing congressman from Iowa took this baseless extrapolation as fact, blurted it out to his district, got into the papers, and thus it turned into “truth” for fear-mongering pastors, among others.)

The lead pastor then argued that war is sometimes justifiable, and showed his intellectual chops by referring to Augustine’s just war theory, though he offered no detail on its elements. He then asserted that the war against Afghanistan was indeed a just war, and that the war in Iraq was “debatable,” on Augustine’s terms. He swept the problem of Jesus’ radical commands against killing into the dustpan by instructing his congregation that these commands pertain to individual duty only and have nothing to do with societal or national responsibilities.

With respect to the role of government in preserving an ethic of life and freedom, he went out on a limb to argue that the founding fathers’ insistence on the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was directed specifically at religious happiness through salvation in Jesus Christ. He is apparently ignorant of the fact that the founding fathers were mostly Deists and some of them, like Jefferson and Paine, detested the ordinary worship of Jesus. “We used to be a Christian nation,” the pastor claimed, “for all the founders believed that Jesus was the only way and that is the hope they intended the founding documents to support. But now ”—here he would offer a third specific behavioral consequence for kingdom allegiance—“our nation doesn’t mind when a woman is just getting an abortion for the fun of it." A rejection of euthanasia had to be thrown in here as well.

The final consequence in his kingdom-allegiance teaching about the limits of government was that economic policy must see to equal chances for all, not equal outcomes. “Redistribution of wealth is simply stealing,” he intoned slowly, forcefully. The place erupted in applause.

This was a 45 minute sermon. No other behavioral consequences were addressed. In sum, 1500 suburbanites plus another 1500-2000 at the 11 o’clock hour were confirmed in believing that a) illegal immigrants are extremely dangerous criminals; b) the war on Iraq might not be wrong — it is debatable; c) the founding fathers were Bible believing Jesus followers; d) abortion is evil; e) euthanasia is evil; and f) progressive taxation is evil.

What a travesty of his integrity! He began by claiming that he was leaving the rutted, muddy ways of ordinary partisan (and Republican) politics for a fresh, clean run across the fields of the kingdom—and then he drenched his listeners in the ordinary slime of right wing Republican religion, including two egregious errors of fact, and God only knows how many errors of omission, since only these few behaviors were singled out for attention as worthy of kingdom care.

To borrow from an old song, you could have “found me crying in The Chapel.”

Now, fringe-friendly worlds will not directly touch the mega-church world. It might be a waste of time to have written at such length about the experience—a kind of slumming. But I want to be open to a different possibility.

In his book “The Left Hand of God,” Michael Lerner argues that fundamentalist religion correlates positively with social oppression which, in America, primarily takes the form of relatively low wages and the commodification of labor, meaning that people feel thoroughly used by their employers as means toward other people’s ends. They are in too much pain, he argues, to have a more-open view of the world. Tightly closed religious boundaries are a kind of anodyne to the deep, unexpressed pain. I find that argument persuasive.

The beginning of the end of the old left/right politics and all the other adversarial paradigms of the culture wars will not come from the next victory of the 51% righteous over the 49% unrighteous (as to which is which, choose your weapon). We have seen that battle for the bare majority ruining the Presbyterians for a few decades, just as it has the nation at large.

The end of the old fight and the opening of the next society, and its new religious reality, can come through the work of leaders who accept that, since nothing can be known of the ultimate destiny of any person, the main work is here, namely, being good in priority to being right. Of course we know the cut of the blade of neo-orthodox theology which asserts that no one can know what is good apart from the right teaching—which only “we” have! Gotcha!

The fringe-friendly are learning how to accept the partial validity of this pole of truth, as well as the dire necessity of invoking its opposite. They understand the polar opposition necessary to all truth-saying. (From time to time, I used to tell my congregation, that since truth required that we unsay each week some of what had been said the week before, it was incumbent on them to come to church every week in order to avoid half-truths.) And the fringe-friendly get it, that they need to stay connected with folks who do not see these things, even while those folks are skewering them in private and in public. Which means, somehow I should connect with the pastor of The Chapel at Cross Point! I guess going to the cross is the point!

Fav fringe -- exile ... fav fringer -- coyote

Hi

Glad you like the trappings.

I'm posting a long poem that I wrote about Coyote and the idea of exile.

The text of the poem is printed as the first comment to this post, since it is long.

To see the poem in a more pleasing form (the Riverside-Salem UCC web site), go here.

Herd About It

Hey boys! We're in. Thank so much, Jon. I like the handle.

A word about "-gregations": Con-, se-, and ag- do of course all come from one root.

So also: gregarious (as we'd assumed) and category and allegory, and . . . agora (you get the prize, Jon!)

Their common ancestor is an Indo-European root "ger-, meaning "to gather" and apparently arising from a word for "herd" or "flock"

So, while it's not clear that new gregations (maybe that's a word worth a coin) need new pastors, they will surely move in new pastures.

Steve