Text: Exodus 12:1-14
Date: September 4, 2011
Green Street UMC, Augusta, ME
© Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher
So Shawn, an Irishman, meets his friend Paddy on the way to church. “You’re looking sad this morning, Paddy,” says Shawn. “What’s troubling you so?”
“Well, I’ve been to a funeral,” says Paddy.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” answers Shawn. “A friend of yours?”
“Oh, yes, a fine friend,” says Paddy. “A loving husband, a devoted father, but an atheist.”
“An Atheist. Is that why you’re so sad?” asked Shawn.
“Yes,” Paddy answers. “I looked down at him in his casket, dressed in his finest jacket, shirt, and tie, and I thought to my self, ‘Poor Seamus, all dressed up and no where to go.”
Well, I’m happy to leave the eternal destiny of Seamus to his creator, but his predicament begs the question for all who do profess a belief in God, are we expecting to go anywhere? I was entering family birthdays into Google calendar the other day, and with each addition I was given several options:
Is this a recurring event? Yes
How often will this event occur? Yearly
For how many years will this event reoccur or will it reoccur forever?
That’s the question, isn’t it? I’d like to think that I’ll be having a birthday 20 years from now, but I’m pretty sure 100 years from now is pretty optimistic. Although I did read an article from a reliable source last month that suggested that the first human beings to reach the age of 150 have almost certainly already been born. So be nice to the kids in the nursery; they may be around for a while.
All dressed up and no place to go. Maybe you saw the cartoon of the three angels in heaven, one sitting on a cloud with a laptop computer close at hand, weeping profusely. “What’s wrong with him?” asked one of the angels. The other answered, “No Internet access.” The point is that heaven is going be a dreadfully boring place if we don’t live now like we expect to be living then. Do we really expect to live eternally checking our Facebook page, watching Soap Operas, and looking for good buys on Ebay? We had a reminder of our technology dependence last week as power went out across the region, and then came back slowly, for some not until Friday or Saturday. And as I saw folks later in the week or as they got back on-line, some reported that they had had the worst time of their lives, while others--even with all the difficulties--described the experience as life-changing. Tracy Cochran, who’s a blogger on Word Press, wrote about how the dynamics of her family and community life began to change.
“For days,” she writes, “I collected sticks in the yard to burn as kindling in the wood stove, and hauled buckets of water into the house to flush the toilet and wash the dishes. It was strange, being so cut off in one sense yet feeling so intimately connected with life and with the way much of the rest of the world lives. Instantly, I was aware of how precious clean water is, and how much I usually waste. Suddenly, I became aware that a house grows dark and cold at night without someone to build a fire and tend it. I became the fire builder, the keeper of the hearth. Anthony, my daughter Alex’s boyfriend from England, cooked food on the cast iron stove. We all learned how long it takes to cook over a fire—hours! And yet this was the center of the evening, the light and warmth from the fire, the promise of warm food, the common talk of how it was coming along, and then stories we told as we ate. We all learned what is elemental and crucial, and that these basic things can be hard work, yet there is something inherently good and right about it. All beings deserve to eat and be warm and safe, and being mindfully engaged in this work can bring wisdom about life. ....
“As the third day dawned to no hot coffee or tea (unless I got up and built a fire and waited for three hours), it began to feel like an ordeal. Alex was sick with a bad cold, our water supply was almost exhausted–and I discovered that those little moments of good humor—that impulse to forget ourselves and help someone else are as crucial as fire. On the third night, as I was struggling to light a fire with damp kindling, the neighbors came by with big pales of fresh water: “We wanted to give you the gift of being able to flush the toilet,” they said.
“...I...marveled at the way this common humanity–this pulling together–just arose spontaneously. We innately know we can’t go it alone. We neighbors who rarely have the chance to stop and talk stood outside together laughing and talking (for hours). We even looked up at the stars that we commented were so clear without ambient lights....” (http://parabolatracy.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/irene-lessons/)
I don’t want to romanticize life without technology. The memories of last week are too fresh for that. But it is clear that something emerges when the lights go out that is closer to our heavenly life than our typical everyday existence. We appreciate the value of our relationships, we marvel at natural wonders that we’re inclined to ignore, we appreciate the simplicity of warm food, adequate portions, and shared responsibility.
I read these words with today’s Scripture lesson close at hand. Moses is told to prepare the people for Passover, that wonderful yet terrible night when the angel of death will smite the first born of their oppressors. In order to preserve their families from this terrible fate, the Hebrews are asked to distinguish themselves from the society in which they live by gathering for a meal, a Passover meal. They are to roast a lamb and to find someone to share it with (Passover is a community event and doesn’t come in single serving containers). They are told to dress as those who expect to be delivered from slavery by morning--shoes on their feet, staff in their hand. There are to be no leftovers, because surely tomorrow morning we will be free.
Likewise, we are called to gather here this morning for this meal set before us. It is the foretaste of the heavenly life that will envelope us when we run out of birthdays. It is communal, and lived in real time, when we are gathered together. It can’t be shared electronically or experienced historically, it can only be eaten now, here, and together. It is more powerful than the darkness which will surround us tonight when the sun goes down, it is more powerful than the hunger as we wait for fire to warm our food; this altar is the hearth around which we gather so that our story may be told to those who haven’t heard it, as well as those who have, but who don’t mind hearing it again. This altar has been here for mere decades, but it is also ancient. It has been the gathering place of our ancestors since Jesus first broke bread upon it and said to his friends, “This is my body, broken for you.” Indeed, it is the same table upon which a roasted lamb was placed, as mothers told their children, “Eat all of it, because tomorrow we will know freedom.”
All dressed up, and someplace to go. Have your staff in your hand, and your shoes on your feet this morning, for this world is not our home. Amen.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Sermon for Homecoming Sunday
Text: Romans 8:26-39
Date: July 24, 2011 (Homecoming)
© Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher
Green Street UMC, Augusta, ME
Homecoming. What a wonderful word, and a wonderful day. To see faces that we haven’t seen in a long time, to feel once again the power of place in our spiritual journey, to experience in a small, miniscule way what it must be like to arrive at our heavenly home, whether five minutes from now or a century. Homecoming.
I’ve had a number of Homecoming experiences this year. In part due to my Dad’s illness, I’ve become nostalgic for places that I have left behind, places that he and I have shared. We lived for five years in Marlborough, Connecticut, outside of Hartford when I was seven or eight years old, and I diverted on a journey last fall to go see my old house, and school, and church. It all seemed so small, and the distances so much shorter than I remembered. My school was gone completely, swallowed up by an expansion project now 20 years old. But as I drove slowly from school to my old home on Chapman Road memories came flooding back: the house where we used to trick or treat twice and the owner would pretend not to remember. The backyard studio where I took music lessons, now become a tool shed. The store where I bought sour apple chewing gum on the Fourth of July one year, just before the parade started. The Library where I read every Hardy Boys book ever printed. The Little League field where I sweated and prayed that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me, or if it was that I wouldn’t do anything stupid like get hit in the face with it. The house of a friend, whose father worked for Hostess; the pantry in the home had a magical Twinkie box that never ever hit bottom. I had to stop myself from ringing the illuminated doorbell and asking for a Yodel or Drake’s cake. Strangely enough one of my good friends from my Pennsylvania college now lives two doors down from this home in the tangle of relationships that we weave over a life time.
My old home was different. The deck was now a sunroom, the shingles painted rather than weathered. But the old apple trees out back were still there, along with an ancient grape arbor that was old when we lived there 40 years ago, the remnant of a farm long since subdivided. The church continues to thrive, now nearly in its 200th year; I know that because I was there for their sesquicentennial celebration in the early 70s, and my mom had to explain that it meant 150 years. There is still a wrought iron boot scraper at the front door of the church, beckoning those with mud on their shoes to nonetheless enter the house of God, fresh from the fields and the morning milking. The dairy farms have long since gone, of course, but the boot scraper remains; it used to fascinate me as a kid; I’d forgotten that. I went around to the back door, which was locked, but recalled the Sunday we left my brother at Church. I don’t know how, but we went tearing back to get him and there he stood with the pastor at the kitchen door waiting for us, secure in the knowledge that we’d be back. No one greeted me on this little trip down memory lane. After 40 years, most everyone I know there has moved on or would be unrecognizable to me, and I to them. Do they know that the kid in the back row of the Sunday School class who asked all those pesky questions wound up in the ministry? Probably not. We have, to use the usual term, “lost touch.”
Probably while I’ve been speaking the last few minutes, you’ve taken your own nostalgic trip, to that home that you left behind, the church where you grew up, the school, or job, or place of natural beauty that you’d love to visit just one more time. If so, perhaps you learned—as I did on my detour that day—that while places may hold a fascination for us or remind us of old times, it’s the people that we miss. We go home to where we are remembered because we don’t want to loose touch, to re-establish touch, to share a handshake or a hug or a story of long ago, to reinsert ourselves into the story of a place and a people that we miss.
Paul, in the eighth chapter of Romans, reminds us that there is no touch in our life that is ever completely lost. “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks. “Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No….” I love it when Paul answers his own questions; it saves so much time. “For I am convinced,” he writes, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
When I lead Young Adventurer’s Camp at Mechuwana, my co-dean Todd shares a story by Max Lucado with the kids, a story of the Wemmicks, a puppet people who are strangely similar to some non-puppet people that you might encounter from time to time. The Wemmicks often find themselves in some self-inflicted turmoil or another, but their most profound problems are usually solved by a visit to Eli, the master craftsman who fashioned the puppets long before they could remember. “Return to the workshop,” they are told, return to your Maker, and all will be well.” And it is. I watch the kids while Todd reads, and at some point, usually about half way through, most of them get it. I don’t explain that Eli is Hebrew for “My God.” That would ruin it. And for those who don’t get it right away, there’s that moment in the middle of the night when the brain puts the pieces together. “I know who Eli is,” a girl said to me the next morning a few weeks back. “Should we keep it a secret?” I asked. “Of course not,” she answered. “I’ve already told five people!” “Good girl,” I answered. “Good girl.”
I love Homecoming. I love seeing familiar faces and welcoming strangers home for the first time. I love the food that is brought from homes and shared, reminding us that we are one family who are gathered in the house of the Lord, the home that always waits for our return, patiently, persistently, without judgment. But most of all, I love what Homecoming has to teach us, that the master crafter waits for us as well, waits for us in the door of the workshop where we were fashioned with our odd noses, bald heads, creaking joints, or shocking red hair. It is inevitable that we will leave places and people behind as we make the journey of life. Time or distance or both will see to it. We can always go back, but it’s never quite the same. God’s workshop, however, isn’t like that. God has traveled with us on every moment of the journey, from our newborn cries, to the many homes of our childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and even through and beyond death itself. God is the constant presence in our life, who knows us completely—the good and the bad, the public and the private, the recent and the ancient. But still God stands in the doorway, arms outstretched, eyes trained on the horizon, breathing slow and shallow, desperate to see that familiar face appear over the hill, a child of God come home. Amen.
Date: July 24, 2011 (Homecoming)
© Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher
Green Street UMC, Augusta, ME
Homecoming. What a wonderful word, and a wonderful day. To see faces that we haven’t seen in a long time, to feel once again the power of place in our spiritual journey, to experience in a small, miniscule way what it must be like to arrive at our heavenly home, whether five minutes from now or a century. Homecoming.
I’ve had a number of Homecoming experiences this year. In part due to my Dad’s illness, I’ve become nostalgic for places that I have left behind, places that he and I have shared. We lived for five years in Marlborough, Connecticut, outside of Hartford when I was seven or eight years old, and I diverted on a journey last fall to go see my old house, and school, and church. It all seemed so small, and the distances so much shorter than I remembered. My school was gone completely, swallowed up by an expansion project now 20 years old. But as I drove slowly from school to my old home on Chapman Road memories came flooding back: the house where we used to trick or treat twice and the owner would pretend not to remember. The backyard studio where I took music lessons, now become a tool shed. The store where I bought sour apple chewing gum on the Fourth of July one year, just before the parade started. The Library where I read every Hardy Boys book ever printed. The Little League field where I sweated and prayed that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me, or if it was that I wouldn’t do anything stupid like get hit in the face with it. The house of a friend, whose father worked for Hostess; the pantry in the home had a magical Twinkie box that never ever hit bottom. I had to stop myself from ringing the illuminated doorbell and asking for a Yodel or Drake’s cake. Strangely enough one of my good friends from my Pennsylvania college now lives two doors down from this home in the tangle of relationships that we weave over a life time.
My old home was different. The deck was now a sunroom, the shingles painted rather than weathered. But the old apple trees out back were still there, along with an ancient grape arbor that was old when we lived there 40 years ago, the remnant of a farm long since subdivided. The church continues to thrive, now nearly in its 200th year; I know that because I was there for their sesquicentennial celebration in the early 70s, and my mom had to explain that it meant 150 years. There is still a wrought iron boot scraper at the front door of the church, beckoning those with mud on their shoes to nonetheless enter the house of God, fresh from the fields and the morning milking. The dairy farms have long since gone, of course, but the boot scraper remains; it used to fascinate me as a kid; I’d forgotten that. I went around to the back door, which was locked, but recalled the Sunday we left my brother at Church. I don’t know how, but we went tearing back to get him and there he stood with the pastor at the kitchen door waiting for us, secure in the knowledge that we’d be back. No one greeted me on this little trip down memory lane. After 40 years, most everyone I know there has moved on or would be unrecognizable to me, and I to them. Do they know that the kid in the back row of the Sunday School class who asked all those pesky questions wound up in the ministry? Probably not. We have, to use the usual term, “lost touch.”
Probably while I’ve been speaking the last few minutes, you’ve taken your own nostalgic trip, to that home that you left behind, the church where you grew up, the school, or job, or place of natural beauty that you’d love to visit just one more time. If so, perhaps you learned—as I did on my detour that day—that while places may hold a fascination for us or remind us of old times, it’s the people that we miss. We go home to where we are remembered because we don’t want to loose touch, to re-establish touch, to share a handshake or a hug or a story of long ago, to reinsert ourselves into the story of a place and a people that we miss.
Paul, in the eighth chapter of Romans, reminds us that there is no touch in our life that is ever completely lost. “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks. “Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No….” I love it when Paul answers his own questions; it saves so much time. “For I am convinced,” he writes, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
When I lead Young Adventurer’s Camp at Mechuwana, my co-dean Todd shares a story by Max Lucado with the kids, a story of the Wemmicks, a puppet people who are strangely similar to some non-puppet people that you might encounter from time to time. The Wemmicks often find themselves in some self-inflicted turmoil or another, but their most profound problems are usually solved by a visit to Eli, the master craftsman who fashioned the puppets long before they could remember. “Return to the workshop,” they are told, return to your Maker, and all will be well.” And it is. I watch the kids while Todd reads, and at some point, usually about half way through, most of them get it. I don’t explain that Eli is Hebrew for “My God.” That would ruin it. And for those who don’t get it right away, there’s that moment in the middle of the night when the brain puts the pieces together. “I know who Eli is,” a girl said to me the next morning a few weeks back. “Should we keep it a secret?” I asked. “Of course not,” she answered. “I’ve already told five people!” “Good girl,” I answered. “Good girl.”
I love Homecoming. I love seeing familiar faces and welcoming strangers home for the first time. I love the food that is brought from homes and shared, reminding us that we are one family who are gathered in the house of the Lord, the home that always waits for our return, patiently, persistently, without judgment. But most of all, I love what Homecoming has to teach us, that the master crafter waits for us as well, waits for us in the door of the workshop where we were fashioned with our odd noses, bald heads, creaking joints, or shocking red hair. It is inevitable that we will leave places and people behind as we make the journey of life. Time or distance or both will see to it. We can always go back, but it’s never quite the same. God’s workshop, however, isn’t like that. God has traveled with us on every moment of the journey, from our newborn cries, to the many homes of our childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and even through and beyond death itself. God is the constant presence in our life, who knows us completely—the good and the bad, the public and the private, the recent and the ancient. But still God stands in the doorway, arms outstretched, eyes trained on the horizon, breathing slow and shallow, desperate to see that familiar face appear over the hill, a child of God come home. Amen.
Monday, April 19, 2010
A National Day of Prayer
Did we even know that it was there until someone suggested we might lose it? It’s like that with a lot of things, I suppose. It’s the little things we take for granted in life, and the more routine they are, the less we appreciate them. Family dinners, summer cookouts, good health, an undisturbed night’s sleep, for example. But then life or law or circumstances or the passage of time take such things from us, and we wish that we had treasured them more when we had them.
I suspect it is that way for at least some of us with the National Day of Prayer on May 6 (the first Thursday in May). I have gone to the community prayer breakfast on that day at the Armory, a tradition that both Republican and Democratic Presidents have encouraged since before I was born. Perhaps because a government task force organized it, there didn’t seem to be a need to shoe horn yet another event into the church’s calendar. But then US District Court Judge Barbara Crabb on April 15 ruled (over the objections of the White House) that the National Day of Prayer (practiced in this nation since 1775 and made “official” in 1957) was in violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. In Judge Crabb’s words,
It bears emphasizing that a conclusion that the establishment clause prohibits the government from endorsing a religious exercise is not a judgment on the value of prayer or the millions of Americans who believe in its power. No one can doubt the important role that prayer plays in the spiritual life of a believer. In the best of times, people may pray as a way of expressing joy and thanks; during times of grief, many find that prayer provides comfort. Others may pray to give praise, seek forgiveness, ask for guidance or find the truth. And perhaps it is not too much to say that since the beginning of th[e] history [of humans] many people have devoutly believed that 'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'" Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 433 (1962). However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic. In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual's decision whether and when to pray.
Intellectually, I understand what her Honor is saying, that there is a real danger in allowing our secular government to set the religious agenda of the nation (one of the reasons that our ancestors wound up here in the first place). But spiritually I’m troubled, troubled at the loss of a single day when all of the nation’s denominations and faiths would unite their hearts in prayer to the Creator of us all. The government never told us how or what to pray, only that doing so—each in our own tradition—could be a great blessing to our nation. The President’s proclamation last year put it this way, “…Let us also use this day to come together in a moment of peace and goodwill. Our world grows smaller by the day, and our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife; and to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.” Those are good and important words, and they will live on even if a nationally sanctioned day of prayer does not.
I would urge us not to surrender the spirit of the National Day of Prayer to the scrap heap of history. If indeed the Constitution requires elected officials to put this work down, then let the many people of faith take it up again, exercising their freedom as sons and daughters of God to bring the welfare of our national and global communities before the ever-watchful eyes of our maker. With or without a proclamation, the work of prayer belongs to all of us, and so I would invite each of us to set aside time for prayer on Thursday, May 6, to lift up to God our nation, its leaders, its poor, and its foundations of freedom and justice. Politically, we are all very diverse, but the faith that unites us is stronger than the momentary events of history. Let us unite our hearts on that day, and pray for God’s guidance and wisdom in these times.
Your fellow traveler,
Thom
I suspect it is that way for at least some of us with the National Day of Prayer on May 6 (the first Thursday in May). I have gone to the community prayer breakfast on that day at the Armory, a tradition that both Republican and Democratic Presidents have encouraged since before I was born. Perhaps because a government task force organized it, there didn’t seem to be a need to shoe horn yet another event into the church’s calendar. But then US District Court Judge Barbara Crabb on April 15 ruled (over the objections of the White House) that the National Day of Prayer (practiced in this nation since 1775 and made “official” in 1957) was in violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. In Judge Crabb’s words,
It bears emphasizing that a conclusion that the establishment clause prohibits the government from endorsing a religious exercise is not a judgment on the value of prayer or the millions of Americans who believe in its power. No one can doubt the important role that prayer plays in the spiritual life of a believer. In the best of times, people may pray as a way of expressing joy and thanks; during times of grief, many find that prayer provides comfort. Others may pray to give praise, seek forgiveness, ask for guidance or find the truth. And perhaps it is not too much to say that since the beginning of th[e] history [of humans] many people have devoutly believed that 'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'" Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 433 (1962). However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic. In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual's decision whether and when to pray.
Intellectually, I understand what her Honor is saying, that there is a real danger in allowing our secular government to set the religious agenda of the nation (one of the reasons that our ancestors wound up here in the first place). But spiritually I’m troubled, troubled at the loss of a single day when all of the nation’s denominations and faiths would unite their hearts in prayer to the Creator of us all. The government never told us how or what to pray, only that doing so—each in our own tradition—could be a great blessing to our nation. The President’s proclamation last year put it this way, “…Let us also use this day to come together in a moment of peace and goodwill. Our world grows smaller by the day, and our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife; and to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.” Those are good and important words, and they will live on even if a nationally sanctioned day of prayer does not.
I would urge us not to surrender the spirit of the National Day of Prayer to the scrap heap of history. If indeed the Constitution requires elected officials to put this work down, then let the many people of faith take it up again, exercising their freedom as sons and daughters of God to bring the welfare of our national and global communities before the ever-watchful eyes of our maker. With or without a proclamation, the work of prayer belongs to all of us, and so I would invite each of us to set aside time for prayer on Thursday, May 6, to lift up to God our nation, its leaders, its poor, and its foundations of freedom and justice. Politically, we are all very diverse, but the faith that unites us is stronger than the momentary events of history. Let us unite our hearts on that day, and pray for God’s guidance and wisdom in these times.
Your fellow traveler,
Thom
Monday, September 21, 2009
Text: I Corinthians 9:19-23
Date: September 20, 2009
Green Street UMC, Augusta, ME
©Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher
“I have become all things to all…”
Though I am free and belong to no one, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all … so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. (I Corinthians 9:19-23, NIV)
I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War. I don’t romanticize it, at least I hope I don’t. But it was such a defining moment in our nation’s history, that I find it hard to look away when a documentary or film comes my way, reminding me of that troubled period in our nation’s history. My Great great great grandfather Jim Blackstone fought with the 20th Maine at Gettysburg, or so the family legend goes, and my grandfather said that he could still remember Grandpa Jim’s sword hanging over the family fireplace when he was a child. That tale and others made my first trip to Little Round Top at Gettysburg a moving, emotional experience. How many of Grandpa Jim’s friends and neighbors had died on that very spot? Had he ever gone back there to remember, or was it too painful to recall? I’ll never know.
I was reminded of that experience by watching the 2003 film Gods and Generals last week. It’s not the most amazing film you’ve ever seen, a bit dry in places, but there is Joshua Chamberlain striding across one battlefield after another, and for people who live in this city in this state, well, it’s just something you ought to see. When I’m teaching on the Portland campus of the seminary, I teach in the Joshua Chamberlain Room, and there his picture is, staring down at me for three hours every week. It is an intimidating experience. I always imagine him thinking as I walk out of the classroom, “For this I saved the Union?”
Civil War. It is probably the most horrendous kind of war, because it turns family members, fellow citizens, and those who share a common heritage, into blood enemies. One of the most memorable scenes in Gods and Generals, the film I mentioned, involves the battle at Fredericksburg. At one point in the battle a regiment of Union soldiers made up of recent Irish immigrants finds they are attacking a similar regiment from Georgia in a large open field. Brother against brother, fighting for a country that is not yet even their own. Later that night as the wounded and dead are tended to, one of the town’s Irish American residents recalls how Fredericksburg 20 years before had sent corn grown in that very field to relieve an Irish famine. “I can’t help but wonder,” she remarks, “did we save the lives of boys on both sides, just so that they could come here to kill one another?”
It was against the backdrop of watching Gods and Generals that I later that night turned on the news. And the clashing words of partisan opponents that I heard troubled me, troubled me because these were my fellow citizens, filled with such anger for their fellow citizens, and I began to understand how the Civil War could have come to be.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should start stocking up on canned goods and cannon balls, but I don’t think anyone under the age of 50 will object if I say this is one of the most painful periods of national disagreement in my memory. Perhaps, then, it is a fair question to ask of the Gospel this morning, what is the role of the church when the forces of social and political strife bring such emotions to the very door of our church, our sanctuary, our holy place? Indeed, what does God ask of us when such issues sit the pews between us, hovering spoken or unspoken as we sing our hymns, pass the peace, confess our sins, listen to God’s word, hear the sermon, make our offerings to God, gather at the table, pray for our neighbors, and receive God’s benediction?
Has the Gospel traveled such ground before, we might ask. And the answer of course, is “absolutely.” Perhaps the greatest benefit of Bible Study is to discover that there is very little that we experience in life that earlier generations haven’t already weathered by the grace of God. Notable exceptions include trying to get children’s toys out of their packages, foods that explode in the microwave, and telephone menu options. Those particular plagues are unique to this day and time. Most everything else has already happened to somebody.
The big questions in today’s world are really not all that perplexing compared to struggles that the early church experienced in its earliest days. The role of women and slaves, the divine and human nature of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, and the importance of the Old Testament. These don’t sound like agenda breakers at the next church council meeting, but in fact the blood of Christians has been shed by fellow Christians over every single one of them. But perhaps the single most divisive controversy in the NT is the struggle between Christians of Jewish heritage and Christians of Gentile heritage. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, but in case you’re not, put yourself back in Jerusalem on Pentecost when the Holy Spirit falls on people of many languages, and persons of diverse cultures begin to speak in languages that are understood by all. And suddenly Jewish disciples of a Jewish Jesus begin to realize that God’s plans for this new religious community are immense. And it is not long before Christians who speak Greek and Latin, who are not circumcised, who eat pork roast on Sunday, and who dress in togas start showing up at the fellowship suppers. And you guessed it, pretty soon there are romances in the youth group, and Miriams start making eyes at boys named Tiberius and Julius and before you know it there is a full blown clash of cultures going on. It’s why Paul is such a controversial figure in the New Testament. He is a good Jewish-Christian preaching, very successfully I might add, to Gentiles. And out there among the great unclean, Paul is taking offerings and sending them to the mother church in Jerusalem, where the traditionalists have to decide whether or not to cash the check.
I know all of this sounds like a silly dispute to us, but for first-century Christians it was a full-blown crisis. Page after page of the New Testament is dedicated to resolving it, resolving it in a way that heals community, and allows brothers and sisters to experience the unity of Christ. In Rome, it was easier since the Jewish and Gentile Christians could form separate congregations, but in small towns and villages it was heartbreaking. Every time a church supper came up, separate tables would be available for kosher and non-kosher families. Every baptism raised the question of whether the convert should first be circumcised as the law requires. (those of you considering membership at Green Street by the way will be relieved to know we have resolved that particular issue!). There were questions of intermarriage between the two groups, and the status of their children, and the nagging problem of “what do we do when the relatives come to visit?” These were not happy days; these were not easy days to be a Christian.
Then along came Paul, this hot-tempered, disagreeable, brilliant man who could argue from sunrise to sunset for a radical rejection of Jewish purity codes among the new Gentile Christian communities. This argument shaped everything that he was. He was passionate that the new converts were free to eat whatever they wanted without criticism from the hardliners, and he made that argument from one end of Asia Minor to the very heart of Rome.
But then, in today’s passage, a strange thing happens. The Spirit of God gets hold of Paul by the heartstrings and reminds him that being right isn’t the only thing, that to be incorporated in the Body of Christ is to be in a relationship of service to others, and some of those others were people whose dress, habits, language, surnames, food, or politics totally disgust, confuse, or enrage him. Paul thinks long and hard about that insight, and the result is this passage in First Corinthians, in which Paul unbelievably says that he is willing to set aside being right, for the sake of being loving; that he will eat a kosher meal, against all of his principles of dietary freedom, if it means he has the chance to tell his dinner partner about the incredible love of God. It doesn’t mean he’s given anything up; he can still go grab a BLT on the way home and not feel ashamed, and if someone asks his opinion, he’ll surely give it to them. He’s really good at that. But when it comes down to it, Paul—as he writes in I Corinthians—will do whatever he can, whatever he has to do, to share the Gospel. He will attach the greatest value to being in fellowship with a brother or sister, even if he or she disagrees with his most passionate views on the controversies of the day.
Now I want you to understand that this is not necessarily an easy sermon for me to preach. Like Paul and maybe like some of you, I often have strong opinions and a desire to share them, and I do. But we are asked by this scripture to remember that the brother or sister who disagrees with us on some issue or another is equally a beloved child of God, as well as a person trying to please God according to what he or she thinks God wants him or her to do. And the takeaway from this scripture passage is that we need to figure out how to live and minister in harmony with those who disagree with us, because the reality is that there are always going to be areas of disagreement in every community, and club, and church that we’re ever going to be a part of, unless of course we go start our own churches, slap our names on the door, and hope nobody comes.
I go through all this, this morning, because the secular world isn’t ever going to teach us this lesson, and because you are a congregation that is articulate, smart, passionate, and diverse. I don’t say those things to butter you up, but as a pastoral diagnosis. That is in fact who you are. And in this season of secular and political debate some of those passions are going to come into church and sit among us, particularly for the next seven weeks or so. That doesn’t trouble me. Christians are supposed to be passionate about justice and righteousness, just as God is. But on November 4, which I’m pretty sure is the day after election day, on that day when inevitably there will be winners and losers, on all kinds of issues, the nation is going to look around and ask itself, ‘How can we live like this? How can we be one nation under God and yet be so divided?”
On a day like that, it would feel so good to have the citizens of Kennebec County, Maine look around and say, “Hey, look at Green Street Church over there. I’ve never seen such a diverse collection of folks in my life, but through all this they kept feeding the poor, and giving thanks to God, and praying for the sick, and gathering around that communion table, where no one has power over anyone else, and every one of them is there as a guest of God. And when they go home at night, some of them watch Fox News, and some MSNBC, and some Public television, and some the Home shopping network. But when they are together as a church, there’s something about them that is more important than any of that. I wonder what it is.” And one will turn to another and say, with a sound of urgency in her voice, “Let’s / go / find / out.”
I would like us to be that church. The church that gets through times such as this, not by shushing the important conversations, as some churches no doubt will, but by ending every heart-to-heart sharing of convictions with the words, “I love you, brother; I love you, sister. You drive me nuts. But I love you.”
That’s important for us as we go about planning, and funding, and implementing the ministry of Jesus Christ in this place. But it is even more important to our neighbors, those who might well assume from the secular media that there is no future for America other than one long, constant, bitter, drawn out argument. As they go looking for better answers than that, I hope and pray and expect that we have a huge helping of God’s generous and inclusive spirit to share with them, not because we are of one mind about anything, but precisely because we are not: we who are so different from one another, and yet united in one ministry by our Savior, Jesus, the Christ. Amen.
Date: September 20, 2009
Green Street UMC, Augusta, ME
©Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher
“I have become all things to all…”
Though I am free and belong to no one, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all … so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. (I Corinthians 9:19-23, NIV)
I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War. I don’t romanticize it, at least I hope I don’t. But it was such a defining moment in our nation’s history, that I find it hard to look away when a documentary or film comes my way, reminding me of that troubled period in our nation’s history. My Great great great grandfather Jim Blackstone fought with the 20th Maine at Gettysburg, or so the family legend goes, and my grandfather said that he could still remember Grandpa Jim’s sword hanging over the family fireplace when he was a child. That tale and others made my first trip to Little Round Top at Gettysburg a moving, emotional experience. How many of Grandpa Jim’s friends and neighbors had died on that very spot? Had he ever gone back there to remember, or was it too painful to recall? I’ll never know.
I was reminded of that experience by watching the 2003 film Gods and Generals last week. It’s not the most amazing film you’ve ever seen, a bit dry in places, but there is Joshua Chamberlain striding across one battlefield after another, and for people who live in this city in this state, well, it’s just something you ought to see. When I’m teaching on the Portland campus of the seminary, I teach in the Joshua Chamberlain Room, and there his picture is, staring down at me for three hours every week. It is an intimidating experience. I always imagine him thinking as I walk out of the classroom, “For this I saved the Union?”
Civil War. It is probably the most horrendous kind of war, because it turns family members, fellow citizens, and those who share a common heritage, into blood enemies. One of the most memorable scenes in Gods and Generals, the film I mentioned, involves the battle at Fredericksburg. At one point in the battle a regiment of Union soldiers made up of recent Irish immigrants finds they are attacking a similar regiment from Georgia in a large open field. Brother against brother, fighting for a country that is not yet even their own. Later that night as the wounded and dead are tended to, one of the town’s Irish American residents recalls how Fredericksburg 20 years before had sent corn grown in that very field to relieve an Irish famine. “I can’t help but wonder,” she remarks, “did we save the lives of boys on both sides, just so that they could come here to kill one another?”
It was against the backdrop of watching Gods and Generals that I later that night turned on the news. And the clashing words of partisan opponents that I heard troubled me, troubled me because these were my fellow citizens, filled with such anger for their fellow citizens, and I began to understand how the Civil War could have come to be.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should start stocking up on canned goods and cannon balls, but I don’t think anyone under the age of 50 will object if I say this is one of the most painful periods of national disagreement in my memory. Perhaps, then, it is a fair question to ask of the Gospel this morning, what is the role of the church when the forces of social and political strife bring such emotions to the very door of our church, our sanctuary, our holy place? Indeed, what does God ask of us when such issues sit the pews between us, hovering spoken or unspoken as we sing our hymns, pass the peace, confess our sins, listen to God’s word, hear the sermon, make our offerings to God, gather at the table, pray for our neighbors, and receive God’s benediction?
Has the Gospel traveled such ground before, we might ask. And the answer of course, is “absolutely.” Perhaps the greatest benefit of Bible Study is to discover that there is very little that we experience in life that earlier generations haven’t already weathered by the grace of God. Notable exceptions include trying to get children’s toys out of their packages, foods that explode in the microwave, and telephone menu options. Those particular plagues are unique to this day and time. Most everything else has already happened to somebody.
The big questions in today’s world are really not all that perplexing compared to struggles that the early church experienced in its earliest days. The role of women and slaves, the divine and human nature of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, and the importance of the Old Testament. These don’t sound like agenda breakers at the next church council meeting, but in fact the blood of Christians has been shed by fellow Christians over every single one of them. But perhaps the single most divisive controversy in the NT is the struggle between Christians of Jewish heritage and Christians of Gentile heritage. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, but in case you’re not, put yourself back in Jerusalem on Pentecost when the Holy Spirit falls on people of many languages, and persons of diverse cultures begin to speak in languages that are understood by all. And suddenly Jewish disciples of a Jewish Jesus begin to realize that God’s plans for this new religious community are immense. And it is not long before Christians who speak Greek and Latin, who are not circumcised, who eat pork roast on Sunday, and who dress in togas start showing up at the fellowship suppers. And you guessed it, pretty soon there are romances in the youth group, and Miriams start making eyes at boys named Tiberius and Julius and before you know it there is a full blown clash of cultures going on. It’s why Paul is such a controversial figure in the New Testament. He is a good Jewish-Christian preaching, very successfully I might add, to Gentiles. And out there among the great unclean, Paul is taking offerings and sending them to the mother church in Jerusalem, where the traditionalists have to decide whether or not to cash the check.
I know all of this sounds like a silly dispute to us, but for first-century Christians it was a full-blown crisis. Page after page of the New Testament is dedicated to resolving it, resolving it in a way that heals community, and allows brothers and sisters to experience the unity of Christ. In Rome, it was easier since the Jewish and Gentile Christians could form separate congregations, but in small towns and villages it was heartbreaking. Every time a church supper came up, separate tables would be available for kosher and non-kosher families. Every baptism raised the question of whether the convert should first be circumcised as the law requires. (those of you considering membership at Green Street by the way will be relieved to know we have resolved that particular issue!). There were questions of intermarriage between the two groups, and the status of their children, and the nagging problem of “what do we do when the relatives come to visit?” These were not happy days; these were not easy days to be a Christian.
Then along came Paul, this hot-tempered, disagreeable, brilliant man who could argue from sunrise to sunset for a radical rejection of Jewish purity codes among the new Gentile Christian communities. This argument shaped everything that he was. He was passionate that the new converts were free to eat whatever they wanted without criticism from the hardliners, and he made that argument from one end of Asia Minor to the very heart of Rome.
But then, in today’s passage, a strange thing happens. The Spirit of God gets hold of Paul by the heartstrings and reminds him that being right isn’t the only thing, that to be incorporated in the Body of Christ is to be in a relationship of service to others, and some of those others were people whose dress, habits, language, surnames, food, or politics totally disgust, confuse, or enrage him. Paul thinks long and hard about that insight, and the result is this passage in First Corinthians, in which Paul unbelievably says that he is willing to set aside being right, for the sake of being loving; that he will eat a kosher meal, against all of his principles of dietary freedom, if it means he has the chance to tell his dinner partner about the incredible love of God. It doesn’t mean he’s given anything up; he can still go grab a BLT on the way home and not feel ashamed, and if someone asks his opinion, he’ll surely give it to them. He’s really good at that. But when it comes down to it, Paul—as he writes in I Corinthians—will do whatever he can, whatever he has to do, to share the Gospel. He will attach the greatest value to being in fellowship with a brother or sister, even if he or she disagrees with his most passionate views on the controversies of the day.
Now I want you to understand that this is not necessarily an easy sermon for me to preach. Like Paul and maybe like some of you, I often have strong opinions and a desire to share them, and I do. But we are asked by this scripture to remember that the brother or sister who disagrees with us on some issue or another is equally a beloved child of God, as well as a person trying to please God according to what he or she thinks God wants him or her to do. And the takeaway from this scripture passage is that we need to figure out how to live and minister in harmony with those who disagree with us, because the reality is that there are always going to be areas of disagreement in every community, and club, and church that we’re ever going to be a part of, unless of course we go start our own churches, slap our names on the door, and hope nobody comes.
I go through all this, this morning, because the secular world isn’t ever going to teach us this lesson, and because you are a congregation that is articulate, smart, passionate, and diverse. I don’t say those things to butter you up, but as a pastoral diagnosis. That is in fact who you are. And in this season of secular and political debate some of those passions are going to come into church and sit among us, particularly for the next seven weeks or so. That doesn’t trouble me. Christians are supposed to be passionate about justice and righteousness, just as God is. But on November 4, which I’m pretty sure is the day after election day, on that day when inevitably there will be winners and losers, on all kinds of issues, the nation is going to look around and ask itself, ‘How can we live like this? How can we be one nation under God and yet be so divided?”
On a day like that, it would feel so good to have the citizens of Kennebec County, Maine look around and say, “Hey, look at Green Street Church over there. I’ve never seen such a diverse collection of folks in my life, but through all this they kept feeding the poor, and giving thanks to God, and praying for the sick, and gathering around that communion table, where no one has power over anyone else, and every one of them is there as a guest of God. And when they go home at night, some of them watch Fox News, and some MSNBC, and some Public television, and some the Home shopping network. But when they are together as a church, there’s something about them that is more important than any of that. I wonder what it is.” And one will turn to another and say, with a sound of urgency in her voice, “Let’s / go / find / out.”
I would like us to be that church. The church that gets through times such as this, not by shushing the important conversations, as some churches no doubt will, but by ending every heart-to-heart sharing of convictions with the words, “I love you, brother; I love you, sister. You drive me nuts. But I love you.”
That’s important for us as we go about planning, and funding, and implementing the ministry of Jesus Christ in this place. But it is even more important to our neighbors, those who might well assume from the secular media that there is no future for America other than one long, constant, bitter, drawn out argument. As they go looking for better answers than that, I hope and pray and expect that we have a huge helping of God’s generous and inclusive spirit to share with them, not because we are of one mind about anything, but precisely because we are not: we who are so different from one another, and yet united in one ministry by our Savior, Jesus, the Christ. Amen.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Formal Dance
In Augusta, it's called the Chizzle Wizzle Ball, a formal dance at Cony High School which occurs the week of the Chizzle Wizzle show, a student-run variety show which is claimed to be the "longest continuous student variety show in the United States". Year # 118 for them in case you're wanting to offer some competition! :-)
Hanging out at the formal wear shop in early March, one begins to understand that such events are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Even weddings are largely "smart casual" affairs these days, but tuxes, cummerbunds, and white shoes are few and far between. It's easier for the guys, of course. They know that if they basically all look alike, then they haven't messed up. The girls, however, live in dread that there across the dance floor will be someone else in an identical dress. When I lived in Aroostook County, where bridal shops are few and far between, such occurrences were commonplace. There are treasured photos of two, three, even four dance-goers in identical dresses lined up together, all displaying a "less than amused, but I'm a good sport about it" smile.
The end result of the fancy clothes and the dinner and the newly scrubbed and vacuumed "ride" is a sense of separateness. The effort to which one goes to get ready for the big dance sets that time aside as "special." We know going in that the pictures and memories of this night will last a lifetime, and so we prepare.
On Holy Thursday, our church will be remembering Jesus' final night with his disciples, how they shared a meal at Passover. At some point during the meal, the youngest participant is invited to ask, "Why is this night different from all others?" It is the question that opens the door to the telling of the holy history of the Hebrews' deliverance from their oppressor.
We are approaching a holy season. Let us not drown these days in ordinariness, diluting their power in a vat of the "every day." Let us cloth our hearts and spirits with prayer and fasting and repentance, coming to God's holy festival days with a sense of expectation.
Why are these nights (and days) different from all others?
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
How Much to Warm a Church?
I imagine staring at your energy bill for the last few months is not the most pleasant task of the day. It's even less pleasant in a church setting, trust me. Thousands of dollars spent for a black liquid of unknown origin, all of which has been burned and exhausted up and out the chimney. As Winter yields to Spring, what do we have to show for it? Were the community and congregation better off because these four walls we call "church" contained heat on cold days? I surely hope so, and in my gut I believe so. But it is terribly intangible as I stare at the numbers on the page. What is the monetary value of worship? Of a community supper? Of the person who sits in an office or a classroom and talks of God and his or her relationship to the Divine? Was heating the church building "worth it?" Did we get our money's worth? I suppose it's like a pot luck supper. "If you walk away hungry, it's your own fault," my high school pastor used to say, standing behind the steaming casserole dishes and bean pots. Creating and heating a space for God's abundance to be made known is our way of setting the table, I guess. I'm personally grateful for all the folks who came to the party this winter, some of them old friends; some of them new to the church. I can't imagine life without worship and church, and so we'll pay our fuel bill and try to smile while we do it. In truth there is no putting a price on community and worship, even if both sometimes come with a bill. Warmer days are here again; let us give thanks in the House of the Lord!
Anyone remember this song of praise from the 1970's?
Anyone remember this song of praise from the 1970's?
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
A Church in a Parking Garage?
While hurrying down a hallway in an anonymous parking garage in Portland yesterday, I was halted in my tracks by the symbol of my church on a sheet metal gray door. It gradually dawned on me that I was standing outside the worship and office space of our new experimental faith community in Portland: New Light Fellowship (www.newlightportland.org). Officially at 185 High Street, with plenty of parking which surrounds and towers over it, New Light is a community of United Methodists rethinking what it means to be a church (their entrance on High Street is actually a LOT more attractive than what I discovered is the back door). I got the grand tour from a long-time friend Allen Ewing Merrill who co-pastors the community along with his wife Sara. Also showing me around was Erica Tobey of Green Street UMC fame who had just discovered thousands of excess postal labels left by the previous tenants. (Lord only knows what she'll do with them; I suggested name tags, but that's probably a federal crime or something.)
It's been a fascinating journey for the New Light group. Rather than starting with a congregation and urging them to join small groups, New Light has begun as small groups meeting in homes who are just now starting to worship in a larger gathering on a weekly basis. Their space is cozy, flexible, and filled with possibilities. I don't know what new churches will look like in the 21st century, but my guess is that this is how they will start, with bonds of relationship and community in Christ. All that church stuff can come later (or not!).
Good luck, New Light Fellowship. I have a feeling you'll have a lot to teach us in the days ahead.
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