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Events and Celebrations
Christopher Scott Rambo, Jr. Graduates High School
Christopher Scott Rambo, Jr. graduated from Guilderland High School June 25, 2016.
Events and Celebrations
Baptism of Kate Rosemary Williams
Kate Rosemary Williams, daughter of Johanna and Jimmy Williams, was baptized on June 19, 2016.
Sermons
“The Mystery of God – A Personal Take” by…
I am
honored to take my place in this pulpit.
It has a reputation for allowing free expression, and I am sure that I
am not the only one who might have expressed views and opinions regarded as
outside the current dogmas of the Church.
This is not the first time I am asked to give a sermon in a Methodist
Church. I grew up in a Primitive
Methodist Church and my Father was a Lay Preacher for 50 years. You see in England in the 1940’s, the
Methodists did not have sufficient full-time ministers for one at every church
and chapel. The churches were organized
into 5 to 10 in a circuit with perhaps half the number of full-time ministers,
hence the need for Lay preachers to fill the vacant spots. So in my youth I was in training to be a Lay
preacher and occasionally was asked to conduct the services at small chapels in
the countryside of North-West England.
The one piece of advice I was given by an old gentleman at one of the
Chapels was “Be sure to include the Lord Jesus in every one of your sermons”. So here goes:
We each
one of us is aware that we have been endowed with both Reason and Heart. At
times we can be rational and at other times we act and behave
irrationally. We have been given such
amazing characteristics such as imagination, daring, patience, fortitude and
peace that we can envisage such spectacular feats as landing humans on the
Planet Mars; yet we also have within us characteristics such as jealousy, hate,
idleness and often a desire for War. So
this exploration of the Mystery of God is my attempt to try to understand the
concept of God as expressed in the Bible and use my personal rationality as far
as possible, recognizing that somewhere along, Faith and Belief are heavily
involved.
I’m
starting with three assumptions as a basis for my discourse:
First: That since we are here in this place at this time,
that we all believe in God, and we are here to worship him, or her, or it.
Second: That we can all agree in the concept of God the
Creator of all things, Omnipotent, God only Wise.
Third: That we are
each of us made in the Image of God.
Now,
each of us has a personal view of other characteristics that we may project and
I propose to relate some of my questions, truths and speculations that that I
have recently had pause to consider. Living in a Retirement Community with many
essential services provided, leaves time to remember the past and assess one’s
life journey.
The
Bible, particularly the Old Testament, cites many stories of a person’s,
usually a man’s, encounter with God, although God never shows himself. For instance in the Garden of Eden, Adam and
Eve were created with Free Will, the ability to choose, and they ate of the
Tree of Good and Evil; they encounter God who knows they have disobeyed his
commandment to eat only the Tree of Life, and for that they must leave the
Garden and henceforth their lives will involve toil and pain. In our first lesson, we are given the story
of Moses and his encounter with God and the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. Moses wants to be given a name so he can tell
the people in slavery who it was that sent him there. And God’s answer is “I AM that I AM” or an
alternative translation of the Hebrew is “I AM that I AM or What or Will BE”.
I
believe we can all agree in the belief of God the Creator of THE Universe,
though to me it seems there may not be one, but in fact, many parallel
universes that exist but which we are unable to see or experience. If you want an easy metaphor of such parallel
universes, just surf your cable TV and witness the separate existences that
occur that you only are aware of when you tune in to that particular channel.
If you
believe with me that each of us is made in the image of God, then the inverse
of that is that HE, SHE, or IT (or as modern theologians would call God – “The
Ground of our Being”) must possess all our characteristics in Spades & much
more. Since I was trained as a
Physicist, I must assume God is the Supreme Physicist, the most capable
Experimenter & the All-knowing Theoretician. So what if our Universe is a Grand
Experiment? As a physicist we are not
uncomfortable with parallel universes or with the concept of a Universe of
Opposites. Pythagorus (who you all know
from his famous Geometric Theorem) was also a philosopher & religious
teacher who lived some 500 years before the Christian Era, and he drew up a
Table of Ten Opposites describing our universe: (in those days the number 10
was a special number)
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Unity Plurality
Right Left
Male Female
at
Rest in Motion
Straight Curved
Light Darkness
Good Evil
Square Oblong
We can add many more – Physicists now know there is Matter
and Anti-matter, an electron & a
positron, while there is a neutrino, a friend of mine who heads a Govt. Lab in
Virginia has recently had an appeal before Congress to spend several hundred
million dollars of public’s money to fund an experiment to attempt to discover
the anti-neutrino. There is also Joy and Pain!
So I believe that God must in fact be a Duality – A God of both Positives
and Negatives, a God of both Good and Evil.
And that presents for me a Major Dilemma. How to understand the occurrence of Pain and
Suffering that appears to be inflicted on both good and bad people?
So, from
what I have said, might we infer What God’s Strategy for Mankind might be?
If you
follow me, I am suggesting that our Universe is an experiment in Free Will, and
God wants to see how humankind handles it, and the Bible indicates that God
wants us to walk this balance between Good and Evil and over time God has tried
several different techniques to send messages to attempt to make it clear as to
how humankind should conduct itself. The
early books of the Bible suggest to me that God chose “Judgement” initially to
let people know his ways; through Moses he attempted to send a list of
Commandments, still later he chose to send messages through the Prophets. In the case of David, he first called Samuel
to be his messenger who then much later used him to anoint David to be King. However
it was many years before David was actually installed as King of Israel. You can probably think of many other ways the
books of the Old Testament describe God’s action to convince his chosen people
to walk the straight path. Finally, as
John describes in his account of the coming of Jesus – God sent his only
begotten Son that we could be saved and St. Paul said that not only Jews, but
all people could be part of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Back of
all this is a personal awareness of God’s identity. The early Jews called God “Jaweh”, and later
David used the term “Adonai” and these have come down to us using the vowels of
one and the consonants of the other as “Jehovah”. We in First Methodist recently heard Gendis
Khan, a Moslem and the Iman from the Schenectady Mosque, describe God’s identity
as Justice. Pope Francis has recently
authored a book entitled “The name of God is Mercy”. I personally believe that “God is Love”, and
God expressed that Love in sending his only begotten Son to earth in order to
show us how to walk the balance between Good and Evil.
It is
my belief that God has a purpose for each of us. For sure, we can only do our
best in the present. As illustrated by
the story of Samuel and David, God’s timetable is completely different from our
own. As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
wrote – Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.
Therefore, go forward with courage and hope and obey Jesus’s Commandment
– Thou shall Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind and Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. AMEN.
Sermon March 6, 2016
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“It is FINALLY Christmas: Now What?”based on Isaiah 52:7-10 and…
Second
Isaiah is a cheerful writer. He writes from the exile, to
broken-hearted, broken people. He speaks words of hope, reminders of
the nature of God, and expectations that healing is possible.
Today’s passage is classic Second Isaiah.
For
those who have NO CLUE what I’m talking about – Isaiah is a book
with 66 chapters. Scholars agree that chapters 1-39 reflect one
point of view “First Isaiah”, 40-55 a second “Second Isaiah,”
and 56-66 a third – wait for it – “Third Isaiah.” First Isaiah
comes before the exile. Second Isaiah speaks DURING the exile – in
the immediate aftermath. Third Isaiah has a later voice, debated to
be either near the end of the exile, or post exilic. For those who
still have no idea what I’m talking about – in 587 BCE the
Babylonian Empire defeated Judea, took the city of Jerusalem,
destroyed it, and force marched its leaders across the desert to
serve as slaves in Babylonia. 70 years later they were freed when
the Persian Empire beat the Babylonian empire and the exiles
RETURNED. So I’m saying that this cheerful dude was writing after
his city and country had been utterly devastated.
Our
passage today starts with “How beautiful upon the mountains are the
feet of the messenger who brings peace.” This is not a literal
statement. In those days important news was “brought by a runner,
an athlete whose marathon commitment to good news drove him across
the arduous mountain, where his whole frame ached from the effort of
bringing good news. His feet were crusted with callouses and torn by
the rocks and thorns of his course.”1
The
messenger’s feet were NOT pretty. The feet were ugly. The news they
brought though, could make even the ugly feet beautiful. The
beautification of the feet continues as the message is shared. God
Reigns, restoration is coming, goodness will return, people will
spontaneously break out in song, God’s comfort will be known, and all
the earth will see the healing power of God.
The
message of Second Isaiah was heartening to its first hearers – they
desperately needed the hope it brought. The message was obviously
heartening beyond its first hearers, as it made the cut to be a part
of the book of Isaiah. Furthermore, this text is part of Christmas
every single year in the traditional readings. (Although not the
most common ones.) Christianity has claimed this text as a way of
understanding Jesus, and the meaning of his birth. That implies that
it has significant meaning beyond the original intention.
Second
Isaiah wrote to a displaced, broken hearted, broken people, with
signs of hope. The concerns of the people were practical. The
meaning is different when applied to Jesus. Connected with the
Christmas story, the messenger gets undertones of angelic messengers
– who very well may have beautiful feet for all I know. Connected
with the birth of Christ, this passage has often been spiritualized,
which I mean in the bad way. The sort of spiritualization that I’m
referring to takes this passage out of the practical concerns of the
world and into some sort of forgiveness of sins/afterlife concerns.
The
ironic change of the meaning of salvation from being a down to earth
act of liberation from oppressors to an otherworldly acceptance into
heaven really weakens this passage. As one commentator puts it,
“Among the affirmations [Second Isaiah] offers are: (1) God cares
deeply about this world –
so deeply, in fact, that God intends not rescue us from it but to
redeem this world through us; (2) where we are matters; that is, if
God wants to redeem that
place (Zion/Jerusalem), God wants to redeem this
place.”2
If WE want to take this passage as our own, and as a valid
interpretation of our Christmas narrative, then I think we have to
start there!
Traditional
incarnation theory suggests that God became human in the form of
Jesus in order to redeem the world. Many of the theologians I like
best are very excited about the incarnation. For some it is the
centerpiece of their understanding of God. My New Testament
professor was one of them. He loved to quote Philippians 1, which
says,
“Christ
Jesus,
who,
though he was in the form of God,
did
not regard equality with God
as
something to be exploited,
but
emptied himself,
taking
the form of a slave,
being
born in human likeness.”
For
many years, I struggled with incarnation. It is such a powerful and
meaningful theological idea for MANY people, including most of the
people I look up to theologically. I never knew why I couldn’t get
excited about it. I felt like I was missing something. (Namely, I
felt like I was missing the entire point of Christmas, if not
Christianity.)
My
dear friend Chad is a much more orthodox Christian than I am. He is
the one who TOLD me why I don’t care. He said to me one say, “You
are a panentheist, right?” (A panentheist believes that all that
exists, is within God and yet God is more than all that is.)
“Yeah,” I responded without understanding. “Well, then the
incarnation would be sort of redundant to you, wouldn’t it? I mean
if you already think God is fully present in the world in all times
and places, then Jesus isn’t really different, is he?”
“OH!”
I responded. Which cleared things up for me. I fully support
anyone, including Chad, for whom the traditional understanding of the
incarnation works. You are in good company. But I’ve never been
able to wrap my head around
it. It doesn’t make sense to me to think that Jesus WAS God, at
least not in a unique way. My favorite succinct summary of Jesus is
Marcus Borg’s, “Jesus was a Jewish mystic.” He goes on to
explain, “My claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic means Jesus
was one for whom God was an experiential reality. He was one of those
people for whom the sacred was, to use William James’ terms, a
firsthand religious experience rather than a secondhand belief.”3
That
fits what I hear in the Gospels. Jesus was unusually connected to
the Divine, and he had wisdom that most people lack. He was faithful
to loving all of God’s children in a particularly unusual way. He
lived as if he KNEW God. I’m pretty sure that’s so amazing, and so
exciting, that it is why we still talk about him and his teachings
all these years later.
In
some ways this gospel story seems abrupt. Jesus is born, and then
that’s sort of it. The passage from Luke today is unique to Luke.
Only Luke and Matthew present Jesus before he was a grown man, and
Matthew has nothing between his birth and his ministry. Luke has two
stories: the story of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, during
which two wise old sages proclaim respond to meeting Jesus with
praising God, and this story. Both present the “holy family” as
particularly devote Jews. Both conform to common practice of
biographies in that day – including by having the hero show his
precocious talents while still a child. (Jesus is 12 here. He was a
“man” at 13.) This story is the first time that Jesus speaks in
the Gospel of Luke, it serves beautifully to foreshadow Jesus’s
ministry. The story mostly seems to exist in order to remind us that
Jesus was God’s first and only his parents’ second. The story
clearly comes from a separate tradition than that of the Bethlehem
birth, as it seems to come as a surprise to his parents that Jesus is
so… different.
The
interesting piece of the story, whether it is intentional or not, is
the expansiveness of it. There is no boundary around the nuclear
family. Jesus’s parents did not travel alone on the journey to
Jerusalem. They were with a large group of friends and family –
that’s how we can presume he was lose-able. Jesus himself wanders
away from those he knows in order to inquire among the teachers of
the law. Both the holy family, with their large expansive group of
travelers, and Jesus himself, who drew the circle wider, foreshadow
the welcome that will exist in following Jesus. The welcome never
ends.
The
ministry of Jesus was decidedly earthly, and practical, much like the
original meaning of the Second Isaiah passage. Jesus heals broken
bodies. He worries about food and drink for the people . He talks
about animals and agriculture. He takes seriously concerns about
taxation. The sacraments of the church are symbolized with water,
wine, and bread. The salvation that Isaiah references, that
Christians understand to come through Jesus, is an earthy one.
The
work of Jesus is to redeem THIS world, and for us, in part, THIS
city. God’s work of redemption and salvation is also earthy. As far
as I know, “heaven” isn’t a place in NEED of healing or
redemption. Peace is needed on EARTH. Equality is needed on EARTH.
Justice is needed on EARTH. New policies, procedures and laws that
recognize the value of all human lives are desperately need on EARTH.
No
matter how we understand the birth, Jesus served to remind us of
God’s presence with us on EARTH, and God’s work here to bring hope
and healing. The work of the followers of the way of Jesus is to
continue his earthy ministry. May we do so – with the
cheeriness of Second Isaiah himself. After all, if he could speak
words of hope in a time such as THAT, then we can do so in a time
such as this. Thanks be to God for hope. Amen
1Neal
Walls, “Homiletical Perspective on Isaiah 52:7-10” from in
Feasting on the Word Year C
Volume 1
edited by Barbara
Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press:
Louisville Kentucky, 2009), page 125-7.
2Stephen
B. Boyd “Theological Perspsective on Isaiah 52:7-10” also in
Feasting on the World Year C Vol 1, page 122.
3Marcus
Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperOne:
1995), page 60.
Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
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Webcast: Northeastern Jurisdiction Global Connection Plan
Webcast: Northeastern Jurisdiction Global Connection Plan
If you wanted to know more about the Global Connection Plan (created by the Northeastern Jurisdiction of the UMC’s Global Structure Task Force, on which Sara sat) you can watch it here.