Month: July 2010

The names of other gods got worked into the Hebrew religion. How’s that for the most boring sermon lead in ever? The names of other gods got worked into the Hebrew religion, for example the Canaanite word El, which we find not only in titles like Elohim and El Shaddai, in place names like Bethel and Israel, but also in people’s names like Daniel and Michael, names that in the original Hebrew spoke of the person’s relationship to God. But the oldest name for God seems to be Yahweh, a name connected with Israel’s time in Egypt, connected with the Midianites. You see, that wicked revolutionary Moses lead his small rag-tag band of slaves out of Egypt, and in the process Moses came to know the name of the God of Abraham, of the Patriarchs. In Hebrew it is something like the letters YHWH, and we have interpreted this ancient unspeakable name, this name without vowels, as Yahweh, and we dare speak it, we sophisticated modern folks who don’t believe that names have magic.

This ancient name, Yahweh, has been interpreted into modern languages. We refer to God as “I AM,” or maybe as “I AM WHO I AM.” This is a statement of being. But while I was in divinity school, some scholars suggested that in ancient times it could just as easily have been read “I AM BECOMING.” Because of complexities of tense and case in ancient Hebrew that are far beyond my understanding, these scholars argue that the verb is progressive. God is not static, God is becoming. And when I first heard this I thought “well all right then… this is a theology I can deal with, this is a God I can love.” Not the static scary god concept we stole from the Greek philosophers and tried to shove down on Yahweh, nope, this was a living God. “I AM BECOMING.” Well God, so am I, through your grace, so am I. Continue reading “The Converted Community”

Note: Dad died on January 25th, 2010. It was the first funeral sermon I ever delivered.

Protestant Theologian Karl Barth once wrote about the difficulty of the preacher’s task. According to Barth, before the preacher sat the Scripture, the Word of God, mystery beyond all understanding. And just past the Scripture sat the body of Christ, the congregation, mystery beyond all understanding. I wonder what Barth might have made of the funeral sermon, where the mystery of the Word and the mystery of the congregation contemplates the mystery of eternal life.

For it is eternal life that we are here to contemplate. The Christian pilgrim has completed his earthly journey and has gone home, to the source of his life, to the source of all life. And it is worth reviewing that life as we consider our own journeys.

Dad’s early life was not easy. While he was still a child his father, a Norfolk police officer, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The entire family was uprooted and moved to New Mexico. There was grueling poverty, many nights Dad had only a piece of fried fat back and a single potato to eat. It was all to no avail, for his father would never recover. After Dad’s father died the family moved back east… times were still tough, and there were more moves. As soon as he was able to he escaped, enlisting in the Army. He had been promised he would not be sent to Korea, so of course, that is exactly where they sent him. During one firefight he was shot through both legs while his buddy, standing next to him, was killed. Dad was young and angry and refused the Purple Heart. He was patched up and returned to combat, surviving the war and returning to Tidewater. Continue reading “Funeral Sermon for My Father”

Let me begin with a confession of sorts. Like many of our lectionary texts, this readings starts rather abruptly. I have taken the liberty of adding some of the context to verse 30. It actually reads “they went on from there,” but few of us would have remembered where “there” was, though we might have guessed about the “they.” I point this out because details are important, context is important, and I will be starting from a seemingly small detail.

But before I get there, I want to stir up some memories. How many of you remember felt-board Jesus? Of course, there was also a felt-board Pharaoh and Moses, a felt-board Paul. The felt-board was a common Sunday School teaching tool of an earlier age… today its Powerpoint Jesus, DVD Jesus! And how many of you remember the paintings of Jesus that hung on the Sunday School walls? If you were raised in the Roman church the images might have been of the Sacred Heart, scary in its own way. For many Protestants you had either creepy Jesus or wimpy Jesus. Creepy Jesus had long flowing hair that looked like it belonged in a shampoo commercial, and blue eyes, eyes that followed you no matter where you went in the room. Then there was wimpy Jesus, sitting on a hillside surrounded by children and lambs. This Jesus didn’t confront Empire, overturn the human-made systems of oppression. This Jesus clearly ran a daycare and petting zoo! No wonder generations of boys fled from the church at the first opportunity, continue to flee from the church! I have no idea when these tropes worked their way into Christian culture… maybe it was when we went from being the subversive outsiders to being the establishment, though that seems too easy of an answer. But there it is… Jesus with the children… just like in today’s reading. Continue reading “Feltboard Jesus”

A Sermon delivered on the 11th of July, 2010

I hope you are comfortable, for this morning I plan to preach for 22,369.36 miles, give or take a few hundred miles. For this morning I have been asked to preach about environmental bumper stickers. You’ve seen them around, and if you haven’t there are a few on the cover of your order of service. They are completely familiar to me, for I spent three years in Cambridge, home of Harvard and M.I.T., and a place where our on-going destruction of the planet is the greatest of concerns. Of course, Cambridge is the home of many bumper stickers, half of which make no sense outside of the academic world. Bumper stickers like “Heisenberg Slept Here… Maybe.” One of my favorites, suitable for our mathematicians, says “Don’t drink and derive.”

In all seriousness though, one cannot preach on the subject of our relationship to the rest of God’s creation without noting its immensity. The distance I cited is in fact the distance the earth will travel in its orbit during the length of the average sermon. Never mind that our Solar System is moving within the Milky Way, or that the Milky Way is itself hurtling out into the cosmos from the source, from the moment and place of creation we can only guess at, but that we call the Big Bang. At the other end of the scale we have the beauty and fragility and sheer mind-blowing mystery of life itself, the evolution of new traits, the development of species. And smaller still we have the atomic, Newtonian Quantum mysteries of the atom and the sub-atomic, and it is mind-blowing too. Continue reading “Despicable Me”