In the Beginning

Advent 4, b, Dec. 21, 2008

John 1:1-10

This morning our Scripture lesson completes the logic of our Advent 2008 worship planning. Our first Sunday was a marvelous Hanging Of The Greens describing for us the relevance and meaning of all of the adornments of our sanctuary.

The next week we heard and discussed the good news of the coming of Jesus into the world in the Gospel of Mark through the proclamation of John the Baptist.

The following week, last week, the 3rd Sunday in Advent, we looked at how the Gospel of Luke talks about Jesus coming into the world, especially through the eyes of his mother Mary.

This week, in the concluding Sunday of Advent, if we want to move from the most earthly to the most spiritual, the most flesh and blood Jesus towards the most Divine Christ, then we have this progression along the continuum completed this morning by taking a look at the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The Gospel of John is often called the “church’s gospel” because it has been for nearly 2000 years the most beloved. Whereas Mark wants us to see the powerful working of God in the very human Jesus, the Gospel of John presents to us a Jesus who is God, who barely touches down to earth, who sees and knows and understands what no human ever could. And so we should not be surprised as begin this morning at the beginning of the Gospel of John with the most dramatic statement about the nature of Jesus Christ that we find in the Bible.



“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2 He was in the beginning with God.

3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.



Here in the writings of the Gospel of John the growing tradition around the man Jesus of Nazareth has reached a new level, an apotheosis, finally here reaching a new claim that Jesus the Christ was the logos, as the Word, the founding logic and order of the universe “was in the beginning with God,” preexistent and eternal, what would become the bedrock claim upon which all discussions of the Trinity would later be founded.[i]

For those who could and can accept this perspective, the amazing story has a thoroughly satisfying sound. John Shea tells the story of one such recipient of the news:

"She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity, convinced every word was revelation. She said, "They were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass (hee-hee), but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lighted the roof. Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was?" Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars. "The baby was God." And she jumped in the air, whirled around, dove into the sofa and buried her head under the cushion"[ii] which for those who can believe the news may be the only proper response the incarnation of the Word in Jesus.



But there are many, including many Christians, and a growing number in our age, for whom such an exalted claim for Jesus seems both ridiculous and highly problematic. “Who could believe such a thing?,” they say. “Perhaps,” they go on,”in a very metaphorical way I could buy that, but that only if we aren’t making a literal claim of Christ’s identity with God.” The majority of respected Biblical scholars in our age would agree with them that even Jesus, himself, never held himself in anything near that high regard.

Another practical trouble with this perspective is that it can elevate Jesus Christ right out of the reality in which you and I must live. If we take the humanity out of Jesus, we can end up with a theology that tends to denigrate the earthy as base and unworthy. It can lead to an elevated, almost escapist spirituality, that would rather hunt for God experiences in hours of meditation and shun spending similar hours of service to the poor,

that separates worship from work,

that honors belief more than being and making visible Christ’s gracious presence in the world. If we follow that spiritual path we run the risk of becoming, as the old saw puts it, “so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good.“

Let me give a very present example. As one of your ministers I am keenly aware of the need to develop and sustain a worshipful atmosphere in the midst of our time together on Sunday mornings. Mary Lu and Roslyn and I have talked on numbers of occasions about how it is that we can maintain that worshipful spirit as we flow through the service, recognizing that there are some aspects of the service that have a propensity to breaking that worshipful sense.

What might come to your mind is the sermon. Sermons are calling you out of a direct worshipful experience into a listening, hopefully learning, and sometimes inspiring experience, but not worshipful in the same way that your communion experience or your prayer experience provides.

Some notice that the Offertory Moment is another time that shakes one out of a settled inward turn.

But certainly the worst culprit for breaking that sense of worshipfulness must be that aspect of our time together that receives the least regard; the time when there is more twittering, whispered conversations in the congregation than anywhere else. Yes, I'm talking about our Announcements.

The Announcements do seem like a box of buttered popcorn at the symphony, don’t they? They can come across as a clumsy segment of boorish necessities wedging their way into our hour of inspiration.

I have not researched the matter, but am willing to place a small wager that what happened here at University Christian Church is what happened at many of our Disciples of Christ congregations across the country several decades ago. There used to be a time in most of our churches when the congregational announcements, the prayer concerns, the highlighting of upcoming events, the encouragement to be making items for the church bazaar; a call for folks to join the ministries of the prayer team, and the men’s breakfast, and church lawn mowing….you know what I mean, some of the most mundane activities that we do in church would be shared just before the time of the pastoral prayer, far along into the service itself. That way we could be sure to tie the churches needs to the church’s prayer time. And it didn’t hurt that all the latecomers would’ve arrived by then, either.

But the Announcements there seemed so awkward, so intrusive. So many of our churches and gave up that order and moved the announcements up to the beginning of the service or back to the end of the service itself, so folks could slip out while the deacon read on, and on from that announcement list. And the reason for moving the Announcements made sense, because they were seen as too detrimental to the maintenance of that liberating, high-flying, worshipful spirit we are really after when we gather in church. [iii]

I remember those days of the older order. There were so many times in worship at my home church in Florida when I had been lifted to the heights of inspiration by the singing of the choir or the profundity of an Elder’s prayer at the Communion Table, only to have the vulgar crash to earth again with, “we still need 4 more women to sign up for the kitchen cleaning next Saturday morning.” And the spell was broken! I was rudely jerked back to mundane living. I have a feeling that you know what I mean.

But, my friends, I believe our Scripture passage for today challenges us to see this differently, to focus not only on the Incarnation of Jesus, but also the Incarnation in us. You see, if you think carefully about it, I suggest you will discover that it is in the Announcements where we best see how the rubber of the church's theology hits the road.

It is in the Announcements that we discover the needs and the hopes of the Fellowship.

It is in the Announcements that we discover what the church values enough to spend our energy and our precious time on. Oh yes, the choir anthem may bless you, the sermon may intrigue you, the Communion Service may confirm in you the very presence of Christ, but it is in the announcements more than any place else that we discover whether or not our faith has legs, whether or not our faith has the power to really move us into significant action in nurturing growth in the church and in serving the wide world’s needs in the name of Jesus Christ. It is not in our worshipful listening and appreciating nearly so much as in our being, and especially in our doing, that we will know if and how Jesus Christ is being incarnated in us.

Perhaps that old order of worship is especially fitting in that it doesn’t segregate the sacred and the mundane. One moment you are singing the sublime, “All Creatures of Our God and King” and the next we are caterwauling our need for a 3rd grade church school teacher. It is so messy, but if we can see and claim these both as equally needful elements in the life of the congregation….that the victorious anthem makes sense only when we’re also wrestling with a church budget …Then perhaps we are closer to that incarnation we seek.

This morning we might recognize that while our Johannine (Jo HAN in) version of Jesus often seems far removed from the flesh and blood Marcan version, but on this point they as well as Matthew and Luke do all agree. The God towards which our Jesus Christ points is not about to be segregated into the emotional highs of any service of worship. The message is Incarnation. And for those of us who want to be called “Christians,”whether we can believe that God was incarnated that night in the Bethlehem manger, or whether we cannot believe that literally, we jolly well better find a way for that incarnation to take place inside of us.

To that end, then, let me close this morning with a prayer attributed to St. Theresa of Avila:

"Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now."

My friends, may we go forward then as agents, as ambassadors of Christ in Christmas joy sharing the Good News in our words, incarnating that Christ spirit in our deeds, and freely sharing it with all who will receive God’s blessing.

Amen.



[i] Many will understand this exclamation of high Christology as the best faithful response to the revelation of Christ, but we must recognize that it is precisely in these grand titles, this high understanding of who it is that Jesus Christ is, that we have as Christians elevated our claim to understand and our claim to absolute truth to become a terrible barrier of separation from less exalted Christological fused and even more, separating us from all other religions.


[ii] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977) p. 68
[iii] Now, I confess that I have on numerous occasions in this church and in others been one who has advocated the moving of the mundane matters to the beginning or the end in order to maintain or better maintain that level of the service. s

It's Your Call

It’s Your Call

Epiphany 2, b, Jan. 18, 2009

I Sam. 3:1-2

The story of the young Samuel that Roslyn read for us, really needs to be put into context. Long before Samuel was conceived, his mother Hannah led a frustrated life. Hannah was getting up in years and was unable to have children. In those days a woman without children was understood to have been cursed by God. But in truth the scriptures teach us that God dearly loved Hannah.

On one occasion Hannah went to Temple of the Lord in the city of Shiloh. Now, Shiloh was where the ark of the covenant was kept. For a long time Shiloh had been a supremely holy place, where pilgrims believed there was an especially good chance that the God would hear and respond positively to their prayers.

Hannah came and prayed, asking that God give her a son. Hannah vowed that if God would give her a son, she would dedicate that child to God' service in the Temple.

The Temple's priest Eli, noticed her pouring her soul before the Lord. And after a brief conversation, he blessed her, asking that God heed her fervent prayers.

Unbeknownst to Eli, this woman and her child would figure greatly in Eli's future. For when her prayer for a son was granted by God, and when the boy was weaned, she, honoring her vow, brought the baby, Samuel to Eli at the Temple that Samuel might live there ever after as a servant to the Lord at the Shiloh Temple.

As the boy grew strong and faithful about his duty. His mother would visit yearly and bring him a new robe each visit. And in time Hannah, and her husband were blessed with 5 other children.

It is into this scene that we enter the reading from I Samuel

"Now the boy Samuel was ministering unto the Lord under Eli. The word of

the Lord was rare in those days. Visions were not widespread."

And one night, one very special night, all that begins to change.

The boy is lying in his bed, presumably asleep when he hears a voice calling him by name, "Samuel, Samuel." He thinks that his master Eli needs him. "Here am I" he responds as he runs to Eli's side. Eli says he did not call and sends him back to his bed to sleep.

Twice more this same scene happens, before Eli senses something special may be happening. He tells Samuel, "Go lie down again, and if the voice comes again, answer it, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."

And the dam breaks. Though he had been working in the Temple since he was an infant, the scripture teaches us that Samuel as yet was not sensitive to the Lord's leading:

“Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him." But this night through his dreams: just as Jacob had, just as Joseph his son had, just had Peter would, as Joseph the father of Jesus would, and so many more in the scriptures....SAMUEL HEARD THE VOICE OF GOD CALL TO HIM IN A DREAM.

In the ancient world, people understood better than we usually do that dreams are a special opportunity for God to break through the crowded consciousness of people when they are resting in sleep. Long before Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious", or Carl Jung began the field of modern dream analysis; our ancestors in faith were discovering God within the foggy field of dreams that most often we cannot remember, or that we choose to forget.

And this was only the first of a life filled with messages from God through Samuel for the people. This oracle of doom for Eli and his family was followed by Samuel's masterful ministry at the Temple as its priest. The people came to love and to trust Samuel. Through him their faith in God was gradually restored. Samuel brought integrity back to their religion and their national life.

At the Lord's behest, Samuel first anointed Saul as King of Israel, and the later his successor, the greatest of all Israelite kings, King David. Samuel was a power for healing and encouragement for a nation of people for many years, because one night as a boy SAMUEL HAD LEARNED HIS MOST IMPORTANT LESSON, to hear a voice.... and to recognize it as the voice of his God!

*

On this holiday weekend when we honor the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the simple truth is that King's effective leadership was a fateful convergence of the times, capabilities & faithful of Dr. King that well mirrors Samuel's prophetic ministry. Martin Luther King heard a word from the Lord, and though society thought it impossible, through King’s restatement for that day of Jesus’ teaching of non-violent but active resistance to evil…. in this case the manifest evil being segregation, a whole of people was set on a path towards freedom from the injustice of hundreds of years.

Though we celebrate today, that work is not yet complete for the African-Americans of this nation, nor is it complete for Hispanic or South Asians and others who still feel the stings and blows of discrimination. But Dr. King’s leadership put us on the right road and with the inauguration of Barak Obama as President of the United States on Tuesday we remove another stone that we can only hope is a foundation stone in that thick wall of a still persistent racism.

*

The word that came to Samuel and the word that came to Martin Luther King, is a word that is destined for us. In my heart, I do believe that the Lord God pours through the Holy Spirit a special anointing on some people such as Samuel and Martin Luther King, who are charged to lead. But I believe God has for each of us- yes, every one of us- as a constitutive element of each human destiny in this life, the experience of the presence of God. Maybe not with Samuel's clarity of voice. Maybe not with Martin's clarity of purpose. But the very same joyful experience of knowing God present and sensing God’s guidance in the directions of our ministering.

So let me ask you point blank, do you know the voice of God that Samuel heard? Do recognize when and how God is guiding you in particular direction? To make a particular decision? Can you discern the difference between the guidance of God and all those other psychological drives and yearnings, and – I’m not afraid to use the word – spirits, that try to determine your path? Remember Eli's good advice: Listen! It could be your Call!

Make time in your schedule to be silent before God.

QUIET EVEN YOUR PRAYERS.

CLEAR YOUR MIND OF EVERYTHING.... AND LISTEN.

MAKE IT A PART OF YOUR DAILY ROUTINE.

"BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD!" says Ps. 46: 10

As in Is. 30:15 we find, "IN QUIETNESS AND TRUST SHALL BE YOUR STRENGTH."

Go, said Eli, the wise elder to his pupil Samuel. Put yourself in the best possible position to hear the Lord's call.





Before that day Samuel had lived and worked in the Temple every day of his young life that he could remember. No doubt his prayers had been sincere. No doubt he had sought the Lord's presence. But it was not in his frantic praying, but in the SILENT SPACE THAT HE PROVIDED FOR GOD that the Lord spoke to him.

SILENT SPACES, WHERE THE HOLY SPIRIT can gently move the contents of our consciousness and the contents of our character into new and better configurations:

Writing down in a JOURNAL the questions, intuitions, insights given you… about your inner world,

intentionally remembering, recording, studying your dreams

talking with a spiritual director,

reading about the lives of the saints, prayer partner, spiritual friend

taking a private retreat time....

In other words, putting ourselves in the best position to hear the Lord's call.

*

And when the call does come, Samuel's next response of course might be our guide, as well. "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."

How those words Samuel uttered must have supported all those of have moved forward the cause of Christ. How Martin Luther King must have been encouraged to be reminded of this son of the ShilohTemple's profound obedience. Is it coincidence that the word of the Lord came to Samuel , to one so thoroughly dedicated to the Lord's way? No, my friends, for as Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see [and I would add “ and hear”] God. “[i]

*



Each year at this time we lift up Martin Luther King, our brother in Jesus Christ, to honor his courage & wisdom & to remember & revivify his dream. But It is not just Martin’s dream, anymore. It is our dream, too. It

was our Jesus who taught us the dream. It is the living Christ

who will not let it die.

Friends, I challenge you take these precious moments and grow

from them. Tomorrow many of you will have a holiday, as the years

roll by, more and more of us will have the day off. Here is my

challenge to you. Don't lose the day in typical holiday eating,

drinking, sleeping, gaming, and working. Spend at least a part of it to enriching your spirit…..

In addition to responding the call to serve the wider community in doing good works tomorrow…as emphasize by President –elect Obama…that will benefit the community and engage us in some special way, I encourage you to decide right now to set about some time tomorrow….

1)Spend an hour or more reading the works of Martin Luther

King or one of our contemporaries who, like him, embodies God's

commitment to JUSTICE, especially one of the recaptured gems of the gospel in this century, Jesus' teaching about NON-VIOLENT BUT ACTIVE RESISTANCE TO EVIL.

2) Spend some moments teaching your children, grandchildren, or talking with friends and neighbors about what it means to stand up for the needs and rights

of the oppressed today,

3) Review the story of King's fight of Civil Rights, the cost

of discipleship,

but most of all, pray!

4) Pray that God will open our ears and hearts to the cries for food and

freedom, for jobs and justice, for health and hope that crying din

that might overwhelm our earth. Pray that God will show us those today, those who are being enslaved because of our blindness. Pray that God would SHED A LITTLE LIGHT ON US!

And if you have a bit of fear that hearing YOUR CALL from God might lead you out of your routines into a new commitment, a new way of being, that goes beyond your capacity, your strength or your will; “fear not,” as the angels always say in the Bible. Fear not, because the same God that utters YOUR CALL to serve God’s people will also provide you all the strength and all the wisdom that you will need to follow through.

AMEN.








[i] Matt. 5:8

Beyond John’s Baptism

Acts 19:1-7

Epiphany 1, b, January 11, 2009

It's good to be back with you here in Austin at the beginning of this new year. I will always be thankful to Kim Campbell and the rest of you who picked up responsibilities that would otherwise have been mine in order to allow Becca and me time in Florida for New Years.

As for most of you, there was a big part of our time in Florida that was simply enjoying being together as family. But there was one important, special aspect to this journey. You know that my father passed away six months ago and at that time his earthly remains were cremated. On December 30 about 35 folks including my mother, sisters, nieces and nephews, family friends, relatives from as far away as New York City all gathered on the dock of Lake Kerr in the Ocala National Forest that had been the center of Dad's universe all his life. It was his axis mundi….that special place, that liminal place that theologians and cultural anthropologists name as one’s axis of the world, where earth and heaven somehow meet.

We held short little memorial service in which we shared some reflections on Dad’s life and then I read from my Dad's Dad's Jewish prayer book and I reminded those gathered whether they were Christians or Jews- as all Dad’s family of origin is Jewish- that we held in common a faith, a belief that the essence of a human being is not bound to a physical body, that we all affirm the importance of the Spirit and believe in an afterlife that is wonderful and eternal.

Then my brother-in-law, David, and I took Dad’s cremains in Dad’s old boat out into the lake a ways and scattered them there. And as we all looked on, Dad’s earthly body’s white ashes sank into the calm, clear water of his beloved Lake Kerr….and all kinds of associations sprang to my mind.

Among them was the recognition that this was another form of a baptism experience, another fresh start, another new beginning for Dad, and for all of us. Death is a transition to something mysterious, but so much better.

And I thought about how often at this particular place – this big bowl of water and the land it touched- this place, had been the site of so many of our lives’ baptisms and blessings, going back to my grandmother’s father first finding this spot nearly 100 years ago.

Another remembrance arose in my mind, probably because of the centrality of water that day and because of the nearness of death. It was the passage was from Romans 6,

3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Lake Kerr is only about 40 miles from the University of Florida where Dad attended college. All his life he was a loyal part of the gator nation, so he would have rejoiced in Thursday evening’s national college football championship that Florida earned. Interestingly, Dad grew up in south Georgia and that would have been a natural place for him to go to school, but my bet was always that he ended up in Florida because of his love for that lake.

So I found it all the more ironic on Thursday evening when the University of Florida gators quarterback, Tim Tebow, the one nicknamed “Superman,” showed up for the game with a curious message in that war paint football players put on before a game. You know the stuff I mean. Usually it is an extremely dark color, typically black. I am told that it is to keep light from reflecting off the sweaty face back into one’s eye, but I've always believed it was psychological war paint worn to terrorize opponents. But Tebow's war paint was different. Underneath his right eye over the black paint was written in white the word “John” and under his left eye written in white on the black war paint was “3:16.” Clever, wasn't he?

Do you remember the guy who always used to appear in the end zones of the professional football games with the huge John 3:16 sign? I don’t know what happened to him but Tebow managed to get the same word out in a new fashion. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

Tebow’s parents were missionaries in the Philippines when he was born, and he has held a lifelong, strong, conservative Christian faith.[i] Tebow returned to the Philippines each of the 3 summers before he enrolled at Florida to support his father’s ministry there. 2 years ago in an interview, Tebow’s pastor, Jerry Vines of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, said “Tebow is up for his future challenges at the University of Florida. There is great pressure in college football,” Vines said. “I believe Tim Tebow has been spiritually prepared by his family to handle that pressure. Of course, the difficulties will be there. But I am confident he will maintain his Christian ideals in the college football arena and will lead many others to a personal faith in Jesus Christ.”[ii]

“Lead many others…” John 3:16 “For God so loved the world….so that everyone who believes in him….” It is a beloved verse, a cherished verse, a central statement of confidence for the Christian; but more often than not through the entire history of Christianity, it has been used as a weapon to coerce, or as a tool to push for conversion of those who hold different religious views, especially when paired with the John 3:18 which reads, “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

Throughout his life – like most of the Jewish people I know - my Dad was the object of many of those conversion attempts: to move him toward a Christian version of repentance, confession, and baptism. And no doubt the very hardest attempts for him to absorb were the conversion attempts made by some of his closest friends and by myself when I was in college. Like most of those who are out seeking to convert believers of other faiths to Christianity, I naïvely believed that the expression of faith in John 3:16 was the common, united voice of all the Christian faith.

How I now wish that someone had set me down and taught me as a young Christian that there have always been varieties of Christian ways to understand faithfulness to God…. Not all of them require believing in Jesus as God, or even thinking that appropriate; but just believing in the God and the coming kingdom of God, to which Jesus pointed.

How I now wish someone had shown me that in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus does not claim to have graduated from His Jewish upbringing. Jesus does not repudiate Judaism or set aside any part of the Jewish law. In fact the Gospel of Matthew makes Jesus the Jewish Superman, a figure of such dramatic historical importance precisely because he was the finest teacher of the Jewish Law![iii]

How I now wish that I had been wise enough to leave my father alone after having witnessed my Christian faith to him; after sharing with him what I had discovered in my own experiments with Truth; and then simply allow him the dignity to respond to God in a way that made sense to him. That would have been a far more hospitable Christian witness than the one that I gave… or the one Tebow gave… or the one that most One Way, finger pointing, Christians give.

But our passage this morning calls not to dwell on the mistakes or the short sightedness of the past, but to reassess where we are today and to move forward! Our passage this morning brings to mind a similar theme in the life of the young Christian church. We have in the book of Acts some of the earliest records of how it is that a Christian message was transmitted from Jesus through the early apostles to that first generation of believers…. And we can see quickly that there were wide variations of belief and understanding among those who called themselves Christians.

19:1 While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples.

2 He said to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?" They replied, "No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit."

3 Then he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They answered, "Into John's baptism."

4 Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus."



At this point in the story, the ball is in the court of the disciples. It is in their power to accept or to reject or to modify this new witness of Paul. We know how it turns out…



5 On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.



But what if they had decided not to receive this new witness from Paul as true for them? What if they had decided to hear out Paul, but not to accept his teaching?

One hopes that Paul would trust that his witness shared would bear its proper fruit in the proper time and would have not badgered these novice disciples. The history of Christian witnessing generally is not usually so kind.

This business of sharing our faith is never as easy as simple or as straight-forward as we might wish. We might well ask:

“What extra does baptism in the Holy Spirit call forth from us?”

This is a relevant question for every Christian, but it is particularly relevant to a group of young people here who will begin preparations for their own baptisms on Easter in classes that start in three weeks. Unlike the new disciples in this passage from Acts, our young Christians are quite unlikely to speak in tongues and prophesy after they are baptized, but surely one of the claims that we do want to make is that they may well be infused in a special way with the Holy Spirit through their baptisms, after their public commitment of their faith, after a serious study of what it means to be a Christian.

How will this effect their sharing of their faith with others?

My hope is that they - and all the rest of us - come to a faith that is strong enough to help them make good & wise personal decisions;

But that never lets them get too comfortable with their current understanding and thus challenges them to grow every single day of their lives;

My hope is that they and all the rest of come to a faith that we hold as our own best, personal understanding of Truth, and that we are excited to share what we have experienced with others when God provides an opportunity;

But also a faith that never stops listening to the Truth that others also perceive;

That never narrowly claims that we have found the only way to God, the only real Truth. For that claim -that exclusivistic claim - smacks of the Greek sin of sins, hubris, overweening pride, overwhelming self-confidence, thinking far too much of our own ability to know the parameters of God.

My friends, let God be the judge of what finally is Truth.

Let us, instead of playing judge, let us show forth the compassionate love of God in our willingness to share the Good News, but never imposing it.

Amen.








[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tebow
[ii] http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=22513
[iii] RSV Matt. 5: 17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Teach Them Science

The following are comments that I shared at a press conference in Austin on Jan. 15, 2008 as part of a team announcing the kickoff of a website to encourage Texans to not allow creationist propaganda to replace science in Texas classrooms. [This is not yet the final copy of what was shared. I'll replace this with the polished copy ASAP.]

In the great sweep of time, it was only yesterday, a mere 500 years ago when Copernicus first wrote his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres and related to his shocked readers that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system. He proposed a theory for how the planets all revolved around the sun that was so elegantly simple that one wonders why it wasn’t thought of earlier.

The truth of the matter was that it had been suggested earlier by a number of people, but you know how it goes, an earth-centered cosmos better suited the narrow vision Europeans held until that time. Then in the early 16th century with that other form of revolution in the air everywhere, it was finally time for the populace to be able to hear and take in a strange and yes, challenging truth.

The Church wasn’t thrilled with the challenges this new way of understanding brought, but it adapted. Today I’m happy to say that I don’t know a single soul who has lost his or her faith because they couldn’t accept the formerly unthinkable notion of the earth revolving around the sun.

Is that situation much different from ours today? I don’t think so. The science that underlies evolution is impeccable. Month by month more and more corroborating evidence mounts. We have with all the new DNA testing demonstrations of the actual genetic changes that move species to new species. Amazing, isn’t it? Every step points to the underlying truth of the theory of evolution that Darwin first pointed us toward.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some in the some religious communities aren’t thrilled by this challenge, either. It is one more in a long string of adjustments religions have had to make in a constantly changing world. But just because we can understand their reticence in letting go of cherished old ways of understanding that does not excuse them of the necessity to do so. Especially, when the children of Texas will graduate from high school and will have to compete for the same spot in a science program of a college or university along side other young people from Michigan and California and New York who were actually taught what scientists understand today! Their young people will know that the earth revolves around the sun and that evolution describes our genesis and they won’t have wasted time and focus on outmoded, antiquated understandings.

I suggest it is the sacred duty of a parent and of a society to provide its young people with a solid cultural education and also a solid scientific education that will help them understand their world, be competent in it and be able to compete in it.

It is not betraying faith to welcome science’s fully orbed evolutionary picture of how varieties of life forms have slowly branched over millions of years into the wondrous multiplicity we enjoy this day. Many a person of faith can see in that very process the slow, steady hand of God arching all the way from simple single-celled life to the soaring heights and complexity of a self-conscious humanity.

It is not betraying faith to welcome science’s answers to the questions of “how?” Nor will science be able to touch religion’s answers to “why?”

But, let us be clear, it is betraying our children to pretend the Book of Genesis chapters 1&2 are literal renditions of how we got it here.