Category: Sermon

Texts:  3 John 1:1-6
Within these sacred grounds,
revenge and anger end:
A way to peace is found,
and injury can mend.
With friendship’s kindness as our guide,
the soul’s made glad and satisfied.
With friendship’s kindness as our guide,
the soul’s made glad and satisfied.
Amidst this band of brothers,
a loving wisdom lives:
All honor one another,
and freely we forgive.
For one deserving human birth,
there is no greater joy on earth.
For one deserving human birth,
there is no greater joy on earth. — Mozart, The Magic Flute, In diesen Heil’gen Hallen
A somewhat peculiar difficulty seems to attend the discussion of ethical theory, on account of its characteristic relation to action. This relation gives rise, on one side, to the belief that ethics is primarily an ‘art.’ Ethics is so much the theory of practice that it seems as if its main business were to aid in the direction of conduct. This being premised, the next step is to make out of ethics a collection of rules and precepts. A body of rigid rules is erected with the object of having always some precept which will tell just what to do. But, on the other side, it is seen to be impossible that any body of rules should be sufficiently extensive to cover the whole range of action; it is seen that to make such a body results inevitably . . . to destroy the grace and play of life by making conduct mechanical.
– J. Dewey, “Green’s Theory of Moral Motive”
Music critics have written about The Magic Flute over the decades in various shades acceptance, from high praise to complete disdain. Once upon a time it was described as a pointless plot driven by weak, ineffectual music. It is now generally regarded as masterpiece; the score alone a work of genius.   On top of that the musical genius of The Magic Flute is of a piece with the libretto, the text of the operatic action.  Unlike other contemporary composers, Mozart did not give his librettist a blank check and ask him to come up with the words to his opera. Mozart worked closely with Emmanuel Schikaneder the music and the text would be of the same enlightened nature.
The Magic Flute is a deep well of themes of most important human issues: love, forgiveness, courage, integrity, good versus evil, peace and human striving in the world.
Continue reading “Jan 31 — Grace and Play of Life”

Texts: Psalm 42, Luke 24:36-48
In 1910 in Edinburgh Scotland, hundreds of Christian leaders from around the world met to discuss the meaning and the nature of Christian mission.  A reporter from the Christian Century, was on the scene.  He described the goal of the conference as  bringing theconcerns of the local church into a global conversation:

Indeed one is safe in saying that there is no home problem which the church is today facing which is not forced to the foreground in the consideration of missionary expansion. And it is coming home to many with the force and surprise of a revelation that these home problems — the problem of Christian union, the problem of Christian education, the problem of a socialized Christianity, and even the academic problems of criticism and theology — wait for their solution until they are carried into the white light of missionary passion.

The conference was not billed as a conference of Christian unity.  But that reporter suggests that as these people talked about the various ways they do mission and experience mission, the final result was that a great and surprising sense of comity prevailed.  He concludes:

What I can write is but a sip of the overflowing cup of good things. The theme of Christian unity is running through the whole conference like a subterranean stream. It breaks through the ground of any subject the conference may be considering, and bubbles on the surface for a time. It is almost the exception for a speaker to sit down without deploring our divisions. The missionaries are literally plaintive in their appeal that the church of Christ reestablish her long lost unity. But tomorrow is to be given over to a discussion of the whole subject, and my heart thrills with expectancy and eagerness to hear the great words that I cannot doubt will surely be spoken.

Perhaps the idea of an eight day meeting about the problems of churches and about mission would not inspire you all that much.  It is in fact difficult to read through that Christian Century article without having to stiffle a bit of a yawn.  And that is my point this morning:  even in the midst of the difficult realities of our modern life, realities complete with tragedies like earthquakes and broken homes, all of us somehow, in different times and in different places, thrill to the sense that God is in our midst, leading us as our Gospel reading put it, to peace; or perhaps to unity.
Continue reading “Jan 24 – Easter Epiphany”

Texts: Habakkuk 2:1-3a

A preferential option for the poor also implies a mode of analysis. In examining TB in Haiti, our analysis must be historically deep: not merely deep enough to remind us of the Peligre dam project that deprived the majority of my patients of their land, but deep enough to make us remember that modem-day Haitians are the descendants of a people kidnapped from Africa in order to provide us with sugar, coffee and cotton.
Our analysis must also be geographically broad. Many believe that the world as we know it is becoming increasingly interconnected. A corollary of this belief is that what happens to poor people is never divorced from the actions of the powerful. Certainly, people who define themselves as poor may control to some extent their own destinies. But control of lives is related to the control of land, systems of production and the formal political and legal structures in which lives are enmeshed. There has come, with time, an increasing concentration of wealth and control in the hands of a few. The very opposite trend is desired by people working for social justice. – Paul Farmer, “Medicine and Social Justice”

I mentioned in my Friday email news, that I had turned to the story and thinking of Dr. Paul Farmer out of my own desperation felt at this earthquake.  The story of Dr. Farmer is a remarkable story of hope in the face of very long odds.  Reading about him and about his efforts in the Partners in Health clinic in Haiti, I reflected on the two meanings of the word triage.
In situations where doctors and nurses and medical supplies are limited, triage is a method of attending first to the severely wounded who have the best chance of surviving — triage in this case is about sorting out those whom you will let die from those whom you will attempt to save.
Triage in a hospital emergency room when people and supplies are not so limited does not imply the withholding of care from anyone, rather it is about identifying grave danger and attending to it first.
In Haiti this last week triage had a third meaning — long defeat.  According to reports out of Haiti in the first 3 days following the earthquake, the situation was  so utterly devastating, there are so many people in need of care, that all supplies have run out.  All one could do is put pressure on the wounds of the ones  around you. That, thanks to an international outpouring of aid and the  fact that their airport is not so damaged as to make it non-functional, has begun to change.
Continue reading “Jan. 17 — Triage”

Texts:  Matthew 2:1-12
An excerpt from a letter to Greg Mortenson in Stones into Schools, by LTC Chris Kolenda, U.S. Army —

I am convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general and Afghanistan specifically is education. The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books and ideas that excite the imagination toward peace, tolerance and prosperity. The thirst for education here is palpable. People are tired of war after 30 years and want a better future. Education will make the difference, whether the next generation grows up to be educated patriots or illiterate fighters. The stakes could not be higher.

According to the story — the wise men were led by a great light in the night sky to the newborn savior.  My hope today is to try to make some sense of the recent deployment of 1500 Vermonters to war in Afghanistan,  by looking to that light. I’d like to shed more light on the issue, than generate heat — but some heat is not all that bad either.  We are after all sending friends and neighbors to war in a desperately brutal land.
To do this, I want to point us back to the Christmas story, for in the familiar and beloved language of Luke’s infancy narratives and again in Matthew’s addition of the story of the three wise men, is, hidden to us non-Greek speakers, clues that this birth will have political ramifications.  That Jesus and those who follow him will have to do with the political order.
II.
When the angels appear to the shepherds they bring a message — a special kind of message — one known as Euangelion.  The Euangelion was the announcement to the people that an heir to the Roman Emperor’s throne had been born.  It was obviously a rare moment, but one filled with a great deal of import.  To announce Jesus’ birth in this way is no mere coincidence.    It is Luke’s way of notifying us that this baby, because he’s clearly not the next in line for the Roman throne, will turn the whole idea of empire on its head. The real empire will be the empire of God.
An early Christian saying in Latin is  “radix omnium malorum avaritia” — the first letter of each word forming an acrostic — the Latin word for the empire, Roma. Translated literally, radix omnium malorum avaritia simply means “avarice is the root of all evil.”  In the context of the early Christian acrostic it means that Rome is the root of all evil.  Marcus Borg, the popular scholar of early Christianity notes that this was the early Christian experience of empire: ” The embodiment of greed in domination systems is the root of all evil”  and located in the Roman Empire (Borg, The Heart of Christianity, p. 137.).
Luke also has the angels announce that the one to be born would be a Savior, Christ the Lord.  Again, for those not steeped in the everyday-ness of those words now as Christian, it was a surprising turn of phrase, another signal — Savior and lord, both titles belonging solely to Caesar.
And what about Matthew?  I mentioned last week, that Matthew’s opening chapter, describing the genealogy of Jesus was coded for those familiar with the cast of characters that Jesus’s ministry would embrace those of his day who would otherwise have been discarded.  Now in the story of his birth — a brief mention that it happened, and a longer story about some visitors from the East.  Kings or wise men, we have no easy translation.  Herodotus mentions that the magi as they are called in Greek, are astrologers.  What we know about astrologers at the time is that they were the ones studying nature and scripture and history.  They were the scholars of the day.
When these scholars finally arrive in Palestine, they naturally go to the King, Herod to ascertain where the heir to the throne is to be found.  The contrast is striking.  Luke’s Herod is stereotypically Rome — he is the root of all evil, and he slays innocent children just to protect his throne.   The scholars are likewise stereotyped — as they remain open to the voice of inspiration.  They are warned in a dream that the intentions of King Herod, in wanting the men to return to him when they’ve found the newborn, are to protect the pax romana by killing this threat to it.  They will have no part in the avarice of empire.  They go home another way.
III.
In a sermon about 8 years ago, on the occasion of our country’s invasion of Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, I preached a sermon that I’m not likely ever to forget.  I don’t remember the details, I remember the reaction. I was critical of the decision and labeled it imperialist.  That day and the aftermath taught me a few lessons about the care that must be taken when going down this road.
That said,  I am not going to avoid calling our country imperialist, I just want to do so lovingly and carefully.  I do not want to mean that by using that terminology that our country is not worth loving, or even dying for.   In many respects  being the world’s superpower has been a good thing for the world. More importantly I do not want to mean that we are calculating imperialists. Or that we were to sit back and do nothing following those attacks.  But I am concerned today, as I was 8 years ago, that we do not carefully enough consider what it means to be the world’s superpower when we begin military action on foreign soil.  The question was, what did that mean as we moved to defend our country after the attacks of September 11?  And what does it mean now, 8 years later?
It was that experience of preaching 8 years ago, that drove me to study the writings of scholars known as the post-colonialists, ultimately leading me to Colorado where I presented a paper on theology in a post 9/11 world and arguing with Jean Bethke Elshtain, a renown just- war scholar and supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2002.
My argument that it was not just, was, in a nutshell, that the origins of all of this violence has deeper and more tangled roots than we like to admit.  Post-colonial scholars help us see that one of the oddest things about the experience of empire is that it dislocates the cultures involved  such that the aims of freedom are veiled in experiences and ideas that masquerade as freedom.  When Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion in 313, that masquerade was fully institutionalized and Christianity itself became a disolaction.  The religion that originally used the word Lord and Savior in a kind of revolt against the avarice and violence of empire had hybridized in order to accommodate empire.
The moral of that story for me has been to be aware that as soon as a superpower  invades a country — it has responsibilities that involve being aware of just this kind of hybridization.  The thing we asserted through our invasion, regardless of whether you think it was justified or not, becomes reversed and our efforts become tangled in a complex dislocating relationship — far more complex than the old Marxian formula of the oppressed seeking revolution against its oppressor.  Far more complex than the politics of identity so often espoused by political liberals where the political action to be taken is simply dictated by the interests of the members of the group who are oppressed by hegemony.
IV.
I think you can see how it was of interest to me to read the letter from LTC Chris Kolenda to Greg Mortensen which he reproduces in his new book.  Mortensen writes that prior to the extraordinary attention garnered by his book Three Cups of Tea, which was about the experience of building a school in Afghanistan after a failed mountain climbing expedition, that his “judgment of the American military conduct in Afghanistan was harsh and rather uncompromising. . . .”  He remains concerned, but he says that after sharing the equivalent of three cups of tea with the U.S. military his perspective began to change.  He hopes those meetings also began to change the military.  Nevertheless, Mortenson and many members of the military, some of whom are high ranking, ultimately agree with Luke, we’ve been warned in a dream and we best go home another way.
I’m not sure what that means in a real, boots on the ground way.  I am quite conflicted about this.  I’m not sure we can have peace with troops and I’m not sure we can see it without troops.  But either way — one thing is clear — we are called to realize that empires get into trouble like this.  To avoid trouble, different tactics are required.    LTC Kolenda is clear — we cannot win in the traditional way.  To win, a different approach through the hearts and minds of everyone involved, Americans and Afghans, Brits and Indians, is required  Books open minds.  And open minds receive inspiration to go home another way, to choke the aspirations of empire and feed the aspirations of a real peace.
We face two ways.  Let me close with an old Native American parable that offers advice about choosing the right path.
A young boy went to see his grandfather because he was angry that one of his friends had committed an injustice against him and he wanted revenge and he wanted his grandfather’s advice on how to get it.  His grandfather sat him down and said, “I know these feelings.  I’ve had them myself.  I too have had the feelings of hatred and anger and lust for blood and a lust for revenge.  It’s as though there were two wolves inside of me fighting for control of my soul.  One is a good wolf who takes care of its pups and who is a peaceful wolf that only fights when its necessary.  And the other wolf is an angry, angry, angry wolf that strikes out in all directions whenever its given a chance.”
“And these two wolves,” the grandfather added, “are inside me all the time fighting to dominate my soul.”  The grandson thought about this for a moment and he said, “I don’t get it, grandfather, which wolf wins?”
And the grandfather said, “The one that I feed.”
We have crossed the border and we will get home again one way or another — but whether violence follows us depends in large part, upon which wolf we feed while we are there.  Greg Mortenson’s story gives me hope that the right one is being fed by a larger and larger number of people.  In the days and months ahead, I hope that we can find ways to feed the first wolf and reach out our hands to help those others who are suffering, here and abroad.  Amen.

Readings
Joel 2:23-29
O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God; for he has given the early rain for your vindication, he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. The threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil. I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent against you. You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame. You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other. And my people shall never again be put to shame. Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.
Matthew 6:22-23
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
“Things to Come,” Amartya Sen
Breakthroughs are hard to predict. They are even harder to demand. But it is sensible enough to think of a shopping list of what we want. In fact, depending on our view of society, there is a connection between what we want and what we might end up getting. While Aristotle agreed with Agathon that even God could not change the past, he did think that the future was ours to make. In this sense, predictions cannot but link closely with what we intend to argue for, and ultimately, fight for.Breakthroughs are hard to predict. They are even harder to demand. But it is sensible enough to think of a shopping list of what we want. In fact, depending on our view of society, there is a connection between what we want and what we might end up getting. While Aristotle agreed with Agathon that even God could not change the past, he did think that the future was ours to make. In this sense, predictions cannot but link closely with what we intend to argue for, and ultimately, fight for.
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A resolution of mine for today, is to keep it short.
This is partly because I have been in the office less than usual and have not had the time I need to go create a “sermon.”  It is also because what time I have had, I have spent on the class I was supposed to have taught yesterday on ethics.
For this course, which has been offered through the Vermont Conf. of the UCC, I have had the students read a book about John Dewey’s ethics.  John Dewey, while he was raised in the First Congregatioal Church of Burlington, VT, did not write as a theologian, but rather as an educator and philosopher.  So his ethics are not “Christian.”
Nevertheless, I find that his ethics are more christian than other “Christian” ethicists I have read.  One of my students is struggling with this statement though.
An answer to this question of what distinguishes merely “Christian” ethics from christian ethics is really the question of what ethics is in the first place.  If ethics, in the first place, were to be less than a christian ethics, then it should want itself to improve it’s thinking by becoming more like Christian ethics.  Or if ethics, in the first place, were superior to christian ethics, then christian ethics would likewise seek to be more ethical.  In other words, what is good for the philosophical goose, has to be good for the christian gander because ethics is, by definition, that mode of living in which we live according to what we intend to argue for, and ultimately fight for, as Sen put it in his little essay on predictions.
For Dewey what is ethical cannot be given to a person, Christian or otherwise, like an employer gives an employer a policy manual on the first day of the job.   Ethical living that is about an attempt to balance the various policies  off of one another — say the rule that we are to love God as our self, with the rule that we are to love our neighbor — inevitably leads to a narrowing and  hardening life.  Life spent this way is not much alive to the beauties and intricacies and possibilities of each various moment presented to us.
If we were to ask ourselves whether the life really worth living, and the one worth fighting for and even dying, is a life that takes a narrow, hard-line view, or an open-minded one where sympathy and aesthetics and intelligence lead us to seek more light, to bring to bear in our worlds attitudes of peace, then we have to say that the later is only acceptable and the former not — even if that means rejecting the “Christian” policy manual.
It is easy to understand, however, why a “Christian” ethics that is not broadly ethical in the sense that I have been trying to indicate is never-the-less accepted as the end toward which “Christian” living should aim.  The bulk of Christian thinking has said about the tradition that because it is about God, and because God is mysterious beyond our capacity to understand — that we have not right, let alone the capacity, to make reasonable decisions about matters of ultimate concern.  God reveals; God provides an epiphany, to use the word we’ll hear much about this month, and we question that revelation only on the pain of betraying our Christianity.
I exaggerate the situation a little bit– but the general point stands — we pit revelation against reason because, so it is said, to reason about God is impossible.  The corollary to this point, therefore, is that Christian ethics and Christian Christian thinking is the pinnacle, no matter what, of all thinking about life and all living it.
Every-once in a while, I get an email about how awful Islam as a religion is.  The email, which is recorded in the online list of hoax emails, detailing which ones of the many we get telling stories in order to make a point or amaze, are factually incorrect.  But that is not relevant, because the point of the email is to bludgeon us with the old idea that Christianity is superior and all else are inferior.
Let me not bludgeon you anymore either with this line of thinking, except to note that Dewey and Jesus seem to agree.  Jesus says, that a healthy human is one who is by one’s own lights, is able to see the finer details, sensitive to the shades of meaning, and engaged with the world the light reveals.  An unhealthy one is not so engaged.  An unhealthy one stumbles in the dark, unable for him or herself, to live wholeheartedly in the moment.
Dewey writes thinks that “Individuals who come to appreciate the moral truths of their moral traditions as a result of their own critical inquiries appreciate and identify themselves with these very truths in a different way than those who just collect and repeat them.”
On the lip of the new year, as we think about our own futures, as we make resolutions, let us remember to do that resolving, not to predict and wrest the future into our control, not to force ourselves into the mold of this or that “virtue” but to develop further the moral spirit — that spirit that refuses to be trapped by one virtue or another, but actively engages in love, so that our conversations, our commitments, our lists of hopes and dreams, will be of a warp and woof of the great weaving of life to fullness and beauty.  Amen.