2023.03.19 | Who Sinned?
The Gospel Lesson today is rather long compared with the pericopes that the liturgical scholars have chosen for most Sundays in the lection. Public Information Officers (PIOs) would advise preachers to truncate these stories, because their audience has the attention span of a gnat. I get their point.
Now that Zoom is the not-so-new room for staff meetings, our employees have to discipline themselves not to roll their eyes when I start telling stories. They know that the Church has paid real money for our Zoom account, so the meeting won’t automatically end in an hour or less. Pity them.
I was raised in an oral culture. I’ve tried to adjust my communication style to match urban expectations, but as you know, I haven’t been successful. Here’s why.
If you don’t hear the whole loooooong story, you don’t hear the gospel, and if you don’t hear the gospel, you leave the Sanctuary or drop off Zoom still stuck in your sense of shame and blame that festers and fosters otherizing.
What is “otherizing”?
Otherizing is a term commonly used by my graduate school friends to describe the behavior of people who draw a thick dark line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” between “us” and “them,” between the “washed” and the “unwashed.”
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2023.03.12 | What's Feeding You
Have you ever felt like your life was spinning out of control? I’m talking staying up to 3am studying for your third final, all happening on a Friday, you ran out of coffee 12 hours prior, and have but 18 cents in your bank account out of control. And you know you should have listened to your instructor more than you did. You know who you are. Or you're staring at an audit deadline and half your team is out sick.
Or how about parents of young children during a pandemic? Can I get an amen? Enough said there right? Sometimes we felt as though we were spinning around just as they were--and we’re still getting over that spin cycle. Speaking of spin cycles, I feel like this next GIF even better encapsulates what many of us are feeling like we have just gone through these past 3 years. We’ve all heard the simile employed of “I feel like an unbalanced washing machine,” but what about an unbalanced washing machine on a trampoline?! What’s up on the monitors probably does our experience a little more justice don’t you think? I’m getting some affirmation from the pews on this one. I see you.
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2023.03.05 | Born From Above
As a 12-year old, I became a Christian on the basis of today’s reading from the third chapter of the Gospel of John. Or rather more specifically, I became a Christian on the basis of John 3:16, which I was taught and memorized as:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
That specific wording is from the King James Version of the Bible and my childhood understanding was elementary. I was taught that if I believed that Jesus died for my sins, then I would live forever after death. Conversely, I was taught that if I didn’t believe that Jesus died for my sins, then I would not live forever after death.
My understanding was elementary because I came to it at Church camp, where it was pretty obvious that it mattered to the camp counselors whether we campers believed Jesus died for our sins or not. I remember a mini-sorting ceremony in our tent where I resisted being categorized as “unsaved.”
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2023.02.26 | The Temptations
The Temptations. When I hear the words, “the temptations,” I confess, I often think first of one of my favorite Motown groups, not the temptations of Christ. And for good reason.
The contributions that The Temptations have made to American music are hard to overstate. Last fall (Oct 30, 2022), The Temptations celebrated their 60th anniversary as a performing artist group. Who can match that? Their staying power is without peer.
Billboard magazine ranked The Temptations #1 on their list of Greatest R&B/Hip-Hop Artists of All Time, and listed them among The 125 Greatest of All Time Artists.
In a similar vein, Rolling Stone magazine named The Temptations among the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and in September 2020, the editors of Rolling Stone magazine named the Temptations the “the greatest black vocal group of the Modern Era.”
In my humble opinion, The Temptations--and The Supremes--are among the greatest performing artists in the modern area. Period.
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2023.02.22 | Be Reconciled
As the Senior Pastor here at Eden Church, I spend a tremendous amount of time on reconciliation--but not in the way that you might imagine.
Those in our congregation who grew up in Roman Catholic traditions may think that I spend a lot of time hearing confessions like the priests in the parish where you grew up. But that is actually not the case.
Protestants don’t have a formal liturgical practice, which is now known as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, like the Catholics practice. Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, liberated us from the notion that a penitent needed to make their confession within earshot of a priest, and then pray the rosary, and be absolved by a priest in order to get right with God. Nope. Luther taught us that every penitent is fully capable of going directly to God with our confessions and requests for forgiveness.
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2023.02.19 | Discerning Truth
Today’s text describes a mountaintop experience known as “the Transfiguration.” This was the occasion when Jesus and his closest disciples slipped away from the City of Jerusalem for a short retreat. They needed a break. But make no mistake, this was no cushy weekend get-away. Opposition to Jesus’ ministry was growing. Things were getting a lot harder for Jesus and his people.
Imagine the scene: a high mountain outside of Jerusalem, where three Hebrew prophets (Moses, Elijah, and Jesus) appear together. Peter, one of the disciples, was awed by the experience and offered to make three booths: one for Jesus, one for Moses, and another for Elijah.
Peter made this proposal because booth making was a way that good Jews celebrated a special blessing that they had received, and thanked God for it.
As they were talking, Matthew explained, a cloud overshadowed the group, and a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
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2023.02.12 | Choices & Commitments
Today’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy is a story within a story within an even larger story.
The innermost or most literal story is the story of what Moses told the ancient Israelites immediately before they entered the promised land after 40 years of wandering the wilderness.
In an extended sermon, Moses reminds them of their history and their special chosen relationship with the Lord their God. He reviews the 10 Commandments given to them at Mt. Horeb (which is called Mt. Sinai in Exodus), and provides them with a legal code to guide their conduct in their new land.
While the legal code is extensive and detailed and often harsh by our standards, Moses cushions the law with a good deal of psychological pleading for the people to understand the importance of remaining faithful to the God who has brought them out of slavery in Exodus, who has given them food and water when they thought they were dying, who has given them military success when they were under attack or attacking others and who has now brought them to the very edge of a bountiful land — a land again and again as being filled with milk and honey.
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2023.02.05 | Salt & Light
Today’s scripture is taken from a section of Matthew’s gospel known as the Sermon on the Mount. The Matthean community was primarily comprised of Jewish-Christians and Gentiles who were familiar with the Jewish religion, so Matthew explained who Jesus was and what his ministry was about, in reference to Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.
Jesus was, in the eyes of Matthew, “the New Moses.” Like Moses who received and delivered the Ten Commandments to the Jews, Jesus received and delivered the eight Beatitudes to the disciples.
At the time when Jesus walked the earth, Israel had been under foreign occupation for almost 600 years. Imagine trying to figure out what it meant to be a Jew in your homeland when it had been ruled by foreign occupiers for almost 600 years. How does one show up faithfully in that context?
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2023.01.29 | Fools for Christ
I wonder, what is one foolish thing you’ve ever done? I promise not to come down the stairs and ask anyone directly to share their answer--at least not while we are livestreaming the service today. But humor me for a moment by pondering these questions:
What is one foolish thing you’ve ever done?
Did you have a co-conspirator?
Did your actions involve a libation or two?
Was your stunt part of an initiation rite for a fraternity, sorority, or club?
What would the neighbors think about what you did?
Moreover, what would they think about you if they knew?
If some examples of your foolishness come to mind, they may surface some feelings of discomfort or embarrassment--or both. If you are feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed, you may be able to empathize with the Corinthian Christians who were uncomfortable with how they were perceived by people outside of their church community.
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2022.01.23 | Gone Fishing
The sign on Johnson’s hardware store back in the summer of 1968 read: “Gone fishing.” Mr. Johnson did not indicate where he had gone fishing or when he would be back.
My father was not happy when he saw the sign, because we had just driven seven miles into town to buy shingling nails, so that he could finish reroofing our front porch before the rain forecasted for the next day started coming down.
Time was wasting. There was no use standing around grumbling. So Dad loaded my sister and me back in his 1956 Chevy pickup. Dad retraced our tracks back to the farm, drove another 10 miles to Storm Lake, bought a sack of nails from someone he didn’t know, and then turned around and went back home to finish the roof.
Fishing notices like the one I remember seeing on the front door of the local hardware store were rare in my childhood, so l was more than a little curious as to the whereabouts of Mr. Johnson.
My dad learned the following Sunday during Men’s Bible Study that Mr. Johnson had been lured out of town by a friend who had invited him to go fishing on Lake Superior.
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2023.01.15 | "Out of the Miry Bog"
Our Scripture Reading today begins by painting a word picture of a person praising God for rescuing them from a pit of mud, which the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates as a “miry bog.” Other Bible versions translate “miry bog’ as the miry clay, deep mud, or mud and filth. Whatever the version, it’s clear that the person being rescued is in your classic metaphoric muddy situation.
Given our recent rains, it wasn’t hard to find a “miry bog” or two at my local park on Friday. These photos were taken after our dry Thursday, so you can imagine that after yesterday’s downfall, they are today bigger, deeper, and muddier.
Our East Bay soil, rich in clay, makes for the worst kind of sticky, icky mud — it’s easy to slip-slide and almost impossible to get rid of. At our local park, the mud was everywhere and sometimes cleverly disguised as grass. Because HARD had thoughtfully closed some of our favorite trails, I didn’t fall into any miry bogs that required divine intervention or rescue.
This time…
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2023.01.08 | “Field Trip!”
Today we celebrate one of the festivals in the Christian year--the Feast of Epiphany. This celebration has evolved over the centuries and is now observed in a variety of ways around the globe. Despite the variations, all celebrations reveal the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah for one and all.
So that we can better appreciate the various ways that Epiphany is celebrated around the world, the ways that various cultural practices have merged and morphed over the years, today’s sermon is essentially a cultural field trip.
As we meander through the message, I will describe the two biblical stories that have most influenced Chrisitan celebrations of Epiphany. They are the Visitation of the Magi and the Baptism of Christ.
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2023.01.01 | Echoes of Ramah
Shhhhh. Do you see that? Over the ridge there? Those flames in the night? That’s Tzipori. The Roman legions are burning it. I can’t get the screams out of my head. Dear God. Why must this war wage on? What have we done? What are we to do? We must flee. I’ll take the dagger. No don’t, it’s better not to, I am told. Annoyed, I oblige, but I don’t know why I do, everything is happening so fast. Let’s leave the livestock, pack only enough meal for us and feed for the donkeys. Shall we go into the mountains or risk our chances on the King’s Highway? What will become of the baby? God, show us the way.
The seventh decade of the Common Era is drawing to a close, the once commander and now Roman Emperor Vespasian has sent his legions to Syro-Palestine, consisting of thousands of troops. Their staging area was not too far from the modern-day port city of Haifa. During the Jewish War they would venture inland and burn entire villages, Tzipori one of them, just 6 km to the north of Nazareth; its surviving inhabitants, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells us, were reduced to slaves--this a quick jog away from where Jesus grew up, the same distance as from here to Lake Chabot.
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2022.12.25 | Sentinels for Joy
Today’s scripture reading, like much of Isaiah, is a poem and it tells its own story, a story that time and Christians have woven intricately into our Christmas story. As a homage to Isaiah, and in search of my own way of understanding both Isaiah’s strong and vibrant fibers and the finished textile that is Christmas today, I offer you this poem:
Behold:
A people in captivity,
their ruined city,
a glorious temple destroyed
all its beauty, all its sacred symbols,
carted away with its wealth.
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2022.12.24 | Messy Christmas
We’ve had some epic weather events across the United States in the past three days. Amen? For those who have been too busy preparing for Christmas to check the weather reports, I offer this recap in two phrases: “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric river.”
I don’t recall reference being made to a “bomb cyclone” or an “atmospheric river,” prior to this winter. Maybe that’s your experience too, so I’ll share the definitions that I have recently learned:
A bomb cyclone, according to the Weather Channel, is the term used by meteorologists to describe a rapidly strengthening storm resulting from a significant drop in the barometric pressure within a 24 hour period.
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2022.12.18 | Just a Little Christmas
It’s Christmas Pageant Sunday!
Today’s Pageant, “Just a Little Christmas” by Sharon Kay Chatwell performed by Eden Church School children and youth during the Worship Service and can be seen in the video above.
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2021.12.11 | Go & Tell
“Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.” So said St. Francis of Assisi, the 12th century Italian Catholic mystic, patron saint of animals, and founder of the Roman Catholic Franciscan Friars and the Order of St. Clare.
Implicit in this dictum is the understanding that the most powerful sermons are unspoken.
Even though I am not an Italian, a Catholic, nor Medieval religious, and even though my doctor of ministry degree is in homiletics — the preparation for and practice of preaching — my soul resonates with St. Francis’ teaching: “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.”
II
I think that this teaching resonates with me because I was raised in a monoculture.
The term “monoculture,” originated from the field of agriculture. According to Merriam-Webster, “Monoculture [has to do with] the cultivation or growth of a single crop or organism especially on agricultural or forest land.”
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2022.12.04 | Clearing the Way
In the early centuries of the Common Era, Israel was under foreign occupation. The Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus, ruled the known world. Caesar appointed Quirinius as governor of Syria, and gave him authority to rule over Israel. Quirinius’ main job was to keep the peace and maintain order, so that Rome’s international business affairs ran smoothly.
Under Quirinius, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The wealthy one percent lived in urban areas and leased out their farmland and pastureland to tenant farmers who raised cash crops that largely benefited the land owners.
The tenant farmers who raised the rich people’s crops and livestock barely had anything to eat. Slaves sometimes fared better than tenant farmers, because their owners fed and housed them. Tenant farmers, by contrast, were on their own. If their crops failed and their livestock died, they starved unless others took pity and shared resources with them.
In addition to the harsh economic oppression that most peasants endured, the vast majority were also considered spiritually difficient compared with the Sadducees and Pharisees.
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2022.11.27 | Perpetual Presence
Good morning, Church. Our reading this morning is taken from a larger corpus of Mt 23-25 on judgment, and comprises two out of seven parables that Jesus uses to communicate the coming age. They are found in chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew and are: The Fig, The Days of Noah, The Thief, The Slaves, The Bridesmaids, The Talents, and The Last Judgment.
Knowing Jesus, who customarily responded to deep questions with parables, this litany of seven parables should give us pause, and make us ask ourselves, what sort of question elicited this response?
So, with that curiosity, let us backtrack to the beginning of the chapter, which falls outside of our lectionary reading: “As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”
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2022.11.20 | The Good Shepherd
This past week was a rough one for those whom the 6th Century BCE Prophet Jeremiah would have called “Bad Shepherds.” The national headlines are resplendent with bad actors--Bad Shepherds--this past week. Consider the following:
The so-called “red wave” did not, as it turns out, materialize in the midterm elections. NPR’s political analysts attribute this November surprise to the fact that voters are angry about the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade and they “remembered in November,” and turned out Pennsylvania and Arizona to elect moderate rather than extreme candidates. Meanwhile, voters in highly contested races such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Michigan rejected election-denying candidates up and down the ballot.
As a result of these red losses in purple places, he-who-will-not-be-named did not get the whole-hearted support of his party, or the momentum that he and most pollsters and political parties had anticipated when he announced the launch of his 2024 campaign for President of the United States of America.
Interestingly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the the leading contender for the Republican nominee for President, watched a federal judge partially block a law that he had championed which was designed to limit the discussion of critical race theory in Florida schools and workplace training. (Critical race theory describes the evidence and effects of racism and privilege in our culture.)
In addition, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup, was sentenced, on Friday, to more than 11 years in prison for felony fraud. According to an article in Friday’s “Mercury News,” Holmes was found guilty in January of defrauding investors out of more than $144M—with total losses estimated at more than $800M.
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