November 26 | Re-Reform
CMC Service 11_26_23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.
Re-Reform
Text: 2 Kings 22:1–23:4
Speaker: Joel Miller
A number of years ago, church scholar Phyllis Tickle wrote a book called The Great Emergence, Subtitle: How Christianity is Changing, and Why. Her big theory, as she describes it, is this: “Every five hundred years, the Church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale.” What she means is that in its 2000 years of existence, the church has undergone four massive historical transitions, roughly 500 years apart.
The first, straddling the year 500, saw the fall of the Roman Empire, the ecumenical councils, and the rise of monasteries. The second, just a bit into the thousands, was the great schism between East and West. The Eastern Orthodox Patriarch and the Roman Catholic Pope excommunicated one another for theological differences that mirrored the politics and economics of the day. The third was the Protestant Reformation which began in the early 1500s. Mennonites and other Anabaptists were considered the radical wing of that reformation and, sure enough, we’re just a little over a year away from celebrating our 500 year anniversary.
Tracing this pattern, Phyllis Tickle proposes that the church is now in the midst of another massive transition. Or, to go back to her original metaphor, the attic is once again cluttered, and it’s time to have a rummage sale. She apparently doesn’t know that around here we accumulate things fast enough to have a rummage sale every year. For new folks we actually do have a church rummage sale every year.
I thought of Phyllis Tickle and The Great Emergence while reading this story from 2 Kings.
There are a number of details here that might stir our curiosity. Like the fact that Josiah was…
November 12 | The Prophet Considers a God Who Reconsiders
CMC Scripture and Sermon 11-12-2023 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.
The Prophet Considers a God Who Reconsiders
Text: Hosea 11:1-11
Speaker: Joel Miller
In the Hebrew Bible, it is the privilege and the burden of the prophet to speak for God. That’s quite the job description, to speak for God. It’s not a form of speech we hear much these days. When we do, we have every reason to be skeptical.
But in the biblical world, that’s what the prophet did, and that’s where the narrative lectionary has us hanging out for a bit. We’re sampling the prophets, hearing them make claims about God and people, interpreting the present and pointing to possible futures. Or at least their present, in the past, and their possible futures, some of which came to pass, others of which are still out there on our far horizon – like that day when the lion shall lay down with the lamb, and we will all beat our swords into ploughshares, or whatever updated form of military weaponry into whatever form of productive life-giving technology. At their best, the prophets stir within us a longing for that which can be, and, by claiming that longing as our own, a bit of that hoped for future makes its way into the present.
When you meet a prophet, it’s good to at least give them a chance. They’re speaking for God, and that can get dicey. It’s OK to be skeptical. Nobody gets a free pass with their God claims because if there’s one thing we can be certain of its that they, and we, aren’t God. Even the prophets who made it into the Bible. So let’s do a brief overview of biblical prophets, before focusing in on the Hosea…
November 5 | What Spirit Are You Of? In Four Stories
CMC Service 11-5-23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.
What Spirit Are You Of? in Four Stories
1 Kings 18:17-40
Speaker: Joel Miller
Story 1. James and John and Jesus
Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus decided he had to go to Jerusalem. He was in Galilee, his home region in the north, and sets off on the journey with his disciples. Luke’s gospel tells about this in chapter 9. As they go, they send messengers ahead, scouting out places where they might stay along the way – kind of the analog, labor-intensive version of scrolling through the Airbnb app. The messengers enter a Samaritan village. Samaritans and Jews had a long running conflict over where the spiritual center of worship should be. When they learn the travelers are headed to Jerusalem, they refuse the hospitality of their village. Word of this gets back to the disciples, and James and John approach Jesus with a proposal of how to respond: “Master,” they say, “do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
It seems a bit unexpected for a couple guys drawn to Jesus’ teachings, and definitely disproportional to the offense. But it did have a precedent. The disciples are referencing an earlier incident in Israel’s history when Elijah the prophet had called down fire from heaven to consume messengers sent to him from King Ahaziah who ruled in Samaria. I’m not sure how James and John thought they were going to call fire down from heaven, but here, perhaps, was their thinking: If Elijah, our spiritual ancestor, when faced with a similar situation, responded in this way, why shouldn’t we?
Luke says that Jesus “turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.” It’s as…
