“Do you…?” “I do” | May 20
https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/20180520sermon.mp3
Texts: Romans 8:22-27; Acts 2:1-8
The records don’t show who he was speaking to, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said this: “You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ; all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it.” (Written while imprisoned in Tegel, 1944).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s. He was one of the few voices in the German church who spoke out against the rise of Hitler and the persecution of the Jews. He helped found the Confessing Church and an underground seminary which resisted Nazi rule in the name of Christ; He was eventually forbidden to print or publish, was arrested, and in 1945, was executed, only a month before Germany surrendered to Ally forces.
In other words, he had a strong sense of what he was talking about when he said that these Christian ideas of reconciliation and redemption, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, add up to something so totally new and revolutionary they lead us to the edge of our understanding. He knew these things were so difficult and seemingly remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore.
But there he was,…
Critical yeast | May 6
https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/20180506sermon.mp3
Texts: Acts 10:44-48, Matthew 13:33
For today’s focus I’d like to borrow an idea, a phrase, from John Paul Lederach. If you haven’t heard of John Paul Lederach, let me build up his credentials a bit to show why it’s worth listening to his ideas.
John Paul is an international leader in the field of conflict resolution. While immersed in the work, he came to see the limitations of the framework of confliction resolution, proposing instead a larger framework of conflict transformation. That shift itself has been widely influential in the field. He has worked extensively in Nicaragua, Colombia, Nepal, and the Middle East. He has sat at the table with militias and gangs, impoverished rural women, and high ranking officials. Rather than treat conflict as a set of presenting issues and problems, he has developed methods of drawing out the stories of those involved to get at what they want, and what they need. He tells organizations and foundations investing in peace they should think in terms of decades rather than short term projects whose immediate results are more easily measured but whose long term effects may be minimal. He’s a professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame and has taught many years at Eastern Mennonite University. He is a Mennonite, still living, in his early 60’s. He’s written over 20 books, but consistently credits the people he works with, often without formal education, as the innovators of peace.
You actually can’t learn a whole lot about John Paul through Wikipedia. My theory on this is that many people probably write their own Wikipedia page, and he’s too busy or humble to write much of an entry about himself. Just a theory.
An excellent introduction to John Paul Lederach is this 2012 interview with Krista Tippet titled “The Art…
Pilgrimage | April 29
Text: Acts 8:26-40
One of my favorite family vacation memories from childhood is when we got lost in Harlem…driving in our large baby blue station wagon pulling a pop up camper. We did emerge, eventually, with an extremely clean windshield. Multiple times us kids watched in amazement as someone would come from the sidewalk toward our car, voluntarily wash our windshield while we were locked in traffic, behind a red light, then wait patiently by the window. Fortunately, my dad knew this meant they expected some payment, which he always did. It was disorienting, and wonderfully re-orienting to a world larger than rural Ohio. It turned at least that part of the vacation into something more like a pilgrimage.
This is a story about pilgrimage.
A pilgrimage is different than a trip, or a vacation. It’s different than tourism or site seeing. The difference is mostly in how one approaches the journey.
TS Elliot wrote about pilgrimage toward the end of one of his long poems.
With the drawing of this Love (capital L) and the voice of this Calling (capital C) We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (Little Gidding, V)
To say “we”, “We shall not cease from exploration,” is to make this a common thing. This is not the calling of a select few. Pilgrimage is not just for the spiritual athletes among us, or the overly religious.
In the Canterbury Tales it’s not just the Nun and the Monk making the pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. It’s also the Merchant and the Physician, the Knight and the Cook, the Wife of Bath.
This is a human thing. We’re explorers. And when we explore well, we arrive back where we started, and know the…
Things to keep open: doors, scriptures, minds | April 15
https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/20180415sermon.mp3
Text: Luke 24:36-49
Around this time of year about a decade ago, Abbie and I and little Eve and even littler Lily were waiting, hopefully, for thousands of small openings in the soil of our backyard. We had just bought a house in Cincinnati that winter. The house fit our needs just fine, but the backyard needed some love. The previous September, during the windstorms of Hurricane Ike, before we owned the house, a massive silver maple from our yard had fallen across several properties. Many of the branches and cut up pieces of trunk were returned to the yard we’d purchased.
Also the family who lived there before us had a large playset roughly the size of a McDonalds play land. It had taken up a good chunk of yard. A neighbor later told us they were pretty sure it actually was a used McDonalds play land set. It was gone, but its large footprint was grassless.
We cut, chopped and stacked the silver maple, and rototilled the yard that wasn’t actually a yard to loosen up the soil. We spread grass seed, threw out some straw covering, and welcomed the rain that soon came. Moisture and warmth from the sun was all it took to open up all those small seeds. With some assistance from us, nature did its thing enabling the seeds to open: to shoot down into the ground with some roots and up into the air toward the sun. Those thousands of openings provided a turf for playing for the following years.
From Easter to Pentecost, the season we’re in now, a similar kind of opening is happening for the disciples. The risen Jesus has this limited time to open his followers to a new reality. To crack the shell of their fear. To put them in a…
Sabbath and Joy | Easter Sunday | April 1, 2018
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Mark 16:1-8
“Where, o death, is your victory? Where, o grave, is your sting?”
These are the words that the apostle Paul uses to exclaim the joy that continues to overflow from the events of that first Easter morning. When he wrote them, he was likely echoing the passage from Isaiah read earlier, putting his own spin on a Jewish theological idea.
“God will swallow up death forever!”
Isaiah proclaims this as he casts a vision of salvation that includes imagery of a rich, abundant feast and the laying aside of funeral clothes and the wiping away of every tear. This mountain-top picnic where all people will gather to throw off their sackcloths and ashes and rejoice in the long-awaited salvation is a vision that speaks to a humanity hounded by the spectre of death in all its myriad forms.
It is a little early in the day for “well-aged wine” like Isaiah suggests, but many of us have certainly shared an abundant feast this morning, perhaps with some well-strained orange juice. And it has become our tradition here at CMC to declare along with congregations all over the world, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!…Christ is risen, indeed!”
We exclaim, and we proclaim, and we declare, toast, sing, and shout these things on Easter morning because we are a people who continue to be hounded by the spectre of death, a people who need to be reminded over and over again of the possibilities that open up when we begin to believe in a God who overcomes death. There always seems to be an extra buzz in the air on Easter morning, but I don’t think it has anything to do with bunnies or eggs or lilies or brunches or fancy new hats. The buzz comes from people gathered to hear an answer to…