Author: harryjheintz

 

Yesterday had an unusual occurrence of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday on the same day. That happens maybe once in a normal lifetime. I wrote in my journal in the morning that the first half of the day I would honor Valentine’s Day and the second half I would honor Ash Wednesday. The first half included exchanging cards with my valentine, bringing her (actually us) some sweets, and having lunch at a new restaurant, sitting outdoors overlooking water at low tide, gleaming boats, and an island nature preserve. In the early evening I went to worship and had ashes imposed (not placed, but imposed) on my forehead as I heard those simple words reminding me of my mortality.

 

In between, on a sunny afternoon in the south, there was yet another shooting in a school, a high school in south Florida, a high-ranking high school in a desirable community. By one count this was the 18^th gun related incident in this new year, not even two months old. I wrote in this blog about the 11^th incident in late January, the one that took several lives and left over a dozen wounded in western Kentucky. Yesterday’s incident took at least 17 lives, most of them young, and left 14 others wounded.

 

How do we make sense of such a day? I thought Valentine’s love theme played nicely with the first day of Lent, since Lent is about sacrificial love. Yes, Lent is not about giving up chocolate or dropping a few of those winter pounds. It is about the journey of our Lord to the cross, a journey fraught with suffering, denial, struggle, and ultimately death. Lent calls us to take note of great realities and respond in appropriate ways.

 

I call Ash Wednesday the most honest day of the year, if we can handle its bracing message. We are confronted with our mortality, even as Jesus went to Jerusalem to die. I grew up in a church tradition that ignored Ash Wednesday and Lent. That stuff was for Roman Catholics, we were told. Now I treasure this season, which is so counter to how Americans want life to be, always light and sunny.

 

I didn’t think the preacher last night was very effective. He did too much explaining and not enough describing. But that moment when I squared eyes with him, heard his words about my being from and returning to dust, then marked an ashy cross on my brow—that was sobering. It was not a nice service. If an Ash Wednesday service is nice, it has utterly failed.

 

How will I keep this Lent? I don’t fully know. My slow read (I usually am reading several books during any span of time, moving from a chapter in this one to a chapter in that one, and back; in Lent I pick one book to read more slowly) is book of collected writings of Mother Teresa, “Come Be My Light.” These writings, many of them her journal entries, deal with darkness, coming from a woman who radiated the light of God in dark places.

 

How will I keep this Lent? I am tempted to go out and scream publicly about my nation’s dark agreement with the NRA. Since the slaughter of 20 young school children and six adults caring for them in Newtown CT in Dec. 2012, there have been almost 300 more shootings in our schools, about one a week, every week, for five years and counting. And that doesn’t include mass killings in nightclubs and outdoor concerts. Does anyone think all this carnage is what the Second Amendment was wanting to protect? Does anyone think the Second Amendment was about every American having access to AR-47s? Does anyone think the Second Amendment assured every American of easy access to any and all firearms? Please read the Second Amendment again. The point of amendments to our constitution is that our constitution will need amending from time to time. Three of our top ten mass killings have been in the last half year. And on and on the gunbeat goes.

 

I believe in prayer and I pray, but I am tired of hearing politicians and officers of the law only send their thoughts and prayers in response in gun inflicted violence. Isn’t something more called for from our government in response to the monstrous evil of our daily death toll from guns?

 

It is the second day of Lent. From where I am writing, it is a beautiful, sunny morning. Yesterday’s Valentine sweets are gone. Last evening’s ashes have worn off my forehead. I will soon ride my old one-speed, foot-brake, fat-tire bike on the beach. My wife and I will have lunch with a dear friend. In the afternoon I’ll do some reading. In the evening we will watch the Olympics, with casual reading in hand. My life is blessed in so many ways, beyond reckoning.

 

Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday, and a horrendous act of violence in a school yesterday reminded me that life is a precious gift, best honored and used in loving ways.

 

 

In the late 1950s the Soviets jumped ahead of us in space exploration. Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin became household words before Alan Shepard and John Glenn did. And people were talking about moon shots. We knew rockets would soon go to the moon.

 

In the late 1950s, the winter of 1958 to be exact, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved across the continent to be become the Los Angeles Dodgers. What broke the hearts of the Flatbush faithful made a dream come true for youngsters in Los Angeles like me. Before the 1958 season, the St. Louis Cardinals were the farthest west extension of Major League Baseball. Among my baseball loving friends, we essentially chose to root for one of three teams, the New York teams, each identified by a star centerfielder: “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke” (one of my favorite baseball songs has that title). I cast my lot with the loveable, usually losing the big games, Dodgers and their star, Duke Snider.

 

In 1954 a St. Louis Cardinals player named Wally Moon won the National League rookie of the year honors. He did everything well for five years with the Cardinals, but people weren’t talking about moon shots yet. Then the Dodgers traded to acquire Moon before the 1959 season. Soon people would be talking about moon shots, but in a whole new way.

 

Wally Moon died three days ago as I am writing this on February 12, 2018. As I read his obituary in the New York Times yesterday, a flood of happy memories came over me. Moon shots became a regular feature at Dodgers home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Not Dodger Stadium; it wasn’t built yet. The Coliseum was a terrible venue for baseball. It was built for the 1932 summer Olympics and hosted the 1984 Olympics and will have a hosting role in the projected 2028 Olympics. It was made for track and field and served well for football, being the home for the Los Angeles Rams, The USC Trojans, and UCLA Bruins. I went to countless track and field meets and football games there in my youth.

 

About all it had going for it as a baseball park was size; it could seat over 90,000 people. Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, would need that revenue to build the new baseball showcase called Dodger Stadium. Right center and right fields were cavernous, cutting into left-handed power hitter Duke Snider’s career home run totals. But left field was barely Little League sized; the distance from home plate to the left field foul pole was just 251 feet. That could make some major league popups into homeruns. So the Dodgers erected a 42 feet high stiff screen in left field. It was like the green monster in Fenway Park, but made of netting that could easily be seen through.

 

That brings us to Wally Moon and moon shots. Moon was, like Snider, a left-handed hitter, meaning his power swing naturally went to right field. In the Coliseum what would have been homeruns to right field in every other ballpark were usually just long outs. When Moon was traded to the Dodgers, his Cardinals teammate Stan Musial, once of the greatest hitters of all time, suggested that he develop an inside-out swing that would send his hits to left field with its cozy dimensions and that big net wall. Moon did just that and soon he was hitting high popups that went over the screen into the left field seats. Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers announcer, was always aware of high culture and pop culture, a poet at his work. As “moon shots” was becoming a common term for those early rocket launches that were catching the world’s attention, Scully began calling Wally Moon’s homeruns to left field moon shots. Of course. In Moon’s first year with the Dodgers, they would win the World Series. And their World Series games in the Coliseum drew the largest crowds ever for World Series games.

 

I was 11-14 years old in the years the Dodgers played in the Coliseum. I would go to games with my dad or friends are often as possible. Our pre-game ritual was clear. We would position ourselves behind the screen in left field for batting practice, gloves on. On a good night, we would get some official major league baseballs before the game began. If the San Francisco Giants were in town, the bitterest of our rivals, we would hope to catch a ball hit by Willie Mays, the greatest player I ever saw in person. But no ball was more treasured than a moon shot. We sometimes took those freshly caught baseballs to the dugout area as batting practice ended to get autographs from our baseball heroes. I got baseballs autographed by Snider, Koufax, Drysdale—and Wally Moon.

 

When Dodger Stadium was built, it instantly became the most beautiful and well-designed ball park in the country. But it would never hold the wonder and mystique of Dodgers baseball in that not-made-for baseball Coliseum, with its ridiculous dimensions and that left field screen.

 

Now Wally Moon is dead. Only Willie Mays of “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke” is still alive. Stan Musial is dead. Vin Scully is finally retired. I am no longer a kid. Spring training for the new baseball season is just a few days away. That will make me a kid again—at least for a while. And today I am thinking of moon shots I saw and baseballs I caught.

[My wife and I are away from home this month, so I am not preaching for six consecutive Sundays. The sermon below is from Luke 7:36-49. I originally preached this at the Stillwater NY United Church in 2013. While we are away, I may post some other sermons from the past.]

 

Some types of people don’t invite other types of people over for dinner. White racists don’t invite blacks. Black racists don’t invite whites. The wealthy are unlikely to invite poor people. We tend, unfortunately, to invite people over for dinner when we would feel comfortable with them and sense, perhaps, that they would be comfortable with us.

 

I find it highly unusual that a Pharisee would invite Jesus over for dinner.  Unless it was to drill him with legalistic questions, perhaps to trap him in some obscure point of law.  Or maybe it was just out of curiosity.  To see this would-be messiah for himself.  To dismiss him as another deluded leader.

 

Whatever his motivations, Simon could not have scripted better what happened.   A woman comes in—uninvited and unwelcomed.  And unnamed. She is unnamed, save to Jesus.  I am pretty sure Simon the Pharisee never bothers to get her name.

 

She, whoever she is—we know that she is a big ticket sinner by the description given her; many think the description suggests that she was a prostitute, though we do not know for sure—she is no coward, no wall-flower, no shrinking violet.  There is a boldness about her.  A forthrightness.  She breaks through all custom and convention, washing Jesus’ feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing them with precious perfume. To the Pharisee she embodied all that he was not:  a sinner, a woman, and offense to his understanding of God and a social embarrassment by daring to do this in his house.

 

So he reasons to himself—and to him reason was of utmost importance—“If this man were God’s prophet, which I never really thought was the case, he would clearly have known what kind of woman this is—a wretched, damnable sinner—and he wouldn’t have let her touch him with a ten foot pole.  That settles it; he will never be invited to my home for dinner again.”

 

Jesus not only knows who this woman is, he also knows who this man is, this self-righteous religious man.  So he tells a simple little story about forgiveness, all of which leads him to nail the Pharisee that is trying to nail him.   He looks at the woman as he speaks to Simon.  Simon has offered meager hospitality; the woman has showered Jesus with honor. Simon’s welcome is sparing; the woman’s offering lavish.  “Her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown.  But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

 

Count me as one who has been forgiven much.  Place me in the company of that woman; forgiven much and grateful much.  Number me not with one Simon the Pharisee, but with one unnamed sinful woman.  Another woman, this one known by name, Annie Johnson Flint, has written of our absolute need of God’s grace and God’s overflowing supply:

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,

                        When our strength has failed ere the day is half done

            When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,

                        Our father’s full giving has only begun.

His love has no limit, his grace has no measure,

his power no boundary known unto men;

for out of his infinite riches in Jesus, He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.

 

Two stories, both true, one about forgiveness and one about dinner guests.

Maybe its an occupational hazard of being a pastor:  I read obituaries: local, national, and global.  A few years ago, I read the obituary for Elwin Wilson in the New York Times.  I had never heard of Elwin Wilson before, but his story grabbed my attention.

 

Elwin Wilson lived and died in South Carolina.  In the spring of 1961, the group known as the Freedom Riders arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, S.C., as part of their effort to end segregation in the South.  When two Freedom Riders, one black and one white, entered a waiting area at the station that was designated for whites only, they were quickly assaulted by a group of young white men.  One of them was Elwin Wilson.  The Freedom Riders did not fight back and declined to press charges.  One of them, John Lewis, became a prominent civil rights leader, and in 1987 was elected to Congress from Georgia.  He still serves in the House of Representatives and had a speaking role in the inauguration of our Barack Obama, the first black person to become our president.  Wilson said he had an awakening after President Obama took office.

 

Wilson said in an interview in 2009 that a friend had asked him, “If you died right now, do you know where you would go?”  Wilson said, ‘To hell.”  Apparently that got him thinking about what he had done and his need to seek forgiveness.  Wilson called The Rock Hill Herald in 2009 to confess that he was one of the men who had led the bus station beating in 1961.  Only then did Wilson learn that one of his victims had become a member of Congress.  Wilson traveled to Washington and met with Lewis to ask his forgiveness.  Lewis quickly granted his forgiveness.  “He started crying, his son started crying, and I started crying,” Congressman Lewis said.

 

Wilson, who spoke slowly and with a thick drawl, once told CNN: “I never would have thought I could apologize to this many people. I feel like I’m apologizing to the world right now.”  Lewis noted that the apology from Wilson was the first he had received for the violent acts committed against him in the civil rights era — and he said he had never questioned whether to accept it; of course he would.

Those two men have acted out something of the biblical teaching about the radical nature of God’s forgiveness.  When the Bible speaks about forgiveness, it speaks in the most eloquent and profound ways.  Jeremiah says that God will forgive our sins and remember them no more.  Isaiah says that though our sins be like scarlet they shall be white as snow.  Paul says that our sins have been taken from us, erased, eradicated, blotted out, by the work of Jesus.  And Jesus said that those who are forgiven much love much.

When Sarah Smiley’s husband Dustin, a Navy man, was deployed overseas for a year, she discovered that the hardest time each day was dinner time, when she and her three children sat at the table and were painfully aware of the empty chair.   So they decided to fill that empty chair.   Whom should they invite?  They started with the children’s schoolteachers and that went well.  What about the mayor?  The mayor came one evening for dinner.  The Smileys live in Maine and one of the boys was studying American government, so he said, “Let’s invite Senator Susan Collins, who has a home in our town.”  He wrote the invitation to her Washington DC office:  “We are wondering if you would like to come to dinner some time this year.”  In December they got a call from the Capitol.  The senator would be home for the holidays and would go to their home for dinner the first week of January.  Senator Collins arrived a little early.  Sarah didn’t have everything ready, so Collins sat with the kids and their dog while Sarah got dinner on the table.  After dinner table conversation, the senator put a tin of brownies on the table.  For a year they had an amazing array of dinner guests: the police chief, TV personalities, an Olympic gold medal rower, an orchestra conductor, a former governor, and a zookeeper.

When Dustin’s year of deployment came to an end, the family gathered at the airport to welcome their husband and father home.  Oh, and about 50 dinner guests joined them in welcoming home Dustin.  That evening there was a piece of paper on the guest chair:  Reserved for dad.

 

One day a Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus to dinner and you wouldn’t believe who also came to dinner and what she did for Jesus.  And what Jesus taught us about forgiveness.  The other guests began talking behind his back:  “Who does he think he is, forgiving sins?”

 

The NFL season is finally over—in early February. It was a good Super Bowl game, the outcome in question until the final play. The action was fast and furious; the athleticism awesome. Some of the runs and catches were balletic. This Patriots fan salutes the Eagles and the great city of Philadelphia. When it comes to sports curses, this Red Sox fan understands. Fly, Eagles, fly. And here’s hoping the 41-year-old Tom Brady will be just as effective, and his brain doesn’t get scrambled like eggs.

 

The matter of concussions and long-term brain injury (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or

CTE) is not over with the season finale. Last week the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Emily Kelly, wife of former NFL player Rob Kelly, now suffering from CTE from his football career. Last week Megyn Kelly of NBC interviewed Mike Adamle and his wife, Kim Adamle. Mike suffers from CTE, directly attributed to his hard driving and hard hitting style as a professional football player, following his years as a college football player, following his years in youth and high school football. It is worth reading that column and streaming that interview. A recent lab study over brains of deceased NFL players found that about 99% of those brains had some level of CTE.

 

CTE is not limited to football players. In happens in just about every sport in which there are collisions. It happens to veterans of military combat. It happens in everyday life, but not with the incidence that happens in pro football.

 

The NFL has recognized this and taken some steps. One is to have doctors not employed by the teams on the sidelines of games. Another is to have little tents on the sidelines into which players shaken up by a hard hit are taken for immediate evaluation. If players are medically evaluated as having experienced a concussion, they leave the playing field and are not permitted to re-enter the game. They are not permitted to play again until they have passed the concussion protocol.

 

These are good steps, but more must be taken. I admit that I am a fan of the Patriots, so I watch their games more carefully. In their league championship game on January 21, one of their star receivers, Rob Gronkowski, was hit helmet-to-helmet after catching a pass. It was a ferocious hit, replayed in slow motion before us. Gronkowski left the game in concussion protocol and didn’t return. The player who hit him so powerfully was flagged and his team received a penalty, but he was allowed to continue playing. The Patriots lost one of their key offensive players early in the game, while the offending player kept right on playing. In the Super Bowl, the championship game after the long season, Patriots’ receiver Brandon Cooks was similarly hit helmet-to-helmet after catching a pass. He was stunned by the ferocious hit, left the game for concussion protocol, and never returned. No penalty was called on the offending player and he continued to play the entire game. Meanwhile, for the second game in a row, both with championship implications, the Patriots played most of the game without one of their prime offensive players.

 

I suggest two steps. First, when there are helmet-to-helmet collisions, as described above, the offending player be removed from the game, whether the hit was intentional or not. The incidence of concussions in the NFL is such that more serious penalties are needed than a 15-yard penalty. If a player from one team leaves the game after a ferocious hit, the player making the hit should also leave the game. That is only fair to the competitive nature of the game.

 

Second, the NFL needs to examine the role of the current helmets in causing concussions. Perhaps safer helmets are now available or can be developed. I am convinced the technology exists to make helmets safer. The NFL needs the will to make this happen as soon as possible.

 

I grew up playing football, from Pop Warner through high school. I never experienced a concussion. Recognizing that players are now larger (a 300-pund lineman is small), stronger (weight training has moved from optional to mandatory; teams have weight coaches), and faster (Olympic and world-class sprinters have played and now play in the NFL) than ever before, there must be ways to preserve the integrity of the game while making it safer. Some states are considering banning tackle football for children. Caring parents are already making that decision for their children.

 

I really love the game of football, but not its violence. I love its strategy and its athleticism. I love its drama. I love its traditional rivalries, college and pro. But I wonder if I can continue watching it if its concussion causing violence is not reigned in soon.

 

On January 24, a fifteen-year-old student at the Marshall County High School in western Kentucky killed two other students and wounded over a dozen in school. This made the national news for a day or two and not much more has been heard.

 

As of January 24, barely three weeks into the month that begins the new year, there were 11recorded shootings at schools. My brief research finds three homicides, two suicides, and at least 20 woundings in these 11 incidents, which were in eight states, scattered around the country. Most were not reported nationally.

 

Then comes one that seems more notorious, like the killing of two and wounding of over a dozen one day on one campus just over a week ago and we are saddened again. Saddened, but hardly shocked. Through my life of 71 years, there have been terrible shootings on campuses (like the Virginia Tech shooting of April 2007, which left over 30 dead, and University of Texas tower shooting of 1966 which killed 13), but nothing prepared us for December 14, 2012, when at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown CT, 20 young school children and six school staff members were killed during a school day just before Christmas. Twenty children aged six and seven were suddenly dead in their classroom. Their innocent young lives were snuffed out in a flurry of gunfire.

 

Perhaps there was a time when certain places were thought to be off-limits for shootings, like schools and churches. We now know better. The killing of nine people at Mother Emanuel A. M. E. Church in Charleston SC on June 18, 2015, and the killing of 26 and wounding of 20 at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs TX last November have taught us that there are no safe places.

 

This is not a Democrat vs. Republican matter. This is an American matter. Every statistical report of gun violence in advanced and prosperous nations like ours puts us off the charts for the most gun violence per capita. Why? Are we a savage country? Have we jettisoned our lofty ideals about all people being created by God with intrinsic merit? Our history sadly witnesses that we have rarely if ever lived up to those ideals, but we still hold them at some level. Those ideals call us to do better and be better.

 

If we are a good country, which I believe we are, filled with good people, which I believe is true, then why do we allow this human carnage to go on? Does our historic love of freedom, which I value and affirm, mean that we allow this to continue as if it is the new norm and the acceptable price for our freedom? Why is our congress unable to move us in a better direction? Why is the White House silent about these acts of violence, unless they are done by immigrants (which most are not)? Does American exceptionalism (a phrase to which I take exception) mean we are exceptionally violent?

 

I understand that human nature means that we will not fully eliminate such acts of violence. I understand that even in the countries with the lowest rates of violent acts, some acts of violence still happen, whether by guns, knives, or other means.

 

In my lifetime we have made great strides in making driving automobiles safer. In my lifetime we have made significant strides in lowering the use of cancer causing cigarettes. We have not eliminated automobile accidents or smoking, but we have moved in better directions with measures that are making positive differences and more will come. Can’t we do the same when it comes to gun violence?

 

We seem to be at a place where we are numbed to gun violence, even in our schools, unless the numbers of the dead and wounded in any one incident are pretty high. I am pondering such matters and questions.

[This sermon was delivered on January 21, 2018, at the Community of the Savior in Rochester, NY. The main text was Jonah 3.]

 

Certain Bible stories invoke warm, fuzzy images. What do you think of first when I mention Noah? What do you think of first when I mention Jonah? Neither of those stories is warm and fuzzy. The story of Noah and the ark is dark with destruction and judgment. The story of Jonah and the great fish doesn’t have a Disney ending.

 

It is always a danger in religion and among people of faith that we divide the world into us vs. them. It is equally a danger in national and global politics. When I was a child in Los Angeles, people were building bomb shelters in their back yards. Soviet missiles were pointed at us. Survivalists were selling kits of water and freeze-dried foods to carry through the apocalypse that was imminent. Five decades later I was in Russia for the first time on a teaching and preaching mission. On one trip we were flown to a city halfway from Moscow to Siberia. It was deep winter, colder and snowier than we have in western NY. On a bitter cold night, we flew on a crowded Soviet era plane to Perm. Our host packed our team into two little cars and directly took us to a park. We saw these long tubes reaching into the early morning sky. Our host told us that these are now used by children as slides. But once they were missile silos aimed at the United States. “Twenty-five minutes,” he said, “and those missiles would have reached your major cities. And now children have fun climbing ladders and sliding down them.”

 

The way I felt toward the Soviets as a child may have been how Jonah felt about the city of Nineveh in the great power of Assyria. But while his issue wasn’t weapons of mass destruction, his issue may have been greater. Those Assyrians were the godless enemy of Israel. When God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh with a word from God, God was asking Jonah to cross a chasm of cosmic dimensions, with global implications.

 

The book of Jonah is four short chapters, a total of just 48 verses. It includes a psalm of praise, but no classic prophetic utterance. All the other prophetic books primarily address Israel; Jonah does not. Rather, Jonah is a narrative, a story in four movements. I can tell it in one minute.

 

God calls Jonah to bring a word from God to Nineveh to the northeast. Jonah goes the opposite direction, booking passage on a ship to Tarshish, which is at the western edge of his world. God brings a violent storm, which endangers the ship and its Gentile crew. All the pagan sailors are praying, while Jonah is sleeping. They wake him and ask him to pray. Nothing helps. They draw lots and the short lot is drawn by Jonah, so into the sea he goes. A great fish swallows him and after three days spits him up on an Israeli beach. Jonah praises God. God gives Jonah a second chance. Jonah goes to Nineveh, speaks God’s word, and Nineveh repents. God shows mercy to the people of Nineveh, while Jonah rages with anger at God for being gracious to his enemies. Jonah sulks, filled with self-pity for being God’s person bringing good news to the wrong people. God sends an object lesson which is lost on Jonah and the book ends with Jonah sulking. It is the only book in the Bible that ends with a question. “And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

 

 

Jonah is both a reluctant prophet and a religious nationalist. He doesn’t want God to be gracious and merciful to the wrong people. Nineveh is an Assyrian city and good Jews should hate all Assyrians. It is us vs. them. Again. With a religious subtext. Israel first! There are limits, it seems to Jonah, as to when and on whom God may show mercy. Jonah hears God’s call and runs the other way. God rescues him, probably to Jonah’s chagrin (how heroic he would have been if he died in the mouth of that great fish). Let’s admit it: this kind of thinking is alive today, both in the Church and outside of it. There is something reassuring about knowing that we are the right people and those not with us are the wrong people.

 

We seem to forget that God originally made a covenant of blessing with Abraham that extended far beyond Abraham’s tribe: “…in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:3) The biblical story of redemption is one of ever-widening circles of grace and inclusion. Psalm 145 exhorts us, “They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power, to make known to all people your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.”

 

 

Christmas and Epiphany remind us of the scope of God’s redemptive mission. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus includes four women, one of which was a Moabite, another country not liked by Israel. When the baby Jesus was taken to the Temple to be dedicated to God, the old man Simeon held him and said, “for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:30-32) And there were the Magi, pagan visitors from a pagan land, that traveled all the way to Bethlehem to worship Jesus and give him lavish gifts.

 

There are some parallels between the story of Jonah and the story of the Magi. In Jonah, the pagan Gentile sailors are more ready to honor the God of Israel than Jonah is. And then king of Nineveh declares a city wide fast, while Jonah sulks. The pagan king trusts the God of Israel to be gracious to Nineveh, while Jonah pouts. When the Magi reach Jerusalem, Herod, whose title was king of the Jews, himself a convert to Judaism, is filled with fear. His little kingdom is threatened by a toddler in Bethlehem. He calls on the religious leaders to find out from scripture where the Messiah was to be born. They find in Micah that he is to be born in Bethlehem. Little Bethlehem is five miles away from Jerusalem. Neither Herod nor his high-ranking religious counselors make the five-mile trip to see Jesus for themselves. Yet the pagan Magi go all the way to Bethlehem to find and worship Jesus, still a toddler. When their Epiphany party ends and they leave for home, God’s angel tells Joseph to gather Mary and the young child and go to Egypt, for Herod will be unleashing his jealous fury on the boy children of Bethlehem. So the holy family becomes a refugee family and seeks and finds refuge in Egypt, another country the Israelites didn’t much like.

 

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time….” Isn’t that good news? God gives us second chances, second opportunities. We are in no place to condemn Jonah, for God has granted all of us second chances when we have failed to be faithful the first time. Who of us ever gets anything totally right the first time? (I have even messed up with Ikea furniture assembly instructions!) “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time….” Jonah did the right thing the second time, but, alas, without the right heart. His hope was that his eight-word sermon would result in the destruction of his enemies. In the Hebrew language that sermon was five words: my paraphrase: “In 40 days, you’re toast.”  I am always for doing the right thing, but with the right heart. Without the right heart, our right deeds are empty. God looks on the heart. “And if I have prophetic powers,… but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2-3)

 

 

The call to repent is good news, whether from Jonah, John the Baptist, or Jesus himself. It means God hasn’t given up on us. “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God; and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” The call to repent, to turn from our old ways to God’s new ways, is always good news. God hasn’t given up on us; God is giving us second chances. And third chances.

 

Last week Edwin Hawkins died. A black gospel singer and arranger, he is best remembered for the recording he had the Edwin Hawkins Singers make of “O Happy Day.” I love that song. “O, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away….” That day Nineveh repented and received mercy from God, Jonah may have been singing, “O Happy Day.” Instead of sulking at the abundant mercies of God, like Jonah, we can be singing, “O, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away…. He taught me how to watch and pray, and live rejoicing every day. O happy day!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“But she (Mary) was much perplexed by his (the angel’s) words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” Luke 1:29 (NRSV)

 

As 2017 was yielding to 2018, a friend, Peter Englert, posted a gentle challenge on his Facebook page: what will be your word for the new year? I hadn’t heard of any such custom—and I tend to avoid such things—but his challenge worked on me for a day and more. I pondered what word I might identify. I pondered whether I should even name one, lest it fall aside like so many new year’s resolutions.

 

In my pondering about this, I realized that my word should be ponder (and a form thereof, pondering). I looked up ponder in one dictionary and found this:

 

“to think about (something) carefully, especially before making a decision or reaching a conclusion. Synonyms: think about, contemplate, consider, review, reflect on, mull over, meditate on, muse on, deliberate about, cogitate on, dwell on, brood on, ruminate on, chew over, puzzle over, turn over in one’s mind.”

 

Ponderous has a different tone; it suggests slowness and heaviness, like a 300+ pound NFL lineman who plugs a hole in the line with his massive frame, but without much agility. That is not what I mean. I am thinking more of Mary’s wonderful response of pondering God’s words and works to find deeper meanings. That provoked me to look at other references, like these:

 

“We ponder your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple.” (Psalm 48:9)

 

“All who heard them pondered them and said, ‘What then will this child become?’ For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.” (Luke 1:66)

 

“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

 

On the front page of my journal for 2018 I have written: Ponder. I want to ponder things great and small, things lofty and mundane, things ordinary and extraordinary. I want to ponder the fullness of life that God has granted me, the abounding blessings that have marked my journey, beyond anything I could ever earn or merit, and the continuing opportunities to grow, learn, serve, and minister. I want to ponder the mysteries and glories of the Lord.

 

Thanks to my friend Peter for provoking me to ponder much in 2018—and beyond.

 

“But she (Mary) was much perplexed by his (the angel’s) words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” Luke 1:29 (NRSV)

 

As 2017 was yielding to 2018, a friend, Peter Englert, posted a gentle challenge on his Facebook page: what will be your word for the new year? I hadn’t heard of any such custom—and I tend to avoid such things—but his challenge worked on me for a day and more. I pondered what word I might identify. I pondered whether I should even name one, lest it fall aside like so many new year’s resolutions.

 

In my pondering about this, I realized that my word should be ponder (and a form thereof, pondering). I looked up ponder in one dictionary and found this:

 

“to think about (something) carefully, especially before making a decision or reaching a conclusion. Synonyms: think about, contemplate, consider, review, reflect on, mull over, meditate on, muse on, deliberate about, cogitate on, dwell on, brood on, ruminate on, chew over, puzzle over, turn over in one’s mind.”

 

Ponderous has a different tone; it suggests slowness and heaviness, like a 300+ pound NFL lineman who plugs a hole in the line with his massive frame, but without much agility. That is not what I mean. I am thinking more of Mary’s wonderful response of pondering God’s words and works to find deeper meanings. That provoked me to look at other references, like these:

 

“We ponder your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple.” (Psalm 48:9)

 

“All who heard them pondered them and said, ‘What then will this child become?’ For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.” (Luke 1:66)

 

“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

 

On the front page of my journal for 2018 I have written: Ponder. I want to ponder things great and small, things lofty and mundane, things ordinary and extraordinary. I want to ponder the fullness of life that God has granted me, the abounding blessings that have marked my journey, beyond anything I could ever earn or merit, and the continuing opportunities to grow, learn, serve, and minister. I want to ponder the mysteries and glories of the Lord.

 

Thanks to my friend Peter for provoking me to ponder much in 2018—and beyond.

 

[This sermon was given on January 14, 2018, at Parkminster Church, Rochester NY. The text is 1 Samuel 3:1-10, for the second Sunday of Epiphany, and the day before Martin Luther King, Junior’s birthday.]

 

Voices in the night. Do you ever hear voices in the night? I am sound sleeper. When I dream, the dream is often forgotten by morning, though not always. Being a pastor has an on-call component to it. Emergencies don’t keep office hours. Once in my time of pastoring in Brunswick, a phone call came in the wee hours of the morning. I was sound asleep. My wife is not as sound a sleeper, so the phone was on her side of the bed. She answered this call in the night, then roused me and handed me the phone. Someone in the congregation had just been taken to the emergency room of a hospital. Could I be there shortly to meet the family? Yes, of course. I threw on some clothes and asked Rachel, what hospital? She had handed the phone to me; how would she know? I didn’t know. Memory is fuzzy at this point, but I think I started calling the area hospitals (or had Rachel do so), starting with the closest one, and asking something like, “Do you have someone in the ER that is waiting for me?” Somehow I managed to find out the right hospital and get there to see the family. The person survived the night and, perhaps more miraculously, my pastoral credibility survived.

 

God sometimes speaks to us in the night, even in our sleep. I have learned to pay attention to the dreams I do remember in the morning. I have learned to count on my wife to orient me at times of calls in the night. If God really wants my attention, I humbly suggest that God call me in the daytime, preferably during office hours.

 

We have just completed our annual Christmas season, that season of angelic visits with pregnant messages. At least one came in the night, through a dream, to Joseph: “Don’t be afraid Joseph. The Holy Spirit is at work in all this. Stay with Mary and the child she will bear.” I expect that Joseph was more attentive to the details of that message than I have been to voices in my nights.

 

A young boy hears a voice in the night. The backdrop to that night is fascinating. Elkanah had two wives. One bore children; the other, Hannah, was barren. That was a heavy burden for a married woman back then, a matter of public disgrace. She earnestly and desperately sought God for a child. The high priest serving at the holy place was Eli. He was a godly old man, now failing of eyesight. He had two sons and both were wicked. They will follow their father as priests, but they are immoral and unethical. Meanwhile Eli sees Hannah praying and his heart is moved.

 

In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions. I can’t describe it more vividly than that. It was a time of moral darkness. Eli is nearing the end of his days and knows that his sons are corrupt. Eli offers a blessing to Hannah: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.”

 

God granted that prayer as Hannah desired. She bore a son and immediately dedicated him to God. Hannah responds with a song of praise that will one day inspire a young woman named Mary when an angel visits her with earth-shaking news.

 

This setting sounds like the Temple, but it is before the Temple. Likely it was the Tabernacle, which preceded the Temple. Young Samuel hangs out there, the way some kids hang out at the mall or the gym or video game shops. His mother has instilled in him a sense of calling, of belonging to God in an uncommon way.

 

The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel. The lamp here is both literal and figurative. The law given through Moses called for a lamp to burn continuously in this holy place. People would bring oil to keep it burning. It is burning low. Eli’s sons are gone, causing him shame and heartbreak.

In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions…. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel.

What follows would make good TV comedy viewing. God speaks to Samuel. Samuel thinks it must be Eli and goes and wakes him and says, Here I am. Eli says go back to sleep, boy. God speaks to Samuel. Samuel thinks its Eli and goes and wakes him and says, Here I am. Eli says to go back to sleep and let this old man sleep in peace.

Then comes this surprise: Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord: The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. How do we understand that? Samuel is doing everything right in honoring the commitment his mother made of his young life. He is at the right place and he is saying and doing the right things. Except he doesn’t understand it yet. This is prevenient grace at work. Prevenient grace is one of my favorite understandings of God’s ways. This simply means that God is working before we know it. Before we can acknowledge God, God is working in us. God was working in Samuel before Samuel knew it.

And yet a third time the Lord speaks to Samuel in the night. And yet a third time Samuel goes and wakes us old Eli. Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy.  So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” Samuel’s responsiveness revives Eli’s soul and he speaks a word of wisdom,

 

Two irresistible prayers emerge from this night of voices and confusion. The first is addressed to Eli, but perhaps through Eli to the Lord: Here I am. That is not a prayer of location but of vocation. God knows exactly where Samuel is. God’s positioning system, GPS, was working just fine. But Samuel must identify himself to God in availability. This is a prayer than occurs many times in the Bible.

• Abraham prays it to God in Genesis 22:1 and to the Lord’s angel in 22:11. Here I am.
• Jacob prays it after a long night of wrestling with God’s messenger in Genesis 31:11. Here I am.
• Isaiah prays it after receiving a stunning vision of God’s glory in Isaiah 6. Here I am.
• When God was converting Saul the persecutor of Christians into Paul the Apostle of Good News, God called on Ananias of Damascus to bring God’s word to Saul becoming Paul, and Ananias said, Here I am.
• Mary prays it when the angel told her that she, a virgin, would bear a son, the Messiah, Here I am.

This is one of those prayers that is always appropriate. Before we roll out of bed in the morning, we might simply pray: Here I am, Lord. That is not a prayer of location but of vocation. God knows exactly where we are. The original GPS was in place and working, the God positioning system. But we must identify ourselves to God in availability.

The second prayer follows: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ Eli, again, shares God’s wisdom with young Samuel. In the biblical languages, listening equals obeying. We have created gaps in our time and in our language. We can listen and not hear. We can hear and not obey. We can listen and hear and still not obey. The biblical understanding is that listening is hearing and hearing is obeying.

 

In a time when the word of the Lord was rare, when there were not many visions, when the lamp of God was flickering, God raises up a boy named Samuel. He prays two simple prayers and goes on to become one of the giants of the Old Testament. He becomes a prophet and more. While not officially a priest, he serves in priestly ways. While not a king, he serves in political leadership. He serves as a judge. He serves as a sage. No one in the Old Testament serves God in more ways than Samuel. And it all started with two simple prayers: “Here I am… Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

When Jesus calls people to become his disciples, he doesn’t give elaborate plans and projections. More commonly, he simply says, “Follow me.” That is how he calls Philip. In turn, Philip tells Nathanael about Jesus. When Nathanael hears that Jesus is from Nazareth, a backwater town in a backwater region, he exclaims, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” You’d think he may have been talking about some holler in Appalachia or Haiti or some poor African country. And before the day is over, Nathanael is following Jesus.

This weekend we remember the birth and prophetic ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a newly installed pastor of the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery AL when Rosa Parks got on a public bus after a hard day’s work. She sat toward the front. When more whites got on the bus, she refused to yield her seat and go to the back of the bus, the section reserved for non-whites. The Negro community joined together to start a boycott of the buses. Young pastor King was chosen to the speak for the black pastors. Two months later, On January 30, 1956, while King was speaking at a bus boycott rally, a bomb was detonated under the front porch of his home, while his wife, Coretta Scoot King, and young children were home. (No one was ever charged for that horrendous crime, to this day.) No harm was done to them, but that made Martin think about the cost of leading the civil rights movement. Shortly after, he had a voice in the night experience while sitting alone in his kitchen. He answered the voice in the night, “Here I am… Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And the movement went forward. Martin is gone, but the movement continues, as needed today as it was then.

 

Two irresistible prayers and an irresistible command: “Here I am… Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” “Follow me.” And how the world keeps changing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You have been waiting for this annual treat. Actually, I have never done this before! It’s a new year, so I do a new thing: thinking through and sharing some of my bests and favorites of the year just completed. The first title listed in each category was my favorite. The others are not in any order.

 

Movies (some of my choices were released late in 2016, but I saw them in 2017)

Hidden Figures. Moved me at every level. Best movie of 2016.

Loving. This movie didn’t get enough notice. It deserves to be widely viewed.

[Note: the above two could be paired. They both deal with American racism in my lifetime.]

Lion. A thrilling story of a young man’s search for his past.

Wonder. This story about bullying at the middle school level spotlights something happening at every level of society. Bullying needs to be called out and challenged, no matter where it is practiced, from local schools to the highest offices in the land.

Dunkirk and Darkest Hour. These two were not made as a pair, but they inform each other. This preacher and teacher of preaching in me loved the power of the spoken word through the instrumentality of Winston Churchill.

 

[Note: All my choices, save one, were based on true stories (Wonder is the exception). My favorite movies don’t always work out that way, but my love of history telling is evident in this list.]

 

Books

Just Mercy, by Brian Stevenson. A lawyer from Philadelphia gives his life’s work to freeing innocent people, mainly black men, from Alabama’s death row. See my first two movie favorites above and know that I believe that racism continues to be an American reality and tragedy. My wife and I listened to the audio version on a long trip. At times, we had to stop listening and drive quietly for a while, so powerful was its impact. I heard Stevenson speak, remotely, a few months ago. He needs to be read and heard.

On Living, by Kerry Egan. Egan shares insights from being a hospice chaplain. I first read it too quickly (it’s not a long book), then read it slowly during last Lent. This should be read slowly.

The Road to Character, by David Brooks. In a time when personal character seems not to matter much for many, this book looks at the character, including flaws, of some notable people.

Saving Calvinism, by Oliver Crisp. Being a moderate, and often struggling, Calvinist, this book was a wonderful surprise. Crisp brings an openness that Calvinists need and don’t always have or admit.

The Preaching Life, by Barbara Brown Taylor. In my teaching of preaching, I read a handful or so preaching books most years. Taylor is a poet, an artist with words, serving the Good News. It got the highest evaluation from my last class of students. I agree.

The Sin of Certainty, by Peter Enns. Enns messes with our categories, as he did in his first book, The Bible Tells Me So. He makes me ponder and think about what I believe and why.

 

TV

Vietnam. Burns and Novick did a brilliant piece of work. The final hour was documentary story-telling as its best.

The Unabomber. Didn’t get much notice, but deserves a wide viewing.

West Wing, season 2. Such writing. Such acting. I know it’s fiction, but it reminds me that a president can be literate, witty, caring, and human. Every episode grabbed me at some level.

 

Stage performances

The Agitators. This play about the friendship of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, both of whom lived in Rochester, premiered in Rochester. It was a friendship that included sharp disagreements. In the nineteenth century, they made our nation deal with its deficient view of women and blacks. I hope that this goes on the road and gets national exposure and acclaim. This year, 2018, marks the bicentennial of Douglass’s birth. It will be a good year to read at least one book by or about Douglass.

In the Heights. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first musical, before the acclaimed Hamilton, also won Tony awards, deservedly.

Little Women, the Musical. We went because a friend played one of the women. Based on the classic book (which I have never read). I am glad that our friend was in it, because it was that good.

Fun Home. Not fun, but a compelling drama touching sensitive issues.

 

Best bucket list trip. Adult Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church, Plains, GA. Yes, the teacher was President Jimmy Carter. The experience was wonderful and unforgettable.