National Day of Prayer Service for the Healing of HIV/AIDS
Rev. Derek Penwell will be participating in the service.
On Lobby Day
On Ash Wednesday, DBCC took a van full of people, in addition to two cars, to Lobby Day at the State Capitol in Frankfort. We went for the purpose of advocating for statewide fairness legislation and an anti-bullying bill.
In terms of the statewide fairness bill, we were making an appeal to legislators to grant a hearing to Senate Bill 69 and House Bill 188, which would protect people across the state from discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity. Specifically, this legislation would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination across the state of Kentucky when it comes to employment, housing, and public accommodations. Here in Louisville, as well as in Lexington and Covington, those rights are already protected, but not in the rest of the state.
The anti-bullying legislation, House Bill 336, seeks to enumerate protected classes of students who are disproportionately targeted by bullying peers, while affirming a student’s right to religious freedom of speech regarding sexual orientation. Enumerating protected classes (race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or identity) makes the law enforceable.
The importance of anti-bullying legislation became painfully urgent early on in the day. I was at the prayer breakfast with some legislators. Everything was nice and comfortable—eggs, biscuits, grits, coffee. Cheerful conversation. Then, a man in a leather jacket and a crew-cut walked in.
Michael Aldridge, director of the ACLU, came over and said, “That’s Travis Campbell—the father of Miranda Campbell, the girl who killed herself 3 weeks ago in Hopkinsville after being bullied because she was bi-sexual.”
I got up and went over to Mr. Campbell. He seemed shaken—and really, who wouldn’t? I said, “I’m Derek Penwell. I’m glad to meet you, and I appreciate you coming here today. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and he said, “I just found out about this yesterday. I had to come.”
He “had to come” to try to make sure that his loss wouldn’t be forgotten, and to help make a way to protect other people from having to suffer the same grief.
We at DBCC “had to come” to ensure that everyone knows that there’s more than one theological interpretation when it comes to announcing God’s love for all God’s children. We wanted to be clear that whatever discrimination people might suffer because of their orientation or identity, God’s not behind it.
It was a great day. I was proud to say I’m the minister at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church.
Of course, that’s nothing new. I’m always proud of that.
MOVIE NIGHT
The movie this month is Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Come join us Friday, March 2nd at 6:30 for snacks and conversation. The movie will begin at 7:30. Contact Paula Spugnardi 452-9113 if you have any questions. CHildcare can be provided by contacting the church office in advance (no later than Wed. February 29th).
There's No Backing into Adulthood
I guess I realized I was an adult when I found myself in East Tennessee with a new wife and no job. I had graduated from college four weeks earlier, and then got married just two weeks prior to loading up my grandfather’s Chevy pickup and launching out into the great unknown of, what I took to be, adulthood. We moved to Tennessee so I could go to graduate school. There was a little money left over from the honeymoon, which I thought would last us a month or so, providing we could eat on fifty dollars a week. I figured a month would be plenty of time for us both to find jobs and start living like grown-ups.
It occurs to me now that foresight was not a virtue I possessed at twenty-two, because I did not, as I had anticipated, find a job. My wife, at nineteen, already much more readily employable than I, found a part time job as a hostess at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn. Her income, it will not surprise you to know, didn’t turn out to be enough to sustain us. And so, with a nearly empty refrigerator and no prospects for employment on the horizon, we packed up the truck and headed back to Detroit to live with my in-laws.
We didn’t stay too long—though her parents could not have been nicer. After four months we’d both found jobs making sufficient money to move to a small apartment—her working in a doctor’s office, and me in a Speedway.
One might reasonably inquire as to why a situation that resulted in me moving back in with my in-laws made me aware of my status as an adult. Generally speaking, such a move, at least psychologically, means a failure to live up to the standards set for grown-up living. However, it strikes me that though we had folks helping us take care of our basic needs, no one was going to parachute in to right our listing financial ship. A little assistance here and there to help us keep our heads above water, but nobody offered to buy us a boat. It felt lonely at first (and still does sometimes).
But what I finally realized about our predicament was that nobody was going to live our lives for us. Being an adult takes courage and some intentionality, a commitment to hanging on when hanging on seems impossible.
But lest this degenerate into some kind of morally edifying self-help anecdote, it also occurs to me that it’s critical to point out that we were kept afloat. We had people who loved us, who wouldn’t let us fall through the cracks. It is a hard thing to realize that not everyone is so fortunate—and that we could very easily, if just a few things were different, be the people we read about living under viaducts in cardboard boxes. So while living can’t be done by proxy, it can’t be done in isolation either.
Faith, it seems to me, works along the same lines. On the one hand, the spiritual lone wolf is a non-starter; on the other hand, walking through a crowd of people on a journey you happen not to be taking doesn’t make you a pilgrim either. You can neither go it alone nor rely entirely on others to do your work for you. Somewhere in the mysterious middle lies maturity—both as a human being and as a seeker of God.
True Colors Film Screening
Our friends at the True Colors Ministry of Highland Baptist Church are screening the film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin this Sunday, February 5th. If the Super Bowl just isn't your cup of tea, or you're simply looking for an interesting and stimulating activity on Sunday, this is definitely the place to be! For more information, contact Maurice Bojangles-Blanchard at truecolorsministry@gmail.com.
Riding Dead Horses
I found the following list posted by Harry K. Jones on AchieveMax Blog. It strikes me that churches in a post-denominational age need to make a practice of stopping to ask themselves: "Are we attempting to ride dead horses?" That's a structural/organizational question that is increasingly important to consider in a culture in which Emerging generations have less and less commitment to traditional churches and denominations.
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
In contrast, here’s how many people respond when they find out their “horse” is dead:
- Say things like, “This is the way we always have ridden the horse.”
- Appoint a committee to study the horse.
- Buy a stronger whip.
- Change riders.
- Arrange to visit other locations to see how they ride dead horses.
- Raise the standards for riding dead horses.
- Appoint a triage team to revive the dead horse.
- Create a training session to increase our riding ability.
- Compare the state of dead horses in today’s business environment.
- Change your definitionsor rules by declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
- Hire outside
consultants to ride the dead horse. - Harness several dead horses together to increase speed and pulling power.
- Declare that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Provide additional incentive funding (more sticks – more carrots) to increase the horse’s performance.
- Do a case-study to see if competitors can ride it cheaper.
- Purchase a software package or institute a new program to make dead horses run faster.
- Declare that the horse is “better, faster, and cheaper” dead.
- Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
- Revisit the performance requirements for dead horses.
- Downsize the dead horse.
- Reassign fault to the dead horse’s last rider.
- Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
- Shorten the track.
- Declare the dead horse was “one of the leading horses” in its day.
- Establish benchmarks for industry dead horse leaders.
- Gather other dead animals and announce a new diversity program.
- Put together a spiffy PowerPoint presentation to get planners to double the dead horse R & D budget.
- Get the dead horse a web site!
Youth: Saturday Night Movie Social
Sunday Happenings!
Here are some of the cool things happening the next few Sundays here at DBCC:
Jan. 29: Fiesta Dinner
- Come join us in the Robsion Family Life Center for a Mexican Fiesta meal! We'll have all sorts of Hispanic-inspired cultural dishes. All donations from the meal will be attributed to our Mission Trip Fund!
Feb. 5: Super Bowl Party!
- If you haven't already bought your catered tray of hot wings, come on down to the church and hang out with us for Super Bowl XLVI! Whether you are a die-hard football fan, or prefer to partake of snacks and non-sports related conversation, please feel free to join us. We will also be visited by our friends from the Grace and Freedom House.
Feb. 12: Planning Meeting Follow-up
- Join us for a follow-up to our January 7th Event Planning Meeting to dine and discuss the progress of our 2012 events and ministries. As well as discussing plans in greater detail, we will also be giving dates to those events who have progressed to a hard date. This is also a great chance for those who couldn't attend the Jan. 7th meeting to offer their support and assistance for one or more of these initiatives.
Feb. 19: DBCC Dessert Auction
- To raise money for the Mission Trip, some of the members have donated some of the fabulous desserts for auction. Bring your sweet tooth, wallet, and your bargaining edge. These deserts will be in high demand!
Drug Prohibition is Unjust
Here are some thoughts from David Sprawls, Elder at DBCC:
A society that disapproves of an activity enacts laws against it. During the last century, disapproval of drug use has been expressed by outlawing drug production, distribution and possession: “drug prohibition”. (Interestingly, drug consumption is not illegal.)
Drug prohibition is an abject failure. Virtually any drug can be acquired by virtually anyone virtually anywhere. Drug abuse can never be addressed effectively by attempting to restrict the supply of drugs. Drugs are too abundant to ever choke off the supply. Drug abuse will only be reduced by addressing demand and this will require spiritual growth and renewal.
The expenditure of untold resources and the incarceration of a percentage of our population which would embarrass a police state may fool people into thinking we are doing something about the problem, but the net effect has been nothing more than (and will never be anything more than) an expression of our collective disapproval of drug use.
But drug prohibition is not merely an abject failure. It is a disastrously counterproductive failure. Just as during Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, drug prohibition creates a highly profitable, highly destructive and often violent criminal enterprise. Prohibition, rather than regulation, of drugs constitutes an election to create a criminal enterprise. Gangs and organized crime derive most of their revenue from drugs. Fewer people are more intensely committed to continued drug prohibition than the criminals who profit from it.
But drug prohibition is not merely an abject and disastrously counterproductive failure. It is an abject, disastrously counterproductive and grossly unjust failure. It is grossly unjust to incarcerate millions (estimated at more than one and a half million presently) nonviolent drug offenders. It is grossly unjust to imprison a percentage of African Americans warranting description of prohibition as continued racial oppression. It is grossly unjust to treat drug users for illness while prosecuting suppliers, mostly poor with few opportunities, responding to the law of supply and demand. It is grossly unjust to destabilize neighboring countries with our contradictory drug addictions and drug prohibition.
As a Christian, I object to these injustices. As a Christian and as a citizen, I object to the monumental waste of resources and failure to allocate resources to address drug abuse in effective ways. As a Christian and as a citizen, I object to policies and laws that needlessly create a criminal enterprise. I believe faith communities should demand an end to drug prohibition as unjust.
The dilemmas for Christians center on (a) the undeniable moral authority behind prohibition and (b) the concomitant perception that repealing prohibition appears to be condoning drug use. Repealing prohibition is counterintuitive.
The principal objections to ending drug prohibition are that it appears to condone drug use and that it will lead to greater drug abuse. The only answer to the former is that no one else can control our intentions. The answer to the latter is that prohibition is such an utter failure it is doubtful regulation as an alternative would make drugs more readily available. Further, reallocation of resources to education, prevention and treatment would likely reduce drug abuse.
The truth is that anyone who takes reduction of drug abuse seriously actually must oppose drug prohibition. Decriminalization should make it easier to identify abusers and easier for abusers to seek help. Resources can be allocated to effective approaches of treating and, better, preventing drug abuse.
Adherence to prohibition gives the appearance of seriousness about drug use. In fact, adherence to an approach that is a proven failure is a failure to take the problem seriously. Any serious approach to the reduction of drug use actually has to start with an end to prohibition. The choice is between appearing to be serious about drug use and actually being serious about pursuing approaches which will work.
Only our faith communities can invoke the moral authority necessary to reverse the disastrous policy of drug prohibition. Our churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, as a matter of justice, should call on the conscience of the nation to end this injustice. They must invoke moral authority in the name of justice.
People of faith are not libertarians. Libertarians want people to be free to use drugs. Christians want people to be free from the demons which drive them to use drugs; to be freenot to use drugs.
The following is a draft of a resolution proposed for adoption by faith communities and organizations. Proponents of such a resolution are needed.
RESOLVED:
As a community of faith, we demand an end to drug prohibition and commutation of sentences of all nonviolent drug offenders. Prohibition has lead to intolerable injustices:
incarceration of millions of nonviolent drug offenders,
destabilization of neighboring countries,
racial oppression,
exploitation of the poor,
creation of a destructive and often violent criminal enterprise and flagrant waste of resources which must be reallocated to effective means of reducing drug abuse.
We do not call for an end to drug prohibition in order for people to use drugs. We call for spiritual renewal and for more constructive living than drug abuse.
David S. Sprawls, Elder, DBCC
Tearing Open the Heavens (January 8, 2012 Sermon)
Tearing Open the Heavens (Mark 1:4-11)
Seminary, as you might imagine, has occupied a great deal of my educational life. Heck, if you ask my wife, it's occupied a great deal of my actual life. I enjoyed seminary—each of the three different times I went.
Seminary, like any other trade school, has certain points of emphasis. They want to teach you to think theologically, for instance—which is to say, they want to train you to view the world through the lens of a theologically informed faith.
When the country goes to war, for instance, they teach you to think of it not first in political terms (What will this mean for the party in power?) or economic terms (What is this going to cost me?) or even in practical terms (What will this mean for me and people I love?), but in theological terms (What does God think of war? How does Jesus view violence?). Sex, money, politics, justice—all of these things are meant, according to seminary, to be passed through the filter of our relationship to God and God's relationship to us as expressed in Christ.
Another biggie they teach you in seminary centers on one word. This word has to do with the minister's relationship to the world—in particular, her relationship to other people.
You walk into Pastoral Counseling 101 all ready to learn about how to fix people, and they ruin your day by telling you that fixing people isn't your job.
"What do you mean? I thought fixing people was the job. That's why I came! The world's messed up. It needs fixing. And I'm the one for the job, because I know how the world ought to be. I have a particularly good idea of how people ought to be."
Sorry, young master Freud, but that's not how it works. One of the most important things we can teach you has nothing to do with fixing anybody; it has to do with boundaries.
Huh?
Boundaries, my friend. We're here to teach you boundaries.
Why is that such a big deal?
Well, you can never help anybody if you don't know where you end and other people begin.
Ministry, they teach you in seminary, is about having good boundaries. Otherwise, you get the idea that people have hired you to come in and fix them—or perhaps, worse, that you're the main point of everything that goes on.
But people, generally speaking, don't want to be fixed. And those who do want you to fix them, trust me, you learn very quickly there's not enough Transactional Analysis or Systems Theory in your ministerial tool kit for those people.
Boundaries. You've got to know your limits.
Mark, however, completely messes up the whole boundaries thing in our Gospel for this morning. Let me set the stage.
The Gospel of Mark, unlike Matthew or Luke's Gospel, opens without any mention of Jesus' birth or early life. In Mark, Jesus shows up on the scene, fully grown and ready for baptism.
No history. No background. No polite introductions.
Just John the Baptist—"the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
In fact, our passage this morning begins abruptly: "John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."
Who is John the baptizer? Where did he come from?
No artful segues for Mark.
Then, after we meet John, Mark thrusts Jesus on us: "In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan."
The next two verses, however, are the ones Mark's been chomping at the bit to get at: "And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'"
This is the first Sunday after Epiphany, the Sunday traditionally called The Baptism of Our Lord. Mark recounts the story in a straightforward manner. Short. Concise. No extra window-dressing. No flowery language.
First, there's John. Then Jesus shows up, and John baptizes him. God identifies Jesus as the Son.
Next.
It would be easy to dismiss Mark's rather spare account of the baptism of Jesus as workmanlike and uninspiring, wouldn't it?
But, there's a little nugget hidden in Mark's prosaic rendering of the scene—one that distinguishes it from Matthew and Luke's telling of the story, setting up this short narrative as a crucial signpost for us.
And it's found in one word. When Matthew and Mark tell this story, they use the tamer Greek word, anoigo—to open up—as in, when Jesus "came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him."
Anoigo. Open. Nice. Inviting. It's the word Matthew uses when he says, "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you" (7:7).
Anoigo. Open. It's the same word Luke uses when he says, "For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened."
See what I mean? Welcoming.
Good liberals like anoigo. It's how we like to see ourselves.
Mark, on the other hand, uses a different word. A much less polite word. Instead of anoigo Mark uses schizo. It means to split or tear apart. That's, of course, where we get the word schizophrenia—literally, to split or tear the mind in half.
"Ok," you say, "That's interesting, especially for the word nerds. But so what? Mark chooses "tear open" instead of "open up nicely." What difference does that make?"
Well, if that were the only instance of it, I'd be just as dubious about its importance as you are. If it were the case that Mark just used a more violent synonym than Matthew and Luke, it might be worth a mention, but certainly not the belaboring of it I'm doing.
Here's the thing, though. This isn't the only time Mark uses a form of schizo. He uses it another time, later in the Gospel. Way in the back, almost at the end.
In the 15th chapter, Jesus is on the cross; and verse 37 says, "Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last."
The next verse has this: "And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom."
Of course, the traditional interpretation of this act of the tearing of the temple curtain from top to bottom is that—because it's the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies (God's true home on earth) from the rest of the temple—it's a kind of metaphor for God's rending of the veil that separates heaven and earth.
Do you see what Mark has done? In critical terms, it's called an inclusio, which is a device in which an author uses a word or phrase twice, as literary bookends. These bookends modify and interpret that which lies between.
All right. Enough with the pointy-headed explanations. Mark opens and closes the ministry of Jesus in spectacular fashion. He announces that in Jesus—in his life and work and death—God has come among us. God has torn the veil that formerly separated humanity from the divine.
And this tearing is no sweet opening of a door. Open doors can be closed again. In Jesus, God has ripped the door off the hinges! God has transgressed the boundaries that separated us from God.
Since Jesus, there's no more, "You stay on your side of the car, and I'll stay on mine. Don't cross the invisible line."
In Jesus, God has announced an intention to barge right into the living room and take a seat in our favorite Barcalounger.
Now, at first blush, being in the presence of God sounds like what we regularly say we want. Right? We talk about seeking God's face, standing in God's presence—as if we expect it to be a tranquil encounter.
Come right in. Take a seat. Have a nice cup of cocoa while you wait. God will be with you momentarily.
I'm not so sure. I think this whole God-tearing-the-heavens-apart-to-get-at-us thing could turn out to be way more than we bargained for.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of Jesus' presence ripping a hole in the fabric of reality—to the extent that it proves we serve a God who cares about us, who will stop at nothing to be reconciled to us, who loves us enough to become like us. That's good stuff.
After Jesus, God is no longer an abstraction—"out there." God, in Christ, is "right here."
The problem, though, as I see it, is that "right here" doesn't strike me as a place we want God snooping around. I mean, what with the way things are in the world—children dying in the night for lack of food and shelter, the elderly having to choose between buying their medicine or paying for heat, young African-American men lining the cells in a bloated correctional system, while other young people are imprisoned by a financial system that encouraged them to take on stiflingly large debt to get an education, LGBTQ folks sent to the back of the very dangerous and punitive social bus, animals factory farmed to make our Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets as cheap as possible, the environment overwhelmed by our ability to engineer machines—the by-products of which are strangling creation, political systems that ensure that the wealthy and the powerful retain their status, while the poor and the powerless are kept . . . poor and powerless.
I had a guy named, John, come into the office last week. He was a pretty big guy—leather jacket, beard, big workmen's hands. He just wanted to talk to a pastor. His wife died in July, after nine year battle with cancer. He's fighting for custody of his kids, because he's got a prison record. He can't find work. He's losing his house. His life is a mess.
After he finished this awful tale, he looked up at me, tears streaming down his face, and said, "Pastor, I don't know what to do. I keep praying for God to come and show me what I need to do. But I got nothing. Sometimes I wonder if maybe God is for other people—people who aren't like me. I keep waiting, but I haven't seen anything yet."
What could I say? I've taken the class. I've got good boundaries. I prayed with him, then took him to buy some gas.
It occurs to me that John doesn't need a nice door-opening God; he needs Mark's God, a sky-ripping God—a God who's not satisfied with the way things are.
So, here's the thing. If we've got a heavy investment in keeping the world situated the way it is, maybe having God kick down the front door isn't going to be that pleasant an experience for us.
If we think that our biggest responsibility revolves around trying to hang on to what we've got, then maybe having a God who's unconcerned about crossing boundaries is going to sound like bad news*.
If, however, all the boundaries in your world have been drawn to keep you out, to hold you where you are, to cut you off from life—maybe this transgressive, pushy, boundary-crashing God who tears open the heavens and comes to us in Jesus . . . is just the news you you've been waiting to hear.
The Grammar of Faith
“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-7).
Paul sure liked prepositions–in, with, out of, up, etc. Paul’s writings are dense and often tough to read, precisely because he seems to refuse to end a sentence, preferring to keep it going by using prepositions. Paul’s prepositions are not, however, careless addenda. They have a purpose: Paul’s use of prepositions helps him to nuance his arguments, to add theological “meat” to what he’s saying. Paul uses language with intentionality.
One of Paul’s prepositions that fascinates me is the word in. The word in denotes an object contained within or by something or someone else. So when Paul says that we have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places “in Christ Jesus,” he is making a profound theological statement. We might have expected Paul to say that we have been seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus. He uses with quite a bit throughout the rest of this passage, but in this instance he chose in. Why? Does it make any difference?
I don’t know, but to have us seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus could be construed to suggest some sort of coequal status. On the other hand, the use of in unquestionably indicates that the only way we could conceivably have been “seated . . . in the heavenly places” was in a purely dependent role (i.e., we wouldn’t have been invited to the party without Christ). We got in on his coattails–and we remain there only as an act of his grace, not as an act of our own “good life.”
Our little in, then, becomes a glorious word, anticipating verses eight and nine: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God–not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). That is certainly good news.
Grace comes in all shapes and sizes. But sometimes, the greatest gifts come in the smallest packages–a tiny baby, born in a manger, a few rusty spikes that held a little Jewish man to a tree, a few mangy, overused words spoken in love (“For God so loved the world . . . ”). Even a little word like in can pack a lot of wallop in God’s hands.
Philosophy Power Hour
Our philosophy discussion group is back for the new year! We meet from 6:30-7:30 on Wednesday nights discussing all topics from non-fat cheesecake to the existence of a Deity. Please join us tomorrow and every Wednesday and share with us in our gymnasium of thought (also referred to as the Youth Room)!
Friday Night Movies!
Join us for our next Movie Club event on January 6th. We will celebrate Sherlock Holmes' birthday by viewing a vintage Sherlock Holmes movie. We gather and snack at 6:30, and the movie begins at 7:30. We will meet in the Youth room. If you have any questions, see Paula Spugnardi.
From Our Friends at VOA
;)
Breakfast Success!
Thank you to everyone who made our first annual Breakfast with Santa a huge success! The profits accrued have already been added to our Mission Trip Fund. We hope everyone had a great time and hope to see all the new faces at our upcoming events to be announced.
Everyone who had a picture taken with Santa has been sent an email with a link that will take you to the site from which you can download your own copy of you or your child's picture with St. Nick. If you haven't received your email by Wednesday, Dec. 21st please contact us via email or telephone.
We hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season! Thank you for sharing it with us. Merry Christmas!
Sermon Podcast: "Good News" (Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11)
My favorite moment of this sermon?
This God of justice is no dreamy idealist, but a God with dirty hands and a broken heart.
And we who claim to love and serve this God had better be too.
Click the link at the bottom of the post for the sermon audio or just subscribe to our podcast in iTunes and you won't miss a single sermon…
Good News (Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11)
You might not have noticed. Christmas is coming. Two weeks from today. It's a quaint little celebration we have every year. It's pretty subdued. We don't make too much out of it in our culture. If you weren't paying attention, you'd hardly even notice it. A little tinsel here, a bow, there. An occasional cup of eggnog. Nothing fancy. Not that big a deal, right?
Yeah, right.
You know as well as I do that frantic parents are going to be camped out on E-bay, hoping to spend hundreds of dollars to buy the hottest toy on the market–the one Wal-Mart sold out of by early October. Guilty spouses will be haunting the crowded malls, longing to find that special something that says, “I’m sorry ignored you all year. I really feel terribly about it (Not terrible enough to change, of course). But, well, I hope this will make up for it.”
“Surely,” some folks think, “if only I could give this or receive that, things would be different.” Not you or I, of course. We’re far too sophisticated to be sucked in by all that commercial hype. Right? We never spend more than we have to give our children the kind of Christmas that will absolve our bruised consciences.
We’re not the ones walking up and down the aisles at the last minute trying to figure out whether an electric dog-polisher is something grandma can use, or if slipper socks send the wrong message to the crazy sister-in-law with the big hair.
You and I wouldn’t spend each night leading up to Christmas running from one activity to another, trying to please everyone else, while at the same time trying to capture that evasive “Christmas spirit.”
It’s the unwashed masses who dread that day in January when the mail carrier lumbers up the sidewalk carrying the Visa bill, the reminder of all those broken promises to ourselves about how this Christmas was going to be different.
That’s not us. We’re much more on top of things than to be seduced by the false promises of a purchasable “peace on earth,” a consumable “good will toward humanity.”
Yeah, sure.
Then, one day we wake up after our endless striving to reproduce the perfect Christmas we saw on television, only to find that the presents lay in the closet collecting dust, and all the turkey and pumpkin pie have turned to ashes in our mouth. Christmas, as it is popularly observed in our culture can be very oppressive, indeed.
But, come on. There's real oppression out there, right? It'd be nice to think that there's nothing more pressing in our world than whether or not we're going to finally get that iPad, but our world is much more complicated than that, isn't it?
We live in a world where tension over immigration and race continue to exist, in a world where adults abuse little children, in a world where people are trying to figure out if the retirement funds will be there when they need them, if the job, the health insurance, the house will still be there for them come this time next year.
And if there are jobs to be had, will they demand soul-killing labor that asks of us to surrender whatever dignity we've been able to hang onto . . . in exchange for a paycheck?
We live in a world where young people watch for the bus in dread of another day of being subjected to the torments and depredations of bullies because of their sexual orientation, in world where the the poor, the homeless, the jobless are told that they ought to blame themselves if they're not rich, that their children ought to be made to clean toilets--presumably as training for the jobs to which they might one day aspire, in a world in which young people are under intense pressure to take on a mountain of debt to educate themselves for careers they may never find.
It's tough out there.
We live in a world where nations sit tensely, waiting for another drone to drop something deadly from the sky, waiting for another ordinary looking Datsun to explode in a crowded market, waiting for news about whether other nations will be kind enough to save the ruins of your economy from sinking all the way into the toilet, waiting to learn whether the country next door truly is building nuclear weapons, waiting to see if your government really can put a stop to the killings.
In a broken world, sometimes we act as though our biggest fears are about whether we’ll have enough money to buy one more bottle of Hai Karate or one more pair of Isotoners—when, in reality, we (all of us) have bigger fish to fry. There really is oppression and brokenness and dread and anxiety in our world that extends beyond whether two-day shipping really means two days, or whether we'll get the guest bedroom cleaned in time for Aunt Gladys.
The people to whom Isaiah speaks understand oppression. They’ve spent a fair amount of time in exile in Babylon. In our text for today, they’ve recently returned home to find that home is just a big pile of rocks. Jerusalem lies in ruins. Their fields and orchards, untended for all these years are overgrown with brambles.
While they were in Babylon, all they could think of was getting home. They saw in their minds the homes about which their parents and grandparents used to reminisce. Over in Babylon they sat around telling stories about the good old days back in Judah. They painted lovely pictures about the old home place. And the kids sat around their Babylonian digs, dreaming about that day when they might finally get to go back and reclaim their heritage. They had such big plans about what they’d finally do once they made it home.
But now they’re home, standing knee-deep in the rubble. They’ve finally gotten to the place they’ve dreamed of for so long, and they can’t get the taste of ashes out of their mouths. It’s possible, you know, to be oppressed by your desires, a prisoner of your own expectations.
Conditions are less than optimal. People are hungry. They've returned to find the homes that had kept their hopes alive over in Babylon are in ruins. People died along the way. They've been oppressed, exiled, imprisoned, beat down. Now this?
You can hear, if you stop for a moment, the sounds of people choking back tears, covering their faces, shaking their heads. Dejected.
But Isaiah comes to them in the midst of their despair with a word from the Lord: “He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion–to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display his glory. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.”
Good stuff. Lot of great infinitives in there--to bring good news, to bind up, to release, to proclaim, to comfort, to provide for, to give.
That's good news, isn't it? How do you argue with those kinds of verbs?
The problem is not the verbs, though; it's the objects of the verbs that go down so hard. We live in a modern sophisticated society. So, we're all about those kinds of verbs--bind up, release, comfort, provide for. The problem that confronts our society, however, is that we want the objects of those verbs to be deserving. Helping people is fine . . . as long as their the right people.
And if Isaiah had just left it at rhetorically satisfying verb phrases, just left it abstract, it wouldn't be hard to get everybody on board.
But Isaiah's not content to let things stay on a conceptual level, not satisfied to speak theoretically. No, he throws in objects--gets all practical, puts a face on these lofty sounding verbs--bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, to comfort and provide for all those who mourn, to give this whole sorry lot a garland instead of ashes.
This good news comes, in other words, not to those who've just had temporary setbacks, to those inconvenienced by ripples in the stock market. This good news is announced to those who've been on the bottom so long, it's hard for them to remember there's a top. This good news is delivered to those folks on the edge of despair, just short of giving up.
Fine. But why . . . you know . . . those people?
Because, God says, "I love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing." Those who've been at the mercy of the tyrants of this world, sorely used and oppressed, now find themselves under the protection of a ruler who loves justice, who hates the abuse heaped on the poor and the powerless.
And how do we know this good news isn't just more high-flown grandiloquence?
You'd be forgiven for not catching it right off; it's tucked away in verse 2: "The LORD has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor."
What does that mean? Why is that such a big deal?
The year of the LORD's favor is a reference to the Year of Jubilee described in Leviticus. Every fifty years, according to Jewish law, all debts were to be canceled, all prisoners and slaves set free. Everyone was to return to their home place. It was the ultimate in wealth redistribution.
The Year of Jubilee, the year of the LORD's favor was a reminder to everyone in Israel that they all had been held in bondage in Egypt until God delivered them--which is to say, everyone is equal in God's sight. Consequently, the poor could never get so low that they wouldn't have hope, and rich could never get so rich that they weren't accountable to the whole community.
Concrete. Real life. Practical. This God of justice is no dreamy idealist, but a God with dirty hands and a broken heart.
And we who claim to love and serve this God had better be too.
Because, guess what? The good news of Advent isn't just something we sit around waiting for, twiddling our thumbs with stars in our eyes. The good news of Advent . . . at least in part, is supposed to be us.
Disappointment. Devastation. Ruin. Enslavement. Oppression. It’s still out there.
And in the middle of it all, you have a chance to be the good news somebody's waiting to hear.
It's better than slipper socks any day.
-Amen.
Breakfast with Santa
Santa Claus is coming to town! The date is approaching for our first ever Breakfast with Santa! Be sure and stop by the DBCC table at the Farmers Market to pick up a reservation form, or sign up on our online registration form. Don't forget, revenue for this event is going to support our trip to Casa Hogar de San Juan Children's Home in July. We can't wait to see you there!
Sermon Podcast: "In Days to Come" (Isaiah 2:1-5)
Sometimes, good news depends on who's hearing it...
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In Days to Come
(Isaiah 2:1-5)
A social worker just told me a story a couple of weeks ago about an internship where she worked as a night manager at a homeless shelter. “Part of my role,” she said, “was to round up the women and children and make sure lights were out by 10:00 pm. One night a boy was abandoned by his mother. I sat with that little 4 year-old boy until finally CPS showed up and took him to the Home of the Innocents. As he cried in my arms that he wanted his mother, I’m not sure that I’d ever seen such pain, felt such helplessness before. That night I decided I wanted to be a social worker…I wanted to combat the social evils of the world.”
And there are plenty of social evils in the world, aren’t there? We see them all around us. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see the pain and despair. Walk out those doors, take a right, and have a seat at that bus stop right out there. You’ll see a whole new world of social evils 150 yards from where you’re sitting right now.
It’s a tough world we live in. The poor, the homeless, the addicted, the unwelcome, the widow, the orphan—all the social evils of the world—it’s difficult to ignore.
Isaiah knows that. Isaiah understands. God, if you’ve read chapter one, isn’t pleased with Judah. Things haven’t been going well with the children of God. They’ve acted faithlessly, and God’s fixin’ to throw down: “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood” (Is. 1:15). Not good. Not good at all.
Jerusalem, God’s city, the city of peace—once faithful, God says, has become a “woman of questionable virtue,” a city full of murderers. “Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them” (1:22-23).
God, as you might have been able to tell, is ticked: “Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes!” (1:24b). Things can’t keep going like they’ve been going. God’s angry; but God’s anger is redemptive: “I will turn my hand against you: I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy. And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city” (1:25-26).
Things are going to get dark. You can count on that, God says. You’re not going to be able to see around the corner, but I’ve got other things in store for you.
Have you noticed here that, according to the tellers of the story, God’s judgment moves in a particular direction? God will not abandon Judah, but Judah will have to get to the end of her rope before understanding God’s great mercy.
Wait a minute. You’re not going to talk about judgment, are you? I mean, it’s one thing to talk about judgment if you’re a pre-modern yokel from the Palestinian sticks, but it’s another thing to start talking about judgment among sophisticated modern smart-phone users like us.
And that’s the way most of us think, isn’t it? Judgment went the way of witch-burnings and the Inquisition. In fact, calling someone judgmental is among the most potent of epithets in our culture. “You can’t tell me how to live. I’ll live the way I want to live. Who are you to judge me?” Next to being a child-molester, you can’t get much lower in the food chain than being judgmental. Pharisees. Bottom-feeders.
But here’s God saying, “I will pour out my wrath on my foes.” Sounds like judgment to me. “Well preacher, that’s all well and good, but we serve a God of love.”
To which I reply, “So did the children of Judah.” We modern folks, however, have a rather idiosyncratic notion of love. Whereas love has traditionally meant concern for the other, nowadays love is often used as a way of avoiding having to be concerned for the other.
What? What does that mean?
Well, typically, people talk about love in ways that indicate that what’s meant is not love, but rather not wanting to get involved. Sometimes the truest form of love is saying no. The easiest thing to do, and sometimes the least loving thing to do, is not to confront, but to let it ride in the name of “keeping the peace.”
But that’s not peace, is it? That’s just a cease-fire, without resolving the underlying issues. And in that sense, what’s communicated is, “I’m more concerned about myself and about avoiding the stickiness of true love than in your long-term good.” True love is impossible where people refuse to confront one another. Deep down we know it’s true.
We need a God who refuses to give us what we want, but who holds out, determined to give us what we need. Perhaps the truest love, the truest grace is a God who’s willing to stand over against us, willing to hold us accountable for our boneheadedness—unwilling simply to let it ride in the name of “keeping the peace.” Because what God wants isn’t a cease-fire, but a people committed to God’s vision of life in the reign of God. And if we’re truly to be the children of God, principally concerned with equipping disciples for God’s new reign, sometimes that will entail the painful but necessary process of speaking the truth to one another in love.
Sometimes the most loving thing the church can do is speak the uncomfortable truth, rather than letting things ride in the name of “keeping the peace.”
Perhaps, it isn’t until God refuses to bend to our will, and holds us accountable to a standard of behavior that we didn’t devise for ourselves, that we can begin to understand the vision that Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw.
Perhaps it isn’t until God, through the face of someone who truly loves us, says that our lives—the way we’ve constructed them—aren’t working, that we can finally begin to submit ourselves to the true mercy of being transformed into the people God wants for us to be.
Perhaps it isn’t until we’ve lived through the darkness of the former days, when we search for God and can never quite find where God had gone, that we can be open to the alternative reality of God’s peaceable kingdom in days to come.
It’s a hard word, isn’t it? You’ve got to walk through the darkness to get to the light. You’ve got to live with the uncertainty before you get to the serenity of peace. That, of course, is the hard part about Advent. Advent isn’t just an excuse to stretch out the Christmas festivities for a month, like some sort of ecclesiastical Wal-Mart. Advent is a time of preparation, of taking stock, of waiting. And if you’ve ever been on the other end of a telephone line expecting a call that will not come, you know that waiting is just about the hardest thing in the world to do. You get tired of standing on your tip-toes after awhile, peering out into the darkness, looking for familiar headlights to crest the driveway.
No. Advent is the season when we recognize that the world—as it’s presently situated—holds great danger for us, forcing us to turn our “eyes toward the hills from whence cometh our help.” Advent is a scary time of waiting to see how it’s all going to shake out.
We’re hopeful, but it’s not with us now. You only have to read the front page of the Courier-Journal to know that. We can’t see what it’s going to look like in all of its glory; the mist blocks our vision. But we get glimpses, tiny snatches of light. We stand waiting for Christ to be revealed, but the darkness appears to rule. Bullets fly. Children die in the dry night. Governments hire people to invent ever more ingenious ways to damage one another. God is not satisfied with the world as it is presently arranged. And we hear Isaiah say, “In days to come . . .”
In former days, we lived in the flat land, hemmed in by fear and terror on every side, but “in days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”
In former days, God’s displeasure with the way the world was ordered blackened the sky, but in days to come a star shall shine in Bethlehem and the horizon shall be lit by the faces of ten thousand angels announcing God’s desire for a world in which the poor are not trampled, and the orphan is defended, and the cause of the widow is heard in the land.
In former days, your silver turned to refuse, your wine turned to water, and your princes turned into rebels and companions of thieves, but in days to come, your swords shall be turned into plowshares, and your spears shall be turned into pruning hooks, and your enemy shall be turned into your friend.
In former days, your hands were full of blood and you housed murderers in your city, but in days to come, says the LORD, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall you learn war anymore.
We who live in the aftermath of September 11th and the wars that still wage a half a world away, we who live in a world where 13.3 million people are officially unemployed and 45 million people live without the benefit of healthcare, where the poor and the widowed and the orphaned continue among us, we find it difficult to see for all the smoke and dust in the air. But Advent is here, and it’s hard to avoid the darkness around us.
Judgment is tough for us to hear. We who have much ought to take care that we’re part of the solution and not part of the problem. We who are well situated might find the refining of Advent much less inviting than the popular picture of old-fashioned Christmases that get pitched to us between episodes of “The Walking Dead.”
But if you’re an abandoned 4 year-old, maybe this kind of judgment is just what you need to hear. Maybe to hear that God cares enough about you to get angry about the way you’ve been treated, the way you’ve been forgotten and left behind, is exactly the kind of Good News the gospel of Advent announces.
Isaiah spins for us a vision of God’s new kingdom, and we get a glimpse, just a peek at what God has in store for those who endure. Just a glimpse in the night of the kind of world where the abandoned are reclaimed, where the forgotten are remembered, where the lost are finally found.
Just a hint. Not much. But the message of Advent is that God doesn’t forsake the poor, the widow, the 4 year-old—expecting the same commitment to justice from those who claim to follow Jesus.
The message of Advent is that God can make a king out of a baby, which means that God can make a kingdom out of the likes of you and me.
And the uncomfortable truth of that, my brothers and sisters, is more good news than you ought to be exposed to in one sitting.
-Amen.
Water Under Snow Is Weary
Susan and I went Christmas shopping one time at a mall in Knoxville. Everyone with a pulse was out doing last minute Christmas shopping. We fought and clawed our way through the mall like good little consumers, keeping our eyes always open for the perfect Christmas gift (read “sale item”).
At any rate, it only takes me about a total of four minutes of Christmas shopping to get tired of Christmas, to get tired of the tension of the holidays, to get tired of life—to get tired. As we were standing around, devising our next strategic move, we saw some children all dressed up in front of the Proffitts department store. The young boys were wearing black suits with red bow ties, and the girls were wearing light gray dresses that made them all look like young Dutch maidens. Obviously, we figured, they were a part of some group brought to the mall to entertain the hordes of admiring adults (perhaps with the underlying genius being that the cuter the children were, the more the dumbfounded adults would be inclined to buy). We soon found out that they were the boys and girls choir from a conservatory.
Susan and I, wanting an excuse to step out of the rat-race for a moment, and intrigued by this young group of vocalists, decided to stick around to hear their program. They began with a sort of classical version of the Proffitts’ theme song, “For the style of your life . . .”—which occurred to me at the time as a sort of unashamed commercialization of young talent, but what do I know? My favorite Christmas character is the Grinch. Their next song was, however, Vivaldi’s Gloria, which was beautifully performed. Susan and I looked at one another and mouthed, “Can you believe this?” Needless to say, we were thoroughly impressed.
But it was the third song that struck me, whether as incongruous, or as ironic, or simply as a commentary on our increasingly cynical society. The title indicates the melancholy nature of the song: Water under Snow Is Weary. The song was complex and haunting, but lovely nonetheless. And yet to hear a six year-old sing about how the exigencies of life can wear one down seemed to me infinitely depressing. Apparently, the song had some sort of meaning for the children because three of them yawned wearily throughout its performance.
The truth of the song rang through, however, because water under snow is weary; which is to say that for all the decorations we put up during the holidays, for all the pronouncements about peace on earth at this time of the year, for all the flash and dazzle of our Christmas celebration, the reality of pain, loneliness, and bone weariness lies beneath the surface of our lives like bows and tinsel on dead trees. Life is often maddening and always tiring—even six year-olds know that truth. And yet, it is at this time of the year (perhaps like no other) that the church has an opportunity to speak a word of hope to people who have put wrapping paper and garland over their fears and frailties. Indeed, we also have been given a message through a small child about the exigencies of life. The difference being that the message we bear to the world doesn’t have cynicism and weariness as its last word. Rather, the last word of the message we bear to the world is hope. Water under snow may be weary, but the hope we bear to the world is that what lies beneath the heart of the Christ child is grace and peace.
Upcoming Events with Our Friends at Grace and Freedom Houses
It is always a good thing when one good effort leads to another. One of the outcomes of our Shalom Suppers over the summer here at DBCC is a project which will benefit the residential treatment centers of the VOA. We will benefit as well, to be sure. - The Grace House and Freedom House are residences for women and children who are in treatment for addiction. The services and homes are services of the Volunteers of America where the rare opportunity is available to both the addicted and the children who are implicated by the addiction. Such treatment is usually available to parents without provision for the inclusion of the children. The mission of this program is compatible to the mission of DBCC and there are many ways in which we can enter.
- On November 20, the day of our Thanksgiving Dinner at the church we to share our feast with the women and children of Grace House, who were our guests. An Angel Tree has been established at the church for the benefit of Freedom and Grace houses. You can pick one off the tree in the Gathering Area.
- Additionally, an open house is being planned at Grace House for November 30, from 5:00-7:00, in which some people from DBCC will be assisting. We will take the church van for those who wish to ride. We'll plan to leave the church at 4:30.
- A clothes closet has been established at DBCC where residents may select clothing they need for themselves and their children. Karen O'Hara is coordinating this project and is receiving clothing for women and children, primarily warm clothing right now. Towels and washcloths are needed for residents at both houses.
- Eventually there may be opportunities for meal preparation and dining at one or both residences.
There are some protocols that are necessary for us to observe and the cadre of people from DBCC is learning about how we can best serve these families. If you are curious or want to become more involved, please ask about these opportunities by calling or emailing the church office. More information will be forthcoming.
- Submitted by Mary Ann Lewis