We Proclaim

We Proclaim

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 February 2024

            Now I would remind you, my siblings and friends, of the good news that I and my predecessors have proclaimed to you, which you have received, in which you also stand, through which you are also being saved, if you hold firmly to the message, for you have not believed in vain.

            This is a season for proclamation.  For the apostolic work of the church.  For us to be reminded of the good news of the gospel and for us to share that good news with the world around us.

            We live in a time when people hunger and seek after meaning.  They want to be part of something bigger, that helps them to make sense of their lives.  Something in which they can stand.

            The Anglican bishop and Bible scholar N. T. Wright has declared that the current mission of the church is to pioneer a way into a new world, in which we model a new way of being human, rooted in the love of God.  Which includes a reconstruction of how we know, not through abstract propositions, but centered, also, in love.  The church helps us to see our lives as part of a great love story, from which we draw our model of human flourishing, and the courage required for living in these days.

            One of my UCC colleagues told a story a few weeks ago at our annual conference about a young woman who, when she joined the church, asked to address the congregation.  And what she said was “Thank you for this space where my life can be bigger and more beautiful.”

            This is the good news that we proclaim.

            And the message we proclaim is a message of salvation.  We are being saved by this good news.

            The good news that God has invaded the world in order to complete the creation by defeating the forces of sin and evil and setting us free to become a new, flourishing humanity.

            That is the essence of the story of Jesus that Paul tells us here in 1 Corinthians.

            The story begins with acknowledging that we stand in need of deliverance from this world, this age.  Here’s how feminist scholar Beverly Roberts Gaventa describes the situation:

Our deep attachment to corrupt systems of measurement, our distorted quest for identity, to say nothing of the malformed relationships between men and women—all of these are more than attitudes in need of adjustment.  They are symptoms of the persistence of the “present evil age” with which the gospel collides.  No social agenda will correct the situation, and no pedagogical strategy will suffice, because the power of evil is such that it can corrupt even the purest motives and the sternest resolve.

            As Paul scholar Anthony Thiselton states, “the gospel is not a human social construction.”  So it is not wedded to any ideology or party or nationality.  It is God’s power of love at work in the world to bring about a new creation.

            Which is the essence of Paul’s proclamation, that he had received and handed on to the churches—"Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was raised on the third day . . . and appeared” to so many people, including Paul himself.

            This story is about power, it is about love, it is about vindication and liberation, it is about newness and opportunity and hope, it is about sharing in glory.  And this story is the place in which we stand, which gives us courage to keep on proclaiming.

            Gaventa writes:

First, Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death).  This means that the gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.

            God has acted  to bring about a renewal of the cosmos.  An act of compassion, grace, and love.

            And God’s “invasion” of the world, as she describes it, is not your normal human invasion.  God came to earth as a baby born to a peasant family on the far reaches of the empire.  And the man that child became led no armies and engaged in no violence.  Instead Jesus awakened the Spirit within everyone he encountered, setting them free to flourish and become who God dreamed that they could become.  He showed a new mode of human existence, and when others saw it they were amazed and desired the same thing.

            And Jesus not only didn’t use violence; he became the victim of state violence, a lynching, an innocent lamb taken to slaughter.  And in that way absorbed the violence, modeling a sacrificial and peaceful way of being.  A way to end the violence, end the war, end the oppression.

            But that death was not the end of Jesus, for God raised him from the dead, vindicating Jesus and his way of being and making clear for all time that this is the way we should live, this is what God wants, Jesus’s way  should be our way, so that all might live and all might flourish and all might share in divine glory.

            And through that Sin and Death are and will be and are being defeated.  Because we followers of Jesus have become God’s agents of new creation, being used by the Holy Spirit to bring about the common good for all humanity and all creation.

            God is reclaiming and renewing the creation for our liberation and our flourishing and our participation in glory.  Within us lies the germinative energy, as the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov calls it.  The seed from which the new creation is constantly growing.

            And this is not merely a spiritual reality we proclaim.  We proclaim a bodily resurrection.  As Michael Gorman writes, “The body is the means by which we encounter others and serve God.”  And that resurrection change is already occurring in our physical bodies as we turn them away from Sin and death and toward God and what God expects of us.

            Our bodies then bear witness to a new humanity and a renewed creation through the acts of support and service we provide one another, all humanity, and the whole creation.  We become vessels and agents of God’s love, that we talked about last week.  And I really enjoy this description of that love, appropriate for the week of St. Valentine’s Day, by Beverly Roberts Gaventa—“When Paul speaks of the ‘love of God in Christ Jesus,’ it is no sentimental valentine but a fierce love that rescues creation itself.”

            Paul proclaims this story and what it means for us as a source of power and courage and hope because it is Paul’s own story.  He has witnessed it.  He has experienced it.  And as an apostle he invites his hearers and readers to make it their story too.

            Paul himself is an example of the new creation.  He once persecuted the church, involved in the deaths of some of Jesus’ earliest followers.  A man who believed that religious zeal meant purity and dogma and even using violence to achieve your religious aims.  But all of that changed forever for Paul when, he encountered the Risen Christ.  He became a man of peace, going about the world trying his hardest to create radical egalitarian communities of mutual love.

            And so he becomes our apostle, our model of the work to which God continues to call us as a church.

            Work that we can only accomplish because of the grace of God that is with us.

            This is what Paul wants his readers to remember.  And what I too proclaim so that you too might remember and believe.  Believe the great story of which you are apart.  Believe in the power, the courage, the hope that are yours.  Because God is at work in you and through you.  God has saved you, is saving you.  Setting you free from all that enchains you, including Sin, Death, and the evils of this age.  Creating you anew, a new human being, in a renewed body, that shines in holy glory.

            This, my friends and siblings, is what we, with authority and humility and courage, proclaim.


The Greatest Gift

The Highest Gift

1 Corinthians 13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

2 February 2024

            One of the most astonishing things about newborns is that they are able to imitate the facial expressions of their caregivers.  One reason this is astonishing is that newborns have never seen their own face.  Which is evidence that newborn human babies arrive with the capacity for empathy.  They almost immediately understand that they can imitate the looks and the feelings of their adult caregivers.  And almost immediately they learn that they can use their own facial expressions and feelings to compel those caregivers to attend to their needs. 

            We are so used to these behaviors in babies that we probably haven’t taken the time to realize how astonishing it is that the newborn brain functions in this way, has these incredible skills from the beginning.

            And, of course, we now understand how important that early care-giving is.  A child who receives care, attention, touch, affection will development attachment, leading to empathy, and ultimately love.

            By one a child assumes that their mind operates similarly to the other minds they encounter.  By two or three they have developed a basic understanding of empathy, understanding that others feel similarly to them.

            And that’s when children are ready for the next stage of moral development—understanding rules—taking the way you want to be treated and extending that to everyone.  If morality only operated from empathy, then we would have a rather small sphere of ethical action.  We also have to learn how to treat people well even when we don’t feel it.  As Allison Gopnik, who had studied and taught this child development, points out, “Simply relying on immediate emotion isn’t going to work. Somehow we need to extend that emotion to people we aren’t close enough to see and touch.  We need to care about people we don’t know.”

It is so much easier to mature and grow in love if we have the grounding early in our lives of being well cared for.  From that stable base of care and affection, we can expand our moral consciousness, ever-widening the circle of concern, to the point that we can extend the ethics of love to all people.

This is the goal of the human life.

James Fowler, in his classic work Stages of Faith, writes about the levels of development we pass through as we grow and mature.  In the higher stages, we become more open to other people and other ideas and do not see them as a threat to ourselves and our beliefs.  The highest stage of human development, stage 6, he calls “universalizing faith” and claims it is quite rare, found in heroes like Gandhi, King, Mother Theresa.  These are the people who express a universal love for all humanity and are willing to sacrifice themselves for that love.  They have an openness to all people and, quite simply, appear to be, as Fowler writes, “more fully human than the rest of us.”  He believes such people embody the future which we long for.

I believe this is the sort of love Paul is praising here in First Corinthians.

He ended chapter 12 by writing that he was going to tell them about the highest gift.  This directed to the people in that congregation who felt they should be developing the “higher” gifts, out of some bent desire to feel superior to other people. 

Paul has been at pains in this letter to knock some sense into those folks.  The church is a radically egalitarian community.  No one is superior to anyone else.  In fact, the folks that seem, by normal human standards, to be less important, are in the church, MORE essential.  So no Christian should lord themselves over another or mistreat anyone who is vulnerable.  Those are affronts to the Body of Christ.

And, if you actually want to be more spiritual, to pursue the highest gifts, then you need to be pursuing this universal, unconditional love.  Because not only is that the most important gift for building up the common good of the church, it is also the goal of what the best human life is.  It’s the kind of life Jesus modeled for us and invites us to follow.

Of course, reading 1 Corinthians 13 today, one can’t help but compare and contrast with the current administration and the actions they’ve taken over the last two weeks, so many of which have been devoid of mercy and compassion.  And you’ve already felt these decisions beginning to harm your friends, your family, your own lives.

It is important for us to gather in church and hear that we have not mistaken the Christian faith, we have not misunderstood morality, we have not been fools—unconditional, universal love and its expressions in grace, mercy, and compassion are what God expects of us, are what the best human life should aim for.

But this moment also means that we have to double-down on love.  We have to continue our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation. 

So, what is God calling us to?

First, we should remember that this love talked about here isn’t a feeling.  Or isn’t just a feeling.  It is, as New Testament scholar Anthony Thiselton describes, “an attitude and habitual practice for everyday life.”

Yes, love arises for us foremost and most powerfully in feeling.  The feelings we have for our children, our spouses, our closest friends.  But mature love must expand beyond immediate feeling and begin to encompass everyone we encounter and ultimately those we never meet.

And the only way to do that is to make loving actions a part of our daily habit and routine.  Which is something you have the power to do, regardless of what’s happening on the news.  Every day you can be kind.  You can be empathetic.  You can reach out in care and concern and support to someone who is vulnerable and hurting.  You can be generous with your time or money.  You can offer to help.

Make these sorts of actions our daily habits, and we will continue to grow and develop into more loving people.

We also can’t be consumed by rage.  This week I read the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield.  My UCC colleague John Allen, who is a pastor in Maine, highly recommended the book, and now I’m passing that recommendation on to you.  It would be great book for you to read, right now.

In one early chapter she explores how appealing wrath is, but how we must learn to confront our rage with the skills of peacemaking.  I liked how she described this emotion—“wrath, in the form of self-righteous rage and contempt, is a compelling, borderline pleasurable emotion.”  Admit it, you’ve felt that.

She says wrath often helps us to avoid the fear, guilt, or overwhelm that we are actually feeling.  Wrath helps to distract us from those other negative thoughts, partly because it feels more powerful.  She also points out that wrath is addictive, like a sugar-high.  And that we can also use it to bond with other people in “our shared contempt.”

Any of that sound familiar?  Yeah.  She’s on-the-nose that that is one of the sins holding us back from experiencing the fully aliveness that God dreams for each of us. 

She is quick and careful to separate anger from wrath.  Anger can be healthy, effective, and required.  But wrath is that feeling that ultimately disconnects us from other people and from who God intends us to be.

So Oldfield invites us to engage in spiritual practices to confront our wrath so that we might grow in peacemaking, which is clearly one aspect of the love we are talking about today.

One practice she recommends is to make two lists.  One of the types of people you are most comfortable with and the other of the types of people you are least comfortable with.  And then to get really specific in writing down why.  Why one type of people makes you comfortable and another uncomfortable.  And she gives the instruction that you can’t write down an attribute of theirs, you have to make it about you.  What has happened in your experience that makes you feel that way?  What is it that you feel?  What is it that you fear?

And she points out that “if your list isn’t slightly painful, you’re probably not being honest.”

What’s the purpose of this exercise?  To better understand our feelings, particularly our fears.  And with a better understanding, then maybe we are less likely to get caught up in fight-or-flight mode.  Because when we are in fight-or-flight mode, we can’t summon empathy.  We can’t calmly stand-our-ground and speak truth in helpful ways.

Our turbulent times require more love.  We can’t just criticize the lack of it in other people.  We also have to focus on our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation.

Which we can do, because we are powerful people, filled with the Holy Spirit.

In the passage we read last week, Paul contrasted weakness with the normal ways in which humans think of and use power.  And he’s rather critical of the ways humans normally use power.  Paul writes about how God works differently, using what humans consider weakness in order to achieve God’s purposes.  And love is the most important way that God works.

Which really means that love is powerful.  Not powerful in the way humans might ordinarily think of it.  But truly powerful because that’s the way the God who created the world works.  And that’s the way God designed the world to work best.  So when humans operate from love, they tap into the deepest source of real power.

I think many of you, right now, are feeling powerless.  But you are not powerless. 

Listen to these words from the feminist theologian Meggan Watterson:

The good news . . . is that true power rests within us. . . . no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power.  Because it’s not a power over us or outside us.  It’s a power that rests within us, and we can rest in it, be led by it, and be carried by it.

            And what is this power?  You’ve guessed it already.  She answers, “It’s a power that’s the opposite of power.  It’s love.”

            Later she adds, “the love that’s hidden within each of us is the only power that can save all of us.”

            You are a beloved child of God.  You are created in love.  And you are redeemed by-and-in the love that Jesus Christ demonstrated.  A love so powerful that it defeated death and through it we have the power of resurrection.  And that you-are-risen love fills every cell of your body because you are a vessel of the Holy Spirit.  Which comforts you, advocates for you, and gives you the skills and talents you need to live well and fully.  And you’ve been called into the beloved community of the church, where you are not alone, but where your gift is shared with my gift and everyone else here’s gifts, and together those gifts are multiplied to become part of God’s mission to heal humanity.

            No one can take any of that from you.

            So here is what you are capable of:

You can be patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  You don’t insist on your own way; you aren’t irritable or resentful; you don’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoice in the truth.  You can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things.  Because the love that empowers you never ends.


10 Most Influential Thinkers

In early December, El Pais, named a list of "the 10 most influential thinkers in the world."  One of my church members sent me the link.  As I read through the article I was excited to discover that I had read nine of the ten thinkers.  And, in an amusing coincidence, the only one I hadn't read, Byung-Chul Han, that very day I had added his latest book The Spirit of Hope to my t0-read list after reading a review.  So it floated to the top of said list, and I read it shortly after, rounding out all ten on the list.

The ten are: Judith Butler, Thomas Piketty, Noam Chomsky, Jürgen Habermas, Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zižek, Byung-Chul Han, and Peter Singer.

Let me take them in the order I encountered them.

Martha Nussbaum lectured at the University of Oklahoma when I was still an undergrad philosophy major at Oklahoma Baptist University.  Her topic in that series was the emotions and how emotions have rational content.  It was some years later before I read any of her books, the first one being one she wrote on religious freedom in America (I highly recommend).  Since then I've read many of her books, and she's become one of the thinkers influential in my own thinking.  If you're a non-academic reader looking for a good place to begin, I recommend The Monarchy of Fear.  Much of her best work is on better understanding our emotions, while her justice work has focused on what capabilities all humans need in order to live well.

Jürgen Habermas was one of those names you learned in a survey of the history of philosophy for his contributions to how the public uses reason to make decisions and solve problems.  I probably first read an excerpt in my history of contemporary philosophy class as an undergrad.  While in graduate school I did read his book Justification and Application, though I really don't remember anything from it.  Last year I read volume one of his current project (he's 95 and wrapping things up), which is a history of philosophy explaining how our use of reason has emerged and developed.  

In graduate school I enrolled in one of those intersession courses where you cram a semester's worth of reading and essay writing in about two weeks.  This particular course was on the philosophy of language, using Noam Chomsky as our main text and other thinkers in dialogue with him.  I came to the course initially with a view of language acquisition that believed we start with a blank slate and have to learn everything as children.  Chomsky argued that we are born already wired with the capacity to learn language, that the slate is far from blank.  This course was one of the few times I could point to such a sudden shift of opinion on my part, brought on my reading convincing arguments of one thinker.

Peter Singer and Michael Sandel are two contemporary philosophers I first read in excerpts while in graduate school and only in the last fifteen years finally read one of their books, particularly when I was teaching philosophy myself at Creighton University.  Singer is a utilitarian ethicist who has followed his convictions to make bold statements on animal rights and alleviating the suffering of newborn humans.  In this century he was the source of what became the effective altruism movement (which was until a few years ago quite trendy) in which one determines the most good one can do with one's resources.  One outcome of this was changing how philanthropy worked, with folks maximizing the life-saving potential of their donations--anti-malaria nets, for instance, are one of the most cost effective ways.  His The Most Good You Can Do outlines this perspective.

Sandel taught a course on Justice that became the most popular course at Harvard.  He later turned it into a very good book, that surveys the major approaches to creating a just society.  The book seriously needs an updated version, as the final chapter waxes euphoric about the election of Barack Obama and all the good that portends for the country.  Sandel believes that a society must have some vision of the good life and what it means to be a flourishing person and create the institutions that will help to further these goals, if we are to achieve justice.

I read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble after I came out as a gay man and was in a period of reading queer classics in various genres and fields.  Butler's work was seminal in our contemporary understanding of gender.  Gender is culturally constructed and is performed.  She was one of the key figures in the development of queer theory then.  As gender has become a hot-button topic in recent years, Butler's old work has come under increasing fire.  She's written a newer book trying to understand what has caused all the trouble.  I haven't read that one yet, but do intend to at some point.  

I'd been hearing about Slavoj Zižek but didn't know much, when I was browsing through Powell's, the great Portland, Oregon bookstore, with my friend Dan Morrow and came across a copy of Zižek's Violence, which explores all the various ways violence and our perception of it permeates contemporary culture and economics.  Zižek is a fascinating provocateur, and much of his work as a public intellectual has been online.  A video I enjoyed using in my philosophy courses was his takedown of philanthropy.

Thomas Piketty's Capital I read during my paternity leave in 2015.  Often with sleeping newborn in one arm and the heavy economic tome in the other.  Piketty's book galvanized folks a decade ago as it explained the deep inequalities of the global economy that helped to explain what had happened in the Great Recession.  And it seems that the things Piketty warned about have only gotten worse in subsequent years.

After it was a major global bestseller, I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, but frankly didn't care for it at all.  So I've never understood his popularity or influence in how we understand human history and use that to anticipate our future.

Which brings me finally to Byung-Chul Han.  I had missed any familiarity with him until the end of this last year and have since seen a few friends commenting on him and his books.  I do plan to go back and read earlier works that I missed, but I have now read his latest book translated into English, The Spirit of Hope in which he writes about the fear that arises in our current moment of history because of all the crises we encounter.  In this period he encourages us to hope, for "It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon that reinvigorates and inspires life.  Hope presents us with a future."  


A Beautiful Ending

A Beautiful Ending

Isaiah 65:17-25

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 December 2024

            We humans long for a beautiful ending.  Not just the fairy tale happily ever after, but in the biggest and grandest sense of the idea.  We dream and long for history to arrive at a beautiful ending, whether that’s the communist utopia or the kingdom of God or a scientific techno culture that has expanded human habitation into the stars.  The historian John Jeffries Martin has revealed the ways in which this vision of a beautiful ending not only animates our religious ideas but is also embedded in our modern political ideas, which imagine a better, more just world of freedom and equality.

            This Advent we’ve been exploring the beautiful endings imagined by the Hebrew prophets.  And, in particular, how those visions of God’s redemption are rooted in the here and now, with rather ordinary, mundane visions of the good life—old people at rest, children playing, young people making merry, everyone with plenty of food to eat, where work is fulfilling and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, where the disabled are included, people feel safe and secure, where griefs are comforted, and together we joyfully celebrate with dancing and music. 

            And today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah adds to the wonderful imagery.  The poet dreams of a new heaven and a new earth.  God is about the work of new creation, and that new creation will be filled with joy and delight.  The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about this passage, “[God] is moving beyond what is troubling and unresolved to what is wondrously new and life giving.”

            And what will this newness look like?  Again it is very practical, very here and now.  God is creating a new city, a new social arrangement.  Walter Brueggemann identifies three qualities of this divinely new society. 

            First, there will be “stability and order that guarantees long life.”  In a world of violence, where lives are so often cut short by the bombs of war or a random shooter, what a blessed dream that we could be safe enough to enjoy long life free of those horrors. 

            The second quality of Isaiah’s vision is economic stability.  There will enough to go around.  Our work will not be in vain.  We will not live in fear that someone else will take what we have worked for.  Here’s how Brueggemann describes it:

[God] will be the guarantor of a viable, community-sustaining economy. . . .  Nobody is threatened.  Nobody is at risk.  Nobody is in jeopardy because the new city has policies, practices, and protective structures that guarantee . . . an egalitarian possibility.

            And the final quality of the beautiful ending Isaiah imagines—“an agenda of well-being for our children.”

            This October, Wendell Berry, the great American poet, essayist, and social critic, who is a deep person of faith and a Kentucky farmer, wrote a scathing cover article for The Christian Century entitled “Against Killing Children” in which he condemns our society for not “prevent[ing] our own children from being killed in their classrooms—and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war.”  According to Berry, we have become the exact opposite of what Isaiah envisions.  Ours is not a society that prioritizes the well-being of children.

            Yet, in the face of our troubled, disappointing reality, we return again and again to visions like Isaiah’s.  We want to imagine something new, something better.  We long for this.  We want to prepare for it.  We keep waiting and hoping for the beautiful ending.

            Advent, of course, is the season of hope.  A season of waiting and preparation.  The beautiful ending isn’t here yet, it’s still coming.  We are still longing for it.  We can imagine it, maybe even begin to taste it, but it isn’t here yet.  We’re doing what we can to prepare for it—hoping, loving each other, enjoying life, and practicing peace.  But, we are still waiting.

            And, truth be told, we keep on waiting.  For all the fun and excitement of Christmas morning, we know that when we return to normal routines next week, the world won’t have radically shifted, the beautiful ending will not have finally arrived in all its wonder.

            Which is one of the many reasons I appreciate the liturgical calendar of the church.  In the cycle of the year, our worship focuses on so many human emotions and experiences.  All of us have Good Fridays, for instance—days of deep and despairing darkness when all seems lost.  We also have Easter moments—filled with new life, the bright sunshine of a new dawn, a chance to begin again.  We face Ash Wednesdays, when we are confronted by our own limitations, our mortality, our vulnerability, our weaknesses, our sins.  But there are also Pentecost moments in our lives where we are filled with spirit, on fire with passion, capable of amazing things. 

            It’s not that every year we are in the same emotional place on the same day as the church calendar.  But all these aspects of the human condition are explored each year and over and over again, reminding us that our spirituality and our faith flow from and are present in all the varied aspects of our lives.

            Advent is that season of waiting and longing.  And sometimes what we are waiting and longing for, never quite arrives.

            On the Alban Institute blog this week I read a fine essay on the meaning of Advent.  When I shared it to the church Facebook group, a few of you responded, including one congregant who wrote, “Thanks for sharing....I'm right there.”

            The essay was by Jean Neely, who teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, and she wrote about the profound depths of this season of longing:

Advent says that there’s room in the church for all of us whose desperate faith is more doubt and longing than steadiness of belief.

Advent is for the eternally bothered, those of us who too keenly feel our own pain and the world’s. The season meets us in our inability to perform “good cheer” or “great faith” when it is not well with our souls.

In Advent, we attend to the heartache over all that has gone awry. We join our yearnings for more love in our homes, our churches and our country; we cry for peace in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan and around the globe.

            These reasons Neely articulates are why it is so important for us to observe Advent and not just rush into Christmas.  Not everyone is feeling as festive.  Each year there are people grappling with new losses and griefs who may want to be in the mood, but just can’t muster it.  Each year there are some people stressed out and made anxious by all the holiday preparations.  Each year there are some people dreading seeing family.  Each year there are some people for whom this season is always difficult, because of their memories of what has happened in the past.  Each year there are some people for whom this darkest and coldest part of the year brings on depression.  There are always folks who are more “In the Bleak Midwinter” than “Joy to the World!”  And Advent is for them.

            Jean Neely continues:

This time of year, we get to remember that we’re still in the waiting season, that though the Light has come, we’re still caught in the place of unfulfillment. It’s for all of us who never feel ready for Christmas or who feel like Christmas never quite comes in the ways we’d hoped.

Advent says that it’s OK to still be waiting through Christmas for God to show up. We’re allowed to “always always long for something.” Advent invites us to come with our fragile hope, our dimly flickering faith and our . . . longing to the Christ who welcomes all of who we are.

            The great truth of Christmas is that Christ was not born once long ago, but Christ is born anew in each of us every year, all the time.  The love, the power, the glory we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth is made available to us in our vulnerability by the Spirit of God that dwells within us. 

            God is present with us, and empowering us, even in our moments of unsatisfied and unfulfilled longing.  And because of that, we dare—despite the present circumstances and whatever might be troubling us—to gather together and lift our praises.  To sing with the angels and proclaim with the shepherds, while also pondering like Mary. 

            Because something good and wonderful and beautiful and true is happening.  In us, in others, in the world.  And we continue to hope for more of it to break out and spread and bring the change we so desire.  And we continue to practice peace, even if this world is violent.  And we continue to love, because that’s the greatest gift of all.  And we rejoice, because joy is our birthright as children of God.

            So, we do all of this together—we wait, we dream, we imagine, we lament and mourn and grieve, we wonder and prepare, we light the candles and ponder the darkness, we sit quietly and we make merry together.  We do all of it.  Because we continue to long for the beautiful ending, and our eyes are open to see all the little bits of it already present among us.

            A Happy Fourth Sunday of Advent.

A Blessed Solstice.

And, a Merry Christmas.


The Spirit of Hope

The Spirit of HopeThe Spirit of Hope by Byung-Chul Han
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

He was recently listed by El Pais as one of the top ten intellectuals in the world. And, he was the only one on the list I had not read. But, ironically, the day before I had put this book on my to read list after seeing it in an end-of-year best-of list.

I really enjoyed the beginning and the idea of hope as "searching movement." There are definitely sentences I'll be quoting in sermons in years ahead.

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At That Time

At That Time

Jeremiah 31:1-14

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

15 December 2024

            Earlier this week, the Rev. Becky McNeil, who used to attend our church here but now lives happily in retirement in Trinidad, Colorado, posted to Facebook a column John Pavlovitz had written for his blog on the negative mental health impacts of staying up with the news these days.  Pavlovitz begins:

Growing up, I was taught that knowledge was power.

I used to agree.

Now, I'm beginning to believe differently.

Now, I think it's a pain in the ass.

Right now, knowing is actually the problem.

            He continues detailing his daily stress from reading the news, before concluding, “I think responsible people of empathy are suffering from information-poisoning right now.”  And in that environment, he’s finding it more difficult to be hopeful.

            I was on a panel this week of queer clergy persons speaking to a diversity training at the Omaha Chamber of Commerce and the organizer’s last question to us was “What is something that makes you hopeful right now?”  It took us a moment to arrive at good answers.  So, I understand Pavlovitz’s feeling.  A feeling that’s likely pretty widespread.

            But while he admits that being aware is affecting his mental health, he also knows that trying to exist in blissful ignorance is not the solution.  That choice, while protecting ones mental health in the short-term, only contributes to the long-term problems facing society. 

            Instead, he decides:

If there's a way forward, it isn't in knowing less, and so I'll keep reading and learning, while trying to be wise in how and when I absorb the news so I can minimize how much turmoil it creates within me. We all need to selectively expose ourselves to media, having the discipline and restraint to know the difference between awareness and self-harm. There are ways to be blissful without being ignorant, and we all need to seek that balance.

            Which isn’t some grand insight, genius solution, but probably the best answer one can give.

            So, why bring this up today of all days—Gaudete Sunday, our annual excuse to be gaudy on the Sunday of the liturgical calendar devoted to joy?

            Well, the short answer is that if we are to find any comfort in joy, if our sorrows are to be turned into joy, as the prophet Jeremiah imagines, then we have to first start by acknowledging our current circumstances and the things that are troubling us.

            This is the great insight of the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, who writes in his classic little book The Prophetic Imagination that before the prophet can lead us into imagining a new and better world, the prophet first has to speak the truth about what’s going on and invite us to lament for our sorrows.

            And in this way the prophet works counter to what Brueggemann calls the “royal-consciousness.”  According to Brueggemann the ruling authorities generally don’t want people to lament their current circumstances, and so they often keep them distracted with other things.  Roman emperors used gladiatorial contests for this.  Lots of rulers throughout history have distracted people from their own failures at governance by starting a war somewhere.  These days in the West sometimes the distractions are far easier, coming in the form of easily consumed, saccharine popular culture. 

            The point of these distractions is to numb people.  Brueggemann writes that the prophet must break through the numbness and get people to genuinely feel.  The prophet must bring to public attention what is troubling people, the real fears and sorrows of the time.

            And no prophet is better about that than Jeremiah.  Today’s beautiful vision of the redeemed future is actually not a typical passage from the Book of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah is most often sad, angry, even bitter.  Brueggemann describes it as a “ministry of articulated grief.”  When you read this book, you feel the deep emotions of the prophet.  Which is exactly what the prophet wants to evoke in you.

            Only when the prophet can break through the numbness and get us to genuinely feel, can we then begin to imagine something new.

            I think this partially explains the cultural experience this country has gone through the last two weeks after the assassination of the United Health Care CEO.  The moment shattered the status quo and broke through the numbness.  People have used this opportunity to express their real anger and hurt from the way health care is managed in this country.  They employed sarcasm and dark humor to great effect.  And the more elites scolded people for not having the “right” reaction to the murder, the more upset people got.  This should become a moment then to address the real issues that have been revealed—the epidemic of gun violence, the injustices of the health care system, the feeling of masses of people in this country that they are not heard or seen and that the system is rigged against them. 

            For Walter Brueggemann, the lesson of the prophets is that newness only comes through weeping.  He writes, “The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.”

            This vision of the prophet of Jeremiah that we read today is part of a section of Jeremiah called by scholars “the Book of Consolation.”  After all the grief, sadness, anger, and bitterness of earlier parts of Jeremiah, now the prophet turns to consoling.  And what a beautiful vision it is.

            Terence Fretheim, another great Bible scholar who was one of Jim Harmon’s seminary professors, describes this passage:

The return to everyday life of the village, with its familiar tasks and joys, are given special attention.  God is imaged as a loving, nurturing parent (both as father and mother), comforting those who sorrow and caring for the needs of a bruised community.  It is as if God is finally able to get back to doing what God has always wanted to do for this people.

            Our Advent series this year is focusing on an aspect of the vision of God’s deliverance that we find in the Hebrew prophets—it’s everdayness in the here and now.  When the Hebrew prophets imagine what God’s redemption of the people will look like, it is not a militaristic triumph.  It is not a powerful hero leading the people into a new golden age.  It is not some impossible to believe utopia.  It’s radicality is in how mundane the visions are.  Such as last week in the passage we read from Zechariah where he imagines old folks sitting in the public square and children being free and safe to play.

            What does Jeremiah imagine that God’s steadfast love and deliverance will bring the people?  That they’ll go dancing with their tambourines.  That they’ll plant vineyards and get to enjoy the fruit of their labor.  That the children and the disabled will be gathered together.  That people will join together in singing over the harvest.  That young people will make merry with one another.  That priests will be able to eat enough to get fat.  But most importantly, sorrows will be consoled.  After the tears will come the joy.

            What is being imagined is a new creation, built on God’s love for the people.  And one that invites the people themselves to participate in what is being created and built.  Terence Fretheim proclaims: “Their lives will become like a watered garden, flourishing and fruitful, and they will never (!) languish again.” 

            Now, to return to Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the prophetic imagination.  After the prophet has broken through the numbness and gotten people to feel, then they can finally move toward something new.  Brueggemann calls this “prophetic energizing and the emergence of amazement.” 

            He writes, “It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.”

            The ruling regime wants to inhibit the imagination from dreaming of new, different, better things.  The prophet wants to expand our horizons and get us dreaming, imagining, envisioning all sorts of ways that everything can be better.

            What if guns weren’t so easy to get?  What if young men were formed in different ways that helped them avoid turning their anger into violence?  What if we didn’t have a for-profit health care system?  What if people could receive the care they need without all the forms, phone calls, and bureaucratic headaches that pile on the stress and despair?  Are any of these really that difficult to imagine? 

            Here’s Brueggemann again, “The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.”

            What breaks through the despair and provides us hope, according to Brueggemann, is “the language of amazement.” 

            And here, I think, is the purpose that these joyful visions of ordinary life serve.  We can imagine these worlds—where the old folks have a chance to rest, where public spaces are safe, peaceful, and beautiful, where children have the freedom to play, where abundance is shared more equitably, where people receive the care they need when they are hurting, in pain and despair, where youth can make merry with one another, where people sing and dance because they are happy, where we can do the work we find meaningful and enjoy the fruits of that labor, where we all come together to celebrate the achievements of our community.  

            These are not impossible to imagine.  That such a world feels impossible is a result of how we’ve been distracted and numbed and trained to limit our vision for what is possible.

            But what’s best about these visions of ordinary life is that they are joyful.  They’re just . . . fun.  God invites us to have fun.  To enjoy ourselves.  To enjoy each other.  To enjoy our blessings.  This isn’t rocket science.  We ought to be living lives of delight. 

            Do not let fear, anger, the bad news rob us of what we deserve as God’s children—JOY!


Left is not Woke

Left Is Not WokeLeft Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've often returned to Neiman's Evil in Modern Philosophy and so was intrigued when I saw this new publication. In it Neiman stands up for four values of the left--universalism, justice, progress, and doubt--against their critics, especially those on the left itself who critique these values. It's a good read to help us philosophically understand our moment.

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Some Homiletical Nerdery

I really enjoyed the writing of today's sermon "Awe's Purpose."

We were completing an autumn sermon series on Awe using Dacher Keltner's book.  In it he discusses eight "wonders of life," and today was the final one--epiphanies.  He emphasizes the power of awe to reveal to us knowledge of fundamental truths about the interconnectedness of the world.

With that buzzing in my mind, I read two columns this week that ended up framing my sermon.  The first was last week's piece by Ross Douthat on how the election reveals ways in which the world has changed, particularly that there is no longer any mainstream mechanism for setting the terms of the debate, and so more wild and extreme ideas are now a part of the conversation.  This set up the idea that truth is contested and institutions (like the church) are no longer trusted to help govern such debates.

The second was an essay in The Christian Century about Reign of Christ Sunday, which this is in the liturgical calendar.  Part of its meaning to defend truth that transcends nationalism, racism, etc. in this age of lies.

So, I used the sermon to establish an epistemology to respond to the challenge posed by Trump's election, according to Douthat's analysis.  Establishing an idea of what truth is and how we get to it (through awe & wonder and the spiritual practices that contribute to them).