Previous month:
May 2021
Next month:
July 2021

June 2021

New Realities

New Realities

Malachi 4:1-3

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

27 June 2021

            This summer our worship theme is “Restore.”  We are ourselves living through a season of restoration, as many aspects of our lives return after more than a year of distance and isolation.  We are also doing new things and creating a new normal, both restoring and transforming the lives we once had and the lessons we learned during the worst of the pandemic.

            And that pandemic along with the reckoning for racial justice, violence in our streets, the tumultuous election, the attempted insurrection, and more have left a collective trauma upon us and really every person in the world.  How do we heal and grow from these experiences we’ve been through?

            To explore these concerns, we’ve turned to stories in the Hebrew scriptures about the return from exile of the Jewish people as they worked through their collective trauma and tried to restore their society, their culture, their religious faith.  Our reading has opened up insights on the emotions and resilience and courage.  But also some lessons in what not to do, especially the tendency of traumatized people to hurt others.

            Today, we read a passage from the Book of Malachi, and I want to use it as a launching pad to explore the importance of imagining and enacting new realities as part of the process of healing.  Hear now the word of the Lord:

Malachi 4:1-3

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.  You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.  And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

For the Word of God in scripture,

For the Word of God within us,

For the Word of God among us,

Thanks be to God.

 

            This oracle of the prophet invites the people, invites us, to use our imaginations.  Let’s imagine a day burning like an oven—no stretch for us who have endured some awful heat the last month.  On this day, God’s justice will arrive.  The wicked and the evildoers will meet their just rewards.  And the righteous will go out leaping because a new day has dawned, bringing healing.

            Don’t you like the image “the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings”?  We can picture it.  Even sing about it.  It’s an evocative image of newness, hope, possibility.

            And this imagining of a new, good, joyful reality is what I want to focus on today, as we continue to explore the theme of Restore.

            One of the best books I’ve read on trauma and healing is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk.  There was a point this last winter when in a few weeks four different people mentioned the book in conversation, so I finally thought, “I’d better read that.”  And it is a thorough, informative look at the way trauma affects our bodies and various approaches to healing.

            In the early chapters of the book, Van Der Kolk explains what research has revealed about trauma and its impacts on our minds and bodies.  That research has shown how dramatically it can affect us, reorienting our minds and deeply impacting our ability to live well.  He writes,

We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.  This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.

            Van Der Kolk then goes on to explain further,

Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions.  It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.

            In detail in the book, he discusses these impacts and how a traumatized person can begin to view everything in their reality through the lens of the negative experience.  And how this can damage their relationships and sense of well-being.

            Brain research has shown how trauma physically impacts the brain.  He writes, “We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive.”

            One of my favorite quotes to use, that has often shaped my preaching and ministry, comes from St. Irenaeus—“The glory of God is a humanity fully alive.”  Another is our Reformed teaching that the chief end of humanity is to “glorify God, and to enjoy God forever.” 

            To live fully, with enjoyment and glory, to be our best selves—these are central ideas in Christian theology and in my own approach to ministry. 

            But the research on trauma studies shows how difficult that can be for people who have experienced real trauma, those who suffer from various forms of PTSD.  Or those who have been traumatized by poverty, injustice, and oppression.  Plus, all of us experience less debilitating forms through grief, depression, illness, loss, or the even the world events of the last year and a half. 

            And so we face a spiritual challenge.  To develop resilience, to hope, to heal, to rise up again.

            This brief passage from the Book of Malachi contains one of the ways we do that—through imagining and then living into new realities.

            Here’s what Bessel Van Der Kolk writes about the importance of imagination:

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives.  Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting.  Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true.  It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.

            Since trauma compromises the ability to imagine, it can have devastating effects on our well-being and our enjoyment of life.  So, part of healing from trauma is learning to imagine again.  For imagining, over time, can actually heal the brain.

            But if our ability to imagine is compromised, how do we start to imagine new realities? 

            Another book I’ve read recently on healing from trauma, by Mark Wolynn, emphasizes the importance of having new experiences and how practicing those new experiences slowly retrains the brain.

            How many of you were a nervous the last few months the first time you were in a crowd, or went to a restaurant, or took your mask off around other people?  Yet once we did those sorts of things, we became a little less nervous and took bigger steps. 

            Wolynn emphasizes the value of new experiences that “engage our sense of curiosity and wonder.”  Also those that bring “comfort or support, or feeling compassion or gratitude.”  He writes,

On a neurophysiological level, each time we practice having the beneficial experience, we’re pulling engagement away from our brain’s trauma response center, and bringing engagement to the other areas of our brain, specifically to our prefrontal cortex, where we can integrate the new experience and neuroplastic change can occur.

            So, we begin to rewrite the brain as we have these new positive experiences that help us to imagine new realities.

            Last week I had a most marvelous experience.  I drove back home to Miami, Oklahoma for their first ever Pride Festival.  Miami, Oklahoma—my birthplace and hometown and the place four generations of my family lived—has a population around 12,000 and is located in the northeastern corner of the state.  I was thoroughly shocked about a month ago when someone sent me a Facebook post about their upcoming Pride Festival in Riverview Park.  At first I donated some money to the effort, but pretty quickly realized that young Scotty Jones would not forgive grown up Scott if he didn’t go to this event.

            Riverview Park, where the Festival was held, was the site of so many events in my childhood and adolescence—family reunions, church picnics, Independence Day fireworks, and more.  But here I was, in this place of such rich memory, watching drag queens perform and trans kids march. 

            Hundreds of people showed up.  There were twenty or more vendors.  A large area for crafts.  Bouncey houses for kids.  Food trucks.  And a performance stage that ran all afternoon.  I sat on my lawn chair in the shade with one of my high school teachers and everyone who stopped by said, “Did you ever imagine this would happen?”  And the answer was, of course, “No.”  But here it was.

            Someone did imagine it.  And they then made it real.  And here, in an unlikely place, a new reality came into being.

            And I’ve watched this week on the Facebook group organized around the event as parents have posted pictures of bringing their queer kids to this, their first ever Pride, and what a good and affirming and welcoming experience those kids had.  In Riverview Park in Miami, Oklahoma.

Mark Wolynn does give us some particulars about what we need in order to imagine new realities.  He writes,

We will need sentences, rituals, practices, or exercises to help us forge a new inner image.

            Aha!  Worship!  Church!  Prayer!  Spiritual practice!  We already come equipped with tools of hope and healing.  We can sing a hymn like “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,” and that singing, that physical act of our bodies, helps to rewire our brains.  Or we read passages from ancient scripture that invite us to imagine “the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings” and something happens in our prefrontal cortex that helps us to develop courage and strength. 

            And so this place becomes a sanctuary, where we are safe and comforted.  In this space, we hear and say and sing good words.  We see beautiful images.  We encounter encouraging, smiling faces.  And we begin to imagine, and our brains begin to change, and our bodies begin to relax, and new realities begin to emerge, and healing is possible.

            I return to Bessel Van Der Kolk, who writes that for people to heal, they need to have experiences “rooted in safety, mastery, delight, and connection.” 

            Then, he adds, “to be welcomed into a world where people delight in them, protect them, meet their needs, and make you feel at home.”

            I experienced that last week in Miami, Oklahoma—when home felt even more welcoming. 

            And I experience that here every week—a place of comfort, support, and delight.  Where God brings healing as we make this home a new reality.


Upheavals of Thought

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of EmotionsUpheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha C. Nussbaum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For the last month I have been engrossed in this over 700 page treatise on the emotions. And it is a brilliant masterpiece. I've read so many of Nussbaum's books but hadn't ever ventured this major work until this spring as I'm dealing with my own emotional turmoil around my divorce. It seemed a perfect time to connect my academic interest with personal need.

And what a great fit this book was. Despite it's intellectual rigor it is a an eloquent, emotional, engaging read. A true literary work, which few philosophical masterpieces achieve. One only wishes that this was more widely read.

View all my reviews

Danger!

Danger

Ezra 7:25-28

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

20 June 2021

            Last week we read from the book of the prophet Haggai as he encouraged the people to finish rebuilding the Temple after they had returned to Judea from exile in Babylon.  This week we get the story of the priest and scribe Ezra.  Some decades after the Temple was rededicated, Ezra was commissioned by a new Persian king to lead yet another band of exiles back to Judea in order to purify religious practice.  Our text today begins with part of the proclamation of the Persian king Artaxerxes and concludes with Ezra’s own recorded thoughts on this commission.  Hear now the word of the Lord:

Ezra 7:25-28

“And you, Ezra, according to the God-given wisdom you possess, appoint magistrates and judges who may judge all the people in the province Beyond the River who know the laws of your God; and you shall teach those who do not know them.  All who will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, let judgment be strictly executed on them, whether for death or for banishment or for confiscation of their goods or for imprisonment.”

Blessed be the Lord, the God of our ancestors, who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king to glorify the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, and who extended to me steadfast love before the king and his counselors, and before all the king’s mighty officers.  I took courage, for the hand of the Lord my God was upon me, and I gathered leaders from Israel to go up with me.

For the Word of God in scripture,

For the Word of God within us,

For the Word of God among us,

Thanks be to God.

 

 

            When the Babylonians conquered Judah, they took the elite members of society as hostages back to Babylon.  They left a remnant of Jews in the land, mostly poor peasants.  Some of those people eventually left Judea and traveled to Egypt and formed a new Jewish community there in the town of Elephantine, where they even constructed a Temple.  And so for a couple of generations there were at least three different Jewish communities—the old elite living in Babylon, the peasants left in Judea, and the group of refugees who’d traveled to Egypt.  And each developed independently their own understanding of the faith and culture. 

            What comes down to us in the Old Testament is primarily the faith and culture developed by the exiles in Babylon.  We know about the Jewish community in Egypt because of modern archaeological discoveries.  The Egyptian Jews seem to have developed a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan culture and faith.  While the Babylonian Jews formed a more tight-knit community centered on the written word.  It is the Babylonian Jews who finally wrote down and edited and treasured the texts that later formed the canon of Hebrew Scriptures and gave birth to Judaism as it’s been known through the millennia.

            When the exiles in Babylon returned to Judea, they encountered people who had lived in the land throughout that time but they didn’t recognize them as Jews.  These poor peasants continued to practice the faith and culture that had been handed down to them, but they had missed out on the developments of the faith that had occurred among the exiles.  Plus, they had learned to live with the other people around them, including marrying and having children.  The returning exiles viewed the remnant in the land as practicing an impure, unfaithful version of the faith. 

            But for the first generation or so that didn’t matter too much.  The focus of the first returnees was on restoring some sort of society and rebuilding Jerusalem. 

            So, after the Temple had been rebuilt, Ezra, who was a priest and scribe living in Babylon determined that he should organize a group to return to Judea and institute proper worship.  He received the backing of King Artaxerxes for his effort.  He organized a group of priests and Levites and had them prepare themselves for a spiritual mission.  They viewed themselves as a new Exodus.

            And when they got to Jerusalem, they were shocked by what they encountered.  The faith and culture were not pure.  It was not focused sufficiently on the Hebrew Torah that had been written down while in exile.  Even the earlier returnees had grown laxer in their practice and had begun to intermingle with the non-exiles and foreigners. 

            Ezra, using the authority he had received from the Persian emperor, set out to rectify the situation.  To educate people about the true faith.  To impose proper rituals upon the Temple worship.  And to rid society of its foreign elements.

            And right about here, if not before, you should be sensing the danger of what’s to come.  For Ezra is one of the most complicated figures in our religious heritage.  On the one hand, Ezra is largely responsible for the Hebrew text we are able to read today.  He and his scribes valued the written word.  They accumulated, preserved, and edited the texts that had been written down before them.   And they wrote much of it themselves.  If we are “people of the Book” it is because we are spiritual descendants of Ezra.

            And of course this accomplishment, centering the Hebrew faith upon written text, moral commands, and religious practices, gave birth to Judaism as a faith that has survived the millennia, despite much war, violence, persecution, and being spread around the globe.  Of all the ancient cultures of the near east, it is the one people group whose literature and faith survives into the modern day.  And Ezra is a key figure in that story of survival.

            But, Ezra is also something of a fundamentalist.  Unlike the prophet Haggai who we read last week, Ezra’s was not a universal vision.  Both visions are present in the Hebrew Scriptures.  One tradition inclusive of diversity and another that is not, but is exclusive, focused on purity.  Ezra falls within that second group.  He wanted to purify the faith and the people and to exclude all the elements which posed a danger to the long-term survival of the Jewish people.

            And so what Ezra did is he required that all the returned exiles, including those who had already been living in Judea before he returned, to divorce their non-exile wives and set aside their children from those marriages.  So any wives who were foreigners or any wives from the old remnant of people who had lived in the land.  The returning exiles were only able to remain legally married to other returned exiles. 

            On one day he gathered all the people together and all the men were compelled to take this action.  The wives and the children were set aside and disinherited.  And no surviving texts record for us what happened to them.

            This is one of the truly terrifying stories contained within our Bible.  Even if we work to understand it, it horrifies us.  As it should.

            We get that this was a traumatized people, trying to do something new and move on from their trauma.  And research shows how fears of the other can manifest themselves in traumatized people.  I talked two Sundays ago, when we started this summer worship series, that these ancient forebears didn’t always succeed at creating something better.  Sometimes they failed and created more trauma.  And this is the clearest example of the ways in which a traumatized people can traumatize others.  So it’s important that we rumble with these stories in order to learn.  And in this instance what we learn is what not to do.  Not to focus on purity in a way that excludes and leads to division and violence.

            Back in the winter Katie introduced us, via Zoom, to one of her professors Rachel Mikva who talked to us about her book Dangerous Religious Ideas.   This is an excellent book, that I highly recommend.  We still have some copies in the church office too, if you’d like to purchase one.

            In the book Mikva explores how key religious ideas can be good, vital, and helpful to our spirituality, yet also have dark sides that can be exploited in ways that lead to harm.  She explores these ideas in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Ultimately she is focused on how all of us can and should develop a self-critical faith, so that we can handle these dangerous ideas.

            The two dangerous ideas she spends most of the book on are scripture and chosenness.  Ezra is a key figure in both of these ideas.

            Why is scripture a dangerous idea?  She writes, “As long as there is scripture, people will wield the word as a weapon against each other in order to justify their own biases.  As long as there is scripture, we have to reckon with the painful silences of those voices left out of the canon.  As long as there is scripture, some people will turn their back on other God-given ways of knowing.”

            Having myself grown up in a tradition that was overtaken by fundamentalists who insisted on the inerrant and infallible word of God and that their interpretations were the authoritative and correct ones to the exclusion of all others, I know how dangerous scripture can be.  The Bible can become a weapon.  And as a gay may I’ve been clobbered by fundamentalists abusing scripture.

            Scripture doesn’t have to be this way, of course.  We can have a critical faith, that weeds out what is terrifying and unethical, and treasures what is good and just and loving.  Scripture inspires us to be our best, helps us to make sense of the world, comforts our sorrows, shapes a community with a mission to others. 

            So, I’m grateful for those teachers and professors and scholars who early in my life helped me to understand the dangers of mishandling scripture and how to embrace a more open and vital faith.

            It is easier for us to see how the religious idea of chosenness can be dangerous.  As Mikva writes, even the Hebrew prophets saw and warned about “complacency, chauvinism, and parochialism” that can result.  And we’ve seen throughout history how campaigns for purity lead quickly from exclusion to violence. 

            So, is there any good side to chosenness?  Over the centuries Judaism came to understand the idea of being “God’s chosen people” not that they had some special identity separate from other nations, but that they were given a responsibility to bring peace and healing to the world. 

            Which is closer to Haggai’s vision, not Ezra’s.

            What should we learn, then, from reading a text like the Book of Ezra?  I think rumbling with our stories can teach us what not to do as much as it can what to do.  Reading this story invites us to empathize with the characters we encounter.  What horror did the divorced wives and children experience?  What were the feelings of the men forced to divorce their wives and cut off their kids?  Can we even get into the mind of Ezra and understand what might lead someone to do such an awful thing? 

            As we try to empathize and understand a story like this, we learn and grow our emotional capacity, and we develop a self-critical faith.  Which we can then apply to our own lives and situations.  And maybe develop ethical principles to guide us in considering the hot button issues of our time, like how to treat transgender children or migrants at the border.

            As we are engaged in our own season of restoration and transformation, let’s beware of the dangers that lie ahead even during this season.  Let’s not be tempted into the paths revealed in this story.  But let’s instead be inspired by the universal, inclusive, compassionate vision we also find in scripture.  So that we might lay a foundation for a better future for all.


Take Courage

Take Courage

Haggai 2:1-5

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

13 June 2021

            In her latest best-selling memoir Untamed, Glennon Doyle writes about “the cost of living a brave, openhearted life.”

            She writes,

            I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming.  If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths.  My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself.  The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be.  I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new.  I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank.  I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther.  Again and again and then again.  Until the final death and rebirth.  Right up until then.

            Glennon Doyle rose to fame first as an evangelical mommy blogger and memoirist who developed a large following of readers, primarily other evangelical moms.  Over time she organized her audience into a massive philanthropy.  And she kept evolving.  Four years ago, I was surprised that she was one of the keynote speakers of our United Church of Christ General Synod.  At the time I’d never heard of her, not falling into the evangelical mommy demographic myself.

            But by then Glennon had radically altered her life.  She had divorced her husband, fallen in love with and married the soccer great Aby Wambaugh, left evangelicalism and joined Naples UCC (which is pastored by my friend Dawson Taylor), and awoken to social justice activism.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed her talk at General Synod and then heard her again at the Iowa Conference meeting in 2018. 

            This latest memoir recounts how she so radically transformed her life and the spiritual and emotional resources she drew upon to live a brave, openhearted, untamed life. 

            She claims that transformation is always on-going and that we must develop the ability to courageously let go of the past in order to move openly into the future.  This work is not easy either spiritually or emotionally.  But wholehearted living is the result of overcoming our fears and living courageously.

            The prophet Haggai proclaims in his oracle that the people are to take courage and not fear.  They are to be strong, but it is an emotional and not a physical strength that is called for.  What they need is spiritual courage to complete the task of rebuilding the Temple.  And the prophet is the one encouraging them with vision, hope, and inspiration.  [A note: my interpretation of this passage relies heavily upon the commentary by Carol and Eric Meyers.]

            Last week we read the proclamation of the Persian emperor Cyrus allowing the Jewish people to return to Judea and to rebuild Jerusalem.  But now a number of years have passed and the restoration has not yet been accomplished.  Now under a new Persian emperor, Darius, and a new Jewish governor, Zerubbabel, the work is renewed, largely at the instigation of Haggai and his oracles of encouragement.

            When the people returned to Jerusalem they faced many challenges—rebuilding a society, providing for themselves, acquiring resources, fending off opponents, and more.  The rebuilding of the Temple had started but not been completed.  And so Haggai, much like the old prophets before him, receives a word from God that he then proclaims to the people.  And this is a call to take up the work again, to rebuild the temple, and to see it to completion.

            And it seems that Haggai was successful.  Because of his preaching, the rebuilding began anew and it was completed in a short time and the new Temple was dedicated.  Some scholars believe that the written book of Haggai which we have today was prepared for the dedication ceremony and was read aloud as a reminder to the people of who and what had inspired them to do the work.

            Part of the task of the prophets was to help people comprehend their experiences, including the suffering and trauma they had encountered.  And then to help them to face the challenging tasks of restoration.  In order to do that, Haggai had to ease their uncertainty, help to clarify their world, and then provide hope.  From this the people would develop the emotional strength to carry on this work. 

            The passage I read a moment ago from the Book of Haggai most scholars believe came a few months into the work on the Temple, when people began to see what they were building and began to have doubts and to lose their energy and focus.  The purpose of this oracle was to inspire them to keep at the task, to renew their energy.

            And so Haggai raises a question.  It seems that as the people have watched the new Temple arise from the ruins of the old one that they’ve begun to question its glory.  Surely the new Temple does not match the glory of the old Temple built by Solomon.

            Now, at first glance this seems to be about a physical comparison.  That some in the crowd believe that this new building isn’t as grand and beautiful as the old one.  But we would misunderstand this proclamation if we understood the question this way. 

            The fact is, it is very unlikely that anyone physically present at this rebuilding of the Temple would have seen and remembered the old one.  It had been almost 70 years since the old Temple was burned.  And life expectancies in this era, especially of a traumatized, exiled people, were not that long.  Almost two full generations, according to the ancient reckoning, had passed.  So maybe the workers’ grandparents had seen the Temple?

            What’s more, almost none of those grandparents would have seen anything but the exterior.  Only the priests could enter the Temple building and only the High Priest into the Holy of Holies.  Even the old Temple of Solomon was rather plain on the outside.  The ornamentation and the gold, silver, and bronze embellishments were mostly on the inside.  So, any physical comparison is highly unlikely, except that maybe the people have read about the original Temple and what they see rising around them doesn’t fit the description?

            It’s also the case that by the time the Babylonians burned the Temple, much of its treasures were long gone, stolen by various other invading armies over the centuries.  So even before the conquest of Jerusalem, the Temple had long not been as glorious as what the ancient historians recorded at the time of Solomon.

            So, what might the people have in mind if they were grumbling about it not matching a former glory?  Carol and Eric Meyers, in their commentary, point out that the people would remember that the old Temple had been a part of the royal complex of Jerusalem.  It had been imagined by King David and built by his son Solomon.  Their royal descendants maintained the Temple.  And stories of kings are often connected with the Temple, like the restoration of the Temple in the reign of the boy king Josiah.

            What is different this time is that Judea has no king.  No king is building this Temple, the people are.  No king has conquered other territories and is bringing back their riches to adorn the Temple.  There aren’t the great trade alliances of the past, by which goods and artisans arrive in the city to help with construction.  The new Temple, then doesn’t reflect the royal and national glory that the people once had.  They are not independent, they are ruled by a vast empire headquartered far away, and they are but a small and lowly piece of a much larger puzzle. 

            And, so, the challenge for the prophet Haggai is to inspire the people to find glory in a new way.  Not in the old ways of the kingdom.  In fact, Haggai has already engaged in a bold act of people-making.  He has already inspired and organized the people to do something that they once relied upon a monarch to do.  They are building the Temple. 

            Haggai is forming a new national identity, centered not on a monarch or a political structure, but around religious faith and moral demands.  A new Jewish identity focused on God.  And as such, Haggai is vital to the develop of Judaism throughout the millennia, helping to turn it from only the faith of a small ethnic group, into a global faith focused on religious practice and moral living.

            Haggai had a universal vision.  He basically tells the people—“If you build it, they will come.”  He believes that once the Temple is built, God will use it as an instrument to bring the world together in peace and abundance.  The Temple will become the center not of a new, small nation, but of an international community of peace.

            And God will bring this about.  Because God is not only the sovereign of the Jewish people but is the divine ruler of all.  No matter how good, wise, and benevolent the Persian emperors Cyrus and Darius are, God’s rule is even better.  Here is how the Meyerses describe this idea in their commentary on the passage:

The well-being for which the [Jews] yearn will become available to them, but not only to them.  In the future time, when other nations recognize [God’s] universal rule, those nations too will achieve well-being.  The power of [God] as universal ruler will not be exploitative.  In contrast to human emperors, [God] will establish universal plenty.

            It is this vision that Haggai says the Temple represents, not a restoration of what had once been, but a transformation into something new, bold, and wonderful.  So, take courage,  people, for God is doing something new here and you get to be a part.

            To help us take courage against our fears, Glennon Doyle shares one of her mantras, that she finds particularly helpful in parenting her children.  She tells them, “This is a hard thing to do.  We can do hard things.” 

            Haggai is saying something similar to his people.  And I think it’s a powerful message for us.  In the midst of fear and uncertainty, when we too face the crises of life, we can keep our vision focused on restoration and transformation and take the courageous action necessary to rebuild and renew. 

            Because God is with us.  God’s Spirit fills us with divine power and divine glory.  This presence is the source of our courage.

            So, we too can do hard things.


Go Up

Go Up

2 Chronicles 36:22-23

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

6 June 2021

Let’s back up.

A generation before this moment we just read about, the armies of the Babylonian Empire, under the infamous King Nebuchadnezzar, invaded the Kingdom of Judah, conquered it’s people, and took control of Jerusalem.  The Babylonians took the Jewish King Jeconiah hostage and along with a significant portion of the nation’s elite, carried them away into exile. into the Babylonian heartland of Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq. 

Nebuchadnezzar appointed a puppet government over Judea.  Eventually the puppet king Zedekiah rebelled and the Babylonian armies returned.  After a long siege of the city of Jerusalem, the Babylonians defeated the Jews.  Then they tore down the city walls, burned the Temple, executed the king’s family, blinded him and carried him off to prison where he died.  More people were taken to Babylon, and only a small, poor remnant of people remained in the land, which was reduced to a province of the great empire.

Meanwhile, in exile in Babylon, Jewish culture seized the moment of trauma and in a bold act of resilience their culture thrived.  Ezekiel had visions of the bones of the defeated Jews being brought back to life by God’s Spirit.  He imagined a new temple, restored and glorious.  The poet Second Isaiah dreamed of a day when all the nations of the world would stream to a new Jerusalem, a city of peace. 

Poets, songwriters, historians, religious scholars, prophets all began to dream and to tell stories and to write.  They looked back on the ancient stories of Abraham’s journeys, of the Exodus from Egypt, of David’s establishment of the kingdom.  And in those stories they found hope and tools to survive and ideas for the future. 

And they waited for the day when they might return again to the land and rebuild their society and worship God in freedom.

In rather shocking, quick order that day came.  Babylon, the once great empire that had commanded most of the near east, collapsed quickly before the armies of the Persian emperor Cyrus.  Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian kings, was so disliked by his own people, that they did welcome the Persians.

And Cyrus was something of a messianic figure, honored as such even by the Book of Isaiah.  For Cyrus took a different approach than the empire builders before him.  The old Assyrian Empire had built itself through ethnic cleansing and genocide.  When they conquered a nation, they removed most of its people and spread them through the empire and moved new people into the homes and cities of the defeated nations.  In doing so they wiped from history many of the ancient peoples, including the northern kingdom of Israel and its lost ten tribes.  The Babylonians were not quite as fierce, but kept something of the same idea in their kidnapping of a country’s elites.

But Cyrus, he and the Persians took a different approach.  They respected the diversity of their empire’s peoples, their cultures and faiths.  They left people groups intact and allowed them to continue their religious practices and granted some autonomy in how they organized themselves.  And, so, one way Cyrus gained favor over his new subjects was to allow those who were in exile to return to their homelands and re-establish themselves.  And, thus, the Hebrew Scriptures honor Cyrus as an agent of God, creating the opportunity for the people to return home.

And so, after a generation, they were able to Go up to Jerusalem once again.  But the Jews of Babylon didn’t all rush to return.  In fact, they never all left.  The Jewish community of Babylon and eventually Baghdad was one of the centers of Jewish intellectual life well into the Middle Ages and a remnant of that community remained well into the modern age. 

The first group to return to Judea was led by Shesh-bazzar and probably included the bravest, the most daring, and those with little to lose.  It took many years and multiple waves of return under Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah before the new Jerusalem and the new Judea began to take shape.  It is this story of restoration which we explore this summer in our worship.

A few years ago we followed the first part of this story—the conquests of Israel and Judah, the people being led into Exile, the formation of a new people through resilience after trauma.  At the time we always intended to tell the second part of the story, and this year seems fitting, as we too have gone through our own collective traumas with the global pandemic, the racial uprising and reckoning, the insurrection.  We are also in a time of restoration, taking our first stumbles out into a new normal, some of us with eager fascination and some with great anxiety and trepidation.  All of this while the dangers are still present, and we aren’t quite sure what the new normal will look like.  Or whether our society will muster the political and cultural will to heal and rebuild and restore, creating something better than what we’ve known before.  So, we turn to these ancient stories looking for tools and ideas and spiritual connection.

Healing from trauma begins with the ability to tell our story and have it listened to by a compassionate person.  And so the stories of ancient Judea are their attempts at this process of healing and resilience. 

According to Serene Jones, healing from trauma involves three stages—first, establishing our safety; secondly, remembering and mourning; and finally, reconnecting with ordinary life.   We will encounter each of these in the ancient stories.  And all of us have been moving through those stages, and we are at different places along the journey.

One of the more popular writers and spiritual guides of our time is Brené Brown.  In her bestselling book Rising Strong she writes about how we go up again.  She says, “Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are.”  She says that it is this process which tests our courage and forges our values.

In her research, Brown has identified a three stage process involved in rising strong from a fall.  It begins with a reckoning, particularly a reckoning with our emotions.  She writes, “Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave.” 

This first step can be a difficult and tricky process, because we have so often been trained to suppress or ignore our emotions.  Which is why often this work requires professional help. 

This stage also involves listening to our bodies, which teach us so much about what we are feeling.  Even when we are trying to ignore an emotion, it will often manifest itself as an ache or a pain within our bodies.  Being aware of our physicality and the ways our bodies keep the score, is an important part of emotional maturity and wholehearted living.

As we read these stories this summer, listen for the ways they deal with emotions.  Today’s brief passage, for instance, exults with joy and celebration.  Let’s also be aware of our own emotions and pay attention to our bodies and what they are telling us, as we begin to move into this new normal.

According to Brown, the second stage of the rising strong process is to rumble with our stories.  Here’s what she says about that fun word “rumble”—“By rumble, I mean they get honest about the stories they’ve made up about their struggles and they are willing to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives as they dig into topics such as boundaries, shame, blame, resentment, heartbreak, generosity, and forgiveness.”

So, step two isn’t easy either!  Learning to rumble well with topics like shame and resentment and forgiveness can take a lifetime of spiritual work.  In another of her books, she writes, “When we have the courage to walk into our story and own it, we get to write the ending.  And when we don’t own our stories of failure, setbacks, and hurts—they own us.”  So, yes, it’s not easy work, but it is vital work.

And remember: we are beloved children of God, with amazing minds and souls, empowered by the Holy Spirit, filled with amazing grace, and radiant with glory.  We are capable of growing into our best selves.

Our ancient forebears had to do the serious spiritual work of rumbling with their stories.  They didn’t always succeed at creating something better, as we will see.  Sometimes they failed and created more trauma.  Let’s learn from that as we rumble with our stories.

The final stage of the rising strong process, according to Brené Brown, is the revolution.  She describes it as writing “a new ending to our story based on the key learnings from our rumble.”  And that we then “use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead.”

And it is this ability to rise strong from failure that leads to wholehearted lives.

That’s our goal, isn’t it?  How to rise up from our pandemic experience better, whole, joyful, and glorious?

            In ancient Babylon a few, brave, intrepid souls heard the call of God in the proclamation of the emperor Cyrus to “Go up.”  They traveled to a place that required vision and hard work if it was to be transformed and restored. 

            In our own lives, may we too rise strong and hear God’s call to go up, to be restored, to become our best selves.