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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.


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.


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!


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).


Awe's Purpose

Awe’s Purpose

Isaiah 60:1-5a

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

24 November 2024

            So, many of you have probably been reading articles, columns, and essays analyzing the recent election and what it means.  Everything from analyses of the polls to much deeper pieces claiming things like the end of the neo-liberal era have been all over the place.  The conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had a piece last weekend in which he claimed that the election was the clearest sign that the era we had been living in is over and a new one has begun.  He wrote,

probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.  A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.

            Instead, he pointed out,

All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.

            The consensus that has existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union is now over and political, social, and cultural debates will range over a much wider set of options and possibilities.  And there’s something else that’s new about this time we live in.  Douthat writes,

even the wilder influences are here to stay, because there is no cultural forcing mechanism to make the radical and reactionary go away . . . or to establish a zone of respectability and marginalize everything else.

That’s because we are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate.

            Douthat summarized this as “We’re experiencing a more radical kind of informational fracture.”

            I’ve been pondering what this analysis, if true, means for the Mainline Protestant Christian Church and the institutions and practices we’ve spent centuries building. 

            But today I’m going to talk about how this relates to the purpose of awe, as we wrap up our autumn series on the topic, with the eighth and final “wonder of life” as identified by the psychologist Dacher Keltner.  These are the eight ways that humans across the globe and in myriad cultures and religions experience awe.  We’ve examined nature, music, art, mysticism, etc. and today we come to epiphanies.  Ever had an epiphany that left you in awe?

            Here’s how Keltner describes the physical experience we humans have when we are in awe.  Read excerpt page 249.

            And that process in our bodies results in a shift in our thinking and feeling.  Keltner writes, “Awe shifts our minds from a more reductionistic mode of seeing things in terms of separateness and independence to a view of phenomena as interrelating and dependent.”  He continues, “Awe enables us to see that life is a process, that all endless forms most beautiful are deeply interconnected, and involve change, transformation, impermanence, and death.”

            In other words, the very experience of awe, including its seven other forms we’ve already talked about, generates epiphanies.  Awe and wonder lead to us seeing things in new ways.  Opening our minds to new things.  Transforming the ways we think and feel and interact with the world.

            Awe, he teaches, “is about knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths.”  We gain self-knowledge in moments of awe.  And we gain knowledge about the world and how it works.

            The fundamental epiphany that Keltner declares results from an exploration of awe—our interconnectedness with all of reality and the ways we depend upon those larger systems.

            This is how he finally answers the question, what is the purpose of this emotion?  What is the purpose of awe?  He answers, “Awe integrates us into the systems of life—communities, collectives, the natural environment, and forms of culture, such as music, art, religion, and our mind’s efforts to make sense of all its webs of ideas.  The epiphany of awe is that its experience connects our individual selves with the vast forces of life.”

            One of my favorite 21st century books of philosophy is Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought.  A fascinating discussion of the ideas of Frederick Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, John Rawls, and others, and what we can learn about evil and the struggle against it from their writings.

            For Neiman, the problem of evil is not just the classic religious problem of how evil exists if God is good and powerful.  Rather, she believes the existence of evil is a challenge and a threat for all belief systems that try to make sense of the world.  Even more a of challenge for those belief systems based on reason than those based on religion.

            She writes, “When the world is not as it should be, we begin to ask why.”  That’s the origin of the problem.  She adds, “We proceed on the assumption that the true and the good, and just possibly the beautiful, coincide.  Where they do not, we demand an account.”

            And nowhere is that human demand more obvious than in children when they cry out, “That’s not fair.”  Or when they won’t quit asking questions, trying to understand.  Neiman states it well—“The adamant child who wants every question answered expresses something about the nature of reason.”  She adds, “In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.”

            This fundamental human insistence on understanding and fairness is what drives us to keep on.  When the world doesn’t make sense, we don’t resign ourselves to hopelessness and despair and give up.  We have the power to fashion human relations and culture that do make more sense than what we currently have.  And in that childhood demand we get a sense of the ideals we are aspiring too.

            Part of what kids awaken us to is awe and wonder.  And those are vital to the project of overcoming evil and making the world a better, fairer, more rational place.  Here’s how Neiman puts it, “We experience wonder in the moments when we see the world is as it ought to be.”

            Maybe the greatest thing about our experiences of awe is that they show us the world we desire—one that is good and beautiful and rich with meaning.  Our experiences of awe teach us what we yet may create.

            So for Neiman, wonder is an essential tool in overcoming evil.

            The theologian Kevin Hector, in his book Christianity as a Way of Life, elevates the crucial importance of the spiritual practice of paying attention.  He writes, “At the most basic level, to practice attention is to loosen the grip of our preconceptions in order to see a particular object in all its particularity and, so, to let our mind be filled with that object’s peculiar reality.” 

Think of all those great Mary Oliver poems that do this—paying attention to a rock, a turtle, wild geese, the waves on the shore.  Or the current wave of anti-trans actions, which surely stem from a failure of paying attention—of paying attention to trans persons in their particularly.  Paying attention is vitally important to our spiritual and social well-being.

            But Kevin Hector adds that attention by itself is not sufficient for the Christian way of life.  Attention trains us to see the world as abundant with the blessings of God our Creator, but we have to take a further step.  We can’t only attend to the thing in front of us, we must also wonder about it.  Wonder leads to appreciation.  When we wonder, he writes, we must linger in that wonder, “let it sink in, and just so, to do justice to whatever wondrous thing we have beheld.”

            And in this way attention, leading to awe and wonder, teaches us something.  In other words, an epiphany.  What does it teach?  Hector answers that we will get better at contemplating God because we’ve gotten better at seeing God’s glory in everything around us.

            Today is Reign of Christ Sunday.  Originally “Christ the King Sunday” before we Christians made the wise choice to listen to women and alter our language and practice, and thus take one tiny step toward a better, fairer world. 

            A great essay this week in The Christian Century by T. Denise Anderson told the origin of this liturgical day:

In 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast day of the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. To understand why he did this, we should consider what was happening in the world at the time. That year, Adolf Hitler had just published the first volume of Mein Kampf, which detailed his descent into antisemitism and his sinister designs for world domination. . . .  A year later, more than 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington to demand, among other things, immigration restrictions based on race and nationality. With membership of over 5 million at the time, the Klan was the largest fraternal organization in the United States. . . . The world was still navigating the aftermath of the Great War, and there was growing nationalist sentiment around the globe. Pius wanted to counter what he perceived to be unhealthy nationalism and increased secularism. He called the church to declare Christ’s kingship over all creation. The Christian’s first allegiance is therefore to Christ, whatever the nation of their citizenship. Regardless of where in the world Christians live, they should be guided by their values as followers of Christ, over and above national movements or cultural ethics.

            Anderson then draws on why this liturgical celebration is important in 2024.  She writes, sounding somewhat like Ross Douthat, “In a world in which misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories abound, the truth is not always obvious. The lies are often so much louder, more insistent, and definitely more abrasive.”  She adds, “The truth is anathema in this age, probably because it’s easier (and often more profitable) to deal in lies. Lies concentrate power among the few, while the truth disperses it among the many.”

            What, then, are Christians to do?  If we truly live under the reign of Christ?  Here is Anderson’s answer.  Which I think is our Christian response to the world we live in as seen by Douthat in his essay.  And an answer we can get to because of what we learn in our moments of awe.  Which means this answer may be the purpose of our own exploration of awe this autumn.  So, let me conclude with her words:

When we love our neighbor as ourselves, when we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, and when we care for the afflicted and stand up for the oppressed, then we abide in truth and count ourselves as citizens of Jesus’ unique kingdom. The lie is fear. Scarcity narratives that stoke the fear that we don’t have enough, when scripture assures us God knows and intends to provide for our needs, are lies. The fear that siblings with different or no citizenship papers would all seek to do us harm affronts God’s truth that commands us to welcome the stranger among us. Fear is a lie. Love is truth.

A recommitment to truth in these times is in order for everyone, but especially for Jesus’ church.


Self-Transcendence

Self-Transcendence

Isaiah 6:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

17 November 2024

            In their book The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, the scientists David Yaden and Andrew Newberg describe the Awe Experience Scale which is used to measure spiritual experiences.  These experiences are measured according to these six different aspects:

  • Vastness—the feeling that we are in the presence of something grand
  • Accommodation—we struggle to take it all in
  • Time—which feels like it is slowing down
  • A feeling that the sense of self has diminished
  • Feeling connected to everything, and finally
  • The physiological responses like goosebumps and chills

I’m going to venture a guess that probably none of us sitting here have had the type of mystical vision described by the prophet Isaiah?  But I am guessing that we have had spiritual experiences that check all the criteria on that scale.  What are your most profound, moving, and memorable spiritual experiences?

The next wonder of life in our autumn series is mystical awe.  We’ve talked about various other types of awe—arising from nature, music, art, and the beauty of moral character.  And while each of those has had what we might call a spiritual component, we haven’t explicitly gotten to spiritual and religious experiences until today. 

Religion has another connection with awe.  As Dacher Keltner points out, our religious and spiritual teachings and practices themselves arose from some person’s awe experience.  Our beliefs and rituals are themselves archives of ancient experiences of awe.

Yaden and Newberg identify that these religious experiences generally contain a feeling of unity with God, nature, the universe, or other people.  And some sense of transcending or losing the self, the ego.

Mystical experiences are the most extreme version of what are a variety of self-transcendent experiences.  Psychologists also list mindfulness, flow, awe, and peak experiences as other common human moments of self-transcendence that fall short of the most vivid mystical experiences.

In his classic study of mysticism, the father of American psychology William James, described them has having four qualities—ineffable (that we can’t adequately describe our experience to others), a noetic quality (meaning that we’ve gained some sort of knowledge or revelation—like Isaiah and his vision), third, that these experiences are transient, not lasting long, and finally that we are passive in these moments, that they come upon us from the outside.

More recent empirical studies have revealed similar but differing qualities.  A 2015 study of mystical experiences, for instance, found that they include a feeling of unity with ultimate reality, being overwhelmed with positive emotions in a form of ecstasy, losing our sense of space and time, and, finally, James’s idea that we cannot adequately describe the experience.

But even if these experiences are difficult to describe to others, that generally hasn’t stopped people from trying.  Prophets, poets, and all sorts of religious practitioners have talked about and written about these types of experiences.

For example, the journalist Michael Pollan in his book on psychedelics—How to Change Your Mind—describes the loss of the ego he experienced on one of his trips:  Read excerpt from pages 263-4.

Pollan, who is not a religious person, takes this loss of the ego as the defining characteristic of the spiritual.  That spiritual experiences are precisely those that “arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced.” 

And this, he takes, is a good thing.  The ego so often gets in our way with its negative self-talk and its limited perspective on the world—what he calls “a measly trickle of consciousness.”  Spirituality is what opens us up to see and feel and experience more than what our ego limits us to.

And the neuroscience seems to back that up.  MRI studies have demonstrated that when a spiritual experience is being had, the brain’s default mode network (the source of our ego and sense of self) is quiet.  Leading Pollan to conclude that “the mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network.”

The psychologist Mark Leary reports more of what neuroscience has taught us about religious experiences.  He writes, Read excerpt from page 160.

 

So the latest science affirms what religions have long taught—that the ego gets in the way of us achieving enlightenment and experiencing the fullness of God.  Western religions have traditionally focused on how we can control and change the self, while Eastern religions have focused more on quieting or losing the self.  A great example of the latter is Zen Buddhism where the goal is go to through every moment of life, no matter what we are doing “with full and complete attention and no self-commentary.”

Mark Leary, in his book The Curse of the Self, explores all the ways that our egos hold us back and limit us.  So religions have devised ways to control, overcome, and quiet the self.  Regarding mystics, he writes that they “aim to obtain direct knowledge or first-hand experience of reality without the use of thoughts or reasoning.”  And they do that by turning of self-reflection.  When they do, “they experience a world that is somewhat different from the one they experience in their ordinary state of consciousness.”

What do mystics report?  That they experience the universe as a unified whole.  Often they feel that they have merged with God.  Time becomes irrelevant, as if one has escaped from it.  They are usually flooded with positive emotions, reporting feeling peace, love, and joy. 

So, the pay off to these spiritual experiences, to these moments of awe is the loss of personal identity, the ego, the sense of self.  Mark Leary describes the “nonegoic person.”  Read excerpt from 196-7.

That sounds to me like the best description of the kind of spiritual growth and development we ought aspire to.  Leary is quick to admit that none of us, even the most spiritually mature, function at that level of well-being at all times in every moment.  But it remains the ideal, the inspiration, the goal of our spiritual lives.

This wonder of life, mystical awe, provides us insight on how to transcend our self, quiet our ego, and grow in spiritual and emotional maturity.  Most of us are unlikely to have a profound mystical vision like the prophet Isaiah, but we can cultivate the daily spiritual, religious, and emotional practices that open us to awe and help us to transcend the self.

And the easiest way to start is to pay attention.  Which is a point I’ve made every single Sunday.  Learning to live with more attention to ourselves and each other and the wonders of the world around us is maybe the easiest and most important spiritual practice we can engage in.  Cassidy Hall, in her new book Queering Contemplation writes that “Attention is the undistracted self, willing to truly look, deeply understand, and release attachment to moments before or after what is present.”

This week I can’t give you the assignment to go out and have a mystical vision. (But if you do, please tell me about it!)  But I can encourage you to pay attention, to cultivate you awareness.  And thereby to quiet the ego and begin to transcend the self.


Sacred Geometries

Sacred Geometries

Proverbs 8:22-9:6

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

10 November 2024

In the mountains of southeastern Turkey lies the archaeological site Göbekli Tepe.  A Neolithic site around 11,000 years old and maybe the oldest example of monumental human architecture that’s been discovered.  UNESCO describes it as follows: “this property presents monumental round-oval and rectangular megalithic structures erected by hunter-gatherers . . . . These monuments were probably used in connection with rituals, most likely of a funerary nature.”

The first excavator of Göbekli Tepe, Klaus Schmidt, called it “the world’s first temple,” an idea later dismissed.  But it is still a site that stuns, to think of hunter-gathers, at the dawn of the age when human settlements began, were already erecting monumental structures that would persist for thousands of years. 

In her book, Reality is Broken, the video game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal describes Göbekli Tepe:

[which]  features an intricate series of passageways that would lead visitors through the dark to a cross-shaped inner sanctum, almost like a labyrinth.  This particular architecture seems designed intentionally to trigger interest and curiosity, alongside a kind of trembling wonder.  What would be around the next corner?  Where would the path take them?

            And McGonigal draws upon some research in Smithsonian Magazine that suggests that instead of complex, settled human societies giving birth to monumental architecture, that maybe it was the reverse that happened.  Humans first came together to build monumental architecture and the effort involved in doing that gave birth to settled, complex human societies.  McGonigal draws the conclusion that these works “actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed.”

            Whatever could have inspired neolithic hunter-gatherers to build monumental megalithic structures?  McGonigal believes it was the human need for awe, which she describes as “the single most overwhelming and gratifying positive emotion we can feel.”  We are drawn to awe because it makes us feel so good and also because it provides us a “potential source of meaning,” to be a part of something larger than ourselves, a collective human action.

            She writes that humans need and desire “epic environments” that she defines as “vast, interactive spaces that provoke feelings of curiosity and wonder.”  These epic environments then make space for epic projects, the massive, cooperative tasks of humanity that are carried out over the long-haul.  And these then become part of the epic stories that we tell to connect ourselves to something much bigger than ourselves.

            These ideas resonate with what Susan Sink writes about today’s scripture lesson, in which Wisdom builds herself a house.  Sink writes, “Wisdom is with us and beyond us, accessible to humans in the world around us but also greater than our minds can grasp.”  We build ourselves epic, awe-inspiring spaces to inspire us to wisdom, to become part of epic projects, that bring us adventure and meaning.

            The next wonder of life that psychologist Dacher Keltner discusses in his global study on awe is the awe we experience from visual design—designs in nature and of human creation in art, architecture, movies, and even video games. 

            He writes that “there is transcendent, even spiritual, feeling found in seeing the deep geometric structures of the world.”  Think of the fractal shapes of a nautilus shell or the complexities of a dandelion puff.  Have you ever found yourself staring at the intricate shape inside the bloom of a flower?

            Keltner opens his chapter on visual awe by describing the first time seeing that scene in Jurassic Park when the brontosaurus appears.  And then the shot pans out to the valley filled with dinosaurs.  Remember how thirty years ago we had never seen CGI like that before?  The awe was multi-layered, right?  Awe at the artistic and technical wonder that went into creating the film.  Plus the awe of being transported for the first time into what it might actually feel like to encounter such massive beasts.  A few years ago when I rewatched the film with Sebastian, I was amazed at how well that moment holds up over time.  It still brought me chills and goosebumps and absolute delight.

            Keltner draws upon the work of philosopher Iris Murdoch and proclaims that good art allows us to delight in what is excellent while also giving us “a new way of seeing the world.”  Such moments of visual awe allow us to transcend our selfishness and join “with others in an appreciation of what is meaningful and live-giving.”  He summarizes these ideas by declaring “In good art, there are so many opportunities to reach the highest part of the soul.”

            I hope you’ve been to the newly reopened Joslyn Museum.  If not, you really should.  The new building is a marvel of design and sacred geometries, while also allowing us to see the old building in fresh and new ways.  Much less the art, including so much new art, that graces the exhibition spaces.  I’ve been three times already, and there’s one particular room in the Schraeger collection that I find to be a meditative, spiritual space.  The walls covered in abstract paintings, mostly fields of color.  The response it elicits in me reminds me of visiting the Rothko Chapel in Houston.  Another place you should visit if you ever get the chance.

            According to the latest science of awe, viewing excellent and beautiful visual designs and art stimulates the dopamine network in the brain leading to greater wonder, increased creativity, more inspiration, improved problem-solving abilities, and “openness to others’ perspectives.”  As Keltner writes, “Art empowers our saintly tendencies.”

            While working on this sermon, I thought back to Holy Week 2019 when the cathedral of Notre Dame burned in that catastrophic fire, compelling a global grief.  At the time I talked about how the Gothic architecture pioneered in the cathedral and the art and music it inspired were ancestors of our own sanctuary and the music and art of our worship. 

            So many read deeper meanings into the destruction of the cathedral. 

            John Pavlovitz blogged, “Watching the flames swallowing up such a universally beloved testament to the staggering creativity that humanity is capable of, we recognize how tethered to each other we are, how fragile and fleeting everything here is—and how starved for beauty we all are these days.”

            Historian of religion Jean-François Colosimo described the scene as ‘images of the end of the world’ that communicated ‘the extreme fragility of our situation.’”

            The art critic Jonathan Jones wrote:

A cathedral can endure the loss of its stained glass and other fineries . . . .  It’s precisely this endurance that makes medieval architecture so special. Almost a thousand years after its original creation Notre Dame still speaks to us. Like cave paintings, it connects us with some primal aesthetic urge. Now our time faces a challenge. . . . If we can reawaken the creativity this building embodies it will be a great moment of artistic renewal . . .

            And it seems that that renewal is underway.  The Paris Olympics this summer gave us glimpses into the grand and glorious work that is being done.

            Another thing John Pavlovitz wrote at time was this: “We all belong to one another.  The more we remember that, the more beauty we will make together in this place.  And the world needs beauty now more than ever.”

            Wisdom reminds us that we are part of something far larger than ourselves.  Something bigger than the times in which we live.  An on-going human project that spans the aeons. 

            We are invited to be a part of that collective project.  Enjoying the awe and wonder and helping to create it and maintain it, for the good of all.  For the beauty we crave is the beauty that can touch our souls deeply, inspiring our imaginations, leading to transformation.

            Let me close, for the second time this autumn, with the invitation that Divine Wisdom offers to us:

Wisdom has built her house;
she has hewn her seven pillars.

She has slaughtered her animals,
she has mixed her wine,

she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls,
she calls from the highest places in the town . . .
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”


The Wonder of Communion

The Wonder of Communion

Proverbs 9:1-6

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

6 October 2024

            Often when I’ve been in a group of clergy persons who are relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, we’ll get to laughing about our experiences in church and sooner or later we’ll get around to the genre of the funny communion stories.  Because for every minister something funny has happened to them during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. 

            One of my staple stories in this genre comes from a youth Sunday in the first church I served.  Four middle schoolers were helping with communion, holding the elements.  Derek had one of the half loaves of bread.  In this congregation actual loaves were used and when people came forward they were to rip their own piece of bread off of the loaf and then dip it in the cup for intinction.

            Now, Derek was at that point in a middle school boy’s life where everything adult and serious was amusing.  But he was trying his best to do this job well.   Which is relevant to the story.

            That’s when one of our older gentlemen, Bill, came forward.  Now, Bill was a retired math teacher.  He was often very serious and very proper.  Which is also relevant to the story.

            Bill reached for the loaf of bread, and when he tried to tear a piece of the crust, he failed to do so, at which point he muttered, “Damn!”

            And that’s when I knew poor Derek was going to lose it.  He turned beet red as he exerted all his will power and focus to contain the giggle that was trying to burst forth from him.  To Derek’s credit, he held it in, never erupting in laughter.

            Another of my funny communion stories is from here, my very first Sunday.  I was standing here in the center aisle serving the bread to everyone as they came by.  And for many folks, it was the first time they’d met me.  Which was the case for John and Dorothy Hill.  Dorothy was a retired minister, using a walker to get around at that time.  And John, her husband, was and is a character (he’s our oldest living member). 

            Dorothy was hurrying down the aisle toward me as fast as a person in a walker can move, clearly excited to meet me, her face beaming with that broad and bright smile she had. 

            And, then, suddenly, John, who was behind her, started chanting.  You know how someone who is losing their hearing often speaks far louder than they realize they are?  That seemed to be what was happening in the moment.

            And what John was chanting was “Boomer Sooner,” the University of Oklahoma fight song.  Loud enough for pretty much everyone to hear.  And then, when he got even closer, he kinda hollered, “We are Sooners too!”

            There’s another genre of communion story besides the funny one.  There’s the profound and moving kind.

            One time, while pastoring my church in Oklahoma City, I received an email from someone who had visited the church the day before.  With overwhelming gratitude they expressed their thanks to me that their daughter had been able to receive communion at our church the day before.

            Of course she had.  We were a UCC church and practiced an inclusive and open communion.  For our part, such a thing seemed routine and normal.

            But not for that family.  Their daughter had a severe disability and was unable to speak.  This parent explained to me how in their previous church the pastor had forbidden the daughter from taking communion because she was incapable of professing Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  Because she couldn’t actually say those words out loud for another person to hear, she wasn’t welcome in the full communion of the Christian church according to that pastor.

            After my candidating weekend here at First Central in May of 2010, my weekly clergy group back in Oklahoma City asked me about this congregation.  I said, “Let me tell you this one thing, and it will reveal all you need to know.” 

            And I told them about how Grant Switzer, who was then just a kid, not even quite in the youth group yet, brought forward a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to place on the communion table as an expression of this congregation’s food pantry and ministries to feed the hungry in the wider community.  And that was (and still is) Grant’s role every month.

            My colleagues all agreed that that alone revealed this place to be a real good church.

            “Communion is concerned with the ethics of our shared life and always has been,” wrote the longtime UCC pastor and educator Mary Luti.  The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is “a practice that produces just and courageous lives.”  She continues, “By the power of the Spirit, participation in the sacrament is meant to shape us collectively into a body that behaves in a distinctive way in the world: a body that looks, sounds, thinks, speaks, and acts like Communion, doing in the world what we do at our tables whenever we ‘do this.’”

            Mary Luti currently seems to be on a quest to get us in the UCC to think more deeply about how and why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  She has a new book published by our denomination’s press entitled Do This: Communion for Just and Courageous Living, and she’s speaking about the topic.  I got to hear her in January when she was the keynote speaker for the UCC Senior Minister’s annual gathering.  And her topic was the ethical imperatives embedded in the sacraments of baptism and communion. 

            She began her talk on communion exploring what has recently become dogma within the progressive wing of the American church—an open communion at which everyone is welcome.

            She said, our “invitations to communion . . . make it emphatically clear that everyone is

welcome, and no one will be turned away. As you know, these welcomes are not warm fuzzies,

but acts of justice, extended takedowns of every possible barrier that sin and shame construct:

Come if you’re this; come even if you’re that. Jesus welcomed everyone to his table; even

deniers, betrayers, and abandoners. You come, too.”

            She explains why we have done this: “the unfencing of the table stems from our current intuition about the profound difference it makes to human wholeness to have a seat there. We’ve reached a consensus that communion is the sacrament of inclusion. Christ’s love is a great feast, abundant, unconditional, and for all.”

            But then Mary Luti pointed out that this is a recent development and wildly at odds with the longstanding practice of Christianity.  She said,

It wasn’t long ago that every church fenced the table—you had to belong to this denomination, or this congregation, or at least be baptized. You couldn’t be a notorious sinner or hold incorrect theological beliefs. You had to be old enough to understand what it’s all about. To extend a fully un-boundaried welcome is a complete break with past ecclesial norms. The universal church has never witnessed, much less countenanced, the kind of openness that is now characteristic of many progressive Protestant churches in the West.

            She doesn’t point this out in order to judge our current practice.  In fact, she’s quite clear that our current practice is working, that we’ve hit upon something vitally important  She said, “Unfencing the table is in part a response to the weaponizing of past sacramental practice, perceived to separate, subordinate, punish, correct, and demean. And it’s proving itself by its fruits: we all know someone who’s been healed by graceful and emphatic invitations from the table.”

            Yes, like the family with the young disabled woman I told you about.  Or Judy, who was one of my church members in Oklahoma City.  A lesbian who had long felt ostracized by Christianity before finding Cathedral of Hope.  Judy, despite having been in that church for years by the time I pastored there, still cried every Sunday during communion.  They were tears of joy that she had found a place where she was welcomed and accepted just as she was.

            What Mary Luti wants us to remember and to think deeply about is how new and radical our open and inclusive communion is.  She also warns us not to get consumed with righteous indignation and moral self-satisfaction about it.  Not to become the mirror image of what we are reacting to.

            She also had a few points of critique of much current practice, and she used those to illuminate further some of the ethical implications of communion.

            For example, so often in our liturgies we talk about Jesus welcoming everyone to the table and so we do too.  I’ve used language like that.  Probably most UCC pastors have.  But here’s something Mary Luti points out:

I find only three instances in scripture when Jesus could be said to host a meal—the improvised feeding of the multitudes; the for-members only Last Supper at a borrowed table; and the post-resurrection breakfast on the beach for a handful of his dearest disciples.  Other than those instances, Jesus doesn’t host, and he never does so at his own table. He doesn’t have a table. He’s always at someone else’s. Pharisees and tax collectors throw dinners for him. Peter’s mother feeds him. And Martha in Bethany. Jesus doesn’t invite: he gets invited.

            What might it mean if we remind ourselves that Jesus isn’t a host, but a guest?

            Mary Luti thinks it will remind us of the same.  We aren’t the hosts of this meal, this table.  We are also all guests.

            These are her words:

So when we say we welcome everyone to our table because Jesus welcomed everyone to his, we’re on shaky evidentiary ground. Which isn’t meant to be clever, pedantic, or picky; much less is it to argue for exclusion or undercut the practice of radical welcome. But it does suggest that the ethical challenge communion poses may not lie so much in Jesus having been such an all-inclusive host, but in his having been such a willing, modest guest.

If our churches are not yet as inclusive as we hope, it’s not for lack of inviting. But it might be, at least in part, because we’ve mistaken ourselves for the Giver of the Feast. We’ve embraced the host’s role. But we’re not hosts. We’re guests among guests. We may have arrived earlier than the others, but that doesn’t give us proprietary rights over the hall. And if we think or act as if it does, we haven’t yet pondered deeply enough the Mercy by which we all got in here in the first place.

            So, if we aren’t the hosts at the communion table, but only the guests who arrived before others have, then how does that realization shape us differently? 

            She answers, “One of the ethical imperatives embedded in the act of eucharistic welcome is to relinquish any sense of entitlement we might have to be welcomers; to cease welcoming others as if there’s such a thing as ‘others;’ and to learn to be good guests, amazed as good guests always are at how generous and good the Giver of the Feast is to us, and to all.”

            She continues, “If we take seriously Communion’s ethics of guesthood, it could shape not only what we do in the church, but also our posture in the world. A communionized Body would gratefully accept the invitation of others, find comfort and strength at other people’s tables, respect their manners, sample their food, nourish itself with their fellowship, and cherish their gifts and graces. And when such a communionized Body does welcome the world to its own table, it would do so in amazement, in thanksgiving, on its knees.”

            One of my clergy friends, who was also at this same event where Mary Luti reminded us of the ethical imperatives of baptism, was traveling this last week from Chicago, where she had spent the weekend preaching and teaching at another friend’s church, to Cleveland for a meeting of the Stillspeaking Writer’s Group at the UCC national headquarters.  She realized that her drive would take her through Springfield, Ohio around lunchtime.  So, she made sure to go to a Haitian restaurant.  And in her broken French she ordered her lunch.   That’s an example of living out the ethical imperatives that we Christians learn at the communion table.

            Mary Luti taught us that the ethical imperatives of the Eucharist are many.  She only covered a few and I’ve got even less time today than she did at our conference.  So I’ve only highlighted a couple.  We could talk also of the truth-telling we learn from this ritual, what it teaches us about remembering, the hope and perseverance that sustain us in this meal, how we learn to share and to feed others, and what resilience and joy we draw from it (some of which was captured in today’s contemporary reading).

            Communion should evoke our wonder and inspire our imaginations to think and feel more deeply about what God is doing in this moment.  What God is showing us.  What we are to learn and how we are to be shaped so that we might more fully live God’s goodness in the world.

            As Holy Wisdom declares in today’s scripture lesson:

Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”


Wild Awe

Wild Awe

Psalm 104

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

29 September 2024

            Once again, I asked on Facebook about where and when you have experienced awe in nature, and the list included hiking in the mountains, Niagara Falls, Denali, the Grand Canyon, the turquoise blue of the Aegean Sea, or closer to home like the Nebraska Sandhills or the Ponca Hills north of Omaha.

            Rick Brenneman, still a church member, though he lives in Texas, wrote about two trips to Africa as a zoologist:

I think my moments of greatest awe were on my first two trips to Africa. Early on my first trip we drove through the entrance to Hells Gate National Park and looked down into the valley at many clusters of various species all calmly coexisting. The second was when we first arrived at the Namib Desert, driving to the top of one of the magnificent dunes and seeing miles of dunes before the Skeleton Coast.

            Those sights sound sublime.  But we don’t have to travel around the world, we can find natural awe in our everyday environment, as Jim Harmon reminded us when he wrote about his daily hikes through the Loess Hills where he lives.  He wrote, “I have awe overload from nature.”  If you like to hike, you should definitely arrange to go on one of those walks with Jim. 

            I turned this week to a few writers and their descriptions of wild awe.  For example, the opening lines to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

            All it took was a gentle breeze in the countryside to evoke rapture in the poet.

            Closer to home, Nebraska’s own Loren Eiseley wrote beautifully about wild awe in so many of his essays.  Probably his most vivid description is about one time floating in the Platte River:

Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off.  The sky wheeled over me.  For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent.  It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward.  Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in the dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea.  I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion.

            Such wonder just from floating in a Nebraska river.

            As psychologist Dacher Keltner states in today’s contemporary reading, it’s difficult to imagine anything better you can do for your mind and body than to go outside and delight in nature’s beauty.  Such experiences can reduce inflammation, improve our immune responses, and help to address chronic diseases like depression, anxiety, heart disease, and autoimmune disorders.  It also helps with loneliness and despair.  He writes that awe is pretty much the antithesis to the stressors that affect us.  The stresses of daily life send chemicals through our bodies that lead to inflammation and distress, and moments of natural awe send the opposite chemicals, bringing us calm. 

The affect is so profound, he believes we have a biological need for wild awe.  We have been wired that way.  The clearest evidence is watching a toddler explore the world. 

Also our bodies respond to the signals nature is sending us.  Our vagus nerve activates at the sound of water.  The scents from some plants reduce our blood pressure.  So just being out in your garden can be a healing exercise.  Basil and rosemary, for instance, send signals to our frontal lobes, activating the region where emotions and ethics intersect.

Studies also show that wild awe helps in quieting the ego and promoting sound reasoning.  All around, then, there’s nothing you can so easily do to help heal your body and mind as spending time in nature, paying attention to the beauty around you.

Once again, we arrive at a reminder of the spiritual importance of paying attention. 

One of my favorite, recent nature books was The Forest Unseen  by David George Haskell.  He spent a year observing a one square meter space in the forest, and that resulted in a rich book, filled with details of the seasons and the vast amount of life that made a home in or passed through that small space.  The book is an excellent study in how we don’t need to go to the grand wild places like Yellowstone or the Alps, but how we can find beauty, awe, and wonder in the ordinary, if we only look.

At the close of the book, Gaskell writes, “We create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.”  Even our urban and suburban backyards can provide us the healing beauty we require.

So, here’s an assignment for this week—every day spend some time outside.  You can just pick a spot in your yard, a comfy patio chair maybe, and for five or ten minutes just quietly absorb the sights, sounds, and smells all around you.  Feel the touch of the sunshine or crisp autumn air.  Magical, wonderful, healing, spiritual things can happen.

And we believe that all of this goodness is a result of God’s creative blessings.  God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has created us wired to connect with the world around us.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

The Psalmist begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”  The great Walter Brueggemann writes that these words are a “summons to the self to turn fully to” God.  And the way we do that is by observing God’s glories and gifts in creation. 

Brueggemann goes on, “The psalmist is smitten with the beauty, awesomeness, generativity, and ordered coherence of creation as guaranteed by the creator.  Everything is in its place as part of a coherent, life-giving system.”

So we celebrate creation as the work of God’s hands while also meeting God in the wild.  Robert Alter, the great Hebrew scholar, calls this psalm an “ecstatic celebration” and emphasizes how the poem is a “whole chain of present participles.”  From this grammatical observation, Alter concludes, “The poet imagines the presence of divinity in the world as a dynamic series of actions.”  God is present in the world in dynamic, on-going ways.  The creation was not something done once and over but is God’s continuing action.  God’s continuing gifts and glory.

Yet, this weekend we have watched the horrible scenes from the southeast as Hurricane Helene has laid waste to towns, leaving a path of destruction and death over several states.  Our hearts go out to the suffering people who have lost so much.  And I’m sure in the days ahead, we will have opportunities to generously respond to help them recover.

We know that these storms are worsening and setting new records because of the changes wrought to our climate by human industrialization.  We now live in the era that calls for resilience as we face the consequences of our actions and those of previous generations. 

One of the new words to enter our vocabulary in recent years is solastalgia.  Which is defined as “the emotional distress that people experience when their environment changes.”  Particularly our home environments, those we’ve loved, those we’ve drawn sustenance, nurture, delight, and awe from.

The theologian Hannah Malcolm assembled a book to help the church in this new era.  Entitled Words for a Dying World it is filled with essays from Christians around the world helping us to come to terms with the loss and grief of environments we have loved.  According to Malcolm, we must take time to grieve these losses if we are going to be effective in taking the steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening in the future.

As she writes, “if grief is an expression of love, our grief takes on the shape of the places and creatures to whom we intimately belong.  We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from.” 

Malcolm believes that “the tenderness of caring for the dying is not a despairing act but a courageous one.”  And so operating from that perspective empowers us, but in gentle, tender ways.  She writes, “Adopting an orientation of grief means choosing to invest in things that are small, that are temporary, and celebrating them in the broken, fragile beauty they bear in the eyes of God.  It is soft, cruciform foolishness.”

So, after watching the weekend’s news, we might not be able to sing today’s psalm with as much confidence as its writer—that everything is in order and all of creation is a blessing.  But, we also learn that even in our grief at the losses brought on by a changing climate, we can train our attention to perceive “the fragile beauty” that is God’s gift. 

God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has wired us to connect with the world around us in ways that are healing and transformative.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

Even as we grieve the losses of nature, we can pay attention to the glories and gifts of God still abundant in the world around us. (Even by spending just a few minutes in our own yards.)  God is calling us to work together to protect and restore the creation to the way God intended it.

Then let us join with the Psalmist and proclaim, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.  Praise the Lord!”