Climate Change

      My eye was caught at the fitness center by the TV tuned to that cable news channel I never turn on myself, describing over scenes of the NYC march against climate change, the guest referring to the people there as “wackadoodles.”  The people assembling for the UN climate conference were an incredible cross-section of global concern, and to dismiss them was insulting.  Since the week before I was at a meeting where one of my colleagues needed to leave early to moderate one of the panels of experts, I have first hand familiarity with some of the people involved.  She is the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance coordinator after Superstorm Sandy, helping the presbyteries of northern New Jersey, Long Island, and downstate New York.  PDA, like a lot of agencies, is shifting from recovery mode to “resilience” efforts.  That’s a shift to rebuilding to improved standards, using wetlands to absorb storm surges, providing barriers to flooding, providing evacuation and shelters.  It is also a shift to planning for “when” storms will cause havoc, not whether.  Interestingly to me, much of it is driven by insurance and economics.  At that level, the debate over climate change is irrelevant; those who look at the costs are assuming significant losses will occur based on rising sea levels.  There is no ideology in their calculations, just data.  I personally do not find the alliance of religious organizations, insurance companies, climate scientists, and persons who live in at-risk areas to be “wackadoodles.”

      It seems a prod in the ribs for the Exodus lesson this Sunday to be the tale of water from the rock at Massah and Meribah.  That was an age when people and societies were much closer to nature and felt a greater connection between nature and the divine.  We, in our time, are more insulated from the processes of nature… until something big happens.

      The root text is from Genesis 1:26, what has long been translated as humans having “dominion” over nature.  More recent translators prefer “stewardship” or “management” as being closer to the Hebrew than the haughty superiority suggested by “dominion.”  And, really, until the industrial revolution, it wasn’t that big a deal, predominately because humans really couldn’t do all that much to the planet.  Yes, poor agricultural practices caused problems, but with industrialization came large-scale landscape changes, lots more carbon emissions and pollution, and our hand upon the earth became heavier.

      Actually, from a faith perspective, we kind of are at fault.  By “we” I mean the northern European renaissance and the Reformation which are predominate theoretical drivers of the developed world.  Yep, the oldline mainlines like the Presbyterians and Congregationals.  Individualism, scientific process, the development of technologies, the shift from agrarian to industrial society, the glorification of profit, and the corporation, came along rapidly, literally changing the planet.  The Reformation added a sense of Godly approval to the domination of earth.  Extracting minerals and energy sources replaced the stewardship of the earth so crops could flourish.  Further, Protestantism encouraged “getting ahead” and personal wealth, especially in the circles inhabited by leaders of industry.  Being successful became a moral and theological good, unbridled by a sense of community welfare.  So the variant of Christianity among the successful classes in England, northern Europe, and the United States read that old word, “dominion,” and ran with it.

     So there are days when I believe, in addition to the social and scientific reorientation so clearly discussed, that we of the “successful” Protestant Church have some atonement to do, as well.  Our theology was too willingly co-opted to support poor (to downright dangerous) environmental practices, and it is necessary for us to repent and refocus and return to a right and sustainable stewardship or management of the planet God has placed us upon.  It’s not just a matter of marching, not just a matter of engineering, but a matter of spirituality.

      May God continue to teach us a wiser way!

                                                                        
                                                                            David


Texts For Sunday Worship:
       From the Hebrew Bible      Exodus 17:1-7
       From the Epistle                 Philippians 2:1-13
       From the Gospels               Matthew 21:23-32

Updating

      Some of you have realized that more of my brains live in my phone and computer than in my skull.  Without the files, contacts, reminders, and above all, calendars, I would be barely functional.

      So this week I updated my iPhone to IOS 8, the new version. The update server was, of course, quickly clogged.  I tend to be near the front of the line when it comes to updating software.  Some people just jump on updates like they are the best thing since sliced bread.  Then they get upset when they are not seamlessly perfect or have differences in what they expected.  Others, of course, never upgrade, sticking with what they know and are used to (my mother still has her trusty ol’ flip phone).  I fit in the middle, interested in seeing how new things work, but also realistic that there will be glitches and maybe even failures.  I fully expect that upgrades will mess with things I like or even drop features I use, but in general I find that the tradeoffs are improvements.  Once in a while I find a revision really bad and roll back, chalking it up to learning something through the experience.

      But I’m probably not going to get the new iPhone 6 when it comes out.  I’m pretty satisfied with the 5 I have, and I’m much slower at upgrading hardware.  What matters to me is the improvement in function and process, the new software for getting things done.  I like to try new ways of doing things more than having a new object.  (But if one of you jumps on a 6 or 6 plus, I’d love you to show it to me after church some day!)

      While waiting for the download, I got to thinking about churches sort of the same way.  I’m really pretty happy with the hardware of the church, but I am always looking for new and better ways of doing the churches functions.  It occurred to me that the bylaws and constitution and the decision-making processes like the Council are like the operating system, and the ways different groups do particular things are like the applications running within the church.  We have the worship app, the children’s apps, the music-playing app, the expense tracking app, the arty quilt app, the crowd-funding app, and so on.  Sometimes a church may swap out an app or redesign it, but it’s just a piece of the whole system.  Sometimes a new idea is a disaster (#fail), but it might turn out to be wonderful.  Just like I sometimes delete an app from my phone because it didn’t work for me, sometimes churches have to delete or roll back something that seemed like a good idea at the time.  Some of you may now understand why I am an interim: I’m willing to try new things but also willing to admit when the results are not worth the change and try something different or something old again.  Bugs can crop up in any changes, too, and have to be fixed.  But I stick with the hardware because it fundamentally is good.  We just may need different ways of doing things.  New things are not automatically good because they are new but because they work better with the needs and hardware of the congregation.  You have to be sensible and sensitive in going forward to get the best out of a church, just like a phone.

      So, let’s keep working on First Congregational Church of Ithaca, version 2015, wisely but confidently, OK?  Go with what works better, even if some of the things that are so familiar get done a slightly different way.  Above all, remember we are in God’s hands.

      (Bread 2.0 was upgraded by Otto Rohwedder’s invention of the loaf-at-a-time slicing machine in 1928.  The first nationally marketed pre-sliced bread was Wonder Bread.  Remember that when we have communion next month!)

                                                                                        In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                         David


Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible      Exodus 16:2-15
      From the Gospels               Matthew 20:1-16

Perspective

       On Thursday I went back over my files concerning the events of September 11, 2001 and afterwards and over my files from the first anniversary (especially for the Yates County community service at Keuka College while I was interim pastor at the Penn Yan Presbyterian Church) and from the tenth anniversary in 2011.  It was interesting to get a perspective on my own reactions and pastoral and preaching thoughts which I shared.

      But the biggest thing I realized was how little actually changed because of 9/11/01.  Certainly at the time it was cataclysmic.  But with time it has fit into the broader sweep of human history.  I had compared it to December 7, a truly pivotal day, and one that was every bit as emotionally life-changing for those who experienced it, but one which years tempered.  It has remained momentous and significant, and it truly changed our nation and our behavior and taught us all sorts of things which remain with us yet.  But I said in 2001 that 9/11 would also be tempered by time and go from being emotionally horrifying to part of our national (and international) experience to be learned from.  By 2011 that was much clearer; 9/11 was a reference point, and like the families of the victims, we had adjusted to the different sense of reality.  The losses had been reconciled in our minds and hearts, and we could move on with those events as part of our shared experience.  Yes, 9/11 was a troubling indication of human evil.  But also, we saw in 2001 and by 2011 that amazing depths of human compassion and concern and support emerged despite and because of the evil.  Good was stronger.  (Still is.)

       Even by the newsletter column I wrote at McLean Community Church in September 2011, it was clear that not much ended up changing.  We did not, as a nation, truly come together in a reliable, permanent sense.  Injustice, evil, crime, racism, religious intolerance, selfishness and greed did not go away.  Human nature did not improve.  We are still the same compromised mixture of good and bad individually and collectively.  We made national decisions that didn’t exactly show us at our best, and some of our decisions and actions made some things and some places worse.  The wonderful hopes at the extraordinary New York City interfaith worship service came only partly true, and not all of our swords became plowshares but were used in anger.

      And in the years since the horror of 9/11, we’ve seen a bunch more horrors.  And we’ve coped with them.  And we have seen a bunch more ways that the good in human beings surpasses the horrors.

       In early 2012 I was at a conference for interims where one participant served a church who lost something like thirty members that day, and she gave me a very sharp sense of perspective of the grief and turmoil felt by the families and church and community.  I remember my daughter calling to tell me that “they got bin Laden” in May 2011, because it was such a big thing to her.  From her perspective, half of her life was spent looking for him.  From my perspective, it was a fifth.  I got another interesting piece of perspective because the McLean Community Church had a quilt square from Shanksville, PA in the display case at the back of the sanctuary, given to them in an exchange of squares among UCC women some years before.  I found it eerie.  But I also sensed an important “communion of saints” binding us to the church near where the fourth plane was crashed.

       Perspective affects how we incorporate major events and psychological dislocations into our lives, our hearts, and our minds.  We can have a limited, reflexive reaction that sees others as bad and to be defeated.  We can go fatalistic and become defeated and passive.  We can shrug things off and be indifferent.  We can consider only how something, even great somethings, affect us personally and otherwise dismiss their significance to others.  Perspective matters.  But we can also step to a different place and gain different and new… and perhaps better… perspectives.

       If we take any perspective beyond those that focus simply on our own well-being— our own financial or personal well-being, our body’s wellness and comfort, our immediate family and friends— to adopt any perspective which sees beyond our selves and beyond our own years— ones that look for the peace and justice and harmony and well-being of our communities and society and nation, that look at the community of the world, at global peace, at the well-being of our planet and environment for time to come, at generous distribution of resources to all humans, and, in our case, perspectives that place the divine at the center of our lives with all the other good perspectives radiating out from that— then we will have perspectives far better able to cope with all the troubling things we encounter.

        The church’s perspective best comes from the assurance of Psalm 46, that God is our refuge and our strength, no matter what, even if the mountains shake and the seas roar and foam.  God is our protector, our protector far beyond our understanding or our human notions of protection of our bodies, our lives, or even our souls.  God is our protection and our hope.  No matter what.  At the end of the day, our perspective it that we are in God’s hands, and that is the best place to be.


                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                        
                                                                            David


Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible      Exodus 14:19-31
      From the Epistles               Romans 14:1-12
      From the Gospels               Matthew 18:15-20

New Season, New Faces

      Wow, the first week “back” has all sorts of stuff going on!  Perhaps my favorite is that we are beginning a new section of our children’s program, a class for our intermediate students led by Stacy Wilder, our Children’s Ministries leader.  The younger children will continue with their program, led for the first term by Monica BosworthViscuso.  We still welcome assistants for that age group, especially those of us who do not have children in Sunday School now, and especially especially men!  (Got that? Volunteer, OK?  Now!  Call Stacy at 257-6033.  Seriously.)  The new person welcoming our littlest in the nursery is Bindy Arthur.  And just to remind you that there is stability somewhere (!), Diane Beckwith will continue with our Youth.

      Choir is cranking up, and soon the Bell Choir and the Junior Bells with Nancy Weislogel, too.  Pam Swieringa is joining Building and Grounds as co-chair, and the Search Committee is continuing its chances for you to talk with them about our future and to fill out their survey.  Outreach has completed its emphasis on Our Church’s Wider Mission (OCWM) offering and beginning a new one for the Kitchen Cupboard and its need for baby items.  All sorts of great stuff cranking up!

      We also welcome a “student intern,” Sue Fast.  Sue is working her way through the New York Conference School of Ministry (NYSOM) which is a way to prepare for ministry roles on a non-seminary track.  It’s sort of like going to night school, only churchy.  NYSOM is one of the things (like pastoral search assistance) supported by our OCWM offerings. We will be providing her a “supervised ministry experience” as she continues to explore her interest in ministry.   Some of you may wonder (or even worry) about the wisdom of me supervising any ministry experience of any kind.  Mercifully, Sue has known me for some time and is well-prepared to deal with me.  She began her exploration of entering authorized ministry while I was her interim pastor in McLean, after she retired from teaching 9th grade Earth Science in Ithaca.  She is creative, warm, wise, and funny, and will be a delightful help to FCCI as we move along.  Sue has served for several years as the licensed pastor for the Groton City UCC Church between Groton and Cortland.  Groton Community, Groton City, and McLean Community churches have worked cooperatively for years as the “3 parishes,” so I am familiar with Sue’s pastoral approach and skills.  You are going to like her!

      Sue has limited hours available, so we are working out how best to deploy her time among us.  I’d like her to get the full experience of the more complicated system, so I hope she will be able attend our council, committee, and staff meetings with some regularity.  Her Groton Community obligations mean she will typically participate one Sunday a month here.

       Since most of her church life has been in smaller congregations, I’m happy to provide a large-church context for her continuing education.  This was why her mentor suggested asking us.  The process and structure for decision-making here are so very different from a country crossroads church, and I believe it will be instructive and exciting.  What I’m kind of excited about is hearing her reflections about the differences in church function when, by weird providence, one of the most variable of variables is controlled, that is, the pastor.  I’d like to see her report on how, with the same interim pastor, things may be different because of size and community.  Sue has watched me in a pastor-centered community church; how are things different in a large congregation in a university city?  It is very rare for someone to see those differences with the “same guy at the front!”

      It’s cranking up.  May God get us started with grand grace this Sunday!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                        
                                                                            David


Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible        Exodus 12:1-14
      From the Epistles               Romans 13:8-14
      From the Gospels               Matthew 18:15-20