“A voice was heard in Ramah,
  wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
  she refused to be consoled,
  because they are no more.”

      Matthew quotes that passage from Jeremiah 31 right after the tale of the magi going back home another way to avoid Herod’s troops, whom he then dispatches to kill the infants in Bethlehem.

      It was hard not to think of it Monday evening after the announcement that officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the death of Matthew Brown in Ferguson MO.

      At the end of October, the Synod of the Northeast (Presbyterian Church U.S.A.) had a presentation by Dr. Margaret Aymer, Associate Professor for New Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center and a Teaching Elder in the PCUSA on the systemic issues leading to the protests for justice in Ferguson.  Aymer outlined several structural factors: redlining which directs people of color into neighborhoods starved of resources; the “broken window” theory underlying aggressive policing in those neighborhoods; a modern-day “debtors’ prison” system in which fines levied disproportionately on the poor (often African-American) who cannot pay small original fines (largely for nonviolent or vehicle infractions) have additional fines and fees laid on them until they are jailed for non-payment; the militarization of police departments through the Department of Defense Excess Property Program; and the history of lynching never far from people of African-American background which is manifest in “the Talk” parents tell their children how to be submissive when approached by law enforcement so they are not injured, arrested, or killed.  All of those factors collided on that morning in Ferguson in the fatal shooting of an unarmed youth and the community reaction and the police reaction.  Those factors also appeared to me at play in Monday’s non-indictment and cascading reactions to it.

      I sat with an elder from Newark who told me of a recent time when that person was stopped at an intersection, looked across to see a police car, and carefully pulled out.  The police officer u-turned, turned on the lights and stopped the elder.  When the elder asked what was going on, the police officer said, “you were staring at me.”  The elder said, “I didn’t mean to.”  “Well, get out of town.”  Mind you, she is a retired school teacher and educational consultant, with greying hair, hardly noteworthy except that she is African-American.  When a deputy turns lights on behind me, I expect that it is yet another burned-out headlight.  Not that I might be confronted, berated, possibly pulled from the car, or arrested.  I cannot imagine how, if a grandmother feels such racism going about her daily activities, how a young black male must feel every minute being outside of his home in some communities.  Recent confrontations in Ithaca point out that even here people are not immune.

      There will be some serious conversations in the next weeks, and I pray they will get beyond conversation and into healing and justice and enhancing well-being for everyone in all communities.  But our history of actually dealing with racism and majority privilege is bad.

      Lots of people will be taking sides, of course, and many will suggest that their perspective is God’s, but the harsh reality of Matthew’s account of the “slaughter of the innocents” by the powers-that-be is that God was not actually coopted by the Herodian security apparatus but was with the mothers crying over the bodies of their babies.  Christ is not likely to be wearing armor or protecting the status quo, but in midst of the community suffering.  White, privileged, well-off people like me might want to think really deeply about that as we begin the Advent season preparing for the birth again of the Prince of Peace.

                                                                                                     In Christ,                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                      David


Texts For Sunday Worship: 
      From the Hebrew Bible       Isaiah 64:1-9
      From the Epistles               1 Corinthians 1:3-9
      From the Gospels               Mark 12:24-37

Thanks

     I have no proof the author of this tweet lives in Buffalo, but….
             Church Curmudgeon ‏@ChrchCurmudgeon 
      I can’t believe they're putting out the Christmas weather before Thanksgiving.

      Somewhere between the ads for turkeys and department store sales, the handy-dandy tips for cooking the perfect Thanksgiving repast, the promos for the football games, the giant inflatable lawn decoration pilgrims and turkeys, and the barrage of ads, we seem to have lost Thanksgiving as a day of reflection and, well, thanksgiving!  Not even the elementary school reenactments of the first thanksgiving with pilgrims and native Americans sitting and eating together have prevented this Thursday’s holiday from being buried by Christmas decorations and catalogs.  Singing the doxology as a table grace has been overwhelmed by the din blaring from store PA speakers.  I don’t know whether it has to do with our society losing touch with the whole concept of thankfulness and expressing gratitude and trusting the God whose providence sustains us every bit as much as it did the first European settlers to the new colonies or whether it has to do with Thanksgiving being resistant to being manipulated into a marketing opportunity.  You can’t sell Thanksgiving day like Halloween or Christmas, so it gets reduced to a fancy feast followed by football, the day before heading off for the official first day of Christmas shopping.  And I think something important gets lost.

      Thanksgiving.

      Giving thanks gets lost.  It’s a real problem, given that the church believes all that other stuff comes from the God who preserves, protects, and provides for us.  You see, the big problem for mass marketing Thanksgiving is that it’s a holy day not based on us!  Thanksgiving focuses on God, not humanity, and that’s kinda out of fashion right now.  Mercifully, there are enough souls out there who do grasp the deep and significant nature of providence and thankfulness that in most homes it is still a day of gathering with family and friends and a celebration of togetherness and even a pause to recognize that we have been brought this far by a God who loves us and takes care of us.  And in a way, I guess I’m glad that the advertising and retail industries have been unable fully to co-opt Thanksgiving.  In fact, even those folks seem to have a residual recognition of the significance of Thanksgiving Day and thanksgiving.  Even they realize it’s not all about us!

      The distinctive thing about “thanksgiving,” to my mind, that goes beyond a mere “thank you,” is that it is a transaction between humans and God.  There are psalms of thanksgiving, prayers of thanksgiving, and so forth.  The point of the first settlers’ feast was thanksgiving to God that they had actually made it through the winter alive.  Without getting into the debates about the historicity of it all, the Plymouth colonists were plenty thankful to the existing population for helping them survive in their new home.  The real thanksgiving was to God for the providence and protection God had afforded them.  Their piety was to rejoice in the good rather than question the bad.  They saw a deep and strong connection to God in everything they did.  They were aware of how dangerous their circumstances were and how unlikely to survive they were, so they counted it a blessing that they survived and were ready to continue.  That is an amazing sense of providence.  They knew they were dependent on God to make it, so they were also very, very grateful.  Living much closer to God’s care and providence than our society, they were correspondingly more willing to express and celebrate that.  Gratitude for God’s care and support and grace is what we call thanksgiving, transcending mere human thankfulness.

      If you switch gears back to thanksgiving, the seasonal arrival of Thanksgiving Day and Harvest Home remind us that all we have, all we have received as gifts, all that we have harvested in our lives and received to our good are ultimately from God.  Above all, it is a chance to refocus on God’s providence and providing and how we share the blessing.  We recapture a sense of thankfulness and thanksgiving, and we thank God.  Even very secular souls use that pilgrim language about blessing and thanksgiving. We recapture that pilgrim thankfulness, as we return to God a portion of what God has given us.  And so, with genuine gratitude, with some thanks expressed to the people who have been blessings to us, and with a large portion of genuine, extravagant thanksgiving to our God who loves and saves us, let us all go to our Thanksgiving observances this week, filled with gratefulness and joy as we gather together... to share in God’s blessing!

                                                                    In Christ,

                                                                            
                                                                      David


The Weekly Word is available on blog! Read the post and click here to leave a comment!


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible    Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
      From the Epistles             Ephesians 1:15-23
      From the Gospels             Matthew 25:31-46

Living and Dying… at the same time

      So there was a link on CNN.com for an opinion piece called “How Brittany Maynard forced us to look at death.” Daniel Burke actually does a very nice job writing about our societal discomfort with death and dying even yet.  He makes a good point about how times previous to ours and other cultures beyond American mass culture have in fact confronted the reality of death and learned how to deal with it.  So I guess my immediate, snarling reaction was directed at the headline writer: “Hey, we’ve been looking at death all along!  And it’s not a big scary news story!”

      I’ve occasional said, that for pastors, like EMTs and police officers and ER staff and undertakers and Hospicare, “Death is a presenting issue.”  A lot of other helping disciplines deal with death, but for counselors it’s often more like unresolved grief or trauma about a death that are the presenting issues.  For a small number of jobs, death is itself the matter at hand.

      The piles of unformed and not-very-informed words heaped up about Maynard’s decision to die more on her terms threw me back a couple of decades to Kubler-Ross’ work, which was an early model of how people react to the process of dying.  Certainly it is one of the most common models.  It had the advantage of being concise and from a psychological perspective.  Looking back, it may have been simplified, but it got the topic into conversation.

      Given that, by and large, most people die “just the one time,*” that in the sixties someone felt the need to describe the stages of dying or having someone close die is an interesting societal development.  My personal read is that in the mid-20th century, and especially in urban and suburban areas, dying became “hospitalized.”  Just as childbirth went from homes and midwives in mainstream U.S. culture to hospitals, so did the natural processes of dying.  In just a couple of generations, most people died in hospitals, even of natural causes.  And by not dying in the presence of family, a surprising lot was lost, psychologically, societally, and religiously speaking.  So it’s not surprise that Kubler-Ross came up with a clinical description of what was by then a too-clinical situation.

      The medial industrial complex had turned dying into a medical problem instead of a natural part of human life.  And it has taken quite some time to refind a healthier understanding.  Bodies die.  It’s just a fact.  But people inhabit those bodies, people with hopes and fears and all the rest, and we have different reactions to those last days.  And, of course, other people love people who are dying, and they, too, have hopes and fears and different reactions.

      Before death became a clinical problem, most people through history hoped for a “good death.”  It was more than a calm or peaceful slipping away or bravery in battle or at the end of a good stewardship of one’s allotted days, it was a desire to show faith and style as one died, hopefully leaving a sense of peace to one’s survivors and a good lesson about faith and wisdom about living and dying.  The Greeks felt is was a civilized, wise person’s last duty to demonstrate a good way of dying.  Epicurus said, “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.”  Think of the stories of last words on the deathbeds of famous personages in the 18th and 19th centuries.  People passed from this world surrounded by loved ones and neighbors and friends, not beeping machinery.

      I’m glad that we have rehumanized dying, although I’m not sure that “death with dignity” is the best catchphrase, either.  Even since I began ministry I’ve seen the medical profession changing away from fighting death to understanding and listening to the patients as people, people with feelings and hopes and fears.  I have seen the steady rise of hospice movement seeking a more dignified and holistic context for what none of us can escape, particularly in some of the slower ways human bodies cease to work.  I rejoice in their work and witness.  I marvel at how much grace they share with the people they accompany.

      From the perspective of  communities of faith, we believe that there is far more to our human being than just the bodies we inhabit, and that there is something beyond us— call it spirit, energy, being, whatever, consider it personal or impersonal, call it religious or scientific, whatever— that intersects with our dying.  Being part of the larger whole is, by and large, comforting, and the stories and understandings of faith help us make the transition and help us when others we love are making the transition.  Death is not the end.  That does, as Paul puts it, take away the sting of death, for we know that death is not the last word.  Believers have been looking at death in a healthier context for a long, long time.  No matter how one conceives of that cosmic pool of being, of life, placing ourselves in that context makes a huge difference.  It eases our fears and awakens hope.

      Deciding to do the best you can with your allotted days is always a good thing, and it’s something the church has always believed in.  Deciding to do the best you can with the end of your allotted days is something the church has always provided help with, giving a wider, longer, better perspective on our lives, reassuring us that those we lose and those we leave behind will be OK.

      One of my favorite people has a pretty pessimistic prognosis, but she and the man who cares about her have been on a tour of the sights out west (the Grand Canyon of course) and the people around the country she loves, deciding to live her days on her terms.  She may be dying physically, but at the same time, she’s choosing life the whole way.  As a retired pastor, she knows what’s coming next, although she hates to be forced to leave by her illness too soon.  I’d say she’s choosing life with dignity, right through the end.

      We all know people who face the last chapters of this existence with more hope than fear, and our congregation has lovely examples present and past of good and gracious souls and the people who minister to them.  And people like that teach us far, far more about dying with grace than any CNN story.  Thank God there are so many who show us how to live and die with hope.

                                                                                  In Christ,

                                                                                          
                                                                                  David

 * bonus points for being able to tell me in what television show that line was used.


The Weekly Word is available on blog! Read the post and click here to leave a comment!


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible       Judges 4:1-7
      From the Epistle                 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
      From the Gospels               Matthew 25:14-30

Entrance Polls

      The surveys tell us that the fastest growing religious group is “The Nones.”  Those who identify themselves as having no religious affiliation.  No religious affiliation.  No religious affiliation.  None.
    
      What is significant is that they do not identify with any religious tradition.  Not that they don’t belong to any particular institutional religious expression, but that they do not identify with any tradition or strand of any world religion.  Nones are nothing.  They are not Christian.  They are not Muslim.  They are not Buddhist.  They are not Jewish.  They are not Hindu, nor Baha’i, or folk religionist, or Confucian, Taoist, Sikh, Shinto, or even Wiccan.  They are not religious.  They consider themselves “None of the above.”  They are satisfied having no perspective on the world that includes a sacred dimension.

      It is kind of hard for someone like me who grew up in a faith-filled family to get comfortable with the idea of going through life with no religious component.  Most of the kids I grew up with had some sort of religion, whether Christian (although I grew up in a place and time when “Catholic” and “Protestant” might as well count as two different religions, not just Christian branches), Jewish, Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist, or Mormon.  There were a few free-thinkers who decided they weren’t anything, but even they grew up something.

      The thing about the modern demographic cohort of Nones is that they are, by and large, a generation reared by a generation of non-believers themselves, so they have essentially no context for religious experience.  Some of the inner stirrings they feel they label as “spiritual, but not religious.”  They have heard and read about spiritual things, but have absolutely no interest in some sort of organized expression of things on that plane.  This makes them religiously rootless.  And, from my perspective, it makes them interestingly spiritually rootless!  How the church (or any world religion) can helpfully interact with them becomes a wonderful, creative challenge.

      And, interestingly, Sunday’s Hebrew Bible story (following last week’s crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land) concerns Joshua, son of Nun, the new leader of Israel in Canaan.  I simply cannot help myself enjoying the ironic pun, Joshua son of Nun and the Nones.

      In Joshua 24, Joshua Nun lays out before the people the chance to reaffirm their covenant with Yahweh, God Abraham and Sarah, God of Moses, to follow only God and to be God’s people, with all that entails— obedience, worship, humility, hope.  And as he places the challenge, he speaks those famous words, “As for me and my house, we will follow the Lord.”  He cannot force anyone to follow God, but he can declare his own allegiance and worship.  Gladly, the people affirm that as their choice, too.

      We cannot compel Nones even to consider a life of spirituality, but we can invite them to join us.  In fact, I believe it will be the sense of being bound into a community of faith that will enfold them far, far more than any appeal to their minds.  Feeling the love and support of a family of faith may very well make a difference.  Our best appeal will be that Nones see we cope with the troubles that befall us with a tiny bit more grace and a bit more success than those without the support of faith.  And it will be a soft, gentler sort of evangelism that catches their attention; we just handle life a bit better.  As for me and my family, I will follow God.  And I can help you meet the loving God, too!

                                                                                                   In Christ,                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                    David



Texts For Sunday Worship:
       From the Hebrew Bible      Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
       From the Epistle                 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
      From the Gospels                Matthew 25:1-13