Hard to see

      There are a lot of people going through life with problems that most people don’t see.  Many of the conditions which make life difficult are not visible from a distance.  Honestly, most of us have (at least a few times) seen someone get out of a car in a handicap space and wonder, so, I wonder what that person’s story is; I don’t see anything wrong.

      Of course, just because someone is not using a wheelchair or a white cane or carrying oxygen or limping doesn’t mean that person is healthy.  From a distance cardiac disease, respiratory issues, healing surgeries, and the like have no external signs.  Mercifully, most of us move seamlessly from impatience to consideration by the time we drive by the parking space, but there are just enough times when we want some sort of proof to justify out sympathy.

       And, mercifully, most of us most of the time do have true sympathy for people who may have troubling ailments.

       But society is still lagging on some of the other difficulties people can have that may not be physically based.  Brain disorders and mental illness and like conditions have not found the sympathy and support they deserve.  I don’t think it is lack of awareness, for our daily conversations are filled with references to mental illnesses, brain disorders, personality issues, traumatic events recent and past, addictions, obsessions, abuse, developmental delays, emotional troubles, and such, and most people can grasp that there are neurological and biochemical and physical things that can impact a person.  We know that events or conditions or bad experiences or problems at birth or before birth can cause problems for years or a lifetime.  At least we know intellectually that such things exist.  But they make us very uncomfortable and standoffish.  Maybe because things that can happen unbidden to others’ brains are especially scary and confusing to most of us precisely because they happen to our brains.  Perhaps it is confusion.  Perhaps it is shame.

       We are still very poor responding to and supporting individuals with mental illnesses or brain disorders or emotional conditions.  And part of that is how few of them manifest themselves on the outside of a person.  That’s why some call them “invisible disabilities.”   My son’s ADHD and anxiety were overlooked or downplayed when he was a child because he didn’t look like anything was wrong with him, other than he acted really zoomy.  But his brain has some processing snarls and miswiring that cause issues other than hyperactivity which he has had to learn to work around and with.  Several people I am related to or very close to have been dealing with depression and anxiety, but most people wouldn’t know that about them.  As a pastor dealing with families for many years, I know for sure that more families have members with diagnosed or suspected mental health issues, but most cope in hidden silence.  It is still uncomfortable to talk about.  And it is hard to get help and support.

       All of which makes me reassured and hopeful as we have been observing May being Mental Health Awareness month with resources from the UCC’s “Wider Welcome” emphasis and our local Family and Children’s Services of Ithaca.  Sunday, Karen Schachere from F&C will lead our AfterWord, and I encourage you to attend and to avail yourself of the resources in the narthex and online.

      It is time to be kinder, more supportive, and more caring of those with “hidden” disabilities and the people who love them.


                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                       
                                                                           David


Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the New Testament         Acts 7:55-60
      From the Epistles                   1 Peter 2:2-10
      From the Gospels                   John 14:1-14

Mothers Day????

      I’m not the first person writing a church column disinterested in the big commercial to-do around Mother’s Day.  I can get pretty scathing about the modern observance of Anna Jarvis’ memorial for her mother Ann in 1905.  (Although I have to admit Ann Reeves Jarvis was quite a person, a peace activist who tended the wounded on both sides of the Civil War and who founded Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address public health issues.)

      Without ignoring the fathers and grandfathers also rearing, loving, supporting, and protecting children, this is a very tough time for mothers right now.
    
      Hundreds of mothers in our near vicinity are trying to keep families together without enough resources— money, food, housing, medical care, education— every day, not just Sunday, May 11.  Some have suddenly found themselves in circumstances that have changed.  Some are young and single parents coping with hardly any supports from the beginning.  We know they are around, but mostly we keep them off to the side of our thoughts.  This week, let’s remember their hard work.

      The last months have seen some terrifying events brutally impacting mothers.  There was the young mother whose mother and daughter were killed in the Washington mudslide.  The television cameras have dwelled long on the crying mothers of flight 370 and the Korean ferry sinking.  But we glimpsed again the mothers of the victims of last year’s Boston Marathon bombing.  The mothers who buried children because of gun violence still cry.  My heart is most broken for the mothers of the 276 girls stolen from school in Nigeria.  But it also breaks for mothers in war-torn areas and occupied territories.  Haitian mothers are still recovering.  Mothers in hospital and hospice cradle their children.  We know of mothers whose children have run away or have become hard to live with.  This month we are reminded of the families dealing with mental illness and brain disorders.  Mothers are addicted or impaired themselves or try to help children who are.  Sometimes it’s just the usual stresses and strains of just plain regular life that make motherhood hard.

      This is not the stuff of greeting cards and frilly jewelry.

      Days are brutal for mothers.

      It is incumbent on faith communities to be leveraging assistance and advocacy in support of mothers’ issues and needs.  There are many ways we can do that through church and community channels; but a moment’s search and you can find ways that fit your concerns and abilities.  In fact, since Ann Reeves Jarvis was herself a powerful worker for good, perhaps that would be a far more suitable celebration of Mother’s Day for us to undertake!

      So let’s get serious, not sentimental, about this Mother’s Day.

                                                                                        In Christ,
                                                                                    
                                                                                        David

Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible           Psalm 23
      From the New Testament       Acts 2:42-47
      From the Gospel                    John 10:1-10

First Supper

      Fifteen evenings ago we gathered in the darkening sanctuary and observed the night when Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples, then moving beyond it with bread and cup instituting what we call the Last Supper.

      Sunday we will recount something that can, on first read, seem like not a big deal.  Two followers of the rabbi Jesus are walking off toward a little town of Hammat— Imwas in Arabic, Emmaus in Greek— about ten kilometers outside Jerusalem.  Another traveler falls in with them, and they converse about the events of the weekend.  Strange events. Worrying events.  Impossible to understand events.  But the traveler helps them understand.  Helps them not to worry.  And starts to move on.  The two invite him to supper, and it turns out he invites them into the mystery of resurrection and new life in a few tiny motions.  “He took the bread and blessed it and broke it, and they recognized him.”  It was as simple as that.

      I come from a tradition (like many) which begins the Lord’s Supper with those really simple words.  “When the risen Lord was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them, and they recognized him.”  That first supper after resurrection connected back to the Passover shared but two weeks prior, and it connects forward to every time we take the bread in Jesus’ name and bless and break it.  And recognize each other as table partners, as beloved, as those for whom Christ is still present and still nourishing.  Our hearts still burn within us, all because of a few gestures made at the front of churches ever since the road to Emmaus.

      I like the context of our common communion to be not so much the long, elaborate, crowded tableau of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and more three travelers at an inn at dusk sharing a loaf of bread and God’s love.  That same simplicity and intimacy is why I like earthenware cups and baskets of bread instead of ranks of gleaming silver communionware and mini-cubes of bread. What we do seems much more like supper with family and friends, the kind of meal which sustains us in grace.  Emmaus is our first supper.

      Come join us Sunday as we break bread together, meeting up with the merciful traveler wherever we are on our roads to wherever.

                                                                         In Christ,
                                                                      
                                                                             David                                                          

Remember that we will, providentially enough, be having our congregational roundtable discussion about worship and preaching and music here at First Congregational following worship this Sunday.  There will be a light buffet (cold cuts, etc.) available right after worship, so please make your lunch and bring it into the sanctuary so we can get started quickly.  (If you don’t plan on attending the roundtable, kindly wait until those who do can serve themselves before you start working on the leftovers!)



Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the New Testament       Acts 2: 14a, 36-41
      From the Epistles                  1 Peter 1:17-23
      From the Gospel                    Luke 24:13-35

Forsythia

      The forsythia out the back door of the church is bravely trying to bloom; it probably will be in full flower by Sunday.  But it is still a bit tentative today on Friday.

      Just a few adventurous or foolhardy (or just plain hardy) buds around Dundee, but we’re a bit higher in elevation than here.  There are beginning traces of yellow in Watkins Glen when I drove through, but Seneca Lake is a lot colder even than Cayuga, so it’s a bit behind.  But coming into Ithaca is reassuring these last couple of days.  On the warm hillsides and in the valley, forsythia and other flowers are beginning to bloom.  But coming up the hill to the church I’ve noticed that while forsythia are well established at the bottom of my commute, they get thinner as I drive up the elevation, not so many a third of the way up, not many at all at the top, until the parking lot shows more promise than actuality!

      Spring, like a lot of things, takes a while to make its way up the hill or south to north.
Easter’s new life takes a while to make its way through human life, with the bands of newness inching their way up the elevations.  This is true on the huge, cosmic level, for we just have to look at the news to see evil and death have not relinquished the earth.  But still the little blooms of Christianity and other religious perspectives keep popping up, sometimes like crocus through the snow or forsythia in the sleet.  It is true on the individual level when we and those we care about cope despite bad things happening and sickness and the reverses of life.  Forsythia is a pretty tough plant even though its blossoms are fragile.  And it is true on the congregational level.  The little flowerets of the future of this congregation are just starting to make their presence know as slightly swelling buds.  Clearly, there is a lot of work ahead for the Search Committee— Patricia, Monica, Ray, Tove, George, Cindy, Bob, and Elizabeth— who have just started meeting, but we can be absolutely sure that even if it seems perhaps too slowly, their work will blossom.  The long delay in spring’s arrival and the creeping progress of forsythia blooms up the heights give us a parable of waiting for the slow and steady progress to bust out in full bloom.  And anyone who is used to waiting for spring in Ithaca knows it will take longer than we want, but wow, how nice it is when it arrives.  So I’d like to remind you to be as patient with the process as you are with forsythia and tulips.  If we can tough out “Spring” 2014, FCC can handle any search process, right?

      Come join us Sunday as we commission our Search Committee and rejoice in the bright flowering of resurrection, of spring in our souls, and of our faith in the life to come!

                                                                                     In Christ,
                                                                                        
                                                                                               David            


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the New Testament      Acts 2: 14a, 22-32
      From the Epistles                  1 Peter 1:3-9
      From the Gospel                   John 20:19-31

Easter

      Some years it seems winter just will never let go.  Spring’s new life seems just out of reach for so long… Even for lifelong upstate New Yorkers like me, the last couple of months have been weirder weather than usual.  Tantalizingly warm at times, then followed by winter howling still.  Last week was really discouraging as we went from grand hopes of spring actually being here to windshields full of snow and ice again.  Winter seems determined to hang on.

      Some years it seems Easter’s new life is just out of reach for so many… bad things and death just never seem to let go… Even as we have been preparing for Easter and God’s triumph over death, death has snapped back with a vengeance.  And like the bizarre weather, there have been a lot of bizarre things that have gone wrong.  It has been really out of the ordinary.  (Although the ordinary wear and tear and sadness and sorrow and separations have continued unabated, too.)  Lost airplanes.  Sunken ferries.  Mudslides which still entomb a town’s worth of victims.  Shootings and school stabbings.  Earthquakes.  Wildfires.  Truck and bus accidents.  An avalanche on Everest.  This is just strange stuff, almost like evil and death are being intentional at catching us by surprise.  It makes it hard to arrange Easter lilies and talk to children about new life.  It takes more than a little faith in things as yet unseen to believe in resurrection this year.

      Theologians write about the church living in “the time in between,” the time between Christ’s divine victory over death but before we regular humans experience it fully for ourselves.  We know in our hearts and from the Bible that the strife is over, the battle won… but bad stuff still goes on.  People we love get sick or injured or die or have discouraging reverses in their lives.  Hospitals and funeral homes are still needed.  Death seems to hang on like winter, not really relinquishing our lives to spring and Easter.  Commentators liken this to the skirmishes that still occur after the decisive battle is won but victory has not been secured.  Death is defeated but not done making us miserable.  Some preachers like to phrase it as a time when death is defeated “already but not yet.”  Although it sounds better in the long Greek or German phrases theologians use for already vanquished but not gone yet, it feels to me like this extended not-quite-spring-no-matter-what-the-calendar-says is very much the meteorological parable to this spiritual state.

      But the way we cope with the inconclusiveness of the season and its mud is not a bad way to relativize sin’s and death’s persistence.  We put away the heavy winter coats and hang the lighter jackets at the front of the closet.  We rearrange the garage so the mower is in front of the snow blower.  We plant flowers.  We decide to “Think Spring.”  We “set our minds on it.”  We set our minds on Easter beyond Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  We set our minds on life instead of distress.  It is a super set of thinking positively (which is not being blind to the negative but consciously deciding that goodness trumps it).  Thinking spiritually is very powerful, even if some of the ways we implement it are kind of simple.  We dress our children in bright Easter clothing.  We buy pastel candy eggs.  We choose to interact with the good around us instead of being dragged down by the bad.  And sometimes that is a very conscious, very intentional, very determined, very against-all-evidence choice.  We decide to see the light instead of the shadow.  We decide to look for little flowers in the mud and not the mud.  We choose life.  We choose Alleluia.

      Come join us Sunday (whether at Lakeview at 6:30 or either service at 9 or 11) for the bright shining promise of resurrection, of spring in our souls, and faith in the life to come!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                   
                                                                           David            


Texts For Sunday Worship:
       From the Epistles                 Acts 10:34-43
       From the Gospels                 John 20:1-18

Triumph, Tragedy, Triumph

      Something former associate pastor David Kaden mentioned last weekend when he was here for the Foote Lectures came to mind about our lessons for Palm Sunday.  He mentioned the gospel writer’s use of imagery drawn from the Greek and Roman world, one of which was the Triumph, the procession through Rome by the triumphant emperor or general, displaying the treasures and captives of a fallen nation.  Of course, other cultures had their victory parades, too, including Israel many times in the Hebrew Bible.  Important people arrive in processions.

       David reminded me of some of the richness those historical contexts add to the gospel narratives of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  Unlike the big official processions that take lots of planning, Jesus’ arrival the week before Passover was spontaneous and from the people, and rather humble at that.  People cut branches and threw laundry on the road to keep the dust down, not quite the strewing of flowers before the guest of honor, but a practical way of showing respect and affection.

       In the full-bore Roman triumph, the conqueror or emperor rode a chariot with four white horses.  Incidentally, those had not happened in Rome for several generations when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, but there were smaller occasions in different cities for celebrities of non-empire standing.  Victorious generals or magistrates and such would have processions in which they rode a white horse as the guest of honor.  Israel had a tradition of kingly entries back to Saul and David and Solomon, and the branches and cloaks would have been typical.  Some commentators make much of Jesus riding a donkey instead of a horse as a sort of subversion of the state procession, but some writers have noted processions when the guest of honor was on a donkey as a sign of self-conscious humility.  In Jesus’ case, we know it was actually humility.

      Luke is a good author and trying to use the literary and social conventions of not only Israel but of Rome to reinforce his theological point about Jesus’ being the savior of the world.  So I think he plays with the conceits of the triumphant entry to emphasize and reinterpret Christ through the events of that day.  He picks up on Israelite kings— including King David, reminding us of the whole Davidic Messiah thing— processing into the capital city and the imagery of palms in Psalm 118.   He sprinkles a couple of dashes of Roman lore on it for those in the wider ancient world.  But I like the way he has the “triumphant entry” happen before anything really happens!  The victory lap seems premature, and it will seem tragically misguided as arrest and crucifixion play out.  Yet Luke knows perfectly well that the triumph of Easter will prove it all very true and very powerful.  The real victory triumph— the victory over sin and evil and death— will be resurrection.  Christ’s resurrection.  Our resurrection.

      Come join us Sunday for palms and procession and pageantry (and pancakes) and faith in the life to come!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                   
                                                                           David            


Texts For Sunday Worship:

    From the Epistles             Philippians 2:5-11
    From the Gospels            Luke 19:28-40

Set up

     This Sunday’s scripture lessons are a total set up.

      The Hebrew Scripture is Ezekiel’s noisy vision of the valley of dry bones rattling together.  The Gospel story is Jesus raising Lazarus from the tomb outside Bethany.  Both are pretty familiar to most of us, but they have added value this last Sunday of Lent 2014.

      Ezekiel is telling a totally dejected, defeated people of Israel that God is not done with them.  Even in their spiritually desiccated state in exile in the 580s B.C.E., Ezekiel’s vision told them, they were not done in yet.  They were still alive— parched, but still alive.  In fact, even if they weren’t, if they were as dry as them bones in the valley, God still could get them up and going again.  So bringing them out of exile wasn’t a trick for God.  It is time to trust that God has more of the story to go!

      John’s narrative of what happened in Bethany to Lazarus is a masterful piece of storytelling.  Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, is desperately ill.  Instead of having the hero arrive just in the nick of time like most writers would, John has Jesus dawdle away a couple of precious days so he not only arrives after the nick of time, but days after.  So the audience knows that Lazarus is dead… really dead.  Not to put too fine a point on it, just in case the reader wasn’t paying attention, they remark that there will be a smell if they open the grave.  So it’s really clear Lazarus is dead.  By all reckoning, Jesus is too late to accomplish anything.  And, wonder of wonders, Jesus does reanimate his friend.  Nothing is impossible for Christ, for God, even coming back after death.

      So these two stories, appearing as they do just before Holy Week, are a total set up to remind us that revivification had happened before, so even as we get crowded down the apparently blind alley of Christ’s Passion, we have a glimmer of a thought that death is not the end.  Ezekiel and Lazarus are foreshadowing Jesus’ resurrection after death (and that bigger purpose is why John never really covers what might have happened to Lazarus afterwards; he’s a living plot device, if you will).  Even several days in the tomb or several hundred years in the desert sun are not going to prevent the God of life and love bringing new life beyond death.

      Way past the end of things, God is still at God’s life-giving work.  It’s hard not to recall Gracie Allen’s line, “never put a period where God puts a comma.”  So we can relax even as the gathering darkness of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday’s Crucifixion, and holy Saturday’s gloom makes it seem like the end.  We know that God does some of God’s best work after the end, and that can help us spiritually and personally get through the worst the world can throw at us.  The Bible sets us up for Easter.  In Ezekiel and Lazarus, we have sort of a trailer for Holy Week, a preview of resurrection.  There is a lot more story to go!  There is no period, just an everlasting comma.

      Come join us Sunday for an advance sample of resurrection.  But don’t just take my word for it… take David Kaden’s!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                   
                                                                           David            

 
Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible        Ezekiel 37:1-14
      From the Gospels              John 11:1-45