Passing the Mantle

We use the phrase “passing the mantle” to describe transitions in leadership quite frequently.  Coach So-and-so inherits the mantle of the university football program.  Sue passes the mantle of the department to Joe.  Things like that.  But seriously, when was the last time you talked about mantles in regular conversation?  And what is a mantle anyway??

Well, Sunday we meet the prototypical instance of passing the mantle: when the prophet Elisha picks up the cloak of his mentor, Elijah, and becomes himself the prime prophet of God in Israel.  Elisha literally picks up the mantle.

But the thing about mantles (the heavy cloak or vesture, not the thing above the fireplace or on your camp lantern) is that the transfer is not really about the cloak but about the person who has worn it and the one who begins to wear it.  And much more depends on the people than the sign of office.

Sure, sometimes the next person is just not up to the quality of the first person, which can be a big disappointment.  But more often the next person is different from the mentor, which can be confusing or disorienting or simply causing a new way of doing things.  A coach and his or her successor may have radically different ways of running the team or of training, but have the same win-loss stats.  Since

Steve Jobs died, Apple watchers have been writing endlessly that Tim Cook, the new CEO, “is no Steve Jobs,” but the company continues to make and sell a lot of products and make money.  Sure, there are differences in management, but the overall corporation continues.

There probably a bunch of Israelites complaining that “Elisha is no Elijah,” but God kept speaking to Israel, even if Elisha had a markedly different way of doing prophecy.  The overall faith continues!

Furthermore, those differences in management and prophetic leadership might just be part of God’s overall plan!  Moses was prophet provocateur; his subordinate, Joshua, when he took over the leadership of Israel upon entry into the promised land proved a powerful general and manager of the settling of the land.  If Moses was the instigator, Joshua was the consolidator.  Likewise, in our turn, we have pastors who possess different gifts and skills, so when a congregation “passes the mantle onto” the next pastor it should expect differences in organizational approach even if the overall mission of the church continues.  Part of the interim self-study is to understand the leadership here over time and to become clearer on what is the best sort of pastoral leadership for the future.

Come Sunday to hear how God transferring the mantle of Elijah to Elisha tells us something about change and continuity— both— at First Congregational.

                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                               David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible      2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
From the Gospels             Luke 9:51-62

God Speaks to Elijah

    The morning scripture at the recent Annual Meeting of the New York Conference of the UCC was from I Kings 19, the familiar story of God passing by the prophet Elijah.  And God was not in the earthquake, fire, or storm but in the sound of sheer silence (NRSV) or the more familiar “still small voice of calm.”

    A couple of things struck me as we reflected as a conference on the passage which are quick thoughts of somewhat less than a full sermon’s length!

    The first was that the voice of God interviewing Elijah (who was hiding out in a cave from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel for calling judgment down on them) asks a couple of times, “Elijah, what are you doing here?”  Rolling different inflections around in my head, I imagined it with God’s voice an exasperated, “What are you doing here?” as in why are you cowering a cave when you could be out doing something somewhere else?  Come on, get it together, Elijah!  There are lots of times when we just wuss out.  The other way I heard it was “What are you doing here?”  It’s not just why are you hanging out here, as opposed to some other place, like Jerusalem instead of a hole in a rock out in the wilderness.  The way I heard it was as a genuine question, nearly a challenge: what are you doing, here, in Ithaca NY?  You are in a specific place with specific needs and specific resources and specific challenges in the community… so what are you doing about it, right here, right where you live?  Instead of sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, Mr. Prophet, what are you going to do?  Instead of sitting there, FCC Ithaca, what are you going to do here? Here.  Where God planted you.

    The last idea that nudged me was that all of this conversation and the vision of God passing by not in earthquake, fire, or wind but in the sheer silence took place at the entrance to the cave.  The entrance.  At the entrance where Elijah’s inner life met the whole wide world.  And sitting in the conference space, I was struck that in a profound way, Elijah was being invited to leave the darkness in which he was hiding and enter the world where God was still working and still speaking.  It was not the entrance to the cave, but the entrance to the world.  And it is “out in the world” where God is making both the commotion and the deepest truth the human heart can experience in the sheer power of God’s ever-present silence.

    Come Sunday to hear how God speaks to Elijah… but listen how he speaks to you.


                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                               David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible     I Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a
From the Epistles             Galatians 3:23-29
From the Gospels             Luke 8:26-39

Forgiveness and Grace

Jesus is having dinner at Cornell President Skorton’s house, and in slips a woman in fashionably ripped jeans, black boots, preternaturally black hair, a Jack Daniels tank top, visible red bra straps, a nose ring, a few brightly inked tattoos, and a bunch of silver jewelry.  She kneels down, splashes some Chanel “J’Adore” on Jesus’ feet and sobs while she washes his feet and dries them with her hair.  The other, invited guests, in their Brooks Brothers suits and dresses, shift uncomfortably.  Jesus starts talking about forgiveness and grace and gratitude.  When he looks up from the woman, he looks up past the guests in that room, and looks at us.

By the way, except for the brand on the shirt, that description is pretty close to the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a prolific, powerful writer and preacher at dozens of youth events each year and a Lutheran pastor.  She goes by @sarcasticlutheran (you should follow her).  She spent a lot of her life being uncomfortable in church because she made conventional churchgoers uncomfortable.  Mercifully, she found a church that accepted her for who she was… really… and she found her voice and her vocation.   A congregation saw the real her— beaten up by life, needing help, finding forgiveness so she could let herself off her own hook, sharing that forgiveness with others.

That Gospel story for this Sunday confronts us with our need for forgiveness and grace and invites us to feel forgiveness for ourselves and to celebrate when others experience it, not to evaluate others as more worthy or less worthy.  Worthiness turns out not to be about us.  It has everything to do with God.  By definition, grace comes to us as a free, unmerited, unexplainable gift from God in Christ. Yay!

Some of the crowd mutters about “if only Jesus knew what sort of woman this was…”  What they didn’t grasp was that Jesus actually knew exactly what kind of woman she was… and exactly what kind of people every one of them were!  And the biggest problem? That he didn’t care! He was ok with the woman, with Simon, with everyone there, with all of us.  He accepts people as they are, whole or broken, staid or notorious, visibly damaged or internally damaged, tired, lost, seeking forgiveness, feeling forgiveness.  Even more, he asks us to accept other people as those he loves.  And even even more, he asks us to accept ourselves as loved by him.

Come Sunday to hear how Jesus speaks to the woman in Luke 7… but listen how he speaks to you.

                                                                                                            In Christ,
                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Epistles        Galatians 2:15-21
From the Gospels       Luke 7:36-8:3

Time to celebrate!

Every year we mark the end of our church school program year with a special Sunday dedicated to celebrating the young people of our church, the programs we share all year and the people who make them special and make them happen.  In the past, we’ve had musicals, skits, songs, special musicians, guest preachers, decorations, gifts given and food to celebrate.  Though the means of celebrating have varied from year to year, the message and purpose stays the same: Our church values kids and Christian education, and we are pretty happy with how well it goes each year, so much so that we want to devote a whole worship service each year to show it!

This year we have some great things planned for Children and Youth Ministries Celebration Sunday!  The children have two special songs that they have been learning that they would like to sing for everyone.  The Youth Congo Band will be playing throughout the service as well as a special violin solo by Sophie BosworthViscuso and a special song played on the chimes by a group of children and youth.  We’ll sing well loved hymns. One of our Senior High students, Alexander Babiak will be our guest preacher.

What’s a celebration without special food??  After worship we will head downstairs for coffee, lemonade and the youth work trip strawberry shortcake fundraiser.

The children are very excited to share their music with you!  We look forward to worshiping together.

                                                                          In Faith,
                                                                          Stacy and Diane
                                                                          Children and Youth Ministries

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Psalms         Psalm 92
From the Gospels        Luke 13:1-21

Trusting It Will Happen

     Sunday we will meet one of those minor, apparently walk-on characters Jesus likes to meet.

     It is a Roman centurion, and one of his servants is gravely ill.  He asks some synagogue leaders tell Jesus about the situation and ask Jesus to heal the servant.  The elders tell Jesus that the centurion is a friend to the synagogue and a worthy man.  Notice that the religious leaders and the relationship of a Roman citizen to the Jewish synagogue in Capernaum is positive and merely taken for granted, somewhat unlike other interactions of Jesus and the authorities.

     So Jesus agrees and sets off to the centurion’s house.  But the centurion send someone to tell Jesus he doesn’t need to show up.  He, after all, as a commander understands that Jesus can just say the word and his servant will be healed; he doesn’t even need to be there.  Jesus, says Luke, is impressed.  If the centurion says to a soldier, “Go,” he will go.  The centurion doesn’t have to check back on him.  So he expects that if Jesus says the servant will get well, he will!  He simply believes Jesus can do it… and that is good enough.  Luke has Jesus marveling at his straight-ahead trust it will happen.

     Part of my family lore is of my great-grandmother, Molly McKinney (yep, a lot of Scots-Irish blood in this Presbyterian!), who was apparently a mighty pray-er.  One of her favorite lines was, “I have to be careful what I pray for, because I will get it.”  By all accounts, she wasn’t showing off or bragging; she just prayed really well and in her trust that things would happen, they did.

     It’s too bad the centurion doesn’t get more publicity in the Bible, because this interaction is one of the most straightforward descriptions of faith.  Ask God.  If God says it, trust it will happen.  Brilliant.

     And remember our UCC motto?

     God is still speaking…!

     May we have such trust, such faith.
                                                                                                          

                                                                              In Christ,
                                                                                David

Please sign up for one of the small, informal conversations during June for people to share their experiences of this church over the years (not just in the past three) so I can understand the landscape and history.  Either email the church at office@fccithaca.org, call the church office at 607-257-6033, or sign up outside the church library and sanctuary on one of the many clipboards.  I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!


Texts For Sunday Worship:
The Hebrew Bible         1 Kings 18:20-39
The Epistles                 Galatians 1:1-12
The Gospels                 Luke 7:1-10

The number this week is: Three

Last week I started my “Weekly Word” with the word, “Spirit.”  How could I resist this time with Sunday being Trinity Sunday?

The whole concept of Trinity is mysterious.  And not just a mystery boggling the mind of most of us trying to understand it, but an actual, official Mystery. The ancient creeds consistently call the triune nature of God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer— a Holy Mystery.  The exact way God can be One yet Three keeps defying various attempts at logic, yet it is consistently experienced as true by the faithful.  So theologians write explanations and preachers keep working on analogies like St. Patrick’s famous shamrock.  But most of us, when singing a Doxology know that we mean God is both the Three Persons and yet One God, have a hard time with the details.  And frankly, even as a “paid professional” in such subjects, I mostly pass up trying to outline all the theological subtleties and work with the certainty in my ribcage that I experience God as both three and one.  Modern confessions of faith seem to settle on the old word, “Triune” God, which is pretty much the same as declaring it a mystery for us to believe and to find comfort in instead of to understand.

For often-intellectual UCC and Presbyterians, it is hard not to be able to articulate the complex theology of the Trinity, but I notice that we can all sing “Holy, Holy, Holy!” with lots of feeling and lots of gusto and lots and lots of faith.

Sure, I’ll take a run at “explaining” the doctrine, but mostly I just feel it in my bones as true.  Just like 2000 years of believers before us.  Come join the celebration this Sunday.  And bring someone with you to enjoy it, too!

                                                                              In Christ,
                                                                                David

Please sign up for one of the small, informal conversations during May and early June for people to share their experiences of this church over the years (not just in the past three) so I can understand the landscape and history.  Either email the church at office@fccithaca.org, call the church office at 607-257-6033, or sign up outside the church library and sanctuary on one of the many clipboards.  I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!


Texts For Sunday Worship:
Hebrew Bible        Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
New Testament     Romans 5:1-5
Gospels               John 16:12-15

Wind of the Spirit

    The word this week is: “Spirit!”

    This week is Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit descended on the upper room of the disciples, filling them with, empowering them, sending them into the world to tell of Christ’s amazing love and resurrection, symbolized by people from all over hearing them speak in their own languages.  It is the breakout moment of the church.

    Pentecost is is one of the most layered of our church holy days.  It is widely celebrated as the “Birthday of the Church,” sometimes with birthday cakes.  Its color is red to catch the flames.  Most of us are familiar with the wordplay around “Spirit,” meaning in both Greek and Hebrew “breath,” “wind,” and the spirit that animates us.  And I’ve been in churches which pick up on those images with balloons, big fans, streamers, and even the occasional pyrotechnics!

    Our theme this year will move around wind, picking up some of Jesus’ words to Nicodeumus about the wind blowing where it will but you can’t see it, just its effects.  Where churches sometimes key in on the force of the wind, the power of the wind, this year we’re listening for the harmonies of wind rustling windchimes.  After a season of stormy weather, I want to remind us of the quieter, more melodious effects of wind, the gentle breeze, the tintinnabulation of tuned chimes, hopefully giving us a chance to re-experience the ways we play together on the wind of the Spirit.  In a way, the idea is kind of obvious, and we can agree that it’s so, but there is something moving in being together in the sanctuary with the tinging of the gently moving chimes filling the room… and us... with the reminder we are all borne on the Wind of the Spirit.

    So please bring wind chimes to jingle during the service when we hear the scriptures say “Spirit,” and wear flame-bright reds and oranges and magenta in your wardrobe to “get into the Spirit” of Pentecost.

    Come join the celebration this Sunday.  And bring someone with you to enjoy it, too!

                                                                           In Christ,
                                                                                David

Please sign up for one of the small, informal conversations during May and early June for people to share their experiences of this church over the years (not just in the past three) so I can understand the landscape and history.  Either email the church at office@fccithaca.org, call the church office at 607-257-6033, or sign up outside the church library and sanctuary on one of the many clipboards.  I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!


Texts For Sunday Worship:
Gospels                 John 14:8-17, 25-27
New Testament       Acts 2:1-21