Sermons

October 31, 2020

Text: Ruth 1:1-18

For a Zoom video recording of Jay's teaching click here.

In a time of famine, Naomi, her husband, and her sons leave their homeland of Judah [or Israel] and start their lives as strangers in Moab. They left Israel in order to find food, security, and to make a living for themselves. And they stay in Moab for ten years — for as long as the famine persists. But, while in Moab, Naomi’s husband dies. Her sons grow up and eventually marry. Being in Moab, her sons marry Moabite women. But as more time passes, Naomi’s sons die, too. Then, Naomi, an Israelite woman, was left with her Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. With no husband, no sons, and the famine in Judah coming to an end, Naomi decides to return to Judah. She starts back toward her homeland with Orpah and Ruth. However, she turns to her daughters-in-law to tell them to stay in Moab. After all, Naomi has nothing to offer them--no sons and no security. She has nothing to give Orpah or Ruth and she considered herself useless to her daughters-in-law. Orpah, heeding Naomi’s advice, remains in Moab — not out of selfishness, she simply needs to make the best decision for her survival.

October 10, 2021

Zoom Recording of Teaching

Text: Matthew 25:31-45

My father was a pastor in the United Church of Christ.  He taught me the Social Gospel.  Faith is not so much a matter of Christian belief as it is of practice.  Faith is a matter of following Jesus.  For me that has been best expressed in the Matthew 25 passage we read earlier.  It ends:

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did for me.”

And that’s perhaps the simplest description of my faith.  The individual’s response to the Gospel is love for my brother or sister.  The community’s love-response is justice: the liberation of the poor and oppressed.

October 3, 2021

Text:
     Mark 9:38-50
     James 3: 2-5

Zoom Recording

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus points to “hardness of heart” in the Pharisees as the reason why Moses wrote the law about divorce and a man’s permission to write a certificate of divorce for a woman.  Where God-created bonds are broken, that’s where formal laws and rights enter in.  In my own experience, I had resort to the formality of laws and courts to try to resolve a painful and unhappy relationship with my first wife.  This Gospel reads as something that both challenges and convicts me, but also asks me to become my best self, to be allowed to approach with the open-heartedness of a child to seek Jesus’ blessing.  The original sense of “blessing” is “kneeling,” but it also carries the gift of God’s promise, benefit and surprising renewal and restoration.

More specifically, what have people with disabilities taught me about God

A Zoom recording of this teaching can be found here.

September 12, 2021

Almost every day, I receive a phone call from Grace.  Grace is a 58-year-old mentally disabled woman who bags groceries for work, is a tennis star in Special Olympics, and who lives with her brother and sister-in-law now that her parents have died.  She is also my younger sister so I have known her since her birth.  She calls to see how I am doing and to say that she “loves me to pieces.” The conversation lasts about a minute but it is a regular, consistent, expression of love that has changed my life.

From Mo Higgs and Eileen Scofield from L’Arche, Washington, to Tony Lobello and Mary Wilson from L’Arche Syracuse, a variety of mentally disabled individuals have changed my life and my understanding and experience of God.

September 5, 2021
Texts
     Psalm 146
     James 2:1-17

I have been honored to be the Chaplain Organizer for what used to be the Empowerment Faith Center and now is called the Faith and Workers Center, El Centro de Obreros y Fe for over two years. We pray, support each other in our health and with our prayers, work and act for justice. COVID-19 has been a time in our lives where we all had to face the unbelievable, the whole world shutting down because of a terrible plague.  This hit our most vulnerable people the worst.

Knowing our members in the El Centro helped me to see how our country left many people behind. There were stimulus checks for citizens, but not for those who worked hard every day and paid taxes, but who were not citizens. The Psalm says, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.” It is a shocking thing to me that very few people in Congress thought about the eleven million people who work in the fields to enable us to eat, who keep our buildings and stores and airports and hotels clean, who serve in restaurants, who take care of so many of our children, that they too needed the stimulus checks so much more than most of us in our congregation and others who did not lose their jobs.

August 29, 2021

Texts:
     Mark 7:1-23
     James 1:17-27

Mark 7:8 “Having no regard for the command of God, you hold fast to human tradition.” New English Translation

Click Here for Zoom Recording of Teaching:

1. Glimpse into the Early Church
   
   1. Conflicts:
      1. Jewish/Gentile Divide
         
         1. v. 1-8 Purity and Piety: Where do I belong?
         2. v. 9-13 Property: What belongs to me?
2. Heart
   
   1. Inheritance from Greek Philosophy
      1. Divide between the heart and the mind
      2. Distrust of the Heart (Jeremiah 17:9)
         The heart is deceitful above all things
             and beyond cure.
             Who can understand it?
   2. Hebrew Tradition
      1. Entire Interiority
         
         1. Heart
         2. Soul
         3. Mind
      2. Sound Familiar?
         
         1. Matthew 22:36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
            37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

July 22, 2021

Charles is a Reformed pastor, a Native American activist, public speaker, consultant, and author on Native American issues as well as a journalist, blogger, and computer programmer. He spoke to us about for whom the Biblical narrative was written.

A YouTube presentation of Mark's teaching can be seen here.

A signed copoy of his book, Unsettling Truths - The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, can be found and purchased here.

Sito Sasieta introduces our teacher and links to an interview from which her teaching was  taken: The catholic priest, Richard Rohr, writes, “If something is spiritually true, it will also be true in the physical world, and all disciplines and all religions will somehow be looking at this “one truth” from different angles, goals, assumptions, and vocabulary.”

Ten years ago, I would have distrusted a quote of this nature. Two weeks ago, when I heard today’s teaching, I found myself reveling in how other traditions can enrich the way we enter our tradition, for how fresh language can help us go deeper in Scripture & prayer.

August 8, 2021
Texts:
     Psalm 78:23-29
     Exodus 16:2-15
     John 6:24-35
     Ephesians 4: 1-16

Zoom recording: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/qVzae1MJ0qYE_1s__G2HYaRDCTNz0nWUXY8hPYo6CPdE-uDIAbN63iyg-yA1oXrU.Zn_ZiBdn7st2hBln?startTime=1627828476000

When I was thinking about the Scriptures you just heard today, I noticed that they are very aligned in their observation of human nature — which hasn’t much changed, it seems, over the past 2,000 years.  We humans tend to get demanding, jealous and ungrateful, especially when stressed!   Even when offered gifts, whether from God or our fellow human beings!   (As a 4 on the Enneagram, for those of you who have studied it, I think I understand the jealousy or envy that comes when someone is exercising their gift and I’m not “as good as” or as gifted at that person.  I may even understand the perfectionism that always notices what’s not there – or not good enough – and leads me to be ungrateful for what is).

The Israelites complain to Moses and Aaron, "if only we had died at the Lord’s hand in Egypt, where we sat around the fleshpots and had plenty of bread to eat!   But you have brought us out into this wilderness to let this whole assembly starve to death!"

Instead of being grateful for Moses and Aaron’s leadership out of the oppression they suffered in Egypt, they complain they have no meat!  Psalm 78 is a retelling of the story of Israel’s rebellion and complaints against God – told repeatedly, over and over again ad nauseum!   It says God was filled with fury and his “anger blazed up against Israel because they put no trust in God…” In the psalm (if you read further than today’s reading), God is repeatedly angered by the people who are in rebellion against him.  But God turns around again and again, and, like a human father with his complaining children, then acts with benevolence toward his spoiled offspring, granting them what they are demanding — “meat and sweets,” all for free.  They said the manna was like a honey wafer.  I probably would have told the people, “Eat prickly cacti – there’s plenty of that where you are there in the wilderness.” I guess God really wanted the children of Israel to survive — so the compassionate side of God, the merciful, forgiving side won out.

July 11, 2021
Texts: Mark 6:1-13
           2 Corinthians12:2-10

The lectionary scriptures this week, at least in the gospel and the epistle, are about embracing vulnerability, or in the Holy Spirit’s words to Paul, “Your strength is made perfect in weakness.” Jesus sends out the disciples with just the clothes on their backs and they come back rejoicing about the amazing outcome of casting out demons and healing sick people.  Paul, after a stunning heavenly revelation, receives a thorn in the flesh and is given the paradoxical wisdom: be thankful for your weakness.

Gail and I have been keeping Nathan a bit this week while Matthias is away.  We consider it a great privilege and a lot of fun.  Tuesday, he just would not take a nap even though we took turns rocking him, Gail took him to a darkened room, we played, read books, sang, and did patty cake.  He just squirmed and grinned at us and insisted on his own way.  His behavior is just a perfect image of my resistance to rejoicing in weakness and finding strength in it.

I resist, I squirm, I get busy and distract myself.  I have not yet fully accepted the fact that I am really, really old.  I am just beginning to learn the developmental task of hallowing my diminishments, of finding strength in the increasing weakness of my body and even more, my mind.