Silverside Sermons by Dr. David Albert Farmer

2010-06-27T15:11:00.000-04:00

My son was surprised to drive by the church this week and see the title of today’s sermon announced on the sign out front: “Dr. David Farmer Talks about My Relationship with My Spouse.” He called and wanted to know if there was something I’d forgotten to tell him, said he didn’t think I’d had a spouse since his mother and I were divorced about sixteen year ago.

Of course, the “my” in the title actually refers to those of us with spouses collectively. Also, the full title includes spouses and significant others, but there wasn’t room on the sign for that. So, I’m still single, and the sermon is about strong relationships with spouses and significant others--assuming that if you have one, you have only one or one or the other, not one of each or more than one of each. I will remind you right here at the beginning that both Hebrew and Christian scripture were written by and for those who believed in and practiced polygamy so any biblical references we use have no clue as to what modern US monogamy is supposed to look like; nor does scripture have any concept of the modern so-called “open” marriage or relationship. The marital laws were written so that men could have multiple wives and concubines too. Women could only legally be involved in one relationship, and that would be with the man to whom she was married; which was another way of saying, “the man who owned her.”

The rule of thumb was that a man could have as many wives and concubines as he could afford to care for and as many children from them as he could afford to support. So, when the Ten Commandments command, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” for the man, this meant stay away from the female property of other men; for women, this meant you’d better not have sex with any man other than the man who owns you.

There’s a lot of adultery going on today, so many couples dissatisfied with their sex lives. The legal document signed by me, two witnesses, and the Clerk of the Peace does not make a couple married according to the law of relationships, only by the law of the land; and it provides for property and financial rights and privileges and, strangely enough, conjugal expectations. The mechanics of sex are not discussed or described in any marriage laws I’ve even seen, but I’ve always been taught that Baptists favor the missionary position. Sexual expression is for most couples a vitally important aspect of demonstrating the depth of love for most couples, but there’s no formula that works for every couple; frequency as well as style has to be determined by each couple and likely gets readjusted across the years. Although in the age of Viagra, perhaps there are no changes at all in terms of timing or method. There are just new answers for the doctor when she asks, “How did you get that bruise?”

How often are married couples in the United States having sex? Who better to ask than Dr. Oz, and this is his answer:

It turns out that for married couples under 30 years of age; the frequency (on average) is about twice a week. For married couples between the ages of 50-59, the frequency is about once week. So now you know how often your neighbors may be having sex. But remember, these are averages. Some couples are happy with more frequent sex, some happy with less frequent sex. And that's really the point: not how much sex you're having, but whether you and your partner are happy with the sex you're having, regardless of the frequency.

If you’re not happy in that department, the stage may be set for adultery.

The Hebrew/Jewish law said that committing adultery was punishable by death; practically speaking, the women caught committing adultery were put to death while the guilty men managed to go unnoticed. This is exactly the scenario in the famous story of the woman caught in the act of adultery and dragged from her bed of adultery to the feet of Jesus by the Pharisees who wanted to test his toughness on the law. They said to Jesus, “We all know the law says adulterers are to be stoned to death. As religious as you say you are and as committed to the law as you say you are, we’re SURE you want to help us keep the law so why don’t you get this stoning party started?”

Jesus said, “You’re exactly right, but all of you who have never sinned should get to cast the first stones; step up to the front of the line.” No one moved. It was typical not to find the man who had been in bed with her; perhaps he was back at home with his wives, or perhaps he was one of those in line demanding that she be put to death. The player who cheats with you, who makes you “the other woman” or “the other man,” will not necessarily stand with you in case your seedy sexual alliances come to light and cause trouble.

Anyway, the crowd slowly dissipated, and after a few minutes only Jesus and the woman who’d been thrown at his feet were left, and Jesus asks her an odd, but redeeming kind of question, “So where are all your accusers?” The answer was obvious. Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.”

What words of grace. She had just experienced the equivalent of being strapped to the electric chair just as the governor calls the warden and halts the execution.

My very favorite retelling of this story is in a youth musical from the mid-70’s called “Bright New Wings.” The words to the songs and the dialogue were written was Ragan Courtney. Little did I know that when I directed a church youth group in performing this moving production, I’d one day meet Ragan Courtney and go to church with him and his family. So, now, though I never see him, I consider Ragan a friend, and he wrote this rendition of the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery, set in the Old American West. Ragan is married to the glorious singer, Cynthia Clawson, and they have been co-pastoring a church in Texas for a bit, but are leaving that so that she can get back full time on the concert circuit; and he can get into a full-time writing mode.

Back to the woman caught in the act of adultery story as concluded by the stupendously creative, Ragan Courtney. We pick up after the woman’s accusers had faded into the sand. She is narrating her own story, unlike the biblical version.

He turned to me and smiled. I smiled back at him, and he said, “No man condemns you, and I don't either. Go and sin no more.” I turned and walked out of that place a new woman. And my red taffeta petticoats no longer sounded like the viscous whispers of jeering people. No. They sounded like angel wings as I turned and walked into the newness of life.

For the most part, we’d have to say that cheating on spouse or partner is destructive to a marriage or partnership. Someone was telling me just this week, and I can’t remember in what context, this worn old tale that isn’t true, but continues to be repeated over and over again: Men are less capable of faithfulness than women are. That’s nonsense. There have many more opportunities for men to cheat on their wives in most cultures across time, but, given the opportunities, women have kept up pretty well.

II.

In 1997, so-called “infidelity statistics” for Americans stacked up something like this, according to “menstuff”:

22 percent of married men married several years had strayed at least once during their married lives.
14 percent of married women married several years had had affairs at least once during their married lives.
Younger people were more likely candidates; in fact, younger women were as likely as younger men to be unfaithful.
70 percent of married women and 54 percent of married men did not know of their spouses' extramarital activity.
5 percent of married men and 3 percent of married women reported having had sex with someone other than their spouse in the year 1997.
90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong.
50 percent of Americans said President Clinton’s adultery made his moral standard about the same as the average married man, according to a Time-CNN poll.
61 percent of Americans thought adultery should not be a crime in the United states; 35 percent thought it should; 4 percent had no opinion.
17 percent of divorces in the United States were caused by infidelity.

Let’s get some numbers closer to today:

Recent studies reveal that 45-55% of married women and 50-60% of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time or another during their relationship. That’s up A LOT in ten years.
Only 46% of men believe that online affairs are adultery. Some 80% think it's ok to talk with a stranger identified as the opposite sex. 75% think it's ok to visit an adult site.
About 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair at some point in some marriage according to marriage therapist Peggy Vaughn.
Affairs affect one of every 2.7 couples, according to counselor Janis Abrahms Spring.
Ten percent of extramarital affairs last one day, 10 percent last more than one day but less than a month, 50 percent last more than a month but less than a year, but 40 percent last two or more years. Few extramarital affairs last more than four years.
A lesser known fact is that those who divorce rarely marry the person with whom they are having the affair.
Frank Pittman has found that the divorce rate among those who married their lovers was 75 percent. The reasons for the high divorce rate include: intervention of reality, guilt, expectations, a general distrust of marriage, and a distrust of the affairee.
One-third of divorce litigation is caused by online affairs.
Spouses who get hooked on Internet porn are a growing complaint among spouses filing for divorce, according to a survey of 350 divorce attorneys. "If there's dissatisfaction in the existing relationship, the Internet is an easy way for people to scratch the itch," said lawyer J. Lindsey Short, Jr., president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, which conducted the study.

Even though both Hebrew scripture and Christian scripture were written in cultures that permitted and encouraged polygamy in the context of arranged marriages, there were still some great love affairs, some great marriages and partnerships along the way.

One of the greatest love stories in Hebrew tradition was the one about Jacob and Rachel. Many of you know at least part of their story. Jacob asked Rachel’s father, Laban, if he could marry Rachel, and Laban said, “Of course. We’ll agree to the marriage, and you can read the fine print later.” That was ok with Jacob; he’d have done anything to marry this beautiful woman who knocked him off his feet just being in her presence. Laban said, “You’ll get to be with her most every day, but we can’t go through with the actual marriage until you earn her hand by working for our family for seven years.” Jacob hated the requirement, but if that’s what it took for him to have Rachel as his wife he’d do it, and he did.

After severn long years, Jacob said to Laban, “OK, Pops, it’s wedding time.”

Laban agreed, “Indeed it is.” So a great ceremony was planned, and as at many weddings across time many of the participants had too much to drink. Jacob was one of those who had guzzled the wine with delight. Finally, the beautiful Rachel would be his wife. Seven years of waiting; now a lifetime of joy with her.

Someone guided the drunken Jacob into the honeymoon tent, and then Laban escorted his daughter to the tent where she would enter to begin her sexual life with her husband. It was an extra hot night in the old desert that night, but Jacob nearly had a conniption fit the next hung-over morning when he saw the unveiled face not of Rachel but, instead, of her older sister, Leah. Jacob went running for Laban, “You idiot. You brought the wrong daughter to our marital bed! What in the world is wrong with you.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Laban said. “I decided that you could marry both daughters, but Leah, the older, should go first. You can go ahead and marry Rachel too while we have the Rabbi and the musicians here, but in order for me to give her to you as your wife, you will have to agree to work another seven years. It will go by so quickly though; you’ll be living with the woman you love with a bonus.”

The curse words Jacob used to tell Laban what a low life he was have never been able to be translated with accuracy so use your imagination, and you’ll probably be pretty much on target. Jacob worked those seven extra years so Laban could never come back and say to him, “You still owe me for her.”

I want to tell you about another great biblical couple, but they never married--each other anyway. They were a gay couple when there was no such thing as gay marriage, but a gay thing on the side was rather widespread. In this case, the gay thing became the most important thing. The lovers were the Prince of the Hebrews, Jonathan, son of King Saul, and King Saul’s court musician and armor bearer, David, who himself would be king someday.

We get some little hints here and there about the importance of their relationship, but the truth doesn’t come out in full, as far as we know, until both Saul and Jonathan die in battle-related confusion; and David laments over them in the hearing of all of Israel.

Jonathan lies slain upon your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished (2 Sam 1:25-27 NRSV).

I can’t tell you how many fundamentalists would like to clip this page out of their Bibles, but it’s here to stay. Jonathan and David were a couple, and they loved each other with intensity. True love, I’d say, lasts to the end.

III.

What makes long term marriage work? Well, I have words from the experts today. First, words from Diane Ekquist who just celebrated fifty years of marriage to Don this past Friday.

David,

It is difficult to put the way we have handled 50 years in a capsule, but here are some thoughts:

1) Of course love comes first even in the hard times.

2) A close second is respect for your spouse and with that, for each one to be worthy of respect (including fidelity).

3) To be interested in your spouse’s work or occupation so that you can be aware and share the ups and downs.

Find something to laugh about every day.

While this may not apply to every couple, life has never been dull with Don!

Writing from the 58 year marriage mark, Bob Miller devised a list of twenty secrets to the success of a long term marriage.

Here are 20 secrets for starters:

1) Faithfulness to partner is imperative.

2) Agreement on number of children.

3) Agreement on raising of children.

4) Agreement on individual caring of children.

5) Agreement on education of children.

6) Agreement on letting go of children.

7) Agreement on handling money; thrift and savings,

8) Agreement on investments, trusts, wills, etc.

9) Agreement on lawyers, CPA’s, etc.

10) Travel together both local and foreign.

11) Plan for retirement way ahead.

12) Enjoy each other's company.

13) Enjoy each other's friends.

14) Enjoy each other's health and vigor.

15) Enjoy both work and retirement.

16) Aid those you can in various ways.

17) Love in-laws whom you can and move away from those you cannot.

18) Say, “I love you,” at least once a day to each other.

19) Keep yourself and clothes clean.

20) Make all important decisions together.

I perform a lot of weddings and have throughout my ministerial career. The first marriage ceremony I performed was my sister’s; a few years later, I performed my brother’s wedding also. When my sister’s son got married three or four few years ago, he had or would soon be enrolling in Jerry Falwell’s seminary, and I wasn’t even asked to help carry the trash out after the reception; I was offered no role whatsoever, which was intended by my nephew as a slap in his liberal uncle’s face. But I’m not bitter.

Some weddings I’ve performed through the years delighted me. Some bored me. Some brought tears to my eyes because of the tenderness I sensed between the couple. Some made me anxious like the one in Baltimore ay which the bride who arrived a full hour late for her ceremony. Some made me laugh like when a bride insisted on going ahead with an outdoor wedding even though there had been lots of rain leading up to the wedding; we did as she wished, but her lovely high heels, dyed to match the color of her dress, sank into the mud; and when the ceremony was over she had to be carried away from the altar because her feet were stuck in that mud.

Recently, it was thrilling to perform the wedding of Liz and Rick, Barbara Reader’s daughter and, now, son-in-law. They worked so hard on their ceremony to make sure it was exactly them, and that helps the officiant more than you can imagine. Add to that their exuberance for each other, and it was both deeply moving and electric. I share with you three poems that Liz and Rick chose for their ceremony, one of which I read, and each one read one of the other two poems to her or his about to be spouse.

I read this one by Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism.

Your love contains the power

of a thousand suns.

It unfolds as naturally and effortlessly

as does a flower,

and graces the world with its blooming.

Its beauty radiates a transforming energy

that enlivens all who see it.

Because of you, compassion and joy

are added to the world.

That is why the stars sing together

because of your love.

And I couldn’t help throwing in a little Disney, from “An American Tail.” A spouse isn’t necessarily a soul mate, though we would wish for that. When a spouse is a soul mate, the marriage--indeed life itself--is richer shared with this other human being who may not make the sun rise and set for any other person in the world, but she or he does for you; and you realized it early on without having to be told. When you had to be separated either before excellent cell phone quality or in the absence of a quality coverage area, you found yourself singing along with Fievel Mousekewitz, the brilliant little mouse from the animated film, “An American Tail,” when he had to be separated from all his loved ones. This is part of what I think of when I ponder what makes a great marriage.

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight

Someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight

Somewhere out there someone's saying a prayer

That we'll find one another in that big somewhere out there

And even though I know how very far apart we are

It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby

It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

Somewhere out there if love can see us through

Then we'll be together somewhere out there

Out where dreams come true.

Rick read this Yeats poem to Liz. There were fewer and fewer dry eyes in the crowd.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Then Liz read a Sara Teasdale poem to Rick.

As dew leaves the cobweb lightly

Threaded with stars,

Scattering jewels on the fence

And the pasture bars;

As dawn leaves the dry grass bright

And the tangled weeds

Bearing a rainbow gem

On each of their seeds;

So has your love, my lover,

Fresh as the dawn,

Made me a shining road

To travel on,

Set every common sight

Of tree or stone

Delicately alight

For me alone.

I think monogamous marriage for life is a great and glorious way of life for those who are cut out for it; that’s why I’m still performing marriage ceremonies in spite of the fact that my own marriage failed. My marriage to Lindon Fowler failed, but marriage as an institution did not fail.

The best way to strengthen marriage and to have it continue lasting as an important human institution is to stop trying to force people who lack long-term marriage skills to get married. There is a majority of people in our country who think that marriage is like chewing gum--or tobacco, depending on what part of the country you’re from; if you’re just given enough time, you’ll catch on and become a pro in a flash.

There is no paradigm for just what will make your marriage work for you. The plan, the promise, the persistence--these are all in your hands and, to some degree, in your hands alone. Others may want to help because they care, but the two of you will make it work and make it last if it does, and you will find your own ways to ensure that. We all of us are outsiders. We will not understand the foundation or the cornerstones. The mortar, only you will know how to mix and dry and cure.

2010-06-20T18:29:00.000-04:00

It’s a beautiful sight to see a baby or a small child absolutely glow with delight when mommy or daddy return after a time of separation, even if it’s been no longer than it takes to walk to the laundry room and transfer a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer. It is not a pretty sight, in contrast, to see a child of any age showing disrespect to a parent who deserves respect.

Talking about parents in general is a tough job since there are so many different kinds of parents--many of whom are great parents and plenty who are bad news any way you slice it. Some parents make a child’s life; other parents take the lives of their children. Some parents are the major sources of support of their children and contribute immeasurably to their children’s successes; other parents have children who must succeed in spite of their parents.

One of the Ten Commandments, the foundation of ancient Israel’s moral and spiritual codes, says that children, in healthy cultures, honor their parents. The Ten Commandments were not for kiddies, but rather for adults. Honoring mother and father in the context of the Ten Commandments was not a call for young children and teens to obey their parents; that teaching is in scripture, but the Ten Commandments calls on adult children to honor parents, which meant respecting them and caring for them when they need care.

That commandment in its fullness reads: “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod 20:12 NRSV). Not all ten of the commandments have a “tag” or an explanation attached to them, but this is one that does. There’s a rationale given for honoring parents, and it’s a powerful rationale. You honor parents, at least in part, to keep the your culture alive; said another way, when the generations lose respect for each other, a whole community, a whole way of life, dies out. That is something worth remembering in our country today where there is woeful lack of respect among the generations for other generations, younger people often showing no respect for older people and older people, just as frequently, refusing to honor younger people.

Another characteristic about the Ten Commandments worth remembering is that they are more designed for collective adherence than for individual adherence. Obviously, individuals have to live by the guidelines in order for them to be kept, but they were developed as a word to and for a whole people. So, for example, it’s not simply an individual who is supposed to refrain from killing another human being, but whole communities or countries that are supposed to live by the standard; and I presume the logic is that if the group sets the standard, then individuals within the group are more likely to live by the standard. Similarly, if a whole culture lives in such a way that parents are honored, it’s much more likely that individual children will live accordingly. Conversely, if the culture treats the elderly with disdain, the young people growing up in that culture will simply follow suit.

Let’s give organized religion a word of praise here. They were taking the lead in elder care long before it became a highly profitable undertaking in an aging culture making the enterprise increasingly attractive to secular corporations who are often more interested in profit than in compassion; although we all know of examples of extraordinary compassion shown in a secular care facility and some examples where compassion for the elderly has not been shown in a religiously affiliated institution. As usual, generalizing leads to distortion.

The great American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, said: “We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.” That is profoundly and painfully true. If we could fix that, most major conflicts between parents and children of all ages would disappear. Even those children who know that they are loved can’t imagine how much they’re loved. Nor can children comprehend that their blessing is as golden to a parent as a parental blessing is to them.

Both parents and children must be forgiving of each other, just as spouses and siblings and friends must be forgiving of each other. I say it again: forgiveness must be operative continually.

At some point, most all of us are going to do something or say something that hurts those whom we love most, and as humorist Dave Barry pointed out, “There is nothing in the world more embarrassing to a teenager than a parent!” Along the same lines, author Kathy Lette confessed: “I am not allowed to sing, dance, laugh, or wear short skirts. Having a teenage daughter is like living with the Taliban.”

The tricky part of forgiveness in the parent/child relationship structure is that young children somehow innately assume that parents don’t make mistakes; thus, a parental mistake feels to a child like an intentional effort to hurt. Without making a child feel scared that she or he ended up with a dangerously inept parent, I think it’s important for parents to communicate with their children about the fact that parents make mistakes too. This remains true as parents age. Everything is a new frontier for parents, and since no two kids are exactly alike even when we parent more than one child, everything is still new and challenging. The way I raised child number one didn’t work at all with child number two. The Earl of Rochester once said: “Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.”

Here’s another thing. Just as a child moves through individual life stages so also do parents, so who is surprised at calamity in a household where the mother is going through a rugged menopause right when one of the kids hits puberty. And many of you know the relatively new set of pressures on modern middleagers due to increased life expectancy; they are called the “sandwich generation” because they are dealing with pressures from teens still at home at the same time their aging parents need them in ways they hadn’t needed them before. And it’s not at all unusual these days to see child and parent--both in their senior years.

If I’m an aging parent, I can still make mistakes with my adult children, and I will. If I’m a loving adult child, I will still make mistakes with my aging parent, and I do. I say again, forgiveness must remain operative in all stages of the relationship between parents and their children.

Good parenting is no guarantee of a quality product. There are some great parents out there who end up with a child that grows up to do all the wrong things, and there are some people who are worthless as parents who end up with the most accomplished and well-adjusted child imaginable.

At the same time, good parenting usually helps rather than hinders, and we always have to remember that whatever we build with a strong foundation--whether it’s a house or a relationship--has a much greater chance of lasting than what is built on a shoddy foundation. Practically speaking, this means that even if there are bumps along the way, strong parental relationships with younger children will more likely lead to strong parental relationships with teen children and adult children too. Again, there are no guarantees.

Hindsight can be much clearer than foresight, and that must have been what Diane Loomis had in mind when she reflected back on her parenting experience. Her words:

If I had my child to raise over again

I'd build self-esteem first and the house later

I'd finger paint more and point the finger less

I would do less correcting and more connecting

I'd take my eyes off my watch and watch with my eyes

I would care to know less and know to care more

I'd take more hikes and fly more kites

I'd stop playing serious and seriously play

I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars

I'd do more hugging and less tugging

I'd see the oak tree in the acorn more often

I would be firm less often and affirm much more

I'd model less about the love of power

And more about the power of love.

II.

I am thinking about a biblical “parent hall of fame.” Who were the exemplary parents mentioned in Hebrew and Christian scripture, and why were they remembered?

Some scholars of Christian scripture believe that Paul’s second letter to Timothy was the last thing he wrote. Nero had Paul put to death probably in Rome, probably about the year 63. Paul believed that the continuation of what he had given the latter part of his life to--namely, spreading Christianity--rested largely on the shoulders of his younger protege, Timothy. They shared a very warm relationship; Paul was definitely his father in the faith. We hear nothing about Timothy’s biological father except that he was Greek, but both his grandmother and mother are mentioned in Paul’s final piece of correspondence, Second Timothy. He wrote to Timothy:

Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.

Timothy was well-grounded, spiritually speaking, and Paul didn’t take the credit for it; he certainly would have if he could have. Paul, instead, attributed Timothy’s spiritual grounding to good parenting and grandparenting. Our parents cannot give us the gift of healthy spirituality, but if parents model that for us it’s so much easier for us, so much more natural for us, to recognize that spiritual seeking is an important component of balanced, productive living.

We can only have a functional spirituality if we choose it; it can’t be a gift, but the parent who models sincere spiritual seeking makes it so much easier and so much more likely that her or his child will incorporate that into the way she or he lives. The faith Paul praised in Eunice and Lois, Timothy’s mother and grandmother, was a strikingly sincere faith, and Paul believed Timothy had chosen the same path thanks to their example.

I believe that encouraging by example is the very best way for parents to deal with matters of faith and spirituality. Those parents who are part of religious groups that believe there is only one “right” way to believe, spiritually speaking, are under tremendously greater duress about this than are parents who are open to the concepts of multiple truths and multiple expressions of God. Parents in restrictive religions can’t rest until their children conceive of and act on religious matters exactly as the parents have; everyone in the group must have the same beliefs and must act on their faith in exactly the same way. Parents in inclusive religious groups believe that the spiritual life is one of several aspects of life that needs to be nurtured in the healthy, well-rounded and balanced person. As long as their children are nurturing the spirit, even if it’s in a way that differs from how the parents do it, these parents can be happy.

Of course, if your kid takes a college course in Native American studies and comes home for break to tell you that she or he has finally found THE spiritual path for her or him, and thank Mother Earth for the highly spiritual substance, peyote, you might wonder.

Another mother I want to nominate to the biblical parent hall of fame is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Even though she, with others, questioned his sanity at times, she stood with her first-born (whom you could call “unique” and/or “eccentric”) literally to the end. Practically all of his followers had abandoned him by the time Rome executed him, but his mother, Mary, was one of the handful who stood as close to the cross as they could to support him with their presence until, in agony, he said, “It is finished.” You know what she had to witness that day ripped open her heart, but there she stood.

Any parent who has a child who lives against the grain endures some extra heartaches because almost all non-status-quo types suffer some kind of rejection if not some kind of active persecution. Every harsh or diminishing word that first pierces the heart of child whose only crime is being different will eventually pierce the hearts of that child’s parents too if they are sensitive parents.

Mary heard all the names Jesus’ detractors had called him. She knew how numerous people made fun of him, and she knew about the threats on his life. She was hardly surprised when she leaned that Pontius Pilate had sentenced him to death. Excruciatingly painful as it was for her, Mary stood at the cross while her first born child died. Perhaps, she thought, when his eyes caught hers, he would see the great love she had for him once again and be strengthened in his ordeal.

For a father in the biblical parent hall of fame, I nominate the prophet Hosea because he stepped in to provide full care for his children when their mother, Gomer, repeatedly walked out on them to pursue her numerous extramarital affairs. Not all fathers left to care for children when the mother is out of the picture for whatever reason step up to the plate and care fully for the children, but first-class single fathers have appeared across time though much less frequently than single mothers.

Preoccupied while blatantly and wantonly Gomer was cheating on him, Hosea still took care of his kids. He gets no special reward for that because that’s exactly what he should have done, but had he not done so few people would have looked down on him; many more people, even today, look down on a deadbeat mother than a deadbeat father. That double standard is unfair, however. Both parents are equally responsible for the well-being of the children they bring into the world. If one of the parents is unable to or unwilling to take on the responsibility, then the other one should step up to the plate.

Hosea may have been a fictional character, but whether fictional or historic he was a fine father. He was able to love without limits, and just for the record he never stopped loving his unfaithful wife. At one point, when it looked like she’d left him for good, he went out in search of Gomer and found her tied to an auction block, being sold as a slave. He himself bought her and brought her home yet again.

Finally, I nominate Job to the biblical parent hall of fame. Job was a wealthy man who loved his family more than he loved his money. He had seven sons and three daughters, and one of the writers of the book of Job seems to suggest that the children of Job, all adults when we join the story, are serious partiers. The boys appeared to have been the party planners or instigators, but they included their sisters in their get togethers. They were a close family.

Job was known for his righteousness. Sadly, he believed in a god who was a punitive god and a god who played games with people’s lives; that’s for another sermon. As related to his children, though, Job got up every morning and prayed and tended to his own spiritual health, but because he thought some wild things were going on at the bashes his kids were throwing, he spent a part of his prayer time trying to encourage God to think well of his children despite their behavior. He must have prayed prayers that sounded like this: “God, they are really good people at heart; they just get carried away with their partying. I hope you’ll overlook the exterior, God, and see in their hearts the good people they really are.”

Well, we don’t know if those prayers had any impact on the god Job envisioned or not, but there’s no question about the fact that he loved his children and would have done anything for them. Sadly, again, the god of the book of Job decided to let the satan test Job, and the satan destroyed all of Job’s property and killed all ten of his kids. Thank goodness, God doesn’t really act this way, but Job believed God did. His grief was immeasurable, and he must have wondered over and over again day after day what he could have done differently to have persuaded God to protect his children. After all, if anyone deserved to have her or his prayers answered, it was Job.

Later in life, the god of Job would allow Job to have his fortunes restored, and he and his wife had other children. One of the writers of the book seemed to think that was a happy ending, but we know that one life can’t replace another.

By the way, God doesn’t bring tragedy to our children, to punish them, to punish us, or for any other reason.

III.

When we try to use the Judeo-Christian scriptures to give us guidance about how to appreciate and honor our parents, we are dealing with cultural chasms too deep to cross. The extraordinarily high regard in which parents, yea all elders, were held in those cultures that produced both Hebrew and Christian scripture far surpasses the way that children in our time and place, even those whom we would recognize as especially attentive to their parents, treat their elders. Built into those Jewish traditions, as in many eastern societies today, was an absolute respect and love for parents and grandparents and other elders, rarely ignored.

A society that has allowed elder abuse to become a social epidemic can hardly understand a way of living where age is a badge of honor and not a target for disrespect and disdain. That said, we still look back to the ancient wisdom to be challenged to improve our attitudes towards those parents who deserve honor and attentive care from their children.

Having pointed this out, we are even harder hit to understand a disturbing snippet from the ministry of Jesus.

A scribe then approached and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Child of Humanity has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:19-22 NRSV, adapted).

The contrast in this little story is astounding. An enemy of Jesus pledges to become his most ardent disciple, and a disciple--someone who has already identified himself as a devoted follower of Jesus--hedges when a demanding assignment comes his way.

Scribes and Pharisees resented Jesus for trying to make the ancient law relevant. They were literalists, and scribes were the lawyers who kept on offering only literal interpretations of the ancient law as acceptable. Here, though, a scribe comes up to Jesus and effectively ends his career by saying to Jesus, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” Instead of turning summersaults and yelling out, “Chalk one up for our side,” Jesus said to the scribe whom we have every reason to take as sincere, “Are you sure about that? Have you noticed that those who follow me as my disciples have given up all the frills? Lawyers like you have nice lives and ample funds and lots of respect from the community. My disciples, many of them, used to live privileged lives, but they were willing to let go of that in order to give their attention to serving the poor and the sick. In order for us to do what we must do, there are times when we have nothing materially. Foxes at least have their holes, and birds at least have their nests, but my disciples and I end up many a day with no place to lay our weary heads. Are you really up for that?”

Before he can answer, this would be disciple hears the conversation, and he has evidently not thought through fully what the demands are for those who are willing to live like Jesus lived. He doesn’t back out exactly, but all of a sudden, he is thinking of his father’s funeral; and the father is still kicking--no where near death as far as anyone knew. But someday, yes, the son would be responsible for giving his father an honorable burial so when Jesus blurts out, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” everyone is stunned. We are stunned. How could Jesus have been more crass and callous--especially in that culture of high regard for parents?

What he said makes no sense if taken literally; if read literally, the statement really is an affront to respect due parents. Obviously, the dead can’t bury the dead so he’s clearly referring to the spiritually dead. Those who are really living life can’t allow future crises and tragedies to keep them from investing fully in today, in the tasks at hand. Of course, when that disciple needed to go and attend to his father, in sickness or death, Jesus would be the first to encourage him to go and would go with him.

The call or opportunity to serve the neediest and most rejected people in society is by no means an excuse to neglect or mistreat parents. In fact, to do that would be to violate what Jesus stood for.

I have some suggestions for adult children in regard to maintaining strong relationships with parents.

Aging parents these days are usually not sitting around in rocking chairs with nothing more to do than get the morning newspaper and wait for the mailperson to deliver. If they are, that’s OK, but it’s no longer the norm. Busy adult children and busy aging parents need to establish some suitable pattern of consistent quality communication so that both are comfortable initiating and receiving the contacts. This is affected tremendously by how close they live to each other. Those who live closer to each other usually, not always, have the easiest time with the quality communication piece. There is such a thing as too much communication just as there’s such a thing as too little communication. Balance is the key, and that has to be worked out relationship by relationship.
Both aging parents and adult children are still growing and changing; they are not exactly the people they used to be, and change has to be embraced. I’ve seen too many adult children create a rift with their widowed parents who decide that romance doesn’t have an age limit. Often, the real concern is what will happen to family money if the aging parent marries again, and, realistically, that has to be considered and worked out since there are those in our world who are busily looking for somebody else’s money most of the time.
How to ask for help and how to offer help has to be determined with respect for boundaries and independence, and it’s not just aging parents who need the help all the time. There are a good number of adult children who need the help of their parents too.
To the best of our ability, we want to live without regrets so let’s get it right as often as we can and ask for forgiveness promptly when we don’t.

Kendall Hailey had this insight, and I like it a lot: “The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.”

Amen.

2010-06-13T14:15:00.000-04:00

I’m just now watching the HBO television series called “In Treatment,” which must have aired originally a couple of years ago. Someone recommended the series to me, and I can get the whole season very inexpensively through Netflix rentals, so I am.

The basic premise of the show is that this therapist is, indeed, affected personally by what’s going on in the lives of several, not all, of his clients. The series follows them, these clients whose problems and pains have an impact on the therapist beyond the counseling room, for the whole season. Viewers see these clients working with the therapist all season long. As is often wise for someone in the helping professions, the therapist has his own therapist, and it’s fascinating to see how he has to work in his personal life to be able to deal long term with some of the very complex and painful problems people bring to him.

The therapist’s name is Paul, and one of his clients is an early teen girl who attempted suicide after years of sexual abuse by her gymnastics coach and as a result of her parents’ divorce, from which her father walked away, moved away, refused to allow her to live with him and the new woman in his life, and established a pattern of communication wherein he called all the shots; meaning, they could only talk or see each other only when he initiated it, which nearly always was random and fairly quick.

I’m happy to report that this young teen, Sophie, makes great progress during season one, though there are plenty of bumpy roads. In the final episode of the season, her father shows up as Sophie is about to enter the therapist’s office for her session. He demands to attend the session with her, and Sophie talks the therapist into agreeing to this though Paul wasn’t comfortable with the abruptness of it.

Just when we think that the father is going to play Sophie the way he has for years, the tables get turned on him, and Sophie chews out her father for how he treated her for two and a half years, and though he pledged his love for her time and again, she kept saying tearfully to him, “How can you love me when you don’t even know me? Did you know, Dad, that my accident wasn’t an accident? I rode my bike into that traffic on purpose; I was tired of the pain and tired of living. You didn’t know that, did you, Daddy? No, because you don’t know me.” Very poignant, very powerful.

In the musical, “Into the Woods,” Bernadette Peters’s character sings an all too true song about children. Here are some of the words:

How do you say to your child in the night?

Nothing's all black, but then nothing's all white

How do you say it will all be all right

When you know that it might not be true?

What do you do?

Careful the things you say

Children will listen

Careful the things you do

Children will see and learn

Children may not obey, but children will listen

Children will look to you for which way to turn

To learn what to be

Careful before you say, “Listen to me”

Children will listen.

A story popped up this week in the New York Times with the title, “Stop Texting, Dad! I’m Talking to You!” Ouch from all of us technology addicts!

Janice Im is an early childhood development specialist. She was waiting for an elevator recently, somewhere in Virginia, and she witnessed an exchange between a parent and child that greatly troubled Ms. Im, though she wasn’t surprised because of the research she’s been involved in lately.

She guessed that the little boy waiting with his mother for an elevator was about two and a half years old. That guess alone tells you that she is a childhood specialist; any of the rest of us would have said “two or three years old,” but very few would have guessed “two and a half.”

Well, the mother was busy with her Blackberry, texting up a storm, and the little boy kept saying, “Mommy. Mommy.” His mother vacillated between ignoring him altogether and saying, “Wait a minute.”

“Mommy, Mommy,” he’d say.

Silence.

“Mommy, Mommy.”

“Wait a minute.”

From there the kid began to tug at his mother’s shorts, which got him no further. The Blackberry was still winning out.

Finally, in desperation, he bit her leg, and that worked! He had her attention! A word of concern from the article:

Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology--and its effect on their offspring--is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studyiing how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books.

The title of Ms. Im’s book is scary, isn’t it?

So it’s not just children and teens blocking out their parents with technology; it goes the other way too, and it may be worse with parents who have more money than their children and may be able to afford the constant transition from technology types: cell phone to laptop to iPod to iPad.

How can someone feel or sense that she or he is valued by someone who never gives her or him undivided attention? “No attention” spells lack of interest, and most children, it seems, are inclined to pass on to their parents the same kind of treatment they received from their parents. This isn’t always true; there are no absolute rules to guarantee that children will grow up well and love the parents who loved them as the parents age.

James Baldwin said: “Children have never been very good at obeying their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” According to Jack Canfield, “The greatest deficit in America isn’t the trade deficit. It’s the attention deficit of our children. The average child gets 14 minutes of attention a day from each of her or his parents. So the greatest thing you can give a kid is time spent listening to him or her."

Harry Chapin sang the haunting “The Cat’s in the Cradle” years ago; it made me wonder what I’d be like if I were ever fortunate enough to be a parent:

My child arrived just the other day

He came to the world in the usual way

But there were planes to catch and bills to pay

He learned to walk while I was away

And he was talkin’ ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew

He’d say “I’m gonna be like you dad

You know I’m gonna be like you”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon

Little boy blue and the man on the moon

When you comin’ home, dad?

I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, son,

You know we’ll have a good time then

My son turned ten just the other day

He said, “Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let’s play

Can you teach me to throw,” I said “Not today

I got a lot to do,” he said, “That’s ok”

And he walked away but his smile never dimmed

And said, “I’m gonna be like him, yeah

You know I’m gonna be like him”

I’ve long since retired, my son’s moved away

I called him up just the other day

I said, “I'd like to see you if you don’t mind”

He said, “I’d love to, dad, if I can find the time

You see my new job’s a hassle and kids have the flu

But it’s sure nice talking to you, dad

It’s been sure nice talking to you”

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me

He’d grown up just like me

My boy was just like me

II.

In Arabia, before the development of the Islamic faith, children were considered as property. The Qur’an speaks specifically against the idea that parents own their children. Instead, children are given as gifts by God to be held in trust according to Islamic standards; children--both females and males--are to be physically cared for and properly educated.

In Arabia before Mohammad became a powerful force, infanticide was practiced for various reasons, one of which was what one scholar called postpartum birth control. The Qur’an speaks of a handful of “grave” sins, and these include: polytheism, homicide, and infanticide. Two related passages from the Qur’an.

Say: “Come, I will rehearse what Allah hath (really) prohibited you from”: Join not anything as equal with Him; be good to your parents; kill not your children on a plea of want; we provide sustenance for you and for them; come not nigh to shameful deeds. Whether open or secret; take not life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law: thus doth He command you, that ye may learn wisdom.

O Prophet! If believing women come unto thee, taking oath of allegiance unto thee that they will ascribe no thing as partner unto Allah, and will neither steal nor commit adultery nor kill their children, nor produce any lie that they have devised between their hands and feet, nor disobey thee in what is right, then accept their allegiance and ask Allah to forgive them. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

Lest you think this is an outmoded concern, do I have to remind you of how many parents in this country kill their children for hosts of reasons including what they call discipline and because, they claim, God led them to or told them to kill the children.

Muhammad was himself an orphan by the time he was six years old. His mother died shortly after his birth, and by the time he was six, his father had died. He was raised from then on by an uncle. Undoubtedly because of his own experience as an orphan, thankfully a well-treated one, he always had a soft-spot in his heart for orphans, but he was opposed to adoption. Faithful Muslims were to treat orphans as members of the community of faith, but not as members of their own households, which could conceivably confuse heredity and marital laws.

While Muhammad embraced a great deal that had been

taught by the ancient Hebrews, he was not as embracing of orphans in his religious teachings. They weren’t to be tossed aside, as we’ve seen, but they weren’t to be brought into families as equal, beloved members as was more likely done by the Hebrews.

The preacher in the book of Deuteronomy preached this as a part of her or his message:

When you have finished paying all the tithe of your produce in the third year (which is the year of the tithe), giving it to the Levites [that is, the clergy], the aliens [immigrants, in other words], the orphans, and the widows, so that they may eat their fill within your towns, then you shall say before the Lord your God: “I have removed the sacred portion from the house, and I have given it to the Levites, the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows, in accordance with your entire commandment that you commanded me; I have neither transgressed nor forgotten any of your commandments”

(Deut 26:12-13 NRSV).

Spiritual seekers and people of faith are supposed to take care of children; it’s our responsibility. If they are our children, of course, we take care of them. If they are parentless, they are still our responsibility; they are children.

All of our children are precious, but so are the children of others whom we don’t know. No person is stronger than the person who lifts up and empowers the powerless, and children are powerless by virtue of their size and status. We can’t let them be brutalized or neglected by any source, including their parents.

One of the stories from the life of Jesus that many people love is where he blesses the children. The story is told in at least two of the Gospels. I think Luke had the greatest concern for outsiders among the four Gospels so I look to that Gospel first when I’m studying a passage about the peripheral people. Families might value their children, but it would be hundreds of years before we’d begin to have whole societies who valued children for who they were as they lived their little lives--not for how they could become a part of a free labor force to keep family finances rolling or for how they might, if they were boys, keep the family name alive in the next generation.

People were bringing even infants to Jesus that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it. But Jesus called for them and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the empire of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the empire of God as a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18:15-17 NRSV).

So, blessing two birds with one breath, as it were, Jesus states boldly that children are important and that they are as deserving of his attention as are adults. Jesus is also saying the way a child believes in whatever it is she or he believes in, with both utter innocence and with absolute acceptance is the way adults who want to be a part of his movement have to come into God’s empire as citizens of the empire--believing in it though only parts of it can be seen and believing in it with absolute acceptance anyway.

Part of what the disciples did when traveling with Jesus was crowd control; otherwise, people seeking Jesus’ attention but especially his widely known healing skills would literally have overwhelmed Jesus. We get the idea that not all holy men and holy women welcomed the opportunity to work children into their schedules. The disciples were operating off that preconception. Get these kids out of Jesus’ hair so he can heal those who really matter, the grownups.

Jesus responds by saying to his disciples, “Don’t give the kids who want to be near me any grief, and don’t give the parents of the infants trying to have their babies blessed or healed any grief for bringing the little ones to me. They count just as much as the adults.” In other words, we can’t neglect the children.

Anyone, then, who wants to be a part of the Jesus movement knows from the get go that caring for children, teaching the children, loving the children remains a major part of our responsibility in every generation. James E. Faust has put it just the way many of us believe it: “No gift bestowed upon us is so precious as children. They are proof that God still loves us. They are the hope of the future.”

Many Jews, past and present, have not/do not believe in a life after Earthly life. Some do; most don’t as I understand it. That is why for many generations children took on an extra value for many Jews. For a substantial number of those Jews who didn’t and who don’t believe in an afterlife, people live on through their children and grandchildren, their descendants. Those Jews weren’t concerned about rewards or punishments for themselves in some unknown place, out there somewhere. They wanted to make a contribution to the world in which they had lived, and they could do that by bringing up the children in all the right ways and leaving them to keep making the difference the now-deceased parent had been making or hoped to make. A better way of envisioning this, I believe, that takes the pressure or burden off your offspring is not to expect them to follow in your footsteps, but to be empowered to use their respective gifts to make the world a better place. They need to do it their way.

It’s admirable that Jews who see themselves as living on through their children and grandchildren aren’t worried about all the good things coming to them like prizes in Cracker Jacks boxes in another world, but are much more concerned with continuing to want this world to be a better place, and who can we trust more to keep our concerns going, in their own ways, than those who knew us best, our children?

III.

If you listen to my sermons with any kind of regularity, and I’m not assuming that just because you’re in a pew here that you are necessarily listening to me, you’ll know that parenthood is central in my life and that my sons mean the world to me. As far as I know, this attitude is shared by all Silverside parents.

Not meaning to shock you, but I’m not the perfect parent by a long stretch, yet, I do think I got it when it came to understanding that my children were gifts to me and their mother. They didn’t ask to come into the world; we brought them in, and it was our joyful responsibility to care for them and share life with them in all the positive ways that are possible at the various life stages. It never occurred to me that Lindon and I should have kids because of what they’d be able to do for us. They didn’t owe me anything, and they were not around to serve me or my interests.

Parents who burden their children with this, “You owe me,” song and dance have forgotten how many votes were cast to move ahead with conception. I do believe children owe respectful parents respect. As far as forming a pool of free labor or providing personal domestic or valet services, no.

Parents who dare to say to their children, “After all I’ve done for you...,” are parents who have no understanding of unconditional love, and unconditional love is the only kind worth having. Conditional love eventually turns out to be no real love at all. Children, sadly, and many adults don’t know the difference between conditional and unconditional love. They, therefore, make the mistake of saying yes to what looks like love to them, but that eventually will obligate them to whatever the person promising pseudo-love demands.

For a pile of complicated reasons, I kinda sorta missed out on most of childhood--not completely, but mostly. And one of several joys of parenting Jarrett and Carson was the opportunity to revisit childhood and fill in that gap, reclaim some of what I’d missed. In ways, I re-grew up with them. In order for that to have happened, I had to learn a great deal from my sons, and I did; I still am learning from them.

From the Children’s Defense Fund:

USA Today reported this week that the national poverty crisis now affects 1 out of 5 children in the United States, up from 1 out of 6 just four years ago. This astonishing figure is a sober reminder that the recession isn't just stretching our safety net, but it's also threatening the success of the next generation of Americans. Indeed, childhood poverty in the United States ignites a devastating chain of consequences that leads to equally devastating places:

Four-year-old kids living in poverty are 18 months behind their peers. These gaps in early childhood persist throughout a child's youth, with clear and established links to the high school dropout rate, teenage pregnancy and unemployment.

Only a little over 15 percent of fourth graders from poor homes are reading at levels considered proficient by the U.S. Department of Education. According to a recent study from the Casey Foundation the clearest sign a child will drop out of high school is subpar reading scores in elementary school. Almost half of all high school dropouts are on government assistance and a high school dropout is eight times more likely to be incarcerated.

One of the best ways to support our children in their struggles is to support whole groups of children who have struggles similar to the ones with which our own kids contend. As parents, naturally, the most pressing concern we have is that things are right for those amazing people whom we call our kids. But crusades for educational reform and medical research for one child aren’t going to go very far.

Chances are, until all children fair well, few children will fair well anywhere in the world.

Regarding relationships with children for which we are most directly responsible--as parents, stepparents, and grandparents--I have some guidelines.

Children are children and should be allowed, even encouraged, to delay adulthood until childhood naturally fades. When the Apostle Paul wrote about love he included a reference to putting away childish ways when he became an adult. Childish ways aren't childish to children.
Children are like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike, even identical twins. Therefore, expecting the same patterns of behavior from several children including siblings is an indication of being ill-informed about the nature of human beings.
There are childhood emotional bruises that will never completely heal. Time does not heal all wounds, and children are breakable.
Children are inclined to mimic the behaviors that they witness in their parents' lives even if they detest those behaviors, even if those behaviors are extraordinarily subtle. So, children of divorcees are more likely to divorce than children whose parents stay together healthily. Children of alcoholics are more likely to have substance abuse problems than the children of parents who do not have those illnesses and struggles.
Children cannot learn what they are incapable of taking in developmentally. This includes spiritual lessons. The church forever more has been guilty of trying cram doctrine down the throats of children, doctrine that even informed adults don’t understand fully.
Unless given a reason not to be, children are inherently trusting and have to be taught in this crazy world that a substantial number of adults are not to be trusted. This is one of the saddest commentaries on the modern world and one of the burdens on children that didn’t used to be there to the degree that danger is there today.
There is no good reason to keep children away from clear teachings of Jesus, but not every story about Jesus is a story for children. I’d favor a lesson on “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” over a story on one of the miracles lest children think of Jesus as a magician or an early relative of Harry Potter.

I am the child,

All the world waits for my coming,
All the earth watches with interest to see what I shall become.

Civilization hangs in the balance,
For what I am, the world of tomorrow will be.

I am the child,

I have come into your world,
About which I know nothing,

Why I came I know not;
How I came I know not;

I am curious;
I am interested.

I am the child,

You hold in your hand my destiny,
You determine, largely, whether I shall succeed or fail.

Give me, I pray you,
Those things that make for happiness.

Train me, I beg you,
That I may be a blessing to the world.

2010-06-06T13:42:00.001-04:00

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MYSELF

The blurb says that Dr. Nathaniel J. Williams is a “success expert.” If there really is such a profession, I say that we need more of them! This is a quote from Dr. Williams:

The most important relationship in your life is the one you have with yourself. And if you let those negative thoughts affect how you think, feel and act, how can you expect to build healthy relationships with anyone else? You must put yourself first when it comes to maintaining positive relationships.

Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, said much about the self; here is one of his quotes that has always stood out to me: “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

Therapist Virginia Satir wrote for her clients a kind of declaration of self:

In all the world there is no one else exactly like me.

Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone chose it.

I own everything about me; my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, whether they be to others or to myself. I own all my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes, because I own all of me.

I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts. I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me and other aspects that I do not know, but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and for ways to find out more about me.

However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded. I can see, hear, feel, think, say and do--I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive, and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me.

I own me, and therefore I can engineer me. I am me and I am okay.

Writer Nathanial Hawthorne wrote about the self that is opposite Satir’s liberated self; he asked: “What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”

In this new sermon series on “Life’s Pivotal Relationships,” the place to begin has to be with self. The degree to which we know or fail to know ourselves, the degree to which we love or fail to love ourselves, the degree to which we believe in or fail to believe in ourselves has everything to do with all other relationships that we try to manage. Almost always, if we have a problem or problems with ourselves, there’s a spill over into all other relationships. Thus, a healthy relationship with self is foundational to all other healthy relationships in so far as our contribution to the relationship goes.

Certainly, we can be good with ourselves and be trying to manage a relationship with someone who hates her- or himself, and there will be nothing you can do to salvage that relationship. You can even love the other person, but someone who doesn’t love self can’t understand what being loved feels like so, in effect, she or he never feels the love you offer. One of the painful lessons of maturing for many of us is the discovery that love alone cannot make or sustain a long-term, involved relationship; this is because love may change a few undesirable characteristics about someone we envision ourselves married to or partnered with, but even the greatest love on your part can’t do an overhaul on someone else. Honestly, complete overhauls initiated by someone who loves us and not by ourselves will probably not work.

If you are familiar with the general ebb and flow of how life worked for Jesus of Nazareth during his public ministry, you will know that his nemeses were the legalistic Pharisees. They were often trying to trip him up with questions that would drive him inevitably, they believed, to answers that would make him look bad to his fellow Jews and/or to the Romans who ruled over the Jews. On one of those occasions, the Pharisees were trying to get Jesus in hot water with the Jewish authorities by getting him to say outright that not all the ancient laws, which the Pharisees claimed to keep to a tee, were important or, at least, of equal importance. So the question came up in a public setting, “Which of our ancient laws is most important?” Remember, now, there were hundreds of these laws by the time of Jesus. If Jesus didn’t answer, “They’re all sacred and important; one could not be more important than another.”

He didn’t say that, though. What he did do was to tell one of his most important parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and then he summarized. The most foundational principle for living is to love God with everything we are or have; a close second rule or law, he said, is that we have to love our neighbors like the guy who helped in the story, the guy whose people hate our people; despite that he loved one of us.

In the story of the Good Samaritan, there are several options for showing love; some are ignored, and some are acted on. I agree with the scholarly consensus that says Jesus was trying to make one main point when he told a parable, and the parables shouldn’t be dissected in an effort to find multiple meanings. I do think, however, that there are sub-points worth noticing, in any case. For example, have you ever stopped to think when you’ve heard this parable told how the helpless Jew beaten up and left for dead by the side of the road is unable to resist or reject the acts of love being shown to him by this unusual Samaritan, given that by custom all Jews and all Samaritans were supposed to hate each other.

That teaching from Jesus presupposes self-love, self-respect, self-care, self-affirmation on the part of the Samaritan, not the two Jews too busy to help their countryman. It is not possible to love someone else unless we love ourselves.

Let me remind you that “love” as Jesus used the word here has little or nothing to do with emotions. It’s not like having the proclivity every time you pass a mirror to ask, “Mirror, mirror, on the way, whose the fairest of them all?” “Love” as Jesus typically used any of the Greek options for “love” was much more about actions than gushy feelings. As I’ve said in other contexts, “love” for Jesus is usually an action word meaning that I will take steps for the well-being of the other person regardless of how I feel about her or him and regardless of how she or he feels toward me.

Let’s not lose sight of the context in which Jesus offered this wisdom. He’s saying to a hostile, right-winger in a way that left him unable to diminish Jesus or get him into trouble with any of the power people with whom he had to contend that any religious regulation that matters is connected to one of three kinds of love, which all happened to be intertwined in various ways: love of self, love of God, love of others--those we like and those we don’t like.

We’re having our first sermon talk back of the summer season today so you can challenge me on this if you wish. I think we can’t receive God’s love until we love ourselves. Self-love is the foundation to all other expressions of love--both the giving and receiving of love. This, I think, especially makes sense when we realize that the part of God to which we most easily and readily relate is God within us--not the God out there somewhere.

II.

Many of us are still reeling from the loss of the Shaw family. I have loved having them in our church, and we’ve benefitted from their gifts. Some Georgia church is going to be very lucky to get them.

If you’re on the eblast list, you also know that this past week as they were driving to Milledgeville, Georgia, which is where they are living for the time being, their moving van had an axle break, throwing the van into a wooded area off the highway where it immediately burst into flames, killing the driver and his son who was with him and destroying all the possessions of the family--including irreplaceable items like sentimental trinkets and Steve’s several military decorations.

This tragic situation led me to speak to Steve by phone, and he assured me that their insurance was johnny-on-the-spot and that they were in need of nothing. He’s trying to find out about the family of the driver and his son--to see if they have needs, and if so Steve wants us to send what we’d have sent the Shaws to the family that has suffered this extraordinary loss. That kind of concern sounds exactly like Kasia and Steve, doesn’t it?

In the course of our phone chat, he told me that the slower pace of life there in Flannery O’Conner’s hometown was beneficial as he confronts his severe case of post traumatic stress disorder. I want to make sure you know right at this point that I have Steve’s permission to share this personal information with you.

His several tours of duty to the front lines brought him into the presence of danger and gruesome death beyond what most people could bear. When he got back to Wilmington after discharge he began to have hints that PTSD had come to stay with him, and it has gradually worsened.

As this relates to today’s sermon on self, Steve said that PTSD not only causes him to relive time and again the horrors he saw first hand--many of them coming about as a result of orders he gave because his superiors ordered him to do so--but also a sense that his life is out of his control. He said he feels like people who believe they’re possessed must feel. He feels that there is a power overtaking him from time to time without warning that leaves him feeling out of control of himself. He knows who he is. He understands what happened to him and his colleagues and why, but there are moments when the worst he lived through comes back and overtakes him as if it’s all happening to him again--and all at once.

By the way, in giving me permission to share this very personal part of his story, Steve said that letting people who care about him know what he struggles with makes him feel less isolated and weak in the face of this monstrous syndrome. I know you will join me in continuing to hold Steve and Kasia and Bryant and Ashley in your prayers and positive thoughts--along with the family of their moving van drivers.

Self-control is a key part of knowing and being comfortable with oneself. Some cultures and some families and some religious movements discourage or discredit self-knowledge and depth self-understanding. Those entities that favor the blind following of a leader or of tradition push members not to get to know themselves in depth; there are several reasons for this, but the main one is that those who search within too intently may find something that causes them to question what the group stands for or what the dictatorial leader wants them to believe, to accept, without question, without debate, without analysis.

People who know themselves well tend to be, to some degree, free spirits. They think for themselves and know their real needs, their true goals, and their limitations, if any. When I talk about a free spirit I’m not talking about someone with no boundaries. Those who say, “Anything goes,” are much more likely people who don’t know themselves well. Or those who fail to know themselves may not think they need any limits on life because they’re only going to do what some authority figure and/or the community to which they belong tell them to do. If you only follow orders, you don’t need to know yourself or to do much thinking period--just enough to accomplish what the authority source commands.

As with most skills and tendencies, the earlier one begins getting to know herself or himself, the easier it is to continue so adults who grew up in environments in which they were encouraged to know themselves find it natural to continue that process throughout life. The ease with which many children learn a language not native to them is amazing to behold. The semester I taught in Switzerland, my older son was three years old. Within the four months we were there, he could carry on conversations with Swiss folks. In contrast, his mother and I mastered about twenty Swiss-German words and maybe five key questions such as, “Where is the bathroom?”, and, “May I have a hundred grams of whatever it is I’m pointing to here?”

To start peering deeply within, in middle or late life is tough, and for some people it’s impossible. There may be a cracker jack therapist here or there who can see into the soul of someone who is unwilling or unable to do that for herself or himself, but that will not ensure that the person will be able to look where the therapist looks or accept what she or he sees that the therapist takes to be blatantly obvious.

There’s another group of people who don’t get to know themselves, and they are the ones among us who have been taught by their families or their communities or the religious movements with which they identify that if they look too deeply within they’re only going to see such darkness and depravity that they don’t really want to and shouldn’t want to put themselves through that.

I think that Jesus knew himself well and loved himself. In contrast, the Apostle Paul knew himself a bit, and he lived with a load of self-loathing. Having joined up with the Jesus Movement, he hated that he’d been a part of the small group of Jews who conceived of themselves as ultra-devout and who saw themselves as defenders of their faith who had no real choice other than to persecute their fellow Jews who thought that Jesus’ take on Judaism made much more sense than a worn out tradition.

There were other reasons, perhaps, that Paul seems to have hated himself, and those might be interesting to explore some time; but it’s sad for us that the person most responsible for the development of Christianity as an institution, naturally passing on a great deal of himself to those of us who would join ourselves to the movement he began. Interwoven in much of Paul’s reflections is an indication of how much he disliked himself; a number of people, those who tend to learn by example let’s say, begin to think at least subconsciously that it’s meritorious, a sign of humility and deep faith to dislike themselves as Paul did.

There’s the possibility that if Paul had looked more deeply into his inner self, he might have liked himself or, at least, have liked much more of himself. Getting to know oneself only a little bit may be no better than the absence of self-knowledge altogether.

Certainly there is no guarantee that as we take our inner journeys we will like everything we see. Aside from criminal behavior, therapists like the late Virginia Satir whom I quoted earlier believed that one shouldn’t assign moral values to what one sees within oneself. What I see is what is there; some of it is pleasing to the inner eye, and some of it isn’t. It’s like taking a walk on the beach or taking a drive through the mountains. Part of the landscape may be pleasing to us and other parts not so much; this doesn’t mean that every eye would see it just the way ours does.

You may agree with Satir or not, but she’s surely closer to the truth than those, especially those who claim be honoring the God of monotheism, when they teach adherents to detest themselves. It is beyond ironic to preach that God is love on the one hand, and on the other hand teach that people should hate themselves to the glory of God.

III.

Paul blamed his self-hatred on his humanity. Originally, in Judaism he had been a Pharisee, and the Pharisees, from all indications, believed in human perfection, demonstrated in the keeping of all the laws. Though he didn’t know Jesus, he learned his teachings, and he came to concur with Jesus on the issue of the place of laws in the religion they shared. One could keep all the laws and still not be a good person, much less a godly person. This had seemed incomprehensible to him as he lived in the thick of Pharisaism, but as Jesus’ perspective began to make more and more sense to him, he knew Jesus was right about it. Sad to say, he still had tendency to create rules as proofs of devotion to God and the Christian religion.

Though Paul believed fervently in the love of God that Jesus lived and died to proclaim, I suspect that divine love never touched him in his deepest self or even just under the surface where he did manage to look. He was, at least at times, a tortured soul. He couldn’t allow for mistakes made by himself, and not too much for the mistakes of others. What he saw when he tried to look inside himself was a person who couldn’t manage to do what he really wanted to do and a person unable to keep from doing a number of things he thought improper.

See if you can follow this sincere rant, as Paul tries to explain himself to the Christians in Rome:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Rom 7:15-24 NRSV).

My grandmother died recently as many of you know. Had she lived until last week, she’d have been 95 years old. She struggled with complications related to Alzheimer’s Disease for many years, but she never got into the later stages of the horrible disease. She sort of plateaued in the middle stages.

May Pearl Foust was her name; she was an LPN by profession, and she was quite remarkable in many ways. But her accomplishments weren’t enough to help her think well of herself; nor did the love of God she went to Africa to proclaim as a short-term missionary nurse reach her in her depths. We called her Mimi, and she had many good qualities; but she never liked herself, which only became more evident and more pronounced as she aged.

Oddly, she showered her patients with kindness, concern, even love. Her heart went out to strays, which is why she was rarely comfortable in a big church or a fancy church. More typically, by the time I was grown, she’d choose a struggling church, a small church. The pastors she loved most were those who were oddballs and/or rejects; that is to say, other churches had sent them on their way. Down in the hills of Tennessee and Georgia we referred to the firing of a pastor as a “running off.” Mimi generally had a pastor who’d been run off from some church other than the one where she knew him.

So, her patients and the strays, she loved. Her family, however, caught the brunt of her self-hatred. She took it out mostly on her daughter, who is my mother; her son, my uncle Bob; and her husband. They loved her, but there was a price to pay. Those of us who cared about her ached for her, but sometimes we had to keep our distance to be free of her tongue-lashings. We wished she could have gotten to know herself well enough to love herself the way her patients loved her, the way we wanted to love her. Sadly, she never did or never could.

Mimi had outlived most of the people she’d known and served. There was a slightly younger brother, Mom, and Bob. There was no funeral. Twelve or so people gathered around the graveside in the Blueridge Mountains of north Georgia. I couldn’t get down there as quickly as my uncle wanted to get it all overwith, but one of Mimi’s stray preachers showed up to eulogize her. Mom told me the day after the graveside service that the saddest part of the whole event was that after burying Mimi, she and Uncle Bob could think of virtually no happy memories during their growing up years.

In the extreme in the realm of Christian self-hatred, we think of the Roman Catholic group called Opus Dei, founded in 1928 and dedicated to the belief that every person of faith is capable of living lives of holiness. If they fail, they physically punish themselves, through means such as whipping their bare backs until blood flows. If I look into my soul and see what I consider moral failure, I have to beat myself in some way into submission.

Part of what a seeker must seek is self-knowledge. There’s no way to be a liberal or a progressive person of faith and pass, on the getting to know self part. Just can’t be done. But there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus that is going to lead to self-hated no matter how deeply within we are willing to dig and to look. No matter what we see, even if it disappoints us or embarrasses us, God’s love flows through us--unless we block it, and many people have done just that. They have blocked themselves from God’s love because they believe they are not worthy recipients of God’s love; they refuse it.

It is possible to know ourselves in depth--see the good, the bad, and the ugly--and still embrace the reality of divine love. That’s the goal. The process is risky and almost certainly will be painful at some point along the way, but one of the greatest accomplishments in life, and it’s a privilege too, is to get to know ourselves fully, and the opportunity is open to everyone even if there’s someone in their lives telling them otherwise. Remember that there is no hope for any other relationship until this one is embraced and dealt with.

Amen.

2010-05-30T17:14:00.000-04:00

Most branches of the Christian Church have long been messed up on the subject of human sexuality. Jesus and our other Jewish forebears are not to blame. If you want to point the finger, there are two fingers to point within the Christian tradition--the first finger gets pointed to the Apostle Paul. Paul was, presumably, a celibate bachelor who liked to talk a lot about sex, especially his ideas of sexual “do nots.” That paradigm has been perfectly followed up by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. People who criticize in detail practices they supposedly abhor and have had little or no experience with or have up and turned away from are to be suspicioned. These people who work in the brainwashing movements to turn gay people into straight people and are themselves, by their definition, “former gays,” not infrequently get caught in public places such as gay clubs on dates with or trying to pick up, hold onto your hats, gay men.

Supposedly celibate men, and some of them really are, making themselves the rules makers when it comes to birth control methods is a riot. I mean, seriously, can you imagine having someone who’d never had sex describing the only acceptable Roman Catholic option for birth control for married couples, the “rhythm method”? That would be like taking driver’s education from someone who’d never driven, except maybe a simulator! (I warned you last week that this week’s sermon was adult oriented!)

Paul’s writings are literally filled with sexual prohibitions. We have no absolute evidence either way about whether Paul was ever married; the weight of scholarship has leaned to taking him to have been a bachelor. Just because he never mentions a wife doesn’t mean he was wifeless; I know lots of married men who never mention that they are married--especially when they are trying to set up a date with someone to whom they are not married. Philosophically speaking, an argument from silence is nearly always the weakest possible argument. For example, there are members of Silverside Church who never tell anybody they are, and nobody knows until the obituary is published at which time even many of us who are members are surprised. Anyway, just because Paul fails to mention a wife doesn’t mean he was always a bachelor, even if he were divorced by the time he wrote the letters that would eventually appear in what we now call Christian scripture. Even so, I suspect that Paul was a bachelor.

As I mentioned recently, John Shelby Spong in the last few years has been the scholar to raise questions about Paul’s own sexuality. Spong wasn’t the first, but he has been the one in our time to be most pointed about bringing up that issue. Spong believes Paul was a very conflicted gay man, even though being gay wasn’t condemned in the Hebrew scriptures on which he’d been reared or in the Greek world where he did most of his ministry. Paul criticizes many specific homosexual behaviors, but he never offers a blanket condemnation of homosexuality. I think it’s very important to know that and to point that out to the “Christian Right” who makes Paul their champion and hero.

If Paul were a conflicted gay man, he imposed the condemnation upon himself. That’s such a terribly sad place to be, and in my profession I’ve known all too many people who lived a lifetime under that relentless shadow that never lets the full light of life’s joys shine through.

Hebrew scripture and culture didn’t give Paul any reason to condemn himself if he were gay, and there’s not a single word putting down homosexuals in the teachings of Jesus. If he lived his life under self-imposed condemnation, then he’s a tragic figure, and those of us not particularly fond of him need to be more patient with him.

Either way, he wrote all the time about sexual prohibitions for straights and gays. He was obsessed with sex, and he didn’t have the internet to help him along! There’s a hilarious song in the musical, “Avenue Q,” called “The Internet Is for Porn.”

The other finger has to be pointed to one of Paul’s most ardent admirers, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Augustine’s personal story was very different from Paul’s. He wrote the first known full-length spiritual autobiography in the Western world. The book was titled, Confessions, and was first released in the year 400. It’s one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, and I’d never have completed it had it not been required for my first church history course in seminary. Lord, have mercy, it was a dreary read.

Writing late in his life, looking back over what had brought him to where he was at the time he wrote, the self-loathing was the overpowering theme in my reading of the piece. I don’t mean he hated himself his whole life long. I mean that as he looked back, in retrospect he hated himself for the way he’d lived his life, and that’s always such a waste of time. Mistakes are mistakes; we can’t erase them and shouldn’t try. We can learn from them, and that’s all. Otherwise, we just have to let them go; there’s no other option.

I’m not saying we deserve to be proud of everything we’ve ever done, but preoccupation with the past, especially those wrong decisions we made along the way, will do nothing more than rob us of the way life is supposed to be lived. Many of us choose not to dwell on our mistakes; Augustine, in contrast, did what amounted to a “tell all.” The book may have been not only the first full-length spiritual autobiography, but also the first full-length tell all. Augustine was, before his conversation, one of the most sexually promiscuous figures in history except maybe for Tiger Woods and those who have been prostitutes by profession. Sorry. Tiger Woods jokes are getting really stale, aren’t they? Seriously, I believe when someone acts out like Mr. Woods, there’s some kind of deeper problem. Truthfully, Augustine who is the third most powerful influence on the Christian Church after the Apostle Paul and Jesus--and I put them in that order intentionally--made Tiger Woods look like a eunuch.

In his later life, however, Augustine converted to Christianity, embraced Paul, and suddenly came up with the notion that celibacy is better than being sexually active and that the less sexual one is the more holy she or he is. Augustine came up with the belief that the only commendable sexual activity is intercourse, and that is utilitarian--for procreation, not for enjoyment. So, even when you’re having sex to try to have children, you’re not supposed to enjoy it. If you’re enjoying it, then something is morally wrong. Now, remember that this perspective comes from the man who for much of his life had sex with every willing female on northern Africa and southern Europe!

He pushed his anti-sex, sex is dirty campaign onto the church in which he became a bishop, and for some reason these Augustinian principles have heavily influenced not only Roman Catholicism, but also conservative Protestantism. Sex can be made into something lewd, and it often is; but humans were made to enjoy sexual expression if they so choose. For the church to teach children and teens and adults that there is anything wrong with healthy, safe, respectful sexual expression is morally reprehensible.

I’d be more willing to listen to someone advocating celibacy who’d practiced it all or a good part of her or his life. I think Augustine stopped having sex, in part, because he was worn out. We have to wonder if Viagra had been around in those days would Augustine have been so eager to push so zealously for celibacy as the preferred way of life for the spiritually focused.

Just for the record, Augustine did live with a young woman for some eleven years, and evidently they were monogamous. He never calls her name in his writings, and they were never married--evidently because there was some social status issue to which she didn’t measure up. They had a son together, Adeodatus. Sadly, the boy died suddenly of unknown causes when he was only 17 years old. After the relationship with Adeodatus’s mother ended, Augustine became a single dad, and a good one; and we all love good single dads!

II.

If you really need a laugh some time, you should take up a study of how the church has interpreted the biblical book the ancient Hebrews called the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs.

The book is probably better referred to as the Song of Songs rather than the Song of Solomon; the main reason I say this is because the book is a collection of love and love-erotic poems between one couple--one man and one woman, as it turns out. One woman wasn’t nearly enough for King Solomon. Of course, there were several men with the name “Solomon,” but only one stands out; same with “David.”

King Solomon had 700 wives and, in addition, 300 concubines. With all those women at hand, even a goodhearted guy like Solomon just couldn’t feel this much intensity for any one in the harem. He may have loved women in general with great intensity, but he couldn’t have loved any one of the several hundreds of wives and concubines with the kind of intensity we read in the book, the Song of Songs. The “Wittenberg Door,” a journal that parodies religious issues and themes, had a funny article a couple of years ago called “700 Wives, 300 Girlfriends, and No Voice Mail.”

Eerdman’s Publishers introducing a 2003 commentary on this biblical book said:

The Song of Songs is one of the greatest pieces of erotic literature ever written. Consisting of intense expressions of physical love, this classic poem describes the voluptuous beauty of lovers longing for one another. With a uniquely feminine perspective, its language is seductive and intimate, conveying an immediate, sensuous, and intoxicating desire.

The couple who speak the words of the poet in the Song of Songs have a deep love for each other punctuated with loving lust. Not all lust is loving, as we well know, but when love and lust get all rolled up together it’s a powerful combination...as I recall! The couple speaking to each other in this biblical book are clearly in love and in lust. I assume that ancient Hebrews keep this book in the scripture collection to celebrate sex and to read at weddings perhaps. One scholar has said that these songs were sung in taverns in Hebrew towns and villages.

Here comes the Christian Church all influenced by Paul and later by the celibate Augustine not knowing what in the world to do with blatant erotica in what they consider their holy scripture. The option most often chosen was and is to ignore it, to pretend it isn’t there, and to hope that no one in a given congregation finds it. The next most frequently chosen option, and this is where the humor comes in, is to allegorize it, to spiritualize it so that Jesus is the male lover, and the female lover symbolizes the church. This approach is just too wild for many reasons--one of which, of course, is that these poems were written hundreds of years before there was a Jesus or a church. That fact notwithstanding, interpreters through the ages and into the present start with some of the New Testament symbolism of Jesus the bridegroom and the church as his bride and work backwards into the Hebrew scriptures to say that’s what the ancient poet anticipated all along. The results are hilarious. Let me give you several examples.

We’ll start with a simple one: “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts.” Sometimes when you hear sermons about the Magi coming with gifts to celebrate the birth of Jesus, about two years after the manger birth, much is made of the gifts that the Magi brought with them to honor Jesus: gold and frankincense and myrrh. One of the things plenty of preachers love to do is to tell their congregations what these gifts meant in the ancient world, and they like to talk about where these items--gold and frankincense and myrrh--are mentioned elsewhere in scripture. Well, I want to tell you that in all my years of listening to sermons and editing sermons for publication I never came across a single sermon mentioning that the myrrh the Magi brought little two-year-old Jesus in ancient times had once been put into little fabric bags and worn as a necklace, as a perfume.

The lover is to the woman who speaks like myrrh that lies not just near her heart but between her breasts. I can imagine that his ears really perked up when he heard her speaking this metaphor.

What could the early church do with such flagrant flirtation, given the fact that it had the church being the woman flirting quite erotically with her lover, whom the church said was intended by the poet to be Jesus? Did the church have breasts, and was the church supposed to try to seduce Jesus? This is the position in which they, the early Church teachers, were getting themselves with their allegorical frame for interpreting the book.

Let’s take this a little further: “As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”

Oh my. Can someone turn on the air conditioner?

If the fundamentalists are told that this book is in the Bible, and they get a hold of it, the next thing you can look for is a rash of Bible burnings and demands that libraries take sexually suggestive Bibles off their shelves at once.

I don’t know if you can take any more of this at church, but I have to preach the Bible so here we go: “My beloved speaks and says to me: O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards—for our vineyards are in blossom.”

From all indications, at least some of their encounters are clandestine, and there is a fertility theme here too. Little foxes are ruining the vineyards, and the vineyards are in blossom. He says to her, “We have to make use of the vineyards when they are in blossom, not when they’re dried up or used up.” How much clearer could he have been, speaking to her with her face uncovered out in secret places where no one could see them?

Now back to the woman in the poem:

Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not. The sentinels found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go until I brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!

I promise you that no Sunday School teacher of mine EVER taught me this passage of scripture.

This beautiful woman lies in her bed at night sexually desiring her lover, and she imagines or dreams that she goes out into the town in search of him. She asks person after person if they’ve seen him; no one she asks had recently seen him. Suddenly, she comes upon him; she holds him, embraces, him, will not let him go, and in her dream she takes him back to her home--the home where she lives with her mother. She takes him into her mother’s home in the middle of the night. She doesn’t say point blank what happened after they were together as her mother slept, but she does begin speaking to her girlfriends in a way that lets us know what happened in her dream that night. She tells her friends: do not stir up love or awaken it until it is ready. We get that, don’t we? There’s a point of no return once that sexual energy begins to overtake you...as I recall!

Back to the gentleman one last time for today: “Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; on it hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies.” Well, now you know why Solomon sang!

III.

A few years ago, I had a student at Wilmington University who gave a report one day on a pressing social issue. He took us all by surprise. He said that his mother was an administrator at a nursing home, and one of the increasingly challenging problems her facility faced was what to do about venereal disease among the residents. It seems that Bingo and handcrafts were quite enough to occupy the minds or the energies of the patients. Doctors couldn’t order restraints to prevent sexual activity so there was the basis for a dicey novel called something like “After Hours at Rest Haven Home” or “The Abraham and Sarah Syndrome.” Most sexually active residents weren’t coming down with venereal diseases; they were just enjoying themselves and never complaining about the food or wanting to come home. A smart marketing person could use the scenario to lure reluctant residents to agree to move in with no resistance to family members who have decided that a greater level of care must be provided for dear old Grand Mama! Given the demographic that many fewer men live as long as women do, the fewer men in the community were having no problem getting in their cardio exercises week by week.

Years ago, a friend in Texas took me over to Galveston to attend a play at the Grand Opera House about a crazy Texas family--hard to imagine any such thing as a crazy family in Texas I know. I remember that two male actors played all the roles. It was a riot. One scene had something to do with a grandchild finding out that his grandparents “still” had a healthy sex life. He was shocked beyond words and almost angry. His grandmother said to him, “Well, calm down, honey! What in the world have you thought all these years that the old people in the homes with all that time on their hands?!?”

The early church was scared to death to deal with the subject of Jesus’ sexuality so it didn’t. That was one of the problems making him divine solved. God is spirit and doesn’t have the body parts to have sex; if Jesus was God in any kind of way then he was beyond the need for or an interest in sex.

Just because making Jesus rather androgynously divine suited many in the early church, there were others who continued to think of Jesus as a human who experienced life very much the way they did, and they knew they had sexual desires so they assumed the same of Jesus. The major reason the Religious Right hated Dan Brown and his “Da Vinci Code” is that Brown had Jesus and Mary Magdalene married to each other, and if Jesus had married her, there would have been a honeymoon! In all likelihood, there would have been children, which is precisely one of the many traditions about what became of Jesus and those associated with him.

This is not the point of today’s sermon, and I won’t take the time to pursue it. Maybe we’ll do that at one of our summer Wednesday evening discussions together. I will say that art, dated after Jesus’ execution, has been discovered showing Mary Magdalene, pregnant at the foot of Jesus’ cross, and there is a picture of Mary that has been discovered holding twin children whom art historians tend to recognize as little girls; I can’t tell from the picture. There has long been a legend in parts of France that Mary moved there after Jesus’ execution and raised their children there; descendants of Mary and Jesus remain there to this day, some say.

Despite the groundbreaking work of the Song of Songs in the area of affirming human sexuality along with the typical bluntness about sexual expression and the acceptance of it in the culture and scripture passed on to Jesus, Paul, the Gnostics, and Augustine among others did their best dirty up sex and try to make it disgusting while they were at it. This is part of the reasons some of the theologians of the early church were able to sell the doctrine of the virgin birth, which really should be called the doctrine of the immaculate conception. The deal was, Jesus could not have been holy and pure, they said, had his begetting in any way involved human genitalia. Propagating these theories or any variety of them is opposed to the religion Jesus inherited and taught. The Song of Songs calls us to a sense of goodness about sex and sexuality. It is fun, playful, alluring, and healthfully lustful, and it’s not just the right time for sex when it’s time to try to have a baby. Menopause isn’t supposed to call a halt to sexual expression. Judging from a few episodes I’ve seen of “Sex in the City” and from my viewing of every episode of the “Golden Girls,” my beloved “Designing Women,” and both installments of “Grumpy Old Men,” sex might even be more fun and exciting after forty.

I don’t think it’s up to the church to tell anyone who her or his sexual partner or partners should be. We all recognize that unprincipled sexcapades lead to all kinds of problems--physically and emotionally. We as followers of Jesus don’t want to pass along the idea that sex in a connection where there’s nothing more than sex is a good idea; it usually isn’t, and it definitely isn’t if someone involves herself or himself in a string of these meeting for sex only encounters.

Having great sex is a worthy goal in a relationship. The graphic Song of Songs, in the end, tells us more about how to love sex than did either Dr. Ruth or Dr. Phil. No question about it, if our true love partner can also be our lust partner, we’ve found our way into the best of all possible worlds.

An important part of sexual maturation is owning your own sexual management processes. How people express themselves sexually is their business, and not mine.

Parents owe their kids a proper sex education, and the church owes those same kids the message that God loves them so much that they need to live in ways that reveal their love for themselves. A good rule of thumb for a modern adult sexual ethic could well be: Be safe. Be selective. Be sensible. Be sure. Be safe. And don’t fall for every Tom, Dick, or Harriett you may meet.

How graceful are your feet in sandals,
   O queenly maiden!
Your rounded thighs are like jewels,
   the work of a master hand.
Your navel is a rounded bowl
   that never lacks mixed wine.
Your belly is a heap of wheat,
   encircled with lilies.
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
   twins of a gazelle.
Your neck is like an ivory tower.
Your eyes are pools in Heshbon,
   by the gate of Bath-rabbim.
Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon,
   overlooking Damascus.
Your head crowns you like Carmel,
   and your flowing locks are like purple;
   a king is held captive in the tresses.

How fair and pleasant you are,
   O loved one, delectable maiden!
You are stately as a palm tree,
   and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
   and lay hold of its branches.
O may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
   and the scent of your breath like apples,
and your kisses like the best wine
   that goes down smoothly,
   gliding over lips and teeth.

I am my beloved’s,
   and his desire is for me.
Come, my beloved,
   let us go forth into the fields,
   and lodge in the villages;
let us go out early to the vineyards,
   and see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
   and the pomegranates are in bloom.
There I will give you my love.

2010-05-23T14:27:00.000-04:00

In my illustrious career as an organist, I played for one wedding and one funeral before retiring. Through I’d trained on pipe organs at Carson-Newman College, out in those two real world opportunities, pipe organs were unavailable so I played in each case on a two-rank Hammond Chord Organ--one with a full pedal-board and the other with just eight pedals, one octave only for deep bass accompaniment.

At the funeral, I was mostly background music, which suited me fine because nobody was paying much attention to my mediocre playing. Not all of my playing was mediocre given the circumstances and the context. The funeral director told me to play hymns I thought appropriate, and that is what I did. I’d grown up playing more hymns than anything else; and though hymns aren’t usually easy to play I did all right for the most part specifically because I’d been playing them frequently--from the time I was in the third grade on. Even so, I found myself wondering after just a little while there amid the sadness why anybody would want to have that kind of job on a daily basis. Certainly, I didn’t. At the wedding things were much different. Many more people were paying attention to me--as opposed to having my music be just background, mood setting melodies. What I played at the wedding was much more important; for example, specific songs determined when certain members of the wedding party entered, when the soloist sang, and so on.

Shortly after we got the bride and groom and wedding party processed in, during a terrible lightening and thunder storm, I was playing the music during which the couple was lighting the unity candle. A bolt of lightening struck the little country church down near Lenoir City, Tennessee, and blew out the power. The organ and its music died, but not suddenly or instantly; one brave and strong note held on, all by itself, as long as it could. Then it started to give up the ghost one little bit at a time, getting flatter and flatter as it lost power.

Now, you know why things happened the way they did, but the folks in the congregation that night didn’t know the power was out because all the lights were already off in the candlelit sanctuary. They thought something was seriously wrong with the young organist.

I think the officiating minister went ahead with the vows or some other essential part of the service. It was right in the middle of such a serious, poignant moment that the instrument turned itself back on.

That little church was prepared, I want to tell you. It had a generator, a trusty little generator that brought the power back up, and with it the brave note reclaimed its place in the musical composition....going sharper and shaper this time to get back to where it had begun losing ground. This continued, even though the officiant was talking by this time, until the full chord that had been playing when the organ’s electrical source was attacked by the lightening. Everyone looked at me as if I not only could but should stop the resurrection of that chord, but alas I had no control whatsoever over how the organ recovered from the attack. I was humiliated.

The sad part was that my playing, given the context, was adequate, and the sound problem wasn’t my fault. I had played poorly enough on occasion to have been justifiably humiliated, but the music stopped that night; and it wasn’t my fault. The wedding ceremony was severely interrupted, but how was I supposed to explain to a bunch of people in the middle of a wedding that there was a very important reason we call electronic organs “electronic.” I did officiate at a wedding ceremony once at which the organist was a friend of the bride’s, and she volunteered to play for the wedding. The bride was elated even though she’d never heard her friend play. The volunteer organist played every piece so badly that she finally stood up beside the organ, and spoke to the congregation saying, “I’m SO sorry.”

I had agreed to play the organ on that occasion, by invitation and not as a volunteer, because one of my dear friends from college was getting married, and practically all of his friends, as he had been, were ministerial students. He wanted to include as many of us as he could in his ceremony, and since I was supposed to be able to play the organ that was one job he could assign not eating up the few opportunities for ministerial performance at his wedding.

People who aren’t in the know say one of two things about such an event. They either say something like, “Bless his heart, that young organist couldn’t play that organ to save his life, but why he hung on to that one dying note didn’t make any sense at all!” Or, they say, “Janie and David deserved at least decent music at their wedding. I wonder where they dug up that guy. They must have owed somebody a favor, or he’s related some kind of way. The lady who plays at the skating rink could have shown him up ten times over, and, besides, she knows how to keep things moving no matter what.”

The music died that rainy Tennessee night, and though I had absolutely no control over it, public perception said that I did; I couldn’t face the humiliation so I resigned on the spot from accompanying anybody for anything, and I’d have to say that the musical world has been vastly better off as a result of my decision.

A long, long time ago...

I can still remember

How that music used to make me smile.

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make those people dance

And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver

With every paper I’d deliver.

Bad news on the doorstep;

I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried

When I read about his widowed bride,

But something touched me deep inside

The day the music died.

We were singing this song as my high school years came to a close, “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie.” Most of us had no idea what we were singing about, but we sang out with gusto when this song came on the radio. It turns out that there may have been some serious meaning behind what this lyricist, Don McLean, had written.

Some people in the know have said the “American Pie” lyrics were about Buddy Holly and other notable music figures from McLean’s past who weren’t around any more. Others have said that the “American Pie” lyrics attacked the Vietnam War. Centrists, naturally, said McLean had both realities in mind. McLean himself once told an interviewer that the song had something to do with his own impressions that, into the 1970’s. popular music was in decline, and he wanted to make an historical/musical comment on that in his song.

Almost no one disagrees with the fact that the actual day the music died, the first time that phrase appears in the song, was the day a plane crashed in 1959 killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson Jr. The second the song refers to “the day the music died,” McLean was almost certainly referring to the rapid succession of assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. McLean would never confirm, as far as I know, that some of the lyrics in “American Pie” condemn nuclear war and anticipate the Apocalypse.

And in the streets: the children screamed,

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.

But not a word was spoken;

The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most:

The father, son, and the holy ghost,

They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died.

II.

A military chaplain in Iraq recently wrote up a story of an event he’d observed when some of the troops he served had gotten together for a movie night. He explained that it’s the custom in the States and abroad when military personnel are gathered to watch films to have the National Anthem played--as it is at a sports function. On the particular night about which he wrote, the chaplain said the crowd stood and snapped to attention when the music began. Evidently, it was taped music because when the player got to a certain point--say, about three-quarters of the way through--the music stopped.

The tech trying to operate the equipment couldn’t get it to work at all; one would have expected the crowd to sit down and wait for the show to start--no doubt, hoping for a better technical outcome than with the playing of the National Anthem. The chaplain recalls being very surprised that with the one thousand military folks gathered, there wasn’t a single ribbing or rude comment made, which, he said, almost certainly would have occurred at a similar event in the States. The other fact that surprised him was that not a single one of the women or men took a seat. They remained quietly at attention with eyes fixed on the flag. Finally, the music started again--from the beginning. The soldiers listened attentively, standing quietly at attention. You won’t believe this; at exactly the same point as before the music stopped. Still, no laughs, sighs, grunts, or groans. Each one present continued to stand quietly at attention.

Suddenly, the chaplain reported in his report, there was a single voice, then a dozen, and quickly the room was filled with the voices of a thousand soldiers, finishing where the recording left off: “And the rockets red glare, The bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night That our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

In the reporting chaplain’s words: “It was the most inspiring moment I have had here in Iraq. I wanted you to know what kind of soldiers are serving you here.”

Italy is opera's birthplace. On and off stage drama is no stranger to Italy; lately, there has been more drama off stage than on. This uneasy situation has been caused by what one journalist called “a clash of austerity politics with artistic passions.” The result is that most opera houses have been closed down because of sudden unannounced strikes; singers and musicians are refusing to perform in response to the government’s recommendations to make all 14 state-owned and state-operated opera houses income sources and not just income drains. What critics of the government are saying is that the government is willing to let the quality of the music slide in order to balance a budget, and they are willing to try to balance an unsuitable budget by messing around with the one thing Italy is most known for and produces consistently well.

Reporters, op-ed types, and bloggers are having a field day with this crisis. Daniel Barenboim, one of Italy’s prominent conductors, insists that Italy’s musical heritage deserves to be protected, but he agrees that the government has a right to expect the opera companies and their opera houses to be more self-sustaining.

Do you remember the 2003 strike on Broadway when 325 musicians refused to play for the productions they were contracted to play for because producers were taking steps to replace live orchestras with canned music and/or to drastically reduce the size of the orchestras they employed for their productions? Generally, the actors and the stage hands supported the musicians, and initially 20 theaters were left dark on a Friday night because of the strike. The music stopped, my friends.

There were bitter, highly publicized disputes between musicians and producers over how many players were required to make even a small orchestra. For the large theaters, fifty years of staffing patterns said that an orchestra must be made up of about 25 players. This, naturally, was adjusted downwards when the theatre was smaller or on occasions where the musical accompaniment didn’t require a full orchestra.

At the time of the strike there had been a committee in place for a decade to approve exceptions to the “less than 25 rule.” Most requests were honored, but producers brought in their mediators and muscle trying to get the musical companies to agree to a minimum number of orchestra players of seven; even when, in negotiation, that was doubled, the musicians were saying, “Fourteen people don’t add up to an orchestra.”

Part of what was at stake was the quality of the music, the preservation of live music for Broadway performances, and the disdain for training professional singers to sing along with prerecorded music that can’t change with the mood of the performer or the audience. Well, you know by now that that strike finally ended, and the music started playing again. Show after show shut down, and it took those involved four only days to settle their disputes. News sources reported that Mayor Bloomberg quietly became involved in the negotiations and helped move the groups at odd with each other to a resolution. By Tuesday evening, the music started up again.

In Act IV of Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” before anyone realizes that Juliet has taken the potion to make her appear dead, there is a household filled with joy and excitement, aflutter with preparations for a wedding planned for that very day. The Nurse is sent to go and awaken Juliet. She finds Juliet appearing dead and screams. Juliet’s parents run to their daughter’s room and are soon joined there by Paris and Friar Lawrence and a group of musicians who had arrived at the home to play for a joyous wedding.

The pragmatic friar encourages everyone to take heart for two reasons. First, he says, Juliet has gone to a better place. Second, with a few little adjustments all the setup for a wedding can be easily adapted to a funeral. I have no comment on that at all! But I will say the Friar was being pragmatic. You have to credit my fellow clergy in all ages with pragmatism where potential financial contributions are involved, don’t you?

Peter is a servant to the Capulet family, and he asks the musicians why they don’t play happy tunes to ease his sorrow. They refuse and say that it would be in appropriate for them to arrive at a function expected to play songs of joy only to turn around and play the music of death. One musician, though, realizes that if he stays long enough he can get paid for playing at a funeral AND get dinner on top of his fee. Not all were so noble as the musicians who said that there were reasons they did what they did that had nothing to do with music itself or with money.

III.

Hear again the words of people for whom music has stopped.

Our ancestors sinned; they are no more, and we bear their iniquities. Slaves rule over us; there is no one to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. Our skin is black as an oven from the scorching heat of famine. Women are raped in Zion, virgins in the towns of Judah. Princes are hung up by their hands; no respect is shown to the elders. Young men are compelled to grind, and boys stagger under loads of wood. The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased; our dancing has been turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned!

Many of the ancient Israelites lived as if the negative circumstances that befell them might have been caused by their own failures to live up to God’s standards, but they also, many of them, believed that some of the unpleasant realities with which they had to live were ongoing punishments of their grandparents. In other words, if someone did something bad enough to punish, punishment in that person’s life alone wouldn’t be enough; in order to make things right, God might have to punish that person, her or his children, and her or his grandchildren several generations down.

That’s about as off-base as the belief of too many people today that nothing we do has any impact on the generations to follow us. Both perspectives miss reality all the way around.

The book of Lamentations is closely connected, a companion volume really, to the prophetic book called Jeremiah. The words read earlier and these I’ve reread to you are from Lamentations. The whole book is a collection of songs of sadness, songs of wailing. In some branches of Hebrew tradition, the book is known by its first word, “How” in the sense of a question that asks God HOW such horrible things could be happening to such wonderfully dedicated, even if ever so slightly imperfect, people.

The prophet Jeremiah himself is crying out his concerns about how such catastrophes could happen to his people as have been perpetrated against them by the Babylonians. Many people who are God’s people expect to have SOME rough places here and there, but they don’t expect to have things quite so damaging as what comes to those who have no regard for God whatsoever.

My dear friend and mentor, the Reverend Dr. Marion Bascom, and his wife, Dorothy, began to have a siege of health problems between the two of them as they aged, and I was visiting with them once down in Baltimore when they said it had become helpful for them to stop asking the question, “Why us?”, and change it instead to, “Why not us?” I told them as much as I loved and respected them that that approach wouldn’t work for me. As long as trouble left me and my loved ones alone I’d keep my mouth shut altogether, but if it visited I might not ask, “Why me,” but I surely wouldn’t ask, “Why not me?” I don’t understand many of life’s great mysteries, and that’s fine with me. If struggle skips over me, I don’t need to know why. I do think Marion’s and Dorothy’s approach is much more biblically grounded than mine is, but I’ll happily concede on those grounds too!

According to this song of lamentation, everything that the Hebrews valued, everything that they’d come to believe they could count on to celebrate life had been taken from them. They were humiliated, and keeping life going in every practical way was a struggle. They weren’t really governed by the Babylonians who sort of let things go wild, and those acting as their overlords on behalf of the Babylonians were other enslaved people so the ancient Hebrews found themselves ruled by slaves who didn’t care.

Hebrew women were raped regularly for entertainment. The men’s lives were at risk when they ventured out to find food for their families in this strange land.

Elder men in their communities had long served as the rule makers and the standard bearers for their Hebrew communities. The situation they were in, in exile made that pointless so the elders have left the city gates, and the young men whose love for life as evidenced in the music they sang to the delight of the whole communities had been silenced by the tragedy in which they found themselves.

The music of the young men was a sign of the joy of the people. Now the music has stopped. No music meant the absence of joy.

It’s not just the older folks who hated captivity, but also the younger people. The seniors couldn’t make life better for those whom they most wanted to enjoy life--their children.

Outside a context of captivity, the same message holds true. If our young people can find nothing about life in which they can take joy, the present is shaky, and the future is doomed. Now, I join you in hoping that loud, vulgar RAP music isn’t what we have to endure in order to guarantee a strong future for our kids and our culture.

I seriously disappointed a student several years ago. He wrote out his final presentation for the course as a RAP song. It was amazingly creative, but there was a key part of the RAP song written just for good ole Dr. Farmer. I tried, as a good sport and out of concern for his feelings, to sing my part when the time came, and I was an abysmal failure at RAP. I couldn’t get into the rhythm at all--not in any kind of way. At first the class laughed, laughed heartily, at my efforts, but after a few tries they looked at me with a combination of pity and frustration or embarrassment. My student said, “But I wrote it just for you, Doc.”

I said, “I know, and while it may not seem like it to you, I’m busting my butt here. I just can’t get it. I can say the words you wrote, but rhythmically I just keep botching it.”

“Oh, Doc,” he said, “‘Botching it’ doesn’t even come close to describing how bad you are at RAP. I hope saying that doesn’t hurt my grade.”

I said, “No, but if you keep asking me to embarrass myself here, I see your grade moving closer to the letter Z than the letter C.”

He sang the whole song through singing my part himself, and I was amazed. I rarely give an A+, but I did for that assignment. Everyone off campus to whom I turned for consolation in my humiliation only said, “Oh my God, is it on YouTube? You’re going to be famous like that goofy Asian kid pretending he could sing. Your church is going to be so proud of you! Are Jarrett and Carson willing to be seen with you in public?”

Yes, we can talk about my selection of friends at a later date, if you like.

I do think the happiness of our youth is a test of how well we’re doing as a culture and what kind of future we’re creating for those who will come after us. If they put aside all their happy music and sing only sad songs or nothing at all, we can know they know what we want to conceal--that their elders have created a joyless world for them, and while the youth about whom Jeremiah spoke in Lamentations had the added slam of being ruled by an enemy state, the principles, I say again, are essentially the same.

Things are bleak in that department for us now. Depression among our young people has risen to about 25%. Now, not all depression is caused by external factors; some depression is chemically based and would be present even if a young person were living in an environment providing for every happiness. But a good deal of depression is situational; it’s caused by unhappy situations through which people, young people included, have to live.

Right now, suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students in this country. The sadnesses that lead to such horrible results often begin in high school, before the students become a part of the college statistic.

In our world of information availability, I can tell you that pressing and frightening world problems and government leaders at war with themselves contribute greatly to the unwillingness of our young people to sing happy songs, to get the music going again. Before the finger pointing is finished, I’d like to say squarely into the face of organized religion for the last twenty-five years at least: “You too are at fault for giving children and young adults no reason to grasp for or hope for joy. The central part of almost every chapter written on religion eventually gets around to violence and hatred, and before that poison turns outward the religious folk turn it on those in their own number.”

So, I need to work on my RAP skills as one way to keep our young people singing songs that both reveal joy and keep it alive. I have to be careful not to pass along pessimism or apathy about the present or the future to impressionable young minds. Young people singing songs of joy is both sign and source that there’s a future out there worth living toward.

Listen! The happy songs are returning. Blessings on our beloved young people who carry the weight of a bright new world on their backs and in their voices.

Amen.

2010-05-16T12:51:00.001-04:00

Our friend, Dr. Bob Miller of the Jesus Seminar, has shown conclusively in his book, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God, how typical it was in many ancient cultures to respond to human beings with amazing personal abilities, especially those that seemed to reach beyond what mere mortals were able to do, by calling them
“divine,” a part of the family of the goddesses and gods. Divinity was accorded Jesus in just this manner--by looking back over what he had done. Only seriously retrospective stories looking back to his birth presented him as divine from the womb on. No one on the scene looked at the cute little Jewish bundle of joy and said, “He’s divine!” Part of the issue was, no one associated smelly diapers and spit-up stains on swaddling clothes with a deity; surely such substances and smells were human things, not things from the gods! We want our gods to smell good or at least neutral.

Even so, there are those who insisted that anyone who would speak as forcefully for God and heal people in God’s name and in God’s power had to have something more going for her or him than “just humanity,” and, thus, divinity was pronounced upon the mortal.

There are two major ways modern theologians have discussed the question of the humanity versus the divinity of Jesus. “Christology” is that branch of Christian theology concerned with understanding Jesus’ nature and the core of his teachings. Among these Christologists, there have been two main ways of understanding his divinity by those who affirm it; and not all do or did. A “Christology from above perspective” holds that Jesus was born as a divine entity; God had sent Jesus into the world as God’s own child--thus, making him divine from birth or conception onward.

Other Christologists have affirmed Jesus’ divinity, but called it “Christology from below.” It’s an adoptive motif that says that when God saw how Jesus was devoted to God, God adopted Jesus as God’s child and bestowed divinity upon him at that point; that point is normally taken to be Jesus’ baptism, but that isn’t necessarily the time of divine adoption.

Then you have a handful of theologians who are interested in Christology only for academic purposes; they themselves do not believe that Jesus was divine at any point. They do not believe that Jesus was ever anything other than, anything more than a human being exactly like you and me. As I tend to say when this subject comes up, if there was any divinity in Jesus it was no more than the spark of the divine that exists in every human being who has ever lived.

It’s kind of silly to argue this point though there are those who make a career of it, literally. If there’s not enough evidence to pull you in one direction or another, then nothing’s going to change because we already have all the information we’re ever going to get on that subject. Same thing about the subject of an afterlife. There is no additional information to be had on that subject, biblically speaking. Whatever you believe about it is valid for you, and you have all the information there is to be had until you move to that other realm, if it exists, and send a postcard back to the rest of us who didn’t make the trip with you.

We know there are plenty of people in the Christian movement as has been the case from the beginning of the movement who were persuaded that one has to BELIEVE the correct facts in order to be in good with God. To believe the wrong things is deadly since, they say, there’s a penalty for believing the wrong facts; and it is eternal separation from God. I consider that whole notion nonsense, but it’s not our topic for today so I’m trying to leave it alone.

The mother religion of the two other monotheistic faith traditions is Judaism, and Judaism was, from its inception, much more concerned with how people acted than with what they believed. Generally speaking, our actions are determined by what we believe. If, by some strange turn, we do the right thing while believing the wrong facts, how odd, but how good nonetheless!

We do well to check our motivation now and then because being honest with ourselves and others is an important thing, but in the mean time if we feed the poor because someone we admire does so more than because we are trying to live like Jesus lived, the poor are still coming out better than if we did nothing at all for any reason.

Same thing with peace. If we join an antiwar group because the leader of the group is cute and charismatic and not because we want to be the peacemakers Jesus called us to be, well, more is still being done for peace than would be done if we had no crush on the antiwar group leader and stayed at home every week to watch one of the 14 options for a CSI venue. Hopefully, going to the group will sustain a lifelong interest in peace whether or not we ever get a date with the group leader.

What you believe about the nature of Jesus and Jesus’ relationship to God has nothing at all to do with how much God loves you or with where you will live in the realm after this one. Right theology doesn’t get one in good with God and doesn’t get anyone a gold star or golden crown. Call the next realm heaven or whatever you prefer. If there is such a place, the souls of those gathered there in God’s intimate embrace are not there because they all believe the same things theologically or because they at least got the top five doctrines right--whatever those might be.

There isn’t uniformity of thought on hardly any theological concept when you look at the Judeo-Christian scriptures as a whole anyway. Those who believe that the Bible confirms in multiple contexts key theological concepts are seriously mistaken. The Bible if not continually then frequently contradicts itself. “Then why study it?” inquiring minds ask, and the answer is not to find any systematic unity of thought on key theological ideas. The two main reasons to study the Bible are 1) to learn a chunk of the history of how two of three great monotheistic religions grew in their understanding of God; and 2) to seek out inspiration from some of the same stories that have inspired many seekers across time, which is not to say that every story or treatise found within what we call the Bible will inspire me if it inspires you, and vice versa.

I think another reason to read the Bible is that it is an amazing anthology of types of literature collected by diverse people of faith across centuries. They are written around some bias toward the God of Israel, and that’s literally all many parts of the Bible have in common with each other. Again, it’s not the same bias in many cases.

In the same way that doctrines of God Godself developed over time, many in conflict with each other, so also doctrines developed about who Jesus was, especially in relationship to God. There were differences of opinion at the beginning of the theological journey, and those differences continued all through the process; in many cases, they are still going on today.

For some people, to say the name “Jesus,” is to call the name of a remarkable human being who lived in the environs of Jerusalem during the first half of the first Christian century; he was a carpenter and a great teacher who died for offending the Roman Empire with his message of a God, the only one there ever was or will be, who loved all people and, thereby, challenged Rome’s sense of ultimate authority making him a political enemy of the mighty Roman Empire.

For other people, calling the name “Jesus” is calling the name of a human being who was also fully God, a human being in whom God fully invested and fully revealed Godself. In the extreme, the names “Jesus” and “God” are synonymous. There is no reason to prefer one over the other; both have the same functions, and either may receive our prayers. This may be your view, and if so I respect you; but it is not how I view Jesus at all so I have a difference of opinion with you and a serious difference of opinion with the Christological hymn, which Paul borrowed when he wrote to the Christians in Philippi.

II.

Several weeks ago, I made reference in my sermon to this hymn Paul used in the book of Philippians and to the broader fact that there are several hymns that the writers of New Testament books used when they wrote to their respective audiences.

In the Gospel of Luke, when Mary realizes that the child she is carrying will have a special role in leading God’s people, she breaks out into song. Today, we call her song, “The Magnificat,” but Luke doesn’t cue the orchestra when we read the passage; we read it to sound as boring and monotonous as we take most of the Bible to sound. Still, this young woman is singing, folks; in Luke’s version of the story, whether you take it literally or not, Mary is singing when these words come forth from her:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is the divine name. God’s mercy is for those who fear God from generation to generation. God has shown strength with the divine arm; God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. God has helped the divine servant Israel, in remembrance of God’s mercy, according to the promise made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever (Luke 1:46-55 NRSV, adapted for inclusive language).

When we read the book of Revelation correctly, it’s a little easier for us to see how the music could fit in, since the book of Revelation is a pageant, a drama. Some prominent New Testament scholars through the years have insisted that the book of Revelation was originally written as a seven-act drama, envisioned by the writer, John, as suitable for performance on the stage of the great theater at Ephesus. I studied with one of those scholars, the late James Blevins, whom I hold in highest esteem.

It’s easier for modern readers to envision a character suddenly starting to sing in a drama than a novella or than in a theological treatise, but in Christian scripture hymns show up all over the place. Speaking of the book of Revelation, here’s one of the hymns that Dr. Blevins believed was intended to be sung when the play finally made its way to a stage, if the political situation in which John wrote it ever allowed for that.

The book of Revelation is John’s visionary view into heaven, and one of things he observes while in his visionary state is this:

And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev 4:8 NRSV).

Since John is clever enough to use the verb “sing” here, we get it. The four living creatures--these were God’s most intimate attendants--see everything that is going on around God’s throne (thus all the eyes), and they sing constantly a very simple song. “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” Singing as they serve God and kind of watch out for activity around God’s throne is nonstop.

This is a little song about the eternality of God; in relationship to people on Earth, God came, is now present with people on the Earth, and will be present with people on Earth in the future. The song is ironic because a part of the meaning of the word “holy” is separateness. So, the God who is and will be with humanity is also, in some sense, separate from them, from us in an exalted way. No one person and not humanity as a whole can receive the presence of God in such a way as to usurp or take away all that is God. There is always more to God than humanity can apprehend. God reveals Godself to us in bits and pieces, and not always in fine narrative or chronological forms. This is part of the mystery that is God. There is no representation of God, no revelation of God that is so comprehensive that the divine mystery dissipates. To some degree, God is always a mystery to human beings. This is one of several reasons we can never be more than seekers on the journey to find and to know God.

Another song from the pageant that is the book of Revelation:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen” (Rev 7:9-12 NRSV).

This song in the book of Revelation counters those theologies that limit the number of people who make it to heaven. The crowd that John observed in his vision was so numerous that no one could count all the people. This song also counters the notion that only one ethnic group will make it to heaven or that only the adherents to one theological movement will have a place in the next realm.

Careful to stress that God and the risen Jesus are separate entities and not one in the same being, this humongous crowd is shouting out its conviction that humans cannot create their own spiritualities. God is the creator of spiritual realities, and Jesus, the Lamb in this context, has made the truth known.

Now for some more singing. This time the four living creatures are joined by others attending God who sits on God’s throne; the attendants fall on their faces before the throne, symbolizing utter devotion to God, and they sing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen”

They begin and end this song with the word, “Amen.” There is no special reason that “Amen” has to come at the end of a prayer as a way of letting God know that we’re finished for now. “Amen” means so be it, and can be said in affirmation of any theological truth one has spoken. The song sings of God’s astounding attributes, God’s amazingly powerful ways, all used for the good of humanity, and the song sings in hope that this will always be the case. Amen, so be it!

III.

So Paul uses a well-known hymn from his time, something sung in worship where he worshipped, no doubt, to say what he wanted to say about Jesus. Paul’s Christology was a Christology from above, but even grander than that alone. Paul believed, we have to assume that he did, that Jesus was fully God and had existed in the heavenly realm with God before the earth came into being. Paul was following the pattern I mentioned earlier, and literature from the religions of the world are filled with it; seeing a remarkable human being as either fully or to some degree divine.

We can’t miss that or ignore it here, but Paul did, after all, have a motive for including the song as a part of what he wrote to a congregation of which he was particularly fond, the Philippian congregation.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, the Anointed One, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord, to the glory of God (Phil 2:5-11 NRSV, adapted).

Did you notice how the song began? That’s vital to our understanding of its message. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, the Anointed One.” In Paul’s way of thinking as evidenced in the hymn, if a divine entity, Jesus, came from the lofty heavens down to earth, which was surely an act of self-humbling. That alone is beyond comprehension, but to make what he did even more remarkable he didn’t come to the Earth to be an emperor or a chief; he chose, instead, to be a servant to the marginalized, a servant who would preach the reality of divine love until hatred would try to extinguish him and his message.

I do not buy into the preexistent Jesus thing--that he lived with God or as God before the world was created and then relinquished his divinity in some kind of way so that he could be a human being. As I’ve said before in the hearing of many of you, the truly remarkable thing about Jesus was that he was fully human. Still, Paul’s comparison in his use of the hymn is well-taken.

Someone who is truly connected to God isn’t concerned about power, prosperity, and prominence; instead, she or he is concerned with service to the dispossessed, to the neediest people of all, to those whom most others want to ignore. Let the mind that was in Jesus be also in you, Paul said. Don’t be worrying about how powerful or well-known you can be. Don’t be sweating how you can get people to do things for you to make your burden light. You roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work, and be thankful for the opportunity. You even demonstrate your willingness to serve in places where seeing God’s love in action is entirely unwelcome.

Is that the song we sing? Many of us? Any of us?

I don’t really want to do the dirty work, do you? I mean, I’m willing to do my share if it’s absolutely necessary. I’m willing to pay my dues so that I can move beyond the dirty work and get to a better place, a nicer place, a cleaner place, a more respected place. I’ll do my share of the dirty work, but I don’t want to be stuck doing it for long! Let the newbies go ahead and get their turns! Surely, after all these years, I’ve put in my time!

The other major twist in the song is that, ironically, Jesus gave his life serving those who weren’t usually regarded as worth anyone’s time, and in the end God lifted him up as the example for all to emulate. Jesus had washed the dirtiest of feet and hung out with lepers and prostitutes. These were not behaviors that Paul’s readers would have applauded, and yet God said that by doing the dirty work Jesus earned the right to be honored according to every means humans have for honoring those who make a real difference in the world. They are honored not by sitting in high-rise, corner, corporate offices, but by being given the opportunity of hobbling along on an AIDS walk to take the chance that a little more money for a little more research will alleviate even a little bit of pain for someone the people of Westboro Baptist Church say don’t even have the right to live.

Martin Luther King Jr. may have had some imperfections that were kept from the public until after his death when some of his former associates had the need to make him look bad. That humans are imperfect isn’t exactly new news. I’m glad that for the most part the smears didn’t minimize in the minds of historians and others his contributions to racial equality and other expressions of social justice.

Say what you will about Martin Luther King Jr, Reverend Abernathy, but he lost his life in the struggle for justice for all. Let me tell you something about Dr. King. With his brains and his upper-crust academic credentials and his astounding gifts for communication, he could have had any of several high-paying, cushy jobs. He could have been pastor of any number of high-paying churches. He could have been an esteemed professor in any of several seminaries; he could even have been president of several of those schools. He could have written more and made piles of money that way, but he did the dirty work. He had the same mind that Jesus had. King rolled up his sleeves and said that Black people count. They need a voice, and they need opportunity. They deserve to be educated, and they deserve the right to vote. They deserve the right to gather for worship without being jeered or bombed. King spent more than his share of time in jails because he kept combating these ills through his nonviolent means. In his death, many have seen that he deserves to be exalted and honored.

I don’t care about the Christological debate that the song Paul quoted unavoidably raises, but I do care about the comparison and the challenge he uses it to inspire. Let the mind that was in Jesus be the same mind that you have. Whatever claim to prominence and privilege you may have, forgo it; role up your sleeves and give your life to the dirty work.

A few summers back, one of the college kids from my church in Baltimore grew up and was graduating from Harvard Medical School. His name is Ricky Grisson, and I’ve loved him from the first time I ever shook his hand. He called and asked me if I’d come to his graduation, and I told him nothing could keep me away. As you can imagine, every graduate was a star. Each one had already done impressive research and/or served in key hospital settings; it was clear that the new generation of Harvard docs were going to follow in the footsteps of those impressive women and men who had taught them.

The students elected a few from among their number who received special awards, and it was the award recipients who did most of the speaking at the ceremony. I was stirred by all who spoke--what they had done and what they hoped to do. One of those students inspired me the most, however. He had done his clinicals, most of them, in a clinic for the poverty stricken, and his main goal as a Harvard doc was to return and spend a lifetime of service in that clinic or one like it. He didn’t care if anyone outside that clinic ever knew his name. He wasn’t concerned that with so little administrative assistance and support he’d have little to no time to get himself published or to take those speaking engagements that would pay him handsomely. He cared about ministering medically to those who had absolutely no one else to help them find their way to healing if that was at all possible.

Other than seeing Ricky walk across the stage and take his diploma, the highlight of that commencement for me, and I’ve sat through a pile of them, was the brand new Harvard doc who intended to use his Harvard credentials in a place where no one would or could ever understand its importance.

The docs and the dentists graduated together. I remember that one of the award recipients from the dental side was so happy about the fancy car he was going to be able to afford as an orthodontist to the rich. Nothing wrong with that. No reason rich folk should have crooked teeth if they don’t have to, but I have to tell you that the dentist whose goal was to get a fancy car seemed like the court jester in comparison to the humble young doc whose calling was to patients, few of whom would ever be able to pay him more than a token amount of money, if that. Let the same mind be in you that was also in Jesus.

As far as that goes, all claims to divinity aside--and I think they all came from others and not from Jesus himself--Jesus with his communication and healing skills could have made a nice living for himself. He could have been wealthy, well-known, and a Jew in the good graces of Rome had he been willing to use his gifts to promote himself. He could have preached God’s love a little less radically and lived to a ripe old age, but he never counted his God-given gifts as the bases for self-promotion. He knew that everything that he was or could be had to be used in ministry to those who could neither pay him nor praise him.

Amen.

2010-05-09T13:15:00.000-04:00

I.
    I am thinking this morning of sources of comfort to me in my 56 years; some are not repeatable. And, no, that’s not because they’re X-rated; as far as I know, all the X-rated moments in my life can still be repeated--not that I’m trying for that or hoping for that, just trying to help you focus a bit and save some time when you gather for coffee and conversation this morning.
    When I was a little boy, my Dad car pooled to work when he was on day shifts, and if he’d be required to work overtime, he couldn’t catch the carpool back home so Mom would have to drive out to pick him up when he did finally get off for the day. It was usually late, and to make life less complicated when we all got home, she dressed my sister, Kim, and me in our pajamas before we got into the car to make the trip from home out to Oak Ridge where he worked.
    Sometimes I’d fall asleep on the ride back home, and when I did Dad would carry me into the house and tuck me in my bed and kiss me goodnight. That was amazingly comforting to me; I felt safe and secure and as if all was surely right with what I knew of the world. In time, even if I weren’t asleep as we neared home, I pretended to be, just so I’d get carried in, in Dad’s strong, loving arms.
    Being taken care of by my Mom when I was sick was not only comforting to me, but also, as I realize now, part of the healing process. She would sit for hours holding a hot or a cold cloth on my head to help the pain of a headache or the discomfort of a fever go away. Her efforts to cook just the right food when my stomach would say, “I double dare you to send anything else down here!”, also comforted me. Mom and Dad were mountain people who believed the major cure for most things that ailed you could be found in the proper foods. Dad had a special leaning to buttermilk as the true modern cure; the mere thought, much less the smell of buttermilk, made me sick if I were well. Once with intestinal flu I hadn’t been able to keep anything on my stomach for several days. I don’t why or how Mom got in her mind that tapioca might do the trick, but it did. This was long before the internet so I don’t know how she knew that the tapioca root was so widely effective in curing various ailments on Africa, but she made me bowl after bowl of tapioca pudding--from scratch. There was no instant tapioca pudding back in those days. It was the only food I could keep on my stomach for days; it worked, and Mom’s efforts comforted me.
    When I fell in love and got married, of course hugs and kisses were comforting, but the two most comforting parts of being married were 1) going to sleep beside and waking up beside the person I loved; and 2) knowing as I drove home from work every day that I had someone to drive home to.
    We don’t ordain anyone to anything around here, but I grew up in a tradition in which both clergypersons and deacons were ordained for their respective ministries. Following what many take to have been the practice of some of the early Christian communities, ordination often involved laying hands on the head of the person being ordained. You had to be ordained to lay hands one someone else being ordained, so when I was ordained no women laid their hands on my head as women were forbidden to serve as deacons or ministers in the traditions in which I grew up and did my early church work. Still, when I was ordained at the age of 21 or so, as I knelt in the altar and every ordained person present was invited to lay hands on my head--usually with a whispered message--I was highly comforted, and not just for that afternoon.
    Dad was an ordained deacon so he was in the line to lay hands on my head. I believe the presiding pastor had Dad lead the way. He was too emotional to say much, and I don’t remember what he was able to say; but I remember his hands lovingly touching each side of my head. And the two main pastors under whom I’d grown up were both in line; I felt their hands and heard their words of love and support and encouragement. This was more comforting than I could explain.
    If I tell TRU-DEE that I have a prayer concern, when she emails me to let me know she’s been praying about whatever it was I shared with her, this comforts me deeply. When someone goes out of her or his way to give me a word of support, that comforts me as well. Margaret Walker who has had her hands more than full lately taking care of her beloved Tom after his motorcycle accident, still found time to express her condolences on the occasion of my grandmother’s death. This comforted me and touched me deeply.
    At this time in my life, no one can comfort me more than my sons, and I’m so lucky that they care enough to do so. They encourage me all the time. They are proud of the work I do--though, my older son, once hated the ministry and the fact that his father was a clergyperson. They worry that I work too much. They don’t like that I’m single, and when I get at a low point just hearing their voices cheers me.
    I’ve always been lucky enough in ministry to have congregants who knew the clergy road was a rocky one, and they made/make it their business to find a way to try to comfort me when life got/gets tense and troubled on the congregational front. A note or a call that said, “We’re in this together. Don’t give up on us; we’re not giving up on you!”, made all the difference.
    Comfort is a combination of encouragement, journey-sharing, a promise and evidence that no retreat is planned. It comes through written words, spoken words, nonverbal communication. It comes through music--music with words to sing as well as music with only melodies and rhythms. It comes through a warm touch, a lite kiss on the forehead or cheek, a firm handshake, a serious embrace. It comes through one’s presence, an invitation to have coffee or tea. It comes through meaningful conversation in which someone who was a stranger last week remembered some bit of information we shared, but didn’t expect anyone to be listening seriously enough to care to remember; yet, she or he did remember--a whole week later!
    It’s comforting to know, as some of the biblical writers understood it, that God wants God’s people to be comforted. There was that voice of one crying in the wilderness that Handel turned into a song we like to hear well sung by a tenor as Christmas is drawing nigh.

Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people.
Saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem (Isa 40:1 NRSV).

There’s more to the comfort of the God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. For example, here’s another word presented as God’s own utterance recorded in the book of Isaiah:
As one whom a mother comforts, so I will comfort you;
And you shall be comforted in Jerusalem (Isa 66:13 NRSV).

    Comfort comes up as a concern of the Apostle Paul’s rather often, and this helps us to see the pastoral side of Paul, which can be rather easy to miss.
To the Christians at Rome, he wrote: "Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify God" (Romans 15:4-6 NRSV, adapted).
To the Christians at Philippi, Paul wrote: "Therefore if there is any consolation in the Anointed One, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind" (Phil 2:1-2 NRSV).
And to the Corinthians, he wrote: “Blessed be the God of our Lord Jesus, the God of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (1 Cor 1:3-4 NRSV).

II.
    Music has often been called “the universal language.” I don’t recall where I found the following paragraph, but I like it.
It is a complex blend of rhythm, melody, pitch, harmony, and interval. It is inherent in all human societies and a vital part of every cultural fabric. It is also one of the most complex and demanding cognitive efforts that the human mind can undertake. It requires precise timing of various organized actions and perfect control over pitch interval production implemented through diverse affects according to the instrument used.

    Alicia Richardson discusses the power of music:
A powerful instrument, it has the capacity to alter mood, communicate feelings, and create distractions. A potent stimulus it can significantly influence physiological and psychological functions of the human brain and body. When expertly executed, it becomes a form of nonverbal communication or a symbol designed to bring pleasure or distraction from a stressful event.

    In the last couple of months, the press has reported new about how a music therapy student from the University of Alabama did a study of music comforting many hospice patients and their families. Her faculty supervisor praised her for her compassion, which she blended with her talent and set out to see if she could use music to relieve pain. The positive results were amazing and noteworthy.
    The student’s name is Sarah Pitts, and she along with her guitar comforted a large number of dying patients and their families. Music can comfort physically and is used in pain management; it has been demonstrated not only to reduce pain, but also to reduce the heart rate of a heart beating too fast. It has also been shown to minimize the effects of shortness of breath. Music therapy has been credited with helping Alzheimer’s patients remember what had seemed long forgotten. It has helped autistic children focus. Emotionally, music comforts because it helps the dying patients recall special memories as well as to help them say things to their families that they can’t find the words themselves to say. In Ms. Pitts’s experience, music therapy helped provide spiritual focus for dying patients; the most requested song from her down there in Alabama was “Amazing Grace.”
    Thankfully, there are many reasons we need to be comforted than that we’ve lost a loved one, but while we’re near that topic, I do need to tell you that there companies specializing in music that is played by funeral homes while families sit with a lost loved one and greet friends. There are several options for purchase, but they often boil down to “Protestant,” “Catholic,” and “Other.”
    Someone has compiled a list of the top ten pop songs that comfort listeners, and of course no one song and no list applies to all people; but there are a lot of people who find these ten pop songs comforting:
“Beautiful Day” by U2
“Hero” by Mariah Carey
“Everybody Hurts” by REM
“I Believe I Can Fly” by R Kelly
“Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand” by Diana Ross
“You’ve Got a Friend” by James Taylor
“Imagine” by John Lennon
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel
“Let It Be” by the Beatles
“Angel” by Sarah McLachlan

    According to Wellsphere, there have been numerous studies at university medical schools across the country proving that listening to music for 20 to 30 minutes can help the body release endorphins. Endorphins work to alleviate stress and pain that normally minimize optimal health and even suppress your immune system. Listening to classical music from Beethoven to Mozart for ten minutes a day, just a few days a week can effectively lower your blood pressure; and this is just one of the noted benefits.     Once I went to visit Dick Holmes before a surgery he was having at St. Francis Hospital; all the way back in the holding area next door to the surgical suite, next door to the operating room itself, there was Dick, listening to music with portable player and earphones. Naturally, he made some wise crack when I asked him what he was listening to; he snapped back, “I still love listening to myself on the radio!” The truth is, he was listening to some of his favorite tunes to keep him calm before his surgery; even though he was a veteran surgical specimen by then, it’s hard not to ponder a whole range of post surgical results.
    Alternative and Complementary medicine people tell us that when we listen to music as well as rhythmic sounds in nature such as waterfalls and breezes in a forest, our bodies react positively to them. Brain waves can be accelerated or slowed down, depending on the volume and rhythmic patterns you hear. Breathing can change as can one’s heartbeat. Most of the time, our bodies synchronize with sound so we can choose the desired result. If we want to energize mind and body, we choose upbeat, fast music. For a calmer, relaxed state, we can select slower, quieter rhythms in music and sound--and maybe favor instrumental selections since words add one more process to have to take in.
    This is all very personalized. When I was a freshman in college, all first year students were required to live on campus; in fact, only seniors were encouraged to live off campus if they wanted to try something other than a dorm. I wasn’t a very good dorm dweller. I was a lite sleeper, and there were lots of loud sounds with a bunch of late teen boys corralled in one restricted space. Some of the guys claimed that they couldn’t study without loud blaring music that helped them tune out all the distractions. I never knew what those distractions were. In Jefferson City, Tennessee, most people under 40 were praying for distractions--any kind of action on which we could focus for a few minutes.
    I was just the opposite, when it came to noise. I was, and I remain so today, someone who must have near silence to study. I don’t want to hear anyone else’s music and rarely play music of my own while I’m writing, in particular. I don’t want to hear people talking outside my office door. I don’t want to hear neighbors gathered in the street to talk loudly about all the latest excitement in Elsmere. I think I probably have some attention deficit disorder that didn’t get a name until I was too old to be tested.
    If I’m gathering general information for a sermon or an article, then music serves me wonderfully, and I’m sure my sanity is directly tied to the music I listen to. There’s no need for you to offer any opinions on that part of my self-perception. Thanks in advance!
    Albert Imperato in his Blog, wrote an article this past January that he called “Musical Comfort Food--Or, Everyone Loves Haydn.” Not only are there lots of Haydn pieces to choose from, but also Imperato insists that they are all “hearty, nourishing, and always inviting.” He continues, “The world can be a fairly rotten place, but Haydn’s music is exactly the opposite – it’s charming, earthy, (mostly) joyous, imaginative, clever and inexhaustibly fresh. Heck, it’s even fun.”
    Daniel J. Levitin wrote a book titled The World in Six Songs, which has been highly regarded. You may recognize him as the author of the bestselling book This is Your Brain on Music. The newer book’s subtitle is “How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.” The “Six Songs” refer to the six sections of his book, one of which is “Comfort.” Our comfort songs make us feel more comfortable, whether by enhancing comfort levels even if we’re feeling no discomfort at the moment or, obviously, by helping relieving us of our discomfort.
    Sometimes, comfort songs are sad-sounding. This is because maybe we are comforted at a place of pain or confusion by being reminded that others are and have been where we are, and they lived to sing about it. In fact, according to Levitin, sad songs are the most common form of comfort song. Lullabies and blues songs follow in importance and popularity.
    Comfort songs benefit us for several reasons; one reason is that they often cause our brains to release prolactin, a tranquilizing hormone that comforts us, along with a few other functions. That’s a powerful benefit from such music.



III.

    Several weeks ago in another sermon in this series on the great musical texts in the Bible, we talked about the famous story of David, the shepherd boy, playing a stringed instrument that turns out to have been the only thing that could console King Saul when he was distressed. His advisors had him believing that when he was stressed or distressed, God had sent an evil spirit upon him to make his life uncomfortable. This would not be a great way of making me feel better, especially if I were already down in the dumps.
    Despite the King’s tendency to believe what his advisors told him, a mistake continued by such great world leaders as Barack Obama, the music relieved him of the feelings that were tearing him apart. In his case, we’d have to say that the music did more than comfort him; it had something to do with curing him. The irony of the biblical story is that the powerful King was reliant on a commoner, one of his subjects, to get rid of those feelings that wanted to do him in. More than likely, we’re talking depression here, but that’s not the only option. There are hosts of feeling-based disorders that can stop good people in their tracks and leave them in pain and largely nonfunctional. This was King Saul’s illness. He was trying to run a kingdom, and his depression--not evil spirits; there are no such things as evil spirits--would incapacitate him. There were no drugs for his condition and no impetus to try to find healing substances since the widely-held thought was that God had caused the problem as a punishment or a reminder. NOTE TO GOD: A TEXT WOULD BE INFINITELY MORE EFFECTIVE AND CRUELTY FREE!
    Seeking out music as a healing response to the King’s depression seemed to be acceptable, however; and that is what the King’s advisors hoped to accomplish when they found this amazingly talented shepherd boy, also a brilliant musician. Though we have no idea, we have to wonder what made the music so curative. It’s important that we see this as a key part to the plotline of this story and not as an insignificant throw-away clip from the tale. We have so many other stories of healing in Hebrew Scripture and in Christian Scripture, and few of them--none that I can think of right off the bat--use music to promote healing. Why was it overlooked? Why is it still overlooked?
    Dr. Oliver Sacks is an author and a physician; his primary post is as professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia Medical Center right up the road from us in New York City. He has expended tremendous energies bringing the arts to bear on healing processes. Here’s something he said about music:
All of us have all sorts of personal experiences with music: We find ourselves calmed by it, excited by it, comforted by it, mystified by it and often haunted by it. It can lift us out of depression or move us to tears. I am no different. I need music to start the day and as company when I drive. I need it, propulsively. when I go for swims and runs. I need it, finally, to still my thoughts when I retire, to usher me into the world of dreams.

In his body of writing, he confesses that it wasn’t until he himself was a patient that he actually experienced what he took to be a physical need for music. He was mountain climbing in Norway and had a serious fall that left one of his legs completely nonfunctional. Nerves and muscles were so severely damaged that, from all indications, he would never use that leg again. Even after surgical repair, Dr. Sacks’s leg was essentially paralyzed. After a period of time with no ability to use the leg at all, he said he lost any sense that the leg existed as a part of his life.
    Later on, he realized that he forgot how he would use the leg even if he were able. He remembers that he also lost the idea of using or even moving the leg again. It was “just there.”
    As someone who appreciated music, he said that his days of hospitalization were made much worse for him because there was no music in the hospital, and radio reception was bad. Just so we all know we’re not slamming Norwegian hospitals, it’s rare when I’m visiting in a hospital and hear music playing anywhere except maybe in an elevator. Maybe at Columbia where Dr. Sacks works, he’s changed that, but I think it’s normative for hospitals to avoid playing music for the whole hospital to hear. We know that many surgeons choose to play music while they operate and that the typical patient has access to music at her or his bed. Eventually a friend brought him a little tape player along with a tape of one of Sacks’s favorite pieces, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. In his own words,
Playing this over and over gave me great pleasure and a general sense of being alive and well. But the nerves in my damaged leg were still healing. Two weeks later, I began to get small twitches in the previously flaccid muscle and larger sudden, involuntary movements. Strangely, however, I had no impulse to walk. I could barely remember how one would go about walking until, unexpectedly, a day or two later, the Violin Concerto played itself in my mind. It seemed, suddenly, to lend me its own energy, and I recovered the lost rhythm of walking like remembering a once-familiar but long-forgotten tune. Only then did walking regain its natural, unconscious, kinetic melody and grace.

His story is truly remarkable.
    Dr. Sacks has high hopes for music and healing. He’s especially optimistic about how music can aid in the healing of patients who have become neurologically impaired. It may have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves--at least in the precious few minutes that it lasts.
    For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, musical abilities often are among the last to be lost, even in cases of widespread brain damage. I’ve never had even an inkling of this fact. What it means, among other things, is that a patient who is disabled by a stroke or by Alzheimer's or another form of dementia may still be able to respond to music in ways that can seem miraculous.
Quoting the Dr. again:
After a stroke, patients may suffer from aphasia, the inability to use or comprehend words. But the ability to sing words is rarely affected. even if an aphasic cannot speak them. Some patients can even be "reminded" in this way of words and grammatical constructions they have "forgotten." This, in turn, may help them start to regain old neural pathways for accessing language or to build new pathways in their place. Music becomes a crucial first step in a sequence followed by spontaneous improvement and speech therapy.

    Could it be that Israel’s first king, King Saul, was not just depressed from time to time, but that he may have had episodes of dementia as well--with the music of young David working to heal both? Saul did some pretty far out things, forgot some important facts, and took some remarkable risks putting his own life in grave danger. It’s something to think about. Music was part of what got him through.
    It is no wonder that David passed along to his son and successor, Solomon, who would build Israel’s first Temple the strong recommendation that music should be a part of Temple worship, and if David had observed healing because of music then there’s a foundation laid for at least some of the spiritually-based music, songs we sing when we gather, to be healing music.
    I think music in Christian tradition has been more obsessed with indoctrinating people, but part of the music that mattered the most in the tradition that gave rise to ours looked to music to heal. We can’t lose that focus, that opportunity. The music in our Gatherings should continually promote comfort as well as healing.

2010-05-02T18:44:00.000-04:00

I learned from Dr. E Glenn Hinson that, essentially, praise is a kind of prayer or some other appropriate act that honors God for who God is, in contrast to giving thanks to God, which obviously is about thanking God for specific actions taken for our benefit as individuals and as the human family. They go naturally together, and often there’s a fine line between the two; but when observed closely enough praise is a celebration and an acknowledgement of who God is independent of what God has done for us.

In biblical perspective, God is both the creative energy as well as the grand architect who brought this world into being. Before we start a masterlist of perks God worked into the system, which would be about thanksgiving, praise would be honoring God for being both powerful and generous enough to envision and bring into being, through the marvelous processes of evolution, our shared habitat.

When we run across titles of honor and acclaim for God in scripture, we have happened upon efforts to praise God. Here are some examples: Almighty King, Creator, My Cup, Deliverer, Everlasting God, Father, Fortress, Hiding Place, Lord, My Light and My Salvation, Most High God, Potter, Redeemer, Refiner, Refuge, Rock, Rose of Sharon, Ruler, Shield, Shepherd, Tower of Strength. All in all, it has been said that in Hebrew scripture there are 72 different names or titles for God. In Qu’ran, however, there are 99 “beautiful names for Allah.”

These titles are tools for praise in the monotheistic traditions. At a very different level, this is what is going on when Barack Obama enters a room, even if all the people there are his long time associates, and he is addressed by everyone except Mitch McConnell as “Mr. President” instead of “Yo, Barack!”

This is why university students once took a little time at the beginning of a term to learn what to call their professors--”doctor” if such a degree had been earned, “professor” for an experienced teacher without the doc, and maybe “Ms. Aimes” for an instructor in her first year of teaching. My seminary students are very careful about this; my Wilmington University students, by and large, are not. In fact, many of them leave a course evidently thinking that my name or my title is, “Hey.”

Praise the Lord!
Sing to the Lord a new song,
divine praise in the assembly of the godly!
Let Israel be glad in its Maker;
let the children of Zion rejoice in their Sovereign!
Let them praise God’s name with dancing,
making melody to God with tambourine and lyre!
For the Lord takes pleasure in God’s people;
the Lord adorns the humble with salvation.
Let the godly exult in glory;
let them sing for joy on their beds (Psa 149:1-5 NRSV, adapted for inclusive language).

The people in ancient Israel who established monotheism as a faith foundation began to make much of praising God--not only in terms of the language they would use to describe God, or to refer to God, in their liturgies, but also in terms of a theology of praising God. It’s easy to summarize that theology; in fact, it only takes two words: “deserves” and “demands.” Human beings praise God because the great God deserves human praise, having created us after all; and human beings praise God because the Most High God demands such response from underlings.

In modern American culture, we honor an important person with applause, perhaps, or by standing when she or he enters a room; yet, after the noise and the movement, the dignitary and her or his admirers generally expect quietness and focus as she or he speaks. In ancient Hebrew culture, however, things may have been different for all dignitaries, but certainly when people thought they were gathered to praise God. Loud was the order of the day; there might have been a time and place for quietness and silence, but not while God was being praised. I think there were several reasons for this.

One, the people knew that God Godself wasn’t going to walk up to a platform and speak to them with a human voice. Two, the volume and endurance of the loud sounds they thought extended the honor they wanted to show God with their praise words and deeds. Three, there was not a way of looking at God in the oldest patterns that could conceive of God as being anywhere and everywhere all at once. At one point, the people thought that God didn’t leave Israel to come and dwell among them when they travelled to what for them was a foreign land. Later, when they’d decided God wasn’t geographically limited, they still refused to conceive of God being just anywhere. They associated the presence of God with the great Jerusalem Temple, generally, and the Holy of Holies, the innermost room in this huge structure, in particular. The loudness had something to do with making sure God could hear them gathered at the great altar while God was more or less tucked away in a place where it might be hard to hear what was going on elsewhere.

We make so many assumptions about God today--one of which is that an all-powerful God sees and hears everything. Somewhere along the way, if you think of God as in any way a thinking, interacting force, you have to realize that God hears everything you say. Would you want God to hear everything you say? Don’t be guilted by that old image. God isn’t upset by our frustrations and our carelessness--unless we’re hurting others or ourselves, but those are different categories.

The ancient Israelites who gathered at their grand Temple for high worship wanted to make sure God heard their enthusiastic expressions of praise, and so loud was the order of the day. Before there was a Temple worship that was conducted out of doors was loud too as God was thought to come no closer to the Earth than to the peaks of the highest mountains. Some of us today might well think of acts of praise as quiet or silent and reflective. I don’t think this was the case in ancient Israel unless it was possibly thought of in personal devotions, private communing with God.

C. S. Lewis, the famous British atheist turned believer, said this of praising God:

To praise God fully we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God, drowned in, dissolved by that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression. Our joy is no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds.

Lewis’s enthusiasm is not to be taken to mean that we can only praise God when we are happy, only when we sense life’s joy. Even in our sad times, there is a profound appreciation of God.

Karl Barth, the German theologian and the most influential world theologian of last century, had the following words about praise of God. I have not been able to find any reason he would say what he did, but here’s what he said nonetheless: “It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.”

II.

Psalm 150 closes that great collection of worship songs for ancient Israel’s corporate worship. Music is clearly a part of their worship in general and their praise of God in particular.

Praise the Lord!
Praise God in God’s sanctuary;
praise God in God’s mighty heavens!
Praise God for God’s mighty deeds;
praise God according to God’s excellent greatness!

Praise God with trumpet sound;
praise God with lute and harp!
Praise God with tambourine and dance;
praise God with strings and pipe!
Praise God with sounding cymbals;
praise God with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord (Psa 150 NRSV, adapted for inclusive language).

On that note, and I mean that literally, the last psalm is sung: “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” Numerous inanimate objects had been called on to join in the praise of God as the psalms were sung through over time. For now, however, every person and animal that breathes was called on to join into this magnificent musical praise of God.

I imagine the psalms were sung through, according to some pattern so that when finally fully collected all the psalms would be sung in, say, a year’s time.

The two most often conceived places for God’s habitation are called out right at the start: God in God’s sanctuary, meaning the Holy of Holies; and God in the heavens or skies--somewhere way up there above every created thing; from the highest heavens right down to this specific place of worship, the Temple itself, structured and staffed to honor the Creator of heaven and earth and all that dwell in both realms. It’s a comprehensive focus on God for this glorious musical praise.

The great British Baptist, cigar-smoking preacher, Charles Hadden Spurgeon, who was thought one of the greatest preachers in the world in his day, commented on this psalm in one of his sermons: “...the one God, should be the one object of adoration. To give the least particle of God’s honor to another is shameful treason; to refuse to render it to God is heartless robbery.”

The Temple orchestra on days when this psalm was sung included brass instruments, strings, wind instruments, and, of course, a serious percussion section. The same trumpet that called people to worship in the first place joined the Temple orchestra to play the songs of praise, to accompany the singing of the excited people gathered to honor God the best they knew how.

Everything the other instruments played was punctuated by the cymbals, and the musical notation said: “loud crashing cymbals.” This wouldn’t be a service to sleep through.

David Dickson has noticed that:

The variety of musical instruments, some of them made use of in the camp, as trumpets; some of them more suitable to a peaceable condition, as psalteries and harps; some of them sounding by blowing wind in them; some of them sounding by lighter touching of them, as stringed instruments; some of them by beating on them more sharply, as tabrets, drums and cymbals; some of them sounding by touching and blowing also, as organs: all of them giving some certain sound, some more quiet, and some making more noise: some of them having a harmony by themselves; some of them making a concept with other instruments, or with the motions of the body in dancing, some of them serving for one use, some of them serving for another, and all of them serving to set forth God's glory, and to shadow forth the duty of worshippers, and the privileges of the saints. The plurality and variety (I say) of these instruments were fit to represent divers conditions of the spiritual people, and of the greatness of their joy to be found in God, and to teach what stirring up should be of the affections and powers of our soul, and of one another, unto God's worship; what harmony should be among the worshippers of God, what melody each should make in herself or himself, singing to God with grace in one’s heart, and to show the excellency of God's praise.

Some Jewish scholars tell us that after Rome destroyed the magnificent Jewish Temple in Jerusalem for the second time, this time in CE 70, the Jewish religious leaders ordered that instrumental music be kept out of Temple worship as one sign of grief for what they, as a people had lost, at the hands of Rome. There was no prohibition of singing acapella; indeed, the dirges of grief had to be sung in that culture in order for people to be able to express the depth of their loss. But no instruments.

The early Christian communities being Jewish sects, followed Temple protocol, and evidently after Judaism and Christianity had completely separated themselves from each other, the early Christian groups might sing but not with instruments in worship.

I wish I were more of a music historian than I am so that I could feel more confident that what I’m about to tell you is correct. It is my understanding that instruments were excluded from Christian worship for six hundred years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the year 670, Pope Vitalian allowed some organs to be introduced into a handful of churches in southern Europe. Elsewhere in the world, still vocal music only. There would be other periods in the history of the church when instrumental music would be banned.

A true musician might well understand the need for silencing instruments as an expression of grief; since the music the instrument makes is so intricately tied to the musician she or he can no longer make music as before. When I was pastor of St. Charles Church in New Orleans, our tenor soloist, Ed Broussard, suffered the tragic loss of beloved partner to a disease that was just getting a name back in those days; today we know the name of the disease, AIDS, all too well; in the mid-80’s, not so much. Singing was much of Ed’s life. In fact, he’d come to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary to earn a degree in music because he felt called to serve God through the ministry of music. He realized, while there, that he really was gay; those feelings hadn’t just been an Alabama hoax, and he also realized that in order to work in churches for a career he’d have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t so he finished his degree, but never tried to get a church job. Instead, he became one of the most admired principals in the Orleans Parish school system, and generously volunteered massive amounts of time to the church that knew him as he was and loved him all the more.

When overtaken by the grief of his loss and an added grief of a disease that seemed early on to target gay men, Ed could no longer sing. He could speak, but he couldn’t sing. It was tragic. A day came when his gloriously unique voice returned, and he sang again to the utter thrill of our congregation; but not too many years before AIDS took him out of this world too.

III.

I’m so glad I’ve grown up and continue to live in an era when music is central, basic, foundational to spiritual gatherings, and I’m equally delighted that we’ve learned, some of us, that music doesn’t have be to officially tagged as “sacred” to make it appropriate for enhancing spiritual celebrating. Certainly, not all Christian groups believe that instruments should be a part of worship, but most--thankfully, from my perspective--do.

I can’t imagine my spiritual pilgrimage without music.

I’ve sung in church choirs. I’ve accompanied youth choirs. I’ve sung in massive oratorio choruses. I’ve listened with excitement and with tears as music helped me express something in worship and at home I couldn’t quite manage without the music.

Professor Mary Charlotte Ball, my former organ professor, long ago retired from Carson-Newman College, and not so long after her retirement she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Since then, she’s had a relapse but essentially is cancer free again. One of the things that has given her healing and hope is the strength to keep on playing the organ; and how magnificently she plays. We have a sermon coming up on the healing power of music before this series ends.

Not surprisingly, to those of you who know me, I have a different take on praise of God than what has traditionally been taught and practiced, and the joy of the varied instruments in spiritual celebrating adds to the view that I express. I point out to you that it’s proper to make changes in understanding and practice as we move along our spiritual and religious pathways.

As far as praise is concerned, the first thing followers of Jesus have to take into account since we make him our example in some kind of way is that he never, never, not ever, groveled before God or did any of his service to God as if in fearful appeasement. That’s the first reason we have to rethink what praise has become in many Christian communities. Being grateful doesn’t mean groveling. Honoring a great figure doesn’t mean saying, “You are everything, and I’m a nobody in comparison to you.”

We’ve also learned that God isn’t hanging out in heaven, that space above everything that has been created, peering over our every move, hoping to find an error to punish. These are two faults: the where of God and the mission of God.

God isn’t up there, out there. God is within us; yes, there’s more to God than the part of God contained in all humans collectively, but we primarily know God within us. We aren’t able to have much to do with a God who is in any way separated from us or removed from us. If that aspect of God to which I can and must most readily relate to the God within me, then I’m not making loud praises to a God who might nod off on me unless I make sure the volume is kept up. I can praise God in silence. I can praise God with the words of a song sung quietly. Or I can praise God with the loud rhythmic sounds of instruments playing songs that have no words or no words that I know. In any case, the focus of my praise isn’t far away some where, but within my heart. And that God isn’t trying to find fault with me, but rather keep on teaching me to love myself as God Godself does.

Those of us who’ve never lived or lived for long under the rule of a monarch don’t really get all these images and attributes accorded God by those in ancient cultures who knew of no governmental forms other than monarchies. God as a king or a queen doesn’t make sense to those of us who’ve never had to bow or curtsy before royalty or lived under the very real threat of being killed off in a matter of minutes by a vicious sultan whom we somehow displeased.

What I’m saying here is that there’s no basis for what can only be called “negative praise,” by which I mean efforts to praise God strictly as a way to keep God happy or happy enough. God may deserve our praise, but God isn’t going to get upset and vindictive if we overlook that. We will lose out on something enriching to our connection to God, but God doesn’t set out to find fault with us. I think a fair summary of God’s goals for humanity based on the teachings of Jesus would be: Love God. Love Each Other. And Love Life.

Biblical images for praising God may or may not work for me any more. There are modern titles for God that may work more readily for us as we seek to honor God for who God is. Poet Francis Thompson called God the Hound of Heaven who would not stop sniffing Thompson out even when he tried his best to run like hell from God. So, if you’ve ever had a sense that God forgot about you, you’d have been wrong, but the feeling or the fear could have left a bruise anyway, maybe Thompson’s image of God is something you’d work into your praise too. God has created women and men free to act to the extent of the political environment in which they live; we are free to make terrible mistakes. We are free to make choices that hurt us and others. In a frenzy, we may run from God, but Thompson nearly cursing God’s persistence in sniffing him out knew that he ultimately pulled through life as well as he did, with plenty of scars, because God would never leave him or forsake him.

A part of that uncomfortable poem that influenced thousands, not the least of whom was J. R. R. Tolklein:

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat—and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet— ‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.‘

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

By many a hearted casement, curtained red,

Trellised with intertwining charities;

(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,

Yet was I sore adread

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside).

But, if one little casement parted wide,

The gust of His approach would clash it to.

Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.

Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars....

Plenty of modern seekers find that Karen Armstrong’s idea of God as the Great Mystery or the Great Mystery and Presence is the most powerful image of God anyone could provide for them. Getting too specific about what God does or too anthropomorphic about describing God or God’s ways confuses them or turns them off, but they can connect with her image; and it becomes the core of what they can say in praise of God. In any case, let everything that has breath praise God!

Amen.

2010-04-25T17:13:00.000-04:00

There’s a huge difference between having a song in the back of your mind somewhere that sort of springs into consciousness every now again as you work or between spurts of work and, in contrast, listening with great focus and intensity to a symphony in which you intend to appreciate the whole as well as the intricacies of the musical composition. The one, for all practical purposes, seems mindless, though it probably isn’t at all. The other is intentionally mindful; in the latter, I want to take in all my thinking capabilities will allow me to understand and absorb. Singing music is similar. There are songs I’ve long since memorized, and others if I tried to sing them again and again I’d still be sweating over my score and staring at the conductor just to contribute my one little bit to the oratorio.

The Apostle Paul had two levels of making music in mind when he wrote to the Christians in Corinth--not exactly mindlessly and mindfully, with the mind unengaged and the mind engaged, but rather listening to music or making music with the spirit on the one hand and with the mind on the other. In other contexts, one in particular, Paul contrasted praying in the spirit with praying intellectually. Praying in the spirit wasn’t praying with the mind disengaged; instead, it was praying with an awareness that words got in the way of the most profound prayers. If I try, if I force myself, to articulate every thought I’m feeling and pondering something will get lost in translation; no question about it. So, Paul said, when you are communing with God at those most profound moments, don’t be a geek! It is unnecessary to verbalize everything for God’s hearing. God gets it better than we can express it even when we are at our best with our well-chosen words.

At life’s deepest moments, both the most joyous of those as well as the most painful of those, words get in the way. My tear is my prayer. My smile is my prayer. My belly laugh is my prayer. My pride at what someone dear to me has accomplished is my prayer. The hug is my prayer. The gratitude that takes over all of me is my prayer. That is praying with the spirit or in the spirit. I’d sound like a bumbling idiot if at one of those moments I tried to force my brain to produce suitable words.

I tired to tell my older son, once, as he was about to fly back to Ireland--not as a student this time, but as a graduate returning to build on the love relationship he’d found and begun there--about how all moments in a child’s life regardless of how old the child is are interconnected in a parent’s mind. I see a young man walking to the checkin counter to claim his seat on a plane, but I also see--at the very same moment--the little boy walking into school for the first time after he’s let go of my hand at furthest door to which parents could walk; and further back even to the first ride he ever took by himself even though it was just to other side of the carousel. It was completely the wrong time to try to explain something like that, not that at the moment it made any sense to anyone but me anyway. If he ever fathers kids of his own; he’ll get it.

I was telling someone the other day how much more my father and I had in common after I became a dad than beforehand. Dad and I weren’t very much alike except that I inherited his workaholism, but in terms of hobbies and such, all those genes got passed onto my younger brother. They loved their spots events and their fishing expeditions. They loved the scramble to get from one game to the next, even when seasons overlapped, and my brother had to change from a football mentality to a basketball mentality during a brief car ride.

Dad worked on top secret, atomic energy projects for the government most of his career, and he couldn’t talk about work. I wasn’t into sports. He hated my choice of television shows--though I never knew how anyone could hate “The Monkees,” “Batman,” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” When I became a dad, though, the whole landscape of our conversations changed. He was interested in every detail of how both boys were getting along in day to day life, how effectively their teachers were recognizing their obvious brilliance, and how well I was doing at being less demanding of them than he’d been of me. Before there were so many words to share, I still knew that Dad loved me through hardly ever articulated with words. If someone loves me, I like to hear that spoken, but we all know that without seeing love lived out words are painfully empty. Because of his generation and culture, it was tough for Dad to say to me, “I love you, son.” But it wasn’t tough at all for him to say, once with boys were with me, “I love you all!” as a phone conversation concluded.

Not having a Roman Catholic background and not having grown up in a predominantly Roman Catholic part of the world, I was surprised and ill informed when a stranger tapped at my office door at my church in New Orleans, and asked, “Father, can you give me a prayer for good luck?”

I said, “I don’t pray for or about luck. Is there some specific something you need that I can help with?”

“No,” he said as he stomped off. I later asked one of my Catholic pals who told me that the guy meant he wanted me to give him a written prayer that he could pray a couple of times a day. He left thinking I was a dunce or a cheapskate. In his tradition, the words to prayers were very specific and very important. In my tradition, words can help things along or not. Words can be hit or miss, and if they’re miss it doesn’t matter. God gets it better than my best words can convey anyway.

If a loved one is sick, should I pray for her or his recovery? That’s kind of a silly question. Regardless of what my head says, my heart is hoping for restoration of heath. It would be ridiculous for me to act like I didn’t care one way or another, so even though my words aren’t shaped around a specific prayer petition, in my heart, in the powerful nonverbal part of how I think and reason and hope, I’m not willing to give up my loved one to the realm of statistics. I’m not willing to be stoic about her or his suffering. As liberal as I may be, my heart, is hoping for health and recovery, and while in no way begging God to perform magic my consciousness is reaching out to a place where the health problem is resolved and where my life may continue with this dear one as it had before illness intruded.

Paul told his fellow faith seekers in Corinth that when he prayed, he prayed with mind and spirit. I take that to mean that he did the best he could do with words since as a writer and preacher just the right words were very important to him, but he also knew when words had done all they could do. After all, it’s not the words that make a prayer a prayer anyway. What makes a prayer a prayer is the communion with God that takes place. At best, at most, words help me to approximate what I’m trying to communicate, but what is going on in my spirit is always the true prayer; it’s not an approximation. That’s the real thing, which, as I’ve said, words may or may not help along.

As I understand Paul here, I think he’s saying that he realized a point came in his communing with God where he knew if and when he had to let go of the words--as hard as that was for him to do. We wordsmiths love our words. We live in little worlds we create with our words, and without our words we feel at a loss. But that is what praying in the spirit is about; I have to trust that the God who loves me and the others for whom I care reads my deepest feelings, and what happens is that I find God and I share care and concern for my dear one.

If I try to talk about it, at that moment anyway, I’ll botch it up. What I feel in my depth takes over, has to take over. This does not make words pointless, but secondary. Maybe they have helped me focus, and maybe they will again; maybe not. I’ve fallen into praying in the spirit, and I’m sharing a sense of God’s concern for me and the one I love who is presently in need or in pain.

I realize in that moment how much God’s love embraces me and the one for whom I care. Letting go of my words got me to a much better place than I could ever have gotten to if I insisted on using them as my crutches and curtains. That is praying in the spirit.

I didn’t consult with Annie Duch, our liturgist today about this, but as a physical therapist I’m sure there are times when she has to say to her patients, “OK, this time without the crutches. I’ll be here to catch you if you stumble, but the crutches stay over there this time.”

II.

Paul dealt with one controversy in the early church that was never settled, and the issue still comes up fairly frequently somewhere in the world from time to time. I’m talking about what Paul called “speaking in tongues or unknown tongues,” officially designated by linguists as “glosslolaia.” There is some possibility that when Paul makes reference to signing in tongues as he writes to the Christians in Corinth that this is what he’s referring to, ecstatic utterance in song. This is not my take on his intent, but it deserves attention.

I doubt if many of you have ever been in a worship service where participants were speaking in tongues. The thing is, no one can understand what is being said; yet, it’s supposed to be a prayer language. Even the people themselves who are speaking in tongues don’t know what they are saying; according to Paul’s theology, God had to appoint someone with the gift of interpretation to tell the speaker and the other listeners what had been said.

Now, I know that something like this goes on every Saturday night/Sunday morning in Trolley Square where after too much to drink, and I’m not talking too much communion wine from hitting several late-night masses in the area. Someone says something; he or she has no idea of what was said, and often no memory that there was any speaking at all, so it’s up to friends or those strangers standing nearby to make sense of the utterance.

Paul himself claims to have had the gift of tongues; he could and did speak in tongues, but he had to wait for an interpreter to tell him what he said. Similarly, in certain hypnotic states, the subject has no idea what she or he said or did while hypnotized and has to be told later.

In your readings about life in the ancient Greek world, you might have read about the Oracle at Delphi. “Oracle” in this case is very complex word. It might refer to the person delivering a message and be an oracle in that sense; the same word might refer to the message itself. It can also refer to the shine at Delphi were the oracles were spoken. In any case, they tie in to what we’re speaking about here because they were ecstatic utterances, and in order to know what the oracle said, an interpreter had to be employed. You have to wonder about kickbacks, don’t you?

All the oracles as far as I know were priestesses in service to the god Apollo who was believed to be able to see into the future in part because of his vantage point of doing his daily job of strapping the sun to his chariot and driving the sun across the sky. From up there he could see everything so these priestesses, called pythia, had their full time jobs going into traces so they could find Apollo and ask him on behalf of one who had come to Delphi the answer to all sorts of important questions such as should I marry her or him, should I invest in that product, should our nation go to war with this other nation, will my son ever return from battle?

Out of body via trance, the pythia would contact Apollo and come back with his answer spoken ecstatically, in tongues, in the language of a deity. The customer may have paid a hefty price for the wisdom of Apollo, but unless an interpreter was called in, no one there would have any idea what the message was. Honestly, it wasn’t a whole lot more reliable than the eight balls we used shakeup and read when we sought answers to our complex life questions down in Halls Crossroads. You know those eight ball toy things I’m talking about, don’t you? The answers were about as definitive as fortune cookies. So once I wanted to know if I should marry Patsy Stooksbury. I thought I wanted to marry Patsy Stooksbury. Who wouldn’t? Who didn’t? But only one of us was going to get her, and I was in the wrong crowd of popular to get her attention. She liked the athletically popular. I was popular for being responsible with Student Government, Yearbook, and school newspaper, a Clark Kent with absolutely no Superman alter ego.

Even so, once I braved asking the miraculous eight ball if I should marry Patsy Stooksbury, and the answer came back confirmed by all four of my friends with me that night that I should definitely marry Patsy. The answer from the eight ball was, “You will make the right decision!” Never mind that the eight ball had answered the last seven questions with the same answer including my goofy friend who asked the eight ball if he should dress up as the study hall teacher for the Halloween Party.

Patsy was a good friend who didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but we were no match. I can’t remember how she gently let me down, though breaking my heart, when I’d told her about the unquestionable wisdom of the eight ball. I still love her to this day, but, alas, the eight ball had been wrong. I shouldn’t have married her or even tried.

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of those who traveled to Delphi to get a word on a critical issue got a generic word back from one of the pythia’s interpreters that was no more conclusive than what the eight ball told me. Examples: “Better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.” “You deserve special treatment; enjoy desert!” “Today is a lucky day for those who remain cheerful and optimistic.” Well, DUH!

I think singing in the spirit is having a strong idea of what you feel and what you’d say if you could, but you know words will get in the way. You don’t need anyone to tell you what the music means to you or for you. You know the message it conveys within you, and so you sing it.

Sometimes I think singing in the spirit involves the song we sing with words; it’s just that the connection is so profound it’s way beyond mere intellectualism. When we hear it, whether with someone sining it or as in instrumental arrangement, our spirits are captured, and we’re drawn immediately to something profoundly spiritual for us.

I was a little kid when I first heard Ethel Waters sing as part of the televised Billy Graham Evengelistic Crusades that were often watched in our home, and the great Broadway performer and singer made be a believer when she sang all over her range but ended up in her deepest chest voice.

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come,
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heav’n and home,
When Jesus is my portion? My constant Friend is He:
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

Refrain:
I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,
For His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

Then on the last sing through, Ethel would alter that last word:

For His eye on the sparrow, and I know He watches WE.

With that song, I sing in the spirit, no matter who sings it though no one has ever sung it better than Ethel; no matter if singing is absent altogether. The song takes Jesus’ parable about not worrying and touches me profoundly; it doesn’t keep me from worrying altogether, but it makes a dent.

In my young adulthood, Reagan and Cynthina--Reagan Courtnryand Cynthia Clawson--made my soul sing with much of their music. Reagan usually wrote the words. Buryl Red typically set them to music, and Cynthia most always sung them. Mercy, mercy, mercy.

He's the wind I soar on; He's the grass I run through; He's the one I turn to when I have to laugh or cry. He's the light of my world; He's my priceless pearl; He's my answer to why, He's my friend even after I die. He's the sun I sing in; He's the sea I swim in; He's the mountain I climb to when I want to reach a new high.

If God is the wind, I’m soaring on God’s wind. If God is a huge field of soft green spring grass, I’m running barefoot through that field. If I need light, God is my light. If I wonder what my true treasure in life is, it’s God. If God is the sea, I get to swim in it. If I’m climbing toward my potential, God is the mountain I’m climbing.

If someone started plucking that song out on a piano even with just one finger, my heart would rush back to this song that made me feel I was soaring in and singing in and swimming in God as Jesus conceived of God. That to me is signing in the spirit--words or no words the music drives me into most of God I know and feel.

I need a broader repatorie; indeed, I need songs I sing with my mind too, songs that make me think every time I sing them, but a handful I can sing in the spirit serve me well.

I’ve been at many nursing home facilities and heard an older resident play a song to perfection at the piano, tuned or not. That resident couldn’t tell you a thing about that song, but she or he was, without a doubt, singing profoundly in the spirit.

III.

I have been wondering about the potential impact the Mozart Effect has on or may have on spiritual development. If I combine a little research on the Mozart Effect with some of Howard Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences, two of which are musical intelligence and spiritual intelligence, I start wondering about a new well-deserved appreciation of music for spiritual seekers.

With plenty of skeptics, the researchers on the impact of some of Mozart’s music on a fair number of young listeners is seriously impressive. Skeptics notwithstanding, however, the results are astounding.

Generally, musicologists and composers say that Mozart’s music conveys a feeling of ease, grace, and spontaneity as well as balance, restraint, and proportion. Yet mysterious harmonies contrast with lyricism, and the compositions fuse elegance with power. Not only do many of his compositions sound effortless, but also they were created with miraculous ease and rapidity; for example, he completed his last three symphonies in only six weeks.

Many of Mozart's concertos are among his greatest works; his piano concertos--composed mainly for his own performances--are particularly important. He also wrote concertos for violin, French horn, flute, bassoon, oboe, and clarinet. His musical gifts will probably never be comprehended or duplicated.

Mozart was able to write out the parts of an orchestral score or actually compose while he was talking to or joking with someone else. His life was full of extreme hardship and often sadness, but his music almost never betrays this fact.

The so-called Mozart Effect is an inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health, education, and well-being. The Mozart Effect represents:

The use of music and the arts to improve the health of families and communities;
The general use of music to improve memory, awareness, and the integration of learning styles;
The innovative and experimental uses of music to improve listening and attention deficit disorders;
The therapeutic uses of music for mental and physical disorders and injuries;
The collective uses of music for imagery and visualization, to activate creativity, and reduce depression and anxiety.

Research with the impact of Mozart's music began in France in the late 1950’s when Dr. Alfred Tomatis began his experiments in auditory stimulation for children with speech and communication disorders. By 1990, there were hundreds of centers throughout the world using Mozart's music containing high frequencies, especially the violin concertos and symphonies, to help children with dyslexia, speech disorders, and autism.

In the 1990's experiments were begun at the University of California in Irvine with Mozart's music and spatial intelligence assessments. As recently as 2001, new studies in England use Mozart’s music to study its effect on epilepsy.

Sound is the vibrational field that makes up language, music, and tone; when it is organized, we communicate words, ideas, feelings, and expressions. In its disorganized form, it creates noise.

Sound, whether we are in the womb or even in a coma, reaches our brain and our bodies through skin, bones, and ears.

Every person listens in different ways. When rhythm, melody, and harmony are organized into beautiful forms, the mind, body, spirit, and emotions are brought toward harmony.

Music helps release the stress of being ill; it can vitalize, inspire, and reduce pain. Music is not an instant cure for disease, although there is much research on the importance of auditory stimulation in health. Music and rhythmic patterning are used extensively before and after surgery and for patients who have had strokes and head injuries.

•There have been many studies about how, and probably a hundred different ways, to measure intelligences.

•We know certain music brings us to greater attentiveness, allowing for better focus and concentration.

•Studies show that playing music early in life helps build the neural pathways that allow language, memory, and spatial development to take place.

•We know that stimulating linguistic rhymes, dances, movement, and play in the early years are essential to the foundation of bringing the emotions, mind, and body together.

•Music can be effective in study and assist in concentration.

A popular study into the use of music, dating back to the early 90’s, showed that students who listened to Mozart prior to testing scored higher marks in an intelligence test. Another study showed that college students who listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major before taking an IQ test scored nine points higher than when they had sat in silence or listened to relaxation tapes.

The most profound effects take place in young children, while their brains literally are growing. Researchers at Irvine’s Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory found that preschoolers who had received eight months of music lessons scored 80 percent higher on object-assembly tasks than did other youngsters who received no musical training. That means the music students had elevated spatial temporal reasoning--the ability to think abstractly and to visualize physical forms and their possible variations, the higher-level cognition critical to mathematics and engineering.

Music has been and remains vital to most all religious ceremonies. Music engages the speaker or the worshiper at many levels. It didn’t just stumble into a spirituality gathering one day and stay. Where has music taken us spiritually? Where has it yet to take us?

2010-04-18T17:26:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, preachers who were pastors took it on the chin by some church growth research; it turns out, said the researchers, that people who are looking for a church are more likely to join a church based on their feelings about the music they hear when they visit than based on how they feel about the sermon or sermons they hear while they are prospective members. Ouch!

I don’t know of any research out there that tells us about retention. If the sermons are bad, are members likely to stay in the church anyway as long as they keep on liking the music? My guess is, it’s a mixed bag on that one. There have always been people who joined a church and participated faithfully in that church even though they never liked the sermons--or the preacher, for that matter. There will be no time given for testimonies today; thank you very much.

Music definitely should never be in a spiritual gathering simply as “mood music,” the way music is supposed to function at a skating rink. Music is its own unique contribution to a spiritual gathering; it doesn’t play second fiddle to the sermon, pun intended. In the end, neither the music nor the sermon is offered for critique. Both, instead, are offered to draw us away, if just for an hour, from the spoken and sung messages the non-spiritual world throws at us incessantly during all the hours we are away from our place of communal spiritual gathering.

Furthermore, there should never be a competition between music and sermon as to which made any given service or gathering of value. Music and preaching are companions in the great ongoing tasks of the church, to proclaim and to inspire. Not a few churches have died emotionally if not numerically when the pulpit ministry decided to make the music ministry its enemy rather than its peer. Indeed, there have been preachers and there have been church musicians known to possess egos larger than the sanctuaries or cathedrals in which they each worked--presumably to the glory of God and not for self-edification.

The last time I made a decision to join a church as a listening congregant and not as the pastor, which must have been about 1984, the church I joined had fantastic preaching overall as well as fantastic music at all levels. The congregational singing was great. The choral music was great, and the instrumental music was great as well, thanks to Paula Snodderly Roberts. I wouldn’t want to be in a church without excellence in both areas, preaching and music; and I certainly wouldn’t join a church with good music and rotten preaching. But I very well might join a church with strong preaching and rotten music.

My sense here at Silverside is that almost everyone in the congregation enjoys and appreciates the music as much as I do. Two people have told me across the years here that the musical part of the service doesn’t matter to them; neither of them was critical of our music, but one person said that he just wasn’t a musical person and didn’t listen to much music in any area of his life. The other person said that when she comes to a gathering, she’s coming for an intellectual experience so she said her brain is ready to wrestle, and she doesn’t need the music, she said. Again, no criticism of it whatsoever; it’s just that she doesn’t need it.

There probably are those think that preaching is something they can live without, at least as it is typically offered--with one person expressing ideas and others given no opportunity to interact or raise questions. And, naturally, there are those who don’t dislike all sermons, just bad sermons. Maybe some of you have actually heard a bad sermon or two in your life. Again, there will be no time given to testimonies in today’s Gathering.

Under the best of circumstances, I think the most beneficial spiritual gatherings affect most of us both intellectually and emotionally. Both the sermon and the music contribute to those ends, which is to say it’s not just the preaching that has us working intellectually, and it’s not just the music that touches us emotionally. The words the choir sings bring us a message complemented by the melodies, and the sermon should, at least at times, engage us emotionally by asking us to grapple with matters of the heart.

What I don’t think should happen with either music and/or preaching ever is the creation of a purely emotional service with no intellectual content whatsoever; that is the foundation for a service of manipulation. When I talk about intellectual engagement with the sermon, I mean that you should be thinking critically about what is being spoken. The sermon is most beneficial when it causes you to think through and claim your own values and positions on the topic or topics being discussed by the preacher; the last thing any preacher should want in a sermon she or he preaches is congregational dumbing down and uncritical acceptance of the preacher’s position. Now, you and I both know very well that there’s an abundance of preachers who preach precisely to indoctrinate, and they have no intention of encouraging sermon hearers to think for themselves. Those preachers are preaching what they believe their hearers need to believe so in such contexts, sermons are for indoctrination, not for intellectual stimulation or engagement.

An interesting intersection for intellect and emotion to meet in a sermon is at the place of pastoral care. Long ago, Harry Emerson Fosdick suggested that preaching, at least some preaching, should be something like a group counseling session. The failure of his comparison is that only one person is doing all the talking; if a therapist did all the talking in a group therapy session, and none of the clients said a word, almost everyone would consider that session a failure. Still, we get the pastoral emphasis Fosdick believed much preaching should have; he believed that people needed to be lifted up and encouraged by preaching--not put down, diminished, or frightened. We would thank the late Fosdick for that if we could because he certainly struggled against those who wanted to make preaching--and, by the way, worship music--vehicles for demeaning people by having them wallow in self-hatred and uncertainty about whether or not God could love them in this world or the next. His opponents more often won out in that sad battle. Indeed, church music has been just as guilty as preaching of wanton manipulation of worshipers who are willing to leave their brains at home when they come to church.

Dr. Thomas Troeger is Professor of Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Not only is he a preacher, but also he is a hymn writer. Many great preachers also wrote hymns; Fosdick was one of those too. While Troeger was still teaching preaching at Illif School of Theology before he began at Yale, he wrote a piece about how preaching and music should often come together to provide pastoral care to those who come to spiritual gatherings. In that article, Troeger said: “When we sing we perceive our intended wholeness with all that God has made.” What a magnificent goal! He then quoted some hymn words he had written to be used on the occasion of a pipe organ dedication:

Articulate with measured sound
the song that fills all things
for even atoms dance around
and solid matter sings.

Let healing harmonies release
the hurts the heart compiles
that God through music may increase
the grace that reconciles.

The names I’m about to speak will be mostly, not altogether, names of people you don’t know, but they comprise my spiritual music hall of fame; they are people who taught me and/or inspired me in a lasting way with the music of faith, and they are more or less in chronological order.

Mildred Newman

Linda Lakin Hart

June Hubbs

Ethel Waters

George Beverly Shea

David Davis

Ruth Davis

Professor Mary Charlotte Ball, my LONG-suffering organ professor

Dr. Louis O. Ball

Paula Snodderly Roberts

Don Nixon

Dr. Linda Shipley

Elizabeth Huling

Ronnie Myers

Sandra Skeenes

Michael McKnight

Robert Hale

Dean Wilder

Cynthia Clawson

Mona Bond

Ed Broussard

Dr. Bill May

Dr. Leslie Jones

Alexander Todd

Dr. John M. Yarborough

Ronald J. Gretz

Klaude Krannebitter

Jennie Ritter

Dickerson Crook

John Siegfried

Melissa Heieie

II.

Psalms. Hymns. Spiritual Songs.

The Psalms we read from the ancient Hebrew scripture collection were originally all sung in corporate worship at the great Temple in Jerusalem.
Hymns are pieces to be sung based on scripture other than the psalms.
Spiritual Songs are musical pieces about spiritual truths with words that come from sources other than scripture.

One of the most highly regarded church historians in the last half century has been Kenneth Scott Latourette; he called the book of Psalms the anthology of ancient Israel’s worship music. Professor Latourette said that the writers of the psalms agreed with the prophets that God continues to be actively at work in the world; in other words, there is no basis for Deism in the prophets and the book of Psalms. In light of the teachings of Jesus, some of the theology of the various psalmists is disturbing. By the way, King David may have written a few of the psalms, but he was not the author of the whole compilation. It’s a serious misreading, or missinging, of the psalms to imagine that King David is behind each one. Remember, they were communal songs--not specifically the experiences of Israel’s most famous and most mentally unbalanced king put to music.

The psalmists wrote songs inviting the worshipping community to sing to and about God with high praise and embarrassing honesty. The majesty of God is addressed, but the psalmists aren’t above singing about their anger toward God as well as their blatant criticisms of what they believed God had done or left undone. If you have a theology of providentialism, my word for it, then you believe God commands or causes everything that happens in the world to happen--from war wins or loses to summer showers and starvation-causing droughts. If your enemy wins, this kind of theology tells you that God caused the win to teach you a lesson.

Plenty of folks in Judaism and Christianity find the psalms highly inspiring and deeply consoling. By far, the two most famous and most loved psalms are the twenty-third psalm and the hundredth psalm.

Psalm 23. Hear it as if a massive congregation were gathered singing these words, not as if a single voice were speaking it:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

God makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters; God restores my soul and leads me in right paths for the divine name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you, God, are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long (Ps 23, NRSV adapted for inclusive language).

One of the great musicians in our congregation, Brent Grant, dislikes Psalm 23, and the primary reason, if I may dare to speak for Brent, is that he finds the fundamental perspective of the psalm entirely self-serving. The congregation in ancient Israel was singing about all God did for them without any mention whatsoever of what they, as God’s people, should be doing for others.

Here is Psalm 100. Again, an enthused congregation of perhaps hundreds of people are signing in their most beloved worship site. One person is not standing before the congregation reading as would have been done with Torah and the Prophets:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.

Worship the Lord with gladness; come into God’s presence with singing.

Know that the Lord is God. It is God who made us, and we are God’s; we are God’s people, and the sheep of God’s own pasture.

Enter God’s gates with thanksgiving, and God’s courts with praise. Give thanks to the Lord, bless the divine name.

For the Lord is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever, and God’s faithfulness to all generations (Ps 100, NRSV adapted for emphasis and inclusive language).

As far as I know, Brent has no particular problem with this psalm, but a pastor I heard in my growing up years wondered why so many people like this psalm. He said that if you pay close attention to its words, there’s not a very high view of humanity in it. God, indeed, is great, but sheep are really dumb. If we are the sheep of God’s pasture, said Alton McEachern, then God has to be unnecessarily busy keeping us from our own low-level intellectual functioning. For example, sheep have been known to become so enthralled with their grazing that they’ve grazed to the edge of cliffs and fallen off. The psalmists and their psalms were embarrassingly honest, as I said.

An example of a hymn, a song based on scripture outside the book of Psalms, would be an anthem from the book of 1 Chronicles. Here’s an excerpt from a much fuller anthem; in fact, this is the conclusion of that anthem.

Save us, O God of our salvation,

and gather and rescue us from among the nations,

that we may give thanks to your holy name,

and glory in your praise.

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

from everlasting to everlasting (1 Chron 16:35-36 NRSV).

Many people in the past who have seen themselves as God’s people have also seen themselves as passive and destined to suffer or be in trouble unless God comes to their rescue. There are plenty of people today who agree with that notion absolutely. A better overall reading of humanity’s role in relationship to God is that we’re supposed to use the thinking capabilities innate to human beings to save ourselves, as it were.

The best thing always is not to get ourselves in situations from which we need to be saved in the first place, but we have a way of ignoring that and hoping that God will overlook the fact that we grazed to the edge of the cliff and fell off and, instead, miraculously catch us before we hit the hard ground in the valley below the cliff. Example: practically the whole western world got itself into really severe financial trouble, and middle and lower income people in most western nations have really been suffering the fallout of that unnecessary plight. Numerous congregations believed the answer to the problem was to ask God to save us from our greed and irresponsibility instead of taking the painful steps necessary to check it ourselves.

When ancient Israel sang songs about salvation, they, yes, were hoping God would get them out of a mess they’d created for themselves. One complication after another found them scattered and spread out from each other; they realized they were at their best, and at their strongest, when they were gathered rather than scattered. Coming back together as a whole was precisely their salvation as some saw it, and so they sang out their longings when they gathered for worship. They sang to God with the promise that they wanted salvation, restoration, as a nation not just for national preservation but so that they could intensify their praise of God, which could happen if their unity were restored, but not, as they sang it, if they remained cut off from each other.

Much that we long for and pray for, in our spoken prayers and in the ones we sing, is already within our power to accomplish. Of course, some discourses we call prayers are really divine dares. Some prayer requests we have are nothing more than selfish wishes, not prayers at all. Some customers pray before they buy their Lotto tickets. Some fans pray as they drive to the stadium to see their favorite team play.

There are those for whom prayer is nothing more than a quick and easy way to have a wish come true instead of working long and hard to make it happen. The only reason we’d need to pray to ask God to make something obviously good for us and others happen would be if we were providentialists caught up in the notion that the bad we have to endure was willed by God and can’t be changed unless God changes it; therefore, our efforts are useless. Sad, but that has long been sung.

III.

In Christian scripture, we run across excerpts from musical compositions all the time, but because they’re written and typically read in a worship service, we don’t recognize them as having originally been songs. Preachers and writers on spiritual subjects still today frequently quote songs in sermons or articles. This is because, obviously, the poets who pen the words the musician will set to song can often capture a truth that pure prose cannot.

Here’s one that Paul used when he wrote to the Christians in Philippi, and it would count as a “spiritual song” since it’s not based on any known scripture. The theology of this hymn, if the words are literalized, disturbs me, but it went right up Paul’s alley.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, the anointed one, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus, the anointed one, is Lord, to the glory of God.

Scholars call it “the Kenotic Hymn” because of Paul’s use of a form of the word “kenosis,” which pictures self-emptying. The writer of this hymn, who was not the Apostle Paul, was in clear agreement with the writer of the hymn that opens the Gospel of John, a Gospel that would be written some forty years after Paul wrote Philippians.

The theology of both of those hymns indicates that Jesus was a divine being, and not only a divine being but one who existed with God/as God before deciding to become a human being for a little while to kind of see what this humanity business is like. As with the church as a whole throughout its history, we have many views on that issue here in our congregation, and by no means does everyone in the congregation agree with my view. But I do want to tell you what my view is, since I’m here in the pulpit and all. I think Jesus was a fully human being, and if he had any divinity in him it was the same spark of the divine that is in every human being. If Jesus were really God masquerading as a human being, then his life was kind of a hoax, and what he did was not particularly remarkable. If Jesus were one of us and managed to stay as focused on God and serving God’s people as he did, then that is remarkable!

Nonetheless, the spiritual song quoted by Paul dared to wrestle with the issue that many in her day or his day and ours have wrestled with. Given the fact that Jesus was such an amazing man, what was the nature of his relationship to God? One poetic way of answering the question, which some literalized, was to think of Jesus as God Godself, having existed forever, long before there were heavens and an earth. At some point, God decided to reveal Godself as a human being, and when God carried out this plan, according to the song Paul quoted, God, of all things, came to Earth as a peasant, not as a sovereign. He came as a struggling carpenter, not a king, and he devoted his earthly life to serving others rather than to demanding service from others.

So, Paul told the Ephesian Christians that part of what could help them live as they should, including in times that were particularly challenging, was by keeping the music of faith on their tongues and in their hearts:

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus, the anointed one (Eph 5:15-20 NRSV, adapted).

At the foundation of this bit of advice from Paul is a call to be wise. There is no need to ask God to think for us when we’ve been gifted with the ability, most of us, to think for ourselves. Prayer isn’t supposed to be a substitute for what we can accomplish through our own efforts. Some really smart people, deeply spiritual, believe that prayer isn’t supposed to be about making requests of God at all. Prayer is a way of thanking God, a way of acknowledging, that before we thought to ask for God’s loving involvement in whatever our complicated situation is, God was already at work promoting wholeness of whatever sort through the power of divine love, which is consistently at work in the world.

You’ve got brains, Paul said. Use them! If you live in times when evil seems to prevail, then you have to work twice as hard to overcome evil because of how powerful and pervasive it can be.

Getting drunk to forget your problems won’t solve your problems. A better shot for dealing with those problems is to stay spiritually-focused; that’s easier said than done, especially when evil seems to prevail, but it can be done, Paul said, and one of the best ways of all is to keep the music of faith alive in your spiritual communities; then carry those songs with you between times when you can gather as a community.

For me, I’d say the spiritual songs of today are the musical sources that encourage me the most, and I don’t think they have to be framed in traditionally religious language or primarily sung in churches. Truth is real wherever we find it, and the church has never held the only key to truth. Encouragement is a wonderful gift wherever we can find it.

An old spiritual song--not to be confused with the Negro spirituals, which were for the slaves and other oppressed persons of color sources of great encouragement--that encouraged me in the midst of some of my struggles had a chorus that insisted:

No, never alone.

God promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.

Years later, I’d hear the music from the production, “Carousel,” written by two Jewish guys for a serious contralto, not naming God at all, but giving me exactly the same kind of encouragement:

When you walk through a storm

Keep your chin up high

And don't be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm

Is a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,

Walk on through the rain,

Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown. Walk on, walk on

With hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone,

You'll never walk alone.

Why is it that music makes this message more believable to me than the spoken word alone?