When No News Is Good News (February 17, 2019)

READINGS

Jeremiah 17:5-8

Luke 6:20-26

COMMENTARY: The prophet Jeremiah was convinced that the overthrow of his nation’s government by a foreign power was no accident: it was God’s judgment. His people, he announced as speaking for God, had chosen to ignore mercy and to favor wealth. Their greed got them into the political mess they faced and the historical exile they experienced, as the nation’s ruling and merchant classes were carted off to Babylon for discipline and servitude. Six centuries later, Jesus was able to draw parallels between Jeremiah’s humiliated government and Jewish leaders in his own time who cooperated with the power of Rome in occupied Galilee and Judea. Note in the Luke passage the intentional linking by Jesus between the successful of his own time with those who were the cause of Judah’s judgment in Jeremiah’s time. He does this by referring to the cooperators as if their ancestors were those who were sent into exile, six hundred years before. Indeed, the Beatitudes as spoken in the gospel according to Luke when laid side-by-side with Jeremiah’s preaching ring very familiar.

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

COMMENTARY: Written in or about the year 54 CE, what we call Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth is actually the third that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. The first two having been lost to the ages, this one offers correction to misperceptions or misconceptions those Christians had had about their new faith. In the letter Paul demonstrates their misapplication of what he had written before. In this passage the misapplication has to do with the central tenet of the Christian faith – Christ’s resurrection. Paul weaves an argument together out of Jewish thought and Greek thought. His argument is sublimely logical, like arguments of Plato or Aristotle, but his premise and his conclusion are like those of the ancient rabbis. He focuses on a predicted end-of-history event, the raising of the dead, when God will pass judgment on all people. This resurrection will provide for the righting of historic wrongs. It will reverse the fortunes of those who lived unjustly but without punishment and those who lived righteously but without mercy. Jesus’ own resurrection has been proof that the day is coming, Paul says, and the arrival of that day is the lynchpin of Christian faith and proclamation. This claim was as problematic for his Corinthian audience as it may be for us today. There is no physical evidence of Christ’s resurrection, no glorified Jesus who is visible anymore. There is only testimony and theological imagination. Paul counters those who claim to practice this faith without believing in a coming resurrection by suggesting that the dubious are calling him a liar.

A sound file of this sermon may be found at soundcloud.com/FirstChurchWG

Today is the Sunday of Presidents Day weekend. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born near this day. Darwin and Lincoln, those two voices which have had the most defining effect for America in our history, were born on exactly the same day – February 12, 1809.

It’s also African American History Month, and today is our special observance of Science and Technology Sunday. And even though it may seem as though we’re forcing an issue just because of the confluence of those coincidences, I still was inspired to consider that confluence. After all, all of life can seem sometimes as if it’s just a confluence of coincidences that we’re trying to make sense out of – as if the combination of circumstances in our environment are forming a vortex, and we are at the center of it, trying to imagine what all of the randomness means, like Alice in the Rabbit Hole.

Our scriptures for today seem like part of it. Jeremiah and Luke offer beatitudes and curses; Paul scolds the Corinthians (interestingly) not for not believing but for not believing enough! And, I’ll tell you, the Psalm of the day, which doesn’t appear at all in this worship service, is the first of the Psalms exalting the faithful for being like well-watered trees full with leaves. Four disjoint sayings, except that Jeremiah and the Psalm both share similar tree imagery, and Jeremiah and Luke share a similar motif of blessing and cursing.

So you can imagine, I find that reading scripture passages together can be kind of confusing and feel kind of random unless they can be considered with a certain topic. And with the timeliness of considering together both how some of our citizens have been historically mistreated (because of Black History Month and Lincoln’s birthday) and what we do with what we know (because of Science and Technology Sunday and Darwin’s birthday), I thought I might be seeing a glimmer of something meaningful shining through Paul’s remonstrance of Corinth and Jesus’ beatitudes in Luke.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Human One.

That’s what Jesus said.

If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

That’s Paul.

Those two portions really stuck out to me with their emphases of suffering and death and breaking their strangle holds on our existence. I thought, That’s where I want to go with this.

So, on Facebook I asked how other people encounter Paul’s assertions in First Corinthians 15 about Jesus’ resurrection and the coming resurrection of the righteous. Where and how have you met (are you meeting) the Messiah? I asked. Another way to put this, I said, might be to ask, What is real for you about your faith?

Here are some of the answers I got:

If Jesus was not physically and spiritually resurrected he is not Jesus the Christ, the Messiah! I, because of the witness of those who where there, believe in the full resurrection of Jesus. And that the promise of eternal life in Christ is real because God’s promises are real. I have a faith that says that those who die in Christ shall live again and that this spiritual place is a communal gathering of those who have also lived and died in Christ. So to answer the question, it is important because I believe in a faithful God, who has never failed, lied or not come through. I believe that there are many metaphors in the Bible, but that the bodily and spiritual resurrection was testified to by the Apostles and to their followers whom I believe to this day.

A medical professional said, There is a major difference between resurrection and resuscitation. Resuscitations occur frequently in ambulances and hospitals around the world. Jesus’ resurrection is important because it set a precedent. He was the “first fruit” and because Jesus did we have the testimony of this happening in God’s Word, we have faith that we will rise again after death too new life (and not just be resuscitated to live the same old life).

[A Japanese pastor said that she asked] for help with [her] sermon on Twitter! She asked the question, “How do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus?” and got 73 responses to her multiple choice answers. Answer 1: I believe ultimately in the resuscitation of the Jesus body – 30%. Answer 2: I believe in only idea of the resurrection of Jesus – 15%. Answer 3: Not exactly sure what happened but believe in the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus – 55%.

One church member replied, I honestly don’t have a clue about whether there was a resurrection... Jesus presented to us a way of living.

I think the bedrock fact of the resurrection is that Jesus showed up and changed people... And the bedrock meaning is that God is ultimately on Christ’s side, evidence to the contrary sometimes notwithstanding.

To me, it doesn't matter if Jesus rose bodily or in Spirit. What matters is Christ made known that he conquered death itself and that there is life beyond what we know on Earth.

Quoting an Easter sermon I preached about five or six years ago, one church member said, I think of the resurrection as “Jesus loose in the world.” It had a big impact on me and how I think about the resurrection.

I find Christ’s presence in the often surprising evidences of guidance and providence in my and other's lives. A person can be clever and far-sighted in planning one’s own life, but the way things fall into place (or don’t) outside of one’s control does create story-arcs that, to me, are amazing examples of Christ's presence.

I think about the resurrection this way: I think that, as I’ve said at other times, If it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for us. Resurrection, whatever it is or means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God.

We claim to have good news. We use the word gospel a lot, but it can sound mysterious. So, let me remind you that, when Paul or Jesus said the word we say when we say gospel, they said, “good news.” So, that’s what we have: good news bringing meaning and relief, salvation and life, despite the strangle holds of suffering and death. That is the meaning of resurrection.

Even so, even for all his concentration on our good news, Paul points out that it really is no news.

Because of the resurrection of Jesus, he says, and Christ’s glorification by God, we don’t have a Jesus with whom we can make physical contact anymore, the way the apostles once did. This can be a problem, he admits, because we may then believe in Jesus’ actual resurrection, but we may imagine that it was a one-off and that he would have been the only one who gets that treatment.

No, Paul insists, Jesus was only the first. A day is coming... and you can read about what he envisioned for the rest of us in my commentary. But people then weren’t believing it. They were coming up with rationalizations and explanations for their loved ones dying and not being raised. They were doing the things that we do: insisting that people live in our hearts long past their earthly lives, and that this is what lends them eternity. Or that their spirits are still among us, and that this is what proves their eternity.

Paul said, No, that isn’t enough.

And you and I know: Our sentiments are sweet, but they’re cold comfort.

When you think about what he saw in daily life – its cruelty, its futility, and itscrushing effects on some, while others either take for granted their affluence or didn’t take it for granted and insulated and isolated themselves from the suffering that is so often the expense of their luxury. Paul was not satisfied with some sort of “pie in the sky when you die by and by.” Paul insisted that, if there was going to be justice, it had to be real. If, therefore, resurrection happened for Jesus, it has to happen for us too.

Paul, not having lived through the Dark Ages or the Enlightenment, hadn’t come to any sort of notion about democracy or anti-slavery or workers outnumbering their masters and casting off their chains. He didn’t know about such things, except that invariably, when he saw the underclasses rebelling, they were subdued and subjugated again and again.

What he knew was that there came now this good news from on high, a good news that he preached: that the Creator was redeeming the world and that, eventually, those same sufferers and their suffering children would be saved and justified, and their oppressors and all those who did nothing to ease their burdens made to suffer for the sins they committed in this life.

And even without Jesus in his former flesh restored to assert the authority and glory of God, that measure of no news, that He’s not here, still was good news for Paul and other Christians. Keep your eyes on the prize, Paul instructed the Corinthians. Accept no substitutes.

No news is good news.

This was a problematic assertion back then, and it is a problematic assertion in our own time. No news can be dangerous in a world that is growingly more disposed to evidence. The development of science in human history has led us to draw our most assured conclusions about the patterns around and among us. We do this through evidence and, in particular, measurable, quantifiable, repeatable evidence which reveals to us laws of nature and of physics which are only ever poetically referred to in scripture, if they are referred to at all.

Religion, meanwhile taking the sometimes-deadly combination of a lack of evidence (no news) and an abuse of the evidence we do have, has often faced contradiction (and continues often to face contradiction) either with force or with denial. Our refusal to submit to science’s superior knowledge has always led to exactly the suffering we are supposed to prevent.

And a share of that suffering is beginning to affect not only poor people but affluent people also. Up to now, we’ve been able to keep the world pretty well divided between the poor and the affluent (I’m not going to say rich, because most of us don’t think of ourselves as rich). We have been able to isolate ourselves from the kind of despair and misery that exists in two-thirds of the world, and maybe even more than that. We have been able, through our advances, technological and otherwise, to separate ourselves from the pain of existence that people suffer through starvation and famine, or through war and suffering, or through corruption. But now we’ve got global warming. There was a time when affluence could provide insulation from suffering, but no more. Now, we’ve really done it.

Poverty has always been accompanied by violence or destruction, but even what we might consider a small amount of affluence has provided protection from misery. Technology, even the simplest or most basic, has borne the evidence of this. The generation and widespread distribution of electricity, as well as the development of the internal combustion engine, of batteries, and the host of means of providing energy to masses of people have lifted humanity up, as far as our relative standards of living are concerned. But they have brought with them war and corruption and pollution. The advancements in medicine and hygiene, the purification of water, and the development of chemicals for use in everyday life have likewise made possible longer life expectancies. But what is the value of a longer life if violence continues and injustice persists?

Let me be clear. If you are poor, the best you can hope for in the face of violence and corruption and pollution is that you might be able just to live with it. But if you’re affluent, you have the choice of either fighting it or fleeing it. You can get away.

But the way things are today, fight or flight may not exist as an option much longer.

The rabbi Jesus and the apostle Paul call to us with the voice of the Holy Spirit, reminding us that no news is good news! We may not have physical evidence by which to prove our faith, but the truth of our faith is undergirded in a belief that the impossible for one is possible for all.

If it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for us. Resurrection, whatever it is or means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God. And God did this, intervened, raised Jesus. And God will raise us too.

And whether that’s a day of justice at the end of time, or today when we presume to follow in Christ’s footsteps and seek new and glorified life in God: that’s our choice. Resurrection, whatever it is, whatever it means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God.

I’ll tell you why I think this way. If there are so many who are suffering in this life, especially young lives being wasted as Pilate intended to waste Jesus’ young life as an example for others, then certainly in that way if it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for anyone.

So, it may be that our only hope is resurrection.

And here, we soar beyond the limits of what science can tell us. Here in Christianity, we soar beyond the limits of what science can tell us! From science you will only get facts and figures from which you can make premises and assumptions about future outcomes. From religion, and especially Christianity, you get promises of life and truth and beauty in love. Oh, so much love!

That’s when no news is good news, by the way... when you don’t have the slightest evidence in the world and its quantifiable, measurable results, but you have a promise, a promise you can trust. That’s when no news is good news.

And so, I don’t have the evidence to give you, to show you that Jesus was bodily resurrected and lives glorified at the right hand of God. God sort of prevented this, and yet we have that knowledge and understanding that, once it did happen. And it can happen again.

No, it will happen again.

For Ash Wednesday - A Children's Sermon for Everbody

I’d like to have a bit of a meeting with the young people present, but I’d like for the rest of you to listen in.
Have any of you ever chosen to stop doing something?  Why was that?
You know, we’re starting a special season in the church year called, Lent.  Lent is a time that lots of grownups use in order to stop doing things for a while.  They won’t eat, or they won’t eat meat, or they won’t eat chocolate, or they’ll stop watching TV or following Facebook or something like that.
Some people take up a new discipline – like reading some portion of the Bible or praying at a certain time, or exercising.
(Have you ever given up something for Lent, or taken on something new?)  Why do you suppose people do that?
Well, what I’ve heard is that people who take on a new discipline want to make themselves better people.  They think that, maybe, if they can do what they’re doing for the forty days of Lent, then they might be able to keep on doing it after Lent is done.
And the people who give something up?
You know something we’ll all be giving up for Lent? “Alleluia!”  That word, and the phrase, “Praise the Lord,” we put away for the season of Lent.  Not because we don’t like God and want to praise God, but to show God how concerned we are about how things are with the world.
The idea is that, whenever someone who gives up something for Lent experiences a craving for what they once did, feeling the craving will be a reminder for them to think about God.  We don’t live just on what we eat and drink, after all.  We live also on the word of God, on what God has spoken to us through Jesus and through the prophets and apostles.  So, it helps if we can be reminded of God.  Being reminded of God, even if the reminder is hunger or thirst or the desire to do something we’re used to but have decided not to do, reminds us of love; because God is love.
You’ve heard of the Sermon on the Mount?
In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells the disciples that trumpet blasts and fasting (like the ones on Yom Kippur) and long, loud prayers (like the ones during Gentile penitential seasons) really don’t make very much difference if you’re doing them to show others how pious you are.   You have to do such things for your own benefit... privately.
Sometimes people like to talk about what they’re doing for Lent.  And this can be a problem, because sacrifices and disciplines aren’t supposed to be something other people know about.  In Jewish tradition, which is the tradition in which Jesus grew up, such things are called mitzvot.  The word mitzvah means literally, “commandment,” but there’s a sense in this word which means, “something good you because it affirms your relationship with God.”  Other people might benefit from it, but they’re not necessarily supposed to know about it.  So, if you’re giving up something for Lent, keep quiet about it unless someone asks you.
A sacrifice during Lent is for you and God; it’s a mitzvah.  It makes your relationship with God stronger, fuller, more meaningful.
It’s in this part of the Sermon on the Mount that he dictates a prayer that he says ought to be typical of the prayers they say.  You know the one, “Our Father in heaven...”  The disciples don’t ask Jesus to teach them the Prayer, the way that they do in Luke (“Sir, teach us to pray...”).  No, here he says that this prayer would be a good example of the piety they should express.  Look, you just need a quiet, few words, and these words are enough.
Jesus kept a fast before he began his ministry, for forty days.  Fasts can be helpful for starting things like that. You sacrifice for a time so that you feel ready to go with some big and new project.

It’s important to understand, Jesus never says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Don’t do that penitential stuff.”  He says, “Be careful about it.”
That’s not the way our spiritual forebears heard what he said in Matthew at this point – or at least the UCC contingent.  The earliest Congregational churches had no stained glass.  They thought that the pictures in stained glass could distract people from focusing on God.  The Evangelical and Reformed movements that led to those so-named branches of our denomination wanted to practice piety better in America than the wider churches with the same name had been doing in Germany.
I think we may have blown the piety thing, though.  Between the iconoclasm of the Congregationalists and the pietism of the Evangelical and Reformed, we kind of over-compensated for the practices the Catholics never parted with – especially the practice of personal, devotional sacrifice.  We didn’t revisit the practices but instead abandoned them entirely, as if there is something somehow wrong with penance or fasting.
I tell you, there is something sensibly wonderful about having a pang in your tummy which you put there, remind you of God; or of leaving The Good Wife alone until rerun season; or of setting aside chocolate for forty days and not substituting it with something else.
And there is something spiritually splendid about having a bit of ash rubbed onto your forehead and hearing someone say to you, even in a droning sort of ritual way, “Remember mortal, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Not that we really need to be reminded; God knows, there’s enough death around, we cannot possibly forget.
We have relegated so much of our religion to our heads and our hearts, and that’s good too!  But O the sweet vulnerability of allowing our religion to be imposed upon our bodies..!  Even the most intelligent or the most heart-centered among us have to acknowledge that there is nothing quite so potent as an object lesson.
Kids have hearts and heads, but they’re not as developed as adults’ hearts and heads.  They need ideas to happen literally.  It helps to act things out.
And sometimes, that’s good for adults, too.  Sometimes, it’s good to experience more than just bread and cup once a month and water once in a lifetime.  Sometimes, you need to let your religion make a mess of you... to get the smudge and to feel a gentle pain you’ve imposed upon yourself.
So, to begin forty days, that’s what we’ll do.  We’ll take tonight, and we’ll call it Ash Wednesday, and we’ll get ready for a big day called Easter.  But we won’t say Alleluia (oops! I said it!) after this moment.  And we’ll feel that little twinge every once in a while for forty days, much like Jesus did when he was getting ready to start his ministry.  And the twinge will remind us of God and just how wonderful God is and how good it is to be with God.
Have a good Lent, beginning right now.

The Mystery of Singbe Pieh

Singbe Pieh

A sermon by the Rev. David Denoon, delivered March 3, 2013
For audio, listen here (delivered extemporaneously).

References - Luke 13:1-9; “Black Agency, in the Amistad Uprising: Or, You’ve Taken Our Cinqué and Gone – Schindler, Morphed into John Quincy Adams, Rescues Africans — a Retrograde Film Denies Black Agency and Intelligence, Misses What Really Happened, and Returns to the Conservative Themes of the Fifties; with an Account of What Really Happened, and a Few Words about Abolitionists as Fanatics.” By Jesse Lemisch (Souls, Winter 1999); "Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth," by Howard Jones, Journal of American History, December 2000

The problem of suffering, Jesus seems to have said, is not really a problem. It is a condition. It is a learning opportunity... or, as a colleague of mine calls such things, "A.F.L.O." The "A" stands for, "Another," and the "L.O." refer to "Learning Opportunity." The F stands for what you think it stands for, when you are confronted with yet one more learning opportunity you don't want.

One such example of suffering might turn out to be the Sequester, now in effect, a singularly foolish and manipulative ploy suggested by the government to convince Congress to cooperate on reducing the federal deficit.  The new recession predicted by many economists as a result could prove crippling to working people across the country.

The people of Galilee killed by Pilate didn't deserve what they got any more than the eighteen underneath the falling Tower of Siloam deserved what they got. Nor does any of us deserve what we get when life proves miserable, at least not when the disaster we experience comes as a result of anything but our own stupidity. The important part of a random disaster is not the incident itself, Jesus argues. It's the positive purpose that may come forth from it.

"They were no worse sinners than you are," he assured his listeners, "but you do deserve what they got, if you don't make things better, if you refuse the blessings of the realm of God for yourself." Such things are going to happen; that is the condition of existence. What are you going to do about it.

Consider then, a man of Sierra Leone. The title of this sermon is, The Mystery of Singbe Pieh.

The mystery for many of you may be, purely and simply, Who or what IS Singbe Pieh?

Singbe Pieh was the leader of the revolt that took place on the schooner, La Amistad, which was a slave ship which likely had started as a transport of human cargo between islands in the Caribbean, but which in July 1839 was captured by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter off Long Island and was subsequently brought to port in New Haven, Connecticut.

Frontispiece image from A History of the Amistad Captives, compiled by J. W. Barber
(New Haven, CT: E. L. & J. W. Barber Publishers, 1840)

Singbe Pieh is the Mendi name of an Sierra Leonean citizen who, from the years 1839 to 1842, was known as Cinqué or Joseph Cinqué, as his case along with that of 52 other captives was considered by U.S. Federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Singbe Pieh motivated the initiation of the evangelistic effort of the Congregational Churches in America through the American Missionary Association, an association which funded not only his and his fellow captives’ legal defense but also the liberated captives’ return to Sierra Leone.  (In all fairness, not only the abolitionist Congregationalists funded the legal defense and restoration of the captives, but also northern Baptist and Presbyterian abolitionists.)

For the American public who read the newspaper accounts of his capture, trial, and restoration, Singbe Pieh was either a heroic figure or a fearsome one, depending on one’s opinion of African people.

Freedom Schooner Amistad

In the early 2000s, as part of the 160th anniversary of the span of years during which he and the other Amistad captives were in the United States challenging our identity as a nation based on freedom, equality, and justice, a full-scale replica of the Amistad funded in part by the United Church of Christ toured the seaports of the United States.  In the UCC we are proud of this moment in our history.

But it is important to remember that it was only a moment, just a little over three years.  Singbe Pieh’s life spanned about 25 years before the day in January 1839 when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, and as many as 60 years afterward, depending on which account you believe.

You see, that is the problem about how we view Singbe Pieh.  We treat him often as if his life began, one triumphant night in June 1839 when, after being terrorized repeatedly by the taunts of the ship’s cook about his Spanish captors’ intention eventually to butcher him and the others and sell them as food, he managed to break free of his chains and then to free others, break into a box of sugar cane swords, and attack the ship’s crew.  They killed the captain... and the cook... and took the remaining crew prisoner.

That’s pretty amazing stuff.  But his life included so much more that we know only shadows of.  He was a husband and father of three, a rice farmer who lived in the Mendi village of Mani; so it is not difficult at all to imagine why he wanted to get back.  But when he did manage to return, his wife and children were gone and the village laid waste – victims of a civil war that started while he was away.  Singbe Pieh survived the Middle Passage and the American justice system.  You would think he deserved a happier reward.

My new favorite author, the professor of history emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, in 1999 published an article in the Columbia University journal, Souls, which identifies itself as “A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society.”  The article was entitled, “Black Agency, in the Amistad Uprising: Or, You’ve Taken Our Cinqué and Gone – Schindler, Morphed into John Quincy Adams, Rescues Africans — a Retrograde Film Denies Black Agency and Intelligence, Misses What Really Happened, and Returns to the Conservative Themes of the Fifties; with an Account of What Really Happened, and a Few Words about Abolitionists as Fanatics.” By Jesse Lemisch (Souls, Winter 1999)

The Amistad in question here is the 1997 film by Steven Spielberg starring Morgan Freeman, Djimon Hounsou, and Matthew McConnaughey (oh! And Anthony Hopkins as former president John Quincy Adams – what is it, lately, with foreign actors recruited to play American presidents!).  In his article, Prof. Lemisch points out that, for all Steven Spielberg’s good intentions in creating the film which at the time the director referred to as his most important work to date, for Lemisch the film was “a present-minded Nineties screed for white paternalism.”  Prof. Lemisch points out that there was a distinct lack of back story included here.  Singbe Pieh appears to have come up with the idea of revolt entirely on his own.  Others join him, seemingly, because he has managed to free himself and looses their chains too.  There is no indication of conspiracy or planning.

But the fact that, historically, the captives used a file to cut through their shackles – not a loosened nail to unlock them, as the movie shows – they must have devised a system together to hide the file.  Furthermore, their knowledge of a sealed crate filled with swords and the speed with which they must have acted to open it and distribute them – since the crew on deck appears to have been taken completely by surprise – points to quite a bit of premeditation.  Lemisch argues that the real story of La Amistad is not about a group of black people set free by the magnificent justice of a white people’s system of government or about black and white cooperation.  The Amistad incident is about resistance and rebellion; it is about, as Lemisch puts it, “black agency.”

"The Revolt," one in the Amistad Mutiny series of murals (1938) by Hale Woodruff

Not only was much of Singbe Pieh’s life stolen from him, but the moment of his triumph toward liberation is made to seem more like an accident than a well-planned victory. And yet it must have been.

Then, the most abiding story about him after his return to Sierra Leone is that he became a slave trader there.  And, no matter how much evidence there may be to the contrary the allegation keeps getting repeated.  The most damning evidence to the contrary is that this part of his biography is actually taken from a novel, the author of which admitted that where there were gaps in the story, he made things up.  ("Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth," by Howard Jones, Journal of American History, December 2000)

Why?

Not, why would people believe this?  We know that!

No, Why, after his life was so piled high with misery, would Singbe Pieh not at some point have seen some enduring happiness?  At some point, hasn’t he suffered enough?  At some point, haven’t we all suffered enough?

__________________________

I don’t know if it’s a satisfying response for you.  I know it isn’t entirely satisfying for me, but Jesus offered this response to his followers when they pressed him to know why people who seemed innocent should have been the subject of suffering... the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices, the eighteen who died when a tower fell on them.  He said, “Were any of these less righteous than any other ordinary people trying to live life as best they could?  No.”

And then he told them a parable about a garden and a fruitless tree.  The owner of the tree wanted to cut it down and replace it.  The one who tended the garden, however, pleaded with the owner to allow him to fertilize it.  “Let me dig around it and put manure around it,” the gardener said.

That, Jesus seems to say, pretty well sums up our condition: we are given lives abounding in manure because that is what enriches them.  Granted, in the moment of suffering, these words do not come as much comfort, saying as they do that suffering is inevitable and perhaps even necessary, even if in it we can find new meaning and purpose for ourselves.

People caught in disaster don’t deserve it.  There's no real mystery to it.  They simply were as they were when misery began.  It isn’t God’s will that people suffer, and they don’t go through it or succumb to it because they are worse sinners than anyone else.  The world is as it is, says Jesus: Manure happens.  But because it happens, we can be better; life can be better than it was.

Singbe Pieh and his fellow captives deserve to be recognized as something more than victims of their times or as justifiers of the American system.  They deserve to be seen as more than people saved from perdition by a single man (John Quincy Adams) or group of people (abolitionists).  They deserve to be recognized as human beings who when they saw the opportunity to reverse their fortunes, together tried.  However difficult it may be this century and three-quarters later to see them clearly, we owe them at least that much recognition.  And this is the day we in the UCC celebrate Singbe Pieh and all of them and the mystery of the tragedy they shared and the life we all share.  From sadness and hardship, they were able to wrest redemption into the light of day.

And their story bore brilliant fruit: Something not often remembered is that their was the first of three great slave rebellions in a period of five years.  In November 1841, nineteen slaves aboard the Creole, which was loaded with 153 slaves bound from Hamption Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans, Louisiana, overwhelmed that ship's crew and ordered them to sail for Liberia.  Insufficiently provisioned for a trans-Atlantic voyage, the crew convinced the mutineers to allow them to sail for Nassau, the Bahamas, instead.  Once arrived in the port of that British protectorate, despite repeated protestations from the American consulate, because British law forbade the ownership of slaves, Bahamian police set all but seven of the captives free.  Those seven - three women and four children - elected instead to sail on to New Orleans.

Furthermore, in November 1842, hundreds of slaves of Cherokees in the Indian Territory, walked away from their masters and headed for Mexico, which also had outlawed slavery.  [Here, the audio version of this sermon misrepresents the actual history. I apologize for the inaccuracy. -DD]  The Cherokee Nation raised a militia which captured the slaves, just north of the Red River (Texas border).  It is interesting also to note that, after this rebellion in 1842, there was not another slave rebellion until Harper's Ferry in 1859.

It can surely be no accident that, with the sensationalism of the Amistad story in the news in both the North and the South almost constant from 1839 until 1842, that the affirmative decisions in 1841 of the Federal District Court in New Haven and the U.S. Supreme Court influenced the resolve of those slaves to assume freedom when the opportunity presented itself.  Slave revolts and rebellions such as those on the Creole and in the Indian Territory could not have occurred without conspiracy and planning of individuals convinced that freedom was within their grasp if they would only take it.

The inspiring agency of the Amistad captives continues to bear fruit today, in articles I have cited here, and in Civil Rights and Human Rights movements, here and across the globe.

And much as the Sequester threatens to recede our economy, because we know the story of the liberated Amistad captives, we know that there is hope.  But we knew that already didn't we.

The one who told the parable of the fertilized fig tree is one who lived this reality himself.  Our Jesus was arrested unjustly, and tortured, and executed for no good reason.  But he would not be kept down; on the third day he was restored to life, gloriously and for ever, as a living example for us all.

We have that hope for ourselves, so let us be examples of the freedom that makes us free and the love that gives us life.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

What We Say (sermon, September 16, 2012)

[Our seminarian, Reina Ueno, a native of Sendai, Japan, was the reader of scripture for the morning's service. To hear her reading Isaiah 50:4-9 and James 3:1-12, please listen to the audio version of this sermon.]

The scriptures we have heard today I think are unusually apropos of our particular moment in history.

Furthermore, for a church in a denomination which asserts that “God is still speaking,” these readings are pointedly significant.  And to have them spoken among us by one whose first language is not English I think may add light to just how important what we say can be.  Then to be aware that the language in which the letter of James was written was not English but Greek, and that even though translated from Greek into English, the letter (by evidence of some untranslated Hebrew or Aramaic words in it, such as Gehenna) probably was collected from sermons preached in Aramaic by James full of the Holy Spirit, it is entirely fitting to our purposes today that a non-native English speaker should be working so diligently to make James's message understood.

As to this moment in history...

Of course what I am referring to is, when an anti-Islam radical in Hollywood made a scandalous motion picture about the Muslim prophet – of whom their holy book and tradition insists that no image (graven or otherwise) shall be made. Muslims with perspectives similarly limited as the radical producer’s reacted violently.

I have heard speculation that the producer of the film is probably a Coptic Christian with an agenda to humiliate Muslims as he remembered having been humiliated for his Christianity growing up in Egypt.  But he ought to have resisted the temptation to do what he did.  “Not many of you should become teachers,” the apostle James once said, “for you are judged more severely.”  What that producer expressed in fourteen minutes... what he said incited violence to the extent that innocent and genuinely good-hearted, helpful people got killed.

Now, the fact that good people got killed indicates that what you say may not be the only concern we ought to have as we seek to restore the whole, which of course is the focus of our new Sunday School curriculum.  No, also, what you do is significant, and next week’s sermon is titled, “What You Do,” so I’ll get to the murderous mobs next week (I imagine that will still be timely.).  What we say is enough of a topic, for now.

Over time, we have always acknowledged that things we say carry weight, even power.

Christianity includes a very important clause, in the law on which our practice of faith is based, namely the commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

That law is in our holy canon, because we know deeply – having as one of our myths of creation a story in which what God says causes things to be – words have power.

That law (“You shall not bear false witness.” (Exodus 20:16)) is there, because we affirm in that creation story, that words have power.

That law (“You shall not bear false witness.”) is there, because the power that words have originates with the speaker.

That law is there, because we who speak claim to be people of an invisible Creator whom we give substance!  We are God’s physically existing representatives, and when we misrepresent God by saying something as scandalous as to disrespect someone else’s religion, someone else’s prophet, we invite God’s judgment upon us and the world’s judgment upon God.

Even if some members of that religion deserve to have God’s judgment brought against them because they once persecuted you simply for being a follower of another faith tradition, our law says that it does not give you the right to bear false witness against them.  The things one knows to be untrue, and the things one only speculates are true, and the things that one just really, really wishes would be true – all of which appear to have been contained in the testimony made against Islam in the fourteen minutes of video available about that crazy movie on the internet – are false witness, once you say them.

“Brothers and sisters,” James said, “not all of you should be teachers.”

What we say as people of God – and by virtue of our baptism, there is never a time in our lives when we are not the people of God – what we say has potential for a profound effect, to do what God’s words can do – to bless or to destroy.

What we say may not only have a profound effect on others; it can affect us, too.  Words are powerful, and at their best our words give sound and substance to a silent Spirit waiting to be revealed.

But church people over the past many decades have begun to stay away in droves.  Christian communities have seemed more interested in delivering a good message than in allowing that message to activate with power.  We struggle as faithful people to demonstrate the power we have experienced God’s word to have in our lives.  I witness daily the perseverance with which you all endeavor to make your lives resonant with the power you have found in the word you have received.

It’s the word of life, and it has restorative potential.  What choice do we have but to respond, thus demonstrating that not all church people are hypocrites!

To the end of presenting a new and vitalized word for others to speak, theologians will revise concepts of the divine, or propose new interpretations and patterns of those concepts, in order to get to the heart of God’s pure message.

The Rev. Dr. Charles McCollough at work

Our friend Charles McCollough is here, this morning, with the express purpose of visualizing God’s word anew, through his sculpture.

Our friend Libby Reimers is encouraging us to invite others to re-envision their search for faith in a Wednesday morning series, starting October 10.  In that study, some very creative writers and illustrators and videographers invite us to consider our beliefs in new or innovative ways.

Because what we say about God and ourselves in relationship with one another gives the rest of the world a pretty strong impression about who we are and what ends we are seeking to accomplish.  And it says profound things about how we think of ourselves.

What we say as people of faith (and there is no time in our lives, once we have joined the church by baptism that we are NOT people of faith) will provide a centerpoint of focus for those who do not somehow know God.  It will further provide a centerpoint of concentration for those who are seeking to know God more fully and are trusting us to be accurate representatives... people like our children and others with formative minds and hearts.

What we say is important.  “Not all of you should be teachers,” said James.  “You bring greater judgment on yourself.”

But what choice do we have?  What choice is there?  Words have power, even if we don’t want to use them as if we were teachers.  We serve the word of God – Christ the word – spoken from the start of creation and still being spoken today.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Chief Rabbi of Great Britain Jonathan Sacks has said,

The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities, discovering a genesis of hope.  

He has used as evidence the parents in Israel and the Palestinian territories whose children have been killed in violent conflicts there, seeking reconciliation for the sake of future generations of children and for the continuation of their homeland in peace.  When they have been able to be vulnerable with one another, they have found new ground and invited others to it.

Perhaps on what you would consider a more mundane level, but which affects me greatly as a minister, if divorcing couples can talk together, maybe with a moderator present, and take the time really to speak from the heart and to listen from the heart, respecting and not insisting on one’s own way, the parting can be peaceful.  Thus, Rabbi Sacks has further observed, "It’s when you can feel your opponents’ pain that you're beginning the path to reconciliation."

We can underestimate sometimes just how crucial it can be to actually listen to somebody and to make yourself heard.  The premarital course of study that I share with couples includes a section that I emphasize probably more than they care to perform.  It’s called Assertiveness and Active Listening, and through it what I try to do is to strengthen the couples’ understanding of the importance of stating their hopes and dreams and feelings, and the equal importance of paying attention to what the other says.  It is the discipline of echoing what the other has said and checking in with the speaker that one has understood, and only then offering back one’s own feelings and thoughts, constantly checking in with the other about the vicissitudes of the human conscience and heart and spirit, until new ground is reached or familiar ground affirmed.  If we lose that, if we fail to allow the other to say what they need to say, if we fail to allow their words to have the power that they can have with our own, then we weaken and disrespect the other.

This way of speaking and hearing affirms what we all insist is true about the power of words, and as a fellow person of faith I think Rabbi Sacks is right.  If we can simply learn to practice respectful patterns of speaking and listening, affirming our own and others’ power of words, the world will be a better place.  "The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation."

Maybe the best we can do is to try not to forget how much power our words may have... and how important it can be to say them rightly, properly...  Maybe the best we can do is to live our speaking as Reina was having to live it a while ago: endeavoring to say the English words that represent the Greek words that represent the Aramaic speaker who sought to represent the heart of God.

We will not necessarily say our words with the same kind of precision that a foreign-born reader might be seeking, but we will be endeavoring to represent faithfully to our world One who speaks beyond words and, perhaps through us, with words, in Christ’s name.

Incasts (sermon, February 12, 2012 - unedited version)

[SCRIPTURES for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany]

Listen to the audio of this sermon, by clicking here (*.mp3 file)!

Last week, our signboard created something of a sensation. I like to say that it "went a little bit viral."

In solidarity with the students at Clayton High School who were going to be picketed on Monday, February 6, by the Westboro Baptist Church, I posted a saying I had seen on a placard from a similar counter-protest of WBC, last summer at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas. The message on one side of each of our two signboards (on Elm and Lockwood Avenues), now reads:

As I went out to the parking lot to take that photo, I couldn't help but notice a passerby had pulled into the lot to take a picture of it too.

I don't know whether it was his photograph that made it onto the internet, but on Tuesday of last week, the office received a telephone call from an anonymous caller saying that a photo of the sign had been uploaded to imgur.com and was generating quite a favorable response on the Atheism section of reddit.com.

And it sure was! Altogether, those two websites report 530,583 views on imgur.com; 456 comments on reddit.com’s “atheism” page.  Since last Sunday, we have registered 11 new "likes" on our Facebook page, mostly from strangers.  A separate posting of the photo on the Facebook page (and if I offend anyone by the name of the page, please excuse me:) "We survived Bush. You will survive Obama." now registers over 2,600 "likes" and 747 "shares."

And all of this comes with thanks to the Westboro Baptist Church for showing up at Clayton High School, this past Monday. 

I wish Fred Phelps was around, so I could give him a proper thank you and a smooch.

OK, so I don't really want to smooch Fred Phelps. Furthermore, I'm sure he wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a smooch from me.

Which reminds me of a story, about another couple of guys who had some difficulty liking each other...

The story of General Naaman and the Prophet Elisha, believe me, is sort of a negative example of the kind of thing I want to talk to you about, this morning.

To a certain extent, I’d like to offer some thoughts on how to build community, but the real emphasis is about the hazards of building a community of faith together.

And the Prophet Elisha here pretty clearly has no presumptions about building community.  He does not want to build community.  As a matter of fact, it’s pretty clear that he has no real interest even in healing a sick man, though that is what he is doing.

Naaman washes in the Jordan,
from ArtBible.com

Naaman was an enemy, after all, to Elisha and to anyone who might have been hearing or telling this story the first few times it went around.  When King Jehoram of Israel makes his complaint that Ben-Hadad King of Aram has requested his holy man to cleanse Ben-Hadad’s general, it is because Jehoram perceives an attempt at provocation to a war that he is not ready to fight.

Furthermore, neither Naaman nor Ben-Hadad desires to soften international relations.  Both of them just want for the general to be better, so that he does not lose face (literally) before his soldiers and thereby diminish the strength and fighting capacity of an army centered on him and his prowess as a warrior.

Basically, nobody here wants the annoyance of handling anything that’s in front of them to be done.

No compassion.

No real caring.

Just a lot of power being bandied about: Naaman and Ben-Hadad bandying military power, Jehoram political power, and Elisha (of course) the power of God.  And none of this power, power to be trifled with.

By contrast there is Jesus in the story related by the gospel according to Mark, today – the occasion in that gospel in which the Christ the healer cleanses a person of leprosy.

“If you choose, you can make me clean,” says the leper, which evokes some sort of passionate response in Jesus.  In some early copies of Mark, the Greek word for Jesus’ reaction means literally, moved with pity.  In others, the word implies  moved with anger.  Suffice it to say, Jesus was moved by the statement of the ritually unclean person.

Jesus heals a leper
Pen and ink drawing; 14.7 x 17.2 cm; c. 1655-60
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

Next, Jesus does something truly, truly shocking.  He touches another human being, one with leprosy.

This is a big issue.  You have to understand: this is an ENORMOUS issue!  You don’t touch unclean people!  You just don’t!  If you touch someone unclean, you become unclean too – literally, guilty, and you have to report it to a priest and perform the appropriate sacrifices, and likely you’ll have to spend some time in isolation.  And who, but especially what prophet, can afford that!

So, Jesus shouldn’t be touching him.

Let alone the fact that maybe it wasn’t pity or compassion, but anger, that was the motivation for him touching the guy in the first place… and all because the guy had said, “If you choose to…”

I mean, what kind of attitude is that!  “If you choose to…”  C’mon, buddy, what is with that!  No wonder it’s confusing, to try and figure out whether Jesus was motivated by pity or anger to cleanse you!  You seem to be dealing with a pretty serious dose of self-pity, here!

How disappointing.

In most cases, it always seems, Jesus performs some healing, and tells the person, “Your faith has made you well.”

Not this time, though: this guy is no paragon of faithfulness.  He’s like the psalmist in the middle of Psalm 30, wallowing in self-pity and seeming at least to accuse God of the miserable circumstances being dealt with:

to the holy ONE I made supplication:
“What profit is there in my death
      if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
     Will it tell of your faithfulness?” (Psalm 30:8b-9)

Something like, “You show me your faithfulness, and I’ll show you mine,” the guy is saying.

I would not have been inclined to help this guy out.  There’s just too much on the line.  (Don’t look at me like that.  You think you would want to help him out?  He’s not down on his luck; he’s down on his life!)

It’s Boy Scout Sunday, today, and that time in which we annually celebrate the giftedness of youth involved in scouting, especially the young men who meet with their troop here at the church.  “Be prepared,” is their motto.  Be prepared.

And there certainly is much to be prepared for, when you are part of a movement founded by a man who would touch ritually unclean people without any compunction whatsoever.  One of the biggest circumstances to be prepared for, in fact, is the reality that you will be coming into contact – regularly! – with some pretty unpleasant people… present company excepted, of course!

And when you come into contact with all those other people, which is pretty often, you’d best be ready.  They’ll be wanting your help out of the trouble that they’re in… likely as not, trouble that they deserve, or that they don’t deserve but won’t take the advice to avoid.

Everybody is going to want a piece of you, because you have managed either to steer your way clear, or to work your way out, of the trouble they’re in.  What they don’t know is how much insight you have accumulated or gleaned along the way, and heeded, so as to avoid or step clear of the trouble they’re in.  Because the most problematic part about being part of a religion the founding statement of which was, “Repent and believe in the good news,” (Mark 1:15) is the fact that so very few people are actually willing to change their ways that need changing!

Maybe they’re just not able to change.  I mean, it is not as though our society makes change easy.  We like our slots, our pigeon-holes, our categories, our prejudices; they’re so informative about other people!  So often, poor people aren’t poor because they have brought it upon themselves or because they deserve it, but because their expectations of themselves and what they can achieve are so low!  They know society isn’t going to respect them and their efforts, so why try!

On this Racial Justice Sunday in our denomination, it is on the one hand simple enough to look about and learn the achievements beyond expectations of the host of African American and Asian and Pacific Islander and Latino and Native American people in our country, but it is far more common for us – no matter our ethnic origin or the color of our skin – to presume what any other African, Asian, Islander, Latino, or Native American is going to be like.  And our presumptions are likely as not to be established strongly in our learned expectations.

But this is also Lincoln’s birthday, the natal anniversary of a man who lived by that grand old Republican understanding that the equal creation Jefferson wrote about implies that all should have equal opportunity to assume equal responsibility.  That alone ought to be sufficient motive for any society to heal itself.  Ours hasn’t, but not for lack of opportunity.

And this is Charles Darwin’s birthday, too, you may know – a man whose whole life was dedicated to the understanding that creatures will adapt themselves over time to the environment in which they find themselves, or else will be destroyed by it.

We are our environment.  We create the circumstances in which other find themselves.  We have an inherent obligation, when those others are either defenseless or disarmed, to assure that they may succeed if they desire to.

That will mean, to a certain and very deep extent, that we are saddled with the responsibility to heal the environment in which we have found ourselves – the racial environment, the political environment, the economic environment, the cultural environment.  We are required to do as Jesus did, maybe out of compassion, maybe out of anger, but to do it because we are called to righteousness, justice, and peace.

We have been given a vision of what can be.  Jesus offered it.  He touched others with bold caring.  Those whom society either declared outcast, or rendered outcast, Jesus made (oh, let’s call them) incasts.  The blind, the deaf, the poor, the rich, the lame, the unclean, the stranger, the possessed, and the oppressed – Jesus liberated them all, by touching them.

He didn’t care what others thought.  He knew what God thought of these outcasts.  And he did something about it.

Now, I’m not here to disparage Elisha the man of God.  He was a good man, a fine prophet, a conduit of true power who lived according to that power.  You see, at many points, the Bible itself is not a book or a collection of books, about compassion.  In the case of Second Kings, it’s a book about nationalism and the greatness of the national deity, Yahweh, whose power is for the foreigner, even the enemy, as well as for us.

I’m just not satisfied, in retrospect, that – powerful or not – Elisha took no more initiative to set an example for others, of caring.  True, he did assure that the Aramean General Naaman was healed of his ailment and that Naaman would have no doubt that the God of Israel was the power behind the healing.  But the healing of the skin disease was where the healing ended.  Elisha did nothing to heal the rift between his country and its neighbor; he did nothing to calm the fears of his own king.  In fact, he may have exacerbated both!  Aram and Israel were at war, just a few short years later, according to Second Kings.

No, I much prefer the lesson lived by Jesus, that we need to be prepared to touch the very people we may feel least inclined to, either because of our environment, our history, or our prejudice.

Because the resistance to make contact, the temptation to preserve someone else’s outcast-ness, is entirely our own: “If you choose to,” they will say, “you can make me clean.” And for as much wrong as we may be able to see about them, and for as obvious to us what their right track will be, they at least have the wherewithal to recognize that we have power ready to emanate from us, if we will but make contact… dare to touch.

Water Wonders

This will be the first in a multi-part series of articles evoked by my consideration and study of the Sacraments, during the meeting described below, and since. It is not intended to provide definitive positions for me or my church (well, maybe for me) about what the Sacraments mean or ought to mean for Christians today. Nor is it intended to delimit the administration of the Sacraments. I encourage readers to respond with comments and questions for further discussion and consideration.

I am part of a group from my church, participating in the Creative Faith Project of the Missouri Mid-South Conference of the United Church of Christ.

Led by Associate Conference Minister Marc Wessels and Conference Artist-in-Residence Cliff Aerie, the CFP has convened three meetings of about a dozen churches with groups like my church's during the past six months or so. The third of those meetings took place on Saturday, January 28, at Columbia UCC in Columbia, Missouri.

The CFP has been funded through a grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. For the most part, we consider together enhancements to worship that might be practicable in our local settings, and to share what enhancements have "worked" in our own churches and which have met with some resistance. That makes for a lot of discussion!

The topic for consideration on Saturday, January 30, was The Sacraments, and conversation was invigorating, often provocative, and occasionally controversial.

It might be helpful at this point to explain that, in the United Church of Christ (as in just about every Protestant church), there are two sacraments - Baptism and Eucharist, the latter also known as Communion. In one of our faith traditions - Congregationalism - these two were historically referred to as ordinances, because they were ordained by Jesus himself (baptism in Matthew 28:19; eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11:24-26). And as far as most Protestants are concerned what makes a sacrament a sacrament is Christ's ordinance that practitioners of the faith ought to do these things.

In other Christian groups, but particularly the Roman Catholic Church, there are as many as seven sacraments: Baptism, Confession, Eucharist, Confirmation, Marriage, Holy Orders, and Sacrament of the Sick, which was once known as Last Rites. In each of these cases, they are sacraments because they are "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace mediated by the Holy Spirit of God." In other words, they are occasions when God's presence is incontrovertible and action irreversible.

For most Protestants, especially those in the Reform tradition like the UCC, the sacraments are symbols of grace, though not so much the grace itself. God is present always and everywhere, and what God does cannot have anything added to it or taken away from it, thus making all of life sacramental. But sacraments are another type of thing.

What type of thing are they? the planners of the CFP event asked.

Discussion about Baptism was considerably talk about the ritual, and how it is conducted.

Clergy in the UCC tend to be very, very liberal in their understanding of the person and substance of God and therefore in their use of Trinitarian language. We will often forgo the words "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" in favor of words that are not gender-based. Thus, it is not unusual to find prayers and blessings spoken "in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Comforter" or of "God, Christ, and Spirit." I myself commonly substitute the word "Child" for "Son." Other clergy admitted to calling the Creator, "Father and Mother of us all," though I lean more toward the appellation, "heavenly Parent."

But the command at the end of the gospel according to Matthew is that new Christians should be baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (again, 28:19). And, somewhat with the intention being to prevent "making wrongful use of the name of YHWH your God" (Exodus 20:7), some who are more conservative theologically have determined to use only that invocation as the proper acclamation of the authority by which they baptize. We UCC ministers have found ourselves constrained by tradition and history, also to perform baptisms "in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit," if the baptisms are to be recognized across denominational lines.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure but that this is a good idea. Conformity is not altogether awful, and restrictions on creativity tend often to force greater work to flow. But a feminist and liberationist organization such as ours generally finds the reality simply distasteful, if not offensive.

We all were asked to consider the components of our rituals. Water, obviously I suppose, was the most common component for baptisms, but the location of the water was not necessarily common. I mentioned having performed five immersion baptisms during my career so far - one in the baptistry (pool) of a Baptist church, another in a recreational lake, and three in an Ozark stream. There was also an immersion remembrance of baptism I performed in that stream, but I would guess that the recipient is not referring to it as remembrance but rather as the actual event for him who was baptized as an infant - professional hazard, since you can only be baptized once.

But most baptisms I have done, and most of them that my colleagues talked about, that day, like the one in the photo far above have been performed in the sanctuary of the church I was serving, at its baptismal font, during a worship service. Infants, children, teens, and adults I have customarily sprinkled from a stoop after saying a blessing over water poured from a pitcher or ewer into the basin.

Having the baptisms conducted in a worship service is in keeping with the United Church of Christ emphasis on community. It is in the community that the sacred may most surely be encountered. It was as community that the church was founded. And it is in the community that we live and grow.

So, in the course of a baptismal ritual, the faith community is called upon to support those who say vows. The church responds as a body, "We promise our love, support, and care" of those who are baptized among them.

Though there had been a longstanding, informal practice of UCC clergy performing baptisms outside of Sunday services, the emphasis in recent decades has been toward the reappropriation of the sacrament being as much an element of worship as the sacrament of eucharist has always been.

Strangely, the theological assertion that the Holy Spirit is most assuredly present when the community is gathered, almost eradicates the possibility of performing baptisms elsewhere than in the sanctuary! I say this is strange, because "believers baptizers" will focus on an image of immersion that Paul presents in the letter to the Romans, chapter 6 (vv. 3-5), as the reason why only immersion baptisms should be valid - they emulate death:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (emphasis mine)

Whenever I have performed an immersion baptism, the challenge has come from clergy colleagues, "But how shall the church be acknowledged?" I have always had to respond that I have to count on a broader definition of "church" than the gathering of the people in the sanctuary, and that under such circumstances my congregation - who simply cannot all be at an immersion baptism at once - will have to be represented rather than be in attendance.

Our community cannot trump scripture, not in this case. Lose the right to immerse because the location is inconvenient, and we lose a significant part of our heritage and a powerful symbol of the beginning of faith.