May 13, 2012                                                          Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Sabbath and the Present Moment”

Genesis 2:1-3, Mark 6:30-34, Rumi, “That Lives in Us”

In Mark 6 Jesus says, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile”. The story in Mark today is probably familiar to you. It comes in the Gospel of Mark immediately after the Disciples have been sent out on their own to teach and heal. They were directed; you may remember to take nothing for their journey except the clothes on their backs and a staff and to rely on generosity of strangers as they traveled. They returned reporting great success and many people miraculously healed. Jesus had just been rejected in his hometown of Nazareth, despite huge success everywhere else. Then Mark tells how John the Baptist was killed in prison. So we take up the story as Jesus is reunited with the Disciples and perceives that they are tired. He is probably tired and grieving himself, and he suggests that they get in the boat and go to a lonely place where they can rest and recover. They head off, and as they go, the crowds see where they are going, and they follow them around the shore, collecting more people from surrounding towns as they go. When Jesus and company arrive on the other side they discover a huge crowd waiting for them. Jesus, though tired, sees the people and it says that “he had compassion for them”, and he consents to teach them and heal their diseases.

I confess that the line, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile” sounds like my plan for Sabbatical. I am preparing for my Sabbath. I have been telling people that my main emotions are guilt, since most people don’t get the luxury of 3 months off for rest and the other emotion is great relief, for I do feel the need for a rest. David Stendahl-Rast, a Catholic monk says, “Life is like the breath, we must be able to live in an easy rhythm between give and take. If we cannot learn to lie and breathe in this rhythm, we place ourselves in grave danger.” I am not sure how good I am at the rhythm of give and take. My pattern is to get unbalanced, so hopefully, I can use this sabbatical to learn how to slow down.

Wayne Muller, author of Sabbath, Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest says that some of us fear the emptiness that looms outside our busy lives. We wonder if we are worth anything apart from our work. We are a little worried about what we will discover about ourselves if we stop. There is this lurking, empty void outside our busy lives and we feel the need to keep filling it. So we keep moving. I relate to this. When I was a little boy I worked hard at skipping stones and prided myself on my ability. If you get it just right, you can skip the stone so well it hardly gets wet and skips many times, sometimes all the way to the other side of the pond. But if you don’t throw it well, it sinks. We are afraid to sink, and our goal is to skip over life without getting wet. We don’t want to disappear, so we keep our calendars and blackberries full.

But I need to remember not to fear the void. It is out of emptiness that God created everything. In Chinese landscape paintings that I studied in college as a East Asian Studies major, I learned that empty space is just as important as the painted space. Every painting has emptiness as well as mountains, water and signs of human habitation. The Chinese Taoists considered full space and empty space to be equally important for it is out of emptiness that the ten thousand things are created. Both are necessary for wholeness. So it is with our lives – we need busy, productive time, but also empty, rest time: activity and inactivity, work and Sabbath, fullness and emptiness. So I go on sabbatical seeking emptiness.

I go holding a story in my mind which I want to share with you. It is from a short story by Leo Tolstoy, but Thich Nhat Hanh told it in his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which I recommend highly. It is about living in the now, the present moment, which is another way of bringing Sabbath rhythm into our lives. There is an Emperor who seeks the answers to three questions: 1) what is the best time to do each thing? 2) Who are the most important people to work with and 3) what is the most important thing to do at all times? Many experts were brought in but no one could answer it to his satisfaction. Finally, he decided to go ask a contemplative hermit who lived in the mountains. He dressed in humble clothing and left his bodyguards down the trail and went up to the hermit alone. The hermit was digging a garden and the Emperor approached him and asked his questions. (Repeat) The hermit just patted him on the back and kept digging. It was very hard for the hermit, for he was an elderly and he puffed with each breath. The Emperor, observing this, offered to help him and the hermit gratefully turned over the shovel and sat down. The Emperor dug for a long time, and the sun began to go down. He asked his questions again, but again received no answer. Instead the hermit looked up and asked: “Do you hear someone running?” Sure enough, a man ran into the clearing and ran straight toward them. He was bleeding from a wound in his chest. The Emperor helped the man, laid him down and stopped the bleeding with his shirt, wringing it out again and again as it soaked with blood. Finally the bleeding stopped and they moved the man into the hermit’s cottage. The Emperor fell asleep sitting in the doorway. In the morning the wounded man woke up and looked at the Emperor and said: “I very sorry, will you forgive me?” The Emperor was confused until the man explained that he was the Emperor’s mortal enemy whose brother been killed in the Emperor’s wars and left his family penniless. He had been determined to kill the Emperor but his guards had seen him following the Emperor and recognized him and wounded him. “I surely would have died of my wounds if you had not saved me, forgive me and I will serve you with all my heart for I see you are a compassionate man.” The Emperor was pleased and had his own doctor’s look as his wound and then he let him go. Before he left he asked the hermit one more time his questions. The hermit said, “Your questions have already been answered”. “How”, he asked. “Well, yesterday, if you hadn’t taken pity on me and helped me dig, you would have been attacked on your way back, so the most important time was when you were digging, the most important person was me, and the most important pursuit was to help me. Later, when the wounded man ran up here, the most important time was the time you were dressing his wound, for if you had not cared for him he would have died and you would have lost the chance to be reconciled with him. So, the most important person was the attacker, the most important job was taking care of his wound. Remember, the most important time is always now, the present moment. It is the only moment over which we have any power. The most important person is the person you are with and if alone, it is you. And the most important thing to do is taking care of that person, making them happy or serving them.

This is the truth I leave with you and take with me on Sabbatical; all we really have is the present moment and the people and animals that share that moment with us. In this moment we can find our rhythm of rest and work, and let go of fear, for that resides in the torturers rack of the past and the future. I will seek to rest in the now.

May 6, 2012                                                            Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Abiding in God”

Cynthia Bourgeault, “The Divine Indwelling”,  John 15:1-11

Behind the housing development where I grew up near Chagrin Falls, Ohio, was an old farm. The farm had once owned the land where the suburban homes were, but now all that was left was a crumbling barn, some out buildings, an old orchard and plantings. This is where we played, building tree forts in the apple trees, having our annual “apple wars” with the kids in the next development, fishing in the creek, climbing in the rafters of the barn 9a very dangerous activity in retrospect) and picking black berries. Off in the field was a grape vine. Once I suppose there had been grape trellises, but what had grown up in neglect was a huge mass of grapes, grown wildly out of control like a big clump of vines. It was an enchanted place. We would burrow down deep underneath and look up at the ceiling of vines and leaves that was so thick it blocked out the sun. It was a fort or a house depending on the game. We would climb on top and use it as a trampoline, for the vines were wound so tightly it supported our weight. We harvested the grapes, eating most of them on site, risking death, we thought, to poisoning. Those I brought proudly home were viewed with suspicion by my mother, though as I think about it now, I think they were concord grapes.

But this vine will forever be my vision of the vine that Jesus talked about as connecting us to God and to each other. “No man is an island entire of itself”, wrote John Donne in the often quoted lines, “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less: as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of your friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, if tolls for thee.”

In our reading from John, Jesus uses the vine as an image of our connection to God. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. Someone noted, perhaps Thomas Keating, from the perspective of the branches, “it’s all vine”. It’s all one plant. This metaphor points to the mystery that Cynthia Bourgeault addresses in our first reading today, the divine indwelling or as Meister Eckhart writes: “There is in the soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God.” The word John uses to express the connection of the vine and branches is meno, which is commonly translated as abide. Abide means: “to rest, to dwell, to tarry or stay in the same state, to be firm or immoveable, to continue permanently, to live, lodge or endure”. Think of that as Jesus says “Abide in me…abide in my love”. To tarry in God, to be firm and immoveable, to continue permanently, to live, lodge and endure in God. We can abide in God, we are one with God in some deep, mysterious way. The Kingdom of God is within.

There was rancher who had to move a bull from one field to another and somehow things got out of control and the bull charged him. He was far from the fence and couldn’t get out of the way and he was gored. While lying on the ground the bull charged him again and gored him in the side again. He had to get away, but could hardly move. He began to crawl toward an old trailer that was across the field. Bleeding and desperate, he began to pray. A sense of peace came over him and he found the strength to crawl and made it to safety. The continued to charge and butt the trailer, but he was safe. Unfortunately, his pickup truck was across the field outside the fence and he had to get there if he was going to get help. He had no cell phone. After a time, the bull wandered away and he began to crawl again. Praying every inch of way, he found strength and it seemed to him that a protective bubble was around him that kept the bull from noticing him. In any case, painstakingly, he made it to the truck. Now he had to hoist himself into the driver seat. Praying continually, he made it and began to drive home. His injuries included a wounded leg and he was having trouble concentrating, but he drove home. But there was no one there and couldn’t think what to do. He didn’t think he could get out of the truck, so he prayed. Immediately the answer came, “Drive to the hospital”. So once again he summoned his energy and drove slowly and painfully the 20 miles to the hospital. He felt God was with him every mile and he rested in God’s presence. He arrived alive and laid on the horn to attract the attention of the emergency room staff. He slumped gratefully onto the stretcher that carried him to safety.

He felt he has been sustained by God and he had lived. But over the next few days he began to feel lost and alone, depressed. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He was alive and healing and should feel great. All he knew was that his unease had something to do with the pickup truck. One day it hit him. He had left God in the truck. All through the crisis he had had an amazing sense of connection to God but when he go to the hospital he relaxed and began to rely on the doctors and on his own sense of accomplishment of what he had done to save himself. But he had lost the connection to God that has sustained him and it left a huge hole in his psyche. He resolved to try and live his life continually seeking the connection he had had with God during his crisis. He decided to abide in God.

I like this story because I also struggle to keep my connection to God. Most of you know I have had to deal with anxiety and panic. It first hit me related to drug use when I was young. But it returned when my father was dying.  As I have entered the contemplative life with meditation and centering prayer, it went deeper and I have had a profound confrontation with fear over the years. At times of crisis I have prayed, and at times I have been sustained by a deep connection to God. I am learning to welcome fear as one of the things that draws me back to my connection with God. I fall on my face again and again, and face anxiety at deeper and deeper levels, but God picks me up and like the rancher, I am learning to abide in God.

We can abide in God. In fact, I have come to believe that at our deepest point, we are one with God, and God is one with us. “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me” to quote Meister Eckhart again, “My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love”. Meditation and contemplative prayer are one way to gradually uncover our connection to God. But as usual, for me it comes down to trust. As I turn to God, trust in God and acknowledge my connection to God, I grow better and better at abiding in God. May God help us rest, dwell, tarry and stay in God; be firm and immoveable, continue permanently, live, lodge and endure in God. God is the vine and we are the branches, but from the branches perspective, it’s all vine.

April 29, 2012                                                          Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Do Nothing and Everything Will be Accomplished”

Tao Te Ching, Chapter #47, Acts of the Apostles 4:5-12, 5:27-42

Let’s hear chapter 47 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu one more time, “Without venturing out-of-doors, one may know the world, Without looking out one’s window, one may know the ways of Heaven. For the further one travels, the less one knows. Therefore the Sage arrives without going, sees all without looking, does nothing, yet achieves everything.” Doing nothing, yet achieving everything is called in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, “Wu Wei”. It is the philosophy of softness, inaction, non-violence, no words. This ancient teaching (500 BCE) is hard to understand for westerners – yet when I first heard in a religion class in college there was something that resonated with me immediately. Chapter 43 of Tao Te Ching reads: “The softest thing in the world rides over the hardest things. What has no being enters what leaves no opening. This makes me realize the advantage of not doing. Teaching done by not talking, the advantage gained by no doing- few things in the world can match this”. Water, running over rocks wears down the rocks. The power in many martial arts is based on using the force of the opponent against them. There are many examples of Wu Wei. There is a story from Chuang Tzu, another Taoist teacher, of the Gorge of Lu, where a great waterfall plunges for thousands of feet, its spray visible for miles. In the churning waters no living creature can be seen. One day, Kung Fu Tse was standing at a distance from the pool’s edge when he saw an old man being tossed about in the turbulent water. He called to his disciples and together they ran to rescue the victim. But by the time they reached the water the old man had climbed out onto the bank and was walking along, singing to himself. Kung Fu Tse hurried up to him and said, “You would have to be a ghost to survive that, but you seem to be a man, what secret power do you have?” “Nothing special”, the old man replied. “I began to learn while very young, and grew up practicing it. Now I am certain of success. I go down with the water and come up with the water. I follow it and forget myself. I survive because I don’t struggle against the water’s superior power. That’s all.’

I thought of Wu Wei as I read again the story in Acts of Peter and John coming before the Sanhedrin, that is, the high religious court. In the court is the famous Pharisee, Gamaliel, teacher of Paul of Tarsus, and a leader among the Pharisees. The story unfolds as Peter and John have healed a lame man outside the temple in the name of Jesus. The word is spreading throughout Jerusalem and the religious officials decide they must do something. They arrest Peter, John and man who was healed, but grow afraid of the crowds and release them. Later, all eleven disciples are arrested, but are miraculously released by the action of the Holy Spirit that night. The disciples are in the temple preaching again the next day and the high priest has them brought before the Sanhedrin. Before the court Peter and John speak courageously, to the amazement of the court. Aren’t these uneducated fishermen, commoners, known as “idiota” by the educated elite? Yet they speak out articulately in the court, witnessing to Jesus. The Sanhedrin members become enraged at their presumption and want to have them killed, and this is when Gamaliel rises to speak. “Men of Israel” he begins, “take care what you do to these men. Theudas arose…but he was slain and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him Judas the Galilean arose…and he came to nothing…so in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; for if this undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God.” In other word, “Do nothing and everything will be accomplished”.

Wise word. Gamaliel was right. If God wasn’t with the Christians, don’t worry, they won’t succeed. But if this is God’s work, you don’t want to be against it. There are many things in our world that we should leave alone and let God’s will be done. There is a time to speak and time to remain silent. We often rush around, trying to cover God’s back. We worry, fuss, go to war, build up the police, all because we don’t really trust that there is a God who cares for the world. Trust the shepherd of the 23^rd Psalm to lead us in right paths. Doesn’t God take care of lilies of the field and birds of the air. We really do not trust God, but seek to care for ourselves and the world. Most of the time we act as if there is no God to trust.

But wait a minute, you might be thinking, isn’t there a time for action? We can’t just sit around and let God do everything. We are God’s hands and feet on earth, after all. Surely we are called to action for justice and peace. We are to feed the poor and help the homeless and all the work in taking care of people and society. One way to interpret the Tao Te Ching and Wu Wei is to see Wu Wei as a way of acting. Taoism does call people to action in other chapters of the Tao Te Ching, but Wu Wei, non-action, is a way of acting in the world. To act without violence or aggression, for example. That is, to take no action that violates another person, but to act with compassion, humility and moderation. Softness, non-resisting is the to be like water, which does not resist, yet wears down the rocks in the stream. Water that falls hundreds of feet and does not resist, flows to the lowest place, yet gathers strength as it flows. Water is actually one of the strongest forces in the world. So we are to find that which in human nature and behavior that is like water. Martial arts, redirecting the force of the opponent, non-violent resistance, seeking to change the behavior of the opponent through love, following the natural order of things and finding the soft way, the compassionate way, the loving way.  There is a story in Taoism of skilled butcher cutting up an ox. With years of practice he was able to cut it up very efficiently with just several smooth motions and almost no effort. He told Chuang Tzu that with practice he had discovered the soft places between bone and sinews and let his knife follow these. Learning to cut up the ox with the least number of cuts and energy.

But there is a deeper level of understanding of Wu Wei, non-action, as well. David Frenette, a contemplative Christian teacher, teaches a prayer to use when beginning your meditation that goes: “I let go of my efforts to change myself, and let God change my heart”. In other words, there is a dimension of faith that it is God who transforms us, not we who transform ourselves through great effort. If the Kingdom of God is within, and our basic identity is of God – if we are branches on the vine which is God, connected and one with God and other people, then our spiritual journey is the letting go of self and discovering our true identity as children of God. This is called Kenosis, or self-emptying, and is an aspect of all religions. We let go of self and discover our true nature. Wu Wei and Taoism teach that the Tao is the basic pattern of all creation, and the human quest is to uncover this pattern of how the Tao works in people and get our lives in harmony with with the Tao.  I believe this is true of Christianity as well, and all faiths, in fact. If we are made in the image of God and part of God’s vine, then we can discover or uncover how to live in harmony with God. We can let go of self and self-serving thoughts and actions and discover how to live with trust in God’s action in and through us.

The early Christian community seems to have been an example of people living out this self-emptying life of faith. From Jesus they learned a profound trust in God that freed them to fearless and transformed lives. They went singing to prison, refused to serve in the armed forces of Rome, healed and preached with no thought to personal safety, formed communities that shared possessions and had all things in common and saw their lives as serving God and neighbor. Something happened to those humble, powerless people that transformed them and eventually transformed their society. We are called to fearlessly let go of self and open ourselves to the transforming action of God.

April 1, 2012                                                           Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Donkey Fetchers, on Being Great or Useless”

Mark 11:1-11, Thomas Merton (from (The Rain and the Rhinoceros”)

In Mark’s account of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, Thomas Long, writing in the Christian Century, drew my attention to the fact that a great deal of the story is concerned with two of the disciples being dispatched to find a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey. It seems odd, in the midst of Jesus’ moment of announcing that he is the Messiah, fulfilling Zechariah’s prediction that the anointed one will arrive on a donkey, that the story focuses on these mundane details: where to go get a donkey, what to say to the owners, what kind of donkey to get and so on.

Whatever those two disciples imagined they would be doing on the glorious day that Jesus enters Jerusalem, it probably wasn’t fetching a donkey. Mark does not name the two disciples, but just hours before this event, James and John were asking Jesus which of the Disciples was the greatest, and if they could sit with him, on his right and left when he came to his kingdom? Jesus says the greatest will be one who is the least, like a child. I like to think that when it came time to fetch the donkey, Jesus looked over at James and John, the seekers of greatness, and sent them.

This theme of greatness, or lack of it, is common to Jesus. He does not place himself first and encourages others to forget self, be servants, and take the lowest place at the table and so on. It is interesting to me that as Christians remember the Last Supper, we have historically focused on Jesus taking bread and the cup and seemingly instituting the ritual of communion. However, I frankly doubt that Jesus envisioned any such thing, and did not intend for us to interpret his breaking of bread to represent atonement. However, Jesus did do something at the Last Supper I expect he might want us to remember and repeat: he washed the feet of the Disciples. Taking a role usually fulfilled by servants and slaves, Jesus got down on his knees and acted as a servant. The greatest became the least. We shy away from this ritual, mostly because I think we are embarrassed about how our feet look or smell, but it’s a much better symbol, I think, of Jesus’ message than communion. If we want to follow in the way of Jesus, it has a lot more to do with servant hood, fetching donkeys and washing feet than it does with triumphal entries.

My father volunteered for WWII and went off anxiously and courageously to be captain of a ship in the Pacific. He did see action and many Kamikazes, but mostly he told us about the tedium and boredom of service. Carl Love kids me sometimes about revising my job description when he finds me emptying trash and doing yard work. But the reality is that church ministry is a lot different than I imagined when I was ordained, and mostly is about everyday tasks of typing bulletins, collecting cans for the food pantry, cleaning bathrooms occasionally and visiting people. Most jobs and lives are like this, I think, particularly if we are following spiritual values: somewhat tedious, involving service and humility, putting ourselves last and others first.

Thomas Merton, who we heard read in the reading today, definitely found his life journey in ministry to lead him into a downward spiral toward simplicity and a less glamorous life. He came to embrace this “downward mobility” and to see his simple existence and life as a hermit as a way to be closer to God. In “The Rain and the Rhinoceros” he compares his journey to the simplicity of rain, which he calls useless, for it doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t earn anyone a profit so is not valued by society. He wonders if rain would become more real more if a business could make it and therefore charge a fee. So with our lives: it would seem his life as a monk and a hermit had little value since he produced nothing, purchased very little, didn’t see many people. His life seemed useless and valueless, yet for him that was a sign that he was on the right track. In his uselessness and servant hood he was closer to God. In “No Man is an Island, Merton wrote: “The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness.”… Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.”

In the Tao of Pooh, one of my favorite books, Pooh Bear is held up as an example of the correct way to live, because he doesn’t try to be anything he isn’t. He follows his own nature, and is therefore closer to the Tao. Chapter #8 of the Tao Te Ching reads: “The way of the Tao teaches us to flow like water…this is the pattern of the Tao…it does not struggle or compete. It flows everywhere, even the low places, especially the low places, the places people avoid, so it is like the Tao. We should learn from water, accept where we are and who we are…water never fights. It flows without harm and this wears down and wins in the end. Don’t compete, be yourself, everyone will respect you.”

To be a follower of Jesus is to be downwardly mobile. It is to be servants to others and find ourselves doing tasks we never expected. The Disciples did not find themselves prestigious priests of a new religion or leading armies to drive the Romans into the sea. They found themselves performing simple, humble tasks: feeding people, walking from town to town, chasing down donkeys, telling the story of Jesus. All went on to lives of sacrifice and danger and all died violent deaths, with the possible exception of John, who may have died in prison on Patmos. To be followers of Jesus, or any true spiritual path is, I think, less to do with success and greatness and more to do with uselessness and servant hood. Preparing the way of the Lord has less to do with waving palm branches and celebrating, and more often with standing knee deep in a donkey’s stall.

March 25, 2012                                                       Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Waiting for the Lord and Jeremiah’s Field”

Jeremiah 31:31-34, Jeremiah 32:1-15

The prophet Jeremiah spend most of his prophetic career telling the people of Judah that they better change their ways or the Kingdom would fall. They were ignoring God’s justice and abusing the poor. They were worshipping the little gods of fertility and agriculture. They were not caring for the widows and orphans, and God had noticed. Meanwhile, the Babylonian empire was scooping up nation after nation in the Mideast and Jeremiah said Judah was going to be scooped up too if they didn’t change their ways. After a time it become apparent that this was going to happen in Jeremiah’s lifetime. In 570 BCE the Babylonians arrived, burned the land, destroyed the Temple and hauled many of the people off into slavery and exile. As the war raged around him, Jeremiah changed his tune. He began to offer words of hope and reassurance that God would not forget the Hebrew people. It might seem that God had written them off, but Jeremiah told them that the day would come when they would return from exile and rebuild the nation. He said: “Then shall the young women rejoice in dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” He told them God would make a new covenant with them which God would write on their hearts. Isaiah actually promised the same thing to the exiles in Isaiah 40, the end of which we read in the call to worship. “They who wait upon the Lord will rise up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint”. Jeremiah and Isaiah call on the people to wait on the Lord.

I think most people I know have more in common with the exiles who have lost hope than we do with Jeremiah and his confidence that God will turn our mourning into joy. It’s hard to observe the world today or consider human history and find much evidence that God is taking care of things. The 20^th Century was a violent as any in history. There was a book and study done that indicated that there is actually less war and violence percentage wise than at any time in history, but it’s still hard to read the newspapers. Our weather lately is wonderfully warm and dry, but it’s hard not to feel concerned that the climate is changing. The news this week that an entire island in the Fuji Islands has had to be evacuated due to rising ocean levels is not encouraging. Iraq is still a powder keg of violence and the US war in Afghanistan has reached a new low with burning of the Qurans and the shooting spree of an American soldier.  I could go on with a recital of poverty, starvation, refugees, disease and war, but it wouldn’t be news to anyone. How do we wait on the Lord in such a world? It seems much more rational to assume that God, whatever we conceive God to be, is remote from human affairs and we are on our own to try and clean up the mess we have made. Jeremiah’s words seem naïve and from a more innocent time when people still believed these things.

But Jeremiah didn’t stop with his hopeful words. He did a strange and wonderful thing. Jeremiah buys a field. The next chapter in Jeremiah is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. Imprisoned by the King of Judah, Jeremiah arranges the purchase from his jail cell. He sends for his cousin, and negotiates a complicated purchase of a field from his family and town elders. At a time when the Babylonians are at the gates of Jerusalem, Jeremiah buys a field on the front line of the battle. When everyone else is trying to divest their investments and hide their resources, Jeremiah wastes his on some land that is currently occupied by the invading army. He is making a symbolic gesture, of course, a prophet act. He buys this land to take concrete action on his hopeful words that God has not abandoned the Hebrews and that they will return to the land and rebuild. He is taking a personal risk that his field will be worth something again someday and that he will come back to this field and build a home. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar and expert on Jeremiah calls this act: “A specific, public, concrete and economic act” of hope. By buying a field, Jeremiah affirms his faith in God and in the future.

I love this story. Instead of the endless prophet words that don’t seem to be very relevant to our contemporary world, Jeremiah took action. He modeled here a way of living and trusting God. It is a model for us in a world where the Babylonians continue to invade and burn Temples. We are called to live as if there is a God and a goodness in the universe. Live as if, and invest as if, and take action, as if the humanity will eventually figure out how to take care of the creation and live in peace with each other. This is a way we can wait on the Lord – keep forgiving, keep loving, keep trying to live nonviolently, keep feeding the poor, keep protesting violence, keep working to stop capital punishment. Keep the faith, wait on the Lord.

I’m sure most of the people of Judah were giving up. Historians say that most of the Hebrews believed their God had been defeated by the Babylonian god, Marduk. They were selling off their land, hiding their gold in the ground, running for the hills or just giving up. They were taking care of themselves and their families and trying not to read the newspapers. Not too different from the way I live most days. But Jeremiah would go buy some land in Afghanistan. He would have a small field on the border of North and South Korea. Maybe a little in Antarctica, where the ice is melting fast the last few years. Jeremiah would not give up on God or on the human race, but take concrete, specific, economic actions of hope. And so must we!

Yes, the world is changing, and it seems the climate is changing –whether people have caused it or not, it is. Most of humanity is still seeking peace through violence and arming themselves for Armageddon. But we are called to stay compassionate. To keep working for justice, equality and peace. To keep giving money to the dreamers who try to work with the poor, start businesses in Haiti, try to negotiate peace in the Middle East, recycle and grow organic vegetables. We should definitely support the efforts to build transitional housing in Boulder, and any low income housing anywhere. Maybe we should buy a field somewhere and grow food for EFAA and Community Food Share. We could name it Jeremiah’s field.

We are called to keep the faith and wait on the Lord. Even it makes no rational sense at all. If the Process Theologians are right and we are co-creators with God – that God is a process of creation and we are part of that process –then ever action for compassion and peace, however small, helps create the Kingdom of God on earth.

Listen again to Archbishop Oscar Romero’s words. He wrote these words a year or so before his death at the hands of a government hit squad who opposed Romero’s work for the poor in El Salvador in 1980.   (Read Romero, “The Kingdom of God Lies Beyond Us”)

March 18, 2012                                                       Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“Christ is Our Peace”

Ephesians 2:11-22, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom

Have you noticed the human tendency to “keep score”? I have a friend from years ago who was a particularly good example of keeping score, though, to be honest, I do this was well, as do many people. He was am example of a person who didn’t get mad, he got even. He was not violent, but if someone did him wrong, he got even. Sometimes it was in small things, like keeping track of whose turn it was to wash the dishes. Sometimes it was not being invited to a party, or if someone didn’t pay their part of a bill at a restaurant, or another driver who cut him off. If he was wronged, he remembered, and seldom gave the person another chance. Perhaps it came from insecurity, or his family of origin, I don’t know, but I was careful not to cross him. He kept score.

Actually, it is a very common human tendency. Think of conflicts between people and tribes and nations. The old story of the Hatfields and the McCoys. The divisions between nations and nationalities that go back centuries. The way the crusades still influence relationships between east and west in the Middle East. It is the basis for the idea of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. This teaching in the Old Testament was originally a moderate position, calling on people not to retaliate with more violence than they had received. Keep it to an eye for an eye, don’t gouge out both your enemies eyes. But the problem is, of course, that if humans don’t change this behavior, we will end up as Gandhi said with the whole world “blind and toothless”.

Jesus addressed this when he talked about an eye for an eye, saying that he had a new teaching, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”. He goes on to say, that if someone invites you for dinner and we have them over to reciprocate, “what credit is that to you?” It is no credit for you are still keeping score. If you love those who love you, or lend to those who lend to you, “what credit is that to you”. One of the biggest obstacles in community life, family life or world peace is this human tendency to keep score.

In our passage from Ephesians 2, the author, (who scholars doubt was Paul of Tarsus, but one of his students), takes up Jesus’ vision of love and peace saying that: “Christ is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility…Christ came and preached peace to you were far off and peace to those who are near; for through Christ we both have access in one Spirit to God, the Creator and Source of Life”. The author was addressing the division between Jewish Christians who often followed the Law of Moses and Gentile Christians, who often didn’t. This dividing wall of hostility was a big problem in the early church, probably not unlike the division in Christianity today between conservative and liberal, fundamentalist and Biblical Interpreters. So how did the author think that Christ is our peace? Is this true?

A fairly common theme for Paul was this idea that in Christ we are all one. He was talking about Christians, of course, those who had taken on the life of Christ, but I am unapologetic about the fact that I expand this to all people. At our deepest point, I believe, humans are one. Call this the Kingdom of God that is within, call it Christ, call it the Buddha Nature, call it the Tao, call it Oneness, it is all the same concept for me. I believe we are part of God, or God is part of us. Our essential identity is God within, and when we can let go of self and ego just a bit, what we discover is an essential unity with God and with all other people. We are indeed one in Christ. Teresa of Avila uses the example of a room with two windows with light streaming in. The light becomes one light. Creator and creature are one. Or use the metaphor of a stream that flows into another stream or into the ocean. The water is of one substance. Jesus taught that God is the vine and we are the branches. But from the branches point of view, it’s all vine. The Kingdom of God is within, wrote Luke, and so it is, we are all one in God- or as Paul believed, one in Christ. So that essential part of us that is united in God is also united with each other. We are one.

If we apply this to the teaching that Christ is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, we are saying that this essential unity makes it possible for us to have compassion, forgiveness and peace with other humans. It doesn’t say Christ could be our peace, or can be, or should be, it says Christ is our peace. It is a reality that will eventually bear fruit in human relationships.

But you might well point out, as I am very much aware, that this is not a reality of human life most of the time. We keep score. We are surrounded not by peace, but by conflict. There is tension, frustration, anger, vengeance and war. Am I, and those of us who claim that God will be a source of peace among us guilty of the charge Jeremiah leveled at the religious people of this time when he said, “You have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying, ‘peace, peace’, when there is no peace”?

Well, I can only go back to the meaning of peace, which is shalom in Hebrew and eirene in Greek. Both words mean “completeness or unity”. They can also mean “concord and harmony”. You’ve probably heard me talk about this before. But briefly I will note that most of the efforts for peace both internally and with other people, have to do with the “absence of conflict”. We speak of peace when we have beaten down the opponent. This is not peace. Peace is the end of conflict, when people find “harmonious and thus non-destructive, nonviolent management of control of conflict and tension” (The Working Paper on Peace by the UCC –Rev. Bob Lee) we find peace or shalom, completeness and unity, only when we dive into conflicts and find nonviolent solutions. Only when there is equality and justice between those in conflict is the conflict truly ended and there is shalom. For Martin Luther King, Jr., in our reading, he agreed with this unity between people, white and black and brown. He was working for freedom and equality not only for the African Americans, but for all Americans.

This happens at the interior level, peace within a person and at the external level with peace between people, communities and nations. We have to address the conflict, not beat it into submission. We do not end interior conflict such as anxiety, addictions, tensions, sadness and anger by just trying to ignore them and hoping they go away. They just go deeper. We have to address them, solve them, look at ourselves honestly and courageously. The same is true of conflicts between people, communities and nations. We do not achieve shalom by forcing our opponents into submission, we have to seek creative solutions to conflict. To use the Biblical metaphor, peace is not achieved when the lion is killed or driven from the land, thus enabling the lamb to feed undisturbed. Pace is the lion and the lamb together, feeding in harmony.

Christ is our peace is an incredibly hopeful statement, offering faith that in God we are united, we are one: with God and with other people. Once we begin to accept this oneness, we develop compassion for ourselves and for our neighbors, even our enemies. We are connected. We are part of the vine that is God. We like drops of water in the ocean, light streaming into a room. Christ is our peace, in God we are one.

March 11, 2012

Sermon by Peter Terpenning

Community United Church of Christ

Boulder, Colorado

“God’s Foolishness”

I Corinthians 1:18-31

Paul, writing to the Corinthians tells the story of the craziness, foolishness of Jesus. He notes: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” Clarence Jordan says this more clearly in his Cotton Patch version of the New Testament: “Therefore, since the world with all its learning was unable to understand God, God in his own wisdom decided to save, through the folly of the Christian message, all those who put their trust in it…It appears that God deliberately selected the world’s morons to show up the wise guys, and the world’s weaklings to show up the high and mighty, and the world’s lowly and rejected, the nobodies, to put to heat on the somebodies.”

So I’ve been thinking about this foolish journey of Christianity this week and I noticed that following this path does lead us into looking pretty foolish at times. I tried to think of some of the times that following faith made me look pretty stupid, and it wasn’t hard to think of examples. I remember when I came back to Christian faith is college I was trying to clean up my act and among other things I joined an overtly Christian Choir, the Wittenberg University Choir. Some of the kids I met in the choir were part of the nerdy campus Christian group and they decided to take me in hand and started inviting me to their Christian events. Here I was, the radical convert, who imagined myself to be a hippie of sorts, hanging out with the clean cut Christian group. I felt foolish. It was hard on me to be so uncool. But I realize now in some ways those nerdy kids saved my life. Much later, I was working against Ronald Reagan’s Contra War in Nicaragua and I had the opportunity to travel with Witness for Peace to Nicaragua. Someone had the idea that if we put Americans in the Nicaraguan villages, the American funded Contras operating from Honduras would hesitate to attack since the last thing they wanted to do was kill Americans and risk their funding source. So groups of Americans traveled down there to sit in villages and offer our presence as protection. It was the right thing to do, and I went down and found myself sitting in the Wiliki resettlement camp one night when the Contras attacked. What had seemed like a good idea suddenly didn’t seem so smart anymore and I stood, quite literally quaking in my boots as I watched the tracers bullets flying at the perimeter of the camp. But the Contras retreated quickly, and I like to think our presence had some effect on saving the men, women and children living there.

Christianity seems pretty sensible when we talk about it at a safe distance on a Sunday morning. But if we listen to what Jesus and Paul were advocating, it begins to sound pretty foolish: “Blessed are the me”, “Thou shalt not kill”, “Love your enemies”, “Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor”. Take meekness out into the real world and see how far it gets you. It is pretty likely to get you beat up or get you a pink slip at work. “Blessed are the peacemakers”, “Blessed are the merciful”, “Blessed are the persecuted”. Soren Kierkegaard said: “Christianity has taken a giant leap into the absurd…Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them.”

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan talked about this foolishness in the work on Paul of Tarsus noting that in the time of Jesus and Paul, the world lived under the principle of “peace through victory”. The way to get peace was to beat your opponents into submission through war, and it worked pretty well for the Romans as they put in place their “Pax Romana”. Jesus, Paul and the Christian movement taught a revolutionary, yet ridiculous sounding new philosophy called, “peace through justice”. The idea was that violence only results ultimately in more violence, and the way to achieve ultimate peace is my bringing justice through just means. Nonviolence resistance is what Jesus practices, leading a protest against the cooperation of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Roman overlords. The Priests were collecting taxes for the Romans and were basically puppets for the overlords, and Jesus marched in and took over the Temple. When arrested, Jesus did not fight back or even defend himself, but went nonviolently to his death. Crazy, foolish, ineffective. The cross was a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. It still sounds pretty foolish.

I had a friend in Michigan, who, at the beginning of the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait, advocated raising a non-violent army of Americans to go over and stand on the border of Kuwait, as an alternative to invading Iraq. He was serious, but everyone he talked to thought he was out of his mind. Talk about a foolish, ridiculous, ineffective method. In the world’s wisdom, they were right. But what if there were actually an army of people willing to die rather than shed another person’s blood? It worked for Gandhi.

I think Christianity, and actually, most religions, advocates a radically different way of living than the rational, sensible, safe way most of us live. The quote from John Muir that was read as one of our readings today illustrates this crazy, fearless way of living life that I find advocated by Jesus. Go straight into the eye of the storm and climb a giant fir tree to fully experience life. There is a greeting card I received a couple years ago that I loved: it showed a middle aged lady, laughing, dressed for a special occasion, who was running toward a large pond or fountain in what looked like Central Park, clearly about to jump in and ruin her shoes, not to mention her whole outfit. The words under the picture read: “Have you ever noticed that ‘what the hell’ is almost always the right decision?” We are invited to live our lives fearlessly, lovingly, foolishly, non-violently, unselfishly and courageously. We are invited to quit worrying if we look foolish or respectable. We are invited to trust God and live on the edge. Flannery O’Connor famously remarked: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd”. Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple wrote: “People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.”

The challenge and our gift we receive from Jesus is a seemingly foolish way of living that is actually the wisdom of God. We are to offer: love for the unlovable; forgiveness for the unforgivable; healing for the broken and broken hearted; nonviolence for the violent; mercy for the unmerciful; peacemaking for those making war; meekness for the powerful; life for those who have died. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”