05-04 - Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula

COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA

P. O. BOX 222811

CARMEL CA 93922

(831) 624-8595

www.ccmp.org

Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor

Independent and United Church of Christ

April 5, 2020

Dear Friends,

Elizabeth and I can tell from calling many persons in our church community that none of us has contracted the virus yet. We’re praying that it stays that way! I’m behind in the calls I was planning to make because I was down four days this week with food poisoning. I hope to personally speak with everyone by Easter. Please keep Bill Daniel in your prayers. He was in hospital again this past week, but is now back at home.

I’ve gotten some mighty fine responses to last week’s reflection questions on the sermon, but not yet quite enough to post. I’d especially like to encourage the persons involved in our two Bible studies to consider sharing their responses to the questions. This way we can keep Bible study going and perhaps even find some more persons to participate.

As most of you already know, at its last meeting in March our Board of Governors took the rather unprecedented step of offering our fellowship hall for twenty four hour sheltering in place for the I Help women. It was amazing to hear Kim Swan’s passionate presentation of this idea to the Board, and the Board’s enthusiastic response. The hope was that Community Church could pave the way and become a model for other churches to do this. That hope has been realized! The I Help women were here for two weeks without incident and now have moved on to another church. Many thanks to the fearless leadership of our Board and the collective wisdom of Kim, Richard & Carolyn Gray, Dolores Joblon, and Carole.

Dolores asked me to share the following announcement:

We will not be doing the I Help men’s dinner this month. Jeffrey and Kristen Thompson of Jeffrey’s Restaurant in Carmel Valley have graciously offered to provide the meals for the I Help men in place of Community Church on our appointed day, Wednesday, April 8th.

They will be providing not only dinner, but breakfast and lunch to the men who are being sheltered in place at another church. If you can, please thank them by patronizing their wonderful restaurant in Carmel Valley. They are open for takeout in these unprecedented times. Thanks.

I’m happy for this introductory part of our weekly worship service to become a bulletin board for our community. If you have an announcement you would like me to include, just email me at paulccmp@yahoo.com or phone me at the church. I’m in the office from Wednesday through Sunday from one till eight.

WORSHIP SERVICE FOR APRIL 5, 2020

We recently started a new sermon series on the most important texts in the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. For the most part, we will be considering these texts in the order in which they appear in Scripture. But during Holy Week, Easter, the first few Sundays after Easter, Advent, and Christmas, we will consider crucial texts that reflect the most important events in Christianity, namely the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection of Jesus.

Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. This year I’ve decided to focus on one of the last things that Jesus said on Good Friday. One of those crucified next to him asks Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. Jesus unhesitatingly responds: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” We will take a close look at what each of these words means.

OPENING READING (Author Unknown)

Think of –

Stepping on shore, and finding it Heaven!

Of taking hold of a hand, and finding it God’s hand,

Of breathing new air, and finding it celestial air,

Of feeling invigorated, and finding it immortality,

Of passing from storm and tempest to an unbroken calm,

Of waking up, and finding it Home.

PASTORAL PRAYER (Joyce Rupp, Contemporary)

This is a form of bidding prayer. Simply fill in the names of those who come to mind under each category.

We remember those who are deep in depression, whose inner world is bleak and dark. . . especially. . .

We remember those who have recently said farewell to a loved one and who feel that joy will never return. . . especially. . .

We remember those who struggle to believe in their own goodness. . .

We remember those who have lost their dreams and their enthusiasm for life. . .

We remember those who are experiencing failure in relationships or in work situations. . .

We remember those who doubt their inner growth and who question their journey with God. . .

We remember those who have been rejected, deserted, betrayed, or abandoned…

We remember those who live constantly with worry and anxiety. . .

SUGGESTED MUSIC “Be Thou My Vision” – My Favorite Irish Hymn

Sung by Nathan Pacheco You Tube

SCRIPTURE – Luke 23:32-43 (NRSV)

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” They cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”

The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

“TRULY I TELL YOU, TODAY YOU WILL BE WITH ME IN PARADISE”

Luke 23:32-43 4/5/20

One of the two persons crucified next to Jesus asks Jesus to remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom. Jesus replies, not just with abstract hope but with emphatic assurance: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

But before focusing on this crucial conversation, I feel a need to look at some of the ways in which pastors and priests often distort the actual teaching of Jesus in funerals and memorial services. I bring these issues up because several in our own congregation have come to me upset after attending one of these services. Upset, and full of questions.

It’s hard to talk about these things without sounding judgmental oneself. I want to say straight off that I don’t doubt the sincerity of those making the assertions that I’ll be considering. But I do doubt their scholarship. For me, true scholarship has to be based on fact, not simply the personal opinion or denominational leaning of the person making a claim. We all know that arguments about religion, sex, and politics simply don’t work in terms of moving a person from one position to another. So I’m offering the following not to be argumentative, but to provide some clarification for those in our own Christian family.

Many of us have witnessed the following scenario: A truly wonderful Christian person has died, and after a moving eulogy, the preacher says to those present: “If you want to see your loved one again, you had better accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, like your loved one did.”

The preacher then proceeds to offer an altar call, at which several persons come forward – coerced and manipulated by the preacher into doing this.

Besides the fact that coercion and manipulation are never acceptable in Christian ministry, the minister who plays on people’s grief to get them into heaven is also practicing bad theology.

To cite just one of many possible texts in opposition to the judging God who sends people to hell if they don’t happen to believe what this particular minister or denomination happens to believe, what about Jesus’ own words in the Gospel of John when he states, referring to his coming crucifixion: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 10:32) This text – and many others like it – makes it sound like everyone is covered by the reality of what happened inside of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Add to this the fact that Jesus himself never told anyone that they had to accept him as their Lord and Savior in order to be “saved.” For example, when Jesus is asked point-blank by a lawyer “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25), he does not answer this question by naming certain things that the lawyer has to believe about Jesus or God, but simply tells him to love God and neighbor. Similarly, in the final judgment scene of Matthew 25, the basis of judgment is not holding the correct doctrine, but feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger.

While many ministers and denominations hold it as “self evident” that the basis of God’s judgment is believing the right stuff about Jesus, this is not what the Bible itself has to say. Here is where sound scholarship is especially important.

Many memorial services that take place in mainstream Christianity (your typical Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Catholic church), although not manipulative, often leave people quite confused as to where their loved one has actually gone.

This is because the single most popular Biblical text used at mainstream Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox funeral services is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, where St. Paul writes:

“But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

(1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, RSV)

I don’t know about you, but I find much more confusion than comfort in these words from St. Paul. With all his talk about the dead being asleep, he gives us the impression that death is a deep sleep until Jesus comes again.

When St. Paul wrote these words, he expected Jesus to come back any day. Nearly two thousand years have passed, and we are still waiting! If the dead who sleep are indeed asleep until Jesus returns, they are, indeed, in a frozen sleep of long and indefinite duration. Where is the hope and the comfort in that?

This is merely one of many possible examples of how a great deal of mischief and misunderstanding take place when Christians focus more on the teachings of Paul than on the teachings of Jesus.

St. Paul said some great things; he said some terrible things; and he said quite a few confusing things. This popular memorial service text falls, I think, into the category of confusing.

Some argue that since Paul’s letters were written before the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, we should look to them first.

But they are forgetting the strength of the oral tradition in Jesus’ day, an oral tradition that ensured that the words spoken by a prophet were remembered accurately well beyond the thousandth retelling. This oral tradition argues for the authenticity of the great majority of things that Jesus is reported to have said. Add to this that one of the chief criteria that Biblical scholars use to determine the trustworthiness of any given teaching of Jesus is its uniqueness – the fact that no one else had said anything like what Jesus is saying – and we come up with a very high degree of probability that Jesus actually did say to the revolutionary crucified next to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

In passing, yes, it is a revolutionary, not the traditional “thief,” or as our NRSV translation has it, a generic “criminal,” who was crucified next to Jesus. The actual Greek word means “insurrectionist,” or “revolutionary,” not “thief” or “criminal.” This is simply another example of how many Bible translators insist on “protecting” us from the harsh political realities going on in Scripture. Scholarship again.

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

This statement stands out as uniquely Jesus’ own. The Jewish understanding of life after death before and during the time of Jesus rejected the notion of an individual’s receiving God’s gift of eternal life. Rather, the Jewish tradition of Jesus’ day taught that at the end of time, the Jewish community as a whole would receive the gift of life after death. Jesus’ saying to one crucified next to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” would have stood out in stark contrast to what his contemporaries were saying.

Assuming that Jesus actually said these words, then, let us take a close look at what he meant when he said them.

First of all, “today” in Jesus’ understanding pretty much means today. To be more precise, “today,” for Jesus, was the precise word used when describing a period of time lasting from one to three days. It was a shorthand way of saying “a very short amount of time,” just as “forty days” referred to a relatively long period of time, not literally forty days.

According to Jesus himself, then, death is not a state of being frozen in deep sleep until he returns. Jesus does not say to the person asking to be remembered: “When I come back your body will rise from the dead to be with me.” Rather, by using the word “today,” Jesus is emphasizing the fact that death itself is an immediate bridge to life eternal.

Continuing to look closely at this sentence, the word “you” in Jewish understanding – and here we must remember that whatever else he was, Jesus was immersed in Jewishness – the word “you” always referred to the human being as a whole: body, mind, soul, spirit. Unlike the Greeks, who maintained that at death the human spirit was freed from the encumbrance of being attached to a body, the Jewish tradition held that the entire human being – very much including the body – would be raised “at the last day.”

Jesus corrected the traditional Jewish understanding of timing, but held on to the traditional Jewish understanding of the human person as embodied spirit.

In other words, one did not have to wait until the “last day” to experience eternal life; eternal life, for Jesus, begins today, at the moment of one’s death. And the being who today experiences eternal life is not a disembodied spirit, but a fully restored human being, complete with a fully restored human body. This corresponds nicely with the many stories near-death experiences in which a person encounters departed loved ones: if their bodies were paralyzed in this world, their bodies were fully restored in the next; if their bodies were bowed down with age in this world, their bodies appeared at the prime of middle age in the next.

Moving on to the next critical word in this profound statement from the lips of the dying Jesus, we come to the simple preposition “with.” Prepositions are words that connect, and of all prepositions, the word “with” is the most connective, the most relational.

In using this relational preposition, Jesus is emphasizing the relational nature of the life that comes after this life. The United Church of Canada does a good job of capturing the relationality of what Jesus says here when it ends its affirmation of faith with the words: “In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.”

Finally, lest the person to whom he is speaking fear that in spite of all these reassurances, they would still ultimately wind up in what the Old Testament calls “sheol” – a non-relational, in-between world, more shadow than light – Jesus chooses to describe the place where they are going as “Paradise.” “Paradise” is a borrowed word from Persia which designates the special garden where the king walks with his most beloved confidantes. In other words, Jesus is saying to the person dying next to him, and who asks to be remembered by him, that when he dies he does not have to worry about waking up in sheol, or the nether world, but that at the moment of death will find himself with Jesus not just in any old garden, but in the best of all gardens, the garden of the king.

This one statement from the mouth of Jesus is, I think, the most meaningful, the most consoling statement about life after death ever spoken on this planet: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

This teaching is emphatic, one of only six times in the entire Gospel of Luke where Jesus uses the phrase “Truly, I tell you…” to introduce a teaching of ultimate importance and truth.

What an incredible gift gave to the entire human race – past, present, and future – about the non-finality of death. While he himself was dying, he went out of his way

to assure the rest of us that death is not God’s last word to us – God’s final word is always life, more and more life.

Amen.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

(Please send me any part of your responses to these questions that you wouldn’t mind being shared with our congregation as a whole. I’d like to use your name, but will also honor “Anonymous” contributions. This is one way of doing Bible study together during this time of sheltering in place.)

Have you ever been to a funeral, memorial, or celebration of life service that made you uncomfortable? What was the reason for your discomfort?

Can you think of any examples from your own experience when a preacher, pastor, or priest misrepresented the actual teaching of Jesus?

How can one stay true to the teaching of Jesus when so many clergy people and so many denominations get it wrong?

What does Jesus statement “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” mean to you personally?

CLOSING PRAYER (Ann Weems, Contemporary)

Hurting, they came to him,

Healed, they followed him.

Grateful, they gave to him what they had and what they were.

Blessed, they became a blessing

and went out to all the world in his name.

Those who are hurt

and healed

grateful

and blessed

still move among us

in his name.

Amen.

SUGGESTED MUSIC “Amazing Grace” Best Version

Sung by Nara Mouskouri You Tube

BENEDICTION

Patiently and persistently God loves.

Relentlessly and unconditionally God loves.

Now and forever God loves.

Amen.