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
August 2, 2020
Dear Friends,
The news this week is that we successfully launched a Bible Study via Zoom. We meet Wednesday evenings from 6 to 7 and are studying the Gospel of Luke. In addition to the sharing being really good, it was quite a treat to be able to actually SEE people! The Zoom process is relatively simple – you click on a link that is sent to you before the meeting. Computers with webcams work best, but it is possible to use a computer without a camera and still be able to participate in the audio portion of the session. You can also access via smart phone. We only covered the first four verses of Luke last week, so it’s still a good time to start. If you would like to give it a try, just email me at [email protected] and I will see that you get the link.
Heidi’s weekly virtual bouquet of altar flowers will be sent to you by a separate email. Thanks for your amazing artistry, Heidi!
We continue our sermon series on the most important texts in the Bible from Genesis through Revelation. Today we leap from the Ten Commandments, given around 1200 BCE, all the way to the time of the prophet Elijah, around 900 BCE. During these three hundred years the twelve tribes of Israel were loosely governed by a series of rulers known as “judges.” Eventually the people rebel and demand to have a king like all the surrounding nations. God reluctantly gives the go-ahead for this. The results are disastrous. King Saul is replaced by King David. David’s son, Solomon, succeeds him, and proves to be a tyrant. Ironically, we are told that Solomon builds the temple in Jerusalem through the use of forced (slave) labor. God has freed the Hebrews from Egypt only to see them enslaving themselves to their own version of Pharaoh. King Solomon is so oppressive that the country splits into two rival kingdoms – the Kingdom of Israel in the North, and the Kingdom of Judah in the South. God sends prophets to remind the people that their ultimate ruler is God, not a king. Today we look at a crucial event in the life of one of the major prophet’s in the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah.
Take Good Care and remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us, Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR AUGUST 2, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING/PRAYER Joan Bel Geddes, Contemporary
God, teach me to let my soul rest,
to still my worries and doubts,
to stop my constant clatter of questions and protests.
Let me come to you sometimes and just sit quietly,
like a mother smiling at her sleeping baby
and listening to its soft breathing…
or like a small child intent on hearing a kitten’s purr
or a little bird’s chirp…
or as if I were trying to hear a soft breeze moving across a pond,
a leaf dropping onto the grass.
Let me learn to wait patiently and trustingly for you
to make things clearer to me.
Teach me to be as calm as a lake after sundown…
as trusting as a baby in its mother’s lap.
Teach me to grow gradually, unprotestingly, like a flower…
to go unresistingly wherever you send me,
like airborne seed obeying the breeze.
Teach me to turn always toward you,
the very essence of love and of life,
the cause of love and life,
the nourisher of love and life,
the purpose of love and life –
the way leaves keep turning toward the life-giving sun.
SUGGESTED MUSIC God of Grace and God of Glory
First-Plymouth Church Lincoln Nebraska You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Ted Loder, Contemporary
Gentle me,
Holy One,
into an unclenched moment
a deep breath,
a letting go
of heavy experiences,
of dead certainties,
that, softened by the silence,
surrounded by the light,
and open to the mystery,
I may be found by wholeness,
upheld by the unfathomable,
entranced by the simple,
and filled with the joy
that is you.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING 1 Kings 19:4-13a, NRSV
But Elijah went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.
SERMON: GOD’S RESPONSE TO THE VIOLENCE DONE IN GOD’S NAME
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlinings simply indicate what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
We find ourselves in the ninth century BCE in the Kingdom of Israel (the Northern Kingdom) with the prophet Elijah.
Our reading takes place just after the bloody account of Elijah’s sacrificial contest with the prophet-priests of the competing god Baal. I need to give you a brief summary of this event to provide you with the context for understanding what God is up to with Elijah.
Ahab was one of the many apostate kings of the Northern Kingdom. His queen, Jezebel, who was a Canaanite, brought with her her own gods, including the Canaanite high-god, Baal. The religion of the Canaanites included ritual promiscuity and the sacrifice of children.
Immediately preceding today’s Scripture reading, Elijah has provoked a confrontation between himself, the prophet of the God of Israel, and the 450 prophet-priests of Baal. The confrontation between the two deities has taken the form of a competition to see which one will send fire from heaven to consume a sacrificed bull.
The priests of Baal spend all morning cajoling their god to make an appearance. The biblical text tells us tersely: …”but there was no voice, no answer, and no response” (1 Kings 18:29b).
Elijah has his bull drenched with water three times, and calls upon the God of Israel to send fire. Immediately fire falls from heaven and consumes the bull. The multitude of assembled Israelites fall on their faces and proclaim the God of Israel to be the true God.
What happens next is crucial for today’s discussion: Elijah takes advantage of the situation and orders the slaughter of the 450 priests of Baal, which is speedily accomplished.
Queen Jezebel is enraged at the killing of her priests and makes a solemn vow to kill Elijah. Elijah flees for his life. This brings us face-to-face with today’s text.
An angel of God feeds Elijah in the wilderness and orders him to journey to Mt. Horeb, another name for Mt. Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were given.
Sheltering in a cave on the mountain, Elijah has a close encounter with God, described in our well-known passage. God turns out to be present not in a violent wind, not in a violent earthquake, and not in a violent fire.
Quite surprisingly, God turns out to be present in the form of “a sound of sheer silence,” as the New Revised Standard Version has it, or in the form of “a still small voice,” as more traditional translations have it.
Reading in the space between the lines, as many Jewish and Christian biblical scholars would encourage us to do, we get the sense that God is sick-and-tired of all the violence that has been and still is being carried out in God’s name. We get the sense that God is sick-and-tired of all the mighty displays of power carried out in God’s name.
We get the sense that God is making an almost-formal announcement that God is not to be found in the violence of wind, earthquake, and fire, but in the shalom, in the blessing of “a still small voice.”
In other words, God is telling God’s people that God is not to be found where they expect to find God – namely, in various forms of violence, but that God is to be found where God is least expected, namely, in stillness, and smallness, and silence.
Another way of putting this would be to say that God is telling the people that the divine presence is to be found in their interior life, in a personal I-Thou relationship with God that takes place in their hearts and then overflows into the rest of their lives.
As is mostly the case, then and now, the people were not ready to hear this message from God, and continued in their violent ways. They also continued in their habit of projecting their own violence onto God and then claiming that violence as part of God’s nature and God’s will – a vicious circle if ever there was one!
Many Christians still do this, finding more meaning in Elijah’s slaughter of the priests of Baal, than in God’s implied repudiation of Elijah’s violence by revealing Godself to Elijah as “a sound of sheer silence,” or “a still small voice.”
Let’s review a few principles of biblical interpretation: accommodation, consistency, and development.
Accommodation refers to the fact that God condescends, as it were, to meet us where we’re at – if we’re still in the primitive stages of spirituality, projecting our own violence onto God, that’s where God connects with us.
Consistency means that God’s nature doesn’t change – God has been, still is, and will always continue to be love personified. God’s nature doesn’t change; it is our understanding of God’s nature that changes.
Development points to the dynamic that over time our understanding of God’s nature tends to get deeper and higher and wider.
Today I would like to review a fourth interpretive principle, a principle that we can see at work in our Scripture text for today. This principle is what I would call biblical topography.
Most of us have seen topographical maps which indicate higher and lower elevations for the purposes of backpacking and mountain climbing. Topography as an interpretive principle with regard to the Bible means that Scripture texts are not all created equal -- some texts are “higher” than others. The crucial point is this: where two or more texts seem to be in opposition or contradiction to each other, we go with the higher.
The principle of biblical topography can be traced back to Jesus himself. He uses it on numerous occasions. A good example would be from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus states: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies…” (Matthew 5:43-44a).
Paraphrasing today’s Scripture reading according to biblical topography, one would have God saying to Elijah, and by extension, to us: “In the past you thought you found me in various forms of violence. Listen up. I am really to be found in the stillness of your heart when you are silent and let me softly speak with you.”
In today’s text from the ninth century BCE, we find another of God’s critiques of a vast system of theology that was a mistake. We saw an earlier critique in the absoluteness of the fifth commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” no exceptions allowed when it came to human beings. This vast theological system was and is a mistake because it takes our human addiction to violence and projects it onto God.
With the exception of a brief three hundred year interval immediately after the ministry of Jesus, the Christian church has been living out the same mistake that Elijah made way back in 900 BCE.
The good news is that there are signs that the vast edifice of Christian theology that is violent and has God demanding blood is beginning to crack and to collapse.
The fact that millions of people around the world simply refuse to connect with churches that preach a violent God is one of these signs.
The rediscovery of the fact that Jesus lived, breathed, and taught creative non-violence is another.
Another significant sign is the vitality of liberation theologies lived out by a broad spectrum of those who have been oppressed, often in the name of an oppressive God. Thus we have liberation theologies written by women in general, minority women in particular, South American Christians, Asian Christians, African Christians, and gay Christians.
This slow-motion collapse of racist, sexist, colonialist, militarist, and homophobic Christianity is something to be celebrated. From the ruins will arise a Christianity that has recommitted itself to living out the actual teachings of Jesus, especially in the areas of creative non-violence, love of neighbor and enemy, and a wildly inclusive diversity. Out of the ashes will come new life.
So far we’ve been talking about the biblical and theological implications of our text for today. But our text also includes some substantial personal implications as well.
On a personal level, our text implies that precisely when and where we experience the collapse of anything dear to us – the collapse of a false way of thinking and being, the collapse of our finances, the collapse of a cherished dream, the collapse of an important relationship, the collapse of our health, the collapse of the health of someone we love -- our text teaches us that precisely where and when we experience a collapse, precisely there and then new life is waiting to be born, take root, and flourish.
Out of the ashes will come new life.
I found a powerful example of this principle of new life springing from collapse in the book Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul. Heidi Marotz writes:
“Legs. We run, ski, climb mountains and swim without thinking much about them.
My husband Scott had used his legs to win downhill ski scholarships in college and climb to the top of the Grand Tetons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Then, without warning, during an unseasonably warm April, a tumor was discovered in Scott’s spinal cord. We were told death or paralysis could be the end result.
Our children – Chase, Jillian and Hayden – ranged in age from seven to two. They didn’t understand all the ‘bad stuff’ that was going on – but they were the biggest cheerleaders and the best teachers when Scott found out his life would go on but he was paralyzed from the rib cage down.
Adults sometimes get stuck looking at the things that are gone. I would think about the camping trips we’d never take, the mountains Scott would never climb and the fresh powder he’d never ski with his children.
Chase, Jillian and Hayden were too busy with the business of life to get bogged down with what their dad couldn’t do. They stood on the pedals of his wheelchair and screamed with delight as he raced them down quiet hospital corridors.
The doctors said to prepare Scott for life in a wheelchair because if he thought he’d walk again – and could not – he would be depressed.
The kids didn’t listen to the doctors; they urged their dad to “try to stand up.’ I worried that Scott would fall down; the kids laughed with him when he fell and rolled on the grass. I cried but they urged him to ‘try again.’
In the middle of all these changes in our lives, I took a drawing class at a local college. For a week, the instructor told us we couldn’t draw things, we could only draw spaces between things.
One day as I sat under a giant pine tree drawing the spaces between the branches, I began to see the world as Scott and the kids saw it. I didn’t see the branches as obstacles that could stop a wheelchair from traveling across the lawn, I saw all the spaces that would allow wheelchairs, people and even small animals to sneak through. When I wasn’t focused on the branches – or the obstacles of life – I gained a new appreciation for all the spaces.
Oddly enough, whether you draw the spaces or the branches, the picture looks pretty much the same; it’s just how you see it that’s different.
When I joined my family in looking for the ‘spaces,’ a new world opened up. It wasn’t the same – sometimes we were frustrated – but it was always rewarding because we were working together.
As we tried all these new adventures, Scott began to stand up and then walk with the use of a cane. He still has no feeling in his lower body and legs, he can’t run or ride a bike, but he enjoys so many new experiences.
We learned you don’t need feeling in your legs to fly a kite, play a board game, plant a tree, float in a mountain lake or attend a school program. Legs aren’t needed to hug, bandage a cut or talk someone through a bad dream.
Some people see branches; Scott and the kids see wide-open-spaces with room enough for all the love and hope a heart can bear.”
I see a correlation – a co-relation – between this inspiring story and today’s Scripture text.
The spaces that Heidi learned to draw echo the “sound of sheer silence,” or “still, small voice” of God’s speech to us. Just as those spaces that Heidi drew were filled with possibility and new life, so are the spaces that God creates in our lives after a significant loss. Often the loss creates the space for God to sneak in and fill that space with a great surprise.
We always need to remember that while illness and death and estrangement seem to be final words for us, they are never final words for God.
God’s final words are always health and life and fullness-of-relationship.
We need to remember that when all is said-and-done love wins because God wins and God is love.
Amen.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
How has God surprised you in your own life by not “showing up” in ways that you expected, but by “showing up” in very unexpected ways?
How can the principles of accommodation, continuity, development, and biblical topography help you in your reading of the Bible?
CLOSING PRAYER Edwina Gately, Contemporary
Be silent.
Be still.
Alone,
Empty
Before your God
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God
Look upon you.
That is all.
God knows,
Understands,
Loves you with
An enormous love.
God only wants to
Look upon you
With love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.
Let your God –
Love you.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Dear God, Embracing Humankind
North Yarmouth Congregational Church You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.
BIOGRAPHY – Jane Heider
I was born in Akron, Ohio. My mother was staying in her brother’s already-crowded small house, so after I was born we made our gracious exit, back to --
Caripito, Venezuela! where my father was working as a chemical engineer. He met us at a tiny airstrip in the jungle, and almost dropped little me onto the tarmac in his excitement. We lived there for six more years. I remember catching tropical fish, and finding a poisonous frog in the swimming pool, and the day a snake tried to slither into our kitchen. I reveled in the adventure of life, my father loved the challenge of running an oil refinery, but my mother hated the narrowness of ex-pat wife life. She threatened divorce if he didn’t accept a desk job in --
Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1960s a beautiful city with opera, museums, country clubs, for-the-most-part happy people, and a glorious climate (of which I imagine the climate still exists). Almost every weekend we would drive out in the country, and find a picturesque spot to spend the day; my parents both painted, while I explored – mountains, jungle, creeks, parks. Alas, after ninth grade I had to go away for boarding school in –
Pennsylvania! where I studied geometry and Latin, and saw snow for the first time. George School was run by Quakers but I managed to learn a lot about boys. When my father retired I finished high school in Carmel, then off to college in –
Los Angeles! In those days, Occidental College’s most famous alumnus was Robinson Jeffers (now, of course, it is Barack Obama). Oddly, neither of them stayed at the school long enough to graduate. It taught me all about being a hippie but not much about economics. USC was more rigorous, but still not the real world. I learned more about money the year after I graduated! I got a job with the Defense Department, then with a private company as a computer programmer. After becoming a wife and mother, I returned (doesn’t everyone?) to –
Carmel! where we’ve been ever since. My wish for my sons is that they never have to look back on any period and say “that was so much better than now.” By keeping expectations simple, life can be a continuous upward journey! I will close with a saying that my father carved on my bed when I was a teenager: “Blest be your Rest if today you labored for Truth, Beauty, and Freedom.”