17-05 - 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

May 17, 2020

Dear Friends,

This marks the ninth week since we’ve been unable to worship in our sanctuary. I’m hoping and praying that we’re well beyond the half-way point to reopening. Our Board of Governors will be meeting via conference call tomorrow and, among other things, will be coming up with ideas on how to safely resume public worship when we’re given the go-ahead. It will be great to finally be able to be with one another again – in person, and not just over the phone or by email.

VERY BIG CONGRATULATIONS go out to Blair and Marilyn Hyde, who recently celebrated their 75th Wedding Anniversary! Way to go, Marilyn and Blair – we have been deeply blessed to have you as long-time members of our community. Please send cards to 8545 Carmel Valley Road, Carmel, CA 93923

Bill Daniel’s obituary is now available. I wrote down the steps involved in finding it on The Paul Mortuary website, and there were 12 of them! To simplify things, I’m retyping it here for you.

William Allen Daniel, December 20, 1927 – April 18, 2020

Captain William A Daniel, Retired of Carmel-By-The-Sea, California.

At the age of 92, Bill, surrounded by family, peacefully passed away on April 18, 2020. He was born in Shidler, Oklahoma to Ralph and Jessie Daniel. Ralph passed away when Bill was only nine years old. Bill became the provider and protector of his younger siblings Ginger, Jean and Jack. His mother later married Ferdinand Bennett and stepbrother Ronald joined the family. Bill took great pride in his Cherokee and Scottish-Irish heritage that was a big influence in his life. Knowing hard times and against all odds, Bill excelled in the subjects of math and history which ultimately led him to join the Navy in 1945. Achieving his goal of flying, Bill became an accomplished Naval Aviator.

In 1948, while attending the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he met the love of his life, Mildred Tileston from Santa Monica. After a tour of duty in Saipan, Philippines, he returned to the mainland and married Mildred on July 11, 1950.

During their honeymoon, he was whisked away to serve in the Korean War flying military radar seaplanes. Upon returning to the U.S., Bill and Mildred were transferred to various naval stations across the country and Guam. Their daughter, Cynthia, was born in Norman, Oklahoma in 1952 and their son, William “Wayne”, was born in Guam in 1955.

Being the high achiever Bill was, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey was his next stop where he earned a degree in electronics. Then on to San Diego for more routine squadron operational duties and training in jet fighters. Throughout his career Bill’s dedication and hard work earned him promotions and assignments each in a new field of expertise. His tours of duty included Personnel at the Bureau of Weapons in Virginia, NPS for a second time earning a degree in Management, Executive Officer at the Naval Air Rework Facility in San Diego as well as contracts at Naval Air Systems Command in Arlington, VA. Bill was awarded numerous medals for his service including the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with 2 stars.

As a Captain, Bill retired May 30, 1974 to Carmel-By-The-Sea, California. As a man of faith, Bill loved being actively involved at the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula where he volunteered his services for many years. Later in life Bill and Mildred traveled to England, Switzerland, Austria and Spain. He also loved playing golf and cribbage.

Fly like an Eagle, Dad, across the skies, over the land and seas.

Bill is survived by his wife of almost 70 years, Mildred, sister Ginger Thompson and her husband Gib of Jenks, Oklahoma, daughter Cynthia Daniel of Carmel-By-The-Sea, son Wayne Daniel and wife Cheryll of Carmel Highlands, granddaughter Christine Apostolou of Kuna, Idaho, and adopted granddaughter Angel Donica of Boise, Idaho, great-grandchildren Tristan, Isabella, Ali and Skye, as well as numerous nieces and nephews.

A Celebration of Life is planned for July 11th at the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula in Carmel Valley. We will keep you posted with any changes in the date. Memorial donations may be made to the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula, P.O. Box 222811, Carmel, CA 93922.

This introductory part of our Worship Service is turning into something of a newsletter. If you have news that you would like mentioned, please email it to me by the Friday before the Saturday the service goes out. My email address is: [email protected].

Remember, Jesus is Emmanuel, God WITH Us. Pastor Paul

WORSHIP SERVICE FOR MAY 17, 2020

OPENING READING (Philip Yancey, Contemporary)

Last summer a surgeon operated on my foot. While rehabilitating from that, I often did exercises that hurt because I knew that working through the soreness would allow my foot to regain its usefulness. On the other hand, the surgeon warned against bicycling, mountain climbing, running, and other activities that might endanger the healing process. Basically, anything that sounded fun, he vetoed.

On one visit I tried to talk him into letting me play golf. “Some friends get together once a year. It’s important to me. I’ve been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?”

Without a flicker of hesitation, my doctor replied, “It would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months.”

“I thought you were a golfer,” I said, appealing to his sympathies.

“I am. That’s how I know you can’t swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal.”

My doctor has nothing against my playing golf; as a fellow golfer, he sympathizes with me. But he has my best interests at heart. It will indeed make him unhappy if I do something that might damage my long-term recovery. He wants me to play golf next year, and the next, and the rest of my life, and for that reason he could not sanction a match too soon after my surgery.

As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor’s odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict – “No golf!” – I might have stubbornly rebelled. He left me the free choice and expressed the consequences in a most personal way: Disobedience would grieve him, for his job was to restore my health.

What a doctor does for me physically – guide me toward health – God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view [God’s laws] not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs – for our own sakes.

RECOMMENDED MUSIC Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer Copyist 58 youtube

OPENING PRAYER (After St. Columba, 521-597)

My dearest Lord,

be now a bright flame to enlighten me,

a guiding star to lead me,

a smooth path beneath my feet,

and a kindly shepherd along my way,

today and for evermore.

Amen.

SCRIPTURE READING: Exodus 20:2, NRSV

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE FIRST OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS Exodus 20:2 5/17/20

The Ten Commandments, which are foundational for Biblical ethics, would have been foundational for Jesus’ own spirituality as well. For the next ten weeks we will be taking another look at the Big Ten, seeing them through the Jewish eyes of Jesus.

We immediately notice a discrepancy between Judaism and Christianity over how the commands are to be numbered.

Christianity, with its emphasis on the Ten Commandments as laws, considers the first commandment to be “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), and regards today’s text, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2), to be merely an introduction to the laws which follow.

The Jewish tradition, however, with its emphasis on the commandments as ten life-giving words, or teachings from God, considers our Scripture reading to be the first, and all-important commandment, first and all-important because in it God reveals how God desires to be understood and related-to.

Today’s word, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” is nothing less than the gift of God’s self-description, the gift of God’s sharing with us God’s primary self-identity.

As such, it is a word, a revelation, that is incredibly surprising. One would have thought that God’s primary self-definition to Israel, like the gods of so many of its neighbors, would be first-of-all in terms of creation; in other words, in terms of what this God had made, and the power of this God to keep creation going.

But no. Although creation is an important aspect of God, as shown by the two creation stories that begin the book of Genesis, creation is not the primary self-description of God.

Or one would have thought that the most important revelation of who God is would have been God’s designation of Godself as “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). But no. Although God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is significant, especially for its emphasis on God’s history with human beings, past history is not the primary self-description of God.

Or one would have thought that the most important revelation of God’s nature would have been the revealing of God’s name to Moses at the burning bush as “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). Indeed, Christian theology has used this highly abstract translation of God’s name as the basis for a nearly eighteen-hundred year reign of abstract, philosophical theology, a theology that loves to draw speculative insights about God’s being from this metaphysical approach to God’s name.

But no. The entire slant of the Hebrew Scriptures argues overwhelmingly against abstract speculation concerning God’s nature.

Jewish Biblical scholar and theologian Martin Buber has argued convincingly that translating God’s name as “I am who I am,” is a flagrant mistranslation, and that a much more accurate rendering of those words would be: “I was with you; I am with you; and I will always be with you.” God’s name, in other words, communicates the primal fact that God is unfailingly with God’s people.

With Buber’s insight we are getting closer to the extraordinary import of today’s text: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).

Today’s text answers the all-important question: How is God with us? And the answer is: God is with us as the God who frees from slavery.

This revelatory self-description on God’s part gives us precisely the single insight we need in order to be able to distinguish between false gods and the one, true, real God: any God who does not lead from slavery to freedom is by definition a false god.

We are offered a simple test by which we can discern if something in our life is an idol – we ask: is this substance, is this relationship, is this attitude, is this priority, is this insatiable desire leading me to freedom, or is it leading me into slavery? If we are honest with ourselves, the answer will be clear.

This same simple question – does it lead one further into slavery or more deeply into freedom – can provide us with a crucial interpretative lens through which we can discern true biblical interpretation and true theology from their bogus counterparts. By this criteria, a whole lot of biblical interpretation and theology can be seen for what they are: misleading, and ultimately death-dealing understandings of God and God’s ways, in contrast to approaches to God which liberate and are liberating.

David Hazony, in his book on the Ten Commandments, invites us to imagine the following:

“Imagine you are a ten-year-old child, living in Europe in the middle of the last century. Your father disappeared when you were a baby, sent off to war like so many fathers. All you know of him are stories you’ve heard from your brothers and sisters, and a few photos in an album. He is a stark presence in your childhood, sometimes painful and sometimes revered, but always missing.

But then the war reaches your own country. Enemy forces overrun your town, and your community is plunged into darkness and fear. You and your family are transferred to a prison camp where you suffer intense deprivations of hunger and cold and forced labor, every day and night for long months…

You are just a child, enduring the horrors of war, dreaming of being saved.

And then one night you are awakened by gunfire and confusion. Guards and prisoners fall dead, sirens blare, and quickly it turns out that partisan forces hiding in the nearby forest have engineered a daring escape from the camp.

For weeks you are led through snowy woods, struggling with the elements, but free from your captors, until finally you reach an encampment where you are given food, clothing, rest, and medical attention.

On the third day, the rebel commander finally makes his appearance, a tall and imposing figure sporting a uniform and beret, inspiring both awe and fear. He takes your hand, looks you in the eye – and suddenly you recognize him. “I am your father,” he says. “I took you out of prison.”

This is something like what the Israelites must have felt when hearing the dramatic opening of the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God, who have brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

In light of this self-description of God’s part, in light of this self-description on God’s part being the first and all-important commandment, or word of life from God, the life-giving word from which all the rest of the Ten Commandments follow, or flow, the Ten Commandments can be seen as nothing less than the foundational document of human freedom.

There is nothing else in the ancient world or the modern world, for that matter, which can claim this unique status.

The Ten Commandments are God’s instructions to a bunch of recently-freed slaves on how to live as a free people, or as someone put it: “…it wasn’t enough to just get those slaves out of Egypt. God had to get Egypt out of them.” (Sean Cladding, Ten, p.251.)

As the foundational document of human freedom, the Ten Commandments are never out of date. They are perpetually new, challenging, and capable of renewing society and culture if followed, lived-out, and made a vital part of one’s daily life.

At their best, both Judaism and Christianity have expanded their understanding of God’s liberation to include not only liberation from the slavery of historical circumstances, but liberation from our personal brokenness as well.

To know the God of liberation is to come to know ourselves as forgiven, not so much “forgiven” in the negative sense of being freed from sin; but “forgiven” in the positive sense of being given God’s presence with and for us (for-given) before we even ask for it.

The amazing, awesome claim of both Judaism and Christianity is that the God whose self-described job description is to lead us out of slavery wants to be known, wants to be known personally.

As Christians, we know that Jesus called this God his “Abba,” or “Daddy,” and that Rabbi Jesus gives us permission to use this same term of endearment with God.

Many Christians throughout the centuries have discovered that the surest route to coming to know the strength of this powerful God of liberation is to boldly approach this God on the most intimate terms possible: to dare to address God as “Abba,” to dare to claim the God who liberates from all slavery, both societal and personal, as “Daddy.”

The paradoxical claim is that the best way to get to know God’s power is by way of first getting to know God’s love.

If God seems distant and inaccessible, hidden behind a cloud of unknowing, perhaps the best way to bring this God down to earth, so to speak, is to take the bold step of knowing God, as Jesus did, as “Abba.”

“Abba, I belong to you.” “Abba, I belong to you.”

Amen.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

How would you describe your attitude toward the Ten Commandments?

Can you find a relationship between law and freedom?

Over the years, we come to learn different names for God through our own personal experience with God. What are your favorite names for God? Why do these names appeal to you so strongly?

CLOSING PRAYER (Ruth Burgess, Contemporary)

As we plan and make decisions,

God be our way.

As we learn and ask questions,

God be our truth.

As we grow and as we change,

God be our life.

Amen.

SUGGESTED MUSIC

All People That on Earth Do Dwell (Grace Community Church) Martijn de Groot) You Tube

BENEDICTION

Patiently and persistently, God loves.

Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.

Now and forever, God loves.

AMEN.