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
October 11, 2020
Dear Friends,
The phones will be down for several days at the church. You can reach me by email [email protected] or at home at 622-9770. Carole’s email at the church is [email protected].
Sad to say, there’s been yet another death in our church family. Kathy Warthan passed away Saturday morning after a bad fall on Friday. Kathy was one of the kindest and most caring persons that many of us have ever known. She will be deeply missed.
Please continue to pray for comfort for Solomon’s family given the shocking reality of his sudden and unexpected death. His parents are flying in from South Korea and I will be talking with them on Sunday afternoon.
Also, please continue to pray for Bob Tarozzi, Barbara Wells, and Peter Sewald, who recently had hospital stays, and for Clyde Klaumann who is often in very severe back pain.
Elizabeth, Luna (our dog) and I had a fine vacation in Mammoth Lakes. The fire danger was so extreme on the eastern side of the Sierra that ALL the trails were closed from Yosemite to Lone Pine. There went our day hikes! And the air quality left much to be desired. Fortunately we brought a lot of books and had a good time reading.
Hopefully, there will be a Zoom Worship Service on Sunday at 1:00. I’ve had several experiences now when the link goes through successfully only to have the participants told that “Meeting is unavailable because host is hosting another meeting.” I met with Helmut Schonwalder on Friday. Helmut is the computer professional who we turn to in times of dire need. He watched me correctly enter all the right information, create a seemingly successful link, only to have it blocked when he tried to get in. He’d never seen anything like this before! He came up with an end-run in case this happens again on Sunday, but it isn’t certain that this end-run will work consistently either. At any rate, a Zoom worship service is planned and will hopefully take place. If it’s blocked yet again, we will keep working on it until we have consistent access.
The persons who have signed up for Zoom worship at some point are Bonnie Bragg, George Brehmer, Kathy Curless, Richard & Carolyn Gray, Jane Heider, Jo Ann Holbrook, Pam Klaumann, Amy Krupski, Lisa Ledin, Peggy & Larry Kuck, Sharon McFarlin, Ada Morton, Nancy Phillips, Kate Reynolds, Lyn Rosen, Elise Rotchford, Lisa Sargisson, and Betsy Werner. I will automatically send you a link for Sunday Zoom Worship on Sunday around 12:45, unless you wish you name to be removed from this list.
If you would like to add your name to receive a link for Zoom worship, just let me know by email – [email protected].
We continue our sermon series on the most important texts in the Bible from Genesis through Revelation. Today’s difficult text from Isaiah is quoted by Jesus and clarified in a second text from the Gospel of Mark.
Always remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us.
Take Good Care, Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR OCTOBER 11, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING/PRAYER Angela Ashwin, Contemporary
Christ our Guide,
stay with us on our pilgrimage through life:
when we falter, encourage us,
when we stumble, steady us,
and when we have fallen, pick us up.
Help us to become, step by step, more truly ourselves.
and remind us that you have traveled this way before us.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Take My Life and Let It Be
(Hymn Charts with Lyrics, Contemporary) You Tube
OPENING 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.
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass
against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
And the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE READINGS
Isaiah 6:9-10
And he [God] said,
‘Go and say to this people:
“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.”
Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears, and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.’
Mark 8:14-18a, 21
Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread;
and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.
And he [Jesus] cautioned them, saying,
‘Watch out – beware of the yeast
of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.’
They said to one another, ‘It is because we have no bread.’
And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them,
‘Why are you talking about having no bread?
Do you still not perceive or understand?
Are your hearts hardened?
Do you have eyes, and fail to see?
Do you have ears, and fail to hear? . . .
Do you not yet understand?
SERMON: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BIG PICTURE
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlining merely indicates what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
Could you use a little guidance on how to discern what is really important in the personal, spiritual, and societal dimensions of your life? Hopefully this sermon will provide a bit of help.
Kenton Anderson writes: “My family and I recently saw the prime meridian in Greenwich, England. I took a picture of my children straddling the meridian, each with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and the other foot in the western hemisphere.
The prime meridian itself is not impressive. You would not realize it was there if it were not for a bold line cut across the pavement.
The demarcation is a human invention. Prior to the International Meridian Conference of 1884, each local region kept its own time, a system that, if continued, would have rendered impossible our current arrangements for trade and commerce.
While the meridian is humanly derived, its relation to the stars is not, and that heavenly correspondence allows us to find our place on the map and in the world. The prime meridian is the work of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, who made it his life mission to produce a proper navigational chart of the heavens, mapping the location of thousands of stars.
Based on Flamsteed’s work, scientists were able to help people find their position on the planet, allowing them to answer that fundamental question of philosophy and physics: Where am I?”
Christians who take the Bible literally use illustrations similar to this description of the prime meridian to make the point that the Bible is the prime meridian – the standard point of reference – for our spiritual lives.
But claiming prime meridian status for the Bible is a mistake because the Bible is way too diverse, and way too contradictory, for it to serve as a sure guide for ethics or theology.
To give just two out of endless possible examples:
Concerning ethics, the Bible tells us in different places both to turn our weapons into farm implements and to turn our farm implements into weapons. Which should it be? How shall we decide?
Concerning theology, St. Paul writes about the partners in a marriage both (1) “Be submissive to one another,” and (2), “Wives, be submissive to your husbands.” Which should it be? How shall we decide?
Churches which have deep roots in the whole history of Christianity, and not just the few centuries experienced here in the United States, hold that there is, indeed, a prime meridian – a standard point of reference – for our faith.
But they see this prime meridian of our faith not in terms of a book, the Bible, bursting with multiple points of view often at war with one another, but in terms of a person – Jesus of Nazareth – whose actions and teachings, whose life, death, and resurrection, give us the interpretive key that we need to make sense not only of the Bible, but of our individual lives as well.
And Jesus himself does not hesitate to make clear choices concerning which directions in Scripture are gateways to God and which directions in Scripture are dead-ends.
Thus, for Jesus, beating swords into plowshares is a gateway to God and turning plowshares into swords is literally a dead-end.
For Jesus, mutual submissiveness in marriage is the way to go, and the one-sided servitude of women to men simply a reflection of one of the dead-ends in Jesus’ culture – and ours.
Throughout his ministry Jesus makes it abundantly clear that he has the authority to “correct” Scripture. He corrects Scripture dramatically in the Sermon on the Mount when five times he states “You have heard that it was said. . .”, quotes a well-known teaching from the Hebrew Scriptures, goes on to say, “But I tell you…”, and then supplies his own teaching in its place.
Here’s just one example: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, ‘Do not resist evil with evil.”
Almost as dramatic are those corrections which Jesus makes when his hearers simply assume a well-known biblical “principle,” such as God blessing the good with health and wealth and God cursing the bad with illness and poverty – and Jesus in no uncertain terms telling his hearers that God does not operate this way.
All through his ministry, however, are more subtle examples of Jesus nudging his hearers in the right direction concerning Scripture. Today, for example, I’ve chosen two Scripture texts. The one from Isaiah was usually interpreted in Jesus’ day as God speaking in anger and cursing the people with a total lack of understanding.
Jesus echoes Isaiah in our reading from the Gospel of Mark, but he turns the curse into a challenge by assuming that his rather dense disciples still have the option to choose to really hear, to really see, to really understand.
The context for our reading from Mark is that Jesus has just provided bread for a very large number of people. He and his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee. The disciples have forgotten to bring any bread of their own. Jesus says to them in warning: “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.”
The disciples, fixated on the literal, immediately jump to the wrong conclusion – that Jesus is criticizing them for their forgetfulness.
Jesus, however, is thinking about something way bigger, way more important, than their lack of bread.
“Yeast,” in the Jewish tradition, when used as a metaphor, almost always referred to something extremely bad, something equivalent to poison. By using “yeast” in connection with the Pharisees and Herod, Jesus is contrasting their vision of God’s Kingdom with his.
Many of the Pharisees wanted to turn Israel into a theocracy – a rigid hierarchal system where every action and attitude was dictated by God’s law.
King Herod and his followers saw God’s Kingdom in terms of the magnificence of the temple and the splendor of the city of Jerusalem.
Jesus was hoping that his own disciples would be able to distinguish between the Kingdom of God as presented by the Pharisees and Herod and the Kingdom of God as presented by himself.
It was the difference between a kingdom whose defining characteristic would be meticulous observance of all 613 commandments as interpreted by the Pharisees, or a kingdom whose defining characteristic would be the grandiosity of the temple as reconstructed by the Herodian regime – or Jesus’ own vision of God’s Kingdom as a kingdom of healing, compassion, justice, nonviolence, forgiveness, and love.
Jesus’ disciples were so busy focusing on the “trees” – whether or not they had their daily provisions – that they missed the “forest” – the much bigger reality of building God’s Kingdom.
Those of us who try to follow Jesus in 2020 face the very same challenges as did Jesus’ original disciples.
Building God’s Kingdom has both societal and personal dimensions.
On the societal side of things, it is so easy to get caught up in the “trees” of maintaining our standard of living and our status as a nation that we miss the “forest” of God’s concern for those who are poor and those who are strangers.
On the personal side of things, Tim Sanders, former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!, offers some great practical advice:
“Take your life and all the things that you think are important, and put them in one of three categories, represented by three items: glass, metal, and rubber.
Things of rubber, when you drop them, will bounce back. No harm is done when these things are dropped. So, for instance, if I miss a Seahawks game, my life will bounce along fine. Missing a game or a season of football will not alter my marriage or my spiritual life. I can take ‘em or leave ‘em.
Things of metal, when dropped, create a lot of noise. But you can recover from the drop. If you miss a meeting at work, you can get the cliffnotes. If you don’t balance your checkbook and lose track of how much you have in your account, and the bank notifies you of an overdraft – that will create some noise in your life, but you can recover from it.
Things of glass, when dropped, shatter into pieces and will never be the same again. They can be glued back together, but they are altered forever. They may be missing some pieces, and they probably can’t hold water again without leaking. The consequences of this brokenness will forever affect how the glass is used.”
The moral of this extended metaphor is clear: We had better take great care in choosing which items or realities to place in each category. It’s easy to get so caught up in the “rubber” and “metal” parts of our lives that we leave the “glass” dimension of our lives unattended. And leaving something unattended is about as good a way as we can get to insure that what is left unattended will eventually be broken and perhaps lost.
C. S. Lewis has some very wise words about the importance of keeping the first things in our lives first.
According to Lewis, there is only one first thing in life, and that is our relationship with God. If we put and keep our relationship with God first, all the other things in our lives will be able to find their proper place.
But if we make first in our lives something that is second or third or fifteenth or sixteenth, we lose what is first, and all the rest are hopelessly muddled.
I’d like to close with an illustration from Charles Swindoll. I think it is big enough to echo and bring to completion all the metaphors that we’ve been working with thus far. Swindoll writes:
“There are few things worse than living in a city and not knowing your way around. This happened to us when we lived in San Francisco for a few months in the latter part of 1957.
It is easy to get lost. All the streets on one side of Mission run in one direction – on the diagonal. All the streets on the other side of Mission run in the perpendicular. Then you add those incredible hills and the winding streets and the tiny signs that should have been repainted years ago, all the buildings, many of which look alike, and the fog and the hills and the fog and the trolleys and you’re apt to get lost.
Cynthia and I were with some friends atop the new San Francisco Hilton one year and things changed. The Hilton has over twenty stories. For the first time the layout of that city fell into place for me. . .
Off in this direction was the Golden Gate. Over here was the Bay Bridge. Down here was Fisherman’s Wharf, and then Nob Hill and then Chinatown, and back down south were Daly City and points down the peninsula.
From that perspective we could see everything at once, [we could get a sense of the whole].”
To echo Swindoll, we could say that there are few things worse than living life and not knowing your way around.
It is easy to get lost among the “trees” in the 31,102 verses of the Protestant Bible.
Inviting Jesus to be our guide, however, enables us to see the “forest,” what is important in Scripture and what is not.
It is tricky to make the most life-giving choices as to what to place in the “rubber,” “metal,” and “glass” dimensions of our lives.
Inviting Jesus to be our Guide – our Way, our Truth, and our Life – empowers us to put what is first first and what is second second.
And like the high vantage point the Swindoll’s discovered in 1957 San Francisco, accepting Jesus’ invitation to see through his eyes gives us a sense of the whole, a map by which to navigate, and a hand to grasp when it’s foggy and cold.
Amen.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Make three lists: Rubber, Metal, and Glass. List the various dimensions of your life under these three categories. What did you learn about yourself that you did not consciously know before?
Have you had an experience like Chuck & Cynthia Swindoll, when something confused suddenly became very clear when you had a big enough or high enough vantage point? Describe.
CLOSING 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.
SUGGESTED MUSIC BE THOU MY VISION – My Favorite Irish Hymn!
NathanPachecoMusic You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and Persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.