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
September 6, 2020
Dear Friends,
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Joe and Sheila Mark for a very generous gift of Apple stock in memory of their friend and neighbor Bill Daniel. This is the latest of many monetary gifts to Community Church they have made over the years. We deeply appreciate their support.
September 6th is Cindi Daniel’s birthday. Happy, happy birthday, Cindi! You bring so much happiness and joy to so many here, and we hope that you have a very special day – and year.
Continuing thanks to Heidi Quandt for the beautiful virtual flower arrangements she provides for us every week. I’ll be emailing this week’s bouquet soon after you receive this.
Continuing thanks as well to Dolores Joblon and her I Help team for providing the dinner for the men’s program this Wednesday.
Next Sunday we add a third option for connecting with our worship service. In addition to the email and print options, WHICH WILL CONTINUE, we will be adding a “live” worship service via Zoom. I’ll be sending out more information about this option later on this week.
The great thing about Zoom is that it enables people to see and to hear one another. A major drawback is that it is time dependent. We’ll be experimenting with a 1:00 starting time for the worship service.
In terms of this week’s sermon, we’ll be doing a bit of review, looking at one of our church’s core values, and considering another section from the book of Job.
Stay Safe and Take Good Care, Remembering that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us! Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR SEPTEMBER 6, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING John O’Donohue, Contemporary
From To Bless the Space Between Us
To Learn from Animal Being
Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.
We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.
Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.
May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.
Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.
May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyes stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.
SUGGESTED MUSIC All Creatures of Our God and King SE Samonte You Tube
OPENING PRAYER St. Patrick of Ireland, 389-461
At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it has,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along the path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness;
All these I place
By God’s mighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
I arise today,
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.
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 READING Job 38:1-11, 39-40; 39:1, 26-27, NRSV
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall answer me.
‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements – surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? –
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors,
and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped?”
‘Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
when they crouch in their dens,
or lie in wait in their covert?
‘Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you observe the calving of the deer?
‘Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings towards the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its nest on high?’
SERMON: GOD LOVES GOD’S CREATION – DO WE?
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlinings merely indicate what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
Most of us know the story of Job and how God allowed just about everything to be taken from him: his children, his wealth, and, finally, even his health.
His wife urges him to curse God and die.
His friends, instead of mourning with Job at his losses, aggravate him with their endless theological arguments, arguments about how Job must have done something really, really bad to deserve such dramatic punishments from God.
In recent sermons we’ve talked about some major principles of biblical interpretation. One of these is the principle of accommodation, which means that God condescends, as it were, to meet people where they’re at in terms of their own limitations in terms of history, culture, and personality.
At times, however, we definitely get the feeling that God is getting impatient, impatient with the slowness of people to catch on to who God really is and how God really operates.
By the end of the book of Job, God has completely lost patience with Job’s friends, who keep mouthing the conventional theology of the time, that God is a God of violence and punishment, a God who is eager to catch people in their sins and make them pay the consequences.
At the very end of the book of Job, God rejects the bad theology of Job’s friends and asks Job to pray for them, that they may not reap the folly of their own refusal to grow in their understanding of God and God’s ways.
We saw last week – in the middle of Job’s screaming at his friends, the remnant of his family that’s left, and, finally, at God -- that in the midst of Job’s intolerable pain, God gives Job a glimpse of God, not as eternal policeman (the primitive understanding of Job’s friends), but of God as eternal Redeemer, a Redeemer who is so with one in terms of love and compassion, that death ceases to have the final word and Job catches a vision of eternal life with this life-giving God.
Ironically, if the research is right, a huge majority of American Christians are much closer to Job’s friends in terms of their theology than they are to Job himself.
Some three thousand years have passed since the writing of the book of Job. If God was impatient with the bad theology of Job’s friends back then, one wonders how much more impatient God must be now, now that God has definitively revealed Godself in Jesus, the person who was the incarnation, the embodiment, of God’s own goodness, compassion, creative nonviolence, restorative justice, and unconditional love.
Way too many of those who call themselves Christians today still don’t get it, and follow the threatening way of Job’s friends rather than the redemptive way of Job’s God. They project their own violence onto God, then claim that this violence is part of God’s will.
The second core value of Community Church states that “We welcome all people, wherever they are on their life journey.”
This core value flows directly from the ministry of Jesus himself, who welcomed all people – especially those who were outcasts in the culture of his own time.
Significantly, people like Job’s friends – persons who had a much more conventional and traditional take on things – were also welcomed by Jesus, but he expected them to grow into the compassion of his own ministry, especially when it came to those rejected by the rest of society.
So I see our core value, “Wherever you are on your life journey, you’re welcome here,” as considerably more complex in meaning than it first appears. When tied to the ministry and model of Jesus himself, it does not just mean that all positions on the spectrum of faith and practice are of equal value to Jesus.
All persons are of equal value to Jesus, all positions are not.
“Wherever you are on your life journey, you’re welcome here,” means that this church is a safe place for everyone, from the most dyed-in-the-wool conservative, to the most tie-dyed, spaced-out liberal.
Jesus’ challenge to both these extremes, Jesus’ challenge to everyone, wherever they happen to be on their life journey, is to become more like him.
Sometimes, I think, we use this core value of ours as an excuse not to grow, not to allow ourselves to be challenged in terms of our faith and practice. After all, if God loves us just as we are, why change?
The reality is that God loves us just as we are precisely in order to empower us to change, to become more and more like Jesus, whether we happen to be liberal or conservative, passive or passionate, democrat or republican, libertarian or independent, black or white or brown or red or yellow, straight or gay.
But does this mean that we’re all supposed to think alike, and that no one is allowed to disagree with the pastor? Of course not! Your pastor has a lot of growing to do himself. As often as not, I find myself hiding behind our slogan about God accepting us wherever we are, to shield me from my own challenges to growth in faith and practice.
What isn’t going to work, however, is coming at me with arguments like those of Job’s friends, and taking the attitude that since they’re in the Bible, they’re automatically good arguments. The bad theology of Job’s friends is in the Bible precisely to be refuted and corrected.
Arguing like this would be like coming at Jesus with the argument that since it’s stated in the Bible, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy” must be a respectable theological position. Not so! God’s Spirit has spoken through Jesus to correct this bad theology, changing it to, “but I say to you, love your enemies.”
So if we’re going to discuss, debate, and sometimes disagree, which this church encourages , let’s agree to discuss, debate, and perhaps disagree on what Jesus means. And there is plenty of room for differences of opinion concerning Jesus, all the way from what he taught and did to who he was and is.
Back to Job.
Among Job’s final words to God are words of complaint and challenge:
“O that I had one to hear me!
(Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!)
O that I had the indictment written by my adversary!
Surely I would carry it on my shoulder;
I would bind it on my head like a crown;
I would give him an account of all my steps;
like a prince I would approach him.”
(Job 31:35-37)
These words of Job are followed by six more chapters of bad theology by yet another pompous friend, bad theology in which God is again presented in terms of violence and violent punishment.
Finally, God appears on the scene, appears on the scene in a whirlwind, and literally blows away all opposition.
Speaking specifically to Job, God gives Job an incredible vision of God’s incredible creativity and fierce investment in creation. God goes on for four full chapters bragging about God’s creative powers. Much as in a show-and-tell session in elementary school, God gives Job a sampling of the many extraordinary creatures that God has made. We get a small taste of this in today’s Scripture reading, which represents about one thirtieth of the bragging that God does.
Our question is this: Given the fact that Job’s world has completely fallen apart, of what possible help can these four relentless chapters detailing God’s glorious creation possibly be to Job?
Let’s try to put ourselves in Job’s place.
Job is so extremely down-and-out that God gives Job an extreme vision to counteract his down-and-outness.
The horizon of Job’s vision has been pretty much limited to his family, his village, and himself.
God explodes Job’s narrow vision and replaces it with a vision that includes nothing less than the whole of creation.
God is basically saying to Job that village, family, and self are not first in the order of things – God and the wild diversity of God’s creation are first in the order of things.
The Implication is that in order to finally find family and self, we must first find God and celebrate God’s creation.
According to the vision of creation that God gives to Job, the entire world needs a gigantic refresher course in getting our priorities straight. God seems to be saying to Job, and to us through Job, that until we put God first we are never going to find our true selves; that until we humans become benevolent stewards of creation, as God teaches in the first chapter of Genesis, rather than the users and abusers of creation which we have become, finding our true selves, our real selves, will remain an impossibility.
I would like to close with a traditional Native American prayer, which, like the decimated native peoples themselves, I believe is very close to God’s own heart:
O Great Spirit,
whose voice I hear in the winds,
and whose breath gives life to all the world,
hear me!
I am small and weak,
I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold
the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made
and my ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand
the things you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength,
not to be greater than my brother,
but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.
Make me always ready to come to you
with clean hands and straight eyes,
so when life fades, as the fading sunset,
my spirit may come to you without shame.
Amen.
CLOSING PRAYER Mary Rogers, Contemporary (Adapted from the Gaelic)
Deep peace of the running wave to you,
of water flowing, rising, and falling,
sometimes advancing, sometimes receding. . .
May the stream of your life flow unimpeded!
Deep peace of the running wave to you!
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
which fans your face on a sultry day,
the air which you breathe deeply, rhythmically,
which imparts to you energy, consciousness, life.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you!
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
who, herself unmoving, harbours the movements
and brings forth the life of the ten thousand creatures,
while resting contented, stable, tranquil.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you!
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
which stay invisible till darkness falls
and then disclose their pure and shining presence
beaming down in compassion on our turning world.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you!
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you,
who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air,
quiet as the earth and shining like a star,
breathes into us His Peace and His Spirit.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you!
SUGGESTED MUSIC God of the Sparrow God of the Whale
First-Plymouth Church Lincoln Nebraska You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.