Christ Church UCC Evansville, IN

2010-05-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

"ETSA CABINET May 12 8;30am at St. Johns downtown"

Tabitha Arise

2010-05-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Sermon:"Tabitha Arise"
Text: Acts 9: 36-43
Date: April 25, 2010
By: Kendall Brown

A while ago, Emory College hosted a speaker who was an expert on Russian religion and culture. He told about attending worship in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral. This cathedral is beautifully decorated with icons – pictures of saints, apostles, Biblical heroes, Mary the Mother of Jesus and of course of Jesus, himself. The icons cover the walls and ceiling and are awe inspiring. In that sacred space, the worshipers remained standing for the entire service. The professor became entranced by the icons and was admiring their beauty. As he, told the story, suddenly a man behind him whacked him on the shoulder. The man said, “you are disturbing our worship, this is not a museum!” The professor's admiration of the icons was disturbing the worship of others around him. Why? You see, in Orthodox worship, the icons are windows to the divine. The intent is to see God through them and that is worship. In my language, the icons create a worshipful thin place where one can draw near to God. They are intended to be seen through, but not stared at as the professor was doing. His staring at the icons in that setting was about as obnoxious as someone's cell phone going off in the middle of a public prayer, a movie, or an opera.

(Story told by Scott Hoezee and accessed via www.textweek for this Sunday.)

This story has some guidance to give us as we approach today's lesson from Acts. Think of the story about Tabitha and Peter as an icon – a window to look through and see the power of God to which the window gives us access. It is easy to get caught up on the details, especially those that jar our rationalistic sensibilities. What is important for us is to see through the window to the truth and the power that is there for us to find in and through the story. We can get all hung up on the questions that come to our mind. Questions like: did this mini resurrection really happen? What happened to Tabitha after this event? How long did she live? Did she go back to her life of service in the community? Or we can try to make the story fit into our frames of mental reference points by explaining it as symbolic. I doubt that the author, Luke, intended for this story to be heard as having only a symbolic meaning. On the other hand, I doubt that Luke was all that concerned about rationally explaining exactly what happened to people who would be reading the story two thousand years later. I do believe that Luke is relating a story that came out of the early life of the church in Joppa. I also believe that Luke's purpose in telling the story was that the story served in the same way as an icon. The difference being that icons are viewed and stories are heard.

For Luke, the central theme of Acts is that the church was the Body of Christ in the world after Jesus was gone. Being the Body of Christ, the church had the same power and authority that Jesus had when he was with Peter and the other disciples. Among those powers, was the power to conquer death even as Jesus had done in the resurrection and in his ministry when he raised the sick young girl and Lazarus.

Sometimes I am amazed by the way events in my own life end up running in parallel with the Scripture lessons that I am reading. That happened this week. As I was reading and studying this story from Acts this week, I was also in touch with some former parishioners in Massachusetts. They are upset and knew that we would be too because of the death of Ann. Ann was a modern day Tabitha or Dorcas. Every church has at least one. There are often many more, but you need at least one to have a church at all. Ann was legally blind and had received her elementary and high school education at the Boston School for the Blind. Although her eyes didn't see very well, Ann saw things that everyone else missed. She could read a person like you and I can read a comic strip. She could spot a phony a mile off, I guess by the sound of their footsteps. No one wanted to try to pull the wool over her eyes because it couldn't be done. She was as sharp as a tack, had a great sense of humor and made the best pizzelles (an Italian cookie) that I will ever eat. She hadn't been feeling all that well since October. This past week, she was hospitalized and operated on for cancer. She died a couple days after the surgery. The cancer was too far advanced. That was the news I was getting as I was reading about Tabitha.

Ann was a good friend of ours. We would have loved it if her minister could have gone to her room this past week, like Peter of old, said to her, “Maiden, arise,” to translate today's word a little more specifically, and to have her cancer cured and her life restored.

But I know better and I don't expect that type of miracle. Still we prayed for Ann. The church community, a community of love of which Ann has been a part, prayed fervently for her. I believe those prayers provided a spiritual environment and surrounded Ann with an embrace of love, strength and wholeness that she herself told another friend that she felt and was helped by. If I were still her minister, I would have gone to her bedside. I might have gotten there a few minutes before she drew her last breath. I might have arrived after she died. In either case, it doesn't matter which, I still would have very well said a prayer – that prayer would have been the same as Peter's at Tabitha's bedside, “Maiden, arise.” “Ann, arise.”

You see, in Acts, the word, “arise,” used here is also found in a few other places in the New Testament. It is the same word that is used as a verb in reference to Jesus' resurrection. It has a very specific use. It doesn't mean to be revived or resuscitated, nor simply to awake and get out of bed. It means in this New Testament usage, to enter into the resurrected life of Jesus. It means for Tabitha and for Ann and for you and me to be in that same life as Jesus has entered. I also believe that live people don't have to stop breathing and dead people don't have to start breathing to enter into that life. It is the gift of eternal life that God has given us. That is a portion of the truth to which this iconic story points us. It is a truth, that like the icons in the Russian cathedral, deserve standing worshipfully in awe of and giving thanks to God for all the gifts of this life and of life eternal.

Sept.6, 09: "A Bad Day for Jesus"

2009-09-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

Communion Meditation
September 6, 2009
Mark 7: 24ff
By Kendall Brown
Last Sunday, I made the comment that every time I read and study the Scriptures, I learn something new. Sure enough, that happened this week. One commentator on this week's lesson points out that often when something critical or earth shaking or just plain important to Jesus' mission happens, a woman is present in the Gospel of Mark. Today's lesson has more to it than a story about Jesus healing a child.
Jesus was having, what we all know as, a bad day. He was trying to get away from it all. He was seeking a moment of rest. Luke would say that he was also seeking some time just to be alone with God and in prayer. He had traveled to a place beyond what had been his normal sphere of work to get away. It was like Evansville folk going down to the Land Between the Lakes for a weekend break. But peace and quiet did not follow Jesus. Instead, his reputation preceded him and one woman in particular was ready and waiting for him. Her daughter was ill and like any good mother, she was willing to do anything for her child, even break the social and cultural rules about women not even speaking to men in public, not to mention arguing with one.
Jesus, on the other hand, was not having one of his best days. Mark tells us that he wasn't quite up to par in his ability to respond to and take care of people. I know the feeling. It has happened to me. I remember one morning a couple years ago when I was on my way to the hospital. This morning I was going to the hospital for myself, instead of making a call on someone else, to have a stress test which ended up with an emergency admission for more cardiac care. Even before the test I knew myself that something was wrong. I had gotten to the point where I could not carry my laptop up the stairs to our apartment without having chest pains. So I was a little anxious that morning and had a few things in my own life on my mind. I made the mistake of coming into the church that morning and sure enough I ran into someone who took me off guard. My response wasn't quite my pastoral best, even a little under my ministerial mediocre. That is where Jesus was that day.
His response was less than ministerial mediocre. His response to the woman's request for help for her daughter was. “it is not right to take the children's bread and feed it to the dogs.” The meaning here is that the gifts he bore were for the Jewish people and not for Gentiles like this woman. There is no way around it. What we are seeing here is Jesus' bad side on a bad day. What we are also seeing is that Jesus is human and that is something that we should neither be embarrassed about not should we try to ignore.
The mother was not about to let go. She came right back with her comment that even the dogs got some crumbs under the table and that even a crumb would be good enough for her. This woman didn't give up on Jesus just because he was having a bad day or because he had insulted her. How often do we give up on another person for much less. She persisted and she won – everybody won, there were no losers.
I think that Jesus, himself, was probably embarrassed and humiliated by this exchange. But this low moment in his spiritual life and ministry is also presented by Mark as a critical thin place in Jesus life.. The persistent mother pushes a whole new direction into Jesus' ministry. A whole new reality opens up for Jesus. Indeed, he is refreshed and renewed in this place, but not the way he expected or that we would expect – such is the way the spirit moves.
Mark indicates the importance of this moment by where he places the story in his Gospel. The story about the Syrophoenician woman is located smack dab in the middle between two stories of Jesus miraculously feeding thousands of people. In Mark 6, we have the familiar story of Jesus feeding 5000 people with five loaves and two fish. When it is over, there are twelve baskets full of fish and bread left over. In Mark 8, on the other side of the story about the persistent mother, we have the second feeding of 4000 people with 7 loaves and a few small fish with seven baskets left over at the end. The stories are similar, but built into them is one significant difference.
The difference is in the blessing. In Mark 6:41 the blessing at the first feeding of a multitude is described in this way: “And taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people. At the second feeding in Mark 8, the blessing is described in this way: “and he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people.”
The first blessing in Mark 6, is described as a typical Jewish table blessing, “he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves,...” The second blessing in Mark 8, is described differently. What is described could be the description of any common blessing shared by many Gentiles according to their non-Jewish traditions. “he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks, broke them...”
The first multitude was a crowd of Jewish people. The second crowd is far more inclusive and Jesus' blessing acknowledges that indeed the bread on the table is for all, no one is to be considered a dog, or that even those formerly thought of as dogs, now have a place at God's table.
Life altering, direction changing places, thin places that turn us around can happen. I think that knowing that is one of the rewards of acknowledging and becoming acquainted with Jesus' humanity. This Jesus invites all of us, with all of our flaws, with all of our weaker moments, with all of our regrets and wishes that we didn't say this or should have said that, to come to this table. Come, be fed and be whole.

2009-08-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

Christ Church UCC in Evansville, IN now has a YouTube site and is beginning to post Sunday morning messages there. We are staying away from the word "sermon" here as it has too much baggage attached to it in today's world. The messag...e is the Good News of a reasonable faith proclaimed in a thirsty and hungering world. Here is the Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/ChristChurchUCC

Singing from the Lectionary - inclusive hymns, music and songs based on each week's Revised Common Lectionary

2009-08-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

Singing from the Lectionary - inclusive hymns, music and songs based on each week's Revised Common Lectionary

Sermons by Rev. Kendall Brown: Purity Codes – Then and Now

2009-06-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

Sermon: Purity Codes – Then and Now
Date: February 15, 2009
Text: Mark 1: 40-45

The word “kosher” never meant an awful lot to me until I went to my brother-in-law's wedding in a Jewish synagogue in West Hartford, CT. Wayne married Elaine in accordance with her Jewish faith and tradition. Kosher then became a reality for me. In those days, our home was where Cheryl's family gathered on Easter. They were fun holidays. We had a great big parsonage with plenty of room. All of the rooms were filled every Easter. The bustle of family life brought new life to the celebration of the resurrection. After Wayne was married we tried to be a little more conscientious about the Easter Sunday menu. The traditional Easter ham is not kosher! I even learned to look at food packaging labels for vegetable oil instead of oil based in animal fat. Kosher was no longer a distant and foreign word for me. Elaine from the other side did her part to move towards the center, too. At Easter worship, she and Wayne would be sitting with the rest of the family in the front pew right under my nose. The family would go to church early to get that pew because Uncle Lou, Cheryl's uncle and also a redhead from Maine, wanted to be sure to have a seat where he could distract and annoy me. Kosher had come to my house on Easter Sunday no less, and I have learned a lot more about it since.

Sending the man off to the priest to be examined after Jesus had healed him was all about being kosher. And kosher was a big deal. That is why Jesus sent the man to the priests. The man had a skin disease. In those days, any form of skin disease was called leprosy and the patient a leper. The only leprosy that we know today is also called Hansen's Disease. The man in this story may or may not have had Hansen's Disease but the specific diagnosis of his ailment is not our concern here this morning. What is important is that the presence of a skin disease made this man impure. That was a big deal. One could be ostracized for an impurity. That could mean more than being kept out of the synagogue or temple. It could also mean being run out of town. The impure person would be marginalized or driven to the edge. The priest could administer cleansing rites that would allow one to be restored to the community. Obviously this gave the priesthood a great amount of power.

Jesus in sending the man to the priests was honoring the laws set out in the book of Leviticus. These laws are known also as the Purity Code. They defined what is clean and unclean, kosher and not kosher. The Leviticus code worked to polarize society by setting apart different groups. Men/women, clean/unclean, pure/defiled. There was a hierarchy of purity. Priests were on the top. Women and children somewhere in the basement.

The purity code was the work of a group of religious leaders and scholars known as the Deuteronomists. They are named for the book of Scriptures that they are responsible for the form we have today – Deuteronomy. They also authored the codes of purity found in Leviticus. The
Deuteronomists came into their years of glory during the exile.

It is easy to understand why their work was valued during that period. During the exile, the greatest threat to the very existence of the Jewish community was the possibility of it's assimilation into the Babylonian culture and eventual complete disappearance. Babylon was where Israel's educated, ruling, wealthy and powerful people had been taken into exile. Also, the Babylonian culture through Babylon’s military conquests was spreading across the ancient world. You couldn't get away from it any more than you can get away from McDonald's arches anywhere in the world today.

The Deuteronomists devised and refined the culture of purity to define Jewish culture and community, to demark the boundaries between its people and all others, and to preserve Judaism in the ancient world. That mission was as important in Jesus time as it was 600 years earlier during the Exile. In Jesus' day, just substitute Romans for Babylonians as the threat to Jewish life.

When John the Baptist linked baptism with repentance, he was picking up an ancient rite and giving it a new twist. Baptism was a practice established under the purity codes. It was a rite of cleansing used for non-Jewish persons who were becoming Jewish. The non-Jew was impure, dirty if you will, and to enter the Jewish community needed this cleansing ands purifying rite.

In Leviticus, there are many regulations around sexual behavior. All of those regulations were aimed at practices which took place in the fertility rites in the Babylonian religion. The code in may ways says “This is who we are as Jews,' by pointing fingers at practices of the Gentile culture around them and saying “Those are things that Jews don't do.” The code defines all sorts of things like how one eats, what one wears, what one plants in the ground and how it is planted.

Leviticus 7:19 says, “Flesh that touches any unclean thing shall not be eaten.” This law was not written by the Health Department to protect people from the spread of germs and maintain sanitary practices. This law was written by a bunch of religious folk trying to preserve their community. They were survivalists who had been transported to Babylon where they found Babylonians eating lots of strange things. So they said to their community, “We don't eat this stuff. It is unclean. It is so unclean that if any of our kosher food as much as touches it then you throw out the kosher food too.” In other words, do your grocery shopping at your local kosher market and support your own people and stay in all things within the boundaries of your own people. Let us not have any of this assimilation stuff with those who are not like us. The unclean food business was like moving from afar to St. Louis and discovering people eating brain sandwiches! Euch! How dirty can you get? That is an abomination and the word abomination is found a lot in Leviticus. Then brain sandwiches are declared unclean and a rule is set up that you can't eat it if you want to continue being who you are. You can't even allow your egg salad sandwich to as much as touch a brain sandwich.

It is important to remember as we use the Scriptures to guide us today that the priests who wrote the purity codes which are found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy were far more interested in defining community than they were in defining the will of God. Often that distinction is lost today when these particular texts are lifted up as the will of God. The New Testament teaches us that the word of God or the will of God became flesh in Jesus Christ. It does not teach that the word of God or God's will became flesh in a purity code written by men to preserve a community – even if that code is found in the Scriptures themselves.

New Testament writers took issue with the purity codes – especially as those codes defined community. Where the Purity Codes defined a community that was the epitome of exclusiveness, the New Testament defines a new community which is the epitome of inclusiveness. Paul is taking issue with the Purity Codes when he wrote in Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.” This well known and oft quoted verse is a flat out rejection of the purity code and all of its related exclusiveness.

The purity codes had a strong hold on people and it was a struggle to break free of all the attitudes and prejudices that the code had engendered and nurtured in people's hearts and minds. In a way, the entire book of Acts is a history of the early church's struggle to break free of the tenacious and choking hold that the purity codes had on them and on their own spirit trying to breath fresh air of Christ. Over and over a variety of issues were settled on the side of inclusiveness as the early Christians accepted Gentiles into their fold. The issue of circumcision was decided on the side of inclusiveness. The biggest issue of all was the issue of eating unclean (non-kosher) food, which was decided on the side of inclusiveness. We don't fully appreciate what a big thing it was for Paul and the other early Christians to decide to chuck the purity codes and eat non-kosher. That was a matter of turning what they had known as their world totally upside down for their faith. It was a subversive and a counter-culture act.

In today's Scripture lesson, it would seem that Jesus is upholding and affirming the purity codes, when in accordance with the codes, he dispatches the man, whom he had healed of some infirmity of the flesh, to go and see the priests. But Jesus in sending the man to the priest was not simply obeying the law because it is the law. Jesus was concerned with a person's wholeness - the person's total health. The man had leprosy. Because of his leprosy he was ostracized from the community. Jesus could heal the man physically of his disease. But Jesus could not make that man's life whole again by restoring him to his community. Only the priests could do that. Sometimes in our build up of who Jesus was we forget there were things that even he couldn't do. Only the priests could restore the man to community. This story reminds us that there are things in our world that Jesus cannot do and
that only we can do for him. Community building, including people in stead of excluding them, is something that only we can do ourselves.

The strength of the purity code mindset is still very much with us today. One of the places where we see that mindset alive and well is in the debate in our culture to make a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The effort to make that constitutional change happen is a straight forward effort to turn our constitution into a religious purity code, which is something that the Constitution is not and should never be made into. The Constitution especially the Bill of Right is an instrument that protects human rights. In no way does the Constitution work to diminish or take away rights. To change the Constitution into a religious purity code is the first step in turning our country into some kind of Taliban.

Personally, I think the way the Sabbath has been destroyed in our society presents a far greater threat to the moral life and even economic life of this country than a gay married couple or two scattered around the neighborhood. The commercialization of the Sabbath has its philosophical roots in the same base from which operate the captains of Wall Street and the Loan and Banking industry whose greed has contributed greatly to our present woes. I could get real excited about a return of the Blue Laws and a constitutional amendment banning soccer on Sundays.

But as a US citizen who both enjoys and loves the freedom established and guaranteed by our Constitution and laws, I would never propose or support such an anti-soccer amendment. Even though I am more pro-Sabbath than I am pro-soccer, I could not support constitutional changes that impose my religious beliefs on others and that change the Constitution and laws into a religious purity code that any Taliban type would just love.

For all the same reasons, I cannot support a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. Gay marriage is still an issue. And it is an issue that we need to talk to each other about and listen and learn. The proper place for that religious/moral conversation is in our churches. Our country is in trouble and has been for a long time and will continue to be as long as we take our conversations which we should be having in the religious community among ourselves out into the political arena, and change them into political debates which serve the purposes of divisiveness and polarization very well. Polarizing is the very thing that Paul and Jesus worked so hard against and by their witness and work call us, as their followers, to also work against.

The ethics that Jesus was practicing in today's lesson might be called compassionate pragmatism. He was known to practice it in other places. In Mark 11, we read about Jesus with some disciples passing through a field on the Sabbath when the disciples plucked and ate some ears of grain. The priestly bean counters and purity coders got all bent out of shape. Jesus reminded them that once upon a time priests behaved a little different. He recalled the story of King David being ill and taken to the temple on the Sabbath. There the priests, even though it was the Sabbath, made it their priority to restore him to wholeness. They violated all the Deuteronomists’ purity codes by not only feeding David on the Sabbath, but also, good grief – heaven help us, they fed him from the only bread available - the consecrated bread of presence on the altar, which only God should have been eating. That is compassionate pragmatism. Doing what has to be done to bring wholeness, healing, and health to others. That is our work here on earth. Becoming purity coders and counters turns us into judges. It can't be avoided. As it said on the sign out front for the past couple weeks, we are here to do God's work – not God's job.