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October 2, 2005 - February 5, 2006

The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 25, 2006

In nature there are unexpected storms; in life there are unpredictable vicissitudes.

―Chinese Proverb

Scripture Lessons:
Job 38:1-11
Mark 4:35-41

Disturbances

I could have chosen the story of David and Goliath for today’s Hebrew Bible Lesson.  After I read through all the choices in the Lectionary, I picked God’s answers to Job from the whirlwind as a more logical pairing with the story of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee.  But, a few nights later, the story of David and Goliath came to mind when Oscar asked me to tell him a story at bedtime.

We had already said prayers and the lights were out.  Jane and I always stay and snuggle with him a bit.  We like to do it and it helps Oscar settle down.  He’ll no doubt outgrow it before we tire of it.  The book Oscar had chosen that night was an I Spy book of visual puzzles.  They’re great books, but I think it left him a little parched for bedtime narrative content.  So I was not surprised when he said he wasn’t tired and asked me to tell him a story.  In these cases I usually rely on folk tails or fairy tales that I can dredge up from the recesses of memory.  The first thing that came to mind was the story of David and Goliath, as I had just reread it. 

It seemed appropriate at the time.  Oscar and I are both the youngest sons in our generations.  David was the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons.  I began the story describing the battle lines and the taunting Philistine champion, so huge he struck fear into the hearts of the whole Israelite army.  I told him about the brave young shepherd boy who was scandalized by the cowardice of his older brothers and his countrymen.  I didn’t us the names, but it didn’t take Oscar long to figure out who I was talking about.  I told him how the king offered David his own armor, but that when he put it on, the boy couldn’t even walk.  I told him how, as a shepherd, David had used his sling to drive away lions and wolves from his father’s flocks.  I told Oscar how Goliath was enraged that the Israelites had sent a young boy to challenge him, and then how David killed Goliath with a stone to the head.  I left out the decapitation part.

At first, Oscar’s reaction was what you would expect from a boy who had just heard about a young hero triumphing against overwhelming odds in mortal combat.  As I think about it I have to wonder if somewhere out there some Evangelical electronic gaming company has designed and marketed David vs. Goliath: The Video Game.  I would be surprised if there’s only one.  But soon Oscar had moved from savoring the classic tale of heroic conflict to the nature of its resolution.  In the dark of his bedroom, he pulled close to me and said, “Dad, I’m afraid of death.” 

You can imagine that this took me back a bit.  When the subject of death comes up, I always try to be honest with the boys in an age appropriate way.  Oscar tends to talk about it more than Max.  When Oscar brings it up I usually talk about how he has so much more life to live before he has to worry about death.  I also tell him about people I have known who, when they approached their own deaths, were ready to die.  They were tired, their bodies were worn out, and they welcomed death.  I told Oscar that death is part of life.

The next thing he said really threw me: Oscar said, “Dad, I’m scared of life, too.”  Now, like many kids his age, Oscar can be contrary and is certainly not above employing his rhetorical skills to forestall going to sleep.  But he was serious.  There was a note of anxiety in his voice.  What do you say to a boy who has just turned eight, and he is in the throes of genuine, honest-to-God existential despair?  This is a boy I would generally describe as happy, too.  Because I had no idea what to say I was saved from the impulse to say something facile and trite.  I simply asked Oscar what he meant.  Why was he scared of life?  “Because a lot of bad things happen,” was his answer.

That has haunted me since he said it.  It was an honest answer and it betrays a growing awareness of a big and imperfect world.  Oscar’s first day of preschool was September 11, 2001.  He knows that our country is at war and that people are dying in that war every day.  He knows that hurricane Katrina killed hundreds and displaced thousands of people.  He sees homeless people on the streets.  He knows that the man who recently surpassed Babe Ruth’s homerun record cheated.  Scared of life and of death, my sweet little prince, at eight years old, is edging his way into Hamlet’s dilemma:  “To be or not to be?  That is the question.  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles.  And by opposing, end them?” 

I didn’t quote Shakespeare to Oscar as we snuggled in his little bed, just after dark last week.  I simply paraphrased a line from the opening sentences I use at funerals: whether we live or whether we die, we belong to God and remain in God’s hands.  After recounting the heroic defeat of a giant, we found ourselves facing the whirlwind and the sea of troubles.  I stayed with him until well after we had both dozed off.  I woke when I heard Jane and Max talking in the hall and lumbered hazily out of his room.

God’s response to Job out of the whirlwind is not a terribly satisfying answer and the story of Job is a troubling one.  God was challenged by Satan, who in Job is portrayed as a member of the Heavenly Host, not the demonic lord of fire, brimstone and evil.  Satan said that the only reason Job was virtuous was because he had such a comfortable life.  Send a little misfortune his way, and he’ll not be so faithful.  God accepted the challenge and essentially ruined Job’s family, health and fortune.  Though Job remained faithful, he wanted some answers.  He thought God was supposed to be just.  This begs the question, before Job’s ordeal; did he assume that those who suffered poverty, disease and misfortune somehow deserve it?  I think the most important part of the book of Job is that it rejects blaming the victim, by which we too often absolve ourselves of social responsibility.  In the end, God’s answer is that some things, like innocent suffering, will remain a mystery.

As we face what Hamlet called “a sea of troubles,” the Gospel Lesson shows us, we’re all in the same boat.  In a world of instant-worldwide-digital-satellite communication, round-the-clock cable news, international trade and geopolitics, the boat we are in is this shrinking and fragile planet earth.  We, the Church, are the Body of Christ in the world, and we need to wake up and be a voice that addresses the storms that threaten to swamp the boat.  I know it sounds like I’m talking politics again, because I am.  But stick with me; I think that we have the ability and the responsibility to reach for common ground.  I think you would all agree that our religion has a moral and ethical core, and the political process should be how we live out our morals and ethics collectively. 

That said, we live in a politically divided nation and people of both parties can see the damage and lost opportunities because of those divisions.  Together, Second Church is a covenanted congregation, even as we represent various and sometimes opposing political commitments.  We serve no one if we become a divided congregation, and yet we cannot turn a blind eye to crisis for the sake of hollow unity.  But perhaps the fact that we are a Christian community made up of Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Independents who stand together before God, seeking to do good is an important starting place.  Together we raised a lot of money for Tsunami Relief and were a collection point for Katrina relief supplies.  It is no small thing that we are an Open & Affirming congregation where we celebrate gay marriage while still a congregation of Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Independents.  The fact that we can be a loving, nurturing worshipping community with certain shared moral convictions across political boundaries is an important witness in the midst of a divided nation.

As the Body of Christ we are called to be healers.  We don’t have to be the same, but we are called to be healers.  We all have felt the pain of this divided and partisan political climate.  I know conservative Republicans in Newton often feel like pariahs in their home town, and that’s not right.  I know many liberal Democrats have a hard time identifying with much of the country between the two coasts, and that is a tragedy.  We are all human beings created in the image of God.

I am now going to make a modest request, and it is political.   If I’m out of line, I’m sure you’ll let me know.  If you are a registered member of a political party, make it somehow known to your party and your representatives, that by your votes and your donations you will do everything you can to bring end to partisan demagoguery in your party and to support reformers who want to reach for meaningful consensus.  If you are an independent, you should write to both parties because they both want your vote.  Perhaps I am being naïve, but I think of it as being faithful.  I want my son to go to sleep at night with a sense of hope.  Maybe if enough of us wake up and say, “Be still” the winds will die down, and we can all get somewhere, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 18, 2006

Understanding is the wages of faith.

―St. Augustine

Scripture Lessons:
Ezekiel 17:22-24
Mark 4:26-34

                                     Growing in Understanding

My very favorite biblical screen epic has to be Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.  I should warn you at the outset that it is not a movie for the whole family, unless everyone in the family is over seventeen.  The storyline of the film is not actually biblical.  It does take place in first century, Roman-occupied Judea.  The title character was born in close proximity to Jesus at almost exactly the same time.  The movie opens with the Magi mistakenly arriving at Brian’s house and presenting gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to Brian’s bawdy, single mother.  Moments after they leave, they realize their error, burst in and snatch back their gifts. 

As the story unfolds, we learn that Brian is the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier.  Incensed by this discovery, he becomes embroiled in the radical politics of Judean liberation.  There are two prominent militant groups on the scene: the Judean People’s Front and the Front for the Judean People, both of which hate each other more than the Romans they are sworn to fight.  There is also a third group mentioned, The Popular Front for Judean People, which consists of one person.  Though The Life of Brian has a very modern sensibility and is largely an absurdist satire on religion and politics, the Pythons’ eye for historical detail is meticulously employed and their satirical observations are stingingly perceptive.  Throughout the entire outlandish romp, there is a surprising air of authenticity and a constant undercurrent of wry insight.

The reason I bring it up is because there is a wonderful scene when Brian is running away from his would-be followers.  As he made his getaway, Brian lost one of his sandals.  Coming upon the abandoned footwear, the pursuing mob becomes fixated on the lonely sandal itself.  They take it to be a sacred relic and a sign from their reluctant messiah.  Some believe that, to be faithful followers of Brian, they must only wear one shoe.  Others suppose that is a sign for them to hop around on one foot.  Within minutes of discovering what they believe to be a revelation, they descend into arguing about its significance. 

The aftermath of Brian’s lost sandal has a wonderful and stinging veracity concerning the foibles of religious people.  At various times we are prone to both oversimplify and over-interpret what we take to be revelation, even when what we take to be transcendence may be as random as a lost shoe. It also shows the tragic propensity of groups to fragment over interpretive differences.  While these liabilities have been in evidence throughout the history of Christianity, we certainly do not have a corner on factionalism or interpretive absurdity.  These human vices are played out in every religion every day.  While religion is focused on the divine/human encounter, religion itself is a human endeavor, prone to every human virtue and every human vice.

One of the great beauties of the Bible is that so much of it documents human missteps in religious expression, from the beginning of time.  The first murder took place over sacrificial offerings.  God accepted Abel’s offering and did not accept Cain’s.  In a jealous rage, Cain murdered his brother.  When you think about it, it is such a blessing that our sacred text is so utterly suspicious of religion.  Think about it:  our religion actually critiques itself.  In one of the most ambiguous and powerful stories of the entire Bible, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son and then stopped him from doing it. 

Though the sacrificial cult was at the center of the worship life of ancient Israel, the prophets repeatedly denounced formal religious practice when it threatened to crowd out the people’s sacred obligation to justice and compassion.  The prophet Micah asked, “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8) 

Isaiah was similarly critical of empty fasting.  What good is repentance if there is no effort to right the wrong?  Speaking the word of God, Isaiah demanded, “Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a rush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the LORD?  Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?   Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?  Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.”  (Isaiah 58:5-8)

None of this is to say that ritual and worship are not important.  Worship is what binds the faith community together.  Ritual orders our behavior and focuses our attention.  But, to what end?  As I said last week, the sanctuary is a place we pass through to gain inspiration, motivation, healing and respite.  The worship for which we gather should focus us spiritually and ethically so that we can grow as individuals and nurture our relationships with God, one another and the whole world.   The very first psalm speaks of how the righteous are like trees planted by streams of water (Psalm 1:3), rooted in scripture and watered by prayer. All our scripture lessons today employ similar organic metaphors.  The Psalm we read responsively in the Call to Worship tells us “The righteous flourish like the palm tree.”  (Psalm 92:12)  Ezekiel spoke of how God will take a young sprig from the top of a cedar and plant it on a mountain top.  He described how it would grow to bear fruit and become a home for every kinds of bird. (Ezekiel 17:22-24)

In the Gospel Lesson, Jesus spoke of seeds to describe the Kingdom of God.  He told his disciples, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”  I love the way that this parable portrays faithful action in the sowing and the tending, but that the growth is somehow mysterious, “…the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.  The earth produces of itself…” 

I think this is an amazing image of the tension between faith and action, both of which we have to rely on as a church, and in life in general.  In a sense, the hard part is the easy part, which is to say pitching in and doing the work.  At least we know what is involved, what is required of us, if only we would believe that what we do matters.

But what to do about the crop in the ground?  Let go, let God.  I’ve mentioned that my mentor, Kit, was a recovering alcoholic, and he would often regale me with twelve-step proverbs.  “Let go, let God” was one of his favorites. It’s all about understanding what we have control over and what we don’t.  “Let go, let God” is the bumper sticker version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

It is often said that true genius is simplicity, and in those three lines of prayer, Niebuhr summed up the religious life.  Our worship, our fellowship and our stewardship are meaningless, if they do not serve to bring us to an awareness of God that inspires courage, serenity and wisdom.  This is our purpose as individuals and as a congregation:  to seek courage, serenity and wisdom from God to change our lives, change our community and act with justice and compassion a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 11, 2006

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to [humanity] as it is, infinite.

―William Blake

Scripture Lessons:
Isaiah 6:1-8
Mark 1:2-13

Holy Here, Holy There, Holy…

Last summer, I stood in fairly close proximity to where Isaiah had his vision of God calling him to be a prophet.  Temple Mount, the highest point in the Old City of Jerusalem, is where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock now stand.  The gleaming gold dome is visible for miles.  The same was probably true of Solomon’s Temple and of Herod’s magnificent Temple, the one Jesus knew when he walked the narrow streets of Jerusalem.  Both Temples were constructed on roughly the same site.  I went up there with a group of Jews, Christians and Muslims who were part of the International Summer School on Religious Tolerance I attended in Jerusalem last year. 

Access to Temple Mount is not simple.  All entrances have a heavy security presence.  Mahmoud is a Palestinian Muslim from Jerusalem.  Like me, he was a student at the International Summer School.  He is a disciple of a Sufi Sheikh who teaches at an academy in the Old City, adjacent to the Temple Mount.  Mahmoud arranged with the Sheikh for our group to enter the compound at the entrance near the Lion’s Gate, in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City where Muslims enter to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  When we arrived, despite the invitation, police guarding the entrance would not let us in.  We had to walk to the Jewish Quarter, and enter through a series of security barriers, near the Western Wall. 

Understandably, our bags were x-rayed and we walked through metal detectors under the watchful eyes of armed police before we could ascend to the Temple Mount.  It may surprise you that, of the members of our group, the one who attracted the most attention from the police was Shlomo, an Israeli Orthodox Jew who was one of the organizers of the summer school.  Israeli Police and security forces have the unenviable task of keeping a lookout for fanatics from both sides of the enduring conflict.  The fragile peace is not only threatened by Islamic terrorists, but also by ultra-Orthodox Jews who would like to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque so that the Temple can be rebuilt.  Israeli intelligence units have discovered and foiled various plots aimed at the demolition of these Islamic holy sites.  At the checkpoint, the police took Shlomo aside and questioned him.  Before allowing him to proceed, they warned Shlomo that if he made any provocative moves, like tearing his clothing (which would be a sign of mourning for the destroyed Temple) or shouting out slogans, he would find himself immediately under arrest.

The warnings were understandable, but misplaced.  Shlomo is indeed a patriotic Israeli and a devout Orthodox Jew, but he is also a man who pushes boundaries for the sake of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.  My last night in Jerusalem, I sat at his table on Erev Shabbat with his family and fellow students from the summer school, which included Christians and Muslims.  Shlomo and his wife were really excited to have the opportunity to go to the Temple Mount.  Before the visit, they met with their rabbi, to find out where they could and could not walk on the Temple Mount, to avoid stepping on the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest would have been allowed to go.  They also went to the Mikveh, a ritual bath, to purify themselves for the visit.

Holy places can induce profound inspiration and high emotion.  As well as being places of religious significance, they are also politically potent symbols.  In the days of Solomon’s Temple, religion and politics were intricately linked.  Prophets denounced the actions of kings and the community.  The security and well-being of the kingdom were explicitly linked to the righteousness of the people and their leaders.  Try to picture the scene in Solomon’s Temple.  Not just Isaiah’s vision, but imagine the place and atmosphere, drenched with holiness, in the biggest building on the highest spot in the sacred capitol.

Isaiah mentions that he was in the sanctuary, and we know that he was in fairly close proximity to the altar.  He was in a large room lit by gleaming metal oil lamps, with a fire burning on the altar.  The sanctuary was filled with aromatic smoke from the burnt offerings and incense, smelling something like a heavily perfumed barbecue.  Priests in their turbans and scripturally prescribed robes moved about sacrificing animals, dashing blood on the sides of the altar, saying blessings, tending the fires.  Perhaps the High Priest stood at a distance, overseeing everything, his gleaming breastplate set with twelve different colored precious stones representing the tribes of Israel.  In the midst of all this holy hubbub, Isaiah had a vision and spoke with God.   

I have been thinking a lot about the power of holy places.  Their power comes from a mixture of history, location, architecture and emotion.  Some of the history we bring to the holy place with us.  Consider the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, DC.  Though a secular memorial, I cannot call it anything other than a holy place.  It is a place where people go to be healed.  Though its design was controversial, it was embraced by the veterans almost immediately.  Even when new, it was drenched with history, carried in by the veterans and families who bore the weight of a war as they came looking for the names of fallen comrades and loved ones.  They brought offerings of flowers, medals, teddy bears, notes.  Reverently, they touch the names carved into the black stone; some made rubbings, creating sacred relics to bring home.  I have been there with teenagers, born well after the end of the war, and all are moved by the experience of being there, in the proximity to so powerful a sacred place and the reverence it inspires.

The holiness of this sanctuary began to work on me soon after I came here, almost eight years ago.  Overwhelmed by its ornate expansiveness as well as by the commitment I had made to this community connected to it, I adopted something I like to call a ritual of mindfulness.  Because such effort and expense went into erecting and maintaining this sacred space, and because you have entrusted me with the spiritual care of the congregation that gathers here, I wanted to avoid rushing through it without acknowledging the God it was built to glorify and serve.  Even when I am simply pass through this sanctuary to get a book out of the study or use the printer, I always try to say, out loud, the twenty-fourth verse of the 118^th Psalm, “This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  It is a small thing, but it serves to remind me that I am in a holy place.  More importantly, it reminds me of the God we are meant to serve in and beyond it.  We must not pass through a sacred space without being mindful, without letting it do its work on us.  We should also remember that sacred space is for passing through, not staying.  Sacred space is an intersection between sacred and the everyday, between the eternal and the existential.  We come to the holy place to remind ourselves and strengthen ourselves for living out God’s intentions for all of creation. 

Think of every story of a divine vision you have ever read in scripture.  When has the person who received the vision ever been told to stay put?  Today’s Gospel Lesson begins with Jesus meeting John at the Jordan River to be baptized.  The Jordan itself is a sacred place, the river the Israelites crossed to enter the Promised Land.  There Jesus saw the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove.  Did he remain there to savor the vision?  No.  Scripture tells us that “...the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1: 23-13)  And of course, Jesus did not remain in the wilderness to live the life of a contemplative hermit, either.  Three verses later he was walking along the Sea of Galilee, calling disciples and beginning his ministry.

In both of this morning’s readings we see how sacred places function within our religious tradition.  They are where the community gathers to live out its collective religious and ritual life.  Offerings are brought, sacraments are administered and the sacred narrative is transmitted and relived.  Often the sacred story is conveyed by the architecture itself.  Consider Solomon’s Temple.  The central importance of God’s Word was conveyed by the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant resided.  The Ark contained the tablets Moses received at Sinai, that is to say, God’s Word.  Sacred space is a gathering place, and even a resting place, but not a residence for people of faith.  They are places where we come regularly to focus on what God would have us do with the life God gives us.

Both of this morning’s scripture lessons are portrayed in the Cole Window, in the north wall of this sanctuary.  At the center of the window is the Prophet Isaiah standing in Solomon’s Temple as a seraph purified his lips with a red-hot coal from the altar.  Surrounding this image are various scenes from Jesus’ ministry, including his baptism by John in the River Jordan.  If you look near the feet of Jesus and John, you will see an image of the Second Church baptismal font that stands in the south transept, by the entrance to the Children’s Chapel.  In that detail, our sanctuary is linked to Solomon’s Temple and the events of Jesus’ ministry in the Holy Land in the first century.  But there is more.  Interspersed with depictions from the Gospel narrative are images of a contemporary pastor, officiating a wedding, confirming young people, counseling a couple and visiting the sick.  This shows us that the holiness of the sanctuary is inseparable from what we do in it and beyond it.

We often repeat the hymn of the Seraphim, “Holy, Holy, Holy… Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus… Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh.”  It echoes through Jewish and Christian worship.  But do we remember what passed between God and the Prophet in that holy place?  God asked, “Who will go?” and the prophet’s reply was, “Here I am.  Send me!”  Though our lives cycle through sacred places, these places exist so that we may find inspiration to serve God and God’s people beyond the sanctuary in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
June 4, 2006

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

                                                             ―John A. Shedd

Scripture Lessons:
Ezekiel 37:1-6
Acts 2:1-8, 11-21
John 16:12-15

Confirmation Meditation

The story of the Apostles’ testimony on Pentecost is extraordinary for a number of reasons, not least of all because of the way they are portrayed in the preceding incidents in the New Testament narrative.  The Acts of the Apostles was written by the same author as The Gospel According to Luke, and picks up where the Gospel story leaves off.  It would be hard to argue that the disciples were not a pretty fearful lot in the closing episodes of all four gospels.  In Mark’s account of Jesus’ arrest in the garden, they all scattered.  In repeated gospel accounts, Peter, who had once so boldly declared that Jesus was God’s anointed one, denied he even knew Jesus for fear of the consequences.  In The Gospel According to John, when the Risen Christ appeared to his disciples, he found them huddled in a locked room, seemingly paralyzed by fear.

Truthfully, they had good reasons to be afraid.  Their hero and their hope, Jesus, their teacher and their inspiration had been arrested, humiliated, tortured and brutally executed.  They had dared to hope that he would liberate their holy land and restore the monarchy of David, God’s favored king for God’s chosen people.  Instead, the occupying superpower nailed Jesus to a tree to die slowly beneath their mocking herald: “This is the King of the Jews.” (Luke 23:38)  The Roman Empire was not subtle in enforcing order and Pilate was a particularly brutal administrator. 

So what turned these once-cowering disciples into bold and articulate apostles?  On the day of a pilgrim festival when Jerusalem was filled with Jews from nations all over the known world, they stood up and testified for all to hear.  Their enthusiasm was such that some assumed they were drunk.  They were not filled with wine, but with the Holy Spirit.  Their courage came not from some miraculous sense of invulnerability, but knowing the Risen Christ, they understood that death was not the end of the story.  In fact, many of them would be martyred themselves before all was said and done.  And yet, they stood up and proclaimed their faith joyously, with confidence, and a new measure of commitment.

Today we celebrate that our church has new life and spirit breathed into it in these ten members of the Confirmation Class of 2006.  Today these ten young people will accept the responsibility for their faith journey, accepting for their own, the vows made for them at their baptism.  We must no longer speak of these young people as the future of the Church, because they now stand with us as full adult members of this congregation, contemplating the ongoing mission and ministry of the Body of Christ, and of the place and purpose of Second Church as a part of that Body.

Each Confirmation Class begins with a meeting with the students and their parents.  I tell them all very clearly that the decision ahead belongs to each confirmand, and that it was for me and their parents to accept, respect and support their decision, whatever it is.  I am here to tell you that these Confirmands have thought long and hard about the commitment they are about to make today.  They have considered our faith as it is outlined in scripture, ancient creeds, in more modern formulations as well as in our Second Church Covenant.  For some it was a more difficult decision than others, but I am pleased to say that all ten of the students who began this year’s Confirmation Class have chosen to become members of Second Church in their own right.  I hope that they will soon begin to live out their ministries by serving on boards and committees and joining in the work of our church, as some of them already have.

The religious holiday we observe today is, in its origins, an ancient Israelite agricultural festival.  It is prescribed in scripture to follow fifty days after the Passover and is an occasion to offer the first fruits in thanksgiving for the spring harvest.  Later, it became the time when Israel would celebrate the giving of Torah at Sinai.  This was the festival that the Apostles observed when they preached to crowds of pilgrims, inspired by the Holy Spirit, prepared to abandon their fear and embrace their ministry.  As Confirmation Sunday, this is something of a harvest festival for us and, in truth, an offering of first fruits.  Our Confirmands offer their willing commitment to their church as a first fruit of their growing maturity and coming adulthood.  For the rest of us, it is an offering in the sense that it is the time when we must begin to let go, and trusting in the grace of God, recognize that these young people are now our peers in the life of the Church.  It is with these ten that we share our mission and ministry, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
May 28, 2006

Search well and be wise, nor believe that self-willed pride will ever be better than good counsel.

            ―Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Prometheus Bound, 1. 1034

Scripture Lessons:
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19

Planted by Streams

For me, one of the great pleasures of living here in Newton is riding the MDC trails along the Charles River.  In a two hour ride, I can trace a loop of trail and roadway that takes me into five different cities: Newton, Watertown, Cambridge, Boston and Waltham.  In the past five years I’ve hit those trails as often as time and weather would allow.  I watch the seasons change along the river, and have become a birdwatcher along the way.  Now when I ride, I take a pair of binoculars and a Peterson’s Field Guide of North American Birds in a pack with my tool kit and spare inner tube. 

Whenever I can, I hop on the trail along Cheesecake Brook that breaks off briefly at Bridge Street and then picks up again along California Street.  The trail hugs the river on asphalt and boardwalks, passing boat ramps, soccer fields, and observation decks that are part of the designated nature walks.  Behind Watertown Square a narrow bridge crosses the river just above the falls where early New Englanders built a mill in the seventeenth century.  I like to call that particular crossing the “Monet Bridge.”  This steel and concrete structure is a lot clunkier and industrial looking than the gracefully arcing bridge we know from Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny.  It is still beautiful in its way, and when I look upstream from the observation deck at the falls, as it hovers above the water lily filled river, I am always reminded of the impressionist painter.  I am so fond of this bridge that I often route my bike rides so that I cross it a second time on the home stretch. 

I usually cross again from the same side, making my loop more of a lopsided figure eight, then head home along the Watertown side of the river.  Almost to Bridge Street, behind a car dealership, there is a bench facing a shallow bend in the river.  At the bank is an enormous, probably ancient willow, which sways high above, and at times dips the ends of its low dangling branches into the water.  When I see this tree, I almost always think of the line in Psalm 1 that describes the righteous as being “like trees planted by streams of water.”  (Psalm 1:3)  When I read Psalm 1, I almost always think of that willow in Watertown, growing along the bank of the Charles River for God-knows how long.

The tree, as symbol, is an ancient archetype that joins heaven to earth: the roots sunk deep into the earth, the branches reaching into the sky.  The tree’s fruit sustains life.  In Genesis, humanity’s relationship with God hinged on a tree, whose fruit was forbidden because eating it gave the knowledge of good and evil.  The Torah is often referred to in Hebrew as Etz Hayim, the “Tree of Life.”  Throughout Christian literature, the cross is referred to as a tree, underscoring the archetypal resonance of this central symbol of our faith.

Psalm 1 is fascinating in the way that it begins to define in the negative.  The Psalmist tells us what the a blessed person does not do:  “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers.”  (Psalm 1:1)  Mitchell Dahood’s translation in The Anchor Bible offers this English wording “…nor in the session of scoffers sat.”  I think we have all been in proximity to a scoffing session, if not indulged in one from time to time.  You know scoffers by their characteristic negativity.  Scoffers try to sound intelligent by criticizing everything they see.  They rarely have anything nice to say about anyone.  Scoffers can kill a new idea before it can breathe, yet rarely venture an original thought.  The electronic media have made scoffing into an industry, between talk radio and round-the-clock news channels.  The Psalmist knew this sort of discourse to be poison, and absence from petty scoffing is a blessing.

The Psalmist also tells us what a righteous person does: “Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate every night.”  ( Psalm 1:2)  This is a thoroughly Christian translation of the Psalm.  When the text refers to “law” it is translating a form of the Hebrew word Torah which could as easily, and perhaps more accurately be translated as “teaching.”  The Jewish Publication Society translation reads “the teaching of the Lord is his delight, and he studies that teaching day and night.”  The Hebrew word torah can be translated both ways, but the choice is rather telling.  Paul, the first of the New Testament writers, characterized our faith as being liberated from “the law,” and he had a tendency to paint Hebrew Scripture and tradition as legalistic.  The truth is that there are indeed over 600 commandments in the Torah, as well as a great deal of other material.  Given the influence of Pauline theology, it is not surprising that a Christian translator, even a learned one, would translate torah as “law,” while a Jewish translator would choose the equally accurate and probably more appropriate English word “teaching.”  Every translation is interpretation.

Teaching or law, the Psalm is speaking of scripture.  This is most likely the five books of Moses collectively known as The Torah.  And the important thing, whether we read it as the law of God or the teaching of God, is that it is preferred to the company of the wicked.  It is a better and more nourishing use of time.  To become learned in holy scripture is to ground oneself in the richest kind of soil, grow strong, and bear fruit.  When the Scottish poet Robert Burns translated the first Psalm, he wrote,

That man shall flourish like trees

Which by the streamlets grow;

The fruitful top is spread in high,

And firm the root below.

One so firmly rooted or grounded, acquires judgment that is valuable to the community.  Leaving scoffers behind, who are scattered to the wind like chaff, the righteous one stands in learned company and offers wise counsel.  As the Psalmist concluded, “…the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for [God] watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”  (Psalm 1:5-6)

Encapsulated in this six-verse Psalm is a model for a faithful community and an individual’s place in it.  By taking Scripture seriously, by engaging the content, context and meaning of our received tradition, we gain the wisdom of the ages.  No doubt we raise a few questions in the process.  God gives us to one another and we can be a blessing or a burden.  Hopefully we can get through life being more the former than the latter.  We may seek wise and edifying counsel and aspire to share wisdom with others.  Or, conversely, we can choose to be just so much noise, our bitter words scattered on the wind, heard by few, heeded only by fools, remembered by none.  By our choices and our relationships with one another, we discover our relationship with God, one way or another.

The Gospel Lesson compliments the Psalm beautifully.  It illustrates one more element that binds a faith community together and nourishes the spirit.  In this passage we find Jesus on the last night of his ministry, expecting immanent arrest and certain death.  What did he do at that moment of crisis and despair?  He prayed.  If scripture is the rich soil in which we are grounded, prayer is the stream of ever-flowing water that quenches the arid soul.  We tend to think of prayer as a matter of asking for things, but it is really more about discovering what God asks of us as well as recalling what God never stopped giving.  You’ve probably heard the story of Abraham Lincoln being asked whether he thought God was on his side.  Lincoln responded that he was more worried about whether or not he was on God’s side.  Prayer and the study of scripture are how we find our way to God’s side.

Prayer, like the study of scripture, should take place on a variety of levels.  We should pray and study alone, in small circles of friends and loved ones, and in the congregation.  This is the way that we can, together be a healthy tree.  Created in the image of God, it is our vocation, each and all, to join heaven and earth by serving God and loving one another.  With God’s word written on our hearts, a prayer on our lips and in our ears we root ourselves in solid ground even as we reach for the skies, in a world without end.  Amen. 

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
May 21, 2006

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future – and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

                                                                                 ―Albert Camus

Scripture Lessons:
Acts 10:44-48
John 15:9-17

What A Friend We Have

The other day I was having lunch with a friend of mine who said that a woman working on a book had been interviewing him about in his management style.  In preparation for the interview, she challenged him to sum up his philosophy of management to fit on a bumper sticker.  And because I have been prone to disparage what I perceive as oversimplified religious thought as “bumper sticker theology,” I was a little chagrinned to realize I could reduce my own pastoral theology to a bumper sticker: it’s all about relationships.  I have been repeating that encapsulation consistently throughout nearly eight years here at Second Church.  Not only is it a guiding principle in my vocation of ordained ministry, but I believe it is the guiding principle of the Christian faith.  It’s all about relationships.

This morning’s Gospel Lesson comes from the extended farewell address Jesus made to his disciples in John’s account of the Last Supper.  He instructed his disciples, and by extension us, to abide in his love and to love one another.  Jesus called his disciples friends.  What a friend we have in Jesus, what a relationship.  Consider Jesus’ answer in Matthew, when he was asked what was the greatest commandment.  Jesus answered with two commandments. “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’” (Matthew 22:36-40)  Jesus may in fact be consciously echoing the answer given by the great Rabbi Hillel, when he was challenged to summarize all of Torah while standing on one foot, concluding, “The rest is commentary.” 

Their conclusions were the same: all of Hebrew scripture is about relationships.  We are expected to love God with everything we have, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Implicit in the latter commandment is that we are expected to love ourselves.  If we cannot love ourselves, the love we offer God and our neighbor is not going to be worth very much.  In any case, the guiding force of the universe is love.  As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the church in Corinth, “Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.  For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.  When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became [an adult], I gave up childish ways.  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.  So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:8-13)

Last week on Youth Sunday we heard two of our young people articulate the essence of this principle eloquently.  Kirsten Holland and Ben Plotkin, from very different perspectives, both zeroed in on the idea of community as the central work of the Church.  It was what they valued most as they approached the decision of whether or not to become full members of this church at their Confirmation just  two weeks from today.  And we must understand that to be a member of the Church is not simply to affiliate with an institution that gathers in a building in a specific place.  To be a member of the Church means that we are part of a mystical Body, united with all who confess faith in Christ in all times.  This is what is meant by “the communion of the saints.”  I liked the way Ben broke down the word “community” to “common unity.” 

This sense of “common unity” is brilliantly expressed in the Pauline symbol of The Body of Christ, one body operating in various ways to one purpose.  Saint Paul wrote, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.  For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and all were made to drink of one Spirit.  For the body does not consist of one member but of many.  If all were a single organ, where would the body be?  As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.  Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 18-20, 26-27)  For Paul, “the body” was a dynamic symbol of diversity and unity.  In fact, he was quite specific about ethnic and socio-economic diversity when he spoke of “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.”

Paul’s words about the power of love and the unity in the Body of Christ were addressed to a fractious and contentious Church with a lot of problems.  In our passage from Acts this morning, we got a glimpse of one of the most heated controversies of the early Church.  You may have wondered why the author made specific mention of “circumcised believers.” (Acts 10:45)  That was because there was an intense dispute among early church leaders as to whether or not gentile converts had to be circumcised as the Torah required, or whether baptism was a sufficient rite of initiation.  This was part of the growing pains, and something of an identity crisis that the early church went through as they struggled to understand whether they were part of an existing faith tradition or something new and different.  In those days new and different were suspect while old and stable were held in higher regard.  This is why issues of dietary laws and circumcision were focal points of that debate.  The apostles held differing views.  If you read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, you will see that he made a strenuous argument that circumcision was indeed required by scripture, but that through Christ, our circumcision was metaphorical and spiritual.

Ultimately, Paul’s metaphorical interpretation won out.  I find I keep coming back to the distinction that Walter Cuenin made when he preached here on Reformation Sunday in October, when he said that the greatest division among Christians today is not Catholic and Protestant, but between Christians who read the Bible literally and those of us who read and interpret the Bible in context.  Because Paul was the earliest of the New Testament authors, and made great leaps of metaphorical interpretation, one could argue that Christians who read scripture metaphorically are most in touch with Christian fundamentals.  You could say we are the real fundamentalists.

We must take scripture seriously and this means taking the diversity of the Body of Christ seriously.  As uncomfortable as it makes me at times, we are one with both Jerry Falwell and with Al Sharpton, even if we have different visions.  It’s our religion too.  Whether one embraces the scripture as literal or as divinely-inspired visionary metaphor, what we are talking about in either case is a deep and rich tradition that embodies a coherent moral and ethical framework.   The moral framework is inherited from the Hebrew traditions of holiness and justice, as well as the prophetic skepticism of empty formalist religion. 

As Christians, we may discern our interpretive principals without much difficulty from Jesus’ teachings and the New Testament writers.  Reading the New Testament as a whole, one pieces together big-picture morality and compassionate humanism.  These principals are borne out by Jesus’ critique of the technical, ritual righteousness that ignored the weightier matters of justice.  (Matthew 23:23-24)  He used the image of one who would strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.  The moral framework of the New Testament is readily discernable without much straining, when we look to the teaching and example of Jesus.  His vision of justice included mercy, forgiveness and compassion.  Jesus forgave adulterers and debtors and insisted on healing the afflicted even on the Sabbath.

In the end as in the beginning, it is all about relationships.  We are called friends by our great teacher and we are called to love one another.  We are commanded to love God with all we’ve got and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  As the Body of Christ we are a living, breathing, dynamic body, called to joy and to service and to love in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
April 30, 2006

Children show scars like medals.  Lovers use them as secrets to reveal.  A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.                            ―Leonard Cohen

Scripture Lessons:
Psalm 4
Luke 24:36b-48

The Scars We Wear

I once wrote a poem about my favorite scar.  I got it during my college years, while I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant on lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas.  Lower Greenville is to be distinguished from upper Greenville.  Upper Greenville was more mainstream and commercial, with large glitzy restaurants and discos.  Lower Greenville tended to be more artsy and Bohemian.  It was where the funkier boutiques and nightspots were located.  One of my favorite haunts was an old honky-tonk called Stan’s Blue Note.  It was right next door to Caulfield’s, where I worked.  During the time I worked there, John Caulfield bought Stan’s.  He cut a hole in the kitchen store-room wall, so he could start serving burgers and nachos at Stan’s.  We’d cook the orders in Caulfield’s kitchen and pass them through the window in the storeroom to Butch, the bartender at Stan’s.  As far as I know, the Health Department never got wise to that arrangement.

In my two summers in Caulfield’s kitchen, I started as a prep cook, worked the line and ended up a broiler man.  One of the steps along the way is fry-cook, a dirty, sweaty, and sometimes dangerous job.  When things get busy, cooks have to work fast as possible and try to keep track of the orders coming through your station.   The 350 degree oil (cottonseed oil, in this particular Texas eatery) does not always stay in the fryer.  Grease burns are an unavoidable hazard for the fry-cook.  One day as I was serving up a plate of curly fries, some hot oil from the fry-o-later basket landed on the back of my left hand.  I did not drop the fries.

After the blisters healed, I was left with a burgundy colored scar on the back of my hand.  It was shaped vaguely like a saxophone, and there was something about its curves that reminded me of Arabic calligraphy.  It looked like an exotic branding.  It looked strangely intentional, though it could not have been more random.  Someone at a party that summer said it looked like I was in some secret society.  As was my tendency in those years, I wrote a poem about it.  Playing on the hot grease that caused the mark, I called the grease burn my “Greek Tattoo.”  Unlike a real tattoo, the scar eventually healed and there is no longer any trace of it on the back of my hand.

Scars are an inevitability of human existence.  Scars are the way life writes stories into our very flesh.  I think part of us would like to think of scars as permanent, but flesh is hardly archival.  We began Lent with ashes on our heads and the words, “Remember mortal, dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  Now we are in the season of Easter, when we celebrate and contemplate resurrection, renewal, eternal life and that which transcends death.  Luke’s account of the resurrected Christ appearing to the disciples is not ethereal but shockingly physical. 

Luke’s resurrection account could be called an anti-Ghost story.  Jesus made it very clear that he was not a ghost.  He was with them, in living flesh and blood.  As if to underscore the point, he asked for something to eat.  They gave him a piece of broiled fish and you can just imagine how carefully they watched as he ate.  Christ who was dead was alive with them again.  He demonstrated this by showing them his wounds.  He said to them, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.”  What I find really fascinating about this interaction is the way Jesus referenced his wounds in this passage.  First Christ used his wounds to identify himself to his disciples.  By drawing their attention to his hands and feet, he showed them that the man in the room with them was the same man who had been arrested, nailed to a cross and buried in a tomb.  The marks of that experience endured in his flesh.

Though the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet identified him and bore enduring witness to his suffering, neither the Risen Christ nor the author of Luke fixated on the wounds themselves.  In a twelve verse passage, there are just two quick references to these wounds.  Christ was more interested in getting on with life with the friends he shared a mission.  They resumed their conversation regarding their received Jewish tradition and continued the interpretive engagement that would ultimately bear fruit in the emergence a new and different religion.  The lesson in this passage is that life does not triumph over death just so we can lick our wounds.

Just as scars are an inevitability of human existence, there is something very human about our tendency to relish our wounds.  Perhaps we don’t all take it to the extreme of writing poems about grease burns, but there is something natural about the way we identify ourselves with our identifying marks.  I am not just talking about physical scars, either.  In the therapeutic culture in which we live there has evolved a tendency to savor our pain.  It sometimes seems to me that diagnosis is an end in itself, rather than a step to healing.  Think about how often you hear family dysfunction come up in conversation.  Of course NO family is perfect.  All our families have their quirks and inflict various scars on their members throughout the rough and tumble of daily existence.  But perhaps we should focus more on the fact that families actually do function despite the various pressures of modern existence.

But by saying that I think we have a tendency to fixate on our personal misery, physical or emotional, I do not mean to just say “get over it.”  Suffering is real.  Pain is real.  We have to identify our afflictions before we can be healed.  Healing can be dramatic and it can be subtle.  Healing is not always what we would have it be.  Many of you have or are currently engaged in heroic struggles against pain, illness and death in big and small ways.  I stand in awe of your courage.  Confronting suffering is at the heart of the Gospel.  How often do we find Jesus in the midst of the poor, the crippled, the sick, the despised and afflicted?  How many of the stories in the Gospels are devoted to healing and casting out demons?  When Jesus commissioned his disciples, healing and exorcism were explicit elements of their ministries.  At the center of the Gospel is healing, the journey from brokenness to wholeness, the triumph of life over death.

In a song called It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding, Bob Dylan sang that anyone “…not busy being born is busy dying.”  It makes me think of Pedro Zamora, an AIDS education activist who died of the disease in his twenties.  His struggle was made famous in the 1990s by MTV’s Real World and the graphic novel Pedro and Me by Judd Winick.    In one episode of the show, as he spoke to a classroom full of high school students about the realities of AIDS prevention, he disclosed that he was living with the disease.  He made it very clear that he was not dying of AIDS, but that even though his time was likely to be short, it was his intention to live until he died.  Pedro Zamora spent the remainder of his short life teaching young people how to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.

To live until we die and be a force for healing is our sacred mission. We are all broken in our ways, and yet we are all created in the image of our creator.  Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Human being is a disclosure of the divine.  The grandeur of human being is revealed in the power of being human.”  At the essence of our being human is the urge to create and the imperative to heal a broken and beautiful world created for goodness.  We can be healers at a number of levels, first of all by living the healthiest lives of which we are capable.  To do this we must be at peace with ourselves, our God, our families, our church and our community, in harmony with the battered and beautiful planet that is the only home we will know in this life.  Notice that when the Risen Christ appeared to his disciples in the Gospel lesson, he bade them peace.  This was almost certainly expressed as “Shalom.”  Shalom is most frequently translated at “peace” but it also means “wholeness.”  The Risen One, the healer with wounded hands and feet returned to call us to peace and wholeness, in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 26, 2006

Judaism and Christianity are polished gems of thought that have been crafted by rabbis and philosophers, clerics and theologians for centuries.  But for all the devout industry of these divines and the alpine pile of tractates and treatises produced as guides to the perplexed, a single disquieting truth endures: The God of the Bible is a moving target and remains impossible to pin down. 

                                                 ―T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley

Scripture Lessons:
Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21

Looking and Believing

For the past three months, the Newton Clergy Association has been engaged in an interfaith study of problematic passages from the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  All of these dealt with “the other,” meaning those outside the faith community to whom the texts were directed.  At our January, February, and March meetings, a different scholar came to read passages from the New Testament, the Quran, and Torah with us.  Reading our sacred texts in the company of people of other faiths, especially disparaging texts that spoke about people outside our own faith communities, pressed us to listen with the ears of another. 

I actually had that kind of uncomfortable listening experience last week in worship as I listened to the Scripture Lesson.  The Hebrew Bible reading was taken from Exodus, in which Moses received the Ten Commandments on Sinai.  What’s wrong with that?  Those are ancient legal norms that are rooted in the core of our biblical tradition.  Besides, we are a church not a courthouse, what’s wrong with reading them in worship?  Nothing.  In fact I had a great time during the Children’s Sermon remembering all ten of the commandments with the children and with the help of the choir and congregation.  Together we got all ten.  Right now, I’ll stick my neck out and go on record as being in favor of all Ten Commandments.

My discomfort did not come from the moral absolutes of the commandments, but from one particular verse in the passage that was read in worship.  “…I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me.”  (Exodus 20:5b)  That is a verse I have always wrestled with.  It hit me particularly hard hearing it just after our children had left the sanctuary.  I wondered how they would have heard it.  And yet, there is a difficult truth embedded in that hard nugget of scripture.  The sad truth is that, even with the very best intentions, we all do things that will make life difficult for our children. 

Some family dysfunctions are so pathological that they resonate across the generations; and three to four generations constitute living family memory.  I know that the manner in which my grandparents converted from Judaism and the anti-Semitism they internalized created significant emotional trauma for my then-teenage mother that was a contributing factor in her suicide nearly fifty years later.  That chain reaction certainly continues to resonate in my life, my siblings’ and the lives of our children.   It behooves us to struggle with those difficult fire-and-brimstone passages, because we discover existential and eternal wisdom when we keep faith with our received tradition.  But keeping faith does not mean throwing our critical faculties out the window.

Viewing scripture in the light of history and context does not diminish the power of scripture, it enriches it.  Our Hebrew Bible passage today is a strange one which echoes through other places in Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.  Today’s Gospel Lesson makes reference to it.  The passage in Numbers opens with a familiar theme.  As the Israelites were moving from one location to another in the wilderness, they began complaining about Moses and God.  “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”  (Numbers 21:5)  This is like the old joke about two people in a restaurant complaining about the food.  One says the food is terrible, and the other responds, “Yes, and such small portions.”

In this particular case, God had heard enough complaining.  To punish the people for their complaining, God sent in poisonous snakes to bite the people.  Some of the people died.  The people saw the error of their ways and went to Moses, saying, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” (Numbers 21:7)  God’s answer to Moses’ prayer was to instruct him to “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” (Numbers 21:8)  Faithfully, Moses made a serpent out of bronze, placed it on a pole and it did the trick.  Whenever someone was bitten by a poisonous snake, they would look at the bronze serpent and live.

This is a strange story on a lot of levels.  First of all, as we read last week, God forbids the worship graven images.  In this week’s lesson, Moses was instructed by God to make one.  Beyond that, the bronze snake functions as a magical object, which seems somewhat out of place in the Bible.  King Hezekiah, whom scripture remembers as a righteous reformer, felt that Moses’ bronze snake was out of place, too.  He smashed it and removed it from the Temple because it had become an object of worship.  In 2 Kings we learn that Hezzekiah, “…broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people made offerings to it.” (2 Kings 18:4)

In light of the snakes’ destruction, we might wonder why Jesus would evoke the object in reference to his own mission.  Jesus said, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)  Perhaps because of Jesus’ use of that image, early Church Father Justin Martyr looked on that bronze snake and saw a cross.  He wrote, “…God through Moses announced a mystery by which he proclaimed that he would break the power of the serpent, who prompted the sin of Adam.  He promised that he would deliver from the bites of the serpent (that is, evil actions, idolatries and other sins) all those who believe in him who was put to death by this sign, namely, the cross.”   Similarly, rabbinic commentators have looked beyond the apparent inconsistencies of a graven image serving as a magical object and discovered a more edifying lesson.  They found that in setting the bronze serpent on a pole, Moses drew his panicked community’s attention upward, to the heavens and God, on whom they could rely. 

This is significant for us and for our own religious life and practice.  Within scripture and subsequent interpretive traditions, we have seen a problematic passage in scripture both discredited and redeemed.  Just as a deeper understanding of the bronze serpent can be teased out of the original story, there is also a deeper lesson to the story of Hezekiah destroying that same bronze serpent.  Why did he destroy it?  Even though God commanded its construction, Hezekiah smashed the bronze serpent to pieces because the people were worshipping it.  The object intended to heal the people and draw their attention back to the one true and living God had become an object of idolatry.  I think that is a lesson for us in relation to the way we read scripture.  Taking the words of scripture literally and without breaking the surface, takes our attention away from the God they are meant to teach us about.

Looking at the bronze serpent was not what saved the snake-bit Israelites, it was looking up at the serpent (a construct) and remembering that the God who brought them out of Egypt was still with them.  It is in looking with eyes of belief that scripture lives with us and in us.  When we come to the page with the belief, there is more than what we see on the surface that we learn the most.  Sometimes that can mean looking, arguing and wrestling with what we find there.  Remember, Jacob received a blessing because he wrestled with an angel. We must also open ourselves to letting scripture read us critically as well.  But when we look hard at scripture with our minds and hearts engaged, we find the way to abundant life.  When we look into the Bible with the eyes of faith, we can discover a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 12, 2006

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs.  [One] who can pronounce my name aright, …can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.      ―Henry David Thoreau

Scripture Lessons:
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Mark 8:31-38

The Power of Names

You have likely witnessed or experienced the harrowing discernment process of choosing a name for a baby not yet born.  It may have involved books of names. Perhaps it meant weighing which ancestor or relative the child might be named after.  The decision probably involved thoughts of what the child’s peers would make of the name.  Jane said that before Max was born, she and Akira wanted to find a name without “l’s” or “r’s” in it, because those letters would make it difficult for his Japanese relatives to say.  One should have a name one’s family can pronounce. 

I was somewhat unilateral in choosing Oscar’s name, though Jane did sign off on it.  I decided on it long before Jane and I ever even dated.  Initially she was not too sure about it.  Perhaps she mostly associated the name with grouches, wieners, or the “odd couple.”  Then I started talking about how much I like the name Roscoe. Jane warmed up to the name Oscar pretty quickly after that.  I did not choose Oscar simply for the novelty value.  I didn’t just pick the name off a can of sardines.  It was my grandfather’s name, Carl Oscar Malmberg.  He was an old Swedish farmer from Minnesota, who built the house my father was born in.  I never really know him.  He died when I was five.  I remember him being a quiet old guy. 

But, the summer I turned thirty, I went to a family reunion in Minnesota.  My old Swedish farm cousins told stories about my grandfather, who was something of a wild man in his younger days.  They said things, “O, Oscar had a 1913 Excelsior motorcycle.  That thing’d been worth a fortune now.  He used to give me rides on the handlebars.  Remember when Oscar drove his motorcycle into the shed that time?”  I think it was a combination of the way those old cousins said my grandfather’s name and the revelatory nature of the stories they told, that I decided that weekend in 1991, if I ever had a son, I wanted to name him Oscar. Oscar, by the way, means “spear of God,” somehow apropos of both my son and my grandfather.

Throughout the Bible there are various names for God.  In the Hebrew Bible there are several.  There is El Shaddai (שדי אל), which is often translated as “God Almighty,” but is more accurately translated as “God, the one of the mountains.”  Elohim is interesting, because it is a monotheist name for God, in a plural form.  Some suppose that this means it implies the heavenly host.  Shekinah ( שכינה ) is a name for God’s Spirit  and means “that which dwells.”  The fascinating thing about that name is that Shekinah is feminine.  The Hebrew name for God with which you may be most familiar is Adonai (אדני), which simply means “Lord.” 

Far and away, the most sacred name for God appears in the Hebrew Bible as four letters, יהוה , generally transliterated into English as YHWH.  These are all consonants, because Hebrew has no vowels.  Subsequently, we cannot know precisely how this name is pronounced, which is as it should be.  Frequently rendered as Jehovah, that is not even close.  Because this is the most sacred name of God, it should not be spoken.  In the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, this name was uttered only once a year by the high priest in the holy of holies on behalf of all Israel on the Day of Atonement. 

A devout Jew will not say this sacred name of God, even when reading Torah in worship.  Generally, Adonai is substituted when the name of God appears in the text.  If in a context of study or conversation, many religious Jews will only speak of God using the term Hashem, (השם) which literally means “the name.”  This reverence for the name of God is even reflected in Christian Bibles in their modern English translation.  If you look to the Hebrew Scriptures in our pew Bibles, you will find places where “LORD” is written entirely in capital letters in various places.  This indicates where, in the original Hebrew text, God’s sacred name appeared.

Names of human figures in the Bible often tell us things about them, and what role they play in the narrative.  The book of Ruth is the story of a woman, Naomi, and her relationship to her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth.  Most of the story takes place after Naomi’s husband and two sons died suddenly.  The sons’ names were Mahlon and Chilion.  Mahlon comes from the name of a disease and Chilion means “to perish.”  Small wonder the two sons don’t even make it past the fifth verse.  These are not the names of major players.

A change of name can signal a significant occurrence.  Such is the case in this morning’s lesson from Genesis.   Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah as an expression of God’s covenant with them and their descendants.  It is unclear what the original meaning of Sarai was, but Sarah means “princess.”  At the root of Abram’s name is the Hebrew word for father, av (אב).  Abram means, “exalted father,” which is interesting, because he does not have any children.  As a sign of the covenant, God changed his name to Abraham, meaning “father of many.”  Suddenly, Abraham had a new name, but still no children. What he did have was a promise from God.

As we fast-forward across the centuries, we know that Abraham became the father of Ishmael and Isaac.  The Israelites are the descendents of Isaac, and the Arabs are said to be the descendants of Ishmael.  Abraham is not simply the father of many generations of his family, but Abraham is also the father of many faiths.  We meet Abraham in the first book of Torah, but he is also named in the New Testament and the Quran.  In Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man, it was Abraham who embraced Lazarus in the world to come.  In Islamic tradition, it is believed that Abraham constructed the Ka’ba, the enormous stone cube that is the focal point of the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. 

Jews, Christians and Muslims owe our faiths to the faith of Abraham.  It is appropriate that all three of our faiths are collectively referred to as Abrahamic religions.  In Abraham, our three faiths share a common ancestor.  The enmities between our faiths at various periods of history are perhaps not unlike sibling rivalry.  What is interesting, though, is that similar tensions within each of these faiths are mirrored in the others.  When Father Ceunin was here in October, he pointed out that the greatest division within Christianity was not between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but between those of us who read the Bible literally and those of us who read it in context.  As people who read the Bible in context, we must consider the criticism of the literalists: that we don’t take the text seriously, if we read it at all.  That said, we have a responsibility to know and study scripture so we can bear witness to the fact that literalism is the shallowest level of interpretation, and in fact obscures layers of understanding and depth of meaning.  I believe the same is true among Jews and Muslims, and their relationships to their sacred texts and their co-religionists.

You may have come across an article in yesterday’s New York Times about Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born physician, now an American citizen.  She has been catapulted into prominence since she appeared on al-Jazeera in a debate with an Imam.  She was highly critical of the violence practiced by some Muslims.  On al-Jazeera and in Arabic, Dr. Sultan said, “The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations… It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras.  It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the 21^st century.  It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.” 

In the wake of almost daily Jihadist terrorism, it is heartening to hear such a critique from an Arab.  Even as we agree with Dr. Sultan’s words, we must remind ourselves that no religion is immune to fanaticism and violence.  A Jewish fanatic assassinated Yitzak Rabin, and Christian fanatics have bombed abortion clinics and murdered doctors in this country.  These are the sorts of things that drive reasonable people to reject religion altogether.  Sadly, Dr. Sultan no longer considers herself a Muslim.  Though raised a devout Muslim in Syria, she left her religion behind after seeing her university professor murdered in a classroom by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who shouted “God is great!” as they pumped his body full of bullets.

Is it possible to have a fervent faith without becoming a fanatic?  Can we be open to the transforming power of God without becoming something we despise?  On the other hand, can we have a reasonable and rational faith that is not doomed to lukewarm, cerebral indolence.  Look at Martin Luther King Jr.,  Ghandi, William Penn or Abraham Joshua Heschel and you tell me.  We must not be afraid of the power of faith just because human beings have a tendency to abuse power.  As people of faith, we must embrace other people of faith and search for what we have in common, like our reliance in a just and compassionate God, like the planet we share, like our common humanity.

In the Gospel Lesson this morning, Jesus taught his disciples not to pick up a sword and fight, but to take up a cross and follow him.  We are called to absorb suffering, not inflict it.  We call ourselves Christians, because we are supposed to follow the teachings and example of Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ name is actually derived from the Hebrew name יהושוה, or Joshua.  It means “savior”.  Jesus’ taught us to strive for a particular name, when he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God,” in a world without end.  Amen.

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The Second Church in Newton
West Newton, MA
The Rev. Richard E. Malmberg
March 5, 2006

Noah, how long can you tread water?

                                                                                  ―Bill Cosby

Scripture Lessons:
Genesis 9:8-17
Mark 1:9-15

Flood and Fast

As people on the Gulf Coast continue to struggle to recover from the floods brought on by hurricanes Katrina then Rita, our Hebrew Bible reading for this first Sunday in Lent has special poignancy.  Mardi Gras arrived six months after Katrina hammered New Orleans, so we were again treated to gut-wrenching video images of floodwaters coursing through city streets and survivors waiting to be rescued from their rooftops.  Along with images of homes reduced to splinters along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, we can glimpse the colossal violence at the center of the Noah story.   

When Oscar was a baby, we hung in his room a colorful SERRV wall plaque from El Salvador depicting Noah on the ark with animals on board and a rainbow overhead.  When I was a kid, I saw an animated version of the story, with Mr. McGoo as Noah.  It is much easier to focus on the image of a little floating zoo, and forget that the boat represents the only survivors of a planetary environmental crisis brought about by God’s wrath.  We seem to have a tendency to try to reduce what is utterly untamable to a children’s story.

I have heard some suggest Noah was the first environmentalist, on a mission from God, to preserve biodiversity from the deluge.  That is an interesting and valuable interpretation.  We do need to sit up and take notice of a biblical example of humanity in service of the created natural order.  There is a strong element of environmental stewardship here.  However as we celebrate Noah as an environmentalist, we must not ignore the violence of the creator, or Noah’s apparent indifference to the rest of humanity.  To understand the meaning of the flood narrative, we have to look hard at the violence that operates throughout the story.

This morning’s reading from Genesis comes at the end of the flood narrative.  The ark has landed and its inhabitants are on dry land.  God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign of covenant between the Creator and “all flesh.”  This is the happy ending.  God promised never again to destroy the earth by flood.  God turned from the violence he had just inflicted upon the earth.  Further, God prohibited violence to the remnant of humanity.  In the earliest verses of the chapter, God gave to humans all the plants and animals for sustenance, yet admonished humanity not to consume the blood of the animals we eat, saying, “…you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”  (Genesis 9:4)  While an animal may be eaten, we are reminded that all life is sacred.  Further, God prohibited the killing of human beings, because in God’s “…own image God made humankind.”  (Genesis 9:6)  In fact, the Bible tells us it was humanity’s violence that provoked the flood:  “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”  (