Sin: A Public And Private Affair!
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As recent headlines about scandalous conduct have reminded us, sin is a constant in human endeavors. By its very nature, sin enslaves us -- even in places where we take morally upstanding behavior for granted. There have been numerous stories in the news about the Los Angeles Diocese's multi-million dollar settlement of priest sexual-abuse cases as well as the release of a prominent Washington D.C. madam's address book -- leading to the revelation that yet another member of Congress has patronized prostitutes. In this installment of The Immediate Word, team member Paul Bresnahan points out that an "unholy trinity" of money, sex, and power captivates our culture. Yet the only one we Christians are meant to be captive to is Christ. As this week's epistle text puts it: "See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8). Money, sex, and power are indeed powerful compulsions -- but the ancient Christian disciplines of poverty, chastity, and obedience offer potent antidotes. Team member Steve McCutchan offers an additional perspective, reflecting on the media's penchant for exploiting each new story of public sin by playing on our sense of outrage and betrayal. This can breed cynical attitudes about our public figures -- particularly when it touches the church -- yet since we're all sinners, we ought not to be all that surprised. Yes, we need to continue to resist sin, but it is the power of God's grace and forgiveness that gives us the strength to do so.
Sin: A Public and Private Affair!
by Paul Bresnahan
Colossians 2:6-15
Not many years after Cardinal Bernard Law made a settlement with abused victims in the Archdiocese of Boston, the scandal of pedophilia struck the Church again, this time in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Only last week Cardinal Roger Mahoney settled with over 500 victims of abuse to the tune of $660 million. That is a whole lot of abuse! That is one whale of a lot of sin from a source we just don't expect it to come from.
Not to be outdone, in the same week we have a strident "pro-family" senator, David Vitter from Louisiana, who appears to have been a regular customer of a D.C. madam's services. He and his wife provided us again with the spectacle of a public act of contrition. And even though Vitter had previously insisted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton for his indiscretions, he feels it is entirely appropriate that he return to his duties in the Senate.
Sin strikes again. And we can point our fingers at either the indiscretion of people in public trust who should know better, or the hypocrisy of the so-called "righteous" people who we thought were above this sort of thing. But alas, sin strikes us all -- and our slavery to sin is unrelenting. It never goes away, and temptation is always staring us in the face.
Sin's great public and private engines churn on: Sex, Money, and Power. They are engines with all the power of sin, and they drive our culture toward its mindless ends. We shudder to think where it will end. And thus our Sacred Writings remind us this week: "See to it that no one takes you captive according to the elemental spirits of the universe."
Let's consider how to face the constant and relentless bombardment of these temptations, and see if we can find a way to regain our faith and find the way to freedom!
THE WORLD
Not only are we faced with the social evil of war, terror, poverty, environmental degradation, and the disparity of the "haves" and "have-nots" at all levels of the social order, we also see an endless list of indiscretions on a more personal level from folks we thought we could trust, like our clergy and our politicians. I'm sure there are those cynical voices out there pointing to the fact that they never trusted politicians in the first place, and many others who point to a long history of immorality among church leaders.
This is clearly a sinful world. All we have to do is open up the morning newspaper or flip the dial to CNN or Fox News to see just how much sin there is. The sorry catalogue of human cruelty and immorality is just chock-full of examples of sin.
This is not altogether new to our time. Kierkegaard was fond of quoting both Shakespeare and the Bible -- there was so much sin in both... and so much redemption. It seems to be inherent in human nature that we are capable of greatness and depravity at the same time. And so we are slaves to sin, and yet we seek our freedom in Christ.
So much of the world we live in would prefer not to think in terms of sin. It has become an unpopular word. Still, no less a light than the world-renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a rather well-read book in 1973 -- Whatever Became of Sin? -- in which he muses that some sense of personal responsibility may after all be healthy in a society going a bit off toward the end of the self-indulgent scales.
We are a violent land. We are at war. We are on the edge of terror. And still corporate leaders steal vast sums, clergy misconduct is seemingly pervasive, and political corruption and hypocrisy are just too obvious for us to tolerate.
THE WORD
When Amos took a hard look at his Israel's experience, he saw much that was wrong. But the greatest problem he saw was that the state abandoned God and turned to other avenues of worship and praise. There were all the idols of the time, but the greatest and most dangerous idol was that of oppression. If you renounce God, you do so at your own risk -- and the primary risk is God's renunciation of us in return. That is a loss I would prefer not to contemplate. It is interesting that the social evil of oppression of the poor is often identified in the prophetic tradition as a personal "lifestyle" sin, akin to whoredom. It is not a pleasant image, but the prophets had a penchant for calling it as they saw it.
Paul's appeal is for us to live in Christ. Insofar as we have received Christ with joy, so too we want to be rooted, established, and growing in him. Paul reminds us that we were buried with Jesus in a death like his in order that we be raised again in a life like his. Paul's approach is active and not passive. If we become an active participant in the process of redemption, we will find freedom from sin's allure.
Or will we? Remember that Paul too had a "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7). He prayed for it to go away, but it "humbled" him throughout his life and remained with him throughout his ministry. Sin still has its power, and the "evil one" still has some sway in the affairs of human experience.
This week's Gospel provides us with an alternate rendering for the Lord's Prayer. Luke's offering differs in some striking ways from the Matthean version (Matthew 6:9). In the Lucan version we have a reassurance following the prayer that if we seek, we will find; if we knock, the door will be opened; and if we ask, we shall receive. In Matthew's version, by contrast, we are warned not to make a show of our religion as the hypocrites do. Both reassurance and admonition are helpful in living in Christ. As we work out the details of our salvation, we are repeatedly challenged by scripture to be an active participant. There are so many verbs: "ask," "knock," "give," "forgive." In fact, the entire Bible is said by linguists to be dominated by verbs, unlike a consumer society with its love of things and nouns.
The most striking contrast to me is the "time of trial" petition. The Old English rendering for that is "lead us not into temptation." As much as we may want to cling to the old translation for familiarity's sake, it is just not correct. The Greek refers to a time of testing. The International Consultation on English Texts (an ecumenical body that provides a "universal" translation for common texts to use in public worship) gives us the translation "save us from the time of trial." This new translation never "took off" -- and it's no wonder why. We're always being tested, aren't we? I'd rather the translators gave us one slightly different word: "save us in the time of trial." That would have been a daily prayer I could us right about now.
We are in a daily struggle against the "powers and principalities, the rulers of the present darkness" as Paul has aptly put it. We need to know how deadly serious this struggle is. So it appears did Jesus, when he gave us his prayer.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
When Karl Menninger left teaching at Harvard Medical School, he returned to his native Topeka, Kansas, to found the Menninger Foundation. Together with his father he provided us with a life's work of brilliant psychiatric insight and clinical effectiveness. One of Menninger's goals was to collaborate with the pastoral skill of the clergy in returning the nation to its moral compass. By training a generation of competent and professional pastors, it was his hope that we would indeed make a real dent in the unfortunate turn to permissiveness that had so pervasively invaded American culture.
Instead of checking the growth of sin, its hold on the social order seemed only to tighten. One of the great contributions of his life was the book Whatever Became of Sin?, which he wrote near the end of his career in 1973. He was hoping to kindle the flame of passion once again among the clergy for guiding us back to a sense of the moral agency and responsibility of the self.
In every society, in every age, the engines of sin will churn on. We will always "seek our own will instead of the will of God." That is a working definition for sin that I tend to use, which comes from the catechism in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer.
There is an amazing power to sin: sex, money, and power are the great powerful engines that drive our society. Philip Turner, writer and dean of Berkeley Divinity School, noted that when he wrote Sex, Money, and Power he really preferred to have called his book by the ancient opposites that represented the greatest virtues of the monastic tradition: poverty, chastity, and obedience. He finally decided that the book would sell better with the glitzier title, and that would allow him to lead readers to reconsider the ancient virtues.
It is interesting to note that there is nothing inherently wrong with sex, money, or power. Neither is there anything intrinsically righteous about poverty, chastity, or obedience. It is rather the stewardship of those realities that determines who we are as human beings. And it is in the management of those realities that Grace is to be found.
In a helpful review of Menninger's book, Albert Outler, a professor at Perkins School of Theology, hoped Menninger could also write sequels to his book on sin, namely Whatever Became of Guilt? and Whatever Became of Grace? It is refreshing to see great psychiatry ally itself with good theology. And I believe that Paul was onto something when he noted that what puts our sins to death is the act of Christ "nailing it to the cross." Thus the power of Christ paying the price for our sin sets us free to be his, and thereby gives us abundant life unlike anything we had imagined.
We need to take responsibility for ourselves. The clergy in my denomination are required to undergo independent background checks every time we move from one church to another. That has cleaned house for our denomination very effectively. We will also discover a new freedom in life by taking ethical responsibility for ourselves. But that is not something we achieve merely through background checks. Grace wells up within us as we embrace the living Christ in our lives. As we honestly seek to serve Jesus, we find our whole lives transformed. It is by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus that we will be changed from Grace to Grace, and the bountiful power of God will make us more fully children of God as we live our lives into Jesus.
That is a very active and exhilarating prospect. An inactive faith cannot do what an active one can do. And yet an active faith will not achieve salvation for us. Salvation will always be the free gift of God, and through it we will find freedom!
One wonders about some clergy, some senators, and some captains of industry. There will always be sin, but there will always be salvation -- and the choice between the two will always be ours to make.
ANOTHER VIEW
by Stephen McCutchan
Have you ever noticed how much delight the media takes in discovering that someone or some institution has feet of clay? This is especially true if the person or institution has been speaking about morals in our society. A clear example has been the response to the revelation that Senator Vitter, who has made family morality a centerpiece of his campaign, had himself used the services of a prostitute. And this week there was also news that the head of the Christian Action League in North Carolina has been caught using the services of a prostitute. With respect to institutions, the financial settlement of the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles because of the sexual sins of some of their priests has also made national news. Similar reports in other denominations like the Southern Baptists and Presbyterians received less notice only because they have been overshadowed by the larger settlements within the Catholic Church.
Such failings have created a great deal of cynicism about the church and served to rationalize many people's refusal to participate in a church. Yet such an attitude rests more on a secular understanding of the church than it does on a Christian understanding of the church. Christians should not be surprised by either the sinfulness of politicians or the sinfulness of the church. We do not address the issue of sin in the world from a position of purity. Rather, we address it from a position of recognizing in our own lives the power of sin. This is not to justify the failings of the church but simply to affirm that even when sin gets the best of us as individuals or institutions, God is not defeated. God's redemptive power is most fully present when we, by our own strength, have failed to resist the power of sin. As Paul reported God saying in 2 Corinthians 12:9: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
In last week's lesson from Colossians 1:15-28, we heard that Christ is head of the church. The cynic might say that, given the state of the church, he is not doing a very good job. This week's lesson makes an even bolder claim that Christ is head of every ruler and authority. Unless we are to dismiss such statements as overinflated rhetoric, we need to re-examine what it means to say Christ is the head.
First, Paul is asserting that faith in Christ is not one among several competing philosophies and human traditions, but the very core of reality in the universe. Circumcision was the physical act by which the Jewish people were marked as belonging to God. Paul asserts that there was a spiritual circumcision through baptism by which God claimed all peoples. Physical circumcision was restricted to males who practiced the Law of Moses. This spiritual circumcision through baptism erased the barrier between males and females and that between Jews and Gentiles. Through Christ the sovereignty of God is expressed in overcoming the divisions of humanity.
While this universal dimension to God's purpose had been glimpsed in the words of various figures in the Hebrew Scriptures, it was now made abundantly clear in the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus had challenged many of the accepted traditions of Israel in his ministry. He seemed to have violated the Sabbath, eaten meals with tax collectors and sinners, presumed to speak for God in offering forgiveness of sins, and been found lacking by many of the religious leaders of the day.
Therefore, by all that the best thinkers in Israel believed to be sacred, Jesus died a sinner rejected by God. Jesus, who proclaimed the steadfast love and grace of God, was seen by the law to be a sinner. Yet his resurrection revealed God's affirmation of Jesus. God allowed this law that condemned Jesus to be nailed to the cross (2:14) and erased the record against him through the resurrection. The Roman rulers and the religious authorities had exercised their power against Jesus in a public execution. Jesus "made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it."
Because the cross has become such an important symbol of our salvation, we sometimes forget that originally the cross was not meant as a symbol of something good. To kill God's son on the cross was the world's response to the gracious love of God. God sent his very best, and the world, through the Romans, killed him in the most cruel way possible. From a religious point of view, it had become an accepted understanding of the law, as expressed in Deuteronomy 21:22-23, that "anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse." It was out of that which both religion and the secular world counted as sin that God drew the redemption of the world.
Churches and individuals should not sin. However, as Christians we should not be surprised when they do. The church is made up of forgiven sinners -- but as Augustine once said, "grace doesn't change nature." To be forgiven of your sin does not mean that you are no longer a sinner. It simply means that you are a forgiven sinner. The process of sanctification suggests that as forgiven sinners we are to strive to exercise our spiritual muscles and grow in our capacity to resist sin. However, when we fall we need not be paralyzed by despair, because we know that God is not defeated by sin. We can therefore look for God's redemptive power and joyfully respond in the grace of God.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Many people wonder about the word choice in different versions of the Lord's Prayer. One version, favored by Roman Catholics and Anglicans, uses the phrase "forgive us our trespasses." To the modern ear, "trespass" seems an odd word to use. Another version, favored by Protestants of the Reformed tradition, says "forgive us our debts," another odd choice to the modern ear. Many modern translations simply use the word "sin" instead. Why the difference? It has to do with translation.
Matthew, writing in Greek, uses the word opheilemata, which has a literal meaning of financial debt, but which also has a metaphorical sense of spiritual obligation. This sense of debt meaning spiritual obligation is also present in Aramaic writings of the period, and Jesus, who spoke and taught in Aramaic, uses this metaphor in various parables. Luke, however, has a different version of the prayer in which he uses the Greek hamartia, a word that quite literally means sin.
When it came to producing an English Bible, translators had to choose which English word to use.
Wyclif (1384) and the translators of the King James Version (1611) chose to use "debt" to translate Matthew's opheilemata. Debt dates to c. 1300 and is from the Old French dete or dette. The letter B was artificially inserted into the spelling in the 16th century to parallel the ultimate Latin root, debita.
This preserved the original Aramaic metaphor, but had the problem of the fact that debt did not have a sense of sin or violation in English. And such a sense of the word has never really developed in English. Use of debt to mean sin is pretty much limited to the translation of this particular verse.
William Tyndale, on the other hand, chose the word "trespass" for his translation (1525). This word did have a sense of sin in English, although it did not preserve the original metaphor. Trespass is from the Old French trespas, literally meaning passage, but also having the sense of offense against the law. In English the word dates to c. 1290, and the original sense is the general one of a violation of law or a sin. The more usual modern sense, unlawful entry onto real property, doesn't appear until c. 1455.
Many modern translators prefer the straightforward "sin." In English, this is the oldest of the three words, from the Old English syn and dating to c. 825. It has cognates in other Germanic languages and it may be related to the Latin sons, meaning guilty.
There is a belief that sin derives from some archery term meaning to miss the target. This tale stems from confusion and misunderstanding of preachers giving Sunday sermons. The English word "sin" has no such etymology. The Greek hamartia, however, can literally mean to fall short or miss, especially in the archery context. Preachers sometimes use this Greek etymology as a sermon illustration, and people confuse it with the etymology of the English word. The sermon illustration, however, is somewhat flawed. By the time of Christ the archery sense of hamartia was obsolete, so the sermon illustration is anachronistic. To Christ and his contemporaries, it would simply mean a violation of God's law.
-- David Wilton, www.wordorigins.org
***
Max Lucado tells the story of a ship called the Pelicano. In 1986, it was the world's most unwanted ship.
The Pelicano wandered the seas, but could find no port to admit her. There was nothing wrong with the ship, although it was a bit old and rusty. Nor was there a problem with its legal paperwork, or with its crew.
The problem was the Pelicano's cargo. It was trash: 15,000 tons of it. The trash came from a Philadelphia sanitation workers' strike in 1986. A contractor purchased the stuff, loaded it on the ship, and figured he could find a place to dump it. It was a poor decision. There were no takers. The Pelicano was left to wander the high seas like the legendary Flying Dutchman.
Sin, says Lucado, is like that. Sometimes we have this garbage we've picked up somewhere, and we have no place to dump it. So we just cruise around aimlessly. Lucado concludes:
"We can live with the garbage of our past or we can choose to dump it at the foot of the cross and start anew. Jesus likened himself to a physician. He came not for the healthy but for the sick, for those sick of the garbage of their past, for those ready to experience the health of forgiveness and live garbage-free."
***
Sister Joan Chittister (a Benedictine nun) points out in one of her many books that one of the worst mistakes we can make in the Christian life is to assume that we will not sin -- that moral perfection is possible for us:
"The problem, of course, is that we fail. We know ourselves to be weak. We stumble along, being less than we can be, never living up to our own standards, let alone anyone else's. We eat too much between meals, we work too little to get ahead, we drink more than we should at the office party. We're all addicted to something. Those addictions not only cripple us, they convince us that we are worthless and incapable of being worthwhile. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the worst order because it traps us inside our own sense of inadequacy, of futility, of failure."
***
"This Man Was Dead -- He Isn't Anymore" proclaims the cover of the July 23, 2007 issue of Newsweek. The lead article tells the story of Bill Bondar, a 61-year-old man whose heart suddenly stopped one night as he was unloading his bass guitar from his car after a jam session.
Fortunately his wife Monica found him moments later and called 911 -- and asked that he be moved to a hospital 15 miles away that was using a new procedure for dealing with heart attacks. There his core temperature was lowered to 93 degrees for 24 hours, and he survived.
Technically he'd been dead -- his left anterior descending artery was 99% blocked with plaque, leaving a passage no wider than the width of a human hair. The new technology brought him back to life.
You and I were also dead -- and brought back to life. Our Colossians passage this week tells us: "And when you were dead in trespasses... God made you alive together with [Christ] when he forgave us all our trespasses."
We are then invited to live a new life in him: "As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him."
Bill Bondar received a wonderful gift -- he was given back his life. But at 61 he knew that his life was limited to a few more decades. The new life our Lord gives us has no limits; it continues from now through all eternity.
***
An interesting thing happens in this week's Gospel. Jesus teaches us to ask our Heavenly Father for whatever we need. He tells us to Ask, to Search, and to Knock -- with the first letter of each word forming the word ASK.
But then a strange thing happens. Jesus doesn't say that we're sure to receive the shiny new car we're asking for, or the trip to Hawaii, or the horse. Look at what he says.
He says that if we know how to give good gifts to our children, our Heavenly Father knows even better how to give good gifts to us. And what will he give us? Not necessarily whatever it was that we asked for.
He gives us the Holy Spirit. What? How could the Holy Spirit possibly be the answer to our prayers? Well, having the Holy Spirit with us to teach us and remind us and guide us will be better than any gift we could possibly have asked for. The Holy Spirit will help us live as followers of our Lord.
***
It's almost four months until Thanksgiving, but this week's second reading urges us to abound in thanksgiving.
Have you ever noticed how the happiest people you know are the ones who are the most thankful, the most grateful, for what they have? Whereas the people around you who are always complaining and feeling sorry for themselves are the ones who are the most unhappy?
Appreciating what we have seems to release something good in us -- maybe like the release of endorphins when we exercise.
The Bible tells us to give thanks -- not because the Lord needs us to do this, but because we do.
***
For those preaching on Hosea:
She was always good company -- a little heavy with the lipstick maybe, a little less than choosy about men and booze, a little loud, but great at a party and always good for a laugh. Then the prophet Hosea came along wearing a sandwich board that read "The End is at Hand" on one side and "Watch Out" on the other.
The first time he asked her to marry him she thought he was kidding. The second time she knew he was serious but thought he was crazy. The third time she said yes. He wasn't exactly a swinger, but he had a kind face and he was generous and he wasn't all that crazier than everybody else. Besides, any fool could see he loved her.
Give or take a little, she even loved him back for a while, and they had three children whom Hosea named with queer names like Not-pitied-for-God-will-no-longer-pity-Israel-now-that-it's-gone-to-the-dogs, so that every time the roll was called at school Hosea would be scoring a prophetic bulls-eye in absentia. But everybody could see the marriage wasn't going to last, and it didn't.
While Hosea was off hitting the sawdust trail, Gomer took to hitting as many nightspots as she could squeeze into a night, and any resemblance between her next batch of children and Hosea was purely coincidental. It almost killed him, of course. Every time he raised a hand to her, he burst into tears. Every time she raised one to him, he was the one who ended up apologizing....
[O]ne day she didn't show up at all. He swore that this time he was through with her for keeps, but of course he wasn't. When he finally found her, she was lying passed out in a highly specialized establishment located above an adult bookstore, and he had to pay the management plenty to let her out of her contract. She'd lost her front teeth and picked up some scars you had to see to believe, but Hosea had her back again and that seemed to be all that mattered.
-- Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (HarperCollins, 1979)
***
For those preaching on Genesis:
Sodom was a place of such sin that God was ready to wipe it off the face of the earth. It makes one pause to wonder how much is too much before we must face the wrath of God. NBC's Dateline has run a series of programs where their personnel have pretended to be a 13-year-old girl in an online chat room, interacting with adult men. When they arranged a time to "meet," some men drove several hours across the country to meet this fictional 13-year-old for sex. The disturbing part of the story is that over a three-day period, Dateline filmed 26 men who came to the appointed meeting place in order to have sex with this 13-year-old girl. "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8).
***
It is easy to point the finger. Between the behavior documented by Dateline and the record payoff by the Catholic Church to victims of sexual abuse, there is plenty of blame to go around. However, lest we point the finger elsewhere, Flannery O'Connor reminds us: "The Church was founded on Peter, who denied Christ three times and who couldn't walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.... To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs."
We are reminded of what Paul wrote in Romans 8:22-23: "For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering."
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by Thom M. Shuman
Call to Worship
Leader: It is in this place of holiness
that we can come with our fears, our doubts, all the questions of our hearts.
People: We come to this place, to hear
the words of peace, of hope, of joy God speaks to us.
Leader: It is in this place of discovery
that we can come searching.
People: We come to this place, to find
the One who has been looking for us.
Leader: It is in this place of openness
that we can come knocking.
People: We come to this place, to be embraced
by the One whose heart is never locked.
Prayer of the Day
Loving God of heaven and earth:
the morning breezes whisper your holy name,
the trees clap their hands in time to creation's songs of joy.
You build your community in our midst,
despite our best efforts to tear it down.
Your simple gifts of love and peace
are of more value than all the world promises us.
Jesus Christ, Teacher of our hearts:
you walk with us through the streets of fear and failure,
holding our hands so we have no need to reach out for the Evil One.
You give us words to speak
when the worries of our lives turn us speechless.
Spirit of Grace and Hope:
your river of mercy tumbles through us
washing our hearts of all we cannot release,
so we may reach out and embrace all who have hurt us.
Your peace defends the weak,
your glory shines in the oppressed,
your justice embraces all people.
God in Community, Holy in One,
we lift our prayers to you.
Amen.
Call to Confession
We are invited to pray:
all who have hurt someone else,
and all who have been hurt by another.
We are called to pray:
for hope, for healing, for mercy.
We pray to the One who seeks to make us whole;
whose will is to restore us to new life.
Join me as we pray, saying . . .
(Unison) Prayer of Confession
We do not find it easy to speak of how we do not live as your people,
but you invite us to share our weaknesses and failures with you, Inviting God.
Tempted to think your salvation is for a select few, we put up barriers for others.
Clinging to all you give to us, we are reluctant to share with those in need.
Surrounded by evil and violence,
we find it easier to close ranks with those just like us,
rather than seeking peace and reconciliation for our world.
Forgive us, Salvation's God.
Open our eyes to our sisters and brothers all around us.
Open our ears to the word of hope you speak to us.
Open our spirits to the presence of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior,
who flings wide the open doors of your kingdom, that all might find life with you.
(silence is kept)
Assurance of Pardon
Leader: Here is the good news, my friends:
Christ came searching for us, calling us by name,
leading us into God's kingdom.
People: In Christ, we become new people:
broken, we are made whole;
lost, we are found;
forsaken, we are restored to new life.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Responsive Pastoral Prayer
Leader: Our Father who art in heaven:
People: remind us this day that you are not only creation's Architect,
but you are the Babe who cried for food,
the teenager who knew loneliness,
the adult who felt the rejection of loved one.
Leader: Hallowed be Thy name:
People: yours is the name spun by the stars;
yours is the name whispered by the dying;
yours is the name written on our hearts.
Leader: Thy Kingdom come:
People: may it be a kingdom of peace, not prejudice;
may it be a kingdom of sharing, not grasping;
may it be a kingdom of hope, not hurting.
Leader: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven:
People: may your Word be more than print on a page;
may your justice be more than a wish in our hearts;
may your will become our deepest desire.
Leader: Give us this day our daily bread:
People: let us taste it in the kisses of loved ones;
let it fill us in the empty moments of our lives;
let it slip out of our hands to mend the brokenness of our world.
Leader: And forgive us our debts as we forgive others:
People: may those who have hurt us find a welcome in our hearts,
even as we have found our home in yours.
Leader: And lead us not into temptation:
People: turn our hearts from the seductions of our world,
and the simple pleasures that turn us from you.
Keep us from thinking we are so important
that we ignore those around us.
Help us to always bring others to you in prayer,
before we bring ourselves, as we do in these moments:
(prayers are lifted for others)
Leader: But deliver us from evil:
People: not just great evils of war and hunger,
but from ingratitude, self-love, pride,
all those little evils that do such great harm.
Leader: For thine is the kingdom:
People: our heart's true longing;
Leader: and the power:
People: which you set aside to serve us in weakness;
Leader: and the glory:
People: which we would mirror in our lives, our bodies, our minds, our souls,
this day and every day;
Leader: forever and ever.
People: Amen.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Surround Yourself with Christ
Colossians 2:6-15
Object: two eggs and a clear glass
I brought two eggs with me today. Eggs are really neat. There's a hard shell on the outside. The shell protects all the stuff that's on the inside and keeps it all in one place. This egg is the kind we eat. Look what happens when the shell breaks. (Break the egg into the glass.) Now the shell doesn't protect the egg white and the yolk and it won't stay fresh as long. The egg needs the shell to keep it safe. If our egg had a baby chick inside, it would definitely need the shell. The baby stays inside the shell while it grows. When it is ready to come out, the baby breaks the shell because it doesn't need it any more.
When we first become Christians we are like babies too. We learn a new way to live, and we need to spend our time growing strong. Jesus teaches us to see the world in a different way from everyone else. We've talked before about how hard it can be to live the way God wants! We need help to be his people. We need help to live like he asks us.
In today's lesson, the scripture writer tells us that we should live in Christ. That means that we should surround ourselves with people and things that encourage us in our new lives. We need a safe place to grow strong in Christ. Just like the baby chick inside the egg, we need Christ to protect us while we grow. What are some things we can do to surround ourselves with Christ? Like our scripture writer says, how can we "live" in Christ? (Spend a moment helping the children understand what you are asking. Get their ideas of what living in Christ means.)
There are many ways to surround ourselves with the protection of Christ's love. We can pray, we can read the Bible, and we can spend time with people who can teach us about God. The main thing is to remember that we are to be as close to Christ as we can be. When we do that we will grow stronger, and we will begin to understand all the wonderful things he has to teach us.
Prayer: Dear God, please protect us while we grow strong in your love. Help us grow to understand you more and more every day. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, July 29, 2007, issue.
Copyright 2007 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
Sin: A Public and Private Affair!
by Paul Bresnahan
Colossians 2:6-15
Not many years after Cardinal Bernard Law made a settlement with abused victims in the Archdiocese of Boston, the scandal of pedophilia struck the Church again, this time in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Only last week Cardinal Roger Mahoney settled with over 500 victims of abuse to the tune of $660 million. That is a whole lot of abuse! That is one whale of a lot of sin from a source we just don't expect it to come from.
Not to be outdone, in the same week we have a strident "pro-family" senator, David Vitter from Louisiana, who appears to have been a regular customer of a D.C. madam's services. He and his wife provided us again with the spectacle of a public act of contrition. And even though Vitter had previously insisted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton for his indiscretions, he feels it is entirely appropriate that he return to his duties in the Senate.
Sin strikes again. And we can point our fingers at either the indiscretion of people in public trust who should know better, or the hypocrisy of the so-called "righteous" people who we thought were above this sort of thing. But alas, sin strikes us all -- and our slavery to sin is unrelenting. It never goes away, and temptation is always staring us in the face.
Sin's great public and private engines churn on: Sex, Money, and Power. They are engines with all the power of sin, and they drive our culture toward its mindless ends. We shudder to think where it will end. And thus our Sacred Writings remind us this week: "See to it that no one takes you captive according to the elemental spirits of the universe."
Let's consider how to face the constant and relentless bombardment of these temptations, and see if we can find a way to regain our faith and find the way to freedom!
THE WORLD
Not only are we faced with the social evil of war, terror, poverty, environmental degradation, and the disparity of the "haves" and "have-nots" at all levels of the social order, we also see an endless list of indiscretions on a more personal level from folks we thought we could trust, like our clergy and our politicians. I'm sure there are those cynical voices out there pointing to the fact that they never trusted politicians in the first place, and many others who point to a long history of immorality among church leaders.
This is clearly a sinful world. All we have to do is open up the morning newspaper or flip the dial to CNN or Fox News to see just how much sin there is. The sorry catalogue of human cruelty and immorality is just chock-full of examples of sin.
This is not altogether new to our time. Kierkegaard was fond of quoting both Shakespeare and the Bible -- there was so much sin in both... and so much redemption. It seems to be inherent in human nature that we are capable of greatness and depravity at the same time. And so we are slaves to sin, and yet we seek our freedom in Christ.
So much of the world we live in would prefer not to think in terms of sin. It has become an unpopular word. Still, no less a light than the world-renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a rather well-read book in 1973 -- Whatever Became of Sin? -- in which he muses that some sense of personal responsibility may after all be healthy in a society going a bit off toward the end of the self-indulgent scales.
We are a violent land. We are at war. We are on the edge of terror. And still corporate leaders steal vast sums, clergy misconduct is seemingly pervasive, and political corruption and hypocrisy are just too obvious for us to tolerate.
THE WORD
When Amos took a hard look at his Israel's experience, he saw much that was wrong. But the greatest problem he saw was that the state abandoned God and turned to other avenues of worship and praise. There were all the idols of the time, but the greatest and most dangerous idol was that of oppression. If you renounce God, you do so at your own risk -- and the primary risk is God's renunciation of us in return. That is a loss I would prefer not to contemplate. It is interesting that the social evil of oppression of the poor is often identified in the prophetic tradition as a personal "lifestyle" sin, akin to whoredom. It is not a pleasant image, but the prophets had a penchant for calling it as they saw it.
Paul's appeal is for us to live in Christ. Insofar as we have received Christ with joy, so too we want to be rooted, established, and growing in him. Paul reminds us that we were buried with Jesus in a death like his in order that we be raised again in a life like his. Paul's approach is active and not passive. If we become an active participant in the process of redemption, we will find freedom from sin's allure.
Or will we? Remember that Paul too had a "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7). He prayed for it to go away, but it "humbled" him throughout his life and remained with him throughout his ministry. Sin still has its power, and the "evil one" still has some sway in the affairs of human experience.
This week's Gospel provides us with an alternate rendering for the Lord's Prayer. Luke's offering differs in some striking ways from the Matthean version (Matthew 6:9). In the Lucan version we have a reassurance following the prayer that if we seek, we will find; if we knock, the door will be opened; and if we ask, we shall receive. In Matthew's version, by contrast, we are warned not to make a show of our religion as the hypocrites do. Both reassurance and admonition are helpful in living in Christ. As we work out the details of our salvation, we are repeatedly challenged by scripture to be an active participant. There are so many verbs: "ask," "knock," "give," "forgive." In fact, the entire Bible is said by linguists to be dominated by verbs, unlike a consumer society with its love of things and nouns.
The most striking contrast to me is the "time of trial" petition. The Old English rendering for that is "lead us not into temptation." As much as we may want to cling to the old translation for familiarity's sake, it is just not correct. The Greek refers to a time of testing. The International Consultation on English Texts (an ecumenical body that provides a "universal" translation for common texts to use in public worship) gives us the translation "save us from the time of trial." This new translation never "took off" -- and it's no wonder why. We're always being tested, aren't we? I'd rather the translators gave us one slightly different word: "save us in the time of trial." That would have been a daily prayer I could us right about now.
We are in a daily struggle against the "powers and principalities, the rulers of the present darkness" as Paul has aptly put it. We need to know how deadly serious this struggle is. So it appears did Jesus, when he gave us his prayer.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
When Karl Menninger left teaching at Harvard Medical School, he returned to his native Topeka, Kansas, to found the Menninger Foundation. Together with his father he provided us with a life's work of brilliant psychiatric insight and clinical effectiveness. One of Menninger's goals was to collaborate with the pastoral skill of the clergy in returning the nation to its moral compass. By training a generation of competent and professional pastors, it was his hope that we would indeed make a real dent in the unfortunate turn to permissiveness that had so pervasively invaded American culture.
Instead of checking the growth of sin, its hold on the social order seemed only to tighten. One of the great contributions of his life was the book Whatever Became of Sin?, which he wrote near the end of his career in 1973. He was hoping to kindle the flame of passion once again among the clergy for guiding us back to a sense of the moral agency and responsibility of the self.
In every society, in every age, the engines of sin will churn on. We will always "seek our own will instead of the will of God." That is a working definition for sin that I tend to use, which comes from the catechism in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer.
There is an amazing power to sin: sex, money, and power are the great powerful engines that drive our society. Philip Turner, writer and dean of Berkeley Divinity School, noted that when he wrote Sex, Money, and Power he really preferred to have called his book by the ancient opposites that represented the greatest virtues of the monastic tradition: poverty, chastity, and obedience. He finally decided that the book would sell better with the glitzier title, and that would allow him to lead readers to reconsider the ancient virtues.
It is interesting to note that there is nothing inherently wrong with sex, money, or power. Neither is there anything intrinsically righteous about poverty, chastity, or obedience. It is rather the stewardship of those realities that determines who we are as human beings. And it is in the management of those realities that Grace is to be found.
In a helpful review of Menninger's book, Albert Outler, a professor at Perkins School of Theology, hoped Menninger could also write sequels to his book on sin, namely Whatever Became of Guilt? and Whatever Became of Grace? It is refreshing to see great psychiatry ally itself with good theology. And I believe that Paul was onto something when he noted that what puts our sins to death is the act of Christ "nailing it to the cross." Thus the power of Christ paying the price for our sin sets us free to be his, and thereby gives us abundant life unlike anything we had imagined.
We need to take responsibility for ourselves. The clergy in my denomination are required to undergo independent background checks every time we move from one church to another. That has cleaned house for our denomination very effectively. We will also discover a new freedom in life by taking ethical responsibility for ourselves. But that is not something we achieve merely through background checks. Grace wells up within us as we embrace the living Christ in our lives. As we honestly seek to serve Jesus, we find our whole lives transformed. It is by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus that we will be changed from Grace to Grace, and the bountiful power of God will make us more fully children of God as we live our lives into Jesus.
That is a very active and exhilarating prospect. An inactive faith cannot do what an active one can do. And yet an active faith will not achieve salvation for us. Salvation will always be the free gift of God, and through it we will find freedom!
One wonders about some clergy, some senators, and some captains of industry. There will always be sin, but there will always be salvation -- and the choice between the two will always be ours to make.
ANOTHER VIEW
by Stephen McCutchan
Have you ever noticed how much delight the media takes in discovering that someone or some institution has feet of clay? This is especially true if the person or institution has been speaking about morals in our society. A clear example has been the response to the revelation that Senator Vitter, who has made family morality a centerpiece of his campaign, had himself used the services of a prostitute. And this week there was also news that the head of the Christian Action League in North Carolina has been caught using the services of a prostitute. With respect to institutions, the financial settlement of the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles because of the sexual sins of some of their priests has also made national news. Similar reports in other denominations like the Southern Baptists and Presbyterians received less notice only because they have been overshadowed by the larger settlements within the Catholic Church.
Such failings have created a great deal of cynicism about the church and served to rationalize many people's refusal to participate in a church. Yet such an attitude rests more on a secular understanding of the church than it does on a Christian understanding of the church. Christians should not be surprised by either the sinfulness of politicians or the sinfulness of the church. We do not address the issue of sin in the world from a position of purity. Rather, we address it from a position of recognizing in our own lives the power of sin. This is not to justify the failings of the church but simply to affirm that even when sin gets the best of us as individuals or institutions, God is not defeated. God's redemptive power is most fully present when we, by our own strength, have failed to resist the power of sin. As Paul reported God saying in 2 Corinthians 12:9: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
In last week's lesson from Colossians 1:15-28, we heard that Christ is head of the church. The cynic might say that, given the state of the church, he is not doing a very good job. This week's lesson makes an even bolder claim that Christ is head of every ruler and authority. Unless we are to dismiss such statements as overinflated rhetoric, we need to re-examine what it means to say Christ is the head.
First, Paul is asserting that faith in Christ is not one among several competing philosophies and human traditions, but the very core of reality in the universe. Circumcision was the physical act by which the Jewish people were marked as belonging to God. Paul asserts that there was a spiritual circumcision through baptism by which God claimed all peoples. Physical circumcision was restricted to males who practiced the Law of Moses. This spiritual circumcision through baptism erased the barrier between males and females and that between Jews and Gentiles. Through Christ the sovereignty of God is expressed in overcoming the divisions of humanity.
While this universal dimension to God's purpose had been glimpsed in the words of various figures in the Hebrew Scriptures, it was now made abundantly clear in the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus had challenged many of the accepted traditions of Israel in his ministry. He seemed to have violated the Sabbath, eaten meals with tax collectors and sinners, presumed to speak for God in offering forgiveness of sins, and been found lacking by many of the religious leaders of the day.
Therefore, by all that the best thinkers in Israel believed to be sacred, Jesus died a sinner rejected by God. Jesus, who proclaimed the steadfast love and grace of God, was seen by the law to be a sinner. Yet his resurrection revealed God's affirmation of Jesus. God allowed this law that condemned Jesus to be nailed to the cross (2:14) and erased the record against him through the resurrection. The Roman rulers and the religious authorities had exercised their power against Jesus in a public execution. Jesus "made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it."
Because the cross has become such an important symbol of our salvation, we sometimes forget that originally the cross was not meant as a symbol of something good. To kill God's son on the cross was the world's response to the gracious love of God. God sent his very best, and the world, through the Romans, killed him in the most cruel way possible. From a religious point of view, it had become an accepted understanding of the law, as expressed in Deuteronomy 21:22-23, that "anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse." It was out of that which both religion and the secular world counted as sin that God drew the redemption of the world.
Churches and individuals should not sin. However, as Christians we should not be surprised when they do. The church is made up of forgiven sinners -- but as Augustine once said, "grace doesn't change nature." To be forgiven of your sin does not mean that you are no longer a sinner. It simply means that you are a forgiven sinner. The process of sanctification suggests that as forgiven sinners we are to strive to exercise our spiritual muscles and grow in our capacity to resist sin. However, when we fall we need not be paralyzed by despair, because we know that God is not defeated by sin. We can therefore look for God's redemptive power and joyfully respond in the grace of God.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Many people wonder about the word choice in different versions of the Lord's Prayer. One version, favored by Roman Catholics and Anglicans, uses the phrase "forgive us our trespasses." To the modern ear, "trespass" seems an odd word to use. Another version, favored by Protestants of the Reformed tradition, says "forgive us our debts," another odd choice to the modern ear. Many modern translations simply use the word "sin" instead. Why the difference? It has to do with translation.
Matthew, writing in Greek, uses the word opheilemata, which has a literal meaning of financial debt, but which also has a metaphorical sense of spiritual obligation. This sense of debt meaning spiritual obligation is also present in Aramaic writings of the period, and Jesus, who spoke and taught in Aramaic, uses this metaphor in various parables. Luke, however, has a different version of the prayer in which he uses the Greek hamartia, a word that quite literally means sin.
When it came to producing an English Bible, translators had to choose which English word to use.
Wyclif (1384) and the translators of the King James Version (1611) chose to use "debt" to translate Matthew's opheilemata. Debt dates to c. 1300 and is from the Old French dete or dette. The letter B was artificially inserted into the spelling in the 16th century to parallel the ultimate Latin root, debita.
This preserved the original Aramaic metaphor, but had the problem of the fact that debt did not have a sense of sin or violation in English. And such a sense of the word has never really developed in English. Use of debt to mean sin is pretty much limited to the translation of this particular verse.
William Tyndale, on the other hand, chose the word "trespass" for his translation (1525). This word did have a sense of sin in English, although it did not preserve the original metaphor. Trespass is from the Old French trespas, literally meaning passage, but also having the sense of offense against the law. In English the word dates to c. 1290, and the original sense is the general one of a violation of law or a sin. The more usual modern sense, unlawful entry onto real property, doesn't appear until c. 1455.
Many modern translators prefer the straightforward "sin." In English, this is the oldest of the three words, from the Old English syn and dating to c. 825. It has cognates in other Germanic languages and it may be related to the Latin sons, meaning guilty.
There is a belief that sin derives from some archery term meaning to miss the target. This tale stems from confusion and misunderstanding of preachers giving Sunday sermons. The English word "sin" has no such etymology. The Greek hamartia, however, can literally mean to fall short or miss, especially in the archery context. Preachers sometimes use this Greek etymology as a sermon illustration, and people confuse it with the etymology of the English word. The sermon illustration, however, is somewhat flawed. By the time of Christ the archery sense of hamartia was obsolete, so the sermon illustration is anachronistic. To Christ and his contemporaries, it would simply mean a violation of God's law.
-- David Wilton, www.wordorigins.org
***
Max Lucado tells the story of a ship called the Pelicano. In 1986, it was the world's most unwanted ship.
The Pelicano wandered the seas, but could find no port to admit her. There was nothing wrong with the ship, although it was a bit old and rusty. Nor was there a problem with its legal paperwork, or with its crew.
The problem was the Pelicano's cargo. It was trash: 15,000 tons of it. The trash came from a Philadelphia sanitation workers' strike in 1986. A contractor purchased the stuff, loaded it on the ship, and figured he could find a place to dump it. It was a poor decision. There were no takers. The Pelicano was left to wander the high seas like the legendary Flying Dutchman.
Sin, says Lucado, is like that. Sometimes we have this garbage we've picked up somewhere, and we have no place to dump it. So we just cruise around aimlessly. Lucado concludes:
"We can live with the garbage of our past or we can choose to dump it at the foot of the cross and start anew. Jesus likened himself to a physician. He came not for the healthy but for the sick, for those sick of the garbage of their past, for those ready to experience the health of forgiveness and live garbage-free."
***
Sister Joan Chittister (a Benedictine nun) points out in one of her many books that one of the worst mistakes we can make in the Christian life is to assume that we will not sin -- that moral perfection is possible for us:
"The problem, of course, is that we fail. We know ourselves to be weak. We stumble along, being less than we can be, never living up to our own standards, let alone anyone else's. We eat too much between meals, we work too little to get ahead, we drink more than we should at the office party. We're all addicted to something. Those addictions not only cripple us, they convince us that we are worthless and incapable of being worthwhile. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the worst order because it traps us inside our own sense of inadequacy, of futility, of failure."
***
"This Man Was Dead -- He Isn't Anymore" proclaims the cover of the July 23, 2007 issue of Newsweek. The lead article tells the story of Bill Bondar, a 61-year-old man whose heart suddenly stopped one night as he was unloading his bass guitar from his car after a jam session.
Fortunately his wife Monica found him moments later and called 911 -- and asked that he be moved to a hospital 15 miles away that was using a new procedure for dealing with heart attacks. There his core temperature was lowered to 93 degrees for 24 hours, and he survived.
Technically he'd been dead -- his left anterior descending artery was 99% blocked with plaque, leaving a passage no wider than the width of a human hair. The new technology brought him back to life.
You and I were also dead -- and brought back to life. Our Colossians passage this week tells us: "And when you were dead in trespasses... God made you alive together with [Christ] when he forgave us all our trespasses."
We are then invited to live a new life in him: "As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him."
Bill Bondar received a wonderful gift -- he was given back his life. But at 61 he knew that his life was limited to a few more decades. The new life our Lord gives us has no limits; it continues from now through all eternity.
***
An interesting thing happens in this week's Gospel. Jesus teaches us to ask our Heavenly Father for whatever we need. He tells us to Ask, to Search, and to Knock -- with the first letter of each word forming the word ASK.
But then a strange thing happens. Jesus doesn't say that we're sure to receive the shiny new car we're asking for, or the trip to Hawaii, or the horse. Look at what he says.
He says that if we know how to give good gifts to our children, our Heavenly Father knows even better how to give good gifts to us. And what will he give us? Not necessarily whatever it was that we asked for.
He gives us the Holy Spirit. What? How could the Holy Spirit possibly be the answer to our prayers? Well, having the Holy Spirit with us to teach us and remind us and guide us will be better than any gift we could possibly have asked for. The Holy Spirit will help us live as followers of our Lord.
***
It's almost four months until Thanksgiving, but this week's second reading urges us to abound in thanksgiving.
Have you ever noticed how the happiest people you know are the ones who are the most thankful, the most grateful, for what they have? Whereas the people around you who are always complaining and feeling sorry for themselves are the ones who are the most unhappy?
Appreciating what we have seems to release something good in us -- maybe like the release of endorphins when we exercise.
The Bible tells us to give thanks -- not because the Lord needs us to do this, but because we do.
***
For those preaching on Hosea:
She was always good company -- a little heavy with the lipstick maybe, a little less than choosy about men and booze, a little loud, but great at a party and always good for a laugh. Then the prophet Hosea came along wearing a sandwich board that read "The End is at Hand" on one side and "Watch Out" on the other.
The first time he asked her to marry him she thought he was kidding. The second time she knew he was serious but thought he was crazy. The third time she said yes. He wasn't exactly a swinger, but he had a kind face and he was generous and he wasn't all that crazier than everybody else. Besides, any fool could see he loved her.
Give or take a little, she even loved him back for a while, and they had three children whom Hosea named with queer names like Not-pitied-for-God-will-no-longer-pity-Israel-now-that-it's-gone-to-the-dogs, so that every time the roll was called at school Hosea would be scoring a prophetic bulls-eye in absentia. But everybody could see the marriage wasn't going to last, and it didn't.
While Hosea was off hitting the sawdust trail, Gomer took to hitting as many nightspots as she could squeeze into a night, and any resemblance between her next batch of children and Hosea was purely coincidental. It almost killed him, of course. Every time he raised a hand to her, he burst into tears. Every time she raised one to him, he was the one who ended up apologizing....
[O]ne day she didn't show up at all. He swore that this time he was through with her for keeps, but of course he wasn't. When he finally found her, she was lying passed out in a highly specialized establishment located above an adult bookstore, and he had to pay the management plenty to let her out of her contract. She'd lost her front teeth and picked up some scars you had to see to believe, but Hosea had her back again and that seemed to be all that mattered.
-- Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (HarperCollins, 1979)
***
For those preaching on Genesis:
Sodom was a place of such sin that God was ready to wipe it off the face of the earth. It makes one pause to wonder how much is too much before we must face the wrath of God. NBC's Dateline has run a series of programs where their personnel have pretended to be a 13-year-old girl in an online chat room, interacting with adult men. When they arranged a time to "meet," some men drove several hours across the country to meet this fictional 13-year-old for sex. The disturbing part of the story is that over a three-day period, Dateline filmed 26 men who came to the appointed meeting place in order to have sex with this 13-year-old girl. "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8).
***
It is easy to point the finger. Between the behavior documented by Dateline and the record payoff by the Catholic Church to victims of sexual abuse, there is plenty of blame to go around. However, lest we point the finger elsewhere, Flannery O'Connor reminds us: "The Church was founded on Peter, who denied Christ three times and who couldn't walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.... To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs."
We are reminded of what Paul wrote in Romans 8:22-23: "For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering."
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by Thom M. Shuman
Call to Worship
Leader: It is in this place of holiness
that we can come with our fears, our doubts, all the questions of our hearts.
People: We come to this place, to hear
the words of peace, of hope, of joy God speaks to us.
Leader: It is in this place of discovery
that we can come searching.
People: We come to this place, to find
the One who has been looking for us.
Leader: It is in this place of openness
that we can come knocking.
People: We come to this place, to be embraced
by the One whose heart is never locked.
Prayer of the Day
Loving God of heaven and earth:
the morning breezes whisper your holy name,
the trees clap their hands in time to creation's songs of joy.
You build your community in our midst,
despite our best efforts to tear it down.
Your simple gifts of love and peace
are of more value than all the world promises us.
Jesus Christ, Teacher of our hearts:
you walk with us through the streets of fear and failure,
holding our hands so we have no need to reach out for the Evil One.
You give us words to speak
when the worries of our lives turn us speechless.
Spirit of Grace and Hope:
your river of mercy tumbles through us
washing our hearts of all we cannot release,
so we may reach out and embrace all who have hurt us.
Your peace defends the weak,
your glory shines in the oppressed,
your justice embraces all people.
God in Community, Holy in One,
we lift our prayers to you.
Amen.
Call to Confession
We are invited to pray:
all who have hurt someone else,
and all who have been hurt by another.
We are called to pray:
for hope, for healing, for mercy.
We pray to the One who seeks to make us whole;
whose will is to restore us to new life.
Join me as we pray, saying . . .
(Unison) Prayer of Confession
We do not find it easy to speak of how we do not live as your people,
but you invite us to share our weaknesses and failures with you, Inviting God.
Tempted to think your salvation is for a select few, we put up barriers for others.
Clinging to all you give to us, we are reluctant to share with those in need.
Surrounded by evil and violence,
we find it easier to close ranks with those just like us,
rather than seeking peace and reconciliation for our world.
Forgive us, Salvation's God.
Open our eyes to our sisters and brothers all around us.
Open our ears to the word of hope you speak to us.
Open our spirits to the presence of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior,
who flings wide the open doors of your kingdom, that all might find life with you.
(silence is kept)
Assurance of Pardon
Leader: Here is the good news, my friends:
Christ came searching for us, calling us by name,
leading us into God's kingdom.
People: In Christ, we become new people:
broken, we are made whole;
lost, we are found;
forsaken, we are restored to new life.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Responsive Pastoral Prayer
Leader: Our Father who art in heaven:
People: remind us this day that you are not only creation's Architect,
but you are the Babe who cried for food,
the teenager who knew loneliness,
the adult who felt the rejection of loved one.
Leader: Hallowed be Thy name:
People: yours is the name spun by the stars;
yours is the name whispered by the dying;
yours is the name written on our hearts.
Leader: Thy Kingdom come:
People: may it be a kingdom of peace, not prejudice;
may it be a kingdom of sharing, not grasping;
may it be a kingdom of hope, not hurting.
Leader: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven:
People: may your Word be more than print on a page;
may your justice be more than a wish in our hearts;
may your will become our deepest desire.
Leader: Give us this day our daily bread:
People: let us taste it in the kisses of loved ones;
let it fill us in the empty moments of our lives;
let it slip out of our hands to mend the brokenness of our world.
Leader: And forgive us our debts as we forgive others:
People: may those who have hurt us find a welcome in our hearts,
even as we have found our home in yours.
Leader: And lead us not into temptation:
People: turn our hearts from the seductions of our world,
and the simple pleasures that turn us from you.
Keep us from thinking we are so important
that we ignore those around us.
Help us to always bring others to you in prayer,
before we bring ourselves, as we do in these moments:
(prayers are lifted for others)
Leader: But deliver us from evil:
People: not just great evils of war and hunger,
but from ingratitude, self-love, pride,
all those little evils that do such great harm.
Leader: For thine is the kingdom:
People: our heart's true longing;
Leader: and the power:
People: which you set aside to serve us in weakness;
Leader: and the glory:
People: which we would mirror in our lives, our bodies, our minds, our souls,
this day and every day;
Leader: forever and ever.
People: Amen.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Surround Yourself with Christ
Colossians 2:6-15
Object: two eggs and a clear glass
I brought two eggs with me today. Eggs are really neat. There's a hard shell on the outside. The shell protects all the stuff that's on the inside and keeps it all in one place. This egg is the kind we eat. Look what happens when the shell breaks. (Break the egg into the glass.) Now the shell doesn't protect the egg white and the yolk and it won't stay fresh as long. The egg needs the shell to keep it safe. If our egg had a baby chick inside, it would definitely need the shell. The baby stays inside the shell while it grows. When it is ready to come out, the baby breaks the shell because it doesn't need it any more.
When we first become Christians we are like babies too. We learn a new way to live, and we need to spend our time growing strong. Jesus teaches us to see the world in a different way from everyone else. We've talked before about how hard it can be to live the way God wants! We need help to be his people. We need help to live like he asks us.
In today's lesson, the scripture writer tells us that we should live in Christ. That means that we should surround ourselves with people and things that encourage us in our new lives. We need a safe place to grow strong in Christ. Just like the baby chick inside the egg, we need Christ to protect us while we grow. What are some things we can do to surround ourselves with Christ? Like our scripture writer says, how can we "live" in Christ? (Spend a moment helping the children understand what you are asking. Get their ideas of what living in Christ means.)
There are many ways to surround ourselves with the protection of Christ's love. We can pray, we can read the Bible, and we can spend time with people who can teach us about God. The main thing is to remember that we are to be as close to Christ as we can be. When we do that we will grow stronger, and we will begin to understand all the wonderful things he has to teach us.
Prayer: Dear God, please protect us while we grow strong in your love. Help us grow to understand you more and more every day. Amen.
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The Immediate Word, July 29, 2007, issue.
Copyright 2007 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
