Family
Stories
Object:
Contents
"Family" by C. David McKirachan
"Hell: Choosing Death Over Life" by Lamar Massingill
"Chancel Drama" by John Sumwalt
* * * * * * * *
Family
by C. David McKirachan
James 5:13-20
The other night we had a family dinner. There were eight of us, I being the oldest down to a cousin and a girlfriend who are eighteen and twenty. The table was set with the second best crystal, stoneware from my mother, cloth napkins, silver candlesticks, and roses. It was a Tuesday night turkey dinner. Parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, significant others, and friends made quite a pile of people. The table was set, the bunch was gathered, and the candlelight sparkled in the crystal. It was lovely. Until somebody asked for the rolls and someone else tossed one to them. It was a good throw, right on target. It was a good catch, no fuss, no muss. But there were plenty of giggles.
Now, I must say that our family has more class than many other bunches. We appreciate the finer things in life. Bach, Mozart, and Copland are friends of the family. But my wife who whistles Foure's Requeim enjoys Jimmy Hendrix. It's an interesting bunch.
So, you might ask, what the heck does this have to do with the letter of James?
The church of Jesus Christ is often seen as a formal, structured bunch. We have dogma that makes it wrong to do anything fun, to get our hands dirty, to get involved with unsavory characters, to let in new ideas, or to laugh out loud. I sincerely doubt our Lord would be very pleased with this assessment of a bunch that carries his name. He spent a lot of time confronting such formalism and got in a lot of trouble for it.
I do not advocate letting go of our liturgy, our stained glass, or our traditions. Many of these ancient methods and means do more to help people discover the love of Christ and his living presence than our contemporary fads. At my core I am a traditionalist. Our disciplines are not all stuffy strategies that keep things from evolving and prevent us from taking responsibility for our calls to ministry and our sin.
But I will say this. The love of God is a relational, inclusive activity. It is a transitive verb. It transcends our forms and enriches them in the process. James gave instructions for Christians to use their gifts and their burdens, to bring themselves as they were to the table. He invited them to appreciate each other as gifts of God, brothers and sisters of Christ by refusing to be distant whether saint or sinner.
I did not advocate the tossing of the roll. But as the dinner progressed, I realized I was quieter than usual. I sat back and bathed in the give and take, the affection and the humor, the laughter and the silliness. And I realized I was home. Such is the Kingdom of God.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Hell: Choosing Death Over Life
by Lamar Massingill
Mark 9:38-50
A few years ago, there was a man who "wanted to hear a sermon on hell." Well, down here in the South, I knew what he meant, and he probably wanted a little brimstone with it! Believing that the foundation for good preaching is good listening, I decided to preach the sermon my way: by trying to find all the truth I could about hell.
First, I want to say with much humility that when anyone attempts to describe the indescribable, they must only share what they know and have learned from biblical criticism and not simply how they feel about a certain topic. Even the biblical writer who wrote these passages about hell did so by metaphor, or images that people of his time and context could understand. There is much that Jesus said about hell in this passage, such as "If your eye offend you then pluck it out; it is better for you to live with one eye than to have both thrown into hell." Well, I don't see too many people plucking their eyes out these days. It is exactly mistranslations such as these that give God a sort of Santa Clause image, "making his list, checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty or nice."
Regarding hell, we are confronted by two seemingly contradictory images of God: God is love and the very concrete statement that it is "not God's will that any should perish." Alongside of that image are a multitude of dark and fearful images like "lake of fire" or "outer darkness" or the one that we find in our passage this week, the "unquenchable fire." The question is: "How do we reconcile these two images?"
I think first, we have to acknowledge that creation was an act of generosity. There is not the slightest hint that God was forced to create but did so out of love and joy. In fact the entire refrain throughout Genesis 1 was "It is good, it is good, it is very, very good," says the Great Power behind this wonderful creation. This kind of freedom is the very essence of God's kind of joy. But understand that in order for His creation to have the same kind of joy, then the same freedom had to be given to them as well. An experience of joy and delight can only be a reality by free people choosing such. There is no such thing as coerced joy or manufactured delight. It is at this point where I discovered how the Bible can speak of a God of love and simultaneously point to that darkness the Bible calls hell. So the very capacity that enables us to choose and experience joy can also give birth to our choosing dissatisfaction. We choose our own stances in God's creation.
To me, that is a basis for hell. It is not so much God's dissatisfaction with us as it is our dissatisfaction with Him and the gift of life He has freely given us. I don't believe hell is a divine creation; it is a human one. This surprises us at first because we always associate hell with the anger of God lashing out at human beings, but I don't think anything could be farther from the truth. The biblical witness from Genesis to the Revelation of John is that it is not God's will that any should perish but that all come to experience his joy. Hell is not a monument to divine wrath, but to the fact that the freedom which is essential to joy and life can be abused, and when it is, a condition is created that is opposite to God's intention, which is that He wants people to choose life over death. The image of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem is far closer to God's reaction to sin than anger or torture (Matthew 3:37).
God cannot make abundant life available by himself. We too have to participate in that decision. And if we choose not to do so then like Humpty Dumpty, "All the kings' horses and all the kings' men," and that includes God, are powerless to make us choose life.
C.S. Lewis used to say that there will eventually come a point that either we say to God: "Thy will be done" and enter into the joy of God, or with infinite sadness, God says to us, "Thy will be done," and allows us to go back into the nothingness out of which we came. I realize this image of Lewis is quite a different image of hell than we are used to, but I want to share why I think allowing us to go back into nothingness is more consistent with what we know of God than any dark destiny.
First, I don't believe that any of the many images and metaphors for hell were meant to be taken literally. The word for hell used in the New Testament is transliterated from the Greek "Gehinna." Gehinna was an actual place in Jerusalem. In fact, it was a garbage dump outside of the gates of the city, and there was a continual flame burning there. To prevent disease, the people of the day of Jesus threw, for example, dead and unclaimed bodies in Gehinna so there would not be a spread of disease. Furthermore, Revelation depicts hell as a "lake of fire" while Jesus depicts it as "outer darkness." Obviously, light is a component of fire so there could be no total darkness where such a lake existed.
The biblical writers used many different images and symbols to declare one thing, namely, that it is possible to miss completely the purpose for which we were created. It represents a person who has chosen to discard his life into a garbage dump.
God said in the beginning of creation that what he had done was "good, it is good, it is very, very good." What, I would ask, is more opposite of that condition than ceasing to exist altogether? Choosing a garbage dump over the gift of abundance? That would represent a choice of death over life -- the death-wish over the life-wish. God will do all that love and mercy can do to reconcile one to Himself, but there is one great barrier that God cannot force Himself into and that is the barrier of the human heart. So if God's kind of joy is not chosen, rather than hold one in existence forever in his/her own chosen misery as if trying to prove one made the mistake of not choosing His joy, with infinite sadness, God will let the death-choice triumph and say finally, "Thy will be done."
This is not eternal punishing, it is eternal punishment. God will let us have what we want most, and if that happens to be death, this He will finally do. The issue can finally be summed up in Hamlet's soliloquy: "To be or not to be." We answer that question every day of our lives. And in the end we will finally get what we want most: life or death, being or non-being, God or nothing.
As for the Mark passage, I hope it never happens that we throw so much of ourselves into Gehinna that we realize our dissatisfaction with the great gift God has given. It won't be easy at times, but choose life! The possibilities are eternal!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
Chancel Drama
by John Sumwalt
James 5:13-20
Advice from Brother James
Invite a dozen or more members of the congregation, youth, adults, or a combination, to play the part of the chorus. Have them gather in the middle of the chancel before the liturgist announces the Epistle Reading. Have them respond enthusiastically after each passage is read. It may help to have the Chorus' lines printed on cue cards and held up by the director of the drama who can also model facial expressions and other actions. Choose three people to play the parts of the wanderer and the two to act as shepherds when they bring him/her back to the group.
Reader: Are any among you suffering?
Chorus: Yes!
Reader: They should pray.
Chorus: (folds hands and look heavenward recite "Our father who art in heaven..." in unison)
Reader: Are any cheerful?
Chorus: Yes! (with exaggerated smiles while patting each other on backs)
Reader: They should sing songs of praise.
Chorus: (sings a few bars of a favorite praise song or hymn: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow")
Reader: Are any among you sick?
Chorus: Yes! (shoulders droop, looks haggard, coughing, sneeze loudly in unison)
Reader: They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.
Chorus: You are forgiven!
Reader: Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed.
Chorus: Lord, we want to be healed!
Reader: The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.
Chorus: It did not rain!
Reader: Then he prayed again...
Chorus: OH LORD LET IT RAIN!
Reader: ...and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.
Chorus: The heaven gave rain! (One member of the chorus gets up and begins to wander from the chancel and up the center aisle, looks around at the windows, looks up at the ceiling, whistles all the way.)
Reader: My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another... (reader looks up, says, "Will someone please bring (name) back?)
Chorus: (two members of the chorus go after the wanderer, embrace him/her, and gently lead the wanderer back to the chorus)
Reader: ...you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner's soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
Chorus: Thanks be to God!
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller in the Milwaukee area. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
*****************************************
StoryShare, September 30, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. 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., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Family" by C. David McKirachan
"Hell: Choosing Death Over Life" by Lamar Massingill
"Chancel Drama" by John Sumwalt
* * * * * * * *
Family
by C. David McKirachan
James 5:13-20
The other night we had a family dinner. There were eight of us, I being the oldest down to a cousin and a girlfriend who are eighteen and twenty. The table was set with the second best crystal, stoneware from my mother, cloth napkins, silver candlesticks, and roses. It was a Tuesday night turkey dinner. Parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, significant others, and friends made quite a pile of people. The table was set, the bunch was gathered, and the candlelight sparkled in the crystal. It was lovely. Until somebody asked for the rolls and someone else tossed one to them. It was a good throw, right on target. It was a good catch, no fuss, no muss. But there were plenty of giggles.
Now, I must say that our family has more class than many other bunches. We appreciate the finer things in life. Bach, Mozart, and Copland are friends of the family. But my wife who whistles Foure's Requeim enjoys Jimmy Hendrix. It's an interesting bunch.
So, you might ask, what the heck does this have to do with the letter of James?
The church of Jesus Christ is often seen as a formal, structured bunch. We have dogma that makes it wrong to do anything fun, to get our hands dirty, to get involved with unsavory characters, to let in new ideas, or to laugh out loud. I sincerely doubt our Lord would be very pleased with this assessment of a bunch that carries his name. He spent a lot of time confronting such formalism and got in a lot of trouble for it.
I do not advocate letting go of our liturgy, our stained glass, or our traditions. Many of these ancient methods and means do more to help people discover the love of Christ and his living presence than our contemporary fads. At my core I am a traditionalist. Our disciplines are not all stuffy strategies that keep things from evolving and prevent us from taking responsibility for our calls to ministry and our sin.
But I will say this. The love of God is a relational, inclusive activity. It is a transitive verb. It transcends our forms and enriches them in the process. James gave instructions for Christians to use their gifts and their burdens, to bring themselves as they were to the table. He invited them to appreciate each other as gifts of God, brothers and sisters of Christ by refusing to be distant whether saint or sinner.
I did not advocate the tossing of the roll. But as the dinner progressed, I realized I was quieter than usual. I sat back and bathed in the give and take, the affection and the humor, the laughter and the silliness. And I realized I was home. Such is the Kingdom of God.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Hell: Choosing Death Over Life
by Lamar Massingill
Mark 9:38-50
A few years ago, there was a man who "wanted to hear a sermon on hell." Well, down here in the South, I knew what he meant, and he probably wanted a little brimstone with it! Believing that the foundation for good preaching is good listening, I decided to preach the sermon my way: by trying to find all the truth I could about hell.
First, I want to say with much humility that when anyone attempts to describe the indescribable, they must only share what they know and have learned from biblical criticism and not simply how they feel about a certain topic. Even the biblical writer who wrote these passages about hell did so by metaphor, or images that people of his time and context could understand. There is much that Jesus said about hell in this passage, such as "If your eye offend you then pluck it out; it is better for you to live with one eye than to have both thrown into hell." Well, I don't see too many people plucking their eyes out these days. It is exactly mistranslations such as these that give God a sort of Santa Clause image, "making his list, checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty or nice."
Regarding hell, we are confronted by two seemingly contradictory images of God: God is love and the very concrete statement that it is "not God's will that any should perish." Alongside of that image are a multitude of dark and fearful images like "lake of fire" or "outer darkness" or the one that we find in our passage this week, the "unquenchable fire." The question is: "How do we reconcile these two images?"
I think first, we have to acknowledge that creation was an act of generosity. There is not the slightest hint that God was forced to create but did so out of love and joy. In fact the entire refrain throughout Genesis 1 was "It is good, it is good, it is very, very good," says the Great Power behind this wonderful creation. This kind of freedom is the very essence of God's kind of joy. But understand that in order for His creation to have the same kind of joy, then the same freedom had to be given to them as well. An experience of joy and delight can only be a reality by free people choosing such. There is no such thing as coerced joy or manufactured delight. It is at this point where I discovered how the Bible can speak of a God of love and simultaneously point to that darkness the Bible calls hell. So the very capacity that enables us to choose and experience joy can also give birth to our choosing dissatisfaction. We choose our own stances in God's creation.
To me, that is a basis for hell. It is not so much God's dissatisfaction with us as it is our dissatisfaction with Him and the gift of life He has freely given us. I don't believe hell is a divine creation; it is a human one. This surprises us at first because we always associate hell with the anger of God lashing out at human beings, but I don't think anything could be farther from the truth. The biblical witness from Genesis to the Revelation of John is that it is not God's will that any should perish but that all come to experience his joy. Hell is not a monument to divine wrath, but to the fact that the freedom which is essential to joy and life can be abused, and when it is, a condition is created that is opposite to God's intention, which is that He wants people to choose life over death. The image of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem is far closer to God's reaction to sin than anger or torture (Matthew 3:37).
God cannot make abundant life available by himself. We too have to participate in that decision. And if we choose not to do so then like Humpty Dumpty, "All the kings' horses and all the kings' men," and that includes God, are powerless to make us choose life.
C.S. Lewis used to say that there will eventually come a point that either we say to God: "Thy will be done" and enter into the joy of God, or with infinite sadness, God says to us, "Thy will be done," and allows us to go back into the nothingness out of which we came. I realize this image of Lewis is quite a different image of hell than we are used to, but I want to share why I think allowing us to go back into nothingness is more consistent with what we know of God than any dark destiny.
First, I don't believe that any of the many images and metaphors for hell were meant to be taken literally. The word for hell used in the New Testament is transliterated from the Greek "Gehinna." Gehinna was an actual place in Jerusalem. In fact, it was a garbage dump outside of the gates of the city, and there was a continual flame burning there. To prevent disease, the people of the day of Jesus threw, for example, dead and unclaimed bodies in Gehinna so there would not be a spread of disease. Furthermore, Revelation depicts hell as a "lake of fire" while Jesus depicts it as "outer darkness." Obviously, light is a component of fire so there could be no total darkness where such a lake existed.
The biblical writers used many different images and symbols to declare one thing, namely, that it is possible to miss completely the purpose for which we were created. It represents a person who has chosen to discard his life into a garbage dump.
God said in the beginning of creation that what he had done was "good, it is good, it is very, very good." What, I would ask, is more opposite of that condition than ceasing to exist altogether? Choosing a garbage dump over the gift of abundance? That would represent a choice of death over life -- the death-wish over the life-wish. God will do all that love and mercy can do to reconcile one to Himself, but there is one great barrier that God cannot force Himself into and that is the barrier of the human heart. So if God's kind of joy is not chosen, rather than hold one in existence forever in his/her own chosen misery as if trying to prove one made the mistake of not choosing His joy, with infinite sadness, God will let the death-choice triumph and say finally, "Thy will be done."
This is not eternal punishing, it is eternal punishment. God will let us have what we want most, and if that happens to be death, this He will finally do. The issue can finally be summed up in Hamlet's soliloquy: "To be or not to be." We answer that question every day of our lives. And in the end we will finally get what we want most: life or death, being or non-being, God or nothing.
As for the Mark passage, I hope it never happens that we throw so much of ourselves into Gehinna that we realize our dissatisfaction with the great gift God has given. It won't be easy at times, but choose life! The possibilities are eternal!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
Chancel Drama
by John Sumwalt
James 5:13-20
Advice from Brother James
Invite a dozen or more members of the congregation, youth, adults, or a combination, to play the part of the chorus. Have them gather in the middle of the chancel before the liturgist announces the Epistle Reading. Have them respond enthusiastically after each passage is read. It may help to have the Chorus' lines printed on cue cards and held up by the director of the drama who can also model facial expressions and other actions. Choose three people to play the parts of the wanderer and the two to act as shepherds when they bring him/her back to the group.
Reader: Are any among you suffering?
Chorus: Yes!
Reader: They should pray.
Chorus: (folds hands and look heavenward recite "Our father who art in heaven..." in unison)
Reader: Are any cheerful?
Chorus: Yes! (with exaggerated smiles while patting each other on backs)
Reader: They should sing songs of praise.
Chorus: (sings a few bars of a favorite praise song or hymn: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow")
Reader: Are any among you sick?
Chorus: Yes! (shoulders droop, looks haggard, coughing, sneeze loudly in unison)
Reader: They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.
Chorus: You are forgiven!
Reader: Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed.
Chorus: Lord, we want to be healed!
Reader: The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.
Chorus: It did not rain!
Reader: Then he prayed again...
Chorus: OH LORD LET IT RAIN!
Reader: ...and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.
Chorus: The heaven gave rain! (One member of the chorus gets up and begins to wander from the chancel and up the center aisle, looks around at the windows, looks up at the ceiling, whistles all the way.)
Reader: My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another... (reader looks up, says, "Will someone please bring (name) back?)
Chorus: (two members of the chorus go after the wanderer, embrace him/her, and gently lead the wanderer back to the chorus)
Reader: ...you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner's soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
Chorus: Thanks be to God!
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller in the Milwaukee area. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
*****************************************
StoryShare, September 30, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. 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., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
