I trust that springtime has found you all well.  We enjoyed another great Sunday School lesson this past weekend and discussed the community project that is occurring this coming Sunday.

Whether you missed last week, or did not participate in the “Knock on Nine” event, and even if you haven’t attended Sunday School in a long time, you can still come and join our class in helping to make 2 homes in our “Mile of Grace” better places.  The Mary Virginia Thomas Sunday School Class volunteered to clean up two yards this Sunday.  The more help we have the less time it will take us – however, we have been assured of being done by 10:45 am.  Afterwhich we will enjoy a nice church picnic. 

WE ARE NOT MEETING AT THE CHURCH.  To help us, come to Helping Hands at 8:45 am.  We will have some brief instruction and then head over to our 2 projects.  Wear yard clothes, bring gloves, clippers, weed eaters and the like, plus a little picnic food and join us.  Many hands make light work!

For more information, please read the letter below and/or call the church.

There won’t be a Sunday School Class this weekend.  Hope to see you at Helping Hands.

Brian

Danny pointed me toward Karen Sudduth’s wonderful site today. If you subscribe to our church’s daily devotional, you’re familiar with some of Karen’s writing. When I read the devotional that our church emailed us today, I knew who the author was within the first few sentences. There’s not many people that I can recognize through their writing that quickly – but she’s that good (and her artwork is too).  I could share more with you about Karen’s journey, but I’ll let others who know her comment here.  Better yet, take a trip to her site and learn for yourself.

Anyway, thanks to Danny for pointing us to Karen’s site.  It is a blessing.

5 I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments;
6 let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned.
7 We have offended you deeply, failing to keep the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances that you commanded your servant Moses.
8 Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples;
9 but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are under the farthest skies, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place at which I have chosen to establish my name.’
10 They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand.
11 O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man!” At the time, I was cupbearer to the king.  Neh 1:5-11 (NRSV)

Have you heard echoes of Nehemiah’s prayer in worship services you attend?  Knowing the source of some of these phrases may make those prayers even more meaningful.  They do for me.

But the history we’re studying wasn’t the 21st century – it was a time when the survival of the people rested on a knife’s edge.  I believe that God wants us to accept one another – including strangers.  That is the ultimate will of God.  But the circumstantial will of God – allowing for humankind to develop – was to further the intentional will of God – to allow Israel to survive as his chosen people: the culture he prepared for the incarnation.  What I mean is that under ideal circumstances, God would have had Israel flourish and truly be a holy nation and a royal priesthood – an example to all the nations.  But allowing both Israel and the surrounding people to follow their own independent will, this did not happen.  Instead, Israel fell into sin and ultimately this led to Israel’s exile and the destruction of the Temple.  In an ideal world where God’s people followed his will, marriage outside of Judaism would have been dealt with as Paul dealt with the issue in 1 Corinthians 7:12-13.  But that’s not what happend - the people not only married outside the covenant, they abandoned the covenant.  Indeed, even those who remained married to other Jews were included in Ezra’s prayer of confession and sorrow:

5 At the evening sacrifice I got up from my fasting, with my garments and my mantle torn, and fell on my knees, spread out my hands to the Lord my God,
6 and said, “O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens.
7 From the days of our ancestors to this day we have been deep in guilt, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been handed over to the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plundering, and to utter shame, as is now the case.
8 But now for a brief moment favor has been shown by the Lord our God, who has left us a remnant, and given us a stake in his holy place, in order that he may brighten our eyes and grant us a little sustenance in our slavery.
9 For we are slaves; yet our God has not forsaken us in our slavery, but has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to give us new life to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judea and Jerusalem.
10 ”And now, our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken your commandments,
11 which you commanded by your servants the prophets, saying, ‘The land that you are entering to possess is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations. They have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness.
15 O Lord, God of Israel, you are just, but we have escaped as a remnant, as is now the case. Here we are before you in our guilt, though no one can face you because of this.” (Ezra 9:5-11, 15)

There are lessons to be learned from this scripture on several levels.  Here are a few:

• There’s the lesson that the quarterly series wants us to understand – that we sometimes are required to make radical changes in our lives to walk with God instead of the world
• There’s the historical lesson that it was necessary – if seemingly brutal and callous – to require mixed marriages to be set aside and the children of those marriages disinherited – it was necessary for the survival of Judaism as a people set apart;
• There’s the cultural lesson that instructs us regarding the tribal nature of people in general, and of Judea in particular – this should help us understand all the more the radical nature of Christ’s message in parables such as that of the Good Samaritan; and
• There’s the lesson that ultimately challenges us to pursue – and not only to pursue, but to facilitate – God’s ultimate will that we all be as one.

 We can’t see Christ in one another until we can see ourselves in one another.

Anyway, we have also been celebrating, recently, the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Would that we continue to celebrate that amazing feat of human enterprise.

When considering this 40th anniversary and when considering the term “faith,” read the words of President John F. Kennedy, spoken September 12 at the University of Houston football stadium (this was before his more famous speech to Congress on the same subject):

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. …

“But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun — almost as hot as it is here today — and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out — then we must be bold.”

Obviously, we often study Biblical examples of faith — as well we should — but to my way of thinking this is one of the most striking examples of faith presented humankind.

This one phrase: “… made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented …” is the pluperfect example of faith.

President Kennedy could not have known how (not the details, anyway) American astronauts would get to the Moon, but he was totally convinced they would get there and return home — safely — even though some of the needed physical materials were not even in existence … had not yet been invented.

Even as I write this, I am reminded of the admonition we find in James: “Faith without works is dead.” JFK believed America would land on the Moon, but it was his faith that led him to make administrative decisions that truly enabled the government’s space program to … well, to take flight.  And that was bold.

At least that’s my opinion.

And I agree with it.

Have a good week.

— Danny McKenzie

A young man came in to see me and said that he thought he was losing his faith. I asked him about his major. “Philosophy,” he said.

“That explains it,” I said. “You’ve been running around with the wrong crowd. But what is this ‘faith’ that you are losing?”

“I am no longer able to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus,” he said. …

“Look, I hate to tell you, but the virgin birth is not the strangest thing we are going ask you to believe.”

“Really?!”

“Really. No, next we’re going to ask you to turn the other cheek rather than turn violent, to look across a communion table and believe these strangers are sisters and brothers, to start thinking that the poor and the outcast are really royalty. We start you out on the virgin birth because we think if you can believe that without choking, we can eventually get you to swallow the really important, really essential stuff about Jesus.”

— DMcK (with an assist to Bill Rice for lending me Willimon’s book.)

By Danny McKenzie
June 13, 1993

While we are engrossed in our public wailing and gnashing of teeth over the state of the world today, we need to take time to consider the manifestations of the Rev. Ernest Fitzgerald.

“The need of our day is not a code of ethics, but a creed,” Fitzgerald told 2,000 or so of us United Methodists congregated last week in Jackson for our annual conference.

In that one so very simple statement, Fitzgerald, retired bishop of the Atlanta Conference of the United Methodist Church, not only identified what is wrong with our society, but also what can be done to correct it.

Fitzgerald’s logic was as plain as his words: A creed, a system of beliefs, would, in layman’s terms, keep us honest. A creed would force us to come to know ourselves better, thereby forcing us to live together in harmony.

So many among us don’t understand their purpose for being. That hardly qualifies as a revelation. A day-to-day existence is the best they can do. Hope is not in their vocabulary.

And there are those who are getting by, some doing quite well, but who still have no purpose in life. They just know they’re supposed to work hard and everything else will take care of itself.

But that, Fitzgerald told us, is not enough. The human mind, he said, demands explanations to the ultimate questions of life, and that the simple accumulation of facts doesn’t always guarantee complete and satisfactory answers.

“We need to not only have something to believe in, but we need to know why we believe in it,” he said. “Our creed determines our behavior.”

Those of us trying hard to be Christians are familiar with the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and many others we read with great regularity – and sometimes pay attention to. Each time we read them we are looking closely at what we profess to believe in and who we, as Christians, are.

Introspection is good for the soul – for the soul of the individual, for the soul of the country.

Our Declaration of Independence is perhaps the closest thing our nation has to a creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. …”

Those very plain words were written by Thomas Jefferson nearly 217 years ago. How powerful have they proven to be?

Mr. Jefferson and those who endorsed his profound document were a group of unusual men whose brilliance was matched only by their courage. Their courage was made strong by their hope.

In the middle of complete chaos and total turmoil, these men determined there could be a better way of life. Seemingly, there was no reason for them to look to the future, but they did and they declared it would not be bleak. So, Mr. Jefferson wrote their “creed,” and they signed it. And the world was changed.

Who among us would say it cannot be changed again?

If, however, our society is to change for the better, those of us in our society must look at how we are living our lives. We need a creed to serve as a set of guidelines for our lives.

The Rev. Jack Meadors, bishop of the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, reminded us that “how we live can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“If we believe that the past was the best we can do, then that is what it will be,” Meadors said in the closing worship session of the annual conference. “But if we believe the best is yet to come, then that is what it will be.”

That, of course, should be the very first item on any creed of any nation or of any society. Understanding, then, that it will not be easy, we must always believe the best is yet to come.

We must have faith.

© Danny McKenzie

The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly the ones in Mississippi, they’re all related . . .
          — Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori
             Opening Address at General Convention 2009

I really need to let some one with better wit and means of expressing it (Danny Mac or Otis) take this one on, but I can’t resist posting at least the quote.  It’s from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s opening remarks at the Episcopal Conference in Anaheim, California.  I’m not sure if she’s complaining about conservatives in Mississippi, or making a joke about first cousins and matrimony.

She does go on to make a statement of theology that’s bound to cause more than a little discussion in the Bible Belt:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.  It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus.  That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.  That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

Okay, class . . . surely someone has a comment to make about one or the other of the foregoing.  The full text of Bishop Schori’s address is here.