Sunday, Sept. 12

Sarah Lucas, our new seminarian/youth leader

Youth Group Runs on Pizza!

First Sunday, Church School kicked off, and (fueled by pizza!) youth made animal noises. (Just ask one of them about it!)

My sermon script is below. If you want to hear the entire interview from "Speaking of Faith," check out this link: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/days-of-awe/

09/12 Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Luke 15:1-10 "Community Under Construction"

If you've ever been through a renovation, you know that being "under construction" is not an easy experience. I've survived a church without a roof where my books got soaked by rain, I've lived in a manse without a kitchen for a month, and most recently in our own home on Cape Cod, the general contractor walked out, declaring bankruptcy, in the middle of the work!

C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, used the image of the reconstruction of a living house to illustrate the painful transformations involved in being a disciple of Jesus. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what God's doing:...getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently God starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is God up to? The explanation is that God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of--throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace and intends to come and live in it.

Church communities often include people who face truly difficult challenges! Long-term health issues. Unemployment that lasts more than a year. Family members who have died, or who can't seem to find the release of death. These realities might seem to be a threat to faith in a good God. But amazingly, some of the hardest hit often have the deepest sense of God at work in their lives.

Again this week, we have texts that create problems. The Prophet Jeremiah offers visions of devastation, of a world that has gone back to the primordial chaos. Everything is without form and void. Darkness is over everything. God declares judgment and seems to say that repentance is out of the question. Neither God nor the people will turn back from destruction.

I wondered why our "Whole People of God" Sunday School curriculum chose this text for Kickoff Sunday, but the theme "Community Under Construction" gives us the clue. From destruction to construction--that's always an option. And indeed, before the new work can begin, there often needs to be some demolition. The new creation comes after the old one has been swept away.

But the Gospel lesson isn't much better. Jesus spends too much time dealing with outsiders, rather than care for the congregation…. But he's building a new community. A Community under Construction.

Our Jewish neighbors are in the midst of the High Holy Days — ten days that span the new year of Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur's rituals of atonement. Christa Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" presented a young rabbi who serves a congregation in LA who are making life-giving connections between ritual, personal transformation, and relevance in the world. I've brought an audio quote:

Growing up in New Jersey, Sharon Brous saw synagogue as a familial obligation and experienced the High Holy Days, in particular, as a trial to be endured. Today, she's a rabbi in the Conservative school of Judaism. And as she approaches the High Holy Days, I wondered how does she bring words like judgment and atonement alive in herself and for her 21st-century urban congregation. How does she understand the meaning of the word teshuvah, often translated as "repentance," which is a watchword for the entire High Holy Day experience?

Ms. Brous: A couple of things. I mean, one for — as alienated as people are by the Hebrew in the prayer book, often the English is far worse than the Hebrew, because using words like that that don't resonate for many of us. At least, the Hebrew, you know that you don't know it, and so there's some kind of air of mystery to it.

Ms. Tippett: OK. Yeah. Isn't the, that word in Hebrew quite visual, like stopping in your tracks and turning around the other direction or something like that?

Ms. Brous: That's exactly what it is.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: It's return. It's literally returning to a right path. And, I mean, the whole Jewish notion of sin is you've just gone astray and you can turn it around. And, you know, the principle, the fundamental principles of teshuvah, of return, is that human beings have free will. We have the capacity to make great mistakes. And we have the capacity to turn it around. And of course, there are certain things that there is no full teshuvah that can be affected for because the damage is irreparable, things like murder and sexual assault, and some kinds of public humiliation, that it's impossible to ever fully turn back.

But for everything else, our tradition says it's possible to turn your life around and to make amends in a way that will heal the breach that you've caused in the relationship, either, you know, with yourself, with God, with someone in the community, with the world. And that's really, I think, also, the ultimate challenge of Rosh Hashanah, which is, we call it, you know, it's — in the prayers, we say, "Hayom harat olam" — "Today is the birthday of the world." And Rosh Hashanah is this, it's this moment in which we celebrate the creation of the world, which meant nothing to me, you know, when I heard that growing up is …

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right.

Ms. Brous: "Today, we celebration the creation of the world," that means nothing.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: But what does mean something to me is the fact that each one of us participates in creation every single day, when we make a choice about how we want to live in the world. And then, you know, there are ways in the liturgy and in the religious — in Jewish religious practice, in which every single day, we strive to kind of identify the things that need to be transformed in our lives. But the tradition also gets that doing it every day sort of, it might lose some of its power. And so we need to have this, you know, this moment in time that's part of the calendrical cycle, that's, you know, sort of built in to the calendar.

Ms. Tippett: This kind of dramatic High Holy Days — where everything stops.

Ms. Brous: Exactly, in which we stop everything.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: And, I mean, even many — you know, secular Jews or people who don't identify, oh, will still stop and kind of recognize it's Rosh Hashanah or it's Yom Kippur. And we have this shofar, which blasts in our ears. And it's not supposed to be beautiful and melodious. It's supposed to really wake you up and say, 'Look at yourself. Are you the mother you want to be? Are you the friend you want to be? Are you the American you want to be? Are you the human being that you want to be in the world?'

This [a hunting horn from Swaine Adeney] is NOT a shofar, but it has some of the same power to wake people up.

The Prophet Jeremiah, and Prophet Jesus, speak a "wake-up call" to the the world. Are we being the kind of persons, and the kind of church, in the world that we want to be? Are we a "Community Under Construction"? We'll need to treat each other with special consideration. We'll understand if some wear the hard hat of defensiveness. We'll be sensitive if some put up yellow "Caution" tape and distance themselves from others. But together we are being built into something magnificent, where God truly dwells. And we (and the world) will never be the same. Amen.

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor