When We Sing, We Pray Twice! 10/27/19 (Reformation)

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

When We Sing, We Pray Twice!

Oct. 27, 2019   Reformation Sunday - Celebrating Congregational Singing

            The phrase I used for the title here is attributed to St. Augustine, from back in the 4th century - that’s the 300’s!!!  - whose writings about Christianity have survived and been kept.  Even though the music of that era sounds pretty different to our modern ears, evidently it spoke to their hearts and emotions like our music does to ours.  Good words can move us on a deep level, too, and not just on the linear and logical level - they can stir us up and capture our feelings.  Joined with music, which has its own appeal to a different part of our human nature, the result can be powerful.  People seem to remember music in a different part of the brain, and even the words set to that music can endure brain damage and some dementia. Music, with its beats and rhythms, stirs us as human creatures, kind of like we might say heart level instead of head level?  Or right brain instead of left brain?  So St. Augustine realized that singing a prayer prayed on two levels at once.  Or worships at two levels at the same time. 

            I know that certain tunes can bring up whole memories, and bring tears from that time, too.  Other tunes can make my arms want to lift in praise.  Some tunes make us want to march joyfully, some make us know the bad guys are creeping up…. or that true love is blossoming. When the right music is found for the right words, it connects parts of us together in ways that we haven’t done - and speaks deeply to our souls.  Music comes from the whole person, and we bring our whole selves to God that way. 

            Evidently in the earliest churches, based on the worship at Jewish synagogues, people sang together in, as the Bible puts it, “songs, hymns and spiritual songs.” I don’t know what they sounded like.  Music that got written down was often just sung by an appointed cantor, or was learned by the monks who sang the Psalms to various tones.  Of course people have always made music with instruments and voices, I just am not sure how much people who attended worship sang together before the Reformation.   Martin Luther was  a German priest whose hopes for reforming what he saw as poor practices in the church he served, ended up excommunicated from the Roman church; and attracting the attention of other church folks, they started their own branch of Christian practice.  One of the sayings he’s known for is, “Why should the devil have all the good music?”  He wrote Christian words to the tunes of bar songs so folks could sing them with vigor. The Reformation is credited with reinventing and revitalizing congregational singing.

Its obvious that the sounds and styles of music changed over the decades and centuries.  So we really shouldn’t be surprised that even in recent years church music continues to change with the various influences of musical styles.  After all, the hymns we might call traditional and think of as suitable church music, were once a new style to earlier people,m and probably looked at askance and questioned if it belonged in church at all.  Music is just a medium, a powerful medium of course; and any style of music can carry the words and experience of faithful people.   When I was a teenager, churches were aghast at rock ‘n roll, and at the way Elvis had brought the sounds of black gospel music into white people’s repertoire.  Now a lot of the Christian music I sang at Christian coffee houses to the accompaniment of 12-string guitarists, is in our hymnals and sung by those like me who are now in their 60s. My parents and my church wondered if it was right to sing about God to rock beats and if guitars should be in church.   In seminary, I read books advising about “the Worship Wars,”  when congregations were fighting and splitting over “contemporary music.” 

That’s a lose-lose situation for a congregation….   Any music can become the carrier of the faith message, and resisting the newer sounds only alienates the coming generations.  I know those of us who are older still love the sounds from our own youth, the sounds we associate with warm memories and experiences of faith back then.  And we know the melodies better.  Its counter-productive, however, to expect the younger generations to groove to what we did.  We can’t freeze time, and we can’t freeze music.  God and the gospel are new every moment, always current.  If we’re smart and forward looking, we will embrace the music that calls and speaks to the upcoming leaders and members as well as the music that still speaks to us.  Musicians are continuously writing new expressions of Christian faith and life.  New hymnals and songbooks from our denominations  seek out good new music to include in the new hymnals being published.  

I mean, even as a child I realized the words to the church songs we sang on Sundays weren’t written in the way people spoke today.  I learned them anyway, and could listen well-enough to get what they were expressing.  I have many fond memories of those songs, even while I was interested in the guitar songs of the coffee house that sounded more like me.  I’ve ended up liking almost any style of music as long as its well-written.  I do miss a congregation that could sing parts, where I could sing my alto and hear tenors, basses and sopranos in the various pews around me.  And I do miss the vigor of the congregational singing back then.  Presbytery meetings, now, and conferences - that’s where I hear that sound again.  When I have an opportunity to sing in a congregation nowadays, people sing more quietly and privately.  It feels different.  Maybe we look more towards the professionals than we used to, I don’t know.  People certainly don’t sing on front porches and around pianos like we used to.  I miss that.  So I enjoy the singing at VBS, and the way the newer styles of music are being used, and the kids jump in. 

This morning we’re going to sing a variety of music, and our choir is seated up front here to help lead us.  I encourage us to sing out, enjoy the music, listen to the words, be a part of the congregational singing. And appreciate the praise that is sent to God on our voices.  AMEN.

Don't Lose Heart, Friend 10/20/19 (Pentecost 19C)

The Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Don’t Lose Heart, Friend  - Keep On Keepin’ On

Oct 20, 2019   Pentecost 19C    Luke 18:1-8

            One of my favorite folk singers is a western Virginian by the name of John McCutcheon -  I’ve been a fan from way back.  Like many folk singers, he often tells stories between songs in his concerts.  I‘ve borrowed one my his favorite lines about storytelling:  “You know, storytellers always tell the truth…  (audience titters a bit)...then in a wry voice, “Just not always factual.” That is kinda the way stories work, isn’t it? Aesop's fables using animals to reveal human behaviors; mythology telling us truths about living that are usually peopled with made up folks. 

            Jesus is a story-teller, too.  We call Jesus’ stories ‘parables.’  There have been different ways of working with these parables through the ages of Christianity.  Quite a ways back,  it was fashionable to look at them as allegories; that is, where there is a one-to-one correspondence, like The Judge represents X, the widow represents Y, her lawsuit represents Z, and so on, and all about the Christian life.  On through a few decades, a scholar named Jeremias started a school of thought that looked at parables as having only one main point, and you either got it or you didn’t.  More recently, parables have been seen as multi-layered, with a recognition that our interpretations may differ because of where and how we have lived, ie our cultures, and our life events.  The most recent method of looking at parables have seen them as terse political commentary on the culture of Jesus’ day, which makes for interesting reading for social commentary on today.  To be sure, while cultures have come and gone since Jesus’ time, the things people get up to really haven’t changed a whole lot, so if we can hear Jesus’ critique on his culture, we can apply it pretty easily to the world we know. I’ve recently read a book called Short Stories of Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine, who, as a Jew herself, adds a unique understanding of 1st century life for Jerusalem and surrounds, plus a good knowledge of Greek and Aramaic.  Those details of life and translation often add depth, too. 

Today’s parable seems to have been taken a certain way for many years, based mostly on the sentence Luke adds at the very beginning, that its supposed to tell us to pray always and not lose heart.  I’ve had trouble with this interpretation since early in my own career.  Let’s look at the story’s details.

The story opens with the main character, a widow.  We may remember from Sunday School that widows (and orphans) are often poor and powerless persons in that century and culture.  Without a husband, brother, father or son to take care of them and their lives, they are virtually invisible in a patriarchal-based culture.  Widows and orphans are basically family-less, and sometimes called “the least of these” in Scripture in both Old and New Testaments.  If you know the musical Les Mis - the word ‘Miserable’ is the word for the ‘least of these,’ the ‘wretched of the earth,’ as one of the songs from Les Mis translates into English.  Widows and orphans are among the powerless, those who are the bottom of the chain, those marginal and almost invisible persons on the underside of human cultures, and they rarely get justice.  So this widow is our protagonist.  People who heard Jesus tell this story would understand that.   

The next character introduced is the judge who ‘neither feared God nor had respect for people.’  He also is a recognizable character - in it for what he could get, buying into the culture that overlooked those of the lower classes, and not caring about their welfare.  “Let them eat cake,” (which is a kind of coal, not a dessert), may describe his attitude.  And it actually sounds like he didn’t even respect ANYone.  He’s been called “The Unjust Judge” in other translations. Its not that he is overwhelmed by the size of the problems of the poor and doesn’t know where to start - its that he likes things the way they benefit himself, and frankly doesn’t care about anything else.

The problem of the parable is that the widow keeps coming to this judge in court, to get justice for some issue that involves her rights. She wants wrong corrected, and right to prevail.  And the judge really doesn’t care, doesn’t see the problem, and wishes it would all go away.  Eventually, the story tells us, he reasons like this - “I neither fear God nor have respect for people,” he says to himself, “but this widow’s persistence is making me look bad.  I’m tired of her and her problem, and she’s giving me a black eye.”  ‘Black eye’ is what Levine says this Greek word really means - I think its a way of saying he’s being damaged in his own status, not looking good to others.  SO…. he grants her the justice she seeks so persistently. 

Now the interpretation I’ve heard all my life says that we ought to be as persistent as that widow, and keep praying day and night, until God answers.  What bothers me about this interpretation is that I hear the story teaching precisely the opposite!  That God is NOT like that unjust judge, but rather cares deeply about us.  The unjust judge is the opposite of what God is like, as revealed by Jesus.  The unjust judge is the foil, the antithesis of God’s response to us, which is caring and loving.  God hears our prayers, God cares for our situations!  God isn’t unconcerned; we don’t have to pound on God’s door to get attention to our situations; we don’t have to wear God out with our own heart’s pain until God finally pays attention and does something just to shut us up!  That is not what God is like!

Sometimes, we might feel that it takes forever for something we’ve prayed about to break open and be addressed.  Here’s my take on this - I think God hears and cares immediately, and that it often takes God a lot of steps before things are addressed.  Maybe WE have to grow; maybe another person has to come to a realization - maybe that person is incapable of acting how we wish they’d act, and we have to come to grips with that ourselves.  Who knows what is going on while we think God is ignoring us?  I believe that God is already working.  I’ve also thought about how God’s idea of ‘immediate’ isn’t like ours -  I mean, the view of our faith on material creation as a work of God is described in the book of Beginnings, Genesis,  as a “day.” It actually took billions of years and lots of steps, our science now knows.  God doesn’t seem to be in the same sense of linear time that we know. 

Well, that’s how I’ve looked at this parable, and its been helpful to me in thinking about issues of justice, like how many years it has taken for the status and treatment of African Americans to be seen as an issue for all of us in our country.  All kinds of bigotry held it back; all kinds of cultural assumptions had to be confronted.  The system here in America worked well for white people - we had little initiative to change it.  It took a long time, and much work and writing to make us take this issue seriously.  It took leaders being raised up and even murdered to bring us to the conviction that this was wrong.  God was working – and it took a long time.

Its now been 60 years since the Presbyterian church began ordaining women to the ministry, and it took more than 25 years of work and advocacy before that positive vote!  THEN the local churches had to see this wasn’t just a theoretical thing, and hire us, which was another long time.  Lots of things have to be addressed before an initial vision of justice becomes reality. 

In preparing for this sermon, I was challenged to see yet another way to view this parable, a new way for me.  I call it the “quit seeing yourself as the good guy, and picture yourself as the bad guy” way of interpretation.  So, what if we’re the unjust judge??? What if the widow’s perspective is the perspective of GOD? Its GOD who is angry at injustices in the world, and GOD who keeps urging us and urging us to do justice for those who are more powerless, and suffering at the injustices of the societies of the world.  Like the unjust judge, we humans take SO LONG to finally see things as God sees them.  In this take on the parable, God identifies with people like that widow - the humble, the powerless, and those who are wronged by the way cultures function.  It not US who long for justice, but God, who has to keep at us and keep at us, gradually enlarging our hearts and our compassion until we care as God already does. 

Play with THAT in your mind for a while!  Its quite a shift in perception, and I think there’s something in it that speaks to what Jesus reveals about God in the rest of his ministry and teaching. Its also the message of all the Old Testament prophets, one after the other - cultures and nations are judged by God based on how the least among them is treated.   Keeping the ways and commandments of God is intricately tied up with the way a community treats the least among them. 

We can look at the examples I made earlier - that it was and is God who awakens consciences and consciousness of people to the injustice going on in our practices  - for example, of enslaving people and misusing our  power over people’s lives in a way that angers God, who cared and cares for ALL people.  God had to work persistently against the way our culture thought of people of color, and what we white folks of the dominant class thought was okay to do.  God even had to open our eyes to seeing how we church folks had misused Scripture to try and prove our bias. 

And that it was God who finally broke through the bad teachings and assumptions about women that, again, we church people had tried to prove through misusing Scriptures.  And the whole culture that accepted a view of women as lesser -0 those things take time to shift.

We could go on - the state of New York required all employers THIS YEAR to institute training to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.  All employers had to accomplish this by Oct 9.   Churches were not exempt - we here at Jamesville Community Church did it, too. 

We could add other current issues of our culture - and any issue we talk about probably has Christ-followers with various points of view as to what faithfulness and justice look like.  Knowing that, we could look at the refugee crisis at our southern border, which many Christ-followers are perceiving as a justice issue as well as a humane issue, and seeing that Scripture calls for us to care for the suffering and treat all people honorably. There is also the ongoing responses to in church and culture to those who are born with a different sexual identity. Even our two contributing denominations here at our church - the United Methodist and the Presbyterians - there have been opposing votes on the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ persons.

  

What I’ve noticed in my own spiritual life is that ever since my heart became more sensitive to injustice, mainly from what I‘ve seen as a clergywoman, my sensitivity to mistreatment and injustice to ANY group of people has increased.  There was a time when none of these issues were on my radar screen, and how things were was unquestioned. 

This morning, I hope looking at this powerful though short story of Jesus, raises up some meaty material for our own talks with God in prayer.  Shortly after the benediction today, as we gather in the Fellowship Hall, we’ll look at the last 100  or so years of our own congregation’s history, and think of how things have changed over the years, and what generations before us faced as faithful believers.  The larger, capital-C Church, in seeking to be faithful, has sought God’s will through wars, economic development and depressions - yet has kept on.  Its our leg of the race now, we’re carrying the torch or the baton, and we celebrate the faithfulness of God through the centuries before and centuries to come.  AMEN.

The WAY of Awareness and Thanksgiving 10/13/19 (Pentecost 18C)

THE WAY OF AWARENESS AND THANKSGIVING

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Oct 13   Pentecost 18C      Luke 17:11-19

            At the retreat/conference that I attended last week, a presenter asked us if we remembered what the early believers in Jesus as the Christ of God were called, before they were called “Christians.”  I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but it popped back into my mind  - the first believers were called “Followers of The Way.”  “The Way,” of course, was the way of Jesus,

 the path of life that Jesus taught, the way of walking in the realm of God, the practices of Jesus’ disciples who lived as he taught.  A Way, a path, a walk, a pattern of life choices that were distinct.  Jesus actually called himself “The Way” - the way one lives for God, the patterns of thought that guide our choices, the path we walk by the light of Scripture, the world view of faith out of which we live and act.  Being a Christian is NOT just a set of beliefs we have to get right!

            So I often use the phrase “Christ-followers” in place of the word “Christian,” for that reason. The other reason is that the word ‘Christian’ has come to mean so many weird things in the media….linked to behaviors and attitudes that to me are actually NOT Christ-like, in fact the opposite of the very love and welcome of God to all people. I am saddened to be characterized or stereotyped in the minds of folks who meet me by my association of what the word “Christian” has come to mean.  I wish the term “Christian” carried associations with humility, justice, love, welcome, respect, honor, and forgiveness.  I wouldn’t mind being identified as one of those.

            See, living in trust of what Jesus taught is what faith is; pondering the insights of Christ is what faith is; seeking to live according to what Jesus modeled is what faith is.  Faith is a lifestyle based on knowing God and God’s word.  Faith is NOT a set of things one says one “believes” while acting, well, however.  Faith is NOT being able to quote a few verses and just be a nice person.  Faith is a living relationship, and a path to follow - a “Way” of being and living. 

            Gratitude, thankfulness, giving thanks, gratefulness to God - these are important aspects of the path of following Christ.  As I pondered on this story of the 10 healed guys and the 1 who returned in gratitude, I realized that this has to be about more than just good manners - Jesus didn’t need to be Dear Abby and tell us to write thank you notes for presents. I searched for and thought about deeper levels he was communicating in this story, because Jesus’ stories were always more than just what’s on the surface. 

 The first thing I notice is that the guy who stops, turns around and returns to express gratitude is, of all things, a Samaritan.  We’ve seen the unexpected Samaritan be the good guy in the story before, in the parable of the Man Who fell Among Thieves - remember that one?  The religious guys pass by this beaten-up man on the road, ignoring him perhaps, or not wanting to get involved because they’re so busy in their religious work.  Who is the true neighbor to the man left for dead?  Its that blasted, no-good, half-caste Samaritan.  Perhaps because he’s discriminated against in his region, he has learned compassion, he has learned to take time and care of those who are hurting.  Perhaps, even though he’s not in the “In” group, religiously, he has developed a deeper spirituality of care for other mistreated folks.  In any case, the Samaritan is the surprise good guy in that parable, and in this one, too.  Its a Samaritan who is the only one of the healed folks who returns to give thanks.  Again, the challenge is for those of us who think we religious folks have dibs on right behaviors towards other people. 

The second thing I notice is that all 10 guys are so overjoyed at being healed that they run, RUN, to see their families and friends again.  They are overjoyed to be healed, bursting with joy.  Maybe there’s one grumbler who thinks he was entitled and just getting what he deserved, finally!!!  But in my way of looking at it, they’re all so glad and excited to be returning to life that they take off!  I bet most of them are grateful, and when things settle down again, they’ll realize it.  What makes one of them, the Samaritan, stop and come back sooner for giving thanks, before running back home?

I wonder if, perhaps, he had already developed, in his own faith life, the ability to see God’s gifts around him.  I wonder if, perhaps, his disease has already sensitized him into an awareness of God’s love and grace supporting him.  I wonder if he has already cultivated the awareness of God’s sustaining presence as a practice of faith.  So that giving thanks is already a habit of the way he lives his faith, even in his illness, his affliction.  So when he is healed of the dreaded disease of leprosy, even in his wildest joy he quickly remembers his gratitude, his indebtedness to God.  Its already a practice, a habit, a path, a way he lives.

 See, when we aren’t thankful, either we’re not paying attention or something’s going on in our soul that needs to be looked at.  Awareness, paying attention, giving thanks in all things - this is part of the path of following Christ.  When we follow Jesus, we live our lives in the midst of the gifts of God, surrounded by the gifts of God - are we not aware of that?  Its easy to overlook all the gifts of God that surround us, to take them for granted, to not be aware.  Are we, for example, aware of the air that surrounds us, that we breathe a zillion times a day?  Not usually - unless something is going wrong with our air, like pollution or smoke, or lung troubles. Then we’re very aware of air, because of its lack.  Air and breathing is connected to the word ‘inspire’ and ‘inspiration’ – we are created, in our faith teaching, of earthy dust and the breath, the air, the inspiration, of the Divine.  The air we rarely notice is actually pretty theological!

There’s a pretty tree at the entrance to the Baptist church just down the street, and I’ve been watching it turn a beautiful color this fall.  I notice its color - but am I aware of how that tree functions as a part of my environment, filtering the air and producing the oxygen I need?         Am I aware of the way my body takes in that air automatically, without my direction?  How my lungs fill with it and how it goes out carried in my blood, making it bright red, flooding my brain so it can think?  Our bodies are miracles of cooperation and balanced functioning, our various systems acting below our consciousness. Our very life depends on such minute processes functioning correctly, and a positive interaction with our outer environment.  Our sciences and medicines are learning more and more of the smallest functions and parts, and actually how to help fix many things that can happen to us. These gifts, and more, surround us at every moment, and when we become aware of them, we give thanks to God who makes and sustains it all. 

Awareness leads us to gratitude.  The way our Christian tradition has developed doesn’t emphasize the development of awareness the way other traditions around the world have.  I think of Buddhist mindfulness, for example, and the awareness of the body and the mind’s intentions that it teaches more explicitly than we have.  In our own tradition there is a comparative path, I think, of remembrance.  Throughout Judaism, people of God are urged to remember what God has done, remember that God has been faithful, remember the great deeds of the past - tell them to our children, speak of them in our houses - - and know that this God is also here and continues to work on our behalf, continues to desire our growth, our freedom, our shalom - wellness, peace.  That this is the God we worship - remember.  

That’s rather like awareness, to me.  When we teach that God created the world, what is that but an awareness that God is responsible for all this, and sustains it, gives it life?  When we teach that God created humans from the dust of the earth and then breathed into us God’s very breath, what is that teaching but an awareness of our connection both to the elements of earth and to the Divine?  God who is Life itself, gives this life to us? Is that not the ultimate awareness of who we are and whose we are?   

If this awareness of God around us, in us, above us, beneath us - is this not a thankfulness to God, from whom all things arise?  In whom all that is has its being?  Who is our beginning and our end? 

And if that is our practice, our faith, our Way - we will be like that Samaritan who remembers quickly to give thanks for the special joys.  Its interesting that in the last line of the story, Jesus says that this man’s faith has made him well.  He’s already healed - and even those who didn't immediately give thanks were healed, too.  But now this one is also made WELL. That’s the last step - awareness, gratitude - and that makes us well.  WELL - despite whatever else is going on, we are WELL. What a promise that is!  Wellness is more than healing, and we can even be made well if we’re not healed - if we walk in the path of gratitude. If we walk in the assurance and remembrance of God who makes all things well.  AMEN.