SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
TEXT:18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. THEME: A wise view of the cross sees love. INTRODUCTION Which is wiser; to spend our time arguing with our mother or to just do what she asks us to do (which will probably take 5 minutes, an hour tops if we do a good job)? We may complain at first, at coming home as a grown adult, and being saddled with chores to do. But once the spoil child calms down and remembers that these are things our mother is unable to do for herself and she could use our help while we are visiting with our family. After all, not only did she raise us to be the fine human being we are today, but she also paid for our seminary education and housed us for free when we came back to work for the church and gave us the down payment for our house. It only took a few minutes to complete the task and knowing we are appreciated for being the good child. Maybe the next time there won’t be a complaint but just get right to it, saving energy for chasing the kids at the beach. Maybe this sacrifice is about relationships, helping each other, doing what we can to contribute to each other’s lives. It’s a sacrifice, a giving up a part of ourselves for the benefit of someone else. It is not a payment to settle a debt. It is about loving. SCRIPTURE Yes, the people at the Corinthian Church are still at it. This is the third part of the first chapter in Paul’s letter. This time they are trying to figure out what is wise and what is foolish. It begins with the last verse of last week’s reading, “the message of the cross is Foolishness to those who are perishing…" Before we get sidetracked by the argument, of what is foolish to God is wiser than any human wisdom… Let’s remember that all of this is set in the context of relationships, and that the church in Corinth has taken sides and build divisions instead of building bridges. They are practicing dominance and power over humility and love. If it is human wisdom that has gotten them into this mess, it is going to take God’s wisdom to create the people of God out of this foolishness. The answer my friends is in a wise view of the cross. The cross is about relationships. Later, in another letter to another church (this time in Rome) the Apostle Paul will talk about nothing, (not mentioned but including sin), being able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus. (Rm. 8:39) We have taken our loving parent God and turned our perception of God into that of a Judge of humanity, who requires payment for our offenses and reparations that we will never be able to afford. We have solved this impossible equation with belief in a miraculous sacrifice. But this is not free forgiveness because it comes at the price of a violent sacrificial death. Then we apply this same formula in our graceless relationship that have fallen short in breaching reparations before forgiveness can be achieved, creating unreconcilable chasms of hurt, betrayal, and anger. Our legal court systems have foolishly thought that money can bridge this gap. Money has never been a replacement for a life that has been lost. But this is how we have cheapened our view of the cross. It has become a violent transaction of debt abatement, void of the real power of God’s love, grace and forgiveness. Richard Rohr says that Jesus takes away the sin of the world by exposing sin as ignorant violence and by refusing the usual pattern of revenge. Violence only destroys. Jesus replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. He showed us on the cross how to hold pain and let it transform us, rather than pass it on to others around us. Marcus Borg adds to this discussion by stating that animals were sacrificed in the temple, but not as payment for sin. Its root meaning is “making something sacred by giving it as a gift to God,” (and is almost always involving a meal.) Sacrifices in Judaism served a number of purposes: thanksgiving, petition, purification, and reconciliation. But they were not about “payment.” Rather, a sacrifice of reconciliation was about restoring the relationship (“make up” with a gift and meal, flowers and dinner. But it was not about payment or a substitution of some sort. The cross is a way, for personal transformation and God’s passion for a transformed world. Wisdom from the cross and the sacrificial death of Christ is about relationships, helping each other, doing what we can to contribute to each other’s lives. Sacrificing, a part of ourselves for the benefit of someone else. It is not a payment to settle a debt. It is about loving. APPLICATION Jesus dying on the cross calls us to a different reality, with a different set of values and different way of understanding the power of God, through love. How do we to live differently displaying signs of foolishness and weakness? We have an unsolvable problem in the Hawaii Conference of the United Church of Christ. In 1893, during the annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom by the United States of America, the Churches of our denomination in Hawaii were silent over this illegal act. As the spiritual descendants of these churches, there are churches today that have polarized this issue and are asking for reparation from the Hawaii Conference for their complicity. There are angry feelings about how our ancestors in faith should or should not have behaved at that time. In 1993, Paul Sherry, the President of the United Church of Christ made an apology for the role our Church played at that time. The Hawaii Conference since then has done reparations with money, land and resources. But at this last Aha Pae’aina these old wounds surface as funding for a resource person specific to the Hawaiian Congregations was not appropriated. In my opinion when we see Jesus’ violent death on the cross as a payment for our sins, it creates a pattern where reparations need to be made to settle a debt before forgiveness can take place. If we adopt this precedence, then we negated grace, and have not replaced works with faith. We are sacrificing our relationship with each other because we do not see the Power of God’s Love on the cross as Jesus holds pain and lets it transform, rather than pass it on to others around us. Without grace, love and forgiveness, the Hawaii Conference will suffer a violent death. CONCLUSION Over the last few weeks in preparing for preaching over these passages from Corinthians, I have wrestled with the sacred and sanctified, Original sin and Maturing into responsible human beings, the Lamb of God and Sacrifices, Adam and Eve in the Garden and God caring for Adam and Eve out the garden and the view of the cross. There are all kinds of details and perspectives that can take us down a variety of paths as we seek truth, but one thing is for certain, God is about relationships, and all though we may hold different thoughts of importance in what we believe, God can put up with a broad range of our theological conclusion as long as it continues to inform how we treat each other with grace, grow in love for each other, and behave with manners and respect for all and not just for a few as we have faith in God and believe in Jesus. Although we may complain, sacrificing a bit of ourselves, to do good for others is a blessing. It is not about paying a debt, but about loving. I want us to see this as the power of God on the cross as love, that holds onto pain, for our transformation, rather than to pass it on to others around us…saving our energy for chasing the kids on the beach.
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SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
TEXT: 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. THEME: Finding power for eloquent love in the cross of Christ. INTRODUCTION Kung Hee Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year. In 1941, the Rev. Kim On Chong, was the last pastor of the Wailuku Chinese Church as it closed its doors on Market and Wells, across the street from the Wailuku swimming pool. Some of its members joined Wailuku Union Church. Part of our spiritual heritage became linked to those who came from China to Maui to find their fortunes and found faith in Christ. Although our backgrounds are varied, we find our commonality in Christ. We are different from each other, with our own particularities, but we do not reduce everything as universals and are willing to accept each other for who we are, making us diverse and not divided. We have our different languages, cultures, theological slants, values, political views, but everyone matters, we value each other, we are willing to learn from each other, are enriched by each other and work together for Christ. We agree on most things but are gracious, patient and accepting of each other when we don’t. The church in Corinth had elements of this diversity but they saw them as difference, competitiveness and used those peculiarities to cause divisions. SCRIPTURE The Apostle Paul draws attention to these divisions while trying to turn their focus upon the common work of Christ on the cross. Tom Hollan, Christian author and historian, says the cross embodies everything weak and foolish. The ways of Christ are not the same as those of the world. Christ is the victim as Jesus lays his life down. Matched against the political power of Roman Empire, the political crosshairs of King Herod and the resources of the temple Religion of Chief Priest Caiaphas, Jesus refuses to stop his ministry of love and continued to act to overcome the world’s systems of oppression, by creating freedom for us in its stead. What seems as weakness was the power of God’s love. Tom Hollan falls in line with the idea of Creation being ‘good’ but not ‘perfect’. The Creator is God and is unchangeable and worthy of worship. Creation is changeable and should not be feared or worshipped. According to this perspective, Creation is God’s temple. Christians are God’s technicians with the ability and gifts to use creation to create, and reflect God’s character in the world. We have the potential to radically change the world with the power of God’s love. APPLICATION What happened on Christ’s cross that should stop us from having divisions in the Church? The faith we inherited believed that our sin required a payment to satisfy an angry God, but what if forgiveness does not require a payment? What if God’s grace and love for us is enough, so we don’t need Jesus to die before we can be forgiven? Forgiveness is in the context of relationships, grace, love and peace, and not making sacrificial payment to fulfill a debt. That is works not grace. This goes back to how we treat each other. Of our behavior when someone holds an opinion that is different from our own. Or whose bright idea is doesn’t seem that bright. Or when we hear of an ancestral story of hurt and betrayal that leads to deep seeded pain today. The power of God’s love can give us the ability to listen without judgment, to be patient. To not try to fix their hurt, and to pray for them. Before the pandemic (BP April 2019), the ‘Aha O Nā Mokupuni ‘O Maui, Molokaʻi A Me Lānaʻi brought Eric Law to do a workshop on Holy Currencies. Relationships were one of the currencies of the church that he identified but he said that he was surprised at the inability of church people, to hold a conversation where all they did was talk about themselves. He advocated that we would have a “Holy Curiosity” in our conversation with someone we didn’t know, and refrain from only talking about ourselves to ask them questions about themselves from our interest in them. As obvious as this may seem, it is important for us to be aware of this dynamic, so we can foster new relationships. During the Pandemic we were sheltered in and were isolated. Moving out of the Pandemic (AP 2023) we have lost our capacity for friendly chit chat, so this skill has become dormant and we need to foster again to build relationships with others as people of grace, love and forgiveness. These conversations will give us a back story where we can have more empathy for why a person thinks the way they do. We may not still agree with them but we have an understanding that helps us to be more gracious with them. God does not seem to be as concern about right theology as we are, because our theology keeps changing with new revelations and there are so many different varieties of Christianity. God actually seems to tolerate a lot of diversity. We have been so obsessed with what we need to do, to keep us from perishing that we have missed out on adding to the quality of our living for the examples of a loving God. CONCLUSION The heart of God is relationship. Fellowship in the garden of Eden, fellowship with us here on earth and fellowship with us in heaven. It is easy for our anxiousness to portray God in the colors of Crime and Punishment. But through our Holy Curiosity with others and God, we will get a different portrait of God that we never even considered. This comes as we are willing to discover God’s shards of light in every person and every event. This is the power of the cross of Christ, the power of God’s love. SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
TEXT: 9God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. THEME: What we know about God shapes us to Live differently from others who have not experienced God in the same way INTRODUCTION The church in Corinth is fractured with some for Apollos, some for Paul and some for Cephas. Spiritual gifts have them competing for notoriety while others are without gifts (I assume that made them feel inferior), multi-cultured, rich and poor, these differences split this church into different camps. Paul opens his letter to them with their common identity as being sanctified in Christ, but as humans we like to regulate the movement of God and quantify spiritual things for comparisons. We want things uniformed when they don’t need to be. In this setting, the church is at odds with themselves, unable to appreciate their particularities. SCRIPTURE Paul launched into this grand address of the sacred and the sanctified. This is a good discussion for us today. We may not see ourselves like the church in Corinth but our beginnings as a church in Wailuku was by our differences and our shared sanctification. Our churches were built up as separate camps, separated from each other as Japanese, Hawaiian and Haole. All unique, special, different from each other with separate languages and cultures. Don’t get me wrong, worshipping in a language that you can understand is extremely important. Not to mention language, as being a vehicle that contains our cultural identity. Having cultural values that you can appreciate enriches our lives. But in today’s setting, our language, although important is not something that separates us as before. At the last Aha Pae’aina that was held on Maui, we were asked to bring an ethnic entree to feed the delegates on the Taste of Maui opening dinner. Wailuku Union Church couldn’t think of a particular ethnic dish that would represent our church’s culture. So, we sit in our camps, fractured by our own sacred buildings, our theologies, our own experiences with God, and our particular way of doing things, sanctified but separated from each other. As Paul’s letter comes to us today, he is asking us, How should the sanctified behave together and in the world? The words Sacred and Sanctified come from a similar root which means holy. Holy does not mean better than someone else, all it means is set apart. To be holy is to be set apart for God. What we know about God through Jesus Christ makes our experience of God different from how the rest of the world has experienced God. In this address to the church Paul calls them together by a common calling of Christ that makes them saints, apostle and gifted. A common grace that they received through Jesus and sanctifies them, into a family, as siblings of a holy parent, as a common community the Church, aka the fellowship that has a common purpose as they wait together for the Reign of Christ. APPLICATION So, sanctified by our experience of a gracious God through Jesus Christ, how do we live our new found peace with God in the world, while displaying these nuances in our livings with our siblings in Christ? In thinking about this I made two generalized lists; the first of how is the church seems to be coming across today and the second on how I want our churches to be known in our community. First, the church seems to be coming across as close minded and judgmental. Unkind and unloving, hypocritical because they don’t do what they say, mean spirited, pious, self-righteous, regulatory, homophobic, all about money and power, stingy administrators of God’s prodigal grace, backwards, old fashioned, and treats all as ‘sinners’ first so they can later come to save us. This is how the church is sometimes represented on TV, the news and in the media. The second list is how I hope the church would be known; for love, kindness, acceptance, grace, justice, respect, ecology, welcome, friendly, purposeful, generous, smart, open, engaging, provocative, wise, communal, relational, spiritual and animated following in God’s way. Certainly, these are not comprehensive lists but off of the top of my head, fodder for pondering. This goes in line with what Paul is addressing in his Corinthian letter, ‘How saints, gifted with grace are to behave; with each other, as a community, in the world and with other saint communities.’ As we chew on that, instead of taking each one of those topics and exploring their implications, I am going to make a jump to talk about our building. We are a sanctified people who worship in a sacred space. What is sacred about our sanctuary or grounds? It is the place of our religious celebration of births and solace in sorrow. This is the place where we have made the transformations of our lives known. For some this is the place of our coming home or being at home. This is the place where our community sits down for meals at Christ’s table and where we pray our toughest prayers. A thin place where the nearness of God can be felt. Could we possibly share this place with someone else who would not feel the same way about our sanctuary? What if they don’t feel the specialness of this space in the same way? Or worst does something in it that we would never do? This is a place where God has met us, for generations, over and over again. Our sanctuary does not hold God but we bring its sacredness to it. Its purpose is to house our worship and fellowship of God, but not to be the object of our mission or worship. So, imagine if we turned this around, so that our building was not a drain of our resources but by charging other groups to use our sanctuary, it could help pay for its up keep, insurance and God’s ministries through us. It would become an asset of God ministry and allow us to have more resources to create beyond what we thought was financially possible. As stewards of this gift of God we would have to draw up good legal understandings that represent our sanctuary’s sacredness and protect us, but it could be possible. Where ever we have felt a closeness to God is Holy Ground, but it does not remain Holy on its own. Maybe this is why, at the Transfiguration of Jesus, Peter was not allowed to build shelters to commemorate the event. We like to make markers as if they could hold onto our ever-moving God. CONCLUSION When God creates in Genesis, the pronouncement of what was made was ‘good’ not ‘perfect’. Being ‘good’ means we are able to change, evolve and to do better. What is good is not perfect, to be worshipped or is unchangeable. It is not the created that is to be worshipped but the Creator God. ‘Good’ reveals part of God’s mission for us as we have the opportunity to participate in creation, to build with it, to make improvements and to evolve in our own particular way causing diversity not uniformity. Hawaii Public Radio had a broadcast where they talked about Hawaii’s indigenous hibiscus and through the Hibiscus Society has created over 1,000 hybrid versions of the hibiscus. This is like the grace, gifted to the church, from Christ Jesus, enriching and gifting us to create fellowships with God and opportunities for others to discover this grace by the way we behave. Knowing God shapes what we do, nurtures our relationships and enriches our communities with diversity not divisions. SCRIPTURE: Revelation 21:1-6a
TEXT: 21:1Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven an THEME: Living in a new way with God and others. INTRODUCTION Have you ever moved to a new place to live? What do you bring with you? What do you leave behind? What is no longer relevant? What new things do you need to get? Over the course of the last few weeks my garage has been demolished and rebuilt and now it is empty, and uncluttered, But I don’t want to put anything in it. Not even the cars. This is what this passage in Revelation is all about. New digs for God that has an impact on our living arrangements. SCRIPTURE Heaven is the place where God lives and Earth is the place where we live. But in verse 1, three things are demolished: heaven, earth and the sea. The Israelites don’t get along with the sea. The ‘sea’ represents their fear of the great unknown. Winds and waves can act up for no reason, as well as giant leviathans who swim in the deep and could swallow you up whole like Jonah. The meaning of revelation is up for grabs. There were some people who may have said they figured it out but unless you were the first readers of this letter, the symbolism and references are lost and one guess is just as good as another. For this reading of Revelation, the sea is the fear of death that is passes away with belief in the resurrection. That being said, where do we live? The New Heaven and the New Earth are made up the same components but in a different configuration. This is the vision God, is giving John the author of Revelation, of our living arrangements, that the dwelling place of God and our dwelling place would be one and the same. When couples were engaged in those days, the groom was supposed to build their home. After he built a home, they got married. In this image, God provides a city as a sign to end our engagement and for our marriage covenant with God to unite. The home of God is among mortals.3b Wrapping our minds around this, we have God, the Creator of all things who breathes life into us, dwelling among us. Death will be no more; Mourning will be no more. And crying and pain will be no more. This is full circle from the Garden of Eden to the New Heaven and New Earth where God and ourselves dwell together. APPLICATION God has had this vision of our dwelling together since forming us out of the dust of the ground in Eden. We on their other hand, don’t care for God being so close to us. We like to keep God at a distance in Heaven. At bay so we can indulge in our own folly without feeling guilty about it. But what if we begin to see the dwelling in the New Heaven and New Earth more as a marriage than a standard of righteousness, where our lives cohabitate with God. Where what we think we are giving up is pale in comparison to the richness we gain in our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is engaging, affirming, helping us to be our best selves while expanding our horizons as we participate with God, doing things that we have never done before. We lack imagination to think what living with God would look like. As many people who has ever lived are the ways to live with God. Our human tendency is to regulate and conform our experiences so they can be judged and scrutinized. But humans are unique, each personality is unique, and each have their own particular ways of dwelling with God. Then what of the community of God, the church, how does God dwelling among us change who and what we are? We dwell with God now, not waiting for death. The church dwells with God. We live not trying to escape judgment, but in loving acceptance and grace. The church is not angry, scolding people, or up against some evil. With God dwelling with us, we have the capacity to love, accept, be patient, do kindness and care for others. We have not always been understood and have been persecuted and oppressed because we play by a different set of values. We value and respect people over money or power and advocate loving treatment of all and respect. This is how we show that God is dwelling inside of us. We support each other because we still grieve. It is easy to get tempted, and lost. And we continue to learn more about God because just when we think we’ve got it, God is able to reveal another facet of Glory that we’ve never considered. Our Theology is ever evolving, tested, refined and informed. This is why, as many churches are worrying about the decline of membership, which also impact their sustainability, we pray about our Affordable housing project. And if this could be a model that other churches could copy. We are dreaming about what kind of impact it may have for our neighbors, born and raised on Maui being given a chance to raise their families on Maui. We are talking with our neighbor churches about what kind of things we can do together so we don’t need to duplicate services but share our resources. All of these ideas come with our thinking about ourselves, the church, God’s call and our resources in different ways. All part of God’s dwelling among us. Last observation about God dwelling among us, this makes God is discoverable. In nature, in the lives of Christians, through the activities of the Church and us just being who we are dwelling with God, makes the invisible God visible, dwelling among mortals. CONCLUSION I am going through the things I took out of my garage and deciding if I am going to put it back in there or not. How am I going to keep it in place? New shelves, new containers, new tools? New digs mean new way of living. New organization. Less cluttered lives, aligned with Church purpose. Now I have a place to put those boxes in the house that we walk around. As pristine as the Garage may look, its value to me is in being utilized. Through Christ and the Holy Spirit, the space between God and ourselves is nonexistent. Its purpose is for God to be a part of our lives and for us to be part of God’s. We can find creative ways to do this, dwelling together, God did is once with Jesus, and continues to do it today, “See, the home of God is among mortals”. New Digs. |
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April 2024
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