Scriptures for Sunday, June 30, 2019
Psalms 77: 1-2 & 11-20
2 Kings 2:1-14
Galatians 5:1 & 13-25
Luke 9: 51-62

I am writing on Monday, one day after our (delayed) Bethel Annual Meeting.  I am very proud of our church members who made the commitment and the effort to attend and take their part in it.  Your faithfulness gives hope for God’s work here.
Bethel is the type of church known as “congregational”: that is, its leadership and rules are voted upon by its members in open meetings. 
Many churches are not like this at all.  They may have a group of leaders with powerful traditional authority who choose their own successors, as the Roman Catholic Church has done for nearly two thousand years.  Or they may use a combination of voting by members and rule from the “top,” as Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others do.  Each denomination has its own ways.
Congregational ways are not automatically better than the ways other churches do things: if the members of a congregational-style church become lazy or otherwise fail to show up and pay attention, it can quickly go to hell in a handbasket.  The same is true of the leadership of other types of churches, as we see, all too often, in the news.  Bad leaders bring the downfall of their institutions, unless the membership somehow rises up and sets things right.  At worst, poorly-functioning churches are no better than badly-run, worldly businesses.
As I moved from reflecting on yesterday’s Annual Meeting to this week’s Scripture lessons, a single word came into focus:  discipleship.
Discipleship is a vital theme in our Christian way of life, and it strikes me that discipleship— or lack of it— will prove to be the deciding factor in how our Bethel moves into God’s exciting future, or it winks out of existence with a sigh or a whimper.
Check out these Scripture passages:
Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as Bethel.”
But Elisha said, “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.”  So they went down to Bethel. ...
Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.”
Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.”
He responded, “You have asked a hard thing.”
                                          2 Kings 2:2, 9-10
 
And from the gospel:
As they were going along the road, someone said to [Jesus], “I will follow you wherever you go.”
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
To another he said, “Follow me.”
But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”                     Luke 9:57-62

In the ancient world, discipleship meant staying with one’s teacher and imitating the teacher’s way of life.  Elijah took Elisha to be his disciple.  When Elijah disappeared in the “sweet chariot,” Elisha took up Elijah’s mantle— and his job description. 
Jesus invited twelve men whom he called disciples, and many other women and men followed him with varying degrees of intensity.  Jesus calls us, now.
For Christians, perhaps the most stirring commandment that Jesus gave his disciples was this: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.  And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
                                           Matthew 28:18-20
Notice that Jesus did not tell them to make church members or build buildings:  he told them to "make disciples."  This means that we followers of Jesus are to imitate him by being with other people and demonstrating the Jesus way of life, day in and day out... and those who follow us will do the same.  
When Jesus said, “I am with you always,” he was talking about the Holy Spirit, Who is present with us as we strive to live as Jesus showed us.  The Holy Spirit gives us gifts to help us in our disciple-making:
the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
                                           Galatians 5:22-23

Scriptures for Sunday, June 23, 2019
Psalms 42 and 43
1 Kings 19:1-15
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8: 26-39

Summer officially arrives this week, with the Summer Solstice making this Friday the longest day of the year.  At Noon on Friday, the sun will appear as high in our sky as it ever gets.  Don’t strain your neck, or your eyes, looking at it!
Summertime, for many people in our culture, is a time of kicking back and relaxing.  We all need a fair dose of that.  But we can choose to take advantage of the change of pace— perhaps retreating into a cool place for a siesta ?— to catch up with some things we know we ought to do, but we don’t... when the world is calling us to be busy, busy, busy.
One such opportunity— to do something we know we should— is the exercise session now happening at the church, each Tuesday and Thursday at 6 PM.  The exercises are gentle, and we are instructed to hold back from going too far in any direction that brings pain.  So far, we’ve met three times, and it’s been pleasant.  We know it’s good for our bodies.  Research supports the notion that a healthy body is good for our minds, as well.
And then there are our spirits.
If you are going somewhere “away” this Summer, you are probably planning leisure activities such as sightseeing, shopping, hanging out on the beach or the river, and the like.  Consider planning where you will go for worship, as well.  The internet gives us ample resources to check out the options.  At our worship service in Elk Run Cemetery in May, we were blessed by the visit of a couple on their honeymoon!  They had located our church building online, and when they got there and found us “out,” they tracked us down to Elk Run!  How far would YOU go to worship God while you’re “away” ?
Also for our spirits: opportunities to read and dig deeper to understand your Bible and grow your relationship with God through prayer.  Most Thursdays, we have Bible study at Journeys Crossing.  Not only do we spend time in the Bible: we listen to one another and draw closer as friends and neighbors.  Then on most Sunday evenings, we have Bible study at church.  Currently, we are finishing up reading through the book of Isaiah.  It gives us a wealth of food for discussion and growth.
And each week, we publish the Scripture lessons that will be featured in our Sunday worship service.  
You can look them up and read them at your “leisure.”

Now that we are in the part of the Church Year called “ordinary time,” we will get back to this year’s main source of gospel lessons: Luke.  From other New Testament writings, we will read in Galatians, Colossians, Hebrews, Philemon (it’s short!!), 1 and 2 Timothy, and we’ll end the church year by reading in 2 Thessalonians.  This year, for our “ordinary time” Old Testament readings, we will start in the books of Kings before wandering through several of the Minor Prophets and spending significant time with “the weeping prophet” Jeremiah, including the Book of Lamentations which is connected to him.
Our Psalms (42 and 43) this week probably originally were one psalm, but somehow got assigned two separate numbers along the centuries of hand-copying.  It is mostly a song of lament— of upset and sorrow in a world where things are not going as we want them to. 
Here is Psalm 42: 3 & 9:
 
My tears have been my food day and night,
     while people say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
I say to God, my Rock,
     “Why have You forgotten me?
Why must I walk about mournfully
     because the enemy oppresses me?”
 
Lament: we have permission to hold our troubles before God and demand answers.
This week, I found an interview that acclaimed Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann gave to the radio program, On Being in December, 2011.  

https://onbeing.org/programs/walter-brueggemann-the-prophetic-imagination-dec2018/

He said, “at least one-third of the Book of Psalms are songs or prayers of sadness and loss and grief and upset, so that very much the Old Testament experience of faith is having stuff taken away from us.  What’s so interesting is that in the institutional church with the lectionary and the liturgies, the whole business of lamentations has been screened out because….
The interviewer, Krista Tippett said, “Because we don’t know what to do with those depressing passages.”  And she laughed.
The Rev. Dr. Brueggemann replied, “Yeah, and we don’t want to.  Because of consumer capitalism, you just go from triumph to triumph to well-being to ease to prosperity, and you never have any brokenness.”

Well, we’ll see about that.

SCRIPTURES for Sunday, June 16, 2019 
Psalm 8
Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31
Romans 5:1-5
John 16: 12-15

After the Day of Pentecost comes a season of rest from church holidays and festivals.  We have filled the weeks since last November with Advent and Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter Day and fifty days in which to study and meditate on Easter... until now: Pentecost season.  Pentecost reminds us that God gave us the Holy Spirit. 
We open this “ordinary time” by calling attention to the nature of God, the Three-in-One.  This has always been the nature of God, but we humans have been struggling to grasp it since before Jesus sat down with Nicodemus, a couple of thousand years ago (John 3).  A hundred years or so into the Christian era, a teacher named Tertullian invented a word for God’s three-fold nature, and it stuck: “Trinity.”  That’s a mash-up of “three” and “unity.”
Christian teachers have devised all sorts of ways to try and communicate the truth of the Trinity, but as Elvis Costello said (originally in reference to writing about music), it’s kind of like “dancing about architecture” – it’s nearly impossible to do.
The Bible’s way of communicating the truth of the Trinity is storytelling.  When God was creating the earth, the Spirit was moving over the face of the deep.  Prophets foretold that the Son of God would come into the world.  Baby Jesus was born in a stable, in a manger.  Jesus got baptized, but the Baptizer prophesied that Jesus would go on to baptize with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus conducted his earthly ministry by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And Jesus promised his followers that, when he was no longer with them in the flesh, the Father would give the Holy Spirit to them.  And that came true after Jesus returned from the dead, after he ascended into heaven, at Pentecost.  Do you see in these stories the interplay of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ?
When I read today’s StillSpeaking Daily Devotional,
                  [subscribe at https://www.ucc.org/daily_devotional ]
I thought maybe it could serve as a way of applying the truth of God the Three-in-One to our stories today.  Look in it for the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Keep in mind that Jesus suffered for us, with us.  This is written by Vince Amlin, co-pastor of Bethany UCC, Chicago, and “co-planter of Gilead Church Chicago, forming now.” 
 
                          The Years the Locust Has Eaten
"O children of Zion,
   be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God.
I will repay you for
  the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
  the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter,
  my great army, which I sent against you.
Then afterward
  I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
  your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
  your old men shall dream dreams,
  and your young men shall see visions."
                                      - Joel 2:23a, 25, 28
Sometimes biblical narratives of restoration strike me as too simple.  Too uncomplicated.
Like when Job receives a new family to replace the one he lost, as though that were an even trade.  Or when God promises through Joel, “I will repay you for the years the locust has eaten,” as if good years somehow erased bad.
But trauma echoes.  In bodies and communities.
I remember learning in a human paleontology class that signs of childhood malnutrition were present in the fossilized remains of an adult some tens-of-thousands of years later.  The years the locust has eaten are written into our bones.
Pain and oppression have lasting consequences, scrawled across generations.  And a better world today (or maybe tomorrow?) is not enough to heal past harm.  It doesn't begin to be enough.
It's hard to imagine what ever could be.
So God sends a new imagination, pours out a greater vision.
A dream of true restoration.  Of meaningful reparations.  Of healing, down to the bone.
May all flesh receive it.
Prayer
Spirit of Restoration, be poured out over us.  Give us greater understanding of the trauma that echoes within and around us.  And greater imagination for a world in which it can grow quiet and still, truly healed.

[Dan here, again ! ]  Look!  God creates.  People rebel.  Jesus calls us to repent, and we are saved.  Jesus suffers with us and leads us to new life.  The Spirit lends us imagination to see God’s perfect plan.  God creates things anew.  And around and around.  
Come, celebrate the mysterious Trinity.

SCRIPTURES for  PENTECOST
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:24-35
Acts 2:1-21
Romans 8:14-17
John 14:8-17, 25-27

This coming Sunday is the Day of Pentecost, the anniversary of God’s Holy Spirit coming to the church.  The Jewish festival called Pentecost celebrated the early harvest.  It is also known as the “Feast of Weeks,” seven weeks after Passover, day fifty.                  

                                                  (7 x 7) + 1 = 50.

After the resurrected Jesus went up, up, and away from his followers, they waited in Jerusalem as he had told them to do.  They prayed together a lot, and spent their time in the Temple. 
Then, during the Pentecost festival, something really strange broke out among them: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.... about God’s deeds of power.” (Acts 2:4 and 11).  Visitors who had come to Jerusalem for the festival from foreign countries were able to understand the message in their own native languages.  Jesus’ disciples told everyone about God raising Jesus from death to life!
This event at the beginning of the church’s story raises numerous issues for us today, when we are still trying to be the church.  One issue is language. Rather than make all of the foreigners in Jerusalem understand Hebrew (or Aramaic), the Holy Spirit made the Apostles able to speak the various languages of the foreigners!  The Apostles were fairly ordinary Palestinian Jews: fishermen and so forth.  Nevertheless, by the power of the Holy Spirit, they were transformed into translators.
In our current situation, when many Americans are troubled to hear languages other than English spoken, the Pentecost story reminds us that God does not like the English language any better than Farsi or Creole or Korean. God likes his people to get past their differences.
“For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--
   Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--
   and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”      
                                          -1 Corinthians 12:13
 
                            †                      †                      †
On Sunday, we will hear about the coming of God’s Holy Spirit, from two different sources in the New Testament:  The Gospel according to John and the book of the Acts of the Apostles.  In John, we hear Jesus promise to send the Holy Spirit to his disciples and to anyone who would follow him; in Acts, we hear how the Holy Spirit actually showed up on the Day of Pentecost in the city of Jerusalem. 
As one gets familiar with the New Testament, it becomes clear that these two documents came from very different authors who worked within distinct communities of Christians.  In Acts, the Holy Spirit is always called “Pneuma Hagion,” which can be translated “Wind / Breath / Spirit Holy.”  But in the Gospel according to John, Jesus promises to ask his Father to send his disciples the “Paraclete,” which he says is the same as the Holy Spirit (see John 14:26).  The only New Testament writer who calls the Holy Spirit the Paraclete is John.
Untold numbers of books, sermons, and articles have been written about the mystery of the Paraclete.  At the most basic level, a “paraclete” means someone who is called to one’s side.  In general, you could say that you call someone to come and help.  Among the ancient Greeks, as well as other groups who ended up using the Greek language, this word paraclete most often referred to a lawyer, someone whom you could call upon to stand by your side and speak for you when a judge or some other authority figure was on your case.  The Latin-language translation of paraclete is advocatus: this is where we get the word, ‘advocate.’  To this day, in languages that come from Latin, a lawyer is an ‘abogado,’ an advocate.

Human lawyers are often stereotyped as weaselly characters who take all your money, and, if you’re lucky, they may use their tricks and technicalities to get you out of trouble.  Not exactly “holy.”

But then, how is the Holy Spirit like a lawyer?

In the New Testament, John tells us two ways:
One, the Paraclete will be with us and in us and among us forever, to “teach you everything, and remind you of all that [Jesus has] said to you.” (John 14:26)  The Holy Spirit is an ‘inner Counselor,’ who always helps us stand up to the wicked world, as Jesus did.
Two, through the Paraclete, Jesus himself advocates for us with the Father.  The Spirit of God lives in you and me, helping us stay right with God, as Jesus in his time on earth helped his disciples.
                                     (John 14:16, 1 John 2:1)
 
                             ...send forth Your Spirit... 
                                           - Psalm 104:30