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Life Taken, Life Protected, sermon of Rev. Fred Kinsey

5/17/2015

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Readings for Easter 7B, May 17, 2015
  • Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 
  • Psalm 1 
  • 1 John 5:9-13  
  • John 17:6-19

Life Taken, Life Protected
As I researched the origins of ECRA, the Edgewater Community Religious Association, for our Sacred Seeds Inter-faith event later this afternoon, I came across this story that Rabbi Shaalman shared with the Edgewater Historical Society: It was after recounting how Pastor Baum of the Edgewater Presbyterian Church came knocking on his door at Emanuel Congregation some 55 years ago, and how they had struck up and friendship and first began inviting other clergy and congregations to form ECRA.  Edgewater was growing, and even in those days included significant racial diversity, though less tolerant, apparently.  One of the members who joined was Pastor Pomeroy of Bethany Lutheran Church who one day made Rabbi Shaalman, aware of the racial tensions over at Senn H.S., and that it seemed possible they might boil over into actual violence.  So Pastor Pomeroy and Rabbi Shaalman who had become fast friends, headed over to Senn.  Apparently the school was trying to address it in some sort of an open forum, but it took the “Rabbi and Pastor” actually getting in between the two opposing groups to hold them off from physical confrontation.  ‘They were ready to come to blows,’ said Rabbi Shaalman, ‘and they had knives and such.’  What they – “Rabbi and Pastor” – prevented was more than we can know.

 

And, it is always surprising and disturbing to me, how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect that life. 

 

Jesus; who was sent by God; who came to save us; and who takes leave finally at the Ascension, on the 40th day after the resurrection; obviously feels a great responsibility.  “All mine are yours [Holy Father], and yours are mine; …While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one,” prayed Jesus.  “I guarded them, and not one of them was lost, except the one destined to be lost, so that scripture might be fulfilled.”  It is always surprising and disturbing, how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect life. 

 

That one destined to be lost, by the way, was Judas, of course, the betrayer, one of the twelve apostles.  Judas was just as faithful, up to that point, apparently, as the other 11 disciples.  When the 12 were sent out to preach the good news and heal the sick, for example, Judas was teamed up with someone, and completed the same mission?!  And so there were feelings of shock and grief when Judas died.   And it was Peter, then, who “stood up among the believers,” in our Acts reading, to address the 120 gathered there – that’s 12 x 10 – and figure out a way to elect a replacement for Judas, who euphemistically describes him as, “a guide for those who arrested Jesus.”  A Guide, yes, but his Betrayal was also a great embarrassment for the early church.  So now choosing a replacement restores the community that Jesus had worked for, a community that would look like, and thus act like, a new kind of Israel.  The 12 Apostles represent the 12 Tribes of Israel, which had been so formative for the Hebrews when they returned to the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, under the leadership of Moses.  Jesus’ kingdom would not be bound to one particular piece of land, but would need witnesses, to the ends of the earth, a kingdom of God, formed, however, by the 12 tribes of Jesus’ followers.  A community willing to guard and protect life, which can so quickly and easily be taken away!

 

For better or worse, our appointed Acts reading today, omits 3 verses in the middle of this story, as you may have noticed, which contain the complicated, and the archaic story, of what happened to the Apostle Judas: basically that he bought a field with the 30 pieces of blood money he was paid, to tip-off the soldiers, who arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then, he fell into a ravine on that plot of land, and died spilling his blood, the implication being that he deserved it, and etymologically, it explains why the field is now called, Field of Blood. 

 

And just to complicate things a bit further, the Gospel of Matthew has a slightly different take on the Judas story: same name for the land, Field of Blood, but Judas is repentant, according to Matthew, and tries to return the money. But when the leaders explain they can’t take blood money back, Judas throws it on the ground, and goes out and ends up hanging himself. 

 

It’s surprising how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect life. 

 

This week two high profile capital sentencing cases came down at the same time.  Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected President of Egypt, who was later  ousted by the military after days of street protests by Egyptians, was sentenced to death.

 

That same day we heard the sentencing verdict in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 21-year-old who was convicted last month for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.

 

Even as Christians, we have differing opinions, pretty much across the spectrum, on the death penalty.  So to get my own bias out of the way, let me just say that I stand opposed to it, after some years of discernment.  But it is a much larger group of Lutherans who wrote and voted on the ELCA Social Statement on the Death Penalty who Citing Scripture, said about it: the statement supports the Christian calling to “respond to violent crime in the restorative way taught by Jesus and shown by his actions” (p. 2). Restorative justice involves “addressing the hurt of each person whose life has been touched by violent crime” (p.3). Such an approach “makes the community safer for all”. … ‘the message conveyed by an execution, reflected in the attention it receives from the public, is one of brutality and violence.’ ” 

 

It is surprising how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect life. 

 

The families who lost loved ones, or who were injured by the Boston bombing, also came to various conclusions, both pro and con, about the death penalty.  Though public opinion polls in Massachusetts overwhelmingly opposed it, by a four-to-one margin, as increasingly do Americans in rejecting capital punishment. 

 

“Ultimately,” the ELCA Social Statement says, “the death penalty distracts us from our work toward a just society.” (http://www.elca.org/Faith/Faith-and-Society/Social-Statements/Death-Penalty#sthash.2P0diWA1.dpuf)

 

Our work towards a just society, that’s what troubles me most about the verdict for Mr. Tsarnaev.  The death penalty is mostly a “distraction” from this work.  Imposing death eliminates our job of being restorers of the breach.  Is the message of the gospel good news, that when the going gets tough, let’s find a victim, ousting them, eliminating them, and surely our problem will be gone!  Or is it that, it is surprising how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect life the mission Jesus handed over to us?! 

 

Jesus came to save us from this, eye for an eye reaction-ism, exposing on the cross our previously unseen complicity in scapegoating and blaming.  Jesus stood with those we’d like to eliminate our forget about, and then opened his arms, knowing he was next in line.  Remember what the criminal on the cross next to Jesus said?  That he himself deserved to die for what he did, but what has Jesus done to deserve death?  That is the story that convicts us every time, a story that has the power to change and convert our hearts, and eventually our minds, because it is surprising how quickly and easily life can be taken, and how hard it is to guard and protect life. 

 

Jesus is our guardian, the creator of life, new life, and the kingdom of God.  Jesus said, “Holy Father… While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.  But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 

 

Let us become guardians and protectors of life, in our joy, as a life-long practice of our faithfulness.

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Holy Spirit Wild Fire, sermon by Pastor Fred Kinsey

5/10/2015

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Readings for May 10, 2015, Easter 6B
  • Acts 10:44-48  
  • Psalm 98  
  • 1 John 5:1-6  
  • John 15:9-17


Holy Spirit Wild Fired, Rev. Fred Kinsey
Even Peter couldn’t deny, that like a fire out of control, the Holy Spirit had leapt from the Jews to the Gentiles, wild and unpredictable, and totally beyond human restraint. 

 

When Kim and I lived in the wilds of the UP, the rural Upper Peninsula of MI, surrounded by lakes and streams, and many more trees than people, we used to get together with parishioners and friends around bonfires, often on a Friday night.  It could be magical, whether in the evening of a star lite summer night, or in the frozen winter time, ice fishing on the Net River.  Dennis Hiltonen, provided most of the fires.  He owned some 35 rental homes, and was always in the midst of tearing apart one or two, and remodeling them, and so had piles of old furniture and flooring, doors and windows, and more, ready to set alight. 

 

Some fires were very near uncontrollable, flames jumping 20 or 30 feet in the air, throwing off sparks, this way and that.  And some summers were dry, and the DNR had fire-bans, and with good reason, as his Camp, and many others out in the woods, were surrounded by thousands of acres of pulp forests, adjacent to State and National Forest lands that grew Maple, Pine and Poplar, Oak, Birch and Spruce.  And once a fire decides to jump to the next row of trees, it’s hard knowing where the wind will blow it, and for how long! 

 

Maybe we were lucky, then, when someone pointed out one day, that Dennis was burning some very expensive wood – chairs and tables and flooring – some of it 100 year-old hard wood, from virgin timber, long gone, that rumor had it, would fetch quite a price, down in say, Milwaukee or Chicago!  After that, we had bonfires together, less often, as these new circumstances brought his pyro-technics under control.  Dennis had found a side business, which was always a welcome thing in the poverty of those UP neighborhoods.  But I missed the fascinating fires that lit up the warm, or cold nights, and those gatherings that brought us together – the new friendships that were ignited, and the unpredictable and creative spirit, that filled us.

 

In two weeks’ time, we will hear the Pentecost story from Acts, when the sound of a rushing wind swept through the upper room, and tongues of fire rested on each of the disciples, who spoke suddenly in foreign languages, all signs of the Holy Spirit.  This is the same unpredictable spirit, like a wild-fire, that fell upon all who heard Peter excitedly telling about what he experienced in the house of Cornelius, the Roman Centurion.  Peter, directed by the Spirit to go to Cornelius’ house, was welcomed by his household, and ate with them -Gentiles- who don’t follow the kosher restrictions, which Peter had known as so defining to his faith, growing up.  And now, as all of the household of Cornelius listened to Peter’s preaching, they spontaneously praised God and spoke in the tongues of the Holy Spirit, and Peter could no longer see why they shouldn’t be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ! 

 

It is hard to describe the movement of the early church, in those first few decades, and how the followers of Jesus so quickly included Gentiles, except that, like a fire’s ember no one was keeping an eye on, there was a sudden wind shift blowing it up into a wild fire, which jumped to the first row of trees, and then the next, until it had been fanned into a worldwide conflagration.  The barriers of race and ethnicity and religion came tumbling down.  We saw it start in the Acts story from last week when Philip the evangelist baptized the Ethiopian eunuch – and who could be more of an outsider than he – and now Peter, the pillar of the early church, follows not just his heart, but the invisible, and living power, Jesus had sent.  “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these [Gentile outsiders and this soldier of the Roman army,] who have received the Holy Spirit just as we [Jewish Christ followers] have,” said Peter?!

 

First the Ethiopian eunuch!  And now this Centurion, our oppressor and enemy!  Who will God ask us to baptize next?  And how can we stand in the way of the Spirit's movement?  Who are we to say who is in, and who is out?  And how can we remove the ideology, the prejudice, or tradition that blinds us, or keeps us, from what God wants to create? 

 

The outcome of Easter morning – which we celebrate for not just one, but 7 weeks – can only be full of surprises, when you think about it, though sometimes scary ones!  When Jesus walks into the upper room of the disciples hiding away on Easter evening – and one more time a week later, just for Thomas – Jesus greets them with, Shalom, Salam, Peace be with you.  And then he breathes on them and says, receive the Holy Spirit.  In that breath of life, on the eighth day of creation, the day of resurrection, Christ’s Spirit gave birth to a new fire, the fire of rebirth and renewal.  And humans have not been able to resist this wild-fire, which spreads when, and where, we least expect it. 

 

In two weeks, it will be Pentecost Sunday, and we will witness the Spirit descend on Ngbarezere, as his faith is Confirmed.  And appropriately, Pastor Emily is scheduled to be preaching that day – so I guess, today is my Pentecost sermon! 

 

But how do we experience this Spirit poured out?  In the more traditional, mainline churches, the liturgical churches like our own, here, we are not known for speaking in tongues or ‘falling out’ in the Spirit.  So, have we contained the movement of the Spirit, institutionalized or domesticated it, past the point of resuscitating it’s embers?  Even in Pentecostal churches, where the spirit sweeps the congregation like wild-fire, still, they too have a mode of containment, in that they keep it to Sunday mornings, in the same place at the same time.  “The Spirit works well for movements, but fares poorly in institutions,” as writer John Killinger has said.

 

And, even Jesus didn’t have a whole lot to say about the Holy Spirit, besides in the upper room on Easter.  We know the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove at his baptism.  But the only other time he talked about the spirit was in Nazareth, at the beginning of his ministry, when he was in his home synagogue and got up to speak from the scroll of Isaiah, saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (Luke 4:14-18).  And then he went out and lived it.  The movement of the Holy Spirit anointed him, and he showed us how to lift up the poor, and heal the sick, and to set the oppressed free. 

 

The Holy Spirit is still at work in us in the world too, through the power of our baptisms, our Confirmations, and each new morning when we rise, and we pray for the Spirit to burn within us, and in everything we do that day.  The Spirit can ignite even the smallest ember, for the Holy Spirit is always much bigger and more “other” than we normally think, capable of blowing where it will, and upending our worlds, when we aren’t expecting it.

 

Then maybe – in the courageous, and tongue-in-cheek words of Annie Dillard – we might think well each Sunday morning, “to fasten our seatbelts and wear crash helmets when we step into our pews, lest God decide to move among us again.”

 

And who knows who the Holy Spirit might start having us baptize then, as Peter and the early Christians did, finding new bonds of friendship in the faith, with former strangers and outsiders, brought in, suddenly making us question the boundaries we ourselves have accepted so long.

 

Sometimes the old beautiful wood in our lives is sold for a pretty penny, and money in the bank.  And sometimes it is fuel for the wild and unpredictable fire of the Holy Spirit, totally beyond human restraint. 

 

Praise be to God for the gift of the Holy Spirit!

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O Blessed Spring, Pastor Kinsey

5/3/2015

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Readings for May 3, 2015, Easter 5B
  • Acts 8:26-40  
  • Psalm 22:25-31  
  • 1 John 4:7-21  
  • John 15:1-8 



“O Blessed Spring,” as the Hymn of the Day goes, “where word and sign embrace us into Christ the Vine: here Christ enjoins each one to be a branch of this life giving Tree.”  And this is exactly what happens when the Spirit, sends Philip, to meet the Ethiopian Eunuch, in our 2nd Reading! 

 

First, just a bit of context, to orient us in this story, from the book of, The Acts of the Apostles.  It helps, I think, to consider this story as the bridge between, 1) the church in Jerusalem, under the leadership of Peter and James, and 2) the spreading of the gospel to foreign lands under the leadership of Paul.  The ministry of Peter and James – filled with power and a fast growing church that shares all things in common – runs into a roadblock of a sort, when, after calling, and laying on hands for seven new leaders, besides the Apostles, and one of them, Stephen, who was gifted in preaching, is stoned to death, for his confrontational message, delivered before the Council in Jerusalem. 

 

But Philip, another one of the seven newly ordained with Stephen, who is also skilled in evangelism and healing, begins ministering to the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were the fallen away Jewish cousins, rejected mostly for inter-marrying after the return from Exile.  Then in our reading today – and Philip’s next sign of reaching out to include the outsider – an angel of the Lord directs him to simply get up and go on the road toward Gaza on the coast of the Mediterranean.  And sure enough, he catches up to the Ethiopian eunuch, royalty, riding in his limo, the very Secretary of Treasury, from his far-away land.  Except, I don’t picture a Timothy Geitner, Secretary of Treasury, an uptight, and staid, know-it-all.  What I picture is a more flamboyant young 20-something, named Adumani, who I was introduced to by a mutual friend, a couple years ago, a sharp and colorful dresser, and a refugee, who had escaped Sierra Leone with his life, because of the persecution for his sexual orientation – an outsider, looking for a larger, life-giving truth, and a community where he would be welcome.

 

Philip, by the way, must have been young too, and in extremely good shape.  You know – to have caught up with the Secretary of Treasury’s chariot, on foot!  Hurry, says the Spirit, go over to this chariot and join it.  So Philip ran up alongside it, and still jogging, heard the Ethiopian eunuch reading from the prophet Isaiah.  Hello there!  “Do you understand what you’re reading,” asked Philip, a bit breathless?  No, not so much, but please, get in and sit beside me! 

 

Apparently the Ethiopian eunuch is attracted to the Word of God, but no one has actually taken the time to sit down with him and discuss it.  A eunuch from Ethiopia, BTW, was triply impure, and not considered a good candidate for religious inclusion.  Philip, however, has been ‘divinely directed’ to go to him.  And, Philip has the gift of interpretation, as much as running! 

 

And like Jesus who interpreted the scriptures to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus the evening of his resurrection, Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch is all about Jesus, the Suffering Servant, who died that we might live; who like a blessed spring, rose up from the cold dead earth, and now has blossomed into a holy vine; a prophet, a priest, the Christ; a life-giving tree.  And no doubt Philip told the Ethiopian eunuch about the sacrament of baptism, which Jesus gave us as a mark of rebirth, that by water and the word, we too may be revived and joined to Christ the tree, forever.  Because, when the Ethiopian eunuch saw his chariot pass near a pool of water, he got so excited, he stopped the limo, and was baptized by Philip, right then and there! 

 

So begins the long list of radical inclusion in the Book of Acts, as the mission of the nascent Christian church is taken to the Gentiles far and wide throughout the Roman Empire: Eunuchs allowed?  Yes!  Roman soldiers, like Victor from Mauretania who we commemorate this week, and Cornelius in Acts chapter 10?  Yes, them too!  Women?  Yes!  Like the independently wealthy Lydia who met Paul and became a leader of a house-church in Greece.  And like Philip’s own daughters, all three who remained unmarried so they could carry on their ministry of prophecy in Caesarea Philippi.  Everyone was included, and no one was turned away, who accepted the new life, of this life-giving tree, the vine in which all are grafted on, a symbol of Christ in us, and we in Christ. 

 

“I am the true vine,” said Jesus.  “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…” 

 

How many more are driving in their limo’s and chariot’s, or are riding on the Red Line or the Broadway bus, who are reading, or looking for a Messiah and Savior, for them?  How should we introduce them to this Countercultural King, the one who died as a silent lamb, and whose humbleness subjected him to a death, in the words of Isaiah, like so many un-named victims denied justice, throughout history: like ‘black lives’ snuffed out where no video camera happens to record what took place; like refugees fleeing war, and the chaos their countries are left in, in the wake of foreign army invaders, or civil unrest, who drown in boats not built for the likes of the Mediterranean Sea; like teenagers, lured from poverty into modern slavery and the sex-trade.  

 

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, the Ethiopian eunuch read from Isaiah.  And Philip, the runner, was able to explain how Jesus had taken on the mantle of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, a new kind of Messiah and Savior, not removed in high places, but humble and born in a manger; armed only with the Word of God, and anointed by the Spirit so that “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight…” a tree of life, who lived and died, for all. 

 

“When we were baptized, we were given a new name: Branch,” says Susan Palo Cherwien, author of our Hymn of the Day.  Christ is the vine and we are the branches.  She was inspired to write this hymn, she says, because of the bronze sculpture that hangs above the baptismal font in her Minneapolis church.  The artwork “depicts a tree with four branches growing out of a central trunk. Each branch represents a stage of human life: …and the central trunk is … a rising Christ, with arms extended skyward, …the tree's very life and form…  The Christ image, wrote the artist, is at the center of this family [the Christian family] in every season of life.”

 

The tree of life, of course, is prominent in Judaism, as well as Christianity, and other world religions like Buddhism.  One of my favorite trees, when I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was the mysterious and holy, northern white cedar, which is now in serious decline.  One hope for these cedars, is how wonderfully adaptive they are.  They grow in shade and light alike, in swampy soil and on cliff’s edge.  As recently as 1994, Canadian researchers discovered that “small, twisted cedars growing along the edges of Lake Superior, though modest in appearance and size, … Growing no more than twenty to thirty feet, …[are] part of a magnificent unacknowledged old-growth forest that actually dates back 400 to 800 years.”  (Jon Magnuson: http://cedartreeinstitute.org/2012/12/healing-time-honoring-spirit-of-the-cedar/)

 

What are the ways that you and I can live and grow in Christ, our holy vine, and holy tree?  Where age, and size, and species, don’t preclude anyone from being grafted in!  How can our blessed spring in baptism, make us feel more embraced by Christ, and keep us strong and faithful when youth is past, and winter comes, as winters must?  How deep are our roots?  How well are we watered?  Whose chariot are we being called to run up alongside of, to share this good news, that has saved us? 

 

“I am the true vine,” says Jesus.  “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…”

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