George Hermanson

Joy

  Luke 1 : 47 -55         Joy     The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson -Dec. 11 - 2011

2012 - As it gets close, the scaremongers of our age will increasingly gives us end of the world paranoia.  Creating fear as part of our daily bread. Adding to our fear.
Fear of crime.  Fear about the economy.  Fear of terrorists.  Fear is used to demonize those different from us.  We hear fear in the rhetoric of politics, in pushing through a flawed crime bill. Fear causes us to retreat from life, a mind killer.  It paralyzes us.  It prevents us from acting.  It isolates us from others.

This Advent Sunday the word that counters fear is Joy.  Joy.  It is the third spiritual gift and discipline of  Advent.   Advent is a way of strengthening our spiritual muscles, preparing ourselves for tough times, times of doubt, times when God seems absent or occupied elsewhere.  Advent is about being thoughtful and meditative and quietly joyful in getting ready for Christmas   Reflecting on the Joy of Advent  means getting clear on what it means. We often confuse joy, which is a spiritual gift, with its secular, cultural counterparts - happiness, merriment, pleasure, gladness.  Happiness, merriment, pleasure and gladness are all too superficial to be joy. They are emotional states, influenced by circumstances, responses to circumstances. They are outer directed.




Joy, on the other hand, is inner directed. Joy is a spiritual condition.  Joy has about it a kind of serenity, deep pleasure, satisfaction in the sense of fulfillment and contentment, delight and bliss. No wimpy adjectives here. Joy is not dependent on external circumstances. Joy is about deep confidence in the presence of God in our lives and in the world. Joy helps us flourish.

Joy is a product of a spiritual state that wells up from within us, there for us to experience, to draw strength from, even on our worst days.  Just as waiting becomes yearning, so happiness turns to its deep, spiritual counterpart - joy

Mary offers some hints in the reading from Luke.  The Song of Mary is an ancient hymn of joy.  Mary would be young - about twelve or thirteen years old.  She is called a virgin - which means a very young woman who has just reached childbearing age, so is marriageable, but who has not given birth.   She has just discovered the worst thing that can happen to a teenaged girl has happened to her.  She discovers she is pregnant.  And Joseph, her husband-to-be is clear that he is not the father. 

Not a great time to sing a song of Joy, yet she does. In response to fear Mary sings.  Her pondering in her heart ends in a song.  She sings about hope, joy, and love that come with a birth.   The singer offers a prayer that she will greet her son with arms of Love.  Mary had the grace to be wide open to God's indwelling presence.  I am reminded about this wide open love every time I see a child running toward her parent - or in the song Arms Wide Open.

This singing is world shaking, a real end of the world as we know it.  This event challenges a stratified society where one is to be a good girl or a good boy, a rule keeper.  This narrative challenges all stratified reality.   For out of the despised - the dishonorable - the shameless - the useless  - comes God's grace. Beginnings come out of unexpected places and times. 

Advent days are days of anticipation and expectation to prepare us for such a birth in our heart.   We are moving slowly to the event that defines us and shapes us. Along with Mary we are called to ponder how God works in our lives.   Advent reminds us of the value in taking one's time to arrive at a destination.  Instead of hurrying through a banquet, we take our time to relish, to taste each flavor of food.  This is not the season for fast food, nor buffets, but a time of tasting, stopping, talking, tasting, and reflecting. Expectation, and taking time make all human activity more enjoyable. We want good things to last, and taking time trains us to make things last.   This is why the Advent journey is so important to the Christmas season.   It is a time of deep reflection upon what is important in life, and what makes life more enjoyable.  It is a building of the melody until we cannot help but shout.  God is here!

Advent teaches us that difficult situations don't evaporate; it doesn't promise that life is without difficulty.  Faith does not remove the marks of suffering, but it can transform their meaning.   Love feels our pain and transcends it.  There is real danger and Joy gives us the strength to live in it.

The hymns of joy are descriptions of God's relation to the world and our relationship to God, our relationship with each other, and the world.   Such praise illumines our days.  Praise gives us the intuition that even when the world does not reflect the light of God's countenance, and it is still there.  Beginning in joy we have a sense of a trace of God's presence with the world.   This sense of joy can nourish hope as we live into the promise born of Mary.
As Mary sang "the Mighty One has done great things for me" we join in the singing.  For out of great Joy we respond with deep caring.  We are called to Mighty Acts of Joy.
Remember Isaiah.  He  reminds us that God is preparing a highway through desert times. Since the highway belongs to Yahweh, Yahweh's people can cross the desert in safety and continue to be holy, belong to, their God.  This is a beautiful image of the power of God to keep God’s people even in dangerous places.  Yahweh extends God’s sway, God’s kingdom into dangerous places and makes them safe and beautiful, full of life giving streams and vegetation.  Paradise comes to the desert and the response is joy.  God is part of every aspect of the universe and in it God’s loving presence is found.
As the poet Yeats says, in dangerous times, live with joy.  Mary, young and ill equipped to deal with the dangerous times she faced, left us a spiritual treasure - a hymn of joy.  Like her, we too live in dangerous times - our deserts - places and times when we are not certain. So we ask God to build a highway through the deserts of our hearts and minds making us holy, wholly belonging to God.  This is our spiritual practice of Advent: waiting and expecting the presence of God.  And we, like Mary, find Joy.

Joy - an orientation toward life that is founded on cultivating the gifts of hope and peace. Joy, an attitude and conviction that says that it is God who has the last word about life. Joy, rooted in the confidence that God is ultimately in charge of the world and of our lives.  We can have deep peace and serenity, and even joy, in that knowledge

vision

Be Awake
I am not preaching much but every so often I check out old sermons.  I do so in case I might be asked to preach and thus I want to see if the sermon done is worthy of revision.  Another reason is to see how my thinking has changed.  Or our issues of today actually call into question what was said.  This last point is a reminder of how what we see is so influenced by new knowledge.

One of the points was about my uncle.  Well, I have doing some research on the family ( I guess when one gets to a certain age you want to trace out one's history) and guess what the old family story was not exactly what happened.  The date was Oct 10, 1918.   That does not change much because we now even more clearly that the war was winding down and many were sent out to be killed for the sake of the ego of the leaders.  So the paradox of remembrance day is still with us.
The other thing is the occupation of wall street movement.  In one sense it is understandable yet unexpected.  Where is will lead is unknown.  Will it call people into active work, voting and really examining the values?  One thing that struck me as a Process person is the reaction to the idea that a corporation is a person.  It is clear that the occupation movements know the falsehood of this idea, that metaphysically it is not an actual entity but a collection of actual entities.

What the passage of the 10 suggests is when we don't pay attention dangerous ideas slide into our consciousness - we create stories that mislead us, and remove us from our actions.  Nietzsche reminds us that forgetting is not just because of inertia:  "It is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression."  We don't forget because we have to, and there are times we must do that. but because we want to.  It is this aspect of our remembering that can be so problematic to the common good.  We choose selectively to construct a world that keeps us blind or  unable to see the possibility of changing for the common good.
If there was another issue before us as a society it would be the crime bill before the house.  It is an illustration of the maids who  would not open their eyes to what is really the situation.  My brother and 5 of his friends visited not long ago and they all worked in probation.  They were outraged by the view of the bill before the house. It went against all the experience they had. Yet, the bill moves on through the house and will become law.  Of course we can let our MPs know that this bill is the foolishness of the not seeing.
So if I were to rewrite this sermon these are some of the thoughts I would have to work around and let the text speak to these issues.  So some ideas for you to kick around.




November 9, 2008
Edwards (Knox) United Church
Twenty-Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Read the passage: The Message   or   The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Matthew 25:1-13
Read the passage: The Message   or   The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Click here for an easy to print or email Adobe PDF version of this post.
The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
It is one of those - "it goes without saying" things - we see events from our personal experience.  We filter the world out of what we believe and what has formed us.  Symbolic acts create moments that form us and then we must move on to how to live the moment of transformation.
This morning we participated in a highly symbolic moment - remembrance.  It means many things to us.  And yes we have ambiguous feelings.  For some it is the feeling of never again.  In my family we have a history of service - in both First and Second wars. Yet the symbol that forms me was my father’s brother.  On Nov. 10 1918 the Generals knew that the armistice was coming.  Yet my uncle was sent out and he was killed.  Thus, I have always rejected the concept of redemptive violence- redemption sacrifice.  Yes sometimes we are called to risk and act but to never see it as justified or needed to bring transformation.  Never forget reminds us of that fact.
We remember those who responded, to face the power of those who sought to oppress.  We remember so we do not become like that which we resisted and to remember both our best and worst efforts - how war brutalizes and degrades both winners and losers alike. We remember never again so we can examine our past and bring forth that which leads to peace - to know that in the end it is bring those different from us to the table that really brings transformation - violence does not.
Our remembrance to honor calls us to become inventive in designing institutionalized means of resolving conflicts  - to honor what William James called for a century ago, that of a “moral equivalent to war.”  We remember to remind us that is our goal is to remember our interrelatedness - no longer can we see the other as absolute enemy for they are part of us.  Peace is not merely an unrealistic yearning but a way of life necessary for its continuance.  Thus we asked who do we ultimately serve?
Our texts are about this reality. Joshua is now the symbolic/prophetic leader.  Moses went to the mountain top and dreamed God’s dream of paradise - the promise - of a peaceful kingdom.  But he does not get to see it and Joshua is the one who now must actualize the dream.  So he calls the people, the elders, the leaders and issues a challenge to choose a better history.  Words that Obama used last week.  In a call/response Joshua asks who will they choose: the gods of their self interest or the God who cares of all of creation? He asks them to really come to terms with the call and he asks them several times who will they server?  Who will you serve? And the people respond - God - and the call is repeated.  We saw this call and response, which is built into some preaching, the other night.  Yes we can, yes we can.
So Joshua preparers the people for the hard work of change. It will not be easy.  It will take time.  It will take wisdom.  It means being awake and prepared. In watching the events on Tuesday and watching Jesse weep I was reminded that change takes commitment. There is the need of the power of persistence, of the need to do what can be done, even in the face of resistance, and to expect that actually it will be others, in new circumstances who "enter the promised land."
We move to the ten maids.  They go off to wait for the bridegroom.  Matthew is telling his community that change has begun and one needs to be awake to see it.  Of course not everyone is prepared for the time it takes to greet the new morning. It takes what is called second sight to see.  It means waking up and staying awake.  This is to see simultaneously from within the issues and from without - from the personal to the universal needs. “This is the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.” (W.E.B. Dubois)  Choose this day who will serve  - God,  which means the eyes of others.
Matthew suggests that when the bridegroom arrives reality has been changed. The old ways of doing things no longer sustain.  Paradise is, and is arriving.  It calls for new eyes, second sight.  In such time there is danger, a desire to move back to the familiar, to return to safety of the how we have done it in the past.  The status quo feels good and like those maids who did not bring enough oil it freezes us in the past and we are not awake - we miss the transformational moment.
As I watched the event on Tuesday, the celebration, I remembered as I saw Jesse Jackson weeping - I remembered Grand park - the summer of walks with Martin Luther King - the day that our cars were parked there for a march (my was not) and we came back to burning cars - saw Andrew Young on Colbert last night and his car was burned - meet with him, Jesse, and King in many a church basement.  John Cobb, at an event in Victoria, said a miracle is what we did not see coming - in those days and nights, when shots rang out, stones were thrown -  we did our bit - community organizing by the churches - walked and talked - helped form operation breadbasket to get jobs in the south side, which then shifted into Jesse's organization.  Did we see this event, this coming, this yes we can moment?
No, it is a miracle in Cobb’s terms. Did we know?  We hoped and worked for the possibility.  But this is only a beginning, and God saw it was good enough for a beginning - a beginning for remembering the hoped for affirmation of same sex marriage hope failed - those who voted for Obama and did not catch the full radical postmodern change needed - a small step but a big step.  Did we know?  Can we believe?  Yes we can!
Symbolically, those maids who did not prepare tell us much.  Those who do not open their eyes, do not prepare for the long journey, miss the moment of transformation.  A lesson for our times.
Christians are called to live in the reality of our world, with its potential and loss of potential.  Steps forward and the slowness of that movement to a better history. What we carry with us is the knowledge that the bridegroom has come and that paradise is now, and this world has been claimed by God as good.  This is the inner reality which is not always seen, but we know it, we have tasted it, we have seen it.  Faith and hope prepare us for our journey - our continuing commitment to the care of all.  We are called to join with others who work for the transformation of our society, where the images of all gathered at the table.
Faith gives us this double vision -of seeing ourselves in the other. This sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.  We remember to whom we belong and commit ourselves to persevere, to work, for the transformation that is and still is to come.
George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com

Words of Comfort and Challenge

Twenty -Third after Pentecost  Aylmer United Quebec
October 23, 2011
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 Psalm 90: 1-6, 13-17  Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22: 34-46

Words of Comfort and Challenge

Have you noticed the spontaneous gathering of people around a site where some tragedy has happened? There are pictures of piles of flowers that spring up at the site of the latest tragic event. This is experience is close to this community.  As a community we seek ways to heal our broken experience.

Think about this in light of the story in the Old Testament about Moses.  It begins with him being  a healthy and vigorous old man, God says to Moses:  “Go up the mountain and survey the land I will give to your people.” He does and looks over the land of promise. He is reassured that he has done his part to bring God’s people to a land where they can live out the covenant in abundance and grace. His work is finished. And then he dies.

Just as today, national religious leaders of ancient Israel were buried with great pomp and ceremony and their graves became shrines and places of pilgrimage. This tradition of revering the graves of the saints, the holy, the religious leaders of
the past stretches right back to the beginnings of our religious past and seems to be common in every religion and is part of our secular society.



Yet Moses burial place is unknown. There is no shrine or grave marker. There is no place of pilgrimage, there is nothing earthly to remember him by. The founder of the Jewish religion, like the founder of our own, has no known resting place on earth.

And then the story tells us something beautiful. Moses’ burial place is unknown because God witnessed his death and buried him. Think of that. God, in God’s tenderness and compassion, attends Moses in his death and buries him, God’s self.

When we see tragedy today we can take comfort in the reality that everything that is and was is known to God, and God, in God’s tender mercy, continues to care for them in death, just as God cared for them in life. As Christians we remind ourselves that when the powers of destruction have done their worst, God is still there, extending God’s love and compassion to all of creation. Willing the best that is possible in this situation, just as God wills the best for all creatures in every situation. In the midst of death and destruction, God lures us to life and abundance.

The gospel passage spells out our responsibilities for the creation of goodness in our world. It tells us that God’s compassion is known through our actions. Chapter 22 of Matthew is a series of questions posed by different religious and political authorities to trap Jesus.  This week they have another question: which is the greatest commandment?


Now keep in mind that the person asking, who is called a lawyer in the text, is a teacher of the Law, that is he is a Torah expert.  This teacher knows perfectly well the answer to his own question. And so does Jesus. Jesus answers by quoting the Torah himself - Deuteronomy 6: 5 and Leviticus 9: 18. To love God with all our heart, soul and mind is to love and desire God without reservation. It clearly means that nothing and no one is to become more important then God and God’s desires for the well-being of all of creation.  Desiring God means desiring the flourishing of all of life. To love God is to love the world.

Following this law, fulfilling this commandment is no easy matter. It requires all of our focussed attention to see where God is luring us in a world full of distraction and noise. And focussing our attention on God and God’s desires is the content and practice of our spiritual life as Christians. It means asking
ourselves in every situation: What is the best in this situation? How is God luring us to greater well-being now, in this moment of existence? How will flourishing happen?

That spiritual religious practice brings us to the second half of Jesus’ answer. The second commandment is to love our neighbours as ourselves. The issue revolves around who is our neighbour?  Scripture moves from treating the stranger, the enemy with hospitality to treating the stranger as neighbour. This shift does not seem much but holy hospitality makes the stranger not an enemy but a friend. 


This means to continually ask ourselves: How is God calling us to respond to the need of strangers? The text asks us to consider: how would we want to be treated in a similar situation? And in that consideration is the answer that guides our action.

Alfred North Whitehead, a great philosopher summed this passage up this way: Religion is what we do in our solitude that drives us to world solidarity.

Religion has two parts = an inner work and care of the earth. To say we are practicing our religion, that we are faithful and spiritual requires that we practice both. Solitude is the time we spend in study prayer and meditation. It is our pursuit of God, our activity of loving God and desiring relationship with God and knowing God with our whole being.

Yet if it ends there we cannot call ourselves religious. We cannot claim that we are spiritual. For the second half of this rule requires us to love others, to demonstrate God’s love and care for others, to be God’s hands and feet in the world; to become a window into God’s boundless love and compassion for all of
creation’s creatures.

Our texts are clear and unequivocal: No one stands outside the circle of God’s love and care. No one. We as Christians are obligated by the faithful practice of our faith to enact that love toward everyone.


It is not easy. It is not easy for us to speak out about our obligation to love and care for others in our own community. Yet we know a God whose compassion is so limitless that God attends Moses and countless others in the hour of their death, and in God’s tenderness and compassion, buries them and remembers them.

With such a God as this calling us to live showing compassion and grace to all, how can we do less? Can we expand the circle of inclusion?  Really mean it?  It means developing institutions and the politics of inclusion.  To use our   best to make life flourish. It is to identify with those who call our society to its best, to make a common good for all.

Reading The Bible As If It Matters

The Madawaska Institute for Culture and Religion                 
                                 Where Spirit & Life Meet            
              Series on Transforming Theology for the sake World and  Church                                            
                Reading The Bible As If It Matters
Oct 12  to 14,  2011.  The event begins on Wednesday Morning and ends on Friday at 5 p.m.   

We will use the seminar and interactive methods.  Meet each day from 9 to 5 and lunch is included.  We limit the event to the first 20.  A deposit of $25 is needed.

Leader: Ronald L. Farmer was the Irvin C. and Edy Chapman Dean of the Wallace All Faiths Chapel and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Chapman University. He chaired the Bible and Contemporary Theologies Group of the Society of Biblical Literature, serves on the Advisory Council of the Process and Faith Program at Claremont School of Theology. His publications include Beyond the Impasse: The Promise of a Process Hermeneutic (1997); Revelation in Chalice Commentaries for Today (2005); and a mystery/suspense novel, Awakening (2009), Currently, he is working on his second novel and co-editing a collection of essays promoting interfaith dialogue and cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  If  you go to Process and Faith, and check Creative Transformation, you can read some of his work.

We will cover these topics:
* An Introduction to Process Hermeneutics.  How this will help us read the Bible so we transform the church for the sake of the world.

Applications to Revelation; the recovery of the idea of Paradise.

Application to the Hebrew Scriptures

Examination of New Testament texts and application for preaching.

New Testament Christology: Looking through Different Lenses

COST:  $225 - Members- $190  Lunches included -  Oct 12 to 14  Burnstown (Ottawa) Ontario

To register george@hermanson.ca  Because we limit the number so it is an intimate event a deposit of $25 is required:140 Fleming Dr. Burnstown Ont. K0J 1G0  ph 613 432 8852

Thinking about the remit on the 20 articles

I know I don’t have the remit in front of me re the additions of other statements of faith of The United Church.  So I don’t know what they are asking.  I also know that Touchstone is coming out with a series of reflections.  I look forward to that. Still I want to offer some thoughts on the subject in hopes of beginning a debate.

I have been tossing around some ideas  and as a discussion starter I offer these ideas.  I also am willing to change my view as these are provisional reflections.

My gut reaction is to vote no on the remit. I do so for the following reasons.

There is much debate around the 20 articles being a historical statement and the aspect of in essential agreement places them not as creed but a reflection of what were the basic theological concerns of the time.  My fear is by adding the other statements, which are also reflect a time and place in our history, we will be sliding in, by the backdoor, a creedal test.

I never look at the 1940’s statement and while, in some sense, the Song of Faith is closer to my theology, to use it as an affirmation misses the point.  It reflects very much the confusion in the current thinking of The United Church.  It tries to say something that resonates with too many views and, for  me, it is not cohesive in its theological perspective, so I say yes and no all the way through it.  Of course the essential agreement statement can work for all.  But in revising the bases of union I think we are giving too much credibility to provisional statements which are even more time bound.  At leas with the 20 articles we know its historical context.  The Song of Faith is a statement looking for a consensus. That means it really is time dated.

Part of my thinking is influenced by my experienced.  When I was ordained I objected to the doctrine of God, which was so foreign to my Panentheism.  I think I reflected the Zeitgeist of the fact fundamentalist liberal.  I had seen the articles more as a creed. I was asked did I believe in God and my response was a short riff on panentheism. The committee was happy and said I was in essential agreement. The rest of the articles could now be seen in that light. ( A footnote is the person who said I was in essential agreement went on to be a leading figure in the committee of concern - a nice irony.)

My fear is by adding more statements we will make weak the essential agreement aspect  It is not a defining creed.  To add more will be moving more toward a narrow understanding of orthodoxy.  That orthodoxy may actually reflect a more liberal perspective, which could be ok, but in doing so we will create more debates over the meaning  “the traditional historical orthodox” understanding of the bases of union.  By leaving it alone no side will be the orthodox side and diversity will be held by the words essential agreement.

Of course this does nothing with the issue of post theism and the different understandings of theism.  Those who are not in essential agreement with some form of theism will not be happy  even with the additions. As one who rejects the supernatural and wholly other aspect of the bases of union, I can live with the 20 articles.  This theological discussion is not solved with the Song of Faith nor the 1940 statement.  If anything they allow us to ignore it.