Jonah Tries To Run from God’s Will

 2013 01 27

Sermon: the Baltic Parish: Jonah Tries To Run from God’s Will

God's instruction to Jonah is very clear.  "Arise, Go to Nineveh and prophesy against it because it is wicked!"  That seems pretty clear.  And Jonah was a professional, royal, prophet, so you would expect Jonah to understand clear instructions from God and to do them, in proper, "Thus says the Lord" fashion.  After all, that is what a prophet is for, to be the mouthpiece of God. Prophets are always to speak for the Lord, often they are to speak the very hard truths that we don't want to hear – and they are never to speak for themselves.  That's how it works.

But that's not how it worked with Jonah.  Jonah arose alright. And then he made a 180 degree turn from the direction on Nineveh and went down to Joppa, intent on fleeing the presence of God altogether by going to Tarshish.  Tarshish was as far as one could get from Nineveh at that time, way out on edge of the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of what we now call Spain.  Tarshish was literally thought to be at the "end of the earth."

And here we get the FIRST point of the story: it won't work!  It is not possible to escape from God when God is intent on calling us to a mission. And so, in a masterful use of metaphor, the writer tells us that Jonah then begins a series of "descents" from God.  He goes "down" to Joppa; he goes "down into the ship;" (most translations says "went on board" but the Hebrew word is "down.") he then goes down into the hold of the ship; he lies down; and he drops down into sleep.  He is forced to get up, but not of his free will, is thrown overboard, and then he goes down into the sea.

Before Jonah gets anywhere near Tarshish he is already going down, down from God, down, he says, to the very roots of the mountains, down to where the deep surrounds him, where weeds wrap around his head and the gate of the Pit closes upon him….Down to a place where, without help, he is as good as dead.

 Jonah thought he knew what he wanted: to do whatever it takes to flee from God; to go to Tarshish; and, if necessary, to die. But we learn here the SECOND point we need to know: that it is impossible to escape the presence of the Lord.  The Psalmist knew what Jonah did not: you can never escape the presence of God.  From Psalm 139 :

7  Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
8  If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9  If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10  even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11  If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"
12  even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

And a THIRD truth is revealed to us here: it is impossible to escape the tasks that God assigns to us.  After all that happens to Jonah, after the fish spits Jonah safely onto the beach, God does not say, "Well, I hope that you have learned yours lesson.  Take a few days off.  Get some rest.  Then report to me next Monday and I'll find something for you to do that isn't so disagreeable to you." Not a chance. In the very next line, before Jonah has time to take a shower, comb his hair, shave, brush his teeth and put on some clean clothes, we are told, "The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, 'Get up; go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim the message that I tell you!'"  Jonah is back at square one.

But more important than these teachings is the FOURTH teaching that is inherent in this story of deliverance: that it is impossible to escape the LOVE of God.  Psalm 139 also clearly says this as do many other places in the Bible, such as Paul's great hymn of God's love in Romans 8: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord."

Jesus himself tells a story, perhaps the most beloved story that he tells, of the prodigal son, who could not bear being at home with his father, and so he demanded and got his inheritance, left, squandered it, and then sunk "down" into the pit with the pigs that he fed to stay alive, literally eating the scraps thrown to the pigs he tended.  And so at the end of his rope he returned to his father. He came home, content to be a slave, not a son, if that be his father's will.  Yet, upon arriving home he learns that, in all his attempts at running away, he had not escaped the love of his father, who was beside himself with joy that his son had come home.

Jonah, like the wayward son in that story, has to learn the hard way.  And it is not by accident that, only after Jonah had exhausted all his own options, only when he reconsidered the death that he had shortly before thought he wanted, only when he was one tick away from drowning did God send the fish to save him. It was sent not simply to save his life, but to save Jonah from himself!

Moving into Chapter Two we see Jonah within the belly of the fish reconsidering all he had done, a changed man, far different than the one we were coming to know in the first chapter. In fact, most scholars, including me, think that this prayer, a poem in the style of a psalm, was added to the story by a later writer who sought to rehabilitate Jonah by making him thankful for his deliverance from certain death. We will learn later on that Jonah’s rehabilitation did not take.

But, regardless of who wrote it, we are expected to learn something from this prayer, this psalm.  Which brings us to the FIFTH thing we can learn: and that is that when we are down, when we have exhausted all of our own resources, the only thing left to do is to pray to God for deliverance.

For someone of faith, and often also for those who have previously had no faith at all, when we, like Jonah, go down, and then the bottom falls out; when we reach the end of our rope; when we cannot possibly create a new future for ourselves; when the god we have made of ourselves fails us, all that is left to us is to pray to God for deliverance.

When he was going down into the depths of the sea Jonah's initial thought was that he had been thrown into the sea by God, and then had been abandoned by God.  But when we read the story carefully we know that neither of those things that Jonah thought were true.  Jonah did it to himself!  Can we learn something here? I think we can.

And so we come to the FINAL lesson for today. Isn't it often true that when, by our own decisions and actions, we are cast into the depths of despair, of desperation, real or imagined, we want to blame our misfortune on someone, and often that someone is God?

Well, so did Jonah.  But when he finally realizes that he is getting his death wish, that he will forever dwell in the Pit, when he fears that he will be barred from the face of God forever, then and only then does he wake up.  "When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, God!"  And God remembered Jonah.  And so Jonah completes his psalm of praise with the one thing that he now knows for certain: "Deliverance belongs to the Lord!"

Unfortunately, too often we think that deliverance is something we can handle ourselves.  But our faith teaches us that when things get really rough, when we are finally done shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, and God points us toward a way out of our despair, we finally figure out that our salvation comes as a pure gift, a free grace from God.  Salvation does, indeed,  belong to the Lord. Jonah learns that much, but only for a short while.

And so we end this exploration of the first half of the Book of Jonah.  Next, in the third and final sermon in this series, we will learn lessons every bit as important and practical as those we have learned today.  Like today’s lessons, the lessons for next week will be clearly applicable to our daily lives, and the big question is whether we will willingly open our hearts to the lessons we learn in this series, and make them a part of our lives.

God bless you all.  Amen.

2013 01 20 Sermon: Jonah, Part One: An Epiphany Rejected

2013 01 20 Sermon on Jonah, Part One: An Epiphany Rejected

(A NRSV translation of the Book is attached at the bottom of this sermon.)

This is the first Sunday of a brief three part series about a very brief book.  The book of the Prophet Jonah is but four short chapters long. It is a whopping good story; and it is a good story to study during Epiphany because God clear Epiphany was revealed to Jonah; and Jonah equally clearly rejected it. Which almost never happens, since prophets are supposed to, by definition, get with God’s program. Whatever else Jonah had he certainly had some nerve! And the upshot of that is that, in spite of God’s great efforts with him, Jonah would not have known an Epiphany had it crawled up his leg and bit him!

First, I want to share with you some thoughts about misunderstanding the Book of Jonah. Jonah is well worth some study because most of us do not have a clue as to what God is trying to teach us in this book, and what he is trying to teach us is both applicable and important to us.  The book is simple and straight forward which makes it a bit astonishing that so few practicing Christians or Jews actually understand it.  Hopefully, this brief series will put an end to that for you.

Unfortunately, if you are anything like me and the hundreds of students and parishioners I have taught about Jonah through the years, your ideas about Jonah have been warped by an almost exclusive focus on the first half of the book, and particularly by the idea that Jonah was swallowed by a "whale." And that particular understanding has been further distorted by Walt Disney's "Pinochio" and that very scary scene where the puppet-boy is chased and swallowed by a very menacing whale. So you may not know that the Bible says nothing about a whale that chased and swallowed Jonah, but the story actually tells of a "giant fish" that was sent by God to rescue Jonah!

And you may well have been subjected to one of those boring arguments about whether or not Jonah actually could have been swallowed by a whale, or whether or not that part of the story was a metaphor, or hyperbole, or fantasy: all of which are possible.  But there is no critical agreement on those options, so the spectrum runs from literally true to pure fantasy and picking one leads you no closer to understanding Jonah than you were when the argument started.

It usually helps to understand a story by having an idea about who wrote it, when, for whom, where, and others basic things that give us the sitz im liben, the "setting in life," of the story. For better or worse we don't know much about Jonah, but what we don't know helps because we have been mislead by well meaning scholars who did a lot of guessing about Jonah and forgot to tell us they were guessing.  We will straighten that out now.

We do know, from 2 Kings 14:25, that there actually was a prophet named "Jonah, the son of Amittai," who was active during the reign of King Jeroboam II.  And we know that Jeroboam II ruled early in the 8th Century, BC, from 786 to 746.  The Jonah in our story has exactly the same name as the prophet during Jeroboam's reign so we know the writer of the Book of Jonah wants us to believe the exploits of the Jonah in the story is the same man who served King Jeroboam II.  The problem is that we know next to nothing about the 40 year reign of Jeroboam II.  2 Kings tells us, "Jeroboam II restored the border of Israel from Lebo-Hamath as far as the sea of Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant, Jonah, son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-Heper."

From that we can infer that Jonah was in favor with the King to the point of being allowed to speak for the Lord during his reign.  So Jonah was a royal prophet, not some wandering prophet who was out of favor with the reigning monarch.  We know essentially nothing about when it was written.  It is written in the third person so, regardless what the author would like us to believe he is not Jonah, but someone writing about Jonah. and scholars have said it was written in the 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th and 3rd centuries, BC, so you can take you pick and not be "wrong."  What you can know is that at least one Biblical scholar got his PhD writing his dissertation defending each of those rough dates.

Perhaps more importantly, we don't know who did write the book, or why.  Nor do we know if it was written all at once by one author or a group of authors, or whether it was patched together from bits and pieces, perhaps over several centuries.  A good example of that question involves the prayer that Jonah prays to God while he is in the fish.  It is prayed in the form of a psalm, a poetic writing, wholly unlike the prose narrative of the rest of the book. In the prayer Jonah is both thankful and pious, completely different than the man described in the rest of the book. And once Jonah is spit out of the mouth of the fish Jonah becomes once again the familiar old grouchy, negative, defiant Jonah we have come to know, if not love.  This has led some to say that this prayer was inserted at a later date to make Jonah look a bit more orthodox, and a whole lot more likable.

We can say something pretty definitive about is who it was written for. We know that the author was an Israelite writing for other Israelites.  In other words, and this is important, the Book of Jonah was written by an insider for other insiders.  And as it has been handed down through the ages it is also written for today's insiders – us.  Of course others can learn much from it as well, but it is addressed to insiders and how those insiders feel when God chooses to treat even hated outsiders with compassion and mercy! Let me reiterate that: it addresses the question of how Insiders react when God decides to show compassion and mercy to Outsiders!

One of the ways we can be sure that this writer was an Israelite, and insider, is that the God referred to here is Yahweh, the God of Israel.  And when you know when God is called yahweh in a Biblical text you also know that the center of the story is NEVER about the human actors in the story; rather it is about God.  So, if you were to count the references to God in this short book you would find that God is mentioned 39 time in its 44 verses.  God is the center of this story from beginning to end.  God starts the story by calling Jonah, and ends it by telling Jonah what he already should have known: that God is a God of compassion and mercy, so get used to it!

We do know quite a bit about Nineveh.  It was located on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq.  It was truly a great city, large and prosperous long before most of the other cities of the middle east were important.  Under King Sennacherib it became the capital of Assyria at the end of the 8th century BC and remained so until the fall of that nation in 612 BC.

Israel hated the far superior military might of Assyria which ultimately conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, leaving only Judah, and carrying most of the leaders of the northern kingdom off in chains to Ninevah.  This goes a long way towards understanding how the prophet could hate Ninevah. Ninevah was infamous in the eyes of the Israelites for its evil, debauchery, whoredom, thievery, treachery and cruelty.

The deep and bitter hatred of the Assyrians by the Israelites after the fall of the Northern Kingdom is why many scholars date the writing of the book as later than 722 BC, at least a third of a century after Jonah prophesied. There is no proof of this, but it is widely accepted as making sense.  Of course it is also likely that the Israelites had hated the Assyrians long before they invaded Israel.  Generally speaking, throughout Israel's history Israelites hated all nations that were bigger and stronger than little Israel and that sought to subjugate that tiny nation, either through war or by the insistence on the payment of tribute to avoid war. Regardless, what is very clear is that Jonah hated Ninevah and was none too happy with his God who had the audacity to ask Jonah to preach to them and warn them that God was about to punish them.  And, as we will see, Jonah would rather go to the end of the earth than to obey that instruction of God.

Next time we will look closely at the first two chapters of the book, the first half of the book actually, and begin to answer that great theological question that I insist we all ask: "So what?"  "So what?  What can Jonah and Ninevah possibly have to do with me over 2700 years later?"  The answer is, "A whole lot more than you may realize."  God bless.

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The Book of Jonah, NRSV translation

Chapter One

1:1  Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 2  "Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me." 3  But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.

4  But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. 5  Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. 6  The captain came and said to him, "What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish." 7  The sailors said to one another, "Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us." So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

8  Then they said to him, "Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?" 9  "I am a Hebrew," he replied. "I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." 10  Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, "What is this that you have done!" For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them so. 11  Then they said to him, "What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?" For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. 12  He said to them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you."

13  Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. 14  Then they cried out to the LORD, "Please, O LORD, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man's life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you." 15  So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. 16  Then the men feared the LORD even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.

17  But the LORD provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Chapter Two

2:1  Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, 2  saying, "I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3  You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4  Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?' 5  The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head 6  at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God.

7  As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. 8  Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. 9  But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!"

10  Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.

Chapter Three

3:1  The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2  "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." 3  So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across.

4  Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" 5  And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. 6  When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7  Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8  Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9  Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish."

10  When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

Chapter Four

4:1  But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2  He prayed to the LORD and said, "O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3  And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live."

4  And the LORD said, "Is it right for you to be angry?" 5  Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. 6  The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7  But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8  When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, "It is better for me to die than to live." 9  But God said to Jonah, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die."

10  Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

2013 01 13 Sermon Mark 1: 4-11, The Baptism of Jesus

Mark's was the first description of the baptism of Jesus written. It is the simplest, and it offers no explanation of the BIG question that Biblical Theologians like to debate endlessly: “If, as the Bible says, and the Church confirms, Jesus was without sin, why was he baptized by John?”  Mark doesn't answer that question, content to let God be God and accept the divine mystery. Mark was never burdened when he didn't understand everything about God. He didn’t expect to, and neither should we.

However, writing several years later, Matthew worries about it, and includes a sentence explaining that John was not happy being put in a position to have to baptize Jesus, to which Jesus replies, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."  According to Matthew, that answer is good enough for John, and so he baptizes Jesus.

In any case, Jesus decided to be baptized by John, even though John was baptizing "for the forgiveness of sins" and not “to fulfill all righteousness,” whatever that means. And the Bible tells us that Jesus was without sin.  So Matthew doesn’t solve the question of why, but only adds another one: “What does “to fulfill all righteousness” mean? And there are dozens of ideas about that, and I am not going there in this sermon.

Rather, let’s stick to the question of why Jesus would want to be baptized by John. Now, it is possible, but just barely possible, that at that point in time, BEFORE he began his ministry he may not have known that he was sinless! God had not spoken directly to him as far as we know, and he was likely pretty hard on himself in terms of trying to be as good a person as he could be. So, that is a possible reason. But it raises a lot of questions about when Jesus was aware of who he was, his relationship to God before his baptism, and what his mission in life was to be. In other words, that answer, even more than Matthew’s answer, raises far more questions than it solves.


But, I believe, after many, many hours studying this issue, that Jesus may well have had another agenda than to wash away his sins. And that is that he was determined to set a proper example for all those who, like us, would come to be his disciples and would do our best to emulate him in our own lives. And I will discuss why I think that is the correct answer in a bit. But, the bottom line is that no one knows for certain why he let John baptize him, and probably never will. It is a mystery.

In any case, three of the four Gospel writers tell us that Jesus was, in fact, baptized by John, the Baptizer, and one Gospel writer, St. John the Evangelist, avoids the issue.  So, I think it is safe to say at the very least that John did, in fact, baptize Jesus; that the heavens were, in fact, torn open, that the Spirit did, in fact, descend on Jesus, and that He did, in fact, hear a voice saying that He was God's Son, in whom God was well pleased.

BUT, there is no indication that anyone else heard God’s voice; though, conceivably, they might have. If they did there is no indication that they ran around telling others about it who were not there. And since it would have been a startlingly miraculous event, I doubt that anyone but Jesus heard it, or we would have read more about what a fantastic revelation this was. So, the tearing of the heavens apart, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the voice speaking to Jesus immediately after the baptism are all things that three of the Gospels say only Jesus saw and heard.  To everyone else who was there that day maybe nothing all that special appeared to be going on. Incidentally, this partially explains why Jesus’ disciples seem so dense for such a long time and unable to comprehend who Jesus is until well into his ministry.

Clearly, we now all have all this testimony as to what actually happened; because the Spirit obviously told Mark, Matthew and Luke to share this revelation with us in the Bible.  But, at the time it happened, it was a very private statement of the manifestation of God in the person of Jesus.  It was very much a private epiphany.  Now, it is not.  We all know what happened, even if we are a bit shaky on the details, and a lot shaky as to "why was Jesus baptized at all?"

So, let's look at Mark's text again.  It's the one that strips the scene to the bare essentials.
9  In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  10  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  11  And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

That may look like a pretty innocent paragraph, but, believe me, folks, there is a lot of stuff going on there, in these so called "bare essentials" that give us information about this Epiphany: the manifestation of God in Jesus, the Christ.

Note, first, that the heavens are "torn apart."  In the Greek the word for "torn apart" is not a gentle word, and does not convey a gentle image such as we always see in the paintings of the sweet dove descending on Jesus. The word itself is violent: tearing, ripping, shredding -- powerful: the very heavens ripped open!  God sends the Spirit upon Jesus in power and glory!  Which, if you recall, was Isaiah's prayer, uttered 700 years before as he stood frustrated by the sin of the people, begging God: "Oh! That you would tear open the heavens and come down!"  Come down in power and glory and with justice and judgment.  In Christ, that prayer is finally fulfilled.

Interestingly, the very word for "torn apart" used here is used only one other time in the New Testament: at the time of Jesus' death.  Then, Matthew tells us, at His death, "the curtain of the temple was torn apart, from top to bottom."

That massive curtain, which is said to have been a foot thick and 40 feet tall, was ripped to shreds.  That curtain was the very thing that Jews believed separated them from God, from the inner sanctum, the "Holy of Holies," a place where only a handful of priests were allowed to enter.  Now all of that is gone; and God is to be confined there no more; but is to be found only in Jesus: the One who will be raised in three days.

And yet, in the midst of the massive display of power at the ripping open of the heavens at Jesus' baptism, we see a paradox as the Spirit gently, with total love, alights on Jesus, even as the voice heralds the great epiphany, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

And today, we here are privileged read about and to witness to this great event; this great epiphany as the Father notifies Jesus that He, He alone, is his Son, the beloved Son, with whom the Father is well pleased.

Is it any wonder that I get frustrated sometimes with scholars who get so consumed worrying about what they can and cannot understand? Clearly God tells Jesus that he is well pleased, delighted, with him.   And this is the same Jesus who was just baptized for the repentance of sins which He did not commit.

And so now we come back to my idea that the reason for his baptism could well be to set an example for us. Why should that surprise us?  Is not this the same Son, the same man, who will, within three years, will go to the Cross to die for sins which He did not commit, sins that WE committed against the Father and the Spirit, and yes, against Him?  Can we not see the symmetry in that?  Can we not see that at his baptism, even before His mission began, He was identifying with us, probably knowing that He was, Himself, without sin, but willing to show us, by His example, the steps we need to take in obedience to God's will?

He offered Himself to a baptism He had no need to do.  I believe that He did this because He wanted to be obedient to God.  Perhaps He knew why God wanted this; perhaps not.  But what He did know is that God wanted it.  And so He did it.  Just as, as he waited in Gestheme, He wished that the cup of death might pass Him by; but knowing it was God's will that he die for us, He said, "But not my will, but thine be done."

This was no ordinary man. Yet at the cross He allowed Himself to be crucified as an ordinary man, an ordinary sinner, even though He was without sin.  In both cases He did what He did because He knew it was the will of the Father. And it was Jesus’ will to set an example for us.

Why, to this day, do so many not experience the epiphany of seeing who this man really is: The beloved Son of God?  Even with the testimony of the Bible, I run across people who think of themselves as Christians who say, "I admire Jesus.  I really admire him; he was a great man.” Which is, of course, true.  He was a great man.  The question, however, is not whether he was a great man.  The question, which requires a personal epiphany on every Christian’s part to answer correctly, is "Who IS Jesus?"

By reading the Bible accounts of His baptism we are given strong, undeniable clues as to his identity; clues which many who should know better constantly ignore.  They would rather argue over whether or not He should have been baptized by John, or whether He was baptized at all; and argue over who did or did not hear or see what; and over countless trivial things that we can't explain and never will be able to explain. But “Who is Jesus?” is the only question about his baptism that really matters.

We've got to be more like Mark.  There are some things we can't explain; that we never will be able to explain; and that we probably were never meant to know.  If our God is so small that we can figure out everything about him that we want to know; then that God is not the God who is the Father of Jesus. This Season of Epiphany we have to get beyond all the trivial detail and answer for ourselves the real question of the Epiphany: "Who is Jesus?"

Many of you know that C. S. Lewis was probably the greatest Christian apologist of the last century.  He was a crusty, sarcastic and delightfully blunt man; a brilliant man; a man who came to Christ reluctantly, as an adult.  And he was a man who fell head over heels in love with his Savior.  He puts the issue of the Epiphany about as clearly as I can imagine it can be put.

Listen to this statement from his classic book, "Mere Christianity."

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher; but I don't accept His claim to be God."  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  he has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

Lewis, previously an avowed atheist, decided that Jesus was his Lord and God. He did this fairly late in life, when he was already famous, and at a time when coming to faith in Jesus Christ could do his career no good, and possibly do it harm.

We each one of us need to remember that when we lift all the facts we can from all the books and all the scholars, and sift carefully through them, when we listen to all the voices who claim to know what is and isn’t true in the Bible, all of that pales in the face of the great question Jesus asks each one of us, “But you, who do you say I am?”

It is a great Epiphany, and a great blessing, if we can answer, “You, Lord, are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

God bless you all.

“Our Epiphany: To Know Self Sacrificial Love”

Epiphany, 2013

In his first letter to the church at Corinth at Chapter 13 St. Paul describes a special kind of love. I have reflected on 1st Corinthians 13 many, many times and in no other place have I found a better statement on the absolute importance of that kind of love. And I can think of no better way for us to approach the season of Epiphany than understanding our need to demonstrate such love.

As a Christian it is absolutely necessary to understand that God loves us, all of us.  And our response to God's love is clear: we are to love God with all our heart, mind and soul. We are also to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus challenges us further.  Jesus says we are to love our enemies. The kind of love that makes any of that possible is agape love: self sacrificial love that puts the well being of others first. “Agape” is the Greek word used in the Church for that kind of love: a love that puts the needs of others ahead of our own wants and needs.

Let’s approach this issue first by thinking about some things people do, often unconsciously, that can impede them from exhibiting agape love toward others. Here just a few.

Too often being abrupt and dismissive.  And its opposite: assuming that someone who might simply be pre-occupied was being abrupt and dismissive to you. 2. questioning the motives of others, rather than taking one another’s statements at face value, and giving people the benefit of the doubt. 3. suspicion that there must be an ulterior motive behind what someone is telling us. 4. an unwillingness to see mistakes as a normal part of life. But people forget, and people make mistakes, lots of them; and most of them are unintentional. 5. a failure to realize that others have their own convictions and need not always agree that everything we think is right. 6. assuming that when someone disagrees with an idea of ours that they are attacking us personally. 7. finally, an unwillingness to actually listen to what someone else is saying, rather than trying to figure out what we are going to say next.

Now, who is guilty of that?  Well, me, for one. I am guilty of some of that from time to time; not all of it all the time, but definitely some of it some of the time.  I’m not proud to say that.  But it is true.  We are all sinners, including Pastors.

Let’s look at what St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians says that would help us to avoid that list of mistakes I just read to you. Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth is addressed to a divided church. Paul wanted them to understand that they were not exhibiting "self sacrificial" love even toward one another. Paul calls self-sacrificing, or agape love, a love that “seeks not its own.”

As Paul lays it out in Chapter 13, he sees that kind of love as the ultimate truth about who God is, about who Jesus is.  It was Paul’s own epiphany in terms of understanding what God is trying to do on this earth: to establish love: love for the Father, love for the Son, and love among all people.  Ultimately, nothing else matters.  Only love. And here is his bottom line for all of us: Without love we are nothing. Here is just some of what he says in that Chapter.

Paul says, “If I speak in human tongues or even the speech of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

Preachers ought to pay attention to that one.  No matter how well I preach, no matter how clever I am, no matter how well I know the Bible and no matter how well I can speak about it, and write about it, if I do so without love, I have done nothing more than make a lot of noise. Paul, a beautiful writer, says that pretty words are nothing but noise without love.

Paul says, “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge… but do not have love, I am nothing.”

All the education that I have accumulated over the years is worthless without love.  All the insight into the Bible, all the “insider” information that I have picked up, isn’t worth anything on its own. I want to rebel at that.  A lot of hard work went into the gathering of all this stuff in my head.  How about you?  All you have learned, the wisdom you have gained, the skills you have perfected?  Don’t they stand for anything?  Well, without love, Paul says that they don’t!

But what about faith?  Paul says : “And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

That’s going a bit far, isn't it?  Isn't faith, after all, what saves us?  How can it be “nothing?” Well, Paul says that without love, it is nothing. Faith without love, my friends, isn't faith.  Period.  So if you are a Christian and are proud that you are saved, which is a sin in itself, then, watch out; because if you can’t demonstrate love toward others, you really have no faith at all.

In my life I have known many Christians who know just about everything there seems to be to know about Jesus, except that he is love. These people wear their faith on their sleeves, like some badge of honor.  But they don’t know that he is love. If they knew that then they wouldn't use their knowledge to bludgeon everybody else over the head with it.  They wouldn't feel so self-righteous because they think that they sin less than others. They wouldn't spend so much time testing fellow Christians about the details of our faith, separating us in their minds from the "true believers" like themselves.  They wouldn't be such Pharisees.  Not if they truly loved like Jesus loves.

I could go on with further examples about the importance of agape love.  But I won’t.  Because Paul spells out the characteristics of self-giving love in detail.  These, says Paul, are the characteristics of agape love:

4  Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
5  or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6  it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
7  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8  Love never ends.

That’s it. First Corinthians 13.  Read it.  Study it.  Pray about it.  And then compare this definition of agape love with how you demonstrate your love to others day in, day out.

I can’t tell you how that comparison will come out for you.  I can tell you that I've done it.  I come out fine on some, OK on others, and I fail on some.  Six months ago I probably would have come out about the same way, but not necessarily succeeding or failing on the same points. You see, we all change. Hopefully, we grow, and in that growth we can demonstrate more agape love.

In this new year my prayer is that anyone who looks in on the churches of the Baltic Parish, anyone who asks "Is this the right place for me?" will say, "Wow!  Look how those folks in the Baltic Parish really care for and about one another! I would like to be part of a community like that!"

Amen.

“THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS”

“THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS”

2012 12 30 SERMON

Texts: Luke: 2:21, Matthew: 1:21; Galatians: 4:4-7; 

Philippians 2:9-11 

(read during the Sermon)

It may feel a bit like Christmas is all over, but, according to the Church today is still the Christmas Season and will be until next Sunday, the First Day of Epiphany. And, while we will all celebrate Tuesday as New Year’s Day, January 1st of each year is set aside by the Church to celebrate not the fact that it is a new year, but to celebrate the fact that the name of Jesus is holy.  “The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ” is the proper name for an obscure feast day on the Church calendar that falls every January 1st.

And, obscure though that annual event might be, if you think about it, there is no one more important to Christians than the one named Jesus.  So, we are going to talk about him. There isn’t any thing or any one in the world more interesting, more important, or more relevant to our lives as Christians than Jesus.   

Today I want us to concentrate first on just one verse in the Gospel according to St. Luke, the verse that comes immediately after the story of the birth of the Messiah.  Luke 2:21 reads: “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”  

In one of his plays Shakespeare asks, “What’s in a name?”  Whatever Shakespeare actually thought about names, for Christians it is by our name that we are known.  Will Willimon writes, “What’s in a name?  A whole being, a tag for a full personality.  In our name is our identity, the essence of who we are.”  So, if Willamon is right, and I think he is, there is a lot in a name.  And there is everything in the name of Jesus. 

And that is why long, long ago the Church decided that January 1st would be a feast day in the Church known as The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Did you know that there is still an ancient collective prayer that is to be prayed in worship services on that day; that is, in the few churches that still have worship services on that day.  

Let me share it with you: It reads “Eternal Father, you gave your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting.  Amen.”
  
Kind of nice, isn’t it?  Sort of puts a perspective on things: on New Year’s parties, and football, and lots of things the world thinks are more important these days.

What’s so special about Jesus’ name?  The name of Jesus means “Savior.” Luke doesn’t mention the meaning of the name of Jesus, but Matthew’s gospel is very clear about it. Sometimes we miss it as we rush through the story. At Matthew 1:21 an Angel of the Lord tells Joseph to not be afraid to take Mary as his wife, for “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  The Holy Name of Jesus literally means “The one who saves.”

We also may miss another important point in both our haste and our seeming familiarity with the birth texts.  Did you notice that neither Mary nor Joseph comes up with this name for the child?  The child is from God, and he is given his name by God through his emissary, an Angel “of the Lord.” God named him, God claimed him as his own: just as God knows us by name, and claims us as his own.

What are the consequences of such an act of grace?  Our other text for today tells us the consequences.  It comes from St. Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, a church which had fallen away from the true Gospel.  

Paul writes, starting at 4:4: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’  So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”  

Think about it.  Named and claimed as one of Christ’s own, you are an heir to the kingdom of heaven.  Yes, there is a lot in a name.  And there is everything in the Holy Name of Jesus.  

Jesus.  That name carries power with it.  To say that “I am doing this or that in the name of Jesus” carries an enormous responsibility.  To call upon the Holy Name of Jesus is to call upon the maker of the universe, to invoke all that is holy, all that is sacred, all that is righteous, all that means anything to our lives.

Doing things in the name of Jesus and invoking of his name in our worship, in our prayers, in our songs and in our day to day lives is serious stuff.  And it is what Christians are to do.  It is what the Church is all about.  All the activity that we will do in this church during this coming year will be done “in the Holy Name of Jesus.”  

Because you are a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, you are his ambassador.  You are his designated representative in the world, the emissary from his Kingdom.  Most of us are Christians because we met one of those Christian ambassadors before we met Christ himself.  We met those who labored “in the name of Jesus” before we met Jesus. Not only in prayer, but in all that you do, you are responsible to do it “in the name of Jesus.”  You are responsible to pattern your life after his life.  Your name is to be made holy, as his is holy.

To be a Christian is to be someone who has been blessed by Jesus in order to be a blessing to the world.  Just like the priests of old, you and I are to bless people in the name of Jesus.  In sum, we are blessed in order to be a blessing.

Each of you, with your unique names, have already been named and claimed by the one whose name is above all names.  And in addition to your given name, each of you has another name, an infinitely more telling name: Christian.  By that name are you to do all that you do “in the name of Jesus.” You are to bear that name in the world, so that all those in the world may see Jesus coming to them through you.

Listen to St. Paul in his letter to the church at Phillipi speaking of the glory of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; (Philippians 2:9-11) “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.”

And so, in the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ: I wish each of you, children of God and heirs to Christ’s Kingdom, a most glorious and righteous New Year.

Christmas Means Many Things

Note to Readers: I have been requested by several friends and readers to resume posting on my blog in Open Salon. However, I find it virtually impossible to access that web site these days. In addition, what I have time to write these days are sermons. And so, I am posting here my Christmas message to the members of the Baltic Parish here in Ohio, where I am now serving as Interim Pastor. As I approach my 74th birthday anniversary on the 28th of this month I have much to be thankful for: including sufficient relief from the pains of my erythromelalgia to be able to continue serving God in in the ministry. My wife, Sue, and I wish you the most blessed Christmas and pray that you be blessed abundantly in the coming year.

What is the total meaning of Christmas?  That is a question that can cause real conflict in us if we just think about it.  That is because there is the meaning of Christmas most of us grew up seeing portrayed in the society around us; and there is the meaning that the stories of the birth of Jesus in the Bible portray; and, finally, there is the total meaning of Christmas that we, as Christians, know, but really don’t want to think about very much. And, ironically, we especially don’t want to think about that third meaning at Christmas time!  And so, both emotionally and intellectually, those three views of Christmas tug at us in strikingly different ways.

One part of me, a very sentimental and romantic part, a part supported by movie myths like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “Miracle on 34th Street,” and Hallmark ads on television, wants to approach a mystical manger and linger in adoration over a magical baby who will take all the pain away from the real world – if only long enough to allow Santa Claus and Toys R Us to fill the area around the Christmas tree with answers to every want we ever could be convinced we had – even if we knew not what we wanted.

Many of you might not notice, but, at heart, most of us are hopeless romantics, and so we actually really like the romantic, “It’s a Wonderful Life”  idea of Christmas; because we grew up with it and it surrounds us every waking minute from well before Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve.  It is the Christmas that America loves.

And while it is deeply seated in the romantic myth of Christmas, it is also the one that feeds the economy so effectively that, even now, the Business Section of every newspaper in America has daily articles of projected doom or salvation for the entire country – all dependent on the sales figures in this crucial season.

Since we were born it has been ever so.  And so, through good economies and bad we have always liked it. Why shouldn’t we like it?  Happy people, pure white snow, merry times and mistletoe, and all the other trappings of a bright, joyous time. Part of us really loves that vision and desperately wishes it were always true. After all, it has been THE image of Christmas since most of us were born.  It is familiar.  It is very comfortable.

But there is another Christmas that is not quite so comfortable; not so commercial; not quite so myth-filled; not so sentimental or romantic.  That Christmas, the Christian Christmas that focuses on a babe in a manger is also joyful and, in many ways, mystical.  But, still, the Bible is clear that this is no magical baby.  There is no mythical manger.  This Christmas is real; even as in the background of the manger loom shepherds, wise men and angels.

But, we know that while that scene played out for a few hours, very few people even knew it happened. Even the wise men went home without telling Herod or anyone else what they saw. And Joseph and Mary and the baby soon left Bethlehem and fled into Egypt. And Herod, furious that the wise men did not tell him where the baby was to be found, ended up slaughtering all the little children in and around Bethlehem in hope of killing this tiny baby that one day might seek to take away his crown.

We don’t focus much on that post-Christmas scene because it is horrifying and does not fit the image we want to have of that wondrous night when Christ was born. And we hardly hear anything about Jesus for another thirty years or so.  But still, in the Church, the focus at Christmas time is on the beauty and wonder of that one night of the birth of the Messiah.  And we love that sharper focus, because it allows us to avoid, if only for a while, the truth that will come after.

And so that brings us to the third image of Christmas: the fuller, truer, image of Christmas for a Christian. There is room in that image for much joy at the beginning, much pain shortly thereafter, and a long period of normal life as Jesus grew from baby to boy to man and began his ministry. But ultimately that meaning of Christmas has to recognize, at least out of the corner of our eye, that there is a story we already know that is at the heart of the Incarnation: that the babe in the manger did, as on of our beloved carols notes, “come for to die.”

And we, if only for a fleeting instant, have to recognize this third meaning of Christmas. Because it is not only in naive innocence that the Christian must approach the Incarnation of the Christ.  Rather there must be wide-eyed recognition that no babe in any manger saved the world.  The salvation of the world is the work of a man, a God-man to be sure, but of a man nevertheless; not of a babe in a manger.

So the Christian must, from time to time, look at the babe in the manger with full awareness of who he will grow up to be, and of what work our God will set him to do and of what will become of him. And our sentimentality must also admit the pathos, and our joy must be leavened by the reality of the work that lies ahead for this swaddled child.

In this view, of course, there is much room for the promises of peace, hope, love, and joy; and for great celebration of the coming of the Messiah into the world.  There is room for laughter, and wonder and awe; for rejoicing and, most of all, for worship.  For what could be both more awesome and more awful to contemplate than the fact that God so loved the world that He came into this creation of His in the form of a human baby for the simple, indescribable, purpose of saving us from ourselves?

And while I know that this is the real Christmas, I sometimes don’t like it nearly as much as the one offered to me by the culture or the one that focuses only on that one wondrous night of Christ’s birth.  This third, broader Christian look at the meaning of Christmas is too complicated; it is too messy. It is full of hope; but also of pain and despair – it is all too real.  And the grace that finds us searching our hearts to understand this Christmas is not a cheap grace at all; but a grace that comes at a great price.  Yet, thanks be to God that the price has been paid for us – because we are incapable of paying for it ourselves.

And so, for me, and perhaps for many of you as well, the question still haunts:  How do we approach Christmas?  We all know the answer is not easy.  Discipleship is never easy.

And it is in the light of that fact that I leave each one of you with my Christmas wish: that you and I, we together, may come to know and live the true meaning of Christmas: the wonder and joy of the night of Christ’s birth, and yet also be aware of the awful reality that must yet come as that child becomes a man.

May we celebrate the beginning of the story with the true joy that comes only from knowing the whole story.  Because, in the end there is resurrection and salvation for all who believe!  What begins in a manger moves to a Cross – but it ends in Easter!  And that is Christmas enough for all of us.

May God pour out abundant blessings on each of you this Holy Season, and may the God of Love who thought enough of us to send His only Son to be our redemption be with you and bless you and yours in the year to come.

May the Peace of Christ be with you all.

Memoir: The Earliest Years, Part One: Those who came before

First published on Open Salon, JANUARY 6, 2011 1:00PM

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Why now?

I  just celebrated my 72nd birthday, and have decided that it is none too soon to begin fleshing out my personal memoir, bits and pieces of which are already written, but with huge gaps remaining. As the old saw says, "I am not getting any younger."

As a child I was usually called "Little Monte" since I was a "Junior," or "Monte Gene," because my middle name is "Eugene." A brief glimpse of my early childhood was first introduced to my Open Salon readers in the final installment of the series "A WWII Romance." There we saw a melodramatic, but all too true, tale of "Monte Gene," then 6, being secretly lowered through a window by his uncle into the arms of his mother, Wilma, followed by a quick automobile run for the county line.

This "kidnapping" was the culmination of a bitter argument between his mother and his maternal grandmother, Lola, with whom he had lived most of his life up to that time. Wilma had remarried, over the vehement objections of her mother, to a young man named Alva Galemore. Al was to Lola nothing more than "poor white trash" and she had vowed to never give Monte up to go live with the newlyweds, even if it meant a court fight.

My life up to that time had been relatively uneventful from my point of view, but, from the perspective of the other parties involved, a center of controversy from the start. And it is there that my story really begins, long before I could have any actual memories of the history or the events.

However, all of the parties to my earliest years were eager, through the years that followed, to convince me of the truth of their versions of my earliest years. And, out of that cacophony of biased opinion, as I grew older, I pieced together my own version of my earliest years. That my version may be wrong in this or that detail is likely the case. But that the quilt that I pieced together from these multiple memories molded my understanding of human nature, family dynamics, my identity, and of life itself cannot be denied. That, of course, is a mixed blessing.

None of the key parties to this earliest story are alive, save me. And there is little that can be remotely called "evidence." There are, of course, a few photos, some crude information, what I have been told, and my personal memories which go back to about the age of three.

I am told there are those folk who remember their first birthdays, but I claim no such extraordinary abilities. And I only know that my memories go back to about three because there are pictures of me inscribed as taken at "age three" at events about which I remember details not in the pictures. Before that there are pictures, but I remember nothing about them other than what I have been told.

Before the Memories

But we must start even before my memories, because earlier events shaped those who shaped me, and I have distilled from them some background of those people who were vital to my formative years.

My father, of whom I have only the vaguest memories prior to age 12, was Monte Eugene Canfield. The version of my birth certificate filled in by the doctor, gives me that same name, but another certificate, the official state version, lists me as Monte Eugene Canfield, Jr.

In any case, there is some undocumented genealogical information on the Canfield side so we will start there. There is no genealogical information on my mother's side.

According to family records, my particular branch of the Canfield family emigrated from England to New England in 1639. My direct ancestor, Matthew Canfield, was born in 1604 and died in 1673. Later generations emigrated From New England, first to eastern Ohio when Ohio was a territory, part of the Western Reserve, and, later, to Kansas territory.

[Ironically, by shear accident, I have retired into the same eastern Ohio area of the early Canfield emigrants, some 60 miles southwest of the city of Canfield here in NE Ohio. I had no clue that there were Canfields in Ohio until after we moved here in 1997.] 

Some 9 generations following Matthew Canfield, my paternal grandfather, Leo See Canfield, was born in June, 1892. He married my grandmother, Ola G. Montgomery, in 1915, and died in Dec, 1918 at Scranton in eastern Kansas where he owned a small town newspaper. While the records do not say why he died, that was the year of the great flu pandemic that originated in the US in Kansas, at Ft. Riley, and killed over 1/2 million people here in the US, and 50 to 100 million world wide.

My father, Monte Eugene Canfield, the first of two sons, was born in 1916.

My father's mother's maiden name was, as noted above, Ola Montgomery. I know nothing of her background other than that she was born in eastern Kansas. After my grandfather died she gave birth to her second son some three months later, my uncle, Leo. My father was then about 2 1/4 years old. In spite of those dire circumstances, rather than give up the family newspaper, and knowing nothing of the newspaper business herself, she determined to learn the trade and run the paper and print shop. This she did. She later went on to become a highly respected member of the press establishment in Kansas.

My mother was born Wilma Lee Elaine Allensworth in eastern Kansas, in 1923. In those days her friends called her "Willie." She hardly knew her father as he deserted the family when she was a very small girl and she was raised by her mother and her second husband, William Isaiah Isaacs. Bill Isaacs owned three small coal mines in Osage County, Kansas and they lived in Burlingame, Kansas, some 30 miles south of Topeka, and 6 miles from Scranton.

From the time Wilma's mother, Lola, and her stepfather, Bill, combined their two very large families, Bill Isaacs was known to Wilma as "Daddy," as he was to all of Lola's children. Wilma was given the name Isaacs as her family name, but Lola's older children were offered the choice and all chose to be known by the name of Isaacs. I did not even know that Bill Isaacs was not my grandfather by blood until I was a much older child and by then could not care less. I idolized him.

My maternal grandmother was born Lola May Barnes. I know nothing of her family background other than that there was an alleged ancestral relationship to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, one which my grandmother was not interested in discussing. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that her family was part of the "free state" pioneers in the days of "Bloody Kansas." I judiciously never pursued that line of thought with her.
The Importance of Ancestry
The truth is that within my own family our ancestral pedigree was not very important, except for a small interest shown on the Canfield side. The general conviction on both sides of my family was that people earned their place in society by dint of hard study and/or hard work, preferably both.

As for myself the only thing I think is interesting about this little foray into my family background is that all the associated names are English in origin. I make no more of it than that.
And, I have little interest in the importance of "blood" beyond a sense of love and obligation to my immediate family, and, even then, "blood" cannot not define my immediate family.

The fact is that the man who had the most influence in my earliest years was my "step" grandfather, Bill Isaacs; the one who raised me throughout my public school years was my "step" father, Al Galemore, and the one who helped me most through my college years was my biological father's "step" father, Sam Shade.
All of those men treated me with unequivocal love as one of their own.

I have a sense of unconditional love and devotion to their memories today. They were my heroes, my mentors and my role models; and I loved them shamelessly and passionately. And I think of and miss them to this day; especially my ("step") Dad, Al Galemore.


Next: Wilma and Monte Sr. marry. And I am born, not in Kansas, but in the Oklahoma panhandle, a harbinger to an itinerant childhood.

Backing Up Your Posts/Comments to New Site is Easy

Originally published, Open Salon, DECEMBER 4, 2010 4:26PM

 

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I haven't spent much, hardly any, time here lately, but there seems to be a bit of panic going on, again, on OS. This time its what happens if Salon.com sells out, folds, etc. It could happen, but does not look very imminent.
 I wondered about what would happen to my stuff when a similar panic hit shortly after I came on OS. (To my recollection this is the third such panic since I came here in October, 2008). So, in addition to keeping back up files on my computer of everything I post, I decided to set up a "mirror blog" on Google's Blogspot. (Used to be known as Blogger.)
I was more concerned with keeping the formating, the pics, vids, links, etc. than just the content since it is time consuming to set up a post anywhere.
I chose Google's Blogspot over the many other available free spots to start a blog simply because I am lazy and Blogspot does almost all the work for you. They have templates you can choose from to set up the blog in any style you want, and step by step instructions about adding content.

In any case, once you have set up your account, chosen a format, and set up your blog name, etc. here is all you have to do to move content to Blogspot.

Open your Blogspot blog in one tab. In the Blogger "Dashboard" click on "New Post." That will open a window to allow you to add content.

Now, Open your Open Salon Blog in another tab and go to a given post on OS that you want to copy to Blogspot.

Right click and hold down the mouse key to highlight the post, including title, comments, etc. that you want. (You can edit out any ads, and miscellaneous stuff you don't want.) Left click the mouse and select "copy."

Then dump the copied material, pics, videos, etc. and all into the Blogspot window. (Left click the mouse and select "Paste."
Move the Title up to the title box in Blogspot. Move the "tags" into the "labels" box on Blogspot. And clean up any miscellaneous stuff that you don't want moved into Blogspot.

Click "Preview" and take a look at what you have. Edit that if necessary.

 When you are satisfied it looks OK, Click on "Publish Post." You are done.
(You can edit the post further at any time, or delete it entirely.)

That's it. Several of our OS friends have started doing this and many of them have Blogger accounts. You can follow their blogs there just the way you can here, and you can send notices of your posts, etc.

 Take a look at my Blogger "Mirror Site" to get an idea what it could look like, although there are MANY options how to set up your own blog using the templates.
http://montecanfield.blogspot.com/

If you have any questions let me know in the comments and I will try to walk you through any issues with doing this.
 Blessings,

Monte

Links to my Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Essays

Originally published on Open Salon, DECEMBER 1, 2010 8:55PM

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 Traditional Lighted Moravian Star

These essays are part of my ongoing, and developing, Christian Calendar Series. The links are posted here for those who like to reflect on the truths, beliefs and faith associated with those who celebrate these holy days in the life of believers. It is also hoped that those who do not share the Christian faith will come to better understand the importance of this tri-part season of love, hope, peace and joy.
                                                                      ---  Monte

 Links to Open Salon Articles in this blog:


The Rich Man and Lazarus: Approaching the Coming Holidays 

An Advent Reflection - Leaning toward God  

Advent Reflection: God Does Not View Us From a Distance

My Christmas Gift - -Blessings & Peace 

The Epiphany -- A Reflection on The Word of God


 

A Story of Thanksgiving: Where Are The Other Nine?

Note: While this is written from my Christian perspective, I believe this essay raises issues for people of all faiths or of no faith at all.

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Luke 17:11-19

Jesus was passing along the border of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, ten men who were lepers stood far off and lifted their voices to him, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." When he heard them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were healed. One of them, a Samaritan, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorifying God he fell upon his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Jesus answered, saying "Were not ten healed? Where are the other nine? 18 Are there none who return to give glory to God, except this foreigner?" 19 And Jesus said to him, "Arise, and go on your way: your faith hath made you whole."

---

This little story about Jesus and the lepers is about a time of great personal crisis brought on by a horrible, incurable disease. And there is no "big deal" in life quite like being really ill, whether it is a sudden onset sickness or a chronic and incurable disease.

Serious illness is one of the worst things life can throw at us. It is not only the pain and physical misery that has to be endured; it is also the mental anguish, first of not knowing what is wrong, and then of knowing and wondering if anything actually can be done about it. All of that mental anguish is a function of being confronted with the truth of our own mortality, or of a painful morbidity that we might have to face for the rest of our life. Death is no longer an abstraction, something that happens to someone else. It is something that is happening to us. It is a time of our greatest vulnerability to the one thing we can't avoid: our own decay and death.

Serious illness is an all too graphic reminder that this life is fragile, finite and short. Even though we know that to be true on an intellectual level it is often only on our sickbed that we finally figure out that our personal earthly life is terminal. At its worst, serious illness is a foretaste of what it is like to have the world go on without you.

Perhaps that is why, when we are well, we often avoid those who are seriously ill. We may send a card or call, but we find it hard to visit. And the more seriously ill a person is the more reluctant we are. I remember that when I was a hospital chaplain back in the early 90s I would watch visitors stream in to see someone who had hernia or gall bladder surgery, or a broken leg. But I would walk down the hall to the AIDS ward and sit quietly talking to those folks and never see them get a visitor for days on end. In those days when science was just confirming how AIDS and HIV were transmitted the general public was afraid that they would catch their death from someone who had that affliction. Literally.

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The many stories of Jesus and his dealings with those who had grave illnesses tell us that he understood this fear of death that we try so hard to cover over. This story of Jesus and the lepers takes place as Jesus is on the way to his own death, a death which he has foretold, in Jerusalem. Yet, on that journey he took the time to heal others. In this case, he was dealing with lepers. Ten of them to be exact.

It is hard for us to understand just how awful leprosy was in those days. Leprosy was a sentence of death, a slow, disfiguring, incurable death. But long before lepers died physically, they were essentially dead to anything approaching what we would call living. They were cast out of their homes, separated from their families, forbidden, literally, to come anywhere close to healthy people. In fact, they often lived in caves along the main caravan routes in colonies of other lepers, bound together in their dance with death, calling out for whatever alms they could get for essentials like food. They lived off the scraps of society because to society they were nothing but scraps.

When they moved about they were required to shout "Unclean! Unclean!" so that healthy people could avoid being in close proximity. Meanwhile, the relentless disease ate away at their bodies, distorting their features, even as it ate away at their pride and whatever dignity they had before they contracted the disease. Long before these unfortunates were physically dead, they were dead to their families and their community, even forbidden to practice their religion with those who were deemed "clean".

And so, into this setting comes Jesus, walking along the border between Galilee and Samaria. One of the ten lepers was even more of an outcast to a Jew than were the nine others, for he was a Samaritan. Samaritans were hated as a half-breed, syncretist race who held to a corrupt, compromised religion. That this hatred was ill founded did not really cross the minds of the Jewish leadership. And so, in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi like Jesus it should have been hard to imagine anyone lower than a Samaritan leper.

And thus the scene is set. We see Jesus walking along and, standing far off, the lepers beg Jesus for mercy. What did they want? What could they expect? Did they hope for a few coins, some bread or dried meat? Did they hope for a blessing or perhaps a kind word. Could these lowest of the low actually hope for a miracle?  And why would a Jewish rabbi help them at all, knowing that the priests had condemned them to this life. How could he afford to do anything contrary to custom and law?

Well, Jesus does not break the law nor does he do anything that indicates that there is a miracle afoot. He makes no gestures of healing, does not touch them or come near to them, does not say anything to them that would indicate that he is doing anything for them at all. He simply treats them as if they are healed. And so he commands them to go and show themselves to their priests.

But, why would they? They are a mess, covered with sores, their features distorted, some beyond recognition. Why go to the priests only to be rejected yet again? Had they not suffered enough rejection for ten lifetimes? After all, the priests held their lives in their hands. They decided who was clean and who was unclean. They decided how severe the uncleanliness was and how the affected person was to deal with it.

Yet Jesus, a rabbi, told them to go to the priests as if they were clean. And here is the first miracle: they obeyed. As I have said many times before, trusting obedience is the most rudimentary form of faith: to trust and obey may not seem attractive to us individualists, but it is the first step in faith. Belief "in" something or someone comes later. We do not know why they trusted Jesus and obeyed him. Luke does not say. But many of the graces of God are not explained. I believe that their trusting obedience had to come from some place beyond themselves. It could not have come out of any grace filled experience they had up to that point in their wretched lives. It was a gift of faith.

And so, uncured, they go as they are told to do. And, as they go, the second miracle occurs: they are healed. They trusted and obeyed before they were healed, and having done so they find that they are, in fact, healed.  And nine of them just keep right on going. Apparently they make no connection between their healing and the strange instruction of Jesus.  Like us when we are healed, sometimes we are so happy just to be well that we forget why it happened or who brought it about.

But one leper, the Samaritan, makes the connection between the healing and the healer. He comes back, praising God at the top of his lungs, throwing himself on the ground in front of Jesus and thanking him profusely: "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"

And Jesus doesn't pick him up, dust him off and tell him some little comforting parable or saying to remind him of what just happened. Instead, Jesus asks two not quite rhetorical questions. "Hey, what happened to the other nine?" and "Did only you, a foreigner, see fit to come back and praise God?" Then Jesus tells him to go on his way because his faith has "made him whole" (or, "has healed" him).

Now, I know most modern Bible translations say that the man's faith "healed" him. But that is far too obvious a conclusion, and robs the story of its extraordinary power. I believe that phrase should read "your faith has saved you." Luke is trying to tell us something vitally important here and most modern translations are missing the point. The Greek word we see here translated as "healed," "made well," and "made whole" is precisely the word used throughout the New Testament for "saved."

And here is the point I believe Luke is making: we know that all ten were "healed," or "made whole." That is obvious. But only one came back. And that one was "saved" by having done so.  Only one, the Samaritan, turned back to the source of his healing and expressed thanksgiving: joyous, outrageous gratitude; thanksgiving directed at God through the instrument of his healing: Jesus. Only one felt and understood the source of his salvation.

So, what is the difference between the thankful one and the nine who do not come back to say thank you? The ten lepers were all dead people. Spiritually and socially, and, increasingly, physically, they were considered dead. And every one of them would have given just about anything to be made well again, to simply be "normal" and to live a normal life. And Jesus gave all ten of them that. So, what is the only real difference?

Just this. What Luke is really talking about here is the possibility of a spiritual resurrection: a resurrection that gives them a chance to restore relationship with God and not to be just "normal" like other people. And if they did not know that Jesus is about the task resurrecting people to more than just physical life but to be in right relationship to God, then Luke knew exactly that. Story after story in his Gospel portray this role that Jesus plays throughout his ministry.

Luke knew that all of the healed lepers were once "outside" of normal society, and he knew that all are made "insiders" once again by Jesus. But only one, the Samaritan, realizes a spiritual resurrection. This one is not only healed, he is "saved," delivered, made whole, not only in body but in spirit. He alone comes back to say "thanks." He alone realizes that Jesus has now established a relationship with him, and has renewed his relationship with God.  Most importantly, he alone recognizes that he is saved and was accepted by Jesus while he was yet a leper, while he was still sick, untouchable -- before he got well.

That is the true message Luke brings to us in this little story.

---

Personally I believe that Jesus is saying to the Samaritan, "Your acceptance of my embracing, life giving love, your faith in me even before you knew you were healed, and your recognition that the source of your healing is God; that faith has saved you."

As for the others they too got a wonderful gift for they were healed. The healing of the leprosy came with no strings attached. There was no requirement that they turn back and thank the one who healed them.  And, like us, there is little likelihood that they will. You see they are all back to being "normal." And give it a year and they will forget all about who healed them. After all, their skin is clear, their sores are healed, there is a mortgage to pay, children to raise, shopping to be done, and work to do to make all of that possible.

But for me there remains a certain pathos in that outcome for the nine. What a shame it is to have met the Lord and giver of life and to come away from that encounter only "normal."

What happened to the other nine should remind the Christian believer that we really cannot ignore the One who blesses us, and in so doing not recognize the source of life and the offer of life in Christ's name.

And for my all of my readers, Christian or not, I would hope that you come away from this essay remembering that we really do not get by in this life without the help of others. And when someone comes into our lives and comes bearing life giving, life sparing or life changing gifts, be that person divine or human, we need to ask ourselves: do we both recognize and give thanks for the gifts we are given; or do we take them for granted and believe that no thanksgivings are in order?

The choice, of course, is always ours.

Monte