parsippanyumc.com/blog

A sermon preached on May 13, 2007, Mother’s Day, and the occasion for the baptism of Emma Grace Crowningshield, based upon Revelation 21:10, 22 – 22:5.

Last Sunday evening, many of us had the profound privilege of hearing Ursula Pavel speak in this very pulpit, describing her first hand encounter with evil on a truly horrifying scale as a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. 

Ursula’s mother wasn’t born Jewish.  She fell in love with a Jewish man — converted, married, and together they had two children:  Ursula,  and her younger brother, whom they called “Bubschen.” 

When the Nazis began rounding up the Jews in Germany, for some reason they first called sixteen year old Ursula to report for deportation to a so-called ‘work camp’.  Her mother and father, concerned to keep the family together, and certain that soon enough they, too would be deported as well, requested that the whole family be allowed to join Ursula in her deportation. 

The Nazis were happy to take Ursula’s father and her brother, who both were born Jewish, but they refused to take her mother, since she had been born Christian. 

And so her mother was left behind, never to see her beloved husband and son again. 

When they arrived at Auschwitz, Ursula was immediately separated from her brother and father.  She would never see them again; they were promptly executed in the gas chambers. 

Somehow Ursula survived where the vast majority of those sent to Auschwitz were murdered.  Maintaining her physical vitality in the starkest of conditions, Ursula was among the few who were taken from the camp to work in German factories. 

In contrast to the heartlessness of the vast majority of her captors, Ursula remembers the kindness shown to her by two young German soldiers who intervened at some risk to themselves in order to save her life, and how, in the course of a train ride they shared, these soldiers wept heart-wrenching tears over the terrible cruelty their people were committing against the Jews

This being Mother’s Day, I want to read the description from Ursula’s book of her reunion with her mother after a 500 mile bicycle ride with her girlfriend, Buschi, following the liberation of the camps, a full three years after her deportation.

“It was late in the afternoon, a beautiful sunny day.  Lippborg has only one main street.  When we pushed our bikes up the street, I saw my mother in the middle of the street, carrying a large stack of clean washing on her way to my grandmother.  I recognized her instantly.  I had remembered her with black hair, but it had turned completely gray.  When she saw us, she had dropped the whole load of washing right there in the street.  Tears were running down her cheeks.  She looked at me and Buschi, and beyond.  She stared down the road, her whole body seemed rigid.  She turned back to us, and she realized that nobody else was with us.  She embraced me and her first words were:  ‘Daddy and Bubschen are not coming back?’  She was crying and asking me a question and making a statement.  She was shouting my Aunt Minchen’s name.  People came out of their houses.  My mother kept repeating over and over again and again:  ‘My child is back!  My child is back!’”   (p. 115)

I know this is hard stuff to listen to, and I expect that many of us came to church on Mother’s Day hoping to hear something a good deal more upbeat.  But the truth of the matter is that although motherhood brings great joy, it also lays upon the hearts of women the lioness’s share of the suffering of this world.  To be a mother is to live inside the sufferings of one’s children.  Wherever someone suffers great pain in this world, generally speaking, there is a mother suffering somewhere as well.

Shortly after the reunion of Ursula and her mother,  they traveled together here to the United States, where Ursula came to know a good deal of happiness.   She married a wonderful husband with whom she shared 51 years of marriage before his death. 
She was blessed by the joy of motherhood, bringing two fine sons into the world. 
Her loving husband encouraged Ursula not to dwell on the darkness she had witnessed –
But to give herself time to heal — time to allow life to grow strong within her after having seen so much death.   And so it was only in her later years, when certain people began to publicly deny the reality of what happened in the Holocaust, that Ursula felt compelled to speak out and describe the horror of what she had experienced. 

Ursula is a gracious, gentle, kindhearted woman.  Her spirit deeply touched our spirits. 
During the question and answer period, our neighbor, Rabbi Ron Kaplan asked Ursula to comment on how her experience of the holocaust had affected her faith.  

Ursula answered honestly:  she had come to doubt God.  How could a good God stand aside and allow such terrible suffering and injustice to take place?   For years Ursula hadn’t been able to attend a Seder meal at Passover.   Growing up, Ursula’s little brother had been the one to read the central questions in the ritual, and the pain of his absence had been more than she could bear. 

In recent years, however, Ursula had been able to share once again in Seder meals, affirming her tradition, if not her faith. 

And so this morning I feel compelled to try and reflect upon the spiritual meanings of Ursula’s powerful testimony. 

And the first thing to be said is simply that Ursula’s story reminds us that evil is very real, although more often than not its manifestations are very subtle.  And that at the heart of human life there is a great struggle between the forces of good and evil. 

What is evil?  Somebody suggested that a way to get a handle on this is to think of the word “live” spelled backwards. L-i-v-e; e-v-i-l.   Evil is that which destroys life. 
Wherever human beings are treated as disposable, as things rather than as precious, indeed, sacred — well, that’s evil.  And in this age we are also recognizing that evil is involved in the destruction of life in other forms as well — that there is evil involved in the destruction of the plant and animal life of our planet. 

I don’t think it is common for us to look at life as a great struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil,  and in part this is because it is our good fortune to live somewhat removed from the more overt expressions of evil:  war and starvation and the like.  We see life as being about any number of other things:  it’s about finding happiness, or achieving security.  We devote a good deal more attention to what we’ll make for dinner or how our child’s soccer team is doing than we do to attending to the presence of good and evil. 

But the struggle between good and evil is always there, regardless of where we live.                                                  It involves the day to day choices we make regarding how we relate to the life around us and within us; whether we are nurturing, encouraging, embracing of life or whether we are in various ways destroying life.   It also involves whether we are able to humble ourselves in recognition of the dark capacities that live within our own hearts –  the very thing the Nazis could not or would not do.   They only saw the darkness that was not their own. 

But the lure of evil also comes in us in the temptation to look the other way — like the Priest and the Levite in Jesus’ story who passed on by the man whose life was draining away, lying beaten and bloody at the side of the road. 

The evil of the Holocaust that overwhelmed Germany was orchestrated by a relatively few, but in order for this evil to take over, it required the compliance of the many — the willingness to be led along like unquestioning sheep. 

This morning we baptized Emma Grace.  To bring a child into this world is an act of courage; for it requires a conscious engagement in the struggle between good and evil. 
And so at the very outset of the liturgy, two questions were asked of Keith and Audrey that deal directly with the struggle between good and evil, and by extension, the same questions were asked of us as well:

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world,
and repent of your sin?

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?

To state the obvious, if evil is real, then so is goodness.  In a certain sense, in this world at least, goodness has no meaning except as it involves a conscious choice for the light over against the darkness. 

Candles only reveal their light in the midst of darkness. 

Ursula spoke of the kindness shown to her by the two young German soldiers; their goodness was so striking because it intentionally went against the stampede of the herd.

And Ursula herself is a shining example of goodness:  to come through what she endured and still be able to affirm life and to want to align herself with the light in the midst of the darkness.  This is a kind of faith — a faith I would say God cares more about than simply the intellectual conviction that the creator of the universe is good. 

And when we witness such faith, we are moved deeply, inspired to be more intentional about our own choices for goodness.  If it is our good fortune not to have to deal with what Ursula had to deal with, what we nonetheless have to deal with by way of evil is real — dangerously real — maybe we can find inspiration in the courage of her life for the more common place struggles of our lives to do good rather than evil.

But I would like to address Ursula’s honest confession that she found it hard to believe in God after what she had witnessed. 

 I’d like to say simply this.  If this life is the only life there is, then surely Ursula is right to question God‘s reality, or God‘s goodness.  Life in this world isn’t fair.  There are many, many people who get crushed by the evil of this world — who get an absolutely raw deal out of life.  There is no way to deny this.  

But this morning we heard a piece of scripture that records a vision received by a man named John, and  I believe that what John caught a glimpse of in his vision is real.  And because of this, until we reach that distant shore, the jury is still out on the question of ultimate justice of the universe.

Living in his lonely prison cell on the island of Patmos, John saw what he called the holy city of Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, adorned as a bride for her husband, a place where all the tears are wiped away, where there is no pain or death, and everyone is made new.   A place where

… all the heartbroken mothers get their sons and daughters back safely home, and their hearts are made whole again;
… where there is no need for the sun or the moon and there is no night, because the very light of God fills every corner of the place;
… where there is no need to lock the doors, because everybody is trustworthy and welcome, and there’s always room in the circle — the only thing you can’t bring into the circle is cruelty and deceit; evil in all its life-killing manifestations gets left outside or you can’t come in.

But it’s so wonderful inside that holy city that in the end  I believe most everybody chooses to leave all the bad stuff outside, and come on in where it so very beautiful. 
 
And John tells us that in the holy city there’s this river full of the water of life, shining bright like crystal, flowing from the very throne of God. 

And its so very beautiful there that once we get there, all the sufferings that have been experienced in this world will seem like a drop of water in comparison to the beauty of that crystal river flowing from the throne of God. 

The tree of life is there, too, the fruit of which we’ve already tasted in the best moments of this life, and the leaves of this tree will one day bring about the healing of the nations, bringing an end to war and genocide and brutality and starvation.

So let us hold on to the vision as we would raise little Emma up; let us share the fruit of the tree of life; let us be together a community where Jesus is at home and you can catch a  glimpse of the holy city of God. 
 

A sermon preached on May 6, 2007 based upon Acts 11:1 – 18 and John 13:31 – 35.

Before I came to Parsippany eighteen years ago, I served for seven years as the pastor of a little country church in the tiny village of Everittstown, New Jersey. In the village a man in his sixties named Harold lived alone. Harold was a farmer, with several hundred acres of lovely, rolling farmland that I was grateful that he allowed me to go walking upon when my body and spirit were in need. The animal life on Harold’s farm consisted of a handful of cows, a couple of pigs, a couple of sheep, some chickens and two or three cats.

Harold was a pretty solitary man. He had been married once and the marriage had ended in divorce. He had a couple of grown children he didn’t see very often. Crowds of people made him nervous, and he never came to church. He wasn’t especially good with words, but we would talk from time to time when we would meet on my walks.

Harold alluded to the some pretty tough times he had gone through in his past suffering from severe depression, apparently having to be hospitalized at one point. There was something that his psychiatrist had said to him years ago that Harold had remembered and held onto, and he shared it with me, and I have held onto it ever since for its simple wisdom. The psychiatrist said, “Harold, those animals need you. And you need those animals.”

The truth of that observation sustained Harold, getting him out of bed in the morning. The animals needed him to tend to them, to feed them and clean up after them. And he needed the animals as well. It gave him something for which to live, providing him with an essential connection to life beyond himself.

Loneliness was something I, too, dealt with in those days, and so I found it easy to identify with Harold, and the wisdom of the words resonated with me as well.

Midway through my time there Harold began a long term relationship with a lady friend, a shy woman from a neighboring town named Joan. They provided companionship and caring for one another. They never got married; I don’t think Harold would have been able to handle that. But it brought some happiness to Harold’s solitary life, deepening the connection to life beyond himself.

In the words of the poet John Donne, “No man is an island.” We need others to be fully human. Left all to ourselves our souls will shrivel and die. We were put on this earth to learn how to love, and we are given lots of opportunities to practice love, and practice is what love requires.

There is much within us that would lead us to live as if we were islands, to give up on the difficulty involved in love: Self-centeredness, pride, greed, the pain of heartbreak, etc. not to mention all these qualities in the very people we would seek to forge a connection with in life. And sometimes these relationships can be abusive – soul-destroying in their own right, requiring that they be severed. But we are never released from the call to try again: to get back out there and practice love in its various expressions.

(A man and a woman were talking, well, more precisely, the man was talking and the woman was listening, and the man’s subject was himself. Finally, aware of how much he was dominating the conversation, he said, “Well, listen to me go on and on about myself. How about you? You talk about me now.”)

Try again.

It is striking to me that on the last night Jesus spent with his disciples, as he was giving them his parting instructions, he said the words with which we began our worship this morning: “A new commandment I give you, that you should love one another, as I have loved you. This is how others will know that you are my followers, that you love one another.”

Love is the thing, he said. How will others recognize you as my followers? It won’t be by what you say you believe, or by the scriptures you can quote. It will be by your willingness to keep on practicing at the art of love. Without love, everything else is just a facade.

If you’ve heard me preach for a time you probably know that for me this story is pretty central: A lawyer, seeking to test Jesus, asked him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus put the question back on the lawyer, asking him how he read the scriptures. The lawyer responded by lifting up two commandments: Love the Lord your God will all your heart and soul and mind; and, love your neighbor as yourself.

Yes, Jesus agreed, love’s the thing.

But then the lawyer zeroed in on the challenging part of this whole “love your neighbor” thing. Who, exactly, is my neighbor? He asked. And in response Jesus told the story about the man going down the road to Jericho who gets jumped by bandits who beat the crap out of him and take all his belongings and leave him half dead at the side of the road. A priest comes by, and passes on by. A minister comes by, and he, too passes on by. Finally, a Samaritan, a member of a race Jesus’ listeners would have despised, came along. He gets off his donkey, goes to the man, bathes his wounds, applies bandages, gently places the man on his donkey, and takes him to a nearby inn, where the Samaritan foots the bill while the wounded man heals and recovers his strength.

Who, Jesus said, was neighbor to the man who was beaten? The one, I suppose, who showed mercy, said the lawyer. Go and do likewise, said Jesus. The “neighbor” is whomever God places in our path in life. It implies that the call to practice love begins wherever you find yourself. For Harold, the beginning was with his animals.

But the Spirit of God keeps pushing us to go further in love, to go beyond our comfort zone. In the lesson we heard from the book of Acts, we hear about the earliest church getting pushed by the Holy Spirit in the practice of love.

Jesus was a Jew, as were all of his first disciples, and following his ascension; his followers just assumed that to be a Christian you had to first be a Jew, with all that this involved: the kosher laws, circumcision for the men, etc. The Jews had been called to be God’s holy people, set apart, with a distinctive set of practices that marked them as a holy people.

But what about this whole Good Samaritan thing Jesus had pointed to in his teaching?

The first Christians preferred to stay in their comfort zone. Being Jews themselves, they understood Jews, and so they restricted sharing the Gospel with other Jews.

In this morning’s lesson, Peter recalls the extraordinary interventions of the Holy Spirit that pushed him to be in communion with Gentiles. “The Holy Spirit lead me to see that there is no ‘us and them.’”

Time and again the Church has had to be pushed forward beyond its comfort zone. White Christians have had to acknowledge the full, equal humanity of Blacks. Straight Christians are being pushed to experience the full humanity of gay people.

We live in extraordinary times, full of both great danger and opportunity.
The times are dangerous in part because In our society it is easier than ever before in human history for a person to try and live out the notion that “I am an island unto myself.” It is possible to live in the midst of countless “neighbors” without ever interacting with them and developing a real connection. There is so much material distraction offered to us with the implicit notion that we can occupy our lives with stuff and never really deal with another human being on any kind of intimate level. But to buy this lie is to follow a path that leads to the death of one’s soul.

The time is full of opportunity because to an extent never seen before the neighbor we are likely to find on our path is likely to be someone with a different race, nationality or religion. And this is what Jesus and the Holy Spirit has been encouraging us to do all along — to experience a love that transcends all barriers.

Consider Parsippany, New Jersey, for instance. For hundreds of years, Parsippany was a community made up exclusively of descendents of White Europeans. In the sixties, our own Fred Coleman became the first person of color to live here. A few years from now, if the present demographic trends continue, Parsippany will be a community in which the descendents of white Europeans will be a minority.

Now you can see this as a problem one would rather avoid, but I don’t see how a follower of Jesus can see this situation we face as anything other than as an opportunity.

And one thing I can say with certainty for our church and for any other like it in Parsippany, whether or not we are still around and flourishing fifty years from now will depend upon whether or not we learn how to reach out and embrace folks of other races.

I want to go back to the concern that Sharon Coughlin lifted up for us two weeks ago on Earth Day. There is a growing consensus among scientists that global warming is real, and that it represents a cataclysmic threat to the entire human race, as well as to all living things.

I haven’t seen the latest movie by the great film maker and recovering racist and alcoholic Mel Gibson, entitled Apocolypto, but someone described the final scene to me, and it provides a powerful image for where the human race finds itself today. (I know I’ve ruined some movies for folks before by spoiling the ending, so if you plan on seeing the movie and don’t want to know the ending, tune out here.) The movie describes the bitter warfare that took place between indigenous tribes living in the South American rain forest shortly before the arrival of the European invaders. In the final scene, two opposing warriors are racing through the forest, locked in mortal combat. Exhausted, they come crashing out onto the beach, where they are startled to see out on the horizon a fleet of Spanish ships, marking the arrival of the conquistadors.

Suddenly, everything that has separated these two warriors seems very small compared to the common threat they face with the coming invasion.

The threat of global warming is terrifying, but perhaps it also presents an opportunity. The survival of life on this planet depends upon Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists get together and work to face the common threat. This, I believe, is what the Holy Spirit has been nudging us towards all along.

Curiously, the solution is to be found in recognizing the neighbor not only in the stranger, but also in the animals and plants and every living thing. Just like Harold.