March 29, 2009
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
I awoke Wednesday at 4:30 AM. Our bathroom window faces south over Lake Fairlee, with Ely Mountain as the horizon. Morning twilight had not set in. Perhaps less than a degree of arc above the tree line shone a star of modest magnitude. One could never have seen such a star in a city. I recalled the brilliance of Orion on the preceding evening, westwardly pursuing the setting Pleiades. I reflected upon the daily rotation of our globe, its annual revolution about the sun, the span of our galaxy and upon the millions of stars—some with identified planets--belonging to the countless visible and invisibly distant galaxies that spangle our heavens. How incredibly small we are within this immense universe! How awesome the firmament must have seemed to the writer of Genesis; how more awesome still it has become as we learn more and more about its celestial dimensions.
I start today’s message with the above vignette, a reminder of the magnitude and, if you will, the glory of creation. En route to our summation, we’ll pay lay visits here and there to Scriptural passages I have found particularly meaningful, and, without further apology, forge a loose concatenation of otherwise unrelated scriptural sidebars. I will conclude this brief message with a humble citation.
Let’s start with the Creation story. There may be a few of you to whom I have not already told this, but I need to share something I learned from Fred Berthold, the emeritus Dartmouth Professor of Religion who was preaching in this pulpit a few weeks ago. I’ve known Fred since 1967 when I joined the Norwich church. (Walter Frey topped me for he first met Fred when he, Walter, joined the Norwich church in 1957!) And neither of us had ever heard Fred sing, as he did most well in the course of his sermon here on Thetford Hill. After the service I asked Fred if was doing other singing, and he enthusiastically reported that he was in three groups, one of which was “The Octet”. He reported that there were six men in the Octet but that they had “had to” get two women to sing tenor. Shocked, I suggested to Fred that he had best tweak his statement, dropping the “had to”, and to say that “the men had worked very hard to recruit two excellent female singers to lead the group.” With the customary twinkle in his eye (and Fred’s eyes have always had a matchless twinkle) he responded, “That reminds me of Genesis 4 when, after placing Eve in the Garden of Eden the Almighty found her a bit morose and pining: something seemed missing. The Almighty comforted her but, returning a bit later, the Almighty saw her distinctly unhappy. Inquiring as to the nature of her apparent longing, the All Powerful was told that she, Eve, wanted a mate. “You certainly don’t want a man!” was the response. “They’re dirty, they’re unreliable, they leave things a mess…Not a man!” A tear in her eye, Eve said, “Yes, a man.” To this the compassionate Almighty replied, “All right. I’ll give you a man, but on one condition: that you never, ever tell anyone what I’ve done. This will be a secret between the two of us: woman to woman.”
Today’s lectionary readings from Jeremiah, the Psalms, John’s Gospel and Hebrews do not readily lend themselves to lay speakers. For me, Hebrews comes closest. (Hebrews is on page 172 in our new pew bibles.) We read in Chapter 5 as far as verse ten. Verse 11, which we didn’t read, has real significance for me, as anyone who knows me well will recognize. The verse reads, “About this we have much to say which is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.” “Dull of hearing”: Ah, too true!
In Hebrews also we ran into the name, Melchizedek. God is quoted as saying to Christ,
“You are a priest forever,
according to the order of Melchizedek.”
We’ll come back to Melchizedek. But I’ll ask you right now, “Of what jurisdiction was Melchizedek king?” Two points for anyone with the answer before I spill the beans in a minute or two.
[Prop: Biblical trivia.]
This foray into the last few pages of the good book brings to mind one of my favorite passages. It is about the Laodiceans. The passage comes close to what Tom Paine decried some 17 centuries later in the winter of 1776. Paine spoke of the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot”; John in Revelations, Chapter 3 writes to the Laodiceans, “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” Mixing metaphors, does that lukewarm shoe fit you? “Summer soldier”? How strong is your commitment? “Sunshine patriot”? Does our commitment go beyond words?
I first heard this passage—I may have related this story another day here in this sanctuary—while an eighth grader in wartime West Virginia. My junior choir from Martinsburg had traveled to a creaking frame country church in Hedgesville. The church was heated on that bitterly cold night by an over-stoked, pot-bellied stove standing near the only door. That’s where our choir clustered, waiting to sing, as the wintry wind tore at the building. Starkly boney, pale-skinned, black-haired and with deep, fiery black eyes, Reverend Hofrichter stood at the pulpit, gripping the white-painted 2X4 railing which surrounded it. “Because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth!” And he meant every word of it.
Feeling a bit wishy-washy? The folks in Melchizedek’s day were anything but.
We’re going to rewind a bit from Revelations to Micah, but first another word from Hebrews. The author of Hebrews, with apparent gloating salivation wrote in Chapter 7, vs 1-2, “For this Melchizedek, king of Salem [gesture of “You got it!”] priest of the most high God, met Abram returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him; and to him Abram apportioned a tenth part of everything.” (To be sure, Abram missed the big battle; he simply routed the forces responsible for the slaughter. The story is back there in Genesis 14.)
[Biblical trivia.]
But skip now to Micah, not part of the lectionary readings for the day, but something of an expiation, in my mind, for the bloodiness in Genesis, the Old Testament in general, and much of the New Testament. There Micah (6:8), in my view, atones for all this blood with his marvelously simple, “and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”
How clearly Micah presages the answer Jesus gave the testing Pharisean lawyer who asked, “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?” As we all know (Matthew 23: 37-40) Jesus responded, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Faith and works. Like sugaring, that’s what it boils down to.
Sugaring prompts comment on the hymns of today, especially the first. Sap runs best on sunny days after cold Vermont nights: nights when a solitary star can sit right on the horizon while above the heavens are indeed star-spangled. That’s why I picked our first hymn, The Spacious Firmament on High as our opening book-end.
Our second hymn, a Lenten round, builds community more than ordinary unison or parts singing can do. Phrase leads to phrase, voice leads to voice, like sand bags passed hand to hand on a North Dakota levee. Feel that pulse. If you need to, latch on to a choir member as a confidence builder. Then smile at your neighbor when we’re done.
Our final hymn has many verses of which the fifth is my sermon’s final bookend. It speaks of bread and blankets. It echoes Micah. It echoes Christ’s summation of the law and the prophets. Its message is clear. It is “faith and works”
And it is not lukewarm.
James R. Hughes
March 29, 2009
Sermon 03/29/2009