What's Saving Your Life Right Now? V: The Practice of Paying Attention : Reverence

Eastertide

May 5, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Revelation 4

We know that reverence is one of the things that is saving our lives right now. We know what makes us flourish. We know what’s good for us. We know what we need, because every day as we scroll through our media, we encounter a swollen, grotesque, vainglorious ego scowling out at us from the screen, reverencing nothing and respecting no one, and we know instinctively that that is exactly what we don’t want to be.

It’s ironic: to live large, to live up to the towering stature of our full humanity, we remind ourselves now and then that we are in fact small, contingent, unnecessary creatures, living only by the grace of that Crafty Wizard who threw a hundred billion galaxies across vast eons of emptiness.

And so now and then we pause from our daily round to hear something like George Frideric Handel’s "Dettingen Te Deum", a staggering paeon to the matchless majesty of God Godself, the “luminous deep being a lofty light,” as Dante puts.[1]

[1]Dante Alighieri, Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, ll. 115ff.

What’s Saving Your Life Right Now? VII: The Practice of Living with Purpose: Vocation

May 19, 2024 • Christine V. Hides • Matthew 22:34–40

Kenilworth Union Church roots its mission in two verses: Micah 6:8 and the Greatest Commandment from Matthew’s gospel we just heard. These are carved in stone over the cloister walk. When Jesus was asked this trick question, he knew the answer because he grew up learning scripture. Maybe his youth leaders said something like what we say every Wednesday night at youth group: here in this church we have one rule and it is the only rule we need. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Love God. Love neighbor. So simple and easy to remember. Barbara Brown Taylor isn’t the first person to point out that we can love God and love our neighbor no matter what we are doing: playing soccer, taking out the trash, having recess on the playground, going to school, or working as an investment banker or making milkshakes at Dairy Queen.

What's Been Saving Your Life? VI: The Practice of Walking on the Earth: Groundedness

May 12, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Exodus 3:1–12

This message might have just as easily been received elsewhere. Maybe Moses didn’t have to go into the wilderness to hear, to see, to take off his shoes, and receive what was holy. Maybe he didn’t have to go beyond the mountains with a herd of sheep, into a wilderness beyond the wilderness in order to meet God. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the one who numbered the stars. The one who ordered the planets. The one spoke the words “let there be light” and there was light. This is not a God of the margins, but of the center, a God about whom this whole story is written. But Moses isn’t paying attention. And it takes a burning bush to turn him toward God.

The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings: Benediction

April 28, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Numbers 6:22–26

In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating the funeral site of Ketef Hinnom in West Jerusalem, and came across a small piece of silver amid the debris pottery and other artifacts. He describes them as about the size of a filter on a cigarette, it being the tobacco heyday of the 1970s and all. Two pieces of silver about the size of a pencil eraser, the size of a tic tac, the size of a ladybug. It wasn’t solid silver, but instead, a silver scroll. Unroll it and in tiny script are the words of the blessing I read to you today. It is from 600 BCE. Think of the artistry. Who pounded the silver? Who chose which blessing to include? Who took a small carving tool to write the text? Who rolled the silver into a small amulet? Who wore the amulet with its holy blessing? The blessing of the wilderness was held dear, embraced, honored, retained, remembered, condensed, and passed on. The blessing of the wilderness, or rather the blessing in the wilderness, was transmitted, entrusted, bestowed generation to generation, so that we might hear it. “May YHWH bless you and keep you.”