201708 August Dateline

UPCOMING EVENTS July 31-August 4 – Kettering Healthy Youth August 6, 13, 20, 27 – “You Asked For It” Sermons August 9 – Keenagers/ Church Picnic @ Bender’s August 11 – Game Night at The Grove DAVID’S DATELINE S.I.G.N.S. Drive-In Movie Night AUGUST 2017 Newsletter August 13 – Sunday School Meeting Sunday Worship, 8:30 & 9: 50 a.m. Warm Wishes 2 Church School, 9:50 a.m. August 20 – New Member Orientation Church Office Hours: Monday – Friday, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Phone: 937-434-2131, Fax: 937-434-1913 August 27 – Blessing of the Backpacks/ www.davidsucc.org S.I.G.N.S Bonfire Ministers of David's Church - All David's People Senior Pastor Brian Q. Newcomb August 31 – Chancel Choir Begins Associate Pastor Michelle Wilkey From the Pastor’s Desk… Recently, I heard an interview by Terry Gross on her NPR show “Fresh Air” with celebrated fiction author Jonathan Sofran Foer, about his recent novel, “Here I Am,” which led me to one of those drive-way moments. You know, where you sit in the car at your destination to hear the rest of the story. Foer is also the author of two novels that have been made into movies, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Following the interview, I went out and bought the new novel the very same day, and that evening listened again to the podcast of the show, to hear parts I may have missed or overlooked. Foer’s latest book, as Gross and the author described it, tells the story of a Jewish family in crisis, the marriage is coming apart, the oldest boy is resistant to participate in his own Bar Mitzvah, and an aging Grandfather with outspoken ideas about faith and politics has reported that he is waiting until his grandson’s ceremony before he can die in peace. According to reviews, there is also a suicide, an earthquake that devastates the land of Israel, and a war breaks out in the Middle East, but I’m only up to page 50, so not too many spoilers. The title of the book comes from the Hebrew word, “Hineni ,” which besides appearing in the recent album by the late Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker , also appears twice in the book of Genesis, in the telling of the story of Abraham. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved only son Isaac, and Abraham responds “here I am.” It is a word that suggests one is listening and eager to follow where God leads them, it suggests spiritual presence and availability. The second appearance of the word is a few verses later. Abraham’s son, Isaac, realizing that he may be the actual sacrifice, calls his father’s name, and Abraham again answers, “Here I am.” Thus, the theological tension in the story and in Foer’s book: How can one be present to both God his son when God has made the requests that Abraham sacrifice the child? I was very taken with Foer’s thoughts on religion and spirituality during his interview with Gross. While he admitted that he was for all intents and purposes agnostic at best on the idea of God and faith, he admitted that when asked “are you religious?”, as a character in his novel is, he tends to respond with a “not yet.” He went on to say that he didn’t mean “not yet” in a cynical or ironic way, but more out of a sense of longing. He explained that his response is intended to communicate a desire to believe, a desire to have a deep religious life, so even though he currently is less than active in his community of faith, he sees his words as “aspirational, optimistic, and even hopeful.” While the content of Jewish faith as it had been presented to him throughout his upbringing and adult life felt as if it required a level of trust and belief that was beyond his rational capabilities, he also saw how religious practice could bring meaning to a person, was beautiful in and of itself, and that it invited humanity to live with kindness toward ourselves and others. I was struck by the value Foer found in the practice of some of the rituals in his native faith, even if he did not completely believe in the One to whom the words and actions describe. He said, “Ritual can give us a way to respond to life’s challenges and mysteries. When we don’t know what to say in a situation it tells us what to say, when we don’t know what to do, it tells us what to do.” I really responded to that thought, that rituals provide us a path through the uncharted and emotionally fraught times in our lives. Like at a funeral, when a loved one has died, it is often the rituals that sustain us with a sense of direction, and move us through the events of the wake, burial and gathering of family and friends. In our grief and loss, we don’t always know what to say or do, and left to our own devices many of us would fold into a pile and weep until we could weep no longer. But the tradition and ritual invites us to hear the words of the sacred texts, to sing the songs of promise and hope, to repeat the familiar words that express our aspirations and longings, if not our actual feelings at the time. Last month, I closed out my thoughts here in the Dateline, with an emphasis on the importance I find in a Christian funeral for people of faith, members of a church, with words from the closing prayer in the liturgy of “Thanksgiving for the One Who Has Died.” It came directly from the United Church of Christ Book of Worship, which leans on ecumenical liturgical resources like The Book of Common Prayer used by Episcopalians. Those words are often repeated at every funeral that I lead, unless the family and loved ones have reservations about traditional “God language” in the service. As Foer suggested above, the sudden reality of death, especially the death of someone whose life we valued and loved, can leave us speechless, unsure what to say or do. The traditional language of the funeral service says for us that we have hope in the life to come, that we want to believe even if at times our rational minds make it difficult to express such thoughts with certainty. When we are called together and hear that “we gather in the protective shelter of God’s healing love,” and “we are free to pour out our grief, release our anger, face our emptiness, and know that God cares for us in moments like this one,” we find ourselves assured in ways we could not express in our own words. Such words have been made sacred by our faithful repetition. If we were to just pray something off the top of our heads, no doubt we would rely on stereotypical platitudes, words that dance around the situation rather than address it head on. While some worry that formal funeral words are stock religious phrases that lack meaning and purpose, these rituals contain words that speak something that is important about all of us, and about God, when we are not sure what is safe to say or believe. When we hear the prayer to God “whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, grant that your Holy Spirit may intercede for us with sighs too deep for human words,” we are dealing honestly with the very real feelings we are experiencing, acknowledging that we are feeling deep wounds for which there are no words. We are comforted as we ask for God to “Heal our wounded hearts made heavy by our sorrows.” In this way, rituals tell us what to say, and what to do, when we are facing a challenging reality and we do not know what to say or do. In other words, they provide a well-trodden path to help us make our way from where we have found ourselves to where we want and need to be. In that way, rituals are a rich and meaningful gift to us that I believe would a mistake to ignore. Over the years, I have attended and even participated in funeral services, some times renamed as “Celebrations of Life,” where a decision had been made not to rely on the traditional language, not to follow the rituals of the church, even though the family or individual that had died had a long history of religious practice and connection. On some occasions, these were very beautifully and meaningfully thought out, and it was a good experience that brought family and loved ones together around the life of the beloved one who had died. But more often than not, without the framework provided by the traditional ritual of prayers and sacred text, people’s thoughts and feelings were scattered helter skelter with little sense of focus or direction. The result was less than satisfying or helpful in moving us together to the place where liturgies and rituals seek to carry us. The same can be said of weddings, of confirmation, of many of the high and holy events in the life of our church. Our rituals may seem stodgy and stiff to some, but for many of us, these traditions have become for us a path into an encounter with God’s goodness and grace, meeting needs that we have not yet even begun to wrap words around.

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