Month: October 2023

A Prayer for Today

by Rev. Lynne Hinton

God, the Great Creator, You may know the plans for us but we do not. We try to focus on what you have done throughout history. How you have brought us strength and courage for the difficult times, how you have been present to us, faithful throughout all our wars and battles, a mother hen, a shepherd, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night; but being completely honest, Holy One, it is hard to think of a future with anything but sorrow. The fights between enemies seem long and never-ending. The struggles feel complicated and rife with old pain. The weapons are deadlier, the costs higher, the consequences more dire.

We cry out for peace. We beg for the harm to cease. We pray. We light candles. We preach. We prophesy. We reach out. We weep. And we look ahead to the days before us, the tanks along the border, the rockets filling the skies, the anger growing, the death count rising, the blame shifting; and we imagine the worst. We fear what we will now ultimately and finally do to each other.

On this day we pray for those most affected by the violence. We pray for the children hiding in fear, the grieving mothers, the old ones begging to die, the young vowing revenge. We pray for the leaders of all nations to be wise and guided by courage and humility. We pray for those trying to breach the gap between those who hate each other. We pray that people of all faiths and those without, for people across the world, different and yet the same, for all of your children to see this as an opportunity to come together and say, “Let us begin again. Let us stop the killing, the destruction. Let us find a way to peace. Let us believe in a future with hope.”

Merciful God, help us to stop the violence building in our hearts, to see goodness in each other even when it seems impossible. Help us to put down our weapons and words of hatefulness and anger and pick up bread to share with the ones before us. Help us to open our clenched fists and receive your blessings that await us when we surrender. Help us to release the despair and have our hearts filled with hope. For today. For tomorrow. For a future we all desire. We look to you, The One Great Source of Love.

Amen.

Recycling Old Blood

by Rev. John Indermark, written the day before the Hamas attack on Israel, and the crisis that has resulted

After Pilate attempted to deny his responsibility for putting Jesus to death, Matthew 27:25 records this: “Then the people as a whole answered, His blood be on us and on our children!” No other gospel records those words, only Matthew. But whatever reasons may have first led to their inclusion in Matthew and nowhere else, those words spawned disastrous consequences in the wholesale smearing of Jews as Christ-killers and the rise of anti-Semitism.

The history of the Church’s active role in promoting anti-Semitism goes back at least to the time of the Crusades, when several massacres of Jews took place not in the battlegrounds of the Holy Land but in the homelands of Germany and France. While we may delight to the music of Fiddler on the Roof, its historical setting involved the violent pogroms that victimized Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Russia. In the background of all these and other persecutions was a twisted lie known as “blood libel” – the claim that Christian boys were slaughtered so their blood could be used in secret Jewish rituals. Too often, the Church kept silent in the face of the lie – or worse yet, promoted it.

The power of that lie, and its association with “blood,” infested 20th century fascism. In 1930, the same year he joined the Nazi party in Germany, Richard Darre wrote a book whose title in English is A New Nobility Based on Blood and Soil. Darre, whose field was agriculture and eugenics, argued in it for a program of selective breeding (the blood part of the title) to insure Nordic and Aryan racial purity. And once again, except for the courageous witness of a small Christian movement known as the Confessing Church, much of the rest of the Church remained silent as Aryan purity transitioned from far-fetched ideas into concentration camps not only for Jews, but also for others deemed unfit – Gypsies, Gays, Slavs, the infirm, Bonhoeffer.

So why bring this up in a 21st century church newsletter? The leading presidential candidate for one of our nation’s parties made the following statement this week about migrants and immigration: “It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.” Sound familiar? It is not an accident, and it is deadly serious.

Poisoning the blood. Its origins in anti-Semitism stretch now to include whoever is the stranger, the other, the outsider. We have seen its results before. In the past, too often, the Church has stood silent in such times, and the world suffered. We cannot do so again. Never again.

A Teacher of Faith

by Rev. Lynne Hinton

Like many of the hospice patients I served, this one became my teacher. He was a composer, author, philosopher, and artist. He also happened to have ALS. After receiving that diagnosis, he lost the use of his arms and hands. This meant that he could no longer express himself in the creative ways familiar to him. He also lost much of his ability to speak. Every word required great effort until finally, after an hour of conversation about saints and mystics, the stories he was convinced I needed to learn, he stopped talking. “I’m tired,” he would say, and so, we would turn to silence.

My teacher didn’t have a plan for what he was going to do when his disease progressed. This frustrated a lot of people. And if I’m honest, there were times when I wished he could tell me that he had a place to go, money to spend, or a reliable person to take care of him. But this was not his way. This had never been his way. “The things I need, the people I need, they all show up when I need them,” he kept reminding me, and as hard as it was not to ask for proof, I believed him. This is, after all, my understanding of the very essence of faith. To believe in the unbelievable, to hope even when there is no clear reason to do so, to trust that what we need will come to us in the time it is most needed.

In all the religious places and events where I have been and served, there are very few people I know who are actually living out that kind of faith. There are none that I know who follow the mandates of Jesus when he told his newly chosen disciples as they were going out, “take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff.” All the good folks in my circles, myself included, carry at least one backpack on whatever mission trip we agree to. And most people don’t really believe that Jesus was talking to everyone when he said, “sell all your belongings and give the money to the poor.” I have found that most ministers have a little nest egg set aside for retirement. The truth is that many say they live by faith but very few test it like my teacher from years ago. And though some may have admired his lack of anxiety over having no resources, calling it faith, there were others who criticized him for his apathy, calling him lazy and irresponsible. Still, he upheld a set of values that many people claim to honor. He believed in what he could not see. He trusted that what he needed would come.

And in the end it did, in fact, work out for him. A week before he died, he hired caregivers from Craigslist; and they were there for him when he transitioned from this world to the next. With only knowing him a few days, they, like me, loved him instantly and surrounded him in the peaceful presence he was waiting for. They met all his needs.

It’s been a while since my teacher died, but I will never forget his lessons. I can only hope that one day what I learned from him will come true for me. What I need will arrive in just the time I need it; I simply must believe.