Unity

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I am a parish minister currently serving the Eliot Church of Natick MA. Eliot Church is a Community Church affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ. Any statements made and postions held in "Unity," however, are solely mine(of course, they may be used with appropriate atribution). Therefore if you disagree, please do not blame the church!

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Adalius for Peace!

Here is an article about professional athletes opposing the war and the barriers they face in speaking out. Pro athletes have a great deal of potential power that they rarely use. People listen to them. Kids listen in particular, but parents do to. All you have to do is look at all the folks with football connections in the recent election. They are there, from Heath Schuler to George Allen to JC Watts. Tom Brady gets paraded around from time to time by the Bush administration as do others. Dave Zirin, in his article, urges liberal athletes to speak up and to organize. I wish him (and them) luck...

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Christmas Vacation

Two things happened recently that got me thinking. I was walking to the church yesterday after dropping the kids off at school when one of the other "walking dads" asked me what I was doing for Christmas vacation. "I'm Working!" I said. This, of course, is true. I am working three services on Christmas Eve. After that, I proceded to tell him how I would spend Christmas morning. After we parted company I started to wonder if what I told him might have sounded a bit too much like complaining. After all, most people have family-time, parties, and Thanksgiving-style feasts on the big day. My family does not. In fact, if one didn't know what I did for work, one might assume that I had been possessed by the ghost of Ebenezar Scrooge (pre-reformation).

Then this morning I read the post over at Peacebang, where she outlined her rather ambitious Christmas rituals and realized that I am not alone. Her plans are "ambitious" in the sense that we all try to achieve that level of relaxation and in-the-now-ness from time to time. More often than not, we fail.

So I thought I would share with you what I do. This story is not unique to me (or to Peacebang, whose plans are similar). Church Organists, Choir Directors, clergypeople and just about every trumpeter in Chrisendom celebrate in very similar ways. We like it.

For the last seven years, I have worked on Christmas Eve. I get to church early, make sure the place is clean, call my readers, musicians, deacons, etc to make sure all are ready and there is nothing that they need from me. I then read through the services. There are usually two of them. This year there is a third at the usual Sunday morning time. Are there enough chairs up front? Do the flowers still look fresh? Do we have the candles for the "silent night" lighting? I go through everything. I know that the deacons, musicians, etc are doing the same thing, but hey. It never hurts to check that list twice!

Then the services. This year the first one will be a small half-hour gathering for communion (probably) at 10 am. Wherever two or more are gathered as they say! This will be festive in a small way. If it goes well, maybe we will do it again.

The second service is the "Family" one. The kids play music. Congregants (many of them former RE denizens or RE Committee people) read from a "Children's Bible" and we will recite Christmas poetry from Dylan Thomas and Horatio Alger, Junior. Later, the more formal service begins. We used to refer to it as the "candlight" service but we have candles at the Family service, too. My readers will be the two community ministers affiliated with Eliot, the Reverends Dave Miller and Donna Tetreault. After that, I will have lost my voice. We say our "Merry Christmases," our Music Director, Stephen James, grabs a flight, and I close up church.

Back home we put on a video. My wife and kids will have ordered pizza after the first evening's service and put in some serious "claymation special" time. After a while we will go to bed.

My Christmas Day is similar to Peacebang's except with kids. We get up, we open presents, we have an enormous breakfast, walk, eat, play, and then sleep. We do not have visitors. Usually, we do not see family. I am too tired to do much more than hang out with my immediate family. Since they hadn't seen me pretty much for 24 hours, they like it, too.

That is Christmas for a religious professional. Certainly I miss the family and a part of me would like to be with them. Still, I like it this way. My mom, after all, is also a minister, so my parents will be doing similar things. They understand and I like the day without distractions, doing nothing with the wife and kids. It is a rare opportunity for everyone these days.

I hope you all have similarly satisfying ways of spending the holiday. God bless. Merry Christmas.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Advent Sermon, 1st Sunday, 2006!

Here is my first Advent sermon of the year. I finally took the time to "prosify" one for ease of reading. I should tell you that--I use a lot of these--. Mostly it is because sermons are meant to be spoken, after all. Blogger continues to be a bit sticky, so, for some reason I cannot make this as readable as I would like. Maybe when they get around to fixing themselves, I will come back and adjust everything...

Demonstrations of Doubt
Rev. Adam Tierney-Eliot
The Eliot Church
December 3, 2006

"The Days are surely coming," says God through Jeremiah
"When I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel."

This is a statement of certainty and optimism. It urges us to look forward with anticipation to the sure fulfillment of prophecy. This certainty is a hallmark of much of modern faith, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim or any other of the great world religions. There is the sense of absolute truth. We see this understanding in the architecture of the great cathedrals and the rituals of the church. We see it particularly during Advent, when so many people are preparing for Christmas, for our annual celebration of the birth of Jesus

This story of Christmas--one that many churches begin preparing for today--is a powerful one. It is a story that, in many ways, transcends our actual beliefs. But, of course, as moving as the story may be, many of us who gather here today to help usher in the Christian New Year and with it the holiday season, probably have a few questions lurking in the back of our minds. There are doubts sitting and whispering in the corners of our hearts

Our newspapers are filled daily, not with the news of the coming Commonwealth of Heaven, but with news of war and famine and tales of natural disasters that ruin lives and communities. The suffering continues in spite of the promise of prophets like Jeremiah. For many of us, the very stories, themselves, from the Creation in Genesis through the Christmas nativity and on to the resurrection, have become harder to comprehend and believe in the light of two thousand years of growth and discovery.

Our doubts can wear on us and wear on those who would just like to believe and want us to believe, too (to be happy, maybe when we are not,to worry about “putting the Christ in Christmas” when, perhaps in deference to our Jewish and Muslim friends, we do not). Still, we gather on this first Sunday in Advent to once again experience and remember the teachings of the prophets and heroes of the Biblical past. We gather together to celebrate Christmas just as dissenters of the past did--people like the Universalist Olympia Brown, the Unitarian Fredrick Henry Hedge, and (while his father, Lyman forbade it growing up), the Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher--all of whom we have spoken about this past month. We gather just as they did to live out a faith founded on love.

Why do we do it? Why do we celebrate this holiday even when we have questions? Well, the asking, of course, is natural, it is part of our tradition. It is a tradition of debate that goes back to the Bible. There we can find plenty of people who aren’t so ready to accept the party line. There is Peter, of course, and Thomas, apostles who required convincing on many occasions. There is Zekariah, from one of our readings today, unwilling to believe the angel of God, saying, “How will I know that this is so?” (Luke 1:18)

The Gospel writers, themselves, disagreed with each other--each book representing a different tradition and a different audience. The texts are filled with contradictions as each early Christian community or school of thought attempted to have their perspective heard and understood. This merely proves that in faith and scripture, it is hard to find any absolutes.

For example, in the Gospel of Luke we find the virgin Mary and her husband-to-be, Joseph traveling to Bethlehem where Mary gives birth to Jesus in a barn. In Matthew, however, Jesus and Mary apparently already live in Bethlehem and Jesus is born in a house. The writer of Mark, the oldest Gospel, seems to feel that the circumstances of Jesus’ birth are not remarkable enough to record (which is strange when one considers the claims made by Matthew and Luke). In fact, the earliest texts in the Bible are Paul’s. He doesn’t mention the virgin birth, either, and the Gospel of John refers to Joseph as Jesus’ father, without any qualifications that would indicate that his fatherhood was adoptive rather than biological.

Knowing all of this, it seems almost too much to point out that the Hebrew word (Almah) in Isaiah--a word that Matthew cites to legitimize Jesus as the main character in a messianic prophecy, and that our Bibles have translated as “virgin”--lacks the biological implications that we usually associate with it. It refers instead to a young woman who has recently been married but isn’t yet pregnant.

The jury is out on the historical veracity of the Christmas story as we know it, as it is on many aspects of scripture. However, that doesn’t mean we have to box up our ornaments and take down the tree. Nor must we anoint ourselves the town Grinches.

All of these points of theology, either known or intuited by many of us here today, have less to do with why we celebrate Christmas than we might think. Norman Vincent Peale once said that, “Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.” There is something magical about this time, A beauty and a goodness that tries hard to break through the shell and cynicism of our modern minds.

Our understanding of the Bible and its contradictions isn’t a reason to throw it away. Instead, it reinforces an approach and acceptance of the fact that (In the words of Bible Scholar and priest Father John Dominic Crossan) “It is possible to take the Christian message seriously, without having to take it at all points literally.” The spirit after all, is still there, strong and holy. For all that the tradition has done to present our faith as one monolithic system of beliefs, the fact remains that from the very beginning there have been different ways to understand it. We, in the tradition of our forebears are well within our rights to demonstrate our doubt. Our doubts keep us honest. They excite and energize us. They allow us to find, in all the competing signs, the true light and spirit of the season.

One thing that the liberal church does well is to articulate what we do not believe. Much less frequently (and often with an overabundance of modifiers and conditions), we say what we do believe. This Christmas season gives us the opportunity to do both. For at the root of our faith is an idea, one that all of the Gospel writers can agree on: That God is in the world. Wherever and whatever else God may be, God is in the world and in us and between us.

Today we read responsively from a piece inspired by the Magnificat, when the gospel of Luke quotes Mary as saying,
“My soul magnifies the sovereign God
And my spirit rejoices in God my savior
For God has looked with favor
On the lowliness of this servant”
God is with us and in us. God is with and in all the lowly servants, just as it was for Mary and the Commonwealth of Heaven exists for us all--women and men of all races, all nations and creeds--in our joy as well as in our deepest suffering--no matter how painful, no matter how dark.

It is telling that the great Roman critic of the Christians, Celsus, objected to the idea of the virgin birth of Jesus, not because he thought such a thing impossible--the Emperor Augustus, for example was supposed to have been the son of the god Apollo--no, his objection was that such a thing would happen to the least of these. Not to an emperor but a carpenter. Not to a warrior but a rabbi.

The story of the birth of Jesus is a parable in some sense lived by us each year. It is lived by us in rituals and retelling and is meant not to widen the gulf between us and God, but to help us bridge it. To help us bridge the gap through the life of a man who did and said extraordinary things.

The great irony may be how isolated the holidays can make us feel, so let us all try to celebrate this universal message of peace and of love, to remember that God is with us all. Amen

Friday, December 01, 2006

Advent Pastoral Email

Dear Eliot Church Members and Friends,

This Sunday marks the beginning of Advent. It is a busy time. Advent is the beginning of the church's worship cycle, preparing us for the story of Jesus. It also means that it is a mere four weeks until Christmas! In the midst of all the festivities and general holiday craziness, let us all try to find times of quiet and of peace so we may maintain our own good humor in the days to come. Also, the holidays may be hard for some of us. I urge everyone to look out for each other and to reach out when the opportunity presents itself.

Naturally, it is a good time to be in church, too. It is nice to be able to see friendly faces this time of year. It is also good to gather and remember why it is we celebrate Christmas in the first place! Besides, we have some important dates coming up soon. The famous annual Christmas pageant, for example, will be cast this Sunday and the pageant, itself will be on December 17th. I hope everyone will be able to attend and participate. Also, this year we will have three services on December 24. The first will be at our regular time (10am). The other two will be evening services at 5pm (this is the "family" service) and 7pm (a more traditional service).

Once again, have a blessed and joyous holiday season.

Yours in Faith,
Adam