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Watch and listen to sermons by Pastor Gordon Stewart: Re-Defining Abundance, The Heart of God, The NAME or What Language Shall I Borrow?
Below you will find samples of the theology and direction that come from the pulpit of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska (SHPC). But worship and preaching are spoken arts; it will take a visit on a Sunday morning to experience what we at SHPC experience every Sunday. Between now and your visit, here's a taste of the kind of thoughtfulness we experience, an audio clip from an October 30, 2009 MPR Commentary called "Quiet at 4:00 AM" aired on "All Things Considered." The preaching of Pastor Gordon Stewart is nationally recognized by publication in Harper & Row's Sermons series (photo above) and in the national journal The Christian Century. His voice reaches beyond SHPC Church in Chaska over the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio's news and informaton station (KNOW 91.1 FM). Listen to "Blackwater and Michael Jackson," a July 2 MPR Commentary on "All Things Considered" following the tragic death of Michael Jackson. The commentaries are not sermons, but you'll hear the thoughtful voice you can expect to here every Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska.
The New Harmony Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska Pastor Gordon Stewart Text: Matthew 5: 1-12 This morning I invite you to consider the grandeur of God and how we humans live in the face of such grandeur. We catch a glimpse of that grandeur when we explore the universe. Do you know how far light travels (in a vacuum) in one year? Five-thousand-eight-hundred-seventy-eight trillion, 625 million, 373 thousand, and 183 miles (5,878,625,373,183 miles)! It’s called a light year. Just one of them. The nearest star (other than the Sun) is 4.4 light years away. Four point four times five-thousand eight-hundred-seventy-eight trillion, 625 million, 373 thousand, and 183 miles ! Our galaxy (the Milky Way) is about 100,000 light years in diameter. The distance to the galaxy M87 in the Virgo cluster is 50 million light years. The distance to the farthest object yet seen in our universe is about 18 billion light years. Eighteen billion times five-thousand eight-hundred-seventy-eight trillion, 625 million, 373 thousand, and 183 miles! Put that in your calculator and see what happens. That’s just a glimpse into the grandeur – the Otherness and the utter transcendence - of God. What we call ‘God’ exceeds every human measure. Our ability to conceive the mind of God can be compared to the ability of an amoeba to comprehend the physics theories of Stephen Hawking. Christian faith at its best maintains an essential tension between the transcendence of God and what is called the immanence of God – the nearness of God. It offers a humbling sense of the self and of the human species as very small in the face of such incomprehensible grandeur. The Psalmist captured this essential tension between God as the One who cannot be known and the God whose love we know. “When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou art mindful of him? (Psalm 8: 3-4) Today we celebrate the Communion of Saints – our oneness with what the theologians call ‘The Church Militant’ (congregations like this all across the world who still labor for the Kingdom’s sake) and what they call ‘The Church Triumphant’ (the company of the faithful departed who now rest upon another shore and in a greater light). I have come to believe that this language is a problem when placed within the context of a God whose arms are wrapped around a universe of trillions and trillions of light years. My problem with the terms is that they are not the language of Jesus. The word’ militant’ and the word ‘triumphant’ never came from the lips of Jesus. Never, ever. They entered the church’s vocabulary in 325 CE when the church wed itself to the Empire as the handmaid of the Empire where triumph was the goal and militancy and the sword were the way to triumph. Jesus’ only militancy was the opposite of conquest and his only triumph lay in his utter defeat at the hands of a militant world that demanded victory and triumph. In the little town of New Harmony, Indiana, there is a small park called ‘Tillich Park’ dedicated to the witness and memory of the great 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. The little village of New Harmony – once the home of an Amish-like Christian utopian community - was one of Tillich’s favorite places. As you enter the park and walk among the pine trees there are large stone boulders inscribed with the words of Tillich and the Scriptures. At the entrance to the park stands the stone that introduces you to the park: Estranged and re-united The New Being Paul Tillich As you walk along the pine needle path, you stroll past other stones: Man and nature belong together in their created glory – in their tragedy, and in their salvation. He who tries to be without authority tries to be like God who alone can stand by Himself, and like everyone who tries to be like God, he is thrown down to self-destruction, be it a single human being, be it a nation, or be it a period of history like our own. The boulder that stands over his ashes speaks the words of the Psalmist: And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit for his season. His leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. (Ps. 1: 3) Tillich’s faith was faith in Jesus as the carrier of the New Being and the New Harmony which is the kingdom of God breaking into time. Nowhere is that New Being clearer than in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes that bear witness to a world turned on its head. So this morning, as we gather at our Lord’s Table, I invite you to remember who the host is at this table. I may stand behind the table as the Celebrant, but I am not the host here. I only stand here because the church has ordained me to this office as a flawed and tragic representative of Christ himself who alone is our host. We are all his guests. In his name, we prepare to come to his Table, I invite you to consider the beatitudes – the reversal of fortunes to which Jesus pointed our spirits and our behaviors, the turning of the tables of a world that is too full of itself and too empty of wonder and humility. Blessed – fortunate – are the poor in spirit –those who are not full of themselves, those whose spirits do not yet have a home – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; Blessed – fortunate – are those who mourn – those who really feel the loss of connection, who grieve the loss of love and the loss of union – for they shall be comforted. Blessed – fortunate – are the meek – those of a gentle spirit, whose way is tender – for it is they who shall inherit the earth. The planet exists for the likes of them. Blessed – fortunate – are the pure in heart – they whose hearts are unsullied, un-poisoned by the prevailing gods of violence and narcissism – for they shall see God. Blessed – fortunate – are the peacemakers – those who work for reconciliation for the forgiveness of enemies, those who honor the God-given unity of all that God has made – for they shall be called the children of God. So there we have it. The sense of the transcendence of God and a creation of trillions upon trillions of Light Years from one galaxy to the next – and the humility of Jesus who calls us to honor that unity and the nearness of God, and to work for that harmony which is the Will of God for all creation. We are called to follow Jesus, the representative of the New Being and the New Harmony that stands the world as we know it – the world of power, violence, wealth, and pride that is its own authority – on its head. That’s how we’re called to live. Perhaps a visual picture will etch it in our hearts and minds on this Sunday when we celebrate the Communion of Saints.. A man asked St. Peter to show him what heaven and hell were like. St. Peter took him by the hand to the first room. There was a table laden with all the foods one could ever want – French soufflés, Chateaubriand, Rothschild wine… - and people were seated all around the table. But they were emaciated. They were starving because, while they could reach the food just fine, they could not feed themselves because their arms were tied to splints. They couldn’t bend their arms to get the food to their mouths. St. Peter then took him to the second room which was identical in every way. Same table. Same food, same arrangement of chairs around the table. Same splints on their arms. But they were not starving. They were well-fed; they were joyful. There was laughter in the room because, although they too could not feed themselves, they had learned to reach across the table to feed each other. That is the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of the beatitudes. Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for a world like that, for you will be satisfied. | The Name Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska Pastor Gordon Stewart The Day of Pentecost represents the truth of a great reversal. It’s the reversal · from building to receiving; · the reversal from pretense to submission; · the reversal from anxious striving to un-anxious joy. · The reversal from domination to cooperation. · The reversal from ‘me’ to ‘we’, and · The reversal from ‘we’ and ‘our’ to Thee and Thine, the Ground of Being Itself; · The reversal from control to trust; · From the flight from death to discovering ourselves for the very first time.
The long human journey through time we call history, says theologian Sebastian Moore, “is a vast papering over of the human crack.” The crack is the knowledge of death. We paper over it with social building. Which is what happens in the legend of the Tower of Babel? “Human living as it is normally pursued is an escape from reality. The gospel message is a recall to reality…. It is an appeal to man on the vast and portentous scale of his historical build-up to take another way and discover himself for the first time. [The gospel] is an appeal to man who builds against death to realize that in doing so he hardens his heart. “In building against death, man distorts himself. Quite naturally, he divides life up sharply into the part that he can do something about and the part he can do nothing about. The latter part is death. And thus, death, which man must know to be his one certain future and therefore a prime ingredient in his self-understanding and real living, becomes for the social builder something to be disguised and disregarded. So the great human [tower] goes up with time on its side and death as its un-avowed underside. History is a vast papering over of the [reality of death]. The gospel is a recall to reality. It takes many years to see this, I think, unless one is gifted with wisdom prematurely at an early age. Yet even as a college student I caught of whiff of it that sent me into deep despair. Pushed to the edge of the cliff of humanity’s social building and self-adulation by the courage of existentialist writers who were critical of faith as illusion, I had to look back at all that human hands had made and wonder about the meaning of it all. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and Albert Camus’ “The Plague” demanded that I either agree that life is absurd and that faith is an illusion, or crawl out from my denial of death to discover a faith that was courageous enough to stare down the crack of nothingness. My faith, you might say, was rescued by Christian theologians whose theology was clearly not escapist. My heroes became Dietrich Bonhoeffer, author of Christ the Center and The Cost of Discipleship; Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller and Paul Tillich, all of whom demonstrated the courage called for by Sartre and Camus by risking their very lives in opposition to the Third Reich and who saw in the Third Reich the incarnation of death itself. They saw in the attempt to build the perfect society the face of death, the papering over of man’s build up of himself that ends always in destruction. One doesn’t have to go the plain of Shinar where a less sophisticated humankind sought to make a name for themselves with the fortified city and the tower at Babel to understand the meaning of it. In our time just now it’s not a tower, it’s an oil drill that poked a hole in the ocean floor a mile down. The oil gushing into the air through the clean waters of the Gulf of Mexico is a symbol for the Tower that the sons of men have built, our pretentious social building and our denial of any limits. During the time that my father was off in the South Pacific in World War II, my mother and I lived with my grandparents in the big house on Hobart Road in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. There was a staircase with a landing half the way up – or half the way down, I guess, depending on which way you were going. And on the landing was a huge stuffed owl. The owl’s big yellow eyes, lit with electricity, served as a nightlight. When I would come down the stairs in the morning, the owl would be looking at me; when I went to bed at night, he was still there, just sitting there. He wasn’t building anything. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just watching and listening. There was something eerie about the old owl, but more than anything, she was comforting – a sign, although I couldn’t name until just now – of stability and wisdom in a world gone crazy. These days I have a special fondness for the owl and the nursery rhyme about its wisdom. A wise old owl lived in an oak Stepping back – living in the tall oak tree – allows us to see what’s really happening down below where we humans live most of the time. Living even momentarily in the tall oak tree provides perspective, an angle – a point of viewing – that’s different from all the shouted points of view and the distorted angles of vested interests that impair our vision and stuff our ears with noise when we stay on the ground floor. The problem is that we can’t get to the second floor all by ourselves. We can’t get up into the oak tree by ourselves. When we try, we end up in the social building, the flight from reality that papers over death. And that’s what Pentecost is about. It’s about a Spirit that comes to us, if we let it, and sometimes it comes even when we don’t. And what we see when the Spirit comes down; what we see when the dove or the owl comes down to join us, is Jesus Christ as the heart which society seeks but flees and betrays in its building up of itself as a hedge against death. “Crucified and declared in the power of the Spirit, Christ is shockingly man in the midst of all that [humankind and each of us does] to make a name for ourselves. At the funeral of our daughter Katherine just over a week ago, Marcus Cox described the mystery of faith and life and death as well as I’ve ever heard it. Here’s what he said: “May I suggest a way of thinking about the eternal life that God holds out to us? It is a thought that I have offered many times before on occasions like this, but because many have found it helpful, I dare to offer it yet again. It goes like this. “Each of us understands the world from a unique center, and that center is one’s own self. Quite naturally and necessarily, we perceive and intend the world from our own pulsing heart. In that sense, each of us is a world, a universe unto herself, unto himself. We dare to think that God made everything, but the universe we have in mind when we confess that is really something we have put together ourselves, something of our own making. It is really quite a tiny thing, too, as Lady Julian of Norwich has written, like a little hazelnut lying in the palm of God’s great hand. “The real world, the one that God has made, has for its center God’s own loving heart, which is Jesus Christ. That world, which is heaven itself, is not something away out beyond the perimeters of our little worlds – no, for the immensity of God enfolds and embraces every one of us! “But our task, then, is to learn to see our little worlds in relation to that vast reality that God in fact has made. And when we can catch even a glimpse of that reality, we will want to offer our own heart to the heart and center of God’s love, surrendering it gladly to his will, so that our tiny worlds may stretch and expand and grow until they begin to conform to that immensity which is the reality of God. “Katherine has now relinquished her world to God, as each of us must do in the end, either grudgingly, or with a trusting heart. And now, by the loving-kindness of our gracious God, she wakes to take her place in that real world that God has made, which we call the Kingdom of Heaven, as the unique, honored, cherished, perfected and redeemed individual whom God had in mind when first he thought of her. “ The Day of Pentecost represents the truth of a great surrender and reversal from building to receiving; · from pretense to submission; · from anxious striving to un-anxious joy; · from control to trust and cooperation; · from ‘me’ to ‘we’; · from ‘we’ and ‘our’ to Thee and Thine, the Ground of Being Itself Name beyond our names; · From the flight of the escape from death to discovering ourselves for the very first time. Come, Holy Spirit, Come!
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Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska - host of First Tuesday Dialogues -celebrates God's unconditional love for everyone, feeding the soul and challenging the mind with worship, education, outreach, and community gatherings that seek to re-create the public square and promote the common good in the name of Christ. SHPC Pastor Gordon Stewart, frequent guest commentator on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) "All Things Considered," leads the preaching and administation of the sacraments, the two centers of life in the Presbyterian Church. What is different is the magical flavor of the jazz-gospel-classical sacred music from the fingers of Shepherd of the Hill's one-of-a-kind Momoh Freeman. Look for the huge rocking chair on the lawn on the way to Chaska Community Center. |