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A Place for the Heart and Mind
| A thoughtful pulpit is central to who we are. The pulpit is a free space, an uncensored place, where the pastor seeks to engage our daily lives by an educated interpretation of the Word of God in Scripture. A January 5, 2011 commentary on MinnPost.com provides a glimpse into how our pastor reads the Scriptures. Click on sermon titles below to listen to sermons at Shepherd of the Hill Church in Chaska by Pastor Gordon Stewart: |
Our Pastor's voice also reaches the Upper Midwest over the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio's news and informaton station (KNOW 91.1 FM). If the word 'sermon' turns you off, here's an audio clip of "Blackwater and Michael Jackson," a July 2 MPR Commentary on "All Things Considered" following the tragic death of Michael Jackson. 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. Sermons of Pastor Gordon Stewart appear in Harper-Collins's Sermons series (photo above) and by the national journal The Christian Century.
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 Yoke Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska Pastor Gordon Stewart Texts: Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:24-32 At the end of the sermon this morning, songwriter Tim Frantzich will lead us in a song about Paul and Silas praying in their jail cell, the earth shaking, all the prison doors swinging open and all the chains falling off every prisoner. In that story from the Book of Acts it was not just the prisoners who had had chains on them. it was not just the lawbreakers who were imprisoned. The jailer, who held the cellblock keys, also had been in his own kind of prison and was set free. Whatever happened that day, they were all set free. It started with Paul and Silas, two of the inmates. It started with the freedom of two prisoners whose freedom came from a different sort of freedom that springs from a different kind of captivity. The singing that echoed down the hallway of the cells in the jail house came from a freedom that is different from the "freedom from" that is popularly regarded as the nature of freedom. It came instead from a "freedom for" that comes when one exchanges the myth of absolute individual freedom for the freedom for the neighbor that comes with freedom in Christ. James Carroll describes a similar scene in the Preface to the late William Sloane Coffin's book, Credo. The jail house singing took place this time following the arrest of a number of national religious leaders for engaging in a mild, nonviolent anti-war protest in 1972. "The night was passing with anguished slowness. Murmurs occasionally broke the silence, and doors clanged on a distant corridor. The barked orders of guards jolted the air now and then. Otherwise, an eerie silence filled the dark." James Carroll was a young man who had never been arrested before. Like most of us, he had been raised to resepct authority and to obey it. He was completely disoriented to find himself a lawbreaker. He was depressed and afraid with a sinking feeling in his stomach, "he himself falling like a stone in the well of his own chest." At some point in the middle of the night the man in the next cell began to sing. He sang softly at first. Slowly the music filled the air with a resonant baritone voice singing Handel's "Messiah": "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people." It was the voice of William Sloane Coffin, the primary speaker arrested in the capitol rotunda who, along with the others, would not leave the rotunda until Congress voted to end the war. From a jail cell next to Coffin's in that Washington, D.C. jail, a young, scared James Carroll could hear Bill Coffin the way Silas must have heard Paul, singing alone at first, as if he were the only person on Earth, "and the old words rose through the dark as if Isaiah himself had returned - to speak for God to you. Soon others on the cell block joined their voices with Coffin's - 'The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light' - but Coffin's voice, in effect, carried the others. He knew the words, and he knew the music." How does a man or woman manage to sing from a jail cell? People sing because they know who they are. They sing because they know that to be free from restraint is not the full measure of true freedom. They sing because, like the Apostle Paul who realized his blindness on the road to Damascus, they have heard a gentle invitation that has re-framed the discussion of freedom. They can sing because they have been released from the idolatry of freedom that makes the individual the center of the universe. They sing because they have come to understand that we always hitch our freedom to some kind of yoke that plows someone else's field. "Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." The language is so familiar to many of us that we don't realize its paradox. There is no absolute freedom. It's a myth. Jesus uses a metaphor. Like oxen whose job is to plow the landowner's field, we are always plowing some field or other, and we are always yoked to something or someone. To the extent that we labor under yokes that do not fit - ideas, ideologies, political loyalties and parties, wealth, social position and economic powers that chafe and burn our necks and bruise our shoulders; yokes that keep us awake and worried in the night - we live with a heavy burden, though we believe we labor under the banner of individual freedom. But the wisdom of Bill Coffin singing Handel's "Messiah" and of Paul and Silas praying and singing iat midnight is that, whether we know it or not, we are always yoked to something, and that exchanging the myth of freedom for the yoke of Christ sets us free not only from the hurful yokes but frees us for one another and for the wider world whose yokes have yet to be broken. The new yoking to the One who is meek and lowly of heart places us on the One who alone owns the land and whose disciples' calling is to plow the field of the Kingdom of God. When our freedom is harnessed to the yoke that is "easy" and whose "burden is light", our voices break forth freely in the great Hallelujah Chorus: "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The kingdom of this world has become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ; forever and ever, King of kings and Lord of lords; King of kings and Lord of lords!...And he shall reign forever and ever. And he shall reign forever and ever. Forever and ever, forever and ever! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujiah!" "And suddenly you do believe that your Redeemer has stood upon the Earth with you, bringing you to the most unlikely place. You see, indeed, that you belong here and that you are strong enough for whatever lies ahead" (James Carroll). Your prison door swings open, and all your chains fall off. Timothy Frantzich then led the congegation in his composition "All the prison doors swung open; everybody's chains fell off." |
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. 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. |