Litchfield Presbyterian

This sermon was recorded on March 7, 2010. To listen to the audio recording of this sermon Click Here.

Today I want to offer you an interpretation of the earliest years of this congregation.  It’s certainly not the only interpretation possible, but it makes sense to me and it is, I think, quite instructive.  It has become cliché to say that those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.  Cliché notwithstanding, it is in the hope of gaining some useful insights from our past that I ask you to turn your attention for a few minutes to the very brief career of the first minister settled in this town, the Reverend Mr. Joshua Tufts.

Tufts was not the first minister to preach to the people of Naticook – as this area was first known. There are indications that at least three ministers preached here in the 1730’s.  Nor was Joshua Tufts the townspeople’s first choice for a settled minister.  Mr. Josiah Brown and Mr. Isaac Merrill (see Rev. Newhall’s Address) both were extended calls to settle here, but both declined.  Maybe they were just not the right men for the times.  Maybe Joshua Tufts was.  The story goes like this…

Late in 1741, two riders pulled up their mounts in front of the house of the aging Reverend John Tufts of Newbury, Massachusetts.  One rider represented the voters of Merrimack, New Hampshire on the west side of the river and the other represented the voters on the east side in Litchfield.  The two constituted a committee invested with the authority to treat with the elder Mr. Tufts for permission to extend a call to his son Joshua (recently graduated from Harvard College) to settle as the preacher at the newly erected meetinghouse in Litchfield.  (Being slightly fewer in number, the residents of Merrimack were obliged to cross the river on the Sabbath to worship on the Litchfield side – an arrangement, I might add, that was not much to their liking.)  Now, you may think it strange that the father’s permission should be solicited in this manner, but in those days, a male child under the age of 21 could not legally work outside the home without it.  Even after reaching 21, it was considered a common courtesy to seek a father’s permission to employ his young adult son.  The elder Mr. Tufts consented, and the riders returned to Litchfield with the news.  Shortly thereafter a second delegation was sent from Litchfield, this time leading an extra horse, upon which the young Mr. Joshua Tufts rode for the return trip up the river.  Joshua arrived at the steeple-less meetinghouse, where he was to be examined for his fitness to preach.  And what an examination it was!  We can well imagine that the young man may have – or perhaps should have – had some serious misgivings about accepting the call.  I will explain, but first a little context.

To understand the religious situation in Litchfield in 1741, and the difficulties faced by the congregation and young Mr. Tufts, we must first understand the religious climate in the New England colonies in those days.  As you well know, the Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay colonies were settled for the most part by dissenters from the Church of England.  Puritan leaders like the preacher John Cotton, the poet Anne Bradstreet and the politician John Winthrop (by the way both Cotton and Bradstreet were ancestors to Tufts,– his grandmother was Mercy Cotton and his mother was Sarah Bradstreet) in any case, the Puritan leaders believed that they were on an errand from God, to establish a shining “city on a hill” in the New World.  Though they never did become the model of Christian charity that some had hoped for, the early New England colonies were brimming with pious Puritan zeal.  But generations passed and by 1720 – a hundred years after the first Pilgrims stepped off of the Mayflower – the fires of Puritan passion had cooled considerably and Puritanism had settled into a dull and formal orthodoxy.  Then, in 1727 a strong earthquake shook New England and church attendance surged.  But anxiety about the impending end of the world soon faded and church attendance resumed its gradual decline.  Jonathan Edwards famously described the situation.  “… it seemed to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion,” he wrote.

As the colonies expanded, worldly concerns often trumped heavenly ones.  On the New Hampshire frontier which included the town of Litchfield, for example, settlers were not only preoccupied with their crops, or with the harvesting of local timber, but they were greatly concerned about the ongoing boundary dispute between the Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire colonies and its impact on the validity land titles and consequently their economic survival.

All in all, by the end of the 1730’s the times were ripe for a revival of religion.  It was then that itinerant evangelistic preachers began to appear – and they had tremendous appeal.  Men like George Whitefield, James Davenport and Gilbert Tennant, drew crowds in the thousands. People flocked into public squares and farmer’s fields to hear them preach their extemporaneous sermons.   The messages of these preachers, many of whom were Presbyterian, were highly emotional (“enthusiastic” as their critics called them) and extremely effective.  Many of their listeners came under the powerful conviction of their sinfulness and need for a “new birth.”  Stories of dramatic conversions, healings and awakenings of faith circulated through every church.

A contemporary account tells it this way:

“In 1739 [there] arrived among us … the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable … as an itinerant preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields. The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was a matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them that they were naturally half beasts and half devils. It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”  Benjamin Franklin

Franklin, who was an admirer of Whitefield though never a convert, once conducted an experiment.  Starting from the place where Whitefield stood preaching in a field, he walked away from him until he could no longer hear him distinctly.  This procedure he repeated in several directions.  After careful calculations, he arrived at the conclusion that 30,000 people had heard Whitefield at that one meeting!  An incredible claim!

Settled preachers in many churches adopted the energetic style of the traveling evangelists and not a few congregations were stirred from spiritual lethargy to renewed religious passion.  But, as Franklin remarked, not all ministers were favorably impressed by what came to be called “The Great Awakening.”  When established orthodox ministers – many of them Congregationalists – were directly challenged, accused of being unconverted and of being tools of the devil leading their congregations to hell, they declared war and struck back.  Pamphlets and tracts were published denouncing the revivalists as excessively emotional, over-excited and manipulative.  James Davenport was literally banned from Boston.  Prominent among the counter-revivalists was Charles Chauncy, the “Old Brick,” who launched his counter-attack from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Boston.  Chauncy and the establishment clergy were known as the “Old Lights” as over against the revivalist “New Lights.”  Chauncy’s famous booklet, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, published in 1743, was a point-by-point refutation of the teachings and perceived excesses of the traveling evangelists.  In July that same year a convention of “New Light” ministers gathered in Boston.  As a reply to Chauncy, they signed and had published in the newspapers a statement entitled “The Testimony and Advice of the Pastors of the Churches in New England” in which they supported the revivals as a genuine movement of God.   We’ll hear more about both Chauncy’s “Seasonable Thoughts” and the rebutting “Testimony and Advice…” in a few minutes.

The first half of the 1740’s was a time not only of turmoil, but often of outright chaos in the churches of New England.  From 1740 to 1744 most churches in New England aligned themselves with either the “New Light” revivalists or the “Old Light” traditionalists.  The split was about 50/50 with a few congregations attempting to remain neutral – usually without success.  Controversy and ill-will abounded.  Some congregations split in half.  Many congregations tended “New Light” while their pastor tended “Old Light” and vice versa.  In those cases, the pastor usually got sacked, or if he managed to stay on, large contingents of the congregation often abandoned him to attend, or even start up, another church more to their liking.

In Londonderry, the newly formed West parish was led by the charismatic “New Light” David MacGregore, and the established East parish was led by “Old Light” William Davidson.  The two ministers held each other in tremendous contempt and refused to speak one to the other.  The whole town drew up sides and squared off against each other.  On every Sabbath “Old Light” residents of the west side of town defiantly marched right past the front door of the West parish meeting house to go clear across town to worship at the “Old Light” East parish.  And equally outraged “New Light” residents of the east side streamed past the nearby East parish meeting house to worship with the “New Lights” in the West Parish.    According to E.L. Parker’s history of Londonderry, “This unhappy division was productive of evils long felt in the town, not only occasioning alienation of feeling, and often bitter animosities between the members of these two religious societies, but also preventing all ministerial and even social intercourse between the ministers.”     This situation was not unique to Londonderry.  Such was the state of affairs in many New England towns when the young and inexperienced Joshua Tufts was examined for his fitness to preach in Litchfield.

Here is what we know about the circumstances surrounding the examination.  As everywhere, there certainly were in the Litchfield-Merrimack community divisions of opinion along “New Light” and “Old Light” lines.  I suspect that most of those on the Merrimack side of the river were “Old Light” Congregationalists while many of those on the Litchfield side were more sympathetic to “New Light” Presbyterianism.  It appears, however, that the voters who were to elect their first settled minister wanted to avoid the hostilities that existed in Londonderry and elsewhere, and so were not prepared to declare outright for one side or the other.   They certainly didn’t want their newly gathered church to be fractured before it was even established.  Accordingly, they insisted that their minister should satisfy both “Old Lights” and “New Lights” as to his fitness.  To that end, prior to the examination of young Mr. Tufts, the voters approached two nearby ministers and asked them to help.  Would they provide a series of questions that they might put to their prospective pastor?  After the candidate responded, the ministers could review his answers and help decide his suitability.  They proceeded to solicit a list of examination questions from the Reverend David McGregore, the decidedly “New Light” Presbyterian pastor in the West parish of Londonderry, and from the Reverend Thomas Parker, the staunchly “Old Light” Congregationalist pastor in Dracut.  The questions were then put to Mr. Tufts and, astonishingly, the 25 year-old Harvard grad, managed to answer them to the satisfaction of both the “New Light” McGregore, and the “Old Light” Parker.

Based upon his startlingly successful examination, the twenty-six male voters on the east side of the river and the twenty-five on the west, voted to call Joshua Tufts as their pastor. Tufts accepted the call and was ordained on Dec. 9, 1741, and with his new wife, he settled in Litchfield.  This was an auspicious beginning to his relationship with the people here, but it was only the beginning.

We don’t know many details of Mr. Tufts’ career in Litchfield.  We do know, however, that in 1742 as the publisher was preparing to print Charles Chauncy’s anti-revivalist “Old Light” booklet, “Seasonable Thoughts…” he gathered over 700 advance subscriptions.  In those days subscriptions paid in advance were used as a way of underwriting the production of books.  Among the subscribers were the Rev. Thomas Parker of Dracut, Tufts’ “Old Light” examiner, and … The Rev. Joshua Tufts of Litchfield.  Tufts’ subscription to the work placed him squarely among the “Old Light” anti-revivalists.  Less than a year later, in July of 1743, when the Boston convention of “New Light” ministers published their “Testimony and Advice…” supporting revivals, whose names should appear among the signatories, but the Presbyterian revivalist and ordination examiner The David McGregore of Londonderry – and amazingly, the Rev. Joshua Tufts of Litchfield!   Tufts blatantly and very publicly contradicted himself.  There could only be two reasons for this. Tufts was either entirely muddled, or he was making a deliberate statement.

So what shall we make of all this? Tufts was a brilliant young man, graduating Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and near the top of his class, but there are some anecdotal references by classmates to his unsteadiness and vacillation in his student days. I was at first tempted, therefore, to think that Tufts may have indeed been weak and indecisive.  I was also tempted to think that the church set him up for failure by setting him an impossible task.  The lesson in that case would be: “he who seeks to please everyone, pleases no one – not even himself.”

But upon reflection, I have come to think more highly of both Tufts and of the church.  I believe both he and the congregation, for the good of the whole community, were actually trying to preserve peace by steering a diplomatic middle course between “Old Light” and “New Light” sentiments.  I choose to think that the congregation wanted to avoid the kind of division that so disrupted all of life in places like Londonderry.  I believe that the people of Litchfield called Tufts to be a peacekeeper – and he tried his best to be just that.   His apparent self-contradiction was not a sign that Tufts was too weak or too indecisive to take sides – it was a sign that he deliberately chose not to.   And that was itself a definitive stand.

I choose to believe that Tufts was a man who actually saw value in the diverse perspectives of the “Old Light” traditionalists and the “New Light” revivalists.  He didn’t choose between them, but instaed chose them both, because in his mind both had merit.  Perhaps he genuinely believed in both the value of tradition and the necessity for change.  Perhaps he saw that both renewal and continuity had to be embraced.  I want to imagine that he saw that people forget their past at their own peril.  But I want to believe that he also recognized that it is equally perilous to be so mired in the past that we overlook new possibilities.  It may be that Joshua Tufts did the best that could be done for the fledgling church in Litchfield.  He saw them through a turbulent time and held them together until the heat of passion died down and the crisis passed.  He may have been called to the young church in Litchfield for just such a purpose as that.  I think the evidence points that way, but it’s not really possible to know.  Still, this address is not just a history lesson, it’s a sermon about the lessons of history – so I hope you will allow my speculations and we’ll all learn what we can.   What we do know for certain is that by 1744, the fevered revivals of the “Great Awakening” had run their course, and Joshua Tufts’ pastorate in Litchfield came to an abrupt end.  One cryptic record simply says, “He was dismissed in 1744.”  Why and whether at his own request or not, we are not told.

This sermon was recorded on February 14, 2010. To listen to the audio recording of this sermon Click Here.

This sermon was recorded on Boy Scout Sunday, February 7, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording  Click Here.

This sermon was recorded on January 31, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording  Click Here.

This sermon was recorded on January 10, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording  Click Here.

Out of my distress I called on the LORD;
the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.  Psalm 118:5

There once was a man named Hobson who owned a livery stable.  He had a few horses to rent out and in order to rotate the use of the animals, he would move them, each in turn, to a stall nearest the door of his establishment.  He would then offer his customers a choice.  They could take the animal in the stall nearest the door, or they could take no animal at all.

Thus, so the story goes, originated the term “a Hobson’s choice.”  It is a choice, which in point of fact, is no choice at all.  “Like it or lump it.” “Take it or leave it.”  It is the appearance of multiple options when there is actually only one.  As Henry Ford famously said of his Model T, you could choose to have it in any color you wanted, so long as it was black.

The hard economic times we are all facing reminds me of another story.  In Bisbee, Arizona, in the early years of the 20th century, a dispute between copper mining companies and mineworkers developed. In 1917, the workers had organized in labor unions and approached the company management with a list of demands for better pay and conditions. The mining companies responded by giving their workers a choice.  On the one hand, they could continue to accept the harsh and underpaid work at the rock-face of the copper mines or, on the other, they could accept unemployment and poverty.  The workers said that this choice put them “between a rock and a hard place.”
I hate to be “between a rock and a hard place” don’t you?   The worst part of hardship, economic or otherwise is to have no good choices.  It is horrible to feel hemmed in by circumstances, to feel stuck in a dead end situation, to feel powerless, constrained and constricted.  It is like the walls are closing in on you.  You feel hopeless, as though there is nothing you can do, or as though anything you try to do is futile.  Every option is a bad one.  Every human feels this way sometime.

The Bible is a wonderful book, because it is so human.  It looks our humanity square in the face, and tells it like it is.  The poet writes, Out of my distress I called on the LORD; the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.  He understands that deliverance, salvation if you will, means being set in a broad place.  He cries out of his distress – out from his confinement, out of where he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.  He cries out because he has no good choices, no real options. Who is this person?  What is this rock and this hard place?

This is the person who has to choose between two unbearable choices.  He is surrounded by his enemies and faced with the choice of surrender or conquest.  But he cries out not only for himself.  He cries out for everyone who is hemmed in, surrounded and out of good options.  He cries for the elderly man who has to choose between giving up a meal or giving up a prescription.  He speaks for the single mother who has to choose between the humiliation of welfare and the indignity of $7.25 an hour.   He cries out for all the lonely, for all the imprisoned, for all the homeless, all the addicted. He cries out for everyone who must endure injustice, who lives with violence or lives without hope. He speaks for them all, for us all, for all who cry out of their distress.  Above all the poet cries out for the dead young rabbi closed in by the cold stone tomb.  For the crucified Christ who cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” For the dead Messiah who can no longer cry out for himself.

And what is God’s response to this cry?  How does God answer?  What does the poet say? “the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.”   The imagery is beautiful.  God takes him from the confinement of a place with no good options, from between the rock and the hard place and sets him in a wide-open space, in a broad place.  God puts him in a place without narrow boundaries, a place with room to move about, a place where he is no longer tightly limited, where he has choices.  This is the answer that God makes for human distress, God wants to make people free – free to choose among many possible options, all of them potentially good.

This is a big part of what Easter means.  God shows us in Christ what is God’s intention for all people.  Jesus described his own sending, a mission fulfilled in his resurrection: he uses these words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”   This is Christ’s mission: to bring good news to the poor… to let the oppressed go free.  Jesus came to announce God’s intention to take people from between a rock and a hard place, and to set them in a broad place, a wide-open and free space.

One of the meanings of the word “transform” is to move across boundaries into a new form, a new mode of being.  When the prisoner is set free his world is transformed.  When the oppressed find justice, their world is transformed.  When the exploited are treated with dignity and respect, their world is transformed.  When the addicted are treated, it is transformation.  When poor are lifted out of their poverty, when the hungry are fed, when the homeless are sheltered, when the sick made well and the broken are made whole, the world for them is transformed.  They are set in a broad place and given a whole new world of options.  That is the mission of Christ, and that is the power of resurrection.

Now my friends, you know very well that as much as God intends this to be so, as much as God intends the world to be transformed, it can only come about through the direct action of people doing good work, doing God’s work.  God always works in and through human hearts and human hands.  This work is placed in our hands.  It is the human world that needs transformation and it is for humans to transform it.  This is our business.  It is our business to feed the hungry, the shelter the exposed, to comfort the grieving, to make whole the broken, to give people real options, to give them something better than a Hobson’s choice, to get them out from between the rock and the hard place.

We have taken some steps to do this, but there is much more that can be done, much more that we can do.  Our purpose as God’s people is to worship God by transforming the world.  This begins when we look around us.  Observe and take note where the restraints are.  Where are the prisoners and what makes their prisons?  Where are the narrow places where the choices are no good?  Where are the dark and dismal tombs of discouragement and despair?  Who are lonely?  Who are struggling?  Who are stuck?  That’s where it begins.  Then what can we do about it?  What help can we offer? What support can we give?  What space can we create?  These are the questions, and the answers can lead to the transformation of the world.

But are we not too small for this?  Are we not too weak, too poor, too few?  Only if we think that God is small, that love is too weak, that compassion is too poor, that one or two and Jesus are too few.  In the tomb, Jesus was weak beyond weakness, he was poor beyond poverty, he was alone in the cold, dark, narrow place.  It was from there that it all began.  I imagine a slight small stirring of the spirit, blowing up into a storm, a rushing wind, lifting hearts and inspiring minds with the presence of Christ, the power of love, the possibility of hope.  The few followers of Jesus knew he was living still, not dead, not entombed, not hemmed in and held down.  With great joy they began to proclaim the news, and to care for one another, and to invite others in, and to heal and help and do good in Christ’s name.  And from that small beginning, from those few, those poor, those little ones, the fire started.

We are not too small, not too weak, not too poor or too few.  We can transform our little corner of the world, for the risen Christ is here as much as anyplace, the risen Christ is now as surely as at any time.  Christ is risen!  Let us sing!

Here are some thoughts distilled from a recent sermon on Wisdom. The reading are from Proverbs 8 and John 1:1-3

Before the beginning of the cosmos, before physics or mathematics, certainly before geology or biology, and long before psychology, there was a reason, a purpose, a logic, a will, a desire, an intention.  In the New Testament this purposeful energy is personified as the “Logos” of God.  In the Old Testament, and especially in the book of Proverbs, purposeful energy is personified as the female principle, Sophia – Wisdom.

This logic, this wisdom, has to do with the right order of things.  It is the principle by which everything from subatomic particles to humans in society is intended to operate.  It is an intention of deep harmony, mutual care and interdependence.

It is the way of goodness and life.  We may even say that the idea of “the good” is the presence of this order, this intention, in the realm of human thought.  “The good” is not a derivative of ethics or morality, it is a self-evident principle that transcends and judges ethics and morality. Wisdom is the way that a good father orders his household, it is the way a good mother lovingly orders her children, not according to any rule, but according to the guidance of “the good.”

When we see the shades or hear the echoes of this harmonious order in our world, we perceive this as beauty.  We say that something – a sunset – a piece of music – a loving family – is beautiful when it exhibits or displays something of this deep harmonious order.

To be guided in our actions by this deep order is to live in wisdom.  In religious language, we might say that it is to live by the Word of God.  By that, I most emphatically do not mean the Bible, but rather the living Word (Logos, Sophia) that, as Jesus says, “proceeds from the mouth of God.” Another way to say this is that the mother wisdom that nurtures and orders and cares for everything should be the guiding principle by which we live our lives

Wisdom is the fitting, timely, apposite, situationally appropriate, right, application of knowledge.  It is a fallacy to think that there is a timeless and universally appropriate rule for right, good, or godly behavior.  Discernment is always required. It is necessary for us to judge what is fitting and when.  SQ

Scripture Lessons:    Geneis 2:7 “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

Galatians 5:14 “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The … great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; [is] that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.”  (The Over-Soul, 1841)

Today I want to show the nature of our relationship to one another, and then based upon that relationship, I want to show our responsibility to one another.

Do you know what is the world’s largest creature?  We may think of elephants, giant squids, or whales, perhaps we’ll even think of a dinosaur. But we’d be wrong on every count.  It depends upon how you measure it, but by some measures, the world’s largest living organism is the Populus tremuloides (trem u low id eez).  It is 80,000 years old and  weighs 12 million pounds.  Imagine that!  Of course this creature is not an animal at all, but a giant grove of quaking aspen trees in the Rocky Mountains of Utah.  Extensive DNA testing has shown that the entire grove is in fact one vast male aspen tree with a huge interconnected root system.  This forest, which covers many acres of land, appears as many individual trees, but in fact it is only one giant organism.

I believe that the entire human race is connected in a way something like this.  We are one vast organism – in our case, not merely a biological organism, but a spiritual organism.  We all share the same life… we are animated by the same spirit.

The Source of our life is a Unitary Spirit.  It is a single Life Force, a single Creating Energy, a single Over-Soul (as Emerson called it).  In the language of the Bible, this creating, animating, life giving Source is called Elohim: the Divine One.  The Jewish name for Elohim is Yahweh, “I Am.”  In common parlance we call it God. 

Imagine vast, unbounded Being, not “a” being, but Being itself.  We find it difficult adequately to think of this Principle of Life,  this infinitely conscious, aware, good, and self-giving Essence.  But that unlimited Life-giving Life is what we mean by God.  When we think of God as “a” being, we usually end up thinking of a big “man” in the sky.  Admittedly some of the language of the Bible leads us to think this way, but it will not do.  God is not a really big, really smart, really powerful, really good being.  Not even the “Supreme Being.”  God is Being itself, and following our analogy of the Aspen tree, God is both the root system of all being and the nourishing soil in which every being is rooted.  The analogy, like all analogies, breaks down, but is still useful.  A better image has God a the fountainhead, the eternal spring from which flows the water of life.  This living water flows into all beings and by it all beings are sustained.  As the Bible says. “In God we live and move and have our being.”

So, from this point of view, it is not as though we each have an individual, separate soul. Even though we speak of “my soul” or “your soul,” of “his soul” and “her soul;” there is actually only one “soul” of which we all partake.  That is, we take part in a single human soul, which is not separate from or even different than the Life that is God.  God is not the collective human soul.  I am not saying that.  God is more than that.  God is the Life without limit of which each human life may be seen as a particular, limited instance.  As a Buddhist might say, “A wave on the ocean is not the ocean, but the water that is the wave is not other than or separate from the ocean.”  If we think of it in this way, God is the ocean and we are the waves, and every wave is connected to every other wave because all waves are part of the same ocean.  The ocean has dark and unfathomed depths that the waves do not know, but the waves are no less one with the ocean because of this.  Being has depths which no particular beings can know, but they are no less one with Being because of this.  To use Biblical language, there is “one God, [the parents] of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

It is clear then, that the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is not using metaphorical language when it says “as yourself.”  The individual, separate and autonomous self is an illusion as far as this teaching is concerned.  There is no such thing.  This is underscored by the great image of the Christian Community; “The Body of Christ”, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12:9)

The command to love our neighbor as ourselves recognizes that the self and the neighbor are one, since they are completely connected at the source. To love the neighbor is actually and not metaphorically to love the self.  Furthermore, since it is God who is the animating principle present in the neighbor as in the self, when we love God, we must love each other, and when we love each other, we,  in fact, are loving God.  That’s what the Bible says.

Jesus was once teaching on the commandment that we must love our neighbor as ourselves, when a clever man tried to trip him up.  “Ah!” said the man, “but just who is my neighbor?”  In response Jesus told him a story, the great parable of the Good Samaritan.  The point of the story is that the neighbor is the one who is in need.  Or rather, the one who helps, makes himself or herself a neighbor to anyone whom he or she chooses.  When we see somebody in need, we are called upon to love that person as ourselves, for the need that I see is my own need as well.   The Good Samaritan didn’t say to himself, “Not my problem.”  His understanding was that whatever human problem he encountered was his problem since, as part of the human race, he is one soul with all other humans.

The first people whom we must love as ourselves are those who are closest to ourselves.  As the old saying goes, “Charity begins at home.”  It doesn’t end there, but it begins there.  The people we encounter every day are the ones we must attend to first.  There are many, many needs right across the breakfast table from us, right next door, right in the pew beside us.  There are people here who feel ignored, who are suffering alone, who have real needs going unmet.  These needs are part of me, they are my needs as surely as any.  Let us pay attention to the people near to us, for through familiarity, they are too easily overlooked.

But we must also become aware of the needs beyond the range of our immediate vision.  There are needs in our world, which belong to us as well.  There are many millions who suffer from sheer neglect.  There are millions who are not powerful, who have no voice, whose tears are shed in secret.  They cannot command anybody’s attention.  And for the want of attention, they suffer and die.  It is our responsibility to these, who are no less a part of us, to pay attention.  It is our responsibility to raise our awareness, to look and to listen and then to feel with them and to do what we can.  As a church, we need to do better in looking beyond ourselves. We need to pay greater attention and find ways to do more.

Beloved, if we can acknowledge that as humans we are one soul with all humans, that we are connected at our source, if we can attend to the real needs that are all around us, and if we can resolve to act, to do whatever we can, then we will be doing all that true religion requires.   “For all the law [of God, and all true religion] is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”  May it be so with us.

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 7:1-5

Every society has norms.  A norm is “a principle of right action binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior.”  Norms are the regulations by which a group of people play the game of life, so to speak. In his teaching, in his way of living and his way of dying, Jesus sought to renew human society according to its own best possibilities.  He sought to describe the norms by which humans could live together as the society of God – the kingdom of God.  This is his work as the Christ.

Our work as Christ’s followers is simply to live by those norms, to live as members of the heavenly society, as citizens of the kingdom of God.

This society is not utopian, but it is blessed and good.  It is not perfect, but it is positive and progressive.  It is not finished, it is evolving.  It is not arriving from somewhere else, it is emerging from within us.  This society is not exclusive, it is not for some select few, it is inclusive and is God’s intention for all.  It is not governed by a strictly enforced set of rules or laws, but it is guided along its way by certain principles of right acting and appropriate behavior, certain norms.  These are the ways of humane, or wholesome human society.

All people are people of God, all are members of this wholesome human society, but not all know this, therefore all do not live accordingly.  Some have come, as it were, to see the light.  That is the light of life.  The light of life has shone with unique brightness in a few great and godly souls.  These are the wisdom teachers.  Their teachings endure in the world’s great religions.  Jesus is such a brightly shining light, and that is why we seek to follow in his path, to go in the way he illuminates.

I believe that in this way lies peace and joy.  I believe that in this way lies the greater realization of my true humanity.  I believe that in this way lies fulfillment and contentment.  In this way is acceptance and love.  These are the things that I seek.  And these are the things that the Christ guides me, draws me toward.

So we come again to the central questions for those who seek to follow in the way Christ reveals – What does Jesus want me to do?  What does Jesus want us to do?  What must we do in order live as people of the light?

The answers to these questions are both personal, that is individual, and they are corporate, that is communal or societal.  One must follow Christ for oneself, but we can only find our way together.  We are individuals, but we are connected.  We have a common life, of which we all partake.  This is the symbol Holy Communion.

Our Bible passage for today is a record of one of the teachings of Jesus having to do with our life together.  In it Jesus points us toward one of the great norms of wholesome human society – one of the great norms of the kingdom of God, to use traditional religious language.

Wholesome human society is non-judgmental.  It is an environment of compassionate discernment, but not of judgment.  “Do not judge, lest you be judged,” Jesus teaches. Let me explain what I think Jesus means by this.

What judgment is not = awareness of flaws in myself and others.  Not critical discernment.

What judgment is = condemnation.  A self-righteous and self-serving put-down of another, whether spoken and acted upon or harbored in my heart. Whenever one seeks to gain by making a condemning evaluation of another while remaining unreflective about oneself, that is judging.

When a group accepts judging as a societal norm, it becomes the rule by which all members of that society must play.  All judges are ultimately judged and such a society will finally consume itself.  Judgmental behavior is personally and societally self-destructive.