| Welcome to The New Coffee Room. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Puppet Show; (sermon 10/30/11) | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 29 2011, 08:18 PM (202 Views) | |
| Dewey | Oct 29 2011, 08:18 PM Post #1 |
![]()
HOLY CARP!!!
|
But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you. Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise. (Isaiah 43, various verses) ===== Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:31-36) ===== I’m not a big science fiction nut, but I do like stories with strange and unexpected twists to them. And there was a short science fiction story like that, that I read when I was just twelve or thirteen, and it’s always stuck in my head. The story is called “Puppet Show,” by a writer named Fredric Brown. In the story, an alien lands on earth, way out in the Arizona desert near the Mexican border. The scene unfolds with the alien riding into town on a donkey being led by a grizzly, dirty old prospector. The alien is nine feet tall but weighs only about a hundred pounds – he’s like a stick figure, his long legs dragging on the ground as the donkey walks along. And he’s hideous. He looks like he’s been skinned alive, and had his skin put back on inside-out, or just left off altogether, with exposed veins running all over the meaty red surface of his flesh. Through the efforts of a local from the little town nearby, the alien gets officers from a military base to come out and meet with him, and he explains to them that he’s been sent to determine whether earth is fit to be invited into a peaceful intergalactic federation, which would bring peace on earth, unbelievable technological advancement, and interplanetary colonization. Being part of the federation would usher in an unimaginable golden age of human existence – if we passed the test. The alien, whose name is Garth, has them set up a tape recorder, to record the conversation to take to the earthly leaders. So they set a microphone up on a tripod, and they all sit in a circle around the microphone – Garth, a local tavern owner who first met him coming in out of the desert, the prospector, the military officers, led by a colonel; the prospector's donkey tied off just outside the circle, chewing on a stubbly tuft of desert grass. Garth explains to the ranking officer that as they were speaking, they were being tested. He explained that he was picked to come to earth because while there were all kinds of intelligent life in the universe, his people were humanoid – and specifically, the humanoid form that we humans would consider the most hideous, repulsive, scary, and potentially dangerous. The federation had to see if we humans were sufficiently inquisitive and unafraid of engaging peacefully with someone like him. But in the middle of this test, Garth just lies back on the ground and stops – stops talking, stops moving – stops breathing. The military officers rush over to him to see if he’s got a heartbeat – but the prospector just laughed, and told them not to waste their time – they wouldn’t find a pulse, because Garth was really just an automated creation – a kind of puppet, the prospector said, explaining that he, the prospector, was the real alien – and he peeled off his artificial beard and wiped grime and makeup off his face, revealing that he was actually a very normal, handsome, very human-looking alien being. He explained that Garth was actually a mockup of a real life form somewhere in the universe, but that they had just used this puppet to test the officers. “Well, I guess that’s actually a relief,” said the colonel. “I mean, I suppose we could all get along with any kind of alien life out there, if we had to - even one as hideous as Garth - but to be honest, it’s a bit of a relief to know that a human civilization like you is really the most advanced life form, the master race, if you will. So, I assume we passed our test?” “Actually, you’re still being tested,” the handsome young alien said, and as soon as he said it, he laid back on the ground just like Garth had, and he shut down, too. And it was then that the donkey lifted his head, turned toward the officer, and said, “Now, just what were you saying, Colonel? What’s that about a master race?” Today is Reformation Sunday, when we think about how God transformed what people understood the Church to be, through the work of the various church reformers who mainly spoke out in the 1500s and 1600s. That’s why this Sunday each year, we’ll almost always sing John Calvin’s hymn “I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art,” or Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, whether a person remained within the Roman Catholic tradition, or became part of the Protestant tradition, what it meant to be a Christian would be different forever. It would never again be what people had thought the church was. Just like the surprises in Fredric Brown’s story, where the reality of the situation changed as people were considered able to handle the new reality, God has continued to reveal more and more about God’s self, and the fullness of what the church is all about, and the nature of our relationship with God and with each other. It began in the earliest of times, continuing through God’s revelation to Moses and working to bring the Hebrews out of bondage and slavery. It continued through God’s sending prophets to the people, revealing more and more about what God desires – love, not sacrifice, relationship, not ritual. It reached its high point in God’s actually entering our world in Jesus, the ultimate act of love and oneness with us, and self-revelation to us, showing us in the flesh, literally, what love is supposed to look like. Christ coming into the world was the high point of this process of revealing things to us in the right time of God’s choosing. That was God’s last word, a done deal, about achieving our reconciliation with God. But it wasn’t the last of God’s gradually revealing more and more about how we understand the relationship between us. As the gospel spread to other cultures around the world, and across the centuries as our society continues to evolve, God continues to show us new things, to reveal new understandings about the details of the relationship between us. This happened as the early church worked out our understanding of a Trinitarian, “three-in-one” nature of God; our understanding that Jesus himself was in some mysterious way both fully human and fully divine. This expanding understanding of the faith continued through history. Even more was revealed to us during the Protestant Reformation, and the subsequent “Counter-Reformation” within the Roman Catholic church. And it continues on. The Christian author Phyllis Tickle has written that in Christian history, just about every 500 years, the church goes through some massive upheaval that changes how we Christians understand the basics of our faith. And she points out that the last of these major upheavals was the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s and 1600s – and she points out that not only are we on schedule for the next great upheaval and redefining of the church, but in fact, the changes are already starting to be seen – in the way churches are rethinking their sense of mission, and how they engage with the people they find themselves in the midst of. You can see it in the changing way people are “being” or “doing” church, ranging from having little “house churches” like the first disciples, to congregations that speak to the current and next generation of urban twenty-somethings, meeting in pubs and adopting worship patterns that we traditional church people can hardly recognize. Adopting new, even radical beliefs about the centrality of Christians living out their faith by serving the people around them. Some of these new groups will be just slight variations of what we thought church life and Christian theology was, but others will be completely different from the traditions we grew up in the church with. And that’s a good thing. In order for the church to continue to be “reformed, and always being reformed,” this has to happen. And we will have to adapt, too, or die. Old has to gradually change and be renewed, to speak timeless truth in new voices. In Isaiah, God says, “see, I am doing a new thing, can you not perceive it?” It’s already in the air – can you feel it? God is renewing, reforming the church, often when the church doesn’t want to change. Often when, out of discomfort over the challenge to its habits and traditions, the church calls God’s new thing to be unfaithfulness, or apostasy, or heresy. It’s just a larger version of what God does in our own lives, our own hearts. When God’s Spirit dwells within us, we see the world in ways completely different than the way nonbelievers understand it. We see the world in ways completely different from the way we ourselves saw it before we entered this relationship with Christ. God has done, and is continuing, to do a new thing, in the church as a whole, and in us. Today, we honor Reformation – the reformation that God brought about, and is doing again, in the church, and the reformation, the transformation, the God has performed, and will continue to perform our own hearts. Today, Reformation Sunday, we remember God’s setting old, mistaken, outdated understandings of the church aside – letting those older perceptions lie down and go silent in the desert, like Garth and the prospector. Today, we remember, as our cousins in the United Church of Christ say - “God is Still Speaking,” – comma, not period. And we pray that we’re able to pass the test, that we aren’t slaves to our old perceptions and traditions, either in the church or in our own hearts, and that we allow God to do the new thing in us, keeping our faith current and vibrant in the new and exciting world that we live in – not in the long-gone world of ancient Geneva or Heidelberg of 1550 – or even Frankfort of 1950. God is doing a new thing. Can we perceive it? Are we part of it, will we grow and thrive into the next generations? Or are we just end up the puppets, no longer of any use in God’s kingdom, that will get shucked off and forgotten? Thanks be to God. |
|
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685. "Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous "Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011 I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14 | |
![]() |
|
|
|
| « Previous Topic · The New Coffee Room · Next Topic » |








4:16 PM Jul 10