Sunday closest to November 16
	Year A Proper 28 RCL

 November 13, 2011 Sermon Audio, Rev’d Warren Hicks

Judges 4:1-7

Psalm 123

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Matthew 25:14-30

	Third Sunday of Easter
	Year A RCL

May 8, 2011 Sermon Audio

Acts 2:14a,36-41
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35
Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17

The Gospel According to Bob Dylan: The Old, Old Story for Modern Times copyright 2011 by Michael J. Gilmour, Westminster John Knox

“There are only two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind”-Duke Ellington

“All of these songs added together don’t even come close to my whole vision of life”-Bob Dylan (as quoted on p. 94 of ‘The Gospel According to Bob Dylan”)

As a child of the 60’s and one who engaged the charismatic renewal of the 70’s as a teenager, I was very intrigued when this title came up for review.  I mean I remember hearing the murmurings about Bob Dylan around my house, I even remember my dad and his friends playing Bob Dylan tunes on the guitar around campfires.  That didn’t seem so odd to me except that in looking back I know my dad and Dylan didn’t see eye to eye politically in those highly charged times of the 60’s.

The epigraph above has been attributed to folks other than Ellington, including Richard Strauss.  My point is that my dad, his friend and I recognized good music when we heard it.

In The Gospel According to Bob Dylan, Michael Gilmour, associate professor of New Testament and English at Providence College in Manitoba, Canada, makes a persuasive case for Bob Dylan being a purveyor of the Gospel, that is ‘good news’ even if he doesn’t claim publicly the same sort of Christian fervor that he did during his Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love period of publicly espousing his ‘born-again’ Christianity.

Gilmour takes a long hard look at the body of Dylan’s work, spanning some 50 years and more then 30 albums, films, poetry and the 2004 publication of Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles: vol. 1.

From his birth into a Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota to the resurrection(s) of a career thought to be moribund, if not dead, on more than one occasion, Gilmour weaves a tapestry of Dylan’s experiences and inspirations to show how God and particularly the texts of Scripture crop up in Dylan’s work.  Not only do they appear in the music, but the ‘hold together’ to support and compliment a view of spirituality that is consistent with both Dylan’s Jewish roots and other forays into religious exploration and expression.

Gilmour contends, rightly in my view, the text of both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and the Spirit of God that inspired them is never far away in looking at Dylan’s work.  Just as with Scripture, the richness and nuance of Dylan’s work and the experience that inspired it cannot be fully seen or appreciated when it is taken out of context to prove one’s previously held positions or understandings.

What comes out of a reflective engagement with Dylan, as Gilmour deftly demonstrates, is a sense of narrative and ‘coming of age’ in what Bob Dylan sees as ‘good news’.  At the end of the day, it bears a striking and faithful similarity to the Good News of God in the Canon of Scripture and deserves thoughtful consideration and reflection.  He summarizes this well when he says, “if we find answers in Dylan, it is because we are already asking particular questions,” (p. 42).

As with all good art, including music, Gilmour’s work on Bob Dylan allows enough space for our experience to guide our reception of the offering of the artist. The dialogue we have in question and answer and call and response with Gilmour’s book and Dylan’s music is good reading and listening.

Not the other kind.

The folks at Ignitermedia.com deserve credit for this offering showing a digital take on the Christmas story.

About six weeks ago we held a Movie Night at St. Luke’s featuring the documentary film Young@Heart. The film is the story about a community chorus made up of seniors (age 70+) from Northampton, MA.  It’s a delight and you should put it on your Netflix queue.

In addition to its entertainment value, it seems to me that the story of this chorus has a message to send to the Church today.

About 20 years ago this group quit singing the ‘old standards’ of their day and began taking on selections from more contemporary artists.   They traded in Sinatra and Gilbert & Sullivan for Sonic Youth and Jagger & Richard.  The result was in international explosion of popularity for the group and a rethinking of what it means to know one’s audience as well as one’s message.

As the relationships in the chorus are explored so to is the relationship between the chorus, their music and the audience.  In the midst of it all I found myself thinking that the Church has an opportunity to vary our repertoire as well.  Not to pander to the audience, but to transform our expectations of just what is at the heart of the good news of the Gospel of Jesus.  Just as these folks found and expressed meaning in music they wouldn’t have considered otherwise, so too can our Churches find and express new meaning in proclaiming the Word made Flesh to folks we might not imagine being interested.  It would do us all good.

Do yourself a favor, watch the clip below and view the film.

Today we remember in the Common of Lesser Feasts and Fasts Ephrem of Edessa (died 373).

Ephrem was a deacon of the church who was instrumental in the spread of the Gospel in Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue) in the 4th Century.  Ephrem was a man of letters.  He wrote commentaries, poetry, homilies and hymns.  He was fluent in the language of the people, make no mistake.  He was also fluent in the language of God, namely that of the heart.

Ephrem had a great clarity about the nature and power of the Gospel and was able to communicate effectively to folks from many different segments of his society.

Despite dressing in a ‘cloak of patches sewn together’ his eccentric appearance was coupled with an engaging personality that encountered the people where they were.  His efforts to set the story of God in Christ to music was effective in helping folks ‘sing their way to faith’ as Sam Portaro puts it in Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts.

Perhaps it is simplistic, but it seems to me that Ephrem’s ‘Mission strategy’ for evangelization was to go around, get along, listen and learn about God’s people.  Too often today it seems that the goal of Outreach, Mission and Evanglism is to get people to ‘come around’ to our way of thinking, doing things and behaving.

Ephrem’s life and witness was about taking the world as it comes and trusting in the power of the Gospel and the Grace of God to be about the work of transformation.  It seems to me that we’d do well to imitate that sort of posture.

If we enter whatever mssionary endeavors we undertake from a posture of relative superiority we sell the Gospel and Grace short.  When I’ve been on ‘Mission’ trips and encountered the other with a beginner’s mind I find myself receiving at least as much as I imagined giving.  The power of the Gospel is transformational to the teller as well as the hearer.

In the spirit of Ephrem of Edessa, may we and all of God’s people be willing to listen as much as we speak, to be changed as much as we seek to change others and to be fed as much as we seek to feed others, in spirit and mind as well as our bodies.

Is the final question in this video the one that the Church should be dealing with most?

Thanks to my colleague Rich Simpson for sending the video link and the provocative question??

How does the message of the Gospel compete with all the other demands that a massively transitional world throws at us?  How do we imagine the path to faithful witness in the face of a world that is preparing for questions it can’t even ask yet?

Many of you (if there are many of you) will know that I am more than a bit of a Technology Jones.  I Twitter.  I’m on Facebook.  I blog, I podcast (ok, sort of).  One of the reasons behind this is I love gadgets.  I like my phone.  I’m fond of my MacBook.  Some folks tinker with cars, I’ve always been interested in making connections with folks.

The convergence between my Techno-Jones interests and my desire to connect with folks and to connect folks I connect with has taken an interesting turn.

I want to share with you this blog post from a friend of mine that summarizes the current state of explosive growth on Facebook.

More than a year ago I reponded to two clergy colleagues who asked me to join Facebook.  For a time I resisted and then I looked in on it.  I liked the folks who asked so I gave it a shot.  After spending some time doing little with it, I dutifully updated my profile, started to add some of my background information about Schools and where I’d been and what I’d done.  After a bit I found that there were other folks doing the same thing.  I remember clicking through to my High School Class Group and finding that I was the 3rd of my graduating class to join a group on Facebook of folks admitting to having graduated in 1978 from Fairview High School in Boulder, CO.

One of the other guys I found there I hadn’t seen since we graduated HS some 30 years ago.  We started to exchange messages and found we had common interests.  I had managed to become more ‘friendly’ with him over 3000 miles of the country than we’d been in the same town and HS of 2000 students.  But, the circle was still small.

Once in awhile I’d stumble upon new ‘friends’ or more accurately ‘friends of friends’ or acquaintances of people and I began to be aware of how thin the separation between folks can really be.  I remember wondering if I’d ever amass as many as 50 ‘Friends’ on Facebook.  This week sometime I’ll likely pass the 400 ‘Friends’ threshold.

The connections continued and I’d check through my email address book every so often with tool on Facebook to see if folks I knew otherwise were in the FB world.  I’d come up with 2 or 3 every so often.  Last night I did it again and the tool came up with 67 ‘hits’.  It confirmed something I’d suspected.  Namely, that folks FB is getting older and it’s reach is getting broader.  People I hadn’t thought of in 30 years, much less talked to, are seemingly excited about making connections that they’d forgotten or at least put away.

So, where’s the connection to the Gospel?  it’s this.  Somehow, through people reaching out and carrying a message to other folks, connections are being made.  A community, albeit a virtual one if you will, is forming and the growth is geometric not simply arithmetic.

Simply put, the Good News of God in Christ has always grown and spread in exactly the same way the FB is exploding.  Someone tells someone else, who invites them to look and see and then the decision is made as to whether the relationships made possible give life or not.

FB is not the point…the point is this; we were created for relationship and we’ll suspend our disbelief and skepticism at times to take a chance on connecting with ‘the Other’.  If we can regain the sense of wonder and excitement of talking about Jesus as much as we do about saving the Rainforest with’Green Patch’ or playing the latest iteration of ‘Scrabble’ on FB then just like Facebook with it’s millions of users, the Gospel can go viral again, just as it did in the first centuries after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension.

We can hope and we can invite! Wanna be Jesus’ friend??

I have purposely given myself a few days to process the spectacle that was President Obama’s inauguration.

It seems to me it would be easy to point out what was dissonant for me.  I will say this however.  I was told by my liturgy professor that when doing either a wedding or a funeral where there might be the occasion for someone other than the presider (the Clergy) to speak, do whatever you possibly can to assure that the Gospel, the Good News, gets the last word.

I’d have to say that the President got that one exactly right in his choice of The Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery to do the benediction for the inaugural.

I was reminded of the lesson that the fledgling politician Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn) in the film Milk learned in the aftermath of his first debate.  His political opponent critiques Milk’s performance in the debate by saying, in effect, “Harvey you’ve got a lot to say and it’s true but you talk more about what you’re against than what you’re for.  You spend so much time condemning what is that it’s hard for people to be hopeful in your message.  You’ve always gotta leave ‘em with hope. You’ve always gotta give ‘em hope.”

As Pastor Rick Warren’s prayer for civility and hope gave way to the President’s somber, honest and challenging message of where we find ourselves now, Rev. Lowery closed by appealing to our higher ideals by calling us to live in the hope of the ideals of peace, inclusivity, mutual respect and compassion that he managed to maintain at the core of his being through the darkest days of the struggle for simple dignity for an entire race of people in this country.  His message; hopefully, playfully and forcefully delivered, should give us pause to remember that there is Good News where we choose to see it and, given the chance, our better angels can prevail with God’s help.

Congratulations Mr. President on letting Hope have the last word and the Good News call us all into a more hopeful and gracious future!

Thank you Rev. Lowery for linking past horrors, emerging opportunity and present hope together for a new generation of God’s people (that would be all of us) to take aim at.

Peter Gomes really ‘gets’ the whole Colbert premise. I particularly like the line that almost gets lost when Colbert talks about his neighbor. “We all have your neighbor”Amidst all the thrust and parry of their ‘fencing’ are great calls to the nature of what it means to follow the ‘Scandalous Gospel of Jesus”.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1588070&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D184931]