Sermons
Read Reverend Art Domingue's Sermons below.
Relics of a Resurrection III - Nails
03/07/10
RELICS OF A RESURRECTION III – NAILS
Psalm 22: 16-20; Luke 24: 13-32; John 20:24-29
Squaw Valley Chapel, United Church of Christ
Olympic Valley, CA
March 7, 2010
Art Domingue, Minister
Not one of the gospel stories about Jesus’ crucifixion specifically mentions the word nail. It isn’t until John’s story about Thomas doubting that the word is mentioned, and then it’s not the nails themselves but the holes. But we know from archeological finds that nails were available in the first Century. A seven inch “square” nail has been unearthed in Scotland and scholars have determined that it was made by the Romans about 2000 years ago.
The Bible seldom gives all the details of a story. They don’t mention the saddle or piece of wood that most likely was a part of every cross the Romans used. It jutted out at right angle from the cross and the condemned prisoner sat on it so that his whole weight was not pulling on whatever held him to the upright. Death came from exposure, or shock (we’re told that the soldiers broke the legs of the thieves that hung on either side of Jesus) or from the loss of blood if, indeed, the hands and feet were pierced.
Since the crucifixion, nails have been used employed as a positive or a negative symbol by the Christian Church.
On the web you can a resource called “The Service of the Nails.” It is a service to be used on Good Friday; a service that highlights seven human failings, each one a nail in Jesus’ coffin. The nail of pride, the nail of betrayal, nails of envy, indecision, cruelty, hatred. It’s a grim list.
But also on the web you can read about the Cross of Nails made at Coventry Cathedral in England.
Coventry Cathedral was almost completely destroyed by German bombs in a 1940 blitz. Only the steeple and a few walls survived. The sanctuary was reduced to rubble. After the blitz, the cathedral’s stonemason, Jock Forbes, saw two charred beams that were lying on the chancel floor in the shape of the cross. He tied the beams together and stood them up where the altar had been. Perhaps that’s what gave the idea to the cathedral provost. Richard Howard pulled nails from the roof truss that had also fallen and fashioning them into the shape of a cross. When the new cathedral was built he placed this cross on the altar. At the end of the war there was, in Coventry as everywhere else in Great Britain, a deep hatred of everything German. Soon however the leaders and members of Coventry Cathedral began to realize that this hatred was poisoning the possibilities of a positive future. It left everyone less loving, less energetic, less human. So they made a second cross from the nails of their cathedral ruin and delivered it to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. It too had been destroyed by bombs, allied bombs. It too had rebuilt a new facility alongside the ruins of the old. Both churches were visible reminders of the destruction that comes with war.
And Coventry Cathedral founded a Cross of Nails Center dedicated to fostering forgiveness. Today there are more than 160 Cross of Nails Centers around the world advocating the use of silence, prayer and meditation in restoring human relationships.
In this nails have become a positive symbol, one that fits in with my memory of Jesus saying from the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
And there is more. Nails have become a symbol of authentication.
As I have said the first mention of nails in the Christian scriptures is of the holes they left in Jesus’ hands and feet and Thomas’ choice to make them a condition of his belief. “I will not believe that Christ has risen until I am able to touch the nail holes in his hands.” And when Jesus came to him, as Jesus comes to all who teeter on the brink of belief, he insisted that Thomas follow through and touch his hands. Many believe that when Jesus broke bread at Emmaus it was glimpses of the wounds in his hands that let the disciples recognize him. John wrote of scales falling from their eyes, “That’s why our hearts burned within us when he spoke to us on the way here!” Long before DNA or finger prints, wounds became one of the ways that Christians identified the real thing. Saints such as Francis of Assisi developed their own wounds “stigmata” they called them, wounds in their own hands and feet, as signs of their authenticity as disciples of the wounded one.
Nails have become positive pointers and they are pointers beyond pain.
And there is more. Nails and the holes they leave began to become pointers toward what is to come. By now they have become relics of a resurrection for Jesus has shown that pain passes and yet life remains.
Some say that if a life is without pain there can be no solid relationship with God. I reject that just as I reject the example of the flagellants who whipped themselves along the roads of Medieval Europe and the monks and nuns who wove thorns into their undergarments so that no moment would be without its pain. Pain is not the normative condition of the life God intends. God’s people are to work for the alleviation of pain, not its increase. Look beyond.
Some say pain has its virtues. I usually say pain stinks. But I have to admit that pain can be useful as a warning; a warning to remove our hand from the fire or make an appointment with a doctor. But in these instances, pain is looking beyond itself.
Yesterday I participated in a memorial service for Jimmy Huega, who grew up on the slopes of Squaw Valley. Jimmy was one of the first two male America skiers to win an Olympic medal. In 1964 at Innsbruck, Billy Kidd won a silver medal in the men’s slalom and Jimmy Huega a bronze. 5 years later Jimmy learned that he had Multiple Sclerosis. His dreams of continuing athletic triumph were shattered. I image the pain of that disappointment was intense. Jimmy went beyond that pain to a new future. For the next 40 years he pushed his body to the limit, leading doctors to see that MS was not as confining as they had imagined. Jimmy helped thousands of people living with MS realize what they could still do, physically and emotionally. The pain was real but Jimmy looked beyond.
Nails can be the symbol of breakthroughs yet to come; of new visions born of bad experiences. Nails are relics of the resurrection, what was left behind when Jesus passed through it, on his way to a new life in God:
Henrik Ibsen, in one of his plays, has a character complain, “I wish I had never been made.” And another comments, “You’re not made yet, your maker’s still at work.”
Pain passes becomes a relic; along with heartbreak, fear and sickness. In a world doomed to fragility, nails offer the testimony that one day death shall pass too.
Relics of a Resurrection - The Holy Sponge
02/28/10
RELICS OF A RESURRECTION II – THE HOLY SPONGE
Psalm 69:16-21; John 19: 28-30
Squaw Valley Chapel, United Church of Christ
Olympic Valley, CA
February 28, 2010 – The Second Sunday of Lent
Art Domingue. Minister
One of the things I try to remember when reading the Bible is that it is the relic of an oral tradition; what was set down when people of faith began to fear the precious stories might be forgotten. Before, during and after Jesus’ lifetime the news about God, was shared mouth to ear and was written down only in times of extreme danger from plague, invasion, or imminent death. A similar situation exists today in my family. For years I have been telling my children that the marble top table in the entry way of our home in San Jose used to belong to their great-great aunt Edna – the one who wrote the family history – and that her book is in the bookshelf in the master bedroom. I’ve shared where the wills are stored and what hymns I want to have sung at my funeral. I’ve seen their eyes glass over. They don’t want to think about these things. And now I feel the need to write it down. There is a great difference between what is written and what is said. The written word is often the bare minimum, it is less lively than that which was conveyed through the spoken word…. its only advantage is that what is written seems to last longer. As my son, the lawyer says: “if it isn’t in writing it doesn’t exist.
A second thing I try to remember when reading the Bible is that when the stories of faith were still a part of the oral tradition and had been in circulation for any number of years, the story tellers didn’t have to tell it all, just a phrase would do. Perhaps, in your family there is an old chestnut, a funny story told so often that it is polished to a gleam and laughter can be induced by simply saying “Dad’s trip to the woodpile.” Everyone knows the detail. When some of these stories were written down in the Bible they were left in shortened form, without the details, which makes it hard for us to know what was going on. For example, when Jesus was on the cross he was heard to say, “My, God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” it might seem, to those of us reading the written word 2,000 years later, that is was a cry of utter despair. It wasn’t. The disciples knew that Jesus was singing what had been set down as the 22’nd Psalm. The song begins with the words “My God, my God why has thou forsaken Me.” but goes on to affirm absolute trust in God:
In you our ancestors trusted, and you delivered them.
To you, they cried, and were saved.
In you they trusted, and were not put to shame.
It’s little wonder that sometimes we have trouble understanding the full meaning of what’s in the Bible. The authors had, for generations been telling stories at their Passover meals, singing songs in worship, citing the lives of the patriarchs in their discussions about faith and when they came to write it down they were less interested in the facts of any one moment than they were in how the stories were connected, the connections offering truth about the mind of God
Reading the story of Jesus being offered a sponge soaked in vinegar at the end of a stick of hyssop, I am aware of how much of that story remained in the mind of the story teller; was not written down. On the surface it may seem to be a story of uncomplicated compassion, but I believe it is very complex. Any story that involves a sponge, vinegar and hyssop will set off memories in those steeped in the oral tradition and they will begin to make connections that prove profound.
Vinegar appears twice in the stories of Jesus’ last day of life as told by Matthew and Mark. Just before Jesus is nailed to the cross he is offered vinegar that had been laced with a pain killer (variously described as myrrh or gall). It was a compassionate gesture but once Jesus realized the vinegar was spiked he refused to drink any more if it, presumably wanting to remain fully aware. (Matthew 27:34; Mark 15:23). Those who heard this story would remember words Isaiah had spoken about God’s suffering servant: “He endured suffering and pain, the pain that should have been ours, the pain we should have bourne. “ (Isaiah 53: 3,4 TEV).
Mark and John record that in the last moments of Jesus life the people gathered at the foot of the cross thought they heard him cry, “I thirst!” and someone rushed to soak a sponge in sour wine and lift it to him on a stick of hyssop. (Mark 15:36; John 19:28-30).
And, finally, Luke offers a third version. Yes, vinegar was lifted to Jesus’ lips, but by the Roman soldiers and as a way of mocking him: “If you are King of the Jews, come down, save yourself.” (Luke 23: 36, 37)
That these stories differed from one another bothered no one in the oral tradition. It was not the truth of any one story that mattered the most but the aggregate. That hyssop does not produce branches long enough to reach someone on a cross was of no matter. The story tellers and their listeners were busy tracing hyssop through all the other stories they had heard. For such as these them there was no tyranny of the immediate moment, no slavish adherence to fact. They believed that seldom was there anything new under God’s son and when you begin to make connections between what happens now with what happened then you begin to understand the mind of God.
Especially helpful in this process of connecting was the word “hyssop.”
Hyssop played a role in the Passover story, the story told every spring at the festival family table (cf. Exodus 12: 21-23):
How Moses called the elders of Israel together; told them to have each family
select a lamb and slaughter it. Each household was to take a branch of hyssop,
dip it in the blood of the lamb and daub it on the lintel and door posts of their
home. When the destroyer passed by their house intent on striking down all
first born children it will see the blood on the lintel and the door posts and pass
over the house and go on to the houses of the Egyptians.
How poignant for them, the image of Roman soldiers lifting hyssop toward Jesus’ lips and
chanting: “Who’s going to save you now?”
In Leviticus, the laws regarding lepers mention hyssop. If a leper wishes to be cleansed of his sin (yes, leprosy was considered to be the result of sin. Why did one person get leprosy and not another? It was because the leper had somehow offended God!) A leper wishing to be cleansed of his sin was to have someone sacrifice a bird for him in the temple. And this same someone was to dip a sprig of hyssop in the blood of the bird and shake it over the head of the leper. The leper is to bathe himself and wait 7 days. (14:1-9).
And don’t you know those who knew this story began to make connections: Jesus was treated as if he were a leper – ostracized, scorned…. but It took him only 3 days to be restored.
In a song sung in the temple and later written down as the 51’st Psalm, hyssop is connected to inner cleansing:
Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean,
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. – vs.7.
When hyssop has a role in the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, those who knew all of God’s stories made the connection and then the assumption that something happened of the cross which saved and cleansed Jesus and his followers.
And the Christian Church has pounced upon these connections:
Fanny Crosby, the blind gospel hymn writer, whose hymn, Blessed Assurance, we sang this morning often included in her lyrics the words “washed in the blood.” This image was a staple for Evangelicals and often asked as a question: “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb.” It was Passover all over again. The sacrificial lamb was Jesus. His blood was shed on the cross. And because of that sacrifice we shall be spared – just as the Israelites were spared - when the angel of death comes by.
It was Leviticus redux. The blood of sacrifice shall cleanse us from our sins, “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.”
The message of sponge, vinegar, hyssop at the crucifixion is that Jesus death is health for us all. And I believe it – but not in the way that Fanny Crosby did….or the Evangelicals did.
I refuse to believe that God needs a death – the sacrifice of any animal or person – in order to love those whom God hath made. I do believe it sometimes takes a death to crack apart rotten systems and let a little humanity in – a humanity that recognizes the worth of every life.
I will not affirm that God rejects the unbelieving when they die. I do believe that sometimes it takes one approaching death with dignity and great courage…, one who trusts in God’s eternal goodness… to open our eyes to the possibilities of faith.
I shall never applaud martyrdom for I am suspicious of suicide in any form, but how often will we let religious institutions and leaders silence the more adventuresome believers, before we realize that faith is always an adventure that cannot not/must not be regulated by institutional calls for conformity?
Now and again to some lone soul or other
God speaks, and there is Hanging to be done – from poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Hyssop, sponge and vinegar… these three provide the clues that many stories are connected to the story of Jesus’ death upon the cross. And the story they tell is as much or more about connections to eternal truth as it is the retelling of fact.
Relics of a Resurrection: Thirty Pieces of Silver
02/21/10
RELICS OF A RESURECTION: Thirty Pieces of Silver
Exodus 21:32; Zechariah 11: 4-14; Matthew 26: 14-16; 27: 3-8
Squaw Valley Chapel, United Church of Christ
Olympic Valley, CA
February 21, 2010
The First Sunday of Lent
Art Domingue, Minister
Years ago, when our hair was longer and some of our clothing was tie-dyed, Joanne and I owned a red Volkswagen bus. We took out the middle seat and carpeted the floor and it became a travelling rumpus room for our children. Seat belts were not yet the law. It was a sweet vehicle that fit the needs of our family. But, in time, it began to lose its charm. In winter months the interior temperature seldom rose above frigid. The bus climbed the New Hampshire hills at a pace just a little bit slower than a snail
Joanne and I stopped at a car dealership to ask the question “How much will you give us for this car?” What they offered on a trade in would dictate what we might be able to afford in a newer car. I don’t know what we expected but it was a bewildering conversation.
It was clear to the salesman that this was a car we wanted to be rid of and he made it clear to us that this was a car for which he had no room for on his lot. On this note, negotiations began.
The salesman asked if he could drive our bus around the block. We agreed but before he left…in fact, as soon as he had started the engine, he opened the door again and asked if “that” had been giving us much trouble? We had not a clue what “that’ was but assured him it had not troubled us in the least. He lurched off (as if the clutch was slipping) and returned in about ten minutes with a shopping list of potential problems that indicated to us we ought to pay him for taking such a relic off of our hands. The salesman said he’d have to look at a book he kept in his office but before that he needed to know “How much did we expect to get?
Joanne and I left that dealership confirmed in our ownership of a red Volkswagen bus. We went home and we both took a bath. Some sort of sleaze had settled on us.
I mention this this morning because in Margie’s reading from the Christian Scriptures we heard the same question: “How much will you give?” It was Judas’ question. He asked the chief priests of the Temple, “How much will you give me if I give Jesus to you?” And in that transaction there was a good deal of sleaze.
The chief priests also had a book in their office; a book to consult before setting a price. Theirs was the book of Exodus (21:32) – in which it is written if your ox gores another man’s slave you must pay that man 30 shekels of silver. Thus the price of a life is set. And the High Priests thought 30 pieces of silver sounded just right in exchange for Jesus’ life.
There a few things I would like to say about this exchange this morning.
First it that it was a deal born of contempt.
Setting Jesus’ worth at the level of a slave displayed the chief priests’ arrogant dismissal of all the claims that being made about Jesus, it was their way of trashing the disciples’ insistence that here was a man of God. And, I believe, it showed how little they knew of God’s love for everyone.
In 1675, the Rev. Peter Thatcher, minister in Milton, Massachusetts Bay Colony, bought an Indian girl on the deferred payment plan. He paid 5 pounds down and five pounds at the end of the first year. We know about this because the Rev. Thatcher wrote the terms in his diary. He also wrote “[The girl dropped our baby] whereupon I took a good walnut stick and beat [her] until she promised to do so no more.” When someone treats another human being as if he/she was property to be disposed of at the owner’s whim, everyone – owner and slave is degraded. Life is always worth more than that.
In these days slavery has been outlawed but paying a price to use another person as you wish is still with us. The more we learn about some of those who flooded into Haiti to find themselves an orphan, the uglier the reality appears. Selling babies on the black market; giving up children to sex traffickers; establishing the price to be spent on a date above which date rape becomes justifiable…all these are very much with us, they degrade life and show contempt for that which God has made.
The 30 pieces of silver were a symbol of contempt
In Jewish legend there is a story that when God wanted to make the first human being God gathered dust from every corner of the world; black dust from the deepest mines, red dust from the desert, yellow dust from a river bed, white dust from the ocean shore. All these God mixed together so that the first creature was a composite of everything else that God had made. To set a price on another human being is to set a price on our self:
Still, as of old, we by ourselves are priced.
For thirty pieces of silver Judas sold himself, not Christ
- H. H. Cholmondeley
When the high priests set the price for Jesus at 30 pieces of silver… when Judas accepted at that price, both wallowed in gross contempt of God’s love of life.
And when the chief priests set the price at 30 pieces of silver they were signaling their opinion that Jesus’ ministry had been a failure.
This too was derived from a book, this time the book of Zechariah. There we find the curious story of a prophet hired to be a shepherd; to lead God’s people to still waters, to green pastures, to places where they could feed without fear, but the sheep ignored him. They preferred those things that usually lead to slaughter. Frustrated, the prophet quit. He believed that he was a failure. He settled with his employer for 30 pieces of silver.
The chief priests were quite willing to bargain for Jesus at the failure rate.
Perhaps Judas thought Jesus a failure, as well. There are old stories about Judas being a Zealot, a patriot who hated seeing his country under Roman rule. He hoped Jesus would lead a revolt! It has even been suggested that he agreed to betray Jesus in the belief that that might jump start a revolution. The high priests believed Jesus to have failed as a religious leader, Judas saw him a failure as a patriot. Thirty pieces of silver was the pay for failure upon which both could agree.
And a final thing that strikes me as unusual about the 30 pieces of silver is that the chief priests offered money at all. Historically religious leaders have preferred to keep money for themselves or for their institution. What they have offered as inducement have been promises of a care-free hereafter, of relatives released from purgatory, of loose security checks by Peter at the pearly gates.
That money came to be involved, might, again, be attributable to Judas. John Bunyan once described Judas as a man who was “religious for the bag.” We know Judas was the treasurer for Jesus and his disciples. The suggestion has been made that he followed Jesus because it was personally profitable, that he was a precursor of the Christian Yellow Pages.
Certainly religion was profitable for the chief priests. They got kick backs from those who sold animals in the Temple courtyard – animals that had to be pre-judged by the priests as being suitable for sacrifice. What’s more, the priests on duty the day the animals were sacrificed got most of the meat to take home to their table. The chief priests got kick backs from the money changers – Caesar’s coins were not acceptable as a temple offering, Temple coins were not available in the market. It was a tidy business, this making change.
Negotiating over a bag containing 30 pieces of silver Judas and the High Priests recognized each other. They were all religious for the bag.
Which is why they found Jesus so offensive.
Jesus had no problem being treated as a slave so long as that meant people would begin to see each other as God’s children, precious, beloved.
Jesus didn’t mind being called a failure because he knew his was not a failure and, someday, would triumph even over death.
Jesus despised greed, especially when attached to religion. He overturned the tables of the money changers, drove out the sellers of sacrificial animals. He frequently asked the question: “What does it profit to gain the whole world, and lose your soul?”
These things are now relics - 30 pieces of silver – relics of a resurrection, what is left over after Jesus has demonstrated that greed and the thirst for power cease to be important when we love God and our neighbor as our self.
