The Hurricane After the Sermon

The sermon last week was entitled "God's Presence Demands a Reponse", a fitting response to the power of prayer.  Then came Sandy.  The day after the storm, I drove into Perth Amboy to check the church.  And there, in the midst of the debris being cleaned off the streets, boats from the marina piled up onto Front St., power out in 85% of the city, 66% of the state, those words stood out from the church sign.

God's Presence Demands a Reponse.

A day without power makes one feel small, two days and it feels like something off the television.  There is a darkness without any lights out that is so different from the electric invasion of the night that we are used to.  Shades of dark blue and gray and black are the pallet, not the shadows of streetlamps giving glimpses of the day time in the pools of light they throw out.

For me, it was like God's presence moved into the technology that we so take for granted and, just for a moment or two, the tech was shoved aside for something more primal. 

We are a week from the election and, as always, it is so polarized, so ugly, so overwhelmingly negative these last few weeks...then a storm of epic proportions comes in and we, the people, left, right, donkey, elephant, we close ranks to care for one another.

For me, it was like God stepping down from on high and reminding us that elections are good, elections are necessary, elections are the foundation of the best form of government in history, but let us not forget who is really in charge, who can really pull a country together.

People died in the storm, that tragedy cannot be forgotten.  And to credit God with the storm is to set responsibility for those who died on Him as well.  But how about some perspective?  How many shootings?  How many homicides?  How many other ways that humans have to kill humans far outweigh this event? 

It is not my intention to lessen the impact of those who died in the storm, but neither is it my intention to lessen the deaths of any human beings.

All this from a sermon title.  Well, a sermon title is supposed to derive from a sermon.  A sermon is supposed to derive from the interpretation of God's Word.  This time, the Word was not spoken from the pages of Scripture but from the world created by a Word of command.

Scripture and the death of an officer in the Line of Duty

There has been a campaign going on to achieve the goal of keeping the number of officers killed in the line of duty under one hundred in a year.  We made it to October.  Arthur Lopez, a police officer on Long Island, was killed in a traffic stop on Tuesday, the 100th officer to die in the line this year according to an online law enforcement website.

**Need to correct something.  In the emotion of reading, I made a mistake.  The 100th officer to die in the line of duty occurred two days after Officer Lopez was shot.  It was an officer killed in a car crash in Prince George's County.  I apologize and can only say that I wasn't reading as clearly as I should have.**

I don't know what to say about that.  I am a chaplain for the police department of the city where my church is located.  I know that the loss of their first officer in the line of duty was part of the background that has led to this part of my ministry.  And I do not know how devastating it would be if this were one of ours.

What tends to push me to blog is when things coincide in ways that I cannot let stand still.

The death of Officer Lopez, finding out he was the one hundredth officer to fall, came right on the heels of my sermon prep for Sunday.

My text is 1 Samuel 2.  Plot synopsis: Elkanah has two wives, Penninah and Hannah.  Penninah bore him children, Hannah not.  He loved Hannah more, like she was a trophy wife.  She prayed and was given the gift of a child, called Samuel, whom she gave to the Lord.  The text for Sunday is her prayer of thanksgiving to God.  And I am sitting here trying to figure out how her prayer, so confident and so explicit of the powers of God, applies to our lives today.

Then, dodging the work and going to my emails, I came across the story on Officer Lopez.  Going back to the text, 1 Samuel 2:6, "the Lord kills and brings to life..."  Hannah prays this triumphantly to the power of God.  Now I am looking at the obit of a 29 year old cop and considering the same words and where God is in that officer's death.

Right now, it is just a raw struggle to pray about.  I will put down more when the Lord gives me something more.

Women and Men

Sometimes interesting things coincide.  I am reading "The Pastor", the memoir of Eugene Petersen.  His earliest recollection of ministry comes from his mom, who was a traveling preacher among the mining camps in the Rockies where they grew up.  She stopped when some man quoted Paul about women not teaching or having authority over men.  Oi.

Cut to Halloween 2012.  I am in a Costume Warehouse looking to complete the costuming of the family for the holiday.  Being late October in 2012, Christmas stuff is also on display (in a Costume Warehouse a week before Halloween...but that's another post).  There are the red and white furry costumes for a grand old Christmas time.

For the men, it is the classic St. Nick costume, red hat to trousers, white trim at the ankles and wrists, heck, white trim on the faces as well.  You see hands, eyes, a bit of the cheeks, rest guarenteed to be covered against the cold of the Yuletide sleighride.

And then there were the costumes for the ladies...  There is the classic image of Mrs. Claus, red plaid floor length dress, a jolly companion to Mr. Claus.  But in the Costume Warehouse, they were the Christmas bimbettes, not dressed for the cold but...what...the warm fire back home?  Same color scheme as Father Christmas, but shrunk in the dryer...then shrunk again...and maybe a third time as well.

It is a repeat of the two classic gender role heroes in the D.C. comicbook universe, Superman and Wonder Woman.  Supe had the long johns that covered neck to toes, Wonder Woman equipped with armored Victoria Secret.

As followers of Jesus, we should really have something to say about that, objectifying women, treating them as second class people though first class sex objects.  Maybe Paul's words about how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free, in other words, in Christ, there is the systematic dismantling of hierarchy based on race, gender or economy.

But way too many of us Jesus freaks like Paul's other stuff better, the sideline stuff, the specific stuff, the contextual stuff, women stay in the second class, no authority, no teaching men.  I used that argument myself.  But I was an obnoxious middle school kid in a Christian school with a pastor's wife as my homeroom teacher.

We need to speak up.  And we need to speak up strong!