Lent 1: Genesis 2:15-3:7
Prayer after reading of the garden’s Keeper
Maker:
for gardens and walls;
for Eden and our homes to the east;
for your talk with us and ours with you;
The water that overwhelmed Indonesia, Sri Lanka, parts of India and Thailand, and killed thousands of people caught the attention of the world. The immensity of the tragedy was difficult to comprehend. The power and strength and force of the water were overwhelming.
What have people been saying about God and the Indian Ocean tsunami? I have seen quite a few “Why did you let this happen, God?” articles, from both inside and outside the church. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such pieces: such accusatory questions have precedent, even in the Scriptures. To ask this question of God in a time like this is not an impiety, but an understandable longing to see more clearly in the often-murky pool that is human existence.
We may look at the contributions of Shirley Guthrie to the Presbyterian Church, to the church catholic, to his students and colleagues, and to his family and friends from many angles. In the appreciative articles honoring him and his work, the Outlook, with the advice of his colleagues at Columbia Seminary, has represented those angles of approach to this profound thinker and teacher of great simplicity, who by God's grace (he would most certainly say) had a beneficent and transforming effect upon multitudes. Wherever his students preach and teach, Shirley's influence is spread to people in the pews, who themselves begin their own theological reflection -- even if they are shy to call it that.
In the fall of 1963, I entered Columbia Theological Seminary right after finishing Presbyterian College. Professor Felix Gear’s favorite phrase for us new students, “theological tadpoles,” was a compliment in my case. Shirley Guthrie took me under his wing as he did for the other 100 new “tadpoles” who wanted to learn what it means to be a Reformed theologian.
Professor Edward Dowey occasionally remarked that Karl Barth’s theology “is a secret known only to God and a few seminary professors.” Dowey attributed the comment to Leonard Trinterud, who, along with Dowey, served on the committee that wrote The Confession of 1967, and in part the comment may reflect the resistance they both encountered in the church to the Barthian perspective in the confession.
Shirley Guthrie was, in my opinion, one of the great theologians produced by American Presbyterianism. He did not do the things that theologians often do to gain national and international fame. He did not, by saying things that had never been said before, found a “new school of theology” with its own distinctive label.
“He taught us how to live and how to die.”
Charles Cousar
In early summer 2004, it became apparent to family and friends that Shirley Guthrie was not feeling well. He was having some digestive problems and had limited his eating to soup and light food in the hope that this would be of help.
Those of us who entered seminary in the latter years of Shirley Guthrie’s career are grateful that this teacher never relinquished his passion for sharing his gift with the church. Already a professor emeritus by the time I entered Columbia Theological Seminary, Shirley gave little evidence that he had laid aside his calling to instruct. Indeed, his beloved wife Vivian knew that, in many ways, the seminary classroom was his first home.
Harrowing images assail us; newspaper reports tell of mega death, miraculous rescue, fragile hope. The peoples of earth offer assistance to nations devastated by earthquake and wave. No one asks how such a thing could happen in a world created by God.
We live with the uneasy assurance of science that unstable tectonic plates produced an earthquake eight times more powerful than the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Yet what do we say about the Creator of the rolling spheres, and of the roiling deadly seas.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains tremble with its tumult. (Psalm 46:2 -- 3)
It is fitting for The Presbyterian Outlook to salute the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by remembering what tireless advocates Dr. E. T. Thompson and Rev. Aubrey Brown were for racial integration and justice. (Thompson was the Outlook's first editor and professor of church history at Union Seminary in Virginia; Brown was editor from the 1940's to the 1970's.) This paper stood tall on these matters when such beliefs were dangerous to espouse.
When Thompson was tried for heresy in Mecklenburg (now Charlotte) Presbytery, everyone understood that the sub-texts of that trial, ostensibly about the faithful interpretation of Scripture, were his positions on integration and ethics. Because of the malign interweaving of biblical inerrancy with segregation in the South, people who agreed with Thompson and Brown were labeled communists by fundamentalist Presbyterians.
The 50th anniversary celebration of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was a necessary spotlight on that ruling’s profound contribution to goodness in this nation. With the commemoration over, that spotlight becomes a searchlight, seeking us out in the darkness where in an audience we sit, comfortably, when it is our turn to take the stage.
"What time is it?" is one of the most frequently asked questions, and no one wearing a watch has difficulty answering it. But change the wording slightly and mystery abounds. "What is time?" has been pondered through the ages and we think about it especially at the coming of a new year. Time is elusive--you can't smell, taste, hear, or see it even though you may have a lot of it on your hands!
Two quotes I saved from a piece in the New York Times called "The New Designer Despair," take issue with a destructive tolerance that leaves souls shriveled and minds tired. The subject was education in moral judgment. The writer quotes the principal of his daughter's school: "We encourage our children by telling them that there are no bad ideas." He also references Modern Times by the English, Roman Catholic historian, Paul Johnson: "the church is the last place in the world where we make the distinction between good and bad ideas."
If the biggest, baddest, and best story of 2004 is religion, religion in politics and public life, then the designer despair generated by too much tolerance is gone. There are scores of religious people who tell us what is good or bad. The presidential election was shamelessly religious. Jerry Falwell ran a partisan voter registration campaign in countless congregations, and Democrats cast their usual nets into African-American churches.
Scripture Readings: Deuteronomy 8:1-3, 6-10, 17-20; Psalm 65:9-14; James 1:12-18, 21-27; Matthew 6:25-33
”You crown the year with goodness, O God, and your paths overflow with plenty.” Amen.
How long do you suppose it has been since we have talked about – or even allowed ourselves to feel – a sufficiency of anything?
The morning routine at our house calls for reading the letters to the editor of the New York Times. Since the election, that’s become something of a trial. More often than not, the letters have to do with the role of “religion” in politics. Many letter-writers see the nation divided between the devout, who are concerned for “moral values,” and the secular, who are presumably interested in issues that have nothing to do with “morality,” such as war and peace, and the obligations of the rich toward the poor.
As the first faint light of Christmas cast its imperceptible glow around the celebration of Thanksgiving, I preached and celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the renovated chapel at an ecumenical Christian community, Richmond Hill.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Is peace possible?
I have been increasingly troubled by our continued reliance on the “just war” theory as a path toward credible peacemaking. In the last three years, my chagrin has grown to an almost visceral discomfort with the rhetoric and the reality of the “war on terrorism.”
Union Seminary had let out for the 1957 Christmas holiday, and I had come home, looking forward to being with my parents, and to sharing the good news that I had "met someone" with whom I might get serious. As I looked about the neat little house my parents had just built in the York County, S.C. countryside, I noticed that there was a new woman keeping watch over the modest Christmas display.
The fallout from Presbyterian actions involving the Middle East continues to rain down.
On Nov. 11, the denomination announced that it no longer employs two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) national staff members who traveled to the Middle East last month and were involved in a controversial meeting with Hezbollah, a group that the U.S. State Department lists as a terrorist organization.
Gone are Kathy Lueckert, who as deputy director of the General Assembly Council was considered part of the top level of the denomination's leadership, and Peter Sulyok, coordinator for the past dozen years of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
In announcing the departures, John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, did not make it clear if Lueckert and Sulyok resigned or were fired -- or say precisely why they no longer are PC(USA) employees, citing in a written statement their right to confidentiality.
But the Hezbollah visit, made during a two-week fact-finding tour by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy -- a visit that also included high-level meetings with political, human rights and religious leaders around the Middle East -- had provoked strong and immediate criticism both from Jewish leaders already angry with the PC(USA), and by some from within the Presbyterian church.
Presbyterian-Jewish relations have been tense since the General Assembly's decision, last summer, to begin a process of phased, selective divestment in some companies doing business in Israel, in protest over Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people.
Editorial note: Retired Presbyterian pastor Ralph Bucy in the December 20/27 2004 issue of the OUTLOOK in his opinion piece "Beyond Reinhold Niebuhr" writes about Christian Realism and current events. It responds to an OUTLOOK editorial of November 1 entitled "Where is Reinhold Niebuhr?" by O. Benjamin Sparks. Since this editorial appeared while the OUTLOOK web site was inactive, it and Bucy's response appear below.
on Isaiah 9:2b-7 and cities of no refuge:
Tehran, Baghdad, New York, Sarajevo, Beirut, Hanoi, Selma, Nagasaki…
The warriors’ tramping boots their martial cadence count
dawn to day to dusk to dark by sighs.
Editor’s Note: This presentation was made at the recent Dialogue on Anti-Semitism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. The speaker, Sari Ateek, was presenting the night’s dialogue participants, Rabbi Dr. Elliott Dorff and Fuller President, Dr. Richard Mouw.
Before I introduce our two speakers for the evening, I’d like to share with you a few personal remarks. When I was first asked to do the introductions for this dialogue, I have to admit that I found myself initially hesitant for at least a couple of reasons.
In Meredith Wilson’s enchanting musical, “The Music Man”, Prof. Harold Hill comes to River City and tricks the whole town into buying his mail order musical instruments for a new children’s band. The parents are dubious, but the kids are excited. On the day of the promised delivery, they wonder in song if there is anything coming “for me”.
With this issue The Presbyterian Outlook introduces the columns of Ron Ferguson, who was a journalist before attending divinity school and becoming a Presbyterian minister. He studied at St. Andrews, Edinburgh, and Duke Universities. Ron began as a pastor in a huge public housing area in Glasgow, Scotland, called Easterhouse (a place more like Gethsemane and Calvary than Easter).
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