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10:30 am Worship

Thursday, June 5, 2025

Psalm 105: 1

¹ Give thanks to the Lord and call upon his Name;
make known his deeds among the peoples.

I re-opened the pages of one of my long-ago textbooks this week and began rereading powerful essays by some of the leading Christian thinkers of the 20^th Century. Wise men and women all, they tried as best they were able to explain God, church, religion, humanity and its societies. Most ordinary Christians, at least the ones I know, would run in terror from their complicated theories and descriptions of faith, yet I have found God in their writings.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a Detroit pastor writing near the end of the second world war, tried to understand how faithful humans might have to do some of the things which were done in that awful war. His political theories, based in deep faith and rising out of years of human horror, suggested it might be right to oppose evil and sin violently. A German Lutheran, Rudolf Bultmann, argued for the necessity of stripping away purely mythological elements in the Christian writings in order to get to what he called the kerygma (preaching/Word of God). Paul Tillich, who fled Germany to get away from the Nazis, spoke of our need to clearly understand the greatest command. Pay attention, he said, to the ultimate concern, not the finite concerns of the world.

The list goes on and on, and as the century progressed, theological writings began to focus carefully on the gospel lived out in daily life. Black theologians, James Cone and Martin Luther King, began to speak of the great stories of liberation found in the Bible, beginning to end. Like Moses himself, they stood against Pharaoh. Like Isaiah, they searched for the level path that would help oppressed people to cast off their chains. A white theologian, Alfred North Whitehead, saw how Caesar had impregnated early Christianity with many of the attributes of earthly kingdoms. The church created a hierarchy and demanded grandeur. He saw a different path, a Galilean origin which emphasized the tender elements of life, which worked in humility and obscurity to create the kingdom in this world. Latin American pastors working among the poorest people in the world began to write about the necessity of looking at our faith through the eyes of the poor. Feminists began to examine the Bible through feminine eyes and discovered wondrous new understandings of the biblical story.

The theologians used big words. They forced me to read my theological texts with the lesson for the day in one hand and an unabridged dictionary in the other. Few of the ordinary men and women sitting in the pews in my churches would have been willing to endure the slog.

It’s unfortunate.

For the wise men spoke of God in the world in which those men and women live and where they daily face the necessity to make decisions which will shape their lives and the societies in which they live. They were, indeed, concerned with that which is ultimate, rather than that which is finite and temporal.

When I read Karl Barth, one of the greatest of the wise men, I found myself nodding and plodding, struggling. Then I discovered the man in a small, slim volume of sermons which he had preached in a Swiss prison. There, he confessed in a moment of utter candor before a room filled with thieves, rapists, and murderers that he considered himself the greatest sinner in the room. Absolute humility and Christ-like love encapsulated in a single moment. He spoke to the prisoners in simple, clear ways about the wonders of Christ’s grace.

This is the task facing every Christian. We desperately need to examine our own lives and to see God at work in all the brokenness. We need to speak of the miracles which have held us up and which sustain us this very day.

Help me, O God, to see your miraculous presence today.

Hymn of the day: Morning Has Broken. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

Rev. Lawrence Keeler