Community Congregational Church of Chula Vista UCC (276 F St)

“Waiting in Silence”

A meditation based on Isaiah 40:1-11

and Psalm 62:1-2

December 10, 2017

Community Congregational Church of Chula Vista

Dr. Sharon R. Graff

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                   There is a rumor floating around the Christian world that silence is really only for monks and nuns and other reclusive religious types who like to hole up in monasteries or live their lives far apart from others.  I used to think that, too!  Silence could never be for active busy me, I thought…but no longer!  Twelve years of practicing sacred silence have taught me that silence is a treasure holding incredible gifts—gifts that are accessible to each of us, gifts as unique and personalized as we are as humans.  Now, I’m not talking about the sort of silence where the phone just doesn’t ring for an hour or where you have a few blissful minutes of receiving no text messages or a day without visitors or appointments.  No, this silence of which we speak today is the sort of intentional silence that the psalmist describes.  Hear and see those words again: [on screen…]

For God alone my soul waits in silence,

for my hope is from God. 

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

In these couple of verses, the psalm writer confesses to practicing a type of sacred silence—time carved out from the regular routine, perhaps in a special location, or at the least with a special attitude and approach to the silence.  For the psalmist, intention and focus seem everything.  “For God alone” the psalm begins…not for others, not for profit, not for direction, not for even family…but “for God alone my soul waits in silence.”  The next line is equally as focused: “for my hope is from God”…the psalmist isn’t waiting for, or expecting, hope from any other source; rather, in the silence, the psalmist hooks up directly to the Source of all life and love.  And in that connection—that sacred connection which comes from intentional and sacred silence—the psalmist is able to experience God as that rock, as that saving force, as that protective place wherein there is the affirmation, “I shall not be shaken…”

                   To ask rhetorically, who of us doesn’t want that sort of foundation and calm in this chaotic and busy world??!!  But what does such a practice of sacred silence look like, and how does one begin?  Here are some suggestions…

                   First: arrange ahead of time to be alone, without family, without schedule, without commitments for whatever time you’ve allotted for this sacred silence.  It may be a few minutes in a private room in your home.  It may be an hour before bedtime or in the morning.  It may be a carved-out bit during your lunch hour at work, in a place where no one will interrupt you.  It may be a weekend or whole week or more at a retreat center.  The length of time is not as important at the beginning of your practice, as is your commitment to plan that space and time carefully.

                   Second: turn off your phone…no, not just turn it to vibrate or airplane mode.  Turn. It. OFF!  Swipe right or left or push that button that deactivates that little device.  If you have a landline, turn the ringer to “off” and, for those of you, like John and me, with an old-fashioned answering machine, turn the volume off so you cannot hear incoming messages.  I know this is asking a lot in our world of instant communication, yet this is an important step in claiming your right to silence. 

                   Third: enter your silence with intention.  Here’s a ritual others have found helpful.  You might want to stand or sit in a favorite spot in your home and say these words out loud: “Christ in front of me, Christ behind me, Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me, Christ above me, Christ below me, Christ beside me, Christ within me…Christ, I welcome you to this silence and ask for your guidance.”  And there’s your doorway into silence.  After that last word, no more spoken words until your sacred silence is over.

                   During your silence, you may wish to read a verse of scripture, or take a walk, or gaze at a work of art, or write in a journal, or listen to a piece of music, or simply sit and look out the window.  I’ve found that, in silence, whatever activity I choose offers me gifts, because I bring into it an expectation and a focused attention that clarifies all I see and do in that silence.  I want to warn you, silence is not always pleasant…in fact, often when we give ourselves the gift of sacred silence—be it for a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days—the silence can turn cloudy and lead us into some difficult places of mind and heart and soul—places we normally and judiciously avoid with our busy schedules and packed routines.  In silence, it’s as if a space opens up inside us, and that part of us that wants to grow jumps into it, and so, even those clouds (those difficult thoughts or challenging memories) can be gifts if we follow them, in the silence, with prayerful intention.

                   Finally, when you are ready to leave silence and re-enter the rest of your life, I suggest you take another moment to intentionally pass that doorway again.  Maybe you restate the same thing you said to enter silence: “Christ in front of me and behind me, Christ to the right of me and to the left of me, Christ above me and below me, Christ beside me and within me…Christ, I thank you for being with me in this silence.  Amen!”  And then you resume your normal life’s work and activity.

                   Sometimes, when I’m teaching about sacred silence, I’ve heard the question from people who live alone, “why do I need to practice silence?  My whole life is silent!”  Alone time is not the same as sacred silence.  The difference is in your intention.  In sacred silence, your intention is to connect or reconnect with the Divine…to be open-hearted and open-minded to experience God’s presence with you…to even set an intention to work on a particular question or concern… and sacred silence is about setting time and space for those things to occur.  Here’s an example, timely for this congregation: those of us not on the Search Team, might want to help them out by practicing some sacred silence for a few minutes each week, with the intention of finding the best possible minister to lead this congregation into your bright future.

You can see, I hope, intention is much the same as prayer.  The kind of prayer we see in Jesus so many times.  In particularly busy or complicated situations, Jesus carved out time and space away from others for very specific praying.  This is sacred silence…and it is nothing like simple alone time!
                   A practice of silence—even and especially while we wait—adds such depth and meaning to our lives, it can grow our prayer life and deepen our spiritual connection to God and others and it can increase our compassion, our ability to forgive, our understanding of others—and it actually makes the waiting time we experience calmer, steadier, more hopeful.  Just like the psalmist promised!

                   We are in a season of waiting, not just for a new pastor…but we are in this Advent time while we wait again to honor the birth of Jesus, the gift of light and enlightenment.  The scriptures we read during this season of waiting include the passage we heard this morning from the Prophet Isaiah.  Now neither of the words “waiting” or “silence” appears in this passage, yet there is a driving sense in it that the author is talking about the wait.  For he describes what is yet to be in the distant future where every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain.  You know he’s talking metaphor here…and we could use some of that calming, yes?!   And yet we wait.  Isaiah says that, for now, while we wait, the need is for speaking tenderly.  The need is for careful preparation.  The need is for noticing where God is present and declaring it out loud.  The need is for anticipating and expecting that God will feed you like a shepherd feeds the flock; and protect you like a shepherd gathers the sheep; and love you, deeply, intentionally, personally, just like a shepherd carries the sheep close to heart and leads the mother sheep gently home again. 

                   Silence, my sisters and brothers, is about carving out some time and setting aside a space, so that, while we wait, we also return home regularly to the very heart of God.

 

* Amen and Blessed Be *

 

“Waiting in Hope”

A meditation based on Psalm 130:5-6 and John 1:1-14

December 3, 2017

Community Congregational Church of Chula Vista

Dr. Sharon R. Graff

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                   The psalm writer is so timely in his or her writing today!  Hear the words again: “I wait for God, my soul waits, and in God’s word I hope.  My soul waits for God more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.”  You always know, when you’re reading scripture, that when the verse repeats itself, there is a lot of truth the writer really wants to communicate!  So, he or she will say it a couple of times to make sure we get it!

                   Any of you, who have lived through a long night, know the meaning of the image of waiting and watching for the morning light.  Maybe you’ve been in the ER with a injured family member, or waiting for word from a loved one all through the night, or up for hours with a sick child, or simply awake as your mind races from one anxiety to another.  We’ve all been there, in one way or another.  We’ve waited through many a long night, and we know what the psalmist means with those words: we wait for God like one who watches for the morning.

                   Let’s be clear, waiting is not something most of us enjoy.  Are there any other “wait haters” here today?!  Waiting is difficult…because waiting is usually about not yet knowing.  And not knowing—not knowing the outcome, not knowing the information, not knowing the full picture—not knowing, when we live in this age of vast knowledge and instant information, that “not knowing” is quite a challenge for us. 

                   Lately, I’ve had opportunity to have conversations with a number of people about waiting.  No surprise…very few enjoy the wait itself.  My hope, in creating this 4-part sermon series about waiting, is that we all can begin to appreciate the wait a bit more.  For waiting—seasons of waiting—offer us some pretty amazing gifts, if we can calm our impatience and quiet our thirst for information and simply sit in the wait and notice the presence of God there…we will be blessed by waiting.

                   The psalmist seems to know that, in writing about waiting and hope being intertwined.  Let’s think about that for a bit.  When we are thrust into a season of waiting, we usually have some visible outcome in our mind, yes?  Maybe we have several!  In a sense, that’s hope.  For hope, at its most basic definition, is the image of a future.  Now, that future image may be bleak or encouraging or anywhere in between.  What matters is that it is an image of future.  And therein lies hope. 

                   Years ago, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I both lived and learned about this most basic element of hope, that is, the sense of future.  My dissertation was about attempted teen suicide, and I was particularly interested about what pastors and congregations can do to help a family heal after a suicide attempt.  And I learned that the theological heart of the matter for a suicidal person is their loss of hope.  So, too, their healing is dependent on their regaining hope; and that is done, bit by bit, baby step by baby step, through their visualizing and fashioning a future.  The quality of that future vision is not as important as is the fact that the person can see themselves living in the next minute, the next hour, the next month, the next year. 

                   I think the psalmist gives us a clear teaching about this powerful experience of hope, while we wait.  The seasons of waiting are made more tolerable by the visual image of a future; and those seasons of waiting can even be life-giving to us when we have that future image in our minds and hearts. 

                   The author of John certainly practiced this hopeful waiting.  When he wrote the gospel passage we read today, followers of Jesus like himself were being fed for sport to the lions of the Roman Empire.  Christians had to meet underground, and yet the author of John poetically writes of a future image in which Jesus is seen as “the light,” as “the true light, which enlightens everyone,” even the Romans!  The author, while perhaps fearing for his own life, writes of Jesus as “that Word from the beginning made flesh now and living among us…”  That’s powerful hope!  That’s transformative vision of the future.  And that, friends, changes the game of waiting.  More next week…!

 

“THANKSGIVING”

A meditation based on Psalm 100

November 19, 2017

Rev. Victoria Freiheit

 

“O give thanks unto the Lord, O give thanks all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness and come before him with a song.” Congratulations! Every time you come to church, find your seat, sing God’s praises—you are obeying Psalm 100. If illness causes you to miss attending, you can still serve God with gladness and sing at home. We can be thankful every day, not just Thanks-giving Day, the 4^th Thursday in November. In Canada, they celebrate Thanksgiving on October 9.

 

According to Google, Mexico does not have a Thanksgiving Day. Dia de los Muertos is a similar holiday, and there is a Catholic celebration in the pueblos–one day a year to celebrate their Patron Saint with music and food. They give thanks for good harvest, health, and happiness. In many pueblos now they celebrate Thanksgiving in their homes just as in the U.S. for the simple reason that their loved ones live in the U.S., or they returned back to Mexico bringing with them Thanksgiving celebration.

 

I’d like to learn about Thanksgiving Days all over the world, but today, we concentrate on why we have Thanksgiving in the U.S. You’ve heard the story about the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. You can Google the list of Mayflower passengers. They had some interesting names: Desire, Resolved, Humility, Oceanus, Love, and Wrestling. Our own Dr. Bradley used to admit that his forbears had come over on the Mayflower. One of the strands of the United Church of Christ is Congregational, and they trace their roots to the Pilgrims. We are grateful for Nathaniel Philbrick, who recently researched the Puritans and what happened to them when they got here in 1620.

 

In school we learned that they sailed on the Mayflower to achieve religious freedom. They were Separatists who believed you should read directly from the Bible, not from the Church of England “Book of Common Prayer.” Their congregation began with a covenant between a group of believers and God. They saw a person’s conscience as the “voice of God in man.” But all who sailed on the Mayflower were not Separatists. There were a few more families. Miles Standish was a military man, John Howland an indentured servant. He married and had 10 children and 88 grandchildren.

 

We do not know the exact date of the first Thanksgiving—probably in late September or early October when all had been harvested—corn, squash, beans, and barley. The barley came in handy for brewing beer, which they had become accustomed to, due to the bad quality of drinking water in England. Then, the feast: ducks, geese and wild turkeys—probably some bass, bluefish and cod as well. Then came 5 freshly killed deer by the Indian Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets who joined the party. At that first Thanksgiving, the Indians outnumbered the Puritans 2-1!

Chief Massasoit and Squanto both helped them in that hard year since they first arrived. Squanto spoke English and showed them how to use fish for fertilizer on their corn. He also helped arrange the pact which allowed the Pilgrims and Indians to live in peace. But still, half of them did not survive that first year. Have you ever been in a survival situation? Only once for me—I was taking care of Seth, my new grandson, while his Mom and Dad had their first weekend away from home after his birth. They lived in Gunnison, Colorado and it was icy, snowy and cold.

 

They had a wood stove which had to be fed every two or three hours. “Does that mean I have to get up in the middle of the night to keep the fire going?” I asked my daughter and son-in-law. “Yes, if the fire goes out and you can’t get it started again, you will have to bundle up Seth and go down the road to our nearest neighbor and stay there until we get back.” “Survival,” I thought, “me and Seth and the fire.” So, I set the alarm for every two hours just in case.

 

Survival was not to be for many of the Puritans who did not all make it through that first year. Diseases, lack of shelter, pneumonia and scurvy were responsible for 51 deaths of the 102 who had come on the Mayflower. At one point there were only six of them to care for all those who were sick. They had to build homes for each other, hunt for game, plant vegetable gardens, pick whatever wild plants they could eat, and always worry about being attacked by Indians. Chief Massasoit’s assistance came in the form of men to help build, sharing of some food and fending off other Indians.

 

Let us remember that the Puritans were willing to pay a great price for the privilege of freedom of worship. They were profoundly grateful to God! Here, in the New World, no established church harassed them, no government agency restricted them, and no one ridiculed them. They were free to worship in the manner they chose. On this Thanksgiving, let us be grateful for our abundance, thankful for our many blessings. Let us also profoundly appreciate our freedom to worship according to our hearts and minds.

 

That first Thanksgiving was joyful for the Puritans–they knew they were going to make it in the New World. But it was sad, because they missed their loved ones who had died. Perhaps we can identify with them—we too know we can make it—sometimes not so easily—with hard work and prayer. AND we can identify with those who celebrated that first Thanksgiving, because we too must celebrate without our loved ones who have died.

 

Today, as we sit around the tables laden with a bountiful turkey dinner, we silently take notice of those who sat with us last year or in years gone by. We say a prayer, thanking God for all who have had an influence on us; thanking God for the good life we have now; thanking God for those immigrants who came in 1620, 1780, 1890, 1929 and last year as well. We are all immigrants except for Squanto and Massasoit and the other Indians here before us. We are survivors. Amen.