Chasing the wind.- a sermon by The Rev. Dr. Thomas Lane Butts

The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells how he tried all the things which in his time were thought to be fulfilling. One by one he dismisses his experience with a phrase that runs like a thread through the whole book and that was like chasing the wind.

Most of us can identify with much of what he wrote. I can. Change the names, dates, and places and it's our story too. We all spent more time than we would like to admit chasing things that we thought we wanted and avoiding things we thought we did not need. And so much of it turned out to be like chasing the wind or worse.

Can we find a way to get loose from the things that we have chased and caught which have made us miss the main meaning of life? Can we find courage and strength to turn and face the things from which we have been running? Is there a way to re-direct our energy from running to waiting? It won't be easy, but it is possible, and, trust me, it is worth the effort.  more

That's what I want to talk about today. It appears that the writer of Ecclesiastes came slowly and painfully to the saving insight with which he ends his story. We can hear his disappointment at the end of each frustrating experience. We can sense the emotional and spiritual woundedness each time some grand experiment left him feeling empty. Yet he was persistent and stubborn. He tried it all! All of us who have lived very long understand that. We have been there. Some of us are still there. Insight tends to come slowly. Very few people get to see a blinding light on the road to Damascus. We keep on trying the same things over and over, hoping to get a different result until finally it dawns on us that we have been looking for meaning in all the wrong places-chasing the wind.

Sermon : Salt and Light

	INTRODUCTION A pinch of salt, a glimmer of light...little things like a coin, a sheep or a handful of disciples. Jesus had a way of taking what seemed small and insignificant and calling on them to transform the world.[1] One reason we love these verses is that there is no "must," or "should," or "ought," here. Jesus does not say, "You must be the salt of the earth," or "you ought to be the light of the world," He simply pays us a great compliment by saying, "You are the salt of the earth." He speaks the hopeful, encouraging word, "You are the light of the world." Because light comes up so often as a metaphor and symbol in the Bible, and because we have so much to do in our service today, I will concentrate only on the salt image this morning. Salt, sodium chloride, NaCl, cannot lose its saltiness. As often is the case in the parables, there is a subtle, hidden meaning in what looks at first glance like an obvious truth. "If the salt hath lost its taste..." But it can't. It's a staple compound (as Clark Riley verifies) and can't lose its taste. Jesus, who surely knew far more than Clark Riley and John Roberts, knew that.  more

Sermon on the Mount : Earth Quake Resistant Foundation

Sunday, July 13, 2008

In concluding the Sermon on the Mount Mathew records that Jesus has said: Any one who hears these words of mine and obeys them is like a wise man who built his house on rock ... (Matt.: 7:24-27). I have preached on this verse several times. All those sermons were focused on the necessity of unchanging foundation. That has been the way it was interpreted in the Annangar church by Dr. K.M. Thomas, of Kozhikode today. Dr. Thomas is brother in law of Mr. James Abraham (Saji) our choir member) who visited the Church for the promotion of the ministry of the Gideons International. Gideon ministry will place Bibles in Public places in your name for the money you contribute. The parishioners generously responded to his appeal. People are in search of reliable and strong foundation. However, these days I am being challenged by the schools of non foundationalism and post foundationalism. The argument of the non foundationalism is that there are no reliable foundations. There are only shifting foundations and we cannot take any absolute position. Postfoundationalist position warns us of the danger of falling into the foundationalist ghettoism, taking something to be a foundation when such a thing is not there. Unless we read in between the lines of Jesus' sermon we may fall into two dangers: First, building our life on false premises, thinking that it is the foundation that Jesus spoke about as it has been happening in the recent text book controversy in Kerala. Second is endangering our freedom to change since change is the only constant reality in the world.

How to find out what does it mean by rockfoundation in Jesus' words? The Jewish people have been bringing up their children strictly on the word of God. They strongly believed that what they teach are right because all their teachings were based on the words of Torah, the Mosaic Law, the words given by God to Moses. They believed that therefore they cannot be wrong; there is no foundations stronger than their Torah for that matter. Jesus did not accept this interpretation. All his efforts were to challenge the edifice the Jews had built upon the Law, not because that they are built on shifting sands but rather that they are built on false premises, thinking that they are absolutes. All religions find their founding documents authoritative and absolute. It gives them security and sense of purpose. Without them people find them helpless, with out any direction in life. Therefore they are even willing to die for the protection of them. Christians, Muslim, Hindus, without any exception would die for their sacred Scriptures, ground of their faith, since they think that this is the basic minimum that they should do with their life. Without this foundation, no life.

The whole Sermon on the Mount is a challenge to change such traditionally considered absolute foundations based on the interpretation of the scripture. Jesus is asking them to search for new foundation in his words. The strong foundations of faith which the Jews had only led them away from God, to look to themselves and idealize their standpoints. The rock upon which the Jews built their religion had been working well, shaping their community, economics, faith for more than 1500 years. Jesus has been asking them to build their houses on his words that point to the , the fulfillment of the law, the purpose of God for Creation. The Law is fulfilled not in rediscovering the Mosaic injunctions of the past but in search of its present and future fulfillment.

Rocks, rigid, stern foundations are not as safe as we used to think as the modern geology teaches us. Every year, earthquakes, breaking and shifting of rock beneath the earth's surface, take the lives of thousands of people and destroys houses, causes tsunamis. We need to rethink the mode of our structural designing to resist earthquake forces. For hundreds of millions of years, the forces of plate tectonics have shaped the earth as they move slowly over, under, and past each other. Sometimes the movement is gradual. At other times, the plates are locked together and the plates break free causing the ground to shake.

Conventional earthquake resistant design of buildings depends upon providing the buildings with strength, stiffness and inelastic deformation capacity. New structural engineering introduces the concept of base isolation where buildings rest on frictionless rollers. When the ground shakes, the rollers freely roll, but the building above does not move. Thus, no force is transferred to the building due to the shaking of the ground; simply, the building does not experience the earthquake. The base-isolators are flexible pads. Another way is to install Seismic Dampers in place of structural elements, such as diagonal braces which act like the hydraulic shock absorbers. These modern technology provide more stability to buildings rather than inflexible rock foundation.

Jesus is asking us to build our lives on his words which challenge the absolutist categories and conventional wisdom which go over thousands of years. Jesus words act like contemporary flexible pads and base rollers absorbs better the tremors that destroy the house. Jesus' point is that no one would build a house on the sand if one knows that. In Palestine water will rise in wadis perhaps after several years. When some one builds a house one will not be knowing that the foundation cannot uphold the building. Don't try to defend the conventional knowledge as if they were eternal truths but be ready to go beyond. In Postmodernist thinking foundational truths are linguistic constructs, interpretations. So Jesus interpretation, the Words of Jesus, is the true foundation, not settling down by the present foundation. Search for the words of future from Jesus in order to find true stability for our life.

The present text book controversy in Kerala illustrates how people are upset when the conventional foundations are threatened. They are afraid that if the children are exposed to the wind and rain in the world their faith would drift away. Jesus' point is not to blame the rain and wind, which the people are now trying to do. Let the children get the right to decide, rather than we bidding them to grow in our own ignorant and false foundations.

Three Sermons

Today I happened to hear three sermons. One in the Annanagar Mar Thoma Church by Rev. Joseph Chacko and another by Mr.Y. Biju, Thiruvalluvar Hostel secretary and BD student of Gurukul, in the house of one of the neighbours of Gurukul, Dr. P.K. Joy. The third one was in Gurukul Chapel by Dr. Adella Paul.

What interested me in Joseph Chacko Achen's sermon has been the unusual introduction to the sermon, narrating the spirituality of the Hindu pilgrims who go to Sabarimala. He explained the significance of the "Irumudikkettu" which the pilgrims carry when they go to the mountain shrine of Lord Ayyappa of Sabarimala. Irumudikkettu is a two pronged head gear in which the swamis (the devotees) carry coconut, ghee and other pooja (worship)materials. They will break the coconuts before Lord Ayyappa and ghee will be poured upon the idol. The significance of the Irumudikkettu, as it has been explained to Achen by one senior Hindu swami, is that the two bundles the pilgrims caary on their head are of different sizes, one is big and another is small. The big bundle represents the sins of people (of course the concept of sin is quite different from the Christian teachings, and for them it is more or less actions of ignorance, agnana, rather than deliberate defying of God's will). The samll one represents the punya (virutous acts of people). The pilgrims take both to the Lord Ayyapaa and offer them and come back as new persons carrying back only the prasadam (sweets blessed by Ayyappa), in order to start a new chapter of life with God. I found the interpretation very meaningful and significant to the spiritual life of Christians. I would write later about another story which is told by Achen to explain the silly character of St. Peter.

Liberative Praxis - A Sermon by Dn. Aby Paul M.

Liberative Praxis - A Sermon by Dn. Aby Paul M.
On Wednesday 25th June, Dn. Aby Paul, M.led the first evaluatory worship and sermon for this academic year (2008-9) in Gurukul Chapel. The worship has been an ecumenical blend, songs and prayers taken from different Indian languages and ecumenical orders of worship as well as from his own traditional Syriac liturgy. Aby belongs to the Antiochean wing of the Orthodox Church in India which considers the Patriarch of Antioch as the head of the Church. Both in his worship and sermon he incorporated the ecumenical spirit and bold theological vision of Gurukul together with his Syriac tradition. Traditional Syrian liturgical emblems and Indian Bhajans were profusely used. He titled his sermon, "Liberative praxis: A Mission imperative." It was based on the Lukan text of the healing the crippled woman on a Sabbath in the Synagogue (Luke 13:10-17). Dn. Abey began the sermon by narrating his personal experience in a Church in North India. A local Christian woman came to one of the Syrian Orthodox congregations there to receive Holy Communion. However, the Presbyter would not give her communion because she did not belong to a denomination which has got intercommunion relationship with the Orthodox Church. This incident disturbed him and there started his theological journey in search of the liberative nature of the gospel of Christ and attempts to overcome the denominational barriers imposed on the praxis of the Gospel. He said he would not disown his tradition but would try to make it more liberative. Those who observed Aby all through his years in Gurukul would testify that he has been a conscientious student contributing his best to the ecumenical character of Gurukul. He has been quite active in the various programmes of Gurukul promoting Dalit and gender liberation. He is one who got selected to study in Jerusalem on an exposure programme for three months. He would certainly be an asset to any ecumenical community and certainly to the Indian Christian ecumenical movement.