Rev. Don Erickson

A religious teacher quizzes Jesus. He has just heard the 2nd greatest commandment according to Jesus, Love your neighbor as yourself. The religious teacher responds with a question? Who is my neighbor? Is it just the person living next to me? What about the person on the other side of town? What about those who are rather different from me? Who counts as a neighbor? What identifies a neighbor? The Jewish understanding is that only Israelites or those part of the Israelites are your neighbors. This expands the table to include more than just your neighbor next to you. But what about non Israelites? What does Jesus think? Jesus answers these questions with the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. A guy takes the infamous Jerusalem to Jericho byway alone and is robbed, beaten, and left for dead. It’s safe to presume the man is Jewish. Jerusalem and Jericho – these are Jewish towns. The man is battered and bruised and maybe dying on the side of the road. Two fellow Jews notice him, a temp...

All of our gospels aim to show Jesus as having some kind of spiritual authority. It’s clear that Jesus was not the typical messiah folks envisioned then and there. He wasn’t what came to mind when Jews contemplated what the messiah would be like or look like. He was not a political figure or a military figure, not possessing political or military power or prowess like David. He was a simple carpenter from the Galilee. He was not wealthy, powerful, or from a famous family. In fact, it was just the opposite. He was relatively poor, unknown, and from a family tainted by the context of Mary conceiving a child out of wedlock. And of course, he'd later be executed as a perceived common criminal. The gospel writers, including the writer of Luke, want to show Jesus as possessing special authority. His authority is a spiritual authority. He has a spiritual power that can overcome the evil in the world and the spiritual illness in people. That’s what’s behind our story from Luke 8. It shows ...

I want to focus on a phrase from our reading from Romans 5. It comes in verse 5. God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that a beautiful image?  Think of your heart as a basin. God’s love like water is poured into that basin until it overflows.  My cup runs over. That is a familiar image, right? Psalm 23. God’s love is poured into us till overflowing!  Paul gives us the means by which this pouring into our hearts happens. The Holy Spirit is the spicket God uses to pour the living water of love into our hearts. There’s a phrase that Paul adds. God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us . The Holy Spirit has been given to us. By whom?  Our gospel reading explains this. Christ promised us his Spirit would remain to guide his followers forward. “The Spirit of Truth,” Jesus entitles this Spirit. The Spirit of truth “will guide them into all truth.”   Let me say something about truth f...

  Speaking to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul says this about that church - You are the body of Christ, and each of you is a part of it. Christ is the head, the heart, mind, the soul, and we are the body. Contemplating this poetic truth produced a poem I share as my short meditation: We hear him sung about a lot. That old hymn comes to mind. We sing it in church. O how I love Jesus, O, how I love Jesus, O how I love Jesus because he first loved me. But do we love all of Christ or only his mind, heart, and soul, that which rests in heaven, Invisible to us? What about the rest, though? Do we love the whole of him, soul and body? Do we love we his body or just Christ in part? Do we love just the heavenly stuff But not what labors and toils here on earth? I spent much of my life not seeing the connection, stuck in the easier stuff of loving just Jesus because he loved me, and you, friend, neighbor, even enemy. Loving someone who loves so purely, loving the perfect heart of Jesu...

Are you at one with Christ? What a question to begin with, hey? We love the thought of unity. That all may be one, we quote Jesus as saying. It's a central verse to the UCC. Jesus gives a prerequisite for this kind of unity. We must be one with him, with Christ so that we might be one with God. Real unity comes by way of Christ. He is the vehicle that brings us to unity in God. Once arrived, we experience unity with others and with the world around us in God. Separated from God, there can be no unity. In God, connected to God, is where unity happens. That’s what Jesus is saying here. But ultimate unity in God begins with our oneness with Christ. What does it mean to be at one with Christ? Imagine two whole-body silhouettes of yourself and Christ. Two silhouettes each with defined lines and separated from one another. Imagine those silhouettes embracing. What happens? Two silhouettes become one silhouette. The lines of separation are no longer present in the whole-body silhouette. T...

Hospice chaplaincy took its toll emotionally sometimes, but it was blessed work. How grateful I was for those days, those days when God graced me with a little bit of the kingdom to keep me keepin' on. Usually, God’s grace came in the form of a patient sharing with me their story. Some days, I’d come home after the last visit full of gratitude. A patient named Gus comes to mind this Memorial Day as we ponder the meaning of selfless service for one’s country. Gus was 92-year-old man I visited just a couple of times. He graced me with his story and it helped me affirm the good in humanity and the goodness of my people. During World War II, Gus was a drafted officer in the German army. He was injured in the infamous battle of Moscow in late 1941. He’d later return to battle and eventually was taken as a POW by American soldiers and brought to Memphis, Tennessee. Gus spent a long while talking about how POW camps in America were different, a good different. He knew about the horror st...

Where I am going, you cannot come. Where is it that Jesus is going that his disciples cannot go? Union with God in heaven, that’s the traditional understanding.  In this case it would be a “not yet.” His disciples have more to do on earth. Heaven is not for them yet. Their union with Christ happens directly, then and there. And this union is what the disciples are living. They commune with Christ every day. We too can be united with Christ in the here and now. Through our taking in of his spirit into our own, there is communion with Christ right here and right now.  But full union with God in heaven is a future reality that awaits us just as it awaited the disciples who communed with Jesus.  There is another level to what Jesus is talking about, though. Yes, the disciples cannot follow Christ in his eventual ascension to heaven right now. But Jesus is talking about something more earthbound too, here.  Where is Jesus headed more immediately? What awaits Jesus before ...

Let’s move on to two other questions: For Buddhism and Christianity: Are humans fundamentally good? What goes wrong? For Christianity, as we know, humans are created in God’s image, enlivened by the Spirit of God. Life in Eden marks the original plan for human beings. Unity between humanity and God and balance in creation was the reality in the beginning. But with Adam and Eve’s fateful decisions, a shift occurs. Christians have deemed it the Fall. A fall into what? Into the reality of sin. From the bite of the bitter fruit thereafter, sin marks human life. There are differences of opinion on how deep the effect of Adam and Eve’s sin goes. The line of Augustine, which crosses the Catholic-Protestant divide into Luther, and Calvin, says sin runs very deep, arguing that the guilt for the original sin of Adam and Eve is passed on to every human born thereafter. Even infants carry the guilt of original sin, and thus deserve the consequence of judgment and punishment sin carries...

As Christians, we presume we have a self, that we are our selves. We presume at the core of who we are, there is an I that is real and identifiable and is separate from the I you are. We might use different terms like soul or self. Or even spirit to name this core identity. Many think the self we are will outlast our bodies, our selves related to God who is eternal. The Buddha taught something completely different.  One of his most central teachings, and one of the most unique teachings in all religiosities, is known as the doctrine of no-self. No-self is the common English translation of the Sanskrit term anatman . An translates as no or non. Atman translates as self or soul. Anatman has thus been translated as no-self, non-self, or no-soul, or even no-ego. The Buddha basically taught that the notion of an eternal, permanent, unconditioned “I” does not exist. I want to highlight those adjectives qualifying “I” - eternal, permanent, unconditioned. I might also add the ...