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Pastor's Message Whenever a serious newsworthy event takes place, we find ourselves wondering about it and listening to conversations about interpretations of the event; the recent airplane accident with the Alaskan senator, Ted Stevens, serves as an example. So far, the accident is “under investigation.” Eventually there may be a determination that is helpful. Public Television has several programs designed to provide exactly such helpful investigations, and this past summer a Nova program presented an analysis of the 9/11 event. Basically, the CIA was in charge of all international threats, while the FBI has exclusive authority within the country, and according to under-standings of the rules in effect at the time, they were not allowed to communicate to one another. So the CIA knew that al Qaeda had extreme intentions to cause a catastrophe, and at one time they knew the names of a half a dozen operatives who come into our country and who were later involved in the 9/11 event, but according to the rule book at the time, they believed they could not telephone the FBI to tell them anything. In an interview with the very person who could have made that telephone call, he said that he now had “regrets.” Even shortly after the event, the phrase a “lack of imagination” was widely used to describe the most serious of defects on our side of what we should have done to defend ourselves. Individuals saw themselves as being an exclusive citizen of the organization that they worked for, and while they did their job, they lacked the imagination to realize that they could have also seen themselves as being a member of a larger moral community, real or imagined. The individual who had “regrets” was a good citizen of America, working in the mentality of an individual striving, from grade school onwards, towards the goal of suburban success and relative isolation. After all, we all have our individual economic boats to develop and keep afloat. American participation in all volunteer organizations has been on a steady precipitous decline since the 1950’s as our country has moved towards the goal of individual success. Today, who has time to do anything more than go to work and build one’s dream house? As Paul wrote to a city steeped in extreme amounts of Roman social identity, he writes that as Christians “we are to live as citizens worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Philippians 1:27), and later, Paul says that what has been extended to us is “citizenship in heaven,” (3:20). For those first readers, and for us, what is offered is an imaginary social sense that we are members of a heavenly community. Roman statues and fountains in the marketplace, Roman homes which were villas of mosaic art decorated floors and walls, these only told half the story of who they were. The other half was to be imagined as they imagined their heavenly home. We are both. We are both members of all the communities that we participate in every day, and members of the heavenly community. So we can bring into everyday expressions a social imaginary sense that is above wherever we find ourselves. And our church is the place where we are to find more of this - both in promise and in reality – more than in any other place. European cathedrals tried to materialize this dual cosmos concept (heaven to earth), but we are to have this stuff in our heads, living it out every day. We are the ones who are to connect heaven and earth together in the simplicity of everyday conversations. Most of the culture which we daily experience is in desperate need of imagination. Day by day, America drifts from the ingredients that used to supply the feeling that we are living in an enchanted world, or of having the possibility of entertaining enchanted thoughts or sentiments. But it’s all there, in the Bible, and scattered around in the available experiences of our church. As we think of September as a beginning of a year of intense living, let us realize that the Lord has spent His life procuring and refining our new citizenship. And let us live a life worthy of the cost of this new citizenship.
Rev. John S. Naugle
Contact InformationRev. John S. Naugle
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