From the Pastor, Bob Nuhn:

As we put together this newsletter, summer is but three-four days old. This is a summer newsletter, the next full issue not arriving until the last week of August.

Summer is always a great time for impromptu fun activities that don’t necessarily make the newsletter. This summer, however, we have two invitations, the Japanese Lunch and Marty and Marion’s picnic, which began as a Sunday School picnic and a couple years ago became an all-church event.

This summer we will have three more worship services on the cottage lawn the first Sundays of July and August as well as the Sunday after the Holy Smoke BBQ in September.

Summer is, indeed, a great time to enjoy life together. As such events are about to happen that don’t make this newsletter, you will receive the invitation by email, Sunday bulletins and over our website, ogdenucc.org.

Come, be a part of summer worship and fun as a church family with an extravagant welcome to everyone.

Please note once again, we three Nuhns have gone exclusively cellular and my number is 435-764-8504.

Peace,
Bob Nuhn, Interim Pastor

This annual meeting was special in several ways. Most of all it was held at LaForet Conference and Retreat Center in the Black Forest north of Colorado Springs and east of the Air Force Academy. Many, of us had not been to LaForet for many years (20 or so for me) and what a change. The forest is still there, though young trees have sprouted up among the older Ponderosa Pines. The buildings on the outside look the same only freshly stained and some have ramps. Inside the cabins, however, the makeover has made the cabins adult-friendly. In the "old" days of LaForet, there was no mistaking it for a summer camp for children and youth. Now the old troth-like sinks and toilet stalls have been replaced with real restroom facilities.

Inglis Hall, only a couple years old, is where our events were centered and then spread out around the facilities. This new hall is large enough for our common meals brought in from the old kitchen in the dining hall across the meadow. Inglis Hall is great for meetings where everyone can hear and see the presenters because of its good sound system, projector, and screen that show us the agendas, budgets, nominations, and outlines of the speaker's messages. You can learn all about LaForet on the web at www/laforet.org.

This environment gave the whole annual meeting a retreat feel, yet the "business" of the conference went smoothly and it was very much a worship and learning experience throughout the two plus days.

Thursday evening, June 10^th, the event began for clergy and spouses with the annual appreciation dinner.

Friday morning the events for clergy and laypeople began with workshops. We were to choose one for right after breakfast and one for mid morning. I chose:

1. Becoming ONA: A Grace-filled Process of Engagement. ONA is the UCC's way of saying "We are an Open and Affirming Congregation." We are open and affirming of persons in the GLBT community (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered People) and their parents, families, friends and all who are turned away from other churches because of who they are.

I wanted to learn how this process has changed since I last went through it with a congregation almost ten years ago. Much has changed for the good to help people in churches considering whether to become an ONA congregation.

Nothing is voted on, but the process is an assessment tool for the whole congregation to discern how far their welcome and hospitality extends. The process carefully lays the groundwork for individuals to personally and privately assess the depth of the church's welcome and hospitality. These forms are collated to assess whether or not, how fast or how slow a congregation should move toward becoming ONA.

There are "Top Ten Things to Consider Before Creating An ONA Process" Then, if the congregation agrees to begin the process, there is a checklist of things to consider: what education for children and adults is necessary, what worship in a welcoming congregation should be like, and there are many, many, many resources and people in our RMC Conference to draw on for help and support through this process.

The final word, like everything else in the UCC, rests with each individual congregation. They alone must decide whether to enter into "The Welcoming Church Process" and how that process would best be carried out in their congregation. One thing is for sure, if a church council likes the idea of being an ONA church and gets a congregational vote to pass an ONA resolution, they will discover that without a year or two discernment process the congregation never really becomes an Open, Welcoming and Affirming Congregation. I will leave the papers I received at this workshop in the church files.
The complete report is on the narthex table.

Easter Sermon, April 4, 2010
Bob Nuhn, Pastor

SCRIPTURE Peter Speaks of the Good News Acts 10:34-43
The Empty Tomb with Jesus and Mary Magdalene John 20:1-18

There are 3" x 5" cards in the pew racks for your QUESTIONS OF FAITH:

What do you wonder about? What do you question? What bothers you?
What do you often think about? Or do you have any other question(s)?
Please place your questions in the offering plate.

SERMON Questions of Faith #4

"Why was it necessary for the physical body of Jesus to be resurrected?
Yet his physical body became a spiritual body soon after Easter.
So why did his physical body have to be removed from the tomb?"

This 4^th Question of Faith one of you put in the offering plate is definitely an Easter question—a very good Easter question. It isn’t however, a question that can be easily answered because there are two routes we can take in formulating the answer. In just these next couple minutes, I hope to take you along in both directions.

First, is the biblical route: What is really said about the resurrection of Jesus, what happens to the physical body, what is at issue surrounding the empty tomb, and how does the physical body transition into the spiritual body? How about that for a full load of faith on Easter morning? Today we heard the Gospel of John’s version of the resurrection. Matthew, Mark, and Luke also have the resurrection story. We must remember that the people who wrote what we call the Bible had no idea that what they wrote would end up in a Bible—these people, I believe, were inspired by the Spirit of God to write about the faith they received from Jesus and through prayer and visions from God.

The biblical writers wrote different versions because they had different faith experiences and so the Spirit of God came to them in different ways. However, there are some similarities that are touched on by one of you who offered us these Questions of Faith for this Easter.

All writers of the New Testament agreed on several points without having checked with each other by email or Facebook. These points are:

1. Jesus was the Man of Nazareth; he had a physical body.
2. Jesus had a Spirit so powerful that it could only have been a God-given Spirit—he had a spiritual body even before the crucifixion.
3. All Gospel writers, disciples, and apostles agreed that the women and men who went to the tomb that first Easter morning found the place where they laid the dead body of Jesus; it was empty.
4. Some of those who came to the tomb had a vision of an angel or one or two young men at the tomb that told them Jesus was not there but had risen.
5. Each Gospel has a little different story about who came to who was at the tomb and what they saw. Mary Magdalene, in today’s scripture from John actually saw and talked with Jesus, but the women in Mark’s Gospel were told by a young man that Jesus was not there, but that he was going ahead of them to Galilee where they would see him (Mark then writes that terror and amazement had seized the women and they said nothing to anyone). Matthew says when the women ran to tell others as the angel told them to do and on the way Jesus actually greeted them. Luke says the women thought what the two men in dazzling clothes told them was an idle tale, which they did not believe; but Peter arrives to look into the empty tomb.

Now how do you come to the absolute truth about what happened on that Day of Resurrection? I don’t think you can fully explain all the details.

U.S. News & World Report has a special collector’s edition out called Secrets of Christianity, Mysteries of Faith, and among the really good articles is one called "Rising From the Tomb" by John Dominic Crossan a former Catholic priest and Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright; both friends of Marcus Borg.

Bishop Wright, a Conservative Christian, reminds us that, "The Resurrection stories in the Gospels do not say Jesus is raised, therefore we’re going to heaven, or therefore we’re going to be raised. They say Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new creation has begun, and we’ve got a job to do."

The other author, John Dominic Crossan, comes from a different perspective. (It is easier to paraphrase Crossan than to quote him, so that is what I will do.) He writes that the real power of the Resurrection is not an afterlife event. It has nothing to do with the "end of the world." It has to do with what Jesus had been talking about in different ways all throughout his ministry—that the Kingdom of God is not a future event, but that it has already begun. Without such a realization, Crossan doesn’t see how we can get to the Resurrection.

For him Resurrection has nothing to do with a bodily resurrection or an empty tomb, but these are ways that point to a new creation—namely, how the world will be changed just as the Man of Nazareth was changed into the Christ of Faith

(This last phrase is mine, not Crossan’s in this article.)

Obviously, then, the Resurrection is a metaphor for what God has done and is doing and will continue to do—namely, make all things new. Continually reframing life in love and peace and justice. Easter isn’t about springtime, but springtime can be a metaphor about Easter.

So you see, both Wright and Crossan, can come from their quite different perspectives of faith (just like the gospel writers) and both are saying, I think, don’t get hung up on the details of the Resurrection. Look instead to the results, to what change happened in the future of both the first century Christians and what it means for we who live in the 21^st century.

Now to move into the 2^nd route that these Questions of Faith can take us:

Questions of Faith #4 "Why was it necessary for the physical body of Jesus to be resurrected?" My answer would be, it wasn’t necessary in the 1^st century or in ours; but through the resurrection of Jesus, we truly come to know the power of the living God. It is so powerful that we can look to Jesus today, 2,000 years later, and still be awestruck and inspired by what Jesus was all about and that spiritual body (read spiritual being or spiritual essence) is made real in us today, in the church and in the world.

In between the two questions of faith the questioner made a statement that sums it all up: "Yet his physical body became a spiritual body soon after Easter."

To this I would simply add that in his life, like in ours, the physical and spiritual essence of our being is all one.

And the second question is: "So why did his physical body have to be removed from the tomb?" Probably to let us know, without a doubt that life does not end in death.

No matter what you personally believe in the resurrection, or if you don’t believe any of these stories however they are told through the Gospels and other part of the New Testament, I hope you can say, "Life does not end in death."

Speaking personally, I’ve experienced the death of my grandparents, both parents, a wife and a son. At the time of their deaths I was living between 65 and 1,650 miles away from them, except wife Ginny, who died at our home. I must say that today I am as close to all eight of these, my family, as when I was physically with them in their lives. And all of them have fully become a part of my life and my life greatly improved not only while living with them, but still today.

If I can say that—How much more has the risen Christ spoken to me, to any of us, who live with the spirit of loved ones who have died, but are very much alive in us?

Wishing you a happy Easter alive in the Spirit!