From the Pulpit

Excerpts from messages being presented at area places of worship this weekend.

Rabbi Mordechai Levin, Beth El Synagogue

Judaism is a religion of ethical monotheism, a system of religious beliefs and practices, and the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. Our faith highlights — among other things — the belief in God, observance of the commandments, the study of the Hebrew Bible and the importance of community.

Judaism can enrich the lives of those who embrace its beliefs, values and ideals. It can fill our lives with holiness and meaning, and can teach us a way of living in this world that promotes inner joy and ethical behavior.

Rabbi Harold Kushner conveys it this way: “Judaism can save your life from being wasted, from being spent on the trivial. It is a guide to investing your life in things that really matter, so that your life will matter. It comes to teach you how to transform pleasure into joy and celebration, how to feel like an extension of God by doing what God does, taking the ordinary and making it holy. The ultimate goal is to transform the world into the kind of world God had in mind when He created it.”

Nonin Chowaney, Nebraska Zen Center-Heartland Temple

Compassion is deep empathy for another being’s suffering and misfortune. When fully realized, it is accompanied by a desire to alleviate the suffering, or remove its cause. Wisdom is deep understanding. When fully realized, the true nature of human life and its place in the universe is fully understood. Wisdom and compassion are both essential to realizing the Buddha-way. Without one or the other, the Way is only half-realized, and we who practice it are not yet complete.

Wisdom without compassion is cold and unfeeling. Compassion without wisdom is directionless pity. Wisdom with compassion manifests as understanding the causes of suffering, deeply feeling our own and another’s pain, and knowing what to do about both.

Wisdom and compassion come together like our right and left hands when we put them together palm to palm in the Oriental gesture of respect and devotion called gassho in Japanese. The right hand is wisdom, the left, compassion. When they come together, they make a buddha, a completely realized awakened one; when they fall away, a buddha becomes an ordinary being. This is an endless process, one realized only through practice, for, in the words of Zen Master Dogen, “practice and realization are one and the same.”

So, we devote ourselves to the endless practice of the Buddha-way, to manifesting wisdom and compassion in each moment of our lives. In this way, our lives become of great benefit to all beings.

The Rev. Kip Mickelson, First Baptist Church of Omaha

Romans 8:37: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

As kids, we used to play King of the mountain. The one who could climb up the hill and keep everyone off was the King, the conqueror, the victor. It took a lot of work scrambling up that hill, pulling and pushing other would-be conquerors down. Once on top and in control of the hill you were offered only a brief moment of victory as others, as relentless as you, were always ready to dethrone you and take their position as King.

That’s the thing about conquerors. Throughout history there have been many of them who, for a brief moment, have taken their place on the world’s stage but whose glory has faded into memory as other conquerors continue to come and go.

Paul says that we are being killed all day long and that we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered. That doesn’t sound very glamorous and hardly something any one of us would sign up for. But he follows this with the statement that “we are more than conquerors.” Notice he doesn’t just say we are conquerors but we are more than conquerors. The victory is won, and there is nothing or no one who can take it away. This happens not because we are the best or the strongest, but it happens “through him who loved us.” Jesus walked up that hill and became our King and won for us the victory.

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