4.4.21 Easter Sermon

Let’s say it. This story, the central story of the Christian faith, is incredibly hard for us people today to make sense of. Sometimes it just seems like too much believe. It’s hard not to wonder sometimes if this story had its moment in history but no longer speaks to our place and time.

Many who follow Jesus do not really believe he died and was resurrected. They follow him because he taught and modeled the a life of great goodness. Jesus showed us the way, the truth, and a life lived with grace. He taught us to love God with our whole being, to love others as we love ourselves, and to work for the reign of God through the pursuit of peace and justice. We strive to do the same. Isn’t that enough?

As someone who grew up in a conservative Midwestern small town, I have had “proven” to me many times, by passionate friends and pastors, that Jesus must have been resurrected in body. Some of the evidence, built up brick by brick, as if for a court of law, comes from this passage we heard today. The stone moved away from the entrance. The grave cloths lying neatly folded to the side. Based on this, we hear, the male disciples believed. They knew that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and they raced back to tell the others. Presumably we should know it too, believe that this must have happened, and accept it as we accept any scientific fact. 

But you know, I don’t really think this works. I don’t think we can actually impose scientific logic on the mystery of the resurrection. It just doesn’t hold up. In the words of one of my favorite theologians, Bart Ehrman, “Almost any explanation for the empty tomb--supposing there was a tomb, since it was extremely rare for victims of crucifixion to be buried at all--any explanation would be less fantastic and therefore more scientifically probable than the one that Christians propose. If you found the body of your loved one gone from its resting place, what might you think? That the body had been taken. That you were at the wrong grave. The last thing you would think is, ‘This person has risen from the dead, taking their body.’”

It is not because this explanation is factually provable that we Christians make it the center point of our faith. It isn’t even because Jesus said that he would be resurrected; in three of the four Gospels he is recorded as saying nothing like that. In fact, in most of the Gospels, there’s little to show that Jesus was anything but a radical Jewish rabbi who wanted to transform his own faith, not create another. Christianity in that sense was made by his followers, who worshipped him and spread the word. And a few hundred years later, when that radical faith was adopted by the Roman emperors, it became tamed, adapted to the needs of power, an official state religion and spread through the world, now with the stamp of royal wealth and status. All of this history gave us what we now know as our religion. But behind it, sometimes almost completely obscured, is a spiritual and emotional truth so powerful it won’t die. Just like Jesus on that first Easter day.

We tell the Passion story not because it has to be true in the empirical sense, but because it represents a deeper reality that we feel, that we know in our selves in times of greatest grief and loss. Its power is represented not in the disciples who saw the empty tomb, but in the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ.

Mary’s reaction at the empty tomb seems to me very natural. I can’t imagine going home as the male disciples do. Apparently, neither can Mary. She hangs around, weeping, checking the tomb again, like we do when we've lost something and keep looking for it in the same place, again and again. Like when someone dies and you keep thinking they are going to call. Like when you lose a baby to miscarriage and still absent mindedly think about your due date, before you remember that that baby is gone. Mary is seeking her lost loved one in a haze of grief. And then suddenly, she's talking with angels.

And when they ask, “Woman, why are you crying?” she replies, reasonably: “They have taken my Lord away.” Mary, not knowing she’s speaking to divine beings--because, after all, that isn’t most people’s day-to-day-- begs the angels to tell her where they have taken Jesus’ body, so that she can get it and bring it back. There is so much that is real and awful here. The reality in that time and place of grave robbing. An attempt to negotiate from a place of powerlessness. Mary is a woman like so many then and now, trying to give her loved one the last care she can. “Let me care for him,” she says. The moment is raw. It echoes of grieving women and slain revolutionaries and the power of sudden loss and violence in every time and place. 

And then the story changes. 

It becomes a story of encountering Jesus somehow alive in the garden, of not at first recognizing him but then suddenly, in a flash, at the sound of his voice saying her name, knowing. Mary knows Jesus when he calls her name. And I wonder if you have heard your name called. I think maybe we all have, very faintly, at a moment when we were most ashamed, most empty, most lost, and most alone. When there is nothing else and the world has nothing for us, that’s when we can hear the voice of God best. And God, in the person of Jesus, is calling us so tenderly by name. 

When I lived in Tennessee, some friends told me I had to watch the famous Robert Altman movie Nashville. I was skeptical! A movie about  In this film one of the characters, a country-western singer, is in the hospital and quite frail, emotionally, mentally and physically spent. In one scene, she sits in a wheelchair in the chapel and softly sings a familiar hymn: ...."and he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own...."

As she sang about the risen Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden, it felt to me like she was also telling her own story of feeling close to Jesus, like a lost lamb being gathered up by her Good Shepherd and taken back to the flock. Like a person abandoned to shame and self-degradation, being found and redeemed. It touched my heart in ways that I couldn't explain, because, to be honest, belief for me at that point in my life was up here, in my head, not here, in my heart.

But now I have a different relationship to this whole human problem of being lost and needing to be found, of being made of clay but longing for spirit. I  understand, but I am a little sorry when I hear people say the hymn "In the Garden" is sentimental, too focused on a private relationship with God, a kind of silly "me-and-Jesus" faith. Because the more I know of death and human weakness, the more this song, and this gospel, seem rock-bottom practical.

The story of Jesus is not real the way an argument in favor of the prosecution is real. That kind of intellectual sword play has its place, and I love it in the sphere of law and debate.  But the narrative of the resurrection has a different kind of reality. It’s true in a deep-down, human way, which means it often doesn’t look like what we would expect. C.S. Lewis said, “Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion that you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up.”

That a Jewish preacher from Galilee, who many hoped would lead a military rebellion against Rome, that this man died an ignomious and horrible death on the cross, rose again, and lives forever to show us how to live and die--that is a strange story indeed. And it is story I find I cannot live without. 

Those who are regulars in this congregation know that one of my favorite books in the world is The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. The main character, the narrator who tells us her story through her letters addressed to God, is Celie, a poor black woman who has been abused all her life.

But Celie has somebody in her life who loves her, her sister Nettie, who gets chased away by Celie’s violent husband, Albert. Albert doesn't let Celie ever see the mail, so Celie never hears from Nettie and starts to believe that her sister is dead.

But Nettie isn't dead. She has gone to Africa as a missionary and writes to Celie many letters over the years; she never gets a reply, but she keeps writing letters to Celie anyway. Then, one day, Celie finds the packet of letter from Nettie that Albert has stashed away under the floorboards. "Dear Celie," Nettie writes, "I know you think I am dead. But I am not." Nettie explains that she has been faithfully writing to Celie all along, and she continues to try to reach her, to tell her, "one thing I want you to know, I love you, and I am not dead." These are some of my favorite words in all of literature.

"I love you, and I am not dead." You may think I am dead and you are unloved, but I am not dead, and you are loved. Celie suffers terrible childhood abuse from her father, and further abuse through her forced marriage to a violent man, has her babies taken away from her and her sister driven from her, but God loves Celie and her life, so full of hardship because of the hard-heartedness of others, is transformed anyway.

When Celie and Nettie are both old and gray, they are finally reunited, and they fall down on the ground with joy. Everyone, she says, must be thinking about how old they look. "But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt." Old, but young and new, anyway.

Easter is God's Yes to Jesus and to new life and new creation and to us. When the world said or says no to Jesus and to new life and new creation, to reconciliation and peace, justice and healing and mercy, God says yes anyway and raises up our hope. This is beyond proving, this is about what we know. Jesus says, today, to you, I love you, and I am not dead. Of all the sweet sounds that we may hear, are any words sweeter to our ear than those?

3.21.21 Written on Our Hearts

Written on Our Hearts: Sermon 3.21.21

Sometimes, in our lives and in our faith, we tell ourselves some stories so old we have forgotten where they came from. We repeat them not thinking about what they really mean, and we need a bit of a shaking up to see them for what they are. One of those stories, which we often tell at this time of year, close to Easter, goes like this: the Jewish people were a people of the Law, so caught up in the letter of that law that they forgot to look for the heart of God. They were legalistic and clinging to old authority. This is unlike us in the Christian church today. They were so full of their narrow interpretations that these people, usually lumped together as “the Pharisees” (which was just one, very misunderstood sect of Judaism) denied Jesus, God’s own child, when Jesus came. They couldn’t see that he came to offer a new covenant, the fulfillment of the law, and so they killed him. 

From this self-aggrandizing version of our faith has come so much anti-Semitism, so many centuries of violence against the Jewish people. On this version of our faith genocide has been justified. As Christians, we live under the sin of anti-Semitism and the tragedy of the Shoah (Holocaust). And this Sunday, as we mourn the murder of six Asian women and two others in another shooting spree committed in the name of our Lord, in the name of purity, I hope we can make a commitment to look again at our old stories and ask what kind of truth is in them, and where our own fears and assumptions and illnesses have become twisted up with word of God--especially in this Easter season. 

As UCC author and theologian Mary Luti writes, “It is one of the bitter ironies of history that our sacred texts have been used to justify the persecution of the covenant people, from whom our Savior came, and who are created, as we all are, in the precious image of God.”

Moreover, I would argue this sort of casual Christian anti-Semitism makes no sense because the Scripture we are looking at today tells a very different story about the Jewish people and the law of love. They, our ancestors in the faith, knew about a new covenant and honored it. They lived it long before Jesus came. This passage from Jeremiah is a prophet calling on the Jewish people to attend to the law not just in the physical sense, but in their heart. According to Judaism, the prophet can give people a word, but only God can give humans a new heart. The “new covenant” didn’t require anyone else coming to humanity; it just requires people to make a renewed commitment to open themselves to what God is always trying to do with us. 

To be open to this working is why we pray every week in church together, why we say that we are listening for a still-speaking God. The Jewish people listen too, and always have. Consider these words from Ezekial, to the people of Israel:

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep Mine ordinances, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God." (Ezekial 36:26-27)

Jesus, our Redeemer, came to offer yet another invitation to God’s people to join the new covenant. There are many ways to enter it. It’s not that the Jews missed it, it’s that God wanted to offer more ways to access it. God wants us to read what God has written on our hearts, but it can take a lot to make us slow down long enough to look, and listen. 

So what I want to ask you, my brothers and sisters who are listening with me for a still-speaking God, is, “What is written on your heart?” Whether it’s from the Bible, from your biography, from literature or country music or movies, or the wise advice of a mentor, what loving truth has God shared with you?

And to start us off, I want to share a few of the things that are written on mine:

When I was ten, my single mom went back to school to get her bachelors, then master’s degree. The next eight years of my life were full of her textbooks stacked around the house, accompanying her to evening classes to save money on babysitters, and quizzing her on material while she got ready for work. I loved it. It made me feel like I was a real help to my mom, that I was helping to get her through school, which I knew was a service to my family.  It was an adventure: We would get take out food on the way to class, and I would explore the dark recesses of her college’s library, which was actually a converted old mansion. I had a great time scaring myself in the shadowy corners and browsing books to my heart’s content. My mom’s return to school fueled my sister’s and my own drive for education: it’s always been a path we followed easily. The two of us became the only ones among our generation in my family to go to college, and then to go on to finish master’s degrees. The importance of education is something written on my heart in my mom’s handwriting, which as we all know, is a stand-in for God’s when we are young.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot in these last few months, as I prepare to finish my own back-to-school stint: I am completing my last course on my path to ordination, and considering what it has meant to my own children to have had a mom in school for the last five years. Fortunately for me, my journey was not as a single mother, but as the partner to a husband who is completely present, and has been carrying more than half the childcare and housework these last five years. So written in my heart is so much gratitude, for my mom’s legacy to me, and the love of a partner that has made my journey so much better.

I’ve also been remembering a less serious but maybe just as powerful source of wisdom that came, in a roundabout way, from having my mom in school. When my mom got a mini-tape recorder to record her lectures so she could listen to them again in the car, I got one too. This little device, so simple compared to the ones children get today, became my favorite toy through my tween years: Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I was constantly badgering my family to give me taped interviews or to be back up singers for my pretend top 40 hit radio show. I had a very shall we say, hopeful, idea of my singing abilities in those days.

Eventually, by the time I was 13, I had abandoned imaginary interviews and singing my own songs (alas), and was using the recorder to make mix tapes. You will all remember those. In these days, when my children make innumerable playlists on Spotify, and share them with friends at the click of the mouse, the era of exchanging mix tapes to cement friendship and prove your genuine coolness seems like ancient history. I remember listening to the radio in my room intently, trying to learn song lyrics so I could talk about them knowledgeably with other eighth graders the next day. I was a bit of a late bloomer, playing with dolls and making fairy houses right through sixth grade, so I had some serious catching up to do in later middle school.  

I had no way to hook the recorder up to the radio, so I would have my finger on the record button, waiting for a song I liked, one that perfectly expressed the mood of the mix I was making. I shake my head to think how many hours I spent breathlessly poised, waiting for the right song. What a metaphor for adolescence! When it came, I would press record, but almost always miss the intro to the song because of the few seconds of lag time. And then I would make the tape, with all the grainy sounds that come with recording from the radio, and listen to it, and share with friends who gave me tapes with mostly the same songs. 

I remember those lyrics so well. They are engraved in my brain and my heart, not always because they were so amazing, but meaningful because of the heightened state of expectation, despair, hope and tenderness that is the teenage state: “Vogue”, by Madonna (my children call this the “weirdest song ever”). But the lyrics! They could totally be from Jeremiah, from any lamentation in the Bible: “Strike a pose/Strike a pose/Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache./It’s everywhere that you go. /You try everything you can to escape/The pain that you know.” Granted, Madonna’s solution was to get out on the dance floor. It’s not the worst suggestion, but by itself I’m not sure it satisfies the longings of the soul. 

Billy Joel, the great American ballad maker and storyteller, was another favorite, though not as popular with my peers. I needed to listen to "We Didn't Start the Fire" innumerable times so I could keep up with fast-paced, complicated lyrics referencing world politics that I didn't even come close to understanding. And I listened over and over to anything by U2, who were a truly soulful and spirit-filled band. So much so that members of the Episcopal Church developed a Communion service entirely around U2 songs, called, well, U2charist. Here’s a lyric from “In the Name of Love” that speaks directly to what are preparing to celebrate this Easter season:

One man come in the name of love

One man, he come and go

One man comes he to justify

One man to overthrow

In the name of love

So, the words written on our hearts come from so many places. Wherever they come from the radio or a page of a book we happen to pick up, from a friend or from the Bible, when the words we hear align with the love of self and God and neighbor, we can trust them. With our Jewish brothers and sisters, with all people of faith, may we listen with an open heart and a sense of wonder. In the name of our still-speaking God, Amen. 

3.14.21: Getting Free
One of the things that I love about Lent is that it forces us to confront some hard truths about ourselves--and then, to try to see them not as we usually do, but as God might, which is a hard perspective to even glimpse, let alone hold. I’m talking about ideas that we Christians often like to avoid, like sin and salvation. These are hard words. They can sound too evangelical, or too Calvinist, or too depressing--choose your objection! But there they are, part of who we are as human beings and part of what we Christians have to think about. As C.S. Lewis said, if we find everything about our faith comforting, we are probably practicing a form of Christianity that we were supposed to leave behind when we were six.

So. Our faith tells us that people are really, really messy. Our own observations probably back this up. The Christian word for this condition of serious messiness is “sin.” When Jesus uses this word, he usually says, “hamartia,” which means, to miss the mark. And, oh, we do miss the mark. In everyday ways like being short tempered with our family and shirking jobs we know we should do and cursing the person who cut us off driving and in looking at our phones so much we miss the beauty of this amazing world, and in bigger ways like cheating people of money and hurting and bullying and demeaning others and betraying our marriages. Every commandment God gave, we can break it.  

So, this is sin. And if we want to know what Jesus says about it, the answer is: surprisingly little. While there is lots in the Old and New Testaments about sin, just about the only time Jesus mentions it is when he is forgiving people, and when he is healing them, which it turns out according to the Bible is the same thing, and when he is telling people that because they are healed they have the chance to sin no more. “Go, and sin no more,” Jesus says, over and over. 

Jesus is very explicit about what he is doing here: he is freeing captives.  When he announces his ministry, he quotes the book of Isaiah, which speaks about prisoners, and something tells me he is not just talking about the physical kind (though those too):

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

     because he has anointed me

     to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

     and recovering of sight to the blind,

     to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4: 16-20)

Jesus, through his words and all his ministry is saying, “Look people, get out of here, you don’t have to stay in this prison; you can be free.” And  we, the prisoners, just can’t believe it. In fact, we have such a hard time believing it that we make up terrible stories about how this freedom thing is actually about punishment. One very common way of explaining why Jesus came into the world is to say that God had to punish Jesus in our place, in order to satisfy God’s need to punish humanity for its sins. This is the satisfaction theory of atonement, and just to be clear, it is not in the Bible. A man named Anselm of Canterbury thought it up around the year 1000. This was in medieval times, and that is appropriate, because this is a very medieval idea. And with tremendous respect for Anselm, who was a learned and holy man, this idea has done a huge amount of damage to Christians and the world. It also seems to me to reduce the grand generosity of God, when we make Jesus out to be a whipping boy. 

Do you know this medieval idea? The whipping boy is an ancient custom by which royal children were spared punishment, since they were too important to be hit. Instead, a servant would be beaten in their place, and the royal child would watch the punishment and supposedly learn a lesson that way. The twisted relationships this must have created are bad enough. But to put this idea onto God is a strange thing indeed.

No, Jesus wasn’t punished for us so that we could go scot free, as the doctrine of atonement would suggest. But that Jesus came to save us--that I believe. How can we understand this? How can we understand that God so loved the world that God sent God’s only begotten child?

UCC writer and preacher Molly Baskette has a great story she tells to explain what this might mean.  Like the Bible, this story has been passed down many times, and I don’t know if it happened exactly this way or not, but I love it and I share it with you now.

A Navy SEAL was performing a covert operation, freeing hostages from a building in some shadowed part of the world. The team flew in by helicopter, made their way into the compound and stormed into a room where the hostages had been imprisoned for months.

The room was filthy and there was hardly any light. The hostages were curled up in a corner, terrified. When the SEALs entered the room, they heard the gasps of the hostages. They stood at the door and called to the prisoners, telling them they were Americans. They asked the hostages to follow them, but the hostages wouldn’t. They sat there on the floor and hid their eyes in fear. They were not of healthy mind and they didn’t believe their rescuers were really Americans.

The SEALs stood there, not knowing what to do. They couldn’t possibly carry everybody out. Then one of the SEALS got an idea. He put down his weapon, took off his helmet, and curled up tightly next to the other hostages, getting so close his body was touching some of theirs. He softened the look on his face and put his arms around them. He was trying to show them he was one of them. None of the prison guards would have done this.

He stayed there for a little while until some of the hostages finally started to look at him and meet his eyes.

The Navy SEAL whispered that they were Americans and were there to rescue them. Will you follow us? He said. He stood to his feet and one of the hostages did the same, then another, until all of them were willing to go. The story ends with all of the hostages safe on an aircraft carrier.

This is, I believe, us. We are the hostages in a corner, curled up, too terrified--or angry, whichever we go-- to believe in our deliverance. So Jesus took off all his godly armor and curled up right next to us, and put his arms around us, and said very softly, “I am right here.” And he still is here, waiting for whenever we are ready to follow him out the door. And we, all of us in the church, are fellow captives helping each other up and stumbling toward the light. Thanks be to God for this much grace—for you, for each of you in this community, and for Jesus. Together, we can be free. Amen. 

3.7.21: Our Stories

You know that I love to hear about our stories, the history of this church, the work of the people here. I love to hear about May, who is memorialized above our kitchen sink, and to hear the stories of Mary Lu, helping to write the profile for this church at meetings held at her kitchen table. And I was there for some of the stories with Alan, directing operations in the kitchen and scaring kids in a truly frightening mask at Halloween. These are all our stories. But we are a local church that is part of a bigger church, the United Church of Christ, and we have stories through our denomination, too. Some of them are so big they are part of the American story, and in remembering them, we can learn a little bit more about who we are and whose we are. 

So let me tell you one of those stories now. 

In 1839, 55 Africans who had been captured in the slave trade struck out desperately for their freedom while being transported out of Havana, Cuba, on a schooner called La Amistad. The name of the ship is ironic, because it means friendship in Spanish. The enslaved African were captured by Portuguese slave hunters in Sierra Leone, in violation of all treaties, and brought to Cuba. There two Spanish plantation owners bought 53 of them, including 5 children, and put them on the Amistad to another part of Cuba. The cook of the ship tormented the slaves by telling them he’d be cooking them. On the third day of the voyage, one man, Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinque, unshackled himself and others and started a revolt. The escaped slaves killed the captain and the cook. They tried to make the plantation owners take them back to Africa, but instead, the owners navigated the ship toward Long Island, NY, certain that it would be intercepted and the slaves returned to them. 

Sure enough, officials boarded the ship, arrested the captives and jailed them in Connecticut for murder and piracy. Meanwhile, the Spanish claimed them as lost property and demanded their return. Whichever they were called, murderers or property, the Africans seemed to have no hope of justice. But then something unexpected happened. The people who had rebelled against their enslavers were befriended by Christian abolitionists, many belonging to churches that are now part of the United Church of Christ. 

A huge problem was that while the Congregationalists suspected what had happened, they couldn’t take the Africans’ testimony because no one knew what language they spoke. Slave trade from Africa was illegal, so the ship’s owners had lied and said all the enslaved people were born in Cuba. One Yale minister and Congregationalist, Josiah Gibsbs, who had taken up the cause was also a professor of ancient languages. He knew there had to be a way to solve the mystery. With gestures and miming, he got the Mende to teach him to count from one to ten in their language. Then he walked up and down the docks of New York and New Haven, reciting the numbers over and over as loudly as he could, hoping to find someone who understood him. On one of these walks he encountered James Covey, a young sailor on a British cruiser. Covey was African and could speak Mende, the captives’ language. With his help translating, the lawyers learned the details of the abduction and were able to make a strong case for the defense. 

The abolitionists hired lawyers, including former President John Quincy Adams, to appeal the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the captives free in 1841. This abolitionist victory helped create momentum for the formation in 1846 of the American Missionary Association. This agency’s work in education and justice eventually became part of the structure of the UCC. The work continues to this day, carried on by our own Minister for Justice and Witness, Traci Blackmon. 

Rev. Blackmon will be speaking at our Vermont Conference Annual Meeting next month, talking about the work of the UCC to end racism. Others will talk about the work we need to do in Vermont. Our history is so rich with justice work. And it is full of our sins, too, which means, the times we missed the mark, the times we failed to see the need, the times we did not act as God would have us do, for justice. These are often hidden histories, because no one wanted to enshrine them in books at the time. There’s a UCC Church in San Francisco that was a gathering place for Japanese Americans who were interned during WWII by the United States government. Thousands of American citizens, first and second generation immigrants, were rounded up and put in internment camps in the desert in case they were a threat to security during the war. One church in the Bay area volunteered to act as a deployment center, hosting hundreds of families carrying all they could hold, as they were divided up and bussed out to makeshift barracks that would be their home for years. Now that church has a memorial to that time and funds a scholarship for Japanese Americans. It wants to tell its story. Another UCC church in this area fired its pastor in 1964 for “activities that took him outside the church.” The main activity, according to the parishioners who were there then, was going to Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The pastor was too political for the congregation, too vocal about racial justice. 

What are our stories? I know one story we have is that Vermont has always been mostly white, and so perhaps we can’t be asked to account for the racial attitudes of our ancestors--to know their stories, and how they interacted with people of other races. But the story that Vermont was all white is not quite true. Rokeby, a sheep farm and apple orchard just down the road, was owned by the Robinson family. They were Quakers and by virtue of their religion, strictly opposed to slavery. From 1830 to 1850 Rokeby was a safe house on the Underground Railroad for people escaping slavery. Black men and some women lived there openly, far enough away from the deep South that they could actually hire themselves out to local farms to make money to buy themselves freedom, or to purchase loved ones still enslaved. Records from Rokeby indicate some of these people worked on farms in New Haven. 

From 1790 to 1890, there was also a thriving black farming community in Hinesburg on Lincoln Hill, often called N-word Hill on local maps. 

This church, New Haven Congregational, was a vibrant church in those times. Our ancestors, either in blood or spirit, were worshipping here then. We don’t have these stories--how did our ancestors respond to their Black neighbors? Those are stories that are lost now, but their absence is also part of our history.  

We continue to write our stories together, by all we do and leave undone, but what we remember and who we leave out. Let us strive to include all parts of the body of Christ as we walk our Lenten journey together.

2.21.21: Promises

I wonder how many of you had Noah’s ark toys as children? I’ll ask you to raise your hands. Perhaps you remember your set as vividly as I remember mine. I was lucky enough to have an amateur woodworker for a grandfather, and he made me blocks, riding toys, a bear clock, and yes, a Noah’s ark set, all out of cherry wood, stained a rich brown color. I thought my set looked like chocolate, and loved the matching animals. I had giraffes, hippos, horses and owls. I would add plenty of plastic monkeys with interlocking tails from another toy set, always lining them up by twos. There’s something so satisfying about anything that comes in twos! And something so cozy about a boat, about a big boat that can float on top of the waves and keep everyone and everything inside safe. It represented safety. And the best part: there was a dove with a little carved olive branch in its beak that could slot into the top of the ark. 

But now, when I read this story again in my middle age, what strikes me as the most important part is the one element that was not in my homemade Noah’s ark playset. There was, for some reason, no rainbow. And the rainbow is really important. After all the action of this story--the collecting of the animals and the seeds, the building of the ark, the herding everyone and everything onto the ship, the endless, pouring, relentless rains, the sending out of the dove over and over again, the settling of the ark and the unloading of people and animals--after all of this action and busy-ness, there is a sign from God.

The sign is written in nature, which is one of our best books about God. The Bible, after all, is our second testament to God’s glory, but creation itself is the first, and that is where God inscribes the sign of the rainbow. 

This rainbow carries so much meaning, it’s hard to take in all that it is supposed to say to us. It means a covenant, a binding agreement, between God and all creation: living creatures and the earth itself. The agreement is that God will never again destroy the earth. The rainbow, according to the story, is meant to help God remember, because, Scripture clearly implies, God is so tested by human wrong doing that God is quite likely to forget the promise. 

I think it's no coincidence that rainbows are one of the most popular icons out there. They are calendar images, wallpaper for our phones, scenes to photograph. Children love to draw and facepaint them. Just a few days ago, my six-year-old nephew drew me a carefully colored rainbow on a goodbye card when I left Indiana. He wanted me to know the colors were in the right order--he’s very proud of his knowledge! To him, it means love. To me, it means promises. I was there when my nephew was born, and there were some promises made then, to be a part of his life as long as I’m around, that I need to continue to live up to. A covenant means ongoing, mutual relationship. And the first one, the first promise that is the parent to all other promises, according to our Scripture, is the one God made to us, humanity, through the rainbow. 

This is the promise of peace to Noah and to all creation. And it was followed by the promise to Abraham and Sarah to make of them a nation and to bless the world through them. Then came the promise of the Law to Moses. And, finally, the promise of a Child to Mary, and through him, the promise of a new covenant, with love, rather than law, at its center. 

As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “They are all the same promise, at heart – the promise of an intimate relationship with God – but the promise has taken different forms over the years, as God has struggled to remain faithful to the orneriest bunch of partners a deity ever had” (Gospel Medicine, pg. 31). 

All of these covenants are proof that God has bound God’s own being to the world. Sometimes we can feel trapped in our physical bodies, with the pain and limitations they bring. I’ve just returned from a visit with my mom and I am struck by how much the body can change in a year, how fragile it can be, how much it can hurt.

But we forget that God suffers too. In creating the world, God put divine creative energy into a physical form, and, just as parents do, in making it, had to let it go. When things are free, they will sometimes cause themselves terrible pain. 

Sometimes Noah’s ark is portrayed as a story of God’s anger and vengeance on the world. I’ve heard ministers say they like this story least among the Bible stories; it is too raw, too crude. But I don’t read it that way. I see the pain: the waves crashing over the earth, the destruction. But I read this as God grieving creation gone awry, and trying to rebuild from what is there, rather than completely start anew. 

If there is pain in the world, God has promised, by contract, by covenant, to share in it. God has promised to be faithful to the orneriest bunch of partners a deity has ever had. To be in solidarity with us. To meet our worst tendencies, tendencies which Jesus himself experienced, with forgiveness and compassion. To tie us back together again when we fray, and to continue to hold us together body and soul, humans and the earth, person to person, creation to our God, and all by God’s unerring grace. Thanks be to God for the first promise, and for the promise that sustains us, that we are loved. Amen.

2.28.21: What’s in a Name

Abigail Diehl-Noble

A name is a powerful thing. It matters if people get our names right: we want to be known as who we really are. When our identity changes in big ways, we often choose to rename ourselves--in formal ways, like when we change a name at marriage, or informal ways, taking on a new nickname. When people take the time to know our names, to say and even spell them correctly, we feel known and respected. When people misname us, we feel that something about us is not seen. 

It takes real grace to handle being misnamed, and strength to insist on the name by which we want to be called. In the school in which I teach, we had for many years a brilliant and energetic gym teacher from South Africa. His name was Mr. Moruthane, a surname that was unfamiliar to most of the children he taught. Some slightly cheeky middle schoolers began to call him Mr. M, taking the easy road with a longer name, and probably also feeling like they were showing how close they were to a teacher they liked. His response was wonderful. “Children,” he said. “I can see it is hard for you to remember my name. I think it will be easier when you feel its rhythm. To feel the rhythm, you should say my whole name. From now on, I would like you to call me by my full name: Mr. Mashbonae Ezekial Moruthane. Let’s say it together.” They said it until they all had it, and while he eventually let them leave out the middle name, for the rest of his time at the school, he was known and called by his first and last name, plus title. No shortcuts taken or allowed. Long before Black Lives Matter, Mr. Mashobane Ezekial Moruthane educated children in Vermont about white privilege and the importance of calling all people, but particularly black people, by their full names and with titles of respect. 

The importance of a name was not lost on the storytellers and writers of the Bible. From the first chapter of the first book, it’s clear that names are so powerful they actually draw creation into being. The first creation story, the one which in God creates the earth in six days, has God naming each thing as it is made, as if it’s not complete until it has a name. In the second creation story, the one about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the name God gives to the “earth creature” (adam) tells us that humanity came “from the earth” (adamah). Over and over in Scripture, God is said to know the names of God’s people. God often changes people’s names, showing a radical change in that person’s identity. Jacob becomes Israel, and Saul becomes Paul. 

And so Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah. Abram shifts from being “a high father,” the meaning of Abram, to Abraham, “father of a multitude or many nations.” The change emphasizes God’s promise to Abraham that he will have more descendents than there are stars in the sky, or grains of sand on the beach. 

Sarai, meanwhile, shifts from being “my princess” to Sarah, meaning simply “princess.” Her identity moves from being in association with someone else to being her own. She is her own story and God treats her independently, if interdependently, from Abram. The interdependent promise, “I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her,” is followed by the independent promise, “I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” God makes a covenant with Sarai and marks it with a new name that reflects her new status. She is a princess. She will raise nations and kings. She is blessed by God for herself, for God’s purposes, and for the generations that will come from her. 

These are the names by which these two, the mother and father of nations and kings, will be known for all time. These names redefine their identities, give them a calling, and reorient their lives. These names stick; they will never be lost. It is their names that identify Abraham and Sarah as righteous before God. As God did for Abraham and Sarah, God names each of us for who we truly are.

Most of us don’t get our names directly from God as these members of the Great Family did. Instead, our parents give us our names, investing their hopes and dreams for us into the words by which they will call us. As all parents know, those dreams don’t usually work out exactly as we expect. Parenting isn’t like ordering from a menu: I’d like one well-behaved child who will love to read and play the cello. That might have been my order! I got three fabulous children, each so different from each other and from me and Chris in some ways, and yet so recognizably ours in other ways. I thank God everyday that I couldn’t get exactly what I thought I wanted, because my life would be so much poorer for it. And still, in their names--each was named after a saint--we placed our hopes for them to have a rich life and a deep connection to their God, no matter what they do.

My own name, Abigail, is from the Hebrew, and means "father's joy." I don't know if he knew it's origins, but my dad himself chose it for me, overruling my mother's vote for "Leslie." Many of you know my dad left my family when I was 12, and I did not see him again in life after I was 18. At his funeral, when I was reunited with a whole side of my family, I told the story of his naming me and how much it means to me. In some way, in spite of our separation, I feel marked by my dad’s love and hopes for me through my name. 

Christians are also marked, named in our flesh, as God’s own. Baptism is a physical sign of our true identities. Our names are stated at our baptism, and are written in the book of eternity. But we know that God doesn’t need the act of baptism to claim us; we are God’s own from the beginning. According to the Bible, God names us as creatures in whom God delights, names us in the womb, calls us precious, and says we are utterly known and loved (Isaiah 49:1; John 10:14-15). You are utterly known and loved. 

Whoever we may think we are on our bad days (dirty, shameful, broken, a hot mess), God knows who we really are, and calls us to live into the name that God has given us. To know our true name is to turn toward it and live it. To be named is to be called. Thanks be to God for our names, this life, and the sense of purpose that is our birthright. For all these things, let us say, Amen. 

2.7.21: When We Are All Prophets

This passage from Isaiah that we heard today is some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible. But it is more than beauty. It is a blueprint for how to live when everything important has been taken away from you, and then given back in a form you can’t recognize. It’s a message for how to live through unimaginable change with God at the center.

We know from our children’s message that prophets are people who come close to God, and God comes close to them. So prophets often have important messages for people going through great change. And I would say, for those of us living in a once-in-a-century pandemic, at the end of a period of Christian history, we all qualify as a people going through great change. 

In this passage from Isaiah, the prophet speaks God’s message to the people when they are at the end of a long exile in Babylon, when the Jews are allowed to go back to Jerusalem, the city from which they were banished 50 years ago. This is good news, a fantastic homecoming, a long awaited return.

But there is a problem. The beloved homeland has been devastated, flattened in the Babylonian attack and never rebuilt by the conquerors. Rebuilding is up to the Jews, who are returning with nothing but what they can carry, as refugees must. There are no walls, no protections left. In fact, the Bible tells us that people had to cast lots to see who would live there, so little did anybody want to return.

Since no full-scale war has come to the United States since the Civil War, our own imaginations might struggle to create a picture of such a city. But we have at least ancestral memory of Pearl Harbor, and we have 9/11, and the fear and sense of loss that Ground Zero invokes. I have a memory of visiting Dresden, a city in Eastern Germany, in 1992, three years after the Berlin Wall fell, and seeing large swathes of a city that were left in rubble 45 years after the war. I remember the feeling of seeing modern skyscrapers next to burned rock, and feeling almost dizzy with the sense of disconnect between the two. And I have a dream to visit Kabul, the jewel of Afghanistan, a city placed in the Hindu Kush mountains, and called the highest capital in the world. It is 3,500 years old. That means it was first built about a 1000 years before the Jews were forced into Captivity in Babylon; Kabul was ancient even then. And this gorgeous, cultured city was almost destroyed in our lifetime, by civil war in the 1990s from which many Afghanis fled here, to the United States. From late 2001 the city has been continuously rebuilt, and now, just as they have through every war and reconstruction, children play in rubble and new construction happens around them. An immigrant acquaintance in Burlington who comes from Afghanistan and grew up during the war told me that cemeteries were his playgrounds; he and his friends would meet there for ballgames and snowball fights, because these were not prime targets of any of the fighting factions.

And so the cycle of humans people building up the most amazing culture and tearing it down continues, as it has from ancient times. We keep coming back to a place where we want to strip away protections from the people we fear, bring them right down to the ground, and build up walls around ourselves to protect from the attacks we are sure are coming. We think if we can break down enough of the enemy's defense, we will be safe. And the children play in the rubble we leave. 

So, you see why I love this ancient book, the Bible, so much, because I think it tells us a lot about ourselves and the raw material God is trying to work with. And so, in this old story of captivity from Isaiah, the Jewish people were invited to go back to their burned out and empty city. And they had some of the same questions the Hebrews had had when Moses led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness. They said the equivalent of: “Really? Are you kidding me?” They wondered to each other if it was better to live in captivity and be fed. 

The thing people had yearned for is not as sweet as they had hoped. In fact, it is tainted with sorrow, as every change is. 

And then God comes into this situation. And we have to think, which face of God are we dealing with here, because God is many things: Parent, Brother, Justice Maker, Holy Spirit. The God Isaiah writes about is glorious, majestic, and eternal. The rhythm of the words in this passage spirals up, creating a picture of strength. Words like “foundations” and “circles” are used over and over again. Just before the passage that we heard today, there is another picture I want to share with you. It describes a mighty God indeed, and all of us in relation to that God.

It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. -

I love this message, because some days, I definitely feel like a grasshopper. I am aware that this world is fleeting, and my time in it more fleeting still. I make noise, but I am not sure if it can be heard or if it matters. And yet, when I feel most defeated, I can go out at night, because we live in rural Vermont and we can see the stars, and I can be restored. A great city like Dresden or Kabul can be laid to waste in a few weeks. But the stars keep turning, as if indeed, God called them each out by name. 

The stars are there for us, too, who are blessed not to live in the middle of a war zone, but who are living through a massive cultural change that is stripping away much of what we knew. If before the pandemic you loved socializing, or singing, or communicating through touch; if you had a restaurant, or you have children, your life is very different than it was. It’s more different still, and much harder, for people who live and lived close the financial edge. Many of them have fallen off a cliff, and they can’t find a way back up. 

And for us in this church, and many churches across the land, we are looking a cliff too. Christianity still has some sway in parts of this country, but not in the part we live, and it isn’t really the dominant cultural force anymore in the United States. Through most of the 1900s, 70% of all Americans attended a place of worship weekly. That began to drop rapidly starting in the 1970s, and today, about 20% of Americans attend church weekly, and the number continues to drop. Other values and pastimes have taken the place of church. God didn’t go anywhere, nor did people’s need for the eternal presence, but most people find God outside of the walls of the church now, and it looks like new ways of being together around God are rising up to reflect this shift.

We are part of this big change, and that’s reflected in the reality that we as a church are running out of money. In this vibrant little community, we have about 18 months to 2 years left to fund what we are doing now. This is true even as we make stronger connections than we’ve ever had to the community around us, as we deepen our prayer life and continue to support each.

So, what do we do?

To me, the whole book of Isaiah seems to be meant for the old, or at least the middle aged. It doesn’t have a lot to say to the idealistic hopefulness of the young. That stage of life is precious too, and the Lord knows, we need the strength of youth to do the rebuilding. Because God makes clear, even though it’s not going to be easy, and even though God hints that it all might be in vain, going back and rebuilding is exactly what the people must do. In the end, of course, that second Jerusalem will also be conquered, and the people will be scattered again, and again. But the people must try.

The youth, I suspect, have to believe that this time will be the last time, that what they are building will be for all time. The old know that only God builds permanence; everything that humans do is temporary. But we keep building anyway, because God is our foundation. And we try to learn how not to destroy so much.

Isaiah seems to favor this more world weary view; he suggests those who take the slow road will go farther in the end. He contrasts those who rely on the Lord, who will “run and not be weary,” with boys and men in their prime, who will “faint” and “fall exhausted.”

And the book of Ezra recounts that when the Jews did return to Jerusalem, the foundations of the Second Temple were laid to replace the first temple which had been destroyed. “And many old people, who had seen the first temple on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this temple, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping.” 

The memories of the elderly were not merely nostalgia; they would have been useful to the returnees. Life in Mesopotamia, in Babylon, would have been so different. There, the refugees would have struggled to learn new ways and new languages; their children would have grown up in the new culture and it would have come easily to them. But when they went back, the older people would have remembered how and where things had been done in Judah, and that  would have been a significant contribution to the effort. The cadence of the passage’s verbs — they shall renew, they shall rise, they shall run, they shall walk — seems to carry us along, as perhaps the older generation carried the younger.

The closing description, “they shall rise up with wings like eagles” is the poetic heart of this passage, and reminds us again of the Exodus from Egypt. In that story, God tells the Hebrews: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” Now it is happening again. God’s people try to match God’s grace with their own efforts. It’s never enough, and yet it is. The Bible tells us from age to age, God hears the cries of God’s people and empowers them — in exhaustion, in oppression, and in moments of greatest need. 

And God’s prophets, the ones who carry the message about how to navigate the crisis, are very often old. They are channels for God, but their own life experience and their physical bodies are the raw material out of which God can shape a message. Their connection to God, which comes partly from their own effort to keep listening for God over a long period of time, makes them available for God’s word. And so, as we consider our future together, we can hold onto a few eternal truths: Our God is great.  Everything humans build comes to an end. God builds for all time. And we, we frail humans, are the stuff with which God builds. When the young get discouraged, we can encourage and remind them. Thank God for reminders, for prophets in unexpected places, for the dreams of youth and the wisdom of old age. In the name of God the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, and the creativity of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

1.3.21 Word Made Flesh

I’ve spent the last two weeks seeing really no one but my family. And I can confirm to you that I love them, and I love being a mom to tweens and teens. I can also tell you that living in a 900 square foot house for two weeks (one of which was too wet to spend a lot of time outside) really puts you in touch with people’s habits in a very physical way. For instance, I am reminded of how one child’s eyes positively spark when he is trying to provoke his siblings. And how another mutters when she’s getting tired. And the way another grunts when he’s conspicuously ignoring us to play video games. And I know they were reminded of all my peculiar habits too, like that blood sugar dip at 5:00 that means I either eat something or say something sharp that I just don’t need to say. 

When you live with people, when you occupy the same physical space and have to deal with each other’s needs, you get to know each other really well. It changes us. 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” 

Now “Word” here means something much more than the kind of words I’m speaking. The Greek is “Logos,” and it is probably better translated as “underlying order.” Catholic theologian Richard Rohr translates it as “blueprint.” So the blueprint for all creation, the map and the model, got a body, and came to live among us.

Each year when Christmas rolls around—and the season-of-Christmas following it, too—we hear these majestic and profound words from the opening of the gospel according to John.  It is a passage that, as one commentator puts it, “lifts [us] above history and into mystery.”  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But for all the mystery and majesty wrapped up in these poetic and powerful verses, they ultimately point to something very intimate… to the passion and love of God who desires both the risk and the reward of living among us, among humankind in all our creatureliness. Who has been trying to come to us for a long time, and who keeps knocking. 

You know I love the story of Mary and the baby Jesus, in all its raw human power. But today’s passage from John reminds us the first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just the moment when it became human and personal. That was when many people began to take God seriously about this personal connection God wants to have with us. 

But God had been among, with us, for a long time before that. Since time began, in fact. The first Incarnation actually happened around 14 billion years ago with “The Big Bang.” That is what we now call the moment when God decided to show up in a big way, at least in this universe. 

The first “idea” in the mind of God was to make what was creative chaos into something physical.  Love has to go somewhere with itself! I know God is not a grandma, but when I think of this mysterious spark that started the universe, the first reaction that began it all and that scientists can’t really explain, but I think of a grandma overcome with love who has to give her grandchild a squeeze. Deep love has to have an expression. And for the author of the universe, love was an outpouring of creative form. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”

And the light kept growing.

At Christmas, we don’t talk so much about the Big Bang. We are remembering two thousand years ago when God came again into the world to remind us of the terms of this partnership. But before there was Jesus there was light, water, land, sun, moon, stars, plants, trees, fruit, birds, serpents, cattle, fish, and “every kind of wild beast” according to the Genesis creation story (1:3-25). 

I have to think that the being that came to earth as Christ was there too, among the stars and the plants and all the creeping and crawling things. Not in the body of Jesus but in the spirit, the love and peace that we can feel in prayer.

Catholic theologian Richard Rohr calls this the “Cosmic Christ.” Through this Christ which is in all things, God lets us know a lot about what God’s like. Christ is not Jesus’ last name. It’s a title. It is our word for what Jesus came to personally reveal—the thing which is true all the time and everywhere.

And what is that thing? Just love. God’s boundless love for all creation, including, miracle of miracles, for us.

It seems like humans had not gotten this message, so Jesus had to come among us, although that message had been there all along.

Those of us who have been around Christianity and the church for a while, this whole business about Christmas and incarnation may seem like old hat.  But let us not forget how utterly countercultural it was 2,000 years ago, and how utterly countercultural it still remains today.  The birth of Jesus Christ, the living-among-us of God as one of us, it pierces through the dividing wall that most of us still try to put up between heaven and earth, between human and divine, between the supposedly “spiritual” and the material, between history and eternity.

It even puts an end to our need to go searching for something we presume to be distant and difficult.  “We do not need to search for God,” says one writer, “but only to recognize the one in whom God came to live among us and whose spirit remains in us.”  Or as the blessed and gifted preacher Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote, “God puts skin on those divine attributes [of grace and truth] so that followers who want to know how they sound and act have someone to show them.”

And that, my friends, is what happens each and every time we gather for Communion, too.  Here at the feast table of Christ, God puts some skin on all the divine promises of grace and love and new life, so that we who want to know what all of that sounds like and looks like and acts like and tastes like, we see it as bread is blessed and broken and given for us and for all.  

Here in the mystery and majesty of the Lord’s Supper, God pierces through the veil between heaven and earth, spiritual and material, history and eternity.  Here in the meal shared among us, God risks coming and dwelling among us in the flesh, full of grace and truth, once again.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.  To Christ be all the glory!

12.20.20: The Invisible, Protestant Mary

You all know I am a Waldorf teacher, though perhaps not exactly what that means. I will just share that Waldorf education is an artistic form of schooling, with music, painting, sculpture, handwork, woodwork, acting and drawing woven into all of the academics. We also spend a lot of time outdoors in nature. But most of all, it’s a spiritual education. It teaches about world cultures and the wisdom traditions of each. Right now, for instance, my third grade is in a Hebrew studies block and just finished celebrating Hanukkah.

But I tell you all this not to talk about Waldorf or even about our Jewish roots but to explain to you how I first came to know and love Mary, mother of Jesus. Even though I was raised in an evangelical community in Indiana, and went to youth group until I got too rebellious and snarky around age 15, and even though I memorized a LOT of Scripture in my youth, I knew nothing about Mary, because, well, Protestantism is not really down with the Mother of God. As my favorite UCC theologian, Mary Luti, says, “People don’t even think about Mary. In many ways, she’s just invisible.” And because I couldn’t see her, I missed her all my life without knowing it. 

So when I was introduced to Mary stories in my Waldorf training, it was like a chord vibrating inside of me, like a song I almost knew. When I was trained as a teacher 20 years ago--a long time ago--Waldorf education was still very Christian centered. It’s much more inclusive now, I am glad to say. But when I was being trained the stories and festivals we were given to share with the children were mostly Christian ones, and that was amazing for me, because I am Christian and it was like seeing my faith for the first time. It opened my heart. 

When I had last been formally taught about Christianity, I was among people who tried to counsel gay teeangers out of their sexual orientation, telling them they would spend eternity in suffering and never see their loved ones again if they did not turn from their sinful ways. And I saw what that did to my gay friends in the church. I was among people who shouted at women going into abortion clinics and told scared teenagers that God would punish them for killing their babies. Many of these people adored the pastors and charismatic youth group leaders in their churches and sometimes turned a blind eye to abuse and improprieties, holding abusive people up on a pedestal and allowing their actions  to continue. 

And because I lived with the people who did these things, who allowed bad things to happen, I know them to be mostly good people, loving people who were doing their best. Many of them would give you the shirt off their backs, they took care of their neighbors, they were striving and trying to follow Jesus. I never make the mistake of dismissing or hating them. But I know first hand the consequences of thinking that God is male, rule-bound, angry, and determined to punish bad human beings. I know first hand the results of giving too much power to men who claim to represent God and to be beyond the rules. That is the God I grew up with and went away from. And then, when I thought I was learning to be a teacher, I found Mary, and learned to be whole. 

To receive the stories and festivals, to paint illustrations of Bible stories, to make Advent wreaths and perform Christmas plays, and most of all, to hear the stories of a loving Mother Mary who cares for all humanity and even for me--this was a coming home for me. I realized that God was not a task master, not angry, and not a man. God is much bigger than us, and not limited by gender, and I can approach God in whatever way helps me to know Godself. And for me, a woman healing from trauma, a mother, a teacher, a pastor, Mary as one aspect of the divine is a powerful way to approach God. 

One of the things I realized on this journey is that feminine does not mean weak. Just think about Mary, for instance: a teenage Jewish girl from a peasant family, who turned up pregnant out of wedlock. Being put aside by her husband-to-be was the best she could hope for; public shame and death were distinct possibilities. 

Yet the angel Gabriel greets her as if she has just won the vocational lottery. As an unwed teenager from an insignificant town in an unimportant province of an occupied nation, Mary was an odd pick for the job of "mother of God."  How was her child going to save the world with such lackluster pedigree?

But God knew what God was doing, and gave Jesus a strong, fearless, gutsy woman for a mother. She was a woman who was willing to take big risks, lay down her life for God and shake her fist at Rome. In every way, Jesus would not have been Jesus without her. She reminds me of some strong women I know and love. Some are on the other side now, and some are still with us. I bet you can think of some strong women too.

In fact, strength is an absolute requirement of all mothers, and of everyone who engages in the caretaking of others. I had a powerful reminder of that this weekend when I was presiding at Mary Lu Hatstat’s funeral. Something I’ve noticed recently is that more women seem to act as pallbearers than I remember in my youth. I love this trend. At Mary Lu’s funeral, one of her daughters and all three of her grand-daughters helped carry the casket. Lee, the funeral director, was clearly a little worried about them slipping in the ice and snow. “Hold steady, there,” he said to them. Page, Sally May’s daughter, who looked to be in her early 20s, said firmly, “We’ve got this.” And they did. They were proud to be carrying their grandma, and they were not going to let her go until it was time. 

That’s what Mary, and the other women around Jesus, did too. Mary birthed Jesus, raised him, watched him take a hard path that was his to take, and watched him die. It would certainly have been women’s work to prepare his body after death, if the authorities allowed this at all. Mary would have been there. Love that can bear so much is love I know can wrap all the way around me. It understands my fear, my grief, my shame, and it loves me all the way through anyway.

Today, I still visualize Mary’s cloak when I am in distress. I imagine its warm blue folds enfolding me, and the queer and gender creative kids I know who are finding their identities, and the teenagers who are making mistakes and learning how to be in the world, and the adults who are sure they are right and the ones who have no idea what is right or what to do. Mary’s cloak of sky and stars enfolds us all and her love shows us the way to the heart of Jesus. 

12.13.20 A Feast of Light

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, and the fourth day of Hanukkah. It’s no coincidence that these two festivals of light are placed right In the midst of the darkness. They remind us of a miracle so ordinary we can hardly remember it: that the light returns, the earth will be warm again, and all hard things have an end. As we light the first candle on our Advent wreath, the Jewish community lights the first candle of the menorah, we celebrate the much needed gift of joy. A gift that has been celebrated for centuries. As Isaiah proclaims, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

There are so many reasons to know about the Jewish heritage that is part of our history. Perhaps the most important is that that Jesus, whom we worship, was a devout Jew. The one whom Christians have called through the centuries – the Messiah, Lord and Savior, Son of God and son of David – born a Jew, raised a Jew, and died a Jew. His world was one of the Torah and the Law and Jewish festivals.

Are you familiar with Hanukah and the lighting of the menorah? Although Hanukkah is considered a “minor” Jewish festival, it ranks as one of the most beloved Jewish holidays, full of light and family celebration. Hanukkah (known as the Festival of Lights) is not mentioned in the Bible. The historical events upon which the celebration is based are recorded in Maccabees I and II, two books contained within a later collection of writings known as the Apocrypha.

Here is that story:

More than 2000 years ago there lived a powerful but wicked king of Syria whose name was Antiochus. Antiochus ruled an enormous empire of many different lands. One of these countries was the entire land of Israel. There is a saying that “the ways of the wicked are like deep darkness,” and this was certainly true of Antiochus, for he was so cruel that he made it a very dark time, a scary time, and a sad time for everyone who lived in his kingdom. 

Antiochus thought he was a god, so he ordered statues of himself to be placed in every town in the land. He wanted people to bow down to his statue and worship him with all the other Greek gods. If the people refused, he would order his soldiers to take their swords and kill them on the spot. The only religion that was allowed was the religion of Antiochus. 

Imagine--there could be no more Jewish holidays, or celebrations, no Temple in Jerusalem. As his first order, Antiochus commanded the great Temple, built by King Solomon and dedicated to God, to be destroyed. He ordered his soldiers to tear it apart, burn the Torah scrolls, and erect a statue of Antiochus.

One day, Antiochus’s soldiers came to a small town not from Jerusalem called Modin. Many faithful Jews lived there. The soldiers rode big black horses and brought gigantic carts with them. In the carts were statues of Antiochus The soldiers lifted the statues out of the cartsa dn began to place them all around the town. The People of Modin gathered around the carts to see what the soldiers were doing. The captain of the guards announced to them: “Antiochus orders all the poel in Modin to assemble tomorrow morning in the center of town. You will bring gifts to the god Antiochus and bow down to his statues. You will kiss the feet of the statue and take an oath to worship him.”

When the Jews in Modin heard this, they were terrified. “What shall we do?” they cried. “We are Jews! We have only one God: the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, God of Jacob and Rachel and Leah. We cannot worship other gods. But if we refuse, the soldiers will kill us.”

The next day, everyone in Modin came to the center of town. The soldiers were there, sharpening their swords. The captain called out his orders: “Everyone line up! Line up before your new god, Antiochus!”

The Jews did as they were told.

“You there,” called out the captain. “You are the first in line. Come up here and kiss the feet of the god Antiochus.”

Slowly, the first person in line came forward. But just as he did, a man ran in front of him and blocked his way. It was Mattathias, one of God’s priests. 

“No Jew will ever bow down to an idol,” Mattathias declared. “Our God is not Antiochus. We have only one God, and we will not let you take away our holidays, our rituals and our temple.”

Mattathias stood right in front of the captain as he spoke. His words made the captain turn red with anger and shake with rage. The captain seized his sword to slay Mattathias, but Mattathias swiftly pulled a knife from under his robe and stabbed the captain first.

“Let all who want to fight follow me!” shouted Mattathias as he ran through the town. And before Antiochus’s guards knew what was happening, Mattathias had escaped with his sons and other Jews.

Antiochus was enraged when he heard what had happened in Modin. “Who does Mattathias think he is?” he barked. So he sent troops to find Mattathias and throw him in prison. But Mattathias was hard to find. He and his followers were hiding in the caves of the Judean hillside, which they knw so well. Their small group was led by one of Mattthias’s five sons, Judah, who was a very clever leader. Whenever Antiochus’s soldiers passed by, Judah and his men would leap from their hiding places and shout, “There is no God but the one God!” With all their heavy armor, shields, and spears, the soldiers could move only very slowly, and by the time they recovered from the surprise attack, Judah and his men would have disappeared back into the hills.

As word spread of Judah and his group, they came to be known as the Maccabees, meaning “hammers,” because they pounced on their enemies like a hammer hits a nail, and then fled before their foes knew what had hit them. Judah and his men would be gone. 

Antiochus tried many times to defeat the Maccabees, but each time Judah outsmarted him and won the battle. Finally Antiochus knew he was defeated. He had lost too many good soldiers. So Antiochus took what remained of his armies away from the land of Judea. The Maccabees had won!

Though Antiochus was gone, signs of his fury remained. He had destroyed so many things in Judea. He had even defiled the old Temple in Jerusalem.

Judah Macabee and his men wept when they saw the Temple. There was garbage everywhere. Pigs and other animals had been killed there. The beautiful curtains had been ripped and slashed. The Torah scrolls lay torn and burned. In the middle of the sanctuary lay the temple’s magnificent menorah, overturned, with all the oil spilled from its cups.

Judah Maccabee suddenly blasted his trumpet. “Look what I have found!” he called. In his hand was a small jar. “It is oil,” he said, “the pure oil that our priests used to light the great menorah. There is not very much inside, but we will use what we have.”

He moved to the menorah to set it upright. Carefully, he poured the oil into one of its cups and lit the wick. A beautiful flame arose. It flickered, then glowed. The Maccabees were inspired by the flame burning in the menorah again. 

“God is here with us,” said Judah. “This is God’s flame, and this temple is God’s house. Let us make it fit for God to visit again.”

Judah and his men worked very hard to clean up the Temple. They polished the silver cups and candlesticks. They pulled the weeds from the earthen floor. They washed the walls and the floors, mended the curtains, and rebuilt the Ark for the Torah. This took them many days, and all the while, as they worked, the flame in the Menorah continued to burn. The flame burned for eight days. No one thought it would last for more than a few hours--maybe a day at most. The Maccabees wondered at this flame lasting so long. There was only the oil from one small jar. But a miracle occurred and the flame burned for eight days. It kept them company, as if God were working alongside them. 

Finally, on the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev, 165, the Temple was finished and rededicated to God. This is what Hanukkah means: determination, grit, resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. A light that should have been snuffed out but instead, was rekindled. May we be that light. 

I close with a poem that speaks to our hopes in this dark time. 

A Hanukkah Prayer for a Time of Darkness

by Marla Baker

Creator of All,

In the beginning You made the night sky luminous with the light of the moon and the stars and

You made the daytime bright with the light of the sun and

Saw that it was good.

And You created human beings in Your own image, with capacity

To distinguish dark from light, with capacity

To create holy sparks, see into the shadows and

Shine light where it is dark.

And You saw that it was very good.

Creator of All and Rock of Ages,

In the time of the Maccabees once more You worked a miracle of light,

Permitting our ancestors to rededicate holy space.

And it lasted eight days and eight nights.

Creator of All and Rock of Ages,

In the dark of night, at the darkest time of year

We light candles in remembrance of the miracle,

One more each night until there are eight.

Creator of All and Rock of Ages,

Too many lights have been extinguished.

The world has grown too dark.

Creator of Light and Dark,

Teach us once more to see into the shadows,

To shed our light in all the dark corners and to

Create holy sparks for all humankind

So that once more we can say

It is very good.

11.15.20 Veteran’s Day Sermon: The Mark of Cain

Veterans Day, originally called Armistice Day, began as a commemoration of the ending of World War I on November 11, 1918. It was, for 30 years, a day to pray and work for peace. After World War II it was recognized as a day to pay tribute to all service members and in 1954, in the United State, it became known as Veterans Day, and almost all the emphasis on removing the causes of war were forgotten.

This is sad, because Christianity has so much to say about peace, and about what war does to human beings, and about how we might work together to heal its ravages. We know that conflict between people is ancient, as ancient as we are. The Bible is full of stories about conflict and war, and about the many ways these end up harming us. One of the first in the Bible is the story of Cain and Abel.

In the Book of Genesis, Cain and Abel are the first two sons of Adam and Eve. Cain, the firstborn, is a farmer, and his brother Abel is a shepherd. The brothers make sacrifices to God, each of his own produce, but God favors Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. This is only the first story of intense sibling rivalry in the Bible! Cain is enraged and murders his brother. God, who can be a trickster in the Hebrew Bible, tests Cain by asking him where his brother is. Cain denies knowing because he is, he says, not his brother’s keeper. God condemns Cain to a life of wandering as a marked sinner.

In this story, the consequences of murder on the community and on the murderer are graphic and clear: Abel’s blood “cries out” from the soil, and Cain is condemned to be a restless wanderer, a mark on his forehead, never resting because of his sin.

This is a strong picture of something that happens inside us when we do, or are forced to do, something that we know is wrong. It is one of the many injuries that has gone unrecognized until recent times, or at least, unnamed. This is called moral injury. 

Moral injury is a relatively recent term used to describe a crisis that soldiers have faced for centuries, the internal suffering that results from doing something against your moral code. In essence it is a wound to the conscience. It is a broken spirit, a shredded soul. And that is why I am here, talking to you about it today in church. Because chances are you know someone with a broken or damaged soul. Our God, the God of Love, does not intend for this to happen, and does want anyone to stay in this condition  And religions, all religions, have practices that help, whatever faith you believe in, or whether you believe in any God at all.

You might be wondering what moral injury looks like, how you could know someone who has it. It’s important to know, it isn’t just soldiers that experience this problem. Anyone who works with at-risk populations has probably seen that empty stare that can be moral injury.

I have seen it in abused children. People in poverty. People struggling with addiction. People whose daily lives and their choices erode their feeling of being a good and decent person, worthy of respect. People who carry unprocessed grief and guilt in ordinary life. 

People with stressful life-and-death type situational jobs such as police officers, doctors and nurses, and yes, even veternarians and animal rescue workers, who, I learned recently, have a suicide rate twice the national average. Because of things we do, witness, are ordered to do, or fail to do in high stakes situations, we can lose our moral foundations and our sense of being a good person.

Moral injury can happen to anyone. We all know people who have violated deeply and truly held moral beliefs: a doctor addicted to drugs steals them from his office; a police chief who is arrested for drunk driving; a mother living in poverty who abandons her children; a social worker who fabricates documents for fear of losing her job; an expectant mother who has to abort a pregnancy that endangers her life; a minister who has an affair with a parishioner; a train conductor who fails to see a warning light and crashes his train.

It is deeply true that we human beings cannot live the lives we are able to envision; we cannot always bring ourselves to live as we hope to live. Sometimes our life circumstances are so constrained, our choices are limited too. Sometimes we begin with small errors that lead to greater ones. Sometimes we do things in desperation that in no way reflect our values. Moral injury afflicts ordinary moral people, when no good choice is possible, where people must use the power they have to act, knowing they will cause harm, or violate their own core moral values. In those situations we actually don't lose our moral conscience, but in judging ourselves, we become both betrayer and betrayed. We can come completely adrift, without the identity we thought we had. We wander the world, very much like Cain wandering the world, feeling marked by the wrong he had done. 

In war, the moral injury is often at its most extreme: it's your job to do those things that violate everything you were ever taught is wrong. In such situations, a soul can become divided against itself.

When I encountered this term for the first time, I felt I knew it, because I have lived with it. I know I’ve talked about my dad a few times recently, but one of the few things he said to me about the Vietnam War is that the hardest things to forget are the things you didn’t want to do.

Now I am awake to moral injury, and I see it as part of living as a human being. Because we forget that God is our only source of true comfort, security, and joy, we can easily hurt each other in an attempt to make ourselves safe. Helping people heal from this hurt begins by noticing: loving our neighbor, or family member, as ourself, and seeing their pain is the first step. Being a witness to moral injury allows the hurting person to know they are not alone. After that, there is a long and varied road to healing. Faith communities are often a major support to those who suffer. Rituals, arts, and telling our story can all help.  

If we remember the morally injured on this Veterans Day, then perhaps we can also take a moment to examine our ideas about goodness.  In a Christian community, this means something much bigger than holding ourselves and other people to strict rules of conduct. In fact, it is the opposite of that, since Jesus was always breaking the religious rules of his time in order to reach out to those in need, and being condemned by those in power for doing so.

Instead of being rule followers and rule enforcers, this Veteran’s Day, let us strive for the humility and compassion that Jesus embodied. Rather than condemn people for what they have done wrong, or what we think they have done wrong, let us offer a vision of the wholeness that we know God intends for everyone. May we be a source of restoration, support and strength to those who are suffering, as Christ was a healing force in all situations.  This Veteran’s Day, let us hear our Savior’s call to offer healing and grace to those who suffer from wrongs done to them, and from the wrongs they have done to others. In Jesus name, Amen.

11.8.20 Strange Blessings

Did you know that there are two sermons on the mount? Most of the time when people say the "Sermon on the Mount," they are talking about the Beatitudes, the list of blessed people that we talked about last week. People really like that sermon on the Mount. It offers hope to the hopeless and assures people that God is present even in the most dire of situations. Today's scripture is a sermon on a mount, too, just a different sermon on a different mount. People are often a little less sure what to do with this sermon on this mountain. It is a different mountain, and the sermon has a very different tone. Where the Beatitudes have hope, the parable of the late-arriving groom has warning.  Where the Beatitudes have compassion for the dispirited, this parable has stingy bridesmaids. It is a much darker section of scripture, one in which lay people and preachers alike stumble. For example, I listen to this preaching podcast every week as I prepare for Sunday, and this week, none of the scholars really was excited to talk about this sermon on the mount. And, these people are biblical scholars and preaching professors. What should we do with it? 

I can't say that I blame people for wanting to avoid this parable. It reminds me a lot of that other strange wedding party story from Scripture we heard a few weeks ago. That party was the story of the wedding banquet where none of the fancy people wanted to come, so the king killed all the ungrateful guests, and invited all the street-people to the party. Then, the king got mad at the guy who wasn't dressed right and threw him out. Jesus does tell some strange tales, doesn’t he?

Here, though, instead of an unstable king, in this story we have an unreasonable groom who was very late to his own wedding and then won't let in the bridesmaids who had to go get more oil because they used more than they thought they would need. And we know why they used more than they thought they needed. Because the groom was late to his own wedding. This guy is not a sympathetic character! And where is the bride in this whole thing? Wouldn't she want them to be let in? And, why didn't the other bridesmaids share with them?  Isn't this parable supposed to be about the empire of heaven? Didn't Jesus consistently tell his followers to share with those who do not have enough? These people are really stingy. How does this bad behavior translate into the empire of heaven? 

And, you know what else strikes me as strange? Jesus seems to tell the disciples that the meaning of this parable is to "Stay Awake therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour." But everyone in this story fell asleep. All ten of the bridesmaids, the five who are called foolish and the five who are called wise, fell asleep. The five who have too much oil still get into the party even though they fell asleep. 

If I read this story, without the explanation at the end, I would think Jesus was telling people to prepare better--to store up more than you think you would need. And, don't share with the people who don't work as hard as you. I would read this parable like it was the old Aesop's fable, the one with the ant and the grasshopper. The ant works hard all summer to save up for the winter and the grasshopper merely plays. The grasshopper says that the ant is dull and boring, and goes on with his frivolity. The ant goes about her work and come winter, the ant is cozy in her hill, knitting and eating sunflower seeds while the foolish grasshopper, filled with remorse, starves. And, the ant sure as heck doesn't offer to share. The grasshopper should have known better.  

The moral of that fable is definitely "Be prepared." But, Jesus didn't tell his disciples to be prepared. He told them to "Keep Awake." Some might argue that preparedness and wakefulness are closely linked. Usually the people who are most prepared for every contingency are the ones who are also paying the most attention to what is going on. They are alert. 

But Jesus seemed to draw a distinction. He specifically called for wakefulness, not preparedness. Alertness, not hoarding of stuff. Now, both sets of bridesmaids do a poor job at wakefulness. Everyone falls asleep. Why wouldn't they? The groom was taking forever. When he actually showed up, all of the women were startled awake. They seem to panic. The supposedly wise ones have such a sense of scarcity that they can't share with the supposedly foolish ones. And, the supposedly foolish ones are so distracted by the things they lack, that is oil, that they forget what their primary role is... that is to greet the bridegroom with great joy. So they go search for what they think they lack and ignore the greater task to which they are called.  

What if they had managed to stay awake? How could the story have been different? So, the groom is later and later. The bridesmaids are getting tired, but they are here for the party and here to welcome the groom and don't want to miss him. So, they do everything they can to stay awake. Someone brews some coffee. They start sharing stories about how they know the bride and groom. Maybe they bond over their dresses and feeling put upon because the groom is so late. And, then, one of the bridesmaids, the groom's first cousin, tells one of the other bridesmaids that she's not surprised the groom is late. He's always late. That's why she brought extra oil. She knew he couldn't be on time. Four other bridesmaids, all family of groom, nod their heads in agreement. He does this all the time. He'll probably be late for his own funeral. God bless the woman who's going to marry him.  

The five bridesmaids from the bride's side are mortified. They will run out of oil. It is so late. There is no way they can get to the store in time to buy more. Someone suggests, "Hey... why don't you just put out your lamps now? Save the oil for when he actually comes. Who knows when that will be." So they put out their lamps and continue with their coffee and chatting. When they hear the shout, "Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!," all the bridesmaids help re-tie ribbons that have come undone and smooth their dresses. And, the bridesmaids who don't have very much oil find that they have just enough to greet the groom. The bridesmaid who brought more than they needed have made new friends with whom they are very happy to finally be able to celebrate. And, the groom... well, the groom still has the bride to deal with. We've yet to see how that turns out.

When the bridesmaids have the opportunity to stay awake together, they may have the opportunity to get to know one another, to build community. They learn to see one another as more than know-it-alls and ill-prepared idiots. They can teach and support one another. And, they have the opportunity to make the waiting more bearable for one another. One of the most difficult things about waiting is feeling like you are doing it alone. Had these women been able to stay awake, maybe they could have made the waiting easier for each other.  

Several of the scholars I read this week pointed out that, in this story, one can see Jesus identifying what will become a central aspect of Christianity.... waiting. We are a people who so often live in a sense of expectation. We may dedicate our time to worship, prayer, and service. But, we are always waiting. From the time of the first followers of Christ, we have been waiting. This week, we have been waiting in our civic life too, waiting for ballots to be counted, waiting anxiously to see how our nation will respond to the stress of our divisions. Those of us who work at the hospital or have had tests done recently have also been waiting for things to get back online after the cyber attack at UVM. And all of us are waiting for a return to a more normal life, if not quite the same life, post pandemic. So much waiting.

We could spend our time preparing, storing up things to make sure that we get into the party. We could show up with just what we have and hope that we won't have to wait too long. The thing is, we're probably going to be waiting longer than we expected. We don't know when things will get better, or when the fullness of God will arise here on earth. Even as we contribute to it, work to build it up with God, we do not know when it could be complete. And, we may grow weary as we wait. We're probably going to fall asleep. But, if we pay attention to the people around us, we may find some unsuspected partners who can help us to stay awake to new encounters with the Divine. We may find compatriots in our journey, others who are waiting, watching, and serving, too. We can find friends who will elbow us if we nod off. If we can stay awake, maybe we can learn to be less afraid of having enough and learn to keep focused on what is actually our true calling to begin with, to welcome with great joy the one who invited us to the party in the first place.  

I don't think Jesus calls us to be stingy bridesmaids or hyper-vigilant ants. Jesus just wants us to stay awake. Even in the midst of tension and world woes, a celebration is happening all around us. We don't want to sleep through it or panic and exclude some people who want just as badly to be there as we do. So, stay awake. We don't want to miss the best part.   

10.25.20 Stewardship Sermon

I am going to talk about money today.

And I am really sorry about that.

But, this is not a bad thing, I promise!  Like many of us, I have a complicated story around money. In my family there was some, and then there really, really, wasn’t, and being a Midwesterner, you definitely didn’t talk about it. So I had a lot of angst around this part of being a pastor.

But then, in one of my courses, I worked with a professor who specialized in  nonprofit leadership and taught a course on church administration.  I told him I hated asking for money and he smiled and told me he loved asking for money.  He explained that he only ever asked for money for organizations that he was truly passionate about.  And, in asking a person to donate to that organization, he was asking them to be part of the mission of the organization, knowing that beyond any kind of financial support they might give, there was a good chance their lives might also be changed along the way.

So even though I am going to talk about money today, it really is not all about the money; it is about changing lives – our lives.

Because here is the thing, New Haven Congregational Church – I completely believe in this church.  I believe it has the power to change people’s lives, both inside our walls and in our little town of New Haven in Addison County and beyond.  I believe this church has the ability to live out the Gospel in a way that is relevant and real. That the people here mean it when they say they love their neighbor, and they do it.  I believe people here are serious about being part of the Body of Christ and doing church together, and they want to get other people excited about it too.

Together.

Together.

I’m reminded of a passage from Acts: 

All the believers were one in heart and mind.  No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.

Acts 4:32

That sounds pretty radical, right? And not exactly the way we do things in New England! Here, every person’s property is important. A man’s house is his castle, his land and its boundaries are to be respected. And yet. And yet we know there are some things that are more important than that: in our New England past, the church was often the first building to be built in the town, even before people made their own permanent homes. And in our New England present, people might not share everything in common, but they sure do help each other at every rough patch. 

And what I take from this is that, as a church, we are stronger together than we are separately.  We are more than simply the sum of our parts; we are the Body of Christ.

And that means something.

It means something in the life of our church and it means something in the lives of each and every one of us sitting here.

We all have our own stories about this. About the times someone brought meals when a family member was sick, the calls when a child was injured or in trouble, the quiet help that came when someone got laid off. My own stories include the sweet outpouring from the women in my church when I experienced a series of miscarriages. I still feel like the love and food I received in those hard times tasted like Heaven as much as I can know it on this earth. 

And do you remember the church potlucks and the church dinners in the era before COVID?  We’d go into an event or a meal worried that there would not be enough food for everyone and then five minutes later we had to set up another table because we were running out of space.

People always ask me how this happens and the truth is, I have no idea; it can only be described as grace.

But here is what I do know:  When we had these loaves and fishes moments, they never happened because of one person.  No doubt there were a few food superstars, but the abundance happened as a community – because we are better together.

Together, we can take morsels of food and feed a crowd that has gathered.  Together, we can create a space in this church where all people feel welcome, where we all have a safe space to learn and grow in our faith.  Together, we can worship God and teach others that the Gospel is a story that is still worth telling.  Together, we can change people’s lives, our own included.  Together, we can do the impossible.

And that is why I love this season of Thanksgiving and stewardship. That is why I am excited to ask people for money and to prayerfully consider their level of giving for the upcoming year.

Because we are stronger together than we are as separate units.  The offerings that we give to this church have more of an impact when they are combined with everyone else’s than they ever would if they were on their own.  We have the capacity to make a real difference here, not only to help sustain this church, but to help it thrive in the years to come.

Something really special is happening here, at the church.  Momentum is building; I can feel it in the very depths of my soul.  I believe that God has a vision for this church in this town.

This morning marks the begin of our official stewardship season and I am humbly asking you a few things:

1. Please look for our church mailing this week and pray over what its message means to you.

2. Consider increasing your pledge. Think about the impact that even a small increase in your pledge would have on this church if we all did that together.

3. Also consider including this church in your planning for your 

However you pledge, however you give, however you donate and however you serve – thank you.  You are the reason that we are better together.

Thanks be to God!

Amen.

10.11.20 Let the Little Children
I love doing christenings. It’s probably one of my favorite things about being a minister. I love them, not only because they are such a celebration of life, but because when I have the honor of holding that child in my hands, I’m keenly aware that they have their whole lives before them,  a life of stories they are living into.  

Today we mark the celebration of the Children’s Sabbath as a way of honoring the presence of children in our congregation. The Children’s Sabbath was started in 1992 by the Children’s Defense Fund as a way to educate people about the urgent needs of our country’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens and celebrate the gift of the presence of children in our lives. We give thanks for all that our children have and we remain keenly aware of all that some children do not have.

We see that complexity, that tension, in our story today. The presence of children creates quite a stir for the disciples and quite a teaching moment for Jesus. He is in the middle of speaking to a crowd of people when a group of parents bring their children forward for a blessing. It was customary in Jewish society for the rabbi to bless a newborn child as a way of accepting the child into society. Jesus’ actions – touched, took in his arms, blessed, laid hands on – are the official actions of a rabbinical blessing.

But this blessing almost didn’t happen because of Jesus’ “helpers,” the disciples. As the parents get close to Jesus, the disciples step in, acting like bouncers in charge of guarding the door. “These people shouldn’t be bothering Jesus. They have children with them! And you know what kind of behavior that means: demanding, short-tempered, fussy. We don’t need that kind of childish behavior around Jesus.”

We may bristle at what appears to be the disciples’ insensitivity, but it was accepted behavior back in those days because children weren’t valued. Well, I take that back. Boys were valued, especially first-born boys. But all children were treated almost like property.

Children added nothing to the family’s economy or honor and did not count. In the Greco-Roman world one could literally throw children away by exposing them at birth. Child traffickers of those ancient times would gather those abandoned children and raise them to be used as gladiators, and girls would be made sexual slaves. It was easy to ignore children or bar their access because there was no one who really cared or would fight for them.

Except Jesus. Immediately after the disciples try to clear away the children, Mark tells us Jesus is – I love this word! – indignant. He’s not just perturbed or annoyed; he’s indignant. He recognizes an injustice has been done, a power play has been perpetrated against the powerless. And he turns the disciples’ sense of authority against them. Gathering the children like a mother hen, Jesus says to his followers, “You all are so concerned about entering the Kingdom of God? Here’s how. Look at these children. Be like them.” What does Jesus mean by this?

I think he means we need to stop acting our age. As we mature beyond our childhood years, we begin to lose the qualities that make us more open and accepting of God’s presence in our lives. As we get saddled with more responsibilities and take on more worries, we forget what it’s like to see things through the eyes of a child. I’m thankful for celebrations like the Children’s Sabbath that remind us of the need to get down on our knees, because from there we have a better chance of seeing things from a child’s perspective. Author Michael Elliott writes, “We spend too much time trying to be on top of things rather than trying to see things from below. We should remember that the only time Jesus saw things from the top was when he hung on the cross.” So if we seek to follow Jesus’ topsy-turvy proclamation, which of the child-like qualities should we strive to emulate?

The first, I think, is trust. Children are trusting. Unlike us, they have not yet learned to be suspicious of the world. We see a stranger, someone different than us, and we immediately go on the defensive. A child often sees a stranger as a friend they haven’t met yet, which is why we as adults have to be diligent in protecting them. But think of the level of trust they exhibit, especially in those of us whom they love. When my son Simon was little, he loved to go higher and higher up the steps and jump down into my arms. He wanted to fly, and still does. He never worried I wouldn’t catch him. That’s the trust Jesus is talking about here, being willing to take a leap of faith, believing that we will be safe in God’s arms.

As adults, we want to question, examine, pull things apart. We sometimes come at our faith like investigators, putting God under a microscope to try and discover why things happen and if God is really listening to our prayers. But children seem to have this instinctive understanding of God’s presence. Sometimes we ask a lot of “if” questions about God – if God is real, if God loves me, if God is listening. Children may ask “how” and “why” questions about God, but for them, God usually isn’t an “if”. That’s trust.

Another quality I believe Jesus calls us to exhibit is humility. Children are vulnerable. They’re little. In our story, their littleness contrasts sharply with the overbearing disciples, who try to assert their influence. Little children don’t try to act like someone they’re not; they’re not conscious of the image they are trying to project. They are uniquely, fully themselves, sometimes to our chagrin. We all have stories of a child or grandchild or niece or nephew who has blurted out an inappropriate statement in the middle of a crowd. I would share some personal stories here, but I know the embarrassing stories are not mine to tell anymore. But that’s kids! They don’t have as many filters in their brains. They simply want to share what they have, be it curious questions or dinosaur drawings.

This leads to another child-like quality that I think almost many adults lose, and that is a sense of wonder. When a child discovers something new, it immediately becomes the most amazing thing in the world and they just have to tell you about it! Do we remember what it’s like to feel that sense of wonder? Or think about a baby discovering her hands for the first time. She’ll look at them like they are some sort of alien object that’s waving in front of their face, and then she’ll suddenly realize that she can control this thing, she can actually make it do things like pick up a toy and put it in her mouth. A whole new world has opened up! I wonder what it would be like if we re-discovered God like a baby discovering her hands?

Are we too jaded for that? Is it too late to stop acting our age? Or can we somehow find our way back to a child’s perspective, receiving Jesus as he was meant to be received, as a gift that we can’t understand but can completely love? What if we greeted God each morning like that?

All of these qualities – trust, humility, a sense of wonder – are smaller parts of a bigger quality I believe Jesus is highlighting here. On our tax forms, what are our children called? They are dependents. In other words, they depend on us, their providers, for their well-being. I believe Jesus is encouraging dependence in his followers. That’s ironic, because isn’t one of the qualities we try to nurture in our children a sense of independence? Be your own person, don’t follow the crowd. And yet the more we try to set ourselves apart from others, the farther we get from our connection with them, our sense of community, our tether to the image of God in other people. Jesus reminds us here that to have a child-like faith means acknowledging that we are ultimately dependent on the One who created us, nurtured us, gave us roots and wings. We adults tend to separate life into two categories: the big stuff that I need God for and the other stuff I can handle myself. But kids bring it all to God. They pray to God for their dead goldfish and their friends’ skinned knee and their mommy’s tummyache, not out of obligation, but because they believe God actually cares about those things. An adult might say God doesn’t care about those things, but that’s not the God I believe in.

“Let the little children come to me,” Jesus says. Adults can find all kinds of reasons to reject this invitation – too busy, not good enough, not enough faith. But not children. They receive this gift with trust, with humility, with a sense of wonder, fully dependent on the One who calls them to his side. What a place to spend your time! May God grant us all the wisdom to see as children do. 

9.13.20 Dreamers

I think some of you share my admiration for Pope Francis, a pontiff like any in modern times. He’s a man who speaks for the poor. He uses his voice for those who can’t always be heard. And this summer, he spoke for the older generations of the world, urging young people to cherish their elders. 

"The elderly are dreamers – dreams, however, full of memory, not empty, vain, like those of certain advertisements; the dreams of the elderly are imbued with memory, and therefore fundamental for the journey of the young, because they are the roots. From the elderly comes the sap that makes the tree grow, makes it blossom, gives new fruits," he said. 

"The elderly, grandparents have a unique and special ability to grasp what is important in difficult situations. Life often teaches us to let the small things fall away, and to see what is important: connection to our God and to other people. And when they pray for these difficult situations, their prayer is strong, it's powerful!"

The Bible story we heard today, of the Prodigal Son, is such a beautiful illustration of this quality. It’s not a grandfather, but a father, who recognizes the essential fact: his erring son has come home, and that is cause to celebrate. The younger man feels wronged, and wants to hold onto grudges, but there is something important about letting go of the hurt of the past. Not pretending it doesn’t exist, not saying it is OK, but moving forward from it.

My mother showed this quality to me several years ago. She and her siblings had had years of disagreement over family issues, the way one of the boys had treated their parents in his 20s, and much else that came from that. Siblings never spoke to each other, and everyone was standing firm in their idea of what was right. My mom was one of the most stubborn in this fight--she’s a strong one! Then ten years ago she had a health crisis, was in a coma for weeks, and nearly died. When she recovered she was crystal clear that nothing was worth being estranged from her siblings. She reached out to her brother, arranged for gatherings, and asked everyone to be civil. She used her illness to demand good behavior in her presence! Branches of the family came together that hadn’t in decades. It was a powerful lesson. 

I don’t mean that reconciliation is always best, but a new book on this subject found that for people who want this and do it after estrangement, it feels like one of their greatest life accomplishments. I know my mother thinks of it that way. The key to being able to heal these hurts, according to Paul Pillemer, the author of the book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend them, is to let go of the attempt to make the other person see the past as you see it. It’s to acknowledge that our own perspective is not the only one that is possible. That’s a hard lesson to learn, and for many of us, it takes a lifetime. This is a truth many elders know. 

When the Pope spoke about elders, he was about to celebrate his 83rd birthday. The second part of his remarks was about honoring the innate value of older people in our society.

Older people should be regarded as a "resource" and not a "burden", he said.

"The biggest challenge that society will face in the coming years is to promote the human resources of the elderly within the community with ever greater effectiveness."

"Older people, on a social level, should not be considered as a burden, but for what they really are, that is, a resource and a wealth. They are the memory of a people," he said.

Older people can work with the young to build a more just, more beautiful, more supportive, more Christian society, he said. "Young people are the strength of the journey of a people and the elderly reinvigorate this force with memory and wisdom. Old age is a time of grace, in which the Lord renews his call to us: he calls us to preserve and pass on the faith, he calls us to pray, especially to intercede; he calls us to be close to those in need."

Too often, Pope Francis said, the elderly are discarded as sick, disabled, dependent, isolated, with no social role.

Likewise the very young, because they have no work.

But society needs to see the value in these apparently less productive people. "The future – and this is not an exaggeration – will be in the dialogue between young and old. If the grandparents do not talk to the grandchildren, there will be no future. We are all called to counter this poisonous culture of waste in which we live. We are called to build a different, more welcoming, more human, more inclusive society, which does not need to discard those who are weak in body or mind but sees the value of the spirit shining through."

Pope Francis concluded by saying that we cannot act as if the lives of elders only had a past, or were "a musty archive," he said. "No. The Lord also can and wants to write new pages with them, pages of holiness, service and prayer."

May this be the future for us all.

Amen.

8.9.20 Bible Drama

The stories we hear today in the Lectionary share a quality of drama, of big, almost unbelievable and incredibly vivid stories. In the passage from Matthew, Jesus not only walks on water in a storm, looking like a ghost. He gets Peter on the water too, until doubt weighs the disciple down and he begins to sink beneath the waves. Jesus grabs his hand and saves him, making for a satisfying end to the story. 

These stories are so big, so dramatic, they remind me of soap operas. Or actually, of a particular kind of soap opera my daughter and I love to watch. Telenovelas are Latin American soap operas. They have huge, melodramatic plot lines, improbable twists, beautiful, impossible scenery and lots of music. They are, in other words, completely over the top.

The story of Joseph and his brothers is a lot like that. It is as exciting as a telenovela and much, much longer. It has a little of everything contained in my favorite tv dramas: passion, attempted murder, blood revenge. And like all great stories, the main character changes. Because Joseph at the beginning of this story is, let’s say it, not 100% likable. To understand the situation he’s navigating, we need to know that like many families today, Joseph’s was a blended one. His father Jacob had several wives, and Joseph was the youngest son of the youngest wife. Jacob favored Joseph, the “son of his old age,”  and gave him nicer gifts than all the rest, including an that famous coat. 

His older brothers, of course, resented this terribly. Joseph, in the meantime, acted like kid brothers everywhere. He tattled on his brothers, bringing a “bad report” of them to his father. Who knows what he said? Maybe that they weren’t working for their dad as hard as they should, maybe that they were sneaking off to see some girls. Then, to make it worse, Joseph tells them his dreams mean his brothers have to serve him. Upsetting the natural hierarchy of siblings is often a bad idea: older siblings can get really nasty if they feel like their seniority earns them nothing. The baby already gets away with more, being older should at least mean they get some privileges or respect.  So Joseph’s brothers want to kill him.

All of this is really how families work. Not all the time, not at their best, but sometimes for sure. I have a teenager and an almost teen and I can tell you threats of murder are not unheard of. I will name no names, but in their younger days  blood has been shed in my house when a block flung in anger split somebody else’s eyebrow. The story of Cain and Abel, of Issac and Esau, of Joseph and his brothers--these stories are alive in all of us.

For Joseph, being sent to check up on his older siblings worked out very badly indeed. They see him coming and say, “Here comes the dreamer! Let’s kill him and throw him into a pit and say that a ferocious animal devoured him.” They take their revenge fantasies and make them real. Only the oldest brother, Reuben, has the self-restraint to see how wrong this is. He bargains for Joseph’s life without seeming to care too much: “Let’s just throw him in the pit,” he says, meaning to come back and get him out. 

While Reuben is away, the gang of brothers has lunch while their younger brother lies in a pit, hungry and thirsty, and without even a drink of water. A caravan passes by, and that's when greed enters the picture. Judah suggests that they make some money from the situation; they "drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him" to the traders who took him to Egypt (37:28).

The brothers come up with a great idea: killing a goat and soaking Joseph's beautiful robe, the sign of his favored status, in its blood, and tricking Jacob into thinking Joseph has been killed by an animal.

There’s real irony in this, for Jacob's long-ago treachery against his own blind father, Isaac, and his brother, Esau, is echoed by garments and goat's blood in this story of deceit by sons against their father and brother.

It's fair to say that Jacob's trickery comes back to haunt him when his favored son appears to be lost to him. Our family skeletons, the wrongs and hurts of one generation, often crop up in the next in unexpected ways.

With Joseph on his way to Egypt and his brothers on their way home, plotting to deceive their father, we might pause and sit with it all for a while, knowing that next week we'll get "the rest of the story." The story of Joseph is much longer than these two lections, however, and what happens in between them helps us to understand the man Joseph becomes through suffering.

Because Joseph changes tremendously through this story--not in the part we hear today, but after he’s sold into slavery, and works for the Pharoah, and grows up to become a merciful and wise person very different from this arrogant seventeen-year-old self. It’s a good thing that most of us do get to grow up, and the truth is, we usually get there through some hard times and hard feelings.

So, in this week's episode, there's greed, jealousy, and hatred between brothers, and the violence they provoke, and we don't have to go back thousands of years to know what that's all about.

We might feel like Joseph in the pit, trapped by circumstances partly of our own making but still feeling it is terribly unfair.  Or maybe we can admit to understanding some of the brothers' resentment toward a tattletale brat who thinks he's better than the rest of the family. We might even relate best to Jacob, the father, vulnerable, worried and then grief-stricken by the loss of his favorite child.

The ending of this part of the story, which is not an ending at all,  reminds us that God’s answers are not easy or fast. Walter Brueggemann writes of the "hiddenness" of God's power in our lives), and next week's text is about about how God was at work in the story of Joseph and his people. 

For now, though, we sit like Jacob, who didn't like hearing about Joseph's dreams of the sun and the moon and stars, of Joseph apparently lording it over his parents and brothers. But he was wise and patient and trusting enough, the text says, to wait for more of the story to unfold. Hasn't Jacob already seen many amazing things from the hand of God at work in his life?

He may wince when he hears the dream, but we hear in the text that Jacob  "takes these things and ponders them in his heart, just as Mary did so long ago when she heard that she was going to give birth to Jesus.  Jacob is deeply open  to future possibilities.

This is such a beautiful phrase: taking and pondering these things in one's heart. It is just that kind of openness that will help us as we await the rest of the story, in next Sunday's text (Genesis 45:1-15). Perhaps all appears to be lost, but that is often when God is preparing for something new to open. 

 7.5.20 Easy Burdens

We are now in the long season of Pentecost, which stretches from the first Sunday of Pentecost in the spring all the way until the first Sunday of Advent in November. It’s a season in which we concentrate on hearing the life and sayings of Jesus, and thinking about what they mean to the church today, and to our lives--which in a way is the same thing, since we have been reminded strongly in the last few months that WE, not this building, are the church. And we need those words and sayings more than ever right now, as we face a time of great turmoil. 

Our passage this week is from Matthew. One of the reasons it’s a three year cycle is so that we can spend a year on each of the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, reading it along with passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, and thinking about how they relate to each other. 

This morning’s passage definitely contains one of the Bible’s greatest hits, a consolation passage that you probably know. “Come to me all who are weary, come to me and I will give you rest.” If, like me, you like to spend time in old cemeteries, you will often see it etched into tombstones. And it’s put on plaques and needlepointed into pillows. It’s often read at funerals. It’s a promise people like to hear. “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”

It is a wonderful promise, a comforting promise which many of us have turned to when our burdens seemed hard to bear. It is a promise many of us need now as we come out of months of quarantine to find our businesses decimated, our work life uncertain, our children struggling with new academic and social realities. It means even more to migrant workers, who received no stimulus checks and are being laid off as the dairy industry struggles even more, or to African-Americans whose bodies are vulnerable to violence and systemic racism. 

It meant something very similar when Jesus said it 2000 years ago. He had just finished a preaching mission to Galilean cities, where his welcome was less than warm. The people in those cities were smart and capable. In spite of the Roman occupation, both their local economies and their religious institutions were still working. They did not want a rabble-rousing rabbi to bring the wrath of the empire down on them. They literally, in some cases, ran Jesus out of town. They were not looking for help or for trouble, and they declined whatever Jesus was trying to offer.

His mission was a failure, in other words, and in this passage we hear Jesus response to that failure. After some choice words for those who did not welcome him, he gives thanks to God for showing the simple people what the wise and privileged cannot see. At least one reason this is so, apparently, is so that no one gets human wisdom and power confused with divine wisdom and power. Those who know God do not arrive at that knowing by their own brilliance or even work. They know God because God chooses to be known.

Next Jesus offers to lighten the load carried by the simple people. Some of the burdens are part of human nature: the tendency to cause ourselves harm by being selfish, by being afraid. Some of the burdens are placed there by the people the world sees as wise and powerful. In the first century, the burden might literally have been sticks or bricks, or even the pack of a Roman soldier. According to the oppressive law of the empire, a traveling Roman soldier could demand that a stranger carry his pack for up to one mile on a Roman road. No doubt some of Jesus’ first listeners had been forced to do just that, to drop their farming equipment, fishing nets, or carpentry tools and carry a heavy pack, losing hours of work in the process. 

The burdens that Jesus was talking about were probably emotional and spiritual as well. Living under an oppressor takes a toll on a people; it wears them out, makes them feel that God must have forgotten them, since they are suffering unjustly. Jesus came to say that God is very much present, and on the side of “the little ones,” the underdogs, the oppressed. 

And the last thing that is at play here is an argument within Judaism, the religion of Jesus. There’s a tension between the Jewish groups who were resisting the Romans, the Saducees and the Zealots, and the people who collaborated with them, the Philistines. Jesus does not like those folks as much. He often talks about how they were educated, and comfortable, and not taking care of the simple working folks. 

And so Jesus comes to say for those people, the ones who are not getting such a good deal, that he is offering a lighter burden. That they can learn from him to be gentle, and humble of heart, and find rest. His listeners flocked to hear the message, but they struggled to understand. They asked lots of questions: are we really supposed to not worry about tomorrow? What about the rules? Don’t we still have to follow them? Are you saying we should or should not follow the empire, the laws of the culture in which we live? Are you really not here to lead an armed rebellion? They really struggled to understand what Jesus was talking about. 

Jesus' offer of rest is still there. I think we still struggle to take it. On the one hand, we long to believe that God comes to us just as we are, utterly unimpressed by the tricks we do for love. We humans are so good at working hard to earn other people’s approval, some of us are wired for it.  Others are wired to rebel and fight whatever someone else tells us to do. Either way, we find ourselves in constant reaction to the circumstances, never at ease, never able to respond from a place of calm. We are always struggling to defend ourselves or please someone else. Not to pick on teenagers, but you can see this in extreme form in them, this alternating need to either completely conform to other people’s expectations or to rebel against them.  I think of my awkward teenage self, relentlessly trying to study the cool culture--memorizing Michael Jackson lyrics, reading teen magazines to learn fashion trivia--all so that I could be more likable, more lovable, more popular. My hard work didn’t really pay off in social situations: it turns out that you can’t study coolness. Other kids know; they have a nose for these things. And if my peers weren’t impressed, how much less so God, who knows all my intentions and tricks to earn divine favor? 

I don’t think most of completely outgrow these childish tendencies. To some degree, we are often caught up in being like other people, wanting to have what others have so we can belong, or pushing against people we decide aren’t like us, that we call bad. 

I see it in myself. I may believe in God’s grace, but I act like a Scout collecting badges. I structure my life so that my to-do list is always a mile long, I will by definition never catch up, and majority of things I do are things that I have to do. It’s as if by boxing myself in I think I will earn God’s favor. I act like everything depends on me even though I know it doesn’t. It’s a hard lesson to unlearn, that God is not keeping score of brownie points in heaven. 

I look around me and I see other folks with different ways of carrying their burdens. Most of these ways also seem to add to our burdens rather than lessen them. 

Do you know what I mean? Humans have a way of turning Jesus’ easy yoke into a hard one by driving ourselves to do more and whipping ourselves to be more and being mad at other people for trying to take from us when all God ever asked was that we belong to God, and when Jesus made clear that the most precious things of all can never be stolen. We get it turned around. We think God has rules for belonging, like most human groups do: to demonstrate your loyalty to this group you have to wear the right symbol, have the right bumper sticker, carry a gun or protest the right thing, wear a mask or never be seen wearing a mask, repost the right FB post, call people certain names. In social media, this is called “virtue signaling.”  We are flashing our virtues to whatever party we want to belong to, saying, like little children or like teenagers with their carefully chosen hairstyles and fashions, “Look at me! Look at me! I’m good. I’m one of you! I belong! I count! I’m worth something!” The message I hear from the Bible is that God is not impressed. God says, “You are worth something because you are part of me, and all creation is sacred. You are already holy. You have nothing to prove. Relax, already.”

Because, and I think this is the crux of this whole passage, when we love God and our work and actions flow out of that love toward other people, it doesn’t feel like work at all. We don’t have to scramble to prove ourselves, or to defend ourselves against anyone, violently or otherwise. We don’t have to exhaust ourselves with posturing. We can be real, and present, and know no one can take away who we are. And we know what not to do, when to refrain from action or speech, when to stop. We’re God’s, we can act in the certainty that one part of us is mortal, with real limitations, and that some part of us will never die.

I wonder what it would mean to you if you really believed that? I wonder what would change in your life if you totally accepted that you are an eternal child of God?

Perhaps part of the answer for you will like the difference between a single yoke, which allows a person to carry on their shoulders a heavier load than they could with their arms, and a shared yoke, which allows two animals or people to share the load. Plenty of us labor under the illusion that our yoke is a single one, that we have to carry things alone. We think the only way to please God is load ourselves down with heavy requirements--good deeds, pure thoughts--all the rules we make and break. And then we give up because we are so clearly not going to get there, not be good enough. All the while, Jesus is standing right in front of us, half of a shared yoke across his shoulders, the other half waiting for us to become part of a team. 

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” No wonder these words are music to our ears. They assure us that those who please God are not those who carry the heaviest loads alone but those who share the load, who are willing to enter into relationship with God, who has given us a standing invitation. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

6.21.20 Father’s Day Sermon: Hagar’s Broken, Beautiful Voice

Something that I have learned through my ministry courses and work with social justice is that there is a rich African-American Christian tradition that in some ways is quite different from the European-American one. It’s wonderful that we can all start from Jesus, our savior and redeemer, and because of such different human experiences, different histories, different lenses, we can all say, in the words of the beautiful hymn, “I Love to Tell the Story,” and we can even mean the SAME story, but the ways we tell it can be very different. I think this speaks to the power of our faith: it has been so adaptable, it has spoken to so many different people living in such different conditions over such a long time.

I love this about our faith stories. I have one way of hearing them: my reading of the stories in the Bible is closely bound up with my experiences of being a mother, wife, daughter, of loving words and of wanting to defend people I see as being held down. I find the stories that emphasize those things. I miss some of the others. I love to hear what stories other people hold dear; I understand the Bible in a new way. 

The story of Hagar is one of those kind of stories that I might not have heard. For many of us who grew up with the Bible, Hagar is minor character, if she’s mentioned at all. She’s often left out of children’s Bibles altogether because her position as a slave used by her master and mistress for childbearing is pretty hard to think about. That might be all right for children, but then, we need to hear this story again when we are adults so we can think about the hard parts. I am remembering something C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and a great Christian thinker, said. He said that sometimes people who argue against Christianity use the child’s version they heard when they were little, and point out that this isn’t nearly enough to explain the suffering of the world. But, Lewis says, the Christianity we learn when we are six isn’t the end. We need to grow in faith and let the stories grow with us, right into the hard and terrible parts of life. Because God has something to say about those too.

It turns out this story, Hagar’s story, is really important in the African American tradition, from slavery times on. The themes of sexual abuse and being a surrogate mother held deep and painful meaning for enslaved women. Many were forced, along with manual labor, into sexual slavery. Many were forced to nurse and raise white children, not their own, because this work was seen as demeaning to white women. Many were forced to witness abuse of their children and were unable to stop it; a pain so great it can hardly be spoken of. And many, many women were torn from their children, separated by sale and policies that were meant to break up families. 

In these circumstances, which were part of so many women’s lives, turning to God was the only thing to do: there was truly no one else to hear a mother’s cries. There’s another passage that historians tell us enslaved women repeated in their sorrow: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jeremiah 31:15 NIV).

I am reminded again of a sign I saw in a recent demonstration for Black Lives Matter: “All mothers were summoned when George Floyd called out for his mama as he died.”

How do we reconcile this suffering, the suffering of mothers separated from their children or forced to watch them hurt, in ancient Israel, in nineteenth century America, in twenty first century America as immigrant families are separated and black sons and daughters are killed? How do we understand this and also listen to the other Bible story we heard today, the one that promises that God knows every hair on our head, that not a sparrow falls but God knows, and that God loves us so much more than the sparrows? 

I think the answer in how to combine these two lies in something else Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew passage we heard today. Jesus said, 

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

A strange message to hear on Father’s Day. A strange message for anytime. 

What I hear in this is that Jesus made no promises that our work would be easy. He didn’t say that facing evil in ourselves and others, in exposing the harm we cause each other, would be smooth, or pleasant or nice. That’s why I get worried when people say, “Can’t we just be kind? Can’t we just be nice to each other?” Because those two things are different. 

Jesus was deeply kind, kind and inclusive almost beyond human understanding. He was not at all nice and he never made nice. He did not gloss over human sin; he exposed it, demanded better, and loved people anyway. He did not make social occasions easy by avoiding hot topics. He confronted injustice head on, turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple. He didn’t come to lead an army, but he said he brought a sword. His words divided people and hurt their feelings and made them uncomfortable and required that they love God more than anything else. 

I don’t think that we can do all this as Jesus did. But I think we are supposed to try to follow in these very big footsteps. We’ll fail, for sure, but making an effort at it is what being a disciple’s all about. C.S. Lewis said it this way:

“Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always existed and always will exist. Christ was the son of God. If we share in this life, then we shall also be the children of God. We shall love the Father as he does and the Holy Spirit will arise in us. He came to this world and became human in order to spread to other people the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming Christian is nothing else.”

And so, from Hagar, a broken and oppressed mother whom God gave the power to survive, I come back to the best kind of Father there is, the pattern for all Fathers in this world. God the Parent of us all sent his son, Jesus, to show us how to be the people God intended. All we can do is practice being a little Christ, because the purpose of our faith is nothing less. May God the Father, Jesus our Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit bless our efforts and show us the way. Amen.

5.24.20 Crumbs from the Last Supper

We are at the very end of the very long Last Supper. Much has happened, much has been said, Jesus and the disciples have lingered over the meal. And then a long pause. The action halts. It's time for contemplation. Jesus lifts his eyes toward heaven. He's already caught up in what he's been talking about with them: being one with the Father.

And so the disciples overhear him praying. How puzzled, moved, confused and awed they must have been. Jesus prays to be glorified, which is what they desperately wanted for him (and for themselves!) But the glory, in John’s Gospel, isn’t a big win. It’s not a fist-pumping moment with victory laps. 

It’s the Cross. It’s the nails and thorny crown, the blood, the lance in the side. And knowing all this is going to happen and being open about it. This is how the Father glorifies the Son. If there is any single idea in the Christian tradition I struggle to communicate, or even to “get” myself, it is this. It’s not the rush to the empty tomb, or the beautiful hope of Easter day. It’s in the agony, it’s at the heart of the moment when we feel forsaken by God, and how frankly weird it is that God and Jesus call this “glory.”

But I want to offer a few crumbs of insight, a few thoughts on this Mystery, on this last Sunday of Easter.  My thoughts have to do with glory, and with being real. Because the original Greek word for “glory” is doxa, as in the doxology. The word also means to know. To know what is real, to know God, to know the truth. Jesus is not sugar coating reality here. He is talking about pain like it really is, and saying that something great and beautiful exists in the middle of the hurt. 

This is not always the way we operate down here, to speak frankly about pain and what lies on the other side. For example, when a group knows that a beloved member of their community will die, we often deal with this with a lot of denial. Such a dynamic is depicted in a movie I love, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, in which a large extended Asian-American family goes to great lengths to hide a terminal diagnosis from their beloved grandmother. The film is a touching and comedic depiction of their efforts to avoid the reality that they will lose their matriarch.

In John’s story, Jesus takes the opposite approach. Throughout this Gospel, Jesus makes explicit references to his coming death. Here, in his final prayer for his disciples, he offers them a final word of comfort and challenge. John’s Farewell Discourse is a lengthy address (taking up chapters 14-17) that serves as the culmination of a narrative that has always been forthright about the fate of its hero.

The Gospel’s early readers likely never knew Jesus on earth, and there are some clues that suggest they were mourning the loss of their own community leader. Read through this lens, Jesus’ prayer is good news for anyone who feels that God is distant, who finds themselves missing connection with the divine, or who is grieving the loss (or worrying about the potential loss) of a loved one.

To these people, to us, Jesus says two things: first, we are one with God, whether or not we feel it in any given moment. 

Two things immediately stand out when reading this passage. First, there is an emphasis on unity or oneness. This vision is especially clear in verse 21 “… that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

The Gospel of John presents Jesus as the one who is one with God, who can do God’s work of closing the distance between God and the world. The epistle takes the image a step further. We are the ones who can show what God is like. No one has ever seen God … but if we love one another God lives in us. When we love one another God’s love is perfected; we can bring God’s love to its intended purpose.

This theme is present in Jesus’ final prayer in John 17 where Jesus passes his mission on to his followers. “As you have sent me into the word,” Jesus says, “so I have sent them into the world” (17:18).

This passage ends on a sobering note: “I am no longer in the world.” Living with the loss of a loved one, with loss in general, is quite a burden to bear.

[Spoiler alert: If you haven’t yet seen The Farewell, you may want to turn your volume down for a moment.]

At the end of the film, you learn that the beloved matriarch, despite being diagnosed with terminal cancer and given little time to live, is still alive and well. The family who spent so much energy hiding her diagnosis still get to enjoy her presence and follow her wisdom. It is a joyful ending to a wonderful movie. But most times, that’s not the ending to the story. Most often, the diagnosis ends in death.

Jesus’ disciples don’t know how to continue Jesus’ mission in the face of his death and departure. John’s readers are dealing with the very real challenge of trying to live out a mission of love for the world, while living with huge loss. The hope comes in at the second half of our final verse: “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world” (John 17:11). We become the incarnate love of God. In our connection to God, we extend God’s mission.

At the risk of incorporating too many movie metaphors, I am reminded of a favorite scene in Disney’s The Lion King. Rafiki tells the adult Simba, who is grieving the death of his father, Mufasa, that he knows where his father is. He takes Simba to a pool of water, and tells him to look down. Simba complains, “That’s not my father, that’s just my reflection.” “No, look harder,” Rafiki says. As he looks, Simba begins to recognize his father in his own reflection. “You see?” Rafiki hums, “He lives in you.” 

The lesson aligns remarkably well with Jesus’ message in John 17. When we feel lost, aimless in our mission, forgetting who we are, when we see only the cross—remember that we are eternally connected to God. Remember that God lives in you. Remember that it is in living out God’s love for the world that we have the oneness with God that echoes throughout Jesus’ final prayer.

5.10.20 Mother’s Day Sermon: Laughing Through Tears

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

There is no doubt the world is a little more stressful this month than it was six weeks ago for many moms. We’re quarantining with families we adore but also see a lot of these days. Many of us are also now juggling homeschooling our kids with little to no warning. I’d like to start this Mother’s Day sermon with a short prayer by comedian and mother Bradalyn Shropshire:

Father God, I am a child of God. What I am not is a homeschooling teacher. Lord, I am home but there is not a lot of teaching going on around here. Lord, I am your humble servant. What I am not is a math teacher. Lord, the Spirit of the Common Core has attacked our household, and the only thing we have in common is a lot of crying and no answer to the math problem. Lord, I ask that you send down the Angel of the Carry Over. Help her know, Lord, that if she carries the one to the tens place she will get the right answer. Lord, I am a layman in your vineyard. What I am not is a cafeteria lady. I need you to help her understand Lord I that just because there is a refrigerator it does not mean that it has to be open and just be because there is a stove it doesn’t mean I have to be standing on it. If things continue this way Llord I am not going to be  your servant but an inmate. I ask nlord hat you change the way thigns are going now. Thak you 

I don’t launch into such eloquent prayers, but in these pandemic days I do find myself moving quickly from joy to deep sadness. It’s as if everything is heightened and so, so important, a bit like the feeling in the days after a baby’s birth. As in those times, I’m not sleeping very well. As in the postpartum days, I am mostly confined to the house, alternately chafing against the feeling of restriction and reveling in a sense of home. As in them, my protective instincts are all measuring off the charts. I remember how nervous I was in those first days to let anyone hold my little one, even older women who knew their way around a baby way better than I did. But still. Only I loved my kid with that fierce love. Just before I gave birth to Benedict, our first, a mom friend explained to me what this love is like. “If a lion came through the window you would kill it,” she said, “You just know you would.”

I know that doesn’t sound exactly like Jesus, but we do know that our teacher could be fierce. He also knew all about sacrificial love. At the Last Supper Jesus says, “This is my body broken for you” and “This is my blood shed for you” and all of it was to bring about new life. How similar to what a mother can say to the baby she just birthed. Because a mother’s body is also transformed and her blood is also shed to make way for new life.

In many church traditions, women are not allowed to preside over the communion table, or to help serve communion to the congregation. I am so glad--and of course I am sitting here today only because--our church believes God had a different plan in mind for sharing the love of God. I think the story of Mary tself points to something quite different.

After all, it was Mary who first shared the body and blood of Jesus as she carried him in her womb for 9 months. Even though we can explain now how exactly how all this happens, I still think it’s nothing short of a miracle that every baby born was made out of the material stuff of its mother’s body: every mineral that formed its bones, every drop of fluid that makes up its blood, all of it comes from the women who grew that baby inside of her.

And it was Mary who delivered his body and blood into the world, for the benefit of all creation.

In recent years I have been struck by how feminine communion is. And every time I get to receive communion from a woman at church, I am reminded that my God isn’t afraid of being perceived as having feminine characteristics and doesn’t stray away from showing sacrificial, motherly love.

This is the kind of love Jesus talked about. It was not defensive or aggressive. It does not posture or get revenge. It is giving of itself, in the material and spiritual sense. It is the opposite of the energy that is coming from leaders in our times. It is very holy. 

So today I want to honor mothers who are the best embodiment I know in this world of Jesus’ sacrificial love:

I want to honor the mothers who carry, in most families, the greater part of the work of homeschooling and the housework while also holding down jobs. 

The mothers who are essential workers for their families and in the world, and who are also disproportionately poor: the child care workers, grocery store clerks, lunch delivery ladies and bus drivers, LNAs, elderly care givers, cleaners of buildings so that others can work safely. 

Mothers who even in the best of times didn’t have nannies, babysitters, housekeepers, or cleaning ladies.  This is for all the mothers who don't have the help they need.  

This is for the mothers driving used cars that aren’t reliable. Mothers whose sick days are used up by sick kids and sick parents whom they tend, and that was before a pandemic.  This is for mothers whose employers think that childcare and eldercare and now homeschooling are a personal problem.  For mothers who get asked "Is there a father in the home?" at parent-teacher conferences. This is for single mothers and for two-mother families whose structures nurture their families but are not seen as whole by others.

This is for step mothers, who blend families and schedules to an extraordinary degree, juggle multiple parenting styles and everyone’s emotions and keep things moving. 

This is in recognition of women whose hearts have broken over lost babies, miscarriages, and infertility, and who use those wounds to love others more deeply. This is in recognition of women who do not have biological children but who have loved many children, given selflessly to families and communities, and have helped raise many, many children to be responsible, kind, and giving adults. For these aunties, mentors, and foster grandparents, a huge thank you for what you give so that children can thrive.

This is in recognition of all the meals cooked, lunches packed, and groceries put away.  The diapers changed, band-aids applied, hair combed, and clothes folded.  This is for every load of laundry schlepped up the stairs or home from the Laundromat.  This is for the bills paid, the late-night calculations about how your family will survive with less income, with job loss. This is for wrangling technology so that kids can learn without enough bandwidth or devices. This is for alternating between working in the bathroom on a Zoom call, and tutoring math and science and making lunch and supervising arts and crafts. 

This is for mothers stocking up on fever remedy and juice, masks and hand sanitizer,  and for all the prayers that your kids will be well and that you will be spared so that you can continue to care for them. 

This is for every mother taking care of children and holding it all together, more or less, and now doing that in extraordinary times in times such as we have not seen in a hundred years. 

In recognition of these and all other burdens carried by mothers, I'd like to suggest: dear mothers and mother figures, please sit down—or better yet, lie down—and repeat to yourself today's scripture.  Jesus won't mind if you fall asleep and take a brief nap. I like to think that in this scripture, Jesus is saying that he knows how tired you are.  And he's saying there are times when you must put your burdens down.  Put them down, and take your rest. It will make your love and example stronger. The kind of giving you do, without looking for advantage, without looking for reward, with an eye to the long term well being of others, is what the world needs. The world needs you and us to keep doing for a long time, so practice stopping for a little while, and coming back. The world needs transformation and sacrifice, but it does not need your body literally broken. Jesus already did that for us. Let us rest so that we can keep going, walking a path of love for others that is our statement of our love for the world. 

4.19.20 Holy Doubts

As I listen to this Scripture passage, one part of the story of what happens after the Passion, after Christ’s death and resurrection, I’m struck by how similar our situation is right now to the situation the first disciples found themselves in. After all, they didn’t know it was Easter. The sunrise on that Easter day didn’t tell them that something new was breaking into the world. It’s not always easy to read the signs of change: generally, the messengers of total transformation look a lot like the prelude to chaos and disaster. Because sometimes that’s what it takes to  a new world. 

So, the disciples were huddled into a locked upper room, in fear of their lives, that the authorities who killed Jesus might come after them, too. Maybe they also feared the crowds who loved Jesus so much. What if those people came demanding an account of how Jesus died? None of the disciples had stood with him the way they had promised. What if Jesus’ followers wanted them to take up the mantle and lead in his stead? Those frightened followers knew they didn’t have it in them. So they waited, mourning the death of their leader and teacher. They didn’t know what was coming but they were pretty sure it wasn’t good. 

And I think of us, most of humanity, holed up in our homes, many of us frightened and unsure. We feel threatened by something that is larger than us. We may not feel responsible, but we surely doubt our ability to manage it. As we watch jobs disappear, local businesses close, milk prices drop, and our children become more fragile with isolation, even the most privileged of us can feel deeply saddened.

But then, this woman, Mary Magdalene, came to the disciples, making the most incredible claim that would undo, would overturn, their turmoil, their sense of failure and inadequacy, their loss of hope. All might be made right after all; all might be healed. Could it be? Could it actually be so? Can it be for us? Does this ancient story actually mean anything today?

I think it does because the story of the Resurrection, and of the Pentecost that followed, doesn’t end with Mary Magdalene’s certainty. It includes the skepticism, the doubt of the disciple Thomas. We don’t know why Thomas gets called out in this story; it seems a little harsh that centuries of blame have been cast on him for being the one who needed proof of the risen savior. Surely, he couldn’t have been the only one. 

Perhaps Thomas speaks better to our generation of Christians better than the unvarnished hope of Mary. Like him, we need evidence. We are a scientific people, living in an age of proof and reason. So even though we can’t see Jesus, we want something concrete. Show us the facts! What does the crucifixion and resurrection look like to us today? What does it mean in the world? How will we really know in the middle of this pain that something better is coming?

I think to find the signs of hope, we need to start with the darkness. I think that the Passion looks like what we are experiencing right now: a world where the broken places are laid bare. We see that the workers we have valued so little--the grocery store clerks, the childcare workers, the farmers--are essential to our survival. We see that the health care and financial systems we have created leave some bodies much sicker and more vulnerable to disease than others. We see more clearly who fills our prisons, who can’t afford to miss a paycheck, who is close to the edge. We see small businesses and churches closing because they can’t keep going. The faultlines in our society and our world are very, very clear. 

And what does the Resurrection like? Maybe it looks like bodies healing,  health restored after suffering and illness, and a world that places more value on public health--because we realize that when anyone is ill, that we are all more likely to get sick. We see our interdependence in a new way. Maybe the resurrection looks like relationships repaired and renewed, first through the computer screen, then, with great joy, in real life--relationships strengthened by the brush with death we have all felt. Maybe the resurrection looks like churches brought back from the brink of closing to new and vibrant ministry because in their loneliness people feel a new connection to spirit and community.  The experience of resurrection and new life, in moments and ways both large and small, all point to the One who gives us life and promises life eternal, the One who raised Jesus up on the third day.

The wonderful writer, Anne Lamott, has shared her life story with honesty and deep spirituality, including her struggle with depression: "I am a broken and a resurrection person," she says. So many of us would say the same.

As I write these words, I hear the "echo" of a lovely post by Lucy MacNeil, singing the beautiful hymn, "Lord of All Faithfulness" (set to the tune, Slane, the traditional Irish melody used in "Be Thou My Vision"). Her prayer serves as a lament and a reminder of our need, like Mary Magdalene so long ago, to grieve and lament what we have lost and what we fear is still ahead, and yet to trust and rejoice as well in the promises of God. Because God is still speaking, and we are an Easter people. Let us demand proof of the resurrection, but let us look for it in the world around us, and in the activity of ourselves, making wholeness out of the brokenness we find. Now and forever, allelieu and Amen. 

3.1.20 Leaving the Garden

My favorite new-to-me television show this season---which I watched quite a bit while I was sick-- is the very popular "This Is Us.” It’s the story of a family over several generations, told in intriguing and often moving ways, and somehow conveying the vulnerabilities and weaknesses, the challenges and triumphs of mostly everyday, ordinary human beings.

Revisiting the Genesis text about Adam and Eve reminded me that this ancient story (from the very first century of all), could also be titled, "This Is Us," because this is our story, too. Adam and Eve remind us of our ourselves in many ways.

We may remember our childhood, for example, as a time of innocence and unawareness of the evils of the world, and we hear the term "loss of innocence" used to describe a first experience of deep disillusion or wrongdoing. In the school where I teach we have noticed how often this experience happens first happens around the age of 9 or 10--a time when a child often “wakes up” to the fact that the world isn’t all good, that adults don’t always do the right thing, that there are some problems that can’t be solved. This is a real leaving the garden of Eden, so much so that in my school, in third grade we literally tell the story of humanity’s fall, the story of the Garden of Eden. It turns out many oral traditions have a story about the loss of innocence, about the change from feeling like you are one with the world to feeling how separate and alone we can be. Once you feel that, the world is a very different place. 

I think my son Simon had a moment like that this weekend. And while his story is his story, I asked permission to tell you about it today, because I think these little moments are also all of our stories, and they help us understand the Bible and how it lives in us now.

Our family is an activist family, and we go to a lot of actions, mostly on behalf of climate justice and migrant justice. This weekend we went to a protest in which someone with a different perspective became enraged and began to shout at Simon and a few other children, children of migrant workers, who were also attending. The man was not angry at them particularly, but angry at being confronted. He came over to where the children were and shouted threats and obscenities. We were with a pair of five-year-old twins who were really frightened, cowering in the seat of the truck in which we were sitting. I asked him not to swear in front of the children and he said he didn’t care what he did. I think that in that moment that was true; he was out of himself. Simon had never experienced anything like that before. It wasn’t our plan for him to experience it; we try to assess the safety of these events, had been to many similar actions and had never experienced anything like that in Vermont. 

It was an eye-opening moment for us, but more so for Simon. He had not seen an adult so threatened that he was out of control. He had never been shouted at by a stranger. It changed something for him. Simon had just been learning in school about the Civil Rights movement, and had been incredulous that adults threatened and hurt children in the protests then. On the way home from this action, he said quietly, “Mom, people aren’t as different now as I thought they were.” Simon will turn 10 on Friday. His awakening is right on cue. 

In a way, I am sad about this. For the first decade of his life, Simon didn’t have to think a lot about safety because we kept him safe. He has a loving extended family, wonderful school and church communities where he is seen and cared for. And he still has all those great communities to grow up in and to help him. But he knows something now I can’t take back: that not all adults will put children first. That adults can lose control when they feel threatened and can, in turn, threaten people more vulnerable than they. Some children have to learn that much sooner, so I feel blessed that we got to raise Simon and our other children here, and in groups that helped us care for them. But it is hard as a parent to watch your child gain that consciousness, take a step away from childhood and a step into the next stage.  

And still. We can’t keep children in the garden of Eden forever. I don’t want Simon to be in teh world thinking every adult is safe. Children need to step out sometime, and, just as in the Bible story, there will be falls. They may involve pain, loneliness, and hard work. Sometimes the fall  even feels like being separate from the Source, from God. And we all have to find our own way back: through pain, sin, temptation, distraction, and suffering. We have to come back to God not through innocence, but experience. We have to come back to oneness having been separate, because only then can we really know what it means to be in unity with the Creator.  

I think this is the real story of Adam and Eve.  We think we know this story: it’s so familiar that it's become part of the cultural water we swim in: who doesn't know about the temptation of the beautiful, shiny "apple" offered by Satan, in the form of a hissing snake, followed by the historic act of disobedience by Eve, the temptress, who seduced poor Adam to sin--the story of the Fall of Man?

Because of Eve's willful weakness to temptation, we are taught, sin entered the world, and so did death, and then God cursed human being and drove them out of the garden (after making them some clothes). The snake would have to crawl on the ground and be hated by humans, the woman would suffer in childbirth, the man would have to continue to till the earth but now, instead of a luxurious garden, he would be forced to sweat and labor to get the uncooperative land to produce sustenance for his family.

And in subtle but powerful ways, like the church and the society it influenced and undergirded, we were influenced by the story of that seductress, Eve, and what it meant for the subsequent images and oppression of women.

We absorbed the idea that we girls/women were somehow to blame for the mess the world is in, that we were weaker because we [always] gave in to temptation, but strangely powerful, too, because we could "control" the men who nevertheless ruled over us in every area of life. Commentators never mention the strangely weak response Adam makes. When God asks him why he ate the fruit, he says, according to Genesis, “The woman made me do it!”

We were taught to read the story as literally "true," that is, factual and historically accurate as a written record of actual events, and that thousands of years of restrictions on women based on this interpretation were tacitly approved. In the process, we seemed to miss out on its "true" truths, this remarkable story about us, about humankind.

I think there’s anothscaer way to read it. 

This story is about the first command given by God. "Be fruitful and multiply" was a blessing, not a curse. Because of this blessing we have the gift of parenthood, one of the most intense spiritual practices there is. We also have the curse/gift of hard work. I know that in my life, and I think in many of years, hard work has incredible value and meaning. It is good in itself, and lends dignity to life. I think in a farming community, the value of hard work is something we can agree on. So the “curses” in this story turn out in our life to have the potential for great blessing.

We can also read this as a story of emerging human self-consciousness. Theologian Richard Hanson writes that  "life is a pilgrimage from innocence to maturity through a land fraught with the dangers of loving and hating, growing powerful and cowering in humiliation, living and finally dying. It is a story about God, too.”

Mature faith and understanding come from having unsettling experiences and surviving them. In other words, we do not know we are strong until we have been tested. We do not know we believe until we have wrestled with doubts. The kind of faith Eve has come only after she has been evicted from the garden. In this reading of the story, Eve is no temptress. She is a hero of the faith, fallen but striving, as we all are. 

As we set out on the journey of Lent this year, we have so much to consider when we return to this story about all of us, when we return to our roots, to the very beginning, and to the blessings and challenges and promises God showered upon us. Our God continues to call us to new and deeper and more mature lives of trust, of care, of grateful obedience and of courage. Let us this Lent remember the words of Micah, the simple things God calls us to do in this world of experience : To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. It’s hard work, and there will be struggles on the way. The path lies before us; let us, then, begin again.

3.8.20 Blessing to be Blessed

Bold Blessing--that could be the title of today’s message. This Sunday's focus scripture reading brings about the 40-day pilgrimage ahead of us which is shared by all, through a common thread: God with us, God with others, and God's wisdom with us. God challenges us on our journey with the task of leaving behind what is known and comfortable.

This passage calls us to challenge ourselves and the status quo and to plow our way out of passiveness by commissioning ourselves into God's life-giving realm.

As we heard in Genesis 12:1-3, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

These are the initial words spoken to Abram when God called him into action, calling him into the context of becoming, along with his family, a blessing in the world.

Little did Abram know that this was to be his call in life--a call that would start a whole new beginning from the previous beginnings with Adam and Eve, and Noah. It should be noted that Abram was 75 years old when he actually set out, for better or worse, to find the Promised Land.

Genesis 12:1-4a presents us God’s master plan for humanity. By working with one very messy human family, God sparks new hope and life in order to address the despair, distress, and violence of human selfishness.

The basic premise of God's master plan in working with human failure unfolds in verse 2: "I will make you become a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you will be a blessing." So here God is working with the people through this one identified family to bring forth blessing to the human race/human family, "and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (12:3).

How is it that a messy family became the center of God’s plan for all humanity? I think of my deep curiosity when I was a child, to find out about other families. When I became old enough to babysit I entered each home scanning for clues: who were these people? How did they live? My real quest, underneath my adolescent nosiness, was this: Are these people as flawed as I am? As my family?

When we are little, we assume the way our family lives is the way all people live. And then friends begin to provide another perspective. I remember when children started spending the night at other people’s houses, they came back full of reports: this is how much television they get to watch. This is the kind of (usually better) cereal they eat. Often this became a part of the kids’ campaign to get us to live a more “normal” (read: more commercial, less healthy) lifestyle. But really, they also wanted to know: how do we compare to the rest of what’s out there? Is our normal really normal?

I began to realize as an older child that my family did have problems not every family had: parents who fought, a father who drank. I decided that meant we weren’t normal, and that everyone else was happier. Later, as an adult, I began to revise that idea. As a pastor I have another idea entirely. All families are inherently messy, and some are outright damaging. What matters is how, in each moment, we choose to respond to that.

Abraham’s family was full of pain and secrets. Not mentioned in the Scripture passage today is that Abram and Sarai were childless for many years, a situation that in that place and time was equated with shame and abandonment by God. Abram had a child with Sarai’s servant, Hagar, at her suggestion. Then Sarai was overcome with pain and jealousy at this fraught situation and was cruel to Hagar, who fled to the desert with her child in misery. There she waited to die. God had a different plan, but the pain and desperation fairly leap off the page.

Later, the descedents of Abraham, those who “numbered more than the grains of sand in the desert or the stars in the sky” had their own troubles, including sibling rivalry that makes the sometimes vicious squabbles in my home look pretty benign. Maybe this is one role for the Bible: seldom does it get as bad in our lives as it did in the Hebrew Bible.

The human story, as recounted in the Bible, is a story of big mistakes and big tragedies.

So what do we do? Faced with the fact that our families are deeply, deeply flawed, that we often cause each other injury on injury, and set ourselves up for more pain, what do we do with this unit that God gave us to change humanity?

So how then does God help humanity find its way back? God saw Abram and his family and called them into action.

All of this struggling, failing through error, making mistakes, and still missing the mark are where faith--and more specifically the faith journey begins.  We don’t know what is coming next. We can’t control the plan or how other people react. We can only choose how we will react, and take one step at a time. We can choose connection, restoration, de-escalation and healing. We can answer sarcasm with warmth, hearing the pain behind it. We can reach out to people who have dropped away from the family. We can try again, and again.

This doesn’t mean we accept abuse or that we let ourselves be run into the ground, chasing someone who will not be found. But we can love, and pray, and be open, and try occasionally, and know that God works in mysterious ways, that people can change, and that relationships can heal, if sometimes only after death. We can accept the mess in ourselves and those around us, and know that this raw material with which God works great things. 

This is what is means to remain in the struggle, to choose to be alive. We keep trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel, with the faith and hope to fight for what is just and life-giving to ourselves and others. 

E. A. Speiser says it best: "Abraham's journey to the Promised Land was no routine expedition of several hundred miles. Instead, it was the start of an epic voyage in search of spiritual truths, a quest that was to constitute the central theme of all biblical history.” It was the journey of a human being in the context of family. It tells us of redemption and resurrection, for those labeled as barren one(s) and those judged not worthy. It tells us how become God’s witnesses and prophets of the new world to come. We and our families can be greater than we are, with the help of God's spirit that has always been and will continue to be. 3.15.20 Soul Power

The nature of evil, the nature of Christ, the power of temptation: each of these ideas has been named, over time, as a possible theme for the opening verses of the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. This is a passage that is easy to visualize, hard to forget once you have heard it. The image of Christ and the devil, whatever that being looks like to you, atop a temple tower--it’s a vision that stays with you.

And that’s good. Because we need a lot of reminders. This passage names three temptations that Jesus must face. We’re not talking here about being seduced by a second brownie. We’re talking about the temptations that distract us most from God and cause us to deny our role in God’s creation.

In this passage, Jesus has already been baptized and heard the voice from heaven say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” We see Jesus trying to sort out what that means, to be deeply loved in a world that is NOT the kingdom of God, in Jesus’ words, or “The Beloved Community” in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is not yet a place of constant reconciliation and redemption. But, and this is the key, our actions can make it so at any time. It is a commitment that must be constantly renewed, literally in every moment. It is not a place we are going, but a state of connection we create by our choices.

We witness Jesus doing just that as he and the devil spar with each other with Biblical texts. This is signpost number one for us in the blueprint for how to deal with temptation: beware misreading the Bible. It is very easy for the devil to take the words of Scripture and use them to urge an action that is against the good. 

What makes this scene so powerful is that the devil’s offers are not obviously bad. They are real options that anyone would want to consider, that would have been part of what the early church considered as it figured out how to follow Jesus. They are options we are constantly faced with today. They are compelling distractions.  The tests are to see whether even good things can lure Jesus away from a focus on God’s will--or can lure believers into following a more comfortable messiah.  Let’s look at them one by one.

The devil’s first offer seems a reasonable one. It’s to turn a stone into a loaf of bread, to assuage Jesus’ hunger after the long fast. By implication, if he could do that, he could feed everyone in Israel, in a land often wracked by famine. The challenge is to be a new Moses to his people, which Jesus accepts when he cites Moses’ words in Deuteronomy, that human beings don’t live by bread alone. Jesus affirms the interconnectedness of matter and spirit, and refuses to separate them.

The second test portrays the devil as “ruler of this world.” For the price of worshipping or honoring that authority, he will hand it all over to Jesus. Remember that most of the known world in Luke’s time was under the imperial authority of Rome. A regime change would have seemed good! But Jesus says the price is too high. His reply is the She’ma Israel, that it is written that humans will worship and serve only God.  

The third and final test occurs in Jerusalem, the place where Jesus’ ministry will culminate in his passion and resurrection. The devil quotes Psalm 91, which promises God’s protection to the righteous. The devil urges Jesus to throw himself off the temple to prove his status with God. Again Jesus’ reply comes from Deuteronomy: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” It is not right to throw away the physical body and all that God has given us, out of pride.

The ideas underlying these temptations echo the basis of Celtic creation spirituality. In particular, in the chapter we read for today from Listening to the Heartbeat of God, we see the intertwining of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, time and eternity. Christ, the King of Elements, is not a distant ruler, but imagined rather like a Celtic chief, known to his people, close to them, drawing his power from their respect and his understanding of nature. John Scotus Eriugena expanded on this ancient view in the ninth century, articulating a philosophy in which spirit is the heart of life. The more deeply we look into matter, the better we see God.

The temptations that Jesus talks about essentially separate spirit from matter. They distract and trick us into seeing division where there is none. The result is that we are taken off the course of co-creating, and become agents of destruction--often unconsciously.

I would like to share a story of someone whose very life was a testament to the intertwining of flesh and spirit, and whose laser focus exemplified the commitment God ask of us. Carrie Ann Lucas died on February 24, 2019. She was an ordained minister, lawyer, and disability rights advocate whose understanding of justice was shaped by her own life experience of having a degenerative muscular disease. 

From a busy law office in central Denver, Carrie Ann Lucas fought for 15 years for clients whose humanity and particularly whose right to parent, were questioned by others.  One of her clients was a deaf woman whose toddlers were put up for adoption because social workers feared that she could not hear their cries. Another was a family whose homeowners association raised aesthetic objections to a fence they put up to protect their 8-year-old son with autism. Yet another was a developmentally disabled woman who was permanently sterilized by her doctor without her informed consent.

Lucas defie all the myths by personal example. For the last decade of her life she was deaf and legally blind, breathing through a ventilator and getting around in a wheelchair. She proudly parented four adopted children with developmental and physical disabilities, ranging in age from 14 to 23, all of whom experienced abuse and neglect in their birth families and in the foster care system.

“We hear things all the time like, ‘How can you be a parent if you can’t throw a football for your son?’ ” she told a Colorado newspaper in 2016.

“As disabled people,” she said, “we are always addressing the issue of how society devalues our lives and experiences and very bodies.”

Lucas was deeply affected by other people’s inclination to value the physical body above the spirit. She never let people do that to her or her children. She also never accepted pity, which she called “spiritual poison.”

In a world filled with distractions, Lucas unnerved people with her incredible focus and perseverance.  She was the lead plaintiff in an epic eight-year suit against Kmart that resulted in the largest and most far-reaching accessibility class action settlement in history.

She was also active in civil disobedience. In the summer of 2017, she participated in a 58-hour sit-in at the office of a Colorado Sen. Gardner’s office which was widely credited for helping to save Medicaid benefits in Colorado.  That demonstration ended with her and other advocates being arrested, and she earned an additional citation for resisting arrest when she politely, but firmly, refused to show a police officer how to work her power chair. 

Lucas knew about what Martin Luther King called “soul power,” or “creative suffering for the good of all.” She became nationally known in the last decade as a campaigner against what are often called “death with dignity” laws, arguing that these measures are often based on wrong assumptions about the quality of life of the disabled, and are used disproportionately on people with disabilities. She fought constantly against the trope “better off dead than disabled.”  In one interview she noted that a man in Oregon who chose medically assisted suicide cited as his reasons: use of a feeding tube and ventilator, limited mobility, deteriorating speech and frequent pain. Lucas also noted that these are her daily reality while carried on a law practice and parented children. “People never know what they are capable of until they have to do it. The fear of it is what gets in the way.”

These are not comfortable ideas. I welcome you to engage them challenge them, because in this passage from Luke we see that Jesus wanted us to debate, to ask questions and go deeper into Scripture to seek God’s will for us. Where do you see temptation, for you personally, or in our culture? Where do you see examples of focus and perseverance that help to bring about God’s kingdom?

3.22.20 Facing the Storms

Lent is a time when we are asked to think about the spiritual obstacles that face us, and to find new hope as we move toward the promise of Easter. We need these lessons now, as we try to be Christians together in a violent and polarized time. As we look at this text today, I am holding with you all the terrible loss of life in Christchurch. Let’s see what we can discover in the Gospels to help us in this moment.

In this New Testament passage we find Jesus confronting some serious barriers to the Spirit, which come in the form of political power plays. Jesus was very good at dealing with those kind of political traps--”Look,” he said in another passage in Matthew, “I am sending you out like a sheep among wolves. So be as shrewd as snakes and as harmless as doves.” But in this passage he seems to throw caution to the winds. 

When the Pharisees, who have not up to now been supporters, come to tell Jesus that Herod wants to kill him, we have to wonder what their motives are. As a group they were among the most threatened by Jesus topsy-turvy kingdom.  In the line just before this passage begins, Jesus described God’s reign in this way, “Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” This was not good news for the Pharisees, a Jewish sect with considerable power at the time.

As a middle school teacher, I know well the dynamic in which one person tells another that someone else doesn’t like them, and warns them against that third party. There is power in that, and usually something more the teller hopes to gain. According to one commentary, the Pharisees may have been hoping to drive Jesus out of Herod’s domain, into the arms of Pilate, thus making him the responsibility--and the problem--of a more powerful Roman official. 

Of course this is speculative; it’s hard enough to parse our own politics, let alone get a clear picture of ancient power dynamics. What is clear is how Jesus responds to an imminent political and physical threat. This is where the true meaning of Jesus’ way becomes clear; the authority he is claiming is anything but passive. He will not use violence because he is marshalling a more powerful force. 

Jesus says, “Go and tell that fox for me,[a] ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.” I love this line. Jesus is describing just another a busy day in the life of a Messiah. In the verses before we’ve heard about his healing, telling parables, and his warning people seriously that they must change their minds and purpose. Over and over again Jesus demands “metanoia.” This is usually translated as repentance, but a more accurate rendering would be “to change direction of one’s mind or purpose.”

Then Jesus continues to describe the tragedy that lies ahead if the people do not change, “ Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” 

There is a drama being played out here, a story in which everyone has their roles. Jesus doesn’t like it but the people he came to help are not awake enough to work with him to create a different ending. It happens that way often in the course of human events: we seem driven to live out our worst case scenarios over and over. 

In chapter 3 of Listening to the Heartbeat of God, we read about another such drama in history--a tragedy on a massive scale, the uprooting and displacement of a spiritually powerful people in order to serve the privilege of the ruling class. Most of us probably didn’t learn much about the Highland Clearances in history class. Partly that’s because our curriculums tended to focus on American history, year after year, but also because what British history we did learn was confined to the perspective of the powerful. If we heard anything it was probably about the kings and queens. 

This is another side of the story: In order to make room for the next innovative industry of the time--sheep, whose wool was being woven on the looms of the Industrial Revolution--the British ruling class and the Highland chiefs they controlled destroyed the  traditional form of agriculture, and along with it, the clan structure in the Scottish Highlands that had held society together for thousands of years. It was a brutal, sweeping change: tens of thousands of people were turned out of their homes and off their collective farms over a few decades. Their earth-and-thatch cottages were burned to the ground, and the people forced to march hundreds of miles to new land on the coast. Many died on the way. When they reached their new homes, they had to take up industries they did not know, harvesting kelp and fishing. They were given small plots of land called crofts on which to grow vegetables. It wasn’t enough to survive. The Highlanders became the migrant labor of Britain. Men spent most of the year south in the Lowlands and on English farms, working for wages they brought home to their families on short visits during the Christian holy days. They did whatever they had to do to keep their families together and hold on to a small piece of land in the north. 

It’s hard to miss in this story parallels to the history of Native American tribe, in the near-destruction of a culture, and to contemporary Central Americans who work on U.S. farms as migrant laborers. 

In the case of the Scots, as conditions became untenable, tens of thousands of Highlanders eventually emigrated, especially after the potato blight of the 1840s. The result was the Highland diaspora--millions of people around the world who now trace their heritage to Scotland, and who are interested in its culture and traditions, and inspired by its spirituality.  You have probably heard there are more people of Scottish and Irish descent in some U.S. cities than Scots and Irish in Europe. Our deep interest in Celtic spirituality probably owes something to that connection, as well as to our yearning to reconnect to the earth which we have so long abused. 

Today, things are different for crofters in the Highlands. They are still there, the great-great-great grandchildren of some of the original holders, and new families who have bought in to the crofts in modern times because they want to farm sustainably. They are 21st century entrepreneurs. They are like farmers in Vermont, trying to do everything they can to diversify revenue: they keep bees, host tourists, and make everything from jam to craft beer to add value to the crops they grow. They fish sustainably and harvest small amounts of seaweed for sale to be used in medicines and as food. Many still work in other places part of the year. But they are not victims. With information and support form the government they make a living and a life that is rich. I like to think of that as we are saying Celtic prayers inspired by the early Celtic Christians.

In the words of Martin Luther King, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that we as a species are growing in consciousness and moving ever closer to God’s vision for us, of justice and inclusion for all. But there is resistance--the more the world opens toward acceptance and inclusion of all God’s children, the greater is the backlash of fear. New York Times Opinion columnist Michelle Alexander, in a piece last September, wrote about this from a more secular point of view. She said that those who oppose oppression, nationalism, and violence are NOT the resistance. That is the way the world is moving. Rather, the resistance is everyone who opposes the radical evolution of democracy. 

Alexander quotes Vincent Harding, one of the heroes of black liberation, who said that the long, reach toward freedom flows through history “like a river, sometimes powerful, tumultuous, and roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid, covered with the ice and snow of seemingly endless winters, all too often streaked and running with blood.”  But it can’t be stopped. Those who commit verbal and physical violence build dams, but they cannot alter the larger flow.

When we face violence such as happened Friday in the mosques of New Zealand, we need to strengthen our commitment to change our hearts and minds toward God, as Jesus asks us to do. We can do this in many ways right now: We can stand up and visibly support our Muslim brothers and sisters. We can declare our belief in the importance of a multi-cultural society as a benefit for all. We can renew our efforts to pursue sane and reasonable gun regulations in our own country. We can re-commit to full inclusion of all religions, races, sexes, gender expressions, sexual orientations, and abilities. And we can  speak up against hateful and discriminatory speech or actions, wherever they occur.

I would draw your attention to two actions in the next two days. On Monday, at 4:30, there is a time of witness and solidarity at Middlebury College in acknowledgement of the massacre in the mosques. And on Tuesday, at 7 pm at Ilsley Library, Migrant Justice is presenting a talk about how to support Vermont migrant farm workers and their families. Mexican workers are another vilified and threatened group in our midst, and we can do more to create safety and inclusion right here in Addison County. 

This is where God is taking us. Whenever we encounter fear and hatred that wants to throw us off course, let us say with Jesus, “some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” We will not be deterred by the political power plays of our time, any more than Jesus was by those in ancient Judea. Following Christ, we have a guide, and we need only look for our next small, right step on the journey. 

3.29.20 Never Lost

These two passages speak of our two deepest sets of need: our physical needs, the feeding of which sustains our bodies, and our spiritual needs, the nourishing of which sustains our souls. In our time the reality of latter has come under question. In fact, large numbers of people in our culture deny the existence of spiritual needs entirely. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. That just means that one essential aspect of us can go hungry our whole life long.

Our passage from Isaiah comes from the beautiful Book of Comfort, addressed to the Jewish people in exile in Babylon almost six hundred years before Jesus. We know that a prophet speaks sternly to the people when they need it, but also knows how to speak tenderly, to convey God's great love and mercy.

And this prophet knows that the people are hungry for a message of hope, a message that promises an end to their captivity and a different way of life, back home, where they can be who they are called to be, and live lives faithful to the God who has made an everlasting covenant with them. Isaiah knows that even the mention of the great King David's name will stir the people's memory, drawing their hearts and minds back to a time when Israel was great. Here, however, he adds that this time, as God renews the covenant, it is extended beyond one king or dynasty and even beyond one people, for the chosen people will be a light to the nations, drawing to it people they have never known or even heard of.

Long ago, God had led the people from bondage in Egypt and fed them manna and water on their way to a land flowing with milk and honey, but this trip home will be no bread-and-water journey. This will be an overflowing feast of delicious, delightful foods.

But to get to the feast, the people of Israel must rethink value. They must stop spending on and striving for what does not feed them. 

Like some of the ancient Jews exiled to Babylon, we may have made a strange and uneasy kind of peace with the empire orders our lives. It’s hard not to value what the culture values, which, as you may have noticed, is just about everything before Spirit. Just as some of the faithful made the uncomfortable choice to collaborate with the Romans, we are easily trapped from our into thinking of our culture-- that worth is equated with productivity, that a dollar amount can be assigned to our value (think of the term "net worth").

 Look at how we spend our lives: by every measure, Americans work more than any other culture: More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese.

And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too. For white collar workers, this looks like an expectation of 24-hour access through our technology, and weekend work. The clock never stops. For workers in retail and other blue-collar jobs, this often means piecing together a series of part-time jobs to make a subsistence living, and paying for health care on top because part-time jobs offer few benefits. There are so many ways to turn people into commodities. 

And if adults demonstrate their worth through work, children are expected to do the same through their activities. I can testify to the great pressure today to enroll preschoolers in a round of enriching activities: music, dance, gymnastics, soccer, and even academics like French or Mandarin. When parents meet at the library story hour they compare notes and recommend teachers. By grade school everyone is being shuttled from one class to another, often after they get out of after-school care. In part this is all fulfills child care needs, but also there is a focus on using time productively, on learning something every minute. 

When we ask why kids aren’t often in church and youth group anymore there are many reasons, but one is that parents love their kids dearly, want them to fit in, and therefore choose activities that the culture values. They choose what they think will help them succeed in life and--this speaks to our head-oriented culture--that will get into good colleges. Drama club, SAT practice, sports. If kids did just come home, the neighborhoods are empty. There’s no one to play or hang out with; they are all at Little League practice or chess club.

We can’t turn back a cultural change wholesale, but we can take notice of the dark places to which it leads. You may remember, for example, hearing that the compensation received by family members of those who died on 9/11 was based on the victims' earning potential. It made me stop and think about the grief of the widow of a minimum-wage worker in a restaurant in the World Trade Center. Does anyone think her husband's life was worth less than one-tenth that of the executive 100 floors above?

We are caught up in a commercial, profit-driven, productivity-oriented culture of excess that does not know the meaning of enough, does not know what will really satisfy our deepest hunger and thirst. 

So what to do, besides worry, which we know just saps our energy and can easily lead to dark places of its own? I find some helpful answers in the life of George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community and subject of chapter 5 in Listening for the Heartbeat of God. A clergyman for the Church of Scotland, MacLeod was a modern day mystic. He taught that we should look for God not away from the material world, but more deeply in the life of the world. That led to some counter-intuitive positions for this deeply pious man. For instance, instead of clinging to “Sabbatarianism,” the strict enforcement of Sabbath rules, he lobbied for trains and recreation sites to be open on Sundays, so that working people could enjoy the countryside and cultural destinations like museums on their only day off in a week. 

MacLeod said no walls could be put around God, and he was always finding and creating church in other places, in the streets of Glasgow. It’s easy to apply his forward thinking to our time, as many churches sell old properties to rent new ones, and put the money that had been used to maintain historic structures into mission. Other post-moderns are taking church to the people, as new churches start up in bars, bookstores, parks, yoga studios and on farms and hiking trails. 

The premise of all of MacLeod’s work was that we can’t escape our union with God, we are tied to by the gift and burden of our physical body. We can only plunge into the life of the world, trying to make it better, using all the resources God gave us. He was as guilty of overwork as any American today, filling his days with meetings and action, but insisted that we can’t “put the pressures of life on one side, while God is on the other.” He counseled a practice of constant prayer in action, as well as setting aside every day for quiet, concentrated prayer, and time for retreat at least once a year. It was for this reason that he established the Iona Community, a place of pilgrimage for lay people and clergy, where they could sink briefly into the rhythms of a semi-monastic life for a week, and then return refreshed to the life of the world. 

We cannot abandon or lose God. That's what Isaiah tells us, and that's the truth that lies buried deep inside us, the truth that makes us restless even in the midst of plenty, even and especially in the midst of excess. We can only temporarily forget what really matters, and the reminder of God’s grace may lie in a break from the pressures of life. But mostly our reminders are all around us every day, in the faces of other people who are hungry for bread and spirit. And the way we feed ourselves is by feeding them. 

Easter Sermon

EASTER SERMON

Let’s say it. This story, the central story of the Christian faith, is incredibly hard for us post-moderns to make sense of. Sometimes it just seems like too much believe. It’s hard not to wonder if this story had its moment in history but no longer speaks to our place and time.

Many of us who follow Jesus do not really believe he died and was resurrected. We follow him because he taught and modeled the quintessential life of goodness. Jesus showed us the way, the truth, and a life lived with grace. He taught us to love God with our whole being, to love others as we love ourselves, and to labor for the reign of God through the pursuit of peace and justice. We strive to do the same. Isn’t that enough?

As someone who grew up in a conservative Midwestern small town, I have had “proven” to me many times, by ardent peers and pastors, that Jesus must have been resurrected in body. Some of the evidence, built up brick by brick, as if for a court of law, comes from this passage we heard today. The stone moved away from the entrance. The grave cloths lying neatly folded to the side. Based on this, we hear, the male disciples believed. They knew that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and they raced back to tell the others. Presumably we should know it too, believe that this must have happened, and accept it as we accept any scientific fact. 

As you probably know, this is an amazing stretch of the imagination, to think that we can impose Enlightenment logic on what can only be described as an incredible and ancient narrative. Evangelical Christians, in particular, are very drawn to this extension of a scientific worldview into the world of the Bible, as if we could use this method to demonstrate spiritual realities. But we can’t.  In the words of one of my favorite theologians, Bart Ehrman, “Almost any explanation for the empty tomb--supposing there was a tomb, since it was extremely rare for victims of crucifixion to be buried at all--any explanation would be less fantastic and therefore more scientifically probable than the one that Christians propose. If you found the body of your loved one gone from its resting place, what might you think? That the body had been taken. That you were at the wrong grave. The last thing you would think is, ‘This person has risen from the dead, taking their body.’”

It is not because this explanation is empirically provable that we Christians make it the center point of our faith. It isn’t even because Jesus said that he would be resurrected; in three of the four Gospels he is recorded as saying nothing like that. We tell this story  because it represents a deeper reality that we feel. It’s power is represented in the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ.

Mary’s reaction at the empty tomb seems to me very natural. I can’t imagine going home as the male disciples do. Apparently, neither can Mary. She hangs around, weeping, checking the tomb again, like we do when we've lost something and keep looking for it in the same place, again and again. Like when someone dies and you keep thinking they are going to call. Like when you lose a baby to miscarriage and still absent mindedly think about your due date, before you remember that that baby is gone. Mary is seeking her lost loved one in a haze of grief. And then suddenly, she's talking with angels.

And when they ask, “Woman, why are you crying?” she replies, reasonably: “They have taken my Lord away.” Mary, not knowing she’s speaking to divine beings--because, after all, that isn’t most people’s day-to-day-- begs the angels to tell her where they have taken Jesus’ body, so that she can get it and bring it back. There is so much that is real and awful here. The reality in that time and place of grave robbing. An attempt to negotiate from a place of powerlessness. Mary is a woman like so many then and now, trying to give her loved one the last care she can. “Let me care for him” she says. The moment is raw. It echoes of grieving women and slain revolutionaries and the power of sudden loss and violence in every time and place. 

And then the story changes. 

It becomes a story of encountering Jesus somehow alive in the garden, of not at first recognizing him but then suddenly, in a flash, at the sound of his voice saying her name, knowing. Mary knows Jesus when he calls her name.  

When I lived in Tennessee, some friends told me I had to watch the famous Robert Altman movie Nashville. In this film one of the characters, a country-western singer, is in the hospital and quite frail, emotionally, mentally and physically spent. In one scene, she sits in a wheelchair in the chapel and softly sings a familiar hymn: ...."and he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own...."

As she sang about the risen Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden, it felt to me like she was also telling her own story of feeling close to Jesus, like a lost lamb being gathered up by her Good Shepherd and taken back to the flock. Like a person abandoned to shame and self-degradation, being found and redeemed. It touched my heart in ways that I couldn't explain, because, to be honest, belief for me at that point in my life was up here, in my head, not here, in my heart.

But now I have a different relationship to this whole human problem of being lost and needing to be found, of being made of clay but longing for spirit. I  understand, but I am a little sorry when I hear people say the hymn "In the Garden" is sentimental, too focused on a private relationship with God, a kind of silly "me-and-Jesus" faith. Because the more I know of death and human weakness, the more this song, and this gospel, seem rock-bottom practical.

The story of Jesus is not real the way an argument in favor of the prosecution is real. That kind of intellectual sword play has its place, and I love it in the sphere of law and debate.  But the narrative of the resurrection has a different kind of reality. It’s true in a deep-down, human way, which means it often doesn’t look like what we would expect. C.S. Lewis said, “Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion that you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up.”

That a Jewish preacher from Galilee, who many hoped would lead a military rebellion against Rome, that this man died an ignomious and horrible death on the cross, rose again, and lives forever to show us how to live and die--that is a strange story indeed. And it is story I find I cannot live without. 

Those who are regulars in this congregation know that one of my favorite books in the world is The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. The main character, the narrator who tells us her story through her letters addressed to God, is Celie, a poor black woman who has been abused all her life.

But Celie has somebody in her life who loves her, her sister Nettie, who gets chased away by Celie’s violent husband, Albert. Albert doesn't let Celie ever see the mail, so Celie never hears from Nettie and starts to believe that her sister is dead.

But Nettie isn't dead. She has gone to Africa as a missionary and writes to Celie many letters over the years; she never gets a reply, but she keeps writing letters to Celie anyway. Then, one day, Celie finds the packet of letter from Nettie that Albert has stashed away under the floorboards. "Dear Celie," Nettie writes, "I know you think I am dead. But I am not." Nettie explains that she has been faithfully writing to Celie all along, and she continues to try to reach her, to tell her, "one thing I want you to know, I love you, and I am not dead." These are some of my favorite words in all of literature.

"I love you, and I am not dead." You may think I am dead and you are unloved, but I am not dead, and you are loved. Celie suffers terrible childhood abuse from her father, and further abuse through her forced marriage to a violent man, has her babies taken away from her and her sister driven from her, but God loves Celie and her life, so full of hardship because of the hard-heartedness of others, is transformed anyway.

When Celie and Nettie are both old and gray, they are finally reunited, and they fall down on the ground with joy. Everyone, she says, must be thinking about how old they look. "But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt." Old, but young and new, anyway.

Easter is God's Yes to Jesus and to new life and new creation and to us. When the world said or says no to Jesus and to new life and new creation, to reconciliation and peace, justice and healing and mercy, God says yes anyway and raises up our hope. This is beyond proving, this is about what we know. Jesus says, today, to you, I love you, and I am not dead. Of all the sweet sounds that we may hear, are any words sweeter to our ear than those?

4.19.20 Lord of all Faithfulness

As I listen to this Scripture passage, one part of the story of what happens after the Passion, after Christ’s death and resurrection, I’m struck by how similar our situation is right now to the situation the first disciples found themselves in. After all, they didn’t know it was Easter. The sunrise on that Easter day didn’t tell them that something new was breaking into the world. It’s not always easy to read the signs of change: generally, the messengers of total transformation look a lot like the prelude to chaos and disaster. Because sometimes that’s what it takes to  a new world. 

So, the disciples were huddled into a locked upper room, in fear of their lives, that the authorities who killed Jesus might come after them, too. Maybe they also feared the crowds who loved Jesus so much. What if those people came demanding an account of how Jesus died? None of the disciples had stood with him the way they had promised. What if Jesus’ followers wanted them to take up the mantle and lead in his stead? Those frightened followers knew they didn’t have it in them. So they waited, mourning the death of their leader and teacher. They didn’t know what was coming but they were pretty sure it wasn’t good. 

And I think of us, most of humanity, holed up in our homes, many of us frightened and unsure. We feel threatened by something that is larger than us. We may not feel responsible, but we surely doubt our ability to manage it. As we watch jobs disappear, local businesses close, milk prices drop, and our children become more fragile with isolation, even the most privileged of us can feel deeply saddened.

But then, this woman, Mary Magdalene, came to the disciples, making the most incredible claim that would undo, would overturn, their turmoil, their sense of failure and inadequacy, their loss of hope. All might be made right after all; all might be healed. Could it be? Could it actually be so? Can it be for us? Does this ancient story actually mean anything today?

I think it does because the story of the Resurrection, and of the Pentecost that followed, doesn’t end with Mary Magdalene’s certainty. It includes the skepticism, the doubt of the disciple Thomas. We don’t know why Thomas gets called out in this story; it seems a little harsh that centuries of blame have been cast on him for being the one who needed proof of the risen savior. Surely, he couldn’t have been the only one. 

Perhaps Thomas speaks better to our generation of Christians better than the unvarnished hope of Mary. Like him, we need evidence. We are a scientific people, living in an age of proof and reason. So even though we can’t see Jesus, we want something concrete. Show us the facts! What does the crucifixion and resurrection look like to us today? What does it mean in the world? How will we really know in the middle of this pain that something better is coming?

I think to find the signs of hope, we need to start with the darkness. I think that the Passion looks like what we are experiencing right now: a world where the broken places are laid bare. We see that the workers we have valued so little--the grocery store clerks, the childcare workers, the farmers--are essential to our survival. We see that the health care and financial systems we have created leave some bodies much sicker and more vulnerable to disease than others. We see more clearly who fills our prisons, who can’t afford to miss a paycheck, who is close to the edge. We see small businesses and churches closing because they can’t keep going. The faultlines in our society and our world are very, very clear. 

And what does the Resurrection like? Maybe it looks like bodies healing,  health restored after suffering and illness, and a world that places more value on public health--because we realize that when anyone is ill, that we are all more likely to get sick. We see our interdependence in a new way. Maybe the resurrection looks like relationships repaired and renewed, first through the computer screen, then, with great joy, in real life--relationships strengthened by the brush with death we have all felt. Maybe the resurrection looks like churches brought back from the brink of closing to new and vibrant ministry because in their loneliness people feel a new connection to spirit and community.  The experience of resurrection and new life, in moments and ways both large and small, all point to the One who gives us life and promises life eternal, the One who raised Jesus up on the third day.

The wonderful writer, Anne Lamott, has shared her life story with honesty and deep spirituality, including her struggle with depression: "I am a broken and a resurrection person," she says. So many of us would say the same.

As I write these words, I hear the "echo" of a lovely post by Lucy MacNeil, singing the beautiful hymn, "Lord of All Faithfulness" (set to the tune, Slane, the traditional Irish melody used in "Be Thou My Vision"). Her prayer serves as a lament and a reminder of our need, like Mary Magdalene so long ago, to grieve and lament what we have lost and what we fear is still ahead, and yet to trust and rejoice as well in the promises of God. Because God is still speaking, and we are an Easter people. Let us demand proof of the resurrection, but let us look for it in the world around us, and in the activity of ourselves, making wholeness out of the brokenness we find. Now and forever, allelieu and Amen.