From Generation to Generation

Luke 1:39-55, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 22nd, 2024 · Duration 18:40

From Generation to Generation

Luke 1:39-55

What I remember most was the smell of the thing when we pulled this old nativity set out of the box from the attic it lived in for most of the year--that light musk of old wood. It was nothing fancy, this set. Made of dark stained wood, the figurines mildly abstract, the colors muted. Craft-store moss had been glued around the sides and on top of the stable, which seemed to give it an air of realism and would get thinner each year as some would fall off in transport. I don't know how much moss there is in the trees around Bethlehem, but it matched the Spanish moss that cascaded down the limbs of the live oaks at my grandmother's house, where we spent every other Christmas. A house that, to a child, felt old enough to have been biblical.

I.

Not long after Audrey and I were married, we got our first nativity set. I bought it from a street vendor in one of the markets in the Dominican Republic while on a trip. It's just a small hand-formed set made of clay, painted and glazed, and contains only the holy family, an angel, and a few stray farm animals, all small enough to hold in two hands. We moved several times during those first years of marriage and never had much space, so it was always easy to find a small surface to put it on and wrap it back up in its paper at the season's end. Without the stable, it somehow felt as transient as we were.

In the years since, we have added other sets, though none as lovely as the one given to us a few years ago by two old saints in our previous church who'd begun downsizing to move closer to their children. A big, beautiful Willow Tree set now sits in a place of prominence in our dining room, and I think of them every time I pass it.

Our boys, too, have a nativity all to themselves, a Fisher Price set we got them several years back. In years past, it was the first thing they looked for as we brought all the Christmas boxes in from storage. They would gather around it, and for the next half hour--an eternity in our home--would be transfixed by it, setting it up and taking it apart, pushing over and over again the angel that sits at the top of the stable that plays the most grating version of Away in the Manger you can imagine, especially when powered by fading year-old batteries.

But they're usually not content to let it be, and soon, other figurines from their toy collection find their way to the scene. There have been years when Lego men from assorted sets and Star Wars figures with light sabers and spaceships could be found at the side of the stable. Other Fisher Price characters have also appeared--a firefighter and a construction worker over by the shepherds. Superhero action figures fill in between the sheep and the wise men. Even a few smaller stuffed animals have been seen hovering around them, offering their comfort and protection to the holy family.

And it has occurred to me that this ragtag nativity set, with makeshift parts combined with a sense of childlike imagination and proximity, in some ways, may be the most accurate of all the sets we own. In fact, it stands in the face of a persistent danger of these precious nativities that we carefully arrange on bookshelves or on tabletops with candles and seasonal decor, which is that if we're not careful, they can make the story they aim to tell too fixed, too self-contained, too final and finished, with no room for anyone else, no room for us.

After all, the world of these nativity sets extends no higher than the star connected to the top of the stable and no further than the farthest sheep, encapsulated like a snow globe, meant to fit together perfectly in one box to be put away at season's end. But the Christmas story is much bigger and wilder and much more real than that. And any of our attempts to compress it or shelter it contradicts the words of scripture, which goes to great lengths to remind us this story has to do with more than a lowly stable just outside the little town of Bethlehem but involves the whole world. The gospels insist on telling us all that was happening around this family and this baby--what was happening in history and the world that made this birth so necessary.

II.

The story of Jesus's birth in the second chapter of Luke--in a familiar passage we will hear again in this room on Tuesday night--begins, surprisingly, with the names of government officials at the time and notes that it was imperial taxation policy in the Roman Empire that brought the holy family to Bethlehem in the first place. What nativity set could be complete without a tax official standing out there to one side?

Luke means to remind us that this story did not happen "Once upon a time in a land far, far away," but during "the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria." The lens is much wider than that stable and the manger "where he lay." And just a chapter before, this lens is wider still, in the passage we heard earlier, of the song Mary sings in her cousin's living room upon hearing they're both unexpectedly expecting:

"My soul magnifies the Lord," she sings, "and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is God's name.

Her song begins by giving voice to the mysterious sense that any expectant mother might feel, that something beyond her is happening inside her. But as she continues, her song takes a turn, and it becomes clear that Mary is aware of just how far beyond her this story extends.

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

And suddenly, what began as a sweet song about the birth of a baby is revealed to, in fact, be a song of the rebirth of a people; the rebirth, even, of all creation--rebirth described more as a reversal of the world as we know it (we can see where Jesus gets his prophetic spirit, passed down from his mother like dimples or the color of his eyes).

Not far outside that first nativity scene, all of these other characters were quietly finding their place:
--the proud and the powerful
--the lowly and brokenhearted
--those without anything to speak of
--and those with more than they know what to do with.
This story has something to do with them, too. And not just something, but everything.
These characters are not likely to be included in any set we would find in the store or even in the attic, but they must be present in our telling of this story, not only to make it true to scripture as we receive it but to make it true to the world as we know it. Those harder, sharper, darker, and colder parts of life in the world tend to come upon us this time of year as a kind of intrusion, as something foreign and inappropriate, almost offensive. Sickness and death, depression and longing, politics, poverty, and other evidence pointing toward the truth of our brokenness. They have no place in our holiday celebrations--like the holy couple that night, there is no room for them in the inn. Or so it seems.

Is it a comfort to remember all these things--these dents and dings, these shards of glass, these bruises and breaks--are not counter to the story we tell but so deeply at the heart of it? In fact, their existence is the very reason this story happened in the first place. And if they were not, how could we believe it was true?

III.

The poet farmer, Wendell Berry, in one of his Sabbath poems,1 writes of walking into his old barn one crisp morning, and as he reaches to open the latch of one of the stalls (as he's done countless times before), it flashes before his imagination that behind that stable door he might find the holy family "breathing there:"
the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe,
light beaming upon them from some unknown source,
the air
Around them joyful as a choir.

He stands there with one hand on the door, Looking into another world that is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.

Remembering, he writes, that it happened once and that we ourselves are living in the world it happened in when it first happened.

IV.

And this, I believe, is the key--or perhaps the latch--to open us to the beating heart of this story and the mystery it presents us with each year, and what, I believe, each of the nativities that we surround ourselves with this time of year aim to remind us of, as they sit amid the clutter of our home or as the centerpiece of our most cherished traditions, a miracle wild and reckless enough to hold our attention for a few moments each year: which is that we ourselves are living in the world it happened in when it first happened.

And that it happened not sheltered, staged, or apart from the world as it was, or as it is, but there in the middle of it. And so the night that we remember was perhaps a little darker than we often imagine it to have been, but so too is our world now more holy than we often perceive it to be. It is the same world, filled with the same people, our same trials, faults, and failures. People bearing the light of that same divine image, hidden as it often is.

And if it happened once, what's to keep it from happening again?

What's to keep it from happening in this moment and all the moments that are to come in these days ahead or, even more, any ordinary day of our lives? What's to keep it from happening even in those times and seasons when we cannot imagine God could be so close?

What's to keep it from happening, church?

What's to keep it from happening again in you?
__________________
1 Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poem VI, 1987


What, Then, Should We Do?

Luke 3:7-18, The Third Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 15th, 2024 · Duration 16:56

What, Then, Should We Do?

Luke 3:7-16

A few years ago, it was discovered that there were over 1,000 musical instruments owned by the School District of Philadelphia, PA, that could not be played because they were broken, and there was no available budget to fix them.

In response, a number of organizations around the city came together to form something they called "A Symphony for a Broken Orchestra." The idea was this: they collected some 400 of these broken orchestral instruments heretofore lying unused in storage around the city and took on the work of seeing what kind of sounds they could make in their broken state. So they plucked on a broken violin or blew into a French horn that was all warped and bent.

If an instrument couldn't make its intended type of sound, they found another way to make music with it: lining up a bunch of busted cellos to be used as percussion, and so forth. They cataloged all these instruments, recorded all these sounds, and handed them over to a man by the name of David Lang, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, who then composed an original piece of music made especially for the sounds these instruments could only make in their broken state. In talking about his approach to writing this music, Lang said, I'm trying to make the brokenness kind of the foreground. I don't want to avoid the things that are broken. I don't want to make these instruments sound like we don't notice how changed they are. And so I tried to ask for things that would highlight the fact that they're changed.

They performed this piece before a live audience to rave reviews, the assembled orchestra embodying the project itself--including students in grade school, amateurs, and some professionals. A 9-year-old cellist playing alongside an 82-year-old oboist. One reviewer described the performance: As the 40-minute symphony progressed, the instruments roared to life with powerful force. Some musicians struggled, like a clarinetist who could get out only short spurts of sound and a French horn player who kept losing his mouthpiece. But together, the orchestra produced rich harmony.

Following the performance, each of the fixable instruments was sent away to be repaired and then returned to the schools to be used by the students. Said one reporter, Next fall, children in the Philadelphia public schools will open the cases of their flutes and violins and find a note explaining how these wounded instruments were healed.1

The crowds were coming out to the wilderness to meet John the Baptist at the River Jordan, and he told them to prepare for the one who was coming. And they asked him, What, then, should we do?

And he told them: Fix what is broken, but find the music in brokenness, too.
I.

Broadway United Methodist Church in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, meets in a towering old sanctuary built back in the church boom of the first half of the twentieth century. As is so often the case, the neighborhood around the church looks much different than it did back then, as does the congregation that meets there. But Broadway, better than most churches, has embraced a new mission presented by its changing context.

"Stop helping people" became one of their slogans some years ago. Along with, "Do less, be more." As in, focus less on what you can do for your neighbors and more on how to be a good neighbor. They decided to back up and focus on the first step in being a good neighbor, which is simply to be interested enough in what God is doing in people's lives to ask about it. So they started asking and building relationships with their neighbors and seeing what the Holy Spirit was already doing around them, which they might be a part of, and amplifying it where they could.

They'd run an after-school tutoring program for 30 years, but when they stopped and looked, they saw that the graduation rate in the neighborhood had actually gone down in each of those years. They began to wonder what good they were doing. Nevertheless, a few years back, they were looking for more teachers to help in their program. They heard about a woman in the neighborhood named Maya, who was tutoring neighborhood kids in her home.

Someone from the church went to see one of her sessions and found children of all ages there in her living room being tutored in any subject they could bring to her. They met every day after school, and on Fridays, their parents were invited to join them for a party where the kids would present their work and have it celebrated. It was beautiful. The church realized they didn't need Maya to come be a part of their ministry; they needed to do whatever they could to bless her in her ministry. Sometime later, they did just that as part of a practice they'd taken on to invite folks from the neighborhood doing good work to receive a blessing from the church in worship.

Mike Mather, the pastor of Broadway at the time--whose book we read this past summer and who was kind enough to Zoom in to talk with us about it--said after that experience, they started asking a new question when looking for the Holy Spirit at work around them, which was, Where are the parties? Where are people celebrating in the neighborhood? What are they celebrating? Because the Holy Spirit is probably among them.

They even started throwing more parties of their own. They started to organize meals in honor of a neighborhood youth in someone's home. The youth would get to invite some people, and the ministers would invite folks from the church who they thought might connect with them. They would all bring food to share, and at the end of the supper, they asked the youth to share with the group what they thought their gifts were and how they felt called to use them. Then the question was posed to the group of adults from the neighborhood and the church who had gathered there around them: Having heard this young person speak of their gifts, what will you offer to support them? How would you meet these gifts and bless them? People would respond, thinking of their own gifts and resources. And then they would gather around the young person, lay hands on them, and bless them.

After one of these holy meals, one of the adults from the church came up to Mike and said, We need to do these for adults, too. And so they did. They started hosting these meals for all sorts of different people in the neighborhood and the church. They would gather in homes, then go around the table, name their gifts, and ask how the church can support them in living out their calling, remembering the power of blessing knows no age.2

The crowds were coming out to the wilderness to meet John the Baptist at the River Jordan to hear about this coming Kingdom of God, and they asked him, What, then, should we do? And he told them: Throw more parties.

II.

Parker Palmer is one of the most beloved spiritual writers of our time, and, as is so often the case, the power and depth of his writing for others on their journey is rooted in the hills and valleys of his own. Years ago, he wrote about one of his very low periods. He was in his forties and already a well-known author. He had found himself in a period of dark depression. He said he wasn't just "lost in the dark," he had "become the dark." There was not an atom of my body that felt connected to anything, he said. I was just floating in cold outer space.

But there was one person who was able to touch him in the one place where he still had feeling, which was his feet. His friend, a man named Bill Taber, would come to his house every afternoon and rub his feet. Bill wouldn't say anything. Wouldn't offer platitudes or advice or even good, honest words of encouragement. He would just gently but firmly rub his friend's feet in silence. And Parker would feel something. He would feel someone, and be pulled little by little out of the cold darkness and back into the world of life and love and people. He would say later that Bill saved his life, by reminding him how to feel.3

What, then, should we do? the crowds asked John in their longing.
And he said to them: Rub each other's feet.

I heard once of a tribe somewhere deep in the Amazon that had a custom where if someone in the tribe was known to have committed some moral failing--some crime, some hurt--that person was to sit in the middle of town for three days, right where everyone would walk by them throughout the day. And when anyone from the community would walk by this person, they were to stop and tell them every good thing they could think of about them. To stop and recite to this person--who had ruptured, in some way, the social bonds that they lived by--all the things they loved about them; to remind this person--and themselves, perhaps--that they are more than the worst thing they've ever done. And this would continue for three days, and after that, the matter was done.

An anthropologist who observed this practice wrote in his journal, I hope when the missionaries get there, they don't mess that up.4

What should we do? the crowds asked John.
Forgive each other. Then forgive yourselves. And you will know resurrection.

III.

I knew a group of friends some years ago who, like so many groups of friends, had not seen each other in nearly two years since the start of the pandemic. And in that time, one of them had had a baby, her first one. A beautiful little girl. These friends supported her as best they could from afar, but it was a hard pregnancy, a harder birth, and perhaps an even harder postpartum.

These friends celebrated with her and grieved with her from afar until, finally, they were able to go and be with her, and so they did. They hopped in cars and boarded planes, and they descended upon her home to meet this beloved new child of God. And they saw her nursery and her little bouncy chair where she liked to take naps and the world that this dear family was making together.

They took their friend out and her sweet new daughter, too. And while they were out, it came to be the child's nap time, and so she was getting fussy, and the new mother was rocking her there at their table, and stepping away and trying to give her a bottle and change her diaper and all the things you do to get babies to stop crying in public, and her friends could see she was getting frustrated, and so one of them reached for the child and said, May I hold her? The friend hesitated, so he said to her, She can cry in my arms just as well as she can cry in yours. And so she handed her daughter over to him, and she fussed, for a time, in his arms instead, but settled down. And then another friend took her into his arms, where she fussed for a time and then settled down. And this is what they did together for the rest of that meal and in so many ways for the rest of the time they spent together--they handed this baby over from one pair of loving arms to another, to another, to another.

What should we do? the people asked.
Hold each other's babies, he said.

IV.

What should we do? the people ask John, standing there still dripping wet in the river. What should we do to prepare for this one whom you tell us is coming to bring the Kingdom of God here among us?

And John tells them, in so many words, Live as if it is already here.
Live as if God is already here among us. Little things: share what you have. Work hard and be honest in your labors. Treat people with fairness, generosity, and compassion. Cultivate contentment in your own heart, in your own families. They ask him what to do to prepare for Christ's arrival, and John tells them, The secret is that there is no secret.

The secret, church--of this season and of this story, and what we're to do because of it--the secret is that there is no secret.

1 "A Symphony Breathes Like Into 400 Broken School Instruments," by Joshua Barone, Dec 4, 2017, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/arts/music/philadelphia-david-lang-symphony-for-a-broken-orchestra.html?_r=0
2 https://www.faithandleadership.com/death-and-resurrection-urban-church. Supplemented by Mike's presentation at Broadway UMC for 'A Convocation of Christian Leaders,' Duke Leadership, May 9, 2018.
3 "Living the Questions: What's the communal equivalent of rubbing each other's feet?" Parker Palmer, On Being Blog, Feb 5, 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/living-the-questions-whats-our-communal-equivalent-of-rubbing-each-others-feet/
4 This is my best rendering of a story Tom Long told during a workshop at the McAfee School of Theology Preaching Consultation in Chattanooga, TN, October 2015.

All Hearts Beat as One

Luke 2:8-14, The Second Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 8th, 2024 · Duration 8:09

All Hearts Beat as One

Luke 2:8-14

News of Great Joy, News of Great Mirth

The first Christmas hymns of the church date back to at least 4th-century Rome, but it wasn't until some 800 years later that some monks in France began penning new lyrics about the birth of Christ to popular tunes, thus laying the seed for what would become the tradition of the Christmas carol--a carol being a festive song often meant for dancing and merrymaking. Originally, these songs were much more at home in an alehouse, on a street corner, or in other secular settings than in a church sanctuary.

In fact, it wasn't until the late 19th century that these popular Christmas tunes found their way into official church worship services. That seems to have crystallized in 1880 in the town of Truro, England when the local cathedral held the first Service of Lessons and Carols. It was held on Christmas Eve, at least in part, to serve as an alternative to the revelry and singing that typically commenced that evening in the local pubs!

But what's interesting about all of this, to me at last, is that this tradition would coalesce around Christmas in particular. It seems only natural to us now, with these melodies and words being so much a part of our own memory and expectation--the hopes and fears of all our years--it's hard to imagine Christmas without them. And yet, why all of this about the Christmas story and not, say, Easter? What about this story has led people through the generations to sing--not just in churches but anywhere that people gather?

I suspect it's because the Christmas story, at heart, is a story about people finding each other--or even more, people being called to one another--by means of song. You could say the first carol was actually sung that first Christmas night by the angelic choir in the skies over Bethlehem. Neither was it offered in a sanctuary as part of official worship. True, it was out in the fields and not on a street corner or in an alehouse. But then again, who knows what the shepherds were drinking to keep warm?

The Christmas story stays so close to our hearts and to our mouths because it suggests that God can come into this world just about anywhere and through pretty much anyone. Maybe even people like us. So there is always reason to celebrate, no matter where we find ourselves, or whom we find ourselves with.

About to Turn

The story of Christ's birth, since it was first told to the shepherds that night, has brought people together in songs of celebration. This makes it curious that so many traditional Christmas carols and anthems are sung in a minor key. We'll get into a very little amateur music theory here, but there are major keys and minor keys. Major keys tend to feel bright, clean, clear, and resolved--O Come, All Ye Faithful is typically sung in G major, which complements the triumphant message of its lyrics.

But minor keys are different. Minor keys can often feel unsettled, complex, and even sorrowful. So many of our most beloved carols and hymns of this season come to us in a minor key--Carol of the Bells, What Child is This, We Three Kings, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Sing We Now of Christmas, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, just to name a few. All just a touch haunting, mysterious, unresolved, even as they celebrate Christ's birth.

This seems to tell us something else important, which I believe we all know and feel intuitively: there is a tension very close to the heart of this season and this story. It is a tension the church lifts high in these weeks leading up to Christmas in the season of Advent, which is that while we celebrate that Christ has come, we also know our world is not yet perfect.

It is the tension, we often say, between "here" and "not yet." On the one hand, God is here; the Word has been made flesh and the Light of the World has come. And yet there is so much darkness, so many shadows. In fact, this season, with all its tenderness, accentuates this truth: that mourning and crying persist, that death has not yet been defeated. That some chairs are still empty.

It is important that we say this. But it's much more natural for us to sing it. Music helps us believe two things can be true at once. So the choir can sing words like, "My soul cries out with a joyful shout that the God of my heart is great," but to do so in a minor key.

And we know somewhere deep within us this, too, is Christmas.

All Hearts Beat as One

It's common and even standard practice these days for new parents to come up with a "birth plan," which is often a written document that outlines your preferences for labor, delivery, and those precious minutes and hours after birth. In our experience, the birth plan is also the first thing that gets thrown out the window as soon as it's "go time". Followed by your sanity and any hope of a good night's sleep.

We received wonderful care, but very little about the births of our three sons went according to plan. One part that did, however, was for us to hold each of them to our chest in those first minutes after they were born for what they call "skin-to-skin contact." There is all sorts of science behind this--but it seems to confirm what is most natural: that it is good for a child's first moments on the outside to imitate, as much as possible, what their life was on the inside. For them to be held, for them to be surrounded by warmth and love.

Though it was not our plan, it ended up being my chest that our first son was held to those first few minutes--and even that almost didn't happen. After the delivery, he needed to be whisked away by the nurses, so Audrey looked me in the eye and said, Find him and hold him.

So I did what I was told. I followed them to a room behind large glass windows and watched as they poked and prodded him. And after it seemed they had done all they needed to do, I tapped on the glass and motioned if I could hold him. They let me in, and I unbuttoned my shirt and held him there as best I could--which, I'll be honest, for how natural it was supposed to be, felt pretty unnatural.

But after a minute or so, we both settled down, he and I. They say holding a baby this way has a calming effect--probably on both of you. It stabilizes the baby's temperature, breathing, and even heart rate, which will slowly match that of the one holding them until they are beating together--a closeness that was not even possible in the womb.

What better image for what God aimed to do that first Christmas night. What better way for us to wrap our arms around the miracle and mystery of incarnation than to imagine Almighty God come in the small, helpless, purple body of a newborn child, to be held by us--all of us--skin-to-skin, until all our hearts beat as one.

The Days Are Surely Coming

Jeremiah 33:14-16, The First Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 1st, 2024 · Duration 11:50

The Days Are Surely Coming

Jeremiah 33:14-16

There's a little button on the wall in the birthing center at the big hospital in downtown Macon, Georgia. I'm told that other hospitals in town and probably other places have a similar button, but in this hospital, it's in the main hallway that leads from the birthing rooms to the suites where the new families spend their first few days together.

And it's the practice in the hospital for new mothers, after they've given birth and are being wheeled down the hall to their rooms, to reach up and push this button, which sends a familiar lullaby over the intercom system across the rest of the hospital, letting everyone know that a new life has just come into the world.

I.

It's a beautiful little gesture. Audrey got to push the button after each of our sons was born, and I can tell you from the many times I visited folks in all the other parts of that hospital, it's a sight to see people's faces change in the hallways or other rooms when the music starts playing. The fevered pace of the hospital seems to calm ever so slightly. In the elevator, all the people who moments before were trying hard not to acknowledge those standing around them now look up to make eye contact and smile knowingly at each other.

I've heard that this little melody is especially popular on cancer treatment floors and ICUs, where situations are dire, and outlooks are often bleak. Some have even suggested this lullaby has real medical benefits, helping to stabilize heart rates and breathing, which seems reasonable.

Years ago, I learned that one of the local pediatricians, having observed the impact of this little lullaby, didn't even wait for a new mother to press it. He went ahead and pushed the button himself whenever he walked past it--sometimes several times a day.

I'll admit my first reaction when I heard this was, Is that maybe a bit dishonest? And in the sense that this lullaby is supposed to let people know a baby has just been born in close proximity to them--right down the hall or the next floor up--perhaps. Perhaps it is a little misleading.

But in the sense that this lullaby is meant to remind people that, no matter what circumstance they're facing, they live in a world where babies are still being born, where new life is constantly springing forth--a world where, every day, new eyes are opening, and small bodies feel arms wrap around them in love and care and comfort the first time--no. No, this isn't dishonest or misleading. This is telling the absolute truth right when it's needed most.

This is telling the truth because we do live in a world where these things are always and everywhere happening. In fact, to tell a different story, to act as if these things weren't happening, well, that would be dishonest, wouldn't it?

II.

The church, on the first Sunday of Advent each year, the Sunday we dedicate to "hope," is a bit like this hospital pediatrician, God bless him. Because neither do we wait for an actual birth to send this song of hope out into the world. We go ahead and let it ring in anticipation of the new life that we know is on the way in just four weeks' time. We send a hopeful lullaby out into a world that, from time to time, needs to be reminded that new life is not only possible, but it's already growing among us in ways we often cannot see.

In fact, hope only has to do with things that are not yet here fully. Hope fills the gap between "is" and "should be," and imagines a future that is different from the present. A future that is brighter, fuller, sweeter, more complete.

And as often as the church insists on singing this song of hope to a weary world, we take our place in the lineage of God's people, for hope is the seed from which faith grows. This is the wisdom of starting with hope on this first Sunday of our year, for the rest of the story flows from it.

Hope is why the scriptures were written--why the prophets spoke, why the psalms were sung, why the gospels were recorded and kept and treasured. In fact, you could say hope is why we are here--it is that organizing principle of God's people. Our defining feature through the generations and the tie that binds us to all those who came before is our great belief, our insistence, that there exists somewhere in God's imagination a world that is this world, but different.
A world where wrongs are righted.
A world where mourning and crying and pain are no more.
A world where people enjoy the fruit of their labors and everyone has their fill.
A world where everyone finds their way home. And that this world is coming, that it's happening even now.

Here at the start of our year together we remind ourselves again how we are a people who proclaim that the present is not all there is or will be. That there is light beyond whatever darkness we may see in the moment. The days are surely coming, says the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, in that biblical refrain, when I will fulfill my promises.

The question we ask together throughout the year ahead is how much we believe this is true? Admitting that we know not how it will come to pass, or when.

III.

You see, there must always be a tincture of humility in hope. To be truthful in hope, we must also be clear that this future will almost certainly take longer than we might like. This is true of the smaller hopes of our individual lives and certainly the wider hopes for our world that the prophets imagined and the birth of Jesus foretold.

In fact, we must even say that this future may not come to pass in our lifetime, at least not entirely. Hope often requires that we have a vision that extends beyond the years we are given. But we nonetheless say that this future is coming, somehow and someway, and, should we choose, we can have a part in its arrival. And the part we are invited to have is this: simply to keep this melody of hope alive. To keep the gospel promise of the more-ness of God and God's dream for us and our world alive. To hum its tune when we are at home and when we are away. To teach it to our children so they can teach it to theirs, so it is passed down from one generation to the next just as it has since the beginning. To keep playing this simple melody, this child's lullaby, and as we do, to watch how we start living as if this future we dream of is growing among us. How we breathe a little deeper, how we treat each other a little kinder, how we hold ourselves a little gentler. Hope can do that.

IV.

So I say go ahead. As you walk through the doors of this church back out into this world that waits for you, go ahead and give that button a push. Let the melody ring out. That baby won't be born for another four weeks or so, and there is so much to be done before he comes.

But go ahead and give that button a push.

Let everyone know that wherever they are and whatever is before them, new life is on the way.

It would be misleading not to.

My Kingdom is Not From Here

John 18:33-37, Christ the King Sunday

Scott Dickison · November 24th, 2024 · Duration 20:32

My Kingdom is Not From Here

John 18:33-37

The gift of calendars is that they let us know where and when we are.

Of course, this is true on a surface level--the purpose of a calendar is to tell us what date it is. But it is also true on a deeper level. Calendars help us as a people keep days and seasons sacred and rooted in our deepest principles and values. This is true for us as families and individuals, as we hold certain days sacred, marking births, losses, and anniversaries.

And it's, of course, true in the church. As we have said, today is Christ the King Sunday, also known as Reign of Christ Sunday, the final Sunday of the Christian year. And while it's not one of our "High Holy Days," there is a certain wisdom to it. In holding this final Sunday as sacred, we give ourselves an opportunity to pause and take stock of all that has been before moving on to what is to come. Not only the church year but the entire "Holiday Season" is about to start again, whether we're ready for it or not--and let's be honest, for many of us it already has, with the making of plans and menus and cleaning out the guest room (my boys have been out of school since Thursday). But I submit to you that this is exactly why we need this Sunday, and it may even be why you're here this morning.

I.

I suspect you're here this morning to pause, like you are so many Sundays. To exhale. Or perhaps, before you exhale, to truly inhale--to breathe deep in a way that is difficult when you're constantly running and hurrying from the next thing to the next thing, to the next thing--like so many telephone polls along the highway. I suspect this is why you're here because this is why I'm here, to breathe, for a moment.

You're also here, I suspect, to lift up prayers--to confess your mistakes and seek forgiveness. To come before God with your own troubles and deep longing. But also to come before God on behalf of others. To ask God to be near others in their suffering, in their pain, in their uncertainty or loss. I do too.

You're here to take in silence and open yourself to the God who waits for us there. But you're also here to make a joyful noise--to sing the hymns of the church, and hear them sung because singing is good for your soul, and it reminds you of the hymns your mother would sing around the house, and there's probably nothing we do that opens us up more to the presence of God in the here and now, and stirs our imaginations to how it will be than singing together.

You're here to give--this is a big part of what we do in this hour. We give. We give our time, our voices, our presence, our warmth, our money. You're here to give because you know deep down there's no greater act of faith than letting go.

And some of you may even be here needing a hopeful word. To hear the scriptures read, and to ponder their meaning. To expect, or at least suspect, some truth is hidden within them that will help us along the way. Help us see things differently. Help us understand life in the world better or more deeply, more hopefully. Some bit of bread for the journey ahead.

I suspect this is why you're here, and why I'm here, this Sunday and so many other Sundays: to do these things and, in so doing, to pause, to reflect, to immerse yourself in a story that is much bigger than you but of which you are an essential part, and to do these thing with others, for while there is so much we can do open ourselves to the presence of God in our life by ourselves, there are certain parts of the life of faith that can only be accessed with others. So we come here, to this place, to gather with these people, to inhabit this hour of time together in a different way than we do most every other hour of the week.

And the shorthand for all of this--the shorthand that we use because it's the shorthand Jesus used--is to call all of this "the Kingdom of God."

II.

Hardly a Sunday passes without us invoking this term, this image, this title, this hope. It's something Jesus himself points to repeatedly in the gospels. The Gospel of Mark, which we've been following for much of this year, says right from the start, this is why Jesus came, to usher in this new, emerging "Kingdom of God." This was Jesus's opening sermon in Mark that he expanded and expounded upon throughout his ministry: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news!

And it turns out this Kingdom is really less of a place and more of a happening. The word in Greek is basilea, which can be translated as "kingdom"--the physical territory where the king rules, but also as "reign"--the period of time or the age in which the king is in charge. And so we can think of the Reign of God as the time or the age to come when God's vision for the world--God's Hope, God's Dream--will be made complete. But it's also the moments, the events, the happenings in the here and now whenever what God wants wins the day.

Throughout the gospels, this is what Jesus does: he makes this future thing a present reality. Whenever he heals someone, because this coming kingdom will be marked by healing. Whenever he calls someone back to life, because in this coming kingdom we all will get to come home. Whenever he invites someone unexpected around a table or plops a child in front of some adults and says, Listen to them.
In his teachings, Jesus describes what this kingdom will look and feel like. He does this mostly in parables, little stories that flip things on their heads and light our imaginations on fire. He uses a variety of images, most of which draw on everyday things and people.

He says this coming kingdom is something that grows mysteriously, magically, almost. It's like a mustard seed that starts small--so small you could barely see it. But before you look, it's grown big enough for birds to rest in its shade. Or it's like some seed that a gardener just throws on the ground, then he goes inside and takes a nap, just goes on with his business, and finds that with a little sunlight and a little rain, the seeds grew while he wasn't even looking. Or it's like yeast that's used to bake bread. You mix in the yeast, knead the dough, then put it in a bowl with a towel over it and let it sit in the corner--don't fuss with it, or it will collapse in on itself. Just do your part, let it go, and watch as the bread rises. The Kingdom of God is like that, he says--as a comfort, I think. Yes, we have a part to play in its coming, but ultimately, it's not all up to us, thank goodness.

Other times, he says this kingdom of God is like something precious you find--it's treasure hidden in a field or a pearl necklace that catches your eye. You realize you just have to have it, so you spend way too much money to buy it, but then you wear it on special occasions or for any other reason. Or this kingdom is a party you never expected to be invited to--a wedding, let's say. But then your invitation comes, and you get there, and the service is beautiful, and then the reception is incredible, with food, the dancing--you don't know hardly anyone there, so you don't mind dancing a little more than you normally do. And you feel so welcome, so caught up in the joy of it all. And you start to think that people aren't so bad after all. That maybe we really are all in this together. The Kingdom of God isn't something owed to us, Jesus seems to say. It's an unexpected gift. A surprise.

Other times, this kingdom is like losing something special or precious, and then finding it again. It's like when a sheep, a little lamb, wanders off from the flock, and the shepherd goes out and looks for it until he finds it. Or a coin that a woman loses in all the clutter and turns the house over until she finds it. Or it's like a son. A son that a father loses, and so he waits by the window each night scanning the horizon for that familiar profile, and when he sees it, he runs and hugs him and says I love you. This is your home. This kingdom is mysterious and unexpected and joyful and abundant.

But it's also challenging and sometimes uncomfortable, and maybe most of all it is at odds with the world as we know it. There is a hard edge to this Kingdom, this Reign of God Jesus describes. The coming of this new world must mean a change from the old. In fact, Jesus suggests that this new kingdom's arrival will be marked by the world as we know it being turned on its head. The last becoming first and the first becoming last. Those who are at the top suddenly finding themselves on the bottom, and those for whom life in this world is hard and painful and unfair being rewarded for making it through. As Frederick Buechner put it, the good news of this coming Kingdom will inevitably be bad news for some, at least at first. Because it means we must change. Repent, Jesus says, over and over.

After all, it's this Kingdom that Jesus keeps preaching about that lands him in front of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Judea, in our gospel lesson this morning, and it was this Kingdom that, just a few hours later, would get him killed. The Kingdom isn't all about sheep and mustard seeds and wedding banquets. It's also about those harder parts of life in the world. Who has what, who's "us" and who's "not us." We have to reckon with the fact that there was something so offensive, so unnerving, so unacceptable to the powers that be that they saw it fit to kill him because of it. This Kingdom is risky. You may have to lose the life you know to find it, Jesus says. The promise is that when you do, it will be worth it. But you know this. It's why you're here. You've experienced something of this Kingdom of God breaking through in your life. Some moment, some season. Some loss that opened up to new life. Some feeling of calm that revealed what's possible. Some windfall, some relationship. Some table you never expected to be at. Some hymn that always makes you cry. Some people you've found to sing it with. And while the Kingdom of God is not so much a place, it's also true that this kingdom seems to "happen" in certain places more than others.

III.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I attended college at Wake Forest University, is home to one of the region's largest Moravian communities. The Moravians are a wonderful little protestant group that dates back to the mid-15th century in Moravia, in present-day Czech Republic. They're one of the earliest reformation movements, known for their humility, unity, and maybe most importantly, their delicious sweet rolls, which they eat this time of year as part of one of their great traditions, the Moravian "love feast," which is something like Communion but where actual food and drink are shared.

There are two main Moravian bakeries left in Winston-Salem. One is Dewey's, for which I'm partial and have even ordered sweet rolls on rush delivery. The other is Winkler's, which may be the older of the two and is located in historic Old Salem, the site of the original Moravian community.

Audrey and I took the boys to Winker's when we were in town a few years ago--this old, old bakery where they've been making these sweet rolls to be used in these "feasts" of love, peace, and unity for years and years. And it turns out that when they make the dough for the sweet rolls there in this generations-old bakery, they just ball it up and place the rolls on racks over in the corner, not using any yeast to help them rise. They don't have to add yeast to the rolls because from all those years and years of baking, there's enough yeast in the air to make the rolls rise.1

IV.

I like to think the same is true in this place. That within these walls where people have gathered for so long for the same reasons you and I have: to worship, to pray, to sing, to listen, to wait in silence, to give, reflect, to pause, to breathe--people have been doing these things for so long, that this Kingdom we seek is simply in the air.

So take a deep breath, church. Next week, we will begin telling our story together again, but this week, we breathe.

1 Special thanks to dear friend, Alan Sherouse, for passing along this incredible tidbit about Winker's.

The Birth Pangs

Mark 13:1-8, The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · November 17th, 2024 · Duration 15:24

The Birth Pangs

Mark 13:1-8

In his poem "The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy," which is printed at the end of your order of worship, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai writes about this strange human phenomenon: We can describe the pain we feel with exactness but often struggle to find words for joy.

The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy, he writes. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't learned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that----a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything. I've heard people say
after nights of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain --
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.1

I.

It's true, isn't it? We have 1,000 words for pain and learn to use them with precision and even creativity from an early age. When he was 2, our son, Billy, reached up on the kitchen counter, touched a sheet with hot cookies, and learned, viscerally, the meaning of the word hot. And from then on, all we'd have to do was say, Careful, that's hot, and he would immediately pull his little hands away. Hot was one of his first words--he learned to speak among the pains. Once his younger brother, Sidney, came along, he even tried it himself: whenever Sid would pick up a toy Billy wanted to play with, Billy would say, Careful Sid, that's hot!

We learn pain's location. We're asked, Where does it hurt?, and we learn to locate it and respond, Here. We can point to pain, we can give voice to pain. Pain almost demands that we describe it. But pain can also be confusing.

I recently learned of something known as referred pain or reflexive pain, which is a phenomenon in which the pain is felt differs from the place where the real painful stimuli are happening. The most common example is during heart attacks. Of course, the real damage is happening in the cardiac muscles of the heart, but the pain is felt in the left arm or neck or back and not the chest.

As a runner, I learned the hard way some time ago that pain felt in the knee is often the result of muscle tightness in this small area in the hip--the glute minimus for those of you keeping bingo cards out there. It's not at all intuitive, and your body doesn't help you find the true locus of this pain, but once you do find it--and it takes just a touch--it becomes very clear just where the real problem is, and as you press it, almost immediately the pain is sucked back into its source. It's strange and mysterious. But this is often how pain is, isn't it?

Where the pain presents isn't always the real issue. The real problem is someplace else, someplace deeper and more difficult to get to. We're struggling at work, and then something at home sets us off. A child is suffering through something at home, and the pain shoots out in the classroom. Someone in our life just seems to aggravate us in ways we can't understand, and then we realize they remind us of our father or mother. I suspect that most of the pain we inflict on others is just referred pain in our own bodies and hearts, that leaks or, at times, explodes out in unexpected ways. We're often not even aware we're doing it or just where the real point or tension is. But once a skilled hand finally puts a thumb on it, we know.

So when Jesus--a man of sorrows acquainted with grief--speaks with precision about pain, we can trust he's pointing to us to something specific.

II.

When we meet Jesus and the disciples here in the 13th chapter of Mark, it's Wednesday evening of Holy Week, the last week of Jesus' earthly life, and he and the disciples are coming out of the temple in Jerusalem. Now, being fishermen from the Galilee, this was likely the first time the disciples--and Jesus, for that matter--had been to the great city as adults. And so you can imagine how they're taking it all in. One of them remarks on the grandeur of it all--the enormous walls of the temple. Most of the temple would indeed be destroyed in the decades following Jesus' death and resurrection. And, looking at the stone, Jesus seems to predict what's to come: that the temple will be razed--all will be thrown down, he says.

As you might imagine, the disciples have some questions about this, and so later, as they're sitting on the Mount of Olives, which overlooks the temple, they come and ask him to explain what he meant--When will this happen and how will we know what to look for when it does? And Jesus describes for them an apocalyptic scene, looking ahead to the end times: wars and rumors of war, nation rising up against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines.

And it's all very dark and even a little bizarre, but maybe more than anything, it's confusing. What's lacking in all of this is specific details about exactly what will happen and, even more, when. In fact, as others have pointed out, Jesus' overall message in all these "predictions" of the end times that come near the end of each gospel seems to be, Don't worry about the details. Don't think you've got the details figured out, and be suspicious of those who act like they do.2 Jesus's message to his disciples seems to be similar to those famous and comforting words from Frederick Buechner, This is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

This is the world, Jesus tells them here. Terrible things will happen--not a bold prediction in first-century Palestine or 21st-century America--Hard, painful, confusing things will happen in your life. But don't catastrophize these things and assume this must be the end. Christians in every generation since Christ ascended into heaven have looked around and seen the violence and war and death and injustice, all of which seems so much worse than how it used to be, and they've wondered if this must be it? If we're living in the times of which Jesus spoke--with each generation it's the same thing.

The past has a way of taking on a kind of sheen the further into the past it goes. Things were simpler back then, we say. Children behaved better and communities were stronger and we all just got along. It's different now. And some of that may be true, but there have been plenty of dark days. There have been wars and violence. There has been terrible injustice, subjugation, and discrimination. It's almost always true that the good old days for some were dark days for many others. The past is always more complicated, more nuanced, than we remember it to be.

III.

And it sounds odd to say, with these images of famine and earthquakes and war and rumors of war, but Jesus intends for us to feel some degree of comfort in these words about the state of things any time we feel the walls closing in and the future seems in doubt. Terrible things will happen, he says, but don't be alarmed--don't be "startled" is another translation; don't be surprised, in other words. Have clear eyes about the darkness in the world, but don't forget the light. There will be war and violence and all manner of disaster, and these things will be terrible. But think of them as the beginning of the birth pangs.

The birth pangs, Jesus says, with precision. A deep pain, to be sure. An all-consuming pain. The labor pains of childbirth are perhaps the most terrific natural pain there is--and yet they signal a very specific thing. This is not a futile pain, or a senseless pain, or even an unnecessary pain. If any pain is necessary, this is it, for it's from this pain that new life comes into the world.

This is the hope offered by Jesus here to his disciples, who in just a few day's time would witness his death and face their own betrayal--and like any real and authentic hope, it is grounded in a clear-eyed understanding of the present. They would have their own trials in the months and years to come as the church was birthed into the world. Jesus, like a good midwife, like a seasoned nurse, knows it's best not to lie about what's happening or gloss over the intense pain but simply to hold our hand through the pain. To squeeze it, and look us in the eye and say, This is going to hurt, but it will be worth it.

And this is one of the mysterious things about scripture, that these words meant of the disciples in their time of trial back then have spoken to each generation since and speak to us today. For each generation knows some great hardship. And each individual life will know some great trial. We all have sat with pain that we didn't earn, and some of it that we have, and even at times looked out at our life and wondered what is to come it? We've looked at our world and wondered, Where are we going?

Jesus knows as well as anyone the truth of death, the presence of violence and pain, of discord and division. But the good news he proclaims here, and in just a few day's time would bring fully into the light, is that God is with us through the pain, and wherever God is--we say even now with Advent just a few weeks away--there is an opportunity for something new to be born. The good news, is that no matter the pain, no matter how deep, if God is there, then something new can be born of it.

IV.

And if we, as the people of God, could find a way, if we could trust each other enough not to defer or distract or deny the pain we feel, but to gently but firmly, lovingly, squeeze each other's hand, and say, I will see you through this...
I wonder what blurry joys would finally come into focus?
__________________________
1 Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. As found in Joy: 100 Poems, edited by Christian Wyman.
2 William C. Placher's commentary on Mark from the Belief series has again been immensely helpful.

All We Have To Live On

Mark 12:38-44, The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · November 10th, 2024 · Duration 17:15

All We Have to Live On

Mark 12:38-44

Over these past several weeks, the lectionary has taken us through the Gospel of Mark with Jesus and the disciples as they make their way through the Galilee and turn toward Jerusalem and all that waits for him there. And now we're nearing the end.

Just a chapter before our lesson today, Jesus rode his donkey triumphantly down those city streets straight to the temple, where he flipped over the tables of the moneychangers. Now, just a few days later, he's back at the temple, only this time he trains his eye not on the ones collecting money but on the ones giving it.

I.

Now, the temple there in Jerusalem was a complex, with the sanctuary and other rooms inside and a large outdoor area around it where people would gather. Jesus and the disciples are there with all the rest of the crowds in town to celebrate the Passover, and he sits down opposite what Mark calls the treasury, probably some kind of booth or vestibule where tithes and offerings to the temple would be collected.

He watches as many people of considerable means come through bringing their large sums of money. Giving to the temple in those days, was clearly not the mostly private affair that it is in churches today. Apparently, this is all happening in public, creating the scene you might imagine, with people bringing their bags of gold pieces for all to see. But that's not what catches Jesus's eye.

After they pass through, and we can imagine everyone else goes back to their own business, a woman comes to the table and takes from her purse two copper coins, together worth just a penny, drops them in the collections box, and moves through, just as quickly and quietly as she came, before disappearing into the crowds. No fanfare, not even a second look--no reason to. Just someone, anyone, bringing her small, unassuming offering, just as she did every week and had done for as long as she can remember. Just as she saw her parents do when she was a child.

No one sees her--why would they?
But Jesus sees her.
He leans to his disciples and tells them, She has given more than anyone today. Everyone else has given from their abundance, but out of her poverty she's given everything she had, all she had to live on.

II.

This is perhaps Jesus's clearest lesson in the gospels about what it means to give faithfully and generously. It's not as much the amount given that's important, but how much it is relative to what we have--or as the Apostle Paul put it, we each should "give as we're able." Faithful, generous giving is giving that's proportional.

Yet this is not an approach to giving that's celebrated in most places, including the church. Large gifts are impressive and important--and can be proportional, too, we should say. Smaller proportional gifts are harder to see and harder to appreciate. In truth, the only ones who will ever really know the proportion of our giving is us. Ultimately these are spiritual questions as much as financial ones. Or as we said a few weeks ago looking at what Jesus says about wealth--there's always a spirituality to the choices we make with our material possessions.

Spreadsheets can be deeply spiritual because they lay out for us clearly--and sometimes painfully so--just where our priorities are, something that's as true for us in our homes as it is in our church.

The benchmark for giving within the church through the years has been the tithe, the practice of giving a tenth of your income back to God through the church and other causes. If you grew up in a church and a Baptist one in particular, you probably learned this concept from an early age, folding little cardboard boxes in Sunday school to house nickels and quarters. And there are some biblical roots to this idea, and it's without a doubt an effective way to ensure you're giving in a way that's intentional and proportional. But I worry that while the tithe is meant to be a benchmark--a standard put out there to help point us in the right direction--it's more often seen as a barrier.

After all, 10% is a lot! Especially if we haven't made giving a part of our budget before. Giving is like any discipline in that you start small with consistent habits, and you grow along the way. You start with a percentage you can feel good about and you stick to it. Then the next year, you sit down, and you see what it would look like to give a little more--a half a percent here, or a percent there. And you do it. Maybe in some years, you have to take a step back; maybe in others, you're able to make a leap forward. But before long, it simply becomes a part of what you do, which then becomes a part of who you are. I'll confess to you that tithing is something Audrey and I have struggled with through the years, especially early in our marriage when we didn't have any money and were paying off student loans--my student loans. But we made a commitment when we didn't have very much and found that it just grew with us through the years until, before long, we looked down and saw we were able to give in a way that surprised us.

And I'd like to say we haven't even felt it through the years. But the truth is that we have felt it. We have felt it, and it feels good.

It feels good to contribute in a way that's meaningful for us, that we feel and have to plan around, however it may stack up against the gifts of others. It is hard, maybe harder each year, to live in a way that aligns with our values. We live in a complicated world and have probably never been more aware of its complexity. For us, giving is one way we've found to take some kind of control of being the kind of people and family we want to be. And for us, focusing this giving on the church, on a place and a people who we know and trust and who represent and are committed to working toward and embodying the kind of world we want is deeply meaningful.

And this question of where we direct our giving points to another important part of this story that we in the church need to hear.1

III.

Remember this scene with the widow and her "mite" comes just after Jesus teaches the crowds there at the temple to Beware the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets--these religious leaders who relish not only in their piety but the esteem they're granted by others. Beware the ones who hold the chief seats, as Augustine put it, Not because they hold them, but because they love them.2 These scribes, Jesus continues, Devour widows' houses and, for the sake of appearance, say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.

It's immediately after these scathing words against the scribes--the leaders of the temple--that Jesus sits down and looks out over the temple with his disciples and sees a widow give what to her is a great sum to an institution he has just claimed is corrupt. In fact, in the very next passage, Jesus tells the disciples that this whole temple will be destroyed.

This, too, is a message about faithful, generous giving that the church needs to hear, maybe especially around stewardship season. We need to make sure the church is and remains an institution--a place and a people--worthy of our best gifts. Gifts that are given not off the top, but at some real cost. Gifts of money, yes, but how much time? How much energy and effort of so many? How many prayers? It's a holy and humble thing to receive the generous, faithful gifts of so many. This is a privilege the church absolutely cannot lose sight of.

And sight is really the key to this story. All of this begins with Jesus looking across the courtyard and seeing this generous, faithful, quiet gift that others do not.

There are so many times when we may wonder if what we do or what we have to offer is worth anything in the end. To us, it feels like a great deal--the time we give, the prayers we lift. Our efforts to do the right things, to love the things and the people Jesus loves. To give what we can to what we understand to be the work of God in the world--be it through the church or other organizations or institutions or efforts. To do our part to nudge the world forward toward God's dream of healing and wholeness for all people and all things. To us, it is a lot--it is our time, our energy, our effort, our imagination, our sanity(!), and our very lives. But there are times when it does not feel like a lot to the world. It can feel like a couple of pennies dropped in the jar.

And so it may be that the good news we need to hear this morning is that these things matter to God. That ours is a God who notices. Who sees through the crowd all the small gifts offered in faith and hope and love and sees them for what they are, which is much larger. They are, in fact, all we have to live on.

How important is it that Jesus says the greatest gift given that day was one given out of poverty, not abundance? How often is it that we feel we must "have it all together" first before we're capable of giving something worthy of God's blessing or before we can participate in the work of God in the world? Jesus says enough with that.

What a comfort it is to know that, to God, these gifts--all that we have, whatever that may be--mean everything.

IV.

If the church is to be the church, then we must be a people who see in the same way that God sees; a people who sees the true abundance of gifts when they are offered. For only in this kind of holy noticing will we be a place and a people worthy of the gifts we receive.
_______________________
1 I'm indebted to William C. Placher's wonderful commentary on Mark in the Belief series, 179-183
2 Placher, 181

Let Me See Again

Mark 10:46-52, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 27th, 2024 · Duration 16:42

Let Me See Again

Mark 10:46-52

Jesus and the disciples have just passed through Jericho, a city about 18 miles northeast of Jerusalem, their final stop before entering the holy city. In the verses immediately following this story, Jesus will send his disciples to fetch a donkey, which he will ride "triumphantly" to begin the last week of his earthy life. As Mark tells it, our encounter this morning is his final act before Holy Week begins.

And for Jesus, it must have come just in time, because in all his travels he's been waiting for someone like Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus--the last person Jesus will heal in the Gospel of Mark and the only one whose name we're given. Mark wants us to make sure we remember this one who, from the moment he learns of Jesus's presence, knows just what to do.1

I.

Laying there at the city gate, when he hears that Jesus is walking by him, Bartimaeus cries out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! "Son of David" is a messianic title, meaning that Bartimaeus is second only to Peter in the Gospel of Mark in recognizing Jesus is the Messiah. He begins to cry out loudly, so much so that the crowd tells him to be quiet, but he cries out all the more: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! And at this, we're told Jesus "stood still."

Now, throughout the Gospel of Mark to this point, Jesus has been on the move. The pacing in Mark is hard to miss--it's one thing after another, after another. The word "immediately" occurs over 40 times in Mark, more than the rest of the gospels combined. Jesus is always on the move, always in a hurry--remember, the Kingdom of God is at hand, we're told at the beginning. Repent, and believe the good news! There's no time to waste! There are people to heal and feed and teach and save--this is really at the heart of why Jesus is at times so short with the disciples in Mark: he knows time is running out and they can't seem to grasp his urgency. But here...we're told Jesus "stood still."

Still, like the wind and the waves he calmed so many chapters ago. Jesus has been traveling and moving and searching for someone who understands who he is, and when it happens, he stops. He calls Bartimaeus to him--not since he stood on the lakeshore and called out to those fishermen who would become his disciples has he called to someone--do you see how it's all coming full-circle here?

Bartimaeus hears the call and springs up, throwing off his cloak, quite possibly the only thing he owned in the world--doing precisely what the wealthy young man who came to Jesus earlier in this chapter could not do when Jesus told him, Go, and sell all you own and come and follow me. He had so much and couldn't, wouldn't do it. Bartimaeus, having little, could and does.

Jesus says to him, What do you want me to do for you?--the same question he asked James and John, the sons of Zebedee, just a few verses before.
We want to sit with you in glory, one at your right hand and one at your left, they responded then.
They wanted honor and the world's measure of greatness.
What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asks Bartimaeus as he stands in front of him.
Teacher, let me see again, Baritmaeus responds.

Not honor, not glory, to sit at Jesus's right or his left.
Not even eternal life, as the rich man had sought.
Let me see again, he asks Jesus.

Jesus looks at him and says, Go, your faith has made you well--the word there for "well" is sozein, which can mean "to heal" and also "to save." Your faith has healed you, Jesus tells him--even, perhaps, Your faith has saved you. And immediately--there's that word again--Bartimaeus regains his sight, and follows Jesus on the way. Of all the people Jesus heals in the Gospel of Mark, only Bartimaeus is said to follow him "on the way," which of course is more than just the road before them.

All through the gospel to this point, Jesus has been leading his disciples down this "Way"--the way of compassion, the way of humility. The way of wholeness, of mercy, of peace--and to this point no one has been able to truly grasp it, until this blind, destitute, relentless man calls out from the side of the road and asks Jesus to help him do just that.

II.

Which suggests the first step in coming to see in all the ways Jesus calls us to, is to be aware of our own blindness; all the ways we cannot and do not see.

And this is hard. It may be one of the hardest things in the world, to see, to be aware of our own need. It often takes something or someone to flip the lights on for us in ways that can be painful.

I remember talking with a good friend some years ago who had just recently entered recovery for alcoholism. I can still hear the pain in his voice when he described hitting rockbottom and coming to see for the first time all the hurt. But he sought help. He went to meetings, started therapy, and more quickly than he thought, things started to change.

He began opening up in ways that surprised him; he hadn't realized how closed off he'd been--from others, but also those truest parts of himself. But now he found himself depending on people he never considered would be there for him in that way, and was overcome by their generosity and compassion. And receiving generosity and compassion from others led him to start offering these things himself. He said it was like he was seeing people for the first time, and discovering he wasn't alone in the world, that we're all really in this together. Or can be.

I remember he told me how he was out walking one day and was crossing the street when a car came flying by, way too fast. The lady driving hadn't seen him, and so he jumped out of the way to avoid being hit. He said before he would have yelled and screamed at her and been angry about it for the rest of the morning. But he found himself in that moment able to see her. He imagined what was going on in her life. He wondered where she had to be. He said he'd always heard people talk about being able to do that but never understood how or even why. He found himself saying a prayer for her.
I don't know if I believed it, he confessed, but I said it.

Let me see again, Bartimaeus asked.

Sometimes it's surprising to learn what we're not seeing. Other times it's not that we can't see but that we lack the courage to look--and courage, in the Gospel of Mark, is one of Jesus's favorite signs of faith. A kind of chutzpah, a boldness to take a risk--to leave it all and follow, to keep shouting for Jesus when the crowd tells you to shush.2

Some years ago I received a letter from good friend with whom I'd had a falling out. It had been painful and I was ashamed and embarrassed. I was convinced this letter would outline all my faults and flaws, all the things I knew were true. I put the letter in drawer in my desk and didn't read it for six weeks. When I finally worked up the nerve, I opened it and saw that instead of listing my failures, my friend had listed his. I wrote back and said, I'm so sorry.

Let me see again, he said.

III.

Sometimes we don't know our own blindness and aren't aware of the things we're not seeing. Other times we're aware but it's too painful to look them head on. And other times, still, it's a little bit of both.

Some years ago a group of us from the church in Macon, Georgia I came to you from traveled to Montgomery, Alabama with a group of friends from an African-American congregation with whom our church there shared a history. In recent years we had covenanted to grow in relationship and explore this history together--a painful history that dated back before the Civil War, of being one church, with slaveowners and the people they enslaved.

On this occasion we traveled together to see and experience the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which had just recently opened and bears witness to the over 4,000 known victims of lynching in our country from the late 19th century into about halfway through the 20th, as well as the countess other victims of racial violence whose names and stories have been lost to history. This is not a part of our nation's history we choose to see very often: the era of Jim Crow, and the world of domination and violence, of which lynching was the cornerstone.

Knowing this would be an emotionally demanding trip for our congregations to take together, we met for supper the night before we left to get to know each other a little more and share what had led us to come on this trip. After we'd eaten, with folks talking and laughing and getting comfortable with each other, we turned our attention to the journey before us and went around the table, one by one, inviting each person to share a hope and a fear for what they would see at the memorial.

It was a holy moment around those fellowship hall tables. Hearts opened. Tears were shed. Painful memories were unearthed--some long suppressed, others that had been passed down through the generations, of relatives gone missing and the whispers of what had happened. Of prejudice taught and learned. Of course, the content of these memories differed greatly between those from each congregation. But all were received with tenderness and care.

At one point, a man from within our congregation said something that seemed to speak for many of us. He was a local attorney who had grown up in a prominent family in a South Georgia town. His father and other relatives had served in local government and law enforcement. He said we worried about what they had participated in, or had been aware of. He said, My hope and my fear for tomorrow are the same: that I'll feel responsible. This was exactly it. We knew something of what we would see in those markers and the names written on them, enough to know it would be painful. But we knew enough about the gospel to know that this seeing could also bring about the conditions necessary for healing. That it might save us.

IV.

Teacher, let me see again.

The witness of Bartimaeus is that this is where discipleship begins: with the desire to see, the courage to see--again, or maybe for the first time.
To look at the parts of yourself you'd rather not.
To see parts of the world or parts of the past that might feel far removed, and see them as your own.
To see other people and how we're all wrapped up together in this world. How our lives and our histories are intertwined, in large and small ways--how we're all a part of the same whole. How this is what Jesus means when he talks about the world of God's dreaming that's at hand--it's close enough to see, if we would. And watch as our world changes around us.

Let me see again, he said to him.
Lord, let me see.

______________________
1 I'm indebted to William C. Placher's wonderful commentary on Mark in the Belief series, 154-156
2 My friend and mentor Matt Myer Boulton writing from SALT Project, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/10/23/your-faith-has-made-you-well-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-third-week-after-pentecost

Can You Drink the Cup?

Mark 10:35-45, The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 20th, 2024 · Duration 16:21

Can You Drink the Cup?

Mark 10:35-45

We pick up the story this morning near the end of a long stretch in the Gospel of Mark of Jesus and the disciples "journeying" through the region of the Galilee, preaching and teaching about this coming Kingdom that will flip the world on its head.
Twice already on this journey has he tried to explain where this journey will end and how he will be rejected. Now in the verses just before our story this morning, he does it a third time:

Look--he tells them--we are headed to Jerusalem, where I will be handed over and condemned to death. They'll mock me and spit on me, and kill me, but in three days I will rise again.

But the disciples still don't get it. Just after the group had continued their walk and were discussing these things among themselves, James and John, two brothers, come to Jesus and say to him, Teacher, do for us whatever we ask of you--yet anther time in Mark when the disciples come across as little more than petulant children, bickering or posturing among themselves, or here, asking their parent, Daddy, whatever we ask, you have to say yes. Which, in our house, is usually followed by something like, Can so and so spend the night? Or, Can we have ice cream for dinner?

I.

Unfortunately, we're not told anything about the tone of Jesus's reaction here, but, pioneer of "gentle parenting" that I know he was, I like to imagine him taking a deep breath first, to regulate his own emotions before he responds to them, in order to create a nurturing environment where the disciples feel safe to express their feelings (modern parents will know about this!).

What is it that you want? he asks.

And they say to him, Grant us to sit, one at your right and one at your left when you come into your glory.

It's interesting, the way Matthew tells this story, it was their mother who made this request of Jesus for her sons, a good reminder for us parents to consider our priorities when mapping out our children's futures. But here, the brothers make this play for themselves.

By now the other disciples catch wind of what James and John are up to and grow irritated with them, and so Jesus sits them all down and tells them, again, what he has tried to tell them so many times before, but this time perhaps even more clearly--Listen, greatness in the world around you is taken through force and violence and is measured by wealth and status and influence. People angle and vie and climb over each other. But it can't be like that with you. In this new way we're walking, true greatness will be known by servanthood. The first among you will make themselves the last. For I came not to be served, but to serve.

And then he adds this new twist--and I came to give my life as a ransom for many.

II.

All along this journey, Jesus has been connecting this way they're living with their final destination--this way of humble service to others with the cross to which it leads. But here he offers a glimpse at what all of this will mean--his ministry, the miracles, the healings, the cross, the empty tomb after it, the whole story of Jesus. A ransom, for many, he says. Ransom referring to a transaction, and a cost paid to free someone from captivity.

But what exactly does this mean?

The question of just what the passion of Jesus means has been a question Christians have asked since that morning the women came and found the tomb empty. And it may come as a surprise to learn that the church through the generations has never been able to completely agree on this matter. Yes, we say it has something to do with salvation, the forgiveness of sins, the redemption of the world, the reunion of what had been torn apart. We have all sorts of language to describe it--all of it captured in the compound word "atonement," which can be broken down as "at-one-ment," how we and God can be "at one" again.

But the church, for all its councils and conferences and confessions and dogmas and doctrines, has never agreed upon, once and for all, just how this was accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Which I take as just one of the many instructive examples of how when faced with the mysteries of life and faith, the church, at its better, most clear-minded and opened hearted moments, has chosen the language of poetry rather than prose. As CS Lewis puts it, The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.1

And through the generations of the church, there have been different theories, or models, or "streams" of thinking, seeking to interpret as best they can the various accounts and descriptions and idioms and images from scripture, alongside what we know about God handed down to us from tradition, and that we have learned and received and heard from our own life's path, all seeking to create a framework for understanding the mystery of God's work of love in Jesus Christ.

For simplicity's sake we can divide them into three general "streams" of thinking.2

The first is the one perhaps best known to many of us, that has been the dominant model in the western church since at least the middle ages, often called the "substitution" or "satisfaction," model. Drawing on the language of feudal justice, this understanding says that since the fall of Adam, God's honor has been damaged by human sin, and so we owe a debt to God--a debt too great for us to ever pay ourselves. And so Jesus's death, as the Son of God, is understood to "satisfy" the demand of God's law, or pay this un-payable debt to God on our behalf--to pay our ransom, to use the language of Jesus here in Mark.

So in this way of thinking, Jesus undergoes the punishment meant for us, or pays the ransom of our debt to God, making us free and clear.

But there's another ancient stream of thinking, maybe best known to us through CS Lewis's great retelling of it in his classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In this model, it's not God to whom Christ pays the ransom for our sin, but the Devil--Satan, or the forces of evil an death, whom God has given charge over us in our earthly lives. So in submitting himself to suffering and death, Christ rescues us from these evil powers. This understanding, by the way, has been and remains the primary story the Eastern church tells, who have never subscribed to the previous model.

So in this model, Christ pays our ransom to the Devil.

III.

But there's a third model, a third stream of thinking, that says the problem is not God's honor being damaged by our human failure. Nor is it the Devil or the forces of evil to whom a ransom must be paid to win us back.

The problem is the broken, shallow, aggrieved, and oblivious life we too often choose for ourselves, both as individuals and as a people. In this model, to continue this image of paying a ransom, it's not the anger of God to which we are held captive, and nor is it demonic forces. This model says we're really held captive in the prison of our own self-centeredness. Our own love of power, our own fear of falling behind, our own need for validation, and our vain attempts to fill all these needs through any number of ways--accumulating wealth, status, brute force, or passive scheming.

In this model, Jesus didn't come to die as much as he came to live and show us how to live. Freely, justly, compassionately, abundantly. But as he's told the disciples along the way, it happens that when you live the way he lives and love the way he loves, you have a tendency to run up against the world's crosses.

Over and over again here in Mark, this is Jesus' overwhelming focus, his understanding of why he came: to illuminate this new way of living, and the new world it has the power to create. Rejecting the world's counterfeit measures of greatness and embracing the life that truly is life.

And so the church is where we put this way into practice.

In fact, the Book of Acts says this was the church's first name. Before they were "the church," they were simply known as the people of "the Way." And we still are. We're people committed to following Jesus's example as best we can in our dealings with one another and in our posture toward the world, especially the vulnerable among us. Practicing generosity in the face of scarcity. Living by principle in the face of fear. Choosing hope in the face of cynicism. Offering confession and seeking forgiveness in a world that in so many ways tells us we're not accountable for anything.

When we're doing it right, it's not often a way that will make headlines. It's more often a way of quiet grace, of humble service, of deep, consistent love. A way of healing. Of belonging. Of home. And before we know it, there the kingdom of God is.

Born and nurtured right there among us.

IV.

Many, many years ago at the church I came to you from, one of the associate pastors at the time, Ben Taylor, and his wife, Dale, welcomed what would be their first and only child into the world, a daughter they named Mary Ben. It was not until she was born that they discovered Mary Ben had Down Syndrome.

Dale was in the hospital for some 13 days after Mary Ben was born, and as they were preparing to go home, she sent Ben over to the Washington Library just up the street from the church and hospital downtown to check out some books on Down Syndrome so they could begin to read and research--this was well before Google. But when Ben got to the library, he saw that all the books he was looking for were missing from the shelves. He found a librarian and asked when they might be returned. The librarian pulled up the cards for each of the books and showed them to Ben so he could see the dates. But what Ben saw was the names. They were all people from the church, who had checked out all the books so that they, too, might be prepared to care for Mary Ben. Because she belonged to them, too.

I do not believe that salvation is a hostage situation.

I do believe salvation in an invitation. And invitation to live more richly and fully.

An invitation to love more deeply and truly.

An invitation to give of ourselves wholly and completely, for the sake of a life that is only possible when we celebrate the ways we share in this world in the days we are given.

And if the love of God is truly a transaction, I believe it's the kind that would involve a library card, and a people seeking to learn how best to care for one of God's little ones.

That's what I believe.

____________________

1 CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

2 Adapted from Matthew Myer Boulton, "Alternative "Streams" in Christian Soteriology," handout (Christianity: The Liturgical Year, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2009). Boulton's commentary on this week's scripture from his wonderful newsletter was also helpful in crafting this sermon, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/salt-project-lectionary-commentary
For more on the differences in these atonement models see, James McClendon, Systematic Theology Vol. 2: Doctrine (Nashville: Abington, 1994) 197-237. Stephen Finlan, Options on Atonement in Christian Thought (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2007).

What Must I Do?

Mark 10:17-31, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 13th, 2024 · Duration 16:57

What Must I Do?

Mark 10:17-27

My father was not one for many "I love you's." Now, a firm handshake or a grip on the shoulders--of course. But the "L" word was not something he used a lot, so when he let one slip I paid attention.

The way the Gospel of Mark tells it, Jesus is kind of the same way.

The word "love" only appears in two passages in Mark. One is a couple of chapters later when Jesus gives the "first and greatest commandment," to love God and to love our neighbor.

And the other is our passage today, from chapter 10, the only place in Mark where we're told Jesus loves a particular person, and so we need to pay attention.

I.

This is a story we know well. Jesus is setting out on a journey when a man runs up to him and kneels before him, and asks him, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus seems to gently call him on his flattery, and directs him to the 10 Commandments, specifically the back half of them which have to do with how we treat each other: don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, or bear false witness, or covet (or "defraud" as it says here), honor you parents.

I have kept all of these from my youth, the man responds, perhaps a bit too eager, we can admit, or with a touch of naiveté. But just as we may begin to roll our eyes or grow weary of this man and his question and his presumed piety, Mark tells us Jesus, looking at the man, loved him, and said, You lack one thing: go, sell, what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.

Then Mark reveals what appears to be the hinge detail, which is that the man "had many possessions," and so, shocked at Jesus' invitation, he went away grieving.

II.

And its understandable that he would have been shocked. It's tempting to find some kind of moral flaw in this man to help us be more at ease with this whole exchange. John Calvin said he was "Intoxicated with foolish confidence." Luther was incredulous that someone would claim to keep the whole law since youth--not since Adam has someone "fulfilled the law."1 But I think we miss something important in this story if we assume the man was anything other than he appears to be, which is a good, honest, person--yes, of some means--who is concerned enough about his own spiritual well-being to consult with Jesus on the good life. Someone, in fact, who Jesus looked upon with love.

Nor would the man have been prepared for Jesus to tell him part with all his possessions. Conventional wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures says that wealth is a sign of God's blessing. If we're honest we tend to think the same is true today. Now, there are plenty of places in scripture that observe the corrosive nature of power when mixed with wealth, or that wealth can be accumulated dishonestly--the primary object of the prophets' wrath are corrupt economic systems that choke the poor and benefit the powerful, as we heard in clear terms in this morning's reading from Amos. Dishonest wealth is condemned throughout scripture.

But that's not what we have here.

There's a word for dishonest wealth in scripture, mammon, you may have heard, and it's not in this story.

The disciples, too, seem to think this man was a pretty good guy, perhaps more impressive than them. They're uneasy with Jesus' invitation and even more with his observation after it, How hard it will be for the whose who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.

They were perplexed, it says, and were greatly astounded when he continued with one his most enduring images: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. An enduring image, no doubt, but also one that the church through the generations has tried to soften--perhaps betraying our concern. One popular modern explanation says that "the needle's eye" was a certain narrow gate in Jerusalem, and so someone on a camel could get through, but they just had to wiggle a little bit. I'm sorry to report that as best we know there was no such gate.2

Sadly, there's no getting around Jesus' words here, which are in line with what he says elsewhere and what the other New Testament writers would say after him, which is that for all the other things it may be, wealth is also a problem.3

In fact, when we take scripture as a whole, I believe this is a fair rendering of the biblical view of wealth and material goods, which is that they are risky. Or to be especially exact, it's not the money or the goods themselves that are a problem or risky--wealth or "stuff" in this story and elsewhere is morally neutral. It's the having them that's risky, maybe even more the seeking after them. And while there are plenty of other stories in the gospels that point to all the different ways having or seeking wealth is risky, this one may be the most straightforward. When given the choice between eternal life--abundant life, the life he said he wanted--or the life he knew, the life he'd created with all his many things, this man chose the life he had.

III.

And this is another point in the story when we tend to show our hand, and imagine that Jesus is really talking about folks other than us. We can always imagine someone wealthier or with more possessions than us who this story is really about. But we're never told how much the man has. Just that "he had many possessions," which, I can tell you, having just moved about a year ago, leaves me feeling very seen! There is nothing in this world that will put you more face to face with the sorry accumulation of all your stuff than having to move it from one place to another. To take it all and put it in boxes, and then to run out of boxes and get more boxes, and then more boxes. To labor over what to keep and what to leave. To get to your new home and open the boxes and say, Why did we bring this? To have boxes you don't even open, but stash away. (There's an old Greek proverb that says, There's nothing so permanent as the temporary.)

No generation in human history has had more stuff than our own at this moment--this is just a fact. I read recently that the average American has 5 times more clothes today than in the 80s. We don't know how much the man had, but we do know what it is to have many possessions. And so if anything, we're left with a definition of wealth that is less an economic reality than it is a spiritual one. While it stands to reason this gets harder and truer the more we have, in the end the issue may not be how much you possess, but how much what you have possesses you.

I heard someone say you never truly own something until you give it away. Until then it will always own a part of you--maybe that part of you that knows who you are apart from it.

One of my teachers, Peter Gomes, said there's no reason to think this man lacked faith in Jesus to not accept his invitation, after all, he had faith enough to approach him in the first place. What he lacked was sufficient faith in himself, to imagine a life without all those things by which he has sustained and measured his life; his riches, his things.4 And how many among us could claim different? This is the true measure and risk of wealth: it's however much you can't imagine a life without. Which is to say, it is however much you have come to believe you need to be yourself, the "you" you want to be, that you imagine yourself to be. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, Jesus says elsewhere, illuminating the deep ties between the material and the spiritual and how we confuse them, how they confuse us.

It's not that these two are separate, the material and the spiritual. It's that we don't often realize just how wrapped up in each other they are. The material is always spiritual. How we think about and even more what we do with what we have always reveals our values and principals, stated or not. And our spiritual concerns--our beliefs and values and principles, how we understand the world and our place within it--always bring with them material demands. They call to be lived out in our choices.

Of course this is true for us as individuals and families, but it's also true for us as a church. In the coming weeks we'll be sending out the proposed budget, our plan to distribute our resources for the coming year. And this is a theological document as much as it is an economic one. Spreadsheets can be deeply spiritual. In fact, this may be the most theological document we have as a church because it outlines in great detail just where our heart is, or where we intend for it to be.

And on the one hand, these choices we make, individually and collectively, about where we will put our treasure are revealing: they show us just where our heart is. But the good news is that they can also be formative; they can be, and very often are, the most effective way of shaping, or reshaping our heart to be more how we want it to be. Slowly, over time. Choice by choice, gift by gift, letting go by letting go, as we find ourselves not lacking as we possess less, but somehow, by God's economy, receiving so much more.

IV.

All this takes time, and time is quietly at the heart of this story right from the start.

We're told Jesus was "setting out on a journey," when this man runs up to him. And it may be that Jesus wasn't the only one setting out on a journey that day. Yes, the man found himself unable to answer the call right then and there. But we don't know what happened later.

It's possible he went back to his life and continued on as usual. But then again, maybe he didn't. Maybe he went home and realized all the things he had surrounded himself with weren't what he thought they were. Maybe at some point long after slinking away from Jesus the invitation stayed with him--a sneaking suspicion that one day blossomed into full-on revelation that led to a slow but sure transformation.

There's this odd moment near the end of Mark's gospel, when the soldiers surprise Jesus and the disciples at the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him and take him away. And in the middle of this, we're told there was "a certain young man" who was following Jesus wearing nothing but a linen cloth, and when the soldiers reached to take hold of him, he escaped, leaving them standing there holding the cloth while the young man runs away naked. Some have wondered if this wasn't the same man from our story today, and if perhaps we're meant to know that in the end he did leave all he had to follow Jesus anyhow, even down to his last garment.

Anything is possible--and isn't that what we're left with here, finally?

Isn't this what Jesus told the disciples after they'd witnessed these things? If it were up to you, he tells them, it wouldn't be possible. But with God, all things are possible.

With God all things are possible--Do you believe this?

Because if we do it means there's hope for us yet. No matter how tangled we are in our things--the trappings of life in this world. With God all things are possible, and so there's hope for us yet. That may have been Jesus' point all along. There's hope for us yet.
_________________
1 Found in William C. Plathcer's excellent commentary on Mark in the Belief series, which was helpful in shaping this sermon, 148
2 Platcher, 146
3 Peter Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, chapter 14. Gomes' interpretation was helpful in shaping this sermon, both in his book and in sermons I was fortunate enough to hear him deliver as a student near the end of his career.
4 Gomes, 291

What Are Humans?

Genesis 2:4-8, 18-24 and Psalm 8, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 6th, 2024 · Duration 16:06

What Are Humans?

Genesis 2:4-8, 18-24

Psalm 8

Scene 1:

It was Christmas Eve of 1968. NASA's Apollo 8 mission had launched just a few days before with the purpose of taking pictures of the surface of the moon to find an adequate landing place for future missions to take people there. And yet it is a picture not of the moon but of Earth for which this mission is best remembered.1

When the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon for the fourth of its ten planned evolutions, the crew was spellbound as they saw the blue and green orb of the earth come into view against the pitch black. Crew member William Anders grabbed a Hasselblad camera with 70 millimeter color film and snapped the most enduring picture from those early missions to the moon, and probably one of the most famous and influential photographs ever taken, known simply as "Earthrise."

A few hours later the crew would beam footage down to earth through a television signal and people all over the world would sit rapt by similar images, as the crew read from the opening chapter of Genesis describing creation, before mission commander Frank Borman signed off saying, famously, And from the crew of Apollo, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you--all of you on the good Earth.

The next morning, the New York Times would publish a reflection by the famous writer and poet Archibald MacLeish, to help put this world-altering moment in proper context. He wrote,

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers (and sisters!) on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers.2

Scene 2:

Scientists have learned in recent years that the Allied bombings of Germany in World War II were so powerful they sent shockwaves that reached the earth's atmosphere.3

While the impact of the massive bombing raids during World War II left deep and obvious scars on the land, the article says, a new study suggests that the shockwaves reached the edge of space as well. As a result, those shockwaves actually weakened Earth's upper atmosphere, called the ionosphere.

"What they didn't realize at the time was that the [ionospheric records]...contain the signatures of the actual war itself," said Chris Scott, the author of the study.

"The images of neighborhoods across Europe reduced to rubble due to wartime air raids are a lasting reminder of the destruction that can be caused by man-made explosions," said Scott. "But the impact of these bombs way up in the Earth's atmosphere has never been realized until now. It's astonishing to see how the ripples caused by man-made explosions can affect the edge of space."

Scene 3:

Recent technological advances have allowed researchers to map a small piece of the human brain in staggering detail, creating what they call a "cell atlas."4 The article reads:

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimeter, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses -- the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. Which is 1,000 terabytes; the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text. 500 billion is more than twice the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.


"I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual
synapse from this woman's brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels," said Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google...and a co-author of the paper. "It felt sort of spiritual....It's a little bit humbling...How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?"

Scene 4: Again from WWII

Lt. Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin was among the first British soldiers to arrive at the Nazi Death Camp Bergen-Belsen. His diary from those days after the end of the war when the Brits took charge of the camp and before it was eventually closed has been preserved a horrific picture of that scene--the death, the chaos, the inhumanity. He writes one point, One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect.

But sometime in 1945 he wrote this account:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived...that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.

I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm...That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.5

+++

When I look at your heavens, the psalmist writes, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

This may be among the most honest and important questions of all of scripture: What are we? And what are we that God would be mindful of us? That God would pay attention to us, that God would bother to care, that God would not only see, but know, and in knowing, love?

The universe is so big--infinitely larger than the ancient psalmist could have known--and yet this feeling of smallness has always been a part of human life. Always.

We are dust--on this much, science and scripture agree. Whether it is Genesis imagining God's hands forming and molding us from the muddy earth, or astrophysicists telling us we--and all things--are all finally star dust, all life coming from the same essential elements. And yet, the psalmist continues, You have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. And this, too, is true.

We are but dust walking around on a piece of rock suspended in infinite darkness, and yet we're capable of leaving this floating rock on a vehicle of our own making and turning around and taking a picture of it.

We are but dust, and yet we're able to fabricate weapons powerful enough not simply to wipe out cities and scar the earth, but send shockwaves out to the edge of our atmosphere, leaving imprints of our destruction.

We're dust, and yet one thimble-prick of our brain contains a complexity as vast as the cosmos we float in.

We're just dust and yet with a little lipstick...

What are we? We, who both bear and defile God's image? We, who were made by God's hands from the same stuff as the earth, and then are charged with its care, and yet who are in so many ways responsible for its scarring?

As far as scripture is concerned, it may be that to ask this question is to answer it. To ask it in full knowledge of our complexity, our hypocrisy, our paradox--our strengths that are also our weaknesses, our weaknesses that in the end are revealed as our strengths--to ask this question of what we are, in this honest way, this faithful way, is to answer it.

For the truth of our humanity in its fullness is found by holding these two seemingly opposing truths at once. To lift too high the divine spark is to risk losing our kinship with the earth, and the truth of our mortality. To dwell too much in the dust and dirt is to risk forgetting that the whole world was made with us in mind.

So we do our best to hold them both. That we are both dirt and divine.
Soil and sacrament.
Breath and spirit.
We're all of it, all of us, all the time. And for reasons beyond our comprehension, God is mindful of us. Mindful to the point of love. And for that we can only say, Thanks be to God.
________________________

1 For a beautiful piece of writing on this mission, the photograph, and MacLiesh's reflection, see "We Are All Riders on the Same Planet," by Matthew Myer Boulton and Joseph Heithaus, New York Times, December 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/earth-space-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html
2 Archibald MacLeish, A Reflection: Rider on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold, New York Times, December 25, 1968.
3 "Shockwaves from WWII bombing reached the edge of space," Ashley Strickland, CNN. September 25, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/world/wwii-bomb-raids-ionosphere-space/index.html
4 "A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail," by Carissa Wong and Nature Magazine, May 15, 2024. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-cubic-millimeter-of-a-human-brain-has-been-mapped-in-spectacular-detail/
5 http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/Database/ReliefStaffAccount.asp?HeroesID=17&

Curiosity, Cooperation, and What Matters Most

Mark 9:38-50, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 29th, 2024 · Duration 17:09

Curiosity, Cooperation, and the Life That Matters

Mark 9:38-50

The disciples and Jesus continue to make their way to Jerusalem, and Jesus continues to try and explain and prepare them for all that waits for them there, what this coming Kingdom he keeps preaching and teaching is all about, and even more to the point: what it will demand of them. But they don't want to hear it.

I.

Two weeks ago it was Peter scolding Jesus for saying that to follow in his way, to live how he lives and love how he loves, will invariably lead to suffering and rejection--this was not what they signed up for. Last week the whole lot of them were caught arguing about who among them was the greatest. Jesus reminds them in this new world of God's dreaming, greatness will be measured by humble service; by welcoming and showing hospitality to others, especially to those who are in no position to welcome you back.

Now another disciple, this time John--giving Peter a break, it seems--runs up to Jesus to inform him that they caught someone outside their group casting out demons in Jesus's name, but not to worry, they told him to cut it out.

In theological terms we call what John does here "tattling." And as with most cases of tattling, at least in our home, the offender is not even doing anything wrong. And we should note that they did not say this person was not following Jesus, but that he was "not following us," the disciples.1 In any case, Jesus is having none of it. He's just told them that one of the marks of this new family of God's people will be its capacity to welcome others in from the outside but now they've done just the opposite.

Whoever is not against us is for us, he says, resisting the disciples' efforts to close the circle, to exclude or deny, and insists that all who would be a part of this mission to bring healing and new life to the world are free to do so.

Which, when we're being honest, can be a hard thing for us to hear in the church--the first of several hard words from Jesus this morning. This one is hard because it cuts against our impulses to retract into our own tribes, our own groups--our own denominations or, more the case today, our own congregations. In the verses just before these, Jesus centers hospitality as one of the marks of the emerging community of God's people. Now he centers cooperation.

II.

And the two of them, hospitality and cooperation, are rooted in the same approach, the same posture, which is one toward humility, openness, trust, and mutual concern. One that acknowledges the ways our lives are all wrapped up in each other's.

It's a posture, first of all, toward giving others the benefit of the doubt--which is an incredible and increasingly under-appreciated benefit, we should say! A gesture maybe best articulated by the fictional poet-coach, Ted Lasso, when he said, Be curious, not judgmental. What a gift it can be to give others a charitable read, and be given one ourselves. To assume the best in others and have the best assumed of us. To not rush to judgment but to hear folks out--and then upon hearing them out, to seek common ground where possible. Jesus is not interested in ideological purity tests. The main thing, Jesus seems to say here and elsewhere, is to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing here is that people are being healed. That the hungry are being fed, the naked are being clothed. The ones on the outside are being welcomed in and the gifts of all people are being named and valued. And so for us in the church, where we see these things happening, the question becomes, How can we bless it and partner in it, even if there are some matters upon which we cannot and will not agree? In other words, what room are we willing to make for the common good, because Jesus seems to be willing to make a great deal of room.

This is even more of a challenge as our world has become more polarized. Our differences are amplified and hardened, so our appetite for cooperation is diminished--something that is true across the ideological spectrum. Which is not to say they're aren't things we simply cannot or should not get past when choosing partners and affiliations--of course there are. We have to be clear about what the main thing is. But it is to say that our posture should be one toward cooperation. One that looks for what we share in common and the good we can do together.

This impulse to stay to ourselves can be a special concern for churches with enough resources to persuade us we don't need anyone else. In my experience at community conversations or councils or clergy associations, or other places where the faith community comes together, it is rare for the largest congregations to participate. Which is a shame. It may be these churches have enough going on in their own shops to keep them busy, which is perhaps understandable. But Jesus also seems to remind the disciples here that they, that we, should be careful not to think we can do it all by ourselves. There will come a time when you will need a cup of water from someone, he says, and it will be a blessing.

We must be careful not to enjoy our self-reliance too much, because cooperation, same as hospitality, can be a spiritual discipline. There is a spiritual value in working with others, in finding common ground, in appreciating mutual need. It makes us bigger, fuller, more compassionate, more humble, more understanding people. And as risky as it can feel to open ourselves to others in this way, the arc of Christian thought has said it's much riskier to stay only to ourselves. In fact, this is how Martin Luther defined sin. Incurvatus in se, he called it, which in Latin means being "caved-in on oneself."

He said sin is the condition of being so wrapped up in your own life, your own thoughts, concerns, and desires, that you can't see anyone or anything outside yourself. You're so turned inward that you can't see the people in front of you or beside you and you certainly can't see God.

And it's so easy, such a natural thing to do--our back naturally arcs inward. This is our first instinct to protect ourselves, isn't it? To roll up in a ball? The critical step of the life of faith, which, not coincidentally, is the first step of relationship, the first step of love, is to somehow find strength enough to uncurl ourselves. To trust enough in God to open ourselves to others. To unclench those abdominal muscles, and straighten our backs, and look up and out and into the faces of those around us and pray that they will do the same.

The people of God, especially in times of trial and challenge and uncertainty, are called to a posture that would open up, that would reach out, that would seek friends and partners. That would look for and assume the good in others, the same that we would want them to assume and look for in us. And it's through this lens of the golden rule--of doing unto others as they would do unto us--that we must view these hard verses that follow.

III.

At first blush this is not the Jesus we prefer, talking about hell and punishment, and certainly not cutting off hands and feet. Its unseemly--and the good news is that it would have been just as unseemly back then as we hear it today. Jesus is engaging in some hyperbole and exaggeration and metaphor here--no one is being asked to amputate a limb or otherwise engage in self-harm. Jesus is trying to make a point, and the point is that the stakes are high, and the community of faith should look inward to examine their own discipleship first before casting judgement on others. Jesus always has his harshest words for those of us on the inside.

The word translated "hell" here in Greek is Gehenna, which in those days was an actual, physical place. It was the name of a valley south of Jerusalem that in ancient times was the site of Canaanite worship known to involve child sacrifice.2 These practices were brought to an end hundreds of years before the time of Jesus and the valley was turned into a garbage dump, where refuse was discarded and burned. By the time Jesus had come around, Gehenna had become a kind of shorthand for "the worst place imaginable," a place reserved for the worst characters among us, or even where the world was headed if changes weren't made.

This may sound surprising, but it's hard to say from the Gospels just what Jesus believed about the nature of the afterlife--about who goes where and for how long. The main thing for Jesus is that the Kingdom of God is on the way, and in fact, in some ways it is already here, and it is open to all people. Much of Christian teaching about heaven and hell and all the rest of it, while rooted in scripture, developed through the generations of the church, and has in no way been uniform across the Christian world.

But laying all of that aside, in these particular verses what seems clear, and what we can affirm from the whole of the gospels, and really the whole of scripture, is that what we do, or do not do, in this life matters. It matters.

The harm we are capable of is real and has consequences, and very often outlives the moment of injury--which of course it does. Pain lingers. Pain is an efficient teacher; its lessons stay with us. Wounds from childhood, past relationships. Words we wanted to retract the second we said them. As Richard Rohr has put it, pain that is not transformed will be transmitted. Meaning, unless our pain is addressed, or worked-through--unless it is healed, or channeled into something life-giving, it's very likely we will pass it on to someone else, in some way. The question is, perhaps, how far beyond us will it go?

But we also know the good we do in this life matters, too. The joy we produce or peace we make or the blessings we give outlive that moment and even our own individual lives, rippling out into the lives of others, in a kind of butterfly effect--perhaps anther reason why the butterfly was an ancient symbol of resurrection.

The stakes are high, Jesus seems to say. So take care that you do all you can to be bearers of love and light and healing in this life.

Take care to not lose your salt, he says here at the end, in a curious turn of phrase. Across scripture, salt is a metaphor for "covenant," or the promises we make with God and with each other about the kind of people we will be.3 So salt is really a metaphor for character--you are the salt of the earth, Jesus says elsewhere. Be careful with your character, Jesus seems to say; with who you are at root, at heart. Be mindful of what animates you, what drives you, of what you keep at your center. Hold these things close, because once they're gone, they're hard to get back.

IV.

Be curious, church. Be open to seeing the good and the gifts of others.

Seek ways to work with--to cooperate, to partner toward the common good, for there is more than enough to be done.

And with all of this, remember what matters most, which is the healing of this world.
Remember what we do in this life matters, it matters greatly.
Which is to say, remember you matter greatly, to God, to others, and to this life--this life we cannot help but share.

_____________________
1 William C. Platcher's commentary on Mark in the Belief series was helpful in shaping this part of the sermon.
2 Platcher
3 Chad Myers makes this point in his landmark commentary on Mark, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Marks Story of Jesus

Humility and Hospitality

Mark 9:30-37, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 22nd, 2024 · Duration 15:15

Humility and Hospitality

Mark 9:30-37

It's a topic of discussion for Biblical scholars as to why the disciples in the Gospels of Mark come of as such--how shall we put it--slow learners. After all, it was the disciples who likely shared all of these stories that would eventually be written down, so you'd think they would cast themselves in a little better light!

I.

When we pick up the story, they're fresh off of Jesus's blowup with Peter, where he told them all in no uncertain terms how to follow in his way--to live how he lived and love how he loved--is to open yourself to suffering and rejection. Now they're settling in from their travels, kicking off their sandals, loosening their tunics, when out of the blue Jesus asks them, So, tell me, what were you arguing about on the way? And you get the feeling--Son of Man that he was--Jesus knew exactly what they'd been talking about, which was the question of "Which one of them was the greatest?" You can imagine how they all, again, kind of look around and down at their feet, and someone elbows Peter for always talking too loud.

Jesus tells them to sit down, and he tells them again what he's said and shown in so many different ways in their time together, that in the Kingdom of God, all the old orders of greatness and power are being flipped on their heads. In this new world of God's own dreaming, whoever wants to be first should make themselves last and humble themselves through service to others.

And then to drive home his point with a visual example, he calls over a child who must have been there in the house with them. Maybe it was one of their own children--we're told many of the disciples were from there in Capernaum and they may have been in one of their houses. And so maybe it was Andrew's little boy, or Phillip's little girl--and he takes the child in his arms and says to them, Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

Greatness, in this topsy-turvy world of the Kingdom of God is measured in humility. And humility will be known and shown by our capacity to welcome.

II.

And not just welcome anyone--not just our friends and our family (though at times that can be challenging enough!), but to welcome those who are unexpected. The ones, we could say, who are not in a position to welcome you back. Maybe even the ones who aren't sure they are welcome. The ones society says should not be welcome--which is what this child represents, however jarring it is for us to hear.

Children, in the ancient world, weren't thought to be the precious jewels we understand them to be today--the center of our family with their schedule of activities dictating the calendar, and leaving Legos all over every floor in the house, stinky socks on couch, book bags and school materials scattered on the kitchen countertops so you can't even fix their dinner that they probably won't eat...I'm sorry, where were we?

In the ancient world, children were part of the very lowest rungs of the social ladder, regarded as little better than slaves. Not only were they not to be heard, they weren't even to be seen. Along with women--whom Jesus also went out of his way to call into his inner circle--children weren't permitted in the company of men. So for Jesus to draw this child into the middle of that circle for any reason would have been a scandal, but then for him to take the child in his arms and say that to welcome one such as her is to welcome not just Jesus, but the God of creation?

At the heart of this new Kingdom, which some have described as more of a Kin-dom, a new family of God's people that's emerging in the world, will be hospitality: the generous welcome of others. Hospitality is what will hold all of it together, because in offering hospitality we put into practice so many other marks of the kind of community Jesus imagines: patience, gratitude, generosity, and maybe most of all, humility.

You can't truly open your home, let alone your heart, to someone without a sense of humility, a sense of gratitude that your guest is there with you. To welcome and receive others generously is to recognize that others have gifts and experiences and perspectives we do not, and so our community--be it a home, a neighborhood, a church--is enriched by their presence. We've known this from dinner parties and play dates and other social engagements. It's one of the beautiful parts of being in the company of others, the way it opens us to surprise and growth. To welcome, openly and generously, is a sign of communal health because it requires both a security in who you are, as well as an openness to become something more. Welcome, I have heard it put, is one of the signs that a community is alive1--that a community is thriving. There is a dynamism to hospitality, an energy, a certain spirit required to prepare and receive others in an authentic way.

III.

Some years ago, I heard Krista Tippett, the noted author and host of the On Being podcast and radio show, speak about these things. Hospitality, she said, is more than simply extending an invitation. Deep hospitality creates an inviting, trustworthy space--it's an atmosphere as much as a space--in which the ground for something new can be laid.

The ground for something new.

Henri Nouwen, said something similar, Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It's not to bring [others] over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.2

Isn't this it? Hospitality, the offering of generous welcome, creates an "inviting, trustworthy space." A "free space." Or in the church we might say, a "sacred space," a holy space, in which "the ground for something new can be laid." Space not only for us to be and move together, but for the Spirit of God to be and move among us, often in new ways.

I remember one Pentecost Sunday at our church in Macon when we celebrated our language ministry, where students new to our country could come and learn English, but also where anyone could learn other languages. We had a handful of teachers among us who taught Chinese. They'd come to the states to teach their language in the public schools and initially found their way to our church to work on their English. But, as they shared with us that Sunday when we invited them to offer a few minutes of reflection, it was clear they'd found much more here.

They spoke tenderly about feelings of isolation in this strange land. Not knowing the language or culture well. But here at the church they'd found space to be themselves. They'd found friends. They called us their church even though few of them were Christian and had ever been with us on a Sunday morning. And to show their appreciation they wanted to sing for us. So they began to sing a traditional Chinese folk song about friendship, and it was beautiful and touching, and we thought that would be it, but then they asked if they could sing another song they'd learned, and so we went with it because that's the only thing you can do when someone has the microphone, and they began singing, "You Are My Sunshine." And soon everyone--them, us, suddenly now "we"--began to laugh, and before we knew it, the whole congregation was singing along with them, eyes watering, smiles glowing, and I can tell you this all was just as unusual and unruly there as it would be for us here.

We had opened space for them, and there in the middle of worship they had opened space for us to feel and know the Spirit that had been at work among us in a new way.

And this of course was a special but small thing, but it points to the risk inherent to hospitality that Nouwen mentions: the risk of being changed by those we welcome. Jesus, too, knew that change is wrapped up in hospitality. In Matthew's telling of this story he actually tells the disciples they must "change and become like children," and the way to change and become like children, he says, is to welcome them. Change, or transformation, is a natural part of hospitality; we can't open ourselves to others and not be changed by them, through new perspectives, new experiences, new truths. And change makes us uneasy--it can even make us fearful. But it's often what scares us, or makes us uncomfortable, that has the power to save us.3

IV.

Which is why hospitality and a renewed practice of vigorous welcome may be precisely what our world needs at the moment. Our well-documented fractures run deep. They have divided families and friendships and churches and communities. They have convinced us the world is best understood in terms of "us" and "them." But maybe most damaging, they have persuaded us that our individual perspectives and the world we choose to align with them, are fixed and complete, and so there is no need for anyone else. There's so little room for humility in this. So little room for the Spirit.

And so it's no surprise that we're also in the middle of what's been called a "loneliness epidemic," where increasing numbers of people, especially the young, who in many ways should be the most connected, feel isolated, without a people and a home and a place to belong. And isn't belonging, in the end, something we need, something we absolutely cannot live without, like food, like water, like air to breathe?

It may be that a generous flinging open of our doors, and the offer of a place to be received and valued, a place to share gifts and have gifts named, a place to be welcomed, fully and completely, is the most important gift the church has to offer the world in the present moment.

Because where else will this happen?

Who else will create a space for something new to emerge? A free space, a sacred space--a risky space, a space where we all may be changed--but finally a space where we can encounter each other as we truly are, which is God's children. Where else will this happen but among God's people, slow learners that we surely are.
______________________________
1 Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, found in Christine D. Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, 159
2 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
3 This is borrowed from my friend and mentor, Steve Shoemaker, who I once heard say something similar, "That which embarrasses us has the power to save us."

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Mark 8:27-38, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 16th, 2024 · Duration 17:01

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Mark 8:27-38

The town of Clarksdale, MS, up in the delta, is home to the intersection of Highways 49 and 61, which locals simply call, "the crossroads." Legend has it, it was at this spot many years ago that Robert Johnson, one of the first famous delta bluesman, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for being able to play blues guitar.

No one sells his soul here in the eighth chapter of Mark, but the Prince of Darkness is invoked, and we are at a crossroads.

I.

You can almost think of the Gospel of Mark as a two-act play. We enter the story this morning right at the beginning of the second act, and it mirrors the beginning of the first.

The Gospel begins abruptly with the words of the prophet Isaiah, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord. And in the verses that follow this way is prepared, with Jesus meeting John at the River Jordan and the Spirit descending upon him, revealing that he is "God's beloved." The Spirit promptly drives Jesus out into the wilderness, and when he returns he comes to Galilee, calls his disciples, and begins to proclaim the nearness of God. All of this happens over the course of a couple of paragraphs, as a kind of prologue to the book--an overture in musical terms, introducing themes and characters and conflicts. And here at the beginning of Act Two we have a similar overture.1

We're once again "on the way," only this time it's to Jerusalem. And where the first act begins with the voice from heaven telling Jesus who he is, now the issue is raised by Jesus himself: Who do you say that I am?

This is the great question of Mark's Gospel: Who is this mysterious Jesus? And just as important, What does it mean for him to be who he is? Ched Myers, in his landmark commentary on Mark, says the answer to this question of Jesus's identity is "the fulcrum upon which" the whole gospel balances. And not only that, but, "upon our answer"-- the answer of the church--"hangs the character of Christianity in the world."2 I'm haunted by this. In other words, Jesus being God's Beloved Son, come to proclaim the nearness of God, is one thing--an important thing. But it's another thing for us, his followers, to understand rightly just what this means, otherwise we risk being bearers of a different, lesser gospel.

And it's the line between these two that Peter walks when he steps up and answers for the rest of them, whom you might imagine were just kind of looking at each other or at the ground, trying not to make eye contact with Jesus--like in our house when Audrey asks, Who did this? Even the dog looks away.

Peter gets the first part right, who Jesus is. You are the Messiah, he responds. Or the "Christ" in Greek--they mean the same thing, "God's anointed," the one sent by God to deliver God's people--and we shouldn't underestimate the importance of this moment in the story of the gospel.

Paul Tillich said it was at this moment, when Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah of God, that Christianity began. Not at the cross, not at the empty tomb, but this moment when the disciples are faced for the first time with the question of who Jesus is and declare him to be the Christ.

Peter gets that part right. But he doesn't get it all right. He understands that Jesus is God's anointed, come to deliver God's people, but he doesn't understand what this means; just what this will require of Jesus, or of those who would follow him. So when Jesus begins to explain these things to them, "openly" it says--honestly, directly, and I believe we can say, lovingly--that to be God's anointed means he will first suffer, and after suffering will then be rejected, and after being rejected will be put to death, and finally, after death will come new life--suffering, rejection, death, and then new life, this is the way it will go--as he's telling them this, Peter, before Jesus even finishes, pulls him aside and begins to "rebuke" Jesus, which is quite a thing to do.

II.

The only other times someone or something is "rebuked" in the gospels apart from this scene is when Jesus rebukes the winds and the waves out there in the Sea of Galilee and says, Peace be still!, and when he rebukes demons as he cast them out. But here Peter rebukes Jesus. He scolds Jesus, at the thought of him, God's anointed, being subject to suffering and death. Peter thought what they all thought abut the Messiah--that it would be a conquering hero to reclaim the Kingdom of Israel from the forces of Rome. There was no room in this image for the laying down of one's life that Jesus describes.

And Jesus meets his fire with a fire of his own, and turns to the rest of them and rebukes Peter, Get behind me Satan! You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. This is an extraordinary exchange. Temperatures are running high, for Peter and Jesus. One gets the feeling the weight of it all, this ministry, this mission, not to mention simply the close proximity all these men had been living in for these years on the road, all of this is bearing down on them.

We know Peter runs hot, and it's hard to blame him for not immediately understanding that Jesus must suffer and be rejected--if we're being honest, the church is still trying to figure our just what that means. But for Jesus, here, just as they're about to make their turn toward Jerusalem and all that waits for them, the stakes couldn't be higher. Before they go a step further he needs to make sure the disciples know what they are signing up for.

It may be why he wanted them to be quiet about him being the Messiah, and spoke so openly about the costs of it. He knew the meaning of it had to change.3 As much as the disciples may have expected the warrior king come to lead the charge against Rome, what they will get is the suffering servant. And while we might prefer the exalted, victorious, risen Christ, scrubbed clean in the light of Easter morning, the church must always remember that even the risen Christ still has wounds. Those didn't go away--in fact, later on, when he appears to the disciples, it's his wounds that let them know it's truly Jesus standing in front of them.

Suffering and rejection are not optional when it comes to being the Messiah, and to follow in his way means that we must be prepared to take up our own cross--though we must be careful here, because misunderstanding the link between suffering and authentic faith can lead to some real world consequences.

There have been times when these words of Jesus have been twisted to justify the sufferings of others--as if abuse or neglect were one's "cross to bear." Jesus didn't seek suffering and didn't ask his followers to seek it either. It's just that you cannot live the way Jesus lived and love the way Jesus loved without running up against the world's crosses. When you "stand up for and sit down with," as I've heard it put, the kinds of people that Jesus did, suffering and rejection have a way of finding you.4

III.

But so does abundant life. The kind of life that's worth living in the first place--and this is the part we tend to miss in all of this, which is the point of it all: the questions Jesus asks the disciples, the talk of what it means to be the Messiah and all that will happen to him, the suffering and death and the invitation to join him, and even on a larger scale, the whole reimagining of what it means to be God's incarnate presence in the world, the great divine experiment that is Jesus--all of it has to do with life, and how we can live it, not death.

The mystery of it all is that to live this kind of life, which can only be lived completely when all others are able to live it too, this kind of life requires a kind of death. Not a physical death--though the promise of life beyond the limits of this world is a comfort and part of the story, too. But death of another kind. A dying to certain things. I laying aside of one way, of one kind if life or living, in order to pick up another. It's in the story of Jesus that we find this mysterious, holy interplay between loss and new life.

It's this interplay that the poet Mary Oliver captures in so many of her poems, but maybe none better than in her poem, "In Blackwater Woods."5 As in so many of her poems, this one finds the poet in the woods and looking at the trees over a pond, noticing how they're "giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment," and "the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds." Which leads her to reflect on how the whole forest turns itself over each year with the change of seasons, year after year. The whole forest, she comes to understand, is a testament to loss, but also to life, and how the two are interwoven.
At the poem's end she writes these words,
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
To love what is mortal--what cannot last forever--to hold it, knowing your own life depends on it, and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

When we speak of traditional notions of power and strength, there are voices who would argue that this is simply the natural way of things: the strongest survive, hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed. And those things are certainly found in the natural world. But isn't it true that underneath these things, hidden in the very ground upon which we walk, is an even more natural way? The way of gentle handing over.
The way of loving deeply and then when the time comes, letting go.

And don't we find in this letting go, that new life already grows within us? In the way we feel the world? In the way we know, deep down, we're a part of it. In the way that, through our loss, we've somehow claimed our place, as she says in another poem, in the family of things? And don't we learn, most times the hard way, that despite our impulses, it's in holding on, tightly, that we lose whatever it is we hope to keep?

When I think of the losses in my own life, and the ways my world was turned upside down in the way they comes only from suffering, when I finally got to some other side--and there is another side--it really was in the letting go that life came and found me. I didn't find it. It found me.

IV.

Isn't this strength of a different sort? Isn't it finally more powerful than anything else? And its' it literally the ground upon which we walk?

Is it possible this is what God had in mind the whole time?

What do you think?
___________________
1 Ched Myers' landmark, Binding of the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, explains the structure of Mark beautifully.
2 Myers, 235
3 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:312, found in Mark, by William C. Placher, in the Belief series.
4 Anna Case Winters, Matthew, from the Belief series, 211
5 I first heard this poem connected to this passage by the good people at The SALT Project in their lenten devotional some years ago, pairing the poetry of Mary Oliver with the lectionary texts

Rich in Faith

James 2:1-10, 14-17, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 8th, 2024 · Duration 12:47

Rich in Faith

James 2:1-10, 14-17

As I remember, it was one of those Sundays.

A light was out in the education building hallway and the sanctuary AC was acting up again. We were down an usher, still needed to do a mic check for the soloist, and I may have had just a little bit of work to finish up on the sermon--rarely happens! So when one of our greeters brought a young family who had found us that morning and were in need of assistance, I'll confess I was not where I would want to be mentally and spiritually to receive them.

We were a downtown church and it wasn't uncommon for folks to come in need of assistance in this way, and we had some recourses in place to help when we could, though it rarely felt like enough. They spoke just enough English to tell me there were passing through town and were in need of money for gas and maybe some food. Their two young children chased each other around our legs as we talked.

I told them I could get them a bag of groceries from our pantry downstairs, but admitted most of it was canned goods. I was sorry, but we didn't keep any cash in the office, and I knew that I didn't have any on me myself. I told them they were welcome to stay with us for worship.

The man shook his head and looked at me unflinching. He said they really needed some help, money for gas and food they could eat.

I apologized and told him again what we had, and said I wished we could do more. Sundays were hard and maybe if he came back in the morning...

Could you ask some of your people if they have any money they could give us? he asked.

I told him that was not really something I wanted to do and mumbled something about policies
--Then I will ask them, he said.

Sir, I really would rather you didn't.

People started walking by us on their way to the sanctuary for worship, which was about to start. He didn't move.

Why don't you stay for worship and then we can talk more afterward, I offered again. He agreed, and I led them down to the sanctuary and helped them find a pew.

They stayed for the whole service. Their children came down for the children's sermon, and I saw them all sitting there together when I stepped into the pulpit to read the lectionary passage for that Sunday which was to be the sermon text. It came from the second chapter of the Letter of James,

Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?

And then--was my face burning as I read it?--

If someone comes to you who is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

He came to find me after worship and told me again what they needed.
Give me a minute, I told him. I found a few deacons and told them the situation, we cobbled together some money, and I gave it to him. He thanked me earnestly, they piled in their car, and I stood there in the church office understanding, maybe for the first time, what the great Danish theologian Soren Keirkegaard meant when he wrote, When you read the scriptures, you should always be saying to yourself: It's talking about me, it's talking about me.

I.

There are certain voices in scripture and in life that refuse to let us forget this, that scripture is talking about us, and the letter of James is one of them.

Tradition tells us it was written by James of Jerusalem, a leader in the church in Jerusalem, the original church. James is also said to be the brother of Jesus. Other parts of the New Testament report that Jesus had several brothers and sisters, though none of them were among his followers during his lifetime. It wasn't until after his resurrection that they came to believe--which, as a parent, makes sense. I think one of our boys would have to be raised from the dead for his other brothers to follow him.

James is just four chapters long but packs a punch. He seems to have inherited some of his brother's harder edges, focusing our attention on some of Jesus's most challenging teachings. James has little interest in high-minded, philosophical ponderings about what faith might be in the abstract. James would pull us out of the clouds and remind us that action matters. How we live and treat others matters. Faith without works is dead, he says, famously--something theologians since Martin Luther have bristled at, with their concern for "works righteousness," the notion that we might earn our way into God's good graces. But that hardly seems to be what James is saying here. James is simply saying that faith is not solely a matter of the intellect, or even of the heart. Faith should manifest itself, it should reveal itself, in one's life. You should be able to see it. Show me your faith without works, he says in the verses just after ours this morning, and I by my works will show you my faith. Acts of kindness and generosity are the natural results of a vibrant faith. You will know a tree by its fruits, Jesus says in the gospels.

James is what we might call a "Sermon on the Mount Christian," and these are challenging Christians to be around. These are Christians who insist on taking Jesus literally when he describes in concrete ways just how the Kingdom of God will come to be "on earth as it is in heaven," as we pray in this room ever Sunday morning. It will feel like the world being flipped on its head, starting with our very lives and how we treat one another, how we see each other. When Jesus says things like, "turn the other cheek," or "love your enemies and bless those who persecute you." When he says, "give to all who beg of you and don't refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." "Forgive others and God will forgive you"--there is an "if" and a "then" there. "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear," or as James reminds us here, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." In fact, he might be a bigger fan of Luke's version of this beatitude, which is even more to the point: "Blessed are you who are poor, for your's is the kingdom of God." And then to drive the point home, "Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation."

II.

The poor and vulnerable have a special place in Jesus's heart, which is to say, they have a special place in God's heart, something to which the whole of scripture can attest. In Catholic social teaching this is called God's "preferential option for the poor." Yes, God loves every last one of us, deeply and fully. But God's first concern is for the poor and vulnerable of the world. And so, the teaching goes, if the poor are closest to God's heart, and we want to be close to God's heart, then we need to be close to the poor. Dorothy Day, the great 20th century social activist and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, said "to live the Gospel is to stay close to the poor." The poor, we're told time and time again, have special access to the truth of the gospel that we who are not poor might miss, or more likely, might be tempted to read past.

Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries out in East Los Angeles, the country's largest gang-rehabilitation organization, writes about A homie, as he calls him, named Cruz [who] spent his last dollars taking a Metrolink train sixty miles to Los Angeles from San Bernardino, where he had relocated his [family] to avoid the dangers and desperation of his previous gang life. He had a part-time job but couldn't get his boss to give him more hours.

Boyle writes, Now he sits in my office, rattling off a list of the pressures and needs of his family. With no safety net in sight but me, he speaks of no food in the fridge, no lights, landlord looming, no bus fare. When he finishes this breathless account, Cruz stops, shaken and exhausted. He grows teary-eyed and says quietly, "I just keep waiting."

For what, son? Father Boyle asked.
For the last to be first.1

III.

James is one of those hard Christians to be around who insist on telling us the truth. Who won't let us move on to the parts of it all that are easy to love and celebrate and focus our time and attention to.

The ones who insist on reminding us of what Jesus actually said and did. What Jesus said the kingdom would be like, what it would look like. What Jesus actually called us to, and who Jesus called us to be in the world. Those voices who insist on reminding us the Christian faith is not merely a system of beliefs, but is meant to be a way of life, a way of life that is often inconvenient, and at times uncomfortable, and as much at odds with the world today as it was back then--something that, depending on how you look at it, should either be a point of discouragement or comfort.

One of those blessed souls who insists on pointing at the words of scripture and telling us, in love and hope and expectation, It's talking about you, it's talking about you.

One of those voices we absolutely cannot be the church without.
____________________
1 As told by Greg Boyle in, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, 60

Voice of the Beloved

Song of Solomon 2:8-13, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 1st, 2024 · Duration 10:35

Voice of the Beloved

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

I think it's safe to say the Song of Solomon is not a book we read often in the church. For generations it's been a source of both embarrassment and intrigue--not unlike it's subject matter, which is the dramatic, often sensual courtship of two lovers and the intimate celebration of the human body. We don't really know what to do with it.

I remember first being introduced to the Song of Solomon as a young teenager by the older youth as if it were a church secret, akin to knowledge of how to climb up into the steeple, or which refrigerator always has ice cream in it. It was a kind of marvel that we couldn't believe had made it into the Bible--Don't they know what's in there?

I.

And the truth is that the Song of Solomon almost didn't make it into the canon of Scriptures, for all the reasons you would expect. At first blush it appears to be nothing more than a love poem, with almost comically descriptive figures of speech about gazelles and figs, while the name of God is never mentioned even once, at least not directly. Why should this be taken as scripture?

But with the embarrassment, there has also been an undeniable fascination with the Song. For many generations, the Song of Solomon was one of the most beloved books in all of scripture, for both Jews and Christians. It may be surprising to learn that no other book of the Bible was written about more in medieval times. It inspired hundreds of commentaries, interpretations, and sermons. Rabbi Akiva, who lived in the generation or two after Jesus and was a part of those discussions over whether the Song should be included in the Hebrew Scriptures, spoke up in favor of it saying, "all the scriptures are holy but the Song of Solomon is the Holy of Holies."1

What do they see that we don't?

II.

There have been two approaches to understanding the Song of Solomon and its place in the Bible. The first is to read it metaphorically. Previous generations of readers saw in this story of passion and excitement, of longing and fulfillment, absence and presence, a stirring metaphor for the love of God. The rabbis said the Song of Solomon tells the love story of God and Israel, which is important because this story is rarely described in positive terms. You could argue the Song is about the only place in scripture where we get to hear about God and God's people actually in love, not falling out of it.2

Tim Coker shared with me this past week that church musicians through the generations have understood our passage today as a metaphor for the resurrection, where Jesus calls out to us, to "arise" and "come away" with him, along with all the corresponding images of spring and new birth evoking our Easter celebration.

These are both beautiful interpretations, and important--we should appreciate faith as more a matter of the heart.

But I don't think we should dismiss the Song of Solomon for what it is at face value--not a metaphor for divine love, but a poem celebrating deep, romantic, human love--and to consider what that tells us about scripture; what it is, and what it can be.

It we're to understand the Bible to be a collection of writings that speak of and to the whole of human life--our purpose and pitfalls, our hopes as well as our challenges--then how could such a library be complete without a book that speaks directly about the romantic love between two people? And not just speaks to it, but celebrates it? That teaches, in subtle ways, what it can and should look and feel like?

The love described in the Song is passionate, but more importantly it's mutual. The courtship is told in two alternating voices longing for each other. This isn't a relationship where one is dominant and the other submissive. This is one of equality, where both lovers are mutually vulnerable to each other. In a world where we're inundated with so many questionable visions of romantic love, isn't it important that scripture offer something different? And wouldn't we be wise to pay more attention?

III.

But even more than this, the wisdom of the Song of Solomon is that it knows these two things--the spiritual love between God and us and the romantic love between two people--have something to do with each other, because ultimately both expressions of love are about the same thing: intimacy.3 Opening oneself, leaving oneself vulnerable for the sake of a deeper relationship, and recognizing how that love can change you for the better.

As Ellen Davis puts it, both spiritual love and committed human love demand a steady practice of repentance and forgiveness, and sooner or later both will require some suffering and sacrifice.4 Intimacy, she says, is the means whereby human life in this world is sanctified.5 Meaning, the deeper we go in relationship, the more of ourselves we give, the more life and love are made holy--the more they are brought into the presence of God.

Isn't it true how the love we share with others, and maybe especially the love we share with a spouse or a partner, teaches us what it means to love? These intimate and personal relationships help us put the Christian love we're to have for all people into rigorous practice, as we become each other's nearest neighbor. These loves make us better, more complete people. They challenge us and sharpen us, and force us out of ourselves to become more empathetic, more understanding. More passionate, more faithful. They bring us more fully into the love of God.

My teacher and friend, Stephanie Paulsell, tells of a woman whose husband served in the Navy on a submarine back in the 1970s. In those days, family members could send messages from time to time to the sailors, but the message could be no more than eight words long. A Bible verse, however, counted as only one word, so it was common practice for the loved ones on shore to fill their messages with them. And one of the favorite books for the sailors' wives and girlfriends back home to quote from was the Song of Solomon.

They would send messages like: SoS 1:2, and the sailor, deep below the surface of the ocean, would look up Song of Solomon chapter 1, verse 2, and read his beloved's message spoken through scripture: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." Or SoS 4:7: "you are altogether beautiful, my love, there is no flaw in you." Or maybe even SoS 8:7: "many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."

Stephanie writes,
Those women flung the words of the Song into the sea like a lifeline, where they entered the submarine like a secret code...Bent over his Bible like a scholar, a sailor would search the Song for his beloved's voice. Together they crossed the miles of water between them on the bridge of the Song.6

And in the end, isn't this what scripture is, or it's meant to be: a bridge from us to God. The world we know, and the world God dreams for us? The exterior, deep into the interior, which is where God resides.

IV.

To live a life of faith is finally to live a life of intimacy. To risk yourself for the promise of greater fulfillment through deep relationship with others, and knowing that these things are wrapped up in your life with God--like love notes written in Scripture.
______________________
1 Stephanie Paulsell's wonderful commentary on Song of Solomon in the Belief series was incredibly helpful in preparing this sermon.
2 Ellen Davis, Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament, 67
3 An interpretation both Ellen Davis and Stephanie Paulsell, along with I'm sure many others, both draw out in their respective commentaries.
4 Davis, 69
5 Ibid., 80
6 Paulsell, 186

Where God Is

I Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · August 25th, 2024 · Duration 16:24

Where God Is

I Kings 8

It was promotion Sunday, I'm told, the Sunday when all the children and youth Sunday school classes move up a year, and all the adult Sunday school classes make jokes about moving up a year--it's the same in every church.

It was also the Sunday when the new kindergarteners would be led into the sanctuary during the opening hymn for their first children's sermon.

They would walk in through a door to the side of the chancel and would enter to the sound of the majestic pipe organ and hundreds of voices singing. And they would see this room with high, vaulted ceilings, and giant columns. And to their left they would pass by this beautiful, ornate, carved wooden pulpit--which was the kind that had a spiral staircase leading up to the podium where the preacher would stand.

And as these children entered into the place and time they had heard so much about, "big church," and were in sensory overload, one of the little boys--whose eyes were especially wide open--looked up at the teacher holding his hand and said earnestly, Where is God?

He wanted to know where he needed to look. I'm told at least one child asked this same question every year.

I.

Where is God? Such a beautiful question when asked with anticipation--to presume that God is nearby, in this very room.

And of course those children would think that! Walking into that space for the first time. I imagine some of our 1st graders will feel the same way in just a week or two when they come to be with us for the first time. This is exactly what church architecture has meant to do for generations--or better put, it is what it has presupposed. Let's build a building, or a room, that's fit for God--that evokes God's transcendence--because we do believe God is present in this place.

Where two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus says, there am I in their midst.

We believe God listens to the prayers lifted, the music sung, the sermon delivered. We believe God is especially present in those rituals tradition has called sacramental--communion and baptism may be chief among them, though we can't presume to know just how, no matter how hard the church has tried through the years.

We believe God is here, in this place-- something that we should consider probably more than we do. Something that should bring us comfort and hope, and produce in us a sense of reverence and joy, and most of all, possibly. If God is truly here, what all is possible?

But we also believe God is not just here.

In my year among you I have observed the ways in which we here at Northminster take seriously all that we do and how we do it, and though we of course could never be sure, we would not be surprised to learn that how we do things is the way God would prefer they be done.

But we would never presume to say that God is only present in this room, beautiful as it is. Or even that God is more present here than anywhere else--though we perhaps don't appreciate that enough, either. In fact, it might be a good spiritual practice to acknowledge and give thanks for the fact that God is surely in so many other sanctuaries and places of worship besides our own, moving among and through the ways they feel called to do them.

And not just other sanctuaries or rooms or places designated by humans for God's presence. God is not limited to the places we construct for God. God can go where God pleases. And we know this because we have experienced God in so many different places. In nature, of course, to start. God is surely on mountaintops and on the beach at sunset.

The Celtic Christians called these "thin places." Those places where the barrier between the earthly realm and the spiritual realm feels especially thin, even porous. In the Gospel if Mark when Jesus says to "repent, for the Kingdom of God is near," it literally says, "for the Kingdom of God is at hand." It's so close you can touch it, and occasionally it can reach out and touch you.

Some of these places we choose to visit. We make pilgrimage to them, we seek them out when we need to brush up against transcendence again. But other times these thin places find us. I've known hospital rooms to be very thin. But so is your grandmother's vegetable garden, or the backyard when the lighting bugs are out.

God can be present to us in just about anytime and any place, and so we say that God is "everywhere." God is the one "in whom we live and move and have our being," to quote Paul in Romans--which is meant as a comfort, that God is always near and present to us. But it also feels necessary to say that this doesn't always feel true.

There are times--and we probably don't say this enough in church--when we don't feel God's presence. When God feels anywhere but where we are. When God feels absent. Missing. And it feels like it must be our fault for not perceiving God.

There's something to this--that God longs always and everywhere to be present to us, but we are not always present to God. And yet I also know it's true that there are some times and places when we want to know and feel God's presence so badly, and cannot. And the church has wrestled with this through the years, with some saying, No, God is always present to us, just pray harder. And others saying, Maybe there are times when God is not nearby.

II.

Where is God, and where is God not? And can we know if God is here?

These sound like modern questions, but in fact they are quiet ancient. You could argue they are the first questions of faith, rooted in a longing for God. They're asked and answered throughout the bible, and they are very much a part of the scene from our lesson from 1 Kings today, of when Solomon dedicated the temple in Jerusalem.

In a very real sense, the temple was understood to be where God was. It was God's house, where God lived. And if you wanted to be sure to be in the presence of God you went there, to pray or worship or offer sacrifices. So at its best, the temple was the thriving epicenter of religious and cultural life in the ancient kingdom. If you wanted to offer up thanks and praise to God, this is where you did it. If you wanted to seek forgiveness and make amends, with God or your neighbor, this is where you went. So more than just a house for God, the temple was a place where all these things happened: where lives and families and communities were put back together. And so there is a whole tradition in scripture that celebrates the temple of Solomon as the place where heaven and earth meet, where God can be found and where all these marks of healing and reconciliation and even salvation, happen.

But as a place of such power it was also ripe for corruption. A place where power could be flaunted and poverty exploited. Where character and moral clarity could be conflated with whomever can afford to offer the biggest sacrifice. Or on a more mundane level, a place where the pageantry and rituals can begin to become ends in and of themselves, instead of practices meant to point us to something bigger. And so there's another tradition in scripture that looks upon the temple with suspicion and the mess of corruption and scandal around it with contempt. With what shall I come before the Lord--the prophet Micah asks--with burnt offerings and calves a year old? Thousands or rams, and rivers of oil. Shall I give my first born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

It's what leads him to answer:
He has told you what is good, and what does the Lord require but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Which seems to suggest that we've gotten it backwards if we think we must go somewhere to be in God's presence--to worship and pray, and seek forgiveness and give thanks, to live a life before God. The prophets seem to say that as often as you do these things--along with acts of kindness and works of justice and peacemaking--as often as we participate in these marks of healing and grace that can literally save us, we enter into God's presence. Or if you like, God's presence is revealed wherever you are.

Or as Paul would put it years later, Do you not know that you are God's temple and God's spirit dwells in you? Do you not know you are where all of this happens?

III.

In one of her short stories, Flannery O'Connor tells of two teenage girls who leave their boarding school at a convent and go to spend the weekend with some friends of the family out in the country--a mother and her young daughter. The girls arrived wearing their brown convent uniforms but the girl observes that they quickly changed into their red skirts and "loud blouses," along with lipstick and their Sunday shoes--this was in the 1950s, let's remember--and pranced around the house in these high heels, always being sure to pass the long mirror in the hall to get a look at themselves.

None of this was lost on the child, especially the way they addressed each other that whole weekend--calling each other "Temple One" and Temple Two." The child's mother finally asked them why they called each other by these names--which sent them into a giggling frenzy, but finally they managed to explain.

Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man should--and the girls could hardly get through their laughter here--on what to do if a young man should--"behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile." Sister Perpetua said they were to say, Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost! and that would put an end to it. And in relaying this message, the girls completely succumbed to their laughter.

But the child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn't see anything so funny in this. And her mother didn't laugh either and said, I think you girls are pretty silly, after all, that's what you are--Temples of the Holy Ghost.

Of course the two girls politely dismissed this, but the child sat there and absorbed this idea. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. O'Connor writes, "It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present."1

IV.

It is possible to find God in a beautiful sanctuary. In a majestic pipe organ, with people singing in unison. Or in the stillness of prayer, or the taste of bread and cup against your lips, or the waters of baptism washing against your skin.

It is possible to find God on the tops of mountains and overlooking the sea, or in the luminescent goo of a lightning bug's backside. We will be surprised to find God there beside us when the world is dark, and the future is unclear, or when we feel lost and alone.

And if a child should ever ask you where God is, you can tell her any of these things. Or you can tell her that God is everywhere, in all people and all things. You can tell her God is in heaven, or even in her heart. You can tell her God is wherever healing happens, or wherever thanksgiving is lifted. Wherever wrongs are made right, wherever people find the courage to ask forgiveness and the courage to forgive. God is wherever lost things are found and broken are things mended, But be sure to tell her she's the place where this can happen. Tell her she's a Temple of the Holy Ghost. It will be as if someone gave her a present. It will be as if someone gave you a present.
__________________
1 Flannery O'Connor, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," from A Good Man is Hard to Find

The Beginning of Wisdom

I Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14 and Psalm 111, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · August 18th, 2024 · Duration 15:48

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Only What is Good for Building Up

Ephesians 4:25-5:2, The Twelfth Sunday of Pentecost

Paul Baxley · August 11th, 2024 · Duration 17:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Telling the Truth

II Samuel 11:26-12:13a, The Eleventh Sunday of Pentecost

Scott Dickison · August 4th, 2024 · Duration 12:21

Telling the Truth

II Samuel 11:26-12:13a

When we last saw David he was trafficking in deception: scheming a plan to hide his vulgar misdeeds, which ultimately lead to the murder of Uriah, a loyal soldier and the husband of Bathsheba, whom David had taken for his own. Now, as this sad moment in the life of David and in biblical faith is exposed, we learn that the only thing strong enough, the only thing clean and sharp enough to cut through the fortress of lies and deceit that David as trapped himself in, is the truth.

I.

Our scene opens with Bathsheba-- named only as "the wife of Uriah," to shine an unflinching light, again, on David's betrayal--lamenting over her husband's death. David does not lament. He waits. He waits until her mourning is over, sends for her, and marries her. She bears him a son, and as far as David is concerned, the matter is closed. But, we're told, the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.

We're told over and over how David summons people to his presence, sending messengers here and there. Now the Lord is the one who does the sending. God sends Nathan to David, charged with the risky task of telling David the truth. Power doesn't often respond well to the truth. In fact, power often has a contempt for truth because truth is the great challenge to power. Power would make its own truth--this is what David's scheme with Uriah has ultimately ben about: crafting a different version of reality, one where Uriah died in battle as so many soldiers do, and the king, in his compassion, saw it fit to make sure his wife was taken care of. But the backbone of biblical faith, the thing that, if it's not true then the rest of it doesn't hold any water, is that in the end Truth stands apart from human power.

Nathan comes to David and delivers the truth in a classical biblical way. He tells him a story--in fact, a parable. Two men, one rich and one poor, each with sheep. The rich man had many flocks and herds but the poor man had but one ewe, which he had bought at great price. A little ewe that had grown up with his children, eating at his table, snuggling in his easy chair--it was like a daughter to him. This is more than a sheep, this is the family pet.

The rich man entertains a guest, and though he had all the sheep from his own flock to choose from, in his cruelty or oblivion he instead takes the poor man's pet lamb, kills it, prepares it, and serves it to his guest for lunch.

Hearing the brutal end of the story as it hangs in the palace air, King David, the son of a shepherd, and once a shepherd boy himself--fashioned even now as God's shepherd for the people--rages against this man, and declares with the full weight of the throne, This man deserves death for what he's done!

And I imagine Nathan, before the words had even left David's mouth, replies in a voice, firm but measured: You are the man.

Just two words in Hebrew, same as the two words of Bathsheba when she tells David she is pregnant.

II.

The truth has been told. It falls like a stone and in a second shatters the world David had constructed like so much broken glass. Nathan goes on with his prophetic forecast, outlining the fall that would come to David's house, how this thing would echo out through his family.

And while there's little in this story to affirm in David, we can say, and must say, that having his cruelty uncovered, and absorbing the judgement handed down, David summons the courage we have seen in him before, and there before Nathan and God responds in the most honest and faithful way that he could, I have sinned against the Lord.

Again, just two words in Hebrew.1

He tells the truth.
He tells the truth to Nathan.
He tells the truth to God.
But perhaps most important of all, he tells the truth to himself.And at it's heart, this is what confession is: it's one way we tell the truth about ourselves.

It's not the only way. Celebration is another. And for some, it must be said, it's just as much a struggle to celebrate and delight in what we've done and, even more, who we are, as it is to confess when we've fallen short.

I think it's important to lift these two up together: celebration and confession, as marks of truth telling that, and when we're at our best, we do well as the church and as people faith. To tell the whole truth we can't lift up one without the other. We encourage each other, "build each other up," as Paul puts it, and say again and again the great truth of our faith that we are beloved of God no matter what we do or leave undone. But we also hold special space to confess when we have fallen short: cultivating the practice of being honest with ourselves, learning to summon the strength to say, I did that. And this is so hard and so necessary because confession, more than celebration, is one of the more counter-cultural things we do as people of faith.

III.

Never confess, is the rule we receive more often from the world. We live in a culture of self-protection, which is the opposite of confession--it may be the opposite of faith.

But this is not to say that we don't live in a culture of guilt. In fact, I believe we live our lives carrying around an incredible amount of guilt and shame--and not just for our actual failings, but perhaps even more for the ones we imagine. We live in a culture of inadequacy and comparison, the sum message of which is: you are not enough. So we feel guilty for not working enough, not achieving enough. Or not being a good enough parent or not being a good enough child or not being fully present to our loved ones or our children--guilt often at odds with our guilt for not working enough. In our zero-sum, you win/I lose, high-anxiety system, guilt is ubiquitous. Shame is our currency. And missing from all of it is the truth.

The truth our tradition hands down to us in the pairing of these two: confession and celebration. The truth of our brokenness that cannot be understood apart from the truth of our belovedness. The whole truth we lift up each week in this room when we hold space to confess our failings, immediately followed by the assurance that God's love is greater than all of them. The deep truth that we routinely and at times bitterly fall short--that we are capable of and often guilty of terrible wrongs. And the even deeper truth that we are more than the worst things we have ever done, or the accumulation of all our faults. That there is always a way out of the pit. That "as deep as the wound is," as we so often say, "that's how deep the healing can be."2 If we would do the work. If we would make amends.

This is the good news--news that would not, could not, be nearly as good, nearly as true, if it didn't account for all of it. All our faults--ugly as they sometimes are, all our gifts, muddled as they sometime feel, and everything in between. But it does.

IV.

The consequences would come as they must for David. But as he sings so powerfully in this morning's psalm, he would meet them with a "clean heart," and a "new and right spirit," believing that the God who had brought him that far would remain him, come what may. And the same is true for us. Thank God, the same is true for us.

_____________________
1 Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel, Interpretation Series, 282. Brueggemann's commentary has been instrumental in shaping this sermon.
2 The poet Mary Karr.

As Your Soul Lives

II Samuel 11:1-15, The Tenth Sunday of Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · July 28th, 2024 · Duration 14:04

As Your Soul Lives

II Samuel 11:1-15

This is a difficult text.

It is difficult to see the vulnerability and lack of agency that Bathsheba experiences in this part of her story. When this story was told to me as a youth and a young adult, Bathsheba was always cast as a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it, but I think a closer reading of this text proves otherwise.

It is difficult to hear David's wrongdoing called out knowing that he, as 1 Samuel 13 tells us, is a "man after God's own heart." But we cannot be honest with this text and not recognize that there is moral failure on David's part.

It is difficult to see Uriah, an innocent, courageous, loyal man, betrayed because he will not leave the servitude of his king for the pleasures of his home. There is enough injustice here to make all of us leave fuming, and yet, there is truth here, truth that can help us as our souls live through our own experiences of injustice, through our own difficult moments, and through our own terrible decisions.

From the very beginning of the text, we can see that David is misusing his power.

"In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, but David remained at Jerusalem."

David isn't where he is supposed to be. He is not out to battle. He is protected in his home. And as often happens when we aren't where we are supposed to be, David gets himself into trouble. He sees what he wants, and he takes it.

It happened, late one afternoon when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.

Take note here, that Bathsheba is where she should be. This was often presented to me as if Bathsheba was on her roof flaunting herself before the king, as if she knew he would be watching, but Bathsheba was only following the cleansing ritual prescribed in the law of Moses and required of women each month. According to
the Scripture, David was walking about on the roof when he saw a woman bathing. She could have been on the roof as that was where rain water was collected but she also could have been in the courtyard of her home where baths were often located. David sees her and decides to send someone to inquire about her. He learns that this is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. The story should end here when David learns that Bathsheba is the wife of one of his soldiers, but it does not.

"David sent messengers to get her."

The word for "get" here is the same word for acquiring or purchasing commodities. Perhaps Bathsheba willingly went to David, but she did not have a choice. She is summoned by the king. To ignore the king is dangerous. Bathsheba goes to David, they have an encounter, and she returns home. A while later, she sends a message to David. She speaks three words, just two words in Hebrew, the only words she speaks in the story.

"I am pregnant."

Immediately, David sets out to cover up his wrongdoing. He brings Uriah home so that he might go to Bathsheba but Uriah, loyal to a fault, refuses to go home. He sleeps at the king's house, among David's servants, unwilling to abandon his king for his home.

Uriah says to David, "As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing."

Then David tries again. This time, he attempts to get Uriah to drink too much so that he will go home. But even a drunk Uriah is loyal to his king and stays and sleeps among David's servants. So David writes a letter to Joab.

"Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die."

Uriah is a leader in the army, he had men that would have gone with him, so David is not only condemning Uriah to death, but also his men. And in perhaps the most terrible part of the whole story, David sends the letter to Joab by Uriah so that Uriah unknowingly delivers his own death sentence. I don't think we can ever say that the Bible is not dramatic.

On the precipice of Uriah's death, with Bathsheba about to bear David's son, today's lesson ends.

Today's text is difficult but there is hope.

Uriah will die, a terrible act of injustice. But as his soul lives, he will be remembered for his loyalty and his courage.

Bathsheba has more grief ahead of her, but ultimately, she bears Solomon and together she and Nathan, the prophet, insure that Solomon will follow David as king. Through Solomon, Bathsheba finds herself in the lineage of Jesus. This does not gloss over what happened to her in today's story. I know that there are people among us who have experienced the vulnerability that Bathsheba experiences here. Though this story is told from David's perspective and does not capture Bathsheba's pain and anguish, you know that the pain and anguish is there because you have experienced it. You are not alone. Psalm 34 tells us that the Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in Spirit. Today's reading from the Psalm, Psalm 145, tells us that the Lord is near to all who call on the Lord. God is with you. And like today's reading from Ephesians, God grants you strength in your inner being through God's Spirit.

And Church, we don't always know who the broken-hearted among us might be, which is why we must live our lives in such a way that we come alongside people, ourselves rooted and grounded in love, so that they might know the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ even when we don't know that they need that reminder. As Bathsheba's soul lives, she is not defined by this story. She is remembered as one of five women listed in the lineage of Jesus. She helps to bring God incarnate into the world.

David too has more grief ahead of him. But he is not defined by this one decision. We all know that there is no sin too great that God cannot forgive it. Are there consequences? Yes. There are people among us who have experienced the regret that David will come to experience due to his decisions in this text. And your life is not defined by one bad decision. Are there consequences? Yes. Psalm 145 tells us that the Lord is just in all the Lord's ways. But then it says, "and the Lord is kind in all the Lord's doings." God's kindness and love far exceed our understanding. God forgives when we wouldn't.

And church, we are called to be God's people, a people of forgiveness, to forgive as we have been forgiven. Do not hear me say that we must make ourselves vulnerable to those who have hurt us, but we must figure out a way to forgive them, both for our own sake and for theirs.

As David's soul lives, he is remembered as a man after God's own heart, a man who is forgiven, a man who finds himself in the lineage of Jesus. Should we be careful about putting him on a pedestal? Yes, and he is a man who helps bring God incarnate into the world.

The truth is we can probably see ourselves in Uriah and in David and in Bathsheba. We all have lived through our own experiences of injustice, through our own difficult moments, and through our own terrible decisions. As our soul's live, we are not defined by our one bad choice or one awful event, we will be remembered for the overarching narrative of our lives. As our soul lives, may we be remembered as one who helped bring God incarnate into the world.

Between If and Nevertheless

II Samuel 17:1-17, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · July 21st, 2024 · Duration 17:00

Between "If" and "Nevertheless"

II Samuel 7:1-17

When pick up our story here in 2 Samuel David has finally and triumphantly been named King of Israel. He has consolidated his power by moving the throne to his new capital city of Jerusalem, and as we heard last week, he has paraded the ark of the covenant--the chest in which the law of the covenant was kept and where God was thought to literally reside--through towns and villages before arriving at their new home.

As our passage opens, you can almost feel the turning of a page: Now when the king was settled into his house (not David anymore, but simply "the king"), and the Lord had given him rest from his enemies around them, the king said to the prophet Nathan (the new royal advisor) See how I'm living here in this beautiful house, but the ark of God stays in a tent.

And Nathan, talented counselor for the king that he is, understands what David wants to do without him actually having to come out and say it: he wants to build a house for the ark--a proper temple, a permanent home for God in this new royal, holy city. Nathan responds, one gets the feeling, how he often would respond to the wishes of the king: Of course, your highness, go, do all that you have in mind, for the Lord is with you. And the matter must have seemed settled. But that night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan with a new plan and a new promise. There will be no temple, at least not yet. God will do David one better. God will provide David with a "house," a dynasty, and his line will continue through the generations. But what's more, God's promise of blessing that had been upon the people of Israel since Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with his face aglow from the presence of God will take on a new depth.

When your days are fulfilled and you lie with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, and will establish his kingdom. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him. But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I've done before. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever.

I.

Theologian, Walter Brueggemann, claims this unconditional promise of God to David, establishing his kingdom that will last forever, is "the most crucial theological statement in the Old Testament."1 Which is quite a thing to say. Of all the statements, all the covenants, all the promises, this is the most important, he says--the most pivotal, maybe even the most surprising.

It's the most crucial theological statement because it changes the nature of God's relationship with the people. Up to this point, in the covenant made with the people at Sinai with the Ten Commandments and all the rest of it, God's presence and provision in the lives of the people was conditional: If you love the Lord your God, walk in God's ways and observe the commandments--if you treat each other fairly, caring for the oppressed and vulnerable, and so forth--then I will bless you. But if you don't--if you fail to keep the covenant, if your hearts turn away and you're led astray by other gods, if you turn your nose to the oppressed, then you shall perish.

The covenant between God and the people was a conditional one, with clear expectations and possible outcomes. God's blessing was contingent upon the people's faithfulness.

But now that has changed. Now the relationship between God and God's people is grounded not in the great "If" of our obedience--quite a big if, we must say--but in God's gracious promise, as Brueggemann puts it, of "Nevertheless." Yes, there will be times of distance or darkness or correction needed along the way, but these won't be permanent. From here forward, as Paul would later put it: nothing can separate us from the love of God.

II.

This is a big deal! The whole story has changed. The whole ground upon which the people of God would live their lives is suddenly different. It's suddenly more steady, more firm. A kind of no-matter-what-ness has been added to God's love. This promise of God here in 2 Samuel grounds the people of Israel through generations of upheaval, through exile and return. Though the world crashes in upon them and it seems God has abandoned them, while their "weeping my last for the night, joy comes in the morning."

It is the root of some of the most profound images and testimonies we have in scripture and in our faith. That in the end, light conquers darkness.

In the end, love conquers fear.

That "the worst things are never the last things," as Buechner put it. This promise is the seed planted that will one day blossom into the life and ministry of Jesus, Son of David. Here, God has done a new thing--blessed be the name of the Lord!

And yet.

And yet, "while the covenant of "If" is "silenced" in this new covenant of "Nevertheless," it doesn't completely go away.2 In other words--it hasn't been removed completely from the books, and in the pages to follow in scripture this "If" will reappear from time to time. Voices within scripture will continue to argue that, steadfast as God may be, there are nonetheless limits to God's patience. That in the end, accountability must be held and justice must be served, and that's that. There are times--these voices would say--when God's blessing truly does leave us or would. If certain lines are crossed, if certain deeds are done or left undone. That we, ourselves, can choose this path outside of God's blessing. And this nagging "If" continues beyond scripture and into our generations of tradition, and even into our own lives.

The generosity of "nevertheless" is hard to accept. There are times when we look at the world and wonder if God has left us to our own devices. Or see the atrocities and think if there is any justice in this world, surely there is no way back to the heart of God from that. Or even in our own lives, how many have wondered if the pain we feel is the weight of God bearing down upon us? Or perhaps more likely asked, Where is God within it? How is God watching this and doing nothing? Or wonder if we ourselves have failed so completely then we must be somewhere beyond God's redemption. Is "Nevertheless" anything more than a children's story?

Years ago I saw there an expedition to plunge the depths of underwater caves--hundreds and hundreds of meters down into the darkness--that went catastrophically wrong, with the divers dying and then the rescuers sent to bring them back up dying as well. They'd all gotten so disoriented by the thick, impenetrable darkness that they'd gotten tangled in their lifelines. One of the divers who eventually made it down to collect their bodies remarked, There are some places on earth where dark truly does overcome light.

This tension between "If" and Nevertheless" is unresolve--in scripture, in our lives and the world, and even, Brueggemann wonders, in the very heart of God. And so we're left to struggle with it.

III.

As Christians, we might like to think this all would have been settled in Christ. But I think we all can attest to how these questions of the limits of God's love and patience weren't put to rest in Christ, but in some ways were intensified. Depending on where you find yourself within the Christian tradition it's possible to understand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as God's resounding and jubilant "Nevertheless!" or God's final, gut wrenching plea for "If." And both are found in the New Testament.

Will we look to Paul when he says he is convinced--he has been "persuaded"--that "nothing can separate us from the love of God, not height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation..."

Or will we look to Jesus speaking by candlelight to Nicodemus in John, saying, "God so loved the world that God gave the Son, that if we should believe in him we should not perish."

Is it the prodigal son who receives his father's forgiveness before he even takes his first step home, or is it the king who in the end must separate the sheep from the goats: the ones who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and incarcerated, and the ones who didn't?

This tension continues into the church. It's tempting to say there are "If" Christians and "Nevertheless" Christians--that there are some in the church who seem to relish in the divine "If" and the idea that God's love and patience might run out for some, and others in the church who would hold the door open for just anybody, everybody, with no consideration for damage done or injury caused. But I think what's closer to the truth is that we each have both of these inside us.

Sometimes just where we find ourselves depends on the day--who's cut us off in traffic, what nasty email we've read or catastrophe we've seen on the news, or how long it takes to put the kids to bed, God help us. There are some days where "If" sounds perfectly reasonable.

But then, before sneaking out of the room, you manage to see the way their faces look when they're sleeping. Or you step outside and feel the coolness in the air after it rains, or you see how the world comes alive at sunrise, morning by morning. There are moments when "Nevertheless" feels not only possible, but maybe even inevitable.

It may be that we need the chance, the possibility of "If" to keep us honest about the world's evils and the need for justice and accountability. But without the promise of "Nevertheless" there may be days when we wonder if it is worth it.

And I wish I could tell you which one wins out! I wish I could tell myself. But here's what I believe and what my best reading of scripture and life in the world points to.

I believe God's hope is "Nevertheless." I don't believe God hopes for "If."

I believe God's great dream for the world is "Nevertheless"--that, come what may and in the end, God longs to bring all things and all people back home. I believe the witness of scripture says this is God's hope, that this is what God wants more than anything. And I believe the witness of scripture also teaches us that, more than anything, we're to want what God wants. God wants peace and justice and mercy and compassion and wholeness and reconciliation for all people--God wants a banquet table long enough for everyone to have a chair. And so I believe this is what we should want--and not only what we should want, but what we should order our lives around. It's what we should work for, what we should pray for. It's the standard we should hold for ourselves, as the church: to want and pray for and work toward what brings wholeness to our lives, to our communities, to our world.

And so I believe we should live as if in the end, love wins over fear. As if, in the end, light overcomes darkness. As if, in the end peace waits out violence and anxiety. As if, in the end, right conquers wrong, justice wins the day and then finds its home in mercy. We should live as if, in the end, nothing can separate us from the love of God--ourselves and all people. I believe we should, we must, stake our faith in the nevertheless-ness of God's love, because I believe "Nevertheless" is what God wants, desperately.

IV.

That's what I believe.

Which leaves just one question, which may be the great question behind all of scripture and all of faith: Does God get what God wants?
_____________________
1 Ibid., 258-259
2 Ibid., 259

Dancing Before the Lord

II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · July 14th, 2024 · Duration 16:00

Dancing Before the Lord

II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19

When we pick up the story here in the sixth chapter of 2 Samuel, David has just been crowned king of Israel and begins to consolidate his power by bringing the ark of the covenant on a long tour through Judah en route to Jerusalem, his new capital city.

Along the way, as the ark passes through different towns, there are great celebrations. And we'e told that, caught up in the fervor and excitement and gratitude for God's presence and provision, David and all the house of Israel "dance before the Lord"--a passage that's probably caused more heartburn for Baptist preachers through the years than any in Scripture, maybe outside of the Song of Solomon.

And not just did they dance, but they danced. They "danced with all their might," it says. It was fervent dance, a wild dance, even a risqué dance. We're told how during this dance, David himself was "girded with a linen ephod," what we would call today a "loin cloth." And wearing this loin cloth he nonetheless proceeded to leap and dance before the Lord--which all the people loved, as you might imagine. Everyone save for his wife the queen, who, when she saw David "leaping and dancing," we're told, "despised him in her heart." Later, after David had arrived in the palace, she approached him and said, "My, how the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself before the eyes of his servants' maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly" do.

I.

And she may have had a point. Dance leads much up to interpretation, an ambiguity that is, I believe, part of its appeal. It can mean many things, sometimes all at once, in ways we're not even fully aware while we're in the midst of it. Was this simply a spontaneous eruption of gratitude and joy, or was David maybe showing off a bit? Was he allowing himself a moment of release after so many years of turmoil, or was he giving the people "bread and circuses?"

The answer is probably, "yes."

Dancing is powerful that way, and even subversive. It muddies all our prescribed codes of conduct and decorum. It can be rebellious, maybe even thought a little reckless, a little wild. Who knows what it might lead to. If a person will dance there's no telling what he'll do, a truth that lands differently depending on where you are in the dance.

Annie Dillard tells of a Jewish congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts back in Cold War times that held an annual celebration on Simchat Torah, when the synagogue completes its yearly reading of the Torah. And people would come from all around to be a part of this great celebration, where they would dance in front of the synagogue well into the night.

The rabbi there once asked a newly arrived Soviet Jewish immigrant what he thought of their Simchat Torah celebration here in the states, and the man said that it was fine, but it was better in Leningrad. The rabbi was a little insulted and asked just how it was better. In Leningrad, the man explained, if you dance in front of the synagogue on Simchat Torah you must assume that the secret police will photograph everyone. This means that sooner or later your employer will be notified. And since such a dance is considered anti-Soviet, you must be prepared to lose your job, or even worse! And so you see, he went on, to dance on such an occasion, this is a different kind of dance.1

Dancing says to the world, "You don't control me. Not all of me." There's an inhibition required to dance, a shamelessness, a freedom. It's why Juke Joints were so necessary in the Jim Crow South. It's why every new generation from the beginning of time has asserted itself before their elders through dance--it didn't start with TikTok, I'm sorry to report. I've seen footage of the Twist, the Bump, Swing, and don't get me started with the Shag, I'm from the Carolinas! The old rabbis used to say that to dance is an "achievement." They said it was an achievement to struggle with your sadness or embarrassment or pride enough to "bring it into the joy." They even said, "by means of dance one can transform evil forces."2

II.

Some years ago Audrey and I went to a party that a friend of ours was throwing for his mother who had recently been diagnosed with ALS. The disease was moving quickly and this party was part fundraiser for her treatments and part fulfillment of her wish that they recreate her wedding reception. And so friends and family all gathered in a big ballroom in downtown Boston, and we had a wonderful catered dinner around tables with linen cloths. There were toasts, and tears and the raising of glasses, and then there was dancing. And the first dance, of course, was reserved for the bride and groom. They made their way out to the dance floor, the loving husband pushing his dying wife in her wheelchair. Upon reaching the center, he stopped, pushed down the brakes, and moved in front of her to lift her up. But as he did, she waved him off, and began to slowly lift herself up. She took hold of his hand and his shoulder, and they danced. It was an achievement.

Children, we should say, have no idea what this means that dancing is an achievement, because children dance instinctually--which is to say, of course, that people dance instinctually. I'm convinced of this. We come into the world hardwired for dance, maybe not so unlike the way we come hardwired for things like wonder and miracle.

We took the boys to New York City a couple of years ago for Spring Break and had an incredible time. It was the first time they'd been to a big city like that and so maybe more than any of the things we did or the sights we saw, they enjoyed riding the subway or just walking up and down the city streets--and by walking I mean dancing. Mac in particular, so caught up in the spirit of New York, danced his way up and down the sidewalks right outside of Madison Square Garden. Someone tossed him a dollar! There he was, flailing his body around out in front of everyone, not caring a bit.

Of course, part of the sweetness was knowing a day will come when that will end. Come to think of it, that's part of what makes any dancing, all dancing, special: that we know it will end.

David and all the house of Israel danced before the Lord with all their might. All their might, it says. And I wonder what it would it look like for us to do the same? Not in a literal sense, with all of us filing out of the pews and dancing in the aisles of this sanctuary--that would never happen! But then again, what would it take? What would have to happen in our lives, in the world for us to be so overcome with joy or wonder or gratitude that we saw no other way--remembering there are plenty of churches where this happens nearly every Sunday, and God bless them for it, for dancing for the rest of us!

Or if that is too much to consider: What would have to happen in your life for you dance before the Lord with all your might, anywhere at all?

What has happened for you to dance in that way--to achieve that kind of joy?

You know that dancing isn't reserved for dance floors. Some of the most powerful dancing I've seen happens with no dance floor in sight. I've seen dancing happen in hospital waiting rooms. I've seen it happen at airports and heard it from the other end of the telephone. I've seen slow, near-silent dances happen in nurseries to the hush of a lullaby. I've seen dancing at graduations and anniversaries. On kitchen floors at the sight of a car in the driveway. Dancing happens wherever life does. Not life as we usually experience it, but life that's just under the surface of that life. Life that's always there but rarely exposed. Abundant life, it's been called.

III.

Truth is, in the nearly 12 months that I have been among you here, I've seen you dance quite a lot, actually.

The dance begins every Monday morning at 8:30 sharp, when the Caregivers make their way to the library, to pray and share concerns and thanksgivings and sign cards. To some it might just look like people sitting around a room, but there is so much dancing--so much is brought into the joy.

It continues through the week. All those who dance in the kitchen making food for Meals on Wheels and then those real free-spirits who dance out to their cars and then off to deliver it, dancing up to doorways all around town.

I've seen dancing in support groups, such an intimate dance. I've seen it in committee meetings--even the finance committee lately, praise God! In Bible studies, and on Wednesdays when we gather for supper and to pray--it look me all spring to learn the steps to our midweek Vespers service, but near the end I finally picked it up. I hope I didn't step on too many toes.

There is dancing, too, in the youth house, I feel I must tell you. And when we gather the children to teach them the stories of our faith, or share with them how the Christian life calls us deep within ourselves and just as deeply out into the world around us--is that "Sunday school" and "Atrium," or aren't these really dance lessons? And don't we teach them to dance so they can one day teach us, soon, if we'll let them?

I see so many of you dancing when you clean up the grounds or plant flowers, or prepare communion, or do any of the innumerable tasks that allow us to gather here as we do. Or when you sing so the rest of us can dance along in our heads. All of you, each of you, a lilt in your step as you move about this place. And I see you dancing, of course, when we gather in this room. Especially on those Sundays when your knees ache, or your hearts, your spirit. I see you dancing on those Sundays when the kids are going nuts, and it would be easier to do just about anything else than drag them up to church, or even when you find your way to your computer screen or iPad or TV and join in the dance wherever you are. When you sing along with the hymns, and bow your head in prayer by yourself. When you pick people out from the back of their heads on the screen and say a prayer for them. I know those mornings may feel about the furthest thing from dancing, but dance it is.

IV.

It's a dance, this life we live together as the church. It's not always an easy dance. Sometimes we just can't get in sync with each other. Some want to go this way when others want to go that, to the point that sometimes we wonder if we're hearing different music. But it's a dance we decided a long time ago is better to do together. Maybe one that can only be done together.

And so this is my prayer for us. That together we would take our tiredness and frustration, our sorrow and worry, and all the things we all carry with us that would keep us from dancing, and I hope together we would find strength enough to bring all of it--all of you--into the joy.

I see you dancing, church, and I hope every now and again you see it too. I hope you see how you dance before the Lord.
____________________
1 As told by Annie Dillard in her powerful book, For the Time Being, p.144-145
2 Ibid.

The Holiness of Now

II Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · July 7th, 2024 · Duration 11:45

The Holiness of Now

II Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

In her poem, "The Gate," Marie Howe tells of her younger brother, John, whom she lost to AIDS many years ago. She writes,

I had no idea that the gate I would
step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother's
body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded
every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever
rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting
for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This--holding up my
cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

In an interview some years back, she described how she was with him and his partner Joe those last few weeks of his life, and what a gift they were. She said of their large Catholic family, he was that sibling who was the best of them all. He had a way about him--a spark. He was her "spiritual teacher," even in those final days of his own life directing her focus--to simple things. The cheese and mustard sandwich she was eating. The sheets they folded together, that dance that is so much easier to do with another, taking the ends, holding them tight, then bringing them to. Doing the dishes, the glasses rinsed under cold and running water--all the mundane, ordinary tasks and events that make up so much of a life.

This, he tells her, opening his arms to the moment they shared, that moment before them, is what you've been waiting for. This.1

I.

Over 35 chapters in 1 and 2 Samuel, the story of David's rise unfolds, with every critical moment of his life seemingly recorded in detail, all leading us to this moment--the culmination of so much prophecy and divine intervention, the hand of God pulling, at times even dragging the story toward this end result. Finally, David is crowned king in all his glory, a moment of ecstasy and rapture described in these few verses we heard earlier, which can only be described as...underwhelming.

So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel.

Then a few verses of retrospective clearly written after David's reign noting his age, how long he was king and ending with a summary statement: And David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.

And then on whatever comes next--another battle with the Philistines, same as before.

It reads almost like a tersely written obituary, like the ones in the newspaper where you have to pay by the word. The reign of Israel's greatest king, the one "after God's own heart," summarized in a few sentences, same as the rest of us.

II.

What are we to make of this?
Perhaps the ancient historians here are capturing something of David's own mood. It may be that this is how he experienced this culmination, this literal coronation. The last 15 years of his life, give or take, all moving toward this moment, this triumph, and when it arrives...it just arrives, and then it is gone.

Of course, one doesn't need to be a king to learn that this is often how it goes: these culminating moments--moments we have anticipated and worked toward and sacrificed for--when they finally arrive, can feel somehow different from how we expected them. The satisfaction can be somehow less potent than we imagined, the euphoria more fleeting. The dream job, the promotion, the deal that will change everything. The degree, the appointment. The graduation, the victory. The kitchen renovation. This is the reality of mountain tops or summits: once you reach them there is literally no direction to go but down. And so it's perhaps only natural for our minds and hearts and imaginations to turn toward the next one, and the next one...

What if this is what we've been waiting for?

This.

This moment, and then the next one. The gift of this point in time--instructively called "the present," I would add.

In full view of where we've been, and in anticipation for what is to come. Centered between them, but not dependent on either of them--the past or the future, which are really inventions of our memory and imagination. This is the only place we can truly be, truly live--where we can come alive. Where we can find each other, where we will know God.

I wonder if David had someone in his life, in his court, who would tell him this. Who would lift up that cheese and mustard sandwich. Someone along the way, before he was crowned, who would call to mind the beauty of the grass beneath their feet as they marched over the hills and fields. Who would give thanks for the friendships that sustained them through so many hard times. Who would tell him to go take a nap, or read a book, or maybe, just maybe, even as God's anointed, to not take yourself so seriously. We all need one of these people.

Someone to remind us as we climb, as we work, and improve, and achieve, and go and go and go--as we make something of ourselves, as we do our part to make a better world--someone to tell us, again, as we try our best to squeeze all the life that we can out of the days we are given, that every moment is holy. That every breath is sacred. That, in fact, it is not the apexes or singular achievements that make for a good and full life, but the joy and delight and contentment we find in all the moments in between. The holiness of now.

III.

And wasn't this the gospel Jesus was teaching and his preaching, and what he sent his disciples out to proclaim--wasn't he trying to get them to see what was right there before them? This new world breaking forth within the old one, like a flower's bloom? Saying to his disciples and anyone else who would listen along the way, This is what you've been waiting for.

And they'd say, What?

And he'd say, This--holding up a mustard seed, a bit of yeast.

And they'd say, What?

And he'd say, This--lifting a child to his lap.

This--telling stories of lost sheep and lost coins and lost brothers. Of outsiders and religious folk and the space between them. How God meets us there.

As they made their way through the towns and villages, dusting off their feet when necessary. To the tables of Pharisees and tax collectors. As he touched people right at the place of their wound and said, This is where your new life begins.

And then with a wisdom only the dying have, when he gathered them around a table and said, This--as he broke the bread and lifted a cup.

And they'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, looking around at their faces.

IV.

So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel.

This is the story we are told. But just before they did, just before David felt the oil drip down upon his head and his life change forever, I hope he looked up and saw just how perfectly blue the sky was above them.

________________________
1 Marie Howe discusses this poem in a beautiful interview with Krista Tippett on On Being, https://onbeing.org/programs/marie-howe-the-power-of-words-to-save-us/

Who We Are In Grief

II Samuel 1:1, 17-27, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · June 30th, 2024 · Duration 17:08

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Between David and Goliath

I Samuel 17, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · June 23rd, 2024 · Duration 15:58

Between David and Goliath

I Samuel 17

In our sermons this summer we're tracing one of the major story arcs in the Old Testament and in the history of ancient Israel, which is the rise and fall and eventual redemption of King David.

Last week we met David, the young shepherd boy from Bethlehem, called in from the fields to his father's living room where he would be anointed by Samuel as God's new choice to be king of Israel. But in the process, we were given an insight into the heart of God, a truth that extends beyond that scene and this story and out through all of scripture, and we hope the whole of our lives, that "The Lord does not see as mortals see: they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

We might have those words echoing in our heads this morning when we pick up the story one chapter later with this showdown of truly biblical proportions.

I.

David and Goliath.
Among the pantheon of stories from the Bible that have worked their way into popular consciousness, this may be chief among them. It's the classic underdog story, having transcended biblical history and entered the realm of myth: stories that don't just tell us what happened, but tell us who we are.

One the one side there's mighty Goliath: the pride of the Philistines, a monster of a man, shouting and waving and mocking the Israelites and challenging them to send someone out for a one on one fight for all the marbles--a classic villain if there ever was one.

And on the other side there's David, with his youthful naiveté to offer himself to this battle. His force of character and maybe the slightest touch of arrogance, as he describes for the king all the animals he's slayed while out watching his father's sheep, then shrugs off the king's generous offering of armor and weapons in favor of his own sling and smooth stones. Shrugging off the king! Who would do such a thing?! We love it!

We love an underdog story. We love the charm and inspiration. We love to imagine ourselves as the little guy, the "nobody" who deep down really is "somebody," scrapping and clawing against all odds and prevailing in a glory that borders on miracle. Isn't this how we imagine ourselves and understand our own success, no matter our path in life?

I remember Sam Wells, the former dean of the Chapel at Duke University reflected on this story of David and Goliath at the baccalaureate service for all the new Duke graduates. He observed at one point, We want our movies to be about David, but we spend our lives trying desperately hard to be Goliath.

We think it's quaint and clever, he writes, that David got by with five smooth stones and a sling, but we spend our own energies stockpiling swords and spears and javelins...You've just spent four years of your time and energy, he told all the new graduates, the academic world's best facilities, books and teachers, and a large swath of someone else's money acquiring the prestigious social and economic entry ticket known as a Duke degree. But think for a moment. Why is a Duke degree so coveted? Because it gives you a chance to be Goliath. It gives you the armor. It gives you the weaponry. It gives you the respect. It gives you the acclaim. All the things Goliath had. All the things David didn't have.1

II.

Nobody wants to be Goliath in this story because we know how the story ends. But in the story of our own lives, the twists and turns of which we don't know, we nonetheless choose the path of Goliath more times than not. And of course we would.

Goliath is the path of power and security. The size, the strength, the armor--Lord, the armor! Did you notice the attention scripture gives to Goliath's armor and David's lack of it? We're told precisely what Goliath was wearing, how big it was, how heavy: He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze. He had greaves of bronze on his legs and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders. The shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam, and his spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron; and his shield-bearer went before him.

We're told, too, of Saul's armor that David was to wear: his bronze helmet, his coat of mail. How much do we celebrate and even idolize--literally, do we make an idol of-- security and protection advantage? We want all the armor we can get, for ourselves and those close to us.

There is something to the armor in this story. David is surrounded by it. He's up against it and those around him are pushing it on him.

And yet, the irony--or perhaps the lesson--is that in the end it was Goliath's armor that was his downfall. Goliath must have thought he was invincible. Armor can make you feel that way. All of it covering him, protecting and making his sizable frame look even bigger--save for one obvious spot, right there between the eyes.

And then there is Saul, the old king, once a warrior himself, now in decline physically, morally, spiritually, trying to drape David in his own armor. The boy isn't fighting off animals in the field anymore--this is the armor David will need to prevail here in the real world. All of which Saul seems to offer unwittingly as a symbol of his own downfall. All the accumulated weight of years and compromises and regrets and secrets. All the world-weary and cynicism, compressed into so much mail draped over his shoulders like a yoke, like prison chains.

If this story were a parable Jesus told in the gospels, he might close with some pithy maxim: Be careful the armor you choose, what you would clothe yourself in for protection, lest it press you into the dirt, let it keep you from feeling the gentle breeze of the Spirit against your skin it when it blows.

David refuses the armor, which may be the critical moment in the story. He sees through it. Stays true to himself, stays close to God--and this is really where the story leads us. Will we choose the world's armor, heavy and burdensome, and seductive in its promise of protection? Or will we trust the God of creation, who promises to stand by us, to be our strength and our shield, to provide for us everything we need?

This may be the true conflict in this story, and one that continues long after this battle in through as the shape of David's life unfolds, which is that David eventually becomes Goliath.2 David himself becomes a bully, using military strength and imperial command to manipulate things and people--even leading to the death of vulnerable people under his rule and his own family's ruin. David would, in time, become Goliath, and it would one of the great tragedies of scripture.

It's always a tragedy when we become the things we once fought against. And yet, it happens so often. Success, maybe especially unexpected success, has a way of changing things, changing people. It's so easy to put on that armor, to think we can carry it. Maybe not all at once, but one piece at a time until suddenly we covered in it, and we can't even feel how heavy it is.

III.

In David, God was doing something new: calling someone from outside the normal circles of power to be God's king for the people. A nondescript, un-credentialed shepherd boy from some backwater town. Someone, we learned last week, whose potential only could have been seen by a God who look doesn't look where humans look, a God who "looks upon the heart."

And it was so: scripture tells us in David God found "a man after God's own heart." Someone whose heart is like God's heart. Which is kind of a remarkable thing to say. This is, after all, the hope of living a life of faith: that our heart might be like God's heart. And it raises the question: what is God's heart like?

We can probably think of many attributes: God's heart is generous and kind. God's heart is full of wonder and imagination. God's heart is patient and courageous and loving and utterly creative--God's heart is wide, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians, so wide as to hold the whole world. But if we were pressed to pick just one word to describe God and God's heart in the Bible, I think it might be "compassion."

Over and over the refrain we hear describing God in scripture, from the Psalms, to other characters we come across, to the voice of God speaking through the prophets, is that the Lord is "gracious, and full of compassion."

And of all the words we could think of to describe Jesus, who we claim is God in the flesh, compassion may be at the heart of it. Compassion literally means "to suffer with." To see another's pain and suffering and vulnerability and to share in it, somehow. To take something of it on as our own. Compassion is what reminds us of the ways we share in this life, how we are never truly unto ourselves. How our lives are all wrapped up in the lives of others, in ways that are as confounding as they are beautiful.

This is how we know God's heart to be, a heart that beat in the chest of Jesus of Nazareth, whose life and death and resurrection is one long, mysterious compassionate act. Which reminds us that compassion, like love, is not just a feeling--a feeling of care or concern or shared hurt. Compassion may start in the heart, but it eventually moves to the hands and to the feet and leads us to real action; to do something on behalf of others.

Here, standing between those armies, facing down the symbol of violence and protection--all that compassion is not, we're told David's heart was like God's heart.

And it's years later when David, the shepherd boy now become king, is hidden, protected, separated from others behind the impenetrable armor of his palace walls, that his heart begins to change. His wide heart contracts. His sense of compassion is dulled, a sense that is accessed through and kept sharp by an awareness of our own need, our vulnerability, and perhaps most of all our proximity to others in their need. And his situation begins to unwind before him.

In the end, the only thing out there on the battlefield between David and Goliath was armor. But it it may be that the only thing that separates the Davids of the world from the Goliaths is compassion. It's compassion that keeps us close to the heart of God, that let's us know we're seeing how God sees, looking where God looks.

IV.

How do you think David felt when he shook off Saul's armor--heavy and ill-fitting as it was--and headed out to meet the challenge before him? Did he feel vulnerable?
Did he feel helpless?
Or did he remember again what it's like to feel free?
Amen.

_______________________
1 Sam Wells, "Five Smooth Stones," delivered May 14, 2010, accessed on Faith and Leadership, https://www.faithandleadership.com/five-smooth-stones
2 Grateful for Sam Wells here, again.

Where God Looks

I Samuel 15:34-16:13, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · June 16th, 2024 · Duration 16:07

Where God Looks

I Samuel 15:35-16:13

Regular attenders of worship will have noticed that for our sermons this summer we've been staying close to the Old Testament texts assigned for these weeks, which trace an important arc in early history of ancient Israel.

The story starts before Israel became a kingdom and were a loose confederation of tribes bound by a shared story of the Exodus from Egypt and a covenant with the God who delivered them. Over these past two weeks we've seen how the prophet Samuel arrived on the scene as God's messenger to the people in dark times, and how the people, in their fear of the challenges that faced them--which were quite real, but scripture contends were no match for the God of creation--demanded that God appoint for them a king, so they can compete with and, as they put it in our text last week, "be like all the other nations." This is the people of God in their insecure pre-teen phase, God love them. A phase we all access from time to time.

Samuel relents and anoints a king for them, Saul--a strapping lad, a king if you ever saw one. In fact, scripture can't help itself describing Saul's physical beauty. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he, it says, he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.

Saul is Prince Charming you know from Disney movies. Flowing locks, chiseled jaw, eyes you could just get lost in. He's tall and handsome and comes from a wealthy, prominent family--he has all the trappings of royalty. And yet in time it becomes clear Saul is not up for the task and we learn a valuable lesson in discerning the will and movement of the God of creation. Saul was the obvious choice to be God's anointed, but God's choice is almost never the obvious one. And so we find ourselves here in Bethlehem.

I.

Now for us today as 21st century Christians, Bethlehem might appear to be at the center of things. It's the birthplace of Jesus, with the manger and the animals and the star, "the hopes and fears of all the years" and so forth. But in those days Bethlehem was about as far from the center of things in Israel as one could get. Bethlehem, in the time of Jesus and all these many generations before, was a sleepy backwater town out on the margins.1 just some 5 miles from Jerusalem, but culturally and socially and economically a world away. Which, one gets the feeling, is precisely why God looked there. God has found a new king in a new, unexpected place. Not only is it the tiny town of Bethlehem, but in the house of a modest sheep herdsman named Jesse. There are no credentials to be found here in this living room, as his sons are paraded in front of Samuel.

Jesse's oldest son, Eliab comes down, and, just like Saul, he is tall and kinglike, and Samuel again is smitten. But we can imagine how as he reaches for his anointing oil, the voice of the Lord comes to him and delivers a truth about the ways and means and heart and eyes of God that extends far beyond this Bethlehem living room, out through the whole of scripture into this sanctuary and our own lives and ears: Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature...for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

And so each of the sons come by, and each are passed over until Samuel asks if there are any more and Jesse tells him, almost waving his hands in desperation, there's just the youngest who's out in the fields, almost an afterthought in his own family it seems, to not be called in with the rest. David is his name. He's sent for, and when the young man appears, the voice of God is clear to Samuel, telling him: that's the one--this is where my blessing for the people will be revealed, and we're off.

Now, it is true that scripture almost can't help itself and assures us that David, too, is "ruddy," and "handsome," and has "beautiful eyes." But that's not why God chose him! He just happened to be a little dreamy, too. The center of this story--the heart of this story you could say--is this insight into the heart of God, which is that God doesn't see how we see.

II.

In fact, the Hebrew is a little more direct than that. It literally says God doesn't look at the things we look at. Which is an important distinction. What scripture seems to point to here is not how God has better vision than us, or that God is able to see what we cannot--like the way it's said Michelangelo could look at the chunk of stone and see the sculpture that was already inside it.

If this was the case then we might be tempted to let ourselves, not being persons of artistic geniuses, off the hook. But that's not quite what scripture is saying. It's not so much that God sees differently from us, but that God looks in different places. And if that's the case, then it opens up the possibility that we can too. It opens up the possibility that we might one day--through practice and intention, and not just a little bit of failure and missing the mark, begin to change our usual habits of looking, our typical field of vision. We might widen our perspective and sharpen our focus, and begin to look where God looks.

Perhaps we too might learn to look beyond the center of things, the small world of people and places in which we spend most of our days, and see the ways the Spirit moves among those out there on what to us may seem to be the margins, but to them who call it home is simply their life and world. One need not go even 5 miles to enter another world here in Jackson, 2 miles will do, maybe less. Is it possible that's where seed of God's Kingdom in our community is germinating? Is it possible that is where God's anointed would be found?

Perhaps we too can learn to look beyond the surface of things, or the ultimately narrow list of qualities or characteristics that we have come to sort each other by as determinative, and learn to look instead to the heart of things, the heart of people; the things to which the heart of scripture consistently directs our attention. "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just and pleasing and commendable or excellent or worthy of praise, think on these things," Pauls tells us. Look here, in other words, at these things. This is what's important. Scripture is always widening our lens when it comes to people, and refocusing it when it comes to gifts.

add in whatever is said!

III.

In our gospel lesson from Mark this morning, Jesus speaks of one of his favorite images for the Kingdom of God and the faith we're to have in it. The tiny mustard seed--smallest among the seeds--that grows into "the greatest of all shrubs."

The kingdom is small, we're told so small that if you're not looking in the right place you could miss it. But if you're paying attention, if you know where to plant it and how to water it and nourish it, then it will grow and grow and give shelter to the birds.

Elsewhere Jesus tells the disciples that if they have faith the size of a mustard seed then they will be able to move mountains--to say to the peaks and ranges "move from here to there" and they will move. Faith is that powerful, we're to believe. It's that potent.

And yet the poet Denise Levertov wonders if we're also to believe that faith is also that rare--miraculous, even.2 After all, mustard seeds don't grow into shrubs large enough for birds to nest in. They're no bigger than weeds that might grow long the side of the road. And so many mountains remain where they've always been. Not once in human history has a person spoken to a mountain and seen it move.

And I think she has a point--faith in it's purest form is rare, exceedingly so.

But then again, my mother is from the Florida panhandle--the tiny old mill village of Historic Bagdad, Florida, just on the other side of the Escambia Bay from Pensacola, and just a few miles from any number of beautiful beaches there on the gulf--beaches so many of you will be visiting in the weeks to come or by the looks of the healthy glow around the sanctuary this morning may have already been. And so while she has lived most of her adult life on the East Coast and has visited the beaches of North and South Carolina a hundred times, for her, a beach, the real beach must always have bright, brilliant, white sand that squeaks when you walk on it.

Some years ago I learned just where this remarkably white sand comes from. It is mostly white quartz crystal, washed down over millennia and millennia from the Appalachian mountains. Grain after grain after grain, year after year after year, as the mountains, slowly, slowly, move from here to there. And for all we know it's still happening. I don't know how you could keep track of these things--most of these grains of sand arrive at their destination without fanfare. But one by one they do, until after a while there is a beach, home to seagulls and sea turtle eggs and hermit crabs and sand-fleas, those skittering creatures of a child's sunset imagination.

Mountains do not move at our command, no. And maybe that means faith is that rare.

But in God's creative imagination they do move, eventually, slowly. And if we know where to look, we can see it. We can see how God most often moves and acts in the world, which is not in bolts of lightning or eruptions of the earth, but in the slow, weathered imprint of water striking against a rock, day after day, week after week, year after year, for as far back as faith allows. And we learn that this is how the Christian life works, too. What Eugene Peterson has called the "long obedience in the same direction." And how the world will be reconciled to God's dream of wholeness, one by: grain by grain by grain.

This gives me hope. It give me hope somehow each day we are given opportunities to adjust our vision, to look someplace different, to find some trace of the Kingdom that we couldn't see looking in the places we usually look. That slow water against the rock is the only change happens, in the world our own spirits.

IV.

The Lord doesn't look where we look, we're told.

We look at the surface of things as they appear there before us.
God looks at the heart that's all around us--one giant heart. A heart that's so often, too often, just outside our view. And tells us: This, this is the one. Here is where my blessing will be revealed. Do you see it?

_____________________________
1 Walter Brueggemann, 1 and Second Samuel, Interpretation series, 120
2 "On the Parables of the Mustard Seed," by Denise Levertov

A Peculiar People

I Samuel 8:4-11, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Scott Dickison · June 9th, 2024 · Duration 16:43

A Peculiar People

I Samuel 8:4-20

"We are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations."

These words of the people of God, arguing to Samuel to have God anoint a king over them, haunt me.

They haunt me because there's no bluster, no euphemism, no claimed piety--just a moment of almost refreshing honesty: the people of God are insecure in the face of the challenges that surround them, and they admit to Samuel and to God what we all want deeper down than we would like to admit. They just want to be like everyone else.

I.

Admittedly, it is a unique situation they have found themselves in when we pick up the story. Maybe even a bit quirky. The people of God in those days were unique in the region in that they were not ruled by a king. Instead, from the time Joshua, the successor to Moses, had led them into the Promised Land the people had been guided by a group of elders and occasionally what the Bible calls "judges," these leaders from within the elders who in times of crisis would intervene, discern God's will, and lead the people through it, and then recede to the background.

As Walter Brueggemann puts it, this relationship between the people of Israel and their God was "peculiar."1 But the way scripture remembers it, this peculiarity is by design. Their system of leadership was different because their relationship with their God was different. They were in no need of a king because God alone was king.

Where other nations worshipped bloodthirsty deities who they believed created humankind as their slaves--a figure embodied by their king who lorded over them ruthlessly--Israel proclaimed a God known by steadfast love and tenderness, who created them in love to bear God's image on earth, to be partners in this great divine hope of redeeming the world.

Where other nations worshiped gods of war, and ordered their society accordingly, Israel proclaimed a God of shalom, of deep and natural peace--of "right relationship" with each other, with God, and with all of creation--and they ordered their community accordingly. This commitment to shalom was outlined in the law of the covenant, the torah, rules for living that can only be described as peculiar, guiding them in how to live together in a community of love and forgiveness and compassion and fairness. A community committed to caring for the most vulnerable among them, the widow and the orphan, the stranger in their midst--care for the stranger in your midst, it said, because you were once a stranger in a strange land, always reminding the people of where they had come from. Not pumping them up with memories of triumph, but grounding them in the fact of their own vulnerability. Peculiar.

They had peculiar instructions to forgive debts--every seven years all debts were to be forgiven, everything wiped clean. They had peculiar laws like the Sabbath that demanded that they rest every seventh day, as a way of keeping rhythm and balance and a reminder that God would provide. And this sabbath was to be kept by any who happened to be in their community--the people who worked in their fields, even the animals they raised on their farms, they were to rest, too. No milking the cows, give them a break, it says! Utterly peculiar, we might say. A God who demands rest!

And you might think, this all sounds wonderful--too good to be true! Rest! Forgiveness of debts! Caring for the vulnerable! But of course, as scripture tells it, the people of God never quite get used to it. They never quite settle into this arrangement, never quite embrace their peculiarity. In fact, this is an effective lens through which to view the whole of scripture: God outlining ideals, setting principles and ordering practices to ensure these ideals, and the people constantly pushing against them. Limiting them. At times, outright ignoring them.

II.

Any this isn't just an "Old Testament thing" either, its a dynamic that extends well into the New Testament and beyond. Jesus comes preaching a gospel of boundless compassion and forgiveness and acceptance, throwing the doors wide open, whosoever would come, you, and you, and you--yes, yes, yes. And then the early church, almost from the time they lower their heads from watching Jesus ascend into heaven, begins wondering, Well, is that really what he meant? Jesus came and flung the doors of God's Kingdom wide open and ever since then it's like the church has been trying to pull them back closed. Grace is peculiar. Forgiveness is curious. Generosity and sacrifice and humility and simplicity are all strange. It's much easier, it seems to us in the moment, to choose something else.

I remember some years back a prominent preacher in one of our country's flagship churches--if there is such a thing anymore--decided to scrap the sermon she had prepared for the next morning which was to be on the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, should would simply preach the Sermon on the Mount itself. And so as the faithful in Christ assembled that morning, she climbed into the pulpit and proceeded to read from the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5 through 7, and then sat down without any commentary.

At the coffee hour following worship she was somewhat surprised at the number of folks who came up to her--a higher number than usual--to tell her that they really did not care for or agree with certain parts of her sermon that morning.2

That was a little harsh, pastor, someone said.
We don't need that much politics from the pulpit, said another.
Turn the other cheek?
Love your enemies?
Bless those who wish who harm? Heck, Don't worry about your life, what you'll eat, or drink, or wear? Peculiar. So very different from what we see around us--in fact, so often the teachings of Jesus and the even the law of the covenant seem to describe the exact opposite of life in the world today. What's valued, what's revered. What everyone seems to be concerned with. It is hard to take a different path. Especially when it seems like it may cost us something.

III.

And it may. Our world is not always organized to reward the things that scripture prioritizes. I remember when we lived around Boston years ago the New Englanders liked to say that "no good deed goes unpunished." It is simply a fact of the world as it is that kindness is not always met with kindness. Compassion can be abused. Generosity cheated, mercy exploited. And it's not hard to imagine how the people of God in those days might have looked around and seen these other nations, following different gods and prioritizing different things seeming to "get ahead."

Was it that this strange covenant they made with this peculiar God is to blame for their struggles? Was it keeping them behind? Were all these commandments to care for the vulnerable and welcoming the stranger putting them at a disadvantage? How can we rest every seventh day when the Philistine economy is out there booming?

And was it really enough to simply have God's will written down on those tablets for all to read and hear and discern together? That's a lot of responsibility. Not always clear and easy. In fact, it was probably very often a headache. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one person figuring all these things out for them? A king to mediate God's will on their behalf? Were all these peculiarities to blame for their struggles, or was it like Samuel tells them, and that the real problem is that they're not being peculiar enough? They're not keeping the covenant enough--they're not caring for the widow and the orphan, they're not treating each other fairly, they're not trusting in God to provide for them. And trust is really what this is about.

All these things we talk about so much, all that the covenant commanded and all that Jesus embodied. All that defines this kingdom that we seek and are told is even already alive among us--all of it leaves us a little exposed. There is no getting around this, it's simply what happens when you open yourself to others. And so living a life before God can only be rooted in trust.

Trust that on balance kindness will beget kindness. Generosity will beget generosity. Compassion will lead to more compassion, mercy to more mercy, one forgiven transgression will lead to another and then another until finally--though we'll likely never know it or enjoy the fruits of it in this life--there will be, somewhere, a cascade of forgiven acts, an array of healed people, a panoply of once-broken relationships and families and communities now put back together. It takes trust to live as if the Spirit really is moving around us and within us leading us, as often as we would let it, to someplace wider, someplace more spacious, where there is room enough for everyone to live as God made them to be.

So much of faith is trust. Trust that in the end things will turn out how God says they will. It's trust that allows us to risk all the other inefficiencies in the present. And so trust is really rooted in imagination. When we trust, we imagine how things might be different, how these small acts of kindness, how this posture of openness, how this insistence on second chances, and this assumption that people are infinitely more complex and wondrous than we often take them to be, might result in a world far different from the one we know. It takes a different kind of thinking, a different field of vision to see this.

Father Greg Boyle is a Catholic priest who runs Homeboy Industries, the nation's largest gang intervention center based out of East Los Angeles. It's an incredible ministry and Father Boyle is an almost mythic figure, how he moves within these communities, offering counsel and support and most of all limitless compassion and grace as he tries to help people leave that harsh and deadly world behind to start a new life. Some years ago, Anderson Cooper visited him there in LA to do a feature on him and his ministry. At one point Cooper asked Father Boyle how he would respond to critics who say these gang members are just taking advantage of him. And I'll never forget, he said, How can they take my advantage when I'm just giving it to them?

IV.

The people of God were afraid. They looked around and saw every reason to doubt this covenant they made with this God they were only still beginning to know. And we can understand that, surely. Fear is a powerful motivator. Scarcity is an intoxicating mindset. And it may be true that they occasionally they lead us to some efficient solutions. Some understandable compromises.

But so often over the course of a life, heck, a week, a day, we will be asked in so many ways: Which way we will choose?

We will be asked to choose if we will live by fear and scarcity, with a vision of the world that's so small, and a mind that is more comfortable and safe being closed.

We're given this choice: will we stake our lives on that? Or are we willing to stake our lives on something else?
_________________________
1 Walter Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Samuel, Interpretation series, 62
2 Amy Butler, "The Sermon on the Mount is Counter-cultural. That's the Point." Baptist News Global, 2/7/17. https://baptistnews.com/article/the-sermon-on-the-mount-is-counter-cultural-thats-the-point/#.WJ3Yw7GZOV4

Speak, Lord

I Samuel 3:1-10, The Second Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · June 2nd, 2024 · Duration 12:34

Speak, Lord
I Samuel 3:1-10

As the story goes, the old, revered scholar pastor was late coming into the sanctuary for worship. He was known to emerge about halfway through the service from a door in the back of the chancel and make his way to his chair not long before the sermon, when he would then climb the spiral staircase that led to the pulpit.

But something was different this morning. It was almost time for his weekly ascent and he had not yet emerged from the bowels of his study. Then, just seconds before it was his time--and seconds before the minister of music had a heart attack--the door opened, and out stepped the preacher. He carried himself up the steps of the spiral staircase to the pulpit, where he opened his folder and arranged his notes. The congregation stared at him, afraid to breathe. He stood there looking back at them, his eyes heavier than usual, until he finally broke the silence that covered all of them and said, I have no word from the Lord this morning.

He then gathered his notes, closed his folder, turned, and walked down the stairs, sat down in his chair, and after a few beats the closing hymn began.1

I.

"Now the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread."

This is the state of things when our story opens here in 1 Samuel. The people of God are struggling. Not yet a kingdom but simply a loose confederation of tribes, under constant threat by their regional rivals the Philistines. Internally, they're a community in chaos. Corrupt leadership, moral decay--they're a people on the decline, rudderless, and close to slipping away altogether.2 It's a bleak state of affairs Scripture can only summarize by saying the word of the Lord--the heartbeat of God's people--is no where to be found.

Until, in our passage this morning, it reappears. And as is so often the case in scripture, it falls on unexpected ears, the young boy Samuel, as he lay asleep in the temple.

II.

There is an archetypal quality to this story of the "call of Samuel," the voice of God coming down from the heavens to address us, audibly, clearly, decisively. And so I remember as a child listening so hard as I prayed in my bed each night for the voice of the Lord to call back to me as it did Samuel. Or as a teenager when the world stopped making sense how it once did, and I felt I didn't have anyone else to talk to other than the God of my silent prayers. And I became discouraged, as perhaps you have, and even a bit distressed at times, when I didn't hear the voice of God come to me like I expected it.

And so it came as a relief some years later--as I hope it has for you--when I learned that this is not the only way God speaks to us. In fact, save for perhaps a few blessed saints among us, it is not likely how we will hear the call of God upon our life. The voice of God comes to us in so many other ways, almost too many to name, beginning even before we can speak ourselves, I believe.

Have you ever seen a child look out over the ocean for the first time? How they stand there, or perhaps you're holding them, and their eyes are drawn out to something bigger than they've ever seen. The movement, the smells, the sounds all around them. Their center of gravity begins to move them toward it. Isn't that the voice of the Lord speaking?

I drove through the plains of North Dakota one August years ago and saw from the highway fields of sunflowers in every direction as far as you could see. Have you stood at the edge of a mountain, looking out over the earth laid out like a sheet? Or seen the sunrise squeezed within the small box of an airplane window? Any nighttime sky when it's clear and dark. Call it transcendence, or the numinous, there are so many words we give to it--the feeling that that is beyond words where we become aware we're in the presence of something holy, something beyond, which calls us to be something more, ourselves. Speak, Lord.

Other times the voice of the Lord finds us at a particular moment in our life--a season of transition or change, where the scaffolding that use to hold us up is suddenly rickety or is gone for good. A season of loss, a death, a divorce, a diagnosis. An unexpected career change, a breakdown in who we thought we were. And suddenly through those fresh cracks the voice of God creeps in as the tug toward something different, something new. At times it may even feel like being drawn, or being summoned by our imaginations to what could be, possibilities that are only now visible, spoken in words we are only now able to hear.

There are other ways. Certain writers or thinkers or artists we encounter, whose work speaks to us as the voice of God. Or moments of inspiration when something deep within us has been touched. Robert Frost said a poem begins "with a lump in the throat." Frederick Buechner said the same is true of faith.

Other times we hear the voice of God through our conscience. That voice inside us that says, That's just not right, or Someone should do something, and often eventually, It's you. You have to do something. It's usually not the voice that tells you to do what you want to do. It's the voice that tells you what must be done.

You've heard the voice of God before, probably many times, though you may not have thought of it as such--and this is the danger of the call of Samuel and other places in the Bible where God breaks into the lives of people in ways that feel so obvious or incontrovertible--angels in the sky, people once dead walking out of tombs. We begin to think these are the ways God only or most often speaks to us.

III.

But maybe most often the voice of God comes to us in the voice of others. People in our lives who are able to see us and our situation and the possibilities before us better than we can. Trusted mentors, parents, or friends. Or if they are not the voice of God themselves, as with the case with Eli, they are able to teach us what the voice of God sounds like, or confirm for us that the voice we hear summoning us really is who we suspect it is, and give us the courage and even the words to answer it for ourselves.

We all need these people in our lives, and this is so much the work of the church. It's what we hope to do first of all for our children: to tune their ears to the voice of God--or as the old hymn puts it, "tune their hearts, to sing God's praise." We tell them, in so many ways, That's it--that's the voice. The one you feel resonating down in your chest. The one where your heart feels full and broken at the same time. The one that tells you to reach out to the stranger and stand with the vulnerable. That voice inside you telling you to say yes to compassion and understanding and imagination, and no to fear and judgment and cruelty and cynicism. The one that says there's always another way, even if you can't see it at the time. That words matter, that forgiveness is hard but worth it. That you never really own something until you give it away. The voice that tells them, that tells each of us, You are God's beloved.

We teach the sound of this voice to our children, yes. But the truth is we all need help hearing this voice from time to time, remembering how it sounds, how it feels. It's why we gather every Sunday. It's why some of us have to dress up in robes--to remind us to listen.

And church, while there will be plenty of times when we find ourselves as Samuel, listening for the voice as it comes to us, there may be many more times over the course of our life where we find ourselves as Eli: the one in the story meant to help others hear the voice that's speaking to them. To receive them, and tell them, Go, and when it calls, answer it. Say, Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.

And then, for the love of God, tell us what it says.

1 I've heard this anecdote told with a number of pastors in the starring role: Reinhold Niebuhr, Carlyle Marney
2 Walter Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Samuel, Interpretation series, 10

The Same Mystery

Romans 8:12-17, Trinity Sunday

Scott Dickison · May 26th, 2024 · Duration 15:02

The Same Mystery
Romans 8:12-17

It's certainly easy to get lost in the Doctrine of the Trinity, or cynical about its origins, or skeptical that it's anything more than some kind of ancient theological riddle that has little practical bearing on our lives today. But the mystery we celebrate that gets lost in the fuzzy math is really very simple, and when weighed against our own experience, I believe, is quite true, which is that the life of God is not so different from human life in that they're both defined by relationship.

I.

Humans are social creatures. We thrive in relationships and communities--we're wired for connection. I read once that the human brain can recognize the face of someone it's met in less than a quarter of a second. Not just a familiar face but any face it's seen before.1 Now, their name is another thing...

But you don't need scientific evidence to know we're at our best and within our fullest potential when we live in relationship with others. There's something generative that happens among people. There's energy and growth. It's one of the great mysteries and paradoxes of human life how in the company of others we become most fully ourselves.

Yet, relationship is at the heart of human life because it's at the heart of all life. Our world is literally held together by connective forces, most of which are hidden from our view. In recent years scientists have learned more about the deep interconnectedness of trees in forests.2 It turns out that there is a subterranean network of fungi, called a "mycorrhizal network," that connects different trees in the forest, allowing them to communicate and even cooperate with each other. When we think of fungus, we think of mushrooms popping out of the ground, but these mushrooms are actually the "fruit" of the fungus. The bulk of fungus lives in the soil, interwoven with tree roots, in the form of tiny threads called mycelium.

These threads wrap around the roots of trees and function almost like an internet of sorts--the "wood-wide web" I've heard it put--a tremendous dad joke. A tree in need of water, for instance, can send out a distress signal through the fungus, and other healthier trees--usually larger, older trees whose roots can extend down further and tap water sources, called hub trees or mother trees--these trees will receive the distress signal and send back nutrients in response.
For years we've imagined that competition is at the heart of the natural world, and yet more and more we're learning it is not competition but connection and even cooperation that defines the deepest, most fundamental levels of life.

Aspen trees take this even a step further. Aspens do not exist as solitary trees. A group of aspens, known as a clone, is actually one singular organism. What appear as individual trees are actually connected beneath the surface by a common root structure. And this manner of living is quite effective. Aspens are the most plentiful trees in North America, and an Aspen clone in Utah's Fishlake National Forest is the oldest known organism on earth, having lived more than 80,000 years.3 It's a fair question to ask, not just for trees but for any of us, where does one life end and another begin? Aren't we all tied together on some subterranean level?

II.

But for me, the real mystery of all this begins at the subatomic level. Since the apple fell on Isaac Newton's head we've conceived of the universe as a collection of objects floating around in air, like billiard balls moving around a table. But physicists now believe the universe is better understood as a field of energy we merely perceive in different forms. It's "a world of happenings, not of things," as some have put it.4 Where Newton imagined a perfectly ordered cosmos governed by fixed laws that were "universal and irrevocable," physics now leans toward the story of a cosmos with randomness and probability at its heart--religious folks might say "mystery."

Our best models now teach us that everything we can touch is made up of atoms and that these atoms are made up of smaller particles still-- that model you may remember from your middle school science class: a nucleus made of protons and neurons, all surrounded by electrons. Protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller particles, called "quarks," which, mysteriously, exist only in threes. There can be no single, solitary quark, just three quarks at a time, and these little triune particles are something like "the glue that holds all things together," as someone put it.5

But it gets even spookier--which is a scientific term Einstein was known to use. There's a point in both science and theology when our language starts to fail us. We speak of subatomic "particles," but these particles are not "pebble-like" things floating around. The closer you look, these particles are not really things at all, they're interactions. Electrons, for instance, only exist--in the way a book or a pulpit exists--when someone or something is looking at them, or when they're interacting with something else.6 Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli says of these mysteries, "What does this mean? That the essential reality of [our] system is indescribable?...Or does it mean...that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?"7 We might say, that reality is only relationship.

What does this mean, for us?

If this is who we are and what every thing is, at the subatomic level--not distinct objects as much as a collection of interactions, different vibrations along a field of existence, then how should that affect and inform how we live? How we think of and treat each other and our world?

III.

Connection, interdependence, relationship. You could say the Trinity is simply the church's way of insisting that the creator is best known by the creation. That God, just like all of creation, is defined by communion--that God is "with" as much as God is "one." That relationship is at the heart of the divine.

There's a certain mystery in all this, of course--just like there's a certain mystery in describing what's happening in the expanse of the universe, or the base of creation on the subatomic level, or networks of fungi underneath the earth--or even what happens when two people touch hands for the first time, or for the last time. And yet throughout its history when the church has sought images to help understand this mysterious and confounding doctrine, they have reached for the most elemental components of life in the world.

Tertullian, the great North African theologian in the early church who may have been the first to coin the term "Trinity," described it as being like a kind of plant, where God is the root going deep into the ground, the Son is the shoot that breaks forth into the world, and the Holy Spirit is that which brings beauty and fragrance into the world.8 I'd love to know what he would do with fungal networks!

The Eastern Church has long described the work of the Trinity as perichoresis. which literally means "dancing around." And you can see this is mo much of Eastern Art, how the three figures of the Trinity dance with each other. God isn't just Lord of the Dance, they claim, God is Dance--God is the interplay of moving bodies set to music. And the goal of the Christian life, they say, is to join in the divine dance, sometimes moving in concert, and other times in tension--both of which, it turns out, are essential to dance and faith. It takes a kind of faith to dance, and faith is a kind of dance.

But the image of the Trinity perhaps most tethered to the Christian tradition comes from one of the great mothers of the medieval church, Catherine of Siena, who imagined the Holy Trinity as a supper to which we've all been invited. She says that at this dinner party, God is the table and chairs: where we gather and what's underneath all that we're doing, supporting us, giving us a place to rest our weary bones.

Christ is the food we eat, that nourishes us and brings us together, the bread broken for us, the cup poured for us. And the Holy Spirit, she says, is the host who's prepared a place for us, who greets us at the door, who invites us in and brings us to the table, who serves us the food, carries the conversation, makes us feel welcome and at home in this dinner party of the Holy Trinity.9 Of all the mysteries in life, the mystery of what happens around a table filled with food has to be among the most fulfilling--at least the most filling.

How much of life takes place around a table? Do something for me: picture your childhood dinner table--maybe the one in the house you grew up in, or your grandparents, or wherever home is or has been for you. Can you see it?

Can you feel it? The grooves, the worn places. The marks of pen and paint from school projects. You can hear the creaks and cracks. You can smell the smells, too--the rolls burning in the oven halfway through the meal--or was that just my family? You can taste the food. You can see the faces. You can hear the things that were said. The nightly check-ins, the celebrations, the laughter. The hard news. The tears.

And there are so many other tables. So many other meals. So many hosts.

IV.

What if all the meals you ever ate and all the people you ate them with, and all the tables at which you sat-- what if the mystery of what happened there in the midst of those things was the same mystery as the God we worship? The mystery of your grandmother's biscuits and the expanse of the cosmos? Peas and carrots and space and time? Grooved wood and creaky legs and the love that will not let us go?

What we celebrate this Sunday each year--what we marvel at even though we do not fully understand, or perhaps marvel at because we do not fully understand--what we proclaim even if only in a whisper, is that they're all the same mystery.

"The mystery beyond us, the mystery among us, and the mystery within us are all the same mystery,"10 Frederick Buchner writes. They're all the same God. It's all the same love. It's all the same food, and we're invited simply to gather around the table, to sit down and eat our fill of it, trusting that the God that holds us together with all people and all things, will be there among us and within us as we do.

___________________
1 As found in Gary Gunderson, Leading Causes of Life: Five Fundamentals to Change the Way You Live Your Life, 67
2 "Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath Your Feet," Britt Holewinski, Nation Forest Foundation, https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network
3 "Tree Profile: Aspen--So Much More Than a Tree," Hannah Featherman, National Forest Foundation, https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/tree-profile-aspen-so-much-more-than-a-tree
4 Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, chapter 2
5 Kathleen Norris, Trinity, in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 290
6 Rovelli.
7 Rovelli.
8 Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 291
9 Catherine of Siena, from Pneumatology, by Veli-Matti Karkkainen, p.55
10 Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

The Spirit We Have

Acts 2:1-21, Pentecost Sunday

Scott Dickison · May 19th, 2024 · Duration 15:33

The Spirit We Have
Acts 2:1-21

In another story, about a different Spirit, sent by some alternative Christ, to animate and empower a hypothetical church, things may have happened differently at Pentecost that day in Jerusalem.

I.

In that story, the Spirit, when it came to the disciples, may not have spilled them out into the streets, but instead kept them inside, behind closed doors, separate and protected from the community around them. And in that story, the gift of language this Spirit gave them may have been a secret tongue that only the initiated could understand. Or perhaps this Spirit wouldn't have come in the form of language all all--the primary way we communicate and connect with others. Maybe in this other telling, the gift of the Spirit would have come in the form of some esoteric knowledge or insight, or a state of consciousness each of the disciples would receive quietly and independently of each other, let alone all the unwashed outside.

And in that story, of that different Spirit, sent by an alternative Christ, perhaps there is no church at all, at least as we know it. Perhaps the story ends with those gathered in that room behind closed doors, and the gift they received and no one else. And so the disciples themselves are better for having received this Spirit, but the world around them goes on as if nothing has happened, because in the end, nothing had. Maybe in some other telling the Pentecost story, this is what happened.

But fortunately for use and all the countless others through the generations who have called themselves the church, and the innumerable more whose lives we hope have somehow been touched by the church for the better, this is not the Pentecost story we are given, or the Spirit we have.

II.

In the story we are given, as told by Luke, the disciples and other followers of Jesus have done as the risen Christ commanded them as he ascended into the clouds, and have stayed in Jerusalem to await the coming Spirit. They're waiting behind closed doors, praying, and deliberating, and organizing themselves. But one also gets the sense they've been hiding. Word has gotten out that Jesus's body is missing and now there are reports and rumors or resurrection. It's not difficult to imagine that the disciples may feel the threat of reprisal bearing down on them from the same forces that put Jesus to death. So they're gathered there inside, when suddenly, interrupting their silence, from heaven there comes a sound like a rushing, violent wind and it filled the house where they gathered. And as this wind was blowing and circling, this Spirit filled them and suddenly, miraculously, mysteriously, they find they are able to speak in other languages.

They find themselves speaking, and loudly it seems, maybe even shouting--maybe even singing--to each other at first, but no sooner do they realize what's happening there among them when the doors to the house are thrown open and they're outside. No longer in hiding, kept to themselves, but suddenly, and I would imagine, alarmingly, out there in the middle of the crowds that have now gathered around them.

And in this story as we have it, these crowds, too, hear the commotion coming from the group spilling out from behind the doors of this house, and though they have come from so many distant locations, they hear, miraculously, mysteriously, this small group of Galileans--simple fisherman and other common folk who until recently hadn't been more than a day from home--speaking to them, each in their own language. Parthians, Medes, Elamites. Folks from as far as Asia and Egypt and Libya--all of them, each of them, hear in their native tongue the disciples speaking to them about "God's deeds of power"--almost as if all of this commotion, whatever it was, wasn't just something they happened to overhear, but was in fact intended for them.

Some were intrigued. Others dismissed them as having perhaps started the weekend early. Then Peter, sensing that the moment had come, clears some space there in the town square and speaks, for the first time in public, of the good news of Christ's resurrection and the coming kingdom of God, and the gift of this Spirit that marks the beginning of something new and irreversible God is up to in the world. And so in this story the church is born--not unto itself, but in and around and for the world of which it is a part.

But when we speak, in the church, of matters of "the spirit" or "spirituality," or our "spiritual life, I often worry we have that other, alternative, hypothetical Spirit in mind. Something interior and private, something we keep to ourselves and that doesn't have much to do with anyone else. Because if there's one thing this Pentecost story is clear about its that the Spirit has no interest in leaving us to ourselves. The Spirit is, by definition, that part of God that seeks to connect and bring us in relationship with others.

The words "spiritual" and "spirituality" have a tendency to feel squishy, or esoteric--sometimes deliberately so, if seems. So I think this Pentecost story can help us ground these things. I believe when we speak of the "spiritual" or "spirituality" we're talking about those things that make us aware of the deep connective tissue of life and the world. Those parts of ourselves that connect us with others, and with God, and with all of creation. This is the model of the world we are given time and time again in scripture: one of deep interconnection and relationship. A universe created in love and with purpose, by the moving of God's Spirit, which comes in the form of the wind the moves the leaves and the air that fills our lungs and becomes the words we speak to each other.

And so to have a "spiritual life," I think, is to cultivate our awareness of these things. To train our muscles of perception so we can live from a deep sense of the ways our lives are not our own, but wrapped up in the lives of others, and the life we share in God. And in a similar way, I fear the vision of too many churches is concentrated too much on what happens within their own walls and the people who gather here, at the expense of everyone and everything beyond them. In the story of Pentecost we have, the disciples begin behind closed doors but are taken, swiftly and deliberately beyond them--it happens in one fell swoop with the gift of the Spirit. It's why the Spirit came in the gift of language in the first place--language and speech, these primary modes of impersonal connection are also God's preferred mode of creation. Communication is creation. Holy speech--kind, generous, hopeful words--can literally create new worlds.

The church was not given the Spirit to keep it to ourselves--to hide it under a bushel, no! We were given the Spirit to share it with the world. To reveal God's nearness, bear God's love, demand God's justice, imagine God's mercy. The Spirit did not come for us to navel-gaze and celebrate ourselves or our own blessedness or worry about our own future. In fact, it seems to have come to pull us out of these things. And if in the church we ever find ourselves struggling to discern our next step, the Pentecost story that we have suggests we will find it out there.

III.

Which brings us to this group of sixth graders--and I want to talk just to you all for the next few moments, though everyone else can listen in if they'd like.

I want so badly for each of you to have a spiritual life that is rich and complex and grows with you, and maybe most of all is durable enough to see you through the inevitable challenges, disappointments, failures, and losses that are a part of every life well-lived. And for some of you, you may find you're able to cultivate this kind of spiritual life through going inward: through prayer and study and reflection and silence and all those wonderful things we talk a lot about. But even if this journey, for you, begins by going inward, I hope that in the end it will lead you outward. That as you come to see and know the Spirit as it moves in you, you will find yourself better able to see and know and love the Spirit in others, and will then come to know something important about the God that is so often found between you.

But for some of you, this path will not feel as natural. And it may feel for a time as if the problem is with you--that prayer is hard, silence is confusing, and study alone is unfulfilling. But hear me now that the problem is not you, for the Spirit is not one-size fits all. It is not mechanized like some automatic dishwasher--wash, rinse, repeat. There are many paths into the spiritual life. And so for you, it may be that you have to first start outward. You will need to involve yourself in the lives of others, through acts of service, which may lead you to acts of solidarity--standing alongside others in real and sometimes risky ways. It may be that you will become an advocate from others--what Jesus says the Spirit will be for us in our gospel verse from John.

And you will find that through starting out there, you will in time start your journey inward, and see how the closer you get to your neighbor, the closer you are to God, and even more mysteriously, the deeper you will come to know yourself. And however you find your way into the spiritual life, I hope you will share it with us, with the church. With this church for the time you are here among us, and in years to come, with another church, maybe many others. Because wherever path you take to find your own life in the Spirit, the church needs you to find and complete its own; the life we share together.

IV.

Perhaps in some other story about a different Spirit, sent by some alternative Christ, the church could exist solely for and unto itself, and we ourselves could live and thrive and and enjoy lives of purpose and meaning and wholeness without anyone else to complicate it or challenge or even confuse it. But thank God this is not the story we're given. Thank God this is not the Spirit we have.

Is Now the Time?

Acts 1:1-11, Ascension Sunday

Scott Dickison · May 12th, 2024 · Duration 16:54

Is Now the Time?
Acts 1:1-11

Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?

This is the question the disciples ask of the risen Christ as they all stand there on the Mount of Olives just before Jesus is lifted into heaven. Is this the end, finally? The culmination of history, the once and for all defeat of death and darkness, and the reign of God in full bloom?

Standing where we are, some 2,000 years after the fact, this question may seem almost laughable. But it's not hard to imagine why the disciples that day would have thought, "This is it." After all, Jesus has been raised from the dead! They had seen and touched his wounds. They heard him explain the scriptures, how all of this had to happen, how it would change everything--and so must be the time for this change to happen. For God to "lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things." When the last will finally be made first and the first last. Now must be the time when God will "wipe away every tear" from our eyes, when "Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more," when all wrongs will be righted, all prayers will be answered--now must be the time when God's Kingdom will come to be "on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus has been raised, miraculously, mysteriously, so now must be the time. Please, Jesus, they seem to say, tell us now is the time.

Do you hear the weariness in this question? The exhaustion, and even the slightest bit of sorrow; their own wounds as fresh as Jesus's? Please, let now be the time.

I.

It's a familiar question, isn't it? A question you've asked before and I have asked before: Lord, after all that's happened, is now the time?

We've done the treatments, we've fought and worried and kept a brave face-- Please, Lord, is now the time when the scans come back clear?
It's been two years and three miscarriages. Lord, is now the time when we'll have a baby?
Lord, I've buried her and don't know what's left for me here. Is now the time when you'll call me home?
Is this when it will happen?
When I find my purpose?
When they will finally find their way? When the weight will be lifted?

The disciples want what we all want, which is for God to act--faithfully, powerfully, decisively, finally--just as we're promised God will. But the answer they get from Jesus in response is also familiar: It's not for you to know the times and the periods God has set.


Now, interpreters of this exchange between the risen Christ and the disciples have at times tended to read a scolding tone onto Jesus here, as if he's slapping them down for asking a question they should know better to ask. But that's not how I hear it. I can't imagine Jesus would let that be the last thing he said to his friends before leaving them for good--after all they'd been through? Don't go to bed angry, my parents always told me, let alone go off to heaven. No, if anything, there must have been just a touch of grief behind his words. Maybe more than a touch.

My dear friends, I hear Jesus say with a lump in his throat, I wish I could tell you these things, but they're not for you to know. In the end, you might be glad you don't know just how long it will take for the Kingdom to come...But--and we must always pay attention in Scripture to what happens after this word.

But--you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

II.

It's such a critical turn Jesus makes, here. In their exhaustion and deep longing the disciples ask Jesus to bring all these final things to pass, to fulfill these promises of new life and restoration and reconciliation: Lord, is now the time when you will do these things? And Jesus--as he loves to do--turns their question around to them: Only God can know just when this Kingdom will come, but in the meantime, you will receive power in the Holy Spirit and be my witnesses that this Kingdom is coming; in fact, that it is already here.

And this is the great tension of the story of Christ's Ascension: Christ is no longer here among us, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead, showing us the way. No longer here to tell us just how to navigate the chaos of these times, or repair the tears in the fabric of our common life. Christ is no longer here among us in that way. But the story of the Ascension is not one of abandonment as much as it's a story of empowerment. Yes, Christ has ascended and left us to finish the work. But we have not been left unprepared or ill-equipped to meet our moment, for a part of him remains here with us. And we know something of this, too.

I think of parents dropping children off at the first day of school--or maybe even more, taking them off to freshman year. Sending them off to begin this new chapter of their life. Giving up some control and entrusting them, in some way, to others. But also trusting them--the child or young adult. Or rather, trusting that something of what you have instilled in them up to that point has stuck, and will guide them--that they will be somehow prepared.

That first day of kindergarten can feel like an abandonment--to you and to them! But wasn't it necessary? Didn't you tell them, when you got down on one knee and looked at them, one teary, bleary eye to another, You can do this. You have what you need. You know your colors and numbers and animal sounds. You know how to be kind and forgiving and generous. You know so much already but you still have so much to learn and it will be so much fun and sometimes scary, but remember I'm not far away. A part of me will be right here with you. And I love you.

Isn't this what you told them? Isn't it what you told yourself?

This is the way of things. It's how anything good lives on in the world: it must be handed down one generation to the next. The younger being reassured that they are more ready than they feel. And the older trusting that God has something in mind, and that we're all entrusted with nothing more and nothing less than our own part to play in it. We cannot know the times and the periods God has set. But we can live in confidence that God does.

III.

Sam Wells, the pastor and theologian, writes that living faithfully in the present requires that we remember we're part of a larger drama.1

The Christian story, the story of what God is up to in the world, he says, is like a five act play. The first act was creation: God calling all things into being with beauty and purpose. The second act was the ancient Kingdom of Israel, God focusing on this one people to carry out divine purpose in the world. The third act was the life, death and resurrection of Jesus--this decisive turning point in the story. And the fourth act is where we are now: the church. The people of God living as faithfully as we know how in light of what's happened in the previous acts. And the fifth act is what's next--the culmination of God's story: life in the world to come.

He says it's crucial that we remember where we are in the story. Too often we think and live as if we're in a one-act play, where we're all there is--nothing before us and nothing after, and so whatever is to happen in the story is all up to us. This may be the story of secular society, but it's not the Christian story. It's what's been called "the tyranny of the present." It ignores all that God has already done to get us to this place, but just as importantly, all that God promises is on the way.

What a relief to remember it's not up to us to be and do everything in the story! To know that the salvation of the world or even ourselves or those close to us doesn't depend on us. That the end is secure and we don't have to worry about sorting out all the details and making sure that everything winds up how it should, because that's God's job. We're called simply to be faithful here in "act four." To be witnesses to the story that's been revealed to us thus far, which we're told will prepare us for what we are living through and living into. Living in the way of Jesus, telling the story of God's grace and forgiveness. Modeling, as best we can, the Kingdom of God--this radical reign of compassion and abundance and peace we're told is at hand.

And the beauty of all this is that, since the end is secured and God holds the future and it is good--since this is true, we know that God is able to work even with our mistakes, and Lord knows we have made a few--we ourselves and how much more the church. So the challenge, as the people of God, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, is to make "interesting mistakes."2

I love that. It reminds me of the words of Martin Luther, "When you sin, sin boldly, but have faith bolder still." "Make your sins strong," is another translation, "but your faith in Christ stronger." In other words, as I hear it, don't be afraid to live. If you err--and you will--err boldly on the side of grace, on the side of love. On the side of opening our hearts, not closing them. Perfection is a lie, and God will sort it out in the end anyhow, so live as faithfully and as fully as you can in the time you are given, erring on the side of Jesus.

Make interesting mistakes in the name of the one who came to make all things new, anyway.

IV.

How would it free us up--as people, as a church--to remember that Christ has ascended and continues to live and breathe in the world through us, but that the end is secure?

That Christ has ascended, and has left us here, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to find our way as best we can forward into God's future, but that success is already guaranteed, somehow and someway--and so we just need to relax and have some fun making interesting mistakes for God to do something infinitely more interesting with? Where would that kind of thinking lead us, I wonder? To whom would it take us?

What would that kind of assurance do for us in our own lives, to know that the Kingdom of God will come no matter what we do or fail to do? Not to say what we do or don't do in life doesn't matter--of course it does. We've been empowered to do much good in the world, but we're just as capable of doing much harm or inflicting great pain. Our choices have consequences, absolutely they do. But these consequences are not absolute.

So what would it mean, as a friend of mine puts it, "to live as if it's all up to you, but sleep as if it's all up to God?"3

To live each day as if Christ has been raised into heaven and has empowered you to be his presence in the world, but sleep each night as if Holy Spirit is as close to you as your next breath?

To live as if all those who suffer in the world are looking to you to ease their pain, but sleep as if God is working in ways beyond your understanding?

To live as if our questions of God's timing will one day be answered, but sleep as if they already have been?

What would it mean to live as if what you do in this life or what we do together as the church matters eternally, but sleep as if God has the final word, and that word is "Yes?"
________________________
1 Sam Wells: Improvising Leadership, interview with Faith and Leadership, https://www.faithandleadership.com/multimedia/samuel-wells-improvising-leadership
2 Quoted by Wells
3 A good friend and wonderful pastor, John Jay Alvaro.

I Have Called You Friends

John 15:9-17, The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Scott Dickison · May 5th, 2024 · Duration 14:25

I Have Called You Friends
John 15:9-17

This probably goes without saying for someone we claim took on the sins of the world, but I imagine it was hard, at times, to be Jesus.

And I don't mean just at the end, but throughout his life. Surely being the Son of God took a toll on one's human relationships. The gospels offer us precious little about what Jesus was like as a youngster. There's the one story from Luke when on a pilgrimage to the temple his parents lose him--or more accurately, it seems, he loses them--and they finally find him with the scribes who "were amazed at his questions and understanding." I don't know that we can extrapolate too much out from this one story--was he precocious or a prodigy, or something in between?--but it does make me wonder if perhaps the child Jesus was always more at home with adults. If he was an "old soul," or had such a depth of empathy or perception that made relationships with kids his own age a challenge.

And I wonder how it was for him as a young man when everybody else, it seemed, was pairing off and getting married--the expectation and pressure to do so in 1st century Jewish Palestine would have been tremendous. Did he know, even then, the shape his life would take, and decide it would be unfair to put a family through that? Or would having those attachments make it harder for him to be who he needed to be? All the same, I wonder if it was still lonely at times. And what was the dynamic between him and his disciples, close as they must have been? For all that time they spent together, was it something like that of a teacher and students? Mentor/mentee? As Jesus was pouring into them, lovingly, generously, did they find it hard to know just how to pour back into him? He was close with everyone, but was anyone really close with him?

So that final night together, here in John, when he gathered at the table with his disciples one final time, I can't help but wonder if it meant something more when he said he loved them for the first time, and called them, for the first time, his friends.

I.

Theologians often say that in the "incarnation," Jesus took on human life from birth to death and everything in between. Every emotion and struggle, every trial or triumph, every embarrassment or regret, he experienced all of it, so as to redeem it; to bring it closer to the heart of God. And it would be impossible to imagine human life without friendship.

Family has their place, of course--a special place all to their own. But friendship is something different. These are the family you choose, as it's so often put. And maybe even more powerfully, the family who chooses you. The ones who love you because they want to; because something in you speaks to something in them. Friends, in so many ways, make us who we are. It is a mystery of life and relationships how we become most ourselves in the company of others, certain other in particular. So this must have been true in some way between Jesus and the disciples. Did they pour into him more than they knew? And did Jesus need to tell them this while there was still time? Was friendship the final piece of the human puzzle he had to have in place before he could meet what was to come?

This also tells us something important about ourselves as the disciples of Jesus today. It tells us the love we're to share as the church is to look like the love between friends. Or to put it another way, the love between friends may be the closest thing we have to the kind of Christ-like love to which we're called. Love one another in this way, he keeps telling them, keeps telling us, over and over. This is how church should feel: it should feel like friendship. Friendship marked by at least three qualities.

II.

First of all, it will be intimate. "Abide in me," Jesus says. There's a closeness here. Intimacy is a word we often associate with romantic love, but how intimate the love between friends can be. Friends know us in ways others don't or can't. In fact, it's our friends who probably know us the way we would most like to be known. Friends know the ways we have changed and grown through the years--the ones "who have seen the hairstyles," I've heard it put (Or simply "seen the hair!"). The very good friends are the ones who have changed and grown with us, and in the end what greater intimacy is there?

If we're doing it right, church should be a place of intimacy. Where we talk about things that matter, and speak of matters of the heart. Where we help each other grow and change. Deepen our understanding. Where we raise each other's babies and when the time comes, when we send each other home. Where we lay hands on each other's shoulders. Lift prayers together and cry real tears together. I've cried more in church sanctuaries than just about any other place.

With this intimacy, Jesus says there will be sacrifice; we will be called on to give up something of ourselves for the good of others. "There is no greater love than this," he says, "than to lay down ones life for one's friends." Very rarely in life will we be called upon to lay down our lives all at once in a literal and final way. But what is friendship and life lived in communion with others if not the laying down of something of our own wants and needs and desires, from time to time, for the common good? For the good of others, whose lives we understand to be wrapped up in our own. Learning to listen and not just wait to speak. To disagree but love anyway. To forgive, to assume the best until given good reason to do otherwise. And then go on assuming the best anyway. Is it a coincidence that all the things the world needs most right now are the same things we aim to practice in here?

And finally Jesus says this holy friendship of the church will be marked by joy. Joy may be the most under-appreciated virtue of the church--and under-practiced, I fear. If you polled the general public and asked them what qualities church folk are known by, where would joy be on the list? Would it be above or below things like self-righteousness, or anger or judgment? What would it take to be known for our joy, and all that comes with it? If we are not joyful, underneath everything else--all the reverence, all the prayerful concern and compassion, all the service and serious work of the church, and it is serious--if joy is not the soil in which all of these things are planted, then the vine will invariably wither. And if joy is not the fruit we hope to bear from these things, then we will have missed the point. "I say these things that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete," Jesus says. Joy, in it's completeness, in its abundance, is the purpose of it all.

III.

The great baptist preacher Carlyle Marney once called the deep friendships we have in life, of which most of us can have but a few, "friends for the long road." Which is just right, I think. And knowing how much of his ministry was spent out there on the road with this friends, walking from town to town, village to village, spreading the good news of a love that would bind us all together as God's beloved, it's something of which I think Jesus would approve. And it may be a word for us on this anniversary Sunday at Northminster. Life is short, but the road is long. We need others to walk with along the way, intimately, mutually, joyfully. In the end, is it our buildings and our campus that holds us together, beautiful and immaculate as it is? Is it our rhythms and rituals? The ministry and missions? Yes--it's all of those things, in part. But most of all isn't it the people we find here? The friendships we make, that in turn make us. That take us to places and people and perspectives we could not have found on our own. Isn't that worth at least a potluck and a slice of cake each year? Isn't it really all there is, in the end?

"I have called you my friends," Jesus says on that final night. Let the church not wait that long.

Growing In Love

John 15:1-8, The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Scott Dickison · April 28th, 2024 · Duration 15:22

Growing In Love
John 15:1-8

We pick up the story here in the 15th chapter of John's Gospel on the Thursday of Holy Week, the last week of Jesus' earthly life and the last night he will spend with the disciples.

Now, you'll remember that John tells the story of that last night together differently than the other Gospels. There's no breaking of bread or lifting of cup in John. Instead we're told how Jesus washes his disciples' feet. And where in the other gospels the meal is the focus and little else is described, in John the story of this evening lasts several chapters, recording in detail Jesus's parting words to his disciples.

I.

It's a long and winding conversation, which is really more like a monologue. Scholars call it his "Farewell Discourse," which gives it a kind of official air, but the words themselves reveal something much more intimate. Earlier in this last supper we're told Jesus is in anguish sitting there among them. He tells them his "soul is troubled," and John reports he was " "very troubled in spirit" when he says to them, "One of you will betray me."

Jesus has a lot on his mind that final night and his words to the disciples are at times beautiful, at times rambling, but underneath all of them is a deep tenderness that I worry we don't often appreciate. It's there at that last supper that he calls them, for the first time, his friends. It's there at that last supper that he tells them, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you"--not so different from the dying wishes of any number of loved ones.

Each of the gospels takes a slightly different angle in describing the purpose or shape of Jesus's ministry. In some places they focus on caring for the poor and vulnerable. At other times its the call to repentance and the forgiveness of sins, or entry into the coming kingdom of God. But in John's Gospel, more than any of the others, the purpose of Jesus's ministry seems to be to reveal the love of God in a new way. And it's on the final night that Jesus tells the disciples they will come to know this love of God best and most completely in the love they have for and show each other.

So it's in this spirit of intimacy, as he's searching for words and images to adequately express to them how he feels about them and what it will be like for them when he is gone, that he tells them, "I am the vine, and you are the branches."

II.

Now, similar to the image of the shepherd we looked at last week, Jesus is drawing on a rich biblical tradition here. Vineyards and vines are common images in scripture for the Kingdom of God and the people of God, dating back to the prophets. Ancient Israel was an agrarian culture, and the area of the Galilee where Jesus grew up, even to this day is covered in lush farmland. Here, on the eve of his death, his soul troubled with grief, Jesus looks at his disciples who have become his friends, and says to them, I may be going away from you, but a part of me will stay with you. He'll remain connected to them and they to him, intimately and organically, like branches on a vine.1 Vines and branches are distinct parts of a plant, but they share what we could call "a common life,"2 one that is complex and full of life.

I remember in the backyard of our home in Macon we had a beautiful live oak that must have been at least as old as our house, a Craftsman from the 1910s. Its leaves fell throughout the year and were a nightmare to rake, but in the spring and summer we lived in its shade. And there was for a time, growing up the trunk of this old tree, a thick vine. Its leaves practically covered the trunk and had made their way up into the branches.

Now, in some ways this was a beautiful vine and added even more greenery to the tree, but it's also not good for trees to have such vines growing on them, and so one fall, we cut the vine at its base, and over the winter we watched as the vine died and turned brown. But when all the leaves had fallen off you could finally see the intricate weavings of its growth. From this one vine, all these innumerable branches had grown and wrapped around this tree and each other, so close, so interwoven, that it was impossible to tell where one ended and one began. There was just wild, untamed growth everywhere.

What a beautiful image for the church: this wild, green overflowing plant, rich with life, with branches interweaving in such a way that you can't tell where one ends and one begins, they're just growing together every whichaway. It's a beautiful vision, but in some ways it's also a radical one--it cuts against some of the dominant values of the world around us, things like competition and achievement.

Some have pointed out there is little room for individualism in this image for life in Christ--all the branches blend into each and become one.3 Nor is there hierarchy--there's no preferential place or status. All the branches are defined solely by their connection to the vine. It's also pretty anonymous--no distinct gifts or roles in the community are defined, as in other celebrated New Testament visions of the church, as when Paul imagines the church as a body with different members, each with different abilities. There is really only one spiritual gift here, which is to bear the fruits of love, and anyone can do that.

Like so many images of the church we find in the New Testament and in the teachings of Jesus, this one has less to do with what the church is to "do" in the world, and more to do with simply how the church should "be." Whatever purpose the church might serve in the world is secondary to the manner in which it lives. Or rather, Jesus seems to say that the manner in which we live, which is with love and care and relationship, this is our purpose. This, more than anything else, he tells them, is how they will know you: by your love. The good we do, the people we serve, the change we hope to make, the kingdom of God we spread: all of it must be rooted in the love we have for one another. Later on, the writer of 1 John will expand and clarify this image, and tell us that if we are not rooted in our love for one another, then the rest of it will all be for naught. The medium is the message, we could say: the love we show each other, that grows and moves and changes us, that draws us in: this is the Kingdom we seek.

III.

It's so telling, I think, that Jesus' favorite images for the church and how our common life should be, what life should look like for the people of God, are things like vines and vineyards or even gardens--it is here, after all where scripture tells us all life began. Places of growth and abundance. Of beauty and even spontaneity. Where something deep in our DNA tells us how to grow toward the light, how to take hold of those things that will ground us.

Where we see so clearly the mystery of life and death and the fruit that's born and savored and shared in the time in between.

It seems important to Jesus that we understand the church as a living, breathing thing, and so like all living things it will, it must, even, continue to grow, which is to change in a kind of continuity. In this way the garden perpetuates itself, always becoming something new, but rooted in what has come before. Seeds are nurtured with care until they're strong enough to take up roots in their own soil. The garden bears fruit, the fruit is eaten and shared and this fruit holds the seed for the next generation. The seasons change and the process begins again--it's the most natural thing in the world for a plant to grow and yet ask a child if there is anything more mysterious than a simple shoot of green finding it's way up from a pile of warm dirt.

And in the same way, is there anything more miraculous than a group of people coming together, covenanting with one another to share their lives with each other, their time, their gifts, their prayers--their voices? Tell me where else people from different generations sing together. In fact, tell me where else people sing together at all?!

Where else do we covenant to bless each other's children and grandchildren, and watch as they grow into children and then teenagers, and adults that we send out into the world. Or where people feed each other in so many different ways. Where we commit to learn and to grow--tell me where else this kind of growth happens. This is how I understand the "pruning" of which Jesus speaks. Ask any gardener and they'll tell you pruning is for the health of the plant, a tending-to, a trimming back and taking in for the sake of new growth, more abundance, so that each branch may bear all the fruit it can. Doesn't a church of any depth commit to do this for each other, to encourage this kind of new growth, the kind of abundance that can only happen over the long haul?

I remember years ago when we were forming a new Sunday school class for young adults, one of the couples we invited to be a part asked, "Now is this going to be a class we age out of after a while, or are we going to grow old together?" Tell me where else that question wold be asked? Where we would expect to grow old together? Where people share in life in this way, and when the time comes, where people share in death. Tell me where else in the world this happens.

IV.

And the most remarkable part of it all is that the only thing holding this all together, the only reason that any of this happens--for no one has to live in this way, we aren't required to share ourselves so deeply and intimately with others. With apologies to my children, no one is forcing you to go to church, to be a part of this odd and wonderful thing growing on the side of the road. The only thing holding any of this together is love.

No bond of family or blood. No contract or compensation. None of that would be strong enough, in the end, to sustain the church. It can only be love. A love we proclaim came first from God. A love that brought us and all things into existence. A love that has called us by name, and claimed us as it's own, but through a voice we come to know first in the voices of others. A love we experience and feel most completely in the presence of others.

It was love that called us together. Love that keeps us here. Love that changes us and helps us to grow, at times in ways we could have hardly expected.
And it is love that we take with us each time we leave from this place, and it is love that connects us for however long we are away. It is love, Jesus promises, that makes sure we are never truly apart.
________________________
1 The SALT lectionary commentary was immensely helpful in teasing this out. http://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-easter-5

2 Gail O'Day makes this point beautifully in her commentary on John in the New Interpreter's series, p. 760.

3 Gail O'Day again, 760-761

On Shepherds, and Where to Find Them

Psalm 23, The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Scott Dickison · April 21st, 2024 · Duration 16:37

On Shepherds, and Where to Find Them
Psalm 23

It occurred to me sometime ago when reading this morning's Psalm, the 23rd Psalm, this most familiar and perhaps most beloved of psalms, with it's beautiful and evocative pastoral images, that I don't believe I've ever actually met a shepherd.

I.

The pages of scripture are filled with images of shepherds and sheep. So many of the psalms imagine God as a shepherd, with Israel the sheep. It's possible they were written by King David, who was famously the shepherd boy turned war hero turned king. In our gospel lesson this morning from John, Jesus calls himself "the Good Shepherd," drawing on these deep biblical resonances. His sheep know the sound of his voice and answer when he calls. He leads them, lead us, gently, lovingly. One of the most memorable parables imagines lost sheep being searched for and found. Jesus comes into the world while shepherds keep watch ore' their field by night, the first to hear the angels' tidings of great joy that first Christmas morning.

So for someone who has read and heard scripture for most of his life, and even worn a bathrobe or two and a dishcloth on my head in the church Christmas pageant, these images are familiar.

And yet as a child of the suburbs and in the age of fences and barbed wire, this idyllic scene of a shepherd with his crook out there in the field with his sheep, well, I'm not sure it's something I've ever witnessed firsthand.

But I do love animals. And we always had pets growing up, and have for most of my adult years.

I remember the first dog I had that was truly mine, the first living thing I was personally responsible for and accountable to. His name was Jackson, coincidentally, a rescue border collie mix I got as a pup my senior year of college. He lived with me and my roommate and we would walk him around campus--if want to be popular on a college campus, I learned, bring a puppy.

He came with me after graduation and into young adulthood. Moved in with Audrey and me and endured that first year of marriage with us, offering much comfort, and another place for us to practice our love for each other. He was a wonderful companion--and protective! I remember once during a tornado warning how, sensing the danger, he herded us, shepherded us you could say, into the closet in our back bedroom.

So when he came down very sick, suddenly and surprisingly, one summer, it was devastating. We did what you do. We went to doctors and then specialists. We ran tests. We had procedures. We spent more money than we had. We let him sleep in our bed those nights. We told him it would be okay, believing he would somehow understand our words and not the shake in our voice.

And I remember on what would be the last day of his life, we were at the animal hospital and they asked us if we wanted to spend some time with him first, and we said yes. And so they told us there was some grass in an empty lot next to the building, and there may have been a little creek off to the side that was probably more a drainage ditch. And so we put on his leash, which seemed to be a comfort, and we lead him out there, and he went slowly, until, as dogs do, he hit the grass, and then he had a boost in his step as he put his nose to the ground and smelled the dandelions, those beautiful weeds, and the three of us walked again, one final time in what was suddenly a green pasture, beside still waters. And it restored our souls and seemed to confirm that this was the right decision, that we were on the right path, which is often so hard to see..

And as I think about it now it occurs to me that those green pastures in verse two of this beloved psalm can be and very often are the same dark valleys of verse four. The promise is that because we are never alone, even the darkest valley can be awash with life.

II.

I think about the poem by the Chinese American poet, Li-Young Lee, "From Blossoms." He paints a familiar scene to those of us in the southern United States of stopping at a roadside peach stand. He writes,
"From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

"There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background"-- the shadow truth of this statement being that so many days we do live knowing death is in the background. Not always front and center, but present.
A diagnosis.
An aging parent.
Our own lines and wrinkles in the mirror, our thinning hair and aching joints. A child's nighttime questions about where we all go, if we will always be.

Or the blossoms, be they peach or dogwood or azalea, that bloom for a time and then just as quickly fall to the earth, their impermanence essential to their beauty.
And so we treasure the days when we are given reason to forget, in the welcome of roadside produce, the sugary dribble of peach juice anointing our chin. Or the gift of shade in afternoon sun, and more, to share in this bounty, this goodness and mercy, with another--when our cup overflows.

III.

It also occurs to me, in reading the final stanza of this psalm, that I cannot say with confidence I have every had true enemies, as this psalm imagines, and so many others. This is a persistent theme in the psalms, of enemies circling, always a looming threat. I'll confess these images tend to leave me cold or bewildered. And yet I also understand how much of a privilege this is not to have enemies that I know of.

Many people have a different experience. I saw this week that the number of reported acts of both antisemitic and Islamophobic hate have surged in recent months, of course the result of the actual war being fought in Israel and Gaza and now, perhaps, the broader region.

There are others. One can imagine how many on the margins here in our own communities might feel pressed down upon, even targeted in some way--as if the deck were stacked against them to such an extent that it feels personal, feels intentional.
Or so many others who by circumstance or accident of birth are made to feel somehow "less than."

Ellen Davis, one of my very favorite biblical scholars, says that when reading these more difficult passages in the psalms in which enemies are named and especially those where harm is wished upon them--which, importantly we should say, ask God to act and give no indication the psalmist has taken matters in his own hands--if we nonetheless cannot relate to these psalms ourselves, she says it can be an act of spiritual courage and humility to turn these words 180 degrees and ask, who might say them about us?

I was reading in the Northminster history book this past week and came upon the chapter describing how the church engaged the tumultuous and often volatile years of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, just as the church was starting. I saw how it was Northminster members, including our first pastor, Dudley Wilson, who were among the first to arrive at the home of Rabbi Nussbaum of Beth Israel after it was bombed by the KKK in the middle of the night. This was just a few weeks after the synagogue itself had been bombed--the synagogue that had been our church's first meeting place.

Rabbi Nussbaum and the congregation at Beth Israel expressed gratitude for Northminster's presence and support in those days, and the two congregations worked alongside each other in many important ways during those early years. And yet the relationship was not uncomplicated.

In the heat of the bombing, our history book notes how Rabbi Nussbaum challenged our church to be more active and vocal in opposition to the violence that was happening in Jackson and so many places in opposition to the desegregation of schools, saying to one of our church leaders who worked alongside him with the Anti-Defamation League, "You're a white Christian--a Baptist, the worst kind for Jews. You've got a responsibility for what happened too. It's the Sunday-school lessons from the New Testament in Baptist churches that lead people to commit such terrible acts." 1

IV.

I think finally of a children's picture book, by Tim Ladwig, where he reimagines Psalm 23 not in a pastoral setting, but in a city, where parks and front yards become green pastures, and puddles in the sidewalk and potholes become still waters. And then a kitchen table where the family gathers each night against all that else, that hides in the darkness behind the window's glass. There amid the plates and bowls and heaping food, a cup is filled, overflowing, maybe with chocolate milk. And later in the bathtub a child's body is scrubbed and washed and rinsed, her head anointed with soap, and then clothed in a towel and held close. And how within and among all these nighttime routines and rituals, conducted in so many houses in so many communities and neighborhoods, and maybe even our own, a simple home is revealed as a "house of the Lord." And of course it is. And I think of how sacred that is. How sacred a home can be. Our homes. There is so much out there in this world--so much that would do us harm.

And maybe this is the beauty, and why we read this psalm in difficult times, why we recite it over the grave, why without even trying we have committed so many of its lines to memory. You may not have ever seen a shepherd. Never held a crook in your hand and brought stray sheep back into the fold. You may not have enemies that you know, though very likely, you know someone who does. You may not have experienced so many of these images personally, and yet they feel so familiar, so true, because when you look, this Psalm and the God of which it speaks, and the world it imagines, are everywhere.
____________________________
1 Quoted in Different and Distinctive, But Nevertheless Baptist: A History of Northminster Baptist Church, 1967-2017. 49

The Humanity of it All

Luke 24:36b-48, The Third Sunday of Easter

Scott Dickison · April 14th, 2024 · Duration 19:20

The Humanity of it All
Luke 24:36b-48

Like many new parents, years ago after Billy was born, Audrey and I started to get more intentional about creating our own family holiday traditions, and so I thought it would be nice to do something special for that first Easter dinner after church as a family of three.

I learned that it's traditional in the Eastern Church to prepare a whole, spit-roasted lamb on Easter Day--in honor of Christ, the "Lamb of God," the Passover lamb, and so forth. So I pitched to Audrey that we could roast at least a good rack of lamb, which she agreed to...until she went online to find a local farm where we could buy the meat, and on their website was greeted with pictures of little baby lambs playing in the fields and enjoying their young life, and found herself unable to order one of these precious ones to the slaughter. I was informed we would have to find a different Easter tradition.

So I combed through the resurrection stories in the gospels looking for inspiration, and lo and behold here are these verses from Luke describing Jesus' first meal after he was raised from the dead.

I.

It's the evening of the resurrection and the disciples are about to sit down at the table together for supper. Earlier that morning the women had found the tomb empty and in the hours since there have been reports of the risen Christ appearing to Simon and then two others who met him on the road and invited him in, where he appeared to them in the breaking of bread.

Now around this table, which may well have been the table where he shared his last meal with them, the risen Christ again appears out of nowhere, and then, as Luke puts it--and this has become one of my favorite verses in all of scripture: While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Do you have anything to eat?"

Still startled and dumbfounded, someone hands him a piece of broiled fish, and he takes it and eats it in front of them, and when he's finished, opens to them the scriptures, explaining how all of this had been foretold, how it had to happen, and the Dickison family arrived at their traditional Easter dinner of fish, all the better if shared with an unexpected guest.

I don't know that Luke intended this resurrection encounter between the disciples and the risen Christ to be funny, exactly, but he clearly meant it to be human, and so I think humor is on the table, so to speak.

II.

First the disciples, human as ever in this story. Each of the gospels affirm that when the risen Christ appeared to Mary and the disciples and others, they didn't recognize it was him. And even when they do see that it's him, they don't know what's going on or how to feel about it, and certainly not what it all means. And in some ways this seems to be a continuation of who the gospels describe the disciples to be throughout Jesus's ministry: well-meaning, sure, but ultimately a little bumbling and simply unable to comprehend who Jesus is or what's happening around them.

And that may be true. But when I imagine these first resurrection encounters recorded in the gospels, and how it must have been to see this one who just days before had been crucified, and whose body had been wrapped and tucked inside a tomb, suddenly and mysteriously standing before them--how could they be anything but exactly what each of the gospels says they were: some confused combination of terror and amazement. Or as Luke puts it, some mixture of "joy and disbelieving and wonder." Of course they were.

Isn't that how it is when we brush up against the holy? Ot when we're ambushed by the transcendent? We don't know just how to feel.

The Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, calls this the "blurriness of joy."1 Pain can be precise, he says. Even young children can tell you just how their pain feels: it's a sharp pain, a burning pain. This one throbs, this one gnaws, it's here, right here. But joy somehow blurs everything. What words do we have to describe our wedding day or the birth of a child, or standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or hearing news so good it seems impossible:
--The tumor is gone
--I can hear two two-heartbeats
Blurry joy.

I was taken by William Shatner, of Star Trek fame, and what he said, or tried to say, upon coming back to earth from a flight on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin spacecraft just a few years ago.

I quote: "The covering of blue was...the sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us...And then suddenly you shoot through it all...as though you whip...a sheet off you when you're asleep, and you're looking into blackness, into black ugliness, and you look down, there's the blue down there, and the black up there and it's just... there is Mother Earth and comfort, and there is -- is there death? I don't know...Is that the way death is?...I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now, I don't want to lose it."2

Joy and disbelieving and wonder...

The gospel writers are in agreement that the first response to the resurrection by those nearest to it was not some static "belief," but a dynamic combination of amazement and not knowing, and joy at what could be. And this is still probably the most honest reaction to the resurrection.3

Some measure of awe and wonder and imagination is critical to faith.

They open us and keep us open, so we can continue to be attentive to what new thing God is doing, now. Or what God might do. If God raised Jesus from the dead, what else might God be capable of? What new alternative have we not considered? What healing, what recovery, what forgiveness? What other tomb might we find emptied?

This is the real challenge when we have these experiences of transcendence: to hold onto that feeling, that sensation we "hope never to recover from," so our faith can stay a living, breathing thing. Which is not only what the disciples of course were in that moment, but what the gospels want us to know Jesus is too.

III.

As in the Gospel of John last week, here in Luke, Jesus wants the disciples to know it is really him standing before them, in the flesh. It was important to say that he was not some kind of disembodied spirt or ghost, but a living, breathing person again. He shows them the wounds in his hands and his side. He says, Come, touch me and see. Of course, Luke takes it a little farther and says Jesus ate something in their presence--apparently it was widely known even back then that ghosts can't eat!

The message it seems we're to receive in these things is two-fold. First, as we said last week: there is a continuation from crucifixion to resurrection. The promise of resurrection is not that things will return to how they were before. The promise is that life can continue despite whatever has happened. If even the risen Christ still has wounds then so can we, in our own healing.

And second, which flows from the first: resurrection faith is not simply a matter of the spirit and life in the world to come, but a matter of the body and the life we live in it now, in this world.

Resurrection faith, we learn, is not merely a set of beliefs or moral principals; it has flesh and bones on it. Whatever teachings and instruction we receive from scripture or the life of Jesus--whatever we believe about the resurrection and what it means for life in the world to come--doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't take shape in the lives of people in this world. If it doesn't direct us to the needs and hopes and sufferings of others in this this world. If it doesn't inspire or even implore us to clothe the naked, to give shelter to those without one, to make sure people have access to all the marks of what we know to be abundant life in this world, not in the world to come--some measure of safety and dignity and opportunity. If the risen Christ can ask the disciples to give him something to eat, surely this means we should be asking who around us is hungry? Surely we should be feeding them, and see that as an expression of our faith in the resurrection. There is a spirituality to Christian faith, without question. Something that connects us to each other and to God in some deep, subterranean way. But there is also a materiality to faith; something that calls us to embody it in our actions.

The arc of Christian history bears witness to the fact that reducing faith to merely an inward, spiritual thing has contributed to great deal of actual pain and suffering. And thinking of abundant life as pertaining only to life in the world to come has made life a lot more difficult for many in this world. It has permitted us to treat creation as if it were meant to be disposable or that extreme poverty is simply inevitable. It's allowed us to see our neighbors and their lives and situations as something foreign to us and disconnected from the decisions we make, when in reality our lives are woven, if not sometimes tangled, together. And our faith is meant to touch all of it.

And how important is touch in these resurrection stories?4 Touch me and see, Jesus says. Are we not becoming more aware of the real harm that comes from a life devoid of touch? The isolation of a disembodied, digital world? The loneliness of life devoid of community and shared stories and understanding? It's a kind of death, isn't it?

IV.

On Christmas Eve we stand in this room amid candlelight and declare the miracle and mystery of incarnation: that the Word has been made flesh, and has come to dwell among us. And not simply that God would come, but that God would be born; that God would come as an infant, who must be held, must be fed; God--we're told--with a soft spot. The holiness is wrapped up in the intimacy, the humanity of it all.

And so the resurrection comes as a kind of bookend; a completion to what began at Jesus's birth.

Christ standing there in a human body. The same body he lived in and died in. A body still in need of touch, same as us. A body that still needs to be fed, same as us. A body still with soft spots, same as us. A body that despite it all, God has made whole again, same as us.
________________
1 Yehuda Amichai, "The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy: The Touch of Longing is Everywhere," translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. Found in, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter.
2 Téa Kvetenadze, 'Whoa, That's Death!' Here's Everything William Shatner said to Jeff Bezos After Returning from Space, Forbes, Oct. 13, 2021
3 Grateful to my mentor from divinity school, Matt Myer Boulton, and his SALT Project commentary for this and other insights. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/4/10/faith-and-doubt-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-easter-3
4 SALT, again

By the Marks

John 20:19-31 The Second Sunday of Easter

Scott Dickison · April 7th, 2024 · Duration 13:29

By the Marks
John 20:19-31

History has not been kind to Thomas, whose story we encounter each year on this second Sunday of Easter. He appears in each of the four Gospels but it's only here in John where he is giving a speaking part, and it's more than just this exchange with the risen Christ near the end.

Earlier in the gospel when Jesus tells the disciples they must travel back to the area around Jerusalem to tend to their friend Lazarus, the disciples express some reservations that this might not be such a safe place to go--and they were right; the raising of Lazarus would put into motion the events of Jesus's own death. But it's Thomas who speaks up and tells the rest of them, "Let us also go that we may die with him." And that settles it.

Later on at the Last Supper, when Jesus describes to them how he must leave and says those beautiful words of comfort that he's going to prepare a place for them and that, "you know the way to the place I am going," the rest of the disciples are silent, but it's Thomas who speaks for the rest of them, saying, "Lord, we don't know where you are going. How can we know the way?" To which Jesus responds, "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

But we know him best from the scene in our lesson this morning, when after missing Christ's first appearance to the disciples, Thomas declares, unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand, and I put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, I will not believe.

A week later Christ appears again and this time Thomas is there. Christ tells him to touch his hands and reach out and put his hand in his side, and says, Do not doubt, but believe. And believe he does. In fact, his response, My Lord and my God, is among the most powerful testimonies in all of scripture.

We've been conditioned to read this exchange between Thomas and Jesus as a kind of scolding--as if Thomas' resurrection confession was somehow tainted because he had to see the risen Christ for himself, as if his demand was unreasonable, or even more than the other disciples had needed, when really all of them needed their own encounter with the risen Christ to believe. Thomas, it seems, was again just speaking for the rest of them, which he had done so many other times. And in many ways I believe he speaks for the rest of us.

I.

In recent times Thomas has become a source of hope of many. The patron saint of doubt and skepticism, granting us permission to not rush into faith too quickly, but with care and resolve. Thomas' simple request to see and to touch for himself, or the idea that someone so close to Jesus would need still a closer look, or even that Jesus didn't give up on him despite his reservations--that doubt, too can be a vehicle for faith. This can be a spiritual life raft. And I count myself among those who have found and continue to find comfort and community with Thomas.

Doubt can be such a critical part of faith. It's often what enlivens faith, what gives faith room to breathe and grow. After all, the opposite of faith really is not doubt, but certainty. When we're certain about something we have no need for faith--these are different categories. Faith only lives in the places where certainty is impossible; the places and times and seasons when we are forced to choose between unknowns, and cast our lot with what we cannot be sure of, but somehow come to know deeply is true. This is how it is with all of the most important decisions we will make in life.

And granting permission to doubt or ask questions or simply find your own way to faith, well, this is among the most crucial, honest, and hopeful things we can do as a church--for our children and youth, but really for all of us.

Do you remember when you were first given this permission--to doubt, to ask questions, to claim a faith that is authentically your own? Do you remember the loosening in your chest, that you didn't know was so tight.

Have you been given this permission? If you haven't, consider this the granting--there is no formal ceremony, no certificate. There's only hearing these words said from this pulpit with all the honesty and compassion and hope I have to offer.

Hope is really at the heart of this permission, isn't it? And trust, which flows from hope. Hope that God's imagination is greater than our own. Trust that given the space and grace and promise of a home to return to, we all will find our way. That the Spirit is working in ways we cannot know.

It's why the witness of Thomas is so critical to the resurrection story. He reminds us what faith is and what faith isn't. Faith can be, and very often needs to be, the hard-nosed but largehearted pursuit of what is true and right and good.

But Thomas is also so critical because he reminds us of who Christ is and isn't. Or rather, how we will know it is the real and true Christ being described to us. We will know it is truly Jesus not by the sound of his voice or the look in his eye, but by the presence of his wounds.

II.

Have you considered this, what it means that even the risen Christ still has wounds?

That Jesus, upon being raised from the dead, did not come back to life unblemished, but bearing the marks of his struggle? That God did not see to it that Jesus's body would be pristine or even scarred over, but is still tender? That Easter comes to the disciples with Jesus, standing there before them less triumphant and more vulnerable. Or maybe the lesson we are to learn is that these two--triumph and vulnerability--are not the opposing forces we imagine them to be.

In fact, it is Jesus' wounds that are the focus of these shadowy scenes from John--not Thomas or his doubt. Jesus even tells us, twice, Look here, and here. This is important. This is how you can know it is me. It is important. It's important because if even the risen Christ can have wounds, then we can, too.

We say through the resurrection God made "all things new," but in jesus's wounds we learn that doesn't mean "just like new." Resurrection doesn't mean, "Like it never happened." Resurrection means, it happened, and here I am despite it. The promise of our faith--that we wait for in the end but can experience now at different points in life--is not that things will return to how they were before. It's a promise that life can continue despite whatever has happened. The promise of Easter is not that the clock will magically turn backwards. It's that time, combined with care and community--for resurrection never happens alone--will miraculously and mysteriously bring us forward, out of the darkness of how things have been, the pain we have suffered, the loss we have known, and into the gentle light of God's new morning.

III.

Doubts and wounds. These are the parts of the Easter story we receive from Thomas each year, and I thank God for it. I thank God for it, because it turns out you cannot have Easter without them.

For They Were Afraid

Mark 16:1-8, Easter Sunday

Scott Dickison · March 31st, 2024 · Duration 19:01

For They Were Afraid
Mark 16:1-8

The poet Christian Wiman tells of an evening sometime ago when about an hour after he had put his "blond-haired, blue-eyed scarily intelligent sprite of a daughter" to bed, he suddenly saw her standing in the doorway.

Daddy, I can't sleep, she said, Every time I close my eyes I'm seeing terrible things.

Wiman says he was sympathetic, as a lifelong insomniac, who used to freak his parents out when he was small by creeping quietly into their room and opening their eyelids with his fingers so he could "see what they were dreaming."

Why don't you pray to God, he advised her, in what he described as a moment of either "great grace or great hypocrisy"--as he is not a devout pray-er himself.

But in that moment, seeing her in distress, he suggested to his little girl that she bow her head and close her eyes and ask God to give her good thoughts. Perhaps to remind her of "the old family house in Tennessee that they'd gone to just a couple of weeks earlier...the huge green yard with its warlock willows and mystery thickets, the river with its primordial snapping turtles...the buckets of just-picked blueberries and the fried Krispy Kreme's and the fireflies smearing their alien radiance through the humid Tennessee twilight"--it must be exhausting to have a poet for a parent.

He suggested all of this to his young daughter, who could not sleep for the terrible things that lurked behind her eyelids, that she would "let the force of her longing and the fact of God's love coalesce" to see her through her fear on into morning light.

Oh, I don't think so, Daddy, she said.

What do you mean, Eliza, why not?

Because in Tennessee I asked God to turn me into a unicorn and...look how that's worked out.1

I.

Each of the gospel writers remembers that first resurrection morning in a slightly different way, each pulling forward some moment, some detail that seems to illumine something important about that morning that even after all these years, still lies far beyond description. And for Mark, that illuminating wrinkle to the miracle and mystery of resurrection is the presence of that companion we each have known in different ways since childhood and in our hardest of hearts today: the presence of fear.

As Mark tells it, the women had come to give Jesus' body a proper burial. They came early in the morning to avoid suspicion, only when they get to the tomb they find that suspicion has beat them there: the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty. They enter and see a young man dressed in white, an angel we presume, sitting where Jesus should lay, and they're "alarmed," it says--and who could blame them! Dead bodies can be alarming, but dead bodies not where they're supposed to be are even more alarming!

Sensing this, the young man tells them, You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. There's the place they laid him. Now go and tell the others.

Hallelujah!, we want to sing. Strike up the chorus and let it ring through the sanctuary: Jesus has been raised!

Only in the moment, no hallelujahs were uttered. In fact, far from it. Mark tells us that seeing this angel and hearing these words, the women went out and fled from the tomb, "for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

And in the oldest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of Mark, this is not only where the story of that first resurrection morning ends, it's where the entire gospel ends. The book is closed. In later editions of the gospel it appears that more was added to bring Mark's version in line with the other three: with Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and then the other disciples, and then ascending into heaven. But in the earliest manuscripts we have of Mark, which itself is thought to be the first gospel written, the story of the resurrection ends with no such resolution, no encounter with the risen Christ, no "see my hands and my side," or dramatic ascension into the clouds. What we're left with is those earliest witnesses to the breadth and length and height and depth of God's love running away terrified, and the final word in this good news as we read it is, literally, "afraid."

In the story as we receive it, Death has been overcome, but Fear is still very much alive. And so we might say that Fear, even more than Death, was the enemy of faith then, just as it is now.

II.

The Bible, from cover to cover, it must be said, is not clear on a great many things. But it is strikingly clear on a few absolutely crucial things, and one of them is that the people of God are not to be afraid.2 The command not to fear is at the very heart of our faith.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me."
"A light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it."
"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."
Or simply the refrain, "Be not afraid," which I saw some social media post claim occurs 365 times in scripture, one for each day of the year--which is a beautiful idea, but I'm sorry to report is not true. It's more like 70 times, so about every 5 days or so. But that's still plenty to get the point across.

The people of God are called, over and over again, not to be afraid. They're not to be afraid because God is with them, God has called them by name, God has claimed them, God has the final word and God is good.

But of course, the reason this refrain "not to be afraid" appears so often in scripture, and that the people of God must be reminded again, and again, is that we continue to be afraid. In fact, in this battle between Fear and Faith, you could be forgiven for feeling, at times, that Fear is winning, for there seems to be so much of which to be afraid. The world feels more wobbly than we may have thought just a short time ago. In fact, in a time of seemingly unresolvable cultural division, among the few things on which we seem to agree is that there is so much to fear.

Marilynn Robinson, the novelist and person of deep faith, reflected some years back that fear has a "respectability" she's never seen before.3 Never before has fear been such an acceptable excuse for bad behavior or poor judgment. "No one seems to have an unkind word to say about fear these days"...but "Fear," she writes, "is not a Christian habit of mind."4

This is not to say that there are not real dangers in this world, which of course there are, and Scripture is clear-eyed about those as well. The promises of God in Scripture are made in full view of the world's perils.

But to live by faith is to commit to live not from our worse fears, but from our deepest hopes. The divine command not to fear is the command--come what may--not to let our fear keep us from being the people we are called to be. From doing the things we must do. For it to get in the way of us loving, as best as can, the way that we are loved.

III.

Which brings us back to the women who came to prepare Jesus' body for burial, but ended up running away terrified that he was gone.

This would seem to be an embarrassing defeat of the people of God at the hands of Fear. A hole, as empty as the tomb, at the heart of our story. But this not where the story ends. Even when the gospel was written, they knew it was not how the story ends. They knew, just as we know now, that these women, these disciples of Christ, these first witnesses to the miracle and mystery of resurrection, these preachers of the first Easter sermon, eventually found a way to overcome their fear, to move through it, to lay it to the side like the linens that wrapped Jesus's body, and do the hard thing that simply had to be done. And we know they were able to do this because here we are.

Here the gospel of Mark is! Had they never told a soul what they had found or had not found that morning at the tomb, the story would have ended then and there. But it didn't. They did tell it.

And so like a child standing before her parents at night seeking to a way through the terrible things, I find myself asking how?

How did they make it through? Which is to ask, how do we make it through? What part or practice of faith can we turn to, that is stronger than our Fear?

As they were running from the tomb, did they stop and pray? Bowing their head and closing their eyes and asking God to give them good thoughts, perhaps from a week ago, when Jesus was alive and riding through the streets of town, laughing, on the back of a donkey? Maybe. Prayer in its many forms has often seen the people of God through our fears.

But my suspicion is that even before these prayers would have been lifted, what finally allowed the women to speak their resurrection truth and thus let the risen Christ loose in the world, is the same gift, the same grace that allows children, finally, to return to their beds at night. Which is the same grace you'll find in oncology units at hospitals, or around the circle of folding chairs and styrofoam cups of coffee at AA meetings, or in women's shelters. The same grace you feel in the wrinkles of a loved one's bruised tissue-paper hand as they tell you, I'm not afraid, and you don't need to be either. When they tell you, before their final breath is taken, The worst is over, and you believe them--which is the promise, the holy, gospel promise, that we can "be not afraid," because whatever should come, we are not alone.

"Perfect love casts out fear," scripture tells us. But when I remember the times in my life when I have seen this to be true--when I've witnessed and even on occasion felt for myself how fear can dissolve into love, it has not been some abstract or philosophical knowledge of the love of Almighty God that has done it. It has been the physical, embodied love, shown, generously, perfectly, even, by imperfect people.

Did they look as they were running from the tomb and see from the corner of their eye the person running next to them? Did it start slowly and then suddenly all at once, how they stopped and saw for the first time in each other's faces how much they looked like Christ?

IV.

It was the love of God that raised Jesus from the grave--that defeated Death, that recreated life, that issued a final "yes" to the world's chorus of "no's."--it was the perfect love of God that did that.

But the part of the resurrection story we cannot forget is how that love came alive not only in Jesus's broken and bruised body, but those who went to find him. Those who then found each other in their moment of distress, in their terror and amazement, in their fear. Those who made good on that promise of God we are told in so many ways throughout scripture and finally, finally in the risen Christ: that we are not alone in this life, that we are not alone in death. That we are not alone.

And so, we too, whenever we find strength enough to do these things: to be present to pain, to care for the suffering, to walk--or even run--with each in our fear, to be each other's comfort, to be each other's strength and mercy and grace, to simply be with each other--whenever we do these things, there is a little Easter that happens around us. Something is resurrected in this world, something comes alive in the people around us. Something is reborn inside us.

This is the part of the story we simply cannot forget, especially on a morning like this morning, which is that so much of the Easter story, the story of our faith, the story of the risen Christ loose in the world, depends on you.
__________________
1Christian Wiman, Zero to the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, "I will Love You In The Summertime."
2Marilynne Robinson writes beautifully and powerfully about these things in her essay, Fear, from, The Givenness of Things, 2015
3http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/magazine/the-revelations-of-marilynne-robinson.html?_r=0
4Fear

Two Parades

Mark 11:1-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Scott Dickison · March 24th, 2024 · Duration 17:19

Two Parades
Mark 11:1-11

Palm Sunday comes as a kind of threshold each year between the long Lenten road, marked by a certain solemnity--worship with no alleluias, a communion table with no flowers--and the action and passion of Holy Week. Like the false spring that likes to come before the last frost, it's a kind of false Easter; remembering and reenacting a celebration on the streets of Jerusalem that, however earnest and well-meaning, was premature.

And yet it is good and right for us to celebrate. After all, while the crowds gathered may not have known how the road would twist and turn to get there, they were right to welcome Jesus as the "one who comes in the name of the Lord." They were right to know this moment demanded a parade.

I.

It begins with Jesus and his disciples and the crowds that have gathered in the outskirts of the city preparing to enter Jerusalem from the east, down from the Mount of Olives. And it must have been quite a scene: Jesus is there, of course, as the grand marshal, riding, famously, upon what Mark tells us is colt, and the other gospels fill in as the colt of a donkey--harkening back to the prophet Zechariah, writing some 500 years before Jesus, who imagined the future king "triumphant and victorious...humble and riding on a donkey." As they make their way, those gathered begin waving leafy branches from the trees and laying their cloaks on the ground before him and shouting, "Hosanna," and "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord"--all signs and symbols from the history of Israel of how to welcome a triumphant king.

There must have been children there, too--children almost can't help but find parades. They must have been weaving in and out of the crowds, finding trees and other high ground to see, some even climbing on their parents shoulders. It was a celebration, however modest, brimming with hope that soon things would be different. That somehow this donkey-riding prophet, who was known to heal the sick, and was rumored to have raised the dead, and who told stories about mustard seeds and lost coins and treasure hidden in a field, and a world that would soon be turned upside down, would somehow be the one to make all things new.

But Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem that spring day perhaps not so unlike this one, was not the only parade in town. On the other side of the city another procession was underway, and it had a very different feel--and, no, I'm not talking about the St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown Jackson, which we attended for the first time yesterday. Certainly a different vibe from our Palm procession earlier. No leafy branches, but plenty of green beads, and I may have seen a few folks take their cloaks off.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Cross in their book, The Last Week, tell us that from the west that day in Jerusalem, opposite of Jesus and his crowds, was Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, entering the Holy City surrounded by the armies of Rome.1

II.

For most of the year, Pilate lived in a magnificent palace on the coast, some 60 miles west of Jerusalem, but he was known to come back into the capital city for the major Jewish festivals--not to celebrate them or show reverence to the God of his subjects, but quite the opposite: to remind the people gathering there, which could have numbered in the millions, who was really in charge, which was Caesar and the powers of the Roman Empire. And you can bet he would not have missed Passover in particular, this festival that remembered and celebrated and in many ways reenacted and relived how God had liberated the people from a previous empire--delivering the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.

Pilate would have been on horseback, or perhaps in a chariot pulled by many steeds--no donkeys in sight. Around him a cavalry of horses, soldiers in full battle gear, helmets, shields, breastplates of metal, weapons in hand. The sound of hundreds of feet marching in step, horns and drums thundering through the town and across the hillsides--a breathtaking, and deliberately overwhelming display of imperial glory and power and domination--and theology. After all, Caesar was not only ruler, but claimed to be the Holy Son of God.

All of which puts the parade Jesus had planned in much starker relief. This was not simply a parade but a kind of demonstration, counter to the parade everyone knew was happening on the other side of town. A rival parade, led by a very different king, telling a very different story of a very different kingdom.

On the one side of the city was Pontius Pilate and his uniformed legions embodying the kingdom of Rome. And on the other side was Jesus and his humble, barefoot followers, embodying, in ways as subversive as they are confrontational, the Kingdom of God. A kingdom built not on violence and fear and domination, but on humility, peace, and laughter.

Both Kingdoms, both visions, laid out there as plain as day. And the question for the people around them would have been clear: Whose parade will you join?

And you can imagine for those in Jerusalem watching this scene unfold, this question, on some level, would have been laughable. Given the choice between the two, who in their right mind would hitch their cart to this peasant's donkey? We like underdog stories--David and Goliath, Harry Potter and Voldemort, heck, we're in the middle of March Madness; this is the season for underdogs!--but we tend to like them in the Old Testament, or in fairy tales or sporting events, not when we're planning for retirement or buying a home, or in need of medical care. No, then we're very much for the proven commodity, the established neighborhood, and the board certified physician. No one wants an underdog doctor.

On a certain level, Jesus' affront to the empire was ridiculous. But it was no more so than the rest of the gospel he was preaching: Love your enemies? Pray for those who persecute you?--not just tolerate them, or try to avoid them, but think of how you can best pray for them. Sell all you have and give it to the poor, then come follow me? Deny yourself and pick up your cross? Do not worry about your life?

There's a certain absurdity to each of these things. They challenge the world as we know it be, the life that deep down we would want for our children. Taken as a whole, these teachings of Jesus offer a vision so remarkably different but so surprisingly life-giving that they offer us a glimpse, as someone put it, of this "odd new creation breaking forth in the world," that we call the kingdom of God.2

Put another way, Jesus takes the myths of the world, the stories and assumptions and conventional wisdoms, the foundations that lie beneath so much of what we know and do, and offers, instead, parable.

III.

Parable, the gospels tell us, was Jesus's most enduring tool for teaching. And the goal of parable is to offer an alternative vision of the world. To illuminate through short, potent, surprising story what is possible.

The word parable in Greek means "to hold two things up beside each other"--it shares a root with the word parabola, the u-shaped curve that results in two divergent lines you remember from high school Trigonometry. In his parables Jesus would hold two things up side by side for his listeners so they could see the difference. On one hand there the way of the world--all those things we come to learn in so many ways over the course of a lifetime that take on a certain inevitability: the zero-sum way of winners and losers, of might makes right, the way of shame. Even the common sense way of tit of tat, an eye for an eye, of getting what we deserve.

This is the prodigal son sitting filthy and despondent in the pig pen wondering how it had come this far, and if his father will let him come home, not as his son--that would be absurd--but as one of the hired hands. This is the most he could imagine, probably more than was possible. The way of the world.

And on the other hand, there is the way of God. A way so ridiculous, so surprising and even offensive, it could never be true. This is the father looking over his shoulder to the hillside each day, and sitting by the window at night, imagining he's seen his son on the horizon. And when he finally beholds the silhouette of his son returning home, running out into the middle of the road and embracing him, face red with tears, and then calling for a celebration in his honor. This is a different parade, of a different kingdom, both held up beside each other. It couldn't be true, until suddenly it is.

There in the streets of Jerusalem, nearing the end of his ministry, Jesus doesn't tell the crowds gathered around him another parable, he invites them into one. Against that parade happening on that other side of the city--a statement of "the way things are" if there ever was one; a world of domination and fear and death--he lifts up an alternative vision of how things could be. How our hearts, deep down, tell us they should be. How scripture tells us, one day, they will be. A world of peace in the end, and of compassion in the present, and new life that--if we look--is always springing up from the ground.

There are plenty of times, I think we can admit, when we choose that other parade. Life is long and the world is complicated and dangerous, the distractions and temptations are many. One way we know the story we tell this week is true is that many within the crowds who joined Jesus on Sunday by Friday would have found a different parade to join.

But the most important decisions we make in life are not made once and for all, but over time, and in the long run, more often than not, incrementally, in decisions that after a time don't feel like decisions.

And so we pick up our palms whenever we choose patience and understanding over rash judgment or hostility. When we sit with a question instead of rushing for an answer. Or when we look at the world in it's complexity and mystery, and wonder if there is more to it than we can see now; if maybe death is not the end; if may God really does have something more in mind, for the world, for you, for the people you love. And then we start living and loving and grieving as if that were true.

We lay our cloaks on the ground whenever we consider that all people are children of God, and ask what harm it would be to love them just as they are? Or whenever we put the concerns of others equal to or even over our own--when we realize there's really no such thing as other people's children, or water or health, and begin to see the ways our lives cannot help but be wrapped up in each other's, whether we share a fence, a zip code, a community, a country, a world. Of course we do.

We shout Hosanna when we choose engagement over passive acceptance, or when we say enough is enough, and find strength enough to put something of ourselves on the line.

Choices that don't always feel like choices. Parades that don't feel like parades. Just one path taken over another, and then another, and another, that over time amounts to a life lived walking, with others, in a certain direction.

IV.

And the hard part of this story we have thrust ourselves into this morning and will tell in so many ways for the rest of this week, is that for a time, the other parade wins. This week ends with Jesus in the tomb, and us thinking that fear is stronger than love, that death really is the end, and that nobody remembers your name.

But one thing that does separate us from the crowds that gathered back then, is that we know what begins with Caesar's myth finally ends a week from today in God's parable: God's vision for the world that seems so good, so impossible, that it cannot be, until suddenly it is.

Like bursts of green against brown stalks, like first light breaking through cold darkness, like a gasp of air--suddenly, mysteriously, miraculously--filling empty lungs.
__________________
1Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan outline this story in their wonderful book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem, which helped shape this sermon.
2 Charles L. Campbell, Principalities, Powers, and Fools: Does Preaching Make an Ethical Difference?, Homiletic: The Journal of the Academy of Homiletics, published 11/13/2008

Upon the Heart

Jeremiah 31:31-34, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Scott Dickison · March 17th, 2024 · Duration 16:07

Upon the Heart
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Much of the book of Jeremiah has to do with the time leading up to and immediately following the sacking of Jerusalem by the armies of Babylon, some nearly 600 years before the birth of Christ. It's uncompromising, with prophecies of the coming disaster, followed by scathing interpretations of why all these calamities have fallen upon the people.

But tucked here near the end of the book, there are a few chapters with a decidedly different feel. These chapters, from which our lesson today comes, are often collectively called the "Book of Hope." They seem to have been written a little further down the road following the exile, as the acute trauma of that world-shattering event has given way to the reality that home as they know it is gone and will never be again. And so Jeremiah turns from his prophecies of destruction and takes on a posture of compassion and hope for the future.

Speaking from the midst of exile, Jeremiah assures the people that despite all that has happened, God is still with them, and though it will take longer than they would want, God will bring them home.

And as part of this return, Jeremiah assures them that God will establish "a new covenant" with them. And this covenant which is to come won't be like the old covenant, which was written on stone so that it could break and crumble or be looted by their enemies. This new covenant will be written upon their hearts.

The promise is that after this long season of exile and loss and bitterness, God's love and presence will be as close to them as that warm, constant beating in their chest.

I.

Pain and loss and trauma can write many things upon our hearts. They can write fear or hopelessness about the future. They can write cynicism or distrust, anxiety or distress. The prophet tells the people that in the season to come, in their healing, God will write something new upon their hearts: a covenant, a promise of love and shelter and return. A promise that God is with them even through their worst disasters. A promise of home.

And this promise is still good. It was good for the people of Judah in their exile, who did return home some 80 years after they were taken away. And it has been good for every generation of God's people since, and it is good for all of us who will at one point or another--maybe even more than one--find ourselves far from home; the things or the beliefs or the people that once grounded us suddenly gone. Exile comes in many forms.

And the good news is that we don't have to wait until it befalls us for God to take our broken hearts and write something new upon them. This is something, with the help of God and a community of faith, we can do now. In fact, it is something we're doing right now, together in this hour of worship.

II.

There's an old story in Judaism reflecting on this passage, of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put the word of God upon their hearts. After some time, one of them asked, "Rabbi, why upon our hearts, and not in our hearts?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put the word inside your heart. But studying God's word can put it upon your heart, so that then when your heart breaks, the holy words will fall inside."1

This is so much of why we gather here as we have again this morning, as we do each and every week in this hour, and earlier in Sunday School, or on Wednesday nights or other times during the week. To hear the words of scripture so they would be written upon our hearts.

Or to take on the rhythms of the liturgy or the lectionary or the calendar we keep, knowing they are designed to bring us home. It's why we pray together, in worship or in the Great Hall, or any other time we gather: to teach our hearts and our minds and our bodies how to slow down, and be attentive to silence and the presence of God within and among us.

It's why we teach these things to our children, isn't it? There are so many other things, so many other false promises that over the course of a week, a lifetime, a childhood, try to write themselves upon our hearts; that seek to imprint themselves upon us: messages of shame or rejection, of inadequacy or comparison, division and fear.

So much of what we hope to do in our time together as the church is to make sure the right things are written upon our hearts. The promises of God, that are true and good: that we are bearers God's image. That love is stronger than fear, and that life is longer even than death. So that when our heart breaks--and beloved, it will--it's these things that fall inside.

III.

Isn't that why when we stand at the graveside and look down at that hole in the earth, we find upon our lips the words to the 23rd Psalm, and know in new ways the promise that God is with us "even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death?"

Or in our times of distress we find upon our lips, mysteriously, miraculously, the hymns our mother would sing about the house. And we hear in them the voice of God, who came to us through her voice for so many years?

I heard once of a priest celebrating the Eucharist with a woman in his congregation in the late stages of Alzheimer's who he hadn't seen in some time. He did his best to visit with the woman for a while, though her mind struggled to focus, and her speech often failed her. As he moved into communion he turned to the liturgy and planned to read both the celebrant's part as well as her's, not thinking she would be able to participate. So he read the opening words, saying,

The Lord be with you--and as he began to read the response, the woman jumped in, whispering out softly but clearly, And with thy spirit.
And this continued throughout the whole liturgy, to the final, Thanks be to God.

Alzheimer's had ravaged her body and her mind, but those words of comfort and of hope and home had remained untouched, written upon her heart.

I heard Tom Long tell the story once of a confirmation class's graduation ceremony at the Presbyterian church. All the children were lined up at the front of the sanctuary and their teacher was at the lectern and went down the row, one by one asking the children to repeat what they had learned from Paul's great words of comfort and encouragement and strength in the eighth chapter of Romans: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, not height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And so the teacher asked the first little boy: Johnny, What can separate you from the Love of God? And Johnny responded on cue: Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, not height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And Johnny had a big smile and Johnny's parents were so proud and the teacher nodded with approval, and then went to on to the little girl next to him. Sarah, What can separate you from the love of God? And Sarah, on cue, said the same as Johnny: Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, and so on.

And this continued with each child in the class. One by one they recited these lofty words from Paul. But as they got closer to the end, the congregation started to get a little uneasy because the final child to be quizzed in the class was Rachel. Rachel was a sweet child, with a bright and beautiful smile. But Rachel was also a child with Down Syndrome, and the church knew she would not likely be able to memorize and repeat these words from Paul. And so the tension built until finally the teacher came to Rachel and said to her, Rachel, what can separate you from the love of God? And Rachel, with that big, beautiful smile on her face, looked up at her teacher and then out to the congregation, and with a confidence that would make the Apostle Paul himself blush, said: Nothing!2

One word, written upon her heart.

Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee is a diverse congregation that includes, I'm told, "people with power and PhDs and folks who have never gone past the third grade; folks with two houses and folks living on the streets. As one congregant who struggles with mental health declared, 'those of us who are crazy and those who think they're not.'"

As the story goes, years ago, a woman named Fayette found her way to this church. Fayette lived with mental illness and chronic health issues and at the time was without a home. She joined the new member class, and the conversation about baptism especially grabbed her imagination.

During the class, Fayette would ask again and again, "And when I'm baptized, I am, what? And the class would respond as they had learned in their catechism, "You are Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.'" And Fayette would say, "Oh, yes!" and the discussion would continue. Finally, the day of Fayette's baptism came. Fayette went under the water, came up blowing water from her lips, and cried, 'And now I am...?' And the church called back to her, "You are Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold." And Fayette called back to them, "Oh, yes!" and suddenly they were all awash in God's love.

Two months later, Janet Wolf, the pastor of the congregation and the one who had plunged Fayette down into the water and brought her back up again, received a phone call. Fayette, vulnerable as she was, had been attacked and assaulted and was at the county hospital. Janet went down to the hospital to see her. When she came to her room, she saw Fayette from a distance, pacing back and forth. When she got to the door, she heard as Fayette softly repeated something to herself over and over. She got a step closer and heard what she was saying, "I am beloved, I am beloved, I am beloved..."3

IV.

"But this is the covenant that I will make with my people after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."

There are so many things, so many other things, that would write themselves upon our heart. So many words of pain, of helplessness, of want--so much that would have us believe we are something other than beloved, precious children of God.

So it important, it is absolutely crucial, that we say these promises that are true, over and over again. That we teach them to our children "when we are at home or away." That we speak them to each other as often as we can, so we will learn them, and know them and feel them, so when the time comes when we will need them, we will find that we have them, deep within us. We will find that they are close to us--so close. As close as our beating heart.
___________________
1Anne Lamott tells this story in, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
2Tom Long shared this beautiful story at the Mercer University Preaching Consultation in the fall of 2015, Chattanooga, TN
3As told by Jan Richardson at her blog, The Painted Prayerbook, http://paintedprayerbook.com/2010/01/03/epiphany-1-baptized-and-beloved/. Original story told by Janet Wolf in The Upper Room Disciplines, 1999 (Nashville: The Upper Room.)

Good News Dark Places

John 3:14-21, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Scott Dickison · March 10th, 2024 · Duration 21:08

Sermon begins at 6:36.
Good News for Dark Places
John 3:14-21

We pick up the story very early on in John's Gospel. As John tells it, Jesus has just kickstarted his ministry in about the most provocative way one could imagine in first century Judea, flipping over tables at the temple in Jerusalem and driving out the money changers. The city is abuzz with this new teacher come up from the Galilee, and among those who found themselves captivated or unsettled or confused but wanting to hear more, is Nicodemus, a leader from among the Pharisees.

But to approach Jesus during the day would raise too many suspicions, perhaps even be too dangerous, so Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cloak of night, and quickly finds himself in a mysterious and at times confounding conversation that our passage today picks up about halfway through.

I.

And it's interesting, this story of Nicodemus and his clandestine encounter with Jesus here in the third chapter of John has been of special importance within the Black church tradition, beginning generations ago in the time of slavery when it was illegal for Black Christians in the South to gather without white supervision. Black church services in particular were viewed as suspicious because on several occasions they had birthed rebellion and revolt, presumably inspired by the God they found in scripture who keeps setting people free.

So many Black Christians in those days would instead gather outdoors in secret, often under the cloak of night. They saw in Nicodemus a kind of model for how to come to Jesus outside the traditional power structures, or even proof that it was possible to do so.1

It's a tradition described so evocatively by Toni Morrison in her classic novel, Beloved, where the character Baby Suggs, a formally enslaved woman of uncommon wisdom and courage, was the preacher in one of those woodland sanctuaries. When warm weather came, Morrison writes, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew...

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.

Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

II.

We don't know if there was dancing or laughing or even tears that night when Nicodemus made his secret way to Jesus, but we do know there was risk involved, and we do know that the gospel Jesus revealed to him there in the dark was equally thorny, marked by both ecstasy and pain--the hope that can only spring from knowledge of the world's failings and real evils. But most of all we know Jesus offered up to Nicodemus his great big heart.

Which is an element of this scene I worry we lose sometimes, when we pluck out the punchline from the larger story of which it is a part. You know the verse I'm talking about, John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

We might say this verse has suffered from "over-exposure." Which is a shame, because it's a powerful and important word of scripture. Martin Luther declared it to be "the gospel in miniature." The problem is that when we plaster it on billboards or signs at sporting events or quote it at people, lifted apart from from its context, we lose something important. We lose the depth, we lose the empathy--we lose much of what might make it the gospel in miniature.

Without the story that surrounds it, this verse risks becoming a blunt object that can be used to bludgeon people to belief, when in fact it's intended to be a word of comfort offered by God's Love in the flesh.

For instance, rarely have I seen John 3:16 quoted alongside this obscure reference to Moses and the serpent from the book of Numbers we heard earlier.

That would be difficult to communicate along the highway. I'm imagining one billboard that says, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so was Jesus lifted up." And then the next one says, "For God so loved the world," and so forth. And then another says, "Maybe just forget about that stuff about the snake."

Jesus didn't yell these words out to crowds trying to hear him over the wind and waves of the sea of Galilee, or sling them at a group of his enemies come to challenge him in the temple square. No, he whispers them over candlelight to Nicodemus, who has come to him in his hope and fear and curiosity and need. He says them in the dark. And it turns out that the Christian faith makes the most sense in the dark.

III.

It's like the stars overhead at night. Of course, they're up there in the sky all the time, it's just that we can only see them when it's dark. It's the same way with faith, I think. These things we speak of in the day, love and hope, and especially in this season, life that is longer even than death--they're good and beautiful when it's light outside, when the world is sunny and fresh and new. But it's not until the light fades, when the shadows come, or even when the darkness covers us that things truly shine brightest. It's then when we're able to see them for what they're intended to be, which is a light to guide us through and beyond the darkness. And when we've made it through ourselves, a light to shine back for others.

It may be why so much of the story of our faith happens in the dark.

From a cold, dark nothing God speaks and calls forth the light and creation begins.

The gospels report that Jesus was born at night, maybe in a stable, maybe in a cave, maybe just out in the open under the light of an unusually bright star.

The Last Supper where Jesus washed his disciples' feet and spoke to them of the love they would be known by was not a luncheon, but an evening meal. It was over an evening meal that he would later appear to them risen from the dead. And in just a few weeks, John will tell us that Mary comes to the tomb early on the first day of the week "while it was still dark outside."

In fact, if we were to be true to the earliest Christians, we would gather as they did, not here at midday but in the first light of Sunday morning, in memory of how Mary found the tomb, but also because it was not always safe to gather as the church in the Roman Empire out in the open and in the light of day. So the church would gather as they had to, in the dark.

It's at night that Nicodemus comes, with his questions and his doubt and his hope and his fear. And it's there in the dark where Jesus welcomes him and sees him and speaks to him about the love of God and how it extends to the whole world. About how the light has come, a light that is longer than any night we might know. Jesus knew what you know, what we know, that there are some things that are best said at night, things that simply sound different in the day. Just like there are some things that when said in a whisper are true, so deeply true. But when shouted from the hills become something different.2 And matters of faith, matters of the heart, well, they are almost always meant to be whispered.

IV.

And then the scene goes dark. Chapter three ends abruptly. We're not told how Nicodemus responds to Jesus' words or how their conversation continues or ends. Like most midnight conversations I suspect it was left open-ended. After all, while much can be experienced and learned and known at nighttime, very little can be decided.

And so it happens that we hear from Nicodemus a few more times in the Gospel of John. A little bit later on when he tries to vouch for Jesus and tells the other leaders who are gathering in opposition not to rush to judgement, and he gets smacked down mightily.

And then near the end, just a few weeks from now, on Good Friday at the crucifixion, Nicodemus appears someplace we might not expect. It was not Jesus' disciples, the ones who had walked with him for so long, but Nicodemus, "who had first come to Jesus by night," as John puts it, who took Jesus' body down from the cross. It was Nicodemus who washed him, and covered him in spices and aloes in preparation for burial. And as the sun faded on that sabbath, it was Nicodemus who laid Jesus in the darkness of the tomb.

We're not told if they met again. Nicodemus is not named among those whom the risen Christ appeared to after the resurrection, nor is he known to have been a leader in the early church. But I like to think they did meet. I like to think it was Jesus, this time, who came to find Nicodemus. Jesus, raised and living, but with wounds still in his hands and in his side. Perhaps his breath not fully back in him. Jesus, who found him that first resurrection night, and whispered just the words Nicodemus was ready to hear.
______________
1Gail O'Day, The Gospel of John, in the New Interpreter's Commentary, 555
2Borrowing from from Fred Craddock here in his seminal work, As One Without Authority, who warns about the risks of preaching. He says when God speaks to us, it is usually in a whisper, so in preaching we are really "shouting a whisper." We must be attentive to what might get lost in this kind of translation.

Foolish Wisdom

I Corinthians 1:18-25, The Third Sunday in Lent

Scott Dickison · March 3rd, 2024 · Duration 11:41

Foolish Wisdom
I Corinthians 1:18-25

I can still remember encountering CS Lewis's classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time as a child. It's a magical book, in the way this world unfolds before you that on the one hand is ancient and mysterious--with kings and queens and animals that talk--but also so familiar. Children coming of age, siblings fighting and then finding each other, and through it all, discovering the things that matter most in the world, real or imaginary: love, sacrifice, redemption, the common good.

There are too many scenes to name, but the one that has remained close to me as an adult is the same one that gripped me as a child: when Aslan, the mighty lion-king of Narnia, hands himself over to the White Witch in exchange for the boy Edmond, who's betrayed his siblings and thrown the whole kingdom into danger.

I.

It happens like so many suspicious transactions, under the cloak of night, as Aslan slips away from the camp where the citizens of Narnia are preparing for battle. Susan and Lucy see and follow him, noticing the heavy look in his eyes. They follow him to the Great Stone Table, where all the dark armies of the Witch have gathered. She thinks she's won, having outsmarted the mighty lion and begins carrying on about the "deep magic from the dawn of time" that says all betrayers belong to her. She can't believe Aslan would be so foolish as to hand himself over in place of some petulant little boy--and if we're honest, we can't either; Edmond is hardly the sympathetic character! He's selfish and even cruel. Aslan comes forward and lays down on the table, where he is then tied down and muzzled, his wild mane shaved. When the humiliation is over, the Witch makes the final blow and the dark armies howl in their triumph.

But the story isn't over.

After the gathered hoard have dispersed, Lucy and Susan are there at the Table weeping over what had transpired and trying to make sense of it all. They unmuzzle Aslan's body and watch as mice come and gnaw away at his binding. They turn to leave, when all of the sudden there's a loud cracking sound. They look up and see that the table is broken in two, and standing there before them is Aslan, his mane greater and wilder than before. They wonder how this could be, and he explains that though the Witch knew the deep magic from the dawn of time, there was a deeper magic still from before the dawn of time, that she did not know. This deeper magic says that when true, self-giving love is lived out, "Death itself starts working backwards."1

II.

Many years before CS Lewis would write of a "deeper magic from before the dawn of time" the Apostle Paul would write to the church in Corinth about the "wisdom of God" that makes foolish the "wisdom of the world." "God's foolishness," he writes, "is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is wiser than human strength."

Of course, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe draws heavily on the story of Jesus, and the scene at the Stone Table is a retelling of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. And that this story of CS Lewis meant for children would be such a powerful vehicle for the story of the cross tells us something important about the cross and children.

Children, much more than adults, have a sense of this "deeper magic," or this "foolish wisdom," if you like. It seems to come innately to them, which means of course, it comes innately to us. We see it in the way children trust. The way they feel. The way they stand open to learn and receive the world. How they still expect the best of others and can speak plainly about what is good and right, what hurts and what can make it better.

Jesus knew all of this, of course. It's why children never seem to be far from him in his ministry. It's why he tells the disciples they need to be like children, and that "heaven belongs to such as them." Children seem to have something figured out that we don't when it comes to the Kingdom of God and what it takes to find it. Or perhaps they still have something we have lost.

Perhaps it's that children have not yet been taught to suppress their imaginations, which is our natural sense to the divine. For a child, the world itself is full of magic--this is why so many enchanted forests show up in children's literature. For a child, the world itself is enchanted. The world itself is charged with possibility and potential--it's alive in so many small and wonderful ways, ways so small that children, being closer to the ground, can see much easier.

I remember a few years ago I had the boys outside on a day like we had here yesterday, when it was unseasonably warm in the middle of winter. The other two were running around together and I brought Mac out with us and placed him down on the ground in the backyard--he was just a baby. Our grass was brown and dormant from the winter with a smattering of fallen leaves, but for him it was magic.

And I watched as his eyes looked down and he carefully extended his arm and his hand felt the cool grass, and he took a handful of dried leaves and listened as they crackled in his fingers. And a while later, as I was working on the fence that needed mending, I looked and saw he had crawled over to our red and yellow Little Tikes car that everyone has or has had. He'd pulled himself up on it and found water collected in the grooved space behind the seat and he put his hand in it and was lightly splashing the water, his eyes locked on what he was doing, his mind churning to take in all the newness he was seeing and feeling--this whole world he was coming to know.

I don't know what a prayer is, writes Mary Oliver.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to
kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed...

Which makes me wonder if I had witnessed my son's first prayer.
Which makes me wonder if I know what prayer is at all.

III.

And if the grass in winter is worthy of that kind of surprise and wonder, how much more a person? Anne Lamott tells a story about an eight year old boy whose sister was diagnosed with a blood disease. He was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents told him his blood was probably compatible with hers, and, if so, he could be the donor. They asked if he could test his blood and he agreed, and it turned out they were a match. So they asked him if he would be willing to give a pint of his blood to his sister so she could live. He told them he would have to think about it overnight.

He came to his parents the next day and told them he was willing to give his sister his blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was laid out on a gurney next to his little sister, they were both hooked up to IVs. A nurse drew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then dripped into his sister. The little boy lay there until a doctor came to check on him and ask him how he was doing. The boy opened his eyes and asked the doctor, "How soon until I start to die?"2

IV.

Where is the one who is wise? Paul asks. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Has not God revealed the deeper magic from before the dawn of time that teaches us what is finally true and good, something so true and good that with it and through it, death itself starts working backwards?
And wasn't there a time when we knew it by heart?
What would it take to relearn the way there?
And where are the wise ones who could lead us?
________________
1CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Ch. 13
2Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 205

Impossible, Too

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16, The Second Sunday in Lent

Scott Dickison · February 25th, 2024 · Duration 16:29

Impossible, Too
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

In the biblical story, the covenant between God and Abram and Sarai marks a turning point in human history. Last week, our reading from Genesis told of a different, earlier covenant, that God made with all of creation following the flood. But here, God makes a more targeted sacred promise, not with all of creation, but one couple, one family, who will be the primary vessel of God's blessing to the world.

And to mark how this covenant will change Abram and the course of his life from this time forth, he is given a new name. He will now be Abra-ham, which may mean something like "father of a multitude." This new name is forward-looking. Abraham is to live up to and into his new name.1

Likewise, Sarai, too, is given a new name. She will now be Sar-ah, possibly meaning "princess," but also linguistically linked to the name "Israel," for Sarah will be the mother of God's future people. She, too, is given a new name to mark this new identity, this new trajectory of her life as a vessel of God's purposes in the world. And it's worth noting that while tradition has focused on God's covenant with Abraham, all of these promises are restated for Sarah. She is not simply included in Abraham's covenant, but is presented as an equal partner in this sacred promise with God.

I.

Names are powerful things in scripture. They are vessels of identity and even destiny. The names of places memorialize important events that happened there, and people are named to lift up certain qualities, or even foreshadow the shape their life will take. Abraham and Sarah's boy will be named Isaac, meaning "laughter," remembering how Sarah laughed when she was told she would conceive in her advanced age. We're told in the gospels that Mary's baby will be named Jesus, Yeshua, in Hebrew, which means "God saves," for he will save God's people from their sins.

And name changes, too, are especially powerful symbols in scripture. Later on in Genesis, Jacob, which means "one who supplants," foreshadowing the trickery by which he would take his brother Esau's blessing, will be given the name Israel, which means "one who struggles with God," after wrestling with God by the river at night. This new name becomes a powerful testimony to the change in course in his own life, but also to what it means to be the people of God--we are those who struggle with God.

In the New Testament, we can think of the Pharisee and enemy of Christians, Saul, taking on the name Paul after his experience meeting the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, marking a dramatic shift in his life and the life of the church.

Of course, names can be important today, too. Naming a child is one of joys of becoming a new parent, often rich with meaning, and a way to connect generations of family with the passing down of names. I never met my grandfather but always felt a special connection to him through my middle name, Howard, which was his--or Howie, as he was known.

And the changing of a name remains a powerful symbol of a turning-point in one's life. I remember on the drive with my parents to drop me off at my freshman year at college, sitting there in the backseat and contemplating going by my middle name as a way of starting fresh. Scott was a good enough guy, but Howie, well, he could be anything! When we arrived I was greeted by an upperclassmen offering to help unload the car, and when he extended his hand and asked my name, I told him...Scott.

Some make a name change in marriage, others to mark and make a new identity, a break from their families or their childhood or a part of their past they feel is dead and gone, in ways that can be tender or difficult, but also life-affirming.

Other times our new names are given to us. It's traditional for those hiking the Appalachian Trail, especially thru-hikers aiming to hike the whole 2,200 miles, to be given a "trail name." This is not a name you can give yourself, it is given to you by others you meet along the way. Many of you know that our own Lesley Ratcliff will be spending a month on the AT for her sabbatical later this spring and when we discussed this upcoming adventure at the deacons meeting last week, we all agreed we will look forward to hearing what name she comes back with. We can even add it to the website.

You may have the perfect grandparent name picked out, but it will pale in comparison to whatever garbled, adorable, phonetic mess that first grandchild spits out, GeeGee or Gaga or Peepaw, which will be its own special blessing, signaling a new season in life--a far greater blessing than you could ever give yourself. And that's exactly what this name change is meant to be for Abraham and Sarah: a blessing that will usher them into who they are to become.

II.

But what is not so obvious in this story is that Abraham and Sarah are not the only ones who claim a new name. God, too, takes on a new name as part of this covenant, marking an important change in God's relationship with the couple and all of humanity, and God's commitment to this new covenant of blessing.2

God claims for the first time the name "God Almighty"--El Shaddai in Hebrew, meaning "God of the Mountain." El Shaddai is among the most ancient names for God in scripture, and is often used in Hebrew poetry, calling to mind how God often appears, on mountaintops, wrapped in fire and smoke.

But here when God introduces this name to Abraham and Sarah, the precise meaning of "God of the Mountain" doesn't seem to be as important as the fact that God, too, takes on a new name to mark this new season in their life together. Or rather, that Abraham and Sarah are given a new name to know God by at this turning point in their life.

And this is how it often is with us, that at critical times of change or transition in our lives, as we come to see ourselves in a different light, we too experience and come to know God in new and different ways. We might even come to know God by different names.

Like many, I was first introduced to God as Father, and in my own prayers still find myself reaching for that name and the relationship it points to. Yet this name has come to mean new and different things for me through the years. When my own father passed, the name Father took on a weight of sadness and memory. And then our sons were born, it took on a measure of joy and responsibility and even fear I didn't know before. It was the same name for God I knew as a child, but now means something much more.

Many years ago I was also introduced to God as Mother, which opened up surprising new ways for me to understand who God has always been for me--God as nurturer and comforter and creator.

In fact, motherhood provides some of the most powerful images for God in all of scripture. The prophet Isaiah when he tells the people who are in exile, "Can a woman forget her nursing child, or not show compassion to the child of her womb? So too I will not forget you, says the Lord." Or Jesus, as he cries over Jerusalem, says how he longs to gather the people "like a mother hen" gathers her brood under her wings.

III.

There are other times when learning new names for God can mean letting go of old ones.

For instance, I used to know God by names like Perfection or Accomplishment. I thought these were what God demanded of me. Or names like Correct--being right was so essential to my faith. Or Fear--which seemed to follow close behind the name Correct. These names introduced me to others; names like Shame or Judgment, because I thought these were to define my relationships with others, or even myself.

There were times when I knew God by all of these names, though looking back now I can't say that God ever gave these names to me. I'm not sure who did.

But while I believe now those names gave me a diminished and inaccurate understanding of God, I can say that in the end they led me to learn new names: names like Doubt and even Unbelief--imperfect names, too, but these names can be very useful and even comforting names for God, for a season. They're often exactly where we come to know God more. Where God meets us, and hopefully leads us to other, even richer, truer names.

Names like Tenderness and Gentleness. Names like Kindness and Compassion and Acceptance. Vulnerability and Forgiveness and Joy. And it's funny, as we said last week, I learned the name Joy about the same time I learned that Sorrow, too, can be a name for God, out there in the wilderness. God is mysterious that way. In fact, Mystery has become one of my favorite names for God. Like El Shaddai, "God of the Mountain," it reminds me there is so much of God that is beyond me, and that it's often in the parts of life and my relationships with others that are out of my reach or beyond my understanding that God waits to be found.

It's so essential that we find these new names for God to mark the growth we come to know in our lives and in our faith. To mark new insights, but also struggle. Even suffering. In fact, if we have not learned any new names for God over the course of our lives, we might ask if we've been listening when God reveals them to us, and the testimony of scripture is that God does reveal them.

There are hundreds of names and images for God in scripture, each lifting up a different quality or characteristic of God, or different experience with God. And when we add to these the names for God that have been revealed to us in our own lives, it must be true that there are at least as many names for God as there are people who have encountered the power and presence and mystery of the divine in their life.

Language is so powerful, as we tell our boys all the time, as a way to remind ourselves. Words are the most powerful things in the world. But even words are so limited, so insufficient when directed to the One who is beyond words, or in describing those transcendent moments of encounter we pray to have from time to time. No name for God is complete. But the more names we learn ourselves or share with each other, the more we are opened to a richer and fuller understanding of who God is and can be for us.

IV.

This season of Lent we find ourselves within is the perfect time to learn new names for God and let go of others.

It's likely there are some names for God we find we don't use as much any more. Names that may have served a purpose at a time, but have lost their meaning for us. Maybe this is an invitation to put those aside.

But likelier still, through the years, new ways to understand who God is for us and where God can be found have been revealed to you. Often in places and experiences we may at one time have thought it was impossible for God to be.

This may be just the season to take hold of those. After all, it's in the early light of Easter morning, and the coolness of the empty tomb, that we learn Impossible, too, is a name for God.
____________________
1Terrance E. Fretheim, The Book of Genesis, in the New Interpreter's Commentary. Fretheim's commentary was helpful in shaping this sermon. 458-459
2Fretheim, again

God of the Wilderness

Mark 1:9-15, The First Sunday in Lent

Scott Dickison · February 18th, 2024 · Duration 14:19

God of the Wilderness
Mark 1:9-15

Several years ago I had an opportunity to travel to Israel and Palestine with a combined group from the church I was serving at the time and the local reformed Jewish temple--similar to trips I understand our church has taken in years past. It was a transformational few weeks of learning and seeing and discovering that I have thought about a great deal over these past months.

It was during that trip that I learned of a Palestinian Christian organization called Musalaha, which is Arabic for "reconciliation." For years this group has worked with Israeli and Palestinian youth to heal the divide between their people. One of the things they've learned in their work is that the first step toward reconciling, which is to sit down and talk to people on the other side and get to know them on personal level, is perhaps the hardest.

At first they tried just to bring the youth from both sides together in classrooms or some other setting in their hometowns, but they found that even if they could get these kids together in the same room -- which was difficult enough -- they wouldn't engage each other. They were too close to home, too close to their friends, their parents and all the other voices from so many directions that closed their minds and their hearts to each other. There was simply not enough space for the Spirit to move, we might say. And so they decided to go someplace where space would not be an issue.

They began taking groups of Palestinian and Israeli youth on what they call "Desert Encounters," out into the area of wilderness near the Dead Sea. Their mode of transportation is camels, of course. The youth ride two-by-two, paired with someone from the other side. There's usually some friction at first, and even some occasional aggression or posturing, but the further they get into the wilderness and away from their world at home, the closer they get to each other, or perhaps what they share in common, and maybe, we can say, closer to God. And before long, to an outsider, it would be difficult to tell who is who.

Out there in the desert wilderness, with all the comforts and trappings that shape our world stripped away--the homes and neighborhoods, but also the prejudices and histories--it's only when all that is gone that these youth are able to see things as they really are, painfully and beautifully.

And this has been true for the people of God in the wilderness for generations.

I.

It was from the wilderness of Mt. Horeb that the prophet Elijah witnessed God pass by him not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but in the sound of sheer silence--or the "still, small voice."

Or Jacob, returning home after years away, spends the night by himself in the wilderness before reuniting with his brother Esau, whose birthright he stole, and finds himself wrestling with the angel of God until the sun peaks over the horizon, and the angel tries to escape and Jacob says those haunting words of wilderness faith, I will not let go until you bless me.

And of course, Moses and the Israelites, after being delivered from bondage in Egypt make their way through the wilderness for 40 years, where they are tried and tested, and fail repeatedly--it was one thing to get the people out of Egypt, but quite another to get Egypt out of the people. But it is in this wilderness that they receive God's covenant and truly become God's people.

Time and time again in scripture, usually at some time of transition, or change, or even loss, the people of God find themselves out in the desert, in the barren, open wilderness, where their interior is mirrored in their exterior, and in their vulnerability are able to experience the presence of God in a new way. And of course these two are directly related: it's when our hearts and our spirits are left exposed that God finds a way in. It's when we're no longer sure of who we are, that God reveals who we might become.

II.

And now here is Jesus, still dripping wet with the waters of his baptism, when the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. It drove him, Mark says, the same way Jesus will soon drive out evil spirits. Jesus is sent out into the desert by the same Spirit that blessed him in his baptism, as if this season in the unknown was a kind of prerequisite to begin his ministry, for him to truly be the face of God in the world.

Richard Rohr says we are only able to be a guide for others as far as we ourselves have gone. Was it that in order to feed the hungry Jesus would need to know hunger himself? In order to cast out demons in others would he need to face his own? To truly be present to others, would he need to know for himself what it feels like to be alone? Maybe it was true that in order for Jesus to be who we needed him to be, he needed to know something of the wilderness, the wilderness that is an unavoidable part of every human life.

It's worth noting, too, that Jesus was faced with this time of testing not before his baptism, but after it, a reminder that there is no promise that our lives will be easier after we accept the call to follow. In fact, in many ways, we're promised quite the opposite. My mentor, George Mason, who for many years was senior pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, at each baby dedication, after he had walked the child around the sanctuary, introducing her to her church family, pointing to the people who would love her and care for her and teach her the story of our faith, would pray on behalf of the church that this beloved child of God would have a good life, not an easy life. We know there is a world of difference between the two, but this is perhaps too hard a prayer for a parent to pray for their own child. So this is a prayer we need the church to offer on our behalf.

A life of faith, a life following in the way of Christ, is almost guaranteed not to be easy--there are too many crosses. But our prayer, and our deep hope is that this life we claim and would pass on to our children, would be good, in the richest, truest sense of the word. And one of the surest ways we have to make it so, is the promise that we need never live this life alone. In fact, it may be that the true gift of the wilderness for Jesus is the same for those youth on the backs of camels, and the same for us, that it is out in the wilderness that we find each other.

III.

Isn't it true that it's our own wounds that allow us to tend to the wounds of others with care and understanding.
It's only when we have known the depths of heartbreak and loss that we can truly offer a light to someone else in her own.
It's only when we know defeat, or disappointment, or honest to God failure, that we are we are able to offer a hand capable of holding, that we have a grip strong enough to lift them up.

It is a mystery of life and faith, Paul tells us, that in time and with patience and intentionality, our place of weakness can become our place of strength; that it's our seasons of brokenness that allow us to be made whole, because they open us to others, broadening our lives in a way that we alone and intact are incapable of living.

The poet and essayist Ross Gay, puts it this way,

Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about...how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classroom to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" [she said] Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness--perhaps the densest wilder in there--thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)--is our sorrow?...It astonishes me sometimes--no, often--how every person I get to know--everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything--lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted...Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything...

Is this, sorrow...the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is--and if we join them--your wild to mine--what's that?...

What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying.

I'm saying: What if that is joy?1

IV.

This is the journey we make each year in this season before us; the journey from sorrow to joy. We begin with Jesus in the wilderness and end with the light of Easter morning, light that is only possible because of the darkness of Good Friday. The long hope of Lent, which is the miracle and mystery of resurrection--of love that is stronger than death--is that the wilderness of sorrow, when navigated together, can be a gateway to joy. In fact, there may not be another.

We're not driven out into a place that is foreign or remote, but instead are invited to open ourselves to the wildernesses we all have deep within us. Wilderness we perhaps have closed off, that we have pushed down and all but forgotten.

The invitation is to stand before it, to live within it, through prayer or reflection or simple quiet, or even a commitment to small acts of self-love and gentleness, with the promise that the further we explore our own depths, the more we will find each other, and the God who promises to meet us there.
________________________
1Ross Gay, "Joy Is Such a Human Madness," from The Book of Delights, 49-50

Youth Sunday

Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

George Watson and Kennedy Cleveland · February 11th, 2024 · Duration 9:29

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

To Be Determined...

Mark 1:29-39, The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

Rabbi Joseph Rosen · February 4th, 2024 · Duration 9:34

To Be Determined...
Isaiah 40:21-31, Psalm 147:1-11, 20c, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:29-39

Peace be with you.

I am grateful for the tremendous opportunities our congregations have created through these regular interfaith exchanges. I thank Revs. Dickison, Ratcliff, Poole, and Treadway for our friendship, support, and guidance. How wonderful it is for spiritual relatives to be present with one another, to sanctify these moments in time together.

During the pandemic, I discovered one of my new favorite bands, AJR. A line from their song, 100 Bad Days, says, "Maybe a hundred bad days made a hundred good stories. A hundred good stories make me interesting at parties." AJR's line on cashing in on the tough times in life for some attention is undoubtedly opportunistic. Yet, recognizing that opportunity is how we endure the bad when those hardships grow from burdens to tools of our resiliency. When we share our stories of perseverance, we can celebrate the attributes that brought us to the other side: having tough skin, finding creative solutions, being fast on our feet, or showing unwavering compassion and love.

One of my favorite stories of endurance comes from Chuck Yeager, the pilot who flew the Bell X-1 and broke the sound barrier for the first time. Two days before the test flight, Yeager was riding a horse when he fell and broke his ribs. Fearing that this injury would disqualify him from the mission and a shot at history, Yeager kept the injury a secret, telling only his wife and a close friend on the project. He went to a civilian doctor off the base to save it from his superiors. On the day of the flight, when he was in great pain from his accident, he broke off a broom handle, smuggled it with him aboard the B-52 that would drop the Bell X-1, and used that to leverage the hatch of his cockpit. God only knows how well the victory of supersonic flight served as Chuck Yeager's painkiller that day.

These stories of resilience that capture our attention provide an avenue to gratitude. Rather than just hunger for attention, we can share these moments as meaningful for all when we convey how we gain new perspectives and provide lessons to each other. Our sacred text embraces this attitude when offering prophecy in peril. The theology of the Israelite experience is grounded in struggle when Jacob receives the name Yisrael, which translates to "he who wrestled with things human and divine." Our reading from Isaiah 40 this morning speaks to the Jews in exile after God delivers them into the hands of the Babylonians.
"Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? 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.1

God admits some agitation in response to allowing our grief to overcome us. We're challenged not to let anguish distract us from the wonders of the natural world, our most accessible source of encouragement. Where our troubles are framed to be so minute compared to the cosmic drama unfolding around us, we are asked to witness miracles of creation as a humbling experience. We're reminded of what little control we have, and we marvel at the rest, a grand mystery that invites constant curiosity.

We're put in our place when we marvel at the universe. We recognize certain privileges that enable us to feel that sense of wonder. Thank goodness the airbags went off so that I'm still breathing after the crash. I'm thankful the insurance came through to help me. I'm grateful I have family and friends to lean on when the going gets tough. And we remember not everyone has the resources to overcome obstacles. So, when we feel gratitude for the gifts of life with each breath, we also see our obligation to use our abilities wherever possible.

Jesus exemplifies devotion to this attitude in Mark's Gospel after he performs exorcisms and healing miracles at Simon and Andrew's house, where the whole city had gathered to watch at the door. Early before daybreak the following day, Jesus seeks solitude for prayer, which he is forced to conclude when Simon and his companions come along, saying, "Everyone is searching for you."2 Jesus' ability to sacrifice personal parts of his life is remarkable. Even in prayer, he is vulnerable to interruption and compelled to resume his ministry. We're not brought into Jesus' private thoughts, only his public-facing persona. It's a lonely task he pursues selflessly, eventually magnified when he accepts the meaning behind the terrible fate at the end of his life.

Paul similarly exhibits this devotion in 1 Corinthians: "For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them."3 He reflects on Jesus' self-sacrifice, acknowledging how he sets aside his sense of self to become a living embodiment of Gospel teachings. He willingly chooses the burden of constantly adjusting his persona to build trust in new relationships.

Jesus and Paul's triumphs are eternally tethered to communal transformation. These revered teachers understand the power of self-sacrifice when bringing presence to others' lives motivates them. Likewise, sharing our captivating episodes of endurance can be done similarly. We want to grab each other's attention when we share our hardships, but that's only the surface. The true transformation from such experiences happens when we exchange new perspectives.

Every Thanksgiving, I spend time driving from Mississippi back home to Minnesota. This year, on the way back from Minnesota, one hundred miles from home, outside Grenada, my drive was cut short when a deer jumped from a ditch in the median and straight into the bumper on the driver's side. I don't remember much of the impact, just that suddenly I was hyper-alert when I saw that the airbags had deployed, and the hood of the car flipped up, blocking the windshield and a 200-pound doe from crashing through it. Two strangers pulled over to help me while we waited for police and a tow truck. My insurance came through; my dad drove down his Hyundai to give it to me. This was the most dangerous I've ever lived, and it was padded with privilege. I walked away with a new car, no dent in my bank account, and a slight headache. When I spoke with my dad, he said you could use this for a sermon someday. So here I am now telling you.

"Maybe a hundred bad days made a hundred good stories. A hundred good stories make me interesting at parties." But it's nothing more than clickbait if I can't find something more significant to do with it. For the past few months, I've defined those subsequent actions as to be determined. And I found meaning in the Jewish blessing for surviving a life-challenging experience. When recited in the congregation, the language is not personal; it is communal.
Mi shegmalchem kol tov, Hu yigmolchem kol tov. Selah

May the one who has bestowed goodness upon us continue to bestow every goodness upon us.
And let us say: Amen.
__________________
1 Isaiah 4:20-21
2 Mark 1:37
3 1 Corinthians 9:19

A Healing Word

Mark 1:21-28, The Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

Scott Dickison · January 28th, 2024 · Duration 15:01

A Healing Word
Mark 1:21-28

Several years ago, just after I graduated from seminary, I worked for a summer in the chaplaincy office in a large hospital in Boston. I have so many memories from that hard and holy summer, in which I gained incredible admiration for chaplains. But I think of one patient more often than most. She was in the later stages of ovarian cancer and I was first called by the nurses to go and visit with her after she learned the severity of her diagnosis. We sat together several times over the next few weeks as she made her way around the various units of the hospital.

I remember easing into her room that first time and introducing myself, my body language almost apologizing for being there, and finding my way to a chair at her bedside. I tried to talk to her about her diagnosis and how she was feeling about everything, but she made it clear that all she wanted to do was pray and read scripture, and so that's what we did. I turned to the psalms, thumbing first to Psalm 27, and read:
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?--

but before I could go much further she waved me off, "No that's no good."

So, I turned to another one, Psalm 121,
I lift up my eyes to the hills--
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth--

"No. No good either."

So, I started looking for another psalm that might bring comfort, when she said,

"Why won't you read to me from the Gospels? I want to hear a story about Jesus healing someone because that's what I want him to do for me." "Of course," I said. So that's what we did.

I.

And as I've thought about this exchange since, I don't believe I'd been consciously avoiding those stories that are so plentiful in the Gospels, and especially in the Gospel of Mark, like ours this morning of Jesus healing the man with an unclean spirit, the first public act in his ministry. But I also know that either through my training or my own sensibilities I hadn't thought those scriptures were what was needed in that moment. Might it do more harm than good to focus on such a narrow understanding of physical healing in the face of such a serious diagnosis? Might it be better to focus instead on divine comfort and presence? The promise that God is with us no matter the trial? Maybe.

But the farther away I've gotten from that day, the more I've come to understand that my hesitancy to read from those gospel stories of healing in that moment and so many others had a lot to do with my own discomfort with them. My own struggle to know what to make of them, and how to incorporate them not only into my understanding of who Christ was but who we can expect Christ to be for us, now.

And I don't think I was alone. I think it's natural to wonder how to square these miracles and even the supernatural worldview that they happen within, one filled with demons and unclean spirits, with what we know of modern science and medicine. One approach has been to try and explain these stories through our modern lenses. Perhaps what the scriptures call demon possession we would call epilepsy, or some other clinical diagnosis. And this may work to a point, but it doesn't get us much closer to understanding what happened when those afflicted get in the presence of Jesus and are healed. But more importantly, I think, nor does it take seriously the "demonic" forces in our midst.

I remember another encounter, years later, listening over the phone to a friend who was calling from the hospital where his teenage daughter had been admitted with a very pronounced eating disorder. He described the pain and helplessness of watching his daughter at war with herself, one minute seeing her there in the bed before him, and the next someone who was not her. He said, "If that isn't the demonic, I don't know what is."

What word could better describe addiction? Or the throes of severe mental illness or the lingering effects of trauma? From an even wider lens, can't fear and hatred take on almost supernatural qualities? Aren't they all "demonic," in a sense--how a fever takes hold of us and we become something are not? The world is a mysterious place, and perhaps more mysterious still is the human mind and heart. Scripture honors this mystery, and we dismiss it at our own peril.

II.

Of course, to dismiss these stories would also be to dismiss a major part of Jesus' ministry and who the gospels understood him to be. Jesus was a healer. This is why so many crowds gathered around him: the hope that he would relieve suffering, heal infirmities, for them or those closest to them. In fact, when we read them slowly, aren't some of the most moving stories in the gospels those of long-suffering people finding relief, or of parents bringing their sick kids to Jesus, hoping to God he can save them? Healing is at the heart of who Jesus is, and the promise of a relief from suffering in this life or the next is the very essence of the good news.

In fact, the Greek word for "salvation," sozo, literally means "to heal," or "to be made whole." Which leads me to wonder how much hurt could have been avoided in the church through the years if we'd understood "salvation," or our need to be "saved," less in terms of being "rescued"--from hell or eternal punishment--and more in terms of "being healed?" If salvation wasn't so much about being right and more about being restored, being made whole again.

What would change about our approach to faith and discipleship if these were our goals? For one thing, I think faith and discipleship would seem more natural to the shape of our lives and how we continue to grow and change over a lifetime. Outside of the gospels, healing doesn't come in an instant. In fact, few things of value do. Wholeness is not immediate. Life is lived over the long haul. Newly planted seeds don't immediately pop out of the ground as mature plants. The sun doesn't appear overhead at midday and disappear at night. It slowly rises and slowly sets, with each moment in between offering some new and different light for us to live by. To notice this is so incredibly healing. I believe it can even save your life, one breath, one day, at a time.

III.

I'm not sure I could tell you the moment I was saved. That is not a category that I can speak to.

But I can tell you how after many years there now are days when I am able to see my former self with more compassion and less embarrassment. Not every day, but some days. I can tell you about how at different times my wounds have been tended to by the kindness and compassion of others, who have been Christ to me. I can tell you how there was a time when grief had hollowed me out, but in time, love and memory and life have filled me up again.

I can tell you I have seen people who thought their life was over, whether from loss or misfortune or their own mistakes, who in time and with tears and the humble, persistent presence of others have been astonished to find that they are alive again. These resurrections take longer than a weekend--Jesus was special in that way. But haven't you seen it?

When the good news is that healing and growth and wholeness are possible--the hope for change that's not cheap and fast, but precious and slow--then salvation isn't a box to check, it's bulb to plant. It's not a race to run, but a journey to savor. And we are not competitors trying to get there first, but fellow pilgrims helping each other along.

And if salvation--the reason for Jesus' coming--is really about being healed, then doesn't that clarify who we're called to be for each other and the world? What would change if we understood the church's purpose in the world as being a place and a people of healing? A place committed to the healing of our community? Isn't that a crucial difference: not saving our neighbors, but healing our community? A place committed to the healing of families? The healing of people? What would this look like? What would it involve? What would it demand of us?

Would it soften our hearts toward our neighbor, remembering that everyone has their own wound somewhere, whether they have found it yet or not?
Would it make us more attentive to the suffering of others, often quiet?
What new relationships and partnerships would it open up if we created a space to find each other in our most tender place?
What conversations would be possible?
What change might come--slowly?

IV.

Mark tells us the crowds coming out to Jesus were amazed by the authority of his teaching, that it was unlike anything they'd heard before--and we are told the content of his good news. He was preaching the love of God that was wider and deeper and longer than anything that would keep us apart from it.
He was preaching the radical welcome of the Holy Spirit capable of dissolving any barrier between people.
The nearness of God's Kingdom that is so close we can touch it, or it us.
The promise of abundant life now that shows us something of how it will be in the world to come.
This is what he was teaching--this was the authority he claimed. Such an ancient message that still feels so new.

But in my experience it is also true that the ones who speak with the most authority about matters of the heart are the ones who have plunged its depths themselves. So I wonder what pain Jesus carried that made him so attentive to the suffering of others? Was it some portion of the tenderness God must feel watching the harm we inflict on each other?
Or did even the Son of God, even in the life he had before the the story of his ministry begins, know loss or hardship, or even regret? I don't know.

But what I do know is that if we as the church are to speak with the same authority about the nearness of a God who is capable of healing the world's suffering, great as is, then we must be a people at home with the truth of our own need. And when we commit ourselves to that holy work, I believe we will find that God is even closer than we imagined.

Leaving Our Nets

Mark 1:14-20, The Third Sunday After Epiphany

Scott Dickison · January 21st, 2024 · Duration 11:12

Leaving Our Nets
Mark 1:14-20

In the biblical imagination there are at least two different ways that time is spoken of, two Greek words: Chronos and Kairos.

I.

Chronos is time that we experience in minutes and days and weeks and years--time that we measure with clocks and calendars, and we try our best to organize to the point of mastery with new daily planners and productivity systems and strategies that promise to change your life--I love my bullet journal. Chronos time is important, and even essential.

But Kairos time is different. Kairos time is hard to measure; it's time that we feel.

Kairos time is what Bob Dylan meant when he sang, "The times, they are a changin'," or what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he said, "The time is always ripe to do what's right."

It's what your grandmother means when she says to call her "whenever you have the time." The time is now!

Kairos time is what you mean when her water breaks and you look at each other and say, It's time.

Or when you sit someone down and tell them, I think it's time we talked.

Or what the nurse who's been sitting with your father means when she calls late at night and says, It's time you come. It's what you mean when you hang up the phone and say to yourself, I thought we had more time.

Kairos time. It can be revealed in a moment, but it's often a moment that marks a new season, when we sense something more is happening. That something is different now, and there can be no going back.

II.

Kairos is the word Paul uses in the passage from 1 Corinthians we read earlier, when he says, "I mean, children of God, the appointed time, (the Kairos) has grown short" and goes on to say how now that Christ has come, life will be different. And not just different, but turned on its head--"the present form of the world is passing away."

And it's the word Jesus uses here in Mark when he emerges fresh out of the wilderness, where he'd been driven after his baptism--that he'd received from John in the Jordan River after he must have sensed in his own mind and heart that the time had come for him to accept the calling that had been given to him at birth--and he began to preach the sermon that would be his life, saying, "The time (the kairos) is fulfilled! The Kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe the good news!"

The time is fulfilled. Things are different. Jesus announces that we have left one season in the life of the world and entered another. The Kingdom of God has come near--literally it says the Kingdom of God is "at hand," it's so close you could touch it, or it could touch you. For people of faith, to understand the Kairos of time is to feel God's presence within our lives at a particular moment or in a particular season. It's sanctified time, time in which God's purposes are revealed and experienced, or can be if we are open to them. Kairos is what we mean when we have a sense that some larger intention has been uncovered. When we tap into something deeper. It's when we find ourselves to be on holy ground.

And the Christian witness is that Kairos is not so much something from the outside that is interjected into particular moments or seasons. The Kairos, the holiness of time, is always happening just under the surface of our Chronos. God's purposes are always alive and being carried out whether we're aware of it or not; time and life and the ground we walk on are always holy, whether we are attuned to it or not, the Kingdom is always so close. So we give thanks for the times when it reaches out and touches us.

III.

I am not the Broadway lover in our home (I feel like most households have at least one--it is not me). But I do think of Meredith Wilson's classic, The Music Man, the story of Harold Hill, a con-artist who weasels his way into the town of River City with a plan to sell band instrument to the naive townsfolk's before skipping town with the cash. And everything goes according to plan until he starts to fall in love with Marian, the town's librarian and piano teacher, who at first is skeptical but starts to fall for Harold, too. And this moment when she professes her love to him is captured in the production's most enduring song, and one that Harold sings back to her later in the story, "Till There Was You."

There were bells on the hill
But I never heard them ringing,
No, I never heard them at all

Till there was you.

There were birds in the sky
But I never saw them winging
No, I never saw them at all
Till there was you.

And it continues with music and roses and fragrant meadows of dawn and dew, until finally,
There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No, I never heard it at all,
Till there was you.

The Kairos of things, the Kingdom of God revealed--by love--within the Chronos of life. The bell on the hill was always there, same with the birds in sky, the music and roses and fragrant meadows--it's a little cheesy, this is Broadway after all! There was love all around, so close, but she never heard it singing, until it touched her and then suddenly it was everywhere.

I think the same is true for us at different moments of our lives, maybe in ways that are less sentimental, but maybe not. When something happens--some measure of love or joy or sorrow or the joy that can only come from sorrow-- and something is revealed, and you can't unsee it. Birth, death, diagnosis. A defeat, an unexpected blessing. But it's not always these big moments either. One of my favorite memories of my father is of him sitting on the couch at my aunt's house and absolutely losing himself in laughter watching the movie Wayne's World. I was a teenager and I'd never seen my dad laugh like that. Tears, running down his face, his body just limp and useless. It's not an exaggeration to say it completely changed who I knew him to be, that he was a man capable of that kind of joyful abandon. He'd always been that way, I'm sure it was always there, so close. It was just that I'd never seen it "'till" then.

It's what we hope happens in baptism, that we'll see things anew, as we hadn't seen them before. See people as we've never seen them. See ourselves. It was always there, we were always God's beloved...Or maybe it's this new sight that leads us to those waters. It's what we hope to do in some small way in the time we set aside each week to gather in this room with these people, saying these words, singing these melodies, holding this silence. We hope through these movements to reveal the Kairos of life within the Chronos of this hour. To learn how to see and feel these things in here so that we might better see and feel them out there. To build our muscles of attentiveness to the presence and purposes of God in our lives.

IV.

So that when Jesus walks by, on a day that began like any other, and issues a call from the lakeshore into the routine of our lives to come and follow, and begin something new, reaching out to us, we too will be found ready to leave our own nets behind.

The Most Beautiful Word

Mark 1:4-11, Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Scott Dickison · January 7th, 2024 · Duration 10:42

The Most Beautiful Word
Mark 1:4-11

Of all the beautiful words in the Bible--and the Bible is a book filled with beautiful, beautiful words--there is perhaps none more beautiful than the word "beloved."

It's a word so beautiful, so holy, we scarcely find it outside of Scripture. The way it rolls from the tongue, the way the voice lilts at the end; not "beloved" but "belov-ed." Something ancient, something mystical. But of course, what makes this word so beautiful is not simply how it is said, but what it means, what it declares, which is that you are loved. How powerful that is? Is there anything more powerful?

Scripture tells us this is the word the early church used to address each other: as "beloved," or "God's beloved." It's how Paul addresses the church in almost every one of his letters: "To God's beloved in Rome," "Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immoveable, always excelling in the work if the Lord."

"Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, pure, pleasing, commendable, if there is anything of excellence or worthy of praise, think on these things."

And in the letters of John: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God...Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another." And we should--the word "beloved," after all, first comes to us in the New Testament not on lips of John or Paul, or any of the disciples, or even the lips of Jesus--no, the word beloved first comes to us upon the lips of God. Matthew, Mark and Luke all agree that as Jesus was coming up out of the waters of the Jordan River, a voice comes down from the heavens and rests upon him saying, This is my Beloved Son, of whom I am well-pleased. They're the first words God speaks to Jesus, and even more than this, they're the first words God speaks to anyone in the Gospels, and so they are God's first words to us: You are my Beloved, you make me so happy. (My translation.)

I.

How powerful, how beautiful, how necessary it is to know that you are God's beloved. That this is who you are in the eyes of God, and so this is who you are. Before you are anything else, and despite what you do or what is done to you, this is who you are first: you are "beloved." This is the promise of Scripture, the promise of faith--the promise, in fact, upon which all the other promises rest. Forgiveness of sins, communion of saints, life everlasting--it all begins here with the truth of our belovedness.

Philosophers have a theory that there is a certain kind of love that has the capacity to bestow worth on the beloved. "Love as attachment," it's called--Miroslav Volf writes about this beautifully.1 He says for example, in The Velveteen Rabbit, that classic children's story, what makes the little rabbit, inexpensively made as he is, so much more valuable than just any ol' stuffed animal sitting on the shelf, is the love of the little boy. The little boy who takes to it, and holds it, cherishes it. It's a love, we're told that has the power even to make this toy bunny rabbit "real."

God's love is this way. It is an "attachment" kind of love, a love that rubs off on the beloved and makes it something special, something valuable, something real. And since God's love is for the whole world, for all people and all of creation--all the plants and animals and all the creepy things that creep upon the ground--then there is no thing or no person to whom God is not attached. And so all are "God's beloved," and so all are simply "beloved." All are worthy of love. And in the Christian faith, baptism is when we claim this truth of our belovedness for ourselves.

II.

You see, we've missed the point of Jesus' baptism and ours if we think it has to do with him or us becoming something different. Yes, we may use it as a marker to change how we live. Yes, something may change in how we see ourselves and how we see God--but not in how God sees us. For God, baptism is much more about us accepting who we have been all along.

Jesus didn't become God's Beloved Son in whom God was well pleased at his baptism--no! He had been those things since that silent night we celebrated just two short weeks ago when Mary and Joseph and however many farm animals welcomed him into this world. It was in his baptism, in his coming forward to accept his calling, that Jesus embraced who he already was. And the same is true for us.

You don't become God's beloved in baptism. You are that long before you enter the waters. God will not love you any more once you are sprinkled or dowsed or emerge dripping wet--God cannot love you any more than God already loves you, because God's love is complete. In baptism we say before God and the people of God that we accept this love, that we embrace our own belovedness, and promise to do our best to remember it and live in light of it, and see it in others, as Jesus saw it, all our days.

III.

And so while we will surely say it many times in the year ahead, this Sunday is good reason for us to say it here at the beginning: Church, you are Beloved. You are beloved of God.
God is attached to you, to us, and to all people--impossible as it may seem at times and despite the many voices in the world that would tell us otherwise. But the Christian promise to the world is that it's true. This is our testimony. A testimony of which we routinely and painfully fall short, but it is our testimony nonetheless.

And so it isn't up to anyone to convince us, or persuade us of their belovedness before God. No, beloved people of God, it is up to us to see it in them. To look for what God sees, for what God loves, and at times to name it for them, so when the time comes and the Spirit moves in such a way, they will come to know it in and of and for themselves. That they will know they are Beloved, that most beautiful word. Amen.
_____________________
1Miroslav Volf, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Public Faith in Action, p. 201

Holding Together

Luke 2:22-40, The First Sunday after Christmas Day

Major Treadway · December 31st, 2023 · Duration 15:10

Holding Together
Luke 2:22-40

Today's gospel lesson has a liturgically familiar feel to it. Though, outside of the two turtle doves, it doesn't really fit with the Christmas season as laid out in the Hallmark version of the church calendar, we do here find Jesus going to his family of faith for the first time -- still a baby. And just like good Baptists, Mary and Joseph are bringing Jesus for a baby dedication -- of sorts.

I expect that the swaddled baby Jesus was in his family heirloom white baby dedication gown, smock, shirt, dress -- what do you call those things? I should probably know by now. But you know the one I'm talking about, baby Jesus is likely wearing it in a nativity set in some of your homes.

As Simeon offers the greeting, he tells everyone that Mary and Joseph are bringing their child forward to be dedicated to God in the presence of the people of God. A few moments later, after Mary and Joseph have brought Jesus to the front of the Temple, Simeon takes him and carries down the middle aisle. After saying all the things that one might expect, "this child's name is Jesus Josephson.... I am bringing him out among you as a sign and symbol that just as he is a child of his parents he is also a child of this congregation...," there is a shift. Where it might be expected that he would talk about all the ways Jesus might be cared for and be involved in the life of the congregation, Simeon, instead, offers a song to God about the child Jesus: "you are dismissing your servant in peace," "my eyes have seen your salvation," "a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel."

Mary and Joseph are still standing at the front, nervous about what mischief little Jesus might get up to while he has such a large audience, prepared to jump in and rescue Simeon should the need arise -- though it never does, he's practically a baby whisperer. When Simeon returns to the waiting parents and hands Jesus back to Mary, rather than offering the customary kiss of peace, he turns to Mary and says that Jesus "is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed -- and a sword will pierce your own soul too." Words so dark and harsh, that the long-time prophet Anna, rushes in to offer praises to God and to speak about Jesus to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Every time I read this passage, I am struck by the quick and harsh words from Simeon to Mary. I don't know if I somehow manage to forget them between readings because of the beauty of his earlier song or because of the delightful reminder that the religious leader in this passage, the prophet, is a woman. But it is always there, joy and peace side by side with grief and hardship.

This juxtaposition is not new for Mary. She's been through a lot already. Remember last week, when she was visited by an angel who told her that she would bear the son of God and she was "perplexed" and "pondered." An announcement to which she responded, "Here am I... let it be...." I do not think that Mary was surprised by Simeon's joy nor even by his dark words. In the story she is silent. No crying she makes.

Instead, we find her right where we expect to find her, going to the temple at "the time for their purification according to the law of Moses." They offered a sacrifice according to what is stated. And they found themselves among the people of God engaging in the practices of their faith community when these words were spoken. One assumes that there has been a lifetime of preparation that has led her to this point -- a generations long faith that has demonstrated for her what it means to be a part of a family of faith.

There were many parts of her coming experience with Jesus that she could not anticipate and there were many that she could, but there seemed to be an understanding, based on a lifetime of practice, that it was in the practices of her faith and among her family of faith that would allow her to go through that which she could not go around, that it would be gathered with her family of faith where she would share her greatest joys and deepest sorrows.

Here, at Northminster, our rituals draw us similarly together, as together we draw nearer to God. In baby dedications, first grade bible presentations, mentor Sundays, and baptisms we speak promises to one another. When we fill out pledge cards and give offerings to the church, we make promises to this place. The caregivers find ways to draw close to those in our circles of collective awareness who are in need of extra care and compassion. The widernet committee seeks to find ways to build on the twenty-year friendship this congregation has begun with the folks who live in MidCity. When people marry in this sanctuary, promises are made, families and communities are linked. And when members of our congregation pass into God's nearer presence, one more time we come together to remember the life lived and to surround those who remain with love and community.

A lifetime of holding together, making promises to one another. A lifetime, that for some of us, if not many of us, began even before we were born, carrying forward for generations a faith that we learned to embrace as our own. A faith that we extend to the generation that will follow us and live on after our names join the long list of names we remember and call on All Saints Sunday.

This kind of holding together takes a lot of work. It takes time and dedication. It takes sacrifice and presence. It takes openness and vulnerability. It takes all of these things and more. It takes learning the rhythms of this community, submitting to them, and eventually questioning them and finding where the rhythms might benefit from an expanded measure.

I suspect that Mary knew that when she said "here am I" that she would need her community. She knew that she would need to go to the temple on the appropriate days, to make the appropriate sacrifices, to allow her child to be carried by the community and raised in the faith. She knew that it would probably take more than just the appropriate days, and the sacrifice days, and the high holy days. She knew that there was something about being together that made the holding of this child, this child that would "be a sign that will be opposed" that would be a "sword to pierce [her] own soul," a burden that would easy. Though, not easy in the sense that it is light and takes no effort to carry, rather easy in the sense that it fits right, easy in the sense that at the end of the day, makes you that satisfying kind of tired. Mary knew that holding this child would take a community.

She knew this instinctively the way that each of knows it when we come up against a great difficulty. My family learned what this kind of holding together meant more deeply when we came to Northminster just before hearing those dark and terrifying words, "it's cancer." Here, we were held, as you all helped shoulder the burden of those difficult days. The daily, weekly, and annual rhythms of the life of this place providing structure and comfort, when the rhythms of our daily life had to shift dramatically.

This kind of holding together that allowed Mary and those gathered at the temple that day to hear and overhear Simeon's words among them and to Mary, was the same kind of holding together that allowed this community to weather the COVID pandemic, making room for many types of responses, adapting the ways we interacted, worshipped, fellowshipped, scattered, and gathered holding tightly to the togetherness that was being threatened -- trusting that the togetherness would hold.

Throughout the many years of the life of this congregation are countless stories of burdens held collectively, of joys spread out and multiplied. You each have stories of when you have been a part of the sharing -- though it is possible you were not aware of the meaning of your presence. And if you cannot remember a time when you had a difficulty that you needed to share, if you stick around here long enough, you will. Not because this is the kind of place that attracts wounded people who need to share their burdens. But because that is the story of being human. No life is lived without some hardship that would not benefit from being shared.

And I believe it is also true that when we hold together long enough and strong enough, our capacity to hold together across time and distance increases as well -- allowing us to be apart but still together, creating opportunity to draw, not just individuals, but communities together, further expanding the limits of what we can hold.

Dear family of faith, it is only when we hold together that we can embody Dr. Waley's prophetic charge to and description of this place: "We agree to differ. We resolve to love. We unite to serve." And it is only together that we can hold both the joy of Simeon's song and the weight of his words of truth to Mary. Holding together. Together holding.

Amen.

Courage and Love

Luke 1:26-38, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 24th, 2023 · Duration 17:01

Courage and Love
Luke 1:26-38

She was likely a younger girl, as was the case with betrothals in those days. Promised to Joseph but not yet married, still living in the house of her parents, thinking ahead, preparing for the new life she thought was on the way, the plans she thought God had for her. When suddenly the angel of the Lord appears and shares with her something far different, something far...more. And when we look closely at this "Annunciation" story in Luke, it's clear that Mary herself was something far different and someone far more than we often remember.

I.

Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you, the angel greets Mary.
And then Luke tells us, with typical understatement, "But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be."

Excuse me?!
An angel of the Lord appears out of thin air and this girl is perplexed and pondering?!
Even the angel seems a bit confused by her response--maybe a little caught off guard--assuming messengers of the divine can be caught off guard. He tells her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

And of course, scripture is littered with these words of divine reassurance. The people of God are called, over and over again, not to be afraid. And most every other time this command, this invitation, not to fear is found in Scripture, the person it's said to is afraid.
Moses was terrified when he saw the burning bush.
The disciples out there stranded in the sea of Galilee were scared to death.
Even the shepherds watching their flocks by night just one chapter later in Luke were "sore afraid," as Linus put it. But Mary, here when the angel of the Lord descends upon her was...not afraid. At least not as far as we're told. "Much perplexed," but not afraid.

The angel goes on to tell her what is to happen, how she will conceive and bear a son and name him Jesus. How he will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David, and he'll reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end--and Mary, not overwhelmed with all this talk of the Messiah, instead wonders about the mechanics of her role in it.

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the angel responds, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you--the same word used here as in the opening chapter of Genesis to describe the Spirit hovering over the waters of the earth at creation. The angel tells her about Elizabeth who in her advanced age will bear a son, letting us know this is part of a bigger story, and closes this whole annunciation--a churchy word for announcement--by saying another divine promise we're told over and over again in Scripture, which is directly linked to the command not to be afraid, which is, For nothing will be impossible with God.

It's true. Whenever the people of God are told to "not be afraid" in scripture, it is almost always coupled with some version of this promise: "for nothing will be impossible with God."
Do not be afraid, we're told, for God is up to something.
Do not be afraid because there is more to this moment than you can see.
Do not be afraid because there is more to you than you can see, and if you could see it you would know you have nothing to fear.
Do not be afraid, the angel tells Mary, for nothing will be impossible with God. And Mary--much perplexed, inquisitive, captivated, but so not afraid--responds with another classic biblical refrain,
Here am I. Let it be.

II.

Denise Levertov, in her poem, "Annunciation," considers the weight of this scene, focusing her gaze on a moment we often rush past, for it's no bigger than the space between two sentences in our Bibles. That moment in between the angel's invitation and Mary's response, a moment, she points out, that was so critical, because it could have gone either way:

...This was the moment no one speaks of, when Mary could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,
Spirit, suspended,
waiting.1

It's quite a scene to imagine: the announcement, full of pageantry and grace, issued in confidence just off the angel's lips, now hanging there as the young girl Mary takes it all in, ponders her situation, perhaps weighs her options, content to let the silence expand in the space between them--is that where Jesus got it, his comfort with silence?

What if Mary's response was not predetermined? It's a possibility that opens this story up for us in a new way. Of course, scripture doesn't say and so we're in the realm of holy imagination here, but for me, it somehow means something more to consider that Mary had a choice in the matter, and that this wasn't something that was simply thrust upon her, to bear the incarnate Son of God into the world. It somehow means more, to me, if she could have said "no." Because that means that her "yes" was truly a "yes"--that considering all the angel presented her, she found it within her to shake off what would have been a very understandable "no," and find room in her heart to truly say "yes."

And without taking anything away from the singularity of Mary's annunciation and the invitation offered to her to bear God's Son into the world, I believe when we consider and celebrate the choice she had, and her ability to say yes or say no, that her story can become our story in a new way.

Denise Levertov continues,
Aren't there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman, [they are]
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

Isn't this true, as well, in a way that on most days may come to us like cold water in the face, but perhaps on this day, this fourth Sunday of Advent that is also Christmas Eve, we might have ears to hear: that perhaps the annunciation to Mary was not really so out of the ordinary. If perhaps there aren't annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Critical moments when we're given an invitation to participate in God's dream for our lives, even to bear God into the world--if in much smaller ways. Most of these annunciations, of course, come without the clear presence of an angel standing before us, telling us plainly what is to happen and how we fit into it all and why this is all good news. But all the same, don't these invitations come?

How many young girls did the angel Gabriel appear to before Mary?
Were there other annunciations that were--naturally, understandably--declined before the angel found this one who found within herself the courage and the love, to say, Here I am. Let it be?

III.

And the bond between these two--courage and love--is worth considering on this of all Sundays.

There is, without question, a sweetness to the Christmas story, the story of Jesus' birth, as there is about the story of any and all births. A "pinch-your cheek-ness," a "touch your chest, curve your shoulders, raise your voice-ness." Of course there is. But not far underneath that sweetness--that presenting quality of love--there is something much bolder. Much stronger. Something, as Krista Tippett likes to say, much more "muscular" about this love.

There's a courage, here, in the story of Jesus' birth, as there is in the story of any and all births, as there is in the story of any and all love. In fact, without courage, I think we can say, there can be no love, because love always involves some risk. Always. In romanic love when we open our heart to another there is always the risk that it will be broken, that our vulnerability will be exposed or exploited. There is always the risk we will lose them. Isn't grief the cost of love?

In the love of a parent for a child there is so, so much risk. I remember when Billy, who is now 10, was still a baby and we were still so overwhelmed with it all, so utterly helpless before our love for this little one, Audrey looked at me one night after putting him to bed and said, Love is terrifying.

Still other loves. The kind of love that occurs beyond the bonds of kinship and family, the love we are called to have for our neighbors--which is a word that when we say it means one thing, implying a closeness: the people with whom we share a zip code or a street or a fence. But neighbor is a word that when Jesus says it means quite another thing, which is the people with whom we feel a distance, the people we would rather not love, or the people whom the world tells us we need not love. In short, Jesus means the people who are hard to love. Love your enemies, he says elsewhere, famously, which hardly seems like good news. There is rarely sweetness in this kind of love. Precious little "pinch-your-cheekness." Which means that when it comes to those times and relationships we must look to and lean on those other parts of love to sustain us: the strength, the boldness the conviction. This is when love absolutely must be muscular, to hold us there in that moment when we would rather be anywhere else. To focus our gaze, to pry open our heart and our hands, that we didn't know were clinched so tight. This, too, is when love must be courageous: when we don't want any part of it.

IV.

How many annunciations will there be in this year ahead?

How many invitations given to participate, even in some small way, in the bearing of God's love into the world. For you, for me, for us?

How many times will a messenger of the divine descend or, perhaps more likely, steal upon us, issuing an invitation, revealing a chance that presents as a dilemma, maybe not telling us how it will be, but sparking our imaginations to how it could be, what good could come, what blessing could be shared--should we consent to let God come and dwell among us, grow within us?

I don't know the answer to that question. But here is what I believe:

I believe angels will come, because I believe they do come, though we know them not as such.

I believe they bring holy invitations, divine annunciations to bear God's love into the world as with Mary, or like Joseph to participate in the unfolding of God's purposes, or Elizabeth or Zechariah for that matter--there are many annunciations in the story of Jesus' birth, reminding us we're never asked to bear God's love alone.

What will come this year?
Who will come?
What answer will we give?

Will this be the year we let old wounds heal?
Will we let new possibilities grow?

Will this be the year when we commit to breathe deeply,
when we stand squarely,
when we look brightly,
when we speak kindly,
when we hold dearly,
when we imagine wildly,
when we love--when we love-- courageously?

Will this be the year?
The good new is that it will be.
It will be, if we let it be.
______________________
1"Annunciation," by Denise Levertov

Like Those Who Dream

Psalm 126, The Third Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 17th, 2023 · Duration 1:01

Sermon begins at 33:46

Like Those Who Dream
Psalm 126
For Christians, the 126th Psalm is perhaps not one of our more well-known psalms. It certainly is not in the pantheon of, say, the 23rd Psalm, which so many of us can recite or at least mumble through by memory, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want"--always in the King James.

And it may not even be in the realm of others we have written upon our hearts: "Be still and know that I am God," from Psalm 46, or Psalm 121: "I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where will my help come?"

But in parts of Judaism, Psalm 126 is among the most beloved and well known psalms, recited at the end of meals during the sabbath and other regular times through the year. And it's so special because it describes one of the most profound moments in the history of Israel, when the exiles in Babylon returned home to Jerusalem, in ecstasy and joy:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

It wasn't real, it was too good to be true. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations,
"The Lord has done great things for them." The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced."

I.

But it's interesting, there's some disagreement about when, exactly, this psalm was written. Some believe it was written as it appears to be from the opening stanza of the psalm, which is after the return from exile, looking back in thanksgiving on what God had done.

But others believe this psalm of deliverance may have been written while the Israelites were still in exile, and in its poetic imagination it looks ahead to describe what it will feel like when they are finally delivered and return home, whenever that will be.

And both are possible. Verb tenses are fluid in Hebrew and it's not always clear if something is happening in the past tense or present or future, especially in poetry or song. And so you may have noticed that our translators change the tense mid-psalm, beginning in the past tense and moving to the present:

The opening reads:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter...

And then there's a break, marked in most Bibles by a space between these two stanzas, that almost invites us to catch our breath and brace ourselves as we return from the warmth of future hopes to the coldness of the present:

Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, the seed for
sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

It could be that the first stanza, remembering when those in exile returned home and how they felt like they were in a dream, is actually a dream, and in reality they're still waiting in exile for God to make things right. Which in some ways intensifies the hopefulness of this psalm: to speak as if God has already done these things, to allow oneself to fully rest in that feeling of return and wholeness, while sitting in an uncertain present.

II.

The "in-betweenness" of this psalm makes it a perfect psalm for Advent, for Advent is a season in which the church acknowledges and sits in the tension of "here, and not yet." It's a season in which we wait in anticipation for things that have already happened: the story of Christ's birth, the miracle and mystery of incarnation. And yet we also look ahead to a time when Christ will come again, when wrongs will be righted and tears wiped from our eyes, when crying and pain and death will be no more. Yes, Christ has come, but our world is not yet perfect. Yes, Christ is here, but also, not yet.

And even more, this psalm speaks in particular to this Third Sunday of Advent in which we lift up joy, because it knows that deep and difficult truth that joy is found only on the other side of sorrow. The two are linked in that way. And it may be that the depth of our joy is determined by the reaches of our sorrow. As the poet Marie Karr has put it, "However deep the wound is, that's how deep the healing can be."--and those words, "can be" are so important, for there is no promise that it will be. That depends on so much time, and tears, and not a small amount of grace. Whichever side of exile they were on, the psalmist knew the hard relationship between sorrow and joy. The psalmist knew it, and so do you. You know the relationship between these two, sorrow and joy, and so often it is this time of year that we feel it so deeply.

This is a season of memories, which makes it a season of tenderness.
I think it's important that we say, maybe especially in church, maybe especially on this Sunday of joy, that this time of year can be hard. It can be hard, and that's okay--the tenderness, the sorrow, the longing. It's very often this time of year when we find ourselves closer to the "not yet" than the "here." In so many ways this is the good news of this season: that the story we tell over the coming year begins here, waiting in the dark for the light to come.

And so we light these candles on our wreath for hope and peace and joy and love not because they're what we feel in the moment, but because they're what we long for. What we wait for.

It is because we've been given so many reasons for despair and cynicism that we light a candle of hope.

It's because we've witnessed so much violence that we light a candle of peace.

It's because we've known so much sorrow that we light a candle of joy.

And it's because there's so much to fear that we light the candle of love.

This is the posture, and in many ways the challenge of Advent: to imagine a world that has not yet come to pass, at least not completely, and to speak of it as if it's so close that in some ways it is already here. As if in our speaking we make it so.

And it's been that way since the very first Advent. It's the posture Mary took when she sang her song of unbridled joy when she was finally able to share in this thing that had happened to her with her cousin, Elizabeth. What we now call the Magnificat:

My soul magnifies the Lord, she sings, and my spirit rejoices in God my
savior...for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God's name.

The Lord has shown strength and scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

Remember, Mary sings of all of this before Jesus has even been born! None of these things had happened when Mary, her womb still growing with the wild possibilities of God, sang them. In so many ways, they still haven't. But for Mary, the truth of God's nearness was so powerful it was as if they had already come to pass. Now, I believe Mary, like all expectant mothers, did not need to be reminded that the child had not yet been born. But I also believe, like all expectant mothers, that didn't make the child's presence any less real. That didn't keep her from being among "those who dream" of what is to come. There are some blessed times when we find ourselves closer to the "here" than the "not yet."

III.

Jim Wallis, the great preacher and speaker, tells a story from years ago before the fall of Apartheid in South Africa when he was part of a US delegation that went to support the religious opposition to that oppressive system, led by archbishop Desmond Tutu.

They were at a worship service at the Cathedral of St. George, in Cape Town, this beautiful Anglican church, when the African Security Police--that branch of the government charged with enforcing the brutal apartheid--stormed into the church during the archbishop's sermon.

He stopped preaching as the intruders lined the walls of the cathedral, surrounding the congregation. Many were armed with guns, but some of them also held writing pads and tape recorders to capture what any bold prophetic utterances he might dare to speak, that could be used as evidence against him. The archbishop and others within the faith community had already been arrested just weeks before.

Tutu met their eyes and after a few moments said to them, "You are powerful, very powerful, but I serve a God who cannot be mocked!" And then he looked at the armed men and his stern gaze softened into a smile, with his typical warmth, and he said to them, "Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!"

The people went ecstatic. Wallis says the crowd was literally transformed by the bishop's words of imagination and hope. They had been cowering in fear at the sight of the heavily armed security forces that greatly outnumbered the worshipers, but in that moment they found themselves leaping to their feet, shouting praises of joy to God--and they even began to dance. They danced past the police that lined the sanctuary, out the doors of the cathedral to meet the military forces waiting outside, who hardly expected a confrontation with a group of dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, the security forces backed up to provide space for those people who had sewn in tears to erupt in shouts of joy as they "danced for freedom in the streets of South Africa."1

IV.

Since you have already lost! The Mighty One has done great things for me. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

The first blooms of joy rooted in the soil of sorrow and hardship. Glimpses of light shining in the darkness, which, it turns out, is the place light shines best.
Visions of what could be, so close it is as if it is already there, already here--here, and not yet.

There will be moments this season, and likely there already have been, when we find ourselves closer to one than the other.

There will be moments when we find ourselves sitting in the "not yet" of things. Not yet hope, not yet peace, not yet joy, not yet love--and where we must be at times. And so in those moments the invitation of this season is be at home where you are, trusting that the light we wait for is strong enough to find you.

And there may be other times, praise God, when we find ourselves closer to the "here" of it all. Hope is here, peace, joy, love--all here. And in those moments the invitation of this season is to hold that light for others. Gently, tenderly, warmly--a simple candle will do. But just hold it, bearing witness that it is there, that it is coming.

Wherever you find yourself in this season--and it may change, perhaps many times--know that you are still a part of the story we tell, not just in these few weeks but throughout the year. Know that all of it is needed--the here and the not yet and everything in between--for us to speak the truth about Christ's coming, and God's great dream that, in the end, somehow and someway, all will find their way home.
____________________
1As told by Jim Wallis in God's Politics, adapted.

Now. Here. This

Mark 13:24-37, The First Sunday of Advent

Scott Dickison · December 3rd, 2023 · Duration 11:09

Now. Here. This.
Mark 13:24-37

No matter how many Christmas lights we see up around town, or how many of us have already trimmed our tress--which the Dickisons plan to do today-- we can always count on the lectionary to keep us from slipping too far into the holiday cheer here on the First Sunday of Advent, with these words from Jesus near the end of the Gospel of Mark.

I.

"Keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake!"

This is not exactly a message for holiday cards:
Keep awake this holiday season, love the Dickisons.
May you and yours be gathered among the elect when the Son of Man comes!

We may have thought we'd gotten through these apocalyptic visions over the past few weeks as we brought the previous church year to a close in the Gospel of Matthew, but just as every end is also a beginning, so it is here--a reminder that we will be telling a different story and keeping a different time from the world around us not just in these weeks leading up to Christmas, but in the year ahead.

And as we have been saying over these past weeks, these challenging passages about the end times that come in the gospels as Jesus was nearing the end of his own life make the most sense when we hold them alongside the Jesus we know from the gospels as a whole, and remember what he spent his life and ministry to this point doing: opening people, opening us, to the life that's around them in the present. The birds of the air, the lilies of the field, the children running around him and the disciples, the children running and laughing and passing notes in church. The tiny mustard seed, the bread rising on the counter. The sheep we've lost, or the coin, or the son. The wound we would hide, or the woundedness in others we might rather not see. Life, all of it, all around us.

You don't know the time or the seasons, he says, no one does. There is no use trying to predict the future. The best we can ever do--and it turns out it is quite a lot, in fact it may well be everything--is to be as alive as we can now, in this moment, this breath, this beating of our heart. This is the value and even the necessity of considering things to come, maybe even final things: their capacity to awaken us to the present, and the life we know and could know deeper, now.

II.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, still early on in Christian history, there came to be a movement of people discouraged by all the many distractions of modern, city life, who believed the only way for them to live out their faith and be present to God was leave it all behind. And so they went out into the desert to seek God through a life of prayer and solitude, and so Christian monasticism was born, in the people we now know as the desert fathers and mothers.

And I'm told that when times were particularly difficult for these early monks, and they weren't sure how they would make it out there--on those days when they were particularly in need of God's presence, or feeling especially vulnerable or distracted--they would focus their attention and their prayer to one word, and repeat it over and over. And the word they repeated over and over was not Jesus, or Christ or Spirit. The word was today.1 Today. Today. Today. Today is where they directed their focus and hoped to find God.

This is what scripture means, what Jesus means, when he tells us to "keep awake." It is a command to be present. The sweeter part of this season we begin this morning is looking back and remembering the birth of Christ, with the shepherds and the angels and farm animals and the holy family there among them. The harder edge of Advent is the part that looks ahead to Christ's return, to a time when swords will be beat into plowshares and we'll study war no more, when wrongs will be righted, when tears will be wiped from our eyes. But between these two, the looking back and the looking ahead, Advent begins by inviting us, prodding us, perhaps even warning us, to be here, in this moment, today.

To not let your mind wander to the past, to all the things you wish you'd done or hadn't done. Imagining the person you wish you'd been. Or wandering too far into the future--and not just the very distant future but the nearer future: your list of things to do, errands to run, gifts to buy and wrap, food to prepare, linens to change. Or even more, your list of things to be: Someday I'll be generous or patient or kind or understanding. Those things don't exist anywhere but the present; life does not happen on any day other than today. The poet Philip Larkin asked, "What are days for?" His answer, "Days are where we live." But he was only half right. Today is where we live. This day. Calling our attention to this truth of life and of faith is perhaps the first gift this season brings.

III.

Near the end of his life, Thomas Merton, the great 20th century writer, thinker and Trappist monk, is said to have kept a rule for life rooted in the wisdom of the desert, and certainly in line with these Advent words of Jesus. It was a simple phrase that he repeated to himself in the same manner as those early monks. The phrase was: Now. Here. This. Now. Here, H-E-R-E, This.2

Now--today, this moment, which is really the only moment we ever have.

Here--this place, the place we find ourselves in this moment, and perhaps the wider community of which we are a part.
This--the task or the people at hand, what and whom we have given ourselves to for this time: the work, the rest, the meal, the stroll, the book, the child, the partner, the friend, the face and body and life in front of me, and next to me and behind me.

IV.

Now. Here. This.
Today.
Keep awake!

All different versions of the same song, different translations of the same truth, different directions to the same place, which is the only place we will ever find each other, the only place we will ever find God: the place where we are.

Be here, now, Jesus says, and discover just how much all the things for which you wait and all the things for which we wait in this season are already present among us and within us: hope, peace, joy, love. Maybe not completely, or perfectly--certainly not. But partly and imperfectly, and we may find that these things grow more fully when we tend to them as they are, and nurture them, and help them grow, like we would (can we say here even on this first Sunday of Advent?) a baby.

This is the great hope of this season: that here at the beginning of our year together we would start the long, slow work of training our eyes not simply for the light that is coming, but for the light that is already here, already now, already this.
______________________
1From Fr. Greg Boyle on On Being with Krista Tippett. http://www.onbeing.org/program/father-greg-boyle-on-the-calling-of-delight/transcript/5059#main_content
2Christine Smith, The Ethical Spectacle, July, 2008. http://www.spectacle.org/0708/smith.html

Where Christ Is

Matthew 25:31-46, Christ the King Sunday

Scott Dickison · November 26th, 2023 · Duration 16:32

Where Christ Is
Matthew 25:31-46

At first blush this teaching of Jesus from the 25th chapter of Matthew would seem to be a harsh choice for this final Sunday of our church year together, especially just after Thanksgiving when we're still sluggish on carbs and football and 40% off sales.

And yet the wisdom of the lectionary sees these words of Jesus as fitting because they're the final words of instruction Jesus leaves his disciples in Matthew before the Last Supper and all that would follow. So in a sense, everything he's said and done and taught them over the course of the gospel has led up to this story, this "apocalyptic drama," of the end of days, where "the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him," and gathers all the people of the world and separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats.

But there's no getting around that some of these images are shocking-- it's difficult to hear Jesus speak of eternal fire. And we may find ourselves asking, "Are we to take these things literally?" But when this is the case, I have found it is almost always more helpful to ask instead, "How can I take these words of Jesus seriously?" And if we've been paying attention in the Gospel of Matthew up to this point, what should come as no surprise at all is what Jesus is most serious about--what Jesus says is most important and where and to whom we should focus our attention and energy in the time we are given-- because he's been saying it the whole gospel.

I.

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Give to everyone who begs from you, and don't refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your own family, what more are you doing than others?

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit...Thus you will know them by their fruits.

Whoever becomes humble like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.

Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your servant just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

If we're to take these words of Jesus seriously, we must consider that what truly matters is what he's been saying all along: acts of loving kindness shown to people in need.

II.

Give generously, show mercy and compassion, be humble, serve others--these are the things that matter in the end. In fact, not just in the end--these are the things that matter in the here and now. These are the things Jesus says are the marks of true discipleship. And so it's also worth noting what isn't included.

Jesus doesn't say anything about a creed or a confession of faith or even the confession of sins. Nothing about baptism and whether sprinkling babies is permissible or if full-immersion is the only way to really make it count. None of what has tended to be the focus of the church's many councils and conventions through the generations: the nature of the Trinity, or Christ's humanity or divinity--whether the Son proceeds from the Spirit or from the Father. Nothing about the bread or the cup and what's happening within them or not.

No denominations or tradition. Nothing about a perfect Sunday school record, or deacon service, or ordination. No choir robe, certainly no clerical collar, no tithe, no purity, no perfection. None of that. In fact, nothing about this scene is what we would consider specifically Christian at all.

I remember years ago being asked by my friend Imam Adam Fofana of the Islamic Center of Central Georgia to come and speak at one of their Friday evening services. Seeking to start from some common ground, and knowing the good work they did in our community, I quoted from this story, and said how this is what our tradition says is most important. A hand went up from a man in the back, and when I called on him he said, "Yes, we're familiar with this story, it is in our scriptures too."

Did you give food to the hungry and water to the thirsty?
Did you welcome the stranger and clothe the naked?
Did you care for the sick and visit the incarcerated?
Did you act with love and kindness and compassion to people in need--people who Jesus calls "members of my family."

That's it.

And even more, did you notice how the sheep in this story have no idea they were serving Jesus when they did these things? They didn't know it was Jesus they were serving, and yet here they are in what we can only describe as being in relationship with him all the same.1 Which raises the question of the difference between being a Christian and living a Christ-like life.

Now, it's not that those other things and all the rest of what we do as the church are bad or unimportant. They're deeply important things. It's just that it turns out what's most important are all the things we have a tendency to think are secondary, or perhaps take for granted: caring for people in need with no expectation of reward or without a litmus test of who's deserving or not. Just people, fellow bearers of God's own image, the work of God's own hand, same as us. It shouldn't be surprising, but it is.

III.

And maybe this is the real shocker in this hard story, that once again the focus isn't on what happens in the end, but what we should be doing now with the time we're given. The real point of this story isn't where we're going, but where Christ already is.

"If you did it for the least of these, you did it for me," Jesus says. This isn't a story about what happens when Christ comes back, it's a story to remind us--as we stand at the edge of Advent and the story of Christ's arrival--that Christ never really left. Not completely. We are told where Christ already is.

Christ is with the hungry and the thirsty. Christ is with the stranger--the Greek her is xenos, which is usually translated "foreigner." Christ is with the sick, Christ is with the incarcerated. And not just that Christ is with all of these. Christ is all of these, it says. If you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.

If you've looked in their eyes, you've looked in my eyes. If you've held their hands, you've held my hands--we know those soothing and empowering words of St. Teresa of Avila,

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands and feet but yours, yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.

They're beautiful and absolutely true and good for us to be reminded of again and again--you are Christ's presence here on earth. You are the ones who will bring compassion and peace and love--this is a good thing. But I wonder sometimes if we've become too convinced of Christ's presence with and even in us, and if on occasion we shouldn't turn these words around:

Christ has no body now on earth but theirs, no hand and feet but theirs,
theirs are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.

And this changes things, doesn't it? Because then it's not us being challenged to bring Christ to others, but us being invited to see Christ in others.

Then it's not just us being the presence of Christ for the families to whom we'll provide assistance, as we should, for Christmas this year. It's us being invited to see the presence of Christ that's already there in them.

Then it's not just us being the presence of Christ by delivering Meals on Wheels, or preparing bags of gifts and baked goods for residents of personal care homes--something we've done each Advent for the past 40 or so years, I'm told.

It's preparing these things and delivering them with care so that when we do we can receive the presence of Christ that's spilling out of the homes from them.

It's not just us bringing Christ into hospital rooms or nursing homes or care facilities, or prison cells or shelters, but us going to these places to find the Christ we might never encounter otherwise.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours--I believe that's true. Christ has no hands and feet but yours, no eyes but yours--all true. I believe Christ lives inside you and me and all of us. But I believe it's just as true that Christ lives outside us in others, and maybe especially in certain others. And in those seasons when my spirit has been weak, and I realize I haven't seen or felt Christ's presence in some time, I realize it is almost always because I haven't been looking in the right place.

IV.

Here at the end of the church year and the end of the gospel, after all the teachings, all the parables and instruction, all the healing and miracles to show us what is possible, in the end it turns out there's no secret to discipleship. No hidden wisdom or hoops to jump through, no secret handshake to learn, or prayer to pray, or song to sing or sermon to hear or give. There are only people. There is only, as the writer Annie Dillard puts it, "the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning of where to love and whom."2

No, before this is a story about where we'll be in the end, this is a story about where Christ is right now. Where Christ has been all along. And so perhaps the question for us now and in this year ahead is where and with whom will we be?

__________________
1 Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew, Interpretation Series, p. 291
2 Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Risking Good News

Matthew 25:14-30, The Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · November 19th, 2023 · Duration 15:23

Risking Good News
Matthew 25:14-30

We continue this morning in the latter chapters of Matthew looking at what would be Jesus' final teachings to his disciples, which, beginning with the parable of the ten bridesmaids last week, are presented as answers to questions the disciples have about the end times and what is to come. But Jesus responds to these questions about the future by focusing our attention on the present, as if to say the best way to prepare for what is to come is to live lives of purpose and meaning and intention now.

This morning's parable, or at least it's outline, is surely among Jesus' most well-known. And chances are when we've studied this parable in the past, the talents entrusted to the slaves have been identified as metaphors for the talents or skills or gifts that God has given each and every one of us, "according to our abilities." In fact, the meaning of the English word "talent" has it's root in this parable, as something highly valued that's entrusted to us by God.

And so, as this telling of the story goes, some of us have many talents and others perhaps not as much--but we all have at least one, the parable assures us! So we pray that it's something virtuous like patience or a nurturing spirit and not just being able to shoot water out of your nose. But the lesson is to use these talents, whatever they may be, for the good of the Kingdom. "Don't hide your light under a bushel," Jesus says elsewhere, but "let it shine before others so they may see your good works and give glory to God in heaven."

And this is good and true, and something we can't be reminded of enough, especially in a world that in so many ways would have us believe we have little to offer. And if this is as far as we go in this parable, we would not be wrong, but we would have missed something important.

I.

Some have pointed out it's actually unfortunate that the word "talent" has come to mean what it does in English because it distracts us from the scale and depth of this story.1 You see, a talent was an incredibly large amount of money in those days. One talent represented anywhere between 15 to 20 years worth of typical wages. So if we say the average salary in the US today is around $60,000, then a talent would be the equivalent to roughly $1 million, 2 talents $2 million, and five talents $5 million--this is a lot of money we're talking about here, which is important. Jesus is reminding us that we've been entrusted with something great. So this has to do with more than what we typically think of as our "talents"--playing an instrument or a sport or having a beautiful singing voice or even shooting water through your nose. Jesus is talking about something more. He's talking about not just your light, but your whole life.

The real gift in this story, the talents with which we've been entrusted, is "all of it:" the whole span of life and all the incredible depth of personhood and potential that make up any and all human life, blessings that are new every morning. "This is a wonderful day," Maya Angelou once said, "I've never seen this one before." The opportunity to drink deeply from it all, to render as much out of this time you have been given as you can--and not just for yourself, but also for others. This, too, is at the heart of a life well lived: that it's lived always with others in mind, doing what you can to make sure others have every opportunity to render as much as they can too, because their life, too, is worth a great deal.

We've missed something in this parable if we don't marvel at the sheer generosity of theses gifts given by the master. The first two servants get it. They receive their gifts with thanksgiving and in gratitude and then do all they can to make something of it, with imagination and hope and industry, and are rewarded for it.

II.

But then comes the third servant who took his one talent--still and incredible gift entrusted to him--and he does nothing with it. He hides it in the ground where it serves no one, not even himself. And notice his reason why: he comes forward and blames it on his master, saying, "Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground."

Now, does this sound like the master we've observed to this point in the story? The one who's given indescribable gifts to those under him, entrusting them with this vast fortune? You could even make a case that he's been a little too trusting, maybe even reckless to do such a thing. But harsh? Reaping where he does not sow? Gathering where he did not scatter? Does anything done to this point lead us to believe he is someone who would induce fear?

The root of the problem, it seems, is that this poor servant's perception of the master is off.2 He's somehow missed the qualities of generosity and trust that the others so plainly see, and instead sees someone fearful enough to hide from and wait out.

He sees this incredible gift he's been given not as something to receive in gratitude, but as a burden to bear; not an invitation to grow but a trap to fall into. And this is where I find myself having some compassion for this third servant because the sad truth is that there are too many people who are taught something more like his vision of God than the others'.

The tyrant God who's always trying to catch you doing wrong.
The petty God who holds grudges and keeps score eternally.
Even the outwardly polite God who nonetheless would keep you at arm's length.

The truth of this parable, it seems, is that it's up to us which God we will choose to believe in and order our lives by. And it's also true that we tend to find the God we look for.

If we meet the world with our minds and our hearts and our arms closed, we will see and receive very little and may come to believe very little is out there to be received. But if we can summon enough courage to straighten our backs, lift our gaze, pry open our arms, and unclench our fists, we will find ourselves ready to receive a world of beauty and possibility and the fullness of the God who created it--all that we may not have even known was there.

And it's true, and it must be said, this posture assumes a bit of risk. More than a little vulnerability. It will leave your heart exposed, a bit, and there's no way of denying that. But such is the risk of faith. There was an element of risk to what the first two servants did with what was entrusted to them, no question. They could have lost some of it, or lost everything. But that chance of loss was acceptable to the master. What was unacceptable was doing nothing--simply protecting what was given. "Here is your gospel," José Pagola puts it, "[here is] your project of the reign of God, your message of love for those who suffer. We have kept it faithfully. We haven't used it to transform our life or to introduce your kingdom in the world. We didn't want to take chances. But here it is, undamaged."3

III.

I heard a story once about the late Donald Coggan, former Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England, who was traveling by train through the English countryside, when a young Anglican seminarian noticed him across the aisle. The young student was thrilled, introduced herself, and began to engage the Archbishop in conversation. They spoke for the length of the trip about life and ministry, as the student sought to soak up as much as she could. When the train reached the station, they prepared to part. They exchanged the usual pleasantries: "Dr. Coggan, she said to him, "this was such a thrill. Take care." Then, as she turned to leave, she felt his hand catch her arm. "My dear," he said, "Not take care. Take risk."

Take risk, church!
Isn't this the gospel of Jesus--Jesus who cared deeply, but who risked even more, because of that care? Jesus, who showed us what it means to "risk something big for something good," as you have heard it put in the benediction on the chapel wall? Isn't the good news, in this present time as in all times, that in Christ we are free to risk the imagination and hope and love that faith demands--which in the end is no different from the risk of life--abundant, open-hearted, open-handed life.

Next week is Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of our Christian year together. The following week will be the start of Advent when we'll begin to tell this whole story again, and so we are on the cusp of this season of giving thanks for what has been, and looking ahead to what is to come--which means it is the season of taking stock. What would it mean to ask ourselves--in the most generous terms possible--where and when over the past year we have most lived from this posture of imagination and hope? When have we risked this kind of open-hearted approach to living?

And that sounds grander than I mean it. I mean, where and when did you offer simple kindness in a moment when the alternative is within reach? I mean extending patience just past the point when you realized you needed to be patient--usually by the time you realize you need to be patient, it's over. I mean unexpected generosity. I mean changing your mind, about something or about someone. Teaching your children something you wished you'd learned earlier.

Forgiveness--there is nothing that requires more imagination and hope than forgiveness, both extending it and accepting it.

Was it letting go of old grievance and hurt, finally? Was it giving yourself another chance? Was it, in so many ways, choosing to invest yourself in the things and the people and the ideas that really matter, that are rooted in God's great dream for the world? The God you truly believe in?

IV.

This is perhaps the question before us as we approach the end of the year, that is always a beginning: In what God do we believe, truly?

Which Christ will we follow?
Is it the protectionist, tight-fisted God who would have us bury the treasure of our lives in the dirt so as not to lose it?

Or is it the one true God, the God of creation, of mysterious, miraculous abundance, who has given us much and stands ready to offer even more, if we would receive it, and use it?

___________________
1Tom Long's treatment of this parable in his commentary on Matthew from Westminster John Knox was immensely helpful.
2Tom Long, again
3José A. Pagola, The Way Opened Up By Jesus: A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, found in Anna Case-Winter's wonderful commentary on Matthew in the Belief series.

Prepared By Hope

Matthew 25:1-13, The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · November 12th, 2023 · Duration 17:40

Prepared By Hope
Matthew 25:1-13

I was informed several weeks ago that this would be the Sunday of our business meeting to approve the budget for the coming year, and so it would also be the Sunday in which the yearly stewardship sermon is to be delivered. I was also informed that it needed to be an especially good one since we are running a bit of a deficit this year. And so you can image how relieved I was to see that the lectionary has given us this parable of Jesus about the end times, so we also can be even more uncomfortable!

Would we rather talk about money or the apocalypse? Well, it doesn't matter because we get both.

I.

"The kingdom of heaven will be like this." Ten bridesmaids take their lamps to go meet the groom, five are wise and five are foolish. The wise bring oil enough to make sure their lamps will be ready when the time is right, but the foolish do not. As it happens, the groom is delayed and they all become drowsy and fall asleep, only to awake at midnight with the shout that the groom is on his way. They all go out with their lamps, but the five foolish bridesmaids realize they're running out of oil and when the wise ones tell them there's none to spare they go into town to buy more. But of course, while they're away, the groom comes and when they return they find that they're too late to greet him. Keep awake, we're told, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

This ominous warning for vigilance for fear of missing Jesus when he comes has of course captured the church's imagination, at least in recent generations. I remember being a youth and coming of age during the rise of "Christian rock music" and listening to song after song about the rapture. They were some good tunes--but questionable theology (Though I'll confess I still get nervous when I suddenly find myself alone in the house.).

But notice that the issue here in the parable isn't so much the bridesmaids staying awake--after all, they all fell asleep, the wise along with the foolish. The issue is being prepared. What separates the wise from the foolish bridesmaids is that they were prepared for the groom to take longer than expected. They brought extra oil with them, so when the groom is delayed and the lamps are going dim, the wise are able to replenish theirs and keep their light burning through the night, while the foolish are left without. The wisdom here seems to be not to anxiously and fearfully keep watch, but to be prepared to settle in for the long haul. To be prepared for God's timing to be a little different from our own. For when it takes longer than we would want for God to heal the world, or for God to mend our own broken hearts. To make things right again, or for the first time. The wisdom, it seems, is to take on rhythms and practices that will allow us to keep our lamps burning for the long haul.

II.

I will confess that these days Christ's eminent return does not factor much into my decision making--I hope to the relief of my teenage self. But I suppose I have reached the age when it's become more natural to think about the future, and what I'm doing now, or should be doing now, to be ready for the long run. In fact, that's why I picked up running some years back. After a couple of relatively minor health scares I remember looking in the mirror, literally, and asking what I was willing to do to make sure I would be here for my family and my boys for as long as possible.

Most of us are not wired this way, to think in this future tense--to see the ways what we do now shapes who we will one day be. Or, rather, to be compelled enough to make the changes we should. But these things often come more clearly into view when we take time to imagine a future we want. When we have an image--the clearer the better--of the kind of people we want to be, or bigger than that, the kind of world we want to make, then we can begin to meaningfully ask what we should do now to make that future possible.

Some years back I heard a story about the great dining hall at New College, one of the oldest colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It was built not long after the college's founding in the year 1379 and features a towering ceiling supported with huge oak beams, some two feet across and 45 feet long--think Hogwarts from Harry Potter.

As the story goes, nearly one-hundred years ago the roof of the dining hall at New College was found to be overrun with beetles. These giant oak beams would need to be replaced, which was something of a problem since beams of this size are not easy to come by. Impossible, you would think. At some point it was suggested that they might look on the college's endowed lands, acres of woodlands scattered across the country and run by the college forester. Seeing few other options, a call was placed to the long-tenured forester, presenting him with the problem. He responded, to their great surprise, "Well sirs, we was wonderin' when you'd be askin'."

It turns out that not long after the college was founded, back in the 14th or 15th century, a grove of oak trees had been planted with the purpose of one day supplying wood to replace the beams in the dining hall. And these trees had been nurtured and protected, and this plan had been handed down from one generation to the next, from one forester to another, for hundreds of year, each one of them saying, as the story goes, "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."1

Now that is long-range planning. It's foresight and discipline and not a small amount of luck. But every time I'm reminded of this story I think, what faith. What incredible faith to assume the college, let alone the dining hall, would still be there all those generations into the future. What wild hope to prepare for it in that way. It was that vision of the future they wanted that revealed what needed to be done in the present.

To live by faith is to live from the future back instead of from the present forward.

We begin with the great Christian hope that all of history is moving toward a future of God's dreaming. A world where tears are wiped from eyes. A world where crying and pain and death will be no more. A world where wrongs will be righted, where what is broken has been made whole, what is lost has been found. A world where everything has been made new and all people are welcomed home--a world that Jesus calls here in Matthew "the Kingdom of heaven."

In a sense, as people of faith, we start with the end. We believe that God's vision of healing and wholeness for the world is where we are headed--somehow and someway--and it's from this hope-filled vision of the future that we live our lives. It's from this vision that we find courage enough to risk living a life of faith in the present. This hope in the future is why we can risk things like compassion in a world where cruelty often seems to have the upper hand. It's why we can risk laughter and joy when things can feel so bleak, generosity and understanding in a world of tight fists. It's why we can risk investing in people and in our community and the gifts of creation when the smart money says to hold onto what you have, or find a way out.

When we live by faith, we live from the wholeness we anticipate back, not the pain and disappointment we have known forward. It's from this hope that we're able to meet the trials of life that invariably come. And it's from this vision of the future we want that makes what's needed from us in the present more clear.

III.

I haven't been here very long, but it is clear to me that Northminster has a long history of living from this vision of hope for the future. I haven't heard of any groves of oak trees planted to one day replenish these rafters--though it wouldn't surprise me. But just last week on All Saints Sunday we planted another dogwood in the garden behind us, a tree that grows slowly but in time blooms beautifully--a symbol of what we hope for our grief and the new life we believe is always out ahead of us.

This beautiful campus was build in sections through the years, but I understand was designed decades ago as a whole with the hope that it one day would come to be as it is, more or less. And more than simply the physical spaces, so much of what we do and how we organize ourselves, where we invest our time and energy and resources, is rooted in a clear vision of the future we will one day know--that kingdom of heaven Jesus keeps talking about, keeps insisting upon.

The design of our worship and the reverence and joy that opens us to the God we're told is as transcendent as eminent, the maker of the cosmos who is as close as our next breath.
The shape of our leadership, where women and men alike serve and lead, and all have a voice in our planning, all having been made in God's image. Or the width of our welcome, which we pray is ever widening, as God's circle of love and concern is infinitely so. Or the depth of our giving, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands each year to organizations and people doing good work or who are in special need in our community, because we believe if we all belong to God then we must also belong to each other.

Behind all of these things, or rather, way out in front of them, is a vision of where we are going. A vision of where God is leading us. An image of the future God promises us and all people: of wholeness and of home.

For all the things Northminster is, maybe first all of all we are a people of hope. A people of hope bound by a shared vision of the future. And it's a vision that's been kept alive with each passing generation because when we live from this vision of what's to come, that future has a way of becoming a reality in our lives now, however imperfectly. Much has already been planted here for us to care for and help grow, but I believe we're not done planting either.

IV.

So here's the ask. And it's not so different from the invitation I offer at the end of every worship service, which is to respond. In a few minutes we'll present the plan this church has made for how we will live from this hope in the year ahead, and we'll we'll all be invited to affirm it. But the real response will come in the days and weeks ahead as we each make plans for ourselves and our families for the people we want to be in the year to come.

So as we all do these things I invite you to think of the ways you have seen and known and felt this hopeful future in the present in this place and among these people, and to ask how you can be a part of it--remembering the image of God we hope to bear among us would not be as complete without you.

Maybe for you responding in this way is a practice you've taken on through the years and it's come to be a sacred time of thanksgiving. Maybe this is something you have hoped to do for a while but just haven't made that step. Maybe this is the year. Maybe this is something you never expected to do, to commit yourself to a congregation in this way (and a baptist one at that!), but here you are, having found something you didn't know you were missing.

Maybe you can do more this year than thought. Maybe you can do less than you'd like. The important thing is do what we can and feel good about it. We can feel good about it because we believe God holds the future. And if that's true, there is no telling what might grow here among us.
______________________
1"Oak Beams, New College Oxford," https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-oxford

Where the Church Is

Matthew 5:1-12, The Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · November 5th, 2023 · Duration 9:57

Where the Church Is
Matthew 5:1-12

These verses from Matthew's Gospel, traditional for All Saints' Day, and often known as the "beatitudes," come at the very beginning of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is the sermon, as Matthew tells it, that kickstarted his ministry and in which he outlines how this new community of God's people that would come to be known as the church is to conduct themselves--what will define them, and animate them, and guide them.

But before he gets to the "how" of these things, Jesus begins his sermon with the question of "who." Who will be in this new community? What kinds of people? How will we know when we've found the church--how will we know when we truly are it.

You'll find the church, he tells them, wherever and whenever you find these kinds of people.

I.

You'll know it's the church when you find people who are poor in spirit--which is maybe not where we'd expect this roll call to begin. But to be spiritually poor, the way Jesus means it here, doesn't mean to not have much of a spiritual life. It doesn't mean being downtrodden or deflated, necessarily. To be poor in spirit means to be aware of your own spiritual need. It might include the literally poor, as Luke puts it in his gospel. But Matthew takes it more broadly to mean all those who understand their lives are not in their own control.1 It just happens that when you're literally poor this lack of control over your own life is quite clear to you. Jesus says the church is made up of people who are aware of the extent to which they depend on God and others.

At the heart of this new community will also be people who mourn. People who mourn not simply the losses in their own life, but who mourn the losses of others. People who "weep with those who weep," as Paul would later put it. He just as easily could have said "Blessed are the compassionate," compassion meaning, literally, "to suffer with." Blessed are those who mourn the suffering they see in the world--and there is so much suffering. To some this may seem strange, that a community rooted in "good news" would put mourning at the center, but that's just what Jesus does. And so it's what the church does, on days like today especially, because we know that tears water the ground where hope can grow.

The meek, too, will have a part in the church, and this is an another difficult one. Jesus doesn't mean those without a backbone or who lack courage to do what's right--that's actually the opposite of what he means. This is meek in the sense of being grounded and secure, not feeling the need to play the game of climbing or advancing, or taking or grasping or clinging so tightly. This is having one's hands open. It's these people, Jesus says, who will inherit the earth: not those who take it, but those who receive it.

And he goes on in this way:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness--which is just a fancy church word for justice, which is just another word for working for what's right. Blessed are the merciful--the ones who take forgiveness seriously; the ones who give second chances, and third.
Blessed are the pure in heart--the ones who find a way to hold cynicism at bay; the ones who are able to keep their hearts open despite so much evidence to the contrary. Blessed are those who make peace--not sowing more conflict and distrust and resentment. Blessed are the diffusers--blessed are the Enneagram 9s!

Blessed are those who suffer, Jesus says. Especially those who suffer for my sake, for the sake of what must be right, no matter the costs. Jesus says these all are the kinds of people who will be at the heart of this new community called the church. When you see these people you will know the church is present.

II.

And I think Jesus is onto something here, because when I think of the times in my life when I have been most sure I was in the presence of the church, I don't think of the different sanctuaries I have been in, beautiful as so many have been. I don't think of the children's Sunday school classes or the youth rooms where I was taught so much. I don't think of the fellowship halls and the meals I've shared there, or even the columbaria or cemeteries, and the tears I have shed in those places. When I think of the times I have been most sure I'm in the presence of the church, while it has often been in those places, it has been because I was in the presence of certain people.

People, some who have gone before and some who are still with us, who have in different ways embodied the blessings that Jesus names here. People who showed me how to make peace amid conflict and who kept their hearts pure amid bitterness. People who taught me how to forgive and how to encourage. People who always seemed to know what was right, or at least the next right thing to do. All those people who taught me how to grieve--who showed me how necessary it is, how life-giving it can be. People who had such spiritual wealth but who insisted there was so much they still lacked. All those many, many people whom the church through the generations has called saints--the people in whom and through whom we all have found the church. The people without whom there is no church.

III.

And today perhaps more than most, we're reminded that in order for us to stay the church, the church must regenerate itself, replenish itself with each passing generation or season or year, and so it's necessary to make sure that the bearers of these particular and peculiar blessings do not pass away without someone coming up from behind to take the baton. Someone to make sure these blessings continue to be embodied, however imperfectly, however improbably, for those of us today and those still to come to see and believe.

And understand that none of them who came before were and none of us has to be all of these things all the time--praise God. This isn't a checklist we each must meet at the end of each day. Jesus is describing an inventory of the community as a whole.2 He simply means that among those who would call themselves the church of Jesus Christ, these people must be found, from one generation to the next.

And I know what you're thinking, as you look at these candles and the saints they represent. I know what you're thinking because I hear it to. It's that voice inside your head that says, It's me.

It's us.

Thanks be to God.

___________________
1 Eugene Boring's commentary on these verses were helpful here, The Gospel of Matthew,
New Interpreters.
2 Boring's reflections here were, again, helpful.


Harmonic Love

Matthew 22:34-46, The Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 29th, 2023 · Duration 20:19

Harmonic Love
Matthew 22:34-46
Over these last several weeks we have been making our way through the latter chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, staying close to Jesus and the disciples as as he teaches and preaches about the coming Kingdom. We've watched and listened as Jesus has been locked in a confrontation with the religious leaders at the temple. They argue about a number of things, but behind all of them is a fundamental disconnect between what the religious leaders seem to be most concerned with, and where Jesus says our hearts should be.

They want to know why he eats with tax collectors and people of ill repute, to which he responds, Who will produce the fruit of God's kingdom--compassion and generosity, and gentleness?

They want to know where he stands on paying the tax to Caesar, to which which he responds, Give Caesar what bears his image, but be careful not to give him what bears the divine image, which is you--your life, your love.

All of which has been leading to this final exchange. Seeing how Jesus has silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees huddle together to figure out what to do next, and produce one from among them to ask him a final question:

Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

I.

And it's hard to know exactly what their angle is here. Perhaps they were hoping he would pick something obscure so as discredit him. Or perhaps they wanted to see if he would dare pick just one of the 613 commandments identified in rabbinical theology, when some insisted all were expected to be followed and observed equally. Or maybe they had simply run out of questions and were starting to wonder for themselves what Jesus was really about.

Whatever their motive, Jesus answers them, and begins by quoting a verse from Deuteronomy that is so important to the Jewish faith there's a special name for it, the Shema, which means "hear," from the first word of verse:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength."

And if you were to pick just one commandment to lift up as the most central, the most important, everyone gathered there at the temple would have agreed this was a good place to start--a verse central to Jewish teaching and identity they would have learned as children. But then Jesus continues, and quotes another verse from the Torah, well-known but not as much as the first, this time from Leviticus, saying, "The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these."

Love God and love your neighbor, Jesus tells them, saying in a few sentences what he has been doing his best to live and illuminate throughout his ministry, what he would soon bring to completion, which is that the heart of God does not beat in rules--in do's and don'ts, in this and not that. The heart of God beats in love, and so love is at the heart of the law and love is the heart of the gospel. Love that goes up ad down between God and us, and side to side between us and each other. Love is the greatest commandment. And if you miss that, you miss everything. But if you start there, you'll never be on the wrong path.

II.

St. Augustine said love is the goal of all scripture--the lens through which we're to read the Bible, the only way we can read it clearly. He said if you're reading a passage of scripture and don't understand it to tell you to love God and your neighbor, then you've read it wrong. You need to go back and read it again. He even said that if you're reading a passage of Scripture and don't understand it completely, but assume
that it's teaching you to love greater, then you can't be too far off track. He said you're like someone out walking who leaves her path by mistake but reaches her destination anyhow by "cutting through a field." Love is a shortcut to the heart of God.

And again, these two verses Jesus lifts are not new or obscure. But like elements that react when put together, or colors that are beautiful on their own but when combined create a work of art that is wholly unique, or two people who by themselves are lovely but when they come together in relationship with each other become something or someone altogether different, Jesus takes this central teaching of the tradition and places it beside this other very important verse from the tradition, and when heard together they become something entirely new.

It's like in music when you take a melody that's beautiful in it's own right, but then you add to it a harmony that complements the melody perfectly, and when you play them together you have something deeper, something richer and more complex and more complete. It's almost as if harmony reveals something new within the melody.

Bluegrass harmonies are a perfect example of this--we're not too far from the mountains, are we? Harmonies in bluegrass, and really so much Americana music, aren't complicated, but they're often right on top of each other, and they'll cross over or under each other--almost weaving themselves together. Sometimes they're so close it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, and that's entirely the point.

There's a kind of music that's created in the interplay of these two verses. They do more than complement each other; they inform each other, they make each other richer and more textured. In fact I think it's difficult to understand one without the other.

The first commandment is so big that it can be overwhelming. Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength--with all that you are. Beautiful. But how does one begin to do this? What does it mean to love God? If we're not careful this can devolve into a kind of churchspeak that we hear so often but rarely ask what it means. How do you begin to love something or someone you can't see, or touch or hold? Which is why this harmony that Jesus adds is so important. It clarifies things a bit--it grounds us and gives us some direction. How do you love God with all your heart? You start by loving the things that God loves. Or more to the point, you love the people that God loves. Jesus puts some flesh and bones on this abstract call to love--he incarnates it, you might say. He gives us a face to focus our attention toward. Jesus gives God a body--not simply his own, but so many others.

God has no need for decent, affordable housing, or some one-on-one attention to help him pass the third grade or just to let him know that somebody cares.

You can't make sure that God has food to eat or clean water to drink, or a winter coat to wear when the weather turns.

God has no need for healthcare, or an advocate in the system, a way out of poverty and violence, or a vision and a hope for what life could be.

God doesn't have a sick kid, or parents who are aging, or a family she's estranged with, or a biopsy he's waiting for, or a marriage that's failing, or a spouse who's dying, or a child she fears she's losing, or...

This isn't God's story, but it is our neighbors', and even more than that, this is our story, isn't it?

I believe this is what Jesus means when he says to love your neighbor as yourself. It's not just that we should love them in the same way that we love ourselves--I think God knows as much as anyone that we don't always love ourselves like we should. The commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself because in some small but essential way they are you. Or a part of you, and you're a part of them and we're all a part of God.


And when we begin to see and feel this intimate relationship between loving God and loving those around us and loving ourselves, the truth and the possibility and the challenge of the gospel comes into view. And when we're doing it right, church is a place where we practice this type of dynamic, incarnated, harmonic love.

III.

There are few places where we are taught to care about the life of another as much as we do our own. Or as we were reminded last week, that it is not simply us and those who look like us or think like us who bear the divine image, but all people, everywhere. Where we're given opportunities to come in contact with those we might never otherwise see, offer help to those in need and in doing so have our own need revealed. Where we're challenged to think beyond ourselves and our own experiences and impulses and instincts, and hold them alongside another's.

There are few places where we are invited to share in life deeply and intimately. Where babies are held and blessed and kissed and called God's beloved in the same room in which saints are sent home, blessed, kissed, and called God's beloved. Where else do we sing together, as adults, in public? Where making music is not just for children and professionals, and we're opened to all the joy and intimacy and vulnerability it brings?

Where we are invited in so many small ways to come close to others, so close that we at times stumble upon that great truth of life that Jesus uncovers here, which is that in God's holy imagination it is impossible to live wholly alone. And so we should do our best to make living together as holy as we can.

As many of you know, Audrey and I grew up at church together back in North Carolina. Both of our families were very active in the church, and so the wedding was a big one and all of our parents' closest friends were there. It was beautiful and we wouldn't have had it any other way.

That next summer, we happened to be back home and staying with Audrey's parents for a while, and we received a message on their answering machine. It was from John Spikes--known to most simply as Spike, the tall, gangly, slightly eccentric distance runner who was one of these dear church members who had attended our wedding just a year before. In the message he said he had heard we were back in town and was calling to wish us well on our anniversary.

But then he paused and said something we didn't expect. He said he wanted to thank us for inviting he and his wife, Yvonne, to our wedding. Yvonne, who had been our first grade Sunday school teacher years ago, had passed away not long after our wedding after a long and difficult road with cancer. He said he wanted to thank us for all the memories we had given him.

He said our wedding was the last time he and his wife appeared together in public. It was the last time they had their picture taken together, and our reception was the last time they danced.

And here we were thinking our wedding, and our love, was just about us.

IV.

On these two hang all the law and the prophets: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And what if the whole idea of church is to show the world that this type of love, and this type of life together, is possible? And that this coming Kingdom of which Jesus speaks isn't just a place we hope to one day go, but a relationship we are invited into now? Not just with God but with each other?

Where the melody of love that comes from God and the harmony we add when we share that love with each other--where this music turns into dance.

The Things That Are God's

Matthew 22:15-22, The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 22nd, 2023 · Duration 15:39

The Things That Are God's
Matthew 22:15-22

I remember hearing a story about a little boy some years ago who was told in Sunday school that no prayer goes unanswered, and being an precocious child he prayed to God for $100. He prayed and prayed for two weeks but nothing happened, so he decided to write God a letter requesting the $100. When the postal authorities received the letter addressed to "God, U.S.A.," they were amused by it, and passed it up and up the line, until it finally found its way to the president's desk--so I'm told.

The president was so amused by the the letter that he had his assistant send the boy $50 along with a note from God saying to use it well.

The little boy was delighted with the $50 and immediately sat down to write a thank you note to God that read: "Dear God, thank you very much for sending me the money. However, I noticed that for some reason you had to send it through Washington, and, as usual, those devils took half of it."

This is the Sunday that comes every three years when pastors all over the world get to tell jokes, for better or worse, about "Giving to the emperor the things that are the emperor's.

Of course, the situation then in 1st century Jerusalem was far different than ours here in 21st century Jackson. But there's one thing that hasn't changed much in the 2,000 years in between, which is that questions about paying taxes are never just about paying taxes. There's always something more personal at stake.

I.

It is still the Monday of Holy Week in Matthew's Gospel. Jesus has been locked in debate and confrontation with the religious leaders there at the temple all day. First it was the chief priests and the elders of the temple, and now it's the Pharisees, and another curious group in the Jewish landscape of the day: the Herodians--and this was an odd alliance.

The Pharisees we know well and were a kind of lay-movement in 1st century Judaism, mostly made up of working class people who abhorred their Roman occupiers. The Herodians we don't know much about, other than they were Jews who supported the Roman occupation, which means they were most likely pretty well-heeled and at home at the top of the very rigid social hierarchy of the day. That these two groups would find a common adversary in Jesus should tell us something: that the gospel Jesus preaches rarely cuts along clean lines.

These interrogators have been sent to trap Jesus into saying something either at odds with the law of Moses, or at odds with the law of Caesar, and their plan is savvy. After a lengthy introduction with more than a little flattery, they get to their question, and it's a brilliant one that taps into some of the thorniest politics of their day: Tell us, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

II.

And this question would have been far from hypothetical; this was a genuine dilemma for Jews in living in the Roman Empire.1 Ever since Rome had conquered the Jewish homeland some 70 years before Jesus' birth, they had required an annual tax on the Jewish people. It was required of every adult male, and was burdensome--not simply because of the economic pain it caused, but because of its painful symbolism. It was a tangible reminder that their land and their livelihoods, if not their very lives, were not their own. They belonged to Caesar. So this wasn't just a question of paying taxes, it was also a question of honor, or more accurately, a question of shame.

And even more, the first of the 10 Commandments is very clear that God is Lord alone, and so the question of paying taxes to a foreign, pagan power was also a question of faithfulness. But then again, in the eyes of Rome, not paying taxes was seen as an act of rebellion and they could be killed, so this was also a question of survival.

And aside from the principle of paying taxes at all, there were also questions about the actual currency it was to be paid in. There were two types of coins in circulation in those days. One was used by Jews, and again, in accordance with the commandment prohibiting graven images, had no markings on it. And the other was the currency of Rome, which, as Jesus points out, was imprinted with a picture of Caesar along with an inscription declaring him to be the divine Son of God. Because of this, many Jews wouldn't use the coin for anything other than the tax, and certainly wouldn't want to be caught carrying it around--let alone on the temple grounds--so this question of paying taxes was also a question of piety.

Which leads us to Jesus' response. Now remember, these were leaders at the temple, well aware of the commandment against graven images, who advocated resistance to Rome, and yet when Jesus asks them to bring him one of these idolatrous Roman coins in question, they produce one easily, and so as some have pointed out, before he's even had a chance to get to his punch line, Jesus has already won the argument by revealing the compromise they've made.2 This is like the dear church lady who's mortified when she runs into someone she knows while coming out of the package store...two counties over. (Which is why Audrey's grandmothers used to make sure to go 2 states over!)

Now, Jesus could have stopped there. He's revealed where they are in these things, but he takes it a step further and answers their question. Holding up the coin, he says, Who's head is this and who's title?

The emperor's, they reply.

Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's.

Beautiful. One of those prefect responses you wish you could think of in the moment but never do. But what does it mean?

Now, you don't have to get very far into the gospels to learn that Jesus was very short on quick fixes or easy answers. Jesus rarely intended to settle much of anything once and for all, in fact, his aim was usually to unsettle--to stir the pot, to put bees in the bonnets or ants in the pants, especially of those who would see themselves in the right or on the inside. So it's no surprise that in answering their question he offers another one, and turns it in such a way that gets to the heart of the matter, what's really at stake, and it's not what's owed to the emperor and all the things bearing his image.

For Jesus, the real question is what belongs to God. And if we follow the same logic then we need to look for God's image, and Scripture is pretty clear about where that can be found.

III.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

So God created humankind in God's image, in the image of God God created them; male and female God created them.

The first verses of poetry in the Bible, I'll point out, right there in the opening chapter of Genesis when God creates humans and says they, we, bear the imago dei, the image of God. And not just some, but all--name the full spectrum of male and female would have been surprising and radical in ancient times. It's really shorthand for, "all of us." There is no one whom is not created in God's image.

Give to Caesar what you must, Jesus seems to say--the coins, the tax--fine. Give him the things that have his face on them, but don't let him have the things that reflect God's.

And of course Caesar is more than some dead emperor. He's any lesser power who would claim to be Lord, who would claim your allegiance, but even more, your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength. Yes, Caesar can be the government, or a political party, a social identity--yes. Caesar often bears down on us from the outside in. But Caesar can also be that force that seems to come from somewhere deep inside you, that compels you to work endlessly. That tells you you are only worth as much as you can produce. Caesar is the voice of anxiety, the voice of shame--that voice that comes, at least for me, about 3am, and asks if you're worthy of love, really?

Caesar is whatever would have you believe you're anything less than what God says you are, which is beloved. Called by name by the one true God. Created with beauty and purpose. Imprinted with the image of God in a thousand different ways. Caesar is anything that would have you question whether that's true.

And especially in this season when life feels so fractured, and has for so long now, and the reality of war and unspeakable violence and intractable historical divisions have invaded our collective conscience and utterly destroyed the lives of so many, and left waves of fear and anger and hopelessness that reverberate across the span of the earth, it feels crucial to say that Caesar is also whatever would have you believe anyone else is anything less than a bearer of God's image. Made with beauty and purpose, whose lives are precious.

This is a line--now as much as ever--that we simply must hold. In the end, it may be the only line.

IV.

They come to Jesus with a question meant to trap: should we pay the tax or not, is it this side or that. And Jesus gives them an answer. But then he reveals a more pressing question: the question of what belongs to God. And this really isn't a question at all. It's a promise. It's a posture.

Jesus isn't sidestepping politics. He knows the questions of how we will live together are always important. But he's offering a different politics. A politics that suggests our lives and our loves and our allegiances need not be dictated by those other worldly authorities, whose power is rooted in their ability to divide and defame.

Our politics can be, if we let it, dictated by our shared humanity. By this central theological and spiritual commitment, which when we fully appreciate its implications and demands is finally revealed to be among the most radical, most disarming, most confounding, but most life-affirming claims in all of scripture.

That, "in the image of God" we were created--every last one of us. That we belong to God--all of us. And, church, if that's true, doesn't it just change everything?
__________________
1The Last Week, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, p. 61-65
2Borg and Crossan again, 63

Jesus Is a Banquet, Not a Courtroom

Matthew 22:1-14, The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost

Ed Bacon · October 15th, 2023 · Duration 25:21

Jesus Is a Banquet Not a Courtroom
Matthew 22:1-14

This past Friday, the day before yesterday, I lost my wallet.

It was the day I was to drive from our home in Birmingham to come to Jackson to spend the weekend with you good people -- yes, that Friday, I got up and after my kitchen duties, including feeding the cats, and then meditating for an hour, I began packing. It was time to go pick up from the printer the teaching journals I like to use when teaching with the PowerPoints I have created.

I moved toward my car and I couldn't find my wallet. Yes. That wallet -- containing my credit cards and my driver's license. I started searching high and low. It was not on my bedside table, where I normally put it. As I continued to search, I began wondering how I could pay for the freshly printed journals I needed to pick up right then to bring for yesterday's teaching and the one I will offer at today's lunch. But then as frenzy overtook the nature of my searching, I realized that I could not drive to Jackson without my driver's license. I left my humanity and became a search party, an anxious, non-thinking seeking machine. Then after rehearsing the worst case scenarios, it occurred to me to look in the pants pockets of the suit I had worn to a prayer service at our Alabama cathedral to pray for peace in the Holy Land. After 30 minutes of frantic searching, there the wallet was. Sanity serenity returned, I yelled to my wife Hope that I had found it. I did a little happy dance and went on my way, late by only 30 minutes.

As I drove to the printer's I smiled, thinking that the saga of the lost wallet was the starting story for this sermon on Jesus being a banquet person rather than a courtroom person.

Scholars tell us that most of Jesus's stories end in a party or Jesus's stories are about banquets, as does this morning's readings. And many of those stories about finding what was lost. The woman finding her lost coin. The shepherd finding his lost sheep. The father who lost his prodigal son. The Bapto-Epsicopal preacher from Birmingham losing his wallet. In every case, Jesus ends his story by saying that the person who found what was lost then gave a party -- bring the finest cloak and a ring and bar-b-q some steaks.

The wonderful teacher of alternative orthodoxy perspective on Christianity, first brought this to my attention in his fantastic book, Things hidden. The 10 overarching themes of the Bible. In what for me has become the most important chapter of the book, a chapter named, "The Resented Banquet," he reminds us that not all parties Jesus celebrates are embraced.

For instance, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the older brother who never left home and had been a good boy all his life, comes to his father to complain about the party he's throwing for this dysfunctional second born son of his. He resents that his father is a banquet person. Because, he, the older son is a courtroom person. He keeps score all the time. Filled with his own egoistic list-keeping, he cannot comprehend what God is all about. God is all about unmerited love. The word for that is grace. And we all have a place inside us that can give energy to our courtroom mentality where we see that life is often not fair, according to our courtroom logic. No, life is about love and grace. The only thing with the power to heal, transform, impower, and make things come alive is unmerited love. Grace.

Richard Rohr calls parties and banquets, "Jesus's most common audiovisual aid for his message. Banquets have all the elements of community, equality, joy, nurturance, delight, generous host and open invitation to the 'good and bad alike'" (Matthew 22:10; Luke 14:21) Things Hidden, p. 157

Rohr goes on to write, "The central positive theme of the Bible is the Divine Unmerited Generosity that is everywhere available, totally given..... It is called grace and has been rightly defined as "that which confers on our souls a new life, that is, a sharing in the life of God....Grace is the key and the code to everything transformative in the Bible. .... People who have not experienced the radical character of grace will always misinterpret the meanings and the direction of the Bible. The Bible will become a burden and obligation more than a gift."

And then, perhaps my favorite sentence in this chapter I have been quoting, Rohr write, "I believe grace is the life energy that makes flowers bloom, animals lovingly raise their young, babies smile, and the planets remain in their orbits -- for no good reason whatsoever -- except love alone." Things Hidden, p. 156

The ego does not know how to receive things free or without logic. It prefers a worldview of scarcity, or at least quid pro quo, where only the clever and correct win. It likes to be worthy and needs to understand. Richard Rohr, Things Hidden, p. 156

The flag words for the theme of grace are banquet and food."

And I believe that we can be walking banquets or walking courtrooms. And depending on how much inner work we have done -- whether we think at any given time that God is about separate self-individuals along with heaven or hell OR whether God is about ALL of humanity as a whole within the Whole of the UNI-verse and about caring for the earth -- all of creation --- making choices that are about heaven ON earth -- we can be walking banquets or walking courtrooms.

Oh, Lord, here comes Uncle Earl, the family's "walking courtroom" with all his judgmentalism and condemnations. OR here comes Aunt Elizabeth, the family's "walking banquet," ready to accept everyone unconditionally, dripping with forgiveness, reconciliation, inclusion, and joy. I just feel different when Aunt Elizabeth comes into the room. You can feel it in her atmosphere, in her force field.

Which one are we?

In the midst of the horrors of the brutally evil Hamas terrorist attacks of last weekend, I have been learning from one of my rabbinic friends who has been a consistent Walking Banquet in my life. Rabbi Sharon Brous, founding rabbi of IKAR synagogue in Los Angeles, is her name. I've read all her statements and listened to all her sermons and was delighted that National Public Radio interviewed her along with a Muslim Imam on Friday.

Rabbi Sharon knows the importance of the word, "simultaneously." She knows nuance and complexity and simultaneity and abides in Banquet consciousness. When asked on the radio what she was saying to her congregation she mentioned the pain and isolation of this nightmarish time. She had earlier written, "Added to the pain "as so many of us await word from our loved ones--is the failure of so many people of conscience to condemn these horrific attacks. Some have even celebrated the assaults, in the name of human rights. But kidnapping, abusing and disappearing civilians, targeting civilians for murder--these are not the way of a liberation movement. These are crimes against humanity."

Then she said that, "When we close our hearts to one another's, we create a moral vacuum that only violent extremism can fill. What I am asking is for us to dare to hold the humanity, the heartache, and the need for security of the Jewish people while also holding the humanity, the dignity, the need for justice of the Palestinian people. For too long, these two have been set up as a false binary. In fact, the only liberation will be a shared liberation. The only justice is a justice for all.

"We can gather, again and again in this time of heartache. In theTalmudlearn that in times of sorrow, even when our instinct is to retreat from one another, the most humanizing thing we can do is step closer to each other's pain.

"Let us be tender with ourselves and each other. Call your family and friends in Israel and let them know you stand with them in sorrow and solidarity. Call a Palestinian friend and share your hope for a better future. We can't take each other's pain away, but we can make sure none of us navigates the pain alone. Let us hold each other with love and grace-- https://ikar.org/writings/holding-this-impossible-moment/ Holding This Impossible Moment October 9th, 2023--Sharon Brous

Then on the radio interview she said, "I was on a briefing yesterday, and there was a Bedouin doctor from Soroka Hospital in the south, Dr. Yasmeen Abu-Fraiha. And she's been treating many of the people who came in from the massacre site. And she said the real dividing line is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who believe violence is the answer and those who believe there is another way. And I believe there's another way. And Imam Herbert believes there's another way. And most of us believe that there's another way. So together, we have to reject the very reductive idea that Jews and Palestinians must be enemies eternally and instead create a different way of finding one another in relationship and lifting up and affirming our own humanity and one another's. (https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1205855983/a-rabbi-and-imam-on-how-theyre-counseling-their-communities A rabbi and imam on how they're counseling their communities, October 13, 2023 4:38 PM ET Heard onAll Things Considered ByAri Shapiro)

Rabbi Brous said in her sermon yesterday, "One of the most important questions in life is 'When the darkness comes, who will see you and sit by your side and weep with you. Who will come close?'" AND, weep with those who weep and maintain a banquet consciousness not a courtroom consciousness. https://ikar.org/sermons/lets-not-lose-our-minds-rabbi-sharon-brous/

Last Friday morning after I found my wallet, my preacher brain filled with a question. What has God lost and is frantically searching for right now?

I think God is frantically, persistently, vigorously looking for Peace, for non-violence, for de-escalation of all conflict either in the family or in faith communities or in the world between nations. And while God is searching, searching, searching, God, whose real name is Love and Grace is trying to get your attention and my attention asking, "Will you pour your soul into helping me find Wholeness in the here and now with the people you live with?"

AMEN.

The Fruits of the Kingdom

Matthew 21:33-46, The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 8th, 2023 · Duration 18:17

The Fruits of the Kingdom
Matthew 21:33-46

These few weeks we're spending in the latter chapters of Matthew are one of those occasions when the lectionary doesn't quite match up with the church calendar. This is the prescribed gospel text for this the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in the church year, but in the Gospel of Matthew this scene of the chief priests and elders confronting Jesus takes place on the Monday of Holy Week.

He's ridden triumphantly, if not ironically, through the streets of Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. He's caused a scene at the Temple, turning over tables and driving out the folks selling animals for sacrifice. Later, upon seeing that a certain fig tree on the side of the road is without fruit and instead is filled with nothing but leaves, he curses it and causes it to wither right in front of him, as a kind of metaphor for the question he raises here for the religious authorities of his day, and for us in the church today: where is the fruit?

I.

On the surface this parable is a fairly straight forward allegory for the relationship between God and the people of Israel. The setting is a vineyard, a common image in Scripture for the land of Israel. God is the owner of the vineyard, the people of Israel and especially the religious authorities through the years are the tenants who have been entrusted with this vineyard. The slaves who come to retrieve the harvest only to be seized and killed are the prophets of Israel who were rejected through the generations, and of course the vineyard owner's son, who meets the same fate, is Jesus. Finally, the new tenants given charge over the land are understood to be the followers of Jesus.

But we have to be careful here, because many readings of the parable through the years have tended to take a troubling anti-Jewish tone that's not there in the parable itself, and that hits differently even today in the wake of the terrible war that broke out in Israel this weekend.

To begin with, Jesus was Jewish and never claimed otherwise. And his quarrel in the gospels was never with the people of Israel as a whole, but certain religious authorities whom he saw as corrupt and misguided, and who saw him as a threat to their power. Even more, the church for whom Matthew wrote this gospel was very likely a congregation of Jewish Christians, who would have understood their following of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, not as a rejection of their Jewish identity and heritage but as a completion of it.

So it would be wrong to understand this parable as anti-Jewish. It was told and written by Jews for Jews. It was, however, an internal critique meant to draw attention to the disobedience of the people of Israel and especially their leaders through the generations, and God's welcome of a new people, the followers of Jesus Christ--be they Jew, Gentile or otherwise. This is a widening of the circle.

And here's the tricky part that the church has tended to miss through the years as we've insisted on wagging our fingers at the Pharisees. If we, as the followers of Jesus, claim to be these new tenants in the parable, the ones now in charge of the vineyard, then the responsibility turns to us to bear this fruit. And that part of the story remains open ended. Jesus doesn't reveal whether or not these new tenants were any more successful than the last. That is yet to be seen, and is entirely up to us.

II.

So if we really do understand ourselves to be the ones charged with bearing this fruit of the Kingdom of God, it would serve us well to consider just what this fruit is.

Like the vineyard, fruit is another common image in Scripture. In the Old Testament, especially the prophets, the image of fruit tends to call to mind the goodness and abundance that comes from ordering our lives after God's command, specifically in economic terms, which the prophets thought to be the clearest barometer of spiritual health in a community. Are you treating people fairly and caring for the poor and vulnerable? For the prophets, aligning our actions with God's dream for wholeness and provision for the whole community results in abundance for everyone.

In the New Testament, the way Jesus speaks of fruit is similar: they're tangible signs of the Kingdom of God. Signs of the abundance of the world to come that can and should be cultivated now--things like generosity and compassion and humility. "Do to others as you would have them do to you," Jesus says earlier in Matthew when talking about the kinds of fruit we're to bear.

And of course, Paul probably has the most memorable words on fruit in all of Scripture when he writes in Galatians about the "fruit of the Spirit." You know them--you probably even learned a song about them in Vacation Bible school: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These things, these postures, these habits, these virtues, Paul says, are signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit. And so, we can say, they're signs of the Kingdom of God. For Paul and for Jesus, this side of Glory, the Kingdom of God is not so much a place, but something that happens--something that blooms, that breaks through, right where we are, whenever we align our living with God's dreaming.

Fruits are really remarkable things. Biologically speaking, the purpose of fruit, you probably know, is to protect the seed of a plant and allow it to reproduce, to spread, and flourish. The flesh acts like a kind of bedding for the seed. Everything about a fruit serves this purpose--even that the fruit tastes good. The taste attracts animals to come and eat the fruit and thus disperse the seeds when they take it with them.

These fruits of God's Kingdom work in a similar way, I think. Yes, they're sweet when you taste them in the moment, but under the surface they also reproduce themselves. An act of love leads to another act of love. Joy leads to more joy, peace to more peace, and so forth. They're generative; they spread and live and grow in ways that are at times beyond our control. And thus the Kingdom of God is let loose in the world to grow and spread, like wild blackberries or pawpaw or mayhaws or whatever grew in the fields next to your grandmother's house.

But bearing fruit is not always a passive process, either. Ask any farmer, orchard owner, or migrant laborer and you'll learn there's more to the growth process than just putting seed in the ground and waiting for the fruit to overflow from the basket. Producing fruit takes time, attention, commitment, and effort. You have to work the soil, provide the right amount of water and fertilizer, find the right balance of sunlight and shade, remove all the pests. Sometimes you have to wait years before a plant or a tree will bear fruit. It's hard work. Which is the part the tenants of our story failed to grasp. Instead of working to produce these fruits, they sought to seize them. They tried to skip the important but hard steps of growth and jump straight to the fruits. But this isn't how it works. They didn't understand that the fruits of the Kingdom aren't accomplished in a moment, but over time, with a steady hand, and an open heart.

And this, I believe, is where the church can come into this story. It's true that you need not be a part of a spiritual community to practice the kinds of habits of the Kingdom we're talking about. The church isn't the only place where you'll find people of kindness or gentleness or self-control--not hardly. Praise God you will find people of great love and joy and peace outside the church. You don't need the church to be these things or find these kinds of people.

But where you may need the church, and where I know I do, is when I think about what it takes to practice these things, and bear these fruits, and be the kind of person I hope to be over the long haul. There are very few places in the world where you'll find people committed to living these kinds of lives and bearing this kind of fruit, over time. Planting themselves in a community and seeing it as their purpose, their calling, to do whatever they can to offer as much kindness as they can, as much generosity, as much patience, right where they're planted.

Very few places claim this as their purpose in the world, the reason they exist: to bear this kind of fruit, and make sure they continue to grow and flourish through the generations--a blessing I'm reminded of when I walk through the house and hear one of our boys singing the Gloria Patri or the Doxology. Or when one of them, some years ago, came up to me while I was sitting on the couch and said, out of the blue, Daddy, did you know that God made me? And I got to tell him, Yes, yes I did know that. God made you with beauty and with purpose and I love you.

Of course, the church routinely falls short of these intentions--every tree has good seasons and bad--but there aren't many places in the world, or collections of people, who claim to try, week after week, season after season, year after year.

III.

A few years ago, just before the pandemic, the tree that stood on the green space in the middle of the main parking lot at our church in Macon died. We cut it down and left the stump until we got around to deciding what to plant as it's replacement. Then the world shut down and that task was put on the back-burner, until we started to spend more time as a congregation in our parking lot, which served as our sanctuary for a season before we made it back into our building. Gathering for "parking lot church," as we called it, suddenly the stump went from being an afterthought to an eyesore, but then from an eyesore to an opportunity. What if we chose it's replacement then planted and dedicated it in remembrance of this long season of separation, and most of all, the people we'd lost, who we'd not been able to mourn and celebrate and send home how we would want. We had many options before us--perhaps a maple with it's richly colored leaves in fall, or another holly like we had elsewhere on the grounds. In the end we settled on a local favorite, a peach tree. A Belle of Georgia, I believe it was. We planted it and dedicated it on All Saints Sunday as we read the names of all those who had passed but who'd left seeds among us that we hope, too, would bloom and bear fruit.

May its roots run deep, we said as we blessed it, grounding it in its place among us.
May its trunk stand firm against the winds and rains.
May its branches stretch far, that the birds of the air would rest in them.
May its leaves cast shade to those who would find rest beneath them.
May it bear fruit in its time, and may its flesh be sweet.

Fall turned to winter, winter turned to spring, and it came to pass that on Holy Week, of course, we saw the first buds start to break through the stem, and in the weeks that followed, as we re-entered our buildings and the congregation began, in so many ways, to come back to life, our new little peach tree started to put forth its first fruits in its first year, as if it knew we needed them. A couple dozen peaches, skins dusty and flesh sweet. The birds indeed came to rest in the tree's branches and enjoy it's fruit, as did the children after worship on Sundays, and others who would seek out the church through the week in need of shelter and sustenance.

We had blessed the tree that fall, but as it so often happens, the blessing had gone both ways, and we saw in the fruit it produced a reflection of what had been growing among us in that time we were away, and what we hoped we would be for each other and our community. And each summer since, I am happy to report, the fruit has been more and more abundant. Praise be to God for all that grows among and within us.

IV.

"When the chief priest and the pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them," it says. And isn't this the challenge in such of scripture: to remember it's speaking about us.

You will know a tree by the fruit it bears, Jesus says earlier in Matthew. Bear good fruit, he says. Get your hands dirty in the soil. Bend your knees, steady your back, and breathe deeply, for the work is long and sometimes hard. But the fruit, the fruit is so sweet.

By What Authority?

Mathew 21:23-32, The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · October 1st, 2023 · Duration 10:34

By What Authority?
Matthew 21:23-32

As the story goes, when Pietro Bernadine returned home to the Italian village of Assisi in the year 1182 from one of his regular business trips to France, he found that his wife had given birth to their son. He was furious to find, too, that she had named the boy Giovanni, or John, after John the Baptist. No man of the church himself, and a successful cloth merchant who traveled the Mediterranean, Pietro instead nicknamed the boy Francesco, or Francis, in honor of his business interests.

I.

As a young man, Francis was known around town as something of a playboy--popular, flamboyant, charming, frivolous with his father's vast wealth. He longed for heroism and glory and so when a call went out for knights to join in the crusades, Francis implored his father to buy him the most expensive and magnificent cloak and armor anyone had seen. He road his grand horse out to meet the troops in battle, only along the way he came upon a nobleman who had fallen into poverty laying on the side of the road, and seeing the disparity between them, or perhaps the very thin line that separated them, he came down off his horse to give the man his cloak. Suddenly disillusioned, he turned around and went home, never making it to the crusade.

Not long after, he was riding around his father's lands when he came upon a leper--an outcast, sick and disheveled--and once again found himself coming down from his horse. He knelt beside the man and reached for his purse to give him some money. When the the man lifted his hand to receive it, Francis, overcome with compassion for the man, kissed his hand, covered in sores, and put all the money he had in it.

He began visiting hospitals and others who were sick. He spent more and more time walking in the woods and praying at a small dilapidated church just outside of town. It was there he heard a voice from heaven tell him, "Francis, repair my house, which is falling to ruin." Francis took these words literally and ran back to his father's storeroom where he gathered up rolls of fine cloth. He went and sold them and brought the money to the priest, who wouldn't accept it, but agreed to take Francis in. When his father found out, he was furious, and dragged Francis before the bishop there in the town square. The bishop told Francis to return all that was his father's and trust in God to provide, so Francis gave his father the money, only he didn't stop there--he proceeded to take off the clothes from his back and handed them to his father, too, who was stunned, as his son stood there naked in the middle of the town square.

From that day on Francis lived a life of poverty, praying at the church, spending much of his time in woods. He was said to walk among the flowers, preach to the birds, and even speak with the animals. His poverty opened him to the deep connection in God between all things, which is most visible when we free ourselves of all that would separate us. Sometime later while in worship he heard the words from Matthew chapter 10 where Jesus commands the disciples to "take no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff." And so again, true to form, Francis dropped his staff, took off his belt and replaced it with a simple cord, and kicked off his sandals, from that day forward walking barefoot--so there would be no barrier between him and God's creation, as my teacher once observed.

Word of him and his commitment to poverty and the closeness with creation and with God that sprung from it grew, with many coming to join him. Eventually the church founded an order in his name, who came to be known as the Franciscans, and were at the heart of a season of renewal in the church--or some might say repair. Francis declared that their rule would be simple, that they would commit "to live the gospel." His legend and impact grew and grew, and in many parts of the Christian world, this coming Wednesday, Oct 4, is celebrated in his honor as the Feast Day for St. Francis of Assisi.

II.

The religious leaders ask Jesus, as he stood preaching and teaching at the temple, By what authority do you do these things? And Jesus does what he does so well and turns the question on them: Answer me this, was the baptism John the Baptist offered of God, or merely of himself?

They're suddenly trapped. On the one hand they do think John is a fanatic, calling people out to the wilderness to be baptized. But they can't say so because they don't want to offend the crowds that are now gathering round them. So they defer, saying they do not know.

With their divided intentions revealed, Jesus tells them this parable about a man with two sons--a classic Biblical setup. The man asks both sons to go out to work in the vineyard. Son number one at first answers, I will not, but later changes his mind and does. The second son says, Yes, I'll go, but in the end never does.

Which of these two did the will of the father?, he asks them.

The first one, they answer, of course.

Truly I tell you, Jesus says, all the people who you think could never be close to God, but who know their own need and repent, they're like the first son. But all of you who think you have no need for repentance, you're like the second son, who said one thing but did another.

In other words, this is where true authority comes from: not saying the right things or even having the right things said about you, but doing the right thing, in the end.

III.

There's one kind of authority that is conferred by power. Who has the most money or the most guns or the most knights, the most political or social capital--the finest clothes, sharpest tongue or the shrewdest wit. The root of this authority is fear. And this side of Easter morning, this is the authority that so often seems to rule the day. But, fear being at its heart, this authority, deep down, is terrified of its own weakness, and so does everything it can to project strength. This type of authority always fails, in the end. There's too much space between what it says and what it actually does.

But there's another kind of authority. It's an authority rooted not in fear but in love. It's not taken by power or force but freely given by admiration and trust. This authority isn't enforced at all--it does't need to be because its truth is self-evident. In fact, it is dis-arming, inviting others to lay aside distractions and take serious the things that really matter. This authority is ultimately derived from what we do, the degree that our actions align with our deepest commitments--leaving as little space as possible between them. Call it authenticity, or integrity, or even eccentricity when pushed to the limit. But in the church some have called it simply "living the gospel."

IV.

When he was nearing the end of his life, Francis requested that his body be laid not in a tomb, but directly in the ground and without any clothes on. Just a simple cloak draped over top of him, so there would be nothing between him and dirt from which we come in death as there had not been in life. No space between.

For the Kingdom of Heaven is Like

Matthew 20:1-16, The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 24th, 2023 · Duration 16:44

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like
Matthew 20:1-16

I'm not sure what it is about a beach vacation, but it's about the only week of the year I have this strong urge to put together a puzzle. It's the first day of fall and I guess I'm already nostalgic for summer.

I observed this past June that everyone in our family has their own approach to putting puzzles together. Some, like my wife and middle son, find all the like colors and then build out from there. My father taught me to find the corners then work the perimeter. But the one skill we all have to learn at some point is how to stick with the piece you know is right but just won't fit. If you're like me, your instinct is to get frustrated and either toss it aside and try another one, or force it in, leaving you with a distorted image and a bunch of puzzle pieces with frayed edges. It takes time to learn that the best thing to do is to slow down and keep turning it until the piece fits into place. Just keep turning it and turning it until you see how the image comes together.

I.

A similar wisdom is helpful when reading some of the more challenging passages in the Bible, such as this one from the 20th chapter of Matthew. It's tempting to cast these passages aside or settle for a distorted, frayed image of the Kingdom. So instead, we need to take extra care to slow down and keep turning these stories until we can see the image of the Kingdom of God that emerges. And often this turning begins by asking a simple but powerful question: For whom is this good news?

This is an important question to ask this morning because I suspect most of us find ourselves reflexively standing among those for whom this parable appears to be bad news. In fact, not just standing among them, but working beside them--this is entirely the issue: some of these workers have been laboring all day while others, we imagine, have been simply standing around.

Here these hard-workers are, having gotten to that street corner bright and early to give themselves the best chance of being hired. Every town has this corner--in Macon the scene was just down the street from our church at the corner of Fifth and Poplar. Often it's the Home Depot parking lot, or some nondescript place in the industrial part of town-- every town has one, probably several. They'd been there early and were fortunate enough to be the first ones chosen, and had gone out to the vineyard to labor in the scorching heat, every three hours or so having to stop what they're doing to bring new workers into the fold, including a group at the very end of the day. Only to find that, when time comes for all to be paid, everyone receives the same daily wage--the ones who worked the whole day receiving no more than the ones who came right at the end.

I heard someone say once that this was the parable that got Jesus killed. Not the Prodigal Son and its message of unconditional love and forgiveness. Not the Good Samaritan, and its challenge to be neighborly even to those who would do us harm. Certainly not the sheep or the mustard seed--no, it was this story in which some folks seem to get more than they deserve that did Jesus in. And Jesus seems to know it! Immediately after this parable, in the very next passage Jesus tells the disciples, We're going to Jerusalem, where I will be handed over to the authorities to be mocked and flogged and crucified and on the third day will be raised. Jesus seems to know that this part of his message in which he complicates and even undermines our bedrock notions of fairness and deserving will be offensive enough for the powers to say, Enough!

And we feel this, don't we? It doesn't sit well with all of us who would identify with these workers who'd been hired early. It feels unjust. But is it?

II.

Were those early workers cheated? Did the landowner not pay them what both parties agreed would be fair, "the usual daily wage?" They got what they agreed to, which was a fair wage. And yet something still smells off. It's that stench of...generosity. Bernard Brandon Scott, in his classic book on the parables, says what we have here is "not injustice, but justice with generosity,"1 and when we're being honest, that can be a bitter pill to take. Generosity is a wonderful thing when you're on the receiving end of it, or even admiring it from a safe distance. But when it just misses you, generosity can feel cold. It can feel unfair.

But of course, we don't need this parable to remind us that the world isn't fair--we know that's true. What makes this parable hard to swallow is that it suggests God isn't fair. But in this way it stands squarely within a long Biblical tradition.

If the Bible is to be believed, God, in the end, isn't fair. God, we learn in so many different places, isn't much for tit for tat or straight lines or neat and tidy transactions. God does funny math--known to add an extra mile, or give a second chance, or third, or fourth. And this isn't solely a New Testament thing, it's right there in the Psalm we heard earlier. It doesn't say, "The Lord is fair and disinterested." No, it says, "The Lord is gracious and merciful." The whole notion of grace that we see across the story of the Bible from beginning to end is that we don't get what we deserve, at least not finally.

Now, this isn't to say that God doesn't demand justice of us--if scripture is clear about anything it's clear that God requires all people at least be treated fairly by each other. But God doesn't stop at justice. Yes, God is just, but God is much more than just. God is just + generous, which is to say that God is merciful. And God's mercy doesn't infringe upon God's justice. It doesn't diminish God's justice, or negate it. We confuse this sometimes, as if offering mercy somehow undoes whatever justice is required. Mercy doesn't fall short of justice, mercy is what lies beyond justice. Mercy takes wrongs and hurt and injury seriously. But it takes love and forgiveness and life even more seriously. Mercy recognizes that healing comes not through punishment, but through patience.

And standing there among the day-laborers hired early that morning this is something that's difficult to see. The good news doesn't seem very good to them in that moment. But if we keep turning it, and turning it, and find ourselves standing among those other workers--maybe especially the ones who were hired last--our vision begins to change.

Here they are, having gotten there at the same time as the others, but with the rotten luck of not having been chosen. They've waited around all day looking for work in a tough economy. Children at home, pantry empty, rent due, debt mounting. They went out that morning praying to God there will be work to be done, but as the hours pass, hope turns to doubt, doubt to disappointment, disappointment to despair. When all of the sudden as they're about to head home (they should have gone home long ago, who would be hiring this late?) a man comes, asks them if they need work, and tells them to hop in the truck and go with him. They figure an hour's pay is better than nothing--they don't want to go home empty handed, again--and so they jump in and get to the vineyard just in time for wages to be handed out. Just when the pit in their stomach is about to drop, thinking they surely will not be paid at all, they find that they're given not an hour's pay, or a half-day's pay, but a full day's pay.

Can you feel that? That loosening in your chest? Jesus says, that's what the kingdom of heaven is like. The good news in this story is found there, among the ones who didn't expect it. The ones whose time is running out, tired and frustrated and half-panicked--the ones at the end of their rope, with no where else to turn. The good news is always with them.

And so the good news is with us whenever we stand with them. Which leads us to another piece to this puzzle.

III.

In our rush to spiritualize this parable, and make it about life in the world to come--grace "in the end" or mercy "in the end," the first becoming last and the last first "in the end"--we have to be careful not to rush past the here and now; the story on the surface, about a scene that happens every morning in a parking lot or in a field not far from here, that's part of a network of people and families and shadows that we know are there but don't often have reason to think about. Hired first, hired last, they're still in the same leaky boat, and who's to say the tables won't be turned tomorrow? "The first becoming last and the last first" is a hard reality for many every morning--for some, it may even be their prayer. Until here comes our landowner, who seems determined to find work for them to do. We focus on the wage the landowner pays all the workers, but the real surprise in this story isn't the wage the workers received, but that they were hired at all! Bernard Scott again, "the generosity isn't in the wage but in the need--the landowner's urgent and unexplained need for workers."2

Why does he need these workers? It's almost as if his concern wasn't hiring more workers so he could get more work done, but finding work to be done so he could hire more workers! He just hires, and hires--Here, you come and you and you. What a strange piece in this puzzling Kingdom of God.

Against a dark background of fear and scarcity comes unexpected generosity that throws the whole arrangement up in the air. All the other questions we might ask about what's fair and just and who deserves what who's in and who's out--Jesus brushes all of these things to the side and moves a new set of gospel concerns to the front. Things like:
Will everyone's children eat tonight?
Will these workers go home with dignity, having been hired and paid?
Are we not responsible to each other in this way?3

IV.

This is the piece of the puzzle we so often miss. The one that would have us not simply be grateful for the grace we've received, or even imagine a kingdom of heaven that is measured not by transaction but invitation, but that calls us to do what we can to make God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven--as we pray every Sunday. The piece that reminds us daily bread is something you eat.

But when we do insert this piece--better yet, when we insert ourselves--and ask who we are willing to stand with, the image of the kingdom God dreams for us comes into view. Suddenly this hard news becomes good news for us, too.

This is how it so often is with the gospel. You spend all this time pressing, trying to make it fit, but then you turn it and turn it, and realize the missing piece is you.
___________________

1Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable, p.282
2Scott, 297
3I'm indebted to Amy-Jill Levine, who in her wonderful book, Short Stories by Jesus, provocatively reminds us the most pressing questions to Jesus in this parable and others are those grounded in the here and now.

A Different Kind of People

Matthew 18:21-35, The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 17th, 2023 · Duration 18:21

A Different Kind of People
Matthew 18:21-35

We pick up the story again here in the middle chapters of Matthew's Gospel, when Jesus pulls his disciples close and tells how this new community to be founded in his name that we know as the church should be. Or rather, how the church should be different.

Last week we looked at the verses just before our passage today where Jesus describes how the church is to handle conflict after he's gone. Jesus assumes conflict in the church, just as in any human institution, but says the way the church will be different is how it handles its conflict--reconciliation and restoration are always, always, to be the hope. We hold relationship as sacred, because the Christian life is best lived with others. Where two or three are gathered, he says, I will be with them. Which brings us to our passage this morning, where St. Peter once again plays the part he does so well. And it's really an essential role in any group, to be that person who will say aloud what everyone else is thinking but is too afraid to ask. They're all listening as Jesus tells them these things about community and relationship, and you can almost imagine Peter pulling Jesus aside and saying, Listen, this all sounds wonderful--direct communication, restoration of the offender, two-or-three are gathered. But just as a point of clarification--because I know Thomas will ask--how many times do I have to forgive this person? I'm thinking, like, seven times would be good. What do you think?

I.

Now, two things here. First, Peter gets part of it right. He understands that the goal, the hope, is restoration--which in his mind is radical enough. After all, restoration is not the goal in most justice systems outside the church. Most systems usually seek punishment first of all and then some baseline measure of justice, which is that the rest of us feel that folks get what they deserve (and then maybe just a little more, to deter others). Even in our personal relationships popular wisdom often tells us simply to walk away. Don't waste your time, cut your losses, focus on yourself. Which is tempting, and may be good and right for a time, but this approach ultimately proves thin, and falls short of the demands of Christian community Jesus lays out. Peter sees what Jesus is doing, this radical idea that our first priority should always be reconciliation. But he doesn't see how far Jesus is willing to take this.

Which leads to the second point, which is that Peter thinks he's being generous! And by most standards he is. Seven times forgiving someone?! In most any case--short of parenting--that's a lot. In parenting, that might be an afternoon. But in most cases, forgiving someone seven times is incredibly generous, generous to the point of being unadvisable, especially if we're talking about serious wrongs. Jesus tells him it's not enough. Not seven times, he says. Seventy-seven times. Some translations say "seventy times seven"--the exact number isn't what's important. Jesus seems to be saying that when it comes to forgiveness, if you're counting at all, you're missing the point.1

II.

And so he tells this parable about a king who wishes to settle his accounts with his workers. One man brought before the king owes 10,000 talents--which is an obscenely large sum of money. I did the math this week, and in today's terms, with exchange rates and inflation as it is, this translates to roughly a bazillion dollars.

Jesus is exercising some hyperbole here. This is a tremendous amount of money--more money than any king in that time would have had, let alone someone who worked for him. But all the same, when faced with his debt the man gets on his knees and begs the king, saying, Have patience with me! I'll repay everything--which of course he knew he could never do. The king would have known this too, but nonetheless has pity on the man, and instead of doing what in those days he had every right to do, which was throw him in prison, or even taking an incredibly generous path and reducing the amount of the debt, the king simply forgives his debt. Just like that. And that's worth lingering on.

Debt is one of those things that you can't quite understand until you have it. As a child you hear Jesus' words about forgiving debt and it doesn't make sense. But as an adult? I remember after graduating college years ago receiving the statement booklet in the mail for my students loans. Actually, there were several booklets. Seeing those astronomical numbers on the page and feeling that weight for the first time. Financial anxiety is a special kind of anxiety, isn't it? Debt is wrapped up in so much judgment, so much shame.

The king forgives his debt, we're told. Just like that.

And so this man, who's received an almost indescribable gift of mercy, decides to celebrate by promptly going to find another man who's in his debt, owing a much smaller sum than what he owed the king. He takes this man by the throat and says, Pay what you owe! The other man cannot, and so the first has him thrown into prison--which was his right to do in those days. And yet, especially knowing what we know, it doesn't feel quite right. Not to us, and I suspect not to the disciples listening back then. The other workers witness this and report back to the king, who brings this unforgiving worker before him, tells him what-for, and in anger hands him over to be punished until he could repay this astronomical debt in full. And then, as Fred Craddock puts it, the door of this parable slams shut behind us, as Jesus says: The same will be true of you, if you don't forgive others from your heart.

The mood has shifted quickly, like those ominous cool breezes that come just before big storms. Instead of giving Peter a number to shoot for when forgiving another, Jesus does what he does so well and turns the issue back on him, back on us. He reminds us, as someone put it, "to be unforgiving is to be either forgetful or ungrateful."2 In other words, it's when we remember and appreciate the mercy and grace and forgiveness we've received not only from God, but so many different people who act godly to us, that we find the strength--and it is a strength--to offer the same grace and forgiveness to others.

These things are generative; they build on each other. Mercy has a way of begetting mercy. Love begets love, compassions begets compassion, forgiveness begets forgiveness. In the same way that violence begets violence, hate begets hate, fear begets fear, and all the rest of it-- these are all cycles that build on themselves. The cycle we most often find ourselves in, the cycle the world takes as a given, is the vicious cycle of retaliation which always leads to escalation and where the end is always annihilation. But Jesus offers another cycle. A virtuous cycle that seeks wholeness and healing, of which forgiveness is the central, most offensive but most necessary part, and where life is always the goal.

And this virtuous cycle is so often kickstarted when the vicious cycle we're caught in is interrupted by a gift of kindness or grace or generosity--usually something simple that feels extraordinary--which then dislodges us from that doomed loop and reorients us toward God and our neighbor. And so we first come to see ourselves as God sees us: as beloved children, made with purpose and filled with potential, who aren't worth giving up on, until the cycle slowly comes to completion as we begin to see each other in the same way. And suddenly everything looks different.

III.

I heard a story sometime ago about a famous monastery that had fallen on hard times. They were receiving fewer and fewer guests, and only a handful of monks remained. Its buildings and grounds were in disrepair, and the monks themselves had lost their sense of mission and purpose. In the woods beside the monastery, the rabbi from a nearby town had built a small hut where he would go from time to time to be alone and pray. The monks didn't speak to him often, but they always seemed to know when he was near.

One day it occurred to the abbot, the leader of the monastery, that he might visit the rabbi and seek his wisdom about the troubles the monastery faced. As he approached the hut, the rabbi came out to greet him and embraced the abbot like a long-lost friend. He brought him inside the hut and and the abbot began to share his concerns about the monastery. The rabbi listened intently, and when the abbot had finished, the rabbi offered great sympathy, saying, I know how it is. Fewer and fewer people come to the synagogue each year. I have no wisdom to share with you. But I know that you and the monks are holy men and do good works, and so because of this, he leaned in, I also know that the Messiah is among you.

The abbot was stunned by this insight and walked back to the monastery in a kind of daze as he pondered what the rabbi had said. When he arrived there, the monks surrounded him asking what wisdom the rabbi shared. The abbot said sorrowfully, The rabbi had no wisdom to help us. But as I was leaving he said something strange that I don't understand. He said, The Messiah is among you. And with that he went to his cell. The monks were also confused by the rabbi's words and they, too, went to their cells for the night.

Over the days and weeks to come, they all pondered the words of the rabbi. Who could possibly be the Messiah in their midst? Could it be the abbot, who was such a wise leader? Or perhaps it was Brother John--often disagreeable, but always there when you needed help. Or could it be Benedict who had a way of tending the garden and caring for the animals? And to themselves they went through the entire brotherhood, making a silent case for why each could be the Messiah. And then a disturbing thought came to them: Surely the rabbi couldn't have meant me! How could I be the Messiah? But what if it is me? What would God have me do? None of them could solve the rabbi's riddle, but each in his own way silently vowed to treat the others with reverence and respect since anyone of them could be the Messiah. And in time, a gentle, warm-hearted, loving concern began to grow among them, which was difficult to describe, but impossible not to notice.

Soon as more visitors came to the monastery they found themselves deeply moved by the example of the monks; the warmth of their community was palpable. Slowly the monastery once again became a place of light and learning and love, and as a community it grew and prospered.3

IV.

The church should be different, Jesus seems to say. It should think different an act different. It should feel different--different and distinctive, we might say. It should live and move by a different way. A way rooted in the promise of Christ's presence among us. It isn't a way of counting, of numbering faults or debts. It's a way of standing, which results in a way of seeing, which leads to a way of acting, which over time amounts to a way of living, that's marked by a way of loving.

Who was it, I wonder? Who did it turn out to be in the monastery?
Or better yet, Who is it, right here among us? You would know better than me--I'm still learning everyone's name. But I've got some ideas. It's not who you'd expect. But then again, maybe you would.
________________
1 Anna Case-Winters, Matthew, from the Belief series, 227
2 Ibid., 228
3 The Rabbi's Gift, adapted. A well-known story, the earliest version may have been written by Francis Dorff, O. Praem, of the Norbertine Community of Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1979.

Where Two or Three

Matthew 18:15-20, The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Scott Dickison · September 10th, 2023 · Duration 17:39

Where Two or Three
Matthew 18:15-20

The peace of the Lord be with you!

Well, here we are. I can tell you this is a moment I have been imagining and planning for and perhaps slightly obsessing over for some time, and it feels a bit surreal for it to have finally arrived. But it feel so right.

It was so good to be among you last week in worship, and experience the reverence and warmth I have observed online in person, finally. I also rarely get to sit with Audrey and the boys during worship and that was...stressful. I did my best last week to pay attention to the movements and flow of worship so I wouldn't embarrass myself too much today--so far so good, as best I can tell. Although I'm told those calls usually don't come in for a a day or two!

There are so many people to thank for their part in bringing our family here to Jackson and me to this place and time. We're so grateful for Kelley Williams, Jr. and the rest of the search committee, who were incredible ambassadors for this congregation and have showed us limitless hospitality over these past few months. I went back and watched the conference some weeks ago in which I was officially "voted in," and I have to say, I have to squint pretty hard to just barely make out the pastor and the person who has been described to all of you. But it is a standard I will endeavor to meet.

To those of you who have brought meals and sent emails and notes, and everyone who was able to be with us at the reception last Sunday, we have been overwhelmed in the best possible way by your warmth and embrace. Some of you have even recognized us out in town and come up and introduced yourselves, which has been wonderful. I asked someone how they recognized me and they said, "Well, we did receive an 8.5"-11" picture of you and your family in the mail."

And finally, I want to thank Lesley and Major, first for your generous welcome over these past weeks, which has been so humbling, but also for your tremendous efforts not just this past year, but especially in this past year to minister to this congregation.

Church, this transition for our family and for me professionally has gone so smoothly, more than I ever could have reasonably hoped, and we are so grateful.

Which is why the lectionary gospel reading for this Sunday from the 18th chapter of Matthew comes as something of a drag. Church conflict? Today?! Can't the honeymoon last at least through the first sermon! But rarely are we offered the gospel we want; Jesus is insistent on giving us the gospel we need, and so even on this morning he dismisses any idyllic or uncomplicated images of communal life we might wish for, and instead reminds us that the joys of living in Christian community cannot be separated from the challenges of doing so.

I.

It sounds strange to say, but the church is not something Jesus talks a lot about in the gospels. In fact, Matthew is the only gospel in which the church is directly mentioned at all. And I'm sure Jesus knew something of all the joys that would come within this new community to be founded in his name: the fellowship, the deep, lasting friendship, the intergenerational bonds, the Labor Day potlucks and Monday morning Caregivers, Wednesday night suppers and services, Sunday nights in the youth house, and without question Jesus would have known of the Catechism of the Good Shepherd. Jesus surely would have known of the richness of weekly Sunday school classes--those content to sit in the folding chairs provided and those who need a little more cushion. Christmas Eve candlelight services, Good Friday Tenebrae, Women's retreat, and of course, weekly worship with beautiful music and the choir and Austin organ and morning sun pouring in through the clear glass windows, time for prayer and silence and of course gripping, life-changing sermons.

I'm sure Jesus anticipated all of these things, these blessings, that would be a part of this new creation to be called the church. But he doesn't spend much time talking about all of that with the disciples. When Jesus describes the church he tends to focus on two things: suffering--which he did in the gospel lesson last week when he told his disciples that to follow him was to take up a cross--and, as in our passage this morning, conflict.

And we should note that Jesus assumes conflict here. This is not an "if" but a "when." And not just conflict--plain old disagreements--but out and out wrongs. And he assumes these things not because he anticipates the church will be made up of an especially troubled group of people, but simply because he knows they'll be made up of a group of people. Jesus knows that even while the church will aspire to point to something beyond itself--something greater, something higher, something holy--it will still be made up of humans. And so it will be bound to the same limitations of any other human institution. Mistakes will be made, wounds will be inflicted. There will be disagreement and unrest and fractures and pain and hurt and all the rest of it--he knew this is just the way of things.

But he tells the disciples what will set the church apart is how they'll deal with it.

II.

In the church, conflicts and wrongs won't be ignored or swept under the rug where they can fester or spread. They'll be addressed head on. There will be direct communication with the offending party--always face to face. No gossip or triangulating, or behind the back angling. One on one to begin with, but if that doesn't work, then you take someone else with you. And if that doesn't work, then it comes to the church, all the while with the imperative that everyone listen to each other--did you hear that refrain? Listen, listen, listen. If after all that the offending party still won't budge, only then are they removed from fellowship, to become like "a Gentile or a tax collector." But remember, Jesus ate with tax collectors and reached out to Gentiles. Exclusion isn't the last word, it can't be. Reconciliation and restoration is always the hope in the church.

And yet, there's no getting around the fact that this passage is difficult. It can leave us feeling a bit cold. But at this point in his ministry, Jesus is not mincing words. He wants to prepare the disciples as best he can for what he knows they will learn eventually, and the hard way: that church is not a high-minded thought experiment. It's real, and practical and hard. Community is hard. Relationships are hard--they're complicated and fraught and painful and above all fragile--at times, it feels, especially in the church.

When church is working as it should we're bound together by the deepest bonds there are: the bonds of love and hope and a shared vision for what's good and right and true. But this makes it all the more painful when church relationships are ruptured. Jesus knows this is a delicate balance, of fragility and power. He says on the one hand church is as fragile as human relationships, with our egos and insecurities. But on the other hand it's as powerful as the presence of God in the world. It's fragile enough that its health must be vigorously defended, but powerful enough that whatever we ask will be done for us. Actually, you may have noticed it says, "whatever we can agree on will be done for us," which is a remarkable check on our more grandiose or idealistic plans. You can almost see the wink in Jesus's eye when he said it.

But there are no qualifiers on the promise of Jesus's presence among us. Where two or three are gathered, he says, I will be there among them.

Where two or three, he says. Which I think was Jesus' way of saying that the Christian life is not best lived alone.

It's possible, I suppose, in the same way it's possible to eat spaghetti with your hands--sadly still a regular practice in our house. One day I'll learn. Or the way it's possible to see a sunrise and not stand in awe of the gift of another day, or hold a baby and not feel like you're holding life itself in your arms.

It's possible to live the Christian life unto yourself, it can be done, but that's not how it was designed. That's not what will reveal its sweetness or uncover its richness or open you to "the dearest deep down freshness of things," as Hopkins put it. No, the Christian life, the life of faith, is best lived with others. It's how Jesus lived, not walking around the Galilee by himself, preaching to his own reflection in the sea. His ministry took shape when he found others to walk with him. And the gospel he preached came to life not when it left his mouth as he spoke it, but when it entered the ears and the hearts of those who received it, those who didn't know just how much they needed it, who didn't know just how much they needed each other--do any of us? All those people who didn't know "each other" is why we are here in the first place.

III.

The ancient rabbis asked from time to time why it was that God chose to create the universe. Why would God call this world into being, with all it's suffering and death, or even more, we humans with all our hatred and greed and oblivion. They wondered if God knew the risks involved in creating the world.

Wouldn't it have been better, they asked, for God to just be perfect and complete in divine oneness, instead of opening up all of the madness we know of creation--a question you may have asked yourself from time to time. And the answer the rabbis came up with is that for God the risk of creation was worth one "righteous person"--one tzaddik, in Hebrew--to share it with. If God could share in the goodness and blessing of creation with just one other, they thought, then all the risk would be worth it.1

In other words, the rabbis determined that for God, the possibility of relationship, and the chance at community was worth all the rest of it. It was worth all the disasters and pain, all the dysfunction and disappointment, all the hurt and heartache. For God, the hope of sharing in life fully and deeply with others, was worth it.

IV.

Can we not say this morning that the same is true for us? That this is why we have come here to this place and to be with these people? Because we believe the promise of a life that is richer and deeper and sweeter and harder and more complete--a life that can only be lived with and for others--is worth all that must come with it. Because we believe that love is worth it, in the end.

Put another way: "We agree to differ, we resolve to love, we unite to serve," I read somewhere recently.

Northminster, I am new here, and I still have much to learn about this place and its people and its traditions and loves and history and commitments--and I want to learn it all.

But one thing I do know, that already has been made abundantly clear to me in so many beautiful ways is that you, too, believe deeply that the Christian life is best lived with others.
You believe the church has something vital and joyous to offer this world.
You believe Christ when he says where two or three are gathered he is there among us, which means you, too, believe Christ is here now, as close as the person sitting next to you, as real as the breath we share, as alive as the hope we have for what is yet to come among us.

Which is why I am so grateful to be here with you.
--------------------
1Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, 35-36

How We Hold Our History

Exodus 3:1-15, Matthew 16:21-28, The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Major Treadway · September 3rd, 2023 · Duration 28:47

Our worship together this morning is what some might call a threshold moment – a moment that stands like a doorway between two chapters of our life together; a moment clearly identifiable and in which our momentum will not let us linger long. But while we find ourselves in this moment, eagerly anticipating today’s lunch and the beginning of Scott’s ministry among us, the nature of a threshold moment involves considering what is behind us as well as what is ahead. This morning, I invite you to pause, between our future and our past, and to think with me for a few minutes about how we hold our history and what that means for our future.

In today’s gospel lesson, Peter was just trying to protect Jesus. All he said was, “This must never happen to you.†And in response, Jesus offers that familiar, often decontextualized phrase, “Get behind me, Satan!†These words were spoken to the man whom Jesus had just declared would be the rock upon whom the church would be built. The church which, nearly 2,000 years later, can be found in just about every corner of this planet – including the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover.

How we hold our history is important. Remember the way that Matthew begins his gospel. There is a miraculous birth, an escape to Egypt, a massacre of infants, Jesus is baptized, and then is led into the wilderness where he wanders and is tempted for forty days.â€

As Matthew narrates Jesus’ back story, there is an unmistakable caricature of Moses. It seems that for Matthew, Jesus is the “prophet like Moses†spoken of in Deuteronomy 18. Moses, we know, had a similar beginning. Born among a royal decree to massacre Hebrew infants, he escapes Egypt to come back and lead his people through the wilderness on a journey that famously took forty years.

It seems to me that Peter may have had Moses in mind when he confessed Jesus as Messiah. And yet, no sooner had Jesus affirmed Peter’s confession, than he began to teach the disciples “that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed.â€

That is not the story of Moses. We know the story of Moses. Moses, as we read today, encounters God in a burning bush. He submits to God’s calling to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. He parts the Red Sea. He meets with God on the mountain. He receives the ten commandments – twice. He smashes idols, institutes the law of God, and eventually dies on top of a mountain overlooking the promised land. If Jesus is, as Matthew has led us to believe, a sort of New Moses, shouldn’t he follow the path laid out by the first Moses? Peter finally confirms that Jesus is the Messiah – the anointed one of God. He looks back to his history and pictures perhaps the most influential leader in the history of his people and writes a script in his mind for what the future will hold – a script Jesus quickly rewrites.

“You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things,†Jesus says to Peter.

Greg Jones tells the story that his father, a Methodist pastor, “used to say that every church he served or was a part of had a ‘back to Egypt’ committee in it.â€

From your own reading of the book of Exodus, you will remember that in addition to the leadership highs of the story of Moses, there were times when the Israelites lamented their decision to leave Egypt – going so far as to say they would rather go back to Egypt, back to slavery, than to continue on in the uncertainty of their present journey.

Perhaps, Peter was having a “back to Egypt†moment of his own when he heard from Jesus about the direction that he was planning to go.

While Peter was holding the past as aspiration for Jesus, it seems that Jesus was also looking to the past, but Jesus was holding the past as inspiration. Jesus, like the voice in the burning bush, could hear the cries of the people. Jesus saw a present and past filled with people who would gain the whole world if they could, even if it would cost them their lives; Jesus heard the cries of those on the suffering end of inequality – those who suffered at the hands of the ones in power, even, if not especially, religious power.

Peter held his history as an aspiration for the ministry of Jesus. Jesus held his history as an inspiration for the vision he created for a new future.

Jennifer Riel and Roger Martin, in their book Creating Great Choices make the important point that an aspirational view of history “rests on a massive and flawed assumption: a belief that what we do now will continue to produce the same outcomes in the future. This is only true if the future looks exactly like the past.â€

If there is one thing about which we can be certain, it is that the future will not look exactly like the past. And because we know that the future will not look like the past, we have a decision to make. As we think about our history, the long history of the Church and the shorter, but no less relevant, history of Northminster, we get to decide how we hold our history.

We do not need to do things just because we have always done them that way. That is holding our history as an aspiration. But neither do we need to forget our history and run wild into the future untethered. We have a rich history that has shaped and formed who we are as a community of faith. Holding that history as inspiration for how we move into the future will require us to spend time considering why we do things the way we do them and how we can hold tightly to the core of that “why†as we move into the future with fresh vision and new leadership. As we pass through this threshold, we do not need to aspire to recreate our past, rather, we should be inspired by our past, to embody a fresh and relevant faith as the people of God in the world today.

Amen.

Who Do You Say I Am?

Matthew 16:13-20, The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · August 27th, 2023 · Duration 11:59

“Jesus said to them “Who do you say I am? And Simon Peter answered, “The Messiah, the son of the living God.â€

With those words, Matthew’s gospel finds its central question. We have slowly made our way through much of Matthew’s gospel, the primary gospel for Year A in the revised common lectionary, which started with the genealogy of Jesus and the visit of the Magi, Jesus’ wilderness visit and baptism, the calling of the disciples and the sermon on the Mount. Lately, we have been following Jesus around from town to town, listening to his teaching, watching him perform miracles, wondering exactly who Jesus might be. Then we follow him into Caesarea Philippi, he ask “who do people say the Son of Man is?â€

We often gloss over locations in the scripture, not having a lot of context for ancient cities or even the biblical portions of our modern day world. But we should pay attention to this location. Caesarea Philippi, a city of the empire, a city in which there was a shrine to Pan, god of the wild, god of shepherds and flocks. Jesus chooses this city to pose the question – who do people say that I am? Jesus, the one who proclaims God’s kingdom, opposite in almost every way of the empire, Jesus, the good Shepherd who knows every sheep by name and goes looking for them one by one.

“Who do people say the Son of Man is?†Maybe he’s John the Baptist or Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets. The people recognized that Jesus was a prophet, one who brought difficult words to the rulers of the day, performed miracles, stood in opposition to the empire and brought hope from God. But there was more.

“Jesus said to them “Who do you say I am?†And Simon Peter answered, “The Messiah, the son of the living God.â€

With those words, Matthew’s gospel finds its central question, and the disciples find clarity. Kind of. We know that Peter, as Peter is wont to do, as we are wont to do, paints his understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah onto Jesus and in just a few verses is chastised for it. But for one glimmering moment, Peter stands proud, the foundation of the church, handed the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Peter had heard Jesus’ teaching. Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but those who do the will of my father. The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed – the smallest of all the seed but it grows to become a great tree so that all the birds of the air can make their nest in it, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure, one might sell all that they have to take hold of it. Do you think that Peter heard the echoes of Jesus’ teaching?

“Jesus said to them “Who do you say I am?†And Simon Peter answered, “The Messiah, the son of the living God.â€

With those words, Matthew’s gospel finds its central question, the disciples find clarity and we find our identity – to proclaim the good news of the Messiah, the son of the living God. In Mitzi Smith’s commentary on this passage, she states:
“A living God is a dynamic God and not a static God whose clearest communication happened in the past. Jesus is the Messiah of the living God. Jesus, as Son of Man, means that God continues to speak and to act. God does not have to resurrect John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or any other prophet to speak. God never ceases to exist and to create and to anoint.â€

This is good news for the disciples and good news for us.

From the earliest ages, we teach our children that they are joining God in building the kingdom of heaven. This year, in Children’s Sunday School, our theme is “Be Salt and Light.†Our children have been learning how they are salt and light. Downstairs in the hallway, the bulletin board says “You are the salt and light of the world,†and it has pictures of all the children, reminding them that Jesus has called them just as he calls each of us, as children of God, invited to join God in creating, anointed by God for building the kingdom of heaven.

If you look at the back of your bulletin, right under the Ministry of the Church, it says “every member a minister.†We don’t just give that lip service. We heard last week about the ministries of many in our congregation who shaped and formed this place and its stories, and I can look around this room and tell the stories of the ways that each of you minister within and beyond these walls. One of my favorite job descriptions comes right underneath “every member a minister.†It says, the following persons have been called by this congregation to serve as enablers in such ministry.

In just a couple of weeks, our new Senior Pastor will be added to the list of enablers, and there will be ways in which his ministry among us enables us to do new things for the kingdom, ways in which we will all be called to participate in the ministry of the gospel, of the good news, in ways that we may not have before.
I hope that we will be open to new ways of living the way of our living God in the world, ministering together, all of us bringing the kingdom of heaven on earth.

“Jesus said to them ‘Who do you say I am?’ And Simon Peter answered, “The Messiah, the son of the living God.â€

With those words, Matthew’s gospel finds its central question, the disciples find clarity and we find our identity – to proclaim the good news of the Messiah, the son of the living God. And then Jesus “sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.†Jesus knew that declaring himself the Messiah was a good way to get himself into trouble, but what if he also wanted the disciples, what if he wanted us, to build a church whose actions speaks louder than words? What if Jesus knew that our actions would define us, that the church would be more of who God called the church to be if we didn’t just claim our identity but lived it?

That of course invites the question: are we living in such a way that proclaims the good news? The good news that Jesus is the Messiah, the good news that the kingdom of heaven is a place for the poor in spirit, a place where every kind of bird can make a nest in its limbs, a treasure beyond what the world imagines a treasure to be? The good news that the living God hasn’t ceased to create and to anoint, the good news that the circle of God’s love is as wide as the circle of all of creation?

“Jesus said to them “Who do you say I am?â€

And all of God’s beloved children said “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.â€

And then they went and lived like it.

Amen.

I Will Provide for You There

Genesis 45:1-15, The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · August 20th, 2023 · Duration 11:15

Today marks the end of our summer journey in Genesis. With breaks for the sermons of guest preachers, Major and I have preached our way through the lectionary texts from Creation to Joseph. It would be impossible to read all the way through Genesis in this hour even over all the worship hours of the summer, but we have heard major portions of the Creation story, the Noah story, and the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And we came last week to the story of Joseph.

Last week's reading left Joseph being raised up from the pit his brothers threw him in, sold into the hands of the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver, and taken to Egypt. Since then, Joseph has been sold to Potiphar, then wrongfully imprisoned. In prison, he has interpreted the dreams of a cupbearer to the king and the chief baker in the palace. Two years later, the cupbearer remembers Joseph to the king, and Joseph interprets the King's dream. As thanks, the King places Joseph in a high position of power.

Joseph settles down, as they say, marries and has children with an Egyptian woman, and works to ensure that Egypt is ready for the famine that Joseph has seen in Pharoah's dream.

After seven years of plenty, the famine begins, and Joseph's brothers re-enter the story. They are hungry. Jacob, Joseph's father, learns that there is grain in Egypt and sends 10 of the brothers to Egypt. They unknowingly encounter Joseph, who provides them grain but also accuses them of being spies. To prove they aren't spies, Joseph demands that they leave one brother behind and go get their youngest brother, Benjamin, and bring him back to Egypt. The brothers bring Benjamin back and they have a meal at Joseph's house but they still do not know that Joseph is their brother, and they leave again for home. This time Joseph frames Benjamin by placing a goblet in his bag that does not belong to him. Joseph sends guards out to catch the brothers and bring them back to Egypt.

The brothers appear before Joseph. Benjamin is accused and Judah pleads for Benjamin to be released and we arrive at today's passage where:

Joseph exacts revenge, Benjamin is killed, Jacob dies of a broken heart and the brothers parish from the famine because Joseph will not give them any food. Joseph puts on his amazing technicolor dream coat, climbs to the top of a pyramid and sings "there is nothing I do better than revenge." The end.

I was just seeing if you were paying attention.

Joseph could have exacted revenge. That story could very much be in our Scriptures. Not only would we not fault Joseph because of the pain and anguish his brothers have caused him, but there are other examples of this kind of revenge in our very own scriptures so we must be very careful with these texts.

Let's get back to the rest of the story. Judah pleads for Benjamin to be released and Joseph, unable to control himself any longer, sends away the crowd, and weeping loudly, declares himself to his brothers.

He tells them how what they meant for evil, God has made good. Joseph chooses mercy over revenge.

Joseph's words here - "God sent me before you to preserve life" and "it was not you who sent me here, but God" – those are words that can only come from the mouth of the person who has been harmed. We don't get to interpret the harm we have caused. We must repent. God's mercy is boundless, but it doesn't give us permission to walk away from the pain we have caused without seeking to restore those whom we have harmed.

Joseph instructs his brothers: Go get my father. Settle in the land of Goshen. You and your children and your flocks and your herds and all that you have shall be near me. "I will provide for you there." Instead of scarcity, there is provision. Joseph, now in a position of great power, provides for his brothers and sets an example for all of us.

It could not have been easy for Joseph to forgive his brothers. He must have had to dig deep to find what he needed in those moments. When we look back across the Genesis text, the ones we have explored in worship and the many that the lectionary does not give us time to explore in this space, we can see the ways in which God has provided. Knowing the rich oral tradition of our scriptures, one might wonder if Joseph heard these stories as a child, stories about Great Grandfather Abraham, and Great Grandma Sara, Grampa Isaac and Granny Rebecca, stories about his dad and his uncle, his mother and his brothers' mothers, stories that shaped and formed his life, so that he might live God's kind of provision, stories shaping and forming our lives so that we might live out God's kind of provision.

When we look back across our lives together as a family of faith, we have similar stories of provision. Like the story from 1966 when Leland Speed, John Palmer, Bob Guyton and Rubel Phillips stood on a street corner and decided "to stop talking and do something, that something eventually becoming Northminster Baptist Church. Stories like the one from 1975 when Jan Purvis because the first female deacon here, providing for visible church leadership by both men and women, which would become a hallmark of this family of faith. Stories of pastors like Dudley Wilson and John Claypool leading us beyond these walls, even once on an Easter Sunday, so that we might provide for the needs of our community. Stories like the one where Barry Barr and Suzanne Boone and Alan Perry and pastor John Thomason proposed a program to train laity to be caregivers, caregivers who would provide for church members and others in our community across these last 40 years. Stories like those of Dot Taylor and Elizabeth Dean who went to the deacons and proposed a partnership with Spann Elementary school, providing a rich friendship with that school that has carried across 35 years.

Stories like the ones of Annette Hitt and Betsy Ditto who faithfully welcomed the children of our church every Sunday morning for decades, receiving children from parents whom they received as children, providing for generations of our family of faith to be shaped and formed by the work of our Sunday School teachers. Stories like those of Roger Paynter and Brian Brewer who through their pastorates lead this place to be more of who God has called us to be. Stories like the ones of our choir who work week in and week out so that we might overhear their worship of God each week and so that our worship might rise up from theirs. Stories like the ones of Chuck Poole, who pastored in such a way that drew the circle of his welcome as wide as the circle of God's welcome.

Our stories of provision are abundant, both the ways in which we have been provided for and the ways in which we have been led to provide. Like Joseph, our stories have flawed characters, because all human beings have flaws. Like the stories of Genesis, we have to be careful with our own stories.

But as we turn the page on a new chapter, we have opportunity to hear the words of Joseph in today's story. "I will provide for you there." May we hear those words in the voice of our God. "I will provide for you there" May we hear those words in our own voice. "I will provide for you there."

Amen.


Who to Believe about Belief?

Romans 10:5-15, Psalm 85:8-13, The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

Jason Coker · August 13th, 2023 · Duration 21:12

Inclusion. Who belongs? Who is on the inside, and who is on the outside? Insiders and outsiders, those who belong and those who don’t belong? Who is included and who is excluded? This dividing line is such a major issue in our moment of polarity. It may be even truer for the church, especially in Mississippi. Who belongs in church and who doesn’t belong? Or, maybe, what does one have to do to belong? What are the rules of inclusion? What do we have to do, or who do we have to be, to be welcomed, included, embraced?

Inclusion is not a unique issue in our modern moment. Inclusion was one of the defining issues of nascent Christianity. As this Jewish, Jesus movement grew out of Palestine, one of the primary issues about which almost all the New Testament writers wrote was who’s in and who’s out? For centuries this was clear from the Bible. To become part of Jewishness, there were very specific things one needed to do. First of all, you needed to be born Jewish—that was a great start. But if that wasn’t the case, and there was something appealing about the oddity of Judaism, and it was wildly odd in the first century, then there were specific religious ceremonies that you had to go through. What made Judaism so odd for an ancient religion was its insistence on one God. We cannot fully appreciate how odd this was. Only one other monotheistic religion in antiquity existed that we know of—Zoroastrianism. So, the Shema, was the first tenant of Judaism—this passage from Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.†This is still the core tenant of nearly all forms of modern Judaism. It is a song that still rings in synagogues all over the world.

Non-Jews, or Gentiles, in the first century could believe in this one God and still not fully convert to Judaism, because the next step in the conversion process was pretty invasive—especially if you were a man. Circumcision was the religious ritual that any Gentile man had to accept if he was to convert to Judaism. If you wouldn’t commit to that religious ritual, you could still believe in the one God, but you weren’t part of the community. This group of Gentile’s had a name. They were called God-fearers. We are down with the belief part, but not the practice part!

This “Gentile issue†was a massive moral issue for the early Jewish, Jesus movement. Before this movement was even called “Christianityâ€, the followers of Jesus were writing about this issue of inclusion. What did Gentiles have to do to be part of the Jewish, Jesus movement? Specifically, did the men have to be circumcised? If you don’t want to take my word for it, read Paul’s letter to the Galatians. It is one of the first writings of the New Testament and most scholars date it to the late 40s or early 50s of the Common Era. The whole Letter to the Galatians deals with whether Gentiles need to follow the Law, or the Bible, to be included into the Jesus-believing community. In his first letter, in the first written words that would become part of the New Testament, Paul boldly says, Gentiles don’t have to follow the Bible. They don’t have to be circumcised to be included. Daniel Boyarin, a Jewish New Tesament scholar, calls Paul a “Radical Jew†for his stance on Gentile inclusion.

Paul wasn’t the only New Testament writer who radically includes Gentiles. The Gospel of Matthew goes to lengths to include Gentiles, but with much more hesitation. The Gospel of Matthew includes Gentiles, but reluctantly—not as radically inclusive as Paul. Remember Matthew tells story after story of how Jesus encounters Gentiles, is reluctant to include them, but eventually gives in because of their faith or belief. Even the Gospel of John says, “God loved some of you so much…†No, we know John says, “For God loved the whole world so much…â€

If Paul’s writing career started with Galatians, it most likely ended with Romans. Paul’s Letter to the Romans was his last letter that he wrote—maybe as late as the mid 60s. In this last letter, he speaks to this issue again—twice, in fact. Earlier in Romans 3 and now in Romans 10 where we find our passage from today’s lectionary reading. If you read Paul’s letters chronologically, you can see how his ideas change from his early career to the end of his career (like his view on Jesus’s second coming), but one thing remains consistent throughout his career—Paul’s radical inclusion of Gentiles. Throughout Paul’s ministry, he feels called to the Gentiles. He self-proclaims as the “Apostle to the Gentiles.†The legendary New Testament scholar Paul Achtemeier says of Paul, “The chosen people ha(ve) been broadened, by the same means it was originally created, namely God’s choice, to include gentiles as well.â€1

For Paul, Gentiles didn’t have to follow the Bible and be circumcised to be included in the Jesus movement. Paul defended this Gospel—this Good News of Jesus Christ—throughout his career. And that’s what we hear in Romans 10:12: “Therefore, there is no difference between a Jew and a Greek, for the same one is Lord of all, generous to all who call him.†For Paul, all Gentiles had to do was have the same faith that Jesus had, or all they had to do is believe the same things that Jesus believed. This was not, as many modern Bible translations have, “faith in Jesus,†but the more accurate translation: “the faith of Jesus.†Gentile inclusion was not based on believing things about Jesus, but believing like Jesus. Believing the Great Commandment to love your neighbor. In fact, Paul would say in Romans 13:8-10, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law (or the Bible). The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not covet,’ and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law (of the Bible).â€

So what? Paul is a non-biblical, radical Jew! What’s that got to do with us? We’ve always been told this is the Roman Road and if you didn’t believe x, y, and z, you were out. This was a line of exclusion. In fact, Paul is telling the Roman Gentiles that they have been included in the most radical way… by having the faith OF Jesus—the faith that says love your neighbor. In our historic moment, when identity plays such a role in whether someone is included or excluded, it is vitally important for us to hear Paul’s message with clarity. Gentiles were everyone who wasn’t Jewish. It was everybody who was historically outsiders. Paul says they are now insiders if they love their neighbors, which is Jesus’s faith.

It would be very much in keeping with Paul’s gospel to say, “To all of you who have been traditionally marginalized by the church, to all of you have never felt like you belong in church because we’ve been so exclusionary, to all of you who have felt pushed out and excluded, to all of you who never thought you could come to church much less join a church because of whatever—sexual identity, gender, race, class, etc.—in fact, Paul says, you already belong.†All you have to do is have the faith that Jesus had, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Make no mistake, the good religious people of his time did not like Paul’s gospel. He got in trouble for it all the time. He got in trouble for it within the Jesus movement and outside the Jesus movement, but he remained consistent and clear throughout his career regarding his radical inclusion of Gentiles. For many, Paul was too much to bear and too liberal to accept. If you read his letters, he’s always defending his position and seems to be pretty controversial. So, to accept Paul’s Gospel of inclusion, even today, probably means to accept the push back, too.

Are we willing to follow Paul into this space of radical inclusion based on the love command that Jesus demonstrated? We don’t have to. We can cross our arms and say no. Even worse, we can hold out hands out in caution and say to the world, “You don’t belong here.†We can hold on to centuries of church tradition and tell people all the things they need to do before they come into our sacred spaces. We can do that. But wherever that has happened in the church, there is a wake of devastation, trauma, and pain—because there is no pain like church pain. History is littered with churches like that.

I’m sure there are people in Jackson and across Mississippi who could tell stories of being excluded and maybe even “kicked outâ€. Those are painful stories. Those same people may be looking for a church that practices radical inclusion. This morning, let’s throw our arms out wide. Let’s stretch them out as wide as the love of God in Jesus Christ, and say with truth and conviction that the Church of Jesus Christ is here for all. Bring your whole self, your authentic self, to this place and feel the embrace of the Holy One. And if you have ever been loved, love. If you have ever been given grace, give grace. If you have ever been forgiven, forgive. If there is a place in the whole world where this can happen and should happen, it is this place. May it be so.
Amen.


1Paul Achtemeier, Romans (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), p. 167.

Seeing God Face to Face

Genesis 32:22-31, The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · August 6th, 2023 · Duration 7:18

Change. Sometimes it happens quickly – you go from having little babies to little children and though it took a few years, it feels like the blink of an eye. Sometimes it happens slowly, Jesus is born in a tiny stable and now we gather in this sacred space, celebrating his life, death, burial, and resurrection, with song, and word, and the table of communion in ways that have been shaped by shifts in theology and ecclesiology over 2000 years.

Change. Sometimes it happens with the still, small voice of God speaking to one person in an otherwise empty room. And sometimes it happens in a community, like that first Pentecost, God speaking to many all at once. Change. Sometimes it happens in the quiet space of the human heart, and sometimes it takes a wrestling match, outside under the stars.

“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.â€

With those words in this morning’s lesson from Genesis, the course of Jacob, now Israel’s, life, and the course of human history are changed.

Jacob meets God face to face, and he walks away limping. He walks away with the grief of change, and he walks away into forgiveness from Esau. He walks away blessed so that he might go and be a blessing. Jacob meets God face to face, a human, and walks away a nation, a whole people marked by God. A people out of which Jesus is born. A people out of which hope is born. Jacob meets God face to face and eventually incarnation and resurrection follow.

Change is inevitable. Our world rotates on its axis every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Babies are born. Beloved people die. Relationships are made and broken and restored.

Change impacts us directly as individuals and as a family of faith. We might walk away limping from the changes we experience in our own lives and in our community. We might experience grief, but we might also experience forgiveness. We might walk away blessed to go and be a blessing. We might meet God face to face, and walk away a people marked by God, a people out of which hope is born, a people behind whom incarnation and resurrection follow.

Last week, Major invited us to say the quiet parts aloud as we prepare for our new Senior Pastor to come.

A new Senior Pastor will inevitably bring about change, even in a place as lay lead as Northminster. Scott will shepherd our family of faith, in ways that may be a change from what we have previously experienced.

The quiet part about change is that we typically don’t like it. We like to be in control, we don’t like uncertainty or surprise, we like the way things are, we aren’t sure that change will be for the better.

Change is uncomfortable. Sometimes it leaves us feeling disjointed, as if we have been struck by a powerful God, as if our connections are separated.

The other out loud part about change is that we get to choose, whether to resist it or to embrace it. But if we are unwilling to change, we might not get to walk the bumpy blessed road ahead. It might be a road that looks different, but it is the road we have been walking.

Change. It is inevitable, but like Jacob, we can be blessed by all that has been, and go live into all that will be. We can be struck by a powerful God, our connections separated, so that they might be reformed into the ever-widening circle of God’s embrace, the embrace of forgiveness and hope, and incarnation and resurrection.

As we live into our future, may we see God face to face and may we be changed.

Amen.

Expectations

Genesis 29:15-28, Romans 8:26-39, The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

Major Treadway · July 30th, 2023 · Duration 16:25

Expectations have a way of shaping our experiences that often go unnoticed. One of the ways we can see this shaping clearly and somewhat insignificantly is in how we engage with entertainment.

Have you ever been to see a movie that was hyped way up, one where you had been persuaded that it would be an amazing cinematic experience? Maybe it happened to you last weekend and you were part of the fourth largest weekend in movie theater history with complementary offerings mashed together to be called Barbenheimer. Perhaps, you left the theater awed by your experience. But, perhaps, when the lights came on, you found yourself disappointed, and reflecting that if you had not had such high expectations, then you may have enjoyed it more.

Then there are other times when the expectation is that the movie, meal, class, or sermon will be awful. You know those times when you go along because a friend or family member really wants to go, and you have psych yourself up to endure what is to come. And then, somehow, you find that you have enjoyed your experience. But, upon further reflection, if you are like me, you wonder, if my expectations had not been so low, would I have enjoyed that as much?

Expectations. They have a way of shaping more than just our extra-curricular experience. Look at Jacob in today’s Genesis reading, which includes one of the most incredulous scenes of the Bible. Every time I read this passage I find myself wondering, “How could Jacob not know until morning?â€

Jacob expected that his uncle Laban would honor their agreement and give his daughter Rachel to him when he had worked for seven years. It’s hard to know what Laban expected. And we learn nothing of the expectations of Leah and Rachel – not to mention Zilpah and Bilhah.

For seven years, Jacob worked, dreaming of the day when he would marry Rachel, only to wake and find that he had married Leah. There are obviously many things happening here culturally, that we cannot possibly hope to parse out in the course of this sermon, but Laban sums it up with some expectations of his own in the form of a simple explanation, “This is not done in our country – giving the younger before the first born.â€

Leah was older, she should be given in marriage before her younger sister Rachel. So to any of you out there dating or engaged to the younger sister of an unwed older sister: read the fine print.

Somehow, Jacob trusts Laban to keep his word the second time, enamored as he is with Rachel. He keeps on working for another seven years, expecting that this time, Laban would be true to his word.

One has to suspect that he asked for a few more candles and a little less wine at his second wedding feast.

Further, one has to wonder how a few more questions and a few less expectations might have changed the situation for Jacob.

Back in late 2008, just after Karen and I had gotten married and accepted an invitation to move to Indonesia, we had and were asked a lot of questions about what our life would be like when we got there. People (including us) wanted to know if we would have running water, air conditioning, internet, a car, which side of the road people drove on, if we could learn the language, drink the water, how often we could come home, if it was safe, what kind of visa we needed, how the government felt about foreigners. So many questions. Some of these had easy answers, more did not. Eventually, we started ending each answer about what our lives would look like in Indonesia with the words, “but I really don’t know.â€

I think we’ll have running water, but I really don’t know. I assume there’s internet, at least at our office, but I really don’t know. I hope it’s safe, but I really don’t know. And for many questions, that was about as honest and true as we could be.

But expectations aren’t always as easy and clear as when you’re going to see a new movie, or moving half way around the world. Sometimes they slip in unnoticed until it’s too late. Like with Jacob and Laban.

For many of us at Northminster, we began to form expectations of what life at Northminster might be like under a new pastor all the way back when we first heard from Chuck that he was retiring. I heard many and voiced some of them.

“No one will ever be able to follow in his footsteps;†“the next pastor will have big shoes to fill;†“Northminster will not be the same without him;†“following Chuck will be a near insurmountable challenge.†These expectations are ones that we can face and talk about. We can assess their validity and how they should shape our outlook. We can do these things because these are expectations that we have already named.

But there are likely others, some we know, and some that we do not yet know, that are lurking in our minds waiting to reveal themselves at an unhelpful moment. One of the most predictable and damaging expectations about which we will all need to be mindful, is that of comparing Scott on day one to Chuck on day 8,000.

I do not mean to diminish the memory of Chuck nor the hopes for Scott. And forgive me as I venture into the territory of the “so obvious there is no need to say it out loud.†Chuck’s ministry here was long, storied, beloved, and formative for individuals and this family of faith in much the same way that the pastors who preceded him were – only longer.

Scott is not Chuck and he will do things differently. It is likely that Scott’s facility with computers and flip phones will diverge greatly from his predecessor, and we should not count either of those things against him.

As a community of faith, we can and should have high hopes for the bright future into which Scott will lead us, but we should not fall into the trap of expecting him to fit exactly the mold of his predecessor.

I know you all know this. I know that it seems so obvious as to be unnecessary to be said out loud – especially from the pulpit in a sermon on Sunday morning. I know. But there is something about saying the silent part out loud that helps to shed light on the silent part and reveal it that we might be able to consider it more fully.

When Karen and I started ending all of our answers about what life would be like in Indonesia with the obvious and true words, “but I really don’t know,†it changed the answers in our minds. It left room for the mystery that was out there. It prevented us from cementing a picture in our minds that we could not possibly know would be true.

Part of our work in Indonesia was helping people prepare for and adjust to living in a culture that was not their own. Of the hundred or so folks with whom we worked, perhaps, the most common predictor of how intensely someone would experience culture shock, was how certain they were about what they would experience. In other words, how steadfastly they held to their expectations.

It seems so obvious, right? Of course, it is not possible to be certain what life will be like on the other side of the world. Especially, when someone else is setting up your housing, your work, your church community, your transportation methods, your food, and everything that is not coming in your two fifty-pound pieces of luggage. Of course, there is much that cannot be known. Saying the obvious part out loud helps.

This morning, as we celebrate and anticipate the coming of a new Senior Pastor to Northminster, let’s remember the silent and obvious part. Scott is not Chuck and we should not expect him to be.

Let’s go back to Jacob and Laban again. But as we go back, let me be clear on one point, I am in no way trying to make this story into an allegory. I am not comparing Leah to Scott, one, because that would be poor theological thinking, and two, because to do so would be to draw a further comparison between Laban and the Pastor Search Committee, and that gets us to an equally unhelpful place. What I do want to think about it is the expectations of Jacob.

With that said, let’s think about how Jacob approached his two periods of seven years of labor with good ole Uncle Laban.

For seven years, he worked, smitten with dreams of what life would be with his dear Rachel. When seven years were complete, he celebrated with his uncle, the celebration ended, it was the darkest part of the night, he was married. Then morning came, and he realized that his wife was not Rachel, but her older sister Leah. Jacob confronted his uncle. He got a lesson in the local culture – and in what it felt like to be on the receiving end of some trickery.

But then he had a decision to make. A series of decisions, rather. He had to decide what to do about Leah, what to do with Laban, and what to do about Rachel.

Each time I read this story, there is a part of me that expects Jacob to hop on a camel, scoop up Rachel and ride away to live a happily ever after, Disney storybook kind of ending. But that’s not what happens. Each time I read the story, it’s the same, Jacob, recognizing that his wife is not the person he had dreamed she would be for seven long years of labor, choosing to stay married to Leah, choosing to enter into another bargain with the uncle who deceived him, and choosing to work another seven years so that he can eventually marry Rachel.

In the relatively short span of just a few verses, all of Jacob’s expectations, known and unknown have come crashing down around him. His faithfulness and reorienting himself to his new circumstances are helpful for us as we wrestle with our own expectations about our life together as a community of faith as well as in our individual lives out there beyond these walls.

There is little about the future about which we can be absolutely certain. On this point, Paul’s words to the church in Rome in today’s Epistle are helpful: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.†Paul’s argument here is that the “love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord†is one expectation that we can hold closely and confidently.

In each of our lives, there will be many expectations about which it is necessary to think or say “but I really don’t know.†There are potential expectations that we can name as future cautions. And there may even be some tricky Uncle Labans out there lurking shadily in plain sight, waiting to give us an unwelcome lesson in culture. All of these expectations have the capacity to impact negatively our experience as individuals and as a community.

Our challenge today, and each day, is to loosen our grip on our expectations about the things which we have little real and actual control, and tighten our grip on Paul’s affirmation of the love of God – trusting that the God whose love cannot be separated from us, will accompany us as we encounter all of life’s experiences, those that align with our expectations, and those that do not.

Amen.

The Spirit of Hope

Romans 8:12-25, Psalm 86:11-17, The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Jason Coker · July 23rd, 2023 · Duration 19:41

All of Romans 8 is Paul’s theological exposition of the Spirit. How does the Spirit function in our lives? What does it do? What does it lead us to do or not do? Paul invites these questions as he asks and answers them. How do we answer these questions in our own context?

Hope! It is not for the faint of heart. Hope sits at the intersection of the “already†and “not yet.†In other words, in Paul’s words from Romans today, hope is that Christian experience of both all of God’s glory and, paradoxically, human suffering: “I consider the suffering of this present time not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us†(Rom. 8:18). Paul goes on and tells us about the first fruits of the Spirit. We have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, but it is only the first fruits—the best is yet to come. We have already experienced the power of God’s salvation, but our salvation is not yet complete.

This paradox of salvation between the “already/not yet†runs throughout Paul’s letter and the rest of the New Testament. The earliest followers of Jesus experienced complete transformation. Paul himself tells of his conversion. In Acts, Paul encounters the risen Christ and is literally blinded by the experience. One story after the next in the New Testament are these powerful encounters with the Spirit of Christ that changes and transforms individuals. There was a life before Christ and a life after Christ and those two lives were different. This is also the story of Jesus’s ministry in the four Gospels. One may be blind, but once Jesus comes into the scene, all the sudden there is sight. One may be lame, but once Jesus comes into the scene, there is strength. Over and over again, Jesus transforms people’s lives—both their physical health and their spiritual health.

But this transformation never rescues them from the pains and sufferings of our own humanity. I think your former pastor Chuck Poole captured this tension, this paradox of Christianity, in a sermon he preached here many years ago—still one of my favorite sermons on prayer I think I’ve ever heard. Chuck’s whole sermon, which may have been 10 minutes focused on two points: Sometimes prayer changes our lives—we pray for a miracle, and we received a miracle. Our prayer changed our life. But the opposite is also true and truer: Sometimes our lives change the way we pray. We pray for healing, and when it doesn’t come, we change the way we pray. We begin to pray for strength and then acceptance and then… Chuck then told us about how he sat at the columbarium and read all those names and life situations that changed the way he prayed for the departed as they were departing.

That’s the paradox of our faith: we have already experienced the life changing, soul altering power of God in Christ, but we are still here in a world that seems so hostile to the same God who changed our lives. How do we characterize our lives on the in-between in this liminal space between what has already happened and what will happen? The liminal space between the first fruits of the Spirit and the consummation of time and the fullness of salvation?

On Dec. 14, 2012, I was in a meeting with our deacons at Wilton Baptist Church in Wilton, CT. It was a Friday and as we were finishing up, people’s phones started going off. Everyone started getting messages. I think I still had a Blackberry. Tim Boyle, one of our deacons who lived in Bethel, CT, just ten minutes up the road and right beside Newtown, CT, told us all that there was an active shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Within minutes, I received a call from our elementary school, where my oldest son was in first grade. They told us that the school was on lock-down because there was an active shooter at another local elementary school. By the end of the day, we went to pick up Liam from school—he was safe and sound—and we started to hear about what had happened at Sandy Hook. Our local clergy group came together and planed a prayer vigil, our church hosted meetings to help the helpers, and Northminster, some of you sent a box of Chuck’s book A Church for Rachel, to get that book into the hands of some of those families who had lost their first graders.

I can’t really describe what it was like being so close to such a tragic event—especially having a child the exact same age as the twenty children who were brutally murdered that day. While we didn’t lose anyone in that event, we all lost something. My closest friends at the time were the retired Presbyterian minister in our town and the Rabbi at the local synagogue and we were meeting every week during that time period instead of our regular monthly lunches we had at the Georgetown Saloon. It was Rabbi Leah Cohen that said something to me that was a pivot point in my life and has been a solid foundation for me since. It was so simple and true and profound. She said, “Guys, we believe that good wins. We have to be the one’s who believe that. We’re clergy. Good wins over evil. God triumphs over evil. Right? If we don’t believe that, what hope does our religions offer the world?â€

What hope does our religions offer the world? Does God triumph over evil? Hearing that from my Rabbi, my friend, helped me preach after that tragedy. It helped me stand before my congregation with a real offering of something to hold on to. There is always HOPE. Despair is real, human suffering is vividly true, we make the world a mess, we get terrible diagnoses, relationships break apart, and THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE.

The cross is real, Jesus was murdered as a treasonous radical, AND in the shadow of the cross there is an empty tomb. Our faith is rooted in God’s miraculous power to save and redeem. We confess that Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried and on the third day he arose from the grave. These are foundational for all those who call themselves Christians all over the world and over the past two millennia.

Our faith does not lessen human suffering, our faith doesn’t stop wars from happening, our faith doesn’t prevent evil from having its way. Our faith promises us that our God knows what that feels like in the cross of Jesus and our faith promises us that our human suffering does not have the last word—no matter how bad it gets. Or, maybe, that our human suffering does not have to have the last word. There is another last word and that last word—if we can just get there—is that the Spirit of God can and will usher us through all this. We are not alone in our loneliest moment. When all seems lost, we have a God who loves us still.

And with that, how do we return our gaze to the world? Do we look at human suffering and shrug our shoulders and say, “God’s in control?†No! With a hope that comes from this God who doesn’t abandon us, who loves us through tragedy, who delivers us, who wins over evil, we cannot sit by and watch the injustices of the world run through the headlines and into our lives and do nothing. To look on the world and do nothing is blasphemous. It is to deny the power and love of God.

What can we do? I think we can answer that fairly easily if we answer another question that precedes that one. Before we ask “What can we do?†let’s answer this: Who are we? Who are we? Paul says, “for all who are led by the Spirit of God ARE Children of God.†Children of God. Are we children of God? Are we the Church of God? Are we the community of the redeemed? Are we? If we are, the question is never, “What can we do?†The real question is “What can’t we do?†What can we do in Jackson? What can’t we do in Jackson—if we remember who we are? What can we do in Mississippi? What can’t we do in Mississippi—if we remember who we are?

Years ago, I was in charge of a project on the border of Kenya and Uganda working with AIDS/HIV orphans. When I first arrived, it was like getting punched in the face. A nine-year-old girl as head of the household because her parents had died. Because of the stigma of AIDS, she and her small siblings had to drag their mother’s body from their home and bury her themselves. We were working with about 50 orphans when we started. At one point, I was angry with God and humanity. How do we let this happen? How does God let this happen? So, in my room one night, I said out loud, “God, what are you doing? What are you doing about this?†No sooner as I had said it, a word came to me. It’s as close to anything I’ve ever experienced of having God speak to me. As soon as I said, “What are you doing about this?†This came to me: “I’ve sent you from halfway around the world. You are what I’m doing.†What a terrible plan is what I thought.

Northminster, you are what God is doing in the world. You are God’s plan because you are God’s church, you are God’s people, you are God’s children. That’s who we are. And if that’s who we are, what can’t we do? That is a powerful hope. That’s a powerful hope for this world, for Mississippi, for Jackson. This is the Spirit of Hope.

Amen.

Beginnings

Genesis 25:19-34, The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

Major Treadway · July 16th, 2023 · Duration 24:26

Do you know a great story teller - someone who you know that within seconds of them beginning a story, that you will be hooked and definitely listening all the way until the end?

These storytellers know that great beginnings take work and intention. Great beginnings stretch to all sorts of genres of entertainment. They are in obvious places like movies and novels, but they are also in some, perhaps, less obvious places like pod casts, songs, commercials, even board meetings and sermons.

Beginnings are so important to the movie industry that one critic has developed a metric by which one might judge a beginning. This critic proposes considering the “Grab Factor: how bad do I wanna keep watching?†Then there’s “Memorability: Do I have to remind you of it, or does the scene instantly come to mind when I say the film’s title?†And finally, “Sets the Stage: How well does it work for the movie? Is it part of a bigger picture?â€

The phenomenon of the importance of beginnings is not new. More than 400 years before the birth of Jesus, the Greek philosopher Plato declared, “the beginning is the most important part of the work.â€

As we read the Bible, if we pay close attention to beginnings, we can anticipate and understand more deeply what follows in the stories that unfold.

We know that the stories in the Bible were not dictated in real time. Rather they were told and retold, passed on from community to community. They were considered in retrospect, meaning that in order to get to the important parts in the middle and end, the stories were crafted in such a way that the beginnings would introduce all of these parts.

You might say that the Bible storytellers were thinking along the same lines as a modern day movie critic, thinking how can I best begin this story that it has a high grab factor, memorability, and sets the stage for what is to come.

The story of Job is a great example. Chapter one is made for Hollywood: We are introduced to Job in the first five verses, then the scene shifts to a conversation between the Lord and Satan, a conversation which includes the Lord saying, “have you considered my servant Job?†Hooked, memorable, stage set.

There’s also the introduction of David: David is so young and scrawny that his dad did not even invite him to meet with the King of Israel search committee chair, the prophet Samuel. But Samuel anoints young David in the presence of his seven older brothers. Hooked, memorable, stage set.

And if ever there is a candidate for chief display of the importance of the beginning of a story in the Bible, it is the story of Jesus. We have four gospels, which each beginning in significantly different ways. Each of them has their own hook, their own way of being memorable, and their own way of setting the stage for the way that each will tell the story of Jesus throughout their own gospel.

“The beginning is the most important part of the work,†says Plato.

This morning, as we continue our summer of Genesis, we come to a new beginning. This time in the form of a birth.

It seems appropriate, for on this Sunday, we have just crossed the halfway point of our summer of Genesis. The last five Sundays have followed Abraham. Today, we begin the story of Jacob, who will, of course, come to be known as Israel, for whom the nation of Israel gets its name.

Today, we stand at the threshold. Today, we get our first glimpse of who this person, Israel, is and will be.

The birth of Jacob, Israel, is as significant for what will follow as it is for what it follows. Abram was promised that God would make of him a great nation. At the time of his death, Abram has become Abraham and, according to Genesis, has fathered at least eight sons, but Genesis 25:5 says that “Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac.†A few verses later Abraham dies at the age of 175 and is buried by Isaac who has inherited everything and his older half-brother Ishmael whom Abraham and Sarah sent away into the wilderness.

The promise to Abraham, that he would become a great nation has not happened in his lifetime. He hasn’t even become a neighborhood association, much less a great nation. And he has bet everything on Isaac. Now, the becoming of a great nation is up to Isaac. And today’s reading indicated that we are to learn of the great number of descendants of Isaac, who we are to expect will fulfill God’s promise to Abram. And what is the first thing that we learn? His wife is barren.

Isaac prays for his wife and she conceives. She is pregnant – with twins. Now, I have never been pregnant. I have only been near to people who have been pregnant. And to say that I am perpetually in awe of every human who has been the host to the miracle that is the development of a single cell into a living breathing human would be an understatement. For me, it borders on unfathomable how one cell can become more than one human.

To read today’s story of Rebekah’s experience sounds to me what it must be like for each mother who carries multiple infants in a single womb. “The children struggled together within her and she said, ‘If it is to be this way, why do I live?’â€

God responds to Rebekah, not with encouragement: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.â€

Hooked. Memorable. Stage Set.

In the span of two verses, we went from the hopes of God’s covenant with Abraham to make of him a great nation hanging on a single son married to a barren wife to, not one, but two nations struggling within the womb of that same wife. I hope you got the big bucket of popcorn so you can get a free refill.

This story of beginning continues to build in today’s reading from Genesis with Esau being born first, but born with Jacob gripping his heel on the way out of the womb. One a hunter, one a mama’s boy. One loved by Isaac, one by Rebekah. And then Jacob swindles Esau out of his birthright for a bowl of soup.

[whistle]

What are we to think about this boy, adolescent, man Jacob, who will become the namesake for the people of God? What can we hope to come to understand about God’s covenant with Abraham? And what does it mean that Esau and Jacob will be not one great nation, but two nations?

That’s a solid beginning.

Beginnings in the lived human experience are rarely as well choreographed as they have a way of being in stories, even when the stories are about real-life humans. Because in real life, our beginnings are not lived in retrospect. We do not get to plan our beginnings based on how the story has unfolded and where it ends. Many times, we do not even know when a new story is beginning.

I expect that if you think back over the course of your life, there are significant moments in your story, that were not significant when they happened to you, but have grown in significance because of what happened after.

For me there was the time I invited a friend to go with me to visit Wake Forest Divinity School while I was in college, to which he replied, I don’t care about visiting Wake Forest, I want to visit Duke. To which, I replied, well, I don’t care about visiting Duke, but they are relatively close to each other and both about a twelve hour drive from here, so why don’t we go together and visit both schools?

Or there was the time I accepted the curious recommendation to visit a Baptist church in a suburb thirty minutes away because the recommendation came from the atheist fiancé of a Catholic friend. I could not have known that on that on the first visit to this church, I would meet my wife.

While we cannot know when some beginnings are happening, there are some beginnings that we can anticipate. We know that the first day of school, or the first day of a new job, or the first days in a new community or country will be a new beginning, and so on those days, if you are anything like me, you pay a little bit more attention to the details that are important to you.

Maybe you pick out the right clothes, the right shoes, or wash your car the day before. Perhaps, you check out the syllabus before the first class. Whatever the beginning, there is extra attention given when we know it is coming. It is almost as though we are trying to find a way to live out a hook, to make the day or experience memorable, trying to set the stage for a positive experience for what is to follow.

Today, we are on the threshold of one of those predictable types of beginnings – one in which this community of faith has the opportunity to move forward with intention in this way aiming to live out a hook, to make this new experience in the life of our congregation memorable, and to begin setting the stage for a positive experience for what is to follow.

And while this prospective beginning is significant, it is important to remember that beginnings are happening in our lives and the lives of those around us every day, some of the anticipated kind and likely more of the unanticipated kind.

Because we cannot always know when a beginning is upon us, we cannot always live in such a way that there is a hook, we cannot always live in such a way that we are certain will be memorable, but we can live in such a way that sets the stage for what is to follow. To live in this way is to live each day as though it were a beginning of sorts. This is the every day kind of setting the stage to which we are called as Christians – the loving God with all that is in us, and loving our neighbors as we long to be loved kind of setting the stage. It is each of us ministering to each other inside of these walls and all of us ministering to the community beyond these walls. Setting the stage for what is to come requires each of us to live the kind of life about which we pray each week – one which anticipates and participates in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

So, dear children of God, how will you begin?

Amen.







What the World Needs

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Jason Coker · July 9th, 2023 · Duration 21:06

I love numbers, always have. Sometimes I think in numbers. I like sequences, I like patterns, I like even numbers better than odd numbers unless they are divisible by five—stuff like that. Math people understand. Math is concrete. Math is factual. Two plus two equals _________--every time. So, I geek out with spreadsheets. And we have a lot of spreadsheets in Together for Hope. Out spreadsheets, in many ways, define our work and tell us where to go. And in this case, our spreadsheets are devastating. Just recently I was looking at a spreadsheet of childhood poverty in Mississippi. In one county in Mississippi, the childhood poverty rate is 72.9%. Nearly 3 out of 4 children live below the poverty line in Claiborne County, MS. The number 72.9 has been seared, scorched, branded into my brain. Only 27.1% of children in that county live above the poverty line. 72.9%--what is the future for all those children?

That number—72.9—started making me think: How many children are we okay with living below the poverty line? We know 72.9% is absolutely unacceptable. But what percentage of children living in poverty is ACCEPTABLE in the United States of America? 3/4ths is too many, but how about half? Let’s be honest, half is too much, isn’t it? We can’t accept half of all our children to live in poverty, can we? What about a quarter of all our children? 25% That’s so much lower than 72.9, isn’t it? But 1 our of 4 kids living in poverty—that’s too much too isn’t it? We can do better, can’t we? Let’s say 10%! Just 1 out of 10 kids. Is that acceptable? How many children can we accept living in poverty in the wealthiest, most powerful country the world has ever known? What is an acceptable poverty rate for us?

As a people who follow God Almighty and testify to God’s love for the world through Jesus Christ, how many people can we accept living in poverty? A poverty that destroys their promise, their life, their future? What’s that number?

We should be ashamed, but this isn’t about shame. These numbers aren’t about us, who are not poor, feeling bad about ourselves. That would only make our situation worse. Let’s look at these numbers, these real numbers that represent real people, real children, and do something about it. These numbers are a call to action, not a call to shame. Shame is a terrible strategy! No, this is a call to action!

What’s the larger number in Mississippi? 31.3% of children in Mississippi live below the poverty level. Nearly 1 in every 3 children in this state lives in poverty. If you counted them it would sound like this: one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE. That’s how many children are being swallowed by poverty. That 31.3% turns into 225,150 children in Mississippi.1 I hope the number 225,150 burns in your heart. Those children would be the largest city in Mississippi if they all lived in the same place. In fact they are more than the two largest cities in Mississippi combined—Jackson at 145,995 and Gulfport at 72,236.

So, what do we do with Jesus’s words from our Gospel passage for today? “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentile and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.†Jesus tells his disciples over and over again throughout Matthew and the other Gospels that they are to “take up their cross and follow him.†How is the yoke of the cross easy? How is the way of the cross light?

Chiquikta Fountain is the executive director of Delta Hands for Hope, our flagship Together for Hope site in Shaw, MS. This summer she’s been running summer camp for the kids in Shaw. They’ve had Young Entrepreneur Day where the kids have been making things and selling them to the general public—things like Kool-Aid pickles, lemonade, candy bars, etc. Chiquikta’s job is not easy. She raises money all the time, she plans all the programming, and she manages the facilities. That job is not easy or light, but everyday she wakes up, Chiquikta has a clarity of purpose that is crystal clear.

Kenny Magee is the executive director of Boots to Beyond, which is one of our Together for Hope coalition partners in Greenville, MS, that helps veterans know what their benefits are and helps them sign up for them so that they can get the services that their service is promised. They run “stand downs†which are large events for public health where they invite the VA and other veteran’s groups to come together in a health fair. The pain and suffering that Kenny sees is not easy and light, but the work that Kenny does transforms people’s lives and lets them know that someone loves them and appreciates the time they gave defending this country.

Right now here in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, Together for Hope is partnering with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network to expand Medicaid in these states. We were working with them in North Carolina, but we don’t have to anymore because North Carolina expanded Medicaid, which will provide access to health care for over 600,000 people. If we can be successful in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, we will have helped over a million people get access to health care. This is the continuation of Jesus’s healing ministry in our modern times. This is advocacy. This is easy and light because we know this is right. It is crystal clear.

But, we need more help, don’t we? We need more people to get involved in poverty abolitionism—this is a term I just learned in Matthew Desmund’s latest book Poverty, By America. Poverty in America is not inevitable, it is not inescapable, and it is not necessary; but it is designed. Our system is not broken. Our system is running as it has been designed. Our economic (and political) systems are designed to create this kind of poverty. And if it has been designed this way, we can participate in changing the design, creating a new design, or intervening in the design. Those are our three strategies at Together for Hope—interventions, innovations, advocacy. Advocacy is where we change the system. The work is not easy or light. This yoke of poverty abolitionism is heavy and hard, but the clarity of purpose is so simple infants can see it and know that it is right.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the need. 255,150 children—that’s a lot of kids for a family. Not only is this work overwhelming at times, you also get your fair share of critics. Look at what Jesus says in the beginning of this passage: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon;’ the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.†Even Jesus and John the Baptist had real critics. So much so that both were killed—on my the Judean King and the other by the Roman Governor. That’s not easy and that burden wasn’t light, But Jesus and John knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing and they did it.

Jesus is not inviting us into something easy and light. Jesus knows that the work of the Gospel—to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the poor, set the prisoner free, look after the stranger and immigrant—this work is hard. It is difficult. To do this work, the work of a poverty abolitionist, is heavy and it attracts mean spirited critics.

But it’s also easy because Gospel work is soul work and when you know you’re doing the right thing and truly sharing the Gospel—the Good News—there’s no amount of opposition that can muddy the clarity of God’s call to us to do the right thing. And it’s always right to do the right thing.

So, Northminster, take this yoke upon your shoulders. This hard work of poverty abolitionism, the hard work of the Gospel. Use your time and resources to absolutely change the world. Leverage what you have—your influence, your networks, your power—to let our 255,150 children know that they have a state that loves them and cares for them. The work is too big and the scope is too large not to have everybody involved. So tell your friends, get your family involved, talk about it at the water fountain at work, if they won’t listen, go out into the highways and byways!

What does the world need? What do the 255,150 children living in poverty in Mississippi need? The world needs, these children need YOU. They need you because the harvest is great but the laborers are few. The world needs you.

Amen.


1See ruraldataportal.org/search.aspx (visited on July 9, 2023).




On Knowing

Genesis 22:1-14, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · July 2nd, 2023 · Duration 12:26

I don’t know.

These three words are perhaps the most true and least satisfying words that we can say about some of the biggest theological questions that humanity has ever considered.

They are, of course, not the only words that we can or should say. It is important that we spend time struggling with questions about God – applying that which we do know to the questions about God as we seek to move deeper into relationship with God.

On the question of creation, we can say that God created the heavens and the earth, we can say that God created light and life, but to the question of how, beyond saying that God spoke and creation happened, the more deeply we get into the details, sooner or later we will arrive at the words, “I don’t know.â€

Some questions draw these words faster, like the question: how can evil exist in a world created by a good God? We can appeal to human freewill, we can find comfort in God’s promise of enduring presence with us; but to the root of the question come the same words “I don’t know.â€

For the last couple of months, as I have found myself thinking about this morning’s reading from Genesis and wrestling with an unending litany of questions, I have had to answer an uncomfortable number of times these three familiar words.

Genesis 22, the Binding of Isaac. To me, this story is one of the most troubling in all of the Bible. This story lacks a hero. It is neither tragedy nor comedy. No human dies. There is no celebration or grieving. Only relief and angst, frustration and, somehow, faithfulness.

The God who created all of everything that has been created, the God who created humans out of dirt by giving them the breath of life, the God who promised aging Abram and barren Sarai that they would be the ancestors of a great nation, the God who saw fit, twenty-five years later, to see Abraham and Sarah become first time parents at the ages of one hundred and ninety, this God, in today’s reading, calls on Abraham to take his and Sarah’s son Isaac up the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice. In this story, before I can even formulate the questions, I already know the answer, “I don’t know.â€

How could God… I don’t know.

How could Abraham… I don’t know.

How could Isaac… I don’t know.

Why, why not, how, wasn’t there some other way, did this really come from God? Wasn’t… couldn’t… shouldn’t… why? And the only words I have to offer are “I don’t know.â€

It’s as if this story doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit the character of the God that I have come to know, worship, and proclaim. It doesn’t fit the narrative arc of the Bible. It even seems to contradict the smaller narrative of the book of Genesis.

Didn’t the same God who called for the sacrifice of Isaac also promise that Isaac would be the source of the great nation to which Abraham and Sarah would be the ancestors?

But maybe there is some hope. In this story, in the midst of all of our and Abraham’s and Isaac’s unknowing, when we look back, past the outrage and the tears, we find that even in this story, just as God has always been, God is with us – even in our unknowing.

At the end of the story, just after Abraham has raised the knife and the angel of the Lord stops him, as we, the readers and hearers of the story let out an audible sigh of relief, God says to Abraham, “now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.†“Now I know†says God.

These unsettling words take us back to the beginning of the chapter that are even easier to read past, “God tested Abraham.†Ellen Davis, in her book, Getting Involved with God, argues persuasively that there is a sense in which there is some uncertainity in the grand bargain between Abraham and God, after Abraham and Sarah twice choose deception and expedience over truthfulness and trust.

Davis wonders if these choices by Abraham and Sarah have raised questions in the mind of God, questions to which God must answer “I don’t know.†And so, to know for sure, God tests Abraham.

I can’t speak for you, but I get a little upset when I read the words “God tested Abraham.†It is the same way I get upset when I read Job chapter 1 which attributes to God words spoken to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job.†And it is the same way I get upset when I read in Matthew 4 that “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.â€

I had a college professor who would often refer to tests, with a knowing mischievous twinkle in his eye, as “opportunities.†He would remind us that exams in his class were opportunities to demonstrate what we had learned in his class. More often than not, I was pretty sure they were going to be opportunities to demonstrate something else.

In Abraham’s case, the story begins with God testing Abraham – without Abraham’s knowledge by the way. And the story ends with God saying “now, I know.†To say “now, I know†is to say, before now, I didn’t know. Before this moment, when you were standing here, I didn’t know, I wasn’t convinced, I couldn’t be quite sure, that you feared, revered, and trusted me.

Begrudgingly, it seems I must agree with that college professor, that tests are opportunities to demonstrate something. In his case, it was mastery of course material. In Abraham’s case, God’s test for Abraham contradicted God’s promise. And while many commentators argue that Abraham misunderstood God’s command, there is no getting around God’s statement that “now, I know†– a statement that reveals that in the midst of our unknowing, when there is much we do not understand, that even there God is with us – loving us enough to be with us, loving us enough to continue to learn to know us, and inviting us, to sit with all our “I don’t know’s about God, and continuing to ask questions that we might continue to learn to know God.

Amen.

Family Feud

Matthew 10:34-39, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

David Carroll · June 25th, 2023 · Duration 17:56

It’s good to be with you again today. I thank you for this second invitation. But I do note Jeff Wilson’s absence. I suppose he wasn’t ready to risk it twice!

I again give thanks for Northminster Church – the wonderful spirit and values which you display, the valuable ministries that you provide and support.

Of course, I give thanks for my friend Tim, for Cheryl and their family, his good work amongst you, and for the fact that I might never know where my golf ball went if he weren’t accompanying me on the golf course. My first drive on the golf course is always preceded by the words, “Spotters ready?†My eyesight is only good for about 150 yards! But Tim is always there to help me find the result of the rare (ahem) wayward shot.

There was a gentleman who had the same problem as I who approached his golf pro asking if there was anyone who could help him keep track of his ball on the course. “Oh, I have just the fellow for you. He’s a little bit older, a mere 86 years old, and he’s lost a step, doesn’t play much anymore, but he LOVES to walk the course.

His name is Harry Hanberry. We call him Harry the Hawk because he has the eyes of an eagle.†The next day the golfer met Harry the Hawk at the first tee. The golfer made a powerful swing and felt the crisp contact of an excellent shot, but it was quickly out of sight. “That felt like a good one. Did you see it?â€
“Got it,†said Harry. “Just follow me.â€
Proceeding down the fairway, they passed 150 yards, 200 yards (with Harry slowing down a bit), 250 yards (the golfer getting excited). At 300 yards Harry came to a stop and began to look around.
“I thought you saw my ball,†said the golfer.
“Oh, I did,†said Harry, “but for the life of me I can’t remember where it went!â€

I suppose you’ve seen today’s sermon title, "Family Feud." Maybe it brought some things to mind …
• Richard Dawson hosting the TV game show by that name
• Hatfields & McCoys
• Dishes flying across the kitchen
• I once had a young woman describing her family and how she had once ducked just in time to dodge a block of cheese that her mother had thrown at her!
Face it; families aren’t perfect.

A number of years back two young men, who had each been married about a year, were discussing how things were going in their marriages.
"I'm the head of the house," said one, "I think I should be; after all, I earn the money." (You may BOO if you’d like!)
"Well," said the other, "my wife and I have a perfect arrangement. I decide all the major matters and she takes care of all the minor matters."
“And how is that working out?"
The other replied, "Well, so far, no major matters have come up."

Feuds don't just take place between husband and wife, though:
The little young lady of the house, by way of punishment for some minor infraction, was forced to eat her dinner alone at a little table in a corner of the dining room. The rest of the family paid no attention to her presence until they heard her saying Grace rather loudly over her own meal. It went something like this, "I thank Thee Lord for preparing a table before me in the presence of mine enemies."
And you might think of the Bible when it comes to family feuds...
- Jacob was particularly adept at family feuding
-Conflict over the birthright with his older brother Esau
-Facing the deception of his father-in-law as he married first Leah then Rachel
- Jacob’s 12 sons – Jealous enough to sell their brother Joseph into slavery
- And then there’s always the Twelve …

But the scripture for today brings us to Jesus and the Twelve as Jesus prepares to send them out into ministry and mission; AND it brings me to my first point for today...

A. SOMETIMES WE WILL BE ISOLATED, REJECTED, OR ESTRANGED BECAUSE OF OUR FAITH CHOICES; BUT GREAT IS THE REWARD.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus warns us - "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all manner of evil against you falsely on my account. [Even if it’s your family!] Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Sometimes family feuds occur when a family member bucks established family traditions and values. As Christian missionaries found their way into the Far East, they found that many of their new converts ran afoul of their families, sometimes even to the point of death.

Closer to home and nearer in time, a young woman at Columbine was asked by one of the young disaffected gunmen, “Are you a Christian?†Cassie Bernall’s answer was simply, “Yes.†And it was her last word.

But even in those times and places when one would think we would be in agreement with those around us, we find that we occasionally disagree. It happens in families; it happens in churches; it happens in the workplace; most anywhere you go.

It is helpful at that point to realize that we each look at life, at faith, at the world through different lenses and with different blinders.

As a teenager, I was so taken by the profound kindness of the Good Samaritan and so captivated by the profound grace of the Prodigal Son’s loving Father that these two “lenses†changed the way I looked at and interacted with the world.

There are all sorts of lenses
WWJD or What would Jesus do?
Biblical literalism
National pride or patriotism
Universalism
Globalism
Conservatism
Liberalism

All of these serve as PRISMs that reshape the light, that change the way we see and interpret the world. And it’s important for us to know what our lenses are that are shaping us and affecting our perspective.

But they can also serve as blinders – limiting the view of things that God would show us, leaving us in circumstances where the best that we can do is to agree to differ … and that’s all right.

B. A second point - There is no question - the tone of the passage seems harsh, but in it CHRIST PRESENTS HIMSELF AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE BEST IN OUR SOCIETY -- THE FAMILY.
The call to love Christ more than one's family is a way of paying honor to the family. Loving Christ more than family compares that relationship with him not to the weakest of our society, but to the strongest.

These days with all the challenges to the understanding of what a family is, some might think that the institution of the family is dreadfully weak. Well, let me tell you, the family may be weakENED, but it is still the best our society has to offer from a purely secular standpoint. And when you add God's presence and blessing in a family, it's an AWESOME place to be!

But Christ offers to make the best even better. What would I be without Christ? What would our families be without the presence of God?

John Bergland -- Most times, we believe that devotion to Christ and the cause of Christ will bring a blessing. We may even reason that the more one gives to Christ, the more one will be blessed.
This scripture lesson speaks about the reward of the righteous, but it begins with a radical claim. One's foes will be from his or her own household. One who loves "father or mother more than me is not worthy of me."

Persons who seek a comfortable religion that will make no demands won't hear these words. Still discipleship worthy of the name Christian means desiring Christ more than any other relationship, possession, honor, or position. Even family devotion is subordinate to devotion to Christ.

Suppose a young person joins the Marine Corps with this reservation, "I'd still like to be a Marine, but I don't want to forsake my family. I want to be home for Christmas. I want to be there for the family reunion and for my mother's birthday."

That's simply not the way things are. The reality is that an insensitive and uncompromising drill sergeant demanding obedience tells new recruits, "I'm your mother and your father. I'm your brother and your sister. I'll tell you when to relax and when to stand tall. I'll tell you when to eat and when to sleep. And maybe when to die." If that demand sounds uncompromising, it only lasts for four years for most recruits. It's all tame compared to the radical demand placed on any man or woman who joins the corporate structure of many companies and is required to put family matters second.

Make the FULL commitment – and life will be more blessed, more meaningful, more full of love. Make the FULL commitment to Christ – and find that your family will be stronger, healthier, and more able to withstand the onslaughts of modern life.

C. Thirdly, ENCOURAGE THE ONE WHO SERVES THE CAUSE OF CHRIST.

The day is coming when you will welcome a new pastor, Christ’s representative to occupy the strange glass house that is the dwelling of pastoral leadership. It will be your job to lavishly welcome those who are estranged in many ways because of their allegiance to Christ, daring the new adventure to which Christ has called them.

Strengthen the one who takes a difficult stand for the cause of Christ. Strengthen the one who answers the call of God in this place, and encourage their family because a glass house can be a lonely place to live.

We know the stories of the Martyrs – Stephen, Paul, Jesus. But most of the feuding and sacrifices that we see are much less costly.
What can YOU do?
If you cannot serve … support the one who does serve.
If you cannot teach the child, bring the sandwiches.
If you cannot swing the hammer, hold the nail.
If you cannot sing his praise, hold the music.
If you cannot go the second mile, go the first.
If you cannot wash the feet, fill the basin and hold the towel.
If you cannot bear the cross, honor the One who did.

… and don’t forget to pray for your preacher … from time to time.

There are a lot of people hurting out there, people whose faith has moved them to places of loneliness, heartache, and sacrifice, even in their family life.

And families feud for all sorts of reasons. Some are noble reasons, some are not so noble. I pray that the presence of God blesses your family and mine; and that each of us moves forward from strength to strength … toward that reward … by his grace ... together.

God Has Brought Laughter

Genesis 18:1-15, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · June 18th, 2023 · Duration 14:14

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

You Are What You Eat

Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Trinity Sunday

Major Treadway · June 4th, 2023 · Duration 31:34

You are what you eat. If you have ever spoken these words, or had them spoken to you, you likely recognized the clear message behind them. Be mindful of what you are putting in your body, because it is what you are consuming that will shape and form who you are becoming.

On Trinity Sunday, we celebrate one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith – that the God we worship and serve is three and one, one and three. Each member of the Trinity – God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit – is fully God, and particularly distinct. I can’t speak for you, but for me, those words are easier to say than they are to understand. Even so, on this day, the first Sunday after Pentecost, on the cusp of the longest season of the church year, we celebrate the Holy Trinity.

And on this particular Trinity Sunday, because it is the first Sunday of the month, we also will celebrate communion – a sacred ordinance of the church, rich in symbolism and mystery.

And on this particular communion and Trinity Sunday, we are kicking off “A Summer of Genesis†where Lesley and I, and, perhaps, a few of our guest preachers, will preach from the Old Testament lessons, which, for the next twelve weeks are all found in the book of Genesis, beginning today, at the beginning.

You are what you eat.

There exists no shortage of things to say about the creation narrative that I read to you a few minutes ago. “In the beginning…†the Bible begins. But Genesis is not the only book of the Bible that begins with these words. The Gospel of John also begins this way. In the beginning.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…â€

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.â€

The Word, John will soon reveal is Jesus. So there in the beginning, we have God and Jesus. And if you turn the page to Genesis 2, there we find another account of creation that gives another account of how to think theologically about where everything that is came from. In this account, rather than starting with a formless void and darkness, there is earth, but no plants or animals, or even rain. In this account, God starts with humans, and after God forms a person out of dust, God breathes the breath of life into the first person.

Now, we need to be clear here, that this text does not name the Holy Spirit the way that Acts 2 does. Further the Hebrew word for breath here is not even the word we reminded you about last week “Ruach.†Here it is a synonym that carries similar meaning. Here, the breath of God, animates the dust of the earth.

God, Jesus, and the Spirit, what we Christians call the Trinity, engaged in what Richard Rohr calls the divine dance, all the way back in the beginning. The Holy Trinity in relationship, creating all that we know, as three and one.

Still in that second creation story. After God created that first human, the very next things God created were trees “pleasant to the sight and good for food.†And the very first command of God is “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.â€

You are what you eat.

Every tree good for food available, and God says there’s only one that if you eat it will cause you to die, don’t eat that one. I find it interesting that in this story, after the creation of the first human, God’s next creation and first commandment are both about food.

In my office, are two pieces of artwork that both depict a group of people sharing a meal Rueblev’s “Hospitality of Abraham†and a Papuan take on da Vinci’s “Last Supper.†Both paintings reflect a table from the Bible through the lens of a local artist.

They have another similarity that I only recently realized. The Rublev painting, depicts the scene from Genesis 18, when “the Lord appeared to Abraham†in the form of “three men standing near him.†Abraham and Sarah rush to set up a tent and a table and serve a meal. The painting of this meal is sometimes called “The Trinity.†The figure representing the Holy Spirit in the painting, according to Richard Rohr appears to be pointing to an open seat at the table.

The other picture, the Papuan rendition of da Vinci’s “Last Supper,†includes Jesus, eleven disciples, and an open seat. Jesus holds his hands invitationally. The people at the church where the original can be found would be quick to say that the twelfth disciple is you.

Two paintings, two meals, two open places at the table. The Hospitality of Abraham and the Hospitality of Jesus.

You are what you eat.

The cells of our body are in a constant state of death and generation, and the generation of new cells requires energy and substance, both found in the food we consume. In a very literal sense, we are what we eat. The cells that make up our existence are made up of what we consume.

It kinda makes you wonder if Jesus was a cellular biologist, breaking bread and telling the disciples that the bread was his body, and that the cup was the new covenant of his blood. Jesus invites the disciples to consume his body and his blood in the form of bread and wine - by their consumption becoming that which they have eaten, the very body of Christ – a body committed wholly to God and wholly to their neighbors.

Jesus invited his disciples and invites you to join him at the table of the Lord, to feast on the body of Christ, that you might become the Body of Christ. The Holy Trinity extends an invitation to you to join in the Divine Dance, to know and enter more deeply into relationship with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit – who have existed for all time and who have for all time existed in relationship, a relationship of invitation to you and to all.

Amen.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit

Acts 2:1-21, Pentecost Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff and Major Treadway · May 28th, 2023 · Duration 13:34

Today is Pentecost!

Ten days have passed since the disciples heard a word from Jesus. “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high,†Jesus told the eleven before he ascended to heaven.

Now they are twelve, but still they are waiting. Together. In one place.

The house where they found themselves was suddenly filled with a sound like the rush of a violent wind. And there was fire. A tongue of fire resting on each of them. “Until you have been clothed with power from on high,†Jesus had told them.

Wind and fire hold special places in the stories about God. Wind, unseen, of unknown origin, unrestrainable, and uncontainable, brought famines and plagues, separated the waters of the red sea that the Israelites might cross on dry land, and brought quail for a hungry people. It cannot be tamed or controlled. But there is more to wind. In Hebrew, the word for wind is the same as the word for breath and is the same as the word for spirit. We read and understand these words as different and distinct. But those who wrote the first stories about God, about the breath of God, about the spirit of God, wrote about the Ruach – the wind/breath/spirit of God.

It is this ruach, that made mud into living breathing humanity. So, it is hard to imagine that when we read “from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind†that images of breath and spirit were not also close at hand.

“Until you have been clothed with power from on high,†Jesus told them.

On the heels of the wind came fire. Fire was a purifying agent for the Jews. With it, they made sacrifices and offerings to God. But before that, fire was the very presence of God. It was fire that lead the Israelites by night through the wilderness toward the land flowing with milk and honey.

The gathered disciples, with wind and fire, were clothed with power from on high.

After the wind and fire came, the disciples started preaching. Only, there was something strange about their speaking. All those gathered were able to hear and understand – in their own languages! There were “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, Romans. There were Jews and Proselytes, Cretans and Arabs. And they were all hearing the words the disciples were speaking – in their own languages!

All were amazed – and confused. And it seemed as if everyone was asking the same question: What does this mean?

People from the whole known world were gathered. The people gathered that day must have looked something like the World Cup or the Olympics. Whenever people gather from places where different languages are spoken, power is revealed and starts to create interesting disparities. This power is not the power of the Holy Spirit. This power is the power that corrupts, manipulates, and elevates some groups over others.

Have you ever been in a room with someone who was not a native English speaker and was having trouble understanding or being understood, and there was a spoken or unspoken sense about the tone of the conversation that conveyed a sense of cultural and/or intellectual superiority?

I have. Have you ever been in a room filled with people who spoke a language you had not yet mastered and were engaged in conversation but you did not have the words to understand all that was being asked and you did not have all the words to ask for help and were left feeling misrepresented, inferior, and out of place?

I have. On days like those, I remember this story with a longing that I want to say is righteous.

What if this short story, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church, is, in fact, a snapshot of the Kingdom of God? A place where we can all speak. A place where we can all be understood. A place where we all are valued. A place where we all are seen. Language, meaning, value, and understanding dance like flames, and we take the time to engage in the process of communication in such a way that we are drawn into a community marked by the capacity for mutual transformation. The power of the Holy Spirit clothes the community and displaces the lesser power which is limited to its capacity to separate and discriminate.

The wind and the flame enable those present to speak and understand a unified message: You belong here.

The disciples, clothed in power from on high, speaking a message that does not need translation, communicate clearly: You are welcome here.

The whole world is divided by imaginary lines that have tangible results. International borders affect the languages people speak, the clothes they wear, the foods they eat, their marriage rituals, their religion, and more. But it’s not just the world. Right here in our country, and even in our state and city, imaginary lines divide us. Here, our language is affected, though it’s more in the words we choose to use and how we use them. Here, the lines determine where our children go to school, where we vote, who patrols our streets, and more. All of these tangible differences result from imaginary lines – lines which divide us, and if we are not careful, lure us into believing that they are impenetrable.

They can even, at times, cloud our ability to see that the humans on the other side of those invisible lines are human just like we are. They feel the same emotions as we do. They have the same needs that we do. They dream the same dreams that we do. And just as we reminded each other on Ash Wednesday, that we are dust and to dust we shall return; so are they.

Dust, animated by the Ruach of God. The wind of God. The breath of God. The Spirit of God. They and we, breathing the same breath – the very breath of God.

So, what does this mean?

A few weeks ago, we celebrated the birth of Northminster. We remembered together Harvey Whalen’s first sermon where he said: “If we could not agree to differ, we have no freedom, if we do not resolve to love, we have no Christianity, if we do not unite to serve, the Kingdom of God and the world suffer.â€

Today, we celebrate the birth of the church and the gift of the Spirit. And just as that first sermon continues to influence and guide the congregation that has come to be known as Northminster, so too, the church of Jesus, the church that began with the gift of the Spirit, continues to yearn to be “clothed with power from on high.â€

And just like Northminster carries the spirit of the message of Dr. Whalen, even 56 years after he spoke those words, this church, and the global church, continue to be marked by the Spirit, gifted with the knowledge that each human has value and worth.

We remember that in the great diversity of the human race, that the image of God is upon all. And in the words of Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it.†When we all have the opportunity to speak, when we all take the opportunity to listen and understand, when we all see the diversity of humanity that surrounds us, when we choose the power of the Holy Spirit over the power to separate and discriminate, then we, like that first church gathering, will see the beginning of the Kingdom of God, and we will marvel at the wind and the flame. We will be clothed with power from on high. And we will see and know the Spirit of God moving in our midst and in our hearts.

Today is Pentecost. You have heard the words of Jesus: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on highâ€

But today is Pentecost! And the Holy Spirit is upon you.

Amen







Better Together

Acts 1:6-14, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Amy Finkelberg · May 21st, 2023 · Duration 17:59

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

On Suffering for Good

I Peter 3:13-22, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Lesley Ratcliff · May 14th, 2023 · Duration 12:23

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

The Way, the Truth and the Life

John 14:1-14, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Major Treadway · May 7th, 2023 · Duration 29:56

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.†For the first ten or so years of my life, I read these words as a line in the sand – a clear choice and test to know who was in and who was out. This was, for me, an important point in my argument for why people should become Christian.

However, over the last twenty or so years, my reading of scripture, my understanding of God, and my experience among a broad array of humanity have led me to reexamine and reconsider this interpretation of this text.

Each of the four gospel authors tell the story of Jesus a little differently. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, follow a very similar narrative pattern as they develop their stories. John’s gospel does not follow this narrative. He begins, not with a genealogy or birth narrative, but with the creation of the world, connecting Jesus to the God who spoke the world into existence. The unique features of John’s gospel continue, one of which is the way that John understands Jesus’ engagement with humanity.

In John 1:9, John says of Jesus, “the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.†In 4:42, Jesus is referred to as the “Savior of the world.†In 12:32, Jesus says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.†The Jesus of the gospel of John, “who enlightens everyone,†the “Savior of the world,†who “will draw all people to [himself]†suggests to me that perhaps there is something I have missed.

Similar to the ways that John talks about Jesus, there are important moments throughout the whole of the Bible that reveal God’s longing for all of humanity to be reconciled to God. The God who creates all of everything, keeps showing up, making a way for humans to know and live the righteousness of God, engaging with humanity – humans of great knowledge, power, and wealth and humans whose need and/or depravity continue to surprise us.

And, of course, there are also people in our lives, people we know who are not Christian, yet in whom we see God at work. Already this year, here at Northminster, we have had a lovely pulpit swap with our friends from Beth Israel and an interfaith dinner learning about fasting in the Christian and Muslim traditions. Both of these opportunities enriching our knowledge of God by the ways we can so clearly see the hand of God at work in the individuals we have met and the communities of faith they represent.

So what do we do with this verse? I think we must do with this verse what we do with all scripture. We need to sit with it. We need to hold it in the context of chapter 14 and in the context of the entire Gospel of John. And we need to put it in conversation with the whole of scripture as well as what we know to be true of God.

When we engage this scripture in that way, we will find that the words of Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me,†can take on new meaning in our lives.

It is important to note that in chapter 14, Jesus is talking with people who already believe in him, people who are already following him. In a sense, Jesus is talking to us. To us, not to all those other people who do not or do not yet believe, Jesus is talking to me, to you, to the church gathered with one heart. To us Jesus says, “do not let your collective heart be troubled.â€

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.†These words of Jesus come as a comfort and a challenge to his followers as he nears his arrest and execution.

“I am the way,†says Jesus. To follow after Jesus is a journey. The road is long, sometimes hard, often uncomfortable, but we know that from reading about the life of Jesus.

“I am the truth,†says Jesus. Jesus, the word of God, in the beginning with God, and made flesh, has spoken and embodied truth in fresh and startling ways, helping his followers to refocus their understanding of scriptures and reorder their lives accordingly.

“I am the life,†says Jesus. Calling to mind his recent encounter with the death of Lazarus and looking ahead to his soon coming death, Jesus reminds his followers that he is life. It was the word of God that breathed life into creation, Jesus later proclaimed that he came that they might have life and have it abundantly, and after restoring life to Lazarus, he boldly proclaimed “I am the resurrection and the life.â€

This is the way for those who would follow Jesus. It is not up to them, nor us, to judge anyone’s eternity, our task is in the present. Our task is to follow. These words of Jesus are the truth his followers will need to cling to when they see his body limp on the cross. They represent the life they will need to hold in their hearts as they see him buried in the tomb. Jesus, who enlightens everyone and will draw all people to himself, this Jesus is the savior of the world, he is the way we know God.

I am convinced that these words are also words for the church today. They are words that speak to us who have committed to following Jesus. They are words to give us comfort that by knowing Jesus, we know God more clearly. And they are also words that call us to action. For us to claim the name of Jesus, to wear the mantle of Christian, is to follow, with heart, mind, soul, and strength, this man Jesus, who is the way, and the truth, and the life.

Amen.

New Pasture, Same Shepherd

John 10:1-10, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Major Treadway · April 30th, 2023 · Duration 14:01

“The only thing constant in life is change,†says the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. First written 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus seems to have been on to something. Just in the last three-and-half years, we have seen a global pandemic shape the goings and comings of our day-to-day lives, Jackson has had paradoxical water crises of flooding and water shortage, Northminster has seen the retirement of the longtime constant guiding presence of Chuck Poole. So much has changed. And yet, we press on.

In the midst of these unanticipated changes, today we draw ever nearer to one long anticipated change. Ivey, Lucy, Owen, Roger, and William, since the first time you came through the doors of this church, we have been looking toward this day and your approaching graduations. Some of you have been here long enough, that you were once held by a parent in front of this congregation, as we pledged to you, that “[you] belong to us as well†as your parents. Later, some of you walked here, where you had once been carried, received a red Bible with your name on it, and stood as we promised to “make a place for [you] for [you] belong to us just as we all belong to God.†Still later, as you prepared to move from the children’s department to the Youth House, once again, the congregation made promises to you as you stood here, this time we promised that we “your family of faith will be with you every step of the way.†And one more time, for those of you who have been baptized, we, together, “pledge[d] to you our encouragement and all the resources of our congregation as you continue to grow in Christ.â€

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus says that “when the shepherd has brought all the sheep, the shepherd goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow, because they know the voice of the shepherd.†Further, Jesus says, the sheep “will not follow a stranger, but they will run from a stranger, because they do not know the voice of strangers.†There is something about voices that immediately registers as familiar or foreign. Have you noticed that you can hear just a phrase, or even a word, of a close friend or family member, and without question know not only who the person is but even some things about how they are doing?

Something about the pitch, the pace, or the volume of the voice can let you know if the person speaking is happy or sad, angry or exhausted. And sometimes, a change to a person’s voice will even reveal changes to the speaker’s health.

If all of these things are true about our capacity to hear a voice and know the speaker, that sometimes subtle and sometimes less subtle changes to the voice do not cloud our knowledge of the speaker, but, rather, reveal more information about the speaker, then one has to wonder what it is about a voice that allows one to so quickly connect the voice to the speaker. Yet even as we wonder, even though we don’t know how, we still recognize voices immediately, if not instinctively.

It is this remembering that Jesus is calling his disciples to imagine as they think metaphorically about following after the voice of God.

Over the course of the last 18 or so years, among the many things that has happened at Northminster, in this space and the many other spaces on this campus, we have explored together listening for the voice of God. Sometimes we listen for guidance. Sometimes we listen for comfort. Sometimes we listen to know that we are not alone.

It’s possible that you did not realize what we were doing. It’s not like listening to a Taylor Swift song on repeat while cruising in your pick-up truck trying to learn every note and modulation of her voice. The kind of exploration of the voice of God that we have been practicing together here occurs in the ways “we agree to differ, we resolve to love, [and] we unite to serve.†From there, we practice hospitality to and with one another inside of these walls and beyond these walls. As a congregation, we try to remember the question of Jesus “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor?†as we continue to expand our understanding of who our neighbors are and how we interact with them.

For you, seniors, this exploration has taken on a variety of forms, it began as you were welcomed into the children’s area, it expanded as you aged and began learning more through Sunday School, atrium, and children’s retreats. As you moved to the Youth House, the explorations of learning the voice of God may have shifted to experiments in listening as we engaged in building community, acts of service, and learning. And all along the way, the adults who were guiding you were also listening to you and watching you-your questions, explorations, and revelations giving shape to our understanding of the voice of God.

Seniors, in some ways, it’s not fair to call this an 18-year exploration. For, for some of us, it has been much longer. And for others of us, it has been much shorter. But regardless of how long the journey has been, it is our collective hope, that after your time downstairs in the children’s area, over in the Youth House, in the Great Hall, occasionally in the Adult Education Building, and many years in this sanctuary, that you (and we) have a better grasp on how to know and follow the voice of God.

Ivey, Lucy, Owen, Roger, and William, for you, especially, we pray that when you find you have changed locations, when you are far from Jackson and Northminster, that all of the time you have spent here will have formed you in such a way that you can recognize the voice of God no matter where you may find yourself.

I feel like this is a good point to make a confession. I do not know what the voice of God sounds like. I don’t know if it is pitched low or high. I don’t know if God speaks in Old English or with a southern drawl. The Bible records God saying things, audible to human ears. But my confession to you, today, is that I have not yet been so fortunate to hear an audible voice of God.

But, in the same way that you or I might hear a phrase and say something to the effect of “I could hear her say that†or “that just doesn’t sound like something he would say,†I fully believe that by spending time together exploring the acts of God, through worship, community, reading scripture, singing, prayer, and service, we prepare our souls to hear the voice of God speaking to us through the words and lives of humans in our midst; we encounter the voice of God in nature and community; we see what God is saying when, by our lives, the Kingdom of God is made manifest in our lives and the lives of those to which we are connected.

And so, wherever you go from here, to Holmes and Ole Miss and beyond, when you, like sheep, enter a new pasture, a new place, with new friends and voices, let the voice of God be your constant. Trust what Jesus says in today’s gospel, that you will know the voice of the shepherd. When you hear it, when you see it, when you encounter it, there will be a familiarity to it, even as you experience it in a new place.

We know that this is true, for even as so much about our lives changes, the voice of God remains with us, guiding us and calling us. It is the voice that calls us to an abundant life – an abundant life where God’s abundance is sufficient for all of humanity and for each human. The abundant life of God is the result of a life lived according to the voice of God. It is, as you have been learning all of your life here, a life lived loving God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and it is a life spent loving your neighbor as yourself – continually expanding your understanding of who might be considered neighbor. The abundant life of God is also a life spent ensuring that the abundance our lives does not impoverish the life of anyone else.

The voice of God that calls you, that calls all of us, to this kind of abundant life, will still be calling wherever this life might take you. So when you soon find yourselves having changed pastures, keep on listening for the voice of the Shepherd you have learned to know, trusting that the voice of God will be the same there as it is here, that your experience in this place learning to know and respond to God’s calling, will have prepared you to do the same in all your new places.

Amen.


Back to the Rough Ground

Luke 24:13-35, The Third Sunday of Eastertide

John Meadors · April 23rd, 2023 · Duration 17:02

In the summer of 1799, the artist and poet William Blake exchanged a series of letters with the Reverend John Trusler.  Trusler was an influential priest, writer, and publisher who had commissioned Blake to work on a series of paintings representing human virtues and vices.  The two men disagreed sharply about the merits of Blake’s work, particularly a painting that depicted the vice “malevolence.” Blake’s financial well-being depended on the commission Trusler would provide him, so it couldn’t have been easy for Blake speak combatively with his benefactor.  Perhaps because of his genius as a poet or a painter, the uniqueness of his vision, Blake recognized that he and Trusler experienced the world in profoundly different ways.  Their separate faculties of vision framed the world in narratives that could not in the end be reconciled.  In his second letter to Trusler, Blake linked imagination and vision together in such a way that the latter is shaped by the former:  We see what our imagination allows us to see.  This is what William Blake said to the Reverend John Trusler:  I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision.  I see everything I paint in this world, but every body does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes.  The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.  Some see nature all ridicule and deformity and by these I do not regulate my proportions, and some scarce see nature at all.  But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.  As a man is, so he sees.

Let us pray:

Lord God our merciful Father, we long to be people who see You everywhere.  So we ask you to take your rightful place at the center of our imagination.  Heal our thinking, sharpen our awareness, purge and rebuild our vocabularies, and so restore our capacity for seeing You, even in our neighbor.  Amen.

Today’s gospel passage from Luke also speaks to the notion of seeing.  Seeing, or more properly, the inability to see, is a significant theme in some of Luke’s most cherished passages.  There is the willful refusal to see in the Parable of the Good Samaritan when the priest and the Levite notice the wounded traveler on the side of the road, but proceed on their journeys as if he was not there.  For all practical purposes, he was invisible to them and certainly no neighbor.  And then there is the selfish blindness of the prodigal son, who is so distracted by the romance of distant lands and profligate living that he cannot see the goodness of his own place.  Once removed to that distant land and finding himself in dire distress, the prodigal son “comes to his senses”, his sense of sight in particular is restored as he can see at last the beatitude of life with his father.  And here on the road to Emmaus, two travelers from Jerusalem who were part of Jesus’ band of followers, perceive their traveling companion, but do not recognize they are walking with their Lord.  The sense data is there, they are aware of his presence, but they don’t know who it is that walks and speaks with them.  Given all they have experienced and all they are feeling, their imaginations are not yet ready to entertain the risen Lord.  Luke uses the passive voice to tell us “their eyes were kept from recognizing him,” perhaps implying that God had prevented them from recognizing Jesus.  The passage also lends itself to the more modest conclusion that these two travelers are convinced that Jesus is dead and gone, and that therefore this man now walking and conversing with them cannot be him.  Their well-worn paths for making sense of their lives, will not allow them to countenance a Jesus who yet lives. 

When the unknown traveler joins Cleopas and his companion, he asks them what they are talking about.  This question gives them pause and they stop in their tracks, looking sad, Luke tells us,  or perhaps even angry.  Cleopas is shocked, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’ “What things?” the stranger who is Jesus asks.  And so Cleopas tells the story of the mighty prophet who was crucified, is dead, and was buried.  They had hoped this man would redeem Israel, restoring the kingdom to its glory.  On the very day of this encounter, Cleopas explains, some women had found the tomb empty and told a fantastic story of visions of angels who said that Jesus was alive.  Men from their group went and confirmed the empty tomb, but Cleopas and his companion are clearly unconvinced, reckoning falsely that they know more than the stranger with whom they speak.  Jesus responds abruptly, calling them foolish or dim-witted, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared.”  Then Jesus begins with Moses and all the prophets, interpreting to them the meaning of his life as set out in the scriptures.  At this point in the story, we might expect Cleopas and his companion to recognize Jesus, the stranger’s narrative having all but made it explicit that Jesus’ suffering and death were precisely what they should have expected in light of his teaching and the scriptures.  But still they are blind, and still Jesus maintains the ruse.  In verse 28, he walks ahead of them, as if, he were going on.

Then, at last, the two sad travelers from Jerusalem, overwrought and distracted by the trauma and grief of their last few days, extend a glimmer of hospitality to this stranger who has joined their trek.  They invite him to come in with them to the place where they are staying.  And Jesus does, but now he is finished with words:  The stranger just acknowledged as guest instantly becomes the host.  As he did on the night of his last meal with his disciples, “he took bread, blessed and broke it, and give it to them.”  At the accomplishment of this simple act, so familiar and intimate, so necessary to life, Cleopas and his companion recognize Jesus, and he vanishes from their sight.

In his commentary on the Gospel of Luke, Richard Vinson points out that it was not abstract theologizing or even the exegesis of scripture that delivered these disciples from their blindness.  They did not see Jesus as a result of the teaching delivered on the road.  No creed or confession shook the scales from their eyes.  As Vinson puts it,
Their recognition of Jesus came from the events themselves, from his repetition of a familiar act in a plausible setting, and the moment of recognition was also a reversal of their state of mind.  They go from deep grief to joy, from confusion to understanding, and most importantly from disbelief to faith, and the crucial moment is the breaking of the bread.  What a brilliant pastoral theologian!  Had Luke put the moment of recognition on the road, when they saw Jesus, or at some point in his exposition of the Scripture, then subsequent believers could only wish they could have been present.  Like those who went to look at the empty tomb after hearing the testimony of the women, we might have been able only to testify to what we had not seen.  But instead, Luke says, “he had been made known to them in the breaking of bread:” all of us who repeat the meal as he commanded can have this experience.” 

Taking our cue from William Blake, we might say this morning that the disciples’ imaginations were transformed by simple embodied experience:  in this case the experience of hospitality, the provision of sustenance, and the sudden realization of friendship.  The reconfiguring of their imaginations allowed them to see the Lord.  If we wish to have our imaginations similarly transformed, transformed so as to make it possible for us to recognize the risen Jesus, how might we proceed?  One step must be recognizing that like Cleopas and his companion, we walk well-worn paths when it comes to engaging our world.  These paths are shaped by all we have been taught and everything we have experienced and certainly by an overconfidence in ourselves.  Ever since Plato we have been taught to generalize about our experience of the world.  To say more than we know.  To make sense of the particular things we encounter, we are taught to understand them in reference to the larger categories or classes of things of which they are a part.  Knowledge of the world seems to require that we understand the particular in terms of the general.  Plato advises this policy because particular things, temporal things, are constantly changing or even ceasing to exist, while idealized descriptions of categories of things, what he calls the Forms, are eternal and unchanging.  Real knowledge or real understanding on this view is always abstract, set at a distance from the rugged hurly burly of ordinary life.  Modern science has further estranged us from the particular and immediate contexts of our life together.  It builds on Plato’s “craving for generality” by reducing everything taken as real to a few basic laws and increasingly simple packets of matter and energy.  We experience none of those things directly, but proceeding through the world by means of abstraction and reduction is what it means to be a rational person, what it means to understand, what it means to see.  But do we really see persons if we follow this scheme? 

Cleopas and his companion understood the man who walked with them in terms of simple categories:  he was a stranger, an uniformed man, a traveler, and something of a gadfly.  And at the moment of their encounter with this figure, they understood Jesus in terms of simple categories as well:  he was a prophet, the bearer of dashed hopes, he was for them a disappointment and a cause of sadness, and to their knowledge he was dead and he was gone.  Taken together these labels miss the mark of identifying the one who walks beside them, for in the wholeness of his being and the richness of all his relations, Jesus is much more than all these things, but they cannot see him.  Their view of Jesus is a bird’s eye view, or we might say, a view from thirty thousand feet.  There is a person down there, and we know a few things about him, but we cannot see him. 

And so it is in our encounter with our neighbors.  We generalize about them on the basis of obvious things like their appearance or education, their relative affluence and employment or their level of achievement.  And, of course, there are the easy categories of politics and theology and personal failure.  If I ask you about a certain Jane Doe, and you tell me she is a teacher and she lives in Mississippi and she’s got this theology and that politics and she likes to dress casually, she drives a Toyota and drinks too much and Italian food is her favorite, does a real person emerge?  A person I can see?  What you have given me is string of generalities, a shadow person or a list of labels, and every label is a sweeping generalization that obscures at least as much as it reveals.  Everything you have told me may be true, really true, there is a person down there somewhere and I know some stuff about them, but I cannot see them.  The British novelist Iris Murdoch seems to have had this idea in mind when she said “You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.”

A project and a hope emerge from this reflection.  From now on, let’s engage our neighbors as flesh and blood--real individuals--and assume as little as possible about them. Let’s meet them on terra firma, the rough ground that is the earth we share.  Let’s engage them in the fullness of their being, study their style and trace their multiple engagements.  Let’s take note of their real concerns, loves, hopes, and disappointments, maybe even share a bit in their suffering.  Let’s look them in the eye and acknowledge the mystery of their visage.  If we are fortunate enough, we might sit at their table or welcome them to ours for the breaking of bread.  Let’s be truthful about what we do not know about them, because that acknowledgement is the beginning of seeing.  And in all of this, let’s acknowledge our Easter hope, that the encounter with our neighbor brings us into the presence of the living Christ, Jesus himself resurrected.  Such is our confidence in the resurrection, such is the testimony of our Baptism.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Don't Let the Gospel End

John 20:19-31, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Steven Fuller · April 16th, 2023 · Duration 21:21

Don’t Let the Gospel End. Don’t put a bow on it. Don’t wrap it up. Don’t put your pencil down. Don’t stop the clock. Don’t turn out the lights. Don’t shut the door. We’re not done. Don’t let the Gospel end. Let’s go where we’re sent. Don’t let the Gospel end. Receive the Spirit and let go of sin. Don’t let the Gospel end. Believe.

Like any story, it’s hard to write the ending. The author looks for an event to bring all the characters together and wrap things up: a wedding, a funeral, a victory, a dinner, a luau, a fish fry, an epilogue at platform 9 3/4, setting the scene for the story’s denouement, saying and doing what needs to be said and done to tie up all the loose ends. John tries really hard. In fact, most modern scholars think the end of this morning’s Gospel lesson was the original ending of John. The last two verses certainly sound like an ending, saying how Jesus did a bunch of other signs he didn’t include, but he wrote these down so that you may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing have life in his name. It would make a good ending. Of course, as we know, it’s not the ending, at least not the last ending of John’s Gospel. The story wasn’t over. It needed another chapter. And I don’t mind if he planned it that way from the beginning or chose to add it later. I sympathize with the difficulty of ending a story. Haven’t we all had the feeling that a story....a life... needed one more chapter? It ended wrong: too quickly, too soon, when we wanted, needed to see how it played out, how the characters developed. We were desperate to see all the loving-goodness that could grow if given one more season.

I don’t blame John for taking a couple shots at the ending because there’s something about a Gospel that isn’t meant to end. The Gospel’s meant to go on, to pass from chapter to chapter, person to person, generation to generation, around the table, down the aisle, across the street, from parent to child, neighbor to neighbor, even to enemies actually, like a 24-hour Good News cycle of God’s everlasting love.

And so that’s the challenge I bring before us today. Don’t Let the Gospel End. Don’t put a bow on it. Don’t wrap it up. Don’t put your pencil down. Don’t stop the clock. Don’t turn out the lights. Don’t shut the door. We’re not done. Don’t let the Gospel end. Go where you’re sent. Or, as Jesus said in chapter 20, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.â€

If John had wrapped up his Gospel with the 31st verse of chapter 20, it would have ended with the disciples sitting behind the same closed doors Jesus sent them out of a week before. A week had passed between verse 21, when Jesus sent the disciples out, and verse 26, when the disciples were back behind those closed doors again.

Go. You’re sent. It’s our job to go. Don’t let the Gospel end with you still sitting inside. And I don’t mean literally leave this room right now or move to another city. That would be awkward and hurt my feelings. I don’t know exactly what you’re called to do, but don’t let your Gospel end without us at least giving it a shot. Too often the church goes back behind closed doors because we’re scared of losing what we have if we take it outside the building. We let fear define our faith by keeping it inside, but our faith was meant to go outdoors. That’s why we cast a “Wider Net.â€

Outside these doors, the world is at war. People are languishing in poverty. There are teenage girls whose self-worth is regularly assaulted on social media. There are people whose days and lives are lost to drugs that can’t do what they want them to do. There are people who are transgender being persecuted because of who they are. There are families who won’t talk to one another. There are people who believe their fear can only be satisfied with an assault rifle. There is a centuries old racist veil of sin draped over the eyes and outcomes of our nation. There are also people, young and old, who are just lonely and need a friend or, like, an apple or a new pair of underwear. Big things, small things, a million million things outside this room that need the Gospel of God's love and forgiveness, peace, hope and hospitality that we proclaim inside this room. I know Northminster has more flavors than Jelly Belly’s jelly beans. I don’t know what you’re called to do, and you can’t do it all. Plenty of the things I’ve listed you could spend a whole lifetime working on without making a measurable difference. But in the name of Jesus, go! God will make something of it. Don’t let the Gospel end with us still inside the building.

You don’t want your mom coming back 20 minutes after telling you to brush your teeth, put on your shoes, and get in the car, to find you still sitting on the couch. I’ve seen it. No one enjoys that. Get out of the house.

Don’t let the Gospel end. Receive the Spirit and let go of sin. Or as Jesus says in chapter 20, “Receive the holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.†Be forgiven. Forgive. Receive the Spirit and let go of sin.

If John had put his pencil down after writing the 31st verse of chapter 20, the last words we would have heard from Simon Peter’s mouth would be him denying Jesus, saying, “I am not†one of Jesus’ disciples. Sure, Peter raced the beloved disciple to the empty tomb on resurrection morning and was in the room when Jesus appeared to them both times in chapter 20, but he was still speechless at the end of this morning’s lesson, which, considering he wasn’t the quiet type, makes me think the guilt of his denial held his tongue.

Actually, if you keep reading, the next thing Peter says after denying Jesus those three times is “I am going fishing.†It isn’t until after a miraculous catch, a dive into the sea, and a beachfront fish fry with the risen Lord in chapter 21 that Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?†and Peter finally tells Jesus he loves him.

What if the Gospel had ended with Peter speechless and ashamed because he had denied Jesus, and he never got to tell Jesus he loved him again? What if the Gospel ended too soon, and Peter never really felt the forgiveness he kept asking Jesus about? If we let the Gospel end too early, we may not have enough time to loosen our tongues, receive the grace we need, and speak the love we have for one another.

Because we need to receive the Spirit, receive forgiveness. Like really receive it. We don’t have enough by ourselves to do any of the things we’re called to do. We have to receive the Spirit, this divine and transcendent, intimate and interdependent person to mediate between us. We have to receive the gift of grace. We have to learn how to hold onto things like love and humility, patience and peace. We have to receive them and hold on to them. And in order to hold on to them, we have to let go of other things, like sin and resentment, pride, and power. We have to let them go. It’s like when Peter asked Jesus about forgiveness in Matthew 18. Peter was wondering how many times do we forgive? How many times do we have to let go of the sin that’s put in our hands? How many times? Like 7 times? No, 7 times 70 times. You have to let go of sin and debt a lot, over and over again. We get the Holy Spirit. We get to receive grace, to know the peace of Christ, to hold on the steadfast love of our ever living God. And to really hold on to it, to really get a grip on God’s love, we have to let go of sin, other people’s sin, our sin. Be forgiven and forgive.

And let’s be honest, for some sin, we can’t just let it all go at once. We need time. We need the Gospel to last a little longer, go on for a few more chapters, to give us the time we need to loosen our grip on the sin that has wounded us and take hold of the Spirit who loves us. We may need a long time to let go of all that we have to let go of. Look at all the sin still gripped tight, unreconciled in this world. Don’t let the Gospel end. This isn’t how it ends. God’s not done with us yet.

And lastly, don’t let the Gospel end. Believe.
Believe. Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. We get to believe that. I want you to hear me. I know it sounds kind of weird, but we get to believe. Like, we get to. John says this was all written down so that we can believe. The additional story of Thomas, where the disciples go back to the house, shut the doors, and Jesus appears to them a second time: John tells that story so that we can believe.
I’d even say the reason Jesus appeared to them that second time was so that Thomas could believe. Jesus showing up and then showing up again, as many times as necessary, so that we get to believe!
I know Thomas has a bummer of a reputation, associated with doubt, but Jesus showed up again so that Thomas could believe. It’s clear that Thomas, like all the other disciples, struggled to believe in the resurrection before he saw the risen Lord; even so, I’m sure Thomas wanted to believe. He wanted to believe his rabbi had risen. He wanted to believe his Lord was alive. He wanted to believe that the darkness that held him since his savior died would erupt in heavenly light so that he could see hope beyond the grief, rise through the sorrow, and say what he so desperately wanted to be true: “My Lord and my God!â€

We want to believe. Like the fictional Futbol coach Ted Lasso says, “I believe in believe,†but even more than that, we get to believe that the Lord of all creation knows us, loves us, and was revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, who lived, died, and rose from the dead so that we may believe.

I haven’t been a professional pastor for over seven months now. It’s been really weird. In some ways it’s freed my faith, but it’s also been really really hard. I’ve been angry at God; I’ve been really angry at the church, and specifically some of its members. I’ve had moments when I felt so cynical about the church and Christianity in general that I wanted to not believe, thinking it would be easier, but it wasn’t. It was harder, darker, lonelier.

One day, a dear friend of mine who was once a minister but more recently does not believe in God asked me why I still read my Bible every day. I had what I thought was a smart answer ready to go that even an agnostic could appreciate about culture and history: when I read my Bible, I read the same book my mother and father, grandmother, great-grandfather, and great-great grandfather read every day to make sense of their lives. A collection of texts written over centuries, it allows me to enter an ancient conversation about life and faith with people who collectively have endured every historical struggle and persevered. Then, as the question continued to sit on my soul, I realized the simple answer that I keep reading my Bible every day is because I get to believe.

When I experience grief and loss, I get to believe.
When I experience professional failure, I get to believe.
When I’m sent hateful letters meant to steal my faith, I get to believe.
When friends who previously praised me turn against me because the Gospel I bare isn’t what they want anymore, I get to believe that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth reveals the ever living nature of our ever loving God.

When we encounter the depths of sin and death in ourselves, our friends, our enemies, and this world, we, sisters and brothers, we get to believe that the one who was crucified rose from the dead and “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord†(Romans 8). We get to believe that.

The Gospel isn’t over yet, so don’t let the Gospel end.
Don’t put a bow on it. Don’t wrap it up. Don’t put your pencil down. Don’t stop the clock. Don’t turn out the lights. Don’t shut the door. We’re not done. Go where you’re sent. Receive the Spirit and let go of sin. Don’t let the Gospel end. Believe. Amen.

Suddenly!

Matthew 28:1-10, Easter Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff · April 9th, 2023 · Duration 14:20

In the fall, I arrived at the church early one Sunday morning, one might say, “as the first day of the week was dawning.†I got out of my car, and as I walked across the back parking lot to the children’s area entrance, I noticed a lot of feathers. There’s a large black cat that lives in the drain back there and so I assumed it had gotten a bird. But when I got to the children’s area door, I looked to my right, and out in the grass behind the youth house, there was a fox, with a rooster in its mouth. When the fox saw me, it ran away, which was good because I don’t think I ever learned what to do when confronted with a fox.

But the rooster just lay there. Dead. I knew I was going to have to figure out how to bury a rooster before anyone else arrived, something I hadn’t learned in seminary, but I had all my stuff with me for a long Sunday at church and decided to go set it down and come back.

About the time that I opened the back door, the Deacon of the Week, Ginger Parham was coming down the stairs into the children’s area. I passed along the news of the dead rooster and we decided to tackle the burial together. Ginger was pretty sure she had seen a shovel in the youth house so we walked over to get it, and the rooster was still just lying there, but we noticed that it was still breathing, and we moved more quickly so that we could put the rooster out of its misery. When we came back out with the shovel, we walked out to where the rooster lay. It was indeed still breathing, and it seemed clear that it would not recover. Ginger started to put the shovel to the roosters neck, and just as the shovel pressed to the rooster’s neck, the rooster hopped up and walked off, right into the trees at the back of the parking lot, ready to keep living it’s one “wild and precious life.â€

Resurrection happens in unexpected places.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, as “the first day of the week was dawning,†Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. They had been at the tomb, they had watched Jesus die. They had helped Joseph of Arimathea lay Jesus’ body in the tomb and roll the stone across the door. And then, presumably, they left the tomb to go and prepare for the Sabbath, returning as quickly as they could after the Sabbath, at sunrise the next day.

And suddenly, there was a great earthquake! An angel of the Lord descended, rolled back the stone, and sat on it! And that was the moment their whole world changed, our whole world changed, everything changed!

The angel tells Mary Magadalene and the other Mary, “Do not be afraid.†Even when the news is the very best possible news (in the history of the world,) it is still earth shattering. We’ve heard this story so many times that we may have grown desensitized to it, but fear is the natural response.

“Do not be afraid. Jesus is not here. He has been raised. Come and see where he lay. Go, tell the disciples!†And they went with fear and great joy. Just as at the cross, sorrow and love flow mingled down, so at the tomb, fear and joy float up and out. We must examine our fear, so that we might live the good news. But we also must be careful, especially on this day, to recognize that the joy of the resurrection is not some kind of Pollyanna optimism, it’s not a “check your grief, despair and fear at the door†kind of joy. It is the kind of joy that lives alongside every human emotion, it is the kind of joy that tells us that even in the midst of grief and despair and fear, the risen Christ is with us. It is the kind of joy born in hope. An earthquake and an empty tomb are not what the women expected. They were expecting a crypt, but instead they found a crib, a crib where hope was birthed.

Resurrection happens in unexpected places.

The women run to tell the disciples, and suddenly, Jesus meets them. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary fall at his feet and worship him. One imagines there were tears and laughter, expressions of fear and joy. Jesus tells them himself “Do not be afraid.†And then he sends them on their way to tell the disciples to go to Galilee, some 40 miles away, where they will see him.

Matthew doesn’t tell us much more after that. There are not numerous resurrection appearances like in some of the other gospels. There is only this brief appearance to the women, and then the disciples do as they are told and meet Jesus in Galilee where they too worship him, even though some are doubtful. The joy of the resurrection can live alongside our doubt.

At this gathering in Galillee, Jesus speaks familiar words, the Great Commission some have come to call them.

He tells the disciples to go and make more disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus has commanded them. We know from John’s account that the last time the disciples were all with Jesus, before many of them scattered in fear, was the night when Jesus washed their feet, and shared the Passover meal, and gave them a new commandment. “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another. As I have loved you, love one another.†Perhaps this was on their minds as Jesus told them to obey everything he commanded. After all, he had taught them to love one another with his very life. Much has been made of making disciples and baptizing them, and teaching them to obey Jesus’ commandments, and sometimes Jesus’ final words in the gospel of Matthew get lost, but they are the root of our hope, the reason we make disciples. “And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.â€

The hope of the resurrection is not just an after we die promise of being with God. That promise would be enough if we didn’t have to live over on this side. The hope of the resurrection is rooted in the presence of God with us, now AND even to the end of the age.

Resurrection happens in unexpected places.

My sometimes Sunday practice is to sit in the sanctuary as the sun rises. The sun comes up in these windows and spreads across the pews. Sometimes there is a rooster that crows. As the sun spreads, I can imagine the light spreading over each of you, beloved Children of God, in the places where you have sat, many of you year after year, some of you for the first time today, some of you not in some time but still here in my memory, and in my heart.

I can imagine the new mercies that spread over you, over all of us, mercies that come with the rising of the sun, with a new day that some of us get to face and that others of us have to face, the mercy that mingles with joy and fear, with grief and despair, with the hope that rises with the sun.

On this Easter Sunday morning, I pray that you might rest, not just for today, but for today, and for the next, for this hour, and the next, for these moments, and the next, and even unto the end of the age, that you might rest in hope, the hope that comes from knowing that resurrection happens in unexpected places.

Christ the Lord is risen. Alleluia.

Amen.



Who Is This?

Matthew 21:1-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff · April 2nd, 2023 · Duration 1:04

Sermon begins around 32:42.



In today’s gospel lesson, Jerusalem is in turmoil.

Jerusalem, a small but significant city, with a population of about twenty-five thousand, swelled to a number in the millions just before and during Passover, and that doesn’t include the sheep. In the old city of Jerusalem, the streets are narrow and uneven. One can imagine the crowd would be stumbling forward, bumping into one another, losing sight of those with whom they traveled as they attempt to see this spectacle that has heightened the level of turmoil.

Tensions would have been high. As professor of New Testament, Greg Carey puts it, “Passover, after all, celebrates Israel’s deliverance from captivity, and occasional outbreaks of sedition attended the season. Thus, the Passover season brought crowded and somewhat tense conditions to the city.â€

There may have been anxiety, confusion, unrest. The city moved at a frenzied pace. And then comes Jesus, riding on a donkey (and possibly it’s colt too) and the people, waved their palms, shouted “Hosanna,†and simultaneously asked “Who is this?â€

We know all that is about to happen--the betrayal, the crucifixion, the burial, the resurrection--but just for a moment, just for today, let us sit with their question.

Who is this?

“The Son of David.â€

“The one who comes in the name of the Lord.â€

There were expectations. We see it in the word that the crowd shouts. “Hosanna,†a cry for help, meaning “Save us!†Jesus rides into the turmoil like a war hero, and the crowd expects that the One who comes in the name of the Lord will bring power and security.

But expectations ruin things.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus goes straight to overturning tables in the temple. And there is power in that moment, but it’s not the kind that invites security. It is the kind that invites death, even death on a cross. In his commentary on this passage, Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow says, â€That Jesus, the one who is turning over tables, challenging power, and sitting with sinners in order to heal and love, that’s the one worthy of a parade.â€

The Jesus who enters Jerusalem in Matthew’s gospel is ready to challenge the systems that marginalize people, to see through the traps set before him and proclaim that what is most important is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. The Jesus who enters Jerusalem in Matthew’s gospel is ready to receive the anointing of the woman from Bethany and defend her to his disciples, and then a few days later to wash the disciples filthy, sandal-laden feet, taking the form of a servant.

Who is this?

This is the Jesus who calls us to examine our own expectations. What do we expect Jesus to do for us? Where do we expect security but need to challenge power instead? Who have we pushed to the margins by placing imaginary boundaries around God’s love? Where is our power being used to oppress the weak? Where must we turn over tables for others? In what places should we be taking on the form of a servant?

In light of these big questions, I am so thankful for the quiet, reflective space of Holy Week, so that we can examine our souls. I’m even more grateful that we do not walk this road alone, but together with the God who calls us to this sacred path, who invites us to ask the question, Who is this? This Jesus, who is headed to the cross?

This is the One who turns the other cheek. This is the One who helps us. This is the One who tells stories so we can seek to understand. This is the One who became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

This is the One whose death caused the ground to shake and the rocks to split. This is the God whose death leads to...

We know where it leads, but for today, with the whole city of Jerusalem, we join the glad hosanna. We wave the palms at the triumphal entry. We experience the sense of whiplash as Holy Week’s shadows gather. We walk the purple path of Lent, the anger, and the agony, the darkness and the finality.

Who is this?

This is the One who travels the path with us.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Transforming Life and Death

John 11:1-45, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Courtney Allen Crump · March 26th, 2023 · Duration 18:44

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

The Sight of a Blind Man

John 9:1-41, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Major Treadway · March 19th, 2023 · Duration 22:29

Nine years ago, Karen and Edward and I had recently moved to Vietnam where we facilitated the work of the Mennonite Central Committee for a little over four years. Having just arrived, we had much to learn – language, culture, where and how to get groceries, how to cross the street, where to go to church, among other things.

It was in our first months in Vietnam that today’s gospel lesson became inextricably linked to an experience for me in such a way that I cannot think of the experience without thinking of this gospel lesson, nor can I hear the gospel without being transported back there.

A significant part of our work in Vietnam was with persons who had been affected by Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant sprayed during the Vietnam War. This chemical was sprayed to make it more difficult for Vietnamese soldiers to hide in jungle foliage. It was believed that the chemical, while wildly effective and efficient at killing plant life, did not affect humans. However, since the spraying more than fifty years ago, all the way until today, people, Americans and Vietnamese who were present, or remain present, in areas where the spraying occurred have experienced a significantly higher than normal rate of occurrence of skin disease, cancers, and physical abnormalities. Unfortunately, these effects remain at a higher than normal rate among children and grandchildren of those who were directly exposed.

Karen and I had been reading and learning about Agent Orange as a part of our orientation to Vietnam and our work there. When the time came for our first visit to Central Vietnam where our organization worked with people affected by Agent Orange, the gospel reading for the week was today’s reading. So when we approached the first home where we would for the first time meet a family affected by Agent Orange, the question of Jesus’ disciples “who sinned, this man or his parents?” transformed for me into “who caused this woman’s ailment, this woman or her parents?” And the only answer in my mind, was “it was caused by my country.”

Without making any judgment about the politics, the military, or the government, I was there sitting with the knowledge that my country was responsible for the spraying of a chemical that correlated with this woman’s illness. As I was processing these questions, twenty-month-old Edward, who was as filled with energy, curiosity, and zeal for life then as he is now, shook free from my hands and ran to the woman with whom we were there to meet.

She was walking toward a cow that our organization had provided her family as a means of income. Before I could respond, she had bent down, taken Edward in her arms, and continued walking toward the cow. Moments later, she had placed some long grass in Edward’s hands and was helping him to feed the cow. In an instant, this woman flipped my anxiety over this meeting into a casual offering of hospitality. Her actions suggesting that, despite the language barrier, she knew what interested this little boy, and she knew how to care for him and the object of his interest. She wrapped Edward in her arms, she and he fed the cow together, and our meeting progressed.

The temptation of the disciples in today’s gospel lesson to connect one’s morality to their station in life is one that we know well. While we may no longer look at someone who has a physical ailment that has been with them since birth and try to connect it to their sins or their parents’, how easy is it for us to see a person on the television or on the side of the road and wonder to ourselves what they did to get where they are.

People who live on the margins are most often not there by choice. A multitude of circumstances exist that can result in a person moving to the outskirts of society. We know who these people are. Some of them we know, or we once knew. Some of them we may have met. Sometimes, we may wonder if we will, one day, meet them in the mirror.

When we encounter folks whose lives we see as being on the margins, we have options for how we might respond. We might engage in conversations about the cause of their circumstance. This type of conversation can be a part of potentially transformative change. It might lead to the discovery of systemic patterns that perpetuate the kind of marginalization that we have just encountered. It could also be the kind of conversation that pacifies our want to give attention to the person but prevents actually engaging with them.

We might also offer some sort of help, money, food, socks, a ride. All of these are good and important. They can save a life. They can also be a way for us to do something that is easy and seems like it is an answer, but avoids engagement in similar ways that just talking about the person does.

I’m sure there are other ways we could join the host of witnesses in today’s text. The religious leaders in the text, for example, work very hard to not listen to the man who had been blind. They do not want to believe that he is the same man. They do not want to believe that Jesus healed him. They do not want to believe that his healing came from God. Perhaps, it is an unfair reading, but it seems to me that they are working very hard to avoid hearing the story that this man is trying to tell them. I suspect, if I’m honest, I would have been with the Pharisees on this one.

But in our Gospel reading today there is another route. Jesus shows us another way. Jesus sees the man born blind. He refuses the question of morality offered by his disciples. He puts some mud made from spit and dirt on the man’s eyes and tells him to go and wash. Miraculously, the man can see. The blindness he has known from birth gives way to the light of the world. If the story ended here, that would be enough. Jesus refuting the idea that one’s station in life is representative of their morality would be enough. Jesus giving sight to a man who has been blind since birth would be more than enough for this story. But it keeps going.

After all of the denials. After the Pharisees clearly expose that though they have been blessed with not-blindness from birth, they cannot see that which is so evident before them, the man whose lifetime of blindness has enabled him to see and know Jesus, finds himself no longer stricken by that which he believed had kept him on the margins. And yet, he is still marginalized and ostracized by the religious leaders, the very people he must have been sure would be ready to rejoice with him.

Jesus reenters the story here. Jesus reengages this nameless fellow. He introduces himself fully to the man.

What brings people in from the margins, be they blind from birth, living with the effects of Agent Orange, or any of the myriad ways you and I encounter them on a daily basis? What brings them in is people who care enough to see them, to engage with them with an openness that has the capacity for mutual transformation.

Pastor and Theologian, Sam Wells, argues that the most important word in the whole of Christian theology is “with.” The God we worship created humanity to be with God. Jesus came to earth as Emmanuel – God with us. It is in community that we are able to be with one another, embodying that essence of God that we understand of the holy Trinity – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being with one another in what Richard Rohr calls the divine dance. But this dance is one that invites us to join – to be with God.

And here, this “with-ness” of God, is the challenge offered by the gospel reading today. Our challenge is as much what do we do at the sight of a blind man as it is what do we do with the sight of a bind man.

There is no clean and easy answer to this challenge. In fact, I suspect that there are far more wrong ways to respond than right. However, on one point, I believe we can be sure. If we are to base our lives and our engagement on the life and engagement of Jesus, then our response to folks who find themselves on the margins will involve finding ways to be with them to hear their story, to share ours, to know them and be known by them.

In a society that specializes in walls and windows and locks that are designed for maximum security, this kind of with-ness can sound like pie in the sky reckless abandon. And maybe it is. But maybe, it is just this kind of reckless abandon, the kind we can learn from energetic, curious, and fully alive twenty-month-old children that will teach us how to stretch the circle of our embrace until those on the margins have become a part of the beloved community – replacing questions of moral determinism with the healing welcome of Jesus.

Amen.

 

 

Water in the Wilderness

Exodus 17:1-7, The Third Sunday in Lent

Courtney Stamey · March 12th, 2023 · Duration 16:04

Good morning. Thank you for the invitation to preach this morning just a quick drive away from my usual place just up the street on Northside drive. I confess that there are some of you who know me better than most of my own congregation. I met Mark and Rebecca Wiggs seven years ago. And in a providential carpool, Mark suggested that I be open to the idea of God calling me to Mississippi. And some of us have done the thing that will bond you like no other…gone on youth trips. So, youth and chaperones, try to keep an open mind as I preach. And so I am grateful to be here today and know that this sermon is not preached in a vacuum.

Two weeks ago Pastor Major preached about when a good choice may not be the right choice at that time. Last week, Pastor Lesley preached about beginning again.

Today’s scripture in Exodus has a bit of both elements as Moses, Aaron, and the whole wander the wilderness and countless choices in this new beginning press in on them again and again and again.

Let's put a little context around this text. The people have been freed from captivity in Egypt. They have crossed the Red Sea, and then the murmurings begin. First, they arrive at a place with bitter water. The people complain to Moses, Moses brings it to God, God tells Moses to throw a log in the water, and then the water is potable. They move on and camp near a place with 12 springs of water and 70 palm trees. Not too much later they move from that place and go to the wilderness and there is no food. The people complain to Moses, Moses goes to God and God provides quail and manna. They are instructed not to hoard it. Some still do and when they do, the manna and quail, gets moldy and had worms. The people learn to take only what they need, nothing more or less.

Perfect, they have what they need. Until they move again. This time there is no water again! I mean c’mon Moses, did you bring us out here to kill us, and our livestock and our children. Moses, under the direction of God and witness of the elders strikes the rock with the staff used to split the Nile. Provision comes, water flows. But this stream of thought of God’s provision doesn’t end there. You see, right after this scripture. God provides a victory in a military battle and then after that Jethro, father-in-law of Moses suggests that Moses delegate the leadership of the people. Sometimes you need someone else to point you to the existing provision of God. And then, in chapter 19, God provides something that would change the course of the lives of the Israelite people and more than that have an impact on world culture, to this day, God provides the law at Mount Sinai.

Here is why the context is important. The water from the rock is not the first provision or the last in the wilderness. We are somewhere in the midst of the tumult. If crises’ come in threes, no one told Moses, because in a wilderness filled with uncertainty, each stage of the journey also seems marked one crises after another. And while we know God will provide in retrospect. Moses didn’t know then, the people didn’t know then. At this point the people were ready to stone Moses, by his estimation, and we know this isn’t even the last challenge they will face!

But as Lesley reminded us last week, we begin again, and again and again, and I believe that the truest constant in this start and stop life of ours is that God is with us through it all. Frederick Niedner writes that when crises hit we need to be reminded that “God dwells in a moving fragile home not made with stones.†“But, even though I say I believe that, and I believe I believe that, sometimes I like the Israelites find these words on my lips, “Is the Lord among us, or not.â€

Each week when I prepare a sermon, somewhere in my commentaries I find space to write, the place I am preaching, the date, sermon title (if I know it yet), and I write what was going on in the world, and in the church.

So as I opened my favorite commentary this week, I looked at the note from the last time I preached from this scripture. Where? Northside Baptist Church. Title: Is the Lord with us or not? (when in doubt quite scripture for a title, it’s never a bad idea) When? March 15, 2020 (My heart starts to race because I see where this is going.) Notation: Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, worship livestreamed.

The last time I preached from this scripture, was the very first time we live streamed a service because we could not gather for worship safely. And in God’s providence the scripture that Sunday asked the question, Is the Lord with us or not? I wondered, “will God provide water for a rock, here in central MS 2020 because we are afraid and thirsty for the living waterâ€. At that time, I was convinced we would be back for Easter Sunday in just a few weeks. And while we did worship Easter Sunday virtually, we would not return to in-person indoor worship until the following Easter 2021.

Here is what I know now. It was clear to me in those early months of the pandemic how much God was with us. As we had to begin again and again and again as we had to discern was something of a good choice or a wise choice. The clarity of God’s presence in those days, of the provision of the living water to thirsty and afraid believers, was unlike anything I had ever experienced and perhaps, unlike anything I will experience again.

Like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness of Sin, the world was wandering in the wilderness of the coronavirus pandemic. The wilderness as a location has rich meaning in our scriptures. Most notably, it is a thin-liminal place where one meets God. It’s where Hagar names God as the one who sees her as she is in her most desperate moment. It’s where God appears to Elijah in the sound of sheer silence. It is where the spirit drives Jesus immediately after his baptism, and closer to today’s scripture its where God guides by pillar of cloud by day and fire by not. If we are seeking God we have a better chance to experience God in the wilderness than on the mountaintop.

I imagine some of you can relate to the wilderness this year. An interim can be a wilderness place. You have left what is familiar and ventured out into the unknown. There are Moseses, Aarons, and Miriams to guide you. It can be an uncertain place, however, it is in it’s uncertainty that beckons us to rely more fully on God.

I wonder how you all have seen God’s provision with fresh eyes this year, already. What problem surprised you that a leader in your congregation found a solution to? How has the Holy Spirit moved new believers to a place of placing their trust in Jesus? How have you learned the depth of Christian love, by grieving the move of the Poole family you all have come to love so much? How has God challenged your prayer life to pray for the pastor search committee, the pulpit supply committee and your capable ministers? Can you see God’s provision at work in this wilderness already?

In our scripture, the people quarrel with Moses, he redirects them. Saying why do you test the Lord? Commentator Donald P. Olson writes that the Israelites demand to Moses was an act of idolatry. He writes, “As surely as they poured molten gold to fashion a calf to worship, they tried to gold-leaf Moses with the paradox of praise and protest–the idolatry of leadership, the habit of misplaced authority.†Like the Israelites in the wilderness, there may be a temptation to gold-leaf your current leaders or your future leaders in this wilderness. Resist that urge, friend.

In your wilderness season, who are the people who can keep pointing you to God?

I know your instant response may be your pastors, chair of deacons, but also look for the others who lead in such a way. They may be the ones you least expect…I often find they are children.

Just this last Wednesday night, we were engaging in liturgy writing as a congregation. While waiting on my group writing the offertory prayer, I engaged two young siblings about 5 and 6 years old. In discussing the purpose of the offering prayer and how we give thanks to God for all God has given to us, I asked what was something God gives is. The first thing one of the children said was hope…maybe because giving an offering shows our belief in hope for the future. But of all of the concrete things God gives us, this six year old, said…hope. Something he cannot see, something we adults cannot understand.

The Israelites had a real tangible and legitimate concern. They had real thirst…AND there is something we overlook in verse three. They were concerned about the next generation. I imagine, you like most churches in interim periods have that concern too. You have real needs, real legitimate concerns. Concerns that stretch beyond you, to children and children’s children believing that God has called your church to minister here in Jackson. So, please do not hear me delegitimizing your concerns. But do here me say this. God does not wait for you to be out of the wilderness to act.

Back in 2013 my husband Michael was hired at First Baptist Church of High Point, NC as the minister to youth and children. I started attending there while I was in seminary, and while I still had no thought of serving in a congregational setting. I taught middle school Sunday school, still one of the greatest and most fulfilling spiritual challenges I have ever had. When Michael was hired, and when I joined, the church was in an interim period. The interim minister, Tom Warrington, believed that God acted in the wilderness, and I think Tom was one of those folks who was great about pointing to the work of God. So, Tom pointed the church to the movement of the Holy Spirit in Michael and I’s lives. The church began to call out our distinctive gifts. And the church decided to ordain us in an interim period. Probably the most “Baptisty†thing you could ever do—ordained by the people, without a senior pastor. It was a water in the wilderness moment. The church believed God was still working through them in the wilderness.

God is still at work here, Northminster. God is splitting open rocks, and living water is flowing. Testify to this great and good provision of God. Call out the gifts in those God has blessed. May it be so in our lives.
Amen.







Beginning Again Again

John 3:1-17, The Second Sunday in Lent

Lesley Ratcliff · March 5th, 2023 · Duration 9:44

In today’s lessons from Genesis and John, the books of the Bible that begin with “In the Beginning,†Abram and Nicodemus find themselves beginning again.

Abram and Sarai and Lot leave their country and their kindred, to pursue the land that God will show them.

Nicodemus leaves behind the certainty of his belief, to pursue his questions.

Abram is promised blessing and a great name. Nicodemus is promised either condemnation or no condemnation depending on his choices.

They both witness the work of God and must begin anew.

Sometimes we witness the work of God, and we must begin anew. Sometimes we are forced to begin again; sometimes we begin again because God calls us to do so; sometimes we begin again because of our own mistakes; sometimes we begin again because of someone else’s mistakes; sometimes we begin again because we cannot ignore our questions any longer; sometimes we begin again because we have found different ways of being, of seeing, of living our one wild and precious life.

No matter the circumstance or cause, beginnings are usually scary. Whether you choose to begin again or if it is forced upon you, the uncertainty, the grief, the judgement of others, the judgement of ourselves, the fear, the sometimes-painful hope, beginnings often hold that which would stop us from ever starting if we had the choice.

Abram begins again, and we know a good bit about what happens afterwards: his triumphs and his failures, his lineage in the birth of at least three faiths, his change of name from Abram to Abraham, and his descendants whose number outnumber the stars.

Of Nicodemus, other than his late-night conversation with Jesus, we know only that he asked for a fair process when Jesus found himself, as Jesus often did, in another argument with the leaders of his day. And we know that Nicodemus returned to help with Jesus’ burial after the crucifixion. And yet, Nicodemus’ questions are tied to one of the most, if not the most well-known scripture reference of the New Testament, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son.â€

For God so loved the world. God’s ultimate beginning again. God sending God’s self into the world to show us how to see, and how to be, and how to live.

In the faith of my childhood, this verse was all about the future, about what God had done and how it could give us a some-day, far off hope of joining God in heaven. And yet the God of today’s lessons walked with Abraham, sat with Nicodemus, filled the shoes of Jesus. When we are forced to begin again, the God who called Abraham, the friend of Nicodemus, the God made flesh in Jesus is our help, our shade at our right hand, the one who keeps our going out and our coming in.

Lent is a time for starting over. The purple path is filled with those who are beginning again, trying to let go of that which weighs us down, trying to take up that which recognizes God’s nearness to us. It is a season that helps us to recognize where we might begin again, where we need to begin again. It is a season that helps us
know where we need to take up the “God so loves the world†kind of love in our own lives, to love others the way God loves us.

Lent is a season big enough to hold all who are beginning again. The purple path is big enough for those who come to it after the fall, after getting back up again, after the move, after the divorce, after the marriage, after the death, after the birth, after the loss, after the gain, after the vote, after the disaster, after the miracle. Lent is a time for us to recognize that God is with us on the path, no matter how many times the path comes back around to the beginning.

When we come to the table, we begin again. We remember the work of Christ; we remember our place in that work. We come to the table together to remember that we surround and support one another, that we are surrounded and supported by one another, in all our beginnings. The table is open to everyone to remind us that we are God’s beloved children, and so are all those whom God created. The table is open to everyone because it is God’s table.

It reminds us that God so loved the world, it reminds us that we are called to look beyond the small world that we have created, to the great big world that God created to determine the size of our love. And when we look again, we might need to begin again.

When we come to the table we begin again. It might be a new season, or a new month, or a new week, or a new day. Sometimes its just a new hour. But we carry the God whose supper we celebrate with us. We walk with the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.

When we begin again, when we walk the purple path, when we come to the table, we remember that our help comes from the Lord, the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth. In the beginning.

Amen.

When Good Things Aren't The Right Things

Matthew 4:1-11, The First Sunday in Lent

Major Treadway · February 26th, 2023 · Duration 12:47

Food for the hungry. A safety net for those who are falling and have no one to catch them. Wealth, authority, governance. These are the things with which Jesus was tempted by one interchangeably called the tempter and the devil, one whom Jesus addresses as Satan. Are these not among the very things that Jesus will encourage people toward throughout the rest of his ministry?

Jesus will take a small amount of bread and fish offered by a boy, enough for a simple meal for a small family, and break it and share it and break it and share it and break it and share it until thousands of people have been able to eat, enough so that none of them go hungry, and there remain an abundance of leftovers that far outstrips the meager amount the boy first offered to Jesus.

There is the story of Jesus teaching in a house full of people, and being the hands that are present to catch a paralyzed man being lowered through the roof in need a healing. It is Jesus who heals this man, telling him to “stand up, take your mat and go to your home.â€

And Jesus had plenty to say on the topics of wealth, authority, and governance. Though, on these topics the position of Jesus had a way of being considerably different than those of the people with whom Jesus often found himself engaged. He tells the rich young ruler, to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Jesus observes a widow putting in the offering plates two small copper coins and commends her gift, one of sacrifice, over the larger gifts born out of abundance. Another time Jesus is recorded to have said “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.†And, of course, Jesus expends a significant amount of effort trying to communicate the nature of his Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven.

And yet, here is the tempter in the wilderness with Jesus, dangling these temptations, presumably hoping, expecting, that Jesus just might reach for them.

I guess I have always heard and read this story under the title of the section in every Bible I have ever owned: “The temptation of Jesus.†And since each week, we pray as Jesus taught us to “lead me not into temptation,†I have just begun with the assumption that it was all bad. Somewhere along the way, I began to consider that in this story of temptation, there were not just ends with which Jesus was tempted, there were means too. The kinds of means and ends that cause people to sit around and argue if the means justify the ends, if the ends justify the means, and which of the two is more important.

Looking at all the parts of this temptation narrative individually, though, there are some that cannot conclusively be labeled as intrinsically bad – means or ends. Some are clear – “fall down and worship†the devil. That one, a means, clearly bad. The end, though, all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, it is hard to define whether possessing them would be of an inherent nature of good or bad.

The first temptation causes the most confusion for me, because, temptations are supposed to be bad, right? “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.†Jesus hasn’t eaten anything for forty days. What evil could come of turning stones to bread? Afterall, Jesus’ first miracle in the Gospel of John is turning water into wine, and not because people are thirsty, but because his mother asked him to. Further, the author of the Gospel of John tells us that it was upon seeing this that the disciples believed in Jesus. The story is not a direct parallel, yet it bears sufficient similarity that makes me wonder.

The second temptation, the devil telling Jesus to throw himself off of the highest point of the temple because the angels of God would catch Jesus and he would not get hurt. I’m not sure how this one is even a temptation. But for the sake our discussion, throwing oneself off of such a high place seems to land clearly on the bad side of things. But angels of God catching Jesus doesn’t seem so bad.

This story, the temptation of Jesus, reminds us one more time, that the Bible does not have the answers to all our questions. In this case, as in others, for me, it creates more questions the more I read it.

While I have lots of questions in this reading and others throughout the Bible, there are some things about which I am increasingly certain. Among them, that our faith is a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year kind of faith. It is not a one hour on Sundays and sometimes on Wednesdays kind of faith. Our faith influences the whole of our lives and affects all of the decisions we make – the decisions we make in church and the ones we make out of church; the decisions we make in private and the ones we make in public; the decisions that have clear right answers, and the ones where it seems there might be two good answers and we’re not sure which one is right.

But, how does our faith inform our decision making process when things aren’t clear? How can we know when something is good and when something is right?

Sometimes, thinking of decisions in parts helps. We can think in terms of means and ends. Are the means good? Are the ends good? Or perhaps it is helpful to consider the process itself. One way to get down in the weeds of whether a decision is good or not, if it is right or not, is to ask these questions – particularly when our decisions affect more than just ourselves – and if the answers are not that the means are good, the ends are good, the process is good, for us and others whom the decision impacts, then it just might be that, like Jesus in the wilderness, we are being tempted toward something that seems good, but isn’t right.

This kind of thinking and discerning fits well with the season that has just begun, Lent. Lent is the season of fasting and prayer, of penitence and preparation. We tend to associate Lent mostly with fasting, or as the Today show captioned it this week “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-day challenge.†But we know that the fasting of Lent is not a one-time easy decision, and it is more than a 40-day challenge. It is a daily commitment to a fast that will continually call us deeper into prayer and deeper into relationship with God.

The fasting of Lent removes from our lives some of the stuff that is taking up time, space, energy, and/or resources, and that deprivation leaves space for something new. Traditionally, that something new has been prayer and contemplation – practices which draw us ever closer to God, turning our focus toward the cross that waits at the end of the journey of Lent.

Decision making. It is just like any other discipline. It takes practice to get better. If we start with the easy decisions, the ones that have a clear good and right option, and consistently choose what is right each time we come to those easy decisions, they get easier. But something else happens too, our practice of choosing what is right begins to spill into questions that might otherwise take more effort to understand and choose. But even with practicing choosing what is right, there remain some decisions that just take time and discernment– some even that require calling on the community of God to join in the process to help us to understand if the ends we are considering are good, and if the means to get to that end are good, and if the process is good. Even more, the community of God can help us to discern what is right.

As we together enter this season of Lent, and as we choose fasts that will help us draw near to God as we journey toward the cross, let us also find healthy practices to fill the space left by our fasting. And as we journey deeper into Lent, all the while drawing near to God, let our decisions be marked by discernment that it might be ever more clear that we are leaning toward making decisions in which the ends are good, the means are good, the whole process is good, and even more than good, that we are striving toward making decisions that are right.

Amen.

Youth Sermon - Ivey Yelverton and Lucy Elfert

Youth Sunday, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Ivey Yelverton and Lucy Elfert · February 19th, 2023 · Duration 14:55

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Does God Laugh With Us?

Deuteronomy 30:15-20, I Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37, The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Joseph Rosen · February 12th, 2023 · Duration 11:29

Peace be with you.

Again, I want to express gratitude on behalf of Beth Israel Congregation for the strengthening of spirit provided by your attendance at our houses of worship this weekend. Revs Treadway, Ratcliff, and Poole have been great clergy friends for me ever since I came to Jackson. And I feel confident speaking for all of us when I say how great it is to sit together as spiritual kin, where our destinies share the hope of a better world, despite religious differences.

For the past few weeks leading up to the pulpit swap, I’ve been conveying the connection between our congregations, telling the story about how a Northminster member approached a Beth Israel Board member about using our sanctuary for a small Baptist congregation in formation.

But I had a gut punch moment when Arty Finkelberg emailed me this week and reminded me how the relationship between our congregations began when Beth Israel was transitioning from our Synagogue on Woodrow Wilson to our Synagogue on Old Canton. I read those lines of the email a few times because I’m just now processing how I’ve been telling the story wrong since I learned it almost four years ago. I had been under the impression that the relationship between our congregations began in the 80s, and I have been relaying that ever since I learned of Northminster. Instead, as Rev. Treadway reminded us Friday night, our story began in ’67, when the Woodrow Wilson Synagogue still stood.

Now, nobody had corrected me before about this discrepancy. So maybe it wasn’t noticed. Still, I could not help but feel a bit embarrassed. But there’s nothing to do about it now other than to share what I’ve learned. So, I relied on humor, laughed at myself to get past the mistake, and sat down to write.

I’m an advocate for using humor to move on from mistakes. Laughing with yourself is a quick way to ensure some levity and easy happiness to support carrying the many burdens of life. But, of course, humor can be a tricky tool to use. Although levity is the reward for its use, we don’t want to risk taking away from the importance of a given moment. Experience, more than anything else, can teach us when a playful demeanor would work.

We are created in the image of God, meaning that the need for levity must also be a divine attribute. And that brings me to my question today: Does God laugh with us too?

What a powerful question to ask, given the lectionary readings this week. From Deuteronomy 30, from Moses’ final speech to the Israelites, “if your heart turns away and you give no heed and are lured into the worship and service of other gods, I declare to you this day that you shall certainly perish.â€1 In Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount, “If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.â€2 Bringing humor to these verses feels inappropriate, especially given their place to inspire us as we sit in a worship service. And although the more profound message in these passages is to choose life over death, to build a just society, and to express reverence for the One greater than us, we should wonder how the Israelite and Jesus’ congregation transitioned from listening to these heavy words.
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1 Deuteronomy 30:17-18
2 Matthew 5:30

In the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, the Fellowship of the Ring is separated, and some of our heroes go to aid the kingdom of Rohan. Facing the impending evil forces from Isengard nearby, Rohan evacuates their capital city to find refuge in the mountain fortress of Helm’s Deep. In a scene between terrified people fleeing their homes and being attacked by Orcs riding monstrous wolves, we are treated to a humorous encounter between Gimlee the Dwarf, and Eowyn, niece of Rohan’s king. Gimlee rides high on his horse with fantastic dwarf tales before accidentally egging his horse onward a bit too much, and he is tossed from the saddle. Other refugees laugh, and the scene gives a break from the impending evils that threaten. It’s hard to imagine that refugees and warriors found humor in their endeavors, yet, the laughs still echoed in the field, even if only for a moment.

Rewatching that scene from the Two Towers reminded me of a fateful Christmas Eve celebration on the Western Front of World War I. A British machine gunner, Bruce Bairnsfather, recalled December 24, 1914, in his memoirs,
Here I was, in this horrible clay cavity…miles and miles from home. Cold, wet through and covered with mud. [There didn’t] seem the slightest chance of leaving – except in an ambulance. At about 10 p.m., Bairnsfather noticed a noise. “I listened,†he recalled. “Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.†He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, “Do you hear the [Germans] kicking up that racket over there?â€3

The German soldiers were singing Christmas carols. The British and Germans met in No Man’s Land to trade holiday greetings, songs, tobacco, and wine. Another solder, Ernie Williams, described a soccer game. “The ball appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where…They made up some goals, and one fellow went in goal, and then it was just a general kick-about. I should think there were about a couple of hundred taking part.â€4 German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch remembered, “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.â€5

Joy, humor, and companionship provide levity from the more solemn aspects of life. And in those moments of relief, new perspectives can be gained. Throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the heroes often refer to their enemy as an evil that never sleeps. It’s hard to imagine not sleeping at all. Yet, perhaps that lack of rest allows their cruel and violent intentions to persist.

True evil, therefore, festers from the lack of perspective gained from levity and rest, where there is no moment to take reflective action. In First Corinthians 3, Paul writes, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly – mere infants in Christ.6 When considering how we bring humor and levity to provide relief in life, we can identify with the Corinthians as striving to better ourselves. Compared to the Eternal, our mortality and innate flaws make us infants who grow into children. Unable to grasp the complete and mature wisdom represented in the Divine Presence, how can we hope for anything more?
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3 https://www.history.com/news/christmas-truce-1914-world-war-i-soldier-accounts
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 I Corinthians 3:1-9

When our children laugh and babble, we can’t help but share that happiness with them. And the Eternal is our ultimate parent when we crave levity. So even amongst the more sober and daunting instructions we are tasked to take to heart, we must allow ourselves to laugh when needed. The theology we experience in worship and a sacred text can often be overwhelming, so levity is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Or, in the case of Moses and Jesus, I hope they provided a nice spread for their congregants after sitting through these monumental sermons — nothing like some physical nourishment to help us digest such forceful teachings.

Our texts from Deuteronomy and Matthew each have their way of asking us to choose life. Yet, even with these teachings’ solemn and sober tone, life demands space for processing, for the transition from task to task. In this sacred obligation, humanity is united as beings created in the image of the Divine. And in our reflections, when we weren’t at our best, we pray for mercy and grace, the helping hand to pull us up when we fall. And when we laugh, purposely, or even masking discomfort, may we look inwards to feel the smile of the Eternal, that we may be encouraged to reorient our attention to a world that needs it.

זָכְרֵנוּ ×”' ×ֱלהֵינוּ בּו לְטובָה. וּפָקְדֵנוּ בו לִבְרָכָה. וְהוש×ִיעֵנוּ בו לְחַיִּי×

This day, remember us for well-being. Bless us with your nearness. Help us to a fuller life.

And to these prayers, let us say, Amen.


There's No Hiding on This Hill

Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 5:13-20, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Major Treadway · February 5th, 2023 · Duration 1:06

Sermon begins at 34:43

Today’s readings from Isaiah and Matthew each feel a bit like a sermon in and of themselves. And, in a way, each of them was.

Isaiah hears from God, “Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!” And then he does: Isaiah preaches “you serve your own interests on your fast days and oppress all your workers.” In his preaching, he mocks what the people to whom he is preaching call worship, pointing toward a different kind of fasting as a more genuine representation of worship: loosing the bonds of injustice, letting the oppressed go free, sharing bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless into their houses and more.

Then there is a shift in his sermon to say, if you do these things, then God will do these other things. It is almost as though there is a bargain to be struck. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail, says Isaiah.

And then there’s Jesus. In the midst of his longest recorded speech, the Sermon on the Mount, he speaks clearly and directly to those around him. “you are the light of the world, a city on a hill cannot be hid.” He does not mince words. He does not appeal to the past. He does not offer conditions or options. He states simply and clearly: “you are the light of the world.” He does not say, “you might be.” He does not say, “if you do this, you could be.” He does not say, “because of that you may one day become.” None of that. Jesus says: “you are.”

Now, at this point, we must acknowledge the great disservice that has been done to the English-speaking Bible reading community of the world, that disservice, is, of course, that all evidence would suggest that, so far, in the history of English Bible translation, those who do the translating have yet to consult a southerner on the proper way to write the plural of “you.”

King James gets an excuse. Back in 1611 when he was translating the Bible, folks had not yet figured out how to say “y’all.” But since 1856, when the word “y’all” first made an appearance in print, there is really no excuse. English Bible translators know enough Greek to know when the word “you” is singular and when the word “you” is plural, and if they had just consulted a southerner, then many of the Bible’s second person pronouns would be clearer.

For example, in today’s gospel lesson, we would not have to wonder if Jesus was looking to an individual and saying to one person “you are the light of the world” or if he was saying “y’all are the light of the world.” We would know. Jesus was talking to the whole gathered listening congregation. “Y’all are the light of the world,” says Jesus. “A city on a hill cannot be hid.”

There is something gripping about these statements from Jesus. “Y’all are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hid.” It is as though the truth of what Jesus says rests entirely upon who Jesus is and what he has said. Because Jesus has pointed to this gathered community and claimed them, it must be true. They must be the light of the world. They must be the city on the hill that cannot be hid.

Jesus, the light of all people, the light that shines in the darkness, and darkness did not overcome it. That Jesus claims unto himself, the gathered congregation: “y’all are the light of the world.” In naming and claiming y’all, Jesus proclaims with Isaiah “your light shall break forth like the dawn… the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.”

And in the city of God, the city on the hill that cannot be hidden, all engage in the fasting of the Lord: loosing the bonds of injustice, letting the oppressed go free, sharing bread with the hungry and homes with the homeless.

Having these claims of Jesus and Isaiah draped over us, binding us to Jesus, can feel uncomfortable. It might be easier to pick and choose which parts of Jesus’s calling and Isaiah’s reading to aspire to. And yet, it is precisely when we hear and understand that “y’all” as “you” and we individualize our faith that we lose the fullness of the community of God.

In this community called Northminster we are each and all welcomed into the community of faith and claimed by the abundant love of Jesus. Our calling is more than individual. Our responsibility in the Body of Christ extends further than our responsibility as citizens of any city, or state, or nation. For in the Body of Christ, I am bound to you and you to me, in such a way that for you to feel pain is for me to feel pain and for me to feel pain is for you to feel pain, for one of us to celebrate is for all of us to celebrate, and when any of us suffer, all of us suffer.

“Y’all are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hid.” On the last page of your order of worship each week, you will find the words “every member a minister.” There again, taking a cue from Jesus, everyone who is a member of this community of faith has been claimed as a minister. There is no hiding on this hill. If y’all are here, if y’all are a part of this community, y’all are ministers.

Y’all are the light of the world.                                                    

Amen.

What Does the Lord Require?

Micah 6:1-8, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Major Treadway · January 29th, 2023 · Duration 11:17

In January of 2021, nine months on from the first recorded cases of COVID in Mississippi and in the midst of the time when deciding how we would do what we would do consumed much time and thought for many folks around Northminster, the deacons gathered in the Great Hall for their annual Deacons’ Retreat. Twenty-one chairs, enough for the eighteen deacons and three pastors were spread in a circle around the Great Hall – you know that room over there capable of holding over a hundred folks sitting around tables. We were spread out. Many of us were in masks. And as a result, we were probably shouting at one another to be heard. At that meeting, then Deacon Chair Jeff Stancill called on the deacons that day to consider what were the largest questions facing Northminster at the time.

It was at this meeting that Chuck gave the first indication to the deacons that he felt like the time was coming when he would retire from Northminster, and as a result, one of the questions for Northminster that day would be to consider what none of us were ready to consider – a Northminster without Chuck Poole as the Senior Pastor. While this question may have been the one that registered most clearly from that day, none of you who know this place well will be surprised to hear that the questions raised that day were the kinds of questions that do not have fast and easy answers.

There were questions about the financial present and future, the aging lighting system in the sanctuary and the trees growing on the roof. And there were questions about how COVID would impact our family of faith and how we would respond. There were questions about the shape and make up of the staff and the ongoing ministries of the church. Overall, the deacons, on that day, were asking the question, in response to the prophet Micah: How do we do good? How do we do what the Lord requires of us? What does it mean for Northminster in the 2020s to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?

Fast forward in time to another deacon’s meeting. At this meeting, the conversation was concerning the interim period, the time and space where we now find ourselves. One deacon put words to the anxieties that many in the room and in the congregation were feeling. What this deacon said can be summed up as: “it is in interim periods when congregations have a tendency to lose their vision, and when they lose their vision, they lose their momentum, and when they lose their momentum the whole of the community of faith suffers.â€

These fears and anxieties, to me, felt like a summing up of what I had heard in and among the congregation. They are also truths that we have all observed in many other spheres – companies, sports teams, other congregations. Perhaps, the clear naming of such broadly held concerns is why this moment has held such a clear resonance in my mind.

This morning, we are five months into the interim, in a season of undetermined length between senior pastors, and these words of concern still find their way into meetings and planning sessions. In this interim period, what does it mean to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?

The truth is, this is an important question to ask at any time, and to keep asking, imagining, and plotting for the near and distant future opportunities that wait.

Since that deacons’ meeting back in January of 2021, that long list of questions was boiled down into a more concise list. An ad hoc Long Range Planning Committee was appointed and given those questions and a charge to draw up a plan.

By now, you have, I hope, had an opportunity to read through the planning document that the Long Range Planning Committee has developed. After this worship service, we will convene as a congregation to consider this plan in a more formal way.

What this proposal and the actions of this congregation over the course of the last five months suggest is that through careful attention, collective action, and communal buy-in, Northminster will emerge from this period between Senior Pastors with a renewed sense of identity and purpose, still hearing Micah’s call, and still asking together what that call means in the present and near future.

You should know, that it is not a generally recommended practice that congregations begin building projects when a Senior Pastor is retiring. General consensus among congregational consultants would be that this is a bad idea. However, as you no doubt read on Friday in an email from Finance and Stewardship Committee Chair, Jeff Davis, Not only did this congregation exceed the budget for the fiscal year 2022, but also raised more than 75% in pledges and contributions toward the cost of the building project, A Renewal of Stones and Light. And while that’s worth celebrating, I’m sure that Jeff would also want me to remind you that there remain about 600,000 opportunities to participate with pledges and contributions.

Despite what might be recommended, Northminster has continued to lean into its commitment to be a lay led congregation where every member is a minister and bears responsibility for the discernment and direction of this community of faith.

Much in the same way, those same consultants who might advise against starting building projects when this one started, they would also likely advise against forming a long range plan in an interim period. Yet, the questions that were given to the long range planning committee are not questions that are going away. They are not questions that will wait for a new Senior Pastor, nor are they questions that any of us would expect a new Senior Pastor to be able to answer, no matter how much we might want for them to be answered.

In response to concerns about momentum, where finances are one (though certainly not the only) indicator, this community of faith has met the opportunity of the interim. Today, we have opportunity to meet the question of vision. In order to maintain our momentum, in order to continue to thrive as a community of faith, we will need to follow the wise council and example of our deacons and ask hard questions. We will need to remember the words of Micah. “What is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?â€

The Long Range Planning Committee has sat with these questions, with members of the congregation, with the deacons, and discerned the questions and how we as a community of faith might respond.

In just a few minutes, we will consider their recommendations and how these recommendations might become the vision that will carry this congregation through the interim period, how these recommendations might become the response to those anxieties and fears that weigh on our hearts as we wait and anticipate in this season between senior pastors.

“It is in interim periods when congregations have a tendency to lose their vision, and when they lose their vision, they lose their momentum, and when they lose their momentum the whole of the community of faith suffers.â€

What if during this interim period, as a community of faith, when we consider together what it means to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God, we embrace a new vision, and lean into that vision to create new momentum, so that at the end of this interim period the whole of the community of faith will not have suffered, but will have found new ways to thrive?

Amen.


Dropping the Nets

Matthew 4:12-23, 1 Corinthians 1:10-18, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Jason Coker · January 22nd, 2023 · Duration 21:50

How many disciples did Jesus call? This is a real question. You have permission to say it out loud. If you said 12, you are absolutely right. I think most of us know how many disciples there were in the New Testament. All four of our Gospels say so. Twelve. But, my question was definitely a trick question, so you were right in being hesitant. While it is true and biblically correct that there were 12 disciples, we actually don’t know how many Jesus actually called. We only know how many said yes to that call. In today’s passage he heard of four resounding yes’s! James, John, Peter, Andrew—yes, yes, yes, yes. Peter and Andrew dropped their nets. James and John got out of their boats. And they followed Jesus. They have been known for this for over two thousand years. Here’s the lesson: Drop your nets, get out of your boats, and say YES to Jesus.

There’s no mistaking this passage today as anything other than a passage for the Season of Epiphany. This is the season when the church universal pays close attention to all those passages that emphasize a revelation of sort. “This is my son, the beloved†That was a revelation that you know doubt have already heard by now in the Season of Epiphany. Today, Jesus calls these four dudes. It’s a revelation for them; an epiphany. I wonder how their families heard this story told time and time again over meals and at parties. “I’ll never forget when Jesus showed up and called us out of the boat…†Epiphany moments! I hope this morning is one for you. I hope you never forget this moment. This is a moment when Jesus is calling to us. If there is a season within the Christian calendar when Jesus is calling, it is now—and what a moment for his voice to act like a dawning light shining out over the shadow of death. What a moment.

What will it take for you to drop your nets? Sit up from your desk and close your laptop? Get up and get out of your boat? What epiphany is Jesus bringing you? First, a cautionary tale. What happened to all the people that Jesus must have called that did NOT follow him? We actually know a powerful story from all three Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell a terrible and devastating story of one young man that said no. In fact, he didn’t even say no. He just walked away sad—walked away from Jesus.

It comes to us from Matthew 19:16-22, Mark 10:17-22, and Luke 18:18-23. It’s the story of The Rich Young Ruler. Here’s Matthew’s version of that story: 16 Then someone came to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?†17 And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.†18 He said to him, “Which one?†And Jesus said, “You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; 19 honor your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.†20 The young man said to him, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?†21 Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.†22 When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.â€

Let’s sit with the end of this passage ringing in our ears for a moment: “ ‘Then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.†He could not let go of his nets. He could not get out of his boat. He could not sell all his many possessions. He could NOT follow Jesus. Let’s make no mistake about it, this is a calling story every bit as much as James and John’s and Peter’s and Andrew’s. It’s actually the exact same words—even in the Greek: Follow me. Four men followed; one walked away. How many countless others walked away?

We all have these moments in our lives when we are standing on a threshold. We are at the point of a decision, or even at the cusp of an epiphany. When I was a religion major at William Carey College (back when it was a mere college), all of us religion majors came up to something called “The Line.†It was that point in your theological education that when you crossed it, your faith would never be the same. Some students got there, saw the line, looked at what was past that line, and recoiled. Nope! I’m not going to doubt anything that I was ever told by my pastor, Sunday School teacher, mama, or grand maw. I’ve got all the answers I need and I’m not crossing that line. In fact, to cross that line would be a sin.

Others took a step of faith and crossed the line into the unknown. What else could we learn? Some of those who crossed that line lost their faith. They found out that everything that they had built their faith one was as flimsy as sand and they couldn’t trust anything after that. Others took a step of faith and crossed the line into the unknown, but kept it as a deep secret. They became pastors and never spoke of the line again—certainly never challenged their church members to think differently—or even think at all. And then there were still others, that took a step of faith and crossed the line into the unknown, and found that there was deep meaning in real questions, that life was not as simple as they always were told, that there was a depth that was deep but God was in the depths—and so were the epiphanies.

Those lines exist in religion and they are real. Those lines exist in politics, too. When you get to a point, a line, when you start thinking that the politics that you’ve inherited from your mama and grand maw and pastor and Sunday school teacher, might not be exactly what you think may be right. You’re standing on that line looking over and wondering, what do I do?

Here we are in the middle of a legislative session when our elected officials are making the real decisions about how we are structuring our society—what is law and what is not. How we will spend money, and how we won’t. It is exactly in moments like these when our religion and our politics intersect—as they should, as Dr. King would probably remind us. Our faith in an all-loving God, a God who would come to us as a child, our faith in a sacrificial God is calling us. Calling us to participate in justice, participate in mercy, participate in our society as though we actually wanted God’s will to be done on earth even as it is in heaven. Our politics should definitely follow that.

Jesus is calling us to follow, calling us to drop our nets, calling us to get out of our boats, calling us to cross that line into the depths of God’s love. So, here are our choices in this season of Epiphany: Come, follow me. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. Come, follow me. When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving…

Jesus has called you to follow.
You have heard Jesus’s voice of light breaking through the darkness.
Standing in the light of God’s gracious love,
Your free will sits in your gut.
As you leave this sacred space may each set out be a step toward Christ
Following our LORD to the most prescient needs of our world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Singing the Servant's Song

Isaiah 49:1-7, The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Major Treadway · January 15th, 2023 · Duration 15:09

This morning’s reading from Isaiah is one of four songs in Isaiah that are called the “Servant Songs.†These songs typically show up in Holy Week readings as a part of the final procession from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, calling us to remember what it means for Jesus to have been a living, breathing human and servant of God.

This week though, we are not in the midst of Holy Week, we are in Epiphanytide. Last week, the reading from Isaiah was the first Servant Song. There are two more that only show up in the lectionary during the Holy Week readings. All of them giving a vision of what it means to be a servant of God.

The song that sings forth from Isaiah this week unfolds in three movements:

The servant recognizes with other voices throughout the Bible that in some certain and incomprehensible way the call of the Lord was on the servant’s life even while still in the womb. This idea sounds wild, yet it is consistent with scripture: Psalm 139 reminds us “for it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.†Paul claims in a letter to the Galatian church: “God… set me apart before I was born and called me through God’s grace.†Again, to the Ephesian church, Paul writes: “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love.â€

These scriptures also sound a bit strange. Though, in more modern times, doctors and psychologists encourage expectant parents to read to their not yet born child, nurturing a bond between parent and child even before the child is born. This too sounds strange, but maybe if we can believe that a parent and an unborn child can bond, then perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to believe that God can know us even before we know ourselves.

This first movement of the song seems to be as much an acknowledgement of the call that is upon the life of the servant as it is about the difficulty of believing when that call was placed there.

The second movement of the song is the one that feels most natural to me. The servant says to God, channeling all of the cynical parts of Ecclesiastes that can be channeled: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.†This impatient complaint to God is about results that have not yet squared with the expectations that the servant has concerning the ways that effort and call will come together and materialize.

In the third movement, Isaiah records God’s response to this complaint. Only, God does not respond the way we might expect. God conveys to the servant: the way you understand your calling is too small. Further, God says to the servant: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.†Lastly, God reminds the servant of where this relationship began. It began with “the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.â€

If you are anything like me, after reading or hearing these words from Isaiah many questions spring to mind. As happens frequently with Isaiah, the first question for me is: can we read that one more time? After wrapping my head around all that is being said and sung, I have several other questions, chief among them – who is this servant? And what does it mean to be called by God while still in the womb?

Like so many questions that seem to our twenty-first century minds easy to answer, there is no broadly agreed upon answer to these questions. Instead, there is strong scriptural evidence, in this passage and others supporting it, that suggests any one of three identities as the servant in the songs. It could Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. It could be Israel, the nation. It could also be that the servant is Isaiah, the prophet who recorded these words. Who can say with absolute certainty?

There is comfort in the ambiguity, for whether the servant is the person of Jacob who became Israel, or the nation of Israel, or even the prophet Isaiah, there is a point of connection. If the servant is Jacob who became Israel, there is the long and turbulent, very human, very flawed, approachable story of Jacob. A story which is as inviting as it is hard to take in. A story that feels like it could be about someone I know or even about one of us if a few details were changed. If the servant is the nation of Israel, there too, we can find ourselves – not because we are of Jewish heritage, but because of the wideness of the welcome of God, because in Jesus, we have been welcomed into the family of God and the family of faith, and as a result we journey together on this long and winding path. And if the servant is Isaiah, there too is hope, for if the servant is Isaiah, there we can find ourselves, as did Isaiah, using the gifts with which he was blessed, in the places he found himself, to do the work of God.

And about the being called while still in the womb question. Well, there are many who might read these words and say that they are clear evidence for predestination or something like it, and as the words on the page read, it seems they may have a point. But I also think if we read them in the context of Psalm 139 and Paul’s letters to the churches in Galatia and Ephesus, that there is comfort in being known by God and also, there is a calling. The calling of God that comes to us while still in the womb is a calling of grace. It is a calling to “be holy and blameless before God in love.â€

With these two questions addressed, even if not fully answered, let’s go back to the servant’s song in today’s Isaiah reading and see if we might be able to join in singing it with Isaiah.

In this song that unfolds as a conversation between the servant and God, a problem arises that is in no way due to the faithfulness of the servant or the effort of the servant, but rather because the servant has developed expectations around what God might do with the effort that the servant is putting forward.

God responds by clarifying that the servant’s plans are not God’s plans. And God has plans.

As a community of faith, Northminster is marked by its willingness to take up the servant’s song, singing alongside the servant, leaning on God’s calling to “be holy and blameless before God in love.†Historically, Northminster has sung this song by leaning on the gifts and passions of the individual members that make up this place. It is because of these leanings that as a community, we have gotten involved with so many initiatives. If you have been coming to Wednesday night suppers this year, you have had the opportunity to hear about some of the endeavors to which individuals and groups have connected Northminster. And if you’re available tomorrow morning, you can be one of those individuals joining the song and sustaining Northminster’s good and important friendships in MidCity.

And there is also something beautiful about the way that Northminster sings the servant’s song. Northminster sings it together, becoming stronger than just a gathering of individuals leaning on their individual callings. In a way, being a part of this community, singing the song in this way, is like being woven into a multi-colored tapestry, where there are times when one thread or color is featured, and other times where that same thread is hidden behind other colors, where to pull on one thread is to pull on many, where it is only by taking a step back that one can see the picture that we are all together weaving.

And yet, even with the individuals using their gifts to respond to the calling of God to be holy and blameless before God in love, and with the tapestry we are weaving together, we still have a way of finding ourselves, at times, frustrated with God and/or with our progress.

But, I wonder if God might hear our singing the servant’s song with Isaiah and respond to us as God responded to the servant. I wonder if God might hear our dissatisfaction and call us to remember that our dreams do not limit God’s dreams. I wonder if God might call us to dream a different dream – one that somehow incorporates all that we have been dreaming all along, but more as a piece of a much larger whole.

If the servant’s song that we are singing is only a piece and not the whole, it just might be that we can really only sing the servant’s song when we are a part of God’s great big choir. The kind of choir that enjoins “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them singing†the same song – a song of salvation for the whole earth, a song of salvation for this nation, this state, and this community, a song of salvation that we sing “because the Lord, who is faithful, … has chosen you.â€

Amen.

New Year, Old Us

Isaiah 63:7-9, The First Sunday after Christmas Day

Lesley Ratcliff · January 1st, 2023 · Duration 7:09

On Christmas Day, in the early hours when the only creatures who had stirred were me and the cats, I was sitting on my sofa, in the glow of Christmas tree light, our Advent wreath, and a computer screen preparing for worship. As I was working, an email popped up in the corner of the screen and the title of it was “New Year, New You.â€

It was 5am on Christmas Day.

In this morning’s lesson from Isaiah, we hear the prophet proclaim “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.â€

When we move so quickly from one celebration to the next, we often miss the opportunity for gratitude. When we consider the Christmas message, God with us, there is much for which to be grateful. This week, in the holiday haze when many do not know what day it is, we are encouraged to move from the celebrations of Christmas to the resolutions of the New Year, but let’s not miss the opportunity to remember what God has done and who we are in the light of the Christmas message.

We are the ones who stand up and count the gracious deeds of the Lord. We, with the prophet, notice God’s mercy, and the abundance of the Lord’s steadfast love. We rest ourselves in the truth that we are God’s people. We recognize that God’s presence saves us, that we are redeemed and lifted and carried all our days.

What if we had a “New Year, Old Us,†one in which we remembered who God says we are, instead of trying to shape ourselves into what the world demands?

Pope John Paul II famously said, “we are an Easter people.†We are also a Christmas people. We are a people of resurrection and a people of incarnation.

What if our new year’s resolution isn’t to try something new but to try to be who we’ve said we’d be all along?

We are people who tell the story of the incarnation. We tell it with our voices when we speak with mercy and love. We tell it with our bodies when we are present to those who need God’s presence most, and when we go about creating God’s kingdom here on earth. We tell it with our lives when we give ourselves fully to loving God with all that is in us and to loving people as God loves us.

Our culture, and even our own liturgical calendar will tell us to move along quickly. There is good in the rhythms of the church year, the seasons of preparation, and celebration and growth, that help us to see our own lives in the light of the life of Jesus, the early church, and that which is to come, when God will be all in all. And there is good in the inflection point of a New Year, a fresh start, a chance to look with gratitude on what has been, and to look forward to what will come.

Coming to the table of our Lord on New Year’s Day is a practice of remembering. What if our new year’s promise isn’t to redefine who we are but to remember who we are?

We are an Easter people, and a Christmas people. We are a people of a resurrection, and a people of incarnation. We are a people who speak of a Christ who is with us, and a people who embody the One who created us.

When we remember who we are, we remember whose we are and that is the kind of truth we want to carry into a New Year. Happy New Year, Old Us!

Amen.

And the Word Became Flesh

Christmas Day

Major Treadway · December 25th, 2022 · Duration 15:40

And the word became flesh.

The Word that was in the beginning; the Word that was with God; the Word that was God; the Word, through whom all things came into being; the Word that was the light of all peoples; the Word that is a light which darkness cannot overcome.

This is the Word that became flesh. The Word that was God. God became flesh.

Today, we have gathered to celebrate this moment – the moment that everything in the world changed, and almost nobody knew it.

This is my favorite Christmas story. John cannot be bothered with trying to piece together whether Matthew was right and Jesus was born in Bethlehem in a house, or Luke was right and Jesus was born in a barn in Nazareth. John is not concerned with the wise people and their gifts, nor shepherds and songs. John gets right down to it.

Channeling the first words written in Genesis, the first book of Torah, the sacred scriptures of the Jews (which was, of course, the religion of Jesus and his parents), John begins his Gospel with these famous words of creation, immediately pulling our consciousness back to the beginning, linking the Word that was in the beginning, with the words spoken by God in creation. In the beginning was the Word. And the word became flesh.

John brings the full force of the significance of the moment to bear. He does not bother with seemingly trivial details. He doesn’t just skip the birth of Jesus altogether like Mark, but he wants to communicate the theological significance of the moment. And the Word became flesh.

To read this beautiful introduction from John alone, one might get the idea that somehow, Jesus’ birth was a large and celebrated event – on par with the upcoming coronation of the King of England – television crews standing by, the paparazzi close at hand vying to get the first picture of the baby Jesus, the mothers of Mary and Joseph having a nice-off over which would hold baby Jesus first and for how long.

But thanks to Matthew and Luke, we have some details, and we know that this single birth of cosmic proportions and significance, was small and normal. Of course, it’s not just Matthew and Luke that we have to thank. We can also thank every nativity scene everywhere. They all feature approximately the same cast of characters, you know them – they’re probably in your house: Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus; three wise people, a variable number of shepherds, some animals, and a star.

The stories around how the Magi and the shepherds arrived to bring gifts and greetings to Jesus are nothing short of Hallmark-level-spectacular. The story of Herod’s massacre, a clear parallel to the tenth plague in Exodus 12, is equally devastating. And yet, there is also a sense in which the birth of Jesus was otherwise unremarkable. John tells us the Word became flesh, and Matthew tells us he was born in a house, Luke tells us he was placed in a feeding trough.

There was no medical team standing by, there were no sonograms, blood tests, or epidurals. It just happened the way births had always happened for ordinary folk. Young Mary gave birth to Jesus. And then, after all the exiting details of the build-up and aftermath in Matthew and Luke, and even with the cosmic introduction in John, outside of one story about Jesus going to temple as an adolescent, the Gospels are silent on the next thirty-or-so years of the life of Jesus.

This silence should not surprise us. At least not any more than the relative silence of the Gospels on the last one to three years of the life of Jesus. It is the nature of storytelling to highlight the parts of the story that are either interesting, contribute to the overarching narrative, or both.

And the Word became flesh.

We get these snippets of the story from Matthew and Luke, they take up a page, maybe two. And we have John pulling all the grandeur from Matthew and Luke and making a sweeping theological statement that the Word became flesh. And somehow, I find myself thinking and questioning all the unwritten details of these events. Why Mary? Why Joseph? After Mary hears the proclamation from the Angel and after Joseph’s dream, why do they still have such apparently modest accommodations for the birth of the Word who caused all things to come in to being? Why the long silence on the infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of Jesus?

There must be something to the silence. The most obvious answer, of course, is that these details were unremarkable. The same way that if you were telling someone from Northminster about the Christmas Eve service last night, you might not describe color of the carpet, or position of the organ pipes, or the smell of the air in the Narthex. These details fade into the background, not because they are unimportant to the service, but rather, because to describe them to someone who has been here many times would feel unnecessary and run the risk of your story becoming boring.

The truth is these questions that swim in my mind cannot be answered, at least not at present. There is no way to know with certainty the answers to any of these questions. And, while admittedly failing to satisfy my curiosity, there is comfort in the not knowing. In many ways what we do know about Mary and Joseph parallels those storied places in our lives that we love so much. We don’t know why Mary or Joseph. All we know is that Mary and Joseph lived their unremarkable lives in such a way that Mary found favor with God and that God knew Joseph to be one who would trust an appearance of an angel in a dream.

This might not seem like a lot, but it says to me that what has gone unseen because of its unremarkability has created lives that are truly remarkable.

When I think about this place, Northminster, and the things that make it remarkable, I know that it is the things that are unseen, the things that might not in and of themselves be noteworthy for a single story, are the things that accumulate to make it what it is.

We gather here in this space on a weekly basis, and we regularly tell of the great music in worship. What doesn’t often make it into the story is the hours upon hours of commitment and practice of the choir, nor does the lifelong dedication to their craft of the musicians. When we talk about the community of Northminster, we note the ways that support is given and received. What sometimes goes unseen are the Monday morning gatherings of folk to share what they know, the prayers offered throughout the week, the cards and meals, prepared and delivered.

Unseen in this space this morning (and every time we worship) are the hands that receive and hold the youngest in our community while we are gathered here. Unseen in this space are those who join us virtually each week, faithfully journeying with us even when they cannot be in the room with us.

There are more than thirty committees that undergird the shared life of this community. Each committee performing important functions, often in the background, a few people gathered around a table, on a Zoom call, or in an otherwise vacant room of the church – individual meetings unremarkable, but making this place, this community, into the place we know and love.

Similarly, it was the unmentioned parts of the lives of Mary and Joseph that prepared them to be the kind of people in whom God would find favor and entrust with the awesome task of parenting the Christ child. The silence around the life of that same Christ child growing and becoming the adult about whom read about in eighty-four of the eighty-nine chapters of the combined four Gospels, we can assume, exists as a result of it having a similar unremarkable nature as the lives of Mary and Joseph.

Following the birth of Jesus, his life became the sum of its parts, each day slowly forming him shaping him into the adult he would become, the adult who would, at the age of about thirty, step off into the waters of baptism and begin his short but powerful ministry, a ministry that would culminate with his execution and resurrection.

With the newborn baby Jesus, on this holy day in the church year, we sit and we celebrate, and from here we reenter a world in which it is the routine, mundane, everyday goings about of our lives that will continue to form us into the person each of us is becoming. And the same is true for Northminster. In order for Northminster to continue to be the kind of remarkable place that it has been in each of our lives, it will require that each of us engage in the unseen, behind the scenes, mundane work of growing into the body of Christ.

Sometimes, the connections between the little things we do and the way it contributes to making this place remarkable are obvious – like when there is a gathering to make palm crosses the week before Palm Sunday. And sometimes, the connection is more behind the scenes, like the months the Finance Committee spends working putting together the budget. The truth is, all of us, each of us, have something to contribute, and much of it, will be in a small group, out of the spotlight, in a way that few will notice immediately, if at all. But that is not the only truth. It is also true that it is these very contributions to this community that are shaping and forming Northminster into the place it is becoming. Each of us finding a way to use our talents, our time, and our resources. Each of us responsible for embodying the Word in the world today.

And the Word became flesh.

Amen.


Be Born n Us

Matthew 1:18-25, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Lesley Ratcliff · December 20th, 2022 · Duration 22:13

Much like Northminster, the church I grew up in had a wonderful choir, and each year we had a big Christmas worship service led by that choir. Like that old Johnny Cash song, in my family of origin “Daddy sang bass, mama sang tenor,” so with my sister on alto and I on soprano, we could put together a duet, a trio, or quartet. We were often asked to sing in the service in some combination. One year, my dad and I sang “Mary, Did You Know.” I remember standing on that stage, my legs shaking, like they always did, like they still sometimes do, and being so moved by the melody and the message of that song that song that it settled me, and I was able to sing.

When I listen to the song today, I hear it in the context of the Magnificat, that song of Mary, recorded in Luke:

 

”Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is the Might One’s name.

The Lord’s mercy is for those who fear the Lord
   from generation to generation. 
The Lord has shown strength;
   and has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 
The Lord has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly; 
the Lord has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty. 
The Lord has helped the Lord’s servant Israel,
   in remembrance of the Lord’s mercy, 
according to the promise the Lord made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants forever.’

 

Yes, Mary knew. When she spoke those words to the angel, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word,” she stepped into God’s holy disruption and became precisely who God called her to be.

But we’re in Year A of the Lectionary which leads us through the gospel of Matthew instead of Year C which leads us through the gospel of Luke. Which means that the birth story of Jesus is told from Joseph’s perspective.

“When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” Maybe here one could sing “Joseph, did you know?”

But the Scriptures quickly take a turn. Joseph gets his own angel. I think if I were in Joseph’s shoes, I would probably need an angel too. The angel tells Joseph that he should not be afraid. The angel restores Joseph’s faith in Mary. And the angel tells Joseph that she will bear a son who will be called “God with us,” a son that will save his people from their sins.

 

“When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.”

 

Joseph too steps into God’s holy disruption and becomes precisely who God has called him to be.

Our gospel lesson today leads us right up to the precipice of Jesus’ birth. Matthew skips over the manger and the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night and moves straight to the Magi and their gifts. Another angel appears to Joseph and the holy family flees to Egypt, as refugees from Herod’s wrath. Another angel. Another holy disruption.

After the death of Herod, the Holy Family returns to Israel, although in fear, they settle in Nazareth instead of Judea, two more angels, two more holy disruptions.

I’ve done a little research this week, and I’m not sure who coined the phrase “holy disruption.” It’s sometimes attributed to Thomas Long, the man who literally wrote the book on preaching, “a” book anyway, the one we used in my main preaching class in seminary. I don’t know for sure who coined the term but I’m grateful they did. It’s the kind of phrase we need, a lens through which to view life’s disruptions.

A holy disruption is an opportunity to become more of who God has called us to be. As Joseph did in today’s gospel lesson. As Mary did in Luke. When the whole world gets turned upside down, when your world gets turned upside down, it is a comfort to consider that it might be a holy disruption, not caused by God, but used by God, to help you become exactly who God has called you to be.

We are standing on the precipice of holy disruption. On this fourth Sunday of Advent, just a week from Christmas Day, just a week from the birth of that tiny baby in Bethlehem. How will we respond to that holy disruption? How will we allow the Christ child to be born in us? As our children have reminded us each week, we can let the candle reveal the glory of Christ’s birth. As we approach the end of this Advent journey, we look to its lessons to help us make sense of the holy disruption for which we wait.

We have lighted the candle of hope.  We thrive on the hope of the coming incarnation, and we seek to be the kind of people who live in that hope bringing hope to all those around us. This week as I was preparing for a funeral, I read through some correspondence of a beloved church member who was facing challenging days, holy disruption. They wrote about how meaningful it was to come home from the hospital and to meet some of Northminster’s caregivers on their front porch, folks who were brought them a meal and prayed with them. That is what it looks like when Christ is born in us. We embody hope to others.

We have lighted the candle of peace, and while it is easy for doubts and fears to rise, we look to God for the strength to live with our doubts and fears and the peace to live faithfully through them. When I think about this place called Northminster, the broad range of theological thought that gathers under this roof, the ways in which we love each other around and through disagreements, working hard not to compromise how we see God calling us to be God’s people in the world, while continuing to care for one another when those callings lead us in different directions, I can see Christ being born in us. We embody peace to one another.

We have lighted the candle of joy, and we carry God’s joy, the joy of knowing that God is with us in all things, to our own weary hearts and to all those who grieve, or hurt, or need.  We have learned in this sacred space how to carry grief and joy at the same time. When one of us is in the midst of grief, we remind them of God’s presence with them through our presence with them. We show up for the folks in our family of faith and beyond. We hold the truth that God is with us for one another when someone cannot hold it for themselves, and the Christ child, Emmanuel, is born in us. We embody joy.

We have lighted the candle of love. We embrace one another and the stranger in love, knowing that we are all God’s beloved children. On Wednesday nights this fall and continuing into the spring, we have been hearing from organizations that we support through local and direct missions. I have been struck by how we meet needs throughout our city through our giving, and also by the number of people from our family of faith who serve in those places. It is one example of how the Christ child is born in us. We embody love.

When we embody hope, peace, joy and love, we allow the Christ child to be born in us. When holy disruption comes, we can allow the Christ child to be born in us. Our whole lives are about living from the gratitude for the love of the one who created us, for the gift of love that will be born to us, born for us, born in us.

 

It reminds of another song:

 

O holy Child of Bethlehem,

Descend to us, we pray,

Cast out our sin and enter in,

Be born in us, today.

 

As we walk to the end of this Advent road, as we meet with holy disruption, may we embody hope and peace and joy and love. May we embody the Christ Child, born in us, today. May we, like Mary, like Joseph, like our family of faith before us, like the Christ child, be exactly who God has called us to be. Amen.

 

 

What Kind of Messiah

Matthew 3:1-12, Second Sunday of Advent

Major Treadway · December 4th, 2022 · Duration 10:54

It seems like each year, it gets a little harder to disentangle the season of Advent from the commercialized season of Christmas. Perhaps it is because I see Christmas decorations and sales beginning earlier and earlier each year and hearing Christmas music earlier and earlier each year. This year, I think it started on the way home from a Halloween party – maybe you’ve experienced something like this. This disentanglement is further complicated by the commercialized Christmas season, each year seeming to move closer and closer to the point where the only thing shared with the church season of Christmas is the name. Christmas.

Before this sermon turns into a war on Christmas, and let me assure you that it’s not, let’s get to the disentangling, let’s see just what the second Sunday of Advent holds for us.

Last week, of course, we began this journey at the end, resting ourselves in the hope of the final advent of the Christ, even as we celebrate the first advent of the Christ. Last week, Lesley called us to stay awake and to embody hope as we live into our apocalyptic imagination, embodying Christ as light and love in a world in desperate need of both.

This week, as if in response, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness of Judea. To give us a little context Matthew informs us that this John the Baptist is “the one whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.â€â€™â€ Further, Matthew tells us about his clothes and his diet, both of which sound more like a TikTok challenge than real life.

With all of this strangeness, John the Baptist is somehow attracting people from quite a long way to come out to him in the wilderness. But that’s not the way that the flow of traffic was supposed to go. Traffic was (and still is, really) supposed to move people toward the city, towards civilization and structure. It was civilized space, where the Romans and their stewards wielded power. And it was here, in the city, where one might find the most sophistication, the most wealth, the best education, the best healthcare, the seats of power, even the best churches and seminaries.

Everyone knows that the closer one gets to the city, the wider the roads, the more housing, the more schools, the more commerce. It’s why traffic flows toward urban centers. But not in today’s gospel. In today’s gospel, people are following a different pull. They are finding a way to move away from all the certainty that modernity provides. And they’re doing it without motorized transportation and GPS. It’s all word of mouth; and, presumably, following the river.

This John the Baptist, was sent to “prepare the way of the Lord.†This John the Baptist, today, is calling to us, reminding us that the season of Advent is one of celebration, but it is also one of preparation – a twofold preparation preparing our hearts for the coming of the Christ, but I think also, there is a sense, at least in John the Baptist, of preparing the world around us for the coming of the Christ.

John the Baptist saw the world as it was. While he may have been a spectacle to some and a fascination to others, he anticipated that Messiah that would come would not be bound by the established centers of power. His ministry was not concerned with wealth, power, prestige, getting ahead, or getting close to the right people. His ministry was about preparing the way for the Messiah.

It is at this point, I expect some of you might be thinking: if his ministry was focused on preparing the way for the Messiah, but clearly not on all those other things, what was it focused on?

Matthew skips a portion of this story, at least as Luke tells it. In Luke, the crowds as John the Baptist, “What then should we do?†He answers them: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.†To Tax Collectors he said “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.†To Soldiers: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.â€

Those last two might need a little unpacking to fully understand, but what we don’t need help to see is the direction John the Baptist is directing his listeners attention. Their bodies have been moved from the centers of commerce and accumulation, now he calls for their minds to move as well. He asks each person/group to forgo excess that other might have enough.

And here it seems that maybe John the Baptist is calling on us all to try to disentangle the season Advent from the season of commercialized Christmas – to recognize that to prepare the way for the coming of the Christ will be for us to find ways large and small to prepare our hearts and to prepare our places – including this one.

We have a long history of finding was to prepare this place for the coming of Christ. This afternoon, we will gather in the Great Hall to pack bags to distribute around the city to folks who might benefit from a blanket, gloves, socks, toiletries, and homemade cookies. Yesterday, the some members of the Youth prepared and served lunch at Stewpot, many of you regularly support institutions that are engaged in important work – turning our perspective from accumulation to righteousness. These activities, of course, are not exhaustive. Neither were four that John the Baptist shared.

The way of the Lord that John the Baptist was preparing, that Jesus would eventually travel, and which is now a part of our journey and opportunity, is a way marked by such a strong regard for the physical, spiritual, psychological, emotional wellbeing of others that it just might appear as disregard for the systems the lure people to centers of civilization, commerce, and power.

Living in this way just might seem that we are preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah.

Amen.

The Hope of the Present

The First Sunday in Advent

Lesley Ratcliff · November 27th, 2022 · Duration 12:13

“To pay attention is the rare and purest form of generosity.â€

As I arrived this morning, I was met at the doors with wreaths adorned in purple ribbons. I walked the halls and felt the cloth advent wreaths in our youngest children’s classrooms. I noticed the empty cradle in the wooden manger scene that greets our children downstairs, and another one in the Narthex, with Mary and Joseph waiting expectantly. I brought the bulletins around from the office to the Narthex and noticed their purple ink, and the empty trough inside the Northminster window that is printed on the front. As I walked pass the Angel Tree, I took note of the Advent Devotionals that our Worship and Music committee have written.

A little later, as I walked the halls, I heard children’s voices singing as they practiced for the living nativity, and the orchestra playing as they prepared for this morning’s service. I smelled the matches as they were struck to light the advent wreaths in Sunday School classrooms, told a class of children about the Boarding homes project next week, heard some of our adults discussing today’s first Sunday in Advent readings in Sunday School, and saw people sporting their purple clothes, while the sanctuary sports her purple paraments. The signs and symbols of this first hope-filled day of Advent always seem to call out to me, centering my feet on the purple path, as we begin a new liturgical year, beginning this year as we do each year anticipating the birth of hope.

“To pay attention is the rare and purest form of generosity.â€

A dear friend handed me a notecard with that quote from Simone Weil on it, one afternoon, about a year ago.

Most days, I consider myself the absolute worst at paying attention, so I grinned at the card as I took it assuming that they were trying to remind me to do better.

“This quote reminds me of you,†they said.

And what followed was a discussion of the nature of paying attention. Even those of us who think we are bad at paying attention, are paying attention to something – maybe to the distractions, maybe to the many needs of the people around us, maybe to our own needs, maybe to our own racing thoughts, maybe to our work, maybe to our long lists, maybe to the people we love, maybe to the changing of seasons.

I taped that card to my desk to remind me to pay attention to what and to whom I am paying attention.

“Keep awake,†Jesus says in this morning’s gospel.

Every year on the first Sunday of Advent, we talk about hope, and because it’s Advent, one would think that it would be the hope of the Christ child born in just a few weeks. But the lectionary draws our attention to Jesus’s arrival, not as a tiny baby but as the Son of Man, arriving on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Each year, Advent “begins at the end†some preachers like to say. It is as our children sang this morning, the fire of our hope – Christ coming again. We are exhorted then by the scriptures, by Jesus, by the Epistle writers, and by the prophets to stay awake, and lean into our apocalyptic imagination, to dream about the triumph of good over evil that will one day come with the return of Christ. We are called to pay attention to what God is doing in our world and to whom the hope of Christ’s reign is being proclaimed.

And that, my friends, is not just a call to imagine what will be. It is a call to see what is, to look at where God is showing up in our world, to stay awake to the work of God today, so that we might live into the hope of the coming Christ now, not just after the babe in swaddling clothes is born, not just once Christ has arrived on the clouds, but today. We must pay attention to the hope of the present.

With the prophet Isaiah, we must ask “Where are the ways and paths of the Lord being lived?â€
With the Psalmist “Where is the good of everyone being sought?â€
With the letter to Rome “Where is the armor of light being worn?â€
And with the gospel writer “Where is the Son of Man appearing in power and glory?â€
Where is the hope of the present?

If we ask where, we must ask what. What are the ways and paths of the Lord? What does it mean to seek the good of everyone? What does the armor of light feel like? What does the appearance of the Son of Man in power and glory look like?

The hope of the present is that we know the answer to those questions. The ways and paths of the Lord, are the ways and paths of compassion and courage, which seeks the good of all God’s beloved children and we are all, within and beyond these walls, God’s beloved child.

The most important way that Christ sees, lives and acts in the world is to love neighbor as self. So when we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, we love our neighbor as we love ourselves and we help others to do likewise.

Matthew Skinner says “Wakefulness is a lifestyle, a way of living with a posture of embodying Jesus, his restless attentiveness, and his merciful solidarity. Christian hope is an active force.â€

In 1 John 1:15 we hear that God is light. And in 1 John 4:8 we hear God is love. God is light and God is love. Paul calls the church in Rome to put on the armor of light, and just a few verses later he tells them that the sum of all the law is to love your neighbor as yourself. To put on the armor of light is to live a life of God’s kind of love. The kind of love that reaches across every kind of human barrier to carry each other’s burdens. The kind of love that rejoices with those who rejoice and weeps with those who weep. To live that kind of love is to pay attention, to stay awake to what God is doing in the world, to recognize the hope of the present.

If you are paying attention, then you have probably noticed the scaffolding outside our windows. Our church is literally under construction. It is also figuratively under construction as we look for a new Senior Pastor. This season of Advent, this season of waiting, is filled with the hope of what will be, the hope of a new roof that will last. The hope of a new Senior Pastor that will shepherd us through the next season of the church’s life. The hope of the Christ child born in just four weeks. The hope of resurrection. We must wait with hope. It is the very nature of our faith.

But on this first Sunday of Advent, we cannot just wait. We must also live in our hope, our hope that calls us to pay attention to what God is doing in the world. The hope of carrying bags to folks who need a little holiday cheer, the hope of providing gifts for a child to celebrate Christmas, the hope of teaching our children the rhythms of the church year, the hope of worshipping God in the sounds and silences of this hour, and in all the hours that fill our days,
the hope of drawing the circle of our welcome as wide as that of God’s welcome, the hope of embodying Jesus here and now, the hope of the present.

On this first Sunday in Advent, we are invited to consider hope. We are invited to live into our apocalyptic imagination, the hope of the coming Christ, but also to live into the embodying of Christ, the hope of the present. May the fire of our Advent hope lead us to pay attention. Amen.

King's Cross

Luke 23:33-43, Christ the King Sunday

Stan Wilson · November 20th, 2022 · Duration 13:40

If it’s unusual to be at the cross in November, and it is, we should note that it’s unusual to have preaching at all on a day we read from the story of the cross event. On Good Friday, you generally ask your preachers to remain silent. Which I understand. But then, it’s unusual that we don’t hear many sermons about this event because this is the crucible of the gospel stories. This is where all gospel stories lead. There’s no better place to go to sum up all you’ve heard this last Sunday of the year.

But, be advised: It’s a hard story. Real human beings get hurt and die in this story, and others do cruel and inhuman things. And be aware as you hear it that some people have heard this preached a lot, only it’s been twisted and used in manipulative ways. But here’s the thing: as awful as this story is, there’s beauty here, too. And there’s truth here. And good news.

But before we enter this story, I think we need to make one thing clear: There’s no angry deity lurking in this story, requiring death in order to be satisfied. If there’s an angry entity, it’s the people. God is not the angry one here.

The story begins at a desecrated place called The Skull. This is holy land that the Romans have desecrated by making it a site of crucifixion. Crucifixion was a public execution designed to send a signal to the world about who is in charge. That’s what a cross is. It’s a reminder of who rules. The Romans used crosses to send a message to subjugated people, but we need to be honest that they weren’t barbarians. They thought they were doing what was necessary. They thought they were acting out of noble intentions. And they were not the only people to use such an instrument.

Last week I was in Montgomery, with 150 other Baptists trying to get down to the bottom of our own disorder, and we went to the National Memorial of Faith and Justice, otherwise known as the Lynching Memorial. There, every county in the country where a lynching happened, is represented by a hanging pillar, in the shape of a casket. Buncombe County NC, where I live, is there. Dekalb County, GA, where I grew up, is there. Hinds County, MS, where I’ve spent more time than any other county, is there. So much depends on telling this story truthfully. We can’t live truthfully without telling the story of the cross.

“When they came to the place that is called the Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.†There’s a revealing word in that sentence, and it’s the word “they.†Luke doesn’t pinpoint anyone for this injustice. Instead, he says, “they did it.†One reason for being careful who you preach about the cross is the temptation to blame someone. We so badly want to know who we can blame, but that only repeats the logic of crucifixion itself. It’s not the Jews, it’s not the Romans, it’s not the state, it’s not the people. They all had a hand in this, and nobody is to blame. Luke doesn’t blame anyone; and it’s a very small signal, but it’s such a big deal. You cannot point fingers here. The only way to enter this story is by your own repentance and recognition.

And this is where something beautiful happens. “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’†Again, them. They crucified Jesus, and they are the ones for whom Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them.â€

We’ve heard this so many times that it’s almost hard to recognize how plaintive and beautiful this is. This is a human being. He’s alone, abandoned by his people and his friends, an innocent man, hanging between two criminals on a garbage heap outside of
town. And in that moment, he reaches for the abundance of God’s love.

The ancients believed that you can tell a great deal about a person’s life by the way they die. Their last words summarize their whole life, and this is traditionally considered the first of Jesus’ last words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.†And sure enough, Jesus’ death is a window into his life. This is what he’s been about from the start.

Jesus’ whole life has been about reaching into the deep abundance of God’s love. In a world that tells us there is not enough for everyone, a zero sum world, Jesus reaches over and over into the deep abundance of God’s love. There is enough bread for everyone in the desert and then some. There is enough grace for everyone in the prodigal son story we heard only in Luke this year, and then some. There is more grace than we know what to do with in the story of his life, more than we know how to handle.

Jesus is true to himself in his death. He follows his own teaching, which is its own rare thing. He practices what he preached in Luke 6: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.â€

Jesus’ teachings only really come into focus when we read them through the cross, which is why he tells us over and over, not to follow him if we’re not ready to pick up our own cross.

His teachings are not about how to live safely in this world. They’re all a gamble on the abundance of God’s love. And they all lead us to this story; they culminate here, which is why we read it on the last Sunday of the year.

I get why we don’t preach it often because it is so easy to distort this story. But this is where the depth of God’s love responds to the absurdity of our sin - and that is to love us even when we have no idea how much damage we’ve done. Jesus’ reign is revealed here, and it’s a kingdom of redemption and forgiveness as Paul said in Colossians. This is where we reach “the bottom of the disorder.â€1 It is a hard story to tell, but where would we be without this story?

On our way out of Montgomery last weekend, four of us drove by the Dexter Avenue parsonage. It was here, on this porch, in this front yard, after that house was bombed, that Dr. King launched the nonviolent part of the movement. Here is where he told people to put away their guns. “No more of this,†he said, like Jesus to his disciple after he pulled out his sword. This was the holy place where he determined that the only way to stop the killing and live in truth is to love. He paid for that with his own life, but he got the idea from Jesus.

Where would we be without this story? You can’t tell the good news without it. But if you’re careful, you can see it, even here, in this hard story. Amen.


______________
1 Quaker preacher and abolitionist, John Woolman, quoted in Dan Snyder’s book, Praying in the Dark:
Spirituality, Nonviolence, and the Emerging World, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2022

Not a Hair of Your Head

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Joey Shelton, Dean of Chaprl and Dir. of Church Relations, Millsaps College · November 13th, 2022 · Duration 31:55

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Go, Seek and Make Room for Salvation

The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Kasey Jones · October 30th, 2022 · Duration 25:16

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Front End Alignment

Luke 18:9-14, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

David Carroll · October 23rd, 2022 · Duration 22:53

First of all, thanks to Jeff Wilson whom I came to know as part of a pledge class of dynamic Jackson young men for whom I developed great respect, even as I served as their pledge trainer in the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity at Millsaps College. But if you catch Jeff and Cindy headed for the exit, we must be headed downhill fast.

Another couple I simply must acknowledge is Tim and Cheryl Coker. When I entered retirement seven years ago, I laid out some guidelines for how that would look:
1. Remember how to say ‘no,’ at which I have been largely successful,
2. Pursue only the things that I was passionate about. Those pursuits have been mostly related to Camp Lake Stephens near Oxford which serves as my spiritual “hometown,†Ministry Architects of Nashville, TN, with which I have been associated since 2006, and Millsaps College which I have served in a number of capacities through the years, currently as Chaplain of the Millsaps Majors Football Team (and yes, they are not a bunch of choir boys) and as a Trustee of the college.
3. Visit a different church every week - After all, I spent 35 years listening to myself; it was time to hear from some others. I have found to be true what Bishop Nolan Harmon once said. Asked if he had ever heard a sermon he didn’t get something out of, Bishop Harmon said, “No … but I’ve had some pretty close calls.â€That was NOT the case when I attended Northminster and heard Chuck Poole’s sermon “Be Careful What You Think You Know.†Afterwards, I told him that it was a fine Methodist sermon, to which he replied, “I get that a lot.â€
4. Play golf on a weekly basis, which I have done religiously, extending that to three times a week.

I was playing golf by myself at Canton Country Club as I entered retirement seven years ago when I came across another gentleman playing alone at the 14th tee. I extended a greeting without noticing. He replied, “David? It’s Tim!â€

There he was, my high school chorus teacher and Minister of Music of my home church as I graduated from Tupelo High School in 1974. And there he was - always as gifted an athlete as he was a musician, spiritually formed having explored pastoral ministry himself, an encourager, Mr. Positivity. Tim has been enduring my poor golf game three times a week ever since that day that we ran into each other.

One thing you need to know about Tim the athlete, though. While he is always positive and encouraging, and (and he would say this) he’s juuuuuuust a bit competitive.

One day in June we had started a round at Lake Caroline, and my putter was failing me as is often the case. Missing a short putt on the first hole, in frustration I complained to myself, “Good God Almighty!†Tim didn’t say anything.

At the second hole it was a similar story - missed short putt, I once again complained more audibly this time, “Good God Almighty!†Tim, once again - nothing.

Third hole? Yep, same missed short putt followed by my rather LOUD, “Good God Almighty!†But sensing a potential teaching moment and being the spiritual man that he is, Tim spoke to calm me down. “Now, David, you’re getting all worked up for a man of God. Next time if you miss the putt, I want you to say, “Praise the Lord.â€

“Praise the Lord,†I muttered to myself as I returned my putter to its resting place and pulled my pitching wedge for the par 3 number four hole. “Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord.â€

Tim had hit a nice ball to the green. And as I prepared to swing, I marveled at the day around me - perfect sunny day, perfect early summer temperature. I aimed just left of the hole and let fly. There was a little whisper of wind. With crisp contact the ball flew high and straight, landed softly, bounced twice, and rolled into the hole. I turned to Tim and exclaimed, “Praise the Lord!†And Tim replied, “GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY!â€

Totally not a true story … except for the hole-in-one.

It wasn’t long after meeting Tim and Cheryl back in the early 70s, though, that I had the chance to make my first car purchase - a 1974 Toyota Celica - a white hardtop 5-speed beauty that I found at a Tupelo dealership in 1975. Finding it not long after it had been traded, I asked to take it for a test drive. I must confess that I felt wrapped in “cool†as I pulled away from the dealership. But at about 30 mph I noticed a shimmy that got progressively worse as my speed increased, the steering wheel shaking almost violently. But it disappeared completely at 50.

Returning to the dealership, I asked about it, and they mumbled something about having the front-end alignment checked and that maybe the tires might be unevenly worn. But did I buy that 1974 Toyota Celica? Why of course I did! And I endured the shimmy until the third repair shop took care of the problem. Oh, and I got to replace two tires.

That’s the way it goes when things get out of line.

Some Christians think that Jesus is a line drawer, that Jesus draws lines in the sand and tells us not to cross them. But I rather believe that Jesus is much more the artist, a drawer of big circles that gather people in and a sketcher of lines that show us pathways to follow …

I find that to be true in this Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Jesus describes the two first - the Pharisee looking down his nose at those around him, then the tax collector (sometimes called the publican) the picture of humility before God. Given Jesus’ proclivity to deride the Pharisees, one can see where the parable is headed, and Jesus draws a pathway leading straight through the humble tax collector’s repentant heart, a line for us to follow.

But this is not the only instance in which Jesus tells us that we have a choice, that there are values to live by if we would like to walk with Him. The Gospel of Luke is full of value-laden passages pointing us to the ways of Christ …
Question About Another Exorcist - Luke 9: 49-50
Parable of the Good Samaritan - Luke 10
Story of Martha and Mary - Luke 10: 38-42
Parable of the Rich Fool - Luke 12: 13-21
Parable of the Prodigal Son - Luke 15
Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus - Luke 16: 19-31

Luke’s Gospel is full of the ironies of reversed fortunes, that the first shall be last, and here that the contempt of even the righteous pales in the light of penitent humility. As much as we hate to admit it, in Luke we find that the gospel which comforts the afflicted is just as likely to afflict the comfortable.

Maybe that’s why we like Luke’s gospel so much, particularly Luke’s parables. But why? I think it’s because we are instinctively drawn to the values of Jesus which Luke reflects.

I find that reflected in today’s psalm, Psalm 84:
“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts.
My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord.
My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.â€

The psalmist celebrates, in essence saying,
We want to live where you live!
We want to do the things you do!
We want to go where you go!
We want our lives to be aligned with your Life!

In preparing for today I spent some time reading through materials on Northminster’s website, things like the Northminster Covenant, the church’s history, as well as descriptions of its worship and ministries.

What I found, I thought was striking, a church seeking to state its mission and values, something around which its people could unite, something that could describe for the world what it was seeking to be and do - a church aligned with the cause of Christ, simply stated by former pastor Harvey Whaley, “We agree to differ. We resolve to love. We unite to serve.â€

John Wesley put it similarly, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.â€

The words draw a picture, like the picture on the front page of blueprints.

As we built a house almost ten years ago, the blueprints conveyed what was important to us and how we wanted to live - natural building materials, a home engaging the outdoors.

The pages that followed fleshed it out - plumbing, framing, electrical…

Northminster’s statements convey what is important to you and how you want to live in faith together and in the world.And those things are expressed in things like ministry organization, budget structure, physical plant, etc.

This worship space reflects important things in Northminster’s worship life:
• The vertical space leading the eyes heavenward,
• The table as the central piece - the place we meet God,
• The middle aisle leading to it - the pathway to God and the road leading us back into the world,
• The baptismal font elevated and highly visible through its tree symbolizing new life,
• The highly visible presence of the Austin organ - As psalms were the hymnody of the Hebrews, Northminster values music and sound as a distinctive pathway to heavenly places. As Robert Lowry put it in his beautiful hymn, “How Can I Keep from Singing!â€
• The elevated pulpit expressing a great respect for proclamation of the Word, and
• Over it all hangs the cross, the symbol of our faith and the ultimate expression of God’s sacrificial Love.

But the congregation’s mission and values are also expressed in its staffing and leadership structure:
• Every member a minister, yes
• But how do those values get expressed in a pastoral search?

Tim asked me a couple of months ago what I would be preaching on today. I told him I thought I would preach a sermon entitled, “Preacher Pickin’ 101.†NOT that I know a lot about Baptist preacher picking, mind you, and so Tim laughed. I mean, you know the Methodist preachers all jump on a moving merry-go-round at the same time and all jump off somewhere else … all on the same day!

But let me meddle for a minute. In my work with Ministry Architects over the last 16 years, I have seen a number of churches that so desperately wanted a pastor, that they would have been satisfied with a pastor who could just keep their church “between the ditches.†“Just keep us from running off the road again!†they would say.

And I’ve seen pastors questioning their “fit†in the congregations where they were serving.

One associate pastor led his large congregation in prayer one Sunday introducing those moments with the words, “Let’s pray.†The pastor bee-lined to him following the service with this admonition, “Do not EVER use a contraction in our worship again!†He began to wonder if his understanding of ministry and worship was out of line with the church within which he was serving.

Face it, some people want particular things, some unconsciously, when the church is seeking a pastor:
Some want “preacher hair.â€
Some want “preacher prayers†dripping with syrup.
Some want a “preacher voice,†“Gawd†spoken in three syllables.
Some want a preacher that sings.
Some want a preacher that uses an expository style … or exegetical style … or an inductive style …
Some want a preacher that tells you what to do … or doesn’t.
Some want a preacher that tells you what to think … or one that helps YOU to think critically.
Some want a preacher that tells jokes … or doesn’t.
Some want a preacher that tells stories … or doesn’t.
Some want a caring pastor, some want a dynamic preacher, some want an organizer, some want a visionary …
When it comes down to it, some folks want the repentant humble tax collector, but there are still some folks who want the pious Pharisee … go figure.
Some are so scrambled that they have no idea WHAT they want!

The question is - What do YOU want? Better yet, what does GOD want for and from Northminster?

Friends, pray first that, on the front end, Northminister is in alignment with the pathways of Christ, the values that Jesus teaches through simple yet profound little stories.

Then find a pastor who is aligned with Christ, who has a sense of ministry that is aligned with the vision for mission and ministry true to this church, but one who will tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it, one who will love you through the ups and downs of life together, one who will walk beside you as you grieve and as you grow. One who years later will cause you to say, “You remember old Rev. So and So? I think we got that one right.â€

I will be praying for you and for the one who will answer the call to this magnificent church, and I’ll be checking in from time to time hoping that I can hear another good “Methodist†sermon.

Let us pray: Take these words, oh God, inadequate though they may be, to speak the Gospel of Love that it may be written upon our hearts. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.



To Be Blessed

Genesis 32:22-31, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · October 16th, 2022 · Duration 16:23

I won’t let go unless you bless me.

These words from Jacob in today’s reading from the book of Genesis are at once the culmination of a life spent searching for a blessing that belonged to someone else and a turning point toward a new life, a life that Jacob had never imagined.

You will remember from your own reading of the book of Genesis that Jacob, twin brother to Esau, son of Isaac and Rebekah, was born clinging to the heel of Esau. Even before his first breath was drawn, Jacob was already holding on, refusing to let go. Later in life, Jacob would swindle from Esau his birthright. Still later, Jacob would trick his father Isaac into giving him a blessing that, it would seem, should have been for his brother, Esau.

All throughout the narrative of Jacob to this point, he is struggling for a blessing, and even now, when he has received the blessing that should have been given to his older brother, when he has been tricked into working for his father-in-law for an extra seven years, when he has many children, great riches and livestock, and is making his return to a land that was promised to him, he is still struggling for a blessing.

I won’t let go unless you bless me.

The scene unfolds somewhat strangely, Jacob seems nervous about his upcoming encounter with his brother, so he decides that he will overwhelm him with generosity so that when the two finally meet, perhaps, the animosity of Esau will have had time to settle. Jacob has had twenty years to wonder what shape this reunion might take – twenty years he has been absent from his brother, while he went to find a wife in the homeland of his mother; twenty years Esau has been in the home of their father, in the land that was promised to Jacob because of Jacob’s trickery. For twenty years, the two of them have known that they would one day meet again. And they have known that the land on which Esau lives has been promised to Jacob.

So Jacob sends gifts, and servants, he divides his camp into two parts, and finally he sends his children and his wives ahead of him until at last, somehow, Jacob finds himself alone, separate from his family beside the river Jabbok. And it was here that Jacob encounters a stranger in the night with whom he wrestles until daybreak.

Jacob, so consumed with the struggle of his life, the struggle for a blessing, will not be bested by this stranger, nor any other human, until finally, the stranger mysteriously strikes Jacob on the hip and puts his hip out of socket. But still, Jacob will not relent. He struggles on, it is as if Jacob has once more come up against the deceitfulness of his father-in-law, who tricked Jacob into marrying his older daughter, though he had agreed that Jacob could marry the younger. Then, as in his present struggle, he did not look back. Then, he agreed to work for another seven years. Now, he continues his struggle to not be bested by this stranger in the night.

Finally, the stranger says to Jacob, “let me go, for the day is breaking.” Only to have Jacob offer his famous reply, a reply that could be the slogan of his life, “I won’t let go until you bless me.” Jacob is as committed to struggling for a blessing as he ever has been. It is as though he is holding onto the heel of the stranger, withholding the nourishment needed for life, wearing woolen skin, and agreeing to work another seven years all over again. And all for an unspecified blessing.

I won’t let go, unless you bless me.

The struggle continues. And the stranger asks Jacob for his name. Jacob gives it and the stranger, curiously, gives Jacob a new name, Israel. So, naturally, as one might do after an evening of intense combat, Jacob asks for the stranger’s name. And it is at this point that, in response, the stranger blesses Jacob.

And, then, the stranger is gone. The immediate struggle is over. Jacob has not overcome the stranger, but he has come away with that which he had wanted – a blessing.

However, this blessing was not the first Jacob had received. The blessing Jacob receives from the stranger in the night includes something that the ones before did not. This blessing, included the giving of a new name, Israel – so given, according to today’s text, because Jacob had striven with God and with humans, and had prevailed.

Jacob becomes Israel. The blessing after which Jacob had struggled his whole life, the blessing which had been foretold while in the womb, stolen from his brother, and spoken by his father, finally culminates with the giving of a whole new identity – an identity which will require him to change from his wrestling, conniving, thieving ways, and which will allow him to live into the promise of God – a promise first given to Abram, then to Isaac, then to Jacob – now to be fulfilled in the person of Israel.

Blessings sometimes are like that. Sometimes we struggle so hard to obtain a blessing that when we finally realize that we have achieved that for which we have struggled, we realize that we what we have achieved is nothing like what we thought we were after in the first place.

Today, when we think of someone who is blessed, we tend to think in a different way. When we think or speak of someone as blessed, we think/speak of someone who has no struggles, someone who has all that they need and more, someone who has overcome a great hardship, someone who has had an unanticipated success.

Jesus, though, had a few things to say about people that were blessed that seem to be different from this contemporary understanding of what it means to be blessed.

Jesus said in Matthew in his “Sermon on the Mount:” “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “blessed are those who mourn,” “blessed are the meek,” “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” “blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

Luke remembered these sayings of Jesus a bit differently. In Luke, Jesus says in the “Sermon on the Plain:” “blessed are you who are poor,” “blessed are you who are hungry now,” “blessed are you who weep now,” “blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.”

When was the last time you were scrolling on social media and saw a picture or a post about any of the people Jesus just described with the hashtag “blessed”?

We have something that Jacob did not on that night on the other side of the river Jabbok. Or rather, we have some hindsight that Jacob had not chosen to embrace. We also have these words of Jesus describing for us in uncomfortable detail what it means to be blessed in the Kingdom of God.

Maybe Jacob in his singularly focused quest for a blessing had it easier. He knew that he wanted, he needed, a blessing. So strong was his determination, that even after his hip was dislocated, he struggled on with the stranger in the night, refusing to quit without a blessing.

Jacob’s blessing of a new identity allowed him to live into the blessing that God had already promised over Jacob and his ancestors. Dear children of God, just like Jacob, the blessing of a new identity has already been promised and given to us.

Our struggle is not with a stranger in the night. Our struggle, here on this side of the river Jabbok, at the corner of Eastover and Ridgewood, or in whatever space we might find ourselves, is to hold onto God long enough, that we might also find that which we need to live into our blessing. Our struggle might also be, that we know what Jesus says about what it means to be blessed. Our struggle might be that that identity is not one we are yet ready to embrace. Our struggle might be that we are not yet ready to cross the river Jabbok and face the difficulty ahead.

But for us, like Jacob, a new day is coming, and with it come new beginnings, new opportunities to embrace the life to which Jesus has called us to live, a life spent with our face turned toward the living God, with eyes open to the lives lived by the humans around us, loving, supporting, embracing, and being with them. This is the identity with which Jesus has blessed us. 

Jacob says to the stranger in the night, I won’t let go unless you bless me.

We, like Jacob after this struggle, have the blessing of a new identity, what remains for us, as it did for Jacob, following his struggle, is to live this new identity, this everyday fresh blessing. Like Jacob, the blessing of our new identity has also been made plain for those willing to hear and see. So, we do not have to struggle to hold on, demanding a blessing with singular determination. We have the opportunity to embrace the blessing of our new identity. But that does not mean that our path is without struggle. Far from it. There is great depth in the struggle to embrace the kinds of blessing which Jesus spoke on the mount and on the plain.

Perhaps our plea will not be like that of Jacob, I won’t let go unless you bless me. Perhaps, our plea will be, I won’t let go, because you have blessed me.

Amen.

 

Sympathy for the Other Nine: Why the Good News Can Be So Hard to Accept

Luke 17:11-19, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gene Corbin · October 9th, 2022 · Duration 15:06

It is so good to be back at Northminster Baptist Church. Someone asked me how long it has been since I last stood in this pulpit--not enough fingers!

One of the many things that I carry with me from this place is your tagline “every member a minister.” So many people in this community of faith ministered to me when I was here, and some of you continue to serve as the go-to persons that see me through the unexpected twists and turns of life. So, this is an important place for me, and it is good to make new friends here as well.

And I’m glad to be here on this date due to the Gospel reading assigned for today in the lectionary. The story of the ten lepers has always intrigued me. As you know and just heard again, Jesus heals ten lepers, and only one returns to say thanks. So yes, it’s a story about the importance of living a life of gratitude. But one senses that there is much more to this story. Plus, you didn’t bring me all the way down from Boston to deliver a message you’ve likely heard many times before.

And I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I tend to feel some sympathy for the all-too-human characters in most stories, like these oft-maligned other nine, rather than the protagonists. The developmental stages of my adult life often seem something like the following: 

 

â—      In my teens and 20’s, I wanted to save the world.

â—      In my 30’s and 40’s, I wanted to save myself.

â—      More recently, I’ve started thinking that the trick might be to save the world from myself.

Therefore, the really interesting question is the one posed by Jesus towards the end of our text: “But the other Nine, where are they?”

There are many plausible theories, but, Luke, as our narrator, leaves a clue dangling for us: The one who returns to thank Jesus is a Samaritan, and the other nine, presumably, are not.

Let’s try to answer this question by starting at the beginning of the story and working our way forward. Luke sets the stage by informing us that Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.

Some background information: Although the people of Samaria, the Samaritans, were Israelites, due to variations in ancestry and religious practices, they were viewed as outsiders by the Jews of Galilee, the Judeans. For this reason, Jesus refers to them as “foreigners” in our text. Outsiders and foreigners were the nice terms that found their way into our Bibles, as terms such as half-Jews, or, more bluntly, half-breeds, or even Gentiles were also used. In fact, the Samaritans were so despised that the common practice at the time was to travel south to Jerusalem by crossing the Jordan river many miles to the east rather than taking the shorter direct route through Samaria. You know, kind of like driving from Memphis to New Orleans by way of Alabama.

So, to understand this story, we must recognize from the outset that the leper who will return to thank Jesus is double-marginalized: Shunned not only due to having a disease of the skin that is feared to be contagious, but also because of belonging to a scorned ethnic group. Our story is one of many in the Gospels that reminds us that Jesus, rather than avoiding such places, is attracted to borderlands where privileged people are unable to avoid rubbing elbows with outcasts.

It’s interesting to try to bring this setting to life by thinking of contemporary analogies. Jesus travels to the border of the U.S. and Mexico is one example which seems to come to the minds of many commentators. But, if we’re true to the text, here’s what it is also saying that doesn’t often get repeated. It’s the migrants, rather than the U.S. Citizens, who would respond appropriately to Jesus.

How about this one closer to home. Jesus takes a circuitous route from Eastover to the MS State Capital by way of Stewpot Community Services. And it’s the guests in the soup kitchen line, rather than the volunteers from a congregation such as Northminster, who recognize and praise him.

I know, you were glad to see me, but now I’ve clearly gone from preaching to meddling. But the connection between Jesus and the marginalized is undeniable and permeates the Gospels, especially in Luke.

So, one lesson, highlighted again in our text, is that if we want to be followers of Jesus, we must seek to be in community with people marginalized by society. But here’s the real kicker--at least for me: Not because we can help, or even worse, save such people. But because they are more likely to understand things that, those of us with more privilege, often can’t seem to comprehend.

Maybe that’s what is going on with the other nine.

You’ve likely seen or even participated in one of these presentations on dominant versus marginalized groups that are increasingly being utilized to help organizations become more equitable and inclusive. Based on identity categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, mental and physical abilities, socio-economic status, etc., we either belong to the groups that are viewed as the norm in society or the ones that are often discriminated against both subtly and, sometimes, not so subtly. The point is to challenge people with dominant identities to recognize their privilege and their responsibility to be allies to people with marginalized identities. But I wonder if these exercises don’t expose our spiritual challenges as well.

I know, these workshops are not always comfortable, such matters are often more complicated that either/or categories can capture, and, besides, some people in those dominant identity groups have achieved status in society because they’ve also worked hard. Believe me, I know. Because I check the dominant box in most every category.

However, rather than being resistant, maybe we should be asking ourselves whether our Gospel reading is not trying to tell us that Jesus was leading a form of these trainings over 2,000 years ago. It’s really not a reach to interpret “Samaritan” as a metaphor for whatever identities are out of favor in any given society, whatever groups of people are likely to feel that they don’t belong. And they seem to be the people Jesus often seeks.

The problem with privilege is not that there is anything inherently wrong with any of those dominant characteristics, that’s decidedly not the problem. The problem with privilege is that when society centers our identities, it makes it harder to recognize our need for anything beyond ourselves. Stated another way, when everything is about us, it makes it more difficult to make room for God and others. Stated yet another way, it’s hard to believe in anything bigger than ourselves when we’re being led to believe that there is nothing bigger than ourselves.

The spiritual life Jesus is offering is hard to accept because there’s this voice reverberating in our heads that is incessantly screaming one word: me, me, me, me. And society further amplifies that voice, at least for some of us.

I’m not suggesting that spiritual life doesn’t take some effort, but when we are able to recognize and rely on a power greater than ourselves, doing the things God would have us do gets easier. The hard part is getting ourselves out of the way.

Maybe it’s not about us.  Maybe we’re special because God loves us, we’re part of what God is doing in the world, we’re interconnected with the family of God. Such a reorientation lifts the horrible anxiety of always trying to prove ourselves, always wondering if we’re really measuring up.

It’s not something we do or earn. That’s what makes it so hard to accept. As Henri Nouwen says so eloquently on the cover of our worship bulletins, it’s about opening our clenched fists so we can experience the unconditional, everlasting love of God. The addiction community refers to this state as surrender, reaching that point where you recognize that you can’t do it on your own.  

But I grew up hearing that God helps those who help themselves. Maybe it’s a useful message, but it’s not the Good News Jesus is offering. God helps those who know that they can’t help themselves.

Jonathan Walton, who I know preached here a few weeks ago, signs his emails with the message “one love.” It’s a succinct way of saying that the love that flows from God to us makes it possible for us to extend love to others.

So, what blocks this flow in your life? What makes it hard to accept the miracles that God offers to you?

One of the many answers I could give is that it’s a privilege to have too many degrees listed next to your name. Especially in a society that is nowhere close to extending equitable educational opportunities to all. You’re prone to start thinking, however subtly, that you’re a little smarter than others. You don’t need God or anyone else. You can figure it out on your own.

So, when I think about our question, I picture nine, yes white men, sitting around a table somewhere in Harvard Square, having a heated intellectual argument about which one of them discovered the cure for Leprosy and gets to publish the paper in some obscure academic journal. 

The Samaritan in our story doesn’t have the barriers that tend to come with such privilege. He is ready to believe that there might be something more and, when it comes, is ready to live a life of gratefulness for God’s transformative role in his life.

But there’s one more puzzle left in our story.

Jesus says to the Samaritan, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” But didn't Luke previously tell us that all 10 lepers had been healed?

There’s a distinction here between being made clean or being physically healed and the word used only to describe the state of the Samaritan, being made well or, as several other versions translate this passage, being made whole. In short, as we all know, one can be okay physically without being spiritually well or whole. Everything can appear to be great while we live with the gnawing sense that we are lost spiritually. 

Perhaps a case in point, the other nine apparently returned quickly to the mainstream of society. Likely trying to convince themselves that whatever happened back there was not such a big deal. We can handle things on our own now.

For the Samaritan, everything has changed.

But let’s not be so hard on the other nine.

And let’s not be so hard on ourselves.

Instead, let’s make space for God to work such miracles in our own lives.

May it be so.

 

God Is With Us

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4. The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · October 2nd, 2022 · Duration 8:28

God is with us.

These four words are among the most important in the Christian religion. All throughout the Bible, we are reminded of these four words: in Genesis, just after creation, God is with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; in Exodus God tabernacles with Moses and the people of Israel in the wilderness; in the gospels, God takes on flesh in the form of Jesus and is with humanity in a new way; and in Acts, and all throughout the epistles and even until today, God, the spirit descends and accompanies us on life’s journey. And it’s not just the Bible, these four words are also commonly the last words spoken in a funeral homily from the Northminster pulpit – a reminder that just as the person whose life we are celebrating and mourning is with God that God is also with us. This weekend, the children of Northminster have been on their annual fall retreat, this year studying the life of Moses, following the children’s ministry theme this year, "God is with us". Rainbows on bulletin boards, book shelves, t-shirts, stoles and even socks calling us all to remember that God is with us.

Sometimes though, when we remember that God is with us, we remember the phrase almost with a question mark. We turn on the news or scroll on social media, we hear of coastlines ravaged by hurricanes, senseless acts of violence, catastrophic accidents, and terminal illness – unexpected and life changing circumstances turning our sure and certain declaration that God is with us into the pleading question, "God is with us?â€.

Today’s Old Testament reading from Habakkuk, a minor prophet, just three pages long, tucked back in the latter part of the Old Testament between fellow prophets Nahum and Zephaniah, begins with the prophet looking out over the people of God, his certainty (if not his sanity) seemingly wavering as he shouts at God: “how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?†How long, oh Lord. With these words, Habakkuk joins a long list of similar lamentations in the Bible – cries to God of those faithful who have found great difficulty in their circumstances.

With their cries, and with ours, when they come, there is hidden behind the words and emotions, a gentle burning ember of hope. It is there in the midst of the pain and anguish, it is that smallest of hope that pulls the lament from the mouth of the lamenter and propels it to God. I know this hope is there, otherwise, where we see, read, and hear lamentation would be silent. If hope was truly lost, if the prophet Habakkuk really believed that God would not hear his cry, that God would not save him, then he would not expend the energy to shout his frustrations at God. Nor would I. Nor would you.

But we do. We join with Habakkuk in our pain, in our grieving, in our loss, in our uncertainty. We join together with one another from this community, and we cry “how long, oh Lord, how long?â€. And when we can shout no more, when we have no more tears, we return to that ember that burns deep down at the center of our being and remember that God is with us.

This process is often not a fast one. It can take days, weeks, months, years, even longer. Sometimes, remembering these four words and embracing them feels like the doing of a thing and waiting on the believing of it to follow. One has to wonder if the prophet Habakkuk felt that way in the second part of today’s reading where the prophet says: “I will stand at my watchpost and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what the Lord will say to me, and what the Lord will answer concerning my complaint.â€

Habakkuk has not forgotten his complaints and questions of God. The pain, sadness, and anger from the first chapter have not gone away, but his actions have changed. He resolves to wait and see, faithful that the God who has been with him until this point will continue to be with him in the future.

In this lamentation from Habakkuk and in others throughout the Bible, we find the freedom to bring our whole selves to God, including our pain and frustration and anger and grief. But that’s not all we find with the prophet Habakkuk. We also find the same reminder that we have heard so many times before. We find that even in the midst of our most unfiltered emotions, God is with us.

Amen

By and By, Today!

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Jonathan Walton · September 25th, 2022 · Duration 24:39

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

When the Answers are Questions

Luke 16:1-13, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · September 18th, 2022 · Duration 12:33

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

When 99+1 Equals Joy

Luke 15:1-10, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · September 11th, 2022 · Duration 12:11

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until it is found?

I’ve heard this parable maybe a bit more than other parables, because combined with John 15, it is the centerpiece of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, the method we use for teaching our 3 year old through 3rd graders on Sunday evenings in the atrium.

I’ve never been asked this question by a child, but when I study this parable with adults, especially if they read a version where the rest of the sheep are left in the wilderness, someone usually asks “what about the 99?†They find themselves in a liminal space, the threshold of having been with the shepherd and then finding themselves on their own.

I heard the explanation once that the shepherd going to look for one sheep is good news for all the sheep. If the shepherd shrugs and let’s one sheep go, then how do the other 99 know that the same wouldn’t happen to them if they got lost. The shepherd going off to find the one sheep reminds the other 99 that each one is important. The one belongs to God and so do the 99.

But I also think it matters that the 99 have each other. If you’ve ever seen a herd of sheep or even a picture of a herd of sheep, you know that they surround one another, coming alongside one another to provide warmth and security. During the story, the uncertainty of this liminal space between the shepherd leaving and returning, the sheep surround and come alongside one another.

The 99 belong to the shepherd, and the 1 that is found belongs to the shepherd too. The Bible says there is great rejoicing when that one is found.

In the atrium, the children gather in two rooms specifically prepared for them to practice being with God. The children are taught that the room to which they have come is prepared especially for them to spend time with the Good Shepherd. The Montessori style setup means that the children choose what work they will do there. The children discover parables and narratives in the Bible by reading the words and working with figurines.
They concentrate on pouring, sorting and sifting water and rice and beans, giving their hands something to do while their minds are focused on listening. They draw and color words and images drawn from the pages of Scripture. They pay attention. Maybe they don’t always pay attention to the adults who come alongside them in the atrium, but they are listening and watching for the Good Shepherd. They will learn to listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd and to know that they belong to the Good Shepherd.

We have placed these red bibles in the hands of these 1st graders today for similar reasons. We want them to have the word of God to help them learn and grow. We want our children to read the stories that will teach them that they belong to God, and that God knows them, each one, whether in a group of 99 or all alone.

What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?

Susan Beaumont writes of Scripture that many of its stories are “liminal tales, with an ending, followed by a disorienting season of transition and finally a reorientation to something new that is substantially different from what was left behind.†These parables in Luke 15 are stories of liminal space for the 99 with a missing shepherd, and for the 1 who is lost. For the woman who loses a coin and then finds it again. Beaumont says that “Through liminal experiences human beings are transformed and brought into deeper relationship with God.â€

As I was making the final edits to my sermon this morning, I sat right back there, on one of the back rows, and watched the sun rise out of the sanctuary’s great big windows. There’s a rooster that lives near enough to our sacred space that you can hear it crowing with the rising of the sun. There are people who arrive here just as the sun is coming up most days, some who tend the columbarium, some who tend flowers, some who practice so they might tend worship, all of them tending the soul of this sacred space.

Sunrise is a liminal time, between the night and the day. A space where the soul is tender, tender with grief and gratitude for what has been, and tender with joy, joy in the hope that comes with the certainty of the rising sun.

Richard Rohr calls liminal space “the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.†That is the hope in the spooning of rice from one bowl to another by our preschoolers in the atrium. And that is the hope of placing shiny red bibles in the hands of our first graders. And that is the hope for the 99 as they wait for their shepherds return. And that is the hope for the 1 whom the shepherd seeks.

When the shepherd has found the sheep, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. When the woman has found the coin, she invites her friends and neighbors to rejoice with her.

There is a moment where these parables become problematic. It is exactly at the point where the sheep become too invested in their security and stop allowing all God’s sheep to join the herd. That’s why it’s so important for us to remember that we belong to each other, that Jesus taught often about sheep, and that in John, Jesus reminds his friends that he has other sheep that are not of this herd.

Ninety-nine sheep plus ONE equals joy. Nine coins plus ONE equals joy.

There is hope in the joy that comes on the other side of the liminal space. Ninety-nine sheep plus one sheep equals joy because of that hope. Nine coins plus one coin equals joy because of that hope.

But there is also joy in the liminal space. Look out these great big windows and imagine the wonderful colors of a sunrise. That is joy in liminal space. Look in your bulletin at the things that will take place this week – the places this congregation will serve, the opportunities for spiritual formation that this family of faith will provide. There is joy in learning and living the good news of our Good Shepherd. Look around at the people gathered in our sacred space. There is joy in coming alongside them. Look at your heart and imagine the joy of discovering more of the gifts of God. There is joy in being more of who God created us to be. Look at our great big world and imagine the joy of God breathing God’s spirit into it. There is joy in the Holy Spirit’s work in our world.

Dear family of faith, there is joy in this liminal season, the one we find ourselves in now as a family of faith, the one we live between our birth and our death, the one in which the world lives between creation and that final day of resurrection. What a day of rejoicing that will be! Let us rest ourselves in the hope of that joy.

Amen.


On the Potter’s Wheel

Jeremiah 18:1-11, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · September 4th, 2022 · Duration 9:03

One Sunday, some years back, I showed up at First Baptist Church in Clinton for what I expected would be a standard Sunday evening service. When I walked in the sanctuary, though, I noticed that all the ornamentation had been removed from the platform, leaving only a single column that had on top of it what looked like a large cylindrical mound of mud about two feet high. Not long after my confusion had fully settled, the lights dimmed, and a man, who I would later learn was internationally renowned sculptor Dr. Sam Gore, stepped onto the platform, and walked up to that formless mud.

For the twenty minutes that followed he used his hands to squeeze, pull, press, and form the mud, which turned out not to be mud, but clay. He pressed on some parts and pulled others. He found ways to smooth some places and make others sharp. He pressed his thumbs deep into the clay, and he scooped some of it out. He placed parts of it from one place onto others. And as he worked, and the rest of us watched, that mound of mud started to take shape. Before our eyes the clay with which he was working transformed into a face. First it had a nose, and then a chin. Soon after, there began to be a hairline – for which I was jealous. Then eyes and a mouth started take form. And finally, to help reveal the subject of his sculpting, Dr. Gore placed a crown of thorns on top of the head.

In just twenty minutes, this master sculptor took a formless mound and formed it, carefully and intentionally into the head of Christ.

For years, I have remembered watching in awe as he worked – carefully, meticulously, confident of his craft. I had the good fortune to see Dr. Gore sculpt the head of Christ on at least one more opportunity. Again, he started with the same column of clay, and using only his hands, he shaped and molded that clay over the course of twenty minutes into the head of Christ. Each time, slightly different. Each time, clearly the head of Christ.

This morning’s reading from Jeremiah always calls to mind for me sitting and watching Dr. Gore transform that clay. This week, in this season of our life together at corner of Eastover and Ridgewood, I find myself feeling in some way linked to that clay on the potter’s wheel. Here we are, four days into our life together following the retirement of Chuck Poole. If you are anything like me, there is a space in your heart that hoped that maybe this morning, Chuck would be in the narthex when bells chimed. But, he wasn’t there. His absence has the capacity to create for me, for you, for all of us a larger than normal sense of uncertainty – an uncertainty that, if we let it, will hang around us like a cloud and consume us.

It is that sense of uncertainty that causes me to identify with the clay on the wheel – particularly in the moment when the potter, Dr. Gore in my mind, walks up to the clay, walks around the column looking it over with a seasoned eye, seeing, sensing what I cannot. Then, he takes a position, slowly turns the wheel on which the clay is resting, still looking at the clay, not yet having touched it, and then he puts his hands on the clay, not yet shaping it, only touching it, as though he first needed to get to know the clay – all before he could begin, to use his words, “singing with my hands.”

It is this moment of tension, the moment when the sculptor’s mind is at work, but before the hands have set to motion, it is this moment with which I most identify with the clay this morning. The moment before the new work has begun, the moment when the uncertainty is at its peak.

When I saw Dr. Gore sculpt the head of Christ after the first time, the experience was different for me. When I saw the platform bare aside from the column supporting the potter’s wheel and the clay, I anticipated what would come. I knew Dr. Gore to be a master potter. Rather than the confusion that had threatened to consume me at my first experience, I was prepared to be awed by what Dr. Gore would reveal from the lump of clay.

Northminster, we are the clay. Unlike the clay that Dr. Gore would approach, we are not without shape or form. Indeed, we have fifty-five years of rich and strong history. We have been shepherded by six strong pastors, including Chuck Poole, whose impressions will mark us all for years to come. We have also been guided and nurtured by faithful members – members who show up ready to dream, ready to do, ready to be shaped and formed by the living God to be the people of God.

In our pain, we grieve. We are rightfully sad at Chuck’s departure. And we are rightfully uncertain about the future. But we can be confident as well. Because if we are the clay, we can be confident that God is the potter. If we will submit ourselves to God, to God’s careful examination, to God’s creative imagination; if we will submit ourselves to be turned by God on that potter’s wheel, to be pulled, pressed, and squeezed, to be formed and reformed, we can be confident that God, the master potter, will continue to shape us into something new and beautiful.

Amen

A Summing Up

Luke 14:1, 7-14, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 28th, 2022 · Duration 13:54

Tucked away in a quiet corner of  Marilynne Robinson’s remarkable  novel Gilead, there is that tender moment when the old preacher, John Ames, looks back across his long pastoral life and says, “I wrote all my sermons out, word for word; fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals...Two thousand two hundred and fifty sermons; sifting my thoughts and choosing my words.  Trying to say what was true.” After which, he concluded, “I have been boring a lot of people for a long time.”

All of which is true, as well, for me.  Forty-five years, two thousand and something sermons; roughly half of which happened here; a thousand Northminster sermons, all of which now come down to a single, simple summing up of the handful of big ideas which have occupied much of our time together. 

One of which is the wide circle life of love and welcome which we find in this morning’s epistle lesson, which calls us to a life of empathy and solidarity with those who are suffering and struggling, which, when joined to today’s crowded table gospel lesson from Luke, reminds us that the closer we get to Jesus, the wider we draw our circle of hospitality and welcome; sitting down with and standing up for whoever in our world is most marginalized and ostracized, stigmatized and dehumanized, vulnerable and voiceless, ridiculed and oppressed, left out and alone; which is how we live, not because we have made a political decision to be liberal or an ideological decision to be progressive, but because we have made a spiritual decision to follow Jesus, and the closer we get to Jesus, the wider we draw our circle of  welcome; which has been one of the central concerns of our life together.

Another of which has been the spiritual discipline of careful speech; speech which is intentional, mindful, truthful, careful and kind.

Kindness being another fundamental virtue which we have sought to practice; all of us longing to become the sort of people Naomi Shihab Nye described when she said that there are some persons for whom kindness is the only thing which ties their shoes in the morning and sends them out into the day, following them everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

The sort of mindful, thoughtful, gentle kindness we all need to give and to receive, because all of us are at least a little broken, in ways known and unknown, and many of us are hurting in one way or another. Which has been another frequent theme during our now long life together; the fact that so many are hurting so deeply, and are in need of the comfort and courage we draw from one another in the family of faith. 

How many times have we said, and heard, across our thousand Sundays together, that “There is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life, and, while none of us will go through all of them, all of us will go through some of them,” the spirit of God, and the people of God, helping us to go through things so painful that if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to go through them, we would have sworn that we would never make it.  But we do.  We do go through.  Surrounded and supported by the spirit of God and the people of God, we somehow have the strength to stay on our feet, keep moving, and go through what we did not get to go around.

Which may be the thing about which we have thought the most across the past thousand Sundays; except, of course, for that one thing which Jesus said matters most, which is that we “Love God with all that is in us and love all others as we wish all others to love us;” the cross-formed life, we like to call it; our lives stretched up to God in centering prayer, and stretched out to others in welcome and hospitality, empathy and compassion, solidarity and justice; the central standard by which Jesus said, in Matthew 22:40, all scripture and tradition must be judged and measured; our central standard and anchor, the lens of love through which we read all scripture and see all persons.

Which brings us back to where we started; to the simple, central truth that the deeper we go in our life with God, the wider we grow in our love for the world, until the size of the circumference of the circle of  our welcome becomes the same as the size of the circumference of the circle of welcome around God, which, according to Revelation 5:13, is a circle of welcome as wide as the whole human family and all creation.  “Every creature,” says the writer of the Revelation, “In heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea, singing together, forever, around the throne of God,” God’s final and eternal summing up, by gathering up, the whole human family and all of creation, because this is God’s world, and in God’s world, God gets the last word, and if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good; not for some, but for all.

Beyond which there isn’t much more for me to say, other than “Thank you.”  On behalf of Marcia, Josh, Maria and myself, thank you for welcoming us into your care twenty-five years ago.  And, twenty-five years later, thank you for all the grace and kindness you have shown to our once small, now large, family, throughout our now long life together.

Which, as simple as it seems, is, perhaps, the best word to be our last word; Thank you.

                                                                                                                        Amen.   

Concerning the Future of Northminster

Jeremiah 1:4-10, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 21st, 2022 · Duration 18:59

On this next to last of our over a thousand Sundays together, I thought it might be helpful for us to think, for a few moments, concerning the future of Northminster.

In the most near and knowable future, just ten days from now, we will enter another interim between Senior Pastors, the seventh such season in Northminster’s fifty-five years of life. Previous Northminster interims have been as brief as seven months and as long as twenty months, so, how long this one may last, no one can know. What we do know is that our Personnel Committee, Pulpit Supply Committee and Deacons have put in place an excellent “Stage One†interim plan for September, October, November and December, which, if need be, can be extended or revised; a four month plan which will bring occasional visiting preachers to join the preaching of Lesley Ratcliff and Major Treadway, both of whom will also be hovering over the day to day life of the church; two pastors, Lesley and Major, who are true persons of integrity and empathy, wisdom and insight, kindness and compassion; all the virtues which matter most in ministers.

Of course, the Fall will also see the arrival of scaffolding and hydraulic lift machines, pallets of construction supplies and lots of daily activity as we begin the necessary work of replacing our roof and all of our exterior wood work.

As you know, the cost of the work is very great, 2.8 million dollars, of which we now have about eight hundred thousand. So, here is what we need to do: All of us, who can give, need to give, together, over and above our regular budget giving, about two million dollars to undergird this necessary work. Careful congregational speech requires us to say that some cannot give, but most can, and many have the capacity to give very large gifts. If, for example, you have the capacity to give a five or six-figure charitable gift, this would be a very important year for you to make that kind of gift to Northminster.

Those who cannot give should not give. The rest of us need to give what we can, large or small, to help raise the roof and restore the walls of this sacred and significant place where all of us have been comforted and challenged, shaped and formed, called and sent in beautiful and powerful ways.

All of which will make for an important interim autumn at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover; an interim season which will lead into the next new year when, hopefully, at some point in 2023, we might have our next new Senior Pastor.

Needless to say, no one knows who that person will be. But, what we do know is that, whoever they are, she or he will need to have the same opportunity to become your Senior Pastor which I was given when Marcia, Joshua, Maria and I first came here, exactly twenty-five years ago, in August of 1997. Which means that when pastoral moments arise; weddings, funerals, special occasions, hard crises, it will be important for the present and future pastors who will be serving here to fill the pastoral roles those moments require; something which can be so important that the Episcopalians even have a special rule for it, which is that a retiring priest cannot return to the church for a full year. Lacking such a rule, we will all need to exercise a mindful kind of boundary keeping, which may, at times, be difficult, but which will be made less difficult by the fact that, in Lesley and Major, we have such kind and true, thoughtful and mindful pastors, which will also be true of whoever is called to be Northminster’s next Senior Pastor.

While we do not know who that person will be, we do know how they will be. They will be kind and true, thoughtful and mindful; a wide-circle soul with an embrace of welcome for all who gather within these walls and all who live beyond these walls; a person with the same sort of calling which we find described in this morning’s Old Testament lesson, that inescapable calling to, in the words of today’s scripture, “build up
and tear down,†another way of saying that every pastor’s calling and responsibility includes comforting us all in our brokenness and grief, while also speaking the truth, even when that truth is hard to hear.

Speaking the hard truth has always been difficult for pastors, but never more so than in these days when so many people spend so much time in social media echo chambers which often serve to polarize positions and harden differences, leading too easily to any challenging word of truth being characterized as “partisan†or “political.†You will need to guard against assigning partisan political intent to prophetically moral truth; because your pastors, all of them, past, present and future, have the same calling Jeremiah had in today’s Old Testament lesson; what Martin Luther King, Jr. used to call a vocation of agony, the calling to speak truth which both comforts and challenges; something those of us who are called to be pastors can’t not do, but which we must strive to do in the way that William Sloane Coffin so wonderfully captured in his wise old adage, “When you have something to say that is both painful and true, try to say it softly.â€

Thank you for allowing me to “Try to say it softly†in this most beautiful place with all you most wonderful people for over a thousand Sundays past. For the next thousand Sundays to come, remember that we are all broken in ways known and unknown, that we are all loved, and that we all need to be more mindful, thoughtful, gentle, generous and kind tomorrow than we were yesterday, which will make for an even more beautiful future for Northminster, and for us all.

Amen.

New Math

Luke 12:49-56, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · August 14th, 2022 · Duration 19:16

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the math that is being taught in schools today is not the same as it used to be. If you are more than about ten or fifteen years older than me, you may have missed this evolution of mathematics. If you are more than about ten or fifteen years younger than me, you may not have known that you were being taught something new. I learned about this new math, when my friends’ kids entered elementary school, which resulted in these same friends posting to social media complaints that they neither understood nor could help their children with their math homework. The answers were the same, but the path to get to them was sufficiently different to result in enough weeping and gnashing of teeth to cause a national tissue shortage and significantly increased dental bills.

When I read this morning’s gospel lesson in preparation for worship this week, and read Jesus saying that he had not come to bring peace, but division, I thought, “oh no, not Jesus too.” Even Jesus is trying to mix things up and try out some of this new math.

When Jesus asks, “do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?”, my first thought is, “yes! Of course, you came to bring peace to the earth. You are the ‘Prince of Peace!’ And we, Christians, sometimes greet one another with the ‘Peace of Christ.’” When Jesus responds, that he has come to bring division, I cannot keep myself from thinking of verses in the Bible like Colossians 3:15 which instructs the church to “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” or the fruits of the spirit in Galatians which lists peace prominently, or Ephesians 2:17 which says that Jesus “came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”

The Gospel of John records Jesus saying “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” and “I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace.” Even in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says to people twice before today’s reading “go in peace” and to another “peace to this house.”

But not today. Today Jesus wants to talk about division.

What kind of division does Jesus want to talk about? The kind of division that rocks families to their core. The kind that sets fathers against sons and mothers against daughters; the kind of division that sees houses split as near down the middle as they can be split. And here we have Jesus, on the road to Jerusalem – where he will be crucified. He is tired, weary, and worried, not offering words of comfort and care, but words of caution that cause concern. “Do you think I have come to bring Peace?”

There are many texts throughout the Bible that feel far away and like someone needs to sit down with them and think on them for a long time to understand and connect to them, but this description of division feels all too close to our present. It feels as if Jesus might be describing some of us. Here Jesus seems to be looking into our lives that exist beyond these walls and inside of other walls that we think or that we hope protect us from onlooking eyes. It seems like Jesus sees the divisions that cause us deep pain, the ones that cause us to lay awake at night and wonder if anybody knows and if they did if they would still love us.

It is this kind of raw and tender pain that Jesus touches on as a description of the division that he says he is bringing in Luke’s gospel – a far cry from the kind of peace that we will sing about during Advent, “peace on earth and mercy mild,” “peace on earth, good will to all,” “his gospel is peace,” “sleep in heavenly peace.” To this Jesus says, “do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No,” says Jesus, “I tell you, but rather division.”

I wonder if Jesus’ words here, as he is on the road to his death, might be a painful description of what he has seen in response to his gospel rather than a description of his intentions.

After all, Jesus’ ministry begins, as Luke tells it in chapter 4, with Jesus teaching in his home town synagogue. Those who knew him and his family were initially excited about his ability to understand and teach the scriptures. Yet, only a few verses later, those same home congregation members, congregants who may have included some of his extended family members, try to throw Jesus off a cliff. Pain and division, in response to Jesus’ teaching that he has come to bring Good News.

There was also that time in chapter 5 that some guys made a hole in the roof of the place where Jesus was teaching so that they might lower their friend through it to meet with Jesus. The first thing that Jesus says to the lowered, paralyzed friend is “your sins are forgiven.” This greeting upsets the gathered religious folk to the point that they accuse Jesus of “speaking blasphemy.”

Jesus’ disciples did what was unlawful on the sabbath in chapter 6; also in chapter 6, Luke tells us that Jesus pronounced woe to the rich, the well fed, those who are laughing, and those of whom all speak well.

In chapter 7, Jesus, a Jew, says of a Gentile Roman Centurion, that he has not found such faith anywhere among the Jews in Israel. In Chapter 8 when Jesus rids a man of a legion of demons, the kind people of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave. In Chapter 9, The Samaritans didn’t want Jesus even to pass through their village on the way to Jerusalem. And in Chapter 10, Jesus makes the hero of a parable, not the pastors and priests, but the Samaritans (those same ones that only one chapter earlier didn’t even want Jesus in their town).

As I read the gospel of Luke to this point in Jesus’ journey, it seems to me that the message of Jesus was not one of division, but rather as we heard from Chuck last week, “while many things may matter much to God, nothing matters more than that we sit down with and stand up for whoever in our world is most voiceless and vulnerable, suffering and struggling, marginalized and ostracized, embarrassed and excluded, left out and alone.”

This overarching message of Jesus, which started in that first sermon that led the residents of his hometown to try to throw him off a cliff, was good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. The ministry of Jesus continues as it began with a focus on those the furthest from power and privilege: the poor, the imprisoned, those whose health prevents them from engaging in a world built for able bodied folk, and those who for one reason or another are incapable of experiencing the fullness of freedom that other humans enjoy.

This is a mission that we know and have heard preached and witnessed lived throughout the pastorate of Chuck Poole and throughout the history of this good church. When this kind of ministry starts to cause the kinds of division that Jesus describes in today’s reading is when there is conflict between the groups about whom Jesus spoke in his first sermon, and the groups that more traditionally hold power and privilege – notably the not-poor, those with a clean police report, those who are able bodied and neurotypical,  and those who live life without a concern for how the essence of their being might result in their persecution in the midst of otherwise everyday activities.

Jesus did not set out with the intention of dividing, but reconciling. Only, for Jesus, peace begins with a focus on those in need and those in pain. For Jesus, peace has a full range of life implications. For Jesus, peace looks like everyone having enough; so that no one is hungry. For Jesus, peace looks like a world without prisons, because in the peace of Jesus, the principles that govern human interaction are love, redemption, and reconciliation; for Jesus, peace looks like a world where physical and neuro-divergent limitations do not exist, because, in the peace of Jesus, there is space for all, room for all, and time for all – whatever the cost; for Jesus, peace means that all know freedom because where the peace of Jesus exists people know that to diminish the humanity of another through oppression and discrimination is to diminish the humanity of everyone. For Jesus, this is what peace looks like.

In the world into which Jesus came, this kind of peace did not exist, and today it still does not yet exist. And so, talking like this, creates division. It causes heated and passionate arguments where words get thrown around like, possible, pragmatic, and political. Particularly, when the people in the room are people like me, people with wealth, people who have never seen the inside of a police car, much less a prison, people who are physically able and neuro-typical, people who have never known oppression.

Jesus, stands in the midst of this division, in the midst of this pain and hurt, pain that his message of peace and reconciliation has caused, and he does not ignore it. Jesus continues on with his mission. He continues to preach love, repentance, forgiveness, and healing. He continues to seek out the faithful, believing that his message has a chance in the world if people will give it a try.

Dear children of God, the world in which we live is not so different from the world in which Jesus offered this message. Tensions and pains exist, many right here in this room. Many more outside of this room. Some of them related to the peace and reconciliation of Jesus, which has the power to divide even as it seeks to draw together.

In the midst of that pain, be it the pain of not having enough to eat, the pain of broken relationships, the pain of losing a loved one, or the pain of feeling like Jesus is causing significant discomfort, in the midst of any of these pains, and any more that don’t fit into these categories, the message of Jesus remains the same. Our task as Christians, our task as Northminster Baptist Church is to love God with our whole selves, and to love our neighbors like we want to be loved.

We have heard these words often enough, that it is easy to forget how hard they are to live. Loving someone like you want to be loved, can cause pain. And it can even cause division. Look at Jesus, it nearly got him thrown off a cliff and it did get him all the way crucified. Learning to know a person, and to know their pain, requires a special kind of time, attention, and care. And it requires a response.

In order to live in the world about which Jesus preached, we must choose love. In order to live into the peace of Christ, we must seek out the pain, be ready to share it, and offer love and reconciliation as a salve to it. We must offer love. Otherwise, we are destined to be described in the same way Jesus described the world into which he came – a world in which his message brought division.

If you are anything like me, thinking about ideas like peace and division on large and small scales between Jerusalem and Jackson can leave you wondering, well what do I do? Where do I begin? I propose to start here. Ask yourself this question: what is one thing that I can do today to bring about the peace of Christ. What is one thing – that I can do – today – to bring about the peace of Christ? Answer that question, then go do it. Today.

 

Amen.

 

Concerning What Matters Most

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20. The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 7th, 2022 · Duration 1:54

“Until you seek justice for the oppressed, I will not welcome your worship or hear your prayers.†With those words, this morning’s lesson from Isaiah raises the possibility that, while many things may matter much to God, nothing matters more than that we sit down with and stand up for whoever is most voiceless and vulnerable, suffering and struggling, marginalized and ostracized, left out and alone; what Isaiah calls “seeking justice for the oppressed.â€

One imagines that many things must matter much to God, but, according to this morning’s reading from Isaiah, nothing matters more than that.
Amen.

A Sermon on the Subject of God

Hosea 11:1-11, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 31st, 2022 · Duration 13:16

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

You Are Loved

Colossians 2:6-19, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 24th, 2022 · Duration 6:45

As you have already seen, and heard, Bible Camp 2022 has been a most remarkable weekend here at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover; all of our Bible Camp children and grownups thinking, learning and singing together about that big beautiful Biblical image of the family of God as a massive, expansive tree, where every kind of bird is anticipated, celebrated, wanted, welcomed and loved.

My assignment for Bible Camp this year was to play the part of St. Francis, who, of course, was known to preach, not only about the birds, but even to preach to the birds. 

While preparing to play my part as Bible Camp St. Francis, I found myself revisiting, a number of times, that remarkable poem by the late Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow,” in which Kinnell says, “Everything flowers from within, of self-blessing, though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, and to retell it that it is lovely, until it flowers, again, from within.”

That is the church’s job; to keep telling us that we are loved, until we actually, eventually, gradually, finally believe it; and flower, again, from within. 

The church has many jobs, one of which is to tell us that we are loved, until we hear that truth at a place so deep in our spirit that, someday, we might even suspend, for a moment, all of our old coping mechanisms; dropping our defenses low enough, for long enough, to let ourselves float, if only for a moment, in the boundless sea of God’s limitless love; not unlike Jordan, Kaylee and Celia, suspended helplessly for a glorious moment in the water of baptism;  all of us floating helplessly, with the three of them, in the gentle sea of the love of God; letting it be enough, for once, just to know that God is love, and we are loved.

Truth which can be hard to hear over all the other voices which clamor for our attention; shame and guilt, regret and remorse, self-loathing and self-doubt; the incessant inner-chorus conducted by our relentless inner-critic.  Against which it is the church’s job to say, as Paul said to the Colossians in today’s epistle passage, “Do not let anyone condemn you, do not let anyone disqualify you.”  You are loved. 

That is the church’s job; to keep telling us that we are loved, until we actually, eventually, gradually, finally believe it; and flower, again, from within. 

Until then, as Paul said in today’s epistle lesson, “Do not let anyone condemn you, do not let anyone disqualify you,” because you are loved.  As that most amazing anthem of inclusion, “Crowded Table,” says, “The door is always open, your picture’s on the wall.  We’re all a little broken, but everyone belongs.”

Which, if you think about it, might actually land somewhere in the neighborhood of what God says all day every day at the gates to heaven.  After all, the book of Revelation says that there are twelve gates to the city of God, each made of a single pearl, and all twelve are stuck open, forever, never to be closed.  So, it isn’t hard to imagine God, waiting at the gate, saying something like, “The door is always open.  Your picture’s on my wall.  Everyone’s a little broken, and everyone belongs.” 

Until then, as Paul said to the Colossians, do not let anyone condemn you, and do not let anyone disqualify you.  We are all anticipated and celebrated, wanted, welcomed and loved by God; every kind of bird and every kind of us.                                                                                                                                       

Amen.

              

Concerning the Centered Life

Luke 10:38-42, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 17th, 2022 · Duration 10:41

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

You Have Given the Right Answer

Luke 10:25-37, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 10th, 2022 · Duration 7:11

Every time the lectionary asks the church to read today’s words from Luke’s gospel, they call to mind, for me, that wonderful story President Carter used to tell about a summer mission trip he went on with his church from Plains, Georgia.  It was sometime in the 1960’s, not long after Jimmy Carter had been defeated in his first run for governor of Georgia.  Plains Baptist Church sent a group to work for a week in Boston, where Mr. Carter was assigned to assist an urban minister named Eloy Cruz.  Reverend Cruz was so genuinely joyful and peaceful that, on the last day, just before boarding the church van for the long journey back to Georgia, Jimmy Carter took Eloy Cruz aside and said, “You are the most centered, contented, kind person I have ever met, and I am not leaving here until I know your secret,” to which Reverend Cruz replied, “I don’t know.  I guess I just get up every morning and love God and whoever is in front of me.”

Which, according to this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus would call “the right answer.”  When the inquirer asked Jesus the way to eternal life, Jesus asked the inquirer what was written in the law, and when the inquirer said, “Love God with all that is in you and love all others as you wish all others to love you,” Jesus said, “You have given the right answer.  Do that and you will live.”  Or, as Eloy Cruz said to Jimmy Carter, “Get up every morning and love God and whoever is in front of you.”

That’s it.  That’s all.                              

Amen.

 

All the Resources of Our Congregation

Galatians 6:1-6, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 3rd, 2022 · Duration 1:17

Needless to say, that was a very big promise we all made a few moments ago, joining our voices to promise Chesley Quinn “all the resources of our congregation.”

The most important of which is the congregation; all of you dear and good souls, from whom we all draw so much strength, in whom we find so much courage, and with whom we now make our way, together, to the table of communion.

Amen.

Our Anchor is Our Sail

Galatians 5:1, 13-25, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 28th, 2022 · Duration 12:16

The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Those words from today’s epistle lesson are among the great summary passages in scripture; a short list of big verses which sum up, sometimes in a single, simple sentence, what matters most; passages such as Micah 6:8, “What does the Lord require of us, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God?”, Matthew 7:12, “Treat others as you wish to be treated; this is all the law and the prophets,” Matthew 22:34-40, “Love God with all that is in you, and love your neighbor as yourself.  All the law and the prophets hang on this,” Romans 13:9, “All the commandments are summed up in one, Love your neighbor as yourself,” and, from today’s lesson, Galatians 5:14, “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” passages of scripture in which travels the kind of truth which has long served as our anchor here at Northminster.  “Love all others as you wish to be loved,” the central standard by which we long to live, within these walls and beyond these walls; the kind of truth which, when we are at our best, is our moral compass and guiding light, a solid, centering anchor which has remained, and will remain, through all the changes which have come, and will come; including the one which is coming to us all on August 31, when our time with you will come to its close.

Last September, we mailed a letter to all of you, sharing our sense that it was time for someone else to sit in the Senior Pastor’s chair here at Northminster; something which Marcia and I had been talking about at home, by then, for over a year, and which I had raised with the Deacons nine months earlier, at their annual retreat in January of 2021.

Needless to say, it isn’t simple, or easy, to know when it is time for a change in pastoral leadership, but I think I began to sense that need, for Northminster, as early as the summer of 2020.  We have, after all, been here a long time, and, very long pastorates have not been the rhythm of life here at Northminster.  Dudley Wilson, our first pastor, served here for nearly eight years, after which came John Claypool, for five years; John Thomason, for five; and Roger Paynter, for seven.  My first time with you was for six years, Brian Brewer was here for  two years, and now, our second season with you has lasted nearly fifteen years.

 So, by Northminster standards, we’ve been here a long time, during which the world has changed in ways which, even in a church as lay-led as Northminster, call, I think, for a different voice and vision from a new Senior Pastor.

 I’m a little young to be retiring, and the call of God to serve the world is not the sort of thing from which one can exactly “retire,” so Marcia and I will be looking for what and where the next chapter of life might be for us.  For you, there will be an interim period of some time, how long, no one can say, the initial four months of which, September through December, have been planned by our Pulpit Supply Committee, Personnel Committee and Deacons, with a convergence of some visiting Sunday preachers, along with the very capable and thoughtful preaching of Lesley Ratcliff and Major Treadway; our two kind, wise and gifted pastors who will also be shepherding, together, along with the Caregivers, Deacons, and support staff of the church, the day to day pastoral and institutional life of the church, along with the work Lesley and Major already do. 

And, then, there will also be all of you, stepping in to do the good work which Northminster folk always do, only more so.  To the extent that you are able, it will be important, during the interim period, especially, for all of us to give more time and more money.  And, to the extent that you can, it will be important for all to be present at Sunday School and worship more consistently than ever. 

And, all will be well.  In some ways, things may actually be better and more exciting during the upcoming interim season, while our Pastor Search Committee, which you elected  back in March, continues searching for the next Senior Pastor, who will, at some point, join the thoughtful, mindful, generous congregation at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover, a congregation birthed fifty-five years ago with a centering sense of what matters most; love for God and love for others, our North Star, central standard, guiding principle, moral compass and anchor. 

An anchor which, remarkably enough is the only anchor in the history of the world ever also to serve as a sail, because the more anchored we are in the life of love, the further we travel in our embrace of the world; the deeper our anchor, the higher our sail, catching the wind of the Spirit; our anchor, also, our sail. 

Amen.

Concerning Galatians 3:28

Galatians 3:23-29, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 19th, 2022 · Duration 12:27

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer servant or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.â€

Every three years, when the lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words on this Sunday, I am reminded that, in the world of first-century Galatia, if, instead of Paul, a woman had said, “In the baptized family of faith there is no longer male and female,†it would have been just as true, but people might have dismissed it by saying, “Well, of course you would say that, you need more rights.†Or if, instead of Paul, a servant had said, “In the baptized family of faith, there is no longer servant or free,†it would have been just as true, but people might have dismissed it by saying, “Well, of course you would say that, you need more freedom.†Which is why it was so important for Paul, a free, male, Jew, to say that, in the baptized family of faith, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, servant or free, male and female,†because, in first-century Galatia, Paul was speaking from the more privileged side of that list of human differences.

All of which takes me back to some of my own moments of similar responsibility. For example, in the religious world in which I grew up, the voices of women were not welcome in the pulpit of the church. So, since that was all I had ever been taught as a child, it was all I knew to think or say when I was a young adult.

But then, slowly, slowly, little by little, I came to see that, as Peter proclaimed on Pentecost, God pours out God’s spirit on all flesh, sons and daughters, with no regard for whether they happen to be sons or daughters. But, even after I knew better, I went for the longest time without saying so because I didn’t know how to defend the new light I had seen. And then, one day, while reading today’s epistle passage, it occurred to me that, if we were not going to ordain women we never should have started baptizing girls because, according to Galatians 3:28, in the baptized family of faith, there is no male and female. So, of course, we ordain women because we baptize girls.

And, like Paul in first-century Galatia, once I came to see that, I had a special responsibility to say that; for the same reason that, as a white person, I have a special responsibility to say that white supremacy is sin, and, as a straight person, I have a special responsibility to say that homosexuality is a human difference, not a spiritual sin. The family into which I was born in Macon, Georgia sixty-six years ago had no social standing or financial advantage. And, yet, because I happen to have been born white, straight and male, I, like Paul, was born on the privileged side of every human difference you can name, which means that, like Paul, I live with a particular responsibility to speak from the side which has long held too much power for the side which has long held too little power until all these human differences which will not exclude in heaven do not exclude on earth; a kind of sacred, human solidarity which our Lord Jesus embodied throughout the four gospels by consistently sitting down with and standing up for whoever was most marginalized and voiceless; which is what Paul did in today’s epistle passage, and which, in my experience, is what all of us do, too, in those moments when we are most filled with the Holy Spirit, because the deeper we go in our life with the Spirit, the wider we grow in our embrace of the world.

There is a lot of pain in this world; from a store in Buffalo to a church in Sacramento, from a school in Uvalde to a war in Ukraine, from Bailey Avenue in Jackson, where five-year-old Mariyah Lacey was slain at the beginning of this week, to St. Stephen’s Church in Vestavia, where Jane Pounds, Bart Rainey and Sarah Yeager lost their lives at the end of the week.

The church can help lift a little of the world’s pain by forming people who work for a more gentle and welcoming world. As our dear friend Glenda Curry, Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, said in the aftermath of the unspeakable tragedy at St. Stephen’s, “We open our lives and our hearts to the world. We welcome everyone, because we are followers of Jesus.â€

Because we are followers of Jesus, that is how we live. And the deeper we go in our life with Jesus, the wider we grow in our embrace of the world. The deeper we go, the wider we grow, until the size of the circumference of the circle of our welcome is the same as the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God.

Amen.

Concerning the Trinity

John 16:12-15, Trinity Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 12th, 2022 · Duration 13:18

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth...The Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.â€

Every three years, on Trinity Sunday, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s gospel lesson. And, every time they roll back around, they seem to me to be the best possible passage for Trinity Sunday; the second part of the trinity, Jesus, preparing to return to the first part of the trinity, God, by handing us off to the third part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, to take us the rest of the way by telling us the rest of the truth.

Which, for many, myself among them, raises the question, “But isn’t that awfully subjective? How do we know if what we think is the truth is actually coming from the Holy Spirit?â€; the kind of question Jesus anticipates in today’s gospel lesson, when Jesus says, “The Spirit will not speak on the Spirit’s own, but the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.â€

That is the central standard against which we measure what we think the Spirit might be telling us: Is it true to the spirit of Jesus? That is the question. Because the Spirit does not speak on the Spirit’s own, the Spirit will only tell us more of what Jesus told us some of; the Spirit, taking us further and further along the same path down which Jesus got us started.

So, we measure what we believe the Holy Spirit is leading us to say and do by the Jesus we find in the four gospels. Like the rest of the Bible, the four gospels are not inerrant or infallible. “Inerrancy†is a seventeenth century category imposed on the Bible by well-meaning folk looking for an infallible authority. However, while they may not be inerrant or infallible, the four gospels are our most trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, and to read the four gospels is to see that Jesus spent his life sitting down with and standing up for whoever was most voiceless and powerless, ostracized and marginalized, left out and alone, and the Holy Spirit will only lead us further along that same path.

For example, in Matthew 22:34-40, the Jesus of the four gospels said that nothing matters more than loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we wish others to love us, and the Holy Spirit will only take us further along that same path. In Matthew 12:7, the Jesus of the four gospels said that if we understood the way God really is we would stop condemning things God does not condemn, and the Holy Spirit will only take us further along that same path. In Matthew 7:12, the Jesus of the four gospels said that all scripture, tradition and religion can be summed up in a single sentence, “Treat all others the way you want all others to treat you,†and the Holy Spirit will only take us further along that same path; a path of growth and change to which Jesus pointed when Jesus said, in today’s gospel lesson, “I have more to say to you, but you cannot bear it now. When the Spirit comes, the Spirit will guide you into all truth,†the Spirit, taking us further and further along the same path down which Jesus got us started; a path of growth and change with which we are never finished; growing and changing, never smaller, always bigger; bigger in our kindness, our courage, our welcome, our embrace, our celebration of human difference and our longing for human diversity.

How can I say that with such confidence? Partly because of the way today’s gospel lesson talks about what the church eventually came to call “the trinityâ€: The Holy Spirit will only lead us further in the ways of Jesus, who came to reveal the one God who created the universe, the God who is waiting and working toward the day when every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea will sing together forever around the throne of God, which may help explain why Jesus was always redrawing the circle of Jesus’ welcome to embrace whoever was on the margins, because Jesus was revealing the size of the circle of God’s welcome and joy, and the Holy Spirit will only lead us further and further along that same path down which Jesus got us started. So, of course, if we are walking in the Spirit, we will be following Jesus into the never-ending, ever-expanding bigness of God, the life Rainer Maria Rilke described with that singularly beautiful testimony, “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not finish the last one, but I give myself to it.â€

May it be so, may it be so; for each of us and all of us, may it ever be so.
Amen.

Better a Wind Chime

Acts 2:1-21, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 5th, 2022 · Duration 1:31

When the day of Pentecost had come, suddenly there came a sound like the rush of a mighty wind, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.  Every year, when the lectionary asks the church to read those words on Pentecost Sunday, they call to mind, for me, that verse in John chapter three where Jesus is reported to have said that the Spirit is like the wind, blowing wherever the Spirit wishes, beyond our capacity to capture or control.

And, ever since, we have been busy building religious boxes in which to capture and control the wind of the Spirit; all the while, God, one imagines, would have preferred for us just to hang out a windchime.

Amen.

 

Jesus’ Prayer for Jesus’ Friends

John 17:20-26, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 29th, 2022 · Duration 10:31

“To live in solidarity with the pain of the world is what it means to be a Christian.”  At this moment when there is so much pain, throughout our nation, our city and the world, those words of Richard Rohr’s call forth that which is deepest and widest in each of us. 

“To live in solidarity with the pain of the world is what it means to be a Christian,” is Richard Rohr’s more eloquent version of my more cornbread and peas belief that the most inclusive Christian confession of all is that “All is not fully well for anyone until all is finally well for everyone.”  Or, as Glennon Doyle so beautifully and concisely put it, “There is no such thing as other people’s children.”              

Though Uvalde, Texas may be a long day’s drive from here, Rojelio, Nevaeh, Jacklyn, Makenna, José, Eliahna, Uziyah, Amerie, Xavier, Tess, Jayce, Maranda, Alithia, Annabell, Maite, Lexi, Layla, Jailah and Eliahana, their teachers, Irma and Eva; and, yes, also, Salvador, are as much ours as Adrian McDouglas, a twelve year old child who was killed by gunfire on Ventura Street here in Jackson this week, Kiante Scott, a child of our church who was slain on Bailey Avenue twelve years ago next month, and Yeslin Mateo Romero, killed last August while waiting in the parking lot at the grocery store in Canton.

For Christians, there is no such thing as other people’s children, because to live in solidarity with the pain of the world is what it means to be a Christian.

Perhaps it is in that sense that Jesus’ prayer for Jesus’ friends in today’s gospel lesson someday will be answered; Jesus’ as yet unanswered prayer for all of Jesus’ friends to be completely one with one another.  Though that may never mean “one” as in agreement, perhaps it might mean “one” as in solidarity; the whole Church, all of Christianity, every person ever baptized in the name of Jesus, finding the courage and the kindness, the kindness and the courage, to sit down with and stand up for those who are most vulnerable, even when that means standing up against those who are most powerful, because that is the moral obligation of Christians; not special Christians, or some Christians, but all Christians, because to be a Christian is, in Paul’s words, to be crucified with Christ; to join the Wide Armed One, who carries us all, in carrying the weight of the world; all of us, together, as one, living in solidarity with the pain of the world.

Amen.

Who Are We to Hinder God?

Acts 11:1-18, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 15th, 2022 · Duration 11:09

Mary Laurel, Blaine, Parkes, Watts, Anna Mitchell, Charlotte, Celia, Slates and Elise, to see each of you standing at the altar today with your mentor was, for the rest of us, a powerful reminder of all the ways we form and shape one another’s lives in the family of faith; all of us learning from one another.

Not unlike Peter and Cornelius in today’s lesson from the book of Acts, a friendship which started out with Peter as the mentor, but ended up with Peter learning at least as much as he taught; Peter’s life, changed, perhaps, even more than Cornelius’ life; a change in Peter which is what got Peter called on the carpet by the religious leaders in Jerusalem; Peter, criticized by the church for drawing the circle of his welcome too wide, a wide embrace which, at first, was a stretch, even for Peter.  In fact, in his “step by step” report on how he came to be so liberal in his welcome of Gentiles, Peter reminded his critics that he, himself, was, not so long ago, as conservative as they when it came to the size of the circle of the welcome around God.  But, then, Peter had that dream, in which the Spirit of God took a reluctant Peter past the place where both scripture and tradition would have told Peter to stop, which was “step one” in Peter’s “step by step” story of the spiritual journey which led to Peter’s wide welcome of his new Gentile friends.

Step two came soon after, when Peter arrived at the home of the Gentile, Cornelius, where, in Acts 10:28, Peter told Cornelius that he had come only because of the dream, because it was actually against the rules for Peter, a Jew, to be visiting Cornelius, a Gentile; followed by step three, which was Peter’s recognition that the Gentiles had, in them, the same Holy Spirit which Peter had in him; prompting Peter to ask his critics, in today’s passage from Acts chapter eleven, “If God has given them the same Holy Spirit God has given us, who are we to hinder God?”

All of which, while I cannot speak for you, is, for me, a lot like looking in a mirror.  Like Peter, I grew up in a religious world with clear distinctions between insiders and outsiders.  But, then, there came a time in my life, when, like Peter, I met people who became, for me, what Cornelius became for Peter; their lives an undeniable argument that the circle of welcome around God was wider than the circle of welcome I had learned to draw in the church of my childhood.

First, it was Melvin Kruger, the first of many Jewish friends in whom I saw the Spirit of God so beautifully and fully embodied.  Mr. Kruger and I were just like Peter and Cornelius, only in reverse.  This time, instead of the reluctant Jew, Peter, seeing God in the Gentile, it was the reluctant Gentile, me, seeing God in the Jew.  Later, it was Sababu and Okolo Rashid, and Sabri Agachan, the first of many Muslim friends in whom the Spirit of God is so clear and so dear, and Seetha Srinivasan, a Hindu friend in whom the Spirit of God is so unfailingly generous, gentle, healing and kind that Seetha causes the rest of us to want to be better, simply by being exactly who she is; like Peter’s theology chasing his friendship with Cornelius, my theology chasing my friendship with each of those dear and good souls, their lives redrawing the circle of my life to more nearly match the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God, the kind of ever-expanding life Rainer Maria Rilke described with that unforgettable image; “I live my life in widening circles which reach out across the world.  I may not finish the last one, but I will give myself to it.”

I wonder if that might be part of the meaning of that sentence Jesus is reported to have said in this morning’s gospel lesson, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.”  The commandment that we love one another is as old as the Torah, so why would Jesus call it a new commandment?  I wonder if it might be because, as long as we live, there may always be another someone to meet and know who will redraw the circle of our lives the way Cornelius redrew the circle of Peter’s life and love and welcome; that old commandment to live a life of love for others as new as the next time we have to redraw the circle of our welcome, until the size of the circle of our welcome is as expansive as the size of the circle of the welcome around God.

After all, even if, as Revelation 5:13 says, God intends, ultimately, to embrace every creature, in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the sea, inside the circle of God’s welcome, who are we to hinder God?

Amen.    

Full, and Running Over

Psalm 23, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 8th, 2022 · Duration 15:48

“Even though we walk through life’s most difficult valleys, we will not be immobilized by our fears, because we know that God is with us.†I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, that single, simple, sentence from the center of this morning’s psalm has long been the part of Psalm 23 to which I most often have been drawn; that tender old promise that God is with us and for us to hold us and help us; the arms of God carrying us through what we did not get to go around; the spirit of God, and the people of God, helping us to stumble our way through sorrows so difficult and devastating that if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to go through them, we would have sworn we could never make it. But we do; with the help of God and the people of God, we do go through, not only the valley of the shadow of death, but, also, the often even harder valleys of the shadow of life.

All of which has long been, for me, the most beloved part of the most beloved psalm. But, across the past few months, I have found myself drawn, deeper and deeper, into another corner of today’s psalm, that familiar phrase from the old King James Bible, “Our cup runneth over;†an image which, whatever else it may have meant on the psalmist’ lips, in my ears has become a nearly daily way of thinking about the ways the love of God, which comes down to us, goes out through us; our lives, like a cup which is so full of the love of God that whenever anything is dropped into the cup of our lives, the love which has come down to us from God flows out from us to others.

Once the cup of our life is filled full with the love of God, then anything which is dropped into our lives; any moment or conversation, any crisis, stranger, encounter or friend, will cause our filled-up cup to run over with kindness, gentleness, courage, justice, truth and grace; our cup running over and spilling tenderness, kindness, truth and love, the same on all sides.

All of which we must say with only the greatest of care. After all, there are some things in this world which are hurtful, harmful, oppressive, exclusive and wrong, about which the truth must be spoken; moments when “same-on-all-sides†neutrality is not an option. Sometimes, the only way to stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for is to stand up against the same things Jesus would stand up against.

Thinking of all that this week took me back to a moment in my life, well over twenty-five years ago, when Marcia, Joshua, Maria and I were at the church in Washington D.C. I had walked to Capitol Hill to visit a member of our congregation, and, as I was walking away from the Capitol, I encountered a group of persons, chanting slogans and carrying signs which said, “GOD HATES _______ (a profane and hurtful name for persons who are gay) LEVITICUS 18:22. I started to walk on past, but found that the Spirit would not let me. I turned around, went back, and said, as softly, gently and quietly as I could, “You are taking the Lord’s name in vain, and you are taking the Lord’s word in vain. In the name of Jesus, I call on you to repent;†one of those moments when the cup of my life was sufficiently full of truth and love that, when those signs and slogans were dropped into the cup of my life, my cup ran over with truth and love, love and truth.

Sometimes, we must stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for by standing up against the same things Jesus would stand up against. But, even then, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can, as Martin Niemoller once said, “Let love flow out.†No sarcasm, snarkiness, or eye-rolling. No exaggeration of other people’s opinions in an effort to make them look foolish. None of that. Just truth and love, love and truth; what Walter Rauschenbusch called, “The truth, dressed in nothing but love,†kindness and clarity, gentleness and justice, grace and truth; our wingspan as wide as our moral compass is true; our moral compass as true as our wingspan is wide; our cup, running over, with truth and love, equally, in every direction.

All of which calls to mind, for me, Rainer Maria Rilke’s verse, in which Rilke says, “God is a wheel at which I stand, whose spokes sometimes catch me up and revolve me nearer the center. After which, everything I put my hand to widens from turn to turn.†Drawn nearer and nearer into the center of God’s love, the circle of our love grows wider and wider. The deeper we go, the wider we grow; our lives, so filled with the Holy Spirit, our cup, so full of the love of God, that any moment, however large or small, dropped into our lives, causes our cup to run over the same on all sides with kindness, tenderness, truth and love; all the love which has come down to us from God, going out through us to others; spilling over, in all directions, further and further, wider and wider, more and more, for as long as we live.

Amen.

Eastertide Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

John 21:1-19, The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Lesley Ratcliff · May 1st, 2022 · Duration 8:47

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

In the Room Where it Happened

John 20:19-31, Second Sunday of Eastertide (Senior Recognition)

Major Treadway · April 24th, 2022 · Duration 13:20

Can you imagine? Thomas, mourning with the men with whom he’s spent the last year of his life wandering throughout Israel. All of them in disbelief as the one on whom they had hung all their hopes had been executed. They had watched as Jesus was hung on the cross. They had watched as he was placed in the tomb. They had watched as the stone was rolled into place. Jesus was dead and buried, and they had watched.

As all of his friends were gathered, Thomas was not with them. Who knows why Thomas wasn’t in that room with his friends that night? No one can say for certain. Perhaps it was his turn to go buy eggs. Maybe he needed to use the restroom. He could have just needed a break from his friends. But while he was away, the resurrected Jesus came to visit.

And Thomas wasn’t there. What misery he must have felt when they told him the news. Not altogether different from how Aaron Burr seemed to feel in Lin Manuel Miranda’s telling of the story of when the decision was made to move the US Capitol from New York City to Washington D.C. Burr was dismayed, angry, and jealous – not necessarily about what happened in the room, but that he was not in the room where it happened, the room where his political colleagues and adversaries were negotiating and making decisions. Miranda’s Burr sings mournfully of wanting to be in the room where it happens. As the song progresses, his tone changes from mourning to fierce determination, from I want to be in the room, to I’ve got to be in the room.

Could it be that there is a hint of that same dismay, anger, and jealousy in Thomas’s reply to his friends: “unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.� I’ve got to be in the room where it happens, or I’m not believing. His mournful longing becoming fierce determination in the span of a single sentence.

This feeling is not unfamiliar to us. Feeling left out or like something has been missed. It is the realization of the “fear of missing out†– a fear so common it has been shortened to the acronym “FOMOâ€. But these disciples were not in the upper room because of FOMO, they were in the upper room, because they were afraid that the misfortune that had befallen Jesus might befall them as well.

And then something amazing happened, and they were in the room where it happened. And Thomas, well, Thomas wasn’t. How must it have felt to be Thomas? How must it have felt to be his friends? How must it have felt to be Jesus?

Thomas’ friends, realizing that one of their squad was not with them, ran out to find him and tell him what happened in that room. Thomas, realizing that he had missed out on something amazing, responds with what we have come to know as “doubt.†And Jesus, how does Jesus respond? In two ways it seems. First, Jesus shows up one more time in that same room, and confronts Thomas with answers to his “doubts.†But then, after he confronts Thomas’s doubts and fears, as though speaking well beyond him, to all of those others, to us, who would not get to be in the room where it happened. Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.â€

Kristian, Marilee, Caroline, Eli, Logan, Molly, Sam, Madyson, Luke, Ozzie, you all have had the good fortune to be in the room where it happens many times. You have been here, many of you from the time you were born, carried right down that aisle as an infant as this congregation promised share in your growth, claiming that you belong to us [as well as your parents]. You grew up downstairs in the children’s department, in Sunday School and Atrium, Children’s Chapel and Bible Camp. And then, having spent all the time in those rooms that one is allowed, you moved over to the Youth House, where many other things happened. Along the way, some of you ventured into the waters of Baptism, where this congregation made you more promises, this time “our encouragement and all the resources of our congregation as you continue to grow.â€

As this congregation cultivated an environment for your faith to develop, something happened to us as well. For one’s faith development never happens strictly according to schedule. Just like Thomas didn’t plan for Jesus to show up in his absence, we could not have planned for any one of you to develop just as you have. And so, as you have developed, we have watched with awe and gratitude at the ways that Jesus has shown up in your lives. And as we have watched, we have been challenged, by your questions and by your faith, to follow Jesus more faithfully.

Seniors, you have had to endure longer periods of absence from the rooms in which you wanted to be than perhaps any others before you. The COVID pandemic has kept you from the rooms where you wanted to be. Yet, you pressed on. You kept working, you kept trying, you kept growing, academically, physically, spiritually. Your endurance has been inspiring. And now, you are ready to graduate and move on to the next chapter of your lives – diploma in hand.

This next chapter of your lives will be marked by many adventures – some exciting, some mundane. This chapter will also undoubtedly be marked by experiences where you will have missed something you wish that you had not, or where you will notice that one or more of your closest friends has missed something that you know they will wish they had not. This event might be a big game. It might be an important study session. It could even be a particularly moving worship experience or service opportunity. Almost without doubt, those of you who move away from the Jackson area, will miss what happens here, in this room. And you will be missed.

And just as when Thomas was not in the room when Jesus came to visit, and Aaron Burr was not in the room when Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison agreed to move the capitol, some version of the story will eventually make it out. Rather, than basing your response on Thomas’ (and Burr’s) reaction, focused on not being in the room where it happened, remember instead, Jesus’s response to Thomas.

Jesus says to Thomas blessed are those who believe even though they were not in the room. There is no way that we can go back to the room where Jesus was with the disciples. Similarly, after you graduate, and you begin all of your new adventures, it will more often than not, not be possible for you to be here. And even the live stream, as good as it is, cannot replicate being in this room. So, we will tell you the story of what has happened in your absence.

But remember, too. That we will be absent from the rooms where you find yourselves. We will not be present to continue being formed by your forming faith in the same ways we have until now. We will long to hear your stories of all that you are learning and all that you are experiencing. And when we do, that longing to be with you will grow. I anticipate that your growing faith will continue to help ours grow. When you tell us of the ways that you are able to apply in other rooms the faith that has developed in this room, we will marvel, and celebrate with you.

There is too much life to be lived to fill our thoughts with the want to be in rooms where we are not or to wish we had been in rooms where we were not. This morning, we are here. No amount of wishing, longing, or regret will cause us to be somewhere else. All of life is this way. Our presence, our greatest gift. There is time for planning and preparation. There is time for storytelling and reflection. But more important is the life lived in the present, in whatever place you find yourself. It is the present where you will be able to utilize what you have learned in the place where you have been formed. It is only in the present that you can sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for. It is only in the present that you can practice careful speech. It is only in the present that you can widen the circle of your embrace until your arms are stretched wide like the arms of Jesus. It is only in the present moment where your faith can be lived.

And so, as you leave this place to go to all your other places, and as you leave this room to enter other rooms, know that you will miss some of the good and surprising things that are happening here. Know that, like the disciples who ran to tell Thomas, we will tell you as soon as we can. Know also that we will be eager to hear what exciting and surprising things are happening in your lives that we have missed. Come home and tell us so that we can all celebrate together. And let our and your faith grow stronger as we marvel at what God has done, that we have not seen.

Amen

Concerning the Resurrection

John 20:1-18, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 17th, 2022 · Duration 13:46

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Cross

Philippians 2:5-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 10th, 2022 · Duration 10:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Where Do We Go to Begin Again?

Isaiah 43:16-21, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · April 3rd, 2022 · Duration 1:39

“Thus says the Lord; Do not let yourself get stuck in the past, for I am about to do a new thing.†Those words from today’s lesson from Isaiah, joined by Paul’s words in today’s epistle passage, “Forgetting what lies behind, I reach forward to what lies ahead,†help us all to remember that, while none of us can ever start over from the beginning, all of us can always start over from here.

Amen.

The Prodigal God

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Lesley Ratcliff · March 27th, 2022 · Duration 12:59

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

By This Time Next Year

Luke 13:1-9, The Third Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 20th, 2022 · Duration 14:42

So the owner of the vineyard said to the gardener, “For three years I have been looking for fruit on this tree, and still I find none. Cut it down!†But the gardener replied, “Give it one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; and if not, then you can cut it down.â€

Every time the lectionary places in our path that parable from today’s gospel lesson, I think of that well-worn old cliché, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.†As long as the tree in the parable is allowed to live, there is always the hope that, by next year, things may have changed. Given a little more time, and a little more cultivation and fertilization, what the gardener in the parable calls “digging and manure,†who can say how much this tree might change by this time next year?

A parable which, in the mouth of Jesus, is, one imagines, less about the way trees grow than it is about the way we grow; as in, “Who can say how much any of us might grow and change between now and this time next year?†As long as there’s life, there’s hope. As long as we are alive, there is always the possibility that our hearts will be opened, our minds changed, our lives transformed. By this time next year, we could become so thoughtful and gentle, clear and true, centered and mindful, welcoming and kind that those who have long known us might actually wonder what has happened to us; the kind of change we long for, not because we hope to avoid a punishment or gain a reward on judgement day, but because we don’t want to underlive the one and only life we are ever going to have.

God’s got the next life. What we have is this life, and this life is going to end someday. And, as far as we know, we aren’t going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time. Someday will be the last day, which is the truth which travels in the first part of today’s lesson from Luke; Jesus, reminding the disciples that life is fragile, and can end at any moment. That’s why we long to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can; because, as far as we know, this is it. Someday is going to be the last day. Some year, there won’t be a next year.

How we have spent whatever is over of our one and only life, nothing and no one can change. How we will live whatever is left of our one and only life is up to us.

For us, as for the tree in today’s parable, real change and growth take work; what the gardener in the parable called “digging and manure;†the daily work of centering prayer, mindful thinking, listening for the Holy Spirit; the discipline of walking in the Spirit and opening our hearts to new light on old truth. It may not be easy or automatic, but if we open our hearts to the Spirit, who can say how different we might become by this time next year? Who can say how much more kind and gentle, big-spirited and welcoming, any of us might become by this time next year?

As Rainer Maria Rilke said, “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not finish the last one, but I give myself to it.†Which is exactly how we want to live; in ever-widening circles of love, and, also, how we want to die; unfinished, still growing wider in our welcome; a life of expansive piety which keeps redrawing the circle of our welcome until the size of the circle of our welcome becomes the same as the size of the circle of the welcome of God.

One of my favorite images for that kind of growing and changing is what Mary Oliver once called, “swimming inward and floating outward.†The hard work of prayer and contemplation, repentance and resolve is “swimming inward,†what the gardener in the parable called “digging and manure.†If we swim inward long enough, carefully enough, we will, eventually, begin to float outward, redrawing the circle of our life and love to the same as the size of the circle of the welcome around God.

That happened in my life, in part, as a result of reading, prayerfully, over and over, all four gospels. To read the four gospels over and over takes time and work, what the parable calls “digging and manure,†the hard work of swimming inward, into the gospels, which led, in my life, to floating outward, into the world, because, to follow Jesus around in the gospels is to see Jesus consistently sitting down with and standing up for whoever is most on the margins and at the edges. In my experience, to regularly, prayerfully follow Jesus around in the gospels, is to slowly, eventually start following Jesus around in the world; all that swimming inward causing us to start floating outward, to sit down with and stand up for whoever is most marginalized; living our lives in ever-widening circles of love.

If we give ourselves to that kind of life and love, who can say how much we might grow and change by this time next year? Where there’s life, there’s hope. Thanks be to God that for us, like the tree in the parable, there is always next year.

Until, of course, there isn’t.

Amen.

Nevertheless

Psalm 27, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 13th, 2022 · Duration 9:20

“Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.â€

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I cannot hear those words from today’s psalm without thinking of the people of Ukraine, and how those words might land on their ears, on this Sunday, “Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident;†words which rise from a psalm so wide- ranging in its emotions that some scholars of the Hebrew Bible believe it must once have been two separate psalms which were later merged into one; verses one through six, mostly trust and confidence, verses seven through twelve, largely uncertainty and fear; causing some to say that Psalm 27 cannot always have been only one song.

But, I say “Why not?†Why shouldn’t one psalm be home to so much trust and so much fear? Aren’t most lives? I sometimes feel every ounce of everything in every corner of Psalm 27, all in a single day; hope and fear, joy and pain, uncertainty and trust; Psalm 27, with all its hope and all its fear, the soundtrack of my life. (And, perhaps, of yours, as well.)

All of which calls to mind, for me, that passage in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Lila, in which the old preacher, John Ames, says to Lila, “Life on earth is difficult, grave and marvelous. Our experiences are so fragmentary, so much sorrow and so much joy, that sometimes it is hard to believe that the joy and the sorrow are parts of the same life.â€

Such is the nature of life for many of us; so much worry and trust, doubt and hope, confidence in God and anxiety about life; not unlike Psalm 27, with all its hope and fear, fear and hope.

For the two million Ukrainians who are now refugees, and the forty-two million who remain in harm’s way, for the one who wrote Psalm 27, and for all of us who read it, Psalm 27 speaks to us of a nevertheless kind of hope: Even when life is frightening, devastating, exhausting and hard, nevertheless we trust that God is with us and for us to hold us and help us. Even when we are immobilized by uncertainty and crushed by tragedy, even when we are weary from getting up every day of our lives to face the same fears and fear the same faces, even when we are surprised and angry at the way our life has turned out, nevertheless, we trust God to hold us and help us, seeing us through what we did not get to go around.

And, not because we are upbeat, positive thinkers. I cannot speak for you, but life long ago bruised all that sunny-side-of-the street optimism off of me. No, this is something else; something I call “hard hope.†As in, “the deeper the pain, the harder the hope;†that kind of hard hope which stares with clear-eyed realism into all the worst that life can bring; guilt, shame, bitterness, resentment, disappointment, despair, uncertainty and fear, and says, “My life may be a struggling brokenness, but it’s also a living, breathing nevertheless, because I know that the God who is with us and for us is the God who has a long history of wringing whatever good can be wrung from the hardest and worst that life can bring, the God who can’t not take what looks like the end of everything good and, nevertheless, turn it into the edge of something new.â€

Amen.

On Mortality and Opportunity

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-13, The First Sunday in Lent

Major Treadway · March 6th, 2022 · Duration 25:22

The season of Lent, which stretches from Ash Wednesday until Good Friday, is bounded by practices which bring us directly into contact with human mortality. Just Wednesday, we gathered here in this space where we encountered the words from Genesis 3:19, “you are dust and to dust you shall return” as ashes were made into the sign of the cross on our foreheads. The words and the symbol, either by itself is enough to call to mind the limits of this life, together even more so.

The season of Lent ends with the remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion. On Good Friday, we will, once again, gather in this space and remember the day that Jesus was executed. We will remove from this space all of the ornamentation and symbols that add to life of our worship until all that remains is the light of the Christ candle. And at the end, even that light will be extinguished.

We begin Lent with a reminder of our mortality and we end with Jesus, the light of the world, having experienced his mortality. In between we have a season of penitence and preparation.

In some circles, including ones in which I have occasionally found myself, Lent has been reduced to some form of the question, “What did you give up for Lent?” – with the expected response being some small excess that has become more normal than maybe it should have, something like chocolate or coffee. Lent becomes a diet or self-help exercise.

I don’t know about for you, but for me, when the ashes are being made into the sign of the cross on my forehead, with just enough of the residue falling to obscure my vision momentarily while the pastor says the words “you are dust and to dust you shall return,” moments of my life flash through my memory. With my memories, my plans for the rest of the day and for the days ahead come into my mind. I think about those memories and plans through a new lens, through the lens provided by the ashes now on my head and settling on my eyebrows and nose. And I am left to wonder in that moment, and the moments that follow, what this Lent might hold for me.

The Lenten journey is one of forty days, of course to get to forty days, you have to use the kind of math that only pastors and fishermen have fully mastered, for there are 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. So, officially Lenten fasts allow for the six Sundays of Lent to be mini-Easters and a rest. For those of you who may not count like pastors, you may be comforted to known that there are 40 days from today until Good Friday.

The number forty is significant in the Bible. In today’s Gospel reading, we encounter this number with Jesus being led into the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. Also in the Old Testament lesson for today, we encounter the number forty, though it’s not mentioned explicitly. The whole book of Deuteronomy is a collection of the words of Moses to the Israelites at the end of their journey in the wilderness from Egypt to the land flowing with milk and honey – a journey which famously took forty years.

In both stories, the focus is on the end of the journey. The Israelites just across the river from the promised land with Moses instructing them on what they will offer to God. Jesus, enduring three final temptations. Also in each case, the end of their journey is the beginning of a new journey. Israel preparing to begin their new life in a land that they will claim as their own. Jesus preparing to begin his public ministry. Endings and beginnings. Forty days and forty years.

What opportunity might there be within these next forty days for us?

Faced with our mortality, we have decisions to make. Namely, are we living the life God would have us live? What are the excesses in our lives that keep us from experiencing all that God has for us? What are the things that are missing that are keeping us from experiencing all that God has for us? How are we using what remains of this life to live the abundant life which Jesus has made available? How are we using what remains of this life to enable others to live the abundant life?

These are heavy and important questions. Any one of these could easily fill the time for a sermon, or even a serious forty day meditation. Maybe thinking of the end of the journey is helpful in this way. Not dissimilar to the way that thinking of the end of our lives can help to crystalize our thoughts about the life that we are living, thinking of the end of the journey can help us think about the direction we are going.

Some people think of the end as a goal to strive to meet. Some people think of the end as the destination of a journey. Either of these are helpful in thinking about how what we do now matters in the end.

James Clear suggests that one of the most effective ways to form new habits is to imagine the type of person you want to be and then to ask yourself, “what would that type of person do in this situation?”

How would a people brought out of generational slavery into a land they could possess as their own show their gratitude? Perhaps, by offering the first fruits of their harvest as an offering of thanksgiving and retelling the story of their salvation.

How would Jesus, the would-be Messiah, respond to offers of things that he wanted but might conflict with the message he would soon begin preaching? Perhaps, by reminding himself of who he was and who he was to be.

Perhaps, there is something for us there too. Who is it that you want to be in 40 days? What kind of person do you want to be in the Kingdom of God in 40 days? Think about it. What does that person do? How does that person talk? How does that person spend their money? With whom does that person spend their time? Once you know who that person is, once you know who you want to be at the end of this Lenten journey, then making decisions about what kinds of new (or renewed) practices are needed in your life becomes easier and more meaningful than considering whether to give up chocolate or coffee for Lent.

I wonder too, if this Lenten season should not also offer just such an opportunity for the community of faith that is Northminster Baptist Church. I wonder if the same types of questions could be helpful for us as a community. Who is it that we want to be in 40 days, or maybe like the Israelites in 40 years? What kind of church do we want to be in the Kingdom of God then? By what do we want to be known? What does that church do? What does that church not do? As we travel the purple path of Lent for these next 40 days, what are the new (or renewed) practices that are needed in the life of our community to enable us to embody that reality?

The season of Lent begins with ashes and a reminder that we are only dust and that one day will be our last day. This annual reminder of our mortality provides us tremendous opportunity to recalibrate our direction. To rethink the end of our journey and examine our present.

Perhaps this is the posture of lent. The eyes of our hearts focused on God, mindful of the end, that we might live the abundant life in our present.

Amen.

 

Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

Luke 9:28-36 (37-43a), Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff · February 27th, 2022 · Duration 10:06

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon - Luke Williams

Youth Sunday, The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

Luke Williams · February 20th, 2022 · Duration 7:11

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon - Caroline Crisler

Youth Sunday, The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

Caroline Crisler · February 20th, 2022 · Duration 5:08

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Sermon on the Plain

Luke 6:17-26, The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 13th, 2022 · Duration 15:56

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Now That This Has Touched Our Lips

Isaiah 6:1-8, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 6th, 2022 · Duration 7:30

“Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”  With those words from today’s first lesson, Isaiah confesses the sin he assigns to what he calls his “unclean lips.”  After which, Isaiah reports that, in response to his confession, One of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar...The seraph touched my mouth with the live coal and said, “Now that this has touched your lips your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 

Needless to say, none of that was written to us or about us.  However, that phrase the seraph said to Isaiah, “Now that this has touched your lips,” is one I have found helpful to repeat, silently, on Communion Sundays, a practice I would like to share with you, in the hope that you, too, might find it to be a helpful spiritual practice.

Here is how it works.  Often, when I eat the bread and drink the cup of Communion, I ask myself a version of what the seraph said to Isaiah, concerning the coal, when the seraph said, “Now that this has touched your lips.”  Concerning the bread, I will ask myself, “Now that the body of Christ has touched my lips, how should I speak?”  And, concerning the cup; “Now that the blood of Christ has touched my lips, what can I talk about, laugh at, repeat, tease, tell or say?”, the Holy Communion which comes into our mouth guiding and governing the conversation which goes out of our mouth.  “Can I repeat rumors with the same mouth which has eaten the body of Christ?  Can I continue to be relentlessly sarcastic with the same mouth which has tasted the blood of Christ?  Can I speak in ways that are manipulative, controlling, insensitive and unkind with the same mouth which has chewed this bread and sipped that cup?”

Needless to say, this spiritual practice, like all spiritual practices, is not magic.  But, in my experience, practiced faithfully enough for long enough, it can help us to slow down, remember who we are, and speak in ways that are more thoughtful, mindful, gentle and kind.

The problem, of course, is that our friends will expect us to continue to post, tweet, text and talk the same as we always have, and, when we decline to join in the usual banter and gossip at the expense of others, they may ask, concerning our newly careful speech, “What’s wrong?”  To which we might say, “Oh, nothing.  Nothing’s wrong.  It’s just that we had Communion at church on Sunday, and, now that the bread and cup of Communion have touched my lips, my lips are no longer free to say just anything and everything.”

Amen. 

Love Never Ends

I Corinthians 13:1-13, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 30th, 2022 · Duration 11:53

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

One Body, Many Members

I Corinthians 12:12-31, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 23rd, 2022 · Duration 5:57

“The body does not consist of one member, but of many...If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

Those words from today’s epistle lesson never fail to call to mind, for me, that powerful observation of Stanley Hauerwas’ that, in the face of life’s hardest struggles and greatest losses, what we need is not an answer capable of explaining our grief, but a community capable of absorbing our grief; another way of saying that, in the body of Christ, if one member suffers, all suffer together; the church into which we just plunged Lucy Elfert, an outpost of the globe-circling, centuries-spanning, body of Christ, where, when any member suffers, all members suffer together.

 All of which I cannot think of without remembering Mary Oliver’s testimony, “That time I said I could not go any deeper into grief without dying, I did go deeper, but I did not die.  Surely,” she concluded, “God had a hand in this, as well as friends;” the God and the friends which so many of us have found in the church; the body of Christ, where, when one member suffers, all the members suffer together; a community capable of absorbing one another’s grief and carrying, together, one another’s heaviest and hardest burdens.

Sort of like that old story about the time someone said to William Sloane Coffin, “The church is just a crutch,” to which Coffin replied, “Yes. The church is a crutch.  And what makes you think you aren’t limping?”

To which I always add, “If the church is a crutch, I’ll take two.”

 Amen.

Concerning the Water-to-Wine Sign

John 2:1-11, The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 16th, 2022 · Duration 10:56

Despite the fact that an abundance of wine can cause so much sorrow and pain, an abundance of wine, in the Bible, most often serves as a symbol of joy; as in Isaiah, chapter twenty-five, verse six; Joel, chapter three, verse eighteen; and Amos, chapter nine, verse thirteen; all places where an abundance of wine serves as a sign of joy, which is why so many see the water-to-wine miracle in this morning’s lesson from John as a beautiful sign of surprising joy.

Watch the movement in the story. Verse three says, When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.†But then, at the end, there is so much wine, and wine so fine, that the wedding planner declares, “You have saved the best for last.†From no wine at the start of the story to the most and best wine imaginable at the end, the water-to-wine sign, perhaps a promise of joy to come.

And when did this happen? When did the water-to-wine sign happen? Go back to the first verse of today’s lesson from John and see that it says, “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana.†The third day; which, as you will remember from your own life with the Bible, is the Bible’s name for what we now call “Easter.†Ten times in the four gospels, the day God raised Jesus from the grave is called “the third day;†which is the way today’s gospel lesson describes the day of the water-to-wine sign; “the third day,†the day which started with the wine running out, and ended with the wine running over, not unlike the third day when God raised Jesus from the grave, the day when, as Carlyle Marney used to say, “God took what looked like the end of everything good and turned it into the edge of something new;†the deepest joy somehow rising from the deepest pain.

Joy and pain, pain and joy. Isn’t it a wonder how much of each can live in the same life? The same life which starts out as a sea of joy, punctuated by occasional islands of pain, becoming, at some point, a sea of pain punctuated by occasional islands of joy.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila, the old preacher, John Ames, says, “Life on earth is difficult, grave and marvelous. Joy and loss exist in the same life, and each must be recognized for what each is. Our experience is fragmentary,†he continues, “The joy parts and the sorrow parts don’t add up. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are even parts of the same life...Joy can be joy, and sorrow can be sorrow,†he concludes, “With neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.â€

Or, as Mrs. Soames says in Act III of Our Town, looking back across her life from the land of the dead, “My, wasn’t life awful. And wonderful.â€

Indeed. Sometimes the wine runs out, sometimes the wine runs over. Pain and joy. Joy and pain. Both of which we all will know some of in this life.

There is a lot of pain in this life, which is why it is so important for us to be kind, gentle, thoughtful, careful, forgiving and patient with ourselves, and one another, until the time when our pain turns, at last, to joy, and we, at last, are heard to say with the wedding planner in today’s gospel lesson, “Jesus, you have saved the best for last.â€

Or, as one wise soul once said, “Things will not always hurt the way they do now.â€
Amen.

Concerning the Mystery of God's Will

Ephesians 1:3-14, The Second Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · January 2nd, 2022 · Duration 7:05

This Thursday, January 6, will be, for the church throughout the world, the day which has been known, since the fourth century, as “Epiphany”; the day the church celebrates the arrival of those gift-bearing strangers who came from afar by the light of a star; their visit, a sign that the Jewish child, Jesus, was God’s gift to all the world, even the most far-flung Gentiles from the most unknown lands; the universal embrace of God, embodied in those whom we have come to call “the Magi.”

A universal embrace of grace which travels, also, in today’s epistle lesson, where the writer of Ephesians says that, “God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will; a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ; things in heaven and things on earth,” words which belong to a deep, wide stream in scripture, including Colossians 1:20, “Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to God’s self all things on earth and in heaven; I Timothy 2:4, “It is God’s will for all to be saved,” Titus 2:11, “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all,” and I Peter 3:9, “God wants all persons to come to repentance,” verses which leave no doubt that the ultimate will of God is the eternal welcome of all, what Acts 3:21 calls, “The universal restoration.”  Concerning that, there is no mystery.  The only mystery is whether or not God’s will will be done. 

The Bible’s most expansive verses all point to the beautiful truth that the ultimate and eternal will and plan of God is what the writer of the Revelation glimpsed when the writer of the Revelation wrote that “Every creature, in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea will someday sing together, forever, around the throne of God,” or, as this morning’s epistle lesson says, “God has made known the mystery of God’s will; a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ.”

There is no mystery concerning what God wants.  The only mystery is whether or not God will ever get what God wants.  We pray each week for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.  But, if all are not ultimately reconciled and redeemed, healed and home, then God’s will will never be done, not only on earth, but, also, not even in, of all places, heaven.

I have friends who are dear and devoted Christians who believe that everything which happens in this life is part of “God’s plan,” assigning everything from a convenient parking space to a good business deal to the will of God, but who cannot bear the thought that the ultimate and eternal will of God will be done in the next life, because that would mean the eventual salvation of all.

But, the eventual salvation of all, no matter how long it takes, is clearly the will and plan of God, which may be why the early church theologian Origen said, “Christ remains on the cross as long as one sinner remains in hell.”  God has all the time in the world for the ultimate, eventual, eternal fulfillment of the will and plan of God. 

I cannot speak for you, but as for me, I believe that eventually, ultimately, eternally, no matter how long it takes, God will get what God wants, because I believe that this is God’s world, and that, in God’s world, God gets the last word.  And, if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good; for every soul God ever loved, which is every soul who ever lived.  Because, in God’s world, all is not fully well for anyone until all is finally well for everyone.                                                                                                                                          

                               Amen.

Thank you, Beth Israel

Luke 2:41-52, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · December 26th, 2021 · Duration 11:38

It seems like only yesterday that Jesus was a helpless baby in Bethlehem.  But, in this morning’s lesson from Luke, Jesus is already old enough to wander away from Mary and Joseph when they take him to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover; one of several passages in the opening chapters of Luke which underscore the fact that Jesus belonged to Judaism.

Luke 2:22 says that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to Jerusalem to dedicate Jesus to God, according to the Law of Moses.  Luke 2:24 says that they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the Law.  Luke 2:27 says that Joseph and Mary did for Jesus what was customary under the Law, and Luke 2:39 says that Mary and Joseph did not leave Jerusalem until they had done for Jesus everything required by the Law.  Then comes today’s gospel lesson, when Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Passover, after which, in Luke chapter four, Jesus preaches his first sermon, in the synagogue on the Sabbath.

All of which is to say that Luke’s gospel works overtime to be certain that no one can miss the Jewishness of Jesus.  Jesus belonged to Judaism, and almost all of Jesus’ first followers did, too; the church, which eventually became separate from Judaism, originally belonging to Judaism, the church birthed within the synagogue.

Which is what makes Northminster such a fortunate congregation, to have once been housed, before we had a home of our own, at Beth Israel.  All churches were birthed, theologically and historically, in the synagogue, but our church was birthed, literally and actually, in a synagogue.  When Northminster was first being formed, one of our founders, Leland Speed, approached his friend, Maurice Joseph, a member of Beth Israel, to ask if Northminster could rent Beth Israel’s sanctuary on Sundays, to which Mr. Joseph replied, “No.  We will not rent our space to you.  But we will give it to you.”

Thus began a beautiful friendship between our two congregations.  We are happy today to have with us Rabbi Rossen from Beth Israel, along with several congregants; glad to be able to say “Thank you, Beth Israel,” for giving us a home when we were without a place of our own. 

The world needs the witness of friendship between people of all faiths; Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Jews.  Sadly, one of the biggest obstacles to interfaith friendship has been Christian onlyism; Christianity’s claim to be the only religion God recognizes or believes in, as though the God who created the world thirteen billion years ago could be captured inside a two thousand year old religion.

Christians have often turned to John 14:6 to support Christian onlyism, the passage where Jesus is reported to have said that “No one comes to the Father except through me,” popular Christianity interpreting, “No one comes to the Father except through me” to mean, “No one gets to God except through Christianity.”  But, if we were going to assign a religion to those words, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” that religion would be not Christianity, but Judaism, because the one who is reported to have said those words was not a Christian, but a Jew.

So, thank you Beth Israel, not only for giving us a place to meet all those years ago, but, also, for giving us Jesus; not to mention Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, King David and Queen Esther, Psalm 23 and Psalm 121.

And, thank you, also, for that Hebrew scripture passage we Christians read every Easter, Isaiah 25:6-9, which says that, someday, the Lord will make a great feast for all people; and the whole human family, all of us, will eat and drink and rejoice together forever; words which we borrowed from you, and believe with you. 

                                                                                                         Amen.

                       

Luke's Jesus

The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Luke 1:39-55

Chuck Poole · December 19th, 2021 · Duration 6:21

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Lessons and Carols

Lessons and Carols, The Third Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 12th, 2021 · Duration 72:06

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

On Holding One Another in Our Hearts

Philippians 1:3-11, The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 5th, 2021 · Duration 6:16

“I thank my God every time I remember you...And it is right for me to think this way about you, because you hold me in your heart.†Every three years, on the second Sunday of Advent, the lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words from this morning’s epistle lesson; Paul’s gratitude to the Philippians for “holding Paul in their hearts.â€

At least, that is what some Bible translations say. But, other translations interpret that same verse to say, not that the Philippians are holding Paul in their hearts, but that Paul is holding the Philippians in his heart; Bible scholars divided on what the ancient text intended. Was it Paul who was holding the Philippians in Paul’s heart, or the Philippians who were holding Paul in their hearts?

All of which may be a problem for Bible translators, but not for us. For us, to leave open the possibility that Paul is holding the Philippians in Paul’s heart and the Philippians are holding Paul in their hearts sounds exactly the way life works in the family of faith; everyone holding everyone in our hearts, which is just another way of saying that we are thinking about one another, praying for one another, and walking with one another; all of that, and more, traveling in that single, simple, beautiful phrase, “holding one another in our heartsâ€

There is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life. None of us will go through all of them, but all of us will go through some of them, and for us to say to one another that we are holding one another in our hearts may be the most tender and beautiful way we have to give a voice to our solidarity with, and love for, one another.

In my most Spirit-filled moments, I sometimes even let myself wonder if holding one another in our hearts might extend beyond this life, over to the Other Side; we, who are still here, holding in our hearts those who have died, and, dare we say it, they holding us in theirs; all of us who are still here, coming to the table; all of those who are already over on the Other Side, with us at the table; everyone holding everyone in our hearts.

All of us giving courage to, and drawing strength from, one another; calling forth that which is deepest and best in one another, all of which, and even more, which we have not the words to say, traveling in that single, simple, beautiful phrase, which all of us should add, today, to the lexicon of our lives, “I am holding you in my heart.â€

Amen.

On Staying Ready for the Last Day

Luke 21:25-36, The First Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · November 28th, 2021 · Duration 16:18

As you may have noticed, Advent always begins at the end. In the perpetually repeated three year cycle of the Common Lectionary, the first Sunday of Advent always asks us to read one of those urgent sounding gospel lessons which call on the people of God to wake up, and get ready, because the end of time is near; Advent, always beginning with the second coming of Christ, before working its way, week by week, wick by wick, back to the first coming, just in time for Christmas.

Last year, on the first Sunday of Advent, it was Mark’s urgent alarm, “Keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come.†Next year, it will be Matthew: “You must stay ready, for the Son of Man will come at an unexpected hour.†And, this year, it is the passage we read a few moments ago, from Luke; “Be on guard, so that that day does not catch you unexpectedly.â€

Whatever those words of warning may have meant to those who first heard them, they have become, for the church throughout the world, Advent’s annual urging for us to wake up, and stay ready; our annual Advent reminder to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can, because we do not have forever. Someday is going to be the last day, because even if Christ does not come, we will go.

To wake up to that truth is not morbid or depressing. To the contrary, there is, in my experience, nothing more life-giving than finally coming to see that someday is going the last day. And, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time. As far as we know, this is it. To finally come to see that truth at the center of our soul can be to finally, actually decide to live whatever is left of our lives as though someday really is going to be the last day; paying attention to people and moments, looking until we see, and listening until we hear; growing and changing in ever-widening circles of welcome and love, letting the love of God which has come down to us go out through us; sitting down with and standing up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for, because we know that all cannot be fully well for anyone until all is finally well for everyone; living whatever is left of our lives that way each day until the last day.

Amen.

Truth, Power and Kingship

John 18:33-37, Christ the King Sunday

Major Treadway · November 21st, 2021 · Duration 15:17

Today’s gospel lesson seems a somewhat strange reading on a Sunday when the sanctuary is draped with white paraments. When I think about the Sundays of the year when we worship with white paraments, the occasions which our bulletins tell us “magnify the person and work of Jesus,†I think of Christmas and Christmastide, Epiphany, Transfiguration Sunday, Easter and Eastertide, Trinity Sunday and All Saints Sunday. I guess it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that we would celebrate Christ the King Sunday with the white paraments.

Yet, there is something a bit odd about celebrating Christ’s kingship by reading of his interrogation following his arrest. Jesus has had a very long night. He was betrayed by one of his inner circle, while being arrested there was the incident with Malchus’ ear which, Luke’s gospel tells us, needed some quick messianic surgery, Jesus is questioned by Annas, father-in-law of the high priest, by Caiaphas, the high priest, and then taken to Pilate, though those who took him would not enter Pilate’s headquarters because to do so would mean that they would not be able to eat the coming Passover meal. Pilate tries not to take Jesus into his custody, but eventually calls him in to be questioned.

And then, here we are, Christ the King Sunday, sometimes called Reign of Christ Sunday. Jesus, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings being carted around from one would-be judge to another. People angry and unsettled enough with Jesus that they want him punished and killed, but they don’t want to be the ones to do it themselves.

Finally, with Pilate, we get some questions and answers. Pilate asks Jesus “What have you done?†Jesus responds, “my kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.†Pilate pounces, “So you are a king?â€

At this point, for Jesus to claim to be a king would be to place himself legally at odds with the ruling government. But Jesus does not agree. Instead, he responds, “You say that I am a King.†Something which Pilate could never say, lest he lose his position, and likely his life. Then Jesus says something very interesting.

Jesus says: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.â€

In this short exchange, Jesus, the unacknowledged king, verbally and nonverbally, acknowledges the power dynamics at play in his situation, and then sidesteps them to call upon those hearing him, then and now, to recognize a different power structure – one that begins with telling the truth.

These words from Jesus were so threatening and confusing to Pilate, the person with the most power, that the verse that follows this morning’s lesson records Pilate asking, “what is truth?†Then, he moves on to distance himself from offering a judgement over Jesus.

I wonder if Pilate’s confusion came from being in the presence of someone who so clearly saw the world as it was, that the power Pilate had accumulated and the lies that were its foundation failed to manifest in Jesus’s presence and Pilate didn’t know what to do.

Truth is like that. It has the capacity to disrupt and destabilize. Oscar Romero is said to have attributed the underdevelopment of his home country of El Salvador to the “institutionalization of intolerance to truth.â€

Can you imagine saying that about a whole society, that its underdevelopment was the result of an intolerance to truth that has become so normal and expected that it becomes the foundation upon which injustice is built?

Come to think of it. Maybe that’s not so hard to believe after all. We barely expect the people charged with leading local, state, and national governments to tell the truth. There are organizations that turn a profit from rating politicians’ statements on a range of untruth from 1-4 Pinocchios or from true to pants-on-fire.

Perhaps, worse are the lies that we hear a little closer to home, from friends, teachers, or colleagues at work.

Worst of all, are the lies we tell ourselves. Some of them seem innocent enough, I’ll have enough time if I just press “snooze†one more time. Some seem to hurt only ourselves: “5 mph over the limit isn’t really speeding.†And then there are others that have a veneer of truth, but to scratch the surface is to see the truth beneath: “hard work is the key to success.â€

I know all of these to lack the fullness of truth. The snooze button has led to far too many tardies (not to mention broken roommate relationships). A cursory look at traffic laws will indicate that any speed over the posted limit, is speeding. And there are too many people working multiple jobs while living in poverty for hard work to be the key to success.

And Jesus said: “I came into this world to testify to the truth.â€

Yes, truth has the capacity to be uncomfortable and disruptive. If truth can be uncomfortable and disruptive with just these few things, I wonder if that means if we have some of that intolerance to truth Romero referenced.

The truth that got Jesus in so much trouble though, was not the stuff about alarm clocks and riding a donkey over the speed limit. With Jesus, it was a resistance to systems of power that were built on an intolerance to truth.

Jesus recognized God as the true source of power. It was God who created the earth. It was God who breathed life into dirt and called that breath filled dirt humanity. It was God who caused the whole earth to flood and made a century old couple parents. It was God who spoke to Moses in a burning bush, and led the Israelites through the red sea on dry land. It was God who held that kind of power – the power to create and destroy, the power to make and bend the very laws of nature.

Holding to that knowledge, what kind of power did Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate have?

They only had the kind of power which humans agree to give to a person, or more often to keep from a person. Leadership is this way. As long as people agree to follow, the leader has a limited amount of power. Sometimes a board gives power to a leader, a CEO or Executive Director. If the leader loses the board’s confidence, then the leader stands to lose the power that had been given.

This very human power that Pilate and the others possessed was pressed when Jesus said to Pilate, “you say that I am a King.†To put those words on Pilate’s lips threatened Pilate’s power.

Jesus knew the truth about power. Human power fades. It does not last. It can change hands quickly. Jesus also had to have known that human power has limits in terms of what it can do to a human. Humans have found ever increasingly cruel ways to exert power over other humans: slavery, torture, trafficking, terrorism, and more; and all that before just taking a person’s life. Not to diminish the horror of any of those things – but that’s about the extent of human power wielded negatively.

Meanwhile, what kind of power does God have? God has the power to create from nothing, and presumably to make nothing out of creation. Whereas human power is power given, there is nothing to suggest that humans are capable of giving God power. Jesus knew about both of these types of power when he was brought to Pilate.

And Jesus said: “I came into this world to testify to the truth.â€

And the truth that Jesus must have seen in his interrogation by Pilate is that Pilate’s power paled in comparison to the Kingdom of God. That even if Pilate should execute Jesus, the Kingdom of God would remain. And if we keep reading, that’s just what happened. Pilate and the mob clamored for Jesus to be executed, even though he was found not guilty.

Jesus had not broken any of the ten commandments. He had not broken any Roman laws. But he had threatened the power of those in leadership, by telling the truth. Jesus worked to extend the Kingship of God by telling the truth.

What does the kingship of Christ require of us? Well, Jesus offered us a glimpse of that in this passage as well.

Jesus says: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.â€

What does it mean for us that we belong to the truth?

Romero’s words about El Salvador could have been said about the United States – that there is an institutionalization of intolerance to truth. From the information we read, hear, and watch to the words we think, speak, and write.

Perhaps one place to start belonging to truth is with ourselves. Leaning into the power of God, rather than the power of humans, might mean that we try harder to always tell the truth. Some might call that using careful speech. It may sound like a small thing, but like so many lessons we learn in life, until we learn the small things, until we master the basics, until we are fluent in the fundamentals, we will never be able to move on to the more complex things. We must first learn to speak true words before we can effectively uncover truths that are external to ourselves.

Belonging to the truth also requires us to develop a sense of curiosity that is not satisfied with an answer just because it sounds like what we want to believe is true; but presses further and deeper until all that remains is truth.

Jesus understood well the truth of power, who had it and what kind they had; and he understood the power of truth and just how disruptive and destabilizing it can be.

And with all of this knowledge, Jesus said: “I came into this world to testify to the truth.â€

Amen.

Concerning Money and the Church

Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25, The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 14th, 2021 · Duration 14:39

As you may have noticed, this morning’s epistle lesson encouraged us to “provoke one another to love and good works,†the ancient writer’s way of saying that we should challenge, stretch, beckon and bother one another to do our best and be our best, what the writer of the book of Hebrews calls, “provoking one another to love and good works.â€

Which is not a bad verse of scripture for Stewardship Sermon Sunday at Northminster; an annual autumn effort at asking us to do our best to give our most, something which, even after all these years, has never stopped feeling awkward to me, partly because of my never ending struggle to reconcile the needs of the institutional church with the Jesus of the four gospels, who did not share our North American assumptions about what churches should own, have, look like, and offer. So, it’s awkward, trying to involve Jesus in our words about how much money we need to maintain and sustain church as we know church and do church.

Not to mention the awkwardness of asking people who are already giving so much to give even more. Have you ever thought about all the ministries and institutions, helping agencies, schools, universities and hospitals which depend on Northminster members for financial support? As someone who grew up in a household where my parents were barely getting by, living payday to payday, I don’t have a good sense of how much more people have available to give, so I find it awkward to ask people who are already giving so much to give some more; especially when me and mine are among the beneficiaries of the budget I am asking you to support.

But, awkward or not, we need to do a better job, I need to a better job, of asking for the money the church needs. For example, we need a new roof here at Northminster. All of the estimates we have received indicate that the only thing harder than saying cedar shake shingles is paying for cedar shake shingles; about $500,000 to re-roof our church buildings, not counting another few hundred thousand dollars to repair and replace all of our church’s external wood trim. I’ve been wondering for months if someone in our congregation might want to fund a part of that, or all of that, for the church; a generationally important gift, enormously helpful to the church for her next fifty years.

Aside from those really big one-time facility needs, there is the annual, perpetual need for us to give generously to the budget of the church, to support the day to day life of the church.

I sometimes hear people say that it is “more exciting†to give to a specific cause than to a general budget which pays light bills and salaries. Plus, we now live in a post-institutional world, when many people no longer find as much meaning as they once did in supporting the work of the institutional church.

All of that I understand. But, honestly, the most exciting giving Marcia and I do is the financial support we give to the budget of Northminster Baptist Church. Look, for example, at these children and their chaperones, home from their annual autumn retreat, seated here together, in their wonderful new “Growing Together†retreat t-shirts. And, last week, it was the Youth Group, on their annual autumn retreat. Our children have spent this weekend learning the family stories in Genesis, from Abraham through Joseph. Our youth spent last weekend studying the theology and practice of prayer. Who is not excited about paying for that? What could we possibly be more excited about than giving as much as we can, year after year, to a church budget which undergirds that kind of spiritual formation; serious theology being taught to our children, youth and adults, within these walls, which equips us all to live lives of courage and kindness, empathy and integrity, beyond these walls; this church, forming us into the kind of people who get up every morning and go out into the world to let the love of God which has come down to us go out through us. I want to help pay the bills which make the lights come on in all the Northminster spaces where those kinds of lights come on in all our lives.

Northminster, like all churches, has its limits, faults, blindspots and flaws. We all know that the same church which fills your heart can bruise your heart. But, Northminster is a strong and true home to many dear and good souls, a church which is serious about, and committed to, what Jesus said matters most; loving God with all that is in us and loving all others the way we want all others to love us. Northminster has been that way from the day we were started, and, if a church can “earn the right†to be supported in the most generous ways of which we are capable, Northminster has.

Northminster would never want any of us to give what we cannot, but Northminster will always need all of us to give what we can. And, then, when we all have given what we can, we all will have given what we should.

Amen.

Concerning the Book of Ruth

Ruth 1:1-18, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 31st, 2021 · Duration 4:49

As you may have noticed, the writer of the book of Ruth does not want us to miss the fact that Ruth is a Moabite.

Five times in the first six verses of today’s lesson from Ruth, the writer of Ruth tells us that Ruth is from Moab, after which, in the remaining three chapters of the book of Ruth, we will hear Ruth identified as “a Moabite” five more times; the writer of the book of Ruth making certain that no one misses the point that Ruth is a Moabite.

Which might not matter so much were it not for the fact that, back in the book of Deuteronomy, Moabites were declared off-limits, perpetually excluded from the  family of God, Deuteronomy 23:6 going so far as to prohibit the people of God from ever welcoming any Moabite; a prohibition which the book of Ruth completely sets aside, even going so far as to name “Ruth the Moabite” an ancestor of King David, thereby erasing the Bible’s earlier exclusion of Moabites from the family of God; the Bible, itself, growing, before our eyes, from the exclusion of Moabites in Deuteronomy to the inclusion of Moabites in the book of Ruth; the book of Ruth, reaching past the place where the book of Deuteronomy told the people of God to stop. 

All of which is a small sign of the way life moves when we are walking in the Spirit, the circumference of our embrace growing and changing until it matches the size of the circle of the boundless welcome around God; all of us walking prayerfully in the Spirit until we  grow so near to God that we can never again, for as long as we live, be glad about any exclusion God is sad about, or sad about any inclusion God is glad about, because the deeper we grow in our life with God, the wider we grow in our    welcome of all.

When our time together is done, if you remember only one thing from our many years together, let it be that:  The deeper we grow in our life with God, the wider we grow in our welcome, embrace and love of all.  

Amen.

 

 

Concerning the Ending of Job’s Story

Job 42:1-6, 10-17, The Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 24th, 2021 · Duration 13:35

“And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, and gave Job twice as much as Job had before.”  Every time the lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words from the end of the book of Job, they call to mind, for me, that beautiful old sentence, “Things will not always hurt the way they do now.”

Which, perhaps, was the case for Job.  Once Job made it as far as this morning’s passage; his sores healed, his fortunes restored, and his new children born, perhaps things did not hurt as deeply as they did back in chapters one and two, when so much pain and loss broke Job’s heart, and crushed Job’s spirit.

Perhaps, by the time we make it to the end of the story, things do not hurt, for Job, the way they once did.  Perhaps.  But, who can say for sure?  After all, the children Job loved and lost, back at the beginning of the book of Job, would never, for Job, be less lost or less loved.  So, who can say how much of Job’s pain has settled and eased by the time we read today’s happy ending; Job, emerging from his long struggle, with what today’s lesson calls “twice as much.”

A happy ending to a sad story, but a happy ending with which we must take great care, lest the church create the “sunny of the street” expectation that the ending to every sad story will be as happy as the last chapter of Job’s story.

Which is not to say that sorrow never leads to something good.  To the contrary, sorrow and loss often lead us to a more thoughtful, mindful, kind and gentle life than ever we might have known without our sorrow or trouble, tragedy or loss; a truth which leads some to say that God sends us trouble to make us better, and that God allows tragedy to break our hearts so we can emerge from the darkness more gentle and kind; all suffering, a part of the plan of God 

You encounter that kind of theology nearly everywhere you turn in our corner of the world, and, while I do not share it, I understand why so many are drawn to it as a way of making sense of life.  I, myself, once embraced that way of thinking.  But, then, it occurred to me, one day, that, to continue to say that all suffering was either sent to us, or allowed for us, in the will and plan of God, would require me to assign unspeakably tragic, violent, sinful things to the will and plan of God, and, for me, that was to sacrifice too much of the goodness and love of God on the altar of the sovereignty and control of God. 

However, while I do not believe that everything which happens is always in God’s plan, I do believe that all of us are always in God’s hands, and that God is always at work in our lives, in joy and in sorrow, to bring us into a deeper, more thoughtful, mindful, kind and gentle way of being in the world; pain and struggle opening us up to God and others in ways which often leave us, like Job, with “twice as much;” not twice as much security or power, comfort or success, but twice as much empathy and understanding, kindness and  compassion.

Rarely has anyone captured that possibility more beautifully than Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem “Kindness,” in which she writes, “Before you can learn the tender gravity of kindness, before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must first know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  You must wake up with sorrow.  You must speak to it until your voice catches the thread of all sorrows, and you see the size of sorrow’s cloth.  Then,” she continues, “It is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day...going with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.”

Pain and sadness can do that in us, and for us.  Because pain is as surgical as surgery is painful, pain and sorrow, struggle and loss can, indeed, open us up that deeply. 

It isn’t guaranteed, of course.  We don’t all always emerge from sorrow twice as thoughtful and gentle, empathetic and kind.  But we can. And, more often than not, we do.  Somehow, the Spirit of God finds a new opening  in our brokenness, and, as Ernest Hemingway once famously said, we become “strong at the broken places;” our own version of Job’s twice-as-much ending; our arms twice as open, our words twice as gentle, our embrace twice as wide, our spirit twice as patient, welcoming, understanding and kind as we were before the sorrow and the pain; emerging from our worst and hardest struggles with what Howard Thurman called “the quiet eyes” of those who have suffered, what Mary Oliver called “the resolute kindness of those who have eaten the dark hours;” twice as much of a person of grace than ever we would have been without the pain; not because God planned or sent our greatest sorrows, but because God holds and carries, with us and for us, our greatest sorrows; wringing whatever good can be wrung from the hardest and worst that life can do; the God who raised Jesus from the grave bringing whatever is best from whatever is worst, until that far off  someday when things will no longer hurt the way they do now.

Amen.

A Sermon on the Subject of God

Job 38:1-7, The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 17th, 2021 · Duration 13:18

Then the Lord answered Job; “Who is this who speaks words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?â€

Those words from today’s lesson from Job are only the beginning of a long speech, from God to Job, in which Job is confronted with mysteries and wonders so unknowable and great that, by the time God’s sermon is finished, Job’s response, in Job chapter forty, is to lay his hand over his mouth, and say, “I have said too much. I have said, about God, more than I know, about God.â€

All of which might help us remember to take great care when we speak of the ways of God, lest we too easily slip over into what the writer of today’s lesson from Job calls “words without knowledge;†saying more about God than we know about God.

Of course, when we are talking about God, it is easy to say more than we know. After all, when the subject is God, there is so much that is so unknowable. As Isaiah 55:8 says, “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts,†not unlike Paul’s question in Romans 11:34, “Who can know the mind of the Lord?â€

But, still, we can’t not try; building entire religious systems around what we think and believe about God. As Barbara Brown Taylor once said, “For at least five thousand years, we have been lowering the leaky buckets of our religions into the deep well of God’s truth;†sometimes even saying, with certainty, that our religion is the only one God believes in and accepts, while, above, and beyond, all the world’s religions, ours included, stands the God who created the universe, perhaps asking of us what God asked of Job, “Who is this who speaks words without knowledge? Where were you when I created the universe?â€

One of the simplest, but most important, epiphanies I have had in my adult life is the revelation that the God who created, roughly thirteen billion years ago, a universe which, apparently, is still expanding, cannot be captured inside anyone’s religion; including ours. And, for any faith to claim a monopoly on the truth about God is to join Job in saying more than we know. All of our religions, important as they are, are only interim arrangements. As Tennyson said, “Our little systems have their day. They have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O Lord, art more than they.â€

So, we have to take great care when it comes to speaking of God. But, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be said about God.

I cannot speak for you, but, because I am a Christian, I believe that the best look we have ever had at God is Jesus; not the only look, but the best look. And, if the best look we have ever had at God is Jesus, and the best look we have ever had at Jesus is the four gospels, then we can know something of the way God is by looking at what the gospels tell us about Jesus.

To read the four gospels is to see that Jesus lived a walls-down, arms-out life of love, intentionally sitting down with. and standing up for, whoever was most marginalized and ostracized, demonized and dehumanized, suffering, struggling, left out and alone, and that Jesus called his followers to live and love with that same wide wingspan. That is how we can say with confidence that, whenever we draw our circle of welcome wider, we are leaning, living and loving in the direction God wants us to lean, live and love, because that is the way Jesus was, and Jesus is the best look we have ever had at God.

I think that is why we feel a deeper spiritual connection to a kind and loving person of another faith than we feel with a harsh and hard person of our own faith, because that of God which we feel between us is not one faith tradition or another, it is love.

“God is love.†I believe that is what we can know about God. Richard Rohr once said, “The mystics know some things,†but you don’t have to be a mystic to know that, because God is love, the closer we grow to God the wider we grow in our love for all persons; you just have to let down your guard and open your life to the work of the Holy Spirit.

The poet Li Young Lee gave us that powerful sentence, “All light is late,†not unlike Paul’s, “We see through a glass darkly.†All of which is true, as far as it goes. But, the rest of the truth is that we have all already seen enough of the truth about God to live lives of empathy and compassion, welcome and justice, kindness and love.

Amen.

Concerning Job’s Wish to Vanish

Job 23:1-9, 16-17, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 10th, 2021 · Duration 0:0

“If only I could vanish into the darkness.”  Every three years, the Common Lectionary places in the path of the church throughout the world those words from the last verse of today’s lesson from the book of Job.  And, every time they roll back around, they present us with one of the Bible’s more vexing translation enigmas; scholars of the Hebrew Bible so conflicted over the original intent of that verse that, while our New Revised Standard Version translates Job 23:17 as, “If only I could vanish into the darkness,” the New International Version translates the same verse, “I will not be overcome by the darkness.”

 As for which way is the best way to translate Job 23:17, who can say?  After all, life can become so difficult, for many of us, that some of us might actually someday say, with Job, “If only I could vanish;” joining Job in his wish to vanish because life is just too painful to live, too hard to face, too heavy to bear. 

Many of us operate on the assumption that everyone gets to live until they have to die.  But, it is important for us to remember that, for some of the children of God, it is the other way around.  They don’t get to live until they have to die, rather, they have to live until they get to die; not unlike Moses, in Numbers chapter eleven, praying to God, “I cannot go on.  If you love me, you will let me die,” or Elijah, in I Kings chapter nineteen, “O Lord, take away my life; I cannot do this anymore,” or Job; so depleted and exhausted by life that he is reported, in some translations of today’s passage, to have prayed, “If only I could vanish into the darkness.”

But, then, there are those other translations which say that what Job really said was not, “If only I could vanish into the darkness,” but “I will not be overcome by the darkness;” an apparently unresolvable Hebrew ambiguity which might, at first, seem to be a problem, but which, upon further reflection, may actually be sort of a perfect convergence of despair and hope, resignation and resolve, for those many souls who find themselves, on the one hand, wishing to vanish into the darkness and, on the other hand, refusing to be overcome by the darkness; our lives captured in the linguistic ambiguity of Job 23:17, where some say Job says, “If only I could vanish into the darkness,” while others say Job says, “I will not vanish into the darkness.” 

 All of which calls to mind, for me, the Irish novelist Samuel Beckett’s anguished lament, “I cannot go on, I will go on.” 

Which is, after all, what we do.  Even when, like Job, we are most certain that we cannot go on, like Job, we do go on; held and carried by the Spirit of God and the people of God, while we carry and hold whatever it is that we must face and bear. 

Held and carried by the Spirit of God and the people of God, we find our way through things so difficult that if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to go through them we would have sworn we could never make it.  But, we do.  We do go through.  And, not only do we go through what we did not get to go around, we come out on the other side, to eat again and sleep again, to laugh again and smile again, to actually even want to be alive again.  Though we may have wished, at one time, with Job, that we could vanish into the darkness, we do emerge, eventually, out into the light.

May it be so.  May it be so.  And may it somehow, someday, be so for everyone in the whole human family.  Because all cannot be fully well for anyone until all is finally well for everyone.

Amen.

On Loving God Unconditionally

Job 1:1, 2:1-10, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 3rd, 2021 · Duration 8:09

Today is the first of four consecutive Sundays when the Common Lectionary will ask the church throughout the world to read passages of scripture from the book of Job; beginning with today's lesson, in which God says to Satan, "Have you noticed my servant Job, how faithful and devoted he is?" to which Satan replies, "Why wouldn't Job love and serve you? You've blessed Job with everything any person could ever hope to have. Take away the blessings, and we'll see what Job is really made of. " A conversation which reaches its culmination when Satan asks, in Job chapter one, verse ten, "Does Job love God for nothing?"

Obviously, Satan assumes the answer is "No, Job does not love God for nothing. Job loves and serves God in exchange for being rewarded and protected." But, after losing all that he holds dear, in the depth of his sorrow, from the depth of his spirit, Job says those words we find at the end of today's lesson, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?", not unlike what Job is reported to have said in Job 2:20, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord;" a kind of love for God which is not tied to the circumstances of our lives; our love for God as unconditional as God's love for us.

Which in my experience, is what keeps us always prayerful and incurably hopeful; our unconditional love for God. If the best outcome for which we pray does not come to pass, we don't give up on God, we just adjust our praying and hoping from the first best thing to the next best thing. And if the next best thing doesn't happen, we don't become disillusioned with God, we just hope and pray for the next next best thing, our prayers chasing our lives even, sometimes, until, as I once heard someone say, "There's nothing left to want."

And, even then, we don't give up and walk away. Even then, still we pray; trusting God to hold us and carry us, as we stumble our way through what we did not get to go around, until there is nothing left to hold onto but the quiet confidence that God is with us and God is for us; which, somehow, is enough; when our love for God is as unconditional as God's love for us.

A beautiful, centered, settled way to live; loving God the way God loves us, unconditionally.

Amen.

Careful Speech Concerning Hell

Mark 9:38-50, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 26th, 2021 · Duration 12:18

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Concerning Psalm One

Psalm 1, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 19th, 2021 · Duration 15:05

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Words Shape Worlds

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, James 3:1-12

Chuck Poole · September 12th, 2021 · Duration 15:50

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On Theology Chasing Friendship

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Mark 7:24-37

Chuck Poole · September 5th, 2021 · Duration 8:38

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Concerning Psalm Eighty-Four

Psalm 84, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 22nd, 2021 · Duration 13:06

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, indeed it faints, for the house of the Lord...One day there is better than a thousand anywhere else.â€

In another one of those occasional convergences of lectionary and life, the Common Lectionary has asked the church throughout the world to read, today, those words, from Psalm 84, concerning the psalmist’ longing for the psalmist’ sanctuary, at the very moment when so many are so longing for the same; children of God throughout the world yearning, in the midst of a long pandemic, for the same sort of gathering about which the psalmist sings in today’s lesson from Psalm 84.

Some say that Psalm 84 is a glad song, sung at the sight of the temple, by excited pilgrims, on their way to the temple. Others say that Psalm 84 is a sad song, sung by homesick souls unable to get to the house of God. Either way, it is a song all of us know by heart because, like the ones who first sang Psalm 84, we, too, long to gather with the people of God at the house of God for the worship of God; never more so than now, when, for so many, the time to return to large gatherings in familiar ways has not yet arrived.

But, though that time is, for many of us, not yet here, someday it will be. And, when it comes, none of us will welcome it more gladly than those of us who have missed it most deeply.

Like the one who wrote this morning’s psalm, we love the sacred space which is our sanctuary. But, for us, it is the gathering, not the building, which matters most. The thing we miss the most is the comfort and courage we draw from one another when we are together; the people who surround us here, calling forth that which is deepest and best in us; the people we see, and the truth we hear, at church, slowly, slowly, transforming our lives.

In one of his poems, Wendell Berry says, “The water, descending in its old groove, wears it new;†the same stream running through the same groove in the same stone, year after year, eventually wearing the old groove to a new depth, which is not unlike what happens across a lifetime in church; the same truth, heard over and over and over again, opening, eventually, a new depth in our lives.

I think, from time to time, about a conversation I had with a college student who grew up in our church, home for the Northminster Christmas Eve service several years ago, telling me about a night when he was hanging out with friends, when the conversation turned to church. Our young person told me that he said, to his friends, “My church back in Jackson changed my life;†to which they said “How?â€, to which our young person said, “They just kept saying, over and over, that since God loves everyone, we should too. And, somehow, hearing that over and over, year after year, sort of changed me.â€

A simple, beautiful example of the sort of thing which happens in church. Rarely all at once or once and for all, but slowly, slowly, little by little, “The water descending in its old groove wears it new;†a lifetime spent in the presence of the kind of people who make us want to be better, helping us, actually, eventually, to become better than ever we would have been, all by ourselves.

But, in order for that to happen, we actually have to be together, which, for many, because of the pandemic, has not been safe to do for a long time, leaving us to say, with the psalmist, “My soul faints, and longs, for the house of the Lord.â€

But, someday it will no longer be that way. Someday, we will be able to gather in the ways we once did, shaping and forming one another’s lives; saying and hearing, over and over, that same old truth, “Since God loves every person, so should we,†until that same old truth is finally heard often enough, long enough to change our lives; the same simple truth, running through the same path in the same heart until, someday, it opens up a new depth in us and, all of a sudden, everything changes. Except it wasn’t all of a sudden. It was a lifetime spent gathering with the people of God for the worship of God.

Which, someday, many of us will again be able, safely and wisely, to do. Until then, each of us will need to be especially mindful and thoughtful, gentle and patient, compassionate and kind; all of us singing, with the psalmist, those familiar old words from this morning’s psalm; Psalm 84, the most perfect song of all for a season such as this, “My soul longs for the house of the Lord...One day there is better than a thousand anywhere else.â€
Indeed.
Amen.

On Making the Most of the Time

Ephesians 5:15-20, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 15th, 2021 · Duration 12:13

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Concerning David and Absalom

II Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 8th, 2021 · Duration 9:47

“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son.â€

Few words in all of scripture are more filled with regret and grief than those words from today’s Old Testament lesson; David’s crushing sadness over Absalom’s tragic death.

The story of David and Absalom is as complex a family story as one can imagine; a parent and a child who end up literally going to war with one another, which makes the story of David and Absalom unlike anything any of us have ever known in our own families.

And yet, there is a dimension of their story with which many ordinary families can identify; which is the mutual helplessness which bound David to Absalom and Absalom to David; David and Absalom, helpless to manage one another’s choices and decisions, but, also, helpless to distance themselves from the pain of one another’s choices and decisions.

As it was for them, so it is for us; for children and their parents, and for parents and their children; as well as for siblings, spouses, and friends; all of us as helpless to manage one another’s lives, and as helpless to distance ourselves from the pain of one another’s lives, as David and Absalom, Absalom and David.

The kind of helpless love which calls to mind that unforgettable sentence of William Blake’s, “We are put on earth for a little space to learn to bear the beams of love;†the beams of love, sometimes as joyful and bright as beams of light, and, other times, as heavy and hard as beams of lumber; the hardest and heaviest of which Jesus carried until those same hard and heavy beams carried Jesus. Jesus, stretched out in vulnerable, helpless love; joining us in the depth of love’s pain and in the pain of love’s depth; the kind of love which lets go of power and control, and is content to be helpless.

Which may be love’s last frontier, the final step along the path to depth, the ultimate work of the Holy Spirit in our lives; to be content to love those we love without needing to hold the levers of control, content to take care of what we can take care of; the kind and truthful life to which today’s epistle lesson calls us when it urges us to be forgiving, tenderhearted, truthful and kind, and beyond that, content to love helplessly.

Amen.

On Speaking the Truth in Love

Ephesians 4:1-16, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 1st, 2021 · Duration 9:39

“I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.â€

Every time the lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words from today’s epistle passage, the lectionary places in our path one of several calls for the unity of the church which we find in the letters attributed to Paul; placing this passage from Ephesians in the same stream with other Pauline passages such as Romans 15:6, “Live in harmony with one another,†I Corinthians 1:10, “I appeal to you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement,†and II Corinthians 13:11-12, “Agree with one another, and greet one another with a holy kiss,†passages of scripture which join today’s lesson from Ephesians chapter four in calling for the family of faith to be of one mind and one spirit.

All of which, needless to say, is harder to live out than to talk about. In fact, the same Paul who is reported to have issued all those calls for unity and agreement is also reported, in the same Bible, to have parted ways with Barnabas over an irreconcilable disagreement in Acts chapter fifteen, and, in Galatians 1:9, to have called those who disagreed with him “accursed,†not to mention Paul’s public rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2:14. Even Paul, who so longed for the unity of the church, knew that, while everyone may be entitled to their own opinion, every opinion is not equally right and true, and that, at some point, the truth must be spoken; spoken in love, but, also, spoken with clarity.

All of which calls to mind, for me, our Northminster founders, who so wonderfully embodied that early Northminster creed, “Agree to differ, resolve to love, unite to serve.†Yet, when they birthed this church, in 1967, while they birthed our church for several reasons, one of those reasons was that they could no longer “unite to serve†in churches which were denying entrance to persons of color at their places of worship; a fifty-four year old example of the timeless truth that spiritual agreement ends where human exclusion begins, a local example of the global complexity of longing for unity while also having to speak the truth; which may explain why “unity†sounds so much like work in verse three of today’s lesson, where the Ephesians are admonished to “Make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.â€

Having called us to the hard and good work of unity, the writer of Ephesians gives us the tools we need to do that hard and important work, first by calling us, in verse two of today’s lesson, to lead a life of “Humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another in love,†and, then, by admonishing us, in verse fifteen, to “Speak the truth in love.â€

To speak the truth in love may be the most precise, and difficult, practice in the orbit of careful speech. No spinning, or exaggerating, to make our case or win an argument; no tactics or strategies, flattery or sarcasm; nothing but the truth, spoken in that way the Quakers call “gentle and plain,†what Paul calls “Speaking the truth in love;†a way of speaking to, and being with, one another which is as clear as it is kind, and as kind as it is clear; never sacrificing love on the altar of the truth, while also never sacrificing the truth on the altar of love; what Walter Rauschenbusch called, “The truth dressed in nothing but love,†which has always been the church’s best hope for the true and honest, kind and gentle unity to which today’s epistle lesson beckons us, and in which Holy Communion binds us, together.

Amen.

On Standing in Oceans with Thimbles

John 6:1-21, The ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 25th, 2021 · Duration 8:04

“There is a child here, with five loaves and two small fishes. But what is that among so many?†Those words from today’s gospel lesson, about the little lunch which fed five thousand people, land very near to the big truth which has been at the center of Northminster Bible Camp all weekend; the big truth that, when it comes to letting the love which has come down to us from God go out through us to others, no kind word or good deed is too small to matter.

When Andrew said to Jesus, in response to Jesus' question concerning how they might feed five thousand people, “There is a child here with five loaves and two small fish,†Andrew immediately backpedaled, saying, “But what is that among so many?†But, once it was placed into the hands of Jesus, the little lunch became more than enough, a small sign of the big truth with which we have been sitting, and about which we have been singing, all weekend in Bible Camp; the truth that, when it comes to loving God and loving our neighbor, the little things are the big things; no word or deed too simple or small to matter and make a difference.

In fact, we might even say that, of all the miracles Jesus is reported to have done, none is more frequently repeated than the one about which we read in today’s gospel lesson; the miracle of the way the biggest difference sometimes travels in the smallest gifts.

One example of which is what happens each week with the caregiving cards which are signed and sent by the Northminster Caregivers. Signed and sent, those simple cards start out as the little loaves and fishes of ordinary paper and ink. But, received and read, those little loaves and fishes of paper and ink become the comfort and courage of strength and hope; not unlike the little lunch which miraculously became the big meal.

That sort of thing happens all the time, doesn't it? The kind note, the encouraging call, the welcoming word, the gentle touch; all so small when they are written, sent, given or said, but, oh, so big when they are heard, felt, received and read. Like the little lunch which became the big meal, no act of kindness, or word of love, too small to matter.

During those four years when we were away from here, from 2003 to 2007, people would occasionally ask, “Don’t you get discouraged, teaching all those little Bible classes in all those empty parking lots, spending all your time on efforts which show no measurable results of any kind?†But, honestly, I never felt that way, because I knew that, by doing what I was doing, I was in on what God was up to. Plus, I had that verse from First Corinthians playing in my head, “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,†so I was content to get up every morning, go out into the world, and hand over the loaves and fishes of whatever words or deeds I had to offer, and then trust the Holy Spirit to multiply it into what it needed to be, not unlike the little lunch which became the big meal in today’s gospel lesson.

I think of that sort of thing as standing in an ocean, dipping out water with a thimble; content to make the small difference we can make, eliminating from our lexicon not only the word failure, but, also, the word success; content to live a life of love for God and neighbor, and, then, stand back, and prepare to be amazed at what God might make from our smallest and simplest words and deeds of kindness, solidarity, welcome, compassion, empathy and love; content to get up each morning, take up that day’s thimble, wade into that day’s ocean, and start dipping, knowing that the little that we can do will be multiplied by the much that God will do.

Amen.

Concerning Boundaries

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 18th, 2021 · Duration 16:14

The disciples gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done. And Jesus said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves, and rest a while.â€

Every time the lectionary places, in our path, those words from today’s gospel lesson, we get to listen in as Jesus tries to help his first followers establish some healthy boundaries between work and rest, activity and stillness. The disciples have just reported to Jesus on where they have been, who they have helped and what they have done, after which Jesus encourages them to practice what we would now call “self care,†inviting them to stop, be still and rest; today’s gospel lesson reminding us that it is important for us to draw boundaries.

After which, today’s gospel lesson also reminds us that it can be as difficult to keep boundaries as it is important to draw boundaries. No sooner does Jesus help the disciples establish some boundaries around the limits of their energy than those same plans for rest get set aside.

The plan started out well enough, in verse thirty-one, where Jesus said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.†In verse thirty-two, the disciples did exactly that, “They went away, in a boat, to a deserted place by themselves.†But, then, their boundaries had to be redrawn, when, in verses thirty-three and thirty-four, “Many saw them going and recognized them, and hurried there on foot and arrived ahead of them. As Jesus went ashore, he saw the great crowd and had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.†And, right back to teaching and healing and helping they all went; Jesus, asking the same disciples to whom he had just given the day off to come up with a plan for feeding the five thousand who were gathered on the shore.

All of which is a wonderfully real world picture of the complexity of boundary keeping. We know the wisdom of what Jesus told his disciples in today’s gospel lesson when he told them to stop, go away and rest a while. We know that humans have limits, which requires setting boundaries, which includes sometimes saying “No,†even to good and important things, and not feeling guilty about it, because No can sometimes be as sacred an answer as Yes.

That is how we establish boundaries; by owning our limits, and by embracing the fact that sometimes “No†can be as sacred a word as “Yes;†important steps toward a more centered life, a life with the kind of boundaries Jesus drew for his disciples in today’s gospel lesson when he told them to stop and rest; but then redrew when they looked up and saw the hurting hungry multitude, the kind of need they couldn't not respond to.

All of which is a snapshot of real life in the real world; thoughtful boundary making and compassionate boundary moving, both a part of our lives as followers of Jesus; saying “No†to some good things and real needs, because we have to learn to be content to live within our limits, while, also, responding with compassion to needs we can’t not respond to.

For example, in the nearly two years since the events of August 7, 2019 in Canton, Carthage, Morton and beyond, I’ve made about forty trips to the Hispanic community in Canton, not because I needed to add something to my life, but because the immigrant community is a community to which I can’t not go.

We all have those things we can’t not do; things our inner moral compass won’t let us not do, which can, sometimes, make our already full lives too full, raising, for us all, the “boundary†question.

We want, in the words of Mary Oliver, to “walk slowly and bow often,†to live centered lives, fully present where we are, and paying full attention. And, yet, in addition to all we are obligated to do, we all also have a handful of things we can’t not do; each new situation and circumstance calling forth from us the most mindful, thoughtful, prayerful response we can make.

Amen.

Plumb Line People

Amos 7:7-15, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 11th, 2021 · Duration 11:31

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Prophets

Ezekiel 2:1-5, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 4th, 2021 · Duration 6:29

And the Lord said to Ezekiel, “I am sending you to the nation of Israel, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord’...Whether they listen to you or not, they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”

Every time the lectionary asks the church to read those words from the book of Ezekiel, they call to mind, for me, an old article from the Charlotte Observer, in which, on the death of Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney, the paper’s editorial board wrote, concerning Marney’s unrelenting calls for racial justice, “Marney gave us no peace.  But, then, we didn’t deserve any.”  Or, as this morning’s lesson from Ezekiel puts it, “Whether they listen to you or not, at least they will know that there has been a prophet among them.”

A prophet is one who speaks the kind of truth which sometimes can be hard to hear.  I’ve long loved that simple, powerful sentence of William Sloane Coffin’s, “When you have something to say that is both painful and true, try to say it softly;” wise counsel, it seems to me, for those who must speak a word of prophetic truth.  And, though anger is sometimes the most right response to injustice, and, thus, the emotion most often assigned to the prophets, Richard Lischer wisely observes, in his book, The End of Words, that the central emotion of the true prophet is not anger, but sadness; as in Jeremiah and Jesus, both of whom wept over the spiritual blindness of the people of God.

Spiritual blindness into which the prophets are called to speak the truth.  Which, for Christians, is the truth which was most fully embodied in the life of Jesus, which is why the most prophetic Christian voices are the ones which are most clearly and consistently on  the side of those who are most vulnerable and least powerful, because that is where Jesus always could be found; the true voices of the true prophets saying the same things, over and over and over again:  “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”… “Love God with all that is in you, and love all others as you want to be loved”…”God desires mercy, not sacrifice.  If you understood this, you would not condemn the guiltless;” all of which the four gospels place on the lips of Jesus, and which the Holy Spirit places on the lips of the prophets, whose calling it is to say the same to all of us, over and over and over again, until we begin actually to live that way.

Amen. 

 

When Things Do Not Go That Way

Mark 5:21-43, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 27th, 2021 · Duration 15:26

Every three years, the lectionary places in our path this morning’s lesson from the gospel of Mark. And, every time it rolls back around, things work out wonderfully well; twice, first, for the unnamed woman with the debilitating, isolating, flow of blood; and, then, for Jairus, who had lost his daughter, only twelve years old. Two great sorrows, both relieved by the touch of Jesus.

Which is the way things go sometimes. Sometimes, our deepest sorrows become our highest joys, because our heaviest burdens are lifted away. That which we fear the most does not come to pass, the sadness we have lived with the longest is lifted, the disease is healed, the pain is relieved, the conflict is resolved, the worst is behind us, and the best is before us. As it was for the suffering woman and the grieving man in today’s gospel lesson, so it is for us. It’s a miracle. Sometimes things work out that way.

And, sometimes, things do not work out that way. Sometimes, the burden is not lifted, the struggle is not resolved, the disease remains, the sorrow stays. Things do not always work out for us the way they worked out for the people in today’s gospel lesson.

Such is the nature of life. To say as much is not to be negative, or pessimistic, but, rather, to be truthful. People do not come to church to be told cheerful sounding things which will not prove true in life’s toughest arenas. Anything we say concerning suffering and loss must ring true on the saddest ears in the room.

The truth is, there is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life, and, while none of us will go through all of them, all of us will go through some of them; sometimes, one hard thing after another, sometimes more than one difficult thing at the same time, not because God wills it for us or sends it to us, but because that is the nature of life in the world.

To speak of the unresolved struggles and unrelieved sorrows of life often leads to questions about “unanswered prayers,†a way of thinking about prayer which measures the worth of our prayers by whether or not they “worked,†a way of thinking about prayer which sees prayer as a transaction in which we may be able to persuade God to give us what we need if we can show God enough faith, or persistence, or prayer partners, a way of thinking about prayer to which we are naturally and understandably drawn, partly because it leaves us with some control: If we can just pray harder or have more faith, perhaps we can get God to do our will.

There are, of course, some things in this life over which we do have that much control. Are we kind? Are we thoughtful? Are we truthful? Do we live lives of integrity? Do we practice careful speech? Do we treat all others as we wish all others to treat us?

Beyond those things, over which we do have some autonomy and control, there are all those things which lie beyond our power to manage; sorrows and struggles, burdens and losses, diseases and injuries, some of which turn out amazingly well, as happened twice in today’s gospel lesson, others of which do not turn out that way.

But, still, we pray; as C.S. Lewis said, “Not because we are trying to change God, but because we can’t not pray.†Once, we may have thought Paul’s admonition in Philippians that we should “pray without ceasing†was impossible to obey, but, the longer we live, the more we find it impossible not to pray without ceasing; breathing in whatever news life brings, of joy or sorrow, and breathing out either, “Thank you, Lord†or “Help us, Lordâ€; prayer, becoming our life, until, eventually, our life becomes a prayer; sometimes, our prayers changing our lives, and, other times, our lives changing our prayers, from the first best hope, to the next best hope, to the last best hope.

But, never no hope. Because we love God as unconditionally as God loves us, we never stop believing that God is with us and for us, when life could not be better and when life could not be harder.

Which is why, if we say, when we do get the miracle, “Isn’t God good!â€, we also say, when we don’t get the miracle, “Isn’t God good!â€, because we know that the goodness of God is not tied to how well things go for us. Sometimes, things turn out as well for us as they did in today’s gospel lesson. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, God is good, and, either way, we love and trust God the same.

On a Sunday morning in 1927, at a church in Aberdeen, Scotland, a pastor named Arthur J. Gossip, suffering through an enormous crisis in his own life, preached the now famous sermon, “When Life Tumbles In, What Then?†We know the answer to that tender old question. When life tumbles in, we still get up every morning and take care of what we can take care of, our own kindness, gentleness, truthfulness and integrity, and we still love and trust God, praying the same as ever, only harder, for God to help us go through the wonderful thing God might have done but did not do.

Or, as one wise soul once said, “Faith is what you have left when you don’t get the miracle.â€
Amen.

In the Same Boat

Mark 4:35-41, Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · June 20th, 2021 · Duration 12:48

I was a fairly tame high schooler so my first brush with death didn’t come until the summer after my sophomore year. Some friends and I went to Lake Martin for the 4th of July, and we took a tiny pontoon boat out into the middle of the lake to watch the fireworks. Our trip out to the middle of the lake went well and the fireworks were wonderful, but just as they ended, a storm blew up. Other boats were around us, mostly speed boats with much larger motors than ours. The wake of the bigger boats coupled with the wind from the storm created a very scary situation. And when we already thought for sure that we were going to capsize, the only one of our friends who could drive the boat lost a contact. We were clearly doomed. Then, suddenly, the storm stopped, and the other boats cleared out, and with one eye shut, our friend was able to drive us home.

I have some idea of how the disciples felt in today’s gospel story.

“On that day,” the passage begins, connecting us to that which has happened the rest of that day in Mark, primarily Jesus’ telling of parables about the Kingdom, and making us mindful of how this story might impact our understanding of the Kingdom of God. So after Jesus has spent the day teaching, he and the disciples head across to the other side of the sea.

“And other boats were with them.” I had never noticed this passing phrase at the end of verse 36. Were these other disciples – Jesus had more than just the twelve who were regularly with him – or were these people who had been listening to Jesus teach that day, seeking answers for the meaning of Jesus’ parables? We learn in the next passage that Jesus and the disciples were crossing from their Jewish community to the Gentile community of the Gerasenes, so could some of the folks in the boats have been gentiles?

Clearly not everyone was in the same boat, but it didn’t matter when a great windstorm arose. The waves beat into the boat and water began to flood in and fear began to dictate action.

At least four of the disciples were fisherman who worked on the sea of Galilee, which is 680 feet below sea level, surrounded by hills and prone to storms, so if they were afraid, it seems their fear of the storm would be justified. The disciples woke Jesus up, hysterical that he hasn’t risen to address the situation already, their fear turning to accusation. “Do you not care that we are perishing?” The disciples seem to know that Jesus can do something about the storm but are still surprised when Jesus does.

Jesus wakes up and rebukes the wind and says to the sea “Peace! Be still!” The word “rebuke” makes me imagine a Jesus who yells “Peace! Be Still!” and I see this cinematic bolt of lightning that represents Jesus’ power moving over the sea. But the fact that the disciples woke Jesus up, makes me imagine Jesus rubbing sleep out of his eye, and yawning as he says “Peace. Be still.” The divine and the human, speaking power over the sea, no action, just words, and the wind and the waves stop. They aren’t all in the same boat, but when the disciples go to Jesus for peace, the same peace comes to all the boats.

Notice that Jesus waits until after the wind and the waves have stopped to ask his question “Why are you afraid?” In an essay in Feasting on the Word, Michael Lindvall points out that Jesus does not tell the disciples that there is nothing to be afraid of. Jesus asks why they are afraid. This is not a scolding but an invitation to tell Jesus what is making them afraid. We don’t hear the disciples answer to these questions, but we do hear their response to Jesus’ actions.

Their awe and wonder are recorded in the final verse of today’s gospel lesson – they were filled with great awe and wondered “who then is this?” When the waters calmed, did they remember the words of this morning’s Psalmist? “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and the Lord brought them out from their distress, the Lord made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed.” Or did they think of that moment in Genesis when God hovered over the water and then created order from it? Have they finally started to recognize the divine in their presence? They have been learning of the Kingdom but now its Creator is clearly in their midst. They aren’t all in the same boat, but God is in the boat with all of them.

This was probably not the first trip across the Sea of Galilee that Jesus made with the disciples, and we know it was not the last. Just a couple of chapters later, the disciples are again crossing the sea to Gennesaret when Jesus decides to walk across the sea to meet them. As Jesus passes the disciples, he sees that they are straining against an adverse wind and joins the disciples in their boat, ceasing the wind and leaving the disciples astonished once again. The author of the gospel of Mark uses these stories of crossing over in the storm to display his Christology. The reader recognizes that God is fully present in Jesus, even if the disciples do not, and Jesus’ disciples both then and now recognize Jesus’ invitation to cross over to something new.

In her essay “Crossing to the Other Side,” Debie Thomas says “Our work is always to cross over from fear to awe, from suspicion to trust, from certainty to wonder.  No matter how high the storm waves in our lives, may we always rest in God’s presence as we cross to the other side.”

We have some idea of how the disciples felt in today’s gospel story. Some of us have crossed from the shore of what was to what will be and faced the storms of grief and sorrow. Others have crossed from the shore of certainty to the shore of mystery and faced the storms of fear and doubt. Some have crossed from the shore of one deeply held belief to the shore of another and faced the storm of rebuilding. Sometimes we get in the boat because we want to and sometimes because we have to and sometimes because getting in the boat will bring peace to others. Sometimes we don’t get in the boat because we are afraid of the storm that will arise, and Jesus invites us to wonder what we are afraid of? Sometimes we get in the boat and amid the storm we wonder if Jesus really cares? And sometimes the storm stills, and we are just in awe of our Creator, because even though we aren’t always in the same boat, God is in the boat with all of us. When God calls us to do the hard work of crossing over to a new or deeper or wider understanding of God’s Kingdom here on earth, God is with us.

I cannot speak for you but when I think about the shores that the 15-year-old version of myself has crossed to since I survived that storm on Lake Martin, from this side of all those seas, I’m grateful for every boat I’ve willingly, and sometimes not so willingly gotten in. But if I had known all the storms that would blow up then, I might not have gotten in any of those boat and my life would not be as rich, or as deep or as filled with all of you and the wonderful gift of doing life together in this sacred space.

In Chuck’s incredible sermon “Every Kind of Bird” from last week, he shared a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours. “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete the last one but I give myself to it.” I’ve thought of those words often in the last week. I’ve thought of the tiny seed held in Love’s hand that grows into the beautiful, expansive, ever-widening circle of love that is the Kingdom of God. We don’t know when our next crossing of the sea will be our last but I hope we’ll get in the boat. I hope we’ll even help one another in, because eventually, we will all be in the same boat and God will be with us there too.            Amen.

 

Every Kind of Bird

Ezekiel 17:22-24, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 13th, 2021 · Duration 15:49

Thus says the Lord, “I myself will take a sprig from the top of a cedar, and plant it on a high mountain...Under it every kind of bird will live; every kind of bird will nest in the shade of its branches.â€

According to those who study ornithology (the science of birds), those words from today’s lesson from Ezekiel, concerning God’s great tree where every kind of bird will someday find a home, taken literally, would mean that God’s great tree would need to have room for as many as one hundred billion birds belonging to over 10,000 species.

But, needless to say, literally is not the way those words from Ezekiel were intended to be interpreted. (Indeed, to take any of the Bible’s words literally is, more often than not, to send the Bible on an errand the Bible was not written to run.)

However, to take seriously Ezekiel’s vision of God planting a tree where every kind of bird will have a nest in which to rest might be to see that image from Ezekiel as one of the many small signs in sacred scripture which point to the ultimate will and eternal plan of God; Ezekiel’s tree, which will someday be home to every kind of bird, not unlike Isaiah’s promise, in Isaiah 25:6-9, that God is preparing a great feast at which all the world will someday be present; not unlike Psalm 36:6, which says that God saves humans and animals alike; Old Testament promises which find New Testament echoes in I Corinthians 15:22, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive,†II Corinthians 5:19, “In Christ, God was reconciling the whole world to God’s self,†Ephesians 1:10, “God’s will and plan is to gather up all things in Christ,†Colossians 1:20, “Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to God’s self all things on earth and in heaven,†I Timothy 2:4, “God wants everyone to be saved,†Titus 2:11, “The grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all,†and, last, best and biggest, Revelation 5:13, John’s vision of “Every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the sea, singing “Glory to God†together forever;†every kind of bird and creature and human, together, forever, with God, in what Acts 3:21 calls “The universal restoration of all things.â€

Thinking about all of that this week called to mind, for me, a sentence in Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “Holy Envy†in which Reverend Taylor says that she reached a point in her life when she found herself wishing she knew where the Bible verses were which drew a wider circle of grace than the more exclusive faith so many of her friends so often supported with passages such as John 14:6. Well, here they are, the verses which tell us that God’s will, and plan, is for every soul who has ever lived to someday be healed and home with God; Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 36:6, I Corinthians 15:22, II Corinthians 5:19, Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:20, I Timothy 2:4, Titus 2:11, Revelation 5:13, and, don’t forget Ezekiel 17:23; that tree God is planting which will hold a place for every kind of bird; the ultimate will and eternal plan of God; every kind of bird, ultimately, eternally, healed and home with God, the whole creation reconciled to God, just as God has always wanted, chosen and planned.

Many years ago, when Ted Adams retired from a very long pastorate at the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, he began a second career as a Professor of Preaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where, one day, a student asked Dr. Adams, “How long does it take you to prepare a sermon?†To which Ted Adams replied, “All my life, up to now.†It has taken me that long, all my life, up to now, to come to see, and say, the truth that the deeper we go into our own particular faith, the wider we grow beyond our own particular faith, because to go deeper into Christianity is to grow closer to the Christ through whom God was reconciling the whole creation to God’s self.

To grow closer and closer to Christ is to grow wider and wider in our joyful embrace of “every kind of bird;†the whole human family in the whole wide world; what Rainer Maria Rilke called, “Living our lives in widening circles that reach out across the world. We may not complete the last one,†said Rilke, “but we give ourselves to it.â€

To walk in the Spirit is to give ourselves to a life of love and welcome lived in ever-widening circles; circles which slowly grow to share the size of the circumference of the love and welcome of God, whose eternal will and plan is the universal restoration of all things; the whole human family, and all creation, finally, fully, healed and home.

After all the truth has been told, all the responsibility has been owned, all the injustice confronted, all the victims faced, all the sin judged; no matter how many millions of years it takes, the ultimate and eternal will of God finally, ultimately, eternally done; the whole human family of every time and place, healed and home, at last, with God, no matter how long it takes, because God has all the time in the world to finally have what God has always wanted, which is every soul healed and home; every kind of bird.
Amen.

The Reason We Do Not Lose Heart

II Corinthians 4:13-5:1, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 6th, 2021 · Duration 2:14

“So, we do not lose heart...For we know that if this earthly tent in which we live is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

               With those words, today’s epistle lesson captures the hope which lives at the center, and waits at the bottom, of our faith; that relentless and incurable hope which can help us not to lose heart, no matter how difficult or disappointing, hard or heavy, life may be; the sure and certain hope and promise that, as long as we live, God is with us, and then, when we die, we are with God. 

               Amen.

A Sermon on the Subject of the Trinity

John 3:1-17, Trinity Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 30th, 2021 · Duration 10:10

Every year when Trinity Sunday rolls back around, it never fails to call to mind, for me, my all-time favorite Trinity Sunday story, about a centuries old church, in England, now a village tourist attraction, with a sign out front which says, “Here, the Bishop preached every Lord’s Day, except Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject;†the Bishop, annually, preemptively, wisely throwing in the towel, rather than venture a sermon on the notoriously difficult subject of the church’s eternal, communal, theological triangle; the trinity.

Although, sometimes I wonder if, when it comes to the subject of the trinity, the Christian centuries may have made things more complicated than they actually are.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I have a very practical, perhaps overly simple, way of thinking about the trinity; a way of thinking which rises from one of last Sunday’s lectionary lessons, that part of John chapter sixteen where Jesus is reported to have said that, since it was time for him to go back to God, God was going to send the Holy Spirit to take Jesus’ followers further along the same path down which Jesus had started them; all of which is my “cornbread and peas†version of John 16:5-13, where Jesus is reported to have said, “Now I am going back to the One who sent me...I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit comes, the Spirit will guide you into all truth.â€

In a Bible where the word “trinity†never appears, that may be the most trinitarian passage of all; Jesus came from God, and when the time came for Jesus to go back to God, Jesus said that God would send the Holy Spirit to guide Jesus’ followers further and further along the same path down which Jesus had gotten them started; the practical, spiritual, living trinity; the trio, a quartet; the triangle, a square; Father, Son, Holy Spirit and us; at work in the world, together.

I cannot speak for you, but, in my experience, a person can believe in the trinity as a Christian doctrine all day long and still be as hard-hearted, narrow-minded, reckless, impulsive, exclusive and unkind as if they had never so much as heard of Jesus or the Holy Spirit. But, to live in the trinity; ever open to what the Holy Spirit is revealing about what Jesus was revealing about God, is to be transformed, to become what today’s gospel lesson calls “born again;†growing and changing in ever wider ways, the Holy Spirit’s life-transforming work so quiet and strong that we can’t tell if we are drawing a wider circle of love, or if a wider circle of love is drawing us.

The world has never been changed by right belief, because people are not changed by right belief. The world will always be changed by the life of love, because people are changed by the life of love; the Holy Spirit taking us further and further into, what Jesus took us deeper and deeper into, about God; the trinity, once an ancient triangle we only believed in, now a living circle we always walk in; wider and wider, bigger and bigger, until the size of the circle of our love and welcome matches the size of the circle of the love and welcome of God.
Amen.

Concerning the Spirit

John 15:26-27, 16:4-15, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 23rd, 2021 · Duration 10:50

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Nine Words

Nine Words 2021

Chuck Poole · May 17th, 2021 · Duration 0:0

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them asked Jesus a question to test him. “Teacher, which  commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

                                                                                                   -Matthew 22:34-40

Homosexuality is a human difference, not a spiritual sin. It has taken me a lifetime on the path to a deeper life with God to learn to say that single, simple sentence; nine words which, at the risk of sounding naïve and simplistic, I believe hold the answer to the religious world’s long struggle concerning those who are drawn to persons of their same sex.

There isn’t any spiritual difference between gay people of God and straight people of God. We all worship, sing, pray, serve, try and fail the same. Whether we are straight or gay, we have the same capacity to be moral or immoral, kind or mean, careful or reckless, righteous or unjust, generous or selfish. In all those ways, we are all the same. 

All of this finally came clear to me, nearly two decades ago, while sitting by the bed of a dying man in a nursing home; a man who had lived a long life of integrity and fidelity, prayer and devotion, who happened to be gay. As I sat near his bed in the last weeks of his life, it occurred to me that he and I were different from one another only in that he was a gay person; a human difference, not a spiritual one.

Of course, given our long history of turning to scripture to support what we believe, that raises the important question, “But what about what the Bible says concerning homosexuality?”

The Bible includes several passages which are often assumed to address same sex attraction and love. There appear to be seven such passages.  (I say “appear to be” because it is not clear how many of them actually address a committed relationship  between two adults of the same sex.)

Take, for example, the first of those seven passages; the story of the city of Sodom in Genesis chapter nineteen.  Often pointed to as a story about God’s judgement against homosexuality, Genesis 19:1-11 recalls the story of a group of men who attempted to sexually assault Lot’s angelic visitors; an attempt at sexual violence which everyone on the planet condemns, but  which has nothing to do with a committed relationship between two people of the same sex.

In the Old Testament, there are two more passages which are often  invoked to condemn same sex relationships; Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination,” and Leviticus 20:13, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall be put to death.”  Those words belong to a Levitical “holiness code” which also prohibits the eating of pork (Leviticus 11:7-12), forbids rough beards (Leviticus 19:27), and excludes from worship leadership anyone with blemished skin, failing eyesight or poor posture (Leviticus 21:16-20); verses to which no Christians I know assign any continuing authority. 

That leaves the four New Testament passages which are often assumed to indict same sex relationships.  One is Jude 1:7, which refers to the aforementioned passage in Genesis chapter nineteen.  Two more are I Corinthians 6:9-10 and I Timothy 1:10, both of which are on the list of possible passages, because they contain the word “sodomite,” which could be a reference to what we think of as a same sex relationship, but which also may refer to the sexual exploitation of boys by men; something everyone condemns, but something which has no more relation to a same sex relationship between two adults than the heterosexual exploitation of children has to sexual intimacy between a man and a woman.

Of the seven Bible passages often assumed to be about same sex intimacy, those are six; which leaves one; Romans 1:25-31, which says, “Because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator . . . God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another . . .  And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.  They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness and malice . . .  Full of envy, murder, strife . . . They are gossips, slanderers, God haters.” 

Because of the part of this passage which refers to those who have exchanged their natural sexual inclination for “a way of intercourse which is not natural” this passage is sometimes assumed to be Paul’s indictment of  homosexuality, which it may be.  But, to read the full paragraph is to see that it also describes those of whom Paul speaks as being “God-haters”, who are full of envy, murder and malice, which does not describe any of the gay persons I have known, who are no more or less likely to be God-haters who are full of envy, murder and malice than any of the straight people I have known.  Whoever Paul is describing in Romans chapter one, he is not describing the prayerful, thoughtful child of God who happens to be a gay person. 

All of which is to say that, of the seven passages in the Bible which are often assumed to be about same sex sexual intimacy, it isn’t clear which ones address committed same sex  relationships.  The words, and spirit, of the Bible, with the very troubling exception of Numbers 31:13-35, condemn all forms of sexual violence, promiscuity and exploitation; heterosexual and homosexual.  The question is whether or not the Bible addresses, or even anticipates, committed same sex relationships.

But, even if some of those seven passages were intended to address committed same sex relationships, most of the Christians I know would not be able to say that it was because of their commitment to the authority of the Bible that they held a religious objection against gay and lesbian persons, because most of the Christians I know continue to own possessions, resist evildoers, and wear jewelry, in spite of what the Bible says in Luke 14:33, Matthew 5:39 and I Timothy 2:9. That is not to say that there is something wrong with owning possessions, resisting evildoers or wearing jewelry, but it is to say that there is something wrong with using the Bible on others in ways we would never apply the Bible to ourselves. 

I believe that most popular religious judgments about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons have less to do with the Bible than with the way we were raised; what we’ve always thought and been taught.  One very large factor, especially for many men who grew up, as did I, in the deep south Bible Belt of the twentieth-century, is that much of our thinking about gay persons was shaped more by immature masculinity than by mature Christianity. At school, at work, and even in the church, we emphasized our masculinity by ridiculing those who were drawn to persons of their same sex; calling them names and making fun of them. (The sin, in that case, not the sexuality of those who are gay, but the meanness of those who are straight.)

 In the religious world of my origins, we talked a lot about Jesus, but, when it came to how we treated those who were born beyond the comfortable majority, we  often failed to embody the spirit of Jesus, which is one reason why people in our part of the world who had a gay or lesbian son or daughter often encouraged them to move to New York or San Francisco, where they might be more safe from hurt and harm than in the Bible Belt.  Ponder, for a moment, the irony of that: The part of the country which claims the most followers of Jesus is one of the most difficult parts of the country in which to be different; a sad commentary on how far the popular Christianity of the  Bible Belt has strayed from the Jesus of the four gospels.

As far as we know, that Jesus, the Jesus of the four gospels, never said anything about same sex relationships.  He did, however, have something to say about what matters most in life.  When asked, in Matthew chapter twenty-two, what matters most, Jesus is reported to have said that what matters most is that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love our neighbors as we love ourselves; reading all scripture, and seeing all persons, in the light of, and through the lens of, love.  Which is not unlike what we find in Matthew 7:12, where Jesus is reported to have summed up all the law and the prophets in a single simple sentence of nine simple words:  Treat others as you would have others treat you.

One small example of which I heard described in an interview shortly after the death of President George Herbert Walker Bush. In early December of 2018, as the world mourned the death of President Bush, National Public Radio aired a conversation in which two women, Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalson, who own a store near the Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, remembered, with much affection and gratitude, the gladness and warmth with which their longtime friend, George H. W. Bush, had served as a witness at their wedding; a small example from President Bush concerning how to relate to gay and lesbian loved ones and friends; as loved ones and friends, without making one part of their life, their sexual orientation, the most interesting or important part of their life, seeing that human difference for what it is; a human difference, not a spiritual sin.

To learn to discern the difference between a difference and a sin is an important step along the path to spiritual depth; which, for me, has meant coming to see, and say, the truth which travels in those nine simple words, Homosexuality is a human difference, not a spiritual sin; truth it has taken me a lifetime to see and say, truth which many dear and good people of faith do not embrace,  but, truth which many others have always instinctively known.  And, truth which many more might someday come to see, and say, not in spite of the fact that they are prayerful, Spirit-filled, serious Christians, but because of the fact that they are prayerful, Spirit-filled, serious Christians.

- Charles E. Poole, 2021

 

 

 

 

Into the World

John 17:6-19, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 16th, 2021 · Duration 13:15

“As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.†Every time the lectionary asks the church to read those words from today’s gospel lesson, we get to listen in as Jesus did, then, what the church does, now. Just as Jesus sent Jesus’ first friends into the world, then, so the church sends us into the world, now, but not without first helping us, within these walls, to get ready for the world which waits, beyond these walls.

Here at Northminster, the annual Mentor Class, which Bess, Will, Andrew and Chesley are completing today, is an important part of that life-long work of the church to prepare us, within these walls, for the world which waits, beyond these walls. That kind of spiritual formation doesn’t happen all at once or once and for all, but little by little, week after week, year upon year; in Sunday School, Atrium, Girls of Grace and Guys 456; at Bible Camp, Word Search Wednesdays and Passport Kids; on children’s retreats and mission projects, at worship class, play dates and book studies; in the Mentor Class which Bess, Will, Andrew and Chesley have just completed, and, soon, in the Youth House, which they are about to enter, not to mention the countless little conversations with church folk, which happen in the parking lot and hallways almost every week. The church, little by little, helping to shape and form all of our lives for God and the gospel; all of us, together, calling forth that which is deepest and best in one another, helping each other, within these walls, get ready for the world which waits, beyond these walls, not unlike what we watched Jesus do in this morning’s gospel lesson when, in Jesus’ prayer for his first followers, Jesus said, to God, “As you have sent me into the world, so I am sending them into the world.â€

Bess, Will, Andrew and Chesley, we wish we could send you out into the world with an air-tight guarantee of protection from the hardest and worst that life can bring. But, needless to say, even the most faithful lifetime lived in the care of the church does not build a bubble of protection around our lives.

However, while a lifetime lived in the care of the church cannot promise us protection from life’s most difficult moments, a lifetime lived in the care of the church can promise us strength for life’s most difficult moments. It is as though there is a container somewhere down there in our souls; something like a spiritual bucket, a reservoir which gets filled with the kind of truth which can give us strength and hope, courage and clarity, just when we need it most; the reservoir of our soul, filled with the kind of truth we all hear, over and over, year after year, in every corner of the church at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover.

The truth that God is with us, no matter where we go or what we face. The truth that every person in the whole human family is a child of God who bears within them the image of God. The truth that God calls us to treat all others as we want all others to treat us. The truth that in the life of Jesus, we Christians get our clearest glimpse of who God is, how God acts and what God wants, and that in the death of Jesus we see most fully the relentless, boundless love of God, and that in the resurrection of Jesus we find our ultimate hope; the ultimate and incurable hope that this is God’s world, and in God’s world, the worst thing that happens is never the last thing that happens, because, in God’s world, God gets the last word, and if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good.

A lifetime lived in the care of the church fills the reservoir of our soul with that kind of truth; preparing us for those moments in life when we will need to be able to reach down into the reservoir and come back up with something which will give us the strength and courage we need; the strength we need to go through some great sorrow we did not get to go around; the courage we need to sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for if Jesus was here; the church, helping us to get ready for those moments in life when, as one wise soul once said, “Courage is doing the right thing, even when you’re scared to death.â€

Those moments will come. No one can say when or how, but they come to us all, at some time or another. And, when they do, those of us whose lives have been formed and shaped by the church have a reservoir of truth into which we can reach; our lives rooted in, centered on and anchored by a small list of big truths: God is with us. God is for us. The Spirit of God and the people of God, together, will give us the strength we need to go through what we don’t get to go around. God is love; and God calls us, and helps us, to let the same love which has come down to us from God go out through us to others.

The church, slowly, slowly filling the reservoir of our soul with that kind of truth; forming us, little by little, year after year, to live lives of kindness and courage, truthfulness and goodness, empathy and integrity, mercy and grace; out there in the world, to which Jesus once sent the church, and the church now sends us.
Amen.

This Is How We Grow

Acts 10:44-48, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 9th, 2021 · Duration 13:16

Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?†Every three years, the lectionary places in the path of the church those words from this morning’s lesson from the book of Acts; the end of the story of Peter and Cornelius, which begins much earlier in Acts chapter ten, with Peter’s famous dream, in which Peter sees a sheet full of odd animals, all on the forbidden foods list in the book of Leviticus. But, much to Peter’s surprise, the voice of the Lord tells Peter to rise and eat the forbidden meat from the off-limits sheet. To which Peter responds by reminding God that the book of Leviticus prohibits the people of God from eating what the voice of God is inviting Peter to eat; Peter, reminding God what the Bible says about the subject.

About that time, Peter was surprised by visitors at the door, inviting him to come to the home of Cornelius, who, because he was a Gentile, may have been as off-limits for Peter as the food in the dream. In fact, once Peter arrived at Cornelius’ house, Peter realized that his recent dream about eating off-limits food was actually a vision about welcoming off-limits people; saying to Cornelius in Acts 10:28, “You know that it is unlawful for me, a Jew, to associate with a Gentile, but God has shown me that I should not call anyone unclean or profane.â€

All of which brings us to today’s passage, at the end of chapter ten, where Peter says, “Who can withhold the water for baptizing these Gentiles who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?â€; Peter’s decision, at the end of Acts chapter ten, to say “Yes†to Cornelius; a “Yes†which, at the beginning of Acts chapter ten, Peter might never have dreamed that ever he would say.

As you will recall from your own life with the Bible, the story spills over into Acts chapter eleven, where Peter gets called on the carpet for welcoming and baptizing Cornelius. The Bible says, in Acts 11:4, that, confronted with the questions of his critics, Peter explained, “step by step,†how he grew into his Spirit-filled “Yes;†the Holy Spirit, taking Peter past the place where both scripture and tradition might have dropped him off, all of which ends in Acts 11:17 with one of the greatest sentences in all the Bible, “If God has given them the same Holy Spirit God has given us, who am I to hinder God?â€

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, those words from the story of Peter’s spiritual journey are among the most important in all the Bible, perhaps because, in my own life, I, not unlike Peter, have had to outgrow my original “No†on nearly every important issue and question you can name; the Holy Spirit pushing and pulling me along by the hardest and the slowest.

For example, based on the religion I learned in the church of my childhood, I was so sure, at one time, that God did not, would not, could not call women to be ministers; absolutely, immovably certain. But, slowly, slowly, I came to see and say the same truth Peter came to see and say, “Who am I to make distinctions God does not make?†It was hard. Having been so wrong for so long, it was hard to be right. Like Peter, I even quoted scripture to God to defend my “No†against God’s “Yes.†Until, finally, because of the patience of the Holy Spirit, I came to see, and say, with Peter, Who am I to say “No†to anyone God has said “Yes†to?

It has been, for me, a long journey. The same journey Peter covered in a chapter has taken me a lifetime. And, while it has not been easy, if there was one gift I could give to each and every one of you, it would be the gift of that kind of growth and change; walking in the Holy Spirit until, step by step, we all grow bigger; which, I believe, is the kind of growing which God wants for all of us, and from all of us.

Amen.

Concerning Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch

Acts 8:26-40, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 2nd, 2021 · Duration 5:00

And the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip, “Here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?â€

Every three years, the lectionary asks the church, throughout the world, to read, on the Fifth Sunday of Eastertide, those words from Acts chapter eight. And, every time they roll back around, I wonder if the Ethiopian eunuch’s request to be baptized might have created, for Philip, one of those moments in life which our own William Faulkner once described as, “The human heart, in conflict with itself.â€

After all, on the one hand, Philip has those words in his head from Deuteronomy and Leviticus which specifically exclude eunuchs and foreigners from the welcome of the family of God. (And the Ethiopian eunuch, needless to say, is both.) But, on the other hand, there is that passage in Isaiah chapter fifty-six which specifically includes eunuchs and foreigners in the full welcome of God. The Bible, in a tie, with itself; these verses versus those verses. What will Philip do? Will Philip interpret the Bible’s larger verses in the light of the Bible's smaller verses, or will he interpret the Bible's smaller verses in the light of the Bible’s larger verses? Which way will Philip go? Will Philip say “Yes†or will Philip say “No�

However uncertain, or fearful, Philip may have been, Philip followed the nudges and whispers of the Holy Spirit, all the way down into the water with the Ethiopian eunuch. And, while I cannot speak for you, as for me, every time we get to the end of today’s passage, the part where Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch come up out of the water, together, to go their separate ways, I always wonder who of the two has been more unshackled, transformed, born again and set free; Philip or the eunuch, the baptizer or the baptizee?

Amen.

By What Name? (Senior Recognition Sunday)

Acts 4:5-12; I John 3:16-24, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Major Treadway · April 25th, 2021 · Duration 15:35

I want to tell you a secret. Seniors, I am speaking to you with this secret, so if you would do me a favor and not tell any of the other Youth or children, I would appreciate it. This secret is one that is communally held by this family of faith.

For the last 18 or so years, and truthfully, for many years before that, we have all been working together (mostly) to form you into the people who will carry the faith of our ancestors to those who will one day call us ancestors. Almost every adult in your life is in on this plan. I don’t know all of the adults in your life, but I know many of the adults at this church and I have had many conversations with them about this very thing.

Did you know that there are full committees (plural) filled with adults of all ages whose only purpose is to think about your formation? All of these people, gathered in this sanctuary, and on the live stream – dreaming, imagining, praying, and working together to see that you are formed in such a way that when your moment comes to lead and carry the mantle of Christianity to the next generation, you are ready.

In the reading from Acts this morning, two of the disciples of Jesus had recently been met with a moment where they had a decision to make. Peter and John were going to the temple to pray. When they got there, they met a man who, the scriptures tell us, had been “lame from birth.” The man asked Peter and John for some money. They had a conversation with the man and told him that they did not have any money, then they spoke to the man in the name of Jesus, and told him “to stand up and walk.” And the man did. This event led to preaching and the preaching led to lot of people (5,000) believing. Somewhere in the midst of all the preaching and believing, Peter and John were arrested.

This is where today’s lesson picks up. Peter and John were brought before all of the important religious leaders of the day and asked “by what power or by what name did you do this?”

This question could have been asked out of awe or appreciation. It could have been asked out of curiosity or interest. Instead, it was asked out of jealousy and rage. These leaders saw their influence fading and not just fading, leaving them and being gained by, what must have seemed to them, rival religious leaders. They were operating out of a mindset which viewed the world, the people, and all that was in it as though there were not enough, as though the resources available were scarce and anyone gaining resources meant that someone was losing them.

But Peter and John had been formed to see the world differently. They were beholden to a master that had once given them the instructions to “take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money – not even an extra tunic.” The same master famously told a group of lawyers that the second greatest commandment in all the Bible was to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

It is, of course, no surprise to us that the disciples of Jesus would see the world through different eyes. Jesus, who had the benefit of being both fully God and fully human, also had the benefit of knowing that the world in which we live, the world which was created with words, is not a world of scarcity, but a world of abundance. It is only in a world of abundance, that we can hear and know the answer to the question in the epistle reading today: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?”

Because of the ways which we have been formed, we can know the answer that will come even before we read it: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

Just like we have all be conspiring to form you, seniors, Jesus worked hard enough to form his disciples so that they would be able to see this man asking for alms, and not be deterred by what they lacked, money, but be able to perceive the abundance that they did have and offer him health even though he had asked for money.

So when the council of religious leaders asked them, “by what name did you do this?”, the disciples were ready with their answer. Before the question was finished being spoken, before the question had ever been asked, even before they had encountered the man whom they healed resulting in their arrest, they knew the answer to the question.

They knew what they would say to the council, and anyone else who asked, “by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth…, whom God raised from the dead.”

Kaylee, Kimberly, Hawthorne, Noah, Sarah Beth, Milton, Rosie, Andrew, Katie, Samuel, Jeremiah, Leflore, Lesean, Ella Jane, Gibson, Betsy, and Katie, the community of faith that is Northminster has been conspiring to form you from before the first time you ever entered these doors all the way until now. Betsy Ditto and Annette Hitt were ready and waiting to receive you in the nursery and wrap their loving arms around you. Many of you were walked out down that aisle there in Pastor Poole’s arms as the congregation promised to “share in your growth” and in unison told you and your parents that you “belong to us as well.”

Amy Finkelberg and Lesley Ratcliff and Holly Wiggs between them rallied a fierce cadre of Northminster adults to steer you through Sunday School, Atrium, Children’s Worship Hour, Girls of Grace, Guys 456, and Bible Camp.

Steven Fuller, Rebecca Wiggs, Christian Byrd, and Ginger Parham offered opportunities to join in your adolescent formation, by joining Dabbs and Woody in the Youth House on Sunday nights, or Kelley Williams, Jr., Neva Eklund, Chris Wiggs, Bryan and Christine Bridges, Ken Cleveland, Doug Caver, and Pastor Poole teaching Sunday School. Still more people have chaperoned trips, hosted you in their homes and yards and pools. Others have prepared meals, provided transportation, and coached basketball teams. And even more have prayed for you in rooms throughout this church and in the privacy of their own homes.

All of these people and programs have been focused on your formation in hopes that one day, when you are faced with a situation where doing what is right and doing what fits well socially, culturally, legally are not the same thing, that you will choose what is right. The goal of all this formation is that when the moment comes, you will instinctively sit down with the person whom Jesus would have, that you will stand up for the person Jesus would have, that you will stand up against the person Jesus would have.

Sometimes, doing such a thing will result in various forms of the question that was asked to Peter and John. The question might sound something like, why would you do that? Don’t you know that’s not how we do things around here? Are you sure that person is worth it? By what name did you do this?

The type of formation, into which we have all conspired to mold you, and our ancestors before us conspired to mold us, is the type that also has a ready answer: “by the name of Jesus…, whom God raised from the dead.” It is the type of formation that has prepared us to answer: “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

This type of formation names the risen Lord Jesus as its cornerstone. It is because of Jesus, the one who stood against social custom, cultural practice, and even, at times, against the law of the land that we can live and grow into this form. For, Jesus sat down with and stood up for the persons in the most need, the persons who social custom, cultural practice, and the government were leaving behind. And Jesus had some pretty harsh words about how we treat these people. You remember them, of course, in Matthew 25, Jesus says that just in the same way that you treat the least of these, that’s just how you have treated me.

Eighteen or so years of conspiring have brought us to this day where we as a church body look at you seated here, confident that you have been filled up with all that you need to respond to each situation in such a way that someone might ask “by what name do you do this?”; further, we trust that you are ready to answer them.

But there is another secret that is hidden in this conspiratorial practice of formation. All of those people, who are really all of the people that are sitting behind you with tears of pride in their eyes, all of those people, because of their commitment to your formation, have entered into a relationship with you; and relationships are tricky. In relationships, all parties are subject to change. In this journey, each person who has engaged in your formation, each person who has conspired to influence you and shape you into the person you have become, each of us has been influenced by you.

It’s true. You have already been a part of the formation of Northminster Baptist Church, just as Northminster Baptist Church has been a part of your formation.

Because of your presence, your questions, your commitment to this place, to these people, and to each other, we as a community of faith are better able to respond when we encounter situations which place us in the space where what is right and what is socially, culturally, legally appropriate do not align. And we are more ready for the question “by what name did you do this?”

Kaylee, Kimberly, Hawthorne, Noah, Sarah Beth, Milton, Rosie, Andrew, Katie, Samuel, Jeremiah, Leflore, Lesean, Ella Jane, Gibson, Betsy, and Katie, as you go from this place to all of your new places, go knowing that this community of faith is continuing to conspire about you, for you, and with you as you continue this journey into the abundant life that Jesus declared for us. 

We cannot all go with you, and you don’t need us to. I imagine it is possible that some of you might not want us to. You are ready. You are ready to lean on Jesus. You are ready to draw forth from the abundance that Jesus has provided you and all of us to live your life in such a way that those who don’t know you might see you and ask you “by what name have you done this?”

 

Amen.

At the Corner of Sadness and Gladness

Psalm 4, The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 18th, 2021 · Duration 10:15

“Answer me when I call, O God...You gave me room when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.â€

Every time the lectionary asks us to read those words from today’s psalm, they call to mind, for me, that familiar old adage that there are really only two kinds of prayers; one is “Help me! Help me! Help me!â€, and the other is, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!â€

In this morning’s psalm, “Help me†and “Thank you†come so close together that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins; “Answer me when I call, O God,†a “Help me!†prayer, followed immediately by, “God gave me room when I was in distress,†a “Thank you!†prayer, followed immediately by another “Help me!†prayer, all of which happens before we even exit the first verse of Psalm 4; the busy intersection of the psalmist’ “Thank you†prayers and the psalmist’ “Help me†prayers, making today’s psalm a timeless picture, back there on the page, of life as it is, down here on the ground.

Life, for most of us, is part “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you†for all the times we have been helped, healed, saved, spared, and comforted, and part “Help me, Help me, Help me,†for all the uncertainty and anxiety, disease and pain, disappointment and resentment we still struggle to carry and manage; many of us getting up every morning to face the same fears and fear the same faces, all over again; calling out to God with the psalmist, “Help me, help me, help me;†until the next time we say to God with the psalmist, “Thank you, thank you, thank you;†until the next time when it is “Help me, help me, help me,†all over again.

As Fred Buechner once said, “Here is the world. Beautiful things and terrible things will happen.†And both, the beautiful and the terrible, happen more than once in nearly every life. The person who faces only one great difficulty in life is as rare as the one who knows only one great joy. We live in a world where beautiful and terrible things happen, and if any of those things can happen to anyone, all of those things can happen to everyone, more than once.

Like the psalmist, we all live at the corner of gladness and sadness, relief and grief, joy and pain, beautiful and terrible, wonderful and awful, praying “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you†in one breath , and “Help me, Help me, Help me†in the next.

Or, sometimes, even in the same breath, because, sometimes, the sadness and the gladness converge. The book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to dance and a time to mourn, and, sometimes, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

Many years ago, I watched a young family dancing away at a Christmas party. Their life together was being changed, forever, by a crushing sorrow. But, there they were, dancing away to Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,†as though they hadn’t a care in the world; dancing on broken legs, at the busy intersection of sadness and gladness.

Which is, in some ways, what the church was built to be; a ballroom for dancing on broken legs, a choir room for singing “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you†while simultaneously sighing, “Help me, Help me, Help me;†the corner of sadness and gladness disguised as the intersection of Ridgewood and Eastover, where, every Sunday, whether in the sanctuary or on the lovestream, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you†meets “Help me, Help me, Help me,†week after week, year after year, from one generation to the next.

Amen.

On Dreaming and Doubting

John 20:19-31; Acts 4:32-35, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Major Treadway · April 11th, 2021 · Duration 17:00

Today marks the second Sunday of Eastertide – a season that will last for fifty days. On the fortieth day of Eastertide, we will mark the ascension of Jesus to sit at the right hand of God. On the fiftieth day, Pentecost, we will mark the coming of the Holy Spirit. For fifty days we will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus – making this celebration the longest and most significant one on the church calendar.

Today, on the second Sunday of Eastertide, one week since the women found the empty tomb, one week since God raised Jesus from the grave – robbing death of its final word, we find the disciples in a room, the doors locked in such a way that all of their fear is trapped in the room with them. Their fears wear many faces, though we are only given the brief description “the Jews.” Of course, this cannot mean all Jews, or they would not be in the room with each other, maybe not even with themselves, since they were all Jews. Their crucified and resurrected Lord, Jesus, was also a Jew. So, we cannot read this and think that their fear was of a whole group of people. Their profound fear was of particular Jews. They were afraid that the same people that killed Jesus might try to kill them – this is the same fear that led at least one of them to thrice deny any relationship with Jesus. Fear. Their fear locked them up as tight as if someone had rolled a stone in front of the door to that room. But one of the disciples wasn’t there.

Thomas was not in the room with them. Where was Thomas? There is no indication anywhere in the Bible where Thomas might have been that day – only that he was not in the room. When the disciples finally break free from their fear locked room, they run to Thomas, maybe like the women had run to them last week, and told him that Jesus had appeared to them and then Thomas gives his infamous reply, that he will not believe them until he sees Jesus with his own two eyes, touches the marks in his hands, and puts his hand in Jesus’ side.

For this remark, we all know Thomas as “doubting Thomas.” This designation marks Thomas in a negative light. If we listen to Bryan Stevenson and believe that “each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done,” then perhaps, we would do well to look a bit closer at Thomas and think a little bit longer on his life, his words, and his actions.

There is remarkably little about Thomas in the New Testament. But he is listed by all four gospels as one of the disciples. He speaks only three times. All of them in the Gospel of John. Before Thomas speaks in today’s passage, he had also spoken when Jesus was preparing to go and see about waking up Lazarus. When Jesus told the disciples his intention to go back to Judea, it was Thomas who replied to Jesus “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas, so dedicated to Jesus, that he could already see that Jesus was going to die, so dedicated to Jesus that he could already see that he would also die for his dedication to Jesus.

Later, as Jesus foretells his betrayal, and Peter’s denial, Jesus also tells the disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them so that they might also be with him. Thomas, sure that he wants to be with Jesus, still strongly dedicated to following Jesus, says to Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Perhaps, I am biased, but I think I agree with Martha Spong, that when taken in the context of all that we have to look at in the Gospel of John, Thomas sounds a bit like an Enneagram 8. Maybe he isn’t the doubter history has made him out to be. It seems, rather, that he is aggressively loyal and lacks a filter between his brain and his mouth.

Let’s reconsider today’s Gospel lesson in this light. The disciples lock themselves in a room with their fear, but Thomas is not with them. He has already declared that he is ready to die with Jesus. And once you are ready to die, you do not go locking yourself in a room because of fear. Fiercely loyal, when Thomas hears the story that Jesus appeared to those fearful disciples, he says the first thing that comes to his mind, the first thing that might have come to any of our minds, “but why not me?”

Fast forward to when Jesus comes to visit the group again, this time with Thomas present. Jesus immediately presents himself to Thomas with the invitation to touch Jesus’ wounds, but there is no mention of Thomas actually doing it, instead we get the most powerful statement of faith offered in the Gospel of John. Thomas says to Jesus, “My Lord and My God.”

But we still have to deal with these last words of Jesus to Thomas: Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

These words, written by John near the end of the first century and spoken by Jesus about sixty years earlier, have proven to be the great crux and question of countless thinkers and theologians for nearly two thousand years. How is one to believe without seeing? Isn’t it a blessing when one can?

This question is no more limited to Christianity than it is to any other field in existence. Believing without seeing is what sets some people apart from others. In the early 1960s, long before any humans had set foot on the moon, John Houbolt, dreamed about the most effective way to land a manned spacecraft on the moon and get it back to Earth safely. An outsider, resolutely dismissed by insiders who had their own ideas about how to get the job done, Houbolt could see the fruition of his dream so clearly, that he kept pressing. He kept pressing until his idea got a fair consideration. And on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin used his idea to land on the moon. Houbolt watched from Mission Control in Houston. While Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the moon, Houbolts’s chief rival turned to him and said “Thank you, John. It is a good idea.”

Another example a little closer to the orbit of our lives: consider that on a street corner in downtown Jackson in 1966, five men had a dream of a church where any human could be welcomed to join in the practices of worship and ministry. Fifty-five years later, here we are at the corner of Eastover and Ridgewood. These five men were able to believe, without seeing, that this church could be the kind of place that could extend the welcome of Christ to any human, without consideration for what any other church might do or what common practices throughout the city and region might be. Their vision ensured that this place would be a place that could promise to children and their parents that they belong to us and we will share in their growth – without fear of what that growth or that promise might require of us.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

What are the dreams that we have yet to dream? What are the ways of being and doing in the world that we have yet to believe are possible because we have not yet seen them? What are the fields of our faith that remain untilled because we have unhesitatingly chortled that we will not believe it until we have been able to put our hands on it and touch it and know it to be true?

The community of disciples who first heard these words of Jesus started dreaming of what shape life must take now that everything had changed. Today’s Acts reading gives some idea of what their dreams were: the whole group were of one heart and soul, everything they owned was held in common, great grace was upon them all, there was not a needy person among them.

That does sound like a dream – a nearly impossible dream. It may be that this is one of those stories from the bible that we believe is too impractical to consider for the life of our faith community. This is what I am tempted to think and believe each time I read this story from Acts. Sometimes though, I pause long enough to imagine what shape this might take.

I wonder if it might look like the South African idea of Ubuntu – the idea that “I am because we are.” A community living in such a way that their actions are guided by Ubuntu is a community that RESISTS the idea that each individual should be the best individual possible in hopes of having the best society possible. In Ubuntu thought, in the place of the individual, the community takes priority, and the whole is always considered before the individual.

I wonder if this call from Acts might, in some way, be the best attempt that the disciples could imagine of the year of Jubilee. As you remember, the year of Jubilee was to occur every fifty years. It was to be a year when all debts were cancelled, all slaves set free, all lands returned to their ancestral owners that they might be redistributed. The year of Jubilee also featured prominently in the scriptures to which Jesus made reference immediately upon his return from journeying for 40 days in the wilderness.

These wonderings of mine seem to me to be outlandish fiction, the sort that I might find on Audible and to which I might listen as I drive between my house and the church. These wonderings seem the sort that I might be able to believe were possible if I could find a good modern large-scale example, for there is no way that I can believe that they are possible unless I can see them with my own eyes and experience them in person.

Now, I sound like I am doubting. Perhaps I should join Thomas and get my filter examined.

When Jesus comes to visit the disciples the second time, he doesn’t chastise them, or talk down to them. He invites them to see that it is ok to dream that which has not yet been seen. Further, he says that those who have not yet seen and still have believed are blessed.

So, Northminster, let’s dream dreams of the Kingdom of God that have not yet been seen. Let’s imagine the world that we pray for each week – a world where the will of God reigns on earth as though it were heaven. Let’s not lock ourselves inside this building with our fears – for the savior we follow has defeated death. We are in the season that celebrates the most unimaginable truth of all – that death is not the end. We are a people of incurable hope because of Easter.

As we continue this Eastertide celebration for another six weeks, let’s dream. Let’s not be discouraged by a group of people with ideas that are different from ours. Let’s not stand around on street corners just talking. Let’s do something! And let’s do it together – remembering that when any member of our community suffers, we each suffer as a result.

Let’s dream jubilee sized dreams! Let’s dream resurrection sized dreams! And then, Northminster, let’s live like death has been defeated.

For Jesus has been raised from the grave!

Amen.

God Raised Jesus

Acts 10:34-43, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 4th, 2021 · Duration 12:03

“Jesus was put to death, but God raised Jesus from the grave.†With those words, today’s lesson from the book of Acts may come as close as any words ever can to capturing the mystery and meaning of Easter: “Jesus was put to death, but God raised Jesus from the grave.â€

And, ever since Jesus’ first followers discovered that sunrise surprise on the original resurrection morning, the rest of us have been living on the leftovers, all the way to this very day, when countless twenty-first century Christians, all around the world, have added our own “Christ is risen, indeed!†to the daybreak whispers of a handful of first-century Jews who came, as soon as the Sabbath would allow, to better embalm the hastily buried body of their dear Jesus, only to be met, in today’s gospel lesson, by a stone-rolling Easter angel arrayed in sunrise seersucker saying, “Jesus is not here. Jesus has been raised.â€

News which today’s gospel lesson says that Jesus’ first friends at first told no one, but which the other gospels say they did whisper to a few; their quiet first word, “Jesus has been raised,†like the first bird heard at every sunrise, every day.

Every morning, at sunrise, there is a first bird heard, soon joined by so many more than that the solitary first bird can no longer be heard; the first bird heard joined by countless others coming later; not unlike those first, early, all Jewish whispers, “Jesus has been raised,†which eventually became this morning’s, “Christ is risen, indeed!†on the lips of countless Christians.

All of which today’s lesson from the book of Acts captures in that single, simple sentence, “Jesus was put to death, but God raised Jesus;†the resurrection of Jesus, by God, becoming, for us, the ultimate sign of the ultimate hope that this is God’s world, and in God’s world, God has the last word.

And, if the last word said is going to God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good. And finally, eternally, eventually; somewhere, somehow, some way, someday, all will be well, and all will be welcome, at that wonderful feast which today’s lesson from Isaiah describes as happening on a mountain; a mountain where, according to the one who wrote this part of Isaiah, God will destroy death forever, wipe every tear from every face, and set a place at the table of grace for all. All these years, while we’ve been busy making a guest list for some, God has been busy setting a table for all, where, according to today’s lectionary lesson from Isaiah, all will be welcome, and, somehow, somewhere, some way, someday, up on Easter Mountain, all will be well.

I cannot speak for you, but, in my experience, to live in that great hope does not spare us from the hardest and worst which life can bring, but it does help us through the hardest and worst which life can bring.

There is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life. And, while none of us will go though all of them, all of us will go through some of them; sorrow and struggle, hurt and harm, disease and death, all having a word with us. But, not the last word, because this is God’s world, and in God’s world, God gets the last word.

And, if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good; the ultimate sign of which is what happened on that long ago resurrection morning, just when it seemed that so much was so over that too much was too over for life ever to be good or happy again. Just when hope seemed most gone and joy most unthinkable; just when life had done the worst that life could do, God did the best that God could do. God raised Jesus.

And, ever since, even in our hardest struggles and worst sorrows, we have been living on the leftovers of that long ago resurrection morning; going through what we did not get to go around, with a hope so incurable and relentless that, even at the grave, we make our song “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.â€

Because God raised Jesus from the grave; and, we believe, as one wise soul once said, that the God who raised Jesus from the grave will do as well in the future as God has done in the past.

Amen.

In Accordance With a Single Certainty

Isaiah 50:4-9, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · March 28th, 2021 · Duration 20:39

As you may have noticed, while most of the lectionary lessons come around only once every three years, this morning’s lesson from the book of Isaiah appears on the Palm Sunday lectionary list every year, year after year, perhaps because parts of it sound so much like what happens to Jesus every year at the other end of Holy Week: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard. I did not hide my face from insult and spitting,†Holy Week echoes from Isaiah, followed, shortly, by those odd sounding words, near the end of today’s Isaiah passage, “My face is set like flint.â€

“My face is set like flint†is Bible shorthand for a centered, grounded, clear, courageous, undistracted, all-in, no turning back life, the kind of life which Mary Oliver captured so well when she spoke of those who live their lives “in accordance with a single certainty,†their faces set like flint.

An image from today’s Isaiah passage which, when read through the lens of our Christian eyes, sounds a lot like the Jesus of Palm Sunday and Holy Week; Jesus’ face, set like flint to enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, go to Gethsemane on Maundy Thursday and bear the cross on Good Friday; so much so that, later this week, as people are weeping while watching him carry the cross, the gospel of Luke will say to us that Jesus will say to them, “Don’t weep for me. This is what I came here to do.†The face of Jesus, set like flint.

Pondering all of that this week took me back to that moment in Memphis when, fifty-three years ago this week, on April 3, 1968, the night before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Dr. King closed his final sermon by saying, “Like anyone, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. So, I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything, and I’m not fearing any man.†Martin Luther King, Jr.’s face, set like flint.

To say that someone’s face is “set like flint†is not to say that they are set in their own ways. To the contrary, in today’s lesson from Isaiah, those who are said to have their face set like flint are also said to have their ears open, morning by morning, day by day, to listen for the voice of God. The same is so for us. To live with our face set like flint is not to be set in our ways, it is to walk in God’s ways; to live with our ears and eyes ever open, our face always set like flint to go wherever new light leads, measuring any new light we think we see by the single certainty Jesus gave us when Jesus told us that the one thing which matters most is that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love all others as we want all others to love us; love for God as inseparable from love for others as the vertical beam of a cross is inseparable from the horizontal beam of a cross.

With that as the single certainty by which we live, we set our faces like flint, to practice letting the love which has come down to us from God go out through us to others until it becomes the muscle memory of our soul; what Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in the same direction,†the single certainty by which we live the one Jesus gave us when Jesus told us that everything else, all scripture, all traditions, all questions and issues, all matters great and small, are to be measured against one single central standard: “Love God with all that is in you, and love all others as you wish all others to love you.â€

While my life is as fractured and flawed as any, when it comes to this one thing, I can say to you, “Do as I do.†I decided, years ago, to let what Jesus said matters most, matter most; and you should do the same. You should decide to let loving God with all that is in you, and loving all others as you wish to be loved, become the central standard of your life.

And, then, get up every morning and set your face like flint to live that way; your face as set like flint to live a cross-formed life, up to God and out for others, as Jesus’ face was set like flint to die a cross-formed death, up to God and out for others.
Amen.

Heart Writing

Jeremiah 31:31-34, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 21st, 2021 · Duration 16:18

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with my people. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, says the Lord. This time, I will write it on their hearts.â€

Every three years, the lectionary asks the church to read those words from the book of Jeremiah. And, every time they roll back around, we know, instinctively, that we are in the presence of one of the Bible’s great tipping points; the moment when God is reported to have said, to Jeremiah, “The days are surely coming when I am going to make a new covenant with my people. But, this time, I am going to write it on their hearts.â€

Days which, by that time, were not only surely coming, but, also, already arriving. By the time Jeremiah told the people of God that God was going to write a new covenant on their hearts, the heart writing Jeremiah was promising was already happening.

For example, back in the book of Deuteronomy, both eunuchs and foreign-born persons were excluded from the covenant of God with the people of God, but in Isaiah chapter fifty-six, Isaiah says, “Of course immigrants and eunuchs are welcome in the family of God.†In fact, in Jeremiah chapter thirty-eight, it is a foreign-born eunuch who is the hero; an Ethiopian eunuch named Ebedmelech, rescuing Jeremiah from a pit into which Jeremiah had been thrown to die. And, in that same part of the Hebrew scripture which says “No†to the eunuchs to whom Isaiah and Jeremiah say “Yes,†Moabites are also specifically, and permanently, excluded from ever being a part of the family of God, but the book of Ruth not only makes a Moabite the hero of the story, it weaves her into the family tree of David, making a previously permanently excluded Moabite the grandmother of Israel’s greatest king.

Something is happening; not between Judaism and Christianity, Old Testament and New, but even as Jeremiah speaks. Even as Jeremiah is dreaming of a day when God will rewrite God’s law on human hearts, God is already doing it; the children of God, following their hearts past the place where the letter of the law once would have dropped them off.

A new law of love which begins in the Old Testament, and continues in the New, where Joseph has a dream in his sleep which becomes a feeling in his heart that, all indications to the contrary, Joseph should marry Mary, despite his assumption, at the time, that to marry Mary would take them past the place where the written law would have told them to stop.

Then, of course, there is that moment in the gospel of John when Jesus follows his heart past the place where his Bible would have dropped him off, in the face of a crowd with rocks at the ready to stone a person found in adultery; that moment at which John chapter eight reports that when the crowd reminded Jesus that it was written in scripture that the person should die, Jesus bent down, not once, but twice, to write, and then rewrite, something in the sand.

John does not let us see what Jesus writes in the sand. Which means, of course, that, since no one knows what Jesus wrote, then rewrote, we all get to wonder. I wonder if Jesus may have been writing in the sand a new law of love that will, from time to time, like all words written in sand, need to be rewritten; the lines we draw in the sand, needing to be redrawn from time to time, to meet the growing demands of a living law of love written, by the finger of God, not on paper pages, but on pounding hearts, something to which Jeremiah points in today’s scripture lesson, and to which Jesus points when Jesus says, in Matthew 22:34-40, that the central standard by which all the law is to be measured is the commandment to love God with all that is in us, and to love all others as we love ourselves; not unlike Paul’s declaration in Romans chapter thirteen that all the laws and commandments can be summed up in one, “Love others as you love yourself;†New Testament echoes of Jeremiah’s First Testament promise, “The day is coming when God will lay down a new law for the people of God. And, this time, God is going to write it on human hearts.â€

The church has a name for that kind of heart writing. We call it the Holy Spirit. When we open our lives to the Spirit of God, what God wants for us and from us moves, more and more, into our hearts until, eventually, we become so completely born again and so deeply filled with the Spirit of God that we no longer need any external law or rule, chapter or verse, incentive or motivation, reward or punishment. All we need is what we have; the law of love, written on our hearts.

In fact, if we live prayerfully enough for long enough, intentionally open to the Holy Spirit, we can actually reach a place in our lives at which if, for some tragic reason, someone were to come around and take up all the Bibles, while that would be to us an enormous loss, it would not change the way we live or what we do, or how we treat others, because the Holy Spirit has already written what matters most all over the walls of our hearts; the walls of our hearts covered in the graffiti of God; the law of love, just as Jeremiah promised, written on our hearts.

Amen.

One Year Later

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 14th, 2021 · Duration 13:11

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Lenten Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

Exodus 20:1-17, John 2:13-22, The Third Sunday in Lent

Lesley Ratcliff · March 7th, 2021 · Duration 16:23

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

On Letting Jesus Be Jesus

Mark 8:31-38, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 28th, 2021 · Duration 11:26

Every time the lectionary asks the church to read this morning’s gospel lesson, it takes me back to a conversation I had half a lifetime ago.

I was in my early thirties, sitting in the office, at Mercer University, of my dear friend Kirby Godsey. I had recently read all four gospels, all the way through, in a single week; feeling, for the first time, the full weight of that experience. Struck by the distance and difference between the Jesus of the four gospels and the institutional concerns of the church, I said to Kirby, “I cannot reconcile the institutional ambitions, obligations and anxieties of the church with the Jesus of the gospels,†to which Dr. Godsey replied, “Chuck, I’m glad you have that tension inside you, between Jesus and the church. But, I’m afraid that someday it might just tear you in two.â€

And it has, and does, and probably always will; this tension between the Jesus of the gospels and the Christ of Christianity; a tension never more clear than in this morning’s gospel lesson, where, unlike the more manageable, reasonable, Christ of Christianity, Jesus speaks of rejection and suffering, self-denial and a cross, first for himself, in Jerusalem, and then, for us, in Jackson; a Jesus so severe that Peter actually takes Jesus aside and rebukes Jesus.

And, while, unlike Peter, we would never rebuke Jesus, we have, across the subsequent twenty centuries, remade Jesus; the church, remaking the Jesus of the gospels, who never indicated that he planned to start a new world religion, into the Christ of Christianity; a composite of what twenty-first century evangelicalism likes about what nineteenth-century revivalism kept about what Martin Luther and John Calvin said about what Anselm wrote about what Augustine thought about what Paul taught about Jesus; a powerful, successful Christ who is beautiful and wonderful in so many ways, a Christ of Christianity twenty centuries in the making, the Christ of a Christian religion which does more good in the world than can ever be properly named and praised.

But, a Christ who is different from the Jesus of the gospels; not just bigger than, but different from, the Jesus who seeks, not to draw a crowd and build a powerful, impressive religion, but who calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus; the cross, once a place for Jesus to die, now, a way for us to live; a cross-formed, stretched out life of vulnerable love, our lives as cross-formed as Jesus’ death was cross-shaped.

That is the call of the Jesus of the gospels; a clear call to a life stretched up to God and out to others in vulnerable love; the clear call of the real Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels.

It is the church’s job to help us remember that behind, before and beyond the manageable, measurable, powerful, wonderful, composite Christ of Christianity, there is the real Jesus. It is the church’s job to help little Wills Byrd, and all of us, to grow up with a clear, unmuddled-up theology which knows that before there was the Christ of Christianity there was the Jesus of the gospels, who called us, not to be impressive, successful, safe or secure, but to live a life of cross-formed, stretched-out vulnerable love.

Amen.

Every Lent

Mark 1:9-15, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 21st, 2021 · Duration 21:32

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Final Thin Place

II Kings 2:1-12, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · February 14th, 2021 · Duration 14:51

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

New Strength for Each New Day

Isaiah 40:21-31, The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 7th, 2021 · Duration 11:52

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon

Youth Sunday, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Youth - Rosemary Hicks & Katie White · January 31st, 2021 · Duration 8:14

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Concerning Repentance

Mark 1:14-20, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 24th, 2021 · Duration 16:55

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

A Sermon on Psalm 139

Psalm 139, The Second Sunday After Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 17th, 2021 · Duration 10:44

As we all know, we are living through different, and difficult, days; an uncertain season in our life together, into which the lectionary has placed, today, the beautiful, gentle gift of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm.

As is true of all the psalms, before Psalm 139 became a chapter in the Bible, it had an earlier career as a Hebrew hymn. On loan to Christianity from Judaism, borrowed by Northminster from Beth Israel, all the psalms in the Bible started out as tunes in the temple; poetry, which is why none of the psalms are to be taken literally. But, sacred poetry, which is why all of the psalms are to be taken seriously.

Taken seriously, today’s psalm says that God is intimately, actively, constantly with us. “You know when I sit and when I stand,†says the psalmist. “You read my mind from far away.†“You knit me together in my mother’s womb.†“You have a book where the number of my days has already been determined.†Image upon image, none of which should be taken literally, but, all of which, taken seriously, points to how intimately the God who created the universe thirteen billion years ago is with us in the smallest moments of daily life.

Including one which never fails to stop me; that image in verse four where the psalmist says that God not only knows our thoughts before we think them and our steps before we take them, but God also knows our words before we say them; the literalist in me wishing that, if God knows what we are about to say before we say it, God would take a more active role in helping us to be more mindful and thoughtful with our words; maybe even stepping in and stopping us before we say, send, text or post some of what we say, send, text, and post.

As Nicholas Lash says, “The first casualty of sin is careful speech.†It’s true. You know how it goes. We start out trying to impress people with our cleverness or our toughness, so we begin by being snarky and sarcastic. And, maybe it stops there. Or, maybe it moves from that to being mean and bullying. And, maybe it stops there. Or maybe it doesn’t.

And, of course, careful speech applies not only to what we should not say, but do, but, also, to what we should say, but don’t. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The day we fall silent about things that matter is the day our life begins to end;†a hard truth with which to sit.

As one wise soul once said, “Words shape worlds.†It is true; one example of which is the extent to which what we believe about everything from the pandemic to the violent assault on our nation’s capitol is shaped by how many hours a week we spend watching OAN or CNN, MSNBC or FOX; a sad but true commentary on how powerfully words shape worlds; the words we should not say, but do, and the words we should say, but don’t.

Words matter. Which is why, when it comes to that verse in Psalm 139 where the psalmist says that God knows what we are about to say before we say it, I used to wish that God would step in and stop us from using words in such hurtful and harmful ways.

But, then, it occurred to me that God does. God does step in and stop us. All we have to do is give God an opening. Before we speak, send, post or text, we just have to say, “God, not to be a literalist, but, according to Psalm 139, you know our words before we speak. So, is what I am about to say or send something with which you are going to be pleased once it has been said or sent?

And, then, all we have to do is wait; wait to speak, until we have some sense of clarity concerning what the God who created the universe thirteen billion years ago thinks about what we are thinking about saying.

Amen.

Concerning the Work of the Deacons

Acts 19:1-7, Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · January 10th, 2021 · Duration 21:14

Here at Northminster, Deacon Installation and Ordination Day comes, each year, on Baptism of the Lord Sunday; a convergence of two of the great gestures of the church; baptism with water, and ordination by the laying on of hands.

Because of our current public health circumstances, the laying on of hands will, of necessity, be postponed. But, though we must fast, for now, from that beautiful, powerful, physical gesture, we are, today, setting aside these six souls, Smith Boykin, Thomas Elfert, Skipper Jernigan, Susan O’Mara, Ginger Parham and Jennifer Stribling, for service to the church as Deacons; Smith and Thomas having previously been ordained, Skipper, Susan, Ginger and Jennifer installed, today, as a down-payment on the day when they will kneel before the congregation at the altar of the church to receive the sacred sign of ordination by the laying on of hands.

Smith, Thomas, Skipper, Susan, Ginger and Jennifer are embarking on their deaconship at a moment of great challenge for the church, our nation and the world; people of every perspective, opinion and party angered and saddened by Wednesday’s violent assault on our nation’s capitol, which left many injured and five dead.

To speak of that day in that place on this day in this place is not to be political in church, it is to be moral in church.

What happened on Wednesday was a tragic moral moment for our nation, and, also, a personal moment for us. People we know and love, with whom we worship God, were there; one, serving on the floor of the Senate, another, working in a building a stone's throw away. We give thanks for the brave law enforcement persons who helped protect all who might otherwise have been harmed; remembering, especially, the officer who lost his life in the service of our nation, on a day when we reaped the tragic harvest of a now decades long season, called by many, “the culture wars,†a long, sad season in our national life in which we have not only normalized, but incentivized, the kind of reckless speech which demonizes and dehumanizes those who hold a different view of things than we hold; decades of sowing to the wind, and reaping, now, the whirlwind.

Over against which, I would like to place a small, simple story, one which I have long said I was going to save for my last sermon at Northminster, but which, though it is small and simple, seems important to say today. It is my favorite Northminster story, but it begins before we even arrived here, in the summer of 1997, between the time you all voted to call us, in May, and the time we moved here, two months later.

I was at my desk at the church in Washington, one day in June, when the phone rang and the voice on the other end said, “This is Rubel Phillips. My wife, Margaret, and I are going to be in Washington next week, and we would like to meet you. We’re members of Northminster, and are looking forward to your coming to join us.†At the appointed day and time we met, at Rubel’s suggestion, at the Army Navy Club, not far from the White House, for a delightful lunch, during which Rubel said, “I guess you have gotten to know George Purvis,†to which I replied that I had, indeed, come to know Dr. Purvis through his work on Northminster’s Pastor Search Committee, to which Rubel replied, “I’m the most conservative member you have, and George is the most liberal. We cancel each other’s vote, no matter the subject. In fact,†Rubel concluded, “George’s only hope at the pearly gates is that I go first and put in a good word for him.†To which Margaret replied, “Rubel, dear, I doubt George Purvis is going to need any help from anybody getting into heaven, least of all you.â€

Once we arrived here, I learned that Rubel’s characterization of the differences between his view of things and George’s was only slightly exaggerated. But, more importantly, I learned how deeply and truly those two, so different from one another, loved and respected one another. George and Rubel died, appropriately, within two weeks of one another, in the summer of 2011, not long before which, I sat by Rubel’s bed, holding his hand, and said, “Rubel, George Purvis is not well.†Upon which, Rubel turned his face to the window, gazed into the sky and said, through a great and glistening tear, “George Purvis. Finest man I ever knew.â€

I call that story, “The Spirit of Rubel and George.†That’s the kind of church you want to belong to. And, that’s the kind of America you want to live in; one that says “No†to the careless speech which demonizes and dehumanizes those with whom we disagree, and “Yes†to kindness and gentleness, truth and love.

Smith, Thomas, Skipper, Susan, Ginger and Jennifer, that’s where you come in. When you were baptized at St. Andrew’s Cathedral, First Baptist in Greenwood, First Baptist in Jackson, Central Presbyterian Church, St. Richard’s Catholic Church and Maranatha Bible Church in New Orleans, whether by sprinkling at a font or plunging in a pool, the church claimed you for a life of kindness and integrity, gentleness and generosity, truth and love. As you begin, today, your term of service as deacons, we will look to you to help us all to live up to our own baptism, the way you already have been living up to yours.

Smith, Thomas, Skipper, Susan, Ginger and Jennifer, the world may never have needed a good deacon more than now. What a great time to be a serious, thoughtful, prayerful, truthful, gentle servant of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Concerning the Meaning of the Incarnation

John 1:1-18, The Second Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · January 3rd, 2021 · Duration 13:50

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.â€

With those words, this morning’s gospel lesson takes up the great mystery of the incarnation; the God no one has ever seen, embodied in the life of Jesus; the God who created the universe, roughly thirteen billion years ago, fleshed out, for about thirty years, in a single, local, physical, human life; the life of Jesus.

Across the Christian centuries, what that might mean has been one of Christianity's most important questions, spawning church councils and official creeds in the fourth and fifth centuries, and inspiring one particularly important, and influential, book in the eleventh century, by a theologian named Anselm of Canterbury, who, in a book called Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) gave the church an understanding of the incarnation which has shaped the church from then to now.

Anselm’s basic idea went something like this: Jesus was born to be the sacrifice God gave to God’s self to satisfy God’s requirement for a perfect human sacrifice, so that God would then be free to forgive sinful humans without compromising God’s holiness; a way of explaining the incarnation which, a thousand years ago, took root in the church, and, a thousand years later, continues to dominate popular Christianity; a way of explaining the incarnation which is often summed up in the simple saying, “Jesus was born to die.â€

All of which may be true. There is, after all, some Bible to support Anselm’s explanation of the incarnation, and it is believed, by many dear and devout souls, to be the truth concerning the coming of Christ we celebrate during this sacred season of Christmastide.

But, for other Christians, myself among them, it is a way of thinking about the incarnation which raises more questions than it answers. Indeed, while I cannot speak for you, as for me, I wonder if it might be more true to the Spirit of God to say that the incarnation is primarily about, not a problem, our alienation from God, and how to fix it, a human sacrifice to God, but about a life and how to live it, and about a love, and how to give it; Jesus, embodying the grace and truth of God in a way which gave us our best look at who God is, how God acts and what God wants for us and from us. God, coming into the world in Jesus, not because God’s hands were tied by a sacrificial system of God’s own creation which kept God from forgiving and welcoming sinners until God could give God’s self the sacrifice God required, but, perhaps, because God is relentlessly determined to be with us, in the best and worst of life; no mess so big, sin so bad, or humiliation so embarrassing that God won’t join us in the absolute hardest and worst of it; signs of which are that Jesus, the ultimate incarnation of God, was born poor and vulnerable in a barn, and that Jesus, the ultimate incarnation of God, died naked and humiliated on a cross.

And, between Jesus’ birth in a barn and Jesus’ death on a cross, Jesus could always be found keeping company with those who were on the hard margins and despised edges of life, which, since Jesus was the ultimate incarnation of God, must be a sign of the boundless embrace and expansive empathy of God. Jesus, sitting down with and standing up for the outsiders often enough that it made the insiders fearful enough that they decided to silence Jesus; which, according to the four gospels, is what got Jesus killed. The body of our Lord broken for us all, the blood of our Lord poured out for us all; Jesus, dying as he lived; arms out as wide as the world.

But, though the incarnation of God was killed, the incarnation of God did not stay dead, because that one life was the one life that cannot, and, ultimately, will not, be defeated, not even by death.

Which is why I believe that the most true thing we can say about the incarnation of God in Jesus, is that Jesus was born to live; with us, in us, for us, and through us; the embodiment of God’s goodness and love, born again, in Bethlehem, every Christmas; and, in us, every day.
Amen.

Concerning 2020

Luke 2:22-40, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · December 27th, 2020 · Duration 14:20

Today brings us to the first Sunday in the sacred season of Christmastide, and the last Sunday in the long year of 2020; a momentous year, in many ways, some of which it might be important for us to ponder, before turning the page, this week, to next year. 

Several days ago I looked back to the January 1, 2020 entry in my daily prayer journal, and saw where I had written, on the morning of New Year’s Day, 2020, these words: “Who can know what this now new year might bring of joy or sorrow, gladness or pain?”  By February, I was writing, in that same prayer journal, of the rising waters of the Pearl River, and the widespread flooding to which our congregation, along with many others, was seeking to respond with help and hope, comfort and relief.

Then, on March 13, there appears, in that same prayer journal, the first mention of a strange new virus which was bringing much of life to a crawl; a subject which, needless to say, would show up many more times across the coming months, joined in May and June by numerous prayer journal entries concerning a national season of   reckoning around racial justice; for many, myself among them, a surgical season of introspection and repentance, embodied, for us, in the eventual lowering of the 1894 Mississippi state flag. 

All of which is to say that 2020 was quite a year; a year which was, in some ways, unlike any year any of us have ever known.

But which, in other ways, was just like every year all of us have always known.  There is, after all, even in the absence of normalcy, a certain constancy about life; the natural constancy we see in today’s psalm, where the psalmist speaks of the boundaries God has established for the seasons and for the sea; and the spiritual constancy we feel in  today’s gospel lesson when it speaks of Anna, “living in the temple”; worshiping God in the same place, in the same way, week after week, year after year, across a lifetime.

Constancy which is constant, even when normalcy is not normal.  In March of 2020, much of what we generally consider to be “normal life” was changed by the novel coronavirus; normalcy altered in the second week of the sacred season of Lent.  But, though we had to do many things differently, and even fast, for a time, as we continue to, from some of the most beloved gestures of the church, still the Lenten journey took us, as always, to Holy Week, and, right on time, to the celebration of the resurrection of our Lord on Easter Sunday morning.  After which, we kept the sacred season of Eastertide, just as we always do, for seven weeks, until, just as always, the paraments blushed Beth Israel red on Pentecost Sunday, before turning Northminster green for the summer and fall, until we set our feet, one more time, to the church’s other purple path to depth, Advent, and, once again, just as always, we lit the candle of Hope one week, joined by the light of Peace the next, then Joy and, finally, Love; wick by wick, week by week, until, sometime late Thursday night, Jesus was born again, the coming of Christ opening another twelve day season of Christmastide, of which today is day three, and Sunday One; the unaltered constancy of the sacred seasons, with no regard for the absence of normalcy from March to now, 2020.

Constancy; impervious to the presence or absence of normalcy, not only in the rhythms of the sacred seasons, but, also, in the disciplines of the spiritual life.

My daily prayer journals are, by no means, the measure of such matters, but, as a simple sample and small example, throughout the decidedly not normal year 2020, I wrote, just as I did in 2019, 2018, 2017, and on and on, year upon year, almost every day, at the start of each day, the same simple prayer to get on, and stay on, the path to depth; to live each day in a Quaker-quiet way, mindful, thoughtful, prayerful and kind; practicing the discipline and restraint of careful speech; “soft and serious,” to borrow a phrase from Marilynne Robinson, “gentle and plain,” as the Quakers say; as many words as necessary, as few as possible; a life as kind as it is clear, but, also, as clear as it is kind; failing at it, each day, of course, usually before noon, always by dark, but making the yearning for it the muscle memory of my soul by longing for it out loud, in ink, on paper, everyday, no matter what; a simple sample, and small example, of the kind of constancy which is unaffected by the absence or presence of normalcy.

 A constancy captured nowhere better than in that memorable prayer of Mary Oliver’s, “Another day, and I wake, with thirst, for the goodness I do not have”; in  normal times and pandemical times, in 2020, and, soon, in 2021, no matter how normal, or not, the year may be, each day, just another day to rise and pray to live in a way that is kind and gentle, thoughtful and mindful, courageous, uncluttered and clear, no matter what else may or may not be happening in the world around us; constancy constant, even when normalcy is not.

                                                                                                                        Amen.

 

Do Not Be Afraid

Luke 1:26-38, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 20th, 2020 · Duration 12:31

And the angel said to Mary, “Do not be afraid.†I cannot speak for you, but every time the lectionary asks the church to read that verse from today’s gospel lesson, it never fails to make me think about how often those words, “Do not be afraid,†appear on the pages of scripture, beginning all the way back in the book of Genesis, where God says to Abraham, in Genesis chapter fifteen, what Gabriel says to Mary in this morning’s gospel lesson, “Do not be afraid.†Then, not long after, in Genesis 21:17, an angel says to broken-hearted Hagar, concerning her ostracized and stigmatized child, “Do not be afraid, for God will make a great nation from Ishmael.†Later, when Joshua takes over from Moses, God says to Joshua, “Do not be afraid,†and when Gideon cannot believe that God is calling him to lead the people of God to freedom, an angel says to Gideon, “Do not be afraid.â€

And that’s only a few of the “Do not be afraids†in the Bible. We don’t have enough bandwidth on the livestream to mention all the other “Do not be afraids.†In Isaiah 41:10, for example, the voice of God says to the people of God, “Do not be afraid,†in Jeremiah 1:8, God says to Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid,†and in Ezekiel 2:6, God says the same to Ezekiel, “Do not be afraid.†Crossing over from the First Testament to the Second, when Zechariah learns, in Luke chapter one, that Elizabeth is expecting the baby who will be John the Baptist, an angel says to Zechariah, “Do not be afraid,†and when Joseph learns that Mary is expecting the baby who will be Jesus, an angel says to Joseph, “Do not be afraid.†And, of course, when Mary is asked, in today’s gospel lesson, to open her life in a unique way to the wonder and risk of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, Gabriel says, “Do not be afraid.†Not to mention this Thursday evening, when a night-shift angel will say to the third-shift shepherds what that same angel says to those same shepherds every Christmas Eve, “Do not be afraid.â€

An invitation to not be afraid which is, perhaps, easier for some to hear than for others. After all, for some of us, fear and anxiety of one kind or another are our nearly constant companions. I liken living with fear and anxiety to getting up every morning, getting in a car, and driving down the interstate, sixty miles an hour, with the emergency brake on, all day, every day. If I sound as though I know whereof I speak, I do. In fact, if that tiny almond-shaped brain gland called the amygdala is, as they say, where our fears are stored, then I imagine that my amygdala looks more like a coconut than an almond.

The same is so for many; countless lives weighed down with self-doubt and fear; not to mention all the “worst case scenario†thinking which shadows the steps of so many. Concerning which the angels say, “Do not be afraidâ€; the messengers of God, saying, over and over again, to the people of God, “Do not be afraid.â€

Which is not to suggest that, in this life, there is nothing to worry about or fear. To the contrary, there is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life. None of us will go through all of them, but all of us will go through some of them, and no one can say, with certainty, what any of us might someday have to face or bear, adjust to or accept. But, with the Spirit of God and the people of God, we will have the strength we need as we need it.

So, do not be afraid. Speaking on behalf of the real angels, which most of us have never seen, let all of us ground-bound, walk-on angels without wings keep saying to ourselves, and to one another, “Do not be afraid. God is with us and for us. We are all the loved and cherished children of God; every soul in the whole human family, of every human difference and distance, loved the same by the love of God, loved and cherished as we are.â€

Even in a world where there is plenty to worry about, and to fear, “Do not be afraid,†say all the angels all the time; those with wings, which we cannot see, and, more importantly, those without wings, who we can see.

After all, not many of us have ever seen or heard an angel, but, for all of us, as one wise soul once said, “Courage is just another name for friends.†So, let us all say, to one another, what all the angels always say to all of us, “Do not be afraid.â€
Amen.

Gathered and Carried

Isaiah 40:1-11, The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 6th, 2020 · Duration 7:58

We often hear it said that, when we read any of the New Testament epistles, we are “reading someone else’s mailâ€; letters which, while they have a message for us, were not written to us or about us.

The same is so when we read this morning’s lesson from Isaiah; a beautiful word of comfort, written originally to, and about, the people of God in exile in Babylon; their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control; exiles to whom the writer of this part of Isaiah said, “Prepare the way of the Lord. The Lord our God is coming, to gather you up and carry you home.â€; a promise which may not have been written to us, or about us, but which certainly holds a wonderful word of comfort for us.

After all, this Second Sunday of Advent finds us in something of an exile of our own; a season of life when we are all living in exile from so much of what we hold so dear; an uncertain season in all our lives, for which we have the promise that God is with us and for us, to hold us and help us, to “gather us and carry us†as the writer of Isaiah said to those long ago exiles; the arms of Isaiah’s God, and ours, long enough to gather us all in the same embrace, even when we cannot gather in the same physical space, and strong enough to carry us through times so hard that if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to go through them, we would have sworn we could never make it.

But, we do. We do go through, not just one difficult season in exile, but every season in exile which comes to us across a lifetime; gathered and carried by the strong and tender arms of God, and by the courage and comfort we find in the people of God; they, gathering and carrying us, and we, gathering and carrying them; all of us, who are always being gathered and carried by God, gathering and carrying one another.

All of which calls to mind, for me, that familiar verse of Mary Oliver’s, in which she says, “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I did go closer, but I did not die. Surely God had a hand in this, as well as friends.†After which, the rest of that powerful poem says, “It’s not the weight you carry, but how you carry it, when you cannot, and would not, put it down.â€

There is so much of that in so many of us; the weight we cannot, and would not, put down. Earlier this week, as I prayed my way through our church roll, A to Z, Ackleh-Tingle to Zeigler, I thought of the little I know of the weight we all cannot, and would not, put down; the weight of life which we cannot, and do not, carry alone, but with the help of friends and God, God and friends; unable to know, at times, where one ends and the other begins; only that we are all always both carrying and being carried.

Praise God.

Amen.

It's a Great Year for Advent

Mark 13:24-37, The First Sunday in Advent

Chuck Poole · November 29th, 2020 · Duration 9:42

I read somewhere, many years ago, that on an Easter Sunday in the midst of the worst of World War II, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon called “It’s A Great Year for Easter,†Easter’s word of hope never more welcome than in that global season of sorrow and pain.

What Dr. Fosdick said concerning Easter, then, we might say about Advent, now; it’s a great year for Advent. Rarely have we needed the quiet light of Advent hope more than we need it now, in a year when we have never needed to be together more, and have never gotten to be together less. In a year when we need, more than ever, to sit together and eat together as a family of faith, to gather for book studies and Bible studies, play dates and prayer groups, weddings and funerals, dinners and parties; in a year when we need, more than ever, to see one another’s full faces and to feel one another’s kind touch, we have had to restrain and refrain, postpone and cancel, distance and mask.

Add to all of those pandemical changes, which have come to the entire world, the particular losses and sorrows which have come to so many of us in so many ways in 2020, and this year becomes an especially great year for Advent; many of us never needing the quiet light of Advent hope in any year more than we need it this year; the inextinguishable light of the incurable hope that the God who is with us and for us will hold us and help us, giving us the strength to go through what we did not get to go around.

Needless to say, this present pandemic will eventually come to an end, and we may never see another. But, we will see other sorrows and uncertainties, struggles and losses, disappointments and pain, not because it is God’s will or plan, but because we live in a world where beautiful and terrible things happen. And, if those beautiful and terrible things can happen to anyone, they can happen to everyone.

This is important: The difference between being a person of faith and not being a person of faith is not that being a person of faith gives us protection from the worst, but that being a person of faith gives us hope in the worst; not the optimistic hope that everything will work out for us because we believe, and not the narcissistic hope that, because we believe, we have an advantage, over others, with God; but the strong, quiet, incurable hope that the God who came once to be with us in Jesus, and who will someday come again, to gather, from the four winds, the whole human family home, is the God who is with us and for us, in the best and worst, easiest and hardest of life.

That is the hope which opens Advent every year, year after year, which makes every year a great year for Advent, but, especially, this year.

Amen.

Concerning Matthew 25:31-46

Matthew 25:31-46, Christ the King Sunday

Chuck Poole · November 22nd, 2020 · Duration 14:37

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

On Counting the Days

Psalm 90:1-12, The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 15th, 2020 · Duration 14:10

“The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble. They are soon gone, and we fly away… So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a wise heart.â€

Every time the lectionary asks the church to read those words from today’s psalm, they help us to remember that there is a limit to our days, and that someday is going to be the last day.

I cannot speak for you, but, on my ears, that is not morbid news, or depressing. To the contrary, to be reminded that someday will be the last day is to hear the truth which awakens us, and urges us to long to live each day as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can.

Whether the life we have is the life we planned, hoped, dreamed and imagined, or, as the psalmist said, a life of “Nothing but toil and trouble,†the only life we can have is the one life we do have. And the most, and best, we can do with that life is to live whatever is left of it as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can.

As one poet put it:
I was on my way to becoming
The one I was going to be.
But then something happened,
And so much changed,
That instead I became this me.

We all start out with an empty page,
Our horizons as wide as the sea.
But when what happens happens,
Life narrows down,
Until all we can be is this me.

When what happens happens,
The best we can be,
Is the most kind and gentle,
Truthful and tender,
Not who we dreamed we would be, me.

It’s true. The life we have may not be the life we wanted, but it is the life we have. And, as far as we know, we are not going to get another one. As far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over, and get it right next time. This is it. And, it is passing. We may get seventy years, says the psalmist. Or, if we are strong, eighty. But, either way, someday is going to be the last day.

So, “Teach us to count our days,†says the psalmist, “so that we might gain a wise heart;†wise enough to want to live each day as though someday will be the last day; seeing each day, even the most ordinary and routine, depleting and exhausting of them, as the never-to-be-repeated, soon-to-be-gone gift that it is.

I don’t know why, but, in my experience, there is nothing more transformative than that one thing. To sit with the truth that, as far as we know, this is the only life we are ever going to have, and it will someday come to an end, is, in my experience, to become, not death-obsessed, but, to the contrary, more fully alive, and more intentional about living each day as gently, generously and tenderly as we can.

Some of us will get to live until we have to die, while others of us will have to live until we get to die. Either way, all of us will someday be a memory at a Thanksgiving, a story at a Christmas, a spirit in a room, and a picture in a frame, because, for each of us, someday will be the last day. In the meantime, we may have our best chance at becoming a little more thoughtful, gentle, courageous, clear, big-spirited and kind when we begin to pray, each day, with the psalmist, for God to help us count the days.

Amen.


Concerning Justice and Righteousness

Amos 5:18-24, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 8th, 2020 · Duration 15:12


“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever- flowing stream.†Those words from the book of Amos belong to a long line of Bible verses in which the words “justice†and “righteousness†sit close and hold hands; including Genesis 18:19, which says that the way of the Lord is justice and righteousness; Psalm 33:5, which says that God loves justice and righteousness; Psalm 99:4, which says that God acts with justice and righteousness; Proverbs 21:3, which says that God cares more about justice and righteousness than sacrifices and offerings; and Jeremiah 22:3, which says that God calls us to live lives of justice and righteousness.

Those two words, justice and righteousness, which appear together so frequently in our English language Bibles, most often come from the same Hebrew root, a word which means “to make things right,†which can actually make it difficult to differentiate justice from righteousness. My best effort at distinguishing one from the other is, admittedly, sort of “cornbread and peas†in its simplicity, but it goes like this: Righteousness names the inside part of our life with God; and justice the outside part of our life with God. Righteousness, the inner life of truth and integrity; justice, the outer life of kindness and compassion. Righteousness, the True North moral compass of our soul; justice, the stretched out wingspan of our spirit. Righteousness, our deeper life with God; justice, our wider life with others; the public work of justice growing, most often, from the inner work of righteousness. As our longing to live a righteous life keeps drawing us closer to Jesus and deeper with God, that ever-deeper devotion to righteousness results in an ever-wider commitment to fairness and equality, hospitality and welcome, inclusion and justice for all persons.

I read, recently, a sentence from a sermon which said, “Jesus is social justice, and social justice is Jesus,†which sounds as though it might have come from a sermon in the summer or fall of 2020, but which, in fact, was spoken by the great theologian Karl Barth in a sermon he preached on December 17, 1911. And, while Barth’s summary may be a bit of an over-simplification, if you have read the four gospels, you know that it does land in the neighborhood of the truth. This week, I read, again, all four gospels; Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, and saw, again, the truth that the closer we get to the Jesus of the four gospels the more serious we become about justice for whoever is most marginalized, ostracized, stigmatized, demonized and dehumanized. When we truly have Jesus in our heart, standing up for the same people Jesus would stand up for by standing up against the same things Jesus would stand up against becomes one of those things we can’t not do.

As the great Methodist preacher Peter Storey says, When we ask Jesus to come into our heart, Jesus always answers, “Only if I can bring my friends.†And, if you have ever read the four gospels, you know that when Jesus brings Jesus’ friends into our hearts, Jesus brings the least and the last first; whoever is most outcast, vulnerable, shunned, slighted, lonely, left out, and alone all piling in with Jesus. Otherwise, Jesus won’t come, because, if the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, Jesus is all about that public, visible, clear, courageous kind of righteousness the Bible calls justice.

That kind of life, the kind which begins in righteousness and ends in justice, is the kind of life I call “conservative in the mirror and liberal through the window.†When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we hold ourselves to the most rigorous demands of righteousness, and when we look at others through the window, we embrace the world in a welcome of justice which is as liberal as the boundless embrace of God.

Which is true of every great soul I have ever known. In fact, when we came to Northminster twenty-three years ago, I had to create that sentence, “Conservative in the mirror and liberal through the window†so I would have a way to describe all the great souls I found in this good church; all of you great souls who hold the self you see in the mirror to the most conservative demands of righteousness, while simultaneously holding the world you see through the window in the most liberal embrace of justice and grace.

Watch the greatest souls you know. They all have their flaws, limits, blindspots and failures, of course. But, the more conservative they become about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the more liberal they become about issues of social justice and human equality; a life of expansive piety; piety, because it is a life grounded in righteousness; expansive, because it is a life stretched by justice.

What a way to live; walking prayerfully in the Holy Spirit until we go so deep with God and grow so close to Jesus that, in our ordinary, everyday lives, justice does roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream; our longing for righteousness taking us ever deeper into God and our passion for justice taking us ever wider into the world.

And, the great good news is that it isn’t too late for us to become that way. I actually know people who, beyond retirement age, have changed what will be in their obituary, and who will be at their funeral, because they decided to let the water of their baptism, whether a sprinkling at a font or a plunging in a pool, become an ever-flowing stream of righteousness and justice, justice and righteousness.

Amen.

The Great Commandment

Matthew 22:34-46, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 25th, 2020 · Duration 19:01

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Fields and Forests, Seas and Trees

Psalm 96, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 18th, 2020 · Duration 17:51

“Let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice; let the sea roar and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.â€

When those words from today’s psalm speak of fields and forests as though they were choirs and congregations, they join a Bible-wide chorus which includes Psalm 148:7, “Praise the Lord, sea monsters and fruit trees, fire and hail, snow and frost, creeping things and flying birds,†Isaiah 55:12, where the mountains raise a concert to which the trees give a standing ovation, and Psalm 150:6, where everything that breathes, animals and humans, praises the Lord; choir practice for the grand finalé in Revelation 5:13, where every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea, sings glory to God together forever; all creation, fields and forests, seas and trees, singing praise to God.

All of which calls to mind, for me, that simple but powerful observation from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “We start with a big story, and then it shrinks.â€

The story with which we start is as wide as the world and as big as all creation; “The trees of the forest singing for joy; the sea and all that is in it.†A story which starts out as big as all creation, before eventually shrinking to the size of the world’s religions; religions which make better gates to God than fences around God, because the God who, thirteen billion years ago, created a still expanding universe, cannot be corralled inside any religion, or all religions; a five thousand year-old Hinduism, a four thousand year-old Judaism, a two thousand year-old Christianity or a fifteen hundred year-old Islam.

As Tennyson wrote, concerning our efforts to capture the God of fields and forests, seas and trees inside our creeds, confessions, doctrines and religions: “Our little systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of thee, and thou, O Lord, art more than they.†The God of fields and forests, seas and trees, greater than all our little systems; the God of fields and forests, seas and trees, as much out there as in here; as real beyond the walls of the church as within the walls of the church.

I cannot speak of such things without thinking of Mary Oliver’s testimony, “The church could not tame me, so they would not keep me. I wanted to be as close to Christ as the cross I wear; to read, and serve, and touch the linen altar cloth. Instead I went to the woods, where no tree ever turned its face away.†Oh, the boundless welcome, and judgeless embrace, of field and forest, where no tree ever turns its face away; the creation of God sometimes more true to the nature of God than the limited embrace of any religion or every religion. Little wonder Jesus urged our attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, or that St. Francis preached to a tree full of swallows in Assisi, and John Lewis to a yard full of chickens in Troy. And, little wonder that those who go the deepest into their own particular religion often reach the farthest beyond their own particular religion; longing for that of God which beckons beyond the boundaries which creed and confession, doctrine and religion have drawn too soon around the God of fields and forests, seas and trees.

Which makes us even more thankful that our Northminster mothers and fathers, all those years ago, built us a house with such well-windowed walls; these long, tall, sun-lit, see-through windows never letting us forget that the God of altar and parament, pulpit and pew is first, last and always the God of fields and forests, seas and trees. And, that any words we say in here about God are only windows on God, not walls around God. Amen.

Concerning Gentleness

Philippians 4:1-9, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 11th, 2020 · Duration 0:0

Let your gentleness be known to all.”  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, every time the lectionary asks us to read those words from today’s epistle passage, I am struck by the fact that, of all the virtues Paul might have hoped for the Philippians to be known for, the one Paul named was gentleness, perhaps because the Philippians were in some sort of conflict, for which gentleness was the one thing everyone most needed to give to, and receive from, one another.

Paul seems to suggest as much at the beginning of today’s passage when he urges Euodia and Syntyche to be “of the same mind,” not unlike what Paul says earlier in the letter, admonishing the Philippians to “be of one spirit and one mind” in chapter one, and, again, in chapter two, to “be of one mind and in one accord,” and, again, in chapter three, to “be of the same mind.”  All of which would suggest that the Philippians are struggling with some sort of disagreement or conflict, which may explain why, of all the virtues Paul might have hoped for the Philippians to be known for, the one he chose to lift up and underscore was gentleness, saying, in today’s lesson, “Let your gentleness be known to all.”

A plea for gentleness which may be as needed now as it was then; the world around us as polarized by disagreement and conflict as the Euodians and Syntychians in Paul’s letter to the Philippians; subterranean fault lines which usually sit silently beneath the surface, exposed in the year 2020 by a highly politicized pandemic, a significant season of reckoning around race, and a looming national election; all making Paul’s call for gentleness at least as important for us, now, as it was for them, then.

One possible first step toward practicing the spiritual discipline of gentleness is to decide whether or not we want to be that way; to pose to ourselves the serious spiritual question, “Do I want to be known as a gentle person?”  We may have so long learned to make our way through life by being manipulative, controlling, unforgiving or mean, that we honestly cannot imagine making it as someone whose gentleness is known to everyone.  Do we want to be gentle?  If the answer is “No”, then, the answer is “No”.  If the answer is “Yes”, then we have a long, slow, complex, beautiful, spiritual adventure before us.

For starters, what does a gentle life look like in a world where there are moral issues to be addressed and gospel stands to be taken?  In order for gentleness to be genuine and true, gentleness cannot become, to quote Fred Craddock, “An embarrassed tolerance which stares silently at the ground in the face of injustice.”  To the contrary, sometimes the only way we can stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for is by standing up against the same things Jesus would stand up against.

Gentleness cannot become a baptized avoidance of the great moral and gospel issues of justice and truth which confront us at seemingly every turn these days. Rather, true gentleness is what I call “Jesus gentleness,” the gentleness of Jesus, who never sacrificed grace on the altar of truth, but who also never sacrificed truth on the altar of grace; the Jesus gentleness which is as kind as it is clear, while also being as clear as it is kind; an impossible way for us to live, apart from the Holy Spirit.  But, a way of life which is altogether possible with the Holy Spirit.

Practically speaking, to become what Paul called “famous for gentleness” would mean practicing the skills of gentleness until we get better at them.  Not unlike learning to lay bricks, play tennis, paint, bake, write calligraphy or remove gall bladders, the more we practice being gentle, the better we get.  As Wendell Berry said, “The heart’s one choice becomes the mind’s long labor.”  We make the choice to become gentle, and, then, we get to get up every morning and work at it; relinquishing all tactics and strategies, renouncing exaggeration, no more playing gotcha, no more trying to destroy someone else’s position by creating the false choice of the exaggerated option. Choosing, instead, to listen carefully and speak softly; remembering, as Marilynne Robinson said in the novel Gilead, that, “A little too much anger at the wrong time, or too often, can destroy more than any of us can imagine,” reminding ourselves of Philo’s great admonition, “Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle,” all of which may require us to fast, for a season, from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as whichever partisan news source has become our idealogical echo-chamber of choice.

With all such disciplines faithfully practiced, and with much daily prayer, slowly, slowly, little by little, much of our loudness and stridence, vitriol and sarcasm may fall away, until, at last, we might become known for the only thing Paul hoped for us to be famous for in today’s epistle lesson.

Gentleness.

Amen.

Trapped

Matthew 21:33-46, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · October 6th, 2020 · Duration 15:35

You would think that the Pharisees would have learned by the time they got all the way to chapter 21 in the Gospel according to Matthew, that they need to be extra careful when verbally sparring with Jesus. But, not yet. Here in chapter 21, Jesus lays out rhetorical trap after rhetorical trap, and, if you are anything like me, and sometimes read with background music and sound effects in your mind, you can almost hear the music sounding as the traps go off right on cue.

Jesus comes into the temple. The music stops as he surveys what is taking place. Suddenly there is a dark crescendo as he leaps into action - turning over tables and chairs and driving people out of the temple. It is in response to this act that the pharisees question Jesus about his authority to act in such a manner.

If the gospel of Matthew is an accurate account, Jesus responds with a question and a series of parables, the second of which is our gospel lesson today, “The Parable of the Wicked Tenants.” The commercial practice of a landowner renting his land to tenants in exchange for a portion of the harvest would have been common. As would there being a dispute between the landowner and the tenant about rent collection. The pharisees must have felt that, for once, they were tracking with Jesus. And then, as Jesus lays his trap, the music subtly changes – noticeable to us the readers, imperceptible to the Pharisees. Jesus asks them what will happen when the landowner returns. Trap set.

The pharisees, just like you and I might, tried to imagine themselves in the parable. And just like you do, the pharisees would have remembered that in Isaiah 5, there is a vineyard, carefully prepared, complete with choice vines, a watch tower, and a winepress. They would have recognized and remembered that in Isaiah 5 the vineyard is the people of God. Because Jesus was careful to lay on his allusion about the vineyard pretty thick, they could be relatively confident they were not the vineyard. They must have been thinking, are we the landowner, the tenants, or the messengers?

When Jesus asks the pharisees, what will the landowner do to the tenants. It seems clear that they have made their choice. The pharisees understand themselves to be the landowners. The pharisees, after all, are the ones who are the leaders of the Jews, the people of God. If the vineyard is the people of God, surely the pharisees, the leaders, the ones with the keys to the temple, with offices, and fancy robes and stoles. They must be the landowner. So they seize the opportunity and come down strong with the type of retribution that would be expected from the landowner.

Their implication is that Jesus is the wicked tenant. It is Jesus who has driven out people who had workspaces approved by the temple leadership. It is Jesus who has destroyed this livelihood, damaged this property, and likely caused some of the merchandise to be lost. Surely, Jesus is the wicked tenant.

“[The land owner] will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time,” say the pharisees.

And right on cue, the music in the background gives way for a loud and emphatic clash of cymbals – CLANG!!

Jesus flips the parable on the pharisees. They fell for his allusion to Isaiah 5. They misidentified themselves in the parable. When they fall for his trap, Jesus directs them to another familiar scripture: Psalm 118. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” You can almost see the realization starting to come over their faces, reminiscent of when the prophet Nathan stood before King David after David proclaims judgement to a hypothetical scenario and Nation says to David: “you are the man.”

Jesus affirms their answer, just like Nathan did, but he directs the force of the parable (and their answer) back at them. “The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

Through the fog of realization that they have been trapped, Jesus steps back into the parable. Remember, the vineyard is the people of God. Jesus says “The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” In the parable, the fruits the vineyard has produced are oppression, death, and deceit. These are not the fruits that the land owner was hoping to get in payment for leasing his property.

We are left imagining what people might inherit the vineyard, what people might inherit the Kingdom of God?

I have a confession to make. Whenever, I read about Jesus trapping the pharisees, I want to cheer him on – as if Jesus is the great underdog and sparring with the powerful religious elite. And every time that happens, at some point, I pause, hear the music in the background, and remember, that I, as a pastor, resemble the pharisees more closely than I would like to admit. And it’s usually only after I have started cheering Jesus and jeering the pharisees that I realize, a moment too late, that the music has stopped and a cymbal is about to crash as I have stepped right into the trap set by the author of the Gospel of Matthew – this trap set for me.

I feel the snap, and try not to get angry like the pharisees. Yes, Jesus traps me in this parable too. I don’t mean that I have knowingly engaged in producing the fruits of oppression, death, and deceit. But I do wonder what kind of fruit I am producing and if it is the fruit of the kingdom.

Here in this vineyard, at Northminster Baptist Church, at the corner of Eastover and Ridgewood, there are a lot of tenants. We have pastors and deacons. We have committees, you probably got a letter about them a couple of weeks ago. We have Sunday School teachers, nursery workers, Youth leaders, Atrium facilitators, ushers, and musicians. All tenants of this vineyard, entrusted to our care to produce the fruit of the kingdom. And just in case anyone is feeling left out, on the last page of your bulletin are four words that have a powerful influence over how we, as a vineyard of faith, operate and go about producing fruit.

“Every member a minister.” All of us. Each one of us who call this place home. We are all charged with tending this vineyard, and producing the fruits of the kingdom.

I wonder if we can press this fruit analogy just a little bit further. Have you ever been to a farm where you get to pick your own fruit? These are especially fun with fruit loving small children – so long as you pack a change of clothes. Sometimes, when adventuring to one of these farms, if you’re an amateur fruit picker, you might pick some bad fruit. It might be unripe. It might be over ripe. A bug might have gotten inside of the fruit and ruined it. It’s not that all the fruit is bad. It’s not even that all the fruit on the one plant is bad. The plants don’t get to choose which fruit you pick.

If we are to be the tenants of the vineyard of God, if we are to be the vineyard of God, we must reckon with the truth that we are always producing fruit of some kind. That fruit may be the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. There are days that it also might be none of those things. Of course, we are all doing our best to stay away from producing the fruits of oppression, death and deceit. Yet, even when we put our best efforts into producing good fruits, we still don’t get to decide how that fruit will be perceived. No more than I get to decide what you will take from this sermon, do you get to decide how people will interpret the words you say to them, or what you intend your actions to do.

So what do we do? How can we be good tenants? How can we produce the fruits of the kingdom?

Tod Bolsinger, Vice President of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, suggests that churches and organizations must rely on having focused, shared, and missional purpose against which to measure all decisions. Well, Jesus gave us more than a few of those kinds of ideas. Love God with all that is in you and love your neighbor like you love yourself. If we are living a life with those two ideas as our mission, then I think, we are going to be producing the fruit of the kingdom. Certainly, it will be better than if we are trying to hoard all of the fruit for ourselves like the wicked tenants in the parable. Certainly, it will be better than if we are sitting back laughing at the Pharisees for having gotten caught in another of Jesus’ traps.

Yes, as we sit here trapped by Jesus’ parable, considering how we might be a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom, let’s commit to wrapping our minds around how we can better live into those ideas. Depend on the Holy Spirit to reinterpret the memory of each day through the lens of loving God and loving neighbor. Let’s imagine anew what opportunities lie ahead for us each next day.

What fruits might we produce if we imagined how we might love God and neighbor at work? What fruits might we produce if we imagined how we might love God and neighbor when we make purchases? What fruits might we produce if we imagined how we might love God and neighbor when we are in conflict, when someone interprets events differently than we do, when we post on social media, when we are in public, when we are in private, when everyone is looking and when no one is looking? What fruits might we produce?

The kingdom of God will be given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.

Amen.

 

 

On Working Out Our Salvation

Philippians 2:1-13, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 27th, 2020 · Duration 16:08

“Work out your own salvation, with fear and trembling.†Whatever those words from today’s epistle lesson may have meant on the ears of those who first heard them, for us they are a reminder that the same salvation which we sometimes make mostly about where we will live in the next life is also about how we will live in this life.

Whenever we make salvation more about being with Jesus in the next life than being like Jesus in this life, we open the door to the widespread Christian contradiction of those who accept Christ, for the next life, but do not follow Jesus, in this life; a contradiction which Richard Rohr captures in his observation that once we turned Christianity from a way of life into an established religion, we created our current situation, in which a person can be as self-centered and unkind as they wish and still say that Jesus is their “personal Lord and Saviorâ€; the answer to which, I believe, is to recover the truth that salvation is not primarily about a problem, eternal damnation, and how to fix it, but about a life and how to live it, and a love and how to give it; what today’s epistle lesson calls, “Working out our salvation, in fear and trembling.â€

Fear and trembling, not because we are afraid God will reject us if we don’t get life right. Fear and trembling, not because we’re worried that God will love us less if we remain complicated and complex. We know better than that, because we know, as William Sloane Coffin so beautifully put it, that “There is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.†No, the reason we continue working out our salvation “in fear and trembling†is that, as far as we know, this is the one and only life we are ever going to have. As far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time. That is why we continue working out our salvation with fear and trembling; because we do not want to under-live the one and only life we are ever going to have being petty and small-minded, shallow and narrow, manipulative and controlling, deceptive, hard, harsh, unforgiving, suspicious, jealous, envious, reckless and unkind. That’s why we continue to work on working out our salvation with fear and trembling; why we get up, every morning, living the prayer the late Mary Oliver left us when she said, “Another morning, and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not haveâ€...“Working out our salvation with fear and trembling,†as Paul puts it in the next to last verse of today’s epistle lesson.

Which, as you may have noticed, is followed immediately by the last verse of today’s passage, where Paul, having told us, in verse twelve, to work out our salvation, tells us, in verse thirteen, that God is working in the same salvation we are working out. Which must mean we have not been left to work out our salvation all by ourselves. Rather, the Spirit of God is with us to help us; the Spirit of God, working in what we are working on. And, if that is true, then, perhaps, it is more possible than we might first have thought for us to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we long and yearn and ache to live.

If God is working in what we are working on, then, perhaps, we have given up too soon on someday becoming luminous with holiness, what Barbara Brown Taylor calls “see through with light.†If God is working in what we are working on, then perhaps we might yet become persons of careful, truthful speech who are quick to listen and slow to speak, renouncing all of our old tactics, strategies, exaggerations and cleverness, for a way of being in the world, and in the room, which Marilynne Robinson calls “soft and serious,†what the Quakers call “gentle and plain.†If God is working in what we are working on, then perhaps the mind of Christ might someday be so fully formed in us that the cross of Christ will, at last, become, not only a place in Jerusalem for Jesus to die, but a life in Jackson for us to live; our lives stretched up to God and out to others in a cross-formed life of love, our moral compass of integrity as true as our wingspan of welcome is wide, and our wingspan of welcome as wide as our moral compass of integrity is true.

God working in what we are working on until the Holy Spirit and the human spirit become so fully integrated in our ordinary, everyday lives that we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. God working in what we are working on until, eventually, we reach that place in our lives where, as Naomi Shihab Nye says, “The only thing which ties our shoes in the morning and sends us out into the day is kindness;†however much, or little, is left of the one and only life we are ever going to have, in this world, made more strong and true, gentle and tender, brave and kind, because we decided to keep working out the same salvation God is working in.

Amen.


The Journey Jonah Never Took

Jonah 3:10-4:11, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 20th, 2020 · Duration 10:31

“When God saw that the people of Nineveh turned from their evil ways, God changed God’s mind concerning the calamity God had said God would bring upon them, and God did not do it. This was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.â€

With those words, today’s lesson from the book of Jonah reminds us that, though Jonah traveled many miles in the small book which bears his name, there is one journey Jonah never took. Jonah fled to Tarshish at the beginning of the book of Jonah, sailed to Nineveh near the end, and, between those two journeys, traveled to the bottom of the sea in the belly of a fish. But, those many trips taken, and miles amassed, notwithstanding, there was, apparently, one journey Jonah never took; never going far enough with God to get close enough to God to rejoice over God’s wide welcome and boundless grace; God’s wide welcome and boundless grace making Jonah as angry as the all-day workers in today’s gospel lesson, who were as offended by the generosity of the landowner to the last-minute workers as Jonah was offended by the grace of God for the Ninevites.

In fact, God’s grace for the Ninevites made Jonah so angry that Jonah said he would rather die than watch God be that good to the Ninevites. Upon which, in the next verse, God is reported to have said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry because I am good?†not unlike the question the landowner asks the all-day workers in today’s gospel lesson, “Surely you are not envious because I am generous, are you?†Jonah, in today’s Old Testament lesson, the all-day workers in today’s gospel lesson, and countless souls ever since, sad about the same big grace God is glad about.

I often wonder where that comes from, that need for some to be excluded from the welcome of God in order for us to be happy with our inclusion in the welcome of God. Where I come from, we would say that we have to feel that way because the Bible teaches us to feel that way, especially in John 14:6, which limits the size of the circle of the welcome of God to those who have earned their grace the same way we earned ours, by believing what we believe about Jesus. But, the limits we place on God’s boundless grace are not as simple as “the Bible says it and that settles it,†because the same Bible which is home to John 14:6 is also home to Colossians 1:20, Titus 2:11 and Revelation 5:13. The response to which is often, “Well everybody knows that verses such as Colossians 1:20, Titus 2:11 and Revelation 5:13 are not as important as verses like John 14:6.†To which I have long wondered, “Yes, but who decided that? Who made the decision that the verses which support the boundaries we have placed around the grace of God are more important than the verses which stretch the boundaries we have placed around the grace of God?†Back there, somewhere, someone had to make that decision, otherwise all of us would have grown up knowing Colossians 1:20, “In Christ, God was reconciling the whole creation to God’s self,†Titus 2:11, “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all,†and Revelation 5:13, “I saw every creature, in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea, singing to God around the throne,†as well as we know John 14:6, “No one comes to the Father except through me.â€

(Indeed, I found myself wondering, earlier this morning, how different the spirit of Christianity might be if, instead of interpreting the verses which make God’s grace embrace all (Isaiah 25:6-9, I Corinthians 15:22, II Corinthians 5:19, Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:20, Titus 2:11, Revelation 5:13) in the light of the verses which make God’s grace more small (John 3:18, John 14:6, Acts 4:12, II Thessalonians 1:8-9), we had spent the Christian centuries interpreting the verses which make God’s grace more small in the light of the verses which make God’s grace embrace all. Why do we interpret the Bible’s bigger verses in the light of the Bible’s smaller verses, instead of interpreting the Bible’s smaller verses in the light of the Bible’s bigger verses?)

All of which is to say that, the reason why we, like Jonah in today’s Old Testament lesson, and the all-day workers in today’s gospel lesson, have such a strong need for God to limit God’s grace to those whom we believe deserve it, is not as simple as “the Bible says it and that settles it.â€

I cannot speak for you, but in my own case, it probably had more to do with where I grew up than anything else; surrounded by the dearest and best people one could ever hope to know, who taught me to believe what they were taught to believe about the size of the circle of the welcome of God, which left me, for much of my life, like Jonah in today’s Old Testament lesson, and the all-day workers in today’s gospel lesson, grumbling at the thought of too much grace for too many others. The grace God gave to them did not take an ounce of grace from me, but, even so, I would have rather God be left with leftover love than for anyone to have it who didn’t get it the way I got it.

But, then, somewhere along the way, I moved beyond that. I cannot say exactly when that happened, but I do have an idea how it happened. I believe it was the daily practice of praying to get on and stay on the path to a deeper life with God, the daily practice of walking prayerfully and intentionally in the Holy Spirit, until we go so far with Jesus and so deep with the Spirit that we get so close to God that we can no longer be sad about the same boundless grace God is glad about; staying on the path to depth so carefully for so long that we eventually reach that wide and wonderful place where we draw our circle of welcome as wide as God draws God’s circle of welcome; a long, slow, quiet journey Jonah never took, but which any of us can begin any time we choose.

Amen.

In Accordance With a Single Certainty

Romans 13:8-14, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 6th, 2020 · Duration 15:13

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What Do We Know?

Romans 12:9-21, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 30th, 2020 · Duration 12:21

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Concerning Transformation

Romans 12:1-8, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 23rd, 2020 · Duration 13:11

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Northminster Stories

Psalm 133, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 16th, 2020 · Duration 13:59

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Concerning Matthew's Boat

Matthew 14:22-33, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 9th, 2020 · Duration 15:36

“When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshipped Jesus.â€

With those words from today’s gospel lesson, Matthew’s boat sounds a lot like a metaphor for the church. Beyond the boat, Peter was in over his head and sinking fast. But, once Jesus got Peter back into the boat, where he belonged, with the others, the storm stopped, and all was well; Matthew’s boat, perhaps, a stand-in for the church, and, today’s gospel lesson, a reminder, to Matthew’s late first-century family of faith, and ours, that “in the boatâ€, Matthew’s image for the church, is where we all belong.

Which is not to suggest that the church is the only place to find God. To the contrary, as Barbara Brown Taylor has wisely written, “The work of God gets done in the world not only because of, but, also, in spite of, the church.†Not unlike Fred Buechner’s observation, “If the church is Jesus’ hands and feet in the world, then Jesus often is all thumbs and has two left feetâ€, and Mary Oliver’s testimony, concerning the church, “They could not tame me, so they would not keep me...I wanted to be as close to Christ as the cross I wear; to read, and serve, and touch the linen altar cloth. Instead, I went back to the woods, where no tree ever turned it’s face away.â€

But, for all the church’s limits, blind spots and flaws, still, for many of us, it is in the church that our lives have been most powerfully formed and shaped for truth and love, compassion and justice, courage and kindness; not all at once or once and for all, but little by little, week after week, year after year; a lifelong journey which Cecil Sherman once described as “more sandpaper than dynamiteâ€; dynamite changing things all at once, in one big, loud, dramatic moment; but sandpaper changing things slowly, quietly, little by little.

Which is most often the way our lives are formed by the church; singing the same songs, praying the same prayers, reading the same scriptures, saying the same words, hearing the same truth, week after week, year after year; all that repetition shaping our lives slowly, quietly, little by little, until we someday discover that we are a little more kind, a little more careful with our words, a little more gentle and patient, truthful and brave. Have you ever noticed what a difference it makes when a person becomes even a little more kind; just a little more open to, welcoming of, and excited about the beautiful diversity of the whole human family? That is the kind of slow growth and gradual change which can happen to anyone, and should happen to everyone, in Matthew’s boat, the church. Our life together in the church, slowly, slowly, little by little, making our spirit more expansive and welcoming, gentle and kind, redrawing the circle of our embrace to more nearly match the boundless reach of the welcome of God.

That is what can happen to us in Matthew’s boat, the church. In the boat, where we belong, we get to know the kind of people whose moral compass of integrity is as true as their wingspan of welcome is wide, and whose wingspan of welcome is as wide as their moral compass of integrity is true; the kind of people who make the rest of us want to be better just by being exactly who they are.

Staying in the boat where we belong; whether in person in the pew, or, at this present moment, on couches and porches, iPads, Chromebooks, laptops and phones, calls forth, and confirms, that which is deepest and best in us.

For example, two days ago, on Friday, August 7, I went to Canton, Mississippi to remember and mark the events of August 7, 2019 in Canton, Carthage, Morton and beyond, by walking prayerfully through the immigrant community adjacent to the Peco processing plant; singing, softly, in Espanol, to no one but the poor howling perros, a small hymn, “La Cancion de Bienvenidas†(The Welcome Song); a gesture of Christian love so small that, thirty years ago, I would have dismissed it as pointless, at best; silly, at worst. But, now, after more than two decades in the boat with you, I know that no act or word of kindness and love is too small to matter or make a difference; an incurable hope, and quiet confidence in the Holy Spirit, which I did not bring here, but which I found here, in the version of Matthew’s boat which came ashore, all those years ago, at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover.

And where, all these years later, we are all in the same boat; from those whose birthdates, death-dates and names are etched in stone in the columbarium behind us, all the way up to little Lawson Elizabeth Sams, whose welcome rose shines happily on the table before us, and all the rest of us in between, sailing the sea together; in Matthew’s boat, and ours, the church.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Concerning the Journey

Romans 9:1-5, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 2nd, 2020 · Duration 14:46

“I have great sorrow in my heart, and could wish that I myself were cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, the Israelites; to whom belong the promises and from whom comes the Messiah.†Thus begins this morning’s epistle lesson; with Paul in such anguish over the future of those Jews who do not believe what Paul believes about Jesus that Paul goes so far as to say that he would give up his own salvation if it would transfer his share of God’s grace to God’s people.

A passage which calls to mind, for me, that moment in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Lila, when Lila, having realized that her childhood protector, Doll, might not be saved, goes down to the river to wash off her baptism; preferring to be lost forever with Doll than saved forever without her; Lila’s anguish over Doll as severe as Paul’s anguish over Israel.

Paul’s anguish over Israel comes at the beginning of that section of the book of Romans which I call “the Roman parenthesisâ€, a self-contained unit unto itself, which begins at Romans 9:1, with Paul’s anguish over Israel, and ends, two chapters later, with Paul declaring, in Romans 11:26, “All Israel will be savedâ€, to which Paul adds, in Romans 11:32, “God has included all in sin so that God can include all in mercyâ€; Paul’s movement from the onlyism of chapter nine, where he feared that only those who believed what he believed were safe in the hands of God, to the allism of chapter eleven, where Paul declared that all Israel would be saved, because, since God had included all in sin, God would include all in mercy; Paul’s journey from onlyism to allism, all in the space of Romans chapters nine, ten and eleven.

All of which seems to have moved quickly enough, back there on the page. But, if you have ever taken that sort of spiritual journey, you know that to move from the onlyism where Paul began to the allism where Paul ended can be something more like that great struggle of which we read in today’s lesson from Genesis, the battle which left Jacob not only with a blessing, but also with a limp.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, the journey from onlyism to allism has been at least that hard; growing up, as did I, in a world where so much about our faith depended upon our faith being the only faith where God could be found. It was not hard for us to guard that core belief in onlyism, because most of us did not know anyone who did not believe what we believed. For Christians, in the Macon, Georgia, of my childhood, to decide whether or not others could be embraced in the grace of God, was to speak from a place of unchallenged authority, not unlike a Hindu in Calcutta, a Jew in Jerusalem, or a Muslim in Tehran, deciding whether or not Christians can be embraced in the grace of God.

Looking back across my life, I think I always had my doubts about onlyism, but I learned, early on, to keep them to myself; which I continued to do, even long after I knew that something more must be true. But, then, one evening, a little more than twenty years ago, Marcia and I went to Beth Israel (where I went, this past Friday, to write these words). And, following the evening worship service, once we were back home, I completed the same journey Paul started in today’s epistle passage; saying to God, out loud, something I had long known but never said. “Godâ€, I said to the night sky, “In order for me to be an honest man, I need for you to know that I believe that those dear souls with whom we worshipped you tonight are as much your people as the dear souls with whom we worship you on Sunday.â€

Which sounds so simple to say. (And, in a way, a bit arrogant; the late limb saying the original tree is safe with God!) But, if you’ve grown up with nothing but onlyism, it can be so hard, because it can open up so many other questions; good and important questions, all of which ultimately have the same answer, which is that, as Paul said, “God has included all in sin, so that God can include all in mercy.â€

After which, in the very next verse, Paul closed “the Roman parenthesis†by singing, “Oh the depth of the riches of God! The judgements of God are unsearchable, the ways of God unknowable. To God be the glory forever.â€

After which, lost in wonder, love and praise, Paul fell silent.

Amen.


Concerning the Love of God

Romans 8:26-39, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 26th, 2020 · Duration 13:16

“Who will separate us from the love of God? Will hardship or distress, persecution or famine, peril or sword? No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through God who loves us. I am convinced that neither death nor life, things present nor things to come; height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.â€

Concerning the love of God, one could hardly hope to hear more hopeful words than those from today’s epistle lesson; Paul’s great and sweeping affirmation that nothing, no kind of sorrow or failure, distress or despair, life or death, will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A hope-filled affirmation which never fails to make me wonder, “Who is us?†When Paul says that nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, who is us?

No one can say, with certainty, who Paul’s us is, but, as for me, it is my deepest and highest hope that when Paul says that nothing can separate us from the love of God, “us†means all. I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, my hope is that when Paul says, in today’s passage, that, “Those whom God foreknew God predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s likeness, so that Christ might be the firstborn in a large familyâ€; that “large family†is the whole human family of every time and place. Which would mean that when Paul speaks, in today’s passage, of “those whom God foreknew and predestined†to be included in God’s grace, that would include everyone; everyone God ever loved and wanted, predestined, chosen, elected, and embraced by God, so that when Paul says, in today’s lesson from Romans, that “If God is for us, no one can condemn usâ€, us means all.

That is my deepest and highest hope, which is not the same as hoping that there is no judgement. To the contrary, before love can redeem all, love must judge all. Truth must be told, victims must be faced, responsibility owned, forgiveness asked and, if possible, amends made; otherwise grace becomes, as Fred Craddock once said, “A timid tolerance which stares silently at the ground in the face of injustice.†No condemnation is not the same as no judgement. To the contrary, truthful love requires honest judgement; but, judgement in the service, not of retribution, but of redemption; not unlike the final parable in today’s gospel lesson where the good and the bad, which lives in each of us, is identified and judged, so that the bad can be burned away; the fires of hell, burning away all that is hurtful and harmful, unjust and oppressive, deceptive and untrue; a fire of judgement, in the service, not of endless, pointless punishment, but of eventual, ultimate, redemption; the love of God; not rejection, separation or sin, but the love of God, having the last word; nothing in all creation separating any of us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

I cannot speak for you, but as for me, that is my great hope. Once, it was not. Once I needed for Paul’s us, as in “Nothing shall separate us from the love of God†to be only us. But, the more I travel the path to a deeper life with God, the less I need for Paul’s us to be only us, and the more I hope for Paul’s us to be all of us. The further I travel along the path to depth, the more carefully I walk in the Holy Spirit, and the closer I get to Jesus, the less I need for anyone to be eternally excluded from the ultimate triumph of the love of God, and the more deeply I hope that, ultimately, once all the judgement which must be gone through has been gone through, ultimately, finally, eternally, nothing in all creation will separate any of us from the love of God.

Amen.

Concerning Jacob's Dream

Genesis 28:10-19a; The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 19th, 2020 · Duration 11:21

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An Alternative Cosmos

Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · July 12th, 2020 · Duration 13:24

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On Becoming Who We Want to Be

Romans 7:15-25, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 5th, 2020 · Duration 11:45

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How Long?

Psalm 13, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 28th, 2020 · Duration 11:52

As you may have noticed, there is a lot of sadness, anger, uncertainty and pain to be found in the book of Psalms. In fact, of the one hundred and fifty psalms in our Bible, more than sixty belong to the category called “lamentsâ€; questions and complaints which rise from the depths of disappointment and anger, grief and pain.

One of the most familiar of which is Psalm 13, which begins with those words we read a few moments ago, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget us forever? How long must we bear pain in our souls and have sorrow in our hearts?â€

While we have no way of knowing what made the psalmist raise that prayer of lament, we do know what makes us ask, “How long, O Lord, how long?†Whenever life becomes so hard for so long that life becomes too hard for too long, we lift the lament the psalmist raised when the psalmist said, “How long, O Lord, how long?â€

A question many of us have asked many times concerning the time of Covid-19. How long before we can gather for Sunday School and choir rehearsal? How long before the church can safely offer childcare and open the nursery? How long before we can gather for worship the way we once did, instead of the way we now must? How long before we can have funerals and weddings in the ways to which we are accustomed? How long until we can safely shake hands and hug, share communion, baptize and offer the kiss of peace? How long before there might be a vaccine? How long until school will be fully, normally open? The countless “How longs?†of Covid-19; the answers to which none of us can know.

And, layered onto that global lament is our present national lament over the sins of xenophobia, tribalism and racism, and the countless indignities and injustices, suspicions and shuns, suffered for so long by so many; indignities and injustices, suspicions and shuns, which people who look like me can never understand, and must not let stand. How long, O Lord, until the ground beneath all our feet is truly as level as the ground at the foot of the cross? How long until those of us who have held most of the power for most of the time use that power to make things right? (A moral, racial, leveling-out toward which our state took a significant symbolic step this week.)

And, layered onto those two layers of lament; a global physical illness and a national sickness of the soul, are all the personal struggles and individual sorrows which leave us all, at some moment or another, asking God, with the one who wrote this morning’s psalm, “How long, O Lord, how long?â€

Concerning illness and injury, “How long, O Lord, until we can be well again, feel good again, walk, drive and leave the house alone again? Concerning work and income, “How long, O Lord, before we will be able to find a job?†Concerning fractured friendships, “How long, O Lord, before we will be reconciled to one another?†Concerning the great inner struggles of the soul and battles of the mind, “How long, O Lord, must I get up every morning to face the same fears and fear the same faces? How long must I bear this guilt and feel this regret? How long until I learn to live without this crippling self-doubt? There is a long list of ways that things can go wrong in this life. None of us will go through all of them, but all of us will go through some of them; which means that most of us will, at some time in our lives, join our voices to the voice of the psalmist, and raise to the heavens the psalmist’ lament, “How long, O Lord, how long?â€

Needless to say, for most of those anguished “How longs?â€, the answer is beyond our knowing. Only God knows how long most of what we wait for will take to come to pass.

Some “How longs?†only God can answer. But, some “How longs?†only we can answer. If the question is “How long until we become more kind and gentle, thoughtful and clear; how long before we stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for by standing up against the same things Jesus would stand up against, how long before we begin letting the love which has come down to us more freely and fully go out through us, then the answer is not a mystery at all. If the question is, “How long until we become more kind and gentle, thoughtful and clear; how long before we stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for by standing up against the same things Jesus would stand up against, how long before we begin letting the love which has come down to us go out through us, then the answer is, “As soon as we decide that there is nothing that is more important to us than to speak and act and live that way.†That’s how long.

Amen.

What We Hear In a Whisper

Matthew 10:24-39, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 21st, 2020 · Duration 16:55

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Everyone Is Someone’s Other

Matthew 9:35-10:8, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 14th, 2020 · Duration 11:16

             “Go nowhere among the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s gospel lesson.  But, no matter how often they roll back around, they always land at an odd angle on our ears; the same Jesus who, later in Matthew’s gospel, will tell his disciples to go to all nations, telling them, here, to go only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

               All of which may be a reflection of the tension in the community of faith for which the writer of the gospel of Matthew wrote the gospel of Matthew, probably about forty years after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Matthew’s community of faith, located, perhaps, in Antioch, a once mostly Jewish congregation, now a mostly Gentile congregation; the Jewish members, seeing the Gentiles as “the others”, and the Gentiles, seeing the  Jews as “the others”, everyone an “other” to someone, and the writer of the gospel of Matthew trying to turn all those “others” into “one anothers”; reminding them, at the other end of the gospel of Matthew, that the same Jesus who originally instructed his disciples to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, eventually sent those same disciples into all the world and every nation; an originally only Jewish movement eventually embracing the whole Gentile world. 

               All of which turns on the hinge of Matthew chapter fifteen; where the gospel of Matthew says that Jesus refused to help a hurting Gentile woman for no other reason than that she was a Gentile, saying, concerning her plea for help, the same thing he is reported to have said in today’s gospel lesson, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Upon which, the Gentile woman reminded Jesus that, though she was a Gentile, and he was a Jew, her life mattered, too.  Upon which, Jesus withdrew his earlier “No”, and redrew the orbit of his welcome, to take in the Gentile woman.  Not unlike that great tipping point in Acts chapter ten, when Peter starts out assuming he should not welcome Gentiles, but ends up saying, “Now, I know that God has no most favored nation, race or religion;” Peter’s epiphany, another one of those many beautiful moments in scripture when insiders make the right decisions about outsiders. 

               But, all of which, it must also be said, is always written from the perspective of the insiders, who are trying to decide to what extent they are willing to redraw their circle of welcome to include “others” who are, to  them, outsiders;  the kind of question which is only ever asked by those who have the power to say “Yes” or “No” to someone who is, to them, “the other”, which is why the way insiders answer that kind of question, once they ask it, matters so much.   

               Think, for example, of that moment in Galatians chapter three, when Paul made the great declaration, “In Christ there is neither Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free; but all are one.”  If a first-century woman or slave, fighting for dignity and equality, had said that, those who were holding all the power might too easily have dismissed their call for justice.  That’s why it was so important for Paul, speaking from the more powerful side of human difference, to say it.  Paul was the insider, which made Paul responsible for saying that the lives of others mattered the same as his life mattered.

               Pondering all of this through the lens of our nation’s racial reckoning of the last three weeks, took me back to a moment from a morning two or three years ago.  In the aftermath of a tragic act of racial violence, not knowing what to do, but not able to do nothing, I had made a sign on a piece of poster board, which I was carrying, silently, on the sidewalk outside the Mississippi State Capitol, when, out of the blue, I was

joined by two African-American men, one walking on either side of me.  After reading the words on my home made sign, which said, “White Supremacy Is Sin”, one of them said to me, “What about black supremacy?  Wouldn’t that be a sin, too?”  To which I said, “That would be your sign to carry.  This sign is mine to carry.”

               To the extent that everyone is “the other” to someone, they were “the other” to me, and I was “the other” to them; each of us “the other” to one another, but I the one with the particular responsibility which goes with being born on the majority side of human difference.

               The fact that there is an advantage to being born on my side of human difference is not because God planned it, willed it or wanted it that way.  To the contrary, it is xenophobia, tribalism and the sin of racism which have made it that way; and it is the holy work and moral responsibility of those of us who have been helped by that advantage to stand in solidarity with those who have been hurt by it; all of us “others”, to each other, working prayerfully, to become “one anothers”, with each other.

 

                                                                                                         Amen.  

 

Concerning the Trinity

II Corinthians13:11-13, Trinity Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 7th, 2020 · Duration 18:21

(Audio begins at :36)


I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, while I know that our nation’s sorrows and struggles of the past two weeks are about more than race, still they have taken me back, over and over, to childhood memories which are woven from the threads of racial struggle; the day my grandfather chased from his yard, with curses and threats, the African-American child I had met at the store around the corner and brought home to play; the day I got in trouble for inviting an elderly black woman to sit next to my mom and myself on the front seat of a city bus in Macon, Georgia; the day I got in even more trouble for trying to drink from the Colored water fountain at the J.C. Penney's Department Store on Hillcrest Avenue.

All of which came home to me in a quiet but powerful way, earlier this week, when I received a message from a young man who grew up here at Northminster. Baptized in this sanctuary and formed by this family of faith, but now living many states away, he had called to ask if I had anything to share concerning the intersection of Christian faith and our nation’s present moment of reckoning, to which I replied with the simplest truth I know to say, which is that, even though I grew up in a home with absolutely no financial status or social standing, still, because I happened to have been born white, I was born on the powerful and privileged side of human difference, not because God willed it that way, but because sin made it that way. And, since folk like myself have held most of the power for most of the time, we bear most of the responsibility for the way things are, and for changing things.

A way of thinking I learned from the trinity we are celebrating with the church throughout the world today, on Trinity Sunday. Every time I say to the first part of the trinity, God, “Why do I have this burden about racial justice, and this relentless calling to be in solidarity with whoever is most marginalized in our society?â€, God invariably hands me off to another part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, who reminds me that the other part of the trinity, Jesus, said, “To whom much is given, much is requiredâ€; God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus, joining voices to remind me that to be born on the powerful side of human difference is to live with a moral responsibility to work for racial justice and equality, healing and peace.

None of which is simple. To the contrary, there are great complexities about our long national history with race and our present national moment of reckoning, made worse by those who engage in acts of violence and destruction, and not helped at all by the relentless newsfeeds which constantly present us with the false choice of the exaggerated option, as though one must choose between gratitude for law enforcement and solidarity with minority communities, which is absolutely not true.

In the face of all that complexity, this much is clear: To be a follower of Jesus is to be called to live a life of kindness and clarity, clarity and kindness; offering to the wide world around us our best efforts at what Paul called, in today’s epistle lesson,“the holy kiss of peaceâ€; a life of empathy and gentleness, careful listening and sensitive speech; words and actions of ordinary Christian kindness in a time of extraordinary human pain.

Amen.

What Does This Mean?

Acts 2:1-21, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 31st, 2020 · Duration 11:49

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?†But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.â€

Every year, on Pentecost Sunday, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from Acts chapter two; the bewildered Pentecost crowd asking the annual Pentecost question, “What does this mean?†What does this mean, this way of speech which embraces us all the same; Parthians, Medes, Elamites...Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians and Libyans-no border or barrier between us? A bewilderment so great that some said, “They must be filled with wine.â€

And, every year, on Pentecost Sunday, Peter responds to that annual Pentecost question, “What does this mean?â€, with his beautiful Pentecost reply, This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Even upon slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit.â€

That is what this means; the answer, in Acts, to Moses’ wish, back in the book of Numbers, that God would pour God’s Spirit on all God’s children.

Which, perhaps, could be one reason why God chose to send the Spirit in a new way on that day; the Jewish festival of Pentecost, which drew, to Jerusalem, all kinds of people from all kinds of places; so no one could miss the point that God’s Spirit is being poured out on all flesh, with no regard for any human difference.

Which may be why, the more filled with the Holy Spirit we become, the wider the reach of our welcome grows, until what once was our toleration of human difference becomes, instead, our celebration of human difference; a life of expansive piety, in which the closer we get to the spirit of Jesus, the wider we grow in our love and longing for the rich diversity of the whole human family, a life of prayerful piety which leaves us with a wingspan of welcome so wide that some might someday say of us what some said of them, then, “They must be full of wine.â€

To which, we, then, might someday say, with Peter, “No. Not wine, but the Holy Spirit, which will not let us love less.â€

Amen.

Concerning Prayer of Jesus

John 17:1-11, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 24th, 2020 · Duration 10:46

“Holy Father, protect them in your name; so that they may be one, as we are one.†Those words from today’s gospel lesson are one of four times in John chapter seventeen when the writer of the gospel of John says that Jesus prayed for his followers to be one; leaving us to wonder what Jesus may have meant by “being one†when he prayed for his followers to be as fully one with one another as Jesus was one with God.

If by “being one†Jesus meant being “of one mindâ€, then, by the time the gospel of John was written, Jesus’ prayer had been unanswered multiple times. By the time the gospel of John was written, sometime around 90 A.D., Paul and Barnabas had parted ways in Acts chapter fifteen, the Corinthians had been fragmented by divided loyalties and competing opinions, Euodia and Syntiche were in some sort of dispute in Philippians 4:2, and the Galatians were torn between Paul’s message of salvation by grace alone and the more conservative theology of the preachers who came to Galatia after Paul moved on; all of which had already happened before the gospel of John reported the prayer of Jesus for all his followers to be one.

And, from there, the divisions only grew greater; doctrinal disagreements among Christians in the second, third and fourth centuries fueling the formation of the official canon of the New Testament, and the emergence of church councils where creeds were written and declared Christian orthodoxy by majority vote; none of which, one imagines, is what Jesus had in mind when Jesus prayed that all of Jesus’ people would be as fully one with one another as Jesus was one with God.

Whatever Jesus meant when Jesus prayed for Jesus’ followers to become as one with another as Jesus was one with God, it must have been something deeper than agreeing with one another. We all have people in our lives with whom we are one, in love and friendship, with whom we do not agree; sometimes, on very important issues. I have had many such friendships in my life; people with whom I don’t agree on very important matters, but with whom I am one in loyalty, respect, love and delight; the kind of friendships which embody that beloved Northminster mantra, “Agree to differ, resolve to love, unite to serve.â€

All of which, it must be said, can be easier to say than to live; particularly when those with whom we wish to be one say words and take actions which are so hurtful and unjust to others that we can no longer be one with them, because we must stand up for those who are being injured, excluded or marginalized by their words and actions. So, please don’t hear me saying that for Jesus’ people to be as united as Jesus prayed for us to be is simple or easy. To the contrary, it can sometimes be difficult beyond words.

Having acknowledged that complexity, we are then ready to say that there is a way for all of Jesus’ people to become as one with one another as Jesus prayed for us to become, which is for all of Jesus’ people first to become more completely one with Jesus.

Of course, not everyone will even agree on what it means to be one with Jesus. But, to me, what it means to be one with Jesus is clear. If the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, then what it means to be one with Jesus is not a mystery. Read the four gospels, and what you find is a handful of summary statements; moments in the gospels when Jesus sums up what matters most, places such as Matthew 7:12, “Do to others as you want others to do to you, this is the law and the prophets,†Matthew 12:7, “I desire mercy not sacrifice,†Matthew 22:37-40, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. This is the greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,†and John 13:34-35, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are mine, if you have love for one another.â€

To read the four gospels is to see and know that the life of love is what mattered most to Jesus, which means that to be one with Jesus is to get up every morning and choose, all over again, the one thing which mattered most to Jesus; the life of kindness, clarity, courage and love which never says or does anything to anyone that we would not want said or done to us.

Those who live that way are those who are one with Jesus, and, when we become one with those who are one with Jesus, then the prayer Jesus prayed in this morning’s gospel lesson will, at last, be answered. Imagine that; Jesus’ prayer, answered by us.

Amen.

On Going Through

Psalm 66:8-20, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 17th, 2020 · Duration 13:50

“We went through fire and through water, but God brought us out to a spacious place.†Every time the lectionary asks the church to read that verse from today’s psalm, many of us recognize our lives in the psalmist’ words, “We went through fire and water, but God brought us out to a spacious place.â€

When the psalmist says, “We went through fire and water, but God brought us out to a spacious placeâ€, the psalmist is probably talking about the people of God, going through the dangers of the Red Sea and the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. But, whatever those words may have meant in the psalmist’ mouth, on our ears, they sound a lot like the story of our lives. We keep going through whatever comes next, and God keeps bringing us out. Or, as the psalmist says, “We went through fire and water, and God brought us out to a spacious space.â€

Needless to say, life is not all “fire and water.†To the contrary, life is often simple and easy. But, for many of us, life is also a lot of going through difficult moments we did not get to go around. As Fred Buechner once wisely wrote “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen,†not unlike what Mrs. Soames, a character in Our Town, said, upon looking back across her life from the land of the dead, “My, wasn't life awful...and wonderful.â€

The same life which starts out as a sea of joy, punctuated by occasional islands of pain, can, sometimes, become a sea of pain, punctuated by occasional islands of joy; most of us, like the psalmist, going through fire and water, not once, but several times in our lives. And, like the psalmist, coming out on the other side, hopefully, as the psalmist said, “in a spacious placeâ€; psalmist shorthand for emerging from our struggles in a better way; with a bigger, more spacious spirit.

Pondering all of that this week caused me to think of how often I have wondered, during the time of Covid-19, when things might “get back to normalâ€, even though, like you, I know that life rarely goes back to anything. “Back to the way it was†is not the direction in which life generally moves. As C.S. Lewis once said, “The one prayer God will never answer is the prayer for an encore. God’s creativity is much too vast for that. God will not give us back the good old days,†concluded Lewis, “But God will give us good new days.â€

What C.S. Lewis called “the good new days†may be something like what the psalmist called “the spacious place†which waits on the other side of the many fire and water moments and seasons of struggle and pain through which most of us must go in this life; most of us, going through whatever it was we did not get to go around, and hopefully, emerging from it with a more gentle and generous spirit; less arrogant, sarcastic, petty and small; more empathetic, patient, quiet and kind; the fire and the water having burned away and washed away that which was most shallow about us, leaving us with a new depth of spirit we did not have before we went through the fire and water of struggle and pain.

All of which we must say only with the greatest of care. After all, there is no guarantee that we will emerge from our “fire and water†struggles with a more gentle and generous spirit. As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “I have seen pain twist people into exhausted rags with all the hope squeezed out of them. But, I have also seen people in whom pain seems to have burned away everything trivial, petty and less than noble, until they have become see-through with lightâ€; going through fire and water and coming out more gentle and generous, luminous and kind; not always, but often, the most gentle and generous spirits emerging from the most difficult and painful struggles.

As Naomi Shihab Nye once wisely wrote, “Before we can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, we must first know sorrow as the other deepest thing;†going through fire and water bringing us out into a more spacious place with a more gentle and generous spirit; not because God sent the sickness or sorrow, disappointment or loss, pandemic or pain to us, but because God used it for us; the Spirit of God, bringing us out better, each time; the cumulative total of all the fire and water we have gone through, transforming us, little by little, into more and more.

Amen.

Glimpses of God

John 14:1-14, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 10th, 2020 · Duration 14:45

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Another Valley

Psalm 23, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 3rd, 2020 · Duration 10:51

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.â€

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, no matter how many times the lectionary places, in our path, those wonderful old words from the twenty-third psalm, I never fail to be struck by the way the sentence at the center of Psalm 23 promises us support in trouble, not protection from trouble.

Some psalms do appear to promise protection from trouble; among them, Psalm 91, which says, “God will protect those who love God and know God’s nameâ€; Psalm 121, which says, “The Lord will keep us from all harmâ€; Psalm 12, which says, “The Lord will protect us and guard us;†and Psalm 5, which says, “God covers the righteous with a shield of favor;†all beautiful promises of protection, but all, also, leaving us, at times, with much mystery, and hard questions, when we watch those who love God and know God’s name suffer so in this life; the dearest people we have ever known, bearing the hardest burdens we have ever seen; promises of protection for the children of God, notwithstanding.

Which is not to say that no one is ever protected or spared. Most of us can look back on close calls with disaster or trouble; sorrows from which we are certain we were spared and protected. It’s just that we also know of times when we, and those we know and love, were not protected; in some cases, the finest and most prayerful people we have ever known going through the hardest and most painful valleys we have ever seen.

Which, of course, is where the sentence at the center of Psalm 23 comes in; promising us, not protection from trouble, but strength in trouble. “Though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me;†a promise, not of protection from the longest, lowest valleys, but of strength for the longest, lowest valleys; God, not always leading us around the worst, but always joining us in the worst, and seeing us through the worst.

Thinking about all that this week called to mind, for me, a sentence from the novelist, Pat Conroy, who, in his memoir, My Reading Life, said, “Sometimes I think I should sit down and write a letter to the boy I once was.†Needless to say, not all of us can do that, especially now, because while, for some, the season of Covid-19 may have freed up more time, for others, it has eaten up more time. But, someday, when we have the time, that might be an important spiritual discipline; to find a quiet space and write a letter to the child we once were: Dear Me at Twelve, we might begin, Here’s what has happened in the twenty, or forty, or eighty years since I was you and you were me…

The report which might follow for most of us might include the memory of near misses and close calls, sorrows from which we were protected, along with great struggles and deep losses from which we were not spared, but for which we were given the strength to stay on our feet and keep moving; the strength to go through those long, low valleys we did not get to go around; valleys from which God did not spare us, but in which God did join us, to comfort and help us.

One of which is our present season of uncertainty; the time of Covid-19, also sometimes called “novel coronavirus†to differentiate it from other, previous coronavirus strains. But, while the virus may be different, and the responses to it unprecedented, there is nothing novel or new about the anxiety and sadness, uncertainty and loss, which this present season in our lives has brought to so many; another long and low valley, thick with shadows and dense with pain, but one in which God is with us and for us; the Spirit of God and the people of God, seeing us through another valley we did not get to go around.
Amen.

New Beginnings

Luke 24:13-35, The Third Sunday in Eastertide

Major Treadway · April 26th, 2020 · Duration 16:37

        New beginnings come about throughout the lives that each of us live. Often, these new beginnings can be anticipated: Marriage, starting a new job, the adoption or birth of a child, moving to a new place, starting college. There are so many new beginnings for which we can try to prepare. We dream and anticipate. We talk to friends or relatives who may have some special insight about our next adventure. We read books, scour the internet, look at pictures, and even try to get a taste of what this new endeavor might be like – with internships, extended visits, or babysitting (for the record, babysitting is nothing like parenting). We anticipate and prepare as best as we can until that long-awaited moment, when we are swallowed up by the new beginning, and the new beginning becomes our present.

        But there are also other new beginnings that come about throughout the lives that each of us live. There are new beginnings that start in ways that we do not anticipate, that do not follow our plans. This is the kind of new beginning in which the travelers on the road to Emmaus find themselves in this morning’s gospel lesson.

        Cleopas and his friend are walking the seven-mile journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They are lamenting that the New Beginning that they were starting to believe might be true, was not turning out the way that they had hoped. They had hoped that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel – after all Jesus had stood in the temple at the beginning of his ministry and proclaimed “the year of the Lord’s favor,” before sitting down and telling everyone that “today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

        This same Jesus, preached and taught with unusual authority. He healed people, lots of people. He fed thousands of people with just a few loaves bread and a few fish. He knew just where to cast fishing nets. He once spoke to a raging storm and it stopped. Another time, he walked across the surface of a lake – on top of the water. He always commanded the attention of any gathered group, whether they be tax collectors, lawyers, religious folk, or just ordinary sinners like us.

        But then he died. I can almost hear Cleopas and his friend kicking themselves for having believed. I imagine them to be just on the cusp of swearing to never fall for another messianic pyramid scheme again, when a stranger approaches them and interrupts their conversation.

        These two men, it would seem, were ready for a new beginning. They had spent time with Jesus, or at least hearing about him enough to believe that he was the messiah. They were ready for a new beginning that would have flown in the faces of some of the religious leaders of their day. They may not have been quite sure what this new beginning would be, but they had at least chosen that path and begun to imagine and dream of what life would be like following Jesus; but then Jesus was killed and their new beginning was suddenly different. Not like they had imagined.

        Ellie, Raeonna, Katie, Andrew, Thaddeaus, Trey, Kelsey, Ross, Connor, Ainsley, Jackson, Jon-Sanders, and Noel, just over a month ago, you all were finishing up your third semester of your senior year of high school, preparing for entry into the next new beginning of your life as a high school graduate. Readying yourself for life’s next steps. This readying included one more semester with your peers, managing the baseball team, winning a state championship, going to prom, planning a senior trip, a host of graduation parties, gathering here today, walking across a stage to receive your diploma while your friends and family celebrated this accomplishment. This readying included well thought out and planned goodbyes and see-you-laters. It included good and appropriate closure – opportunities for one last hug, one more apology, one last walk out of school and ride off of campus.

        And while it was spring break, all of these preparations that you had planned were cancelled without your input or consultation. Thrusting you into a kind of odd liminal space where you can see your friends and experience your last semester of school – virtually, but not tangibly – in a space where we are all finding that though we are just as connected digitally, that the physical presence we took for granted had more meaning than we had ever known.

        And so your new beginning has been thrust upon you in ways that do not allow you to have the kind of preparation that you would have planned. While the rest of us have also been shaken by this new reality; most of us are not on the cusp of the next phase of our lives.

        All of us, though, are on this journey toward a new beginning that we cannot quite get our minds around. We are all eager to be together, to hug one another, to be with our family of faith, to gather in this space and many other spaces; but for now, we cannot. We are on a journey toward a new beginning that feels like we aren’t going anywhere.

        I imagine that this feeling is a bit what Cleopas and his unnamed friend felt when their conversation was interrupted by a stranger, who invited himself into their conversation. As readers of the Gospel of Luke, we know that this stranger is Jesus, but Cleopas and his traveling companion don’t know. Down as they are, when this stranger asks “hey, what are you guys talking about?”, they welcome him into their conversation and they continued their journey together.

        Their journey together is not long. Though they manage to share enough that when their journey is at what should be its natural conclusion, and Jesus begins walking ahead as though to leave them, these weary travelers, perhaps reminiscing the Deuteronomic command to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” perhaps subconsciously leaning into Jesus’ chilling tale that to welcome “one of the least of these…” is to welcome Jesus, these weary travelers welcome the stranger into their home to stay the night and to share a meal.

        As they sit down to eat, somehow it is this stranger, the guest in the house, who takes on the role of host and breaks the bread, and when he does, suddenly, as though they had known all along, but were not ready to believe that it could be so, Cleopas and his unnamed friend recognize Jesus.

        The next line in the story says that Jesus vanishes. Amazingly, they do not get hung up on Jesus vanishing, instead, the gospel of Luke says that before one hour had passed, they got up and returned to Jerusalem to tell the disciples of Jesus what they had seen, learned, and experienced.

        Seniors, the road that you and we are all on at this moment in history is strange and taking us in directions that none of us could have imagined were even possible just two months ago. We all take comfort in the knowledge that the place where we find ourselves is not the end our collective journey, but just a part of the journey on which we are traveling.

        When you arrive at your new place, be it Jackson, Oxford, Starkville, New Orleans, Missouri,  North Carolina, or somewhere you are not yet anticipating, you will meet strangers – strangers who may overhear your conversation and ask you what you were talking about; strangers who may be from Jackson or may be from some place far away and weird like Portland; strangers who may hold the keys to the all the important social circles or strangers who may have been kept outside of all of the important social circles; strangers who are searching for the perfect church or strangers who have long ago given up on church. Whoever these strangers are, whatever their story, because of the ways that you have been formed in your time here among us, when I imagine you meeting that stranger, I imagine you welcoming him/her into your conversation.

        And later, somewhere down the road, you and someone who was once a stranger will sit in a room, perhaps like this one, and you will hear familiar words and a familiar story. Bread will be broken and passed around, and you will find that you are among a people that you do not presently know, but somehow at that time all will be familiar to you once again.

        The act of breaking the bread. The words that are spoken. The cup. The ritual. It will all come together in such a way that will bind you in that moment to all of the moments that you have been formed by the breaking of the bread in this space, bread that would have sat where your pictures now sit. You will remember not only the experiences that have formed you here and in which you have formed Northminster, but you will remember the words that your new friends, your new community of faith, have spoken to you and how those words have burned within you – shedding new light on old truths.

        Somehow, in the breaking of the bread, you will see before you a lifetime of experience and formation that has prepared you for this new beginning and for the greeting of a stranger. In that moment, as the circle of your embrace continues to broaden, I hope that you will come back to the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover, and tell us all that you have seen, learned, and experienced.

        Come on home and tell us how the words of Jesus are burning inside of you, words that you have heard and studied in the youth house and will have taken on new flesh in your new context. Come on back and tell us about the exciting ways that you are able to translate how your experiences at passport and cooking smiley face chicken sandwiches have prepared you for your new beginnings in all your new places. Tell us how what you are learning there can inform what we are doing here.

        And be confident of this: as certainly as those disciples in Jerusalem would have been excited to hear the story that Cleopas and his friend had to tell about their encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and as assuredly as we all now await the days when we are able again to safely gather back here in this space and share all that has transpired since the last time we were together, we will be enraptured by your stories of what you are learning and experiencing.

         Yes, we will be excited. We will be excited because for as long as you have been a part of this community, this family of faith has been pouring its life into yours – holding you in the nursery, guiding you in children’s church, corralling you through Palm Sunday processionals and Living Nativities, creating nurturing experiences in Atrium, teaching you in Sunday School, chaperoning trips, preparing meals, hanging out in the Youth House, buying your desserts – all the time, watching you, encouraging you, and praying for you.

        We will also be excited to hear what you have learned, because as long as you have been a part of this community, this community has been learning from you – trying to answer your innocent and profound questions, watching as you care for one another, learning from you on Youth Sundays in Sunday School and worship, seeing how you serve, how you love, how you minister to all of us.

        Each Sunday night for the last year, we have closed our gatherings standing in a circle and praying together a prayer adapted from Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. Ellie, Raeonna, Katie, Andrew, Thaddeaus, Trey, Kelsey, Ross, Connor, Ainsley, Jackson, Jon-Sanders, and Noel, my prayer for all of Northminster, and especially for each of you today as you continue to prepare for your upcoming new beginning, is that prayer:

May the peace of the God go with you wherever God may send you;

May God guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm;

May God bring you home rejoicing at the wonders God has shown you;

May God bring you home rejoicing once again into these doors.

Amen.

Concerning Our One Another Faith

John 20:19-31, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 19th, 2020 · Duration 16:04

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Easter in Exile

Jeremiah 31:1-6, Easter/Resurrection of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 12th, 2020 · Duration 14:45

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

This Week

Matthew 21:1-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 5th, 2020 · Duration 12:59

               Needless to say, this week will be different from any other Holy Week we have ever known.  And, it will be the same as every other Holy Week we have ever known.

               Unlike any other Holy Week most of us have ever known, we will not be able to be together, this week; an inability to gather which will mean the loss of some dimensions of our life together, among them, serving one another the bread and cup of Communion, a sacred act which can happen anywhere, needing neither sanctuary or pastor, but one which does need a way for all to serve and be served.  And, so, for this week, at least, we fast from the feast we so love to serve to one another; bound, to one another, this time, by our hunger for the bread, our thirst for the cup, and our deep longing for the sacred practice of Holy Communion.

               A Holy Week made different, also, by the absence of the Palm Sunday procession of palm-waving children; but made beautiful by the palms, which our children crafted and created, which cover and carpet the aisle and altar of our sanctuary.  Add to those Palm Sunday differences the fact that our Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services will, of necessity, be livestreamed instead of in person, and, needless to say, this Holy Week will be different from any Holy Week we have ever known.

               And, yet, in ways which nothing can ever alter, this Holy Week will be the same as every Holy Week we have ever known; Jesus, making his way, today, into Jerusalem, welcomed by the hopeful “Hosannas” of the expectant crowd; followed, later this week, by the anointing with perfume by Mary, the preparation and celebration of the Passover meal, the agony in Gethsemane, Judas’ kiss, Peter’s tears and Pilate’s reluctant verdict; all the gathering shadows of this Holy Week, the same as every other Holy Week we have ever known.

               Bringing us, at last, to the most dense and deep Holy Week shadows of all, as Jesus, once again, this Friday, will carry his cross to the place of his death; climbing up onto the cross to climb down into the worst we have ever inflicted or endured, spoken or heard, caused or felt, given or received; our Lord Jesus, taking it all on, and taking it all in; dying, as he lived, arms out as wide as the world; completing the life he came to live, by dying the death he came to die.

               In all those ways, this Holy Week, though different from any Holy Week we have ever known, will be the same as every Holy Week we have ever known.

               And, next week, the same will be so, again.  Next Sunday will be unlike any Easter we have ever known, but it will also be just like every Easter we have ever known; the whole Holy Week cast of characters, those who were glad Jesus was gone, and those who were sad Jesus was gone, all discovering the same great Sunrise Surprise, next week.

               But first, there is this week.

                                                                                                         Amen.

 

The Church in the Time of Covid-19

John 11:1-45, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 29th, 2020 · Duration 13:36

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

The Next Right Thing

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Lesley Ratcliff · March 22nd, 2020 · Duration 63:56

The sermon begins at 38:15.

The Hour Is Coming, And Is Now Here

John 4:5-42, The Third Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 15th, 2020 · Duration 0:0

                I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I find this morning’s gospel lesson from John chapter four to be among the most important passages in all the Bible; a corner of scripture which captures the passion, and measures the wingspan, of Jesus.

                Jesus, in John chapter four, transcending human boundaries to embrace human differences; going to Samaria, a place many first-century Jews avoided; drinking after a Samaritan, a race many first-century Jews disdained; and talking to a woman in public, which scandalized Jesus' disciples in verse twenty-seven of today’s gospel lesson.  Jesus, in John chapter four, saying “No” to the xenophobia, racism and misogyny of his world, and ours.  Jesus, transcending human boundaries to embrace human differences.

                Which is why I always say that the deeper we go in our life with Jesus, the wider we grow in our embrace of the world.  After all, there isn’t another Jesus for us to be like, get close to, or follow.  The only Jesus there is for us to get close to is the one who transcends all human boundaries to embrace all human differences.  So, of course, the deeper we go in our life with Jesus, the wider we grow in our love for the world.  Until, eventually, we get so close to Jesus that all the human differences which won’t matter to God in heaven don’t matter to us on earth.

                That’s when we know we’re going deep with, and getting close to, Jesus; when we can honestly say that all the human differences which won’t matter to God, then, don’t matter to us, now.

                Which is not unlike what Jesus was saying to the woman at the well in today’s gospel lesson.  When the woman reminded Jesus that her people, the Samaritans, had one place for, and way of, worship, and Jesus’ people, the Jews, had a different place for, and way of, worship, Jesus replied, “Believe me, the hour is coming when we will worship God neither on your mountain or mine.  The hour is coming, and is now here, when we will worship God in spirit and in truth”. 

                “The hour is coming, and is now here, when all these differences which matter so much to so many will no longer matter at all to any”, said Jesus to the woman. 

                “The hour is now here” means that we don’t have to wait until we get to heaven to transcend all the human boundaries of our time and embrace all the human differences in our arms.  “The hour is now here” means that we don’t have to wait until we're over on the Other Side to move from tolerating the diversity of the whole human family to celebrating the diversity of the whole human family.  “The hour is now here” means that we don’t have to die before we can live big, beautiful, strong, gentle lives of welcome, hospitality, justice and grace. 

                Whenever we get close enough to Jesus to say that all the human differences which won’t matter to God, then, don’t matter to us, now, the grace-filled hour, which is coming, is now here.

                                                                                                                Amen.

Concerning the Life of Faith

John 3:1-17, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 8th, 2020 · Duration 13:10

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Temptations of Jesus

Matthew 4:1-11, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 1st, 2020 · Duration 4:15

                Every year, on the First Sunday in Lent, the lectionary places in our path one of the gospel accounts of the temptations of Jesus; temptations, not to be sinful, but to be successful; not to do something bad, but to do something big; temptations to be powerful and impressive, to do God’s work the world’s way.

               And, every year, on the First Sunday in Lent, Jesus says “No”, to the temptation to be powerful and successful; choosing, instead, to live a life of vulnerable love; sitting down with and standing up for the most vulnerable people often enough that it made the most powerful people nervous enough that, at the other end of Lent, Jesus will die on a cross; stretched all the way up to God, and all the way out to others; the cross Jesus said “Yes” to when Jesus said “No” to the temptation to be powerful and successful, safe and secure, and chose, instead of a life of institutional ambition, a life of vulnerable love. 

               Which is the life to which Jesus calls the church; a cross-formed life of vulnerable love, stretched all the way up with love for God, and all the way out with love for others; saying “No” to what Jesus said “No” to, so  that we can say “Yes” to what Jesus said “Yes” to; a cross-formed life of kindness, courage and vulnerable love.                                                                                                                                                             Amen. 

                                                                          

Moses, Elijah and Jesus

Matthew 17:1-9, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · February 23rd, 2020 · Duration 8:21

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

A Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew 5:21-37, The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 16th, 2020 · Duration 0:5

               This morning’s gospel lesson from the Sermon on the Mount is a painful one for any of us to read, and for many of us to hear, because of what it says concerning divorce.

               Of course, we all know that one cannot draw a straight line from the first-century to the twenty-first century, concerning either marriage or divorce, and that this gospel lesson’s use of the word “adultery” is as extreme as its call for us to tear out the eye and cut off the hand.  But, the words on the page don’t take that into account; ink-marks forever fixed in first-century words which land on twenty-first century ears in ways which can be so painful that, were it not for the lectionary, we might never read them in church.  But, because we follow the lectionary, every three years we do read them, and, once we have read them, it seems irresponsible not to talk about them.

               I grew up in a church, in Georgia, and regularly drive past churches, in Jackson, where today’s words from the Sermon on the Mount, concerning divorce, are taken literally, and, thus, are used in ways which add to the pain of those who have already endured one of life’s most complex griefs; all in the name of the timeless authority of the infallible Bible.  But, the same churches which apply timeless authority to those words in the Sermon on the Mount have no qualms about arming themselves against potential intruders, despite the fact that the same Sermon on the Mount says “Do not resist an evildoer”; and, no hesitations about asking if the poor who seek aid from the church are “deserving of help”, despite the fact that the same Sermon on the Mount says “Give to everyone who begs from you”. 

               Let’s be as honest as we can bear to be.  The way much of popular North American Christianity manages the Bible has turned much of the popular church into something like a cruise ship, where all the first-class cabins are reserved for folk like myself; white, straight, once-married, males; with plenty of second-class accommodations for everyone else.  And, any church which doesn’t follow that same path is suspected to be loose and liberal about the Bible.

               All of which makes me feel a little like Willie McCoy, from that classic ballad by the famous twentieth-century American poet, Jim Croce, “You Don't Mess Around with Slim”.  The more musically erudite and culturally sophisticated members of the congregation will recall that, after having been sorely hustled by “Big Jim” in a contest of billiards, Willie, a.k.a. “Slim”, returned, looking for a rematch, declaring, “Last week he took all my money, and it may sound funny, but I’ve come to get my money back.”

               With apologies to Jim Croce, I would like to say that “It may sound funny, but I've come to get my Bible back.”  The Bible has been used too freely to cause too much pain for far too long; including, even, the Sermon on the Mount; and, especially, today’s paragraph about divorce; a part of the Holy Bible which, apart from the Holy Spirit, only adds to the pain of those who have already suffered through one of life’s most complex losses. 

               But, with the Holy Spirit, that part of the Holy Bible ceases to be a crushing burden to those who have suffered the grief of divorce, and becomes, instead, a reminder for us all that marriage is to be entered into with great care, and lived into with much gentleness and long kindness.  Marriage, at its deepest and best; two less than perfect people sharing a less than perfect life, with patience and courtesy, realism and respect, forgiveness and grace; all of which is true for every marriage, be it an only marriage or a subsequent marriage. 

               With the Holy Spirit, that’s the way today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount makes meaning which doesn’t hurt and harm, but helps and heals.

               Which is true, not only for the Sermon on the Mount, but for all of scripture.  We Christians need to worry less about how inspired the writers of scripture were, and worry more about how inspired the readers of scripture are.  Because, without the Holy Spirit, the Holy Bible can hurt us.  But, with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Bible can heal us.

                                                                                                         Amen.

This Much Is Clear

Isaiah 58:1-9, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 9th, 2020 · Duration 13:40

            “Is not this the worship I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice, and to let the oppressed go free, to share your bread with the hungry and to bring the homeless poor into your home?”

               With those words, today’s lesson from Isaiah takes its place in a Bible-wide stream of verses which call the people of God to embody the spirit of God by taking specific, practical actions on behalf of, and in solidarity with, those who struggle on the hard margins of life; a Bible-wide stream which flows all the way from Leviticus 19:10, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall leave the edges for the poor and the immigrant” to I John 3:17, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has this world’s goods, sees someone in need, and yet refuses to help?” 

               Between those words from Leviticus and First John, other verses in that Bible-wide stream include Deuteronomy 15:7, “Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor”, Deuteronomy 15:11,“The poor will always be with you; therefore, open your hand to the poor”, Proverbs 31:8,“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, and defend the rights of the poor”, Isaiah 1:17, “Seek justice,  rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”, Amos 8:4, “Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring pain to the poor, God will not forget what you have done”, Malachi 3:5, “God will bring judgement against those who oppress workers, widows, orphans and aliens”, Matthew 5:42, “Give to everyone who begs from you”, Matthew 7:12, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you”, Luke 14:13, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind”, and Hebrews 13:3, “Remember those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them”.

               Add to all those verses and voices the parable in Matthew chapter twenty-five in which Jesus says that the big question on judgement day will be how we responded to the hungry, the poor, the sick, the stranger and the prisoner, not to mention the parable in Luke chapter sixteen where the one who had more than enough in this life is in     torment in the next life because he failed to care for the needs of poor Lazarus, and it is clear that, when this morning’s lesson from Isaiah says that what God wants from us is for us to loose the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free, today’s lesson from Isaiah is not an isolated voice in scripture, but part of the cumulative weight of scripture; part of a Bible-wide stream of verses and voices, all of which call the people of God to embody the spirit of God by entering into friendship with those who struggle on the hard margins of life.

               The cumulative weight of scripture is clear:  God has a preferential concern for whoever is most vulnerable in this world, and God expects those of us who claim the name of God to embody that same concern in our words and in our deeds.  Whatever else we may, or may not, be able to say with certainty about God, that much is clear.

               I sometimes think of it this way:  If you take a perfectly smooth Bible, and place it on a perfectly flat table, on a perfectly even floor, in a perfectly level building, that Bible will still tilt, turn, slope and lean in the direction of whoever is most vulnerable, outcast, marginalized, ostracized, demonized, dehumanized, stigmatized, powerless, voiceless, overlooked, left out, excluded, poor and alone, because that is where the cumulative weight of scripture tilts, turns, slopes and leans; the cumulative weight of scripture, calling us to get in on what God is up to in this world by sitting down with and standing up for persons in need of help and hope, justice and welcome, friendship and love; persons we need in our lives as much as they need us in theirs, so that the boundaries which separate neighbor from neighbor can dissolve, so that God’s kingdom can come and God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

               Needless to say, there will always be complexities and uncertainties concerning how to go about embracing the most vulnerable and marginalized persons in the orbit of our reach.  But, if the cumulative weight of scripture is to be believed, then there is no doubt that the will of God for all of us is for each of us to open our lives in friendship to, for and with those who live on the hardest margins of life.

               Whatever else we may, or may not, be able to say, with certainty, concerning God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Bible, that much is clear.

                                                                                                         Amen.

What Is God's Will For Our Lives

Micah 6:1-8, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 2nd, 2020 · Duration 5:37

             “What does the Lord require of us but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?”

               With those words, today’s lesson from the book of Micah tells us what God’s will is for our lives.  According to those words from Micah 6:8, the will of God for the people of God is for us to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God; steps which, for many of us, come in the reverse order from the order in which Micah 6:8 names them. 

               Many of us begin with what Micah 6:8 ends with.  What Micah lists last, walking humbly with our God, most of us do first; practicing each day, all through the day, living a prayerful and centered life, the kind of walking with God which slowly forms us into the kind of people who love nothing more than we love kindness; walking humbly with God until, as the poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, “It is only kindness which ties our shoes in the morning and sends us out into the day;” a life of loving kindness which first causes us to sit down with those who are hurting and alone, but eventually compels us to stand up against injustice, exclusion, discrimination, oppression, meanness, bullying, hurt and harm; a life spent walking humbly with God, until we become people who love kindness so deeply that we can’t not get out there in the world and work for justice.

               Which, according to today’s lesson from the book of Micah, is the will of God for the people of God; what God wants most from, and for, each of us and all of us; for us to walk humbly with our God until we love kindness so deeply that we can’t not do justice.

                                                                                                                        Amen.

              

Youth Sunday

Matthew 4: 12-23, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Youth · January 26th, 2020 · Duration 51:41

The audio begins at 1:35.

Concerning the Open Ear

Psalm 40:1-11, The Second Sunday After Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 19th, 2020 · Duration 12:51

“God has given me an open ear.”  Every time the lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words from today’s psalm, we hear the psalm say that God has opened the psalmist’ ear.

But, according to students of the Hebrew language, those words, “God has given me an open ear”, may not be as gentle in the original Hebrew as they sound in our Bibles.  In the Hebrew text, that sentence says something more along the lines of “God has dug out my ear” or “God has bored a hole in my ear”; painful sounding images which, for those who have actually lived an open-eared life, make perfect sense, because, to keep our ears ever open for the voice of the Holy Spirit can cause us to grow and change in ways which, while wonderful and true, can, also, be painful.

In fact, to hear and see new light on old truth can sometimes feel something like going through stages of grief.  First, we become angry at whoever has shown us new light on old truth, because we don’t want to have to change our minds about things we thought were certain, settled and finished.  Then, eventually, we may come to know, at the deep down center of our soul, that the light we have been shown is, in fact, more true to the spirit of God than what we have always thought and been taught.  But, we can’t bring ourselves to say so out loud because it’s not what our family and friends expect us to believe.  At which point we move from anger to denial; “hiding our light under a bushel”, knowing better than we are willing to say, perhaps because we do not want to appear disloyal to, or ungrateful for, those who first formed us for God and the gospel.  Or, perhaps because, for us, and for those whose agreement and approval we want and need, the way things have always been has always worked, especially if we were born on the powerful, comfortable side of human difference. 

They say that “the winners write the histories.”  Unfortunately, the winners also write the theologies, doctrines, creeds, prayer books and rules.  And, more often than not, all those words we put in God’s mouth work best for those of us who were born on the powerful, comfortable, majority side of human difference.   So, of course, change is difficult for us, which is why to live with the open ear can be as painful as the Holy Ghost ear-piercing this morning’s psalm describes; the ear dug out and opened up.  As W. H. Auden once said, “We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

But, on the other side of those moments of truth, there waits a whole new life which we cannot get to without first “climbing the cross of the moment,” and being honest about the truth we have come to see and know concerning what does and does not matter to God. 

Moments of truth which begin with the digging out of the ear, and end with the stretching out of the arms; our arms stretched out so far that, with one hand, we can reach back and bless the best of what is behind us, and, with the other hand, reach out and take hold of the truth we have come to see and must come to say; the Spirit-filled life of the open ears and the open arms; the more dug out the ear, the more stretched out the arms.

                                                                                                                        Amen.

 

Concerning Kindness and Clarity

John 1:10-18, The Second Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · January 5th, 2020 · Duration 9:51

Audio Note: The sermon begins after the choir solo

          “And the Word became flesh and lived among us...full of grace and truth.”  Of all the words in sacred scripture, few come closer to capturing the life of Jesus in a single summarizing sentence than those from this morning’s gospel lesson; words which describe the life of Jesus as being full of both grace and truth; grace which was kind and gentle in its welcome, and truth which was clear and severe in its demands; an expansive wingspan of grace which kept Jesus sitting down with sinners and strangers, and a crystal clear moral compass of truth which kept Jesus standing up against injustice and hypocrisy. 

               Follow Jesus around in the four gospels, and that is what you see; a life full of both, grace and truth; a way of life which, without the Holy Spirit, none of us could hope to live, but, one which, with the Holy Spirit, all of us can try to live; a life which is as kind as it is clear, and as clear as it is kind; a life of kindness and clarity at which we get better by faithful daily practice; praying, each day, all through the day, to be kind and clear in our words and actions; cutting back on the sarcasm, exaggerating and teasing; renouncing the passive-aggressive behavior which says one thing in a person’s presence and something else in their absence; repenting of all those less than mindful ways of speaking and living which are full of neither, grace or truth, so that we can grow into a way of life which is full of both, grace and truth; that beautiful kind of life which the Quakers call “gentle and plain”; a life which, like the life of Jesus, is full of nothing but the kindness of grace and the clarity of truth.                                                                                                                                                                            Amen.

The World Into Which Jesus Was Born

Matthew 2:13-23, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Major Treadway · December 29th, 2019 · Duration 20:38

     I love a good story, don’t you?

           A good story has a way of drawing you in and taking hold of you and keeping hold of you until it is ready to let go. A great story will stick with you long after the telling has finished. Storytelling is an art. For great storytellers, the story itself is only a vehicle for what they are really hoping to communicate. If they have been successful in their telling, the story will take on a new life in the minds of its hearers.

          Today is the first Sunday of Christmastide – a twelve-day season that will take us from Christmas day until Epiphany, when the wise people will visit Jesus and present him with gifts.

          Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to follow the story as the Lectionary has laid it out for us.

           Today’s gospel lesson presents a series of movements, dreams, places, and characters that all help set the stage for who this child, Jesus, is and is to become. I don’t want to get too technical with details, but I think that some of them are instructive. This reading comes from the second chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The first chapter is made up primarily of the genealogy of Joseph, followed by Joseph deciding not to divorce Mary – thanks to a visit from an angel – and then, Jesus is born.

          Chapter 2, where we find ourselves today, begins with the visit of the wise men – we’ll come back to that in a couple weeks. Then, today’s lesson. By the end of chapter two, Jesus is probably 2-4 years old – not yet in kindergarten. The next chapter of Matthew will skip ahead to Jesus’ baptism and the start of his ministry – when scholars think that Jesus was about 30 years old. The 26 chapters of Matthew’s Gospel that follow today’s reading will cover less than 3 years of time. The whole of what the author of the gospel of Matthew wants to introduce about Jesus before his ministry begins is found in the first two chapters – about half of which is a genealogy and story of the wise people’s journey to Jesus.

          All that to say that if we believe that introductions are important, and I do, then we must believe that there is a lot that the author is hoping to communicate in these eleven verses as a means of introducing Jesus.

          The author seeks to connect Jesus to the Jewish story in significant ways. Joseph, named for that other famous Joseph in the Bible – the one who was the favorite son of his father, Jacob, grandson of Abraham, Jacob whose name would later be changed by God to Israel. Joseph, the dreamer. Joseph, who was thrown into a well, then sold into slavery and taken to Egypt. Joseph, who would dream dreams and interpret dreams and eventually call his father Israel and all of his children into Egypt to live. For the father of Jesus to bear the name Joseph carries a lot of weight at the outset – when Matthew tells of Joseph having dreams, immediately all of the first century Jewish hearers of this story would think of that other Joseph and his dreams.

          Sometimes, though, a storyteller will not think that mere allusion is enough. Sometimes a storyteller will need to lay it on really thick, just to drive home the point. In Joseph’s dreams, he is told to flee to Egypt to avoid death. Now, Joseph is firmly connected to that other Joseph.

          But the connection of Jesus to the story of the Jews does not stop there. Young children are killed in Bethlehem, calling to mind Exodus chapter one when the new king over Egypt commands that all newborn males should be cast into the Nile. And then one more time Joseph has a dream. The angel of the Lord calls upon Joseph to get up and lead his family out of Egypt to the land of Israel. Of course, you don’t need to be reminded that another significant character in the Old Testament once had an encounter where he was told to lead the people of God out of Egypt into what would become the land of Israel. You don’t need reminding, and neither did the people for whom the story was originally written.

          For an introduction, I think Matthew succeeds. I think that he has successfully crafted the story of the early days of Jesus in such a way that first century Jews, or anyone familiar with the story of the Jews will be interested to hear more about this child, Jesus.

          Those first century hearers would also have remembered Herod. They would likely have heard of the killing of children in Bethlehem. They may have heard of the visit of the wise people and their deception of Herod. They would have known about Archelaus, and why that would have led Joseph to immediately correct his course and settle in Nazareth. And they would have known that nothing good can come from Nazareth.

          This is the world into which Jesus was born. At the outset, his earthly father is dreaming dreams that take him and his family on a long journey to Egypt and back to avoid his killing. He is born to an ordinary man and woman who have extraordinary faith. He is born to a craftsman. He is born in a small town, forced to flee, then eventually settles in another small town.

          In some ways, all of this story of Jesus seems so foreign. In twenty-first century America, babies are not often born in such circumstances. We rarely hear a story about a father having a dream in the middle of the night that leads to him taking his wife and newborn child to another country.

          In other ways, if we change just a few of the details of this story it could fit very well into today’s world. Jesus is born into to a family of little means. Their wealth is so small that they cannot afford to get to the hospital on time to have the baby in the hospital. So they go into the bathroom of their cousin’s apartment, and there, a child is born. The noise of the birth causes enough commotion that someone calls reports the noise. The family, exhausted, decides that they need to go somewhere else, for they fear that child protective services might come and take the child away.

          This is a scene I can imagine. And while I want for the scene about Herod ordering that the children in Bethlehem be killed to be too far away, it comes close too. Just last night, in New York City, a man broke into the home of a Rabbi who was hosting a small group in celebration of Hanukkah – that great festival commemorating the rededication of the second temple in Jerusalem. The man who entered the home of the Rabbi attacked those gathered, leaving five seriously wounded. It seems that he was intent on killing them – because they are Jews. That attack along with several others against Jews in New York City in the last week make this part of the story all too relatable. A little too close for comfort.

          And we certainly don’t have to use our imaginations to imagine a family not wanting to return to their home for fear of the ruling party. Just months ago, in Canton, Forest, Morton and beyond, the US government arrested 680 people who were at their place of employment, making these places ones to which a small family might not feel comfortable returning.

          And who is this Jesus, born to Mary and Joseph all those years ago – this Jesus whose birth we celebrate?

          The next 26 chapters of Matthew will reveal that to us, but I’ll give you a preview. This Jesus, as the Hebrews lesson tells us today, is God with us. God, the creator of everything – from the dirt beneath our feet, to the sand beneath the ocean. Creator of the stars in the sky, so far away that we cannot even comprehend the distance to them to the air that we breathe in each day that provides life in ways that are so normal to us that we fail to realize the miracle of each breath. The creator of the little bitty tiny animals like ants and gnats and mosquitos to the big animals like elephants, rhinos and even the sea monsters. This God, becomes a human. This God joins the humans which were also among the things created. This is Jesus.

          Jesus, from his birth, comes to know what it means to face adversity - to be snatched from the jaws of oppression that he might have opportunity to achieve that which he was born to achieve.

          This Jesus will go on to be baptized by a strange man in the wilderness. He will be tempted by the devil. He will call disciples. He will gather followers and teach them on a mountainside. He will cleanse lepers. He will heal Jews and Gentiles. He will befriend men and women.  He will dine with sinners and tax collectors. He will cast out demons. He will give sight to the blind. He will be a man of God in the midst of the people of God. He will understand the scriptures of God and find ways to live them out creatively and beautifully. He will challenge the government of his day. He will push the religious elite (the pastors of the day) to be better. He will boil down all of the words of the scriptures that we know as the Old Testament into a simple pair of statements: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. He will then push everyone who nods approvingly to expand their understanding of what it means to be neighbor.

          Jesus will also push the authorities of the day to the point that they will kill him. He will be buried in a tomb. And then, three days later, he will be raised from the grave, triumphant over death.

          In all of this that Jesus will do, he will do it as a human. He will have flesh like my flesh, though his would not have been colored like mine, unless he was the first white guy to be born in the middle east. He will have hair – also not like mine. He will have blood running through his veins. He will have lungs that need the air just like mine and yours. And he will have feelings and emotions. He will laugh, and hope, and play, and tell jokes, and stories, and he will cry. He will feel pain and lament. He will feel hunger and thirst. He will get tired and need sleep.  He will think that there is no way that he is going to be able to make it through this day. He will be ready to give up. But he won’t. He doesn’t. He didn’t.

          This Jesus whom we celebrate was one of us. This Jesus whom we celebrate came to be with us. Emmanuel – God with us. And because he came to be with us then, we know that he is with us now. And because he is with us now, we know that when we reach the point where we feel like we aren’t going to be able to make it through this day, that we are not alone – for God is with us.

              Amen.

On Reading Between the Lines

Matthew 1:18-25, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 22nd, 2019 · Duration 11:09

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

On Not Being Offended By Jesus

Matthew 11:2-11, The Third Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 15th, 2019 · Duration 14:04

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning Our Immigrant Neighbors

Concerning Our Immigrant Neighbors

Chuck Poole · December 4th, 2019 · Duration 0:0

“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.”

               Those words from Leviticus 19:34 belong to a larger, longer cluster of verses in sacred scripture which recall the commandments of God to the people of God concerning their immigrant neighbors; passages such as Exodus 12:49, “There shall be one law for the citizen and the alien”, Exodus 22:21, “You shall not oppress a resident alien”, Leviticus 19:10, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall leave the edges for the poor and the alien”, Leviticus 19:33, “You shall not deprive a resident alien of justice”, and, my favorite one of them all, Leviticus 25:23, where the writer of the book of Leviticus says that, since God owns all the land in every country, in the eyes of God, we are all immigrants.

               Needless to say, we cannot draw a straight line from those words to our world.  However, we can draw, from those words, for our world, the obvious conclusion that God has a special concern for immigrant persons, and that God expects us to share that concern, which is why it is no wonder that people of so many faith traditions have come together to help, in ways large and small, our immigrant neighbors, in the aftermath of the events of August 7 in Canton, Carthage, Morton and beyond.

               As I write these words, three months have passed since August 7, 2019; the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 680 persons at their places of employment in Mississippi, for not having the proper documentation to live and work in the United States of America.

               While I do not have a simple public policy answer to the complex issues around immigration, I do have enough of the Bible in my head and the Spirit in my heart to know that the events of August 7, 2019 placed before us another moral moment for Mississippi; a moment of moral decision concerning how we would respond to our immigrant neighbors.

               Did our immigrant neighbors without legal documents have the option to stay in their country of origin?  Yes.  But, the vast majority of them made the difficult choice to come here out of desperation.  And, while there are undeniable exceptions, in my experience the majority of our immigrant neighbors are among our best neighbors.  We often hear it said that immigrant persons do the kind of work not everyone wants, which is often true.  But, the deeper truth, I have learned, is that immigrant persons not only often do the jobs not everyone wants, they also often bring a spirit not everyone has; making our communities stronger and better, not only by the jobs they do, but, also, by the goodness they bring. 

               Are there exceptions to that?  Of course.  But, those exceptions are rare in the community of families I have come to know since the events of August 7, 2019; including, for example, one immigrant person who had held the same job for over twelve years, supporting their family with no private or public assistance.  But, since August 7, “no mas trabajo”, no more work, which  means no more income, which, without help, would mean no more shelter or food or medicine; one of hundreds of immigrant families in Mississippi for whom the same is so.

               All of which takes us back to where we started:  You shall love the immigrant as yourself… You shall not oppress an immigrant...You shall not deprive an immigrant of justice.  Add to those words, from the Torah, Jesus’ haunting words from the Gospel of Matthew, “I was a stranger, and you did not take me in”, and it is not hard to see why people of every faith group and political perspective have come together to respond to the hundreds of immigrant families who, already vulnerable before August 7, are even more vulnerable since; not because we know, with certainty, what the government should do concerning immigration, but because we do know, with clarity, what we should do concerning immigrants; remembering those powerful words from Leviticus chapter twenty-five, verse twenty-three, where God reminds the people of God that, since God owns all the land in every nation, in the eyes of God we are all immigrants.1 

               And remembering, also, those simple words in Leviticus 19:34, which call us to love our immigrant neighbors as we love ourselves.

                                                                           Charles Poole                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     November 7, 2019

1)      “La Cancion de Bienvenida”  (The Welcome Song) is a small hymn which rises from the truth which travels in Leviticus 25:23, and which can be sung to the hymn tune GIFT OF LOVE; a traditional English melody which appears in several hymnals with the hymn “The Gift of Love”.

“La Cancion de Bienvenida”

 En los ojos del Dios,

Todas personas son immigrantes.

En los ojos del Dios,

Nosotros todos son immigrantes.

 

Todo el mundo, una familia;

Todas personas, son bienvenidas:

Bienvenido, todo el mundo,

En corazon y brazos del Dios.

 

Bienvenidas, todas personas.

Bienvenidos, todo aqui,

Por en los ojos, del Dios,

Nosotros todos son immigrantes.

 

English Translation:

 

“The Welcome Song”

In the eyes of God,

All persons are immigrants.

In the eyes of God,

Immigrants all, are we.

 

All the world is one family,

All persons are welcome.

The whole world is welcome,

In the heart and arms of God.

 

All persons, welcome;

All are welcome here.

For, in the eyes of God

We are all immigrants.

One Will Be Taken, One Will Be Left

Matthew 24:36-44, The First Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 1st, 2019 · Duration 6:29

            “Two will be in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left...Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming”.

               Sometime in the late 1930’s, a traveling evangelist stopped at Red Bluff Baptist Church, in Soperton, Georgia, where he preached a sermon on those words from today’s gospel lesson, which so convinced the congregation that, at any moment, Christ might come again, that a young mother of three, named Effie Mae Cammack, sat up all night long, watching the sky until sunrise, so fearful was she that  one would be taken and another left; a long and sleepless night which is part of my story because one of Effie Mae Cammack’s three children was my mother.  And, for as long as I can remember, I have known that story about the night Mommy, as we called her, sat up all night to guard against one being taken, and the other left.

               But it happened, anyway.  Not that night, but, eventually, fifty something years later, when Mommy was taken and my grandfather was left; not because Christ came down, but because Mommy went up.

               Which happens to someone somewhere every day.  Two are in a marriage; one is taken, the other is left.  Two are in a cherished friendship, a beloved relationship, or a long partnership; one is taken, the other  is left.  It happens to someone somewhere every day; not because Christ comes, but because we go.

               Someday is going to be the last day.  And, as today’s epistle lesson says, that day is nearer now than it once was.  So, it is time for us to wake up, to repent, to decide to change; time for us to make an intentional choice to practice living whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can, because someday is going to be the last day.  We may have forever in the next life, but, not in this life.  This life is going to end, and, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over, and get it right next time.  As far as we know, this is it.

               So, if our highest and deepest hope is to live the one and only life we are ever going to have with kindness and courage, empathy and integrity, gentleness and justice, truth and grace, the First Sunday of Advent would  probably be a good day to begin.                                                                                                                                                                                    Amen.

 

Thank-you

II Thessalonians 3:6-13, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 17th, 2019 · Duration 12:02

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning Life on the Other Side

Luke 20:27-38, The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 10th, 2019 · Duration 13:24

          “Some Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him to say to whom a woman, who had married seven brothers, would be married in the resurrection.” 

               With those words, this morning’s gospel lesson describes an effort, on the part of some Sadducees, who did not believe in life beyond the grave, to confound Jesus, and, perhaps, also, their religious rivals, the Pharisees, who, like Jesus, did believe in life beyond the grave; the Sadducees, learning, the hard way, not to play “stump the preacher” with Jesus, whose answer to their little riddle was that their question is not applicable to the next life, because the next life is not a continuation of this life.  So, the Sadducees’ hypothetical person who had seven spouses in this life may not have any spouses in the next life, because the next life is not just more of the same of this life.  “Those who belong to this age may be married,” said Jesus, “But the same is not so in the next life.”

               Which is not only more of an answer than the Sadducees bargained for, but, perhaps, also, more of an answer that we bargained for. After all, we tend to gravitate toward ways of thinking about the next life which are based largely on the assumption that the next life will be a longer, better, more perfect version of this life.  We look forward to seeing those who have preceded us into God’s nearer presence, anticipating being reunited, at death, with those from whom we have been separated, by death; thoughts about the next life which are, for some, a source of comfort, for others, a source of anxiety, but, for all, a way of thinking about the next life which sees it as something of a continuation of this life.  Which may ultimately turn out to be true, but which would be different from what Jesus seems to be saying in today’s gospel lesson, where Jesus seems to suggest that the hypothetical person who had seven spouses in this life won't have any spouses in the next life, because, over on the Other Side, everything will be different from the way things are here.

               I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I long ago made peace with the fact that whatever we believe about the next life is what we choose to believe about the next life. “Will all persons eventually be in heaven?” “If not, will those who are there be sad, because of those who are not there?” “Will we know one another in heaven?”  “Will we be reunited with our loved ones in heaven?” “Will there be pets in heaven?” What we believe about the answers to those questions about life on the Other Side is what we choose to believe; what rings most true in the deepest corners of our spirit.

               I, for example, choose to believe that ultimately, eventually, once all the necessary judging and redeeming is done, no matter how long it takes, all persons, the whole human family and all creation, will be at home, together, with one another and with God, over on the Other Side; the whole human family of every time and place, all creatures and all creation gathered up into that glorious reality which Revelation 5:13 describes as “Every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea, singing together forever around the throne of God.”

               All of which takes me back to a moment I experienced on Sunday morning, March 10, 2019.  As I drove to church that morning, I was listening to a CD of instrumental music by a friend who serves on the music faculty at the University of Mississippi.  A pianist of international renown, and a Jewish person, my friend had included, on this, his most recent CD, a stunningly beautiful arrangement of “Amazing Grace”.  As he came to the great crescendo of that familiar final verse, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, then when we’ve first begun”, I heard, from somewhere far above, or deep within, I cannot say, the glad and joyful truth that those words concerning life over on the Other Side are as at home in his Jewish hands as they are in my Christian mouth.  

               Can I prove that that is so?  No.  Like everything which everyone believes about life over on the Other Side, that is what I choose to believe, because nothing else rings true to the deepest, highest, best and most that I believe about God.  Which is the way it is with all our thoughts about the next life.  What we say we believe about life on the Other Side is what we choose to believe about life on the Other Side. 

               Which is why, when it comes to life on the Other Side, it is often best to be content only to say, “As long as we live, God is with us.  And then, when we die, we are with God;” trusting, to the love and goodness of God, the many mysteries we cannot yet know concerning life on the Other Side.                                                                           

                                                                                 Amen.   

The Boundless Spirit of God

Joel 2:23-32, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 27th, 2019 · Duration 9:05

              Then I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.  And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.  Even on male and female slaves I will pour out my spirit.

               With those words, today’s lesson from the book of Joel places before us the boundless reach of the spirit of God; the spirit of God poured out on all flesh, male and female the same; a reminder that, when it comes to the calling of God, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the human differences which have always mattered to many have never mattered to God. 

               Needless to say, many things do matter to God.  It matters whether we are kind or mean, gentle or harsh, truthful or dishonest, welcoming or exclusive, mindful or reckless, humble or arrogant, forgiving or graceless.  One imagines that the list of things about which God cares is long. 

               But, if  this morning’s lesson from Joel is any indication, who, how, where and what we were born is not on that list.  Righteousness is.  Integrity is.  Kindness, loyalty, truth, grace, faithfulness and thoughtfulness are, too.  The list is long of things which matter much to God.  But, according to this morning’s lesson from Joel, when it comes to pouring out the Holy Spirit, human difference makes no difference to God.  Rather, God pours out God’s spirit on all flesh, without regard for who, how, where or what we were born.

               To our children, and middle-school and high school students; as you grow older you may have more and more occasions to visit other churches, to go to various Christian camps and to join campus religious groups; places in which you will meet many dear and good souls, some of whom will believe, and say, that it does matter to God who, how, where and what people are born.  But, when you hear people say that, always remember that, in an obscure corner of a tiny Bible book no one can find, there is a verse of scripture, Joel 2:28, which says that God pours out God’s spirit on all flesh the same.  Others will have smaller Bible verses to support their conviction that human differences do matter to God, but you will have a verse so large it carries in its arms the whole human family; God’s spirit poured out on all flesh, without any regard for any human difference.

               Which is why all of us have noticed that the people in our lives who are closest to God are the people in our lives who care the least about the human differences which matter the most to much of the religious world.  The most thoughtful, prayerful, Spirit filled, close to God, people we know care the least about human differences, because the closer you get to God, the more you care about what God cares about; and the less you care about what does not matter to God.

                                                                                                                                Amen.

Concerning the Parable of the Persistent Widow

Luke 18:1-8, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 20th, 2019 · Duration 15:36

              Every three years, the lectionary places, in our path, this morning’s lesson from the gospel of Luke.  And, every time it rolls back around, it leaves me wondering what we should say concerning the parable of the persistent widow.  Given the fact that the Bible calls, more than a dozen times, for widows, orphans and immigrants to be the recipients of special compassion and care, the pleas of the persistent widow might make this parable one of the Bible’s many calls for social justice for the marginalized and the oppressed; a central concern of sacred scripture.  But, given the location of the parable in Luke’s gospel, on the heels of a long passage concerning the second coming, it may be, as the last line of the passage suggests, a parable about faithful waiting for the return of Christ.  Or, on the other hand, the parable may be about what the first verse of today’s gospel lesson says it is about, the need for us to pray always, and never to lose heart.

               If that is, in fact, what the parable of the persistent widow is about, then two things we might say concerning the parable are that, when it comes to prayer, the judge in the story is not the way God is, and the widow in the story is the way we are.

               I grew up in a religious world which said that God is like the judge in the story; always waiting for us to pray harder, or have more faith, or recruit a few more prayer partners, before finally giving in; as though prayer is a transaction in which God must be offered enough faith or persistence or voices to get God to do what God already knows we need for God to do.     

               Because that is what I grew up hearing, that is what I grew up believing.  But, I no longer believe that God must be worn down by our persistence, or impressed by how many prayer partners we assemble to join us in our petitions; a way of thinking I once embraced which did make God sound a lot like the judge in this morning’s parable, reluctantly persuaded by relentless persistence.

               However, while God is not like the stubborn judge in this morning’s parable, we are like the persistent widow.  As Walter Brueggemann says, “When it comes to prayer, like the widow, we keep coming back, because, like the widow, we have nowhere else to go.”

               Day after day, all through the day, like the widow in the parable, we keep seeking, asking, knocking; seeking, asking, knocking.  Where else can we go, but to God, to seek the healing, deliverance, relief and strength we need?  Like the widow in the story, we keep coming back, not because we think we need to wear God down by our constant coming and calling; but because we can’t not keep coming back.  As C.S. Lewis once said, “Our prayers pour forth from us by day and by night, waking and sleeping.”

               Sometimes our prayers change our lives.  Things change.  We get the miracle we want.  And, when that happens, our hearts are thankful, joyful, relieved and glad.  Other times, our lives change our prayers; we don’t get the first, best thing we prayed for, so we pray for the next best thing.  And, if that doesn’t happen, we pray for the next best next best thing; our lives changing our prayers until, sometimes, we are left, at last, with nothing more to pray for than the strength to go through the wonderful thing God might have done but did not do.

               But, even then, like the persistent widow, we do not lose heart, give up, or go away, because we don’t think of prayer as something that works or doesn’t work, because we know that prayer is not a transaction between us and God, in which if we only offer God enough words or faith or prayer partners God will come around and do our will.  Rather, prayer is our constant conversation with God; all through the day, day after day, telling God the truth concerning what we want and need, hope and fear, love and hate; the praying life, not a transaction which succeeds or fails, but the breath we breathe in from God and breathe out to God.

               “I know a lot of fancy words.  I tear them from my mouth, and then, I pray”,  said the poet Mary Oliver.  Which is exactly what we do, too; praying, praying and praying some more.  Like the persistent widow, never losing heart or giving up; always believing, ever the same, no matter what; our hope, incurable; our love for God, as unconditional as God’s love is for us; and our faith, unchanging, not only when our prayers change our lives, but, also, when our lives change our prayers. 

               Because, as one wise soul once said, “Faith is what you have left when you don’t get the miracle.”

                                                                                                                                 Amen.

 

On Living the Life We Have

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 13th, 2019 · Duration 15:50

               Every three years, the lectionary places in our path this morning’s lesson from the book of Jeremiah.  And, every time it rolls back around, I find myself incapable of turning to the gospel, epistle or psalm of the day for the subject of the sermon; the Jeremiah passage always edging out the others because it captures, so simply and beautifully, the intersection where all of us live; the corner where clear-eyed realism meets wide-eyed hope.

               Jeremiah’s letter to the exiled people of God, carried away captive to Babylon, ends, as does our faith, in wide-eyed hope; those hope-filled verses beyond the boundaries of the lectionary lesson where Jeremiah says to the exiles, Thus says the Lord, “I know the plans I have for you; plans for good, not harm, to give you a future with hope;” one of the most beloved verses in all of scripture, and rightly so, filling our hearts and minds with the hope and promise that God, not despair or tragedy, disease or death, but God will have the last word; “a future with hope”.

               But, the same letter which ends in wide-eyed hope begins in clear-eyed realism.

               As best we can tell, Jeremiah had been left behind in Jerusalem when the people of God were carried away captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar’s army, nearly 600 years before the birth of Jesus.  Back in Jerusalem, Jeremiah had heard that there were some preachers among the people of God in Babylon who were telling them that the exile would soon be over; that, soon, they would be going back home and getting back to normal, a message which, needless to say, the exiled people of God were happy to hear.

               But, once the news of those optimistic sermons got back to Jeremiah, he wrote the people that letter from which we read in today’s lesson, in which Jeremiah said, to the people of God in exile in Babylon, “Do not believe those sunny-side-of-the-street preachers with their rosy promises that the exile will soon be over and you will soon be home.  The exile will end only after seventy years, which means that where you now are is where you will be, for the rest of your lives.  So, settle in.  Build a house, and plant a garden”, Jeremiah said to the exiles, “Because, for the rest of your life, this is your life.”

               “Come to terms with the life you have,” said Jeremiah, “Because, otherwise, you’ll end up sacrificing the only life you do have on the altar of a life you cannot have.”

               All of which calls to mind Wendell Berry’s wise observation, “We live the given life, not the planned.”  For many of us, the life we have been given is different from the life we had planned; many of us, not unlike those long ago exiles, having to learn to adjust to realities that will not adjust to us.  As one wise soul once said, “Sometimes our soul has to reach a settlement with our life.”

               As it was for those to whom Jeremiah wrote his letter, so it is for us.  The life we have may not be the life we dreamed, hoped, imagined or planned, but it is the life we have, which makes it the only one we can live deeply, fully and faithfully; getting up every morning as though each new day of our life is the next new day of creation, deciding, all over again, with each new day, to, in the words of the great Quaker, Thomas Kelly, “Make our life a miracle”, choosing, all over again, with each new day, to live a life of kindness and courage, clarity and compassion, hospitality and welcome, gentleness and empathy, grace and truth; living the life we have with equal parts clear-eyed realism and wide-eyed hope.                                                                                        Amen.

We Have Done Only What We Should

Luke 17:5-10, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 6th, 2019 · Duration 4:20

             When you have done all that you were commanded to do, say, “We have done only what we ought to have done.”

               I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, those words from the last line of today’s gospel lesson sound a lot like True North on the Christian moral compass:  When we have done all that Jesus commanded us to do, we have done only what we ought to have done.

               As followers of Jesus, for us to do all that we have been commanded to do would mean that we would treat all others as we want all others to treat us, and that we would love all others as we want all others to love us; following Jesus so carefully and prayerfully that, in each new situation and circumstance, we would instinctively sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for; which, according to what we can see of Jesus in the four gospels, will always be whoever is most marginalized, ostracized, oppressed, excluded, fearful, poor, left out and alone.

               A way of life which, if we ever actually live it, may cause some to say we are courageous and others to say we are radical, some to say we are too conservative about the Jesus of the four gospels, and too liberal about the issues of the day.

               But, because we have read the last line of today’s gospel lesson, we will know that, actually, the only thing to be said by us, or about us, is that we have done only what we should.                                                                                                                                                                           Amen.

 

Concerning the Protection of the People of God

Psalm 91, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 29th, 2019 · Duration 11:20

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

The Way We Do Anything

Luke 16:1-13, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 22nd, 2019 · Duration 12:14

           “Whoever is faithful in a little is faithful also in much.”  Because those words from today’s gospel lesson are nestled between a parable about bookkeeping and a proverb about wealth, they are often assumed to be about money, which may very well be true.  But, the longer I live, the more I find it to be true, in every area of life, that whoever is faithful in a little is faithful also in much. 

               To practice being faithful in the smallest of moments is to prepare to be faithful in the biggest of moments.  We prepare to speak the truth when it matters most by resisting the temptation to exaggerate in the small, everyday conversations of life.  We prepare to be gentle and kind with strangers and friends by declining to tease or belittle our family members in our daily life together.  We prepare to be people of careful speech in public by practicing careful speech in the privacy of our own home.

               As Richard Rohr once said, “The way we do anything becomes the way we do everything”; another way of saying what Jesus is reported to have said in today’s gospel lesson, “Those who are faithful in a little will be faithful also in much.” 

               We prepare to be kind and courageous, compassionate and clear in life’s biggest moments by practicing being kind and courageous, compassionate and clear in life’s smallest moments; a daily discipline we impose on ourselves, not because we are trying to work our way into heaven or earn our salvation, but because we don’t want to under-live the one and only life we are ever going to have. 

               We’re all going to die someday, and, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over, and get it right next time.  That is why we long to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can, preparing to be kind and courageous, compassionate and clear in the big moments, by practicing being kind and courageous, compassionate and clear in the countless small moments of our everyday lives; walking prayerfully in the Spirit all through the day, day after day, practicing the skills of kindness and courage, courage and kindness.

               As with all skills, no amount of practice at living lives of courage and kindness can guarantee success.  For example, I have been writing in a daily prayer journal for well over twenty years now, praying, nearly every day, for the same thing; to live a Quaker-quiet life of careful speech, walking in the Spirit further and further along the path to spiritual depth; praying, in the words of Mary Oliver, to “walk slowly and bow often”, seeking a life of unfailing kindness and courage, without ever sacrificing one on the altar of the other.

               And yet, I continue to fail at it, even after all these years.  What we are talking about here is a never finished, ever evolving, lifelong practice; slowly, slowly, little by little, becoming the kind of people who are predictably clear, courageous and kind, people whose God is love, whose creed is kindness and whose instinctive, predictable, default position is empathy.

               A way of life which, it should be said, is not the same as becoming more tolerant.  In fact, the deeper we grow in our life with God, the less relevant tolerance becomes.  If something is harmful, hurtful, dehumanizing or unjust, it should not have anyone’s tolerance.  If something is not harmful, hurtful, dehumanizing or unjust, it does not need anyone’s tolerance.

               The life of kindness and courage, compassion and clarity for which we long is not a life of tolerance.  It is, instead, a life of “Our God is love, our creed is kindness, our default position is empathy.”  And, the more we practice being that way in every small moment, the more prepared we are to live, speak and act that way in every big moment.

                Faithful in small things, we become faithful in big things; the way we do anything, becoming, eventually, the way we do everything.                                 

                          Amen.              

Concerning the Gladness of God

Luke 15:1-10, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 15th, 2019 · Duration 9:39

            “Now all the sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus.  And the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

               As you will, no doubt, have noticed, those words from today’s gospel lesson set in motion a trio of parables; the first two, which the lectionary assigned to us to read today, setting the stage for the more widely known Parable of the Prodigal Son; not unlike the gospel quartet to which I belonged during my college years, opening at Saturday night gospel singings for the Lamplighters Quartet.  We had double-knit, look-alike leisure suits, not to mention a near-miss for the Hayloft Jamboree on steel guitar.  But, even so, the Lamplighters were always the headliners, and we, the way-paving warm-ups, not unlike the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, paving the way for the larger, longer Parable of the Prodigal Son.  All three parables, lost sheep, lost coin, lost soul, set in motion by the religious insiders’ criticism of Jesus for drawing his circle of welcome too wide; a trio of stories concerning the relentless love, and ultimate gladness, of God.  God, in the first story, a shepherd who cannot rest until the last lost sheep is safe; God, in the second story, a woman who will not stop until the last lost coin is found; and God, in the third story, a father who is not glad until the last lost child is home; the details different in each story, but the subject the same; the relentless love of God which will not give up, and the ultimate gladness of God which will not come up, until, at last, every soul God ever loved and longed for is reconciled and redeemed, healed and home, no matter how long it takes.  Jesus, telling the stories of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost soul to help the religious insiders see that the same size welcome they were mad about is the only size welcome God is glad about.

               Thinking about all that this week took me back to a moment about six months ago when, as I watched, with interest and empathy, another wonderful denomination have another painful conversation concerning what might be the proper size of the circle of their full institutional welcome, from somewhere deep within, or far above, a small prayer formed within me; a simple prayer always to have enough of the Holy Spirit at work in my life so that I will never be sad about any inclusion God is glad about, or glad about any exclusion God is sad about.

               Given the world from which I come, for me to pray such a prayer is a miracle of grace.  When it comes to drawing a small, fearful, exclusive circle of welcome, I was, at one time, as Paul said in today’s epistle lesson, “The foremost of sinners.” But, as it was for Paul, so it has been for me, “To the foremost of sinners, Jesus showed the utmost of mercy”; mercy enough to transform me from someone who once believed that God’s circle of welcome should shrink to match mine into someone who now believes that my circle of welcome should grow to match God’s.

               And if that can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.  And when it does, when we start wanting our circle of welcome to match God’s more than we want God’s circle of welcome to match ours, then we are on our way to becoming so deeply born-again and Spirit-filled that we will never again be sad about any inclusion God is glad about, or glad about any exclusion God is sad about, which is the point of the three stories Jesus told to those dear and good people in today’s gospel lesson, who were afraid that Jesus was making God’s welcome too wide, and God’s grace too amazing.

                                                                                                                                  Amen.

 

When We Come to the End

Psalm 139, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 8th, 2019 · Duration 4:48

            “It was you who formed me when I was being made...And when I come to the end, I am still with you.”

               With those words, today’s psalm sings the simple, beautiful truth that, from beginning to end, God is with us; with us, when we are as small and new as little Dan Stancill, and with us, still, when we come to the end.  Indeed, says the psalmist, we can go up as high as heaven, or down as low as hell, and, no matter where, no matter what, as long as we live, God is with us.  And then, when we come to the end, we are with God.

               As long as we live, God is with us; with us in the best and with us in the worst; with us when we are thrilled with delight, and with us when we are crushed by despair; with us in our most Spirit-filled moments of courage and kindness, and with us in the hidden shadows of our most secret shame; with us when life is going our way, and with us when we are absolutely certain that we just cannot go on; with us to give us new strength for each new day.

               For as long as we live, God is with us.  And then, when we die, we are with God.

               Not content to let the good news be that good, we have wrapped that simple, beautiful truth in layer upon layer of creeds and religions, doctrines and denominations; what Barbara Brown Taylor calls “The leaky buckets we have been lowering into the well of God’s truth for thousands of years;” some of which is helpful and important, but all of which will someday be set aside, leaving us, at last, with the simple, beautiful truth that, as long as we live, God is with us, and then, when we die, we are with God; the gospel of God, to which our most faithful and truthful response is to let that relentless love which has come down to us, from God, go out through us, to others.

               That’s it.  That’s all.

                                                                                                                                                Amen

A Jesus-Shaped Hospitality

Luke 14:1, 7-14, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 1st, 2019 · Duration 5:35

           “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.”

               Of all the verses in the four gospels, few capture more clearly the spirit of Jesus than that one from this morning’s gospel lesson; Jesus, calling us to welcome, into our circle of friends, whoever is most marginalized, vulnerable, powerless, voiceless, left out and alone.

               Which is why the most prayerful, thoughtful, Spirit-filled people we know are always sitting down with and standing up for whoever is most marginalized, vulnerable, powerless, voiceless, left out and alone; because that’s the way Jesus was, and they have been walking in  the spirit of Jesus so prayerfully, and so thoughtfully, for so long, that the way Jesus was has become the way they are; their lives, stretched into a Jesus-shaped hospitality which makes them very predictable; in each new moral moment of decision, they can be counted on to sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for if Jesus were here, which is whoever is most marginalized, vulnerable, powerless, voiceless, left out and alone. 

               All of which is to say that the deeper we go in our life with Jesus, the wider we grow in our empathy for, solidarity with, and embrace of whoever is most in need of help and hope.

                                                                                                                        Amen.

 

Concerning The Way We Read Our Bibles

Luke 13:10-17, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 25th, 2019 · Duration 16:09

               To have the Bible on our side is not necessarily the same as having Jesus on our side.

               Nowhere is that more clear than in this morning’s lesson from Luke.  When the religious leader became angry at Jesus for healing the bent over woman on the sabbath, and said, to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured; not on the sabbath day”, the religious leader had the Bible on his side, Deuteronomy 5:13 and Exodus 20:9-10, to be exact. 

               However, as you will, no doubt, have noticed, having the Bible on his side did not mean that he had Jesus on his side.  To the contrary, for using the Bible literally on the bent over woman, while applying the Bible loosely to himself, Jesus called the   religious leader a hypocrite:  “You hypocrite”, Jesus said.  “Don’t you, on the sabbath, loose your donkey and give it water?  Then ought not this woman be loosed from her bondage on the sabbath?”  Jesus, calling out the hypocrisy of those who use scripture literally on others in ways they would never apply scripture literally to themselves.

               Which remains the most common hypocrisy in popular Christianity; the practice of using Bible verses on others in ways we would never apply them to ourselves, and expecting to do so with impunity because so many of our friends do the same thing. 

               One imagines that  if Jesus were as present here, as he was at the synagogue in today’s gospel lesson, he might say to us, here, what he said to them, there:  “You hypocrites, using the Bible on others in ways you would never apply the Bible to yourself; taking a stand on the verses which work for you, and taking a pass on the ones which don’t.” 

               After which, because Jesus is Jesus, he would help us to make a new beginning, as though we were starting first grade with a brand new Bible we had never used to hurt or exclude anyone.

               In fact, if I had thought about it in time, I might have called the Chairman of the Finance Committee to ask if there was enough money in the budget for us to buy everyone in the church a shiny new Bible like the ones we gave Mary Phillips, Iyanu, Graham, Hallie and Vaughn, this morning, so we could all start over with a brand new Bible which had never been misused.

               But, of course, it isn’t really a new Bible we need,  just a new way of reading the one we already have; reading and using our Bible the way Jesus read and used his; in ways which make the pain of life lighter, not heavier, less, not worse.

               We all pick and choose our way through the Bible; whether we’re at Fondren Pres. or First Pres., Galloway or Pinelake, St. Andrews or St. James, First Baptist or Broadmoor, R.U.F. or Young Life, Northside or Northminster.  No one assigns equal authority to every word of scripture, and we need to be honest about it.  How many people do you know who have dismantled their security systems because Matthew 5:39 says, “Do not resist an evildoer?”  Do you know anyone who has given away all their surplus because II Corinthians 8:15 says that those who have much should not have too much, while those who have little have too little?  How many people actually believe Luke 14:33, where Jesus says that no one can follow him who does not give up all their possessions?

               The truth is, everybody picks and chooses their way through the Bible. We should all be honest about it, and then do our picking and choosing based on the spirit of Jesus; having enough of Jesus in our heart to know which Bible verses to embrace as true to the spirit of Jesus.

               For example, when I read, while on the sabbatical this summer, in Numbers chapter thirty-one, that God told the Israelites to kill all the Midianites, including infants, but to spare the virgins to distribute among the soldiers, I didn’t need a commentary to tell me that that is not true to the spirit of Jesus.  On the other hand, when I read, on July 3, a full month before the events of August 7 in Canton, Carthage and Morton, Leviticus 25:23, where God is reported to have reminded the people of God that, since God owns all the land in the world, in the eyes of God all of us are immigrants, I knew, instinctively, that that is true to the spirit of Jesus.

               We just have to have enough of Jesus in our heart to measure what we read in the Bible against the spirit of Jesus, reading and using our Bible the way Jesus read and used his; in ways which make the pain of life lighter, not heavier; reading our Bibles in the light of, and through the lens of, love, so that, going forward, our Bibles don’t come between us and Jesus.

                                                                                          Amen

By Faith

Luke 12:49-56, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · August 18th, 2019 · Duration 15:47

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Learning to Do Good

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · August 11th, 2019 · Duration 15:48

          “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Moments after reading these words from this morning’s reading from Isaiah, Lesley stopped by my office to talk about how we were going to respond to the ICE raids from the day before. I told her that I had not yet heard about the raids. She briefly described and I subsequently read about the raids that happened around the state of Mississippi on Wednesday.

               With this new knowledge, I sat in my office with the image of two of my children starting their first day of school. When I pulled away from their schools on Thursday morning, I had a mix of excitement for them and anxiety about how their day would go. I was eager to return home and hear how it went. After hearing this news, it was all I could do not to feel for the children who would get off of the bus, eager to tell their parents about their day, only to find an empty house. It was all I could do not to feel for the children who would be waiting at the school for a ride that wouldn’t come.

               With all of these thoughts and many more swirling in my mind, as I began to ponder standing in this space this morning, the clearest thought in my mind was “I can’t not talk about this.”

               Sitting with a lot of hazy thoughts and one clear one, I turned back to Isaiah chapter 1 – the Old Testament reading appointed for today by the Revised Common Lectionary.

               Isaiah does not mince words. He forcefully, and perhaps antagonistically, calls upon the people of God, addressing them as “rulers of Sodom” and “people of Gomorrah.” Isaiah groups all of the people of God, those who have power and are capable of leading and those who are just ordinary folk in with Sodom and Gomorrah.

               Everyone hearing these words would have known that Sodom and Gomorrah were cities that had met the wrath of God in the form of the cities being consumed by fire from God. Many biblical writers refer to Sodom and Gomorrah suggesting that their fate was well known. Ezekiel notes a short list of the sins of Sodom as having “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

               Those hearing these words would also have known that before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Abraham bargained with God. Abraham dissuaded God from an outright destruction. He convinced God that if there were just 10 righteous people in the cities, that God would not destroy them.

               Since the cities were destroyed, it is safe to assume that not even ten were found.

               This is how Isaiah addresses his listeners. It doesn’t get any easier. Speaking on behalf of God, Isaiah says to the people of God. I’m not interested in your offerings. Your well curated services of worship are meaningless. When you raise your hands in prayer, all I can see is the blood on your hands.

               It is the God who yearns to be reconciled with all of humanity who looks upon the people of God and says if all you have to offer is one hour a week, then you have missed the point. It is the God who created all the heavens and the earth and all who inhabit it who longs to draw near to all of humanity.

               As I read these words on Thursday morning, I pictured myself standing here and you all sitting there and I imagined families separated, wondering when or if they would be together again, and in addition to being certain that this event was one about which I could not not talk, I found myself asking, "What are we doing? What are we going to do?"

               Thankfully, Isaiah doesn’t stop there. He continues in verse sixteen: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the

orphan, plead for the widow.”

               I think Chuck Poole might sum this up by saying that “we need to sit down with and stand up for the same people that Jesus would sit down with and stand up for.”

               These words from Isaiah and from Chuck Poole have a strange way of seeming simultaneously incredibly simple to do and nearly impossible to figure out the who what when where how.

               When we hear a story that 680 people in our state have been taken into custody with futures uncertain, it can be hard to know how to "learn to do good."  It can seem like the problem is too big or too complex. It can seem too political or too public. It can seem all of these things.

               Let me let you in on a little secret: the body of Christ is well equipped to handle this crisis.

               We know that all humans are created in the image of God. We know that the circle of Jesus’ welcome can never be drawn big enough. And we know that we are a community of faith that is continuing to learn to do good.

               For 18 years, Northminster has been learning to do good in Mid-City. Folks who are seated in this room have found a way to use what they have to see the face of God in the eyes of those they encounter there. People who are gathered here to worship have spent hours upon hours tutoring children, picking up trash, building houses, providing food, giving rides, attending city council meetings, visiting prisons, buying clothes, celebrating life’s precious moments, and grieving life’s difficult moments.

               Our learning doesn’t stop at Mid-City. People in this room gather weekly to pray for people connected to this community of faith and figure out ways to care for them – sometimes it’s calling to check in, sometimes it’s visiting the hospital, sometimes it’s just going to sit and talk for a while. Other times, it’s attending a funeral and grieving with a family.

               There are still other people in this room who find creative ways to work among people in need as their job or as a volunteer. Other people in this room spend time praying for all of the things that are happening.

               And, we can never forget, that there are people who are in this building, but not in this room, who are ensuring that we and the youngest of our family of faith can all worship.

               In this family of faith, we don’t’ always get it right, but we keep learning to do good. We keep learning what it means to seek justice. We keep learning how to rescue the oppressed. We keep learning how to defend the orphan. We keep learning how to plead for the widow.  We keep learning to do good.

               In many ways, the needs that are now present in Canton and Morton and Forrest (and in some places a bit further away) are very similar to opportunities with which we all have experience interacting. Some needs are specialized, some are not. All the needs are very human.

               If you find yourself wondering, but what could I do in a crisis like this, let me tell you. If you are a lawyer or a counselor, if you speak Spanish or indigenous languages local to lands south of the American border, if you are capable of driving to Memphis or New Orleans, if you can watch children, if you can clean or sort, if you can purchase some specific items from a list, if you can donate funds, if you can volunteer your time, if you can do any of these things or if you know someone who can, then you can help.

               And if you find yourself thinking, I really want to help, but I just can’t right now, no problem. The needs of the families affected by the raids on Wednesday will be ongoing for some time.

               After the service, Lesley and I will be standing in the narthex where we will have a sheet with more specific information about how you can be involved. We’ll leave information with the church office and also provide it electronically to anyone who would like it.

               As you ponder the ways in which you might get involved, I’m afraid I must warn you of something. Learning to do good in this way, caring for those who are among the most vulnerable in our midst, standing up for and sitting down with the same folks whom Jesus would stand up for and sit down with, it changes you. It makes you see the world differently.

               And it makes you want to find a way that the most vulnerable among us might no longer be vulnerable. It makes you want to join with Martin Luther King, Jr. who stood in the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City and said: “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [and sisters].”

               Since the raids on Wednesday, something beautiful has happened. My horror and anger surrounding these raids have been soothed by the balm of seeing the body of Christ spring into action. People organizing, advocating, feeding, caring, loving, coming together, joining hands in solidarity – Southern Baptists and Catholics,     Evangelicals and Unitarian Universalists, English only Speakers and Non-English Speakers.

               It has been a visual representation of Paul’s image of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. Notably, Paul says in verse 26 that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it.”  The suffering of those affected by the raids on Wednesday affects all of us. Most of us have friends, if not relatives who live in one or more of those towns.

               Seeking justice. Rescuing the oppressed. Defending the orphan. Pleading for the widow. Learning to do good.

               Perhaps, Paul had Isaiah 1 in mind when he wrote to the church at Rome: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual act of worship.”

               Not burnt offerings, not blood, not even solemn assemblies, but a living sacrifice – a spiritual act of worship.

               Learning to do good.

                                                            Amen.

No Secrets?

Luke 12:13-21, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Paul Baxley · August 4th, 2019 · Duration 12:36

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

A Sabbatical Report

Charles Poole's Sabbatical Report

Chuck Poole · August 1st, 2019 · Duration 0:0

            “We never step in the same stream twice” is a familiar old colloquialism which came to my mind more than once as I worked my way through the Bible during our sabbatical season this summer.

               Northminster has had pastoral sabbaticals as part of the rhythm of the church’s life since our founding over fifty years ago; at first, every three years, then, every four, and now every five years; seasons of rest and renewal which also always include a plan for learning and growth which, hopefully, helps the sabbaticalizing minister return with new insights.

               Part of my work plan for this sabbatical was to read the entire Bible, which is where that old saying, “We never step in the same stream twice” comes in.  On each of my two previous sabbaticals (Summer of 2001 and Summer of 2013) I had read the whole Bible as a sabbatical discipline, and yet, this time, I saw things I had either missed before, or had seen then and since forgotten.  Or, perhaps, with the passage of time, my spiritual eye has changed.  For whatever reasons, reading the entire Bible was, this time, one of those “We never step in the same stream twice” kind of moments; the Holy Spirit shining new light on old truth on a return trip through the Good Book.

               Since our church is generous enough to make that kind of “only on sabbatical” experience possible, I would like to offer, as an expression of gratitude for your kindness, the following report on some of what I saw, for the first time, or in a new way, in the pages of scripture during this summer’s Sabbath season.

               First of all, I was reminded, during this sabbatical season, of how helpful it is to read the entire Bible in as brief a period of time as possible; a luxury possible only on a sabbatical from normal work responsibilities.  Week after week, we put small, lectionary-length, sermon and Sunday School sized pericopes of scripture under a microscope, which is helpful and important.  But it helps, occasionally, to look at the whole Bible through a telescope, so that we can better understand the Bible’s many parts in their relation to the entire landscape of sacred scripture.

               Secondly, reading the whole Bible all the way through in a brief span of time reminded me of how human much of the Bible makes God sound.  In the First Testament, for example, God feels regret  (Genesis 6:6-7), has a change of mind (Exodus 32:14), is subject to outbursts of temper (II Samuel 6:7-8), and gets so angry that Moses has to talk God out of acting in a way that would hurt God’s reputation (Exodus 32:9-12).  (This is called anthropopathism; assigning human feelings to God, not unlike anthropomorphism; assigning human form to God, both of which happen a good bit in the Bible.)

               Something else I knew already, but saw in a new way on this trip through the Bible, is how ruthless and violent the Bible can make God sound and seem.  In Exodus 32:27, for example, God is reported to have instructed the people of God to “strap on their swords” and kill brother, neighbor and friend.  In Deuteronomy 20:16-18, Joshua 8:18-26 and Joshua 10:28-11:15, the people of God are instructed to slaughter entire communities; killing everyone, young and old, no exceptions.  In Numbers 15:32-36, God commands Moses to have a person executed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath. And, most troubling of all, in Numbers 31:1-35, the people of God are commanded to kill every Midianite; men and women, young and old, “except the virgins”, who are to be taken captive as spoils of war. 

               All of which is one reason why I do not embrace the popular evangelical idea of an inerrant and infallible Bible.  The Bible is powerful, beautiful, comforting, challenging, amazing, intriguing, inspiring and inspired.  But, to say that the Bible is the “inerrant and infallible Word of God” is to leave us with a violent God for whom human life is expendable, which, to me, does not ring true to what we see revealed of God in Jesus.  (And which, in the wrong hands, can actually be dangerous.)

               Needless to say, this is part of the difficulty of reading the entire Bible, all the way through.  To read the entire Bible, skipping nothing, is to be forced to face hard truths and ask hard questions, and to make serious interpretive decisions.

               Other passages of scripture I had previously missed, or had read and forgotten, include Leviticus 25:23, where, in the midst of numerous passages (Exodus 12:49, 22:21, 23:9; Leviticus 19:10, 19:33, 19:34, 23:22, 24:22; Numbers 9:14, 15:15; Deuteronomy 24:17) in which God calls God’s people to be mindful of immigrant persons, God reminds God’s people that since God owns all the land there is, everyone is “an alien and a tenant” in the eyes of God; a sentence the Holy Spirit brought to my attention for the first time a full month before the events of August 7 in Canton, Carthage, Morton and Forest, but about which I have spoken countless times since; sometimes in English, “In the eyes of God, all of us are immigrants”; more often in Spanish, “En el ojos de Dios, todos de nosotros son immigrantes”. 

               Another passage I had forgotten since my last time through the Bible is Jeremiah 38:7-13, where an Ethiopian eunuch is remembered for saving Jeremiah’s life.  We’re all familiar with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts chapter eight.  But, few remember that, not only in the New Testament, but also in the Old, the ultimate “outsider”, the racially and sexually different Ethiopian eunuch, is a part of the family of God.

               And then, there is the story of Cozbi, which I had either previously missed, or completely forgotten, in Numbers 25:6-17.  Cozbi was a Midianite woman who had been brought into the congregation of the Israelites by a man named Zimri, a relationship for which both of them were executed, because of the hatred which separated Israel from the Midianites.  Fast-forward four Bible books to the tiny book of Ruth, where a Midianite woman is the star of the story, and even becomes an ancestor of King David; a snapshot of the Bible’s long internal debate between the exclusive onlyism which demands Israel to separate itself from all others, in the books of Numbers, Ezra and Nehemiah, and the inclusive embrace of all, which we find in the books of Isaiah, Ruth and Acts.

               Another verse I had either missed before, or forgotten, is Proverbs 31:8, “Speak up for those who cannot speak”, which sounds, to me, like a First Testament way of saying, “Sit down with and stand up for those whom Jesus would sit down with and stand up for.”  And, also, Ecclesiastes 7:18, “It is good that you should take hold of one, without letting go of the other,” a helpful Biblical image for the kind of spiritual maturity which holds onto the best of our spiritual past with one hand, while taking hold of the most challenging new light we have seen with the other; the long, slow, sometimes painful story of my life, so far, “Taking hold of the future without letting go of the past”.

               I could go on, but I found another verse during my summer sabbatical sojourn through scripture, this one from Proverbs, which says, “Only fools go on and on.”  So, I will close this sabbatical report by saying that, as I worked my way through the Bible this summer, the one thought I most often found myself thinking is that there is a lot of pain in this world, and, depending on how we use it, the Bible can add to that pain, or subtract from it. 

               May we all always be content to use the Bible only in ways which make the pain lighter, not heavier; less, not worse.

The Words We Pray

Luke 11:1-13, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · July 28th, 2019 · Duration 15:50

             Each week, as we are gathered in this space, a pastor offers a prayer which concludes with all of us joining together to pray what we commonly know as the Lord’s prayer.

               Today, those of you who were listening but not reading when I read the gospel, may have thought I misread the text. Being people who are exceedingly generous and knowledgeable about biblical translation, you may have thought that the Lord’s prayer that we all know and love is in the King James (KJV), but because we read the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) at Northminster, there must just be some translation differences.

               While I appreciate the generosity I have just ascribed to you, even that would be misplaced. I just read what is written. True, it is the NRSV and not the KJV, but the real difference is that it is Lord’s Prayer as recorded by Luke, rather than by Matthew. And like other stories, sermons, and sayings throughout the gospels, Matthew and Luke record the words differently.

               While we could get bogged down in a lengthy diatribe about the origin of the differences and what those mean for the authenticity of the prayer, I would rather us consider the prayer as Luke records it, in the context in which Luke has placed it.

               The previous chapter includes Luke telling the parable of the Good Samaritan and visiting Martha’s house. Today’s reading begins with the disciples asking Jesus to teach them how to pray. He suggests that they should “pray like this”. Then, Jesus, in his best King James English, offers an abbreviated version of the prayer that we have prayed and heard sung this morning. Then Jesus poses two hypothetical situations to the disciples.

               In the first, a man goes to his neighbor late at night to ask for some bread for an unexpected visitor. In the second, a child asks a parent for some food.  These two hypothetical situations and the two parables that precede the prayer that Jesus offers as a model to the disciples can help to cultivate creativity in our minds as we engage with this prayer – Luke’s NRSV prayer and even Matthew’s King James Version.

               In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus places the salvation for a half-dead man in a ditch on the donkey of a despised, other – the least likely person of all to bring salvation to a down and out Jew. Then, Jesus honors Mary as she rests at the feet of Jesus even as he reminds Martha that her dignity and worth lie not in what she does, but who she is.

               These things we know, thanks, in part, to Jason Coker’s and Lesley Ratcliff’s sermons last week and the week before, if you missed out, go to the church website and listen or read.

               Luke then records Jesus offering this prayer, all of which is familiar.  One line, though, sticks out to me more than the others: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” Luke modernizes and summarizes these words into “Your kingdom come”.

               "Your kingdom come."

               The other lines of the prayer make more immediate sense to me.

               In our prayers, we need to name, honor, and praise God. We need to take forgiveness seriously. In our supplications to God, we need to be mindful of what things we need to sustain life, and what things are luxuries. But then there is this “your kingdom come” line, that is exceptionally difficult to read and not hear the Matthew parts: “your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

               It is in this line, where I need the imaginative help offered by the preceding parables and the subsequent hypothetical situations offered by Jesus. I need help, in part, because I have no real-life concept of what a kingdom is. There is, of course, the United Kingdom. But from this side of the ocean, the influence of the monarchy feels symbolic at best. The royal family seems to make the news most for marriages, births, fashion, and potential disagreements, much more than setting policies or placing limitations on the lives of those living under the reign of the Queen. Somehow, this type of kingdom does not seem to fit with that about which Jesus was teaching his disciples to pray.

               If Jason was right in his interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we are called to be neighbors in a new way, in a way where everyone matters, “from the brigands and robbers to the priest and Levites and even the Bible scholars;” and if Lesley was right in her interpretation of the story of Mary and Martha that they both “had value by being precisely who they were… [–] beloved children of God,” this kingdom, for the coming of which Jesus is teaching us to pray is going to be something very different than the United Kingdom, where colonies that have become countries still pay homage to the crown, even while remaining free to be as selfish as they want to be on a day to day basis.  This kingdom is going to simultaneously free us to engage in unexpected relationships of mutual transformation and require that we recognize the image of God in ourselves and in those who inhabit this kingdom with us.

               The stories that follow this prayer continue to create some imaginative space in which our creativity might be unleased. In one an unexpected host needs bread for his guest. He goes to ask for some from his neighbor. If this man is knocking on his neighbor’s door loud enough to wake up his neighbor, the open windows of everyone in the neighborhood would have been able to hear the interaction. All of the neighbors were bound by the same communal expectations of hospitality – hospitality which just might rival the “Hospitality State.” The man in the middle knew this. Though he stood empty handed between his guest who had need, and his neighbor who had provisions, he knew if he asked long enough, and loud enough, he would eventually shame his neighbor into giving him the bread he needed in order that he might be appropriately hospitable to his guest.

               Jesus follows this story with a summary statement, to which I must join Hal in David Foster Wallace’s tome Infinite Jest in having “administrative bones to pick with God.” Jesus notes: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

               Who among us hasn’t prayed diligently (if not desperately) for something that just never came about? I don’t mean winning the lottery or going on a date with that certain someone. I mean truly altruistic things. Cure of a terminal disease. One last chance to see a loved one before they pass. For the abuse to stop. For the medication to work. For enough money to pay the mortgage. To get pregnant. To get married. For people to stop asking how one can be happy not being married. For equal protection under the law – or in the church.

               When these prayers are unfulfilled, quoting Jesus saying “ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find, knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened,” seems to become more of an indictment of the one who quotes Jesus, rather than the one praying prayers that feel as though they are going nowhere.  It almost feels like the message is, "if you just prayed harder or longer, or if you just had more faith, then everything would be ok."  Perhaps, “administrative bones to pick” is not quite strong enough.

               When Jesus makes this statement, that we have for too long made about prayer to God, that enough asking, searching, and knocking will get the righteous person exactly what they want, perhaps, Jesus is describing something different. Perhaps, Jesus is describing what it will mean to be in the kingdom of God.

               When the Kingdom of God comes, we will live with a new sense of neighborliness. We will recognize and celebrate the worth and dignity of every person – the be-ers and the do-ers. We will with confidence be able to step into the night to ask for the help we need to host an unexpected visitor confident that the community that dwells within the kingdom will see this unexpected visitor as a visitor of all of us, rather than just a problem that one family or household must host without any outside help.

               After all, who among us when facing our own mortality or that of a loved one does not have need of community to care and support and do those things for which we just cannot do for ourselves? Who among us would not want help if we were in an abusive situation? Who among us would not welcome help to pay our bills in the    moments when the demands on our resources outpace the capacity of those same resources? Who among us does not want to be valued and celebrated for our inherent worth?

               These are not things that we need to spend time praying about. If we truly want for the kingdom of God to come. If we truly want to experience God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. We need to live in such a way that makes it possible that when people ask, it is given; when people search, they find, when people knock, the door is opened. We need to be a community that comes together when diligent and desperate prayers continue to feel unfulfilled, outcomes less than desired – sitting together, grieving together, loving together. That is what the kingdom of God looks like.

               Don’t hear me saying that we do not need to pray. What I am saying is that while we are picking our administrative bones with God about not receiving the things that we are asking for – altruistic and selfish alike – we need to examine whether we are laying the groundwork for the Kingdom of God to come or if we are helping to prevent the Kingdom of God from being made manifest among us.

               The way we live will influence the way that we pray. The way that we pray will influence the way that we live. It is my suspicion that Jesus and the author of the Gospel of Luke were up to a little trickery with this arrangement of teaching and praying. For you see, we will not be able live in a way that everyone matters if we fail to pray in a way where everyone matters. And we will not be able to celebrate the worth of every human if we do not pray in such a way that celebrates the worth of every human.

               When we pray the words “your kingdom come” and when we pray the words “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” these words call us to more than waiting on God. They call us to action – depending on God, being inspired and empowered by God. They call us to get to work, as we have ability. These words of prayer call us to change the way we live, so that when we pray them again, they inspire us to imagine how we might go about living our lives in such a way that we see just one more glimpse of what God’s coming Kingdom looks like. And this glimpse will call us back to prayer in new and fresh ways.

               Our prayers influencing our lives. Our lives influencing our prayers.

               Our Father in heaven, your kingdom come.

 

                                                            Amen.

 

On Mary and Martha

Luke 10:38-42, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · July 21st, 2019 · Duration 13:30

   

           “Mary has chosen the better part” feels like a bee sting to me. The kind of word from Jesus that makes me suck in my breath and flinch. Like many of you, I have always been like Martha. It’s not that I’m all that great in the kitchen (I’m actually quite terrible), but it is the fact that I often feel more spiritually grounded in the kind of practices that involve doing rather than being.

           The same may be true of Martha. The Greek word here is “diakonian,” the origin word for deacon, someone who serves by connecting needs with resources. So while hosting Jesus probably did entail cleaning the kitchen, preparing a meal, making sure there was a comfortable, clean space for everyone to rest, it also might have meant many other tasks that weren’t necessarily domestic. So Martha is going about all the work of ministry and is so distracted by it that she cannot pay attention to what Jesus has to say.

The next part of the story is where I really relate to Martha. I can imagine her, doing ALL THAT WORK, and looking around at everybody else enthralled with Jesus, and thinking to herself, WHY IS NO ONE HELPING ME? This is the point where I, I mean Martha, starts slamming cabinets a little harder, makes a bed with the kind of strength usually reserved for the weight room, talks to the people she is helping just a little bit louder than necessary, writes the item she has just finished on her to do list just so she can cross it off, the pencil lead tearing a hole in the paper from the sheer force. And then when none of that gets the attention of Mary, the person who should be helping her, instead of asking Mary for help, she takes the passive aggressive route, you know the one she’s been taking for the last hour that hasn’t been working, and goes to Jesus. I’m sure she made quite the kerfuffle, interrupting his conversation to ask why he hasn’t fixed her problem.

           I can see Martha so clearly and I can feel her anger rising up in my bones because I have fallen into the same trap. Just ask Brock Ratcliff. Actually, don’t because that is not how I want to be remembered. In writing. For all of time.

           Martha, Martha, Mary has chosen the better part. Still makes me flinch because of all the ways that Martha has been pigeon-holed and caricatured by well-meaning preachers through the years. I don’t think it is disdain in Jesus’ voice, rather the kind of sadness that recognizes Martha’s inability to recognize her worth beyond what she can do. The service she is doing is important. In his commentary on this passage, Brian Peterson points out that “later in Luke’s gospel, when the disciples are arguing about which one of them is the greatest, Jesus defines “great” discipleship and even his own ministry in terms of serving others, using the same vocabulary that here describes Martha.” I know that many of you are like Martha is described to be in this story, the kind of people who do the kind of ministry that produces the kind of place like this one, Northminster Baptist Church. The kind of people without whom I would not be standing here to preach.

           Sometimes, beloved children of God, we are like Martha in this particular moment, and we need to hear that we are valuable simply because of who we are, not just because of what we can do.

           “Mary has chosen the better thing” feels like bee’s wax on dry lips, a balm to my soul. Like many of you, I have always been like Mary. It’s not that I’m all that great at sitting quietly in prayer, in fact many of the prayer aids I offer to our children have been born from the needs of my own prayer life, but it is the fact that I often feel more spiritually grounded in the kind of practices that involve being rather than doing.

           The same may be true of Mary, or she may just be showing hospitality in a different way that Martha. In his commentary on this passage, Richard Swanson points out that Mary is practicing the kind of hospitality that is “expressed through the drive to learn something deeply from another, to think more deeply together than either could think alone, the kind of hospitality that welcomes strangers who just might be able to teach us something.”

           The next part of the story is where I really relate to Mary. I can imagine her, sitting there soaking in this conversation between Jesus and Martha, absorbing the peace that comes from the blessing Jesus speaks of her. I can feel that peace deep down in my bones, the kind of peace found sitting around a table discussing a book we have all read together, the kind of peace that settles over a hospital room when one of us should be resting and the other should be, oh I don’t know, writing a sermon but we both just can’t stop talking about all that we’ve learned in a recent bible study, the kind of peace offered in those moments of quiet each week in this hour.

           And yet, that is not the only memory of me that I want people to hold onto for all of time.

            As this story is positioned in Luke immediately following the Good Samaritan, Mary’s willingness to sit listening at the feet of Jesus is an example of love for God that serves as the balance to love for neighbor, and just as the Samaritan in Jesus’ story surprises everyone by practicing compassion with the stranger on the road, Mary may have surprised everyone by taking a seat at the feet of Jesus. Rather than assuming the role expected of women in her culture, Mary is sitting learning from the rabbi, a learning posture traditionally reserved for men.

           Sometimes, beloved children of God, we are like Mary in this particular moment, and we need to hear that it is wise for us to push past the boundary of expectation in order to listen to Jesus.

           Mary and Martha. Be-er and do-er. Contemplative and Activist. Better and Worse. They had value by being precisely who they were. One pushed past the boundaries of expectation in order to listen to Jesus and the other did the work needed to offer hospitality. They’ve been pigeon-holed by preachers for centuries. They are beloved children of God.

           We have value by being precisely who we are. We can push past the boundary of expectation. We are be-ers and do-ers. We are contemplatives and activists. We are better and worse. We are sometimes pigeon-holed by our own selves. We can offer hospitality to all. Sometimes, beloved children of God, we need to hear that our God, through whom all things hold together and in whom all things have been created, has reconciled all things to Godself so that we might know the riches of the glory of the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory. And we must not recognize that hope only in our own selves but in every single other person whom we meet.

           Our children sing a song to one another. “I see the light of God in you, the light of Christ come shining through and I am blessed to be with you, O Holy child of God.” It is simple to say and to sing and so hard to live. How do we let the truth of those words sink deep down into our bones so that how we live our lives, what we dream about, where we go and what we say reflects the light of God in one another?

           We do that by choosing the better part. Sitting at the feet of Jesus to learn that the thing that Jesus wants most is for us to love God with all that is in us and to love others as we love ourselves. We must learn like Mary so that we can do like Martha.

           Amen.

 

The Jericho Partnership

Luke 10:25-37, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Jason Coker · July 14th, 2019 · Duration 17:10

Luke 10:25-37

Have you ever been half dead? And I'm not talking about the feeling you have when you come back from Passport youth camps as an adult chaperone - not that kind of half dead. Although, that was a lot of fun to be with the youth of Northminster and Northside last month - and yes, I felt half dead upon return. I'm actually talking about the real half-dead - the dangerous kind - the kind we find in our passage for today. This anonymous, fictional man who is robbed, stripped, beaten, and left half-dead. Dangerously vulnerable. Brutalized, victimized, violated, and left for dead. The word for his wounds in this passage is where we get the origin for our word trauma. Half-dead.

When I was in college in the 90s, I was a serious BSUer! I didn't simply participate in the Baptist Student Unions of my colleges, I was the president of both colleges and then the president for the state of Mississippi BSU. So BSU that I was a summer missionary twice. At the end of my freshman year, I went to the Pacific Northwest as a revival preacher. It’s okay, this is not one of those sermons. After my sophomore year, I went to the Philippines as a summer missionary. Just after the midpoint of that summer, I contracted a mosquito born disease called Dengue Fever. We were so far in the jungle that we didn't have direct access to medical treatment, so I was either going to make it or not. Without any form of air conditioner, the coolest place I could lay was on the concrete slab in our small flat; and that's were I laid for about three days. I was in and out of consciousness and there's really only two things I remember besides the pain that I felt in my body. One was a deep sense of sadness for my parents because I thought about them having to receive my body at an airport or something like that. The other thing I remember was Pastor John Oraza. It seemed like every time I woke up he was sitting on the floor with my head in his hands and he was praying for me in Pangasinan - the local language. Spoiler alert! I made it! If you've ever been half-dead, you never forget who or what helped you survive.

We know this story of the Good Samaritan so well it nearly loses its impact on us. It's like a shiny brass foot of an icon. But that half-dead imagery gets me every time. There's lots of interesting things about this passage. It's unique to the Gospel of Luke - found nowhere else. But, Luke bases this story on Mark's "The Great Commandment" passage - a passage that Matthew also borrows from Mark. Luke does something wildly different! In Mark we have a simple scribe who asks Jesus what the first commandment is. Jesus responds: "The first is 'Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.' The second, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' " After that, the scribe basically says, "You're right!" and Jesus basically responds, "I know!"

Luke takes the Great Commandment - to love God and neighbor - and tells a different story. Here, it's not a simple scribe. In Luke, it's a Bible thumbing Pharisee! Most translations have "lawyer," which makes us think of Rebecca Wiggs or Cliff Johnson. That's not exactly what the term means. A better translation would be Bible Scholar, which makes us think of Ed Mahaffey. Except this Bible Scholar isn't nearly as nice as Dr. Mahaffey! And Luke has the Bible scholar ask a completely different first question. Instead of asking Jesus what the first commandment was, the Bible scholar asked Jesus "What must I do to inherit eternal life." Jesus answers, "What’s written in the Bible? How do you read it?" And here is where Luke is completely different. The Bible scholar tells Jesus the Great Commandment: "Love God and love neighbor." Jesus then says, "Yes! Do it and you will live." This is the end of the story in Mark and Matthew's version of Mark, but not Luke. Luke keeps the story going. The Bible scholar leans in: "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus tells a story - the story!

There are at least seven characters in the story. The man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, the robbers - we don’t know how many there are but it's plural; let's say five, the priest, the Levi, the Samaritan, and the innkeeper. Who’s going to be the neighbor? Before we get to the neighbor part, it's important to know that the "Man" here is totally anonymous. We don't know a thing about him - we are left to assume all sorts of things. The robbers, however, are more than they appear. The word Luke uses is better translated brigands. This is an organized group and Josephus, the Jewish historian from the first century, uses the same term to describe the rebels that ended up causing the Jewish revolt against Rome. So these aren't just robbers, they are rebels and revolutionaries, which makes us wonder now about this anonymous guy! Well, they take everything - even his clothes - and leave him half-dead.

In that condition, a priest comes by. It's worth noting that the Bible scholar who started this whole thing would have looked down on a priest. These are the quintessential Pharisees versus the Sadducees—temple versus Torah! So, the Bible scholar probably bristles to hear a priest coming. Is this the neighbor? No, he passes by as far on the other side of the road as possible. Of course he does, says the Bible scholar. Then comes a Levite - another Temple worker. Is this the neighbor? No, he passes by as far on the other side of the road as possible - just like the priest. Of course he does, says the Bible scholar - those guys are basically all the same. Then, a Samaritan! What? Is the Samaritan going to hurt him even more - is he going to finish him off? Everybody knows about Samaritans! The Samaritan came near him, and saw him and had compassion for him. He bandaged the man and cleaned his wounds and took him to a safe place and provided for his recovery. Didn't see that one coming at all - says the Bible scholar. Jesus then asks the last question: Who's the neighbor to this destitute man? The one who showed mercy. The Bible scholar couldn't even say "the Samaritan!" Go and do likewise.

There are throngs of people who are half-dead walking around Jackson and all through Mississippi like zombies among us. Many of you work with them as social workers and nonprofit managers and doctors and lawyers and ministers. Northminster, you are the neighbor. You, Northside Baptist in Clinton, University Baptist in both Hattiesburg and Starkville, you are all known as neighbors in the state of Mississippi. But let's act a little like Luke this morning and expand the story. Just like he rearranged Mark a little and developed the story even more. Let’s be biblical like Luke.

Let's go back to those "robbers," those organized rebels that nearly killed that man. Let's expand the story this morning and ask what creates those guys? How can we create a road to Jericho that is safe for everybody? Not by catching these guys and locking them up and being tough on crime, but by building a social structure where everybody matters from the brigands and robbers to the priest and Levites and even the Bible scholars. A society where we care enough to take care of the powerless with both direct services like Stewpot and systemic change at the policy level that begins to create a more equitable place to be. Let's join with all the other Good Samaritans in Jackson and Mississippi and create a Samaritan Partnership so there will be fewer and fewer half-dead and less and less pot holes on that road to Jericho. If we can do that here in Jackson and across Mississippi we may move from the ministry to the half-dead to a ministry of the resurrected. That would be Good News! May Jesus' words ring in our ears:
"Go and do likewise." May it be so.
Amen.

What We Can Do

II Kings 5:1-14, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Major Treadway · July 7th, 2019 · Duration 13:03

             In my experience, the hardest time to be a foreign missionary starts about one week after arriving in one’s new country. For many missionaries, it is about one week after arrival that a long arduous journey begins.  This journey is known as language study.  It may sound trivial, but it’s true. Missionaries arrive with big dreams and    excitement for what they will do in a new country. The churches and individuals here that are supporting them are eager to hear all about their new place. The organization there that is receiving them is eager to receive what they have come to offer.

               Yet, in those first few weeks, months, or even years, the new missionary, has to focus on the simple and basic task of learning language. This means repeated embarrassment trying to remember the difference between numbers like “fifty” and “fifteen”. It means desperately trying to remember whether to yell “awas” (meaning “beware”) or “sawa” (meaning “rice field”) in the event that the missionary sees a motorcycle that is about to crash into a rice field. Language study also means weeks, months, or years, of trying to find exciting ways to tell supporting individuals and churches about how interesting it is to sit in a classroom for four to six hours a day being tutored, only to go home and study for another two to four hours.

               It is in this long trudge, that dreams can fade. One can forget the anticipation they brought with them to this new place. It is boring. It makes one feel stupid. And it doesn’t make for good stories. It does not feel like a difference is being made. It is decidedly not the purpose for which the missionary was called. However, it is necessary. Without that time spent in language study, all of that interesting work about which the missionary will write home later, would not be possible. Visits to remote places with no motor vehicles and the cleanest water in the world would not happen. Long conversations that lead into relationships of mutual transformation would not happen.

               Naaman knew what he wanted and needed. He needed healing. He was desperate. Afterall, he was acting on the word of an immigrant slave girl. After a long series of conversations and letters and collecting lots of money to pay for an expensive treatment, Naaman doesn’t even get to see the doctor. Elisha sends out an assistant, a messenger. This messenger tells Naaman to do something ridiculous.

               At this point, it is important to note that the act which is prescribed to Naaman is only ridiculous because of the context that Naaman has built up around his ailment. His expectations are that his problem is so great that it can only be solved by some difficult and/or expensive task. Had the servant instructed Naaman to climb Mt. Everest backwards and at the summit to eat a bowl full of sliced and pickled gizzards, Naaman would have responded “is that all?”. He then, would have dispatched chefs and servants to find the gizzards to slice, pickle and package them perfectly for his journey. He would have bought camels and elephants to take him to the base of Mt. Everest, and he would have hired the twelve best Sherpas around to escort him up the mountain and required that they also climb the mountain backwards.

               But that is not the message that Naaman receives. His message is cheap, simple, easy: “go bathe in that river over there, the one that is a little muddy.” Naaman protests. The task does not measure up to the problem as he has defined it.

               A few thousand years later, not so much has changed. We find problems that we identify as big or significant or both. Then, we look for solutions that are at least equal in their elaborateness to how we have framed the problem. Any solution that does not balance out the problem as we have built it up becomes problematic and insufficient.

               In Mississippi, forty-two out of eighty-two counties have been listed among counties plagued by persistent rural poverty by the United States Department of Agriculture. This designation means that at least twenty percent of the population of the county has been living in poverty at every census since 1980. There are 301 such counties in the United States. Which means that nearly 15% of rural counties listed as persistently poor in the US are in MS. It also means that more than half of the counties of MS are considered persistently poor. Mississippi is regularly regarded as the poorest state in the US.

               This is a big problem. It must require a big solution. We can complicate this problem by talking about education, race, food insecurity, health care, incarceration, and a host of other issues.

               If we talk about the problem long enough, it will get too big to be able to do anything about. It’s too big. It’s too deep. It’s too complicated.

               I suspect that if we were to take some advice from one of the children downstairs and went to ask Elisha what to do about it. We might hear back some news that would seem dismissive. We would, of course, want to hear a fully formed and detailed multi-year strategy for how we were going to turn our state around.

               Those kinds of approaches are important. We need people to think about coordinated efforts to combat poverty that incorporate the voices and ideas of those whom the enacted programs will serve. We need education professionals and funds pumped into our education system if we want to see improvement. We need creative and macro-level integrated solutions to complex and complicated problems. But that’s not what we would hear from an assistant to a prophet of God.

               No, I fear the directive would be much more simple, much more doable, for anyone in this room. I anticipate that the message would be that when we see someone who we suspect is in need, to go and be with them. We would not be tasked with solving the problems that we have identified that they have. But to sit with them, to share a table with them, to learn their names and their stories; and to share with them our names and our stories.

               Learning someone’s name, learning to know their story – the good parts and the hard parts – takes time and effort, and won’t rapidly bring about the kind of systemic change that has trapped generations of Mississippians in poverty. Building relationships that have the capacity for mutual transformation takes time. Weeks, months, years.

               This kind of relationship take effort. It requires showing up repeatedly. It requires learning to know a person and culture without assuming that everything is the same for each person or each family.  This kind of relationship requires withholding judgement. It requires showing up repeatedly. It requires showing up repeatedly.    Because trust has be built. While relationships can sprout up and flourish quickly between strangers, more often than not, they take time and effort. They take showing up repeatedly – when things are good, when things are less than optimal. They require vulnerability, honesty, and patience.

               In this act of showing up repeatedly, something holy, mysterious, and predictable happens. Over the course of weeks, months, and years, the lives of those in these new relationship begin to be woven together. When threads are woven together, each thread lends itself to create something new and beautiful.  Red and blue, when they are woven together, become shades of purple. Blue and yellow, when they are woven together, become hues of green. Black and white, when they are woven together, become beautiful silver.

               But that’s not all, when threads are woven together something else happens. The threads become fabric. They move together and are affected by each other, and they are connected to more than just each individual thread. They become connected to all of the threads to which each one is connected. What pushes and pulls on a single thread causes all of the other connected threads to feel the pushing and pulling and to be moved.

               Learning to know someone’s name and story, is not always exciting. But in this simple, close, and accessible act – an act that requires time and attention, much more than effort and dollars – in this simple, close, and accessible act, we will find somewhere in the midst of this relationship, the beginning of healing to the biggest ailments we can imagine.

                                                            Amen.

The Life We Can’t Not Live

Galatians 5:1, 13-25, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 30th, 2019 · Duration 14:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Elijah’s Prayer and God’s Answer

I Kings 19:1-15, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 23rd, 2019 · Duration 10:12

I Kings 19:1-15

Elijah went a day's journey into the wilderness, where he asked that he might die: "It is enough; O Lord, take my life."

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today's Old Testament lesson. And, every time they roll back around, God answers Elijah's prayer, for a way out, with a way through.

Elijah is so weary, empty, hopeless and afraid that he just wants out, praying for God to let him die; not unlike Moses, in Numbers chapter eleven, so exhausted that he prays, "O God, if you love me, you will let me die", and Job, who, in the depth of his despair, prayed for God to let him die, asking God, "Why do you give life to those who don’t want it, while taking life from those who do want it?", a reminder that, while most people get to live until they have to die, some people have to live until they get to die; death, for some, not a defeat, or a giving in, or a giving up, but the relief and release for which they have prayed; like Elijah, praying in this morning's passage, "I've had enough Lord; let me go."

A prayer which God did not answer, at least, not in the way that Elijah, in that moment of despair, was hoping. Instead of giving Elijah the way out he wanted, God gave Elijah the way through he needed; sending Elijah an angel who brought Elijah something to eat and drink, and who said to Elijah, in verse seven of today's passage, "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you."

All of which, while it may belong to a rarely read corner of the Bible, sounds a lot like real life in the real world for those for whom the journey has, at times, been too hard, too heavy, too messy and too much to bear.

There is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life, and, while none of us will go through all of them, all of us will go through some of them. And, sometimes, it can all feel so heavy and hard that, like Elijah, we can reach that place at which we have had enough; at which point what we need is what Elijah got, the strength to go through what we cannot go around.

For Elijah, the strength he needed came from an angel, who brought him a meal, and told him to eat and drink because, otherwise, said the angel, "The journey will be too much for you."

Which, more often than not, is where we get our strength, too; from angels. Only, more often than not, ours don't wear wings or have halos. The angels through whom God gives us the strength to go on, when we cannot go on, do not, as a general rule, wear wings or have halos, but they do send notes, mail cards, write checks and make calls. Like Elijah's angel in today's scripture lesson, they show up, bring food and offer encouragement; or, sometimes, just stand silently by, their prayers for us becoming God's arms around us, helping us to find, like Elijah, a way through when there is no way out.

All of which calls to mind that unforgettable witness from the late poet/priest Mary Oliver, who spoke for us all when she said, "That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I did go closer, but, I did not die. Surely God had a hand in this, as well as friends."

Indeed. With the help of God and the people of God, we do go through what we did not get to go around; surrounded and supported by friends and God, God and friends; one, so like the other, that, sometimes, we cannot tell where one ends, and the other begins.
Amen.

Further

John 16:12-15, Trinity Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 16th, 2019 · Duration 11:23

John 16:12-15

Trinity Sunday

"I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth."

I, like many of you, have read and heard those words from this morning's gospel lesson more times than I can count. But, this week, for the first time, it occurred to me that, in addition to giving us a snapshot of the Trinity (Jesus, handing us off to the Holy Spirit, before going home to God), there is, also, a way in which those words from John's gospel are, for many of us, the story of our life; the Holy Spirit, taking us further and further into truth which, at one time in our life, we could not bear to hear; slowly, slowly, little by little, across a lifetime of praying and thinking, thinking and praying, the Holy Spirit taking us further and further along the path of spiritual maturity, until, eventually, the same truth we once could not bear to hear, we now cannot bear to hide.

Because of where I started out in life, there was a time, for example, when I could not bear the truth that God calls people to ministry without regard for whether they are male or female; a time when I could not bear the truth that going through the grief of divorce does not disqualify anyone from any role in the church; a time when I could not bear the truth that homosexuality is a human difference, not a spiritual sin; a time when I could not bear the truth that the God who created the universe thirteen billion years ago can never be fully captured in anyone's religion, including mine.

I believe that all of that has always been true, but, for the longest time, it was truth I could not bear to hear. But, a lifetime of walking in the Holy Spirit has slowly taken me from not being able to bear to hear any of that, to not being able to keep from saying all of that.

I imagine that something similar might be true for many of you, the same truth we once feared so greatly, we couldn't bear to hear it, we now believe so deeply, we cannot keep from saying it; our experience, a living, breathing echo of what Jesus described to his first friends in today's gospel lesson, where Jesus is reported to have said, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth."

But, of course, that raises the question, "How do we discern whether or not what we are seeing or hearing is the leadership of the Holy Spirit?", a question to which the answer is waiting in the next verses of today's gospel lesson, where Jesus is reported to have said, "The Spirit will not speak on his own, but will take what is mine and declare it to you." I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, that is the measure of whether or not a nudge or whisper is from the Holy Spirit: "Is it true to the spirit of Jesus? Is what I believe the Holy Spirit is leading me to say or do anchored in, tethered to, aligned with and rising from the Jesus of the four gospels, the Jesus who said that what matters most is that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love all others as we want all others to love us?"

The Holy Spirit will always only take us further along that same path, the path down which Jesus got us started; not a wide and easy way of tolerance, but a steep and narrow way of truth; the path of truth and grace, integrity and love, justice and mercy, courage and kindness down which Jesus got us started, before he handed us off to the Holy Spirit to take us further.

Amen.

Concerning the Work of the Spirit

John 14:8-17, 25-27, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 9th, 2019 · Duration 10:55

John 14:8-17, 25-27

"The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you."
Every time the Common Lectionary asks the church, throughout the world, to read those words on Pentecost Sunday, they remind us that one of the ways the Holy Spirit works in our lives is by calling, to our minds, the words, and ways, of Jesus.
For example, we encounter someone who is in need of help, and the Holy Spirit reminds us that, in Matthew 5:42, Jesus is reported to have said, "Give to everyone who begs from you." Or, we are about to say something hurtful to, or harmful about, someone, and the Holy Spirit reminds us that, in Matthew 12:36, Jesus is reported to have said, "On the day of judgement, you will have to give an account for every careless word you have ever said." We feel our spirit turning bitter toward someone who has hurt us, and the Holy Spirit reminds us that, in Matthew 6:15, Jesus is reported to have said, "If we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us." We wonder why those of us who were born on the comfortable, powerful, majority side of human difference must always be ready to sit down with, and stand up for, those who were born on the minority side of human difference, and the Holy Spirit reminds us that, in Luke 12:48, Jesus is reported to have said, "To whom much is given, much is required."
And on and on it goes, day after day, all through the day. The Holy Spirit doing, down here on the ground, what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do, back there on the page; reminding us of the words, and ways, of Jesus.
Of course, even the Holy Spirit cannot remind us of something we have never known, or learned. Which is why it is so important for us to get the words of Jesus tucked away, down there in the reservoir of our soul; so that, in those critical moments of decision, when so much can be at stake, the Holy Spirit can reach down deep into the reservoir of our soul and lift up some word of Jesus which might give us the courage, clarity and kindness we need to speak and act like a child of God, in that critical moment when so much hangs in the balance.
Which is one reason why, week after week, year after year, we will be so intentional about helping little Mary Gilbert Wylie, and all her friends in the nursery and children’s department and youth group, and all of our adults, young and old, to learn the ways and know the words of Jesus; so that the Holy Spirit will have something to remind us of in life’s moments of decision, large and small.
Needless to say, this isn’t magic. Having the words of Jesus tucked away down there in the reservoir of our soul, so the Holy Spirit can call those words to our minds, all through the day, day after day, does not guarantee that we will always live a life of clarity, courage and kindness. It can, however, make a real, and true, difference in our lives, if we fill the reservoir of our soul with the words of Jesus, and then live, each day, all through the day, prayerfully, intentionally open to the Holy Spirit, whose work is to remind us of the words and ways of Jesus, so that we might, eventually, actually learn to think, act and speak with clarity, courage and kindness.
Amen.

The Last Word?

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · June 2nd, 2019 · Duration 4:59

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

As you may have noticed, this morning's lesson from the Revelation carried us all the way down to the last line on the last page of the last book of the Bible. "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints" is the way some of the most ancient manuscripts preserve that last line of sacred scripture, while other equally ancient manuscripts say, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all." And, even after all these years, no one can say, for sure, whether the Bible ends with grace for all the saints, or grace for all. An unresolvable ambiguity which, at first glance, might seem to be a less than perfect way for the Bible to end, but which, upon further reflection, might actually be the most amazingly perfect ending imaginable. After all, "Grace for some, or grace for all?" is a question which winds its way like a quiet stream across the long landscape of the whole Bible. In Deuteronomy 23, some are not welcome in the family of God, but in Isaiah 25, everyone is. In John 3:16, only those who believe in the Son of God will be saved, while in Colossians 1:20 the whole creation is reconciled to God. In Romans 10:9, only those who confess Jesus as Lord will be saved, while in Romans 11:32, it is all who receive mercy. In Matthew 13:49, only some are with God in the end, but in I Timothy 4:10, God is the Savior of all. Over here, there is Bible in support of onlyism; only those who do right or decide right will receive the grace of God. Over there, there is Bible in support of universalism; the whole creation eventually, ultimately redeemed and reconciled, healed and home; a Bible-wide conversation between onlyism and universalism which is still going on all the way down to the last word of the last line on the last page of the Bible; some ancient manuscripts ending with grace for some, and others ending in grace for all; the perfect ending to the Bible’s never-ending conversation with itself. Amen.

Concerning the City of God

Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 26th, 2019 · Duration 11:26

Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5 And the angel carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God . . . The gates of the city will never be closed by day, and there will be no night . . . And they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. Every time the lectionary asks the church to read those words from the Revelation, they call to mind, for me, something I stumbled across several years ago, from a book by New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa, in which she said, If you had to sum up the whole book of the Revelation in a single sentence, that single sentence would be, "Things will not always hurt the way they do now." Which does seem, to me, to be as good a one sentence summary of the Revelation as one could ever hope to have; "Things will not always hurt the way they do now." When what we now call the Revelation was first written, it was, as best we can discern, a pastoral letter written to encourage a cluster of churches enduring pressure and persecution from the Roman emperor Domitian. Most of the best scholarship we have tells us that Domitian didn’t care how many gods his subjects worshipped, as long as Domitian himself was one of them. So, when Christians declined to participate in the culture of emperor worship, they ran the risk of being seen as poor patriots and suspect citizens. "What's the harm," their neighbors wondered, "in mixing a little emperor worship with Jesus?" But, of course, the Christians couldn't, and, when they didn't, they often became seen as suspect citizens, which sometimes led to arrest, imprisonment or even death, but, more often, in the late first-century reign of Domitian, to being socially ostracized and economically penalized; their businesses boycotted and contracts cancelled. To which the writer of the Revelation said, "Stay strong. I know it's hard. I, myself, am in prison for my faith. So, I know how costly and difficult, even dangerous it can be to live a life of clarity and courage. But, you stay strong, because this is God's world, and in God's world, God, not Domitian or any other earthly ruler or power or problem, but God has the last word, and if the last word said is going to be God's, the last thing done is going to be good. I know it is so because I had this vision where an angel took me on a tour of the future, and, ultimately, eternally, after all this struggle and trouble and pain is done, there is going to be a new Jerusalem; a city of God like nothing you can imagine; streets of gold, gates of pearl. You may be losing your livelihood today because of your refusal to worship Domitian, but you be strong, because someday you'll be walking on gold and leaning on jasper. This new city I saw is so filled with the presence of God that it has no temple, and so full of light that it needs no lamp. And, best of all, the city I saw has twelve gates, three on the north, three on the south, three on the east, and three on the west, and all of them are always open and none of them will ever close; so it won't just be us there, it will be all there; people from every nation, tribe and tongue; just like Isaiah said it would be; the whole world and all creation finally healed and home. So, you stay strong; because, ultimately God is going to have the last word, and things will not always hurt the way they do now." That is what the writer of the Revelation said to those late first-century Christians who first read the Revelation. It was, for them, a pastoral letter to encourage them to stay strong, and not to lose hope, no matter how hard or bad things became because, ultimately, eventually, someday, God is going to have the last word, and things will not always hurt the way they do now. And, what the Revelation said to them then, it says to us now. Across the Christian centuries, we've let all the apocalyptic images and metaphors about beasts and dragons in the Revelation trip us up and sidetrack us. We've gotten lost in the numbers and the colors and all the odd literary devices the writer of the Revelation employed. As late as the sixteenth century, Martin Luther questioned whether such an odd book should even be kept in the canon of scripture, and John Calvin, when he wrote his commentary on the New Testament, intentionally left the Revelation out, so uncertain was he of its value. And, then, in the nineteenth century, came historical premillennial dispensationalism with its literal rapture and tribulation and millennialism, which turned the Revelation into a bewildering puzzle to be solved instead of a hopeful word to be heard; a hopeful word originally written as a pastoral letter to some late first-century Christians who were living with a lot of sorrow and struggle, fear and pain, to encourage them to stay strong. And, what it was then, for them, the Revelation is now, for us. Not a puzzle to be solved, but a hope to be held; the hope that, ultimately, eternally, this is God's world. And, in God's world, God gets the last word. And if the last word said is going to be God's, then the last thing done is going to be good. And if the last thing done is going to be good, then things will not always hurt the way they do now. Amen.

Our Mentor, Peter

Acts 11:1-18, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 19th, 2019 · Duration 9:50

Acts 11:1-18

The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy. Even upon slaves, both male and female, I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
Every year, year after year, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words, from the book of Acts, to be read, by Christians throughout the world, on Pentecost Sunday. When they rolled around this year, they called to mind, for me, something that happened a few weeks ago here in Jackson, when Calvary Baptist Church called Linda Smith as their senior pastor. Calvary did not turn to Linda because she is a woman, but neither did they turn from her because she is a woman; a congregational decision which put Calvary Baptist Church squarely in the heart of the message of Pentecost, the Pentecostal message that God calls God's sons and daughters, with no regard for whether they happen to be sons or daughters.
That is what Acts chapter two says, which, needless to say, is different from I Corinthians 14:34, which says that women should be silent in the church, which sounds sort of like I Timothy 2:12, "I permit no woman to teach a man," which is decidedly different from Galatians 3:27-28, which says that, in the baptized family of faith, there is neither male or female, which sounds like today's lesson from Acts, where God pours out the Holy Spirit upon men and women with no regard for whether they happen to have been born women or men, all of which leaves us with varied voices, in the same Bible, on the same subject; which is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Because the Bible speaks with varied voices, we have to have the Holy Spirit to show us which of the Bible's varied voices matter most to God, and, thus, should matter most to us.
Take, for example, the Bible's varied voices about the role of women in the church. When it comes to those varied voices and verses, the path to truth goes something like this: The life of Jesus is the best look we have ever had at God, and the four gospels are the best look we have ever had at Jesus, and the Jesus of the four gospels lived his life drawing an ever wider circle of welcome and embrace; transcending his culture's religious barriers to fellowship and service. So, when I find some voices in scripture which exclude some of God's children from some of God's service, and other voices in scripture which include all of God's children in all of God's service, the Holy Spirit makes it clear to me that the verses and voices which matter most are the verses and voices which draw the widest circle of inclusion, because those are the verses and voices which most nearly resemble Jesus, who most fully resembles God.
That's the Pentecostal way of reading the Bible; a way of reading scripture for which Jesus himself prepared us when he said, in this morning's gospel lesson, "When the Spirit comes, the Spirit will guide you into all truth." Needless to say, it would be simpler if Jesus had said, "The Bible will be your chapter and verse authority, with every answer to every question spelled out and nailed down in clear and certain black and white." But Jesus warned us that it wouldn't always be that easy when he said, "The Spirit will guide you into all truth," which means that we don't get to abdicate, to the finished authority of chapter and verse, our lifelong responsibility for thinking and praying.
And this Pentecostal way of reading the Bible is not only something we have to do with scripture, it is also something we get to see in scripture. Take, for example, Acts chapter eight. In Acts 8:26, the Holy Spirit sends Philip to baptize an Ethiopian eunuch,
but there's a Bible verse blocking the path down to the water. The verse is Deuteronomy 23:1, which excludes eunuchs from being welcomed into the family of God, but the Holy Spirit is pushing Philip past the place where those words on that page would have told him to stop. And then, there's Acts chapter ten, where God calls Peter to go and baptize the Gentile, Cornelius. Peter says, "But God, what about what the Bible says? You know, in Leviticus 11:44, all about clean and unclean?" But the Holy Spirit pushes Peter past the place where a Bible verse might have made him stop; which sometimes happens, after Pentecost.
A few days ago I was driving up Highway 25, somewhere between Carthage and Noxapater, when I saw, off to my left, a small church with a big sign out front that said, Pentecostal Bible Way Church. I almost turned around, crossed the median, went back and joined up, because that phrase, Pentecostal Bible Way, pretty much says it all. Here is the Pentecostal Bible way to live: You root your life as deeply as you can in the Bible's clear call for all of us to live lives of holiness, truthfulness, gentleness, compassion, kindness, contentment, careful speech and utterly pure, absolutely transparent, completely agendaless innocence, while also leaving wide open every window of your soul for the wind of Pentecost to blow through and take you to people and places which some of the Bible's verses and voices might never have caused you, or allowed you, to go.
That's the Pentecostal Bible way to live. Get up every day of your life and decide to live that way, and you will be living the life for which you are being saved; the life for which you were both born and baptized.
Amen.

Concerning the Kindness and Goodness of God

Revelation 7:9-17, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 12th, 2019 · Duration 9:16

Revelation 7:9-17

The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

"And God will wipe every tear from their eyes." Those words, from today's epistle lesson, like all the words in the Revelation, were probably originally written to a late first-century community of faith, located in western Asia Minor, struggling to resist the demands of the Roman emperor, Domitian. In that sense, the Revelation's original audience was as specific and local as the recipients of Paul's letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Philippians and Galatians. All of which is to say that, as one wise soul once observed, "Whenever we read the Revelation, we are reading someone else's mail."

However, just because the Revelation wasn't written to us or about us, that doesn't mean that it doesn't hold an important message for us. To the contrary, we regularly find, in the last book of the Bible, comfort and hope, for our lives, just as the original readers of the Revelation found comfort and hope for theirs; perhaps never more so than when this morning's lesson places in our path one of the Bible's most tender, gentle images of the kindness and goodness of God; the image of God wiping every tear from every eye, over on the Other Side.

That beautiful image of the kindness of God first appears in the book of Isaiah, chapter twenty-five, verse eight, which says that, someday, God will prepare a banquet for all people, at which God will wipe away all tears from all faces; one of many images in the Bible for the kindness and goodness of God.

The most familiar of which, of course, is the twenty-third psalm, which says that God is with us and for us, not in ways that spare us from the worst, but in ways that see us through the worst. And then, of course, there is Psalm 100, which says that "God's steadfast love endures forever," and Psalm 145, which says that "The Lord is gracious and merciful, good and kind," and Isaiah 66:13, which likens God to a mother who carries and comforts her children; the kind of mother who, in today's lesson from the Revelation, will someday dry the tears from our eyes, and all eyes; just a handful of the Bible's many images for the kindness and goodness of God.

Which is not the same as saying that God is sweet and nice. Given all the evil and harm which happen in this world, God, one imagines, must be kind and good in ways which are more true and clear than sweet and nice. Violence, abuse, injustice, oppression, deception, manipulation, discrimination, ridicule, meanness, unkindness; the list of sins which bring hurt and harm to people's lives is long, and no one should ever confuse the kindness and goodness of God with a sweet, nice tolerance of that which needs to be confronted and changed.

Our task, as the children of God, is to learn to know what the sins are; and, what the human struggles, complexities and differences are. One of the most important journeys any person ever takes, along the path to spiritual depth, is to walk in the Holy Spirit prayerfully enough, for long enough, to eventually learn to discern the difference between a difference and a sin. And, then, to respond to each the way God would, with clarity and courage in the face of the real sins, and with kindness toward all else, and all persons; letting the kindness and goodness of God which has come down to us go out through us, until, as the poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, "It is only kindness which ties our shoes every morning and sends us out into the day," drying more tears than we cause, until we reach that far away Someday when God will wipe them all away.
Amen.

The Largest Verse in the Bible

Revelation 5:11-14, The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 5th, 2019 · Duration 5:10

Revelation 5:11-14

The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, "To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!"

Every time the lectionary asks the church to read those words from today's epistle lesson, it places, in our path, the largest verse in the whole Bible . Not the largest as in the longest, a distinction which belongs to Esther chapter eight, verse nine, but the largest as in the biggest; a single verse of scripture, gathering every creature on the earth, under the earth, in the sky and in the sea, around the throne of God, singing praise to God; together, forever.

Beautiful words from the book of Revelation, but words which, like all of the words in the Revelation, are not to be taken literally, because the Revelation is a book of symbols and images, parables and pictures. Not to mention the fact that, taken literally, Revelation 5:13 would mean that every creature in all creation would have a place in the eternal heavenly choir; lions and llamas, manatees and muskrats, eels and seals, moose and mice. Not even Tim Coker could coax a coherent chorus from that kind of choir.

So, the question is not what Revelation 5:13 might mean taken literally, but, what it might mean taken seriously.

No one can say with certainty, of course, but, perhaps, it means that someday God will get what God has always wanted; the whole creation, and the whole human family, redeemed and reconciled, healed and home. After all the necessary judging and punishing, purging and redeeming is done, no matter how many millions of years it takes, at long last, God, finally getting the one thing God has always wanted most; every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, redeemed and reconciled, healed and home.

Amen.

Unless

John 20:19-31, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Major Treadway · April 29th, 2019 · Duration 14:13

John 20:19-31

The Second Sunday of Eastertide

There they sat, the disciples, in a familiar room. Maybe even a room in which they had previously sat with Jesus. Only this time, it was after Jesus had been crucified. It was after they had heard the story from Mary Magdalene and Peter and John. They were afraid. When Jesus had been crucified their world had been turned upside down and inside out. Then there was this report of an empty tomb and a resurrected Jesus. Again, their world was turned upside down and inside out. But it wasn't as though this news of resurrection had set everything right. Everything was even more different for them than it had been when Jesus was dead.

They finally had proof that they had chosen right. Their choice to leave behind their nets and their tax collecting had been the right choice. But now what?

Have you ever had a moment like that? A moment where you made an audacious claim or did something that seemed so far outside the realm of what was acceptable only to be proven right? It doesn't happen very often, of course, our society operates on a set of prescribed rituals. Changes to these rituals are not typically welcome. The more deeply engrained the ritual, the less welcome the change - it doesn't matter if the change makes sense.

Here the disciples sat with the notion that the most certain thing in life - death - had been overcome. They had watched Jesus die. They watched him breathe his last. They watched as the soldier made sure that he was really dead. They watched as he was laid in a tomb. They watched as the stone was placed over the opening. Jesus had died. They had watched.

But now, there was news that all that they had watched had been undone. They were afraid. So they did what any of us do when we are afraid. They gave their fear a face and tried to find a way to keep safe from that face. John tells us the face they gave their fear was "the Jews." These were the people who had killed Jesus, after all. Who could blame them for giving their fear this face? The only way they knew to keep safe from that fear was to go into a safe room and lock the door behind them. So there they sat, together, afraid, in a locked room.

And then it happened. That calm and familiar voice. The one that had called out to them not so long ago with those life changing words: "follow me." "Peace be with you" the voice called out. Can't you see them looking to each other with tear laden eyes crying out to one another as they had before in recent days, "did you just hear that?" Slowly, each of them realizes that the others had heard it too. They look around and see Jesus. Their grieving transforms. Their tears of sorrow and fear becoming tears of joy.

Knowing their fears, Jesus showed them his hands that bore the scars of nails and his side, where the soldier had placed his spear.

Jesus stays with them a short time and then is gone. One of their group was not among them - Thomas. Those who had seen Jesus go to find him, eager to share with him the good news that the stories were true. They had seen Jesus - alive.

All of their eyes (Thomas' included) still bore signs of too many tears shed. Only there was a difference in the eyes of those who had been in the locked room.

Thomas had to have heard the story from Mary Magdalene, from Peter, and from John. And now Thomas was hearing this story from the small circle of Jesus' closest followers. He had been with them. He had been with Jesus. He had responded to Jesus' call to "follow". He had watched all of the same events transpire that the rest of the disciples had watched. He saw Jesus put in the tomb. In the tomb!!!

Then Thomas utters the words that have long made him the punching bag for pastors and Sunday School teachers needing someone about which to say "don't be like that guy." Thomas says to his friends, words pregnant with yearning hope waiting to burst free and give him the peace he needs. Thomas says, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

These are to me, perhaps, the most human words recorded in the Bible. "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

Carter and JW, it is a blessing to be able to be here to celebrate with you today. Your time being a part of this community of faith - taking part in both being formed by Northminster and forming Northminster - means that you have been surrounded with important ideas, practices, and rituals that are now common and familiar to you. You know the importance of careful speech. You know what it means to stand up for and sit down with the same people that Jesus would stand up for and sit down with. You know what it means to be with your neighbors, those who look like you and talk like you and those who don't. You know about being at the Yellow Church and packing bags for boarding homes. You have many times heard the same familiar words the disciples heard inside the locked room: Peace be with you.

As you go from this place to your new places, if you listen carefully, you will hear in conversations of your soon to be friends and classmates, professors and neighbors, administrators and fraternity brothers (and sorority sisters), their words may not be the same, but you will hear them say "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

When you hear this message conveyed, it will likely not be with the same yearning hope of Thomas, but it might be. We live in Mississippi, where nearly every person you will meet has heard of Jesus, can tell you some bible stories, and can tell you something about the resurrection. They may not believe it, but they know about it.

In Mississippi, the words of Thomas can come when there is a national political dispute between a democrat and a republican both professing to be Christians, and both making public statements that fail to measure up to Jesus' command to love your neighbor as yourself.

The words of Thomas can come when a hurricane decimates the coastline, killing people, destroying property, and forever altering lives and the people watching the news footage ask "how can a good God allow this?".

The words of Thomas can come in discussions about the role of the church in international conflict.

The ways the sentiment of Thomas can be conveyed are endless. They may come in a classroom, when a student or professor will start a sentence, "if Christians really believed in "x", then....

They may come on a Sunday morning when you want to go to church and your roommate will say, "nah, that's not worth getting up for"

They may even come at a football game when people on both sides of the field will pray for the same football to fly in different directions off of the foot of the kicker.

It may even come when you look in the mirror and try to decide what you want your major to be or who you want to become.

These very real conversations, thoughts, and prayers fit right here with Thomas and his statement to his friends.

It is important and instructive to note the story of Thomas does not end with his statement of what he needs to believe. A week later, Jesus comes to the group again - only Thomas is with them this time. Jesus offers the same familiar refrain "Peace be with you," then walks over to Thomas. He meets Thomas' conditions.

Jesus says to Thomas: "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."

Sisters and Brothers, Carter and JW, we are the body of Christ. When someone offers the sentiment of Thomas, that they cannot believe unless they see and feel, that is an invitation. I do not mean to suggest that you or I or anyone else will be able to prove them into faith. Nor do I mean to suggest that anything that you or I or anyone else does should be for the purpose of showing off one's faith in front of another.

However, if someone wants to see the scars in the hands of and side of Jesus, he or she needs only see or hear of your stories, of our stories, being the Body of Christ at Northminster Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi and beyond. You have the language, the faith, and experience to answer.

You know that each human you meet bears the image of God - whether or not you agree with their religion, their politics, or their life choices. You are a part of a Christian community that cares deeply about its neighbors, the Christian ones and the not Christian ones, the ones whose theology lines up with ours and the ones whose does not. You are a part of a community of faith that is not afraid to talk about difficult issues like race, sexuality, and inequality AND admit that there is still much to learn about these topics and others (including how to talk about them). You have formed and been formed by a church that values the voices and talents of each person present. You know this because you have lent your voices and talents in the formation of this family of faith.

Carter and JW, I can't tell you when or where you will hear Thomas' plea, but I can tell you, that if you listen, you will hear it. When you hear it, know that you can say back to that voice, when it's appropriate, "come and see. Look at these hands of Jesus, let me tell you about what they have done." You can say this, in part because of the way that you and your faith have been formed as a part of this community.

And, Carter and JW, because of the way that you have taken part in the forming of this community of faith, even when you have gone from this place to all your other places, when we hear Thomas' plea, and we will hear it, just as assuredly as you will hear it, we can also say: "come and see. Look at these hands of Jesus, let me tell you what they have done."

Amen.

God Raised Jesus from the Grave

Luke 24:1-12, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 21st, 2019 · Duration 8:54

Luke 24:1-12

Easter Sunday

As you may have noticed, the details surrounding the discovery that God had raised Jesus from the grave vary from gospel to gospel. In today's lesson from Luke, for example, several women went to the tomb, while, in John, it was one woman; but, two in Matthew and three in Mark.  In Luke, the stone was rolled away before the women arrived; in Matthew, afterward. In Luke, there are two angels at the tomb, resplendent in their Easter seersucker; while, in Matthew, only one stands guard. And, while, in Luke, the women go and tell the disciples that the tomb is empty, in Mark, they go home and tell no one.

But, however different from one another the gospel accounts of the resurrection might be, when it comes to the single, central point of the story, all four gospels say the same: "God raised Jesus from the grave."

God raised Jesus from the grave, and, ever since, we have been living on the leftovers of that sunrise surprise; that long ago daybreak discovery, a sign, for us, of hope; the hope that, while suffering and pain, despair and death, will have a word with us, they will not have the last word, because this is God's world, and, in God's world, God gets the last word. And, if the last word said is going to be God's, then the last thing done is going to be good; the ultimate sign of which is that God raised   Jesus from the grave.

Whatever else it does or does not mean, the resurrection of Christ from the grave has meant that kind of hope for countless children of God; the kind of hope which gives us the kind of courage which carries us through the struggles we did not get to go around, the kind of hope  which keeps us hoping, even when our life, which was once  a sea of joy punctuated by occasional islands of pain, becomes, instead, a sea of pain punctuated by occasional islands of joy; a hope so incurable that, as the Book of Common Prayer says, Even at the grave, we make our song "Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia."

Needless to say, we can be, and sometimes are, as full of doubt as the disciples in today's gospel lesson, who dismissed the initial reports of the resurrection as "an idle tale." But, even with all our uncertainties and doubts, still, we gather every Easter to say and sing the glad good news, that God raised Jesus from the grave, not because it is something we have to believe about Jesus, but because it is something we get to believe about God.

We get to believe that the God who raised Jesus from the grave is the God who is with us and for us; not in ways which always spare us from the worst, but in ways which always see us through the worst, holding us near and holding us up; with us and for us, in this life and the next, world without end.

Amen.

What Should We Say About the Cross?

Philippians 2:5-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 14th, 2019 · Duration 14:37

Philippians 2:5-11

Palm/Passion Sunday

Of all the mysteries of the Christian faith, few are more difficult to ponder than the one of which our choir just sang so beautifully, the mystery to which this now new Holy Week soon will take us; the wonder and mystery of what was happening when Jesus was dying on the cross.

Of course, on one level, we know what was happening when Jesus was dying on the cross.  Because we have read the four gospels, we know that Jesus was crucified because he stood up for the wrong people often enough that he made the right people nervous enough that they killed him in an effort to silence him.  To read the four gospels is to know that, on one level, that is what was happening when Jesus was dying.  That much is clear.

But, across the Christian centuries, many Christians have needed to say, and hear, more than that about what was happening when Jesus was dying on the cross; more, especially, about how Jesus' death on the cross served as a sacrifice Jesus made to God on our behalf, paying the price for our sin so that God would then be free to save us from our sin, if we make the right response to Jesus' sacrifice; a way of speaking about the cross which was most fully articulated by an eleventh-century thinker named Anselm of Canterbury, who said that God could not forgive sin without compromising God's holiness unless God was first offered a perfect human sacrifice for sin.  However, because all people are flawed by sin, no perfect human sacrifice was available.  Therefore, Anselm concluded, God had to send Jesus to live a perfect human life so that Jesus could satisfy God's requirement for a perfect human sacrifice so that God would then be free to forgive sin without compromising God's holiness.

All of which may be true, and for which one can find support in scripture, especially in Hebrews 10:10 and I John 2:2, but, some of which  does raise large, and deeply spiritual, questions.  For one, if God cannot forgive sin unless God first receives both a perfect sacrifice for sinners, and the right response from sinners, then what room is left for grace?  And, for another, is the idea that God can't forgive sin unless blood is shed actually true about God, or is that a carry-over from the sacrificial system of Judaism into early Christianity?  And, for another, does it ring true to say that God would require a human sacrifice to satisfy God's need for a price to be paid for sin, when, back in Deuteronomy chapter eighteen, God told the people of God that human sacrifice is, itself, a sin. In other words, while it may be true to twenty centuries of evolving Christian doctrine to speak about what happened at the cross as a sacrifice God had to receive so that God could forgive, is it true to the nature and character of God to speak in that way about what happened at the cross?

Needless to say, I do not have the answers to those questions, but, because, they are, to me, as truthful, prayerful and deeply spiritual as they are unanswerable, for many years now, when it comes to the cross, it has been enough, for me, to say, concerning the cross, that, when Jesus died on the cross, Jesus entered fully into the worst of human suffering, humiliation, shame, sorrow, rejection and death; embracing all persons, and all pain, of every time and place, in a wingspan as wide as the whole creation; as Paul said to the Colossians, the whole creation, reconciled to God, through the cross.

Of course, according to today's epistle lesson, from Philippians chapter two, it is not as important for us to solve the mystery of the cross, as it is for us to assume the shape of the cross, to let the same cross-formed mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus; we, as cross-shaped in our living, as he was cross-shaped in his dying.

Cross-shaped as in simultaneously vertical and horizontal; vertical with love for God, and horizontal with love for others; the cross which was, for one day, in Jerusalem, a place for Jesus to die, now, for each day, in Jackson, a way for us to live; loving God with all that is in us in a vertical life of worship, righteousness, prayer and truth; and loving all others in a horizontal life of kindness, courage, compassion, gentleness, justice, welcome and grace; a life which is simultaneously up for God and out for others; our lives as cross-shaped, living, as our Lord was cross-shaped, dying.

Amen.

Pressing On

Philippians 3:4-14, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · April 7th, 2019 · Duration 4:39

Philippians 3:4-14

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

"I have not yet reached the goal, but I keep pressing on, toward the prize, to make it mine." With those words, today's epistle lesson captures our never-ending longing for a deeper life with God; what Evelyn Underhill once called, "Reaching for what we do not have by the faithful practice of what we do have," what Paul calls, "Pressing on toward the prize."

We don't press on toward the goal of a deeper life with God because we are hoping to gain a reward or avoid a punishment, or because we're trying to work our way into heaven or out of hell.  Rather, we keep pressing on to a deeper life with God because we don't want to under-live the one and only life we are ever going to have.

Someday is going to be the last day for all of us, and, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time.  Which is why we want to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully, as possible.  Which is why we keep pressing on to the goal of a more mindful, gentle, thoughtful, prayerful life of kindness and courage; a Spirit-filled, cross-formed life which is simultaneously vertical with love for God and horizontal with love for others, the kind of life which is guided by a clear moral compass of integrity, and stretched by a wide wingspan of welcome; a life which we, like Paul in today's epistle lesson, may not yet have, but, toward which, like Paul, we keep pressing on; reaching for the deeper life with God we do not yet have, by the faithful practice of the passionate longing for it which we do have.

Amen.

Concerning Reconciliation

II Corinthians 5:16-21, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 31st, 2019 · Duration 14:25

II Corinthians 5:16-21

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

"In Christ, God was reconciling the world to God's self."  With those words, today's epistle lesson takes its place alongside Colossians 1:20, which says, "Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile, to God's self, all things, on earth and in heaven," Ephesians 1:9-10, which says, "God's will, for the fullness of time, is to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth," and Revelation 5:13, which says, "Then I heard every creature, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, singing to the one seated on the throne, and to the Lamb, blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever"; verses of scripture which imagine the whole human family, along with all creatures, and all creation, eventually, ultimately, eternally reconciled to God and one another.

After all the guilt has been confessed and all the responsibility has been owned, after all the victims have been faced, all the sin has been judged and all the truth has been told, not without a long, hard hell of judgement, but through a long, hard hell of judgement; at long last, the ultimate will of God, ultimately done, which, according to today's passage, was, and is, the reconciliation of the world, to God, through Christ.

A possibility which is nothing but joy to many of the world's Christians, but which is as troubling to others as the father's welcome of the undeserving younger brother was to the bigger, better brother in this morning's gospel lesson.

Like the bigger brother in the parable, we fear that a welcome too wide makes reconciliation too easy; turning grace into a timid tolerance which allows those who do the worst to get away with the most; what Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously called "cheap grace."

And, for many, not even a long, hard hell where sin is judged, evil is purged, responsibility is owned and victims are faced is judgement enough.  The only judgement which is enough for much of popular Christianity is a hell which is endless and eternal; perhaps because we don't like the idea of grace beyond the grave.  As C.S. Lewis once said, sounding a lot like the older brother in the parable, "No one should get to decide for God after they discover they have no other choice."  The rich man can't escape the flames, to go and be where Lazarus is.  It is appointed unto us once to die, and after that the judgement.  Those who do not believe are condemned already.  No one comes to God except through Christ.  It's in the Book.

But, it is also in the Book that in Christ, God was reconciling the whole creation to God's self, and that, ultimately, eternally, every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea will sing together forever around the throne of God; the whole human family of every time and place, plus all creatures and all creation, reconciled to one another and to God; no one coming to God except through Christ, because everyone, eventually, comes to God, through Christ; which is what this morning's epistle passage says that God had in mind all along, the reconciliation of the whole world, to God, through Christ.

To which, at one time, I would have said, " If God was going to reconcile and redeem the whole creation, then what was the point of Jesus' death?"  To which today's epistle lesson would say, "That was the point of Jesus' death.  The point of the crucifixion was the reconciliation of the whole creation."  What happened at the cross was that big, that powerful, effective and universal; the whole creation, reconciled to God, through Christ.

Which, if it ever actually comes to pass, will, one imagines, make God as glad as the father in the parable of the prodigal son, while also making many of the children of God as mad as the bigger better brother in the story, who found, in his father's boundless grace, as much grief as the other brother found relief.

A reminder for us all that one of the most simple, basic prayers that any of us can pray is for God to give us enough of the Holy Spirit in our lives, so that we will never be sad about any inclusion God is glad about, and that we will never be glad about any exclusion God is sad about; our hope for the reconciliation of the whole creation as deep and as wide as the hope and will and plan of God.

Amen.

On the Other Hand

Luke 13:1-9, The Third Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 24th, 2019 · Duration 11:05

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Another Second Chance

Isaiah 2:1-5, The First Sunday in Advent

Chuck Poole · March 18th, 2019 · Duration 79:58

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

These Verses Versus Those Verses

Luke 4:1-13, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 10th, 2019 · Duration 13:48

Luke 4:1-13

The First Sunday in Lent

Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'God will command the angels to protect you, and on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" And Jesus answered the devil, "It is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Every three years, the Common Lectionary asks the church throughout the world to read those words on the First Sunday in Lent. And, every time they roll back around, we get to watch while Jesus and the devil face off in a contest of these verses versus those verses; the devil, quoting Psalm 91:11-12; "God will command the angels to protect you, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone," and Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test"; the devil, actually using a verse of scripture to tempt Jesus to do God's work the world's way; quoting the Bible accurately, but using the Bible wrongly.

Which, needless to say, wasn't the last time a Bible verse was quoted accurately, but used wrongly.

In the world of my origins, for example, we quoted I Corinthians 14:35 accurately, but used it wrongly, to exclude women from ministry. We quoted Mark 10:11-12 accurately, but used it wrongly, to penalize those who had suffered through the sorrow of divorce. We quoted Leviticus 18:22 accurately, but used it wrongly, to marginalize those whose sexuality was different from ours; like the devil in today's gospel lesson, sending the Bible on errands the Bible wasn't written to run; quoting the Bible accurately, but using the Bible wrongly.

Because that way of using the Bible was what I had known as a child, it was all I could know as an adult.  Which means that, for a time, I participated in that way of using the Bible; a way of handling scripture which created second-class citizens in the family of faith; a sin for which I can be forgiven, but from which it is too late to undo the harm done to dear and good people who were turned away from some of the sacraments of the church because of folk like myself, who used the Bible on others in ways we would never apply the Bible to ourselves.

All of which reminds me of William Sloane Coffin's unforgettable sentence, "Hell is the truth, seen too late," to which I would add, "Heaven will be, too." Whenever I read, in the book of Isaiah, and in the Revelation, that, over on the Other Side, God is going to wipe all the tears away, I sometimes wonder if some of those tears may rise from the eyes of folk like myself, when we learn how much pain we caused when we were using the Bible on others in ways we would never apply the Bible to ourselves.

The remedy for which is for us to decide to be content to use our Bible only the way Jesus used his.  If I belonged to another faith, I'm sure I would have a different measure for how to interpret scripture. But, because I'm a Christian, my measure for the interpretation of scripture is Jesus. That is why I keep saying that the most important passage in the Bible is Matthew 22:34-40, because that's the passage where Jesus says that all the law and the prophets are to be interpreted in the light of two commandments; "Love God with all that is in you" and "Love others the way you want others to love you."

"All the law and prophets" is all the Bible Jesus had. So, when Jesus said, "All the law and the prophets are to be read in the light of love for God and love for others," that tells us how Jesus handled his Bible.

In John chapter eight, for example, Jesus reached past the place where Deuteronomy 22:22 told him to stop, and sent the woman caught in adultery home, to begin her life again. And, in Mark chapter three, Jesus reached past the place where Exodus 20:10 would have dropped him off, and healed the man with the withered hand, without requiring him to wait until the Sabbath had passed; Jesus, clearly not living his life by a scripture here and a scripture there, but, rather, as Mary Oliver once wonderfully said, "In accordance with a single certainty." And, for Jesus, that single certainty by which he read all scripture and saw all people appears to have been the single certainty that nothing matters more than loving God with all that is in us and loving others the way we want others to love us.

There are many things Jesus did which we cannot do, but we can handle our Bible exactly as Jesus handled his; reading the whole Bible in the light of love for God and love for others, even when that means going past the place where a Bible verse might have dropped us off.

I think of it as lowering an anchor and raising a sail. We lower our anchor into the Bible by reading and studying the Bible, getting its words down deep into the muscle-memory of our soul; dropping our anchor deep into the well of scripture, while, simultaneously, keeping our sail always up for the wind of the Spirit.

We keep our sail ever up for the wind of the Spirit because we know that, when the Bible was canonized in the fourth-century, the Holy Spirit did not go into retirement.  When the Bible was finally finished and settled on by the church at the end of that long process called "canonization," the Holy Spirit did not buy a condo in Destin and retire.  Rather, the Holy Spirit continues to nudge, tug, reveal and speak, which means that the wind of the Spirit can still send us sailing; never farther than Jesus would go, but, sometimes, past the place where a verse of scripture might have dropped us off.

Amen.

While Praying

Luke 9:28-36, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · March 3rd, 2019 · Duration 2:25

Luke 9:28-36

Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

"While Jesus was praying, the appearance of his face changed," says this morning's gospel lesson, a moment we recall every year on Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday; Jesus' face, changing, "while he  was praying."

Which is not unlike what happens to us; a lifetime of daily prayer, day after day, all through the day, eventually making us more thoughtful and mindful, forgiving and welcoming, truthful and gentle, courageous and kind; our gradual, eventual transformation coming to us, as Jesus' dazzling, dramatic transfiguration came to him; while praying.

Amen.

Concerning Judgement

Luke 6:27-38, The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 24th, 2019 · Duration 15:00

Luke 6:27-38

The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged."  With those words, today's gospel lesson calls us to show all others the same grace we want all others to show us, by being as judgeless toward others as we want others to be judgeless toward us; which places "Do not judge, and you will not be judged," in a wider Bible orbit with Romans 14:13, "Let us no longer pass judgement on one another," James 4:12, "Who are you to judge your neighbor?", John 8:7, "Let anyone who is without sin cast the first stone," and Matthew 7:13, "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?"; a chorus of Bible verses, and voices, all of which call us to be as judgeless toward others as we want others to be judgeless toward us.

And yet, in this life, there are judgements which we must make; not about   people, which is God's work to do, but about dangerous and destructive words and   actions, harmful and hurtful systems and symbols, and unjust and oppressive policies and practices.

A life with no judgements would be a life which is not angered by the injustices about which all Christians should be angry. Sometimes, the only way we can stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for, is by standing up against the same  injustices Jesus would stand up against.

Take, for example, the Quakers; among the first to call for the abolition of slavery, because they made the judgement that slavery was sin. Or, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who helped lead a resistance movement against Hitler, because he made the judgement that anti-Semitism was sin. And, our own Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, calling for equality under the law for all persons, because they made the judgement that discrimination was sin.

All of which is to say that when today's gospel lesson says "Do not judge," it doesn't relieve us of the responsibility of making real judgements; not about people, which is God's responsibility, but about hurtful and harmful words and actions, which is our responsibility.

Needless to say, every personal failing, reckless moment and careless word does not need to be confronted or judged. Rather, it is those truly dangerous and destructive, harmful and hurtful words and actions, systems and symbols, policies and practices which need to be confronted,  so that they can be changed.

It is our responsibility to make those kinds of judgements, while also being judgeless about people, because making judgements about people is God's job, but making judgements about hurtful and harmful words and actions is our job.

To be judgeless, while making judgements, may sound impossible; and, might be impossible, if there were no Holy Spirit at work in our lives. But, because there is the Holy Spirit, it is completely possible for us to make clear judgements about hurtful words and actions, while also being as judgeless toward the persons behind those words and actions as we want them to be judgeless toward us.

In fact, in my experience, if we walk in the Spirit prayerfully enough, for long enough, the judgeless life of clear judgements we once found impossible to live, we will, eventually, find impossible not to live. Our moral compass will eventually become so clear that it will not allow us to remain unbothered by, neutral toward or silent about the abuses, inequities and injustices which bring hurt and harm to others, while our gentleness will grow so deep and our kindness so wide that we will make those judgements, which must be made, judgelessly.

Amen. 

Luke's Jesus

Luke 6:17-26, The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 17th, 2019 · Duration 11:22

Luke 6:17-26

The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.  And blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled."

As you may recall from your own reading of the four gospels, those verses from today's gospel lesson recall Jesus' words in ways which are unique to the gospel of Luke.  The writer of the gospel of Matthew says that Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" and "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness."  But, the writer of the gospel of Luke says that Jesus said, "Blessed  are the poor," and, "Blessed are you who are hungry."  Not "poor in spirit" or "hungry for righteousness," as we find in Matthew; but poor as in economically, and hungry as in physically; an early indication in the gospel of Luke of the preferential concern Luke's Jesus has for whoever is most poor, hungry, voiceless, powerless, left out and alone.

Something we see, over and over again, in the gospel of Luke, starting in chapter one, where Mary, the mother of our Lord, sings that the hungry are going to be filled, but the rich sent away empty; the lowly lifted, but the powerful brought low; a song sung only in Luke, followed, a few chapters later, by Jesus' announcement in the synagogue that he has come to bring good news to the poor; also, only in Luke.  Then, there is Jesus' exhortation that, when we give a dinner, we should invite the poor; once again, of the four gospels, recorded only in Luke.  And the parable of the once rich man who is tormented in flames, while once hungry Lazarus is at ease in Abraham's arms; a story which appears, also, only in Luke; not to mention Zacchaeus, also, only in Luke, whom Jesus declared well on his way to salvation when Zacchaeus said, "Half of all I have I will give to the poor."

And, then, there's the story popularly known as the parable of the Good Samaritan, also, only in Luke, in which Jesus makes the marginalized stranger the beloved neighbor we need.  And, of course, also, only in Luke, the most famous story Luke's Jesus ever told; the parable of the prodigal son, the grace-filled father and the angry older brother; the point of which is that we should never be mad about any inclusion God is glad about, and never glad about any exclusion God is sad about.

Because Luke's Jesus has such an unfailingly preferential concern for whoever is most poor, hungry, marginalized, ostracized, oppressed, left out, hurting and alone, every now and then, you will hear people call Luke's Jesus "the radical Jesus."  But, Luke's Jesus is actually the ordinary Jesus; the only Jesus there is.

Across the Christian centuries, we've created a more manageable Jesus than the one we find in Luke; a Christian Christ who is sort of a composite of what Luther and Calvin taught about what Anselm thought about what Augustine believed about what Paul said about Jesus; a Christ people need only to accept so they can become Christians; a way of thinking which has produced countless fine people and created the largest world religion on the planet, but which has created an option Luke's Jesus might not have recognized; the option of a Christianity which gets us into heaven in the next life, but which requires no change in our economics, our politics, our public policy, what we say, do, laugh at, post, text, email and tweet in this life; a Christianity which, somewhere along the way, made  being born again more about living with Jesus in the next life than living like Jesus in this life; a way of thinking which has produced many fine people and done much good in the world, but which is very different from Luke's Jesus; a Jew who never mentioned starting a new world religion called Christianity, but who went about confronting injustice, calling people to lives of righteousness and truth, sitting down with and standing up for whoever was most hungry, poor, marginalized, overlooked, left out, sad, ashamed, and alone; and inviting all, who would, to join him in  seeing all people as God sees all people.

That's Luke's Jesus; not a radical Jesus, just the ordinary Jesus.  And, following Luke's Jesus doesn't make us radical Christians, either; just ordinary Christians who get up every morning and go through the day walking in the Holy Spirit; sitting down with and standing up for the same people Luke's Jesus would sit down with and stand up for if Luke's Jesus was here.

All of which is just ordinary, basic, cornbread and peas Christianity; the spirit of Luke's Jesus, embodied in our kindness and courage, gentleness and compassion, integrity and truth.

Amen.

What Happened There Happens Here

Isaiah 6:1-8, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 10th, 2019 · Duration 9:11

Isaiah 6:1-8

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

If you take away the billowing smoke and trembling pillars, what happened to Isaiah, in the temple, happens to us, in the church.  Subtract the flying seraph, scalding lips with glowing coals, and, what happened there happens here; the worship of God, the confession of sin, the assurance of forgiveness, and, at the close of Isaiah's hour, and ours, a time of response, when the question comes, "Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?" to which the answer rises, "Here am I, send me."

What happened there, suddenly, happens here, slowly; our lives formed and shaped, not all at once, or once and for all, but week by week, year after year, across a lifetime.

As my old friend Cecil Sherman once said, "A lifetime in church is more sandpaper than dynamite."  Dynamite changes everything all at once, in a single big moment, while sandpaper changes things slowly, slowly, little by little; rubbing, rubbing, shaping, shaping, gradually, eventually; what happened there, for Isaiah, in a single, big dynamite moment, at the temple, happening here, for us, across a sandpaper lifetime, in church.

Of course, careful speech requires us to say that our lives can be, and often are, formed and shaped, for God and the gospel, in places other than the church, especially in today's world, when so much theology, good and bad, is a livestream, blogpost or podcast away.

But, still, there is no substitute for gathering, with the people of God, for the worship of God.  Being in the same space at the same time, week after week, year after year, with people we love and care for, many of whom do not think, vote or believe the same, but all of whom sing the same, "Holy, Holy, Holy" and pray the same, "Our Father, who art in heaven," is its own kind of life-lifting miracle.

Not to mention what may be the deepest mystery of the worshipping community; the strength we draw from, and the courage we find in, one another's presence when we are together in the sanctuary.  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, there's nothing in all the world quite like the strength we draw from, and the courage we find in, the people of God gathered for the worship of God.

Strength and courage which we find in here, and take out there; coming in here, over and over again, so we can go back out there, over and over again, to let the love which has come down to us go out through us.

We live that way beyond these walls, partly because that is the life for which we have been formed within these walls.  We live lives of kindness, courage and clarity beyond these walls, partly because we have learned, within these walls, to read all scripture, and see all people, through the lens of, and in the light of, love; our hearts and minds, formed and shaped, across a lifetime, in the Children's Department, the Youth House, Sunday School, Adult Studies; and at Wednesday evening suppers and Sunday morning worship, to know and understand that what matters most is what Jesus said matters most; that we love God with all that is in us and that we love all others the way we want all others to love us.

As a result of hearing that said and sung, week after week, year after year, within these walls, we have become people who, when we are scattered beyond these walls, live thoughtful, mindful, prayerful lives of kindness and courage, because our church has formed us into people whose God is love, whose creed is kindness and whose default position is empathy.

Unlike Isaiah, in the book which bears his name, that does not happen for us all at once or once and for all.  For us, it's more sandpaper than dynamite.  And, even after all these years, we still fail at it.

But, that's why we keep coming back; because what happened in one big moment for Isaiah, in the temple, happens, across a lifetime, for us, in the church.

Amen.

On Not Being Mad About What God Is Glad About

Luke 4:21-30, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 3rd, 2019 · Duration 4:00

Luke 4:21-30

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

As you may have noticed, in this morning's gospel lesson the people of God were mad about what God was glad about.  God was glad to reach beyond the boundaries of Israel's insiders to embrace in grace those outsiders from Sidon and Syria.  But, when Jesus reminded the people of God that the reach of God is that wide and welcoming, they became so angry that they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

And, what once made them angry, then, can still make us angry, now.  Which I, of all people, can understand. For much of my life I suffered from that same kind of onlyism which made the people in the synagogue that Sabbath so angry at Jesus.

"Onlyism" is my name for our need for God's grace to operate only within the boundaries which our religion has established for God. For much of my life, that way of thinking formed the foundation of my faith. So, I understand how unsettling it can be to hear what the people of God heard that Sabbath in the synagogue; the truth that our boundaries are not God's boundaries.

But, if we walk in the Spirit prayerfully enough, and stay on the path to depth carefully enough, for long enough, we can, eventually, move beyond onlyism, and come, not only to tolerate, but, actually, to celebrate, the boundless reach of the grace of God; at which time we will come out into that wide and wonderful place in life where we are no longer mad about the boundless grace God is glad about; redrawing the map of our welcome, to more nearly match the wide embrace of the expansive grace of God.

Amen.

Youth Sermon on Youth Sunday

1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Luke 4:14-21, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

J.W. Caver · January 27th, 2019 · Duration 9:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Sign of Water to Wine

John 2:1-11, The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 20th, 2019 · Duration 10:39

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Star

Matthew 2:1-12, Epiphany of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · January 6th, 2019 · Duration 3:40

Matthew 2:1-12

Epiphany of the Lord Sunday

The Spirit of God is as public as a star which anyone can see from wherever they are.

That might be the main point of the familiar passage we read this morning from the gospel of Matthew; the annual Epiphany Sunday story of foreign strangers and absolute outsiders, drawn to Jesus, from someplace far, by the guiding light of a distant star.

A story which, interestingly enough, appears nowhere in Mark, Luke or John, but, only in Matthew; a gospel many students of scripture believe was written sometime around eighty A.D., for an originally Jewish community of faith, still struggling to redraw the circle of their welcome to make room for Gentile newcomers.

Which may explain why, of the four gospels, only Matthew reports the arrival of those Gentile strangers who followed a star from some place far to worship the Jewish Jesus; perhaps, the writer of the gospel of Matthew's way of reminding his congregation that their boundaries were not God's boundaries; a reminder, for us all, that, while we belong to God, God does not belong to us.

Rather, God is as active and present "out there" as God is active and present "in here"; the main message of the familiar story of the Wise Men from afar; that the God we know in Jesus is as public as a star.

Amen.

All That We Say, All That We Do

Colossians 3:12-17, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · December 30th, 2018 · Duration 12:17

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning the Mystery of the Incarnation

Hebrews 10:5-10, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 23rd, 2018 · Duration 12:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Concerning Joy

Luke 3:7-18, The Third Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 16th, 2018 · Duration 16:03

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Lessons and Carols Service

The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 9th, 2018 · Duration 71:11

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Another Advent Journey Begins

Psalm 25:1-10, The First Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 2nd, 2018 · Duration 56:02



"Another Advent Journey Begins"

Psalm 25:1-10

The First Sunday of Advent

Note: This is the whole service for December 2, 2018.

A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

John 18:33-37, Christ the King Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff · November 25th, 2018 · Duration 12:25



"A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff"

John 18:33-37

Christ the King Sunday

The Annual Stewardship Sermon

Hebrews 10:19-25, The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 18th, 2018 · Duration 14:34



"The Annual Stewardship Sermon"

Hebrews 10:19-25

The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning the Bible’s Conversation With Itself

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17, The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 11th, 2018 · Duration 14:15



"Concerning the Bible’s Conversation With Itself"

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

So, Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife . . .  And when Ruth bore a son, the women of the neighborhood named him Obed; and Obed became the father of Jesse, who became the father of David.

Every three years, when the lectionary asks the church, throughout the world, to read those words from today’s Old Testament lesson, the announcement that Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David seems not to be particularly eventful news, until we remember that Ruth has already been identified, no less than seven times, in the book of Ruth, as a Moabite. Which would not matter so much, were it not for the fact that the book of Deuteronomy says that under no circumstances are Israelites to associate with Moabites.  So, when today’s passage makes a Moabite the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king, it places one book of the Bible, Ruth, beyond the boundaries which another book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, established to keep Israelites separate from Moabites.

Which is one example of the Bible’s conversation with itself concerning the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God.  In addition to the books of Deuteronomy and Ruth talking to one another about whether or not Israelites should welcome Moabites, there’s a similar conversation going on in the Bible concerning whether or not the people of God should welcome eunuchs; Deuteronomy 23:1 saying that eunuchs are not welcome in the family of God, while Isaiah 56:5 says, “Oh, yes, eunuchs are welcome in the family of God.” Then, there is Ezra 9:1, which commands the people of God to exclude foreigners from their lives, while Isaiah 56:7 singles out those same foreigners for a special welcome to the house of God; the book of Ezra circling the wagons to keep some people out, the book of Isaiah opening the door to let all people in, another layer of the Bible’s conversation with itself concerning the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God; a conversation which continues in the New Testament, where Matthew 15:24 limits the orbit of Jesus’ embrace to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, while Acts 15:17 says that to make that kind of distinction between Jews and Gentiles is to oppose the work of the Spirit of God.

It’s a Bible-wide conversation; these pages talking to those pages, these verses versus those verses. Over here, Moabites and eunuchs are out; over there, they are in. Over here, God’s embrace is only as wide as the Jews; over there, the circle of God’s welcome takes in Gentiles, too. The Bible, in conversation with itself, a conversation between fear of the other and love for the other; here, fear casting out love; there, love casting out fear, the Bible’s long, difficult, beautiful, spiritual journey, from did mind to don’t mind.

In Deuteronomy, the Bible did mind if Israelites welcomed Moabites, but, by the book of Ruth, the Bible had replaced its original did mind with its eventual don’t mind.  Same with eunuchs, Gentiles, Samaritans, and every other human difference you can name; the Bible, taking down the same barriers it once erected, until, at last, we get over near the end, where, in Revelation 5:13, the Bible’s welcome finally catches up to the welcome of God, which, according to Revelation 5:13, is a welcome as wide as the whole creation; “Every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea,” eventually, ultimately, finally at home with God; the Bible’s long spiritual journey, at last, complete; from, once upon a time, saying “No” to Moabites, eunuchs, Gentiles and Samaritans, to, eventually, saying a “Yes” as wide with love and welcome as the “Yes” of God.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, there is no greater sign of the Holy Spirit’s work in the lives of the writers of the Bible than the way the Bible keeps redrawing the map of its embrace to more nearly match the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God, because that is the direction in which the Holy Spirit always leads; never inward, always outward.

And, more importantly, what happened, then, in the lives of the writers of the Bible, happens, now, in the lives of the readers of the Bible.  The longer we walk in the Spirit, the wider we draw our circle of welcome; the arc of our spiritual journey matching the trajectory of the Bible’s spiritual journey, from fear casting out love, to love casting out fear, until the size of the circumference of the circle of our welcome measures the same as the size of the circumference of the circle of the welcome of God.

                                              Amen.

 

Until We Lose Our Voices

Job 42:1-6, The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 28th, 2018 · Duration 14:05



"Until We Lose Our Voices"

Job 42:1-6

The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost

Then Job answered the Lord, saying, “I have spoken about what I do not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I do not know.”

Every time the lectionary places those words in our path, they remind us that, when it comes to our efforts to explain God, there will always be a place where words run out; a place at which, with Job, we will, eventually, lose our voices; falling silent because, like Job, we realize that, “We have talked about things we do not know; things too wonderful for us to understand,” a moment when, in the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “We stop trying to say what cannot be said.”

I wrote some about all that earlier this week, but, thought more about it, in a different light, earlier this morning, on a long walk in the pre-dawn darkness, my heart as heavy as yours over yesterday’s mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; the worst known single act of violence ever committed against Jews on American soil.

Concerning the mystery of why God does not step in and stop such things, we must, at some point, with Job, lose our voices, and, like Job, fall silent.  Whether it’s the tragic assault on the Sikh temple in Oak Park, Wisconsin, the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the country music concert in Las Vegas, or the A.M.E. Church in Charleston, one sometimes wonders, “Could not God have intervened?  Could not the God who filled the sky with stars at least have caused the gun to jam?  Is it that God could, but wouldn’t?  Or that God would, but couldn’t?”  To speak of such things is, eventually, with Job, to lose our voice, and fall silent in the face of questions and mysteries we will never be able to answer or resolve.             

Silent, for a moment, but not for long.  As surely as we must, eventually, lose our voice for the mystery which is beyond us, we must, eventually, find our voice for the truth which is within us; speaking, with courage, kindness and clarity, what we know to be true.

Concerning yesterday’s massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue, we know, from all available reporting, that the person who committed the crimes was motivated by  anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism, which means hatred of Jewish persons, is a form of xenophobia, which means fear of the other, for no reason except their “otherness.”  That dreadful sin of anti-Semitism has a long, tragic history, some of which, it must be said, has, at times, been embraced by the church.

In fact, it is ironic that today is, for much of the church throughout the world, Reformation Sunday, when we remember the courage and conviction of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517. Luther; a great voice for the reformation of the church, but, also, a tragic voice for the sin of anti-Semitism; preaching a sermon, in 1543, so venomous in its condemnation of Jews that it called for the burning of synagogues as punishment for the Jews; a way of thinking in which Luther was not alone, but which was, sadly, shared by a wide stripe of the church, a Christian anti-Semitism based, partly, on those verses in the gospel of John which speak so harshly of “the Jews” (despite the fact that Jesus, himself, was a Jew) and, partly, on the aforementioned, ever present, sin of xenophobia. Even the ghettos into which Hitler forced Jews were not an invention of twentieth-century Europe, but of the sixteenth-century church.  (And, some say, even earlier.)

Having owned, with repentance, that long history of anti-Semitism, it is our responsibility to speak, with as much kindness, courage and clarity as the Spirit has placed within us, concerning our sorrow for, and solidarity with, those who are suffering so deeply today, in the Jewish community in Pittsburgh, in Jackson, across the country, and around the world.  And, to live and speak as people whose God is love, whose creed is kindness, and whose instinctive, default position in each situation and circumstance is empathy for whoever is most in need of a voice and a friend.  (Not unlike that time, over twenty years ago, when one of our Northminster kids, now an adult, but, then a high school student, spoke out against his teacher’s statement, to the class, that an author the class was reading would be forever in hell, solely because the author was “a Jew.”)

All of which is to say that those of us who are followers of Jesus need to renew our deepest commitments to live and speak as those whose God is love, whose creed is kindness, and whose default position is empathy for whoever is most in need of help and hope; speaking the truth with as much courage, kindness and clarity as the Spirit of God has given us; speaking up for the same people Jesus would speak up for, by speaking out against the same things Jesus would speak out against, until we lose our voices.

Amen.

 

An Important Question from the Book of Job

Job 38:1-7, The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 21st, 2018 · Duration 13:44



"An Important Question from the Book of Job"

Job 38:1-7,

The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Then the Lord answered Job, saying, “Who is this, who keeps speaking words without knowledge?”  Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church throughout the world, those words from the book of Job; that long awaited, much anticipated, moment when, at long last, God answers Job’s questions.

By this point in the book of Job, by my count, Job has asked one hundred and fourteen questions; from “Why won’t God let me die?” to “Why has God made me God’s target?” to “Why do the wicked prosper, while the innocent suffer?”  Question upon question, one after another, a hundred and fourteen in all; during all of which, God remains silent.

Until, at last, we get to today’s lesson from the book of Job, where, finally, God responds to Job’s questions with, much to Job’s dismay and ours, more questions; sixty of them in all, so many questions for Job, from God, that they consume three chapters of the book of Job; the book which bears Job’s name, like the life which bears Job’s pain, just one hard question after another.

One of the most important of which rarely receives much attention; a question Satan asks God all the way back at the beginning of the story, when God points out to Satan what a model citizen Job is, going so far as to say that there aren’t many souls in this world who love God as deeply, or serve God as faithfully, as Job, to which Satan replies, “Does Job love God for nothing?”

“Why wouldn’t Job love you?” asks Satan.  “You’ve given him everything anyone could ever want.  Let’s send Job some trouble, and, then, we’ll find out what your star student is really made of.  Surely,” concluded Satan, “You don’t think Job loves you for nothing, do you?”; a question which is large enough, back there on the page, but which grows larger, still, when we cross the hermeneutical bridge from Job to Jackson, and pose the same question to our life with, and love for, God.  Do we love God in exchange for some hoped for blessing or reward or protection?  Or, to borrow the language of the book of Job, do we, “Love God for nothing”?

For many of us, the answer to that question changes, and evolves, as life goes by.  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, there once was a time when I would have said, “No, I don’t love God for nothing; I love God for something.  I love and serve God in exchange for blessings, in this life, and rewards, in the next;” the idea being that, if I love God deeply enough, and serve God faithfully enough, then, in exchange for my loyalty and devotion, God will protect and bless me and mine.

But, it’s been a long time since motivations such as those incentivized my life with God.  Somewhere along the way, how or when I cannot say, I actually learned to love God without any thought of a blessing, or a reward.

I think it happens that way for many of the children of God.  At first, we see our life with God as a transaction; operating on the assumption that, if we love God deeply enough, and serve God faithfully enough, then, in exchange for our devotion, God will answer our prayers, protect our loved ones and guard our well-being; a transactional    approach to our life with, and love for, God, where everything is a transaction: If we do this for God, God will do that for us.

Then, somewhere along the way, we come to see that life does not always work that way, and that we cannot do enough good, attend enough church or give enough money to obligate God to guard our happiness or protect our family.  Rather, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “The rain falls and the sun shines on the good and the bad.”

And, once we come to see that, once we come to see that we live in a world where wonderful things happen and terrible things happen, and if any of them can happen to anyone, all of them can happen to everyone, then we begin to know the freedom and the joy which come with what the book of Job calls, “Loving God for nothing”; what I call “Loving God as unconditionally as God loves us”; loving God, and serving God, with never a thought about reward or punishment or any other external motivation or incentive; loving God, exactly the same, in good times and bad, happy and sad; content to know that, no matter what, God is with us and God is for us; sometimes taking us around the worst, and sometimes seeing us through the worst, but always with us and always for us, no matter what; the same way we are always with God and for God, no matter what.

If we can stay on the path to depth with God long enough, prayerfully enough, that is the place at which we might eventually arrive.  Stay on the path to depth long enough, prayerfully enough; walking in the Holy Spirit carefully enough, and, eventually, we might come out into that deep, wide, wonderful place where we are completely content to get up every day and love God the same way God loves us; unconditionally, no strings attached, no matter what.

                                                   Amen.

 

From Why? To How?

Psalm 22:1-15, The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 14th, 2018 · Duration 10:41



"From Why? To How?"

Psalm 22:1-15

The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from helping me?”

With those words, today’s psalm raises the kind of question which lives in the spirit of many dear and good souls, who, in the face of much sorrow or long struggle, wonder, with the one who wrote this morning’s psalm, why God doesn’t relieve more suffering, stop more tragedy, heal more disease and protect more people from more pain.

The kind of question which is a sign, not of doubt, but of faith.  After all, if we thought God was lacking in either love or power, we wouldn’t wonder why God doesn’t do more.  (Lacking love, God could do more, but wouldn’t.  Lacking power, God would do more, but couldn’t.)  But, since we believe that God has an abundance of both, love and power, some of us do, sometimes, wonder, and ask, “Why?”; a spiritual question which actually places us in the best of spiritual company, from Moses, in Numbers chapter eleven, asking, “Why is my life so unbearable?”, to Job, wondering, in the book which bears his name, “Why won’t God give me some relief?”, to the prophet Jeremiah, lamenting, “Why is my pain unceasing, and my wound incurable?”, to, of course, Jesus, himself, quoting, from Good Friday’s cross, this Sunday’s psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All of which is to say that no one should ever feel badly about asking why God does not always step in and stop the pain, cure the disease, reconcile the relationship, fix the brokenness and save the day.  In fact, in life’s worst moments, “Why?” is, sometimes, the question we can’t not ask; like Jesus, on the cross, asking, with the one who wrote this morning’s psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But, while “Why?” is a question we sometimes need to ask out loud, knowing why we are suffering is, generally speaking, not as helpful as knowing how to live the life which is ours to live, while bearing the pain which is ours to bear.  More often than not, “How?” matters more than “Why?”.

As Frederick Buechner once wisely observed, concerning poor Job and the tragic loss of his ten children and his own health, “Even if God had given Job the  answers to all his questions about why so much suffering had come his way, Job still would have been staring at the same empty chairs and clawing at the same itching sores.  What Job needed,” Buechner concluded, “Was not answers to explain his suffering, but courage to face it.”

Which is often true for many of us.  Knowing why what happened happened, and why God didn’t do more to stop it from happening, is almost always less important than knowing how best to go forward.  As Stanley Hauerwas once said, “What we need is not an answer capable of explaining our grief, but a community capable of absorbing our grief.”

Which, for most of us, is how we go through what we did not get to go around; with the help of a community capable of absorbing our grief; the people of God, surrounding us and supporting us; their prayers for us, God’s arms around us; their kindness to us, God’s presence with us.

A truth to which the poet Mary Oliver bears a beautiful witness when she says, “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I did go closer, but I did not die.  Surely God had a hand in this, as well as friends.”

Indeed, that is how most of us go through things so hard that if someone had told us ahead of time we would have to go through them, we would have sworn we could never make it.  But we do; we do go through, with the help of God and the people of God.

We may never know why we go through what we go through, but we always know how we go through what we go through; with the strength-giving Spirit of God, and the care-giving, phone-calling, note-sending, visit-making, check-writing, meal-delivering, card-mailing, prayer-lifting, burden-bearing, sorrow-sharing, grief-absorbing, people of God.

Amen.

 

Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

Mark 10:13-16, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · October 7th, 2018 · Duration 15:30



"Like a Child"

Mark 10:13-16

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

In this morning’s gospel lesson, people are bringing little children to Jesus in order that Jesus might lay hands on them and pray. The disciples speak sternly to them. Jesus rebukes his disciples. “Let the little children come to me! Do not stop them! The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these!” Jesus resolutely welcomes the children into his presence, and unwaveringly welcomes the children into God’s kingdom.

Jesus goes on to say “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Mark Hoffman, a biblical studies professor at Luther Seminary, points out that the Greek can be understood in two ways here. The NRSV translates this as a nominative case noun, “Welcome the kingdom like a child welcomes it,” but it can also be translated as an accusative case noun “Welcome the kingdom like you would welcome a child.”

In the nominative form, we hear the importance of a simple, child-like faith. Simple and child-like does not mean saccharine or sentimental faith like we sometimes associate with this passage. I say simple, because often children are able to boil theology down to its essence, even when adults might get bogged down in the details. And I say child-like, because children can accept the mystery of faith in ways that adults often have trouble accepting.  Children have much to teach us about faith. When I went through the training for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, the curriculum for our Sunday evening atrium, I learned to respond to many questions with “I’m not sure. What do you think?” Hearing the answers to that question from our children over the years has been clarifying and life giving on so many occasions. When we dedicate our children, we often hear Chuck say something like “who can say what all this child will learn from us, and who can say what all we will learn from this child.” That is not just a promise for the future when the child becomes an adult, but a promise for here and now. We splash in the deep, wide ocean of faith when we welcome the kingdom, like a child welcomes it.

One Sunday morning, I was in one of our children's Sunday school classes.  One of the children was playing with Nativity nesting dolls and I sat down beside her to play. She took apart the Joseph doll, looked at me and said “This is Jesus’ dad.” Then she took apart the Mary doll, looked at me and said “this is Jesus’ mom” and then she arrived at the tiniest doll, which was the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes and said “this is baby God.”  It was the clearest presentation of Jesus’ dual nature that I’ve ever heard. She was 4.

We must welcome the kingdom like a child welcomes it.

If we look at verse 15 in the accusative form, we hear the importance of welcoming children.  If we were reading Mark in one sitting, when we read about the people bringing the children to Jesus in verse 13, we would likely be drawn back to Mark 9, where Jesus takes a child in his arms and calls his disciples to welcome the child in his name, because as Jesus says welcoming a child, is welcoming Jesus, and welcoming Jesus is welcoming the One who sent Jesus. Northminster welcomes children in many wonderful and beautiful ways –we visit new babies in the hospital and honor them with a rose on the table, we take meals to families, we promise ourselves to families as helpers on children’s faith journeys; we offer loving childcare as often as the doors are open and provide excellent opportunities for spiritual formation, we help provide after school and summer care for children at the Yellow Church, we provide opportunities for the children at Spann School, we welcome our first graders into worship, help them learn to participate in worship and honor many major milestones as they grow.

We teach our children that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed; it starts small and is always growing. Our welcome too, should always be growing. We plant ourselves firmly in a grounded faith, when we welcome the kingdom like we welcome a child.

A few weeks ago in Girls of grace, the girls worked on the concept of the Kingdom of God.  I normally teach Girls of Grace but I was out of town on this particular Sunday evening, and gave them the assignment of creating a book that described God’s kingdom. On Monday morning, I went downstairs to the Children’s area to look at their work and was overwhelmed by the beauty of thought I found represented there." The kingdom of God belongs to everyone. The kingdom of God is beautiful. The kingdom of God has many different people.  The kingdom of God is like a castle where everyone on earth can live." Those are the thoughts of our fourth through sixth graders.

We must welcome the kingdom like we would welcome a child.

I’ve found many a children’s books to be helpful in thinking through big theological constructs. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written some lovely  children’s books. Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his lifelong struggle to bring equality, justice and peace to his native country of South Africa.  In 2008, he wrote a children’s book called God’s Dream.

“Dear Child of God, what do you dream about in your loveliest of dreams? Do you dream about flying high or rainbows reaching across the sky? Do you dream about being free to do what your heart desires? Or about being treated like a full person no matter how young you might be? Do you know what God dreams about? If you close your eyes and look with your heart, I am sure, dear child, that you will find out.  God dreams about people sharing. God dreams about people caring. God dreams that we reach out and hold one another’s hands and play one another’s games and laugh with one another’s hearts. But God does not force us to be friends or to love one another. Dear Child of God, it does happen that we get angry and hurt one another. Soon we start to feel sad and so very alone. Sometimes we cry, and God cries with us. But when we say we’re sorry and forgive one another, we wipe away our tears and God’s tears too. Each of us carries a piece of God’s heart within us. And when we love one another, the pieces of God’s heart are made whole. God dreams that every one of us will see that we are all brothers and sisters – yes, even you and me – even if we have different mommies and daddies or live in different faraway lands. Even if we speak different languages or have different ways of talking to God. Even if we have different eyes or different skin. Even if you are taller and I am smaller. Even if your nose is little and mine is large. Dear Child of God, do you know how to make God’s dream come true? It is really quite easy.  As easy as sharing, loving, caring. As easy as holding, playing, laughing. As easy as knowing we are family because we are all God’s children. Will you help God’s dream come true?”

Tutu knew that we welcome the kingdom like a child welcomes it. We welcome the kingdom like we would welcome a child.

I don’t know about you, but this week growing God’s kingdom hasn’t seemed easy to me. There has been trauma, and name calling, pain and hurt, and a whole lot of un-careful speech. We have a wide umbrella in this congregation, and there are people who sit in this room on every side of every line that has been drawn this week, and in all the weeks before it. That is a large part of what makes us Northminster. All are welcome. Dr. Whaley, our first interim pastor suggested this creed in Northminster’s early days, “We agree to differ, we resolve to love, we unite to serve.” Northminster is the church where people from every part of every spectrum can love one another.

Sometimes that’s really hard, and it’s almost never simple. It’s definitely too much to solve in a sermon. But that’s what we have, a sermon, and then a table set before us. This table, where we commune with God, and with one another. This table of repentance, and forgiveness. This table that represents the kingdom of God.

Jesus took the little children in his arms and blessed them.  There is no one on any side of any line that is beyond God’s reach. While we all have work to do, deep and meaningful and difficult work, soul work, there is no one who is not welcome at God’s table. We come, not because we are whole, but because we are broken.We come because we are hungry for God’s love and grace. We come with questions and wonder.

We come because there is enough. The table of the Lord is a table of abundance, so as we gather at the table this morning, may we find a way to live out of that abundance. There is enough peace to share across the lines that divide us. There is enough forgiveness to find our way forward. There is enough compassion to reach across the aisle or around the world.

It’s going to take time to make God’s dream come true. It’s going to take all of us examining our deepest selves to make God’s dream come true.  Coming to the table represents our willingness to do the work, our willingness to let God’s kingdom come.

May we welcome the kingdom like a child welcomes it. May we welcome the kingdom like we would welcome a child.  Every child.

Amen.

 

What Might Be True About Hell?

Mark 9:38-50, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 30th, 2018 · Duration 13:21



"What Might Be True About Hell?"

Mark 9:38-50

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

As you may have noticed, this morning’s gospel lesson, from Mark, chapter nine, is home to more appearances of the word “hell” than any other passage in the entire Bible.

The word “hell” appears only thirteen times in the Bible, three of which are clustered, together, here, in today’s gospel reading.

Which, I suppose, explains why, every time the lectionary places, in our path, that passage, it never fails to make me wonder what might be true about hell.

I know, of course, what popular Christianity says is true about hell; that those who do not respond with faith, to Jesus, will, for their refusal to believe in him, spend eternity in the perpetual punishment of hell.

(Remember, I am the one who, in the summer of my eighteenth year, got myself re-baptized, after being convinced, by an evangelist at Camp Zion, in Myrtle, Mississippi, that my previous salvation experience may not have been sufficient to spare me from hell.  And, I am also the one, who, that same summer, left a revival meeting at Log Cabin Baptist Church, late one night, went straight to my grandfather’s house, and promised to give him the entire two hundred and eleven dollars I had saved from my summer construction job, if only he would ask Jesus into his heart, because, otherwise, according to the revival preacher, he would burn in hell forever.)

But, while many millions of truly wonderful people have built their belief system around that way of thinking about hell, and look to it as the most important incentive for people to convert to Christianity, and, thus, see it as central to the success of institutional Christianity, in general, and Christian missions, in particular, other equally serious Christians have, across the Christian centuries, found that way of thinking about hell difficult to reconcile with what they see in scripture, and, more importantly, with what they believe about God.

For example, while John 3:16-18 and John 14:6 are often turned to, to support the idea that those who do not believe what Christians believe about Jesus will be eternally separated from God in hell, in other passages, such as today’s gospel lesson, plus Matthew 5:22, Matthew 25:46, Luke 16:24 and Revelation 21:8, people go to hell, based, not on what they believe, but on how they live.  So, in the Bible, who goes to hell, and why, is not nearly as simple as it often sounds in popular Christianity.

And, then, of course, there is the question of how to reconcile a perpetual punishment, in which people are endlessly in agony, with the Bible’s vision, in Revelation 5:13, of every creature, and person, in all creation, singing praise to God, forever and ever, which is not unlike Isaiah’s vision of a great far-off someday when all people will sit down at the banquet table of God, a vision Paul embraces when he says, in Ephesians 1:10, that God’s plan, for the fullness of time, is to gather up all things, in Christ.

All of which is to say that if anyone is in hell forever, then that would mean that the ultimate will of God will never be done, which is what prompted John Calvin, once to say, that Christians are obligated to pray for the ultimate salvation of all.

Which would be a way of thinking about hell which would actually be true to the most, and best, that we know about God; a hell where judgement is in the service of redemption.  Hell, not a place of torment for people to go to, but a path of purging for people to go through, so that every injustice gets confronted, every victim gets faced,every evil gets judged, and every person gets eventually, ultimately, redeemed, no matter how many millions of years it takes, because, on the other side of the grave, God has all the time in the world, to heal every soul God ever loved, which is every soul who ever lived; finally, eternally, redeemed, healed and home; a way of thinking about judgement which is more true to the best and most we know of God, than a hell with no point but perpetual punishment.

No one, of course, can speak of such mysteries with sure and settled certainty, but it does seem right to require what we believe about hell to match what we believe about God, instead of bending what we believe about God to match what we believe about hell.                                                                       Amen.

Way Leads On to Way

Psalm 1, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 23rd, 2018 · Duration 14:09



"Way Leads On to Way"

Psalm 1

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Another Hard Saying of Jesus

Mark 8:27-38, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 16th, 2018 · Duration 13:42

“Another Hard Saying of Jesus”

Mark 8:27-38

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

 

The Way the Spirit Leads

Mark 7:24-37, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 9th, 2018 · Duration 12:47



"The Way the Spirit Leads"

Mark 7:24-37

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak

James 1:17-27, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 2nd, 2018 · Duration 4:30



"Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak"

James 1:17-27

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Another Day

Ephesians 6:10-20, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 26th, 2018 · Duration 11:46



"Another Day"

Ephesians 6:10-20

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Put on the whole armor of God.”  Every three years, the Common Lectionary asks the church, throughout the world, to read those words from today’s epistle lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, it is important for us to remember that putting on the whole armor of God is not something we do all at once, or once and for all, but, rather, over and over, day after day; getting up every morning and preparing ourselves to face another day, which is what it means to put on the whole armor of God.

To put on the whole armor of God is to get ready, to prepare ourselves to face whatever is coming next, to center ourselves spiritually, so that we might actually go through an entire day in a thoughtful, mindful, prayerful way; ready to live deeply, fully and faithfully into each new moment and conversation; paying attention to, and seeing the image of God in, every person who crosses our path that day.

Which is why putting on the whole armor of God is something we have to do all over again, with each new day.  Some people do that by reading from scripture each morning, some by going on a long, slow prayer walk, others by sitting silently for a few moments in centering prayer.  Some turn to a favorite daily devotional guide, such as Henri Nowen’s Bread for the Journey, or Richard Rohr’s amazing book, Yes, And . . . Others find writing in a daily prayer journal to be a helpful centering discipline.

Some do all of the above.  And, some do none of the above, because they can’t, because the minute their feet hit the floor, their household is an incessant blur of family responsibility which leaves little space for any stillness of any kind.

In her book, Eat, Pray, Love, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells about renting a small cabin on the isolated island of Gili Meno, and embarking there on a silent retreat; a spiritual retreat Gilbert launched with the vow that she was closing her mouth, and would not open it until something inside her had changed; the kind of retreat many of us might love to take, but a luxury few of us can afford.  Rather, most of us have to “build the airplane while we are flying it”; putting on the whole armor of God, each day, a little here and a little there, when and where and how we can.

But, for even the most hurried and breathless of us, some kind of daily centering of the soul is so important, because that is how we get ready to face whatever we might face, that day, in a mindful, thoughtful, prayerful way.

All of which is to say that what this morning’s epistle passage calls “putting  on the whole armor of God” is a spiritual discipline as daily as waking up and getting up, to start, all over again, another day; a dailyness which the poet Mary Oliver captures with her simple sentence, “Another morning, and I wake, with thirst, for the goodness I do not yet have.” 

Which is a truly beautiful, deeply spiritual way to live; waking each morning with thirst for the goodness we do not yet have; our daily longing to take another step along the path to depth; each new day, tied to, and yet free from, every day which came before, like the days of creation in the book of Genesis, each day building on, but going beyond, the day before, each day another day bent with the weight of every day already done, but free from the weight of every day yet to come; each new day, another day to practice living in a mindful, thoughtful, prayerful way; putting on the whole armor of God; getting ready to live deeply, fully and faithfully into, and through, whatever is coming next.

                                                 Amen.

 

On Being Careful How We Live

Ephesians 5:15-20, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 19th, 2018 · Duration 15:12



"On Being Careful How We Live"

Ephesians 5:15-20

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning David and Absalom

II Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 12th, 2018 · Duration 12:53



"Concerning David and Absalom"

II Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

The Truth, Dressed in Nothing But Love

Ephesians 4:1-16, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 5th, 2018 · Duration 5:08



"The Truth, Dressed in Nothing But Love"

Ephesians 4:1-16

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

(audio begins about :30)

Concerning Integrity and Courage

II Samuel 11:1-15, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 29th, 2018 · Duration 16:53



"Concerning Integrity and Courage"

II Samuel 11:1-15

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

To Build A Home for God

II Samuel 7:1-14, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 22nd, 2018 · Duration 18:31



"To Build A Home for God"

II Samuel 7:1-14

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning the Plumb Line

Amos 7:7-15, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 15th, 2018 · Duration 16:08



"Concerning the Plumb Line"

Amos 7:7-15

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

At the Intersection of Light and Pain

II Corinthians 12:2-10, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 8th, 2018 · Duration 14:57



"At the Intersection of Light and Pain"

II Corinthians 12:2-10

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

“Whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”  Those words from today’s epistle lesson never fail to call to mind Ernest Hemingway’s unforgettable sentence, “The world breaks everyone, and, afterward, many are strong at the broken places”; which certainly seems to have been the case for Paul, who said, in this morning’s epistle passage, that he was stronger with his painful thorn in the flesh than ever he would have been without it.

Which is so often true, not for all who suffer and struggle, but, certainly, for many. Think, for example of Frederick Buechner, his life forever changed by the sadness of his father’s suicide, but, a sadness from which Buechner has given so many so much light by which to live. Or, think of Anne Lamott, who, through her own battles with brokenness, has given so many weary souls so many words of grace.  And Parker Palmer, whose most healing words have risen from his most crippling despair. And Henri Nowen, who, from the depth of his own self-doubt, has given the rest of us light for the journey. And, of course, Mother Teresa, whose unparalleled empathy rose from a depression so deep that she once said, If I make it into heaven, and they let me say only one sentence to Jesus, I know what it will be: “All my life, I loved you in the darkness.”

Fred Buechner, Anne Lamott, Parker Palmer, Henri Nowen, Mother Teresa; all, like Paul, strong at the broken places, their greatest light shining from their deepest pain.  Which is also true for many of us, too; our strongest kindness shaped by our hardest struggles; our most gentle empathy, rising from our most difficult grief; our deepest pain, the source of our deepest insights.

And, on the other hand, sometimes, it is the other way around.  While it is often true that our deepest pain is the source of our deepest insight, it is also sometimes true that our deepest insights can lead to our deepest pain.

When I was a seminary student, for example, in my mid-twenties, discovering the truth that the Bible, inspired and inspiring, beautiful and wonderful as it is, was never intended to be God’s inerrant, infallible, literal, last word, plunged me into an uncertainty so deep I can still only describe it as “emotional paralysis,” not because what I had discovered wasn’t true, but, to the contrary, because it was so obviously true, but so very different from what I had always thought, and been taught.

As the years went on, and a life of prayerful walking in the Holy Spirit revealed to me more and more spiritual light and insight, there would be more and more spiritual growing pains, as I discovered truths which, to many, are basic and fundamental, but which, to me, were altogether new; revelations such as the truth that, in the eyes of God, suffering through the grief of divorce does not disqualify anyone from anything in the church, or the truth that God calls people to ministry without regard for whether they happen to have been born male or female, or the truth that homosexuality is a human difference not a spiritual sin, or the truth that the God who created the universe thirteen billion years ago cannot be completely captured in any one religion, including my own; each new revelation true to the spirit of Jesus, but, each one becoming, for me, what Paul’s revelations in today’s epistle passage were for him; not only another source of light, but, also, another source of pain; to borrow Mary Oliver’s image, the pain of walking upstream while the world of my origins kept walking downstream.

The poet W.H. Auden once said, “We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die,”  which is something I understand.  I understand why people would sometimes rather go to their grave with less truth than go through their life  with more truth,  because following new light on old truth and letting our long held assumptions die can, indeed, feel, if not like dying on a cross, at least like living with a thorn.

Not unlike what happened to Paul, in today’s epistle lesson; a painful new thorn in the flesh the price of admission to whatever those revelations were which Paul said Paul saw on his journey to paradise; new light bringing pain as surely as pain brings new light; none of the pain sent to us from God, but all of it is used for us by God, to help make us deeper, kinder and stronger, more clear and true followers of Jesus and children of God.

Amen.

 

 

A Sermon on the Subject of Grief

II Samuel 1:1, 17-27, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 1st, 2018 · Duration 5:44



"A Sermon on the Subject of Grief"

II Samuel 1:1, 17-27

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

 

“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; for your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Every time the lectionary places those words in our path, they call to mind Wayne Oates’ powerful old observation, “Grief is the aftermath of any deeply felt loss.”

In this morning’s lesson from Second Samuel, David has lost both Saul, with whom he had a profoundly complex relationship, and Jonathan, who was, apparently, David’s nearest and dearest friend; the news of their death plunging David into that grief which Wayne Oates calls, “The aftermath of any deeply felt loss”; the kind of grief which all of us have known, or will know, at some point in our lives; most of us more than once.

And, not always because of death.  Sometimes it is death which plunges us into grief, as was the case in today’s lesson when David heard that Saul and Jonathan had died.  But, sometimes, it is something other than death which sends us into grief.  The loss of a relationship, the loss of our physical mobility or mental clarity, the loss of a cherished dream or a familiar home, the loss of a pet, the loss of a job, the loss of financial security, the loss of our most basic assumptions about how life would turn out for us; not to mention the anticipatory grief we sometimes feel concerning the way things are likely to be in the future; what I call grieving forward.  All of which is to say that the list is long of reasons why all of us, at some time in our lives, will feel the waves of grief washing over us; sometimes, when we least expect it.

Which, of course, is one reason why we need one another, why we so deeply need the family of faith.  As the poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I did go closer.  But, I did not die.  Surely God had a hand in this, as well as friends.”

Indeed, isn’t it so?  That we are able to bear our worst grief without being crushed beneath it, or finished by it, is a miracle that God surely has a hand in, as well as friends, including our family of faith friends, who keep walking beside us, over and over again, through the depth of grief, and to the table of communion.

                                                         Amen.

A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

I Samuel 17:32-49, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · June 24th, 2018 · Duration 14:07



A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

I Samuel 17:32-49

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

We Do Not Know How

Mark 4:26-34, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 17th, 2018 · Duration 12:20



"We Do Not Know How"

Mark 4:26-34

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

We Do Not Lose Heart

II Corinthians 4:13-5:1, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 10th, 2018 · Duration 13:39



"We Do Not Lose Heart"

II Corinthians 4:13-5:1

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

How Jesus Read Scripture

Mark 2:23-3:6, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 3rd, 2018 · Duration 4:15



"How Jesus Read Scripture"

Mark 2:23-3:6

The Second Sunday after Pentecost

As you may have noticed, the same sort of thing which happened in this morning’s gospel lesson happens all around us all the time; good people, all of whom truly love God, reading the exact same scripture and coming to completely different conclusions.

Jesus’ critics in today’s gospel lesson from Mark were Pharisees; good people, who were deeply committed to living truthful and righteous lives.  But, when they read scripture, they saw what scripture prohibits on the Sabbath, while Jesus, reading the same scripture, saw what scripture allows on the Sabbath.

Which, needless to say, comes to us as no surprise.  Because we have read the four gospels, we have seen Jesus, over and over again, get in trouble for interpreting scripture in the most generous and expansive of ways; always reading scripture through the lens of, and in the light of, love.

To read the four gospels is to see that, while Jesus loved scripture, he loved people more.  And, he didn’t apologize for it.  To the contrary, when Jesus encountered, in today’s gospel lesson, some very good people who seemed to love scripture more than people, “He looked at them with anger, and was grieved at their hardness of heart;” which may be the only time in the whole Bible when we see Jesus that mad and that sad in the same sentence.  An indication, perhaps, of how important it is for all of us, always, to read, and interpret, scripture as Jesus did; through the lens of, and in the light of, love.

                                                    Amen.

A Sermon on the Doctrine of the Trinity

John 3:1-17, Trinity Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 27th, 2018 · Duration 13:03



"A Sermon on the Doctrine of the Trinity"

John 3:1-17

Trinity Sunday

“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

That verse from today’s gospel lesson may not make any mention of the trinity, but it is, nonetheless, a good word for us to hear on Trinity Sunday; reminding us, now, as it did Nicodemus, then, that the mystery of God is as inexplicable and unmanageable as the wind, and can never be captured in any creed or defined by any doctrine, not even one as big and beloved as the trinity.

Most of the best scholarship we have indicates that the word “trinity” was  given to the church by the second-century church father Tertullian, and reached its full development as a Christian doctrine at two fourth-century church councils; the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., and the Council of Constantinople, in 381.

The issue which prompted Constantine to convene the council of Nicea was actually not trinitarianism, but binitarianism; the question of whether or not Jesus is   co-equal to, and co-eternal with, God.  Some of the bishops who gathered at the council of Nicea said, “Yes, Jesus is the same as God,”  while others said, “No, Jesus is the Son of God, but not the same as God.”  Appeals to the Bible were not particularly helpful, because, in the New Testament, there are around eighty verses which seem to say that Jesus is the same as God, and about one hundred and twenty which seem to say that Jesus is the Son of God, but not the same as God.  So, everyone on both sides of the debate had plenty of Bible to back them up; these verses versus those verses.  In the end, they took a vote, and the side which said that Jesus is the same as God prevailed, declaring those who believed otherwise to be heretics.

Nearly sixty years later, in 381, another church council was convened, this time at Constantinople, where the Holy Spirit was also officially declared to be co-equal to, and co-eternal with, God, which is what the council of Nicea had declared about Jesus in 325.  And, with that, the doctrine of the trinity, as we now know it, was more or less settled; a doctrine which, needless to say, became very important for countless millions of Christians across the centuries, giving us some of our most beautiful symbols, inspired art and wonderful hymns.

But, beautiful and wonderful though the idea of the trinity is, long before Tertullian spoke it, and the bishops adopted it at Nicea and Constantinople, we already had our best picture of the relationship between God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in those familiar old words we read last Lord’s Day from the gospel of John, where Jesus said, “I came from the Father, and, now, I am returning to the Father.  And, when I go, I will send the Spirit to you, and the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you;” the most important, and practical, truth about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit: Jesus came as the human embodiment of God, the best look we’ve ever had at who God is and what God wants.  Then, when Jesus’ time with us was over, the Holy Spirit picked up where Jesus left off, telling us more of what Jesus told us some of; Jesus, the temporary revelation of God to us, and the Holy Spirit, the permanent presence of God with us.

That’s the practical side of the trinity; the trinity in work clothes, a way of thinking about the trinity which actually makes a difference in the world.  For example, the other day, I was working on this sermon about the trinity when it came time for me to stop, so I could keep an appointment I had to go visit a person in prison; the Holy Spirit, reminding me that Jesus, who was the embodiment of God in the world, once said that if we forget the prisoner it is as though we have forgotten Jesus; the Holy Spirit, one third of the trinity, calling to mind something which Jesus, another third of the trinity, revealed about God, the other third of the trinity.

It happens that way all the time to all of us.  We may not think of it in specifically Trinitarian terms, but, day after day, all through the day, the Holy Spirit reminds us of what Jesus, the ultimate revelation of God, would do if Jesus was here, and, before we know it, we are out there in the world; in lunch rooms and locker rooms, classrooms and courtrooms, conference rooms and waiting rooms, sitting down with and standing up for the same people Jesus would be sitting down with and standing up for if Jesus himself was in Jackson; carrying casseroles and carrying signs, taking meals and taking stands, mailing cards and mailing checks.

And, when we obey those nudges and whispers of the Spirit and live our lives as Jesus would live his life if Jesus himself was in Jackson, then, in a way, Jesus himself is in Jackson.  And not just Jesus, but God and the Holy Spirit, too; the whole entire trinity, all four of them, counting you.

                                                                              Amen.

 

Concerning the Work Jesus Left for the Spirit

John 15:26-27, 16:4-15, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 20th, 2018 · Duration 12:39



"Concerning the Work Jesus Left for the Spirit"

John 15:26-27, 16:4-15

Pentecost Sunday

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth, because the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

With those words from today’s gospel lesson, Jesus assigned the Holy Spirit the task of saying more of what Jesus said some of; leaving the Holy Spirit to take up where Jesus left off, and take us farther along the same path Jesus started us on.

That’s how we discern whether what we feel led to do or say is the Holy Spirit, or just the echo chamber of our own fears or desires, politics or opinions.  We measure what we think the Holy Spirit is leading us to say or do by how nearly it aligns with what we know of Jesus, because, according to today’s lesson from John, the Spirit will only take us farther along the same path Jesus started us on; the Spirit, saying more of, what Jesus said some of.

Which requires us, of course, to have some knowledge of what Jesus said, and how Jesus lived, when Jesus was here; which most of us learn best by reading the four gospels.  To read the four gospels, over and over, across a lifetime, is to develop a clear sense of what mattered most to Jesus, which is how we then recognize the leadership of the Holy Spirit, because the Spirit will only say more of what Jesus said some of.

I think of it as “anchor and sail.”  We get ourselves anchored in the words and works of Jesus by reading the four gospels, all the way through, over and over, across a lifetime.  And, then, anchored in the gospels, we are ready for the wind of the Spirit to send us sailing, farther along the same path Jesus started us on; the Holy Bible, our   anchor, the Holy Spirit, our sail; the Spirit saying more of what Jesus said some of.

Thinking about all that this week took me back to some of the conversations we had with our friends at the Mississippi Baptist Convention back in 2015 and 2016.  In my occasional meetings with our friends at the convention office, more than once I said that, while Northminster has as many flaws as any other church, one thing I know for  certain is that, to the extent that we long to welcome all persons without regard for human difference, we are being true to the Holy Spirit.

The reason I know that that is so is because the Holy Spirit only says more of what Jesus said some of.  And, when you read the four gospels, you see a Jesus who, in Matthew 7:12, said that all the law and the prophets can be summarized in a single saying, “Treat others as you want others to treat you,” and who said, in Matthew 22:34-40, that nothing else in all of scripture matters more than loving God with all that is in us, and loving others as we love ourselves.

According to the four gospels, that is what Jesus said matters most when Jesus was here.  So, whenever we actually live that way, we can know, with confidence, that we are walking in the Holy Spirit, whose assignment, according to today’s gospel lesson, was to say more of what Jesus said some of; to lead us farther along the same path Jesus started us on.

That is why, once you get serious about staying open to the Holy Spirit, you will find yourself reaching out to, sitting down with and standing up for the same people Jesus would reach out to, sit down with and stand up for if Jesus was here; because the Holy Spirit’s job is to tell us more of what Jesus told us some of, and to take us even farther along the same path Jesus started us on.  So, the more open we stay to the Spirit the more likely we are to live and love as Jesus lived and love

Live that way long enough, intentionally enough, and, eventually, a day will come when you will no longer have to try to live a Spirit filled life.  Instead, you will become one of those truly Pentecostal people in whom the human spirit and the Holy Spirit are so seamlessly integrated that no one will any longer be able to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Amen.

 

               

 

Concerning the Prayer of Jesus

John 17:6-19,The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 13th, 2018 · Duration 14:01



"Concerning the Prayer of Jesus"

John 17:6-19

The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

As you may have noticed, twice in this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus prayed for his followers to be “sanctified in the truth”; the kind of phrase few of us use, but the kind of life many of us live.  Whenever we see new light on old truth, and follow that new light into a deeper life with God, we are slowly, slowly, little by little, becoming the people Jesus prayed for his friends to become in this morning’s gospel lesson, when Jesus prayed for us to be, “sanctified in the truth”; growing into a deeper life with God, as we see more clearly the truth about God.

A way of growing which is rarely easy, and, sometimes, can be very hard.  In fact, growing into a deeper life with God as we see more clearly the truth about God can be so difficult and demanding that we sometimes decide that being “sanctified in the truth” isn’t worth the trouble.  So, while we may see new light on old truth, we don’t let on; fearful that if we are truthful about all that the Holy Spirit has revealed to us, it might place an awkward  space between ourselves and our loved ones and friends.

If they ever open a Hall of Fame for that, I’ll be inducted on the first ballot.  I spent many years of my life knowing better than I let on, afraid to say out loud what I knew deep down, for fear that if I was honest about the new light I had seen on old truth it would make me seem disloyal to the church and home of my origins.  I did not know how to reach back with one hand and bless the best of what was behind me while simultaneously reaching forward with the other hand to embrace new light on old truth.  So, I “hid my light under a bushel.” I was growing deeper and deeper into the truth about what truly does, and does not, matter to God, but I wouldn’t say so out loud, because being sanctified in the truth left me petrified by the truth.  Which is why, to this day, I feel so much sympathy for, and solidarity with, those who do the same.  I know how hard it can be to speak truth which reaches beyond the boundaries of what you have always thought and been taught.

Thinking about all of that this week called to my mind one of my last visits with my mother, as she lay dying last summer.  As I sat, one day, by my mother’s bed, I thought about how, across the years, she and I had come to hold different views of the truth about God and scripture, theology and people.  But, we each had enough of the  Spirit in us that neither of us had any interest in changing the other’s mind.  There was a space between us, but we just filled that space with grace, and loved each other exactly the way we were; she, me, and I, her.

But, while we were fortunate in that way, not everyone is.  In fact, sometimes the risk of being honest about the new light you’ve seen on old truth just isn’t worth it.  So, you dam up the truth you have come to see, sort of like damming up a moving stream.  Someday, the dam may crack a little and let the truth leak a little.  Or, maybe, someday, the dam breaks open and the truth comes pouring out.  Or, maybe, someday, we die, and go to our grave, never once having spoken truthfully about the new light we have seen on old truth.

All of which is to say that, when Jesus prayed, in today’s gospel lesson, for his friends to be “sanctified in the truth,” he wasn’t praying for our life to be a stroll down Easy Street.  He was, however, praying for our life to be one of growing deeper and deeper into the truth; a life made more and more strong and gentle, upright and honest, forgiving and kind, slowly, slowly, little by little, across a lifetime of being “sanctified in the truth”; a prayer Jesus prayed for all of his friends, and one which, one imagines, will surely, someday, be answered; if only part of the way in this life, then, the rest of the way, in the next.
                                                                                                     Amen.

 

 

 

What Peter Said About What Peter Saw

Acts 10:44-48, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 6th, 2018 · Duration 2:30



"What Peter Said About What Peter Saw"

Acts 10:44-48

The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

“Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these Gentiles, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”  

One imagines that those words, which Peter said at the end of Acts chapter ten, would never have crossed his mind at the beginning of Acts chapter ten, when Peter would not even enter the house of a Gentile, until he was persuaded to go by a vision from God.

But, once Peter went, and saw the Holy Spirit in his new Gentile friends, Peter had to change what he said to match what he saw; a small reminder of the simple truth that theology chases friendship.

It happens all the time.  Like Peter, we meet someone whose life or faith is different from ours in a way which we had always assumed meant that they were on the outside of the family of God.  But, like Peter, once we get to know them, we discover that they have just as much of the Holy Spirit in their life as we have in ours.

And, then, like Peter, we get to change what we say to match what we see.

                                                        Amen.

When Love Casts Out Fear

Acts 8:26-40, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 29th, 2018 · Duration 6:41



"When Love Casts Out Fear"

Acts 8:26-40

The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide, Mentor Sunday

As they were going along the road, they came to some water.  And the eunuch said to Philip, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, throughout the world, those words from Acts chapter eight.  And, every time they roll back around, whichever way Philip goes, whether he says “Yes” to the eunuch’s request for baptism, or “No,” Philip will have Bible for, and, Bible against, his decision.  If Philip says “No” to the eunuch, he can turn, for support, to Deuteronomy 23:1, “No one who has had the surgery which makes a person into a eunuch shall be allowed into the house of God.”  On the other hand, if he says “Yes” to the eunuch, he can turn, for support, to Isaiah 56:3, Thus says the Lord, “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbath I will give, in my house, an everlasting name which will never be cut off.”  Either way, there will be Bible to back him up, and Bible to trip him up; another one of those these verses versus those verses kind of moments; the Bible, in a tie, with itself.

So, which will it be, “Yes” or “No”?  The eunuch is waiting.  “Here is water!” he says to Philip,  “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” 

And, in that moment, when Philip had to decide either to get wet with the love which includes, or stay dry with the fear which excludes, Philip, the Bible says, went down into the water; a first baptism for the eunuch, but, for Philip, a second; a further, deeper plunge into what today’s epistle lesson from First John describes as love casting out fear.

And, then, the next verse, the first verse after the baptism, says that, when they came up out of the water, the Spirit carried Philip away, “and he found himself at Azotus.”

The writer of Acts says that Philip found himself at Azotus, but, one imagines that Philip might say that where he really found himself was in that pond, by that road, at that moment, with that eunuch, when love for the other cast out fear of the other.

Or, as Barbara Brown Taylor once said, “Salvation is not something which happens only at the end of life.  Salvation happens every time someone who is holding a key uses it to open a door they could have closed.

                                                    Amen. 

As You Go

Psalm 23, The Fourth Sunday in Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 22nd, 2018 · Duration 12:24



"As You Go"

Psalm 23

The Fourth Sunday in Eastertide, Senior Recognition Sunday

As Thomas, Lindley, Michaela, Ben, Zoë, Sydney, Katie, Nevin and Madeleine prepare to close one chapter and open another, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of them for all the ways they have lifted and blessed this family of faith across the years.

Those of you who are graduating this year have often heard it said that the church has formed and shaped your lives, which is true.  But, as surely as the church has formed you, you have formed the church.  And, once you open the next new chapter of your lives, Northminster will miss you.

We will miss you.  But, in quiet, strong ways, we will also be with you.  As you go, from this place to all your other places, there are some things which you have learned in, and from, your church, which will follow you, and be with you, in life’s next new chapter.

For example, across your many years at Northminster, you have learned that, when Jesus was asked what matters most, Jesus said, “What matters most is that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love all other people as we love ourselves.”  That will follow you, and stay with you; the north star on your moral compass, the measure for how you live your life, the central standard which Jesus said matters most; loving God with all that is in you, which will help you to be a person of integrity, and loving others as you love yourself, which will help you to be a person of compassion.

Across your years at Northminster, you have also learned that how we use words matters, and that, too, will follow and stay with you.  Careful speech is first of all truthful speech; no spinning or lying, no exaggeration or flattery, no speech designed to put down or embarrass anyone.  In an increasingly reckless world of boundariless texts and posts, emails and tweets, you have been equipped, by your church, to set, for others, an example of careful speech.  You learned that, in here, and you know how to live that, out there.

Across the years, here at Northminster, you have also learned the importance of both kindness and courage; the kindness and courage it takes to sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for; kindness and courage which will follow you as you go.

Finally, you have learned, across a lifetime here at Northminster, that, no matter where, no matter what, God is with you.  As the sentence at the center of today’s psalm says, “Even though we walk through the darkest valley, we will fear no evil, for God is with us.”  As you go, hold that truth deep in your heart.  It will not protect you from every sorrow, but it will support you in every sorrow; the deep and abiding     assurance that God is with you and for you, giving you the strength you need to go through what you did not get to go around.

Today’s psalm ends, of course, with that familiar promise, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.”  Which is true. And, we will too.  God’s goodness and mercy will follow you as you go, and, so will we, your Northminster family of faith; following you all the days of your life; showing up in the muscle memory of your soul, which, in some critical moment of decision, might give you the courage and clarity you need to do the right thing . . . . Or, in some painful moment of failure, the grace you need, to let go of the guilt and start over . . . .  Or, in some heartbreaking moment of sadness and loss, the strength you will need to go through what you did not get to go around.

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,” said the one who wrote this morning’s psalm, “And I will live in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

Yes, and, also, the house of the Lord will live in you, too; your Northminster family of faith, with you and for you, deep down inside you, as you go.                                                                                                                                  Amen.

Concerning Christianity and Judaism

Acts 3:12-19, The Third Sunday in Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 15th, 2018 · Duration 14:14



"Concerning Christianity and Judaism"

Acts 3:12-19

The Third Sunday in Eastertide

“Though Pilate had decided to release Jesus, you Israelites rejected him, and killed the author of life.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from Acts chapter three.  And, every time they roll back around, it is important for us to remember that Peter, on whose lips the book of Acts places those words of accusation against the Jews, was, himself, a Jew, as was Jesus.

Which is to say that, when we read those severe sounding words from today’s lesson in the book of Acts, we are reading them as outsiders; listening in on a conversation between Jewish people, some of whom believed Jesus was the Messiah, and some of whom did not.

Which is true, not only in this case, but, throughout much of the New Testament.  Take, for example, last week’s gospel lesson, which said that the risen Lord came to see the disciples, who were hiding behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews.”  Everyone in that story was a Jew; the disciples who were hiding, those from whom they were hiding, and the risen Lord, too.

The truth is, in the early years of the church, while everyone who was in Judaism was not in the church, everyone who was in the church was in Judaism.  Which is not surprising, given the fact that Jesus, himself, was a Jew, who never converted from Judaism to anything, but who died a Jew, just as he was born a Jew.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I think about all this, from time to time; about the ties that bind Christianity to Judaism.  Baptism in water, for example, which is so important to us, is a sacred gesture we borrowed from Judaism, where Gentiles who joined the synagogue had to be fully immersed.  And, the bread and cup of our communion table, needless to say, we adopted, and adapted, from Judaism’s Passover.  The Holy Spirit we count as part of our Trinity is the same Spirit of God which hovered over the creation in Genesis, and animated that orthopedic hoedown in Ezekiel.  Even the resurrection of the dead is not a new Christian innovation in God, but a hope held first in Judaism.  And, our Lord’s Prayer, the one we pray each week, bears a strong family resemblance to a Jewish prayer which includes the words, “Hallowed be the name of the Father.  May your kingdom come on this earth.”

And, most importantly, of course, there is Jesus, himself, who, when asked by an inquirer to say what mattered most, did not offer a new “Christian” answer, but quoted two verses from the Hebrew scripture, the two great central truths of both Judaism and Christianity: “Love the Lord your God with all that is in you.  And, love others as you love yourself.”

I cannot think of those great and wonderful connections between Christianity and Judaism without recalling Amy-Jill Levine’s unforgettable image in which she said that one way to imagine the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is to picture yourself standing on a railroad track, where the rails are separate from, but parallel to, one another.  Now, imagine yourself turning around, she said, and looking as far back in the past as you can see, until the two rails merge into one at the horizon. And, then, imagine yourself turning back around and looking the other way, as far as you can see, to the horizon in the future, where the two will merge, again, as one.  Indeed.

All of which is why I so often say that Northminster is one of the most fortunate churches in the entire world, because of the fact that, before we owned our own building, we actually worshipped in the synagogue.  In fact, every now and then, I will hear some of you who were here in those days say, “I joined the church at the synagogue.”  Which, even after all these years, never fails to stop me in my tracks.

It all came about in the simplest of ways.  We were searching for a temporary home, so, a Northminster member, Leland Speed, asked a Beth Israel member, Maurice Joseph, if Beth Israel might rent us their old sanctuary.  To which Mr. Joseph replied, “No.  We will not rent our space to you.  We will, however, give it to you.”  And, with that, Northminster became the most fortunate church imaginable.  In a world full of churches, every one of which owes their origins, and traces their beginnings, to the synagogue, we actually got to meet in a synagogue.

That story, the story of our temporary home at Beth Israel, is one we will never let fall to the ground; a distinctively Northminster story our high school seniors will carry with them when they leave us in a few months, a story little Annabeth Taylor, and all of our children, will learn and know; the story of a Christian church, which, once upon a time, lived, for a time, in a Jewish home; a snapshot of the whole history of Christianity and Judaism, and a small sign of the great truth that we are all, together, the beloved children of the one true God; the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.                                                                                                                                        Amen.

 

Concerning Our Life Together

Acts 4:32-35, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 8th, 2018 · Duration 12:43



Concerning Our Life Together

Acts 4:32-35

The Second Sunday of Eastertide

“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, throughout the world, those words to be read on the second Sunday in the sacred season of Eastertide.  And, every time they roll back around, the communal way of life they describe sounds, at first, very different from our life together.  And yet, in some ways, our life together, now, does bear a strong resemblance to their life together, then.

For example, today’s passage from Acts chapter four says that the early church was “of one heart,” which is also the way we are with one another.

Which, one imagines, is not the same as being of one mind.  This morning’s lesson from the book of Acts does not say that the early believers were of one mind, and neither are we.  We cannot know how diverse they may have been in their thinking, but we do know how diverse we are in our thinking.  When it comes to what we think about the various political and public policy questions of our time, for example, our congregation has never been of one mind, which is probably why our first interim pastor, Dr. Whaley, admonished us, all the way back in 1967, to “agree to differ, resolve to love and unite to serve”; the Northminster version of what today’s scripture lesson calls “being of one heart.” 

But, while we may never have been of one mind, but we have  always been of one heart; loyal to, respectful of, grateful for and in love with people who do not all think, vote or say the same; which is part of the wonder and beauty of our life together.  In fact, for some of us, in this  increasingly partisan and polarized world, the church may be the last place left in our lives where we get to be of one heart with people without having to be of one mind with them.

In that way, the “of one heart” way, we are like the church this morning’s lesson from Acts describes.  And, also, we are like the original  early church in the way we share, with one another, our possessions.

Needless to say, unlike the early church, we have not relinquished all we own to be redistributed.  But, we do something similar, in miniature, when we pool our resources by giving our money to support the work of the church through the budget of the church.

I found myself thinking about all that Wednesday evening, as I watched dozens of basket-wielding children hunting Easter eggs throughout Northminster’s backyard.  All of us who give to the work of the church through the budget of the church helped buy the burgers, paint the faces and rent the train that made the night so magical and fun for so many little ones.  Not to mention the new playground which soon will be finished; paid for by all of us sharing our resources, with one another, in the family of faith; which is also how we fund the presence of the deputy who slows the Sunday morning traffic on Ridgewood Road, and the nursery workers who keep our babies safe and well, as well as the breakfast we prepare each week for Billy Brumfield, the sixteen chocolate chip cookies we serve every Thursday morning at the Yellow Church Bible Class, the thirty-five pizzas we purchased for the Spann school children on Friday, the one hundred and ten chicken sandwiches our youth group served at Stewpot yesterday and the tiny, shiny, silver dove Lesley placed over the head of little George Smith a few moments ago.  All of that happens because all of us, together, pool our resources to help undergird and support everything our church does, within our walls and beyond our walls; our faint, distant echo of the egalitarian economics of the early church, where, according to this morning’s lesson from Acts chapter four, no one thought of anything they owned as theirs to keep, but everyone held everything in common.

All of which calls to mind, for me, something Anne Lamott once said.  When asked why she made her son go to church even when he didn’t want to, the famous writer replied, “I make Sam go to church because I want him to grow up around people who live by a larger light than the glimmer of their own little candle.”

Which is exactly what happens in a family of faith.  It doesn’t happen perfectly anywhere, including here.  But, a lifetime spent breathing in the Spirit we breath in together in the family of faith, listening to and learning from one another, holding in our hearts people we do agree with and don’t agree with, and loving all of them, and each of them, so much we would gladly lay down our lives for any of them; and, giving our money, together, to causes which transcend our own personal opinions or self-interest; all of that does shape and color and stretch our lives, in powerful and wonderful ways, for God and the gospel.

And, it happens here, in the family of faith, Northminster Baptist Church; our life, together.

Amen. 

             

A Sermon on the Subject of the Resurrection

Mark 16:1-8, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 1st, 2018 · Duration 23:54



A Sermon on the Subject of the Resurrection

Mark 16:1-8

Easter Sunday

Concerning the Cross-Formed Life

Philippians 2:5-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · March 25th, 2018 · Duration 11:58



Concerning the Cross-Formed Life

Philippians 2:5-11

Palm/Passion Sunday

(audio begins at 30 seconds)

With the waving of the palms at the opening of this hour, our children have led us across the threshold of another Holy Week; the church’s annual journey to the cross.

Needless to say, no one can speak with certainty concerning the mystery which surrounds the cross.  Orthodox Christian doctrine says that Jesus had to die on the cross so that God’s requirement for a perfect sacrifice could be satisfied; the idea being that God could not forgive sin without compromising God’s holiness unless a perfect sacrifice was first given to God; a sacrifice Jesus became when he died on the cross, thus paying the price for our sin and freeing God to forgive people, if they respond in the right way to the perfect sacrifice.

That is Christianity’s most prevalent teaching concerning the cross.  And, it may be true.  But, while I cannot speak for you, on my ears, and in my heart, it sounds more like something people would say about God than something God would say about people.

Add to that the fact that the New Testament writers who assigned that sacrificial meaning to Jesus’ death on the cross were people whose lives had been shaped by a Judaism which taught that sacrifices were necessary to receive God’s forgiveness, and it’s hard to know what the ultimate truth might be concerning what was happening when Jesus was dying on the cross.  Was Jesus dying on the cross to satisfy a need in God for a sacrifice to be  made and a price to be paid?  Or, was Jesus dying on the cross, not to rescue us from God’s wrath, but, to join us in our pain?  Or, was Jesus dying on the cross because he sat down with and stood up for the wrong people often enough that he made the right people nervous enough that they crucified him in order to silence him?  Or, was it all of the above?  Or something else?

When it comes to the cross as the place for Jesus to die, there is much unknowable mystery.  But, not when it comes to the cross as a way for us to live.  As a place for Jesus to die, the cross may be wrapped in layer upon layer of mystery, but, as a way for us to live, the cross-formed life is actually, surprisingly, clear.

To live a cross-formed life is to live a life which is formed by, and shaped like, the cross; a life which, like the cross, is simultaneously vertical and horizontal; vertically, stretched up to God; horizontally, stretched out to others.  Loving God with all that is in us is the vertical life of worship and devotion, song and prayer, and loving others as we love ourselves is the horizontal life of kindness and compassion, forgiveness and grace, confrontation and truth, gentleness and hospitality; sitting down with,  and standing up for, the same people Jesus would sit down with, and stand up for, if Jesus lived in Jackson.

That is the cross-formed life; a life which is simultaneously vertical with love for God and horizontal with love for others.

That, my sisters and brothers, is the last conversion; the final frontier on the path to depth; a cross-formed life, a life lived up to God and out to others, which is not another religious something to add to our already over-burdened lives, but, rather, a life that flows from us as naturally as breathing, the kind of life we can’t not live, once we want it enough to embrace it, by praying for it, day after day, all through the day.

Amen.

 

Concerning Suffering

Hebrews 5:5-10, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 18th, 2018 · Duration 15:01



"Concerning Suffering"

Hebrews 5:5-10

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

“Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.”  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I never know quite what to do with those words from this morning’s epistle passage; probably because I grew up believing that Jesus was so perfect that he didn’t need to learn anything, because he already knew everything.  But, according to this morning’s epistle lesson, “Jesus learned through what he suffered.” 

Which is, perhaps, one way in which we, and Jesus, are most alike.  More often than not, we, too, do most of our growing and learning where today’s epistle lesson says that Jesus did most of his; in the school of suffering.

Like Jesus, we learn things, through suffering, we might never have known apart from the pain of our hardest, and worst, struggles. For us, as for Jesus, the path to depth most often goes through darkness.

All of which we must always say with only the greatest of care, lest we lapse over into the popular theology which teaches that, if we learn our deepest lessons from suffering, that must mean that God sends us our suffering to make us better.

I know many dear and good souls who believe that, but I do not.  I don’t believe God sends us trouble to make us better, or that God allows tragedy to come to us to accomplish some unseen purpose, or that human suffering is part of a divine plan.  Rather, I believe that we live in a world where beautiful things happen and terrible things happen, and, if any of them can happen to anyone, all of them can happen to everyone, including you and yours, and me and mine.

But, though God does not aim sorrow at us, God does use sorrow for us.  Like Jesus, in this morning’s epistle lesson, we learn things in pain that we would never know in comfort.  As surely as surgery is painful, pain is surgical; our deepest struggles and worst sorrows opening us up to God, and helping us become deeper, stronger, kinder, less arrogant, more empathetic people than ever we would have been without the pain.

But, even such hopeful words as those we must always say with more restraint than we might want to use, being careful to acknowledge the undeniable truth that, while many of us do emerge from pain and suffering with new insights and a deeper spirit, not everyone does.  As Barbara Brown Taylor once wisely observed, “I have seen pain twist people into exhausted rags with all the hope squeezed out of them, and, on the other hand, I have also seen people in whom pain seems to have burned away everything trivial and petty, until they have become see-through with light.”  (I would add the additional possibility that sometimes pain does both to the same person; leaving us squeezed out like exhausted rags, and so beautifully luminous that we become absolutely see-through with light.)

All of which calls to mind something a wise old rabbi is reported once to have said about today’s Old Testament passage from the book of Jeremiah.  When asked why the prophet Jeremiah said God will write God’s law on our hearts, instead of in our hearts, the rabbi replied, “God writes God’s words on our heart, but in order for God’s words to get down in our heart, our heart must first be broken open.”  Or, as Joanna Macy once wrote, “Only the heart which has been broken open can hold the universe.” Which is not unlike that unforgettable sentence from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “Before we can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, we must first know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” 

Which does seem, so often, to be true; that the pain which comes into our lives, while it was not sent to us from God, is used for us by God, in an amazing alchemy of the Holy Spirit and human sorrow, which helps us become more thoughtful and mindful, understanding and welcoming, compassionate, patient, gentle and kind; through suffering.

Amen.

           

When We Return John 3:16 to the Bible

John 3:14-21, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 11th, 2018 · Duration 9:18



"When We Return John 3:16 to the Bible"

John 3:14-21

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

“For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.”

That verse from this morning’s gospel lesson is, needless to say, one of the most widely known, and frequently quoted, verses in all the Bible. Having appeared in venues as various as billboards and bumper stickers, t-shirts and tattoos, John 3:16 has been turned to more often than any other verse of scripture to serve as the single      sentence which most completely captures one of Christianity’s most widely held     assumptions; that eternal salvation or condemnation hinges, entirely, on one thing; whether a person does, or does not, believe in Jesus.

But, when we take John 3:16 off the billboards, and return it to the Bible, what we discover is that John 3:16 is one verse in a Bible-wide chorus of verses and voices, some of which say the same as John 3:16, and some of which do not.

John 3:18, for example, says the same as John 3:16, that all will be saved or condemned based on what they believe about Jesus, as do First John 5:1, First John 5:12 and Romans 10:9.

But, then, you have Luke 10:25-28, and Matthew 7:21, 12:37, 13:41 and 25:46, all of which make salvation contingent, not on what we believe, but on how we live, and what we do.

Then, of course, there are other Bible verses in which salvation is not about what we believe or what we do, because, in those verses, salvation is more about what God wants, than how we respond; verses such as II Corinthians 5:19, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to God’s self,” Ephesians 1:10, “God’s plan for the fullness of time is to gather up all things in Christ,” Romans 11:32, “God has included all in sin so that God might include all in mercy,” and Colossians 1:20, which says, “Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile the world to God’s self, by making peace through the blood of the cross”;  a verse of scripture which makes what happened at the cross so effective that the cross doesn’t need our cooperation to accomplish God’s work of reconciliation; unlike John 3:16, where what happened at the cross is effective only for those who respond to it in the right way with the right belief.

All of which is what we see when we return John 3:16 to the Bible. Lifted from the Bible, and read all by itself, John 3:16 has helped generations of dear and  sincere Christians to say, with unwavering finality, and unassailable certainty, “Only those who believe what Christians believe about Jesus can have eternal life with God.”  But, returned to the Bible, and read alongside the Bible’s other 31,239 verses, John 3:16 turns out to be only one of many varied voices concerning the subject of salvation, some of which say the same as John 3:16, and some of which do not, requiring all of us, no matter what we believe, to be content to say, “I believe what I believe about  salvation because it rings true to what I believe about who God is, how God acts and what God wants. I can point to some scripture which supports what I believe. But, there is also some scripture which does not support what I believe. Which is why, at the end of the day, all I can say is that I believe what I believe about salvation, because it is what rings most true to what I believe about God.”

I call that “reading the Bible until we lose our voices.”  If we read the whole Bible long enough, we will eventually lose our loudest and most strident voice, which will then be replaced by a less certain, more gentle, one.

Amen.

Remember the Sabbath

Exodus 20:1-17, The Third Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 4th, 2018 · Duration 5:43



"Remember the Sabbath"

Exodus 20:1-17

The Third Sunday in Lent

Remember the Sabbath may be the only one of the Ten Commandments which people sometimes feel more guilty about keeping than breaking, because, to remember the Sabbath requires us, sometimes, to say “No,” not only to bad things, but, also to good things, as in, “No, I cannot serve on another board.”  “No, we cannot help with another fundraiser.”  “No, I cannot attend another committee meeting.”  “No, we cannot say “Yes” to one more really worthwhile mission or important activity.”

Which is why many of us feel more guilty about keeping the fourth commandment than we feel about breaking it, because keeping the commandment to remember the Sabbath requires us to set healthy, realistic boundaries, and setting healthy, realistic boundaries requires us, sometimes, to say “No” to good and important things, because we cannot live a Sabbath shaped life which is centered and mindful, and, also, say “Yes” to everything as though we have no limits, and need no Sabbath.

Perhaps one small step in the direction of a more Sabbath shaped life would be to decide to practice the spiritual discipline of saying silently, as a prayer, day after day, all through the day, Remember the Sabbath . . . Remember the Sabbath . . . Remember the Sabbath. 

Needless to say, there is nothing magic about that, but, that very small spiritual discipline, practiced faithfully enough, long enough, might eventually slow the pace of our movements, lessen the number of our words, lower the volume of our voices and help us, someday, to live more centered, mindful, thoughtful, “less is the new more,”  Sabbath- colored lives.

Amen.

 

 

On Letting Jesus Be Jesus

Mark 8:31-38, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 25th, 2018 · Duration 17:07



"On Letting Jesus Be Jesus"

Mark 8:31-38

The Second Sunday in Lent

“Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and rejection . . .  And Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s gospel lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, they remind us, all over again, of how hard it can be to let Jesus be Jesus.

In fact, the way of the cross which Jesus foresaw for himself, and his followers, in today’s passage, was so troubling that it caused Peter to rebuke Jesus, and Christianity to remake Jesus.

It isn’t easy to identify exactly when Christianity’s makeover of Jesus began, but it is clear that by the end of the fourth century, the vulnerable, suffering Jesus of the gospels had been remade into the powerful, successful Christ of Christianity.

Like Peter, we just could not bear to let Jesus be Jesus.  And, like Peter, we meant well.  We wanted to be big and successful, powerful and influential for Jesus, and it was clear that there were not many people out there who were going to line up to join up with a Jesus who called his followers to let go of their possessions, make themselves vulnerable, put themselves at risk and embrace in friendship whoever was most ostracized and marginalized.  That sounded as unreasonable and unworkable, to us, as it did to Peter.  So, across the centuries, we took the unreasonable Jesus of the four gospels, and remade him into the more manageable Christ of Christianity, which has left us with a powerful, useful, helpful, successful, very influential, world religion which has done much good for many people throughout the world, but which, also, sometimes, bears little resemblance to the true spirit of the real Jesus.

All of which came home to me in a powerful way a couple of years ago when one of those studies by Gallup or Barna or some similar polling organization came out with a list of the most Christian cities in America; with places such as Jackson, Birmingham, Chattanooga and Shreveport all at, or near, the top.

When I heard that, I had a Holy Spirit moment, when I recalled the several times, across the years, when I have heard people, who live in “the most Christian part of the country,” who had an adult son or daughter whose life left them outside the comfortable majority, say that they had encouraged their son or daughter to move out of the Bible Belt, to New York or Los Angeles, or someplace where they might be less likely to face the unkindness and discrimination which they might be more likely to encounter if they stayed in the most Christian part of the country; a powerful commentary on how far popular Christianity has wandered from the Jesus of the gospels.  You know that Christianity has strayed far from the Jesus of the gospels when the parts of the country which are known to have the most Christians are known to be the least Christian when it comes to the very things Jesus said matter most; loving all others as we love ourselves, and treating all others as we want all others to treat us.

Which is one example of how Christianity sometimes finds it as difficult to let Jesus be Jesus as Peter did, which is as understandable as it is ironic.  This week, I read every word of all four gospels; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, one more time.  When you take the time to do that, you can see why Peter rebuked Jesus, and Christianity  remade him.  After all, Those who try to save their life will lose it . . .  Deny yourself . . .  Take up your cross  . . .  Give up your possessions  . . .  Love your neighbor as yourself . . . Do unto others as you want others to do unto you . . . That is not the sort of thing that draws crowds, fills buildings and meets budgets.  One of the biggest obstacles to the successful church can be the real Jesus, because too much of the real Jesus can empty a church faster than the best marketing effort can fill it.

But, every now and then, at least once in every generation, in the interest of being as honest as we are capable of being, and, as a guard against self-deception, it is good and right for the Christian religion to acknowledge the fact that, across the Christian centuries, we have remade the real Jesus, and, to say, out loud, that, while we have done, and always will do, much good in the world, the path we have taken to success is a different way than the path to which Jesus called us when Jesus asked us, in this morning’s gospel lesson, to take up the cross and follow him; something Jesus asked us to do, not because he wanted us to die the way he died, but, because he wanted us to live the way he lived, and love the way he loved.

                                                          Amen.

 

Is There Grace Beyond the Grave?

I Peter 3:18-22, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 18th, 2018 · Duration 16:26



"Is There Grace Beyond the Grave?"

I Peter 3:18-22

The First Sunday in Lent

“Christ Jesus was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church throughout the world, those intriguing words from today’s epistle lesson, words which seem to say that, sometime between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Jesus went to hell to preach a sermon; a passage which, when coupled with I Peter 4:6, which also says that Jesus descended to the depths “To preach the gospel to the dead,” never fails to resurrect in my spirit the hope that, perhaps, there might be grace beyond the grave.

Of course, even the possibility of grace beyond the grave has long been so troubling to so much of “official Christianity” that large stripes of Christian orthodoxy have said that, if Jesus did go to hell, it was to say, “See, I told you so”; the Christological equivalent of a victory lap.

And, in the world of my religious origins, any hint of a hope that there might be grace beyond the grave was always rebuffed by references to Luke 16:26, where Father Abraham consigns “the rich man” to eternal torment, with the announcement that, once one is in Hades, there is no escape; quashing any conversation concerning grace beyond the grave with the confident finality of “the Bible says it and that settles it.”

(Except, of course, we cannot, with integrity,  resort to “the Bible says it and that settles it” to close down conversations and shut down questions, because Matthew 5:39 calls us to a life of pacifism, II Corinthians 8:15 invites us to a life of socialism, Luke 14:33 requires of us a life of voluntary poverty and I Timothy 2:9 does not allow us to have jewelry, hairdos and nice clothing; just some of the many ways the Bible saying something to us does not settle something for us.)

I never have been able to understand why Christianity has been so eager to believe in judgment beyond the grave and so reluctant to believe in grace beyond the grave.  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I believe in both; judgment beyond the grave, and grace beyond the grave.

Because so much evil goes un-confronted in this life, without judgment beyond the grave, all sorts of injustice would go eternally un-confronted; responsibility never owned, victims never faced and truth never spoken, which doesn’t sound like God, at all.  So, there must be judgment beyond the grave.

But, on the other hand, if there is no grace beyond the grave, then, not only does God never get what God wants; the redemption, reconciliation and salvation of all, but people go to hell forever for no purpose other than endless retribution, and perpetual torment, which sounds even less like God.

What does sound like God is judgment beyond the grave which leads, eventually, to grace beyond the grave; the whole creation ultimately redeemed, but not without sin being judged, truth being spoken, responsibility being taken, victims being faced, guilt being confessed and wrong being purged; a hell, not for people to go to, but for people to go through, on their way to ultimate, eternal redemption.

As the great British preacher Leslie Weatherhead once said, “We Protestants have rejected the only view of hell that makes any sense; punishment with a point, judgment in the service of redemption.”  Or, as the Methodist theologian Gregory Jones says, “Just because the fires of hell will always be burning doesn’t necessarily mean they will always be populated.”  Indeed, no less a luminary of orthodoxy than John Calvin himself is reported once to have said, “Christians are obligated to pray that hell will someday be empty.” 

All of this came home to me in a very practical, personal way about a month ago when, late one cold January Saturday afternoon, I took Ansley, Emma Kate and Charlotte to the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.  After our visit, as we walked through downtown Jackson to our car, the girls (whose permission I have to tell this) asked if I thought the people who killed Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and those who committed the other acts of violence about which we had just read in the museum, would be in heaven.  I said that, while it is not my place to say who will or will not be in heaven, I do believe that those persons who committed those terrible acts of violence will be in heaven, not because what they did wasn’t awful and evil, but because I believe that there is so much judgment beyond the grave and so much grace beyond the grave, that, ultimately, God will get the one thing God has always wanted most; the redemption, reconciliation and salvation of all.

I was careful to tell the girls that my belief that there is grace beyond the grave is different from what many Christians believe.  But, as for me, I cannot think of anything more Christian than believing that there will be enough judgment beyond the grave, and enough grace beyond the grave, for God to finally get the one thing God has always wanted most; the redemption, reconciliation and salvation of all; a hope which is always resurrected in my spirit by that visit Jesus made to hell on the last day of Lent; a journey Jesus took to say, not, “See, I told you so,” but, “See, I love you so.” 

                                                                         Amen.

 

They Are With God and God Is With Us

II Kings 2:1-12, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · February 11th, 2018 · Duration 16:27

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

When We Cannot Go On

Isaiah 40:21-31, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 4th, 2018 · Duration 5:30



"When We Cannot Go On"

Isaiah 40:21-31

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

“God gives power to the faint, and strength to the powerless.  Even the young will fall down exhausted, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Those words from this morning’s lesson from Isaiah were originally written for the people of God who were living in exile in Babylon, nearly six hundred years before the birth of Christ.  However, though they may not have been written to us or about us, they have always held an important word of hope for us; the hope that, no matter how overwhelmed or exhausted, depleted or defeated, weary or empty we may be, the God who is with us, and for us, will give us new strength for each new day; the strength we need to go on, even when we are sure we cannot; what this morning’s lesson from Isaiah calls, “the strength to walk, and not faint.”

Which, as you will, no doubt, have noticed, is the strength which came in last on Isaiah’s list.  At the top of Isaiah’s list was the strength to fly like an eagle, followed closely by the strength to run like the wind, followed lastly by the strength to walk and not faint; just enough strength to stumble forward, go through what we did not get to go around, and keep moving, even when we are most certain that we cannot.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I believe that when Isaiah put that kind of strength, the strength to walk and not faint, at the bottom of the list, he was actually saving the best for last.  In my experience, when life is at it’s hardest and worst, there is nothing better, in all the world, than the strength to walk and not faint.

Somehow, in those moments, when the strength to walk and not faint is all the strength we have, the strength to walk and not faint turns out to be all the strength we need.  In the hardest and worst, most paralyzing and unbearable moments of our lives, strength turns out to be the new joy, and, walking, the new running.

                                                             Amen 

Where Truth Meets Love

I Corinthians 8:1-13, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 28th, 2018 · Duration 15:59



"Where Truth Meets Love"

I Corinthians 8:1-13

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

“Now, concerning food sacrificed to idols . . . Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  With those words from today’s epistle lesson, Paul takes up a subject which, apparently, was a significant source of conflict for the community of faith in the city of Corinth; the question of whether or not it was sinful for followers of Jesus to eat meat which was leftover from animals sacrificed in pagan temples; a question of such significance in Corinth that it will consume all of chapters eight, nine and ten of First Corinthians.

It would appear that, in his heart, Paul knows that whether or not one eats meat from animals offered to idols is not something that matters to God as a moral issue.  Paul says as much in verse eight of today’s scripture lesson, where he says, “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.”  So, apparently, this question about eating meat from animals offered to idols is just not an issue, as far as Paul is concerned.  In fact, over in chapter ten, still talking about this same subject, Paul says, “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience.  And, if an unbeliever invites you to a meal, eat whatever is set before you, without raising any question on the ground of conscience.”

Add to that the fact that, in today’s passage, Paul referred to those who thought it was a sin to eat meat which had been offered on a pagan altar as “the weaker brothers and sisters,” while calling those who knew better “the stronger brothers and sisters,” and it seems clear that Paul believed that those who were worried about the meat-eating question were holding onto something they needed to let go of.

And yet, in that same section of First Corinthians, Paul said other things which seemed to support those who thought eating meat from animals offered to idols was a moral matter.  For example, over in chapter ten, in one verse, Paul said that food sacrificed to an idol means nothing, because the idol means nothing.  But, then, in the next verse, he said that “what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons,” and that “Christians cannot eat at the table of the Lord and at the table of demons,” which sounds as though he thinks eating meat associated with pagan sacrifices is a moral, spiritual issue, after all.

Add all of that together, and it appears that, while Paul knows, in his heart, what is true about this issue, he is trying to be mindful of the less spiritually mature believers in the Corinthian congregation, and, as an act of love, to be sensitive to the limits of the weaker brothers and sisters.  In fact, Paul says as much, when, at the end of First Corinthians chapter ten, he says, “I try to offend no one, and to please everyone.”

All of which is a first century snapshot of the every century complexity of  trying to be a person of both love and truth, without sacrificing one on the altar of the other.

Paul makes it clear that if we have to choose between the two, love and truth, love is the more important of the two. “Knowledge puffs up,” he says in today’s passage, “but love builds up.”                

But, of course, it isn’t always that simple. Sometimes, speaking the truth is what builds up other’s lives.  There have been a number of times in my own life when what I have needed most was someone who loved me enough to tell me the truth.  For example, because of the religious world in which I grew up, I entered adulthood with both the blessings and the burdens of popular Bible Belt fundamentalism; the blessing of a rigorous moral compass, and the burden of a fear based way of looking at others, which had little of the Spirit of Jesus in it, because one of it’s primary concerns was protecting the power and control of those of us who already held most of the power and control, because we happen to have been born on the easy side of every human difference you can name.  As a result, when it came to the way I looked at those who were unlike me, I was spiritually immature, and far from the Spirit of Jesus.  To use Paul’s words in today’s passage, I was “the weaker brother.”  The last thing I needed was for the stronger, more spiritually mature, brothers and sisters who came into my life to pretend I was right, so they wouldn’t offend me.  (If that was the way we lived in the church, then no one would ever grow deeper in the faith than what the most shallow members’ ears could bear to hear.)  To the contrary, what I needed was someone who loved me enough to tell me the truth.

Which is always our job, in the church. Our job, in the church, is never to sacrifice truth on the altar of love, while also never sacrificing love on the altar of truth.

Our job, in the church, is to spend our lives practicing the skill of speaking the truth, to the extent that we know it, never with glibness, cleverness, arrogance, sarcasm, exaggeration or unkindness, but, always, in every case, with Quaker-quiet gentleness, what the poet Naomi Shihab Nye calls “the tender gravity of kindness”; a skill so difficult and demanding that none of us will ever be able to practice it apart from the help of the Holy Spirit.

All of us need something in our lives that is so difficult, and so important, that we could never do it apart from the help of the Holy Spirit. This is one of those practices; the practice of speaking, and living, what Walter Rauschenbusch once called,  “the truth dressed in nothing but love”; a sacred skill which none of us will ever finish practicing, for as long as we live, because, even with the help of the Holy Spirit, no matter how long we live, we will never finally, fully, always get this right; this challenging, demanding, complex, world-changing, kingdom-bringing life of truth and love, love and truth.

                                                                 Amen.

 

Youth sermon with Ben Oakes and Madeleine Wiggs

Psalm 62:5-12, I Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-20, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Youth - Ben Oakes and Madeleine Wiggs · January 21st, 2018 · Duration 17:18



Concerning the Voice of the Lord

Psalm 29, Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · January 7th, 2018 · Duration 6:10



"Concerning the Voice of the Lord"

Psalm 29

Baptism of the Lord Sunday

(audio begins at about 21 seconds)

“The voice of the Lord roars like thunder.  The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.  The voice of the Lord flashes forth fire, and strips the forest bare of bark.”

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, every time the lectionary places in our path those words from today’s psalm, I find myself longing for the voice of the Lord to sometimes speak as publicly and powerfully, down here on the ground, as it did, back there on the page.

But, for most of us, the voice of the Lord lands less loudly on our ears than it seems to have sounded in this morning’s psalm, when the voice of the Lord was busy starting strong storms, toppling tall trees and felling full forests.

And, even when we do believe we have discerned the voice of God from all the other voices which clamor for our attention, how can any of us say, with certainty, whether what we have felt in our spirit is, indeed, the voice of the Lord, or only the echo chamber of our own desires?

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, this is the sort of thing I think about very often.  Because I am a very Pentecostal kind of person, the kind of Christian who believes that the Spirit still speaks, I am almost always listening for the voice of the Lord.  As a result, across the years,  I have changed my mind concerning some of the most important ideas one can name; significant changes which I have made in response to what I believe, in the depth of my soul, to be the Holy Spirit’s leading; “the voice of the Lord.”

But, how can I know for certain?  How can I know that what I have felt in my spirit is truly the voice of the Lord, showing me new light on old truth, and not just the echo chamber of my own desires?

Perhaps the best any of us can do in the face of such questions is to measure any nudge or whisper we believe to be the voice of the Lord against the standard Jesus gave us when Jesus said that the most important commandment of all is the one which tells us to love God with all that is in us, and, the second most important commandment is the one which calls us to love all other persons as we love ourselves.

If we make that our moral compass and north star; always only testing what we believe to be the voice of the Lord by that standard; the standard of love for God and love for others, then, while we may not  always get the voice of the Lord right in ways that are perfect and flawless, we will never get it wrong in ways that are hurtful and careless.

                                                                      Amen.

 

Concerning What Simeon Said to Mary

Luke 2:22-40, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · December 31st, 2017 · Duration 18:39



"Concerning What Simeon Said to Mary"

Luke 2:22-40

The First Sunday of Christmastide

(audio begins at about 22 seconds)

“And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” With those words from today’s gospel lesson, Simeon placed a small cloud over a big day.  In keeping with the traditions of Judaism, Mary and Joseph had brought the baby Jesus to the temple for his dedication, at which the prophet Simeon had said some beautiful words over Mary’s infant son. But, then, the tone took a turn when Simeon said that this child would grow up to cause conflict, and that, because Mary was Jesus’ mother, a sword would pierce her own soul, too.

All of which came to pass, just as Simeon said.  Jesus did grow up to cause much conflict, and a sword of sorrow did pierce Mary’s soul when she suffered the sadness of watching her son die on the cross.

But, while Jesus’ death may have been the worst of the sword Simeon saw in Mary’s future, it wasn’t the first of the sword Simeon saw. That may have come some years earlier, when, as an adolescent, Jesus left his parents when they took him to the temple, without telling them where he would be, about which Mary, once said she found him, said, “We have been looking everywhere for you! Why have you treated us this way?; a very human moment for the very holy family, and, perhaps, a first small wound from the sword Simeon said would pierce Mary’s soul.

Then, of course, there was that time when Jesus was teaching his followers and someone said to Jesus, “Rabbi, your mother and your brothers are outside. They need to speak to you,” in response to which we expect Jesus to say to his audience, “Excuse me. My family needs me. I’ll be right back.”  But, as you will recall, rather than responding as we would expect, Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters? My family members are those who do the will of my Father in heaven.” And, one imagines that the sword Simeon said would pierce Mary’s soul wounded her spirit a little more.

And, then, of course, came the cross. Jesus sat down with and stood up for the wrong people often enough that he made the right people nervous enough that they had him arrested, convicted and crucified, and the sword Simeon said would pierce Mary’s soul did, indeed; just as Simeon said it would.

Making Mary’s family, for her, a source, of both joy and pain; a quiet reminder, for all of us, of something many of us already know, which is that the family which loves us most dearly can also be the family which wounds us most deeply; what Simeon called “a sword in the soul”; what I, somewhere along the way, came to call “helpless love.” 

We are helpless to manage the lives of those we love, which is as it should be. But, we are also helpless to distance ourselves from the pain which can sometimes come to, and from, those we love. And, no matter how hard we work at establishing healthy boundaries between our lives and the lives of those we love, boundaries in families are, as one wise soul once said, less like a never-changing brick wall than an ever-changing row of crepe myrtles.

None of which is news to any of us, and, all of which leaves many of us to do some of our most careful thinking, and most ardent praying, around the often complex questions of how best to love one another in families:  When does supportive love become unhealthy enabling? On the other hand, when does tough love need to lighten up? When do difficult conversations need to be had, straight on? On the other hand, when is the difficult conversation which needs to be had not worth the risk of the rupture it might cause?  And what about holding on and letting go? The book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for both, but it doesn’t offer any guidance concerning how, or when, to do one or the other.

Families take almost as many different shapes in our world as they took in the Bible. But, one thing almost all families, of every shape and size, hold in common, is a perpetually repeated, never ending, convergence of joy and pain, simplicity and complexity; not unlike Mary’s life with her unusual son, Jesus; a life of joy, no doubt, but, joy bruised by the sword Simeon saw, which makes the holy family just like every ordinary family, in that, for all of us, the family which loves us most dearly can also be the family which wounds us most deeply.

Which is why it is so important for all of us, no matter what shape or size our family, to practice, in our families, the daily virtues of kindness, patience, respect, courtesy, gentleness and truthfulness; accepting those we love for who they are without requiring them to become who we think they should be, which means relinquishing whatever leverage we like to hold over those we love.

To practice, in our families, the daily virtues of kindness, patience, respect, courtesy, gentleness and truthfulness might also mean to choose to refuse to talk about our family members in their absence in any way other than we talk about them in their presence, and, to decide to renounce the relentless teasing which, in so many families, causes so much needless pain, and, to practice paying mindful attention to one another by looking at one another more frequently, carefully and intentionally than we look at the screens on our phones.

None of which will make our families perfect and painless, but, all of which will make our families more safe and healing; a strong and true gift of grace in a world which sometimes seems to grow less that way with each passing day.

                                                Amen.

Concerning What Gabriel Said to Mary

Luke 1:26-38, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 24th, 2017 · Duration 6:05



"Concerning What Gabriel Said to Mary"

Luke 1:26-38

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

(audio begins at about 25 seconds)

“Nothing will be impossible with God,” said Gabriel to Mary in this morning’s gospel lesson; a beautiful and hope-filled promise, but, one which, in my experience, does not always turn out to mean what we might like for it to mean.

We would like for “Nothing will be impossible with God,” to mean that every prayer will be answered, every disease cured, every tragedy averted, problem fixed, despair lifted, and relationship healed.  We would like for “Nothing will be impossible with God,” to mean that God will always step in and stop things before they go too far and get too bad.

But, needless to say, for most of us, that is not the case.  For most of us “Nothing will be impossible with God” most often turns out to mean that, with the comfort and courage of the spirit of God and the help and support of the people of God, nothing is impossible for us to face or bear or go through.  We know that that is so because so many of us have already lived through things so painful that, if someone had told us ahead of time that we were going to have to go through them, we would have sworn we could never make it.

But, we do.  We do go through what we did not get to go around, and, wonder of wonders, sometimes we even emerge from our hardest  struggles and greatest disappointments with a bigger spirit and a deeper soul; more kind and gentle, thoughtful and mindful, empathetic and understanding of the whole human family; almost as though the Christ who will, tonight, be born, again, in Bethlehem, is also being born, again, in us; the kind of transformation which can only be explained by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, a transformation so beautiful that it makes true, down here on the ground, what Gabriel said to Mary, back there on the page, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”

                                               Amen.

Concerning Joy

Psalm 126, The Third Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 17th, 2017 · Duration 13:45



"Concerning Joy"

Psalm 126

The Third Sunday of Advent

(audio begins at about 20 seconds)

“Those who go out weeping will come home with shouts of joy.”  Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s psalm; a single, simple sentence which captures one of the most fundamental hopes of the Christian faith; the deep and abiding, strong and enduring, hope that, someday, God will wipe all the tears from every face, and joy, not pain, will have the last word.  Or, as this morning’s psalm says, “Those who go out in tears will come home in joy.”

All of which is beautiful to ponder, and hopeful to believe, but all of which must be spoken in ways that are so careful to be so truthful that they ring true, not only on the happiest ears in the room, but also on the saddest ears in the room.  The rest of the world can lapse into a glib and easy way of speaking of joy if it chooses, but we are not the rest of the world.  We are the church of Jesus Christ; so we don’t get to wander off into that “sunny side of the street” optimism which races to embrace joy without first stopping to sit truthfully with the pain which is so deep for so many.

We live in a world where joyful things happen and terrible things happen,  and, if any of those things can happen to anyone, all of those things can happen to everyone; not because God planned it or sent it or allowed it, but, because, as our Lord Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “The rain falls and the sun shines on the good and the bad the same.” 

And, in most lives there is plenty of both; rain and sun, laughter and tears, joy and pain.  As Mrs. Soames said in Act III of Our Town, looking back on her life from the vantage point of heaven, “My, wasn’t life awful . . . And wonderful.”

Truer words have rarely been spoken. Almost every life is both, awful and wonderful; some times a sea of joy, punctuated by islands of pain; other times a sea of pain, punctuated by islands of joy, a convergence of joy and pain which the poet Mary Oliver captured in her verse; “We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, those two, housed, as they are, in the same body.” 

Indeed, isn’t it so?  Earlier this week, I prayed my way, one more time, through our church roll, A to Z; Abell, Adams, Aden, Alexander, Aldridge, Allen . . . Wooley, Worley, Wyatt, Wylie, Yates, Yelverton, Zeigler. In most of those four hundred and something homes, there has been, and will be, plenty of both; pain and joy, because that is the way life is for all of us.  “We shake with joy and we shake with grief.”

I can’t think about all this during the sacred season of Advent without remembering my late friend Bobby McCord. Bobby, like myself, grew up in a decidedly non-liturgical religious world. So, the first time he walked into his church over in Georgia and saw an Advent wreath adorned with three purple candles and one pink, he declared, with no small degree of indignation, “Can this church not afford a matching set of candles?”  Newly initiated into the ways of the liturgical church myself, I took Bobby aside and explained to him that three purples and a pink is a matching set of Advent candles; purple, in Advent as in Lent, a reminder of the bruising pain of repentance, and, pink, the liturgical color for joy; a circle of bruises, interrupted by a flash of joy, which Bobby and I agreed was, in fact, a perfectly matched set, not only for Advent, but, also, for life; some pain and some joy.

But, the last word will be joy. There will be no lack of sorrow and trouble, struggle and pain; not because God is that way, but because life is that way. And, we will have to have one another, and the family of faith, to face it, bear it and make it through. But, finally, ultimately, eternally, those who went out weeping will come home laughing.

As one wise soul once said, “Things will not always hurt the way they do now.” God will someday wipe every tear from all the faces of the whole human family, and every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea will sing glory to God, and hallelujah; all of us, together, warming our hands at the same flame;  the stubborn, relentless, unquenchable, endless, eternal, everlasting light of joy.

                                     Amen.

 

A Service of Lessons and Carols

A Service of Lessons and Carols, The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 10th, 2017 · Duration 1:01:11



"A Service of Lessons and Carols"

The Second Sunday of Advent

When God Comes Down

Isaiah 64:1-9, The First Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 3rd, 2017 · Duration 7:59



"When God Comes Down"

Isaiah 64:1-9

The First Sunday of Advent

A Sermon on the Subject of Judgment Day

Matthew 25:31-46, Christ the King Sunday

Chuck Poole · November 26th, 2017 · Duration 16:33



"A Sermon on the Subject of Judgment Day"

Matthew 25:31-46

Christ the King Sunday

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, this morning’s gospel lesson from Matthew chapter twenty-five.  And, every time it rolls back around, it calls to mind James Forbes’ memorable observation, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”

In today’s gospel lesson, nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner and the poor.  All the people of

every nation are gathered before Christ the King, and those who have shown kindness to those who are most in need of help and hope go to eternal life, while those who haven’t go to eternal punishment; a “salvation by works” kind of judgment day, which lands at an odd angle on our “saved by grace” ears, but which actually fits the pattern of Matthew’s gospel, where judgment day is almost always more about how we lived, than what we believed.  The gospel of John is the favorite gospel of popular evangelical Christianity because, in John’s gospel, what we believe about Jesus is the critical question on judgment day. However, in the other three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, judgment day is almost always more about how we live, than what we believe.

Not unlike the four gospels, the letters of Paul are also home to varied voices concerning the subject of judgment day.  In Romans 10:9, for example, it is those who confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead who will be saved; putting the salvation decision in our hands.  But, in Romans 11:32, Paul says that God included all in sin so that God could include all in mercy; putting judgment and salvation back in God’s hands.  After which, I Timothy 4:10 strikes the ultimate compromise; “God is the Savior of all people (Romans 11:32), especially those who believe.”  (Romans 10:9)

Then, there is the book of Revelation, where judgment day excludes, from the city of God, those who failed to be strong in the face of persecution.  However, the gates to the city are left open, never to be closed, leaving open the possibility that those originally excluded might, eventually, get to come in, especially since Revelation 5:13 envisions an eternity in which all creatures and all people sing glory to God, together, forever; an outcome which Colossians 1:20 anticipates when it says that, in the cross of Christ, God was reconciling to Godself the whole creation. (Which is why every time I drive past that 100 foot tall cross in front of Berry’s Catfish Buffet on Highway 49,  I think to myself, “Too small.”)  According to Colossians chapter one, what happened at the cross was so enormous, and so effective, that it reconciled, to God, the whole world, and every person in it.

All of which is to say that, when it comes to judgment day, the Bible speaks with varied voices; none of which should be taken literally, but all of which should be taken seriously.

Including this morning’s gospel lesson, where no one gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor; a judgment day when our eternal destiny will hinge on whether or not we have shown kindness to those who are most in need of food and clothing, shelter and safety, hospitality and welcome; friendship, help and hope.

The point of which is that, to decide to follow Jesus is to be called to a life of kindness.

Or, as the poet William Blake said so many years ago, “We are put on earth for a little space, to learn to bear the beams of love.”  That is our great calling in this life; to learn to let the love which has come down to us go out through us, in specific acts of kindness and compassion; feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, welcoming the stranger, and giving care to the sick, the sad, the left out, marginalized, ostracized, lonely and alone.

Just to be clear, if we are not living that way, if we are not living lives of welcome and friendship, kindness and compassion, generosity and hospitality, that will not cause us to go to hell on judgment day.  To say that would be to take literally today’s gospel lesson, which would be as wrong as taking literally John 3:16-18, John 14:6, or any other Bible passage which seems to say, with settled certainty, who will be let in, and who will be left out, on judgment day.

However, not taking this morning’s gospel passage literally does not mean not taking it seriously.

To take today’s gospel passage seriously is to know, at the deep down center of our soul, that every day is judgement day; each new day, another day when we get to decide, all over again, whether or not we will live lives of kindness and compassion; deciding, in each new situation, and conversation, whether we will, or will not, sit down with, and stand up for, the same people Jesus would sit down with, and stand up for, if Jesus was in that same situation or conversation. Each new day, another judgement day, when we get to decide, all over again, to live a life of courage and kindness; letting the love which has come down to us go out through us, to whoever is most in need of help and hope.

Which, according to this morning gospel lesson, is like being kind to Christ the King himself, who is reported, once to have said, “Inasmuch as you showed kindness to the least of these, you showed kindness to me.”

                                                                        Amen.

             

Careful Speech About Money and the Church

Matthew 25:14-30, The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 19th, 2017 · Duration 15:01



"Careful Speech About Money and the Church"

Matthew 25:14-30

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning the Last Day

Matthew 25:1-13, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 12th, 2017 · Duration 11:29



"Concerning the Last Day"

Matthew 25:1-13

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

(audio begins at 31 seconds)

As you may have noticed, all three scripture lessons we have read this morning have left us leaning forward; looking to the future, thinking about what Amos calls “the Day of the Lord,” what Paul describes as the second coming, and what Jesus points to as the last day.

In Amos’ fierce sermon, he tells the people of God that if they think that judgment day is going to be good for them and bad for everyone else, they are going to be as disappointed as someone who has escaped a lion, only to look up and see a bear!

Then, in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, Paul does the opposite.  Amos tells Israel they need to be more worried about the last day, but Paul tells the Thessalonians they need to be less worried about the last day.  “Don’t worry about who will and won’t be left behind,” says Paul to the Thessalonians.  “Those who have died, and those who are alive, will all be gathered up to be together forever.” 

And, then, in today’s lesson from Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about the last day, which he concludes with that urgent admonition for us to keep awake, and stay ready, because, while everyone knows that some day will be the last day, no one knows which day will be the last day.

The last day will come for all of us, because death will come for each of us.  For some, death will come suddenly and tragically; for most, slowly and naturally.  For some, death will come as an enemy to be resisted; for others, as a friend to be welcomed, because, while most of us will get to live until we have to die, some of us will have to live until we get to die.

But, whenever and however death comes, the one thing we know for certain is that it will.  Some day will be the last day; which is why it is so important for us to live whatever is left of our lives as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can; with that quiet sense of urgency to which Jesus calls us in this morning’s parable, when he says, “Stay awake and be alert, because you do not know when the last day will come.”

Of course, careful speech requires us to say that to live each day as though that day will be the last day would be unsustainable.  No one can maintain that level of urgency day after day.  However, everyone can live each day as though some day will be the last day.

And, that alone is enough to make us new people.  To say to yourself, on a regular basis, “Some day is going to be the last day.  And, as far as I know, I’m not going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time,” is to come alive, and to begin to live whatever is left of life as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can.

To get up each day and decide to live that day as though some day is going to be the last day is like being born again, all over again, every day, until the last day, when the door will close on this life, and open to the next; over on the Other Side.

                                                     Amen.

 

Another Reformation

Matthew 22:34-46, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 29th, 2017 · Duration 17:30



"Another Reformation"

Matthew 22:34-46

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Throughout the world today, churches large and small are marking the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation; remembering that moment, five hundred years ago, this Tuesday, when, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther is reported to have nailed his ninety-five thoughts about the church to the door of a chapel in Wittenberg, Germany; launching a movement which eventually divided the church into Catholics and Protestants; the “Protestant Reformation.”

Five hundred years later, perhaps it is time for another reformation; a new reformation which might unite what the last reformation divided; a reformation grounded in, and rising from, this morning’s gospel lesson, where Jesus, when asked which of the commandments in scripture mattered most, said, There are two commandments which matter more than any others, and all the others are to be interpreted in the light of  those two, which are, “Love the Lord your God with all that is in you” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

That is the ground from which another reformation might rise; a reformation which might unite what the last reformation divided, because all Christians, Catholic and Protestant, who are walking in the Holy Spirit, want nothing more than for what mattered most to Jesus to matter most to us.  And, according to this morning’s gospel lesson, what mattered most to Jesus is that we love God with all that is in us, and love others as we love ourselves.

That is the ground from which the next reformation might rise; a reformation which is already uniting Catholics and Protestants. Indeed, just this morning, I began this Reformation Sunday by calling Father Mike O’Brien to express my deep gratitude for the Catholic church.  Where would we be without Mother Teresa, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Pope Francis, and countless other Catholic spiritual guides and friends?

And, truthful speech requires me to say that I believe that this reformation, the new one, rising from love for God and love for neighbor, might ultimately unite, not only Catholics and Protestants, within Christianity, but, also, people of other faiths, beyond Christianity.

When E. Stanley Jones, the great evangelical Christian missionary, said that Gandhi, a Hindu, embodied more of the spirit of Jesus than any Christian he had ever met, it was because Gandhi was living a life of love for God and love for neighbor.  That is why, when you are in the presence of people of other faiths who are living lives of love and kindness, you feel a more intimate spiritual connection, to them, than you feel to harsh, hard, graceless people of your own faith; because all persons who are living lives of love for God and love for others are bound to one another by the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit recognizes no denomination or religion, but flows into, and out through, all souls who live to embody the love of God.

In fact, I am so optimistic that a new reformation might be ready to rise from love for God and love for neighbor, that, this Tuesday, October 31, 2017, on the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s door nail, I am going to find some doors in Jackson, Mississippi, where groups, ministries and congregations are daily striving to embody love for God and love for neighbor, and nail to as many of those doors as I can reach (or, attach to those doors with that kind of tape that won’t peel paint) the two commandments which Jesus said matter most; “Love God with all that is in you,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself,” along with a word of thanksgiving for their ministry, because I believe that, five hundred years after the first reformation, another reformation, built on nothing but gratitude and love, might be ready to rise.

Needless to say, it isn’t that simple.  We all know how complex and complicated “loving the world” can become.  As Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “To be a Christian is to be called to a life of love, but that calling is a lifelong task which requires our willingness to be surprised by what love turns out to be.”

But, difficult or not, this is the life for which God is redeeming us, and to which the Holy Spirit is beckoning us; an up-to-God, out-to-others, simultaneously vertical and horizontal, cross-shaped life of love for God and love for others; the life Jesus himself said matters most, loving God with all that is in us, and loving all others as we love our own selves; the ground from which the next reformation is ready to rise.

                                                                         Amen.

 

 

All That We Can See of God

Exodus 33:12-23, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 22nd, 2017 · Duration 17:54



"All That We Can See of God"

Exodus 33:12-23

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

And the Lord said to Moses, “I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand , and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, every time the lectionary places, in our path, those words from the book of Exodus, they seem to me to be a parable of our life with God, because, like Moses in this morning’s lesson, we never get to see as much of God as we want to see.

Early in today’s passage, Moses asks to see God’s glory and God’s face, to which God replies, “You can see my goodness, but not my glory, my back, but not my face.”

And, just to be sure, God tells Moses to hide behind a rock while God passes by.  And, as a further precaution against Moses seeing too much of God, God says to Moses, “I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.  Then, after I have passed by, I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but not my face; leaving Moses able only to see where God had been after God had passed on by; a moment from Moses’ life with God which is a parable of our life with God.

Like Moses,  most of what we can see of God is only afterwards; where God has been.  Or, as one wise soul once said, “Life has to be lived forward, and understood backward.” 

The famous novelist, Pat Conroy, once said, “I sometimes think I should write a letter to the boy I once was.”   We should all probably do the same.   And, if we ever do take the time to write a letter to the child we once were, going back over all that has come into our lives since we were nine or ten, we will, in all likelihood, see many moments when God was with us in ways we couldn’t see then, but can see now.

Sometimes, life works out that way, and, years and years later, we can see where God has been leading, guiding and protecting us in ways which, at the time, we simply could not see.  Like Moses, we couldn’t see God’s face in the moment, but now, like Moses, we can see God’s back.  Like Moses, we can see where God has been; where God has been protecting us when we did not even know we needed protecting.

Sometimes.  But not always.  When we are tempted to say, in the church, that we will someday be able to look back and see how everything was part of God’s plan, we must exercise much restraint and  great word care, because, in those moments, it is too easy to say too much.  To say that, in retrospect, we will someday see that everything was a part of God’s plan would require us, for example, to say that, in retrospect, the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Charleston, Orlando and Sandy Hook will someday be revealed to be part of God’s plan, along with the thousands of kidnappings which feed the horrors of human trafficking, as well as the slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

No.  Let’s be clear; to suggest, as much popular Christianity does, that, eventually, we will see that everything was pre-ordained by God and, ultimately, part of God’s plan, sacrifices too much of the love and goodness of God on the altar of the sovereignty and control of God.  (As one wise soul once observed; “God’s friends say things about God that even God’s enemies wouldn’t say.”)

The truth is, things happen which are not God’s will or God’s plan, and, when they happen, as William Sloane Coffin once said, “Of all hearts, God’s heart is most broken.”

And, I would add, in those moments, not only is God’s heart most broken, God’s help is most near.  When we look back across our lives, at our own worst moments and greatest sorrows, we, like Moses, can see where God has been; where God has been helping us through what we were not protected from.

As the poet Mary Oliver so beautifully says, “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I did go closer, but I did not die.  Surely God had a hand in this, as well as friends.”

Indeed.  Isn’t it so for all of us?  We can all look back on times we thought would absolutely do us in.  But, here we are, all these years later, having gone through what we would have sworn we could not survive.

And, like Moses, and Mary Oliver, looking back, we can see where God was.  God was in the faces and voices of friends, the community of support which showed up and stayed near.   Looking back, that is what we can see; the back of God, in the faces of the people of God.

Perhaps, for us, that is what the church is; what today’s lesson from the book of Exodus called “the back of God”; the part of God we can always see afterwards; the part of God that carried us through what we did not get to go around.

                                                                              Amen.

 

God is God

Exodus 32:1-14, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 15th, 2017 · Duration 16:09



"God is God"

Exodus 32:1-14

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

(Begins at 25 seconds)

The Lord said to Moses, “Now leave me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against my people.  But Moses said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people”?  Why should the Egyptians say, ‘Their God brought them out of Egypt to kill them?’  Turn from your wrath and change your mind.”  And God changed God’s mind.

With those words, this morning’s lesson from the book of Exodus lets us listen in as Moses persuades God to change God’s mind about the punishment God had settled on for God’s people, partly by reminding God that if God went forward with God’s plan against God’s people, it would damage God’s reputation.  “Just think what the Egyptians would say about you,” said Moses to God, after which the last verse of today’s passage says, “So God changed God’s mind”; a conversation  between Moses and God which is an example of “anthropopathism”; the practice of assigning human feelings to God.

A close cousin to anthropomorphism, which assigns human form to God (“the hands of God,” for example) anthropopathism assigns human feelings to God; something today’s lesson from Exodus does when it says that God is so angry that God is going to destroy God’s people, until Moses changes God’s mind.

All of which makes God sound very human; something which, if we are going to talk about God at all, is inevitable, because we don’t really have any other way of speaking of God, than to assign to God human feelings and emotions.

For example, I often find myself quoting William Sloane Coffin’s powerful observation that, whenever a young person dies in a tragic way, “Of all hearts, God’s heart is most broken”;  which is, obviously, a case of assigning a human emotion, broken-heartedness, to God.

Or, take the widely held idea that the larger the number of people who are praying for someone, the more likely God is to answer the prayer.  That is an idea which is embraced by many very wonderful people, but it assumes that God is so human that God, like us, is more likely to be swayed by many voices than a few.

Or, take the Christian doctrine which teaches that Jesus had to die on the cross because God could not forgive sin unless a perfect sacrifice was offered to God.  Think of how human that makes God.  (And, not even the best of being human, either.  I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I know many humans who have forgiven those who have sinned against them without requiring, or even wanting, anyone to sacrifice anything.)

The truth is, throughout the Bible, and in every religion, including ours, God gets assigned all sorts of human motives and emotions.  That sort of anthropopathizing is inevitable.  But, while it is inevitable that we will speak of God in human terms and assign to God human motives and emotions, we need to be careful, lest we end up with a God of our own creation; a God who thinks what we think, and believes what we believe.

Which includes, of course, being careful always to remember that God is not a Christian.  It is hard for us to resist the temptation to create God in our image by enlisting God on our side.  But, the truth is, to say that God is a Christian would be not only to anthropopathize God, but to anthropobaptize God.  Just as God is not a Muslim, Hindu or Jew, God is not a Christian.  God is God.

But we are Christians, and because we are Christians, we believe that the clearest witness we have concerning the true nature of God comes from the life of our Lord Jesus, who told us, in one place, that every commandment God ever gave could be summed up in a single sentence, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and, in another place, that nothing matters more to God than that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love others as we love ourselves; all of which converges to say that God is love, and our creed is kindness.

God is God, and the God to whom we give our lives is love, and the creed by which we live our lives is kindness.

                                                                          Amen.

A Sermon on Psalm Nineteen

Psalm 19:1-14, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 8th, 2017 · Duration 12:38



"A Sermon on Psalm Nineteen"

Psalm 19:1-14

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Let the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.”

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I pray some version of that prayer, from psalm nineteen, more than once a day, almost every day.

Almost every morning, before the day begins, I pray to live, throughout the day, a life of careful speech.  Then, from time to time, throughout the day, especially before meetings and conversations, I pray to have good thoughts and good words; a smaller, simpler version of the last verse of today’s psalm, “Let the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.”

But, while I cannot speak for you, as for me, all that praying notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ve ever yet made it all the way through a full day, thinking thoughts , and saying words, all of which meet the standard, and pass the test, of the final verse of psalm nineteen, “May the words of my mouth and the thoughts in my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

Words that would be acceptable to God would be words that are true and clear, while also being gentle and kind; words that don’t run from confrontation, but, rather, strive to be as straight as possible, while also being as thoughtful as possible; words that will not exaggerate anything in order to close a deal, gain an advantage, make a point or win an argument.

Those are the kinds of thoughts and words which meet the standard of the psalmist’ prayer for the words of our mouths and the thoughts of our hearts to be acceptable in the sight of God; the kinds of thoughts and words which are sensitive to, and respectful of, those who are in any minority which is likely to be ostracized, stigmatized, marginalized, bullied or teased because they are different from the comfortable majority; the kind of thoughtful, mindful speech which is the particular responsibility and special obligation of those of us who, like myself, were born on the comfortable side of every human difference you can name.

(The kind of speech which, for about the past thirty years, has come to be called, by some in popular culture, “politically correct speech,” but, which is, in fact, biblically correct speech, gospel correct speech, living up to your baptism correct speech.)

That is the kind of mindful, thoughtful, prayerful, careful speech to which we are called as children of the most high God and followers of Jesus.  But, it isn’t easy for us to unlearn and set aside all the less thoughtful strategies and tactics by which we have learned to make it through life; all the shading and spinning, the exaggeration and sarcasm, the passive-aggressive talking about people in their absence in ways we would never talk about them in their presence.  It isn’t easy or simple to unclutter our thinking and speaking, to unlearn and set aside all of that.

In her best-selling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert tells about going on a spiritual retreat to an isolated island called Gili Meno.  Weary of years of trying and failing to become a more deeply spiritual person, Gilbert began her twenty-day retreat by saying, “I am going to close my mouth, and I am not going to open it until something inside me has changed.”

Which is exactly the sort of thing many of us need to do, and few of us can do.  Who of us can leave everything behind for twenty days, close our mouth, and not open it until something inside us has changed?  Rather, we have to try to change while going to work and school each day, surrounded by people who expect us to continue to be exactly as we always have been.  We don’t get to escape to a spiritual retreat to change.  Rather, we have to try to change while going to the same breakroom or boardroom, classroom or locker room, Facebook and Twitter where everyone expects us to continue to be who we always have been, while we are trying to change; praying, with the psalmist, “May the words of my mouth and the thoughts in my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

But, what else can we do?  What else can we do but pray each day, all through the day, to become a person of good thoughts and good words; reaching, each day, for an unfailingly clear and careful, gentle and true, way of speaking which we will never stop wanting until it is, at last, ours.                                                                                                                                                    Amen.

           

 

On Working Out Our Salvation

Philippians 2:1-13, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 1st, 2017 · Duration 8:06



"On Working Out Our Salvation"

Philippians 2:1-13

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Work out your own salvation, for it is God who is at work in you.”

Few words in all the Bible capture more clearly, than those, the simultaneously vertical and horizontal life which is ours to live; God, “at work in us” is the vertical dimension of our lives; the love of God coming down to us.  And us, “working out our salvation,” is the horizontal dimension of our lives; the love of God going out through us.

“Work out your own salvation, for God is at work in you,” is the simultaneously vertical, horizontal story of our lives; the Spirit of God coming down to us and going out through us; God putting kindness and courage in us, and, us, working that kindness and courage out in our daily lives; the love and goodness of God coming down to us and going out through us.

To work out our own salvation is, in the words of the poet, Mary Oliver, “To wake, each morning, with thirst for the goodness we do not yet have,” and, then, to work toward that goodness we do not yet have by making intentional decisions about how we will live and what we will say; deciding to live up to our baptism by actually changing what we text, e-mail and post on Facebook; making intentional decisions to actually get into our car, turn the key and literally go stand up for the same people Jesus would stand up for, if Jesus was here, by actually standing up against what Jesus would stand up against, if Jesus was here; praying, each morning, to live a life of kindness and courage, each day, until making that prayer our life eventually makes our life that prayer.

That is working out our salvation; what Evelyn Underhill once called, “Reaching for what we do not have by the faithful practice of what we do have.”  Because, while we may not yet have the goodness for which we thirst, we can practice wanting it until, more and more, we do eventually have it; what Paul called, “Working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.”

But, not on our own, or all alone, because, while we are working out our salvation, God is working in our lives; giving us the wind of the Spirit to help us to be better and stronger than ever we could be apart from the Spirit of God, which is endlessly, relentlessly coming down to us and going out through us; the Spirit which comes down to us from God going out through us to others; grace in, grace out; God working salvation in us, us working salvation out; the simultaneously vertical and horizontal life; a life which is shaped like a cross, because it is being formed by the cross.

                                                 Amen. 

On Not Being Envious Because God Is Generous

Matthew 20:1-16, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 24th, 2017 · Duration 12:55



"On Not Being Envious Because God Is Generous"

Matthew 20:1-16

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon on the Subject of Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35, The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 17th, 2017 · Duration 17:20



"A Sermon on the Subject of Forgiveness"

Matthew 18:21-35

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Then Peter came and said to Jesus, Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?  Jesus said to Peter, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s gospel lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, they remind us of the spirit of forgiveness which followers of Jesus are called to embody; the kind of forgiveness which never keeps score but always gives grace; the grace which has come down to us, from God, going out through us, to others, including those who have wronged us.

To embody that kind of forgiveness is easier for some than it is for others.  In my own experience, I have so rarely been wronged that forgiveness has almost always come easy to me, sort of like the man in the novel Gilead, who said, “If someone knocked me down the stairs, I would have worked out the theology for forgiving them before I hit the bottom.”  But, that may say more about the ease of my life than the depth of my faith.  Maybe my capacity for forgiveness has never really been tested, because I have so rarely been wronged.

Which, needless to say, is not the case for everyone, which is why the church must always take great care to speak as carefully and truthfully as we can concerning the complexity of forgiveness.

On the one hand, we are called to forgive others as fully and freely as God has forgiven us.  That is clearly the point of the parable in this morning’s gospel lesson.  On the other hand, for those who have been the victims of life-changing violence or injustice, there are clear judgments which must  be made before honest forgiveness can be given,  because, if clear judgment is never made about violence, injustice, oppression, deception, manipulation, discrimination and other such sin, then responsibility is never taken, amends are never made and grace becomes a license for those who do the worst to get away with the most.

It is that convergence of grace, on the one hand, and  judgment, on the other, which can sometimes make forgiveness one of the most complex of all the spiritual disciplines, especially for those who have the most to forgive.

Though I speak as one who, so far, has had very little to forgive, I have found, in my limited experience, that, when it comes to forgiveness,  one thing which helps, in addition to walking in the Spirit and living a life of daily prayer, is the passing of time.

Please do not hear me saying that time heals all wounds.  It does not.  However, sometimes, with the  passing of time, what once felt like a wound becomes something more like a sadness, and, once that happens, in my experience, questions about forgiving or not forgiving cease to matter.  On those occasions when we think about whatever it was that happened that hurt us, it may make us feel sad, but questions about forgiveness, which were once so loud and large, have somehow disappeared into what I call “the gray layer of life”; that quiet, gray, grief layer of life where all of our sadnesses reside; whatever we once needed to forgive, but couldn’t, now somewhere down there in the gray layer; a kind of letting go that can bring healing to our spirit.

Of course, even to use the phrase “letting go” returns us to the complexity of forgiveness, because, for those who have been wronged, it can sometimes seem too soon for letting go.  (Not to mention the fact that not everyone wants to let go of their wound, because our wounds give us power over those who wounded us, and that kind of leverage can be hard to give up.)

And, as if all that complexity wasn’t complex enough, there is the inescapable fact that, over the course of a lifetime, we will all find ourselves on both sides of the forgiveness equation; sometimes needing to forgive and sometimes needing to be forgiven.

Or, as the king said to the servant, in this morning’s gospel lesson, “After all I forgave you, you could not forgive someone else?”, a gentle reminder, for us all, that, not only have we all been wronged somewhere along the way, but, somewhere along the way, we have all also done wrong; which means that we all need both to be forgiven and to forgive; to breathe in grace, and breathe out grace; to breathe in mercy and breathe out mercy.

Needless to say, it isn’t that simple.  The life of forgiveness to which we are called is infinitely more complex than a simple “breathing exercise.”  And yet, the truth is, breathing in and breathing out is how we live through life’s most painful moments and difficult  conflicts; breathing in healing love from God and breathing out healing love to others, breath by breath, and day by day, until that glad day comes when all the wrong which has been done to us, and all the wrong which has been done by us, will, at last, be lost in the bottomless well of the grace of God; before whom, as Paul said, in this morning’s epistle passage, we shall all someday stand to give an account for our own lives.

                                                        Amen.

 

A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

Romans 13:8-14, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · September 10th, 2017 · Duration 14:10



A Sermon by Lesley Ratcliff

Romans 13:8-14

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

From Solid Rock to Stumbling Block

Matthew 16:21-28, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 3rd, 2017 · Duration 6:06



"From Solid Rock to Stumbling Block"

Matthew 16:21-28

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Then Jesus turned, and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.  You are a stumbling block to me.”

With those words from this morning’s gospel lesson, Peter took a fast, far fall.  In last Sunday’s gospel passage, Jesus declared Peter the rock on which the whole church would be built.  Now, just seven days later, Peter’s approval ratings have plunged all the way from solid rock to stumbling block.

Which, needless to say, is not the only time this sort of thing happened in Peter’s life.  Most notably, there was all that pain on the last night of Holy Week, when Peter promised to support Jesus to the end, only to abandon Jesus at the end.  Not to mention Acts chapter eleven, where Peter stood up, with courage, for the full inclusion of Gentiles in the church, only to back down, under pressure, in Galatians chapter two.

All of which makes all of us feel nothing but empathy for Peter, because we all know how it feels to fail.

None of us are strangers to the complexity of the human condition.  The wisest people we know have blind spots and limits, and the brightest and best of people sometimes make the poorest and worst of choices.  None of which surprises us, because we all know that we all have our own subterranean fault lines and flaws running beneath the surface of our soul.

Perhaps that is why so many love, so deeply, that sentence at the center of the burial benediction from the Book of Common Prayer;  “Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming.”

Sheep of God’s own fold.  Lambs of God’s own flock.  Sinners of God’s own redeeming.  Indeed, aren’t we all, all of the above?                                                                                                                                                  Amen.

 

Binding and Loosing

Matthew 16:13-20, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 27th, 2017 · Duration 15:25



Binding and Loosing

Matthew 16:13-20

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

The Deeper We Go, The Wider We Grow

Matthew 15:21-28, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 20th, 2017 · Duration 10:09



"The Deeper We Go, The Wider We Grow"

Matthew 15:21-28

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Of all the verses which Sasha, Betsy, Meili Grace, Walker, Anders and Madyson might someday read, from those shiny new Bibles we just gave them, few could be more bewildering than those we read, this morning, from that corner of Matthew’s  gospel where Jesus refuses to help a Gentile for no other reason than that she is a Gentile; placing her beyond the reach of his responsibility when he says, in response to her plea for help, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Because that sentence sounds so far from the spirit of Jesus, Bible commentators work overtime in their efforts to soften the blow of Jesus’ words; usually by speculating that, when Jesus refused to help the Gentile woman simply because she was a Gentile, Jesus was only kidding, or, that, perhaps, he was just testing the woman’s resolve by first saying, “No,” while planning, all along, to say, “Yes.”

None of which sounds much like Jesus, to me; teasing and testing someone in need of help and hope. And, all of which, though well intentioned, diminishes the power of one of the most significant moments in the entire New Testament; a moment when we actually get to watch while Jesus changes his mind; redrawing the circle of his    welcome, to say “Yes” to someone to whom he first said “No.”

Of course, it may be helpful to recall that, for the writer of the gospel of Matthew, this story of Jesus, a Jew, being slow to welcome a Gentile stranger into his circle of care, may have been a parable of what was happening in the congregation for which the gospel of Matthew was written. Most of the best scholarship we have tells us that Matthew was probably written sometime in the seventies or eighties A.D., for a community of faith, probably in Antioch, which had begun as a mostly Jewish congregation, and now was struggling to embrace Gentile strangers; which is exactly what we see happening in this morning’s gospel lesson, where the ultimate Jew, Jesus, at first says “No” to the Gentile stranger, but, then, says “Yes” to the same person to whom he once said “No”; not unlike Matthew’s once predominantly Jewish congregation, eventually saying “Yes” to their own Gentile strangers, after first saying “No” to them for no other reason than how, and who, they were born.

Which, though it pains us to say so, is, apparently, what Jesus did at the beginning of this morning’s gospel lesson. It may be nearly impossible for us to say out loud, but, according to the words on the page, when Jesus said “No” to the woman in this morning’s gospel lesson, he said “No” to her because she was a Gentile; because of how, and who, she was born.

But then, if the story means what the story says, Jesus changed his mind; redrawing the circle of his welcome to take in this Gentile, letting down his hard guard to take in his new friend; a powerful picture for us all of the way life moves, and changes, when we are living and walking, praying and thinking, in the Spirit of Jesus.

My sisters and brothers, there is a reason why the people in our lives who are walking most consistently in the Spirit of Jesus, are also the people in our lives whose circle of welcome, friendship and love is the most inclusive, and that reason is that when we are living and walking, praying and thinking in the Spirit of Jesus, the arc of the trajectory of our life will always, and ever, be moving outward.

There are many things about this world, and the next, which I do not know, but this one thing I do know with utter and absolute certainty: Walking in the Spirit of Jesus will keep us always drawing a wider circle of love and welcome, because, when it comes to walking with Jesus, the deeper we go, the wider we grow.

                                                          Amen.

 

A Sermon on the Subject of the Church

Matthew 14:22-32,The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 13th, 2017 · Duration 13:49



"A Sermon on the Subject of the Church"

Matthew 14:22-32

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon on the Subject of God

Psalm 145: 8-9, 14-21, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 6th, 2017 · Duration 3:33



"A Sermon on the Subject of God"

Psalm 145: 8-9, 14-21

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

According to this morning’s order of worship, what comes next is “A Sermon on the Subject of God,” which sounds like the sort of sermon which certainly could be long . . . But which probably should be short.

After all, how much can any of us say, with certainty, concerning the God we have always loved, but never seen?

For centuries, we have made an industry out of saying more than we know about God, doing exactly what Paul encouraged us not to do when Paul said, in his letter to the Romans, “Do not claim to be wiser than you are.”

Perhaps the most and best we can say, concerning the subject of God, we have already heard this morning, in that sentence from the psalm, which says, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, holding up all who are falling, and raising up all who are bowed down.” 

All of which is just a more beautiful, lyrical way of saying that God is with us, not away from us; for us, not against us.

The most truth we can say about God is the first truth we learned about God, and the last truth we will ever know about God: God is with us, and God is for us.

                                                                                      Amen.

A Sermon On the Subject of Prayer

Romans 8:26-39, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 30th, 2017 · Duration 11:53



"A Sermon On the Subject of Prayer"

Romans 8:26-39

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

“We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

With those words, this morning’s epistle lesson reminds us how little we know about how to pray.  (A particularly sobering thought, given the fact that, a few moments ago, when Lesley asked who would help Cy and Natalie teach Stetson to pray, we all said we would, despite the fact that, according to Paul, we don’t really know how to ourselves!)

When it comes to prayer, all we can do is tell God the truth; the truth about what we want and need, what we are thankful for and worried about, what we regret and what we hope, what we love and what we hate, our greatest dreams and deepest fears, and, then, trust the Holy Spirit to finish saying what we could not capture with our praying, because, as Paul said in this morning’s epistle lesson, “We do not know how to pray, but the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

But, while it is true that we don’t know how to pray, it is also true that we don’t know how not to pray.

We can’t not pray.  Prayer is our life.  Prayer is how we hope while we’re waiting, and how we wait while we’re hoping.  Prayer is not another religious obligation to add to our already over burdened lives; prayer is our life.  It’s how we hope while we’re waiting and how we wait while we’re hoping.  Prayer is how we hold one another in our hearts across distance and time; our prayers becoming God’s arms; holding one another up, holding one another near.

I was reading, this week, one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, when I came across a sentence in which Reverend Taylor said, “There are probably people of such faith that they pray without ever thinking about results, but I do not know any of them.”  When I read that, I thought to myself, “I do.  I know people who have traveled the path to depth with God so far for so long that they pray all the time, without ever thinking of results. They don’t think of prayer as succeeding or failing, working or not working, answered or unanswered, because they no longer think of prayer as a transaction in which God gives us what we want if we give God what God wants.  Rather, they just  pray all the time because they can’t not.  It’s their life; it’s been what they do for so long that it has become who they are.”

And then, what might happen next is truly amazing.  After we live long enough with prayer being our life, our life may, eventually, become a prayer.

If we make prayer our life for long enough, someday our life may become a prayer.  Our every response to every person, situation, success, failure, sorrow, challenge, frustration, betrayal, insult, victory, defeat, change and struggle might become so mindful and thoughtful, clear and true that it can only be described as a prayer; our whole, entire life, a prayer.

What started out as our decision to make prayer our life, may, eventually, lead to our life becoming a prayer.

            Amen. 

 

A Sermon On the Subject of Judgment

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 23rd, 2017 · Duration 16:17



"A Sermon On the Subject of Judgment"

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon On the Subject of the Bible

Psalm 119:105-112, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 16th, 2017 · Duration 15:52



"A Sermon On the Subject of the Bible"

Psalm 119:105-112

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

 

All Conversions are Approximate

Romans 7:15-25, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 9th, 2017 · Duration 13:13



"All Conversions are Approximate"

Romans 7:15-25

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

“I do not understand my own actions . . . I do not do the good I want, but the wrong I do not want is what I do.”

Bible scholars have long debated whether those words from this morning’s epistle passage describe Paul’s life before, or after, his baptism; some saying that it seems unlikely that, at the time of the writing of Romans, Paul would still be struggling to do the right thing, so long after his conversion and baptism.

But, what Paul describes here sounds, to me, like the life of every baptized person I have ever known; perpetually longing for a deeper goodness we do not yet have, reaching, day after day, for a deeper life with God.

My phrase for that lifelong struggle is holy discontentment; discontentment, not with what we have, but with who we are; not with where we live or what we drive, but with what we say and how we act; the kind of discontentment Paul describes when he says, “I do not understand my own self.  I do not do what I want, and I do what I don’t want”; the biblical equivalent of the poet Mary Oliver’s powerful sentence, “Another morning, and I wake, with thirst, for the goodness I do not have.”

We keep striving for that deeper goodness we do not yet have, not because we think we must do better in order to be loved by God, and not because we think a more centered, thoughtful, prayerful life will win us a reward, or spare us a punishment.  Rather, we, with Paul, long to live mindful, thoughtful, centered lives of goodness, kindness and righteousness because, as far as we know, this is the only life we are ever going to have, and we want to live it as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can.

If we were going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time, perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much how we live this life.  But, as far as we know, this life is the one and only life we are ever going to have in this world, which is why we keep striving for a deeper life with God, because we don’t want to waste the one and only life we are ever going to have being reckless and careless, hard and harsh, narrow and graceless, glib and shallow, deceptive and manipulative, sarcastic and unkind.

No one wants to spend their one and only life that way.  What we want is what Paul wanted in this morning’s epistle passage; to get on, and stay on, the path to depth; the path to a deeper life with God, a thoughtful, prayerful, mindful, gentle life of courage, compassion, theological depth and careful, truthful speech.

But, like Paul in today’s passage, our deep desire for genuine righteousness notwithstanding, we often fail.  Like Paul, we want to live lives of unfailing goodness and truth, but we often end up doing what we don’t want to do, and failing to do what we do want to do, after which comes the inevitable self-loathing and self-doubt, until, in our frustration with our own selves we say, with Paul, “O wretched soul that I am, who will deliver me from this complex, complicated, contradiction of a life I am living?”

One answer to that holy discontentment is found in Evelyn Underhill’s memorable sentence, “We must reach for what we do not have by the faithful practice of what we do have.”  We reach for the unfailingly thoughtful, mindful, prayerful, life we do not have by the faithful practice of our desire to be that way.  And, the more we practice being thoughtful, mindful, prayerful, truthful, gentle, generous, agendaless and kind, the better we get at it until, eventually, we begin to become more that way than we once were.

It doesn’t happen all at once, or once and for all.  But, little by little, step by step, we can actually go further and further on the path to depth; reaching for the unfailing goodness we do not have by the faithful practice of the spiritual longing we do have.

All of which calls to mind, for me, an article I once read about a minister in an Episcopal church in London, who, before entering the ministry, had served as an auctioneer at Sotheby’s.  Near the end of the article, the reporter who was interviewing the auctioneer-turned-pastor asked if he had noticed any similarities between the auction house and the church, to which the minister replied, “Actually, there is one way in which they are the same:  Back in the pre-computer days when I worked at Sotheby’s,” he said, “we would write, each day, on a big chalkboard, the currency exchange rates; British pounds to American dollars, and other conversion rates relevant to our customers.  However, since those currency conversion rates would sometimes change during the day, we would always write across the bottom of the board, ALL CONVERSIONS ARE APPROXIMATE.  Which,” he concluded, “I have found to be true, as well, in the church.” 

Indeed, all conversions are approximate; never complete or perfect, a life-long journey of falling down and getting up, reaching for what we do not have by the faithful practice of the desire for true holiness that we do have; never satisfied with who we are, always longing for, and reaching for, a deeper life with God.

Amen.   

 

The Lord Will Provide

Genesis 22:1-14, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 2nd, 2017 · Duration 5:47



"The Lord Will Provide"

Genesis 22:1-14

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

So Abraham named that place, “The Lord will provide.”  With those words from the last line of this morning’s Old Testament lesson, Abraham gave a beautiful name to a terrible spot; naming the place of the most frightening crisis of his life, “The Lord will provide.”

And, while I cannot speak for you, I can say that, in my own    experience, I have found what Abraham said, concerning his own life, to be true as well, for myself, and many others; in the darkest and most difficult of life’s struggles and battles, the Lord does provide.

Which is not to say that God will always step in at the last minute with a miraculous rescue, as God did in this morning’s lesson from the book of Genesis.  However, while God does not always give us the     protection we want, God does give us the support we need; the strength to keep going, the courage to do the next right thing, the people we need to comfort us, support us, and keep us on our feet until we can make it through what we did not get to go around.

The Lord does, indeed, provide; if not rescue, then courage, if not healing and relief, then new strength for each new day; the strength we need to live into, through and beyond, struggles so difficult that, if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to face, we would have sworn we would never make it through.

All of which calls to mind that unforgettable sentence of William Sloane Coffin’s, who, in his first sermon after the tragic death of his son, said, “This time, God gave us minimum protection, and maximum support.” 

Which is, so often, the case.  So often, what we get in this life is not protection from sorrow, but support in sorrow; the strength, the courage, and the people we need to help us go through what we did not get to go around; all gifts from God, who, as Abraham said, does provide; if not what we hoped to have, then, what we have to have to see us through the wonderful thing God might have done, but did not do.

Either way, whether it is the protection we hoped to have, or the support we have to have, thanks be to God, the Lord does provide.

                         Amen. 

 

Fill the Space with Grace

Matthew 10:24-39, The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 25th, 2017 · Duration 13:02



"Fill the Space with Grace"

Matthew 10:24-39

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

“What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, that admonition from this morning’s  gospel lesson is one I have always been slow to keep; slow to say, in the light, what the Holy Spirit has whispered, in the dark; hesitant to say, out loud, what I know, down deep, is true; hearing the Spirit’s whisper, but, then, instead of hauling it to the housetop, burying it in the basement.

Which isn’t always an altogether bad thing.  To the contrary, when we see what we believe to be new light on old truth, it is  wise to sit with it prayerfully, for a while, and test it against the central standard which Jesus gave us when Jesus said that what matters most is love for God and love for others, and all other ideas must be measured against that single central standard.  (If what we think we have heard in a whisper from the Spirit passes that test, and embodies, in deep, wide ways, love for God and love for all other persons, then, it might be new light.  If not, it is more likely just a dispatch from the echo chamber of our own desires and opinions.)

But, across my adult life, I have been slow to say out loud what I know deep down, less out of wise discernment than anxious fear; the fear that new light on old truth, clearly, plainly spoken, might bring what Jesus called, in this morning’s gospel lesson, “not peace, but a sword”; placing space between myself and my loved ones or friends who have not seen the same light or heard the same whisper.

I believe that many of us struggle with similar tensions in our spiritual lives; we see new light on old truth, and, then, we don’t know how to embrace that new light while also holding onto what we have always thought, and been taught, so we spend our lives not saying, out loud, what, deep down, we know to be true.  Instead, we just bury it, and pretend we didn’t hear that whisper of the Spirit, because to speak the truth about what we have come to believe might create space between ourselves and those whose approval or blessing we crave.

I thought about all this a lot last week, as I sat with my mother in this fragile chapter of her life.  In fact, one day, I slipped away for a while and went to the church where I grew up, and was ordained to be a minister; Log Cabin Baptist Church on Napier Avenue in Macon, Georgia.  Finding an unlocked door, I slipped into the empty sanctuary and made my way up to the pulpit where I preached my first sermon.  Looking out on that familiar old room, I could still see those dear and good people who first formed my life for God and the gospel; all of whom I yet love, but, very few, if any, of whom, would  embrace the truth about people, God, the Bible and life which I have come to believe.

In fact, let’s be honest; saying in the light what I have heard in the dark does, in some way, create the kind of division Jesus said it would in this morning’s gospel lesson; it creates a space between myself and my original family of faith; a wide space of real difference, but, a space full of nothing but love and grace.  Standing in that  sanctuary, surrounded by the ghosts of all those saints who first formed my life for God and the gospel, I could feel the space which had grown between us.  But, in no way, did it come between us.  It was just a space filled with grace.

I am a flawed and limited sinner; still in the process of being  redeemed.  But, in this one area of life, I can encourage you to do as I do: Listen for the whisper of the Spirit, say in the light what you have heard in the dark, and, if following Jesus in that way creates space between you and the world of your origins, between you and those you love, then let the Spirit of God fill that space with nothing but grace.

                                Amen. 

 

Stay Until You Leave

Matthew 10:5-20, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · June 18th, 2017 · Duration 15:26



"Stay Until You Leave"

Matthew 10:5-20

The Second Sunday after Pentecost

The Community of God

Trinity Sunday

Lesley Ratcliff · June 11th, 2017 · Duration 16:12

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

A Sermon on the Subject of the Holy Spirit

Acts 2:1-21, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · June 4th, 2017 · Duration 7:17



"A Sermon on the Subject of the Holy Spirit"

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost Sunday

Even after all these years, every time Pentecost Sunday rolls back around, I am struck, all over again, by the fact that Northminster’s red Pentecost paraments were given to us by Beth Israel; a powerful sign of the biblical truth that everything about Pentecost was Jewish before it was Christian.

Not only did Acts chapter two borrow the day of Pentecost from Exodus chapter thirty-four, the whole New Testament borrowed the Spirit of God from the entire Old Testament, where David prayed, in Psalm fifty-one, not to lose the Holy Spirit, Isaiah prayed, in Isaiah chapter sixty-three, not to grieve the Holy Spirit, and, in Ezekiel chapter thirty-seven, the wind of the Spirit transformed a graveyard full of dry bones into an orthopedic square dance revival.

All of which is to say that the Holy Spirit which blew into Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost was not a New Testament invention, or a Christian innovation, but, rather, the same Spirit of God which was present on the first day of creation, and has been at work, each day since, in the lives of the people of God.

We have made an industry out of making the Holy Spirit more complicated than the Holy Spirit actually is. The truth is, the Holy Spirit is another name for the Spirit of God, which has always been at work in the people of God.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God; present with us, speaking to us and working through us.

Several years ago, I was attending an interfaith dinner at the Hilton Hotel on Countyline Road, when a person who is a member of Fondren Presbyterian Church approached the podium to offer greetings to a ballroom full of Jews, Christians and Muslims.  As he made his way to the microphone, I thought of all the ways this one man had embodied the Spirit of God across a lifetime of courage and kindness, and it occurred to me that here was a person in whom the human spirit and the Holy Spirit had become so seamlessly integrated that one could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

And, needless to say, if anyone can be that way, everyone can.  The more prayerfully, and intentionally, we stay open to the Spirit’s nudges and whispers, the more deeply, and fully, the Spirit of God will transform our lives; until, eventually, the human spirit and the Holy Spirit will become so seamlessly integrated in our lives that we will no longer be able to tell where one ends and the other begins; a whole human life, filled with the Spirit.

                                  Amen.

Jesus’ Prayer for Jesus’ People

John 17:1-11, Ascension of the Lord Sunday, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 28th, 2017 · Duration 14:32



"Jesus’ Prayer for Jesus’ People"

John 17:1-11

Ascension of the Lord Sunday, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, I am asking on behalf of those you have given me . . . that you will protect them, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church throughout the world, those words from this morning’s gospel lesson. And, every time they roll back around, Jesus is still waiting for Jesus’ prayer for Jesus’ people “to be one” to be answered.

As you will, no doubt, have noticed, even in the New Testament, we were not exactly one, if one means united to, and in harmony with, one another.  Remember the rift in Rome over whether or not we should eat meat, and the conflict in Corinth over speaking in tongues?  (Not to mention those fractious disputations which tattered Paul’s relations with his once beloved Galatians.)

And, those divisions were only harbingers of greater battles yet to come.  Take, for example, the Council of Nicea in the year 325, where a roomful of bishops chose up sides behind Athanasius or Arius;  Athanasius insisting that Jesus was the same as God, Arius contending that Jesus was the Son of God; a conflict so fierce and public that the emperor Constantine  convened a council of bishops at Nicea to settle the matter, once and for all; Athanasius with eighty-something Bible verses in support of his view that Jesus was the same as God, Arius armed with more than a hundred in support of his view that Jesus was the Son of God; these verses versus those verses; bishops taking sides and hurling charges of heresy back and forth, until, in the end, Athanasius won because, while Arius had the most verses, Athanasius had the most votes.

And then, in the fifth century, came another great Christian conflict; this one over the question of what constitutes a valid and proper ordination and baptism. Known as “the Donatist controversy”, this debate actually escalated to violence and bloodshed; as marauding bands of Christians attacked the churches of those who did not share their views; a crisis which prompted Augustine to develop what we now know as the “just war” theory; an effort, on Augustine’s part, to give otherwise peace-loving Christians theological permission to take up arms against their Christian brothers and sisters who were physically attacking them.

I could go on, but you get the point; division among Christians is not a modern development, but rather, a perpetual condition.  (Jesus’ prayer for Jesus’ people to “be one,” notwithstanding.)

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I think about all that, a lot.  On the one hand, our many divisions and denominations probably bear witness to our failures at achieving the oneness for which Jesus prayed. And yet, on the other hand, what are we to do with real differences, not of style, but of substance, conviction and belief?

Differences of style are not dividing lines among Christians.  To the contrary, they give the church the beautiful gift of true diversity. For example, in my four years away from you, 2003 to 2007, my ministry on the streets of our city included a weekly worship service at the now demolished Maple Street Housing Project.  We met at three o’clock on Sunday afternoons, in an abandoned apartment furnished with twenty metal chairs and two mostly missing windows. We sang and prayed and preached, and though it could not have been more different from this beautiful space and liturgical pace, I experienced the presence of God as powerfully there, as here, because, in both places, the thing that mattered most was what Jesus said matters most; that we love God with all that is in us, and that we love others as we love ourselves.

Which, in my experience, is where the oneness, for which Jesus prayed, is to be found. People who have given their lives to that which Jesus said matters most; loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we love ourselves, do become what Jesus prayed for Jesus’ people to become; we become one, because loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we love ourselves eventually comes to determine everything else; our ethics, our welcome, how we see the world and how we look at all people, especially those who are most different from us.

Being content to let what Jesus said matters most, matter most, makes us one with Jesus, one with God and one with one another; which was, as you will recall, Jesus’ prayer for Jesus’ people.

                         Amen

 

When the Only Way Out Is Through

Psalm 66:8-20, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 21st, 2017 · Duration 14:17



"When The Only Way Out Is Through"

Psalm 66:8-20

The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

“We went through fire and water; but God brought us out to a spacious place.”

We cannot say with certainty if the one who wrote those words from this morning’s psalm was speaking of the literal fire and water through which Israel had gone in the exodus from Egypt and the exile to Babylon, or, if the psalmist was using “fire and water” as images for some difficult struggle in the psalmist’ own life, or both. But, in either case, when the psalmist said, “We went through fire and water, but God brought us out to a spacious place,” the psalmist captured the way life often is for many of us.

Most of us have found, or, someday, will find, ourselves going through what the psalmist called “fire and water”; struggles which threaten to overwhelm us, sorrows which take from us our energy and delight, changes which leave us exhausted, depleted, empty, angry or afraid; great struggles which come to us, not because they were sent to us from God or aimed at us by God, but, rather, because we live in a world where bad things happen, and if those bad things can happen to anyone, they can happen to everyone.

I understand the need so many truly wonderful people have for everything to be God’s will, to fit into a grand plan or a divine blueprint.  It is a need I once had, myself.  But, I am now content simply to know that we live in a world where beautiful and terrible things happen, and, if the worst of those things can happen to anyone, they can happen to everyone, including me and mine; not because God is that way, but because life is that way.   Some of life is just life; not part of a grand plan or God’s will; just life, in a world which is, to quote the famous 20th century American writer, Thornton Wilder, “awful and wonderful.”

And, when life is awful; when, in the words of today’s psalm, we are going through fire and water, the Spirit of God is with us to help us; giving us new strength for each new day as we go through the disappointment, loss, sorrow, struggle or complexity we did not get to go around; the Spirit of God, with us, and for us; embodied, most often, in the kindness and care of the people of God; the Spirit of God, speaking and working through our sisters and brothers in the family of faith.

When we live into, through and beyond the hardest and worst that life can bring, and emerge from it all deeper, kinder, stronger and better, it is almost always by that mystical alchemy of the Spirit of God, beside us, and the people of God, around us; the Spirit of God flowing through the people of God who, in their calls, cards and casseroles, embody the Spirit of God.

All of which takes me back to that wonderful story Mrs. Inola Hearn told several years ago, one Thursday morning, at the Yellow Church; a small story which I have Mrs. Hearn’s permission to repeat; a story about a Sunday school class which was one day discussing how much we all need one another when we are going through the fire and water of struggle and sorrow.  One of the class members disagreed with that perspective, saying, “I don’t need people, because I’ve got King Jesus in my life.”  To which Mrs. Hearn replied, “I’ve got King Jesus in my life, too.  But, when you get sick, King Jesus  is not going to show up at your door with some chicken soup and a pecan pie.”

But, the people of God will.  And, when they do, their kindness and care, their simple showing up, will embody the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God, embodied in the people of God, will help us to go through the fire and water of pain and struggle, and we will come out on the other side; perhaps even into what the psalmist called “a spacious place”; emerging from the pain with a deeper, kinder, more thoughtful and gentle spirit.

And, not just once, but over and over, again.  As you know, almost no one goes through only one hard thing in life.  Most of us go through fire and water more than once.  And, every time we find ourselves in one of those great struggles, going through what we did not get to go around; living in one of those fire and water moments when the only way out is through, we do go through.

With the help of the Spirit of God, and the people of God, thanks be to God, we can, and do, go through.

Amen.

 

“What Should We Say About John 14:6?â€

The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide, John 14:1-14

Chuck Poole · May 14th, 2017 · Duration 15:23



"What Should We Say About John 14:6?"

The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

John 14:1-14

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Those words, from John 14:6, have become, to popular Christianity, what the ninth inning closer is to a baseball bullpen; the one you can always count on to shut down the other team.

Specifically, whenever anyone raises the possibility that the grace of God might embrace persons who are not Christians, the verse most often quoted to shut down the conversation is John 14:6, “No one comes to the Father except through Jesus,” more often than not, with a kind of  “The Bible says it and that settles it” finality, which is why, every time the lectionary places John 14:6 in our path, I feel an obligation to help us think about what we should say about John 14:6.

For starters, careful speech requires us to acknowledge the fact that it is difficult for any of us to say, with integrity, “The Bible says it and that settles it,” about  anything, because we don’t believe it about everything.  If we believed that the Bible saying something settled something, we would sell all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, disable our alarm systems at home and at church, stop wearing jewelry, and embrace the redistribution of wealth as our guiding  economic principle; all of which is what the Bible says, but, apparently, does not settle, in Luke 14:33, Matthew 5:39, I Timothy 2:9 and Acts 2:45.

Let’s be honest; there might be a Quaker, Mennonite or Amish person out there somewhere who can say, with integrity,  “The Bible says it and that settles it,” but no Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian I have ever met in Jackson, Mississippi. The truth is, we don’t live that way, so we don’t get to talk that way, not even when it comes to John 14:6.

And, anyway, when John 14:6 says that, “No one comes to the Father except through Jesus,” John 14:6 probably isn’t even talking about what people are talking about when they talk about Christianity as the only way to heaven.

John 14:6 is one of several verses in John which appear only in John, all of which appear to be more about the incarnation than salvation:
                               The Son has made the Father known.
                               If you knew me you would know my Father also. 
                              I did not come on my own, but the Father sent me. 
                             The Father knows me and I know the Father. 
                             The Father and I are one. 
                             No one comes to the Father except through me. 
                             The Father is in me and I am in the Father. 
                             All that the Father has is mine. 
All of which is to say that, when John 14:6 is used to shut down conversations about the size of the circumference of the reach of the grace of God, John 14:6 is probably being sent on an errand it wasn’t written to run.

John 14:6 gets used that way a lot, and, one imagines, it  always will.  It’s everybody’s closer; the verse most often counted on to shut  down any conversation which raises the possibility that the embrace of God might reach beyond the boundaries which Christianity  has placed around the grace of God.

Which is understandable to me.  I used John 14:6 that same way for more than half my life.  And, the many people I know who  use John 14:6 that way today are dear and good souls.

But, I don’t use John 14:6 that way anymore.  And, I would encourage others not to, also, because, one thing the Spirit of God has revealed to me across a lifetime of walking and praying in the Spirit, is that, any time we use any Bible verse to place our conditions on God’s grace, we are probably sending that Bible verse on an errand it was not written to run.                                                                                                                                                                                   Amen. 

 

50th Anniversary Celebration Service

The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 7th, 2017 · Duration 77:56



50th Anniversary Celebration Service

The Fourth Sunday  of Eastertide

Concerning the Church

The Third Sunday of Eastertide, Mentor Sunday, Acts 2:14, 36-42

Chuck Poole · April 30th, 2017 · Duration 10:22



"Concerning the Church"

The Third Sunday of Eastertide, Mentor Sunday

Acts 2:14, 36-42

“Those who welcomed Peter’s message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. And they devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer.”  

With those words, today’s lesson, from the book of Acts, gives us the Bible’s description of the birthing of the church, which happened, according to Acts chapter two, when Jews from near and far had come to Jerusalem, as they did every year, to keep the festival of Pentecost.  But, this year, while the crowds were in Jerusalem on their annual Pentecost pilgrimage, the Spirit of God came in a way so new and different that some asked Peter what they should do, to which Peter replied that they should open their lives to the Holy Spirit, repent and be baptized.

And, according to today’s lesson, about three thousand of them did, after which they began to meet together and eat together; pray, study, learn and grow together; the birthing, and beginning, of what we now know as the church; at first, a frequently persecuted, mostly poor, largely powerless, fringe group; until the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity a government tolerated religion, and, then, a government endorsed religion, which some Christians celebrated because it gave the church political influence and economic power, but which other Christians did not welcome because they knew that every time Jesus had the opportunity to say “Yes” to that kind of power, he said “No” to that kind of power.  They knew that Jesus was not about that kind of power; so they separated themselves from the powerful post-Constantinian church, choosing to follow Jesus from the edges of the church; groups of believers on the margins of institutional Christianity, saying that the way of the church had strayed too far from the way of Jesus; a tension which became a constant within the Christian church across the Christian centuries.

Including, of course, our century; the seventeenth, when one of those radical marginal groups in England, called Separatists, (because they had separated themselves from the powerful institutional church) stumbled across a group of Mennonites in Europe, joined forces with them long enough to hold a baptismal service in a horse trough, and, then, returned to England in 1611 to birth what we now know as “the Baptist church.”

Several years later, some of them boarded a ship for New England, where they quickly got in new trouble for their radical religious views, whereupon they headed north to Maine, and, then, south, to Charleston, where they started the first Baptist church in the south in 1699, after which some of them eventually wandered west to Mississippi, where, a couple of centuries later, a handful of them were standing on a street corner in downtown Jackson, talking about the possibility of starting a new church, and, quicker than you can say, “fifty years later,”  Owen Carter, Keagan Croom, Lucy Elfert, William Seymour, Roger Stribling, William Walker and Ivey Yelverton are leading, in worship, the same church that was being imagined, on that downtown street corner, fifty years ago.

And it all started back there in this morning’s lesson from the book of Acts, when a group of people, still wet from the water of their baptism, started eating and praying, learning and growing together, on the original birthday of the church.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I never know how closely what the church has become, two thousand years later, resembles what Jesus had in mind, two thousand years ago.  Careful speech requires me to say that I struggle with all that, a lot.

The truth, as Barbara Brown Taylor once said, is that, “The work of God gets done in the world both because of, and in spite of, the church.”  Or, as I once heard one of my friends say, “The same church which can be the source of our greatest joys can also be the source of our deepest disappointments;” what the poet Mary Oliver once called, “The strange, difficult, beautiful church.”

But, while all churches, this one included, are less than perfect, each with its own blind spots, limits, failures and flaws, the church is, also, in my experience, the place where our lives are most profoundly shaped and formed for God and the gospel.

There is something mystical, and wonderful, about the way the Spirit of God is embodied in the people of God in a congregation; the way the people we know at church call forth that which is deepest and best in us, the way they mentor us without even meaning to; making the rest of us want to be better, just by being exactly who they are; shaping, lifting, coloring, stretching, and, little by little, transforming our lives.

It happens in church; our anchor and our sail; the anchor which centers us within these walls, and the sail which sends us beyond these walls; the strange, difficult, beautiful church, for which all of us can only say, “Thanks be to God.”

Amen.

 

Take Us With You

John 20:19-31,The Second Sunday of Eastertide, Senior Recognition Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 23rd, 2017 · Duration 16:51



"Take Us With You"

John 20:19-31,

The Second Sunday of Eastertide, Senior Recognition Sunday

Jonathan, Ben, Stone, Latisha, Shaun, Smith, Rose, Moesha, Meredith, Elijah, Will, Claire, Chris, Blair, Ally, Anna Kate and Shelby, all of us gathered here at Northminster today want you to know that, as you prepare to say a different kind of goodbye, and open the next new chapter of your life, your church will be with you, and for you.

Your next new chapters will take you places near and far; Oxford, Starkville, Ellisville, Hattiesburg, Spartanburg, New York, Paris Island, and Jackson, and, though we cannot go with you, we will, nonetheless, be with you; tucked away down there in the reservoir of your soul.

Some of you, I carried in my arms, up and down this aisle, on the day of your dedication.  Others of you came to Northminster in your childhood or adolescence.  But, all of you have been here often enough, long enough, in Sunday School, sanctuary, Bible Camp and youth house, to have had a lot of good strength tucked away down there in the reservoir of your soul, waiting to be brought up and put to work when you need it most in the next new chapter of your life.

Much of what Northminster puts down there in the reservoir of our souls has to do with living our lives in a thoughtful, prayerful, intentional way; a way of life which is summed up really well in Ephesians 5:15, (page 183 in your Youth House Bible) “Be careful how you live.” To be careful how you live includes careful speech, which includes being thoughtful about what you post or say on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it is too easy to say too much too quickly.  To be careful how you live also includes establishing clear boundaries around your own bodies, and being intentional about maintaining those boundaries, which requires keeping your judgement clear and unimpaired, because impaired judgement puts so much at such risk.

“Be careful how you live” is one great Bible verse to have down there in the reservoir of your soul, as is Romans 6:3-4 (page 146 in your Youth House Bible), the passage we read from the water at every Northminster baptism, the one which says that to be baptized is to buried with Christ and raised with Christ to walk in newness of life; the idea being that, the baptism which takes a moment, lasts a lifetime.  So, be sure to take the memory of your baptism with you into life’s next chapter, tucked away in the reservoir of your soul; a memory which might actually cause you to ask yourself, from time to time, What should a baptized person do in this situation? What does my baptism require of me in this moment?

And then, of course, there is Matthew 24:34-40 (page 26 in your Youth House Bible), where someone asked Jesus to name the most important scripture passage of all, to which Jesus replied, “Love God with all that is in you and love others as you love yourself,” what we sometimes call, around here, the cross-formed life; a simultaneously vertical, up to God, and, horizontal, out to others, life; a life of prayer to God and care for others; the kind, courageous cross-formed life which, in every chapter of life, calls us to sit down with and stand up for the same people Jesus would sit down with and stand up for if Jesus was in Oxford, Starkville, Ellisville, Hattiesburg, Spartanburg, New York, Paris Island or Jackson.

Take all of that with you, and you will be taking some of Northminster with you.

It won’t be magic, but it will matter, because, while a lifetime in church doesn’t guarantee success for anyone, it does give strength to everyone.

Remember, for example, Thomas, in this morning’s gospel lesson.  When Thomas was separated from the community of faith, out there all by himself, in verse twenty-four, he found it impossible to believe in the risen Lord.  But, surrounded by the others, in verse twenty-six, Thomas was able to see, remember and believe what, alone, he could not; a small reminder, for each of us, of how much all of us need one another; how much we all need the church.

All of which is to say that, as you’re gathering your things for this next new chapter, don’t forget to pack the church.  Take us with you where you go.  And, always know that your church will be with you and for you, no matter where, no matter what; with you and for you, not as perfectly as God will be, but as passionately, and prayerfully, as people can be.

                                Amen.   

 

Easter Hope

John 20:1-18, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 16th, 2017 · Duration 10:35



"Easter Hope"

John 20:1-18

Easter Sunday

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb . . .  And Jesus said to her, “Mary!” And Mary said to Jesus, “Rabbi!”  And Jesus said to Mary, “Do not hold on to me,” making Mary the first, but not the last, to try to hold on to the risen Lord.

We have two thousand years invested in holding on to the risen Lord; turning the unspeakable wonder of the resurrection into a doctrine of the Christian religion, and making the right belief in that doctrine a prerequisite for becoming a Christian and going to heaven, which is the ultimate holding on to the risen Lord.

Which is understandable.  When we get to heaven, we may all discover that all the world’s religions, as important as they are, were interim arrangements, and that our faith traditions were never God’s eternal divisions.  But, we’re not there yet, so it’s understandable that we would want to try to hold on to the risen Lord, as though the risen Lord belonged to us.

But, it won’t always be that way.  In the book of Revelation, John’s vision of eternity is that the ultimate and eternal Hallelujah Chorus will be sung by every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and even in the sea; aardvarks to Anglicans, manatees to Methodists, a brief and beautiful glimpse of the way it will be over on the Other Side.

Which is why I believe that, once we get over on the Other Side, we will discover that while, in our eyes, the cross was always a uniquely Christian symbol and the resurrection a uniquely Christian hope, in the eyes of God, the crucifixion and resurrection, like the creation, have always belonged to the whole human family the same; God, in the crucifixion, entering into all the suffering and sorrow, pain and death of all people of every time and place, and, God, in the resurrection, prevailing over all that pain and suffering, sorrow and death, for all people of every time and place.

That is the ultimate Easter hope; the hope of the resurrection, the hope and comfort which came to Mary at her most broken moment on that resurrection morning, and which comes, to us, in our most broken places, on this resurrection morning; the risen Lord, calling us by name, giving us the strength to go through the worst we must face, with the sure and certain hope that the God who is with us and for us is the God who, in the words of Carlyle Marney, can take what looks like the end of everything good, and turn it into the edge of something new.

Which is exactly what God did on that first resurrection morning.  When Jesus’ body was removed from the cross and placed in the tomb, it looked as though everything was over.  But, then, when God raised Jesus from the grave, God took what looked like the end of everything good and turned it into the edge of all things new.

And, ever since, we have been living on the leftovers of that one great, sunrise surprise; finding, in the resurrection of Jesus, the hope that keeps us always leaving room in the room for God, even in the hardest and worst of life, because we take the resurrection of Jesus to be a sign of the way God is; relentlessly taking what looks like the end of everything good, and turning it into the edge of something new.

That is the hope of Easter.  And, while I cannot speak for you, I can tell you that, in my experience, the deeper we go into that hope, the wider we go with that hope until, eventually, we no longer have any need to hold on to the risen Lord; content, instead to know that the risen Lord is holding on to us.

(And knowing that, even if we tried to hold on to the risen Lord, we couldn’t.  In fact, as recently as two days ago, Friday afternoon, to be exact, others tried to nail Jesus down, but, with no success, thanks be to God.)

                       Amen. 

             

Concerning the Cross

Philippians 2:5-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · April 9th, 2017 · Duration 12:47



"Concerning the Cross"

Philippians 2:5-11

Palm/Passion Sunday

“Though he was in the form of God, Jesus emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death; even death on a cross.”

Every year, on Palm Sunday, those words from today’s epistle lesson are read in churches throughout the world; ushering believers of every language and nation into the gathering shadows of another Holy Week, by pointing us in the direction of the cross.

Because the cross has become, across the Christian centuries, the central symbol of the Christian faith, and, because, as we enter Holy Week, the crucifixion of   Jesus is, once again, now so near, it seems right, and important, for us to ponder,    together, the cross, about which our choir and organ have so beautifully sung and sounded today; all of us, thinking together, concerning the cross.

What many millions of dear and good Christians believe, concerning the cross, is that Jesus died on the cross to give to God the sacrifice God had to have so that God could forgive us of our sin.

Behind that understanding of the cross, which is so central to so much of Christianity for so many people, is the basic belief that, our life with God is primarily about a problem and how to fix it; the problem being that, because Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, all subsequent people were, and are, alienated from God, by sin; a problem which could only be fixed by the offering of a perfect sacrifice, to God, for sin.  But, because all persons are born in the same sinful condition, no person could offer God a sacrifice sufficiently perfect to satisfy God’s requirement, which was why God sent Jesus, who, because he was perfect, could, himself, become the one and only sacrifice sufficient to satisfy God, which Jesus became, by dying on the cross.

But, even that sacrifice, perfect though it was, was still not enough to reconcile God to people and people to God, unless people responded to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross by believing the right things about Jesus; making the right response to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross the only way for people to be reconciled to God.

All of which is what countless millions of dear and good Christians believe, and say, concerning the cross.  And, there is scripture which seems to say the same.  But, the longer I live, the more I have come to see that, to say that God cannot be reconciled to people unless God is offered a perfect sacrifice, and, even then, the right sacrifice is effective only if it is responded to in the right way, sounds more like something people would say about God than something God would say about people.

There is, needless to say, much sin in the world, and many sins in our lives; from genocide and violence on a global scale, to the reckless acts and graceless words with which we bring hurt and harm to those we love the most.  There is so much from which we all need to repent, and for which we will all have to answer and make amends.

But, even so, I believe that our relationship with God is more about a life and how to live it, and a love and how to give it, than it is about a problem and how to fix it.  In fact, I believe that even if there had been no sin, God still would have come to us in Jesus, not because God had to have a perfect sacrifice of innocent life before God could be reconciled to us and we could be reconciled to God, but, because God is that determined to be with us; drawing us near and holding us close; healing our broken spirits and reconciling our broken relationships, calling us to live lives that are so filled with the Spirit of God that they become absolutely luminous with holiness; lives of courage and kindness; innocent, harmless, gentle, generous, truthful, transparent lives which instinctively sit down with and stand up for whomever is hurting most.

Which is the kind of life Jesus lived; which, according to the four gospels, is what got Jesus crucified.  The life Jesus lived was such a judgment on, and indictment of, the way people with power had decided the world worked best that they crucified him.

And, on that cross, in ways we will never begin to understand, Jesus joined us in our deepest depths of pain and rejection, betrayal and humiliation, suffering and death; over which all of which he will triumph and prevail for all of us, one week from today, at the other end of Holy Week.

Amen.

 

 

Out of the Depths

Psalm 130, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · April 2nd, 2017 · Duration 8:37



"Out of the Depths"

Psalm 130

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice.”  Because today’s psalm begins with those words, we know, from the start, that the one who wrote the psalm was going through some sort of sorrow or pain, fear or despair.

What we, at first, do not know is from which kind of depth the psalmist was calling out for help.  After all, there are many different depths through which one can go in this life.  Was the psalmist down in the depth of exhaustion or depression?  Bitterness or resentment?  Fear or despair?  Was it physical pain, or some great upheaval of the soul?

At first, we do not know.  But, then, once we get to verse three, we begin to see what the nature of the psalmist’ depth might be, when the psalmist says, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?”, an indication that the depth from which the psalmist cried was the complex, complicated grief of guilt; a sadness in which so many of us spend so much of our lives.

Which is why it is so important for all of us to hear, again, what the psalmist said, when the psalmist said, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?  But, there is forgiveness with you”; a powerful reminder that, while it is always important for us to face our guilt, and truthfully own it, it is also always important for us to know, in our depths, what the psalmist knew in his, which is that, even the deepest of our failures is no match for the depth of God’s redeeming love.

Which is why we are always careful to say that, while no one ever gets to start over from the beginning, everyone always gets to start over from here, because we, at our worst, are no match for God at God’s best.

                               Amen.

Through the Valley of the Shadow of Life

Psalm 23, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 26th, 2017 · Duration 13:41



Through the Valley of the Shadow of Life

Psalm 23

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

 

The Way Jesus Was

John 4:5-26, The Third Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 19th, 2017 · Duration 9:32



"The Way Jesus Was"

John 4:5-26

The Third Sunday in Lent

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” She said to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

Every three years, the lectionary places those words in our path, and, every time they roll back around, they take me back to the J.C. Penney’s department store on Hillcrest Avenue in Macon, Georgia.  I was about seven years old, so it must have been about 1962.  I had wandered away from my mother, and found myself standing in front of two water fountains, one marked “White,” the other, “Colored”; two options, from which, for reasons I can no longer recall, I chose the one marked “Colored.”  But, then, much to my surprise, as I leaned in for a drink, I felt my shirt collar being pulled backward, followed by a stern reprimand which sounded a lot like that moment in today’s gospel lesson, when the Samaritan woman reminded Jesus that Jews do not drink after Samaritans.

Two moments; one, at a well in John, the other, at a store in Georgia; both about water, and, both about xenophobia; fear of the other; fear of whomever does not look or sound or seem like me and mine.

The xenophobia in this morning’s gospel lesson was the fear which separated Jews and Samaritans from one another; a story of prejudice and  division which went all the way back to the separation of the Hebrew people into two kingdoms; the northern kingdom, called Israel, and the southern kingdom, called Judah; both of which were eventually defeated and carried into captivity; Judah in 589 B.C. by the Babylonians, and Israel, by the Assyrians, in 722 B.C.

When the Assyrians conquered Israel, they took some, but not all, of the people of Israel into exile; leaving most of the Israelites behind, after which the Assyrians brought in people from other places they had conquered; resettling them in the area of Samaria, which was a city in Israel.  So, now, Samaria becomes home, not only to the Israelites the Assyrians left behind after defeating the northern kingdom, but also to all of these new people of various backgrounds, who have been transplanted into Samaria by the Assyrians; which eventually led to a convergence of races and religions which many of the people of Judah looked upon with disdain; talking about their Samaritan neighbors as inferior, and treating them as outcasts.

All of which helps explain why, when Jesus, in today’s gospel lesson, asked the Samaritan woman for a drink of water, the Samaritan woman reminded Jesus that for a Jew to ask a Samaritan for a drink is something that is just not done.

Which, of course, is why Jesus did it.  We have read enough of the four gospels to know that when Jesus crossed that long-standing racial and religious divide between Jews and Samaritans by asking the Samaritan woman for a drink from her cup, he was just being exactly who he was.

We sometimes ask, in various circumstances and situations, “What would Jesus do?” as though we don’t have a clue.  But, if the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, more often than not we know what Jesus would do, in our world, because we know what Jesus did do, in his.

If the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, Jesus lived a life of love and welcome which kept him constantly reaching beyond the assumed and accepted barriers and boundaries of his time and culture; getting up every day to sit down with and stand up for whomever was most voiceless, powerless, marginalized, ostracized, demonized, dehumanized, left out, hated, hurting, and alone; a life that was never more fully embodied than in that moment in today’s gospel lesson when Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink of water.

That is the way Jesus was, which means that, if we are following Jesus, that is the way we will be.

There’s a reason why the deepest Christians we have ever known have the widest embrace we have ever seen; because that’s the way Jesus was, and the closer a person gets to Jesus the more a person becomes like Jesus, who lived as he died and died as he lived, arms out as wide as the world.

                                      Amen.

 

Careful Speech Concerning John 3:16

John 3:1-17, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 12th, 2017 · Duration 14:25



"Careful Speech Concerning John 3:16"

John 3:1-17

The Second Sunday in Lent

“For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only Son, so that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life.”

Every three years, the lectionary places those words in the path of the church, and, every time they roll back around, it seems important to speak about them as carefully as we can, because, across the centuries, they have come to occupy such an enormous place in the hearts and minds of so many Christians.

For many millions of dear and good souls, those words, “For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only Son, so that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life,” are the words which most clearly draw the line between Christians and the rest of the world;  which, in the minds of millions, is the line between those who will go, forever, to heaven when they die, and those who will go, forever, to hell.

For countless millions of dear and sincere people, that is the clear and plain truth of John 3:16: Whosoever believes what Christians believe about Jesus will go to heaven; whosoever does not, will not.  And, for many years, it was, as well, for me; until I actually began to meet real people, and make real friends, who did not believe what I believe about Jesus, but whose lives embodied, in clear and undeniable ways, the Spirit of God; Jews, Muslims, Hindus; people whose lives so fully embodied the Spirit of God that to believe they were going to eternal torment when they died, for no other reason than believing what their parents and grandparents believe, the same way I believe what my parents and grandparents believe, eventually became something I could no longer pretend to believe.  I knew better, and, in order to be an honest man, I had to say better.

For me, that long spiritual journey has been more about the Holy Spirit than the Holy Bible.  But, it has helped that, along the way, I have come to see that the gospel of John, with it’s powerful verses such as John 3:16-18, “Those who believe in Jesus will not perish, but those who do not believe are condemned already,” and John 14:6, “No one comes to the Father except through Jesus,”  was not written about our modern, massive, powerful Christian religion in opposition to other faiths, but, rather, for  a small minority community of believers within Judaism; Jews who, by the time the gospel of John was written, in the eighties or nineties A.D., had been put out of the synagogue for believing in Jesus; which means that we have to be very careful about how we use John’s words in our world; lest we make them mean, in our time, something they did not mean, in their time.

And, anyway, let’s be honest; what we believe usually has less to do with Bible verses than with what rings most true in the deepest corner of our soul.  Let’s be honest; if what we believe was really all about what the Bible says, we’d put as much weight on Luke 14:33 as we put on John 3:16.  But then, in order to be saved, we would not only have to believe the right thing about Jesus, but, also, give up all of our possessions; which we all know we are not going to do, no matter what the Bible says.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  We don’t need to give up all our possessions, but we do need to be honest, and say what we all already know is so; that everything we say is about the Bible is not really about the Bible.  Rather, the truth is, we believe what we believe because we believe it, and, more often than not, what we believe is what rings most true in the depth of our soul.

And, even that can sometimes change, because of who we meet, and come to know; theology chasing friendship.

Which may be part of what God had in mind, anyway.  After all, when God sent that angel choir to light up the night sky over Bethlehem, it was to announce, not the binding of a book, but the birthing of a baby; God, in person, in a person.

Or, to quote John 3:16, “God so loved the world, God gave God’s only Son.”  God; in person . . . in a person.  

And, still, it happens, over and over again.  What happened once in a big way in Bethlehem happens still in small ways in Jackson; the Holy Spirit comes to people through people; as inexplicably, unpredictably and undeniably as the Wind.

                             Amen.

 

"All the Resources of the Congregation"

Matthew 4:1-11, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 5th, 2017 · Duration 2:00



"All the Resources of the Congregation"

Matthew 4:1-11

The First Sunday in Lent

As you will, no doubt, have noticed, every time there is a baptism here at Northminster, the entire congregation promises the one being baptized what we promised Ella Jane Simmons this morning; “all the resources of our congregation.” 

The most important of which is the congregation.  The greatest resource of our congregation is our congregation; all of these dear and good sisters and brothers who call forth that which is deepest and best in all of us; making us want to be better, just by being exactly who they are.

Of all the resources of our congregation, the deepest and dearest is all of you; the people of God in whom the rest of us see the face of God, every time we make our way, together, to the table of our Lord.

                           Amen.

 

What the Catholics Got Right:The Ascent of the Mountain

James 2:14-18, Matthew 17:1-9, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Walter B. Shurden · February 26th, 2017 · Duration 17:06

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Annual Winter Lecture Series 2017 Part Three Q and A

"What Both the Protestants and the Catholics Got Right (Eventually and Episodically): The Descent into the Valley by Walter B. Shurden Minister at Large, Mercer University

Walter B. Shurden · February 26th, 2017 · Duration 54:48



Five Hundred and Fifty: The Reformation and Northminster "What Both the Protestants and the Catholics Got Right (Eventually and Episodically): The Descent into the Valley"
by Walter B. Shurden, Minister at Large Mercer University

 
Winter Lecture Series
February 25-26
“Five Hundred and Fifty: 
The Reformation and Northminster”
Led by Dr. Walter Shurden
Minister at Large, Mercer University
Saturday, February 25                Sunday, February 26
Lecture I followed by reception        Worship Hour-Sermon
Great Hall ~4:30—6:00 p.m.              Sanctuary ~ 10:30 a.m.
Lunch followed by Lecture 2 and Q and A
Great Hall ~ 11:45 a.m.
Cost of lunch:  $5 (adults) and $3 (children)
 

Annual Winter Lecture Series 2017 Part One

"What the Protestants Got Right: The Flight of the Dove" by Walter B. Shurden, Minister at Large Mercer University

Walter B. Shurden · February 25th, 2017 · Duration 60:07



Five Hundred and Fifty: The Reformation and Northminster "What the Protestants Got Right: The Flight of the Dove"
by Walter B. Shurden,
Minister at Large Mercer University

 
Winter Lecture Series
February 25-26
“Five Hundred and Fifty: 
The Reformation and Northminster”
Led by Dr. Walter Shurden
Minister at Large, Mercer University

Saturday, February 25                Sunday, February 26
Lecture I followed by reception        Worship Hour-Sermon
Great Hall ~4:30—6:00 p.m.              Sanctuary ~ 10:30 a.m.
Lunch followed by Lecture 2 and Q and A
Great Hall ~ 11:45 a.m.
Cost of lunch:  $5 (adults) and $3 (children)
 

A Different Kind of Perfect

Matthew 5:38-48, The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 19th, 2017 · Duration 13:54



A Different Kind of Perfect

Matthew 5:38-48

The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church throughout the world, those words from this morning’s gospel lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, they sound, at first, unreasonable and impossible.

But, then, when we read the entire paragraph to which that impossible sounding verse belongs, what we see is that when Jesus says, in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Jesus isn’t calling us to live flawlessly; which is something none of us can do.  Rather, Jesus is calling us to love completely; which is something all of us can do.

The paragraph which ends with Jesus saying, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” begins with Jesus saying, You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  But I say to you, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” so that you may be children of your Father in    heaven, who sends rain and sun on good and bad.  It is at the close of those words about the indiscriminate love of God, who gives, to all people, sun and rain, without regard for whether they happen to be good or bad, that Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect; a call for us, not to live flawlessly, which none of us can do, but, rather, for us to love completely, which all of us can do.

In fact, though it may sound hard and heroic, to love as God loves is neither; heroic or hard.  In my experience, to love all people as God loves all people really just requires us to see all people as God sees all people.  And, the way to see all people as God sees all people is to pray, every day, all through the day, for God to help us to walk in the Holy Spirit.  Live that fully open to the Spirit of God long enough, and, eventually, to love all people as God loves all people, which once seemed impossible to do, will become impossible not to do.  Stay open to the Spirit of God long enough, and what once sounded like Jesus’ most unreasonable demand will become our most instinctive response, because the daily prayer and practice of walking in the Holy Spirit will cause us to come to see all people as God sees all people, which will cause us to love all   people as God loves all people.

(Of course, here, we must be careful to be clear about what we mean when we say “love.”  To love all people as God loves all people does not mean to approve of, or tolerate, anything and everything.  There is real evil in the world, which requires us to make real judgements, and to stand up for those who are most marginalized and vulnerable by standing up against injustice and oppression.  This is love, not as the warm and fuzzy noun of Valentine’s Day, but, rather, love, as the clear and courageous verb of Good Friday.)   

As I was sitting with all of this earlier this week, my mind wandered back to my hometown.  Like Jackson, and most other cities in the American South, Macon, Georgia was, and still is, home to many churches and, per capita, as many Christians as any city in the country.  And yet, despite all those churches and Christians, or, perhaps, sadly, because of all those churches and Christians, if someone in our town had an adult child whose life left them outside the comfortable majority, they would often be heard to say, “We hated to see them go, but, honestly, we encouraged them to move to New York or San Francisco, where it might not be as hard for them to be who they truly are as it is down here, in the Bible Belt;”  a sad commentary on the Christianity which filled the air and the water in my hometown, because, the truth is, if the Christianity which filled the air and the water in my hometown, and, which remains so dominate in our part of the world, had embodied the spirit of the Jesus of today’s gospel lesson, the opposite would have been true.  Families in New York would have been saying to their loved ones who were different from the comfortable majority, “You should probably move down to Macon or Birmingham, Tupelo or Jackson; any of those cities in the Bible Belt where there are all those churches and Christians because, since those folk follow Jesus, they see all people as God sees all people, which means they love and welcome all people as perfectly as God loves and welcomes all people.”

That is the kind of life to which Jesus calls us when Jesus says, in Matthew 5:48, for us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect; a life which loves all people as God loves all people because it sees all people as God sees all people.

I heard that life captured in a single, simple sentence a couple of months ago, here at Northminster, at sunset on December the twenty-fourth. I was out in the narthex, waiting for the Christmas Eve service to begin, when a young man who grew up here at Northminster and was home for Christmas came up to me, and said, “A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with some friends one night, and, somehow, the subject of church came up.  I started telling them about Northminster, and how going to church here all my life had made such an impact on my life; like, it really changed my life.” So, somebody in the group said, “What do you mean, it changed your life?” To which, the young man replied, “Being at Northminster changed my life because that is where I learned that, if God loves everyone, then so should we.”

That is the life to which the Jesus of today’s gospel lesson is calling us when he tells us to “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  That isn’t Jesus calling us to live flawlessly; something none of us can do.  It is, rather, Jesus calling us to love completely; something all of us can do.

Amen.

                 

 

The Most Careful Speech of All

Matthew 5:33-37, The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 12th, 2017 · Duration 14:11



"The Most Careful Speech of All"

Matthew 5:33-37

The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

“Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

With those words from this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus called us to the most careful speech of all; speech that is so careful to be so truthful that it never needs any extra anything to punctuate it, no swearing or vowing or promises or oaths or anything; just “Yes, Yes” and “No, No”; a way of speaking which is the most careful speech of all; the simple, clear truth; plainly, clearly spoken.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I sometimes write those words, Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No,”  in my daily prayer journal, as a way of reminding myself to keep practicing the ever elusive skill of careful speech; speech which is content to operate within the boundaries Jesus established for his followers when Jesus said, Let your  word be “Yes, Yes,” or “No, No.”  Anything more than this comes from the evil one; speech which is, in all moments, situations, circumstances and conversations, what the Quakers call “gentle and plain.”

In my experience, that way of life and speech is a difficult discipline; one at which I continue to fail more often than I succeed.  And, I think I know at least one of the many reasons why that kind of careful speech is so elusive for so many, myself included.  Perhaps, one reason why careful speech is such a difficult discipline is that many of us learned, early in life, to make our way through life by using words in ways which work to our advantage.  For as long as many of us can remember, we have been making it through life by using the tactics and strategies of exaggeration, sarcasm, flattery, relentless teasing, smooth spinning and verbal bullying; just one strategy after another, which is how we learned, early on, to make our point, advance our agenda, win our argument, and just generally make it through life.

And, then, along comes Jesus, in this morning’s lesson from Matthew, with his simple words about words; Let your word be  “Yes, Yes” or “No, No.”

That kind of speech is a spiritual discipline at which we get better the same way we get better at playing the piano, hitting a baseball, cake baking, brick laying, chemistry, surgery, calligraphy, crochet, croquet, and ballet; by practicing.  As the great thinker Evelyn Underhill once said, “We must reach for what we do not have by the faithful practice of what we do have.”  We do not have a life of always thoughtful and mindful speech, but we reach for that life, which we do not yet have, by the faithful practice of what we do have; which is the longing to live, and speak, and be that way.

One small way to begin the long, slow journey to the most careful speech of all might be to memorize Matthew 5:37, Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No.” Anything more than this comes from the evil one.

If we can get those words down there in the reservoir of our memory and spirit, we may discover that they might eventually, actually start getting in our way.  Not always, of course, but, at least, sometimes.  So, we’re about to jump into a conversation with our juicy bit of information which is going to impress our friends, but then it hits us that what we are about to say is graceless speech, so we don’t say it; sometimes, even, stopping in mid-sentence.  Or, we’re about to make our contribution to that wireless world of boundariless speech, Facebook, and we pause long enough to wonder, “Am I about to release into the world a word of grace and truth, or just more syllables of sarcasm which will only add to the already over-wrought volume of the vitriol?

It isn’t easy, of course, making those kinds of changes, partly because our friends have grown accustomed to us having a less thoughtful and careful way with words; so now, it’s almost impossible to change.

If, for example, we start challenging the exaggerated choice of the false option, which fills the airwaves, confronting things that are not true, refusing to talk about people in their absence in ways we would never talk about them in their presence, being careful not to over-sell, spin or exaggerate even when it would work to our advantage, and, eventually, someone may say to us, “You seem different.”  And, then, we might have to say something awkward, like, “Well, actually, I’ve recently decided to try to practice becoming a person of more mindful, thoughtful, careful speech, because I have come to believe that to live that way is part of what it means to live as a Christian in this world.  And, then, they might say, “Isn’t that difficult?”  To which we will say, “Yes, Yes.”  And, then, they might say, “Well, then, if it’s that difficult of a discipline, do you think you might eventually give up on it?”.  To which we, of course, will say, “No, No.”

And that’s all.

Amen.

 

What Might God Want Most From Us

Isaiah 58:1-9, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 5th, 2017 · Duration 4:17



"What Might God Want Most From Us?"

Isaiah 58:1-9

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Is not this the worship I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to share your bread with the hungry and to bring the homeless into your house?

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s Old Testament lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, they remind us that the worship which matters most to God is the kind which sends us out into the world to live other-minded lives; sitting down with, and standing up for, whomever is most in need of help and hope.

Which, as you know, is not a novel notion in sacred scripture.  Rather, Isaiah’s voice belongs to a Bible-wide chorus which calls the people of God of every time and place to live other-minded lives; from Leviticus 19:9, “When you reap the harvest of your fields, you shall not reap all the way out to the edges; you shall leave the edges for the poor,”  to Deuteronomy 15:18, “Do not be hard-hearted toward your neighbor in need,”  to Luke 14:13, “When you give a dinner invite the poor,” to I John 3:17, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has this world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help them?”

Little wonder that more than twenty percent of our church’s budget leaves these walls for the wider world, helping support ministries such as Stewpot, Shoestring, Habitat for Humanity, Grace House, and a long list of others which lift the lives of those who are most in need of help and hope.  Little wonder we embraced “A Wider Net” fifteen years ago, opening our hearts and arms, doors and lives, to a neighborhood in need.  And, little wonder we give so much time and energy to Meals on Wheels, Adopt-A-School, Boarding Homes, Angel Tree, Caregiving, and so many other channels of grace which take our lives beyond our walls.

We do those kinds of things, and we live that kind of life, because we know enough about the Holy Bible, and we have enough of the Holy Spirit, to know that what God wants from us, and for us, is an other-minded life; a life of expansive piety; the kind of life which lets the love which has come down to us go out through us.

                                                                                                     Amen.

 

On Being Saved

I Corinthians 1:18-31, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 29th, 2017 · Duration 13:11

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon Rose Daniels

Youth Sunday, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Rose Daniels · January 22nd, 2017 · Duration 6:34

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon Will Hicks

Youth Sunday, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Will Hicks · January 22nd, 2017 · Duration 6:21

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon Anna Kate Williams

Youth Sunday, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Anna Kate Williams · January 22nd, 2017 · Duration 9:17

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Youth Sermon Anna Kate Williams

Youth Sunday, The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Anna Kate Williams · January 22nd, 2017 · Duration 9:17



Youth Sermon Rose Daniels

Youth Sunday

The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Too Light a Thing

Isaiah 49:1-7, The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 15th, 2017 · Duration 13:30



"Too Light a Thing"

Isaiah 49:1-7

The Second Sunday after Epiphany

On Taking Care Of What We Can Take Care Of

Matthew 2:13-23, The Second Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · January 1st, 2017 · Duration 5:49



"On Taking Care Of What We Can Take Care Of"

Matthew 2:13-23

The Second Sunday of Christmastide

In these first and early hours of 2017, who can say what this now new year might yet bring?

What will have changed about us and around us by the time 2017 is over and done? What challenges might we face in this now new year? What moments will arise which will call for clarity and courage in speech and action?  What joys, yet unseen and unknown, will lift our hearts?  What great sorrows might settle over our souls?

Perhaps the most we can safely say about the coming year is that, if it is like every other year which has come before it, it will be, to borrow a phrase from Thornton Wilder, “Awful and wonderful.” Every year, so far, has been both awful and wonderful because life is both awful and wonderful; not unlike this morning’s gospel lesson, where, across the wonderful story of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, there falls the awful shadow of the death of all those other little ones; joy and sorrow, gladness and sadness, beauty and terror, life and death, hope and despair, all on the same page, at the same time.

And so it is, always and ever.  Life is both awful and wonderful, in ways which none of us can predict or control.

In the face of all that is beyond our knowing and our control, all we can take care of is what we can take care of.  We can take care of whether or not we act and speak with courage and clarity. We can take care of whether or not we live in ways that are gentle and kind.  We can take care of whether or not we get up every morning and practice, day after day, all through the day, speaking the truth without exaggeration or sarcasm. We can take care of whether or not we embody the spirit of Jesus by sitting down with and standing up for those whom Jesus would sit down with and stand up for if Jesus lived in Jackson, which, according to the four gospels, would be whomever is most voiceless, powerless, marginalized, fearful, hurting and alone.

In the face of all the things we cannot know or control, predict or manage about this now new year, we can take care of whether or not we live lives of integrity and compassion, truth and grace. And, if we do that, if we take care of what we can take care of, then, we will be more ready to face and embrace the rest, whenever and however it comes.

Amen.

 

Concerning the Incarnation of God

John 1:1-14, Christmas Day

Chuck Poole · December 25th, 2016 · Duration 9:15



Concerning the Incarnation of God

John 1:1-14

Christmas Day

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . .  And the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.” 

Those words from this morning’s gospel lesson are among the most familiar, and beloved, in the Bible, concerning the incarnation of God; the Spirit of God embodied, fleshed out, revealed most fully, in the human life of Jesus; a life which today’s gospel lesson describes as being full of both grace and truth.

And Jesus was that way, wasn’t he?  Because he was full of grace, he gladly sat with sinners, and, because he was full of truth, he turned over the tables of those in the temple who exploited the poor.  Because he was full of grace, Jesus refused to condemn the woman in John chapter eight, and, because he was full of truth, he told her to go and sin no more.  Because he was full of grace, Jesus told the story of the prodigal son to show how wide is the welcome of the love of God, and, because he was full of truth, he told that story to confront the mistaken theology of those who were offended by, and grumbling about, Jesus’ wide welcome and liberal grace.

That is the kind of life Jesus lived, a life which embodied the Spirit of God; full of grace and full of truth.

To live a life which is full of grace is to live a life which is gentle and kind, a life of hospitality and welcome, patience, understanding, and forgiveness.  To embody the spirit of God is to act and speak and be that way; full of grace.

And full, also, of truth; confronting what needs to be confronted, making real judgments about things which are harmful and hurtful, standing up for victims of injustice and standing up to those who perpetrate injustice.

It isn’t easy, or simple, to live that way.   After all, when is “speaking the truth” just an excuse for being reckless and careless with our words?  On the other hand, when is “giving grace” an excuse for avoiding the confrontation I lack the courage to have?

There’s nothing simple about living a life of grace and truth; a life which so faithfully embodies the Spirit of God that our every conversation is full of nothing but grace and truth, truth and grace.

This is yet another one of those areas of life where Wendell Berry’s wonderful old observation applies:  “The heart’s one choice becomes the mind’s long labor.”  If, on Christmas Day in the morning, we decide that our heart’s one choice is to live a life full of grace and truth, then, it is altogether possible that before Christmas Day in the morning becomes Christmas Day in the evening, our heart’s one choice will become our mind’s long labor; because in some conversation or moment we will probably have to ask ourselves, “What will grace allow me to say about this?”  “What does truth require me to say about that?”

And, so it will go for the rest of our lives; each new conversation and moment, another opportunity to discover what it would mean, in that conversation or moment, to live up to our heart’s one choice to live a life which is full of nothing but grace and truth, truth and grace; a life which sometimes embodies the Spirit of God, which was always embodied in the life of the One whose birth we celebrate today.

Amen.   

 

God Is With Us

Matthew 1:18-25, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 18th, 2016 · Duration 11:0



"God Is With Us"

Matthew 1:18-25

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”

Every three years, on the fourth and final Sunday in the sacred season of Advent, the lectionary places, in the path of the church throughout the world, those words from today’s gospel lesson; along with that passage we read earlier from the book of Isaiah,  “Behold, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him  Immanuel”; which is the verse in Isaiah to which the writer of the gospel of Matthew is referring when he says, in today’s gospel lesson, concerning the birth of Jesus, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the prophet.” 

Of course, careful speech about the Bible requires us to say that, actually, when Isaiah said a young woman would bear a son and name him Immanuel, Isaiah wasn’t making a prediction about the birth of Jesus.  If you go back and read all of the passage in Isaiah to which the writer of Matthew’s gospel referred when he said, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” what you will find is a story about the time when two rival kings from nearby nations were conspiring to defeat King Ahaz of Judah.  As Ahaz worried about that looming problem, God sent Isaiah to tell Ahaz not to be afraid, because God was with him.  “In fact,” said Isaiah to King Ahaz, “God is going to give you this sign:  A young woman, who is already pregnant, will soon have a son and name him Immanuel.  And, before that child named Immanuel is old enough to know right from wrong, those two kings you so greatly dread and fear will be gone and forgotten.”

That’s what the passage in Isaiah is about; not the birth of Jesus, but God’s promise to help King Ahaz through a frightening and dangerous time, which probably means that, when the writer of the gospel of Matthew connected that story from Isaiah to the birth of Jesus, the writer of the gospel of Matthew was doing with his Bible what we do with ours; assigning a new spiritual meaning to an old Bible story.

Careful speech about the Bible requires us to acknowledge all of that about Matthew’s use of Isaiah’s story, so that we can embrace, in a truthful way, the point of both the Matthew and Isaiah passages, which is that God is with us.

God is with us is the central point of the Isaiah passage and the Matthew passage; and it is also the central message and meaning of the Christmas we will celebrate one week from today.

Pondering that most simple, basic, fundamental truth of all, the truth that God is with us, called to mind for me that beautiful old testimony of the great Quaker writer, Elton Trueblood, who, near the end of his life, said, “The  longer I live, I find myself believing fewer and fewer things, but believing them more and more deeply.”  That certainly is the case for me, and, one of those fewer and fewer things I find myself believing more and more deeply is the truth which travels in that beautiful old word, Immanuel; God is with us.

God is with us; if not to protect us from the worst, to see us through the worst, a truth of which I was reminded this week, as I prayed my way through our church roll, reading all those names by the light of our Christmas tree at home; Abell, Adams, Aden, Aldridge, Alexander, Allen . . . Wooley, Worley, Wyatt, Wylie, Yates, Yelverton, about four hundred and fifty households in all, pausing over each name to ponder prayerfully the little I know of all the great struggles and disappointments, battles and losses from which God has not spared us and did not protect us.  All of which, ironically enough, is one of the ways we know that God is with us.  If God was not with us to give us new strength for each new day, we could not have lived through the wonderful things God might have done but did not do.

But, God is with us.  God is with us, not because we are good, but because God is good.  God is with us, not because we belong to the right religion or profess the right faith.  God is with us, not because of a decision we have made, but because of a decision God has made; a decision God has made always to be with us, the ultimate sign of which is something that is going to happen one week from today, when Jesus will be born again; Immanuel, God with us.

Amen.

 

 

Lessons and Carols Service, The Third Sunday of Advent

Lessons and Carols Service, The Third Sunday of Advent

Choir, Orchestra, and Congregation · December 14th, 2016 · Duration 67:43

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

As Christ Has Welcomed You

Romans 15:4-13, The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 4th, 2016 · Duration 4:50



"As Christ Has Welcomed You"

Romans 15:4-13

The Second Sunday of Advent

(Sermon begins after about 39 seconds)

“Welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you.”  Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from today’s epistle lesson.  And, every time they roll back around, we know, instinctively, how wide is the welcome to which they beckon us, because we know how Christ has welcomed us; with nothing but boundless grace.  All of our hypocrisy and complexity, pretense and sin, notwithstanding, Christ has welcomed us with nothing but love.  So, we know what welcoming others as Christ has welcomed us will mean.  Welcoming others as Christ has welcomed us will mean living a life with wingspan; the reach of our welcome as fully open to others as Jesus’ arms were, and are, completely open to us.

While I cannot speak for you, I can tell you that, in my own experience, to live with a welcome that wide; a welcome so wide that we welcome others as Christ has welcomed us, is not a burden.  To the contrary, in my experience, it is life’s greatest joy.

My sisters and brothers, this is where the joy is; letting the love which has flowed down to us from God flow out through us to others.

If you want to find the true joy of the Christian life, the joy which no one can take from you, this is it; the joy which comes from getting in on what God is up to, by welcoming and embracing the whole human family, not out of tolerance or obligation, but with joy and celebration; just as Christ has welcomed us. 

                                           Amen.

A Sermon by Jill Buckley

Isaiah 2:1-5, The First Sunday in Advent

Jill Buckley · November 27th, 2016 · Duration 17:10



A Sermon by Jill Buckley

Isaiah 2:1-5

The First Sunday in Advent

Concerning the Budget of the Church

Colossians 1:11-20, Christ the King Sunday

Chuck Poole · November 20th, 2016 · Duration 11:32



"Concerning the Budget of the Church"

Colossians 1:11-20

Christ the King Sunday

Today is the day of the annually awaited, joyfully anticipated, stewardship sermon, and the day of little Jeb Snyder’s dedication.  Which, needless to say, wasn’t planned that way, but which, if you think about it, is, actually, a beautiful convergence; baby dedication and budget exhortation!

After all, it would be difficult for us, as a church, to keep those promises we just made to teach Jeb all about Moses and Miriam, Abraham and Sarah, Jesus and God, without rooms which are clean and lit, furnished and staffed, and heated and cooled; a Northminster network of nurture, care and spiritual formation, all of which is undergirded by the church budget, and, without which, it would be difficult for us to do all that we just promised to do for Jeb, and for all the others who are being watched over in our nursery, as we speak.

Of course, the most rigorously careful speech of which we are capable requires us to be careful to say that, while it would be difficult to form the lives of our children without a strong church budget, and all the infrastructure it supports, it would not be impossible.

The truth is, we could all learn about Jesus and God gathered in an open field, or a public park, or in someone’s living room.  We have to be careful to be clear about that, lest we recruit God into our twenty-first century, middle-class, North American assumptions about church budgets and the programs, activities, and facilities they support.  The God we worship, the God about whom we read in today’s epistle lesson, who was embodied in the life of Christ, created a universe which is, apparently, approximately thirteen billion years old in one direction, and still expanding in the other direction, so we have to be very careful about tying that enormous, transcendent, inexhaustible God too closely to any religious or institutional structure, including our own.

We have to keep our thinking clear about all this, and say what we know to be true; which is that, our lives could be formed for God and the gospel without a large church and a strong budget; but not in the way we do it, because the way we do it requires spaces to gather, material to study and ministers to help; not to mention facility maintenance, copy machines, sound systems, choir robes, laptops, insurance, mustard, ketchup, animal crackers, cheese straws, wireless capacity and all sorts of institutional infrastructure which most of us never think about until something runs out, breaks down or goes wrong; all of which supports a way of forming lives within our walls, and reaching lives beyond our walls, which needs and deserves the financial support of every one of our members.

Six months from now, in May of 2017, we will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of our church; a church birthed as a less than perfect place for less than perfect people. And, while Northminster continues to be a less than perfect church, we are also a more than wonderful place in which to be comforted and challenged by God and the gospel from cradle to grave.  And, while we don’t do that holy work perfectly, it does happen here in ways which strive to be clear and truthful, including, even, being careful not to blur the lines between the budget and God, not even on stewardship sermon Sunday.

That’s the kind of church where you want your children to grow up, and your life to be formed; a church which strives for clarity and truthfulness, because a lifetime in that kind of church will help form us into people who are truthful and clear in our words and actions.

And, that kind of church, which is this kind of church, needs, and deserves, to be supported financially by all of us to the full extent that each of us can.

And, then, when we have all given what we could, we will have all done what we should.

Amen.

 

An Exercise in Biblical Interpretation

The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost, II Thessalonians 3:6-13

Chuck Poole · November 13th, 2016 · Duration 12:12



"An Exercise in Biblical Interpretation"

The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost

II Thessalonians 3:6-13

“Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” Across the years, from time to time, I have heard those words from today’s epistle passage enlisted in support of the idea that the Bible teaches that anyone unwilling to work should not eat.

Which is, in fact, what those words say, when you look at them, on the page.  But, then, after we look at those words, if we look behind them, we remember that, in all likelihood, those words were written to the church at Thessalonica to help clear up their confusion about the return of Christ; a confusion which had, apparently, resulted in some members of the church stopping working, to watch and wait for the return of Christ, because they thought Christ was coming again any day.  So, when Paul said, to the Thessalonians, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” Paul was probably trying to correct that eschatological idleness, as in, “Get back to work. You can’t just sit around waiting for Jesus to come back.  In fact, those who are unwilling to work should not eat.”

That’s what you find when you look behind those words, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”  Needless to say, we all struggle with complex questions about how best to help those who are in need.  But, those words from today’s epistle lesson are not a neat and tidy “The Bible says it and that settles it” resolution to the complexity of compassion in twenty-first century Jackson.  Rather, those words are Paul’s effort to address a specific situation for a specific congregation in first-century Thessalonica.

That’s what you find when you look behind those words,  “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” And, then, if you read the rest of the Bible and look around those words, you see, in the same Bible where one verse says, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” another verse which says, “Give to anyone who begs from you,” an example of the fact that the  Bible often speaks with varied voices, on the same subject; which is why, as much as we might like to, we don’t get to shift our responsibility for thinking and praying in the Holy Spirit to chapters and verses in the Holy Bible.

Rather, serious, thoughtful, Biblical interpretation requires us to look, not only at the words on the page, behind the words on the page and around the words on the page, but, also, beyond the words on the page; opening our lives to the wind of the Spirit; asking the Holy Spirit to lead us into the truth which will most closely align our lives with God’s love.

That is how to interpret scripture. It’s actually very simple. First, we look at the words on the page. Then, we look behind the words on the page, to see what they may have meant to those to whom they were written.  Then, we look around the words on the page, to see how they match up with all the other words on all the other pages in the Bible.  And, then, finally, we look beyond the words on the page to the Spirit of God, which is ultimately what matters most. What matters most is that we embody the Spirit of God in the world, even when the Spirit of God takes us past the place where the words on the page might have dropped us off, because, as important and wonderful as scripture is, the Holy Spirit is more important than the Holy Bible.

Take, for example, those words from this morning’s passage in First Thessalonians, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” Every time the lectionary places them in our path, I find myself thinking about my grandfather, Eugene Poole, progenitor of what we call, in our family, “the Gene Poole gene pool.”

Daddy Gene was a local legend in Kite, Georgia for his ragtime piano playing, his amazing gift as a street-corner comedian, and, sadly, for being, in the words of today’s epistle passage, “unwilling to work.” 

My dad once told me about a time when people from the church came to help them, when he was a boy, and how, even though he was a child, he could sense that the folks who brought the food to their door were resentful about helping them, because everybody knew that the Pooles were hungry, not because Daddy Gene was unable to work, but because he was, in the words of today’s epistle passage, unwilling to work.

But, they came anyway. Even though they could have used that Bible verse we read this morning to leave my family off their list, they didn’t. They could have just looked at the words on the page and said, “Anyone unwilling to work shall not eat.  The Bible says it and that settles it.”  Instead, they kept going past the place where a Bible verse might have given them permission to stop, had they chosen to use it that way; a small, simple example of how life looks when love looks beyond the words on the page; a way of reading the Bible which Barbara Brown Taylor once captured when she said, “I love the Bible, but I hope never to love the Book more than I love the people the Book calls me to love.”

Which, no matter what the issue or question may be, is always the right way to read and interpret the Bible; through the lens of love, in the light of love, for the life of love.

                                                          Amen.

 

Where the Life of Faith Meets the Pain of Life

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4, The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 30th, 2016 · Duration 13:39



"Where the Life of Faith Meets the Pain of Life"

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?”  With those words, Habakkuk joins his voice to a Bible-wide chorus of questions and complaints; complaints and questions which travel about in verses and voices such as Psalm 13:1, “How long, O Lord, will you forget me?”  Jeremiah 15:18, “Why is my pain unceasing and my wound incurable?”  Lamentations 3:8, “Though I cry for help, God shuts out my prayer”; Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, and, of course, Habakkuk, in this morning’s lesson of scripture, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen?”; a Bible-wide chorus of questions and complaints, all rising from the place where the life of faith meets the pain of life, each asking their own version of the same question, “If God cares, and if God can, then why doesn’t God do more? If God cares, and if God can, then why doesn’t God step in and stop things    before they go so far and get so bad?”

In the popular  Christianity which is so dominant in our part of the world, the most frequently repeated answer to, and for, those questions is that when God doesn’t step in and stop the agonies, miseries, tragedies and injustices in this world, it is because God is planning to use those  agonies, miseries, tragedies and injustices to accomplish God’s purposes.

Many of the best people I know embrace some version of that as the reason God doesn’t always step in and stop things.  And, for all I know, they may be right, but I find it hard to believe that the same God who could create a universe of such vast wonder and unspeakable beauty as the one in which we live cannot accomplish good purposes in one life without utterly destroying another.

The answer to that objection, most often, is that God doesn’t send tragedies, terrors and troubles, God just allows them, which is something I, too, used to say, many years ago.  But, then, it occurred to me, one day, that the difference between God    sending a tragedy, disease or devastation and allowing it, even though God saw it    coming and could have stopped it, is not enough of a difference to matter.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I have come to believe that, when it comes to those questions which rise from the place where the life of faith meets the pain of life, it is almost always better for us to ask them than it is for us to answer them.

There’s never anything wrong with asking those questions; but sometimes it might be best for us to be content to let the questions stand; in the words of Rainer   Maria Rilke, to “love the question,” without feeling the need to answer it;  content to know that God can be trusted, even when God cannot be explained or understood;  trusted to give us the strength to go through the terrible loss we did not get to go around.

                                                 Amen.

The Democracy of Prayer

Luke 18:9-14, The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Steven Fuller · October 23rd, 2016 · Duration 22:33



The Democracy of Prayer (And the Heavy Doors of Northminster)

Luke 18:9-14

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

While the Temple of Jerusalem was built on a high and holy hill, the floor is level where the Pharisee and Tax Collector stand to pray to God.

Jesus presents a kind of democracy in our parable today, a levelness that    attends the prayers we bring to God, a sacred space for saint and sinner, Pharisee and Tax collector alike, to stand before God and be heard. the world beyond these walls, there are mountains and valleys, ladders to climb up and ditches to fall down, thrones to reign over and shadows to hide under. But when we walk into this sanctuary, we pray on a level floor.

Like most democracies, the democracy of prayer can make us uncomfortable, especially when we don’t approve of the people standing beside us. I see why Jesus would take some time in his teachings on prayer to express the equitable order of life before God. Like our Pharisee, it’s too easy for people like me who work hard to build lives of righteousness to think we’ve raised a high bench upon which we can sit and judge others. He prays, “Thank you God that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” Pharisees may build towers of religious justification, but Jesus reminds us of that Gospel paradox that the path upward to God has a downward slope. There is no priestly pulpit, political platform, or moral mantle with which we can raise ourselves above our neighbors when we go before God. The floor is level where we come to pray.

But that is not news to Northminster. Such truth is laid in the floors of our sanctuary, kept in the silences of our worship, and opened to all through the heavy doors of our welcome. first time I walked into this sanctuary, six years ago, Doug Boone opened the doors for me. Looking in from the narthex, he explained the theological foundation for the structural formation of the sanctuary. After pointing out the many ways in which the cruciform sanctuary expresses Northminster’s pursuit of a cruciform life, he also pointed to the floor. his finger trailed the aisle from the narthex to the chancel, he said that the back of the sanctuary is intentionally level with the chancel.You see, while the floor has a slight downward slope, the back of the sanctuary is level with the front so that those sitting on the back pew sit at the same height as those who sit in black robes at the front of the sanctuary. sanctuary was built to embody the theological conviction that the floor is level where we come to pray. Sure, we lift the word of God, raise our voices in praise, and hold high the cup of salvation, but we worship God on a level floor.

The democracy of prayer is built into the bones of our sanctuary, and then every Sunday, when we gather to worship God, we honor the democracy of prayer in our worship when we keep silence.  This may sound weird, but what is more democratic than silence? In a world where words travel faster and farther than anything, and are so often flippantly flung or violently voiced, what is more democratic and prayerful than keeping silence? Sure we can all hold high the cup or voice an individual vote in democratic unity, but to keep silence together...Silence has a most democratic reign, which we must all respect or else it is lost. we keep silence, each of us has a hand on this holy moment, this fragile fragment of a holy hour, keeping it, holding it, in a world where words and noise are always ready to rush in and take it from us. We respect one another’s words, affirm one another’s faith, and echo one another’s prayers when we keep silence on one another’s behalf.

We don’t just stay silent at Northminster, we keep it.  And in one of those intentional silences here at Northminster, we keep that space open for confession. We keep that space open for the tax collector in all of us as we go before God and ask for mercy individually...together. I love to sing, and I love to preach, and I love to take communion, but there is nothing we do together as a congregation more vulnerable and intimate than keeping silence for confession together.  In that moment, we are silent together, but we are also vulnerable together and repentant together, opening our eyes to the sin of our lives as we open our souls to the mercy of God. We honor the democracy of prayer in the common silence of confession.

The democracy of prayer is a conviction we built into our sanctuary and keep in our silences, and it’s with this same democratic conviction that we open wide the doors of our welcome.  While only one of the parable’s two characters went home justified, they were both given a place to stand and be heard.  Despite the loudness of our world, keeping doors open can be just as hard as keeping silence. The Pharisee’s    response to the Tax Collector’s presence proves that feeling contempt for others is nothing new. Humans have always searched for heights from which we can look down at others. And yet it seems that Facebook, Twitter, and the 24-hour news cycle give us far more opportunities to cultivate contempt for others than ever before: surrounding us with merciless stereotypes and turning real and complex human persons and situations into reactionary headlines meant to grab us and incite us. When have human hearts been so overwhelmed with contempt for people we’ve never known, touched, stood with, or prayed beside? It seems we know just enough about too many people to have contempt for them, and yet we don’t know enough about them to have compassion for them. Nasty or deplorable, contempt is contagious. It can make us want to shut our doors to those we don’t want to find praying beside us, those whom we don’t feel are worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us before God.

But that’s not Northminster. And this isn’t new. When this church was founded almost 50 years ago, it was founded with the explicit intent of opening its doors to everyone at a moment history when other churches intentionally shut some out. In the middle of that wide open welcome is the conviction that we all need a place to stand before God, a level floor from which to voice our prayers, and a common silence in which to confess our sin.  You see, the democracy of prayer at Northminster starts from the floor, moves up through our worship and out through our doors, inviting all who are in need of a savior to come and worship, sit and pray before God, surrounded by a community of sinners all in the process of being redeemed.

Our duty as faithful porters of Northminster’s wide open welcome should not be taken lightly, because our doors are heavy. This edifice was not constructed with screen doors that flap open with a breeze and slap against the siding. You gotta want to open these doors. And some of you may not be aware of this, or at least you were   unaware of it until you found yourself trapped in the narthex after lingering a little too long, but our big ol’ doors have magnets on them...really strong magnets set on timers. More times than I’m proud to admit, I have run my face right into one of our big ol’ doors because I didn’t time it right while pushing that little green button of   deliverance.

It takes two hands to open our doors. The heavy wood and strong magnets may imply stubbornness, a criticism that can be leveled at most any institution, but there’s something good and true about the heavy doors of Northminster. You gotta want to open them. The heavy doors of Northminster do not open haphazardly. Like the floors of our sanctuary and the silences of our worship, we open the heavy doors of our welcome with intent. And it takes real effort, doesn’t it, to keep the doors of our welcome open? But just like the pathway to our Lord’s table, we take the time and put in the work to open them wide, because the democracy of prayer, the holiness of     worship, and the wide welcome of our impartial God that we built into our bones and keep in our silences is honored when we take the time and make the effort to open wide the doors of our welcome, the heavy doors of Northminster.

Most of you have heard by now that December 11 will be my last Sunday as Student Pastor at Northminster, after which my family and I will move to NC to follow my calling as Senior Pastor of FBC of Gastonia. As someone who first walked through these doors 6 years ago and will go from this place to another place in a couple months, I want to bear witness before God and all who are gathered here to the wide welcome with which you have received me, Chase, Wake, and Beckon into your doors and into your life together.

As a disciple, I have been challenged by the Gospel of Jesus Christ and carried by this congregation throughout my life here.

As your student pastor, I have been given the freedom to lead with my conscience and the support to do it well. It’s been such a gift to my life and my ministry,  to worship with you, serve beside you, and learn from you. Your youth are my youth. That is a point of pride for me, one which grows ever tender as I anticipate our move.

And as a dad to two of your members, I have not only known the joy of   handing my boys off to the church as Chuck walked them down these aisles, I’ve also known grace of handing my boys off to Annette Hitt,  M’lee Williams, Valerie  Linn, and many others in this house and at the Fuller house when, literally or figuratively, my arms were too full, and I needed help.

You see, we are not only stewards of floors, silences, and doors on behalf of others as a selfless act of Gospel conscience. But, like our love for God, the love and welcome we give to others is inextricably connected to the love we receive for ourselves. We not only keep these doors opened wide for others, we keep them opened wide so that no matter where we go or what we do, we can always get back in. The floor is level where we come to pray, the silence is shared when we confess our sin, and the doors of Christ’s church are opened wide, ever inviting us into the presence of God and the grace of Christ Jesus our Savior.

Thank you, Northminster, for letting me in. And thanks be to God.
                                  Amen.

 

Toward a More Truthful Relationship With the Bible

II Timothy 3:14-4:5, The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 16th, 2016 · Duration 13:30



"Toward a More Truthful Relationship With the Bible"

II Timothy 3:14-4:5

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

“But, as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how, from childhood, you have known the sacred writings.”

Based on those words from this morning’s epistle lesson, it would appear that someone had done for Timothy, when he was a child, what we all just promised to do for Davis Frame, when we said that we would teach Davis about Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Jesus and God; all of whom we find in our version of what this morning’s epistle lesson called, “the sacred writings.”

Of course, the sacred writings Timothy had learned in his childhood would not have been the same as what we call “the Bible,”  because the  sixty-six books we call “the Bible” were not officially declared by the church to be the Bible until about three centuries after Second Timothy was written.  But, while the books are not the same, the point is, and the point, then and now, is this: “Sacred scripture holds a large and important place in our lives.”

To be content to say that about the Bible; “Sacred scripture holds a large and important place in our lives,” might be, for many of us, a step in the direction of a more truthful relationship with the Bible.

Here in our corner of the world, it can be hard to be content only to say, “Sacred scripture holds a large and important place in our lives,” because so many people with whom we work and go to school talk about the Bible in ways that sound so much bigger and better than that.  To say, “Scripture holds a large and important place in our lives,” seems less impressive than saying, “The Bible is the perfect revelation of God, in which every word is authoritative for all times and places.”

That sounds like a bigger, better compliment to pay the Bible than simply to say, “Scripture holds a large and important place in our lives.”  But, to be content to say, “Scripture holds a large and important place in our lives” would be, for most people, a more truthful way to speak of our relationship to the Bible, because almost all of the many wonderful people who say that each word in the Bible is perfect and authoritative for all times and places, apply that standard of perfection and authority in a highly selective way.  They have no problem, for example, with protecting their home with burglar alarms, despite the fact that Matthew 5:39 says, “Do not resist an evildoer,” and they continue to need walk-in closets, despite the fact that Luke 3:11 says that if you have two coats you should give one to someone who has no coat, and they are not socialists, despite the fact that II Corinthians 8:15 affirms the principle that those who have much should not have too much so that those who have little will not have too little, and they continue to shop, despite the fact that, in Luke 14:33, Jesus says, “You cannot be my follower unless you give up all your possessions.”

Confronted with all of that, the most common response is, “Well, everybody knows you can’t take those verses literally.  They have to be interpreted.”  Which is true and right; those verses do have to be interpreted.  But, if those verses have to be interpreted, so do all the other verses in the Bible.  We don’t get to interpret the verses which we are afraid to apply to ourselves, and then take literally the verses which we are eager to apply to others, while simultaneously claiming to take every word of the Bible as the perfect and authoritative Word of God.

I know a good bit about that way of using the Bible, because it is a way of using the Bible with which I, and millions more, grew up.  The Bible verses which would have challenged our consumerism and materialism, comfort and security, we found ways to interpret, so we could continue to talk about the perfect authority of scripture without having to rearrange our lives, while we took literally those verses which made those of us in the comfortable majority feel superior to those who were different from us; picking and choosing our way through the Bible, while simultaneously claiming to believe that every word in the Bible was perfect and authoritative for all time.  (And, here’s the amazing thing about all that; none of us ever called out any of us.  It was as though we had all entered into some sort of unspoken agreement that none of us would ever point out to any of us how hypocritical we were when it came to the way we used the Bible.)

Think of how much more truthful our relationship to the Bible would have been if we had been content not to use the idea of “the perfect authority of the Bible” to prop up our lives and hold down others, but, instead, simply to say, “Sacred scripture holds a large and important place in our life.”

Think, for a moment, of how much more truthful everyone’s relationship to the Bible would be if we all just read the Bible, studied the Bible, loved and learned from the Bible, and said, “Sacred scripture holds a large and important place in our lives.”  Period.  That’s all.

                                                       Amen.

 

Adjusting

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 9th, 2016 · Duration 10:36



"Adjusting"

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Sooner or later, everyone has to adjust to something, which may be one reason why today’s Old Testament passage has come to be so beloved by so many; it just might be the ultimate Bible passage on adjusting; coming to terms with the life we have, even when the life we have turns out to be very different from the one we planned or dreamed, wanted or wished.

The lesson we read this morning from the book of Jeremiah is an excerpt from a letter the prophet Jeremiah wrote the people of Judah who had been carried away captive into exile in Babylon.  Life, for them, was turning out in ways they never would have dreamed.  But, at this point, it was still early in the exile, so they were still hoping that their present struggle would soon be over, so that they could return to their homes and get on with their lives.

And, there were, apparently, some preachers who were encouraging the people of God to hope that hope of a soon return.  In Jeremiah chapter twenty-eight, for example, a prophet named Hananiah told them that this would all be over in two years, and, then, everything could get back to normal.

The exiled people of God liked the sound of that sermon.  But, then came Jeremiah, throwing the cold water of careful speech on Hananiah’s optimistic prediction of a brief exile and a soon return: “Don’t listen to those preachers who are telling you what you want to hear about the tenure of your trouble and the date of your return,” says Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 29:9, “Only when Babylon’s seventy years are complete will God visit you and bring you home.”

Of course, we all know what “seventy years” means in the Bible. Psalm 90 says, “The length of a life is seventy years.”  So, “seventy years” is Bible shorthand for “a lifetime,” which means that what Jeremiah was saying to the people of God in exile was that life in exile was the only life they were ever going to have.

Which may explain why, in that part of Jeremiah’s letter which the lectionary asked us to read this morning, Jeremiah said, to the people of God, in exile, in Babylon, “Build a house and plant a garden.”  If they didn’t build a house and plant a garden in Babylon, they would never build a house and plant a garden anywhere, because this was it.  “This is your life for the rest of your life” said Jeremiah, “The only one you are ever going to have.  So, build a house and plant a garden, because, if you put your life on hold until you get out of Babylon, the life you’ll be putting on hold will be the only life you are ever going to have.  Build a house and plant a garden; settle in, adjust to, and make peace with, the life you have, because this is it.  This is your life.” 

Those words of Jeremiah’s may not have been written to us or about us, but, they certainly do carry a powerful word for us; a strong and true word about the hard and holy work of adjusting to those realities which will not adjust to us; learning to live deeply, fully and faithfully the life we have, even when the life we have is different from the life we planned or dreamed, wanted or wished.

All of which might not matter so much were it not for the fact that we are all going to die someday, and, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over and get it right next time.  This is it.  This is our life.  And, even though it may no longer bear much resemblance to the life we had always assumed we would have, the life we planned and dreamed, wanted and wished, it is the one and only life we are ever going to have in this world.

So, let us choose, today, while there is still time, to get up every morning and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, live whatever is left of the life we have, as deeply, fully and faithfully as we can.

                                                      Amen.

 

Courage

II Timothy 1:1-14, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 2nd, 2016 · Duration 7:51



"Courage"

II Timothy 1:1-14,

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

“God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from Second Timothy, and, every time they roll back around, they remind me of William Sloane Coffin’s memorable observation, “Courage is doing the right thing, even when you’re scared to death.”

It’s true.  Having courage is not the same as being fearless.  In fact, if you don’t have fear, you don’t need courage.  Courage is doing the right thing, even when you’re scared to death.

I, myself, am not an expert when it comes to courage. In fact, there are few things in this life I want more of, and have less of, than that one thing; courage. But, one thing I have learned about courage is that courage, like love, is a verb disguised as a noun.  Courage is not something you feel instead of fear, courage is what you do in the face of fear.

You decide to have that painful conversation.  You decide to seek the help you know you need.  You decide to shout from the housetops the truth God has been whispering to you in the closet, but you have been too afraid to say out loud.  You decide to go to a new place with all its uncertainty.  Or, you decide to stay in the old place with all its difficulty.  You decide to sit down with, and stand up for, the people you know Jesus would sit down with, and stand up for, if Jesus lived in Jackson, Mississippi in 2016.

That’s courage; not a feeling that feels courageous, but, ironically enough, a decision that feels frightening; doing the right thing, even when you’re scared to death.

And, while I’m no expert at having that kind of courage, I do, at least, know where to go to find it. And, the good news is, you are already there, because you are already here.

That’s right.  It happens here.  We find courage in the people we find in church. You can actually catch a case of courage just watching the line that forms for communion; seeing the faces, hearing the voices and remembering the stories of all these dear and good souls who live lives of quiet courage every day.

All of which is to say that courage is contagious, and we have come to the right place to catch it; eating and drinking after all these good sisters and brothers who make us want to be better than we are just by being exactly who they are.

                                                                                                                   Amen.

A Sermon on the Subject of Hope

Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15, The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 25th, 2016 · Duration 14:18



"A Sermon on the Subject of Hope"

Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

What Might Jesus Have Meant by That?

Luke 16:1-13, The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 18th, 2016 · Duration 12:30



"What Might Jesus Have Meant by That?"

Luke 16:1-13

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Until

Luke 15:1-10, The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 13th, 2016 · Duration 11:31

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Between Jesus and Christianity

Luke 14:25-33, The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 4th, 2016 · Duration 8:21



"Between Jesus and Christianity"

Luke 14:25-33

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and life itself, cannot be my disciple . . . .  None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” 

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, every time the lectionary places those words in our path, I am struck by the difference between the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson and the popular Christianity which is so dominate in our part of the world.

Even after we cushion the blow of Jesus’ words by reminding one another that, while the Bible is to be taken seriously, it is not to be taken literally, still, we can tell that there is a difference between the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson, and the popular Christianity which fills the air and the water in our part of the world.

The difference between popular Christianity and the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson is that, unlike popular Christianity, Jesus did not have any institutional anxiety, because he did not have any institutional ambition.  Unlike popular Christianity, the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson wasn’t trying to draw a crowd, or see how big and powerful he could get, or make as many converts as he could as quickly as he could.  To the contrary, in this morning’s gospel lesson,  Jesus encouraged the crowd he had drawn to stop and count the cost before they decided to follow him, because he knew that truly fully following him would mean being willing to let go of safety and security, popularity and comfort.

Not able to bear all of that, somewhere back there, between Jerusalem and Jackson, we created a more user-friendly Christianity, which, unlike Jesus in this morning’s gospel lesson, allowed for a category of people like myself, and millions more; Christians who have accepted Christ, but who do not follow Jesus in anything like the way Jesus described following him in this morning’s gospel lesson.

I imagine Jesus looks on that kind of Christianity, now, the way he looked on Judaism, then; with gratitude for all the good intentions behind all our institutional ambitions, but wishing for Christianity now what he wished for Judaism then; that we could somehow learn to be content to love God with all that is in us, and to love others as we love ourselves; which would, more than anything else we can name, shrink the distance and close the gap between Jesus and Christianity.

                                      Amen.

As Though We Were

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 28th, 2016 · Duration 13:40



"As Though We Were"

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

On Not Mishandling the Bible

Luke 13:10-17, The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 21st, 2016 · Duration 16:13



"On Not Mishandling the Bible"

Luke 13:10-17

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done.  Come on those days and be cured, but not on the Sabbath.”  But Jesus answered him and said, “You hypocrites!”

Every three years, the lectionary places those words in the path of the church throughout the world.  And, every time they roll back around, they remind us that having a Bible verse on our side is not necessarily the same as having Jesus on our side.

The man who was angry about Jesus healing the bent over woman on the Sabbath definitely had a Bible verse on his side.  When he said, “There are six days on which work ought to be done,”  he was quoting a verse which appears twice in the Bible; once in Exodus chapter twenty, and again in Deuteronomy, chapter five.  But, apparently, having a Bible verse on his side was not necessarily the same as having Jesus on his side, because, as you will, no doubt, have noticed, despite the fact that the angry man in this morning’s gospel lesson had some Bible to back up his opinion, Jesus called him a hypocrite.

What made the man in this morning’s gospel lesson a hypocrite was the way the man was using scripture on other people; applying the Sabbath prohibition in Exodus and Deuteronomy literally when it came to the bent over woman’s life, but applying it loosely when it came to his own; a way of handling scripture which Jesus called hypocrisy; a form of hypocrisy which is with us still; the hypocrisy of interpreting the Bible literally when it comes to others, but interpreting the Bible loosely when it comes to us; the most commonplace, wide spread and unchallenged hypocrisy in Bible Belt Christianity; taking a stand on the verses of scripture which work for us, and taking a pass on the ones which don’t.

It happens all the time.  People will take a stand on John 3:16 and John 14:6 because they like what they think those verses say about Christianity being the only way to God, and on Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26 because they like the way those verses seem to condemn someone else’s sexuality, but the same people will take a pass on Luke 14:33 and II Corinthians 8:15 because they fear what those verses say about their own materialism and consumerism; interpreting the Bible literally when it comes to someone else’s life, but interpreting the Bible loosely when it comes to their own; using verses such as John 3:16, John 14:6, Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26 on other people, but never applying verses such as Matthew 5:39 (Do not resist an evildoer) or I Timothy 2:9 (No more fancy earrings) to their own lives; taking a stand on the verses which work for them and taking a pass on the ones which don’t.

One way to avoid falling into that way of mishandling the Bible is to decide that we will not use any verse of scripture on anyone else’s life until we have first applied every verse of scripture to our own life.

Several years ago I decided to make that my Bible-handling rule.  I decided that I would not use any verse of scripture on anyone else’s life until I had first applied every verse of scripture to my own life.  As you might imagine, I continue to fail at that from time to time.  But, I can report that the more you practice, the better you get at the spiritual discipline of not using any verse of scripture on anyone else’s life until you have first applied every verse of scripture to your own life.

Of course, we could skip that.  We could skip the small spiritual discipline of being careful never to use any verse of scripture on anyone else’s life until we have first applied every verse of scripture to our own life and, instead, go straight to the big, main Bible-handling rule which was given to us, and modeled for us, by Jesus himself.  As you may recall from your own reading of the four gospels, when a man in Matthew asked Jesus which words of scripture were the most important scripture words of all, Jesus said that the most important words in scripture are the words which command us to love God with all that is in us and to love our neighbor as ourselves, after which he said that every other word in scripture hangs on those two commandments; love for God and love for others.

That was Jesus’ Bible-handling rule; love God with all that is in you and love other people as you love yourself, and all the other verses in the Bible will just have to get in line behind those two.

Our next step along the path to depth is to learn to be content to handle our Bible the way Jesus handled his; reading, interpreting and applying every word and verse in scripture through the lens of, and in the light of, love.

                               Amen.   

Is That Really In the Bible?

Luke 12:49-53, The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 14th, 2016 · Duration 2:54



"Is That Really In the Bible?"

Luke 12:49-53

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

As you may have noticed, the Bible is full of surprises. There’s a talking snake, for example, in Genesis, and a talking donkey in Numbers; a man who eats a book in Ezekiel, and one who eats bugs in Mark; not to mention this morning’s gospel lesson, where Jesus, of all people, the Prince of Peace himself, is reported to have said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth”; just a few of the many surprises waiting inside each of these bright and shiny new Bibles we are about to place in the hands of our first graders; the kinds of surprises which sometimes cause us all to wonder, “Is that really in the Bible?”

When it comes to the Bible, the main thing for all of us, young and old, to remember is that, while the Bible is often surprising, occasionally bewildering, and sometimes speaks with varied voices, it is always where we find the glad good news and deep strong truth that God is with us and for us, to love us and help us, all the time, everywhere, no matter what.

                                     Amen.

The Life of Faith

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 7th, 2016 · Duration 5:26



"The Life of Faith"

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises.”

Those words from today’s epistle lesson come at the close of a roll call of Bible heroes; Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob . . .  each of whom lived the life of faith; but all of whom died, according to this morning’s epistle passage, “without having received the promises”; a quiet reminder for all of us that, no matter how much faith we have, having faith does not guarantee that things will always turn out the way we want or wish or plan or pray.

Sometimes, of course, we do receive the miracle we want; the clear report, the good outcome, the healing, the reconciliation, the protection, the relief.

Other times, instead of the miracle we want, what we get is the miracle we need; the miracle we would not have needed had we received the miracle we wanted, the miracle of enough courage and strength to stay on our feet, keep moving and do the next right thing, no matter how difficult or disappointing life has become.

And, in those times when we don’t receive the news or relief or outcome for which we had hoped and prayed, we don’t lose faith in God.  We just pray for the next best thing.  And, if that doesn’t come to pass, we pray for the next next best thing; the arc of our prayers following the trajectory of our lives, until, sometimes, there’s nothing left to pray for but the courage and strength we need to make it through the wonderful thing God might have done, but did not do; loving God, all the while, as unconditionally as God loves us; no strings attached, never giving up on God, but always leaving room in the room for God to do all that God can do in every circumstance and situation.

At its deepest and simplest, that is the life of faith; us loving God exactly the way God loves us; unconditionally, no strings attached, no matter what.

                           Amen.

Because God Is God

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Hosea 11:1-11

Chuck Poole · July 31st, 2016 · Duration 10:39



"Because God Is God"

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Hosea 11:1-11

To Live from a Quiet Center

Luke 10:38-42, The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 17th, 2016 · Duration 15:57



"To Live from a Quiet Center"

Luke 10:38-42

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning What Mattered Most to Jesus

Luke 10:25-37, The Eighth Sunday after Penteost

Chuck Poole · July 10th, 2016 · Duration 14:17



"Concerning What Mattered Most to Jesus"

Luke 10:25-37

The Eighth Sunday after Penteost

Just then, a man said to Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  And Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer.  Do this and you will live.”

Those words from this morning’s gospel lesson sound a lot like another moment from the life of Jesus, when, in Matthew chapter twenty-two, an inquirer asked Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  To which Jesus replied, The first and greatest commandment is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.”  And a second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Which is not unlike what happens in Mark chapter twelve, where Jesus is asked to name the most important commandment, to which he replies.  The number one commandment is “Love the Lord your God with all that is in you.”  And, “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a close second.

So, by the time we get to today’s lesson in Luke, we are not surprised to hear Jesus’ response to the man who wants to know what he needs to do to inherit eternal life.  The inquirer asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus replies, “What does the Law say?”  The man answers, “The Law says love God with all that is in you, and love your neighbor as yourself.” To which Jesus says, “You have given the right answer.  Do this and you will live.”  Which doesn’t surprise us, because we already know that, if the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, loving God with all that is in us and loving our neighbors as ourselves is what mattered most to Jesus.

I cannot think about all of that without remembering a story Jimmy Carter once told about a mission trip he went on with his church in Georgia, several years before he became President Carter.

Mr. Carter wrote about helping an urban minister named Eloy Cruz each day for ten days, following him around in a huge apartment complex in Boston.  He said that, on the last day of the trip, as they were loading the vans to head home, he took Reverend Cruz aside and said, “I have to know your secret.  I have never been around anyone as patient, gentle, and joyful as you.  I cannot leave here without knowing how you have come to be that way and live that way.”  Reverend Cruz, somewhat embarrassed, stumbled around for an answer, and finally said, “I don’t know.  I’ve never really thought about myself in that way.  I guess I just get up every morning and love God and whoever is in front of me.”

Which is another way of saying what Jesus said matters most; that we love God with all that is in us, and our neighbor as our self.

Of course, careful speech requires us to say that all of this is simple to say but difficult to do.  Just ask the man in this morning’s gospel lesson.  He and Jesus were in full agreement about “Loving God with all that is in us and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.” But then, things became more complicated when the man asked Jesus to define the term “neighbor.”  Wanting to justify himself, says verse twenty-nine, The man asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

As one New Testament scholar has observed, in this case, “Who is my neighbor?” actually means, “Who is not my neighbor? Where do I get to draw the line?”  And, of course, Jesus being Jesus, answers with a parable, in which he intentionally makes the hero of the story a Samaritan; a racial and religious enemy whom the man who asked the question would probably want to boundary out.

“Even Samaritans are your neighbors,” said Jesus, “You have to love even Samaritans as you love yourself.  Even those you most despise, you are called to love as you love yourself.” 

That’s the point of the parable, which is why Jesus made a Samaritan the star of the story.  It was Jesus’ story, so he could have made anybody he wanted the hero, but, he made the hero a Samaritan because he was trying to stretch the man’s heart to draw a wider circle of welcome and love.  The man, wanting to justify himself, asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and Jesus gave him a bigger answer than he wanted.

And still he does the same for you and me.  What mattered most to Jesus was love for God and love for neighbor.  And, when Jesus says neighbor, no one is boundaried out.  Which is why becoming a Christian is, as Stanley Hauerwas once wisely observed, “A lifelong task which requires our willingness to be surprised by what love turns out to be”; a lifelong journey of growing and changing, changing and growing; until, someday, what mattered most to Jesus becomes what matters most to us.

                                     Amen. 

 

Together

Galatians 6:1-10, The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 3rd, 2016 · Duration 4:47



"Together"

Galatians 6:1-10

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

As you may have noticed, in this morning’s epistle passage, Paul told the Galatians that they should bear one another’s burdens; after which, in the same paragraph, he said that everyone must carry their own burden; a pair of sentences which, at first glance, may appear to be a bit divergent, one from the other, but, both of which, in my experience, are true.

On the one hand, it is true that each of us must bear our own  burdens.  Because no one can know the full weight of another person’s disappointment, resentment, anger, failure, regret, remorse, grief, guilt or fear, the full weight of any life can only be fully felt by the one who is living it.

In that sense, it is true that we do all have to bear our own burdens. However, on the other hand, it is also true that we are called to bear one another’s burdens.  By prayer and kindness, note and visit, gift and touch, food and flower, word and thought, we bear, with and for one another, burdens which, borne alone, would be so much more difficult to bear.   By prayer and   kindness, note and visit, gift and touch, food and flower, word and thought, we become what Stanley Hauerwas called, “A community capable of absorbing one another’s grief”; all of us, together, holding one another in our hearts; bearing one another’s burdens, so that, hopefully, none of us has to bear the full weight of our own, alone.

                                       Amen.

Life in the Spirit

Galatians 5:1, 13-25, The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 26th, 2016 · Duration 14:31



"Life in the Spirit"

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

For freedom Christ has set us free . . .  Only do not use that   freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.

Every three years, the lectionary places in our path those words from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and, every time they roll back around, they take me back to a conversation Barbara Brown Taylor once had with a librarian at the Divinity School at Yale University.  After searching for some books which were nowhere to be found, Reverend Taylor approached the librarian and said, “Why are so many of your books    unaccounted for?”  To which the librarian replied, “Theft.  In fact,” he continued, “Here at the Divinity School, our annual library losses by theft are higher than at the Medical School or the Law School.”  To which Barbara Brown Taylor replied, “But this is the Divinity School!  How could that be?”  To which the librarian replied, “It’s that grace thing.  You people think you’re already forgiven, so you just take whatever you want.” 

Which is exactly what Paul is trying to guard against in this morning’s epistle passage.  After four chapters of reminding the Galatians that we are saved, not by our works, but by God’s grace, it occurs to Paul that people might take “that  grace thing” too far, and interpret their spiritual freedom as a license to live any way they please; prompting Paul to say, in this morning’s epistle lesson, “For freedom Christ has set us free . . .  Only do not use that freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but, through love, become slaves to one another.”

With those words, Paul describes a Spirit filled, Spirit led, Spirit guided, Spirit governed life; the life of those who know they are free from the law with all its restraints and requirements, but who live a life of holiness and righteousness anyway, not because they have to, but because they want to; holding themselves to the sternest of standards in what they say and do, while simultaneously looking at other people with nothing but boundless love, understanding, welcome and grace.  That is the life to which Paul calls us when he says, “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but, through love, become slaves to one another.” 

My “cornbread and peas” name for that kind of life is “conservative in the mirror and liberal through the window.”  Looking at ourselves in the mirror, we hold ourselves to the sternest of standards, and require of  ourselves the daily struggle for holiness, integrity and careful speech.  But, looking at others through the window, we love, understand and welcome others the way we want to be loved, understood and welcomed.

We have all known some people who live that way; people who know that they are free in Christ, but who do not use that freedom for self-indulgence, but choose, instead, to become slaves to one another; people who will not use any verse of scripture on someone else’s life until they have applied every verse of scripture to their own life; people who demand nothing but holiness from themselves and give nothing but love to others; people who get up every morning and live the kind of life which is so beautiful that the rest of us have to have God to explain how they got that way; living, without any need for any external regulation or motivation, a life of holiness and righteousness, while, simultaneously, loving all others as generously as God loves all others; a life which sounds impossible, and which would be impossible, without the Holy Spirit.

But, with the Holy Spirit, it is not only possible for us to live that kind of life, but, if we get up every day, day after day, and ask God to help us walk and live in the Spirit, it can eventually become impossible for us not to live that kind of life.

If we intentionally, prayerfully walk in the Spirit, day after day, all through the day, the fruit of the Spirit will become the habit of our life; truthfulness, kindness, generosity and gentleness will gradually become the muscle memory of our soul, until, eventually, the life we once thought was impossible for us to live becomes impossible for us not to live.

We become truthful, gentle, generous and kind, not because we have to be that way, but because we can’t not be that way, because we’re walking in the Spirit.  Our words change, and our voice.  Our movements change, and our pace.  Not all at once, or once and for all, but slowly, slowly, little by little, our texts, emails and Facebook posts change, as well as what we laugh at and joke about, and who we sit down with and stand up for.

And all this transformation comes about, not because of any law or rule, threat of punishment or hope of reward.  We no longer even think in those terms.  We’ve been walking in the Spirit so intentionally for so long that slowly, quietly, little by little, the life we once could not have imagined ourselves living, has become the life we can’t not live; a life so thoughtful, mindful, gentle, generous and kind that other people will have to have God to explain how we got that way; a life which, without the Holy Spirit, we could not live, but which, with the Spirit, we can’t not live.

                                    Amen.

 

To See as God Sees

Galatians 3:23-29, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 19th, 2016 · Duration 17:00



"To See as God Sees"

Galatians 3:23-29

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. With those words from this morning’s epistle passage, Paul told the Galatian Christians that, for those who had been baptized into Christ, the human differences which once mattered so much no longer mattered as much.

It wasn’t that the differences were less different than they once were.  The  human differences among the Galatians were still as different as ever.  The Jews were still Jews, the Gentiles still Gentiles.  The slaves were still slaves, the free still free.  The males were still males, the females still females.  The differences were still differences.  It’s just that, in Christ Jesus, those human differences could no longer be allowed to   divide or separate, marginalize or exclude.  “No more second class citizens,” said Paul to the Galatians.  “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The lectionary places those words in the path of the church every three years.  But, this time around, I saw something I had never before noticed.  This time, for the first time, it occurred to me that, if a woman or a slave had said those same words, to the church at Galatia, they would have been just as true, but those who had a vested interest in  keeping things the way they were could have too easily dismissed their words, because, of course, those who were living on the marginalized side of the equation; a slave or a woman, would say that, in Christ, there is no longer slave or free, male or female.  There had to be someone like Paul, a free, male, Jew, speaking from the side which held so much power, for the side which held so little power, to say that all those human differences which have always mattered so much to us have never mattered that much to God.

In my experience, that is where the path to depth, carefully followed, will eventually take us.  To get on, and stay on, the path to spiritual depth is, eventually, to come to a place where, like Paul, in this morning’s epistle passage, we begin to see the truth that our human categories were never God’s divisions; the truth that the human differences, which have always mattered so much to us, have never mattered that much to God.

All of which is not about tolerance.  Not at all.  Things which are evil, violent and destructive don’t need to be tolerated, they need to be confronted.  This is not about tolerating what needs to be confronted, this is about getting on, and staying on, the path to depth until we someday come to see all people as God sees all people; staying on the path to depth until we someday come to see, and to say, in the spirit of our Lord Jesus, that the human differences which have always mattered so much to us have never    mattered that much to God.

One thing the Holy Spirit has been revealing to me, more and more, in recent days, is that, like Paul, in this morning’s epistle passage, those of us who, like me, live in the comfortable, powerful majority, bear most of the responsibility for speaking that truth.

I say that knowing, of course, that, for the past twenty or thirty years, popular culture has been quick to dismiss that way of thinking, by calling it “political correctness.” But, I don’t call it that.  I cannot speak for anyone else, but, as for me, owning my  responsibility, as someone who was born into every comfortable majority of human  difference you can wear in the American south, (race, religion, sexual orientation) to sit down with, and stand up for, whomever is most marginalized in our world, is not being politically correct, it is being gospel correct; following  Jesus correct; walking in the Holy Spirit correct; living up to our baptism correct; looking not to our own interests, but to the interests of others; striving, seeking, praying and working to see all people as God sees all people.

That is where the path to depth will take us.  The path to depth is a narrow way which leads to a wide place; to a place where, like Paul in this morning’s epistle passage, we begin to see the truth that our human categories were never God’s divisions, and our human differences, which have always mattered so much to us, have never mattered that much to God; a wide and wonderful place where we actually have moments in which we see all people as God sees all people.

            Amen.

Concerning the Cross-Formed Life

Galatians 2:15-21, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 12th, 2016 · Duration 14:39



"Concerning the Cross-Formed Life"

Galatians 2:15-21

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

“I am crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Every three years, the lectionary places in the path of the church those words from this morning’s epistle lesson.  But, no matter how often they roll back around, each time may as well be the first time, because one can never say with certainty what meaning we should make of that mystical, powerful image, “I am crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, what I hear, in those words, is an image of the cross-formed life; an image which takes the cross, which once was a place for Jesus to die, and makes it, now, a way for us to live; you and me and all of us, “crucified with Christ”; crucified with Christ in the sense that, like Jesus on the cross, we are stretched up to God and out to others; not protecting ourselves from the world in fear, but opening ourselves to the world in love.

That is the life to which those who have decided to follow Jesus are called; a cross-shaped, cross-formed, up-to-God, out-to-others “crucified with Christ,” life; the life for which we are formed, in, and by, the church; the community of the cross.

No church, of which I am aware, embodies the way of the cross perfectly.  And, the more institutional a church becomes, the more difficult it can be for the church to live as a  community of the cross.  After all, once churches become institutions, they have to think and act institutionally so they can sustain and maintain their institutional life; which means that the institutional church, the church with buildings and budgets, employees and land, has to think about its own success and security, while simultaneously trying to embody the spirit of One who called his followers to deny themselves and take up a cross; which is to make ourselves vulnerable, to put ourselves at risk, to look not to our own interest but to the interests of others, with no thought to our own comfort, security or success.

If all that sounds difficult, that’s because it is.  What can a cross-formed life be but demanding and difficult?  We can no more follow someone who is going to a cross without getting ourselves into some discomfort than we can follow someone who’s going to the Dairy Queen without getting ourselves into a blizzard.

But, because we are the church, we don’t have another story. The church doesn’t have a story which doesn’t have a cross.  We are the community of the cross; called to struggle with what it means to sit, each week, in a cross-shaped sanctuary and reach, each day, for a cross-formed life.

We don’t do that flawlessly here at Northminster, but we do reach for the cross-formed life in very intentional ways; one of which we will celebrate at our Wider Net luncheon, after worship today.  When we built our balcony, columbarium and education building fifteen years ago, we were sufficiently serious about seeking to embody the cross-formed life that we made a community-of-the-cross decision to transcend our walls while enlarging our walls, was one of many cross-formed moments in the fifty year history of our church.

We don’t always get that right, of course.  Like all churches, we sometimes fail to embody the cross-formed, crucified with Christ life to which we are called.  But we do always, at least, long to be cross-formed, and we never stop yearning to let love flow out through a cross-formed life which is opened up and stretched out in love for others; loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we love ourselves; the up-love, out-love; vertical, horizontal, cross-formed life which we learn to live by watching our sisters and brothers with whom we worship God, follow Jesus and walk in the Spirit at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover; all of these dear and good souls, with whom we sit and sing, pray and think, laugh and weep, give and serve, and live and die, in the cross-formed family of God.

                              Amen. 

 

Faith Beyond the Boundaries

Luke 7:1-10, The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · May 29th, 2016 · Duration 15:22

 



"Faith Beyond the Boundaries"

Luke 7:1-10

The Second Sunday After Pentecost

It isn’t often that we get to see Jesus surprised and amazed.  But, as you may have noticed, in this morning’s gospel lesson, when the Gentile centurion said that, if Jesus would just say the word, his servant would be healed, Jesus was so amazed that Jesus said, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.” 

It isn’t that there was no faith among those of Jesus’ own religious tradition; it’s just that Jesus never expected the people in his own family of faith to be out-faithed by an outsider.  But, in this Gentile stranger, Jesus had met someone whose faith was so deep, that Jesus said, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith as this.”

That small snapshot of Jesus, amazed by the faith of a Gentile stranger, rolls around every three years in the lectionary cycle of gospel lessons, and, every time it comes back around, it reminds us that we never know where, or in whom, we will find faith in God, and the love of God.

The evangelical Christian missionary E. Stanley Jones, in his biography of Mahatma Ghandi, said that, in Ghandi, a Hindu, he had found more of the spirit of Jesus than in any person he had ever known; not unlike Jesus in this morning’s gospel lesson, saying that, even in his own Judaism, he had never seen such deep faith as he found in that Gentile stranger.

I had a similar experience about six months ago.  Back in December, I went to visit a friend who is a Muslim.  As we sat together, he said, “I know that, for you, this is the season of Advent, when Christians wait for Jesus to come again.  I  don’t know as much about Jesus as you,” he continued, “But, based on what I do know about Jesus, I believe that every time anyone reaches out in love and kindness, Jesus does come again.”  To which I said, “Not even among Christians have I heard anyone speak in such an amazing way of the coming again of Christ.”  (Not unlike Jesus, saying, concerning that Gentile, in this morning’s gospel lesson, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.”)

All of which is to say that we never know where, or in whom, we will find the Spirit of Christ and the love of God.  Just as Jesus, in today’s gospel lesson, found deep faith in a person beyond the boundaries of his religious tradition, we find deep faith in people beyond the boundaries of ours.

Which, if you think about it, should not be so surprising.  After all, Jesus himself said that the Spirit of God is “like the wind”; blowing where it will.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, that has been a lesson long in the learning.  It has taken me all my life, up to now, to let God be that free; free as the wind, to stir and blow and move and go beyond the boundaries of my faith tradition.  That doesn’t make my faith tradition any less important to me; it just acknowledges the truth that my boundaries are not God’s barriers; the truth that our traditions are not God’s divisions; the truth that God is free; free to be with, live in and speak through any person and every person.

In my experience, that is truth which is best learned, not from hearing sermons or reading books, but from meeting people; from actually getting to know someone who loves God from beyond our boundaries.  Theology chases friendship; the wider our circle of spiritual friends grows, the deeper our grasp of spiritual truth goes.

Thinking about all of that this week called to my mind an experience my father had during his long combat duty in World War II.  My dad grew up in a very rural corner of Georgia where anti-Catholic preaching was common in Baptist churches; a form of theology which actually said that Catholics were not Christians.  Since that was all my dad had ever heard, that is what he believed.  But then he went away to war; driving a tank in fierce battles from Northern Africa to Italy; fighting alongside soldiers from all across the United States, including “a lot of Catholic boys, from New York and Miami and such.”

Reflecting on that experience, my dad said, “What I learned back home about Catholics was not true.  Those Catholic boys were a whole lot closer to Jesus than I was.  I sat with one as he died; calling to Jesus, and going to Jesus.  Those Catholic boys were more Christian than I am.”

Theology chases friendship.  Which should come to us as no surprise.  After all, ours is an incarnational theology.  God dispatched an angel choir to Bethlehem on that night long ago, to announce, not the binding of a book, but the birthing of a baby; God, revealed in a Person.  And, now, in people.

All of this came most fully home to me one day when I was in the presence of a person of another faith whose life was so luminous with the love and goodness of God that, as I was walking away from our brief conversation, it occurred to me that I had experienced more of what I call “the spirit of Christ” in their presence than I sometimes find in the presence of some Christians; one of those moments which I imagine many of you have experienced, too; one of those moments in life when you find a deeper spiritual connection with a kind, gentle, loving person of another faith than you feel with some people of your own faith.

Which can be a surprise, at first.  But then, you think to yourself, “Why should I be surprised to encounter God in someone who is, to me, an outsider?  After all, my boundaries are my boundaries, not God’s.  Just because someone is an outsider to me, that doesn’t make them an outsider to God.  All of God was in Christ, but all of God is not in Christianity.  God is free to be with, live in and speak through any person, anywhere, anytime.”

One reason all of this matters so much is that, once we free God that way, God frees us that way.  Once we free God to be God beyond our boundaries, God frees us to see God beyond our boundaries.  And that, my sisters and brothers, is a whole new life.  I  cannot tell you how deeply that changes the way you see the world.  It changes you so deeply that it really is like being born again.

                                   Amen.

 

Reflecting the Image of Our Triune God

John 16:12-15, Trinity Sunday

Jill Buckley · May 22nd, 2016 · Duration 15:09

 

 

"Reflecting the Image of Our Triune God"

John 16:12-15

Trinity Sunday

Have you noticed, over the many years we as a church have followed the liturgical calendar, that Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday of the year on which we celebrate a doctrine of the church?  Advent, Lent, Christmastide and Eastertide are seasons which frame the events of Christmas and Easter. Epiphany, Baptism of the Lord, Transfiguration of the Lord, Ascension of the Lord Sundays...all mark events in the life of Jesus. Pentecost celebrates the event that birthed the church.

But Trinity Sunday...Trinity Sunday lifts up for our attention a way of thinking and believing about God  that is rooted in Scripture, but that only began to come to articulation late in the 2nd century. And as an official teaching of the church, the doctrine of the Trinity was not adopted until the late 4th century.  Since that day, if not before, attempts at understanding, much less explaining or describing the Trinity,  have confounded almost everyone, including theologians... and preachers. Earlier this week, Chuck told me the story of an old monastery in England, which has been closed since 1539, whose guidebook for tourists reads: "Here the monks gathered every Sunday to hear a sermon from the Abbot, except on Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject.”

In trying to explain how God can be Three-in-One (Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer), we quickly encounter the limits of our language and of our understanding.  Perhaps, then, it would be better to say not that Trinity Sunday celebrates a doctrine but that Trinity Sunday celebrates our limits...the limits of language and the limits of our comprehension of the immense mystery and majesty of God. In that case, Trinity Sunday does something few Sundays on the liturgical calendar can do: it inspires restraint and humility...which are good practices for all who follow Jesus...at least according to James 1:19, where we are encouraged to be quick to listen and slow to speak.

What, then, are we to say about these things? Fortunately, we can exercise restraint and humility and still say what may be the most important thing about the Trinity both for our life with God and for our life together. And that is this: over and over, the Scriptures insist that God is NOT a solitary, unmoved and immovable Being...a monad, as the philosophers say...instead, the Scriptures show us that God's very existence is social...communal...relational. Sisters and brothers, that is what is at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Consider Jesus' baptism. As Jesus comes up from the water, the gospels tell us that the Spirit of God descends on him like a dove, and a voice from heaven is heard, saying, 'This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."  God and God the Spirit together blessing God the Son.

Or look at last Sunday's gospel lesson and today's gospel lesson.  In both places, Jesus comforts his disciples by assuring them that the Holy Spirit, who shares in the life of the Father and the Son, will come and will continue the work among them that he started... and guide them just as he has.

And consider Matthew 28:19, which contains one of the two explicit Trinitarian references in the New Testament. In Matthew 28:19, Jesus instructs his core group of disciples to go and "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit." Friends, as much as I value (and use)" Creator-Redeemer- Sustainer" to name the Triune God, naming God as Father-Son-and Holy Spirit underscores their relationality, one that Jesus tells us is marked by love and intimacy.

In reflecting this week about how and why all of this heady stuff matters for "life on the ground where we are," I couldn't help but think about a group I led about five years ago at the Yellow Church called "Circle of Friends." Circle of Friends was modeled after a group in Iowa called Beyond Welfare, whose goal was to create spaces where people who live in poverty - which they defined broadly as lack of money, friends, or meaning - could find support, build friendships, and share knowledge and resources.

As for our Circle of Friends meeting, which met twice a month for about 18 months, the group included residents of Mid-City, North Midtown  and South Jackson as well as people from Northminster and other congregations.  Regardless of the make-up of the group each meeting, the common sentiment expressed at our meetings over and over was the joy and relief and encouragement people found in being part of a positive, supportive and non-judgmental group. Leading this group opened my eyes to how isolating poverty can be but it also underscored for me the life-giving power of communities where people can meet each other as human beings and not just as the labels we "wear."

I also thought about a retreat series - called Courage to Lead - in which I've been participating through the Center for Courage and Renewal.  In those retreats, we practice a particular way of doing soul work called a Circle of Trust.  As part of the agreements for being in a Circle of Trust, at each meeting we vow not to try to fix or save each other, not to give advice, and not to set each other straight. Instead, we do our best to honor the soul of each person through reverent listening and by asking open and honest questions intended to help each person explore his or her inner terrain. What this has created for all of us is a community of extraordinary gentleness and compassion...a community that respects each person's individual journey but that does leave him or her to journey alone. In that sense, it too has been life-giving...and grounding.

And I thought about  you...about this family of faith...both the large community and the smaller communities within which people have found and are finding friendships, support, care, growth, strength and perhaps even healing.  You and I have been together for a long time, and I have seen this community love and serve people both within these walls and beyond these walls in remarkable ways.

What connects these for me is the recognition that each of these communities - Circle of Friends, Circle of Trust, Northminster - is a reflection of the God who exists as Three-in-One.  I don't mean to idealize them; all human communities are limited and imperfect...but good communities - communities that honor the soul, that cultivate caring, that allow expressions of giftedness - can help us live into who we were created to be . In the same way that creating art, or music, or food, or order out of chaos makes the image of our Creator God shine within us, sharing in community can make the image of our Triune God shine and shimmer within us.

Friends, over time - and through experiences like these - I have learned that I have a tendency to isolate and guard myself against the perceived threats of vulnerability... and not to rely on the riches that community has to offer. Since realizing that about myself and being able to name and recognize it, I am constantly reminding myself that I am made in the image of a God whose very essence is relationship, community... mutuality... and when I am not offering myself to community or letting community offer its gifts to me, I am not living fully into who God created me to be.

Of course, that is a growing edge that is specific to my life. I can only speak for myself. You may be on a different side of things.  You may be the soul waiting for people like me to come out of hiding so you can initiate and cultivate those bonds of relationship.  If so, you and I need each other...and that is something we can learn from the Trinity, too. We need each other, if we are to live fully into the image of God. We need each other, if this family of faith is to live fully into the image of God!

Here on Trinity Sunday, we indeed celebrate a doctrine of the church...but for all its complexities, we see that it also carries important insights about the nature of the God in whose image we are made.  We celebrate the limits of our language and comprehension...and yet, we realize there are a few things we can say and see that do not at all diminish our awe at the mystery of God. But most of all, we celebrate the power of life-giving, soul-deepening Community, found eternally in the godhead, overflowing into our lives, bubbling up out of our lives if we let it, inviting even (or maybe especially) the most reticent of us into life together.

I guess you could say, then, that - on Trinity Sunday - there's a lot to celebrate. Which is pretty good for one of the most perplexing teachings of the church. We should think about that, just in case, like that monastery in England, we ever consider cancelling the sermon on Trinity Sunday.

 

 

Concerning the Holy Spirit

John 14:8-17, 25-27, Pentecost Sunday

Chuck Poole · May 15th, 2016 · Duration 8:53



“Concerning the Holy Spirit”

John 14:8-17, 25-27

Pentecost Sunday

 

In the gospel lesson which Eli read for us a few moments ago, Jesus told his disciples that, after he was gone, the Holy Spirit would remind them of all that he had said while he was here; which, as I am sure you will have noticed, is exactly what the Spirit does in all our lives, all the time; reminding us of what Jesus said while Jesus was here.

When I encounter someone who is asking for assistance, the Holy Spirit will often remind me that Jesus said, “Give to anyone who begs from you.”  When I am eager to jump into a conversation with my contribution of sarcasm or cleverness, the Holy Spirit will sometimes remind me that Jesus said, “Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No, anything more than this comes from sin.”  If I’m about to speak in a glib, flippant or exaggerated way, the Holy Spirit will sometimes remind me that Jesus said, “On the day of judgement, you will have to give an account for every careless word you speak.”

I’m sure it’s the same with you.  The Holy Spirit, which, in Old Testament and New, is a wind, a breath, a dove and a flame, is also, in our lives, a bridge; a bridge back to Jesus, reminding us of what Jesus said when Jesus was here, which is exactly what Jesus promised in this morning’s gospel lesson, when Jesus said, “After I am gone, the Holy Spirit will remind you of all that I have said to you.”


Take, for example, Matthew 7:12, something Jesus said which we often call “The Golden Rule.”   I can’t tell you how many times a month the Holy Spirit reminds me of those words, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.”  I don’t always live by those words, but I do always live with them, because that’s one of those things Jesus said which the Spirit keeps calling to my mind, over and over and over again, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” 

Thinking about all that this week called to my mind that powerful old story about the 17th century Anabaptist, Dirk Willems.  Willems was in prison, awaiting execution for his Anabaptist heresies, when, on a cold winter day, he saw an opportunity to escape, and ran for his life, a prison guard in hot pursuit.  As he ran, Willems came to a creek which had frozen over.  He crossed the ice safely, but the pursuing deputy crashed through, into the freezing water, whereupon Dirk Willems, hearing the man’s desperate cries for help, turned around, went back and pulled the man from the water; saving his life, which resulted in Dirk Willems being re-captured, and, subsequently, executed.

Were it not for the Holy Spirit in our lives, we might say, “I can’t believe he went back.  I’d have kept running.”  But, of course, because we do have the Holy Spirit in our lives, it makes perfect sense to us that someone would do something as radically selfless and loving as that, because the same Spirit which, in that moment, reminded Dirk Willems what Jesus would want him to do, reminds us of the same things, too.

And, of course, the wonderful thing about all of this is that, when it comes to the Holy Spirit, the more we listen the more we hear.  The more open to the Spirit we stay, the more guided by the Spirit we become, until, eventually,  responding to the Spirit’s nudges and reminders becomes the muscle memory of our soul.  We see the new person in the lunch room at school, or the Great Hall at church, and we instinctively invite them to join us at our table.  We see someone who has been embarrassed, bullied, marginalized or ostracized, and we instinctively sit down with them or stand up for them, because the Holy Spirit keeps reminding us of what Jesus said about treating others exactly as we want others to treat us, and we are listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying, and the more we listen the more we hear.

Live that way, and listen that way, long enough, carefully enough, and, eventually, you will become one of those people whose  ordinary, everyday, human life is so filled with the Spirit of God that, when other people look at your life and listen to your words, they will not be able to tell where the human spirit in you ends, and the Holy Spirit in you begins, because you will have become a person in whom the human spirit and the Holy Spirit are so seamlessly entwined and fully integrated that your whole life is all about nothing but “loving others as you love yourself.”  (Which is another one of those things Jesus said which the Holy Spirit will not let us forget.)

                     Amen.

 

 

A Sermon on the Book of Revelation

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21, The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 8th, 2016 · Duration 13:41

 



"A Sermon on the Book of Revelation"

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

The Seventh Sunday of Eastertide

                The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”

With those words from this morning’s epistle lesson, the lectionary placed in our path the last words on the last page of the last book of the Bible; the closing lines from the Bible book which is sometimes seen as the most bewildering book in all of scripture.

But, actually, the message of the Revelation is not as difficult to discern as its reputation might lead us to believe.  One key to unlocking the meaning and message of the Revelation is to be content to let the Revelation be what it is; a pastoral letter written to encourage a group of late first-century congregations to stay strong in the face of persecution; probably under the Roman emperor Domitian.

As best we can discern, persecution for the church, under Domitian, was not as violent as it was under some of the other emperors, but his empire did, apparently, pressure Christians to worship the emperor as Lord.  Failure to do so occasionally resulted in imprisonment, but, most often, in social exclusion and economic repercussions, because refusing to call the emperor “Lord” was sort of like refusing to pledge allegiance to the nation; making one look unpatriotic, at best, and treasonous, at worst.

But, Christians have only one Lord, and that Lord is not the nation, it is Jesus, so those first-century believers to whom the Revelation was written were living in a difficult, and, sometimes, dangerous, situation.

It appears that those are the circumstances which prompted John to write the letter which eventually became the last book in the Bible; a pastoral letter to encourage his sisters and brothers in the family of God to be strong; to not give in, give up or lose hope, because, ultimately, the goodness and grace of God would triumph over all that was hurtful, harmful and wrong, and the kingdoms of this world, including Domitian’s kingdom, would eventually be swallowed up into the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.

That’s what the Revelation was; a pastoral letter of encouragement to Christians in difficult circumstances.  But, because it was written in the vivid language of apocalyptic literature, full of strange images and bewildering metaphors, it has captured imaginations and fueled speculations across the centuries; spawning an industry of seminars, conferences, books and movies which have taught us to treat the Revelation as an end-times puzzle written to mystify twenty-first century Christians, instead of what it actually was; a hard-times letter written to comfort first-century Christians.

To see the Revelation as a letter, it helps to read it as a letter; all in a single sitting, without taking any breaks, which is exactly what I did, earlier this week.  In fact, at the beginning of the Revelation, in chapter one, verse three, it says that this is a letter which should be read out loud.  So, last Wednesday morning, while no one else was around, I came over here to the sanctuary, and read the whole thing, all twenty-two chapters, out loud, non-stop, while walking up and down the center aisle.  It’s scary to think, but, that same aisle where, moments ago, I was walking with little Beckon Fuller, was, for over an hour, just four days ago, crowded with seven-headed monsters and dragons.  Stars fell, the earth shook, and blood ran in the streets, high as the heads of horses, until the heavens opened, and a city came down; all a-glitter with streets of gold and gates of pearl; a city where they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and God will wipe all tears from their eyes, and sorrow and crying will be no more, because all the hurtful, painful, oppressive kingdoms of this world will be swallowed up into the Kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.

And that’s not all.  While I was walking up and down the center aisle of our sanctuary reading the whole book of Revelation out loud, something amazing happened.  When I first began to read, I found myself envisioning that first-century congregation; hearing, for the first time, John’s letter read out loud; envisioning their faces and imagining how hungry they must have been for the letter’s hope and encouragement, even if it did come wrapped in all that obtuse and bewildering imagery.  But then, at some point, (when and how, I do not know) I ceased to envision them and began to see us; all of us, in these pews, and to think about how hungry we, too, are for hope and courage, encouragement and strength; which we, too, find in the Revelation, because, while it may not have been written to us, or about us, the Revelation does hold a powerful message for us; the same message it held for those who first heard it; the hope-filled message that God, not pain or sorrow, injustice or oppression, death or despair, but God, will have the last word, and, if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good.

That was the message of the Revelation for those who first heard it, and that remains its message for all of us, here today.  As one wise soul once said, the whole bewildering  book of the Revelation can be summed up in one single simple sentence: “Things will not always hurt the way they do now.”

May it be so.  And may it be soon.

                                                                               Amen.

 

Scripture, Tradition and Jesus

John 5:1-9, The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · May 1st, 2016 · Duration 5:37

 



"Scripture, Tradition and Jesus"

John 5:1-9

The Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

“Now that day was a Sabbath.” Those words, “Now that day was a Sabbath,” came at the ending of this morning’s gospel passage, but they come at the beginning of a conflict which consumes the remainder of John chapter five; the conflict and controversy Jesus created by healing the man at the pool on the Sabbath.

The religious tradition of Jesus’ faith allowed for helping on the Sabbath in cases of urgency or emergency, but the man Jesus healed in today’s gospel lesson had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years, so his healing could have, and, therefore, should have, waited until another day, argued the religious leaders.

And, on their side, they had, not only tradition, but scripture, as well; that sentence in the book of Exodus, which says, “Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but, on the Sabbath, you shall not do any work,” giving  the religious leaders who confronted Jesus for healing a non-life threatening disease on the Sabbath both scripture and tradition on their side.

Scripture and tradition which Jesus knew well and loved deeply.  It isn’t that Jesus didn’t know and respect scripture and tradition, it’s just that, for Jesus, loving a living person was more important than following a verse or keeping a tradition.

Which, of course, does not surprise us, at all, because we remember that moment in the gospel of Matthew when someone asked Jesus which commandment matters most, and Jesus said, There are two which matter most.  One is “Love God with all that is in you,” and the other is, “Love others as you love yourself,” after which Jesus said, “On those two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” 

Because we remember that moment in Matthew, when Jesus said that everything in scripture is to be interpreted and applied in the light of love for God and love for others, we are not at all surprised when we see Jesus, in this morning’s gospel lesson, reach beyond a verse of scripture and a religious tradition to love someone the way he would want to be loved. To the contrary, because we know Jesus so well, that’s exactly what we expect Jesus to do.

And that’s what Jesus expects us to do, too.

                             Amen.        

Listen Long Enough to Be Silenced

Acts 11:1-18, John 13:31-35, The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Steven Fuller · April 24th, 2016 · Duration 16:17



"Listen Long Enough to Be Silenced"

Acts 11:1-18, John 13:31-35

The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

The Good Shepherd

Psalm 23, John 10:22-30, The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Lesley Ratcliff · April 17th, 2016 · Duration 16:14



"The Good Shepherd" by Lesley Ratcliff

Psalm 23, John 10:22-30,

The Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Choir Practice

Revelation 5:11-14, The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 10th, 2016 · Duration 12:53



"Choir Practice"

Revelation 5:11-14

The Third Sunday of Eastertide

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever.”

Every three years, the lectionary places, in the path of the church, those words from the book of Revelation, and, every time they roll back around, I hope that what they say is so.  Even though I know that nothing in the Revelation was written to be taken literally, still I hope that this morning’s passage turns out to be a sign of things to come, because that would mean that someday; after all the terrible injustices of this life have been confronted, after all the necessary judging has been done, after all the victims have been faced and all the responsibility has been owned; after all the purging and purifying fire of hell has been gone through, no matter how long it takes, eventually every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea will be singing glory to God around the throne, forever and ever, Amen.

Except, of course, Revelation 5:13 is not the only verse in the Bible. The Bible is also home to other verses; verses and voices which draw the circle of God’s eternal welcome smaller than the universal embrace we saw in this morning’s epistle passage.

In Revelation 5:13, God ultimately welcomes every creature into the eternal choir of endless praise, but in John 3:16-18, God will ultimately welcome only those who believe in the name of Jesus.  Same for Romans 10:9, I John 3:12 and II Thessalonians 1:8-9, all of which draw around God a much smaller circle of eternal welcome than those words we read this morning from Revelation 5:13.

On the other hand, Revelation 5:13 is not alone in its vision of all creation ultimately redeemed.  I Corinthians 15:22 says, “As in Adam all die, so, in Christ, all will be made alive.” II Corinthians 5:19 says, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself,” and Colossians 1:19 says, “Through Christ God was pleased to   reconcile to himself all things on earth and in heaven,” all of which draw the circle of God’s redeeming love as wide as the whole human family and all creation.

All of which is to say, when it comes to the size of the circle around God, the Bible speaks with varied voices, which means that no one gets to say, concerning even this most eternal of questions, “The Bible says it and that settles it.”  Rather, all anyone gets to say is, “I believe what I believe because I believe it.”              

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I believe that when this morning’s passage envisions a day when every creature and person of every place and time sings to God around the throne together forever, it is a sign of things to come, not because the Bible says it and that settles it, but, because I believe that, when all is said and all is done, the last thing done will be good because the last word said will be God’s.  This is God’s world, and, in God’s world, God gets to have the last word, and, if God is going to have the last word, then I believe that means that the goodness and grace of God will ultimately triumph over all sin and separation, rejection and pain; which means that, ultimately, every person and creature of every place and time will sing to God around the throne together forever.

Because I believe that, I also believe that, once we get over on the Other Side, we are going to discover that we spent our lives assigning eternal significance to temporary categories; temporary categories and human divisions with no eternal significance.

Once we get over on the Other Side, we’ll all just be There; all of us, together; every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth, singing, together, around the throne of God, forever.

That is why, the deeper we go in our life with God, the wider we grow in our embrace of the world.  The longer we walk in the Spirit, the more clearly we see the sacred beauty in human diversity, and the more we long for, and love, those moments when we’re in a room with every kind of people; because we recognize those moments as small glimpses of eternity; choir practice for that glad and glorious day when every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth will sing to God together forever.

Amen. 

 

Word Care

John 20:19-29, The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Chuck Poole · April 3rd, 2016 · Duration 7:31



"Word Care"

John 20:19-29

The Second Sunday of Eastertide

Every year, on the second Sunday in Eastertide, the lectionary gives to the church throughout the world the same gospel lesson; the one we read a few moments ago from John chapter twenty.  And, every time it rolls back around, when we get to that part where it says that the disciples were hiding behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews,” I find myself wanting to say, “But, the disciples were Jews.  And, not only that, the risen Lord who was about to slip into their tightly locked room was also, himself, a Jew.”

So, when the writer of the gospel of John said the disciples were afraid of “the Jews,” what he must have meant was that the disciples were afraid of a specific group of Jewish religious leaders who were so threatened by Jesus that they had helped     arrange for his arrest, trial and crucifixion.

All of which John’s original readers, in late first-century Ephesus, would have known. But, because many of John’s later interpreters did not take the time to make that distinction in a careful and thoughtful way, across the centuries, some have, at times, used John’s words, “the Jews,” to stir up hatred toward Jews, when a more intentional effort at careful speech would have explained that phrase, “the Jews”, in a true and clear way that might have saved a lot of people a lot of pain.

All of which is an example of why word care matters. Less than careful speech has consequences, which is why thoughtful, mindful, careful speech is worth the work and restraint it requires.

In fact, I am so certain of the importance of word care as a spiritual discipline, that, almost every time I receive communion, I find myself thinking, “Now that this bread has come into my mouth, what words can I allow to come from my mouth?” 

It isn’t magic, of course, but I have found that small practice helpful in my own daily battle for a life of Spirit-filled word care.  You may wish to try it yourself; asking yourself, as you chew the crumb and sip the cup, “What kind of speech can rightly come from a mouth into which the body and blood of Jesus have gone?”      

                                                                  Amen.

Concerning the Resurrection

I Corinthians 15:19-26, Easter Sunday

Chuck Poole · March 27th, 2016 · Duration 11:10



"Concerning the Resurrection"

I Corinthians 15:19-26

Easter Sunday

One thing for which I try to save some time every year during Holy Week is the practice of praying my way through the Northminster church membership; every name, A to Y; Abell, Adams, Aden, Aldridge, Alexander, Allen . . . Wooley, Worley, Wyatt, Wylie, Yates, Yelverton.

This year, as I prayed my way through those roughly four-hundred and forty homes, I tried to be particularly mindful of those who have faced, or are facing, struggles, disappointments, uncertainties and pain.  Of course, there is much about every family in our congregation which I do not know, but, based on the little I do know, at the end of all that praying through I found myself returning, once again, to the simple truth that there is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life.  None of us will go through all of them, but all of us will go through some of them, and the resurrection of Jesus from the grave which we celebrate today apparently does not protect any of us from any of them, but it certainly does help each of us through each of them, because the resurrection of Jesus from the grave gives us hope; hope for the death we all must die and hope for the life we all must live.

Concerning the resurrection, that may be both the least and the most that we can say.  The resurrection gives us hope; hope for the death we all must die and hope for the life we all must live; the hope which tells us at the deep down center of our soul that this is God’s world, and in God’s world, God, not death or despair, but God, gets to have the last word.  And, if the last word said is going to be God’s, then the last thing done is going to be good.

That is the hope of the resurrection; hope for the death we all must die and hope for the life we all must live.  When Jesus’ friends took his body from the cross to the tomb at sunset Friday, it looked for all the world as though death and defeat, disappointed and despair had had the last word.  But, then came sunrise Sunday, and, it turns out that what death and despair said at sunset Friday was the next-to-last word, but the last word belonged to Someone Else.

Across the Christian centuries, we have made of that resurrection hope a Christian doctrine; something people have to believe so they can become a Christian so they can go to heaven when they die.  But that’s just a Christian fence we have built around the resurrection.  Easter is a Christian holy day, but the resurrection does not belong to us, the same way God does not belong to us.  When God raised Jesus from the grave, God wasn’t thinking, “I’ll add this to the list of things people must believe in so they can come to heaven when they die.”  When God raised Jesus from the grave, that was just God being God, God doing what God always has done and always will do; having the last word; bringing unimaginable good from unspeakable pain.

We have to be careful, of course, when we speak of the resurrection in such hopeful and hope filled ways, lest the hope of the resurrection became confused with a glib and easy, sunny side of the street optimism which promises that everything will always turn out fine.  We all know better than that.  People don’t get up on Easter Sunday morning, put on their seersucker, get in the car and go to church so they can be told cheerful sounding things that they know are not true.  The hope of the resurrection isn’t a glib and easy optimism, rather, it is a deep, quiet, grave hope that, ultimately, finally, when all has been said and all has been done, the last thing done will be good because the last word said will be God’s.

Believing that makes us people of incurable hope, the kind of people who, even at the grave, and, even in the midst of things worse than the grave, make our song, “Alleluia,” because the resurrection has given us hope; hope for the death we all must die, and hope for the life we all must live.

            Amen.

 

Concerning the Cross

Philippians 2:5-11, Palm/Passion Sunday

Chuck Poole · March 20th, 2016 · Duration 11:17



"Concerning the Cross"

Philippians 2:5-11

Palm/Passion Sunday

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself and humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death on a cross.”

Those words from this morning’s Palm Sunday epistle passage point us to the cross which waits at the other end of Holy Week.

Once we get there, once we make it to Good Friday, we will ponder, with   believers throughout the world, the cross as the place where Jesus died.

But, for now, at this end of Holy Week, our Palm Sunday epistle passage    reminds us that the cross is not only a place for Jesus to die, but, also, a way for us to live.

When our Palm Sunday epistle passage says, “Let the same mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself and humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death on a cross,” it makes the cross not only a place for Jesus to die, but, also, a way for us to live.  It calls us to think as Jesus thought, to have the same mind in us that was also in Jesus, so that we can live a life which is as cross-shaped as the death Jesus died; the cross, not only a place for Jesus to die, but, also, a way for us to live.

The world is full of people who believe in the cross as a place for Jesus to die, people who believe what popular, orthodox Christianity teaches about the doctrine of the atonement; a composite of what Calvin and Luther said about what Anselm wrote about what Augustine taught about what Paul thought about Jesus, but whose lives do not embody the mind of Christ.  They may embody good citizenship and traditional values and the American way, but I’m talking about Jesus.  (If your church has never helped you differentiate between the American way and Jesus, you should ask for a refund.)  I’m talking about the cross-formed life which has the same mind in it which was also in Christ Jesus.

It is the cross-formed life; a life shaped like a cross; loving God with all that is in us, and loving others as we love ourselves; a life which, like a cross, is simultaneously vertical and horizontal; a vertical life of prayer and devotion, and a horizontal life of compassion and kindness; a mindful, thoughtful, gentle life which is intentionally sensitive to the feelings of others, so much so that it changes how we see others and treat them.  What we say and how we say it, what we post, tweet, email and send, all transformed, because we have taken in the mind of Christ and, as a result, we have become as cross-shaped in our living as he was in his dying.

This week would be a wonderful week to practice living a mind-of-Christ, cross-formed, cross-shaped life; a simultaneously vertical, horizontal, up-to-God,      out-to-others life.  That way, when we get to the other end of Holy Week and fix our gaze on the cross as a place for Jesus to die, we will have spent our Holy Week days with the cross as a way for us to live.

Amen. 

 

Again

Isaiah 43:16-21, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 13th, 2016 · Duration 10:12



"Again"

Isaiah 43:16-21

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

“Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea . . .  Behold, I am about to do a new thing.  One time, I made a way in the water.  This time, I will make a way in the wilderness.”

Those words from this morning’s Old Testament lesson, like all the words in the book of Isaiah, were first spoken to the people of God who had been taken captive, and carried into exile, by the Babylonian army in 589 B.C.

“Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea,”  was a reminder to the people of God in exile that this was not the first time they had faced a hopeless situation; a reference to that desperate moment, centuries before, when they were trapped  between Pharaoh's army and the Red Sea; squeezed on all sides; an inescapable enemy behind them and an impassable obstacle before them, until God made a way through the sea.

And now, here they were again, in another difficult circumstance; their lives turning out in ways they never would have imagined, again.  To which God says, “I am about to do for you, again, what I have done for you, before.  Once upon a time, I made a way for you in the water, and now, I am going to make a way for you in the wilderness.”

Once again, the people of God are in a hard place. And, once again, God is going to make, for them, a way where there is no way; a way to go through what they did not get to go around.

Which is where their story, back there on the page, intersects our story, down here on the ground. The people of God to whom Isaiah wrote needed for God to make a way for them more than once, and so do we.  Just as most of us have more than one joy in a lifetime, most of us also face more than one crisis in a lifetime, not because it is the plan of God, but because it is the nature of life.  From time to time, we face struggle, disappointment and pain, most of us more than once; not because that’s the way God is, but because that’s the way life is; joy and happiness, again and again, and sorrow and trouble, again and again.

It was the twentieth-century Irish novelist Samuel Beckett who wrote that simple, but unforgettable, sentence, “I cannot go on, but I will go on.” Some of us have been there, more than once; in a sorrow so immobilizing, a dilemma so paralyzing, a battle so exhausting or a sadness so severe, that we cannot go on . . .  But we do.     Wonder of wonders, even when we cannot go on, we do go on.  Somehow, the Spirit of God, which lives in us, and the people of God, who walk with us, conspire to make a way for us; the life-giving Spirit of God and the care-giving people of  God, conspiring against despair; conspiring and converging to make a way where there is no way; the prayers of the people somehow becoming the arms of God; holding us up and holding us near, making a way for us to go through what we did not get to go around.

And not just once, but again and again.

Amen.

Grace

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32, The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · March 6th, 2016 · Duration 5:51



“Grace”

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

As you may have noticed, in the parable of the prodigal son, the same grace which gave the younger brother a thrill gave the older brother a chill.

The older brother thinks the father has given too much grace too freely to the reckless younger brother, and he resents it so much he refuses to go into the party which the father has given to celebrate the younger brother’s return.

It’s just a story of course, so we mustn't read too much into it or try to take too much from it, but, it does seem to capture so much of what so many of us struggle with when it comes to grace.

On the one hand, we know that grace is the unconditional love of God, to which we do not get to attach conditions.  But, on the other hand, if grace is completely unconditional, where are the boundaries?  What about justice?  What about truth?  If truth is never faced, responsibility is never owned and amends are never made, then does grace become a license for those who do the worst to get away with the most?

Those are questions for which I do not have answers, but questions we should probably ask out loud whenever we talk about grace in church, lest people assume that grace is an exercise in denial; God, looking the other way, and expecting us to do the same.

The truth of course, is that grace is the opposite of looking the other way.  To the contrary, the grace of God sees the best and the worst in all of us, and loves us anyway.  Once we know that God has given that kind of love to us, we are more able to give that kind of love to others. And, eventually, not all at once or once and for all, but, eventually, someday, the grace which has come down to us from God will go out through us to others.

Amen.

Sermon on Religious Freedom

Part of the Winter Lecture Series: "Religious Liberty in the World Today"

Holly Hollman, General Counsel and Assoc. Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C. · February 28th, 2016 · Duration 17:04

Sorry, no text is available for this sermon.

Annual Winter Lecture Series Lunch Lecture with Q&A

"Religious Liberty in the World Today" Led by Holly Hollman, General Counsel and Assoc. Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C.

Holly Hollman · February 28th, 2016 · Duration 57:41



Winter Lecture Series
February 27-28, 2016
“Religious Liberty in the World Today”
Led by Holly Hollman
General Counsel and Assoc. Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, February 27
Lecture 1 followed by reception
Great Hall
4:30—6:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 28
Worship Hour-Sermon
Sanctuary ~ 10:30 a.m.
Lunch followed by Lecture 2 and Q and A
Great Hall ~ 11:45 a.m.

Annual Winter Lecture Series Part One

"Religious Liberty in the World Today" Led by Holly Hollman, General Counsel and Assoc. Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C.

Holly Hollman · February 27th, 2016 · Duration 60:06



Winter Lecture Series
February 27-28, 2016
“Religious Liberty in the World Today”
Led by Holly Hollman
General Counsel and Assoc. Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, February 27
Lecture 1 followed by reception
Great Hall
4:30—6:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 28
Worship Hour-Sermon
Sanctuary ~ 10:30 a.m.
Lunch followed by Lecture 2 and Q and A
Great Hall ~ 11:45 a.m.

On Leaving Room in the Room for God

Psalm 27, The Second Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 21st, 2016 · Duration 12:57



"On Leaving Room in the Room for God"

Psalm 27

The Second Sunday in Lent

“Wait for the Lord.  Be strong, and let your heart take courage.  Wait for the Lord.”  With those words, the one who wrote this morning’s psalm invites us all to hold on to hope.  In every circumstance and situation, “Wait for the Lord,” says the Psalmist. Of course, as is always the case when we are reading the psalms, it is important for us to remember that the psalms were not written to be taken literally.  The psalms, after all, were originally Hebrew hymns; synagogue songs set to temple tunes; chants and choruses to be sung in the house of God by the people of God; all one hundred and fifty of them on loan to Northminster from Beth Israel; borrowed songs for battered souls.

And this one is one of the best ones, with its confident first verse, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” and its hopeful last verse, “Wait for the Lord.”

But, between its confident first verse and its hopeful last verse, Psalm 27 is not all sweetness and light.  To the contrary, it appears that the one who wrote this morning’s psalm had been going through something frightening, dangerous, sad and hard.  The one who wrote Psalm 27 speaks of enemies and adversaries; pleading with God not to forsake him, but to protect and shelter him from trouble and harm, which seem to be pressing in on every side.  

In fact, there is, in this one psalm, so much of both faith and fear, trust and trouble, that some scholars have wondered if, perhaps, Psalm 27 was originally two separate psalms which were later merged into one; a speculation based on the rather awkward back and forth in the psalm between faith and fear, trouble and trust.

But, it seems to me that that somewhat awkward intersection of faith and fear, far from being a flaw, is what makes this psalm such a good fit for our lives.  There is, after all, a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life, and, while none of us will go through all of them, all of us will go through some of them; not because it was God’s plan for us to suffer, and not because God sent the trouble to us or put the misery on us in order to accomplish some hidden, unseen purpose; but because we live in a world where beautiful things and terrible things happen every day, and, if those beautiful and terrible things can happen to anyone, they can happen to everyone, including you and yours and me and mine.

There are no exemptions for good behavior.  There is just life; life in a world which, as Thornton Wilder once said, is both awful and wonderful.

When “the wonderful” comes to us, and those we love, we rarely wonder why, but, when “the awful” comes, we often do, which is completely understandable.  But, the greater question, the one that might actually help us live more deeply, fully and faithfully into whatever is left of life, is not “Why?” but “How?” How are we going to go through what we did not get to go around?  Now that life has taken a turn we never would have dreamed or imagined, how do we come to terms with life as it now is, and always will be?  Everyone is adjusting to something; how will we adjust to the reality that is not going to adjust to us?

Those are the kinds of questions for which there are no quick and easy answers.  But, while no one has all the answers for how best to make it through what we did not get to go around, many of us have learned that part of the answer is found in the people who are with us, and part of it is found in the faith which is in us.

We go through things that are so difficult that, if someone had told us ahead of time we were going to have to go through them, we would have sworn we could never make it.  But we do.  We do make it through, partly because of the people who are with us; people who show up, even when they don’t know what to say; and come back, even when they don’t know what to do; their calls, cards and casseroles, small but clear embodiments of God’s love and care, holding us up and holding us near; their prayers for us becoming God’s arms around us, in ways that none of us can begin to explain or understand.

That’s a part of how we go through what we did not get to go around; it’s the people who are with us.  And, it’s the faith which is in us; what this morning’s psalm calls “waiting on the Lord”; the faith which keeps us waiting because it keeps us hoping because it keeps us believing that the one thing God will never do is nothing; the faith which keeps us hoping and believing that God always has something more and new yet to do.

I call that leaving room in the room for God; no matter how thick with despair the room may be, leaving room in the room for God to do what only God can do; waiting on the Lord; believing that, if God doesn’t give us the gift we want, God will give us the strength we need; the strength we need to make it through the wonderful thing God might have done but did not do.

That is the life of faith.  As one wise soul once said, “Faith is what you have left when you don’t get the miracle.”  Like this morning’s psalm, the life of faith isn’t all buttoned up and buttoned down, neat and tidy, seamless and smooth.  Rather, like this morning’s psalm, the life of faith is more like the awkward intersection of trust and trouble, pain and hope.  That’s the life of faith; our life, with God, and one another, in this occasionally painful, mostly wonderful, highly uncertain, unspeakably beautiful world.

Amen.

 

 

The Path to Depth Is a Narrow Way

Luke 4:1-13, The First Sunday in Lent

Chuck Poole · February 14th, 2016 · Duration 13:49



“The Path to Depth Is a Narrow Way”

Luke 4:1-13

The First Sunday in Lent

Jesus cannot do everything, so, every year, on the first Sunday in Lent, he has to choose.  He can draw a crowd by leaping from the steeple of the temple into the arms of the angels, or, he can stay with the way of the cross, but he cannot do both.  He can succumb to the subtle temptation of religious triumphalism, rationalizing about all the good he could do in the world if he had all that power, or he can stay with the way of the cross, but he cannot do both.  He can say Yes to the temptation to succeed on the world’s terms, or he can stay with the way of the cross, but he cannot do both.

The path God has given Jesus to walk is a narrow way.  Jesus cannot do everything and follow the path God has given him.  Saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else.  Jesus has to choose.

Which is also true for all of us.  Just as Jesus could not do everything and stay on the way to the cross, neither can we do everything and stay on the path to a deeper life with God.

Like Moses before him, Jesus defined that path, the path to a deeper life with God, as a life of love for God and love for others.  To practice living that way is to travel the path to a deeper life with God; a path to depth which is a narrow way.

Once we begin saying a prayerful, intentional, daily yes to that narrow way, practicing each day, all through the day, loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we love ourselves, there will no longer be room for some of what once was a part of our lives.   Like Jesus in the wilderness in this morning’s gospel lesson, there are “Nos” which we will have to learn to say, because, once we begin to practice, each day, all through the day, saying a prayerful and intentional yes to a life of love for God and love for others, all the room on the path to depth will be taken; all the space in our lives claimed by love for God and love for others.

The love for God part is the life of prayer and devotion, a life of talking to God, listening for God and staying ever open to the nudges and whispers of the Holy Spirit.  That is the vertical part of life on the path to depth; the “Loving God with all your strength” part.  The horizontal part of life on the path to depth is the “Loving  others as you love yourself” part of life;  the justice and mercy, compassion and      empathy, kindness and gentleness, generosity and patience, thoughtfulness and mindfulness part of life which is both necessary for, and created by, the daily practice of “Loving others as you love yourself.”

By the time we embrace and practice both, loving God with all that is in us and loving others as we love ourselves, the path to depth is full.  It is such a narrow way, there just isn’t room, anymore, in our lives for all those things we used to practice, but which cannot be reconciled with love for God and love for others.

It’s a narrow way, the path to depth; but a narrow way which leads to a wide place, where your whole life eventually becomes nothing but love for God and love for others; a world-embracing life, not of tolerance, (to say that I tolerate those who are not like me is to suggest that I am superior to them, something for which there is no room on the path to depth) but of love; love as wide as the love of God, love and care for the whole wide world; the final destination on the path to depth; a narrow way which will always lead to a wide place.

Amen.

 

 

Little by Little

II Corinthians 3:12-4:2, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · February 7th, 2016 · Duration 9:07



"Little by Little"

II Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

“We are all being transformed from one degree of glory to another.”

Those words from this morning’s epistle lesson remind us that the transformation of our lives, more and more into the image and spirit of our Lord, is a long, slow process of growth and change, change and growth.  God, who began a good work in us, is still bringing it to completion.  We are all in the process of being redeemed; little by little, “from one degree of glory to another.”

So says Paul in this morning’s epistle lesson, and, while I cannot speak for you, that has certainly been my experience.  Every now and then, I will look back through my many boxes of prayer journals; twenty years worth of spiral notebooks of every color and size, filled with nearly daily prayers about many different things, but almost every one of which, sooner or later, ends with something like, “Lord, help me to live this entire day in a thoughtful, mindful, intentional way,”  or, “Lord, help me to live this one day of my life as a person of unfailingly careful speech,” or “Help me Lord, to get on, and stay on, the path to depth . . .”   Twenty years worth of nearly daily praying for, and failing at, a Spirit-filled, Quaker-quiet, cross-formed life of clarity, courage, kindness and holiness; “nothing but love for God and whoever is standing in front of me.”

And yet, all that failure, notwithstanding, still, I commend to you, with my whole heart, such daily spiritual practices, because, little by little, across a lifetime, the daily practice of that kind of deep yearning somehow becomes something like a sail; a small, simple sail which, lifted up often enough and left up long enough, catches enough of the wind of the Spirit to move our lives along at least a little; which is exactly the way today’s epistle passage said it would happen; “by degrees.” 

For most of us, that seems to be the Spirit’s pace; our lives transformed “by degrees,” not so much a sudden and dramatic “Damascus Road Conversion,” as a gradual, eventual “Ridgewood Road Conversion”; little by little, from one degree of glory to another.

So, do not lose heart, and do not give up.  Be patient; patient with God, and patient with yourself.  At the Spirit’s pace, we are being changed; transformed, little by little, across a lifetime, into  people whose lives will soon be so filled with the love and Spirit of God that we might even someday discover, much to our surprise, that our badly bruised, highly complicated, frequently compromised, occasionally broken souls  have become so mended and whole that when other people look at our lives and listen to our words they will not even be able to tell where the human spirit in us ends, and the Holy Spirit in us begins.

Amen.

 

Through the Midst

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Luke 4:21-30

Steven Fuller · January 31st, 2016 · Duration 16:25



"Through the Midst"

Luke 4:21-30

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Sermon by Youth: Graham Eklund and Nate Caraway

The Third Sunday After Epiphany/Youth Sunday

Graham Eklund and Nate Caraway · January 24th, 2016 · Duration 14:01



Sermon by Youth: Graham Eklund and Nate Caraway

John 16:33 and Luke 4:14-21

The Third Sunday After Epiphany/Youth Sunday

A Psalm on the Size of God

Psalm 36:5-10, The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · January 17th, 2016 · Duration 18:55



"A Psalm on the Size of God"

Psalm 36:5-10

The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faith- fullness to the clouds.  Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,your judgements are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O Lord.

Every three years, the Lectionary places in the path of the church those words from this morning’s psalm, and, every time they roll back around, they never fail to remind me of Elvis, singing that great old gospel song, “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it . . .” That’s the size this morning’s psalm assigns to God when it says, “God’s love reaches as high as the farthest cloud in the sky, God’s judgment reaches as low as the deepest depths of the sea, God’s mercy reaches so wide that God saves humans and animals alike.” 

I cannot speak for you, but, as someone who has long been picking and choosing his way through the Bible, latching onto the verses which ring most true at the center of my soul, I have long loved those words from today’s psalm, because they make God sound so big.

(We all do that, by the way; we all pick and choose our way through the Bible, latching onto the verses which, on our ears and in our hearts, ring most true. I know many wonderful people who say that they assign equal authority to every word of scripture, but I don’t know anyone who actually relates to the Bible in that way.  Most of the people I know who speak of the Bible in that way are dear and good souls, but, they still lock their doors at night, despite the fact that Matthew 5:39 says that we should not resist evildoers.  And, they still want to know if people are “truly deserving” before they help them, despite the fact that Matthew 5:42 says we should give to anyone who begs from us. Most of them are not pacifists, despite the fact that Matthew 5:44 says we should love our enemies; or socialists, despite the fact that II Corinthians 8:15 says that those who have much should not have too much, so that those who have little will not have too little. And, they still wear jewelry and nice clothes and get their hair done despite the fact that I Timothy 2:9 prohibits all the above. And, they still like to own the things they like to own, despite the fact that, in Luke 14:33, Jesus says that those who follow him must give up all their possessions.  All of which is not to say that we shouldn’t lock our doors or that it is wrong for us to own things, but, which is to say that we should all be truthful about the fact that all of us read, and relate to, the Bible in highly selective ways; explaining away the verses we don’t like, and latching onto the verses and voices in scripture which, on our ears, and in our hearts, sound most right and ring most true.)

Which is why I so deeply love this morning’s psalm. Nothing in the Bible sounds more right or rings more true, to me, than the size this morning’s psalm assigns to God; steadfast love as high as the sky, righteous judgment as deep as the sea, and saving grace as wide as the world.

Once you begin to think of God as being that big you begin to see the world, and look at other people, in entirely new ways. You begin, not only to tolerate, but to celebrate, the fact that God is not obligated to operate within the boundaries that we have established for God, but that, rather, God is big and God is free; free to love as high as the sky and judge as deep as the sea and save the whole world, humans and animals alike; with, or without, our approval.

Ironically enough, the church is often the last place to let God be that big and free. Across the centuries, we have built ourselves into a massive and powerful institution, partly by keeping God in a corner and keeping a corner on God; so that those who want to get to God have to come through us.

Needless to say, there is some Bible to back that up. But, then, there are those massive passages such as this morning’s psalm which say that God’s love is as high as the sky, God’s judgment is as deep as the sea and God’s grace is as wide as the world.

I cannot speak for you, but those are the Bible passages which ring most true to me; passages such as this morning’s psalm, and Paul’s enormous declarations, in Ephesians and Colossians, that God’s plan has always been to gather up all in Christ, and that, in Christ, God was reconciling the whole world to himself, and John’s equally enormous vision, in Revelation 5:13, of every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea singing praise to God around the throne forever; passages of scripture which sometimes make me wonder if the verse we most often use to reinforce our boundaries around God, “No one comes to the Father except through Jesus,” might actually mean that, ultimately, everyone will come to the Father through Jesus, because Jesus is the incarnation, the full embodiment, of the God who is as big as this morning’s psalm says; a love so high no one can get over it, a judgment so deep no one can get under it, a grace so wide no one can get around it.

Amen.

 

The Line Is Long

Acts 8:14-17, Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · January 10th, 2016 · Duration 3:56



“The Line Is Long”

Acts 8:14-17

Baptism of the Lord Sunday/Deacon Ordination and Installation

Max and Marty, in a few minutes you will experience what Betsy, Gloria, Wilson, Kelley and Dudley, and many others, have experienced before you; that ancient gesture, which spans the centuries, circles the globe and predates, even, the Christian church; the beautiful, powerful, gentle gesture of “the laying on of hands.”

Because Northminster welcomes all to participate in the act of ordination, the hands which soon will be pressing the blessing of the church upon you will come in every shape and size; the hands upon your head, and the whispers in your ear, all sending you forth into your life as deacons; a life of helping the church embody the spirit of Jesus in the clearest and truest, kindest and best ways of which sinners, in the process of being redeemed, are capable.

Northminster deacons have a long history of doing exactly that; a nearly fifty year history of serving the church with mindful, thoughtful, patient, prayerful wisdom and discernment.

And, now, the two of you will take your place in that long line of deacon service, as your sisters and brothers press upon you, with their hands, and offer to you, with their words, the blessing and encouragement of the family of faith you have been called to serve.

Amen.

 

 

 

A Sign of Things to Come

Matthew 2:1-12, Epiphany Sunday

Chuck Poole · January 3rd, 2016 · Duration 7:24



"A Sign of Things to Come"

Matthew 2:1-12

Epiphany Sunday

“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”

Every year, year after year, on the Second Sunday of Christmastide, also known as Epiphany Sunday, the Lectionary places in the path of the church those words from Matthew’s gospel; our annual reminder of the size of the reach of the grace of God.

The wise men are always the last to arrive in Bethlehem because they had the farthest to go to get there.  They came from “the East,” says this morning’s gospel lesson; Bible shorthand for some place distant, strange, foreign and far.

Which is the point of the story.  The point of the story of the Wise Men coming to worship the Christ child is that the reach of the grace of God is as wide as the world.  Those visitors from the distant and mysterious, far and foreign “East” were the strangest of strangers and the most outside of outsiders; which made their presence in Bethlehem a sign of things to come; a sign of that great and wonderful day of which we catch a glimpse in the book of Revelation when every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea will sing together around the throne of the Lord our God.

That’s the point of the story of those late arriving visitors who came from who-knows-where to Bethlehem.  Those far-flung, long-traveled strangers  are there to remind us that the Jesus we love and serve is a Jesus with wingspan; a walls-down, arms-out Jesus who lived as he died, and died as he lived, arms out as wide as the world; and who expects, and empowers, those who claim his name, to love and live the same.

Amen.

Jesus’ Family, and Ours

Luke 2:41-52, The First Sunday of Christmastide

Chuck Poole · December 27th, 2015 · Duration 15:01



"Jesus’ Family, and Ours"

Luke 2:41-52

The First Sunday of Christmastide

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me as though it’s only been a couple of days since Jesus was a baby, no bigger than Krishawn Shields, and now he’s already wandering away from his parents in a crowd.  (Nursery one day, Youth House the next.)

Every three years, the Lectionary places in the path of the church that moment from this morning’s gospel lesson, when Jesus and his parents were separated from one another; a moment of uncertainty and fear; which you can hear in Mary’s voice, when she finally finds Jesus and says to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this?  Your father and I have been searching for you with great anxiety.” 

One imagines that that was not the first moment of worry for Mary about Jesus, and it certainly was not the last.  Mary’s son was different;  different in wonderful and amazing ways, but also in ways which cast many shadows across his life, and hers.  As William Sloane Coffin once said, “Jesus would rather be hated for who he was than loved for who he wasn’t.”  As a result, he was almost always in trouble with someone about something; so much so that, eventually, it got him crucified.  Jesus sat down with, and stood up for, the wrong people often enough that he made the right people nervous enough that, in an effort to silence him, they killed him; a life of struggle and pain from which Mary, Jesus’ mother, was helpless to protect him.  Jesus had to be exactly who he was, which left his mother Mary to live a life of helpless love; helpless to manage Jesus’ life; and helpless, also, to distance herself from the pain of Jesus’ life.

Which actually makes the Holy Family a lot like our ordinary families.  The Holy Family had to embrace the fact that they were helpless to manage Jesus’ life, and helpless to distance themselves from Jesus’ pain; a helplessness which eventually comes to each generation of every family.

All of which can be difficult to embrace.  To own our helplessness and relinquish control; to practice helpless love, is never simple or easy.

A couple of years ago, I heard, on National Public Radio, a segment of “Story Corp” in which a man told about growing up on a dairy farm in the Midwest. He was the only son of the current owner of this large farm, which had been in the family for several generations.  But, though he was the assumed successor to the land, he had a different spirit; a passion to be a writer and a poet. At last, as a young adult, he found the courage to go to his dad one day and say, “I don’t want to be a farmer. I want to get a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, and see if I can, indeed, make it as a writer,” to which his father replied, “You cannot think those thoughts in this house.”  His father, probably motivated by very legitimate concerns for his son, and for his family’s future, couldn’t bring himself to let go.

I had a different experience. When Marcia and I were off at seminary, we went home to Georgia one Thanksgiving and, while Marcia and one-year-old Joshua stayed in Augusta, I met my dad in Wrightsville, Georgia to go hunting for the day. That evening, as we sat on the front seat of my dad’s rusted-out old Ford Comet, preparing to say “Good-bye” and go our separate ways, he reached over and grasped my knee, and, with his strong hand wrapped around my leg, he said, to his budding young seminarian son, “Son, your mama and me and the folks back home taught you everything we knew about God and the Bible and such.  But there’s a lot we don’t know.  Now, I don’t even know what all it is that we don’t know, but, whatever it is, you go learn it.”

Helpless love, at its best; no guilt, no leverage, no control; just unconditional love, turning loose and letting go, with no way to know, or manage, where it might lead.  I was thinking about all that this week, thinking about my dad’s hand on my knee as he said those words to me that day, when it occurred to me that it was with that same hand that my dad had hit me with his fist ten years earlier when, as a sixteen year old, I wanted to let my hair grow long.  We had a big argument, which ended when my dad hit me with his fist so hard that I landed, on my back, in the bottom of my parents’ closet.  Ten years later, my dad’s closed fist of rage had become my father’s open hand of blessing; the hand once closed for holding on, open wide for letting go.

To speak of all that all these years later makes it sound simple.  But, needless to say, when it comes to families, nothing is ever quite that simple.  The truth is, we’re all struggling along, stumbling forward, as best we can.  As long as there are families, families of every kind, shape and size, the family which loves us most dearly will be the family which wounds us most deeply, because no one outside our family has as much access to the deepest, and most vulnerable, corners of our soul as do those inside our family.

All of which means that we will never outgrow the need to embrace helpless love, and call it, out loud, exactly what it is; helpless love.  Helpless love; a phrase every family, sooner or later, will need to have in the lexicon of their life together; a complicated and necessary gift, for Jesus and his family, and, also, for us and ours.

Amen.

Concerning the Incarnation of God

Micah 5:2-5, The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 20th, 2015 · Duration 12:45



"Concerning the Incarnation of God"

Micah 5:2-5

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

On Holding One Another in Our Hearts

Philippians 1:3-11, The Second Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · December 6th, 2015 · Duration 5:44



“On Holding One Another in Our Hearts”

Philippians 1:3-11

The Second Sunday of Advent

Tucked away in the middle of this morning’s epistle lesson, there is that beautiful moment when Paul thanks the Philippians for “holding him in their heart.”

At least, that’s what Philippians 1:7 says in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.  But, the King James version says that what Paul said to the Philippians, in Philippians 1:7, was not, “You hold me in your heart,” but, “I hold you in my heart.”  The New International Version of the Bible agrees with the King James.  But, the New English Bible sides with the New Revised Standard Version, to say that it’s the Philippians who hold Paul in their heart, not the other way around.

The discrepancy rises from a disagreement among Bible translators concerning the most accurate way to handle the Greek text from which our translations are derived, and aren’t we glad?  After all, what could possibly be better than for some translations to say that Paul holds the Philippians in his heart, and others to say that the Philippians hold Paul in their hearts?  What could possibly capture more perfectly our life together in the family of faith than everybody holding everybody in their hearts?

That is what we do.  By day and by night, all through the year, year after year, we prayerfully, tenderly hold one another in our hearts.

And, all the more so, during the sacred season of Advent, when our culture’s assumptions about Christmas happiness can leave those for whom life is most difficult feeling most left out; on the outside of Christmas, looking in.  So, as the slowly growing circle of Advent light spreads its quiet flame from wick to wick, week by week, we hold one another in our hearts, even more mindfully and prayerfully than usual.

And, not only all the wounds within these walls, but, also, all the pain beyond these walls, we hold in our hearts. The violence and oppression, injustice and evil which tear asunder the lives of countless people we will never know, but to whom we are forever bound in the great and vast human family of God; all of that, and all of them, we hold, too, in our hearts.

That is what we do, because that is who we are.  We hold one another in our hearts because we are Christians, and Christians are people whose hearts are broken open big enough, and wide enough, to hold one another, and the world.

Amen.

 

On Living an Intentional Life

Luke 21:25-36, The First Sunday of Advent

Chuck Poole · November 29th, 2015 · Duration 16:44



"On Living an Intentional Life"

Luke 21:25-36

The First Sunday of Advent

"What Jesus Said About Why Jesus Came"

John 18:33-37, Christ the King Sunday

Chuck Poole · November 22nd, 2015 · Duration 15:18



"What Jesus Said About Why Jesus Came"

John 18:33-37

Christ the King Sunday

Careful Speech about Stewardship

Hebrews 10:19-25, The Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 15th, 2015 · Duration 13:26



"Careful Speech about Stewardship"

Hebrews 10:19-25

The Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Last Sunday, our congregation adopted the 2016 Northminster budget, which means that the 2016 pledge cards went in the mail this week, which means that, yes, today is the day we all look forward to all year every year; the Sunday of the annual stewardship sermon.

This year, as stewardship sermon Sunday began to draw near, I found myself wondering what the most specific and careful speech of which we are capable might allow, and require, a stewardship sermon to say about money and the church.

Because we are a church, careful speech about stewardship leaves us somewhat limited in what we can say.  Unlike businesses, or even other non-profit institutions, we are bound by the spirit of Jesus, which means that when it comes to talking about money, there are restraints on what we can say, and how we can say it. It’s actually a bit of a dilemma:  On the one hand, our church has a large institutional life which makes a real and wonderful difference in our lives, our city and the wider world; a large and far reaching institutional life which takes nearly two million dollars a year, year after year, to sustain and maintain.  On the other hand, because we have all read the four gospels, we know that the Jesus of the gospels probably would not exactly share our middle class American assumptions about church facilities, salaries, programs and activities.  So, both despite the fact that we are the church of Jesus Christ, and, because of the fact that we are the church of Jesus Christ, we have to be careful about how we recruit Jesus into our stewardship sermons.  Plus, we have to be careful about what we say about the blessings that come to those who give, or we will too easily take a gospel which calls us to deny ourselves, and turn it into a religious version of consumer capitalism; “The more money you give to God the more blessing you get from God.”  Plus, careful speech won’t let us use fear or guilt to motivate people to give, because we know better; we know that how much God loves us is not contingent upon how much or how often we give to the church.

Those are some of the things which careful speech about stewardship requires us to say; along with, needless to say, one more thing, which is, “Thank you.”  Careful speech about stewardship requires the church, every now and then, to just say, “Thank you.”   For all you give to support the life and work of this church, “Thank you.”  You don’t have to do it, but you do, and you do it with great generosity; motivated by nothing but a deep sense of gratitude, and love, for the work of this church, within and beyond these walls.

One Sunday morning back in September, I was out in the courtyard waiting for the beginning of the morning worship service when, at about 10:27, young Roger Stribling (whose permission I have to tell this story) came sprinting across the courtyard, headed for the church office on an emergency run to the peppermint jar.  At roughly 10:28, he sprinted back toward the sanctuary, newly acquired peppermints safely in hand.  Just before he disappeared through the courtyard doors to weave his way through a narthex full of choir-robes and ushers, I called out, “Hey, Roger. Thanks for being here.”  To which he responded, over his shoulder, as he raced to beat the bells, “No problem.  I like being here.”

              I’m with Roger.  I like being here, too.  And most of you would say the same.  We like being here, not because Northminster is perfect.  It isn’t.  And not because we always get everything right.  We don’t.  We like being here because, though we sometimes fail at it, our church strives to be serious about theological truth and clear thinking and gospel ministry.  We like being here because this is where we find rest for our weariness, strength for our struggles and comfort for our sorrow.  We like being here because, in the words of this morning’s epistle lesson, being here sometimes even provokes us.  Being here, at Northminster, surrounded by all of these dear and good souls who follow Jesus with such courage and hope, sometimes even provokes us to live more deeply and love more widely.  In fact, every time we read this morning’s epistle lesson with its admonition for us, “Not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together,” I always think to myself, “Are you kidding? Don’t stop going to church?  I’d never stop going to church.  I’d crawl across broken glass to get into this room with these people from whom I draw so much strength and in whom I find so much joy.”

And, many of you would say the same.  So, of course we want to support the daily life and work of this church with our money.  We wouldn’t give less if we could, we would give more if we could.  After all, this is the place that marries and buries people we love, dedicates new babies and baptizes new believers, and speaks to us of mercy and judgment, sin and forgiveness, eternity and hope.  And, when we are sick or sad or dying, it will be these people, and this place, that will hold us close, see us through and walk us Home.

So, of course, we all want to give all we can to support the life and work of this good and dear, less than perfect, more than wonderful place.  And, if we all give what we can, then we will all have given what we should.

Amen.

Concerning the Size of the Circle

Ruth 3:1-5 and 4:13-17, The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Chuck Poole · November 8th, 2015 · Duration 12:26



Concerning the Size of the Circle

Ruth 3:1-5 and 4:13-17

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Concerning the size of the circle of the welcome of God, the Bible speaks with varied voices; which is not to say that the Bible is in contradiction with itself, but which is to say that the Bible is in conversation with itself; this page talking to that page, these verses versus those verses; some drawing a small circle of welcome around God, while others draw around God a circle of welcome as wide as the world.

Take, for example, this morning’s lesson from the book of Ruth.  When the book of Ruth rejoices that Boaz, who was an Israelite, married Ruth, who was a Moabite, and that they produced a child who would grow up to be an ancestor of King David, the book of Ruth draws a much wider circle of welcome than the one we find in the book of Deuteronomy, where the Bible says, “No Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.”  With those words, the book of Deuteronomy draws around God a circle of welcome too small to take in the greatly despised Moabites. But, then comes the book of Ruth, which redraws the circle of God’s welcome by embracing a Moabite, and making her, not only a beloved member of the family of God, but an honored ancestor of David, Israel’s greatest king; one small example of the Bible’s conversation with itself concerning the size of the circle of the welcome of God.

Then, not unlike the Bible’s varied voices concerning the Moabites, there is the case of the eunuchs.  In Deuteronomy 23:1, the Bible says that eunuchs are not welcome to enter the house of the Lord.  But, in the same Bible, Isaiah 56:3 says that eunuchs are not only welcome, but  wanted, in the house and family of God; another example of the Bible’s conversation with itself concerning the size of the circle of God’s love and welcome; some verses drawing the circle of God’s welcome too small to take in eunuchs, while other verses draw the circle of God’s welcome too large to leave them out.

Then, of course, there is Jesus, himself.  In his encounter with a Gentile woman in Matthew chapter fifteen, Jesus at first drew the circle of his welcome narrow and small, saying, “Send her away . . . I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  But, two verses later, Jesus redrew the circle of his welcome; taking the circle of his love wide enough to include the same person he had previously excluded.

All of which is to say that, here and there, and now and then, the Bible gets into a conversation with itself concerning the size of the circle of the welcome of God.  Moabites are excluded from God’s family on one page of scripture, but welcomed into God’s family on another.

In one corner of the Bible, eunuchs are not welcome, but, in another, they are.  In one verse, Jesus’ circle of grace is limited to Jews, but in another verse he draws his circle wide enough to take in the strangest of strangers.  Back and forth goes the Bible between the small-circle particularity which leaves some out and the big-circle universality which takes all in.

Interestingly enough, that Bible-wide conversation makes one last appearance in the last verse of the Bible, where the last chapter of the book of Revelation ends with the words, “The grace of our Lord Jesus be with all the saints.”  At least, that’s how some ancient manuscripts recorded the last verse of the last book of the Bible, “The grace of our Lord Jesus be with all the saints.”  But, other equally ancient manuscripts say, “The grace of our Lord Jesus be with all.” 

Some manuscripts end the last sentence of the Bible with grace for all the saints, while others end the last sentence of the Bible with grace for all.  It’s just a small, obscure, ancient manuscript discrepancy, but, what could be more perfect?  Is the circle of grace limited to the size of the circle of the saints, or is the circle of grace as wide as the world? Which is it?  Grace for all the saints?  Or grace for all?  The last verse of the Bible leaves us less than certain, which is the perfect ending to the Bible’s never ending conversation with itself.

What do you think about the size of the circle of the welcome of God?  Did God’s love ever really exclude from God’s welcome Moabites, eunuchs and non-Jews?  Are those verses a reflection of the prejudices of the writers of the Bible, or are they a reflection of the heart of the God of the Bible?  Does God draw God’s circle so small that some must be left out, or so large that none can be left out?

Because I believe that the most basic, fundamental, central and eternal reality of the universe is the bottomless, boundless love of God, I believe that the big-circle verses more accurately measure the embrace of God than the small-circle verses, which is why I also believe that the deeper with God we go, the wider our love will grow, until we, like God, draw our circle of love and welcome as wide as the world.

Amen.

 

On Not Saying More Than We Know

Job 42:1-6, 10-17, The Twenty-second Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 25th, 2015 · Duration 15:44



"On Not Saying More Than We Know"

Job 42:1-6, 10-17

The Twenty-second Sunday After Pentecost

 

A Song of Trust

Psalm 91:9-16, The Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 18th, 2015 · Duration 14:45



A Song of Trust

Psalm 91:9-16

The Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost

“God will protect those who love God and know God’s name.”  Those words from today’s psalm are luminous with confidence and beautiful with hope, so we always love to see them making their way down lectionary lane to the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover.  But, every time they cross our path, it is important for us to     remind ourselves that all the psalms started out, not as chapters in a Bible, but as music in a sanctuary; which means that, though all of the psalms are beautiful and powerful, none of them were written to be read as actual or literal.  Rather, each of the psalms was composed to be chanted or sung as an anthem or chorus; Hebrew hymns, synagogue songs, temple tunes.

All of which is particularly important to remember when we come to this morning’s lesson from Psalm 91.  Otherwise, we might take words which were originally written as a song of trust, and interpret them, instead, as a guarantee of safety.

That is, after all, how the psalm sounds.  When the psalm says, “Because you have made the Lord your refuge, no evil shall befall you,” it does sound like a guarantee of safety.  And, when it says, “God will protect those who love God,” it does sound like a promise of protection.

All of which can make this morning’s psalm as bewildering for some as it is beautiful for others, because,  while God does protect some people from some terrible things sometimes, God does not protect everyone from every terrible thing all the time.

This morning’s psalm says, “God will protect those who love God and know God’s name,” but, the truth is, we have all, at times, watched the most wonderful people we have ever known bear the most crushing sorrows we have ever seen.  God does sometimes do what this morning’s psalm says; God sometimes does spare some people from some things, but God does not always spare everyone from everything.

Because this is so undeniably true, we reach for explanations that are designed to resolve mystery, explain suffering, and defend God; explanations which often come down to something along the lines of, “It’s all part of God’s plan.  God didn’t send this terrible thing, but God allowed it so that God could use it to accomplish God’s plan.”

I think that most of the best people I know believe that way, because most of the best people I know talk that way.  And, as Barbara Brown Taylor has so wisely written, “The final human freedom is to assign whatever meaning we choose to assign to our own experience,” so it certainly isn’t my place to question someone else’s   comfort.  But I, myself, don’t talk that way because I don’t believe that way.  I used to, but, somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that, in order to say that everything which happens is part of God’s plan, I had to be willing to assign, to the will and plan of God, not only all sorts of natural tragedies, diseases and catastrophes, but, also, unspeakable acts of violence and crime.  And, all the usual theological speculation about the difference between “the absolute will of God” and “the permissive will of God” just doesn’t take with me.  It sounds, on my ears, like creating loopholes for God, as does the idea that there is a difference between God sending a tragedy or a disease or a heartbreak, and God allowing it. That way of thinking says that God sees something devastating and destructive coming, and has the power to stop it, but chooses, instead, to allow it; an idea which may be true, but which I am not able to embrace, because it seems, to me, to be unworthy of the goodness of God.  (At some point, we have to   decide how much of the goodness of God we are willing to sacrifice on the altar of the sovereignty and control of God.)

That’s why all those answers to tragedy which assign everything to the plan of God do not ring true to me.  What rings more true to me is simply to say something like this:  We live in a world where beautiful things happen and bad things happen, and, if the beautiful things and the bad things can happen to anybody, they can happen to everybody; including you and yours, and me and mine. We can’t do enough or give enough to get God so deeply in our debt that God will be obligated to spare and protect us and ours from the hardest and worst life can bring.  But, no matter what life brings, God is with us and God is for us, giving us the strength to go through what we did not get to go around.

Which is actually what this morning’s psalm eventually says, down there in verse fifteen, where it says, “God will be with us in trouble.”  Earlier, the psalm says, in verse fourteen, “God will protect us from trouble.”  But then, just in case, verse fifteen says, “God will be with us in trouble.”

Of course, we have to remember, Psalm 91 isn’t a carefully worked out theological explanation of suffering.  Like all of the psalms, it’s a song.  It’s a song of trust, sort of like “It is Well with My Soul” or “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”; a song of trust in the presence and goodness of God, the good and loving God who will either spare us from sorrow or carry us through sorrow, but who will never abandon us in sorrow.

Amen.

A Sermon About Jesus

Mark 10:17-31, The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 11th, 2015 · Duration 18:23



"A Sermon About Jesus"

Mark 10:17-31

The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him, and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.  Then, come follow me.”  And when the man heard this, he was shocked.

Every three years, the lectionary places in the path of the church those words from Mark’s gospel, and, every time they roll back around, the man in the story is shocked by Jesus’ answer to his question about how to enter into eternal life.

The man in the story is shocked, and, so are we.  To tell someone to sell their possessions and give the money to the poor as a prerequisite for inheriting eternal life just doesn’t sound like Jesus.  At least, it doesn’t sound like our Jesus.  If someone were to ask our Jesus what they had to do to inherit eternal life, our Jesus would answer, as any good Christian would, “Just accept Christ as your savior.  Just believe in Jesus.” 

That’s what our Jesus would say.  But Mark’s Jesus, the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson, is different from our Jesus.  Our Jesus is the Jesus of the Bible Belt, the Christ of Christianity; a composite of twenty centuries of evolving church doctrine; what we’re supposed to believe about what popular Christianity says about what Martin Luther and John Calvin thought about what Augustine believed about what Paul wrote about Jesus.  That Jesus, our Jesus, would never say to someone who asked how to inherit eternal life, “Go, sell what you own, give the money to the poor, then come follow me.”

So, there’s a difference between Mark’s Jesus and ours.  And, there is a popular answer for that difference; an explanation which is embraced by many dear and good Christians.  It goes something like this:  When Jesus said such radical sounding things as he said to the man in Mark chapter ten, about giving all your money to the poor in order to inherit eternal life, Jesus was actually only underscoring the impossibility of our ever being able to be good enough to enter the kingdom of God, so that people would recognize their helplessness and embrace his sacrifice on the cross as their only hope for making it into the kingdom. 

Many people  embrace that view, but it doesn’t quite take with me.  I don’t believe that when Jesus said such things as he said to that man in this morning’s gospel lesson about selling his possessions and giving the money to the poor that Jesus was just setting things up for the cross by highlighting our need for his sacrifice.  To the contrary, I believe that the most radical sounding, life-stretching words Jesus said are words to be taken seriously as Jesus’ call for us to live a cross-formed, turned-outward life of material contentment and sacrificial compassion; a life of  charity, justice, hospitality, welcome, friendship and love.  To say that the most demanding words Jesus said were only preparing the way for the cross makes the words Jesus said matter so much less than the death Jesus died that it makes it too easy for us to assume that, because we are  justified by the blood Jesus shed, we don’t have to be bothered by the words Jesus said, which is how we have ended up with a world full of Christians like myself; people who have accepted Christ’ saving death, but who don’t follow Jesus’ demanding words.  (Which is fine.  That won’t keep us out of heaven, but we just need to be honest about it, and say, out loud, that while we have accepted Christ, we don’t follow Jesus; at least, not the real Jesus; Mark’s Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels.)

But, every time we read the four gospels, there he sits; the real Jesus, Mark’s Jesus, the Jesus of this morning’s gospel lesson, looking up at us from the page, just as he looked at the man on the page; “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.”

That’s the good news which travels in the hard words:  Looking at the man in the story, Jesus loved him.  And, we know enough about Jesus to know that, looking at us, he loves us too.  Even with all our superfluous stuff, unnecessary things, questionable theology and repeated failures to truly follow Jesus, looking at us, he loves us.

And we, looking at Jesus, love him, too.  We may not always  follow him, but we do always love him.  (Even though he does scare us when he talks the way he did this morning.)

Amen.

 

Concerning Mark 10:2-16

Mark 10:2-16, The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · October 4th, 2015 · Duration 6:23



“Concerning Mark 10:2-16”

Mark 10:2-16

The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Every three years, the lectionary places in the path of the church this morning’s lesson from Mark’s gospel, and every time it rolls back around, it leaves us not quite certain what to say.

For one thing, this morning’s passage speaks of marriage and divorce from the perspective of the first-century world; in some ways the same, but, in other ways, very different from what we think of when we speak of marriage and divorce.  So, when we draw lines of connection from marriage then to marriage now, we must do so with great care and restraint.

And, for another thing, this morning’s gospel lesson has a long history of being used, by the church, in ways which only add to the pain of those who have   endured the complex grief of divorce.  That was the case in the church of my childhood, and, also, to my shame, in my first pastorate, thirty-something years ago, where we interpreted this morning’s gospel lesson in ways which often left wonderful men and women at the edge of the church for the rest of their lives, solely because they had been divorced.

So, when it comes to this morning’s lesson from Mark chapter ten, perhaps we should be content to say only what we know to be so, which is that the message in the passage is this: Marriage matters.  In ways which are deeper and higher, longer and stronger than any words can ever say, marriage matters.

So, when the time comes for you to think about marriage, think prayerfully and carefully, deeply and seriously.  And, if you are in a marriage, get up every morning and live a life of kindness and integrity, courtesy and respect, gentleness and patience, forgiveness and grace.

And, if you have ever lived through the sorrow of divorce, please forgive folk like myself who, once upon a time, only added to the pain with our misguided use of the Bible.

And, finally, always remember this one simple truth: No matter what shape our family takes, God loves and values each of us, and all of us, the same.

Amen.  

 

 

 

God’s Answer to Moses’ Prayer

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-17, The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 27th, 2015 · Duration 10:36



“God’s Answer to Moses’ Prayer”

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-17

The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

So Moses said to the Lord, “Why have you treated me so badly?  I am not able to carry all this alone.  If this is the way things are going to be, then let me die at once.”

That was Moses’ prayer in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. When we caught up to Moses in Numbers chapter eleven, Moses’ spirit was collapsing beneath the weight of his life.  He had all those unhappy people to care for and all those competing opinions to manage, and he had finally had all he could bear.  Moses had sacrificed so much of his soul on the altar of his role that he was no longer interested in going on with life.  So he prayed for God to do him a favor and let him die.  “Why have you laid the burden of all these people on me?  I am not able to bear this alone,” said Moses in his prayer. “If this is the way life is going to be, then please Lord, do me a favor, and let me die today.”

God’s answer to Moses’ prayer came quickly, but it wasn’t the answer for which Moses prayed.  What God gave Moses was not the relief from life Moses wanted, but the strength for life Moses needed. Moses prayed to die, but God’s answer to     Moses’ prayer was not a way out of his pain, but a way through it.

In verse fifteen, Moses said to God, “If you love me, you’ll let me die.” And in verse sixteen, God said to Moses, “Gather seventy of the elders of Israel, and they shall bear the burden with you so that you shall not bear it all by yourself.”

God’s answer to Moses’ prayer was not the way out Moses wanted, but the way forward Moses needed.  God’s answer to Moses’ prayer was people; people from whom Moses could draw strength, and with whom Moses could carry the weight of the burdens which were crushing his spirit.

It’s an obscure story from a rarely read corner of the Old Testament, but the lectionary is kind to place it in our path every three years, because it is such a true snapshot of where we find our strength. Just as Moses needed people from whom he could draw strength, so do all of us.  When life is at it’s hardest and worst, we, like Moses, need people; people of God from whom we draw strength and in whom we find joy; what Stanley Hauerwas called “A community capable of absorbing our grief.”

That is what we need, and that is what we have; it’s called a   congregation; a family of faith, a church.  It’s what we all promised ourselves to be for little Louis   Boteler a few minutes ago, and what we all always have been, and always will be, for one another; the people of God, embodying the love of God with, and for, one another.

Thinking about all of this takes me back to something I read   several years ago which Kay Shurden said to her husband, Walter.  One day the Shurdens were talking about how much they needed the strength they found in the people at their church, when Kay said, “Buddy, even if we woke up some Sunday morning and discovered that the atheists were right, we’d still get dressed and go to church, because we need those people that much.”

Which is true. We all do need the strength we draw from the  faces and voices, support and kindness, understanding and grace of the people of God in whom we find the embodied presence and goodness of God.

Amen.

 

The Spirit of Jesus

Mark 9:30-37, The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 20th, 2015 · Duration 15:48



"The Spirit of Jesus"

Mark 9:30-37

The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

The Spirit of Jesus is the spirit of humble service.

That is the truth which travels in today’s gospel lesson.  In this morning’s lesson from Mark, when Jesus overhears the disciples arguing among themselves about which of them is the greatest, Jesus tells them that the world’s standards  of greatness, power, popularity, success, are not his standards of greatness. Rather, Jesus says, for his followers, true greatness is found in humble service. “Whoever wants to be first of all, he said, “Must be last of all, and servant of all.”

All of which is to say that the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of humble service.  That is why, for example, when we remember Mother Teresa, who gave her life to, and lived her life with, the sick and the poor, something inside us instinctively recognizes the spirit of Jesus in her life and work.  Or, take that moment when Pope Francis washed the feet of prisoners of every faith and no faith; no one had to tell us that that small gesture embodied the spirit of Jesus. Or, when Henri Nouwen left his highly visible Ivy League teaching post to live and serve as a fulltime caregiver in a group home for severely  disabled adults, we recognized, in that downwardly mobile act of self-emptying love, an embodiment of the spirit of Jesus.

Because we have read the four gospels, we know what the spirit of Jesus is.  Not only in this morning’s lesson from Mark, but throughout the gospels, the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of humble service.  Whatever else we may not know about Jesus, we do, at least, know that Jesus called his followers to a life which is guided and governed, not by the world’s measures of success and greatness, but by a spirit of humble service.

It is the job of the church to form people who understand that spirit, and who embody it in our ordinary, everyday lives.  That is one reason why, every time you open a Northminster newsletter, you see something about opportunities for service; opportunities for service within these walls; teaching stories, making music, singing songs, rocking babies, loving children, folding newsletters, arranging flowers, serving meals, passing the plate, counting the offering, welcoming the stranger and burying the dead.  And, opportunities for service beyond these walls; through Meals on Wheels or the Stewpot Food Pantry, at Operation Shoestring or Billy Brumfield, at Grace House or Spann School, with Salt and Light or Habitat for Humanity, or by helping with Boarding Homes or the Angel Tree, or serving as a Northminster Caregiver of the Week, or showing up as a Northminster friend at the Yellow Church on Wood Street.

Think about what that might someday mean for little James and Dowling  Guyton, who were carried out among you a few moments ago.  There’s an excellent chance that, once those boys get old enough to go places and do things, they might be traveling with Lesley to sing at a nursing home, riding with Steven to serve lunch at  Stewpot, and going with Jill to help in the work of A Wider Net, because we’re a church, and that’s what churches do, because the church is in the world to embody the spirit of Jesus, and the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of humble service.

Several years ago, the British Broadcasting Service interviewed several world leaders, asking each of them to name some of the defining moments in their lives.   Desmond Tutu was among those to whom that question was posed, to which he replied, “When I was a small boy, my mother and I were entering a building in our home town in racially divided South Africa, when a white man stopped, held the door for us, and respectfully tipped his hat to my mother.  Though it sounds like such a small gesture, I can still remember that moment as a defining moment in my life, a moment which gave me hope for the future.”

That is the power of humble service.  No wonder Jesus said “Those who would be great must be servant of all.”  It is through such small, simple acts of gentle, humble service that the love of God flows out through us.

The world around us may not understand that, but it is the church’s job to form us into people who do understand, and embody, the spirit of humble service, which is the spirit of Jesus.

Amen. 

On Following Jesus

Mark 8:27-38, The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · September 13th, 2015 · Duration 16:57



"On Following Jesus"

Mark 8:27-38

The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.  Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Sitting with those words, this week, made me think, again, that, oddly enough, one of the biggest obstacles to the successful church is the real Jesus.  If the Jesus of the four gospels is the nearest Jesus we have to the real Jesus, then, oddly enough, the biggest obstacle to the successful church might be the real Jesus.

As Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote, the “successful” church is a church which, “Makes it easy for people to come, and rewarding for them to stay.  Talk to any of the church growth experts,” she continues, “And they will tell you that the basic idea is to find out what people are looking for and give it to them, so that they will decide to stay put instead of continuing to shop for a church down the street.”

None of which is bad, or wrong, necessarily, and all of which would make  perfect sense, were it not for the fact that the church is in the world, not to succeed on the terms of American consumerism, but to follow Jesus.  And, if the four gospels are a trustworthy record of the words and works of Jesus, then Jesus did not appeal to people on the basis of their own comfort, security or self interest.  Rather, the Jesus of the gospels, when faced with a crowd of potential new members, said, “You all might want to stop and think about this. You need to understand that those who join with me must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” (And that’s the soft and easy version we get in Matthew and Mark.  In Luke, Jesus adds, for good measure, that to follow him will require us to love him more, even, than we love our families, and to give up all our possessions.)

Little wonder we so quickly created the Christ of Christianity, who is more manageable than the Jesus of the gospels.  By the fourth century, the Jesus of the gospels had become the Christ of Christianity. Soon enough, the Jesus who said that those who tried to save their lives would lose them, had armies marching at his command. Then, with the passing centuries, the Jesus who promised his followers no place to lay their head was safely ensconced in cathedrals and castles, enjoying the influence which comes with material wealth and political power.  Add to all that our modern American contributions of consumerism, capitalism and civil religion nationalism, and what you have is a Christ of Christianity we can all live with; a manageable, marketable Christ who bears only the slightest of resemblances to the Jesus of the four gospels who greeted crowds by saying, “You all might want to stop and think about this.  To follow me will mean to deny yourself, take up your cross daily, make yourself vulnerable and leave yourself open.  I’m going to a cross, so you probably cannot follow me without ending up in some discomfort yourself.” (Which is why I say that one of the greatest obstacles to the successful church is the real Jesus.  The real Jesus can empty a church as fast as the Christ of Christianity can fill one.)

I often wonder, when churches market themselves to people on the basis of how comfortable and convenient they are, at what point do they tell their new members that the truth is, the gospel is not a call to comfort and convenience, but, rather, to a vulnerable and open life, a life as vulnerable and open as the nailed and naked body of Jesus stretched all the way up and all the way out on the cross.  If churches succeed by appealing to people’s self-interest, at what point do they break to them the bad news about the good news; the truth that the real Jesus said that in order to follow him we must live beyond our own self-interest and comfort, deny ourselves and take up the cross?

(Of course, who am I to raise such questions?  Let’s be honest; the real Jesus would not accept a large salary to preach the gospel, either.)

My sisters and brothers, every now and then, we just have to remember all this.  We have to remember that the real Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels, is not the same as the manageable, marketable, institutionally successful Christ of Christianity.

This is what Wendell Berry called “the burden of the gospel,” the burden of knowing that beneath, behind and beyond our wonderful, helpful, important institutional Christianity, (and it is wonderful, helpful and important in many ways) there is the real Jesus, who calls us to a life of courage and compassion; a life which is formed by, and shaped like, the cross; stretched all the way up to God and all the way out to others.

And, every time we embody that cross formed life of love for God and love for others, every time we act the way the real Jesus acted in the four gospels by sitting down with and standing up for whomever is most voiceless and powerless, marginalized and mistreated, broken and embarrassed, humiliated and hurting; every time we do that, we are following Jesus; the real one.

Amen.  

Crumbs

Mark 7:24-37, The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Lesley Ratcliff · September 6th, 2015 · Duration 8:10

 



"Crumbs"

Mark 7:24-37

The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Words Matter

James 1:17-27, The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 30th, 2015 · Duration 13:43



"Words Matter"

James 1:17-27

The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

 

“Let everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak . . .  If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless.”

With those words, the one who wrote this morning’s epistle lesson assigns enormous weight to what we say and how we say it.  (A subject which will come up again in James chapter three, which goes so far as to call the tongue, “A restless evil, full of deadly poison.”)

While James’ severe assessment of how much words matter may seem a bit harsh and over-stated, he is actually in good Bible company when he assigns that much significance to what we say and how we say it. Take, for example, Proverbs 18:21, which says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” and Matthew 12:36-37, where Jesus is reported to have said, “On the day of judgment, you will have to give an  account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

All of which is to say that words matter.  Their potential to give comfort and strength is enormous, as is their capacity to inflict deep wounds and do great harm; a capacity to hurt and harm which is so great that, in James chapter three, the Bible actually refers to the tongue as, “a fire, kindled in hell.”

The problem, of course, is not the tongue, from which the words fall, but the heart, from which they rise.  Jesus says as much in Matthew 12:34, when he says, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”  If the heart is full of bitterness and resentment, then, out of that abundance, the mouth may speak reckless gossip, hurtful sarcasm, small-minded prejudice and graceless judgment.  If, on the other hand, the heart is full of the Spirit of God, then, out of that abundance, the mouth may speak kindness, gentleness, truth and love.  Either way, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” and, according to what Jesus is reported to have said in the book of Matthew, what the mouth speaks actually matters so much that, on the day of judgment, it will be by our words that we will be justified or condemned.

Or, as this morning’s epistle passage puts it, “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless.”

That might be a good verse for all of us to memorize.  (It’s only sixteen words, so perhaps we can.)  “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless.” 

If we could all tuck that away, somewhere down there in the reservoir of our soul, then it might help us to practice, more faithfully, the spiritual discipline of careful speech.  “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless.”  If we could get those words tucked away down there in the reservoir of our heart and soul, memory and mind, then, who knows, the next time we are about to spread a rumor, tease a classmate or judge a friend, it might actually stop us.  “If any think they are religious, but do not bridle their tongues, their religion is worthless.” Get something like that rolling around inside our mind, and, the next time we are poised and eager to forward that Facebook post, group text, Twitter tweet or e-mail, we might   actually stop long enough to ask ourselves if the words we are about to say or send will embody the grace and goodness of God, or show our hearts to be full of something other than the love and Spirit of God.

My sisters and brothers, there is nothing at all wrong with taking brief, momentary vows of silence, off and on, all through the day; waiting to speak until our heart is so flooded with the love of God that nothing but grace can come up from there because nothing but love is left down in there.

It may not be easy, of course, partly because our friends, who have come to expect us to speak, and act, in certain ways, will not understand our hesitation to leap into the conversation.  But, that’s alright.  If they ask why you are not joining in with your usual reckless abandon, just tell them that you are trying to learn to be “quick to listen and slow to speak,” waiting to speak until your heart is so flooded with the love of God that nothing but grace can come up from there because nothing but love is left down in there.

I realize, of course, how impossible all of that sounds; how impossible it sounds to suggest that we might actually live that way in the real world.  And, it would be impossible, if we did not have the Holy Spirit.

But, we do.

Amen.

 

 

No Final Victories

Ephesians 6:10-20, The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 23rd, 2015 · Duration 15:37



“No Final Victories”

Ephesians 6:10-20

The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Earlier this summer, while driving to Northminster one morning, I heard a radio reporter interviewing a man who had spent most of his adult life working to help renew the crumbling core of a large American city; focusing on lifting the lives of people in poverty and breaking cycles of violence and despair. The person conducting the interview observed that some of the neighborhoods where this man had spent his long and noble career were still struggling, after which she asked, “Does that ever make you want to give up?”, to which the community worker replied, “Oh, no. Not at all.  We don’t get discouraged.  We just get up everyday and do what we do all over again, because we know that, in our line of work, there are no final victories.”

That phrase, “no final victories” took me straight from the frontage road, where I heard it, to this morning’s epistle passage, which calls us to put on the whole armor of God so that we can get ready for battle, the daily battle for righteousness; a battle we must get up and fight all over again with each new day, because, in the daily battle for righteousness, there are no final victories, just new opportunities to intentionally embody the Spirit of God in our ordinary, daily lives.

Of course, we have to be careful about how we handle this morning’s epistle lesson, with its metaphors of armor to wear and battles to fight.  We do follow a Jesus, after all, who sent his followers into the world without so much as an extra set of sandals, much less a suit of armor; calling them, and us, to a life so vulnerable that to try to save it is to lose it, but to be willing to lose it is to save it.  So, we have to handle this morning’s metaphor of shield and sword with care. Plus, we have to be careful lest we enlist this morning’s epistle lesson into the “us-against-them” kind of thinking which has become so wide spread in modern Christianity; a way of thinking in which people see nations, religions, world-views and political parties other than their own as the “powers of evil” to which today’s epistle passage alludes.  There is no shortage of evil in this world.  Fierce, violent, oppressive powers of darkness have always been with us, but the battle lines are seldom as simple and clear as the culture war pundits like to draw them.

So, we have to be careful with this morning’s epistle lesson, lest we send it on errands it wasn’t written to run.  It’s almost as though we can’t speak of what it might mean until we have first been careful to say what it probably doesn’t mean.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, I think the metaphor of “putting on the armor of God” is a call for us to get ready for whatever battles or challenges we must face in a way which is as intentional as a soldier who gets up, and suits up, in the same way everyday; putting on the armor for battle, piece by piece; shoes, shield, helmet, sword, day after day.

At the risk of sounding simplistic and naïve, I would say that the way we do that, the way we put on the whole armor of God, is by practicing the discipline of intentional daily prayer.

At least, that’s how I do it.  I get up every morning and put on the armor of God by writing in a prayer journal.  I’ll miss a day or two a month, but, basically, every day, I pray on paper, because that has proven, for me, to be a helpful discipline.  It is how I put on the whole armor of God and get ready for whatever is coming next.  Not unlike a soldier putting on the same armor, everyday, I pray pretty much the same prayer, everyday:  Dear God, help me to live a centered, thoughtful life today. No matter how full or busy the day becomes, help me to move through the day in a “Quaker quiet” way; gentle, patient and mindful of those around me. Help me to live this one day as a person of careful speech; as many words as necessary, as few as possible. I pray to live an uncluttered life; sensitive and open to the nudges and whispers of the Holy Spirit. Help me Lord, to get on, and stay on, the path to depth, throughout this one day of my life.

Something like that is how I “put on the whole armor of God” every morning. You may already have a better way, but, if you don’t, I recommend mine to you. I’ve been doing it pretty much every day for the past twenty years. It’s a great way to face the day, like a soldier putting on the same armor, every morning, to face the same enemies and fight the same battles, all over again.

Only, I guess I should tell you that, in my experience, this isn’t magic. In fact, despite twenty years now of praying for more or less the same strength, more or less every day, I still frequently fail at winning the battle for a life of mindful, thoughtful holiness and unfailingly careful speech. Apparently, these are the battles in which there are no final victories, just new opportunities to suit up and show up; facing whatever is coming next, and praying, all through the day, to become a person who embodies the Spirit of God in our everyday lives, every day.

Amen.

 

 

From the Depths

Psalm 130, The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 9th, 2015 · Duration 14:36



"From the Depths"

Psalm 130

The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

“If God should mark iniquities who could stand?  But, there is forgiveness with God.  With the Lord there is steadfast love, and the Lord will redeem us from all our sin.” 

 Those bright and shiny Bibles we just gave to Bess, Will, Lennon, Presley,  Andrew, Watson and Chesley are full of wonderful words of comfort and hope, among the most hopeful of which are those words we just read from this morning’s psalm; words which capture, as fully as any passage in scripture, the grace-filled truth which travels at the center of the gospel of God; the truth that there is forgiveness with God, and steadfast love to redeem us from all our  iniquities.

So says the psalmist, but not in a glib and easy, sunny-side-of-the-street kind of way.  To the contrary, the psalmist’ song of boundless grace rises from a deep and troubled place.  “From the depths, I cry,” says the psalmist, in verse one; Bible shorthand for the overwhelming anguish of a crushed and broken spirit.

There are, of course, many reasons why people find themselves in the depths from which the psalmist called out to God; most of which are out of our hands and beyond our control.  More often than not, we find ourselves in the depths of anguish and grief, not because of anything anyone could have or should have done differently, but because that is just the way our life has gone.  Indeed, it is often the finest of people who struggle in the deepest of depths.

But, in today’s psalm, it appears that the psalmist may be in the depths of overwhelming anguish, not because of some sorrow beyond his control, but, rather, because of some sin for which the psalmist himself is partially responsible.  “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” says the psalmist.  And then, in the very next breath, the psalmist says, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?”  which is why most of the best commentaries agree that the psalmist is calling to God from the depths, not because of a general sense of sadness or despair, but, instead, because of the specific grief of guilt: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?”

But, then, the song shifts from guilt to grace.  Not in a glib and easy, “anything goes” kind of way; but in a voice which rises from the depth of the grief of guilt, the psalmist’ song shifts from guilt to grace:  If you should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?  But, there is forgiveness with you, and steadfast love, and great power to redeem; so much love, and so much power, that God will redeem us from all our sin.”

It is often said, and popularly believed, that the Old Testament is stern, harsh and legalistic, while the New Testament is full of mercy, grace and unconditional love.  But, sometimes, the Old Testament “out New Testaments” the New Testament.  Take for example, this morning’s psalm.  Oddly enough, across the Christian centuries, the New Testament church has often found it hard to let the love of God be as utterly unconditional as it is in this morning’s Old Testament psalm.

With only the best of intentions, institutional Christianity has long attached conditions to the unconditional love of God; conditions about what a person must believe or confess or do in order to meet the requirements for receiving the unconditional love of God; making especially central the condition that a perfect sacrifice had to be offered before God could be forgiving, and a right response to that perfect sacrifice has to be made before sin can be forgiven; conditions we have placed on the unconditional love of God, primarily because that is the way we have historically interpreted some passages of scripture, both Old Testament and New, and, perhaps, partly because we do

not know how to incentivize people to come to Christianity without those conditions we have so long assumed must be applied to the unconditional love of God.

But, every now and then, we come across a passage such as this morning's psalm, which makes the love of God unconditional.  And, while there are many other things for the church to teach and say, every now and then, the church needs to be at least as New Testament as this morning’s Old Testament psalm, and, with the psalmist, be content, and happy, to say, “God is not keeping score on us, God is giving grace to us.  Even in all our complex and complicated brokenness, God knows, understands, forgives and loves us, no strings attached. 

We sometimes fear saying that out loud.  It makes the unconditional love of God a little too unconditional.  We fear that, if we let grace be as amazing as it really is, people might lose their incentive to do right and believe right because they will assume that anything goes, nothing matters and sin isn’t really all that serious after all.

But, difficult though it may be, we have to reach for, and speak, the truth, as best we can; the truth, as best we know it, about both the seriousness of sin and the  relentlessness of grace.  And, the truth is, God does not turn a blind eye to injustice or sweep evil under the rug.  To the contrary, God is the one who judges and purges sin and evil through the fire of redemption.  And then, when all that is done; when all the sinning, judging, purging, redeeming and reconciling is done,  and, when all the religions are done, what will be left at the end, will be what was there at the beginning; the steadfast love of God, of which this morning’s psalm sang from the depths.

As T. S. Eliot once wisely observed, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”  After all our exploring, thinking, speaking and theologizing is done, what we will end with will be that which was at the beginning; the steadfast and unfailing embrace of the one eternal God, whose name and nature is Love.

Amen.

Humility, Gentleness and Patience

Ephesians 4:1-16, The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · August 2nd, 2015 · Duration 6:41



"Humility, Gentleness and Patience"

Ephesians 4:1-16

The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

“I beg you to live a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called; with all humility, gentleness and patience.”

With those words, this morning’s epistle lesson places in our path a simple invitation to a strong and beautiful life; a life of humility, gentleness and patience.

We may not be able to define the words humility, gentleness and patience, but we all recognize a genuinely humble, gentle, patient life when we see one, and we all know what a healing gift it is to be in the presence of someone whose life is guided and governed by humility, gentleness and patience.

I am certainly no expert at humility, gentleness and patience, but, one thing I have learned about humility, gentleness and patience is that we get better at humility, gentleness and patience the same way we get better at ballet or basketball, painting or piano, brick-laying or cake baking; by practicing.

One simple way I have found to practice getting better at humility, gentleness and patience, is to repeat, all through the day, those three simple words as one small prayer.  So, all through the day, from time to time, I’ll just quietly say, or pray, “Humility, gentleness, patience . . .  Humility, gentleness, patience.” 

Try that.  This afternoon at home, or tomorrow when you go back to work, or later this month, when you return to college, or when you go back to elementary, middle or high school in a couple of weeks, practice saying, and praying, “Humility, gentleness, patience . . . Humility, gentleness, patience.”  It isn’t magic, and it won’t change everything about you all at once or once and for all, but, slowly, slowly, little by little, that kind of practice may eventually change how you react and respond, what you say and how you say it, who you intentionally sit down with, and courageously stand up for.

With the help of the Holy Spirit, humility, gentleness and patience, faithfully practiced, might even, eventually, become the muscle  memory of your soul; so much so that you might even become one of those people who instinctively embody the love of God and the values of Jesus in every new circumstance, challenge, conversation and     situation;  speaking in a voice, and moving at a pace, which is governed and guided by humility, gentleness and patience.

Amen.

 

Choices

II Samuel 11:1-15, The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 26th, 2015 · Duration 16:00



"Choices"

II Samuel 11:1-15

The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

Every three years, the lectionary places in our path this morning’s lesson from Second Samuel, and, every time it rolls back around, it never fails to make me think that the most perilous gift God ever gave us is the gift of freedom; the freedom to make real choices which bring real consequences.

In this morning’s lesson from Second Samuel, David made his first choice in the first verse, the choice to stay home from work; after which he chose to send for Bathsheba, after which he chose to cover up his sin with an elaborate scheme, after which he chose to arrange for the death of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah.

Choice upon choice upon choice; one choice resulting in the next choice
leading to the next choice.  If only God had stepped in, early on, and, somehow, over-ridden David’s freedom to choose, then, perhaps David, and those around him, might have been spared from so much sorrow and pain.

But God did not, because, apparently, God does not.  God did not step in and stop David from making those choices, because, apparently, God doesn’t do that.  (Sometimes, perhaps, but not usually.)  In most of our moments of decision, we are left as free as David; free to make real choices.

Which might not matter so much were it not for the fact that real choices bring with them real consequences, not because God is punitive, but because life is cumulative.  As Robert Frost once wisely wrote, “Way leads on to way.”  This choice leads to that result leads to that outcome; until, eventually, the consequences of our choices become the circumstances of our lives.

As much as we all might long to begin again with a blank page and a clean slate, life rarely works that way.  When it comes to  a lifetime of choices, nobody gets to start over from the beginning.

But, while it is true that nobody gets to start over from the beginning, it is also true that everybody gets to start over from here.

I do not mean to be simplistic about that.  I know that it isn’t always that easy.  There are habits of speech and patterns of behavior which may have started out as a choice, long ago, but which have long since become a portable prison from which we have to work to stay free all day everyday, over and over and over again.  So, please don’t hear me speak of “starting over from here” as though it were light and easy, or seamless and automatic.

But, while it may not always be simple, it is always true that everybody gets to start over from here.  In fact, we not only get to start over, we have to start over,      because, we not only get to make choices, we have to make choices; choices about what we say and how we say it, choices about the texts we text and the e-mails we send, choices about what we post on Facebook, choices about the positions we take on the issues of the day, choices about who we are going to sit down with and stand up for.

When it comes to a lifetime of choices, that’s the way it is:  Nobody gets to start over from the beginning, but everybody gets to start over from here.

Because nobody gets to start over from the beginning, it may be too late for us to have the life we always wanted to have.  But, because everybody gets to start over from here, it is never too late for us to become the person we always wanted to be.

We are all going to die some day, and, as far as we know, we are not going to get to come back around, do this over, and get it right next time.  This is it.  So, if we intend to make new choices, we do not have forever to get started.

But, what we do have is the rest of our lives.  We may not have forever, but, if we are still alive, there is yet time for us to choose to change our choices.  Even if it is too late for us to have the life we always wanted to have, it is not too late for us to become the person we always wanted to be.

What an opportunity; what an amazing and hope filled opportunity we all have; the opportunity to choose to change our choices, and, the time to do it; the entire remainder of our lives, however long or brief that might be, to get up every morning and choose, all over again, to become the person we always wanted to be; someone whose life is so beautiful that other people will have to have God to explain how we got that way.

Amen.

 

The Gift of Rest

II Samuel 7:1-14, The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Steven Fuller · July 19th, 2015 · Duration 17:12



“The Gift of Rest”

II Samuel 7:1-14

The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
“The Lord had given him rest from all his enemies.”
At the beginning of our Old Testament passage and in the middle of a long career of fighting, building, and singing, God gives David rest. Rest from his enemies all around him. It’s a pivotal moment in the book of Samuel, a history that, like many histories, moves from one battlefield to the next as the tribes of Israel unite under the house of David. In some ways, it is a singular moment. This moment of rest will not last. In the next chapter, this restful reminder of God’s covenant will turn to the battlefield where David’s armies will fight the Philistines, Moabites, and eventually his own son. For a man who received more than his share of victories and defeats, blessings and curses, it’s nice to see God give him rest for a while. We all need it. Even the most ambitious and productive among us requires rest.

Rest is a nice gift to get, a nice place to settle down, but at times it seems a difficult gift to receive. Looking back, when the Israelites were in the wilderness, God didn’t give rest, God commanded it...every seven days actually. And this rest was not a settling down after battle, it was a cessation marking the end of the week, a line drawn along the horizon as the sun comes to rest on the Sabbath night. I love the idea of commanding rest or ordering Sabbath. It’s a beautiful scene. Sacred silence rises as the sun sets. I can just picture it in my house: It’s 7pm. We’ve finished dinner. My wife, my little guy and I, sitting around, basking in the bounty of our meal. I turn to my child, commanding, “Son, fruit of our love and joy of our life, it’s time to get ready to go night night.” And Wake looks at me with the joyful light of obedience shining in his big brown eyes and says, “Of course, Dada. Time for night night. Dada wise. Sleep now, be happy tomorrow.” And we walk to his bedroom, read our two pre-sleep books, pray, and he slides silently into sleep.

Ah yes, the glories of commanding sleep. The only problem is that that wonderful scene I just described to you is a complete lie! It doesn’t work like that. Not for us. For the lucky few, that’s realistic, but not in our house. He’s two years old. When I command him to do something, he doesn’t see it as an opportunity for obedience but as a threat to the essence of his being which must be defended against! I know this is part of being two for some children, but oh, he likes to test me. I know the rules. I can’t give in. I have to persevere, stay consistent, listen and speak calmly when possible. However, while it may have started as a command, on many nights my mandate morphs into a battle of wills, a duel over diapers, or a perpetual negotiation as Wake multiplies the two pre-sleep book readings into thousands like Jesus with a couple fish.

Mandating rest! It’s a beautiful commandment, a healthy practice, and a prime example of Israel’s unique relationship to God, but we all know it hasn’t really worked out. Long before Sabbath restrictions were soundly defeated by soccer tournaments and brunch, God’s children found ways to turn rest into toil, vacation into work, and Sabbath dinner into a fast food run between appointments.

Mandating rest doesn’t always work. The difficulty we have complying with the order surprises me if for no other reason than its practical necessity. We will literally die without it. Study after study reveals how lack of sleep limits our cognitive and motor functions. We’re slower, dumber, more vulnerable to illness, and not very nice when we’re tired. Several studies of my own have concluded that lack of sleep leaves me far less patient and more likely to say that thing that I really should not have said when I wasn’t really listening and just wanted to be done with everything anyway. Humans need rest. Bees need rest. Plants need rest. Soil needs rest. Even Lebron James had to sit down at some point in the NBA Finals. Since we’re in SEC country, I’ll say that even Nick Saban takes a day off once a year. And this year Urban Meyer gave him an extra week of vacation.

More than an ancient religious law, the need for rest is built into our hearts, bodies, and minds. As followers of Jesus, every one of those things with which we intend to love God requires sleep. When we defy divine command and push our physical and physiological limits, we threaten the very things we promised to God.

Like divine commands, humans challenge the natural limits of rest with necessity and urgency. In a culture that can’t wait, we often form our lives around the impatient immediacy of our own importance. It’s kind of sad how easily something I choose to do becomes something I need to do. At times, I can’t tell the difference between my choices and my needs as I create a life caught in the current of Christ, capitalism, and whatever I see others enjoy. There’s something idolatrous about refusing to rest when given the chance. It implies that what must be done must be done by us as if God’s work may not go on without us. After receiving rest from his enemies, David responds by pointing out that God’s house isn’t as nice as David’s, implying that he maybe should build God a nicer one. God quickly reminds David that the Lord was Shepherd over Israel long before God plucked David from the pasture. God will be faithful to David, building the house and family of David, but the work of the Lord is far larger than any one life.

It’s often easier to see the imbalance between rest and work in others’ lives than it is in our own. So while it’s easy to vilify someone else’s misplaced priorities, there are also those with good reason not to rest. In an article for the New York Times back in 2011, Dr. Pauline Chen described a time in her medical residency when her program was understaffed, and she and her fellow residents tried what they called, “power 60’s,” pushing through 60 hour shifts in order to cover the workload. It’s admirable. They were working to serve, heal, and cure the sick, doing those things at the center of God’s care and Jesus’ ministry. But it’s also absurd and unhealthy. Rest remains important even when lives are at stake. In our Gospel passage this morning, Jesus reminds the disciples of their limits, gathering them around him to say, “‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

Doctors and disciples need rest too. Even when our intentions are to do good, real good, the most Jesus-y kind of good we can do, doing our best requires we rest. It’s a divine command. It’s a practical reality built into our bones, and as our Old Testament passage shows today, it’s a gift from God.
I didn’t see it as something I could give until I became a parent. Because of her work schedule, Chase wakes up with Wake during the week. The only opportunity she has to sleep in is during the weekend, which isn’t abnormal, but when your child routinely wakes up at 530 or earlier, Saturday mornings come too early. So, one day each weekend, I get to give her the gift of rest. She can sleep in the guest room, turn the sound machine up, turn her maternal radar down, and sleep through the morning. It’s more than getting to stay in bed. It’s a gift. It’s the rest of knowing that her child is taken care of, accounted for, and the important work that she is called to do as a parent will go on without her for a few hours while she rests.

It’s a good gift to get. God clearly wants us to have it, and our bodies genuinely need it, and yet...and yet there are those among us whose enemies have not given them the chance. I doubt any of us will face Philistines in armed combat, but there are many of us who have been under attack far too long. Whether physical, psychological, personal, or institutional, we haven’t gotten to put our swords down in a long time. The enemy is at the gate or in our minds or shows up again on an MRI, and we have to fight.

Stuart Scott was a popular anchor of ESPN’s Sports Center during my college days when rest was so abundant that I could watch the 11am Sports Center and the 11pm Sports Center if I wanted to. He had a large presence that changed the tone and grew the reach of ESPN. Sadly, he passed away this past year from cancer. Like many, he described his life with the illness as a battle he fought. This week was the anniversary of a speech he gave at the Espy’s last year, ESPN’s sports awards show, where he received an award for showing courage. I heard a replay of it on the radio while I had this passage running through my head, and I was struck by the thoughtfulness and truthfulness with which he described his fight. Facing a disease without a cure and receiving a treatment that invaded every aspect of his life, he had the insight to say, “Fight… And when you get too tired to fight, then lay down and rest and let somebody else fight for you.” He spoke of doctors, nurses, family, and friends who sat beside him and fought for him when he couldn’t fight for himself. Their effort, their presence, allowed him to lay his weapons down and rest.

It is a gift. There are moments when God gets to give us the rest God wants us to have, but there are also moments when our enemies won’t let us have it. In those moments when we can’t receive God’s rest, let us fight to give it to one another.

It is built into our worship and central to our shared life. Every week, we gather in this sanctuary to read together, pray together, listen together, and sing together, asking God for rest while at the same time giving rest to one another. We sing for God, and at the same time we sing for one another, offering what we have when others have nothing to give and speaking up when others don’t have the voice to speak. We may confess our sins in silence, but we receive forgiveness as a family. We have crosses to bear, but we have a church to bear them together. We put pen to paper, a voice to the phone, a casserole at a door, and knees to the floor on behalf of one another because we get to be God’s rest to the weary. We hover in hospice houses and sleep in hospital chairs, because in Christ we are built into a dwelling place for God, offering the peace our enemies wouldn’t let us have. God desires we receive God’s rest. However, when God doesn’t give us rest, God gives us one another.

Amen.

 

The Ultimate Will of God

Ephesians 1:3-14, The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 12th, 2015 · Duration 17:04

"The Ultimate Will of God"

Ephesians 1:3-14

The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

“God has made known to us the mystery of his will; a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ; things in heaven and things on earth.”

Those words from today’s epistle passage say that the ultimate will and plan of God is “to gather up all things in Christ”; the whole creation, eventually gathered up in Christ; a massive verse of scripture which sounds a lot like Colossians 1:20,“Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, on earth and in heaven,” and II Corinthians 5:19, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself,” and I Corinthians 15:22, “As in Adam all die, so, in Christ, all will be made alive,”  and John 12:32,  “When I am lifted up, I will draw all people unto myself,” not to mention Revelation 5:13, “I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing forever to the One who is seated on the throne.” 

To read each of those passages, one after the other, is to wonder how the word “universalism” ever became such a bad word in popular Christian theology, because each of those passages says that the ultimate will and plan of God is for the whole world to be gathered up in Christ.

In the religious world of my origins, what we said about that was that, while those passages of scripture might seem to say that the       ultimate will of God is for all to be reconciled, redeemed and eventually at home with God, when it comes to a person’s eternal relationship with God, what the person wills is more important than what God wills.  We truly believed that the ultimate decision about eternity rests, not with the eternal will of God, but with the free will of the individual.

And, in that way of thinking, we were not alone.  Then, and now, that is the conventional wisdom of much of popular Christianity. And, it has Bible to support it, in verses such as John 3:16, John 3:18 and Romans 10:9, to name a few; Bible verses in which, ultimately, everything hinges, for all eternity, on what we choose to believe about Jesus.  Those are the Bible verses on which popular Christianity has long placed the most weight; places in the Bible in which God’s ultimate will is not as eternally decisive as human free will.

That view of things, which is held by many dear and good Christians, may be right and true, but, the longer I live, the more deeply I wonder, When does God get what God wants?  Human free will to accept or reject what God did in Christ is  certainly, truly, very important, but is it more important than the ultimate and eternal will of God; the ultimate will and plan of God that all will eventually be gathered up to God in Christ?

According to this morning’s epistle passage, that is the ultimate will of God; that all will be redeemed, reconciled, healed, whole and home; not in some trivial, easy, anything goes, nothing really matters way, but through a serious judgment and a     purging hell, where truth is owned, victims are faced, reconciliation is reached and grace is received, all in what this morning’s epistle lesson calls “the fullness of time,” which, I guess, could take hundreds or thousands or even millions of years, but which would eventually lead to the eternal triumph of the love and grace of God, the everlasting victory of what this morning’s epistle lesson says is the ultimate will and plan of God; all things gathered up in Christ.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, it seems right to hope that, in the      fullness of time, the ultimate will of God, might, at last, be fully done, in heaven.  It seems right for the children of God to want what God wants, which is for all to be gathered up, gathered in and gathered home; somehow, someway, somewhere, someday, in the beautiful, joyful, eventual, eternal fullness of time; all things gathered up in Christ; the final, eventual, eternal triumph of God’s greatest hope, deepest desire, ultimate will and original plan; every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing forever to the One on the throne; the One who planned, from the beginning, for that to be the ending.

Amen.

 

"The Gift of Thorns"

II Corinthians 12:2-10,The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · July 5th, 2015 · Duration 05:42


“The Gift of Thorns”
II Corinthians 12:2-10
The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
In this morning’s epistle lesson from Second Corinthians, Paul speaks of his “thorn in the flesh,” but he doesn’t tell us what it is. Is it physical pain? Emotional  agony?  Crippling guilt?  Paralyzing fear?  Paul doesn’t tell us what his thorn is, but he does tell us how his thorn feels when he refers to it as “a messenger from Satan,” sent to torment him.

So, of course, Paul does exactly what we would do; he prays for the thorn to be removed. “Three times, I pleaded with the Lord to take it away,” he says in this  morning’s epistle passage. Three times Paul asked God to take the thorn away, and every time God told Paul the thorn would have to stay. “My power is made perfect in weakness,” said God, in response to Paul’s prayer for the removal of the thorn.  Paul may not have wanted the thorn, but he was better with it than he was without it.  Because God was most powerful where Paul was most wounded, Paul’s worst thorn was his best gift.

Which is, so often, the case.  Not always, of course.  But, more often than not, our deepest pain opens us up to God in ways that comfort never would have and joy never could have.  That does not mean that God sends us our sorrows to make us better.  But it does mean that when our worst sorrows and struggles come, God works through them to change us.

For reasons we may never understand, the path to depth most often goes through darkness. There’s something about the pain of life which burns away the silliness and glibness, the judgmental arrogance and the self-congratulatory pride. All of that gets broken up and broken down in the depth of pain and sorrow; and we emerge from our worst struggles with a softer eye, a softer voice and a softer heart; with more understanding, kindness, compassion and grace. Our worst thorn often turns out to be our best gift,   because the pain opens us up to God, and we are changed.

So, when the pain comes, don’t waste it. Let the pain open you up to God.  Ask God what there is to be learned from this thorn which life has given you and God will not take away.
              Amen.

"The Mystery of Sometimes"

Mark 5:21-43, The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 28th, 2015 · Duration 10:05



 “The Mystery of Sometimes”
 Mark 5:21-43
 The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
As you will, no doubt, have noticed, things worked out wonderfully well for the sad man and the sick woman in this morning’s gospel lesson.

The sad man had a dying daughter, and the sick woman had a debilitating   disease.  They both sought help from Jesus, and the help they sought is the gift they received; the sad man’s daughter was restored and  the sick woman’s bleeding was  relieved; their prayers answered quickly, precisely and completely.

Sometimes, thanks be to God, things work out that way. Sometimes, we call out to God for healing or relief, and, like the sad man and the sick woman in this morning’s gospel lesson, the miracle we want is the gift we get. Sometimes, thanks be to God, things work out that way.

Sometimes, but not always, which is one of the great and unresolvable mysteries of our life with God; the mystery of sometimes. If God sometimes answers some of our prayers for God to intervene, why doesn’t God always answer all of our prayers for God to intervene?

Popular Christianity has answers for that question; answers such as, “If we had prayed with more faith, God would have intervened,” or, “If we had prayed more persistently, God would have given us what we wanted,” or, “If we had gotten more people to join us in our praying, God would have responded.”

What all of those answers have in common is that they see prayer as a transaction: God will only give us what we want if we approach God with enough faith or push God with enough persistence or impress God with enough prayer-partners to convince God to do our will; a way of thinking which sees prayer as a transaction in which, if we give God what God wants from us, then God will give us what we want from God.

Many wonderful people think of prayer in that way, but that way of thinking does not ring true to me.  I cannot imagine that God is sitting up there looking down on us in our agonies and struggles, waiting for us to put in a certain number of prayer-hours or recruit a certain number of prayer-partners before responding to our prayers.

Rather than embrace that way of thinking about prayer, I’d rather live with the unresolved mystery of why God sometimes answers some prayers, but doesn’t always answer all prayers; the mystery of why sometimes, like the sad man and the sick woman in this morning’s gospel lesson, we do get the miracle for which we so earnestly ache and desperately pray, but, sometimes, we don’t, leaving us to live with the mystery of sometimes.

I cannot speak for you, but, as for me, somewhere along the way, I made peace with that mystery. Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing an answer to the   mystery of sometimes. I think it’s because, at some point along the way, I stopped thinking of prayer as a transaction. Somewhere along the way, prayer, for me, ceased to be a transaction to be successfully completed, and became, instead, a life to be faithfully practiced.

In the book of Philippians, Paul called that “praying without ceasing,” which I once thought was impossible to do, but which I now find impossible not to do.  You just go about your day, all through the day, day after ordinary day, walking with, talking to, and listening for God; telling God what you hope, fear, regret, remember, love and hate; seeking courage, guidance, wisdom, holiness, restraint and strength; talking, listening, walking, sitting, working and resting in the spirit of prayer; trusting God either to give us the healing and relief for which we pray, or to give us the strength to go through the wonderful thing God could have done but did not do.

Amen.

"Minimum Protection, Maximum Support"

Mark 4:35-41, The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 21st, 2015 · Duration 13:43

 "Minimum Protection, Maximum Support"

Mark 4:35-41

The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

 

(This sermon is available in audio only)

"The Seed Will Grow in Ways We Do Not Know"

Mark 4:26-34, The Third Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 14th, 2015 · Duration 12:06



“The Seed Will Grow in Ways We Do Not Know”
 Mark 4:26-34
The Third Sunday After Pentecost
“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise, night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

Pondering those words this week took me back to the time when we were away from Northminster.  During those four years, from 2003 to 2007, I was asked, more than once, “Don’t you find your work discouraging?”  I was spending my days as a minister on the street; working with people in need, and leading after-school Bible classes in some of our city’s most underprivileged apartment complexes; arriving every afternoon to place a card-table in the parking lot, set out fifteen or twenty plastic chairs, and then wait to see who would come, and what would happen, work which was often unpredictable and occasionally chaotic, so I can see why people would ask, “Don’t you find your work discouraging?”  But, honestly, I never did, not even once, largely because of the truth which travels in those words from today’s gospel lesson:  “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”  I never got discouraged, because I knew that all those kingdom-of-God-seeds I was scattering in all those parking lots would someday sprout and grow in ways that I would never know.

I, like all of us, am a flawed and complicated sinner still in the process of being redeemed, but, that is one gift God has given me which I wish I could somehow pass on to all of you; the gift of being content with what this morning’s parable promises; that the seed of God’s love, once scattered, will sprout and grow in ways which we will  never know; the gift of being content to embody the love of God and the values of Jesus in the world, without needing to know the outcome; satisfied, content and happy to know that the seed, once sown, will sprout and grow, without needing to know how or where or when.

In his memoir, Living Faith, Jimmy Carter tells about a time, long before he became President, when he went on a mission trip with his church to a large urban  housing project in Boston, where he served each day as a helper to a minister named Eloy Cruz.  It was a powerful experience for Mr. Carter, primarily because of the authentic    Christian spirit of Reverend Cruz.  When the day came to load the vans and head back to Georgia, Jimmy Carter took Eloy Cruz aside and said, “I have to know your secret.  I’ve never been around anyone as genuine, joyful and peaceful as you.  How did you get this way?”  To which Reverend Cruz replied, “I don’t know.  I guess I just get up every day and love God and whoever’s in front of me.”

If only we could learn to be content to live that way; content to get up every day and love God and whoever happens to be in front of us; content to scatter the seed of grace and love, goodness and truth in every moment, circumstance and situation, and leave the results to God; satisfied, content and happy to know that the harvest is not ours to manage, because, once the seed is out of our hands, how it comes up is out of our hands.

Amen.

What Happens When We Die

II Corinthians 4:13-5:1, The Second Sunday After Pentecost

Chuck Poole · June 7th, 2015 · Duration 4:01



"What Happens When We Die?"

II Corinthians 4:13-5:1

The Second Sunday After Pentecost

“We know that if this earthly tent in which we live is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

Those words from this morning’s epistle passage belong to a corner of Second Corinthians where Paul strings together a handful of images for what happens when we die; images which speak of death as changing houses in II Corinthians 5:1,changing clothes in II Corinthians 5:4, and going home in II Corinthians 5:8; images and pictures which seek to capture something of the mystery of where we go, and what we do, when we die.

Trading these temporary bodies for a house not made with hands . . . taking off the faded clothes of time and putting on the bright  robe of eternity . . . entering gates of pearl to walk on streets of gold; none of those are literal descriptions of life beyond the grave, but all of those are the best images we have for what happens when we die.   A crossing over to the Other Side . . . a step through an open door . . . a last breath here and a first breath there; hopeful images and beautiful pictures of life beyond death.

What all of those images have in common is the promise of Something, and Someone, waiting, over on the Other Side.  The Something waiting is welcome and rest, healing and peace, because the Someone waiting is God, whose nature and name is Love.
Which is why, while we may fear dying, we do not fear death.  We may not know exactly what happens when we die, but we do believe that to leave here is to go there, and to go there is finally to be healed and home; always and ever, world without end.
Amen.    

"On Listening to Jesus"

Mark 9:2-9, Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday

Chuck Poole · February 15th, 2015 · Duration 14:06


"On Listening to Jesus"
Mark 9:2-9
Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday
Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”

On this Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday, I would like to invite all of us, gathered here at the corner of Ridgewood and Eastover, to sit, for a few moments, with those words from today’s gospel lesson, “This is my Son.  Listen to him.”

Of course, the original audience of that invitation had a bit of an advantage on the rest of us.  They could literally do what the voice from the cloud asked them to.  Peter, James and John, who had accompanied Jesus up the mountain and witnessed his transfiguration, could actually, literally, listen to Jesus.

But, for us, needless to say, listening to Jesus is a far less literal practice.  For us, “listening to Jesus” is something more like a convergence of reading from the four gospels, and walking in the Holy Spirit; neither of which is a perfect way to listen to Jesus.  After all, the four gospels were not written by people who were following Jesus around, recording what he said.  Rather, the gospels were written a generation or two after Jesus had died and been resurrected, and each of them was written for a specific community of faith in a specific place, facing specific challenges.

So, reading the gospels is not the same as listening to Jesus, and neither is staying open to the Holy Spirit, primarily because it’s hard for us ever to be certain that what we think the Spirit is telling us isn’t just an echo of what we want the Spirit to tell us.  We have to keep measuring what we believe the Spirit is telling us against what the gospels say Jesus said and did, to see if what we believe the Spirit is saying matches up with what the gospels tell us Jesus said.

All of which is a less than perfect way to listen to Jesus, but it’s the best we have.  And, while reading the four gospels and following the Holy Spirit may be a less than perfect way of listening to Jesus, when it is faithfully practiced it can be more than enough to get us in on what God is up to out there in the world.

Think, for example, of William Willimon’s story about his administrative assistant at Duke University.  Willimon, Dean of the Chapel at Duke, learned that his assistant and her husband had taken a homeless man into their home; a student from Iraq who had suddenly lost all of his financial support,  and had been unable to find a job in Durham.  This was in the early two-thousands, just as our country’s war with Iraq was beginning.  Upon learning of their decision, Reverend Willimon asked his assistant, “Do you think this is a good idea, taking an Iraqi stranger into your home, especially now, with all the tension between Iraq and the United States?”  to which the woman replied, “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea.  But, in case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Dean of the Chapel, I’m a Christian, and Jesus thinks it’s a great idea.”  Now that’s someone who had been listening to Jesus in the pages of the gospels and the wind of the Spirit.

Or, think about the woman in Virginia who arranged for the burial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  In an interview on National Public Radio, when asked why she extended that kindness to Tsarnaev’s family, she said, “I follow one who called us to love our enemies, so it seemed the right thing to do.”   She had heard the voice of Jesus in the pages of the gospels and in the wind of the Spirit.

It is the church’s job to help people learn to listen to Jesus that way; to form children, teenagers and adults who know how to listen for, and recognize, the voice of Jesus.  By “Jesus,” I do not mean the Christ of popular, cultural, Bible Belt Christianity; the I-20 Jesus who dominates the religious landscape from Atlanta to Dallas, but the real Jesus, the Jesus we listen for across a lifetime of reading from the four gospels and walking in the Holy Spirit.

Which is a less than perfect way to listen to Jesus.  But, when faithfully practiced, that less than perfect way of listening to Jesus is more than enough to get us in on what God is up to out there in the world.

Amen.

"Strength"

Isaiah 40:21-31, The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Chuck Poole · February 8th, 2015 · Duration 15:05



“Strength”

Isaiah 40:21-31

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Few verses of scripture are more widely known, or deeply loved, than that one from this morning’s Old Testament lesson.  As much as any verse in the Bible, Isaiah 40:31 is embraced by the weary as a word of hope; the hope that God will give us new strength for each new day; the strength to fly as high as eagles. Or, if not enough strength to fly, at least enough to run and not grow weary.  Or, if not enough strength to run, at least enough to walk and not faint; strength enough to stumble forward and keep moving, the strength we need to go through what we did not get to go around.

All of which is a very hopeful and helpful way for us to hear those wonderful old words.  But, before we apply the hope and strength of Isaiah 40:31 to our lives in that way, we must first acknowledge the fact that Isaiah 40:31, like the rest of the book of Isaiah, was not written to us or about us.  Rather, those words were written to, and about, the people of Judah who had been carried away captive to Babylon in 589 B.C. by the army of King Nebuchadnezzar.

By the time today’s passage was written, the people of Judah had been living in exile in Babylon for many years, long enough for some of them to have begun to wonder, “Where is God? If God cares, and if God can, then why doesn’t God come down, step in, do something and fix things?”

That seems to be the situation which shaped today’s lesson from Isaiah. To the exiled people of God whose hope in God was bent low by doubts about God, the writer of this part of the book of Isaiah said, Why do you say, “Our way is hidden from the Lord; our needs have been forgotten by God?” Do you not know?  Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth . . .  The Lord gives strength to the weary and power to the weak . . .  Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint.

All of which was the writer’s way of telling the exiles in Babylon not to give up on God, but to leave room for God, who has not forgotten them, and who will give them the strength they need to live deeply, fully and faithfully into, through and beyond this long and difficult season in their lives; new strength for each new day; strength to go through what they did not get to go around.

What the writer of that part of Isaiah said to them, then, the words in today’s lesson from Isaiah say to us, now.  Many of us are as displaced, disappointed and stuck in exile as the children of God to whom those words were written.  As it was for them, so it is for many of us; life has turned out in ways we never would have dreamed or imagined, leaving us, like Isaiah’s original exiles, sometimes to wonder, If God cares and if God can, then why doesn’t God come down, step in and fix things?

The popular Christianity which is so prevalent in our part of the world often advises, “We mustn’t question what happens, no matter how devastating or destructive, because everything that happens in life is part of God’s plan.  If it wasn’t in God’s will, it wouldn’t have happened.”  I understand why people embrace that way of thinking, and I often envy their certainty.  But that kind of thinking doesn’t take with me.  I cannot speak for you, but, for me, to assign all the injustice, violence and evil in the world to “the plan of God” sacrifices too much of the goodness of God on the altar of the   control of God.

While no words concerning the mystery of suffering will ever cover everything, I find more truth in places such as Frank Tupper’s simple sentence from the depth of his own sorrow,  “In every situation, God does all that God can do,” and in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s wisdom in the aftermath of  the tragic death of his son, I cannot make it all fit together by saying, “God did it,” but neither can I make it all fit together by saying, “There was nothing God could have done about it.”  I cannot make it make sense.  I can only, with Job, endure.

Which takes us back to where we started, back to Isaiah 40:31, where all the weary exiles, then and now, are promised the strength to endure, the strength to go through the wonderful thing God might have done but did not do; new strength for each new day; the strength to stumble forward, leaning into the spirit of God, and leaning on the people of God, from whom we draw the strength we need to live deeply, fully and faithfully the life which is ours to live, day after day, no matter what.

Amen.