2/2/25 - Joint FOCUS Winter Worship - A Voice to the Voiceless - Jeremiah 7:1-7; Mark 11:15-19

A Voice for the Voiceless

Jeremiah 7:1-7, Mark 11:15-19

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

February 2, 2025 FOCUS Winter Worship

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjeqkqpZmhM

Tony Campolo died in November at age 89.  He was one of the prophets of our time and some of us are proud that he was a Baptist.  A very long time ago, when I was a student, he came to my college, and he began his presentation the way he was beginning his speeches on college campuses all over the world at that time.  He said:  

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a [bleep] (Only he actually said the word I’m bleeping because he was braver than me and because there weren’t children in his audience.] Then he would go on to say “What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said [bleep] than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

The nervous laughter of the audience verified the truth of what he was saying. Tony was good at reminding us that the church often majors on minor things and ignores what is really of major importance.  We have been correctly taught that Jesus calls us to love, but sometimes we have incorrectly internalized that love means being polite or nice or never creating a scene.

Jesus didn’t seem to have that confusion.  He was willing to confront those in power, willing to speak his mind, willing to break social norms at dinner parties as a demonstration of love.  The scene that he created that day in the temple is recorded in all four gospels.  It is so familiar that perhaps it has lost some of its edge.

Several times recently, I’ve been with people who expressed powerlessness.  Some were concerned about the decline of the church.  Despite their hard work of many years, churches continue to struggle for existence and many close.  Others are dismayed by the polarization of our civic life, feeling like there is no way to effect change for the common good. 

I have to think that Jesus of Nazareth shared some of those feelings at least some of the time.  He was working hard, constantly traveling and talking to people, addressing their needs, helping them understand the movement he was leading.

At the beginning of his ministry, in his first skirmish with religious authorities, Jesus said that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  That house is the political system of his time in which a covenant based on justice and mercy was being betrayed by a political economy of exploitation.  In that same skirmish, Jesus also said “no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man”.  Scholar Ched Myers suggests that Jesus’ entire ministry is been about binding the strong man, i.e. Satan or the forces of evil.  This is what Jesus has been about.  He has many apprentices and large crowds come out to learn from him.  The movement is growing, but it probably doesn’t feel like much change is actually happening. 

So Jesus decides to confront evil directly in the center of power. He goes to Jerusalem over the protests of those who love him and fear for his safety. 

He goes to the Temple.  It is probably impossible to overstate how important the Temple was, how sacred it was, to ordinary, faithful Jewish people.  This Temple was built by King Herod to inspire awe and to intimidate. Herod had been Rome’s puppet king.  Under his rule, the Temple had become the center of local collaboration with Rome.  The temple authorities come from Jerusalem’s elite wealthy families. They are the educated scribes and priests.  They are the Temple’s bankers.   They are maintaining their power and privilege by supporting the domination of Rome in the name of religion.  

In the Temple, Jesus drives out the buyers and sellers.  We need to understand that commercial activity was an entirely normal part of any religion in Jesus’ time.   Two thousand years later, we read into the text a concern for the noise and smells that we think are disruptive to prayer and worship.  That is not Jesus’ concern.  He is protesting the ruling-class interests which are in control of this marketplace. [1]

He singles out two stations – the money changers and the dove sellers.  The Temple is a religious institution, but also inherently an economic one. The money taken in by these activities is going to the Temple treasury, to support the ruling class which is colluding with Rome.  The dove sellers are singled out because doves are the sacrifice required of the poor and the ritually unclean.  Jesus attacks the concrete mechanisms of oppression which exploited those on the lowest socioeconomic levels to benefit those at the highest levels.[2]

 Jesus was not against the Temple as such, not against his own religion. He was protesting, from within, a religion that had forgotten its purpose.  He was taking a public stand against a faith system that offered religious cover for political violence.

Did you catch that? He was protesting a faith system that offered religious cover for political violence. 

One of the people Jesus quotes is the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah had also stood in the temple, an earlier version of it, and delivered an ultimatum from God that the temple would be destroyed unless they stopped exploiting the poor.  We should heed that warning – Christianity is being destroyed from within by collusion with the ultra-wealthy, the white supremacists and Christian nationalists. When our faith is publicly aligned with causes antithetical to Jesus, we should not be surprised that the church declines.

Jesus is angry.  This is not a spontaneous temper-tantrum. This is a deliberate, carefully planned action.  We are not always comfortable with the thought that Jesus got mad.  It would be so much easier to follow the Jesus who is always polite to everyone, who never questions economic, political, or religious systems.

We don’t always know what to do with our own anger.  We are angry at economic systems that do not provide living wages to full-time workers.  We are angry at the systematic disenfranchisement of black and brown voters. We are angry at the attempts to erase the existence of trans and queer folk.  We are angry at the lies perpetuated by those in power who benefit when the poor believe them. 

But some of us have become convinced that being angry is not loving. Jesus’ own life demonstrates that is not true.  In her widely influential essay, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” Beverly Harrison wrote: “suppressed anger robs us of the power to love, the power to act.” . . . “Anger is not the opposite of love. It is a sign that we know all is not well in the world around us . . . where anger rises, there the energy to act is present.” [3]

Jesus was angry.  Maybe he felt some of the frustration and powerlessness that you and I do.  Nevertheless, he took action. He dug down to his core understanding of God, to the fundamentals of a covenant that demanded faith-filled care for the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. And then, as just one person against the Empire, he spoke up as a voice for the voiceless.  He acted up for the cause of justice. 

Was it worth it?  Did anything change as a result of his actions?  Well, Mark says that after that, the authorities kept looking for a way to kill him.  We know that story.  But what else?  Did he make any difference? 

Mark reports that he did not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple that day.  The Temple covered 33 square acres.  It seems unlikely that one person could have shut down all business in that vast space.

Biblical scholar Obery Hendricks says “How could Jesus have halted commerce on so large a scale, except that other pilgrims and worshippers were empowered and inspired to stand with him?”[4]  He believes  that seeing Jesus do what he did, hearing him speak their own feelings out loud, gave them the courage to do what they would not ever have imagined themselves doing and they joined in the protest.  What Jesus did was to share his anger and power.  The power to love.  The power to act. What Jesus did that day is told by all four evangelists. It changed the lives of Jesus’ followers and still does.

Friends, I recognize that multiple political views and election districts are represented in this room. We don’t all support the same party or vote for the same candidates.  My appeal is not being made on the basis of that.  Nor is it on the basis of our citizenship or immigration status.  I am appealing to our common commitment to follow Jesus, which is our highest allegiance for those of us who share that, and to our common ministry as FOCUS churches.  Just a few minutes ago, we read the FOCUS covenant together.  We promised to provide a ministry of presence, support and advocacy for victims of society’s injustice and neglect and to speak the truth in places of power on behalf of the powerless because it is a demonstration of the gospel.  That covenant is not a partisan reaction to current politics.  It is decades old and reflects our core understanding of who God is and who we are called to be.

St. Augustine was a long-ago follower of Jesus.  He said, "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” 

Friends, may we be full of hope – both angry and courageous, following Jesus who channeled his anger for the work of love.  Amen.


[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, (Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 2008), p. 300

[2] Myers, p. 301

[3] Beverly W. Harrison (1981), ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of  Love’ in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. xxxvi, pp. 41-57

 [4] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p. 124

 

1/26/25 - Treat the People's Needs as Holy - Luke 11:1-4; Matthew 6:9-13

Treat the People’s Needs as Holy

Luke 11:1-4, Matthew 6:9-13

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

January 26, 2024

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGeB7LBnNIk

Dr. Molly Marshall was my theology professor.   I took a lot of notes in her classes, but one thing she said was so troubling to me that I used to turn back to it.  She said that prayer was the purest form of theology, that whether we pray or not and how we pray is the most accurate reflection of what we really believe. 

Jesus’ disciples say “Lord, teach us to pray.”   The faithful Jewish person of that time prayed three times a day and Jesus’ disciples were in that category.  They were quite familiar with prayer already.  What they wanted to know was what to pray for. Just as John the Baptist had taught his disciples a distinctive prayer, Jesus disciples wanted to know what they were asking God to help them accomplish under Jesus’ leadership.  

We have two versions of the prayer that Jesus taught.  The variations between Luke and Matthew may imply he shared different version on different occasions.  It most likely reflects something they heard him pray often, rather than being a one-time delivery.   We should note that the language of the prayer is “our” or “us” or “we” not “me” and “mine”.  This is not a private prayer, but corporate.  An individual might pray in this way, and should, but this is not strictly personal prayer.

The prayer of Jesus has a simple structure.  There are two petitions that focus on God and three petitions about human need.

The English word “hallow” means to make holy, to make sacred, to set someone or something apart.  Roman state religions required that only Casear’s name be hallowed, but this prayer affirms the holiness of God above Casear. When put combination with “your kingdom come, your will be done” the person praying is pleading with God to hallow God’s own status as God.  It is a prayer that God will demonstrate God’s holiness, by revealing himself to be sovereign by manifesting judgment or mercy.

By law, only Casear’s name is to be honored like this.  But Jesus’ only allegiance is to God.  Only God is sovereign.  Keep in mind that the early Christians would have prayed like this in the ruins of the Temple not just during occupation but outright war with Rome. To have been overheard would have been treasonous. Later manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel include the ending “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”  This is a very dangerous, political prayer.

Friends, full disclosure, today and for the next few Sundays, I am intentionally looking at Jesus’ words and actions through a political lens.  If you’ve been paying attention for the last 14 years, you know that’s not a new thing for me.  But right now, in the midst of incredible turmoil and division, at a time when our new jerk responses are often framed by which political party we adhere to and who we voted for, it seems most appropriate that we ground ourselves in the politics of Jesus.  It is helpful to me to remember that Jesus did not live in a representative democracy.  Neither did first disciples nor many generations of the first Christians. They did not enjoy freedom of religion or a way to compel their government to act with justice.  But still, they lived faithfully, seeking to be part of God’s kingdom on earth.  Regardless of what is happening around us, to believe that God is sovereign and that we can be a demonstration plot for God’s reign here and now, is still an option available to us.

Back to the prayer. It continues with three petitions for human needs – for bread, for forgiveness, for escape from trial.

Daily bread – Bread was the staple of the diet.  Every meal included bread. Jesus fed people and urged others to do the same.  Daily bread recalls manna in the wilderness, where every person’s need for food was met in the same way regardless of their finances or social standing.  This petition is also a prayer against the injustice of the day where the haves get more without regard for the needs of those who are hungry. For some of us, who are not at any risk of starving, this prayer could mean: Help us to let go of fear about not having enough. Help us to be satisfied with what is sufficient for today. Help us to share out of our abundance and our need.

The second petition is very interesting. Matthew records “forgive us our debts” while Luke seeks forgiveness of sins.  In Aramaic, there is one word which means both debts and sins.  That word does not exist in Greek, so in translating, Matthew chose debts and Luke chose sins. 

The cycle of debt in first century Israel was devastating to the people.  When the Romans conquered the region, they claimed they owned all the land and promptly started charging people rent.  People who had been farming their own land found themselves burdened with debt.  Debt was a way in which the conquerors continued to afflict the conquered. [1] 

Forgiving the debts of others also meant refusing to participate in the ways of the conqueror. It is consistent with Jesus’ declaration of his mission in light of the practices of Jubilee when debts were forgiven and slaves set free and land returned to the original owners.   Both Matthew and Luke use the same word for forgiveness.  It also means release.  It is the same word we heard last week when Jesus read from Isaiah about release to the captives and setting free the oppressed.  Release us from our debts as we release others from what they owe us.  It is a petition for release from the obligation of monetary debt and other kinds of captivity or enslavement, even captivity to sin. 

And do not bring us to the time of trial.  How you interpret this may depend on your theology, whether you believe that

God sets up tests for human beings to pass.  I don’t believe that.  In the original context, it is probably a prayer that the community would be spared trials before various secular authorities in which some Christians were being imprisoned or executed for their faith.  It is a prayer for strength to resist the temptation to serve Caesar out of fear or expediency, and that temptation is just as present in our context as it was then.

I’m using Obery Hendricks’ book, The Politics of Jesus, as a primary resource for this sermon series.  He writes, “Jesus treated the people and their needs as holy by healing their bodies, their souls and their psyches . . . .  He traveled incessantly to raise the people’s consciousness that the present order sinned against the justice of God because it sinned against their well-being.”[2]

Prayer is the purest form of theology, my professor said.  How we pray, what we pray for, reveals what we believe about God.  I have also come to believe that praying in the same ways over time shapes us.  Jesus taught us to pray that everyone has enough to eat every day.  That everyone is free from economic exploitation and violence.  That everyone is delivered from whatever captivity they are in whether from unjust government or addiction or poverty or systemic oppression or their own sin.  If we pray this and mean it, it will shape our actions.  It will form in us the sense of “we” and “us” and “our” until we recognize the holiness of all human need, not just our own.  It will remind us that we serve God best by loving each other. 

Those who live with more awareness of their dependence on G od often understand this in ways that those of us with means do not. There are so many instances of this. Here’s just one example.  There is a slum on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda. Those fortunate enough to have a job perform the back-breaking work of strip-mining rocks for construction.  The men mine large boulders and rocks, while the women break the rocks into gravel using hand-held tools.  In 2005, these women earned $1.20 per day.  That was the year that Hurricane Katrina wrought such destruction.  These women heard about that.  Two hundred of them broke rocks for weeks and then donated $900 of their wages to help people displaced by Katrina.  One of them said that those who are suffering “belong to us.  They are our people.  Their problems are our problems.  Their children are like our children.”  [3]

This is what it means to treat all the people’s real needs as holy. 

I cannot end this sermon without mentioning what we all bore witness to this week.  At a prayer service for the unity of the nation, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington Marianne Budde lifted up the needs of real people. https://youtu.be/xwwaEuDeqM8?si=PeE32A4fGUI45z7K

She was asking for mercy from the Empire.  The Empire does not hallow the name of God and is not inclined to mercy.  The stark contrast between the ways of Jesus and the ways of Empire are on full display once again.  May we be found faithful to the one God who is sovereign over all. 

This week, I discovered a version of Jesus’ prayer from a Christian community in Central America.  Let me close with it:

Our Father who is in us here on earth.
Holy is your name in the hungry
who share their bread and their song.
Your kingdom come which is a generous land
which flows with milk and honey.
Let us do your will standing up
when all are sitting down
and raising our voice when all are silent.
You’re giving us our daily bread
in the song of the bird and the miracle of the corn.
Forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice
and for burying our dreams,
for not sharing bread and wine,
love and the land, among us, now.
Don’t let us fall into the temptation
of shutting the door through fear,
of resigning ourselves to hunger and injustice,
of taking up the same arms as the enemy,
but deliver us from evil.
Give us the perseverance and the solidarity
to look for love,
even if the path has not yet been trodden,
even if we fall.
So we shall have known your kingdom,
which is being built forever and forever.[4]
Amen.

 

 

[1] https://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2010/07/lectionary-blogging-luke-11111.html

 [2] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p. 108

[3] https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/2494/Women-In-Uganda-Sent-900-To-Katrina-Victims-In-2005-They-Earned-1-20-A-Day

[4] Janet Morley, Bread of Tomorrow: Praying with the World’s Poor, (London: SPCK Publishing, 1992).

1/5/25 – Practices for This New Year – Luke 2:21-38

Making Room

Luke 2:21-38

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

January 5, 2025

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEC0a6k31-I

On Christmas Eve, we heard the familiar story of Jesus’ birth which begins “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Luke places the birth of Jesus in a certain political reality.  Mary and Joseph and Jesus live under Roman occupation.  The empire has a real and profound effect on their lives, even on the circumstances in which Jesus is born.  I think about all the babies born in the Ukraine in the nearly 3 years since the Russian invasion.  I think about all the babies born in Palestine since the Hamas attack in October 2023. Babies and parents in war zones, lands of occupation.  I imagine contemporary Ukranian Annas and Palestinian Simeons who wonder what life will be for the babies they see. I imagine that as the oldest generation welcomes these infants, they may hope that each one will grow up to live in peace or to wage lasting peace. They likely also fear for too many who will suffer because of the powers at work in the worlds into which they have just been born. 

Jesus’ life is shaped by Roman occupation, but not only by that. It is also shaped by his parents’ faith and faithfulness. The cultural struggle evident throughout Jesus’ life is a battle for identity of his people.  On one side is their identity as God’s covenant people, people who are obedient to the practices of justice and mercy and lovingkindness.  On the other side is an identity as a subjugated people who must submit to the ways of Empire, to the practices of power that dominates and oppresses.  It is a real and hard struggle. What the Emperor wants, the Emperor usually gets.  How can an ordinary person be faithful in these circumstances?

What we see in this chapter of Luke is that Mary and Joseph meet the requirements of Empire.  They go to Bethlehem as decreed.  But they are also obedient to God. They go to the Temple on the eighth day of Jesus’ life because they are part of a covenant community. This ritual of naming celebrates Jesus’ birth, introduces him to the covenant community, and recognizes that, in some inscrutable way, God’s promises are being fulfilled.  It honors Mary and Joseph’s deepest awareness and commitments.[1]  The ritual becomes an expression of the identity they are claiming.  It connects them to the past. This is the same ceremony that their parents and grandparents engaged.  And the blessings of Anna and Simeon connect them to the future, their descendants in an ongoing covenant community.  We might understand their ritual as an act of resistance, a small demonstration of faith despite the brutality of occupation.

Even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as traditional probably have a few rituals that we sustain or which sustain us.  Traditions related to family celebrations or milestone events or holidays. My family usually puts up a Christmas Tree as early as we can in the season so that we can enjoy it for a long time. 

Every year, I recognize a number of ornaments with a connection to Emmanuel. I’ll just mention three.  This one was a gift from Liselle last year.  It is a world with the word Peace on it.  This year, it resonates for me with our theme of a weary world rejoicing.  Two others are related to each other.   This heart says “Love wins”.  It was a gift from Ellen in 2018.  That same year, this star came from Michael.  Our Advent/Christmas theme that year was Testify to Love.  If you don’t remember that theme, you might remember it as the year that we carried a burning sparkler across the sanctuary to light the Advent candles while certain trustees looked on with apprehension every week. The ritual of a Christmas tree with ornaments is a way that links memory and meaning and identity and those links are strengthened every year as the ritual is enacted again.

When I was in Northern Ireland this summer, I became aware of the nuances of the English language and its variations across the world.  Something clicked for me with the phrase Do you mind?  In my American world, Do you mind? is most often associated with asking someone’s permission for a small courtesy.  Do you mind if I sit down?  Do you mind if I smoke?  In that context, do you mind? becomes do you care?

In Northern Ireland, do you mind? has a double meaning.  Just like here, it can mean do you care?  But there it also can referring to bringing something to mind, as in do you mind the year of that great blizzard? Or Do you mind the name of those cousins in Belfast? So it means both do you care? and do you remember?

Ritual can evoke that double meaning.  Ritual enables us to remember and to care. 

Jesus grew into adulthood in a culture where Jewish nationalism vied with Roman nationalism and with Jewish identity as God’s covenant people. We live in a similar moment.  Christian nationalism and white supremacy are deeply embedded in our culture, and consciously or unconsciously, part of our own identity struggle.  We are citizens of the global Empire of our time and we must reckon with what it means to be faithful in these circumstances.  We are weary of the fractious politics we have endured in recent decades.  Many of us are seriously concerned about what might be ahead of us this year.

In such times, it happens that weary people are sometimes sustained by rituals and intentional practices.  I want to invite us to be proactive as we launch ourselves into this new year.  Consider the rhythm of your life.  Where are the times and places where you might develop a ritual that reinforces your deepest commitments? What is a new or old practice that you might sustain?

The most meaningful practices will be the ones you create for yourself.  Let me offer a few suggestions to spark your imagination.  Consider a monthly practice – read 5 psalms every day.  There are 150 psalms. In most months, reading 5 per day will bring back to the beginning by the start of the next month. Similarly, there are prayer books designed for 31 days. 

A weekly practice – Sabbath, which is about resting and balance.  Honor the Sabbath with worship, but also by changing the pattern of one day in seven. Consider how to spend that day – perhaps it is a day to fast from media or social media, or a day to light candles and invite some friends over.  Perhaps you might devote time to reading something special only on that day. My intention for this year is to seek more wisdom from people of color, people who have engaged this struggle in ways that my privilege has insulated me from. In the bulletin, there is an excerpt by Howard Thurman as an example.  Work for social justice is necessary, but regular rest is essential to provide physical and spiritual nurture for the long haul.

Tricia Hersey is the founder of The Nap Ministry.  She maintains that rest is anything that connects body and soul.  She writes “My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body.  I took to rest and naps and slowing down as a way to save my life, resist the systems telling me to do more and most importantly, as a remembrance to my Ancestors who had their Dream Space stolen from them.  This is about more than naps.”[2]

Consider a daily practice – if you bathe or shower daily, consider a ritual of re-affirming your baptism.  As the water flows over you, remember your commitment to follow Jesus in all the ways your life requires.  And also remember that you are beloved in God’s sight.  Spend a minute or two every day in the shower or in the mirror saying out loud “I am baptized.  I am beloved.”

I will be very interested in hearing the new and old rituals that you choose to practice across the next weeks and months.    

When the Communists took over Russia in the last century, one ritual of the Orthodox Church took on surprising power. Until that time, you might have thought that the purpose of the Orthodox Church was to underwrite the rule of the Czars. There was very little sense that the church engaged with politics or economics.  When the Communists took power, here was a church that might have seemed peculiarly ill-suited to challenge the status quo.

There was one Russian Orthodox habit, however, that brought the church out of the church. Before the celebration of Communion, the priest was expected to go to the porch of the church and ring a hand-bell. That bell was to tell the people in the village that Communion was beginning. The early Communist regime outlawed the ringing of the hand-bell as part of its anti-religious campaign. Orthodox priests are unfailingly traditionalist by nature, and they just continued to stand on the porch, ringing their little bells, asserting their deepest commitment, finding it impossible to do otherwise.  The state reacted by jailing and slaughtering priests by the thousands. By refusing to give up the ringing of the bell, Orthodox Christians confronted its nation's rulers with a determination that they had not know they had.[3]

Beloved ones, I would like to find a bell to ring.  In the year that stretches ahead of us, I intend to engage in pro-active prayer practices and rituals that honor God and my own deepest commitments.  I hope that you will join me in rhythms that strengthen our faith and witness, that ground us in God’s abiding love and sustain us with joy even though we have considered all the facts.  May we remember and care.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 75.

[2] https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

[3] Stanley Hauerwas, Pulpit Resource, January- March, 2003, p. 8

12/24/24 – Christmas Eve – Making Room – Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

Making Room

Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 24, 2024

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41gwl0lFgpY

In a few days, our family will gather at Jim’s parents’ home.   We’re not a large family, so there has always been plenty of space, enough that everyone had their own bed.  But the whole family is going to be there this year, some of the adult grandchildren now with partners in tow.  For the first time ever, we had to think about making room for everyone.  For the first time ever, one of the adult grandchildren will be sleeping on an air mattress in what they used to call the playroom.  That kind of thing is happening in many places tonight, someone is sleeping on an air mattress or a sofa bed or in their childhood bunkbed, because someone else already claimed the guest room. 

When Judah read the first part of the story tonight, you might have heard a word that surprised you – the word “guest room” in the Bible story.   We are used to hearing that Mary laid her baby in the manger because there was no room for them in the “inn.” But tonight, we heard there was no room in the “guest room” because a few recent Bible translators have dared to tread on years of traditions of Christmas pageants with innkeepers and no vacancy signs. 

There is a word for “inn” in Greek.  It is the word that Luke uses in the parable about the Samaritan who helped the man on the road to Jericho.  The Samaritan bandaged his wounds and took him to an inn and paid the innkeeper to look after him. That story uses a Greek word that means an inn.

But Luke uses a different word here.  The word here is kataluma. The one other time that kataluma occurs in Luke’s gospel is when Jesus sends his disciples to find a place to celebrate the Passover.   Preparing for what we now call the Last Supper, Jesus told them to ask the homeowner for the use of the kataluma, the upper room or the guest room. The kataluma was an extra room, added on top of a house for the purpose of providing space for guests. 

In the first century, Palestinian homes usually had two main areas – one large room used for cooking, eating and sleeping.  We might call this the living room. The second area, usually down a few steps, was a night shelter for animals and a day room for people. Into this lower level, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep were brought each night.  In the morning, the animals were taken out into a courtyard, the area was cleaned and the house was ready for the day. 

In these homes, mangers were built into the floor of the main room. If a cow or donkey got hungry at night, it could stand and reach the food on the floor of the living room.  So, when a first century person heard this story about the baby  being laid in a manger, they would immediately have understood that Jesus was not in a barn or a stable, but in the living room.  If they thought to themselves, but “why not the guest room?” that it is answered immediately.  The guest room was already taken.[1]

So, Jesus was not born in the stable of some cold, impersonal one star hotel but rather in the living room of a home where aging aunts cousins, and other relatives may have doted on the new baby. God was welcomed into a world with room for Mary and Joseph, into a family, with rituals and holiday traditions, and all the quirks and characters that our families have.

That is what we celebrate tonight, that God came to share out humanness, our pain, our fear, our hopes and joys, and our love. God arrived as vulnerable and weak as any of us. Jesus lived and dwelt among us. God made room for us.

I want to invite M to join me up here. M is 7 years old. Several weeks ago, M called me with some questions. It is a pastor’s privilege to get to make room for the theological questions whenever they occur. We spent almost half an hour on the phone. M had so many good questions and some of her own good answers. I’m still thinking about a lot of them. M is willing to share just a few of them with us tonight. She started with questions about Jesus’ crucifixion, like:

M:  Did the people who killed Jesus get arrested and go to jail for doing that? Why didn’t Jesus just run away? Did Jesus come back to life?  Did he transform or something?

Kathy: She didn’t make it easy for me.  M would ask a question.  I would try to answer.  She would say “Uh huh” and then fire off another one.  And then, in a few minutes, she would circle back to an answer I had offered to a previous question and provide her own comments on that.  For example, I talked about Jesus being God and also being God’s son.  That Jesus could be both of those at the same time didn’t faze her.  But when she circled back, she asked:

M:  You said that there is God who is the parent and Jesus who is the son.  Is there anyone else in Jesus’ family? 

See what I mean about good questions and comments?  I took that opening to talk about the Holy Spirit who we might think of as a kind of sister in Jesus’s family.  Got to get an understanding of the Trinity in at an early age.  But then she circled back to the question that I’m thinking about now. When M had asked me why Jesus was killed, I said that Jesus came from God to teach people how to love each other, how to love their neighbors and their enemies and how to be kinder. When M circled back, she asked:

M:  After Jesus died, were people more loving?  Did they learn to be kinder to each other? 

Kathy: M, that great question is one that I am still thinking about tonight.   Thank you for sharing this conversation with all of us.

M:  You’re welcome. 

Behind M’s questions I heard “Was it worth it?  All that God went through to become human, to live with us as one of us, to be executed and then raised from death – did it make a difference?  Did people learn to love?  Are we kinder as a result of all that?

My first reaction was to think about all the wars being waged, all the atrocities being committed, all the petty cruelties and systemic injustices we inflict on each other – and I might have said “No, people still have not learned to love like Jesus taught.” 

But you can’t really say that to a 7-year-old, can you?  So, I said that we are still learning and that is why we keep remembering Jesus’s teachings and telling them again and again to each other, because it is not always easy to love our family or our neighbors or especially our enemies.

But then, I thought about those who have followed Jesus across the millennia. I thought about how the Jesus movement spread in the first century and how the first Christians were known by the love they had for each other.  I remember how they broke through one cultural boundary after another, caring for foreign widows, making room for the poor, accepting the leadership of those from within and also from outside their religious tradition.  I remember people whose faith compelled them to start schools or reform prisons or abolish slavery or shelter refugees because they believed so fervently in Jesus’ teachings.  And I realize that people have learned to love like Jesus loves and we are also still learning. 

I also recalled one last story about making room for each other.  You might know it already, but maybe it’s ok to re-tell a familiar story on Christmas Eve.  The events of this story happened in 2008.  They happened to Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi is a Palestinian-American poet and novelist. She grew up in Missouri, Jerusalem and Texas. Today she makes her home in San Antonio. 

Naomi says Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed by four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”

Well, one pauses these days.

Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help," said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly in Arabic. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too

. . . .

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies.

Naomi concludes, “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”[2]

Christmas reminds us that the promised peace on earth comes as we learn to love one another. We make room for weary or frightened travelers.  We make room for those who are exuberant and overly loud in the center and also for those who insist on withdrawing just beyond the perimeter.  We make room for a child’s eager questions, for a young adult’s cynicism and for a senior with the weary wisdom of their years. We make room for family and strangers, for neighbors and for enemies. We make room for each other, in all the ways and places we find ourselves, because this is good news of great joy for everyone. Thanks be to God.  


[1] Kenneth Baily, https://pres-outlook.org/2006/12/the-manger-and-the-inn-a-middle-eastern-view-of-the-birth-story-of-jesus/

[2] Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4” from Honeybee. Copyright © 2008 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

 

12/15/24 - Allowing Ourselves to be Amazed - Luke 1:57-66

Allowing Ourselves to be Amazed

Luke 1:57-66

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 15, 2024

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGM0WmiQL0o

 

Jim started seminary ahead of me.  By his last year, I was hurrying to catch up.  My final semester, I was taking a ridiculous course load and doing an internship as a hospital chaplain and working a part-time job selling housewares at Sears.  By the middle of that semester, I was exhausted. Coming home from class or work, I immediately crashed on the couch.  I didn’t turn in a single paper on time. I went to the campus clinic and was tested for anemia.  When that test was normal, I began to think I was clinically depressed.  I was not sad, but oh so very tired. 

Finally, I took an at-home pregnancy test.  It was positive, but I couldn’t believe it was right.  I made an appointment with a friend’s obstetrician just to make sure.  I was not expecting to be pregnant and had no idea how far along I might be.  The doctor set up to listen for a baby’s heartbeat.  As she put the gel on my abdomen, she carefully explained that the baby had to be a certain number of weeks old before we would hear a heartbeat.  I knew that she was trying to reassure me, so I wouldn’t be concerned if we didn’t hear anything.  But I lay on the table thinking, “There’s not going to be a heartbeat, because there’s no baby.  I’m not pregnant.”  But then, almost immediately, the sound came through loud and clear. It was amazing. The tears started rolling down my face.  And this doctor, whom I had just met 10 minutes earlier, had no idea whether I was happy or sad about the pregnancy.  But she said, “Do you have someone with you?”  When I said that Jim was in the waiting room, she went to get him and then brought him in and started all over so that we could both hear baby Molly’s heart together.  And it was just as amazing the second time.

I really wonder what it was like for Elizabeth to be pregnant for the first time so close to the end of her expected lifespan.  How long was it, how many explanations did she rule out, before she truly believed she was pregnant?  And how incredible, how amazing, was it to feel the baby’s first kick?  Or his second, or third?

She stays at home with a silent husband for the first 6 months.  Imagine how many things she thinks about ---

·       whether Zechariah is ever going to speak again

·       what their friends and neighbors are going to think

·       how surreal, ridiculous and incredibly joyful it is to be preparing for a baby finally, now,

·       when the baby grows up, what parent-teacher conferences are going to be like; the teachers are always going to assume she and Zech are the grandparents, not the parents  

·       if she will even survive – will this birth be her death?

 

Elizabeth does survive.  Both she and baby John seem to thrive, in fact. On the eighth day of John’s life, friends and relatives gather, to celebrate and rejoice with the family.  Between Zechariah’s inability to speak and Elizabeth’s isolation, the pregnancy was kept on the down-low, so now the excitement is running high.  

The crowd expects the baby to be named after his father.  So much that they argue with Elizabeth when she announces that his name is John. This is in obedience to what the angel Gabriel announced, although the crowd does not know that.  They go to Zechariah expecting him to back them up, but Zechariah writes that his name is John. At that, the mood of the crowd shifts from dissention to amazement. Suddenly, Zechariah can speak again.  After 9 months of silence, the first words he utters are praise to God.  Amazement turns to awe. Luke writes “Fear came over all their neighbors and all these things were talked about through the entire hill country of Judea.”  They wondered what the baby would grow up to be.  They know that they have witnessed something important, but do not know exactly what it is or what its consequences will be. [1]

Awe can be an antidote to weariness. Especially for those of us who are jaded by too much consumerism and the capitalism of too many Christmases. Scientists say that the experience of awe is essential to our well-being. It slows our heart rate, deepens breathing, relieves digestion.  It can also silence the negative self-critical voices in our heads, disrupting our preoccupation with self and opening us to wider experiences.[2]

If you are weary, I invite you to cultivate awe this week.  Allow yourself to be amazed.  Closely examine a pinecone. Notice your family members – how quirky or funny or helpful or inventive or reliable they are.  Enjoy dish-soap bubbles while washing pots and pans or recognize the deep memories evoked by your favorite Christmas carol. Maybe some of your weariness will slip away in the presence of awe and gratitude.

A year ago, Jim and I were on a cruise with my Dad and brother to Greece and Turkey.  By the time we got to Istanbul, Jim had Covid, so he was simply staying in the room sleeping and fighting his fever.   The port excursion required too much walking for my Dad, so he also stayed on board.  My brother, Roger, and I got on the bus together.  We were going a lot of places that day, but the most important stop for me would be the Hagia Sophia.  The Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church. For a thousand years, it was the world’s largest cathedral and the seat of the Patriach of Constantinople, the Eastern church’s counterpart to the Vatican.  Later it was converted to a mosque and then to a museum and most recently, back to being a mosque again. 

This is a place that I knew about from church history classes as the site of the schism between the Eastern and Western Church.  It was a place that had captured my imagination a long time ago.  As we rode the bus through Istanbul, it suddenly struck me that I was going to be there, at the Hagia Sophia.  It seemed incredible.  It was nothing I had ever planned or expected.  It happened only because my Dad chose and financed this particular trip.  And when I realized that, again, my response was tears.  Because Jim was sick and I might have been also, I was wearing a face mask.  The tears and the mask made me sniffle.  Roger was already nervous that he might get Covid, so I had to explain to him that I wasn’t sick, I was just crying because I was so amazed that I was actually going to the Hagia Sophia.  How could that be?  Who was I to have that privilege?

Elizabeth was amazed by what was happening to her.  When Mary arrived, she said, “who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”  It is a wonderful part of this story that Elizabeth and Zechariah allowed themselves to be joyfully surprised, to be awe-struck at what God was doing in their lives.  Remember that Zechariah’s first reaction was “We’re too old.”  Their on-going response might have been fear – “now the neighbors will gossip more than ever” or “Elizabeth may die.”    It might have been anger – “this is a lot to ask of us right now, God.  Your timing is lousy.”   Their response might have been weariness – “we already get up in the night for our own trips to the bathroom; we don’t have the energy for feeding and diaper changes. How are we going to keep up with him when he’s an active three-year-old?”

God is asking a lot of them.  And they choose to respond, not with fear or anger or weariness, but with delight and awe.    

Luke says that Elizabeth and Zechariah are “advanced in years”.  I think that might be a reasonable description of Emmanuel at 190 years old.  The boiler gave up the ghost last month. I think it was the third boiler that died in my time here.  I could be wrong about that. I’ve kind of lost count.  Last week, Tom was in the building three or four times a day, checking vital signs, ahem, I mean taking temperatures, at various locations, for fear the pipes might freeze.  The building is old. 

Our average age is mature.  We have worn out a generation of grandparents who taught Sunday School decades longer than they expected to.  Other church leaders keep looking over their shoulders for a younger generation to take the reins, but with few notable exceptions, that generation isn’t here.  It seems fair to say that Emmanuel is “advanced in years.”

I hope you will stay and participate in the congregational meeting following worship today.  Everyone here is welcome. As far as I know, Gabriel is not planning to put in an appearance. No promises though.  The Building Team has some important news to share, but I don’t think that they are going to announce that Emmanuel is expecting. Not in those words anyway.

A few weeks ago, I described a new thing that God is doing in our time.  I suggested the analogy of a cell phone church, in contrast to a landline church.  I do want to explore that idea more with you.  But today, because of this text, I’m using another analogy.  Today, I’m wondering if we might actually begin to see ourselves as being called to give birth to what will grow up to be a new church, something we can’t really imagine.  Could Emmanuel Baptist Church be pregnant? That really would be asking a lot of us at our advanced age, wouldn’t it? 

A final memory of awe in my life.  Maybe I was about 12. We were driving around the area where my father grew up. We went past the country church that he and his brothers and parents had attended.  Behind it was a tree, a tree that towered over the church.  It was even taller than the steeple.  My Dad said that my grandmother had planted that tree when he was a child. And I grappled with how long ago that had been and all that might have happened since and marveled that the tree was still standing and I was there to see it.  “To plant a tree is to believe in tomorrow” as someone has said.

Elizabeth and Zechariah bring John into the world, but they are old.  They do not live to see his adult ministry.  They never know that huge crowds go out to the wilderness to hear John preach and be baptized by him.  They only trust, from the prophecy of Gabriel, that he will be part of the astonishing new thing that God is doing.  God chose them, old and faithful and ordinary people for this wild and ridiculous and joyful task. 

Emmanuel, we are faithful, ordinary people, also advanced in years.  What if the call to gestation and pregnancy and new birth is also our call?  How wild and ridiculous and joyful would that be for us? We may be fearful.  We may be angry.  We may be old and weary.  But what if, what if, we could lean into awe?  What if we say Hallelujah anyway, and just allow ourselves to be amazed? 

 


[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 28.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/well/live/awe-wonder-dacher-keltner.html

12/1/24 - Acknowledging our Weariness - Luke 1:1-23

Acknowledging our Weariness

Luke 1:1-23

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 1, 2024

 Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98cE3VookDY

There is a book by Dr. Seuss that is sometimes read to children and parents on the last day of preschool and often given as a gift to high school or college graduates. The book is Oh, The Places You’ll Go. You are probably familiar with it.  You may remember one area which is described as the most useless place, and that is the Waiting Place.

Dr. Seuss’s narrator says, “The Waiting Place (is) for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.”

Advent is the Waiting Place of the church year.  It is the season when we anticipate and wait for the birth of the baby Jesus.  It is also the season when we await the second coming, that time when all is fulfilled and God’s justice and love reign on earth as fully as they do in heaven.  Advent is a structured 4-week season with a predictable emphasis on waiting, but of course we know that we can be thrust into a posture of waiting at any time, without warning and without knowing if or when or how the waiting will end.

The story of waiting in Luke’s gospel begins with fulfillment.  Zechariah the priest has been waiting for his whole adult life for his turn to make the afternoon incense offering.  It is the greatest privilege of his office.  A priest can only do it once in a lifetime and some never get the opportunity.

Zechariah is old.  He has been waiting for this for a long time.  Just like he and his wife Elizabeth have waited a long time, a lifetime, for a child.  

In the ancient near East, a woman’s God-given role was to bear and raise children.  Their understanding of biology led them to believe that if a couple couldn’t conceive, it was always the woman’s fault.  And it was believed to be a sign that God was displeased.  So, a woman who couldn’t bear children was a considered disgrace to herself and her husband.    But Zechariah and Elizabeth are described as “righteous” and “blameless” to tell us that their childlessness is not a punishment from God.

Let us take a moment to recognize that infertility is still a source of great pain for women and men. Let us say out loud that whether a person has children or not, whether by choice or circumstance, it is not a requirement for full participation in this story or in God’s story more generally.  People are whole and beloved by God regardless of whether or not they reproduce.

Zechariah was probably not expecting to be chosen for special service in the Temple.  Just like he probably no longer expects to become a father. It is a constant heartache and a disgrace he tries to shield Elizabeth from, but it is also settled reality.  The dream has died. Zechariah has stopped waiting for an answer to that prayer.  In his weariness, he no longer hopes for much, no longer expects anything. 

If you are joyful this season, if you are full of hope and energy and living your best life, then celebrate that and we will celebrate with you.  We will lean into your joy. 

But I know, you know, that many of us are weary.  We are weary because of our age, because our physical bodies are letting us down.  We are weary of propaganda and disinformation.  We are weary because we have tried hard to make the right decisions and act for the good of others and we are still waiting to see the fruit of those labors.  We are weary because we have faced the same routine, honored the same traditions for years, and seemingly watched nothing change.  We had expectations which were never met and we are weary with disappointment.[1]

Zechariah is so weary that he cannot hear the good news delivered by the angel Gabriel.  He cannot risk believing it.  Zechariah wants assurances.  He wants certainty.  He is not going to set himself up for disappointment again. 

Brené Brown is a researcher and storyteller who studies courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She writes, “There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment. This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.”[2]

People choose to lower their expectations, living with a status quo of disappointment rather than letting themselves hope for more and not get it.  Brené Brown calls this foreboding joy.  It is the experience of joy immediately followed by worry or dread about losing the joy.  

Shirley Caesar sings a gospel song which says “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give to me and the world can’t take it away.”  Austin Channing Brown is a Black author and speaker who describes a spirituality in the Black community born of hardship and joy.  She says that this phrase, “the world didn’t give to me and the world can’t take it away” is a staunch declaration that if the world will take from her, it will only do so once, not twice.  It cannot have both tragedy and her joy.

She writes, “After generations of horrific oppression, after a cen­tury of second-class citizenship, after a host of atrocities from colonization to genocide and all manner of horrors, we have learned that the only thing white supremacy would love more than taking our lives is for the lives we have to be diminished, less than human, filled with despair, containing only fear. But our community has learned that even the darkest depths of human evil cannot snuff out our experi­ence of joy – of laughter and love, of good food and good conversation, of family legacy and hope for the future, of creative endeavor and the pursuit of justice.”

She continues “In the words of poet Toi Derricotte, ‘Joy is an act of re­sistance,’ and so we will lean into that joy, knowing that our humanity demands that we fully partake of this magical ex­perience.”[3]

Those of us who are fearful that we may be in for a long

weary season that may last some years, especially those of us who are White may want to learn from our black siblings this resilience of joy. 

Zechariah does not lean into joy.  In the weariness of prolonged disappointment, he cannot take yes for an answer.  He wants evidence, proof of the angel’s promise.  Instead he is rendered mute, unable to speak.  I know some folks who think it would be just right if what happened to Zechariah happened to every man who starts pontificating about women’s reproductive issues.  We tend to think that Zechariah’s silence is a punishment for his lack of imagination and disbelief.  But maybe it isn’t. 

I was riding a bus to an airport recently when two strangers struck up a conversation with each other.  It quickly became political.  Fortunately for them, they had supported the same candidates in the recent election.  Unfortunately for me, they were not the candidates I had supported.  I tried not to listen, but they were loud.  For close to an hour, they listed all the wonderful things about their candidate and what he is going to accomplish.  Every once in a while, they got in a dig at the opposition – how worthless they are, how ridiculous their supporters are.  Nothing they said was new.  I wasn’t sure why they needed to say it to each other – complete strangers, on a public bus.  Many of us use words and logic as a way of asserting control over our lives.  But words and logic only take us so far. We keep repeating ourselves to those who already agree with us or arguing again with those who disagree. And we are so very weary of it all. 

What if Zechariah’s silence was not punishment, but a healing for his weariness, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, “the angel’s gift to him—an enforced sabbatical, a gestation period of his own during which the seeds of hope were sown again in his hushed soul.” [4]

At the top of my favorite Christmas carols list is It Came Upon a Midnight Clear which was written in the wake of the Mexican-American war and at a time of personal hardship for the author. Verse four says, “O ye, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil all along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, look now for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing.  O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.”         

What if, this Advent, we acknowledge that we are weary, if we are, and we name what causes our weariness.  But what if, at the same time, we also acknowledge that joy is resistance.  For some of us, that might mean being sure to laugh out loud every day.  For others, it may mean singing in the shower or dancing with abandon in the kitchen. But for those of us who are weary like Zechariah, I wonder if we might seek a season of silence, a quiet season in which we simply watch for the subtle signs of God at work?   Perhaps if we quiet ourselves, “we can listen to what God is saying and try to hear where God is still-speaking in our lives and in the world. Maybe it’s there we can hear the things that matter most: like the promise that we are loved, that God’s creation is good, that justice is our calling, and grace is our gift.[5]  And perhaps joy will creep in as we rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

 

 

[1] This paragraph adapted from the Sanctified Art commentary for this season written by Rev. Cecelia D. Armstrong

[2] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (New Yok:  Random House, 2021) pp. 121-122

[3] This Joy I Have by Austin Channing Brown in You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience – an anthology, edited by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown Excerpted at

https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-us/porter/article-194d8acece1a5511/lifestyle/culture/you-are-your-best-thing

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Silence of Angels” in Bread of Angels, Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1997),  p. 93-94

[5] Rev. Jenny Gleichauf in her sermon on the same passage at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Racine, WI on 26 November 2023.

11/24/24 - Towards a Vision for Emmanuel Baptist Church in Three Pieces

Towards a Vision for

Emmanuel Baptist Church in Three pieces

November 24, 2024; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ous5pBm_nFA

I’m sharing today what I had expected to share last Sunday.  Instead of preaching the final sermon on Acts, I will offer my own perspective on the moment where Emmanuel is in history and my glimpse of a future to which God might be calling us.  This is only my viewpoint, and it is subject to change as we continue to discern together. Today’s sermon will be longer than usual – prepare yourselves.   

Piece #1

Like the New Testament world in the first century and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, we are living through a time of great disruption and change. The Reformation was a theological revolution, but it did not happen in isolation.  It had the impact that it did, in large part because of the technological and political revolutions that were happening at the same time.  The invention of the printing press contributed greatly to the spreading of ideas and information across Europe.  The Reformation was not one event in one place, but several different religious leaders sharing similar ideas across Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain and it lasted for a period of years.  Millions of Christians left Catholic churches to join Protestant ones.  Beautiful churches and monasteries were stripped of their art and treasures and destroyed or left to fall into ruin. 

Parallels with our time are numerous – sweeping changes have happened or are happening in our world.  Church participation in Europe and the United States/Canada has steadily declined for decades.  Church buildings are being repurposed as restaurants, apartment buildings, art galleries, or abandoned to fall into ruin.  In another era, we might have said that an individual church had simply come to the end of its life cycle.  But there is a bigger pattern at work.  It is not just individual churches that are dying.  What we are seeing is a large-scale shift from one form of Christianity to another.  What was effective in previous generations is not working now.  It is not that we are doing something wrong.  We are doing something that was right for another time.   

If we do not grasp the bigger picture, we may be tempted to believe that if we simply engage our current ministry harder or smarter, EBC will grow and thrive again.  If we do understand that big picture, then there are two potential outcomes for Emmanuel Baptist Church.  One outcome is that we will die.    We will grieve together, dispose of the assets under NY Religious Corporation Law, hold a final worship service, and cease to be.  Death is not the worst thing that can happen to people who believe in resurrection. 

But there is another possible outcome.  The other possibility is that we could intentionally seek to join or even co-create the new thing that God is doing in our time.  We might become midwives of grace and help bring into the world the new expression of the kingdom of God, the new life that is waiting to be born.   

Piece #2

To state the obvious:  Change is hard.  We resist it.  We like things that are familiar.  We really don’t like change that is forced on us.  The Covid pandemic was hard for so many reasons, but one was how much everything changed overnight and how little control we had over any of it.   

Let’s consider a different change.  It’s something that we’ve all lived through, but it has been more gradual and for most of us, more acceptable.  I’m thinking about the evolution of the telephone.  One of the rules in my household growing up was not to stretch the cord of the phone too far.  Do you remember those very long coiled phone cords?  There was a 25-foot-long cord that connected the handset of the phone to the part where the dial was. (Remember rotary dials?)  You could wander all over our small kitchen with that long cord, but my Dad had a thing about not stretching it so far that the coils got messed up.   

So, I’m thinking about phones.  I’m thinking about landlines and cell phones.  Some of us still have a landline phone in our homes.  Many of us do not.  Almost all of us have a cell phone.  Many of us have made a choice in recent years to only have one phone and in almost every case, the decision was for our one phone to be a cell phone. 

Twenty years ago, only about 5% of Americans opted for just a cell phone.  Now more than seventy-five percent of Americans live in homes without landlines.[1]  

I’m not debating the pros and cons of landlines vs cell phones. I’m just noting that in the last 20 years, a huge change has occurred in the ways people use phones.  We have definitely experienced it as consumers.  But what if you were in the landline business? It is hard to stop doing what was successful for such a long time.  If you were in the landline business 20 or 30 years ago, and you did not adapt and get into the cell phone business, you went out of business.        

My contention is that for the last 100-200 years, the church has been operating like a landline business.  It worked very well for a long time.  But sometime, probably in the last two generations, things changed.  The church did not recognize that new context and continued to deliver landlines when what was needed were cellphones.   

Right now, EBC is still functioning almost exclusively in a landline world.  Clinging to familiar patterns of Sunday morning worship and Sunday School with the dear people we already know and love, is like continuing to use the landline phone with its coiled cord.  That strategy is already putting us out of business. 

If we want to renew our active participation in the new thing God is doing now, then we need to launch ourselves into a new form of Christian community, a culturally relevant form that engages hearts and minds and makes disciples of Jesus.  I’m going to refer to that as being a cellphone church.

Let me say that again, for the purposes of this conversation, being a cell phone church means becoming a new kind of Christian community, a culturally relevant form that engages hearts and minds and makes disciples of Jesus.

Piece #3

What might a cellphone church look like?  In other words, what is the picture of a vital faith community that engages hearts and minds and makes disciples of Jesus in the twenty-first century?  This is the heart of the question that we have been asking for many years, and most recently in our work with Arlen Vernava.  We have tried to imagine this together, in several group processes over the last decade.  All of those conversations were important.  So far, none of them have led to a distinct clarity of vision.

You and I value the wisdom and creativity of this community.  We hear the Spirit in the voices of each other.  Because of that, I have leaned into our group processes with high hopes. Maybe in doing so, I have not exercised the kind of leadership you needed from your pastor, the kind of leadership that maybe these times require.  Maybe what would be helpful now is a word from someone who is committed to serving God among you, someone who loves you and wants the best for you and from you.

What is the picture of a vital faith community that engages hearts and minds and makes disciples of Jesus in the twenty-first century? Let me describe what I see, with the hope that you might imagine something similar.  Or on the other hand, you might envision something very different.  If so, that would allow us as a community to discern between contrasting options. 

The twenty-first century Christian faith community is highly contextual.  That means that it looks different in different places. In one place, the community meets in a gay bar and belts out pop music instead of hymns.  Another one meets outdoors every week for a hike and prayerful conversation under the trees.  And a third one gathers to serve the poor more often than they gather for worship. 

What is the context of Emmanuel?  We are urban and want to stay in the city.  We want to make a difference, to be a blessing to our neighborhood and the wider world.  We are committed to social justice, particularly in the arenas of human sexuality, racism, immigration and environmental stewardship.  We tend to make every meeting into a meal and we sometimes speak as though we personally invented the church potluck.  We place a high value on creativity, inclusive participation and lively, growing faith.

Our version of the cell phone church could look like:

A weekly gathering at round tables, possibly on a Saturday or Sunday evening.  The community gathers to share a meal which is prepared and served by many hands with different crews taking on the responsibility each week and with roles for newcomers every week.  The meal is simple, but delicious and prepared with love. Because we value inclusivity, there are options for vegetarians and those with special dietary needs, to the best of our ability. The meal is necessary, but it is not the primary goal of the gathering.  The cooks and dishwashers come from within the community and participate fully in the entire gathering. 

This gathering is the primary way we nurture disciples of Jesus. Some might call it Dinner Church.  I would call it relational evangelism or relational discipleship.  The method relies on relationship and structured conversation.  After everyone has been served, someone will set up the conversation for that evening.  The set-up might include the re-telling of a Bible story or it might be a personal experience in combination with a teaching of Jesus.  On a given evening, the leader might be the pastor or a lay person.  After the leader has spoken, the conversation will evolve at each table as it needs to. At some tables, it may become something like a deep dive into the Bible story.  Others may be entrusted with a personal crisis that one of the participants brings to the group.  The design might include seating children and youth at particular tables for adult-led age-appropriate conversations.  Or maybe there are multi-generational exchanges.

The table time concludes with all the tables joining together for a closing prayer and benediction.  The evening ends with clearing tables and washing dishes with different crews in rotation and roles for first-time folks to join in.

The work of this gathering is to be fully present to each other so that we can attune to the moving of the Spirit among us. It is loosely structured, but there is an overall plan for the set-up from week to week.  Attention is paid to the major themes of Jesus’ teaching and the seasons of the church year and to individual needs for spiritual growth. 

This is the primary gathering time for this faith community.  As we begin, this may be the only kind of gathering, but other kinds of gatherings will need to be added.  Other gatherings might include opportunities for service or weekly discipleship classes offered with varying content and time frames to meet needs of disciples at various stages of growth. 

Where might this community gather?  It gathers in a right-sized building within downtown Albany, a place where we can engage our urban neighbors.  We need an accessible space with parking.  I envision two primary needs – 1) a highly functional kitchen and dining space and a 2) larger, more formal gathering space.

The dining space needs good acoustics, an easy-to-use, reliable sound system and a projection screen with plug-and-play technology.  We also need a second space that would function as a larger, more formal area for special events like weddings and funerals and wider community functions. We might choose to do baptisms outdoors, eliminating the need for a baptistery.  None of this needs to look like a traditional church.  We should give some care to design so that beauty and symbol are incorporated in ways that do not trigger survivors of religious trauma.

How does this community grow?  It grows by relationship.  Emmanuel shows up and is fully present with each other, newcomers and long-time members alike.  We create a culture of presence and engagement.  We do not retreat into our introverted selves or our laptop screens or the busyness of wearing some church hat.  We speak the truth that we know.  We take personal responsibility for talking about the Jesus we believe to be worth knowing, because the average 21st century American does not know what we know, and they are not going to randomly pick up the Bible or watch a documentary about Jesus and then come knocking on our door.  Most of us don’t know how to talk about our faith naturally because 1) we reject the 20th century models of evangelism which created the religious trauma that we’re now dealing with and 2) the landline church never really required this of us.  So, the 21st century church must meet contemporary disciples where we are and help us grow as evangelists. This community also grows by sustained, effective, targeted advertising which is another skill we will need to develop.

Whew . . . I have said a whole lot at once and over Zoom.  Thank you for staying with me.  

 

A brief recap:

Christianity is undergoing large-scale change before our eyes.   We have been pursuing mission and ministry in ways that have ceased to be effective.  Emmanuel may yet thrive if we recognize that and seek to join the new thing that God is doing in our time.  One possible way of engaging hearts and minds and making disciples in 21st century Albany is a model of relational evangelism centered around a weekly meal and structured conversation.

This is not a formal proposal.  I am offering my thoughts in the hopes that they might crystallize some of yours. I’d like to take about 5 more minutes now for people to offer questions, responses, objections.  I recognize that many of us need to go away and think about stuff before we’re ready to speak.  The Vision Team is meeting today and we all understand that we need more opportunities for continued discussion.  Let me invite anyone who wishes to speak now, to do so succinctly, knowing that there will be more opportunities in the future.

 

 

1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/10/10/who-still-has-landline-phone/75569063007/

 

11/3/24 - Christian Community:  A Matter of Life and Death - Acts 4:32-5:11

Christian Community:  A Matter of Life and Death

Acts 4:32-5:11

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

November 3, 2024 

Image:  Ten of the dancing saints at St. Gregory of Nyssa Church, San Francisco, CA: William Byrd, Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Alexandrian Washerwoman, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Manche Masemola, Isaiah, The Kangxi Emperor, Roland Allen, John Coltrane

 

 Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9zorSYSVC8

This is a terrible story that Angela read for us, a terrifying story. What kind of people were they in Jerusalem that they kept this story alive long enough for Luke to write it down?  This is an awful story.  That might be why it is not included in the 3-year lectionary.  What kind of pastor chooses this story for Pledge Sunday?  You are asking such astute questions today.  I’ll try to circle back to them.

First, I want to remind us about last Sunday’s lectio divina.  The text was about the time when Paul and Silas were in prison and there was an earthquake which shook open the cells and the shackles of the prisoners. The jailer assumed that everyone had escaped and was ready to take his own life, but Paul called out “We are all here.”  In the Zoom chat, there was quite a discussion about that phrase we are all here.  Who is the all in that sentence?  In last week’s discussion, someone said “Rich, poor, differently abled, believers and not believers.”  In the Jerusalem church, we might add “social elites and those on the margins, those with citizenship and those without, Hellenists and Hebrews.”

 We are all here.

This growing community gathers a diversity of people.  Chapter 2 refers to 3,000 people being baptized with another 5,000 being added in chapter 4.  It is a large community that builds its life around the story of Jesus, the breaking of bread, fellowship and prayers.   The whole of this expanding community, Luke says, is of one heart and mind.  They are characterized by their incredible unity; their unwavering agreement on belief and purpose and mutual care.

A common theme in the many speeches or sermons in the book of Acts is to trace the history of God and God’s people right up through the resurrection of Jesus.  In these speeches, the apostles bear witness to God’s intention across millennia to form a people, a people sometimes called peculiar, a people who will be in relationship to God and each other in ways that will be a blessing to the whole world.  The apostles understand themselves to be at the dawn of a new era, a key place, in God’s work.  They are inviting others to join that community which is defined by new loyalties and a new story.  “God is at work to create a new people who are not to be defined by the old categories of race, language, gender, or social class, but a people united in witness to the resurrection. . .”[1]

We are all here.

And people cannot join fast enough.  In this community, they live cooperatively, not competitively.  They figure out how to worship and fellowship together, across barriers of culture and language. They show up for each other.  They are generous with their time and finances.  “There was not a needy person among them” Luke says.  That is a reference to Deuteronomy, to the expectations God set forth when the people first moved into the Promised Land.  From ancient times, God’s desire was for abundance and generosity so that no one would ever be in need. The promise of Deuteronomy is being fulfilled.  This is evidence of the arrival of the reign of God which has always been characterized by love, peace, abundance and justice. [2]

There was not a needy person among them because the people with means shared with those without. This faith community is concerned with practical and concrete everyday stuff as well as big theological ideas.  Lutheran scholar Matthew Skinner writes, Salvation includes “relinquishing one’s real and perceived advantages and entering into true solidarity with others.” [3] 

A few weeks ago, we read the story of Saul’s conversion. We noted that in Acts, conversion is about “crossing boundaries and barriers and reaching a whole new way of seeing and understanding life.”[4]  This is what is happening in Jerusalem. Thousands of people are crossing boundaries to break into a new understanding of how to live life. This pattern repeats itself over and over.  And the community keeps welcoming and including and teaching the newcomers. We are all here.

Imagine with me the rate of change.  Hundreds of individuals are changing their minds and habits.  Some are abandoning family or giving up social standing to do so.  The community leaders are reaching more and more people. The community is developing ways to nurture faith and strengthen new habits and share abundance. Can you imagine the number of meetings necessary for that?  Next week, they have to do it all again with the current folks and add in more.  They are all about changed and changing lives, about sustaining those changes and inviting others to share in changed life.”[5]

As you know, Emmanuel is engaged in an intense process of discerning our purpose. Sometimes, people get tired of the process and they say things like “I wish someone would just tell me what to do and I would do it.” Maybe you don’t feel that way, but I have heard that sentiment on occasion.  So, this week, when I read a sentence that started with “the core purpose of the church is . . .” I gave it my full attention. The sentence was in a book entitled Called to Be Church.  It was written by two people – Anthony Robinson,  a United Church of Christ pastor who has written a dozen books and now coaches congregations, and Robert Wall, a United Methodist New Testament scholar and retired seminary professor.  You might want to know about those credentials as you hear the rest.

Together, they say, “The core purpose of the church is to be a community that sustains continuous change and transformation as we grow in the likeness of Christ and image of God.”[6] 

The purpose of the church is to keep changing? Changing ourselves, changing the world? It has been a very long time since I’ve heard anything like that. I confess that for most of my vocational life, it has felt like the purpose of the church is to pass on the faith to the next generation, just as it was received from the previous one, carefully preserved and unchanged. 

“The core purpose of the church is to be a community that sustains continuous change and transformation as we grow in the likeness of Christ and image of God.”  Tuck that away to mull on more later.

So, what we see in Jerusalem is a church that is having an impact.  Centered around a story of abundance and liberation, they are challenging their culture in life-giving ways.  They are united in heart and soul and there is not a needy person among them, because people who have property make a practice of selling it and giving the proceeds to the church to distribute to those who need it.  Willie James Jennings says that these followers of Jesus released themselves to one another, making themselves responsible for and accountable to one another.  “Money here will be used to destroy what money normally is used to create:  distance and boundaries between people. . . Jesus will join us and he will use whatever we have to make the joining possible. . .  Too often, in our reading of this story our view is clouded by the spectacular giving and we miss the spectacular joining.  Now these followers of Jesus will become the bridge between uneven wealth and resources, uneven hope and uneven life.”[7]  We are all here.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  People are even changing their financial habits.  They’re managing their wealth, not for their own benefit or for their heirs, but for the strangers who keep joining the church.  Barnabas is just one example of someone who sells property and gives all the money to the apostles.

This is where the story gets awful.  Maybe Ananias and Sapphira are jealous of the attention that Barnabas receives.  Maybe they want to be admired as he is.  So, they scheme together to sell land and hand over the proceeds, except that they agree to keep some of the money for themselves.  They each lie about it and they each immediately fall down dead.  The story is terrifying because there is no forgiveness, no mercy.  The offense is not that they kept some of the money.  Peter tells Ananias that it was his property. He was free to keep it.  He was free to sell it and give away only a portion of the selling price.  The offense is that they lied about what they gave to the apostles. They faked their commitment. They lied to the community.  They lied to God. 

We get it.  They did a very bad thing.  But the punishment should fit the crime.  The death penalty for one lie?  That’s over the top.  Where is the God of mercy and forgiveness that this community is always talking about? 

What kind of people were they in Jerusalem that they kept this terrifying story alive?  Who clings to such a story with its image of a quick-tempered, no-second-chances-for-you God? Who thinks or hopes that God acts like this? One scholar writes, “Maybe angry people do.  Or threatened people. Or fearful people.  Not people suffering from merely any kind of fear – maybe these people fear losing what is truly life-giving to them.  Maybe . . .people afraid of losing a community capable of embodying the best things, such as God’s own commitment to them.” [8]

Maybe fearful people tell this story.  They tell it not to warn that God is vindictive, but to plead “This new, one-of-a kind community is vulnerable.  Don’t hurt it.” [9]

What kind of pastor chooses this text on Pledge Sunday? 

Maybe a pastor who hears the deep longing for a flourishing faith community.  A pastor who is aware that we are fearful.  We do not want to lose what has been life-giving.  We are frightened and protective of the vulnerable Emmanuel church. Many of us are convinced that if our location changes, if our ministry changes, we will lose something life-giving, we will lose our community and the embodiment of God’s commitment to us. 

I hope that we can hear what was essential to the early church, what is probably most essential for us:  being of one heart and mind, together in purpose and trust and mutual care.  Today we offer financial pledges, our gifts to God in support of this community because it is here, among these saints, that we are most keenly aware of God’s presence and call and nurture. Our financial support is important, but it is part of a deeper, wider, all-encompassing commitment to God and to each other.  We embrace the change and transformation of the next year together. 

We are all here. 

 

 

[1] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2006), p. 79

[2] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001) p. 77.

[3] Matthew L. Skinner, Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel:  Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts, (Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2015), p 32.

[4] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church, p. 141

[5] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church, p. 80

[6] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church, pp. 80-81

[7] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2017), p 50.

[8] Skinner, Intrusive God, p. 36

[9] Skinner, Intrusive God, p 37

10/20/24 - Conversion - Acts 9:1-20

Conversion 

Acts 9:1-20 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

October 20, 2024 

Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash Used under Unsplash license

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQqAwHg_-OM

Last Sunday, we read together from Acts 17, where the apostle Paul was preaching to the Gentiles in Athens.  Today, we back up to a time when he was called Saul, a time when he held to a rigid boundary between Jews and Gentiles, with his body and soul planted firmly on the Jewish side of that boundary. 

The very first time Saul was mentioned was in chapter 7, when he guarded the coats of those who stoned Stephen to death.  After Stephen’s death, the persecution got so bad that the new disciples fled from Jerusalem.  You remember the church in Antioch which came about in part because of this great scattering. 

Saul is no longer content with just driving the believers out of Jerusalem.  He tries to pursue them all the way to Damascus, which is more than 100 miles from Jerusalem.  The story begins with Saul breathing threats and murder, but that is a mild translation.  It would be more accurate to say that Saul is snorting.  He is riled up. 

Saul has the authority to take life through imprisonment or execution.  Biblical scholar and theologian Willie James Jennings says, “No one is more dangerous than one with the power to take life and who has already mind and sight set on those who are [perceived to be] a threat.  Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their own logic.” [1]

“Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their own logic.” What a great way to describe an echo chamber.  Perhaps you know some individuals who are stuck in an echo chamber. It often seems that no appeals to logic or facts will change their mind.  We are familiar with this phenomenon.  We see it politically – the other party is the enemy.  We see it in the church where one faith stream is pitted against another.  Protestants against Catholics, mainliners against Evangelicals.  We plant body and soul firmly on our side of the boundary. 

This is more than difference of theology or worship style.  Saul is downright dangerous. It takes a blinding light and a disembodied voice and three days of an intense spiritual experience to change him.  His reversal is amazing.  He goes from fully sighted to being blind.  From being a person on a clear self-appointed mission to someone who has to wait for days in order to learn what to do next.  He starts out intending to lead captives back to Jerusalem and ends up being the one led into Damascus by others.  By the end, his position is flipped.  Instead of persecuting the followers of the Way, he joins them.  We might call this a conversion. Ananias is a disciple who lives in Damascus.  He knows who Saul is. He knows that Saul is the dangerous enemy.  Ananias does not readily accept God’s instruction to go to him, to help him.  Saul kills people like him.  Ananias needs some reassurance that the risk he will take is really what God wants.  But he becomes convinced and he does what God asks.  The Bible does not say that he acts without fear.  His hands may shake as he lays them on Saul, whom he calls brother, but he still does it. We might also call Ananias’ experience a conversion. 

We will come back to Saul and Ananias.  First, let me introduce you to two people I met this summer.  They were born on opposite sides of a great divide.  This divide was so intense that people were regularly killed or imprisoned by people on the other side.  Everyone knew who the enemies were. I’m speaking of Northern Ireland where it may be easiest to describe the two sides as Catholic and Protestant, although it is more nuanced than that.

Tom was Catholic and he also served as General Secretary of Sinn Fein for several years.  Lesley was on the other side.  She is a Presbyterian minister.  Tom and Lesley and a few others met secretly to work for peace because it was dangerous.  No one trusted the enemy.  If you trusted the enemy, then you were a traitor.  Lesley was serving her first church.  If the church had discovered her role in the peace talks, she would likely have lost her job, possibly her ordination. She was ordained about 7 years before me. I cannot imagine summoning that kind of courage in my first call.  She had been warned against those people from childhood, the people with whom she was now sharing homemade pizza because they couldn’t meet in a restaurant or pub.   Tom had suffered legal discrimination and imprisonment by the folks on Lesley’s side when he was a young adult.  He had every reason to be angry, to hate her and her kind.  Somehow, they allowed their minds to be changed.  They were converted to the cause of peace.  Their meetings were part of the background that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ending about 30 years of violent conflict. 

We had the privilege of hearing some of their stories one holy afternoon in Belfast.  You could tell that their shared risks developed into an incredible friendship.  Lesley is still ordained in the Presbyterian church. Tom is still an Irish Republican, but he no longer identifies as Catholic or even as Christian.  Near the end, Lesley told my favorite story.  She said that not long ago, she had been ill for a long time.  While she recuperated at home, many people came to see her.  Lots of her Presbyterian colleagues, some church members, family and friends dropped in to encourage her with food and good wishes.  Of all the many people who came over the weeks of her illness, Tom, the non-Christian, was the only one who sat down, pulled out a Bible and read scripture to her.  To have changed your mind so completely about who the enemy is or how you are to relate to them – I would call that a conversion. 

Many of us are not really comfortable talking about conversion in the religious sense.  Mainline Christians have largely subscribed to the notion that if you steadily nurture a person within the faith, they will naturally and consistently identify as Christian, so conversion is never necessary.  Other Christian streams have emphasized the importance of an individual commitment to follow Jesus, a pivotal moment.  Many of those conversions involve turning away from addiction or sleeping around or gambling or some other immorality.  The stories include lines like “I was a complete loser until I found Jesus.  Jesus saved me from all the bad things I was into.” 

Neither one of these approaches really works in America today.  Generations of people have neither been nurtured in faith nor made a personal decision to follow the way of Jesus. [2]  We need to rethink the whole notion of conversion.

Rev. Anthony Robinson writes that in Acts, conversion is not primarily a moral turnaround.  “Conversion means crossing boundaries and barriers and reaching a whole new way of seeing and understanding life.  It is more about putting an end to ignorance than to immorality.”[3]

Saul and Ananias, Tom and Lesley each experienced conversion.  They crossed boundaries and barriers and reached a whole new way of understanding life.  They took calculated risks and gained an expanded vision of what is real and what is possible. 

When Saul fell to the ground on the Damascus Road, he heard the voice say “Why are you persecuting me?”  He could not imagine at first that it was God’s voice.  He was not persecuting God.  He was serving God. . . or that was his sincere intent. 

“Why are you hurting me?”  God asks. Saul’s conversion begins with that question.  African-American theologian Willie James Jennings writes “In our world, this genre of question flows most often out of the mouths of the poor and women and children.  The question casts light on the currencies of death that we incessantly traffic in, and it has no good answers.   . . . But now”, Jennings writes, “ this is God’s question.  It belongs to God.  It belongs with God.” [4]

I wonder if we could ever hear that question directed at us.  I wonder if we might be the ones in need of conversion.  It is hard for me to ask that, hard to imagine how it might be true. 

It is always easier to see the speck in someone else’s eye, so let me tell you about another church.  This church only uses a small part of their large building. They are sincerely concerned about social justice, have been active on major issues for many years.  Not long ago, they were asked to make their building available for asylum seekers.  They are politically supportive of that idea.  The request was that about 24 asylum seekers would shelter overnight in the church for a month.  They would shower and eat meals elsewhere.  Cots and blankets would be provided.  The guests would arrive in the evening and leave by 7 the next morning.  The church was on board with this idea.  The guests could have free reign of the second floor rooms that the church wasn’t using anyway. 

But then the fire marshall noticed that the second floor rooms only had one exit.  That was not safe.  However, he pointed out,  the rooms on the first floor all had two exits.  There were enough first floor rooms to accommodate the needs of all 24 asylum seekers who would be leaving by 7:00 every morning.  But one church member said, “One of those rooms is the toddler’s room.  You know how much children hate other people touching their stuff. They can’t use that room.”  Someone else said, “One of the rooms is the lounge where we have coffee hour.  They can’t use that room, even though they’ll be long gone by the time of coffee hour.”  And so, the church may close their doors to those folks and this opportunity.  

It’s not hard for me to hear God saying to them, “Why are you hurting me?”  It is more difficult to allow myself to hear that question directed at me and possibly at us.  Surely God isn’t asking us that, right?  We are faithful and sincere – but so was Saul. We know the Bible and we understand how church works – but then again, so did Saul.  We want nothing more than for everyone to know the deep love of God.  We want nothing more than to see more people in church on Sundays.  It is outrageous and offensive even to suggest that we might be hurting God,  I know, but what if we are? 

Could you and I be hurting God when we insist on offering the good news only wrapped up in the forms that we’re familiar with?

There’s a loneliness epidemic in our world.  Can we be converted to the idea that God is among the lonely and despairing, calling us to abandon our comfort and security within these walls and learn how to befriend strangers?

Could we be hurting God when we assume that the spiritual practices, the forms of worship and discipleship, which have been vital and life-shaping for us will also be so for the next generations, and therefore must be defended and maintained for all time?

Instead of staying firmly within the boundaries of what has been, of what we were born into, could we entertain a conversion of our imagination? Is it possible that the Spirit is beckoning to us, urging us across boundaries and barriers to a new way of being and doing?  A path that is only being revealed along the way as we start doing it.

This is the power of conversion – crossing boundaries, changing minds, increasing understanding, and taking action leads to an expanded, bold vision of what is real and what is possible.  May God make it so for you and for me.  Amen.

 

 

 

[1] [1] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2017), p. 90

[2] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2006), p. 140

[3] Robinson and Wall, p. 141

[4] Willie James Jennings, p 91

10/6/24 - Conflict and Resolution - Acts 6:1-7

Conflict and Resolution

Acts 6:1-7

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

October 6, 2024 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBtuTxIe_p8

I was at physical therapy this week when I became aware of a therapist who was speaking quite loudly.  I had never noticed this therapist before.   I just continued doing my exercises, counting more deliberately in my head because he was also counting sometimes.  I noticed that his patient was having a hard time following his directions.  When he told her to lie on her side, she went on her back first. When he said to bend her knee, she held it straight.   Pretty quickly, I realized that English was not her first language.  And I wondered if he was repeating his directions loudly in the hope of overcoming a language barrier.  Because that’s a thing we do, isn’t it?  A few minutes later, I noticed that he had a second patient.  The second patient seemed to be very comfortable with English, but the therapist spoke just as loudly.  I concluded that the volume on his inside voice was just turned up high.

One of the first recorded church conflicts seems to have involved a language barrier.  On one side were the Hebrews.  These are folks who spoke a Semitic language, most likely Aramaic.  On the other side were the Hellenists.  They spoke Greek.  The Hebrews were from Israel, possibly from Jerusalem itself, but also from Galilee and other parts of the country.  The Hellenists might have been from anywhere in the Roman empire – from Syria, Cappadocia, Rome or Egypt, just to name a few examples.  They are people whose families had had to migrate and live outside their homeland for the same reasons that people migrate today – economics, natural disaster, war. But these particular folks have returned to their ancestral home, to Jerusalem.  So the Hellenists are not necessarily a unified group.  They all speak Greek, but they may represent different ethnic or racial heritages.  Latino is a contemporary broad term. It refers to a person with ancestry in any one of 21 Latin American countries.  Hellenist is a similarly broad term. 

One important point – the people in conflict in Acts 6 are all Jewish people who have come to believe Jesus is the Messiah.  They are not divided on religious lines, but ethnic and cultural ones.

A complaint arises. The Hellenist widows are being neglected.  This is serious.  From the time of Deuteronomy at least, widows have been seen as one of the categories of marginalized people for whom God’s people are to take special care.   The Jesus-followers in Jerusalem are organized enough by this time that Acts 4 says they share all their possessions and there is not a needy person among them.  But now, the Hellenist widows are being neglected, in the daily distribution of food.

What does this mean?  It might simply mean that the Hellenist widows, the foreign widows, are not getting the food they need. That would be a problem. But the word that is translated as daily distribution could also mean “everyday ministry”.  It could also refer to financial administration. So the problem may be that the Hellenist widows are being denied the opportunity to serve in the distribution of food themselves. They may not be recognized as leaders in the same ways that Hebrew widows are.  They may not be  trusted with the community cash.  

Something has been lost in translation.  It is not clear to us, as twenty-first century readers what the actual problem is. And that makes me wonder how clear it was at the time. There was a language barrier. Is it possible that the Hebrews, who were in charge, didn’t even completely understand the Hellenists’ complain?  Confusion about the real problem is often part of conflict, isn’t it?  A whole lot of times, we rush in to fix it, and our fixing does no good because we didn’t address the real issue.  Then when the complaint arises again, we say “What more do they want?  You just can’t please those people.”

In some way, the foreign widows are being neglected. The word translated neglected means to overlook or disregard. It is not a deliberate, malicious action.  It is unintentional.  The Hebrews are probably not even aware that they’re doing it. 

The Hebrews have the home field advantage. They represent the dominant culture. They are the citizens; the Hellenists are outsiders. They are the true Israelites; the Hellenists carry with them foreign ideas and habits.  In today’s terms, we might say that, in comparison, the Hebrews have privilege.  It is all relative, isn’t it? Because all of them live under Roman occupation.  To say that the Hebrews have privilege is not to say that they don’t struggle.  It is to say that their viewpoint, their way of life, is considered normal, while the Hellenists deviate from the norm.

To their credit, the Jerusalem community takes the Hellenists’ concern seriously.  They decide to appoint a task-force to resolve this.  The community deliberates and names seven respected, wise men to do this work. If we read carefully, we notice that the men all have Greek names.  The implication is that the power to resolve the problem is being handed over to those who best understand it.  This is a countercultural solution in its own time and I would say, even in our time. The Seven are not being put in charge of distribution just to the Hellenists, but to everyone.  The foreigners are being entrusted to use the community resources for the good of all.  That’s a pretty big step. 

Kudos to those first-century folks for figuring that out.  Well-done.  I mean that sincerely, and yet . . .

They still are a bit clueless, aren’t they?  I mean the original complaint is about Hellenist widows. Their solution is elegant in addressing the Hellenist part, but it disregards, it overlooks the fact that the widows are women.   The church’s solution is to appoint seven men and zero women to address what is first and foremost a woman’s concern.  (Gee, I’m so glad that two centuries later we don’t do that any more.) 

Women are recognized with leadership authority equal to and even surpassing men in other parts of Acts, so we can’t blame it entirely on first century culture.  As radically inclusive, as boundary-breaking as this new faith community is, sometimes, they just don’t get it.  They just lapse into well ingrained patterns.  Luke reports this conflict and resolution with no hint of awareness that in a story about women, he only reports the names of seven prominent men.

What does this story have to do with us?  Or maybe, what can we do with this story? 

First, we might understand it as a call to listen with humility.  Especially to listen to the voices of those in the minority, those whose life experience is not well represented by the dominant culture.  If you are a person with privilege, listen extremely carefully.  Deliberately open yourself to understanding a viewpoint that is not yours.  Some of us don’t recognize our privilege.  If the shampoo and soap you use is in the health and beauty aisle and not in the section labelled “ethnic”, you enjoy dominant culture privilege.  If you can move through life without being racially profiled or stereotyped, you enjoy dominant culture privilege.  Those of us with that privilege can easily overlook or disregard the needs of those in the minority.  If we sincerely want to follow the God of radical inclusion, we have to be more intentional about listening without getting defensive, listening without leaning into our own viewpoint, but listening with openness to someone who tells us the real problem. 

Second, this story is about shared power and shared resources.  Working together, trusting each other, for the good of all.

Lastly, for today at least, this story underscores the fact that racial diversity does not equal racial reconciliation.  Just because a community might contain people from multiple ethnic backgrounds with varying skin colors does not mean that community is anti-racist.  It can easily be a community that claims to be color-blind instead of recognizing and celebrating color-diversity.  Or it may celebrate diversity in its speech while subtly continuing to exercise white dominance with every fiber of its structural being. 

Diversity by itself is not enough.  Deliberate, full inclusion and empowerment is the work and purpose of God.

The church in Jerusalem hears the concern and responds.  The story ends by saying that the word of God continued to spread.  We might notice that Luke’s accent is not on the growth of the church, but the word.  “The word of God is not something the church hears or announces, the word of God is what the church lives or manifests. . . . the church’s vitality is the vitality of God’s word.  . . .If the conflict between the Hellenists and the Hebrews is not resolved, it will hamper the church’s ability to live authentically according to its identity.” [1]

If we do not confront and combat racism or ethnocentrism or religious nationalism within our own community, it will hamper our ability to live out our calling and identity.  That is just as urgently true now as in the first century. 

What is also true is that we will never get it all right at the same time.  And so we continue to celebrate, to struggle and to serve in the ever widening circle of God’s grace.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Matthew L. Skinner, Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel:  Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts, (Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2015), pp. 41-42

9/29/24 - Blessing of the Animals Reflection - Psalm 104:10-15,27-30

Blessing of the Animals Reflection 

Psalm 104:10-15,27-30

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

September 29, 2024 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xFiZLdbYE

I’ll start with a few stories.  They might seem random. Bear with me.

One day last week, when I had been sitting with my laptop for too long, I took a break to go out and play fetch with my dog Memphis.  I threw the ball for him and then I remembered that about 30 minutes earlier, I had heard the awful thunk of a bird flying into a window. Going to investigate, I found a bird sitting quite still in a puddle of water.  She looked at me and blinked her eyes, but didn’t attempt to move away.  She wasn’t bleeding that I could see. I took a stick and offered it to her as a perch.  She wrapped both claws around it and seemed steady, so I gently lifted the stick. She was fine, but made no attempt to fly. I moved her out of the water and to a place under a shrub with a bit more protection from any predators.  I don’t know who her predators might be in my backyard. Memphis wasn’t interested in her.

I’m not very good at bird identification, but looking at my backyard bird guide, I think she was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.  She’s the kind of bird I often see foraging in my holly bush.  She was still under the shrub 15 minutes later, but an hour later she had disappeared.  I choose to believe that she recovered and flew away. 

Sometime in the 1800’s, a woman named Mary MacDonald wrote a Christmas carol in the only language she knew, which was Scots Gaelic. She set it to a traditional Scottish folk tune.  After her death, the carol was translated into English and the tune was named after a village near where she lived.  The village is called Bun-es-san, so that is the tune name.  The Christmas carol associated with that tune is Child in a Manger. Another, more well known song which was later set to that same tune is Morning Has Broken. 

Bunessan is a small fishing village on the isle of Mull. Bunessan means bottom of the waterfall.   We rode through it on a tour bus this summer.  Our real destination was somewhere else, but our tour guide was smart enough to give us fun facts every where he could.  So, before we got to the village, he told us about Mary MacDonald and her Christmas carol and then we rode through this village of about 100 people, listening to Morning Has Broken over the bus speakers.  It is going to be a long time before I will hear that song without picturing the stone sea wall, the white croft houses,  the boats bobbing at anchor, the blue sky that I saw there. 

You all know that Jim and I have attended the Wild Goose Festival several times.  For almost two decades, the festival was held in a campground in Hot Springs North Carolina, always in July or August.  The campground is on the French Broad River which is wide and deep. Many times, I would slip down to the river between sessions and take off my shoes and wade in, unbelievably grateful for the refreshment of the cold, flowing water on an oppressively hot and humid day. In the last few days, my Facebook feed has been full of images of the French Broad River well past its banks, flooding the campground and the town, the streets and the restaurants.  You have undoubtedly seen similar videos of homes and businesses, roads and bridges completely washed away in North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  The devastation is incomprehensible.   Power is out.   The only road off of a farm or into a town may not exist anymore. Clean drinking water is in short supply.  Communication with family and loved ones including students at college is cut off.  Anyone with any connection to these places is keenly feeling the urgency and the loss.

Baba Dioum is a forestry engineer from Senegal.  He famously said something like this:

“You can’t save a place that you don’t love,

You can’t love a place that you don’t know

And you can’t know a place that you haven’t learned.”

Some of us call that Watershed Discipleship –knowing and loving the place where everyone and everything drinks the same water. 

The Oxford Junior Dictionary is a children’s dictionary, aimed at 7-year-olds. Every so often, the publishers update it.[1] They remove some lesser used words in order to add new ones which are more relevant to current living.  You can imagine new words related to technology being adding, words like cut and paste, broadband and analogue. Fifty nature words were removed in 2007 and another 20 in 2012.  Words like acorn, dandelion, hamster and otter. 

In their defense, Oxford University Press said that the Junior Dictionary is a very slim children’s dictionary containing less than 5,000 words in total. 400 of those words are about natural world. I am not blaming Oxford.  I’m not blaming the rise of new technology which we all need words to describe. 

Older versions of the dictionary had more nature words, more examples of flowers for example. That was because more children lived in semi-rural environments and saw more plants across the changing seasons.  In a way, the dictionary is simply responding to the lives we are living. So again, we can recall

You can’t save a place that you don’t love,

You can’t love a place that you don’t know

And you can’t know a place that you haven’t learned

For many of us, our pets are our closest expression of relationship to the rest of creation. Our animals experience the places we live differently than we do. They can teach us about the created world that exists beyond human comprehension and how to love it better. Attending to animals for an entire Sunday worship service might seem frivolous to some, but we can understand it as one piece of watershed discipleship. 

One of the Biblical accounts of creation says that God the task of naming all the animals to the first human, Adam.  Naming is a way of remembering, of paying attention, of determining what has value in our lives. We can keep on naming acorns, dandelions, otters and Ruby-Crowned Kinglets even if the dictionary doesn’t. We can remember places like Bunessan and Hot Springs.

Carrie Newcomer has a fun song called A Crash of Rhinoceros. It is her playful take on the story about naming the animals in Genesis.  I’m not going to sing it; but I invite you to listen to the lyrics.

When Adam when out to name the animals

He sat on a rock and he figured

A horse and a cow and a goat and a sheep

Were the best names that he could deliver

 

But Eve looked around at all of that glory

Said, "Hon, I think we should consider

Something a bit more unique and refined

For each and every critter"

 

It's a crash of rhinoceros, a pomp of pekinese

It's a gaggle of geese and a swarm of bees

A parliament of owl and gam of whale

A pandemonium of parrot and a watch of nightingale

A huddle of walrus, company of moles

Exultation of lark and a murder of crow

A simple flock of sheep and a herd of deer

It's a bask of crocodiles, sleuth of bear

 

Adam looked shocked and he scratched his head;  

Eve stood there, happy and beaming

The animals gathered in close to their feet

With roars of delight, barks and singing

She's on a roll and just getting started

The birds and the beasts held their breath

What fine appellation would they receive

And which one of them would be the next?   

 

It's a team of oxen and a mob of kangaroo

It's a charm of finch if there are more than two

A troubling of goldfish, cluster of cats

A bloat of hippopotami, a cloud of bats

Ostentation of peacock, a barren of mules

An army of ant, nursery of raccoon

A parcel of penguin and a dray of squirrels

A bed of oysters with or without the pearls

 

All of that naming lasted into the night

Until even the insects had groupings

Eve was still bright eyed and willing to finish

Though her shoulders and fig leaves were drooping

Adam said, "Darling, I'm proud and amazed

You're really one heck of a woman

So let's go to sleep and tomorrow we'll rise

And start naming rocks, plants and woodlands"

 

It's a tittering of magpie, company of mole

It's a pride of lions and a tribe of goats

A plague of locust and a pack of dogs

A leap of leopard, an array of hedgehog

It's a caravan of camels, a drift of swan

A sulk of foxes and the list goes on

It's a prickle of porcupine, a battery of hen

A cohort of zebra, now once again

It's a colony of rabbit and a sounder of boar

An ambush of tiger, now just a little more

 

It's a business of ferret, a swarm of eels

A covey of quail and a pod of seals

It's a parade of elephant, a dole of dove

A bale of turtles and all of them I love

And she kissed the horde of hamsters

On their furry little heads

Sighed with satisfaction and she went to bed.[2]

 

Amen.

 

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Vq9iWOUfI

9/22/24 - Three Ways to Hear the Spirit - Acts 11:19-26, 13:1-4

Three Ways to Hear the Spirit

Acts 11:19-26, 13:1-4

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

September 22, 2024 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B62X2EWqmBc

During sabbatical, I went to Iona. This island off the coast of Scotland was the site of a monastery from about 563 AD.  It was raided by Danish Vikings, seized by the King of Norway and then reclaimed by the Irish monks, but a monastery of one kind or another survived there until the Protestant Reformation reached Scotland in the 16th century.  Then it was dismantled and abandoned, along with many other formerly Catholic abbeys in Britain.  The building stood open to the elements for hundreds of years until it was rebuilt and restored in the 19th century. 

At some point, the Abbey walls became home to some rare sea-loving ferns.  They live on the light that filters in through the windows and on moisture absorbed through the mortar between the stones.  Their presence is taken as evidence that the building, now enclosed, is still breathing.

I love this image of life that has endured and continues to thrive in an ancient place. It is a great image to hold in mind as we read the book of Acts.  In our time, historical forces are once again dismantling religious institutions. Churches are being abandoned, with some church buildings literally left standing open to the elements. Great sweeping changes like this have happened before.  In those times, the most resilient, most adaptive Christian disciples have returned to our origins, to our formation story, to find the life that still breathes there.   

The earliest Christian communities did not have a lot of traditions or policies to uphold. They did not know about stained glass windows or online giving or lilies at Easter or New York Religious Corporation Law.  They did not even have our Bible.  The gospels were not written down until decades after Jesus.  At first, they looked to the apostles, those few remaining followers who had known Jesus first-hand, for their knowledge of Jesus’ teachings. Over time, other teachers and leaders arose who had received the teachings from the apostles.  But truthfully, sometimes it seems they’re figuring out the what and how of church as they go along.

The main character in the book of Acts is the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes, we see the Spirit blessing the decisions of the leaders and at others, the Spirit has to raise the same issue again and again, as if to say “get it right this time.”  Latino scholar, Justo Gonzalez writes, “the book of Acts becomes a call to Christians to be open to the action of the Spirit, not only in leading them to confront values and practices in society that may need to be subverted, but perhaps even leading them to subvert or question practices and values within the Church itself.”[1]

If we return to our beginnings, we find groups of people engaged by the teachings of Jesus who want to live out those teachings in a daily way across their life span.  And they do that together under the direction of the Spirit.  Today I want to lift up three ways that they tried to hear God’s voice because I think that we can also listen in these same ways.

One way that God speaks is through outward events. One of those events in Acts is conflict and persecution against the disciples in Jerusalem.  After Stephen is stoned by an angry mob, other believers flee up the coast to places like Phoenicia and Cyprus, Antioch, and Samaria. Wherever they go, they fulfill their mission to bear witness to Jesus.

Some end up in Antioch, a cosmopolitan city very important to the Roman Empire. Antioch’s population is estimated between 500,000-800,000 while Jerusalem’s population ranges from 25,000-50,000 in the same time period.[2]   Jewish people have been part of Antioch’s history for a long time. There is a well-established, beautiful synagogue that has already engaged a number of Gentile seekers as converts to Judaism.  Some un-named disciples from Cyprus make connections with Gentiles, likely through this synagogue. Remember that Jesus had told them “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  That is no longer theoretical, but reality. 

There is an intersection between the words of Jesus (witnessing all over the world) and the migration they undertake to avoid persecution and the people they relate to as they migrate.  Within that intersection, we may perceive the working of the Holy Spirit.

Looking back at Albany’s history, we don’t know exactly when Chinese people began to settle in Albany, but by 1886, the city directory listed nine laundries with Chinese surnames. In 1920, there were 24 laundries and 3 Chinese restaurants[3]. Starting in 1887 and continuing for decades, Emmanuel Baptist church offered space for a Chinese congregation and a Chinese language Sunday School.

A global food crisis happened in the early 1970s.  The FOCUS Food pantry opened in 1976. A decade or more later, many Emmanuelites participated in an AIDS Buddy Ministry in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS and the suffering it inflicted. The list of examples is long.  Most of you know it better than I do. 

Willie James Jennings is a Baptist who teaches at Yale Divinity School. His commentary on Acts is one of my very favorites. You’re going to hear his name often in the next few weeks. About this text he writes, “The Spirit speaks to us of what afflicts the world.  This too is our birthmark.  This too is our inheritance.  We are those who from the very beginning are always caught up in what destroys life and threatens the world.  . . . The Spirit always bring to the church specific knowledge of the world and the specific sites of divine concerns.  A church that knows not the particular needs of its time and place is a church that has not heard the Spirit speaking.” [4]

One important way that we hear the Spirit is by attending to the events happening in our time and place. Another way is within our own relationship with God.

Eventually the folks in Jerusalem learn about the mission in Antioch.  At that time, we might say that Jerusalem functioned like headquarters.  So, they send one of their own to check things out.  They send Barnabas.  Barnabas is originally from Cyprus.  He will likely relate to the men from Cyprus who were involved in the start of this mission.  He is also a Levite, which is the Jewish priestly tribe.

One of the questions that we will see repeated in Acts is about just what it means to take the good news to the whole world.  Just how welcome are the Gentiles – those who have historically been outside God’s chosen people?  How much of their identity will they be allowed to keep if they join this Jesus movement?  Barnabas is thoroughly Jewish.  He comes from the Jerusalem church, which at this time, is conservative, in the sense that they want to maintain all the traditions around spiritual practices and identity in the midst of receiving new folks.  This is the ongoing tension which we’ll discuss in a later sermon. 

That tension is not present in Antioch.  They are already welcoming and affirming towards Gentiles.  When Barnabas arrives in Antioch,  he sees what is happening and his immediate response is joy.  Remember, he is a Levite.  His tribe is responsible for providing all the priests and worship leaders for Israel.  He knows all the traditions, all the liturgical rules.  He likely has memorized huge passages of Scripture, including the passages that could be used to exclude Gentiles or include them only under special conditions, but he does not lean into that.  Instead he recognizes the work of the Spirit within the people in Antioch and he yields to it with joy. 

Barnabas’s birth name was Joseph, but the apostles gave him the nick-name Barnabas which means “son of encouragement.”  He is an encourager, a bridge-builder.  And he can handle newness.   He puts those personality traits, those gifts, to work as he bears witness to Jesus.   In that on-going relationship with God, he hears and responds to the Spirit.

 

Three ways to hear the Spirit

1)    Outward events – the trends, shifts, events happening in our time and place;

2)    Attending to our own relationship with God – including our own gifts and desire to join where God is at work; And, the last one for today is

3)     the discernment of the faith community.

In chapter 13, there is a short list of the leaders of the Antioch community.  The list begins with Barnabas.  It ends with Saul, known later as Paul.  After Barnabas understood the scope of the work, he went to get Saul and brought him back to Antioch to help . For a year, they have been teaching the people what they probably don’t fully understand themselves – how to unite a faith community which is so different from the one in Jerusalem but also follows the same Lord. 

There are 3 names between those of Barnabas and Saul

Simeon, probably from northern Africa,

Lucius of Cyrene, perhaps one of the original church planters?

Manaen – who was a childhood friend of Herod Antipas and served on his court either previously or currently on his court. This tells us that there is at least one person in this community of high social standing and political connection.  Herod Antipas is the one who beheaded John the Baptist.  Luke doesn’t tell us how Manaen can be a friend of Herod and a leader in the Jesus movement. 

The short list of names does convey a lot of diversity within this church.  There are differences of culture and language, of faith background, of social status.  We can extrapolate that this is a community where real differences endure.   “[Here] the Spirit speaks, or is heard, in a diverse collection of human beings.”[5]

Together, the Antioch church discerns that God is calling Saul and Barnabas to work somewhere else. Remember that this is a young church, still writing its by-laws.  Saul and Barnabas have been their guides for an intense year.  Sending them away might have been seen as voting against their own interests.  Somehow they manage to hear the idea as a real possibility and to stay open long enough to see it as the Spirit-led option.  They relinquish Saul and Barnabas to the wider mission.  No faith community exists only for its own sake.   We participate in the unfolding of God’s work for God’s purposes.

The church relinquishes their claims on two key leaders at the urging of the Spirit. It reminds me that when our Emmanuel church began, another church, First Baptist, relinquished their dynamic and visionary pastor and about one-third of its members to move to a different neighborhood and plant a church. It reminds me of what I’ve been told about Ralph Elliot when he was Emmanuel’s pastor in the 1960’s.  When someone visited from another part of the city, he would follow up with them after church.  He would welcome them to Emmanuel, but also he would say, “Would you like to hear about the Baptist church in your neighborhood?  I can help you connect there if that is a better fit for you.” 

A faith community does not exist for its own sake. Emmanuel does not exist for its own sake. There is a bigger mission to be part of, and we labor together to follow the Spirit’s call. Communities of faith can often see gifts or deficiencies within individuals that the individuals don’t recognize within themselves. Minority voices within the group may call attention to needs or possibilities that the group has not perceived.  Sometimes a new idea might come from the pastor – I believe that it was pastoral leadership which led to the formation of FOCUS churches.  But just as often, it is the voice of a lay person, as when Larry van Heusen courageously identified himself as a gay man, a gay Christian in 1975 and Emmanuel heard the call of the Spirit in his voice which spoke the truth even as it probably shook. That was the beginning of our calling to receive our LBGTQ siblings with joy.

 

From chapter 13 on, the center of the action in the book of Acts moves from Jerusalem to Antioch.  One scholar says that this happens, “not because the church at Antioch was the most ancient, or the richest or the most powerful, but because it was the one that heard the Spirit’s whisper and responded to the new challenge of the time.”[6]  And so, I repeat what I have said before, may it be so for you and for me.  Amen.  

 

[1] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001) p. 8

[2] J. Bradley Chance, Acts: Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, (Macon:  Smyth and Helwys, 2007), p. 185

[3] https://considerthesourceny.org/using-primary-sources/legacies/chinese-legacies/capital-district/capital-district-chinese-history

[4] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2017), pp.122-23

[5]Matthew L. Skinner, Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel:  Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts, (Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2015), p 99.

[6] Justo Gonzalez, p.141