11/10/19 - Coming Up Short - Luke 19:1-10

Coming Up Short

Luke 19:1-10

November 10, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

You never know what a pastor’s kid will hear and remember. Both of my children have strong connections to the story of Zacchaeus.  Erin remembers that she loved to sing the song about Zacchaeus, the wee little man.  Every once in a while, she’ll ask me when I’m preaching about Zacchaeus again.   Molly remembers a detail from a sermon I preached at least 15 years ago.  That detail is found is verse 3 which says, “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.”  The word “he” appears three times in that sentence.  The last “he” refers to the short person, but there is nothing to tell us whether it means Zacchaeus or Jesus.  You see, the rest of the story works equally well regardless of who is short.  If Zacchaeus is short, he can’t see Jesus because of the crowd.  But if Jesus is short, he can’t be seen because of the crowd around him. It works either way.  Molly heard that throw-away detail in a sermon once and for some reason, it delighted her and continues to do so.

The question of who was shorter – Jesus or Zacchaeus – doesn’t seem very important. It’s not. But I bring it up to point out how very well we think we know this story.   What if we have it all wrong and we should be singing about the wee little man Jesus? I wonder if there might be other things in the story, more important things, that we also have understood incorrectly. 

By way of introduction, Luke tells us Zacchaeus’ name, his occupation and that he is rich.  His name means “clean” or “innocent”.  Perhaps we could pause to wonder whether his name is accurate or ironic, but the next two descriptors “rich” and “tax collector” quickly consume our attention.

Jesus passing through Jericho, on the last trip he will ever make to Jerusalem. Zacchaeus is the last individual with whom he will have a one-on-one encounter before Jerusalem.  The rich have not been presented favorably in Luke’s account of Jesus’ ministry.  “Jesus pronounced woes on the rich [in the Sermon on the Plain].  God called a rich famer a fool and required his soul of him.  The rich man went to Hades while Lazarus [the beggar] went to the bosom of Abraham and Jesus observed how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” [1]  There is no reason to suspect that Zacchaeus will fare any better than the rich people who came before him.

On the other hand, he is a tax collector.  We have heard about Jesus and tax collectors before.  We know that Jesus was unpopular with the clergy of his day because he associated with them.  Levi, the former tax collector, was among his twelve disciples.

So, Zacchaeus is rich and a tax collector which makes it harder for us to predict which way the action will go. How will Jesus respond to him?

The common stereotype about rich tax collectors is that they are greedy and dishonest and you can’t believe anything

they say. Walter Brueggemann describes tax collectors as revenue men for the Roman Empire.  He says, “The purpose of that empire, like every empire, whether Babylon among the Jews, Rome in the time of Jesus, or the US empire . . .is to coercively extract wealth for the sake of the center.  Zacchaeus served such a regime. . . Zacchaeus was an agent of the violence of the empire.” [2]

When we think of tax collectors today, we might picture an IRS agent, someone wearing business clothes and good with a calculator. If that person is auditing us, we might be nervous around them, but we probably would not immediately jump to the conclusion that they are corrupt and greedy and not to be trusted. As long as we think of Zacchaeus like an IRS agent, we will have a hard time understanding the intensity of this story. 

We probably need to look elsewhere for a contemporary parallel. If, as Brueggemann says, Zacchaeus was an agent of the violence of the empire, then who embodies that role today? Is there a category, an occupation that we associate with corruption and dishonesty and greed, persons who carry out the violence of the empire?  I thought about this for a while. I came up with two possibilities. By now, you know my biases, so it might not surprise you to hear that I thought of Border Patrol agents and the owners of private prisons.  You might have other ideas.  You can feel free to tell me why I’m wrong later.  For now, let’s hold onto the image of Zacchaeus as a Border Patrol agent.  BP agents are generally unpopular in our culture right now.  Jim and I toured part of the San Diego/Tijuana border with BP Agents who told us how hard it is to identify their occupation to strangers.  One of them said, “We are not the monsters people think we are.”  The suicide rate among BP agents is higher than other branches of law enforcement which is higher than the general population.   Family members of BP agents report very high levels of stress in working for an agency which overlooks the humanity of the agents.[3] That sounds to me suspiciously like empire looking out for itself.

So, if you would humor me for the moment, imagine Zacchaeus in a Border Patrol uniform.  Imagine that the crowd in Jericho includes citizens and descendants of immigrants and perhaps even some undocumented folks who are following Jesus.  Everything is going fine until Jesus stops and looks up into that sycamore tree.  Down comes Zacchaeus and Jesus invites himself to his house.  Jesus will bring honor to whatever house he enters. By inviting himself to Zacchaeus’ home, he gives him an opportunity to be recognized prominently before the whole community.  The implication of table fellowship is that Jesus accepts him as someone who shares his values. 

And now we understand why the crowd grumbles.  What are they supposed to do?  They want to be with Jesus, sure, but they can’t pretend the Border Patrol agent shares their values.  To go to his house is to imply that they are like him, corrupt, greedy, exploitative, violent.   Someone like him is not supposed to respond to Jesus, anyway, not genuinely.  Surely, this is just another PR stunt. Why doesn’t Jesus see that?

Maybe some people are secretly hoping that Jesus does see that. Maybe they think that Jesus is going to publicly put him in his place – wouldn’t that be delicious? 

If so, they are even more dismayed at what comes next.  Zacchaeus acts as though he belongs with Jesus.  Of course, Jesus would choose to go to his house. Zach is aware of what the people think of him, of course, so he takes the opportunity to tell them about himself.  He says it to Jesus, but everyone can hear. In verse 8, he says “Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”  The verbs in that sentence are in present tense.  He is describing what he already does, not something he is going to start doing from this point on. 

But that’s not how we usually hear the story.  Just as we usually assume that Zacchaeus is the short one, we usually assume that this is a story about his repentance, that as a result of this encounter with Jesus, he is going to start making restitution. That’s the traditional interpretation.  It’s influence is so strong that most translations make the verbs future tense “half of my goods I will give to the poor; I will pay back four times.”  Translators call this a future present tense.  This is the only place in all of scripture where they claim to find this verb tense.[4]  I suspect that their interpretation of the story is influencing their translation, instead of the other way around. 

If we can allow ourselves to challenge the traditional interpretation, then maybe we can take Zacchaeus at his word, which Jesus seems to do.  And then we can recognize that this is not a conversion story, but a healing story.

I say this is a healing story because of what happens next.  After Zach describes his customary practice, Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house.”  And he calls Zacchaeus a “son of Abraham”. Earlier, Jesus had healed a woman in the synagogue, a woman who had been bent over for 18 years.  When he did that, he called her a “daughter of Abraham.”   Her illness had kept her isolated from her people, her community.  Her healing restored her to that community, the sons and daughters of Abraham.

Similarly, Jesus is restoring Zacchaeus to the community which has rejected him.  They have accepted all the stereotypes about him without question. They think they know who he is. “Rich tax collector” tells them everything they need to know until Jesus replaces that with “Son of Abraham.” Which means “one of you”.  Someone just like you, who shares your values, who is generous and cares for the poor.  If I am still imagining Zacchaeus as the BP agent, then instead of “Son of Abraham” I might hear Jesus say “Child of God.”

Jesus’s announced mission is to seek and to save the lost.  He has told stories about the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost sons.  Zacchaeus is lost to his own people until Jesus calls him down out of the tree.

Who comes up short in this story?  Not Zacchaeus.  Not Jesus.  If anyone comes up short, it’s the townspeople whose ability to love is stunted by their prejudice and preconceptions about who Zacchaeus is and who they will allow him to be. 

This is a story about opportunities for salvation and healing, for Zacchaeus and also for the people of Jericho.  That is the intensity of this story which still resonates, in a time when we are so polarized, so quick to judge each other, so quick to assume we know all about someone because of their occupation or political affiliation or a comment on social media or which church they do or don’t attend.  Maybe we can see that one way that Jesus goes about saving us, restoring us, healing us, is by seeking to destroy all of our stereotypes, all of our carefully set up and well-crafted assumptions about “those people” too.[5]

What did the people of Jericho do?  Did they welcome Zacchaeus into their midst or did they cling to their resentments of the past?  The Bible doesn’t tell us.  It leaves it open, asking the same question of us – will salvation and healing come to our house as it has come to the house of Zacchaeus?  Or will we stop short of the fullness of love Jesus intends?

[1] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 357

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “Vision that Trumps Violence” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2015), p. 235.

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/border-patrol-suicide-rate-spikes/

[4] https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1556

[5] Shannon Kershner in her sermon “Jesus Makes Things Complicated” http://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2016/031316.html

11/3/19 - It's a Wonder-full Life: Practicing Gratitude - Acts 4:32-35

Practicing Gratitude 

Acts 4: 32-35

November 3, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

The Rev. Brett Younger is a Baptist pastor now serving a church in Brooklyn. He went to my alma mater, Baylor University, although we were not there at the same time.  

In his first year there, when Parents Weekend came around, a letter went out to all students explaining that there would be a picnic on the quadrangle on Friday, except for those whose parents were not coming.  Those orphan students were to go to the cafeteria as usual. Brett’s parents lived in Ohio and they weren’t coming to Texas for the weekend. Neither were his roommates’s parents.  They thought it was hugely unfair to be left out of the picnic. So, they decided to go anyway.  But, by the time they got in line for fried chicken, they were terrified that the kitchen workers were about to catch them.  Brett said, “I imagined a woman in a hairnet shouting, ‘where are your parents?  Your parents aren’t here.  Security.’”

“So I decided to outsmart them.  Just before I was given a drumstick, I shouted to no one at all, ‘Mom, I’ll be right there.’  That is when the most surprising thing happened.  A woman I had never met shouted back, ‘I’m over here, son.’” 

What would possess a stranger to claim him as her son?  She turned out to be another student suspiciously there without her parents.  Her name was Ashley.   Brett and Ashley have been friends for decades now. For all that time, he has been calling her “Mom” and she has been calling him “Son.” [1]

There are probably many reasons why their friendship has endured, but I think a big factor in its beginning was gratitude. Gratitude for another person who gets your sense of humor and shares your willingness to break social norms.  The kind of gratitude that comes from a shared experience can be a powerful bond.

The early Christian community was bound together by their shared experience of the risen Christ.  At the start of his ministry, Jesus’s personal mission statement was a quote from Isaiah which began, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”  As Jesus’ followers continued his mission, the most dramatic sign of resurrection power was a community in which there was not a single needy person. The transformation bought to the world, brought to their own lives by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, drew from them a response of wonder and awe and gratitude.  They created a community of sharing.  Their faith in God was characterized by boldness and mutual generosity.

Last week, I spent a lot of time talking about what happened in Gander, Newfoundland on September 11, 2001.  I talked about how the residents of that area provided extravagant hospitality for thousands of people who were stranded at the local airport when US airspace was closed. Every need – for food, shelter, medication, access to e-mail and telephones – every need you can imagine, was provided for, at absolutely no cost to the recipients.  We can only imagine how grateful the plane people were.  Of course they said thank you at the time.   They also expressed it in many other ways.  When they made it home, they sent back gifts and notes and money.  One of the first notes to arrive was a fax, sent by Werner Kolb after he reached his home in the Netherlands. He said, “It is not possible for me to tell you how I felt during my stay with you.  Only once was I treated in a similar way. This was when I was a child. I was liberated in Holland in 1945.  You wonderful Canadians have not changed.” [2] Some plane people formed lasting friendships with local folks and returned to the area for frequent visits.  One organization said thank you for the use of a school’s computers by entirely replacing and upgrading the school’s computer lab.  On one departing plane, the passengers who knew that the local high school drop-out rate was high, agreed to set up a scholarship fund.  Every adult on the plane signed a pledge form to donate.  By the time they landed, they had $15,000 towards a fund which is now called the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund. It is now worth over $2 million and has provided almost 300 college scholarships.[3]

Gratitude is powerful.  You should know that Emmanuel evokes gratitude. Some of the best God-moments I experience are when gratitude for this congregation is expressed to me.  It’s one of the privileges of being pastor.  Sometimes I receive the gratitude of strangers, like the time the Fellowship Fund paid for work boots so a man could get a paying job.  Or when a newcomer thanked me, with tears in her eyes, for the worship experience on a Sunday morning. She was thanking me for my words in the sermon, but also for some very specific acts of hospitality that some of you had extended.  Gratitude is not just limited to strangers and newcomers.  I also regularly hear it from long-time members who are going through a particularly hard time and are grateful, in ways that cannot be easily expressed or  measured, for the support and care you offer.  When we receive sincere gratitude, especially from someone who cannot pay us in any other way, especially from someone who really needed what we shared, it is its own reward. It can transform us into people who want to do more for others because receiving gratitude is so powerful.

Gratitude is also transformative when we are the ones who offer it.  John was the senior pastor in a church where I served as associate.  Every time we celebrated the Lord’s Supper, after the elements had been distributed, he would lift the cup and say “Drink and remember and be thankful.”

Every time, I would hear that part “be thankful”   and it would hit me in all the wrong ways. Internally, I would think “Well, I can’t just make myself be thankful.  That’s not how it works.  John shouldn’t say that like it’s a command.” And by the time I finished my internal conversation, communion would be over and I would have basically missed the moment. Back then, I thought that gratitude could only occur spontaneously, when the circumstances were right. But I have come to realize that thankfulness can be learned. We can choose gratitude by focusing on the good gifts around us, instead of primarily attending to the hard things.  We can practice being gratitude. 

In her book, Grateful, Diana Butler Bass writes:  If you choose ingratitude, I cannot help you. But most of us do not willingly say, "I have decided to live my life free from thanksgiving.” . . . Even at ungrateful moments, we feel the tug toward something else. But it can be hard to get there. Ingratitude often results from misunderstanding the nature of thanks, failing to see the larger picture of our lives, or forgetting to nurture a spirit of gratefulness. . . .But when, if even for a little while, we choose gratefulness, that choice builds on itself and begins to create a spiral of appreciation. The first choice . . . sets up the next choice, and the next, and the next one beyond that. To choose gratitude is not an act of dogged determination. To choose gratitude is to hear an inner urging toward thanks, to be aware of the grace in life, and to respond. For whatever reason, we turn and reply to an invitation for a deeper, better life.”[4]

It turns out that we can “be thankful” on command if we practice it.  And the more we practice it, the more natural it will become.

In this season, we have sought to cultivate wonder in our worship because wonder can lead to appreciation which can lead to gratitude.  We have taken a look at the larger picture of our lives, examining the messages we’ve absorbed about money and responsibility and scarcity and enough.  We’ve attended to scripture passages which encourage us to put our trust in God, to seek the things which are ultimate, rather than the illusory security of wealth and possessions.  Our intention is to become more joyful, less anxious and more generous with our time and energy and money.  Our goal is to let our faith shape and even transform our economics. 

Today we come to an annual milestone in this faith community.  Today we make a commitment of our financial resources for the next year.  It’s a commitment we make to God’s work in the world through the mission and ministry of this church. 

We do this every year. Some of us respond out of duty or maybe even guilt.  We give because someone taught us we should.  We give a certain percentage of our income because it seems like the responsible thing to do. On the other hand, every year, some of us give out of gratitude. We give in thankfulness for the good gifts in our lives. We give with a sense of wonder about what God has done and what God might yet do within us and among us. Now, when the pledges are received, when the financial people crunch the numbers, the $100 given from guilt looks just like the $100 given with gratitude.  It all goes into the budget the same.  But I think there is a difference. The difference is that the gift given with gratitude is more satisfying.  The difference is that the gift given with gratitude brings more joy to the giver.  So, beloved ones, may God transform our guilt and fear and duty into awe-inspired wonder and gratitude so that we may give with joy. Amen.

[1] Brett Younger in his sermon “Living with the Spirit”  published at goodpreacher.com, April 20, 2011

[2] Jim DeFede, The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, New York:  HarperCollins, 2002, p. 221

[3] https://www.recordcourier.com/news/local/9-11-survivor-shares-experience-of-landing-in-newfoundland/

[4] Excerpted from Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks.  Copyright © by Diana Butler Bass. Published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpt found here: https://day1.org/articles/5d9b820ef71918cdf2004236/diana_butler_bass_choosing_gratitude_as_a_way_of_life

10/27/19 - It's a Wonder-full Life: The Good Life - 1 Timothy 6:17-19

The Good Life

I Timothy 6:17-19

October 27, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

“Take hold of the true life,” this letter says.  A few verses earlier, it said “take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.”  This passage is not about a futuristic goal.  It is not about a heavenly existence after we die. This passage is about how people who follow Jesus are to relate to other people and to money and possessions in the here and now.

The Greek word that is translated “take hold” means “take hold of, grasp, catch, sometimes with violence.”[1]  This passage is about seizing the true life, the best life here on earth.

The Harper Collins Dictionary describes the good life as “living in comfort and luxury with few problems or worries.”  The good life as the world understands it, the pursuit of ease and pleasure, is not the true life, the best life understood by the author of this letter.  As one scholar reflects, “Living the good life and living a good life pull in opposite directions.  One cannot serve both God and wealth.”[2]

Living a good life seems to begin with putting one’s trust in God and allowing that trust to shape everything else, including our attitudes towards money and possessions.  Many of those in the early church were materially poor. Those who were rich were strongly encouraged to share.  Sharing is at the heart of our faith.  It is the demonstration of the self-denial Jesus described when he said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up the cross and follow me.”  The mission and ministry that Jesus left in the hands of his disciples depends on the financial resources of those willing to share them.  So, we read that those who have wealth  “are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

Every once in a while there is a human experience or interaction that captures my imagination.  Every once in a while, we humans get it right and the kingdom of God among us becomes bold and visible, and the rest of us bear witness to the life that is really life.

I’m thinking today of what happened in Gander, Newfoundland in September 2001.  Many of you know this story.  I’ve been talking about it recently with some of you.[3]  Whether you hear it today for the first time or it is already very familiar, I invite you to listen to it as a parable, a real-life application of the instructions in this letter, about grasping the life that is truly life.

On September 11, 2001, after three commercial airlines had been turned into weapons of mass destruction, American air space was abruptly closed. Flights were cancelled all over the world. But hundreds of planes were still in the air bound for airports across the nation.  Those flights had to be diverted.  Many planes landed in unanticipated places. They landed in several Canadian cities.  Thirty-eight planes were making routine flights from places like London and Paris, Dublin and Stuttgart to places like Houston, New York, Charlotte and Nashville when they were ordered to land in Gander, Newfoundland.  There was so much fear and anguish that day.  Fear could have driven everything that came next, but it didn’t.

The planes landed and parked on the tarmac with some 6700 passengers on board.  That’s almost as many people as live in Gander.   At first, they thought that US airspace would re-open soon, so no one was allowed to get off. Everyone stayed on the planes on the runways.  Imagine that reality.  You’ve already been on the plane for hours flying over the ocean and now you’ve landed in an unknown place for reasons that no one is telling you and they won’t let you off the plane. For hours.  When they finally did let people off, each plane deboarded in order. Some folks were trapped on their planes for almost a day.  For claustrophobic people, that’s your worst nightmare come true. And for  people addicted to nicotine too.  One of the first things ways that Gander cared for the passengers was by emptying the pharmacies of all the nicotine gum and ferrying it out to the planes.

The fear must have been palpable.  People feeling trapped on the planes.  People at the airport wondering just exactly who was out there on the runway. No one knew how many more terrorists might still be part of the plot for the day. What if they were on these planes? After they landed, at first five of the 38 planes didn’t respond to hails from the control tower.  What if they weren’t responding because something terrible was happening on those planes? Fear could have ruled the day, but it didn’t.

What happened instead is that the people of Gander and several other towns recognized that the people on the planes were going to need lots and lots of help.  By the time the passengers were allowed off the planes, Gander had mobilized to provide for them. They closed all high schools, meeting halls, lodges, and any other large gathering places. They converted all these facilities to mass lodging areas for all the stranded travelers. The local radio station ran public service announcements asking for donation of food, spare bedding, extra clothes, anything the passengers might need.  At the community center, the line of cars stretched for two miles as people brought sheets and blankets and pillows from this homes. Nothing was labelled with the owner’s names.  Later a passenger asked a local woman how people would ever get their own sheets and towels back.  The woman said, “It doesn’t matter.”

The town’s bus drivers were on strike, in the middle of negotiations with city officials.  But, when they learned that almost 7,000 people had to be transported from the airport to various shelters within a 40-mile area, they put down their picket signs and got behind the wheels of the buses. 

On those planes were people from about 100 countries.  They included those who didn’t speak English and people who needed a Kosher kitchen and two children who had been on their way to Disney World through the Make-A-Wish foundation. There were parents bringing home a daughter they had just adopted from Kazakhstan, who were also anxious to get home to where the grandparents and older sibling were waiting. There were people of Middle Eastern origins who was as angry and outraged by the attacks as everyone else.  The passengers came from all walks of life, spanning the spectrum of religious and political outlooks.  They included the frantic parents of a NYC firefighter, whose whereabouts were unknown for the duration of their time in Gander, and a man from London and a woman from Houston who fell in love in Gander and got married the next year, and a gay couple who worried about whether a small town in Canada would welcome them.  It did. 

The people of Gander cooked. A lot. Grocery store shelves went bare. The town’s hockey ring became the world’s largest refrigerator.  Pharmacists worked overtime to fill prescriptions for passengers whose medicines were stuck on the planes in their checked luggage. Elderly passengers and others were offered beds in private homes. Some home owners did laundry all night long and left their doors unlocked with an open invitation to plane people to come in and take showers. A family that lived across from a 24-hour urgent care took in a woman who was 33-weeks pregnant.  Everyone who needed it had access to computers for e-mail and telephones to call home and tell loved ones they were safe.   The details of how the town responded to meet the physical and emotional and spiritual needs of all these guests go on and on. 

I’m sure the people of Gander are like people everywhere.  They can be cranky and self-centered, guided by greed or ambition or fear, but when the need arose, they rose above all of that. For a few very intense days, they recognized and attended to what really mattered. They offered compassion and hospitality, generosity and care.  For those few intense days, they took hold of the life that really is life. They were, in the words of our letter, “rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

Every once in a while, we humans get it right and the kingdom of God among us becomes bold and visible.  It happens here too.  It happened last month when you heard about 3 Karen families who lost their homes and everything else in a fire.  You gave $1500 plus clothing and furniture and household goods to help them start again. It happened last week, when together we celebrated the life of Audrey Ford with laughter and tears and wonderful music and a feast shared with friends.  It happens in big and small ways in what we do as individuals and what we do as a community. 

Hospitality, compassion, generosity—these are words that describe the people of Gander and Emmanuel. It is who we are and who we want to be.   The true value of our wealth is not to accumulate possessions so we can live in luxury with no worries.  But if we have wealth, it can enable generosity.  As we said last week, our hearts and our treasure go together.  As we look out at the world, as our hearts go out to the needs of the world, we can direct our treasure to follow.

This community of faith wants what God wants for the world. We want kindness and justice and sharing of resources so that everyone has enough.  We seek to embody Christ in this place, among these people.   We don’t do it perfectly, not by a long shot.  But we are practicing to get it right. 

This week you should receive a letter in advance of Pledge Sunday next week.  If you think you are not on the mailing list and you want to be, please drop your address into the offering plate or call the church office tomorrow.  This is the time of year when we ask ourselves to make a financial commitment for the next year.  It’s a commitment we make to God.  We don’t give to support the budget. We give to God, through the ministry and mission of this church, because within this congregation, we experience the fullness of the love of God.  In this congregation, we find a place to stand, trusting in God more than any of the other trappings of the good life the world supposedly offers.  This body of faith helps us to identify a courageous vision fueled by love and not by fear.  And so we will become rich in good deeds, generous and ready to share, so that we may take hold of what really matters and seize the life that truly is life.  Amen.

[1] Stephanie Mar Smith in Feasting on the Word Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010) p. 110.

[2] Tom Long,  Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) p. 75.

[3] The summary of the events at Gander related in this sermon are based on my reading of The Day the World Came to Town:  9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim DeFede, published by HarperCollins, New York, 2002.

10/20/19 - It's a Wonder-full Life: Treasure - Matthew 6:19-24

It’s a Wonder-full Life:  Treasure

Matthew 6:19-24 

October 20, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

Where your treasure is, Jesus says,  there will your heart also be.  Where you put your money, that’s what you will value.  If you buy an expensive piece of furniture, for example, you will value it, take care of it, protect it. I remember a formal sitting room in a friend’s house where we teenagers were not allowed.  The carpet was not to be walked on, the furniture not to be sat upon – at least not by us. I expect that my friend’s parents put more money into furnishing that room that they had into the basement where we hung out, and it showed.

They treasured that room as place to entertain adult company.  There is nothing wrong with taking good care of your possessions.  Nothing wrong with having some things that get saved for special occasions or furniture that teenagers are not invited to use.   I’m not making a moral judgment, but only trying to apply this saying, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  When you have invested hard-earned money in something, then you care for it.  Whatever your put your money into, your heart will follow. 

This is one of those sayings that can work in the opposite direction too.   If we turn it around so that it says “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also,” it is also true.  I think of collectors.  Someone who loves art or guitars or cars or books. It doesn’t have to be a high end collection, but if you love something, you generally end up putting money into it. And often, if you have one of the things you love, you buy another one and another one.  (Don’t ask me how many feminist theology books I own.) Where your heart is, there will your treasure be. 

Here is a literal translation of verses 19-20  “Do not treasure up treasures on earth where moth and eaters  can consume and thieves can dig through and steal. Rather treasure up treasure in heaven where these things cannot happen.”[1]

“Treasure up treasures…”Treasure is used as a noun and a verb.  To treasure something is to value it, to consider it precious and valuable, to love it.  And, of course, as a noun, treasure is something that is valued or protected or loved.

Jesus is saying that human beings are always going to treasure treasures, but not all treasures are equally worthy.  Earthly treasures are temporary. They can be eaten by moths or rust or mold.  They can be broken or stolen.

We know this. None of us in this room loves money for its own sake. We don’t love the paper and ink of dollar bills or even of $100 dollar bills.  What we value about money is what it can purchase.  Money can buy necessities, to keep us alive. Money can buy luxuries, things that make life more fun, more enjoyable. Money, given away, can provide unimagined possibilities for someone else.  Our conflicts with money are generally about how to use it well, and that is a question of what to treasure.

Middle-class and upper-class people are taught certain ideas about money. We’re taught that responsible people store up money for the future. We save for retirement or for children to go to college or for some unforeseen crisis.  All of which are good things, right?  But remember, where your treasure is, there’s your heart.  So, if you have a retirement fund or a college fund or a rainy day fund, your heart is there too. 

Richistan is a book written about 12 years ago. In it, the Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank studied the lives of ultra-rich Americans.   He interviewed them and learned that many of them were highly anxious, so much so that they had formed self-help support groups.  When he pressed them about the source of their anxiety, he learned that these multimillionaires and billionaires couldn’t sleep at night because they were worried, worried about running out of money. [2]

In one study, these ultra-rich people were asked “how much money would you need to feel financially secure?”  The results were very interesting.  Those worth $1 million said they needed 2.4 million. Those worth $1.5 million said they needed $3 million.  Those worth $10 million said they needed $18 million to feel secure. In every category, the answer was always about twice as much as they had. [3]

It is probably easy for us to think that these millionaires and billionaires are treasuring the wrong treasures. Easy for us to think that they have lost touch with reality. But, are we ordinary folks so very different from them?  Haven’t most of us thought, at one time or another,  that we would feel secure if we had just a little more?  If there were just a little more in the rainy day fund, we would breathe easier. If there were just a little more put away for retirement, we wouldn’t worry so much.

Some of you have learned to be content with whatever you have, and good for you, but for those of us who haven’t learned that yet, it often seems that our heart follows our money.  If we want to change something about our money, then perhaps the key is in changing our heart.

Changing hearts is super hard work.  Jesus was all about that transformation, so what he says here is pivotal. He says, “The eye is the lamp of the body.”  Today, we would say that the eye receives light, but in the ancient world, they thought the eye was like a lamp, an instrument that projects light onto objects so that they may be seen.[4]

All of that suggests to me that the way to change hearts, including our own, is to change what we look at, to change our vision.  Presbyterian minister Tom Long says that the decision about which treasures to treasure is a question of vision and freedom. He says, “If a person see life as a gift from God, a bountiful outpouring of God’s providence, then that person is free to hold possessions with a light grasp and to be generous towards others.  On the other hand, if life is seen as a competitive struggle between winners and losers over limited resources, then one  [will be captive] to that struggle.[5]

Our vision, our outlook on life in general, affects our heart, but so does the specific stuff we look at.

Sometimes we have been looking at the same things for so long that we no longer recognize how they affect us.  I remember a woman whose husband was seriously ill. Her life was a daily round of caring for him.  Then one day, her parents asked for help with an urgent matter. She wanted to help them, but she was caught up attending to her husband, and so she told her parents she could not help.  Later, after the crisis had passed, she realized that, at the time her parents needed here, her husband was in the hospital.  He was being well cared for. She could have left for a few hours to tend to her parents. In the midst of it, she couldn’t see it, but later she said it was obvious.  And she felt she had let her parents down when they needed her.

This is often how we make decisions about our time and our money. We are trying to do the best thing, but our tendency to see just what is right in front of us or what we have been attending to or what is familiar, that is the tendency that makes it hard to change our hearts.

If we really want to follow Jesus, in the matter of treasure, then I suggest, we have to take steps to change what we see.  If we can change what we see, then our heart may change and our treasure will follow our heart.

For some of us, this shift in perspective has happened on mission trips. Seeing other people’s realities has helped us look at our own in a new light. For others of us, it has happened in crisis.  A health crisis, a relationship crisis, a financial crisis – a major event that interrupted life as usual and helped us see with more clarity than ever before what was really most important. Some of us were blessed with parents or mentors who taught us from a young age about how to treasure what was truly important.

For different reasons, some of you have found ways to align your financial practices with your deepest values.  On a regular basis, in at least some arena of life, you lead with heart and let the treasure follow. 

Oseola McCarty was an African American woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She left school after the sixth grade to care for a sick relative and she never went back. For seventy-five years, she washed and ironed and folded the laundry of the bankers, lawyers and doctors in town.  She earned just pennies, but she tried to save what she could and eventually she started a little savings account.  She lived a simple life.  Her earthly treasures were few.  *She lived in a modest house just blocks from the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi. She did not get an air conditioner until she was well into her 80’sand then she only turned it on when she had company. She never owned a car.  She walked a mile each way to and from the grocery store. She went to the Friendship Baptist Church every Sunday, carrying a Bible held together with Scotch tape. When she was 87, Oseola retired.

In 1995, the development office of the University of Southern Mississippi received a phone call from a local bank. The bank had a check for the university from Oseola McCarty for $150,000. No one at the university had ever heard of Oseola McCarty.  She had never set foot on campus.  This washerwoman who had never been to high school, let alone college, gave away sixty percent of her life savings she had for a scholarship fund for minority students.  (She also gave 10% of her net worth to her church, by the way.)  

You’ve probably heard that story.  It made national news. She was invited to the White House and received an honorary degree from Harvard. Today I’m wondering what Oseola saw.  What did her life illumine for her? She saw people who had much more money than she did. Did she pay attention to what they treasured and whether those treasures increased their joy and love?  She had ample opportunity to notice disparities between rich and poor, between those with the opportunity for education and those who lacked it. It seems like her heart was with those who didn’t have that opportunity, and her treasure followed her heart.   

Shortly before she died, someone asked why she did not spend her hard-earned money on herself.  She smiled and said, “I am spending it on myself.” [6] 

Beloved ones, may we wonder at God’s gift of life so that we live in the freedom that enables generosity and our treasure resides with our hearts. Amen.

[1] Ben Witherington, Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary: Matthew, (Macon, Georgia: Smyth and Helwys Publishing, 2006), p. 149.

[2] Robert Frank, Richistan:  A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (New York:  Crown Publishers, 2007), p. 203-218

[3] Robert Frank, Richistan, p. 50

[4] Eugene Boring,  New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VII, Matthew,  (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 210.

[5] Tom Long,  Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) p 74.

[6] As told by Wallace W. Bubar in Feasting on the Gospels, Matthew, Volume 1, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2013)   p. 138.

10/13/19 - It's a Wonder-full Life: Looking Back - Matthew 22:15-22

It’s a Wonder-full Life:  Looking Back

Matthew 22:15-22 

October 13, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

What does a coin tell us about who we are?  If you pull out any American money you happen to be carrying, you might see that it says “In God we trust.”  I wonder how often we notice that.  When I stop to think about it, it seems strange for money to be the medium that carries that message. 

I heard about someone who was challenged by his pastor to make the sign of the cross in marker on his most frequently used credit card.   He did that and then, he said for the next several months, it was nearly impossible to buy something and not ask himself whether his purchase aligned with his faith.  As we move through this worship series on money and meaning, some of us might try that exercise too.

But I mention it because if having a cross on a credit card would make us more self-reflective, I wonder what meaning there is in having the motto “in God we trust” on our money.  This week I learned that the phrase was first added to coins  in 1863, at the urging of a Baptist pastor from Pennsylvania. At least part of the motivation then was to declare the God was on the Union side of the Civil War.   Mark Twain said “it always sounds well  -- In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.” He said the slogan would be more truthful if it designated the paper it was written on as ‘the god we trust in’.[1]

Then in 1956, Congress declared “In God we trust” to be our national motto.  After that, the words appeared on paper money.  At that time, the motivation was to distinguish the USA from godless communists during the Cold War.

So, if I have it right, then, this motto appears on our money more as a statement about power, especially political power, than about theology.  And I tend to think that Mark Twain is right, that American’s trust in money is right up there with our trust in God.

We are not the first to intertwine money and politics and theology.  That’s the crux of the scene with Jesus in our gospel reading. Some Herodians and some Pharisees try to trap Jesus with this question about money. The Herodians and the Pharisees are political opponents. The Herodians support the reign of the Herod family, which ruled Israel under the over-arching reign of the Emperor.  To support Herod was to support Rome and the tax.  The Pharisees are the liberal religious leaders of their day.  They are committed to the idea that every person could faithfully observe the traditional religious practices that were part of the covenant with God.  This intense religious practice enhances Jewish cultural identity and is in its own way, also a form of resistance to Rome.  The Herodians and the Pharisees do not agree on almost anything, but apparently they do agree that Jesus is a threat.  So they ask him “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

Jesus responds by asking them for a coin. What does a coin tell them about who they are?  Having to pay the tax to Rome is a painful reminder that they are occupied by a foreign power who worshipped false gods. The tax could only be paid with Roman coins, which are also pieces of propaganda. Most of the coins contain an image of the emperor proclaiming him to be divine. [2]

The silver denarius, represents a day’s wages for a laborer.  One side of the coin proclaims the Emperor Tiberius as a "son of the divine August," while the other side honors him as the "Pontifex Maximus" or "chief priest" of Roman religion. The two sides of the coin confer absolute religious and civil authority on Tiberius.

The Herodians and the Pharisees don’t care what Jesus really thinks about paying the tax. If he says “Yes, it is lawful,” he will be seen as a traitor to his people, and lose the respect of many of his followers.  If he says, “No, it is not lawful”  he will give the Romans reason to arrest him.  They think they have him right where they want him—either answer will work to their advantage.

Only Jesus does not say “yes” or “no”.  His answer might be his best-know sound bite,  “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”  The coin bears Caesar’s image – therefore it is Caesar’s, so give it to him.  But then what belongs to God? The answer must be whatever bears God’s image. Genesis affirms that humans are made in the image of God – therefore human beings belong to God. Jesus’ response challenges his questioners about where their deepest allegiance lies.  Jesus’ answer is a soundbite for the ages because it recognizes the moral ambiguity that permeates human existence.

In the first century context, this particular tax was a tribute paid to support the occupation of Israel. The Jewish people had to financially support their own oppression.  It’s a moral question about what to do money.  Jesus’ answer is a clue that financial decisions are always moral decisions. 

In our context, as consumers we make choices about where and what to buy, how much to spend, how much to save.  We can make the effort to purchase clothes and shoes not produced in sweatshops, but it does require effort. We can choose to pay more for products that are manufactured and packaged in ways that care for the earth and natural resources.  If we have financial investments, rendering to God involves knowing the practices of the corporations that our money supports. 

The more we think about this, the more we recognize that everything belongs to God.  If we take seriously the idea of giving to God that which belongs to God, we are required to reckon with how all-encompassing that category is.[3] 

Politics, money and religion are all jumbled together in this teaching of Jesus.  Politics, money and religion are all things many of us have been taught not to talk about, although I think it is more socially acceptable now to talk about politics and religion than about money.

We do tend to talk about money with our families.  Or to be more accurate, we tend to learn about money within our families, but sometimes what we’re taught is not to talk about it.  That is one of many messages we might absorb.

Proverbs says “Train up a child in the way she should go, and when she is old, she will not depart from it.”  This verse is often quoted as a positive – teach your children well so they will live well.  It is a true saying and it is also true in a negative direction. The things we learn in childhood, for good or bad, are not easily unlearned.  Because money is often a taboo subject, it seems that we often learn about it at home or we absorb messages from the wider culture.

Messages like:

Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Always save for a rainy day.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

You can never be too rich. More is always better.

How much money you make determines your self-worth.

If you have money, God has blessed you.

If you don’t have enough money, you’ve sinned or you don’t have enough faith.

Many of these messages might be offered from a place of love and concern.  They are intended as guidelines for living well, but they have a shadow side.  Sometimes we internalize good messages in ways that

only the shadow side is evident.  For example, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” can easily establish itself as inherent distrust of other people’s generosity.  Or “always save for a rainy day” might create such fear that the other shoe is about to drop that we would hoard our money and refuse to spend it in ways that might actually create joy in our own lives or for other people.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind.  We are to be all in, loving God with everything we’ve got.  Loving God with heart, soul and mind means examining the money messages we live by, even critiquing the money messages that came from those we love.  It means reckoning with the morality of our financial decisions.  It means rejecting practices that don’t enhance our love of God or neighbor and embracing those that do.   

When Lynn Twist was the director of the Hunger Project, she went to an African-American church in Harlem to make an appeal for a project in Africa. She said it was raining and there were buckets all around the room to catch the water leaking through the ceiling.  She knew that the people in this church did not have much to give. When it came time to ask for donations, her palms were sweating and she began to perspire all over wondering if it was the right thing to do. She went ahead and made the request, and the room was absolutely silent.

After what seemed like a long, long time, a woman named Gertrude stood up. In her late sixties or early seventies, she had gray hair and when she stood up she was tall, thin, and proud.
She said, “I ain’t got no checkbook. I ain’t got no credit cards. To me, money is a lot like water. For some folks it rushes through their life like a raging river, but the money comes through my life like a small trickle. But I want to pass it on in a way that does the best good for the most folks. I see that as my right and as my responsibility. It’s also my joy. I have $50 in my purse that I earned from doing a white woman’s wash and I want to give it to you.” [4]

I love that Gertrude understands the use of money as a right and responsibility, but also as joy.   Using the money that flows into her possession in ways that do the most good.  That is her joy. 

All that we are and all that we have and all that we hope to be belongs to God.  We have been imprinted with the image of God. The ways we spend our money, our time, our resources, our life energy, all impact the ways we bear that image.  So beloved ones, this week, may we bear the image and share the joy. Laugh. Dance. Love. Help. Breathe the cool fall air and wonder at the beauty around us. Critically examine one money message you live by.  Spend money to bring joy.   Make a child giggle. Have a long talk with someone – really listen to them and enjoy their company.  Give money to ease someone’s pain. Keep giving to God all that is God’s. Amen.

[1] William E. Phillips, Mark Twain's Religion. (Macon, GA:  Mercer University Press, 2003), p. 157.

[2] Brian Stoffregen at http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt22x15.htm

[3] Matthew Skinner, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christian-economics0matthew-22-15-22_b_1006128

[4] Lynne Twist “Money is a Lot Like Water”  http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2096

10/6/19 - A Wandering Illinoisan was my Ancestor - Deuteronomy 26:1-11

A Wandering Illinoisan was my Ancestor

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

October 6, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

My parents were both raised on farms in rural Illinois. My mother was one of 10 children.  There were 5 in my father’s family who lived to adulthood.   They met in college and because of my father’s apparent desire to see the world, they have now lived in 5 countries on 3 continents.

When I was 22-months-old, they took me to Ghana, West Africa.  We stayed there until I was in the third grade. Life there was decidedly different than what I would have known if my parents had not wandered so far from home.  My childhood immunizations included all the ones American kids get, plus a yellow fever vaccine.  On an infrequent, random basis, I saw wild elephants or crocodiles or baboons. 

Regularly, I played with chameleons or hedgehogs I found in the yard or with Oscar, our pet monkey. The family rules included a stern requirement that we only drink water from the tank where it was boiled and that we always be on the look-out for snakes which were all poisonous. One missionary family’s yard included the grave of their four-year-old who suddenly didn’t feel well one afternoon.  He laid down for a nap and never woke up.  What my parents told me about that grave taught me that life was precarious and that some families’ sacrifices were much greater than ours.

Air conditioning was unknown in that place near the equator.  We had electric fans, but the electricity went off every night and stayed off until morning, unless the generators got turned on for an emergency surgery at the hospital. Another nightly ritual was my mother lighting the mosquito coil in my bedroom because mosquitos carried malaria.  In spite of that, everyone in my family got malaria at least once and typhoid too, one Christmas.  As a child, I knew people who had lost fingers and toes to leprosy, and I often heard big words like “onchorceriasis” and “schistosomiasis”  which are tropical diseases never ever found in Illinois. 

My parents’ wandering shaped my life.  From third grade on, we lived in the United States, but I carried within me a internal frame of reference which always reminded me that things are not the same all over the world. I struggled to come to terms with some aspects of American life, especially in social studies classes where my class-mates always seemed to be smugly superior about people in places they had never been.  For a long time, I thought that I would become a doctor and return to Africa when I grew up.  I did apparently grow up to be a wanderer. Our current home is the eleventh place that Jim and have lived in 32 years of marriage.

My parents’ wandering shaped my life.  It is why my ear is tuned to the accents of West Africans which I’m delighted to hear often in upstate New York.  It is probably part of the reason I live 800 miles from my parents – if they don’t like that, they have only themselves to blame.  It might be a factor in my ever-present concern for refugees and immigrants. 

I was shaped by my family.  You were shaped by yours.  So many things go into making us the people we are, living the lives we choose, but the events of the past and the ways we attend to them are definitely important meaning-makers.  

The covenant people of Israel were shaped by the wandering of their ancestors. Our reading from Deuteronomy provides instructions to keep alive that memory and to engage it meaningfully on a regular basis.  Every time they made the harvest offering, they were to recite the story that begins “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor.”  Interestingly, here the reference is not to Abraham, but to Jacob who journeyed back to Aram, when he fled from his brother Esau.  The land of Aram is now called Syria, by the way. 

The offering-givers are to identify with their ancestors, so much so that the speaker is to use first person language.  The Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, . . . therefore we cried out to God, God heard us and saw our need and delivered us and gave us this land.  The people recall the past as if those exact events happened to them and then situate themselves within the covenant with their last words, “and now, behold I bring the first fruits of the ground which you, O  LORD, have given me.” 

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.”  That word wandering can also mean perishing.[1]  Israel’s wandering ancestors were landless, threatened,  fearful, victims of other nations and at risk of perishing. The offering-giver remembers the hardship of the past, as if it were his/her own, and gives thanks for life in the present.

A more modern sounding version of this creed might go like this:

“We were at-risk Syrians;

We were exploited as cheap labor;

We were delivered by the wonder of God;

We were brought to a place of abundance;

We enact our gratitude to the God who has saved us.”[2]

There was a possibility that memory would fade, that the harshness of slavery and the lessons learned in the wilderness would be forgotten. There was a danger that the wanderers would settle for something less than the vision of liberation and justice that sent them forth in the first place. [3] And to be sure, that did happen from time to time. But the memory was kept alive in Holy Scripture and in the enactment of gratitude.

With gratitude, they were to bring the offering and tell the story.  But that was not all. Verse 11 reads, “Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.”  Acting out gratitude was more than something done with ritual words and offering. The next part was to celebrate with two specific groups of people.  They were to celebrate with the Levites,  the priests who depended on the offering gifts because they had no land of their own, and with the foreigners, the immigrants, those who lived among them and might not have the means to make their own offerings or celebrations.  It says “Together with the Levites and the foreigners you shall rejoice”. Celebrate and be grateful, together.

The Bible repeatedly warns the Israelites not to oppress the stranger because they were once strangers who were oppressed.  This story has continued to shape Jewish identity for millennia.    

When the US government separated children from their families at the border, one of the first places they kept the children was in Tornillo Texas.  Joshua Rubin, left his home in Brooklyn and went to Tornillo and lived there for 3 months to protest that oppressive treatment of foreigners. When Tornillo closed down, the child prison at Homestead, Florida opened. Martin Levine began his own protest and public witness outside that facility.  Martin did not know Joshua at the time. Martin and Joshua are both Jewish. 

When the Gethesemane Karen Baptist Church wanted to buy their own building, I called Bill.  Bill is my realtor friend.  He is a member of Congregation Beth Emeth.  The first time we all went to look at a possible site, Bill and I stood to one side talking while the Karen church leaders wandered around, inspecting the building.  Bill said, “Who are these people?  What’s their story?  How do you know them?”

I said “They have escaped attempted genocide in their homeland. I know them because they came to my church. They’ve been coming to the United States for about a decade, and because most of them are Baptist, they are re-invigorating Baptist churches across the country. “

When I said that part about escaping genocide, Bill said “These are my people.” 

This narrative summarized in Deuteronomy shaped the covenant people of Israel thousands of years ago and continues to shape us. And, unfortunately, more recent history does too.   The evil and suffering of the Holocaust is never far from mind.

 It was the focus of one of the most significant moments of the Emmy Awards Ceremony two weeks ago.  Alex Borstein won for her role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  It’s a show about a woman in the 1950’s who breaks with social custom when she pursues a career as a stand-up comic.  Alex Borstein accepted the award with thanks to her mother and her grandmother,  who are immigrants and Holocaust survivors.   She said, “My grandmother turned to a guard… she was in line to be shot into a pit and . . . she said, ‘what happens if I step out of line?”  and the guard said, ‘I don’t have the heart to shoot you, but somebody will,’”  Alex said,  “and she stepped out of line, and for that I am here, and my children are here, so step out of line, ladies.  Step out of line.”

Alex knows the story of her ancestors.  It shapes her identity.   She recites to her children with gratitude.  She tells it to strangers to inspire us to courage.

I’m telling all these Jewish stories and you might be wondering where the rest of us fit in.  We who identify as Christian also follow a wandering Aramean. You might remember that Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic.  He was descended from Jacob, that earlier wanderer. He wandered all over Galilee, which was the area of ancient Israel full of foreigners and the landless poor.  For three years, he wandered, healing, and teaching, reminding his people about the God who loved them. He spoke of mercy and inclusion. He demanded justice, welcomed the outcast, and embodied love for his enemies. 

We follow Jesus who knew the story of his people.  He was one who identified with those who had been oppressed and also with the God who delivered them from oppression. He lay down his life to liberate us from the bondage of sin. And he left us a way to remember, bread and wine shared together, received in memory and gratitude.  

[1] John Holbert at https://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2010/11/sacred-thanksgiving

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “Remembering Who We Are” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2, (Louisivlle:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2015) p 44.

[3] Heidi Neumark, “Aliens Welcome:  Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13” The Christian Century, February 6, 2007

9/29/19 - The Journey - Exodus 1:8-14, 3:7-15

The Journey

Exodus 1:8-14, 3:7-15

September 29, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

“Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”  The first chapter of Exodus picks up the storyline from the end of Genesis.  The history of the people of Israel continues to unfold, but this simple sentence alerts us to a major plot twist.

We remember that Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob, the one who had first been taken to Egypt as a slave. But, as he spent years working for the Pharaoh, he earned a place as his second-in-command.  By having the foresight to store surplus crops in the years of abundant harvest, he protected the Egyptians from famine. As the famine went on and people had less money with which to purchase food, Joseph, on behalf of the Pharaoh, accepted their livestock and their land in exchange for food – adding substantially to the wealth of the already rich and powerful king.   When Joseph’s father and brothers and their families fled their homes in Canaan because of the hunger there, there were 70 people who came to Egypt as resident aliens.   The grateful Pharaoh rewarded Joseph by providing them a holding in the best land in Egypt.  These immigrants gained a certain favored status because of their relationship to Joseph.  

But time has moved along and now a new king is in power, a king who did not know Joseph.  A king who did not know his history.  A king who found it convenient to forget the terms that Joseph had negotiated for the welfare of the Hebrews as resident aliens.  A fearful king who thought that the Hebrews posed a threat to the Egyptian way of life.   

In this part of the story, the word Hebrews is used instead of Israelites.  The term Hebrews is more of a social category than an ethnic group.  It is related to a word used outside of the Bible that means “dusty” or “dirty” and is applied to people described as rebels, outlaws, raiders, servants, slaves, and laborers. Hebrews “refers to any group of marginal people who have no social standing, own no land and endlessly disrupt ordered society.   They are ‘low-class folks’ who are feared, excluded and despised.” [1]

Perhaps you can think of some similar social categories, of devalued persons who are seen as a threat or inconvenience to established power. Perhaps you can think of someone like a king who doesn’t know history, someone who, say, has no idea of the Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980 which was intended to provide flexibility to respond to rapidly changing humanitarian crises around the world.  Someone like a king who wants to receive no more than 18,000 refugees from desperate situations across the globe in next year, someone who must not know or care that the lowest number we have ever received is 27,000 and that was in the year following the attacks on September 11. Perhaps you can think of someone like a king who found it convenient to forget the terms negotiated for the welfare of foreign children, laid out in a document called the Flores Agreement.  If you can think of someone like that, then you will understand this story very well.

In the midst of this tremendous on-going suffering, a Hebrew baby is born. He is descended from Abraham and Sarah, the great-great grandson of Jacob.   The baby is Moses.  He will eventually lead the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. 

We know the end of the story, but what I’m most interested in is what it’s like at the beginning or maybe the middle of the story.  What is it like when you don’t know where you are in the story and how or when it will end?

That’s where we meet Moses – in the middle of the story. He was born as a marginalized Hebrew, but rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter.  He grew up in the royal household, with most of the attendant privileges.  But one day, as an adult, he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and he intervened and ended up killing the Egyptian.  Pharaoh heard about it, so Moses fled, to the neighboring area of Midian. 

At the well in Midian, he defended some women from the shepherds who tried to push them aside and take their turn first.  Later, one of those women told her father that it was an Egyptian who defended them.  He must seem more Egyptian than Hebrew to her. 

We picked up the story where Moses is married to that woman and they have a son named Alien.  Moses has settled into life as a resident alien in Midian. Maybe the Midianites aren’t sure whether he is Egyptian or Israelite, but he has settled in Midian where he is safe.  He has a family and a livelihood as a shepherd.  His life in Egypt is long ago and far away.  It seems to be over, as far as he is concerned.

Until the day that God gets his attention through a burning bush.  Some might say that’s when the story starts.  But I wonder.  We tell this long story of Moses and the Exodus as if it’s a fast-action thing, but really there are years and years where nothing happens.

Moses is 80 years old by the time he tells Pharaoh to “let my people go.”  He was just a young man when he identified with the marginalized, when he chose to intervene on the side of the less powerful, those victimized by Pharaoh’s brutality.  Why didn’t the Exodus begin back then? Why did it take so long?

What I’m most interested in is what it’s like when you don’t know where you are in the story and how and when it will end. The word for this place is liminal. It is not a word that I use every day.  It comes from the Latin word limen, which means threshold. Liminal space is the space on the threshold, the time of transition between one thing and the next.  It’s the space in the doorway, the space between moments, the space between before and after.  Liminal space is that place in the doorway.   In a lot of ways, that’s where I find us these days.

You’ve probably seen this image of Greta Thunberg from a year ago.  She’s on strike from school protesting for protection of the environment outside a Swedish government building. A year ago, she was alone. 

Last week, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world joined her cause.    If we look at just that slice of history, it might seem like there was a lot of progress in just one year.  But if we remember that Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and people like her have been urging care for the creation for decades, then we might ask “why is it taking so long?”

Most of us have now heard the idea that every 500 years, the Church goes through a rummage sale where it cleans out the old ways of ordering spirituality and replaces them with new ones.  It’s a way to describe the huge shift we are experiencing in churches, the shift that has been happening for a while now. Phyllis Tickle published that idea and made it popular in 2008, eleven years ago. That might seem fairly recent, but come on, how long does it take to put on a rummage sale?

Every day, it seems, we hear new stories of human desperation and exploitation, of terror and violence, of systematic cruelty, corruption, and indifference.  It happens at our borders and within our neighborhoods and in war zones and places of relative peace, and we wonder how things will ever change.

In so many ways, we find ourselves in liminal space.  And most of us, as we stand in the doorway, we want to know what it will take to move across the threshold.

What did it take for the Israelites? The book of Exodus highlights two things.  First, the people cried out to God.  In their suffering, they groaned and cried out for help and God heard their cry.   It is Israel’s voice of hurt and rage that sets things in motion. Walter Brueggemann says “it is difficult to imagine a more radical theological statement that this; it is voiced grief that mobilizes God to act in saving ways.”   He goes on, “against an etiquette that prefers peaceful waiting, Israel is vigorous and bold, insistent and importunate.  Israel shatters the docile silence, asserts its hurt and its hope. In doing so, it not only terrifies the empire, but it mobilizes holiness on its behalf as well.”  [2]

And so, I wonder as we stand on the threshold, can we hear the insistent cries of those who suffer, the voiced hurt of victims of gun violence, and weary migrants with no safe place to rest, and people of color in a racist world, and those traumatized by one calamity after another?  Do we hear the pain of those who have lost faith because of the church’s failure to love? Do we perceive the groaning of all creation? Like the ancient Israelites, can we hear the lament and raise our own voices, troubling heaven loudly, boldly, vigorously, until we mobilize holiness to action? 

The second thing that moves the Israelites into Exodus is Moses. Moses attends to the bush which burns but is not consumed.  Moses takes off his shoes because he realizes he is standing on holy ground.  Moses listens and hears the voice of God, the voice of the God of his ancestors, the God of his oppressed and marginalized people.  Not the people of Midian where he now lives.  Not the elites of Egypt, the residents of the palace where he grew up, but the people with whom God has been in covenant for generations. The second thing that moves the Israelites across the threshold is that Moses takes up his true identity.  Moses does not do that easily. He resists God’s call and makes excuses.  I don’t blame him.

I’m reading a book called How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going by Susan Beaumont. It was just published a week ago.  Too late for Moses, which is too bad, because I think the title sums up his predicament.  What God is calling him to do is completely unknown and seems impossible.   This brand-new book, just published, is intended for church leaders as we stand on the threshold right now.  The title alone explains so much.

The book also offers another image of liminal space. Instead of a doorway, it suggests the image of a trapeze.  Liminal space is “a time when you’ve let go of one trapeze with the faith that the new trapeze is on its way.  In the meantime, there’s nothing to hold on to.”[3] 

I’ve only read the first quarter of the book.  So far, it is more descriptive than prescriptive, but I have found one useful idea, which is the concept of surrender. Now, in everyday use, surrender often means to accept defeat, to give up, to give in. It’s not a term we usually embrace.  It doesn’t seem especially helpful when you’re free-falling from the trapeze.

But Susan Beaumont is writing as a spiritual director and she says that in the contemplative spiritual tradition, surrender means something else. “To surrender is to yield, to submit to the powerful reality of what is, to take a long loving look at what is real, to welcome the situation in front of you. Surrender means accepting the past for what it was, embracing the present reality, yielding to the mystery of the future and the mystery of God in that future.”[4]

I think surrender is a great description for what Moses eventually does.  He takes a long look at the burning bush and submits to the powerful reality of God, the great I-AM, the One who is and has been and will be.  He accepts the past for what it was and yields to the mystery. 

Beloved ones, it seems we stand on several thresholds.  Maybe it even feels like we have let go of the trapeze and there’s nothing to hang onto.  Perhaps we can hold onto this: 

“At the heart of our tradition is the radical idea that God calls God’s people into a new future, that God is the one who agitates and disturbs us and makes us uncomfortable with the status quo.”[5]  May we surrender to that call, accepting the past, submitting to the powerful reality of what is, yielding to the mystery of God with courage and commitment.  Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 1, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 695.

[2] Brueggemann, p. 707.

[3] Susan Beaumont, How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season, (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), p. 12

[4] Beaumont, p. 43.

[5] This beautiful sentence is from a sermon by the Rev. John Buchanan, also called “The Journey”  http://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2005/091105.html

9/22/19 - Sibling Keepers - Genesis 37:17b-36

Sibling Keepers

Genesis 37:17b-36

September 22, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

The first account of a murder in the world is the story of Cain killing his brother Abel.  Afterwards, when God asked Cain where Abel was, Cain said, “I don’t know.  Am I my brother’s keeper?”   That question, about how much responsibility we bear or should bear for our brothers and sisters, endures throughout the Bible and continues to be one we ask ourselves.

Before soap operas were invented, before moves or TV, before plays were ever written or performed on stage, there were stories.  Some of the world’s most ancient stories are found in Genesis, and let me tell you, soap operas and stage dramas have nothing on Genesis.  Today we come to Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham.  Joseph’s story includes betrayal, sex, political intrigue, dysfunctional family dynamics, famine, imprisonment, revenge and forgiveness.

Joseph’s brothers did not kill him, but they don’t win any prizes for their treatment of him either. Joseph is the bratty younger brother.  He is a tattle-tale and a braggart and the older brothers cannot put him in his place because he is their father Jacob’s favorite. Quite simply, they cannot stand him.

Then comes the day when they are all far from home, tending the sheep.  Without Jacob around, Joseph is at his brothers’ mercy.  They see him coming from a distance and they plan to kill him. Rueben, the oldest, persuades them not to kill him with their own hands. He convinces them to put him in a pit and leave him there to die, but Reuben has secret plans to deliver him later.

The pit is a cistern, a deep hole dug into the ground to catch and store rainwater.  It is dry when Joseph is thrown into it.  The word translated as pit or cistern also means prison.  We might remember that after Joseph gets out of this pit, he will be imprisoned by Potiphar in the land of Egypt.  In the Psalms, the pit is a place of utter desolation. Psalm 69 says “Do not let the flood sweep over me or the deep swallow me up, or the Pit close its mouth over me.” And from Psalm 88, “For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.  I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help,”

The pit is the Biblical term for a place of despair.  It may be the place we find ourselves when we are exhausted from trying to do the right thing but never succeeding, or the place where our own dysfunctional family dynamics catch up with us.  The pit of poverty or addiction or grief may threaten to swallow us on a regular basis.   It may be the place we reach after unending bad news about hurricanes and floods and our governments’ refusal to grant protection to those fleeing them. The pit is a place where escape seems impossible and death is surely imminent.

Joseph’s brothers throw him into the pit. Generations later, the prophet Jeremiah was also imprisoned in a cistern pit.  That was at the time of the exile to Babylon, the years during which these stories took their final form.  So, the cistern, the pit, the place of desolation, becomes a link between the suffering of the present and the suffering of the ancestors.  The people in exile remember that Joseph suffered great injustice and torment, but that God ultimately delivered him and used him for the deliverance of more of God’s people. That link between their time and their ancestor provides hope for their own survival and deliverance.[1]

 Joseph’s brothers throw him into the pit.  Except for Rueben, they all want him to die, in what will surely be a slow and terrifying process.  Rueben secretly plans to come back and rescue him.  Rueben has the instinct to be Joseph’s keeper, but he lacks the courage to stand up to his brothers.  The others seem to feel no shame about what they’re doing. They calmly kill a goat and use its blood on Joseph’s special coat to support the lie they tell their father. 

There are already layers to their cruelty, but then Judah takes it to another level.  He is the one who suggests that there is no profit in murder.  Why kill Joseph when they can sell him? So, Joseph is hauled up, money changes hands, Joseph is carted off to Egypt as a slave and the brothers carry home to Jacob a grief he will bear for the next 22 years.

I am reading these stories through the lens of migration. Joseph’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had all been wanderers at various times in their lives, but in Joseph’s story, there are so many elements common to future human migration patterns.  One that jumps out right here is the idea that being cruel is not enough, evil also makes a profit. This echoes for me in the humanitarian crisis that is our immigration system. Our system currently criminalizes asylum seekers who cross the border. Desperate people fleeing violence, persecution and poverty are being detained by the thousands in private for-profit prisons.   When I went to the child prison in Homestead, Florida, I learned that it is paid $775 per child per day. There were about 2700 teens detained there in June, which rounds up to about $2 million tax dollars flowing into the coffers of the private prison owners every day.  That’s just for one facility.   It is not enough to separate families and terrorize desperate people, some people have figured out how to turn that cruelty into a profit.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” whined Cain.  The question continues to reverberate through time.  None of us here would throw our brother or sister in the pit.  None of us would seek a profit from the suffering of others. But some of us feel like we’re in the pit ourselves and how much responsibility can we be expected to bear for our fellow human beings?  

When the Hebrew people were in exile, and they asked similar questions, they found some encouragement in the model of current prophets like Jeremiah and some hope in the old stories like this one.

I wonder if we might find similar hope and encouragement. We don’t have to look too hard to find contemporary prophets.  Two days ago, thousands of young people all over the world took to the streets to demand that we all step up and take seriously our responsibility for the well-being of the planet which is one of the most fundamental ways we can care for each other. 

Last Sunday, several of us delved into the story of Pia Klemp.  She is a 36-year-old ship captain who spent months on two ships in the Mediterranean Sea.  She and her crew have saved the lives of several thousand migrants, literally pulling them from the water off the coast of Libya.   She and 10 others are now facing trial in Italy. Charged with aiding in illegal immigration, they could serve 20 years in prison if convicted.  Pia feels that far more important than what they’re being subjected to is the fate of those who are completely deprived of their rights, those who continue to die every day as they’re trying to reach safety.    

Born in Germany, she says, “I'm part of a generation that grew up asking their grandparents, 'What did you do against it?’  And I've come to realize that I'm part of a generation that will have to answer the very same question to their grandchildren."[2]

When we were in Copenhagen this summer, our tour guide told us a bit about Denmark during World War II.  He said that when the Nazis first occupied Denmark, at first, they were not as harsh as in some places and Jewish people were left alone.  But by 1943, the Nazis dissolved the Danish government and established martial law.  And then the Jewish population was in danger.  A German official leaked the news that the Gestapo was coming to arrest and deport all Danish Jews within the next 1 or 2 days.  The chief rabbi was alerted and he interrupted Shabbat services to warn people to flee or hide. 

Hundreds of Danish Gentiles helped them.  Mendel Katley was a 36-year-old factory worker with a wife and two children.  When he heard the news, he rushed home to get his family.  Taking the tram home, he saw the same conductor who had been punching his ticket every day for years. The conductor asked why he was going home early.  Mendel told him that of the Germans’ plan. “That’s awful,” the conductor said, “What are you going to do?”

Mendel said he didn’t know, that they needed to find a place to hide. “Come to my house,” the conductor insisted.  Get your family and bring them all to my house.”

Mendel was stunned, “But you don’t know me.  You don’t even know my name and I don’t know yours.”  The conductor held out his hand and introduced himself. Mendel was no longer alone.

Similar acts happened across Denmark.  One well-known physician remembered that a woman he had never met approached him, introduced herself, and said, “This is my address and here is the key to my house if you should ever need it.”  After the war, another woman heard that story and said the same thing happened to her.  At one point, she had keys for 4 different people’s homes. 

Ordinary citizens hid Jewish people until they could get them onto boats and smuggle them by sea to Sweden, which was willing to grant asylum. Over 7200 people were smuggled out of Denmark in a short period of time. Ninety-nine percent of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust.

Our tour guide said that some years ago, he saw an interview with a woman who was a young girl in 1943.  She said that at the time, she had recently been given a doll.  It was new and precious to her, but when her family fled, she had to leave her doll behind.  In this interview, she said that they went to Sweden and stayed there for some years, returning to Denmark only after the war had ended. When they came back to their home in Denmark, they found that a neighbor had taken care of their home for them.  As a child, she came back to her home and walked into her bedroom and found her doll on her bed, just as she had left it.   

Twenty years after the war, a Copenhagen housewife said, “We helped the Jews because they needed us.  How could anybody turn their backs and not do everything possible to prevent the slaughter of innocent people? . . . By saving Jews, we saved ourselves. We kept our integrity and honor. We struck a blow for human dignity at a time when it was sorely lacking in the world.”[3]

Joseph’s story is long and we didn’t get to hear all of it today. Some of you will remember that in Egypt, he is imprisoned after false accusations but later he is helpful to Pharaoh. So helpful that he becomes something like Pharaoh’s Secretary of Agriculture.  When famine strikes the region twenty-two years later, his brothers come to Egypt to buy food. They don’t know who he is, but he recognizes them.  He has the opportunity to take revenge, which he does, in some petty ways. But when it really matters, he provides abundantly for all of them and forgives them and is reunited with his father in the final years of his life.

Ultimately, Joseph chooses to be his brothers’ keeper.  He says, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.”

Sisters and brothers, I offer these accounts of contemporary prophets and stories from recent history not to be discouraging, not to suggest that we should be doing something more or different, but to encourage us all in what feels like a long hard time.  Like the exiles in Babylon, may we remember those who have acted courageously and faithfully before us and may we also trust that within us and around us, in ways we may not yet see, God is at work for our deliverance.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Kathleen O’Connor, Jeremiah:  Pain and Promise, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011) p. 154

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7V1zNNfc_Q

[3] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kindness-of-strangers

9/15/19 - Running for His Life - Genesis 27:41 - 28:22

Running for His Life

Genesis 27:41-28:22  

September 15, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

Every wanderer, every immigrant is a unique person with his or her own story.  That is probably obvious, but with so many people being forcibly relocated in the world now, we often hear about migrants in groups.

Millions have fled the war in Syria. Thousands have traveled from Central America to arrive at our southern border.   The images in the media are of too many people in too small boats coming ashore in Greece or of an ever-growing walking caravan making its way north to Tijuana or El Paso or Nogales.  The images in our minds tend to be of migrants as a large group, not individuals. When we learn the story of an individual migrant, it is usually because something tragic has happened to them.  The large groups of people are on the move for the same reasons – war in Syria, violence and grinding poverty in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, but before they were migrants, they were farmers or fishers, seamstresses, musicians, grandparents, teachers, or children. Every migrant has a story that is larger than their status as a displaced person.   

I realized that particularly this week as I read the familiar story of Jacob.   Pretend for a minute that all we know about Jacob is the part that Barb just read for us.  If we met Jacob for the first time at this point, we would know him as a wanderer, as someone running for his life, someone beyond the protection of his family and country, someone who would likely be killed if he was forced to go back right then.  Someone has said that at that point, Jacob’s existence was in a “world of fear, terror, loneliness, and, we might imagine, unresolved guilt.”[1]  That sounds a lot like the experience of migrants and refugees all over the world right now – fear, terror, loneliness, and quite likely, unresolved guilt over decisions made when there were no good choices and actions taken out of desperation.  So, if all we knew of Jacob was this part of the story, he might seem to have a lot in common with wanderers from other times, including our own.

But we know much more about Jacob.  And that is a reminder that there is more to know about every single person who also happens to be an immigrant, on the move at this moment in time.

Jacob’s story begins in the womb.  He and his twin Esau were so active inside their mother, Rebekah, that Rebekah asked God about it.  God told her that she was carrying two nations and that one would be stronger than the other and that the elder would serve the younger. Jacob is the younger twin.  This word, given to Rebekah before he was born, does appear to come true.

Now some of us are not very comfortable with a God who plays favorites. We don’t like the idea that God would choose one brother over the other.  If this one is hard for us, we have to remember the world into which Jacob and Esau was born was governed by a system of favoritism.  The system is called primogeniture and it means that the firstborn son inherits everything.  No one questioned this; it was just the way things were.  But this word from God inverts the assumed natural order of things.  Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “It affirms that we are not fated to the way the world is presently organized.”  This oracle “expresses a scandalous decision on the part of God . . .   Esau is not judged or condemned, but the accident of his birth is not a title to privilege.” [2] 

“We are not fated to the way the world is presently organized.”  This is true then and now.  True when chattel slavery was or is part of the world’s organization scheme.  Or when children were or are laborers, or when women were or are assumed to be subordinate to men, or when heteronormativity is or was the law of the land.  “We are not fated to the way the world is presently organized”  is true for people born on a certain side of geographical boundaries, into a system that assumes they will be part of the collateral damage of war, or that they will join the gangs that serve the empires of powerful drug cartels. Mass migration is one way that powerless people can reject the way the world is presently organized.  And like Esau, those of us who happen to born within different geographical boundaries are not more entitled to safety and peace than those who currently wander.

Jacob and Esau grow up at odds with each other. Esau loves the woods and hunting.  Jacob is a homebody.    Esau shares his love of the outdoors with his father, while Jacob is his mother’s favorite.  The dividing lines are drawn from early on. Some siblings squabble all through childhood, but as they grow up, they become friends. Not these two. They are adults, in their 40’s, when Jacob does the worst thing ever. He steals something precious that rightfully belongs to Esau.  He tricks his father into giving him the blessing meant for the oldest son.

Esau’s anger at Jacob’s deception drives the brothers apart for the next 20 years.  Jacob runs for his life, like so many leave home today under threat of genocide or starvation or to escape unending war. Using the pretext of needing to marry someone from his own ethnic group, Jacob runs to his mother’s brother, his Uncle Laban.  Earlier, Laban and Rebekah had been identified as Arameans.  It is here that Jacob becomes known as the “Wandering Aramean”.

The journey to Haran is 400 miles, which he makes all alone, on foot.  He spends more than one night in the pitch dark, without a tent, without a blanket, among the stones.

It is then, when Jacob has settled into an anxious sleep that God comes to him in a dream.  God makes the same promises that God had made to his father and his grandfather, promises of land and descendants and blessing.  God also makes a promise that is unique to Jacob, that God will bring Jacob back home.   In that time, gods were associated with a specific place or land.  Jacob has gone beyond the boundary of where he believes God lives, but this God will not be limited to one time or place.  This God will be with Jacob wherever he goes.

Mevan Babakar and her parents fled Iraq in the early 1990’s after Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown on the Kurdish population, including a gas attack on a village near their home. For five years, they moved through Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, and eventually to the Netherlands for a year before moving on to London.  Her short life had been a series of moves to new places where she was always the foreigner. At five years old, she lived in a refugee camp in the Netherlands.  That year, a Dutch man who worked in the camp bought her a bicycle.  Mevan is now 29. Looking back on that incident she said, “I remember feeling so special. I remember thinking that this is such a big thing to receive, am I even worthy of this big thing?  This feeling kind of became the basis of my self-worth growing up.”[3]

Mevan was one of many people in that refugee camp, but she was treated as an individual.  Receiving that bike made her feel like a real person, someone who was worthy of having a bicycle, someone not fated to live in the world as it was organized at her birth.

Mevan’s experience of getting a bike and Jacob’s encounter with God are not parallel experiences, except that perhaps each one created a fundamental shift in their self-perception.  Perhaps Jacob thought he was unworthy because of his second-born status.  Maybe he thought he would only ever get the good stuff through deception.   But now he knows that he is worthy enough that God will come to him in the middle of nowhere and promise him what he most fervently wants, a chance to go home again.

It does happen.  He does go home again, but not for another 20 years. The physical separation with his brother becomes permanent, although there is reconciliation.  God changes Jacob’s name to Israel and he becomes identified with that nation. Esau, is also known as Edom which is a reference to his red hair and his descendants are known as Edomites. The Edomites and the Israelites will continue to be neighbors in the land for generations. Sometimes their relationship works for their mutual benefit and sometimes they act as enemies.  By the time of the exile, the time when the book of Genesis was written down, Edom is considered the epitome of evil and betrayal.

I point this out because the past is always working in the present. Jacob is the ancestor of Israel, the spiritual forebearer of Jews and Christians. Esau is the spiritual ancestor of Muslims. The separation between Jacob and Esau has personal and political and religious consequences which continue to this day.  One of the fears we hear now is that Muslim migrants are coming to take over, to change our way of life.  It is one more of the anxieties about difference being used to stoke fear and division.

Here’s the surprising, hopeful thing that this ancient book of Genesis can offer.  By the time the book is written, the people of Israel associate Esau with evil.  They have more history, more events upon which to base their evaluation of Esau’s descendants than just the story of two fighting brothers.  But if we were to read all the chapters about Esau in Genesis, we would see that he is presented sympathetically. At the time of Jacob’s deception, Esau is the one wronged, Jacob the one doing the harm. When they are reconciled, Esau conducts himself nobly, not requiring anything from Jacob in return for what he stole. And perhaps most surprising is that chapter 36 is an entire chapter devoted to preserving the names of Esau’s descendants.  Those in exile might easily have discarded Esau’s genealogy. Those people are the enemy – why should we care about their ancestors?  But perhaps they are retained as a reminder that those people used to be family. 

Walter Brueggemann says this so well: 

“The Bible chooses to follow the Jacob line.  But that makes the Esau story no less legitimate. We are required . . . to recognize the large vision of Genesis.  This book of gracious beginnings belongs to Muslims (children of Esau) as well as to Jews and Christians (children of Jacob.)  . . . [Genesis] does not pretend that the one line of Abraham’s family is all there is. The memory has not been purged or revised to exclude the others. This awareness has important implications for the faith community in the context of the human community.  While God has a particular and precious relation to this chosen community, it is not the Lord’s only commitment. In other ways and on other grounds, these others are also held in [God’s] care and kept in [God’s] promise”[4]

“In other ways and on other grounds, these others are also held in God’s care, kept in God’s promise.”

“We are not fated to the way the world is presently organized.”  We do not have to accept the inevitability of war and violence.  We do not have to bow down to the gods of consumerism and convenience and corporate greed at the expense of God’s good creation.  We do not have to submit to mistreatment of anyone at any arbitrary border just because that is the way the world is presently organized.

Sisters and brothers, let us remember our connection to the large vision of Genesis.  As Barbara Brown Taylor sums it up, “We are the dreamers of the promise, set apart to bless all the families of the earth. It comes when all our conniving has blown up in our faces and our luck has run out." This is "where the dream touches down, reminding us that we sleep at the gate of heaven, where it has pleased God to be with us, . . . where the bright rungs of God's ladder touch down on our own ordinary pieces of the earth."[5]

Thanks be to God.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Atlanta:  John Knox Press, 1982),  p. 243.

[2] Brueggemann, p. 216-17

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/world/europe/refugee-bike-search-mevan.html

 [4] Brueggemann, p. 287

[5] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Lanham, Maryland:  Cowley Publications, 1995), pp. 115-116.

9/8/19 - Blessed to be a Blessing - Genesis 11:30 - 12:20

Blessed to be A Blessing

Genesis 11:30-12:20  

September 8, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

In her picture book, The Blessing Cup, Patricia Polacco tells a wonderful family story.[1] It is the story of Anna, a young Russian girl and her family The story centers on a beautiful china tea set that had been a wedding gift to Anna’s parents.  The set had come with a note from Anna’s great aunt. The note said “This tea set is magic. Anyone who drinks from it has a blessing from God.  They will never know a day of hunger.  Their lives will always have flavor.  They will know love and joy and they will never be poor.”  Every so often,  Anna would ask her mother to tell the story about the tea set and the message in the note. And even though there was never enough money, they believed they were rich because they had each other.  Before their evening meals, Anna’s mother would say “So that our lives would always have flavor.”  In this way, the tea set and its message shaped their lives.

Then one day, the family was forced to flee, because the czar ordered all the Jews to leave.  As they moved across the land, Anna’s father got very sick and the family ended up living for a few months with a kind doctor who helped him get better.  When they were forced to  leave again, the doctor purchased traveling papers and passage on a ship to America and took them to the train himself.  When he returned home, he was astonished to find their tea set in his dining room.  Anna’s mother had left a message with it “Always remember, dear friend. You are the bread that fed us. You are the salt that flavored our lives. You are the love and joy that held us together. Your golden, kind heart makes you rich indeed. You shall never be poor!  I am leaving our precious tea set in your good keeping.  We kept one cup so that we can still have its blessing among the four of us.” 

The one cup survived the ocean-crossing.  On every family occasion and holiday, they drank together from the cup and told its story.  It was passed from generation to generation.  Anna gave it to her daughter Carle.  In 1938, Carle gave the cup to her daughter.  In 1962, Mary gave the blessing cup to her daughter, Patricia.   Patricia kept up the family tradition, sharing tea from the cup and telling the story to her children. And in 2013, she shared the story with the world in her book.

The cup is part of the story.  But as the cup travels from one generation to the next, it also shapes the story.  The story of the tea set received as a wedding gift becomes the story of the tea set given to someone else in gratitude and the memories formed around celebrations where the one remaining cup was shared.  It is always a story about identity, but the version of the story you heard would depend on where you were in history when it was told. 

There are parallels between the way that story worked in Anna’s family and the ways the stories in Genesis shaped and were shaped by the history of the Hebrew people.  The stories in Genesis are stories about the ancestors, about the covenant that God made with Abraham and Sarah,  Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Rachel and Leah.  They are stories about who and what and where.  Who were our ancestors? What did they do?  What are the names of the places where they lived? Those stories got told over and over again, just like Anna’s mother told her the story of the tea set that had been a wedding gift. 

But then something happened to the Hebrew people. They were captured by an enemy and taken away to a foreign country called Babylon.  They were no longer in the land of their ancestors, no longer in the place where they believed God lived.  It made them question their identity – how could they be Israelites if the country of Israel had been destroyed?  How could they keep the covenant outside the Promised Land?  How had their ancestors done it?  They looked for answers in their family stories, and they told those old stories in ways that answered some of their current questions. Scholars believe it was when they were in exile that the stories were written down as we have them now.  So the experience of exile shaped the identity of the people of Judah, perhaps like giving away the tea set shaped Anna’s family identity, and the new shape became  part of the identity going forward.

The stories we will read this month are likely very familiar to many of us.  It may be helpful to hear them with new ears if we consider how they would have been heard by those in captivity in Babylon.

We begin in chapter 11 with what Walter Brueggemann calls “the most incredible announcement in the tradition of Israel.” [2]  The transition from chapter 11 to chapter 12 is the transition from the history of the world to the history of Israel, or theologically, from the history of the curse to the history of the blessing.   If we had been following along, we would have heard a long genealogy naming generations of Abraham’s ancestors, setting his story in its context.  We might expect the genealogy to continue with the names of his descendants, but instead it abruptly reports “the name of Abraham’s wife was Sarai . . . she was barren.”

We all know people who longed to have children, people who would have been wonderful parents, but people who for a variety of reasons were never able to conceive or adopt children.  Despite the advances of medical technology and reforms in child welfare laws, infertility and the inability to adopt are brutally painful experiences of our time.  We have this in common with Abraham and Sarah.  They have no children and it is brutally painful.

“Now Sarai was barren” sums up a situation of hopelessness.   “This family has played out its future and has nowhere else to go. There is no foreseeable future.  There is no human power to invent a future.” [3]

The history of the people of Israel begins like this, in utter despair.  Imagine how those in captivity would have heard this. They are in a parallel place, of metaphorical barrenness. Without offspring in their homeland, they have no future as a nation. After invasions and deportations, they face the possibility of extinction or of absorption into other nations.  A future life seems impossible, but they realize that it once seemed impossible for Abraham and Sarah too, and their interest is sharpened.

The way out of hopelessness, the path through despair is not created by humans, but by God.  God speaks to Abraham. It is the word of God which has the power, the power of life over death, of hope over despair, the power to make a way where there is no way.

The first thing God says is “Go.  Go from your country and your family to an unknown place that I will show you.”  The goal in their culture was to accumulate enough property and livestock that you were secure,  so you didn’t have to move again. Abraham and Sarah have done that.  They are settled, but God tells them to pick up and go, to venture into the unknown . . . and they do.

Abraham is the spiritual ancestor of three world religions.  For Jews, Christians and Muslims, which make up more than half the world’s population, he is the first model of trusting obedience to God.  God says “Go” and Abraham does.

He was working the plan, moving on by stages.  When you are a wanderer, an immigrant, you may or may not have a plan, but even if you do, it often seems that you have little control over your life, chaos threatens all the time. It quickly threatens Abraham and his family in the form of famine. 

So he diverts from the plan, temporarily, to go to Egypt where there is food.  They are foreigners in Egypt, at risk of being mistreated as foreigners often are. So Abraham gets Sarah to lie about their relationship, to say that she is his sister. He does this as self-protection.  Because she is beautiful, men will want her and will kill him if they know he is her husband. He is correct; a powerful man does want her. She is forcibly taken into the Pharoah’s house where she becomes a part of his harem.  Today we would call that trafficking.  Women and children are still the most vulnerable people within groups of migrants.  Among those moving north from Central America through Mexico, it is estimated that as many as 60% of women and girls experience sexual assault during the journey.[4]  And that experience does not necessarily improve when they cross the border.

When this story was repeated in Babylon, I wonder how it was heard? Perhaps there was some anger at Abraham for failing to protect Sarah.  There were undoubtedly women who could identify with Sarah’s helplessness.  One scholar suggests that Abraham’s trickery could have made him a folk hero.  He writes, “People who find – to their own cost – what powerlessness means, are very well aware of the fact that trickery often is the only, thus legitimate, option for survival.  They sustain each other by telling stories about the inventiveness of their heroes and heroines.” [5]     

The first readers of this story may appreciate Abraham’s capacity for deception as a means of survival, but the message of the story is that God does not approve. The message is that God cares for the most vulnerable, and so God intervenes to rescue Sarah.  They leave Egypt and return to Canaan, back on track in obedience to God’s purpose.

This is the first of many journeys that Abraham’s descendants will make, back and forth to Egypt. Egypt is the world power, the place with resources and jobs, the place where foreigners go when disaster strikes, when the food runs out.   It seems that human migration has always happened like this. When events in one place like famine or violence push people out of one place, they move to another place drawn by the opportunity for work or relative safety. In case I’m being too subtle, let me suggest that this push-pull migration happens in many places in the world.  The closest one to our experience is the movement across the border between Mexico and the USA for the last 200 years.  And guess what --  the world power that parallels Biblical Egypt is the USA.

Abraham is model of trusting obedience in three of the world’s religions. He is held up as an example for all who would be faithful in surrendering our will to God’s.  Knowing his story encourages us to respond with similar courage and willingness to go where God directs. But, there is a second response that Abraham’s story elicits from us [6]—which is empathy towards his situation.  First, we say “That’s supposed to be me. I should be obedient like that.” And then, our next realization is  “That could be me.  I could be the foreigner, wandering without a home, vulnerable and at the mercy of strangers.”  And so the second response which this story seems intended to evoke is a concern for foreigners and strangers, those who might be dependent on our kindness for their very survival. 

The patterns of human existence that surface in these stories – patterns of hopelessness and despair, of faith and trust in God’s purpose, of being sent on a mission into unknown territory and of receiving those who find themselves forced to rely on the love offered by strangers – these are the patterns which began in earliest human history which continue into our own time.  May we hear them with the ears of faith, tuned to places of hopelessness, with heightened awareness of the vulnerability of all migrants and particularly the women and children among them. May we recognize our kinship with Abraham and Sarah, and know ourselves blessed to be a blessing to others. Amen.

[1] Patricia Polacco, The Blessing Cup, (New York:  Simon and Schuster for Young Readers, 2013).

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Atlanta:  John Knox Press, 1982),, p.116

[3] Brueggemann, p.116

[4] https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/amr410142010eng.pdf

 [5] Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, “Sarai’s Exile,” in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 229

 [6] Timothy Simpson at https://politicaltheology.com/the-politics-of-immigration-genesis-121-4a/

9/1/19 - Philoxenia - Hebrews 13:1-3, 15-16

Philoxenia

Hebrews13:1-3, 15-16

Emmanuel Baptist Church/FOCUS Joint Worship

September 1, 2019

Rev. Kathy Donley

It was 4:00 in the morning. I was in a hotel and I couldn’t sleep.  Looking out the window, I saw people working in the kitchen of a restaurant across the street.  The streets were dark, but the kitchen was lit up and inside it, people were active.   They were preparing breakfast for the strangers sleeping in those dark buildings.

My family and I got to visit  Europe back in May.   We did a lot of touristy things – museums and cathedrals and monuments.   We quickly learned to find the pamphlet racks.  Every major attraction provided printed material to explain and interpret the history or to point out various details about it.  And we learned to look for the English version, because it would be available in about a dozen languages.  On sightseeing busses and canal boat tours, there were guides who spoke English or we were offered headsets translating the narrated guide into our language.   I went to a lot of places.  Places where street signs were often confusing and the money was different and the landscape unfamiliar. My journeys were made easier by the preparations that others made on my behalf.  Preparations that included developing printed materials in multiple languages and  working in the kitchen overnight so that breakfast would be ready when I needed it.

Many people practiced philoxenia on my behalf, although I doubt they called it that.  That’s the Greek word hidden in our Scripture reading today.  It’s in verse 2, but let’s start with verse 1.  “Let mutual love continue.”  The Greek says “Let philadelphia continue.”  We are familiar with Philadelphia, the city of brotherly or mutual love.  The author of Hebrews instructs an early Christian community to keep loving each other, to keep on caring for other members.  In a world which was often hostile to the faithful, mutual support and love was essential for survival. 

Then verse 2 says in English “do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers”.  The Greek word, philoxenia gets translated as hospitality to strangers, but it literally means “love of strangers.”   Taken together, the two verses say “Keep on loving each other and don’t forget to love strangers too.”   

“Keep loving each other and don’t forget to love strangers too.”  I was the stranger this summer, in foreign countries and several American cities and also in a number of churches.  And I have to say that it was the churches that seemed to need to hear this the most.  No one was ever mean or even rude, but in several cases, it just did not seem that they had prepared to receive strangers. Often the only person who spoke to me was the pastor and sometimes that happened only because I took the initiative.

When you visit a church, you are keenly aware that you are the stranger. It feels as though everyone is watching you, but few people are talking to you. You are self-conscious about whether to sing or not to sing, about taking communion in the style of this community and whether you will break some unspoken rule that all the insiders know.  It takes a lot of courage to set foot in a church community when you are the stranger. 

It takes a lot of courage to set foot in a church community when you are the stranger.  Some of you know this very well, because you have done it in the last few years, when you joined this church or another FOCUS Church, and we are richer for your presence with us. Some of you may have done it just today, and if we don’t recognize you as a newcomer, its because we think you’re a member of one of the other churches.  But I want to acknowledge how hard this is and how important it is for churches to love strangers. Can we offer a round of applause for newcomers who have had the courage to show up among us?

There’s Biblical precedent for being the stranger. Luke’s gospel records the time when Jesus sent seventy people out of their comfort zones into unknown, sometimes unfriendly, communities to seek welcome there, to be an active part of God’s unfolding love.   What Jesus modelled is this:  “They were not called to welcome the stranger; rather they were to be the stranger seeking welcome.” [1]

Did you get that? The early disciples were to be the strangers, the ones relying on the hospitality of others. We have lost that. Instead now we mostly try to be a friendly church, expecting strangers to come to us.  Becoming the stranger ourselves is not necessarily something we embrace, but maybe we should.

I was the stranger, outside my comfort zone, in need of welcome, when I went to Homestead in June. Homestead, Florida is the site of our largest child detention facility. In June, it held about 3000 teenagers who had been separated from their adults when they crossed the border. I went to bear witness.  I went as one seeking to welcome those strangers, but what I experienced was far more than that.

There are two main areas outside the child prison.  One is a gathering space with two awnings as shield from the weather. In this space, people hang out and talk with each other, or attempt to engage the employees, or hold up protest signs. 

The other area, 300 yards down the road, has stepladders where witnesses stand to see over the fence into the yard where the teens come outdoors. They wave and hold up hearts, never protest signs, in their own effort at philoxenia – sending love across the road and over the fence to those traumatized captive strangers.

On my first day, I took my spot on the stepladders.  For about an hour, it was just Mary[2] and me.  When there were no children outdoors, we talked.  Truthfully, Mary mostly talked and I mostly listened.  But then she got to the part about her Baptist relative who was completely opposed to what she was doing and pretty much everything she stands for.  I realized that I had already told her traveling companion that I was a Baptist pastor.  I figured she would hear it anyway and best to hear it from me. Now, you probably don’t know this, but Baptists as a group don’t always have the best reputation. (Before you laugh too hard, I’ll remind you that Christians as a group don’t either.) 

When I said I was a Baptist pastor, I thought she might fall off the stepladder.  She pretty much thought she knew all there was to know about Baptists and little of it was good. Plus the words “Baptist” and “woman pastor” just did not belong together in her universe. But you know what --  she held back her preconceptions and she asked thoughtful, loving questions and allowed herself to accept me for who I was.  By the end, she shook my hand and thanked me for being “real clergy” and “an authentic follower of Jesus.”  I told her I just keep trying to show up.

The second day, I met Becky.  Becky, was a former journalist who recorded mini-interviews with various people on site on her phone.  Late in the day, on camera she asked me how I came to be there and how it related to my work as a pastor.  When she turned off the camera,  she said, "off the record, would you answer another question?"  She said she grew up in Mississippi and she had heard me say earlier that I was a Baptist pastor, and she was having a really hard time believing that could be true.  So, I tried to give her Baptist history and polity in 100 words or less, assuming that I would bore her to death.  But then she  asked if I would say all that again on camera, because otherwise her friends would never believe her. 

Two days in a row. My only two days there so far.  I might have felt like a true Oddball Baptist, a real outsider, but instead I was invited to be myself.  With love and openness, Mary and Becky set aside their own negative experiences with members of my tribe and welcomed me as an individual.

At the end of that second day, one more thing happened. I had met Susan,  but just briefly.  I was heading for car to go home for the night, when Susan asked if she could have a private word with me. We took several steps away from the rest of the group and she hesitantly asked if I would say a prayer for her.  She said that she had only recently become "open to the Holy Spirit" and since she had heard I was a pastor, was it ok for her to ask and would I pray?  So of course I  did, and what a privilege that was!  I do know that when I pray for someone, it’s supposed to be about them, not about me.  But when I thought about this later, I realized that I had been welcomed to the point that my vocational gifts were also sought after by the community.  Loving the stranger also means inviting and accepting what they have to contribute. 

There are a lot of ways to greet people.  We might say “Hello.”  Or “Good Morning” or “How are you?”  In South Africa,  a standard greeting goes like this:

The first person says “I see you.” 

The second person responds, “I am here.” 

“I see you.”  “I am here.”  Isn’t that just lovely?  When we show up as a stranger, isn’t that what we want – to be seen, to be recognized as ourselves.  And to respond “I am here.”  I am fully present, with all my strengths and weaknesses, bringing my whole self into this place. 

“I see you.”  “I am here.” 

There are always strangers arriving at Homestead, some from the next town, some from across the country, and they are always received with love.  The local witnesses are prepared – they provide cold water and sunscreen and a lawn chair and or a stepladder. They patiently answer the same questions they have answered a hundred times. 

On the 123rd day of the witnesses being present at Homestead, something remarkable happened. About 30 teenagers showed up on a mission trip.  Every single stepladder and a few milkcrates were pressed into service, but still not everyone could see over the fence.

So they climbed up onto plastic barricades that stand in front of an unused parking lot.   The teens on the outside of the fence held up hearts and posters and waved to those inside the fence.  They yelled what the witness usually yell.  In English and in Spanish, they said “We see you.  We love you.”  They wanted to do more. 

One of the chaperones brought their van to the stepladder area and blasted the car radio. Soon youth on both sides of the fence were dancing.  Then some got the idea of climbing on top of the van to dance there.  (These were Presbyterian youth.  Go figure.)

And then this happened. [3]

They are yelling, “No estan solos”  “You are not alone.”

Right after this, it started to rain.  The teens on the inside of the fence knew that they would be moved indoors.  So they rushed to get as close to the fence as they could and they yelled and waved back to the teens on the outside. They were ecstatic at the engagement with people their own age.  The skies opened up and it poured, but the youth group stayed at their posts until everyone else went inside. Then youth moved on to their next appointment, but the local witnesses continued to talk about that morning. 

The story was told and retold to every person who arrived for the rest of the day.  Marty, the very first Homestead witness who spends hours there every week, said, “I now know to a certainty that the daily love and encouragement that we shower on our precious children inside the fence has a positive effect. Those kids came all the way from Colorado just to send love to other kids.” Charley is a young woman who left her job to be at Homestead every day.  Charley said, “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever witnessed here.”

The local witnesses had been loving strangers on multiple levels for months.  Some were probably tired of newcomer’s questions.  Some were weary and discouraged, verging on burn-out. But they provided hospitality anyway.  I cannot tell you what a morale boost the presence of those Presbyterian teenagers was for them. It was almost as if they had entertained angels.

Sisters and brothers, let us keep loving each other and don’t forget to love strangers too.  Amen. 

[1] Beth Ann Estock and Paul Nixon, Weird Church: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century, (Cleveland:  The Pilgrim Press, 2016), p. 18

[2] Some names have been changed to maintain anonymity.

[3] (At this point, we played a short video clip. It showed a line of teens and sponsors, standing on the plastic barricades and on the roof of the van, repeating one in line in unison, over and over.)

8/25/19 - Perfectly Suited - Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17

Perfectly Suited 

Jeremiah 1:4-10, Luke 13:10-17

August 25, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff 

During my second year in Divinity School, I had an internship with the Massachusetts chapter of CURE, Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, a national organization that lobbies for prison reform.  The previous year, I interned in a prison chaplaincy program and had learned a lot of disturbing things about sentencing and incarceration in this country. I was passionate about the need to improve prisons so the working with CURE seemed to be logical next step.

My boss was a Dominican nun named Dot.  I had never met a Catholic nun like her—she wore jeans overalls and lived in an apartment in my neighborhood with another Catholic sister. Sister Dot had been a high school art teacher for many years.  Messy and expressive and easily sidetracked, she fulfilled many of my stereotypes about artists. After retiring from teaching, she went to lead Massachusetts CURE, but to help pay the bills, she also worked a “Color Me Beautiful” consultant.  Do any of you remember “Color Me Beautiful”? It was a system for figuring out what color clothing a person should wear that grouped people into four seasonal types, each with its own sets of preferred colors.  

Sister Dot was a true believer in this system.  She told me at my first supervision meeting with her, “If you’d like to stay a bit late one day, I could drape you.”  I wasn’t really sure what this meant—for all I knew, it was something Catholics did—but I eventually found out that this was the process by which she would diagnose which season I was.  As it turned out, draping was unnecessary. One time, I was sitting in supervision running through my work from the previous week when she suddenly interrupted. “Stop right there,” she said.  “I can’t listen to another word. That sweater is a terrible color for you. Give it to me right now. You are a fall for goodness sake, NOT a spring!”

Sister Dot was not the most likely candidate to lead a statewide lobbying group, and she admitted as such.  She had spent a fair amount of time in prisons and had a very open heart to prisoners and their families. She was passionate and compassionate, but she wasn’t particularly organized or strategic. To her great credit, she knew her limitations.  And yet, she believed that her work with CURE was something God had called her to do. She was convinced of this, not because the job was a good fit for her gifts and aptitudes, not because she was the best person for the job, but because the job was important, that it needed to be done, and she was there to do it.

I didn’t learn a great deal about lobbying that year, but I did learn a LOT about my previously unexamined beliefs about call.  You see, I thought that the way you figured out what you should do with your life, the way you discerned your call, was by figuring out what you were good at doing.  I had taken any number of aptitude tests in school, tests that were designed to identify our strengths and then match those strengths to a series of possible jobs. If you were good with numbers, you were supposed to be an accountant.  If you were good with children, you were supposed to work in a daycare. I understood “call” in the same way. God gave each person gifts. Our call was to use those gifts to do God’s work in the world. Pretty straightforward, right? So, when I encountered someone who really believed she was called to do something she wasn’t particularly expert at, it kind of shook me up.  

Sister Dot is hardly the only one with this experience.  If you read the Bible, you'll discover that just about everyone who gets a call from God feels like there must be someone else better suited for the job.  And here’s the thing: they aren’t speaking out of false modesty. They are being honest with God about their limitations and God doesn’t disagree.  

Consider Moses, for example.  Moses tells God that he can’t be the right choice to challenge Pharoah to free the enslaved Israelites because he has a speech impediment.  God responds by promising that he’ll send Aaron along to help him communicate. Notice that God doesn’t fix Moses speech problem. Nor does God argue with Moses saying, “Oh no, your speech really isn’t all that bad.”  God calls Moses even though Moses won’t perform the task perfectly.

Jeremiah argues God out of calling him to be a prophet.  What’s his excuse? He’s too young. God has such a heavy, serious message for him to deliver to the nation of Israel. Shouldn’t God send someone with more innate authority, someone with a bit more gravitas, someone with a long gray beard and big, shaggy eyebrows?  Jeremiah is sure he is exactly the wrong person for the job, but God calls him anyways. And that story is repeated again and again in the Bible. God’s call is not a reward for a high score on an aptitude test. God’s call will ALWAYS mean facing into our inadequacy--and trusting that God can and will use whatever we have to offer. 

Emmanuel Baptist Church, may I be bold and suggest that your call from God follows this highly recognizable pattern?

There's a statement that often appears in your bulletin and is on your website that says you come together not only to celebrate, struggle and serve, but also to tell the Good News of God's love in the Capital District and around the world.  Really?? Isn't that biting off a bit more than you can chew? I'm not sure how many members you officially have but unless I'm mistaken this is a congregation of around 70 or 80 people. On any given summer Sunday, there are about 40 or 50 people in worship.  And this isn't 40 or 50 people who have a lot of time on their hands. Unless I'm missing something, this congregation doesn't seem to be composed of millionaires. And to complicate matters further, you don't all speak the same native language or come from the same culture.  

And then there's this building--it needs work, Emmanuel, so much so that it could easily consume all of your financial and emotional resources.  The sound system is touchy and the organ occasionally conks out in the middle of a hymn. And then there's your denominational affiliation--here in the Northeast, just about everyone assumes that Baptists are fundamentalists.  All summer, I've had to explain to people who've asked me where I'm working that you're "not that kind of Baptist". I don't mean to be rude, but let's face it: you have issues.

 And yet, it is completely clear to me that you are perfectly suited to tell the news of God's love in the Capital District and around the world.  In fact, I can't think of any group of people better suited to that task. You simply cannot pretend to have it all together. So there's room for the rest of us to fit in between the cracks.  You can't do everything and so there's room for me to step in and offer my own talents or ideas. You haven't worked out all your differences and so there's room for me to be different and still be okay.  These aren't just features of being a small urban church--they are ways to tell the Good News of God's love. They are ways to embody the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

Friends, I know that there are a lot of times when it just feels like too much.  I know there are times when you wonder how to keep this place running given limited time, money, energy of the congregation.  I know that struggle not just because I've gotten to know you, but because that is my personal struggle as well. But as your neighbor, as a citizen of the Capital District and the world, let me just say, please keep it going.  We need you in this city, in this world because we desperately need imperfect people and imperfect buildings and imperfect groups to proclaim God's perfect love.

8/18/19 - So Great a Cloud of Witnesses - Hebrews 11:29 - 12:2

So Great a Cloud of Witnesses

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

August 18, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff

This past Thursday, I had the great privilege of witnessing my nephew Pablo become an American citizen.  Dan's sister adopted Pablo from Guatemala, and as the child of an American citizen Pablo had a right to citizenship in this country, but because he is 16 years old, he still had to go to the Federal courthouse in New York City and take the "Oath of Allegiance".  It was a terrific experience to witness the amazing variety of people who stood alongside Pablo during the ceremony. There have been so many negative comments about immigrants in the news this year that it was a great joy to spend an hour in a room where everyone was welcoming to these new Americans.

One of the surprises of the day was the oath itself.  We had been so focused on arriving at the right building at the right time with the right paperwork that none of us had thought to look up the exact wording of the oath until right before Pablo had to stand and repeat it.  His reaction when we read it to him was, "Wow, that's really old-fashioned!" It began with the declaration that "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen."  This language got me Googling--and I discovered that the Oath of Allegiance is based on a British oath from the 15th century. What's more, the wording has been unchanged since 1929.

That got me thinking.  My maternal grandmother, who was born in Cornwall, England in 1907 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1914, didn't become a naturalized citizen until 1942, after the U.S. entered World War II.  That means that she stood in a courtroom and said the same oath that my nephew said. Dan's maternal grandmother came to this country from Hungary in 1926 and became a U.S. citizen sometime in the 1930's, so she also would have said the same oath.  And my Irish great-grandfather probably said just about the same words, as did Dan's Ukranian ancestors. As Pablo stood with that line of people raising their right hands this week, I found myself imagining my grandmother, and his adoptive great-grandmother, standing behind him with their hands raised.  So many millions of others--some of your ancestors, perhaps--stood in that place. Suddenly the room felt full of witnesses, all of them celebrating the willingness of these people to join in with the dreams and struggles of this country.

Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine your ancestors--biological or spiritual--standing beside you?  Like most of you, I imagine, I tend to think of my family as my “roots”. They are what I have grown up out of, and tending to those relationships is akin to watering and mulching the roots of a tree.  A healthy root system keeps me anchored and stable and allows me to reach out and grow into the open sky.

That’s an image that fits pretty well with our modern American culture, doesn’t it?  We have come from somewhere, from someone, certainly, but we are loath to define our future according to our family’s past.  We kind of like the sense that the future is wide open, undefined, a limitless set of possibilities, a frontier waiting to be explored.  We grow, like the tree, into free and open space. This image of our past helps to explain why "go back to where you came from" is such an insult in our culture.  It doesn't just imply that a person should leave this country and go live in the country where they or their ancestors were born. It also suggests that they are excluded from the forward momentum which is such a valued part of our culture.  We should all be, at all times, going forward. Excelsior!

So what happens when we flip the metaphor on its head?  That’s what the writer of Hebrews does at the end of the passage we read this morning.  The writer reminds his readers about the stories of their ancestors, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and Rahab and so on.  These people are spiritual ancestors to all of us, but if the original audience of this letter was primarily Jewish, then they would have been considered family, biological ancestors.  The writer reminds his audience of the faith of these ancestors, and then he declares that all of these people stand as “a great cloud of witnesses” at the end of the race that has been “set before us”.

Instead of imagining our ancestors as our roots, as our origin, this writer says that our ancestors are our destination, where we are headed, at the end of the race, cheering for us as we go, welcoming us as we arrive.  Perhaps some of you can root this metaphor in your own experience. Who here has ever been in a race of some kind—running or swimming or jumping in a burlap sack? If so, you know what it a difference it makes to have people cheering for you at the finish line.  You can be almost out of steam, ready to stop, but when you hear your people cheering for you, you suddenly find the strength to keep going, keep pushing ahead. That's what our lives of faith are like, according to the Letter to the Hebrews. We're moving towards a cloud of witnesses, a collection of faithful people, in time and beyond time.

But nothing is as inspiring as the finish line--which is where Hebrews says Jesus Christ stands, having already finished the race.  When I think of that image, I remember the race for crawling toddlers that we signed our daughter Rosa up for years ago as part of a family fun run.  In that race--which was all of about 100 feet--the parents stood at the finish line and yelling and sang and did little dances just to keep their toddlers moving in the right direction.  Sometimes I imagine Jesus needs to do all of that and more to get me to move!

 Friends, it has become increasingly clear to me that if I am going to avoid getting stuck in some side alley of despair or cynicism or depression, if I am going to stay hopeful and faithful and engaged, I am going to need more strength and wisdom and power and faith than I can generate on my own.  I need help--and I bet you do too. And so I've been holding in mind the diverse collective of people alive and dead who have shown us some light and encourage us as we face the challenges of our lives and times. If I close my eyes I can almost see those people standing alongside me, and Christ himself ahead of me, encouraging me to take one more step and then one more.

Let's imagine that group together this morning!  I invite you to reflect for a few moments and to remember people who have come before you who encouraged you in your life of faith.  Maybe these are people who formed and shaped you as a Christian. Maybe you will recall people in history who have been a model for you of some quality or value that you aspire to in your life.  Maybe those people are Christians--or maybe they embody a faith of a different kind. Call these people to mind and in a minute I'll go around with the microphone and invite you to share a name or two if you'd like..  Then, we'll lift all these names up together with a prayer of thanksgiving.

8/11/19 - From a Distance They Saw - Hebrews 11:1-16

From a Distance They Saw

Hebrews 11:1-16

August 11, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff   

Do you ever feel stuck?  

As soon as I ask that question I hear the voice of the professor of the one Pastoral Counseling class I ever took who insisted that the only four human emotions are mad, sad, glad and scared.  He claimed the other words we use are just attempts to avoid those four feelings. And while I think she had a point, lately I've been aware of a feeling deep inside me that is some uncomfortable combination of mad, sad and scared, a feeling that I can best describe as stuck.  

Do you know that feeling?  Sometimes it arises in response to situations when we know that we're caught in a behavior, in a relationship, in a life situation that you know is not good for us, maybe even one that could kill us sooner or later, and yet we feel unable to do anything to change the situation.  There have been times in my life when I've been very aware of that personal sense of stuckness, but for me right now, the looming sense of stuckness I feel comes from our national situation.  

It used to be that when I heard about a mass shooting I felt shocked and horrified.  I remember where I was twenty years ago when the shooting at Columbine High School took place--I walked into a convenience store that had a television hung high on the wall, behind the cashier.  I was surprised when I walked into the store that everyone was still and silent, staring at the television. What a shock to see those images of high school students being evacuated from their high school by a SWAT team.  And I was shocked again when there was a shooting in a church, and when there was a shooting in an elementary school, and when there was a shooting at a music festival. And then there came the day when I heard about another shooting and I wasn't shocked.  And last weekend there were two mass shootings and I wasn't shocked. I knew exactly how it would go--the vigils, the facebook posts, the "thoughts and prayers" and then the silence.  

I used to feel shocked at stories of immigrant parents arrested at their workplace and deported, leaving their families, their children behind in this country.  I used to feel shocked at the sight of arctic ice melting into massive rivers. But now those things don't shock me. I have a different feeling when I hear about or see those things--I feel a sense of stuckness, like our whole country has stumbled into something deep and sticky and we're caught, unable to get out.  Do you know that feeling?  

What's the faithful response to stuckness?  What do we have to offer here on a Sunday morning to people (like me, like you) who walk in here with the feeling that there is no way out of the mess we've gotten ourselves in?

 So, there's nothing like a job interview to focus the mind.  Last month, I drove out to interview with a church in Massachusetts.  A member of the search team asked me a question about how I address social issues in the context of worship--and as soon as she did the "DANGER!" light started to flash in my mind.  I didn't have a good sense of where this congregation stood politically and I knew that whatever I said would be too much for some people and too little for others. So I started in on a long, rambling, vague response about how we need to speak to the issues of the day but we shouldn't just repeat the same complaints and worries that we hear outside of church.  The committee pressed me on this--what, specifically, does the church have to offer that is different from what we get from the rest of the world? "Hope," I found myself saying, "We need to proclaim every single Sunday that there's hope for the world and for our lives."  

This seemed to be enough of a response for the committee who moved on to the next question at that point, but on my long drive home that night, I kept thinking about my answer.  Can churches really talk hope without minimizing the problems that we're facing as individuals and as a nation? I have no interest in telling people that there's nothing to worry about because God has a plan and I'm certainly not going to suggest that we have to endure the sufferings of this world as a test to prove ourselves deserving of God's sweet reward in the by-and-by.  The world needs Christians to do more than "keep on the sunnyside".  

The passage we read a few minutes ago from Hebrews has been a helpful conversation partner as I've continued this conversation in my head.  At the start of the passage, the writer connects faith and hope saying, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen."  In other words, faith connects the world as it should be or could be, with the world we live in, here and now. Without that connection, hope is just wishful thinking, day dreaming, playing "what-if", closing our eyes and blowing out a candle while saying in our head, "I want to win the lottery!".  But if we have faith in God, which is to say, if we trust that there is power at work in the world that is greater than our own, then that other world that we pray for and yearn for takes on a kind of substance because it is based not just on our wishes but on God's promises.

The writer of Hebrews offers as an illustration the story of Abraham who was called by God to leave his homeland and journey to a new land where God promised his descendants would thrive.  Abraham had no concrete evidence that this was actually going to happen--he was propelled in his journey by his faith in God's promise. That doesn't mean that his journey was direct--in fact, it included all kinds of turns and detours.  And it doesn't mean that Abraham never doubted or got impatient or frustrated. He did. But throughout the story of Abraham there is a kind of tug, a pull in the direction of the Promised Land.  

That pull is for me just about the best description of the power of faith that scripture has to offer.  And what's more, that pull is the opposite of being stuck. The author of Hebrews writes that people with faith, "desire a better country".  I have held onto that image this image this week as I feel despair welling up within me in response to more mass shootings, more children of immigrants separated from their parents, more people dying of drug overdoses.  Despair is the voice that says, well this is where we live now, we'd better figure out how to get used to it. But faith reminds me that this world is not where I'm going to settle. This is not my home. My God has promised me, has promised all of us, a world where lions lie down with lambs and no one is hurt or destroyed.

It is powerful to get together with all of you and to say this, to remember this.  But it is easy to forget it once we walk out these doors. It's not enough to know God's promises--we have to embody them, take them to heart.  Our country has started to establish rituals of despair in response to gun violence. We need to even more powerful rituals of hope. When the August Worship Design team met this past Monday, we talked about this.  Our conversation reminded me of a part of the Jewish Friday night Shabbat service when the whole congregation stands up and faces East and sings a hymn called "Lecha Dodi" to welcome the coming Sabbath. "Come my beloved," they sing, "Come, my friend."  Curtis immediately responded, "We should do something like that!" He pointed out that in our reading from Hebrews it says that people saw God's promise from a long way off and greeted it. I love that image and I have been thinking of how to embody it every morning.  How can I tie that string between God's promises and the world that I find myself in today? Maybe I can name that promise and find a way to stand and greet it every morning, even though it feels a long way off.

Shall we do that together?  What words would you put to the promises of God?  Let's stand and greet those things and welcome them in--to our lives, to our church, to our neighborhood, and to this whole hurting world.

7/28/19 - Ask and You Shall Receive - Luke 11:1-13

Ask and You Shall Receive

Luke 11:1-13

July 28, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff

Whenever I hear the passage we just read, especially the part about “Ask, and it will be given to you,” a song starts running through my head. It goes like this:  “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz….” Let’s listen to Janis sing it! [Mercedes Benz]

I love that song, don’t you?  It’s such an outrageous parody of something I think just about every person has done at some point in his or her life, whether or not they actually believe in God.  When we desperately want something, we find ourselves exclaiming, “Please God! Let me pass this test!” “Let me not get a speeding ticket!” “Let the results come back negative!”  Sometimes we try to sweeten the deal by offering something back to God. “If you let me get away with this just one time, I’ll never do it again!”

The practice of requesting things from God may be universal, but so is the experience of having that request go unanswered, or at least not answered in the affirmative.  One of the things we can safely say for sure about prayer is that there is not a clear relationship between input and output. Prayer is not a mechanical process. It is not like putting a quarter in a gumball machine.  We can't always get what we want (and no, we're not going to sing that song too!).

So when Jesus’ disciples ask him how they should pray, why does he tell them to make requests to God?  This is the opposite advice from a lot of directions we hear nowadays from teachers who have been shaped by meditation or contemplative practice. Those teachers talk about letting go of desire, releasing the thoughts that come into our heads about everything we want so that we can move to a more reflective, a more receptive place in prayer. But not Jesus.  He even puts words to our desires: give us food, forgive the things we’ve done wrong, keep us safe. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Why would he say such a thing?  Isn’t he setting his disciples up for disappointment? Isn’t he setting them up for a lifetime of unanswered prayers?

It’s a simple question to ask, but I think the answer is a bit complex because prayer is both expressive and formative, and Jesus is speaking about prayer on both of those levels.  

The hymn we just sung, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus", talks about the expressive quality of prayer--whatever you are feeling, the song says, you can "take it to the Lord in prayer".  When we do that, when we pray whatever is on our hearts, we build our sense of friendship with God. Think about it: in human relationships, we tend to feel closer to people when we are able to express ourselves freely and honestly.  If we feel that another person isn’t open to hearing what we have to say, we find ourselves shutting down, tuning out around them. The same dynamic is present in our relationship with God. If we want to build a sense of intimacy with God, we need to be able to express ourselves to God freely.  The truth is, all of us yearn for things that we don’t have or that are not the case. We yearn for world peace and we yearn for a new car and if we spend a lot of energy censoring our prayers and only sharing those that seem lofty or admirable, we’re inhibiting our hearts connection with God.

But Jesus isn't just telling his disciples to express themselves.  He’s teaching his disciples to pray in a way that will, over time, form and shape them into the kind of people who could actually follow him, not just travel with him, but actually live in his spirit, live in the way that he lived.  The kind of praying he's encouraging isn't just expressive--it's formative.

One clue that Jesus was forming his disciples' hearts with this prayer comes in the paragraph after the words of the prayer.  In order to hear what Jesus is saying, we have to hear them in the right tone. Although we often imagine Jesus to be extraordinarily gentle and serene, the Gospels show that he used provocation, hyperbole, humor and even a bit of teasing to make his points.  He tells his disciples a story here about a man banging on the door of his neighbor in the middle of the night until the neighbor finally gets up and gives the man what he wants. If we hear Jesus tell this story in a serious, didactic fashion, we are left wondering if we can actually make God do what we want by becoming sufficiently annoying.  

But I don’t think Jesus is trying to describe God with this story—I think he’s using a bit of humor to remind his disciples that persistence has value.  We know this from our interactions with people, Jesus says, so why not bring the same value into our communication with God? Underneath this provocative story, there is a gentle acknowledgment that when we pray, we often feel like we are calling out to into the dark.  We often find it hard to sense God’s presence in our prayers, so we begin to wonder if we are just talking to ourselves. Jesus seems to understand that feeling—and he says we should pray anyways. Just keep praying through the dark periods, through the doubting times, through the dry spells.  Keep saying these words, keep showing up to prayer, because in the end, this isn’t just about expressing what you feel or what you think. Prayer in this sense is like practicing a musical instrument or training a dog or learning to bowl or play golf. Only by doing something over and over and over can you ever learn to do it at all.  When we keep praying, even when we feel like we aren't getting anywhere with it, the practice of praying is itself having an affect on our lives. We're being formed by it. 

Share the desires of your heart, share your deepest yearnings with God over and over, year in and year out, and your prayers will be like the stream that carves its bed into stone.  They form in us a disposition of friendship towards God—a feeling that our deepest needs and desires are not irrelevant to God. God will not sleep through them. God will not keep the door locked as we pound on it.  In fact, God desires good things for us. Like the benevolent parent, God wants to give us bread, not a snake.

Do you believe that?  Do you have a relationship with God that is grounded and rooted in trust of that sort?  Or perhaps you would like your faith to be deeper, your relationship with God to be more trusting?  Then take a cue from Jesus here and examine your prayer practice. Don’t just consider how it feels to you or what it expresses.  Consider how you are training yourself by what you practice. You may tell yourself that you will pray more once you’ve resolved some of your doubts or once you have a better understanding of who God really is and how God really acts.  But by waiting for the mood to strike you, you may actually be training yourself to stay out of conversation with God, out of relationship.  

Jesus’ teaching here points in a different direction. Pray these words, he says, and pray them persistently, and you will actually be acting as if God is who I tell you God is—holy and hopeful and compassionate and connected.  Jesus says, pray as if what I tell you is true, and slowly, slowly, your prayers will form you into a person who can step into the kind of relationship with God, the kind of intimacy, the kind of reconciled friendship with God, which is the great, good gift Jesus came to offer us.

Mercedes Benz (Remix by Heather Kirk-Davidoff)

Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?

To call out to you Lord, all night and all day

So much that I yearn for, so much I could say

Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?

Oh Lord, won’t you give me a mind that can trust?

If it’s up to me, Lord, I know I’ll go bust!

I’ll count on your presence, if I really must

Oh Lord, won’t you give me a mind that can trust?

Oh Lord, won’t you give me a persistent heart?

I tend to give up, Lord, before I can start.

I trust that you’ll hear me if I do my part.

Oh Lord, won’t you give me a persistent heart?

Everybody!

Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?

To call out to you Lord, all night and all day

So much that I yearn for, so much I could say

Oh Lord, won’t you give me the desire to pray?

7/21/19 - One Thing - Luke 10:38-42

One Thing

Luke 10:38-42

July 21, 2019

Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff, Emmanuel Baptist Church

Here's my problem with the story of Martha and Mary:  I can't help but feel like I could have handled the situation much better than Jesus did.  Jesus doesn't take a moment to consider why Martha it is that Martha is distracted by many things at that moment.  Could it be because Jesus has just showed up at her house and she is trying to take care of him and be a good host?  And Jesus didn’t usually travel alone—he may well have shown up at Martha and Mary’s house with his disciples and a number of other people as well.  And it’s not like he was able to phone ahead and let them know he was coming! Wouldn’t you be worried and distracted if thirteen or more people showed up at your house unannounced?  I have a fantasy version of this story where Jesus says, “You know, you’re right Martha. We’ve made a big mess here. How about Mary and I both help you clear these dishes and then we’ll all sit down and talk together.”  That just seems to me to be a better way to manage the work involved with running a household and hosting guests.

This solution to the central problem of the story seems so obvious to me--and the gender and familiar dynamics of the story are so triggering to me--that it is hard for me to hear the spiritual lesson within this story.  If you share some of my struggle, I would suggest reading this story as a kind of parable. As with other parables in the Gospels, Jesus takes the common things in his world and uses them to teach spiritual lessons. Just as he used a lost sheep or a prodigal son to teach his disciples about the world that God intends for them, so too these sisters are illustrating something bigger than just the dynamics in their household.  If this passage is teaching a spiritual lesson, perhaps the push and pull between Martha and Mary is actually a spiritual struggle, one that takes place inside our own hearts.

Let's test that hypothesis by stepping into the story a little bit.  In your programs this morning, I think you'll find a sheet with a numbered list entitled "To Do".  Is this kind of sheet familiar to all of you? Who here makes a to-do list on a regular basis? Let's all make one right now, shall we?   It could be a list of errands you need to run or tasks you need to complete at work this week or calls you need to make or repairs you need to do to your house or all of the above.  Or it could be a list of all the things that you have you feeling worried and distracted, the things that go around in your head when you wake up in the middle of the night. But please note:  on this list, we are going to start with #2. We are going to leave item #1 blank!  

Now that you've started in our your list, let's check in.  How did it make you feel to write this list? Did it relieve stress or create stress for you?  Do you find it distracting to sit in worship with a to-do list like that in front of you (or did you have that list in your head already when you walked in this morning?) Do you want to hurry up and bring this service to a close so that you can get to work on your list?

Now let's consider item #1 on our list.  In the passage we read from Luke, Jesus says to Martha, "You are worried and distracted about many things.  There is need, however, for only one thing." And to illustrate what that one thing is he pointed to Mary. What is the ONE THING that Mary has on her to-do list?  How would you describe her behavior, her attitude, her choices? Now take a look again at the to-do list you just wrote. Find your own words for the ONE THING that Jesus is talking about in this story--and then write it on that top line.  I'll give you a few minutes to do that.  

Would anyone like to share what you wrote down?  How did it feel to put statement in the first spot on your list?  How does it affect the rest of the items on your list?

My bet is that if we take this exercise home, if we actually made out our to-do lists this way, we would discover that paying attention to Jesus like Mary did makes us look at everything else on our to-do list differently.  When we give total priority to the presence and power of God in our lives and in our world, a lot of what we spend our lives doing starts to seem unimportant. It makes a lot of what we worry about irrelevant. It makes a lot of what we devote our time to seem ridiculous.  So, when we have Jesus’ ONE thing as our ONE thing, that isn’t just a way to get all of our priorities in line. It’s makes a lot of our other priorities evaporate.

Once we really hear what Jesus is saying, our busy lives and long to-do lists start to look a little different.  These things aren’t just symptoms of our complex modern lives. Our multiple priorities are a defense mechanism. They are the way we keep Jesus and his call to radical commitment at bay.  Our distractions aren’t an accident of the media or technology—they are protecting us from what we might hear if we really paid attention. I know this habit well. If there’s a difficult conversation I need to have or a complex project I need to really think through, I will often find myself clearing off my desk, answering my email, doing my filing and watering my plants. I tell myself that I’m being productive, that I’m working through my to-do list, but really all I’m doing is avoiding the one thing on my list that will actually ask something of me.

Do you ever find yourself doing that?  What if that isn’t just a bad habit that some of us have?  What if that is actually a pattern that we see replicated within our community, by our country, throughout this world?  What if all the busyness, what if all the distractions that bombards us, are all ways in which we are actively avoiding addressing the things that really matter?

The story we read from Luke this morning describes an incident in the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago in a town thousands of miles away from us.  But this story need not stay so far away. What if the house in the story is inside us, in my heart, in your heart? What if God has come to that house, shown up in your life, become incarnate in your world?  There’s a part of you and a part of me that wants to notice God’s presence, wants to give it our complete attention, wants to learn from it and allow it to shape our lives. There’s a part of us that has been hungering for that kind of spiritual nourishment for years.  But there is another part of us that is so occupied, so busy, and that occupied self won’t even let the hungry self sit for a moment. That occupied self wants to pull everyone in. She wants to engage everyone around with the busyness of the day.

Can we hear the voice of God speaking to us in that moment? 

Heather, Heather, you are worried and distracted by many things.  There is need, however, of only one thing. That One Thing will rearrange the rest of your life.  Are you listening?

7/14/19 - When We're Overwhelmed - Luke 10:25-37

When We're Overwhelmed

Luke 10:25-37

July 14, 2019      

Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff, Emmanuel Baptist Church            

Someone needs to say it:  The Good Samaritan got off easy.  

Think about it:  He encountered only one man on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and it was completely clear that the man needed help.  What's more, he knew what kind of help this man needed and he had the resources on hand to provide that help. What he did was kind and compassionate, but it was also obvious.

Where this parable gets confusing for me is in its application to our lives today.  If I were to extend the parable, here's how I would describe my life as I experience it:  The road I walk on every day is lined with people who have been stripped and robbed and left half-dead.  I'm not just talking about the people I see in Albany who are clearly in need of help. I'm thinking of all the wounded people I encounter as I read the newspaper or listen to the radio.  I'm thinking of people I know personally, family members and friends who are struggling. And if that's not enough to overwhelm me, at least once a week someone sends me a link to a Go Fund Me page.  If I click on the link, which I almost always do, I hear about friends-of-friends who are facing really difficult circumstances--they have medical bills that they can't pay, their children need medication that they can't afford, they've lost everything in a fire.  

And that's just the people I encounter.  Imagine that there are endangered species on the side of the road--polar bears and salamanders and monarch butterflies, each left for dead.  Imagine that entire ecosystems are there, gasping for breath. Imagine the ocean, the atmosphere, the entire planet, wounded and unable to ask for the help it needs.  But by the end of each day, I know I've walked by people, places, and things that need my help many more times than the Priest and the Levite in the parable ever did.

How do we walk on a road like that?  Does this parable, this simple story of a man who stops and helps a single injured stranger, have anything to teach us about how we travel a life journey in which we encounter an overwhelming amount of need?

As I've contemplated that question over the past week, it has occurred to me that while I don't find it easy to connect to the Good Samaritan, I do relate to another person in this story:  the lawyer who asks Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" That is a question that is seeking a limit, a boundary. Jesus has just reminded him of the commandment to love your neighbor and the lawyer wants to define neighbor so that he knows what the limit to that commandment is.  He's asking in order to figure out who is NOT his neighbor because then he's off the hook with having to care for those people.

So, what's Jesus' answer?  Jesus responds with a parable in which the person who stops and helps the person in need is not the person who you would expect.  The priest and the Levite, the people who you would think would know the law the best, walk past. The Samaritan who comes from a group that is understood to be an enemy to the Jewish people is the one who stops and helps.  So, Jesus' answer to the lawyer's desire to limit or define the parameters of care challenges boundaries that everyone listening would take for granted.  Jesus makes it clear that love pushes past boundaries.  It is our desire to clearly define the boundaries of love--not his.  Every time we draw a line to define who we need to care about and who we need to ignore, a line that indicates who matters and who doesn't matter, we'll discover Jesus standing outside our line, standing with the outsiders, asking us as he asked the lawyer, "So who's your neighbor now?"

That's a powerful lesson--but how in the world are we supposed to implement it?  We are limited people with a limited supply of time and money and energy. How are we to handle the unlimited demands we face along our road if Jesus wants to blur every boundary that we might try to establish?  

I've sat with that question all week, and I've come to a somewhat uncomfortable conclusion.  We can join Jesus in challenging the boundary between neighbor and stranger if we also challenge another boundary which is perhaps even more clearly established:  the boundary between ME and NOT ME. We need to stop thinking only of how I can respond to the world and starting thinking about how WE can respond to the world.  No one can bandage all the wounds of the world on their own, but we can do so much more when we act together, as a community.  

Now, let me be clear.  I'm not talking about writing a check to a refugee agency and then crossing refugees off our mental list and never thinking about them again.  I'm not talking about donating cans of soup to the food pantry and then congratulating ourselves for doing our part to fight hunger. There are ways we can support the work of other people that completely cut off our relationship to either those in trouble or those offering assistance--and we need to guard against our tendency to act this way.

But there are also ways in which we can act as a WE that actually deepens our sense of connection and relationship to others.  I know, for example, that a number of us feel that way about the work of FOCUS, the fifty-year-old organization of Albany area churches that runs the Breakfast Program at Westminster and the food pantry here at Emmanuel.  Whether or not we are currently actively volunteering in one of these programs or serving on the FOCUS board, we have a sense of connection to the work of the organization because we support it financially, we house the programs, we know people who volunteer and people who have benefited from the programs.  We have a sense of US-NESS with FOCUS that I know I value a great deal. Perhaps you have a similar connection to another organization. Or perhaps you know someone who does meaningful work that you cannot do yourself, but you offer support and encouragement and maybe even some financial support to that person or their organization.

The next time you encounter a person or a group or a place whose needs feel overwhelming to you, take a lesson from the other experiences you've had of US-NESS.  Ask yourself how you might connect with someone who is at the front lines of this issue? Is there a way to offer support to that person and/or organization that would build a sense of connection between us?  Could I write a letter of encouragement and mail it along with a financial contribution? Could I commit to praying for that person and their work as well as the people they serve? Perhaps even our act of noticing the hurt of the world, the moment I spend grieving over the sadnessess and cruelties of the world somehow make those who suffer less alone in their suffering.

Friends, it is tempting to read this parable as describing two types of people in the world--those who help and those who don't give a damn.  It is probably much more accurate to say that this parable is about each of us, or all of us. We are people who yearn for limits to the demands that love makes.  We are people who stop and help--but we are at least as often people who walk past. And in the end, we are also the one who has been beaten and is lying on the side of the road.  We have been helped, time and again, in big and small ways. We have been the recipients of grace--God helped us in ways that we could never help ourselves. As the old hymn says, "O to grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be!"  When we remember this--when we see ourselves as givers and receivers, as healers and as wounded--our hearts become more expansive and love wins.

Thanks be to God!

6/30/19 - What Lies Beneath - Luke 5:1-11

What Lies Beneath

Luke 5:1-11

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Dr. Kathleen Moore

June 30, 2019

Click here for sermon.

6/23/19 - A Part of It All - Genesis 1:1 - 2:3

A Part of It All

Genesis 1:1 - 2:3

June 23, 2019

Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff, Emmanuel Baptist Church

As of this past Friday, it is officially summer.  Here's a summer memory that floats into my mind this time of year:  It's late afternoon on a hot day and I'm floating on my back in a lake in northern Minnesota where my parents have a cabin.  It's quiet--no boats, no people around me. I'm looking up at the sky which is bright blue with just a few wispy clouds, and I'm thinking about nothing at all.  I'm just in the lake, under the sky, part of it all.  

Do you know that feeling?  That's not a memory of being awed by nature, the way I felt when I first saw the Grand Canyon or Niagara Fall.  It isn't a memory of being surprised by nature, the way I feel when I turn the corner of a road and see a rainbow ahead, or look up and see a bald eagle.  The memory of floating on the lake stays with me for a different reason. I wasn't looking at nature and admiring it. I was in the picture--right there with the sky below and the water beneath.  I felt connected. Or maybe a better way to put it is to say I remembered that I am connected.

Have you ever had an experience like that?  Is there something you've done, something that you regularly do, that enables you to feel deeply connected to the natural world?  I'd love to hear your experience….

Thanks for sharing those stories.  They each illustrate to me an important insight, something we know in our bones, in our guts.  We are part of creation. We may spend most of our days in our heads, more connected to our phones than we are to the world around us, but at the end of the day we are made of the same stuff as the trees and the birds and the moon and the stars.  All day long we are doers and leaders and shapers and performers but at the end of the day, we are creatures. We are God's creation.

Now I do realize that for some people, those are fighting words.  "Creationists", after all, are people who stand in opposition to modern science.  They argue that Genesis 1 should be understood as a literal description of how the world we know came into being, regardless of what archaeology, astronomy or any other scientific study might reveal.  I'm the daughter of a scientist and I'm married to a scientist and so I learned early on that religious people should stay in their lane. We can talk about how to find meaning and purpose, but stay away from making comments about creation.  Better still, don't even use the word, "creation"! We can read Genesis 1 as a fascinating myth but we want to be clear that it doesn't say anything true about US.

But my mind has been changing.  It has become starkly evident that the way we have been living on this planet since the age of industrialization is no longer sustainable.  The oceans, the atmosphere, the fresh water we drink, the ground in which we grow our food are all heavily impacted by human use and abuse. And we're having a hard time facing this challenge head-on.  It seems to me that building a sustainable future for ourselves and our descendents on earth will require us to use every tool we have--scientific and technical tools but also spiritual tools. There is no sitting this one out.  Religious people have to put ourselves back into the conversation.

Which brings us back to Genesis 1.  What if we stopped thinking about the ways in which the story is not true and instead considered the ways in which this story is true, even in light of what we now know through science about the origins of the universe?  What is most true about this story to me is the role that humans play in the story. Human beings do not create the world, Genesis reminds us.  We are part of creation. We are in the same picture, in the same category as the moon and the stars and the plants and the birds.

Maybe this sounds obvious, like seeing ourselves as natural is the most natural thing in the world.  But consider how hard we have worked to see ourselves in a different way. So much of human effort is framed as overcoming nature.  We talk about history this way--we conquered land, we triumphed over the world of germs and disease and wild animals. We harnessed nature with irrigation systems and sails and windmills and domesticated animals and got it to do our will.  

We frame religious history the same way.  When we were cavemen, we worshiped the thunder god and the earth goddess but now we are more enlightened and so we understand that God is an abstract concept above all of the things we can touch and feel.  And when we talk about Jesus, we tell stories about him descending to earth for a short time and then floating away again on a cloud. He is, at the end of the day, a deserter of creation and a forsaker of the human journey.  Our goal as Christians is to join him eventually--somewhere else, away from the toils and snares of the created world.

This trajectory of human history is profoundly and succinctly summarized in one of the great theological works of our time--the 2008 Pixar movie WALL-E.  Do any of you remember that movie? It is set at some point in a post-apocalyptic future when the earth has become so contaminated and so full of trash that is no longer habitable by people.  So the people have all evacuated to a gigantic spaceship where they sit in motorized lounge chairs and drink slurpees all day while back on earth a solitary robot is tasked with cleaning things up.  The movie makes it clear that human life, abstracted from the created world, is silly and meaningless. The story ends on a hopeful note, though, because the robot spots a plant starting to grow in the earth's soil and the spaceship lands and the people return and begin to plant and grow things again.

When my kids and I watched that movie ten years ago, I was so struck by the ending I wanted to stand up in the theater and announce, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm am a Christian pastor and if any of you would like to discuss the spiritual implications of this movie, I'll be in the lobby and would be happy to meet."  I was just floored that a children's movie had not only succinctly diagnosed the problem with the story we've been telling about humanity but also pointed to a way forward. We need to stop floating above the world in our spaceships. We need to land, to step out of our technological bubbles and remember that this world is our home.  The future will be built out of what we plant now.  

Friends, this isn't just the story of WALL-E.  This is the Good News of the Gospel. At the heart of the Christian story is this amazing promise:  God has not given up on the world. God loves the world so much that God showed up--shows up--right here among us.  Jesus Christ didn't take his disciples away from earth. He brought them closer to it. He taught them to come close to the people who were struggling with disease and to touch them.  He taught them to find lessons about who God is and what God wants in the plants and the animals around them. He taught them to consider the lilies of the field and to see themselves in some way as created by the same God.  And when he was crucified, when he experienced the worst of what this world has to offer, he didn't quit in disgust. He didn't leave us to our own devices. He came back and stood on the beach and cooked breakfast for his disciples and challenged them to keep loving and caring for all of God's good creation.  We are part of that story--that is who we are and whose we are. Good creatures of a great God.

Can I get an AMEN?

5/26/19 - Building the Movement: Hooks - Acts 16:9-15

Building the Movement:  Hooks

Acts 16:9-15

May 26, 2019  

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff 

Just to catch up those of you who weren’t here for worship last week, we were talking about the Christian imperative to throw dinner parties.  Did anyone follow the teachings of Jesus and the model of the early church and throw a dinner party this week?  We actually did have the neighbors over for dinner this week (which was lovely) but I’m still mulling over a dinner we hosted a couple of weeks ago.  A couple we met recently came over with their two grade-school aged kids.  I dragged out an old box of puppets and that gave the adults time for some conversation.  We’re all fairly new to Albany so we talked about where we came from and how we ended up here and soon we were deep into conversations about science and research and public policy.  Eventually, the woman turned to me and said, “So how did you decide to become a minister?”

I get this question so often that I really should have a set answer by now—but I don’t.  Part of my problem is that I don’t have a specific, entertaining story to tell about my call to ministry—no visions on the road to Damascus.  I am also aware that without exploring my questioners’ past experience of church and church leaders, I can’t frame my response in a way that would make sense to them.  And then there’s the issue of vulnerability.  I can feel protective of my faith when I interact with people who are definitely not religious—I don’t really want to pin myself to the wall as “Exhibit A.”

So that night I said what I often say to people I don’t know well:  “That’s a story for another time.”  But afterwards, I kicked myself a little.  Why not talk to these nice people about the things that are most central to my life?  They asked—why didn’t I at least try to answer?

Do people ever ask you why you go to church, or why you’re a Christian?  Do those questions trip you up like they trip me?

When Kathy and Judy and I got together to plan worship for May, Kathy asked a question about the scripture we just read that I’ve been chewing on ever since.  “What did Paul say?” Kathy asked.  “What did Paul say that hooked Lydia?”  The story in Acts tells us that Paul went to Macedonia in response to a dream he had.  In Philippi, he met a group of women who were observing the Jewish Sabbath down by the river.  He strikes up a conversation with one of the women, Lydia, and by the end of the conversation Lydia wants to join the movement that Paul is organizing.  But although the text includes all sorts of intriguing details—the location of this conversation by the river, Lydia’s unusual occupation as a dealer of purple cloth, the town where Lydia is from which is not the town where Paul meets her—it doesn’t say a thing about what Paul said.  It just says they had a conversation and Lydia signed up.  She and her household were baptized, presumably right there in the river.

For those of us who have been to employment workshops where we have been told about the importance of having a good “elevator speech”, this is a frustrating omission.  There’s all sorts of research that suggests that people only pay attention to the first 20-30 seconds of what you say to them (which means of course that I have lost most of you at this point!)  So when you are trying to make a lasting impression, you’re supposed to be able to communicate your most important points in 30 seconds or less.  By the time he talks to Lydia, Paul would have had plenty of time to perfect his speech AND it would have been short.  Why couldn’t it have been included in scripture—at least as a footnote!

Have any of you felt the need for an elevator speech about faith?  Years ago, when I was a young minister in Massachusetts, the denomination I was a part of hired a church consultant named Tom Bandy who was going to come to Massachusetts and help the UCC churches get out of what he called “the spiral of decline”.  I found his trainings to be refreshing—he said things out loud that no one else was saying about how churches needed to change or die.  But at the core of his training was his assertion that every member of a church needed to have an answer to this one question:  What is it about my faith in Jesus Christ that the world cannot live without?

This question caused me all sorts of grief.  I was raised in a very mainstream Presbyterian church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  We definitely did not spend out time talking to people we didn’t know about how they needed Jesus.  In fact, we never talked about how we needed Jesus.  We didn’t really even talk about Jesus that much—we talked about what he called his disciples to do and we talked about how we needed to get to work doing those things.

So I had to chew on Tom Bandy’s question for a long time.  I had to have some arguments about how the question didn’t really seem like the right one to me.  Couldn’t we answer a more inclusive question?  Why do we need to tell people that they can’t live without Jesus?  And for that matter, why does it have to be about me and my faith?  It seemed extremely egotistical to suggest that the fate of the world depended on something so small and personal as my faith.

But then, I was out one night having a beer with a seminarian I knew and we decided to stop arguing with the question and to try to answer it—just for the heck of it.  I don’t remember what my friend said, but I do remember that I found myself saying, for the first time ever as far as I can recall, that the story of Jesus’ resurrection was essential to my life.  My friend seemed surprised, so I had to keep going.  I said that story expresses something for me about how the power of God is bigger than the power of death.  And that I had seen first hand how easy it is to tear things down, to criticize and mock them.  And yet this story, this strange and supernatural story of resurrection, seems to speak a different language than everything else I hear.  It doesn’t play by the same rules.  It insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it is possible to be surprised.  And it makes me feel like hope isn’t something that we have to create for ourselves—hope spring out of life like the tulips—or maybe more like dandilions, impossible to contain or control.

I didn’t even really know that I felt this way until I said it, and then I became self-conscious and aware of how weird I probably sounded.  And my friend and I laughed and changed the subject and went home.  No one wanted to be baptized that night.  No one’s life was changed.  Except maybe mine.  Because I had admitted in public, in a place that wasn’t a church, that the story of Jesus Christ was something I couldn’t live without.  It matters to me personally.

Let me be clear—I didn’t develop my late night ramblings about resurrection into a succinct, 20-second elevator speech.  I didn’t polish it up so I could use it on my church’s marketing material.  Maybe I didn’t even say it again (until now).  I realized that the important thing was not really what I said.  Rather, because I had to say something personal about my faith, I had to let my faith be personal.  I couldn’t just talk about religion in general.  I couldn’t just discuss the activities of my church.  I had to let it come close enough to touch me—and then I had to let someone else come close enough to see that too.

Maybe, in the end, that’s why the content of Paul’s speech isn’t included in this passage from Acts.  What he said didn’t really matter.  He made a personal connection with Lydia, I’m certain, because he told a story that he was personally connected to.  He didn’t pitch anything to her, he didn’t sell anything to her, he just opened his heart to her.

So is it any surprise that in response, she opened her home?  Maybe, in the end, that’s why there’s this theme in the Gospels and in the story of the early church about going over to people’s houses and inviting them to come into your house.  Maybe that is just a way of talking about letting people into your heart.  Letting people come close.  And if that’s what all of this is about, then we start, I think, by letting these stories come close.  Letting Jesus come close.  Letting him in, clearing off the table so he has a place to sit, and inviting him to stay for a while.