11/1/20 - The Great Multitude - Revelation 7:9-17

The Great Multitude

Revelation, 7:9-17

November 1, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/L4FkWqYEU5o

This meme has been trending. It is of a woman leaning over with her hands on her knees, squinting far down the road. The caption reads “Me looking outside to see what chapter of Revelation we’re doing today.”  In a year that has brought pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires, murder hornets, durecho storms, political and economic turmoil, this kind of humor seems appropriate.  We might as well look down the road to see which horseman of the apocalypse is headed our way today.   We associate the book of Revelation with bizarre symbols and cataclysmic events, but it is not unlike some of the ways that 2020 is being described. 

John was a follower of Jesus in exile.  Sent to the island of Patmos, living in a cave thirty-seven miles from the mainland, he was isolated from his faith community  -- a community struggling to hold on in the midst of great difficulty.   The vision which we have in the book of Revelation was John’s gift to them, a vision in which he proclaimed that the world will not always be the way it is now, and that the power at the center of the universe is the power of love.

Here in chapter seven, that power belongs to the Jesus the Lamb, the one who has conquered not with violence, but with love.  Jesus the Lamb whose vulnerability and sacrifice was ferocious and powerful and victorious.  This is the enduring power at the center of the universe, the power that has and will change our world. 

John’s vision is of a great multitude who have come through an ordeal.  He describes it for people who are living in the midst of an ordeal and for every generation since then.  The multitude is more than can be counted – people from every tribe and ethnic group, every language and race, before the throne of God.  It is a vision of  what is happening now on a plane we cannot yet perceive and a vision of the future when the redemption of the world is complete.

On All Saints Day, we imagine all those who have lived before us, all of those who died in God’s love and perhaps we can try to imagine the size of the multitude,  extending in every direction as far as we can see, more than we can count.  But also, we imagine smaller groups within that crowd, people we know and love, people who left us more recently, whose lives continue to shape ours. 

My Uncle Eddie died in March.  Since then, his children, my cousins, have been dealing with the house and farm that he and my Aunt Joyce left behind.  They have shared pictures with my generation of treasures they’ve found in the attic, things from their childhood and antiques like quilts and silver and documents left by their parents’ parents.  The farm, where my Aunt and Uncle lived for decades, is now on the market.  A week ago, I saw the realtor’s listing.  It’s a very simple house.   It still has the furniture that I remember.  It is undoubtedly full of all kinds of memories for my cousins who grew up there.  Aunt Joyce and Uncle Eddie lived on the farm next to my grandparents, so for me the pictures conjure up a line of Thanksgivings spent with the Donley clan.  I imagine that when we join that great multitude, we are each going to be looking for those who were part of our holiday celebrations.

There are a lot of fascinating stories about Christians through the ages.  There were people called anchorites who lived in cells, spending their lives in tiny rooms praying and reading Scripture.  There were hermits who went to the desert or lonely mountain cabins to devote themselves to God. One young boy read about a man who lived for 30 years on top of a 60-foot pillar in Syria.  The boy decided that he was called to perform a similar act of heroism, so he went into the kitchen, climbed up on top of the kitchen cabinet and stayed there all morning.  At lunchtime, he came down.  His mother, said, “Now you must not feel bad about this.  You have at least made the attempt, which is more than most people have ever done.  But you must remember that it is almost impossible to be a saint in your own kitchen.” 

It is almost impossible to be a saint in your own kitchen.  Maybe so. But in our own kitchens and neighborhoods, with our family and friends, that is where we are most often called to be saints.  Of course I am using saint the way that is it used in the New Testament – where it means a person who has been made holy by Christ.  It means every Christian not just the ones we remember for particular acts of courage or piety. 

We usually learn more about the power of love from those who are closest to us.  Which is why that the list of names we lifted up today included people we knew personally.  You sent me the names of parents and family members and people from Emmanuel with whom you worshipped and argued and shared jokes and potlucks.  It included Mark’s mentor in chaplaincy and my ethics professor, people who shaped us directly.  Pat asked us to remember May Shane.  Mrs. Shane was Pat’s Sunday School teacher at Calvary Baptist Church in Charleston, West Virginia when Pat was a senior in high school.  Pat says that she was marvelous and influenced her so much at a pivotal time in her life.  You and I don’t know May Shane.  But we know Pat and we know how many other lives she has influenced since she was in high school.  That is part of the mystery we stand before today – that enduring power of love in which we are conformed to the image of Christ is often conveyed to us by those who are saints in their own kitchens or workplaces or churches.

It is personal and close, but also big and beyond our understanding. Ann and Adoniram Judson were also on our list.  They went to Burma 200 years ago.  Our connection to them would seem to be mostly historical.  Except that they shared Christ’s love with the ancestors of the Karen and Kachin people who moved to Albany.  People whom we had the opportunity to welcome and support and to share faith with in this time and space. 

A friend went to vote this week. In line, standing 6 feet apart, at her election site, she said there was good-natured conversation and some humor, a feeling of togetherness.  She was trying to describe how unexpectedly good this experience had been. She said that she had the sense that there were others present, people who had sacrificed greatly to make it possible for her to vote, for everyone to vote.  She said that she felt like they were there, unseen, the great multitude who had gone on before.  And as she was describing it, it surprised both of us when her voice broke and the tears came.

We remember those who shaped us, those who inspired us, those who endured before us, those we knew personally and those whose names we may never know.  When that remembering comes with tears, they are a testament to the mystery and the power of Christ’s enduring love.

After his mother died, the late Henri Nouwen wrote a book called Our Greatest Gift, in which he said this:

“When we can reach beyond our fears to the One who loves us with a love that was there before we were born and will be there after we die; then oppression, persecution, even death will be unable to take our freedom. Once we have come to the deep inner knowledge—a knowledge more of heart than of mind—that we are born out of love and will die into love, that this love is our true Mother and Father, then all forms of evil, illness, and death lose their final power over us.”[1]

Nouwen got a glimpse of that reality described by John of Patmos.  And so have others.  Desmond Tutu was Bishop in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1980’s, during the ordeal of apartheid.  He described his experience at St. Mary’s Cathedral there like this:

“There is no question whatever that our Cathedral is thoroughly prayed in by all kinds of people – black people, white people, big people, little people, representatives of the variegated family of God find a warm welcome . . .I will always have a lump in my throat when I think of the children at St. Mary’s, pointers to what can be if our society would become sane and normal.  Here were children of all races playing, praying, learning and even fighting together, almost uniquely in South Africa.  And as I have knelt in the Dean’s stall at the superb High Mass with incense, bells and everything,  watching a multi-racial crowd file up to the altar rails to receive communion, the one bread and the one cup given by a mixed team of clergy and lay ministers, with a multi-racial choir,– all this in apartheid-mad South Africa – then tears sometimes streamed down my cheeks, tears of joy that it could be that indeed Jesus Christ had broken down the wall of partition and here were the first fruits of the eschatological community right in front of my eyes, enacting the message in several languages on the noticeboard outside that this is a house of prayer for people of all races who are welcome at all times.   St. Mary’s had made me believe the vision of St. John “After this I looked and saw a vast throng, which no one could count, from every nation, of all tribes, peoples and  languages standing in front of the throne . . .” [2]

When we can reach beyond our fears to the One who loves us with a love that was there before we were born and will be there after we die; then oppression, persecution, even death will be unable to take our freedom.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (New York:  HarperCollins, 1994), pp 16-17.

[2] Desmond Tutu, Suffering and Hope, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984) 134-136.

10/25/20 - Buying the Farm - Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Buying the Farm

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

October 25, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached is available here: https://youtu.be/8c3scrjyBFA

The expression “to buy the farm” usually means to die.  Except for, you know,  when it means to actually purchase agricultural land.  It’s commonly believed that the phrase started during World War I. If a soldier died in combat, the death benefit was sufficient for his survivors to purchase a farm.  So, a solider who was died, “bought the farm.”   In that context, the expression means that one person’s hope comes from another person’s sacrifice. 

When Jeremiah bought the farm at Anathoth, he may not have been giving the people the hope they wanted right then.  He was not personally going to benefit from the purchase, and neither were they, but it was a sacrifice that would give hope to the next generation. 

Ten years before today’s reading, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had laid siege to Jerusalem because then King Jehoiakim had refused to pay tribute to him.  King Jehoiakim had been killed and many Judeans had been carted off to Babylon in the first deportation. At that time, Nebuchadnezzar had chosen Zedekiah to be his puppet king in Judah.  Now Zedekiah is trying his hand at rebellion, believing the Egypt will be his ally against Babylon.  Not surprisingly, Nebuchadnezzar is not pleased. The city is under siege. The Babylonian army waits beyond the gates for Jerusalem’s inevitable surrender. 

Jeremiah had repeatedly warned that Zedekiah, the king of Judah, was going to lose this war.  Zedekiah did not want to hear that, so he had Jeremiah arrested and thrown in prison for treason. 

Jeremiah is in prison.  The city is under siege.  That’s when his cousin Hanamel shows up asking Jeremiah to buy the farm. Apparently, he needed some cash.  Perhaps he was trying to get out of the country.  Perhaps he just needed to buy food for his family.  The only thing that he had of any value was his land, only it was no longer worth much. In normal times in Judah, there was a system to keep property in the family.  If you had to sell, you sold to family members and if they could, they were obligated to buy it.  Jeremiah is next in line to buy this property. 

These are anything but normal times, which is what makes this story a bit ridiculous. Jeremiah describes the transaction in detail, as if he wants to make sure it is legally, binding, but he knows it is absurd. Several times, he stops to say that this is God’s idea, not his. 

Because he is in the palace prison, all of this takes place in front of the palace courtiers and prison guards and even the king.  Imagine the spectacle.  Who is the bigger fool – Hanamel for selling when it is clearly a buyer’s market? Or Jeremiah for buying  when the Babylonians are going to claim any land they want for themselves anyway?

While he has their attention, Jeremiah takes the opportunity to shape the narrative. This land deal has nothing to do with buying low and selling high.  It has everything to do with hope.  He proclaims that he is doing it because God promises that the people will come home from exile and houses and fields and vineyards will be sold again in  It is prophetic action which symbolizes that there will be peace again someday, that the economy will recover and people will live on the land and tend their own farms and vineyards. The defeat of Judah, the imminent destruction of Jerusalem will not have the last word.

I notice that being hopeful, acting out hope makes Jeremiah seem ridiculous.  Once again, he seems to be the fool, the object of derision, the butt of other people’s jokes.  I wonder what his scribe Baruch thinks as he transfers the money and records two copies of the deed and seals them up in clay jars to stay safe. I wonder if we ever feel stupid for being hopeful.  I wonder how often we allow that fear of being taken for a fool keep us from enacting hope. 

Whatever Baruch the scribe might privately think, publicly, he does as Jeremiah directs.  He preserves the record of this action, just in the clay jars, but also in the Bible.[1]  That is the safe place where the evidence of the land deal endures, and along with it, Judah’s long-term hope. 

Martin Luther is supposed to have been asked, “If you knew the world would end tomorrow, what would you do?” And his answer was, “I would plant an apple tree.” Now the earliest evidence of this story comes from 1944, 400 years after Martin Luther died, so it almost certainly never happened. But it’s still true: If the world is going to end tomorrow, plant a tree today. That is living in hope.

Jeremiah said that the appropriate response to Babylon was to lay down arms and surrender.  He recognized the harsh reality of the situation.  And yet, he still maintains tangible hope for the future. 

But it is not all pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.  He also articulates hope in the present time. Remember those people who were deported ten years earlier, the ones who are now living in enemy territory in Babylon?  Jeremiah had a word for them as well.  He sent letters to them. 

One of those letters is in chapter 29, where it says “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters. . .  Seek the welfare of the city where you are in exile.” 

Jeremiah tells those who are in exile to settle down, plant gardens and raise families.  He says to make peace with the Babylonians, to live full and productive lives.  That is the constructive hope he imagines for them.  I appreciate that he has both a short-term and a long-term understanding of hope.

The last time I preached on Jeremiah 29 was in 2013.  I’m sure you remember it well.  That was the sermon where I said that Jim and I had moved around a lot.  So much that we had never planted asparagus, because you have to stay in one place long enough for asparagus to establish itself and we never did.  The next Sunday, one of you brought an asparagus plant to us, as a sign of hope for our future together.  Today, there is a happy healthy asparagus section in our garden. 

That is who you are, who we are.  People who enact hope for each other.  Right now, you are checking in on your neighbors, and sending encouraging notes to those who are having a hard time. You are showing up for worship and other gatherings on Zoom, which none of us love, because you have hope for the long term when we will be together again in person.

Jeremiah was shut up in prison while a war raged outside.  Similarly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for and imprisoned by the Nazis for treason as World War II raged on. Three months before his execution, he wrote to his fiancée Maria, “When Jeremiah said, in his people’s hour of direst need, that ‘houses and fields and [vineyards] shall again be bought in this land,’ it was a token of confidence in the future. That requires faith, and may God grant us it daily. I don’t mean the faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth.”[2]

You and I are not in prison.  Our situation is not nearly as dire.  But we might need this reminder, that confidence in the future depends on faith in God.  We don’t live in despair.  We don’t live in denial, but we can live in radical hope, a hope which allows us to see the world differently, a hope which commits us to action now, even while we await the long-term fulfillment of God’s kingdom on earth, the hope of resurrection.

There’s a poem I have quoted to you before, usually around Easter, but it came to me again this week.  Let me remind us of some of the lines from Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

Practice resurrection.[3]

Beloved ones, The world might end tomorrow. 

Plant a tree today.

Buy the farm.

Expect the end of the world and laugh. 

Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.

Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah:  Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmanns, 1998), p. 302

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer and M. von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, 1943–45 (ed. Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and U. Kabitz; London: Harper Collins, 1994), 48-49

[3] Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. 

10/18/20 - Between an Insistent God and a Resistant People - Jeremiah 20:7-18

Between an Insistent God and a Resistant People[1]

October 18, 2020

Jeremiah 20:7-18

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached is available here:  https://youtu.be/cwbLLM3MQB8

While we were on vacation, Jim and I came across John Brown’s farm in North Elba, New York.  You will remember John Brown the abolitionist who led the raid on the armory at Harpers’ Ferry just before the Civil War.  Until we saw the signs for his farm and burial site, I did not know he had a New York connection.  In fact, he only lived a few years on that farm before his activism took him elsewhere.  

I mentioned our visit to his farm to some friends who told me about a book based on his life called Good Lord Bird.  It has just been released as a TV series.  I wanted to show you a clip from it, but everything I could find was too violent for our context. So I just have this screen shot. Until two weeks ago, what I knew about John Brown was what I learned in middle school social studies, that he was an abolitionist who was executed for insurrection at Harper’s Ferry.  It turns out that his story is much more complicated than that.  But based on that memory from school, I guess I pictured him fairly mild-mannered, maybe like I imagined the scholarly Henry David Thoreau who went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes. If you had asked, I might have described John Brown like that, but just a bit tougher.  Then I watched the first episode of Good Lord Bird where Brown is portrayed as wild and slightly mad.

And because Jeremiah lives in my brain right now, I began to wonder what John Brown and Jeremiah might have in common. John Brown’s biographers described him as both “extraordinary” and “a victim of mental delusions.”  Some called him a terrorist, but others said that his struggle against slavery was very personal and religious. Biographer Stephen Oates said that he was “maligned as a demented dreamer, but that he was in fact one of the most perceptive human beings of his generation.” [2]

This is not a sermon about John Brown, but my brief encounter with him helped me realize that I was probably domesticating Jeremiah, toning down some of his outrageous rhetoric, making him gentler and kinder than he probably was.  Jeremiah’s contemporaries probably thought he was delusional, but the Biblical witness is that he perceived what others did not and he was faithful to God no matter what.

In chapter 19, at God’s command, Jeremiah prophesied against Judah, describing the coming destruction in graphic and horrifying terms.  This kind of speech is costly.   Jeremiah is immediately punished, put into stocks near the gate of the temple where he suffers public humiliation and derision. It is costly in a less visible way as well.  We remember that Jeremiah is from a priestly family.  His proclamation is against his spiritual home, challenging the religious authorities whom he believes are leading the people astray. That takes a personal toll. [3]

Then we hear the complaint that Jim read for us. In these verses, Jeremiah reveals his internal turmoil. He says that he is a laughingstock.  From chapter 16, we know that God forbid him to marry and also forbid him to attend other people’s weddings or funerals.  He was socially isolated. [4]  Everyone seemed to hate him. The people of his home village plotted against him. The priests and prophets called for his death. He ministered for 40 years and in all that time, he never saw a sign of repentance or anyone believing him. 

He never wanted to be a prophet in the first place and now he doesn’t flinch from reminding God of that.  The verbs in verse 7 are very strong.  Jeremiah says “you have enticed me and I was enticed. You have overpowered me and you have prevailed.”  What the NRSV translates as enticed can also mean seduce or deceive or make a fool of.   The second verb can mean overpower in a military or physical sense, but it could also mean to outwit.[5]  Jeremiah has been duped into being a prophet, and he is ticked off about it.

But as much as he hates it, he can’t abandon his vocation as a prophet. God’s word is within him. When he tries to keep silent, it burns inside until he can’t stand it and has to speak it.  But when he speaks, it is at great personal cost. “He suffers if he speaks the word of God and he suffers if he doesn’t, and the God who called him from the womb is ultimately responsible for both realities.” [6]

In the first section of this complaint, he wants some reward for his obedience, some vindication.  He asks God to take the appropriate vengeance. Stuck between an insistent God and a resistant people, he sees that he is helpless.  He cannot prevail, but God will prevail, so Jeremiah’s only hope is that God will be his ally.[7]  This section ends with verse 13 which confidently asserts that God has already delivered the needy from the hands of evildoers.

What follows in verses 14-18 is even more disturbing. Here, Jeremiah is even more candid about his despair.  He wishes that he had never been born. “He imagines the day of his birth.  His father waited while the midwives worked. Then the news.  Then rejoicing.  But the waiting, the news, the rejoicing are all rejected.  If only the news [of his birth] had not been brought, . . . then Jeremiah might have been unnoticed, unvalued, uncalled [to prophesy]”[8]

I notice a couple of things here. First, I notice the honesty of scripture.  Walter Brueggemann says, “It does not deny or deceive about how costly the truth of God’s word is. Such deep faith as Jeremiah’s does not lead neatly to well-being, but to recurring crisis. The Bible knows about troubled, bitter faith that is left unresolved.”[9]

Second, I notice a tension between Jeremiah’s public ministry and his private struggles.  Publicly, he was God’s unwavering mouthpiece.  Internally he was in turmoil.  I point that out because often we only see the public witness of others. Because we are not privy to their private struggles, we may think that faith comes easy to them.  Because we are too aware of our own private struggles, we may think that we are less faithful or less gifted or less obligated by God’s call. 

Verses 7-12 are a complaint to God.  Verses 14-18 are an existential cry of despair.  In the middle is verse 13, which praises God in confidence of deliverance as if it has already happened.  It demonstrates the tension in a faith-filled life which cycles between lament and praise and despair in no particular order.

Here is the good news buried in all of that – if we have seasons of complaint and doubt and anger, if we have times when all we can do is sing the song that says we will understand it better by and by, if we have moments when we question the meaning of our existence, we are in good company.  So did the prophets.  So did generations of faithful ones before us.  Being faithful does not mean never asking questions, never being troubled. Most often it seems to mean asking all the questions and getting few answers and continuing to trust anyway.  Sometimes, some us get a glimpse of God along the way, and that makes praise possible. 

I’m remembering another reluctant prophet.  Dr King was a new local church pastor in Montgomery who thought that he might someday become a professor.  He had no desire to become a national civil rights leader. When Rosa Parks was arrested, King had to be talked into the bus boycott.  Once he accepted that responsibility, that calling, the death threats began.  About midnight one night, he was pacing the floor unable to sleep when the phone rang.  A sneering voice on the other end threatened to kill him and to blow up his house unless he left town immediately.  Listen to his own words about what happened next:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCdmxGjUuyA

We only know the story of the kitchen table prayer because eleven years later, Dr. King shared it in a speech.  It reminds me of the way that Jeremiah was God’s mouthpiece in public and suffered inner turmoil in private.  Again, the good news is that if we wrestle with doubts, fears, complaints against God, we find ourselves among the psalmists and prophets who have wrestled before us. 

Let me close with some good words from Frederick Buechner.  He wrote, “If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say .  .  .  you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible.

Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and...great laughter. [10]

May it be so for you and for me.  Amen.

[1] This phrase originated with Terence Fretheim in Jeremiah,  (Macon, Georgia:  Smyth & Helwys  Publishing, 2002), p. 300.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

[3] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah:  Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmanns, 1998), p.181.

[4] Kathleen M. O’Connor Jeremiah:  Pain and Promise, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2011), p. 75

[5] Terence Fretheim, “Caught in the Middle: Jeremiah’s Vocational Crisis” Word and World, Volume 22, Number 4, Fall 2002, Luther Seminary, Saint Paul Minnesota, p. 352-53

[6] Terence Fretheim, “Caught in the Middle: Jeremiah’s Vocational Crisis” p. 355

[7] Brueggemann, p.183.

[8]Brueggemann, p. 185-86.

[9] Brueggemann, p. 186

[10] Frederick Buechner, The Return of Ansel Gibbs (New York:  Knopf, 1958).

10/11/20 - Mercy Not Merit: That's Going to Take a While - Matthew 20:1-16

October 11, 2020

Mercy Not Merit - That’s Going to Take a While

Matthew 20:1-16

Guest Preacher: Rev. Jim Kelsey, Executive Minister of ABC-NYS

Emmanuel Baptist Church

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached is available here: https://youtu.be/EJYIZSSa0P4

10/4/20 - Close to the Heart - Jeremiah 31:7-14, 27-34

Close to the Heart

October 4, 2020

Jeremiah 31:7-14, 27-34

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/_vUJUSuYpoU

We heard Jeremiah 31:7-14 which the lectionary assigns to the Christmas season. This is a passage of exceeding great joy, joy for reasons impossible for the people of Judah to imagine.

Up to this point in the book of Jeremiah, the images of war and violence and destruction have just piled up, one on top of another on top of another. The disaster that was the Babylonian occupation went on for decades.  There had been three waves of deportations to Babylon.  Every time, gifted leaders had been taken away to settle in Babylon, to have children there, to die there.  Those left behind eked out an existence, or they died of hunger, poverty and disease. Judah was facing extinction by genocide. 

And then, come these words which were probably impossible to believe.  God tells them to sing and shout because God is going to bring back those who were dragged off to Babylon, or their descendants anyway.  And no one is going to be left behind because of an underlying health condition – the blind and lame, expectant mothers, even women in active labor.   They will come home and have farms and flocks and dance and be merry.  In them, Judah will not be extinguished.  In them, there is a future and a hope.

This reminds me of a wonderful video clip.  It’s from a show called “That’s Life” on the British Broadcasting Company.  Esther Rantzen is the host who faces a studio audience and tells the story of Nicholas Winton.  When Winton was 28 years old, he organized the Czech kindertransport.  Just before World War II broke out, Winton supervised the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslavakia.  He did the incredible work of exerting diplomatic pressure and recruiting foster parents in Britain for each child and getting them onto eight trains and out to safety.  Many of these children’s biological parents died in Auschwitz.

On the show, Ms. Rantzen explains all this and then she pulls out a scrapbook.  Winton’s wife had found the scrapbook in their attic and given it to the BBC.  It contains the names of all the children and their ages and tiny little black and white photos, copies of the ones used for their ID’s on the train.  The show is being filmed in 1988, 50 years after the kindertransport.  Ms.Rantzen points to one entry in the scrapbook, reading out loud “Vera age 10”. She says “Vera is with us here tonight.”  And then to Vera she says, “I should tell you that you are sitting next to Nicholas Winton.”  We see Vera take Winton’s hand and say hello.  It is such an intense moment.  What can be said to capture this kind of meeting?  “Thank you”  seems so inadequate, but so necessary.  So as we watch, they exchange a few words, but their body language, their clasped hands, the wiping of their eyes, says so much more.  Then the host calls on someone else, a woman who has brought with her the name tag that she wore around her neck and the pass that got her on the train.  She was saved, along with her sister and her cousin. And she also hugs Winton and thanks him. 

You can see where this is going. Ms Rantzen asks whether there is anyone else in the audience who owes their lives to Winton.  More than two dozen people around him stand and applaud. Then she asks if anyone present is the child or the grandchild of one of those Winton saved. And the entire rest of the audience comes to their feet.[1]

When we watch this clip, what wells up in us in joy . . .  and admiration for the courage and love of Nicholas Winton . . . and gratitude that those children were delivered, were spared what so many others were not.  And the thought crosses our minds that he delivered not just 669 children but all of their descendants, that his actions made the last 50 years of their lives possible, and joy wells up again. 

If you are feeling that joy right now, hold on to that for as long as you can, because that is the overwhelming mood of this chapter.  The people of Judah will not perish from the earth.  A remnant will come home from exile, they will be rescued from disaster and they will have children and grandchildren who will enjoy full and happy lives. 

A time is coming, God says, when things will be different.  A day is coming when overwhelming joy will displace the sorrow of the past.

In this time to come, God will put God’s teachings into the inmost parts of humans.  God will inscribe their hearts with love and justice and compassion and all the principles of the covenant. And everyone will know God, from the least to the greatest.  That sets everyone on an equal footing. It overcomes the social contracts and injustice inherent when some know more than others, when some rule over or exploit others with that knowledge.  And in this time to come, God says, “I will forgive and remember their sins no more.”  Divine forgiveness will set people free from the power of guilt, fear and resentment.[2] 

The good news is that sin and despair do not have to go on and on.  The new chance offered to the people of Judah requires repentance, an end to their attempts at self-sufficiency and the pretense of being right.  But they cannot do this all for themselves. God is at work, to forgive, to release them from the bondage of sin. God who has been plucking up and pulling down, destroying and overthrowing, will now be building and planting for the people of Judah.

As Christians, we understand that what God did for Judah, breaking the cycle of sin and death, God also did for the whole world through the incarnation of Jesus the Christ.  Jesus has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

A time is coming, God says, when things will be different.  A day when overwhelming joy will replace the sorrow of the past, when we will trust each other without fear, intimidation or conflict.  A time when covenant will be inscribed on our inmost being.

Sometimes we believe that day will never come.  It sounds great, but naïve and unrealistic.  And then, every once in a great while, we get a glimpse of those who already live in that reality, what some of us might call the Kingdom of God.

One of those people for me is Ray S.  Ray is our denomination’s consultant on refugees and immigrants, but more importantly, Ray is one who loves Jesus, a person with covenant inscribed on his heart. 

Ray was with us just last year.  You have heard his stories.  You know that he meets people all over the world, people who are caught up in systems that seem to want to punish them for simply wanting to live their lives, people who suffer because of racism and xenophobia, who are suffering the consequences of failed immigration policies held over from previous generations. 

Ray meets people in all kinds of circumstances. He establishes relationships and stays in touch with them. I’m talking about 100’s of people that he cares for.

In November 2018, he met a family in Mexico City, one of the thousands of migrants in a caravan who were trying to reach asylum in the USA.  They were deported back to Honduras last year. He stayed in touch.  Last month, they lost their son to gang violence because they couldn’t pay the demanded extortion.

Last year, while in Tijuana, he met a young man from Russia.  Nancy and Richard were there at the time of that meeting.  “Alexander” (not his real name) is a pro-democracy activist who had to flee from government persecution in his homeland. He is seeking asylum and safety in the USA.  He was able to cross the border from Tijuana in January and then spent 7 months in an ICE prison. His case was re-set several times causing great despair.   Ray was in contact, encouraging him, all that time.

Remember that Ray only met Alexander through a what seemed like a chance encounter.  But on the strength of that meeting, Ray agreed to be Alexander’s sponsor.  He is actually also sponsoring others in ICE prisons right now.   

In September, ICE dropped Alexander on the streets of San Diego, after Ray posted the $10,000 bond.  There, kind volunteers met him and put him into a hotel for the night.  They made sure he had everything he needed. The next day, they took him to the airport and accompanied him all the way to his gate for his flight to Philadelphia.  He is now living with Ray and Adalia for the foreseeable future as he pursues his asylum request. In his first week out of detention, they went kayaking.  Alexander, who wants to become a US citizen, was delighted with the appearance of a bald eagle that soared above and perched nearby, a symbol of hope.

Ray and Adalia work for International Ministries, but it is not an expectation of their jobs that they sponsor asylees, that they take strangers into their homes and care for them.  They do it because they inhabit the kingdom of God. They do it because they know the heart of Jesus.

Friends, this is the mystery to which you and I are invited – to know the heart of Jesus, to live into the covenant inscribed on our hearts, to make our own limited and flawed and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.  May it be so for you and for me. Amen.

[1] https://youtu.be/a0UqioyLBD0

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “The Gift of a New Chance” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 353.

9/27/20 - Heartsick - Jeremiah 8:18 - 9:1

Heartsick

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

September 27, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: Verdant Smailović in Sarajevo's partially destroyed National Library in 1992.  Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/_-R6wfBD2RI

Many of you know the name of William Sloan Coffin. He was the pastor for many years at the Riverside Church in New York City, a church we might call a tall steeple church for the scope of its outreach and influence.  In January 1983, William’s son Alex died in a car accident when the car he was driving plunged into a South Boston channel.  Ten days later, Bill Coffin was back in the pulpit at Riverside.

His sermon that day captured so much about how we respond to tragedy.  I’m going to quote from it at some length.  He said, “When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady!” I said. “Was its God’s will that Alex was driving too fast in a driving rain? Did God have his hands on the steering wheel? Was it God’s will that Alex had a few too many beers to be driving that night? Was it God’s will that that stretch of road on Boston Harbor had no signage warning about that dangerous curve?” I expect that woman got out of that kitchen as quickly as she could.

In the sermon, Coffin went on “For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths. And Christ spent an inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy and muteness. Which is not to say that there are no nature-caused deaths—I can think of many right here in this parish in the five years I’ve been here—deaths that are untimely and slow and pain-ridden, which for that reason raise unanswerable questions. . . . But violent deaths, such as the one Alex died—to understand those is a piece of cake. As his younger brother put it simply, standing at the head of the casket at the Boston funeral, ‘You blew it, buddy. You blew it.’”

“The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is ‘It is the will of God.’ Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”[1]

I have read that sermon a number of times over the years. It is a powerful proclamation from a pastor who, was in that moment, a broken-hearted father. I had forgotten the line from Alex’s brother who said, “You blew it, buddy.  You blew it.”  One of the stages of grief is anger.  It was healthy that he could express his anger that his brother was gone, that Alex had made some choices which contributed to his death.

This is very tricky to talk about.  I do not want to suggest that suffering is God’s punishment for sin.  I don’t believe that.  But it is helpful to understand that Alex’s brother’s anger came from a place of love, from heart-sick grief.

That is a good way to understand God’s response in the time of Jeremiah. We heard from the end of chapter 8. The beginning of chapter 8 and previous chapters have described the people’s extreme self-reliance, doing what was right in their own eyes, no matter what it did to others or to their relationship with God.  God has been looking and listening intently for the people to cry out in remorse or repentance, but the silence has been deafening. In fact, the people seem completely impervious to any sense of wrong-doing. Jeremiah scholar Patrick Miller says that elsewhere Scripture calls “hardening of the heart” and it suggests a point of no return in human conduct.  

He writes, “Self-interest and personal gain may control one’s actions for so long that it is not possible for that person to see or act differently, even when circumstances indicate that a change of heart and a different mode of conduct are, in fact, in one’s own self- interest. A society that focuses on the acquisitive instinct, on personal fulfillment, on ambition, and on accumulation .. . create[s] an ethos of just such hardening where patterns or paths of conduct are so set that they cannot be given up, even when they are wrongheaded and disastrous.”[2]

He was describing Judah in the 6th century BCE, but perhaps you hear something familiar about another culture closer to our time.  Hmm.

It is the point of no return. The armies of Babylon are already on the way.  The northernmost areas have already been invaded, and yet the people persist in thinking they know best.  

“Is there no balm in Gilead?”, Jeremiah asks. Gilead was a region known for its healing resources.  Balm was an ointment made from the resin of balsam trees and applied to wounds. Maybe Jeremiah means that even all the balm in Gilead can’t heal this. Or maybe he means that God has offered healing, but the people are so deep in denial that they can’t accept their need for it, and will never get well.

Jeremiah is grieving. God is heartsick.  Verse 18 says “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”  And verse 21 “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.”  It impossible to determine exactly who is speaking – God or Jeremiah. Their profound sadness has become intertwined.

They suffer because of the people. The people have provoked God with their disregard for the covenant. God is not detached and unaffected by their behavior.  On the contrary God is deeply wounded by the broken relationship. God suffers because of the people.  And God also suffers with them.[3] We might imagine God speaking with her head in her hands – the coming destruction brings God no joy.   God is a bit like Alex Coffin’s brother, so heart-broken and so angry  “You blew it.  You blew it.”

The pathos is deep.  The season of lament is long.  The conflict and occupation of Babylon lasts almost 50 years. The hunger, the violence, the suffering, the loss of loved ones, the economic meltdown, and any sense of normalcy – it just never seems to end. There are other passages in Jeremiah which offer hope, but they are a long time in coming and this is not one of them.

Friends, one of my roles is to help us hold on to hope. Please don’t hear me calling us to despair.  But I am realistic enough to see that we are in a season that requires lament. And we will be here for a while. 

To lament, to express your grief and pain and even anger to God, can be an act of faithfulness.  Among other things, it is a way of acknowledging what is wrong with the situation, a way of taking a stand against that wrongness when you feel powerless to change it.  To lament is to hold to your own moral center, to resist accommodating yourself to the situation, to refuse to let it change you.

You may know the story of Vedran Smajlović. It was 1992.  The former Yugoslavia had erupted in ethnic strife and beautiful Sarajevo, once home to the Olympic games, was now a war zone.  Yugoslavia was splintering into various nations, including what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serb nationalists surrounded Sarajevo and laid siege, a siege which would last for nearly 4 years. For Smajlović and the other residents of the city, life was a daily ordeal of trying to find food and water amid the shelling and sniper fire that claimed thousands of civilian lives.

On May 27, people formed a long line at one of the still-functioning bakeries. A mortar shell exploded into the middle of the line, killing 22 people and seriously injuring more than 100 others.  Smajlović lived close to the bakery and was appalled by what he saw as he helped the wounded.

The next day, Smailovic, a talented cellist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic, dressed in his customary black tails and white shirt, took his place with his cello in front of him. He lifted the bow and began to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. He was not in a concert hall.  Instead he sat in the street in a crater where the day before 22 people had died.

He played in spite of the risk.  A few people listened from doorways or places of relative safety. Smajlović went back the next day and the next 22 days, one for each person killed. Sniper fire continued around him and mortars still rained down in the neighborhood, but Smajlović never stopped playing.

Then he went to other sites where bombs and bullets had taken the lives of Sarajevo’s citizens. He played at funerals at no charge, even though the Serbian gunners would target such gatherings. His music was a gift to all hiding in their basements with rubble above their heads, a musical lament for the city. As the reports of his performances on the shattered streets spread, a reporter questioned whether he was crazy to play his cello outside in the midst of a war zone. He countered, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”[4]

God was heartsick over Jerusalem, both in Jeremiah’s time and in Jesus time.  We remember the words of Jesus, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed to gather your children together, and you were not willing.”  The lament is not limited to Jerusalem, of course, but extends to Sarajevo and Aleppo and Baghdad and Fresno and Matamoros and Caracas. God suffers because of humans and alongside humans, even humans such as us.  God’s heart is the first to break.  May that love which breaks God’s heart be for us a source of love and a transmission of strength. Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] . “Eulogy for Alex,” William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1/23/83 https://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_eulogy_print.html

[2] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 650.

[3] Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah,  (Macon, Georgia:  Smyth & Helwys  Publishing, 2002), p. 155-56

[4] https://readthespirit.com/interfaith-peacemakers/cellist-vedran-smajlovic/

9/20/20 - Cracked Cisterns - Jeremiah 2:4-13

Cracked Cisterns

Jeremiah 2:4-13

September 20, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/Pw98mCaLqCU

“They went after worthless things and become worthless themselves.”  That is the harsh assessment God makes about the ancestors of Jeremiah’s people. In large and small ways, persisting across time, the people had abandoned their story.  They forgot who they were – people liberated from slavery in Egypt and led into the freedom of a bountiful land. They turned away from the God who delivered and sustained them. They broke faith with the covenant. Instead of prizing their relationship with God, they traded it for something of far less value, something worthless.

Take a look at this photo. This is a ceramic piece that was featured on Antique Roadshow.  How much do you think it is worth?  Type your appraisal into the chat if you want. There are no wrong answers.  How much would you pay for it if you found it at a garage sale or in an antique store? How much would you sell it for if it were yours?

The Antiques Roadshow appraiser said it was a one-of-a-kind piece, probably late 19th or early 20th century and was worth . . . $30,000-50,000.   The owner had bought it at an estate sale for $300.

Someone watching the show called a friend named Betsy and told Betsy to tune in.  It turns out that Betsy created this ceramic piece.  In the 1970’s.  In high school. 

I guess the appraiser was told that and revised his appraisal down to $3,000-5,000. The same piece has been valued at $300, $3,000 and $30,000. What is it really worth?

The owner paid $300 at an estate sale because he loved it.  When it was worth $30,000, he put it away for safekeeping.  Now that it is worth less, down in the $3,000 range, he brought it back out where he can enjoy it.  In one last twist, the creator, Betsy Soule was surprised that someone was willing to pay $300 in the first place. She said that if she had known he liked it and it had still been in her possession, she would have given it to him.[1]

How do we know what something is worth?  What is worth the investment of our time and energy and money?  Sometimes we realize what something is worth only when it is threatened or lost. I wonder if, in the last few months, you have been surprised at the relative worth of things – perhaps you learned how much skill your barber or stylist actually has when you tried to cut your own hair, or conversely, maybe keeping your hair a certain length or a certain color wasn’t worth so much to you anymore. A sense of connection to each other has driven up the value of phone calls and internet speed.  A sense of connection to the natural environment seems to have given new worth to activities like gardening and hiking.  Most parents have greater appreciation for teachers. Many of us have been overwhelmed with bad news, so stories about love and healing and human triumph have become more precious.

Our church building is important. It provides a safe, sacred space in which we gather for worship and Christian education and to share meals. It represents generations of community. And yet, we have seen that it is not the only container of our gatherings. We have learned the worth of Sunday morning ritual and the strength of our relationships as we have continued to show up in this space week after week since March. 

Jeremiah’s people have lost sight of what matters, what is really worthwhile.  God says “Look everywhere.  From Kedar in the east to Cyprus in the west.  Look for someone who gives up their gods.”  Who does that? No one. Even those with unreliable idols keep them.  God is stunned and heartbroken that Israel cannot sort out what is real and unreal, what is true and false, what is life-giving and death-dealing.[2]

God indicts priests, politicians, and kings.  The priests failed to ask “where is the Lord?’ The handlers of the law, the ones who instructed the priests, did not know God.  And the kings have violated the covenant. Every category of leader has failed.  They have led the people astray.   They quit telling their story, the story that reminds them what God has done for them and who they are.  The books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are full of instructions about how to teach their children, providing the specific words to use in answer to their questions.  But everyone, even the grown-ups, even the religious leaders, had stopped asking the important questions.  And in that void, the people have gone after worthless things.

I often read the Bible in order to find myself in the text. I mean that’s kind of the point of preaching – to explore the Bible in order to understand ourselves.  There is a danger of putting myself into the text too quickly, of stretching the parallels to get the sermon done. There will be much in Jeremiah that won’t fit our time and, in any case,, we need to seek to understand the story on its own merits first.  But, Jeremiah says that the religious leaders of his day failed in their duty because they stopped asking questions. So I’m going to raise some questions, knowing that part of the work of preaching falls on you, the listeners, to consider and evaluate the best truth to be found in my words.

It seems to me that one of the takeaways from this passage is that the stories we tell, the history we remember, matters.  The foundation of our faith is Jesus, who came in alongside us, as one of us, to embody the God who loves all.  Jesus spent years teaching people about the Creator whose will is shalom, the loving God whose deepest desire is the pervasive and widespread peace and well-being of the whole creation.  The things we tell each other and ourselves, what we teach the next generation, the Bible passages we lift up and memorize, the things we say in worship – all of these things matter. 

For the last couple of years, many of us have been using resources produced by Fresh Expressions. Fresh Expressions is a movement that seeks to help established churches cultivate new forms of church.  Over and over again, they report that these new communities, which may be found in dog parks or yoga studios, define themselves as people having conversations about things that matter.  I think of the numbers of younger people who do not trust churches to exercise moral leadership, because the churches they know have failed to speak about things that matter and in fact have been complicit on serious issues like sexism and racism and homophobia. Someone recently emailed me to say “The Bible has at least some emphasis on love, doesn’t it? Then why is it so often used as an instrument of hate?”

I think about the increasing lack of trust in pastors.  A Gallup poll in 2018 found that only 37% of Americans rated clergy very high on trust and ethics, which was the lowest score since 1977. [3]  The things we talk about, the stories we tell, or fail to tell in church, matter.

One of Jeremiah’s grievances was that the story of God and God’s people was unknown and therefore considered irrelevant, and so they went after worthless things.  Jeremiah spent years calling them to listen, to repent, to remember, but “they stepped outside the relationship of grace to look for the best bargain, the most productive power, the richest benefactor,” [4] or the most strategic political alliance.

Chris Backert is the national director of Fresh Expressions in the United States. About our need for repentance, he says “sometimes our ignorance means we won’t put ourselves in a position to listen and learn and then un-learn what we thought we knew – because we don’t even realize we have something to learn in the first place. The key to this process, of course is humility.  Humility that we may have not done the right things in the past.  Humility that we may not have done the right things, even wen we thought we did.  Humility that we participate in systems that need changing.”[5]

At the end of our reading, God says, “my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”  Cisterns were underground chambers that collected and stored rain water to use in the dry seasons.  The two main problems with them were contamination and stagnation leading to a lack of purification.  Given a choice between cistern water and fresh flowing water, no one would choose the cistern.  But God says that’s what the people have done, by abandoning God who is the source of living water.  And not only that, they built leaky cisterns! In times of crisis, they will discover that they have no resources of their own left.  When Babylon surrounds Jerusalem, the army will cut off the water supply in the aqueducts and the people inside the walls will begin to die of thirst.  Water is life, as the indigenous people say.  Thirst is a powerful metaphor for our dependence on God.

I have been talking about our collective thirst, about our need for living water on a macro level.  But I’m aware that many of us feel especially empty and dry, like our life is draining away, as individuals.  And so, before I close, I want to offer these words from Valerie Bridgeman Davis, a professor of preaching and Hebrew Bible at Memphis Theological Seminary. 

Recalling the Exodus and the water God provided in the wilderness she says,

“When the thirst of life parches your soul, desperation sets in. It sets in hard, and you don’t remember who God is or what God has done. That’s just the truth.

Desperation makes you believe you’re going to die; it makes you test the limits of faith, and of ethics. It makes you blame the “Moses” in your life, the one who gave you the word of your deliverance from bondage. It makes the past struggles seem not so bad. Church becomes a wilderness. Relationships become wastelands. It all gets big. It’s never just about you anymore when you’re desperate. It’s everything. It’s everyone.  . . .When your throat, your life, is parched, you want to stone the messengers. You argue and you test. You bargain and you beg. It’s hard to trust who God is or what God has done. That’s just the truth.

And still, God provides: even when you’re moaning and complaining; even when you’re parched and pleading; even when your faith is a faint whisper from the past.

God still provides. Disappointed in our desperation, maybe. Wishing we would remember the miraculous escapes we’ve had. But providing nonetheless. That’s just the truth.

Look up; there’s a rock gushing with refreshment for you somewhere in your life. Your past only sounds good because you can’t see the future. There is a rock gushing somewhere in your life. That’s just the truth. Look for it.” [6]

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] http://artandfaithmatters.blogspot.com/2019/08/jeremiah-24-13-worth-art-lectionary.html

[2] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah:  Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmanns, 1998),  p. 36.

[3] https://religionnews.com/2019/07/16/new-poll-shows-growing-view-that-clergy-are-irrelevant/

[4] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 608

[5] https://freshexpressionsus.org/2020/07/02/the-world-has-already-changed-more-is-coming/

[6] The Africana Worship Book © 2006 by Discipleship Resources. Used by permission.  For information regarding rights and permissions, contact Discipleship Resources,  PO Box 340003, Nashville TN 37203-0003; fax 615-340-1789.

9/13/20 - Hearing God's Call - Jeremiah 1:1-10

Hearing God’s Call

Jeremiah 1:1-10

September 13, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image from Culture and Quarantine; painted by Nicole MacDonald, Hamtramck, Michigan

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/LV-HTpvuMkU

Jeremiah is one of the longest books of the Bible second only to the Psalms.  We also we seem to have more biographical information about the person of Jeremiah than any other prophet.   Jeremiah was active during a great crisis in Israel’s history and a time of major geopolitical upheaval in the ancient Near East.  I chose to spend time with Jeremiah this fall because of the kinds of upheaval we are experiencing nationally and internationally.  I thought it might be fruitful to see how God’s ancient covenant people responded in their time, to apply their learnings to our context.  And then I read Walter Brueggemann.  

Many of you are already familiar with Walter Brueggemann.  Brueggemann who is 87, is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades.

I was struck by what he said in the introduction to one of his commentaries on Jeremiah – yes, he has written more than one.  He wrote this: “The text has the powerful capacity to cause us to rediscern our own situation, to experience our situation in quite new ways, and to participate in our own historical situation with new liberty and fresh passion . . . with faithfulness.”[1]

He goes on “This text does not require ‘interpretation’ or ‘application’ so that it can be brought near our experience and circumstance.  Rather, the text is so powerful and compelling, so passionate and uncompromising in its anguish and hope, that it requires we submit our experience to it and thereby re-center our experience on new terms. The text does not need to be applied to our situation.  Rather our situation needs to be submitted to the text for a fresh discernment. . . In every generation this text subverts all our old readings of reality and forces us to a new dangerous, obedient reading.”[2]

Dr. Brueggemann is describing the power of Scripture, the power which can prevail even though so much separates us from the historical situation of the Biblical people.  Jeremiah’s starting points and ours are very different, in the ways that we understand the world and especially in how we envision God.  We may be tempted to soften his anger, to elevate the words of hope over those of judgment, to water down his message.   I am saying here, at the beginning of this series, that I will try to avoid that.  I will strive, instead to do as Brueggemann suggests, to allow the anguish and the hope of the text to speak for itself.  I will appreciate hearing from you from week to week about how that is going.

Context is always important. It is crucial for our understanding of Jeremiah.  The first chapter of Jeremiah fixes the beginning of his ministry in the reign of King Josiah.  Josiah was king of Judah at the point where Assyria’s power was in decline.  He was king when a lost scroll was found in the Temple.  He used that scroll, which was probably something like the book of Deuteronomy,  to launch political and religious reform.  Because Assyria’s power was waning, Josiah was able to exert his influence not only over Judah, but also over the much of the former northern kingdom of Israel which had been taken over by Assyria 100 years earlier.  He tore down shrines  to Yahweh and to other gods which were scattered across the territory, and centralized worship in Jerusalem.  It was one of the most extensive and far-reaching reforms in Israel’s history, although it didn’t last long. Many may have experienced this as a re-assertion of Israel’s former glory. 

This is the context in which Jeremiah begins his lifetime of prophecy.   Jeremiah’s call follows the pattern of many others.  God states a divine purpose.  Jeremiah objects that he is too young, too inexperienced to speak on behalf of God.  This is what those called by God often do.  Moses said that he was unskilled, Isaiah that he was unworthy, Ezekiel that he wouldn’t know what to say.  The next step in the pattern is usually that God reaffirms the call and often, there is some mechanism of putting the word of God into the future prophet. Isaiah’s lips are touched with a coal from the heavenly altar, Ezekiel is given a scroll to eat, young Samuel receives advice from Eli the priest.  Jeremiah reports that God’s hand touches his mouth to put words in it.  A certain degree of humility, of surprise that God would chose you, seems necessary for the prophetic task.

Jeremiah is reluctant and humble, but also courageous.  He must accept and own his calling if he is to be of service. Our first hymn suggested some of the varied ways we might hear God’s call, in places of need and moments of joy.  We hear God in the words of other people. And, scary thought, sometimes other people hear or fail to hear God in the things we say to them.  We might set expectations or limitations without even realizing it.  My theology professor Molly Marshall used to tell about Jordan Baptist Church which she served when she was a seminary student. She was the first woman pastor that church ever had.  But she was the only pastor the children had ever known.  One day, in the preschool room, they were playing church.  One of the boys wanted to be the preacher, but the girls knew better.  With the confidence of the truth of their own experience they said “You can’t be the preacher. Only girls can be the preacher.”  

Context matters. The pages of the Bible and of history are littered with people who doubted their ability or value or worth.   And often, those doubts were absorbed from other people. 

What is your calling, what is my calling, in our current context? I suggest we have a duty of care, a responsibility to stay well and keep others from catching the virus as much as it depends on us.  And a responsibility to each other, to keep one another’s courage up, to strengthen our mutual resilience. 

Beyond that, we can seek to open ourselves to the call of God however it might come, not allowing ourselves to be limited by previous expectations. Jeremiah thought he was too young.  Some of us may have thought we were too young or too old or too busy or not spiritual enough.  A lot of things have changed in the last 6 months.  Some of us didn’t serve on church committees because we don’t drive any more or don’t drive at night.  Some of us didn’t teach children’s Sunday School because we couldn’t climb the stairs to the classrooms. Some of us couldn’t find the time for anything beyond Sunday morning because we were running here and there every night of the week.  Well, a lot of those things aren’t true any more, which means that we might need to tune in to a new reality and carefully consider the opportunities God is putting in front of us. 

I am grateful for the leadership of our youth and the presence of children in our worship today.  I cannot help but wonder what the effects of this time will be on our young people.  They are coming of age through pandemic and the rising movement for black lives and  important emerging forms of church.  For some, anxiety and animosity seem as suffocating as the smoke over Seattle and Los Angeles.  I think about how Jeremiah continued to confront and comfort, to challenge and console his people through one of the most terrifying periods in their history.  I pray that God will call out the Jeremiah’s in our time and that you and I will be receptive to the claim that God makes on us.

Some of us may experience a call like Jeremiah’s.  It was a costly call. His call was a burden that he could not set down and yet he was obedient to it.[3]  But many of us will not experience a call like that. 

Our task will not be to be like Jeremiah, but to listen to him.  The words God placed in his mouth were about plucking up and pulling down, destroying and overthrowing, and building and planting.  These terms are repeated throughout his ministry. Someone has characterized his message as 2/3 doom and 1/3 hope.  There were vested interests who resisted the plucking and destroying and others who resisted the building and planting. No wonder Jeremiah is nicknamed the weeping prophet.

I wonder how deeply we can listen to Jeremiah in his time.  I wonder whose voices we are listening to right now. Are they politicians?  Journalists? There are so many possibilities. Artists and musicians are working on much smaller stages.   Musicians are offering concerts online from their homes. This is an art installation in a building under construction near Detroit. There are still some beautiful and healing pieces on social media, but also so much acrimony.

Are we listening to the voices of our elders?  To preachers who feel wholly inadequate in empty sanctuaries and Zoom living rooms?  Are we listening to angry but peaceful protestors or will we ignore that even as it escalates to riot, the language of the unheard?  Are we listening to young people? Two well-known examples are Malala Yousafzai who continues to advocate for the rights of girls and women and for education as one path to peace. And Greta Thunberg who raises her voice to plead with the grown-ups of the world to care for the planet while there is still time.  As our first hymn said, “God is calling, can we hear?”

Some of these voices have been speaking for a long time.  Jeremiah delivered his message for forty years before its truth was vindicated. I wonder if we might be getting close to a time when we can hear the truth and the urgency of our own need for repentance, for profound change and return to covenantal faithfulness.

Let me conclude as I began, with the words of Walter Brueggemann.  He warns us not to misread our context, but to believe in God’s faithful power and love. “If we fail to hear,” he writes, “Like the ancient exiles, we may imagine that our situation is occupied only by despair and alienation, that God’s arm is shortened and there is none to comfort.  We shall miss the summons home, the faint beginnings of new laughter in Jerusalem and shall still be submitting to the empire when we could be on our way rejoicing.” [4] 

Beloved ones, may we hear God’s call. And in this urgent season, may we respond with humility and courage and obedience.  May we be on our way home rejoicing.  Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah:  Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmanns, 1998). p. 18

[2] Brueggemann, p. 18.

[3] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001)  p. 563.

[4] Brueggemann, p. 18-19

8/30/20 - Bless to Me: Blessing the World - Matthew 28:16-20

Bless to Me: Blessing the World

Matthew 28:16-20

August 30, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/mhVS5dCY8PY

I had expected to share more about the ancient Celtic people and the distinctives of their spirituality than I have done so far, and today is the last Sunday of this series.  There are many volumes written on this subject, and probably many arguments about how much can be verified about people who lived so long ago.   This might be more my interest than yours, so let me just offer this one piece. It comes from Bridge House, an intentional Christian community  in Southern England which leans on this tradition.

On their website, they say “Celtic Christianity was a faith hammered out at the margins. The Celts lived on the margins of Britain, on the margins of Europe and on the margins of Christendom. They lived close to nature, close to the elements, close to God and close to homelessness, poverty and starvation. They were under constant threat, from invasion by Vikings and other Germanic tribes, from Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Roman imperialism, from all sorts of forces that were bigger and more powerful than they were. Nor was it just their land and their livelihoods that were threatened but their language, their culture, their institutions and their beliefs. It has been said that there are two kinds of people in history - those who do things to others and those who have things done to them. The Celts as a race indisputably belong to the second category. Their story is one of' oppression, suffering and progressive marginalization - the same way that was trodden by Jesus in his time on earth. But it is a story, too, of remarkable hope, imagination, wholeness and simplicity, qualities that we are beginning to discern our own need of in a society that for all its outward sophistication and success is perhaps just as threatened and suffers just as much.” [1]

“Celtic Christianity was a faith hammered out at the margins,” they say.  There are many who believe that Christians have followed Jesus the most faithfully at those places and times in history when we were not encumbered with earthly power, when we occupied more of the margins than the mainstream. That is certainly how we started.

We heard today the very end of Matthew’s gospel.  We might remember that Matthew’s story began with King Herod and his brutal massacre of babies. The story of Jesus is immersed in violence and injustice.  If the Empire had had its way, the story would have ended with Jesus’ crucifixion.  But that is not the ending we heard.  Instead we heard of a commissioning into a future saturated with the presence of God. 

It is an unlikely ending. Tom Long describes the scene as one of near-comic irony.   We have given these instructions the lofty title of “The Great Commission.”  We might expect to see row upon row of thousands of followers waiting for marching orders while a majestic choir belts out the Hallelujah Chorus.  Instead, when Jesus proclaims “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,”  he  “is on an unnamed mountain in backwater Galilee with a congregation of eleven, down from twelve the week before, and even some of them are doubtful and not exactly sure why they have come to worship this day.”[2] 

Let’s remember how they got to this point.  On Easter morning, two women went to the tomb and found it empty, except for an angel with a message for the male disciples. On their way to deliver that message, they encountered the risen Christ who repeated the message “Go tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee.”  Without seeing Jesus for themselves, the Eleven men acted upon the message delivered by the women and made their way to Galilee.  As a result, they come a place where they do see him.  They respond with worship in the midst of their own doubt.  It literally says “they worshipped and they doubted.” 

“They worshipped and they doubted.” Jesus sends the “whole mixed lot of worshippers and doubters out, sends them out without making any distinctions among them. . .”[3]  Matthew calls them the Eleven, without explanation, but we know that Judas is the one who is missing.  We know that this community has suffered loss and betrayal.  In spite of their brokenness, in spite of their doubts, they obeyed the instructions to go to Galilee and they will obey what he says now. 

To the disciples, Jesus says “Go . . .”  “This is the same voice that said to Abraham, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’ . . . Long ago, God promised Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed because of Abraham’s obedience.  Now, that promise is kept through Jesus, son of Abraham, son of God.” [4]

Unlike the other three gospels, Matthew does not mention Jesus’ physical body, his wounds or scars, or any special post-resurrection abilities.  Matthew’s emphasis is on Jesus’ words, on his teaching. [5]

There is a picture emerging that I find comforting and hopeful. The picture is of a small group of people who have experienced profound loss and betrayal and trauma. They are not at full strength.  They don’t get to see the risen Christ at first.  They have to trust enough in someone else’s testimony to get to the place where that happens.  And then, when they do, Jesus doesn’t walk through locked doors or prove that he is the Son of God. They worship and they doubt simultaneously, but they live their lives on his teaching.  I find that hopeful and comforting because it seems a lot closer to my own experiences with Jesus.

What is not nearly so comfortable is the realization that the small, minority, marginalized community is given the global mission of proclaiming obedience to Jesus and his teaching.  It is a mission that will be  carried out in a dangerous and resistant world. [6] 

They are sent to all nations, “which doesn’t mean ‘nation-states’ in the modern sense, but something more like foreigners, tribes of people who are not at all like you.”[7]  These are people with a proud ethnic identity that goes back to Abraham, but Jesus gives them and us a mission to everyone that transcends any allegiance to country or Empire.  I’ll speak plainly – anyone who works allows loyalty to country to be primary, anyone who chants “America First” has not understood the call for allegiance that Jesus demands.

The command is to disciple others. The ways of carrying it out are baptizing and teaching. The disciples have not been entrusted with teaching before. But now they are sent to teach the world what Jesus taught.  Things like “be reconciled to one another. Love your enemies. Welcome children.  Forgive.  Pray, fast and give alms but not in a way that calls attention to yourself. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. And above all, love God and love your neighbor.”

This is also our mission.  We have a lot in common with the Eleven who received it first.  If we feel small and inadequate, so did they.  If we feel ill-equipped to understand the culture and people we are called to love, so did they.  If we feel, hostility and opposition to God’s ways of love and justice, how much more did they. 

We are often overwhelmed by this call. It sometimes seems that so little of Jesus’ teaching has permeated the world in the last 2000 years.  What difference can we really make? 

I was in a Zoom call last week with Jeff Woods, who is the Interim General Secretary of our denomination. Jeff has served American Baptist Churches at the national level for many years.  Several of you have worked with him.  You know his compassion, his strength as a leader.  This Zoom call was a conversation about our responses to needs of this moment, most specifically to the challenges presented by white supremacy and by pandemic.  Jeff reminded us of the ways we have responded to racism in the past. As early as 1865, we expressed a concern for black education and founded Shaw University, Virginia Union and Morehouse College, three historical black colleges.  During World War II, our missionaries were a regular presence within the Japanese internment camps, ministering to the physical and spiritual needs of those confined there. You probably know that Dr. King was an American Baptist minister.  Jeff Woods reminded us that the MMBB, our pension board, sought him out because he was receiving death threats.  He enrolled in the benefit plan a few weeks before his murder, enabling his family to receive life insurance benefits.

We are a small denomination, made up mostly of small churches, but we have made a difference.  We are carrying out this mission.  We are blessing the world with the teachings of Jesus. In the last months, we have sent medical supplies to Hong Kong and China to slow the spread of coronavirus. Our missionaries in Lebanon are ministering to refugees from the war in Syria and now to those who survived the catastrophic explosion.  We have provided food and rent assistance, medical aid and child care across the United States. Many other Christians are making similar efforts. I mention our denomination just as one example of the ways we are connected to a larger world.   We are blessed to be a blessing. 

It seemed like an impossible mission that Jesus gave. It was.  It is.  Unless we attend to Jesus’ final words here, “Remember I am with you always, to the end of the age.”   We depend, we survive, we thrive, we bless others because of the mercy and strength of God.

“Behold I am with you” Jesus says.  It is an amazing statement which we can only appreciate in Greek.  Ego eimi means I AM.  This is the divine name.  The name of the God who appeared to Abraham and to Moses. The one who said I AM who I AM,  I will be who I will be. Jesus has said I am the Way, I am Truth, I am Life.

Meta humon – means with you. 

But here, Meta humon is sandwiched between ego and eimi.  In Jesus’ final proclamation he asserts the divine name, but “with you” placed inside it.  We are within the very life of God.[8]

“Remember I am with you always, to the end.”  We survive, we thrive, we bless others, with the teaching of Jesus, because of the mercy and strength of God within whom we move and live and have our being. Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.bridge-house.org.uk/ethos/celtic-christian-spirituality

[2] Thomas G Long, in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011) p. 47.

[3] Richard Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Matthew:  A Storytellers’ Commentary, Year A  (Cleveland:  The Pilgrim Press, 2007) p. 136

[4] Thomas G. Long, Matthew:  The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), p 326

[5] John Petty at https://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2008/05/lectionary-bl-1.html

[6] Warren Carter,  Matthew and the Margins:  A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, (Maryknoll, NY:  Obis Books, 2000) p. 549

[7] Tom Long, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3  p. 47

[8] John Petty at https://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2008/05/lectionary-bl-1.html

8/23/20 - Bless to Me: Blessing in Adversity - Romans 5:1-5

Bless to Me: Blessing in Adversity

Romans 5:1-5

August 23, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Photo by Dave Hoefler, Madison, WI

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/pMvKCLqca2c

This week a Baptist pastor wrote about the stress of pandemic for church leaders.  He said that he had recently been in a Zoom meeting with 10 pastors from at least three denominations. As they shared their struggles, one pastor disclosed that he had been imagining taking his own life. Before the meeting was over, four of the ten pastors had shared their own thoughts of suicide.[1]  

That is a shocking story. It should probably have come with a trigger warning. Preaching about suffering is very tricky.  Everyone I know is struggling now.  Everyone you know is struggling now, whether you and I are aware of it or not.  Whatever else you hear today, please do not hear me saying that people are suffering because they lack faith or because they just need to pray more. Please don’t hear me saying they any of us should just tough it out.  I am confident that the pastors in that Zoom call have faith.  I am confident that they pray.  Forty percent of an admittedly small sample of pastors are suffering enough right now that they have thoughts of suicide.  That is not to be taken lightly.

Please hear me clearly.  I am not at that level of struggle.  A tricky thing about preaching about suffering is that I know my own burden is light. It sometimes feels disingenuous to attempt to speak in a meaningful way about something beyond my experience. 

I can only dare to try because of the witness of scripture and the testimony of saints gone ahead of me. One of the gifts of the Bible is access to the lives and experiences of God’s people from across generations and cultures.

The words we read from Romans are those of the apostle Paul.  More than once, he was beaten and put in prison because of his public proclamation of faith in Jesus.  He was shipwrecked three times and faced many other dangers.  Paul earned the right to speak about suffering.  He offers the testimony of someone who has been there.

And he writes to people short on hope. Jews and Jewish Christians had been expelled once from Rome.  Under the new emperor Nero, they had been allowed to return, but the empire was an increasingly  hostile and threatening place.  Eventually, it would execute Paul, the very person who was writing to them about suffering and endurance and character and hope. 

It is Paul’s testimony, but it is not based solely on his own suffering.  His testimony, his hope, is based on his faith in Jesus, Jesus the one who suffered and died to bring about reconciliation with God.  Paul says that we have access to grace through Jesus. The hope we have persists through our suffering because its foundation is Jesus’ solidarity, Jesus’ entering into our life in order to share our fear and longing and pain and weakness.

Paul says that this hope does not disappoint.  Which means this hope will not let us down. It will be fulfilled.  But it also means that living in hope is not something to be ashamed of. We can hold our heads up in the midst of pain; we can trust that tomorrow can be different from today, because the Spirit fills us with strong love.[2]

I want to be careful not to take Paul’s testimony and make it into a formula.  If this were a formula, it would be:                                                                   suffering + endurance + character = hope

If it were a formula, then we would tell everyone who is suffering to endure long enough to get character and then, tada, hope would magically appear. But this is not a formula.  This is Paul’s testimony about his experience.  Paul has earned the right to speak about suffering. But you and I do not have the right to take these words from Paul and use them to prod others into accepting their own suffering on Paul’s terms or our terms.  That is rarely helpful or loving.

What we can do is remember the grace to which we have access because of Jesus. What we can do is to interpret our own adversity in light of Paul’s testimony, to see what grace, what blessing, what hope might emerge if we try to apply his ideas about suffering and endurance and character, not as prescriptions for others, but as spiritual practices for ourselves. 

Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Learning to Walk in the Dark is all about embracing the unknown.  In it, she tells the story of James Bremner.  James grew up in a small Scottish village where there were no wild animals or known criminals.  But there were also no streetlights or porchlights. It got really dark. Every night after supper, it was James’ job to take the empty milk bottles down to the bottom of the driveway so that the milkman would get them the next morning.  The driveway was about 100 yards long, but from the house it disappeared into complete blackness almost at once.  James had to walk out into that darkness.  He couldn’t run because he might break the bottles.  But as soon as he set the bottles down, he would turn and race back up to safety.  The darkness never stopped terrifying him.  Every single night it took all the courage he had to do this simple chore.  As an adult he said that the bravery that drew out of him stayed with him for the rest of his life.  He writes, “Courage, which is no more than the management of fear, must be practiced.”[3] 

“Courage is no more than the management of fear.”  That makes it sound easy.  But have you ever tried practicing being afraid so that you could manage it? 

It seems to me that the kind of anxiety we all have right now, the fearfulness which pervades the airways and social media and our relationships and even gets into our dreams and nightmares, gives us the opportunity to practice courage. 

I don’t know about you, but if there is a choice between telling myself “I am afraid” and “I am practicing courage”, I’m going to find “practicing courage” the more helpful internal monologue.  I will endure longer and better if I understand that I am practicing courage.  Perhaps one blessing that may result from the current trouble will be a stronger bravery muscle for next time.

Paul says that endurance (or, as I’m calling it, “practicing courage”) leads to character.  That Greek word comes from a tool used for etching, making a mark or stamping an insignia. If we think about people who have endured suffering, we often see it on their faces or hear it in their voices.  The marks left on their lives may draw us to them. They often become sources of wisdom, perspective and inspiration.[4]

I think of a man in another church whose only child died as a young adult.  She lived and worked in another state.  During an ice storm, she was in a car accident. Her parents received a call informing them that she was in the ICU.  They drove hundreds of miles and arrived to the news that machines were keeping her alive. They made the heart-wrenching decision to disconnect the machines and release her.  That was years before I met them.  In my time, what was obvious was the way that experience had shaped their character. More than once, to someone struggling with a hard decision, especially a health care decision, I heard that father gently say “there are things worse than death.”  To affirm that death is not the worst thing; to trust that it does not have the last word—that is hope that comes from suffering and endurance.

Practicing courage does not mean a stiff upper lip and silence. Again, please don’t hear me suggesting that we should just tough things out or minimize our own distress.  Walter Brueggemann analyzed the testimony found in the Hebrew Bible, particularly of those in exile. He wrote that “Hope emerges among those who publicly articulate and process their grief over suffering.” [5]

“Hope emerges among those who publicly articulate and process their grief.”   Brueggemann indicates that the opposite is also true. Hope does not emerge when people keep silent.  Naming our distress, offering public lament is a way of enacting hope.   We name what is wrong and what we want to be different.  If we allow our circumstances to reduce us to silent suffering, if we cannot even articulate our pain, then we will likely give in to despair.  That is, ironically, what is hopeful about the story I started with. You and I know about those pastors thinking about suicide because they were able to process their grief over suffering. In a paradoxical way, that is hopeful.  Lament is valuable tool that can help us endure with courage.

A final story.  George Matheson was a pastor in the Scottish Highlands in the 1800’s.  He began to lose his sight as a teenager, but he went to university and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree by sitting near the window for the best light and using thick glasses. He was engaged to be married, but his fiancé ended the engagement when she realized he was going blind.  His oldest sister was a strong support for many years, taking dictation, and helping to write sermons.  She even helped to run the parish ministry in his first church.

Shortly after he was ordained, he experienced a crisis of faith.  He said, “I believed nothing, neither God nor immortality.”  He tendered his resignation, but his church would not let him go.  They told him to stay and preach as much about Christ as he could believe in.  So he stayed.  Gradually,  he was able to deal with his doubts and fears.  He wrote, “I have changed.  Without hypocrisy I preach all the old doctrines, but with deeper meaning.” [6]  He served that church for 18 years.

When he was 40, the sister, who had been such a support for him for decades, was to be married. Then, he experienced another crisis.  He said “I was alone . . . It was the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying overnight in Glasgow.  Something happened to me, which was known only to myself and which caused me the most severe mental suffering.” 

We don’t know what caused his suffering.  Some speculate that it was remembered grief over the broken relationship with his former fiancée.  Others suggest that he wondered how he would manage life without his sister.  We don’t know the specifics. What we do know is the blessing that resulted. That night he wrote his most famous hymn “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”.   It reflects his own experience of the steadfast love of God.  And it has blessed generations of Christians in their own times of crisis.

Friends, this is a hard time.  We are all struggling, but we do not despair.  Let us practice courage and name our pain.  Let us lament and paradoxically rejoice in our suffering.  May we find the blessing in adversity or in spite of adversity because of the hope we know in Christ and the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

[1] https://baptistnews.com/article/too-many-pastors-are-falling-on-their-own-swords/?fbclid=IwAR31_kzj0Tr3ebCrOA9FTDPFzXLAfvUh0mtfckmZOubF2MuWubdatR_Wz0U#.X0BP_MhKiUn

[2] N. Thomas Wright, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2002), p. 517.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning To Walk in the Dark, (New York:  HarperCollins, 2014), p. 36-37

[4] Wendy Corbin Reuschling in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp Editors, ,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 79.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Hope Within History, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987)  p. 84

[6] http://www.bullartistry.com.au/pdf_bestill/033BeStill.pdf

8/16/20 - Bless to Me: Seasonal Blessings - Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Psalm 90

Bless to Me: Seasonal Blessings

Ecclesiastes3:1-8; Psalm 90

August 16, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/pySl7iGLlO0

Pastors often lead funerals for people they didn’t know. My first funeral at Emmanuel happened in September a few weeks after I arrived in August. I met Joe M in the hospital one afternoon and he died the next day. Sometimes a person leaves the church, but they don’t join another church, so the family calls me to request a funeral. Sometimes, I have only known the person in a very limited capacity, visiting them in a nursing home or hospital. I conduct the funeral regardless, but it feels different when it is for someone I actually got to know well.

In the last 10 years here, I’ve helped to lead 20 funerals for people at Emmanuel and 4 for members of Gethsemane Karen Church. Almost all of the Emmanuel funerals were for people I had come to know and love. When I asked you to share your memories of the last decade with me this week, several of you named the departed saints whom you still miss. One of the things that I have gained by sticking around for 10 years is a deeper appreciation for the great cloud of witnesses present in every church, the people whose talents and energies and personalities helped to shape the community into what it is today and in fact, whose presence is still actively felt. When you talk about Audrey or Pickett or Roy or Jennie, I know who you mean because my time overlapped with theirs. But you also mention people I never met, like Craig or David B or the Ralphs, and I am aware of their legacy as well.

We live our lives in moments and days, but we also live through seasons. Here in New York, we get four seasons every year. Some places in the world experience two primary seasons – a dry one and a wet one, in my childhood in Ghana, we called it the “rainy season”. I lived in Florida for a year. It was 85 degrees on Christmas Eve that year. I have lived in other places where there were no autumn leaves and no snow. I missed them both.

The writer of Ecclesiastes recognizes 28 common human experiences, some of which, like planting, plucking, gathering and throwing away, might be connected to the seasons of the year. There’s a verse in Genesis 1 that I have always loved. Describing the creation of the sun and moon and stars, God says “Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.” The Biblical writers understood that creation has a rhythm. They did not know that the earth turns on its axis and revolves at a tilt around the sun, but they knew that the patterns of light in the sky were connected to the seasons. They understood that humans are as connected to that daily and seasonal rhythm as the rest of creation.

We began worship with Psalm 90. In the New American Standard translation, verse 12 reads “Teach us to number our days that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” One of my college English teachers had that verse in that translation at the top of her syllabus and I never forgot it. Of course, she was trying to impress us that numbering our days as students involved staying on track with assignments and tests and deadlines. But Ecclesiastes suggests that we number our days in many different ways. If only my college self had read to the end of Ecclesiastes. To that English professor, I might have pointed out chapter 12 where it says “be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.”

Biblical wisdom, it seems, is knowing what time it is, whether it is the right time for weeping or laughter, for dancing or mourning, for studying or something else. It is knowing how to receive of the days and the seasons allotted to us and to use them well.

Our reading ended before verses 11, which says “God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover God has put a sense of past and future into their minds.” We live our lives in seasons. We can remember winters of the past and anticipate that winter will come again, even when it is summer.

But beyond the seasons of the year, are the seasons of each life. The seasons which Ecclesiastes might describe as a time to seek, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time for love and a time for hate.

The seasons of life include the stages of human development – like infancy, adolescence, and middle age. My 87-year-old uncle recently shared a meme that says “I don’t know how to act my age. I’ve never been this old before.” That is true for every one of us at every stage. Life continues to teach us, sometimes even more than we might choose to learn. We are helped to act our age by the rituals that come with marking milestones. The pandemic is disrupting some of that. Graduations, weddings, births, deaths, and retirement – the ways that we usually mark such occasions help us understand what time it is and transition into a new stage. They help us attend to the meaning of the occasion and act our age, or live within the season at hand. But this is not the time for gathering together and we are feeling that loss.

We also know something about how to act our age, how to know what time it is, because we live in community. We observe others. In relationship with older people, we anticipate what life may be like in our future. Younger people teach us how the world has changed and what it means to live in their now.

This week, I heard from several of you who shared memories. I was struck that newer people tended to share memories of their first encounters with Emmanuel. They mentioned what was for the rest of us probably a typical Sunday morning worship or another activity in which we had participated many times. It was a reminder that we each step into an ongoing stream of life at different times, and that our presence together shapes life for each other.

“Teach us to number our days that we may present a wise heart.” Numbering our days involves recognizing what time it is, caring about the moments and seasons of life to live all of them well.

Joan Chittister is a theologian, author and speaker. In her book There Is a Season, she tells this ancient story:

"Where shall I look for enlightenment?" the disciple asked.

"Here," the wise one said.

"When will it happen?" the disciple asked.

"It is happening right now," the wise one answered.

"Then why don't I experience it?"

"Because you don't look."

"What should I look for?"

"Nothing. Just look."

"Look at what?"

"At anything your eyes light on."

"But must I look in a special way?"

"No, the ordinary way will do."

"But don't I always look the ordinary way?"

"No, you don't."

"But why ever not?"

"Because to look, you must be here. And you are mostly somewhere else."

To look, you must be here. And you are mostly somewhere else. Biblical wisdom knows the value of being here and now. Celtic spirituality with its attention to the seasons was a way of saying “be here now.” Be here and enjoy the season of home-grown tomatoes now.

In pandemic, some of us are being forced to be here more and that may help us to look. Because we are looking, some of us are seeing basements that need to be de-cluttered and walls that want a fresh coat of paint. Because we are looking, some of us are seeing beauty in our neighborhoods. Because we are looking, some of us are appreciating the strengths of our family members and maybe becoming more aware of what we don’t like about ourselves.

“Teach us to number our days,” the psalmist says. “God has granted us a sense of past and future,” the teacher writes in Ecclesiastes. Numbering our days together, you and I have accumulated 3650 of them. Ten years of relationship as pastor and congregation. Knowing what time it is, sensing the importance of milestones, I invited you to share some memories of the last decade with me this week. Let me offer these back to all of us.

You remembered:

Hospitality – receiving a warm welcome at Emmanuel, you felt listened to and valued as an individual whose story was worth taking the time to know

Medieval Feasts, 100-mile potlucks and farmer’s markets

Youth in leadership on Maundy Thursday and the living Advent wreath last year

The boiler breaking down . . . the other boiler breaking down . . . . the first boiler breaking down again

Ken Graham’s 90th birthday gift to us of a projector and screen

Standing with Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter and against gun violence after the shootings at the Pulse Nightclub and Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas High School

Making Room for Grace in the form of a new nursery, library, choir room and bathrooms – I never saw so much excitement over bathrooms!

Emmanuel women and men in the Women’s March in Albany 2016

The gift of new matching chairs for the sanctuary

Mission trips to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic

Baptisms with children watching from the very edge of the baptistery

Repeated requests to keep tissues on hand in the sanctuary

Retreats at Silver Bay and the farm in Berne and with Emmanuel Friedens

Trips to peace camp, to the border and Biennial Meetings

The beginning of Godly Play and Family Matters

Discussions about books like Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow

Little man stories – especially the time he moved his grandmother into the sanctuary

Stars over our heads in the sanctuary during Advent 2019 and angel wings another year

The Seven Last Words banners

Hosting the Karen and Kachin congregations, which included visits from missionaries Dan Buttry and Duane Binkley and bi-lingual worship services and after-school tutoring

Michael’s concerts and cabarets

The silent monk’s version of The Hallelujah Chorus

And walking in the pride parade and hearing people on the street say “thank you” to us and feeling SO proud to be a part of an inclusive, loving church

Your memories of course triggered many of my own. To share just one, I remembered my first Easter at Emmanuel. Because I was the new pastor on the block, I was asked to preach at the FOCUS Sunrise service. Early morning is never my best time. Somehow I messed up my alarm and thought it was an hour earlier than it actually was. When I realized the time, I went dashing out the door without my coat. You all know how cold Easter sunrise can be. I made it in time to preach. Then we all went back to Emmanuel for breakfast. But this was the year that the sausage cooking in the kitchen triggered the smoke detectors and we couldn’t get the fire alarm to quit sounding. My first Easter, so of course, the fire department showed up! I thought we were going to have those seizure-inducing lights strobing all through Easter morning worship. It was a close thing, but David M eventually climbed onto a very tall ladder and physically dismantled the smoke detector and people who arrived for worship at 10:00 never knew a thing.

That one memory encapsulates so much of our life together – I’ve shown up breathless more than once, we’ve dealt with unexpected challenges on many Sunday mornings and other days, and talented, creative people among us have helped us make it through with good humor.

The psalmist says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may be wise.” And “satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” and “prosper the work of our hands.”

We live best in the here and now, but God has placed within us a sense of the past and future. Today I give thanks for the past 10 years with you and I anticipate God’s continued blessing on our next chapter. Bless to us, O God, these people and all our relationships and all the seasons we share. Amen.

8/9/20 - Bless to Me: Daily Blessings - Luke 12:23-31

Bless to Me: Daily Blessings

Luke 12:23-31

August 9, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here  https://youtu.be/O2tMwupAzBg

This week I read several sermons on our text. Sermons by other preachers within the past10 or 20 years.  A number of them started by talking about stress and anxiety. One from 2008 cited a study from the American Psychological Association suggesting that stress levels were close to an all-time high, with people worried about job loss, lower incomes, and how they were going to pay their bills and feed their families. You might remember the world-wide financial crisis of 2007-2008.  You might wonder, with me, if people are possibly more stressed and anxious now than we were then.

“Do not worry” Jesus said.  And then, as I saw this week, preachers start sermons by listing all the stuff there is to worry about. It is as if those three words “do not worry” trigger some Baptist Defiance Disorder so that where there was calm, suddenly fear and anxiety erupt. 

But it’s not only preachers. At Emmanuel’s Bible study on Wednesday, the conversation very quickly became about  people who truly do not have enough to eat, and how unhelpful Jesus’ words can seem in the face of harsh realities. Over the last few months, I have heard from many of you and from others.  You are concerned about friends who live with chronic pain, and about people in abusive relationships, especially those living in quarantine with them.  About those stuck in ICE detention and people in places that were disasters before pandemic, like Venezuela and Syria and refugees in the Mediterranean.  You worry about isolated older people and children with special needs and so many more. Some of these concerns were listed on Wednesday and pretty quickly, I was feeling anxious.  This passage was not going to easily support a sermon on daily blessings.  What had I been thinking? 

“Do not worry,” Jesus says and immediately we start to worry.  It’s a variation on what happens when an angel appears. You know that the first things angels say, at least in the Bible, is “do not be afraid.” And then immediately people get afraid. 

Most of us take Jesus seriously.  We try to follow his instructions.  But not worrying is really hard sometimes.  So we look for loopholes.  We tell ourselves, that maybe Jesus meant “don’t worry about yourself, but it’s OK to worry about others.” Or maybe this only applied to his first followers and everyone knows that life was simpler back then. 

But there aren’t really any loopholes.  Luke indicates that Jesus is speaking to his disciples here.  The men and women who left their homes and families, the ones who abandoned their jobs, to follow him.  They are supported mostly by a few wealthy women and sometimes by the hospitality of those who receive them in the towns around Galilee.  Jesus told them not to carry extra provisions, not even a change of tunic. At this point, they are on the road to Jerusalem where Jesus has already said he will be crucified.  It seems like they might have some legitimate concerns about the days ahead, but to them and to us, Jesus says “do not worry.” 

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says that it is a form of idolatry to give your fears and anxieties the power and authority to shape who you are and to drive your behavior.   Most of us have more time and space now in which to worry.  We have fewer places to go and people to meet.  That quietness combined with a worldwide pandemic is making a whole lot of people anxious and worried. It is real and being measured in all kinds of ways.

We can allow that anxiety and worry to shape us, but nothing good will to come from it. We will likely just make ourselves sick.  Or we can choose to use this time and space differently, to deepen awareness and gratitude. 

“Instead of worrying,” Jesus says, “look at the birds and the lilies.”   These are commandments, as strongly worded as his directions to love your enemy and not to judge. We recognize that those are hard things, but we still try to live them out. If we don’t already do so, perhaps we should try not worrying with the same degree of intention. 

Presbyterian minister and scholar Tom Long writes “The verbs look at the birds of the air and consider the lilies of the field, are, in Greek, very strong verbs.  They mean to suggest more than a casual glance; they invite us to study and to scrutinize the carefree world of nature.  Jesus commands us to look, really look at a world where God provides freely and lavishly, a world where anxiety plays no part, where worry is not a reality.  Jesus invites us to allow our imaginations to enter such a world, to compare this world with the world in which we must live out our lives.”[1]

We are not asked to stop worrying in order to become careless and happy-go-lucky, but in order to strive for the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is a new reality breaking in, a reality in which God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.  Justo Gonzalez says that since it is God’s will that even the ravens are fed and the lilies clothed, to strive for the kingdom, is among other things, to make certain that all are fed and all are clothed.[2]

“Consider the ravens. Look at the lilies”  Jesus says.  This is spiritual practice. It offers us a way out of worrying, path to reconnecting with God.  Biblical lilies are part of the genus allium.  They come up from bulbs in the spring.  Each tiny flower is symmetrical and comes together to form a globe.  There are over 1200 kinds of allium.  Some of them form globes which are a foot across, in reds and whites and purples and blues.  They are beautiful.  They inspire wonder.  What kind of God takes the time to create such beauty in such variety across the seasons? 

The ancient Celtic people offered loving attention to daily life, to the blessings of simple things found each moment.  It is a spiritual practice in which gratitude and wonder can replace worry.

As the poet Wendell Berry writes,

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.[3]

We are not all poets.  But we can all choose wonder over worry.  We can choose prayer.  In her older book, Traveling Mercies, Annie Lamott wrote about a woman who said for her morning prayer “whatever”  and then in the evening she said, “oh well.”  

Annie said the two best prayers she knew were “Help me, help me, help me” and “thank you, thank you, thank you.”  Later she added the wow prayer, saying “Wow is the praise prayer. The prayer where we're finally speechless — which in my case is saying something. . . .  When I don't know what else to do I go outside, and I see the sky and the trees and a bird flies by, and my mouth drops open again with wonder at the just sheer beauty of creation. And I say, 'Wow.' ... You say it when you see the fjords for the first time at dawn, or you say it when you first see the new baby, and you say, 'Wow. This is great.' Wow is the prayer of wonder."[4]

Some of you are great at praying.  You don’t need any instruction.  But for those of us who might need help, especially right now when we are tempted to idolize worry, I suggest that we might use these three simple prayers – help, thanks, wow – as often as we can through the day. 

I am always helped to see blessings by the work of artists, poets and musicians.  So I share with you, the work of Carrie Newcomer. Perhaps this musical video can offer us a consideration of the lilies and the birds and so many other examples of the holy in the ordinary.

https://youtu.be/pxzO8DyY9e8

Augustine said “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God.”  If we have restless worry about tomorrow, it might be a sign that we have not yet learned how to rest in God’s providence and care [5], just as we don’t always fully love our enemies -- to which we can say, several times a day, “help me, help me, help me.”  It is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom -- to which we can say “thank you, thank you, thank you, and wow”.  Amen. 

[1] Tom Long,  Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) pp.75-76.

[2] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 161.

[3] https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/

[4] https://www.npr.org/2012/11/19/164814269/anne-lamott-distills-prayer-into-help-thanks-wow

[5] Tom Long,  Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) p. 76

7/26/20 - Tag Sale - Matthew 13:31-35, 44-52

July 26, 2020

Tag Sale

Matthew 13:31-35; 44-52

Guest Preacher: Rev. Lynn Carman Bodden

Emmanuel Baptist Church

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached is available here: https://youtu.be/NWeIDvPD0hE

7/19/20 - The Tie that Binds: Common Calling - Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

The Tie That Binds:  Common Calling

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

July 19, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here:  https://youtu.be/8A4V0JhAAyQ

For the last few years, I’ve been part of a clergy Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings. Now we meet via Zoom.  Recently, one of the pastors talked about a church leadership retreat she attended many years ago.  There was a point in the retreat where each person was invited to share something about their sense of call.  People took turns around the circle.  One described his passion for working with children.  Another mentioned church finances and keeping the books.  Several talked about the vocal choir or the bell choir.   All of that was in line with what was expected.  What made this memorable was the next person who spoke.  She said, “Right now, I am being called to deep rest.”  It seemed that no one else in the room had considered that that might be a true calling.  Then, of course, some wished that they had thought of it first. 

There is always work to be done and it seems like churches usually need more hands than those that are raised.  We can’t really all be called to rest, can we?  Or can we? 

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”   An easy yoke . . . a light burden . . . what Jesus seems to be offering sounds so good.  I wish I accepted this more.  I’m more familiar with the long list of tasks that churches set out to do.  I’m more acquainted with the earnest, faithful followers of Jesus who never feel that they’re doing enough or that they’re getting it right.   I am more familiar with the Jesus who says “take up your cross and follow me.” Or the one who talks about the narrow gate and the hard road that lead to life.  If we’re following that Jesus, we can’t really all be called to deep rest, can we?

We picked up reading in Matthew just after a preaching mission to major cities in Galilee.  And apparently, it had not gone well.  Jesus had gone to the cities to recruit learners, to engage people willing to hear how God was working in their midst.  But those cities rejected his message. Not necessarily every person in those cities, but the leaders of the cities rejected him.  The ones for whom the status quo was working, the insiders, those who were wise in their own eyes and self-sufficient. 

Jesus seems a little exasperated.  He mentions the children in the marketplace.  Flutes and dancing were associated with weddings, while wailing was an essential part of funerals. It is as if John the Baptist came and played funeral. He preached fire and brimstone and warned them about the imminence of death and destruction.  Some listened to him, but most thought he was too weird, surviving on locusts and honey, dressing like a wild man, and all that gloom and doom talk. They didn’t want to play funeral. 

And then Jesus came along.  He turned water into wine to make a wedding party last longer. He told hilarious stories and welcomed children and shared meals with all kinds of people.  Some of them followed him, but many of the leaders said that he was too accepting, too joyful and frivolous, not nearly serious enough.  They didn’t want to play wedding. 

It feels like people are never satisfied.  No matter what tack God takes to reach us, we will not enter the game.  We will not play.  Jesus is speaking to his own people, reflecting on struggles going on within Israel. 

This might require some stretching of your imagination, but see if you can envision people who are part of the same faith who cannot agree on what might be described as the basics. People of the same faith who disagree about heaven and hell, who get into fights about how and when to do the important rituals, like, say, baptism and communion. Within the same faith, there are those who hold up salvation of souls as the key command of God, while others vigorously defend seeking justice and loving mercy as God’s primary requirement.

I know it’s a stretch, but imagine if you can, people who are citizens of the same country who are at odds about which practices are best for the country’s well-being.  They argue about if and when and how to wash hands, about if and when and how to cover their faces.  Some are doing all they can to restore the nation’s former glory and others are plotting its downfall.

If you can imagine a society like that, then you have a sense of first century Palestine under Roman occupation.  There were a lot of movements or groups, some large and powerful, some on the fringes. Some seeking reform; some enacting resistance, some in violent rebellion.

In the midst of all that, I expect that people were weary.  They were tired and anxious and afraid, just waiting to see what tomorrow’s news would bring and how bad the next crisis would be.   To these people, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

What a profound relief to receive that invitation.    Jesus thanks God for the weak and the poor and the spiritual babies who recognize this as good news, those who accept this call to join Jesus’ small group. In a landscape of varied political and religious and economic movements, they recognize the Wisdom of God found in Jesus. 

In Jesus’ call to rest, they hear echoes of long-ago.  They remember the Exodus, when Moses led their ancestors out from domination under Pharaoh. 

The next part of the invitation says “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”  In Jesus’ day, the yoke was a common farm implement.  Yokes are not something most of us use on a regular basis.

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor is helpful to me here.  She describes the difference between single yokes and shared yokes.  A single yoke fits across a person’s shoulders with buckets hung from poles on each side.  Taylor says,  that with a single yoke, “. . .human beings can carry almost as much as donkeys.  They will tire easily and have to sit down to rest, and their shoulders will ache all the time . . . but still it is possible to move great loads from one place to another using a single creature under a single yoke.”[1]  

She says that a shared yoke works very differently.  A well matched pair of creatures can all work all day because one can rest a little while the other pulls.  “They can take turns bearing the brunt of the load; they can cover for each other without every laying down their burden because their yoke is a shared one.”  At the end of the day, they are tired, but not exhausted.

Taylor suggests that some of us are weary because we are trying to wear single yokes, trying to do all the things and carry all the weight alone, while Jesus is calling us to a shared yoke. 

To accept Jesus’ yoke is to join his movement for life and liberation.  To accept Jesus’ yoke is to resist the cruel and exploitative yoke of empire and to work alongside Jesus as God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

Some years ago, my family went to Mackinac Island in Michigan.  There are no cars there, but a lot of horses. Many of those horses pull carriages for tourists.  Pairs of horses, always the same pair, are connected to each other.  All day long, together, they transport people all over the island.  Someone told us where to find the off-duty horses, the ones that were on their own in the paddock after hours.  So we did, and what we saw was that the horses who had been yoked together all day, chose to stay together in their off time. The one that was always harnessed on the left stayed on the left, the one harnessed on the right stayed on the right, even without the harness.  And the two horses walked together, in matched step, in their off-hours just as they did when working.  The yoke has a power to create relationship, to establish strong connections even when the yoke is no longer physically present.

The tie that binds us is the yoked life with God, the call to a way of life intent on Shalom, the restful well-being and peace which God desires for all creation.  It is work, but work shared with Jesus and with each other.  We may get tired, but not exhausted, because we move with Jesus in Sabbath rhythm.

“Come to me,” Jesus says. 

“All you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens,

come to me. 

All you who are tired of

trying to figure it out all by yourself, come to me. 

All you who are worn out

from trying to keep life under your control. 

All you who think the world is growing scarier day by day. All you who are confused and scared, grieving and exhausted, lost and lonely, come to me.”[2]

Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and you will be find rest.  Amen.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Open Yoke” in The Seeds of Heaven:  Sermons o the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2004), p. 21.

[2] This beautiful phrasing is the work of the Rev. Shannon J. Kershner  in her sermon, Burdens, http://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2014/070614.html

7/12/20 - The Tie that Binds: Forgiveness - Matthew 18:21-31; Ephesians 4:25-5:2

The Tie that Binds:  Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35, Ephesians 4:25-5:2

July 12, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here: 

https://youtu.be/Z5-vMBZ95n0

In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis paints a picture of hell as a huge, gray city.  The inhabitants of this city live only on its outermost edges.  There are rows and rows of empty houses in the middle. They are empty because everyone who used to live there quarreled with the neighbors, and then moved, and quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again.  It is so large that it takes hundreds of years to travel from one end of the city to the other. All because its citizens can never resolve any differences and forgive each other. All they want to do is get as far away from each other as possible.  

Our reading from the letter to the church at Ephesus describes a community that does not want to live on the outskirts of hell. Instead of quarreling and moving on, this community is encouraged to practice things like truth-telling, anger management, honest work, kindness and forgiveness. These are all important for healthy community life.  They all require a certain level of intentionality. None of them is always easy, but I believe the hardest one on that list might be forgiveness, but forgiveness may also have the most power to bind us together. 

Forgiveness is hard.  We don’t always want to be forgiven. We don’t like that we did whatever we did that needs to be forgiven.   And we don’t like having to admit we did it.  Sometimes, we would rather pretend that it didn’t happen, or if it did, it really wasn’t that big a deal, or if it was that big of a deal, then all the more reason not to talk about it.  Forgiveness is hard for the ones who need to ask for it.

Forgiveness is also hard for the ones in a position to grant it.  Sometimes we are still hurt or angry when we’re asked to forgive.  Sometimes we want revenge; we want the other person to suffer the same kind of injury we think they inflicted on us.  Sometimes we want to hold on to the fact that we were right and they were wrong, and if we forgive, it will feel like we let them get away with something.  Forgiveness is hard for the ones who need to give it.

After reading Ephesians, I started wondering about what Jesus said about forgiveness. What popped into my mind was that conversation he had with Peter.   Jesus had been talking about how to resolve conflict in the church.  Peter wanted to know how many times he was required to forgive.  He thought that the right answer was 7 times.  But Jesus said it was more like 77 times or maybe 70 x 7 which is 490 times, depending on how you translate the Greek. 

And then, according to Matthew, to illustrate his point, Jesus told this parable.

“ . . . the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. 

This is a strange and difficult parable.  It could be boiled down to this.  The king is going to sell a man and his family and everything he has because the man owes a gazillion dollars which he is never going to be able to repay. But out of pity, the king releases him from the debt and forgives it. Then that man encounter someone else who owes him a hundred dollars and he refuses to forgive.  Having just been forgiven a huge debt, he refuses to forgive a miniscule amount.  The king hears about that, changes his mind and orders him to be tortured until he can pay the debt. 

This parable is difficult because many traditional interpretations claim that the king stands for God.  This is not how Jesus’ original audience would have heard it.  This is an earthly king who wields violence, pressure and fear, which is not to be compared with God’s loving care.  One scholar asserts that to make the king as an image of God would be blasphemy in Jewish tradition.[1]

Another issue is that Jesus has just told Peter to forgive, more than once, more than seven times. But the king in this story forgives just once and then undoes his forgiveness.   That’s another clue that this king is not to be equated with God. 

What if this story is not about forgiveness at all, but about a lack of forgiveness?  What if this parable is about a system of power and domination that is the very antithesis of the gospel? From the beginning, we know that the king is very powerful.  He can destroy the life of the high level slave and his whole family in an instant.  Threatening to do so is part of wielding that power.  When the king forgives the debt, it is just the flip side of the same power.  It also demonstrates just who is in charge. 

This is a culture where shame and honor mean everything.  The high level slave who has been forgiven has lost face. He has been humiliated and he has to regain it, by re-asserting his authority over the next person he sees, a lower-level slave over whom he has power.   He demands immediate repayment of a small debt, refusing to show mercy.  This makes a mockery of the king, making it seem like the high level slave took advantage of him and got away with it.  Now the king is the one who has to defend his honor and establish his authority, so he hands him over to the jailers.[2]

Maybe Jesus is describing a system that wasn’t really about forgiving another person.  In that system, you would keep track of who committed each offense and who forgave and how many times, with the goal of maintaining your own position and status.  Maybe the point of this parable is to demonstrate how very different it is when you forgive someone with no motives other than reconciliation and restoration of relationship. Maybe that is what Jesus means when he tells Peter and the others to forgive from the heart.

Maybe the point is that Jesus’ followers are to create communities of mutual care, kindness and heartfelt forgiveness, places where no one is vying for position because all are welcome and loved, communities which offer a profound alternative to the domination system maintained by earthly authorities.

You will no doubt remember Amy Cooper. She’s the woman in Central Park who called the police when a when Christian Cooper, (who is no relation) asked her to leash her dog.  Instead of doing that, she called 911 and reported that a black man was threatening her life. She was attempting to wield the power that is racism.  Christian, on the other hand, simply filmed their interaction without escalating it.

Amy has been charged with filing a false police report, which carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison. She was publicly shamed, her dog was taken from her and she lost her job.  Christian thinks those consequences might be sufficient.  He said, “ . . she’s already paid a steep price . . . that’s not enough of a deterrent to others?  Bringing her more misery just seems like piling on. . . . if the DA feels the need to pursue charges, he can do that without me.” [3]

That story is just one specific incident of the racism in this country which needs to be addressed systemically.  That complex conversation is beyond the scope of this sermon.  What I’m noting is simply how Christian did was is encouraged in Ephesians 4 – Christian kept telling the truth to Amy, even when she didn’t want to listen.  He was surely angry, but did not lash out  in the moment and even now, is not taking the opportunity to pile on vengeance.  It looks a lot like forgiveness to me.

Forgiveness is a tie that binds.  Christian communities are sustained by people who are committed to a way of life as a forgiven and forgiving people.  This is may be the  most difficult and most important work we do. So let us be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving one another from the heart as God in Christ has forgiven us. Amen.

[1] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans  Linda M Maloney (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2006), p. 201

[2] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 96.

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/nyregion/amy-cooper-central-park-false-report-charge.html

6/28/20 - The Tie that Binds: Loving Service - John 13:1-17, 34-35

The Tie that Binds:  Loving Service

John 13:1-17, 34-35

June 28, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Photo Credit: Divinity School of Chung Chi College, Hong Kong; Sculpture by Hu Ke,  Photo by Lau Xiu Sang

The worship service in which this sermon was delivered may be viewed at this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUh9BxwBR4A

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says, “that you love one another.”  These words are familiar to us.  It no longer sounds like a new commandment.  But they were familiar to his disciples too.  The instruction to love your neighbor as yourself was as old as the book of Leviticus. Jesus’ disciples already knew and followed it.

So why does Jesus say this is a new commandment?

Perhaps it is because of the new community which will form around it, the community of those who will believe Jesus’ teachings and continue to practice them after his death and resurrection. 

Perhaps it is because they have a new understanding of the God who gave this instruction.  It is the God who stoops to earth in form of an ordinary human being.  It is the God, who in Jesus, humbly serves his friends.

And perhaps what is new is the qualifier – “just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Loving others is not new, but maybe what Jesus is emphasizing is the idea of loving others in direct imitation of him.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”  Jesus says this after he has washed their feet. Washing feet was an act of hospitality.  It was a way of welcoming people after a dusty journey.  The host offered water, but the guests usually washed their own feet, or the host directed a servant to do it.  “When Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, he combines the roles of servant and host.  When Jesus wraps himself with the towel, he assumes the garb and position of the servant, but the act of hospitality is the prerogative of the host.” [1]

This confuses them.

A teacher could expect acts of service from his followers. If anyone was to be washing someone else’s feet, it should be the students, the disciples.  Jesus reverses that pattern.  It makes Peter uncomfortable because it upsets his notions about roles and what is proper.

This happens just before a long good-bye speech and prayer that Jesus offers.  That’s called the Farewell Discourse.  It takes the next 4 chapters.  But before Jesus starts talking, he acts.  He acts out his love for his closest followers, which is symbolic of God’s love for the whole world.  He acts it out in a way that they will remember because it breaks all their conventional assumptions about what is expected between a teacher and his students.

“Love one another as I have loved you,”  he says.  We notice that this love makes them uncomfortable, that it poses a challenge for them to accept. 

We notice that he washes the feet of his betrayer and he says this while Judas is still present.  The love that we are to imitate is inclusive of enemies and those who would harm us. 

In Washington DC, there is a medical clinic called Christ House which serves people experiencing homelessness.  In front of Christ House is a sculpture of Jesus called “The Servant Christ”.  The sculpture is a life-size figure of a barefoot man, wearing jeans and a workshirt with the sleeves rolled up.  He kneels on his left knee.  One hand holds a shallow basin while the other is raised to beckon anyone sitting on the nearby benches to have their feet washed.  His face is turned upwards.  The sculpture is situated where anyone can respond to it in whatever way they choose as they walk by on the sidewalk or enter the building. 

The artist who created it, Jimilu Mason, said, “Many have questioned me about placing this beautiful work in a place where it will surely be abused.  My response has been that there is very little they could do to him that hasn’t already been done.”[2]

“Love one another.” We notice that he says this before he has laid down his life for them.  After Jesus’ death and resurrection, they may come to understand this love as self-sacrificing.  But in this moment, the model of love seems to be one that gives life to others without requiring the giving up of one’s own life entirely.

We notice that Jesus puts on the towel and washes the disciples’ feet, but then when he is finished, he puts on his robe and returns to his previous position at the table.  Jesus is able to move easily from his role as servant to leader. The love he models does not require a permanent posture of self-abasement.[3]

This seems to me to be a tricky thing.  To be confident in love regardless of your role.  To be able to be equally loving as host and as servant. 

“Love one another as I have loved you.”  Loving others as Jesus loved us, means that first we have to receive love from Jesus.  We have to accept the love of God on God’s terms, which might make us uncomfortable.  It might be a challenge for us.  But learning to accept God’s love for us is probably the key to being able to give and receive love from others regardless of their status or ours.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”  This is not a general call to serve humankind.  This is a specific call to give as Jesus gives, to love as Jesus loves, to imitate Jesus in our loving and living.  The new community which forms around Jesus,  embodies and enacts his love, and in so doing, the community reveals Jesus’ identity to the world. [4]

That was what happened during early pandemics.  In the year 165, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire.  Some medical historians suspect this was the first appearance of small pox.  Whatever it was, it was lethal.  During the 15-year-duration of the epidemic, a quarter to a third of the population probably died of it.  At its height, mortality was so great that the emperor wrote of caravans of carts and wagons hauling out the dead.  

Then a century later, came another great plague called the Plague of Cyprian.  Again people died horribly and anyone who could flee, did so.  Without understanding germs, the people knew that the plague was contagious, so when symptoms first appeared, the victims were often thrown into the streets to die.  But Christians went into the streets to rescue them, providing elementary nursing, food and water to those too weak to cope for themselves.  There are some estimates that such care saved as much as two-thirds of the sick. [5]

Christians became known for caring for the sick while the non-Christians gave in to their fear and abandoned the ill and the dying.  Christians were also dying, but they trusted that in life or in death, they were in God’s hands. What went on during the epidemics was only an intensification of what went on every day among Christians.  Christians became so identified with this love that in the fourth century the emperor Julian challenged the imperial priesthood to compete with the Christian charities. In a letter to the high priest of Galatia, Julian urged the distribution of grain and wine to the poor, noting that “the impious Galileans [Christians], in addition to their own, support ours, [and] it is shameful that our poor should be wanting our aid.”  

This kind of selfless love repeated itself many times in history, during the Black Death of Martin Luther’s Time and the cholera epidemic in London in the 1850’s.  In those difficult times and many others, Jesus’ followers took seriously his commandment to love one another as I have loved you.”

This historical information comes from the work of social historian Rodney Stark who suggests that the courage and love and resilience of those earliest Christians led to exponential growth.  Non-Christians who were cared for and nursed to health tended to become Christians themselves.  The faith community enacted and embodied Jesus’ love and in doing so revealed Jesus’ identity to the world.  They kept this new commandment which, in John’s gospel, was one of the last instructions he gave.

After losing his job in 2010, Brandon Stanton moved to New York and began an ambitious project, to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers on the street. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles on foot, all in an attempt to capture New Yorkers. Somewhere along the way he began to interview his subjects in addition to photographing them. He asked one of two questions, which seem to open the doors into people’s lives: “What is your greatest struggle?” or “Give me one piece of advice.”

This project turned into the blog known as “Humans of New York” which has 20 million followers.  One of those Humans of New York helped Brandon understand his project is really about the power of stories. Shirley was an older woman photographed with wisps of grey hair sticking out from a furry cap, with a little bit of mascara under her wrinkled eyes, and an umbrella in the background.

Shirley said, “When my husband was dying, I asked: ‘Moe, how am I supposed to live without you?’ He told me: ‘Take the love you have for me and spread it around.’”[6]

Isn’t that just beautiful?  “Take the love you have for me and spread it around.”

How are the disciples supposed to live when Jesus is no longer with them in body? This is what Jesus commands the disciples to do: Take the love I’ve shown you and pour it out in the world. “Just as I have loved you…you also should love one another.”  Amen.

[1] Gail R. O’ Day, “John,” in New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 722-23

[2] Jann Cather Weaver, Roger Wedell, Kenneth Lawrence, Imaging the Word, Vol 1, (Cleveland:  United Church Press, 1994),  p. 168.

[3] Ian McFarland, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 2 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, ,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2018), p. 153

[4] Gail R. O’Day, p. 727-728

[5] Excerpted from Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 114-119.

[6] https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735/431477093593063/?type=1&theater

6/21/20 - The Tie that Binds: Formation - Jeremiah 18:1-11; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12

The Tie That Binds: Formation

Jeremiah 18:1-11, 2 Corinthians 4:5-12

June 21, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: Lidded jar of the sort used to store the Dead Sea Scrolls. From Qumran, Israel, 1st century CE, British Museum, London, Great Britain

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here. https://youtu.be/OxuDcBWJ9rI

On a Sunday a few years ago, I gave you clay. I gave everyone in the sanctuary some clay to play with, to form into any shape you wanted. I gave a few more instructions than that, but it was a pretty open exercise. I was not asking you to create a certain finished product. Most of you went along with it at the time, because you are great sports, but as soon as worship was over, you dropped your work into the trash. I know because I went around and rescued the clay from the garbage cans. Of all my attempts at creating engaging worship elements, that was one of the more stunning failures.

I wonder what happened. Some of you said you don’t like to work with your hands like that. Some of you said you don’t think you are artistic. I wonder if some of us are, in fact, fairly creative, but clay is just not a medium that we know how to work with. I wonder if any of us found the clay resistant. If it was hard to make it soft and pliable enough to work with, so we got frustrated.

Jeremiah compares God to a potter, working with clay. I wonder if God ever felt like that. The first time God is described as a potter in the Bible is at the beginning. In Genesis 2, God kneels on the ground, grabs a piece of moistened clay and from it fashions a human being. The Hebrew word translated as potter in Jeremiah 18 is the same word used in Genesis 2. And not long after that beginning, human beings start to assert their own ideas, their own will which is not always in keeping with God’s plans. By the time Jeremiah comes into the potter’s shop, God has been dealing with disobedient humans for a very long time. Jeremiah has too.

Jeremiah has been calling the people to repentance for their false worship and social injustice. They have not listened. In fact, a few verses after our reading, the leaders of Judah plot to kill Jeremiah. They don’t like his message and want to shut him up permanently.

The message that Jeremiah hears in the potter’s shop is harsh. It sounds like God is saying “I am the potter who made you and I can destroy you. I brought you into this world and I can take you out.”

It is strong language and we should note that the prophecies of Jeremiah are full of strong language. He repeatedly warns the people of impending doom and they pay no attention to him. His language gets more and more harsh in his attempts to get their attention.

It is also important to hear all of what he says. The Lord is sovereign over Judah, over all of creation, but also hoping not to exercise that power. Four times in these verses, God uses the word “If”. “If” the people will do X, then God will do Y. If the people will change their behavior, then God will change God’s plans. The Creator is responsive to the creature. There is give and take in the relationship.

If this was the only example of divine and human interaction in the Bible, then we might conclude that God is some kind of angry tyrant, a puppet-master who compels humans to do what God wants. But what we actually have in Scripture are stories of unexpected grace, of people receiving what they needed, instead of what they deserved. What we see in Scripture are the times when God’s change of mind was a decision not to punish. We might remember the time when people were in the wilderness and Moses was gone for too long, and they got anxious and built a golden calf to worship. God was going to destroy them, but Moses pleaded with God and God relented. Or we might remember when Jonah went to Ninevah with a message of coming destruction from God, only the people took the message to heart and changed their ways and God decided to spare them instead.

I read up a little bit on potters this week. I learned that they never waste clay. If something falls apart on the wheel, the clay goes into a bin called “reclaim” which is all the scraps and pieces that have failed somewhere in production. They’re kept together to be mixed back into usable clay.

Another potter said that clay is passive, but it has its own life and nature which can resist the potter. So the potter strives to open it up. Keeping it centered on the wheel is important to shape and reshape it. The outside of the vessel must conform to the inside. Sometimes the clay gets exhausted and must be set aside for awhile.

The relationship between potter and clay certainly seems an apt metaphor for the relationship between God and humans. If we understand potters, then we might recognize God not as bent on human destruction, but like a potter who is eager to coax something beautiful from resistant clay.

From the point of view of the clay, it might feel either like punishment or like growth. It seems significant that the metaphor holds as long as the clay continues to be malleable. In the next chapter of Jeremiah, the image is of clay that has been fired and shatters. One scholar suggests that is what happens when we harden. When our shape, our ideas, our faith, become fixed, we leave little room for God’s grace to reshape us.

Jeremiah was speaking to difficult people, his own people, in love. Some five hundred years later, Paul was also dealing with difficult people. The first church in Corinth was resisting his leadership. He had made mistakes. He wasn’t as flashy or as articulate as those who challenged his authority. Paul knew his Bible. I have to wonder if this passage from Jeremiah was in his mind when he mentioned clay jars. Maybe he wanted the Corinthians to remember that God could take them off the wheel and throw them into the reclaim bin. But he doesn’t go there.

Instead he recognizes his own weakness. He recognizes his own suffering and also the suffering of the Corinthians -- they are all afflicted, perplexed, persecuted and struck down. We humans are fragile and easily broken. In Paul’s analogy, we are more like inexpensive pottery that shatters than like malleable clay.

But Paul says, “we have this treasure in clay jars”. We have this treasure that is the Good News of Jesus. We have the extraordinary power of forgiveness and generosity and hospitality and justice through Jesus who dwells within us. And so Paul says,

“we are afflicted in every way

but not crushed;

perplexed but not driven to despair;

persecuted but not forsaken;

struck down but not destroyed”

We suffer, sometimes for the sake of the gospel, sometimes simply because that’s the nature of life, but God’s strength is often demonstrated in our weakness.

Archeologists have recovered clay jars from the first century. Perhaps this is what Paul had in mind – ordinary, functional, not valuable containers. They were considered fragile and disposable. But we might note that jars like this held the Dead Sea Scrolls, preserving that treasure for thousands of years, which kind of makes Paul’s point for him.

“We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

A few years ago, some of us had the privilege of being on retreat with Libby Little. Those of you joining us from beyond Albany may not know about Libby and her husband Tom Little. They were from upstate New York, but they spent 30 years living and working in Afghanistan, where they raised their three daughters. They stayed through the Soviet occupation. They hid in their basement during the Taliban rule of the 1990’s, all to provide eye care for the Afghan people. Tom was an optometrist. In 2010, he was returning from a mission to an outlying area with 9 other people when they were attacked and killed by the Taliban.

On that retreat, Libby talked about her life in Afghanistan. She talked about the loss of her husband and other hardships they had endured, but she did not dwell on that. What was perhaps most vivid in her presentation were her teapots. In Afghanistan, there is a highly skillful process of repairing broken pottery. Glue and metal staples are used to make containers watertight again. Her repaired teapots were fascinating.

There is a similar artistry in Japanese culture, called kintsugi. They use gold in the glue to mend the cracks in an object. They recognize that imperfection is credibility and scars are signs of improvement. So they highlight repairs and make them beautiful.

When the Russians left, Afghanistan slipped into a protracted civil war. Speaking about that time, Libby said, “One hundred rockets a day was a good day. We kept thinking it was going to get better, but it was a terrible time. It was a time when really the ground was levelled. We felt like we were able to come alongside Afghans and their suffering. Until then, we had no idea what suffering was.”

After Tom’s death she said, "We may never know what happened. We're not out for revenge or retaliation at all. We pray for whoever did this and keep working toward forgiveness."

Sometimes it is simple obedience. Sometimes it is fortitude in the midst of unjust suffering. Often it is a combination. But the tie that binds is our formation, our responsiveness to the God who shapes and reshapes us and forgives our sin and is made strong in our weakness.

“We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul says, “so that the life of Jesus may be visible, so that the extraordinary power of God may shine from our hearts.” May it be so for you and for me. Amen.

6/14/20 - The Tie that Binds: Creation - Genesis 1; Psalm 8

The Tie That Binds: Creation

Genesis 1, Psalm 8

June 14, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

The worship service in which this sermon was delivered may be viewed at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwwIxgIqK4Q

This is the second week in our worship series called The Tie That Binds. Some of the ideas for this series came from an intergenerational conference held at a national retreat center where a whole lot of people were very much occupying the same places together for a whole week. I chose to lift up the idea of connections in this time when we cannot be together physically so that we might appreciate the other ties that bind us to God and to each other.

Last week we talked about the goodness of unity when members of households and members of nations can dwell together in peace. Today, we step back from our roles as family members, from our roles as citizens, to consider the bigger picture – what is our place in creation?

We began with reading from Genesis 1. We often hear familiar Bible passages as if they were written for us, which in a way they were, and in a context similar to ours, which they were not. The stories in the book of Genesis were particularly shaped in the time when the people of Judah were in exile. Living far from home, missing the places where they had worshipped God, they drew from a deep well of sacred memory. Most scholars believe that Genesis was written down after they returned to their homeland. The stories of beginnings – the creation of the world and the creation of a covenant people – were necessary to help them begin life together again. Genesis began to be a written book some 500 years before the time of Jesus. That means we are 2500 years from those who shaped these stories. For thousands of years before our time, millions of people read the same words we read now and wondered. They wondered at the power and order present in the world they observed. They marveled at beauty and diversity and abundance of color and shape and sounds. They shrank before the sheer might of wind and water and earthquakes and wild animals.

Imagine the expanse of history that separates us from those before us. Imagine that people told the stories of Genesis around campfires in the times when there was no light pollution to dim the stars, and when they believed the world was flat and if you travelled too far you would fall off, and before anyone understood anything about genetics or germs or gasoline. When I try to imagine times like that, I just can’t hold the thought in my head for very long. But for a moment, I have a sense of being small, of being not very significant in the grand scheme of things. And that’s not necessarily bad. It really is not all about me. It really is not all about you either.

But there’s also wisdom in the other direction. A professor who was also a clinical psychologist taught that the church gets it wrong when it starts with a confession of sin. Instead, he said that worship should begin with an affirmation of human dignity and honor and promise. “You should tell people that they’re almost angels before you tell them how flawed and hopeless they are,” he said. [1]

“A little lower than the angels” – that’s how Psalm 8 puts it. Genesis 1 asserts that humans are made in the image of God. Remember that first audience of this book, remember that they have survived the destruction of war, the loss of their loved ones to death, the humiliation of captivity. This opening chapter invites them to remember who they are, to accept their worth and dignity as human beings. [2]

On the sixth day of creation, we were made in the image of God, according to Genesis 1. But before our sense of self-importance gets too big, we might note that we are created on the same day as the other land animals. We don’t get our own special day -- a signal that we are part of a larger community. We are created after the birds and sea-life. In fact, the animals of the sea and the birds of the air are told to be fruitful and multiply first, before that instruction is given to humans. And before humans ever appear, six times it says “God saw that it was good.”

We are not the best thing in creation; we are not even the only good thing, But according to Genesis, only humans are made in God’s image. And only to humans does God give dominion.

This word dominion has been so abused, that we must pause here for a moment. In giving dominion, God confers responsibility on humans. God chooses not to be the only one who exercises creative power in the world. God shares that power with people. God entrusts the good and precious creation into the care of human beings.

In the very next chapter of Genesis, it says that Adam and Eve were put into the garden with instructions to till and to keep it. To till and to keep – to tend, nurture and protect.

Leviticus 25 and Psalm 24 proclaim that the earth is the Lord’s. God is the landlord of creation; humans are the tenants. We who bear God’s own image are to use the power entrusted to us to preserve and enhance the life of God’s delightful world. We are not to exploit or destroy it. It is not all about us.

Genesis 2 says that God formed the first human from the clay and when God breathed into his nostrils, the human became a living being. We are made from the earth and given responsibility for it. We are joined to God by our very breath.

This is a tie that binds. This is a connection to which we can attend even in the midst of sheltering in place during pandemic. It can begin with wonder, with noticing beauty and delight and goodness. I’ve heard that hiking is on the rise. Lots of people are taking to the woods and trails, even walking through our own neighborhoods, noticing with a new appreciation the daily changes that signal the arrival of spring. This connection to God and to the rest of creation also expresses itself as co-creating, exercising the gifts of shared power with God. This may be the particular vocation of farmers and scientists and engineers and artists, but tending the creation is everyone’s work. It means caring for other humans as friends, neighbors, family members, as teachers, therapists, nurses and doctors. It means loving this world that God so loves by preserving rainforests and fragile ecosystems and endangered species and watersheds.

It is as if someone has pushed a giant pause button. For weeks, humans slowed our activity, we quit travelling in our cars and planes, and turned off the machines in our factories. That giant pause has allowed us to see more clearly our interconnections with the created world. When humans paused, air pollution was dramatically reduced. People in parts of India could see the Himalayan mountains for the first time in decades. Animals started showing up in places where humans would normally be. Mountain goats wandered through a town in Wales, a puma was seen on the streets of Santiago, orcas have come closer to Vancouver because the industrial activity which usually keeps them away has quieted. In America’s National Parks, fox, deer, bears and bobcats have been seen in larger numbers at lower elevations closer to roads and areas usually occupied by human visitors.

If walking is gaining in popularity as a hobby, so is gardening, a very local way to nurture our connection to God and the earth. And humans are also tending to domestic animals with new care. In Spain, Ismael Fernandez was separated from his donkey Baldo for 2 months. Baldo was under the care of his sister while Ismael had to stay in his home in another city. When Ismael was finally able to travel, he was afraid Baldo wouldn’t remember him. The video of their reunion shows otherwise. It’s in Spanish, but I think you will understand it anyway.

https://tanksgoodnews.com/2020/05/22/man-and-donkey-reunited/?fbclid=IwAR125p4qQn-t2y3Zs_ADZLTOODhYUlEzE_kvpIxSNgIoeXL6MtYr1mn4iXA

After the video went viral, Ismael said, “I am not ashamed that you hear me crying [in the video] because it was a demonstration of unconditional love.” That kind of love is a tie that binds.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg is an Orthodox rabbi who seeks to promote greater understanding between Jews and Christians. One of the things we have in common, he says, is an overarching purpose in joining God in healing the world. In the grand scheme of things, our lifespan is short and our perspective is limited, but Rabbi Greenberg says

“we are to find our place in a world that was created eons before we came into being, by a Creator who existed eternities before this universe was shaped; a world whose idealized perfection may well be realized ages after we are gone from the scene. If humans can see the world even a little bit from this perspective, they will recognize their modest place; . . .They will be more able to find their proper role in the . . . world. They will act closer to the norms of love, justice, and dignity, which are the proper responses to the value of their fellow creatures.[3]

Beloved ones, we are created in the image of God, gifted by God with power and responsibility for the creation, formed from the dust of the earth, connected to God by God’s own breath/spirit. Made for communion with God, a little lower than the angels. Thanks be to God.

[1] As described by the Rev. John Buchanan in his sermon “Almost Angels” https://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2009/012509.html

[2] Kathleen M. O’Connor, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Genesis 1-25A, (Macon, GA: Smyth& Helwys Publishing, 2018) p. 43.

[3] Irving Greenberg For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2004), pp. 49-50

6/7/20 - The Tie that Binds: Unity - Psalm 133; Romans 12:9-18

The Tie that Binds: Unity

Psalm 133, Romans 12:9:-18

Emmanuel Baptist Church

June 7, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be viewed here: https://youtu.be/e9tfv8mWNIk

How good and pleasant it is, when kindred live together in unity. How good and pleasant it is, when people live together in unity. About this time last year, my family was in Finland. Finland was part of Sweden for about 700 years and Swedish has an official status there. So all the signs are in both languages, much like Canada uses both English and French. When it was my turn to be served in a coffee shop, the barrista turned and addressed me in Swedish or Finnish, I’ll never know which, but as soon as American words came out of my mouth, he immediately switched to English. I watched as he easily conversed in whatever language was needed by the customer in front of him. How good and pleasant it is, when people live together in unity.

After Helsinki, we went to Berlin. It’s a place where there are still reminders of the wall and the river which once violently divided the city. It’s a place where people pray for world peace every Friday in a the shell of a church destroyed by bombs. It is a vibrant, lively unified city, dedicated to remembering its past so the future will be different. How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity.

Psalm 133 is a pilgrimage psalm. It’s one of 15 psalms that might once have been in small songbook for use for people on their journey to Jerusalem. Verse 1 says “how good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.” “Kindred” refers to family. Families travelled together to Jerusalem for religious or political festivals. Families were and are a crucial institution. In our families we learn may intimacy, love and growth. In our families, we may learn resentment, abuse, prejudice, and destructive behaviors. We know from experience that harmony is not automatic in families and so we can readily affirm – how good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity.

What we learn in our families, we will likely reproduce in other relationships. If what we learned is hurtful, it may take a good deal of work and practice to learn new, healthy behaviors. Psalm 133 starts at the level of family, but its main theme is the unity of the country. It refers to dew of Mt Hermon, which represents the people of Israel, flowing down on Mt. Zion, the center of Judah. It holds open the possibility of reuniting a country which has been divided into two.[1]

One image of unity is the oil that flows over the head of a high priest at his installation. It is not an image that we relate to very well, but we can appreciate that the oil poured on the top of his will flow down and consecrate his whole being.

The second image is of the dew from Mt. Hermon, the highest mountain in the land. The dew is the only precipitation in the dry season and it is sufficient to produce a harvest of grapes. It flows down, like the rain, on the just and the unjust, the deserving and the undeserving, a blessing to all.

I am struck that the two images of unity are oil and water. Oil and water, which we know, are not easily mixed. Oil and water molecules bond with their own kind, unless continuously forced into relationships. What a provocative suggestion about the nature of unity among humans.

I don’t have to tell you about oil and water. You have seen it for yourselves. You have seen it this week in city after city, including our own. In peaceful protests and less peaceful rebellion, in tear gas and pepper balls and riot gear, in looting and the imposition of curfews, in the voices of the oppressed demanding justice for all, reminding us all about the unity and equality upon which our country is supposedly founded. How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity. We understand that most clearly when it is not happening.

When unity is absent, how do we find it again? In his book, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. . . . It is God’s love for us that not only gives us [God’s] Word but also lends us his ear. . . .
Many people are looking for an ear that will listen.”[2]

He wrote that in 1939, another time of great disunity in the world. So many people are still looking for an ear that will listen. There are so many voices speaking on top of each other. There are the voices of people of color who have been crying out for justice for hundreds of years. There are voices of white supremacists who are trying to change the narrative. And those representing law and order who may stand for justice, but may also have other agendas. And those of us who want to be good listeners will have to work hard to hear the truth.

Bonhoeffer continues “They do not find it among Christians because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. . . . [The one] who can no longer listen to his brother [or sister] will soon be no longer listening to God either. . . .
This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life. . . . .
Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by [God] who is the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.[3]

I am learning again how hard it is to listen. I’m spending so much time on the phone and in Zoom meetings where I can’t read facial expressions and body language, where I have to rely on my ears more than ever. Bonhoeffer says that listening is a ministry, a service, entrusted to us by God.

“We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the word of God.” The word of God is a word of strong love always. Throughout the Bible, the word of God is a word that brings good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and lets the oppressed go free.

So, as we sort through the conflicting narratives, as we seek the truth which may restore unity, let us listen especially for the good news to the poor and for release of the captives. And let us listen for recovery of sight, aware that we, ourselves may be the ones who need that most. Let us be open to hearing a perspective different from our own, a point of view that might help us to understand a new reality, so that we may live together in unity.

This is a hard time for most of us, for many reasons. Many feel that our country is coming apart, that our oily and watery natures will never mix, never learn even to get along. But others are seeing signs of hope. And I’m choosing, when I can, to listen to them. One person who offers hope is the Rev. John Floberg.

Rev. Floberg is a supervising priest for 3 churches on the Standing Rock Sioux Nation where he has served for about 30 years. You will remember Standing Rock and the resistance there to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Sixty-seven Emmanuelites signed a statement in support of Standing Rock at that time.

This week, John Floberg wrote these words, “I am writing as the priest at Standing Rock during the NoDAPL stand-off of 2016 and 2017. I write because I feel a need to process once again the events of those days and what it taught me that is being repeated in this day - but on a different scale.

When the fires went out in the Camp it was stated that the fire is not out, it has been relit in many more places.

What had been very much an amazing show of solidarity as people and nations came with their flags to Standing Rock and thousands streamed into the Camps - is now this amazing show of solidarity ablaze in the country.

The NoDAPL movement is about oil - but much more about oil as a means of threatening a people and the callous disregard for those people by others in power. The NoDAPL movement is about Indigenous people and the solidarity that others provided to witness their Standing. People did not come to Standing Rock to get them on their feet - they came because they were standing up.

And now the injustice of some in Law Enforcement, a large piece of what was experienced at Standing Rock is being experienced throughout the cities of our country. But people are not all flocking to Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered. People are, by and large, standing up in their own communities to cry for justice. This part of the NoDAPL Camp Fires has been kindled and the light is showing brightly all around this country.”[4]

What some of us are seeing as disunity, as conflict, as coming apart, John Floberg sees as unity, unity for the cause of justice, a unity that may yet lead to a change of heart and reconciliation.

How very good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity. Beloved ones, let our love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to the good and as far as it depends on us, may be live peaceably with all. Amen.

[1] J. Clinton McCann, Jr. quoting Adele Berlin in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IV, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 1214.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), p. 97

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pp. 97-98

[4] John Floberg, his post in the Facebook group Clergy With Standing Rock, June 5, 2020

5/31/20 - Breath of God - John 20:19-23

Breath of God

John 20:19-23

Emmanuel Baptist Church

May 31, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley

A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be viewed here:

https://youtu.be/Uh6L-vW7nQ8

I looked back at old bulletins and discovered that I haven’t been with you on Pentecost for a few years. When I was with you, I tended to repeat one language lesson, but I have no idea what the guest preachers did, so just in case, here it is again.

Ruach is a Hebrew word. It means wind or spirit or breath. If you see a sentence like “the ruach lifted the kite” you could translate it “The wind lifted the kite” or “the spirit lifted the kite” or “the breath lifted the kite.” All of those translations are accurate.

Does anyone know the Greek word like this? . . . Yes, I heard it from over there. The Greek word is pneuma. And, just like ruach, it means wind, breath or spirit.

Only two of the Gospel writers describe the giving of the Holy Spirit. We usually read Acts 2, written by Luke. That’s the story we heard in the Godly Play video. In Luke’s version, the Holy Spirit is a very loud and windy wind. But in John’s telling, the Spirit is breath

In John’s gospel, only part of a day has elapsed between the resurrection and the imparting of the Spirit. It is Easter evening and the disciples are together behind locked doors when Jesus appears. He says “Peace to you.” It was a standard way to say hello and still is in Israel-Palestine. He says it twice, because the first time, they are still afraid. They haven’t recognized him yet. “Peace to you” from a stranger does not mean the same thing as “peace” from Jesus. When Jesus, the Risen One, says it, he enacts the peace. Jesus is their most trusted teacher. Jesus is the one who has literally been to hell and back. And so, when he says peace, everyone in the room lets go of their fear and breathes more easily.

One time, a church invited a well-known guest preacher, the Rev. Tom Long, to come for a special intergenerational worship service. They gathered around tables in the fellowship hall which were already set with the ingredients to make bread. Each group was supposed to prepare a loaf of bread and then while it baked in the kitchen, there were various exercises designed to get them talking about faith issues.

This was one of those things that looked better on the drawing board, than in reality. The kids played in the baking ingredients, and white clouds of flour coated everything. There were delays in the kitchen and the bread baked very slowly. People ran out of things to talk about. The children got bored and fussy. The planners had hoped for an event with excitement, innovation, peak learning, and moving worship. What happened was noise, exhaustion and people making the best of a difficult situation.

Dr. Long said, “In other words, despite the rosy plans, it was the real church worshipping down there in the church basement.” Finally, the service ended and he was able to pronounce the benediction. “The Peace of Christ be with you all,” he said, and just as he did, a child’s voice from somewhere in the room called out strong and true, “It already is.” [1]

“The Peace of Christ is already with us. A month ago, I remembered that story and I saved it for today. I thought this was going to be a sermon about the comfort and peace brought by the Spirit. I invited you to bring your signs of peace so that we could pass the peace of Christ and remind each other – the peace of Christ is already with us.

That is still true, but I hear it slightly different now. After the events of the last week, the last month, I could not preach a simple sermon on peace. The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah warned against those who say “peace, peace, when there is no peace”. So, I could not just act as though we are safe here in the Zoom space and pretend that nothing unpeaceful is happening. I had to go back to the text and look again.

After Jesus says “Peace be with you”, he says “receive the Holy Spirit” and he breathes on them. He breathes on them and it’s the same word as when God exhaled the breath of life into Adam and he become a living being. It’s the same word as in Ezekiel 37 where God’s breath/wind/spirit blows into the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision so that they may live. And what I had hoped to say today was that the peace of Christ is already with us, it is as close as our breath.

But as soon as I say that, I think of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, who are no longer breathing. And I think of people of color who never breathe easily because the foot of oppression is on their necks. And I’m thinking of 100,000 Americans who have died from a virus that stole their breath, and of thousands more across the country who cannot inhale without a ventilator. And I cannot say “peace, peace” when there is no peace.

I go back to the text and look again. Jesus says “receive the Holy Breath, the Holy Wind, the Holy Spirit” and he breathes it onto them. It doesn’t seem like they have a choice. They aren’t socially distanced. They aren’t wearing masks. They cannot help but receive the Spirit and the power that comes with it.

They had locked themselves away in fear, with good reason. The world terrorizes those who work for justice; it crucifies Love incarnate. Within a few years, the disciples in that locked room will see their beloved Jerusalem in flames; before John’s gospel is written down, they will know the pain of religious factionalism, of persecution and violent separation from friends and family over their understanding of faith. So, if there is a peace that comes with the breath of the Spirit, it needs to be a strong, resilient peace.

Before Jesus breathes Spirit into them, he says “as the Father has sent me, so send I you.” Let that sink in. God sent Jesus to earth where he was accepted by many, but mostly rejected by the powerful, and where he ultimately endured a painful public death. And Jesus says, “as I was sent, so I send you.”

“The coming of Jesus is not just a nice presence; it is a mission.” Walter Brueggemann says, “. . . I do not know where you are sent. But I give you this word from Jesus; you are sent. And if you want the peace of Jesus, then you must accept the sending of Jesus. . . . Jesus is sending all of his disciples, all those baptized in his name, all who share his life, all to the same place, all to the neighbor whom God loves, all to the neighbor in need. . .. Before the sun sets on Pentecost,” Brueggemann says, “we must rethink this sending, and how we will go, and where. If, however, we do not go, we can forget about his offer of peace.” [2]

I have pretty much taken for granted the ability to breathe. I do it all the time without conscious thought. My breathing sustains me without my paying much attention to it. But today, I’m thinking about the Spirit/Breath/Wind of God and I’m wondering if I take that for granted too. How often is the Spirit moving in and around me and I haven’t bothered to notice? What a privilege it is to be able to breathe easily, to breath without fear and without a ventilator. With privilege comes responsibility. So, as long as I draw breath, how do I embody Spirit-infused love and justice? How do I love as Jesus loves?

Father Richard Rohr has said that If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.[3] You and I have seen so much transmitted pain this week --the pain of grief, of justified rage, the rioting of the unheard. If we do not transform our pain, we will surely transmit it. Transformation is Spirit-work and forgiveness is its best tool.

Jesus breathes Spirit onto the disciples and sends them out into a hostile world, empowered with forgiveness. “Because without the work of the Spirit, without the power of forgiveness, the world will be devoured in anger, in violence and in vengeance.”[4]

Those are more of Brueggemann’s good words, “without the work of the Spirit, without the power of forgiveness, the world will be devoured in anger, in violence and in vengeance.” We know the truth of this. On this Pentecost Sunday especially, we feel the anger, the violence, the vengeance that threaten to devour us all. And so, we plead “Come Holy Spirit. Come with power to transform and heal and forgive. Come Holy Spirit. Come and grant us your peace.”

The peace of Christ be with you all.

Not an easy peace,

not an insignificant peace,

not a halfhearted peace,

but the peace of God in Christ Jesus be with you.

It already is.

[1] Thomas G. Long, Whispering the Lyrics: Sermons for Lent and Easter, (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1995,) p. 93-94.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “The Ultimate Gate-Crasher” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), pp. 34-35.

[3] https://cac.org/transforming-our-pain-2016-02-26/?fbclid=IwAR3PWjYVD28-BlqOrwCeO8Y0hSWOMkxuBEmwZ25SZYfKWPGJKe759unT4o4

[4] Walter Brueggemann, “The Life-Giving Wind from Nazareth” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), p. 160.