12/20/20 - Advent 4 - I Believe in Love: Daring Right Relationship - Matthew 1:18-25

I Believe in Love:  Daring Right Relationship

Matthew 1:18-25

December 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/DBUzIdSjLrY

We have had some memorable Advent seasons together.  Of course Advent 2020 is going to be in its own category, but I am thinking about non-pandemic years.  You might remember the time that the Advent candles were lit with a sparkler.  Or the year that the children found feathers in Little Man’s room. They were obviously feathers from angel’s wings – evidence of the presence of the angels we kept talking about that year. Two memories from last year are the living Advent wreath performed weekly by our Youth and the stars over our heads in the sanctuary.

One of my favorites was back in 2012. That was the year that we had a custom-made backdrop of Bethlehem that stood against the wall behind the communion table. Designed by Jean and painted by several volunteers, it reflected Bethlehem in three time frames – that of Ruth and Jesus and our own time. That season we read the book of Ruth, one chapter each Sunday.  Ruth was  a foreigner, a Moabite.  I spent a good bit of time those first Sundays going over all the reasons why Israelites didn’t usually associate with Moabites, about the enmity between them.  I remember overhearing someone in coffee hour who was wondering out loud what was going to happen with Ruth.  She didn’t know the story and was absolutely not expecting that Ruth would become the 29 times great grandmother of Jesus.  That was going to come as a big surprise in the next week’s sermon. I was very tickled to overhear that little tidbit.

Today, I told Hank he could skip the genealogy that Matthew starts his gospel with.  It’s a lot of names, many of whom we don’t recognize, but those of you who were in 2012 will remember that Ruth is in there.  That is remarkable, because in Biblical times and even more recently, women’s names are not always recorded.  In Biblical times, the family tree was definitely traced through the men.  Matthew mostly sticks to that pattern, which is why it is noticeable when he breaks it. 

 In the line of Jesus’s ancestors, he names four women. There’s Tamar who put herself in the path of her father-in-law Judah so that he would initiate an intimate relationship.  That was because he had otherwise refused to provide for her as widows were to be provided for. 

Rahab ran a brothel in Jericho.  Joshua sent two spies into the city and they ended up at Rahab’s place – go figure. When soldiers came looking for the spies, Rahab hid them, lied to the soldiers, and helped them escape the next night.  In return, the Israelites protected her household when they captured Jericho.  Rahab ended up marrying one of them.

Ruth, was an immigrant from Moab, who lived in Bethlehem with Naomi, her Israelite mother-in-law.  Naomi urged Ruth to meet the wealthy Boaz on the threshing floor after dark. The end of that story was a baby named Obed, who was King David’s grandfather.

And then there is the woman that Matthew doesn’t name.  He calls her the “wife of Uriah.” We know her as Bathsheba.  But she was Uriah’s wife when King David treated her like she was his, and then arranged for the murder of her husband. 

These are the women that Matthew goes out of his way to identify among Jesus’ ancestors. The bumper sticker that says “well-behaved women rarely make history” seems true here, except that it is mostly not the women’s behavior that brings them notoriety. 

Baylor professor Beverly Roberts Gaventa says that “each of these women in some way threatens the status quo, and each is in turn threatened by the status quo. For example, [Bathsheba] threatens David with her report that she is pregnant, and he in turn threatens her by bringing about the death of her husband.”[1]

Then Matthew adds Mary’s name to the end of the genealogy.  If we are paying attention, we might wonder what it is that Mary has in common with the other women.  And we might notice that Mary’s pregnancy threatens Joseph’s honor and that his initial decision, to quietly divorce her, threatens her well-being and that of the child she carries.[2] 

Mary has already said yes to the angel.  She has a calling, a vocation from God.  But what if Joseph doesn’t understand, doesn’t believe. What if Joseph doesn’t say yes to his own calling? 

Joseph is a law-abiding person. He knows what the law requires – an investigation, public inquiry.  The law exists to protect everyone, to keep evil out of the community.  And Joseph respects the law.  But Joseph must also be a person of compassion and mercy, because his instinct not to launch an investigation which will humiliate her, but instead to quietly divorce her.  This seems the right thing to do.

Until he has a dream in which he is told to marry Mary.   That challenges tradition. It requires him to go against his understanding of what is right and moral and just. Maybe he tells himself that it’s just a dream. Not to be taken seriously.  Maybe it was his subconscious trying to give him an out, but really, that can’t be the right thing to do, can it?

One scholar says that Joseph builds a response of love in a world of law and tradition.[3]  That, it seems to me, is a challenge we all face.  What is the loving response?  How do we know?  Sometimes what is easiest is to pull out the rule book, to lean on tradition, on the way we’ve always done it, on the counsel of our friends.  But easiest is not always right, is it?  Often, the more loving action is more difficult.  And often part of the difficulty is in finding the wisdom to know when to stick with tradition and when to depart from it.

Walter Brueggemann says “God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.” [4]

That is still happening.  You and I are still being called to discern wisdom, to allow love to take precedence traditions and conventions.

Every day for the last few months, Jim and I have gone past a house in our neighborhood on our walk.  One day, we noticed a Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard.  The next day, another sign appeared. This one said “Blue Lives Matter.”  It was slightly larger.  But the Black Lives sign was still there.  So that was interesting.  The convention of our time is that people on the opposing sides of political issues cannot work together, cannot compromise on anything.  To do so is to give in, to cede power.  And it’s not just a matter of personal power, the argument goes.  Each side thinks that other side’s policies and positions will destroy the country. With that kind of danger at play, the most loving thing to do is to hold one’s own ground.

So we were intrigued by this house with the competing signs in the same yard. We speculated about who might live in it. One day we saw a car with Florida plates in the driveway.  We created a scenario in which grandma owned the house, but lived in Florida.  We decided that the house was occupied by two cousins. In our made-up world, these cousins lived together while in college because it was cost-effective, but they each held fast to their political views. That was the story we spun for ourselves, until a couple of weeks ago. Then, Jim saw the people who really live there.  They look like a middle-aged couple, a husband and wife who are probably empty-nesters.  That was not what we were expecting. How could two rational adults stay married, and live together when they obviously have such opposing political views?  Don’t they know that Black Lives matter and Blue Lives matter folks are supposed to be enemies? Don’t they understand what’s at stake? 

As far as I know, their signs are both still up, buried under the snow now.  I don’t know how they do it, but I’d like to think that love has found a way. 

Another story.  You might have heard this one before. It was a game of college softball.  The Central Washington Wildcats and the Western Oregon Wolves were in the last game before their division playoffs.  Sara Tucholsky stepped up to bat and she hit it out of the park.  She was a senior and had never hit a home run before.  The two runners on base ran across home plate and Sara should have been right behind them.

But Sara’s knee buckled as she pivoted towards first base.  Her ACL was torn.  She was in great pain, lying on the ground, unable to stand.  The rules are that she had to round the bases, touching each one on the way, or her run would not count.  Her teammates were not allowed to help.  It looked like her first home run was not going to count.

But then, Mallory Holtmann asked a question.  Mallory played for the other team.  Mallory knew that Sara’s teammates could not help her, but Mallory asked the umpires if there was a penalty for assistance from her opponents.  There was not. 

So Mallory and her teammate Liz Wallace picked Sara up and carried her around the bases, lowering her to touch each base.  Sara crossed home plate and was credited with her 3-run home run, the last and only one of her career. [5]

The convention is that you play by the rules and if someone gets hurt, they’re out. That’s the breaks.  But Mallory had other ideas.  Mallory believed that winning isn’t everything. She set aside that tradition to act in love on behalf of her opponent.

Now these two stories I’ve offered are kind of ordinary, aren’t they?  No one’s life was saved, no great evil was overcome.  But they might be closer to our everyday lives.  God might ask us some of us to make a big choice, a life-altering decision like Joseph’s or Mary’s.  But God might also ask for smaller ones, something in an ongoing relationship or in an unexpected turn of events.  God will recruit as necessary.  You and I are part of salvation history.

What the Bible teaches, what the story of Mary and Joseph teaches, hopefully what our own experience teaches, is that God still recruits ordinary people like you and me to bring about God’s purpose, to build a response of love in a world of law and tradition and even hostility. We believe in God’s strong love, even when, even when we don’t feel it. Amen.

[1] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Cynthia Rigby, eds, Blessed, One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, (Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002),  p. 51

[2] Blessed One, p 52

[3] John Shea, On Earth as It Is in Heaven Year A (Collegeville, MN:  Liturgical Press, 2004), p. 44

[4] Walter Bruggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2012),  p. 172

[5]https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/sports/baseball/30vecsey.html

12/13/20 - Advent 3 - I Believe in God: Ode to Joy - Luke 1:26-56

I Believe in God:  Ode to Joy

Luke 1:26-56

December 13, 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/LGVr7omMaCQ

Mary was perplexed.  More perplexed than fearful, it seems, at least at first, at the angel’s announcement.  That’s what Luke says.  But I think stunned might be better.  Or astonished, dumb-founded, gob-smacked.

It just doesn’t really make sense. She has done all the right things.  Her parents are respectable. She is respectable. She is betrothed to Joseph who is honorable.  How can this be happening?

But then as the implications begin to sink in, she understands why the angel began, as they always do, with “do not be afraid.”  She imagines what her mother will say, what Joseph will think, and she is terrified.  She is about to leave her parents’ home to go to Joseph’s home, which was frightening enough, but now this. Will she survive the scandal? Will she survive child-birth? 

Despite the questions flooding her being, to Gabriel, she says “Let it be.” To God’s messenger, she says “yes.”  This story is so familiar that it no longer astounds us.  We see Mary as merely obedient, just doing what is required of her.  But we should recognize her courage. We should applaud her heroism. 

Mary’s yes to Gabriel is very costly.  She says yes to a scandalous pregnancy, to the possibility of death by stoning or in childbirth.  But the cost will not end when she delivers a healthy baby and lays him in a feeding trough.  When her son grows up, people will say that he is out of his mind, possessed by the devil. They will call him a trouble-maker, a drunkard, someone who hangs with the wrong crowd.  He will suffer torture and death which Mary will have to watch and be helpless to prevent. 

Writing from prison before his execution by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless . . . – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” [1] The story of Mary and of Jesus can teach us to see history from below.

She is courageous, but she needs support, which she seeks by taking the journey to see Elizabeth, her older relative.  Perhaps that is what Gabriel has in mind by telling her that Elizabeth is also pregnant. 

“Two women in a land under brutal occupation learn that they are pregnant. One is unmarried and knows that bearing a child will expose her to rejection and judgement, perhaps even violence, from her community. The other has been childless for years, and has probably been shamed and scorned because of it. Though this child will be welcome nothing can wipe out those years of anguish. And neither child will survive long enough to care for their parents in old age, in any case. Both will have been brutally executed by their mid-thirties, victims of the political and religious suspicions and hatreds of their time. . . . In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is born amidst the chaos of a Roman census, a forced mass migration demanded by Caesar with no apparent thought of the human cost involved. He is telling us that this will be a story set in a world where rulers with great power do  what they want and the ‘little people’ just don’t matter.”[2]

You know that way back in March, I was in Matamoros, Mexico.  I showed you pictures of the migrant camp there, the site of another mass migration, this one forced by poverty and violence.  It is a place inhabited by those with little power and little value in the eyes of the authorities.  In October, a baby was born there. I expect that many babies have been born there, but I heard about this one. Consuela, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala, went into labor very quickly. The baby came so fast that there was no time to get her to a hospital.  She gave birth near the river, tended by other women in the camp. The baby was born so quickly that she hit her head, but reports were that she was fine.  I think about Consuela and her baby and I wonder at her courage. I wonder kind of future she dares to dream of for her child.  If I were in her place,  I would not get my hopes very high.

But Mary did, and Elisabeth too.  They believed that the children they carried would bring a new future. Elisabeth pronounces Mary blessed which was just the kind of encouragement she needed to break into song. 

Her song is called the Magnificat because that’s the first word of it in Latin.  “My soul magnifies the Lord” she says. 

Mary sings.  I wonder if she danced too. There’s a video circulating in cyberspace right now of a young girl dancing.  She is about 4 years old.  She is standing on a couch which is backed up to a picture window.  She is watching out the window for the letter carrier.  This is the routine that has developed for the last several months.  Every day, she watches for the mailman.  Every day, as he walks up the sidewalk, she dances.  And he does too.  In the video that has gone viral, you can see him through the picture window.  He carries the mail to her front porch and dances while he does it.  He goes back out the same way, dancing.  He imitates her moves and she imitates his.  And the neighbors look on and laugh.  This very small thing has become a daily source of joy for the whole street.[3] I wonder what we don’t see.  I wonder what the mailman struggles with personally, what stresses he is carrying.  I wonder if some days, it takes a bit of courage to dance with this child.

Mary sang and maybe she danced too.  She was joyfully courageous, with her song of yearning and hope and peace and justice.  She sings of a God who enters our world from below, of one who does not accept the world’s power arrangements.  This is a song of revolution on the lips of a peasant girl.  If it wasn’t so familiar to us, it might astound us.

When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, he left Mary’s song in Latin.  The German princes who support and protected Luther in his struggles took a dim view of the social and political implications of the Magnificat, with its reversal of social structures.  Not wanting to  lose his friends in high places, Luther thought it best just to leave the Magnificat in Latin.[4]

But those with less power, the outcasts, those who suffer, have continued to read it anyway.  Ernesto Cardenal recorded Bible studies held within a community of campesinos, farmers and fisherfolk who lived around Lake Nicaragua in the 1970’s.  As they read Mary’s song, one said, “It’s not the rich, but the poor who need liberation.”  Another answered “The rich and the poor will be liberated.  Us poor people are going to be liberated from the rich.  The rich are going to be liberated from themselves, that is from their wealth.  Because they’re more slaves than we are.”[5] 

What Mary imagines, what she trusts God for, is the liberation of everyone, the setting free from sin and bondage and despair. 

I have told you before about my seminary professor who was in Berlin in 1989 when the wall came down.  He described for us the peaceful protests that led up to that event. For several months, people gathered around the St. Nikolai church in Leipzig.  This is a place where Bach composed so many of his cantatas, like the sample we heard from the choir today.  The people gathered to pray and sing at St. Nikolai church, more and more each week, until the day when they numbered more than 70,000 people.  They spilled out into the streets with their prayers and candles, singing songs of hope and protest until their singing shook the powers of their nation and the authorities did not know how to respond.

One American pastor who visited a few months after the fall of the wall asked why this movement had not been crushed like so many before it.  The answer came that the police had no contingency plan for song and prayer, no counter-measures against praying and singing.     

We might think that song and prayer are too small for the weight of the worries we carry, insignificant against the fear and stress and even hostility we may be facing.  We might think that the few of us who come together to sing and pray each week are a small thing in the face of the worries we carry, the fear and stress we are all bearing right now.   Or we might join Mary’s song. 

It's a song that has been sung for generations.  It was and still is heard when the monastics sing Ubi Caritas  -- where love is, there is God. 

It’s heard every summer when campers gather around the bonfire and sing Kum Ba Yah.  And when children or protesters sing This Little Light of Mine. 

When they sang Verdi’s Requiem in the concentration camp, or Ode to Joy in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship,  when Sweet Honey in the Rock sings “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes” --  that’s Mary’s song to a different tune.

When Christians sing Joy to the World every Christmas, we’re singing Mary’s song all over again. 

Each successive generation must find its tune in their own time.  Including us– we also must find the way to sing this song, to know that God is begotten in us.   It is the melody of faith rising yet again, offering defiant and courageous hope to a weary world.  Thanks be to God.  Amen. 

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, (New York:  Touchstone, 1953) p. 17

[2] The Rev Anne LeBas in her sermon “The Power of One”  http://sealpeterandpaulsermons.blogspot.com/2012/12/advent-4-power-of-one.html

[3] https://youtu.be/RTWA3GN3od8

[4] John Buchanan, “Revolutionary Words”  The Christian Century, December 12, 2012

[5]Quoted by Kimberly Bracken Long in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008) p. 95.

12/6/20 - Advent 2 - I Believe in Light: Illuminating Peace - Isaiah 9:2-7; John 1:1-18

I Believe in Light:  Illuminating Peace

Isaiah 9:2-7, John 1:1-18

December 6, 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/ftpzWKQ3LXM

Australia was hit hard by the coronavirus, but they employed very strict lockdown measures.  In October, one of my friends there, told me that they were not allowed to travel more than 3 miles from home.  The state borders were closed and all kinds of things were cancelled.  But, now they have flattened the curve and shops are open and people are allowed to gather in limited numbers.  It is also the beginning of their summer.  One of their department stores has launched an ad campaign that seems to sum up what so many people are feeling this year.  Their slogan is “Bigger than Christmas”  The commercial is just a bit over the top.

https://youtu.be/B5NmhtqGg04

Christmas is already a bg thing – but if more is better, then why not bring on something Bigger than Christmas. 

I was in a mall last week, for the first time in months.  Yes, I wore my mask, kept my distance from other shoppers and didn’t stay long.  But I noticed a sign in a store window.  It said “We need Christmas so hard this year.”  I tend to agree.  2020 has been grueling and we need everything Christmas could possibly offer. 

The intent of the sign at the mall and the Australian ad campaign is undoubtedly to suggest that we need the merchandise they’re selling, as if that is Christmas, as if having the right gift under the tree on Christmas morning will make up for the very real losses and death and grief and hardship of this year.  I agree that we do need Christmas so hard this year.  We need Christmas so hard every year, although we might not recognize it as readily in other years. 

But Christmas is already Bigger than Christmas.  Christmas is already so much more. 

John understands that.  The gospel writer includes John the Baptist in his story of Jesus, but he doesn’t really begin there and he doesn’t begin with Bethlehem.  He begins, at the beginning, at the beginning of creation, at the beginning of time on earth.  So, yeah, the story John is telling is bigger than Christmas as we know it.

John says: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Genesis reads:  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The author of John’s gospel wants us to hear the connection.  The story of Jesus is not an isolated event.  It is connected to the beginning of everything.  God has held the world from the beginning and has not let go.  Divine love was and is and shall be.

John uses symbol very compellingly. His writing influenced the first Christian theologians. One of the early heresies, in the fourth century, was the idea that Jesus was not equal with God.  In a little while we will sing “O Come All Ye Faithful”.  Notice verse 2 when we get there.  “True God from True God, light from light eternal”  -- that is the orthodox position, as summed up in the Nicene Creed, based on the opening to John’s gospel.  His writing and the theology that evolved from it continues to shape our thinking even now. And so, it is important to note that we do not have to embrace the dualism that might be found here. 

“The light shines in the darkness”  is so very familiar. We might easily absorb from it a sense that light is always good and dark is always bad.  In the racist culture in which we live, darkness is associated with black and light is associated with white.  It is not a far stretch from that to the same association being imposed on people, so that black people are imagined as evil and white people are imagined as good. It pervades our language and metaphors  -- pure as the snow, black as sin.   I am not suggesting that we should quit reading John’s gospel.  I am suggesting that we should read it critically, as the first theologians did, and be careful with the language that we derive from it.

So, on one level John is describing something very abstract, the Word of God which was God, the creative power, the organizing wisdom of creation. It is a big, lofty idea. 

But then, John declares, the Word became flesh.  This is another dualism. In John’s day, many would have said that flesh was bad and spirit was good. But John says the Word became flesh, God became human and lived among us.  That’s when the lofty idea gets close and personal. 

Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us. . . . However differently you and I may conceive the world, God, or one another, physical reality is something we can usually agree on. When the temperature drops below 32 degrees, I am as cold as whoever happens to be standing next to me. When I see someone run into a piece of furniture, catching the corner of a table right in the thigh, my own thigh hurts in that same exact place. . . .When I watch a perfect stranger open her mouth for a bite of Key lime pie at my favorite Mexican restaurant, my mouth starts watering without my permission.  Wearing skin brings us into communion with all these other embodied souls.”[1]

God came into the world with skin on to be with us, to know firsthand our joy and suffering, to love, to grieve and even to die.  The incarnation, God becoming flesh, has shown us a different way of seeing life and living in the world--that the creation is good, that the world we live in is good, that our bodies are good,  This is the Christmas we need so hard.

But it is even bigger than that.  John also says “to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God”.  Jesus became what we are, so that we might be what he is – born of God. This is bigger than Christmas, even Christmas in Australia.

The letter of I John says “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” 

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” 

The children of God are the peacemakers, the ones who let their lights shine for justice, the ones who embody love with skin on, so that we behold the glory of God.  The glory of God is not an impossibly bright light. It is loving your neighbor. It is praying for your enemy.  It is offering mercy, waging peace. 

In April, Luciana Lira got a call from her student’s mother.  Ms. Lira teaches second grade and English as a new language in Connecticut.  Zully was the mother of one of her students.  Zully and her husband Marvin are asylum-seekers from Guatemala. 

Zully called from the emergency room.  She was sick with Covid.  She was also 8 months pregnant and she was so sick that the baby was going to be delivered early by C-section.  Zully asked Ms. Lira to contact her husband and explain the situation to him in his own language, which she did. 

The baby was born five weeks early and healthy.   He went into the NICU as his mother went onto a ventilator, and fought for her life for the next several weeks. 

Marvin listed Ms. Lira as the family’s emergency contact.  When the baby was ready to be released, they asked Ms. Lira if she would take him, because by that time, the father and older brother had both tested positive for the coronavirus. 

And she did.  She was working from home, teaching her students remotely, but she and her husband and her own son embraced this baby, meeting all the needs of a newborn for the first six weeks of his life.  She kept in touch with the family, including the grandmother in Guatemala. Someone asked if she was a relative.  She had only known the family since the beginning of the school year.  She said, “I am just a teacher.”[2]  Others might say she was love with skin on. 

This is the Christmas we need so hard this year, and every year. 

Years before his anti-Nazi activities led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to imprisonment and death, he said this “Jesus Christ, God himself speaks to us from every human being; the other person, this enigmatic, impenetrable You, is God’s claim on us; indeed it is the holy God in the person we encounter.  . . . ‘Christ walks the earth as long as there are people, as your neighbor, as the person through whom Christ summons you, addresses you, makes claims on you.  ... Christ is at the door; he lives in the form of those around us. Will you close the door or open it for him?’[3]

It's bigger than Christmas.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God, peacemakers. And we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. Thanks be to God.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith  (New York:  HarperCollins, 2009)  pp. 35–37, 42.

[2] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/ct-teacher-cares-for-students-newborn-brother-as-family-recovers-from-covid-19/2404318/

[3]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Isabel Best, ed, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2012), p. 11.

11/29/20 - Advent 1 - I Believe: Hope for Tomorrow - Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-15

I Believe:  Hope for Tomorrow

Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-15

November 29, 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/DswlOSgglNA

If you want to get to Bethlehem, you have to start with John the Baptist.  The gospel writers all tell the story of Jesus in their own ways, but everyone of them seems to think that there is no way to get to Bethlehem without a detour to the Jordan River where John is baptizing.  Even Mark who doesn’t say anything about Bethlehem or Jesus’ birth, starts with John the Baptist. So every year, on our way to the baby born in Bethlehem, we start with the adult John the Baptizer preparing the way for the grown-up Jesus. 

We begin the church year today, we begin our journey to the manger, but this is not our first time.  We know the whole story. Beginnings make us think about endings.  Do you remember how Mark’s gospel ends?  After finding the empty tomb, Mark says, the women “said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.” 

It was such an unsatisfactory ending that two different endings were added by later editors.  But before they were added, there was the message from the angel at the tomb who said to the women “Go tell his disciples that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him.”   

Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee.  Galilee is where it all began.  The place where he taught the crowds, healed the sick and called his disciples. It was predominantly poor, not a center of power, but a place where ordinary people lived and struggled to survive.

Mark’s gospel ends abruptly, in fear and silence, or maybe mystery and wonder. The end sends us back to the beginning -- the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.  Perhaps Mark is suggesting that the story doesn’t end with resurrection, but cycles around and around, and moves forward through time up to now.

Mark’s gospel begins out in the middle of nowhere. Not in church, not in the capital city, not in the middle of the business district.  It is not a place where God is expected. Mark’s gospel ends with silence and fear. Instead of a tidy conclusion or tying up of loose ends, Mark offers radical disorientation.[1]  

This may be a good word for us now, in the tenth month of a world-wide pandemic. A good word for the beginning of  an Advent season and a story which we think we know already, a good word for a time in which so many of our certainties are being questioned.

Mark wrote his gospel close to 70 AD.   It was a time of war, brought on by revolt against Rome.  Jerusalem was under siege. Israel’s citizens were divided. Some thought God was raising up leaders who would throw off the oppressors.  Others claimed that submission to Rome’s authority would was the only way to peace and security.  Between the news of heavy-handed soldiers and fear of extremist guerillas, everyone was anxious.  The price of oil, olive oil that is, was skyrocketing. Tensions were high in villages where Jews and Gentiles lived side by side.  Families fractured along political lines. [2]

Into that context, Mark proclaims “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.”  Mark begins with John, but John is deeply connected to the past.  Just as Mark’s beginning reverberates to the future, it also brings echoes from the past.  John goes to the Jordan, which is a reminder from long-ago when the people crossed that river as they entered the promised land.  He calls the people out into the wilderness, which might remind them of the wilderness of Sinai where God provided manna and quail and water and guidance for 40 years. Or it might bring to mind the desert highway on which God led their ancestors home from exile. 

John is adapting, anticipating the new in the midst of the old. He trusts that God will redeem humanity from suffering, evil and injustice because of the ways God has done so in the past. 

Out in the middle of nowhere, John preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  Repentance means change. Change of mind, change of heart, change of behavior.  It is a radical turning. Humans normally avoid this kind of thing.  It usually involves giving up things we like, things in which we find pleasure or comfort or security. Repentance has become an uncomfortable word, often associated with guilt or shame.  But crowds were going out to John, out to the middle of nowhere. They were seriously willing to change their routine in order to get in on the good news. 

They might have hunkered down, simply tried to grit their teeth and hang on for however long Roman occupation endured, but instead these crowds were anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, preparing themselves for what would come next. John tells them the hard truth – like it or not, change is going to come.

Some of us are hunkering down, just enduring the break in our routine because of pandemic.  The last months have revealed many things we might not wish to look at – racial and economic disparities, lack of access to health care, dehumanizing immigration policies, the consequences of not trusting science, the effects of party loyalty over the common good.    I wonder if we can see the disruption in our lives, not as a time to be endured, but as a call to repentance, an invitation to change.

I wonder if we can hope for more than returning to normal, but instead prepare ourselves for a shifted landscape in which God is active in new ways to redeem us from suffering, evil and injustice. I wonder.

John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, wearing the clothes and eating the diet of a wild man.  We might picture him like a street preacher with a megaphone.  We might hear him shouting, maybe in the accent of a TV evangelist.

But that is not exactly how Mark introduces him.  Mark focuses our attention on the time of Isaiah, six hundred years earlier. There were similarities with John’s time – It was Babylon, instead of Rome, who devastated Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.  But it was still the people of Israel who were longing for peace in their homeland as they suffered under enemy hands.  The people who said “by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”

Mark compares John the Baptist to the prophet Isaiah.  He quotes from Isaiah 40 which begins “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says God.  “Speak tenderly.” 

What if John is not shouting at all?  What if John is speaking tenderly?  What if we heard John’s message, not as scolding, not as yelling?  What if we heard it as gentle truth-telling, as tender comfort?  What if his message is one of hope and joy that something wonderful is about to happen?

God’s movement is often abrupt and unsettling.  It can be radically disorienting, coming as a whisper rather than a shout.  Sometimes really good news comes only with a honest, hard look at the landscape of our lives.  And sometimes that truth is tender and comforting.

Speak tenderly, God says to Isaiah. Be gentle with people in pain.  Listen to each other, especially when you are in the midst of trauma.   Comfort, comfort my people, says God.

The story is told that during the Blitz in World War II Britain, when the city was strafed and bombed, many children were evacuated to the country, but some remained in London and many of those were orphans. Some were sheltered in a Jesuit order of brothers, who noticed the children had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, night after night. When the children were being put to bed one night, one of the brothers guessed the children’s problem was that they were anxious because of uncertainty in their lives, and gave each child a small piece of bread, saying something like this – “Hold on to your piece of bread while you are sleeping. Remember  when you woke up this morning, we fed you and took care of you. When you wake up tomorrow, and we will be here for you. Let the bread remind you of this. Good night, children.” And the children slept.[3]

Friends, take comfort. God took care of us when we woke this morning and God-with-us, Emmanuel will be present when we wake tomorrow. 

The good news of Jesus which we have been sharing for centuries encompasses life and death, suffering and joy, despair and hope.  It is a story that enters ordinary life at moments when we are lost and when we are found.  It embraces honest lament and songs of joy.  It is a story told by fearful people and faithful people – and often, we are the same people.

Frederick Buechner says it this way, “Then at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn't with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts--whether we believe in God or not--that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. . . . because we remember, we have this high and holy hope, that what Christ has done, Christ will continue to do, that what God has begun in us and our world, God will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition.”[4]

Beloved ones, we begin again, the start of the church year, the journey to a manger. We begin again, standing up to our knees in the past, with our eyes on the future, waiting tenderly, with hope.  Amen. 

[1] Karoline Lewis, Beginnings and Endings, at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-advent-2/commentary-on-mark-11-8

[2] Christopher R. Hutson in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008) p. 44.

[3] Dennis Linn, Sheila Linn, Matthew Linn Sleeping With Bread:  Holding What Gives You Life (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 1

[4] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, (New York:  HarperCollins, 1984) pp.11-12.

11/22/20 - Remember to Remember - Deuteronomy 8:7-18

Remember to Remember

Deuteronomy 8:7-18

November 22, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

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

Every Tuesday, I get together with some pastors for Bible study and conversation.  We’ve been doing this for 3 or 4 years now. We’ve learned each other’s stories.  When John the Baptist comes up in the lectionary, a certain one of us is undoubtedly going to mention a particularly compelling statue of him in Italy.  When we talk about the wedding at Cana, another one is going to remember a funny incident at a wedding in a former church.  I used to get impatient with hearing the same stories over and over again. Until the day I offered what I thought was a rather insightful comment and one of my colleagues looked at me and said, “I’ve heard you say that before.”  That was when I realized that I had become one of those preachers who repeats herself and doesn’t even realize it.  We all remember certain things and what we remember, we remind ourselves about on a regular basis.  That’s not a bad thing, especially if we remember important stuff.

The book of Deuteronomy is concerned with remembering to remember the important stuff.  As the people enter the land, as they leave behind the hardship of wilderness, Moses wants them to make sure they do not forget the Lord who brought them to where they are. 

There’s a story about an old man, who every week, walked from his house down to the ocean, carrying a bucket of shrimp.  He would walk to the end of the pier, reach in his bucket, and feed the seagulls.  Slowly, silently, he distributed the contents of his bucket, every Friday evening, while the sun slipped over the horizon. 

His name was Eddie Rickenbacker, the most decorated WWI fighter pilot.  In 1942, during WWII, President Roosevelt dispatched Eddie with a special message to General MacArthur in the Pacific theatre.  The B-17 in which Captain Rickenbacker was flying got lost, ran out of fuel and ditched in the sea. 

The crew of eight made it into life rafts and began a long and desperate fight to survive the sun, sharks banging on the bottom of the raft, waves, but most of all hunger.  They ran out of food on day three.

On day eight, when it seemed the end had come and there was no hope, and they had prayed what they thought were their last prayers together, Captain Rickenbacker, in the raft, was dozing with his cap over his eyes.  He felt something.  A bird had landed on his head.  He thought if he could catch it, they might survive.  He caught it.  And they ate it.  And used its intestines for bait and caught fish.  The capture of that seagull gave them enough hope and strength and fortitude that seven of the eight men survived the 24 days adrift in their rafts. 

The story of old Eddie Rickenbacker feeding the seagulls in his neighborhood every Friday has been told countless times. While there is some disputing whether Rickenbacker actually fed gulls every Friday, the story of the plane being ditched in the Pacific, the seagull alighting on his head, and his capture, Rickenbacker himself recounted in his autobiography. [1]

It is a story of gratitude. It is a story of careful, intentional remembering. Feeding the seagulls is a ritual way to say thank you, to remember and not to take life for granted.   

The book of Deuteronomy is so concerned with remembering that it describes several rituals, which when performed correctly, would keep the faith memories alive.  After harvest each year, each farmer was to bring a certain portion of the harvest and offer it to God. And every time, he was to tell the story, “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. Then Pharoah treated us harshly. We cried out to God who delivered us with a mighty hand and brought us to this good place.”  You brought the offering and you told the story.  It was a ritual of remembering and thanksgiving. 

We have a national ritual of remembering. More than one actually, because if you are native, you tell the story differently.  But the story of those descended from immigrants recalls that 102 pilgrims set out from England in 1620.  Sixty-five days later, after storms and sea-sickness and miserably cramped quarters and a burial at sea and a birth on board and the rescue of a man swept overboard, they sighted land.  The winter in New England was more harsh than anything they had ever experienced.  Every family lost someone; a child, a parent, a grandparent.  Thanks to friendly native Americans, they learned to plant and fertilize. By harvest time, they knew they could survive another winter on the corn, squash, beans, peas, and barley. And so, still grieving their losses, they set aside a day for thanksgiving.  Every year, in schools and churches, on greeting cards and commercials, their story is told and we remember. 

The spiritual leader Joan Chittister says that Thanksgiving was instituted only after the pilgrims had withstood great sacrifice and difficult living. She writes, “it was not a feast of baubles.  It was a recognition of the glory of survival.” And then she asks a question that I find particularly poignant. She says, “What have you survived this year that is worth your gratitude?  Forget all the fixtures and gadgets and extras in which you’re steeped.  Give thanks for the real riches of life, the things that make you what you are deep down.”[2]

“What have you survived this year that is worth your gratitude?”  When 2020 is over, when, please God, pandemic is over, what do you want to remember to remember?  What is worth your gratitude?

That video that we saw during the children’s time was made by David Steindl-Rast.  He is an American Benedictine monk who was born in Austria.  At 94, after a deeply intensive spiritual life, he knows a few things about gratitude.  He said, “The root of joy is gratefulness… it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”[3]  That might sound backwards.  We might think that something happens to make us joyful and then gratitude follows.  But I think there is a truth here.  It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.  The more we remember with gratitude, the more thankful we will feel, which will lead to more contentment and more joy in our lives. 

Deuteronomy reminds the people, when your life gets easier, do not forget the Lord.  Do not take things for granted.  Some of us tell ourselves that often – count your blessings, don’t take them for granted.  But we forget, don’t we? We take electricity for granted, until we lose power for a day or four.  We take for granted, being able to come and go freely, gathering for worship and for holidays, hugging those we love, until the threat of disease takes away those possibilities.  Sometimes we realize what we have only when it is threatened or absent.  Deuteronomy says to avoid that, set out to remember, remember on purpose, remember with ritual.  Or as our own Hannah said, “Know what you have and be glad about it.”

We have rituals to help us remember and be grateful.   An annual Thanksgiving celebration is one.  So is sharing communion every month and weekly worship and singing.  Many people know more theology from their hymnals than from their Bibles.  Songs get into our heads and hearts and stay there.  This is a singing congregation – even on Zoom. We sing and remember and are grateful every week.  Every year at this time, we engage in the rituals of making a budget and offering our pledges.  I suppose that some of us may do that out of a sense of duty or maybe even guilt, but how much more joyful it is, when it comes from a place of gratitude. 

Many years ago, Joan Chittister attended an international conference in Asia on the status of women.  Most of the participants were women she describes as “well-funded activist types or official observers. They were all there to professionally analyze various women’s issues around the world, especially of the needs of women in developing countries.  At the gathering, these professional women called for more education for girls, more equality through government legislation, more birth control training, better health-care programs, and most importantly more participation of women at all levels of the political process.

As the conference was drawing to a close, a leader of one of the small group workshops, passed a piece of paper around and asked everyone to share her e-mail address so that they could all stay in contact and support one another in their work. One of the participants; a woman named Rose, was a Kenyan pastor of a Presbyterian church in Africa. When the sheet of paper came to her, she simply filled in her name and passed it on. The woman next to Rose passed the paper back to her and pointed out that she had neglected to put her email address on the form. Rose answered quietly:  “I don’t have email where I am.  It is too expensive for us.”

When Sister Joan and her colleague were getting into a cab to leave, her colleague said that she couldn’t leave without first seeing Rose. She asked Sister Joan to wait and rushed back into the hotel saying that she had promised to give something to Rose.  Later as they were waiting to check in for their flight, Sister Joan asked her colleague, what she had given to Rose. Her friend answered that she had given Rose her credit card.

“Your credit card? Why in heaven’s name would you give Rose your credit card?”

Her friend answered quietly, “So she can pay for her email every month.” [4]

E-mail is another thing we might take for granted. And generosity is another way to act out gratitude.

Beloved ones, may we remember the Lord our God who is gracious and loving and abounding in kindness.  May we remember on purpose, may we remember with gratitude, the kind of gratitude that expresses it self with joy and generosity.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] The Rev. Don Lincoln in his sermon How Are You?  November 24,2019 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, West Chester, PA

[2] Joan D. Chittister, The Psalms: Meditations for Every Day of the Year (New York:  Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), p. 126.

[3] Brother David Stenidl-Rast, OSB, http://www.gratefulness.org

[4] Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister, For All That Has Been, Thanks (Norwich, UK:  Canterbury Press, 2010) pp. 20-22

11/15/20 - With a Grateful Heart - Luke 17:11-19

With a Grateful Heart

Luke 17:11-19

November 15, 2020

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 Image:  James Tissot The Healing of Ten Lepers

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

Let’s start at the end this time, shall we?  “Your faith has made you well.”  That’s the last line of today’s story.  Jesus tells the man “your faith has made you well”  or “your faith has saved you,” depending on which translation you read. The verb sozo means both to heal or make well and to rescue from danger or destruction.  In a theological sense, it can mean to grant salvation from sin.

“Your faith has healed you and saved you” is what Jesus says to the tenth man, the one who used to have leprosy but doesn’t any more.  He says it to the one who came back to say thank you, the only one who did that.  The man has demonstrated his faith with his gratitude.  Jesus’ words suggest that there is a close relationship between faith and gratitude and that there is something life-giving about gratitude. [1]

There is a good bit of empirical evidence for the relationship between gratitude and healing. You can find it on the internet.  Let me describe just one study

In 2015, researchers at UC-San Diego and the University of Stirling in Scotland, looked at 186 people who had stage B heart failure.  Using psychological tests to measure gratitude, they found that higher gratitude scores were associated with better mood, higher quality sleep and less inflammation.

They asked one group to keep a gratitude journal for eight weeks.  Every day they were to write down three things they were thankful for.  The control group was not asked to do that. They just kept living their normal lives.  Both groups continued receiving the same clinical care.  What they found was that the group who kept the gratitude journals had significant reductions in inflammation and improved heart rate variability. The control group did not show those improvements.

Dr. Paul Mills, one of the lead investigators said “It seems that a more grateful heart is indeed a more healthy heart, and that gratitude journaling is an easy way to support cardiac health.”[2]  Who knew?

It turns out that saying “thank you” matters.  That is often understood as the message of this story in Luke’s gospel.  It often gets reduced to an object lesson in which the nine other men are the examples of what not to do.  I’m not very fond of this story and I think maybe that is because of the way that interpreters have treated the nine.   

When Jesus first encounters these men, Luke says “keeping their distance, they called out to him,”  Keeping their distance – that jumped out at me, reading this in 2020. Keeping their distance – I wonder if it was six feet or maybe more.  They kept their distance because they have leprosy, which could be any of a number of skin diseases in that time. They have leprosy which frightened many people.  They didn’t know about germs, but they knew enough to suspect that some things were contagious and so, people with leprosy had to keep their distance.

These 10 men were rule-keepers.  They kept the rule that protected the rest of the community from getting their illness. That’s a good thing.  And they had some compassion.  Ordinarily Jews and Samaritans didn’t have anything to do with each other.  They were cultural enemies.  But this group includes one Samaritan. The nine must realize how very isolated he would be, being a Samaritan with leprosy and so they allow him to join them, giving him the benefit of safety in numbers.  That’s a good thing too.  I’m pointing this out because, again, I think that we who read this story are not always kind to the nine.

The ten men with leprosy call out to Jesus.  Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priest.  The priest is the one who can certify them as leprosy-negative.  They obey Jesus.  They head down the road and somewhere along the way, they discover that their skin is clear; they have been healed.  Almost all of them keep on going to the priest. Because that’s what Jesus told them to do.  Because that’s what the rules say – the priest is the one with the authority to let them go back to their families and their jobs and their lives.  Jesus told them to go.  As they were going, they were healed – that’s probably a good indication that they should follow the rest of Jesus’ instructions and continue going all the way to the priest.

I don’t think it is fair to say that they are not grateful.  We don’t know that.  We only know that they don’t express that gratitude to Jesus.

But, as Paul Duke writes, “one of them drops back, stops, turns around. Something wilder than compliance comes into his mind. He is a new man, and that calls for a new voice. He runs back, ‘praising God with a loud voice,’ then falls at the feet of Jesus, pouring out the gladness of his thanks. It isn’t a tidy little thank-you speech but a stammering babble and a puddle of tears in the dust. It has been said that praise is ‘the jazz factor’ of faith. This man’s freedom has found its voice and is having its proper play at Jesus’ feet. Praise is love improvising its answer to Love.” [3]

This time he doesn’t have to keep his distance.  This time, he falls at Jesus’ feet and his joy cannot be contained.

Monday was one of those 70 degree days.  You remember, we had several of them in a row.  On Monday, I met a friend at the Normanskill Preserve. I had never been there before.  It was a perfect day to encounter it for the first time.  Gail and I walked and talked for a couple of hours.  We had seen each other only once since March and there was a lot to catch up on. At bedtime, I realized that I was feeling especially contented.  I was feeling like I had just finished a really good book or like someone had given me a gift that was just what I wanted. I became aware that I was feeling like that and I wondered why.  It took me a bit to realize that the feeling came because I had been writing in my gratitude journal. I had had a good day, for sure, but I felt it the most when I expressed my gratitude.

If gratitude is good for us and if it makes us feel good, then why don’t more of us do it more often?  (Maybe you all do.  Maybe I am just preaching to myself here.  Or just to those of us who are like the nine men who kept on going to the priest.)

What keeps us from expressing gratitude? 

1.     Sometimes we don’t recognize the gifts we have received.  We don’t perceive grace when it happens. We think that the daily blessings of our lives are normal.  Nothing to write home about.  Nothing to give particular thanks for.

2.    Sometimes we think we deserve what we have.  We worked hard for it.  We put in the hours and sweat equity.  We studied and practiced and developed our talents.  The only one to thank would be ourselves.

3.    Sometimes we forget. Life keeps happening.  We do what is required or pragmatic.  We keep following the instructions on the to-do list.  We are grateful, but we rarely stop to express it.

A recent study by the Templeton Foundation found that 90% of Americans think that gratitude is important, but only 52% of women and 44% of men express their gratitude on a regular basis.  There is a gap between what we say we believe about gratitude and how we act on it.  Those statistics are a bit higher for religious people with 65% expressing gratitude regularly. [4]  So, again I realize that many of you are probably in that category.

What I am learning is that feeling gratitude is good, but expressing it has even more power.  Saying thank you out loud to another human being, taking the time to reflect on it and write it down, paying it forward – all of these are part of the discipline of gratitude.  Like so many other disciplines, the more that we practice it, the more natural and spontaneous it can become.  Paul Duke described it as the jazz factor of faith – praise is love improvising its answer to God’s love. What I know about jazz musicians is that they can improvise only because they have mastered the foundations.  Choosing gratitude and expressing it are among of the basic foundations of Christian faith.   

I am not fond of this story because of the way interpreters have treated the nine.  That’s probably because I’m a rule-follower, an instruction-reader.  Even after all these years of life and ministry,  I rarely feel the freedom to improvise.  

Which is probably why I appreciate Barbara Brown Taylor’s reflection.  She thinks that she is like the nine.  She thinks that most of her congregation are also like those who follow Jesus’ instructions faithfully, but are still missing something. 

Taylor says, “ ‘Where are the nine’ Jesus asks, but I know where they are. ‘Where is the tenth leper?’ That is what I want to know. Where is the one who followed his heart instead of his instructions, who accepted his life as a gift and gave it back again, whose thanksgiving rose up from somewhere so deep inside him that it turned him around, changed his direction, led him to Jesus, made him well?’

“Where are the nine?? Where is the tenth?! Where is the disorderly one who failed to go along with the crowd,  the impulsive one who fell on his face in the dirt, the fanatical one who loved God so much that obedience was beside the point? Where did that one go? Not that I am likely to go after him. It is safer here with the nine—we know the rules and who does what. We are the ones upon whom the institution depends. But the missing one, the one who turned back, or was turned away, or turned against—where did he go? Who is he, and whom is he with, and what does he know that we do not know? Where are the nine? We are here, right here. But where, for the love of God, is the tenth?”[5]

Beloved ones, let us give thanks.  Thanks for the world, for each other, for grace in Jesus Christ, for daily gifts, large and small.  Let us improvise our answer to God’s love with a gratitude so deep that it makes us well. Amen.

[1] John Buchanan in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010) p. 169.

[2] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/04/grateful-heart

[3]  Paul Duke “Down the Road and Back,” The Christian Century, September 27, 1995

[4] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_grateful_are_americans

[5] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, (Cambridge:  Cowley Publications, 1993),  pp. 112-113

11/8/20 - In All Circumstances? - 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

In All Circumstances?

November 8, 2020

I Thessalonians 5:16-18

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/QQ_FIEo3wPk

I guess there are some Christians who think that you should thank God for everything.  Thank God for the friend who helps you when you need it, for the rain that waters your garden, for the places of beauty in your day.  But for these Christians, it also means expressing gratitude for a flat tire or a lost job or the onset of disease. Now I’m not sure where that theology comes from, but I suspect that some of it might have to do with how they understand the short reading we heard from I Thessalonians where Paul says  “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”

Trying to honor God and be faithful to Scripture, sometimes people feel that they are supposed to give thanks for misfortune, for poverty or war or disease. It doesn’t feel right.  It doesn’t make sense, but maybe they chalk it up to being a spiritual mystery, one of those things beyond our understanding, and so they say thanks for things they really are not thankful for and hope that God will honor their attempt.

The letter to the Thessalonians is the very earliest part of the New Testament. Written only about 20 years after Jesus, it contains Paul’s instructions about how to live out a faithful life in response to the good news. The community at Thessalonika was a newly formed church who believed that Jesus would return during their lifetime. Only now some of their number had died before Jesus came back, and that was distressing. They also suffered persecution and the hardship of being out of step with their culture in order to be in step with the gospel.  All of that is to say, that life was no easier for them than it is for us, and yet, to them, Paul wrote “give thanks in all circumstances.”

In all circumstances.  Did you catch that?  In English and in Greek, the verse says to give thanks in everything, but not for everything, not because of everything.  We are not asked to give thanks for violence or poverty or abuse or disease, but to give thanks in the midst of those situations, in spite of them.

I’m thankful right now, for scholars who pay attention to details like adjectives.  The difference in meaning between in and for is pretty big here.

So I am grateful. Understanding that I am not required to be thankful for bad things does make Paul’s instructions more attainable. It does . . . but understanding that I could give thanks in the midst of hard things instead of giving thanks for them, does not mean that it is always easy to do so.   

Robert Emmons is a professor of psychology at UC Davis.  He has been studying gratitude for decades. He says that is important to make a distinction between feeling grateful and being grateful.  He writes “being grateful is a choice, a prevailing attitude that endures and is relatively immune to the gains and losses that flow in and out of our lives.” [1] 

The spiritual discipline of gratitude means choosing to see the good, to find the blessing that we can be thankful for, regardless of how we feel.  One way to do that might be to intentionally look at the situation differently, to change our perspective.  This public service announcement from the Foundation For a Better Life demonstrates.  The boy speaks very quickly at first.  He says “I’m the greatest hitter in the world.”

https://www.passiton.com/inspirational-stories-tv-spots/99-the-greatest

“I’m the great pitcher in the world” That is what Wendell Berry might call “being joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

The writer of the Book of Habakkuk says this:  “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines, though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.”  (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

Habakkuk looks at the facts of his situation and says “Hallelujah” anyway.  It seems that being grateful, or at minimum expressing gratitude, is something we can do without feeling grateful.  And in fact, naming something that we appreciate may trigger the feelings of gratitude.  Exercising the muscle of gratitude may seem like just going through the motions, but going through the motions may, in fact, help us to give thanks in very difficult circumstances. 

The first person killed in a hate crime after September 11 was a man named Balbir Singh Sodhi. He was shot standing in front of his gas station in Arizona. He was shot because he was wearing a turban.  He was a Sikh.  For Sikhs, the turban is a symbol of a commitment to serving others, but his murderer saw anyone with a similar head-covering as an enemy terrorist. 

At that time, Valarie Kaur was a young adult on her way to becoming an academic.  September 11 and the events afterwards changed her vocational path.  She became an activist; now she is nationally known. Balbir Singh Sodhi was a family friend. She felt called to respond and so she made her way to Arizona with a video camera.  The stories of the suffering of Sikhs and Muslims in America were not being told on the national news. So with her camera, Valarie asked his widow, Joginder Kaur, what she would like to say to the American people. 

What would we choose to express in such circumstances?  Maybe anger, righteous, justifiable anger.  Or blame, a demand for justice.  Maybe just raw grief.

When Valarie asked “what do you want to say to the American people?”  Jogindar Kaur said “Thank you.  Tell them ‘thank you.’  3,000 Americans came to my husband’s memorial.  They did not know me, but they wept with me. Tell them ‘thank you.’[2] 

Her response does not strike me as naïve optimism.  She did not deny the pain and grief or reality of her loss at all, but in the midst of that loss, she was able to find one good thing.  She strikes me as someone who has exercised spiritual muscles toward maturity.

Sometimes, in crisis, we discover things that matter and we are grateful.  And sometimes, the fact that we are grateful becomes a way we cope with the crisis.  This, I think, is why Paul summarizes it so succinctly for the Thessalonians – “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  One scholar suggests that for whatever reason, thanksgiving did not come easily to the Thessalonians and that they have a particular need to develop the practice..[3] 

Perhaps knowing of their crises, Paul especially wants them to develop the resilience that may come with gratitude. 

It is that same impulse that led the Executive Team to lift up gratitude as an emphasis for this season.  Earlier this fall, as we anticipated this time of the year when we usually focus on financial stewardship, your church leaders talked about their gratitude, their gratitude for the ways our faith community has stayed connected, for the ways you have kept up with your financial and relational commitments.  Most of you received a letter this week.  It came from Judy as moderator, expressing the church’s gratitude for you and inviting you to express your gratitude in the form of a financial commitment for 2021.  If you didn’t receive that letter yet, please contact the church office if it doesn’t arrive in the next day or two.

The purpose of the letter is to enable a tangible ritual of thanksgiving.  One of the ways we express our thanks to God is in our tithes and offerings.  But our other very real purpose of this emphasis  on gratitude is the same as the apostle Paul’s – to remind us of ways to form our lives around the good news of Jesus, to cultivate spiritual disciplines that press us towards maturity, and to develop practices that build resilience in times of crisis.  

The best way I know to encourage gratitude is with stories.  The last one for today is one I’ve told before, but not in several years.  It has a different resonance for me this year in the midst of pandemic.  Perhaps it will for you as well. 

In 1637, all of Europe was at war. The  Thirty Years War  was a terrible time.  There was a walled city called Eilenburg in Germany and thousands of refugees came there seeking safety.  Then the plague came. Soon thousands upon thousands of children and teenagers and men and women were dying. At this time, a 51-year-old pastor named Martin Rinkart, was serving a Lutheran Church in Eilenburg.  In one year, more than 4,000 people died, including Martin’s own wife.  At one point, he was the only pastor remaining in that city – one had moved to a safer place and Martin performed the funerals of the other two.  So, in the midst of his own grief and trauma, Martin was conducting 40-50 funerals a day.

To his congregation he said, “We must lean on God’s presence. We must be the presence of Jesus for one another. We must have the sustaining presence of the spirit to guide us or we will not survive.” And in this time when thousands of people were dying every day, Martin Rinkart wrote a prayer of gratitude which he taught to his children.  We know that prayer as the hymn “Now Thank We All Our God.”  Let us sing it now, as our own way of giving thanks in all circumstances.

[1] https://www.dailygood.org/story/532/how-gratitude-can-help-you-through-hard-times-robert-emmons/

[2] https://youtu.be/5ErKrSyUpEo

[3] Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, Anchor Bible vol. 32B (New York:  Doubleday, 2000), p. 330.

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