2/14/21 - With Authority - Mark 1:21-28

With Authority

Mark 1:21-28

February 14, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Christ Preaching at Capernaum

Maurycy Gottlieb, circa 1878-79

Note:  A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/GRarupM44lM

Perhaps you’ve been to a stand-up comedy show when a heckler interrupted or a politician’s stump speech when a protester demanded attention.  Maybe you haven’t been there in person but you may have seen clips of times when it was a big enough deal to make the news.  When that happens, there is a different kind of energy in the crowd.  People get nervous and excited.  Some will internally side with the heckler, some with the comedian. For some it is just part of the entertainment, but others will be uncomfortable until the tension is resolved.  Imagine that kind of disruption in church.  Maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe you were there.  It has happened in some minor ways during worship at Emmanuel.  Usually when I was at the lectern.  It was unexpected and perhaps distressing to some of us.  We all kind of held our collective breath waiting for the interruption to end and worship to continue. 

We can imagine Jesus at the lectern in Capernaum.  Perhaps he has been speaking for 30 minutes or just for 5, but then the unnamed man yells out, disrupting everything. That feel of discomfort, of nervous energy, of waiting to see who will get the upper hand sets up the tension in this scene.

As people with a scientific worldview, we don’t quite know what to do with this story.  We often apply contemporary categories to the man with the unclean spirit, suggesting that he might have schizophrenia or some other illness. Unlike first-century Palestinians, we don’t generally think in the category of demon possession, and so we want to reduce this story to categories that we understand.

Fred Craddock was a pastor and seminary professor of the last century who said, “we have not, by the announcement that we do not believe in demons, reduced one whit the amount of personal and corporate evil in the world. The names of the enemies have been changed, but the battles still rage.”[1]

Whether or not we believe in individual demons, we can faithfully enter into this story if we understand it as a struggle between good and evil.  The demonic is that which distorts God’s good purposes.  Perhaps it is not such much a personal being as patterns of behavior and ways of thinking that distort our sense of reality.  I appreciate the ways that Thomas Troeger describes it in the hymn we sang earlier – doubts that stir the heart to panic, fears distorting reason’s sight, guilt that makes our loving frantic, dreams that cloud the soul with fright.[2]

The man in Capernaum is in the grip of something -- doubts or fears or guilt -- and Jesus delivers him from that.  On one level, this is a story of individual healing. But it is more than that. This is an exorcism, a confrontation between competing authorities. 

Scholar Ched Myers describes it as a symbolic action which carries weight and meaning beyond the individual level. Symbolic actions are significant because of the context in which they occur.  A monk nails a list up on a church door. A woman sits down on a bus.  Those actions matter on an individual level, but also on a much larger scale.

Jesus is in the middle of teaching. Mark has already said that the people are amazed at how Jesus teaches – with authority.  Interestingly, not a word of what he was teaching is reported here.  But something stirs up the man, so that he yells out “What do you have to do with us?”  which is more literally translated “what do we have in common?” 

“Why are you meddling, Jesus?  What business is it of yours?”

“Stay in your lane, Jesus.”

The content of Jesus’ teaching is pushing someone’s buttons.  It is challenging someone or something in that church.  I’m using the word “church” on purpose, because if I say synagogue, then we might be tempted to think this phenomena happens only in other traditions, not in our own.  And that would be to keep Jesus’ authority at a safe distance.  So in the church, Jesus is teaching and what he says is a challenge to the religious leaders.   We know that they are the target of the symbolic action because they are the only other named authority in the story. 

Ched Myers says that Jesus’ symbolic acts were powerful not because they challenged the laws of nature [with miraculous healing] but because they challenged the very structures of social existence.[3]  If you were near the top of the social order, you perceived Jesus as destructive and deviant.  If you were near the bottom, you perceived him as liberating.

And lest we still think that this happens only in other traditions, I remember some conversations from my seminary days.  With some regularity, the question of pastoral authority would be raised.  The question might be framed “do pastors have special authority because we are called by God or because we are ordained?”  Or it might be a conversation about how careful pastors should be about what they say and do because they wear their authority like a cape and any missteps might sully it.  What I remember is that the male students were always very invested in the details of these conversations while the women tended to resist the very idea of a hierarchy in which pastors were a step above everyone else.  I always appreciated the position of Fred Craddock who wrote a very influential book about preaching.  It was entitled As One without Authority.  As One Without Authority. Part of the premise of that book is that effective preaching enables people to hear the voice of Jesus as authoritative in their own hearts and minds, that pastors’ only claim to authority is in the same Jesus available to all. Jesus is the true authority.

A few years ago, the current president of my seminary delivered a graduation speech in which he challenged those future pastors to go and preach as ones with authority.  That current president was a student when I was.  Decades later, we still approach the question from very different points of view.

The demons attempt to name Jesus as a way to control him.  Jesus silences them.  Silencing our demons may be necessary so that we can hear the true authority in our lives.

Sometimes the demons are the voices in our heads.  I don’t mean the kind of voices that might accompany mental illness. I mean the messages that we have absorbed over our lifetimes. They might be mantras from parents or grandparents.  You might hear the voice of a favorite teacher or an honest critic who told you the truth.  Many of your voices are in my head, along with those from other congregations.  I know some of your favorite theological soap boxes, the things you think someone else really needs to hear, and something I said in a sermon once that you objected to.  I have a lot of voices in my head.  I expect you do too.  Silencing those voices allows us to hear the true authority in our lives. 

In her book Pastrix, Nadia Bolz-Weber explains it this way, “Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own. But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong: capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school—they all have a go at telling us who we are. But only God can do that. Everything else is temptation. Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are.”[4]

I am fascinated that Mark tells us more about how Jesus taught than what he said. I suspect that Little Man’s Grandma is right when she said that Jesus just taught some simple truths about life and love.  But the way that he taught enabled people to hear them in transformative ways, ways that challenged them and challenged the status quo.  That was what amazed and astounded the people who heard him.

The African-American teacher and preacher Howard Thurman said it this way “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.  And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”[5] . . .  If you cannot hear it, you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.  Knowing how committed Thurman was to following Jesus, it is not a stretch to understand that the sound of the genuine for him was the voice of Jesus resonating with authority in his life.

There are so many claims to authority these days;  so many potential voices to attend to, so many alternate realities which prey on doubts and fears, which disturb our peace with distortions and subversions of God’s good purposes. With all of that swirling around us, it is imperative that we listen for the only true authority in our lives, that we silence all other voices except that of Jesus.

Listen, listen to the truest guide we will ever have. Know that before all else, God has claimed us and loved us. Trust that voice to comfort and challenge, to heal, to transform.  Amen.

[1] Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation series (Louisville:  John Knox Press, 1990), p. 66

[2] Silence! Frenzied, Unclean Spirit  lyrics by Thomas H. Troeger, 1984  Oxford University Press ©1986

[3] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), pp 147-148

[4] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful, Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York:  Jericho Books, 2013), pp 138-139

[5] From Howard Thurman's 1980 commencement address at Spelman College. 

1/31/21 - Following - Mark 1:14-20

Following

Mark 1:14-20

January 31, 2021

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/C5nNZGqZE7c

“Every three years all people should forget whatever they have learned about Jesus and begin the study all over again.”[1] So said Robert McAfee Brown, a Presbyterian theologian and professor of the last century.  He was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at Oxford. Later he was a professor at Union Seminary and Stanford and the Pacific School of Religion.  Academic learning was obviously a high value, but even so, he said that people should forget whatever they have learned about Jesus and start all over again every three years.

It is not easy to unlearn what we think we know.  It is not easy to hear a Bible story as familiar as Jesus calling his first disciples with fresh ears.  But I encourage us to try to do it today.

There is an urgency to Mark’s narrative.  His favorite word is “immediately”.  Jesus’ ministry begins in the aftermath of the arrest of John the Baptist. It an uneasy, troubled time.  The risks of making religious-political waves are all too evident, but this is the time when Jesus calls and the time when the disciples follow.

The first ones Jesus calls are fishermen.  They represent an independent artisan class.  They are an economic step above the day laborers whom they could afford to hire.  They are also brothers. They represent households, extended families who depend on their fishing to sustain life.  Simon, Andrew, James and John are not people with nothing to lose, but rather the opposite. There is a definite personal cost to following Jesus. Simon and Andrew drop their nets, the tools of their trade.  James and John abandon their father. This call is urgent and disruptive, a radical break with business as usual. 

Jesus literally says to them “come behind me.”  The word for behind (opiso) can be a spatial term, to stand or walk behind someone. It can be a temporal term, to come at a time after something else. It can also be a status term, behind or under in terms of rank or importance. [2]

Discipleship can require all of these meanings, but the idea that Jesus comes first in importance is evident right away.  They leave everything to follow him.

“Come behind me,” Jesus says, “ and I will teach you to fish for people.”

We hear those familiar words and we know what they mean – right?  We’ve heard those words repeated in song and story more times than we can begin to count. We know that to fish for people means to save their souls, to be involved in evangelism, in sharing the good news.  Some of us, in some streams of Christian tradition, emphatically know that is what fishing for people means.

Some of us know that it means something else.  We know that the fish hook is a Biblical symbol of judgment, especially God’s judgment on the rich and the powerful in the time of the prophets.  To fish for people means to be involved in the struggle against power and privilege, to join Jesus on the side of love and justice.  Some of us, in some streams of the Christian tradition emphatically know that is what fishing for people means.

The interpretation that we prefer, that we know to be truest, depends a lot on what we first learned and who taught us. Probably we learned that first interpretation so well that we’ve never even heard the other one.  Which is why Robert Brown said that we should forget what we know and start over again every three years. 

In the 2,000 years since Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee, his followers have divided and re-divided into so many camps, each claiming to know what Jesus really meant in this verse or that story. But what if, what if, both meanings are true?  What if to fish for people means to struggle for love and justice AND to share the gospel evangelistically?  What if it means to be concerned about someone’s well-being in the eternal sense AND also in the here and now?

It turns out that, according to scholar Robert Smith,  “in the ancient world fishing was a metaphor for two distinct activities: judgment and teaching. Fishing for people meant bringing them to justice by dragging them out of their hiding places and setting them before the judge at the end of the world. And fishing was also used of teaching people, of the process of leading them from ignorance to wisdom.[3]

We don’t have to choose between interpretations.  Jesus could easily have intended both meanings and probably did. 

As I said, there is an urgency in Mark’s tone, things are changing quickly, the time to join God’s action in the world is now. That answers the “when” question, but not the “how”.  James and John dropped their nets and literally walked behind Jesus. That is not an option for us, so how do we respond to his call?

Jesus first words in this gospel are “repent and believe the good news.”  Repent and believe are present tense imperative verbs, which implies continued or repeated actions.  “Keep on repenting.”  “Keep on believing”.  These are not actions that we do once and we’re done.   Rather, following Jesus means that we keep changing, keep trusting.  That is part of the adventure. Imagine a child’s game of “Follow the Leader” in which the leader’s actions never varied.  How boring would that be?  Never let it be said that Jesus was boring. 

Sometime in the 1990’s the Anglican bishop Mark Dyer suggested that great changes happen in cycles, saying that “every 500 years, the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.”  Phyllis Tickle quoted him in her book a few years later and it became a popular way to think about the dramatic changes happening in our time.[4] It is a concept we have talked about often here at Emmanuel.

We know that change is imminent and necessary. We know that following Jesus takes different forms in different times and places, but we have been sorting through our stuff for a while now, trying to decide what is precious and what is junk, perhaps holding on to our favorite things even though they’re broken or missing pieces, or, to tell the truth, they don’t even work anymore. 

Meanwhile, we also know that people are desperate to receive the good news of Jesus with meaning and beauty. They want an encounter on the shoreline, something that comes in the midst of regular life, that has an impact on everything from that time forward. By and large, the people I’m thinking of are not finding that in church as we know it.  We know that because of the growth of the category of Dones – those who have been wounded or broken by the church and will never return – and the increasing number of those who proudly call themselves Spiritual but not Religious.  I have seen this most closely at the Wild Goose Festival – people of all ages whose passion for Jesus is undeniable, but whose support for the business-as-usual church is underwhelming at best.  They show up at the festival in droves to be with others who have the same yearning.

We have seen the signs. We have known that change was needed.  Perhaps we might even have acknowledged a call to something different, something as radical as quitting fishing was for James and John. But the call was muffled.

Maybe it was muffled by our setttledness.  We know how to do church well -- even when our pastor goes on sabbatical, even when we suspend our bylaws, even when we have to worship on Zoom. We are good at this.  I’ve been ordained for a quarter of a century now.  I don’t know how that happened, but I finally feel like I might know a thing or two about leading a church.  And you do too.  So, its hard to imagine that Jesus might be asking us to give up that way of life, a way of life which connects and which sustains so many households.  (But he did ask it of James and John.)

Maybe the call was muffled by our busyness. Even our church busyness. Maybe we were doing so much for Jesus that we couldn’t really hear the call to drop those nets and come after him. But the pandemic stopped that. We  are in a different place as a church than we were a year ago.

It is not a fun place, not a comfortable place, but it is a quieter place,  Maybe it is a place from which we can hear a new call or perhaps I should say a place from which we can follow more purposefully.  We have dropped many things in the last year.  Let us not be too hasty in picking them all up again. 

Truthfully I think the call was muffled because we knew we should do something, but we didn’t know what that something was.  We still don’t know, in any kind of specific way.  But we have identified a direction, a model to explore, in the Fresh Expressions movement.  It is an exciting, scary, destabilizing and quite possibly joyful movement of the Holy Spirit that may offer some of us a new way to follow Jesus.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please check the announcements about the retreat at the end of February and talk to me about it.

Finally I want to say that following Jesus might be boring, on occasion, but it shouldn’t be on a regular basis.  It entails obedience and trust, but if our following is characterized by duty and drudgery,  we may have lost our way. 

Anne Lamott says “I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right.”

What if we understood the call from Jesus as an invitation to get rid of baggage – personal and institutional, an invitation to laugh and to love, to let go of old wrongs and participate in healing?  If we understand it that way, could we follow?  Would we?

[1] Robert McAfee Brown, The Bible Speaks to You, p. 87

[2] Brian Stoffregen at http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x14.htm

[3] Robert H. Smith, Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament: Matthew, (Minneapolis:  Augsburg/Fortress Press, 1989), p. 72

[4] Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, 2008), p. 16/

1/10/21 - Ripped Open - Mark 1:4-11

Ripped Open

Mark 1:4-11

January 10, 2021

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/dqaaaGcjeVA

I don’t know where it is any more, but at one time, I had a button that said “Ordain women or stop baptizing them.”  If we take seriously the concept of the priesthood of all believers, then baptism is ordination to ministry. 

It is hard to talk about Jesus’ baptism without talking about our baptisms.  It is also important, I think, for us to understand a distinction between what his baptism meant and what ours does.  Christians practice baptism because Jesus told us to and because the early church did.  But at least some folks in the earliest churches practiced John’s baptism, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  One Christian community Ephesus was still using John’s baptism when Paul arrived.  We know this because the book of Acts informs us that he had to instruct them on baptizing people in the name of Jesus.  John’s baptism was an act of renewal, part of his work to prepare people for the coming Messiah.  Christian baptism is a ritual that signifies our desire to follow that Messiah, whom we believe to be Jesus of Nazareth.  But Jesus was not baptized in preparation for his own arrival, and Jesus was not baptized as a Christian.  Jesus’ baptism was a singular event.  We follow him in baptism, but before we can begin to understand what that means for us, let us reflect on what it meant for him. 

So, as I was saying, baptism is ordination to ministry.  That is true for us, but also first true for Jesus.  Baptism becomes a pivotal point in his life and identity.  All four gospels tell us that Jesus was baptized by John.  And in each gospel, it is the launching point for his adult ministry. 

We hear Mark’s version of the story today.  If your pastor preaches from the lectionary this year, then most of the gospel readings will be from the book of Mark.  But not even I can tell you what your pastor is likely to do this year.  However, since we’re starting off with Mark, I might remind us that Mark does not have a birth story.  Mark doesn’t tell us anything about Mary and Joseph being betrothed or going to Bethlehem or fleeing to Egypt.  He doesn’t mention angelic announcements to shepherds or visits by wise men. 

We are just a few verses into his book when Jesus of Nazareth walks onto the scene and without saying a word, gets dunked in the Jordan.   Mark’s gospel is the shortest, probably because he leaves out some details we would like to know.  Like whether Jesus and John had already met or why Jesus came to be baptized or what they said to each other before, during and after.

Mark doesn’t tell us those things.  He relies heavily on context and symbols to convey meaning. This happens out in the wilderness, symbolic of the wanderings of the people of Israel after the Exodus.  It happens in the River Jordan, which for Israelites, is like Plymouth Rock for us.  It is a place of origins that shapes identity.   Walter Brueggemann suggests that “Jesus takes upon himself the whole story of Israel.  He relives the memory of Israel.  As Israel begins by going into the waters of Exodus, being at risk and trusting only God, as Israel wades through the waters of the Jordan to enter a whole new life in the land of Canaan, so Jesus relives the Exodus of Israel and relives Israel’s entry into the land of promise.  In this way, he begins again the story of Israel as the faithful people of God.  This is indeed a new beginning, and Jesus takes his place as the initiator of a whole new history of faithfulness to God in the world.”[1]

Mark doesn’t offer a lot of details, which makes us attend carefully to the ones he does.  When Matthew and Luke describe Jesus’ baptism, they say that the heavens opened.  Opened – it’s the same word for opening a gift or opening a door or opening your mouth.  A fairly simple word.  But Mark says that the heavens were Schizomai, which means ripped open.  Schizomai means to rip, to rend, to tear apart in a way that cannot be put back together again.  It is violent and dramatic.

It would also remind Mark’s Jewish audience of Isaiah 64 where the prophet pleaded for God’s intervention, saying, O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, to make your name known to your adversaries, and make the nations might tremble at your presence, working unexpected miracles such as no one has ever seen before.

When things get really bad, some of us might look to the heavens and ask God to rip them open, to make a dramatic entrance and set things right, like Isaiah did.  Mark is offering another clue that Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient longing.

Schizomai – to rip apart so that it cannot be put back together again.  Mark only uses this word one other time.  That is when the curtain is the temple is torn from top to bottom when Jesus dies on the cross, When Jesus bursts on the scene and when he leaves it – the world is changed in ways that cannot be undone.

Jesus’ baptism by John is awkward for the gospel writers.  If Jesus is baptized by John, it implies that he is subordinate to John, but John proclaimed that he wasn’t worthy to undo Jesus’ sandals.  If Jesus participates in a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, it implies that he needs to be forgiven for sin.  Theologians have spent many hours and much ink on these questions. I am not going to spend much time on them today.

But there is a thought that appeals to those of us who understand sin as corporate as well as individual, those of us who are concerned about systemic evil.  One scholar suggests that Jesus’ baptism was a genuine act of repentance.  “As such it ends his participation in the structures and values of society.  It concludes his involvement in the moral order into which he was born.”[2]  In this way of thinking, Jesus’ baptism is a new creation which repudiates the old order of things.  

That might just be a different way of saying that Jesus was sinless.  But it is not an option available to the rest of us. Our baptism does not confer sinlessness.  We are not able to entirely repudiate our cultural systems.  It is another way in which Jesus’ baptism is a singular one-time event.

When Jesus comes up out of the water, Mark says that he sees the heavens ripped open.  There is an implication that only Jesus sees it, that only Jesus understands what is happening at the time.  That is a theme of Mark, of Jesus’ identity being secret and only being revealed to those with eyes to see, those willing to believe.  That is part of our role.  Following Jesus in baptism means choosing to believe that Jesus is who he said he was, to see in his life and teachings what is not always readily apparent. 

Much later, when James and John asked for seats of honor in Jesus’ kingdom, Jesus asked them if they could be baptized with the baptism he was baptized with.  He was referring to his death on the cross.  This is also potentially our role, to say with our baptism that we will be loyal to Jesus even if it means death.

Sara Miles preached at a FOCUS service a few years ago.  Many of you heard her and have read her books. In her book Take This Bread, she talks about the events that led to her baptism.  You might remember that she was instrumental in establishing a food pantry within the sanctuary of her church in San Francisco.  One day, a young girl at the food pantry wandered off and ended up near the baptismal font.  When Sara met her there, the girl asked “Is this the water God puts on you to make you safe?”[3] 

That is such a wonderfully age-appropriate understanding.  Having that foundation of trust in God will serve her well.  But as adults we must understand that the waters of baptism are anything but safe.

Baptist preacher Brett Younger says, “Jesus does not die of old age.  He dies because he takes his baptism seriously.  When Jesus cried on the cross, ‘it is finished’ it was his baptism that was complete.”[4]

In a sermon from 2003, the incomparable Walter Brueggemann offered some words that resonate with me especially in light of the events of this week.  He said,

“You do know, do you not, that these are dangerous times in in the world, when hate and war and greed and ambition are about to destroy us all with our commitments to consumerism and militarism, when the world is being reshaped according to the sweep of violence.  And you do know, do you not, that this is a dangerous time in the church because the church is so settled in its conventions of being liberal or in its conventions of being conservative, so sure of itself and so shut down without energy that it tends to become irrelevant in our society.” [5]

That describes our time.  It describes Jesus’ time.  It probably describes most times and cultures.  But Brueggemann also said something else.  He said, “But do you know that there is in the world church a vibrant new recovery of baptism, a fresh awareness that God’s own presence does come among us to invite us to new vulnerability and new power for new obedience in the world.”

This, I think, is the calling of Jesus and the need of our time, a new vulnerability, a new kind of power, for a new obedience. 

May the Spirit of God be poured out on us, immersing us, baptizing us in power and love and vulnerability.  Come O Holy Spirit come.  Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “A Baptism About Which They Never Told Us” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2015), p. 32.

[2] H. Waetjen as quoted by Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), p. 129

[3] Sara Miles, Take This Bread, (New York:  Ballentine Books, 2007), p. 236

[4] Brett Younger, “Being Baptized” in Lectionary Homiletics, January 11, 2015

[5] Walter Brueggemann, p. 35

1/3/21 - Some Thoughts at the Turning of the Year - Luke 2:22-40

Some Thoughts at the Turning of the Year

Luke 2:22-40

January 3, 2021

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/nyB1dzw3IdQ

What if around this time last year someone had told us that 2020 was going to be the most unusual year of our lives?  What would we have done with that information?  Would we have believed them? Or might we have thought that it was the kind of thing people sometimes say when they want to sound wise?

What does Mary think when old man Simeon, a stranger to her, takes her baby and says “I can die now.  I’ve held the hope of the world in my arms.”  When he tells her that a sword will pierce her soul, what exactly is she supposed to be with that information?  We could think that after the angel Gabriel made his announcement and after the shepherds showed up, she might just take Simeon’s proclamation in stride, but Luke tells us that she and Joseph are amazed. 

I suspect they believe Simeon and Anna.   I mean, what brand-new parents don’t believe every good word uttered about their child? But I suspect they believe because of what has already happened – with the angels and the shepherds.  I suspect they believe because of who Anna and Simeon are, because of the conviction with which they speak. 

Somehow Anna and Simeon recognize this baby for who he is.  They have been waiting a long time for him. Every year, during Advent, churches talk about waiting for Jesus to be born. We pay lip-service to the idea that waiting is an important spiritual discipline, but this year, we have all learned how hard and heavy, how boring and lonely, waiting really is.  The poet John Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”  Standing and waiting has been the vocation of Anna and Simeon for decades.

I wonder why they are expecting a baby. I wonder why they don’t hang out in the youth or young adult area of the Temple, listening to the conversations, wondering about the passion in that voice or the edgy theology in that one.  Somehow they know.  Somehow after a lifetime of prayer and waiting and paying attention, they just know.

I have a couple of books of pictures of Jesus.  One is a collection of the ways that Jesus has been portrayed by artists through history.  The other is a book of photographs of people named Hesus, taken by photographer Sean Hawkey. These are men and women who are called by the name of Jesus, but the world mostly does not recognize anything special about them.  In fact, what many of them have in common with Jesus is that they are rejected by the rich and powerful, seen as trouble-makers.  So, I just have to wonder again, how it was that Simeon and Anna knew who Jesus was.    I have to wonder again how many times Jesus be right in front of me and I might be clueless.

* * *

I asked you this week to think of an older person in your life who taught you something important.  Or someone you remember because they were patient and waited a long time for a dream to come true.  I heard from many of you and I appreciate all of your stories.  Many of you told me about a parent or a parent-in-law.  Some got good advice from a mentor or a boss. You named people who were passionate about a cause, people who kept on advocating for justice.

I was reminded of three people who were finally able to marry their true love at mid-life or later.  You named Roy, Elisabeth, Audrey, Jennie and Lillian and Carl among the Annas and Simeons of Emmanuel.  They inspired you with their good humor and steadfastness and faith, even in hard times, especially in hard times.  They kept you going because they kept showing up, showing up for church, showing up for other people, showing up for life. 

What older people often know better than younger people is about change.  The oldest people among us have seen incredible change across their lifetimes.  Change in their own families and communities, change in technology and political systems.  We are fortunate that Emmanuel has been enlivened with those who embrace the opportunities for transformation and growth to be found in every stage of their personal and spiritual lives. We can be grateful and lean on the courage and sense of adventure of our companions on this journey.

* * *

I notice one more thing about Simeon – he knew the balance of holding on and letting go.  He had held on, waiting to see the Messiah for decades, but now when he has the baby Jesus in his arms, he says “Let your servant now depart in peace . . . for my eyes have seen thy salvation.”  This is the prayer offered every evening in monasteries around the world.  A prayer of relinquishment, of acceptance. Simeon has a sense of completeness and is willing to let go.  He might have asked for more time, more time to stay connected to Mary and Joseph, more time to see this child grow up.  He has held on this long, why not longer?  But the wisdom he offers us is in knowing when to let go. 

We have let go of many things this year. Perhaps we will be required to let go of even more in 2021. Who can say?  We have also held on to much.  We have held to our faith in Jesus as Lord.  We have held to the discipline of gathering together.  Your church leaders have endured, continuing to guide and care for this congregation.    And beyond that, the vision committee has done the faithful work of discernment, pondering together what is essential to hold onto and what we need to let go, as we seek to follow Jesus, to recognize Jesus among our neighbors.

Friends,  at the turning of the year, I am aware that many of us are weary.  We may be ready for 2020 to end, but we do not carry much excitement for a new year.    The fatigue of the last 9 months has accumulated.  The stress of isolation is taking its toll. 

More than ever, we know that we are all in this together.  And so, I encourage us to remember the wisdom of Anna and Simeon, who endured and knew the joy of faithful waiting.  I encourage us to lean on the Simeons and Annas among us, some of blessed memory, some as close as the telephone.  Recognize that perhaps you are the current Simeon, the contemporary Anna for someone else. Hold on, beloved ones, even if the waiting seems endless. Because they also serve who only stand and wait. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

12/24/20 - Christmas Eve Worship: Emmanuel, God With Us - Isaiah 52:7-10; Luke 2:1-7; Luke 2:8-20

A recording of this worship service is available here: https://youtu.be/6BjRYvjMhMw

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