9/12/21 - Unraveled by Surprise - Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

Unraveled by Surprise

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

September 12, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQFlDhoge8

Sarah is beautiful.  Drop-dead gorgeous.  I never really considered that before.  When she was 65, the Pharaoh of Egypt saw her and wanted her.  I guess my ageism is showing.  Sarah’s part in the Biblical narrative begins when she is advanced in years and somehow I never stopped to think about what she might have looked like. 

This week, I came across this photo of  Stasia Foley.  She is 102 here.  I know that Stasia is a white American and Sarah was a Middle Easterner, but this is now my mental image of the Biblical Sarah. 

This picture of Mrs. Foley was taken on the occasion of a good surprise. She was in hospice care.  Her granddaughter, Tara, was engaged to be married. Mrs. Foley  was not well enough to travel and would not live to the date of the wedding.  So her granddaughter traveled from Texas to Florida. She brought along her wedding dress to surprise her grandmother with one last visit. Tara didn’t tell anyone what she had done.  On her wedding day, several months later, she surprised her family with pictures of herself with her grandmother in her wedding dress.  It was a very good surprise.[1]

I think about Stasia Foley, radiant at 102, and about all that her life had held.  And I think about Sarah and all that her life had held. 

Sarah never had children.  Infertility, the absence of children to parents who want them, is such a painful thing, even today.  In Sarah’s time, it was additionally complicated because a woman’s worth was intricately connected to her ability to produce heirs.  The years kept passing without the appearance of a child, lowering Sarah’s self-esteem and status further and further.   It was a grief and a burden that she carried always, everywhere they went.

When they went to Egypt, her beauty became a liability.  And Abraham failed to protect her.  He anticipated that powerful men would want her.  He anticipated that they might kill him to get her, so he told her to say that she was his sister. He allowed the Pharaoh to take her like a wife.  He even profited from it, accepting the gifts of sheep and oxen and donkeys and servants in exchange.  He not only got to stay alive, he got rich while Sarah had no say about it.  Sarah is a survivor of sexual violence and of abandonment by her partner.  She carried that trauma on top  of everything else.

When more than a decade passed without a baby, Sarah  convinced Abraham to take Hagar as his second wife.  Hagar bore him a son.  But Sarah’s plan backfired. Hagar become contemptuous of Sarah. Sarah became jealous of Hagar and abusive to her.

Sarah is beautiful.  She has the rank of first wife.  But her beauty and status have not led to an easy life.  In some ways, the opposite has been true. Like all human beings, Sarah is a complex character with a range of life experiences. She has painful memories and undoubtedly behaviors of which she is not proud.

Maybe she appears tough, even cynical, on the outside. Maybe cynicism is the armor she has learned to wear in a world where she failed at the one thing expected of her, the one thing that would have made her “normal” which is to be a mother and grandmother.    

And then there comes the day when the strangers arrive at the oaks of Mamre.  Sarah is in the tent, listening to the conversation. She hears them talking about her, saying that she will have a son, now, when she is 90 years old.  And she laughs.  Of course she laughs.  Wouldn’t you? 

She laughs because the idea is so ridiculous.  A few decades earlier, this would have been the best possible news, but now, it is painful.  She laughs because she knows her own body very well, much better that those strange men out there who are making pronouncements about it. She laughs, because she has seen the hard side of life and nothing much surprises her anymore, but this does. 

There is a mystery around these strangers. Sometimes it seems that there are three of them, clearly messengers from God.  And sometimes, it is just the Lord who speaks. After Sarah laughs, God asks Abraham why she laughed and she denies having done it. God insists that she really did laugh. 

In the previous chapter, God had announced Sarah’s impending pregnancy just to Abraham, and Abraham had fallen on his face laughing. God did not chastise Abraham for laughing, but it is common to read this chapter as if God is angry with Sarah for it. One scholar says the fact that God would descend to a “no, I did not”/ “yes, you did” squabble with Sarah tells us that this narrative is supposed to be funny.[2]   Sarah does not need to be afraid, for as she proclaims in chapter 21, God has brought laughter for her; everyone who hears will laugh with her.

It would be easy right now to sink into doubt, to wrap ourselves in cynicism because everything is hard.  Pain and suffering is deep and real everywhere, all across the globe.  But there are also genuine surprises, moments of delight and joy. 

Maybe you heard about the Afghan woman who went into labor with complications on an evacuation flight. The other women on the plane stood around her holding up shawls to give her a modicum of privacy. The pilot descended to an altitude which increased air pressure, stabilizing her and probably saving her life. Upon landing in Germany, still inside the plane, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. The baby is named Reach, after the airplane’s call sign.[3]  After all that the woman must have endured, I can imagine her laughing with relief and joy.

Another image you may have seen was the Afghan girl skipping on the tarmac in Belgium.  I don’t know whether she is old enough to understand what she escaped, but the millions of people who have seen the viral photo have some sense of it.  “God has brought laughter for me,” Sarah said.

The message of this story is not that God will deliver faithful people from infertility if they wait long enough and pray hard enough.  The message is not that having faith eliminates suffering.  Those are cruel interpretations which ignore the messiness of the circumstances in which real people live.  They ignore the complexity of human beings who are simultaneously faithful and flawed.

I submit that the message of this story is that God is a God of surprise.  Good surprise.  Yes, the catastrophe in Afghanistan is real. We lament and mourn for it, while still rejoicing with the girl skipping in Belgium.

I love good surprises.  I had one last week. You might remember that over Labor Day weekend, Jim and I went to the Wild Goose Festival.  We’ve gone before.  I go to this mostly for what I learn. I go to learn about the activism of progressive Christians.  I go to absorb what people are doing around issues like immigration or creation justice or mass incarceration.  I also go for conversations with people who have been wounded, those who have left the institutional church, but haven’t entirely given up on Jesus yet. They have important things to say.  There’s not a lot of preaching or worship at this event, which is fine with me. It’s not why I’m there.

Even so, I was a little irked when we arrived on the last morning for what should have been a key note presentation followed by closing worship.  A change of plans was announced.  The expected preacher had not made it to the festival, so the keynote presenter was going to preach. And a team of three people were now going share the keynote presentation slot.  Well, hmm.  I wasn’t very pleased.  I had already heard the presentation by one of the three people and I really didn’t want to hear it again.  Plus I had wanted the original keynoter to have an entire hour instead of the 20 minutes she might get for a sermon.  I was cynical.  This was not a good way to end.  What were the festival organizers thinking?

Of course, as you are anticipating.  I was wrong.  About many things.  But in a very big way about the sermon.  The preacher started off by making us laugh.  She was witty.  I was admiring her craft, trying to take notes so I could repeat it for you sometime.  But she went too fast and I gave up. Which was good because it enabled me to be fully present in the moment.  One minute, we were laughing at Jesus’ disciples, I mean really laughing out loud because she was funny. Then she took a quick turn and all of sudden, we realized that we were guilty of the same behaviors that we were laughing at.  So then we were laughing at ourselves, but it wasn’t so funny. 

A couple of times she said that she didn’t know why she was there, why she had even been invited to speak, but from the attention of the crowd, it was obvious that the Spirit of God was moving.

She drew me in deeper and deeper. I became aware that I was hearing strong truth proclaimed boldly and vulnerably.  More than once, I had to wipe my face – I didn’t even realize I was crying.  Friends, this was the most powerful worship experience I have had in a long time.  Such a good surprise. 

And not just for me, not just for the crowd. During the music which followed the sermon, I saw the preacher wiping her own face.  The next day, she tweeted, “Yesterday, I cried in front of a large group of people, and then I cried on a plane a little more (ok a lot more, I was that lady weeping on the plane). . .”

Laughter . . . tears. . . truth. . . unexpected grace . . .delivered by a preacher who didn’t even know why she was there.  The God of surprise showed up despite my cynicism, despite my desire to keep to the schedule.

Then there was communion.  The station nearest us had a long line, so I stayed seated.  After a bit, I noticed another station with a short line, so I got up and went there.  Because of the crowd, I couldn’t see who was serving until the moment when it was my turn to receive.  And then I realized that standing in front of me was a trans woman and she was offering me the bread.  I immediately remembered the story of Wild Goose communion that I shared with you a few weeks ago, and chuckled to myself about God’s sense of humor.  Just a little extra surprise.

So friends, here is the part where I might say – go and have a good surprise this week.  But, of course, you can’t manufacture surprise.  It just doesn’t work like that. 

What we can do is to allow ourselves to be open to it, to relax the cynicism or world-weariness or despair or doubt that we wear like armor.  What we might attempt every day, is to embrace the question “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?’

What we might do is allow ourselves to hope, to wonder, to delight, to accept goodness in the midst of pain. And perhaps, in God’s own time, we may be graced with laughter.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/bride-brings-wedding-photo-shoot-ill-grandmother-make/story?id=65249688

[2] Song-Mi Suzie Park, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, ,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 70

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/25/politics/evacuation-baby-named-reach/index.html

8/29/21 - In Every Age - Acts 15:1-6, 12-20

In Every Age

Acts 15:1-6, 12-20

August 29, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0s2Ob2mL5U (Recording includes the testimony of member Curtis Klope.)

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ final instructions were “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them . . . and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Luke says it this way “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

The instructions are specific in some ways – as you go, make disciples, teach, and baptize. Begin in Judea, go on to Samaria and then to all nations, to the ends of the earth.  There are important specifics, but not a lot of logistical details.  Jesus told them what to do, but they had to figure out how.

And they did.  They received the power of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem and immediately began telling the story of Jesus there.  A community formed with a connection to the Temple, a community that grew exponentially. The community faced the same kind of resistance that Jesus had, so there was persecution which scattered some of those believers.  Last Sunday, we saw that they moved from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and even farther, pushing out into the known world. They were doing what Jesus told them to do.

That bothered some people. It often happens like that – when one group of people does what Jesus says, another group gets mad.  Jesus said “make disciples of all nations”.  Two unnamed disciples did that – by preaching in Antioch to Gentiles.  And then Paul and Barnabas joined their effort. That was last Sunday’s text.  But here in chapter 15, some people have come to Antioch to set them straight.

You see, word has reached Jerusalem that some Gentiles are choosing to follow Jesus. That’s the good news. The bad news it that they are not quite doing it right. They have been baptized, but not circumcised.  They keep the Lord’s Day at the beginning of the week, but perhaps not the Sabbath at its end. Of course, all of that is required if they are to be truly faithful.  At least that’s what these messengers have come to say.

From our place in history, we have to make an effort to enter into this story.  We know that in a short time, Judaism and Christianity will become two separate religions, but at this point, they are very much intertwined.  From our Christian vantage point, we might think of these as people as former Pharisees who have not left go of previous beliefs after having become Christian.  It is probably more helpful to recognize them as sincere and faithful observers of Torah who also happen to be Christian.[1]  They are followers of Jesus who find meaning and joy in certain spiritual practices.  They want to insure that the next generations of Jesus-followers find that same joy and purpose. The best way they know to do that is to require the newcomers to do what they did.

This is not limited to Antioch.  This controversy pops up in various places all through this section of Acts. But here, in chapter 15, we get an official church response.  There’s a meeting in Jerusalem.  The church in Antioch sends delegates.  And there is considerable debate.  That might sound familiar to you.  You might know this meeting by its other name – a denominational convention or a Biennial.  If you have been to one of those, you know that things can get intense.  I’m pretty sure they got intense in Jerusalem. But then, they reached a decision. 

The decision was that Gentiles did not have to become Jewish in order to become Christian.  They did not have to adopt a different worldview or culture in order to put on Christ.  Now, the final agreement did list four things that were expected of Gentiles.  Three of them were actually related to Jewish practices, and as the two religions moved further apart, those things lost importance.   The point here is the church leaders realized that, within a few decades of the church’s existence, there were already human-made barriers to the gospel.  And, equally importantly, they decided to take down those barriers.  The report that was sent to Antioch said, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials.” (Acts 15:28)

It has become popular to say that every 500 years the church holds a rummage sale where we get rid of what we don’t need any more and rediscover forgotten treasures.[2]  This story suggests that process probably needs to happen more often than that.

This was an internal process, a conversation and ultimately a decision, that shaped the direction of the church.  There were also external forces at work. We’ve mentioned the persecution that resulted in the disciples moving outward, taking the gospel with them towards the ends of the earth.  There was also a war which resulted in the destruction of the Temple. It was a devastating loss to both Christians and Jews, a loss around which they had to shape a new identity. 

Contrary to what we’ve generally come to believe, Christians did not stop offering sacrifices because  Jesus was a once-for-all-sacrifice.  The sacrificial system ended when the Romans destroyed the Temple, which was when Christianity and Judaism were still intertwined.  So that sacrificial system ceased within Judaism before Christianity became a separate thing.[3]  The loss of the Temple, an external event, profoundly shaped both Christian and Jewish theology from that time forward.

At Emmanuel, we work hard at being an inclusive church, a space where everyone is truly welcome.  We do that well, but sometimes our efforts are not enough because we no longer see the barriers between us and those who remain outside.  We may have good intentions – to help others find the joy and purposes that we know by requiring them to engage in the same spiritual and communal practices as we do.  We may not recognize that those practices which are life-giving to us are burdensome to others.

Sometimes our efforts are not enough because there are external shifts beyond our control.  A world-wide pandemic has certainly made that clear. We can think of others. A couple of generations of people with no first-hand experience of church, or a wide-spread suspicion of religious leaders because of decades of abuse and deceit and a grasping of political power, or a culture that sometimes prizes individual rights over the common good and but also sometimes seeks wisdom from crowd-sourcing rather than so-called experts – these are just some of the forces which shape our identity, some of the realities which make us pause and wonder about how to apply the teachings of Jesus now.

As our first hymn says, the church of Christ in every age must keep on rising from the dead.[4] We find ourselves in one of those moments, a time when we have to recognize the particular challenges of our age, and then to rise, responding boldly as the Spirit leads.  

The Jerusalem Council arrived at their decision after listening to people who shared the same faith in Jesus, but who came from a different place with a different perspective.  Curtis is a Jesus-follower.  He is an Emmanuel insider, but he also comes from a different place and offers a different take.  So I’ve asked him to share some of that now. 

 

 

[1] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001) p. 172

[2] Phyllis Tickle, quoting Anglican bishop Mark Dyer,  in The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, 2008).

[3] Mark McEntire, Belmont University, College of Theology and Christian Ministry Faculty Member, in a Facebook post on July 24, 2021 https://www.facebook.com/mark.mcentire.319

[4] The Church of Christ in Every Age, text by Fred Pratt Green, 1969, music by William Knapp, 1738, Text© 1971 Hope Publishing Company

8/22/21 - Responding to the Challenge: The Periphery Becomes the Center - Acts 11:19-30

Responding to the Challenge:

The Periphery Becomes the Center

Acts 11:19-30

August 22, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/oRGhyGHKq88

The church which was born on Pentecost in Jerusalem grows by leaps and bounds. It becomes large enough to be a threat and to suffer persecution.  In response, many of the new Jewish-Christians scatter in various directions across the empire, taking the gospel with them. One of the messages of Acts is that the Jesus movement spreads because of difficulty and resistance, not in spite of it.  The apostles and others remain in the church in Jerusalem.  At this point, Jerusalem is the mother church, the headquarters of Christian faith, which is still very much within the Jewish tradition.

The people who leave Jerusalem likely go to particular places for particular reasons. Like many migrants today, they go to where they have family or friends. They go to big cities where they are likely to find work or to find people who speak their language. 

So, they scatter.  And then word comes back to Jerusalem about what is happening in Antioch.

Antioch is probably the third largest city in the Roman world, with Rome and Alexandria being first and second. The population of Antioch in the first century is estimated at between 500-800,000 compared to a population of 25-50,000 in Jerusalem.[1]  Antioch has a large Jewish community and a synagogue which has attracted many Gentiles.[2]  It is not surprising that some of those who fled Jerusalem find their way to the Jewish community in Antioch. They share their faith in the synagogue, but within the synagogue, there are already non-Jews who also hear the word. And Antioch is a urban center where ideas and cultures and religions are routinely exchanged. So the church grows in Antioch, just like it had in Jerusalem, with one difference – in Antioch, Gentiles are also joining.

Luke has to tell the story in an orderly way.  So in chapter 8, we learn that the persecution begins and the disciples scatter. Then Luke indicates some of the places they go. *Philip is sent on the road to Gaza, where he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch.  Peter ends up in Joppa where he has a vision about God’s inclusion. After that he baptizes Cornelius, an Italian centurion. And two unnamed disciples make their way from Cyrene and Cyprus to Antioch where they preach to Jews and Greeks, and those who follow Jesus there are called Christians for the first time.   Each of these encounters with Gentiles happens as the people scatter from Jerusalem. They weren’t texting each other along the way, so we don’t know which encounter happened first. Luke tells it in a certain order, but it is more like everything is happening at once. 

As the reports filter back, the church at Jerusalem will make an official response to the possible inclusion of Gentiles.  We will talk more about that next week.   But what is exciting here is that, more or less simultaneously, there is a Spirit-driven mission.  God is at work in one-on-one encounters and in far-flung places well beyond the official leadership.

So, the leaders in Jerusalem get the word about Antioch and want to know more.  They’ve been told that those who originally shared the gospel with non-Jews in Antioch were from Cyprus and Cyrene.  Barnabas also happens to be from Cyprus. Maybe that’s why he is the one who gets sent from Jerusalem.   We aren’t told whether his assignment is to investigate or to support the ministry. 

But when he arrives, it says, “he saw the grace of God and rejoiced.”  He saw something unexpected maybe, something different from the way things were done in Jerusalem, maybe something theologically suspect or uncertain even, but instead of considering it a problem, he recognized it as the grace of God.  Isn’t that lovely?

Barnabas recognized God at work in Antioch, so he joined in. And then, he went to Tarsus, found Paul and brought him back to Antioch, where they spent the next year investing themselves, teaching many people there. 

Thinking about our own efforts at evangelism, I note three things. First, Barnabas doesn’t do it alone. He goes to get Paul to share the work with him. Second, they settle in for the long term.  They cultivate relationships, learn the gifts and needs of the people, and tell the story of Jesus over and over again, for a year. (I wonder how long Jerusalem kept waiting for a report?) And third, the community matures to the point where it looks beyond its own needs.  We know that because when they hear that people in Jerusalem are suffering because of a famine, the church in Antioch takes up an offering and sends it to them.  Later, the church in Antioch will commission Paul and Barnabas and send them on to minister to others.

The model offered here is this --  more than one evangelist, investing in relationships over a long period of time, and the expectation that those who receive the gospel will grow to a place of independence from those who brought it to them. These are things I want to keep in mind.

Last week, I mentioned Justo Gonzalez.  I’m reading his commentary on Acts, but Dr. Gonzalez’s primary scholarship is in the area of church history. That adds even more weight to what he says about a shift from the old center of action in Jerusalem to a new center in Antioch.

He says, “Beginning with chapter 13, Luke will deal almost exclusively with the church in Antioch and its missionary work, not because it was the most ancient, the richest or the most powerful, but because it was the one that responded to the new challenges of the time.  The same has been true through the history of the Church.  Those who until a certain moment have been at the periphery, . . . are those who most often prove to be ready to respond to the challenges of a new age.”[3]

Mainline Protestant churches were at the center for a long time.  But we are not any more.  Neither are the evangelical churches. While American churches are wringing our hands over our decline, churches in the Global South are growing exponentially. If you are a Christian today, you are more likely to be poor and African than rich and Western.[4]  Churches in the Global South are more conservative and more Pentecostal than we are used to.  Instead of considering that a problem, can we see the grace of God at work and rejoice?

If Gonzalez is correct, if this move from the center to the periphery is a pattern, then we would do well to attend to the edges, to see where the Spirit is already working, perhaps even outside the categories we understand as officially sanctioned church. I believe that, just like in the book of Acts, this is happening simultaneously in a lot of different places. Let me offer just one example.

This story is told by Pastor Stan.  It happened at the Wild Goose Festival in 2018.  Jim and I happened to be there that year.  This is an outdoor festival with music, art, story-telling and worship. Someone has described it as Burning Man meets the  Chautauqua Institute.  There are a few thousand people present, so a lot of stuff happens in small pockets and we had no idea about what I’m about to tell you.

Stan was in line to receive communion at the close of the festival.  He noticed a woman just in front of him quietly dabbing away tears.  She did this for all of the ten minutes it took the two of them to make their way to the front. He wanted to check in with her to ask if she was OK, but he thought better of it and just prayed for her. Her hand shook as she received communion and afterwards she stood there for a while seemingly lost in thought.

She stumbled over to the front of the main stage, leaning against it to steady herself, with her eyes closed.  In a few minutes, he walked over and slipped a tissue into her hand. Stan told her he felt drawn to check on her.  They made a connection and she told him that she had not been to a church service or received Communion in over fifty years. Fifty years.

She went on to explain she was a cradle Catholic who had grown up in a small New England village. In her early twenties she had gone to her beloved parish priest to confide in him that she was going to begin the process of gender confirmation treatment when she could afford the costs. At their meeting, he mostly listened, offered no advice, and prayed with her before she left. A few days later, though, the priest quietly refused her the elements of the Eucharist at Mass. The Church failed her and she never returned.

For the next fifty years, she went on to live a full and successful life.  And then just a few months before the festival, she had been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.  In the face of that cruel diagnosis, she had created a bucket list.  Near the top of that list, she said, was her desire “to make peace with the church.” Somehow she had made her way to this most unorthodox church setting to do it.

And Stan was there to listen to her story about the decades of estrangement.  He was the church’s representative, repenting and asking for her forgiveness. 

Before they went their separate ways, Stan asked if she was aware that the person who had served her the elements that day was also a trans woman.  Stunned, she whispered no.  Then she closed her eyes and smiled and shook her head in lovely disbelief.

Stan told her that only hours earlier, the woman who had offered the elements had also confided in him.  She used to be a leader in her church.  Her greatest joy had been serving the Lord’s Supper. But since her transition, she had not enjoyed that privilege even once. It had been 10 years, but that morning, she had been invited to offer the gifts of God to the people of God.  Stan says as he shared that, he knew that he was standing on the holiest of ground. [5]

We see the grace of God at work and rejoice.

Gonzalez says that those at the periphery will be used by God as the center shifts. Bec Cranford says it slightly differently: “God will call the very ones the church spit out to lead the next move of the Spirit.” [6]

Friends, I want to be there for that, don’t you? May we find that holy ground again and again.  Amen and amen.

 

 

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

[2] Josephus, War. 7.3.3.

[3] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001).p. 141

[4] https://www.globalconnections.org.uk/sites/newgc.localhost/files/papers/2020_vision_-_the_church_across_the_world.pdf

[5] https://www.facebook.com/stan.mitchell.58  entry for July 27, 2021

[6] https://beccranford.com/

8/15/21 - Life Together - Acts 2:42-47

Life Together

Acts 2: 42-47

August 15, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/oRGhyGHKq88

Let’s do some word association for just a minute.  I’m going to say a word and ask you to notice what comes into your mind.  Maybe it will be more than one thing.  Whatever it is, just notice it for yourself.  People on Zoom, feel free to drop a note in the chat with the word or words that come to mind.  OK, ready.  Here’s the word:  church.

There are a lot of associations we might have made.  When I did this at home, I first thought of that hand rhyme – “here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people.”  Then I thought of so many pastors who have emphasized to me that the church is the people not the building.  The word church also brought to mind the people I know who have very negative associations with the word – because they have been hurt by churches or because they associate church people with judgment and narrow-mindedness even if they don’t personally know any.

If we pooled all of our word associations, the resulting list would likely be long and diverse, but we would probably also have several answers in common.  After 2000 years of existence, the idea of church is complicated.  It is layered with good and bad connections.

The church of the twenty-first century is necessarily going to be different from the church of the first century, but every once in a while, its good to consider our origins, to remember where we came from, and to consider the ways in which we may be re-formed. 

In Acts 2, we find a summary of the daily life of the early Christians in Jerusalem. It says that they are devoted to four things.  Another translation is that they persevere, they keep on doing these four things.

 

The four things are:

The apostle’s teaching

Fellowship

Breaking of bread

Prayer

 

I wonder how each of these showed up in our word association.  We may have called them by other names, but I expect they were probably there.

The first practice is the apostles’ teaching.  They persevered, they kept on learning from the apostles.  As they heard about Jesus, about his life and his teachings from those who had known him, their faith and understanding grew deeper.

Justo Gonzalez is a Cuban-American Methodist theologian and church historian.  His commentary on the book of Acts was originally published in Spanish for Christian communities in Latin America and the USA in the 1990’s.  It was intended to highlight the relevance of the book of Acts for the struggles of Christians in those contexts.  I find it helpful to read over their shoulders (in an English translation) because it helps bring my own context into view.

Gonzalez writes, “The ‘teaching of the apostles’ is not the mere repetition of what the apostles taught.  It is above all the teaching and the studying that allow us to carry forth our own apostolate, our mission today. The Church lives in an ever-changing world. Because the mission is a bridge between the message of what has taken place in Jesus and the reality in which the addressees live, missionary or apostolic study must always take into account the world in which the Church lives. That is why it is not enough to repeat what has always been said, in the same way in which it has been said before. It is necessary to study both the Word and the world to which it is to be communicated.”[1] 

The second practice is fellowship.  The Greek word is koinonia which can mean sharing or solidarity.  There is an intensity to this word.  It didn’t just mean good feelings among friends.  It meant common enterprise. In Luke 5:10, we’re told that Peter, James and John were joint owners of a fishing boat.  The word for that ownership, that partnership, is koinonia.[2]

The Christians in Jerusalem counted on each other for encouragement and friendship, but also to meet physical and financial needs.  They were in each other’s lives on a daily basis. They were as closely connected as business partners are.

The third practice is the breaking of bread. This refers in part to the Lord’s supper, but we remember that Jesus broke bread in all kinds of meals with all kinds of people. So sharing communion and eating ordinary meals together are spiritual practices in the early church.   

And contrary to popular opinion, this is Biblical evidence that Baptists did not invent the potluck. Christians were eating meals together long before Baptists were a thing.

Barbara Brown Taylor notes that Jesus spent his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper.  She says, “he gave them concrete things to do, specific ways of being in their bodies together, that would go on teaching them what they needed to know. . . So Jesus gave them things they could get their hands on, that would require them to get close enough to touch one another. In the case of the meal, he gave them fragrant things to sip and chew that they could pass to each other around the table. In the case of the feet, he gave them real dirt and calluses that they could use to enter one another’s lives.”[3]

We have recognized again the vitality of those concrete, incarnational practices, as we have been deprived of most of them over the last 18 months of the pandemic.

The fourth practice is prayer.  Luke doesn’t describe this much here, except to say that they praised God with glad and generous hearts.

Four practices – teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayers.  They seem simple, but they’re messy enough to keep us busy, and with the presence of the Holy Spirit, to stay just beyond our control.

Here’s a sidebar I find interesting.  The early Christians met primarily in homes.  That was where they shared meals and prayers.  That was how they were in each other’s daily lives. In the gender roles of the time, households were the sphere of women.  Public places were the male domain. But women could be and often were the managers of households, with administrative, financial and disciplinary responsibilities.  They had authority to direct men and women within it.  And so, when church activities took place within households, the role of women in leadership was not questioned.

In her book, When Women were Priests, Karen Jo Torjesen writes, “For more than 200 years, Christianity was essentially a religion . . .  practiced in the private space of the household.  It’s concerns were the domestic life of its community rather than the political life of the city.”  At the beginning of the third century, there was shift from ministry to governance. “As Christianity entered the public sphere, male leaders began to demand the same subjugation of women in the churches as prevailed in society at large.”[4]

Of course, I believe that shift was harmful to women, to the church and contrary to Jesus’ good news.  Recognizing that one change which took place as the church became more institutionalized, I have to wonder what else was shifted in not so good ways.  I have to wonder what else we might need to reclaim from within those practices of the first 200 years.

Church was not easy then.  It is not easy now. We should not expect it ever to be so.  It is counter-cultural. It is messy. It requires us to work with each other, including working with people who make mistakes and need to be forgiven. It means that we will make mistakes and will need to seek forgiveness. It demands sharing and sacrifice.  No, it will never be easy. But sometimes, I wonder if we have made it harder than it needs to be. Or if the things that are hard are not the most important things we should be doing.

I am struck by the intense togetherness described in Acts 2, by the solidarity and sharing.  The Gallup Well-Being Index is an on-going study of happiness in the world. It looks at many different factors about health and well-being.  One of its findings about religious belonging is relevant here.  They group people into three categories -- highly religious, moderately religious and not at all religious – by their own self descriptions.  Moderately religious, are those who have a belief in God, but are not engaged with a faith community. Gallup found these people are less happy and less fulfilled than those who profess no religious belief at all.  It seems that the key is not just believing, but believing and belonging.  To believe and not to belong is a sign that something is wrong.[5]

That suggests to me that our efforts to share the love of Jesus with others might begin with efforts to help others belong.   

Micah J. Murray is a writer and speaker trying to make sense of faith.  He has been described as your typical somewhat disillusioned-but-tenaciously-hopeful post-evangelical millennial.  I have shared this meme with you before, but I share it again because I think it sums up so much of the longing of many in his generation.

“I want a community where we can sit on a couch together and swear about how badly we want to be loved by a god we’re not even sure we believe in anymore.”[6]

What if one of the greatest gifts the we could offer our broken and alienated society was a vision of intense social belonging such as we hear described in Acts today? What if our best testimony to the life of Jesus was our life together? 

Several times in the book of Acts, Luke offers these short summaries of the early church.  Some people think they’re idealized.  Others want more details.  The Rev Janelle Holmes pastors a church in Atlanta that is about 5 years old. She rewrote our text passage to try to make it more realistic and specific.  Here is what she said,

“They learned together, new things, hard things, liberating things. They hung out with the leaders and learned from them things they didn’t know and taught the leaders a few things as well. Some of the leaders were a little over-rated.

They ate together, sometimes with china and sometimes with paper plates. Some were better at cooking than others, and sometimes the kids refused peoples food and it was embarrassing. But they prayed together and that helped calm their nerves and connect them with God’s grace.

Cool things happened in their relationships and in their communities and they were amazed. They spent time together with like-minded individuals because they felt cared for by them and needed to know they weren’t crazy.

They shared the things of their life--food, money, childcare, shelter--to anyone who needed it and it was exhausting sometimes and they had to take breaks, especially the introverts. They did it daily and the extroverts over-functioned. They sacrificed time from other things, which was hard, in order to dedicate a lot of time together in holy places, showing up for God and for each other and for themselves.

They spent a lot of time together in their homes, clean homes and messy homes, eating and being happy and crying and being generous with each other because that is how God wanted their relationships to be. They were so grateful to God for all of this, although resentfulness occasionally sneaked in. Yet in all of this, God gave them more and more friends.” [7]

 

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

 


[1]Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001).p. 52

[2] Gonazalez, p. 51

[3] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2005-04/practicing-incarnation

[4] Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, (San Fransisco:  HarperCollins, 1993), pp.37-38.

[5]Timothy Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, (New York: HarperCollins, 2019)  p. 133

[6] https://www.facebook.com/micahjmurray/photos/10153648604412820

[7] https://www.ormewoodchurch.org/single-post/2020/07/06/relationships-and-community

 

8/8/21 - Changing Plans - Luke 10:1-9

Changing Plans

Luke 10:1-9

August 8, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: He Sent them out Two by Two (Il les envoya deux à deux) - James Tissot between 1886 and 1894

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

Imagine with me.  After a worship service on a high attendance Sunday, we’re all enjoying coffee hour in the fellowship hall.  People are talking with each other and milling around and the energy is high.  And then, Jesus appears, with a clipboard.  He’s looking for volunteers to sign up for something, some project that he’s going to do that week. Except that he isn’t really waiting for people to volunteer. It’s more like he is pointing at people and making assignments – “You two, you’re going to Schenectady.  And you two, to Cohoes. You to Green Island, you to Schodack, you two all the way to Hudson” . . . and then, when all 70 of us have our assignments, he says “OK, that’s it.  Go now.”[1]

Imagine with me.   What would you say?  I mean really.  It’s Jesus.  How are you going to respond? 

My answer would not be eloquent.  It probably would come out something like “I’m not ready. I had other plans.  This was not what I was expecting.  I am not prepared.”

I’m pretty sure that would be my response in that hypothetical situation because it was my response earlier this week as the new reality of the Delta variant began to sink in.  I do like to plan ahead.  I like to be prepared.   I had a plan for this summer.  The plan was to go on vacation in July, to take a break, and then come back for the FOCUS service and Bill’s baptism last week.  The plan was that the country would get vaccinated and we would be able to socialize freely again by this fall.  And my plan was that, at Emmanuel, after a year of hibernation, we could do outreach in some new ways and engage people we haven’t even met yet.  My plan for worship this month was that we would look again at passages like this one, where people went out on missions of peace as a way of getting ourselves ready to do that. That was my plan. 

Then I realized that the pandemic is not close to over.  I realized that we are not going to be completely free to socialize freely and form relationships with people we don’t yet know.  To anyone who would listen this week, I said “I am not ready for this.  I had other plans.  This is not what I was expecting.  I had other plans.”

You probably also had other plans.  You are probably as frustrated or disappointed or angry or deflated as I am. For me, the pandemic has been one long reminder that we do not control as much as we think we do. 

. . .

So, Jesus sends out the 70.  Seventy is a Biblical number that represents all the nations of the world.  The message is to go everywhere.  The number 70 is also an indication that ministry is not limited to the 12 apostles.  Sharing the good news is not task to be done just by the identified leaders, it is for all of Jesus’ followers. 

This section has been called the missionary instruction manual, but there’s not much to it.  It doesn’t provide a sense of orientation or preparedness as much as vulnerability. 

I have a colleague in the church of England named Anne LeBas.  About this text, Anne says, “Jesus starts by very deliberately stripping away from them the props they might be tempted to take with them on their journey. They aren’t to take any money – they will have to rely on the hospitality of those they meet. They aren’t to take a bag, so they can’t accumulate anything along the way that they think might come in useful in their encounters with others. They aren’t even to wear sandals to protect them from the ground on which they tread. It’s a very exposed and vulnerable mission.”[2]

I imagine if Jesus were to repeat this exercise on earth today, he would tell us to leave behind our credit cards, our GPS devices and our cell phones. 

The pandemic has taken many of our church props – our sanctuary, our fellowship hall, our ability to see and touch each other on a weekly basis. It has knocked down my plans. I have railed against this.  But I am trying, again, to understand the power of vulnerability. 

It is the power that Jesus demonstrated – God choosing to be born as a baby, helpless, completely dependent on earthly parents for nurture and protection, even protection from King Herod’s army.  It is the power of Jesus the adult, who entrusted himself to those who followed him, even to those who betrayed and crucified him. In some paradoxical way, we understand that power is the power at the center of everything.

We understand this best at Christmas and Easter.  We understand it, but many of us live a great deal of our lives the rest of the year on another level. On this other level, we believe that we are self-sufficient.  We act as though we are in control, of our calendars, our health, our families, our lives.  We make plans. 

Jesus sends out the 70 with a heightened sense of risk.  They are to travel vulnerably, barefoot, without money or motel reservations.  The biggest take-away from this passage is that they have to rely others. Their message will be welcomed by some and rejected by others, but their safety and well-being entirely depend on those who receive it. 

That’s not how we think about evangelism today.  We think of it as if we have something to give, something to share, not as if we need to receive from others.  But then, we tend to think of evangelism as a dirty word and mostly avoid it.  So, I wonder if we need to spend more time imagining what form that kind of vulnerable evangelism might take today.

Another thing to note – we tend to think of the church as a gathering, but here and elsewhere, Jesus speaks of it more like a scattering. The 70 have been gathered around Jesus, but Jesus scatters them, sending them out in pairs.

My friend Anne LeBas says, “The harvest Jesus talks about is not a harvest of souls to be gathered into the protective bubble of a congregation where they will be safe from the world. Quite the reverse. It is about learning to spot God and work with God wherever we happen to be, whatever we happen to be doing, and to spot God in others and work with God there as well.”[3]

Changing plans happens on an individual level.  The pandemic is revealing how many of our communal and systemic plans also need to change.  For generations, Protestant churches in America have been welcoming people into our protective bubbles.  Our plan for ministry is to gather people under our roof.  That plan worked well for a long time.  But for decades now, it has not been working.  Fewer and fewer people come in on their own.  It seems that a change of plans is in order. Perhaps what we need is to recover this model that Jesus gave us – to put ourselves out there, where we are not in control, to share a message of peace, to form relationships with strangers, to discover those places where God is already at work.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” Jesus said.  Many of us hear that, and because we’re not farmers, we do not understand the sense of urgency Jesus intended.  Harvest time is intense.  The farmer has tended the crop and waited for it to ripen all season.  How well the farmer’s family will live for the next year will be determined by what happens during the harvest.  There is a narrow window when the crop is ripe enough for harvest, but not ripe enough to spoil. In many places, the weather is changing.  Crops must be gathered quickly before the rains or snows come. I have seen Midwestern farmers in the fields long past dark with lights on their combines and tractors, urgently gathering in grain or beans before the crop is lost. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, the gifted Episcopal preacher, tells a story about a visit she made several years ago to southern Turkey. She shares it in her book, The Preaching Life, a book that was published 28 years ago.  She writes that while hiking with some friends and a Turkish guide, “We turned a bend and the outline of a ruined (Christian) cathedral appeared ~ a huge gray stone church with a central dome that dominated the countryside. Grass grew between what was left of the roof tiles and the facade was crumbling.”

Taylor goes on to describe the shell of a once magnificent church, which now was filled with trash and indications that it was a play place for children. On the massive walls were still visible the fading frescoes … lambs of God and angels and medieval saints. In the dome you could see one outstretched arm of the victorious Christ who had dominated the building ten centuries earlier.

She observes: “It is one thing to talk about the post-Christian era and quite another to walk around inside it. Christianity died in Turkey – the land that gave birth to Paul – the land of Galatia, Ephesus, Colossae, Nicaea. Today the Christian population of Turkey is less than one percent.”

In place of the cathedral in Turkey, she imagines her own church, collapsed and ruined because no one practices the faith any more.  She concludes, “such a thing is not impossible; that is what I learned in that ruin on the hillside … that knowledge keeps me from taking both my ministry and the ministry of the whole church for granted. If we do not attend to God’s presence in our midst and bring all our best gifts to serving that presence in the world, we may find ourselves selling tickets to a museum.”[4]

Her story speaks to same kind of urgency that Jesus was describing.  There is a window of opportunity, a generational shift in faith that is happening all around us.

Friends, this is where I am today.  I feel an urgent sense to be on mission, to bring all of our best gifts to serving God out in our community.   I feel less in control that I ever have been and I’m trying to trust that is a good thing.  At the same time, I am aware of the reality of the coronavirus and the need to protect ourselves and our community. I was not ready for that.  I had other plans.

I find hope in two things.  The first is in trusting that the pandemic will not last forever.  There will be a time when we scatter and move out on mission again.  The temporary restrictions may simply give us more preparation time than Jesus original disciples got.  And secondly, we have come through more than a year of pandemic. In that year, we have adapted.  We have changed plans more than once.  We have been faithful. That gives me hope and confidence that we will follow Jesus’ directions into a new future together.  May it be so for you and for me.

 

 

[1] I am indebted to the Rev. J.C.Austin for the sermon title and the opening scene which I adapted from his good work, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003568/changing_plans

[2] https://sealpeterandpaulsermons.blogspot.com/2013/07/trinity-6-eat-what-is-set-before-you.html

[3] https://sealpeterandpaulsermons.blogspot.com/2013/07/trinity-6-eat-what-is-set-before-you.html

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, (Cambridge:  Cowley Publications, 1993), p 3-5

8/1/21 - To Tell the Truth - Ephesians 4:1-3, 11-15

To Tell the Truth

Ephesians 4:1-3, 11-15

August 1, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church/FOCUS Summer Joint Worship; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/Kftj25zcXhg

Perhaps this week, you watched, as I did, four Capitol Police officers testify about the insurrection they survived on January 6.  Probably you heard, along with millions of others, Simone Biles’ announcement that she was withdrawing from the women’s team competition at the Olympics.  Harry Dunn, Aquilino Gonell, Michael Fanone, Daniel Hodge and Simone Biles spoke truth in powerful and costly ways. 

Jesus once said, “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Truth has been elusive lately.  Intentional misinformation and deceitful scheming have undermined our confidence in government and the media and each other.  Church leaders and coaches and others entrusted with the care of young people have conspired and covered up abuse and wrong-doing.  As a result, people have been deeply wounded and traumatized.  People have died because of the lies told around the election and the coronavirus.  Lying and deception are dangerous.  Truth is power.  You will know the truth and the truth will make you free. 

The letter to the Ephesians is ancient, but contemporary.  Written to an early church, it speaks directly to our context.

“When we grow up,” it says, “we will be a community capable of living the truth.” [1]   

Speaking the truth in love, we grow to maturity.  Christ has given gifts to the church which are to equip us for ministry.  The word equipping comes from a term for setting a bone.  It can mean to set a bone, to reconcile, to restore.  Telling the truth, in love, is a foundation for reconciliation, restoration and healing. 

There is so much talk these days about polarization, about division.  Division between and within political parties, within families, within the church.  “We” can’t even talk with “them” anymore.  Some are despairing that any kind of unity can be found.  I confess that I have felt that way too. But, what if, we could harness the power of truth spoken in love?  If we could simply commit ourselves to that one discipline, I believe that Christ would work through us for healing and reconciliation. 

Some difficult conversations are necessary within FOCUS and within our congregations these days.  The anti-racism task force is meeting now.  The immigration task force will reconvene in September.  Each of our congregations has to reconnect and reform itself as we continue to make our way through this pandemic.  We have hard issues to confront and difficult decisions to make.  We will do well to hold before us this instruction – speak the truth in love.

When we grow up, we will speak the truth, we will live the truth in love.  Why is this so hard?

Why is the truth hard?  The truth is hard because it can be threatening.  Acknowledging the truth might mean admitting that we were wrong.  Admitting our wrong might require us to change and change is hard. 

The truth can be frightening.  We might try to avoid the pain of hearing, for example,  a particular medical diagnosis.  But of course, we cannot hope to heal without a clear telling of what is wrong.  There are many conversations about racism going on now.  Some of them spend a lot of energy attempting to avoid pain, trying for a quick fix that would smooth everything over on the surface and let us move on.  Unless we face the truth about our past, about the foundations of white supremacy in our culture and systems,  we cannot move toward the reconciliation God desires for us. 

 

The truth is hard because it can be threatening to others.  They may reject our truth and therefore reject us.   We may not be willing to take that risk. 

I was taught “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”  I learned to confuse being loving with being nice.  Maybe you learned that as well.  We sometimes act as though we think that the truth should not make anyone angry. We have to unlearn that.  Being critical, discerning between right and wrong, inviting ourselves and others to grow and change – all of those behaviors can be deeply loving without feeling “nice.”

Telling the truth in love is hard.  Sometimes it’s because the truth is hard and sometimes it’s because the love is hard.  lovingly is hard.  Sometimes we hide behind the guise of truth-telling to say unloving things.  “No one else has the guts to tell you this, but I will.”  Or  “It’s for your own good,” we might say, when really it’s a sucker punch that we deliver for our own satisfaction.

If we tell the truth, others may accuse us of having a hidden agenda.  And of course, that is something we need to check ourselves on.   I remember being in conflict with a group of people once.  I told one of the leaders of the opposition that I was simply telling the truth.  She shot back “You’re telling your truth.”  And I said, “It’s the only truth I can tell.” 

We were both correct.  Telling the truth in love happens best in community.  That means that we practice speaking truth in love with humility and we practice listening to the truth that others speak with humility.  We may reject the truths offered by a newcomer, thinking that they don’t know us well enough,  and those who know us well may be reluctant to speak for fear of causing pain.  And so we practice speaking with humility and love, and we practice listening with humility and love.

William Sloane Coffin was an incredible pastor and social leader of the last century.  He was chaplain at Yale for many years. One time a freshman named Larry asked if he could give Bill Coffin some advice. 

Bill said, “Go ahead.” 

Larry said, “Well sir, when you say something that is both true and painful, say it softly.  Say it in words to heal and not to hurt.  Say it in love.”[2]

When we confuse being loving with being nice, we may hold back on speaking the truth.  We may say nothing at all until we cannot hold it in anymore and it comes out loudly, like an explosion.   Sometimes, by the time we get the courage to speak the truth, we may be angry.  When anger fuels our courage, our words may not sound loving. As we commit ourselves to speaking up with truth, we learn to speak softly, to heal and not to hurt. 

William Sloane Coffin was active in the civil rights movement.  He marched for justice and spent time in jail.  He spoke against the Vietnam War and worked for nuclear disarmament.  Let me close with some words that he repeated in several different contexts across the decades. 

This is the way he said them in 1981, when he was pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City.  “We are ordained to unrest, in deceptive times, to reach for truth that seems to many like madness; in the darkness of the world’s hatred and prejudice to keep the small flame of love alight.  For the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but love.”[3]

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but love.   When we grow up, when we reach the measure of the full stature of Christ, we will be a community capable of living the truth in love.  Thanks be to God.

 


[1] Allen Verhey and Joseph S. Harvard, Belief:  A Theological Commentary on the Bible – Ephesians, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 304

[2] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 152

[3] William Sloane Coffin, Collected Sermons, Volume 1, “Ordained to Unrest” (Louisville:  Westminster/JohnKnox Press, 2008), p. 404

 

 

6/20/21 - I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Do We Go From Here? - Ruth 1:1-22

I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Do We Go From Here?

Ruth 1:1-22

June 20, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBUxxyAnIQ

In the first church where I served as pastor, there were a number of WWII veterans.  I learned things from them that I never got in history classes in school.  For example, I learned some of the impact on their families.  I heard the stories about the fathers who were complete strangers to their two- and three-year old children.  I heard that it took a long time for the children to get over their fears of the strange men now living in their homes.  In history classes, I had learned the years when the war officially began and ended.  In reality, the war ended in different times for different people as they took up life without combat again. 

Juneteenth observances are another example of how there are not always clear demarcations between war and peace, between enslavement and liberation, between then and now.  There is a process, an unfolding transition as we navigate the space between Before and After.  That is the space in which we find ourselves right now.

I was in a Stewart’s shop this week.  I don’t think I have been in one for more than a year.  It was also the first time I walked into any store without a face mask.  No one else was wearing one either. The man who went in ahead of me held the door open behind him and we came very close to each other on the threshold.  Two years ago, if I had entered a store and found everyone wearing masks, I would probably have thought I had walked in on a robbery.  But this week, when no one was wearing masks, I thought how strange that was and just for a minute, I felt a little unsafe. 

We are in the space between Before and After and the question “where do we go from here” is present at all kinds of levels.

Naomi is in that space.  In the Before, she might have been happy, or at least content, living with her husband, raising two sons in a foreign country. But then her husband died. Before she was a wife.  After she is a widow.  Within the next 10 years, she lost first one son and then the other.  Before she was a mother.  After?   . . . After, she doesn’t know what she is.   She has daughters-in-law and no way to provide for them.   After she is childless and old and far from home, living in a foreign country with no access to any safety net.  Before, she was Naomi, which means Pleasant.  After, she says, “call me Mara” which means Bitter.

We meet Naomi at the end of her life in Moab.  But the whole story is really about how she and Ruth get from that place of defeat and hopeless to a new beginning.  The four chapters of the book of Ruth are the story of the transition, the space between Before and After.

It is a great story, quite possibly my favorite in the Hebrew Bible.  If you haven’t read it in a while, you might want to do that this afternoon. It won’t take long.

What I want to hold up from that story today are Ruth’s faithfulness and courage.  As we navigate this space, coming out of pandemic into whatever is ahead of us, I want to be personally faithful and courageous, and I hope we as a church will strive to be faithful and courageous too. 

For the last 4 Sundays, I’ve been asking you open-ended questions and you have been great about responding, giving us a little way to listen to each other as those have been shared each week.  This week, I asked a multiple choice question.  I asked you to pick your love language from a list of 5.  And that question, the one where you had ready-made answers, that one was the trickiest of them all.  When I asked this question, I thought that maybe the answers would reveal that many of us have the same preferred love language.  I thought that would be an interesting finding.  Or I thought it might reveal that we are all over the place in terms of what conveys love to us most effectively.  That would also have been an interesting finding.  What I did not expect was that you would take apart the question.  But that’s what many of you did.

You didn’t like having to pick just one answer.  You explained that what conveys love to you is different in different contexts.  You mentioned ways that you had been disappointed or deceived by the use of one or more of the love languages in the past and so you didn’t trust them anymore. My take-away is that love can be received by the same person in different ways in different contexts, and that there is no easy one-size-fits all.  As some young people in my life used to say, “Duh, M’am”.  It’s a Captain Obvious finding, but especially significant in this moment. 

Strong relationships adapt for context.  Loving people pay attention to the wants and needs of this moment as well as what came before.  They bend and flex and understand that After may require loving actions that are very different from those needed Before.

Where do we go from here?  Rev. Brooks-Johnson spoke about learning new languages.  During the last year, some of us have been learning a new language about church. We are learning to talk about the inherited church or the gathered church which is the term to describe Emmanuel as it exists now, which is a good and precious thing. And we are learning to speak of the sent church, the fresh expression of church in this time.  We use a different love language to speak to those in the fresh expression of church because one size doesn’t fit all and context matters.

Let me give you a real-life example.  In another church in another state, as the lockdown of pandemic was lifting, the leaders reached out to every household.  They checked in to see how people were doing and if and when they might return to worship.  They heard one repeated message from a number of households, especially households with young children.  These were all households that had been strongly engaged and active in church life Before the pandemic.  But now, in the After, the adults in these households said that they had stepped away from church during the pandemic, that they had gone on with their lives without it, and they didn’t miss it.  They don’t plan to return.  One of my colleagues shared that last week. 

The pandemic experience has revealed many things and this is one of them.  Multiple generations of people had stepped away from church before the pandemic.  This is not new.  But perhaps this time, we can see it with new eyes.  Perhaps what can be different this time is our faithful and courageous response.

When Naomi tries to tell her daughter-in-law that she is done, that her engagement with them is over, Ruth says “OK, but I’m here for you anyway.”  Ruth does not insist that Naomi stay in the place where Ruth is at home, but instead Ruth accompanies Naomi to a foreign land.  Ruth steps out of her own comfort zone to go where Naomi wants to be. In the process, Ruth will learn the customs and culture of another people.  That adaptation, that accompaniment, that bending and flexing of relationship, is the love language that Ruth offers to Naomi. 

We may also hear that some have left our gathering and are not coming back.  And we may also realize that we had missed the opportunity for relationship with many others in the Before.  I wonder, instead of being distressed or anxious for ourselves,  can we imagine the language that we might speak to send the message “We’re here for you anyway?”  Can we step out of the places where we are at home to learn customs and cultures of others?  Can we do this with faithfulness and courage for Jesus’ sake?

This, I believe, is one answer to our question – Where do we go from here?  We keep on speaking the language of love.  Love is expansive and adaptive.  It contains all the ways that we communicated God’s love in the Before AND it recognizes that we may need new ways to communicate for new relationships.  One size doesn’t fit all.

I am not the only one offering this answer.  About 25 of you responded to the Pastoral Relations Committee survey this month.  That was a fantastic response – thank you.  In answer to the question about future priorities, you spoke over and over again about looking outward.  Some of you mentioned Fresh Expressions specifically.  What all of that means, we don’t know yet.  It is still unfolding, but this is a conversation we will intentionally pursue in the next weeks and months.

Another priority you identified on that survey was justice.  You spoke of ministry with the poor and concerns about gun violence and racism.  Again, I would hold up Ruth as a story that is interwoven with justice.  Ruth is bold, audacious even, as she works the system to get what she and Naomi need.  If you only read one chapter this afternoon, read chapter 3 and allow yourself to see how bold and scandalous Ruth’s actions are.

One of our answers to “where do we go from here?” is that we continue pursuing justice.  For the next 5 years, and beyond, we have committed ourselves to becoming an anti-racist community.  This will mean listening carefully to each other, probably confronting hard truths about ourselves.   It will mean understanding how the systems of white supremacy work in our culture and in our church, seeing the weight of oppression and evil in those systems (just like Ruth did) and working to defeat them. There is no simple Before and After to racism, but we have accepted the task of resistance as long as we live in this time where not everyone is free.

Where do we go from here?  We go together, together,  to seek relationship with those who are here and those who we might yet join.  We go with faithfulness to Christ who is with us and ahead of us.  We go forward together with courage . . . and all for the sake of love.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

6/13/21 - I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  What Do You Need? - Job 2:11-13; 2 Timothy 4:9-18

I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  What Do You Need?

Job 2:11-13, 2 Timothy4:9-18

June 13, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n99dTGk8gf0

Bec is a friend I met at the Wild Goose Festival a few years ago. She describes herself as a Bapticostal misfit. Most of you would like her -- in small doses, maybe --  but you would like her.

Her primary ministry is with people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta.   Her organization offers temporary shelter as well as several paths to permanent housing.  A few weeks ago, she shared an incident that spoke to me about this question of needs and whose needs get served and how and by whom.  She gave permission to relay this story in her own words.

Bec said, “I asked a pastor not to hand out food and tents in front of my building onetime.

The look on his face.

Charlie had had a heart attack in the dorm, and the guest service aid called 911. They were in route.”

“Imagine twenty people experiencing homelessness waiting for showers, some of whom have been working with outreach workers to find housing solutions, and then a church pulls up, pops up a table, starts talking about “Gawd,” and getting saved while handing out $40 tents.”

“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches tossed at people, who will later throw those sandwiches on the sidewalk for the pigeons and cat sized rats.”

“Then the crack dealers and the pimps come out to work the crowd while this here preacher with his megaphone is out here talking about an eternal hell. Little plastic bags containing magic rocks and cash go through the crowd by the dope boys in the all-white Nikes, while Preacher Bob is convinced his oration skills are swaying the crowd towards salvation.”

“I walked up to him in humility and asked him to leave because the pop up revival is in the fire lane, and ole Charlie had a heart attack in the veterans dorm. I gave him my card and asked that he call me later to talk about figuring out a different way to work together.  I kindly explained how we could partner together to provide restrooms and a dignified way to serve with those experiencing homelessness.”

“He then told me he was led by the holy spirit and had personally studied the WERD for 35 years, and he had this ministry TO THA HOMELESS for 12 years  and no tattooed jezebel was going to stop him from saving the homeless. He was SENT by Gawd.”

“I gave him a closed-mouth smile, said nothing except ‘EMS is on the way and you’re in the fire lane.’  I was unable to persuade him to leave. But the blaring fire truck got his attention.”[1] End of story. 

Now, if we were to have a conversation here and now about this incident and talk about what was done poorly, what could have been better, you would probably say things like Bec said.  Bec’s own take-aways were these:

1)    Think through what you want to do before coming from the suburbs into the city with your great “knowledge”  This parachuting ministry doesn’t change people’s lives, but often disrupts their progress. 

2)    Come in humility, find out where and what God is doing. 

          And she said,

3)    People experiencing homelessness often know God deeper than I do, and I have 8 years of advanced theological education.  Never assume someone is homeless because they don’t know God.  These are the children of God.

Many of you have had experiences like this one, where a person with good intentions made a situation worse instead of better.  We might enjoy chalking up the many examples of what not to do, because this time it was so obvious, but I offer it as a reminder.  It is much, much harder to recognize the same mistakes when we make them. And we do make them.  Sometimes we make up our own minds that we know what someone else needs. Coincidentally, it often something that we have to give.  Sometimes we fail to ask people what they need.  Sometimes we refuse to be taught by those who are closer to the situation.  I appreciate Bec’s counsel to come in humility, to find out where and what God is already doing.

That is something Job’s friends get right. At least at the beginning of the story.  Job is in the midst of real trauma.  His children have died; his health has been stripped away; his livelihood is gone.  Any one of those by itself would be devastating.  Job’s pain is immense.  Three of his friends show up.  They tear their clothes, they put dirt on their heads – which are ways of recognizing his grief and entering into it. And they sit with him in silence for days.  They honor the weight of his trauma.  They do not to fix it.  Job himself needs time to figure out what he needs, and his friends just offer their presence as a gift of support.

Later on, as we know, they start theologizing, they fill the silence with their speculations about why he is suffering and how to fix it.  That is not their best moment.

Sometimes, we do not know what we need, and the most loving thing another person can do is to sit with us and let us figure it out.

Sometimes, we have figured it out, and the hard part is sharing that out loud.  Your responses to this week’s second question bore that out.  One of you said this week that you changed the question to “if only I could ask for help”.  Others spoke of intense stress, of feeling defeated, of not wanting to admit ignorance, of waiting too long to reach out. Recognizing that we might need help and being willing to ask for it or accept it are not necessarily the same thing.

That’s why I find the passage from 2 Timothy so compelling.  Paul is in a Roman prison.  He is awaiting trial, which he suspects is going to end in his death. He tells Timothy,  “Do your best to come to me soon.  Bring my cloak and the books and the parchments.”  He is cold and lonely. Prison is monotonous.  It will take Timothy some weeks or months to do what Paul asks and Paul desperately hopes to see him one last time. Paul says “Come before winter.”  Come while you still can.  Come now or never.

Can you hear the anguish? Paul names his needs, very specifically, and he names them to his protégé, Timothy.  At one time, their relationship might have only flowed in the other direction, with Timothy relying on Paul.  But now Paul is wise enough to open himself in this way.

Over the last few months, our sister Elaine has been helping me understand some of this.  And she has graciously given me permission to share that with you.   Elaine is ill.  Many of us have been concerned and wanted to do something. 

I have learned that sometimes, people want to help, but we are afraid of overstepping, of being a bother, and so after we have shown up for a while, instead of filling the silence with empty words like Job’s friends, we just wander away and our friend may feel abandoned. 

I didn’t want to do that, so I kind of become a pest. At various times, over the last few months, I would imagine that I knew what Elaine needed, so I would call and offer.

“Elaine, you’re coming home from the hospital.  Do you want me to sleep on your couch tonight?” 

“Elaine, do you need a ride here or there?”

“What about groceries?”

Elaine would always very graciously thank me and very graciously decline my offers.  But eventually we came to an agreement.  We agreed that I would not pester her with what I thought she needed and in return, she would let me know what she actually needed.  Now here’s the really important part – Elaine has kept her part of the deal. 

She actually asks for help when she needs it.  One time it was a ride.  One time, it was soup.  One time, she called me up and said, “Kathy, I have run out of water glasses. I don’t know what has happened to them, but if visitors come, I have to serve them water or iced tea in a mug.  I could really use some plain old drinking glasses.”

And so, we met that need.  I say “we” because I want you to understand that I am not doing this by myself. Elaine tells me what is needed and then I turn around and I ask for your help meeting the need.  On that occasion, I got the glasses and one of you delivered them.  On another occasion, some of you prepared food and I was the delivery person. 

Elaine acknowledged that I would never have guessed that she needed those glasses without her telling me.  It was something only she could name.  And some people might have thought it was too small to mention.  But Elaine kept our agreement and I so appreciate it. 

You are a compassionate, caring congregation. Most of you are willing to do something for someone else at a moment’s notice.  We are also a congregation that lives and moves within a culture that prizes self-sufficiency. Acknowledging that we need help, that we are overwhelmed or stressed out, that there is something we cannot do for ourselves right now, that requires a kind of humility that many of us are still learning.  Elaine is modelling that for us.  Would you join me in thanking her?

This way of being with one another is incarnational.  We ask what do you need?  We ask it of ourselves and of each other.  We come together and bear witness to each other’s existence, our struggles and needs and we spend time together.  As our hymn says, “Will you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you?  Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”

 

Amen.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/rebeccadawncranford/posts/10100882651552178

6/6/21 - I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Does It Hurt? - 1 Samuel 1:1-18

I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Does It Hurt?

1 Samuel 1:1-18

June 6, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/6MEqzTz7ezY

It happened every year. They packed up the family and went to celebrate Thanksgiving. At Shiloh, they went to church where their food was cooked. Some of it was burned up on purpose.  That was God’s part.  A certain portion went to the priest.  The rest was to be enjoyed by the family over the next two days. So when they sat around the table, Elkanah carved the roast that was theirs to share.  The tradition in the land was that the oldest son got two helpings, but Elkanah did not keep that tradition. His tradition was to give two helpings to Hannah, who had no sons at all. He made no secret that Hannah was his favorite wife.  That understandably angered Peninnah, his not-favorite, other wife.

Year after year, they packed up the family and celebrated Thanksgiving.  Year after year, Elkanah carved the roast and gave twice as much to Hannah as to Peninnah.   That made Peninnah feel hurt and rejected, so she took it out on Hannah by taunting her. Then Hannah would get upset and lose her appetite for the holiday meal. And Elkanah, in his clueless way, would say “Why are you so upset, Hannah?”

Hannah is a childless woman in a time and place where bearing sons is the total measure of her worth and honor. Elkanah loves her, but he doesn’t seem to understand the depths of her pain and despair. His efforts to help only make things worse.

This pattern goes on, year after year, until Hannah just cannot take it any longer. She leaves the table and goes to the temple to pour her heart out to God. 

You probably remember other Biblical women who suffered with infertility.  Women like Sarah and Rebekah. In their case, it was Abraham and Isaac, their husbands,  who prayed and pleaded with God for a child. But in this story, it is Hannah herself who goes directly to God. It says “she was deeply distressed and she wept bitterly.” 

She was broken-hearted and telling God about it.  Perhaps she rocked back and forth, perhaps she paced. Either her lips moved in silent prayer, or Eli the priest was hard of hearing and couldn’t hear the words she said. He also did not expect to find a woman praying there. He jumped to the conclusion that she was drunk and told her to stop making a spectacle of herself.

Her pain is mocked by her sister-wife, diminished by her husband and invalidated by her spiritual leader.  Perhaps something like that has happened to you.  These are the things that teach us to hid our pain, to be ashamed of it.  We may even start to believe that it is wrong to feel what we feel and we bury it deeper, which of course, does not heal anything. 

Hannah’s pain and hurt is long-lasting.  It is about one thing – infertility -- and also about many other things which have become part of its complexity. The writer of 1 Samuel devotes 18 verses to describing her hurt, so I invite us to sit with that for a bit, to recognize that this should be a place where we don’t have to pretend that everything is fine. This is a place where we can be real with each other.

. . .

Many of you will remember Leymah Gbowee.  Several years ago we watched the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. It was about the nonviolent movement of women who played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s devastating, 14-year-long civil war. Leymah Gbowee was a key leader of that movement.

Leymah was the fourth of five daughters.  Her name, Leymah means “what about me?”  as in “why can’t I conceive a son?”[1]  Her name  suggests, what her memoir bears out, that there was pain and hurt in her family of origin.

Then when she was 17, her country went to war with itself.  She personally endured much of the suffering inherent in war – the terror of enemy soldiers on her street, bullets through her living room, fleeing with her children to a refugee camp.  She also managed to get some education during those years and she became a social worker, specializing in trauma counseling. 

She became an organizer, organizing women whose voices were never heard in public arenas or private spaces where decisions were made, but who were always the victims of displacement, rape, starvation and other war crimes.

When she met with women, she would write the word NONSENSE on the chalkboard and then cross out the prefix NON.  She told that women “Everything we will say in here makes sense. So don’t be afraid to talk. Say what is true for you”

In her book, Mighty Be Our Powers, she describes travelling to a camp for internally displaced people.  In an outdoor shelter, fifty women gathered to share their experiences during the war. She called this exercise “Shedding the Weight” because it encouraged the women to divest themselves of the emotional burdens they were carrying.  Listening to women unburden themselves was always hard, but on this one day, there were so many stories of violence and shame and grief, so many sobs and wails, that she reached a point where she didn’t think she could take any more.

 “We can just stop,” she said.  “It’s okay.” 

Then a very old woman rose up on her walking stick,  “Don’t let us stop!”  she said.  “The UN brings us food and shelter and clothes, but what you’ve brought is much more valuable. You’ve come to hear the stories from our bellies.  Stories that no one else asks us about.  Please, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”[2]

That old woman understood the power of being heard, of sharing your story, of having your pain acknowledged and validated.

That is the power that was healing for Hannah.  After she poured out her hurt and pain to God, after Eli the priest finally respectfully acknowledged her, and prayed for her, the text says that she went home and ate and drank and was no longer sad. 

There are two pivotal points in Hannah’s story.  The first one is in verse 9, when she has carried her shame and despair as long as she can, the text says “Hannah rose.”  After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before the Lord.

Hannah rose.  She did not give up.  She did not bury herself in bitterness or continue to lash out at Elkanah and Peninnah.  Hannah rose.  She got up and took action.  With vulnerability and courage, she bears her whole story, her whole self to God.

Rev. James Forbes, former pastor at the Riverside Church, preached a now famous sermon called Hannah Rose. [3] In it, he suggested that anyone looking for a name for a daughter might choose that one – Hannah Rose – for what Hannah did in her hour of distress.  There are at least twenty women who bear that name now, including his own grand-daughter.

The first turning point in this story is Hannah’s ability to rise and speak her truth.  The second turning point happens in the encounter with Eli. Hurt is shared. Pain is acknowledged. And there is healing. 

Where does it hurt?  Beloved ones, for some of us, it is an act of faith and real courage to answer that. It requires trust that God is listening, that God cares.

When we stop to name what breaks our hearts, as some of us did this week, we get a glimpse of all that God is holding for us.  We see the enormity and the depth of the pain in our families and neighborhoods, in our country and across the world.  When we bear witness to the pain of others, when we listen with openness and acceptance, we share their suffering.  And sometimes, we may be an instrument of peace and healing.  It is one way that we follow the Christ who gives rest to those carrying heavy burdens and binds up the brokenhearted. Thanks be to God.

 

 


[1] Leymah Gbowee, with Carol Mithers, Mighty Be Our Powers:  How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War,  (New York, Beast Books, 2011),  p. 9

[2] Mighty Be Our Powers, p.121

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

5/30/21 - I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Are You From? - Genesis 2:4-15; John 1:35-51

I’ve Been Meaning to Ask:  Where Are You From?

Genesis 2:4-15; John 1:35-51

May 30, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/s3Z9cm5jTw4

I have seen a couple of articles recently about how to drive a car.  These articles are not aimed at brand-new drivers.  They are intended for people who are out of practice because they mostly stayed home during the pandemic. 

They are out of practice and they need to remember habits that used to come without conscious thought.  Just like those drivers who are returning to the road, some of us are out of practice.  We are a bit rusty on relationships with others. We kept our distance for more than a year and, now,  we might need to remember a few things.  So what I have to say today is not likely going to be new information.  It is intended to help us re-member, to re-connect, with that part within ourselves that is curious and relational, and to reconnect with each other. 

“Where are you from?” has often felt like a loaded question to me. I knew lots of people who had a simple answer.  They were from one place – a single town or a region.  It was always complicated for me.  And usually the person asking me didn’t want to the complicated answer.  They wanted a simple answer that would help them quickly size me up.    I got this question a lot when I went to Texas for college.  At that time, my simplest answer was “Chicago.”  Most of the time, when I gave that answer, one of two things would happen. They would say to me “You’re from Chicago?  Say Wisconsin.”  So that they could do their impression of a Midwestern accent. 

Or they would say, “Hey, I know someone from Chicago.  Do you know so-and-so?’  And I would always look at them rather incredulously.  Did they really not know that the odds were about one in three million that I would know the same person they knew in all of Chicago? 

You see I wasn’t from Texas and while there were many other out-of-state students, we were seriously outnumbered by the Texans.  When someone asked where you were from, they expected an answer with a place that they knew.  If your answer was Paris or Pittsburg, the assumption was that you meant the towns by those names within Texas, not the ones in France or Pennsylvania.  If you weren’t from Texas, they were sometimes at a loss for where to go in the conversation.

Where are you from can be a good relationship building question.  It can mean “tell me about where you grew up”  or “tell me about the place you live now”.  It can mean “help me to understand where you’re coming from, what life experiences have you had that shape your ideas and attitudes now.”  Or it can send a message that you’re not from around here and you don’t belong.  The question can be used to make someone feel like an outsider. 

We already know this. I am just helping us to remember.

In the passage that Pattie read for us, the titles for Jesus pile up.  He is called Lamb of God, Rabbi, Messiah, the fulfillment of scripture and the guy from Nazareth.  Each of the would-be disciples has some preconceptions about who Jesus is.  This is part of John’s way of setting up his story about Jesus.  Those titles and categories will be expanded or transformed or redefined by Jesus as the story unfolds, but this is also a reminder about human nature.  We are not always comfortable with the unknown, and sometimes we rush to label people, to put them in categories as a way of overcoming our own anxiety.

It is interesting to see how Jesus dealt with this. Dr. Raj Nadella suggests that the term Rabbi does not really capture Jesus’ true identity in John’s gospel.  Two of them ask where Jesus is staying, where he hangs out,  and instead of answering him directly, Jesus says “come and see.”  Jesus invites them to his place so that they can understand him more fully.  He does not get bent out of shape because of their labels.  He remains open to relationship.

As people get to know Jesus, they want to introduce him to others.  Philip invites Nathanael to meet him, mentioning Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth. Nazareth was a small village, so insignificant that it is not mentioned one time in the entire Old Testament nor in Josephus' list of Galilean towns.[1] One scholar claims that Nathanael is from Cana,[2] which is a town not far from Nazareth.  When Nathanael sneers “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  we may be seeing some rivalry between two neighboring villages.  Whatever the reason for Nathanael’s skepticism, Philip doesn’t argue with him.  He just extends the invitation to come and see.  And Nathanael does.

Sometimes, we at Emmanuel have been very good at introducing others to Jesus, very good at sharing our faith.  We have asked where are you from? in carefully curious ways.  We have listened and welcomed people who offered all kinds of answers  --

I am from right down the street.

I am from another country.

I live I poverty.

I live in a middle class neighborhood. 

I am gay or straight or single or divorced. 

I come from a more liberal stream of Christianity or politics.  I come from a more conservative stream of Christianity or politics. 

I want to be in relationship with you, but I’m hoping I don’t have to give up who I am in order to have that relationship.  Sometimes we have done well with that.

And then, sometimes, we have not. Sometimes, we have allowed our preconceptions and assumptions about others to shut down real relationship before it ever began. Sometimes, we have been satisfied with the relationships we already have here, and been unwilling to invest the time and energy in new ones.  Sometimes, we have busied ourselves with the tasks of church – of running meetings or setting up potlucks or teaching Sunday School or writing a sermon – and we have failed to be available to people who were just trying to come and see Jesus for themselves.

I say this as an introvert who doesn’t always want to be with people.  I say it as one who has sometimes stayed safely behind the tasks and programs of church instead of venturing out with caring curiosity.  I also say it as someone who has desperately needed to be received with care, to be known as myself.  And I say it, as a pastor who has often been required to invest my time and energy into relationship with people I would not have sought out, people I would not have chosen.  And my life is infinitely richer because of it.

I am not telling you anything new.  I am just reminding us of what we already know.

Sarah Culberson is a woman who set out to answer the question “where am I from” for herself.  That journey led to some unexpected places. The story is best heard in her own words.   https://youtu.be/Ie_m_eBevUI

There are so many parallels between her story and our theme. She had preconceptions about her biological father, which she consciously had to set aside.  She had to consider his life and circumstances before she could even start to look for him.  Then he invited her to Sierra Leone.  Maybe he even said “come and see” and she did.  I loved the description of her welcome – being given a dress that showed she belonged, hearing the song “we are preparing for Sarah”, knowing that she didn’t have to do anything, just showing up was enough.  It’s a great story.

I’m thinking about some other parallels.  I’m thinking about times when you or I were received without reservation and what grace that was.   I’m thinking about people who have shown up here among us and they have felt profoundly welcomed, almost as if we had been preparing just for them.  And I’m thinking about people who are asking “can anything good come out of the church?”  Some of them are skeptical, but curious, they might just come and see, if we would make the effort to invite them and to hang out together.

Over the last year, we have remembered some of the truths of Genesis 2, the passage we heard at the beginning of worship.  That text describes the creation as a living organism, where the earth and inhabitants are inextricably joined to one another, where they depend on one another, and require one another for flourishing life.[3]  The lethality of an invisible virus that spread across the entire world has reminded us of our interdependence.   The isolation of pandemic has taught us how vital it is to be with other people.  Some people are wondering in new ways about where we are all from, about the responsibility we have to each other.

That is the other parallel I heard in Sarah Culberson’s story.  She showed up and was profoundly welcomed just as she was. But it didn’t end there.  Receiving hospitality led to responsibility.  Finding her people meant sharing their difficulties as well as their joys.  And it also meant telling the story to a wider and wider audience, so that individuals could recognize the truth in it and respond to it in their own contexts.

Friends, that is a parable isn’t it?   The kingdom of God is like the woman who was brave enough to ask where am I from and gracious enough to set aside her preconceptions about her father to meet him on his own terms. The kingdom of God is like the woman who went on a journey to an unknown, foreign place and was welcomed home with singing.  It is like the one who receives hospitality and takes on responsibility in an ever-widening circle of grace, because we are created for curiosity and vitality and mutuality and relationship. 

 

It can be like that for you and for me.  Come and see.

 

[1] https://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2018/01/epiphany-2-john-1-43-51.html

[2] Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible Commentary, Volume I (Garden City, NY:  DoubleDay, 1966), p. 82.

[3] Kathleen M. O’Connor, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Genesis 1-25A, (Macon, GA:  Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2018) p. 57. 

 

5/23/21 - Dare to Dance Again:  With Spirit - Ezekiel 37:1-14

Dare to Dance Again:  With Spirit

Ezekiel 37:1-14

May 23, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/PK2g8vMzkqs

 

Every year, bodies of migrants wash up on the shores of the Mediterranean, in Libya, Turkey, Algeria and Greece. 

Every year, human remains are found in the harsh terrain along the US/Mexico border.  More than 6700 bodies have been found there since 2000, probably only a fraction of the actual number who have died from thirst or heat or hyperthermia while trying to cross the border. [1] The bodies of migrants are often reduced to dry bones before they are found. 

The migrants are mostly nameless, but we are starting to know the names, so many names, of black and brown people who are killed during encounters with police – at routine traffic stops or walking down the street or sleeping in their own beds. 

The crematoriums in India are overwhelmed by victims of the coronavirus.  The bodies are literally piling up.  In the United States, estimates of the death toll range from 600,000 to 900,000.   I try, but I cannot imagine that number of bodies, that amount of death.

We are perhaps not very far from Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Ezekiel is one of the prophets of the exile, deported to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. The dry bones he sees are of soldiers slaughtered in battle, left unburied, to be ravaged by birds and beasts.  In his vision, Ezekiel walks around among the very dry, very many, bones.  The bones would evoke memories – of the siege of Jerusalem, with family and friends trapped inside the city, unable to conduct normal life, dying of hunger and disease.  They would surface memories of the destruction of the Temple and of the forced march to Babylon where he is now, among the exiles. And so the dry bones come to represent not just the actual dead, but the living dead.  The dry bones represent those living in exile, those who might as well be dead because they have no future and no hope.

African American theologian and preacher Luke Powery notes that we often link the Holy Spirit with celebration and joy and ecstatic moments.  But Ezekiel was brought out by the Spirit and set down in the middle of a valley and it was full of bones.  Sometimes, the Spirit leads us to valleys of dry bones.  Sometimes the Spirit leads towards places of contamination and death.  Sometimes the Spirit forces us to confront reality.  Powery says “This is holy honesty in the face of existential hell.”[2]

In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of being in Florida, at a time when the loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs.  One evening, when the tide was out, she watched a huge turtle heave herself up on the beach to dig her nest and empty her eggs into it.  Afraid of disturbing the event, Taylor quickly and quietly walked away.  The next morning she returned to the beach to see if she could find the spot where the eggs were hidden.  What she found instead were sea turtle tracks heading in the wrong direction.  Instead of moving back into the sea, the loggerhead turtle had wandered into the dunes, the hot, dry, sandy dunes.  Taylor eventually found the turtle a little ways inland, exhausted, all but baked in the sun, head and flippers covered with sand.  She poured the water from her water bottle over the creature and then left to notify the beach ranger.

The ranger soon arrived in a Jeep to rescue the turtle.  He flipped the loggerhead on her back, wrapped two chains around her front legs, and then hooked the chain to the trailer hitch.  Taylor watched horrified as the ranger then took off in the Jeep.   The turtle’s body was yanked forward with such thrust that her mouth filled with sand.  Her neck was bent so far back Taylor feared it might break.  The ranger continued over the dunes and down onto the beach. 

There he unhooked the turtle at the edge of the water and turned her right side up.  The loggerhead laid motionless in the surf, water lapping at her body, washing the dry sand away.  As another wave broke over, the turtle lifted her head and moved her back legs.  Soon other waves crashed over her and brought her slowly back to life.  Finally one of the waves completely overcame the turtle, making her light enough to find a foothold and push off the beach, returning safely to the ocean.

Taylor writes that watching the turtle swim away and remembering the horrible scene of the turtle being dragged through the dunes, she learned something -- that  “It is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”[3]

It is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by what has turned your life upside down. 

There, in the silent and terrifying valley of bones, God asks Ezekiel “Can these bones live?” Ezekiel’s answer “O God, you know” is delightfully ambiguous.[4]  He could be saying “That’s your call, God.  You hold life and death in your hands.” 

Or he could be saying  “No way, they are all the way dead, and you know it.”

Can these bones live, Ezekiel? 

O God, you know.

Then prophecy to the bones, Ezekiel.

Ezekiel does as God commands and the bones rattle.  Ezekiel continues to speak and skeletons reassemble themselves.  Muscle and skin covers them, but there is no spirit, no breath.  Without the breath of God, they remain lifeless

Call the breath, Ezekiel. 

Call the wind from the four directions

Ezekiel does.  The air stirs, a gentle breeze at first, and then a persistent current of air, relentlessly present, blowing away the chaff, inflating lungs, rousing the dead.  The ruach, that wind/spirit/breath of God which enlivens and awakens is present with power.

The book of Ezekiel is full of visions and almost every one of them is dated.  The scripture records when in Ezekiel’s life it occurred, but not this one. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel has observed that this one bears no date, because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live again.[5] The valley of the dry bones happens over and over again at the intersection of human weakness and divine power. 

Every generation needs to hear in its own time.  This is our moment, our time to know that these bones can live again.   Ruach blows where she will.  Beyond the confines of the church, the Spirit is active in new visions of justice and liberation.  In the movement for Black Lives, in campaigns for environmental justice, and in tenacious resistance to oppression in places like Myanmar and Gaza, we witness the fierce love the Spirit has for this troubled world.[6]

Within the church, Ruach blows where she will.  Did you hear the voice of Pastor Megan Argabrite in the visual meditation, the video with the fire dancer?  She said, “The spirit is not done creating.  We are not done becoming. . . . We are not who we once were and we are not who we shall be.”[7]

Remember that loggerhead turtle stranded and almost dead in the hot sun?  The pandemic has dragged us through times and place not of our own choosing.  Friends, there is great anxiety within churches across the country these days.    A significant number of pastors have re-evaluated their vocation.  Many have left the ministry, including one of my friends. Some have taken early retirement, including one of my friends.  Many church members have drifted away and there is fear that they will not return.  We have lost many of the routines, the structures, the familiar ways of being together in faith.  Can these bones live again?

It is sometimes hard to tell whether we are being killed or saved by what has turned life upside down.  But I believe that these bones can live again.  And not just live, but thrive.  I believe that this is our Pentecost moment.  The Spirit has blown away the chaff, the dullness, the church systems and structures that may have become lifeless, dry bones.   The gentle breeze of God is gathering strength, blowing persistently, awakening life, renewing our hope, summoning us to the radical good news of Jesus with new power and boldness.

“The spirit is not done creating.  We are not done becoming. . . . We are not who we once were – thanks be to God –

 and we are not yet who we shall be.”

Beloved ones, now hear the word of the Lord:

dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again!

[1] https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2018/11/06/migrants-US-Mexico-caravan-elections-Trump-water-desert

[2] Luke A. Powery, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year B, Volume 2 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp, editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 330

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning To Walk in the Dark, (New York:  HarperCollins, 2014), p. 66-67   Note: some liberty was taken in the re-telling of this story; I found it first in another source purportedly quoting the original

[4] John Holbert https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/2015/05/we-rattling-bones-john-c-holbert-05-15-2015

[5] Elie Wiesel, “Ezekiel” in Congregation:  Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, ed.  David Rosenberg (San Diego:  Harcourt Brace Jovanaovich, 1987), p. 186

[6] Wendy Farley in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year B, Volume 2 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp, editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p.315

[7] https://youtu.be/OeCfuC_2ds4

5/16/21 - Dare to Dance Again:  The Absence/Presence Rhythm - Acts 1:1-11

Dare to Dance Again:  The Absence/Presence Rhythm

Acts 1:1-11

May 16, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/hR-JvU0iBpI

At one time in church history, Ascension was a high, holy day, equal in importance to Christmas and Easter.  Ascension always falls 40 days after Easter which means that it always lands on a Thursday.  Just as we gather for worship on Christmas Eve, no matter what day of the week it is, earlier Christians would have gathered to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension on that same Thursday every year.  Now, most Christian traditions move the observance to Sunday, if they attend to it at all. 

The fact that it was once so prominent in the calendar makes me think that a smart preacher will approach today’s sermon like she would on Christmas or Easter.  Which is to say that I know my words will be inadequate in the face of mystery, but I will try to say something anyway.

In one Amish community even today, Ascension is more significant than Easter, but not nearly so festive.  A Protestant pastor asked an Amish bishop if they celebrated the day with a worship service, with a potluck meal, with communion? “No,” he responded. “We don’t really think of the day as a celebration at all, but more like a time of mourning.”   Recalling Jesus’ parable about the time when the bridegroom is taken away and the people fast,  he said “It’s a time for lament because that’s when we remember that Jesus left us behind—that’s when he left us here.” There is no feasting, only fasting.[1]

The Ascension acknowledges loss.  Jesus no longer dwells in physical form among those who love him.  Where there was once a flesh and blood presence, there is now only absence.  We usually perceive absence as loss and therefore something painful.

In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a beloved sleeper once lay.  Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust.  Absence is the overgrown lot where the old house once stood, the house in which people laughed and thought their love would last forever.”[2]

Absence can be painful.  It can also be valuable in revealing what is precious.  Many of us carry within us the voices of departed loved ones.  Every once in a while, sometimes regularly, messages accumulated across a lifetime come to us. Phrases like  “money doesn’t grow on trees” or

“Leftie loosie, rightie tightie” or

“I don’t care who wins as long it’s the Cubs” or

 “I am proud of you.”

We hear their voices within us or we notice that we do something the way they did it.  Their habits become ours.  And so, the absent one becomes keenly present in a paradoxical way. 

Adam and Eve, and therefore all human beings, were created in the image of God to be in relationship with God.  The incarnation,  Jesus in human flesh on earth, was the next step in God’s process of uniting with humans. The Ascension acknowledges the loss of the physical Jesus from the earth, but it celebrates the presence of Jesus at the right hand of God.    It is the culmination – “now there is ‘one of us’ where we all shall be, where from the very beginning of creation we were intended to be.” [3]

There are some people, some preachers and theologians,  who attempt to magnify God by denigrating humans.  The Bible speaks differently, proclaiming that we are made in God’s image, a little lower than the angels.  Theologian Justo Gonzalez writes, “if the one who sits at the right hand of God, is ‘one of us’, that is a human being, then every human being is worthy of the highest respect.  Not only we Christians, but every human being, is like the one who already sits at the right hand of God.”[4]

At Christmas, we attend to the mystery that is God coming to earth in human form.  At Ascension, we can attend to the mystery that is a human going to heaven in God form.  (Or something kind of like that.  I told you that my words would be inadequate.)

As Jesus ascends, the disciples gaze upwards and the angels ask “Why are you standing here starting up into heaven?”  The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr observes, “most of Christianity has been doing just that, straining to find the historical Jesus ‘up there.’  Where did he go?  We’ve been obsessed with the question because we think the universe is divided into separate levels – heaven and earth.  But,” Rhor says, “It is one universe and everything within it is transmuted and transformed by the glory of God.  The whole point of the incarnation and risen body is that Christ is here – and always was!  But now we have a story that allows us to imagine it just might be true.”[5]

Let’s step back for a minute and see this story in its context.  We heard it from the beginning of the book of Acts today, but it is also found at the end of the Gospel of Luke. Acts is the sequel to the gospel of Luke and the Ascension is the hinge between them.  Acts 1:1 says that the first book was all about what Jesus began to do and to teach.  That was only the beginning of the ministry.  The gospel contained the acts of Jesus in the flesh and the second book, the Acts of the Apostles, tells the next part of the history, the ways that Jesus’s work goes on beyond his physical embodied presence.

I’m running out of words again, so let me try with a picture.  This is diagram is the work of Richard Rohr.  It is an attempt to show our growing, evolving understanding of God. At the top of the hourglass are expansive ideas of God, probably too big for the human mind to grasp.

At the very center of this diagram is Jesus, the human being. The one we call Jesus existed before the beginning of the creation as part of the Trinity.  Jesus of Nazareth became the Christ, the Annointed One, in his death and resurrection.  The Risen Christ is Jesus, but bigger and beyond Jesus’ individual form and lifetime. Richard Rohr says that that “the Risen Christ is Jesus released from all space/time restrictions.  He is beyond space, beyond time.  He includes all of the spiritual and the physical world, reconciled within himself.”[6]

The physical Jesus no longer dwells among us, but he lives in us through his teachings and the habits of his which we have adopted as our own.  The physical Jesus was limited to first century Palestine, but the Holy Spirit is present in all times and places.  The physical Jesus was continually inviting his disciples to join him on mission.  And here, at the time of the Ascension, he does that one last time, saying “You shall be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”  They will pick up the story, the story which begins to be told in the Acts of the Apostles, the story of the work of the Spirit carried out by human beings.  That is the story that you and I are invited into, the epic story which we are already part of, as the hands and feet of Jesus. 

Many of you know much more about opera than I do.  You probably know the history of Puccini’s Turandot.  Puccini is the composer of La Boheme and Madame Butterfly. In 1922, he was suffering with cancer, but still working on his opera Turandot. Many people urged him to rest, thinking that he couldn't possibly finish it anyway. When his illness worsened Puccini wrote to his students, "If I don't finish Turandot I want you to finish it for me".   Then came the fateful day in 1924 when Puccini went to Brussels for treatment. He died a few days later.

In 1926, the world premiere was performed in the opera house in Italy. It was directed by Puccini's student, Arturo Toscanini. Everything went beautifully until the orchestra reached the point where Puccini was forced to put down his pen.

Toscanini stopped the music, put down his baton, turned to the audience and said, "Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died".  The curtain was slowly lowered and the audience departed, lamenting the absence of the composer.

The next night, the performance began at the top again, but this time, when it reached the place where Puccini died, the music continued, because another composer had picked up where he left off and finished the work.

We might say that it is a work that will never be fully finished, as others in subsequent generations have also written and continue to write new endings.

Jesus said, “greater things than I have done, you will do.”  We are his students.  He has trusted us to carry on his work, to embody his teachings, to be together, the Body of Christ, in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.  Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

[1] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/may-10-ascension-lord-luke-2444-53

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Lanham, Maryland:  Cowley Publications, 1995), p, 76.

[3] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p.281

[4] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts:  The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001).p. 26

[5] Richard Rohr  https://cac.org/heaven-earth-one-2016-10-27/

[6] Richard Rohr  https://cac.org/heaven-earth-one-2016-10-27/

5/9/21 - Dare to Dance Again:  As I Have Loved You - John 15:9-17 

Dare to Dance Again:  As I Have Loved You

John 15:9-17 

May 9, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/AuVx3YWfKD4

The Rev. David Read was born and raised in Scotland, but he was the senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City for more than 30 years.  His autobiography is called God Was in the Laughter.  In it, he talks about growing up in Scotland and his Aunt Belle, his most  religious relative, who looked like Queen Victoria. “It was difficult to avoid God in her home,” he said, and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. “Morning and evening prayers, endless church services to be endured.” God, he says, was formidable, to be regarded with awe if not outright fear. The Christianity he knew was very serious business. He quotes a Christopher Marley novel in which a character says about Presbyterians and their religion, “It don’t prevent them from committing all the sins there is, but it keeps them from getting any fun out of it”[1]

Our faith can be serious business, even if we don’t approach it like Aunt Belle.  And life can be serious. It has felt especially heavy for more than a year. And yet, there is joy, exuberant joy, throughout the Bible.  In the call to worship, we heard from Psalm 98,  Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break forth into joyous song . . . Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy!

It was Jesus’ last Passover with his disciples and he sensed that.  For about a week, he has been interacting with his adversaries in Jerusalem during the day, but withdrawing from the city to a safer place at night.  The sense of danger, the stress, has been ratcheting up.  At the point of our reading from John 15, he has told the group that one of them will betray him. It is a very serious time, a heart-wrenching time, but it is also when Jesus speaks profoundly about joy.  

“I am telling you these things so that your joy may be complete, so that it may be full,”  Jesus says.  “This is my commandment that you love another as I have loved you.”

Philip Yancy wrote about this.  He said,

Not long ago I received in the mail a postcard from a friend that had on it only six words, "I am the one Jesus loves." I smiled when I saw the return address, for my strange friend excels at these pious slogans. When I called him, though, he told me the slogan came from the author and speaker Brennan Manning. At a seminar, Manning referred to Jesus' closest friend on earth identified in the Gospels as "the one Jesus loved." Manning said, "If John were to be asked, 'What is your primary identity in life?' he would not reply, 'I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist,' but rather, 'I am the one Jesus loves.'"

What would it mean if we could claim that as our primary identity in life – I am the one Jesus loves? 

Brennan Manning also tells the story of an Irish priest who goes out for a walk and  sees an old peasant kneeling by the side of the road, praying. Impressed, the priest says to the man, "You must be very close to God." The peasant looks up from his prayers, thinks a moment, and then smiles, "Yes, God’s very fond of me."[2]

Love one another as I have loved you.  Those who are loved are themselves able to love. We understand this intellectually.   Those who are loved have a capacity for love, an energy from which to draw on.  But what if we could really believe “I am someone Jesus loves.”  What if we could internalize that and trust it deeply? If you hear nothing else today, try to hear this “You are someone Jesus loves.  God is very fond of you.”

Love one another as I have loved you.  As they sat around the Passover table, what memories might those words have evoked? Jesus had loved them in the daily routine, walking, talking, sharing meals, telling stories.  Jesus had loved them in the high moments like walking on water and feeding the 5,000.  He had loved them in the hard times, like when Peter’s mother-in-law was sick, when Lazarus was dead, when controversy swirled around them.  He had loved them enough to confront their lack of understanding, to encourage them on the occasions when they could not heal like he had, enough to call them away from their day jobs to join his mission,

His love for them was a comprehensive kind of love. He calls it friendship.  He says that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Jesus has loved them in the ordinary and now he is prepared to love them in the extraordinary, by literally giving his life for them. 

Love one another as I have loved you.  I call you friends.  If you want to be my friends, then be friends with others. 

The philosopher Aristotle lived 300 years before Jesus. Artistotle described three kinds of friendship. Some people are our friends because they are useful to us; they allow us to make business connections or get into a particular social group. Other friendships are pleasurable; we cultivate these because we enjoy them. But the third kind of friendship—the best kind—is for the sake of friendship itself. . we become friends with those whose lives we seek to emulate.

Aristotle said that “a friend is another self.” Friends form each other in the moral life, taking on each other's characteristics —both good and bad. We are known by the company we keep; in fact, we are very likely to become the company we keep.

These friendships are the most formative: a true friend who loves as God loves will, in time, teach us how to love as God loves.

Thus, when Jesus says "You are my friends if you do what I command you," he is not simply offering a useful or pleasurable friendship to those who have done his bidding. He is describing the kind of deep friendship that Aristotle calls the best kind. We are called into this kind of relationship with Jesus and, thereby, with God. The theologian Thomas Aquinas took up this idea explicitly—suggesting that part of the goal of the Christian life was to become "friends with God." Through this friendship, we hope to take on God's characteristics as our own—

and to love one another as God loves us.[3]

Jesus did not come to give us a list of rules to keep us safe from an angry God.  He came to call us into friendship with God.

Love one another as I have loved you.  I call you friends.  If you want to be my friends, then be friends with others.  Do love for others as I have done love for you.

It sounds all serious again. And heavy.  And maybe not so joyful.  It is not an easy calling, that is for sure.

And yet, several times, Jesus repeats “abide in my love.”  Remain in my love.  Live  and dwell in my love.  Endure, continue, last in my love. Jesus’ love is our example, but also our source.  It is where we live and move, within the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.  It is our rhythm, our dance, where we begin and end and begin again

“Abide in my love.” 

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

“Abide in my love.” 

Anne is a colleague, a priest in the Church of England, in Britain.  One Friday afternoon, she hosted a visit to church for a class of seven-year-olds from a nearby school.  They discovered all sorts of interesting things about the church and had a lot to talk about.  There was one little boy in the class with special needs. He sees the world in completely different way and it is not always easy to know what is going on in his mind.

As he left the church at the end of the visit, he turned to Anne with a thoughtful expression on his face.  She wondered what was going to come out.  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re beginning to look a bit like God.’ 

Anne said, “I have no idea what he meant – probably just that I was looking very, very old . . .and dressed in a white robe on that occasion. But I love the phrase anyway and it gave me a lot to think about.  Wouldn’t it be good if people could look at us and think that we really were beginning to look a bit like God; that we were more loving, more forgiving, more joyful, more disturbed by injustice, more courageous about doing something about it.  If that is going to happen, it will only be because we are abiding in love, and therefore abiding in God.”

Friends,  you are someone God loves.  God is very fond of you.

“I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full,” Jesus said.

Thanks be to God.

 

[1] God Was in the Laughter: The Autobiography of David Haxton Carswell Read (New York: Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 2005) p. 14, 17

[2] Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), pp. 68-69

[3] David S.Cunningham in Feasting on the Word Year B, Volume 2, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008), p. 500

 

5/2/21 - Dare to Dance Again: Guide My Steps - Acts 8:26-40

Dare to Dance Again:  Guide My Steps

Acts 8:26-40

May 2, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Image:  Painting by Wensces Cortez, inside the Migrant Outreach Center, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico

The figures in the mural are all migrants who passed through the dining room at some point.

 

Note:  A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/bTV9-B3OxUY

 

I have to wonder what part of Philip’s life experience prepared him for that day on the deserted road.  Was it his time as a deacon at First Church in Jerusalem? That was when he had to deal with people in conflict, making sure that the widows’ needs were met fairly without preferential treatment because of ethnic background.  Was it his identity as a Hellenist – one of those Jewish people who had relocated to Israel after living somewhere else in the Empire?  His accent and his tendency to speak Greek, his first language, always gave him away among the Jewish people who spoke Aramaic, those who had been born and raised in Palestine. 

Maybe it was that he was part of a growing, but still young, religious movement.  He was used to being in the minority in some other ways; maybe being pushed to the edges of social respectability because of his faith didn’t distress him too much.  But he had been distressed by the persecution that broke out in Jerusalem, enough that he had fled that city, along with many others.  He ended up in Samaria. 

In Samaria, he had risen to the kind of responsibility held by the apostles in Jerusalem. In Samaria, he was an evangelist, a bold preacher and a healer.  Maybe, by this time, he was less surprised by the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Maybe he was so in the habit of relying on God’s guidance that the appearance of an angel telling him to take the road out of town seemed like an ordinary thing.

I also have to wonder what part of the Ethiopian’s life experience prepared him for that day on the deserted road.  He was not an immigrant like Phillip, but a foreign visitor.  He might have been Jewish, one of those who lived far from Israel or he might have been a God-fearing Gentile.  Luke, the author of Acts, does not really make that clear.  He was from Ethiopia, which is the part of the world now known as Sudan. One common stereotype against his people at the time was that they had a dog as a king. Another was that some regions bred human monstrosities – people without noses or tongues.[1]  He was travelling through a country where the inhabitants held those kinds of racist ideas about his people.  I have to wonder how he felt about that and what role that played in his encounter with Philip that day.

The Ethiopian is also a eunuch. In contemporary language, he is gender non-conforming.  For not measuring up to the Roman ideals of masculinity and strength, for being something other than the gender assigned at birth, he would have faced scorn and derision and abuse.    

What prepared him for that day on the deserted road? Luke calls it a wilderness road, but that road didn’t go through a literal desert at that point.  Maybe Luke wants to remind us that important spiritual events happen in wilderness and this is such a place.  Or maybe because it is deserted, off the beaten path, the two men are able to come together in a way that they wouldn’t have on a busy highway. 

The Ethiopian has travelled hundreds of miles, many through actual wilderness, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, earnestly seeking God.  He is on his way home from that.  Whatever happened there is surely in the background of this encounter. 

We don’t know the details of his time in Jerusalem. Deuteronomy 23:1 says “no one whose testicles are crushed shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord.”  This prohibition clearly applies to the Ethiopian eunuch.  But there was a Court of Gentiles in the Temple which had not existed at the time that Deuteronomy was written, so perhaps he might have been admitted that far.  The Court of the Gentiles was the noisy place where the money changers and the temple vendors were.  It was further out than the court of women.  A place that was in, but not fully in.  A marginal place. A place we might call “welcoming, but not affirming.”

What is he feeling now, on his way home?  Does he feel closer to God, after being excluded or maybe just grudgingly tolerated by the religious community?  Or is he in theological crisis? 

He seems to be still earnestly seeking a way to know God.

He is reading from Isaiah 53.  It is a description of God’s servant who suffers humiliation and injustice and death.  It is a passage that Philip would have connected with Jesus.  The Ethiopian does not understand it, but it seems to resonate. “Perhaps it calls to him because it reflects some of the complexities of his own life, his own religious, sexual and racial differences, his own vulnerability.”[2]

The Scripture speaks to him.  It finds him where he is, and on this occasion, God has also provided Philip to act as interpreter and guide.  I have to wonder about their conversation.  I have to wonder if the Ethiopian shared the details of his own experiences of suffering, perhaps even of his exclusion from the Temple.  I have to wonder if Philip talked about his identity as an immigrant and the power of God he had experienced.  I think about how human conversations go and how we seek common ground, and how many points of connections these two might have found quickly.  I have to believe that the Spirit who brought them together moved between them in ways that were healing and transformational for both. 

If the Ethiopian did experience rejection in Jerusalem, Philip might have referred back to Deuteronomy as an explanation or a defense. “Well, you know what the Bible says about people like you.”  

Or he might have taken the scroll of Isaiah and rolled it forward just a little to chapter 56 where he would have read “Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

Deuteronomy says eunuchs are not welcome.  But Isaiah places them within God’s house, with a name better than son or daughter. Two passages of Scripture, seemingly with equal authority.  But they are also contradictory. They must be read in dialogue with each other And they are by no means the only passages which conflict with each other.

So, we dance with Scripture and with the Spirit to order our steps.  We listen to each other.  We learn from each other – from the immigrant and the foreigner and the cultural insider, from the experiences of women and men and non-binary persons.  We listen for how Scripture speaks to those who read passages for the very first time and to those who understand it in wide context.  We teach and we are taught.

This story is usually understood as the Ethiopian’s conversion, but I have to wonder about the ways it transformed Philip too. The guidance of the Spirit is unmistakable in the story, after the fact.  But it may not always be in the moment.  I sense that Philip was able to follow the Spirit’s guidance because he had courageously started doing that some time ago. With time and discipline, he had come to trust that invisible power, those internal promptings, to put himself at God’s disposal as witness for the gospel, to take the lonely road, to speak to strangers. 

Because of that, he is there to hear the Ethiopian’s poignant question – “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  This man has a history of being prevented from all kinds of things, from having children, from exercising power in his own right, from being fully accepted in many ways. 

So, he asks “What is to prevent me?”  “What is to prevent me from belonging to the family of God?  What is to prevent me from being welcomed as Christ’s own?  What is to prevent me from full participation in the risen life and community of Jesus?  What is to prevent me from breaking down the entrenched barriers, fences, walls, and obstacles that have kept me at an agonizing arm’s length from the God I yearn for?  What is to prevent me from becoming, not merely a hearer of the Good News, but an integral part of the Good News of resurrection?”[3]

Friends, please know that these questions have not gone away.  They persist in the lives of young and old, in the hearts of those in the center and those at the margins.  There are still so many who resonate with the stories of the Bible, which they may not fully understand, so many who are earnestly seeking God, in spite of the barriers and obstacles, many of which have been created by the institutional church and well-meaning Christians.

“What is to prevent me?” the Ethiopian asks. The answer is nothing, absolutely nothing. 

As theologian Debie Thomas says, “In the post-resurrection world, in the world where the Spirit of God moves where and how she will, drawing all of creation to herself, in the world where the Word lives to defeat death, alienation, isolation, and fear, there is nothing to prevent a beloved image-bearer of God from entering into the fullness of Christ’s salvation.  Nothing whatsoever.”[4]

Beloved ones, we are Easter people.  We trust that God in Christ is reconciling the world   – the broken, desperate, violent and yearning world – to God’s own self.   So, then, may we find the courage to take the lonely road, to listen to strangers. May we learn and teach and offer radical welcome, again and again and again.  May we join the dance, allowing scripture and the Spirit to guide our steps.  Amen.

 

 

 [1] [1] J. Bradley Chance, Acts: Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, (Macon:  Smyth and Helwys, 2007), p. 136

[2] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome

[3] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome

[4] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome

 

4/25/21 - Climate Migration: How Should the Church Respond? - Genesis 41:53 - 42:5; Luke 9:51-58 - guest preacher Rev. Dr. Leah Shade

On 4/25/2021, Emmanuel Baptist Church joined for a joint Zoom worship service with Westminster Presbyterian Church. Our guest preacher was the Rev. Dr. Leah Shade.

The sermon Dr. Shade preached can be read here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2021/04/climate-migration-how-should-church-respond/

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/NMgVe3mNwjM

4/18/21 - Dare to Dance Again; Dancing with Doubts - Luke 24:36b-48; 1 John 3:1-2

Dare to Dance Again:  Dancing With Doubts

Luke 24:36b-48, I John 3:1-2

April 18, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 

Image: Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival 2017, photo by Ahmad Odeh at unsplash.com

 

Note:  A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/SZie_p2R3EE

 

I have not been watching the Derek Chauvin trial in Minnesota this week.  I am aware that it is happening, as I expect you are.  Every once in a while, one nugget of information, one piece of testimony, has made it into my news feed, and that has been enough for me.  The trial is extremely important, but I have avoided hearing the details.  I have avoided re-living the last 10 excruciating minutes of George Floyd’s life, precisely because they were excruciating. 

One thing that did make it into my awareness was the testimony of the pulmonary expert who said that George Floyd attempted to breathe through his fingers and his knuckles.  Well, more precisely that he tried to use them to lift his body and expand his chest to get more air.  He died from lack of oxygen.  You probably know that that is the final cause of death in crucifixion.  It is a brutal, exhausting way to die. The end finally comes when the person being crucified can no longer lift their chest to get air.

During Holy Week, several theologians discussed the seven last words of George Floyd.[1]  His final utterances offer many parallels with the final words of Jesus.   Which is not to suggest that Floyd is some kind of savior, but to note the  profound similarities of lynchings by the state across time.

I have mostly avoided knowing these things.  I have intentionally avoided knowing them as an act of self-protection. 

Jesus’ disciples did not have that luxury.  They had been drawn into the horrors of the crucifixion.  In that place called Golgatha, they could not look away as surely as the bystanders on 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis could not look away from what played out before them. 

If you think I’m repeating myself, if you think I might have mentioned something about the trauma of the disciples last week or the week before, you are correct.  The lectionary readings this season ricochet from one gospel to the next.  We read from Mark and then John and now Luke all wrestling with the same events. 

Ched Myers is an activist theologian.  He wrote a brilliant commentary on Mark’s gospel thirty years ago, which I read in seminary.  It is still my go-to commentary on Mark.  He lives a life of radical discipleship and teaches others to do the same.  This sermon is largely inspired by his thoughts on the Lukan passage.[2]

Myers says that after Resurrection, the disciples have to reckon with Jesus’ mutilated body.  He calls it “the traumatic somatic.”  The traumatic somatic.  All of the events of Good Friday culminating in Jesus’ execution were traumatic.  They were also somatic, meaning that they involved a body, that flesh and blood suffered great pain And then, every time Jesus appears after his resurrection, the traumatic somatic repeats. The sight of his body reminds them of the trauma of crucifixion.

Last week, we remembered the story of Thomas who needed to see Jesus’ wounds for himself. In this week’s passage, the disciples are afraid at first that Jesus is a ghost.  Jesus points out that unlike ghosts, he has hands and feet.  And then, the person that they have shared countless meals with says, “do you have anything to eat?”  I like to imagine Jesus saying that with a joking tone, trying to break the tension with humor, “Hey friends, I haven’t eaten since Thursday night, remember. Can you help a guy out?”  Then he eats a piece of fish, further evidence that he is not a ghost. 

When Jesus first appears, the disciples are afraid.  In the New RSV, verse 37 says they were startled and terrified.  Myers translates it “terrified and awestruck”.  His translation work is revealing.  The first adjective “terrified” is only used one other time in the New Testament.  Luke 21:9 says “when you hear of wars and upheavals, do not be terrified; these things are inevitable.”  The intention of Roman crucifixion was terrorism – to terrify its subjects into submission.  Luke is saying that violence is inevitable under empire, especially for those who speak truth against it. 

The second kind of fear displayed by the disciples is the kind of awe that comes from being in the presence of God.  So they are terrified and awestruck.  They are caught between the fear of Roman terrorism which they can plainly see in the scars left on Jesus’ body and the dawning awareness that they are in the presence of One who has been raised from the dead. 

Myers says, “On the one hand, they cower before the handiwork of imperial terrorism, imprinted on the body of Jesus. On the other hand, they reel before the prospect that somehow Rome has not had the last word, that the divine conspiracy for life has burst the straightjacket of imperial death-dealing. Jesus, the executed rebel, is back and ready to continue organizing the movement.”

Then verse 41 says, “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering . . .”  Joy, wonder, doubt.  Such a rush of conflicting emotions.  Wanting so much to believe, amazed, hopeful, joyful and yet still unsure, doubting. 

Madeleine L’Engle was a much loved Christian author and speaker. Her best known book was probably A Wrinkle in Time. One time someone asked her if she really and truly believed in God with no doubts at all. Her answer was “I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.”[3]

Perhaps that captures the situation for the early disciples and also for us – we can believe with all our doubts.

How does that happen?  For the disciples who are still struggling, it says Jesus opens their minds.  That word “open” is used more than once in this chapter.  He opens their minds to understand how the scriptures applied to his suffering and death and resurrection.  He invites them to a new understanding, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the trauma they have endured.  He invites them to open minds, softened hearts and expanding imaginations.  When you have never encountered Resurrection before, or any time we are unsure of our next steps, cultivating an open mind is a good place to start. 

But before he opens the scriptures, Jesus calls attention to his hands and feet.  He asks for food.  The resurrected body is centered.  The disciples are invited to see and touch the flesh violated by empire and to attend to its bodily needs.  This brings Ched Myers to a conclusion that I find compelling.  He says, “This, I would argue is the central invitation of resurrection faith; to embrace the traumatic somatic;  . . .to embrace the beat-up bodies of marginalized people and degraded places around our earth. . . to join the resurrection as insurrection. . . .[because] Our world is still riddled with terrorism both official and ad hoc.”

Beyond the trial in Minnesota last week, we could list multiple mass shootings, the ongoing military actions against civilians in Myanmar.  We could lift up institutional racism, poverty and white supremacy as pillars of contemporary terrorism.  The list goes on and on, because our world is indeed still riddled with terrorism.

Like the disciples, perhaps we too are caught between terror and awe, between an all too real awareness of physical fears and a spiritual knowledge of the presence of God.  To which one will we give our allegiance—to the power of violence and death over life that fills our news feeds?  Or to the biblical God’s power of irrepressible life over death? 

This is the question of Easter, the question of resurrection. Which is greater in our lives – the power of death or the power of life?  That is the question --  if we are afraid, if we struggle, if we have been traumatized or are grieving, the question to all of us who long to live as God’s Easter people in a still broken and terrified world. 

Beloved ones, We are children of God, what we will become has not been revealed. Let us cultivate open minds, tender hearts and expansive imaginations. With every single one of our doubts, let us deeply and truly believe in God’s irrepressible power of life.    Amen.


[1]Here is one good example:  https://atlantadailyworld.com/2021/04/11/commentary-the-seven-last-words-of-george-floyd/

[2] Ched Myers “Jesus’ risen mutilated body”  The Christian Century, September 3, 2019 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/jesus-risen-mutilated-body

[3] Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet (New York:  HarperCollins, 1972), p. 63

4/11/21 - Dare to Dance Again: Dancing Together - John 20:19-31; Acts 4:32-35

Dare to Dance Again:  Dancing Together

John 20:19-31, Acts 4:32-35

April 11, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

  

Image:  Christ Dancing on the Sea of Galilee

Heimo Christian Haikala, 1999

 

Note:  A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/udK3_SWSJo8

 

It was Easter Sunday night, according to John. It was Easter Sunday night, but the disciples were still afraid.  Mary Magdalene had spread the word about Resurrection.  She had relayed the story that she had seen the Risen Lord.  If you’re remembering last week where the women said nothing to nobody, well, that’s how Mark tells it. But John says that early on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus talked with Mary and Mary told the others.  But that night, they were in hiding together, behind locked doors.  I don’t blame them.  They had seen how quickly a cheering crowd can become a mob.  They had witnessed the betrayal of Jesus by someone in the inner circle.  The sights and sounds and terrible details of a crucifixion were now seared into memory, part of their nightmares and daytime terrors.  Even though, they wanted to believe Mary, they were still afraid. 

So when Jesus came to them that Sunday night, they were in hiding.  It says that they rejoiced when they saw him. And then, the next Sunday night, they were back in the same place, with the doors locked again.  It doesn’t say that they were in hiding the next week.  It doesn’t mention fear. But I wonder.  How long does it take for the visceral fear of crucifixion to fade?  What’s the average interval for a human being to come to terms with a Resurrection? 

If you have become used to staying away from the crowds, fearful of being out in public, how and when do you pick up your life again?  That question resonates in new ways this year. 

Eventually, the disciples left that house with the locked doors.  Eventually they went out. They went back to the crowded, busy Temple.  Some returned to Galilee. Some put on their traveling clothes and criss-crossed the Empire. They went from huddling behind locked doors to founding a religious movement that engaged other people in exponential numbers.

“What would you do if you were not afraid?”  That’s a popular question in some circles.  An entire sermon could be devoted just to that.  Obviously, fear can be a good thing.  Fear can warn us of real danger.  Fear can keep us alive. 

But fear can also keep us from living fully.  Jesus was afraid. We see that in the Garden of Gethsemane.  But he didn’t allow that to keep him from his mission.  So, perhaps the question is not “what would you do if you were not afraid?”  Perhaps the better question is “what will you do in spite of your fear?” 

The Bible is not very explicit about how Jesus’ first followers overcame their fears.  What I find in our texts this morning are not nearly enough details, but maybe enough hints to get us started.

First we might notice that when Jesus appears, the disciples don’t recognize him right away.  And Thomas doesn’t recognize him right away a week later.    This is a hint that when Jesus shows up in our lives, we may not recognize him. When Jesus appears, as the person who makes us uncomfortable; when Jesus appears, with a task that seems beyond our ability; when Jesus appears, in the midst of our doubts and fears, we may not recognize him.

Jesus appears to the group of disciples, and a week later to Thomas, who needed his own first-hand experience.  Thomas gets two clues to Jesus’ identity.  Jesus speaks peace to him and he lets Thomas see and touch the wounds of his execution.  Serene Jones is the president of Union Seminary in New York City.  She writes, “When God comes, we will recognize God’s presence in those moments when peace is offered, in those moments when life’s most brutal violence is honestly acknowledged, and when in the midst of this bracing honesty, we realize that we are not alone, but have, in fact, been always, already found.” [1]

Thomas and the others recognize Jesus by his peace and by his wounds.  This presence of God is honest about how much there is to be afraid of, but claims peace in spite of it.   There is a power in that. 

A second hint – after they recognize him, it says that Jesus breathes on them.  These days, we try very hard not to breathe on each other, not to share in that way.  We understand shared breath, especially right now, as a negative power, but they understand it as a positive one.  When Jesus breathes on them, it evokes Genesis 2 where God breathes life into the first human being.  Jesus breathes on them and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  We remember that breath and spirit are the same word.  Jesus’s breath is the Spirit of God, the same spirit which filled the lungs and gave life to the first human being.

The second hint about how Jesus’ first followers moved beyond their fears is this – they shared the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus.  This goes right to the heart of our seasonal theme.  It’s the Greek word perichoresis.  Perichoresis – you probably use that word every week. It is one way early theologians described the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.  If we break it down, we have peri – which means around or about, as in perimeter.  And we have choresis – which means to move, to give way, to make room.  It is related to our word choreography.  Perichoresis is the idea that God is fundamentally Being in Relationship. God, whom we might describe as Creator, Son and Spirit, is continually making room, moving about.  The Creator makes room for the Son. The Son moves about the Spirit in a divine dance of mutuality and love and joy.  Perichoresis means dance. 

Meister Eckhart, a theologian from the Middle Ages said,

“Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.”[2]

When Jesus breathes the Spirit onto the disciples, he invites them into that divine relationship, that eternal dance of joy and laughter. 

How do we come out from behind locked doors?  Where do we find courage in spite of our fears?  We just step out on the dance floor with the Trinity,  recognizing the power of God’s Spirit in us, as close as our very breath.

That word perichoresis is very helpful to me. The dance goes on and on. God moves around and makes way for God’s own self and for us, both in simple steps and elaborate patterns we may not even be aware of.

Church historians can look back at the patterns now, but in those early days, people simply moved as the Spirit led them. So the book of Acts reports that they worshipped in the Temple and broke bread in their homes.  Out in the world they were about Jesus’ work together and at other times, they shared meals in each other’s homes.  The dance wove through every aspect of their lives. 

Which brings me to the last hint.  Our reading describes great unity among the believers. It says that they share everything they had with each other and there was not a needy person among them.  What strikes me is that in order for needs to be met, needs have to be known.  In order for needs to be known, they have to be shared.  The person who needs something has to speak up.  Like Thomas did.  Thomas said, “I need to see and touch Jesus for myself.”  And Jesus met his need.  It doesn’t always happen that way.  Some times others cannot or will not meet our needs, but sometimes what is necessary is finding the courage to make the need known. Especially to a community of faith, a community dancing in the Spirit.

A few weeks ago, Daniel and Lisa had to fly on an airplane. Air travel mostly seems to be happening on an urgent basis, but they needed to go visit a loved one.  So they did.  On the return flight, they hit turbulence, really bad turbulence.  Daniel said it was that kind that makes you close your eyes and collapse into yourself and get really quiet.  There was a teenager sitting in their row.  They were strangers.  They had not yet said anything to each other.  In the midst of this turbulence, he said very intensely, “I need you to talk to me right now.  I have terrible anxiety and this is my first time to ever fly alone, and this turbulence is messing with me.  I need you to talk to me right now.” 

So they started talking.  Lisa introduced herself and her husband.  She said, “we are going to be your best friends for the next 90 minutes!  We are so proud of you for telling us what you need! That took a lot of courage and we’d be proud of our own kids for taking the risk you took. We’re all going to be okay, and we’re here for you, so just tell us what you need.”

They talked for the rest of the flight.  They learned that Braden is 16 and that he plays the guitar, ukelele and piano. And that he’d just finished recording his first album.[3]

Daniel said that the conversation with Braden was holy ground, one of the most beautiful things he had been part of in a long time.  But it only happened because Braden took the risk of being honest and let his need be known.

I’m not sure who needs to hear that today, but it is the story that I could not shake this week.  What I know is that many of us are used to handling things ourselves.  We don’t like to be a nuisance or to inconvenience others.  We don’t want to be seen as weak or incompetent or stupid.  All of those things may keep us from simply letting our needs be known. 

What I know is that most of us believe that God has called us to help others.  We’re pretty good at that sometimes.  We usually like to give help more than to receive it.  But I wonder.  In dance terms, it seems like always being the giver is like always taking the lead and the beauty of the dance is that there is leading and following.  The beauty of perichoresis is that God the Redeemer makes room for God the Spirit who moves around God the Creator and the dance of joy goes on and on. 

Maybe you need to find the courage to name your needs.  Maybe you need to find the courage to respond to someone else’s needs.  I pray that together we will find the holy ground where honesty and peace prevail.  I hope that we take a deep breath and join the dance.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Serene Jones in Feasting on the Word Year B, Volume 2, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008), p. 404.

[2] Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, (Rochester, VT:  Bear and Company, 1983 p. 129.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/daniel.grothe.14/posts/874576660049238