10/31/21 - God's Good Earth: A Pastoral/Prophetic Reflection - various Scriptures

God’s Good Earth: A Pastoral/Prophetic Reflection

October 31, 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/qsxK5-CP4xY

Growing up in Baptist churches, I came to understand a certain narrative about what we called the Old Testament.  A quick summary of my understanding went like this:

God made a covenant with human beings, promising to bless them and sustain them as they promised to live by God’s rules which are summed up in the Ten Commandments.  But the humans didn’t keep their promise.  They broke the covenant over and over again in spite of all the leaders and prophets who God sent to guide them and warn them of the consequences of their actions. Eventually God realized that humans were never going to live up to their part of the covenant, so Jesus came to give us another way. 

So, that narrative is basically true, but it leaves out a lot of detail and nuance.  One of the effects of that narrative as it was often taught, is that it gives the impression that the humans who failed to keep covenant with God were inherently bad and that we are not.  One positive message that I internalized was that Jesus gave us another way out of brokenness, a new covenant.  Another more dangerous idea that came in at the same time,  was that we would have kept the original covenant because somehow we are better.  That idea that Christians are inherently less sinful because God’s grace was extended to us in Jesus is at the heart of anti-Semitism. The idea has caused so much suffering in the world and surely continues to break God’s own heart.  Please understand that I am absolutely not putting forth that notion as truth.  What I do want to suggest is that we modern people have fallen into a similar trap of breaking covenant.  I’m thinking about a covenant that is referenced in scripture, but has not been routinely taught, and certainly not emphasized, among many Christians.  I’m thinking of  the covenant that God has with the entire creation, with the non-human creatures and with the earth itself.  I’m thinking of the ways that human behavior interferes with and diminishes and violates that relationship. 

The covenant that comes to mind first for many of us is the covenant God made with Abraham, where God promised a childless Abraham that he would be the father of a multitude and that through him the nations of the world would be blessed.  This covenant was re-affirmed with Moses on Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments.   One of those commandments was to honor the Sabbath.  God’s people became peculiar because they set aside one day in seven for rest. They did so every week from one generation to the next.  

Sabbath meant regular rest for everyone.  Rich or poor, old or young, landowner or servant, even foreigners in the land got a day off.  But Sabbath did not end there.  The livestock also got the day to rest. And there’s more.  As Ruth read for us, the Sabbath principle also applied to the land.  Every seven years, the fields were to be left fallow and the vineyards untended so that they could also rest.  In those years, the people could eat whatever the land produced on its own, but they could not sow and till it.  And not only people, but also livestock were to eat whatever it produced.  And not only livestock, but also wild animals.  Israel was commanded to open their fields to creatures that threatened their very lives because God intended for all of creation to participate in covenantal peace and rest. [1] Sabbath-keeping was a tangible sign of God’s covenant with all of creation – people, domestic animals, wild animals and the land.

Another covenant we might remember is the one made with Noah.  We see God’s concern for the animals when Noah and his family are charged to keep all of the animals aboard the ark alive.  In advance, God told Noah to make sure to take food for his family and also for all the animals.  And when it was all over, in Genesis 9,  God said, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth. . . I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” The rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with the earth and also with humans and animals.

English theologian Robert Murray argues that, out of loving concern for humans and for non-humans, God forms partnerships with both. Murray pushes that idea further saying “if both are God’s covenant partners, how can they not be in some sense covenantally bound to each other?”[2]

If God is in partnership with both humans and non-humans, then it follows that there is a deep relationship between both, a relationship which is more than predator and prey,  something intended to be different than an exploitative, extractive interaction. We might remember that even before Eden’s garden was created in Genesis 2, God made the human being out of the ground to tend and keep it.  To tend and to keep – this  is the fundamental covenant which we humans have largely forsaken. 

The prophets are the ones who warned of covenant violations.  We tend to remember that they spoke against greed, injustice and oppression of the poor, and going after other gods. But they also preached about the effect that those behaviors had on the rest of creation.

Jeremiah 9 says  “Take up weeping and wailing for the mountains, and a lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness, because they are laid waste so that no one passes through, and the lowing of cattle is not heard; both the birds of the air and the animals  have fled and are gone.  . . .Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through? . .  Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, or walked in accordance with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals . .”

Hosea, that very strange prophet, said it clearly “Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.” Hosea 4:1-3

A proverb from eastern Africa says “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.”  The way the people lived their lives directly affected the rest of creation.  Walter Brueggemann notes the similarities between Hosea’s time and ours.  He writes, “The drive for more money leads to displacing people. As the people are displaced, the land goes untended, unloved, un-respected. A little at a time, the land forfeits its will to produce and to multiply, the earth ceases to be fruitful and chaos comes . . .”[3]

I called this a pastoral/prophetic reflection.  It is prophetic in the sense that it reminds us of sin and its consequences.  But it is pastoral because I know that many of you are already deeply concerned the effects of climate change, the potentially irreversible ways in which humans are damaging God’s good creation. You are already keenly aware of the kinship we share with the planet, our interdependency with human and non-human creation, which some might even call a covenantal relationship.  More and more people are reclaiming the role of tending and keeping the creation.  Let us give thanks for persistent people everywhere.  May we have the courage and faith to stand strong among them. Amen.

[1] Brandon Frick in his dissertation Covenantal Ecology: The Promise of Covenant for a Christian Environmental Ethic https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/9238/FRICK-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1

[2] Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (Sweden: Tigris, 2007), p. 102.

[3] Walter Brueggemann,  “The Uninflected Therefore of Hosea 4:1-3.” In Reading from This Place, Vol. 1, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 246

10/24/21 - Unravelling Shame - John 4:1-29

Unravelling Shame

John 4:1-29

October 24, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church

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

Jesus and the woman at the well. Most of us have heard this story multiple times. It doesn’t make us squirm. We don’t pick up on the cues that would have raised the tension and made first century readers uncomfortable. Let’s see if we can raise the ante on that.

They meet at a well.  In fact, it is the well where Jacob met Rachel who would become his wife.  Meetings at wells led to marriages between Jacob and Rachel, between Isaac and Rebecca, between Moses and Zipporah.  The first readers of John’s gospel knew that pattern.  They would wonder if it was about to be repeated.

They are from two different races, male and female. Jews and Samaritans have a history of animosity.  Men and women who are not married are not to associate in public.  We have heard this before, but I don’t think we feel it like they would have. So, what if we imagine this scene taking place on an elevator? A white woman and a black man, alone on an elevator. Or it could be a black woman and a white man.  Neither of them might intend harm to the other, but because of the history of men and women, the history of black and white people, each of them might be suspicious. They might be afraid of each other, afraid of assault, afraid of false accusations.  They might be concerned that the other person might be afraid and uncertain how to set them at ease. 

If you are one of the people on the elevator, what do you do? Do you initiate conversation or just stand quietly in your corner?  Jesus decides to initiate conversation. He asks her for a drink.

Let me digress for just a moment.  In the other gospels, at certain points, Jesus sends the disciples out on mission without him.  When they go, he tells them not to take provisions or money, but to depend on strangers to receive them and provide for them.  In this passage, Jesus models what he taught his disciples to do. He has been walking.  It is noon.  He is hot and thirsty, but he doesn’t have a bucket to draw water.  So he asks the woman for a drink. He puts himself at the mercy of her hospitality.

She went to the well at noon, in the heat of the day.  That was not the usual time to fetch water.   Women were the primary water fetchers.  They still are in many places.  They went early, when it was cool. This was the habit of so many women that the well became the place to meet and greet, to catch up on the news and the gossip.  But this woman was there at noon, fetching water alone, when none of the others were there.  Biblical readers often take that scrap of information along with the tantalizing morsel that she has been married 5 times . . .  then we decide we know who this woman is. She is someone we can cluck our tongues and shake our heads at. Or maybe, if we are feeling kind, someone we might pity.

The text doesn’t say that she always gets water at noon. Maybe there’s a reason that she’s there at that time today. Maybe she has company coming and has already used the morning’s water for extra cleaning. Maybe her household water jar sprang a leak. Maybe the job takes less time if she comes when there’s no line. Most of us have been told that she came at noon to avoid the other women because she was an outcast, shunned by the others because of her assumed immoral lifestyle, but the Bible doesn’t say that she does this every day.  It doesn’t say that she is shunned. 

Biblical interpreters have not been kind to her.  The wonderful preacher Fred Craddock said, “Evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word. [And]  Moralizers . . . have painted her as dangerous: beware her seductive ways, her mincing walk, her eyes waiting in ambush.”[1]

One contemporary Baptist preacher called her “a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria”[2] He said that “she is spiritually dead from the effects of years of sexual and relational sin” [3] which is a big leap from the meager facts presented in John’s gospel and the way the story ends.

Believing her to be shameful, they have heaped more shame upon her, which is how shame works.  Something happens to us or we do something which seems out of boundaries of normal or good, and then those things get stuck onto us as part of our identity from that point forward.

Brene Brown is a sociologist at the University of Houston and a best-selling author.  Her work on shame and courage and vulnerability has helped many people. She makes an important distinction between shame and guilt.  Guilt, she says, can be helpful. Guilt holds up our behavior against our values and creates psychological discomfort when there’s a gap between them.  Guilt recognizes that we did something wrong.  

But shame goes deeper than that.  Shame, she says, is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. 

“Shame is a focus on self; guilt is a focus on behavior.  Shame is “I am bad.”  Guilt is “I did something bad.” [4]

Guilt says I’m sorry. I made a mistake.

Shame says I’m sorry. I am a mistake.

Do you hear the difference?

Shame is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. 

Traditional interpreters say that the woman at the well is ashamed, that she practices social distancing because she has been told that she is not pure enough, not whole enough, not beautiful or lovable or good enough to be worthy of participating in the community. 

Maybe that interpretation is so compelling because we all carry some shame.  We all have memories of things we did or failed to do that bring us pain, things we want to bury down deep so that no one else knows or has a chance to judge us for.

Shame is such a powerful force that it functions like a propeller for Lutheran pastor Nadia Boltz-Weber.  She says, “I think I am not alone. I mean, the wounded parts of me –whether those wounds were inflicted by the sin of others or by my own sin, are what keep me in motion – because I have to try and make up for them, or try and convince myself and everyone else that they aren’t there, or I have to try and get them healed by the love and attention of other people even though none of that ever works….. but wow, it sure does keep me in motion. I mean, I think that if shame could be bottled as an energy source it could easily replace fossil fuels.”[5]

Now, it is likely that this woman is viewed with suspicion.  We don’t know why she has had five husbands.  Has she been widowed multiple times?  Have some of her husbands divorced her?  She didn’t have the legal power to initiate divorce herself.  Whatever the details are, they must be painful.  And it is certainly possible that other people avoid her because they don’t want to suffer the same pain – as if it is contagious.  It is entirely plausible that they hold her responsible for her own misfortunes. Blaming the victim is not a new thing.  If she has been treated that way long enough by enough people, she may have internalized a sense of shame and unworthiness. Not necessarily because she is guilty of any wrong-doing, but because shame comes from messages we receive from others.

She may be ashamed, but Jesus is without shame.  He is shameless about breaking convention, about ignoring the gender and racial barriers between them.  Jesus knows that she has had five husbands, but he doesn’t seem to care why.  He makes no moral judgments about her.  He never says, “Go and sin no more.”  Instead he engages in the conversation that she wants and needs. It is Jesus’ longest-recorded conversation with anyone.  

In the blazing noon sun, out in front of everyone, the Jewish rabbi and the Samaritan woman break all the rules.  They share a drink from the same dipper and they talk personally, meaningfully about life and faith, relationships and religion.  Jesus seems to know her, to accept her without condemnation. He sees her as she really is, everything she has ever done, everything she tried to be, everything she has had to do to survive. He gives her his attention, his insight, his knowledge of himself and of God as if he has all the time in the world and she is worthy of it.  Their deep and long conversation is life-changing for her and ultimately, for her village. 

James Allison is a Catholic theologian.  He describes faith as trusting the totality of our lives to God.  When the woman says “He told me everything I’ve ever done,” I think she is conveying that kind of trust.  Jesus knows all about her and doesn’t condemn her.  James Allison describes that total trust of faith as relaxation.  Faith in God is not subscribing to a set of intellectual propositions, he says, but putting faith in God is like relaxing  in the presence of someone whom we’re confident is fond of us,[6] someone we don’t have to pretend in front of.

That sounds lovely to me, like a gift of living water.  My faith has been shaped more by a focus on the supposed shamefulness of the woman in Samaria than by Jesus’ invitation to relax and enjoy the conversation.   I share Nadia’s sense of shame as an energy source to rival fossil fuels, but I am trying to learn how to relax.

In the book The Color Purple, Celie and Shug have a long talk about God.  Celie has been abused by life.  She tried to be what she was taught was a good Christian for a long time, but now she has given up. Shug asks Celie to describe the God she doesn’t believe in.  Celie says “He big and old and tall and grey-bearded and white.” 

Shug replies “If you wait to find God in the white folks’ church, that’s the one who is bound to show up.  When I found out God was white and a man, I lost interest.”

Shug is the Samaritan woman.  She hears a new voice and learns to worship in Spirit and truth.  She says, “God love everything you love and a mess of stuff you don’t.  Praise God by liking what you like. People think pleasing God is all God care about.  But any fool living in the world can see God always trying please us back.  Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please God.”[7]

Jesus comes to unravel our shame, to love us as we are without condemnation. When we feel loved by God, when we relax into total trust, we do the best we can to please God.  May it be so for you and for me.  Amen.

[1] Fred Craddock, “The Witness at the Well”, The Christian Century, March 7, 1990 https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-witness-at-the-well-jn-45-42/

[2] https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/god-seeks-people-to-worship-him-in-spirit-and-truth

[3] https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-tragic-cost-of-her-cavernous-thirst

[4] Brene Brown, TED Talk:  Listening to Shame March 16, 2012,   https://youtu.be/psN1DORYYV0

[5] https://thecorners.substack.com/p/if-shame-could-be-bottled-as-an-energy

[6] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/editorpublisher/faith-gift-relax

[7] Alice Walker, The Color Purple, (New York: Pocket, 1982), pp 199-204

10/17/21 - When Dreams Unravel - Jeremiah 29:1-7

When Dreams Unravel

Jeremiah 29:1-7

October 17, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: New Roots

by Lauren Wright Pittman

© a sanctified art | sanctifiedart.org

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/gj8UkEXR1p4

I’m going to describe a scenario.  See if it sounds at all familiar.   

Something very bad happens.   The event is widespread. It effects people of all ages and stages of life.  It effects the entire country.  In fact, it is an international event.  As it is happening, people try to make sense of it  The historians speak.  The politicians pontificate. The preachers and prophets weigh in.  But of course, they don’t all say the same thing.  They each speak from their own point of view, about the outcome they desire or to shift the narrative in such a way that they preserve the most power.  And some just tell the truth as clearly as they understand it.

In the country where this devastating event happened, the people listen. Some listen to those who promise the outcome they desire.  Some listen to those whom they admired before the devastating event.  Most listen to those they believe are telling the clearest truth.  After all that listening, the citizens are aligned with the historians or the politicians or the preachers and the country continues to suffer.  It suffers because of the event itself and because the people are not united in their response to it.     

Does that sound familiar?  If it sounds like something you might have experienced, would you please raise your hand?

Thank you.

That scenario was, of course, a description of the capture of Judah by Babylon in the sixth century BCE.  If you thought  I was talking about something else, maybe that’s just a reminder that human beings may not have changed all that much.

The event was the capture of Judah.  The armies of Babylon had ransacked the capital and destroyed the temple.  They had hauled off to Babylon the king and his mother, all the officials and warriors and skilled craftspeople along with the best treasurers from the palace and the temple.  Most of Judah’s wealth and leadership was in Exile.  It was a devastating event.  It was felt at every level.  Jeremiah 7 mentions that weddings are not happening any more.  No one can summon the feeling of celebration necessary for such an occasion. Chapter 16 says that the old and young are dying and no one laments them – there are no more funerals.     

People are stunned.  They are traumatized. They never thought this could happen to them, even though some of the prophets had been warning that something just like this was probably going to happen if they didn’t change their ways. 

And even now that it has happened, even now that the king is in exile and the temple is in ruins, some people don’t want to believe it.  Faced with the reality that it did really happen, they want it to be over, to be resolved as soon as possible, so that life can get back to normal.

The prophet Jeremiah stayed in Judah where he had been ministering for 45 years.  The same people who didn’t listen to him when he warned them about Babylon don’t want to listen now, even though his prophecies have come true.  They prefer to listen to a guy named Hananiah.  Hananiah says that the Temple treasures are going to be returned and all those in Exile are coming home soon.  His definition of “soon” is within two years.  He claims that this is a word from the Lord.

But Jeremiah has a different word from the Lord.  He says that things are going to get worse before they get better.  The temple treasures are not coming back within two years. In fact, whatever is left there will also be taken away.  According to Jeremiah, the Exile will not end for another 70 years.

Jeremiah and Hananiah are both in Judah.  Hundreds of miles away, in Babylon, the people are divided along the same lines.  Using the social media of the day, Jeremiah and his opponents write public letters back and forth.  Our reading from chapter 29 is one of Jeremiah’s letters. 

God’s message to the people has two parts.  The first part is “live fully now.”  The second part is “keep hope alive for a new and different future.” 

“Live fully now,” says Jeremiah.  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens.  Buy washing machines and other major appliances.  Embrace the life that is yours in exile.  Stop expecting things to be like they used to be.  Live the life that is yours now, not the life that was.  Suck it up and deal.

If that’s Jeremiah’s best pastoral care, that might explain why he was called a prophet and not a priest.  These are the people who wrote Psalm 137 about weeping by the river because they were so homesick.  These are the ones who said “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”  “How can we worship God when we cannot even gather together in our holy place?”

But Jeremiah’s word from God is to settle down, to make the best of the situation, to live fully now.  Embrace the life that is yours in exile. 

We have been trying to do that, haven’t we?  We have adapted to the life that is ours now.  Going to work and school, finding ways to worship together.  We’ve even figured out how to do graduations and weddings and funerals again.  We are making the best of it, but most of us are not exactly embracing this life. 

I am hearing from several of you and also from friends beyond Emmanuel that you feel like you’re in exile. Actually you don’t say that.  What you say is that you aren’t enjoying life as much as you used to.  You’re grateful for your health and family and all those good things, but there’s a kind of heaviness that wasn’t there before.  What you say is that you keep messing up little things like forgetting to sign a check before you put it in the mail or screwing up the time and days of appointments.  People are quitting their jobs in record numbers – 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August and that was the sixth month in a row with sky-high quitting rates.[1]  People are burned out and fed up and not willing to work in conditions that they used to.  Big things feel overwhelming and even the small things of every day life seem to take a lot more effort.  We are not exactly embracing this life.   

I have been describing some parallels between the Biblical exile and our current situation. It is always dangerous to put ourselves into any Biblical story and assume that the word of God understood in that time and place applies directly to us.  So, I am doing this cautiously.  And I’m doing so, trusting that you will also examine it carefully to find the truth for our own time.

I do think that this letter from Jeremiah might be good counsel for us.  Embrace life as it is, because it is the only life we now have. 

As they settle in, Jeremiah says, that they are to seek the shalom of the city.  Work for the well-being of all.  They cannot withdraw into a separate existence, because even in exile, they have a missional responsibility.[2] 

They are to care for their own needs – planting gardens, raising children, adapting worship without the temple.  Those are good and faithful tasks.  And also, this small, vulnerable minority is to understand that their well-being is bound up with the well-being of those around them. Seek the shalom of the city where you now live, Jeremiah says. 

The first part of Jeremiah’s letter tells them to embrace the life they have, to adapt as necessary and seek the common good now.  The second part is there is hope for a different future in the long-run. 

It is the people who are in Babylon, not the ones at home in Judah, who offer the best hope for the future, as Jeremiah sees it.  A future generation will arise, a generation shaped by those living through exile right now – that generation will sustain God’s dream for the people of Judah. In spite of this serious upheaval to their way of life, in spite of the wrecking ball that is tearing down their understanding of God, the good news here is that God’s dream goes on.  Future generations will have faith; they will continue to participate the abundance of life God offers.

But the message is also that there are long-term consequences to what they (and we) do now.   We no longer have the life we once did.  Some used to say that the golden age of the American church was in 1950’s.  Now, we look back on 2019 with nostalgia.

The exiles in Babylon learned many things – how to relate to their enemies, how to speak another language, to function in another culture, how to sustain faith beyond the walls of their holy building. They adapted, and because of that, the next generation was more resilient.

Legend has it that the reformer Martin Luther, said  “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

I think this is where we are right now.   The world might go to pieces tomorrow, or maybe it already did yesterday, but we still plant apple trees.  We are adapting, not just to the pandemic, but to a seismic shift that has come with it.  A shift in our thinking about what really matters, about what work is for,  about where God is, about how to sustain a faith community,  a shift in our awareness about our inter-connectedness with our friends and our enemies and the planet.  We will be adapting to this shift for at least the next 70 years, I expect.  There will be long-term consequences for the actions we take now.  

Which is why I believe that Jeremiah’s counsel to those in exile in the 6th century BCE is still relevant:  Embrace the life we have now. Adapt with wisdom and courage. Hope relentlessly for a different future. 

Yes, this is a difficult word.  As hard for me as for you.  As the apostle Paul said to the church in Rome, “suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”

Suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.  Thanks be to God.

[1] https://time.com/6106322/the-great-resignation-jobs/

[2] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah:  Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmanns, 1998), p 257-258

10/10/21 - When Good Things Happen to Bad People - Luke 19:1-10; Acts 9:1-20

When Good Things Happen to Bad People

Luke 19:1-10; Acts 9:1-20

October 10, 2019

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Guest Preacher Rev. Peter Carman

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKTq7KVvN5s

10/3/21 - Unraveled: Pharaoh had a Plan - Exodus 5:1-2; 7:8-23

Unraveled: 

Pharaoh Had a Plan

Exodus 5:1-2, 7:8-23

October 3, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Graphic image by Lauren Wright Pittman; Anti-Creation Narrative

(Pharaoh hardens his heart to Moses’ requests);  © a sanctified art | sanctifiedart.org |

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3fiP8hxvM

It was 1989.  The anti-apartheid movement was gaining momentum in South Africa.  It was a time of high anxiety and repeated violence.  Black activists often died in custody or at the hands of police. Bombs exploded in shopping centers.  Bishop Desmond Tutu had received the Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking efforts. He had also been arrested and had his passport confiscated more than once.

When the government cancelled a political rally, Bishop Tutu organized a “Ecumenical Defiance Service” at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.  Riot police and armed soldiers swarmed the streets outside.   Inside Tutu confidently proclaimed that the evil and oppression of the system of apartheid would not prevail.  The South African Security Police marched in and lined the walls of the cathedral.  They were a special unit of law enforcement linked to torture, forced disappearances and assassination.  They were openly recording his words on the tape recorders they held, threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days.

Meeting their eyes, Tutu pointed his finger right at the heavily armed police “You are powerful, indeed very powerful, but you are not God!”  he said  “And the God whom we serve, cannot be mocked.  You have already lost!” 

Desmond Tutu is 5’ 5”, just an inch taller than me.  On that day, in that moment, he came out from behind the pulpit and flashed his fabulous smile.  Still speaking to the Security Force, he said “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side.” He said with warmth and friendliness, but also with a clarity and boldness that took everyone’s breath away. Jim Wallis, who was there, called it the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny he had ever witnessed.[1]

Years before apartheid ended, when its menacing henchmen were still obviously in control, Desmond Tutu claimed to be on God’s side, the winning side.  Here on this World Communion Sunday, we can look in any almost any direction and see the threat of evil, the powers of death and destruction, division and hatred, seemingly firmly in control.  It might seem ridiculous, laughable, to assert that God will prevail and even more foolish to trust that somehow we will endure on God’s side.

Such was the bold faith of Desmond Tutu and millions of other black South Africans. Such was the bold faith of Moses and Aaron as they went to Pharaoh to demand release.  The first time they went, Pharaoh said, “I don’t know this Lord.  I will not comply.”  Before they went, Moses had asked God for God’s name “who shall I send is sending me?”  God had said “I AM. I AM who I AM.  I will be who I will be. Say that I AM has sent you.”

God’s name and God’s actions convey a fundamental understanding of God’s nature which is freedom. God will be who God chooses to be.  God will act as God chooses to act.  No one controls God. I AM is free. I AM is sovereign.

Human beings, every human being is created in the image of God.  “To be created in the image of a God who is free means that the human person is meant to be free.”[2] 

Kelly Brown Douglas, writing about the faith of black people not in South Africa, but in America, says this: “The exodus story points to the fact that God chose to free a people from circumstances that were contrary to whom God created them to be. God’s choice was motivated by the very freedom that is God.  [The exodus story in black faith] confirms that God’s intention is for all people, including black people, to be free to live into the goodness of their very creation. It is only in freedom that people are able to reflect the very image of a God who is free from all human forms of bondage.”[3]

God is free.  The will of God for shalom, for deep abiding peace for the whole creation, begins with freedom.  This is deeply understood by oppressed people of faith and probably not as deeply grasped by those like me, who are not oppressed, but stand in solidarity. 

Pharaoh did not know this God.  Pharaoh, for all his power, was not free.  He was under the control of fear.  What would happen if he released the enslaved Hebrews? Would he be seen as weak? Would his country falter?  Without their labor, would production keep up with demand?  Would there be enough? In bondage to his fear, Pharaoh hardened his heart.

When Biblical people talked about the emotional center of a person, they usually located it in the bowels or the gut.  They did not locate it in the heart.  They considered the heart to be the controlling center of human actions. Thoughts, intellectual activity, personality all come from the heart. The state of one’s heart reflects one’s essential character.   One scholar says that hardening of the heart means “the willful suppression of the capacity for reflection, for self-examination, for unbiased judgments about good and evil.”[4]

Have you read any comments on social media lately?  Have you heard public conversations amongst pundits and policy wonks?  “The willful suppression of the capacity for reflection, for self-examination, for unbiased judgments about good and evil.”  It turns out that hardening of the heart is still a great way to describe the moral atrophy of those who fail to lead for the common good.

Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.  He did not know the God of freedom and he would not let God’s people go.  There are Pharaoh’s all around us.  Those who occupy seats of great power, those who have limited authority over others, but exercise it as bullies.  Some are actively harmful. Others are callously indifferent to the suffering they cause.

And here we are, on another World Communion Sunday, bearing witness, claiming solidarity, raising our voices, and quite possibly, feeling overwhelmed by the hardened hearts of those in power.  It is sometimes hard to see what God is doing in the world, difficult to trust even that God is at work at all.

But I think about Moses and Aaron before the Pharaoh of their time. I think about Desmond Tutu speaking to the front lines of apartheid evil – “You have already lost!”  And I gain a bit of courage.

One more Desmond Tutu story . . Someone once called him an optimist and he said, “I’m not optimistic, no.  I’m quite different.  I’m hopeful.  I am a prisoner of hope.” 

Prisoners of hope is God’s term used by the prophet Zechariah for the people in Exile whom God promises to restore.  

So beloved ones, we are created in the image of God who is free. Humans are meant to be free.  Working for our freedom and the freedom of others is one way to join God’s work in the world.  On our best days, we will boldly exercise and celebrate that freedom.  But on the other days, when freedom seems diminished, when peace does not prevail, then may we be prisoners of hope, trusting that we will endure on God’s winning side. . .  Amen.

[1] Jim Wallis in God’s Politics excerpted here https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7220860-the-former-south-african-archbishop-desmond-tutu-used-to-famously

[2] Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. ( Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015), p. 151

[3] Kelly Brown Douglas, p 158-9. 

[4]Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel (New York:  Schocken Books, 1986)  p. 64

9/26/21 - Unraveled by Suffering: Transforming Trauma - 2 Samuel 21:1-14

Unraveled by Suffering:  Transforming Trauma

2 Samuel 21:1-14

September 26, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: Rizpah Keeps Watch; R Dunkarton, 1812 after J. M. W. Turner

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

George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by officer Derek Chauvin who knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes.  We now know it was over 9 minutes, but originally it was reported as 8 minutes, 46 seconds. That was in May of 2020.  For every night of the next month, some friends of mine turned on their porch light at 8:46 p.m. and stood there, keeping vigil for 8 minutes, 46 seconds.  They sent out cards to every house and business in the area inviting them to stand in front of their homes with their porch lights on, as a way of illuminating a stance against racial justice.  They began by standing, but as the month went one, sometimes they chose to kneel instead. Some of you know the people I’m talking about –Dan and Sharon Buttry, recently retired global servants for peace and justice.  Dan said, “Holding vigil for 8 minutes and 46 seconds each night makes evident the crime rather than the accident in this killing of George Floyd.  Try it.  You will feel the very cells of your body crying out against the injustice.”

I remembered that this week as I read the story of Rizpah.  I wondered about the intensity of the trauma and loss that she experienced.  I thought about the intensity of her suffering, the degree to which she felt the very cells of her body crying out against the injustice.

Full disclosure – I also spent a lot of time with Dan and Sharon this week, reading their book Daughters of Rizpah. It is a great exploration of today’s story, one which they have used over the last 45 years in their trainings on conflict resolution and trauma transformation.  I learned a lot from this book and I won’t begin to address all of it today.  If you would like to read it, I’ll be happy to lend out my copy. I can also give you an order form and you may order your own signed copy directly from the Buttry’s.

This is not a familiar story for most of us.  Let’s take some time to unpack it.  It takes place when David is king, probably early in his reign.  David is the second king of Israel.  Saul reigned before him. Saul grew up in the area of the Gibeonites which was also the area assigned to the tribe of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe.  Today, we might consider the Gibeonites as indigenous people, those who were living in the land at the time that the Hebrew people were liberated from Egypt and entered Canaan. 

There was an ancient treaty with the Gibeonites which King Saul broke.  Saul massacred the Gibeonites. That ethnic cleansing or attempted genocide happened some time before the events of our story.  But now there is a famine.  And King David has to do something.  So he asks God about it. 

God identifies the problem, the injustice suffered by the Gibeonites.  David does not seem to ask God what to do about it, but instead he goes to the Gibeonites and asks what they want.  They want vengeance. Saul is already dead, so they seek vengeance on his living descendants.  David agrees. 

Now, some might say that within his own time and place, David is trying to do the right thing, to establish a limited justice for the Gibeonites.  And, yes, he probably is.

But it also seems politically expedient. You see, after King Saul died, there was a civil war in which David was only one of several contenders for the throne. It happens that in doing what the Gibeonites want, David will also eliminate others who might claim a right to the throne because they are also descendants of Saul.  So, that adds another layer to the story.

David condemns seven of Saul’s male descendants to death..  He hands over the two of Saul’s sons and five of his grandsons. Merab is the mother of the five grandsons. She is silent in this story.  We should not take that silence to mean that she doesn’t care or is unaffected.

Rizpah is the mother of Saul’s two sons.  Rizpah is Saul’s concubine. A concubine is a slave treated like a wife, but without any of the privileges accorded to wives.  Rizpah was Saul’s concubine, a marginalized person. Her only status might have been as the mother of royal sons.  But now Saul is dead and the civil war has been won by David.  “With the execution of her sons, Rizpah is pushed even further to the margins with all her future security and livelihood lost with her children.  Rizpah is an ultimate marginalized person with no power by any of the measurements of society.” [1] And yet. . .

Rizpah goes to the site of the execution and keeps vigil over the bodies.  She stays there, publicly grieving, proclaiming this trauma and injustice in her actions. What she is does is more than grief.  It is also a form of civil disobedience.  Part of the humiliation of this death was the desecration of the bodies.  She keeps the birds and animals away, so her protection stands between the king and the full execution of his sentence.

She stays there from the spring harvest until the fall rains, probably five or six months.  She stays, even though she is exhausted and the stench is awful, and she knows that people passing by are talking about her, her problems, her need for help, her need to move on already.

Rizpah stays there long enough that David hears about it.  The king doesn’t respond as one whose orders have been obstructed.  He doesn’t send soldiers to drag her away.  But interestingly, he doesn’t go to her himself.  Not at first.  First he goes to the village of Jabesh-gilead.  Some years earlier, Saul and Jonathan and his other warrior sons had been killed in battle and their bodies had been left exposed by their enemies. Their bones had been kept at Jabesh-Gilead and never properly buried.  David goes there to gather those bones and then comes to Rizpah.  He comes as the one who killed her sons.  He also comes bringing the bones of the rest of the family who had died violently and been denied the honor of a proper burial. And then together, David and Rizpah bury all of the bones in the family tomb at home in Benjamin.

Rizpah might have been completely unraveled by her trauma.  She might have been consumed with her grief and anger.  But her courage, her persistence, her refusal to be just a victim, -- all help to shape a new story.  It is not a story where everything is made right, but that rarely happens in real life, does it?  It is a story where the cycle of violence comes to an end, where healing occurs, not just for her, but for many others and for the land. She is unraveled by her suffering, but she transforms her trauma into hope and action.

The story is multi-layered and complex.  I have left out much more that could be said, but I want to turn now to two questions. The questions are where do we find ourselves in this story?  And where is God in it?  Where do we find ourselves? And God?

I said that this story is not familiar to most of us.  It is not in the lectionary. A lot of white folks don’t even know that it is in the Bible.  But this week, I became aware, again, of differences between the Bible stories that have historically resonated with white folks and with people of color.  This one hinges on our experiences and also on translation.  There is a verb that describes the execution of Saul’s descendants.  The verb can be translated to fall, to hang, to impale, to dislocate. The exact means of this execution is not clear.  But the verb can mean “to hang” and apparently, many black American Christians know this story.  They understand that Rizpah’s boys were lynched. 

You undoubtedly know the name of Emmett Till.  I will spare us the recital of the torture that 14-year-old boy suffered at the hands of two white men before they killed him for the alleged crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.  His mother demanded that his body be returned to her in Chicago.  It was barely recognizable because of the violence inflicted on him. His mother’s name was Mamie Till Mobley.  Everyone told her that she should have a closed casket funeral, but she refused.  She said “I want the world to see what they did to my baby.”

And the world did.  Thousands of people attended his funeral and viewed his body.  Photos of it circulated, adding to the national and international outrage.  Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that the world should bear witness to the violence done to her child may have been the single-largest event that sparked the Civil Rights Movement. Mamie’s other name is Rizpah. 

Austin Channing Brown is an author and speaker, a powerful leader in the move for racial justice.  She says, “I cannot get the image of Rizpah out of my head. Rizpah lost a son to state sanctioned violence. She wouldn’t let the violence be forgotten. She wouldn’t let it be swept under the rug. She led a protest of one, fighting off beasts to bring what measure of dignity for the bodies and indictment for the rules that was in her power to do.[2]

Mamie Till Mobley’s other name is Rizpah.  We know about so many other Rizpah’s – Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, Judy Shephard, mother of Matthew Shephard, mothers, fathers, friends and lovers in Newtown, Orlando, El Paso and Charleston, Haitian people under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

Where do we find ourselves in this story? If we know trauma close up, we may find ourselves offering public grief and lament, crying out for justice, refusing to be silenced until the truth is recognized.  Or, if we bear witness to another person who is unraveling with grief and anger and pain, we may find ways to hear the truth, to understand the injury, to share in the suffering until our cells cry out against the injustice.  We may find ourselves not in Rizpah, but alongside David.

Where is God in this story?  God is overwhelmingly with those who suffer.  God is the advocate for the Gibeonites, those whose treaty was broken, those who were massacred.  God speaks for the Gibeonites even against God’s own covenant people. 

And God is with Rizpah.  Here’s how we know that.  At the beginning of the story, God identifies the problem, the context which is creating the famine.  The problem is the injustice suffered by the Gibeonites.  And David tries to make that right.  He has Saul’s descendants executed “before the Lord.” But God doesn’t accept the human sacrifice.   God is silent.  The famine goes on.  The land is still defiled, even more so. [3]

The rains come, the famine breaks, only after David and Rizpah together bury Saul and his sons with dignity and honor.  It was not after the lynching, not after the Gibeonites had their vengeance, but after attention was given to Rizpah. Then and only then God answers the prayer to bless the land.   God responds to changed hearts resulting in changed behavior.

 The Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman offers these words

“I pray that we learn from Rizpah. When we see injustice may we, like Rizpah, climb the mountain of God and defend those who cannot defend themselves. When we see someone unraveling in inexplicable grief, may this sight unravel us from the ways we are entangled with injustice.[4]

Beloved ones, let us pray that we can be unraveled for the good. Let us tell the truth.   Let us confront the beasts.  Let us put the powers to shame. With Rizpah,  let us stand vigil and not go home until justice is done.[5]  Amen.

[1] Sharon A. Buttry and Daniel L. Buttry, Daughters of Rizpah, (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2020),  p. 27

[2] http://austinchanning.com/blog/untitled

[3] Buttrys,  p. 49

[4] Lauren Wright Pittman, Unraveled sermon planning guide, http://sanctifiedart.org

[5] The ending is adapted from language in a sermon by the Rev. Cindy Weber “A Fierce Vigil: Keeping the Beasts at Bay” excerpted in Travelers on the Journey: Pastors Talk About Their Lives and Commitments (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2005) p. 103

9/19/21 - Unraveled by Uncertainty - Matthew 14:22-33

Unraveled by Uncertainty

Matthew 14:22-33

September 19, 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=rLPtmCBVa08

It had been an exhausting day for the disciples.  They learned that John the Baptist had been executed by Herod Antipas.  That was an emotional shock. They had tried to go off with Jesus to grieve and talk and process, but the crowds had followed as usual.  So, they had spent most of the day listening to Jesus with the crowd, but then, he had told them to feed everyone.  That was a different kind of shock, finding out that he expected them to be able to do that.  As we know, Jesus did the hard part of getting the food together, but still, they had to do set-up and clean-up involved in serving a few thousand people. So they were already tired when Jesus made them go away.  He made them get in the boat and leave him alone to pray. 

They were weary.  They just wanted the day to be over so they could go rest. But first, they had to get home and apparently, on this day, their way home was across the water.  Having to fight with the rough seas and the wind in their face only added to their fatigue. 

In Biblical stories like this one, the water functions almost like one of the characters with its own tension and plot development. One scholar says  “Water is the necessity that humans must have for life and we must drink it, even though it can swallow us and all that we have built, in an instant. . . .Water was pushed up and back when God made a safe place for human life in Genesis 1, but water waits, just on the other side of the sky, waits to gush out and wash everything away.  Water waits . . . to return God’s creation to the formless void, the dangerous watery chaos that existed before God began to create.” [1]

A friend is traveling the coast of Ireland right now.  From several different locations, he has shared pictures of sculptures and memorials remembering those who went to sea and never returned. Many of them were fisherman.  The people know the danger.  Every town has its own memories of those lost, but they still go out on the water because they must.

Several of the disciples are fishermen.  They are familiar with sudden storms like this one. The Sea of Galilee is really a lake.  It covers about 64 square miles.  For reference, Lake George covers about 45 square miles. The disciples are never very far from land, but the storm has them in a holding pattern. For hours, they have been straining at the oars and rowing against the wind. They are drenched by the waves, miserable and tired. 

They respect the power of the storm, but they are not afraid of it. Not this time.  They only become frightened when Jesus shows up.  He is difficult to recognize.  His presence is not comforting  They think he is one of the demons who live on the sea or a ghost.  Jesus calls out “Get a hold of yourselves. It’s me.” 

Peter answers. Of course, it’s Peter. I am so grateful for all the stories we have about Peter. Peter says, “If it really is you, Jesus, then command me to walk on the water.”   As a way for Jesus to verify his identity, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.  He could have said, “If it’s you, Jesus, what’s my mother-in-law’s name?”  Or “If it’s really you, tell me what we had for lunch today.”

But Peter says, “If it’s really you, Jesus, then empower me to do something spectacular.”  This sounds something like what Satan at that beginning of Jesus’ ministry “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.”  Peter wants Jesus to make him impervious to the storm. He doesn’t want to have to use the oars and row against the wind any more, but to rise above it all.

I can relate to that, can’t you?  It feels like we’ve been in this storm forever.  I keep thinking that the shore is in sight. If we would just all row together, we would land and then we could get off the boat and rest.  But some people are tired of trying so they quit. And others aren’t taking the storm seriously, they’re content to ride it out while others do the hard work.  Some feel like God put them in the boat and then abandoned them in the storm. They are frightened or sad or angry.  A few people think that they’re exceptional. They don’t need to stay in the boat, they don’t need to keep rowing, because they are not subject to the same rules of physics and biology that the rest of us mere mortals are.

I am grateful for Peter.  I am grateful that we know so much of the range of his experience with Jesus – the time he dropped his nets without notice to follow, the time he declared “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”  The time he jumped in to answer Jesus’ question and put his foot in his mouth.  Not that time, the other one.  The time Jesus asked him to pray with him in the Garden of Gethsemane and Peter fell asleep.  The time he went running to the empty tomb to check out the women’s story.  The time he baptized Cornelius. The time Jesus called him a rock.

Jesus says, “OK then. Come out and walk on the water with me.”  And Peter does.  For a minute. Until he loses his focus and feels the wind on his face and the waves splashing over him. Until he remembers that people can’t do this.  And then he starts to sink.  Peter is “not a skeptic who habitually doubts but a faithful follower who becomes overwhelmed by the circumstances surrounding him and begins to lose his nerve.”[2]

Peter did not learn to walk on water on this occasion. He did learn, again, to trust the presence of Jesus that came to him in the boat. Even when he didn’t recognize it at first,  even when it wasn’t initially comforting.

Most of us are a lot of like Peter. One minute, we feel like we can walk on water.  The next, the wind and waves are too much. As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The truth about us is that we obey and fear, we walk and sink, we believe and doubt. But it is not like we do only one or the other. We do both. Our faith and our doubts are not mutually exclusive; they both exist in us at the same time, buoying us up and bearing us down, giving us courage and feeding our fears, supporting our weight on the wild seas of our lives and sinking us like stones.”[3]

There is no point in beating ourselves up about this. No point in dwelling on our feelings of inadequacy and failure. Our doubts are part of our humanity, a reminder that our strength comes from God. But even a little bit of faith, Jesus said, is enough to move a mountain.

“Take courage,” Jesus says to Peter and to us. Live with heart. We got in this boat with all our doubts, because we believe and we want to follow.   Live with heart. Let yourself trust, even just a little bit, that God is in the boat, in the storm with us.  Take courage. It will be enough. Amen.

[1] Richard Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Matthew:  A Storytellers’ Commentary, Year A  (Cleveland:  The Pilgrim Press, 2007) p. 194

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, James D. Newsome. Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year A.  (Louisville:  John Knox Press, 1995), p 441-2.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Saved by Doubt” in The Seeds of Heaven:  Sermons o the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2004), p. 60

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

7/18/21 - Shepherding Our Souls to Places Green and Still - Psalm 23; Mark 6:30-34

Shepherding our Souls to Places Green and Still

Psalm 23; Mark 6:30-34

July 18, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Guest Preacher - Rev. Mark Chaffin

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

7/11/2021 - There are no Others - Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:38-48

There Are No Others

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Matthew 5:38-48

July 11, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Guest Preacher - Rev. Jim Ketcham

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s15fJ_KIUsY

6/27/21 - Citizens of a City Often Dimly Seen - Matthew 5:13-16

Citizens of a City Often Dimly Seen

Matthew 5:13-16

June 20, 2021 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Guest Preacher - Rev. Jerrod Hugenot

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbmFWOO3y5U

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.