2/13/22 - In Good Company - Luke 6;17-26

In Good Company

Luke 6:17-26

February 13, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Doley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/yj42PSc15Kc

I asked Maria to read from the Message translation today because for many of us, this is one of those too familiar Bible passages, the kind that we may not really listen to because we have heard it so often before. 

Eugene Peterson, who paraphrased the Bible into this updated the language and used some other expressions in many places, but there’s one word that he didn’t change and that’s the word “Blessed”.  I kind of wish he had, because that’s a word that might trip us up.  It’s a word that Jesus used, a word that Biblical people used, and a word that we use – but we don’t necessarily all mean the same things by it. 

“The Greek word for blessed is makarios.  In ancient Greek times, makarios referred to the gods. The blessed ones were the gods, beings who lived way up there in some other world. To be blessed, you had to be a god.”

“Makarios took on a second meaning. It referred to the ‘dead’. The blessed ones were humans who were now beyond the cares of earthly life. To be blessed, you had to be dead.”

“Finally, in Greek usage, the word came to refer to the elite, the upper crust of society, the wealthy people. It referred to people whose riches and power put them above the normal cares and worries of the lesser folk.  To be blessed, you had to be very rich and powerful.” [1]

If we use that sense of the word blessed,

then we might read verses 20 like this:

You who are poor are like gods,

Or verse 21 like this:
How elite, how powerful are you who are hungry

To my ear, that sounds a bit different, from “blessed are you poor. . . .  blessed are you who hunger”

Jesus uses the word within a honor-shame culture. In an honor-shame culture, your honor is everything.  Your personal honor is your reputation, your social standing and the public recognition of it.   The more honor you have, the more privileges you are entitled to.  The opposite of honor is shame. The more shame that is attached to your social standing, the fewer privileges you are entitled to. 

Some scholars suggest that this passage should be translated

“How honorable are the poor.  How honorable are the hungry.  How honorable are those who weep” and “How shameful are the rich, How shameful are the full. How shameful are those who everyone speaks well of.” [2]

We do not live in an honor-shame culture, so we do not have a concept that directly corresponds.  The concept of privilege is perhaps the closest that we can come, keeping in mind that it is not quite the same thing. But if we think about honor as privilege, then we understand that some people enjoy certain perks, certain benefits without question because of their social position. That privilege may come with being male or having white skin or with education or with citizenship in a certain country.

And so, one more time, let’s try a new translation -- “how privileged are the poor.  How privileged are the hungry.  How privileged are those who weep.”  And “how underprivileged are the rich, how underprivileged are the full, how underprivileged are the popular.” 

It does not make much sense to say that the poor are privileged.  Or to suggest that the popular people, the ones who everyone listens to, are somehow under-privileged. To make these claims is to call into question the meaning of the word privilege.   By now you may be scratching your head.  You may be saying to yourself, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

And that, is exactly how it was for Jesus’ first listeners.  Jesus turned established categories on their heads. He completely rejected the established social hierarchy.

There is a large crowd around Jesus here. Within that large crowd, we can identify at least three audiences.  The poor are present.  The rich are present.  And also present are those who would be Jesus’ most faithful followers, those who will suffer for the gospel.  If we made a Venn diagram, the three audiences would overlap. The rich are in one circle, the poor in another, but those who will suffer for Jesus’s sake may come from either the poor or the rich.

Jesus manages to talk to everyone at the same time. He heaps honor on those usually considered to be without honor.  He heaps shame on those considered to be without shame.  Luke includes the detail that Jesus is speaking on a level place. Theologically, this sermon is one of leveling, Jesus upends the systems of privilege and power.  He rejects what everyone else accepts as just the way things are.

He says that God understands reality differently. God sees that the poor know their needs, their emptiness and they have room to receive from God.  That is their blessing. But the rich tend to be comfortable trusting their own resources and so their wealth isolates them from others, sometimes even from God. And so, as Eugene Peterson says “there’s trouble ahead” for them. 

Here, in this room and in this Zoom space, there are probably also three audiences, the poor, the rich and those who want to be Jesus’ most faithful disciples.  Most of us are wealthier; some of us are poorer.  Or to put it another way, some of us carry more privilege, more honor, in our culture than others. And so, we each need to listen and receive the blessing or warning that Jesus offers us. 

But all of us here are part of the third audience. All of us are in that overlapping section in the Venn diagram.  I trust that we want to follow Jesus faithfully.  To that audience, Jesus directs verses 22-23.  In the New Revised Standard translation it reads:

‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.’

As we heard it in The Message version:

“Count yourself blessed every time someone cuts you down or throws you out, every time someone smears or blackens your name to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and that that person is uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—skip like a lamb, if you like!—for even though they don’t like it, I do . . . and all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company; my preachers and witnesses have always been treated like this.

“Know that you are in good company”, Peterson puts it. This is where it gets problematic.  We want to be in good company with Jesus.  

We know that there are places in the world where it is illegal to be a Christian, where you face serious consequences like being disowned by family or having your business blacklisted, effectively depriving you of a living.  We know that some are actually killed for following Jesus, for putting his teachings into practice.  That’s persecution. 

When retail workers wish you happy holidays and not specifically Merry Christmas, that is not persecution. 

When American Christians are encouraged to follow public health practices, to wear masks even when they gather for worship, that is not persecution.  When public schools are forbidden from leading students in prayer, to avoid state-sponsored religion, that is not persecution.

We want to be in good company.  We want to suffer for the gospel, not too much, mind you, but enough for it to count.  And so, there are some who hold up the slightest insult or inconvenience and claim that they are persecuted just as the prophets were.  The more that others suggest that isn’t actual persecution, the more put-upon they feel, and that just reinforces the idea that they are truly suffering for Jesus.

American Christians are deeply divided around this kind of question. It comes out, sometimes, in the conversation around persecution, but it really boils down to what it means to stand with Jesus. 

Jesus said that the last shall be first.  Jesus said to care for the last and the least. Jesus included the outcast, the disabled, the ill, the marginalized, women, children and foreigners. Jesus upended the systems of privilege and power.  He subverted the hierarchical categories that everyone accepts as just the way things are. 

So, here’s a way to evaluate persecution -- if we are facing pushback for upholding the status quo, then we probably aren’t suffering for the gospel.  If we are defamed or rejected because we are clinging to practices that perpetuate the last remaining last and the least remaining the least, then that does not put us in the good company Jesus described.  If, however, someone seeks to discredit us because we are standing up against the way things are, against the systems which continue to disempower people of color and women and immigrants, against practices which diminish the self-worth of queer and trans people, against structures which perpetuate injustice generation after generation, then we are in fact in good company with Jesus.

Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian archbishop famously said “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

Another South American priest, Segundo Galilea, said, “If you make an option for the poor, if you call in question the wealth of the rich and the power of the mighty, . . if you are on fire for the justice of the kingdom, sooner or later you will pay the price. And the price is persecution.” [3]

A few years ago, there was an episode of This American Life which was focused on children’s logic.  One of the stories went like this: A man said that, when his daughter was four, Christmas came along, and she suddenly had lots of questions about Jesus. The dad answered her questions, but his daughter wanted to know more. So they read a children’s Bible together.  He summed up Jesus’ message on her level by saying: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others the way you want to be loved, and treat others the way you want to be treated.

One day, a large crucifix outside of a church caught the girl’s attention.  He realized that he had avoided telling her the Easter story, so the dad told his little girl that some people found Jesus’ message too troublesome. They decided that he must stop, so they killed him.

Some weeks later his daughter was out of school for Martin Luther King Day. They went out to lunch and there was a picture of Dr. King at their table. She asked, “Who’s that?” The dad wasn’t sure how to explain the Civil Rights Movement to a four-year-old, so he decided to simply say that Dr. King was a preacher. “Oh, for Jesus?!”, she said. He replied, “Yes.”

He told his daughter that the reason she didn’t have school that day was because it was a day to remember Dr. King. He had an important message: That we should treat everyone the same no matter what they look like. The four year-old said, “That’s the same thing Jesus said. Did people kill Dr. King too?” [4]

Beloved ones, if we are on fire for the justice of the kingdom, sooner or later we will pay the price.  That is our high calling and Jesus says ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

Rejoice on that day and leap for joy . . .”

May we be found in that good company. Amen.

[1] http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke6x17.htm

[2] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 250

[3] Megan McKenna,  Blessings and Woes:  The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke, (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 1999),  p. 94.

[4] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/605/transcript

1/30/2022 - Rage - Luke 4:21-30

Rage

Luke 4:21-30

January 30, 2022

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=KakfcQ05hbs

“Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?”  That was the opening question in my clergy Bible study this week.[1]

The question was asked because of the rage in this text. The Nazarenes who heard Jesus’ sermon were so angry that they tried to throw him off a cliff. Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?

I have witnessed religious rage a few times. I’ve probably told you about the one and only time I attended a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.  It was held in the Super Dome in New Orleans. It was the end of a decade-long fight for control of the denomination and there were 38,000 battling Baptists in the space. Two things stand out in my memory. One is that when the people in charge didn’t like what someone had to say, they simply shut off their microphone.  In that huge space, if you didn’t have a working microphone, you could not be heard.  Shutting off microphones was rage expressed as power.

The other event happened when a certain prominent pastor stood to speak. He identified himself, “This is so and so, of the First Baptist Church of a well-known city” and the response was thunderous applause. Applause not for the truth of his convictions or the power of his compassion, but just because the crowd recognized his name and knew that he was one of them. He was on their side in the denominational fight. The applause might have sounded like appreciation or affirmation to some, but to me, it sounded like rage expressed as glee.

Sometimes, American Baptists enjoy holding up Southern Baptists as examples of everything we are not. So, imagine my dismay, when after my ordination as an American Baptist pastor, I started attending American Baptist Biennial meetings and saw very similar rage on display in the conversations regarding various resolutions about the inclusion and exclusion of LGBTQ persons. 

Right now, religious rage sometimes flies under the banner of Christian nationalism. A well-stoked fear that the majority are going to lose power and prestige gets cloaked in religious language about God’s will, and those who are afraid project it onto God and make claims about God’s wrath. We might also see it with those who are incredibly angry about being asked to wear a face mask in a building, including inside church buildings, or to be vaccinated.

We know some of the things that currently trigger religious rage, but how did Jesus do it?

Remember that Jesus’ sermon began with a reading from the prophet Isaiah which said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

That last phrase might be part of the trigger. That last phrase – “the year of the Lord’s favor” is a reference to the Jubilee. The Jubilee was a cycle of renewal and restoration that was supposed to happen every 50 years in Israel. In the Jubilee year, debts were forgiven, slaves were freed, and property ownership went back to people who had fallen on hard times and had to sell it to survive.  Two weeks ago, we read the first part of this sermon and you might remember that after Jesus quoted Isaiah, he said, “Today this has been fulfilled.”

So, what the people might be thinking is that Jesus is declaring this a Jubilee year, starting now. And that might be good news for many of them. The working folks are wondering if their mortgages are going to be considered paid in full. The landless poor may be thinking about what it would be like just to have a garden of their own.

Jubilee was God’s original vision for the country, and it is a good one. Jesus is reaching way back to the memories of when the people first entered the land, the story about themselves that they have carefully nurtured for centuries. Imagine a speech that calls Americans to remember our ancestors who left their homelands to fight for freedom here. Imagine a crowd-pleaser built around the poem on the Statue of Liberty. The Nazarenes might have thought they were getting a first-century Palestine feel-good speech about the Jubilee.

Walter Brueggemann says that the principle of divestment in the Jubilee is “the most difficult, most demanding, most outrageous requirement of biblical faith.”  You see, it is not just a kind thought or religious idea. It is a concrete practice where money and property change hands.   Brueggemann says, “every fifty years, you must give back to the people the land and property that is inalienably theirs that they have lost in the rough and tumble of the economy. You must give it back, even if you own it legally and it is properly yours. . . Imagine, when the Jubilee signal is given, everybody returns property, everybody cancels debts, everybody breaks off the mad scramble of accumulation and acquisition . . . because life in the community of faith does not consist of getting more but in sharing well.”[2]

As difficult and unlikely as all of that sounds, maybe, at first, the people of Nazareth are just thinking about what it would be like to live in a place where everyone’s needs are met, about what more they could have than they have now.  OK maybe those who are a little bit better off might have a twinge of worry about having to give up what is rightfully theirs.  But they have probably heard preachers dance around that before, just like you and I have heard great speeches praising our immigrant ancestors without even mentioning the more controversial issue of people attempting to come here today.

They are settling in to enjoy a great sermon offered by a rising star from their own village -- a sermon about who they were in the good old days and who they still are and who God is and how God has chosen to care for them … And then Jesus goes and ruins it. He reminds them about some other old stories -- the one about the Gentile widow that God provided for during a great famine, and the one about the enemy combatant General Naaman whom God healed of leprosy. It is as if Jesus holds up a sign that says Gentile Lives Matter. The people know this. It is not new information. The covenant with Abraham was intended to bless all the people of the world. Isaiah said that Israel was called to be a light to all the nations. It has been part of who they are and who God is from the beginning of their relationship. The people know that Gentile Lives Matter, but it seems to enrage them anyway.

Jesus says that there were lots of widows in Israel during that long-ago famine, but God did not send the prophet to any of them except the Gentile in Zarephath. And there were lots of lepers in Israel, but God sent Elisha only to Naaman the Syrian. And so, one commentator suggests that maybe the Nazarenes are not angry that they are being asked to share God’s favor, but because they are being bypassed.[3] 

This is one of Jesus’s first sermons. He is new at it. So maybe he has over-stated the case, over-emphasized the people’s seeming exclusion from God’s loving action.  Or maybe this story conveys what it feels like to insiders when the legitimate needs of the outsiders get addressed.  When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality may feel like oppression.

Jesus tells them a truth about God that they already know. Jesus tells them that God wants the same kind of communal life, the same sharing and mutual care for everyone, including the people they consider inferior, including their enemies. It was one thing to believe that Jubilee might just happen, that their lot in life might improve even at some cost to the rich. But to think that God might want them to do that for everyone? To provide for their enemies in concrete, material ways? To cancel the debts of foreigners? There were a lot of Gentiles living in Galilee, many who had done so for multiple generations. If Jesus came into an American church and started advocating for reparations for descendants of enslaved people or if he pointed out that native peoples do not benefit from the American narrative that we have carefully nurtured in the same way as the dominant majority, if Jesus said that God wanted our wealth, that we have earned by our own efforts, to be distributed to everyone, then we might begin to understand what the Nazarenes were feeling.

The idea that God wanted the same shalom, the same peace and well-being for those people – well young Jesus has just gone too far. Who does he think he is? They are so enraged, Luke says, that they become a mob and try to throw him off a cliff. Fred Craddock writes that “anger and violence are the last defense of those who are made to face the truth embedded in their own tradition.”[4]

“Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?”  That was the opening question in my Bible study this week.

In a different Bible study, the question was “Who told the truth so clearly that you wanted to kill them for it?” [5]

I’m beginning to think that if no one ever gets angry at us because of what Jesus said or did, maybe we’re not doing it right.

There is so much rage, so much anger and violence swirling around us. Religious rage takes many forms. Sometimes it looks like a well-known well-dressed preacher defending the status quo. That veneer of respectability is a thin cover for violence. We see the true ugliness of religious rage in events like school board meetings where parents cannot even speak civilly as they protest children learning about racism. We see it in the distorted faces of those who terrorize others by the light of tiki torches. We see it in place after place as extremists kill people in the name of their God. And we often see it, hopefully not to such a degree, in conversations with other Christians.

We are not far from the rage of this text.  And that might seem like a cause for despair. Have we really learned so little in the last two millennia?

But I want to suggest that there’s some good news here. If Fred Craddock is correct that anger is the last defense of those who have to face the truth, then perhaps what we are witnessing is a harsh confrontation with truth.  The truth that God is bigger than we can imagine, the truth the God’s love is powerful and comprehensive and intended for all, all, all of creation. The truth that brings good news for the poor and release to the captives and binds up the broken-hearted. The truth that God is love is love is love.

Beloved ones, let us seek to know that truth, to embrace it, to allow it to confront us and transform us over and over again. Because that truth is marching on. Amen.

[1] This wonderfully provocative question was posed by the Rev. Rahel Hahn, pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, Albany, NY.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “On Signal: Breaking the Vicious Cycles” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1, (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2011) pp. 140-141.

[3] Warren Carter in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2018), p. 221.

[4] Fred Craddock in Craddock, et al Preaching Through the Christian Year:  Year C (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), p. 92.

[5] Barbara Brown Taylor “The Company of Strangers” in Home By Another Way (Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1997) p.43.

1/16/22 - In the Power of the Spirit - Luke 4:14-21

In the Power of the Spirit                                                                                                                                             

Luke 4:14-21

January 16, 2022

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/1f4bhG74Uz0

Several of us are currently reading the book Stride Toward Freedom, which is Dr. King’s account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Reading along a couple of weeks ago, I got to the part where he described being arrested for the first time and it took me off-guard.  He was arrested on a false charge of driving 30 in a 25 mph zone – not given a ticket, but arrested and taken to jail. [1] Well, I wasn’t surprised about the trumped-up charges, but I realized that I was surprised that it was his first time in jail.  Because everybody knows that Dr. King was arrested many times.  But there is always a first time. 

And, as Luke tells the story, this is a kind of first time for Jesus.  It is his first public action since his baptism.  In John’s gospel, his first action is to turn water into wine for a wedding.  In Matthew and Mark, it is to call disciples to follow him.  But for Luke, this is it.  Well, technically, maybe this wasn’t his first either.  Verses 14-15 say that word was getting around about him because he was teaching in the synagogues.  But this time is the first time we overhear what he is saying. 

He reads scripture and offers commentary on it.  We usually call that preaching. So this is Jesus’ inaugural sermon.  It sets the stage for the rest of his ministry.  These words are very familiar to many of us.  We hear them and we think “Oh yeah, that sounds like Jesus”  Just like when I read about Dr. King’s arrest and thought, “Oh yeah, that sounds like him.”

Except that when Jesus says these words here, it is the first time.  He is identifying his mission publicly.  He is owning up to a certain claim of God on his life, in front of his family and friends, his neighbors and the people who watched him grow up.  What he chooses to say on this occasion is very significant.

Synagogues used a lectionary by the time of Jesus.  Most of the specifics about synagogue worship in the first century are unclear, but scholars believe that there was a regular rotation of readings from the Torah every Sabbath.  What we don’t know is whether the other readings, from the Psalms and the Prophets, had an assigned schedule or not.[2]  So, when Jesus opened the scroll to Isaiah, he may have chosen it or it may have been selected for him.

Either way, what he says next are words that he chooses.  Luke builds the suspense, by including the details about unrolling the scroll and standing to read, then rolling up the scroll again and handing it back and sitting down.  He sits down because teaching and preaching were done by a person who was seated, not standing. After the drama has built, Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

It is an electrifying moment.  The crowd recognizes that something unusual, something memorable, has just happened.  At this moment, he has them in the palm of his hand.  Now, many of us remember that the situation changes rapidly as Jesus goes on preaching.  We will get to that in two weeks.  For today, we’re sticking with this part of the story. 

In the discussion of Stride Toward Freedom, the point has been made several times that every hero of social change in history did not know the future.  They did not know what difference their actions would make in the short- or long-term.  When Dred Scott sued for his freedom, when Rosa Parks sat on the bus and refused to move, when Ruby Bridges’ parents accompanied her to an all-white school, none of them knew what would happen next. None of us knows the future. Neither did they. But they found the courage to act anyway.

Jesus displays that same kind of courage in this sermon.  He publicly identifies himself with a God-given mission. From this point on, he stands by this proclamation over and over again at great cost.  You may be thinking “wait a minute.  It’s different for Jesus.  Jesus is God and God knows everything.  So, unlike other people who took action for change, Jesus knew what would happen.  He did know the future.”

I suggest that if we suppose Jesus knew the future, then we diminish his humanity.  If Jesus is the one human being in history who knows everything even before it happens, then he’s not subject to the same limitations as the rest of us mere mortals.  We might remember that time when his disciples asked him about the end of time and Jesus replied that he did not know when that would be, because only God knows.  Or we might remember his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane “let this cup pass from me” which implies that the events that night and the coming days were not fixedly determined in advance. 

Jesus does not know the future, but he does know that his words and actions will provoke a response. In the power of the Spirit, he boldly proclaims his agenda.  It might be the first time, but it won’t be the last. 

Jesus is God, living in human form, with all the limitations of human beings. Through Jesus, God lives as a poor tradesman and experiences the occupation of Rome.  Through Jesus, God lives in solidarity with those who are suffering, because Jesus is one of them.  

And through Jesus, we see the revelation of God.  “Jesus [says] the gospel is for the poor and oppressed . . .  Jesus [announces] that he came to liberate from real oppressive structures the marginalized – the impoverished, the war captives, the poor in health, the political prisoners.  Jesus [comes] to turn the economic structures upside down, instituting the year when crushing debts [are] forgiven and slaves [are] freed.”[3]

This is God’s intention, God’s desire, God’s agenda even – the power of God’s Spirit poured out on and through Jesus for the benefit of those who have been victimized by misused social power.  

This is challenging for us who have not been so oppressed. Those of us who have mostly benefitted from the exercise of social power, those of us who are not wounded or threatened on a regular basis by poverty or hatred or violence. For us, the danger is that we will water-down or overly spiritualize or just fail to understand the deep significance of what Jesus is saying. 

This week, some of us heard Nell Stokes speak. Some of you know her.  Nell Stokes has been very active in our community since the 1960’s, but she grew up in Alabama.  At age 16, she was a volunteer in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  She participated in a study of Stride Toward Freedom last year, and during that study, she offered some thoughts on the book.  She said reading the book reminded her of the everyday humiliations that black people had to endure in the Jim Crow South and even now.  She said, “I am 82 years old and still we’re being treated like nothing.  It bothers me and makes me very angry that other people think that we are less-than.” 

Jesus was someone that other people sometimes thought was less-than. He was poor.  He was not a Roman citizen.  He was not the son of a priest. He didn’t have religious credentials or standing in high society.  He was someone that other people thought was less-than. And in this sermon, he has the audacity to say that God is also fundamentally on the side of those who are considered less-than.

Howard Thurman was an African American pastor, theologian, philosopher, and civil rights leader who lived from 1899 to 1981. He wrote many books.  He was a friend of Martin Luther King, Sr and it is often said that Martin Luther King Jr regularly carried his book Jesus and the Disinherited with him.

Howard Thurman wrote this book to talk about what Jesus had to offer those who are considered less-than. Thurman described them as those whose backs are up against a wall -- people trapped in systems of oppressions, made to feel that they don’t matter, that they will not be protected, that they are less than other children of God, and even that they are not children of God. 

Thurman says that the message of Jesus was about an urgent radical change in the inner attitude of the people.  He recognizes that no external force, no matter how powerful it is, can destroy a people without first winning a “victory of the spirit against them”[4].   The enemy that can crush the spirit will win, but Jesus offers real spiritual strength, a technique for survival for oppressed people.  It is the power of the Spirit of God.  Thurman says that the deep awareness that a person is a child of God, the God of life, “creates a profound faith in life that nothing can destroy.”  “To the degree that people know this, he says, “they are unconquerable from within and without.”[5]

Writing about parents who were able to embody this for their children, he says, “In communities that were completely barren, with no apparent growing edge, without any point to provide for the disadvantaged, I have seen children grow up without fear, with quiet dignity and such high purpose that the mark which they set for themselves has even been transcended.”[6]

This is the agenda of God, liberation, transformation, and wholeness for all, but especially for those with their backs against the wall.  If we do not recognize the power and the challenge in Jesus’ inaugural sermon, it may be that we are not trying or our privilege insulates us.   Perhaps we do recognize it, and we are trusting the Spirit to anoint us and embolden us just like Jesus.  To quote Thurman one more time, he wrote, “The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in life and in [human] hearts  . . . which is committed to overcoming the world.”[7]

May the Spirit of the Lord be upon you and me with power and courage and love.  Amen.

[1] Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, New York:  Harper and Row, 1958)  p. 128

[2] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995),p. 105

[3] Robert Parham, The Agenda:8 Lessons from Luke 4: Students Guide (Nashville: Baptist Center for Ethics, 2007) p.3-4.

[4] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, ©1976 Howard Thurman, (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1996), p 11.)

[5] Thurman, p. 45-46

[6] Thurman, p. 45

[7] Thurman, p. 98

1/9/22 - Off by Nine Miles - Matthew 2:1-12

Off By Nine Miles

Matthew 2:1-12

January 9, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  The Wise Men's Dream by Rev. 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/xdBFHMt_5VY

This story about the magi comes around every year. Every time it does, I find, in my files, an article written by Walter Brueggemann more than twenty years ago now.  The article is entitled Off By Nine Miles, and yes, I stole the sermon title from him.

The magi went to Jerusalem, to Herod’s palace, which is where a person might understandably expect to find a royal baby.  But, as Matthew and Luke have told us, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which is nine miles south of Jerusalem.    Not a lot of difference geographically, but worlds apart in most other ways.  Brueggemann notes, “The narrative of Epiphany is the story of these two human communities: Jerusalem, with its great pretensions, and Bethlehem, with its modest promises.”[1] 

The magi did not undertake this trip on a whim. They were not flippant or unconcerned about the outcome.  They planned carefully and gathered provisions.  They packed the camel bags and repacked them to balance and lighten the loads.  They consulted maps and ancient texts and the stars and even remembered to bring gifts.  They did not go straight to Bethlehem, but it wasn’t for lack of good intentions and careful efforts. 

They were off by nine miles, on a journey of 500-600 miles without the benefit of GPS or an interstate highway system. That seems within a reasonable margin of error.  Perhaps it would be better to say they were off by only nine miles.  They just needed a slight course correction. 

I’ve read Dr. Brueggemann’s article many times, but this is the year when it really resonated with me.  It struck a nerve because you and I have recent and repeated experience in course correction. For the last 21 months – which you know is 5 ½ years in Covid time – we have repeatedly been changing course.  We’ve been told it’s safest to stay home, then it’s safe to gather outdoors, then wear a mask.  Come to church with your mask and sing. Oh no, change that. Don’t sing. And you know what? – let’s go back to just staying home again now. 

As far as we know, the magi only needed one course correction.  So good for them.  And maybe, all of the pivoting we’ve done is going to also be good for us.  Maybe it is getting us in shape for something yet to come, a new and better direction.

It’s that time of year when some people make New Year’s Resolutions.  Actually, we are nine days into the New Year -- that time when many have already abandoned any resolutions they made.  But it’s only my first Sunday to preach in 2022, and I’m thinking about course corrections. I’m thinking about how it is possible to plan carefully and do your best and still be off by nine miles. 

It’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens to me with gift-giving. I feel the pressure of making a decision about what to get and then purchasing and wrapping it festively and getting it there on time.  I get caught up in those details, in making sure that I have something for everyone I need to. And then, in that moment when we exchange gifts, I sometimes remember that my goal wasn’t simply checking a list. It wasn’t just having a package to unwrap.  My goal was the moment of fun or surprise or delight or laughter that brings joy.  Sometimes, despite my best intentions and careful efforts, I miss the joy by nine miles.

It happens in my church life too. Planning worship matters to me.  I spend probably too much time word-smithing the call to worship and deciding on art for the PowerPoint and choosing hymns.  I do that because I want to enhance our sense of God’s presence, to enable us to draw us close as we can.  Some services are more frenetic than others.  Christmas Eve was one of those.  I had thought about a lot of things ahead of time – coordinating music with Michael and the choir, planning tech stuff with the tech team, figuring out the best way to do the candle-lighting while attending to Covid protocols.  All of those things were appropriate and necessary – like the magi’s loading the camel bags before their trip. Worship was almost over when I finally connected.  It was at the moment on the third verse of Silent Night when the piano dropped out and we stood together in the darkness, singing a capella. I heard it, I recognized it for what it was, I took a deep breath and it was over.  Caught up in my tasks and details, I almost missed it altogether. 

I expect you have some experiences like that too.  Times when you realize that the worries and responsibilities required in getting through the day have pulled you off course. 

Maybe some of the events of the last 2 years, as difficult and unrelenting as they have been,  have helped us realize our need for change.  Some of us have recognized in a new way the importance of sustaining our primary relationships, and the urgency of tending to what really matters whether that is self-care or spiritual exploration or a change in vocation.

Collectively, we are seeing more clearly the brokenness of our institutions. From health care to policing to schools to our cherished values of freedom and justice for all – almost everywhere, we find evidence that while we might still be pointed in the right direction, we need a course correction. And sometimes, we are pointed in the wrong direction and our only hope is metanoia, repentance.

It will be fascinating to see the history of this time when it is written in the future. Churches, like everyone else, have coped in different ways.  Some have succumbed to internal pathologies and stressors present before the pandemic.  Many will close permanently before it is over. 

Some have been caught up in Christian nationalism, the perversion of the gospel that merges Christian and American identities, resulting in a profound distortion of both.   This is a political-theological worldview that co-opts Christian faith and symbols to support a kind of patriotism which is often a cover for white supremacy and violence of many kinds. 

Many of those involved in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 2021 were Christian nationalists. On the church calendar, January 6 is the day of Epiphany, the day which remembers the choice the magi had to make between the king in Jerusalem and the one in Bethlehem.  That irony is probably lost on the insurrectionists.   At least one sign in the angry mob claimed “Jesus saves”.   Many prayed in Jesus’ name in what they called the “sacred space” of the Senate chamber, giving thanks for the God-given opportunity to do what they were doing.  I hesitate to call that church, because it is so antithetical to what Jesus taught, but some churches are supporting it.  It is imperative that we, who seek to follow Jesus, denounce that as demonic, an utter distortion of his good news.

On a local level, inside the history we are living through, it seems that churches like ours are learning how much we value the personal relationships, the sense of community developed over years of shared faith and life.  Our definition of success has never been about how many programs we ran or how many people attended an event, but about our mutual celebrations of joy and sharing of support in crisis.  Which is a good thing to discover.

But I’m still wondering what we might be missing.  What brings us joy?  What connects us to the very center of Christ’s reign?  How are we so intent on our tasks and to-do lists and good intentions and careful efforts that we miss the goal by nine miles?

One of the messages of this Bible story is that it sometimes takes an outsider’s perspective to nudge us in the right direction.  The magi got very close on their own. And they then asked questions of the insiders.

The magi seem to know a little bit of Bible.  They know Isaiah 60 which speaks of Jerusalem as a place of productivity and prosperity.  They seem to have read what Isaiah says about camels bringing gold and frankincense. But Herod’s scholars, those who are inside the tradition, know more. They know about Isaiah 60, but they also know Micah 5.  So, they quote it to the king “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.”

Brueggemann says “This is the voice of a peasant hope for the future, a voice that is not impressed with high towers and great arenas, banks and urban achievements. It anticipates a different future, as yet unaccomplished, that will organize the peasant land in resistance to imperial threat. Micah anticipates a leader who will bring well-being to his people, not by great political ambition, but by attentiveness to the folks on the ground.”[2]

The magi got very close on their own. Many of those outside our church walls know something about Jesus.  Many of them know a lot. And sometimes their questions can remind us what really matters, if we can let our defenses down long enough.  Sometimes, we already have the answer.  We need to shift our focus to the right text for guidance.  Sometimes, the course correction requires us to stop and see the bigger picture, to cut through the layers of tradition and history and get back to the heart of our faith.

Epiphany means revelation. It is the season when we focus on God as revealed in Jesus who arrived as a baby in Bethlehem.  One way to open ourselves to a course correction may be to listen particularly well to Jesus’ own words.  As we worship together for the next two months, we will revisit Jesus’ first sermon and his primary teachings as Luke gathered them together in the Sermon on the Plain. 

We don’t know what the year ahead holds exactly, but I am hopeful. I am hopeful because we are resilient and we are staying connected to each other and continuing to care for strangers through this difficult time.  I am hopeful about our new governance structure, which is a kind of grand experiment in course correction.  As we began to live into this together, I hope that we will seek to be at the center of Christ’s reign, a place of vulnerability and joy. 

As the poet adrienne maree brown wrote, “Things are not getting worse. They are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”[3]

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

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Off by Nine Miles: Isaiah 60:1-7, Matthew 2:1-12,”  The Christian Century, December 19, 2001 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2001-12/nine-miles

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “Off by Nine Miles: Isaiah 60:1-7, Matthew 2:1-12,”  The Christian Century, December 19, 2001 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2001-12/nine-miles

[3] http://adriennemareebrown.net/2017/02/03/living-through-the-unveiling/

1/2/22 - God Believes We Are Worth the Trouble - Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18

God Believes We are Worth the Trouble

January 2, 2022

Jeremiah 31:7-14; John 1:1-18

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Guest Preacher - Rev. Dr. Jim Kelsey

A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://youtu.be/R3rjBMYWJJE

12/24/21 - Close to Home: Invited Home - Luke 2: 1-20

Close to Home:  Invited Home

Luke 2: 1-20

December 24, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image Ordinary Glory by Rev. 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/0gMud0SyFTk

My cheeky brother Roger sent me a  picture of a kitchen several months ago.  He asked “What do you think about a counter like that?’

I looked at it and said, “It reminds me of our old house.”

I meant the house where we lived from the time I was in fourth grade until I left for college. The house where Roger lived from first grade until sometime in high school when my parents moved to Saudi Arabia and he went to boarding school in Greece.  It was a house where we did a lot of our growing up and the kitchen table was distinctive.  Like the one in this picture, it was attached to the wall.  Not at barstool height like many are today, but at normal kitchen table level.  This picture reminded of that house, but our kitchen had a fake brick wall and oak cabinets. 

So I asked him whose house this was and he kept sending me pictures of other rooms, until finally he sent me the front of the house, which I recognized as our old one.   It’s been a few decades since we lived there. Some remodeling has happened.  If I have a dream in which I am at home, it doesn’t matter how old I am in the dream, I am most often in this house. 

Our Advent theme was Close to Home. Over the last month, we have talked about spiritual homesickness, that enduring yearning for God.  We have talked about faith nurtured in homes and communities which creates peacemakers and justice-seekers. We have described sanctuary, the kind of welcome and belonging and safety that we hope everyone would experience in their own homes, but which some must unfortunately seek elsewhere.

All of that has led us to this night, to the center of the story.  We know the story very well, but even so, like millions of others around the world today, we are here to hear it again, to feel it in the music, to wonder at it by candlelight, to once more find ourselves in the story of God coming to be at home among us. 

Wanting to be home for Christmas or to be with people who accept and love you -- that’s a common theme in Christmas music and made-for-TV movies.  Most of us felt it especially keenly last year when the pandemic kept us confined to our homes, but not necessarily in the home where we usually spend the holidays.  And many of us are still feeling that this year. Family is still too far away. Or maybe we are at home, but home doesn’t feel like it used to. Maybe there’s an empty chair or an empty room, and a hole in your heart.

Home for the holidays is an interesting twist on the original story.  It doesn’t really seem like anyone was at home on the first Christmas. The angels were talking with some shepherds, not in heaven where they apparently live.  The shepherds are not at home – they’re in the fields with sheep.  The magi, who will arrive in a sermon in a couple of weeks, are definitely not at home.  They’re somewhere on the road from the East, probably on camelback.  And of course, Mary and Joseph are not in their hometown, not even, it seems, in a decent motel.

None of that stopped God from being present then, or now. Christmas has always happened in the hearts of many in places far from home. It is happening even tonight in prison cells and hospital rooms, on battlefields, in emergency shelters, and in refugee camps.  Maybe even at fast-food places. Here is one pastor’s description of one Christmas Eve at a McDonald’s.

 . . .A family with three toddlers, jazzy with excitement,
are traveling to Maine in the drizzle of the holy evening. the littlest boy in red and green plaid Oshkosh runs in circles, strangling French fries in his hand. Tired of the car and already eager for presents and bed, his little sneakers tramp
like angel feet.

An older couple in a corner talk quietly about their daughter who’s been dead four Christmases now. They could have gone to their son-in-law’s house. His kind new wife invited them with her family, but it didn’t seem right. And this was the very brightest place – it looked like a star when they drove down the highway, and they knew there would be children here.

A divorced Dad with Budweiser on a black T-shirt jokes with his six year old daughter over milk shakes. A clumsily wrapped present perches on the molded plastic seat. He is trying to make the very best treat he can of their Christmas hour before bringing her back to her Mom’s house. Brown eyes shine at him and he thinks she is excited for later – for Santa and all – but she’s looking at him all over memorizing the gift.

The preacher is on her way to church to remember Bethlehem out loud for the folks who come to break bread and light little candles with paper circles on them that keep the wax from dripping on their hands as they sing “silent night.” Most of them have heard the story about the child before, and so has she. She has come here first, just to sit for a while and watch the christmas eve communion.”[1]

Christmas has always happened in the hearts of many in places far from home. Bidden or unbidden, Christ is present.

We know, from generations of Christmas pageants, that there must have been an innkeeper who pointed to the no vacancy sign and sent Mary and Joseph away. We know this because of that one verse which says that Mary laid Jesus in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. 

The word that gets translated “inn” is the Greek word kataluma. At the risk of messing up all those pageants, I have to tell you that the best translation of kataluma is not “inn.” The best translation of kataluma is “guest room.”  The one other time that kataluma occurs in Luke’s gospel is when Jesus sends his disciples to find a place to celebrate the Passover.   Preparing for what we now call the Last Supper, Jesus told them to ask the homeowner for the use of the kataluma, the guest room or upper room.   The kataluma was an extra room, added to a house for the purpose of providing space for guests.  

When Luke says that there is no room in the kataluma, it means that the guest room is already full. Many people are traveling – it’s Christmas, I mean the census, after all, and providing hospitality for family members who had come home was just basic good manners in that culture.  As is happening in many places tonight, some people will be sleeping on the sofa or an air mattress or in their childhood bunkbeds. So it was with Mary and Joseph, they were bunked down in whatever space was available.

Palestinian homes usually had two main areas – one large room used for cooking, eating and sleeping, and a second area, usually down a few steps, used for everything else. Into this lower level, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep were brought each night.  In the morning, the animals were taken out into a courtyard, the area was cleaned and the house was ready for the day.  Where there are animals, there are feeding troughs.  Mary is simply being resourceful by putting Jesus in the manger, where he wouldn’t get stepped on in this very full house. 

So, Jesus was not born in the stable of some cold, impersonal one star hotel, but rather in the back room of a home where aging aunts, cousins, and other random relatives may have doted on the new baby.  God came into the world, into a family, with rituals and holiday traditions, and all of the quirks and characters that our families have. 

That is what we celebrate tonight, that God came to share our humanness, our pain, our fear, our hopes and joys, and our love.  God arrived as vulnerable and weak as any of us. He lived and dwelt among us.  Of all the characters in the first Christmas story, perhaps it was God who was homeless; The One who left the divine realm to take on human flesh, was the furthest from home. 

Let me close with The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton doesn’t seem to know about the idea of a guest room, but the poem is still true. 

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall [we]come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And [we all] are at home.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Maren C. Tirabassi Christmas Eve at the Epsom Circle McDonald’s and Other Poems, ©2020 by Maren C. Tirabassi

12/19/21 - Close to Home: Seeking Sanctuary - Luke 1:39-55

Close to Home:  Seeking Sanctuary

Luke 1:39-55

December 19, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Photo by Jaimie Trueblood/newline.wireimage.com

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31MlM6HEcJY

What happens after the angel leaves? The Bible rarely gives the kinds of details I want. So, the angel appears out of nowhere and says “do not be afraid,” as they always do.  And then they say whatever it was they came to say. You’re terrified, but trying not to show it, because they said not to be.  Then they leave. What happens right then?  Right after they leave?  Do you have a panic attack?  Do you lean against the wall to keep from falling down or maybe go throw up?  Maybe you crawl in bed, pull the covers over your head and pretend it was a dream. 

We do not know what Mary did immediately after the angel left her, but we do know that within a very short time she made her way to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is married to a priest. Her male ancestors were priests.  Luke describes her as righteous and blameless before God.  So, maybe when you’ve been visited by an angel, one of the first things you might do is to go and see a religious person, someone who is close to God and may understand the mysteries of angels.

If we didn’t already know this story, we might expect a different reaction.  We might anticipate that the righteous religious Elizabeth would speak harshly to her young unwed relative.[1]

I wonder if Mary is afraid of that too.  She has made a journey of 80 or 90 miles, climbing the Hebron mountains perhaps while coping with morning sickness.  That might be evidence of how desperate she is to find someone who will receive her kindly.  She takes a risk and goes to Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth does not cluck her tongue about young people these days.  She does not scold Mary.  She welcomes her with open arms.  She blesses her, she recognizes the bond that they share.  They have each believed a promise delivered by an angel. How wild is that?  What an inexpressible relief that must have been for Mary, she could let down her guard.  She was safe with Elizabeth.

Perhaps you know that feeling. Perhaps at a time when you greatly needed it, someone defied expectations. They didn’t get mad.  They didn’t judge.  They just offered you space to pull yourself together. 

The afternoon was hot, and the two boys were looking for a cool place to hang out.  They jimmied the lock on the back door of the church, walked through the sanctuary and down a staircase. Once in the cool basement of the church, they began shooting pool.  They had done this several times before. But one day, something moved in the shadow of the room and then the pastor stepped forward.  The boys were caught, and they were afraid.

But then, the pastor smiled, "Of all the people in this neighborhood, you guys are trying the hardest to get into this church," he said. He reached into his pocket, then pulled out a key.  "Here," he said, "come any time you want."

That episode changed the lives of the two brothers and their parents. Their family became active in the church.  A multi-generational history of alcoholism was interrupted.   The youngest of the boys, Roger Swanson, grew up to become a pastor and denominational executive.

Sanctuary is the gift of welcome and acceptance and belonging and safety. It can be powerful, life changing. Elizabeth provides sanctuary for Mary which enables Mary to become sanctuary for God.  

Mary becomes Jesus’ safe person. She is the one who gives birth to him when she is far from home. She is the one who flees to Egypt with him and Joseph when Herod threatens his life.  She worries over her teenage son when they are separated on that trip to the Temple.  She coaxes him to save the party at Cana, and she stands by broken-hearted, angry and helpless when he dies.  Other people may be intimidated or threatened or in awe of the amazing adult Jesus, but Mary knows him to well, she is his safe person. 

Sanctuary is an expansive word. We use it to talk about this room where worship takes place.  It is also used about places that rescue hurt and endangered animals. People are finding sanctuary in motel rooms and Red Cross shelters in the aftermath of deadly tornadoes last week.  Some churches have provided sanctuary for months on end to people at risk for deportation. 

Sanctuary is the gift of welcome and acceptance and belonging and safety.  It is not just a place.  It is also the people who create safe places for others. 

Pastor Stan is one of those people.  He is a pastor who provides sanctuary for queer and trans people.  That safe space often happens in person as he travels and speaks in churches around the country.  It also happens on-line.   People who are afraid to be themselves, afraid of the reaction of their families and their churches find him.  They find him through social media, or by referral by someone else who was recently in a similar situation.  He is also often contacted by the parents of LGBTQ people, parents who want to respond with love, but who are conflicted by what they think the Bible says. 

About a year ago, Pastor Stan was contacted by one of those moms. She said that her daughter (I’ll call her Sue) had asked her parents to follow Pastor Stan on Facebook.  He often shares messages of abundant welcome, especially to LGBTQ persons.  Sue told her parents that Stan was an Evangelical pastor who had shifted his position on the issue of sexual orientation and inclusion. She wanted her parents to consider making that shift for themselves.

So, the parents did what Sue asked, and they were surprised by what they found. You see, Pastor Stan has a life beyond his ministry. He has adult children. He has parents. And when Sue’s parents started following him, his posts were about his mother and his family’s journey with her dementia. Well, at that time, Sue’s paternal grandmother had recently died of Alzheimer’s and her parents were actively caring for her maternal grandmother who also had it. Sue’s parents were incredibly touched by the connection between Pastor Stan’s experiences with his mother and their own journey. His sharing of that difficult and tender time ministered to them in a powerful way.

They felt that connection so strongly that they were hesitant to hear his position on inclusion. They didn’t want it to diminish the ministry they had already received.  But, because of that ministry, they wrote to him and said, “We have reluctantly opened our hearts and minds to consider that, just maybe, we have been wrong. We both know, if we are ever where your mom and mine are now, of our four children, our gay child will be the one to sing hymns with us and soothe us through the long and lost days and nights. We are grateful to have found you when we did. We have a sense that God is speaking to us through you in ways we could have never heard were it not for your mom. Thank you.”[2] 

Almost a year later, they wrote to Pastor Stan again saying that they had become fully affirming of their gay daughter.

I thought about Pastor Stan’s experience with that family, and I thought about Mary and Elizabeth. Sue’s parents were more ready to hear him because they made a connection over a shared vulnerability, a shared sense of gradual, impending loss.  And I realized that maybe Elizabeth is more ready to receive Mary because of her own vulnerability.  She is after all, also experiencing an unexpected pregnancy and wondering how she will be judged for it. So, I’m wondering about the connection between the ways that we extend sanctuary, the ways that we make it safe for other people, and the ways that we share our own journeys, especially the hard parts. 

I want to affirm you as a congregation. You have truly been sanctuary for many people. It has happened in people’s homes and private conversations that I’ve never heard, I’m sure.  But it has also happened on the first day that someone came to worship and then I was the one they told how grateful they were to have found this safe place.

I can identify three major groups of people who have found sanctuary here. One was people fleeing persecution and danger in another country. As they sought asylum, which is another word for sanctuary, their journey brought them to Albany and then to us. Some are part of us today, some have moved on. A second group are LGBTQ persons, whom we have officially welcomed since the 1990’s. It is unfortunate, but true, that they still seek sanctuary because many places are not safe. And the third folks I might identify, are those who lost their spiritual homes or felt unwelcome in them as their understanding of God and the Bible, and the nature of faith made a big shift. When they realized that their theology was no longer represented in the communities which had once been sanctuary to them, it was like a foundation was pulled out from under them and they were in a kind of free-fall. But, in some cases, they found a place to stand again among us. I affirm this congregation for providing sanctuary to all those folks. I trust that we will continue to do so.

Those efforts have not been without cost already, I know. But I suspect that if we are to continue reaching out with the gift of welcome and acceptance and belonging and safety, if we are to connect with those who desperately need sanctuary, it will probably require from us even more willingness to be vulnerable, to be our authentic, messy, broken and brave selves. 

Scholars sometimes see this scene between Mary and Elizabeth as the first gathering of the community of Jesus. Paul Simpson Duke says, “It invites us to recall how much we need each other, to draw fresh courage from each other and to celebrate all that we share as bearers of the promise together. If these two women are a prototype of church, they certainly embody [both] how improbable and how subversive the church can be.”[3]

So beloved ones, may we like Mary, go to each other and risk. May we like Elizabeth, receive each other and bless.

May we find welcome, belonging, complete acceptance, safety as we recognize the deep, deep love of Christ present among us. Amen.

[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 22.

[2] The Rev. Stan Mitchell on his Facebook page, October 13, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4366624183406008&set=a.117771208291348

[3] Paul Simpson in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2018), p. 61.

12/12/21 - Close to Home: A Home for All - Luke 3:1-18; Zephaniah 3:14-20

Close to Home:  A Home For All     

Luke 3:1-18

Zephaniah 3: 14-20

Emmanuel Baptist Church

December 12, 2021

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

Isaiah was describing a highway in the wilderness.  He was talking about a literal road on which people would come home from exile.  This road was going to require a lot of levelling. Without dynamite, somehow hilltops were going to be flattened and valleys filled in. Without bulldozers, the path was going to be straightened and smoothed.  It was all for the cause of giving access to everyone who needed a way to get from there to here.  

Building a road today involves different technology, but it is still a huge undertaking.  There are planners and surveyors, excavators, pavers, and don’t forget the stripers.  Building a road is a multi-layered complicated process.  I don’t have to tell you this. You have traveled on highways that have been under construction for what seems like years.  You are aware.

John came along some 700 years after Isaiah.  When Luke quoted Isaiah the prophet to speak about John, he didn’t have a literal road in mind.  John was out in the wilderness, preparing the way for Jesus, but Jesus didn’t need a road made smooth and level. What John did for Jesus was to prepare hearts and minds to receive him.  That’s another kind of multi-layered process. 

John lived in a time when the religious authorities and the political authorities colluded with each other in their grasping for power, a time when the rich exploited the poor, a time when greed and corruption and violence were accepted as normal and to be expected. As far as I can tell, John lived in a time that was similar to most of the other Biblical prophets, even though he was separated from them by hundreds of years, and he lived in a time like ours. In short, John lived in a sinful time, which is the only kind of time the world has known.

John is trying to make a difference in that world. John is trying to lead a movement, a reformation. He is preaching metanoia, which is usually translated repentance.  That translation often brings to mind regret or guilt or shame. But metanoia really is about a significant turn, a change of direction and behavior. Repentance is not about feeling sorry for what went wrong in the past as much as it is making change for a different future. 

John is successful in launching this movement.  I say that because great crowds of people are leaving their homes and making their way out to the wilderness to hear him.  Yale Theologian Willie James Jennings notes that we often tend to think that those with power and wealth need to hear God’s directives most urgently.  Surely if God would speak to them, the world might change for the better. But God prefers to speak through prophets, who most often lived among the common people or at the edge of society. [1]

The emperor and other rulers whom Luke names at the beginning of this chapter represent the military, economic, social and religious powers fully intact and functioning. Jennings says “they collectively imagine that they already embody the will of God and that they have the word of God in hand. They need to hear no new word because they conceive that they are enacting such a word.” [2]

And so, John speaks to the ordinary people, to the ones who are keenly aware that things are not right, that change is urgently needed.   Large-scale reform is like building a road in the wilderness.  It is a multi-step process which can seem overwhelming.  John offers concrete and practical steps that these people can take.

The people ask “what should we do?”  John says “if you have two tunics, give one to someone who has none.  If you have food and someone else is hungry, then share.” 

The tax collectors ask “what about us? What should we do?”

John says “Don’t collect more taxes than required. Don’t be greedy.  Don’t take advantage.” 

Then the soldiers also ask “And us? What should we do?”  John tells them “Do your job without extortion or threats of violence.  Don’t use fear as a tool.” 

John offers specific things that each person can do – sharing resources, enacting fairness, making peace. Each set of actions is a layer in the process of transformation.  No one needs to be daunted by the size of the project, because acting within their own daily sphere of influence, everyone can do something.

But even if everyone does their part, it is likely to be bumpy.  Luke’s first readers would likely have been offended that tax collectors were being included.  They had a reputation for being crooked and deceitful. They were collaborators, working for enemy Rome to exploit their own people. 

Luke’s audience would have also been offended by the inclusion of the soldiers.  Roman soldiers were the literal enemy and for the first 300 years of its existence, the early church did not allow its members to serve in the military. 

Did John really think that people like tax collectors and soldiers should get to participate?  Surely they aren’t capable of metanoia, are they?

But building the highway is about providing access for everyone, it is about extending justice and mercy to all.

As Isaiah said, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” All means all. All flesh means regular folks and tax collectors and soldiers, all flesh means the identified bad guys, all flesh means even those the church might have been excluded before, all flesh means even those whom we don’t expect to be capable of change.

This is how John prepares the way for Jesus, by calling for change, in our daily interactions, in our political and economic systems, even our religious rituals. He calls for a focus on what gives life and restores dignity and in the words his father Zechariah said, “guides our feet in the path of peace.”  This is hard, often tedious work, like building a highway by hand.

A colleague named Nathan shared the story of a memorable Christmas Eve service.  He said that a young woman came to worship that night, someone who had a friend in the congregation. As the service went on, he noticed her and he thought that she was shrinking back from it, almost physically withdrawing into herself to avoid engaging with what was happening. 

His first thought was that the style of worship offended her, but when he spoke to her afterwards, she said she thought it was really amazing.  But she also said that she had never been in a service before where it felt like the words really mattered and that if you said them you had to be prepared to change your life and live them. And she wasn’t. She wasn’t willing to make those kind of changes, so she had to withdraw, to distance herself from the claim on her life. She got it.  Nathan thought that John the Baptizer would have been pleased.[3]

We also heard a reading from Zephaniah today. The book of Zephaniah is only 3 chapters long, but it contains 9 oracles, and 8 of the 9 are oracles of judgment.  It ends with our reading, an oracle of salvation and joy. Before we jumped in, the unrelenting word from Zephaniah was about God’s anger.  It was about the impending destruction of Judah because of violence and fraud, because of corrupt leadership and idolatry and complacency – he lived in a time like John’s and a time like ours. But suddenly, the word from God which Zephaniah brings is a word of restoration and joy. 

This oracle proclaims the end of the shame and ridicule they endured by being the pawns of other world powers. It speaks of gathering in the outcast and the lame, because God will liberate them from oppression, illness and social ostracism. 

Those who are vulnerable, those who have been shamed will be gathered back in to the community. And the joy will be enormous.

There is no evidence in the book of Zephaniah that the people changed. The warnings of judgement do not seem to have changed their behavior.  The gathering of community and the joy are possible because God forgives.

The people of Zion are encouraged to rejoice and sing, but if they do, they will be joining God who is already belting out the festival songs.  The Hebrew words used here are found elsewhere in the Bible describing great jubilation.  As David danced in front of the Ark of the Covenant, in exultation, so God rejoices over God’s people. As the morning stars sang at the creation of the world, so God sings with elation over God’s beloved.[4]

It is not just God’s people who rejoice in their forgiveness and restoration.  God sings.  God shouts with joy.  God, who is deeply invested in the life of the world, is overjoyed at the restoration of relationship.

John calls us to participate in that relationship, to make necessary changes in our lives and in our systems, to protect and empower the vulnerable, to speak truth to power, to share, to each do what we can.

But please hear the good news – it is not all on us.  We can sing Joy to the World because God is powerfully present. Present to heal and build, to care and mend, to challenge and stir. God is among us, and we who are wondrously and inexplicably God’s beloved, join in celebration. 

Joy to the world, the Lord is come . . . Beyond the pain and injustice and heartache of the world in which he lived, Zephaniah heard God singing. He saw a glimpse of God’s future, of justice and peace, a glimpse of a future in which all are well and all are gathered home. Zephaniah saw God in their midst, and God was singing.[5]

[1] Willie James Jennings in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, ,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2018), p. 30.

[2] Jennings, p. 30

[3] The Rev. Nathan Nettleton in his sermon Christmas Joys and Fair-Weather Supporters  http://southyarrabaptist.church/sermons/christmas-joys-and-fair-weather-supporters/

[4] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-advent-3/commentary-on-zephaniah-314-20-2

[5] This beautiful paragraph comes from the Rev. Patrick Johnson, in his sermon Songs for a Weary World https://patrickwtjohnson.com/2015/12/15/songs-for-a-weary-world/

12/5/21 - Close to Home: Into the Ways of Peace - Luke 1:57-80; Philippians 1:3-11

Close to Home:  Into the Ways of Peace

Luke 1:57-80, Philippians 1:3-11

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 5, 2021

Image:  Berakah by Hannah Garrity © 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=sMrJCLdJFDU

John the Baptist shows up every Advent. You might not know that because your current pastor doesn’t always follow the lectionary, but it’s true.  If it’s the second Sunday in Advent, John is going to be preaching in the wilderness.  In Lectionary Year C, which is this year, we get even more. This is the year of Luke’s gospel, so this year, as well as hearing about John the adult, we also hear the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah and the baby John. That’s a story only told by Luke.

We picked up the story at the point of John’s birth.  You will remember that John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest.  It was his turn in rotation to serve in the Temple about 9 months before John was born. You will remember that when he went into the Holy of Holies, he was surprised by the presence of the angel Gabriel.  By the end of their encounter, Zechariah could not speak, an apparent consequence of failing to believe what the angel said.  He was speechless for months until the day when baby John was to be named.

Zechariah often gets judged pretty hard for asking the kind of question that any of us might have.  I mean, when Gabriel went to Mary, Mary’s first response also was “How can this be?” Gabriel treated her question with respect.  But I’m jumping ahead.  Mary’s story is not the one we’re focused on today. 

Gabriel told Zechariah that he and Elizabeth were going to have a baby, and that their son would do incredible things. That was when Zechariah said, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man and my wife is getting in years.” 

Now, when I read this story, what I usually hear is Zechariah saying “I am too old to have a baby.”  This week a colleague helped me hear it slightly differently. 

The Rev. Joanna Harader is a pastor in Kansas.  She is Mennonite, but she comes from American Baptist stock. Joanna says “Maybe Zechariah is not asking such a stupid question. Maybe Zechariah is questioning another part of Gabriel’s proclamation. Maybe he is questioning the parts about the great works John will do. Maybe when he says, “I am an old man” it is not to say that he doubts that Elizabeth will be pregnant, but to say that he will not live to see the great deeds of his son. How will he know that his son will turn people to the Lord?  . . . It is reasonable to assume that Zechariah will be dead by the time his son reaches puberty. How will he know the great works to come?”[1]

I appreciate Joanna’s framing of the situation. It is kinder to Zechariah, for one thing.  It is also a question that resonates with me especially now.  How do we exercise trust for the future?  Where do we find hope?

By the time John is born, Zechariah has had a lot of silence in which to reflect on those questions, to dig down into his faith and reach into the stories from his ancestors.  His answer, which comes out in song, is that he trusts God for the future because he believes that God was faithful in the past. 

His song ends with this beautiful line

“By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

He has just been talking about his son John as a prophet who will go before the Lord and then he ends with the words “to guide our feet into the way of peace.”  Now, I have a lot of associations with John the Baptist, but peacemaker is not high on the list.  Agitator, disturber of the peace, someone who wears strange clothes and leads a movement – yes to all of the above, but peacemaker doesn’t readily spring to mind.

But as I think about it, that’s true for many others who were tried to change hearts and minds for the cause of peace and justice.  I think about John Lewis and his tag-line, “make good trouble.”  I think about Dorothy Day whose 124th birthday was last week. She said that she loved reading about the ways that saints in the past had cared for others through acts of mercy, but it raised a bigger question which was “where were the saints [trying to] change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?” [2]

People who resist the way things are, people who try to change systems of oppression are more often seen as trouble-makers than peacemakers. It is often only after their life is over that their work is truly respected.

I wonder about John the Baptist.  There is so much we’re not told.  I wonder about being born to parents who had longed for him and about the love that they surely showered on him.  I wonder about being born into a family of priests on both his mother’s and father’s sides.  He’s a pastor’s kid,  a double PK – the chances are slim to none that he’ll turn out normal.

I wonder what combination of nature and nurture produce someone like John.  We can guess that his parents died before he reached adulthood and we might wonder what effect that had on him.  He did not go into the family business and become a priest. Instead he wound up as a prophet, someone seeking to reform the religious institution of his parents, and I wonder if that’s not another side of the same coin. 

In his letter to the church at Philippi, the apostle Paul said, “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

It is helpful to remember that Paul is speaking to a group of people.  His claim is that God will complete the work begun in that community, not necessarily that every individual will see it, but that their labors with God will bear fruit.

I go back to the questions underlying Zechariah’s response to Gabriel.  How do we exercise trust for the future?  Where do we find hope?

Bryan Stevenson is a name known to many of us.  Bryan is a lawyer and social justice activist.  Representing people on death row, he began to challenge biases against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system.  Many of us have read his book Just Mercy or we’ve seen the movie version.  He initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama which honors the names of more than 4,000 African Americans who were lynched in this country and the Legacy Museum which documents the white supremacy which undergirds the high rates of incarceration and execution of people of color. His goal is to help people recognize the injustices in our system so that there can be restoration and redemption, so that we can live in peace. He has won many awards for his work, but of course, he has also been seen as a troublemaker.

In an interview about a year ago, he talked about the arc of his life.  His great-grandfather was an enslaved person in Virginia who learned to read when that was illegal.  Bryan marveled at “the kind of hope, the kind of vision it took to believe that one day, you’re going to be free, even when nothing around you indicates that freedom is likely for enslaved people in Virginia in the 1850’s.” [3]

After Emancipation, other formerly enslaved people would come to Bryan’s great-grandfather’s house, and he would read the newspaper to them.  Bryan’s grandmother shared her memories about sitting next to her father on those occasions because she loved the power that he had to engage people, to help them feel more informed and calmer. 

Bryan started elementary school during segregation.  His first school was a colored school.  He experienced racism in all its ugliness, but he also came from a family that instilled in him love and faith.  He speaks from that foundation when he says, “I think hope is our superpower. I mean, hope is the thing that gets you to stand up when others say, Sit down. It’s the thing that gets you to speak when others say, Be quiet.”

I think about Bryan’s great-grandfather.  Like Zechariah, he would not live to see all that God did for his people.  But also like Zechariah, he remained faithful in spite of the circumstances.  That faithfulness was part of the legacy inherited by his great-grandson, part of the guiding of Bryan’s feet in the ways of peace.

Bryan talks about being nurtured by his family, but also by a community of women who had fought for justice.  One time, Rosa Parks came to town and Bryan was invited to be there.  He was invited by Ms Johnnie Carr, a child-hood friend of Rosa Parks and one of the primary organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott.  So, of course he went.  He sat on the porch with Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr and they talked and talked.  He remembered that they weren’t talking about any of the extraordinary things they had done in the past.  They were talking about the things they still wanted to do.  He said there was a hopefulness in their conversation and he just sat there, soaking it in.

And then Rosa Parks turned and asked Bryan about his work.  Bryan gave her his pitch, “Well, we’re trying to end the death penalty. We’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to challenge conditions of confinement. We’re trying to help the mentally ill. We’re trying to help children. We’re trying to help the poor.”

He said that Rosa Parks leaned back smiling. 'Ooooh, honey, all that's going to make you tired, tired, tired.'  Everyone laughed.  Bryan looked down a little embarrassed and then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in his face and talked to him just like his grandmother used to.  She said, “That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave.” [4]

Bryan said he’ll never forget that. Those women taught him about the necessity of courage in the work of justice and peace.

So beloved ones, be courageous.  Hold on to your hope, because hope just might be our superpower.  I am confident that God who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it and to guide our feet in the way of peace.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] https://spaciousfaith.com/new-testament-texts/luke-15-25/

[2] Shane Claibourne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Enumo Okoro,   Common Prayer:  A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010).

[3] https://onbeing.org/programs/bryan-stevenson-finding-the-courage-for-whats-redemptive/

[4] https://onbeing.org/programs/bryan-stevenson-finding-the-courage-for-whats-redemptive/

11/28/21 - Close to Home: Yearning - Luke 21:25-36; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Close to Home:  Yearning

Luke 21:25-36

I Thessalonians 3:9-13

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

November 28, 2021

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjwM40FNnA

There’s a Welsh word that does not translate well into English.  The word is hiraeth.  It means a spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was, a kind of nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return.  Welsh writer Val Bethell says hiraeth is “the link with the long-forgotten past, the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. . . . it speaks from the rocks, from the earth, from the trees and in the waves. It is always there.” [1]

Some consider Wales to be the first colony of Great Britain.  It became a subject state in 1282.   By the mid 1800’s, Wales had been an integral part of the empire for centuries, but poverty and unrest led to riots in Wales and fear of sedition on the part of British officials.  The result was a dismantling of Welsh identity by the British and a steady flow of emigrants out of Wales.  They went to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, among other places. And they took their longing for home with them.  Some point to hiraeth as an explanation for the fact that 40% of the Welsh emigrants returned between 1870 and 1914.[2]

Pamela Petro, an American writer, says that hiraeth is a protest.  It is homesickness brought on because home isn’t the place it should have been. . . . To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.” [3]

I suspect that even if we are not of Welsh descent, even if we never heard this word hiraeth until a few minutes ago, most of us still have a sense of this yearning.  We long for things to be other than they are, for an end to violence, for a dismantling of racism and sexism and many other ‘isms.  As our young people said, “we hope for a world where all are fed, a world with contagious laughter, a world with tall trees and clean flowing water, a world where all people feel at home.”[4]   We yearn for things to be right and just and good.  Advent begins again, which makes us think of Christmas and we long for the peace on earth proclaimed by the angels.

Perhaps hiraeth is like the God-shaped hole in every person described by Blaise Pascal.  Or the yearning that Saint Augustine summed up "You have made us for yourself O Lord & our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Advent begins, as it usually does with a scripture passage of such frightening images and impending doom that it can only be describing the end of the world as we know it.   The bad news is so horrible, in Luke 21, that it cannot be sustained.  Something must be dying or falling or ending.  In part of this chapter, Jesus describes the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple which was very much the end of life as it had been in first century Palestine. 

Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper says that Biblical forecasts of destruction, suffering, and the loss of human life have only one purpose: to call God’s people to repentance.[5]  Repentance, we remember, does not mean just feeling sorry about things we’ve done.  It means changing our behavior. 

In the midst of the cataclysm that Jesus describes, he says “when these things happen, your redemption is drawing near.”  Isn’t that a strange thing? 

Jesus tells his followers to keep their heads up in the midst of the pandemonium and upheaval which is coming, to watch for the signs that the kingdom of God is near. Many of us are just trying to survive the recent upheaval in our lives.  We may tell ourselves that we’ll figure out a better way to do life later. Once everything is stable and routine again, then we’ll take stock and make necessary changes.  But that’s probably not true.  Repentance, or change, is more likely to happen when we are in a place of less stability.   When things are unpredictable and fluid, that is probably the moment when we are most motivated to make lasting change.

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel claims that the most dramatic and violent ruptures in recorded history were also the times of great levelling of social and economic inequality.  He says that things like war and the plague undermined confidence in religious and secular authorities which encouraged common people to question existing hierarchies and explore alternatives.  It often happened that, for a while, the rich became less rich and the poor less poor.  Those changes came at great cost to be sure – one third of the people in Europe and the Middle East lost their lives to the Black Death of bubonic plague.[6]   

I want to be careful not to minimize the suffering that accompanies such change. And yet, I wonder if we can hear Jesus’ parable about the fig tree.  When it sprouts leaves, the summer is coming.  And so, we are to keep alert to what is happening, to watch for signs of hope.  I wonder if we can find it hopeful that so many people are quitting their jobs or that the world-wide supply chain has slowed down. Can we see the potential for good change there? What if we applauded people who refuse to work for not-enough pay or those who need to change to a more meaningful vocation.  What if we appreciated that a wait for material goods might reduce our need for instant gratification?  What if we saw the stresses and strains in our schools and hospitals as a sign that those systems are on the verge of real change?

Almost a quarter century ago, the Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote this “Our society is marked by a deep dislocation that touches every aspect of our lives. The old certitudes seem less certain; the old privileges are under powerful challenge; the old dominations are increasingly ineffective and fragile; the established governmental, educational, judicial and medical institutions seem less and less able to deliver what we need and have come to expect; the old social fabrics are fraying under the assault of selfishness, fear, anger and greed.  There seems no going back to our former world, since the circumstances making that world sustainable have changed.  Because the church has been intimately connected with the old patterns of certitude, privilege and domination, it shares a common jeopardy with other old institutions. Church members are confused about authority, bewildered about mission, worried about finances, contentious about norms and ethics, and anxious about the church’s survival. Our numbed and bewildered society lacks ways of thinking and speaking that can help us find remedies—that can enable us to go deep into the crisis and so avoid denial, and to imagine a better future and so avoid despair.” 

Well, that seems to be even more true now as when he wrote it, but there’s a more important part.  Brueggemann goes on “when the church is faithful to its own past life with God, it has ways of speaking, knowing and imagining that can successfully address our cultural malaise. When it remembers its ancient miracles, has the courage to speak in its own cadences, and re-engages old seasons of hurt, the church possesses the rhetorical and testimonial antidotes to denial and despair.”[7]

And so, we are here, on the first Sunday of Advent, the church’s new year, invited to begin again, to light the Advent candles, to play the familiar music, to remember again our story, to know and to proclaim that God has come very near in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to imagine that God is still speaking, still moving, still loving us. 

Kate DiCamillo writes award-winning books.  They’re sold for children, but really they speak to people of any age. Two of best-known books are Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Desperaux.  A few weeks ago she shared a memory. She said,

This morning I woke up thinking about a fifth-grade boy who came through a signing line at a bookstore in North Carolina. I signed his copy of Despereaux and he said,

“My teacher said fifth grade is the year of asking questions.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. He took out a notebook.

“Every day we’re supposed to ask someone different a good question and listen really good and then write down the answer when they’re done talking.”

“Oh,” I said, “I get it. I’m someone different. Okay, what’s your question?”

“My question is how do you get all that hope into your stories?”

“That’s not a good question,” I said. “That’s a great question. Let me think. Um. I guess that writing the story is an act of hope, and so even when I don’t feel hopeful, writing the story can lead me to hope. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” he said. He looked me in the eye. “It’s kind of a long answer. But I can write it all out. Thanks.”

He picked up his copy of Despereaux, and walked away—writing in his notebook.

“This was years ago.” Kate said.

“Why did I wake up this morning and think of this child?

Maybe because this is a time to start asking good questions, a time to write down the answers, a time to listen to each other really well.

I’m going to get myself a little spiral bound notebook.

I’m going to listen and hope.”[8]

In her answer to that fifth-grade boy, Kate DiCamillo said, “Writing the story is an act of hope.  Even when I don’t feel hopeful, writing the story can lead me to hope.” 

So beloved ones, I suggest that telling our story, the story that God is writing with us, is an act of hope.  Beginning the year again, entering into Advent with faith and courage, is an act that may lead us to hope even when we don’t feel hopeful.  Maybe this is a time to watch for the signs around us, to ask good questions, to listen to each other really well.  May we listen and hope.

[1] https://innerwoven.me/2015/06/07/hiraeth-making-peace-with-longing/

[2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210214-the-welsh-word-you-cant-translate

[3] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/18/dreaming-in-welsh/

[4] These words are from a litany for Advent 1 by Rev. Sarah (Are) Speed | A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org.”

[5] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), pp 405.

[6] https://news.stanford.edu/2020/04/30/pandemics-catalyze-social-economic-change/

[7] https://www.religion-online.org/article/conversations-among-exiles/

[8] https://www.facebook.com/139485862734035/photos/a.156440727705215/4039256512756931/

11/21/21 - Hooray for the Pumpkin Pie! - Joel 2:21-26; Matthew 6:26-33

Hooray for the Pumpkin Pie!

Joel 2:21-26 Matthew 6:26-33

November 21, 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=vd54X87VznY

“The locust invasion started seven days ago and covered the sky. Today it took the locust clouds two hours to pass over the city. God protect us from the three plagues: war, locusts, and disease, for they are spreading through the country. Pity the poor.”[1]  That was recorded in the diary of a soldier stationed in Jerusalem in 1915. 

He was describing the worst infestation of locusts in recent history.  As the locusts approached, the sun was darkened. The locusts were so numerous that they were killed by the ton without any appreciable effect. In April of that year, the government issued a proclamation requiring every man between 15 and 60 years of age to gather 11 pounds of locust eggs every single day and deliver them to government officials for destruction. One eyewitness of this plague said “nothing we did prevented the locusts from coming down and devouring everything green, even the bark of trees, in a matter of minutes.”  That widespread devastation, with the destruction of crops and the blockades of WWI led to three years of famine and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

We might imagine that the prophet Joel is describing something similar when he alludes to the years that the locust has eaten. It is difficult to determine whether Joel is talking about a literal insect infestation or if he using locusts as a metaphor for an invading army.  Given the historical experience I just described in 1915, he could be talking about both.  In any case, the context of this passage is severe destruction and loss, something widespread, something that lasted for quite some time, because verse 21 says “years” in the plural.

“Do not fear. . . Rejoice, be glad.”  That’s the prophet’s message from God.  “The rain is coming.  The threshing-floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.”

“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten. . .”  Many years ago, there was time when my friend quoted that last verse several times a year.  When I read it in preparation for this sermon, I thought to myself, “That’s Mary’s verse.”  I called to ask her what it meant to her, why she used to quote it so much. She couldn’t tell me.  She didn’t remember.   I suspect that different passages resonate with us at different times. I wonder if at that time she was going through something difficult and she was clinging to the assurance that there would be healing, that God would restore her joy.  But now, decades later, her need for that assurance is not so urgent. 

That is just speculation on my part.  But I’m thinking about it because the prophet says “do not fear.”  That’s easier to say when the fearful thing is over, than when we’re in the midst of it. 

Jesus did a similar thing.  When he sat down and taught in Matthew 6, his audience was mostly the poor.  People who earned enough to eat today, but who might not work tomorrow and therefore, might not eat tomorrow.  And people who might not eat today.  And yet, Jesus told them not to worry about food and clothing. 

Most of us do not worry about food or clothing.  Some of us have more than others, but almost all of us get enough to eat.  If hunger is an actual concern for you, please, please be in touch with me.  That is something we can address.  Most of us do not worry about food.  But we do worry.  Most of us carry around a bundle of worry – worry about the coronavirus or cancer, about the widening gap between rich and poor in our country, about democracy, about the planet.  Some of our bundles includes concern for a struggling marriage, or a loved one with addiction or our own loneliness.  We carry this bundle of worry around all the time and it starts to feel like something we cannot escape, something we cannot put down.  It becomes chronic.

I was very fortunate that Wayne Oates was one of my teachers.  He was professor of psychiatry at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and also taught at my seminary.  His work was foundational to the field which is now known as pastoral care.  He is the person who coined the term “workaholic.” 

One particular lecture has stuck with me.  It’s one in which he talked about how to manage chronic pain.  He said that if you live with chronic pain or if you care for someone who does, you have to create coping strategies.  One strategy is distraction or interruption.  In this strategy, you take breaks, to give yourself opportunities to shift your focus from your pain and from whatever you have to do to manage your condition. In some way, you change your routine, your location or whatever is receiving your primary attention.  The second strategy I remember is sharing it.  Do not bear it alone, but tell someone about it.  Even if you are not the one in pain, but the primary caregiver for someone who is, share the load.  Just talk to someone who will listen. Ask for help as necessary.

And so, today I’m thinking about worry as a kind of chronic pain. Pain grabs our attention and holds it in a certain place. So does worry.  Chronic pain is something that does not go away, that cannot be resolved entirely, but must be managed.  So it is with the bundles of worry that we carry around.

I’m thinking that when Jesus says “do not worry”, we may want to obey him, but we don’t know how.  Some of us cannot turn off the worry response any more than we can turn off a pain response.   So, with gratitude to Dr. Oates, I think about the strategy of interruption.

Jesus says “do not worry” and I wonder if we can hear that as “give yourself an hour off”.  I know, I know, you don’t think you can quit worrying cold turkey.  But what if you just set down your worry bundle for an hour? It will still be there when you need to pick it up again.  And maybe you can practice setting it down for two hours next time and work yourself up to more hours of life spent not worrying than worrying.

But begin with interruption.  Begin by setting down your worry bundle and forcing your thoughts to focus on something else. This is where gratitude and wonder come in.  Imagine putting down your worry bundle and picking up your wonder bundle.

Like many of you, I went apple-picking this fall.  I did not grow up in this area. The abundance and beauty of the orchards is still new and astounding to me every single time. I am intrigued and delighted by the range of colors apples come in. I marvel at the load of fruit that each small tree can hold.  Every year, I have to decide where to pick and then which varieties to choose.  

The people who write the descriptions of apples must be related to those who review wine. For example, the Fortune variety is “A spritely apple with a slightly spicy flavor.”

 “Honey & pear flavors mixed with a dash of lemon, almond, and a smooth hint of fine-grained cane sugar,”  – that was Golden Russet, of course.  The experts agree that it pairs well with walnuts and cheese.

So, I went to the orchard. In the center of a row with trees picked bare on each end, I found the treasure of Ruby Frost.  This apple looks so enticing that I think it must have been the kind that the queen gave to Snow White.

Three rows over, I discovered a delicious and beautiful red, orange and yellow apple.  It is called Cordera. Looking it up, I learned that it is the Spanish word for lamb and it was named for the Lamb family.  Robert Lamb, who died in 1997, worked with apples at Cornell for 40 years. His wife Susan is an Ag professor there and their daughter Betsy works in integrated pest management.  I have never met them, but I am grateful, for the literal fruit of their labors.

And you know what? While I was wandering through the orchards and deciding which kinds of apples to pick and how many I had room to store at home, I was not worrying.  I was engaged in wonder and gratitude.  And now, every time I eat one of those apples I picked that day, I remember and am grateful.

The two scripture passages we read today, from Joel 2 and Matthew 6 are assigned to Thanksgiving, and yet, neither of them mentions gratitude.   They do say not to worry, not to be afraid, and to rejoice.  Other preachers might see other connections, but the one that I see is that gratitude is an antidote to worry and fear.  Focusing our attention on what we are grateful for is one good way to distract ourselves from an endless focus on worry.  Set down your worry bundle for a while and pick up the wonder bundle.  It’s much lighter.  The worry bundle will still be there if you need to pick it up later.

“Over the river and through the wood to Grandfather’s house we go”

You know that line.  It’s the beginning of a poem written by Lydia Maria Child in the nineteenth century.[2] She wrote it about Thanksgiving, although sometimes it gets associated with Christmas.  It is from a child’s point of view, about the fun of riding in the horse-drawn sleigh and being welcomed home by grandparents. Even in the celebration, the child recognizes that everything might not go well, that life is bumpy even on holidays.  The fifth stanza says

Over the river, and through the wood —
No matter for winds that blow;
Or if we get
The sleigh upset,
Into a bank of snow . . .

But ultimately, the poem ends this way

Hooray for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hooray for the pumpkin pie!

“O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist wrote.  “It is good to give thanks to the Lord.” 

It is good to give thanks for pumpkin pie, and any other kind of pie, and 100 varieties of apples and shady trees and starry skies and faithful friends and a good night’s sleep.

Friends, let gratitude be your spiritual practice this week.  Put down your worry bundle and pick up wonder as often as possible. If you need it, then reach for the mantra from Joel “I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.” 

Or reach for the other one, which is also theologically sound,  “Hooray for the pumpkin pie.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/JQ_56-57_The_1915_Locust_0.pdf

[2] https://womenyoushouldknow.net/traveling-over-river-through-wood-thanksgiving-lydia-maria-child/

11/14/21 - Provoking Love - Hebrews 10:23-25

Provoking Love

Hebrews 10:23-25

November 14, 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=FlH_HWJ-C-U

They are a discouraged group.  They are “tired of serving the world, tired of worship, tired of Christian education, tired of the spiritual struggle, tired of trying to keep their prayer life going, tired even of Jesus… The threat to this congregation is not that they are charging off in the wrong direction; they do not have enough energy to charge off anywhere. The threat here is that worn down and worn out, they will drop their end of the rope and drift away.  Tired of walking the walk, many of them are considering taking a walk, leaving the community and falling away from the faith.” [1]

That’s how Presbyterian pastor and scholar Tom Long describes the community to whom the Letter to the Hebrews was written I don’t know how much that might describe anyone you know or any congregation you know.  If Dr. Long has accurately described your temptation – to drop your end of the rope and drift away – apparently you haven’t given in to it yet, because you are here today. Thank you for that. 

We don’t know exactly to whom this letter was written. Probably a group of second- or third-generation Christians who have been waiting for Jesus to return.  They expected their wait to be over long ago. They are tired of waiting and beginning to wonder “What is the point? What good is our faith? Do we even need to be gathering together anymore?”

The writer of this letter, whose identity is unknown, takes 13 chapters to respond, but offers one very concise answer in the verses Sam read for us, especially vs 24-25 “let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another . . .”

Today is Stewardship Sunday. Most years we call this Pledge Sunday.  It is the point in the year where we make individual pledges, pledges about the portion of our income that we intend to give to God in the coming year.  Many of us have done that already on the Emmanuel church website. If you haven’t done so yet, please consider your own spiritual journey and your commitment to this congregation and take that step.  Your pledge will be gratefully received.    But instead of focusing narrowly on pledges today, I want to think about stewardship more broadly. 

Stewardship has to do with organizing and managing.  Stewardship means taking care of something like a large household, the arrangements for a group or the resources of a community.  Financial gifts are essential to our communal life. They are one of the most tangible resources we share and they need to be cared for wisely.  That’s good stewardship. 

It is important for us to have honest conversations about money.  It is important for us to be clear with ourselves about the claim that God has on our money if we are seeking to live in right relationship with God. But sometimes we can get focused on the money that we have or that we don’t have, so caught up in how much the budget needs or why some lines were over-spent, that we start to forget what is it we are actually stewarding.  I’d like to suggest that what we are caring for, what we are managing is, in the words of this letter, “the confession of our hope” in Jesus the Christ.

Allow me to share a story about another congregation.  Fred Shaw was a young student pastor in 1969, appointed to the Mt. Olivet United Methodist Church in Tatman’s Gap, Ohio when he was just 19 years old.  He was so excited on his first Sunday.  He had gone over his sermon several times, even practiced grand sweeping gestures for the congregation to see from the back of the sanctuary. 

On that day, he walked into the whiteboard church and found three old people waiting.  They were circled around a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room.  It was summer and the stove was lit.  (I’m guessing that is a clue that maybe he didn’t need the heat, but they did.) The three church members were siblings, close together in age with the oldest pushing 90.  He said “Did I mention that these were OLD people?  Especially to a 19-year-old.”

These folks were well acquainted with the ways of church.  The brother took up the offering from the two sisters.  Then one of the sisters counted it while the other sister dutifully witnessed it. 

Somehow the gestures he had planned for the sermon shrunk. The ringing words he had prepared came limply from his tongue. They sang a song, but the piano-playing sister had cataracts so he was never certain what notes she was hitting.

He offered a perfunctory benediction and walked across the gravel parking lot to his car.  The brother caught up with him, put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Well, son, you see what we have here.  Millie has rheumatism so bad she can’t get out much anymore.  John has a heart problem.  Wilber is just plain old.  We’re about all that’s left, and I suppose the church will die when we do.”  Fred thought the man was right and he chafed about wasting his time there.

He drove home, fuming about the stupidity of bishops who waste a person’s talents appointing them to a dying church.  By the time he got home, he needed to vent.  So, he called his grandfather, the one who had been a minister for 54 years.  He listened patiently while Fred whined about his morning. 

When Fred finally stopped for breath, Grandad said, “Fred, do you believe in the Communion of the Saints?” 

Fred promptly answered that he did. In fact, he had just written a paper about it.  Granddad said, “I didn’t ask if you knew about it.  I asked if you believed it.” 

Granddad went on, “If you believe in the communion of the saints, you didn’t have three old people in worship this morning.  You had millions!  The Communion of the Saints means that when we gather to worship, everyone who has ever worshipped God is present before the throne of grace.  The people in the congregation are the physical link between those millions and the millions who will follow in the future.  You just spoke to three of the most important people on earth.”

Well, Fred went back the next Sunday and told those three people who they were. He shared about the Communion of the Saints, and he had real, not practiced, gestures. They even sang with gusto and forgot about whether the notes matched or not.

This time when Fred walked onto the parking lot, the brother again caught up with him. He looked Fred in the eye, and said, “Pastor…, I’m darned if we’ll be the link that broke!”

Those three old people, who had been waiting to die with their church, went into the community over the next few weeks and brought 24 young people into the church.  Fred said he didn’t do anything.  Those three old people did it by knowing who they were and to Whom they always would be connected. They held fast to the confession of their hope.  

In a few years, Fred finished seminary and moved on to other churches.  Decades later, when Fred was close to retirement, he got an email from a pastor who was organizing a homecoming for the Mt. Olivet Church.  Fred wrote back saying he was sorry that he had a prior commitment and couldn’t attend.  But he had a story about when he served that church and he wanted to tell it to the pastor so that she could share it for him at the homecoming.  The pastor responded immediately.  She said, “Oh, I know that story well. I’m one of the twenty-four people they went out and got.” [2]

I share that story because it is a reminder to me of what we are stewarding, what we are managing, what we are caring for. We are stewarding an identity, a hope that threads its way from generation to generation.  We are nurturing a faith that provokes us to love and good deeds, even when, maybe especially when, we are tired of the struggle. 

Putting money in the offering plate, like we did in the old days, or sending a check in the mail or electronically on the website, like we do now, is just the surface of stewardship. That money goes to pay the electric bill so that those of in the room can be warm. It goes to pay for high-speed internet so that our signal reaches everyone on Zoom.  It pays the salaries of those who serve and lead this congregation as well as our missionaries in other places.  It buys music for the choir and sends children to camp and supports the work of FOCUS and many more things large and small.  The money we give is vital to our ministry, which is after all, God’s ministry. 

In other years, this box was where we put pledge cards. Pledge cards which had written promises with numbers and dollar signs that represented our shared ministry.  Today this box offers just a few objects, a few reminders of what we have shared together this year despite our physical separation and our discouragement.  Standing in for pledge cards, we find popcorn and sea glass, devotional journals, Christmas Eve candles, and fabric prayer strips. There are so many things that can’t be put in the box which were part of our stewardship this year – like the behind-the-scenes efforts of the choir on Soundtrap,  the creative ingenuity of our tech team, and the ways that you continued to show up for each other, offering encouragement with your presence in worship, in phone calls, in prayer, and in welcoming newcomers.

We make our pledges. We give the money and we manage the money, but most importantly, we steward our identity as Jesus-followers. We safeguard the hope that comes through provoking love.  We curate the stories of when we were provoked to forgive, provoked to endure, provoked to compassion, provoked to love and action.  This is our faithful stewardship. Thanks be to God.

[1] Thomas Long, Hebrews: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville:  Westminster/JohnKnox Press, 2011), p. 3

[2] Rev. Fred Shaw posted on November 1, 2021 - https://www.facebook.com/fred.shaw.56

11/7/21 - All Saints Communion Meditation - Psalm 24

All Saints Communion Meditation

Psalm 24

November 7, 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=ab22oeZYNsk

“The earth is the Lord’s.”  So says the psalmist.   But not only the psalmist.  It is a consistent Biblical theme. It’s found in Exodus and Deuteronomy.  Hannah prayed it as she dedicated her son Samuel.  And in the law about property, God declares “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine;” The earth is the Lord’s. It all starts there.

God has an intimate relationship with every aspect of creation.  I hope you got a sense of that from James Weldon Johnson’s poem.  There is an energy, a force, a invisible power that holds creation together. While God is unseen, what we can see is interdependence.  What we can see are ecosystems which thrive and flourish when things are in balance, a cycle of seasons, of springtime and harvest, a water cycle in which rain falls and waters the earth, then gathers in streams and pools and then evaporates to the clouds only to return as rain or snow again.  What we can see, with a microscope, are cells which form organisms and organisms which support larger ones which support even larger ones.  The largest things we can observe – blue whales or sequoias – are sustained by things so tiny that we can barely grasp their existence.

“The earth is the Lord’s” means that God pervades every bit of creation with purpose and beauty. The order and rhythm and inter-connectedness surely tell us something about who God is and about who we are.  

I have followed some of the stories from the climate conference in Glasgow this week, as I know many of you have.  I’ve heard about droughts and floods which destroy farms, raise food prices and leave the most vulnerable even more hungry. I’ve heard about the women in  Colombia where erratic rain falls are forcing them to walk longer and longer distances in more dangerous places simply to bring water to their families; and about the ones in rural Indonesia, which has lost almost 40% of its tropical rainforest in recent decades.  Women are the strongest defenders of the forest and bear the worst impacts of deforestation, but must function within a culture that silences them in the public sphere. [1]  Environmental degradation is a major factor in civil conflict and cross-border migration, including our own borders. 

Creation’s interdependence is its strength, but also a point of vulnerability. Everything is connected to everything else and it all flourishes together or withers together. If the last 20 months have taught us anything, it is surely that we are truly all in this together.  If, as the poet John Donne said, any person’s death diminishes me, how much more are we diminished by the loss of 5 million people to Covid, by the extinction of unique species, by the death of corals in the Great Barrier Reef.

On this All Saints Sunday, we pause to remember our connections, particularly our connections to those of every time and place who understand that they belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.  We use the word saints as it is used in the New Testament.  Not Saints with a capital S, not super-hero Christians recognized for their piety or the strength of their faith under persecution or for their martyrdom, but saints with a small S, the people who live their ordinary lives in everyday obedience to the teachings of Jesus. 

Richard Rohr is an American Franciscan priest and writer.  Many of you have shared with me your appreciation for his thoughts on spirituality.   On the subject of saints and connections, he says this, “Saints see things in their connectedness and wholeness. They don’t see things as separate. It’s all one, and yet like the Trinity, it is also different. What you do to the other, you do to yourself; how you love yourself is how you love your neighbor; how you love God is how you love yourself; how you love yourself is how you love God. How you do anything is how you do everything.”

He continues “Faith is not simply seeing things at their visible, surface level, but recognizing their deepest meaning. To be a person of faith means you see things—people, animals, plants, the earth—as inherently connected to God, connected to you, and therefore, most worthy of love and dignity.” [2]

Many of us here today may need that steadying, that reminder that we are connected and sustained by the Body of Christ.  In the words of Elizabeth Johnson, we are “one community of memory and hope, a holy people touched with the fire of the Spirit.” And we “are summoned to go forth as companions bringing the face of divine compassion into everyday life and the great struggles of history.” [3]

Beloved ones, we are not alone. We are held securely in the mystical web of the faithful.   Our lives are guided by those who came before us, just as we are shaping the lives of those who live alongside us or on the other side of the world or are coming in the future. 

We are not alone because the earth is the Lord’s. The power that sustains creation also sustains us.  

Richard Rohr concludes, “You don’t go to heaven; you learn how to live in heaven now. And no one lives in heaven alone. Either you learn how to live in communion with the human race and with all that God has created, or, quite simply, you’re not ready for heaven. If you want to live an isolated life, trying to prove that you’re better than everybody else or believing you’re worse than everybody else, you are already in hell. You have been invited—even now, even today, even this moment—to live in the Communion of Saints, in the Presence, in the Body, in the Life of the eternal and eternally Risen Christ.” [4]

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Kathy Galloway in her blog on COP26 https://iona.org.uk/2021/11/02/from-the-dear-green-place-a-daily-blog-from-kathy-galloway-during-cop26-day-two-monday-1st-november-2021/

[2] https://cac.org/the-communion-of-saints-2016-12-14/

[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints (Continuum: 1998), p 240, 243.

[4] https://cac.org/the-communion-of-saints-2016-12-14/

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